Maybe we can start out, since no one's saying anything, with discussing the water thing a little bit. If I were... Turn the machine off. If I were... The spirit of a practice place is that it is consensual, basically a consensual democratic organization, while at the same time there's a rather strict hierarchy based on seniority. But the hierarchy makes decisions about... you know, arbitrating disputes and decisions about the overall direction of the practice. But most of the day-to-day decisions are made consensually.

[01:03]

And consensual decision-making is a... a skill that we actually don't have much, because it... You don't make a decision unless everyone agrees. Ah, so not just... It's not a majority. Not a majority. And this is... I mean, it's very strong in Asia. For instance, in Japan, they had a while ago the parliament... They couldn't resolve something. So finally, the majority party just outvoted the... And that's set up because MacArthur set up the thing. It brought the whole government down. Because to make a decision by majority wasn't right. You had to make... You had to work it out till everyone agreed.

[02:06]

But that means you can't... You don't want to be the... You can't also be a holdout just saying... Fuck you, I'm going to... You have to be willing to agree, you have to be willing to compromise. So how we... Whether we are really going to be consensual in that democratic sense, here, and how we work that out, is something that takes time to develop the skills to do. And... I talked with Gerald and Beata quite a bit yesterday and today about the financial situation, and we talked about it in the seminar. And it's wonderful that we're doing well. And as I said to Gerald and Beata earlier, there were many good Buddhist groups in America that got started that didn't make it financially, and they're gone now.

[03:07]

So, you know, you have to make it financially and administratively and so forth, or you disappear. But it may be better to disappear than to have your highest priority, the finances. So, I mean, we have to survive financially, that's the basic condition, but given that, the finances are our lowest priority, in my opinion. The highest priority is practice, the well-being of the people here, and so forth. So, we don't want to find ourselves making decisions about people and so forth. First of all, I mean, we have to survive, but the first decisions are in terms of practice, hospitality, good feeling, and so forth. So, that's my feeling anyway. And... So, as I was suggesting, we need to... I'm asking people to pick titles, you know, to my picking.

[04:13]

I think you need to think about together, you know, what kind of practice place you want this to be and how we can develop it as a practice place. And the real responsibility falls to the people who are living here. And, for example, if... Nico and Beate can move either here or nearby, which your plan is, but this would be a big help in general for the place because of who the two of you are and so forth. And I think the more people who can think of this as a long-range practice place, whether they live here all the time or part of the time or whatever, it will help this place develop as a... Because I would like to see it able to be your home and also able other people to feel that it's their home part of the time.

[05:14]

And... But making practice work over a long period of time is not so easy. I mean, Ulrike just spoke to Frank Basendahl, and he's a little upset because his closest friend on the board... of the Haus der Stille. He's been a practicing Buddhist for many, many years and is, in fact, the guy who came to the Maria Locke seminar, Sashin, and checked us out and then invited us to teach at Haus der Stille. And he said that, I remember what he did, he said, well, you can't come this year because we don't want to steal you from Maria Locke, but we want to say that we've decided you're one of the groups of teachers we'd like to Well, anyway, he just decided to stop practicing after all these years, because it didn't seem to be helping him. It didn't seem... He's done all these practices, done all these things, and it doesn't, in the end, doesn't seem to be working for him. But, of course, you can't say that, I mean, it didn't work at various times in his life, or has worked, but at some point it's very hard to make it work over a long period of time.

[06:24]

And I think we can understand that, you know. And for some people it's just not going to work. But in some way, you know, for most people they don't even start practicing or stay with it for a while unless it works in the beginning. And then at some point it, you know, gets more dead. But I think it really, the real factors are the degree to which you have a sangha relationship, the degree to which you have a relationship with a teacher, and the degree to which your practice is simultaneously to make practice possible for others. But I think you have to renew your practice every few years in some way that's almost like beginning again, or it does get kind of dead. I felt like this, sorry to interrupt you, I felt like this after having met Pauline. Yeah. Because I had a really long period, I couldn't practice, I couldn't sit down. And I really, really missed it. And coming back on the cushion, it really was like beginning.

[07:28]

Again, yeah. Because everything was different with Pauline. Yeah, well, and I'm sure that Eric and Christina find that they were going to practice at Crestone, and then you guys get pregnant, and you think, well, once the baby's born, we'll go back to practice, but it's probably not the same. They're different people now, and it's going to be a whole new kind of decision than a different decision to stay at Crestone. But again, it's a rare opportunity in life to have this kind of time to practice and to study oneself and study with others. It's up to our own creativity and energy and feeling of how this affects our larger personal and community in terms of practice. Okay, that's all I wanted to say about that.

