Well, I'm very happy to be here. I don't know why. I was wondering last night at the station down here, looking at all the buses and trains going in various directions. Yeah, and I was wondering, why am I doing this again? And then I thought, oh, it's because of Angela Norbert. And then I thought, oh, yeah, I see quite a few other people I feel connected with. And, um, I feel loyal to you all, to each of you.

[01:01]

But I also feel an established field of knowing and practicing together. Yeah. And one reason I now mostly do, virtually all of the seminars, et cetera, that I do, are at either Crestone or Quellenweg, Johanneshoff, Is that the centers do most of the work in establishing a field of practice? And we're doing... Zazen in the morning and evening.

[02:21]

And we eat together three meals a day, etc. So the simple being together creates a shared field. And as most of you know, I'm always exploring what is the relationship between the field established in monastic practice. And by monastic practice I don't just mean monks, I mean practicing together in that style. And I suppose the difference between that and the world for most laypeople Is the lay person, by necessity and by me, like walking up here through the streets of Kassel,

[03:44]

Your, I don't know, let's say lived world is established by the world everyone lives in. And the practitioner lives in a world established through him or herself. Yeah, he'll kind of live in the present as presence. The present in this sense I'm using is the abstract out there world. And I'm using presence to mean the world established through how you experience your life.

[05:20]

Now again, the monastic, so-called monastic situation does much of the work of that for you until you get the hang of it, the feel of it in your own body. And so the lay person has an adept practitioner who lives a lay life, has somewhat more of a challenge to establish that through themselves.

[06:37]

Now, it helps a lot if you're doing meditation once a day or so. But really, meditation itself isn't enough. You have to bring certain ways of looking at the world into your conceptual sense of the world, until the presence of those concepts, let's call them wisdom, wisdom concepts, Now begin to be incrementally embodied by you. Okay. So here we are together in Kassel, in Norbert Dangler's large enough house.

[07:48]

To have our secret seminar unknown to the world. I mean, most of it, you know. Okay. So maybe I could mention three things, three views, practices, which establish the field of presence through oneself. Feel the presence that arises through oneself. You know, when you go to sleep, The shift is usually from an externalized consciousness a world

[09:14]

that you externalize in your consciousness. And then there's a certain shift at some point. Now, I think it's interesting that I consider all of us universal or similar enough beings. I can speak about my experience of going to sleep and to some extent observing a spouse or a child going to sleep next to you, that I think probably it's similar for you, could be similar for you. Now, that's interesting.

[10:36]

I think it's interesting that I assume that the way I go to sleep is probably somewhat similar to the way you go to sleep. That would mean that we're connected to the Buddha. Not that you're connected to me, but that you're connected to whatever human beings are. nicht dass ihr mit mir verbunden seid, sondern dass ihr damit verbunden seid, was auch immer es ist, was menschliche Wesen sind. One of the basic positions of Buddhism is that it's all present already, but most of it's not noticed. Und eine der grundlegenden Positionen des Buddhismus ist, dass alles schon gegenwärtig ist, aber dass es nicht bemerkt wird. Of course, you know, most of us, most of what's going on in the our neurons in our body, brain, et cetera, is unknown to us.

[11:37]

As I quoted somebody the other day, In one square centimeter of brain material there's more connections than in the Milky Way. Milkstrasse. Of course, there's more connections among the stars of the Milky Way than there are connections among the cubic centimeter. We're comparing apples and oranges here, connections versus units. But anyway, in Buddhism what's real are the connections, not the units.

[12:39]

So these immense number of connections functioning to allow us to function, there's no way we can know except certain kinds of feelings tell us quite a bit. In other words, most of what's happening to us and happening in our world is outside of consciousness. Certainly part of practice is to make is to make this off-scene world more accessible.

[14:11]

Now here I'm just trying to find some examples for what I said a moment ago. In language, I'm speaking here, but there's a lot going on under my language, anticipating what I could say. I mean, and so, Buddhism assumes that underneath our actions are implied within our action are the possibilities of the realization that we call Buddha-nature. And our attitude about that actually is one of those subtle umbrella feelings.

[15:31]

What's an umbrella feeling? Something that covers. I feel like an umbrella. Mary Poppins. Yeah, one of those... I don't know what an umbrella feeling is. I just said it. Yeah. But the image I was reaching for is, it's something that we, an attitude we have that covers a lot of territory in our experience. But it's an attitude which calls forth the rain.

[16:34]

Every time you take an umbrella, you don't need it. Anyway, something like that. In other words, to put it more succinctly, if you have the feeling in your life The enlightenment isn't in Hannover. It was in Kassel last week. It was in Kassel. In other words, if enlightenment is anywhere, it's here.

[17:48]

Whatever is meant by enlightenment, it can't be somewhere else. So if you have an attitude of Enlightenment is here, already here. But you have no desire for enlightenment simultaneously. Because a desire for enlightenment brings self in, and it brings self in, and self doesn't work very well with enlightenment. So can you create an attitude, a subtle attitude, this umbrella which is both open and shut at the same time? Yeah.

