Hello, everyone. Is there anyone here who is completely new? I've never met before. You and you and you. Looks like I should have met you before. Those of you who are completely new, do any of you have no experience of meditation? You do, huh? And do any of you have no experience of Zen meditation? What kind of meditation have you done? Yeah, . Oh, I know. I know him.

[01:02]

I haven't seen him in some years, but I know him. How was your stay there? Good? Yeah. It's an old fraternity house. And there's a few people who will be here tomorrow who can't come this evening. So I have to... Anyway. I like being back in Munster. I somehow... I like the city of Munster for some reason. And not just because it's Beate's home. But that's a very good reason. Often when I remember something, I'm trying to remember something.

[02:06]

When did I talk about such and such, or what did I say? I suddenly see a train go by in my mind. I say, oh yes, in Münster, what I said. I'm getting very used to these trains going by. Now, The title of the seminar is Living in the Stream of... Is that right? Living in the Stream of Consciousness and Awareness. So I have to work with, in this seminar, work with the word stream. Are there two words for stream in German, fluss?

[03:16]

Like a river can be. And strom is also a river. And working with the word, I can use the working with this word stream as an example of how to bring practice into your life. And an example of how Zen does use language, and it uses language a lot. And it's called a teaching outside the scriptures or outside words and letters. But what that really means is using words and letters outside the way they're usually used.

[04:33]

Now, these seminars have arisen out of my... trying to find a way to teach adept Zen to lay people. So what I'd like to try to do tomorrow, I don't think I can do it tonight, but what I'd like to try to do tomorrow, is just give you some basic instructions, the way they would be given to monks. No, I'm going to give you teachings that are for lay people.

[05:40]

I'm going to try to think of them in terms of for lay practice, but I'm going to give them to you the way they're given to monks. Now, there's not much to that, because the way they're given to monks, their monks are just told to do them without any explanation. Now, one difference will be I will try to give you a number of practices and a... I'll try to give you a number of practices. And... And normally in a monastery, you'd be given one practice in a year maybe, or two practices in a year.

[06:54]

Now I'm bringing up monks because in the development of a lay practice in the West, we have to keep looking at what was done in monasteries. Because that's the primary way Adept Zen was taught. But... Hello? Hello? But since I'm a believer, as most of you know, in adept lay practice and the possibility of that, that's really what I'm emphasizing. But there's a kind of dialogue that goes on between the way it might be done in a monastic setting and the way we might do it.

[07:56]

And for those of you who have never met me, us before, this is Eureka doctor actually, Eureka Greenway. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor. People sometimes say, you should introduce her properly. And we've been working together and teaching together and translating for, I don't know, four or five years now. And she's been part of trying to develop this way these seminars work. But I want you to understand that although I've been doing them now for a few years a certain way, I'm always trying to develop them and I'm quite open to suggestions from you.

[09:29]

And I try to make the teachings more understandable and useful. So there's always the question of how much we sit. And since it looks like most of you are experienced in sitting, I will probably sit a little more than most previous seminars. And if anyone particularly wants some meditation instruction from the Zen point of view or from my point of view, you can ask me directly or Ulrike or Beate and we can sit down, a few of us, and talk about it. You don't have to ask all three of us simultaneously, but one at a time or all at once, it's okay. I'd also like to ask you some questions this evening, which you could maybe have in the back of your mind during the seminar.

[11:08]

One question would be, what practices work for you in your daily life? What difficulties do you have with these practices or the practice that does work for you? That's kind of a second question. The third question would be, what practices do you find it almost impossible to do or you've tried to do and they just don't work? The trick is to turn your life into a kind of stream in which you can find your ease in. Because if I use the word stream, what I'm emphasizing, of course, is path.

[12:18]

But I'm emphasizing also a way of looking at change. And because normally we sort of see the world as these, you know, physical objects that we go around and... Or a possible... strategies by which we could live our life, comparing this and that, and so forth. And if I emphasize this word stream, which isn't a particularly Buddhist teaching,

[13:21]

But in the various ways I want to talk about it, it's an actually fairly radical change in the way you enter and experience the world. Or at least the way we usually do. And a way that arises from meditation practice and from mindfulness practices. And from certain teachings. So in addition to just giving you some practices tomorrow, then the question will be, how do you do them? Then I'd also like to give you some of the excuses for doing them, or Does that make sense?

