And I was so good at sneaking in, no one noticed I was sneaking in. So I sat down and you were already having a conversation. But there were too many going on at once, couldn't be translated, so... So everything happened as predicted. Except I don't know what you talked about. So maybe you can start sharing your conversation with me. Thank you very much. That was my announcement. Yes.

[01:02]

I have a question. I would like to feel the difference between the two more clearly. Well, I would say that, again, just something, I can give attention to this bell. And the particular kind of attention, which I call the agency of attention. Can I call it active attention since we don't have agency? Sure, yeah, sure. Yeah, okay, so you bring this deeply engaged, thoroughly engaged attention, she calls active attention.

[02:03]

Bringst du diese zutiefst sich beteiligende und einlassende Aufmerksamkeit, die sie aktive Aufmerksamkeit nennt? I like the etymology of the word engage because it means to make a contract with. Und mir gefällt die Etymologie dieses Wortes im Englischen engaged, engagiert, weil es bedeutet einen Vertrag abzuschließen mit etwas, mit jemandem. So you make a contract with this active attention. Also schließt du einen Vertrag mit dieser aktiven Aufmerksamkeit ab, diese zutiefst sich einlassende Aufmerksamkeit, um zu sehen, ob du sie kontinuierlich halten kannst beziehungsweise fortsetzen kannst. A sequential stream. And see if you can conceive it and experience it as a field.

[03:18]

And it's the field which lets us experience things as activity. Because a field is basically a kind of oscillation. We could use the word oscillation as the experience that each thing is individually changing in its own pace. So, the field knowing allows you to feel the separate activity of each perceptual appearance. ermöglicht es dir to feel what?

[04:41]

The activity of each perceptual appearance. Ermöglicht es dir die Aktivität von jeder Wahrnehmungserscheinung zu erkennen oder zu kennen? Its own activity, it won't last forever. and your sensorial activity in perceiving it. Clear, simple, hard to do. And even to say it, just to give you a little perspective, even to say it as clearly as I have, which I think it's fairly clear, has taken me decades to figure out how to do it. Those of you who have practiced with me for a long time know the practice develops. Gabriela driving me to the hotel last night said she sees me often enough to see that my practice develops.

[05:46]

And that helps me. So I hope I see you all. I'm not attached, but I kind of hope I see all of you often enough to share the development of practice. Okay, someone else. I promise not to answer so thoroughly such a small question ever again. I mean, at least not for the moment. Yes, Alan. I would like to come back to the 3000 things, coherences, that can approach you in the stream of immediacy. I had the experience that I was standing in the kitchen and suddenly I saw all of them flying towards me, as if they were coming towards me,

[07:21]

Slow down, slow down. Yeah. I'll just stand here and drink a cup of tea. Okay. So I was standing in the kitchen and had a feeling of All of these 3,000 things, there was some image as if they were literally all flowing at me. Various things, complexities like I have to do this, I have to hang up the laundry, this detail that... Is she hanging up your laundry, Andrea? I don't see any laundry here. And so anyways, I experienced all of that like flying at me.

[08:28]

And then there was this shift where I suddenly felt I'm actually just standing here drinking a cup of tea. This is good. Yeah. You can see progress happening. And if you could see with an inner eye, she was standing there in the first part of the time, draped in drying, wet laundry. And in the second part, she was just having a cup of tea. Okay. Yes. We had an interesting conversation during the break, starting with the term, the idea of psychoanalysis, the practice of psychoanalysis.

