So I'm trying to think of how to develop successors and the Sangha so that these two places in Colorado and in the Schwarzwal will likely continue. It's most likely that they won't continue. Take quite a good luck and yeah. other factors if they're going to continue. So my main job is to have at least one successor. And with two places, maybe I need two successors.

[01:14]

So my main job is to have successors, but also, if possible, to continue these two places, because the places will have their own lineage as well as there is a teaching lineage. And I'm sharing this with you because, you know, I'm trying to think about it and, you know, I'm happy to have your thoughts about it too during the seminar or at any time. Now, I'm not planning to have a gloomy seminar. God, he's going to be dead in ten years. It's the tradition, you know, for a Zen teacher to die in Zazen posture. So if you see me, as I get older, nervously avoiding sitting, but rather, you know, I'm quite happy, so it's, you know, this isn't gloomy for me at all.

[02:28]

Ja, aber ich bin ganz glücklich und deshalb ist es gar nicht düster für mich. What to do? Was gibt es da zu tun? So anyway, I'm thinking next year quite a lot of people are involved in, you know, which makes it easier for me if it's other people's ideas and not just mine. Und es ist für mich auch einfacher, wenn es auch noch andere Ideen dazu kommen und nicht nur meine eigenen. With pretty flowers. Was für hübsche Blumen. Gosh. Yes, I'm thinking next year of really not doing almost any seminars outside of Johanneshof. Yeah, so I was just in Munich and I was just in Hamburg and I said, goodbye Munich, goodbye Hamburg.

[03:50]

But it's hello Hannover. So the plan is at present that I'll do three one-week sessions practices, trainings at Johanneshof a year. And one session a year or two. And I guess we'll have some sort of limit to the number of people and some kind of sign up for people who can take a week off. And I thought I would do maybe two seminars outside of Johanneshof a year. Probably one in Austria, because that's been set up for almost 20 years I've been doing it. And one in Hannover.

[05:11]

Something in northern Germany anyway. Probably Hannover. Because of you and you. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry to disappoint you, you're not going to get rid of me, by the way. No, this isn't fixed in stone or anything yet, but this is what everyone seems to think would work. And I'll do the practice period in Creston and also I'll hopefully have some time to write.

[06:14]

Because, you know, I keep thinking I can... do that with the kind of schedule I have, but it's not possible. So that's the situation I'm sharing with you. And the seminar I see has the title Identity and Freedom. And strictly speaking, these are really Western ideas. most everything we mean by freedom and what we mean by identity has very little resonance in Buddhist practice.

[07:23]

On the other hand, I read in the newspaper the other day a piece about... France now commemorating the 100th anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre. Yeah, and I haven't read Sartre for 50 years or so. And, yeah, 50 or so years ago, his main concern, according to this article, which seems to be accurate from my memory of reading him, his main concern was the topic of our seminar, Identity and Freedom.

[08:26]

To what extent is the question he faced his life with, Do we create ourselves or is our life mostly determined by outside conditions? And if we look at it that way, If we look at these two words in that way that I just said Freud does, I didn't think I was planning to speak about Freud.

[09:33]

This morning I wasn't going to shave. I thought, you know, it's kind of funky. You look like a Hollywood movie star if you don't shave. And I was preferring just to not have to shave. I took a bath and after, when I dried myself, I didn't dry my face. So I thought, hmm, something decided to shave. So I thought, oh, I listened to the deeper voice, and so I shaved. And, uh, So I must be going to talk about Freud.

[10:48]

We'll see. Someone was telling me about a British woman, a neurobiologist, I think it was, who was quite interested in Buddhism, as well as studying the brain, etc., And every day when she drove home from her laboratory somewhere she had to choose between two roads. And one was the quick way home and the other was the more beautiful way home. And she said for years every time I get to that intersection I don't know which way to go.

