The Necessity of Fantasy

So I really hope that you're feeling met through the interviews, the group interviews, and through the one-to-one interviews, and through the exchange of question and answers through notes that happens, and through the instructions that we give each morning and in the afternoon. That you feel met where you feel you are, that you feel your experiences are being addressed through what is exchanged and what we're saying, and also that that's happening through at least some of what's said in the evening talks. Because sometimes that is the purpose of what happens in the evening sessions, as well, is that we're still adding stuff to address your experiences as they're unfolding, ways of working, etc.

But sometimes a talk has a different purpose. It has a different job to do, or different jobs, plural. There are different kinds of talk. And tonight I want to give a different kind of talk, and talk in a different way about what may be, for many of us, different kinds of stuff -- different in a number of ways. One is, I want to talk about the bigger picture. So some talks are about the bigger picture. And this one definitely is very big. Bigger picture, anyway, my conception, one's conception and view and imagination of what the 'bigger picture' is in which my practice takes place, that always and inevitably must inform, must lie underneath my sense and perception and conception -- my actual perception of where I am, where I think I am, where I feel I am. So where I feel I am with this particular experience is always informed, in a very fundamental way, by my sense -- even if I haven't articulated it -- about the bigger picture. Always. So that the view of where I am and the perception, but also the response to it, the responses to it, are informed by that. And that's a really, really important insight, massively important insight.

Second way that this talk is -- perhaps it's a difficult talk. It's not an easy talk. Again, it's difficult for lots of different reasons, but partly it's difficult because I want to talk about two subjects, and they're both huge. And one is nested, if you like, within the other one. The first one, or the smaller one, if you like, is ethics, which is huge. That's nested within a larger subject, which is fantasy and image. And I hope I can explain what I mean.

So it might be a little dense. Some of the ideas might be quite unfamiliar to many of us, especially people who have been hanging out in these kind of circles, quite maybe opposite sort of ways of thinking, conceptions, assumptions, etc. And in more ways than one, it's a kind of challenging talk.

There's a real risk here, especially when I talk about the fantasy bit, the stratum of fantasy and image. There's a risk of just not being understood. There's unfortunately a real risk of being misunderstood, and perhaps the best one can hope for is to be partially understood. [laughter] But c'est la guerre, as they say. And we'll take the risk and plough on.

So ethics, that word, 'ethics,' let's just pause a little and ponder, stay with the word a little bit, because the relationship with words that we have is important. When you hear that word, what happens? Or the word 'morality.' Now, for a lot us in this culture, they're kind of heavy words. We bring in, sometimes unconsciously, associations with judgment, with sin -- all of that. If there's a lot of inner critic, it has a lot of power operating in the psyche, these words really are difficult, oftentimes. Sometimes when there's a lot of inner critic, the whole realm of ethics becomes just another realm with which to measure the self and find the self lacking. That's all it is. The whole thing, as the inner critic does with so much -- can do it with practice, can do it with anything -- turns it into something just to measure me and prove what a dummkopf, what a loser I am. Actually, the inner critic, if it's too strong, blocks authentic inquiry into ethics. I just can't have a free inquiry into ethics when the inner critic is strong. So it's loaded, all this, in our culture.

Some modern -- well, actually, it goes back millennia, but particularly modern -- some modern spiritual traditions just kind of sideline the whole ethical issue. There are quite popular sort of 'sister traditions' around, and they literally do not address ethics in their teachings. And then it's quite interesting. Then the sense, the possibility of freedom or happiness, is dependent, in those kinds of traditions, on something more like perhaps the catharsis. If I 'cathart' (if that's the verb), if I release all this stuff stored from the past, if I do that enough, freedom and happiness comes. That's the model, that's the conception, that's the image. Or if I release the self-limiting beliefs I have, that brings freedom and happiness. Right from the beginning, the Buddha -- different -- places ethics very, very fundamentally on the path. It's a different approach. Theoretically, in the Dharma, it's the base -- it's partly the base of the path. [6:41]

So what does it mean, 'ethics'? Now, I'm sure there's a way of precisely defining it philosophically, etc. I want to just be very loose with this and just say, what I'm talking about tonight, at least, is, "How do I live? And how, particularly, do I live in relationship to others? What is my relationship with others?" So that's the very loose definition of what I mean by 'ethics.'

Recently, in this tradition -- and there's been a lot of crossover between this tradition and other, Diamond Approach and other sister traditions, and within this tradition, with Insight Dialogue -- so there's been quite an interest over the last few years in relational practices, where people actually bring awareness and inquiry into working one to one with a partner, or in threes, dyads, triads, etc. And that sense of needing to work relationally, relational meditation, if you like, relational inquiry, the sense of that as something really important has entered the image and the fantasy of what's important. Or it has started to. People say, "This is important. This needs to be addressed." But not yet the wider. I mean, not just two or three and my family and my friends, but the wide, the whole of humanity, seven billion people. And what about the other species? And not just now, but what about future others? And that is not yet really part of, hasn't come into how we think about practice. We're not yet really addressing that. It's not yet, if you like, part of the image or the fantasy of what Dharma practice really involves. It's not really central to that yet.

