Well, Siegfried and I just did a seminar together at Johanneshof. And I enjoyed it very much, and I think it went quite well. And some of you were, a couple of you were there. And you were there. And it was kind of strangely full, kind of one of the possible full circles. And we started out quite a few years ago speaking about the relationship between psychology and psychotherapy and Zen practice.

[01:04]

And now that we ended up near the time when I'm stopping formal teaching, During a seminar together, it was a kind of poetry. And we even did a revealing and powerful I thought dance and constellation of lay practice and monastic practice enacted within a constellation. And we also did a very powerful and, I think, fruitful exhibition on the subject of lay practices and Zen practices that we have enacted.

[02:19]

And I mean, my ending formal teaching doesn't mean I'm ending practicing or continuing with the same investigations, explorations. And what I've been saying recently is that more and more, strongly recognized, struck by, and affected by the difference between what I'm calling East Asian Yoke culture and Western culture. And for the practitioner, I find that has led me to emphasize

[03:35]

the shifts that are that come about can come about through recognizing the difference between experiential difference between East Asian yogic Buddhism and Western culture. Und für den Praktizierenden, die Praktizierende bedeutet das, dass das And the dynamic of the shift, which is so important in Buddhism, and particularly in Zen Buddhism, At least I would say that all realisational practice in Zen Buddhism is aimed at this shift in worldview.

[05:00]

Yeah, now I say a shift in worldview, it's kind of a big term, worldview. But it's a shift in any view. But in my observation, any shift is a shift in worldview. Or a shift in... Maybe that's too strong to say, but a shift in... how we view things is often embedded in our birth culture and lived culture.

[06:22]

Now, whether the shift, again what I found myself pointing out, is that whether the shift is say, a Japanese or Chinese or Korean practitioner within their own culture, the shift may be from one way of looking at things and another way of looking at things. And in our case, in the West, the shift can be within our own culture, within our own way of viewing things. Or the shift can be from Western cultural view to East Asian cultural view.

[07:34]

Oder diese Verschiebung in den Sichtweisen kann stattfinden von einer westlichen Sichtweise hin zu einer ostasiatischen Sichtweise. So if all of that is the case, and I think it's the case, then whether the shift is from A to B or M to L or Z, what's important is the shift itself is more important than what it's from and to. But of course, how you make use of the shift is a big part of the But still, the shift itself is structurally the most important thing.

[08:57]

And, I mean, just to take a very simple example, for instance, in this room, if I ask you, I hope you will say something to me and to everyone. And you have some hesitation or shyness or resistance. Yeah. And that shyness maybe comes from, you know, it's different to speak to several people at once than one or two people. But saying that just, you know, as it is for some people, you feel measured, you feel people are going to measure you, and you don't have control of the measurements.

[10:35]

Well, with one or two people, you have more control of the measuring process. Yeah. Or if you're a person, for instance, who always sits in the back, you might shift and sit in the front. And you moved from the front to the back, I believe. But, yeah, maybe you usually sit in the front, so you thought, this time I'll sit in the back. Oh. So if the... The dynamic of, I use the word dynamic so much and I avoided it for so many years, but I can't find another word.

[11:52]

If the dynamic is you're hesitant to be measured, for example, Then the practitioner says, oh, I want to push at the edge of thoughts. I want to push at the edge of my habits. So they do the opposite. And as soon as there's a chance to speak and they're hesitant to speak, they start speaking anyway. And sobald es die Gelegenheit gibt zu sprechen und sie aber zögern zu sprechen, dann sprechen sie einfach trotzdem.

[12:57]

So you're using your resistance or habits to see if you can shift a view in a simple psychological field. Und dann benutzt du eigentlich deine Muster oder deine Gedanken, um... No. So Zen practice differs from other school practice in that Zen really tries to create the conditions where these shifts can occur. So koans are not riddles, but they're shift machines. No, no, that's not... Anyway, okay.

