Now, for those of you who are new here, I expect some participation. It just doesn't feel good to me to do all the talking. I might as well stay home if I'm going to do that. Yeah. And you're more interesting than me talking to a wall. I mean, a little bit at least. But I'd like you to imagine, I want to have some discussion, but I'd like you to imagine, please imagine a spatial field. A spatial field right here now. A spatial field right here now in this room.

[01:02]

Like you might, if you sat here, you might, during Zazen, listen to the space. So als wenn ihr hier im Sazen sitzt und als ob ihr dem Raum zuhört. Or you might try to feel the space in your shoulders, your cheekbones. Als ob du versuchst den Raum in deinen Schultern zu spüren oder in deinen Wangenknochen. Yeah, or stomach. Oder in deinen Magen. And you, so just imagine a spatial feel that is at present occupied by us, but a field which is created by our mutual occupation,

[02:06]

von der Art, wie wir es gemeinsam besetzen, auch erschaffen wird. But is simultaneously independent of our occupation. Aber gleichzeitig auch unabhängig von unserem Besetzen ist. And could include anything. Und das alles mit einschließen könnte. So imagine us a special, inclusive field And this imagination has something to do with actually generating such a field, even though it's potentially here. Now, do any of you have anything you'd like to comment on from what we talked about at the beginning? Or any direction you'd like to see me go in.

[03:34]

Oh, there you are. Hi. Hi. Yes, I had to think about what was discussed, that in psychoanalysis we have the concept of relational psychoanalysis, relatively new, where exactly that is produced from my understanding, namely an intersubjective as well as intra-psychic event. I felt reminded that in psychoanalysis we now have the... Relational psychoanalysis. Yeah, a relatively new concept, relational psychoanalysis, which I feel like is related to where establishing, creating an inter-subjective field, but also an intra-psychological event or processes.

[04:40]

And maybe I can add, it's also basically about a moment by moment. So a constantly new, [...] new. And here, too, this is about a moment-by-moment event and a moment-by-moment generated field, which is more than the ordinary concept of a dialogical field. and also more as talking about something. Okay. So I think I understand why the word relational is added. Thank you for bringing that up.

[05:42]

Someone else. Yes. You said this morning that thinking is energy, or everything is energy, and brought up the word thinkergy. I keep having the feeling that when I have to think a lot, then that takes up a lot of energy. It sure does. I don't know about your thinking, but my thinking takes up a lot of energy. The energy of thinking uses up more energy than it gives.

[06:48]

Could that be said? The energy of thinking asks us to develop an energetic field from which we live. Die Energie des Denkens fordert uns dazu auf, ein energetisches Feld zu generieren, aus dem wir leben. So, because you're using energy, you develop yourself over your lifetime. And this is Taoism, Buddhism. You develop yourself energetically. And if you're feeling in an energetic field, let me put it that way. Yes, certainly you get tired if you climb a mountain or think a lot. But when you feel this field I just suggested is an energy field too, when you feel this energy, there's a loop.

[07:57]

You're putting energy into the field and taking energy out of the field. It's more something like that, if I try to conceptualize it. But the interconnected complexity is only touched by those words. Yes, Harold. I just found out he's got the same name as my father. You look a little like him, but you're what, younger? I'm a psychologist, but I don't work as a therapist anymore.

[09:26]

I retire. I retired years ago. I do a little bit of counseling. I'm especially here to see Bekaroshi, because everyone relates to him. They do? Yes. James. He's not even at my hotel. Oh, okay. There is a young woman who was very badly hurt in America. She visited America and was nearly killed by a young man. Oh dear. She's walking in the periphery of my family and does very well right now. I asked myself, what about introducing her to Zen? Are there any experiences with persons who suffer from post-traumatic disorder and medication? This was my question.

[10:27]

So this is something she's thought a lot about. Maybe you can say something about it. I have always had a very distant relationship, but I thought about whether it would make sense to introduce you to Sam through therapeutic support. The very short answer is, and a very personal one, is my first safe place, and it is well known that one works with PTSD, was the Sitzkes. And I deal with the topic of traumatization and, yes, a spiritual practice, first of all in a wider sense, because I believe that is always shaken by a traumatization, first of all, a level that raises questions about this quality.

[11:42]

And that's one thing. And the second thing is simply a good place to process, because he is held in the broadcast, for example. So it is important, I think, to have a community. And he is not held only in the I-you relationship, which is injured. So that when someone is interested, I always experience support. Of course, there are also people who turn off the TV at first. You have to accompany that at the beginning to see how someone is doing with this room, how he is doing with this room of sitting and broadcasting. Yeah, I think, I hope she's right. But I think my own experience is with somebody who's practiced with me 10, 12, 15 years, there are traumas which don't release in meditation.

