Are we ready? Let's go. Where? Oh, dear. So, Ivo was my helper, Anja, during the practice period. So he reappeared in this seminar. And we forced him into helping again. And so he brought me a piece of cake and a cup of tea. And then one of the disadvantages of being Anja, you have to sit down and talk. Oh, you don't have to, but... So we had quite an interesting conversation, actually, during the break.

[01:04]

And maybe you could summarize it in Swiss German. For everyone. I mean, do it in high German. I don't care. Don't do it in Swiss German. I won't understand. The title of the seminar is Compassion Made. The practice was about wisdom. And wisdom and compassion are for me two equal expressions within Buddhism. And this morning Roshi told me that compassion is an expression of wisdom.

[02:19]

And not the other way around, and also not necessarily equal. And that confused me. So I asked. And... What I understood is that Buddhist compassion is only Buddhist when what you do is also the attitude contains that it is liberating to oneself or to the other person beyond the concrete action. So that it is not enough to simply help someone, which is a general human duty, but if it is also noticeable that it is about liberation as a whole. And that a satwa, a bodhisattva is, if he or she is able, to convey this attitude or this perspective while she is doing it.

[03:32]

Yes. That made me... You were asleep when you were in my office? No, no, here. It just flows through me. I can't do anything against it. I fell asleep the other day in the middle of the Oryoki meal and dropped my bowl. Ich bin letztens während der Oryoki Mahlzeit eingeschlafen und habe meine Schale fallen lassen.

[04:34]

But that's acceptable. It's not acceptable to fall asleep while I'm talking. Das ist aber akzeptabel. Es ist nicht akzeptabel, einzuschlafen, während ich spreche. We have to give everyone more hours of sleep at night. Ich glaube, wir müssen allen mehr Schlaf geben über Nacht. You don't fall asleep whilst you're talking. Yeah, well, Kobenchino used to do that. When he first came from Japan, Tsukiroshi told him he had to give lectures. But he didn't really know English yet. So he'd be sitting up there and he'd say, Dogen Zenji... And pretty soon the entire room... But this is Zen, you know, so...

[05:35]

But this is Zen. So, you know, I was thinking of having small groups because I really like it, like what happens when you talk with each other in Deutsch. Ich habe darüber nachgedacht, ob wir Kleingruppen machen, weil ich das wirklich mag, was geschieht, wenn ihr untereinander auf Deutsch sprecht. Somehow we ran into too many topics. Aber jetzt haben wir zu viele Themen angestoßen. But I would really like to know how it's been for you so far. These are always experiments to me. Those of you, these are always experiments for me. but most of you who I see often know that even when I talk about the same thing like the four Brahma Biharas I speak about them in different ways

[06:51]

Because I'm experimenting with how to do this. So in the larger sense of what I'm doing I'm trying to find English words and Western concepts and paradigms, which can give you an accessible feeling for practice. And as I said in the last seminar, I can only pass the teaching on to you that can be passed.

[07:57]

And the challenge for me is to find out how to express it well enough that I can share it with you. But I can only share with you and pass on to you what you can also consensually realize. And the degree to which you consensually realize it then allows me to take the next step. And the particular challenge is, Buddhism has been developed to be passed monastically. And monastically means you're together for 10 years or 20 years.

[09:03]

No, I just met you. And even if you decided to really do this as a commitment, I'm not trying to put pressure on you. I only have two or three ten years left. Well, as I said, maybe half a ten years. I mean, I'm 78, so... Another 10 years, I'll be 88. Oh, gosh. So the question, you know, is, can to a group, like, say, you as an example, I probably will never see you again. I mean, I might.

[10:13]

I hope so. And I'll see some of you quite often. I see you once or twice a year. But to a non-monastic, adept lay sangha, Can the teaching be passed? Never been done in the past. But in the past there weren't you people. And now we have this extended campus. And we have to decide with you how to develop it. But if you saw this room a few months ago, you'd say we're making progress. We still have to figure out the lighting.

[11:16]

Okay, somebody want to say something? Yes. Yes, you have spoken about things that partially I have heard from you before. But what was fascinating for me was again to hear that zazen mind is connected to non-dreaming deep sleep mind. And that was like a permission again by you saying it. Deep sleep. And you know, when you do Zazen, you get so you can really sit completely straight and be sound asleep.

[12:35]

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I once, years ago, was having my hair cut by a barber. And I was a friseur. I was only sleeping a few hours a night in those days. So I was sitting in the barber's chair, totally upright and totally asleep. And after he finished cutting my hair, He held a mirror up to ask me how it looked. And from what he saw was a corpse staring into the mirror. Because in my eyes I had no reaction.

