Well, there's a lot of aspects to what you just said. Lenny, you also have a question? Yes, someone else? Lenny? No. Do you have a question, Lenny? Or some comment? Is it all right to ask a question? Were you about to say something? I was going to respond to Herbert. You can ask too. No, go ahead. I like complexity, so bring up something else. What is the... to see the discrimination between, if there is one, between the connectedness and the continuity. Okay, I have to come back to that. Okay. Okay, now, Ulrike's statement, question, etc., lecture, short seminar, is all tied up in... is all assumed in the most...

[01:26]

famous and common question in Zen, which is, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? And we have to, you know, really we're, if you're going to practice, you have to deal with that question. And again, we talked about that to some extent in the seminars in March. If you look at His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh and Suzuki Roshi, there's a surprising similarity between them.

[02:38]

They're more like each other than either is Vietnamese, Tibetan, Japanese, etc., This is because I am sure they know themselves fundamentally. Now, His Holiness may say publicly, you know, I'm not talking with you to try to convert you to Buddhism. And of course he I'm sure that's what he means. And I know if I talk to sometimes a large audience at a conference or something usually I'm making no attempt to convince them that Buddhism is anything that they should do.

[03:56]

My experience of people is each person is quite beautiful as they are and I have no interest in changing them. But at the same time, His Holiness does and used to especially have Western disciples. to whom he was definitely trying to introduce the practice of Buddhism and this study of how we exist fundamentally. So I'm in the context of Johannes Hoff and Crestone and in particular seminars. I am definitely trying to introduce you to this fundamental, what I understand and experience as a fundamental way of being.

[05:14]

At the same time, we again have to ask ourselves this question, why has Buddhism come to the West? Why did Sukhiroshi come to the West? Why am I sitting here with you? Why did you come to this seminar? To listen to Ulrike. I must I guess bring up this idea of broken lineages again Again, the example of, you know, you go to college in the 60s, the university, and you think you went to the university to get an education.

[06:48]

But actually you went to the university to become a communist. Or a leftist revolutionary. Or to sit in Berkeley and bring the university to a halt. Now, you may not have known that's why you went to college or university. But if you actually looked at what those students listened to, what songs they listened to, what poetry they read, what politics they, what experience they had of their culture, On one level they went, yes, to get a career and get their future sealed, samadhi sealed by a PhD. But in their heart they may have gone because they wanted to change their society.

[08:09]

Or in their heart they weren't satisfied with the way the life their culture offered them. So there is no question in my mind that you are here from a personal causality, a personal lineage. And you're studying Buddhism because it's a Western thing to do. Again, I look at William James, the American pragmatist and transcendentalist.

[09:13]

He asked himself questions like, how How does our... How do we have a unity of experience? All this stuff comes in through our senses and so forth, but what constitutes a unity of experience? And he said things like, reality buds from our experience. But he could only take this so far. And there's an interesting thing about these American philosophers. They weren't burdened by the articulateness of European philosophy.

[10:14]

And they had this sense of doing things from scratch, from the beginning. And they were actually quite influenced also by the Upanishads. But I find more than European philosophers at the same time, they kept looking at their actual experience rather than just how this made sense in terms of philosophy. So they came up with a philosophy very much, and where the word pragmatism comes from, very much referenced often, always in their own experiences. And then into Whitehead, they came up with something very close to Buddhism.

[11:36]

And Whitehead? Yeah, Whitehead's a philosopher. But it got stopped. Why did it get stopped? Because he didn't know yoga. They had no praxis to carry it to the next step. And there was no master narrative in the culture to carry it to the next step. And let me come back to my own experience. I was deeply influenced by a lot of people, one of them being Ezra Pound.

