A comment on personal agency and situational agency. A more... maybe an easier example than what I gave earlier today. Where sort of personal agency is more... Beethoven. There's a composer and there's a score and you play the music. And situational agency is more Dave Brubeck. Take five. Or, you know, we have Mozart and Miles.

[01:02]

One is more situational. Like jazz is more situational. You're not working from a score. You're riffing on themes, but it's not a score. So I'd say in this sense yogic practice is more like jazz. You're in the situation and you don't know quite what's going to happen. And as far as I know, and I'm not an expert for sure, but most Asian music, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, is more like jazz than our music.

[02:04]

It depends on exactly who's playing and what they're doing. There's a certain element of improvisation there. And Buddhist ceremonies are conceived this way. If we were to do a Buddhist ceremony here, If it's done with a traditional sense of how it exists. And you do have certain patterns that are put together. Certain units that you put together in any ceremony.

[03:13]

But usually it's, and always, basically if you look at it, it's so complicated. No group of people can actually do it. It's like writing music that no pianist can play. You can get toward, but you can't quite do it. Or a song no singer can sing. That then requires a certain improvisation. Yeah. So anyway, that's just a comment on that. And now we have mastery and transformation, right? I put the mastery in there because of Plato. And I talked about that earlier.

[04:15]

Because Plato emphasizes when he, in the way he speaks about self, is that we have to establish self-control. So then you have a self which controls a self. So you need a soul or a meta-self or something like that. And Freud said basically the same thing. He's got the super ego. And Catholicism, as I pointed out, and Ivan Illich pointed out to me very strongly, it's Catholic monasticism which makes Catholicism work. Did I speak about this yesterday?

[05:44]

Yes, you did. But not today. And so in Buddhism, the emphasis is on not knowledge and mastery, the knowledge which allows mastery, But the wisdom that allows transformation. So that means that instead of the monastic, you have the enlightened person. But that's usually assumed that it's the monastics who are most likely to realize and actualize enlightenment. I've seen that clearly. I know quite a lot of people who had enlightenment experiences, but seldom can a lay person really actualize it.

[06:53]

Yeah, so that's just where we are in the Dharma Sangha, too. Oh, as I said, just the Protestant Reformation was an effort to get rid of monasticism and make it religion universal. It was a democratic, anti-elitist move. So that's why that's there.

[08:00]

I just threw it in to complicate things. Because if we're going to have self, we've got to have the metta self. Okay. So, I mean, the discussion that the soup clutch had. I'm just trying to learn German. The word remember. The word remember. has the feeling, at least in English, I don't know what word you use in German, of the legs and arms have been cut off and you have to put the members, the legs and arms, back on. You have to put it back, you know. Okay. It's the same concept in German? No, it's quite different.

[09:16]

What's the concept in German? In German, the word is erinnern. And I don't know the specific etymology, but to me, inner means like what is inside. And erinnern is maybe to mention what is inside. Does that sound right? Yeah, okay. So maybe that's closer to what I... to my concept of what's going on. I mean, sometimes you can't quite remember. We say in English at least, it's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite remember it. Do you say things like that? So then the question is, what part is on the tip of the tongue and what part can't you remember?

[10:17]

See, my feeling is that at least in English remember is a misnomer. Misnomer means misnamed. Because my own feeling is that everything that's ever happened to you is part of you. Well, I mean, of course, it couldn't be absolutely everything. There must be a few molecules left out somewhere. But if we need working concepts, I think it's better to say for us, everything is present. And that's the concept of the Alaya Vijnana.

[11:32]

And it's sort of like, as an example I use, somebody doesn't saw a car accident and they can't remember anything about it and you hypnotize them and then they say, oh, the license plates were such and such and it was from Friedrich Rüstein or however you say it. How do you say that? I don't know. It's one of the hardest things I know to say. Great. Well done. As an example, one could say that someone was present when a car accident happened and cannot remember, but then is hypnotized and remembers the number sign and all kinds of details under hypnosis. I could remember under hypnotism, but I couldn't pronounce it. Now, if everything is present, I think everything is present in a way like the stars are present right now.

[12:38]

It's just daylight and clouds hide them. And it may be that everything is as present as the stars are now, only that the daylight and the clouds are hiding them. And instead of the red shift, we have a blue shift. Because the red shift shows that the multiverse is expanding. And in this case, as you get older, maybe the stars are coming towards you. You're adding stars and they're moving towards you. Maybe death is when all the stars come together.

[13:58]

And you become a black hole. And your relatives almost get sucked in, but they stay out. Yeah, yeah, okay. So if everything that's happened to you is always with you, what do you forget? Well, I would say you forget the connections between things. What you remember, what's present are the parts, but not what connects the parts. And I think that's what neurobiologists think how we remember. It's all in parts, scattered in different parts of the brain.

[15:03]

But I'm not thinking neurobiologically, I'm thinking experientially. And what happens through incubatory meditation practice? If you develop a fourth mind, which overlaps the three of non-dreaming, deep sleep, etc., dreaming and waking, And it's sort of maybe just to speak poetically, it's like the sky of the mind under the clouds or under the daylight.

