No, I spoke about what I spoke about partly of course because I spoke about it. And partly because Ulrike requested it. Yeah, and so forth. Yeah, and maybe it's of some interest to you. It's more Buddhist than I like to speak about. But I also... It seems to me it's also a demonstration of the possibilities of the world.

[01:15]

And perhaps the fruitfulness of developing particular way to envision the world. The fruitfulness of of developing a way, a particular way to envision the world. And conceptualize what it means to be human. And perhaps to reposition or reconceptualize how we understand our relationships with others. So it seems to me that You have to tell me whether I'm talking through my rain hat or not.

[02:34]

Talking through your hat is an expression in English. Which means you're not saying anything. So gross meat hoot. It seems to me that wild conceptual, wild constellation therapy belongs in the larger field of psychology and psychotherapy. It may be particular enough and unusual enough that it actually is potentially a re-conceptualization of what it means to be a human being.

[03:47]

Yeah, a re-conceptualization of what our relationships with others are. Because we could certainly say the experiences of meditation resulted in a reconceptualization of what a human being is, what it means to be alive. And what over some centuries Buddhists found is that the process of articulating this new conceptualization of what it is to be alive.

[05:02]

actually, in the case of Buddhism, took centuries to develop. And while the major research and articulation has been done, It's still being done as Buddhism finds itself within the paradigms of the West. So I'm asking in a way, do you think that constellation work is in some ways a reconceptualization of what it is to be a human being.

[06:15]

Yes, our gender? Yes, absolutely. Yes, this is part of why I decided that I absolutely wanted to learn this. You just wanted to be different. What I experienced I experienced something that till then I only knew through religious texts. Brothers and sisters, I really experienced that. a group of people unfamiliar to me and therefore in some ways also not I didn't have friendly feelings for them and two exhibitions later they were my youngest relatives friends, relatives

[07:26]

And after two constellations, I was intimately related to them as a kind of relative or a friend. My feeling was that I became a part of an organism. A single... cell only separated from other cells only through a permeable membrane. Und das hat sich auch noch nicht nur auf Legende, sondern auch auf Tote dieser Aufstellung sozusagen erschienen, sie bezogen. Not only did I relate to living human beings in that way, but also to dead people who appeared in such constellations. And then even to embodied ideas or concepts. Good. Anyone else? Coming from a Rinzai background and having done koan training for a while.

[09:13]

Maybe Deutsch first. I'm coming from a Rinzai background and have done some koan training. And I also have done constellation work. And I'm happy, and we've already talked about that at the dining table. When I started practicing Zazen, I felt that Buddhism and psychology and Buddhism were separate. The Zen monastery I practiced at, you weren't allowed to talk about psychology.

[10:22]

And in Esalen or another training context, psychological training context, Buddhism wasn't really included. And now, step by step, it's coming together. from my limited experience of koan training and constellation work if it's done well it's the same koanstallation yes it's working from both sides yeah that's wonderful yeah in you Someone else?

[11:47]

Yes? Yeah, we have constellated a koan here in this room before. And when you presented this Buddhist analysis of sensation, perception and conception, how they are related and how they can be differentiated, And I thought maybe it would be fruitful to use these three concepts to do a so called core core transformation constellation you could you could constellate these three and meet them and they are also organized in a certain hierarchy

[13:03]

And I would be interested in experimenting with that tonight. Tonight? Okay. I can come, right? Okay, good. What did he say? Oh, for those who want to participate, you can do that. Good. Someone else has some thoughts along this line. Yeah, you talked about the three Tantian fields. Mm-hmm. And also compared it to the chakra system.

[14:15]

Related it to the chakra system. . What are the characteristics that you would assign to these three different fields? You also talked about them as animals. What kind of animals would they be? I think the best way is to try it out. Ja, ich glaube, das Beste ist, es einfach auszuprobieren. No guided Tantian teachings. Ich habe keine Anleitung für die Tantian-Lehre. So, you had the concept, the three concepts, the interrelated concepts.

[15:17]

Jetzt hast du dieses Konzept oder die miteinander in Verbindung stehenden Konzepte. And you just try it out. Und dann probierst du es einfach aus. And I walked out at lunchtime and Alexandra was off on the side there and not eating and I said, what the heck are you doing? She says, I'm trying out the three absorptions. I know that one of the things happens when I do it is a kind of auric field appears around objects. Kind of white. flame around it.