[18:54]

That enlightenment is here, but I don't care. I'm uninterested, but hey. Yeah. So those kinds of attitudes influence the many unseen things that are functioning. Okay, so what I'd like to do before we have a break, is start discussing at least two or three, maybe three basic practices, beginning practices for adept practice.

[20:06]

So there's beginning practice, you know, anybody does. And there's beginning practice which lays the foundation for realization. And in the background, the invisible foreground of what I'm speaking about, What is self in relationship to this field one creates through oneself? I haven't used up this topic yet.

[21:08]

And some of you are therapists and some of you are psychologists. So one of the things that must be present if you're also present in the world of Buddhist practice What the heck did Vasubandhu in the 4th and 5th centuries mean when he wrote the refutation of the theory of self? And Chandrakirti followed him and changed his view somewhat. What in a very simplified form has come down to us is Buddhism denies the existence of self.

[22:32]

How the heck does a psychotherapist make sense of that when every client is presenting themselves I had an image of going into a parking lot and they tell you it's besets. Isn't the word fool? So the first ten minutes of the session you say, I'm sorry the parking place for self is full, you leave. Come back with your non-self and we'll talk.

[23:42]

So how are we going to cope with this popular idea and more refined idea of the difference between persons and self? So let me start first with at least one example of creating a field that arises through oneself. Now, every phenomenologist and every practitioner knows that the world you're seeing is seen within your sensory. And what is seen in the sensorium is put together in, let's say, the mind.

[24:59]

So the world that appears to you is not phenomena. It's mind. What appears is based on phenomena, but it's certainly not the whole of phenomena from anybody's very narrow point of view. So, look, when you see an object, you're first of all seeing the mind that sees the object. And knowing that is one of the first basic practices for adept practice.

[26:26]

And it's very hard to remind yourself of that. Because what we see is objects and it's the fact that the mind is seeing the objects is hidden. It's like if you see a photograph, the camera that saw the photograph is hidden. And you'd really have to be an expert at photography to know what camera shot that picture probably. But the practitioner is noticing the camera, the mind that is delivering the picture. Now, once you notice that, and it's familiar to you, Intellectually, conceptually familiar.

[27:38]

So familiar that every object is a mind object. Then you begin to feel mind on the object. And you begin to be able to... to settle into the field of mind that feels the object. Now, let me go back a moment to where I was when I was talking about sleeping and blah, blah, blah. When you go to sleep I think when we all go to sleep there's a point when the consciousness stops externalizing the world. And consciousness can disappear

[28:39]

Or consciousness can disappear into sleeping. And once it disappears into sleeping another field of knowing appears. Now in Buddhism we would not say it's a field of knowing the self in more subtle ways. Which it is sometimes. But we would say it's a field of knowing the world which is often not known by the self. The world which is not known in any way related to one's self-history. Now, that's a concept in Buddhism. And the concept is parallel in Zazen. It's the same concept that applies to zazen.

[30:27]

There's a point at which you enter zazen. It's usually, I think after, depends how skillful you are, usually after one or two minutes or ten minutes, Sukhiroshi said to me once, it takes sometimes 20 minutes before you make the shift. A shift when the externalizing consciousness disappears into the body. or disappears into another kind of mind, in which a world appears of insights and noticings, which may be unrelated to your personal history.

[31:35]

It's a knowing that occurs in more subtle ways than through the self. This view is part of what contributes to Vasubandhu and Chandrakirti's and other people's commentators' view of non-self. Okay, so once you can embody this feel of the field of mind, You have two things that arise simultaneously. That's traditional Buddhism. In this case, the bell arises. And the mind arises simultaneously. So the mind bell arises and the bell arises. Okay, so you have two things.

[32:54]

In a sort of way, two objects of perception. And you're perceiving the mind and you're perceiving the bell. Now, once you know this field, you can shift the emphasis. You can pull the emphasis so it's mostly mind. Du kannst die Betonung so hinziehen, dass du hauptsächlich den Geist spürst. And the object is mainly known as an object of appearance and not even hardly a bell. Und dann wird der Gegenstand hauptsächlich als ein Erscheinungsgegenstand erkannt. It could be a teacup or a replica of her hand. Es könnte auch eine Teetasse sein oder... So the practitioner begins to be able to shift in that field from mind primarily or object primarily, depending on the circumstances.

[34:11]

And the more, of course, there's endless moment by moment appearances. And if the adept practitioner is always feeling the field of mind that's arising simultaneously, We could call that one aspect, one dimension of the presence of the present. the presence of the person as a field of mind. And practitioners more and more, and what Sangha means in a very specific sense, Those who know each other within the field, mutually generated field of mind.

[35:32]

Okay, mutually generated fields of mind are always benefited by coffee and tea. So let's have a break.

[35:47]

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