I'm so glad to be back here at Rostenberg. With Eric translating. And with the good acoustics of Giorgio's building. Yeah. Now, I'm sorry Christiana can't be here. But at least Giorgio and Cecily are here. And I met Christiana and Cecily in Hannover, right? And they brought me these three in a way of a reason I started practicing here in Austria. And the other reason I started practicing here in Austria is because Eric and Christina and Mikhail, we met in Prague, no, Poland, yeah, in Tbilisi.

[01:01]

No, no, where do we meet? Krakow. Krakow, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I... Someone asked me this morning... I said, I travel so much. And I think my little daughter, Sophia, would say, yes, Papa, you travel too much. She calls me every morning. I woke up this morning. She called me. She says, Papa, why aren't you here with me? And no matter what I say, she just repeats this phrase, why aren't you here with me?

[02:23]

And I say, well, you're there and I'm here. She says, no, you're not there and you're not here. But my actual feeling is that I don't travel. I just spend time with my friends in various places. So it's wonderful that Giorgio and Christiana and Cecily and Eric excuse me for being so sentimental. I can spend time with you every year. It's good. And also in some funny way I feel that I mean this is something I might say more about.

[03:27]

But in some funny way, I feel that Vienna, Wien, is the beginning of Buddhism in the West. Or the conditions and interests that have... been a starting point, at least a starting point for opening up to Buddhism in the West. So, you know, I'm happy so many of you could come to this prologue day. And I thought I might use it as a review of some of the basics of sitting practice.

[04:33]

Maybe it's good to do because it seems to me some of you I don't know and even though you may be familiar with sitting practice, And these basic, very basic ways we understand practice is much of the entirety of the teaching of Zen Buddhism. And one conception that has shaped the pedagogy of Mahayana is that each teaching, or in general each teaching, includes other teachings when practiced thoroughly.

[06:00]

It includes not just other teachings but in some ways all the other teachings. But first, you know, I don't know why this came up in me, but I said to myself, am I old because I have a grandson who's nearly ten? Yeah, or am I young because I have a daughter who's three? Yeah. Or am I old because I'm getting it to that age which is supposed to be old?

[07:02]

Yeah. I mean, when you're young, your life is shaped by the idea that someday you'll be old. So maybe when you get to be the age which you're supposed to be old, you should start acting old so young people feel that this is what's going to happen. Did you get that all straight, probably? I think so. Nobody said something against it. I don't think I could repeat it myself. Hmm. Or maybe I'm old because I had all this operation and radiation treatments last year which have aged me.

[08:26]

That's probably partly true. I'm certainly tireder in ways I never was before. But... But I guess what I'm saying, I'm not really trying to talk about myself. I'm just thinking about this discovery of being a different age. It's a kind of discovery. When now being the pretending to be the young father of a three-year-old, I notice that how much someone who's three lives in the promise of adulthood.

[09:34]

because there's nothing she does which isn't informed by eventually I'll have more capacity I'll be able to do this better although I can't do this perfectly well yet when I'm older I'll be able to do it very well And she's always being told, you can't do that yet, like take the computer apart or plug in the toaster, you know, herself or something. So she lives in the promise that adulthood will fulfill her dreams. And all of us are old enough to know this dream comes true. will not be fulfilled.

[11:05]

Adulthood does not live up to its promise. And then when we're adults we look back on childhood as some kind of, we may, not always, but look back on childhood as some living in some globe. I suppose practice is, you could say, Zen practice, Buddhist practice is, can adulthood live up to its promise? And I think that's a question we can take hold of as a guide within our own practice.

[12:24]

And then there's the idea of, Sukhir, she always spoke about this, our innermost request. Yeah, and this is what he meant really was a request. Can we hear our inner request, how we'd like life to be? Und er hat hier wirklich von einem Wunsch gesprochen, einem Wunsch, den wir zuhören können, wie wir gerne hätten, dass unser Leben wäre oder dass das Leben wäre. Now, if I said that I'm finding being this age I am, which is 68, that's the number assigned to it.

[13:39]

But still, I have to recognize that, let's say, the end game is starting. I guess I mean that whatever my life has been, this is what it is. The alternative games are probably gone. When you're younger, you think, well, I could do this, I could do that, or later this that I'm doing will be understood or recognized or something. Yeah, but probably by the time you're 60 or 70 or 80 for sure, the alternatives are mostly gone.