[14:10]

Yeah. And so what's important, I'm emphasizing here when I say it's the shift, is that what's important then is not whether it's A or to B, but the in-between, the third unit here, which is a moment of freedom from any view. And what I emphasize here, when it's about this shift, about the shift itself, and when it doesn't matter whether it's from A to B or from somewhere else to somewhere else, then that's what's important, the space in between, this moment when there's no view at all. Yeah. Oops. So what I'm saying is, and what I believe is, and something, and as much as possible what my experience is, is that the shift allows, creates an infinitesimally dimensioned moment in which you have no views.

[15:38]

And it happens out of consciousness. It may have some kind of representational presence if somebody I spoke to a while ago had this enlightenment experience in which in the midst they were lying in bed and their experience was They were actually lying in bed and their imaginal body was also lying in bed. And they were quite anxious and discouraged and hardly wanted to go on with life.

[16:44]

And they felt themselves at the border of what they could imagine as themselves. And suddenly in this mood, in this Their imaginal body turned 360 degrees in bed. The real body was just lying there, but their imaginal body felt like it went 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and then back to where it was 360 degrees. And suddenly, all the problems they felt were gone. And one of the marks of an enlightenment experience, and not just an ordinary realization or intuition, is that it lasts your whole life.

[18:28]

It's a reference point you can go back to. And we initiate yourself. And they were kind of amazed. They thought, jeez. I really felt like I turned 360 degrees, but I'm still lying here, but I feel totally different. Okay. So I would say, from the point of view of the Dante achieve, they're infinitesimal. dimension, experience of no views, took the form of their national body turning in bed 360 degrees.

[19:45]

And maybe I should speak about the imaginal body and what I mean by that by describing it as the third of the four postures of zazen. But I'll do that only if you ask me. Okay. Why is that funny? Being practical. You're getting the shoulder shakes. Okay. Okay. Now, I just want to say something about this infinitesimal moment.

[21:03]

Because until recently, things that are outside our consciousness aren't real to us. But since I can... Now we live in this... We live in the cloud. The hypercloud. It's funny, you know, cloud and air and wind and spirit, in East Asian yoga culture, Chinese culture, and in Western culture, all the words around winds, clouds, etc., are often related to the forms of the word for spirit.

[22:06]

I don't know if the cloud, the web cloud is a field of spirit, a field of exploitation for sure. But in any case, the example I used here today, I'm in Crestone, Colorado, and Nicole, as the director of Johanneshof, can say to me, did you read my email? She might ask me, did you read my email? And I say, I don't know, it's somewhere. I saw it, but it came in a few days ago.

[23:08]

And she'll say, oh, I'll just send it again. So she goes, boom, and my computer goes, bing. That's the kind of infinitesimal dimensioned event. Last time I asked you to find infinitesimal, it's really, really, really small. Yeah. Okay, so that's still... That's still the same meaning. Okay. Infinitely small. Infinitely small, yeah. Okay, good. It hasn't changed since you sent me that last e-mail. Okay. So we do know now that things do happen of consequence in immeasurably short times. So it is true that much of our experience is actually occurring in these infinitesimal little shifts.

[24:30]

Okay, so that's just to sort of say, or to say, not sort of say, that the particular practice of Buddhism, which Zen is, is designed around, way we do zazen meditation is designed around creating the field of these possible shifts. So what is psychotherapy? and psychology and a constellation of practice and therapy designed around it.

[25:50]

This is more your territory, those of you who are professional therapists, than mine. And one of the things I would think it might be useful for us to explore Is the basic conception of consolation practice significantly different than the basic conceptions that underlie Freud, Jung, Adler, Karen, Horney, etc. ? And one of the questions that I think would be useful for us to explore is whether the basic understanding, the basic concept of the exhibition work differs from the basic concept, for example, of the works of Freud, Jung, Adler, Karen Horney, and so on.

[27:00]

My, my. experiences and senses that it's quite different, fundamentally different. But it's developed in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. And so what kind of, oh, there has to be an overlap. What's the overlap? Is constellation practice therapy a therapy to relieve suffering, to solve a problem, or is it a process of discovery? Or is Constellation sometimes a therapy and sometimes a process of discovery? Oder ist Aufstellungsarbeit manchmal eine Therapie und manchmal ein Prozess der Erforschung oder der Entdeckung?