[11:52]

Shall I go home and get started on things or shall I enjoy a more beautiful drive? One day, after years of this problem, she said, I'm not going to decide. And she pushed the accelerator and she went one of the roads. She thought this was great. Finally she started to practice Buddhism and not just think about it. So we have this expression in Zen, you know, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Wir haben Ausspruch im Buddhismus, im Zen.

[12:59]

Wenn du zu der Gabelung kommst, dann nimm sie. So are we determined by conditions? Or do we make our own life? And what kind of choices do we have? Do we have any choices beyond that? And to make the decision a little more complicated, Sartre was completely against taking the victim role because, well, my life's been determined by conditions and I don't have any choice.

[14:15]

What's interesting, I think, about looking at Sartre facing this fundamental problem question, is that can we who are practitioners dare to enter this territory of great philosophy and say, yeah, but we're practicing, are there really, how would we answer the question? What kind of freedom do we want? What do we mean by freedom?

[15:16]

And I think we have to explore this, we ought to explore this in terms of our own culture as well as perhaps and in addition What would Buddhism mean? Now it's clear that Sophia, my, you know, my, she doesn't belong to me, her, my, her four-year-old, Sometimes I'd like to think she belongs to me, but she wants to think she belongs to herself. As many of you know, I've told the anecdote to my older daughters now. 44.

[16:35]

Her mother and I were trying to get her to do something and we told her, you have to do it. She said no. We said, you have to do it because we made you and you belong to us. You belong to us. And she said, it's too late now, I belong to me. Well, Sophia has that idea very clearly. She wants the freedom to do exactly what she wants. Then she wants it. But she also wants us to love her completely at the same time. And she wants us to love her so much that we'll let her do whatever she wants.

[17:36]

And that's kind of love and trust her. Yeah, but we want to love her in a way that teaches her some of the conditions of freedom. So already there's some problem here. What's freedom and what's love and so forth? I think we have our own sense of freedom. discovering freedom in our life, can we? And you know, the word freedom, free, means to love. And it means to love and also to set free.

[18:38]

But then, if you look at it that way, why would it mean both to set free and to love? It tells you something about the early society, culture, in which such a word appeared. Because the loved ones, the ones you loved, were the ones not in bondage. So the loved ones were, yeah, ones you set free or you... didn't enslave. And it's in colonial southern, and not just southern America, which had slavery.

[19:58]

The slaves most likely to be set free were the ones loved or who were lovers. And Siegfried, if you all know, Siegfried means victory and peace. Siegfried, and that's free. Ja, und der Vorname Siegfried, der bedeutet, ja, wir alle wissen ja, Sieg und Friede. Ja. Victory and peace is also to set free. Und Sieg und Freiheit ist auch frei zu geben. Friday is Frigg, the goddess of the heavens, Frigg, or Venus.

[21:16]

Friday is a heaven's day, goddess of freedom day, goddess of the skies day. And Wednesday is the day of Wotan, or Odin, who was the god of war, culture, art, etc., And the husband of Frigg, the goddess of the sky. No, I'm only mentioning these things because it's a curiosity. But we live with words like Wednesday and Friday. Without being aware for the most part of the long history of these words in our culture. Representing freedom and identity. So I'm also bringing up the basic way of thinking about teachings in Buddhism, which is to incubate them.

[22:45]

What's the word for incubate that might be better than incubate? Simple translation. To sit on an egg. To sit on a black cushion. Do you suppose it could turn into something? I'm keeping it warm. Maybe I'll turn into something. If I start looking like an egg, you'll... We have a word for teacher-disciple relationship which is called pecking in and pecking out. So when the chick begins to peck out, the mother begins to peck in and peck out.

[23:49]

So if you see me turn into an egg, please peck in. So anyway, the basic idea in Chinese yogic culture, out of which Buddhism comes, out of Zen comes, I mean, is that you incubate a teaching. Meaning, as I've said, pointed out recently, the meaning, to the extent there is meaning, it's not in the statement itself. It's in the what happens when you hold that statement in yourself over time. So I'm, you know, what I'm suggesting is that we take this prologue day, you know, we don't have to really do much today, you know, sort of,

[25:03]

mosaic around. We can start incubating the word freedom in ourselves. Of course we want the obvious things, political and social freedom. And to and economic freedom if possible.

