'There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground' (A Talk on Devotion)

When we consider our hearts as human beings, and the journey, the unfoldment, if you like, of our hearts in that gap between birth and death, that span between birth and death, we consider this dimension of our existence, consider what a range the human heart has -- what an enormous range of what is feelable and what is cultivatable, developable. And one of, perhaps, the most potentially beautiful qualities that can be found in the heart, that we can feel in the heart, that we can express as human beings, is devotion. And so tonight I want to talk a little bit about devotion.

It's interesting: our tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, it seems as if there's not much going on in the devotional sort of realm in our tradition, and it's not something we talk about that much. But it comes up. It comes up for people, and regularly people talk about it, usually one on one, or ask about it in interviews. And so I want to address it a little bit.

The first thing to say is, how many different ways of devotion there are, how many different expressions and manifestation of devotion. Some are very obvious, and some are not very obvious at all. So for some people, it's clear to them that devotion is a very central aspect of their spiritual journey or their spiritual path. And for others, doesn't seem so at all; doesn't seem particularly present or even relevant. I want to try tonight to explore it in a way that includes everybody and, in a way, speak to everyone and all those different manifestations of devotion, all those different relationships with the quality of devotion. I think, I feel, that devotion is actually important for everybody, an important quality for everybody, vitally important quality for everybody. But the forms and the form it takes will differ, will not be constant. There are different manifestations, and I want to kind of go into that a little bit.

So where to start? I'm not sure. For some people, and certainly some of you, and some people in this tradition or other traditions, there can be, at times, either because of different practices that one's giving oneself to and engaging in, or through hearing teachings, or reading, or listening, hearing the Dharma, or maybe through a process of healing, healing one's wounded heart, or maybe through nature, through music, just through the sensitivity, the receptivity to the touch of life, some other sense of things becomes palpable, feelable, manifests to the consciousness, to the heart. Could be, at times, little glimmers of something, little glimpses of something, could be more continuous. But somehow, in the unfoldment of things, the heart is touched. And that touching of the heart can then flower in different ways.

One of the possibilities is a sense of sacredness. And that can be quite a common factor in devotion, a sense of sacredness. Somehow the heart feels touched by life, by something, and a sense of the sacred. And then that sense of sacredness, again, can manifest, can show itself, express itself in different ways. So it can be, at times, praise. A wanting to praise, to praise the sacredness, or praise life, or praise something else. It can be a sense of awe -- the heart is wonderstruck. It can be just an acknowledgment of how deeply, how preciously we honour and cherish something. Could be a sense of wanting to offer oneself or give oneself, surrender oneself to something.

And can have a lot of different emotional qualities, what goes on. So it could be joyful. It could be tinged with a kind of bittersweet longing. Sometimes there's a yearning there. It could be completely non-emotional. So just in what I've said so far, and you find, "Well, I don't relate to any of that," I want to go into this: still, devotion can be there very strongly, but it's not emotional. Or it might express in an emotion that kind of defies categorization or labels. It might feel like you remember this feeling or this sense as long as you can remember, from your childhood. Or it may feel, for some people, it comes in in the most unexpected way: I've never felt anything like that before, never had any sense like that before. It doesn't even seem to fit one's self-view and self-image.

And this quality, whether it's strong or weak, whatever, can have a life of its own. Often it does have a life of its own. (I'm just starting somewhere, so I hope this is okay.) For some people, at times, the object, so to speak, of devotion is clear. It's clear what the devotion is towards, what that sense is towards. And it could be the divine, in some aspect. It could be something like love, a devotion to love. It could be Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. It could be Jesus. The object is clear. And sometimes it's even Jesus, and a person has been Buddhist for ages: "I'm not supposed to do that!" It doesn't fit necessarily.

Other times this sense arises and the object is not quite so clear. It's just a sense of this sacredness, a sense of bowing, a sense of devotion, and one can't quite put one's finger on what it's towards, so to speak. It's somehow, perhaps, in the silence of things. Somehow the very silence becomes -- one has a palpable sense of mystery there. And somehow the heart responds to that. The heart is tremoring, in a way, in resonance with something. It's unnameable. It's not even pinpointable. Sometimes it's even more than that -- it's so open, it's so undefined, can't say. And all of that is okay, and all of that is in the realm of devotion.