[08:31]

Now we go back to what should we talk about. I mean, I'm happy to be open to discussion, but I just talked... since I haven't been in a seminar the whole time. On Saturday afternoon when I came in I saw these three words, immediate, borrowed, and secondary, again on blackboard. I was wondering, is he talking about consciousness? Is he talking about feelings? Is he talking about forms? And immediately the five skandhas went through my head. And I was wondering if, because I never heard you actually talking about immediate feelings or perceptions as a word in that kind of contents, you always used it only for consciousness, the three magic words. Three minds of daily consciousness. Right. And I was wondering why. I mean, there is, of course, I have lots of

[09:31]

thoughts about it, but, yeah. I don't understand quite what you're asking. Do these words apply to the skandhas? Do these words apply to the last skandhas, skantap? Consciousness or form, which you call the last one. Consciousness. Okay. Or would you apply to the others? Well, the... The three minds of daily consciousness, the immediate consciousness we can call a consciousness, but it's also, in terms of what I introduced this weekend, this last weekend, it's a signless state of mind. That's why I put it on the blackboard or the flip chart. And so, in that sense, it's the second skanda, feeling, because it's a feeling state.

[10:39]

I mean, as long as you're alive, there's experience. And that experience we can call a feeling state, or we can call it a quality of awareness, and awareness always has a quality of knowing in it. You can't be aware without a feeling of knowing, or possibly knowing, but it's not conceptual knowing, and so forth. You know, the most common to most of us, I would say, for a person who can go to sleep naturally, without pills or being so exhausted that your brain is half asleep by the time you get in bed, which is the case with me sometimes. Usually it takes somewhere 5 to 20 minutes for people to go to sleep. And during that time, I would say that what people are doing is actually holding, though they wouldn't call it this, they're holding a signless state of mind while they're letting go of their thinking.

[11:45]

stopping, identifying and thinking. And then if you can kind of physically know that feeling while you can let your sleeping go, basically you're physically holding a silent state of mind, which is a little bit like going through the clear tube of an hourglass. Then you appear into sleep world. But in sleep world you can also call sleep a silent state of mind even though you're dreaming. And the word in Japanese for detachment means detached but not separate from. So you're not separate from your dreaming mind, but you're not so involved in it. And in fact, generally, if you get too involved in your thoughts or images because the dream is scary or it starts being urgent, like you have to do work, you wake up. So we could say that because you don't wake up, even though you may have images, you're actually in a signless state of mind because your emphasis is not involvement with what's happening.

[12:49]

So we could also just call it detachment, but I think if you think of it as detachment, you think of it as a kind of attitude and not a state of mind. So probably working with actually being able to practice, in the real sense, these three minds, very consciousness, would also be based on or enhanced by being able to go through the skandhas well and separate them out. I asked you during the seminar about the day practice and how that practice could support the silent state of mind.

[13:59]

And you partly answered it. I mean, you then talked about the three first koans in the Book of Serenity, of intention, wisdom and breath. And if you just take this intention, wisdom and breath, if you turn the question around, why is it then necessary, really necessary to live in a Sangha? You could, this is something you practice by yourself. So what is the quality of the Sangha that's added to this or brings it out or helps it? What do you think? What's your experience? I understand. My experience is that, except for now, usually the practice, the daily life of practice is very simple, by intention.

[15:18]

That because it's so simple and it's something you repeat over and over again and it makes more clear that life for a big part is repetition, Can you bring me closer to breath practice? At least, I mean, it starts these questions about why am I doing this and what is all this about? Yeah. And you can't answer this question while you do dishes, but you can watch your breath while you do your dishes. Oh. Mm-hmm. A few potatoes. Mm-hmm. Anybody else? How would any of the rest of you respond to Gaurāla's question? For me, I think Sañjā remembers me through this intention or strength.

[16:30]

He reminds you. We remember you too, but... Yeah, it's strength in this intention. If I, on my own, in Göttingen, I hope I get, yeah, forget. It's a kind of, yeah, it's a kind of anchor. It's another thing that if I, I have my intention, but it's not so strong. It gets stronger if I'm new or if I agree with other people in the same way. Yeah. For me, the answer is that the Sangha makes me different. With every person or every group I am, I am a different person. And it's strengthening me, but it's also a test sometimes. It's a test for intention and for wisdom, and for practice, of course.

[17:32]

Okay, yeah. I think that there are two answers. Sangha is somehow a remedy because if I'm living my daily life and I'm doing my work, life gets very narrow because you have certain ideas and you follow these ideas and I think that I have to make this, this, this and there is no place for other things anymore. And you structure yourself. I structure myself with my life. by certain patterns, like I have to do this and I have to do that, and likes and dislikes and so on, and by that I become a very narrow person. I'm not sure, very narrow, but maybe somewhat narrow. Okay, somehow narrow. But in Sangha the good thing is that there are also other narrow persons with their patterns and you rub against.

[18:32]

And if there is the possibility to practice together, then I can feel certain spaces where to expand or somehow let more things happen. And so I think that by rubbing against and expanding this place where other things can happen, except this narrow pattern one follows on normally, one helps each other and that makes it possible that you widen the space. So that's... Yeah, I understand. Anyone else? For me, the real miracle is anger. Miracle? Yeah, it is for me in a kind, it's a miracle.

[19:37]

You know what the word miracle means? In English, it means to smile. Yeah, to smile. A miracle is something that makes you smile. And the word mirror comes from... It's, I mean, in essence, it really has to do with doing the Zen, doing meditation together. I mean, there's a lot of this psychological stuff around in this daily living and cooking and housekeeping together and all this stuff. structures who met other structures. But the real miracle for me has something to do with this doing the Zen together. And in this doing together, there's something happens. I don't exactly know what.