[12:42]

And I bring this up again. I didn't understand why his poetry in the school around him was called imagist. And I didn't understand it until I saw that the poetry before Pound tried to take received forms, the sonnet for example, and pour their feelings into those forms. And they thought we got to the point they couldn't do that with a feeling of authenticity. So what Pound said, and what these folks said, was the single image, often a phrase or a word, when you bring your attention to it,

[13:49]

the form of the poem is in that single image. It opens up from that single image. There's form enfolded in it. And this is very, very similar to the Buddhist use of mantra and turning words and koans. So I would say that Pound and Emerson and Thoreau and so forth are in America a kind of Western lineage that leads to Buddhism. And I find in Europe, if I read Wittgenstein and Kant and Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida, I find Western lineages that are leading directly to Buddhism.

[15:10]

Because this is a human teaching, not Buddhist or Asian or anything. It's just a human teaching. Sukhirishi came, he says very specifically, he came to America and had trust and confidence in coming to America because he was coming through this human teaching, not through Asian teaching. And he said that he needed to find, because his life was not going to be long enough, he needed to find already prepared students, and he thought the best preparation would be American pragmatism and transcendentalism.

[16:26]

So we have a more complex picture here than just Asian and Western and your own culture and foreign cultures. I think if you study yourself and while you're here you see that while you may be now joining to some extent an Asian Buddhist lineage, And it may speak to you. But it speaks to you because your Western experience and your Western lineage has brought you to this point. What makes what we're doing so interesting.

[17:42]

So I do think you have to look at your inner request. Now to grow down into your own culture. Okay. Yes? that I set up in a different area a year and a half ago.

[18:47]

What does Zen Buddhism need? What does Zen Buddhism need? That should actually be one question. Or do both of them not need it? Or do both beings need it? Well, under the aspect that to a certain degree each question has its own answer or provides its own answer, I would like to ask the same question like I did one and a half year ago. Why does Buddhism need Zen and why does Zen need Buddhism? Why does a human being maybe need both or nothing? But to me Zen is inseparable from Buddhism. I almost would say it's the original Buddhism.

[19:54]

At least it's the Buddhism that tries to root practice in the actual experience of meditation. And there are certain rules of Yogacara and of Zen, which is that you only accept that Buddhism which arises from your experience. But that then requires a discipline. That you don't study more Buddhism than you can experience. And you make an actual... What? That's why I study so little. No. It's also good to have a certain humor in one's wisdom.

[20:59]

But I'm serious about this. You don't study more than you experience. It's a serious mistake to get your study very much ahead of your experience. And it's very difficult for scholars to really base, to really trust their experience. So it's okay to know something generally, but you should keep your experience and your study very closely related. Okay, something else? I didn't really do justice to everything Ulrike brought up, but I have to start another seminar. I'm still hanging on that idea of the core.

[22:17]

And on the other hand, of the core, what Ulrike said before. And as an idea or as a seeking for something, something which is really reliable deep inside of me, we have that seeking. And most times we combine that with a materialistic idea, materialistic feeling. And on the other hand, there is that idea of each moment continuity. From my feeling, it's combined that idea of the core and that idea or experience of each moment continuity. But that each moment continuity, it's not materialistic. If there are link, which is the link between that core and that each moment continuity? .

[23:24]

I am still ... this idea of ​​the core concerns me, it is also there in my psychology, and there is an idea of ​​this core as a last security in oneself, but this core is connected with the idea that it is something material, at least an experience of a material, On the one hand, there is this idea, each moment continuity, this continuity in a single moment. And for me, between the core and this single moment, there is a closeness. And I ask, what is this connection? Or how is this relationship? How does it connect? I haven't read this article of Hillman's.

[24:41]

I have looked at his new book, which has, I guess, become controversial. And I don't like it very much. And it's his first big commercial book, kind of a single-idea book. And I have almost all the books he's ever published and I found them very fruitful. And he's the one kind of philosophical psychotherapist who is most, basically his ideas are quite empathetic with Buddhism. And he's friends of a lot of people I know, including Gary Snyder and so forth. So there's some... fabric of some mutual understanding between us, us and him, I think.

[26:03]

So I haven't tried to really figure out where this new book is coming from. But Ulrike says he defends the criticism by saying it's not a theory, it's a mythology. And that feels like it's the problem I have with it. Buddhism would never say, oh, this teaching is a mythology. All teachings are open to experience, development, cultivation. And the idea that there's some core in us that's not cultivatable is again very much a theological idea.