[14:47]

Whatever your life has been is probably what it's going to be. So that's a kind of discovery of getting used to. And probably if you're wise, your life now should be what it has been and thus leads to. And if you're wise probably what your life has been and without alternatives what that leads to is probably what it should be. I think when you're you don't see life so much as a discovery, you see it as a condition.

[16:14]

Yeah, it's also a discovery, but it's not a discovery you can compare to the entirety of your life. Okay, so again, I think that this, what I'm speaking about now is also, meditation is a process of absorption. The word Zen literally means something pretty close to absorption. So this process of absorption is a process of discovery, which leads us more into a process of discovery, that's enough to say.

[17:27]

Robert Musil says something like, life presents itself as a surface, which has no alternatives. And if we take then the same period Freud, we can say Freud discovered the unconscious. And often I've spoken about that because his process was, I would say, pretty much something like the fourth skandha. And I've talked about it quite often because this process is quite similar to the fourth scandal. Basically he noticed that

[18:52]

one state of mind, you knew things that you didn't know in ordinary consciousness. So if we know things in one state of mind that we don't know in consciousness, there must be some place where those things we don't know consciously are kept. So we call that the unconscious. Basically, once you've seen that, that there's things we don't know consciously, thought about it. His idea was pretty simple. It's an idea which has changed the world.

[20:12]

But he also implicitly discovered, as Robert Musil points out, that life... presents itself as a surface. A surface which pretends to contain the whole of our life. But we know it doesn't. So that's partly what I meant by the Vienna might be a starting point for practice. Yeah, because practice, again, we could define as finding some way to get under I don't like under and above and things, but let's say it that way, under the surface of our life.

[21:18]

Because if I was going to try to describe conceptually what... Buddhism's understanding of being. Buddhism's traditional outer conception of being. where we, this cosmos, is that it's worlds within worlds and folded within worlds. But the conception of being is also that it's worlds folded within worlds.

[22:23]

Although Freud may have noticed the, like Lucille, noticed the surface of our life consciousness is only a surface or not the only territory of our life. But it's still the boss territory. It's the controller. It's the most real surface of our life. Someone said to me the other day in a seminar, when I wake up and I've had a good dream, I feel, oh, this is part of my life, this beautiful dream.

[23:40]

But when I wake up and I had a bad dream, I say, oh, this is only a dream. Yeah, why do we do that? What part of our life do we really think is the real part of our life? For example, when you just assume it's natural to interpret dreams into your consciousness. You're assuming that consciousness is the realest part of our life. Hmm. Hmm. But Buddhism does not make that assumption.

[24:47]

That the dreams are, we could say, an enfolded part of our life, which their real power is their enfoldedness. Is this world the three or four dimensions that we can perceive consciously? Or is it the ten or twelve dimensions that science says, mathematics says, are folded together out of our consciousness? So Buddhism would say that there's much of our life that we can't think or imagine, but that we live through its enfoldedness, and that we only discover part of its power

[26:07]

when we try to unfold it. And discovering part of its power through unfolding we think, oh, This is really important to do. But then we're deceived by, I think, by our small success of the power we discover through a partial unfoldment. But so then how do we live the fullness of our, as much as possible, of the enfolded, of our enfolded life? And to what extent it does unfold.

[27:34]

Or act within the enfoldment of others and the world. This we discover immediately. mostly not through consciousness. And esoteric teachings and mysticism and so forth are often attempts to bring this unfoldment into consciousness. Which is okay. Yeah, important to do. But it's also important not to also know the power of not unfolding but living the unfolding, living the enfoldedness. So whether you're so-called old or so-called young, this entering into your enfoldedness is just about the same.

[29:00]

Yeah. So I thought I'd take some simple... So let's take three. One is don't scratch. Another is, count your breaths.

[30:04]

And the third is, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Yeah, so maybe I can... Or coffee. Don't invite your thoughts to get drunk with you. No one's ever said this to me, but I can imagine someone saying, after Sashim, my thoughts of me went on a bender. A bender, it means you go for a week or so, drink. It's always struck me as funny that in English there's only a few ways to say you love someone. You like, love, adore, that's about it.