And I don't need -- I hope I don't need -- to spend long outlining or reminding us all of the immense challenges that we are facing now as a species, and through our actions and non-action, that we are also giving as a challenge to other species as well. Population, resource scarcity, pollution, climate change, conflicts, etc. Underneath them all, or driving them all, perhaps one of the most fundamental is climate change. That will have a more and more dominant impact on all the other factors -- all of them: resource scarcity, pollution, all of them. And the way we, together, we human beings are changing the climate now, today, and have been for the last hundred years, that is going to change the climate not just today or tomorrow; it will change it for thousands of years. The effects are cumulative. The carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere through our actions, etc. -- it affects the climate of the earth for thousands and thousands of years. And this is already in motion. It drives everything.

As I said, one of the things that's quite significant is actually the species extinction. So the great biologist E. O. Wilson actually reported, at present, there is a rate of species extinction that is 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate. And it's being driven by human activity, human action, and climate change is one of the principal drivers of that. 100 to 1,000 times the rate of species are just going extinct [snaps fingers], disappearing, never to appear again. [10:59]

And it barely made the news, but scientists and also some politicians are quietly admitting that the goal that was sort of very loosely proffered after the Copenhagen Climate Summit three years ago, that it would be kind of really a good idea if everyone agreed to keep the climate change two degrees or less, because above that there is what's called 'runaway climate change'; we don't know where -- it just starts feeding back on itself. We actually don't know where it will stop. Now there's a sort of quiet acknowledgment that it's virtually impossible, with the momentum that has gathered, the emissions that have already been emitted, it's virtually impossible to keep within that two degrees limit. Virtually impossible. What we're heading for -- and this, even the World Bank wrote this in an article the other day -- what we're heading for is more four degrees to six degrees. And that means, as an initial thing, as I said, scientists don't even know what starts happening at four degrees or six degrees. A whole bunch of other feedback effects. We don't know. It's like a snowball rolling.

Now, it might sound, "That's quite nice, add six degrees to here -- bit like the south of France. That's pretty nice." But actually, that would cause immense and widespread devastation for human civilizations, species, and others. Massive floods, much more than inconvenience of not being able to take a train here or there. Cities -- London, New York, Mumbai -- would probably become submerged, and other cities. On the other end, droughts, crop failure -- it's already happened in the States last summer -- leading to radically, drastically raised food prices, and actually a lot of starvation in the Third World -- massive, widespread starvation. Storms, what we tend to think of as a normal storm or as a possible storm, just hugely inflated in the power of its devastation. Acidification of the oceans that feed so much of humanity. They also have worth in themselves, the marine life. And resource wars, as there's less water, less all of that.

And it seems, in the wider culture, sometimes, you know -- someone put it: "It's as if our collective human, our technological intelligence is somehow ahead of, greater than our ethical intelligence." We're so smart with our gadgets and what we can build, and yet our ethical intelligence is really not keeping up. Actually, our political intelligence isn't even keeping up.

And when we come, as a collective species, to address these questions, how much we try and address it by scientizing it! So parts per million, CO~2~ -- hugely important, massively important, but it's measurable facts. And maybe there's a whole other level of discourse on which this all rests that is being missed. And that's about values. It's about the ethics. It's just not being talked about. We talk about parts per million, and changing technologies, blah blah blah. Radical questioning of, "How am I living?" and "How are we living?" And radical questioning of, "What is my responsibility as a human being?" [14:30]

I'm given this life, shared on the earth. I didn't do anything to earn it or create it. What is my responsibility? It's also another meaning of the word 'Dharma' originally. It has the implication of 'responsibility,' 'duty.' And somehow, together, it's a bit like we're a rabbit or a deer entranced by these slowing approaching headlights, just dazzled by something, and not moving, not engaging, not reacting in an appropriate way, not responding in an appropriate way. What are we captivated by? Collectively, as a society, and individually, what am I so captivated by? We talk about the intoxication of youth. What's the intoxication here? What is it that I or we are so intoxicated by that we cannot respond adequately? What is it? That's an open question. I'm actually not sure. I'm sure there are many answers.

And the headlights are approaching. There's a sudden impact with the car coming, but this is more like a slow onslaught of something. So the wider culture, not responding. But also Dharma culture, not responding -- Buddhism, Dharma. We are usually, in the Dharma -- you know, most people -- blessed, very sweet, warm, kind people, Dharma people, generally. And often a lot of service. And yet somehow, this response has not really entered into the story of what we're about yet.

And I don't know if you know, but actually, Buddhism does not have a great track history with this kind of stuff, with engagement. And perhaps a low point was Japanese Zen in the Second World War, which wholeheartedly, with great zeal, leapt into the kind of imperialist expansionism of the Japanese war effort. So all the Zen, Japanese Zen, just got behind all of that, with all the slaughter and the darkness involved in that. Why? Something in the culture. The Dharma was subsumed, dragged along by something in the culture. Couldn't give anything different; it was just incorporated into what was happening in the culture.

And compare with, say, someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian who wouldn't stop speaking out against the Nazis in Nazi Germany. They arrested him, and they gave him a 'trial,' summarily tried and then executed, hung, with a bunch of other people who would not stop speaking out. [17:45] Different. I'm not playing up Christian; I'm just saying, there's something in Buddhism that's actually not that great at all this.

