Usually, if I'm doing a usual seminar, I like to find out what you've talked about in the groups. But the basis for that is because I'm trying to understand what you've understood so I know what I might teach. But I don't feel I'm here to teach Buddhism. I'm just here to participate in some way. So I don't have to hear what you've talked about. But still, if anybody wants to comment... or share it with the group, that's fine with me. And if anyone had some suggestions of what you'd like me to speak about, we can just meet in small groups again.

[01:15]

I'm trying not to take any role here, despite sitting on this funny cushion in here. I'm waiting to see what role you give me. Because, you know, just in the last two months I've given about 50 lectures. And I've done one seminar after another, one every week. So I could just by habit just start. So I'm resisting doing that. In fact, I have no idea what to say. So I'm waiting for you. Yeah. So why not say something about what we were talking about during the break, the lunch break?

[02:38]

And you made clear the differences between Zen and psychotherapy. I don't know if it... I don't know if it's clear, but there were suggestions. I would like him to say something about the subject area. Why is it actually possible that such spiritual development in one person and psychological development I would like you to talk about how it is possible that there is a spiritual path that a person follows and a psychotherapeutic path that a person follows and they can be pretty much unconnected or not connected with each other and how is that possible?

[03:40]

And I am referring to what you said earlier in the past that there are spiritual teachers which are on a personal level not very much developed. Psychologically. Psychologically, yes. I don't have a certain question, but I would like to hear that this theme gets more meat, so to speak. And I would like to add from my point of view, and I also was talking about that in our small group, I would not know if I would not practice psychotherapy, but I would practice Buddhism.

[04:49]

If it would be not connected as it is now. But nowadays I have something to do with both areas, which are unconnected. They are unconnected? No, because psychotherapy is my profession, and I deal with Buddhism every day, it is always in some kind connected. Yeah, and you seem to be mostly one person, so... I would like to know more about that area. I hear you. You know, I have to find the grounds or the ability to speak about that, if I speak about that enough, if I can find a way to speak about that.

[06:08]

I'd want to find a way to engage all of you in the possibility. Yeah, that's, you know, not, Not be possible, but... Not so easy. But I would say just right now that you can have a so-called spiritual path. We have a problem with that word. I mean that there's techniques of practice which you can use. And there's the experience one has of one's life. And then in a sense there's the kind of containers psychological containers that happens in.

[07:12]

From that point of view, I might be able to say something, but let's see if anyone else wants to bring something up. But I'll keep in mind. Something that came up during our talks is the alaya vijnana. And in the sense that pictures and thoughts and ideas seem to come up and rise from there? arise from somewhere and maybe you could call it the alaya vijnana.

[08:34]

Could that be a support for psychotherapeutic practice? if through meditation you get to know that area more and more, and to give the client the feeling that they are not prisoners of their thoughts and ideas from the past. Are you all familiar with the Alaya-Vijnana idea?

[09:40]

Well, it's just to say a little bit about it each time. If we talk about something, we have to have some kind of shared... The laya vijnana is sometimes called, defined as, translated as, the storehouse consciousness. And it's also translated, it's also within Buddhism, sometimes traditionally called Buddha nature itself. Now, if you... If you take these, just let's take simply, there's more definitions, but let's just take these two definitions.

[10:44]

Es gibt mehr Definitionen, aber wir wollen jetzt erstmal nur die zwei nehmen. Now, again, this culture in which Buddhism has arisen, noch einmal die Kultur in... There really aren't entities. And it's very hard to really get ourselves free of that. If I talk about, as I did in Hanover just the other day, background mind as a dynamic of being. And inevitably people think, oh, background mind is some part of you. But it's not. It's just an activity. It's a way of Interacting. So, related to the fact that there's not entity thinking, by entity I mean discrete, separate objects.

[11:52]

Of course there's discrete separate objects. But in a culture like this yoga culture that Buddhism grew up in and helped develop, the discrete separateness is never thought of much. It's always thought about in terms of what you can do with it. You know, it's a hat or it's a teacup or it's a bell. And that's the way it's thought of. And I had a vivid experience of this when I was... My oldest daughter is 44. She was about, you know, so it was 40-some years ago. I had a cup made by the, somebody had given me by the leading potter of Japan.

