Selflessness and a Life of Love

Through profound Insight, inquiry and the practices of the heart, there is the possibility of a radically different relationship with our whole existence, liberating a fearlessness and unboundedness to our love.

I just went for a two-minute walk, literally, outside in the beautiful light, and wandered into the little church in the graveyard there, the old graveyard. And just this sense, with the gravestones and the markers of death, the markers of our mortality. And so, if we can open ourselves to the awareness of the finiteness of our existence, and the brevity of our time on earth, and the uncertainty of that, and that we don't know how long we have, when our death will come. We have this period of existence from birth to death. And opening oneself to that, allowing oneself to be open to that. Sometimes, in that openness, some questions are so deep in their necessity and their insistence. And one is, "How do I want to live?" Really deeply, how do I want to live? This span that I have, that I don't know how long it will be -- how do I want to live? And central, of course, to that question is, how am I loving? The heart's relationship with love.

And if we individually, with spaciousness, if we have a bit of space in relationship to our existence and our life, and look at ourself and look at our life without judgment, and looking also at humanity, at the whole human family, we see, if we look honestly, without judgment, that there are actions and choices that we do make in response to our experience, and also in response to the world. And we see, in the range of those actions and experiences, we see both responses of love, of openness, and connection, and also the opposite of closedness, disconnection, apathy. That's just normal and honest.

And so it's really, really important to say: meditation practice, we don't want it leading to apathy. We don't want that, in relationship to our life and our experiences, but also in relationship to the world. And sometimes people are concerned. They've said to me, in relationship to oneself and the mettā practice, "Well, if I give everybody this mettā, and the difficult person, won't I then become like a doormat, in the sense of everyone will just step on me?" And actually that does not happen. As I said, right going back to the beginning, there's a strength that comes, a spacious, soft strength. But we do not want practice, and certainly mettā practice, to be cocooned in this cuddly, nice space, and then actually manifest a kind of docility or non-responsibility, non-responsiveness in the world.

I think it was last year sometime -- or earlier this year; I can't remember -- Gaia House received an inquiry from a young man who was, I think, a social science undergraduate or something. Obviously very intelligent, and couldn't have been that old. And he proposed some research that he wanted to come to do at Gaia House. He was writing this research paper, I think for his undergraduate degree, about meditation practice, and it was entitled "Subjective Narcissism, or Selfless Engagement?" [laughter]

I'll just read you some of his abstract (or whatever it's called when you write an academic paper):

Investigating the social and political implications in a consumption-centric society. Because some social theory [apparently, he said] has criticized the social implications of meditative, contemplative, subjective, and introspective practices as being dangerously narcissistic, socially and politically pacifying, asocial, de-politicizing, [something called] de-sublimating [which I have no idea what it means], and self-indulgent. [And then the question was:] How does the experience of meditation, retreat, extended contemplation, etc., fit into a consumption-oriented society in twenty-first century Britain?

That's really interesting to me. [laughter] That really is interesting. There's been a lot of research on mindfulness and the brain, and mindfulness and stress reduction, and depression -- which is great. What about all this stuff? What about that? He's a young man. Must be twenty or something. Really interesting. So I don't know what he found, and I didn't have, unfortunately, the chance to meet with him, but I would like to actually give him a call and find out, you know.

I found something else. There's someone called Georges Bernanos. I'm not quite sure who he is. I assume he's a writer, or was a writer. And he says:

I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself ... [not that] but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not [the] sign[s] that rebels insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.

You know, maybe it's a little judgmental, but I think the point is clear and well made.

And there are, for anyone who's in these areas, of course, there are messages, teachings that come to us through the centuries -- through the millennia, actually -- and the teachings of Jesus or Śāntideva (a great Buddhist saint from the eighth century in India). They are so radical, so deeply radical in their re-visioning of what existence can be and is.

And so there maybe is -- as much as there is beauty and a lot of good stuff in society -- there is the movement of this kind of apathy and disconnection, and we see it in ourselves and in society, as well as everything that's beautiful. And as well, there's this deep, deep message that reverberates through the centuries; this deep, deep kind of invitation, this calling. If you really listen to what Jesus is saying or Śāntideva or other teachers, it's so radical, so profound, so turning everything on its head. And because of that, it's not going to be that popular. But they are voices that won't go away. They won't go away, because they are so profound and they speak to the deepest aspects of our humanity, the deepest threads of our humanity.

So Śāntideva, for instance, he talks about the mindset of the bodhisattva actually exchanging the priorities of the happiness of self and other. In other words, we usually move in the world with that my happiness is the priority. Very natural, and normal in a way -- normal at least. And he's saying, what would it be to turn that on its head and actually start prioritizing the happiness of others over ourselves? Or even, at first, equalizing, and then [prioritizing]. There's a passage, a beautiful text he has. He's talking to himself, and he says, "Mind, you must now understand, you belong to others." You belong to others. Everything turned upside down.