I don't know if you know this, but in the last year, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship -- which is, for decades, an organization that existed in America, looking at these kind of issues, and peace, and conflict, and Engaged Buddhism -- it folded. It dissolved itself in the last year. Why? Not enough interest. Last year, the annual general meeting of the English equivalent, the UK equivalent, the Network of Engaged Buddhists, decided, or they debated in their annual [general meeting], "Should we dissolve as well? People aren't interested." And they almost did, but they decided to keep going. Gaia House -- almost every retreat is full these days, or almost full, almost every retreat in the last couple of years or something. One got so few registrations that it was cancelled. And it was about Engaged Buddhism. David Loy, someone called him and just said, "Look, no one's interested, so we cancelled." At the same time, in the culture, huge spread of the mindfulness movement, etc., which is wonderful.

But I don't know. We've had forty years of insight meditation in the West now, which is dominated by mindfulness, you know, as a core practice. Forty years, and I don't know if there's the evidence that it's actually leading to, giving birth to people who, practitioners who are really engaging the wider causes of suffering, and really looking at that. I can't honestly look at that forty years of insight meditation and say that that's happening. The view of suffering has not so much gone beyond the individual. We -- because that's my tradition; I'm part of that -- we, most of us, are not really grappling with these issues, and not even grappling so much with the lifestyle changes that the situation, the enormity of the situation, actually is desperately asking of us.

So I don't know if -- let alone mindfulness -- even the Dharma as it stands, I don't know if it can address these issues, if it has what it takes at the moment to address these issues, if it is actually healing the civilization, if it can. I don't know. And obviously, I would love to be able to sit here and say, "It is. We are. It's happening." But I don't really feel that I can.

David Loy, in a recent essay, asked similar questions. He said, has there been, is there taking place, a "commodification," he calls it, of Western Dharma? Is it being "co-opted" -- these are his words -- is it being "co-opted into a self-help stress-reduction program that does not challenge" what he calls "institutionalized dukkha" -- the dukkha that comes from our institutions, our social structures, etc. -- "but actually adapts to it"? Doesn't challenge it but adapts to it. Strong words.^[1]

The contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek -- some of you will know him -- definitely not a Buddhist, but he wrote:

"Western Buddhism" ... is becoming the hegemonic [means the dominant] ideology of global capitalism.... [Because its] meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.... [Western Buddhism] enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the illusion that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self, to which you ... can always with-draw.^[2]

Now, any Buddhist knows that Buddhists don't believe in 'inner Self,' so he's got a bit wrong. But actually there's something here. And I want to return, because I think he's got something else a little bit wrong. But there's something here that I think we need to pay attention to. I want to return to it though.

Someone in an interview a couple of weeks ago was complaining about this, and called it "'Do Not Disturb' Dharma." [laughs] A friend went to a conference of -- I don't know, I think it was environmental scientists who had met a little while before, and who publicly (because it's the fantasy of science to be objective, cool, detached, not emotionally involved) were giving out facts and figures about climate change and species loss and all this kind of stuff, but amongst themselves were actually experiencing enormous frustration and profound heartache. And in this previous meeting, the one before this one my friend went to, they were asked to make a list of what they would wish for to remedy the situation more widely. And I can't remember what the first one was, but the second on this ordering of -- I think it was actually fifty things they were asking for -- the second most frequent and most important thing they asked for was that spiritual leaders would start voicing this, would start speaking up. The scientists, they were, "This is the second biggest thing that will make a difference. Spiritual leaders need to start talking about this." And yet we are silent. We are silent. We might like or not like that word, 'spiritual,' but it means people like me, and the Dalai Lama, and all the rest of it.

Enormous suffering involved in all this. The Red Cross, back in 2001, estimated -- it's obviously a tricky figure, but they estimated that even in 2001; it must be much more -- there were already twenty-five million environmental refugees, greater than the number they calculated for those displaced by war, already in 2001. Massive suffering is unfolding and will unfold. An issue of suffering -- we would think that the Dharma and Buddhism is relevant, because we talk about suffering, dukkha. So what I'm interested in partly is, why? Why not? Why are we not addressing it? Why are we so silent about this? What's happening psychologically, spiritually, psychospiritually? What's actually going on? Why are we not including this?

To me, that's a fascinating question -- a very troubling question, but a fascinating one. And I actually think there are many reasons. I don't even pretend to know them all or understand it. I just want to talk a little bit about it. Certainly there's the aspect of fear, and denial, the psychology of denial. That comes into it. There's also the whole -- we are part of society, and sometimes we say society is addicted, we're addicted to our way of life. And we're not exempt from that in the Dharma.

There's something more fundamental -- perhaps it's one of the reasons -- that has more to do with the whole view of what the world is. What is this world that I'm in? It goes back to Descartes, etc., that would view the world as basically just 'stuff.' It's just material stuff that we can shift around, in itself meaningless, in itself valueless. Some people put the origins of that even earlier, in the twelfth century. "It doesn't matter," you say, or "That sounds abstract philosophy." But it has become common sense for us. That's how we feel and see the world. Common sense. Listen to those words: 'common sense.' We perceive the world that way. What started as abstract philosophy becomes 'common sense.'