[09:45]

And one term that plays a major role in this school, but also in many other approaches, is the question of how to deal with regression. an appropriate experience of what is happening there, because we have the idea that there are old thoughts, new patterns of behavior, somehow the present situation overlaps, and then there is the idea that the neurotic means that it is no longer really appropriate, it is no longer really fitting, it is also too narrow, and how therapy actually has the idea to dissolve it somewhere, to widen it, to see if there was a match. Okay, so our idea in therapy, psychoanalysis and therapy, is that in regression, old patterns of behavior, old ways of feeling and so forth, that they cover

[11:11]

Just the experience and reaction to immediacy. Okay, and then in therapy we would have the idea that we need to resolve or get these old patterns out of the way. How did you say that? It's hard to describe. There are different forms and exercises. Every student has different ones. Also so that the experience of accessibility was against it, that you were freeing it again. Yes, actually to dissolve the development process, which more so So in therapy we would then try to trigger a developmental process that allows a higher engagement with the present moment. So that it's not so covered with or over layered with the old patterns and so forth.

[12:31]

And that allows for more possibilities of action and self-definition and so forth. So the question is, is there anything along those lines and how the mind is viewed in Zen practice? In other words, you're saying that if you're working psychotherapeutically, psychoanalytically with a client, and they tend to understand the experience of the present in terms of regression, regressives, behavioral patterns, If you can enhance or make more articulate their experience of the present as the present, it tends to weaken the regressions. Is that right? I'm trying to understand.

[13:36]

Because this is a term developed in your practice and not necessarily... Yeah, go ahead. Yes, so then you imply, you mean that if you can make sure that you can show the client how he understands the present more from the present itself and as a present, that then these old patterns, the regressive patterns, that they are then weakened more by it. I just try to understand it, because regression is a term that is more developed in the therapeutic world. Maybe it's too complicated. It's too complex. In other words, my understanding is a little simple. Yes.

[14:37]

The point is that what you were describing now is the actual method of what needs to be done with the regression. And that's probably different for we have so many different schools, therapeutic schools alone in this room. So what the method is, that differs. But what he's asking about is the phenomenons. of the regression itself, the concept of regression. Well, I... Let's for a minute leave the concept of regression out. The assumption in Buddhist practice is your... Your personal narrative tends to establish from the past how you understand the present.

[15:51]

And that's because you understand the present in generalities and not in detail. And you understand the present as projections in effect from the past. The past projected onto the present. So many of the Practices of Zen are simply to make the present more immediate, more vivid. So it either interferes with your narrative or it widens and makes your narrative more subtle.

[16:55]

And then interferiert das, stört das entweder deine Geschichte, oder es weitet sie und macht sie subtiler. And, I mean, this is encapsulated in a statement of Confucian, no, I mean Dogen. A famous, well-known quote from Dogen and from the Genjo Koan. To cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things. And to cultivate and authenticate, in Japanese there's one word, but cultivate is that you... make it make sense to you, and you make it real, cultivate and authenticate the ten thousand things.

[18:14]

In Japanese there is one word for this, cultivate and authenticate, but the aspect cultivate, develop, means that you make it make sense, and authenticate, to make it real, to make it real, yes. And the 10,000 things is usually translated as myriad or many. But it doesn't really mean many, again, which has no boundaries. It means the specificity of your immediate situation. Okay, so to cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things by conveying the self to them is delusion. Okay. Okay, or we could make it more specific.

[19:23]

To cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things by conveying your personal narrative to them. Oder wir können es spezifischer ausdrücken, wenn du die 10.000 Dinge kultivierst und authentifizierst, indem du ihnen deine persönliche Geschichte überstülpst. Das ist Verblendung. But to allow the 10.000 things to come forward and cultivate and authenticate the self is enlightenment. So then practice is how to be in immediacy so immediacy is embodied in your own experience.

[20:25]

So the first self we could spell with a small s, and the second self we could spell with a capital S. Because the self or your personal narrative, which is cultivated within immediacy, is a wider stream than Yabba. Now what I try to explore with practitioners is not just when regressive patterns are influencing people, But more specifically, traumatic patterns appear in their present.