[27:08]

I don't think he says that it's not cultivatable. In my reading of his book, he does. And he gives lots of examples in the book, this book, of how if you go against this inner core, it leads to problems, and even if you do go against it, sometimes it's what comes out later in life and so forth. And I'm sure this is true. If you have some inner belief about who you are, what you are, what you should become, And that stays there.

[28:32]

It's going to affect you all your life. And from a Buddhist point of view, that's a stone in the air or a stone in the gut. I would say that we do... Sukhiroshi spoke a lot about an innermost request. But if you said, well, that inner request has taken a form of some mythology of who I am or who I really am at my core, this would be a mistake from Sukhiroshi's point of view. If you could separate pure feeling of that inner request

[29:33]

From the forms it took when you were five years old and the forms you took when you were eight years old. And you could keep sloughing off the forms it took. Like staying with the root feeling of the dream, but not getting stuck in the forms of the dream that arise from that root feeling. Then that inner request develops and is cultivated throughout your life. That's how I would see it. Then that inner request is part of the concrescence of the particular moment. Congrescence means to grow together. So this sense of the gathering in and growing together of each moment, I will speak about at some point.

[31:14]

For me, there's a wonderful mystery to Western culture That I... That is the creation, like our language, of many people. And it's some feeling I have in being here in contrast to being in America. But it becomes for me part of the field I cultivate through practice. And a field primarily based on signless states of mind. Or rather not culturally determined states of mind.

[32:36]

And Hillman really knows very little about actual practice. So I don't think he fully understands the alternative to just working with the contents of being. The radicalness of the teaching of emptiness has not been grokked by the West yet. That it's possible to know yourself through in a way that's free from the contents of being. Yes. This continuity, this story, you said, the story that one tells oneself, Lost.

[33:51]

Really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is that Deutsch? That's enough? Okay. English? Deutsch? In your backbone. I like this calligraphy of Kaz's. Because it's breath. But the left hand side, he's made very much like a kind of backbone. And as you know that Nagarjuna said, how do you, how do you put a, how do you, how do you straighten out a snake?

[34:55]

You said you put it in a bamboo. Can you imagine getting a snake and trying to stick it in bamboo? But it means to put your mind in your backbone. The mind is at least as slippery and dangerous as a snake. So you develop a subtle breath which you put into your backbone. But this is a big question. What happens There's various ways to establish continuity. So what we could speak about is the different ways of establishing continuity, which we've done occasionally, often in the past.

[36:10]

And the contrast between various ways of establishing continuity and that contrasted with establishing a unity of experience. In a unity of experience, when you know that, you don't need continuity. You need continuity to live, but you don't need continuity so that you don't feel lost. And if you're going to die comfortably, it's good to have a unity of experience. Because if you're dependent on continuity, you're really going to feel lost when you die. I'm going to lose my continuity.

[37:38]

Do we really die? I hope so. I'm quite happy being alive, but I will gladly die. And you know, one of the things that connects Christianity and Buddhism is the so-called founders are both persons who were willing to die. And one fruit of practice is to be willing to die. And not only willing, but ready. Christians say, well, he was also willing to continue living. This is why he was also ready to die.

[38:44]

Okay, I'm willing to continue living. Gladly, I gladly remain alive. I don't particularly want to go to paradise or I don't want any additional lives, but that's my personal preference. Yeah, we're getting too deep here, you know. So, anything else before we... Do you have something else? Yes. Yesterday evening you spoke about time and the present and the Chinese picture

[39:44]

the present can be understood as a room. As a space, yes. As a space. And now I want a connection between this imagine, the present as space, and so each moment, continuity, I can't fill it. You can't, but just by asking the question, it seems like your intuition is that you do understand it. Anyway, why don't you say what you said in German. My question is about the Chinese idea that the present is understood as space, For me it is somehow difficult to connect this with the Each-Moment Continuity, with this idea, as it stands there.

[40:59]

I can't put it together. Shall I go ahead from this point where we've gotten so far? Because there's somebody else who would like to bring up some stone in the air. Yes. Stone in the air doesn't help you die because it's just not heavy enough.

