Stream Entry (Part 1) - Conceptions, Value and Realisations

Hi, everybody. Lovely to see you all. Shall we just start with a bit of silence? Is that okay? Taking the time now to really tune into your body, to open the awareness to the body, the experience of the body. Opening up the body with awareness. Grounded, present, embodied. Within that awareness, that space of awareness, sensitive to the body, how's the heart doing right now? What is present in the emotions? Doesn't need to be this or that; whatever it is, just sensing it, touching it, holding it, caring for it, including it, body and heart. Staying connected, staying open to body and heart. Tuning in, finding again your intention, your intention for this time together. What brings you here? What moves you? What calls you? Feeling your body, your heart, your whole being aligned with that intention, devoted in some way to that intention. Still connected with, including, body, heart and intention, letting the awareness spread out in whatever way is palpable to you or makes sense to you. Sensing the connection, the togetherness that bonds us for this time together -- shared inquiry, shared care. Feeling yourself as part of that web of community, of connection, togetherness.

I said this before for some of you that have been present at these gatherings, these seminars. I'm feeling more and more like it's actually really quite possible to stay connected, heart and soul and relationship, in this virtual mode, staring at a screen (in my case, staring at a screen with lots of little faces on it! [laughs]). So just the encouragement to all of us to keep checking in with body, with heart, with intention, and with the sense of connection -- so connection to oneself, connection with each other. I'm feeling that the more time I'm spending online in these ways, either individually with people or in groups, that that is really possible. What at first seemed such a difficult medium to have the same sense of intimacy or sensitivity, connection, relation, relational amplitude, range, actually a lot more is possible than I initially thought. But it will take that check, just checking in occasionally with yourselves. So I'm not going to remind us to do that; I'll leave that up to you to do that. But it can be quite easy to get sort of in the head and in the eyes, so just periodically to check in with the whole being and really include that in the experience, in the intention.

Okay. So I've done a few other ones of these and I can't remember what number we're on in this sort of series. I think it's the third one. But every time, I have the thought, "I'm not going to say anything. I'll just take questions." And somehow, as it gets closer, I somehow change my mind. [laughs] And think maybe it would be good if I said a bit and then open it up for questions. So I think that's what I'm going to do, and I hope that's okay. The bulk of our time will be with questions and responses. But I think I will say a little bit. In saying a little bit now, I don't want to speak for too long, or certainly spend too long repeating what I've already said elsewhere. In the days of digital recordings and World Wide Web and free access to teachings, there doesn't seem that much point repeating what I've said elsewhere. So you can find more fleshed out explorations about stream-entry and awakening and all that in some of my talks on Dharma Seed and elsewhere.

But I don't want to spend too long repeating that right now. I'll say a little bit. Really what I want to do, perhaps within that, is lean a bit more than I have in the past in a certain direction, which I've mentioned before and opened a little before. Maybe leaning that way actually opens it up a bit more. So that's what I'd maybe like to do now. Okay, so stream-entry. [8:34] Most of you will have heard the term, of course. Sotāpanna is the Pali. It literally means 'entering the stream,' 'entering a stream.' I suppose we could start a little bit by just saying something about what we've received from the Pali Canon, purely classical teachings about that. But again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that.

As I think needs to be the case for any healthy tradition, and any rich tradition, what the Buddha said about stream-entry leaves a lot to be filled in. It's quite ambiguous. It's open to many interpretations, etc. We might wish, "I wish he'd been a little clearer and kind of explained it," but you actually lose quite a bit in losing that [inaudible]. What we have is the Buddha lists ten fetters that are progressively removed at different stages of awakening for a practitioner. A stream-enterer is said to be released from the first three fetters; they're gone for a stream-enterer. So what are they, in the classical view, from the Pali Canon? The first one is, in Pali, sakkāyadiṭṭhi. Diṭṭhi means 'view.' Sakkāya is a compound of two words -- sat and kāya. Kāya means a body, but not necessarily just this body; a body in the sense of a body of materials, a body of teachings, a collection of things. And sat means existence or being. So you've got this kind of strange phrase, sakkāyadiṭṭhi, the ending, the release from views about the existence of this kind of body of elements or something. We'll come back to that.

Second fetter is doubt, vicikicchā I think it's called in Pali, and the third one is attachment to rites and rituals. You've also got, in the Pali Canon, the Buddha, often you hear this phrase, "He was talking to so-and-so," or "So-and-so was practising," "So-and-so heard the Dhamma," and then, for that person, there was the "opening of the Dhamma eye," the "opening of the eye of the Dhamma." But as far as I know, that phrase is never explained anywhere. What does that mean? What does it mean to open the eye of the Dhamma? So it's a lovely, poetic-sounding phrase, but what does it mean? Are we talking about an experience, or are we talking about an understanding, to open one's eyes? Or is it something they've seen in a flash of experience?

So right away, we can see that even in this kind of skeletal description from the Pali Canon, a lot is open to interpretation, and in fact, how we relate to this whole issue is going to hinge on how we interpret these little phrases -- particularly "opening the Dhamma eye" and particularly the first of these three fetters. The sakkāyadiṭṭhi, what does that mean? What, after all, is a view? Diṭṭhi is view. The release from a view. So what does that mean? A philosophical opinion, or an ingrained sort of way of seeing things, or something in between? What's sakkāya? What does it point to? You could interpret it in many different ways. And what you get -- and many of you will know this if you've been exposed to enough contemporary Dharma teaching -- there's a huge range in how people interpret what stream-entry is, and what these fetters mean, and what the release from that is.