[14:50]

I don't want to persuade you, but I want to give you some understanding of why these things have developed or make sense. And I'd like to give you some teachings that relate to these practices. And I'd like to hear from you, too, what is your motivation in practice and, as I said, what kind of practices you attempt to use. Okay, and tomorrow I also want to give you a a koan. Well, tonight I'd like to pass out a koan that I'd like you to read this evening. Now, I don't expect you to read it thoroughly, particularly try to understand it or anything.

[15:52]

And if you're not used to reading English, it's going to feel pretty weird. But even for people who read English a lot, it's... It feels pretty weird to read them. So you read for anything that catches your eye or happens to interest you. This will be column 20 from the Book of Serenity. It's called Dijang's Nearness. And you can work with the, if you go no further than the word nearness, that's already something.

[17:15]

It's like working with the word stream. Or as I say almost every time I teach, working with a feeling like space connects us rather than space separates us. It's just a different point of view. And it's expressed in language. But if you present the language to yourself, you might feel something different than you usually feel. Feeling space separates us. So you might, you know, as I said, just, skim, read a little bit, read as much as interests you, read the first page only, I don't care, whatever you wish.

[18:28]

Of course, you're welcome to read the whole thing. I'm not basing this seminar on a column, that's the point I'm making, I'm just giving it to you. But what I'd like to do by Sunday is bring out a few things that are in the koan that if I brought them out myself you wouldn't believe them. If I tried to teach you some of the things that Koan points out, you'd say, oh, he's gone too far. This is just too zen. Or it's too far out or too subtle or something. So I think... looking at some of these points in the koan, you'll see that actually what seems far out can be commonplace if you change the way you look at things.

[19:49]

So I think that's enough as an initial introduction. So now I'd like us to sit for a little bit. So if you need to stretch your legs or anything, please do. Okay, do you have any questions about anything or is there anything you'd like? What's your agenda or motivation you'd like to have from the seminar? Oh, it's something to play with.

[21:10]

Actually, I'm ordained, so I usually wear something to remind me of that. That's one of the symbols of being a Buddhist. So it's my Buddhist jewelry. Without that, you won't forget any Buddhist. I might. Actually, I need a lot of help in my practice. As most of you know, that's why I practice with you, so you'll keep reminding me. But we all need a lot of help.

[22:13]

That's the point of this seminar. Is that we all need a lot of help. But the help is present in us if we know how to notice it. But this is a kind of way of establishing a continuity, a stream. You can use a physical object to help you create a continuity of awareness underneath your surface attention. And this is an object you can pay attention to. But also as I tried this in the... Sashin, I guess, I talked about the fact you can sleep with something like this.

[23:29]

You can sleep with a physical object, which then the attention you bring to your conscious mind stays inside the dream while you're inside your sleeping time. Babies with their teddy bears have the right idea. Or their blankies. Their blankets. So this is sort of a Buddhist blankie. All right. Some other profound question. Yes. As far as I know, there are 108 beads. 108, yeah. Do you know why or what was happening? Goodness, these questions are getting more profound than I told you. No one really knows.

[24:42]

But 108 is a number used in spiritual situations quite a lot. I think the Upanishads has multiples of 108 stanzas or something like that. And there are Phoenician temples, I believe, where the entry columns are 108, you know, sort of like that. All I know is 108 goes around my wrist four times. Okay. Yes? Is there something like a Buddhist Kabbalah with numbers? This?

[25:53]

I don't think so. But you do, some schools use it to chant with. Yeah. But you know... One thing I haven't mentioned, emphasized, for some reason in my teaching of zazen over the years, is the importance of the hands in your practice. And you can put your hands in a number of ways.

[26:56]

And you can just put them any way you like. But that any way you like should be in contrast to a particular posture. So there's two particular postures that are most common in Zen. And in Zen we don't usually put our hands on our legs, though it's okay if you want to. Usually put our hands together. And the two main postures are you put your thumb in your left palm. And you close your left hand around your thumb. Kind of lightly.

[28:09]

And then you close your right hand around the outside of your left hand. And then you pull that up against your stomach. And there's a certain physical, there's a certain strength in that posture. And it's warmer in the winter. Okay, so now that's a particular posture. It's not just any old way to put your hands together. And it's important that it's a particular posture, not just any old way. So there's the particular and there's any old way. And you have to understand those as two different postures. So any old way is also then a posture.