Sometimes it feels that what the devotion is towards is something, we could say, supramundane -- it's not of this world; it's somehow transcendent or beyond the usual material sense of things. And other times, it feels it's exactly the earthy is-ness of things, the particular uniqueness of the simplest everyday things: water being poured from a jar into a cup. It's just something in life, very particular, very earthy, very material, tangible to the senses. And the devotion is somehow triggered or open, and it's caught up with what we would call the worldly. All of that's beautiful.

And again, at times, with the devotional sense, there's a sense of -- strong, perhaps, or maybe not so strong -- sense of aspiration. The devotional sense and the aspirational sense are wedded. And so someone says to me, "It's as if there's this aspiration to let love guide my life." And one feels it so strongly. One feels it kind of percolating down to the roots of the being, and taking root in the being, and shooting forth, expressing forth, coming forth. That movement of the direction of aspiration is part of the devotional movement, whether it has an object or whether it doesn't have an object. Other times, it doesn't seem to go with a sense of aspiration. Sometimes there's a spiritual hunger or yearning with devotion. Other times it's much less directional; it's much more kind of receptive. Either way, there's this quality of giving oneself and surrendering to that can be common in devotion.

And again, sometimes a person finds and feels this energy, this quality, and finds that the body wants to express it a certain way, almost like the heart is moving the body to manifest in a certain way. So an obvious one is bowing. It's almost as if the body wants to bow by the force of the movement in the heart, by the impulse of the movement in the heart. Bowing -- there's something very, I don't know what the word is, even more deep than primal. I think it's somehow in our anatomy, perhaps, the gesture of bowing. Or it could be singing -- it feels I want to sing or dance. Somehow the body wants to express it. And if that's there, it can be, at times, extremely important to let that be expressed by the body, to let the body manifest and kind of sing in that way, whether really or metaphorically.

And again, at other times, it's not. It's an inner quality. It's an inner movement, an inner feeling, perhaps. No less strong for that. No less strong for not needing to be expressed. It's certainly not that it's not being expressed because it's being repressed or because we're embarrassed of what other people might think. Can be sometimes that that sense of bowing is almost ongoing inside. And it doesn't need, it doesn't feel like it needs obvious expression. Somehow, inside, one is bowing. Inside, one is bowing. And might even be, if one feels that, that it feels it would be disturbed by an external expression, by that movement of the body.

Okay, so I started somewhere. I had to start somewhere. Some people will hear that and say, "Pfft!" It sounds, some people I know in this hall resonate very much to what I've said; other people will hear it and say, "That all sounds very alien to me. What's more, when this person next to me bows in the hall, that seems pretty weird. And I don't know about all this mystical language stuff." Still, as I said before, devotion is everywhere. Devotion is everywhere, and it's being expressed all the time.

So one thing to differentiate is ritual and devotion. First thing to say about ritual in relationship to devotion is there's no need for ritual. I'm not saying it shouldn't be there, but there's actually no need, necessarily, for ritual to express devotion or to feel devotion or to encourage that sense. No need, necessarily. And ritual and devotion are not the same thing.

But still, with this, and talk of, you know, bodhisattvas and Christ and silence and all that, for some people it just pushes the wrong buttons, or it just absolutely does nothing. Now, some people, and particularly in our tradition, in the Insight Meditation tradition, it's very common to say, and I think initially the teachers coming back from Asia, the senior teachers said, "Let's try and have," or "I want a Buddhism without the cultural baggage of the East." Great, and a lot of people resonate to that. And I, for myself, at times in the past, have really resonated with that kind of, "Yeah, let's get to the pith, the core of it, and not all this kind of extra accoutrement superstition stuff."

So, beautiful and wonderful, and not to be knocked, but just a few questions in response. We might feel we're aware of the cultural baggage from the East. What's my cultural baggage as a Westerner? Am I aware of what I might be bringing culturally to the Dharma, to Buddhism, to spiritual practice? We are immersed in a culture of scientific materialism. It's the air we breathe. We move in that. We're also immersed in something that happened a few hundred years ago called the Romantic movement. It's part of the Enlightenment, I think. That kind of sense of our own being and sense of ourself and the self on its kind of journey through life, with its struggles and its despairs and its triumphs and its story and its narrative, that whole way of seeing and feeling and thinking about the self has its roots in the Romantic movement. It's not particular, necessarily, to Dharma. Yet, the way we present the Dharma, quite appropriately, is saturated with those two -- I'm just picking two up for example -- those two kind of zeitgeists and assumptions.