[20:38]

I just can describe it for me as I still, after all these years, have quite problems to sit by myself at home. But I never have problems to sit with other people. Funny, huh? Yeah. And sometimes I think that that can't be true. I mean... And it's, I don't know, I mean, in the clearest way it came out in Sesshin. I mean, if you really are hours and hours together in meditation. It's a kind of, I don't know, bigger mind what happened there. And, yeah, but also nourish everybody. At least me, I can't really explain. Anyone else?

[21:48]

I'm sometimes impressed by the truth which comes out by being together with the Sangha. And I sometimes think, oh, I'd like to not go into that and this, because in my, during Zazen, it's still, I'm cleaning or... I'm in my history. And I really sometimes think, oh, they push me really too hard, but it's okay, I can go and come. But this is what really impresses me sometimes, that you cannot turn around and don't look at. I remember the reason why I started meditating is because I was holding my breath. I watched myself that in many moments I was holding my breath and I was holding back my energy. In just ordinary activity? Ordinary activity. So through meditation before, we call it that way, I learned to watch or to be the observer of myself.

[22:58]

And I didn't want only to do that. in meditation or in satsang, I wanted to do that with people, because I felt coming together with people and working together with people, I was still doing the same exercise, watching myself and keeping my breath closed or open. So that started me actually loving to live in a sangha or being in a sangha, because I could really start studying myself in a true sense. in terms of breathing, and in terms of, I feel, you know, breath is the whole energy we have, or we take from. And if the breath is not clear, moving, then something happens for myself. I'm on talking for myself. And this is what I instill, you know, my exercise in myself is, what is going on, and that I watch myself, that this kind of energy is still.

[24:00]

unfolding and moving. And Sangha helps me a lot too. And in the beginning you said you study yourself, but you study with others. And in the beginning I thought studying myself is studying others too, but that's not anymore. I actually, through my breath, I study myself, but I am with others. So there is a big difference for me. That makes the sound. Okay. Anyone else? Well, I would say it's virtually impossible to study yourself without living with others, practicing with others. Because self is something... It's the way we relate to others and the way we relate to the world.

[25:07]

So you can't make it independent. Now, what most of us do is we create a situation where we have friends and then there's strangers. And we see our friends and we don't see the strangers. And... Except at work and stuff. And then we have a very... As you know from your employees, it's not Sangha and it's not friends and sometimes it's pretty difficult. It's a special, another technique to work with people. But what's interesting about the Sangha and interesting for me is, you know, you live with people who wouldn't be your friends. normally. They might. I feel friendly to everybody, but that's not the people. You don't come here because you're my friends. You come here because we're practicing together. First of all, the way we learn, the way...

[26:09]

Julius will learn who he is and what the world is like. And I'm convinced that I see this is red and this is green and I see you a certain way, how that is about 80% cultural. It's not just the eyes working. And in fact, I read that it looks like in earlier periods, some cultures had less colors they saw. And I think you just learn to make distinctions, what those distinctions mean, what value they have. And they've also demonstrated that babies from conception, there's sensory input which is developing the brain. And if you don't have that sensory input from other human beings and from the world, your brain actually doesn't develop. And these poor Romanian kids who are brought up in nursery homes, and they think it's a good communist way.

[27:20]

I mean, you can take pictures of their brain scans at 20 and 25, and there's just big portions of their brain that are dead. They just don't have the ability to relate to other people and do certain things. It's just blue. I mean, I guess when they take these brain scans, the more activity, it's orange, red, yellow. And when there's no activity, it's blue and black. and large portions of these Romanian kids' brains, the young people, is permanently blue-black. And there's not much you can do to them. They're like monsters, some of them. They can't relate, they can't feel affection. So... the process by which we learn to be Julius or Carrick or Moana or something is a process with others. And I think that if you're going to do something such a big step as Buddhist practice, that process has to, you're sort of being reborn. Actually, that's why it's called home leaving. You leave the person you were.

[28:21]

And you have to create a new situation that duplicates in a way, a certain way, what he's going through. And when you separate the vijnanas out and skandhas out, you're actually transforming yourself. I think there's just been too much emphasis in Zen on the sudden aspects of the practice. And as you all know, I emphasize the crafter practice, and particularly because we're in a culture where sudden experience is not supported by cultural assumptions. So you can have a sudden experience here and still remain the same old schmuck. And, uh, are pretty nearly the same old schmuck. Um... So... Mm-hmm. Why don't you say it? Geschmuck. Geschmuck.

[29:24]

Is that what you say in German? Taste. It means taste. Taste, huh? Yeah, the same old taste. Yeah. Bitter. Sour. Um... So, um... So one aspect of Sangha life is that we learn a tremendous amount from other people. And just as I would say, again, talking about Sally and Tumash, or the two of you and Julius, is that you're teaching him attention span as well as specifics. And we teach each other a certain kind of attention span. We try to find it. And we're an attentiveness to each other, which isn't based on personality. And ideally, bodhisattva practice means that there's no one who gets your goat.