So that's the situation we have in the wider Dharma culture -- these sort of skeletal pointers, and then a huge range of interpretation. You may have come across very different interpretations, all the way from "not really judging oneself any more much," for example, as that's what stream-entry means -- it's the end of the harassing and domination by the inner critic -- all the way, I would say -- what I'm going to say is I don't really even use the concept much more in my teachings. I'm using it tonight because it came to me in an email saying this is the topic for tonight. [laughs] But I find myself to have moved away from it. When, before, I used to use it a lot, I suppose within that range, that how I would define it would be really quite a high bar, relative to the other definitions that are around. For me, what that meant, this opening the Dhamma eye or seeing through sat-kāya, any views about that, really meant seeing the emptiness of absolutely everything. Not just personality, not just self, but the aggregates themselves being empty, time being empty, awareness being empty, space being empty, all of it.

And so, in that range, when I used to use it, I used to put the bar quite high. Some people would say, "That's ridiculous. That's way too high. That's something that an arahant would realize." In the Mahāyāna tradition, where they use a very different system, one of the strange sort of long-standing debates for centuries in the Mahāyāna tradition was, "Does a Theravādan arahant, fully enlightened in the Theravādan lineage, do they understand the emptiness of all things?" And for some reason, they just grasped on that debate, and it was a sort of wrangling point for centuries and centuries. I'm saying that not just for academic interest. So there's everything in between this range of -- yeah, you're just kind of not so oppressed by the inner critic, all the way to this, you've seen the emptiness of everything and something in you knows that. Now, you might not always be in that understanding. Some of you might have heard, I think I've put it out in a talk before, my analogy of the ball bearing in a tube. So an arahant is someone that the ball bearing, their realization, doesn't shift from the bottom of the tube. It's just there. Lesser stages of realization, the ball bearing can move. So the centre of gravity of the understanding is this knowing of the emptiness of all things -- all things, completely; all the links of dependent arising, all of that. But the ball bearing can still move. You can get knocked out of that understanding. But it will come back to that. That's the centre of gravity. Intermediate stages of awakening -- once-returner, non-returner -- get knocked out less, and their ball bearing goes not so high up the tube, so to speak.

Anyway. So there's this whole range, and there's everything in between, the sort of very high bar, relatively speaking, and not very high bar. More recently, I just find myself not really getting that involved in the whole kind of debate. Like I said, I don't use it so much as a concept. And I'm happy -- people can, you know, do what you want with it. There's this range of interpretations. It's up to you, you know, is kind of my default response. But if someone prods me or pokes me, then I think my inclination is really to take the whole discussion to another level, and that's what I want to just go into a little bit now. And I've done it elsewhere a little bit, but I want to, again, open in a certain way a bit more.

[17:19] One of my teachers from many years ago, I remember her saying in a talk -- I can't remember the context, but she said something like -- I have no idea who she was talking about -- "So-and-so might be awakened, enlightened, liberated," and she said, "Well, if that's liberation, you can keep it." In other words, she was relying on her own sense of what liberation should deliver, what the path should deliver. So a person says, "I've lost this fetter, I've lost that fetter," I'm looking at them, Narayan is looking at them, and I want you to have the same right. It's your right to look at someone -- of course you don't know everything about a person -- to look at them and say, "Do I want to live like that? Do I want to be like that? Do I want to be that kind of being?" A person, they say this or that, and you hear this or that about them, but you look at them and you get a sense of them, you get a sense of their life. No one can take that right away from you. They might be in a tradition where they're honoured and this and that. No one can take that right. And even with me, you can look at me and you could say, "Nyeh, I don't want to be like Rob," you know? That's absolutely your right. Or, conversely, you look at someone, and you say, "There's something there, or some things there, about the perfume of that existence, about the way they're living, about what they emanate, how they relate to life. I want that. There's something I want there."

So what often happens is, for some people, this whole idea of awakening and stream-entry and arahant gets supercharged, and for other people not charged at all. That, in itself, is really interesting, and I'm going to come back to that. What happens when it gets charged? Why does it get charged, and why does it not get charged? On either side, whether it gets charged or not, there can be all kinds of quite interesting psychology going on. What's actually happening there in my relationship to these concepts, and my libidinal relationship with these concepts, or anti-libidinal, lack of interest? This is what I mean partly by taking the whole discussion to another level. Sometimes what happens in a tradition is we've a little bit been sold on certain ideas or certain images of what awakening is: "Oh, it looks like that monk, and the way they just smile, and they're so jolly, and they seem to have no preferences. You ask them, 'Would you like this, or would you like that?' and they just shrug, and it's like, 'Wow!'" Or an idea of what awakening is. We're very impressionable, and we can get sold certain ideas and images. And then they're ramped up by certain language, and it can go unquestioned, and it can go unquestioned for decades.

This is a kind of main point -- it's like, can we open this up in a way that has more self-confidence in it? Still the humility, but more self-confidence, more integrity, more penetration of questioning, more radicality? So ideas like ending suffering, or awakening, liberation -- these are charged words, and they need to be, perhaps, opened up more. The question, really, is, "What is it that I most deeply want? And is this, that person's awakening" -- however they're living it in their life; this person says "I'm an arahant," that person says she's an arahant or a stream-enterer, whatever -- "is that what I want?" Look at them. Sense them. Sense their life. Is there something deeply attractive there for you?

