Now is the time for your participation. I'll say something first. Sorry. What I'm trying to work my way towards is immediacy. And how to get some traction in immediacy. So the buzzing fly might land on now. And the buzzing flies now is immediacy. But we're always landing on now and seldom immediacy.

[01:03]

So I'd like to find some way to give us some traction and immediacy. So that's in the context of noticing that this experience of time has layers and dimensionality. And the layers or dimensionality, the dimensions I've been pointing out that I think are useful, we could have many, but I'm pointing out a few. I'm pointing them out because I think they're already our experience, but the pointing out makes a difference. Yesterday I pointed to four dynamics of time or dimensions of time.

[02:18]

Which again, I think are already our experience. But the pointing out makes a difference. It means you can point it out because it means it's useful to notice it and it's useful to learn how to operate the noticing. So we all know that time is in some sense successional, is change. We say the only thing that's constant is change. So change is another word for time. So what aspects of this changing can we notice because we bring attention to the changing and our attention changes the noticing?

[03:47]

So I made, let's say, four distinctions. Sequential time. A cumulative time. Paratactic time. And what I would call immediacy or durative immediacy time. So I want to give some more attention to it. Sounds like an oxymoron, durative immediacy time. But, yeah, so maybe we'll have, find together some opportunity to speak about these things.

[04:48]

At first, though, right now, I'd like to relate an anecdote. Vicky Barna is the Shusso head monk, head monkette, of our sixth... Sixth? Yeah. I have to... I don't know what's going on, but sixth practice period... We've had 20 or 22 or three or so, four practice periods in Creston and now six in Johannesburg. And Vicky is from the Budapest Sangha of Myokinoshi, but this is her third Ango with us. And I asked her to be the head monk.

[06:22]

I didn't tell Myokinoshi, but at some point I did, and he was so excited. He was real happy. And the head monk gives lectures and is also the toilet and trash cleaner. And so usually what you speak about is how you happen to come to practice. So she told something about her father and her mother and how she grew up and so forth. She's Hungarian. And lived in England 11 years, so her English is quite good. Yeah, anyway, she said she at some point did some kind of, worked in an orphanage in Nepal or someplace.

[07:50]

And part of that, afterwards, she decided to take a trek in the Himalayas. And this was quite a long trek of, how long, do you remember? Several weeks. Yeah, I know the second part was three weeks, but I forget the first part. Anyway, on the Annapurna Massif, And they're trekking, hiking at 15,000 meters or something. No, no, no. No, 5,000 meters. Then she'd be almost on the moon. Dead. Yeah, 5,000 meters. 30,000. Yeah. See, thank you.

[08:56]

So they had to get used to the altitude. They would take little hikes up smaller mountains and come back down as they're bricks. And she climbed up this hill with somebody else, and when she got to the top, there was a big rock, so she sat down on the rock. Yeah, and so she's just sitting there cross-legged. And it was very windy in the mountains. I guess the Annapurna Massif is one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. And it was pretty windy. And as I heard, the Annapurna Massif is one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world.

[10:06]

So she was completely taken by the beauty of it. And there were birds in the wind trying to hold their place in the wind. And there were birds flying that tried to hold their place in the wind. Then she could hear the wind and hear the birds crying in the wind. And suddenly, everything became silent. All the sounds she could still hear, but somehow they collapsed into silence. And she found herself in a kind of stopped time. Yeah, she had the experience that this was a world that was there, like the clock is both time and stopped.

[11:10]

She had the feeling that she was in a an experience that she'd never had before, but she knew before. And what I think is interesting about it is that many, some of us will have had such experiences, but many of us, even if we haven't had such experiences, will feel, yeah, that's true, I bet that's true. This shift into another way of being that she anticipated but didn't know is what started her real practice, her committed practice. So I think all of us who practice or find ourselves practicing or interested in practice

[12:29]

Ich glaube, dass wir alle, die praktizieren oder Interesse haben an der Praxis, are interested or practicing because we find ourselves in a life in which we feel there's another side to it. Ich glaube, dass wir deshalb praktizieren, weil wir uns in einem Leben wiederfinden, von dem wir das Gefühl haben, dass es eine andere Seite dieses Lebens gibt. Und die Meditationspraxis ist so etwas wie dir die Gelegenheit zu geben, diese andere Seite zu finden. And practice centers are nothing but ways to increase the probability that you'll discover this. Discover this and discover how to live it.

