Third statement that I gave you yesterday. Unbroken concentration without gaps is the womb of the sage. Now, that's just a way to say concentrate on stillness. Without interruption. But if I said Zen practice is about concentrating on stillness, virtually no one would understand it. They would think, yeah... sounds pretty thin and probably boring.

[01:01]

But if we start trying to find, you know, yeah, we'd say the world. The world is just a word, but look at what the world is. It's because there's no words for such a thing as the world that we have a simple world like the world. The simplicity is because there's no word for its complexity. So we can say in this case stillness is something like that. Okay, so I called it also fullness. A bridge. A bridge of fundamental identity. Or identification. Yeah. And I compared it to, I tried to give you a feeling like the silence of the, excuse me, the stillness rather, of the ocean wave.

[02:30]

When you feel that it's true, nature is to return to stillness. Or the stillness of the tree in moving and in its stillness. The stillness of the tree is rooted in its trunk and roots. The stillness of the oceans, of the waves, is rooted in the immensity of the water. You don't see so much stillness in the splashing of a pond.

[03:34]

Yeah, and as we talked the other day, to use a term like the ground of being is problematical. Because, I mean, it's actually wrong. Because It assumes a priority, something that exists before things appear. And you know the basic conception in Buddhism is not only that everything's changing, but there's no beginning and end. And among the two choices, do things have a beginning, which we're used to. Babies are born, plants spring up. But in the larger context, it's pretty hard to imagine what's before if all this is created.

[04:58]

So Buddhism chose the other choice. As I said the other day. Well, here it is. Let's assume it was always here. It's too hard to deal with what was before. We can see that it's here. Let's just assume in some form it's in some interpenetrating way always here. So there's no ground of being, there's no prior ground. This is a really essential idea if you're going to get where Buddhism is coming from. So instead of ground of being, let's try to find another way to

[06:12]

root the stillness. So if I stick with the metaphor of the tree, instead of talking about the tree in the ground, let's just talk about the roots in the trunk. Und statt vom Baum und dem Boden zu sprechen, bleiben wir bei den Wurzeln und dem Stamm. Es gibt ein Koan, der Himmel, die Erde und ich und du, wir teilen die gleiche Wurzel. Unzählige Dinge und ich, wir teilen den gleichen Körper. Now these statements in Zen, the pedagogy of Zen is to not have you study the sutras, but to penetrate these statements.

[07:44]

So as I said, we can think of the root As the spine itself. The spine is the backbone, the center bone. The center bones. As a kind of mind. You know, the other day when I was talking to... Sophia, about Giorgio's table. The wood, the woodworker and so forth. I said to her, you're seeing this table with your eyes. Treat the table as if it were your own eyesight.

[08:45]

This is a statement in Buddhism, but also Dogen especially points it out. Treat things as your own eyesight. We're very gentle with our eyes, and we have to be gentle with what we see. So as we might treat things with our own eyes, as if what we see was our eyesight or eyes, In a more actually tangible way, treat your backbone, your spine, as a kind of mind or intelligence. And in a way we can say you can experience your own stillness as rooted in and through your spine, this wide spine, not limited to the bones.

[10:12]

Okay. Now I want to change the topic. Although it will seem like I'm going far afield, then I actually might be. You know, I've been here in Germany now and Austria for nearly a year. Certainly for most part of the year I went back to the States only for a month. It's the longest I've been out of the States except the years, four years almost I lived in Japan.

[11:28]

As you know, I'm usually six months and six months. It's been nice for Sophia because she's really gotten a chance to settle into the German language with other kids. It might be good that she had a year of exposure to one language, where she's exposed to English through kids. Und es ist gut, dass sie vielleicht dieses Jahr hatte, wo sie mit dem Deutschen vertraut werden konnte, bevor sie mit anderen Kindern im Englischen vertraut wird. Aber ich sage, das ist einfach nur eine Art zu sagen, dass ich nicht wirklich weiß, was in Amerika vor sich geht. But I feel that the public discourse has to have been seriously corrupted.

[12:50]

Primarily by... agent being this current President Bush. And although you impressions are probably created mostly from the press, I would say that at least every... I don't know anyone, and I don't know anyone who knows anyone, almost, who supports Bush. So, I mean, you have to recognize, I think, that America is many countries within one country.

[13:51]

And the America I live in really does not support Bush. And I don't think any, virtually any educated people support Bush. There are some exceptions. And But just to try to make some sense to you what I'm talking about.

[15:04]

I was going to say the educated people who, you know, 50% of Americans, according to a survey, say they've never read a book. Say they've never read a book if they're asked. Bush has all those. Plus 10% more. And The educated people who have supported Bush are mostly the politicians. And the flawed democratic system of America means you can't be elected if there's any significant constituency opposed to you. To be elected, you have to have several constituencies completely for you.