Because part of what's really significant here is, in the Pali Canon -- I know some people try and dispute this -- but basically it's a whole body of teachings that are set within the cosmology of rebirth, and that human beings, like animals, etc., are just infinitely reborn, again and again and again, and awakening, liberation, arahantship is the ending of that cycle of saṃsāra, of being reborn again and again. You have to really imagine for a second -- even if you don't believe it -- just imagine yourself in that cosmology. It's not just a few births; it's endless. Endless cancer, endless being murdered, endless losing of people you love, endless separation, endless betrayal in romance, endless your children dying, endless pestilence and plague. It just goes on and on and on, and then you get some good bits, and they go too. So the import of what awakening meant in that cosmology, it's enormous.

An arahant has ended rebirth; they're no more reborn into that endless cycle of inevitable misery. A sotāpanna, a stream-enterer, is said to have a maximum of seven lives left. So in the context of that cosmology, to have just seven lives left is like, "Oh, thank goodness! I'm almost done. I'm almost out of this meaningless, endless cycle of dukkha and suffering." Nowadays, I don't know what proportion of people actually buy into that whole cosmology, really, in that sense. And we live, most of us here -- and I'm saying this as someone who's dying of cancer -- we live actually pretty comfortable lives. So we don't have that whole sense of what they had before -- no antibiotics, no painkillers, nothing like that.

What does it mean then? For many people who have just put aside that whole rebirth thing, what does awakening, liberation, arahantship -- what does that mean? What significance does it have? Relative to that sort of infinite dukkha, the infinite dukkha of endless rebirth in saṃsāra, if I say, "I'm seeking to live without suffering," how does it sound? How does it sound to you? If you have really a lot of suffering in your life, that's going to be very attractive -- "I'm seeking to live without suffering." If we turn it around and say, "My purpose in life is to be free of suffering," how does that sound? "I want to go through life without suffering." Recently I've read two things where two different people have claimed that that's what gives life meaning, the attempt to go through life kind of without suffering. I don't know -- how does it sound? Is it even that big a deal, compared to this infinite cycle of saṃsāra -- the relative sufferings I might deal with, I want to end that? Is that the most important thing in your life? And again, I'm saying this as someone who is almost -- very probably -- certainly dying of cancer. Is that the most important thing?

We start to open this up and there's actually more there that comes out of this ambiguity of what might be pointed at. Somewhere or other, I think in the Pali Canon, I couldn't find it, but somewhere the Buddha says also that there's -- I can't remember the phrase exactly, but a stream-enterer abides with a care for ethics or something; I can't remember the phrase. In a way, that's implicit, because ending doubt means you believe in the path laid out by the Buddha and you follow that path, and that path is the eightfold path. Wrapped into the eightfold path is a care for ethics -- Right Speech, and Right Intention, Right Livelihood and all that. So it's kind of implicit there, this care for ethics, this attention to ethics. But when you transfer that realm, that aspect with regard to ethics and the consequences for ethics of liberation (to whatever degree), what does it mean nowadays? What does it mean in our globalized world and culture, with unthinkable species extinction happening right now with climate change and all the rest of it?

[27:24] So what does a certain level of awakening imply, or what is its outflow into the realm of ethics? And can we kind of be relatively good Buddhists, and kind of keep the five precepts, but actually not really engage in what you might call the really pressing, urgent issues of our time, and the complications, the difficulties in relating to these larger issues about climate change and species loss, etc.? Sometimes there's a kind of -- what's the word? -- just a kind of conservatism around ethics. Is it a genuine ethical impulse, or am I just a little bit programmed by, say, Victorian values, or values that come out of a kind of ascetic tradition that's anti-erotic or anti-sexual or whatever? Is that really embodying ethics? Am I just in a kind of safe position there? So the question is open to me: what does, let's say, just the level of stream-entry, what does that look like ethically? What does it look like now, in these times? And now we have, thankfully, I think, the beginnings of a rise of willingness for civil disobedience among Dharma practitioners in relation to climate change. What does stream-entry imply in relation to those kinds of choices?

So all these questions. How am I going to choose? Given this range of interpretations of what stream-entry can mean, how am I going to choose? What is choosing? Why am I choosing this interpretation or that interpretation? And why am I trying to fit into what the Buddha is supposed to have said? Is that the primary question? "I want to achieve what the Buddha talked about" is a very different question than "I want to achieve, I want to move towards, I want to open to what really matters to me." Does that make sense? I know it's a pretty loaded question. We get in a tradition that we love, that has fed us, and then we have this relationship, kind of, with a guy who lived 2,500 years ago, who we never met, and we want to fit into some kind of explanation. There's some likelihood that if we did meet him, we might not actually like him. And somehow we want to fit into that model. And that's a very different question than, "What do I want? What matters most to me? What's the most important thing?"