[12:59]

But there was an unwillingness in this person to, it was a woman, an unwillingness for this person to release all of her identity into practice. So a portion of her identity she kept in practice, kept separate from practice, and she would not let practice touch that. But I'm in no way disagreeing with what Andrea has said. But I certainly think still sitting sitting sitting in stillness with some yogic skills.

[14:15]

It takes a little while to get the skills to do this kind of analytic observation which doesn't interfere, a non-interfering mindful analytic investigation. But in any case, I think that we could say that Zen and Buddhist practice is designed to relate positively to traumatic episodes. Okay, for now. And Gurudev, of course, has a Zen group. Maybe if I could add one thing.

[15:34]

Sure. tool kit, which can be used superbly in silence. So that's for me the multidimensional fertilization, also in the traumatic one, if you have the strength to keep the trauma, also with traumatic events are helpful. I just wanted to add again, because I don't know if it was a misunderstanding, it's not about sitting instead of therapy, but it's about these two levels, that they fertilize each other. Yeah. I added that I think one can also build up a therapeutic toolkit that one can learn how to apply by oneself on the cushion, and then sitting still can be a wonderful space to apply therapeutic tools.

[16:40]

And she said that's also. She says there's never the idea is not sitting instead of therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I often have considered, if I were going to write a book, I ought to write a book on the psychological uses of Zen practice. Because I've thought a lot about it and explored a lot about it, investigated it over half a century. But since I have trouble even getting too far along in my experiential writings, we'll see. Probably I'd have to believe in reincarnation in order to do this book. Okay, someone else?

[17:40]

Yes? You must have something to add to this conversation. Yes, something can always be added. Well, you don't have to add the unnecessary. What? When you spoke about the energetic aspect. I really wonder about how psychotherapy works. And I should add that I really only work with language. I don't do body language.

[18:41]

I know that there are various concepts that work in different psychological schools, but that's not what I mean. I feel that something happens. When something happens, what that works, then I notice it at the moment. But it's difficult to describe, so I always hesitate to speak about it. I have the impression It's like a reaching into me and believing of experience of the two people that I meet.

[20:07]

I don't have a concept to learn. When I try to understand it conceptually, psychotherapeutically, then basically I'm lost. And that's why at some point I stopped to understand this conceptually in the context of psychotherapy, and to just ignore it when it happens. And what helps me to make it happen, that I kind of... I just start speaking, not just start listening. Listening, that I give myself permission to not listen to the content. Of course, I also listen to the content, what people say. But especially when the contents are more broadly known to me, should I get closer to the person?

[21:13]

Do you have to repeat yourself to a certain extent? Then I don't listen to the content. Yes, I hear, in quotation marks, I feel the situation and this So I feel how the presence of the person who comes to me and my own presence of the person that comes to me, my own presence, how they interweave, how they melt into each other, maybe just function within one another. And when that happens, then I keep hoping that something happens that's effective. It's much higher. And I think that's an interesting phenomenon, which I don't have any further concepts.

[22:16]

Okay, thank you. I just ask very briefly. Living, dying, being. What's the difference?

[23:24]

Living, dying and being in bed. And being dead. In the big bed. What's the difference? Well, there's someone there and then there's gone-ness. That's my experience. It's like the event horizon of a black hole. There's someone there and then suddenly nothing. There's just a physical body that's ice cold. So for the challenge, unless you want to believe in reincarnation or some kind of continuation, the challenge, I think, is this gone-ness.

[24:27]

Because when you're dead, the person just isn't there anymore. For a while they were there, as I said the other day with Norbert. The mystery is this gone-ness and this gone-ness which is also present in our lived life. And for me, how we're living on the edge of this gone-ness all the time. And this, for me... This is something I'd like to bring up, but it would take a while to bring up, so maybe I can do it a little later, but it relates to living simultaneously with this godness.

[25:41]

Yeah. Yes, Hans? Harold? Small addition to my colleague. An experience that I sometimes find in my therapeutic contacts is that I'm in single sessions without a strong feeling. I think often in the current conflict situation we look through in a profound way and articulate it. The special experience was that this insight didn't reach into the next session.

[27:02]

It had to be rebuilt in the next session. Maybe that is similar to what you mean with weaving again. During the break, I suddenly had the image or memory I'm feeling reminded of Harry Potter. I had never even watched it. In London, there is this tree in the path or whatever. They have to walk through a wall in order to get to this magic land. That's the most amusing part of it. I'm in stations all the time looking for that.