[16:15]

And you have to have the rest of the constituencies partly for you. Und der restliche Teil, der muss dich zumindest teilweise unterstützen. Constituency is a... Like... No, constituency means... What? No, with... Within a party, there would be women as a constituency, labor as a constituency, Jews are a constituency, Catholics are a constituency. So if you have any one of these constituencies opposed to you, you can't really get elected. It throws the vote. Because otherwise votes are mostly 50-50, 40, 8-55.

[17:17]

If there is someone against you, you cannot be elected. So the Democrats are deeply opposed to Bush, but none of them can be elected if they make it public they're opposed to Bush and be re-elected. So they seem to have decided to play a waiting game of, well, we'll wait and try to stay in power so that when the time is right, we can do something. And I think it's wrong, a wrong decision, because the whole process has corrupted the public dialogue. Now I'm just sharing what I've been thinking about recently and I'm not very well informed about these things.

[18:17]

Okay. What I mean by the public discourse... Is democracy assumes that all the cards are on the table? Or at least the cards that are put on the table are not a marked deck? So I've been reading quite a bit about the First World War. And the quotation I've given you several times in the last month or so, some of you, is a statement in Virginia Woolf, which I didn't mention the first night, did I?

[19:25]

Because in England, and also Ford Maddox Ford, I spoke about that in the last seminar. Yeah. His name is Ford Maddox. But he took the name Ford Maddox Ford. He's the son of a German music critic who moved to London. And he became one of the main figures in the time of Ezra Pound and... the writers around the First World War. So their writing and own consciousness was, and the reason they wrote What seems to be also the case of many of the writers coming out of Vienna was this corruption of what I'm calling the public discourse.

[20:57]

When things weren't what they seemed. And before the First World War, England was presenting here a liberal kind of dialogue about whether to go into the war or not. But actually there was a secret conservative agenda of already made treaties with Russia and France and other countries. Which nobody knew about. So it was already figured out that they were going to go to war and who was going to fight whom, but they pretended that it was still in the process of a public decision.

[22:00]

So Virginia Woolf characterized it by saying, in a social situation, what would people say after the war compared to what they said before the war? And she said, well, she found out they said the same things after the war as they said before the war. But she said before the war there was a difference. Under the conversation there was a hum of excitement and anticipation.

[23:05]

A hum of some kind of joy under the words. After the war that hum was gone. Okay. So I'm saying all this to say that from the point of view of Buddhism, order, societal order, stems from each of us. Ultimately, society and our human world is rooted in us. Die menschliche Gesellschaft ist letztlich in uns verwurzelt.

[24:06]

This is the basic bodhisattva choice position. Das ist die grundlegende bodhisattva Wahlmöglichkeitsentscheidung. I mean, societies, I think Eric Vögelin, do any of you know his work? Vögelin, V-O-E-G-E-L-I-N. He was a Viennese philosopher, historian. And who's the person who wrote the Austrian Constitution? Hans Kelsen. He was Hans Kelsen's assistant and student and helped him write the Constitution. Anyway, a brilliant thinker, though I don't agree with him at all in most things.

[25:09]

He has a basically Christian view and not that's okay, but a view that human nature doesn't change. It's always the same, God-given. I just think that's completely not true. All right. But if it's not true, how do we have a true nature? Okay, so we have that kind of problem. How do we sort that out? But Erich Voegelin writes about the search for order in history in a brilliant way. A search for order. How do you order a society? And he says traditions in our society search in cosmological speculations, myth, philosophy.

[26:21]

But basically something outside ourselves. But Buddhism says you can't look. This is all inside, there's no outside. So from that point of view, the Bodhisattva decision to implement the Bodhisattva decision The Bodhisattva's decision is to become the world you want the world to be. To become the person you wish existed somewhere. As I say, we'd really like to meet a really wonderful person.

[27:29]

That's natural. Let's be awake to such persons. But if you want such a person to exist You have to be that person. There's no other way to make it real. So we say only a Buddha can recognize a Buddha. If you're going to recognize such a person, you have to be in the process of becoming such a person. So how do we find the source of order in ourselves? Or our true nature? This is also one of the fundaments of Buddhist and Zen practices. And I think it's time to take a break.

[28:45]

And this can be part of our own maturation. But the most fundamental thing we can do is also become the person we want the world to be. Or to head ourselves in that, body ourselves in that direction. But I wanted to make clear that at least I consider this practice a political act. And the concept of the Buddha is some kind of timeless presence, realization, etc.