[42:05]

Sukhirishi, when he told this story, he talked about being sick. And He was very involved. He was feeling sick, and generally he had kind of a lousy state of mind. So he asked someone to go bring him a great big stone. And while he was lying down, the person put the big stone on his chest. And it wasn't big enough to kill him, but it was big enough to make him stop thinking. And he said, the stone was much more real than my thoughts, and so I felt better. The stone was much more real than his thoughts, and so he was much better off.

[43:15]

Yes. He did have a certain importance, the air stone. So it was important, the stone in here. Yeah, well, this was a real stone. Okay. Is it possible to repeat the question that we're addressing again? I got lost. There's someone returning. I lost my connection there. Don't worry. We all lost our connection. I'm going to try to pick up all these lost connections and carry them in the opposite direction. We've got a room full of broken lineages here. Okay. What she said was what's the connection between this each moment continuity and presence is space the present as space.

[44:40]

Our mind is simply not Our thinking mind is simply not subtle enough to deal with any real definitions of time and space. Sometimes I define time as the way things get out of the way of each other. Let's start somewhere. You have some experience of a mental world. And you have feelings and emotions.

[46:05]

And you have physical body. And you have the ability of the mind to have direction. And you can give some direction to mind. This is intention. And our basic practice in Zen is to take intention away. The intention to take intention away. And intention in general is riddled with stones in the air. Intention is loaded with half fulfilled desires and so forth. Habits and what other people want us to do.

[47:13]

So zazen is the basic posture, mental posture, inner posture. Zazen, as you well know, is uncorrected mind. It's interesting. Things come up you wouldn't expect. But more important, you're discovering that subtle place where you're letting things happen and not causing them to happen. And we bring our attention.

[48:21]

Attention is the seed of mind and the fruit of mind. Mind is a quality of intention. Emerson says the only thing that's sacred is the integrity of our own mind. But we usually don't experience our mind as having integrity. It's usually going in several directions at once. So... Sāsana practice is to let it go in all directions at once, but observe this happening. To create a wider and wider field of acceptance. And this wide field of acceptance, it itself becomes a kind of unity of experience.

[49:21]

And in doing this you are cultivating awareness. You are cultivating a wide absorbent awareness. And you can almost imagine a kind of clear liquid that will accept whatever is put into it. And it really takes time to do this. It makes a difference between sitting a lot and sitting a little. The practice of mindfulness, of course, also cultivates this wide accepting mind. But it is particularly and most fruitfully cultivated through meditation practice. Because it's most fruitfully cultivated through its merging with stillness.

[51:03]

And it's easier to discover physical stillness than it is to discover mental stillness. Okay, so you discover physical stillness. And that's also a kind of psychological stability. Because it's a stillness outside your psyche, outside the contents of mind. Real stillness can't be disturbed. Or it's not real stillness if it can be disturbed. So when you find this real rooted stillness, any kind of psychological disturbance can come up and it doesn't affect you at a fundamental level.

[52:08]

This is a great place to get to. Particularly if you're disturbed. And knowing this is knowing what we call original mind. Now, the basic assumption of Buddhism is that there is an original or primordial mind. A mind free of psyche and the cultural contents and so forth. So there's relative mind. There's original mind. And there's the kind of relationship between original mind and relative mind.

[53:12]

And there's the cultivation of that relationship. And there's the permeation of relative mind by original mind. And this is really what the phrase, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, means. But this means nothing until it is established in your actual experience. And this would be the second aspect of the process of wisdom when this is established as your actual experience. And certain kinds of enlightenment experiences, small and big, help this process. But for most of us, the secret is the craft of bringing attention to your breath. I have to keep coming back to these basic things.

[54:34]

The genuine establishment of uncorrected mind and the joining of attention to your breath. And again, what you're doing is you're physicalizing your mind. I mean, again, all mental phenomena has a physical aspect and all physical phenomena has a mental aspect. And the cultivation yogic practice is to mix these. Until you physically feel your feelings, your mind, your emotions, your thinking.

