Two stock phrases. Stock phrases are a probing pole and shadowing grasp. You can't even translate it. No, no. A probing pole. Yeah, but what I didn't get... What does stock phrases mean? No, I get that too, but... Shadowing grass. Were you saying the stock phrases are... These two groups of words... Are stock phrases. Are stock phrases. In Zen. So standard... So standard sets, and these are... The probing pole. And it's a typical poetic image from Chinese literature. So the probing pole means like if you're trying to find something in a lake or fishing or something.

[01:14]

You poke around with a pole. Okay. And Zen is taken to mean to be able to understand people's inner feelings. And the shadowing grass, if you're looking into this little pond out here, If there's a shadow, you can see more deeply into the water than if the light is reflecting on it. So that's one meaning of shadowing grass. Another meaning is a farmer's grass kind of outfit that keeps the rain off.

[02:24]

So the shadow in grass is also the person hiding himself or herself. And because it's usually a raincoat, it's in contrast to the probing pole in the water and the raincoat which keeps the water off you. So this is a reference to a good teacher. Because he has a probing pole where he can feel into you and what you're thinking about or know or want.

[03:53]

And at the same time you hide yourself so he doesn't know you're doing it. he's hiding himself. And because he's hiding himself, it's like a shadow in the water, you can see more deeply into the person because he doesn't know what you're doing and that you're looking. Say that again. I shouldn't tell you these secrets. It's out now. And there's no place to hide because it's all connected. as the shadowing grass lets you see deeply into the water, the therapist, or the Zen teacher, who in effect hides him or herself, by hiding him or herself, it's the same as the shadowing grass, it allows you to see more deeply into the person.

[05:20]

Okay, so this koan, by those two phrases, presents the protagonist as that kind of person. Then elsewhere in the koan and they just put these things, scatter them here and there in the koan and you have to make the connection. When you hide the world in the world, you cannot find it. If you're going to hide, hide where there's no tracks. Anyway, so when you hide the world in the world, it's hard to find.

[06:34]

And then it says, this is the usual state of things. The world is hidden in the world. Then the third one I'll offer you. Duckweed is a water plant. duckweed [...] Duckweed is a water plant and floats freely and naturally forms patterns.

[07:46]

But also duckweed itself has patterns on it. And the duckweed, the patterns on the leaves make the leaves stick together in certain ways. At the same time, the duckweed floats freely and makes patterns by chance. So we could say, and I could say the Zen teacher or the therapist, When the world is hidden in the world, the therapist with probing pole hides himself. But creates a state of mind where patterns just float naturally and you observe them.

[09:20]

But you also have to take into account that the leaves themselves have patterns that affect the situation. Now, isn't that a good description of the role of a therapist? More scientific description of what we call cybernetics too. We call it what? Yeah. There's a more scientific term for this. Cybernetics 2. Oh, from Gregory Bateson? Yeah. A dependent observer. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. This is much, much less.

[10:52]

The poetic Chinese one is nice. And maybe more fun. And also maybe working in you, it reaches out. And Gap, is that right? Gap heart? No. I told her you were here and she said I should send you her greetings, my wife. Thank you. You're welcome. And now you're hearing all these Zen shenanigans. Would you like to say something as a person new to these Zen shenanigans? One thing I have to say to you. Yes. I like you much more than the first time. I love your patient

[12:13]

passion to explain things in such a way that they fit what you really want to express. I like what you said that the explanation doesn't interfere with the process of experience. ... like the different pages, the own pages, the contextual pages, the ripening pages. I'm at a point in the process in the group where I'm just gurgling with these individual... Not googling, gurgling.

[13:45]

with these individual words such as the three times, bodily time, contextual time, and gestational time. Thank you. So with this idea how we're always creating ourselves anew from the inside and how to become a better human whisperer. Yeah, okay. Many concepts and experiences and I'm looking at how they affect me. Scheren?

