Okay, I promised you I'd give you Yuan Wu's quote. Okay. Bring the mind. Bring the mind. You can start anew. Bring the mind to where there's no before and after. And I would add, and no here nor there. And realize Buddhahood right where you stand. So it's interesting, these little formulas, that you can take the practices of Buddhism

[01:04]

and your Zen versions of the practices of Buddhism and in a way not reduce them to but concentrate them in a simple phrase like bring the mind to where there's no before and after And he also said, if you want another one, all from the same little paragraph, think non-thinking, concentrate awareness, Don't set up before and after. And thus realize the unborn.

[02:29]

Again, we think of before and after as I asked for you, but the idea that you cannot set up the experiential concepts of before and after and that it makes a difference. In other words, you can change your continuum. All right. Does someone else want to say something so I don't have to talk so much? I've been talking straight for five days. Have a little sympathy on me. Ellen is not sympathetic at all.

[03:31]

She can tell. Okay. Yes. You began us and you can end us. You asked the first question and now maybe this will be the last, but maybe not. Please. Reinhard. Reinhard. So, we spoke about what comes... What I'm thinking about is we spoke about departure points, but also about arrival.

[04:41]

And I vaguely remember yesterday you brought up the sentence, arrival hinders arrival. I didn't rely on my intuition, but on my navigation device, on arrival. The Saxon Ring was ordered and arrived at a point that I could not identify with this house. It was a beautiful house. I did not trust my intuition of where to go when I came here, and instead I set my GPS for Sachsenring number 8, and I arrived at some place that I could not identify as this house. It was a beautiful, different house. And thus I knew I had not arrived. But you had arrived. Your GPS hadn't arrived. It was a beautiful building, but this is also beautiful. So what I could identify is that when you actually arrive, then that's it, then you have arrived.

[06:04]

What came to mind for me was a particular exercise, a really beastie exercise. Like the beastie boys? Yeah, vielleicht. It must be mine. A little mean. you stand in the vertical you stand vertically with closed eyes and then you move your body And then you circle the body, you shift to the right heel, around to the left heel, and so, yes. And then you continue in small circular movements further and further so that in the end there is no movement, no movement can be seen from the outside anymore.

[07:22]

Und die Anweisung ist, diese Kreisbewegung weiter zu vollziehen. And the instruction is to continue the circular motion. Und dann der schlimme letzte Satz war der folgende. And then the terrible last sentence goes as follows. Wenn du noch eine Kreisbewegung fühlst, bist du noch nicht weit genug. If you still feel a circular motion then you have not gone far enough. But if you stand still in the vertical, if you stand still vertically then you have gone too far. It's an aporia. I think aporia is a useful word. Do you all know it? It literally means you can't pass through. But it's used, and I would use it in practice, is you get to certain points where you can't think any further.

[08:53]

There's no language or articulation possible, but you know something's happening. And you don't back away from it, you just stay in that place for a certain feeling time. Okay. Thank you very much, Reinhard. Vielen Dank. So anyone else? I mean, someone else. Everyone else. Noch jemand. Noch alle. Of course, we can just end. I mean, this isn't a threat. It's just, you know... had a long day, you know. And there's a few things I still could say. But now Marcus' turn. Now it is Markus' turn.

[10:01]

I would like to ask you about the term intuitive or intuition. It is a term that you have used over and over again in the past years. How similar or how is it related to the idea of awareness? Because intuition is a very Western, ancient philosophical tradition. I'm interested to hear, since you brought the term intuition, and I know that you, Baker Roshi, also have been mentioning that term in recent years, from time to time sometimes. But what's the relationship between intuition and awareness, since intuition is also an ancient Western philosophical tradition? Yeah. But let me say, in relation to what you said, Reiner, is that what you described is very related, cousins to Qigong practices.

[11:01]

Where you often just stand still for like half an hour or more, or a hand, and then, after a while, movements start happening in you, and they get wilder and wilder sometimes and then they concentrate down and disappear. Dervishes might be the same, but it's like a whirling dervish without moving. And a certain number of people, I mean, I've practiced with a lot of people, so I... No, examples have whirling movements on their cushion which they can't control.

[12:06]

Sometimes they leap off their cushions. And Charles Look, who Philip Wayne calls Chuck Luck, says, causes Zen sickness. And you can see it in his book, in the third series, I think, on Zen. Okay, thank you. Oh, intuition. And I would say that... the intuition is awareness thinking or the knowing that arises through awareness and then since it hasn't arrived through awareness it doesn't come into your consciousness

[13:23]

Since it's been arrived through awareness, it doesn't come naturally into your consciousness. And then pushes through, pops up through consciousness as an intuition. Okay. And often because it contrasts with what we've been thinking consciously. And it's based, I would say, on a wider knowledge, a wider knowing function than consciousness. It feels truer than our conscious observations.