[31:12]

But there's probably hundreds of ways to say how you get drunk. But love is a kind of drunkenness, so there ought to be more words for it. So don't scratch. This means really just to sit still. And when you first start sitting, I think you have these real or imaginary itches that appear. After a while they stop. I mean, maybe ten years or... Two years or something like that.

[32:30]

And you're convinced there's a mosquito in your ear. And sometimes it's actually the case. Or a fly is in your nostril. And then you try to not move but you're going to... When I sat in the monastery in Japan, there are these huge mosquitoes. I mean... When I entered the monastery, first I had to sit for... I don't remember. You have to sit from... seven to one week to two weeks without breaks. I mean, you can get up and walk around, but if you get up too often, they kind of ask you not to stay in the monastery.

[33:39]

Well, when I entered a monastery in Japan, I had to sit for one or two weeks the whole day without having a break. You could get up, but you were observed. You shouldn't do that too often. If you seem to go to the toilet more than the average bladder would expect. Yeah, they think maybe you should Anyway, so anyway, what your robe is, and you have several layers, this is true. You have what? A special kind of underwear that you wear under kimonos and... Then you have what's called a juban.

[34:42]

That's the white thing you see at the kimono. Then you have the kimono. Then you have the koromo. Then you have the okesa. And then you have these little bends. Where all the cloth fits together against your skin. Like that. And mosquitoes. These huge mosquitoes. could get right in those creases and go right through all the layers of cloth. Lines of mosquito bites every place my robe folded in. So anyway, you do would like to scratch or pull your robes off. It sounds like a kind of torture.

[35:59]

A mild form of torture. And it sort of is sometimes. And then you discover that a large percentage, almost 100% of the itches are imaginary. And if you actually decide to scratch, it immediately appears over here, somewhere. And if you actually decide to scratch, it immediately appears over here, somewhere. So in this simple way you learn to sit still. And sit still these real or imaginary itches. And then if you sit for 30 minutes, 40 or 50 minutes, at first, you know, your legs often are quite uncomfortable.

[37:03]

But most of the time, no physical damage is being done. And it's important to know if physical damage is being done, because you can damage your sciatic nerve and stuff. But eventually you learn to sit still through the difficulty of your legs. And you can't do it just by willpower. You can, but that's not very effective. You do it by discovering a mind that isn't bothered by the itches or the pain. Sometimes people in a sashin will have a lot of pain, and then suddenly, for ten minutes or sometimes an afternoon,

[38:30]

all go away and you're just sitting there in some kind of clarity. Now I can introduce a I think we should take a break soon but I'll try to finish a little bit of what I'm saying. Just so that we are on the same page. Let's remind you of this truism of Yogacara Buddhism. That all... Mental phenomena have a physical component. And all sentient physical phenomena have a mental component.

[39:49]

So it means if on that when suddenly there's no pain. If your body can remember the feel of that mind, then you've discovered a mind that has a different relationship to pain and suffering than our usual consciousness. This is one of the minds that in a sense is under, or... above the surface of consciousness. That's not a mind you can remember with consciousness. Because as soon as you're in consciousness, the pain returns.

[40:53]

So if your body can remember this mind that has this different relationship to pain and suffering, then you've created a new kind of mind space or psychological space. And to put it simply, You've broken the connection between thought and action. In other words, now you can feel things, think things, and not have to act on them. So it becomes a psychological process, actually. Or a big space within psychological processes, you don't have to suppress things.

[42:20]

You don't have to express them. You more and more can let yourself feel things completely. If you act on them, they become concentrated and less, different. There's much more complexity to how we feel than we can express. So you discover a space of mind which gets bigger and bigger as you do it, in which you can feel things completely. And let them mature and develop through their own through their ownness, and through this new kind of mental space.

[43:33]

And then they can also mature through acting. And they, in a way, we can say, mature through their remaining enfolded. So this profoundly psychological and deep being space is rooted in a simple instruction like don't scratch. And again, if we look at, if we take take it that consciousness is a surface.

[44:41]

We can ask what seals this surface? What makes this surface? Yes, maybe that's enough. Maybe that's enough for now. So let's have a break.

[45:44]

Machen wir also eine Pause. Thank you very much. Vielen Dank. There's a limited number of toilets and a large number of cups. Also eine halbe Stunde ist ziemlich gut. Treffen wir uns wieder um 5.12 Uhr.

[46:18]

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