[14:49]

Oh, Scheren, yeah. Little islands in the ocean, and maybe we'll find each other at one point. Yeah, well, I hope so. That's basically my process, too. Ja, ich hoffe, das vielleicht klappt. Das ist auch mein Prozess. But when we met at that conference, and you didn't like me... Was it I was fearful? You liked me less. So I must have been impatient and irritable. No, it was not a conference. It was a conference where you... I gave a talk or something. Very different, yeah.

[15:52]

Yeah, it is different, true. Okay, but it's fun. I like your directness. But that's your job after all, right? Yeah, I mentioned several times how Cezanne painted, because it's been on my mind. But when they found paintings that he did, that he threw away, didn't finish. He didn't create pictorial space. He painted a little detail here and he painted a little detail there and after a while the details began to come together. So he let the details, like duckweed, start floating together.

[17:06]

Okay, someone else? Yes, you have spoken. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a therapist. And I'm glad I can be here. What I'm trying to do is to discover myself. Not to know myself, but to discover where things are stuck. And what she doesn't see. where it's stuck so that that can become liberated.

[18:24]

So I'm glad to hear what Roshi is talking about. What's coming up or what has come up is that I'm remembering that as a child I've told stories to myself. I invented stories for myself at the time of falling asleep. And those stories were about giving myself something I needed, And I'm sure that this happened in an intentional space, an inner attentional space that I went into again and again, and that somehow I generated.

[19:37]

This inner attentional space and the ability to tell stories and give myself what is important is an example for me somehow fascinating how something like Gestaltung It's an example. It's fascinating how you're shaping yourself through something like that. But I know that this ability to tell stories and give myself what I need, that's also something that was blocking the path later.

[21:10]

There was one avenue that I discovered for myself, but it was hiding other avenues that are also there. Thanks. Christine? Yeah, I'm... working on something that has to do with this inner and outer. And maybe also with this bodily time and contextual time, maybe, I'm not sure. Ken Wilber wrote some things about this. But in a practical sense I'm dealing with it. But somehow it's true that first we have to grow up, we have to become adults.

[22:25]

To be adults, we need to find out that there are boundaries, that there's a point where I'm stopping, or there's a boundary to myself. For a child it's not so clear whether the parents are outside or inside or whether there really is a difference. If we don't grow up, if we don't become adults, we're constantly involved with the world of our parents.

[23:37]

Then there's a willingness to be symbiotically involved with others. Yes. And that seems to be different from from the practice of being connected with the world. So one thing is practice, but as I'm 58 years old and I'm... Dealing with realizing that here is where I stop.

[24:50]

How do we understand that we allow ourselves our own time and our own space, our own bodily time? And at the same time we're connected and are nourished by everything. And do you study this simultaneously, or do you need one in order to do the other? I have to follow more carefully exactly what you said, but in general, you need one in order to do the other. So, it's all done. Yeah, okay. Yeah, please go. I see it now.

[26:24]

It's been a long time, many years, that the practice has also been used for this, and that the vision was to remember. I learn from an abode, because it's from below, from which I'm not at all from below. So you have to understand that. I am realizing that for years I have used practice to sustain a delusion of being connected in a way that I wasn't really connected which seems to be a A rather unhealthy form of connectedness. Which you hope, a connectedness you hoped to be but probably wasn't. Is that what you mean? Or assumed you might be.

[27:25]

Okay. Okay. I hope to be connected in a way of saving somebody or being close to somebody. It's all this psychological stuff. Really? Psychological stuff? yeah just you know like a like a child is grieving about how you can influence the world being pregnant with your own mother and things like that never had that yeah okay um yeah um I try to notice.

[28:34]

Go ahead. Do you have to consciously notice what's going on in order to let go of it? You're asking me. You should ask the therapists and psychologists. This question has to be asked by the psychologists and therapists, not me. Sometimes you notice, when you've lost it, then you notice that... I haven't heard an answer to Christine's question, how is it with neurotic connectedness?

[29:34]

Well, if you're expecting me to be able to say something about this, this is very optimistic. I'm here to learn from you. All right. All right. Let me start with what Angela said. Do you need to know something to let go of it or something like that? Practically speaking, often yes. But that's not the soteriological or of Buddhism which assumes the possibility of enlightenment.