[16:07]

So that you feel more and more as the practitioner feels the presence of all the parts. So you're feeling the parts on the tip of your tongue, but you can't quite remember the connections or the name or something. You can, you know, feel the person, maybe see their face, but you can't quite remember whether it's Manfred or Friedrich or something. Friedrich. Right. I can't even say Frederick.

[17:18]

Anyway, okay. I am a little embarrassed, but not too much. So if I try to kind of describe the experience I feel, is it... Maybe you've seen a movie where the movie starts with just waves coming in on a beach. Or a long straight road reaching off somewhere. Or maybe wind blowing in trees. And just seeing the image, yeah, it's not exactly the same as your own images. But it corresponds to thousands of windy trees you've seen.

[18:37]

And it calls forth all those, let's not call them associations, all those parts, all those parallel parts. without any image, without any connections. Because that's what I think photographs and movies often play on. The director, consciously or unconsciously, knows how to call those parts, that accumulation of parts into presence in the movie. So you can hear the cooing of doves. And you can call forth the times that you heard the cooing of doves in other contexts. Or you can just hear the cooing of doves without any connections, but it's like a thousand doves cooing at once, deeply somehow.

[20:18]

But you only hear one, you understand what I mean. And it reaches deeply into you. And here I think we can use some neurobiology. For most of the last 50 years, I've avoided using right-brained, left-brained analogies. But the research about it is much more sophisticated now than it was in the 70s. And I now prefer to say right brain bodied instead of just right brained. I'm convinced that what the incubatory repetitious practice of Zen which is not repetitious which is not repetition

[21:41]

is that it makes you more right and left hemisphere balanced. And as I've often said, yoga culture has always assumed neuroplasticity. And as I have often said, the yogic culture has always assumed that the brain has great plasticity. So the parts are probably mostly embedded in feeling, and the connections are embedded in thinking.

[22:56]

but the parts are embedded in feeling and the difficulty getting them together and off the tip of your tongue is getting the connections which are in thoughts hooked up with the parts which are in feelings. I made this all up, don't believe a word of it. And we do know that the right brain body is more connected with the autonomic nervous system. And I think we can also, since we're talking about self, say that the autonomic nervous system has to be the biological ground of self.

[24:04]

So the practice of meditation, the regular practice of meditation, which makes you eventually more right hemisphered, more right brain body, And skillful at bringing the two together and the shifts between. You live in the I'll use the word memory at this point.

[25:24]

You live in the memory of the parts, but not the memory of the connections. And that becomes deeper and deeper and more satisfying as your practice matures. The world feels profoundly familiar. Now, if we also imagine that all the parts are there, I think the example I've often used of distinguishing between awareness and consciousness is that awareness is present like the stars are present whether you're awake or asleep. And you can go to sleep.

[26:40]

And as you can, I'm sorry to just repeat myself, but, and decide intentionally to wake up at 6.02 with an alarm clock. Goodbye, my friend. Goodbye, I'm sorry. Right in the middle of... So painful. That's a very tactful thing to say. Okay. Is that... Say that you go to bed at 11 p.m. My theory is that 11 p.m. knows all the parts. and knows when 6.02 is, so like the example I used before with you, 6.02 and 11.00 p.m. are joined Sechs Uhr zwei und elf Uhr sind verbunden.

[27:54]

And then you're not conscious, like you weren't conscious during exactly, awake but not conscious during Zazen. Und du bist in der Zwischenzeit nicht bewusst. Yeah. So I think that this sort of reactivating or rebalancing or newly actualizing the right brain-body experience. puts us in a very... embeds us deeply in... the world not through memory but the presence of everything that's happened to you.

[29:09]

And there's a, I think a neuroscientist and psychologist named Alan Shore who I think is very good on these things. S-C-H-O-R-E. And one thing he proposes, what we really have is a one-person psychology and a two-person psychology. And he's been one of the primary, I think, researchers in this extraordinary resonance between the mother and the child during pregnancy and in the first 18 months afterwards. And the right brain in the infant is much more developed and has more surface area than the left brain.

[30:34]

And the brain development of the baby is closely tied to the mother's brain development and the back and forth. And he would call that a two-person psychology. And he would say that then, and he does say specifically, that when you work with a therapist, you're reopening two-person psychology. And there are some things you can do with two-person psychology you can't do with one-person psychology to keep you guys in business. And, of course, Zen practice is a kind of multi-person psychology.

[32:12]

And one of the characteristics of it is the mutuality of right brain-body arises arises through feeling more than thinking. So if I'm anywhere good as a Zen teacher And you are good, as the traditional term is, hearers. The traditional term is hearers. Isn't it works, creating a kind of mutual bodied resonance? If I can speak primarily through and within feeling, then we can all participate in this primarily through feeling and not through thinking.

[33:29]

That's why when Zen teachers or lecturers read a text, prepare a lecture and then they read it, it doesn't work. There's no feeling. Or in conferences where people read their texts, you know, scientists, you know, very different when they, there's feeling when you have to remember, have to, it has to come from bodily memory. Okay, so we didn't really get very far on this self-talking. Or we got extraordinarily far. But still. We could spend the rest of our lives together, and I hope we do.

[35:02]

I mean, no, no, no. So, isn't that enough for now? And it's six minutes to five. That's probably a good time. Norbert told me around five. So I think we might listen to the bell. Don't do anything, just...

[35:30]

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