For me, the special pleasure in being here with you is to hear you say whatever you happen to say. Which, you know, whatever you say, I feel some kind of territory in what you say. And my pleasure is also to try to find ways to try, try to find ways to say something about these things that I think are useful. And like one of the main points of trying to point to cumulative time, sequential time, and paratactic time, And so that we can then really notice immediacy time.

[01:17]

So dass wir dann wirklich Unmittelbarkeitszeit bemerken können. Because I would say immediacy time is where the world and yourself really flower. Weil ich sagen würde, es ist die Unmittelbarkeitszeit, in der die Welt und du wirklich erblühen. But if we start speaking about that, I mean around 7 o'clock I will still be excited. Maybe we should leave that till tomorrow if I can get there. And I can instead enjoy the topos of whatever you might say. And then maybe I can enjoy the surfaces, the creation of what you say instead.

[02:34]

Yes. I found it very helpful and explicit that you gave us a picture of the non-interruptible spirit. I found it very helpful how explicitly you gave us an image for imperturbable mind. Because I may have some intimation of it, and I may kind of swim around, but I could never find words for it. And you said one particular sentence in which I thought, whoa. It sank one whole level down.

[03:38]

Oh. Are you all right? It's good. Yes, OK. When you speak about examining inhalation and exhalation. Going along with the weights. then I immediately think of this metaphor, den Wellen folgen, going along with the waves. Und du hast ja davon abgeleitet, sozusagen, dass die Auflösung des inside-outside-Gegensatzes oder der

[04:39]

And you've derived from that the contrast, the opposition of inside and outside. Da war es mir aufgefallen, dass du bei diesem Ankleben an der Außensicht And what I noticed is that through attaching to the outside side of that distinction, that you brought an example that, from my sense, came very much from the social dimension. I've oftentimes had the problem with inside and outside that I drew the line in a physical way, in the sense that everything I can touch Kinetically, touch.

[06:06]

Tactically. Kinetically or tactically? Tactically. That's outside. Es ist mir schwergefallen, bestimmte Sinneswahrnehmung, zum Beispiel das Sehen, zu sagen, als die eigene innere Sinneswahrnehmung zu erleben, also zu erleben, dass jemand einfach in mir herumläuft. And I found it very challenging to experience seeing, for instance, as an interior experience. So to experience that somebody is walking around in me. Yeah. But from time to time that happens. Just now on the break I saw someone walking in the courtyard to the well and I felt that they were walking through me or in me. Paranormal.

[07:24]

At least non-normative. Yeah, but that's right. We have these experiences and don't know how to make sense of them often, but eventually they become more and more common. And the mystery of the world deepens as we become more a participant in the mystery. And one of the, as I said, like the monk is taught not to, or recommended not to see signs and things. Similarly, the depth practitioner is recommended not to make theories about things.

[08:29]

As soon as you have some sort of non-normative experience, you want to fit it into your theories, and that immediately starts shutting down the experiences. As soon as you have a non-normative experience, you try to put it into your experience and that immediately makes this non-normal experience go silent. I am still quite inspired by the statement that we arrange the world rather. In our Western worldview, creating and doing and making and so forth are rather divine or God-bound terms.

[10:02]

Mm-hmm. And there's this view that God made the world from the outside. And then only a week. LAUGHTER And he took a break on Sunday. That was the first six-day week.

[11:03]

So there's this view that God made the world from the outside, and I find this view in myself when I create something, this feeling of when I want to then in the end have it be a certain way. So I think in me there is a particular state of mind that wants to create. And when I make the shift and say, no, it is not to create, but to arrange. And if I shift in that one and say, no, it's not to be created, it's to be arranged, then that's a fundamentally big shift, change. and it makes something soft, there's some soft feeling, and it changes how inside and outside meet.

[12:17]

Yes, it's very inspiring. It's very inspiring. Oh, goodness, thank you. I think the topic you also spoke about with the anchorage is very important. I find the topic of anchoring ourselves, I find that also locating. Excuse me. I find the topic of locating of anchoring important, which you mentioned. And it's not so much the question of where do I always locate or anchor myself as in always the same location or the same point. But more like how, where do I anchor, locate myself in a particular situation. And your remark that this indestructible spirit is a safe anchor point or an aspiring anchor point is certainly true.