And so, in these questions, it's like, can we be interested in these questions? Why does it happen sometimes that I don't act with love, that that somehow feels blocked? That I don't seem to have a response of kindness and empathy and compassion? What's blocking that? Just as when we were doing the exercise, and you see, "Oh! There are certain things [that] happen internally, externally, and that gets blocked." And to be interested in that. Or we could turn it around and say, "How can I move towards living a life of love, in as fully and deep a way as that might be?"

And of course, putting a question like that to all of us -- and I'm putting it to myself, as well, including all of us -- the inner critic can so easily get hold of a question like that. And it just becomes something like, "Oh, here's this thing, and I'm useless, and I have a closed heart, and I always will, and blah blah blah blah blah." [laughter] All right, okay. So maybe just sit the inner critic down by the side, and it can yap away. And there's another part of the being. There's another part of the being, and maybe that other part can get a little look in and a listen. And that other part, I think, in all human beings, longs, longs, there's a longing, a deep longing, for a different kind of opening, and a sense or an intuition of a different kind of way of living in love.

And of course, you know, it's every human being's right to say how much or how little I feel drawn to that, to what degree do I want to turn things upside down. No one can push us with that or make a choice or say, "You should do this or that." But there is this thread in us. There is this hunger. And we see in the world that it's possible, that there is a possibility of living with love. We see it in ourselves, and we see it around us, and we've seen it through history. And some of it is quite extraordinary, what you can, what we can witness: human beings with extraordinary capacity of openness and self-giving, outpouring of love.

Some of you might -- do you know who Viktor Frankl is? Yeah, so a beautiful -- if you ever get the chance to read a book called Man's Search for Meaning, the first half of it he chronicles his time in Auschwitz concentration camp in the Second World War, where he was interned. He later became a psychologist. But he was reflecting on the whole thing in a beautiful passage. He said:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way.^[1]

You know, horrific conditions, and that sort of thing repeated through history -- and yet, somewhere in the human heart is this extraordinary capacity, and sometimes it's accessible, and we see that possibility. And of course that's quite an extreme example, and there's much less. Recently I was teaching in Sheffield, and the place, I was staying with one of the retreatants' partner. And on her wall she had (she was probably in her fifties or maybe sixties; I'm not sure) and on her wall -- she had all kinds of stuff on her wall, and then this little section of photos, old black-and-white photos. And they were photos of her at Greenham Common. Do you guys remember Greenham Common? [laughter] And, you know, it's one of those things that, "I remember that!", in the mid eighties. And all the sense of the beauty of that came up, and this complete madness: the missiles, and humanity madly constructing mechanisms to blithely blow itself apart. And the women were the ones saying, "Stop this craziness!" And putting themselves in a certain situation, and just saying, "No." So, you know, we get a sense of the beauty that's possible out of the heart. The beauty and the sacrifice of that, and all the hassle of that, camping there.

And so it can be big, and it can be small. But there is this capacity that we have. And we see the opposite. We see apathy. So there's another quote, Edmund Burke:

All that is needed for evil to succeed is that decent human beings do nothing.

And we've seen that, if you think back to the Holocaust and other situations around the world in history. Apathy -- what are the roots of apathy? Now, sometimes it's fear. And if you think about something like the Holocaust, it was probably fear of, in this case, a large proportion of a certain population, and other populations actually afraid -- of course, afraid. And that manifests as a kind of non-intervention, a non-voicing of something. But there are other reasons, of course, other roots for our non-opening, our closing of something. I read recently, there's something called the Global Policy Forum report. This is from 2005, so it's a little bit out of date, and I don't know what the figures are. But it said (in 2005): "Rich countries give less than half the amount of aid they gave in the early sixties when they were far less affluent."^[2]

I read that, and I was just -- and I'm not saying this is so, but I was wondering why, and I a little bit had the thought (and again, I don't know), did that have something to do with actually giving aid as a kind of bulwark against the spread of communism and the so-called domino effect, etc.? In other words, the aid wasn't purely aid; it was in the service of something else. And I don't know -- maybe. But very easily our selfishness, our self-centredness comes and blocks our love. And our greed as well. We were talking in one of the groups today: the perspective of the self-view -- I'll come back to this later, but -- the perspective of the self-view, because it feels itself to be [separate], the ego, it's a separate thing in a vast and possibly threatening world, it can have very easily a sense of scarcity, of "there's not enough." And so, "get, get, get, get," because there's not enough. And not really open to the ramifications and the implications of my "get, get, get, because there's not enough for me" on others.