[28:23]

Now I'm speaking about this probably redundantly and all of this is familiar to you and you've thought about it. But I'm trying to get all of us, I hope to get all of us on the same resonant page and our presence tomorrow and the next day when more people are here, our presence will open up these pages for others. Because I would say from my own sense of things that our imaginal bodies are in the process of a constellation right now and will be tomorrow. Now, it's clear in German that this isn't an imagined body, it's an imaginal body.

[29:30]

It's not imagination. Yeah, it's not as clear as in English, but I do not have a different word. But it would be worthwhile to spend a little time on the word. Okay, fine. Maybe I can say this. The question is, is it clear that this is not a imagined, so not a fantasy body or something like that, but that it is not about imagination in English, it is also fantasy or imagination. This is more about, in German, I come in with imagination. If anyone has something even clearer, please say it. We can maybe talk about the word. But just simply, for instance, if you know a certain experience, say, in Zazen or yoga practice, of the spine awakening you,

[30:39]

or a certain way that the spine feels in meditation or in a yoga practice in which you feel very good afterwards. So that feeling of the body which arises through the spine, but is not present always, but can be present when you bring attention to the spine. I would call it an imaginal body, but it's not an imagination. Also dieses Gefühl, das du in der Wirbelsäule haben kannst und das vielleicht nicht die ganze Zeit gegenwärtig ist, Or if you're used to being absorbed in stillness. And you have to wait for somebody, like Andy just drove us here.

[31:59]

From the hotel and he... But he wasn't a moment late. But if he'd been a few moments late or ten minutes or something... I can, it doesn't make any difference if he's late to me, because I've been doing this so long, I can sit there, enter stillness, and just like the whole world disappears, and I'd be in the hotel lobby, and somebody can come by, and I don't know, and then he comes in, I say, oh, let's go. Yeah, so that's what I mean by an imaginal body, not an imaginary body. Now, in English philosophy, English language philosophy and psychology, the word imaginal has its own history, but I'm using it this way.

[33:41]

Okay. So I chose this title of Psyche and Soma because I thought, well, here we are in the last seminar we'll do here that I will do here. Maybe somebody else will be the seminar or we'll have some other format or something. And Giorgio said we can certainly have the space if we want next year But since it's the last time I'll do it, I thought maybe we should go back

[34:45]

before Buddhism in our discussions to Psyche and Soma. But I brought it up partly because I really don't know what the words mean. But we're talking about psychology, but what the heck does the word psyche mean? And in different schools, it means different things. And psyche is sometimes a synonym for soul and sometimes a synonym for heart and spirit and so forth. And soma, I mean somatic, I mean soma in the 60s in San Francisco, soma meant something like psilocybin. And people in India took Soma and probably it was some sort of mushroom, you know, all that stuff.

[36:22]

So in San Francisco in the 60s, the somatic body was the body underneath, within the influence of a psychedelic, so it was a psychedelic body. There we have psyche and... In the San Francisco of the 60s, there was Soma, the body under the influence of psychedelic drugs. And in that sense, it was something like a psychedelic body. And there we have, for example, these two words, Psyche and Soma. And that's the psyche of Greek myth. And there's the psyche of James Hillman. I really love reading James Hillman. He's so literate, intelligent, but I do not agree with his acorn theory. If the emphasis is strongly on faith, there's no need for Buddhism.

[37:42]

Buddhism doesn't make any sense. Okay. So I don't think, at least I can't, figure out what psyche means or soma means, somatic medicine, body or something. I can't really figure out what it means with any consistent precision. Ich kann wirklich nicht herausfinden, was diese Worte Soma und Psyche bedeuten, jedenfalls nicht mit einer wirklich konsistenten Bedeutung.