[30:27]

Who gets everybody? gets you upset. You feel friendly and at ease with anybody, no matter who it is. I mean, there may be some rare exceptions, But in general, even then, you know how to say, this person really annoys me, but you can put that aside. So the process of discovering with a group of people who wouldn't be the friends one would select to support you in every possible way... To come to a state of mind where you can be as relaxed with any person as another person is a state of mind in which also you start learning about the world in a new way. So this whole business, as Sukhriya used to say, living asanga, the hardest part is milk and water often curdled. Milk and water fit together very well, but you can also curdle milk so it turns sour.

[31:29]

So living together like milk and water, without getting cheesy, is the hardest thing to do. And so, but that skill is part of the skill of discovering this other or wider self, not higher self, but maybe higher and wider self for Buddha nature. And so what you do in the Zendo, and we feel some kind of mutual being or connectedness or something, that then is tested in not the special situation of the Zendo, but in our ordinary activity in living together. So in that sense, equanimity, the ability to have a state of mind which is not disturbed by others... is the condition for, and the basis for, and that's what's also a signless state of mind, we can say suchness or equanimity or bliss are all signless states of mind, is the basis for realising, excuse me for saying, but for our true nature.

[32:50]

And, you know, it's interesting to me that a number of people have come back into practice. You know Rhonda Barr. She's come back in after some years. And Paul Rosenblum, who was a student with Suzuki Roshi. You've met him, haven't you? He's come once. He's now been at Crestone a couple more times, and he's coming again. He was there during the practice period. And he was at Zen Center, I think he was... Anyway, one of the earliest practice periods, I don't know if the first one, and in that movie, that video movie of Sukhiroshi and me driving in the car, he's in that movie, Dan Rozen. But he's a very nice guy, very intelligent, and he was on his way to being a Buddhist scholar when he met Sukhiroshi. And he decided just to go live at Tassara instead of doing scholarship.

[34:02]

And then he was with Zen Center for many, many years, and then he became Governor Brown's aide and got married and started a business to support his family and stuff. But basically, but even in his business, He basically does the business so half the income or so goes into a foundation which helps poor people build houses and stuff like that. So he just keeps enough to live on with his wife. He's also a teacher, but in a more Sufi lineage. So he's decided to come back into practice. But what's interesting is... Although he hasn't practiced so formally and intentionally for some years now, all of his practice for 10, 12 years in the early days is now maturing in him. Because it takes quite a long time for practice to... We do it for a long time and there's a lot of long, dry periods. But something's happening, and it takes quite a while before somehow our personality is developed enough that the seeds we planted begin to grow.

[35:15]

So that's also part of... sangha and the presence of sangha and able to come back into sangha i mean if we didn't maintain if some of us uh like myself or ground diesel or others maintain a sangha he would have no place to go back into so part of my job and i felt is i mean i'm practicing for myself of course and i'm practicing for my family i always feel i'm practicing for my daughters and family and stuff. But I, and my friends who don't practice, I feel I'm practicing for them even though they don't practice. My friends don't. And I feel I'm practicing with the people I'm practicing with. That's you now. But I also feel I'm practicing and waiting for those who want to come back to come back. One of the last things he told me in the latter years, just before I went to Japan and when I came back, he said, I want you to be open to all the people who started with me years ago to come back.

[36:23]

And I want you to every now and then let them know. Because he felt the people, even within the first few days, he, on some level, was waiting for them to come back. And if they don't, that's fine. But he creates a life which allows them to come back. In a way, that's why I'm here in Yanisov. Because once I started practicing with you seriously in Germany, Vienna gang trapped me in Poland and stuff like that, I can't leave. I have to make a place where you can come back to. That's what I'm doing here, best I can, with a lot of help from my friends. It's true. We can make a song of it. There is one. Oh, that song, yeah. I feel sorry for Ron Duss.

[37:26]

Dick Alpert. I told some of you I hate him. He's had a massive brain hemorrhage stroke. He's paralyzed inside his body. He can only say yes or no. The Ram Dass? Yeah, Ram Dass. Not the Ram Dass in Cresta. The Ram Dass... You know him from... Yeah. He has that... Yeah, he's an old friend of mine. And he's the person I did the LSD conference with, organized it with in the 60s. And he was like the most brilliant young Harvard professor in psychology. And he had the courage to trust his own... In the end, it really comes down to trusting your own reality. Because everyone told him, you have a career as a psychologist, you're already a full professor at Harvard, you're only 29 or 30 or something. He said, this is open... Psychedelics have opened me up to something else. And I have to go with where my experience is leading me.

[38:29]

So he left Harvard and... But then he also, different from Larry and Metzner, became a practitioner, first of Hinduism and then more or less Buddhism, and brought that all together. The latter part of his life he became a golfer. He did? Yeah. He just decided he'd get tired of all this guru business, because everybody pushed him into this big guru number. So in the last 10 years, he just golfs. And he's from a wealthy Jewish family. And they used to own one of the big railroads. So he has enough money. He gives a lot away, but he has enough money to just live. And so he started playing golf regularly until the other day. Until the other day. In fact, he called me once from a car phone. Hi, Dick. I'm on the way to a golf game. How are you doing? And he also is gay.