[28:11]

I know it's there. And normal people run against the wall. And I don't know how they do it. And they can walk through it and then you're in this magical world. And the reason I'm mentioning this. Oh, it interests me. experience and think in different, I don't know, not worlds, but more spheres. A normal everyday sphere, our world. A normal everyday sphere, our world. That has to do with one entity.

[29:12]

where for me a wide open field opens and what really happens? I know I can live in both and enjoy more and more to stay which for me is a non-thinking, feeling sphere. And what happens at this transition? What can I do? What can I do so that I don't just by accident end up there? And then I came into a bunch of things that helped me, supported me in entering this other world. Sometimes I am limited to the therapeutic space.

[30:34]

Sometimes it can be to just very lightly touch a patient, put my hand on their shoulder and somehow open a space in which we end together, somehow. Or when the bell rings, or when comes the lamp at once, and sometimes I have this field of praxis, and my own inner field, and then this human comes in, And sometimes it's like this. Sometimes. It's actually all present at the moment he enters this room.

[31:37]

And I experience this as being space in space. And I experience this as being space in space to perceive this space. And to maintain that felt space. And that's possible. And at the point where I start to think about it and to have a theory, then I am out of it. To stay in this space alone has a healing quality for me. As if something feels together in another way, as if our common field develops in some way. and in my case something changes, and I notice that something changes in the past, too.

[32:43]

Being able to heal in this room alone has a healing, changing quality. Reiner? I can connect to that. I thought again about why David is being presented here. What is very important to me is not to know this risk. this risk of not knowing how to encounter the patient, but just let my body take that risk time wholeheartedly and exactly that moment when something happens that's much faster than consciousness. faster than consciousness.

[33:50]

Yes. But it's a good enough presentation for God's presentation. It's basically some of this intuitive intuitive bodily presence. What Roshi said about the body. I think that there are some people who practice and in the end through the body, through the spirit.

[34:55]

For me, it is very important that the body is its own domain that is equally In the Taoist doctrine, there is something up here called the clay ball palace or the upper part. Thank you. I'd like to speak to you sometime more about your teacher.

[36:05]

something else, someone who hasn't said anything yet. Oh, thanks. I wanted to know, you said something about energetic development. I think you said, I'm losing up a lot of energy. I guess energy, this term, energetic development, I don't know. Okay, well, let's see what happens. Anyone else before I say, I don't know, something, whatever occurs? I can't get your shirt. I'm not perfect. Is that really? Okay. Do you mean me or you mean you? Because I'm the one reading it. What's the subtitle? It says, I am original.

[37:11]

Oh, that's good. I think if you, sometimes I think of the psychotherapeutic situation, let's say, of just two people. If we had two people, all right, there's two people, the so-called therapist and the so-called client or patient. And they're going to create a shared space. I think that at least has to be the first assumption that they're going to share a space, sitting on a couch together, or sitting facing each other, or sitting, you know, somehow.

[38:23]

They're standing, yeah. I mean, if you don't mind, I'll tell you a little anecdote. It's completely irrelevant, but it popped into my head. Once I was doing doksan in San Francisco, in the San Francisco Zen Center. And really, this guy who was seeming a little crazy, really wanted to come to Dokusan, so we said, okay. And he was crazy enough that my Anges, who had been a boxer and knocked out the person in the first few minutes of every fight he had when he was young, sat outside the door just in case.

[39:31]

So I rang the bell and this guy came in. And he bounded in like a circus acrobat. He did a complete flip and then ended up in front of me upside down with his head facing me. So it was a kind of new kind of normal. So I just talked to him. I was amazed he was able to do it for so long. And I said, you know, by the way, you could sit, you know, vertically in the usual way. And he went like that. Okay, conversation.

[40:42]

He left. But he was around for a day or so. And a couple of days later, south of San Francisco, these huge hangars for airplanes or dirigibles, blimps, I don't know what that is. Zeppelins. Zeppelins. Okay. And the hangar is what? Die Halle. Die Halle, okay. It's the hall, yeah. Okay, thank you. There are two of them there. You could fly an airplane through them. And he was arrested by the police because he was in the place climbing on the rafters trying to fly. Anyway, I never saw him after that. So he was rather crazy. So there may be various kinds of normals for two people to be in the same room together. So I imagine a therapeutic situation is being...

[41:44]

the assumption that two people together can create some kind of fruitful relationship. Now, I assume myself that all of the various therapeutic that have been developed before and primarily since Freud have various conceptual instructions and the different conceptual constructions construct a different kind of relationship or expectations and so forth. And different relationships and... Expectations. Expectations, yeah. But what...