[13:52]

Okay, that's all. So, please, anybody have something that they want to subtract? Or add? Or divide? Yes. Hi. You've mentioned four aspects of time. And then started telling this anecdote.

[15:11]

And what that led to for me is that as you spoke, many dimensions of time happened simultaneously for me as you spoke. And maybe it's not so important, but there is still a curiosity there, what you meant exactly with these four aspects. So which of these experiences and these words are known to you? And maybe it's not so important for right now, but I would still like to hear what exactly you meant with these four categories that you gave these names to. For me, they are new. Okay. Well, thank you for helping me go in that direction. Okay. Yes, what touches me is, for example, this anecdote that you told, where I notice that you are talking about something that we may have experienced or not, but where we have the feeling, yes, that is it.

[16:54]

What touches me about the anecdote is that you're talking about it as something that we may have experienced or not, but that we can feel that, yes, this is true. There's a poem that points directly to what you just said, and I would like to read two lines from that. This is from T.S. Eliot, Bart Norton. It's from T.S. Eliot. It says, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been. But I cannot say where. I cannot say how long for that is to place it in time. That for me is home. That's where I feel at home.

[17:55]

So there is no dance, there is only dance. Ich kann nur sagen, wir waren dort, aber ich kann nicht sagen, wo. Ich kann nicht sagen, wie lang, denn das würde bedeuten, es in die Zeit zu stellen. Yes, this longing to just get back there. And there is something that I have to say that touched me yesterday. This left and right and inside and outside. Ich habe auch darunter gelitten, also links und rechts lernen zu müssen. So there's this yearning, that's one thing, but then also something about what you said that touched me yesterday is about confusing left and right, inside and outside, and I can say for me I also suffered from having to learn left and right.

[19:12]

But I think that as human beings we have to learn that impermanence is something that leaves a deep impression. I remember how as a child I had a snowball in my hand and was completely struck and shocked when suddenly there was nothing left. It's rough, I know. Thank you. Welcome home. Yes, Gerhard. The experience of Vicky that you recounted. Yes. That was certainly a very intense experience, but I'm sure that all of us experience something like this in varying intensities.

[20:50]

But most of us don't really actually notice it or perceive it. It becomes smothered rather quickly by our rationalizations. and somehow generalized and one aspect of the fruit of practice is to actually notice, perceive these experiences and to let them be as such. and not to make them trivial or generalized. And then what that leads to is that there's a certain longing in that direction which remains.

[21:55]

And the way I experience it is that this is also one of the strong impulses for practice. Yes. Yes? Okay. In my understanding of neurophysiology, I would assume, or I have the feeling, that it is about immutability, and the ability, or the way of experiencing it, In my understanding of neurophysiology, I would say that if this is about immediacy, that our capacity to experience it is that it's there as a potential. But it's not something that I can arbitrarily just take out of a box and then apply?

[23:16]

But I imagine that this is something that needs to be practiced and developed and linked, neurologically linked. Yes? Hi, how are you? Good. I used to apply a certain practice about having to do with the space-time continuum. And maybe we know this experience that when you look at the clock at a train station, that sometimes it looks as if the second hand is going slower. There is a short break pause in between. And then I would, when I stared at the clock, I would kind of put myself in trance and imagine I was going somewhere else on vacation.

[25:03]

And then I recognized that I could consciously induce for myself to perceive the second hand going slower. The physical explanation for that is that the time-space continuum is a line. And that if I imagine to go onto a different place in that time-space continuum, and I return, that the way back, I'm not quite getting that, the way back is longer? It takes time. It takes time. OK. Okay, so we think that time goes like this on a timeline?

[26:07]

Yeah, some of us do. You're not guilty of that, are you? And then we go to a different place in the time-space continuum. So then time is different. So it doesn't go like this. It can also jump and go like this. Okay. Yes. Yes. I have experienced 20, 30 years that I have noticed everything in the city, that I have experienced everything in the area for reasons, that everything was to be expected with amazement. And when you just told this anecdote and said about perceiving the stillness, that's something that happened to me where I felt everything was just stillness and looking at everything with awe.

[27:08]

And recently I've been visiting an island in the ocean a lot. And I enjoy watching people and how they look at the ocean and how they move at the shore and so forth. And the Spanish people like moving around along the shore. And then suddenly I noticed that I could see the stillness surrounding everything. And then I was able to initiate this shift. Great. And then I deepened that a little. And then there are young people who are doing sports. And yeah. And everything was surrounded in stillness.