[13:38]

And he went, oh! And I said, oh, excuse me, oh yeah, it looks really nice. I said, excuse me, yes, it looks good. It was not the permission to sleep, but the permission, there is something like a pull of the mind to completely drop. I can only describe it physically. Not the permission to fall asleep, but there is like a pull, like a pulling of mind to completely let go, to completely drop. Good. And this is a physical feeling of extreme deep relaxation, relaxation and clarity.

[14:44]

And that's a bodily feeling of extremely deep relaxation, recuperation and clarity. And it's just that I need to give myself permission to go there more often. You have my permission. Now give yourself permission. We've been practicing together since 83. Sitting on the steps of the Davos Conference Center, halfway up the first flight. I'd given a talk, and then he encountered me, and we sat down on the stairs and talked, and we've been... Never ended. Yeah. We've been together ever since. And he stays thinner and I stay, you know... You promised me once that I would gain weight.

[15:48]

Yeah, but I'm not always correct. Yeah, because I did. Around 50, 55, I started gaining weight, and I thought, oh, you're a normal person. But I, of course, don't ride my bicycle to Holland. Okay, someone else. Yes. When I sit upright, I can't look back. I want to be relaxed. This feeling that Gerhard describes about falling into a really deep relaxation happens for me only when my spine is relaxed.

[17:21]

When I have this really upright spine, I never relax it. So why is the uprightness of the spine so important? Well, generally when you lie down, and have your spine relaxed with support there's a strong likelihood of falling asleep and if you get used to this posture eventually you can relax all the way down through your body and still have the energetic uprightness which allows a certain flow up to the roof of the mouth and to that, etc. And when you relax your whole body, then at some point you can be completely relaxed with a completely upright spine and feel this energetic flow through the thumb, in the mouth, up in the head and so on.

[18:30]

And we all have a chance to practice horizontal zazen every night. So please do that if that's your pleasure. Do it here. He spoke about this practice of seeing everything as mind. Recognizing everything as also mind. Okay, go ahead. Yes. And when I do that, then it's more difficult for me to feel a connection because that again would be a more bodily feeling, to feel connected is a more bodily feeling.

[19:39]

Connectedness is a more bodily feeling than noticing the simultaneity of mind? It's great that you have explored this and noticed the difference. But the more you can rest your sense of location, In the simultaneous continuum of mind. And I think you'll find that creates a much wider, more inclusive, deeper sense of connectedness. So, although your practice is very good, a little more would be good too.

[20:42]

Keep doing what you're doing. I mean, you... Deutsch, bitte. You form the intention to have this happen. And you seed this intention into your gestational time. Now, in the last seminar, we talked quite a bit about this bodily time, contextual time, and gestational time.

[21:49]

Yeah, I don't think it's A day and a half we have time to go into that, but who knows? Right now, not anyway. Someone else? Yes, Tara? Oh, yes, Cornelia? Yes. Now we've spoken all this time about mind and then about body, and now I come along with my Christian beliefs, and now the question, what about the soul in Christianity? It's body, soul, and mind. Is there a soul in Buddhism? No. Right. Sorry.

[22:55]

What is a soul in Christianity? A good question. Yeah, I'm just returning. I need time for responding. All right. We have till tomorrow. I thought quite a lot about it. And James Hillman, you know James Hillman's work? He's a renegade union psychologist who's really great.

[23:56]

His books near the end of his life, I think he's still alive, are not as good, but most of his books are fantastic. And he tries to deal quite a lot with the difference between self, psyche and soul. And what we're trying to say or express or feel when we say soul instead of psyche, for instance. And what we try to express or what we feel when we say soul instead of, for example, psyche. When we mature the psyche, what are we doing? Probably the same things Probably in Buddhism we're doing something the same, but we wouldn't say and we wouldn't conceptualize it as psyche.

[25:15]

And how you conceptualize things makes a big difference. For example, if you just take the words what and who, When you say to yourself, who am I? Who am I? And when the same body and the same lips and the same tongue say, what am I? The shift in Meaning between those two words makes it a very different question. Right now, ask yourself, what am I? And I think you'll feel a difference from

[26:16]

Who am I? So the difference between soul and psyche and self are somewhat like different feeling develops through using a different concept. And for Buddhism, of course, it wouldn't be a thing, it wouldn't be a soul, some kind of passable thing, it would be an activity. I think one thing that occurs to me about how a Christian would... What defines the soul is that one defining characteristic is that it continues to live.