[31:03]

If we go back to the dominoes, they're all set up, right? But only one or two or three different dominoes would make them all fall over. So the concept of enlightenment is, you find the right domino and you get rid of that one, all of them fall over. So then you don't have to, each thing you don't have to, you know, you have to find the one that makes them all... And it is what does happen.

[32:08]

Okay. You know, I... Getting old is okay, you know. So far, so good. But there's so many things I fully intended to do, which I know now I'll never do. I barely have time left to stay alive. Let alone do something. It's full-time work just to stay alive. Anyway, one of the things I always thought maybe I should do is write a book on the psychological uses of Zen practice.

[33:29]

Because I tried to make use of growing up, of course, in the time of Freud and things My mother and father even used to speak to me about Freud back in the 30s and 40s. He was still alive, I guess. I remember my mother saying something to me like, Well, Freud's idea about how men want to have sex with their mother, I don't know about that, he said. My mother said, Freud's idea that men want to have sex with their mother, I don't know about that. And I ask myself why she told me that. I wasn't entirely dumb.

[34:50]

Anyway. So anyway, I've tried to make sense of growing up when people were going to therapists and I'm going to Zen practice. And one practice you can do, which is... There are many practices which in effect can also be psychological practices. But this is one I will mention. But first let me say that certain things you really kind of textural things you have to get used to which are in this yogic worldview different than our usual worldview.

[35:55]

One we talked about earlier on, the directions are coming towards you, not going away from you. And another is that all mental phenomena have a physical component and vice versa. Yeah. And if you don't know those couple things, a lot of things just don't fall into place. And another is that Attention as a fruitful dynamic only works when you, in practice, only works when you learn to bring attention to attention.

[37:07]

It's attentional aware attention. attentionally aware attention. And another is that space itself, well as an activity, We could say that gravity is the activity of space. Or we could say space has a kind of thingness to it almost. The space has a kind of thingness to it almost. Okay, now to this psychological aspect.

[38:17]

What you do while you're sitting. Now this sort of depends on, I think to work, I'm not sure. I've been doing this so long, I don't know what it's like to be normal anymore. Space is felt as a medium in which things happen. It's not empty. So while you're sitting, and the sitting itself develops space as a medium. Okay, so then you ask yourself, Where is my mother?

[39:23]

In the space around me. And you'll usually find your mother is somewhere in the space around you. Hi mom. And then you ask, okay, where is your father? I wonder why most people start with the mother. Maybe girls start with the father, I don't know. And usually the father is not in the same place as the mother, is on the left side or right side or somewhere else. Okay, so you begin to, and then as you get more sensitive, you suddenly find your uncle is in the space too. Then you find like in some paintings, medieval paintings, where the importance of the person is determined by their size in the painting.

[40:32]

You find your uncle might be rather small or rather big. And then pretty soon you find there's a lot of people in the space around you. And then the space around you also, you can ask, you may begin to notice that on one side it's darker than the other. And there's other things you can explore. And then practice becomes clearing the space around you of all these people. It's not a Zen practice, but it's a psychological practice.

[41:44]

I suppose it must be in a way implicit in creating a constellation because people bring these people in the space around them into the shared space. And you can feel, and it takes, I would say, a couple of years before the space around you gets clear. And you have to be patient and just say, oh, you're still there, Mom? Yeah. Mm-hmm. And usually you can't sit really straight until the people around you are gone. Because the one's holding down their shoulder and the other's... You can't really sit upright until this room is free.

[42:49]

Maybe someone hits your shoulder and so on. And also the process of beginning to finding out how to sit straight actually starts being part of clearing the space. So anyway, that's one clearly, I would say, psychological way to use Zen practice. That's good to hear. so what i found out about myself and in my clients there is

[43:50]

There are mothers who are mothers and then there are mothers who are unversorgd, uncared for, an uncared for child that she once was but still is. Yes, so there are several mothers that I have and they all have the same name, depending on what time I'm thinking of or the aspect of the mother that comes to the fore. I think it's lunchtime.

[44:59]

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