Transcription
For over 100 years, maybe 150 years or more, there's been a whole stream of thinkers in Western society who have either observed our alienation, or observed an alienation creep in or seep into the way we feel in society -- either observed that, or actually given rise themselves to ideas which might have created that.
If you think about, going way back to Marx, for instance, and his very perceptive observation of the alienation of labour, that the sense that we have (or used to have) in societies of being very connected with one's work, and what that was, and what it did in the world, and the fruits of the labour, with the Industrial Revolution, etc., there was that separation. Freud, too -- this whole sense that we have a kind of iceberg, tip of the iceberg existence on the top of an unconscious that we cannot really know directly, that's actually much more huge and much more powerful than the ego-consciousness. And in his view, it was quite threatening and dangerous, and needed to somehow be controlled.
The sense of, in a way, alienation from labour, alienation from ourselves, then, in Freud's view, from the depths of ourselves. The dissolving in a lot of Western cultures of the sort of taken-for-granted religious beliefs that used to be so prevalent. Everyone believed in God. That's gone now. And then the existentialist philosophers, and how we're disconnected from each other. So there's all this alienation, alienation, alienation.
In a way, there's some degree of alienation that we are dealing with as human beings in contemporary society. And some people feel that very painfully, and can understand where that comes from in terms of how the society is, etc. Some people feel it very painfully, and it's not clear where it comes from. I have quite a number of friends and people I know who there's a deep sense of actually not belonging in the universe, that somehow my existence is a mistake, somehow it's wrong for me to be here. It's a very deep existential sense of mistake deep in the being, at the core of the being. Enormously painful.
So it can range from that to just a sense of some degree of alienation. What I want to go into tonight is: is it possible -- and if so, how -- that practice can bring a sense of being deeply at home in the universe, deeply at home and belonging? And how might it do that? Because a physical house, even a very nice physical house, it probably won't do it at a deep, existential level. We can have those bricks and mortar, and that sense of security, but in terms of the deep sense of at-homeness, belonging, profound, saturating the sense of existence -- probably not enough.
So really what I want to go into tonight is, again, it's one of those things that actually when one explores it a little bit, it's like, "Oh, this is actually pretty complex." There are pieces, and there are aspects to it, so I want to kind of go into some of the pieces. I can't go into any of them in great depth, but I'm laying some of all this out.
Let's start. What would it involve? What does it need for me to feel really at home in the universe? Really at home, deeply at home. Well, for starters, I need to feel at home with myself. In a way, you can definitely say some of the practices that we are doing are contributing to that, are attempting to contribute to that. So the Buddha -- Chris may or may not get to this when he speaks next -- the Buddha talks about what's called the 'four foundations of mindfulness' or the 'four stationings of mindfulness' -- in the body, and the feelings, and the mind, etc. These are areas or dimensions of our being, of our existence, where we can very easily feel alienation, disconnection, etc. The Buddha's pointing the attention, the mindfulness, in certain directions to heal that. That's part of what's going on, to heal that connection so that we feel more at home with ourselves.
As Chris was saying last night, and we've been saying many times on the retreat, what is the relationship with what's going on? What's the relationship? And what is my relationship with this experience, this heartache, this joy, this pain in my knee, these thoughts that come through? What is that relationship spawning if I'm aversive to it, if I'm trying to hang onto it? What comes out of that, and particularly for tonight, in terms of my sense of alienation or at-homeness and belonging? Similarly with the view. We talked about this yesterday morning. If I have a certain view of things, make certain conclusions and assumptions, what comes out of that? How easily the views can support alienation, support disconnection.
So these practices -- and we started with the emotional, the sort of stream of emotions, and the heart states, the mind states we're talking about -- in a way, becoming more and more at ease with what passes through the being, what passes through the heart, what comes up, what difficulties, what stuff, what experience moves through. And, as I said, we're moving gradually towards confidence there, a confidence. So unlike what Freud might be pointing to, one actually feels at a certain point, "I'm not afraid of what comes up. I may or may not be sitting on a volcano, but if it erupts -- if there is one, and if it erupts -- I can be sure that I can handle it, because I've worked with these practices, and I understand how the relationship influences, and I've worked with playing with that." So one is no longer afraid of what might come up. Or a certain situation might trigger certain feelings, or certain information -- whether it's about myself and my past, or about the global situation, as we talked about. I'm not afraid of that, and there's confidence there. That's a huge part of just being able to kind of rest, breathe easy, settle deeply in life. There's nothing that can come up emotionally that would make me afraid. So that's what we're moving towards gradually in these practices, gradually.
We're doing a lot of work with our own process as it comes up. But not to neglect in this how important the value of others is -- my friends, or a therapist, or a teacher -- and that people, together, in relationship, can create something very beautiful that contributes to our deep sense of being able to hold experience, emotion, and our life, and with that a sense of belonging. A friend, or a teacher, or a therapist, whatever, together can create a field of trust. Maybe the parts in our being that are hidden or there's shame around, we don't want to look at them, we can bring that to light in the context of a safe and accepting, loving, compassionate field there, and together look at that, and together support a sense of acceptance of what that is. And acceptance has everything to do with feeling at home.
[9:15] Now, even that takes quite some courage -- to make oneself open with another human being, to share that openness, especially the parts that feel wounded and shameful. There's a vulnerability there. It takes something to present that. But it might well be that that togetherness and that sharing together is on its way to being able to do it on one's own, being independent in this regard. And if you remember that question I threw out in the opening talk: "What do I want from working with my emotions?" Well, two things in relation to what I just said. I want to be able to share them freely and honestly in relationships and spaces where it feels safe, one thing. And second thing, I want to, at some point, be independent of others. Not that I can't share if I want to, but that I'm actually able on my own to look inside and hold this stuff, the difficult and the lovely, as it comes up, and relate to it in a healing way. So those two aspects -- others and independence.