[13:11]

And Hamada. And it was, you know, the sort of equivalent to having a cup made by Picasso here in Germany. It was probably worth at least as much as a Picasso, though even that was given to me. My daughter came in and knocked it off the table, my desk. I was using it. It broke into lots of pieces. And one of my weaknesses is I love beautiful things. So it's nice. I like this cup. It was fun to use. But when it fell on the floor, I had no reaction. And the only reaction I had, I said, hey, practice must be working.

[14:30]

Because I had no sense of loss. Oh, my entire feeling was, oh, it's now something to clean up. It's now something to get repaired. It's now something to replace. My daughter was a little bit worried that I might... And I wouldn't have felt that way before I practiced. Because it was entirely now and I was surprised by my reaction it was entirely now an activity. Unbroken it was a new kind of activity. Okay, so there's quite a different thinking when you really see things only as activity.

[15:34]

And the example I use all the time, because the word true and tree are the same root. Because it's true, trees are usually where you leave them the night before. But really you should call a tree treeing. It shouldn't be called a tree. It shouldn't be a noun. It should be a verb or a gerund. You should see it ideally in the way I'm thinking. A tree should just be an activity. It should be an activity. It should be an impermanence, an active feeling of impermanence and empty. Now this is a different way of thinking about things.

[16:45]

But it's a possibility for us humans. It's a possibility that we can discover. And we all have a taste of it to some extent. And we can use our already taste of it to bring it more into presence. And again in this thinking, there's no natural being, there's no instinctual being. Now, I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying that's the view. And that's all a little background to say words are primarily... understood contextually. That makes translating Buddhist terms very difficult because they really can have different meanings and they don't have fixed meanings.

[18:00]

They're contextual. General area, but contextual. What was the general? There may be a general territory for it, but it's still contextual. So Alaya Vijnana is a word which represents a general territory of stored experience. Alaya Vijnana is a general expression for If you use that stored experience one way, it's called Buddha nature. Okay, so if we look at it as a storehouse and Buddha nature, and given that they're contextual definitions, you can maybe get a feeling for what this means.

[19:03]

Now many people in the West say, oh, it's the Buddhist word for the unconscious, which it is definitely not. In that kind of way of looking at it, the word alaya vijnana means all experiences, conscious, non-conscious, never touched consciousness, but somehow are present to your life. So defined are all things, conscious, unconscious, conscious, or also conscious, not conscious, Now, then the question is, how does that enter into our mind? Now, there's a second idea of manas or the editing consciousness.

[20:07]

And part of practice is to get that editing consciousness out of the way. Now, one of the ways you would do that is... Ralph, are you still back there somewhere? It might be in the swimming pool. I can't see. What's the term that you told me that Freud used for tuning in to the... Free association. Yeah, that's what you just said today, but a couple of years ago you told me... Evenly suspended intention. Yeah, evenly suspended intention.

[21:23]

My teacher back there. So something like evenly suspended intention where there's a... a face-to-face development of a certain kind of state of mind, we could say is one way to get past the editor and have another sense of maybe another access to our stored experience. And I think, you know, I don't know if you know Alan Shore's work, but his and others' work, which shows the relationship between the third trimester of pregnancy and the

[22:26]

first 18 months of life. And how the brain, the limbic system, the wiring of the neurological wiring is developed in this three-moment relationship to the mother. Connection, pulling back and correction. And he examines the emergence of the neurological pathways and, so to speak, the wiring in the brain and a three-phase relationship between child and mother There's a connection, there's a drawing back, and there's a correction.

[23:32]

And they can measure that now in real time. And I'm convinced this is accurate. I'm convinced this is accurate. And that we're actually wired for face-to-face communication. And I think that that's one way psychotherapy is very thoroughly like Buddhist practice, Zen practice in particular. Because in Zen, the whole emphasis is there's no real teaching, understanding, without face-to-face interaction. You could learn a lot about psychotherapy from reading a book, but that's not psychotherapy.

[24:51]

And the similar practice, there has to be this face-to-face interaction where things happen that are outside the categories of ordinary knowing. The Laya Vijnana is one conception that developed, I don't know, 1500 years ago or so. It's not in early Buddhism, it's in late Buddhism. To try to explain how this face-to-face interaction works. And it's also a way people try to explain or have some... explanation is the wrong word but I'll use it... explanation for how we discover our experience in meditation. Why I said explanation is not a good word because it's not meant to explain anything.