[28:21]

But then there was one special thing. There was a beautiful woman who was lying there with her family. . She did gymnastics. Then she did gymnastics so that she would get more beautiful. Is this a confession? Is this a confession? What did you say?

[29:23]

My question kept being why there is no stillness around her. I had the feeling, I wanted to know why, I had the feeling that it was fixed externally on her body. It was so beautiful. Oh, you think it was here? Yes. He said that he thinks that she was so focused on how she looked that maybe she didn't perceive her own stillness. And I said, oh, you think it was her, why there was no stillness. OK, thank you. Can you hand this over? I also invented such a time machine, a time manufacturing machine.

[30:34]

We have established that we manufacture time and we are not separate from time. And what I've noticed is that you can extend a moment that is only a moment but has the duration of a moment. You can extend that duration quite a bit when you write. So let me take an extreme example. When you're at the bed of someone dying, a moment between life and death.

[31:37]

And you try to describe this moment and what it elicits in you, what is happening. You need a lot more time to describe it than this moment ever has taken. And the crazy thing about that is that when it takes you three or four hours to write these three or four sentences, what I haven't noticed is how the three hours passed and how long I've let Arthur wait. Okay. And one can experience this in sitting, Zazen.

[33:01]

When I started sitting, I thought, oh, time is horribly long. It's interesting to feel that we're making time, that we are time, to feel that we are time. Thank you. So begin to write. For me, your explorations of time have reminded me of a phrase. I don't know exactly if it's from the Heart Sutra, but... This is echo from... The World Beyond Worlds. And for the longest time, I've thought of them as worlds out there.

[34:02]

Until I recognized that if I unfold these worlds, that then the worlds are unfolding on the inside. And my observation is that a condition for this is stillness in the widest sense. zeitlich und räumlich und weltlich interessante Aspekte zu zeigen. And then, temporally and in terms of time and spatially, und was war das dritte?

[35:21]

Weltlich, glaube ich. And worldly, some interesting aspects begin to appear. Und And what I think you are inspiring here is is to really become free of all ideas, words, and expectations. Maybe that's it now, I don't know. Well, okay. Someone else? Yes, Angela? I would like to stand up for what I would like to say. I would like to stand up for what I would like to say.

[36:23]

I would like to stand up for what I would like to say. [...] And I feel so incredibly grateful that it was possible for me to live in the last weeks with Norbert. Everything that you're just speaking about now and all these aspects are in it, this feeling of having infinite time. I know it was only possible because we practiced it together for years and we could really practice it. And I know that this was only possible because we've been able to practice this for so many years and then we're able to apply it.

[37:24]

And that gives me so much power to continue living. And I'm happy. Thank you. I'm happy that it's spoken about in such an alive way and that it comes to language and the way you're doing it. And to share this with all of you means a lot to me. Well, this seminar means to me, not only will I not see most of you again, but also that I won't see Norbert and Neil again. What this seminar means to me is not only that I will never see many of you again, but also that I will never see Norbert and Neil again. Yes. Yes, Susanne? I wanted to ask the question that just came to me, which is who is inspiring whom here?

[38:38]

And just a short experience. When I was in Rastenberg, I heard a bird. And this bird suddenly sang in me. This example just came to mind. And now I'm wondering, have I brought forth the bird? Or has the bird brought me forth? Or both? That's my question.

[40:08]

Well, it's not a question, it's a statement. Yeah, it's what we experience. And it's particularly what we experience when immediacy opens up. Yeah, thank you. But somehow I have a... But I've gone a path in order to experience this. Yes, me too. That's what's so wonderful about being on the path with you. Yeah. Yes.

[41:08]

Yes, I would like to say first that I am very grateful for the things we have discussed. Yesterday I noticed that you talked about meditation and you said that in medicine there is something constant and I also had the same experience and I am very pleased. I'm very grateful for the topics we are discussing. And yesterday you spoke about meditation and you said that in meditation there's something that's continuous, something that's constant. And that's my experience too. And that makes me happy. Okay. And my experience is also that this thing that is constant, sometimes when I... And then there are times when it's not possible. Or I've always thought, sometimes when I meditate, I hear our children.

[42:12]

And so what I observed is that Sometimes I'm sad or I'm angry or I'm happy and it doesn't disturb this constant factor in meditation. Or sometimes our kids are crying and then sometimes the constant factor is not disturbed. But sometimes it's not possible. And then I am sad or I am angry. It's not possible, but the constant factor is not disturbed. Or then I think, oh, geez, can't these kids shut up? And so maybe that's an observation that also other people have. For sure. Yes, Richard? Yes. Yesterday I heard an example of a person who fell and as she was falling, she felt that time was slowing down.