[13:41]

And your mentioning that imperturbable mind is a safe or secure anchor point or a point that we want to work our way towards is, I think, certainly right. But I don't experience it that much. Instead I anchor, locate myself, as you also suggested, in the body. And depending on the situation that's a lot more accessible or easier. and the imperturbable mind is more like a gift, more like, yeah, more like a gift.

[14:42]

Okay. Crystal? Yeah. I noticed that I often trickle out myself, when I notice that I am in the past, in the memory. I say to myself, wait a moment, when does the memory take place? Now. plans for the future, for the thoughts or worries, what will happen now. So I remember then, I force myself to remember, yes, these are all things that are happening in this moment right now. The whole past that I mentally create, So about the sense of time, the moment-moment sense of time, I keep reminding myself when ideas of accumulated time, worries, or anything like that comes up, or emotions, I remind myself.

[15:54]

When is this happening? Now. Or worries about the future. When is this happening? Now. So I'm bringing the sense of accumulated time into the moment, moment, moment time, into the current time, present time. Yes, and then I have a logical problem. That is actually not a big logical problem. I try to teach the type of scandals, that is, to say, the step-by-step observation and coming to my consciousness in this one small jhana moment. I can't suppress it. So I have, let's say, a jhana moment of perception, but maybe I'm also there at the same time,

[16:58]

to process the previously advanced successive moments and to promote them into consciousness. This means that I have to process not only things at the same time, but also at the same time, and all this in the same moment, and this is flowing. Yes, that was no wonder. Tell me, how good is your English? I can try, but tell me something, Xana. Do you mean Jana? It's an experience or a millisecond of perception. OK. OK. Good. And now I have a logical problem with that, which is that you may have to help me. That when I look at that I'm in this moment,

[18:02]

Shana? I didn't know the right word. Is this one moment of appearance? Yeah, okay. So when I try to... to use the different teachings like the five skandhas. The five skandhas are a process teaching. But in this one jhana I can't do the whole process, so there has to be the perception from this moment, but there has to be the Just until the third, fourth, third standard object, you have to make it conscious. They have done more moments itself.

[19:17]

I have the problem with one moment time and all the process of different moments that has to be in a flow of time to get to the point to... It's a process. ...to get in this process. But it can't happen in this one moment. So in the main one moment, it can be in the process of different moments before. That's my logical problem, I'm sorry. There are worse problems. Yeah, I understand, I think. There is differentiation. And we make use of the differentiation. But at some point, the more and more the various articulations and differentiations are experienced simultaneously. But it is definitely this practice as a craft which takes time to get a feeling for making it work.

[20:35]

You have to both let it happen and nudge it too. But I'd have to spend some little time with you to feel what your process is to see how I would experience the same thing or something similar. But mostly I don't want to respond so much anyway. I want to just hear what you happen to say. Oh, okay. Hi. David? Ich hatte heute das Gefühl, ich fand es interessant, diese Unterschiede. I found it interesting today to hear these different ways of perceiving time, different terms for perceiving time.

[22:12]

Perceiving, noticing, and experiencing. OK. And I think that other recommendations in practice have given me another feeling for time. such a practice of working with appearances, i.e. in the form of a mental division of appearing, then a length, an end and a letting go. And especially working with appearance in the sense of appearance, then duration, then ending, and then letting go.

[23:28]

It gave me a very special feeling that time is like a ray of time for me. And because of that, everything seems to be in a ray of time rather than beginningless or beginningless. that that especially has given me a feeling of breaking time into units and like, do you say a time ray, like a timeline or something? Yeah, okay. Yeah, a timeline, especially through that practice. So not so much that time is beginningless and endless, but through the practice of appearance, I've had this feeling of having time in little lines. Okay. And if I take the other perspective, then the practice seems to me much more open or much further.

[24:33]

So if I understood that this morning, then it makes an impression on me of a much further understanding. And if I now apply, if I understood correctly this morning, the distinctions you brought in, then that gives me a much wider sense of how I can practice, or a much wider sense. Okay. Good. Yes, please. Is it a smart one? Yeah. Maybe a little louder? I mean, I know you can hear yourself. The question is, shouldn't we put the anchor down?

[25:51]

I ask the colleagues over there, they are so complicated things. The world becomes so complicated, Buddhist. Okay. Just now is enough. Yes, I understand that, that's fine. I have a problem with Gerwald's anchor and the sense of anchoring in general.