Sometimes, some of you, I know, are working as therapists, etc., and this is such a key aspect of the relationship. And also sometimes in a teacher-student relationship, saying to someone -- someone I'm thinking of -- about coming to Gaia House, and they need to hear this message: "It's really okay to be here. You're really welcome here, and there's nothing you can get wrong in what you say or what you do that's going to lead to me rejecting you." And the wounding around that is so strong and so scarred that it's almost like it takes a while for that message to penetrate, to penetrate the scar tissue. But slowly, slowly, it begins to seep in, and a being peers above the parapet: "Is it okay? Is it okay to come forth?" That's a beautiful thing we can give to another being, the message "It is okay. You can be you."
And gradually they come to see, "I won't get rejected. I won't get rejected. It is perhaps more safe," and as that grows, they can explore the fear of rejection, and the whole sense of threat can subside, and the sense of okayness can increase. Beautiful healing that can take place between two or more human beings.
And then, of course, that's part of what we call Saṅgha, of community. This word, Saṅgha, if you don't know, it means 'community,' 'togetherness,' 'spiritual friendship.' And that exists in the present -- me, now, with others, together in the present. But interestingly, it also exists in the past and the future. So was it yesterday we were chopping off the past and future? But actually past and future can be helpful. You come into this hall -- how many people over the years have sat in this hall, and sat patiently and dedicatedly, working with what's difficult and cultivating what's beautiful? When we come in here, we're moving into that stream. We're tapping into that past current. And it's really, really helpful to acknowledge that and to feel supported and moved along by that current. So powerful.
Gaia House didn't come to this building until ninety-six, I think it was -- 1996. That's not that long, but there are a lot of people that have been in here. What if we go back further still? And how many years, centuries, millennia have people been doing these kind of practices, with dedication, and with difficulty, and with inspiration, and with all of that? And we are part of that stream, and we're contributing to future generations. And there is a kind of fantasy, because I don't know exactly who was here, and I don't know who will come, but I have stories of my teachers and my teacher's teachers and all that, and that fantasy is actually really helpful. It's very nourishing. Past and future fantasy is something that embeds me, at home, in a moment in time, with a direction in what I'm doing.
There's also being at home with the mind and the thinking mind -- we've touched on this a little bit -- and really the calling of the insight. You know, we can get to a place where thoughts are just not a problem. They're just not a problem. The thinking mind is not a problem. It's like a mind, in its nature, spawns, produces, gives rise to thoughts. That's what it does, just as a tree, if it's healthy, gives rise to leaves. That's what trees do; it's the nature of the tree. It's the nature of the mind to give rise to thoughts. So I can decide that shouldn't be the nature of the mind, but I'm fighting nature. I can decide that the tree should not have leaves. Or I could get upset about some leaves are pretty and some leaves are ugly; some thoughts are pretty, some thoughts are ugly. It's the nature. It's the nature of things.
If I believe thoughts, then I start to really upset things and my potential of really being at home with a mind that thinks. And if I identify with thoughts -- just because I had a judgmental thought or an ugly thought, "It means something about me" -- if I'm identified with thought, then [it's] also very difficult to feel at home. But I can, over time, open and discover a relationship with the thinking mind where it's just not a problem that there's thinking going on. It's not a problem that there's ugly thinking going on at times, or thinking that one wouldn't be, so to speak, 'proud of.' It's just not a problem. It moves towards a sense of the mind -- we're at home in the mind. Mind becomes a playground, even, all this thinking.
And then there's the body. And what is it to be really at home and not alienated with bodily existence, and how the body is, and the aches, and the pains, and the difficulties, and illness, and health, and all of that, and the way that it appears? To really be okay deeply with how the body is, it's difficult. It's a journey. It's not necessarily easy. So with these foundations of mindfulness, the Buddha keeps using a curious phrase in each one. The body is the first one, the first foundation of mindfulness. He says, "Can you see the body in the body? Can you see the body as the body?"[1] You think, "What does he mean?" Partly he means instead of comparing the way this body appears, or its health, or whatever else, or whether it's beautiful or ugly, comparing that and measuring it with other bodies that I see in glossy magazines and all that kind of thing, instead of that comparing that we usually do in relationship to the body, can I see the body as body? I'm relating to things minus the measuring self. That makes a huge difference. I'm going to come back to that later. So as the body ages, not simple, not easy to be okay with that.
Part of being at home with the body is seeing that the body is nature, in some very fundamental sense. The body is part of nature, and is not disconnected from nature. All this comes from nature and will definitely go back there at some point -- "dust to dust," as they say. There was someone on retreat describing a beautiful practice that she would do early in the morning. She would get up early in the morning on retreat, and she would go outside, and she would bow deeply to the five elements, which is also part of the teaching in the discourse on mindfulness. This body is made up of the earth element, the fire element, the water element, the air element, and the space element. That's an archaic way of thinking, but it's also saying, "This belongs to nature." She would go out there as the sun was coming up and bow to the elements in the environment outside, knowing in the bowing, "This is not separate from me. The earth there is the same as the earth element here. The water there is the same as the water here, in the tears, in the urine, etc., in the blood. The warmth there is the same as the warmth here. The air that moves there is the same air, space and space." Really bringing the heart into an insight contemplation in a very deeply devotional way. That heartfulness is also what can take insight deep, and take this, allowing ourselves to feel at home, to take it deep. And these elements recycle. When this body dies, it goes, as I said, back to nature. And from nature come other bodies, eventually. Different ways animals eat and plants take in nutrients from the soil, and there's this non-separation there.