[21:50]

I don't know exactly the difference between regression and trauma, but what I see as a trauma is it's a real hard nut to crack. When a person shifts into a traumatic mode of mind, they don't know anything but that traumatic mode of mind. They have no perspective on it. So I'd like to refine what I'm feeling and understanding in terms of regression, but right now I think we should go on. Thank you. Okay. Someone else? Yes? Martin? Yes.

[22:50]

I'm still Martin, yes. Yeah, all right. I got you mixed up with Matthias earlier, but that's all right. No, that's all right. Yeah, I'm glad you're still Martin, because otherwise this seminar would have no meaning. I found it quite beautiful what you said about the way you spoke about the leaf and its movement and the three steps until eventually the leaf becomes an emanation of one's own mind. On your website I found a saying which you have obviously said.

[23:53]

Oh, is it obvious that I said it? Well, because he named it there. Oh, okay. Yeah, my narrative. I'm on the web? Yes, the micro is the work as the window holds. Oh, that's right. She put that on. But then I would ask myself, is it the house which the window is, the house of impersonality? What I would like to ask you, whether I'm on the track or completely off the wall, that stream of consciousness is located in a sense of impersonality, in which my personality is located. So, getting into that stream, I have to dislocate myself from my personal narrative. Is that correct? You have to loosen your relationship to your personal narrative. Yes. Can you actually translate yourself? For me it's very difficult to translate German into German.

[24:58]

Maybe you can do it for us. Okay. Are we all right now? Can we go on? I agree. I have no problem with what you said. Okay. I wouldn't take such a strong approach to, I have to dislocate my personal narrative, but rather loosen the relationship or develop a wider perspective.

[26:13]

It's not so much surgical as wearing out your narrative stream. You know, we have a kind of melancholy attachment to our potential strength, our narrative. And that melancholy is, yeah, rather nice.

[27:15]

but it gets replaced gradually by the immediacy, vividness of the present. Someone else, anyone else? Yes, hi there. I would like to come back to the subject of dreams again. Yesterday we had this example that the dreams, our dreams, are not aware of us or we are in a state of non-consciousness, of the unconscious. And yesterday we talked about the fact that it is an important moment as soon as we wake up and with the dream content we still contain a moment. This moment who would then be practically the link to the Buddhist We spoke about dreams yesterday.

[28:41]

I'd like to come back to that and how dreams aren't happening in consciousness. And then you spoke about this moment of waking up when the dream is still present and that moment of how in Buddhism you would deal with the interaction with the dream or with the content, you said? So the moment when we don't yet bring the dream into words, don't conceptualize it yet, that moment, what exactly the Buddhist approach to that is that I would like to understand better. If I understand you, you concentrate on the feel of the dream and not the articulation of the dream. The moment before I would tell someone about it, before I would put it into cognitive words.

[29:45]

And even if it appears to you as a vivid image or as a specific couple of words, You try to feel the field behind the vivid image or the words. So you're one of the ships in practice is to feel the world, not to think the world. And one of the problems with that, one of the hindrances we have as Westerners, we tend to believe that knowing is merely conscious.

[30:48]

is that we don't really know something unless we know it consciously. And it's very true that certain aspects of knowing are most useful if they're conscious. Okay, but even when that's the case, there's still a field of feeling behind it. And I'll give you one other practice I have been emphasizing the last couple of years. There's a number of famous, well-worn statements and koan references to non-thinking.

[32:10]

And it's a word called Hishiryo in Japanese, H-I-S-H-I-R-Y-O. And it's translated usually as non-thinking. Not thinking, but non-thinking. And even in Japanese, it's translated to mean something like non-thinking. But in Japan and in East Asia, non-thinking doesn't approach the way so strongly as it does in the West, not-thinking.

[33:24]

Not and non are so close that we basically feel them the same. Because actually the word hishirio means unmeasured thinking. unbemessenes Denken, unermessliches Denken, unermessliches Denken. But unmeasured thinking as a way of knowing. Aber unbemessenes Denken als eine Form des Wissens. It's partly like imagistic thinking.