I think if we're talking about liberation or awakening or the goal of the path, it's that second one that matters the most -- am I moving towards, am I in the stream of opening and realizing and achieving what I most want? Or, again, am I plugging into some strange thing because I've got this idea about the Buddha or something like that? So how do I choose, and why do I choose? And in relation to something like stream-entry or stages of awakening, how easily the inner critic is quite influential, or the ego: "I don't want to have the pain of feeling like I haven't achieved when others around me have," or "I want to feel like I've achieved something." Sometimes that can be an ego motivation. Or sometimes a person has a relationship with this whole idea of stream-entry and, in a way, they've become not interested in it any more, but, as I said, the non-interest can be coming from very different places. So I could be not interested in stream-entry any more -- maybe I've been practising for decades, "I'm not really interested in that any more." Why? What's happening psychologically? Has the fire gone out? That's the more important question. My lack of interest may look impressive or it may look like a certain level of freedom, but actually the fire has gone out. And in a way, my lack of interest is just perpetuating a kind of status quo in my life, in regard to my practice, in regard to what can open up. Maybe there's laziness there. Actually, I don't really believe in laziness; maybe it's more a lack of eros, a lack of desire.

So what it is that matters most to you? What is it that matters most? And that might have come to you, that you've seen someone living a certain way or heard someone explain a kind of vision of a certain kind of life, a certain kind of realization, or have read about it. It doesn't matter if it's received; what matters is that it actually is congruent with your deepest wishes. And that's not necessarily an easy question. So, again, I invoke my teacher, Narayan, and her feeling free to say, "Well, if that's awakening," whoever she was talking about, whatever vision of awakening, and saying, "you can keep it. I don't want it." And as I said, you can have that too. I feel it's really important you have that, with some humility as well and some open-mindedness, of course.

But if you ask me, and if I kind of claim that right, right now, for myself, and I look, and this person says they're a stream-enterer and that person says they're an arahant, and I might look and from my own sensibility, I might see, "Well, okay, but there's not much nobility there. There's no sense of beauty there. There's no sense of the poetry of life. There's nothing poetic emerging from that being. There's very little that's radical. There's not sensitivity," perhaps. And sensitivity or attunement, they're not anywhere in that little list the Buddha gave, but to me ... I remember a person, I think he was claiming he was a non-returner or something, and just the way they were moving around and interacting, it seemed quite insensitive and not very attuned. It's like, "Yeah, well, if that's it, you can keep it." So you have to decide. These are the kinds of things that matter to me. And to me, awakening is a big deal. It's not a little deal. It's a big deal. Again, it's just my opinions right now, and everyone is free to form their own opinions, but it's a big deal, and it's something radical. Something should be radical there. So if what comes out in the life is not very radical at all, and the Middle Way turns out to be just kind of middle of the road -- don't want to offend anyone, it's all kind of quite usual -- to me, it doesn't speak to me. So you kind of have to decide as well, what is it that draws you? And not so transfixed by labels and claims and -- how would you say? -- systems.

Last thing. We can turn it around, turn this whole question around, and say, what interpretation -- or however I'm interpreting, let's say, stream-entry or awakening, however I'm framing it, however I'm defining it, and however I'm positioning myself on that scale -- "I am a stream-enterer," "I'm almost a stream-enterer," "I'm far from it," "I'm an arahant*,*" "I'm a this," "I'm a that" -- what way of framing the self and the goal, in this case, what do those framings lead to? In other words, how I think about myself, how I define myself, and how I define the goal -- what are the consequences of those definitions? So, "I'm a stream-enterer," "I'm not interested in it," "I'm not a stream-enterer, but I'm really striving for it" -- to me, the question, or one of the things that's most important -- and again, it's just me speaking now, and I have that privilege -- but to me, what's actually important about those definitions is the consequences.

Definition of self in relation to this goal, and definition of what that goal is. What do these definitions of self and goal do with respect to my eros? I'm not going to unpack that word, but I mean my infinite longing, the juice, the depth, the mystery, the calling, the vocation, the devotion. What do the ways I am defining the goal, whether it's stream-entry or arahantship or whatever, and how I'm seeing myself in relation to the goal -- what do they do to my eros? What do they do to the directionality and the full-blooded, wholehearted, whole-soul movement of my love and my life? What do they do specifically to my eros for discovery, to discover more? My eros for the poetry of existence? My longing for mystical insight? My sense of the beauty of life and the depths and the ranges of that? To me, that's the much more interesting question. What happens? A person says, "I'm not interested in it," as I said, and actually what's happening is they've just shut down that definition, and maybe the reason for that defining has actually just shut down that eros.

[38:27] Another way, a sort of shorthand way of defining liberation or awakening, from the Pali Canon, is the ending of the three kilesas, or the reduction of the three kilesas. So sense desire/greed, ill-will/aversion, and delusion/avijjā. Sometimes what you get nowadays is people picking up on that definition of what awakening means, refusing to define it in terms of any kind of mystical insight or opening of the Dhamma eye to some transcendent realm, for example, and saying, "That's all nonsense. I just define it as this reduction of greed, aversion, and delusion." And again, I can just invoke my right and your right to look at people who are talking about awakening and relating to awakening different ways, and see how it sits, how it sits in your soul, how attractive it is or not. I'm sure there are people who think of the path as primarily reducing greed and aversion who would -- I'm sure there are people who I would look at them and feel like, "Wow, that's really opening up a radically beautiful life. There's something so lovely and so really radical," and I mean that word in a very full sense, "about the choices for the way they live that comes out of defining and thinking about awakening as that, as just a reduction of greed, aversion, delusion." But the people that I actually know that think that way -- again, I'm just invoking my personal right to see this -- I don't feel a lot of beauty there. I don't feel a lot of radicality. But it's up to you.