[39:31]

And he had the courage also to be gay and to be a guru and to take psychedelics and to just put it all out there. And he was basically the most popular figure on the alternative scene in America. I mean, even recently, if he went and gave a lecture, thousands of people would show up. He's a nice guy. So it's not clear whether he's going to die or vegetate or recover. He's 67. Not very old. No, not by my standards anyway. He's the upper end of my generation. Did becoming older for you another quality for what you always teach, in the sense maybe don't have, don't be fearful before, have fear for the death, but you become older and you have now, like Ram Dass or several other people seeing dying at your age, is it changing your feeling about it?

[40:57]

No, you don't? Well, you know, it's a... How can I say? I'm attached to doing things, and I'm planning to do things, but I know I have another state of mind. Like, say I get a little sick or something, I think, oh, good, it's going to be over in a few minutes. I mean, not a few minutes, but I feel completely... Very often I feel, God, maybe now's the time. Great. So I... That's one reason I don't have medical insurance and all that stuff. I mean, basically, I really could afford medical insurance if I wanted to. Paul Rosenblum says, in fact, if I'll bother to pick up policy, he'll pay for it. But I don't care what I do. I don't care. I'm not too interested in whether I stay or die. But I don't feel like I'm depressed or wanting to die. I don't care much one way or the other.

[42:01]

I know what it's like to shut my eyes. So eventually I'll shut them and not open. And I guess that's what makes you more. relaxed about it. I knew I'd feel relaxed about it, but, you know, if I get very sick and you see me panicking and starting to start getting the Christian Bible out, you know, you know. I also admit, when Nancy Wilson Ross died, she sort of became a Christian near the end of her last weeks and began praying. And that's very common. A lot of Buddhists, they're Buddhists all their lives until near the end and then suddenly... Because it's their own culture? Well, they go into this state of dying and they don't know what and everything. So they go back to their, I think, just their earliest sense of what's safe. But I don't feel very old at present.

[43:02]

No, that's not what I mean. No, I know what you mean, but it doesn't hit me that I'm old yet. Yeah, that's... So maybe in ten years, when I'm, you know, more interim, drooling down the front, you know, then I'll start getting worried when you're feeding me, you know. I just recognize that becoming a child changed how I feel my life span. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So... A big change, of course, for most people is when their parents die. When both parents are gone, you suddenly feel out there, exposed. Hey, little guy. I like his little feet. So, what else? This koan on breath is, you know, in the third koan, this prajna tarah and all, it's worth looking at if you wanted to.

[44:15]

And you can also understand it in relationship to this recent sashins of this movement of compassion and wisdom. one question comes into my mind we have you spoke about Sangha which supports us in a way for our practice another thing which I always feel is supportive yes yeah but it's got a taste of negativity. It's suffering. And how much... Can I practice without suffering? Is it normal? To suffer? Yeah, it is. I've heard it. I should have learned this. This is normal, but how much...

[45:16]

How much is needed? Can we realize, understand the practice without, would we realize it without suffering? There's many groups, like I have friends, they are sannyasins, and they do sessions, and they have happenings, and they look like they're really having a lot of fun, and they are easy in a way. I have sometimes my problems with them, but they have... They're not so stiff, you can say, maybe if you look at us, some people would say they feel a little stiffness watching us. And it feels like they don't suffer so much. I don't know what they reach or where they go or what they understand, but is it necessary to, not only the physical pain... Of sitting.

[46:30]

Of sitting, for example. Well, you know, what do you think about this, Moana? How to say it? I cannot answer this question directly. My feeling is that for certain people it is the right thing to become a sannyasi and go this path, or become a Zen student and go this path, or go into Hinduism or whatever. It is simply what attracts them, something that resonates in the teaching, something inside themselves and so they go this direction it's not a question do they reach more or less or it's my point of view or is it a better thing or worth more it's not the question

[47:44]

Well, I'm not a sannyasin. I'm a munyasin. I'm not a sannyasin, so I don't really know what... I couldn't make a comparison. I've known a number of sannyasins and sannyasin leaders, and I feel they don't. They only know a certain... From a Buddhist point of view, they only know certain stages. But... But I don't know everybody and I don't know that. And all in all I feel, particularly in Europe, the people who've been sannyasins, they have a nice feeling. And there's quite a few sannyasins who were practicing with the Dharmasanda, who were former sannyasins, yeah. Well, if you ask... If we say, does a person realize practice without suffering?

[49:10]

Well, it's often the case that somebody has gone through a big experience of suffering. who's often also quite open to practice. And it's often been true of AIDS people. I mean, often they spend the first year or two depressed, And very many of them then feel their life is so much better than it was before, even though they have a death sentence, or it seems like they have a death sentence. And Ulrika has a friend like that, named Haydn, who doesn't have AIDS, but she was a teacher in her school. And she's got tumors all over her place, and doctors keep saying she's going to die. And Eureka seems to be this woman's main friend and calls her up regularly and stuff. And they're visible, these things, all over her.

[50:14]

And it's been going on for several years now. But she's in a great state of mind all the time. And she was a very mousy teacher before. Mousy, we say mousy, meaning committed. And she had a husband who... who had affairs all the time and beat on her, etc. And she was one of the most uninteresting, unalive teachers at Eureka School. But she got this disease at some point. She just completely changed and she got rid of her husband. And, you know, she was, you know, they told her a year or so ago that she had weeks to live. She said, I'm still divorcing that son of a bitch. And before I die, I want him out of my life. So she divorced him completely. And she's not sure she has any money to live on and so forth. But she's so much happier without him. She got her own apartment. She fixed it up. And she tries various cures and things, but she's the happiest she's ever been in her life.