I came across a book a while ago by the commander of the armed forces in Rwanda, the UN armed forces that were there to try and make peace and keep peace when the genocide broke out in Rwanda. His name is Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. He wrote quite a shocking book about it all, about his reflections. He actually had kind of a breakdown after the whole thing, and felt like it had failed for many reasons. And part of his healing his own breakdown was writing this book and writing his perspective on the whole experience. And he writes this passage:

That mission [which was called UNAMIR] failed. I know intimately the cost in human lives of the inflexible UN Security Council mandate, the penny-pinching financial management of the mission, the UN red tape, the political manipulations, and my own personal limitations. What I've come to realize as the root of it all, however, is the fundamental indifference of the world community to the plight of seven to eight million black Africans in a tiny country that had no strategic or resource value to any world power. The world watched, and yet could not manage to find the political will to intervene. Engraved still in my brain is the judgment of a small group of bureaucrats who came to assess the situation in the first weeks of the genocide [and he reports they said]: 'We will recommend to our governments not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans.'^[3]

"All that is here are humans." That's saying it directly. But we know that this goes on. We know where a lot of the decisions, maybe kind of geopolitical decisions in the world may be coming from. Painful. Sad. And it's in a way doubly complicated these days, because we have a globalized culture and a globalized information culture with the internet. So much information from around the world is available, so many possibilities of reaching out are available. With all that information, there can be complete numbing -- on the TV and the internet, etc. It's not easy, not easy. And of course, with all that, and with that overload of information about the enormous suffering in our world, very easy to feel futile, to feel a futility of trying to change the direction of anything. Or trying to change any of these huge momentums that seem to be occurring in the modern culture and the modern world, and climate change and all kinds of stuff.

So that's very common: futility, a sense of futility, a sense of despair and pointlessness. Actually, that thing about the cells that I read you the other day, that came from -- I have it here -- what it actually is is this guy Paul Hawken, this entrepreneur, writer, environmentalist. He was invited to give what they call in the States a 'commencement address' to a graduating class. It's really when the undergraduates from a university are graduating after three or four years, and then they all get their certificates and whatnot, degrees, together. And someone's usually invited to speak. And so, if you ever come across it, I think it's the most beautiful, extraordinary short speech. So, so beautiful. There's a piece I want to read about this, but if you will indulge me, I just want to read a little bit before that. So he begins -- and remember, he's addressing 22-year-olds, probably, something like that. There's a little bit of an introduction, then he says:

Let's begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation, but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.^[4]

[laughter] He's wonderful! I just, so much, I love this. Then he goes on:

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint.

And this is the part I really wanted to read. This is in relation to futility:

And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians [etc.]

And if you have a religious bent, bodhisattvas or Buddhas or whatever you might like.

So I'm reading that because one response to this futility, and it's there, is this sense of, "Yes, all this is happening, and all this other stuff is happening," and a sense of a great surge in the human spirit, and all these connections being made, and the power of that, the kind of underground power of that. And with that, optimism.

I read you the wrong thing in the wrong order. He gave the example of the abolitionist movement. That's another part of it. I'll read it to you again. It's okay. He's talking about the kindness of strangers. So there is this apathy, but there is also this amazing thing that we witness in human beings of a kindness of strangers, and he says:

This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. [He talks about abolitionists, those who were trying to end the slave trade.] Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown -- Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood -- and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day [and he goes on and relates it to what I was saying before about this mass movement].

Another thing about the abolitionist movement is that, if you look at the history of it, it actually took sixty or seventy or eighty years to actually make an effect. And some of the people who started it didn't live to see the fruits of it. So there's something about this giving myself to benefit others. I will never see them, I will never meet them, I will never get anything from them, whether that's people or parts of the earth. And having this long view. And somehow it cannot be, in that case, about the limited self. It cannot be, because the limited self is not getting anything out of it.

So there's optimism. He's a voice of optimism, which is beautiful. But how might we have this sense of urgency without despair? Meeting the enormity of the suffering in the world with a sense of urgency in the heart, engagement in the heart, but without despair. How can we have, as human beings, a love that keeps going no matter what? And we call that 'equanimity.' It's an aspect of equanimity, that it stays steady no matter what. The love, the compassion stays steady.