[19:39] So all of that very naturally leads to another level of being at home, and non-alienation, and connection, which is the connection with the earth. We talked about that the other day. The Buddha, in his time, took that completely for granted: he was born underneath a tree, he attained his awakening underneath the Bodhi tree, and he died underneath two sal trees. He lived most of his life outside in forests, etc. He took that connection completely for granted, which it's almost like -- it's hard for us to do nowadays. I think it was Prince Charles, he was talking about the Age of Enlightenment, which I mentioned the other night, and he said actually the Age of Enlightenment became -- because of industrialization and what we could actually give to ourselves (in a very good way) through all that, it became the 'Age of Convenience.'[2] That became what we're going for, and so very easily that becomes -- again, talking about values -- a value that we're plugged into, maybe not even consciously realizing it, and then the 'Age of Convenience' very easily becomes the 'Age of Disconnection.'
There's a lovely stanza from a poem by May Sarton:
Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.[3]
When we talk about connection with the earth and the earth as our home, of course -- someone a long time ago said to me -- you know, to me it doesn't mean at all that everyone should live rurally and live this simple kind of rustic existence. That appeals to some, and to others not at all. So that's not at all what I'm saying. But when those Apollo astronauts went up, and they go right out of the stratosphere of the earth, and they look back from the spaceship and you see the earth -- that's an iconic image, this multicoloured jewel hanging there in the middle of a lot of nothing. They say, oftentimes, coming back, deeply spiritually transformed from that seeing of that. Some of them go around the dark side of the moon to reconnect with the other astronauts who landed on the moon, and they look around, and there is not much out there in our vicinity -- very large vicinity. [laughter] One of them said, "It's an awfully long way to the next watering hole." This is it. This is it.
So are we taking care of our home? Just like I don't urinate on my carpet, am I taking care of my home? Am I watching its foundations, that it can care for me? I mentioned I was in London a few weeks ago, and I met this woman. I can't remember exactly, but she was like a journalist about environmental stuff, and also a bit of an artist; I'm not exactly sure. But she told me a -- well, 'weird' story I think is the word for it -- that she was researching. She said there are these very big lakes -- I don't know if you know this -- where they dump the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. Huge. And they're so huge, and they glow because of the radioactive waste, that you can see them from the highest Google Earth map, this kind of glowing radioactive waste. Well, the thing about it is, because they're very toxic, and they sort of leave the stuff there because no one knows quite what to do with it, and so it's just going to stay there. And the thing about it is it radiates, so seagulls come and they land on it. They like it because it's also radiating heat and it warms their belly. Now, of course, the seagulls are going to fly off other places and take the radioactive waste that stuck to their belly with. They didn't realize that that would happen; they just dumped the waste and said, "We'll think about this later. We're not quite sure where to put it." Seagulls come, completely unexpected.
And so the next thing they do is hire a bunch of guys with rifles to shoot the seagulls. You just think ... [laughter] How disconnected exactly is it possible to be? So we talked about this; I don't want to dwell on this, because there's actually quite a lot of other stuff I want to go into. But this consumerism and individualism and all that, and the thinking underpinning economics, how is it affecting the sense of earth as home? That's a real question.
How am I moving through life on earth? We travel a lot these days. We move around -- maybe much more than our ancestors did; I don't know. But one can move around, metaphorically or literally, as a tourist and a kind of consumer of experience. And then things like what Prince Charles was saying -- convenience and comfort become values that are high up in what I want as I'm moving through life and the planet as a tourist. But that very prioritizing of comfort and convenience will lead to this deeper homelessness; it cannot but not.
Peter Owen Jones, some of you will know this, Extreme Pilgrim -- do you know this guy? Yeah? He says,
I now feel that with each new hotel we build we lose another drop of the milk of human kindness. The idea of luxury -- of paying to be pampered -- has been so very damaging to all of our humanity. Take a good long look at so-called luxury: it is cold, so cold. Those long lines of loveless 'palaces' strung out along some of the most beautiful beaches in the world.[4]
He says, how different to move through life and to travel as a pilgrim. What is it to move through life as a pilgrim? A pilgrim wants something very different than a tourist. It's a whole different sense. Something else is getting prioritized. The intentions are different. And out of that set of intentions and values, the experience cannot be but different. It has to be different, because it's intentions and values that give rise to the kind of experience I'm going to have in life.
When I look for this, I might get what I'm looking for, but I'm going to get a whole lot besides. If I look for convenience, comfort, pleasure, if that's my priority, I get a whole lot of other stuff that hasn't even entered my thinking in terms of how I feel and the experiences I have. But if I have other values, I reap something, again, which I may not realize, but may be very beautiful.
So the effect of consumerism, individualism, etc., and that kind of thinking, on how we feel in the sense of this bigger home of our earth, that's one thing, and we talked about that. And then there's a piece that's quite complicated, or at least I feel it's quite complex. I hope I can go into this a little bit.
[27:49] What is the effect of all that on a person's -- or the seven billion people now -- what's the effect of that on people's self-view? The effect of all that mind state and those kind of values, what's the effect on the self-view? We talked about a couple nights ago, there's the loss of sense of common endeavour in society, the sense of societies being fragmented. We don't really share a sense of moving towards something together, of supporting something together. Consumerism/individualism is about 'what I can get.' There's a fragmentation. There's the individual pursuit and all the values that go with that.
When there's individualism, when there's a belief in the individual as being something important and prominent, and a centring of the whole psychic seeing around the individual, that brings with it a lot of effects. Because when there's the individualism, there's the need to express the identity. I need to express my identity; it goes with what it means to be an individual. I'm an individual. How do you know I'm an individual? Because I'm expressing a unique identity.