[51:20]

So that kind of suffering. Yeah. I know that's probably not what you meant. That's part of what I meant, yes. But that seems to often be the case. But often you can just, if you're a person who, and one thing that happens in practice, is suddenly other people's suffering gets through to you. Mm, mm. in the world and situation just around and the frustration not just suffering of illness but the basic frustration in most people's lives and things and uh so some kind of openness like that but i chris i don't think that i know that zen people are often a little glum and stiff i know that i don't know what to do and maybe i'm glum and stiff but i don't feel glum and stiff and uh I don't feel that it's like that too, but I just imagine people... No, but it is. I mean, I've seen photographs of Zen parties. Their eyes down, you know, nobody's dancing.

[52:24]

I remember my first Sushina, I thought, my God, every man should be going to military. It's better for them because I really didn't know what's going on. And this changed a lot, but in the beginning... Yeah. Some people overdo it when they do Kinyin. Some of the men do Kinyin. But at the time when they carried the kiyosako, there were some hot stuff going on. But yeah, there's no question that the I mean, the only suffering that's part of our practice is sitting a long time is difficult. But there is a point at which it's not exactly pain anymore. And then I find, anyway, it opens you to other people's suffering.

[53:25]

Once you can tolerate a certain level of physical and mental difficulty and not run away from it. You don't run away from other people's problems. And they also don't seem as serious. Because, you know, you're suffering, so it's okay. We have to live through it. When I was born, Pauline, I really went through a hard time, 17 hours of pain. Labor. Labor. And I really tried, in my preparation month before, I really tried to... do it like maybe like a sashimi breathing and I was really pretty prepared for it and in the last moment they used forceps this I didn't know and this was really a huge huge pain and I think a baby coming out is a huge pain anyway without forceps but what forceps?

[54:32]

I'm not angry, but I'm in a way enthused. Disappointed. Disappointed that in that moment I couldn't get loose of this. I couldn't go beyond pain as I maybe several times could go in the sashin after the third day. But you were exhausted. I was exhausted, yes. That makes a big difference. If you're doing a sashin and for 17 hours you had to sit, most people cannot... I mean, if you're fresh in a sashin and you're rested, it's not so painful. As soon as you get beaten down, you know, that is the real test of whether you just have the will and the energy go through or you actually got through to the point where it doesn't bother you. When you're beaten down, then generally most people at some point should lose it. You know, that's just normal. If you only had 12 hours of labor, you might say, boy, did practice work for me.

[55:37]

It did work. It did work the whole time. It was wonderful somehow. Yeah. But in this last section, I couldn't handle it. And I was really angry. I thought maybe, boy, they didn't tell me what to do then. I really thought technical about it because I really thought maybe I could have changed if somebody or something I knew. Well, of course, I've been through things which I felt, I mean, I went for many, many years. where I felt good all the time, nothing bothered me much. I always felt in a good mood. But there are certain aspects of the Zen center mass when I had hundreds of people upset with me. I mean, at some point I always felt good inside, but there were certain energetic levels which I ceased to be able to function. I just couldn't function anymore on certain levels, because it was just too much to have.

[56:38]

But I survived because of practice. At least I think I survived. But there were certain levels where I just kind of almost became inoperative at the level of one's ordinary personality. So, you know, it was interesting for me. So I said, well, practice worked for this, but then it made me realize it might not work in a war. I mean, if suddenly the city was blowing up around me and people were killed and I had to go days and days without food and, you know, I don't know if practice would help me at that point. Like in a ghetto when you don't come out and you have to really try to survive. You know, these people like in Zahir and these places where you have to wander from one border to the next. I don't know how those people managed to hold it together. Of course, something else probably takes over and you just go from moment to moment.

[57:43]

But there's no question we can be put in situations which test our ability to survive. In general practice makes us quite a bit stronger for most circumstances. I'm sure after 17 hours of labor I would have lost it too. Particularly, I would have been very poorly prepared, having not expected to go into labor at all. But maybe then you would have made it. A miracle, a miracle. I think the first child, nothing you expect anyway. I know, Catherine, from Phoenix, what's your last name? Berkel? No, I'm... Catherine. Yeah. Yeah, we know her. Yeah. She said, if I wouldn't have said such things before, I would have been so upset that it hurts so much. Yeah. And she said without the session experience and the sitting experience, she would have just messed it up.

[58:49]

She said, I was so, I mean, I was in the mood of getting angry, but then I remembered, it's okay. And she called me up after birth and she said, I'm so thankful that I could actually be in Santa Fe. I spoke to her for the first time in a couple of years recently. I wonder was she still with Will and trying to get free? Really? I'm writing the letters from time to time, but I never get an answer. Okay, so anything else we should talk about? That's the thought and the feeling I had when we were talking about Sangha. It's interesting on a certain level, you said that we were rubbing against each other and we we are and we change and we are open for changes. But it's so interesting when I see people and if I look closely, actually everybody who comes, came to Creston or comes here on a certain level realized all these virtues already.