The whole quality of individualism that's part of the Romantic movement, we tend to talk about practice and see our practice that way. Sometimes -- and again, it is still and was in the past very attractive to me -- it's like this sense of, what happens if I don't believe anything, and I just pay attention, I'm just mindful, and I'm just aware in as simple and raw and bare way as possible? And I want an awareness without preconceptions. And it's beautiful, and the heart can actually be devoted to that and be moved by that. But going back to the talk on emptiness, is there even such a thing? Does it even exist, an awareness without preconceptions?

So, just very briefly, about ritual. One sometimes feels like ritual has to be prescribed. It's like we get told what to do. But actually, it can be very freestyle. A person can find their own expression of ritual, or change it. It doesn't need to be the same. It's like following an inner impulse. The form may be there, the devotion may not be there; the form may not be there, and the devotion may be there. When we look more carefully at the life and the society we find ourselves in, like in any society, we actually live in a world of ritual. We live in a world of ritual and customs and symbols -- I mean, just something like shaking hands. We live in that world anyway. We live in a world of symbols that we are imbuing with meaning. And there's not a problem with that, but we need to recognize it.

So we've just had, you know, what is it, a week ago now, we've had Christmas. And lots of rituals around Christmas. But what does it mean for us? What did it originally mean, and what has it come to mean, Christmas? What are we making it mean? Christmas is originally, of course, it's the birthday of Jesus, it's the birthday of the Christ. Sometimes, now, that means nothing to many people, of course, in England any more, and it's become something else. It's become something about family and friendship -- beautiful -- and maybe giving and receiving. Beautiful. But easily it can become something else, become something about pressure and a need to go shopping, etc. It's originally the birth of the Christ Child into the world. What is that? Some inexplicable mercy born into the world. Some infinite gentleness. And the story, and the myth, and we can look at it one way or another. In the manger, the silent night -- that song, "Silent Night," what's it saying? Some infinite tenderness has come into the world. Some almost incomprehensible willingness to sacrifice oneself for others. Some willingness to shoulder others' burdens. Something so beautiful in that.

And of course, in the diversity of what devotion means to different people -- I don't know how many people are in here tonight, seventy-five or whatever it is -- it means different things, as I said at the beginning. For some people, what makes much more sense than everything I've said so far is a sense of devotion to one's potential as a human being, to one's spiritual potential as a human being, and devotion to that potential in others. So one of the meanings of Buddha-nature is exactly that. When Buddhists bow to each other, and I bow at the end of a talk, and we bow to each other sometimes at the end of sittings, it's like bowing to that sacred kind of empty space in us which is our potential. I bow because I recognize your potential, the infinite capacity of your potential. And recognizing that, and devoted to that in myself, and devoted to that in another, and seeing that equally in everybody -- that no one is void of that potential.

So it may express in bowing. That also can translate, of course, if there's a devotion to potential, it can translate into devotion then to the elements of practice and the factors of practice. So devotion to generosity, a devotion to ethical care and how we are with each other, devotion to samādhi and the depths of consciousness that are available, devotion to wisdom and the spirit of questioning. It can actually feel like we are devoted -- it expresses through our dedication in practice -- we are devoted to those qualities. And the whole other list of qualities, pāramīs, that the Buddha talked about, a whole list of qualities that are developable, cultivatable, that take us to our fullest potential. And for some people, it's a devotion to our capacity to pay attention, devotion to awareness, to mindfulness. There's something so beautiful in the human capacity to actually pay attention to our experience in a curious way and to grow and to learn that way.

There's a beautiful poem, some of you may know it, by Mary Oliver. It's called "The Summer Day." It's talking about this devotion to attention.^[1]

[22:04 -- 23:17, poem]

So really at the heart of devotion, or common at the heart of all manifestations of devotion, I think, is one thing, and it's this: what direction and what meaning are we consecrating? What direction and what meaning are we reminding ourselves of again and again, in our existence, in our life? What meaning, what direction are we devoted to? Any human life expresses devotion. Actually, any life expresses devotion, in a way. But any human life expresses devotion. It is being expressed. Everybody is devoted to something or some things, so it's there. The question is, what am I bowing to? What am I serving? It may be visible; it may be invisible. It may be conscious to myself; it may be unconscious. But it has to do with alignment, our deepest alignment of our being. What are we aligning with? And it has to do with aligning with our deepest truth, and with our deepest longings and our deepest aspirations. That, right there, is at the core, I feel, of devotion. So partly to do with giving one's best, living one's best, living in that alignment. So maybe anything -- I don't know, but I'm wondering this -- maybe anything can become, in that way, an act of devotion, just by the heart's relationship with it and the way that the heart is seeing it. Maybe anything can.