[16:28]

Kind of white flame. Yeah. Anyway, so I think that the fun part is to try it out. See what happens. And Yeah, I assumed you would give such an answer. Well, I'm glad you know me so well. No membranes. No membranes. She said there's membranes in there. Okay, someone else. Yes. Yes. You have to speak louder than the rain. When I, if I understood correctly, when you said that the perception, for example, of the stone,

[17:41]

That it disappears when you step over the stone. And I'm asking myself, what if the perception remains and doesn't disappear? And related to that for me is a question that I'm dealing with today, a real question about letting go. My impression of myself right now is that I'm faced with the task of letting go, letting go of people, of behaviors and reactions to others.

[18:54]

And I wonder if this idea of having to let go leads to being tied even more? . And I wonder if that's related to what you brought up yesterday, this sense of being inseparable. You know, at Crestone, we have many rocks. In Crestone, there are many rocks. And the mountain has been, for millennia, rolling rocks down the hill. There's a few around as big as this building. And there's lots of little ones. And I love rocks. And sometimes I go out for a walk around and I don't like to know where I'm going.

[20:20]

I just sort of start wandering. And how can I say? the practice of inseparability, which, in my experience, dissolves interiority and exteriority. Um, um, I find I'm walking inside the flesh of the world. And the stones are like an oriental rug come to life.

[21:22]

And, you know, you see literally in a walk thousands of rocks. And every now and then I see one I'd like to bring back to my room. And sometimes I see a big one that I'd like to bring back to my grave. No, I mean... but then I know I have to tell Christian and Dan can you get a tripod out there and move you know but then I try to keep in mind where those nice rocks were But since I've just been wandering, I hardly know where I am anyway.

[22:45]

So it's a particularly hard job for me to say, okay, this really pretty rock here, which my pockets are already too full. is sort of near that tree which looks like every other tree, etc. And when we went out looking for trails, I was trying to remember where certain stones were. So I... Certain stones stay in my mind.

[23:49]

The percept stays in my mind. Because I want something from that percept. I want to go back to that stone. So I have to sometimes say, I have enough stones. So sometimes you have to find a way, I don't know if this is good advice, to notice what you want from the percept you want to go back to. And instead of trying to remove it in general, Item by item, where you notice there's something you want to go back to, you try to remove yourself from that.

[24:53]

I mean, that's pretty obvious advice. And in the only sense it might be useful. Is that it's not done in general, it's done percept by percept. Okay. Yes. Christa. I want to come back to this concept of sensation only. There is something in me, these individual sensations,

[26:38]

I'm experiencing a certain kind of resistance, these singular sensations. To put these singular sensations next to each other as if there wasn't anything integrating there. Also because I have a feeling for something that is integrative there. There is something there. I allow for a kind of incubation for what that could be.

[27:51]

During the lecture, the aspect that revealed itself... My lecture? And the aspect that revealed itself was maybe that is space? Maybe it's the body? And when Alexandra and also you spoke about this new concept of what it means to be a human being, it could maybe point into the direction of a new humanity, even though that has a kind of

[29:00]

Kitschy, schmaltzy. Kitschy, schmaltzy, new age, etc. But let's do it. And so I wanted to ask how you think about that. Yeah, yes. Sometimes I speak about paratactic depth. And paratactic is a word or parataxis is a word which means things are beside each other but not related.

[30:14]

Parataktisch oder parataxis ist ein Wort, das beschreibt, dass die Dinge nebeneinander stehen, aber nicht miteinander verbunden sind. Das könnten wir wechselseitige Unabhängigkeiten nennen. Und wie ich neulich gesagt habe, It's related to a movie term, a cinema term, where you show different images that are unrelated, but the audience then starts trying to make a relationship. Okay, so there's lots of things in this room. People, persons.

[31:24]

Different ways of dressing. Different ages, different genders. Different people. attentional bodies. And they're somewhat related. Some aspects are very related, that's why we're here together. But some aspects are quite unrelated. Now the danger is in our habits of perception. We see what's related. And we don't notice too much the unrelated. But the unrelated is often a kind of unconscious or non-conscious dimensionality.

[32:41]

Yeah, it's like in a movie, if you were a filmmaker. In every scene you might have a blue object. And at the end of the movie you'd have some feeling from these blue objects even though they never related to the story. And you couldn't even conceptualize your feeling, but there was a feeling because of the blue object. Okay. Okay. Now, why I say paratactic depths is because often my experience is there's another story being told by those things which are just beside each other that are not part of the main narrative.