[60:05]

Like It's not visible, but on a deep level all these virtues are there and because whoever comes here has made that decision. And making that decision is a process. And through this process people are willing to change their lives. And somehow with this decision To live in a sangha. We realized it already. Yeah. Embryonically, perhaps. Giving birth to it. Yeah, it's something else. But I have a question like, oh, what this example, Beate talked earlier about the suffering. There's kinds of suffering you can't avoid, you know.

[61:07]

You're in that situation, you have to go through it and see how you manage. But would you say it's, like, also with practice, is it meaningful to stick through suffering or wouldn't you think that it's better to go a path where you just feel more alive and where, yeah, that it feels strengthening for one's person? Well, if the contrast were between a practice which made you feel more alive and strengthening and the other made you feel weak and dead, I'd choose the one that made you feel more alive and strengthened. If the practice makes you feel dead and weak, you're probably doing the wrong practice. But if, like Sashin or in general, I always say that one should turn toward suffering but not try to go through it, you know, in some absolute sense.

[62:17]

Because I think you build your strength. So if you have some psychological problems or attachments or emotional things, you can turn toward it each time instead of turning away from it. but you turn toward it at the level at which you can handle it. Finally, you can turn more, probably even 360 degrees is okay. And I think that's true in sitting, too. In general, I would say that if you really want to go through it, it's great to do that sometimes, the pain of sitting. But it's also okay to go as far as you can and then stop. I mean, I don't believe that we should just make ourselves miserable. I mean, at one point I thought we should only sit half-hour periods because I thought 40-minute periods were too hard for people. So I actually considered having, when I came back from Japan, having everything 30-minute periods because most people can handle 30-minute periods.

[63:22]

But there's just something that happens in 40- and 50-minute periods. It's not the same in a 30-minute period. Yeah, really? I think so. For me, it's true. Because I was thinking, when was it, yesterday morning, maybe not in Zizine, in Zizine it felt differently to me, but in a normal morning period, like here, 50 minutes, I had the feeling, in a sense, it's a little bit, for me, useless, because I can't hold the concentration for 50 minutes. I mean, I'm... There's a sleepy part in it, in 50 minutes. But not in 30. Not in you. Well, it's true. You know, when we first started at San Francisco Zen Center, Mr. Kiroshi said, he was quite fierce about it.

[64:24]

He said, I do not want anybody here insisting there be two periods in the morning. One period is enough. So we had one period for quite a while. because he didn't want some people to create a practice which makes the average person feel excluded. So it might... But at some point, everybody wanted to sit. So I finally had to disagree with... He said, Krishna, you're by then dead. But I had to change because everyone wanted to sit two periods, and we made it very easy for people to come to the only two periods, only to one period. So we had it all set up so a large number of people could come in easily after one period was finished. But it might be that for a non-practice period situation, 50 minutes is too long. We should have a 40 and a 40 or a 40 and a 30. Because we're not sitting so much, so a 50-minute period is pretty long.

[65:27]

Yeah, and I sit a lot. Then 50, I sometimes feel 50 minutes are different because then you really can go into it. And often then at the end is a concentration part, at least for me. Well, one of the things that's different is that Rinzai, for example, usually sits 30-minute periods only. Mm-hmm. But they emphasize an intentional concentration through the whole 30 minutes. And you can't hold that. But the point of our way of sitting is that you don't want to just do that. You want to sometimes just be kind of... You want something else to happen than you're doing the period. And it's fairly easy to maintain a certain 30-minute thing. Could you explain this intention and connection to... I mean, what's the difference between sitting this style and that style in relation to having an intention and the intention is...

[66:38]

Or my feeling is that in this style you described in the late part that you were ready for a silent state of mind, but you are not particularly about what kind of state of mind that would be. So that's a different intention than seeking Rinzai style as you described it. Well, the emphasis in Rinzai style is to accomplish something. And the emphasis in our way of practice is to study oneself, whatever you are. And so you just sit. And just sitting has a number of levels of meaning, but just sitting also means you just sit without even concentrating. And you allow your... Actually, we are more... We emphasize the particularities of practice, of posture, more than Rinzai does, because our concentration is in trying to sit well. And if you try to sit well, then you don't have to mentally concentrate so much, because the sitting well is the kind of concentration.

[67:45]

So you try to maintain a good sitting during 40 minutes. And in Rinzai, you tend to either really try to stay with your breath the whole 30 minutes, or you work on a koan the whole 30 minutes. And when you lap from that, you bring yourself back to it, etc. And we tend to allow something else more to direct our practice. I mean, uncorrected mind is not something Rinzai people practice. And for the kind of practice we do and studying oneself, I think uncorrected mind is essential to practice. So, I mean, and when your posture is really quite good and you can develop through daily sitting a posture where you can really be, feel, an energetic awareness throughout your body.