Some of you might know, a couple of weeks ago, a group of us went to Copenhagen. A group of Dharma practitioners went to Copenhagen while they were having the climate talks there. And just before we dispersed, we were just checking in with some people, and some people said to me, "You know what? It felt like a pilgrimage." And I, for myself, also felt that the whole trip there -- we were there for about three, the whole journey was like three days -- it felt, the core feeling of it was very prayerful, like it was certainly a pilgrimage and a kind of prayer, a movement of prayer.

And I realized something: that when we had cobbled together this email which we'd put out there, and I was the person who sort of cobbled together this email, and I said what we were trying to do, and I said -- I can't remember -- something like, "We are going to be part of, you know, obviously the demonstrations, trying to persuade or request world leaders to take enough measures regarding climate change." With the knowledge that it probably wouldn't make that much influence or difference. And of course that was part of what we were doing. But I actually realized that something before I went was there for me, too, which I didn't express in that email -- foolishly, because I actually thought it wouldn't be understood. And now, in hindsight, I realize that it was perfectly, perfectly well-understood by people.

And that was that actually it was a prayerful movement. It was a desire to voice something and be the voice of something independent of the result that came; to express something, to sing something independent of the result; to stand in alignment with something that one really, really, really cared about, again, no matter what, no matter what the outcome was. And actually it was even more than that: it was also a desire to be present, to actually be present at a time, what felt to my perception, to my mind and my heart, to be present at a time in history that feels extremely pivotal, and to be there at this moment of common human history either way, whether we choose this, or whether we choose this. To be there and to be present, and to bear witness somehow.

All of this felt like part of the prayerfulness of it: to bear witness to humanity, to all of us at a crossroads. That's what it felt like to me. And even more than that, being there and meeting with people and hearing lectures and workshops, etc., it included, the prayerfulness, for me, it felt like it included the opening to all the pain of what I heard there about what was going on in the world and the way different political and economic and financial mechanisms were holding the whole thing in place. Opening to that pain, opening to the massive amount of confusion and complexity of it. Just opening, bearing witness, letting it come in. Opening also to the togetherness of it, the togetherness of the humanity and the celebration of humanity and the appreciation of humanity. And all that, for me, was actually the primary reason certainly that I was going, that I wanted to put that out there. And somehow I didn't say that. That's okay. It's not a problem. But I feel like I wanted to say that now. What devotion can mean -- it's like any act can become devotional.

We have two words in English, 'devotion' and 'dedication.' We can talk about, I was saying before, dedication to practice. It's an expression of devotion. We talk about dedication to practice, dedication to kindness, dedication to awareness, to generosity, dedication to awakening. That's all an expression of devotion. There's also, some of you will be familiar in some traditions of dedicating one's merit. And that's a funny word -- it's like you've got a bank account of sort of brownie points or something, and you're giving them away. It's actually dedicating one's positive energy that one develops through practice -- dedicating that not just for me, not just for me, but for others, for all beings. Our practice becomes something that we wish to give the positivity to others.

So when we were in Copenhagen, we were walking back from the main march, and we'd actually been on our feet all day. I mean, I don't know how many hours, but really, really a lot of hours, and walking, and it was quite cold. Now, for some of us, we're used to walking and being quite physical, and that was really not a problem at all. And for others, that was really quite a long time on their feet and quite a long time walking in the cold. And one of our group, she was reflecting as we were walking back, "My feet really ache. But I'm realizing that had I spent the day doing this much walking sightseeing, you know, wanting to sightsee and see Copenhagen, it would feel very different. Because it feels like I've been doing that for the sake of all beings." The actual feeling feels different. The actual sense of the whole experience feels different. One has dedicated it. So devotion also becomes, should become, a kind of lens through which we see existence and experience, and it changes the meaning of things. It changes the felt sense of things. And that's its power. That's one of its powers.