So he's obviously very optimistic and very lovely. Other options if that optimism -- and at times, it does not feel accessible probably for many people -- does not feel accessible. We keep talking about this quality of buoyancy in the mettā practice, that we're trying to cultivate that. One of the reasons is because 'buoyancy' is another word for 'equanimity.' If we're, in the practice, cultivating this sense of keeping the mind up and bright, and it's still open, and it's still sensitive, and the heart is open and receptive, but the consciousness is buoyant, that means it won't sink when it meets the suffering in the world. The compassion will be buoyant. And so why we keep saying "the body," and is it possible to nurture that sense of well-being in the body, because it brings long-term, with practice, this sense of buoyancy more and more. And that's not about suppressing anything. Again, if there's flexibility in practice, then I can cultivate that well-being as a resource for me to keep me buoyant. And I can also, at times, go and hold and meet directly what is difficult. We're not in the business of suppressing; we're flexible.

But -- or rather, and -- what else? What other options in the face of this futility? What other options in order to keep this love steady no matter what? That's really what I want to go into tonight. It has to do with the Dharma teachings of emptiness. Śūnyatā, emptiness. So how can we go into this? It's a huge subject. I just want to approach a little bit. Let's go in, in relationship to what we've been doing a little bit. Let's consider anger, the opposite of loving-kindness.

When there's anger or judgmentalism, whatever, obviously we see the mettā is less and the acts of loving-kindness are less. If I just dwell on anger for a second, it's clear that anger is a problem in the world. It causes huge devastation and wreaks havoc in the world. And yet it's complex, and Chris touched on this yesterday. We need our "no." We need the strength to set boundaries and be firm with that. And that can have the energy of anger. But the will, the desire to hurt another, to destroy, to inflict pain or revenge on another, that is always going to be a problem. Always going to be a problem and to cause suffering. To quote the Buddha: "Anger with its poisoned source and fevered climax is murderously sweet."^[5] It's like Shakespeare! [laughter] But you get this sense, it's so seductive sometimes. Murderously sweet. It has a poisoned source, and there's a kind of climax to it all. We have to see that it brings suffering, it leads to suffering. And we see that even, sometimes with people, it's like, "Well, I can't really get interested. I just feel a little irritated at this person or a little aversive." And yet, see: there's suffering there, and so I have to be interested in cultivating the loving-kindness. And the more sensitive I become, the more I'll be bothered by the suffering of that aversion and irritability.

So we have anger, and it moves in us sometimes in aversion and irritability. And we have beautiful qualities. But we can see, with the movement of consciousness, how we reinforce habits of heart and mind, how easily we reinforce the habits of heart and mind. And with that, with those different habits, our happiness goes up and down. An angry, aversive, irritable state of mind is not a happy mind. A mettā-ful heart and mind is a happy one. And with that -- and as I was touching on this morning -- with that movement between, say, aversion and love, we also notice the perception change. The perception of the world changes. And this is where the emptiness bit comes in.

But there are different aspects of this. So it's important to point out, again, we're not being apathetic or non-responsive. When we see injustice, either personally or in the world, it's not at all that we're, though mettā, condoning certain actions. That's not at all what we're doing. There's a place to pointing out certain actions are not okay. But we're trying to prevent selves getting defined -- either my self or your self -- in a stance of righteousness, or "You are like this. You are evil. You, me," like that. Defining the self, that's where the problem comes.

What happens is in certain states of mind, like the afflictive emotions, any afflictive emotion, any afflictive emotion brings with it a tendency for the perception to lock. Do you understand what I mean by that? It locks into place, seeing self and other and the world in a certain way, and it's kind of stuck in that and also the suffering of that. So there is something, you know, when we're working with the difficult person: can I focus on this person's good qualities? Can I be interested in effecting or encouraging a change in my perception? It's huge.

So as human beings, obviously in our personal life we get into difficulties with people at times. You know, we have arguments, we have fallings out and all that -- normal, very normal. And when we're trying to work it out with someone, sometimes it's so hard not to want to just tell the other person what's what. We know that I should really listen to their half, but it's so hard sometimes! The impulse, the fire, the burning, the pressure of the anger wants to get my stuff out. And yet, a lot of the healing will come from the half of willingness to listen and hear the other half. And so sometimes it's good -- I read a book about it, about difficult conversations recently -- it said, see if you can, when you're having a difficulty with someone, see if you can seek to have a learning conversation. That your actual intention for the conversation, rather than telling this person what's what and how you feel and what happened, etc., that you're actually seeking to learn something about them and about their point of view. And that's difficult. That's not always easy with the pressure and the heat of it.

But that's where empathy comes in. And when empathy comes in, it starts to soften this locking of perception. So people seem to us a certain way, and in a way, part of empathy is, what would it be to imagine myself inside this other person? Inside their life, perhaps with their background, looking out from their eyes, from their experience. There's a beautiful phrase -- it's like, when we are trying to be empathic -- or when we are empathic, in fact -- we're on a journey with a direction but no destination. In other words, I can never arrive at fully understanding you. And kind of having that sense of the openness of it is really, really helpful. Hugely helpful.