[27:45]

Yeah, well, that's not true of Buddhism. I mean, reincarnation has been tacked on to Buddhism by Hinduism. Although in Tibetan Buddhism it's become quite institutionalized. Buddhism says maybe such things as reincarnation happen. But we don't, no practice in Zen Buddhism depends on a belief in reincarnation. And even those who believe in reincarnation, enlightenment means you can stop the reincarnation. and even if I don't ever get enlightened in that way I'd be happy to stop the reincarnations I've had enough I'm doing the best I can now I don't want to try it again I'm looking forward to disappearing yes

[29:01]

In connection with that, there is a book by Dr. Eben Alexander. Have you heard of his book? He's a psychiatrist who experienced brain death for quite a long time and had an experience outside with his body, although with his body, brain was completely dead. And then he came back. And he, who was once very... Okay. German, please. These Americans, they just like to speak English. At the beginning, I can't say for sure, but he was also brain dead for a certain period of time and also had experiences and wrote a book about what he experienced in this state. Well, I was part of a group that met once or twice a year in California, in Kesselin.

[30:47]

The group was called Survival After Bodily Death. And I met with them, you know, for a week at a time, once or twice a year. For several years, for, I don't know, five years, six years. And they have a book out. It's pretty good. I don't know. I forget what it's called. I could have been part of it, but I decided not to. And the seminars were convinced my best friend of reincarnation. He's still my best friend, but I don't agree with him. When you look at the evidence, reincarnation really follows the cultural patterns.

[31:56]

In China it's different than in Ghana and stuff like that. But out-of-body experiences are quite convincing. But they don't convince me that there's reincarnation. And a fairly common experience for people who end up practicing Zen They'll say, well, as a kid when I went to sleep, I would find myself at the ceiling looking down at myself. I used to have those experiences and I know lots of people when they talk privately about what led them to practice.

[33:11]

It was experiences like that that they couldn't explain in terms of our usual way of looking at it. And just supporting you and speaking within this conversation we're having. As part of, and these are the leading researchers in United States and England and occasionally from France in this whole area of out-of-body experiences and reincarnation and so forth. This group. And one of the, you know, and I've the most vivid of the quite a few out-of-body experiences I've known, know about and have seen, studied.

[34:17]

It was a film of a woman who, she had to have a very complicated operation. And they had to cut off the top of her skull. And they lowered her temperature until she was virtually dead. And then they, I don't know how they, they had to do things to the brain. They had to stop blood to the brain for a certain length of time. Yeah, and I'm watching the film, right? And they're doing this.

[35:20]

Yeah. And then it took, I don't know, the operation took, I think, a couple hours or so. But the film I saw was about half an hour. And you had a clock going. Yeah, and so you knew when certain things happened, like the... So after she recovered and was conscious, She started describing what happened during the operation. One of the funny things she said, what was that electric toothbrush you had on my head? Which was actually a saw sawing her head open. And one of the funny things she said was, what was this electric toothbrush that you used in my head?

[36:25]

And it was actually a saw with which her skull was opened. So she described all kinds of things. She described what the doctor said during the operation and things like that. But do you all know who Rupert Sheldrake is? He's an old friend of mine. And one of the films he's made, which is quite fun to watch, Someone and this woman go into town in England somewhere. And they have a film watching the dog who stays at home. And there's a camera watching them shop at the same time.

[37:31]

Simon says you can see the clock going. Okay. So they are in town for like an hour and 15 minutes or so. I can't remember. And the woman sits down on a park bench and says, geez, we better go home now. I think we've done everything. The dog gets up and goes to the door to wait. And a few minutes later, they decide, oh no, I still have to go to the apothecary and stuff like that. The dog goes back where he was. And then 20 minutes, 30 minutes later they decide to go home and the dog gets up and waits by the door.

[38:47]

And I've seen that at my friend Michael Murphy's house. His wife, they had a dog named, I forget the name now. Anyway, a dog. And they lived in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge. And Michael and I would be sitting talking. And the dog would get up and go sit by the door. And Michael would say, Delcy's on the Golden Gate Bridge. And that's about a 20-minute drive. 20 minutes later, she'd be down.

[39:48]

There were something like 85 steps going up a hill to get to their house from where you parked your car. And it took more than five minutes, especially if you're carrying groceries or anything, to get up all those steps. So after about 20 minutes, Michael said, the dog got up and then stood by the door. And Michael said, she's at the bottom of the stairs. And then she came in the door. And I said, I knew it all the time. Well, I don't know. I know about a lot of anomalies like this. I call them anomalies. And the style of Buddhism is not to make theories about them.

[40:58]

So I don't make theories about them. Okay, should we stop? He wants to stop. You didn't help her either. What? You didn't help her carrying out the rosary. Well, we didn't. I don't remember either. None of us helped her, but I think she was all right. But he, if you were there, you would have gone down to the bottom of the stairs. Yes? Okay, let's stop. Unless somebody objects. Es sei denn, jemand hat was dagegen. We're talking nonsense now. Sprechen ja jetzt Unsinn. Anecdotes.

[41:52]

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