[26:04]

It's meant to be a metaphor or a concept which when used enhances your practice but takes you far beyond any explanation. Someone else wants to bring up something. It touches the question that came up in the hallway.

[27:08]

And from the Buddhist point of view, what is the unconscious? And the view of the human being of conscious, unconscious, what is like the viewpoint, what's behind all this? You're saying What we explain by unconsciousness, does Buddhism use a similar explanation? There's really no idea of the unconscious in Buddhism. I say that sort of as a challenge.

[28:26]

There is no way, not knowing. There's certainly we don't know. There's lots we don't know. Yeah, go ahead. I would like to add because I was in the same group. We came up towards the end with the question, why do consciousness processes take so long? They seem to take over. They do? Change. Why does change take so long? Even if people don't like their behavior, it takes a long time to change their behavior. Why does it take so long? It's great you think I can answer this question.

[29:32]

It's charming. It's charming. I would say that the reason that I wouldn't say there's any idea of the unconscious in Buddhism because the unconscious, it seems to me, and you guys know more than I do, you can correct me, is a dynamic in relationship to consciousness. and it's a concept or metaphor which suggests that whatever the content of the unconscious is it could be conscious or it was once conscious and there's some kind of idea it's almost like a liquid you're pushing something down under

[30:56]

which there's a pressure for it to come up, but something's keeping it down. Now that may not be correct. What would you say? The subconsciousness is a normal process, as well as repression. So the unconscious is something you just like pushing something away down. And it's part of our being which we do and where we don't have to know much about. It's just what we are doing. And sometimes it's enlightened when we understand something when we need it. But that sounds like what I said.

[31:58]

Maybe you said it better. You know, for you it's different. What you said is different than what I said. Maybe not. I thought so, but maybe not. Yeah, I mean, you're saying it's something we push away or... See, I'm not saying that the unconscious doesn't exist. I'm just saying Buddhism doesn't emphasize it. And I think the more we have a consciousness which has to be productive and function a certain way, we need some things off-scene. So, in any case, the alive jnana is things that you may never be able to be conscious of, or that are fine to be, you know, it's just all your accumulated experiences.

[33:01]

Period. Now, look, if I go back and study various ideas, there's been... centuries of discussion about what the Ilaiya Vijnana is. So, you know, I'm just... So the only useful thing for me to do here is to bring it up as an idea, a way of looking at things that's in some contrast to thinking about the unconscious. Okay. Now, I can't... It's a much more complicated... It's a more... I speak about sometimes yogic culture, which includes much of the Far East.

[34:28]

And many of the things I speak about are actually quite common within the whole culture, Buddhist or not. But some are... quite particular to Buddhism. And particular to even Zen. And particular to a way of shaping our mind and self. So from that point of view, from the point of view of strictly practice itself, you're shifting your location, your sense of identity, your sense of location out of consciousness into, let's say, simply awareness.

[35:34]

And in fact, you can locate your sense of... move your sense of location to several different kinds of minds. And we in fact do that kind of thing without having it very well articulated, I think. Now, the artist is, when he's painting, say, a visual artist, he's probably, while he's painting, moved his sense of location into another mind that allows him to paint, or an actor before he goes on stage or something. And I think Freud somehow discovered a kind of meditation posture.

[36:40]

And free association, which we call the fourth skanda. And with this evenly suspended attention, we could say he's locating himself in another kind of mind. And then he noticed that people knew things in this mind they didn't know in their conscious mind. So then he presumed, where is that stored? The unconscious. So the concept is related very closely to, I think, Freud's experience of seeing that people knew things they didn't know in consciousness. But a depth of practice means you're in a situation where consciousness is a very small part of your functioning and you're able to physically hold consciousness in such a way that you can open yourself to other flows of mind at the same time.

[38:20]

So the idea of unconscious is something that's present actually. I should go a little slower, I'm sorry, yes. Going to different kinds of minds means going to different activities of minds. Yes, that too. Okay. Let me define mind briefly.

[39:21]

We can say a mode or state of mind which is homeostatic and self-organizing. And a simple example is you're asleep. And that's a particular mode of mind which allows dreaming. And you wake up. But you don't want to wake up because Sleeping mind is homeostatic, wants to keep maintaining its state. And it's self-organizing because it hears the alarm and decides it's a telephone and doesn't have to answer. And then once you wake up and you really start thinking, you can't go back into the dream.