[34:39]

Es ist teilweise so wie bildliches Denken. Or to think in metaphors. Oder metaphorisches. Metaphorisches Denken. widened is a wider stream, a more inclusive way of thinking than discursive thinking. Then discursive. I mean, Einstein, our favorite genius, noticed simple things. One of them I think is great. He sat down in a chair. And sitting in a chair, he suddenly realized that if he was just falling, he wouldn't feel his weight drop. So he felt the weight sitting in a chair, but most of us would sit in a chair and say, well, I don't know.

[35:59]

We wouldn't think, hey, what if I wasn't sitting in a chair? I wouldn't feel the weight. So that's thinking in sequential images and not discursive rational thought. And it's well known that many of his insights came from metaphorical thinking. All right. So, Hishiryo, if we want to practice Hishiryo, and again, this took me forever to figure out how to practice unmeasured thinking. And I realized it was as simple as the description of the word itself. So the practice of Hishiryo, which Dogen says, is the most important word perhaps in Zen practice.

[37:24]

Is to develop a repeated habit. of noticing without thinking about. So I notice Nico, but I don't think about him. Ich bemerke Nico, aber ich denke nicht über ihn. I just allow whatever happens when I notice, and I sometimes spell that word K-N-O-T-I-C-E, to notice. Ich lasse einfach zu, was auch immer passiert, wenn ich bemerke, und manchmal im Englischen kann ich das dann, auch kann ich dieses Wort notice mit K buchstabieren, also notice, im Deutschen vielleicht wissendes bemerken. And if you actually develop a habit of noticing without thinking about, you actually, by repeating this and getting the habit of noticing without thinking, just noticing, you begin to develop and recognize that you're knowing a lot

[38:32]

But it's not conscious, but it's a knowing in which you function through that knowing, but not only through consciousness. Okay. Okay. I promised I wouldn't get wrong answers, but no. Yes, Ralph? Would you agree that what you have just described in a wonderful way, as I think, that it is best to describe it here as aesthetic art? Would you agree that what you've just described, and I think wonderfully so, that here in the West we could describe that as an aesthetic experience? Yeah, I think that aesthetic is a narrower word, but if you feel things aesthetically, that's the same territory.

[39:57]

But in English, the word aesthetic has the sense of appreciation in it. Aber im Englischen hat das Wort Aesthetik auch das Gefühl von Wertschätzung in sich. And this is a noticing which isn't only appreciating, it's just a noticing. Und das hier ist ein Bemerken, das nicht auch mit wertschätzt, sondern es ist nur ein Bemerken. I said that because I don't know much about it, but in modern aesthetic theory, the presence is emphasized much more than the interpretation. So there is a movement to emphasize the phenomenon of presence more in the aesthetic sense.

[41:05]

So I'm mentioning this because, and although I'm not very involved with this, but I do know that in aesthetic theories nowadays, the experience of presence is emphasized a lot more. So there's a whole movement towards the presence phenomenon. of emphasizing presence phenomena. Well, it's completely Zen practicing. I mean, we're not talking about the present. We're talking about the presence of the present. Yeah. Let me use what you said as an excuse to bring in one thing I think I have to say. I'm sure it's clear for any therapist or psychoanalyst or consolation therapist. We are biologically and psychologically multigenerational beings.

[42:24]

Simply genetically, you're your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, etc. Okay, so you're biologically and psychologically a multi-generational being which somehow, often, isn't part of our personal narrative as expressly as it ought to be or could be. biologically or psychologically, we are generational beings, and this is often not so much part of our personal history as it should or could be. And one way I suggest people practice with this as an initiation, When you're sitting, you have a feeling of an inner space.

[43:46]

And you develop that feeling of an inner space, which has a kind of luster, a pewter-like luster, a silver-like luster. I don't know. Know these words? You don't know what luster is? And pewter, like, also... Pewter is that metal that they make teapots of and think that's grayish, but not... Sin. Sin, okay. And luster? Luster is to shine. Okay. Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm. I seldom run into, she doesn't know a word, but you know. Go ahead. So you begin to extend that inner space, the feeling of the inner space as a a light or a room to around the body.