One of the ways we do that -- and this relates to the climate change thing, because one of the reasons why it's so difficult to halt this snowball of climate change is because consumerism is very difficult to stop, because people keep buying stuff and material stuff, because it's part of what expresses their identity. People will be very reluctant -- it's not just the pleasure and the greed; it's actually tied in. The car I drive, the clothes I wear, whatever it is, the kind of phone I have -- all this expresses something for a lot of people in quite a deep sense about the identity, who I am in the world, who is my individual. That's one way of expressing the individuality, and so it's hard to let go.
Now, along comes Dharma understanding, and it's very easy, if you've heard Dharma teachings and stuff, to say, to want to say, "What everyone needs to do is let go of the need to have an identity." Because we've all heard -- or if you've been around these circles long enough you've heard: "The self is not real. The self is the problem. The self is an illusion. Therefore, let go of the need for identity, because that's wrong, and the need to express it. All of that is selfing, ego, delusion." I'm really wondering whether that's too simple, whether that's too simple and that won't do the trick nowadays. Anything I do and say, and any act, is in some way expressing -- it's a statement about what I believe. So I could decide to completely not take any care of how I dress. You might not know this, but I take ... [laughter] Honestly! But if I don't -- let's say I was the kind of person who didn't care about my dress and ... [laughter] and keeping up with fashion. Let's say I was that kind of person. That's still a statement. If I was a monk, I wear something, and it's making a statement. It's making a statement about what this individual believes and says, what they're investing in and what they're not. It's actually hard to get away from that, if not impossible nowadays. We're always making a statement.
And I wonder actually if we need to express the self, that it's actually very healthy, deeply, to express the self. Rather than saying, "The self is the problem. Get rid of it. Don't try and express it, because it's all an illusion," etc., we need to express the self. And if I don't ... well, put it this way: if I express myself in the world, I will feel more at home in the world. If I stop my expression of self, it's usually nowadays because of a withdrawal. I'm withdrawing my life force, my libido, my expression from the world. And that's usually coming out of fear. And that leads to depression, etc., in a very unhelpful way, and more alienation.
So this is complex. This is really complex. The question of identity nowadays is actually not a simple one. It's no longer a simple question. Do we need to express identity? What is identity, anyway? I think it's got to the point now that we can't just kind of try and eradicate individualism. No way. It's not going to happen. Psychologically, our understanding has moved on. In some ways, it's way different now than when the Buddha was then, and culturally the whole -- it's so embedded; we cannot get away from this sense of individualism in some respects.
So maybe individualism can be good. That's what I want to say. Rather than saying, "Okay, we're completely -- forget about it, it's a mess, it's intractable," actually maybe there's something good in individualism, and it's not so much that we need to get rid of it but rather open it out, open it out in a different way. It's a little unfair of me to go into this in this talk, because I don't have time to really fill it in, but I just want to mention it. Is it that we're grasping individualism and identity in the wrong way, that that might be part of it?
If you read, if one reads the Buddha's words in the Pali Canon, his original words from 2,500 years ago, and you read them carefully, you see an absence of the kind of problem with self that we experience nowadays. There's no one walking around talking to the Buddha about how they hate themselves, or how they feel they don't measure up, or they don't like this or that about their personality. That conversation was just absent. The whole notion of personality and the complex notion we have of it nowadays is very much part of modern culture and came out of psychological thinking and all kinds of things in modern culture. So we're in a very different place in terms of the actual issue that we're addressing in terms of the self, and when we talk about the emptiness of self and getting rid of the self. There are different levels of this, but one level is a kind of level that didn't really exist when the Buddha was around. So that makes it quite interesting.
Nowadays, we tend to believe automatically -- this is what is fed to us, and we all kind of feed it in each other -- we believe in the 'personality-self': "One central personality is who I am. Rob has this personality. Michelle has this personality. Juha has this personality. That's who I am, and that's who they are, this personality." And very easily, with this belief in one personality, "I'm like this. I'm a little not so bright, or a little boring, or I try to be like this," or whatever, it's all personality-level self-view. And that has become very important in our culture of individualism, how we think about selves. Having one, it's very easy that it comes to be measured -- this self that we believe in as one personality-self, very easily it's a central personality-self to be measured, to measure up. So it's always, "Am I good enough? Am I bright enough? Am I boring? Am I this? Am I that? Am I respectable? Am I beautiful? Am I ugly?" It's always so much emphasis on the measurement of that self. Do you understand what I mean? Comparing and competing.
And that level of self-suffering is what we get in our society because of the feeling and the sense and the notion we have of the self. It didn't exist so much in the time of the Buddha. So we have a different set of problems. It's coming out of this belief that I'm one personality, and this sense of measuring it with others. So out of that, how much social anxiety comes? We were talking about this in both groups today and with others over the days. It's like, how prevalent, how epidemic in our society is this worry and anxiety of what other people think of me? "Am I okay? Am I measuring up?" It's so painful, and so prevalent, and it seeps in like a cancer into all relationships -- relationship with oneself, relationships with others, of course.
When that's there -- this social anxiety, worrying what other people think -- how can I feel at home? How can I possibly feel at home? Because the very presence of others is threatening me, I can't feel like I can settle and belong there. So this one personality-self to be measured. And also, it's a kind of illusion that I have one personality, and so also in this seeking of identity, we're trying to make that substantial. This thing that's actually a belief, we're desperately trying to root it somehow by crystallizing its identity.
So we move a lot these days, like I said, in society. I lived for years in the States, and then came back and lived in a different place in England. Most of my friends have moved around quite a bit in their lives, and oftentimes don't live in the country of their origin, etc. With that, the social fragmentation that we've been talking about. Then the question is not letting go of identity, necessarily, but where am I seeking identity? Where, and in what, and how am I seeking identity? And how am I expressing identity? And again, the golden question: is my seeking of identity and expressing of it helpful to self and the world, or not helpful?