[34:16]

There's sub-narratives and non-narratives. Okay. What such a thing as a field of mind does is it... relates to the paratactic depth of the situation and not just the narrative level of the situation. Okay. So... To allow the non-narrative aspects to have a presence is part of sensation only. ...

[35:31]

ist Teil dieser Übung von nur Sinnesempfindung. Someone we practice with in Creston said to me that her experience of sensation only She finds herself in an experiential, an experienced world. Now this is just her image of her experience. And I'm not trying to make it logical or something. And sometimes an image of an experience can be a turning point in your life even though you can't explain it except you can just describe it.

[37:03]

Her experience is that she's in the midst of a lot of threads. And those threads go in all kinds of directions. And they're all horizontal. And they're narrative. A causal. They lead to this, that and the other. And there's different layers of this these causally articulated threads. Some related to her practice life, some her family life, some what she might do in the future.

[38:10]

But sometimes, through the practice of sensation only, all the threads go vertically. And all of the narratives disappear. And the threads are still there, but she feels bathed in light. Okay. Sounds good. I want to do it. Okay. Okay. But it is interesting that things like practicing sensation only, particularly in a context of meditating and so forth, can be transformative in a way you can only describe as an image.

[39:20]

Now it's five minutes to six. But... The first round is over, the second round is over, and the third round can be three hits or ten hits. So is there anything anybody wants to say or add? Of course. Okay. This morning in meditation I worked with the word inseparable. For me at first it was...

[40:22]

unfamiliar and unusual. I heard sounds and birds and changes in perception. I experienced... and that in conjunction with inseparable. And the feeling that arose was, and all that is also me. It was a little shock. Because I also started thinking about people I don't like. And this word inseparable became a kind of affirmation.

[41:44]

to accept all of that. Then I was flooded with a deep feeling of love. And my sense was that the expression of inseparability is love. Well, I couldn't ask for more than that. One little word. Now, did you use a German word or an English word? Was that for you a German or an English word? Okay. One thing that the earlier discussion made me recognize, probably recognize, is that

[43:13]

The Rinzai approach to koans, or since Hakuin in Japan at least, which I've done with Yamada Mumunroshi, a Rinzai teacher, I've done koan, is that it's a it's a the koan establishes a context between the practitioner and the student and the teacher and it's pretty much a practiced within that context and within the practitioner's own life. And it's often given by the teacher to the practitioner.

[44:29]

Okay. Now in the Soto tradition, and as far as I know, the pre-Hakuin tradition. Koans were presented in Taisho, in lectures. And the practitioner decided whether to pick up on the koan or not. Und der Praktizierende hat dann entschieden, ob er oder sie das Koan aufgreifen will oder nicht. And often all Taishos in my tradition are commentaries either implicitly or explicitly on koans.

[45:33]

Und in meiner Tradition sind Vorträge oft... In the early days of Western scholarship, people sometimes said that Dogen didn't use koans. He's a so... Japanese soto teaching. But in fact, all of Dogen's writings are commentaries on koans. But still, in our tradition, my tradition, koans are more specifically worked on, still one-to-one, the practitioner. So I wasn't joking with my... co-installation, my familiarity with, to some extent at least, with constellation practice, may be

[46:55]

may have influenced the way I work with koans now because we have these two weeks a year I do at Johanneshof where I don't as much as possible I know nothing about the koan before I start although I may not familiar with it I can't not know it, usually after all these years. But I actively don't think about it or prepare. And then we have something like 40 people. And we inject the koan into the situation a little bit like a consolation over several days.

[48:17]

Yeah, and so I say something in the morning and Everybody else discusses in the afternoon and so forth. And the koan starts appearing like a constellation in the group and emerging as a group behavior. And then I can start and we can start together identifying certain things that are happening because of the presence of the koan as a constellation. And it seems to be an extremely fruitful way for people to do it because they keep coming back year after year to do it again.

[49:20]

So I think it is a koan-stallation. And thank you for your help in developing Western Buddhism. Thank you. And thank you for your help in developing Western Buddhism. I'm serious. I'm kind of joking, but I'm serious. It sounds like the third round of the Han is just ending. So let's have evening repast. And what time shall we meet again for sensation perception and concept? What time?

[50:24]

Okay. And if you want to do a co-installation at some evening, I could think about if we could do it. What did I just get myself into? Okay.

[50:38]

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