If we take those three kilesas, loosely speaking -- greed, aversion, and delusion -- the question is, what does my definition of this whole concept lead to? The one that it really hinges on -- greed, aversion, delusion -- is the definition of avijjā, of delusion. Because if I have a view -- for example, I say, "Okay, liberation is the progressive lessening and eventual extinction of those three kilesas," the tenor of my life, the sense of what existence is, the sense of what the world is, the sense of what a human being is, most of that will depend on how I define avijjā, how I define fundamental delusion. Less on how I define aversion and greed and the attenuation of that. If I define avijjā, this fundamental delusion, if I define it as, "The end of avijjā is seeing that what the self is, is, for example, just the process of the aggregates in time. You're just this kind of rolling on of a causal chain of moments of aggregates, of body and mind. There's no personality. That's all illusion. Anything on top of that basic view is a kind of illusion. And that's what avijjā is, seeing that. The self is just this momentary arising of a process of aggregates." And if, together with that, avijjā means you see that everything is impermanent, then impermanence is an ultimate truth. And if, on top of that, basically the scope of avijjā is relative to the self, but the world is, for the most part -- apart from, like, really deranged papañca states -- is basically what it seems to be: I'm sitting in a room in Devon, we're on the internet together, it's seven-whatever-it-is time, etc. The world stays what it is. So the avijjā there has quite a small scope. What kind of life comes out of either realizing that and ending one's realization there, or even just having that as a goal? What kind of perfume? What kind of flavour of existence, of being, of world, etc.?

Compare that with the idea that avijjā may be the reification or the believing in the reality of anything at all, anything -- these aggregates, these physical/mental components, time, space, awareness; all of that is empty. And so ending avijjā is seeing that all of that is empty. Then, to me, there's a whole different, enormously different range of mystical scope, scope of mystical possibilities for perception, for the very sense of what it is to be a human being, and what the world is, and what it can be, how we can sense it. That whole range opens up. What happens to the existence if that's my view, if that's the goal I've reached? But even if that's the goal that I'm aiming for.

To me, and again it's just my opinion, but to me, if we're thinking about what opens up the eros, what opens up a beautiful life, in the fullest, richest, most poetic sense, what opens up most radically? What vision, what definition of these terms? So it's not, "Have I or haven't I? Am I or am I not? What did the Buddha really mean?" What's possible here? The choice that I make regarding how I define both the goal -- whatever it is, stream-entry -- and where my self is in relation to that, that will determine my self-view, my world-view, and the whole kind of movement and range and texture and richness of my desire and eros, and my whole life. We're talking about whole different senses of existence.

Very last point. It's just to say that another way around. Our aims or our goals, where we're aiming in our lives, that may constitute our being. Our aims and our goals may constitute our being. Where we're going, or where we think we're going, where we're intending to go, may constitute our being and our sense of existence sometimes more than anything else. Sometimes more than where we've come from and what's happened to us in the past. Even if I don't reach where it is I'm aiming for, just having that intention sets a direction and, in setting a direction, it doesn't just influence my actions, it influences my very world-view, my sense of the cosmos, and my sense of the self. So the flavour, the tenor, the perfume, the scope, the range, the dimensionality of existence comes as much and sometimes more out of the aims that we have than anything else.

So that was longer than I thought, as usual. Apologies. But that's what I wanted to say tonight. As I said, I've said other stuff elsewhere, but it just felt like I wanted to lean a bit more in that direction. So maybe we can open for some questions now. And again, I just want to really encourage you to, if you do feel a little nervous or shy about asking, just know that your question will almost certainly be helpful to someone else here, if not to yourself, of course, or someone listening at another time. And if that knowledge, if that trust and that intention can help you ask, then that's good.

Anyone? Claire's got her hand up. Yeah, please.

Q1: the relationship of stream-entry and clearing away psychological stuff

Yogi: [48:33] Being an old lady, as I tell you frequently, I am a bit shocked recently by how I have discovered -- despite all my years of looking -- quite a lot of unknown furniture in the room: neuroses, things that need looking at. I would love to be a stream-entrant; I'd love to turn into Dipa Ma and be like that. It'd be a lovely thing to achieve. But I'm unclear now. Do we have to clear all our furniture from the room to become enlightened? Or has it got nothing to do with how much we've cleared the furniture out? Do you know what I mean?

Rob: I might understand you more than the others, because we've been speaking over the years. Do you want to say a little bit more what you mean by furniture?

Yogi: Yes -- things that I've been unconscious. I discovered that I've had almost trauma hidden away, which circumstances have brought up. There may be lots of other things which I have built a life that skirts around them so I don't see them, I don't know how much furniture is there. I've been a bit shocked by discovering how much furniture is there recently still to be worked on. I mean, working on it has also enlivened me and brought other things as well, loveliness, but the idea that one might have to clean out all one's furniture before you get to any of these stages is a bit daunting. Maybe it has nothing to do with that.

Rob: Yeah, so, again, I would rather put the question back to you. It's like, do you want to be free of that furniture?

Yogi: I want to be like Dipa Ma. I want to fill a room with love. I want to go as far as possible in the direction of -- I think Jack Kornfield said when you came into a room and everybody in the room was filled with love, as one aspect. I'd like to be the best I can be. If that involves clearing the furniture, I'm very happy to clear it, and I feel when I clear it I have more energy. But it's a bit funny if it depends on ... The things you said, it's like sometimes this thing just happens to people. Is that right? Stream-entry? Obviously we can lean in that direction, but ...