[38:44]

No, if you're working within a certain, you know, I'm just, I feel like an idiot talking to you professional therapists about this, but I'll continue. If you're practicing within a certain tradition, Psyche may be a very precise or fairly focused term that is consistent with the whole approach. But I always ask myself, and I want to know a word, I don't ask what it means in Buddhism, I don't ask what it means in the dictionary, I ask, what does my body do with the words? I ask, how do I use it?

[39:47]

Because now, what I'm making a shift to now is the emphasis again on this... revolutionary, revolutionizing term or distinction between activity and entity-ness. Just, since we've spoken about it quite often, but just to refresh our memory and feelings since I don't see you, many of you more than once a year.

[40:51]

Yeah, okay. So, It took me, as I've mentioned, a long time to decide to use the word activity, even though I see everything as an activity. And I didn't see how to use it until I saw, sort of by chance or permutations, that I could contrast it with entity. And I didn't see, even though I started using it in contrast to entity, giving it a meaning in contrast to entity, I didn't see really how revolutionary it is.

[42:08]

One thing, for example, is it puts you into a world that you know through feeling and not through thinking. And that opens you up into the recognition that all knowing is not thinking knowing. There's a knowing which is as functional, perhaps more functional than thinking knowing. That happens through noticing, but not thinking. Okay, so what that means for the practitioner and then

[43:10]

but perhaps also the practitioner of psychotherapy. Is that he doesn't just, as we all do, intuitively function through a knowing that arises not necessarily through thinking, and sometimes a knowing the practitioner perceives shift to really functioning through and knowing that isn't the result of thinking. If I say it that strongly, it's not quite true. Certainly we know things through thinking. But it's more like a kind of information necessarily than an embodied knowing.

[44:59]

And in a world of embodied knowing, you're cued through feeling and not somewhat cued through thinking. So all of this has been just, I didn't know it would take so long as usual. So all of this, which I didn't know, would take so long as usual. is to say that I would like us to explore what these words mean to you, not in dictionaries in any school of psychology or philosophy, but what these words mean to you bodily.

[46:02]

In other words, if the word just jumps into a sentence, how do you find yourself using it? For instance, I might say, geez, I'm psyched up, or he looks psyched up. Oh. We wouldn't say that. You can say it. That's good. But I wouldn't say, I'm sold up. I'm sold out, maybe, but not sold up. Okay. Maybe you can't give any examples in German.

[47:04]

Not like that. We have different ones. All right, I'm sure you do. Or we can say something's insold, but I wouldn't say it's in psyched, in psyche. Insold means given a soul. Aha, okay. Beseelt. Beseelt, ja. Genau. Das können wir auch machen. We can do that. Also, wir können zum Beispiel sagen, dass etwas beseelt ist, aber wir würden nicht sagen, dass etwas bepsücht ist. Was sagt zum Beispiel die Psyche? If the word soul or psyche or spirit appeared in a dream, what would it mean to you in the dream? Wenn das Wort Seele oder Psyche oder Spirit, Geist oder sowas, in einem Traum auftauchen würde, was würde das Wort dann für dich bedeuten?

[48:21]

Wenn du sagst, das spüre ich, das fühle ich in meiner Seele. Wenn ich das sage, was meine ich dann? If I say I feel it in my psyche, what does that mean? When I say I feel it in my heart, are they all three the same statement or is there some difference in I feel it in my heart or I feel it in my soul? So I'm asking you to look in your embodied dictionary. But dictionary means diction, well, all right, embodied dictionary. Intuitively, without thinking, how do you use these words? Because we're not talking now about, again, dictionaries and schools of psychology. Wir sprechen jetzt nochmal, wir sprechen hier nicht über Wörterbücher oder unterschiedliche psychologische Schulen.

[49:46]

We're talking about what kind of reference points are these words for you. Sondern wir sprechen darüber, welche Art von Bezugspunkten sind diese Worte für dich. And then can you talk to your psyche? Und dann kannst du mit deiner Psyche reden? What kind of thing is this? Can you talk to your soul? Does your soul talk to you? Because the way these reference points are... Oh, that's a bird. Stuck in here? Poor baby. Okay. We can leave some doors open. Yeah. Because I can't, I have, none of us have the skills to go up there and catch it. That's right, maybe the soul does. Yeah, yeah. The spirit might. No, the psyche is not going to do it.