[55:38]

Thoughts now, the living word means thinking that you can feel in your body. Rooted thinking, not flighty thinking. And when you have rooted thinking, you can really trust your imagination. Because in rooted thinking, what you imagine is possible. And you keep rooting your thinking by bringing your attention to your breath. Again, intention is a mental posture. Attention is actually a physical posture.

[56:42]

As again, if I say to you, attention. But if I say, intention. Okay, so you have the intention, a mental posture, and you bring a subtle physical posture, attention to your breath. And the joining mind and breath. And you're actually now weaving mind and body together. Every moment during the day and night in which your mind and breath are together, you are generating a different kind of body. You're generating a different kind of mind that's not Chinese, not Japanese, not German, not American, not Hillman's.

[57:47]

You're generating a mind very particular and unique to you. And uniqueness is an extremely important check-up on reality. Interdependence, this teaching of interdependence, it's a nice idea, and we're all interdependent. But you don't actually understand it until you actually experience each moment as unique.

[58:49]

It's a nice moral idea, but the actual experience of it is this is absolutely unique right now. And the more you discover and feel this absolute uniqueness right now, You're entering into the actual fabric of time. Or of space. Because this absolute uniqueness, time stops. And now we're not talking about the time of physics, but the time of your actual experience. And there's time that rushes by and there's time that's very slow.

[59:49]

And they can even be together. You can have time that rushes by in one part of you and time that's very slow in another part of you. And again, yogic practice is to open us to this necessary condition for our mental and physical health of timelessness. Where things feel stopped. where the blind open their eyes. Now, as you bring mind through intention and attention To your breath.

[61:06]

It begins to rest on each breath. So there's a kind of unit quality. You experience each inhale is unique. Each exhale is unique. You don't have to put yourself in a prison and think you have to feel this all the time to be a good Buddhist. But this is something open and present to us. And Buddhism says it's good and healthy to know this. You can know other things too, but you should also know this unique, timeless, stopped space.

[62:06]

And again, Dharma means what holds, what stops. Karma is everything changing and leading to each other. Dharma is the mind that stops. And you find it on each moment of experience. And on each breath. So this each moment of experience, you can stop it and widen the each. So at each moment there's a kind of confluence or convergence of experience. You're letting the world in. And there's everything that comes from the past arising simultaneously.

[63:33]

And they grow together. And it's a kind of enfolding. And dharma is to be present in this enfolding of each moment. The unique enfolding of each moment. Now we can, through our zazen practice, learn to follow thoughts and moods and so forth to their source. And we can see how the fabric of our mind arises. And we can participate in it. But we can also edge back what the present moment is to when things actually arise. When they arise from zero and not from previous thoughts.

[64:41]

And this would be in the actualizing present. This would be to be in the actual present or the actualizing present. Now this is a point William James came to. What is this moment where everything comes in and what do we do with it as it comes in? What absorbent state of mind stays still long enough to let everything come in? And then to grow together and not just rush by. So it's a kind of letting the present grow together.

[65:51]

This is what I meant by using the word concrescence. Which means to gather in and to grow together. So the world is always being enfolded in you. And it establishes the next moment. Just as the previous moment partly establishes this moment. So the previous moment establishes this moment. But only establishes a percentage of this moment. Because Nico sitting here in front of me, Mark Harvey, Monica, all help establish this present moment. And Dharma practice is to be more and more open to the immediate present joining the previous moment.

[66:59]

And to allow the space for this to grow together. And this can be very wide sometimes, less wide. But this practice, this awareness of the wideness of each moment growing together, And that which allows the stream of so-called night dreaming mind to come in, and you now are emphasizing a unity of experience, not a continuity of experience. And technically this is called the mind of Samantabhadra. Or this mind which is absorbent gathers in

[68:02]

and then is unfolded into the next moment. Then you have a choice about how you unfold it. And the bodhisattva's choice is to unfold it through the paramitas. Because the more you can be present in the unfolding, You can then make a decision about how it unfolds. And to unfold through the parameters would be unfold through generosity, patience, and so forth. But you watch, and sometimes it unfolds in ways you have nothing to say about it. Sometimes it is frustrated and falls back upon itself. But if you have the wide mind of zazen, of awareness, you keep trying to free up this process.