So a person may wonder, what's going on here? What is all this about, and how does it work? We might have Tārā or Jesus or whatever. Why would one be devotional to that? What's going on there? And it's important to ask that. It's important to inquire into this. Can be that this Avalokiteśvara, Kuan Yin, is an embodiment of certain qualities. So it's an embodiment of love, of mercy, of compassion. And one's somehow associating the heart with those qualities through a certain form. One's drawing close to certain qualities and imbibing certain qualities through that association -- even if it's imagined. There's also something about humility. Somehow, the devotional sense, it's like looking upwards at a sense of more fulfilled potential from where we might be. So it constantly keeps us looking upward with humility.

But a person might wonder, "Well, why externalize it so much?" These are good questions. And I certainly don't want to persuade anyone in terms of forms or ways it needs to manifest. What happens if I just stay true to my own sense of this in myself, my own sense to what feels authentic in terms of the devotional movement? So it might be that it makes sense to me, it makes sense to my heart to bow to another. I can see that. Maybe that. Or maybe there is the sense of some kind of unnameable, perhaps, sacredness in nature. What if I just stay true to that, and not worry about putting anything else on? Maybe, I'm not saying it will, but maybe the heart begins to go on a journey with that sense of devotion and with what feels meaningful and real for us. The heart goes on a journey. Maybe, and it doesn't need to, but maybe along that journey it begins to encompass more and more, and more and more of what might have been kind of alien concepts at first. It just begins to expand and include that.

Often for people, what comes in is a question of belief: "Is devotion and belief the same thing?" Sometimes people, again, equate devotion and belief. So that's an interesting one. I'm not sure. Are they necessarily a part of each other? A while ago, I was talking to someone, and she didn't like that. It seemed to her that devotion implied belief, and coming from a Catholic background and not necessarily always easy Catholic background, she was very suspicious of this and felt inside herself a kind of split. This is in her relationship to coming across aspects of Buddhist devotion in Zen and other retreats. And felt this split. We were talking about it, and she said, "I can feel good in terms of belief, in terms of a sort of rational experience-based belief. Like, I can see that if I practise mindfulness, then this grows. And that, I feel comfortable with that." And so I said, "Okay, go with that. You don't need anything more. Go with that. That's your investment in belief. Great. Beautiful." But it wasn't quite the end of the story for her, because she said, "And I also feel a sadness, because there's a kind of polarity inside, I feel. And it feels like the heart -- I really feel I can ground and value the rational, but my heart feels also drawn at the very same time to something irrational, to something that I'm calling irrational." And that's okay. That's really okay.

So sometimes we encounter, in some Buddhist tradition, or other tradition, or some other teaching, we encounter something that the intellectual mind rejects, doesn't want anything to do with, and yet the heart feels drawn. And that incongruity can feel uncomfortable. Can feel uncomfortable. But it may be, it may be for some people, strangely enough, in the whole mystery of how this all works, it may be that that particular form that we feel mysteriously drawn to, even though the mind doesn't like it, that particular representation -- maybe it's the Crucifixion of Christ; maybe it's the idea of a whole pantheon of bodhisattvas sort of beaming compassion at you -- maybe at that time that might be the only way for a certain heart opening to happen, even though the mind doesn't like it. Might I trust that? Might I trust that movement? Might I trust that calling? I'm not saying we should or shouldn't. I'm just raising it. Maybe I need to recast something in different language. I don't know.

A person, often, with all this territory, and feeling drawn, and then beginning to question their sense of devotion, says, "What's actually real here? Is there really a thing or a being called Avalokiteśvara, or Tārā, or the Cosmic Christ, or Padmasambhāva, or some other bodhisattva? Is there really that?" And this is an important question: what is real? And it relates actually to what we were talking about the other night with emptiness, of course. But given what we said with emptiness, it's actually that maybe whatever answer we come up with in terms of reality just has to be provisional for now, just provisional. The nature of truth is perhaps not quite so cut and dried as "This is true, and this isn't. This is so-called [knocking on something] 'real,' and this isn't." Maybe that's not the nature of reality. And we have to go with a provisional truth, a provisional conceptual framework.