[40:22]

So then you can think of minds as a kind of liquid. In consciousness, dreams sink out of sight. In the liquid of dreaming mind, they float to the surface. So you can re-establish, you can get it. Another basic of this practice is all mental, all mental modes of mind. have a physical component. No mind without a body. And all sentient or human physical states have a mental or feeling component.

[41:47]

Now, part of the practice of mindfulness is you develop the skill to feel states of mind. you can feel states of mind. You can have the physical feel for and a physical location for. So you can tune, in a sense, tune a state of mind. You can decide to tune a state of mind. So in another simple sense, if you, during meditation, would make a different decision than you would during ordinary consciousness, that's a different state of mind, if it produces a different decision. No, I could say a lot more about that. That's enough to give the picture of how Buddhism thinks about the mind. There's minds connected to one sense, mind connected to two senses, mind connected to three senses.

[43:07]

Yes. And we are exactly in the territory where our group tried to produce a question. We have two days. Where does the psychotherapist locate himself?

[44:09]

What kind of state of mind is it? What physical place is it? You're asking me? I'm not a psychotherapist. And it was the question what did we bring from our Zen practice into the psychotherapeutic practice and the possibility to tune and adjust that That was described as something like not knowing a bigger space, background mind. So what kind of...

[45:17]

How does that change and relate to the client when I'm coming from this bigger and wider sense of working with the client? Well, I don't know if I quite understand it as it's passed through translation. But let me say simply, and see if this relates at least, that it's assumed, much like Ralph said, Freud, there's this evenly suspended attention. And it's assumed, as Ralph said, there's this evenly suspended attention. so there's an assumption in Buddhism that there's a larger somatic body present in this room for example and that larger somatic body is tuned by all of us but somebody who has a great deal of presence or power in there mind-body.

[46:48]

Like who's that guy who hypnotized the whole audience? Erickson or Whittinger. Erickson. Can tune a whole group of people. So the therapist, it would be assumed in Buddhism, that the therapist can establish a mind that is not coercive, but allows the client to go into territories that they normally don't experience. It's coercive, it's not manipulative.

[47:53]

So the psychotherapist, it is said in Buddhism that the psychotherapist can create a space So in Zen practice you'd only go into a state of mind, I mean I'm making this sound awfully simple like a cartoon, but you'd only go into a state of mind that the other person already knows to some extent. Now, what you said about consciousness... I mean... Suzuki Roshi said in 1971, shortly before he died, the nature of thinking mind is to simplify the world.

[48:56]

so that we can act in it and understand it. So that means that we're living in a ghost world. So he says, but if you... So... So he said, but if you can not depend on thinking mind in the way you act, you're more likely to know things as they are. Now, within this simple statement of of Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, is an implied definition of consciousness, which is the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. If I look here, Nicole,

[50:30]

And then I look back at you. Consciousness is going to make me fairly certain when I look back, Nicole is going to still be there. And consciousness would be very surprised if she weren't there. Somebody pulled a lever and she just went right to the floor. So we have to make the world predictable to function. So the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. Sequential, chronological. And cognizable.

[51:33]

And that's all good and useful, but it's basically delusion. A kind of delusion. And it's a delusion because the world is not predictable. So consciousness keeps fooling us to think the world is predictable. So then the part of practice is, how do you make use of consciousness? And simultaneously know all the time things are impermanent. And so you don't begin to establish your sense of moment by moment continuity through consciousness. You don't identify with that continuity as yourself.

[52:52]

Now let me just give you... Now what I find useful in trying to speak about these things is to take little examples And see the implications of little examples. And then let the little example work in you and then that makes sense of other things. One example is, for instance, the Chinese idea of the concept of the future. It's something that comes to you. We have, at least in English, and maybe in German it's different, we have the sense the future is something you go into.

[54:04]

Well, if I'm going to go to Hanover, I have to have a target. And if I'm going to go into the future, I have to imagine the future is somehow predictable. But the Chinese idea of the future is it's not something you go into because that implies the future is expected. The future is always coming toward you in its unexpectedness. So what you expect is the unexpectedness.