Rob: Lean in what direction?

Yogi: Well, lean in the direction of clearing stuff and having more openness and energy and eros; we can lean in that direction. Do you know what I mean? We don't have to become totally good. [laughs]

Rob: I don't really know, to be honest. I think if that's what you want, then the question is really ... Even in your description of Dipa, I'm not exactly sure what it is you're after there. But if that's what you want, then the question is really, do I need to clear the furniture in order for that to happen? Is clearing the furniture part of making that happen? Or is it a result of that happening?

Yogi: Well, that's what I wondered, yes.

Rob: So in those terms, you know -- and this is kind of ... leave aside much of what I said tonight -- but just in terms of classical Dharma, obviously you get pretty split opinions on that. Some people say, "Don't worry about your furniture. If you realize X," whatever X is, depending on their bar of stream-entry or actually arahantship, "then your furniture will disappear," happily. Some people would say, "No, you can do that, and you can have plenty of furniture left around that you're going to have to deal with in a different modality, probably, and approach from a different direction through psychology, etc." So I think if I just restrict myself to those kinds of paradigms, I'm probably somewhere in the middle, is my opinion. I think some stuff just needs working on from a more psychological direction, and some of that -- let's call it psychological furniture -- will get dissolved, not even through realization; sometimes it gets dissolved through samatha or mettā or stuff like that. So I don't think there's a complete formula. Again, I'm just confining myself to sort of classical paradigm, or classical paradigm meets sort of common contemporary psychotherapeutic paradigm, let's put it that way. I would say both, you know?

There's also then the added thing of just what my relationship is with that furniture, and how much is that furniture harming others. So these are other questions. I might have some furniture, but I see that I'm actually quite good at being aware of it and taking care that it doesn't harm others, it's just something I bump into occasionally, maybe. So these are all the kinds of questions. I don't know -- you'll have to find your own answers with that. For me, again, I go back to what's interesting and what's lovely to do. For me, approaching things more from the kind of psychotherapeutic paradigms, even standard ones -- soulmaking, leave that aside for now -- is just as interesting as approaching things from emptiness, and it's all discovery, and it's creativity, and there's liberation at different levels. I don't tend to split the two like they're separate paths or something, or expect some kind of -- I wouldn't equate them, either, but I don't expect some magic. So it depends on you, you know? Does that sound okay?

Yogi: Yeah, thank you.

Rob: Okay, good.

Q2: working with uncertainty and complexity in regard to ethics, ethical antinomies

Yogi: [54:54] The part about radicality, I'm exploring that. I'm making some steps professionally. It's quite scary at times. It's really shifting from the non-violent bodhisattva. I guess one of the burning questions I have is how do you [inaudible] things like civil disobedience or radical action that might seem actually quite strong or even offensive to some people, with the spirit of unconditional loving-kindness, which I also aspire to. Because, you know, if I have the space to be able to explain my action maybe to some people, sometimes, it could be quite clear actually what is the depth of my intention, but a lot of times, I find I'm misunderstood and judged. It's like, "Oh, Boaz has lost his way. He's not compassionate any more. He's really lost it. He's gone mad or something." So I don't know if it's possible to answer the question like that, or if I need to give something more specific, but it's around that.

Rob: Part of the question seems about how you're perceived by others. Is that correct?

Yogi: Yes, and then that also of course has a consequence in terms of the impact of my actions. If I take a radical stance, it's to be able to try to make a shift in a system or in a community or in a small group, and what might be misperceived then sometimes [inaudible] ... accountability for unskilful action and maybe inappropriate action at times, for sure. But that misperception then has a direct, negative impact on what I would consider the skilful initial intention.

Rob: It might, yeah. It's tricky because everything has a shadow to it. Everything has a potential shadow to it, whatever we choose, and there are always dangers of whatever we choose. Sometimes I feel that, within Buddhadharma, this sort of "not offending anyone" can get an unduly high sort of status as being of great import. You'll have to decide -- okay, there's a practical thing about what's the result of my action if I offend too many people, etc., or if they don't understand. Is it actually a beneficial action? If I offend people now, but a little time later on down the road, then people understand more, and they look back at the action and see it differently ...

One of the difficult things about making ethical choices is knowing the results of our actions, and their consequences, and how they ripple out, and who they affect, and how it interacts with the whole web of life and consciousnesses there. It's very hard to tell, you know? So we can have a very simple rule, like, "Oh, I want to decrease suffering," but actually most of our actions in life, it becomes very difficult to tell, other than the most immediate consequence for whoever's right in front of me, it becomes very difficult to tell what are the consequences of our actions in terms of reducing or increasing the totality of suffering in the world.

I think sometimes there's a danger, probably with all ethics, but certainly with Buddhist ethics as they're taught, that we can grasp at a kind of simplicity, and think what we're doing is a kind of simplicity of an ethical map, and assume that what we're doing is minimizing suffering. We just haven't opened it up, opened the consciousness up to -- we just don't know, in terms of what ramifications there are. So one of the obvious things is what's going on with XR right now, in Extinction Rebellion, and yeah, people will get pissed off, etc. In the long run, it's hard to know, in terms of results. These people in this traffic jam get pissed off, but I don't know what the larger result is. So this kind of attempt to weigh out, what's called utilitarianism in ethical philosophy, it's this trying to measure what the maximum minimization of suffering is in the totality of time and consciousness -- pretty hard to do, you know? And if we're trying to use that to inform our choices, it very quickly runs into problems.