What matters here? What matters? I feel that what matters is, is this practice of devotion or this sense of devotion supporting a stretching of the heart, supporting an opening of the heart and an expanding of the heart into compassion, into service, into a devotion to goodness, into a draining away of fear in our life? Is the devotion and the practice and whatever system one has of that, is it supporting that? That's the important question. Is it bringing more lightness into the being, more opening, more dedication? What's coming from it? That's what's important, what's coming from it. So if that's the case, if it is stretching the heart, it's not that this kind of belief in bodhisattvas or someone up there caring for us or whatever it is, it's not that that becomes then an easy feel-good option. It's actually quite the opposite.

There was an interviewer who interviewed Mother Teresa once. They were talking, and at one point he goes, he said something like, "Oh, well, obviously you're not married," or something like that, "because you've taken a vow of celibacy." And I'm not sure what point he was trying to make, but he said, "You're not married." And she just interrupted him, and she waved her hand in front of him, showed him her ring which signifies the nun's marriage to Jesus, to Christ. And she waved that and said, "Yes, I am." And then she said, "And he can be very difficult at times." [laughter]

And there's this sense, and if you know a little about her life, that's what the devotion meant for her. It was always stretching this already enormous capacity for compassion, for giving and for service and for surrender. It was stretching it. And so the thing that's important is, is it leading, is it encouraging and supporting this surrendering? Surrendering of the self to love, to compassion, to service. That's one of the principal reasons for devotion. And that can go really, really, really, really deep. So Jesus, Avalokiteśvara, whatever it is, can be the embodiment of something which is, so to speak, asking us or supporting us or moving us towards this surrender.

There's an old spiritual song that I was listening to just a few days ago, and it says, "Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You can have all the world, but give me Jesus." And beautiful melody. But what's going on there? All deep Dharma turns everything upside down. Turns everything upside down: our sense of priorities, our sense of what's important, our sense of what's true. And that movement, "You can have all the world, but give me Jesus," what does that mean? Give me that mercy. Give me that love. I want that in my heart. I want that to express through me. Give me that, and you can have all the world. Turning everything upside down.

And so this movement, and this movement towards surrender, and this movement of the heart opening, it has everything to do with, as I said before, our deep desire and our deep longing. And, you know, that's an interesting one, because sometimes we're a little bit stand-offish in relationship to our really deep desire in life, our really deep longings. We're not quite sure about opening to that level of, that strength and that depth of desire in our life. A little bit unsure what it might mean for us, or even just the force of the feeling or whatever.

And, you know, I'm using the word 'longing,' but again, it can be mixed with praise. It can be different qualities. So sometimes, in one of the expressions of devotion -- and please keep in mind this whole, obviously not everyone's going to relate to everything I'm saying, and that's fine -- sometimes that longing is really strong, and it seems to be the strongest thing in the devotional sense. And we say, "What exactly am I longing for?" And sometimes it's not even clear: what am I longing for? What is this longing? And you know what, sometimes the longing is for longing. The longing is for longing. I long to long. So there's a sweetness in our spiritual hunger. In that depth of desire, it has a sweetness, it has a beauty to it. And we need to, if it's there, or to the degree that we feel it's there, we need to nurture that. It's a flame inside of us, and we need to guard that flame and take care of it.

So we could say -- and again, it depends what language one likes or resonates with -- we could say the longing is from the divine; it's a gift from the divine. You could say the longing is a gift from the Buddha-nature, if you prefer, from that capacity in us that wants to realize, that wants to awaken, that potential in us. The longing is a gift from that, the longing is the voice of that. The longing is that. It is the divine within. It is the Buddha-nature within expressing itself through longing.

Here's a poem by Rumi. It's called "Love Dogs."^[2]

[44:34 -- 45:42, poem]

We can feel this flame in us, at times, to some degree or other at times. And like any other quality that's important on the spiritual path, the Buddha talks about feeding and starving, these two metaphors. How can we feed what's nourishing to us, what's important to us, and starve what isn't? So he talks about it in terms of hindrances and factors of awakening, etc. Feeding and starving. And this is something we need to explore. Perhaps each person for themself needs to discover and find out: what feeds this flame in me? What feeds my flame of desire? So it might be for some people the ritual, the shrine, that that's very important. For others, it's time in nature. For some people, it's solitude, enough solitude. For others, it's community. Maybe certain practices give rise to that devotional sense, that flame. And some things are going to starve it and extinguish it and blow it out and deprive it of air. If one really, really cares about this flame, one has to inquire into: what's the effect of TV and alcohol and eating too much, etc.? It's important, because that flame is so precious.