This is a little bit aside, but when there is a difficulty between two people, it's interesting: usually we are actually more interested in knowing that the other person is trying to understand us, trying to empathize, than in whether they have actually achieved that place of a certain arrival point or goal -- that they're willing to struggle, to try. That makes all the difference. Have you noticed this? As a participant in a difficult conversation, it would actually, in a way, really be helpful: we can communicate -- and in fact, we need to communicate if we want it to go well and heal -- we need to communicate a sense that we're trying, we're struggling to understand. And even if I don't, when the other person sees that you're actually trying, that's what makes a difference. That's what makes a huge difference.

But the main point is that empathy has this capacity, this resonance that Chris was talking about a little bit yesterday. This resonance has the capacity to soften the locking of the perception. And reminding ourselves, recognizing the complexity of another, the humanity of another person when it feels like we're pigeonholing them or they've done something, "They are difficult. They are bad," or whatever it is. The malleability of all beings. We've talked about the malleability of the mind and the heart. All beings' minds are malleable.

And how we are all subjects of past and present conditioning. Someone was telling me a while ago -- he said when he was very young, I think two, or less than three, even, he had a baby brother born, and the brother was born with a disability. And very quickly, because of different conditions and maybe not such skilful communication, he perceived it that it was his fault. You know, you think -- the consciousness of a 2, 2½-year-old can't really, tries, struggling to make sense of things in a kind of practically preverbal way. And somehow absorbed, took on this understanding, that somehow it was his fault that his brother was born disabled. And with that, very quickly led to a sense of "There must be something really wrong with me, that I'm bad." And internalized that very deeply.

And from that -- from that conditioning -- something else spun out, and a sense of "I'm bad. Therefore I don't deserve good attention. But I know I need attention, and I will get bad attention." And saw a pattern in the life of attention-seeking in all the wrong ways. And beginning to get conscious of that. So just knowing that these kinds of things go on for people, this powerful stream of conditioning. And we might see a person, and we have no idea about the stream of unfolding conditioning that leads to certain ... And in the present, seeing that begins to change that conditioning as well.

To the degree that I can loosen the definition of self and other, the mettā increases. Someone was telling me a while ago on retreat, got into a very peaceful state of mind, and then noticed when she was in that very peaceful state of mind (actually, relatively peaceful state of mind), there was no judgment of certain incidents or people that she would otherwise have judged. And this struck her. It's like, "Wow, that's interesting." Even trying to bring up, thinking of certain incidents -- and in this case, politicians and other stuff -- it was like dropping something in, and it just didn't arise. We were talking: what's the insight from that? Well, one is, she, or I in this case, am not by nature a judgmental person. In other words, that's not 'who I am.' That's not my self. It depends on the condition of the mind in the moment. Do you see? So the self-view of "I am judgmental" -- it cannot sustain any more; it's loosened. But also, "This person is bad," or whatever it was the judgment would have said, that also cannot sustain, because it wasn't there. This perception of the situation is not inherently real, we say. It depends. It depends on the heart and the mind, and the state of the heart and the mind.

So when there's mettā, and some of you have been tasting this, when there's mettā, there's a loosening. There's a loosening, and with that, a kind of spaciousness. That could be this big spaciousness that we've been talking about today, but it's also the spaciousness of the loosening of definitions. Mettā brings spaciousness, but also, spaciousness brings mettā. Again, this double causality, direction. 'Spaciousness' meaning not just big physical space, the space of awareness, but the spaciousness of the loosening of these self/other definitions.

So what does that imply? It's easy to say, "Yeah, yeah." But the implications of this are so profound. It means that our perception of things, all things, is flexible, is malleable. And this is a big part of what emptiness means: that there is no 'real' way things are, I am, you are, it is. There is no fixed, real, independent of my perception, independent of my heart and mind 'essence' to things. Perception, the way things are, the way things seem, depends on my heart. It depends on my heart.

We can see this emptiness in many, many ways, but tonight I want to focus on the ways that can naturally evolve out of a mettā practice. But seeing emptiness in any way brings more mettā. We have this word 'emptiness,' and it sounds kind of bleak, etc., but actually, as I see this emptiness, this non-independent essence of things, it actually opens up the heart of love more. It opens that possibility up. When I see that my perception of other, self, situation is dependent on my heart, then my rigidity of definition must begin to dissolve. And with that, the space and the mettā increases.

There's a further piece. We could take it a little bit further here, because with the mind state comes the perception of others. So with aversion, as someone was saying today, "I felt really aversive. I walked into the hall, and it looked a certain way. Everyone looked a certain way. Everything was annoying me." [laughter] We know this. We know this is as human beings. The opposite, and the same person at a different time in a very different mind state: "I looked at this, I looked at that, I looked at them" -- very different perception. What a swing! The range of human consciousness, the range of the heart and the range of perception.