[43:07]

No matter what the conceptual descriptions are, probably what's going on really is the space that's created. And how that relational space is created depends a lot on the two persons. But it's also going to develop and change as it has over the decades. But the shared aspect common to all the different therapeutic approaches with two people involved And within Zen, of course, there is the classic and necessary part of Zen practice is this meeting called Dokusan or Sanzen between the teacher and the practitioner.

[44:48]

So there's those interactions aspects too of how you establish this relational space. Now, I think there would have to be a difference if your conception going into this relationship is there's going to be a relationship that's based on language Or whether the relationship is articulated between the two people. Oder ob die Beziehung sich zwischen den zwei Menschen ausdrückt, artikuliert.

[45:50]

Oder ob du davon ausgehst, dass der Raum selbst eine Beziehungsdynamik ist, noch bevor irgendetwas passiert. or whether you emphasize the bodily presence and posture as much as the linguistic posture, etc. Now, I would say that from a Buddhist point of view, Because Buddhism assumes that touch underlies the dynamic of the five senses. And so that... So that if you start what you notice, the dynamic, if there's a space, it's an attentional space.

[47:17]

And if you assume the space itself is a connectivity, as the potentiality of connectivity, that potentiality of connectivity is related to the degree of attentional skill and capacity and power. dann hat das damit zu tun, wie viel Kapazität man für das Herstellen von Aufmerksamkeit, Aufmerksamkeit, Fähigkeiten und Kraft hat. Okay, so from that point of view, we have these ingredients.

[48:24]

And you're building the therapeutic or experiential, experienceable space with attentionality. But of course the shape of the room and how one enters and when one enters and whether you enter in relationship to the therapist or to the wall, all of that would be thought through extremely carefully. And if you assume that you're creating this potentiality And as I said earlier, I'm neologistically out of control.

[49:41]

You understand neologism means to make a new word. In German, the word says that. Good, thank you. I know we're just a dialect of German. Okay, so maybe we have moment-by-moment opportunity. Okay. as Alexander said. And maybe then we can say that moment-by-moment opportunity is a momentunity. In English it works okay, good enough.

[50:45]

And so then, in English I would spell the tune within momentunity as T-U-N-E. That would mean that practice is to tune each moment. And that Zen would then assume that that tuning would start with posture or with touch. Now this is a conception that Zen is bringing into this meeting of two people. that the meeting creates a space and that space is tuned through noticing and that noticing has to start somewhere

[52:03]

And so in the sense that you build up this field of noticing, eventually it just happens, you build it up with touch. So you would feel literally how your bottom, say, is sitting on the chair or cushion or whatever. And you would assume that that touch is actually beginning like little radio waves to affect the space. Now you're creating an imaginal space. You're imagining this space has potentiality that can be tuned with the sensorial body.

[53:33]

Being tuned by the sensorial body. Now, nobody wants me to go into the five skandhas again. No, she says. Yes, yes, no, no. A thousand times no, a thousand times no. But I did in Hannover, you know, and I'll resist doing it here. But I will say one thing, which is that we have a brain skin. The brain is an editor and a designer. And it designs and edits our senses so that it produces a world in which we can function with a practical effectivity.

[54:54]

But it edits out. particularly, and it depends on the culture you're in, it edits out a whole lot of stuff. As Louis-Louis-Emile Girard, as I use this example all the time, showed that your eyes, when you're reading or scanning, that's saccadic scanning and fixing, fixing and scanning, is edited out by the brain, but that's actually how the eyes are functioning. In the late 19th century. And in the 80s. In Buddhism, the manas, which is often translated as mind, is actually the editing function which shapes your experience into what consciousness wants to see.

[56:13]

Und im Buddhismus sind in den acht Vijñanas, das siebte Vijñana, die Manas, das ist so etwas wie die Herausgeberfunktion, die editierende Funktion des Bewusstseins, die, and now, how did you just define what do the Manas do? It edits the sensorial information to produce the world as your culture and consciousness want it to be. Predictable, etc. Now, transformative Buddhism, not well-being Buddhism, but transformative Buddhism, is all about getting outside, underneath, in between, or above the world consciousness shows us.

[57:18]

Yeah, and so the... This editing and designing function of the brain consciousness, I'm calling the brain skin, an important dynamic of the five skandhas is to peel this brain skin off the sensorial body. As if you now had a body made of the five senses, independently and mutually. sensitively and aesthetically knowing the world.

[58:49]

But knowing the world quite independent of consciousness. Consciousness is just a peripheral aspect of your experience. And so the creating this, whatever conceptions you use to create this relational space, Part of it is so that mutually, at least individually, the teacher or the therapist can peel off the brain skin from the sensorial body And peel the skin ideally, and it's already should with Zen, good Zen student, peel off the practitioner.