[38:45] So partly I wonder whether -- we say, "at home with the personality," again, talking about at-homeness -- can I be at home with my personality? But maybe making it plural takes the pressure off: at home with personalities. There are many persons living in here. I'm not just one. There are many persons living in here. And that opens the whole thing up and takes the pressure off. Less buying into this one personality-self that's then about the self to be measured: "Am I good enough?" There are all kinds of other selves in there that have nothing to do with that. Less pressure to measure up. Less pressure, then, to buy all this stuff to assert my identity, make it feel real, and score higher on the relative comparisons.
What if we open up even bigger than that? We started with the self, and being at home with the self, and all these different parts of that. What about the sense of existence itself, existentially? What is it to feel at home in existence, in the sense of existence? So where there's life, there's death. This is a big part of feeling at home existentially, that we need to contemplate death, to learn how to contemplate our death and the death of others. If I don't go near that, there's always a kind of tension in my life of trying to avoid that knowledge, pretend it doesn't exist, or ignore it. So that seems key. It's like opening to the most fundamental fact of my existence, which is that I'm going to die, and somehow opening it in a way that allows an at-homeness.
But this is interesting. If you read some existentialist writers and philosophers and all that, they say, "Face your existence," but the assumption is that you can't feel at home in an existence that you're going to die from, that there's no way that you can feel okay with that. There's a physicist, Brian Greene, and he's got a really good book called The Fabric of the Cosmos. He starts it, if I remember, by saying when he was a kid he found this book in his father's library by Albert Camus, the writer and philosopher. He opened it, and on the very first page it said something like, "The only real question in life, or the only real philosophical problem and question, is the question of suicide -- whether seeing what life really is, the thing to do is just to end it."[5] [laughter] The book was, I think, justification that was the right way to look at it. Brian Greene makes the point as a physicist, it's like, "Well, okay, but are you seeing life correctly?" Because the assumption in what Camus was saying, and some other existentialists, is that what appears to us is life. It's just, "Well, that's what it is." But Brian Greene, as a physicist, is saying when I go and look much deeper at what life is and what things are, it's not at all what it seems to be. So if I'm judging whether I should commit suicide based on a non-penetrating, illusory sense of what life is, I'm making quite a big mistake, right?
Same with the Dharma. Nowadays, there's quite a popular stream in the Dharma of a kind of existentialist Dharma, which has its place (I'm going to come back to that). But am I equipped to look at life deeply? Am I equipped? Brian Greene was talking in terms of my understanding of physics and the nature of reality. But also am I equipped meditatively, that my looking can go deep and penetrate? I can make all kinds of conclusions about existence, and how I should feel, and what it is, and present that as a kind of spiritual philosophy, but if I haven't penetrated in my seeing, it's not resting on something.
Coming out from that, and we've said this a couple of times in the hall: whenever there's dukkha, whenever there's suffering, or something goes wrong in life, or there's a difficulty, there's always a context for that. There's always a context of what the difficulty is. So you can't have a difficulty without a context. Now, we talked about the context being the attitude of the mind, or is the mind spacious and all that, but let's take really, really a big picture context and say: my whole sense of existence, my whole sense of what existence is, as a context for this suffering. I spill something on the carpet, my car breaks down, I have an illness, I'm feeling stressed out, whatever -- just the little, nitty-gritty stuff of life, or a heartache, or whatever it is -- in the whole big picture sense of what existence is. And, in a way, making a black-and-white division, the sense of existence -- there's a mystical sense to existence as one sense that one can have, or another sense, which is: "Existence is basically meaningless. We are in this life as an evolutionary accident from certain chemicals coming together from stars, and they were in a swamp a long time ago, and da-da-da-da, and here we are!" [laughter] "It was just an accident. It doesn't mean anything. And if you think it means something, you're basically a sissy who is kind of trying to create something." [laughter] So there's atheistic meaninglessness or strongly agnostic. Now, I don't want to say that's wrong or right. What I want to say right now is I think it's important to make that big picture context present in an alive way when there's dukkha. Because very easily what happens is we get sucked into dukkha on dukkha's terms. The car breaks down, and that's all I'm thinking about. That's all I see. It's just too tight, the whole view. It's just that. It's just the hassle of it. And there's a way then that the whole perspective shrinks.
But what would it be, the car breaks down, and I really am with -- palpably, in an alive, present way -- the sense of the meaninglessness of existence, if that's my thing? [laughter] I really don't want to knock that, okay? So rather than getting sucked into "It's just this thing that's in my face," it's like actually bringing to bear in a very strong, alive, present way a much bigger -- let's call it 'philosophical,' but it comes into the way of seeing, a context. So I'm not sucked into the perspective of just this little thing. Then what happens? Whether it's mystical or meaningless, what happens then?
So I might try as a practitioner to avoid that level of big picture stuff, but again, it comes with consequences. It comes with a lot of consequences. The Buddha, again, if we go back to that phrase in the discourse on mindfulness, "See the body in the body. See the mind as the mind," etc., it sounds like, "Can you just be there with what it is, without seeing any other meaning or mystical thing, or anything else, or it's meaningless? Just be with the thing as it is, minus all that other stuff." But what that is is a meditative instruction. It's something that one sustains in meditation. And when those monks and nuns got up from their meditation, they had a pretty strong world-view that the Buddha had given them that sustained and informed how they were relating to their life.