Mind state influences perception of others; perception of others influences mind state. And we can use that. Meaning, if the perception of others is actually not a real, independent thing, and if it's malleable, why don't I mould it in a certain direction? What if I were to find ways of seeing the beauty of others? And that's what that thing about wonder that we were [talking about] the other day: in a way, that gives a sense of this incredible existence of another being. In lots of different ways, I'm shaping, nurturing certain kinds of perceptions of others, because that will influence my mind state. And then there's a positive feedback loop, and they start influencing each other that way.

Whether it's aversion or whether it's love, they will still be feeding off each other. So if I have aversion, everyone looks like a bunch of ... [laughter] I look out at a bunch of nyeeugh. [laughter] And how do I feel? What does that feed my mind? Nyeeugh. [laughter] And so it goes round. And the opposite is true. And if this is the case, why on earth wouldn't we feed the other? Why wouldn't we use that feedback loop? And if you've heard a little bit about tantric practice, this is really part of the essence of tantric practice. Things are empty; let's incline a little bit towards a different kind of perception.

Another possible avenue of emptiness is that this self that seems so obvious -- "I'm sitting here, Harry is sitting there, Annie is sitting there or whatever" -- it seems so obvious. I'm here, you're there. There's Harry's self, here's Rob's self. It seems so obvious. And I look a little deeper: where is this self? You're looking. Here's a body. Okay, where's the self? Am I my body? Where is it? Am I my mind?Which part of my mind? Actually, when we go deeply, really deeply, meditatively looking, this self is unfindable. It's unfindable. And it seems so obvious. It seems so obvious I spend my whole life dictated to by the demands and needs and pressures and wants and neuroses of the self. And where is it actually?

It was a funny thing a while ago. I can't remember when it happened, but not too far from here in one of the fields, I walk and I ride my bike and stuff, and there was an open piece of ground. Then just suddenly one day -- this is a piece of ground; it had been there ages -- and then suddenly one day two posts appeared with a gate between it, padlocked. [laughter] And there was nothing else around it! [laughter] And I just went by on my bike, and I went back to take a double-take! And I actually thought, that's a perfect metaphor for the self and what we do.

The nature of things, we could say, to use slightly different language, the true nature of things is actually open -- what could we say? -- relaxed, spacious. That's the true nature of things. But when we believe so firmly in this solid, tight self, we don't see that openness, we don't see that spaciousness, we don't see that inseparability, that unboundedness. And instead we construct gates and fences, and we lock them, believing we're protecting something that's really real. Believing that we're protecting something really real. And for all the life of us, it feels so real. But that's actually delusion. From a deep Dharmic point of view, it's actually delusion. We feel like we're protecting something that's really real, and it's not. It's not.

So in the exercise today -- well, over the days, actually -- the 2:30 one that everyone hates ... [laughter] Except one person, apparently. [laughter] A couple of things, and Chris was going into this today a little bit. When there's not, and I said this in relation to receiving, when there's not enough self-mettā, there's an increase in the difficulty of contact, and there's an increase, certainly, in the sense of blockage of giving mettā to others. When there's not enough self-mettā, there's not enough of this nourishment that I was talking about, going back to the opening talk. And so Chris was experimenting, and saying, "Well, what if I make it 50/50, and don't abandon the love to myself?" Hugely important. And still, though, I have a feeling that that still won't quite cut it at a certain level. Any time there is the belief in this self, there will be some sense of constriction around that and some sense of self-consciousness and some sense of blocking of the love. To the degree that the belief in that solidity of self goes down, or at the times when that begins to quieten, the rigidity and the tightness and the self-definition (and that has a whole spectrum of how dissolved it can get, and the sense of emptiness of things), fear drains out of the whole situation. Completely drains out of the whole situation. And mettā is there naturally, as a natural quality of the openness that is allowed. Completely natural with the emptiness.

So the self, we say in Dharma language, is empty. It's not real. The self of myself and others' selves, it's not real in the way that it seems so real. It's actually not. That's an illusion and delusion. We also say, taking this a little bit further, we say in the Dharma that not only are selves empty -- myself, yourself -- but all phenomena are empty. All phenomena, all things: external things, the world of physical reality, but also internal things, emotions and sensations. All phenomena are empty.