[14:40]

Intuition says it feels true. And that as actually that truth dimension of intuitions can be a problem because sometimes intuitions are true. I would say, but I would say the mental activity of an adept practitioner is a flow of intuition. You don't have intuition so often because everything's an intuition. Because you're not functioning primarily through consciousness. Okay. Yes, Guido. I have a question. So if you are sitting there and the client is coming and suddenly there is a thought

[16:09]

And you have no clue what that is. And then later in the session, it can be the crucial, the crux of the session. Yes, that's right. And I think the more you get used to following a flow of intuitions, the more you know which ones to trust and which ones not to trust. Yeah, but it's surprising that what you say is often the case. That's my experience. And I generally trust those things. You were going to say something, Nina? Yeah, I have a question.

[17:40]

We spoke today about what we can do as a therapist. But sometimes I have a feeling that it's also an impossible profession. Of course it is. That's what makes it interesting. she's asking whether she should continue continue As a therapist, do you mean, or continue with your question? No, no, that's a question. You'd have to ask some experienced therapists, you know, around you, like those people around you here. Yeah, you know, it's... I think we're all bloodied and wounded. And some of us continue to function despite our wounds.

[18:53]

And we help others with their wounds. Somebody should do it. Why not you? You'd probably be good at it. But you do need to seal yourself and not armor yourself. Because, you know, crazy people try to make you crazy. Because crazy people try to make you crazy. That's their job. I remember a close friend who drove across the United States with almost everyone in his family is crazy. Three of his brothers are clinically crazy.

[19:53]

And one of them was visiting him in California. And they decided to drive across the United States together to New Jersey. And the one who was my friend was doing his best to kind of work with his brothers three quarters in San Francisco. And bring him into his sane world. And his brother was trying to bring him into his world. And there's a lot of powerful energy in craziness. And my friend said, by the time we crossed the Mississippi, I'd lost it.

[21:10]

And we drove into New Jersey, both of us, crazy as loons. And I think that therapists who work in mental hospitals have a particular problem because you're so outnumbered. What is sanity afterwards anyway? Probably it's the ability to work effectively with others. But sometimes psychopaths can put on a mask of working effectively with others while something else entirely is going on. And they can often be extremely successful because they've got this ability to make things happen.

[22:15]

So if you continue as a therapist, you have to make sure you take care of yourself. And how many patients you see a week and so forth. Isn't that all true? I would guess. It's all true. Stefan, I think you were going to say something. It's okay. Because you already said it. Okay, I did. All right, thanks. But the thing, what you said, what you said about therapists, an important detail from my point of view is modesty.

[23:22]

To survive. To survive, yeah. Yeah, I would guess, and I don't know if this is the same, you have to avoid the inflation of helping and influencing others. The helper role. Okay, someone else. Okay. Do we have all eight points? Yes. I mean, they've all happened, except... I mean, I could have made a list of 16, but I made a list of eight that seemed the most important.

[24:25]

Of the eight that I picked, the only one we haven't discussed is the phrase, more than near. which is a phrase I think one could use, more than near, and it's a little more powerful perhaps than already connected. And I try, I practice sometimes with nearer than near, but in English that's not quite as good in English. in inducing non-duality as more than near. So let me say something that's also just on my mind.

[25:26]

And then we will end soon. What makes me happy to have been with you these two days? Okay. The difference between entities and activities. Something I started to emphasize four or five years ago, partly in Rastenberg, if you will remember. And again, it's the complementarity of entities and activities which makes it effective. For many years, I mean back in the 60s, I've been saying A doesn't exist, B doesn't exist, only AB and BA exist. But that's not as effective a practice as seeing that we... Because that's rather philosophical.

[27:03]

As... seeing that everything is an activity in contrast to everything's an entity. So first you have to notice and practice with our habit of seeing things as entities. Which is related to always seeing things as interdependent, resting on each other, dependent on each other, etc. Okay, once you establish that you often just automatically see things as entities,

[28:12]

Just if you primarily think about things prior to feeling about things, you're actually thinking in entities. And you want to get the habit of feeling before you think. Feeling before you name. You see a flower. And your first reaction is, Could that be a flower? Yes, it's red and it's got petals. Oh yeah, I guess it's a flower. I'm just joking here, sort of. But you've got to play with your perceptual habits. You're going to change them. Okay. The practice of direct perception, which is a very basic practice in Zen Buddhism, is to give such attention to anything, a flower, a vase, a salt and pepper shaker.

[29:52]

Did you pierce right through the names? The names kind of fly off and you're just seeing this object without names. Which isn't even an object, it's an activity. Okay. So... Okay. So the self... The self is a construct. The self is an activity. The self is a function. Okay, so now let's think of the self, if it's a construct, but it keeps appearing in our life, let's call it a continuum.

[31:08]

But if you call it a continuum, you're acknowledging that it's a construct. It's not an inherency or a permanency. Okay. And so now again, let's emphasize it is a construct which keeps appearing in our lives so we can call it a continuum. Okay. If it's a continuum... Then it's an activity. Okay. Now, entities have identities.