So it's a meditative view. If you try and sustain that, actually, first of all it's impossible, and it's not realistic. As an attempt to deal with the complexity of modern life, it will fall on its face pretty quickly. I mean, I'm going through a divorce or this or that, or something really complex and difficult; you have a problem with your children, I don't know, doing drugs or something ... In itself, it's a meditative tool, and that's all. Very powerful, but that's all. Something else needs to come in. So bigger picture, bigger picture.
[48:54] When we have a bigger picture, you can see a bigger context, that it relativizes what's going on, right? This car breaking down or whatever, it puts it in a bigger context which informs that. That makes a big, big difference. Oftentimes, like I said, we get sucked into suffering on the wrong terms, with the wrong perspectives.
So is it possible -- next level here -- is it possible to find a whole other level of at-homeness in existence? With the fact of death, with all this that we find ourselves in? The Buddha, in the story, he left home. He left a very, very comfortable, wonderful home as a prince. He left home, in his words, to search for a security that was unconditional, unconditioned.[6] He was looking for a different level of home. He left one home to look for a different level of home.
Historically, Jesus, if we talk in those terms, was an 'illegitimate' son. He didn't know who his father was, in practical human terms. That had an enormous, enormous stigma in the Jewish law and tradition and culture at that time, enormous -- what's it called? -- throwing someone out of the culture, rejection. And then in the story of his birth, and there's no room at the inn, and being rejected from his home town of Nazareth when he tried to teach and preach. There's this 'not at home, not at home, not at home.' But he goes to another level. He opens to a whole other level in the sense of existence, in a mystical sense of existence, and he calls this sense God, or if we use that language, Abba, which means 'father' in Hebrew. It's a whole other sense that heals and informs these other, lower levels.
So with all this social alienation that we've been talking about, the way society can really feed a sense of alienation, for different reasons, we have a sense of alienation; it's not just that society is feeding that. For lots of different reasons. Can I find a whole other level? Which doesn't mean that I don't engage with society and the problems as we talked about the other night. Because also in engaging, it's a way of expressing the self, and that's part of what makes me feel at home. Even when I have problems with the society, if I engage with it, that makes me feel at home.
Is it possible for us as human beings, and as practitioners especially, to discover, to open up to what we could call a 'mystical' sense of home, a whole other level of being at home in this existence, in this universe? And it is. It most definitely, absolutely is, no question about it, and in a number of ways. When we introduced this practice today with the space and the opening up of the awareness, that's very powerful in that direction, in that regard.
I want to go into this. It feels a little quick, after we just introduced it this morning. Remember what I said in the opening talk: a lot of these talks are for later. You might feel, "I'm not quite getting it all right now," or "It's a bit beyond where I am," or "a lot beyond where I am." They're not just for right now, okay? I want to say a little bit about the possibilities of where this practice of opening up the awareness can go, potentially.
We open up the space like we did this morning. And when Harry asked -- it was very helpful that you asked that, Harry. It's like I begin to also, within the space, open to the sense of space or silence itself and how that feels, tune into it, familiarize myself with that open space. And over time, gradually, I begin to see -- it's almost like my eyes getting used to the dark in a darkened room. I begin to feel and intuit and sense that the space is actually -- what could we say? -- shot through or full of qualities, of beautiful qualities. I may not notice that at all at first; it takes time. So please, as you're listening to this, don't believe the inner critic that wants to measure where you are in terms of experiences. I'm just describing how it can unfold for people.
So sometimes, there's a sense of love in that space. One doesn't notice it at first, but it opens up a mystical, universal, all-pervading sense of love, or radiance, or peace. It's like that peace is vast, endless; silence that's vast and endless and fathomlessly deep. All that's a possibility. Oneness, a sense of non-separation. As one person I was speaking to on the phone a while ago [said], "I feel an affinity with everything." There's an affinity, a sense of non-separation, an affinity with everything. And in that affinity, it's like the fear -- there was a habit of fear for this person and anxiety -- the fear just drains out, because the fear comes in the separation: me, who I need to protect, and what I look like, and "Am I okay?", like we said before. That just drains out of things.
Someone, actually the same person at another time, [said]: "It's like being held in pure love." And actually, with practice -- she was practising at home with this -- was able to access that sense. Even at work when things would get difficult and something would trigger a sense of shame or self-doubt, was actually able to kind of find her way back into just accessing this quality of being held in pure love, and how that softened and eased the difficulty that was going on. So it's possible, when it opens up like that, there's a profound sense of support, deep existential support, a kind of ground that's supporting the consciousness and the existence, and, in fact, all manifestation; the ground of being -- you might call it that.
But this is interesting in the trajectory that any person, any practitioner, might have in relationship to this as their practice develops (usually over months, in fact, but it could be sooner or could be longer). Because some of those aspects and qualities that one might open to in the space might feel easier or more difficult to open to for some people or for others. Some people -- and I know some people, again, I'm thinking of, not on this retreat -- the love that they feel in that space is actually very difficult to bear. It's touching on old wounds about being loved, and it's quite difficult. For others, it's the radiance, someone else I'm thinking of.
But there is, over time, a really deep healing possibility in that sense and in that space. It's actually possible at times to bring the shamed parts of ourselves, the unloved parts, the knotted, darker corners -- one kind of brings them into this space and offers them, holds them up in the space, to be held by the space, by the silence that effortlessly holds. And that silence, that space, that love, or that peace, it permeates those wounded places. It's almost as if the silence doesn't care what's in it; the space doesn't care what arises, and so it loves, you could say, it loves everything equally. It receives everything equally. It holds everything equally.
Now, over time -- and it's possible even that some people tasted some of this today, so the whole pacing of this thing, it's not important -- when that space opens up, quite a lot of interesting things happen. But one of the things is that -- if I say this, I wonder if you can understand what I mean -- the sense of self dies down. The sense of self gets less as that space opens out. The sense I have of a solid, separate being, with all my stuff and my thoughts and my personality and all this, and that's always what I'm identified with, that identification, but also that manifestation, begins to die down.