And again, there are many ways of seeing that, many ways of penetrating that understanding, but we can also see this through the mettā practice. The Buddha has a lovely discourse, I can't remember exactly where it is, and it's the simile of the salt crystal. And he says -- I'll paraphrase -- he says something like, "If you take a little rock of salt, a little rock crystal, a salt crystal, and you take that and you put it in a glass of water, and then you drink that water, it's going to taste very salty, very unpleasant. But if you take that salt crystal and you drop it in a big freshwater lake, and then you drink some of the water from the lake, you barely notice it." He said, "Just so is it when the heart becomes immeasurable. When the heart becomes immeasurable, that which is painful from the past -- in the body, in the heart, in the mind, old karma (so-called) -- all that stuff becomes almost as if it barely is there. Almost as if it's barely there."^[6] And there are different ways in which the heart can become, the consciousness can become immeasurable. There are many different ways. Mettā is one of them, what we've been doing today with the spaciousness. But it begins affecting our very perception of phenomena, perception of the world, both inner and outer.

We can grow in immeasurability through spaciousness, through mettā, through compassion, through joy, through equanimity, through non-grasping. Basically, immeasurability is allowed through non-grasping. The less we grasp, the more immeasurable the consciousness becomes. And so, again, this business*,* "Whoa, isn't this real? Maybe I'm suppressing something." And I really want to respect that aspect of our psychology like I was talking about a couple of nights ago. There's huge importance for grappling with what's difficult, meeting it directly, not running away from it. And yet there's a whole other level of truth: this is not suppression. All I'm doing is opening and non-grasping, and things begin, just like the salt crystal, dissolving and barely making that impact.

So we say, what's the real thing? What's the real taste of this? Empty, empty. Without an independent reality, independent of the heart. And then today, as well, we were talking about, or in the group, sometimes the possibility of, when the mettā goes to all beings, this kind of huge space of universal love opening up, and almost it being non-personal. Love seems to pervade the cosmos, seems to pervade space in a boundless and infinite way. Very beautiful. Very possible for us as human beings to open to that kind of mystical perception. It is an opening, a change of perception that is kind of mystical. And that can actually begin to go on its own journey. So there is this space of love at first that seems to hold everything, and as it gets even deeper, for a dedicated practitioner (sometimes people not even on retreat, not even meditators, occasionally open to this), everything begins to seem like, to be perceived as if it's an expression of love. The true nature of all things -- all things, even solid things -- their true nature, somehow, mystically, is love.

And this is a real, palpable perception for people. It's possible. And someone might hear that and say, "Well, that's not Buddhism," or whatever. But there is something here about how healing and how helpful and how useful it is to open up. And some of you today have even touched a little bit of this, or at other times on different retreats, etc. How immense the power of that is, for our own healing and for what we then manifest in the world. And actually -- and I don't have time to go into this, but -- in some way, it's actually a truer perception, we could say. It's more real, I would say, at some level, it's more real than the reality that maybe six billion people would agree on, kind of scientific materialist reality. I don't have time to get into that.

With practice, it is possible, and even just through mettā practice, beginning to see everything is empty in this way. We begin to see the different ways -- the understanding evolves: all things are empty, all things. When I begin to see that, or as I begin to see that, it's like I begin to see the beauty, then, in all things through their emptiness. And with that, affection and care are natural. They're natural responses to that emptiness and that beauty.

The perceptions that go with our non-love -- you know, even if it's not particularly angry or irritable; it's just a little bit 'me' -- those kind of perceptions, in a way, they seem so real. But all that's the case is that they're habitual. It's only that they're habitual. It's not that they're real, the perceptions of non-love, of this or that being irritating or a problem or whatever. And they're actually not based on reality. There was a Tibetan teacher from a while ago. He must be dead by now. He was a disciple of the great, great Tibetan teacher called Mipham Rinpoche who died in 1912. This guy's name is Khro shul 'Jam rdor. He talks about this, what happens as we go deeper and deeper in the path. So I'm kind of just painting a picture, if you like, or a possibility that can unfold through this practice. He says:

Practising the path is like purifying a defect of the eyes, for instance removing a cataract, in that purifying the subject stains [meaning the stains of the heart, of consciousness] likewise purifies the object. Internally, when the subject [the heart] is purified of stains, externally there is no object that is not purified.

And so they talk in some traditions about the purified conventional perception, and what does that mean? It means that with all this unfolding, the possibility is that, little by little perhaps, more and more, the world of things, we see: empty. Somehow magical, even. Somehow perfect. Somehow perfect in a magical way in that emptiness. Somehow luminous, numinous. And in some traditions, the Dzogchen tradition, for instance, they talk about divine appearances, that the world becomes a realm of divine appearances. It's a certain language, but this is what it's pointing to. So going back to the opening talk, and some who say "Mettā's a baby practice" -- and it can lead all the way to that. And actually what's happening is mettā is leading us to see more in harmony with reality, as I said earlier in the talk. And unkindness, interestingly, feelings of unkindness, perceptions of unkindness, they cannot sustain in the light of truth. They cannot sustain in the light of deep truth. But love can. Love can.