[29:13]

Because it's in contrast to a particular posture. Then the other, the more classic way is if you're right-handed, you put your left hand on top of your right hand. Overlapping your fingers. And touching your thumbs together lightly. And generally you keep your forefinger and your thumb in a vertical plane. But you can turn it up with your thumb touching your stomach if you want. And if you want your arms to come down your sides, with a little space under your arms, and you want your hands then to be, they can rest on your feet if it doesn't pull your shoulders forward. But depending on your body, if your arms are at your side, your hands may be up a little bit, lifted up a little bit off your feet.

[30:33]

Now, The importance of this is that you maintain, are able in zazen to maintain a particular posture of the hands. It's very much the same idea of holding something like beads or some other object, if you like, in your hands while you're sleeping. Because you're taking a certain conscious physical attention, attaching it to the beads so that you're able to not hold them during the night. I mean, so you're able to not drop them during the night. Most people said, I kept dropping it, it didn't work. One guy said, I held some sort of carved object in his hand, you know.

[31:36]

He said, I didn't drop it, but I couldn't get my hand open in the morning. He woke up. But you get the idea of it, is that you've taken a physical object and you've able to maintain enough awareness to hold it while you're sleeping. And then you've gone to sleep. But you've created a little tunnel of awareness, a consciousness that looks into the sleep, a little tube that goes into your sleep. And you can do it as a part of developing a marriage of awareness and consciousness or a marriage of sleep mind and waking mind.

[33:03]

And it can be part of a dream practice in being able to stay conscious and lucid in your dreams. Now, with your hands in zazen, you're doing the same thing. As you well know, your conscious mind has known for a long time how to count. But your zazen mind doesn't know how to count. And you shouldn't get mad at your zazen mind or you for not counting your breast to ten. Because you haven't educated your zazen mind yet to count to ten.

[34:19]

Okay, so what you begin to do is be able to have a kind of mind that can't count to ten, but can begin to count or pay attention in some other way. So your hands are an important part of this kind of practice. So Sukhriyasi, as most of you know, told me to put my mind in my hands. This was pretty difficult for me to do until I recognized that my mind was already in my hands. I didn't know how to notice that. Once you begin to recognize that the world is also more like a musical instrument than just some dead physical object,

[35:21]

Well, the world is more like a baby's head you support in your hand. More like a lover than some dead physical object. Dogen says, treat the physical world as if it were your own eyesight. So your hands are kind of physical mantra practice. So instead of chanting something, where you create a verbal repetitious modulation that goes underneath your thinking mind, You begin to find an awareness, locate, find an awareness in your hands that stays present in your hands even while you're talking and doing other things.

[36:48]

And much of your intelligence, your problems, your thinking, your feeling are actually in your hands. Some people's hands are very little different than their feet. They're often cold, full of calluses and so forth. You know, thick pieces of skin. Hornhaut, yeah. But part of one of the things that you begin to notice if you practice is your hands are always warm. That means your consciousness is reaching into your body. So the first step is you begin to be able to maintain a particular posture of the hands throughout Saga.

[38:16]

And sometimes you lose it and your thumbs fall down. In this posture, your thumbs are kind of barometer. When they're down, it means your mind is too relaxed. And when they're pushed up, it means you're thinking too much. It's quite clear. It's true. Making. So the first step is you begin to be able to take a posture, go into zazen mind, basically disappear, but still the attention to your mudra of your hands doesn't disappear.

[39:17]

And then you begin to be able to spread this attention or awareness in your hands to other parts of your body and then finally throughout your body. And then you begin to be able to bring that feeling to waking and zazen time, ordinary life and zazen time. So your body begins to get a kind of, to be able to live in a physical presence that's continuous. And that's part of what I mean by living in a stream of consciousness or living in a stream of Zen. You begin to feel a continuous presence in your body, again, a kind of dignity in your body. It doesn't leave you.

[40:37]

And it's so continuous, you can just relax into it and let it take care of you. But this kind of physical presence is most directly open to you through the hand mudra. So this would be one example of living in a stream of Zen, a phrase I could use. Now James Joyce speaks about the most common contemporary use of a stream of something is James Joyce's idea of a stream of consciousness.