[50:50]

So do you see what I'm getting at? No, I try to go up there. Okay, yeah, if you can. Okay. I mean, traditionally, the soul, as I said in the last seminar, is something like the in-between God and us. And in the Middle Ages, when they first started dissecting bodies, One of the first things they did was look for the soul. They couldn't figure out which part of the body it might be. And if we're in a relationship in our Christian culture, Abrahamic culture, if we're in a relationship to heaven and God, is solely in between.

[52:04]

And as some traditional archetypal psychotherapist, which I don't know if any of you are, Do they assume they're talking to the person's psyche? Or maybe the person's psyche talks to them? I mean, what do we think is going on? Yeah. See, I said no one could do this, but he can maybe. Yeah, but you're on the way. Okay, and now my point is asking you to feel in your embodied dictionary how these words exist.

[53:26]

We may be able to feel somewhat clearly how our embedded culture, Western culture, is functioning in us. Because my own understanding is that unless we really see how our own culture is working in us, we can't understand another culture. Because when we understand and look at another culture without really knowing what our own culture is, seeing it because it's taken for granted, We implicitly understand the new culture really from the point of view of our old culture.

[54:34]

So the first step in really making the shift to yogic culture and bringing that into our conception of psychotherapy or our constellation practice The first step is, really is? You decide. Okay. So if we if we have a pretty clear sense of key points of how our own culture works, and we understand and respect our own culture, because our own culture has developed, you know, helped,

[55:49]

It creates civilization and society, not all civilization, but society for a long time. And I think from seeing our own culture with respect, we can then look at this other culture and say, hmm, works differently. So that's the background process that I hope at least we can sense in the next days. And I don't know where we're going and what we're doing, but whatever I feel now is likely to have something to do with the future. Yes. I somehow have the image that it is the other way around, that only when you are really addicted, when you have the chance, the opportunity to really be addicted to a yogic culture, that you are then only able to create your own culture,

[57:47]

I have a feeling that it's the other way around, that only when you've actually immersed yourself into a different culture, into a yogic culture, and really felt that, that then through the contrast, you can only really begin to feel and see your own culture. Yes. And you're right, maybe. But what I'm suggesting is that now that we're far enough along looking at yoga culture, let's really look at where we're at in our Western culture to see if we can look more purely at the yoga culture. So after two or three decades of doing this, Now let's look at our Western culture newly and say, what's that like in relation, so they don't overlap, so we see how we're overlapping them.

[59:19]

Yeah, I mean, again, just to say one thing more about the distinction, the revolutionary, I think, revolutionizing distinction between activity and entity. When you start thinking of things as activities and not entities, they no longer function through names. Because activities take time and space. So again, as I've said often, a tree, if you look at a tree as activity, it's treeing.

[60:35]

And if you look at treeing as an activity, then you have to look at the boundary between treeing and non-treeing. dann musst du dir die Grenze zwischen Bäumen und Nicht-Bäumen anschauen. But treeing is not isolated from non-treeing. Non-treeing is part of treeing. Aber nicht Bäumen ist nicht getrennt oder isoliert von Bäumen, sondern nicht Bäumen ist auch Teil des Bäumens. Und dann ist es so, dass alle Bäume nicht nur Bäumen, sondern auch Weiden sind. All treeings are trying to become a forest. I'm just a lonely tree standing here, but I would love a forest. So I'll create a little shade for this bush over here and hope it turns into a tree.

[61:37]

So even where you see a tree all by itself, it still has a border with foresting, because its future is foresting. So every tree is also the activity of implicit or potential foresting. So as soon as you start saying activity, you end up in a field. there's no boundaries, and then you have to start studying how boundaries function within a field in which there's no boundaries. So I agree. Anyway, that's enough. Thank you.

[62:48]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.18