[29:50]

But the concept of the Bodhisattva is a historical concept. The bodhisattva is realized in his or her society. And for his or her society. And the... realization of the bodhisattva is the potential of the society and if that potential isn't there isn't felt or experienced now we're not talking about ignorance or realization That would be to think of them as entities.

[31:11]

We're speaking about a movement toward realization or a movement toward ignorance. And the movement toward realization realizes. In other words, The world is always passing through us. If it passes through our moving in the direction of realization, it transforms what passes through us. Wenn die Bewegung ist in Richtung Verwirklichung, dann transformiert sie das, was durch uns hindurch geht. You can imagine it as a kind of prism. Prism that reflects light. Ich kann es wie eine Art von Prisma vorstellen, das Licht reflektiert. If the direction is a prism, wenn diese Richtung ein Prisma ist,

[32:12]

And as the world passes through you, it is affected by the direction of your life. And the world passing through you then reinforces the direction your life is taking. So it makes no sense to think, oh, I'm stupid or I'm not realized or something like that. That's to think in entities. But if you think in relationships, processes, then the process or direction, the intention to realize how we actually exist, shows us the world as it actually exists. How do we find this order in ourselves? It's actually simple, simple, basically simple.

[33:46]

It's the experience of being alive. When you in some circumstance really feel this is what it must mean to be alive. And I call that finding your seat. It can perhaps most directly occur through sitting meditation. At some point, you're not distracted. You're not feeling you've got to go somewhere, do something. You're just deeply at ease. And something comes over you. This is what it must mean to be alive. You feel the power of simply being alive.

[35:11]

I think of Smokey Robinson, the singer. Do you know Smokey Robinson? He says, this may not be the love everyone talks about, But this must be love. So it's some feeling like that. And once you've had this feeling and come into this feeling, you don't search anywhere else for what it means to be alive. This is your own power, your own capacity. And it becomes the measure of the source of order. Your sense of what makes sense Yeah, I think that's enough for just these right now.

[36:30]

So I'd like to see what any of you have to say or what you could talk about together. I would like to see what you would like to say and what we can talk about. Don't all speak at once. Yes. In our rooms there is a little printed page from this Lichtung, from the organization. And there is a quote of Robert Musi on it. Actually, I'm somebody else or I'm different, but I hardly ever get to that way or hardly ever can be that way.

[37:44]

Sounds a little bit like my friend Lou Welch looking in the mirror. And saying, I don't know who you are, but I'll shave you. But, yeah, I find Musil's book is translated as The Man Without Qualities. And I think it really means... from reading the book, The Man Without Collective Identities. I think he was one of the first people to really see we have to escape from identities, such collective identities.

[38:49]

Well, that's very nice. It's in the rooms. I started a restaurant once. And there was a little former bathroom in the warehouse. We turned a warehouse into a restaurant. And this restaurant, I mean this little room, was quite a nice little room. I think I made it into a curved door, arched door. And I had printed very carefully Wittgenstein's fly box. No reference to it formally being a toilet.

[39:52]

But it was there. I liked it there in the restaurant. No one understood it, but it's all right. And after I left, they painted it over. Yeah. Yes. In meditation, you repeated that it was the most basic thing for a human being to become the person you wanted to be in the world. Well, I didn't say in meditation, but I just said practice is to become the person you want the world to be.

[41:01]

And I found it somehow like the categorical imperative of Zen. And what touches me very deeply is this enormous challenge and possibility this gives us. And my feeling is the biggest challenge is not to make it real, but to to recognize how this person should be.

[42:23]

Yes. And I thought this has to be like a process without end. Yes. It would be boring if it had an end. And you could fail if it had an end. But if it has no end, you can't fail. You know, as many of you know, Ivan Illich was a close friend and teacher for me. And in his book, Celebration of Awareness, he starts out with some equivalent statement about we have to become the world we want the world to be.

[43:29]

And he says we can't think our way to this world. We also agreed that Buddhism and Christianity are searches for ultimate friendship. And I told some of you I was lucky enough to spend three days with him just before he died. A few months ago. Yeah, and he was full of energy and vigor at that time. And we walked all the way downtown Bremen and took a streetcar back.

[44:34]

And the last thing he said to me just before I left, the conversation we had just before, he said, let's write a paper together on why Christianity and Buddhism are not religions. I said, well, yeah, let's do it. We both knew there probably wouldn't be time because he'd almost died last summer. Last summer, a year before. And two weeks later, I guess it was Silja, his person of his protégés who was closest to him, They talked about they were going to meet in about half an hour. And she came in about half an hour and he was sitting on the couch there.

[45:35]

Something else you would like to speak about? In this process of transformation, where I try to develop in a certain direction, and this is important in psychotherapy, also then in your personal life? All the time I'm confronted with my own greed and delusion and what strategies are there to deal with it.

[47:10]

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