[41:40]

So what he means by that is an associative stream of association I think is important for Zen practice too. Someone else asked me, Sig, Sigrun, is she still here? There you are, Sigrun, asked me, she asked me about the eyes, is that right? What did you, you were surprised that, why don't you say it in German? Yeah, why don't you say that in German, in Deutsch.

[42:42]

I had gotten used to it. It was the first time I'd seen meditation in yoga. It was with my eyes closed, and now I had 20 minutes with my body. I had to get my eyes closed, and at one point I heard a little gurgling. It was a shock. I sat down on a small chair and sat down. Yeah, I want to stop in a few minutes, by the way. But let me respond to what you said. This idea of having your eyes slightly open or slightly closed is typical of Zen practice. I went from Hamburg, I went to Kassel and Ulrike and I, and we saw the documenta, documenta you say?

[44:09]

And I would describe one aspect of the documenta is a disruption of the familiar. Or disrupting familiar. In other words, you walk into a room. What's more familiar than bricks or cinder blocks? You see them all the time. They're part of the silent majority of your life. They're often present and not noticed. Until you find 40 of them in a straight line across your living room rug. And the familiar has disrupted you.

[45:11]

And in a way, what Zazen wants to do, what Zen style does, And Zen is very particular about posture because it tries to bring all the teachings and schools of Buddhism into a way that's taught through the posture. So if you look at Buddhist statues, if you look carefully, you'll see that their eyes are always open. Because the usual way is your eyes are closed or your eyes are open. But Buddhism wants to say your eyes are not either the usual posture or not any old way.

[46:24]

But in a particular posture that disrupts the familiar. So it actually takes some time, like maintaining your posture of your hands, it takes quite a while to maintain a posture of the eyes. But there's no rigidity, there's no sort of secret Buddhist police watching your eyes, you know. In America, they have these thieves now who steal credit card telephone numbers by standing at an airport with a movie camera from a distance, and they film everybody making phone calls. Then they go home and sell the phone numbers. They see you dialing in.

[47:25]

But there's no Buddhist secret police filming you from a distance to see if your eyes are open or not, you know? So if you want to close your eyes, please close your eyes. If you want to open your eyes, open your eyes. But once you know there's a particular posture, then the closed eyes becomes a particular posture. It's not any old way. You've made a decision. You prefer to sit with your eyes closed. That's okay. Sometimes I do. But the effort is the beginning of posture or occasionally where you can feel the difference when you also know this middle posture, which is not sleeping, not awaking.

[48:44]

And Zazen is not sleeping and not waking. Zazen is a middle posture. And so the eyes being a little bit open are a kind of symbol of and a practice of this mind which is neither waking nor sleeping. Now it's getting time enough to we could start thinking about ending so we can have sleeping. The sense of practice is that there's a quality of a stream to your life already.

[49:53]

And the... Question then is, how do you dip into it? Or how do you let it surface in your life sometimes? Or how do you enter it so you're continuously present in it? And you could say that Zen Buddhist practice is organized around these possibilities. Dipping into the stream. Recognizing it. letting it come into the surface of your life, or entering it continuously.

[51:03]

And that's what this... Maybe we need to close the window here. By the way, since always there's some people who can't make it Friday evening, does anyone have a, I'm just wondering if it, I don't know if anybody has anything to say about it, but I'm wondering if it might be better just to start an hour earlier on Saturday morning.

[52:06]

An hour later Saturday morning for Miriam. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud. So... there's a lot of practices that have been designed to enter you into a kind of physical, non-conceptual stream. And those practices are reinforced, of course, in a monastic setting, because everyone does them. It would be like trying to do a sashin all by yourself in your room for seven days.

[53:15]

At least for a beginner, even for somebody experienced, it would be almost impossible. Zumindest für einen Anfänger, selbst für jemanden, der schon ziemlich erfahren ist, ist das fast unmöglich. Am Morgen des dritten Tages fällt einem sicherlich etwas anderes ein, was man tun könnte. Also jetzt ist die Zeit, einfach ein Nickerchen auf meinem Kissen zu halten. But what's strange about it, if you're in Sesshin, you kind of, here's these folks sitting on either side of you and they look totally motionless. And sometimes they are nearly motionless. And you think, okay, and you sort of pull yourself up and try to sit.