[27:08]

Shouldn't we take out the anchors? And also when I hear these other questions, contributions, I wonder, it sounds so complicated. Aren't we complicating? The Buddhist world seems really complicated. So the question is, doesn't this all also work a little simpler. I remember in the beginning when you first started teaching in Europe, you would have simple phrases like, just now is enough. And if we were to focus on that in depth, then everything would just come together, and that would be simpler. Yeah, OK. I'll come back. Darauf komme ich zurück. Darauf komme ich zurück.

[28:10]

Yes? Dagmar? Für mich war heute das Highlight deine Erwähnung der Lebendigkeit. For me, the highlight today was your mentioning of aliveness. And in my experience, the easiest way to get there is to keep returning to the breath. And what you mentioned today, that's something that I just recently started teaching in my Qigong courses, where we also do some ground work, like being on the floor.

[29:16]

And I've just started to suggest to people to feel where throughout the body the breath is moving. There are many areas where you can feel the breathing. And that for me is the epitome of aliveness. Yes, thank you. So we're breathing, but if you lie down on the ground and you start having some attentional power, you begin to notice breathing in much more subtle ways. And still, just now is enough. Someone in the back there? Yes. Hi. I'm Chinese. I'm Chinese.

[30:41]

I noticed. Through Buddhist teaching, I learned that life does not end with death, that I have infinite time. In my past and past life. What I've done then is what I'm harvesting now. And what I can't do now, I will just continue in my next life.

[31:42]

Good luck. Now, most cultures, almost all, they want to know what's going on, so they make a story. And the story begins to be tantamount to reality. Now, I may be wrong, but I think reincarnation and so forth is a story added to Buddhism.

[32:46]

And if you look at various, and I've done this with Thich Nhat Hanh and with other people, looked at the various reincarnation stories, they shift. In China, it's more like ancestors. And in other countries, it's more of other ways of interpreting reincarnation. And I looked at these stories, including with Thich Nhat Hanh and with other people, and we noticed that the stories, the reincarnation cases, that they differ culturally. That, for example, in China it is more about ancestors who reincarnate within their own ancestors, and that there are other patterns in other cultures and countries. And these stories survive because they become powerfully inclusive. This is my opinion.

[33:52]

For example, I would say Christianity, which I don't think is a story, it's created a world here in Europe and America, too, where everyone wants to live. Zum Beispiel hat das Christentum, von dem ich glaube, dass es im Grunde genommen eine Geschichte ist, trotzdem hat das Christentum hier in Europa und in Amerika eine Welt erschaffen, wo alle Leute leben wollen. So it's a very powerful story which has evolved into the kind of governance we have and so forth. Es ist eine sehr kraftvolle Geschichte, die sich in das, was wir jetzt haben, in die Art von Regierungen und so weiter, die wir haben, hinein entwickelt hat. My opinion is, and I may be wrong, is that strictly speaking, Buddhism says, all there is is your experience at this moment in this life. is that Buddhism, strictly speaking, actually says that everything that exists is your experience in this moment and in this life.

[35:06]

I don't... And I only talk about or practice what I've experienced. Not what I've been taught, just what I've been experienced. And... Yeah, that's enough to say. Okay. Yeah. I've thought about this a lot, of course, but I've said enough.

[36:11]

Hans? That's enough. To what she's bringing up, an added question. In our lineage, we have our ancestors. Yes. And at various occasions you've said that whether this lineage actually happened this way or whether it's partly constructed and whether it actually can be traced all the way back to the Buddha, that that's secondary. Aren't we also constructing a story? Right now you mean?

[37:13]

Yeah, right now and also with the lineage, with all the ancestors and so forth. Of course. Yeah, natürlich. But it's a useful story. But it's quite extraordinary. My ancestry as a lineage holder... can be traced back fairly accurately into the Song Dynasty. There's actually papers and sort of. But earlier than that, into the Tang Dynasty and earlier, it begins to be constructed. But the Buddha said, supposedly, probably, don't look to me Look to the Dharma.

[38:36]

Now, see if I have time for a little riff. One aspect of time which I wasn't planning to speak about. We could call experiential or conflated time. Okay. So I have a feeling about my father's family, partly because my great-great-grandfather Teils, weil mein Ur... My great-grandfather, actually. Mein Urgroßvater. Was in the gold rush. From Massachusetts, he went all the way around the horn on a boat and was in California when it was in the 1850s.