[26:20]

Nowadays there's a corruption of people wanting absolute economic freedom at the price of honesty. But we can't have a perfect fit with our society. There's a little poem I've always liked from when I was first practicing. A little Japanese haiku. Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes. Grass grows by itself. It's kind of an embarrassingly simple little poem.

[27:23]

But somehow it's always for me been one of the measures of my practice. Do I feel something like sitting quietly doing nothing? Am I able, actually, to sit quietly, doing nothing? You know, in Asian poetry, especially Buddhist and especially Zen poetry, It's almost never psychological. And it's always, you know, a description of the world. But... If we made a... You know the two words that, I don't know, in American... What do you call it?

[29:16]

Social, political, feminist thinking, etc. ? Two big issues are an issue is whether the emphasis on nature or nurture. Yeah. And nature or nurture is also determinism or freedom. Ja, und Natur und Nahrung ist auch Bestimmtheit oder Determinismus und Freiheit. Ja, and it struck me that these two words really suggest quite a big difference between the Buddhist worldview and the Western worldview.

[30:17]

And this is always something I'm speaking implicitly or explicitly speaking about, the difference between these two worldviews. And one reason I speak about them is not to say one is better than the other. Of course, it's partly to point out the worldview out of the worldview which supports and arises from Buddhist practice. So it helps our practice to see the worldview which arises from and supports practice. But my meta point is that practice really means to be free from your cultural and social views.

[31:37]

Any culture and social views. So it struck me in this... Oh, here comes Freud. Freud has, you know, this... You know, I did this instinct and, well, not just Freud, instinct. We have some aggressive nature and so forth. Are we nature or, you know, do we have an inner nature or do we have... Do our genes determine our life? And I see both, you know, of course the truth to both sides.

[32:54]

I remember, you know, I knew quite a lot of the Black Panthers back in the 70s. Anyway, a lot of their members were, I don't know a lot, but quite a few of the fathers were killed in various shootouts. And what surprised people within the Black Panther community was how these kids who'd never known their father had attributes that were hard to imagine were genetic. They laughed the same way. They had similar senses of humor, things like that.

[33:59]

Things you think you learned from the presence of your father, not the genes of your father. But the point I'm making here is not which is correct, which is the essential, the more important emphasis, nature or nurture. But to point out that Buddhism as a whole, yoga culture as a whole, is almost entirely on the side of nature. that you really can start, you can really almost completely create yourself.

[35:19]

Or at least an emphasis is much stronger than in the West. You don't have to deal with your inner aggressive nature. You can drop aggression. And if you hear a little poem like sitting quietly doing nothing, Spring comes. Grass grows by itself. If that gives you some feeling, you don't have to think, oh, that's a nice feeling. I like to read poems because it gives me a nice feeling. Yes, I have a beer and read a nice poem and then I get back to being a realistic, aggressive kind of guy.

[36:25]

I mentioned beer. Maybe, you know, in America I really didn't like beer. It's terrible. It's worse than their coffee. Generally you have quite good local beers and it's really quite nice to have one down there. But in a yogic culture if you have some good feeling from a poem You can say, hey, that's a possibility of my, that's a potential of my nature.

[37:35]

What can become my nature? This feeling, if it feels really good Hey, it can be the basis of my life. Now, I myself think that's an extraordinary thought. But you can have a feeling, particularly good feeling, and say, hey, I can make that feeling the basis of my life. We can say that's the fundamental faith, the promise of practice. It's the root of and the intuition of the decision to practice.

[38:37]

Now I think we should have a decision to take a break. But there's no beer upstairs. Unless he has a supply somewhere that we don't know about. But at least I think there's probably water, apple juice, things like that. You guys are so well prepared here in Hannover. Oh, okay. Thank you very much.

[39:19]

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