And that kind of, if we like, 'materialism' in the large sense, our modern Dharma is saturated in it. We're in that. Or sometimes it's what they call 'idealism,' or just "Everything is consciousness." That's a bit more rare, but that exists too. Either way, the world is just meaningless or valueless: "It's just stuff," or "It's just consciousness. Who cares what happens?"

But actually, that's not what I want to talk about, though, important as it is. I want to talk about this piece about fantasy, which is a very strange way to come into this, or would seem unusual at first. Image and fantasy. One person who's bothered by all this, she said, why don't we do, we should do what a lot of Protestant Christians do, or Evangelical Christians. They ask this beautiful question: "What would Jesus do in this situation?" Beautiful. "What would Jesus do?" They use the fantasy, use the imagination. Say, "What would the Buddha do?"

Well, actually, I think, lovely question, but you run into a problem immediately, because whose Buddha are we talking about? Whose Buddha? If you read enough biographies or even passages referring to the Buddha, and people, you realize, "Oh, it's a fantasy of the Buddha. It's an image of the Buddha." So I could, you know, there are three or four or five -- we have a fantasy, an image of the Buddha, and in that, an image, a fantasy of the direction of practice, Buddhahood being a direction of practice, of the goal. Whose Buddha? Some Buddhas don't give a damn about the world. Some Buddhas are thinking about other stuff.

But actually, even more than that, with this business of fantasy and image, if you go back and you read the original texts, the Pali Canon, you find, actually, they are saturated -- it's not obvious at first -- they are saturated in fantasy and image. The whole thing is saturated with certain fantasy and image, and that is of a kind of equanimous removal from the world. And sometimes we don't quite like that in some aspects, so we've kind of covered it over a bit, or filled it out a bit, but actually that is the dominant archetypal image of Pali Canon Buddhism: in the world, but kind of removed, on the way out, and not really that involved -- cool, non-attached, equanimous, maybe warm.

So I wonder if we can question that as the dominant image, and actually critique it, even. And maybe that makes some of you nervous. But to that, I would respond, why are we not free to question that? Why are we not free to question the dominant images and fantasies of Buddhism, of Dharma? And if I feel, or you feel, that you or I or we are not free to question and critique that, I would just respond, I would ask in response: what fantasy, what story, what imaging tells you or gives you the sense that you're not, that I'm not, that we're not? Do you see it's a religious fantasy? "I can't go back and question the Buddha." It's part of a religious storying. Do you see what I mean? There's a religious fantasy at play, even in the non-allowing of the questioning, non-allowing of the shining that kind of light on the tradition.

There are other problems here. In the Dharma, we tend to talk a lot about letting go of fantasy, non-fantasy, about "being with things as they are," about meeting actuality, letting the story go, etc., all of which is quite important. But it's almost an indoctrination there. We assume that that's actually possible.

If you go deep into Dharma and understanding emptiness and dependent origination, you actually see: what we perceive, our reality, is being constructed all the time. And the mind is playing the dominant part in that. And part of the construction is the fantasy, the image, the story that we have of what we are doing, and what life is, and what this is, and what that is. So certainly, meditatively, it's possible to "let go of fantasy, let go of fantasy." But you don't arrive at a bare actuality. Everything empties out. You go into non-appearance, levels of non-appearance. One can emerge out of that meditation, but once I emerge into the world, I'm back into the realm of fantasy, of imaging, of storying.

So even we, now, or monks in the Buddha's time, come out of their meditation and perceive themselves in the fantasy, in the story, in the image: "We are monks in the dispensation of the holy Buddha. He is the holy Buddha." I am on this track of the tradition even now. 2,500 years later, I am on the track. I see the past behind me, the tradition, and stretching, through this self and this time and this place and all the work that went into it, into the future. Story, fantasy, image.

I'm not denigrating fantasy and image. It's necessary. It's part of the way the psyche works. So I'm using it more in the sense that Jung or Hillman or those kind of psychologists would use it. I'm not talking about being lost in some kind of elaborate daydream. I'm talking about levels of resonance, levels of meaning, colourings of things, the way we give vitality and meaning and direction and beauty and love to things in our existence and the self in that.

Rather than trying to get rid of fantasy, or trying to pretend that it's not there, maybe it would be helpful to really acknowledge that it is here. We are saturated in it. The way we tend to talk, the way I dress, the way this place is set up, its decor, certainly the images, what we talk about, what we don't talk about: it's all part of the fantasy and the image, the story of what's happening here. And it's beautiful. But let's acknowledge that it's here. And it has tremendous power. It's in everything that we love. It has to be there.

So admit fantasy, image, story. It's here. We cannot live without it -- mythos, fantasy, image, story. From the mythos comes the ethos. From the mythos -- from the fantasy, image, story -- comes the ethos, meaning the ethics and the feel of things, the emotional resonance of things. From mythos comes the ethos. So that's one thing: acknowledging, admitting, recognizing the power.