[55:08]

There's almost a feeling the future is just doing like this to you all the time. That puts you in a different world than if you think somehow it's pretty safe to go, you know. We're supposed to stop at six, right? Yeah. One of the main topics that appeared in our group was the experience of increasing consciousness through meditation on the one hand, and then the question of young people, especially young people who consume drugs. Do they actually reach a similar state? Yes, what does that mean?

[56:17]

We haven't gone that far. But the question I would like to ask now is, could it be understood as a search for a tendency towards religiosity or spirituality? In our group we just brushed one subject, we were exchanging about our meditative practices, some Zen, some different, and experiences which broaden the mind, and then someone brought in the aspect of drug addiction, abuse, and that taking drugs, with drugs they could have a similar experience, which you have with... You mean psychedelics or something? Psychedelics, right. But we didn't discuss it further. It was just basically just... That was that. My question now is, could one say that it also expresses, because it's a big problem, does it also express a search for spirituality, for transcendence, you know, this taking of drugs?

[57:29]

So that's my question. Yeah. And maybe also could you answer, is there a comparison between experiences through drugs, psychedelic drugs, and meditation? Is there a comparison? Do you realize how complicated a question you're asking? Yes, there's a lot of relationship and similarities, and there's a lot of... There's fundamental problems. Conceptual problems and experiential problems in thinking drugs take you to the same place. Yeah, but certainly, anyway, yeah. But you know, can I comment on something?

[58:31]

This is just an observation. When you spoke German, you looked at him. And I couldn't catch your... Now when you spoke English, you looked at me. But I can understand much of what you're saying even though you're speaking German. And I don't know a word of German except Gesundheit. So there's an assumption, I'm not saying exactly because you might have looked at me, but there's an assumption that most of your communication is the language. Well, in fact, a very large percentage of your communication is not the language. I was longing for you to look at me. Yes, but I would like to ask again.

[59:53]

This idea is a mistake. We have not answered this question. Is such an expansion of consciousness and experience with drugs comparable to a meditative experience? We have not answered it, but Ms. Washi has not answered it either. I would like to ask you again. Can you say it again in English? All right. Yeah? Yeah, please. I'm waiting. Okay. We haven't found the answer. It's a question. We haven't found the answer. Is it the same experience that you can attain through drugs or through meditation? We haven't found the answer, so I'm asking you… Okay. All right. First of all… What is your… First of all, different is different. There's no such thing as the same experience. The same experience is entity thinking.

[60:54]

Every moment is entirely unique. There's no such thing as a similar experience. All religions don't lead to the same truth because there isn't the same truth. There's no such thing. That's a belief in God. I'm not saying that's true. I'm only saying that's what Buddhism says and what I say. I don't like to go into it too much, but psychedelic experiences do bring you into similar territory to some meditation experiences. And I organized in 1966 the first conference on LSD in the United States and I guess the only conference.

[62:01]

And I organized in 1966 the first conference on LSD in the United States And the University of California tried to almost destroy me because I did it under their auspices. It was called the LSD conference. And I was extremely interested because I could see what was happening in society with the advent of LSD. And it was happening when I was in college where teachers of mine in the 50s were saying it produces full-blown schizophrenia.

[63:05]

And other kids were taking it who had just come from Paris. Yes, some European kids who'd gotten it in Switzerland came to Harvard, where I was, and they were taking this stuff they'd gotten from Hoffman. and then children from Paris or Europe came and brought the LSD and now it's from Hoffmann. So, you know, I'm not an expert, but I do know quite a bit about it. Because, you know, I was in San Francisco in the 60s. And I was one of the editors of the Psychedelic Review. But I never took LSD. No, I really decided to put all my eggs in one basket, which was practice, and see where it would go.

[64:17]

I was never tempted or curious. But as they say in articles, there should be a disclosure here. In articles, you know, like, they publish an article and they say, disclosure, I work for this magazine or something like that. Oh, it's not important. What is disclosure? Disclosure... Here you'll hear a disclosure. I never took LSD, but I did take peyote and mescaline in the 50s. Yeah, and... Yeah. And ten years later I did the LSD conference.

