How I see Buddhism Lecture given before the Buddhist association of Bonn, on August 19th, 2007?

Now examine your own organism quite unbiasedly! It is the expression of perfect, immutable lawfulness. And I am asking once more: Why don’t you acknowledge this lawfulness? In childhood you were not able to, since energy, intellect, willpower, and understanding could not yet be used in the right way.

Think it over: Could there exist any human being with whom from the moment of conception, by taking food and nothing but food, a something has come to shape itself in a perfectly systematic way into what we call our organism and later on our individuality? The organism is the very factor of order for your life, no matter how we treat it. Its lawful order of the sense-organ processes cannot be altered by you or anybody else without injuring the whole course of life. Likewise nobody can exchange his sense organs or replace one organ by another. It is no doubt possible to support the working of the organs through a suitable assistance, though impossible to alter their functional capacities, in the long run.

Now consider yourself. Do you employ the “sixfold sixness” – of the sense organs of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking – with necessary attentiveness? Or are you rather inclined to carelessness in using them? Are you really clearly conscious of the functions of your senses? Maybe your reply is: I cannot, I am not a monk, a nun who see therein their main life work. – How thin then is this objection when you only observe the fact that you as well as the monk and nun can but live by using these sense organs. Or is the lawful functioning of the sense processes solely applicable for monks and nuns? No!

“The cooperation of eye, form and working consciousness is visual contact. The distinct visual contact is visual sensation. The distinct visual sensation is visual perception. And the fully distinct visual perception is visual concept” (Majjhima Nikaya 148). Likewise with the remaining five sense processes. Especially important is the participation of consciousness in the occurring visual contact, hearing contact a.s.f., without which a functioning of the organism could not be possible. Man would fall senseless and, with continuous unconsciousness, die.

This lawfulness guarantees the reasonable use of the organism for every man, without respect of person, profession, or name. But attentiveness is the indispensable postulate as it is the guarantee for the reasonable use of the sense organs too. Lawfulness is incorruptible, not to be influenced by either desire or craving, nor experiments of any kind. Lawfulness would react with rejection only otherwise and man would realize, sooner or later, that it is impossible that way.

Freedom from suffering presupposes the unconditioned acknowledgement of the lawful nature of our organism. But it is not at all unconditioned acknowledgement if we continuously weaken the organism by overstraining one sense or the other (how fair the purpose may be, on the other hand); if we permanently fail to understand the symptoms of fatigue as warnings for reasonable use, if we insist upon carrying through our will, our opinions in order to perhaps evade occasional inconveniences or to get advantages or to feed our personal ambitions.

With impartial consideration, everybody must see that the fluctuating life force never allows this functioning of the sense organs to be separated from the totality process, as something independent. Also, special care for every single process cannot guarantee a self-dependent sound functioning. Life is no mechanical synthetic, no central or self-directed occurrence. Every moment it is totality, dynamic cooperation of uncountable manifestations’ of forces which maintains to life’s end their lawful order as individuality (= indivisibility, i.e. indivisible occurrence, efficaciousness, fluctuation of forces.

Beside the order of the sense organs, there is some further order through which the functioning of the sense organs is given its unity, purport and value, and which is attacked likewise sharply, pitilessly, and recklessly by the force of suffering. This is the regulation of the processes of the five groups: bodily form, sensation, perception, forming of conceptions or thinking, and becoming-conscious or the experience of “I” (Samyutta Nikaya 22). The working combination of the five in health as well as in illness decides the rhythm of life and is the constant controller and caller: be attentive, be on the alert! Never forget what being a man means, namely being endowed with intelligence and understanding, with will, energy, insight and judgement! You have the never failing potential for suffering – sensation – with its grandiose simplicity, the grandiose triad: well-being, woe, neither-wellbeing-no-woe or neutral, which works more precisely, more speedily, more spontaneously than the most perfect electronic – this offspring of you brains!

Now we are confronted with a second astonishing phenomenon of our language: that we are accustomed to name ourselves with one single word – “I” – comprising in it all processes of our life force, good or bad, positive or negative, joyful or sorrowful ones. The peculiar thing is that, here also, it is the matter of a disguise of the force of suffering, so that everybody need attentively take care in order to perceive the pranks and tricks of such a camouflage and to raise the hiding place in which the force of suffering retires – namely: the process of thinking – into bright light of consciousness.