[54:15]

And you find your own strength in that. It's definitely your own strength. But you find it from the person on either side of you. So somehow you find your own strength through the people around you. So in lay practice, that's quite difficult to do. And as I said last night, the way the teachings or practice instructions are given in a monastic setting is you're just told to do them. And everyone else does that. So you always sit with your hands like this. And when you're walking, you always walk like this. I mean all day long, your hands are either in this posture or this posture. And you cannot do this inside your personality.

[55:49]

You have to move outside the ordinary bounds of how you think of yourself to hold your hands in one position all day long. And suddenly, at some point it's possible. Because somebody said to you, walk around all day like this. And you could forget about it and walk around all day like this, you know. People say, I'm sorry I can't hear you, I have my thumb in my ear. So, I mean, this sounds cookie to you, but it's a very condensed way to... make you live in a different territory than you usually live.

[57:05]

And that's what this koan is about. And this koan is specifically about enlightenment. And I'm happy to entertain questions about the koan. And next summer or next year, I'm thinking of doing some or most of the seminars perhaps each on a particular koan. So we'll read it together and try to look at it together over a couple of days.

[58:08]

Since that wasn't my intention, at least initially with this seminar, so I think we'll just leave it open if you want to bring up something about it. But if you want to, and the question I'm responding to people's questions in a way here, if you want to practice in your daily life, you have to take one thing and try to do it all the time. Or one thing and try to do it often. And there's various alternatives, various possibilities. There's lots of possibilities. And we can discuss quite a number of them. which will make you, as they say in the terminology, a stream-enterer.

[59:22]

You somehow have to get one hand in the water. It's like you're going around through the day, but nobody notices it, but one of your hands is in water all the time. Or one foot is in water. Or your stomach is in water. Or your heart chakra is flooded Or maybe there's some phrase you're repeating that's in the water, in the stream. A phrase you're repeating outside the usual thinking. And when you can actually do that, you're called actually technically a stream-enterer.

[60:30]

And it says, I think, in this koan, one phrase covers everything. Yeah, it says in the bottom of the first page there, They hardly realize that the phrase of the ancients covers everywhere. Like the sky supports everywhere. Like the sky supports everywhere like the earth. So that's taking a phrase, which could be anything virtually, and entering it into a kind of stream outside the ordinary activity of your life.

[61:36]

And you can't do this Always understanding why you're doing it. Because if it's always in the realm of understanding, it's not outside your life. Inside your bigger life, but outside your usual life. So the only way to do it is with faith. You somehow have to have faith or you have to be desperate to say, hey, this is my last life raft. It's like the story of the one-eyed turtle.

[62:37]

Which always wanted to see what was up above the ocean, but couldn't. And then one day over the great ocean it noticed a board floating with a knot hole in it. This story doesn't make a great deal of sense, but it is a traditional Chinese Buddhist story. Somehow this deep sea ocean turtle swam to the surface and grabbed the board and put its one eye to the knothole and was able to view the world. Somehow, but even if it doesn't make quite a lot of sense, it's a very vivid image. Is she saying the same things I'm saying? Sometimes I think she's giving an entirely different lecture.

[64:02]

No, I'm saying one thing. She decides to heck with that blind girl. Let him play with her. She starts telling something else. I like that. None of us would know what we're doing. You could take turns listening to me or her, you know. So, you know, you need some practice like this blind turtle. You need to find this board that you kind of hold on to. So now I'd like to, well, I think that's enough for that.

[65:03]

I'd like to listen to you if you have something you'd like to find out about practice or know about practice or something I could do to make this more useful for you. Nothing to do, no place to go. Is that a koan place? Nothing to do and no place to go? Yeah. No, it's something I made up. But it's entirely within the language of Zen. No. You know, the Dogen emphasizes the so-called genjo koan.

[66:22]

And the genjo koan means the koan of your everyday life, your everyday situation. And sometimes that means we don't have to... understand koans because, you know, everyday life is the fundamental koan. And yeah, that's true. It's true that everyday life is the, your own life is the fundamental koan. But it doesn't say your everyday problem, it says your everyday koan. So it doesn't mean you don't study other koans.