The second thing is: has the Dharma tradition, either recently or right from the beginning, shrunk the range of fantasy and image? Has it contracted it down to predominantly one? The archetypal range of expression, has it contracted it down to one? And is that very singleness the problem, or a problem, let's say? Because we could ask, here in this culture -- and some of you have been around many years; some of you will be newer -- where is the madness? Where is the divine madness? Where is the warrior? Where's the raging? Where's the balls? Where's the wildness, different kinds of wildness? Where is the diversity of sexual expression? I don't just mean being open to LGBT and all that, important as that is. I mean the different sexual personae, the archetypal ways that that can express. Are they given an equal honouring? Or sensuality, or the breadth of artistic expression and range and feeling. Is it, rather, that something -- this calmness, equanimity, etc., warm still -- has actually become the dominant thing, the dominant image, the image to which (consciously, explicitly, or implicitly) we feel we're moving and we should move?

So those other kinds of things -- certain kinds of other expression or manifestation or archetypal range -- actually get relegated. Maybe they're seen as morally inferior in some cases. Maybe they're just relegated or sidelined. Maybe they're tolerated. We can be mindful of that, we tolerate it, but it's still one thing that we're drawn into. And we don't actually regard those others, those other images, fantasies, archetypal expressions as equally beautiful, that diversity, honouring them equally. And I don't even mean to integrate all that. I'm not even going in that direction now.

Some of you may have heard the teacher Andrew Cohen. And he used to be involved many years ago, way before my time, in this tradition at Gaia House. And now he's got his own sort of tradition, and he's a teacher. I read just a small passage from his biography some years ago. And he relates an incident with one of the senior teachers in this tradition, donkey's years ago. And something happened in an interview or over a couple of interviews, and the teacher, the senior teacher from this tradition -- I don't know what happened; it got a little heated, and shouted at Andrew. And Andrew said, "This was unbelievable." It just blew his mind. How could a spiritual teacher shout? How could they shout? [laughter] This is showing anger. And how can you be a spiritual teacher and have that? And it ruined it, and that -- I don't know if that was the breaking point, but something, and off he went and did his thing.

What's interesting to me there is, rather, what's in the image? What's in the image of what a spiritual teacher is like, and by extension, then, what we are moving towards? What this person is supposed to be embodying is someone who's more, further along on the path. What's in the image? What's included in the image? And what's excluded even from consideration in the image: shouting, anger, or what, don't even think, "That has nothing to do with it"?

So within the Dharma, there is not -- I could look and say it does exist, but generally there is not really much life force in the fantasy of engagement, of dynamic response to these gargantuan crises that we face right now. You certainly get outdoors Dharma, wilderness Dharma, but it's kind of about being equanimous or calm in nature, or connected to nature. It's a different thing. And you certainly get, like, people with veggie gardens and stuff. Great! Is that really going to hack it? [laughter]

So I don't want to suggest shrinking the fantasy, either, to one of like, "Now we're all going to be eco-warriors." I'm not suggesting that at all. What I want to really suggest is expanding, expanding the range, that somehow it has gotten too tight.

Well, let's explore this a little bit more about the image and fantasy, because we have image/fantasy of the goal and of the path. Wrapped up in that, part of it, is simplicity. I'll just draw it out, that dimension: we have an idea that both the goal and perhaps the path are simple, that we're aiming for some kind of simplicity. It's so attractive as a notion. And maybe, secondly, we're also, then, too simple in the way we regard, say, agitation. So it's interesting. Generally, we want to do away with agitation. We want to move away from agitation, let that go. And yet, certain kinds of agitation are okay. Perhaps if it feels like something is catharting from my childhood or whatever, and I'm agitated as I go through that, that's maybe allowed. Or the agitation of, in some traditions, the fourteenth stage of insight or whatever -- that's allowed, because it's seen, there's a conception behind it that allows it. But generally, we don't like agitation. We let go of agitation. Or again, too simple in the way that we're considering rage, that which rages within us, and that which is outraged, or might be outraged.

So a lot about simplicity. But climate change is not simple. It's not a simple issue. And the forces that are coming together to propel this juggernaut are not simple, not simple at all. We like this simplism, and maybe we're a bit seduced -- understandably; we have complex lives. It's like a siren song, seductive. And maybe there's something a bit, I don't know, missing in there, a bit stupid, even. And endlessly letting go of agitation, non-involvement, even using the word 'equanimity,' dressing it up as equanimity; it's actually non-involvement. Is that what's needed? Are we too in the thrall of one dominant direction there? We use words like 'wakefulness' and 'awakening,' but maybe with all that we've been lulled to sleep. Or some dimension of the being is being lulled to sleep. And though we might be very alive and sensitive in some area, in some other range or arena, there's actually quite a numbness there, a disengagement.

It's interesting. I mean, historically -- and I think I said this in the opening talk -- Buddhist ethics has a lot to do with simplification, in fact. That's one of the driving reasons behind Buddhist ethics. It's a kind of a safety net, as one of my teachers would say: just keep the five precepts. It forms a safety net for your practice and for your being, for your heart and your consciousness. So I don't have to think about, "Oh, now what did I lie to that person? I have to remember the lie and how it relates to this thing, or who I gossiped behind their back, or what I took." I don't have to keep being troubled by all that. It simplifies. And that simplification allows calmness, because I'm not agitated by my non-keeping of the precepts.