[69:21]

And you find if it unfolds some ways, you feel sticky and lousy. If it unfolds other ways, you feel better. Now you understand this possibility. One aspect of visionary thinking in Buddhism is to hold the vision of what I just said and the vision of your own understanding of it, and the deeper vision than both of our understanding,

[70:55]

And to know how to hold that vision as a real possibility. And this is the process and practice of wisdom. And the willingness of wisdom. To not say, oh, I'm not good enough or this is far beyond me or I'll never get there. But to have the confidence to hold this vision. And you can't do it just for yourself. You just don't have enough strength to do it just for yourself. You have to really see that all of us, our society needs us to hold this vision. Even if you can never realize it, you can hold this vision.

[72:19]

And if you hold this vision present in your thinking and feeling, whatever it is, it begins to actualize itself. And with others, too. So we could say this is one way to speak about the process of vision and the vision of Buddhism. That seems like enough vision before lunch. So why don't we sit for a few moments, a little while, and then we'll have lunch. Thank you for translating.

[73:23]

Please don't be weak-hearted. Discover for yourself your own innermost request. For all, all. Your innermost request for all of us. And have the confidence to bring it into presence in your own life and thinking. We need this kind of courage.

[74:29]

The word courage means a strong heart. A strong heart for each of us. And please trust that this truth, this Dharma, is here in your breath, in your body, in your mind. And the more you bring body, mind and breath together, it will come out.

[75:35]

This kind of faith and trust is necessary. the bird knows I find everything reveals this truth Well, I'm sorry I can't participate in your discussion in German, but since I cannot, you have to share it with me in English.

[79:58]

And then she translates it, or you speak in German, and then we all share, because I can't speak German, then we can all share the discussions. So there's some benefit to my ignorance. So I would like to hear something about the discussion, at least one or two people from each group. Yes. In our group we experience that there are various understandings of what vision means, and most think of vision as a wish for the future, that something would happen, but also vision in the sense of...

[81:10]

to see right now an experience or to understand the feeling or so a vision in the sense of to see since the Latin origin is more related to seeing. So this is more related to the immediate understanding of the situation. and then there have been various visions mentioned for example peaceful society as a vision for Buddhism in general or to reduce suffering or to handle the conflict and relationship between to be close to people and also to protect the individual area but of course this is a so very problematic, and to achieve enlightenment, or to be able to follow the path to enlightenment. Yeah. What else?

[82:16]

What did I forget? Connectedness, we discussed what connectedness means in Buddhism, what connectedness contains, and to reduce pattern of behaviour, to be free to act. Which does not mean to be separate, but to be free to act in relation to others. Yes, compassion and connectedness. So we guess that compassion is connectedness and opposite to the Christian sense of . Sounds like you didn't leave anything out. Deutsch. What does vision mean to us?

[83:20]

In general, it is the understanding of a wish that can be achieved in the future. The vision is directly related to the perception of a situation, more in the sense of seeing the modern origin. as well as personal, i.e. peaceful society, to reduce suffering, to take the path to enlightenment, to deal with behavioural patterns that generally cause you to react in situations, or in relationships, it is better to follow the boundary between the obligation to have a relationship, but also to limit yourself, Thank you. Okay.

[84:46]

Someone else? I don't want to say everything because it was a lot of things. One thing was that we were talking about how visions change during the life. And for me it was like this, that vision was something very social or political when I was younger big things has to change to happen and that the vision has come nearer to me or to my body or to something now the vision for me and maybe for others too is more to yeah I have a certain experience of from white Yeah, from kind of Zen mind and I want to have this experience opened or more opened in the... So the vision is only to make bigger or more of the thing than I have already experienced.