[67:23]

It means koans are a way of thinking, a kind of Zen Buddhist language. Koans are just a way of thinking, a Zen Buddhist language. And you can't use your ordinary life situation as a koan unless you understand the way of koan thinking and apply it to your everyday life. And as we spoke last night in response to what you asked about the eyes, the eyes neither open nor closed is a kind of mid position between our usual states of mind, waking and sleeping. And koans are an extraordinary form of literature in my opinion that's somewhere in between dreams and ordinary language.

[68:49]

It's a kind of philosophical, enlightened poetry. And it's a special kind of literature. No other culture or religion has produced anything quite like Koan. And Zen Buddhists, even though they don't use koans, it's endemic or it's pervasive in their way of thinking. So it's a way of peering into the fabric of your life. And to see the fundamental spiritual activity in your life that you don't usually notice.

[69:57]

Yeah. But what did you ask again? I'm still answering your question, but I forgot the question. I just asked whether it is a koan, your phrase. Yeah, okay. From a part of a koan. No, it's not. I made it up. But I made it up within the thinking of practicing with Suzuki Roshi. And it occurs in various forms. For instance, it's right here in page 88. At the bottom of the page. In the last paragraph. Thus one speaks freely. and acts freely, goes where his or her legs go.

[71:14]

In the spring moon, the flowers bloom. In the autumn, the leaves fall. There is the same sense of it, no place to go and nothing to do. is also expressed here in goes where his legs go. And on page 20 at the bottom, it says in the common... 87, I'm sorry. At the... In the commentary at the bottom, it says, after complete enlightenment, one is again the same as someone who is not yet enlightened. That also means no place to go and nothing to do. The challenge there is, can you come to the point where you completely don't need anything?

[72:37]

Where there's no strategies of self-improvement. And if enlightenment is a strategy of self-improvement, it's headed for defeat. So like right now in the group of us, could we be at a place this weekend without being the least bit depressed which being filled with causeless joy we don't care whether we live or die we have no plans for after this weekend I mean on one level you have plans for after this weekend but no This is a very fertile place to be.

[73:47]

No place to go, nothing to do. It's wonderful to be here with each other. What's missing? There's air. Trains going by. We're already there. No place to go and nothing to do. So you take a phrase like that, you just immerse yourself in the stream of the phrase. And in the spring moon, the flowers bloom. In the autumn, the leaves fall. I like the phrase in here. Where does it say...

[74:47]

The non-difference of all things doesn't mean that you add to a duck's legs and cut a crane's legs. Take a duck. Okay, duck, here we're going to add some crane's legs to you. He says, water can level things. Just level them with water. But as Yangshan said, even water has nothing to depend on. So for a moment, you know, this weekend maybe we can also have nothing to depend on.

[76:17]

So you see, I made up the phrase, but it's completely in the language of koans. And it's a phrase I practiced with for about a year and a quarter, I believe. And I've told you often that it took me about that long before it just was always present with me with no effort. But it took over a year of faithful effort to keep reminding myself of the phrase before it was just present. So this is very classic way of practicing Zen is to use a phrase to enter the stream. The only thing most of us are really mindful of is money. Most of the time we know which pocket it's in.

[77:38]

Where our purse is. Whether we give it away, spend it, lose it, or save it, we always know. Yeah. And we could choose some other objects to be mindful of. We seem to do it without too much effort with money. For some people. And with keys, you know, usually with your keys. You need some kind of Buddhist praise as a key or... Enlightenment money. Yeah. Okay, some other question, statement? Yes. You said you were practicing the sentence.

[78:41]

You were reminding yourself of dissenters and saying to yourself again and again in different situations. That's exactly right. Want to say that in Deutsch? I practiced other things during the time. But they kind of floated on the surface of this basic practice. And I took the phrase because I was always going somewhere or doing something. I was a student at the University of California in Asian Buddhist history. studies and so forth.

[80:12]

And the history of science and technology. And I was also working full-time for the university as doing adult education programs. I was assistant head of engineering and sciences extension. And I was married. And I had a one or two year old child, little girl. And I was practicing with Suzuki Roshi. So I had quite a lot to do and places to go. So every time I thought, I have to go somewhere, I said, there's no place to go. But I went there, but I said, there's no place to go.