[65:21]

Eight years later. But in the meantime I started to practice and I decided that for me the psychedelic experiences weren't a big change. They were kind of what I already knew but a different kind of emphasis of what I knew. And in the meantime I started to practice and these psychedelic So my experience and my teacher's experience with many of, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with our practice and a very large percentage, were taking LSD a lot. Some people were, you know, now we're talking about people who took hundreds or thousands of trips. Some of them were You know, disoriented and damaged by it.

[66:34]

And there were murders and people cut up and parts of their bodies in different apartments and suicides. But most people did okay. Some cut off others and threw the body parts all over the place, but most of them, they don't know. They did. There were thousands of people involved, but only a tiny percentage. Yeah, but anyway, I know lots of experiences and stories. I would say that people with a very strong, very intelligent, strong personality, a wide ability to deal with things, took hundreds of trips and they just were fine.

[67:45]

And somewhere in the spectrum, toward borderline cases, those people had a real problem with they took too many seconds. Main, there's two problems. If you've taken a lot of psychedelics, it seems to change the wiring. And your meditation experience develops much faster than the average person. And by the way, women's meditation experience develops usually faster than men. No, I don't mean women are naturally psychedelic. But what does happen is it seems to create a kind of groove and it levels off people's experience. It's taken a lot of trips.

[69:12]

Then your meditation experience, when it gets more subtle, keeps going in the direction of a groove. And if you look at the leading figures in the psychedelic movement, and most of them are friends of mine, So they shall go unnamed. Twenty or thirty years later they're giving the same lecture. That's not... It's an extraordinary lecture, but it's the same one. So that's one problem. The other problem is a simple one. I was one of the, and so was Michael Murphy, I mentioned earlier, one of the people that Joe Kamiya did the early experiments of wiring up and measuring meditation.

[70:22]

And so, yeah, there were a whole group of people, and I recommended that Sukhiroshi do it, and he agreed. And there was a whole group of people and I asked Suzuki Roshi if he would participate. And I asked Suzuki Roshi if he would also participate in the group and he said yes. And almost immediately there was the idea, this is the conceptual problem, Ah, if we can see the brain pattern that is this kind of great state, blissful state, then we can find ways to produce that state quickly. And that's entity thinking. As if there's some state.

[71:41]

Now, if you have a student who's quite gifted at meditation, you try to make it difficult for him in every way you can. You try to keep him going down the wrong roads, etc. Because he doesn't learn anything. It's the... It's what happens through the process, not the state you achieve. So a whole lot of people got, oh, we've got to create this special state of mind. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Then there's also the problem that all these results are supposed to be secret, but, you know, two or three years later, the lab assistants are saying, he had a really high score, he had a low score. You know, it's terrible. It was immediately a kind of ranking mentality going on.

[72:46]

Since then I refused to participate in any experiments. Sorry to get into that, but... Is that enough on that? Sorry? Yeah. But also the question that if a therapist who has meditation experience can help young adults or kids better who have psychedelic experiences.

[73:54]

I think so. I definitely think so. To give them another frame where they... But also to be able to go where they're going without taking drugs. Okay. We only have... Eleven minutes left. So unless you, if you mind if I just mention something that I think, who's going to say I mind? It's something that interests me much more, it's something I've talked about recently more clearly than I have for a while. And I bring it up as a difference in Yeah, a different way of looking at things. But let me come back for a moment as an aside to what Angela said.

[75:03]

The means from Buddha's point of view for transformation is not through consciousness. You can't change consciousness unless you change the views in which consciousness is rooted. Because the views operate in you prior to perception, so your perceptions reinforce your views. denn die Sichtweise, denn die Konzepte sind vor deinen Sichtweisen und beeinflussen deine Sichtweise. Okay, now, recently, some of you were there, in Rastenberg, a few months ago, a couple months ago, I... The topic was the four foundations of mindfulness.

[76:05]

So I decided to emphasize the one aspect of the four foundations of mindfulness, which are what is called the four noble postures. Okay. And, yeah, so I think it struck me that this is quite interesting, why they say four noble postures. And it's, you know, a nice etymological pun that noble and knowable are the same root. And noble. And knowable. So these four noble postures are also the four knowable postures.

[77:09]

Now, why the four noble postures are walking, standing, sitting and reclining? Now, why do we emphasize that? Why do you say such a dumb thing? Well, I mean... What the teaching of the four foundations of mindfulness is about is what are the most productive targets for attention. Does that make sense to say it that way? What do you bring attention to? What does anyone bring attention to? Do you bring attention to the ceiling? Do I bring attention to my shoulder? What's the most useful place to bring your attention?