[43:47]

Yeah. Yes, and I thought about whether I ever had such an experience. Interestingly, I had such an experience of a slower pace today, and namely at the threshold between dream and reality, that is, not sleeping. And then I wondered, have I ever had an experience where time is much slower? And then I found it interesting that I actually have had such an experience very often, which is on the threshold between waking and dreaming, and so not sleeping yet. Once I was lying down on a street, and what's interesting is that I was sitting on a wall, and I was lying down on a street, and I stumbled over a branch, or something like that, in a time loop, and I noticed how I was also kicking forward in the reality of the feeling.

[44:54]

And so in my example, I was leaning against the wall and sleeping. But in the dream, I was walking, I was running down the street. And then in the dream, I fell over a branch. And then also in reality, I was falling forward. But I fell in slow motion. And then in reality, I also went... I understand. Yeah, if I was to try for the sake of the Dharma, if I was to try to say what I think is happening when we have this kind of experience, his consciousness perceives things in a kind of sequential line. ist es das Bewusstsein, die Dinge in einer Art aufeinanderfolgender Reihenfolge wahrnimmt.

[46:03]

But awareness perceives a field which isn't dimensioned. So, and the experience we've all heard about is that when somebody just before, like in a car accident or something happens, they might die, they see their whole life appear before them. That really does happen to people. Something very much, not their whole life, but something that feels like your whole life. Yeah, because in awareness, Everything can be present and not sequenced temporarily.

[47:06]

Yeah. And so when you fall, sometimes you fall out of consciousness and into awareness and everything moves very slowly. This happens in athletics and it happens in satsang. So I gave you, suggested to you, these four dimensions of time. But we've added stopped time, as in Vicky's experience. And we've added the awareness of time, which is to be unaware of time. The time which occurs in awareness, which is not the consciousness of time.

[48:19]

And then we had, too, yesterday, the conflated time in which the past is in the present. So we need another seminar. At least. Thank you, Richard. I know him as Richie, but it's nice to call you Richard. It's your decision. Yeah, OK. Thanks, Richard. Yes, hi. . I'm wondering then how we could see or maybe name a particular state that I've once found myself in.

[49:38]

Sometimes I get stuck with particular phrases, and the phrase that I got stuck with is temporarily undying, temporarily immortal. Well, this is good. I'll start using it, too. I heard that in the radio as the title of a book, and it immediately took hold of me. And from once in a while, such a weird thing will occur to me. ... I don't know how long that was and didn't know for a moment that I was going to die.

[51:19]

And so this sentence, I had that in mind. And the last thing I remember from this experience is that I found myself, I was sitting at a table, and then suddenly, next thing I know is that I found myself standing. I don't know how long the time span was between the two, but all I know is that when I started, I found myself standing, but I was wondering, am I alive now or dead? So then what I did is I would touch the table and thus confirm that I was still alive. But I had to touch it. So then how can I understand that? Because there's nothing. There's not even time. Nothing. Yeah. I... You know, one of the... Just to confirm how much this kind of stuff...

[52:53]

these experiences, and I feel I'm sort of swimming in the midst of our shared path. Einfach um zu bestätigen, wie sehr Erfahrungen wie diese, und ich habe das Gefühl, wie zu schwimmen in unserem gemeinsamen Weg. Is this phrase of Dogen's, Mujokan. Das ist dieser Satz von Dogen, Mujokan. Which means, again, to... Realize appearance as impermanent. Or realize appearance as empty of any substantial reality. And the word that's translated sometimes is to realize appearance as contingent.

[53:57]

Oh, not just before lunch. Out of order. I don't know. Contingent actually means, which is interesting, contingency. Please keep going. Contingency literally means to make sure something's real by touching it. Together, contingent, touch. So you actually touch something to see if it's real. So one of the practices of Mu Jo Kahn is to make sure it's real by touching it. It's interesting how so much experience of generations goes into one word. Yeah. So now I'm practicing contingency by texting all of you.

[55:21]

Let's have lunch. I'm a little early, so maybe we can be silent for a moment. But there's nothing wrong with early. I like it that everyone thinks they have to change their posture to be silent for a moment. I guess that's what I've been teaching, isn't it?

[55:57]

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