[81:32]

I felt so free. And I had to do all these things. I said, oh, there's nothing to do. So I did each thing. Some got done, some didn't. Oh, no. but I knew it was working when I forgot it for three months and I didn't care that I forgot it and one day I remembered and I didn't say to myself oh you bad boys forgot for three months And I didn't say, you evil boy, you've forgotten the sentence for three months. I just started again, oh, no place to go, nothing to do.

[82:36]

And I used to repeat it very, very like a mantra, no place to go. That's a little crazy, you know. So I just repeated this sentence like a mantra. But as I said last night, and I don't think you all really get the importance of what I was saying about the hands, is recognizing the mind in your hands is a kind of physical mantra. When you take your hands and you put them in the mudra, you're putting them into the stream of your spiritual life. And you put them there in your conscious state of mind. And it stays there intact through your zazen mind.

[83:46]

So it again becomes something that's neither only in zazen mind or neither only in conscious mind. Your hands become like two psychedelic experiences. which you can bring together. And they begin to combine both the presence of zazen mind and the presence of conscious mind is in your hands. And you can begin during the day, feel your hands are a kind of mantra, even if they're just writing or working or Shaking hands. This is the sound of one hand chanting. Okay, something else. Let's have someone new here. I have a question according to what does it mean to be Zen Master?

[85:15]

I haven't figured that one out. It's not quite clear to me. I have a question according to what does it mean to be Zen Master? Well, I'm asking the question because I dreamed once that I had contact with the Zen Master, but I didn't go to him. Are you ready now? It's good, you know, because dreams tell us things, of course.

[86:16]

I would say it showed you some kind of desire, not necessarily Zen, but whatever represents a spiritual life to you. And made clear to you that you have made a decision not to do it. But this is how I would understand it if the dream happened to me. I would understand it to making clear to me that I decided not to do it. And the dream would make clear to me that I could do it. That at a deep level I knew the possibility was there. And I had to understand when I was ready. And I had to understand also that it was a decision.

[87:19]

And if you were practicing Zen, you would now take a koan. you'd turn this into a kind of koan like when will I be ready you might take that as a phrase when will I be ready or am I ready and you can let the phrase change I'm feeling ready. I'm ready for anything. Accept me. I accept you. You can let this kind of phrase take different forms.

[88:24]

And when you do it, it creates an aroused state of mind ready to understand. A little simple thing, it's a little bit like this, happened in the Sashin, House of Stila. And Ulrike told me early on that Willy Brandt was very sick and might die. So in the middle of the night around two o'clock a siren went off very loudly. And so Barik and I were sleeping in the same room and I woke up and I said, Willy Brandt is dead.

[89:34]

I was trying to be a good liberal German. And Ulrike woke up and she said from her bed, Chernobyl is blown up or something. Yeah. So anyway, and then they started two different areas, sirens started going, you know? Three different areas. So maybe you can just say in German about your feeling hearing the siren, what it made you feel about impermanence. Man muss sich vorstellen, dass man in einem Sechin ist, wo man sowieso sehr wenig Schlaf hat und die wenige Zeit von Schlaf, die man hat, also sehr ängstlich bewacht, dass man da auch wirklich schlafen kann.

[90:50]

Man ist gerade eingeschlafen oder im Tieftraum und dann gehen also diese Sirenen los und da ist man sehr roh mit allen möglichen The first stage for me was simply fear. Did something like Chernobyl happen again? And in a session I didn't have the opportunity to listen to the radio or to be in contact with the outside world. And yes, there was a kind of worry in the immediate present. Did something happen? Should we run out, try to find out what happened? Then the next shift for me was, yes, A lot of memories came suddenly. I grew up, spent a lot of time with my grandparents and grew up with stories from the war, where my parents and my grandparents just had to go out at night in an air-protected cellar in such a situation.

[92:01]

And for years and night after night. And they didn't have any sleep either. And I'm still thinking about whether I'll get enough sleep from the skis. And that's how it turned out very strongly for me. And I realized at the same time how much I was working hard. I had no control over my surroundings. If I sit in a chair, if I take care of a spiritual life, a conscious life, a life that hurts someone, a Buddhist life, I can strain myself as I want. A siren can always start at any time, at any moment, and change everything completely. And in that moment I felt a great freedom and an enormous relief. Yes, then I can really give up. And that was then of course also in the middle of a Sesshinom and then also really in this room that opens up there.

[93:09]

It was very nice.

[93:09]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_71.64