But within that, there is a kind of individualism. The range of ethics is very individual, and the notion of awakening is very individual. Nowadays, you know, if we think at all about the bigger picture, the wider picture in modern times, we maybe hope that, perhaps a person hopes that, "My working in my personal way on ethics and meditation and awareness and kindness, and in my circle of family and friends and work colleagues, etc. -- hopefully that will ripple out and cause a wider change in the wider culture." So oftentimes that kind of idea is there. But maybe we don't understand quite -- we're a bit naïve, underestimating the power of what we are up against or, we could say, we are creating -- the power, the enormous power of social structures and assumptions that form the fabric of our society, globalized society. Because we do now live in a globalized society, a globalized world. The carbon that we emit, the climate change that is happening is not localized. It's globalized. It's everywhere.

And again, looking in, probing a little bit into Buddhist precepts and ethics and their history, there's a lot about trying not to do: I undertake the precept to try not to harm, to try not to kill, to try not to steal, to try not to be abusive sexually. "Try not to": it's quite negative. Then, quite interesting, throwing a moral dilemma in. So if I'm walking by a lake or the sea, and a young woman is drowning and shouting for help, is it morally wrong to not help her? I mean, clearly it's good to help her. We say it's good, it's kind or whatever. But is it morally wrong? Maybe I say, in the Dharma language, "It's good karma to help her." But is it bad karma not to help her? And if my equanimity is disturbed, or my whatever else is disturbed, is it still bad karma? I don't know. Stinginess is bad karma, but you have to kind of search for that teaching.

Now, that's one person passing by another person in trouble. Amplify it to a globalized situation, and these moral dilemmas become quite difficult, because one can always say, "Well, there are other people around, and everyone else is walking by. No one else is stopping, doing this or that, or stopping to fly, or everyone -- whatever it is." The whole situation, morally, becomes so entangled, and so easy to just kind of shrug, shrug away. And if I look at it karmically, in a globalized situation -- if you believe in karma -- my bad karma for not jumping in and saving her is dissolved in the very globalization, in the very complexity and wideness of what's happening. Is that okay?

Molière, the writer Molière, already in the seventeenth century: "It is not only for what we do that we are responsible, but also for what we do not do." That's a hard thought, especially if the inner critic is strong. It's a hard thought, becomes the inner critic, just takes that -- it's so heavy: "Not just for what I do, but also for what I do not do, the action I don't take." Complex. All this is complex and difficult. Not easy, not simple, and actually agitating.

And woven into all this, as part of the images, the fantasies, is the conceptions, the views and assumptions that we have about the Dharma and about practice and about the goal and the path. We talk about suffering, dukkha. What is dukkha? What on earth are we talking about when we talk about dukkha? What is dukkha? That's the problem, right? Dukkha is the problem. The Buddha said, "I teach suffering and the end of suffering." What do we mean when we say dukkha? What's the problem? What actually is the problem? What is this that we're addressing? And what do I believe -- Second Noble Truth -- first is dukkha, second is, what do I believe is the cause? Fundamental Dharma conceptions: what are we actually talking about? What are we actually addressing?

Because dependent on my conception of what dukkha is and what I believe is its cause comes the other two Noble Truths: what I believe it looks like to be free of dukkha, and what I need to do, what it involves to get there. Dependent on my conception of the first two truths comes the conception, the image of the second two truths. Is it individual, the dukkha and the cause of dukkha? Is it purely individual, or am I including, in that, social structures, social assumptions -- and environmental, by extension?

If, for example, my -- and this is quite popular within the Dharma -- if my notion of dukkha is it's coming from "My patterns prevent my freedom to express my self," quite a common view. "That's the challenge that I have: my patterns, probably caused from my family and my past." That can be very much the dominant view. And as a dominant view, it has enormous effect. A view like that -- could pick out another one, but such a view will have enormous effect on then what the fantasy and image is of what freedom looks like, or what's involved in freedom, and what it looks like, what the fantasy or image is of what it looks like to help others achieve freedom. Such a view -- and as I said, could've picked out others, and there is truth, of course, in that view -- but when it's the dominant one, when it's shrunken around, then there isn't the inclusion of an attention to social or environmental roots of dukkha.

So we have Four Noble Truths, and we have three kilesas: greed, hatred, and delusion. And we say awakening is eradicating the three kilesas. So these lists and concepts, Dharma concepts, and we use these terms. But actually, they're like skeletons. Four Noble Truths is like a skeleton. Three kilesas, three defilements is like a skeleton, needs fleshing out. But how do we flesh them out? That's what brings them alive.

It's hard to read the Pali Canon, the original teachings, without this sense of, "What we're trying to do is get off the wheel of rebirth and not be reborn again." You can fudge it and take things out, but it kind of doesn't quite hang together. That's okay. I don't have a problem with taking rebirth out at all. But then when we do that, if that was the image and fantasy of what awakening is, what is it now? What will it be now? What is the image and fantasy of awakening? What's liberation? Without that -- that's gone as a central theme for a lot of people now -- what fantasy/image replaces it?

Personally, I'm coming to think, I don't actually see any proof -- some people, even Engaged Buddhists, say when the self is let go of, when the three kilesas die, then a person will be engaged naturally, as a result of having less self, etc. And we'll start to engage the social roots of dukkha. We'll start to really care for environmental ethics. We'll start to make radical changes in lifestyle, important changes in lifestyle. I'm not sure. I don't know.