So we have to have something to inform our choices, and it gets complicated. I just don't know about the idea of trying to minimize offence-causing, you know? Sometimes I feel that can be a bit of a shadow in the Buddhadharma. You look across traditions, you look at someone like Jesus -- didn't hesitate to cause offence, you know? I mean, it got him into trouble, to say the least. But sometimes Buddhism has a kind of shadow side of not wanting to cause offence. And of course, sometimes that can be genuine kindness and genuine concern, but sometimes it's not -- it's just a kind of constriction of habit and a bit of fear and all that.

The other piece -- and I'm not sure it's the place to get so into it, and I've talked about it before -- is the range of archetypes that can come in. You say, "Okay, I want to do good. I want to serve liberation in the world. I want to serve an attenuation of suffering." And then the styles of doing that can be really quite different. Sometimes we get too myopic, too constrained in our vision. We mistake the style for the intention and the result. In other words, "If you want that, it's going to look like this, and it's going to look quite narrowly sort of gentle and meek, etc." Maybe not. Maybe there are very different archetypes that move in the same direction but with a very different style, and they can call a soul, this soul more than that soul. We have to ask about that. Am I talking in the ballpark of what you're asking, or is there a piece missing?

Yogi: No, it's very good, Rob.

Rob: Do you want to say more? You don't have to. I'm just curious.

Yogi: Well, the main gist of what I hear as your response is it's okay to feel uncertain about that question and to hold that level of complexity as a part of that challenge and that transition in terms of playing around and expanding these archetypes, and it's okay to go through crisis.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I feel that it's a mark of ethical maturity, or maturity in relationship to ethics, to be able to hold uncertainty and complexity. What we get, what's an inevitable kind of fact of a life that really cares about ethics and is really engaged is what some philosophers call ethical antinomies. It means ethical pulls in different directions. And we are -- crisis, we're at a cross, in the middle, being pulled, and it's uncomfortable. It's like, how do we navigate that? Again, it's a huge plus of the Buddhist path to simplify ethics -- five precepts -- and it all looks very simple. But again, that has a shadow, because as I care about it more, there will be more complexity, and I'm going to have to navigate that complexity. And ultimately it has to be one's own conscience and one's own listening, and that's not necessarily a comfortable or easy process. In choosing to honour one direction ethically, one set of what they call virtues, we'll almost certainly disregard another. So it's very common that an ethical commitment in one direction is an ethical transgression or sin or omission in another direction. And part of growing up as a human being, let alone as a practitioner, but growing up as a human being, is actually realizing that and being okay to hold that and being okay to hold the consequences. So you might piss people off. I mean, maybe you can try and explain yourself and then there will be less people pissed off because they'll understand. Maybe. But there's cost, in this multidirectionality of the ethical pulls on our soul, and I think we need to step up to opening to that. Does it make sense?

Yogi: Yeah, thank you.

Rob: So it's not an easy answer, but apart from in the most obvious situations, I would be really quite suspicious of anyone who just offered easy answers around some of these questions, especially nowadays in a globalized context. Our ethical choices are globalized, whether we like it or not, and that makes that whole kind of utilitarian process, as I said, a bit like, "Hmm." It's hard to judge that way. So I would be suspicious of anyone who just offers an easy answer. It's the downside of this love of simplicity and love of, "I just want to be free of the hassle. It's less dukkha." This crisis, this pulling in different directions, is actually dukkha. There's a kind of dukkha to it, at a certain level. And if what I'm after in my path is simplicity and peace of mind, I want to have a mind free of thoughts, and I want everything to be simple -- okay, but then that might come at a cost in terms of my ethical involvement, engagement, integrity. You understand?

Yogi: Sure, yeah.

Rob: Do you want to say anything else?

Yogi: No, I thank you -- for me, it's a revolutionary way to provide a platform and a conceptual framework for awakening and really validates involvement in the world, also, because that's where a lot of these sort of ethical questions are really challenging. Thank you.

Rob: Thank you.

Q3: balancing service and contemplation, advancing realization through emptiness or bringing in other factors like soul

Yogi: It sounds like, from what you've said this evening, and from your series of talks, "What is Awakening?" that you published the beginning of last year, that there are different uses of the term 'stream-entry' and they have their own kind of internal logic and helpfulness, even the lower bars that you've talked about. It sounds like a helpful label for a certain stage. And the label that you're using to describe the complete understanding of emptiness -- and you talked about the kind of U-bend model with the ball bearing that kind of returns to the understanding of the fabricated nature of experience -- the one that you lay out is the one that I find most helpful and most resonant. There is also a higher bar, which is to say that stream-entry is the complete falling away of self-view, and the unperturbability, the non-moving of that ball bearing in the U-bend. So I sort of questioned -- I asked Christina Feldman about her view on this, which is of the unperturbability and the complete cutting off of self-view, to the extent that there are no longer any worldly winds. You're unmoved by praise and blame, for instance. You're interested in why we're interested, so I'll say I'm interested in this in order to be as skilful as possible. So it's like, "What's the fruit of a lifetime of practice?," one Zen monk was asked, and he said, "An appropriate response to life." And I want my responses to be as skilful and as appropriate as possible, in service, essentially.