With all this -- I'm just painting a picture of what might be possible for us, what is possible for us -- the understanding of emptiness, the perception of emptiness grows. And with that, it becomes easier to love in a way that lasts -- what I was talking about -- to sustain that love because of the perception of emptiness. And with that, this, what some would call 'divine appearances.' And again, instead of a negative or an unpleasant feedback loop, you get a lovely feedback loop. The more the world appears magical, divine, empty, luminous, the easier it is to love. And that goes round. And the more empty it is, the easier it is to sustain without sinking into the futility and the despair or the apathy. So basically, in other words, all this deep insight that comes from mettā practice brings equanimity with our compassion -- and engagement, the possibility of engagement.

There's a lovely poem by Rumi, the mystical Sufi poet.^[7]

[1:01:59 -- 1:02:18, poem]

"Emptiness brings peace to your loving." And emptiness allows a kind of radical, radical loving-kindness. So in some traditions -- again, going back to Śāntideva, we were talking about exchanging self and other, which really means exchanging the priority of my happiness over your happiness. And that seems like such a -- hard to think of that outside of the realm of, "That must be really unhealthy psychologically, and co-dependence and all this stuff." But when I see the emptiness of things, I can take this. Like I was saying, I threw out this morning: "I have some difficulty, I have some pain in the body. I'll take it, because I want you to have the good stuff." And what makes me able to take it? Because I feel it's empty, I know it's empty, it's nothing. In essence it's nothing, so I can take it. My capacity to take on, to sacrifice, to take on what is difficult so that you are unburdened begins to get huge and eventually even bottomless. There's this possibility through the emptiness opening up of radical love becoming possible. Not apathy, not at all apathy.

And we get -- if we want to, and we get interested in this -- we get more skilful at sort of navigating all this. Remember at one point I was talking about, well, you can give the mettā to a narrative self -- myself or others -- a narrative self, the self of my journey and story; the self of my body and being, very simply; the self of a dropping of definition, a dropping of the selfing, either in me or the other or both; a self of emptiness, the non-self. And in a way, we can let each of those places on that spectrum be the source of mettā. And there's a different flavour of mettā, perhaps, we could say, with each. And that all becomes kind of our playground. We can move on that spectrum. And it's all good. It's not to say that we say, "Well, I've had a glimpse of this oneness or this huge, mystical, universal, impersonal love in the cosmos. That's the only reality," or "It always must be that." It's not that. As human beings, we have this range, and all of it is beautiful, and all of it is human.

Just to finish: another implication of all this is actually, if we reflect, that practice, long-term -- well, actually from the beginning; from the beginning, practice is a journey of removing, we could say, the veils of delusion. And what does that mean? It means the delusion that things exist in a real, independent way, independent of my heart and my mind and my perception. In other words, we begin to understand emptiness more and more. We're removing this veil of delusion. And as we do that, the love increases automatically, organically.

And so -- and we've said this before a little bit -- is it really that I'm developing mettā? Like I said, I'm huffing and puffing, and "Come on, almost got it!" [laughter] I mean, let's be honest: sometimes it feels that way, and sometimes it is that way. But is that really what we're doing at the deeper level? Or are we allowing mettā, unveiling mettā, if you like? Something that is natural, or what we might call our Buddha-potential or our Buddha-nature.

To the degree that we see the self, others, and phenomena are empty, to that degree, it reveals the world as luminous, as empty, and as pure somehow, pure and perfect. And with that, there's a natural loving-kindness, natural mettā, natural compassion. And a natural shedding of the habit of seeing and living from the "me first, me first, me first." And gradually -- all this is very gradual; I'm talking about gradual possibilities -- gradually, over time, we begin, there's a possibility of becoming more steady with that, even, and actually living a bit more from that understanding.

I'm not sure if that sounds far-fetched or not, but what I want to say is, it's really, really available, and it's really possible. And this practice which we've just tasted together for a few days, this is the direction of possibility here. And it's there for us if it's something we want and we feel called to explore. As I said right going back to the opening talk, the possibilities are usually way more for us than we almost dare to conceive for ourselves. And it's there, and it's a very real possibility, and there are people in this hall right now who, through long dedication to practice, etc., have experienced what I'm talking about. It's possible for us as human beings. It's possible for us as practitioners. And this longing that we have, something in there -- to whatever degree -- a different possibility for the heart, a different possibility for the life. It is there for us. It's definitely there. And we walk down that path as far as we want to walk. And that's up to us. But it's there.

Okay. Shall we have some quiet together?