[32:11]

Activities have activity. Okay. So, if the self is an identity... You can't do much about it. If it's an activity, it has quantity. So identities don't have, entities don't have quantity, they have identities. All right. So if self is identity, our experiential self is a continuum. And it's a self-referencing continuum. So the larger quantity of self-referencing affects you, the lesser quantity of self-referencing affects you.

[33:31]

So you can try to reduce the self-referencing dynamic. And one of the ways to do that is to try to remove like and dislike, the like and dislike habit. Sukhiroshi says his first enlightenment experience was when they took, he and the other young monks who were on their early teens, took a bunch of spoiled pickles and the Japanese pickle all kinds of vegetables and stuff like that. It's different than our pickles.

[34:51]

So they knew Yokojin, his teacher, he makes them all eat this stuff. They were poor, the temple was poor. So they took this out and they went far out in the garden and they buried it under a tree. And a couple of days later, in comes Gyokujin, and he's got a handful of these pickles that he dug up from under the tree. And Shinryu was the youngest of the group. And Gyokujin said to the young kids, wash them and cook them. So then they were served.

[35:56]

And Sukhirashi looked at them and the other sitting around the table. So he just ate them. And the dislike-like continuum disappeared. That lost its hold on him and he wasn't involved with likes and dislikes anymore. And that's one of the aspects of enlightenment experience. It's a little intuition, a little thing like that, but it stays the rest of your life. So, now, you can deal with quantities, you can't deal with identities. If the self is an identity, you're sort of stuck, stuck behind the self. Mm-hmm. But if it's a quantity, you can lessen the quantity.

[37:22]

And you can even start substituting for self-referencing something else. Now, what we've been talking about and Guido's been bringing up too again is is appearance. Now the technical name for the practice of appearance is presencing. So every time you have the experience of an appearance you presence it a moment. You sort of shine on it and let it shine on you. And this is a version of to pause for the particular. Or when you begin to feel the world as a series of pauses, in fact the pauses are bigger and bigger and then we call it emptiness.

[38:41]

You're practicing presencing. dann praktizierst du presencing. Okay. So if appearances begin to, the continual flow of presenced appearances, wenn der kontinuierliche Fluss von vergegenwärtigten presenced Erscheinungen becomes your continuum, wenn das dein Kontinuum wird, supplanting the self-referencing continuum, You have then gone from what in Buddhism would be called the usual flow of reality to a higher order of reality. And that practice is based on seeing things as activities and not as identities or entities.

[40:00]

Because if the experience of self is just the quantity of self-referencing, or you lessen the quantity of self-referencing, or you make use of the groove, that self-referencing has created, that we can call a continuum. And you put in that groove presencing. Then, in order to presence, you begin to have, as I've said earlier implied, have to have acceptance.

[41:01]

You can't... presence appearances without the mode of mind being primarily one of acceptance. So your continuum now becomes patience, acceptance and compassion. So now, instead of thinking of compassion, it's very good to be compassionate and moral and ethical and all that stuff. You've gotten so tired of the crappy experience of self-referencing.

[42:03]

You've been compassionate to yourself and replaced that crappy continuum with compassion. bist du dir selbst gegenüber mitfühlend und ersetzt dieses schreckliche Kontinuum durch, you replace it through, du ersetzt es durch das Mitgefühl für dich selbst. And now everybody says, oh, he or she is so compassionate. Und dann sagt jeder, er oder sie ist so mitfühlend. I'm just so selfish, that's why I'm compassionate. Yeah. Okay. Now we could talk about the next higher order reality based on unbounded openness, but again, we have to stop.

[43:08]

I stopped sort of at the same place in Hannover. Promises, promises and miles to go before we meet. Instead of quantity, could one say intensity? But there's an intensive dimension to patience and intensity isn't limited to self-referencing. So you want to lessen the quantity of self-referencing. You'd also like to reduce the intensity of self-referencing. But intensity is independent of self-referencing. And you could say that mindfulness practice

[44:10]

develops when there's an intensity in mindfulness practice. Or a density to mindfulness practice so that it feels like mindfulness is just enveloping everything. And liveliness? Liveliness, yes, that's your job. Attentional vitality. It is a unity. It is always difficult in German. It is not unity. You can understand unity differently if you see it as a closed object for itself. One of the things I've tried to show here is the usefulness of a conception and seeing your own activity clearly allows you to see alternatives.

[45:50]

I immediately reminded of Gregory Bateson saying to me when he first started teaching in the United States, At UC Santa Cruz. He said, it's terrible teaching American students. They always agree with you. You say something to them, you know they've never thought of it before, they say, groovy. And if they can't experience the contrast, they don't learn anything. They just say, oh yeah, great. Yeah, super.

[47:00]

I didn't say that, but, you know, you're very creative in the translation. I'm just teasing you. I'm just showing you I know a few words. Super, for instance. Oh, super. Thanks. You were all super. Plus we had a broth as well as super. Ah. Ah.

[47:26]

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