So there is that flame. There's that possibility. There's the possibility of the feeling of that and the emotion of that that we feel in our being. But as much as we're interested in feeding and starving it, not to get too hung up with the intensity of the feeling. So people are different, and for anyone, the feeling will come, get more and get less. Like anything else, it's impermanent. It changes. It fluctuates. So sometimes we feel an intensity, and sometimes much less. And it can be that with the devotional sense being there for a person, a person opening to it, over years it might mature, and hopefully it does mature. And it might be that in the maturing it actually mellows, so to speak. So there may be a period where it feels one's kind of on fire with this, and it's very much at the forefront of one's practice. And some time later, it's somehow quietly in the background. And then maybe it comes up again for a period.

So the feeling is important, or the feeling can be important, but it's not the primary thing -- like so much; we say that when we talk about mettā as well. What's more important, to rephrase something I said earlier, is the reality of our surrender. Is it a real thing that the heart is surrendering? Surrendering to what? Surrendering to the search, the quest, the movement towards truth?

And one of the functions of devotion is that, with it kind of carving out a space in the heart and in the being, that that surrendering to the search becomes more and more of a priority in life, becomes more and more at the centre of things, and everything else takes its place around that. And the emotionality of what's going on will [move] up and down, up and down -- very secondary actually. It's the crystallization, the unification of our devotion to a direction that's the most important thing.

If you practise prayer at all, or you spend some time maybe talking and asking someone who does practise prayer or has practised prayer for years, what becomes clear is there is a spectrum of prayer, if we talk about prayer, for instance. So at the sort of beginning, so to speak, layers of prayer, it's an asking for. I'm asking for this or that in my life. And it feels normal for human beings to do that, relating to that that way. But then that matures and becomes an asking for perhaps love and compassion for self and for other. There are other aspects. Can be an inviting of a certain energy in. Can be opening to something, opening to a certain quality, a certain energy. Can be inviting guidance. But again, is the guidance for me and my sake? "I want to know what I should do so that things turn out good for me"? Or is it, Christians for instance talk about listening for God's will. And someone with a really deep, if you talk to a long-time Christian prayer, "I'm surrendering to God's will, whatever is in it for me." It's not so much about the self. And ultimately prayer becomes about surrender again. All of that is good.

What's important here, as well, is that it's really not just a heart feeling. It's not just about the feeling. And I know, some people -- there are so many people in the hall, and people saying, "I don't relate to all this talk about emotionality and intenseness, intensity of emotion. I just don't relate to it." Not a problem at all. And even if it is there (especially, actually, if it is there), we need also to bring our intelligence and our discernment and our integrity and our honesty into relationship with this. Which means, is all this intensity of emotion translating? Is it translating in my life to something? So a person may love bhajans (devotional songs), may love Rumi poetry, etc., but somehow it's not really translating. Somehow the heart is still "me and my process," "me and my spiritual practice," "me and my psychological dilemmas," etc. It hasn't done something. And there's a real question in that. Really to bring the intelligence and the questioning: how can it translate more? How can it open up, open me up to this wider love? We need to check that. We need to check out: is it happening, and how can I encourage it to happen?

So devotion can be a practice like any other, which means it needs regularity. We regularly align ourselves with something. You know, sometimes you might be present at a beautiful ceremony or something, and it's like lots of incense and this and that and lights, and very beautiful. But it might just be a one-off thing. And one-off things, whether they're meditation experiences or whatever, don't tend to have the same depth of transformative power in the being as, over and over, aligning oneself with something as a practice.

I'm not sure what to finish with. What we want, in terms of what I was just saying, what we want is to translate what can feel like a very lofty emotion into -- in the movement of the day and the busyness of the day -- into a different way of relating to experiences and situations. That translation from something that may actually be, in a way, quite abstract emotionally, although the feeling is there, needs to be translated, so that this situation, this hassle, this moment of a person needing something or whatever, is actually seen in a different way. We're seeing situations differently, and that emotion is kind of coming down. And gradually, the devotional sense is more and more lived.