[85:47]

It's totally different from the kind of vision that was ahead when I was, yeah, yet since a year before it was more the vision coming in this direction, like going there somewhere. Now it's a vision more near. And, yeah, there was one experience that when you're really connected with your breath, that there's no vision anymore. And this was a point that's maybe contradictory, because do you have a vision in Buddhism when you're really in Zen mind, there is no vision? and there's no need for a vision, maybe. So this was the two, the experience of and the vision. Yeah, it was fun. We came up with the topic of how visions change in the course of life or how they feel differently in the course of life.

[86:51]

And there was one observation that maybe when you are younger you go more outward and want to change something bigger, want to change politically, want to change society. In my experience, but also in the experience of Ulrike and others, it is actually more so that the experience you make, that you expand it, so to speak, or maybe you want to make more people accessible, but actually you want to expand this experience. Yes, to arrive, I think. Yes, to arrive, exactly. So this feeling of arriving. It's interesting you felt the idea that if your mind and breath are joined, you don't have a vision. Let me try to come back to that.

[87:58]

Okay, something else. Someone else. We spoke, first we talked about what vision, but before I start, could you translate in German? I'd like to reserve my own linguist. We spoke first about what vision is and how you can understand it, whether it's something to be attained or something that's already there.

[88:58]

We also spoke... about our personal visions, and there were several things that came out of that personal experiences. Excuse me, let me translate a little bit. Oh, yes, of course. We first talked in our group about whether visions are something that is already there, or whether visions are something that one has reached in the course of a process, and then we talked about our personal vision. on the basis of our own experiences, actually why we were sitting here. Several things came out of that that were common, I think, to most of us. One is that there is a negative reason often

[90:07]

was setting out to find truth. So there is pain, there is whatever. And the other is that we found, that all of us, I think, found that in Buddhism and in our own experience, the acceptance of that which is there and the total connectedness were very important ingredients in that somehow was different from the usual idea of happiness, something which is to be attained and which is not there, something you have to go after. So the difference with the Buddhist vision of Buddhist vision would be that it's already there. And by opening, you can be connected to it.

[91:13]

And you can find it. And that there is a practice to look at. Yes, so we then thought about what our own vision is and part of this question of course also includes that we think about why we are here and we came to the conclusion that it is often just more negative reasons in the sense that we come because we somehow suffer or have pain, that we are looking for a way to overcome them. And another reason is that we want to make an experience of this connection. And this connection is now less a hunt for happiness or for something that is not there, but in a Buddhist sense simply opening up for this connection, which is always there anyway and we just have to become open to it. I don't know, Mahakali, could you say some other things?

[92:21]

Good enough? Okay. Mahakali usually can say some other things. Okay. Something else? Someone else? That's three. There were four groups, weren't there? Where is the fourth group? Number three? When I look to our group, what I remember is we started with the question, what is our vision, why are we doing that practice? And I remember three points we had. It was freedom, peace, wisdom. with several variations of the global acceptance, but these were the main points.

[93:29]

For me, it was very special that we spoke about peace, not about peace between countries and so on, but just peace within us and peace between the Singaporeans. The other part that is still with me is the question whether all these things are to tell us what is Buddhism and what is just, I would say, humanism. And I could just bring it up just as a question. I just spoke a bit about that. The two things that I remember most are the one that we asked what kind of vision we have, and then I remember three things, that was peace, freedom and wisdom, and now I would especially underline peace, that it was not about peace between peoples,

[94:45]

peace within a single person or between single people. The other point that is still very present at the moment is the question of whether all this that Roshi has presented to us this morning, whether this can only be thought of with Buddhism or whether it is not simply humanism. and I would like to bring this question to you as a question. Okay. There is another point which is related to this point, which is if we have a vision in Buddhism, what does it mean for our society in terms of our Western society? I think if we continue doing Buddhism in the West, this must be reflected somewhere in the society.

[96:01]

Because in the moment we are going somewhere. It just looks like it's gone down the drain. Yes. What still comes to my mind, which we haven't talked about for a long time in our group, is how, if there is a vision in Buddhism, how it works best with the social situation, although I consider this to be relatively critical and feel as if all the strange things are being destroyed and falling apart. And I find it very interesting when Roshi has something to say about that.

[96:40]

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