I was at an Engaged Buddhism conference. I don't know when it was. Juha was there -- was it a year or something ago? And David Loy was speaking, and he said, he thought that shortly after the Buddha died, monasteries arose, institutions, Buddhist institutions, and they needed the support of local kings, the financial support and the military protection of local kings. And because they needed that, they couldn't speak out. They had to confine their discourse and teaching to individual dukkha. And they couldn't speak about socially caused dukkha and the social roots of dukkha. And for that reason, they just decided to confine it to individual dukkha and keep the status quo. And that's why we have Buddhism as it is now.

I mean, nice idea, but I don't know. It's a conjecture. Is it true? We have modern traditions that, like this one, have no need to pay any lip service to any government or military ruler or king or anything like that. Others -- you know, Diamond Approach, modern Advaita -- all quite similar in the way they point at the self and seeing the illusion of the self in some way or other, different language, and very little speaking about the engagement. So just the idea that "The self, the ego, is the problem" may not be sophisticated enough psychologically in relation to all this. Maybe we need new fantasies. Or that's one thing that we need, is new fantasies, new myths, new images to be included. Certainly, mindfulness now, but even insight alone, maybe, without the right fantasies or appropriate images, it just will not give that fruit. It will not give birth to that kind of engagement, that kind of wrestling.

So can I, can we, as teachers, give you new myths? What new myths? What new stories? What new fantasies? What images will you demand of me? New myths, new stories, new images, new fantasies -- and what will they be? From the fantasies, from the images, from the stories, from the mythos comes the ethos, comes the ethics. In the wider culture, what are the images, what are the fantasies? Norman O. Brown said, you know, if you want to change a civilization, you need "to change the imagination of the masses."^[3] That's what actually changes things. You change the imagination of the masses. Ben Okri puts it in a slightly nicer way: "Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations."^[4]

The stories, the fantasies, the images -- they also condition the emotions we have. So the very fact that we're not speaking and sharing with each other much in the culture about the enormous grief of species loss, of climate change, of what we're actually engaging in together and giving rise to -- it's partly because that's not in the image. It's not being fed by the right image. It has not become normalized through the images and the fantasies -- grief or outrage.

Anthropologists, historians see that, actually, the emotions that we feel as human beings -- we feel they're so primary, they're just natural -- how conditioned they are by the stories and the conceptions in the culture. So in medieval Europe, there were a whole bunch of emotions that we just have lost completely, because they had to do with certain conceptions of God that we just don't have in our culture any more. So we have a whole bunch of other emotions that they didn't have, because we talk in, we have a whole bunch of other fantasies, images, conceptions of self, etc., that they didn't have. And it gives rise to different emotions. [53:56]

So what fantasies, what images, in the wider culture? This is a very beautiful thing from the wonderful astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan. It was in an address that he gave to a graduating year in an American university. It must have been very shortly before he died. And he's showing them a large photo of an image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft a few years before that. So he's giving them an image, he's giving the world an image. And he says:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.^[5]

So to me, that's beautiful. It's an image. And wrapped up in it is a certain fantasy: it's the fantasy of our cosmic situation. And the rhetoric goes with it. It's beautiful rhetoric. No problem with rhetoric. Image/fantasy brings rhetoric. We have rhetoric in here. No problem. As I said, fantasy is good. It brings meaning. It brings image.

But we've had that image since 1969 when Apollo went up and turned around and took the photo. Maybe it's not enough for all. Maybe we need a plurality of images and fantasies. And this is really what I'm getting at. So what image, what fantasy, what do you love? Because there's so much love coming through what he's saying. And maybe it works for you. For me, it moves me tremendously. Doesn't work for everyone. It will not work for everyone.

What do you love? What has more meaning for you even than your life? What has more beauty and more importance than your pleasure or your pain, your suffering, more beauty and more importance than anything else? What image, what fantasy gives that? [58:19]

Guys, I've been speaking for an hour. Is it okay if I speak more, or have you just had enough? It's okay? All right, thank you.

What happens if we don't have a fantasy, if we don't have a spiritual, a meaningful, deep image in the psyche, or images in the psyche? One thing that can happen is, we start sacrificing at the altar of the god of convenience. Convenience takes, fills up the void left by the absence of meaningful fantasy, of vital, vitalizing fantasy. Sacrificing what? 'Sacrifice' used to mean, 'make something sacred.' But it's the opposite. We're actually letting go of what's sacred. Everything's about convenience. That's one possibility. Or perhaps convenience itself becomes the fantasy. But it's a pretty thin fantasy. It's a pretty meagre fantasy -- a mean fantasy, actually.

Why is it that shopping in big supermarkets feels so wounding to the sensitive soul? Sometimes people who have done a lot of retreats think, "Oh, because there's so much sensory stimulation." I actually don't think it's that at all. I wonder -- and all this is a question; I don't know the answers to any of these things -- I wonder if it's actually because, what is the supermarket? There isn't the deep care for deep beauty. It's gone. It's not addressed. It's not brought into the equation, into the economic equation, the fiscal equation. There is also not any real intimacy with either the produce or those who sell. It's a place of non-intimacy. What it is a place of is convenience: "Let's put everything in one place. People can park in the car park, and it's convenient." And that trumps what is more meaningful and more deeply beautiful. And it's painful, and it has an effect.