[44:51]

And then you ask yourself, hmm, you look at it, you kind of, with an inner eye, you look at it. And almost surely one side will be darker than the other. And that's extremely interesting. Why would one side be darker than the other? And then you can try to switch them. Let's see if I can switch the dark side. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And playing with it and trying to switch it, things like that, or move it around, you know, by degrees, gives you a kind of new kind of active feel for your bodily presence in space.

[46:13]

And to play with it, to see if you can turn it around or if you can move it or something like that, that gives you a new kind of access or feeling for your presence, a more active feeling for your presence and your space. Then you can ask yourself, is my mother in this space? And if she's in this space, where would she be? And almost surely, you will find your mother somewhere on your left or right, behind you or something. It's a kind of inter-constellation practice which I worked with long before I never ever heard of constellation therapy. Because it's just something you practice within, in practice.

[47:15]

And then you say, okay, is my father somewhere in the space, or are both parents in the same space? They're usually not. And then you start thinking, is there anybody else here? Brothers, sisters, teachers, grandparents? And yes, it's a populated space that you're in. It's a direct experience of being a constellated, multi-generational being. And then practice is to begin to clear that space. And very mechanically, hi mom, what do you want from me?

[48:39]

Why are you still hanging around? And the Japanese have very clear, there's even ceremonies they try to They think the mental space is occupied by all kinds of forces as well as families. And they have annual practices that are Shinto and Buddhist, which are meant to exercise the space around you. And exorcise. Exorcise. Okay, so now the second part of this is, first is we're psychological and biological multigenerational beings. We can also be a multi-generational bodhisattva.

[49:48]

Because what you do in practice and transmission is it's about a precept bloodline. And so for those of you who received the precepts, and if you look at your Kachimiakou, the line that connects the names in the lineage is red. The concept here is that not only are we multigenerational beings psychologically and biologically, but we can also be multigenerational beings through wisdom.

[50:55]

So I've not just received the teaching, I mean, the best I can, from Dogen through successor teachers to Suzuki Roshi and myself, I've also received the presence of a beingness. Perhaps the aesthetic even of a beingness. received as the lineage, as a kind of multi-generational wisdom presence that's also past.

[51:56]

als eine Art generationsübergreifende Weisheitspräsenz, die auch weitergereicht wird. So if I, by holding, not following the precepts, but by holding the precepts woven into the presence of my activity, indem ich die Gelöbnisse halte, nicht ihnen folge, sondern indem ich sie in meiner Aktivität halte, I create in my own presence a wisdom being to various degrees, is realized. And that wisdom being is what I'm trying basically to present as I'm teaching. And it's not just, it's not mine, it belongs to or it's part of this multi-generational wisdom being which we call the lineage.

[53:13]

And it doesn't belong to me, but it belongs, through what we call the generational guideline, it belongs to the guideline. I think this is such a radical, wonderful idea, I could never have thought my way to it. So here that it's possible to take our multi-generational narrative and widen it into a wisdom narrative, we can share with others. Okay. I feel like these are little treasures that I've discovered and given and shared. But so let's after the lunch break, and maybe we can make it shorter because it's the last day, I don't know.

[54:29]

So we start now at 12.15. Shall we start at 1.30, 1.15, 2 o'clock? You're the housemaster here. 1.30 is possible. Okay, 1.30, quarter to two. Quarter to two? That's good? Okay. 1.45? That's okay. 1.45. Or two, I mean, make it five if you want. Two? Quarter to two. Quarter to two. What did Gabriella say? She always makes the final decision.

[55:29]

No, no, no. In this case, I'm only repeating in my words. I have no idea what it means, though. I don't understand.

[55:38]

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