[39:38]

And he left a stack of about 12 diaries where she wrote everything that happened. I have them. And he described what happened, and he said, in California, it's better if you went into a saloon or a bar, you better not carry a gun or you're asking for trouble. And he quoted poems when he was in his 80s, he was quoting poems from high school and things like that. So I have some sort of feeling about him and the time, but not like I have for my mother's family.

[41:04]

And my mother's family, I don't know why, but there was a big house, kind of farmhouse type house, and lots of unmarried sisters and cousins lived in it, and they were quite a big extended family. And my mother, my father wasn't, but my mother was something of a storyteller. So I know about Aunt Ori and what so-and-so did, etc., extending back more or less to 1850. So I have a feeling of the last 150 or more years is present to me somehow. And we could call this conflated time.

[42:16]

It's not the sense of time as some sort of neutral, even flow that historians assume and things happen along the line of time. So if we imagine it's been 2,500 years since the Buddha was born. Which isn't really very long ago. If I have a feeling for a 250-year period where things are pretty much the same, 10 of those bring us back to Buddha. And I've lived only 82 years so far, but I'm getting close to 100. I'll not make it, I'm quite sure, but you know. I've lived most of a century.

[43:38]

Only a hundred of those bring us back really into what we consider very past. Only a hundred year lifetimes. Bring us into what seems like ancient times. Okay, so what I'm... So... If there were, let's say there's been a thousand people, I'm just making this up, let's say there's been a thousand people who practiced in every century since, every year since the Buddha was, since the Buddha died. The historical. So that would mean that there have been 2,500,000 practitioners.

[44:44]

Now, in conflated time, we can imagine they're all here right now. Now, when you read some of the sutras, the Lotus Sutra would be the most obvious. And they talk about the Bodhisattvas and there were so many, 100,000 Bodhisattvas all present. That's a concept of conflated time. Each one of you is a multi-generational being. And in some ways all your multi-generational families up to some degree are present right now in this room. So the sutras are written as if this conflated time was present now.

[46:03]

And the stories are indexed to you, the reader or experiencers, immediately. Now the brilliant folks who created the koans, and the koans are the Chinese way to make Indian Buddhism Chinese. So the Sung Dynasty folks took Tang Dynasty stories and pretended they happened in the Tang Dynasty, but they actually happened in the Sung Dynasty. But they indexed the stories to your time as the reader.

[47:29]

It's a brilliant creative move, ability, skill. So you read the stories as if they could have happened to you. Now, you can read stories from, you know, the 12th century and... This could never have happened to me. This is weird. But the koans were written so that you read them now and you think, geez, pretty much this could be my experience. So this sense of time as all time is available but indexed to the present moment is one of the, one dynamic of Buddhism which if you read the Lotus Sutra from that point of view it makes a lot more sense.

[48:51]

And this feeling, this feeling in Buddhism that all time is accessible but all time shows on your own time I didn't expect to go there this weekend. But it does bring into our attention that we are multigenerational beings, each of us. In that sense, our Dharma ancestors, those who practice in a similar view and vision, are also within our present time. Okay? Why not? So I really would like to, and I guess I will have to leave it, as I said earlier, to tomorrow.

[50:23]

I have to maybe review a little bit, because there will be a few new people tomorrow. Fifth? No. Fifth? No. I told people you measured with calipers. Put this all in. And the waiting list is full of long-legged people. I told people you measured with millimetres and put all the long-legged people on the waiting list. Except Gerhard. It's really kind of weird. Um... Yeah, so that we can look at this sense of noticing the time as we experience it. We're going to stop in a minute, but please. So just now is enough.

[51:24]

is a useful prescription. But it's not a description of now. And if you want to look at it with more attentional... You have to look at experientially, what do I really mean by just? Dann musst du dir wirklich in deiner Erfahrung anschauen, was meine ich wirklich mit diesem nur oder einfach. And how many layers are there in now? Und wie viele Schichten gibt es da im jetzt? Spatial and temporal. Räumlich und zeitlich. And when is now a cumulative time and when is now sequential time and so forth.

[52:41]

And with increased attention, the layers begin to open up. And there can be powerfully noticed if your noticing is always enough. Rooted in enough. Which might be an anchor or at least a mooring. A mooring? An anchor is anchored. A mooring is just where you put the boat. So we're all moored in this seminar. And we're all in little moors next to each other and the water is jiggling us.

[54:06]

And I'm happy to be moored with you. Okay. Thank you.

[54:11]

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