So in the wider culture, what are the fantasies that we can maybe give rise to, do we need to give rise to? What are the dominant ones? What ones can we question? What ones can we bring in? But in the Dharma culture as well -- that's my world, and that's what I want to address -- can we shake something up? Can we open something up so that there's less of a kind of monolithic dominance of the equanimous, non-attached acceptance of a situation, the 'doing nothing' as a style of existence? Less monolithic, the simple, the simplifying, the non-agitation, the non-fire of rage? Can there be a greater range? Can we admit and open up a greater range?

You know, it was interesting when the Occupy movement was there, and Rowan Williams, then the Archbishop of Canterbury -- he had no problem actually publicly saying, "Yes, I agree, this is great. There should be a Robin Hood tax, what's more," making political suggestions. Archbishop of Canterbury! As far as I was aware, no one in my Dharma circle felt it was appropriate for a spiritual person to be commenting on matters like that, about social structures, etc. Why? It's not in the image.

Or again, if we go back to that situation with Andrew Cohen and his teacher back then, we might notice and question and feel morally troubled if a teacher or someone who's been practising a long time is, for instance, promiscuous. And we think, "Well, is that morally" -- we think, "Well, that can't be morally right, sexual promiscuity." Or if there's a bit of wildness in how they are and what they express, or if what seems like rage or anger is coming through, we maybe notice that more than we would notice non-engagement. It's an absence. We don't notice an absence. What if we turn that around? And actually, one starts to question the non-engagement and say, "That can't be quite right, maybe."

We go back to that Žižek quote, and he's saying, "Oh, you guys, you're all retreating to your thing, and you can just turn the world off with your meditation." I think what he got wrong there is, people need to rest. Even a soldier. Apparently, you can only give soldiers sixty continuous hours of combat before they start to lose it. But even an activist needs to rest. Meditation is rest, deep rest.

What he's mistaken is, the dominant image in Buddhism, in Dharma, is not so much of meditation as entering into deep calm and then emerging. Actually, the dominant image is a life of calm, a pervasive equanimity. So even if you say, "It's okay if you can't get deeply calm," the implicit (often) or explicit image is of a life of equanimity. And that is poisonous, perhaps. Fine, I mean, beautiful, to be able to rest deeply. But to try and have a calm life, an untroubled life, an equanimous life, so that the image, the fantasy that's beginning to get quite pervasive is one of an equanimous or spacious busyness, so I can do all this stuff and be really busy with the demands of modern life, and yet inside I'm equanimous and spacious. And maybe that's not such a great fantasy and image to have, popular and attractive as it might seem.

Maybe, again, included in the range of images can be this sense of, "Is there a place for a kind of Dharma that's not about 'me'?" It's just not me and my suffering. It's much wider. So maybe as a part of all this, increasing the range. We can't force anyone into falling in love with or adopting a certain fantasy or image. It's impossible, especially in the postmodern era. Sometimes the ecopsychology movement, I feel, tries to sell this kind of Mother Nature image, but some people just think, Mother Nature? They feel like, "This is a bunch of hippies talking. I don't relate to it." It won't be for everyone.

Going back in the Buddhist tradition, we have the fantasy, the image of the bodhisattva. But it's not forced on anyone. At the beginning, when it came to pre-eminence, when it was arising, this bodhisattva image, this fantasy, actually, they had monasteries existing where people who took up that fantasy and image coexisted very well and very peaceably and amicably with people who didn't take it up. Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna -- no problem, living together, and just saying, "That's your fantasy. It's fine. This is mine. No problem." There has to be, maybe, a plurality.

Just finishing up now. Originally, this bodhisattva fantasy and image involved the idea of many lives and a kind of transcendent goal of unbelievably transcendent Buddhahood, almost difficult to even get the head around. What might it mean now? What might it involve now? A modern version of the bodhisattva -- what image might that be, without all this business about lives and other realms and transcendence and all that? Might it be a range of images, and within that greater space, a wider range of fantasy, and wilder range? The fantasy, the images admit wider and wilder. The Buddha, in the time of the Buddha, they talked about the lion's roar of the awakened ones. On awakening, they utter the lion's roar. What is the modern lion's roar? What might be included in the modern lion's roar of awakening?

So is it that these other aspects that we tend to perhaps dismiss, or just not notice, or not give life to, or feel troubled by, we tend to want to try and tame them, or look down on them? Maybe there's something about honouring them deeply, allowing them, making them available. And if you listen and you think, "That sounds dangerous, all this talk about wildness and rage and outrage. It sounds dangerous." Maybe it is. Maybe there's no such thing as a path without danger. I don't think there is. Any path has danger. Eyes open to danger. There's always a danger. But if the only or the dominant image is equanimous non-involvement, warm but not really getting involved, it seems safe, seems like there's no danger: safe, sane, sanitized. But maybe there's huge danger lurking in there through the very non-involvement, the non-agitation, the non-outrage.

So maybe one element in all of this that we're facing, one small but perhaps important piece, is to do with widening the range of what we honour. And I really mean 'honour' in the fullest sense, not just 'tolerate.' Honour the images that emerge, the fantasies that emerge. And then maybe that's one element that allows, that will or might allow, might contribute to allowing the Dharma to actually really offer something to the world at this time.