Now, for some people, that can bring up fear. Very understandably, that brings up fear, because the self and all this difficulty, even, and the complexity, is what I know. That's all I know for ages. The only time I let go of it is in deep sleep. So it's hard to let go of that central landmark and that familiarity, and we cling to that, we cling to the self. So it can bring up fear. Gradually, we can work with the fear. Eventually, we can learn to let go there.
And eventually, as a person not on this retreat said, it's almost like one realizes there's no need for that kind of self, and no need for that kind of self-defence. And that's very healing, something very deeply healing with the whole self-sense. Non-separation comes in, a sense of non-separation. And with non-separation, of course I'm going to feel the universe is home, because it's not separate.
[59:43] But it's interesting, if we just go into this a little bit in more detail, because it's one of the practices on this retreat, so I want to just explore this a little more. Sometimes the space opens up, and it feels very holding and comforting for the self. In other words, you feel the self in it, in a kind of cocoon, or you feel the self being held. So the self is sensed as the receiver of that love and that holding. That's really good and really healing. You don't want to rush through that. That's actually really important. And, as this practice deepens with the space, it's almost like, like I said, the self-sense dies down a little bit, quietens -- can. And then, with that dying down, there's also less to be held, because it's the self that needs holding. So there's less to be held. Actually, the whole perception or the experience of holding gets less. The flavour of that whole space transforms over time. At first it might feel very holding; then that goes, because there's less to be held. That, too, is very healing, extremely healing.
All this is over time, and it unfolds at its own pace. We need to let it take its time doing what it needs to do. But going in and out, probably over years of practice, in and out of a sense of less self and then the self comes back, and less self and the self comes back -- knowing that, knowing that even slight dissolution of the sense of self, even slight, that heals a lot of self-views. It heals a lot of the pain and contraction of the self. So a person says, "I'm not good enough. I don't deserve to be happy. I don't deserve to be loved." Those kind of tight self-views, they get healed by looking at them, in part, and they also get healed by dipping into this less self, and dipping out again. Something almost magical happens to those very particular self-views.
So you could be listening, and very rightly, you could be saying, "Well, okay. But is that real? Is that a real thing that you're talking about, or am I making that up? Is that just a bit of mystical mumbo-jumbo? What's real? What is real?" It's a really important question: what is real? So let's come at it from a whole other angle. I want to talk quite a bit about this whole question on this retreat, because it feeds into everything that we're going through in the practice, as well.
But if you know anything at all about modern physics, discoveries in relativity and quantum physics, what they imply, and their understanding -- so I'm coming outside of a meditative understanding for just a little bit, to show something -- that the things that we take for granted as being obviously existent things -- you know, I can't deny the existence of the alarm clock. I can't deny the existence of the carpet and everything. I can't deny this or that. Everyone takes that for granted, "This is what is real," and time, and space, and all the rest of it. But modern physics understanding, actually a thing that I might take for granted as real is not a thing in itself, independent of my observation of it.
So whether it's light or matter, dependent on the way I look at it, it can appear, it can have the properties of a wave or a particle. Why is this relevant? Because we're talking a lot in meditation, with my experience, about ways of looking, if we go back to the opening talk. I look at things in certain ways, and how I look reveals what I see. And we eventually see there's not something independent of how I look. We tend to assume there is -- there's a clock, there's a this, there's a that, there's a heartache, there's an anger. But how I look is part of the thing. The thing doesn't exist independent of how I look, and how I look determines what I will see and what experience I will have.
[1:04:48] So if you know a bit about this physics, it's like you can't actually say that, for instance, a particle is here, travelling in that direction, going there. Werner Heisenberg, one of the really radical thinkers at the beginning of the quantum physics revolution:
The 'path' [of the subatomic particle] comes into existence only [when] we observe it.[7]
Something revolutionary in the whole understanding of what reality is. The path of the electron, of the subatomic particle, comes into existence only when we observe it. So looking deeply at the nature of reality, I can't even say this thing has a location, which seems like the most obvious thing that a thing could have -- it's there. There it is. We say it's a particle. You can't even say that. You can't say, "It's a particle, and it's there without my observation." It's my observation that gives it that location and gives it that quality of being a particle or whatever.
So our observation, our looking, influences and affects what we see, whether it turns out to be a wave or a particle, where it is, and how it's moving, and how fast, and all that. All of that's affected by the observation. Again, if you know about the physics stuff, it's not that we're clumsy observers, that the equipment isn't good enough. It's not that. It's in the nature of reality itself. It's in the nature of a 'thing' to not be a 'thing' until I look at it. A 'thing' is not a 'thing' without me observing it.
There's a physics writer called Paul Davies. I'll just put it in his words. In the classical physics world-view, a particle is like a tiny billiard ball that is somewhere and moves in a certain way. "Our observations [in that view] do not create reality: they uncover it."That's how we think of the world. "Atoms and particles continue to exist with well-defined attributes even when we do not observe them." This is typically just how we assume the world to be. By contrast, in the usual interpretation of quantum mechanics, that "rejects the objective reality of the quantum microworld."[8]
So we're asking what's real, what's real? And they're saying, at a very deep level, we're rejecting the notion of an objective reality. The particle cannot be regarded as a little thing. We can't meaningfully talk about what a particle is doing between observations, because it is observations alone that create the reality of the particle. The observation or the measurement of a particle's position creates a particle with a position. The observation or the measurement of a particle's momentum creates a particle with a momentum. But neither entity can be considered already to be in existence prior to the observation being made.