[78:21]

And attention is presumed to be the most valuable aspect of our living. Und Achtsamkeit wird angenommen als das Wertvollste in unserem Leben. Okay, so what are the targets of attention? Was sind die Ziele unserer Achtsamkeit? And the four foundations of mindfulness, or each foundation has quite a lot of targets, is bring your attention to this, bring your attention to that, etc. Also die vier Grundlagen der Achtsamkeit haben natürlich verschiedene Unter- They could also be called the four foundations of bodyfulness. Okay. All right, so one of the targets are the four noble postures. Okay, so what are the... They are walking, standing, sitting, reclining.

[79:27]

Okay, so the first thing to think about that is in these postures... we live our life. Your whole life is in one of these four postures. So if it's so obvious that that's where we live our life, why even mention it? And then what's noble or knowable about the past. You know, as I've pointed out to some of you I've practiced with in the past, Charlotte Selver, who started Sensory Awareness in the United States, And I talked to some of you about it. Charlotte Selva developed sensory awareness in the USA.

[80:29]

She came from Germany, but she spent most of her adult life in the United States. Since she died at 102, she could have come even as an old woman to the United States and still had most of her adult wife. But when I first met her, she said, She didn't say, stand up. We were sitting and she didn't say, stand up. She said, come up to standing. And this little tiny experience was one of... Many little tiny experiences that changed my life. Because I didn't go from the mental position of sitting to the mental position of standing.

[81:30]

I went through a process of thousands of moments, each one a different posture. I've never since then stood up without feeling I'm traversing a path. Okay. So what are the four noble postures? Now another example that's helped me understand it. And another example that helped me understand this, as I've said, was watching the Noh theater, Noh plays, in Japan. And what's interesting, if you've ever seen a Noh play, is if you took pictures at any moment, any photograph is a fantastic photograph.

[82:36]

And the interesting thing is, when you take pictures You never have to ask them to pose because they're always posed. But they're not posing, but they're posed on energy or something like that. Now, I'm using the English words to suggest a difference, position and posture. I don't know how it works in German, but it works moderately well in English, the distinction. And I realized that no actor is moving from posture to posture and never to a position.

[83:47]

And what do I mean by that? Well, this, as I said, this is a position. Aye. There's no energy in this position. This is the Dutch idea of comfort. But if I say, bring some energy to this position... This happens. So a posture is a position you can fill with qi, qi, or energy. So these four positions we live in are half dead in muster postures.

[85:01]

And it's even in Taoism thought to be a form of longevity practice if you can fill at all times every little cell with energy and aliveness. It will keep you young. I started late. So if I was a Zen therapist, I would instruct my I would try to give the feeling that the territory of living should be... Like when you're walking down the street, you should feel the earth coming up through you.

[86:09]

You should feel aliveness coming up through you. And you should feel as you're walking in a way that everything's nourishing you. So then when we talk about the lived body or the self as body, so this would be conceptually similar to you treat the health and not the disease. I would try to suggest to the client that whether walking, standing, sitting, or reclining, they all try to keep moving into this feeling of aliveness and energy in their posture.

[87:09]

And I'm sure that would change their compulsive thinking or neurotic habits and so forth. So this self as body in Buddhism means something like this, something like I'm trying to describe. So zazen, you could say, is the sitting posture which you can most feel with energy. And then if you can continue that feeling in the rest of your day, it also is where the flow of meditation mind goes into your activity. And if we can do this in our daily life, then, so to speak,

[88:19]

So now what I find useful, to try to give a feeling for practice, is little things, like the future coming toward you, always in its unexpectedness. Coming clearly, you don't have to go to it. Which leads you to feel a spatially extended future rather than a temporally, in your mind, extended future. Or this idea of these four noble postures. That you're actually going to live your whole life in. So make them noble postures, not just positions.

[89:36]

And working with those things, then other things become clear. Okay. Sorry I got carried away there and it's five after. So, please give some feeling to what we might speak about tomorrow or what you might ask me to speak about or how we... Yeah. Because I want to just be a participant here. We're starting at 9, right? Okay, thank you really very much.

[90:16]

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