[59:54]

And with a good Zen teacher, one should remove this skin from practitioners anyway. So you're now in a sensate, aesthetic world, which is not confined by logic and conceptual thinking. and begins to know things that are outside the horizon of the client or practitioner. Another way and a simpler way to look at this is you ask yourself, what is the horizon of this person that I'm meeting with? Within this space.

[61:22]

And what is my own horizon? And can I begin to function outside my horizon and find ways to function outside the horizon of the client or the student or practitioner? So something begins to happen in this relational space which can be noticed but not thought about. And then if I was a therapist But having been a Zen practitioner for so long, I would create, attempt to feel this imaginal space. And then I would bring in whatever therapeutic approach I was taught or using and see how it affected this relational space.

[62:34]

Okay. Is that enough? I mean, it makes any sense to you? Okay. One of the things, let me just say, because we should go to lunch soon or have lunch soon, do lunch soon, meet lunch soon. One of the things that interests me, and I think we want to be just being alive in our culture, is we have layers of identity and we have layers of experiential actuality and different experiences of reality maybe in contrast to actuality

[63:39]

Which are extraordinarily convincing. They're very real and they're very hard to shake. But one of the things I think is necessary, because we're actually in a world now in which the great civilizations of East Asia... Europe has considered itself the dominant view of the world and a universal view of the world for a very long time. And the Silk Road brought a little bit into the West. Marco Polo, I guess, changed Chinese noodles into pasta.

[65:08]

So that's been a big effect on Germany. But really, East Asian ways of thinking, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc., really are working underneath and around in our culture but they're not the dominant or they're not a definitive way of being for most of us. So I often look for contrasts that can surprise us a little, give us an entry And the one I've been noticing recently is Western languages try to be clear, try to represent the world with clarity and with a conscious clarity.

[66:37]

And we take that for granted. Why shouldn't language try to be clear? But what's interesting to me, and I'm not very good at Japanese, but I lived in Japan for four years, and 35 years every year, practically. And Japanese is quite vague. It's very difficult to know exactly what is meant. Even the word high, H-A-I, which is taken to mean yes, Actually means only, I've heard you. And so within Japanese, in my experience, and I'm a little embarrassed to be speaking about this in front of a native-born, real thing, Japanese person here.

[67:48]

is that in Japanese there's a lot of almost invisible but little pauses And the pauses become, and that's in English too, for an actor or anything, but it's more built into the language that the pauses are part of the speaking. And the pauses are often vocalized. And whether you're inhaling or exhaling on a word gives a different sense to the word.

[68:56]

And of course, the writing system is based on... Chinese characters, ideographs. And there's hiragana and katagana as two more writing systems and romaji. And in classical Chinese, this vagueness is even more clear. Im klassischen Chinesischen ist diese Wahrheit sogar noch deutlicher. In classical Chinese the language is not phonetic. Im klassischen Chinesisch ist die Sprache nicht phonetisch. Words have no morphology. The form doesn't change. Worte haben keine Morphologie, also ihre Form verändert sich nicht.

[69:58]

The words have no or little syntax. Die Worte haben keinen Syntax. You have to decide whether it's a verb or a noun. And the kanji, the characters, are not phonetic. The orality of the language is different in Chinese than the reading of the language. There's a written language, but the written language isn't written as spelled as sounds. You have to know the sound, but it's not spelled out like our alphabet.

[71:02]

So you have two things going on. You have the written language, and then you have the orality as a contrapuntal event going on, and they're the same but different. So we can ask, why would East Asian people want to have a language which has vagueness in it? And my understanding is that basically those languages reflect how the world is indeterminate. There's an indeterminacy. Mein Verständnis davon ist, dass diese Sprachen widerspiegeln, wie die Welt tatsächlich existiert, nämlich in Unbestimmtheit.

[72:09]

Die Welt ist unbestimmt. It means you can't put, as Alexander pointed out earlier, you can't put everything into words. So the language creates a relational field which depends on the two people and depends on all kinds of factors to... pull out what's really meant by imagination and creativity. So it requires a relational relationship to the language so language doesn't do all the work for you. So, for me, the language, though I'm not good at any of them, the languages of East Asia present the world as it's more true to me as a field of activity and relationships.

[73:21]

And German and English try to present a world that can be described. And East Asian languages more describe a world that can be. Now this is a huge difference. And it's just built into how you live your life. Okay. Sorry for that little riff. In only a few minutes, let's have lunch. When do we meet again? 5, 4, 3, 2, 12.30. 2.30? 3? 2.30? 2.30 is okay.

[74:21]

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