And some people ask, "Okay, sure, but does that lead to liberation?" Good question. Somehow one might get a sense sometimes of two things which seem separate: letting go of attachments, renunciation, as Christina was talking about yesterday, letting go of attachments, and devotion to something, we could say, more meaningful, more profound, more important. Ideally, one should bring the other. And if we're noticing, we'll actually notice this: the more I let go of attachments, the more I renounce, the more the devotion, the sense of devotion to something more important, more profound, more meaningful. And the more the sense of devotion to something more important, profound, meaningful, the more the ability to let go and renounce. And actually it can almost seem like one movement. It's one roll, one roll of something. There's something very beautiful in that.

Sometimes a person just doing insight meditation and through different practices (whether it's the mettā practice, or concentration, or mindfulness, or letting go of the self), the sense of the self, the solidity of the self, as I was talking the other day, the sense of me gets less. It's just I am there less, and less solidly and less prominently. You know, at first that takes getting used to. With time, one gets used to it, and starts to pay attention to what's present when the self is more absent. What's more present when the self is more absent? And often, one of the things that's more present is bowing. A sense of bowing, of devotion. And again, it might not be to anything. It's just that something goes, something gets quiet, and something else comes into the being and fills that space and expresses through that space.

So this whole movement of devotion or prayerfulness or devotional practices, like any practice, should evolve over time. It goes on a journey and evolves. There's another story from Mother Teresa, I don't know if it was the same interviewer who clearly was getting a hard time that day, or another one, but anyway, this interviewer asked Mother Teresa, "What do you say to God when you pray?" And she says, "I don't say anything. I just listen." And so, "Oh!" So the interviewer asks, "What does God say to you then?" And she said, "He doesn't say anything either. He just listens too." And before he could ask another question, she said, "And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you." [laughter] Something goes on a journey with this. What might feel outlandish and ridiculous and superstitious, the heart has a kind of innate spiritual intelligence to it. And it goes on this journey, and something transforms.

In the Christian tradition, there's what's called the via negativa. Some of you may have heard of this. There's a via positiva and a via negativa. The via positiva is all about, well, positive religious experiences -- experiences of, like, really this or that, or "Wow! I saw this. I saw that. I experienced this." The via negativa is a letting go. It's an abandoning of experiences. So if you're a little bit familiar, say, with the writings of St John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart or The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous English mystical text, Christian mystical text, somehow, in their language, the soul, the consciousness, moves into the silence of God. It's not about God appearing in all bright lights, and see his crown and the big robe and everything. It's the silence of God. It's the absence. And there's something in that silence and absence. St John of the Cross says as the (his language) soul "matures" and deepens in its practice, God will abandon the soul, in terms of not showing up in particular fireworks kind of experiences. And it's the necessary journey to go deeper into what God is. Meister Eckhart goes even a step further. He says don't wait for God to abandon you; abandon whatever experience you're having of God. Abandon God first, so that you can move more into that actuality of God, which is more in terms of emptiness, more in terms of absence and silence.

Simone Weil, philosopher: "I do not ask you to believe in God. I only ask you not to believe in everything that is not God." Now, we talked about emptiness the other day. What if I rephrase that and substitute some words? "I only ask you not to believe in everything that is not really real." Might I not end up in exactly the same place? Might it not be that those practices are completely mirror images of each other?

So Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic -- he lived in the twelfth century, the eleventh and twelfth century, I think, in Germany -- he said, "Abandon creatures." What he meant by 'creatures' is that which is created. So this experience, no matter how wonderful, this experience of God, this experience is a creation. It's a creation. In Dharma, we say abandon what is conditioned, abandon what is impermanent, abandon, abandon, abandon. Why? Because it takes you deeper into something that may not be conditioned, that may not be created.

So it's wide, you know. It's hugely wide, this whole area. It's enormously wide. There's capacity to hold all the personalities in here, and all the inclinations, and all the different kinds of relationship with emotionality and intellectuality. It's all there. It can all be held in the ways that devotion manifests and gets expressed. And as I said, it's there anyway. Our devotion is expressing itself anyway. What's really important is that we care for that. We really care for the devotion, the devotions that we want to get behind most deeply. Because all kinds of devotions express; the question is, am I getting behind, am I devoted to the devotions that I really care about? Am I caring for my devotion? And sometimes, you know, we're suffering in practice or whatever, and that sense of dukkha can squash our sense of devotion. It gets squashed out somehow.

I'll finish with a poem by Rumi. It's a very well-known one.^[3]

[1:01:55 -- 1:02:19, poem]

"Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

Shall we have a bit of quiet together?