Again, Werner Heisenberg says:
If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word 'happens' can only apply to the observation, not to the state of affairs between two observations.[9]
It's a completely different way of understanding what reality is. And quantum physics, apparently, is the most successful scientific theory ever in terms of its accuracy and range of prediction.
So what does all this mean? John Wheeler, who must be about a hundred (I think he is still alive), he was a teacher of a lot of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and a very lovely man, as well, from what I've read of his biography. He says:
One has to cross out that old word 'observer' and put in its place the new word 'participator.' In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.[10]
So the universe is not [like] that old Enlightenment model. It's not this great machine, a process, the cogs of which are kind of running blindly on, independently of us. That's not the nature of things when we really penetrate the truth.
Quantum mechanics says it's not only that we influence our reality; in some aspects, and to some degree, we actively create it. Tricky. It's tricky. It's a very different way of thinking. So what does that imply in terms of what we're talking about tonight? All this applies to meditative observation, too, and I'm going to talk more about that. I'm not just talking abstractly about physics. It applies to everything that I consider real, my whole sense of, "What is the nature of reality that I'm existing in?" What it all implies is, it's not separate. It's absolutely not separate from me. If a thing doesn't exist without me looking at it, if the way that I look at it makes it what it is, how can I think of myself as existing in a separate way, in a universe that's separate from me?
Now, of course, if we hear that from the physics, it's all like, well, either "Cool," or "I don't get it," or "It's abstract. It feels irrelevant." But why I'm mentioning it is because it has everything to do with what we can discover in meditation. It's the same insight. Someone was saying in a group today, the Buddha, all this time ago, discovered something really deep that we're only recently beginning to uncover about the nature of reality. This is at its core. So is it really that things are separate from the way we're seeing and from the mind? Is it really that one part of 'reality,' so to speak, knows another part of 'reality'? Is that really what's going on? Seems obviously, intuitively, that that is the case. The deeper we go in practice, our understanding, we see that's not what's going on. That's not the nature of reality. When we open through practice and contemplation to that sense of non-separateness, that realization of non-separateness in the deepest sense of the word, the issue of finding a home in a universe that's alien is gone.
Does everyone know who Winnie-the-Pooh is? [laughter] Mario, do you know? Yeah?
"Hallo!" said Piglet, "what are you doing?"
"Hunting," said Pooh.
"Hunting what?"
"Tracking something," said Winnie-the-Pooh very mysteriously.
"Tracking what?" said Piglet, coming closer.
"That's just what I ask myself. I ask myself, What?"
"What do you think you'll answer?"
"I shall have to wait until I catch up with it," said Winnie-the-Pooh. "Now, look there." He pointed to the ground in front of him. "What do you see there?"
"Tracks," said Piglet. "Paw-marks." He gave a little squeak of excitement. "Oh, Pooh! Do you think it's a -- a -- a Woozle?"
"It may be," said Pooh. "Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't."[11]
A wave, a particle. A heartache, a space.
"You never can tell with paw-marks." ...
"Wait a moment," said Winnie-the-Pooh, holding up his paw.
He sat down and thought, in the most thoughtful way he could think. Then he fitted his paw into one of the Tracks ... and then he scratched his nose twice, and stood up.
"Yes," said Winnie-the-Pooh.
"I see now," said Winnie-the-Pooh.
"I have been Foolish and Deluded," said he, "and I am a Bear of No Brain at All."
"You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.
So for the Buddha, the ultimate security is this understanding of reality, and understanding the emptiness of things, which means they don't exist in this way separate from the seeing, separate from the mind. The mind, too, doesn't exist separate from the seeing. It's not like the mind exists separately, and it's looking out and creating everything. The mind, too. Radical, radical understanding. The conceptual mind can barely grasp it. In fact, it can't grasp it. There's a point it can go, and then it can't go beyond it.
So what we struggle with in life, what we feel alienates us and the problems we feel, in the deep Dharma understanding of emptiness, not a problem, because it's empty. This is from the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra:
The Buddha asked, "Mañjuśrī, where should the state of Buddhahood be sought?"
Mañjuśrī answered, "It should be sought right in the defilements of sentient beings [right in the impurities, right in the things that we would normally be ashamed of and the difficulties]. Why? Because by nature the defilements of sentient beings are inapprehensible."[12]
Shall we have a little quiet time together?
E.g. in MN 10, DN 22. ↩︎
Urmee Khan, "Prince Charles: next generation faces 'living hell' unless climate change tackled," The Telegraph (9 July 2009), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/5781888/Prince-Charles-next-generation-faces-living-hell-unless-climate-change-tackled.html, accessed 25 Jan. 2020. ↩︎
May Sarton, From May Sarton's Well: Writings of May Sarton (Watsonville, CA: Papier-Mache Press, 1994), 1. ↩︎
Peter Owen Jones, "Pilgrim or Tourist?", Resurgence, 265 (March/April 2011), https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article3331-pilgrim-or-tourist.html, accessed 27 Dec. 2019. ↩︎
Paraphrasing Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, tr. Justin O'Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 3. ↩︎
MN 26. ↩︎
Werner Heisenberg, "Ueber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik and Mechanik," Zeitschrift für Physik, 43 (1927), 185. ↩︎
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, with introduction by Paul Davies (London: Penguin, 2000), xii. ↩︎
Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 22. ↩︎
John Archibald Wheeler, "From Relativity to Mutability," in Jagdish Mehra, ed., The Physicist's Conception of Nature (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1973), 244. ↩︎
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Penguin, 2009), 36--43. ↩︎
Garma C. C. Chang, tr., A Treasury of Mahāyāna Sūtras: Selections from the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991), 28. ↩︎