[68:53]

You can forget about your mind almost and allow that kind of... It's almost like you become, as I said in the seminar, the kind of vast body appears. And you feel this very clear field. And you can sit forever sometimes when you have that feeling. And then your body starts teaching you. then you begin to have something, not you do zazen, but your body-mind begins to teach you how to sit. But you can't... That's when you begin to have teaching dreams and things like that, too. You begin to have dreams which are clearly not ordinary dreams, they're dreams which are instructing you about how to practice how to sit. It's interesting, this posture also sometimes teaches you how to talk during the day. It's like you don't know where it comes from, but it clearly comes from the backbone or the legs or so.

[69:59]

It's not in the mind or the brain. I hope I can start writing that way. Writing that way? Yes, I'm going to have to write with my brain. Sit there. But there's a certain, I mean, one thing I would like to talk about more, but I even forget how to talk about it. I may try a bit in Kimse for the seminar coming up, because, you know, they want me to talk about the bodhisattva. I don't know, there's three words, bodhisattva, compassion and wisdom. So, that's the title they gave me, so... But when we talk about compassion and wisdom, it falls into some category of like emotion or love or something. Some category we understand.

[71:02]

It's supposed to be like a better kind of love or less attached kind of love. But anyway, for us it's in the category of emotional things we're familiar with. And wisdom, too, we try to make it, well, is this like being smart or making good decisions or something like that? And we're trying to understand these two words because they're words, and we put them into categories of emotion or thinking or functioning or something. And they're not necessarily in any category we're familiar with. But those categories are not accessible to us because we're not You know, our way we experience things falls into certain categories. We try to give it meaning in certain categories and make it meaningful. But that's meaningful in our usual personality, but it may not be meaningful in terms of Buddha nature.

[72:03]

It may not be meaningful. In fact, it's not. So the key to this and the key to the real sangha is this sense of signless states of mind, which then open you up to other categories of functioning and feeling that aren't what we're used to. It's a way of speaking and writing and being and so forth, where almost you feel something else is doing you. And I suspect it's very close to what people talk about when they say they're channeling. But they attribute it to some ancient being as channeling these platitudes. They're usually pretty platitudinous. They really had a kind of experience in Creston. I never did a garden. My mother always was digging and stuff, and I always was picking... Stealing.

[73:04]

Stealing the carrots. Hanadorobo is called in Japan. Flower thief. You asked me to be in the garden. Always when I went from the garden out to do work, through the garden, there was always something talking to me that I had to go through the garden. And look where I wanted to plant what. For some reason, it all came together in the first year. I was wondering what was doing that. And during Zazen, I never thought about the garden. But I always, after Zazen, I went outside. And I knew exactly, I want to have sunflowers there, and I want to have cabbage there. It was just there. And I was wondering, you know, where that came from. But after a while, I could figure out that it was a kind of different mind was always... Well, we know an immense amount. And it's maturing. Some people seem to have a gift for allowing this all to flow through them.

[74:07]

But you can't... Normally it can't flow through your personality. So it feels like your personality is put aside and something else is doing you. But how to talk about that and make it... make some... Open us to it. Is this connected with what you described with synchronicity? Recently? Did I speak about synchronicity? When did you speak about synchronicity? Which, tell me now, what? Proportion or synchronicity? Synchronicity. No, this feeling, what Gisela described, is it... Things all fit together? Yeah, it's like that, yeah. I just want to disagree with what you said about channeling.

[75:09]

I think what people mostly do When they channel, they're able to read the other person's mind. And they bring it up into words or pictures. And that's why it feels so good to people when they get out of these sessions. Well, that's fortune reading, fortune telling. Well, I don't know. Challenging is... There isn't a second person. Yeah, channeling is usually nobody else present. But people go and talk to a channeler and ask questions. Yeah. Are you talking about those? No, I wasn't talking about channeling. There are books written by channeling composers. Oh, people who just start channeling. What, W.K. Yates? But, you know, the Findhorn community was built on... That guy who was killed in that car accident recently, his wife channeling. And Yates, some of Yates' poems were written through his wife channeling.

[76:15]

But channeling seems to be something that you can get a certain state in mind. But I think that's also, I would guess that in the wider sense, a good therapist channels, you know. Okay, I think that's enough. As we sit around here in our little thing, exploring what this all is about. Oh yeah, that's, I'm sorry. O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

[77:42]

It's nice that all these things are in German. By the way, I want to apologize for not being in Sazen this morning, but I did get up at 4. I went to bed at quarter to 4 and got up at 4.30. And I did apologize to Gerald, but... I knew I couldn't do the seminar if I... It would be harder to do the seminar unless I had some sleep. I seem to be using, as I said to Eric, the remnants... Remnants? You know what the word remnant is? Leftover cloth or remnant? The remnants of jet lag I have to allow me to work on the book. So I'm getting a tremendous amount done around 10 o'clock. Five hours of continuous work, it's great. But it's a little hard on my daytime activities. Yeah. I did it two days, three days in a row now.

[79:00]

But yesterday I thought, I might still be asleep now if I'd gone to Zazen and then had breakfast. So I apologize. Before you go on Thursday, may we do a nice walk together, an hour or so, with you? Sure. I'm ready to be scheduled. Great. Okay. If we want, we could have dinner Friday, Thursday night out or something like that, if you'd like, but let's just have dinner here. Because Friday morning I have to be at the train station at ten or something.

[79:41]

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