So it sounds like Christina Feldman's definition would be pretty handy, because although I do, I feel, return to the bottom of the U-bend that you described, I can be moved out of it. I am moved by criticism, for instance -- much, much less than I used to be, and I return to the understanding of the emptiness of it and everything else fairly quickly. But there is, I imagine, a level of resilience that you can get to by being unmoved. The cost of being moved at all is that it's tiring to be perturbed in that way, and you can't move so quickly through life that you haven't got an opportunity to touch in and return to the bottom of the U-bend on a regular basis. Would it be possible for me to act on a greater scale and to help society if there was greater attainment in her way of seeing things? What it comes down to is how much resource do I put into awakening now versus acting now, and if there was a greater level of attainment possible just round the corner, should I go and invest in realizing it so that I can be so much more effective and powerful in creating positive change in the world? So what I feel now is that there's the kind of independence of others, there's the kind of return to an equilibrium, which is a full immersion in path and realization of emptiness, as far as I can gather. But what is the value and benefit of pushing on further to even greater unperturbability, I guess? What are your reflections on that definition of it, that higher bar, and what would the value be in investing now in attaining it?

Rob: I'm not sure I would agree it's a higher bar, as I think what's wrapped up in the view is somehow different. But, again, we could just open the question out. What about looking at people who you feel, you look at their lives, either historically or contemporary, and you really feel like, "Wow, they're really committed and doing fantastic work, and they get a lot of flak and they somehow keep going," etc.? I mean, how many of those people are actually Buddhist practitioners, or even have heard the word 'stream-entry' in the first place? So that, to me, again, brings in the question: is that what's most relevant to an ability to continue serving and putting things out? Because I can think of many people where that's not even in the mix of factors.

So then the question would be, well, if these people are doing it without any Buddhist practice whatsoever, and those people who have Buddhist practice and say they have that are doing something but it's not that inspiring, am I on the right track, in this question, for what I really want? And if these people are doing it without the stream-entry and the sotāpanna and all that, definitions and practice, what is it that they've got, what is it that they do, that allows them to keep going regardless of praise and blame, etc.? That, to me, would be a maybe more slightly pertinent question. What's going on there for those -- we look at people and we're kind of really touched in the soul by what they're capable of, and how they've lived, and the sacrifices they've made, and the steadiness, and the devotion, and the commitment, and the courage in what they've put out. What's going on? And is my frame in which I'm trying to understand that too small? Just the fact that they may never have even heard of Buddhism, Buddhist practice, stream-entry, etc., may indicate that it might not be quite the right frame.

I think, to me, that's probably more pertinent a question. If you still wanted to stay within that frame and decide, I don't know the answer, Jamie. Or I feel like I can't really go into that box any more. I don't really buy the package any more, to be honest. Because I think the other factors are just way too important, factors that I would now call factors to do with soul, you know, what's in the soul, as opposed to just where this ball bearing is. The power of what's in the soul to help us to stay steady, to be courageous, that will probably eclipse the other kind of more narrowly viewed paradigm, the effects of stream-entry and all that. I think that's probably my honest answer.

Again, if we expand the question just a little bit, I think for a lot of people who are practising, there is this pull between, say, service and contemplation, and how am I going to navigate that in my life, what choices am I going to make when. And again, it's one of those difficult sort of tensions and pulls, and people make different choices in relationship to that: "I'll do all my contemplative work first, and then I'll be free in the world to do what I want," or I go back and forth, you know. There are different possibilities. What do you think?

Yogi: Yeah.

Rob: I would, again, encourage you to look at people and see, get a real sense. You can get a sense of, I think -- sorry to use this language for people who are not familiar to it, but -- where someone's soul is at, in relation to what they're putting out in the world, how bold their stances, the courage, the sacrifices made. We can get pulled into a certain narrower frame of trying to sort of explain that, but I think -- yeah, I would just encourage you to do that and just see how it all stacks up, really.

Yogi: Yeah. The praise and blame is just one example, I guess, of sort of costly self-view. [inaudible] that have affected different heroes in different ways. Martin Luther King seemed relatively steady in that view, but had other kind of hookups cost him significantly in his private life; there are examples. I really appreciate the freedom and the flexibility that your teaching around this brings, but I mourn the loss of being told what to do. [laughs]

Rob: You'd like to be told what to do?

Yogi: Yeah, the peace of having a linear model and saying, "You get to this point, and then you're golden, and you can go forth, back to the marketplace, get on with things." I'm very happy where I am and feel like I'm doing good work, but don't want to be doing it if there is an even better refuge field around the corner. But it doesn't sound like you think there is, necessarily.

Rob: I think I would just like to give it back to you, you know? As I said, to hone your question in relationship to your sense of what you see in different people, in doing different kinds of service work, and also what you feel really called to. And in terms of liberation, we talk about Martin Luther King or people like that -- might there be other responses to where -- you said praise and blame; might his relationship with praise and blame [have been that] it wasn't that he was impervious to it? Might his relationship to praise and blame, and his freedom in relationship to praise and blame, or his ability to keep going and not be knocked by that, might that have come from something else, his freedom, some other capacity? When I talk about practice, it's not just "emptiness is going to fix everything." Sometimes I feel like -- and it goes back to Claire's question -- there's this idea that there's a certain realization, and it's going to be like the golden bullet, you know, and then everything will be taken care of. But maybe there are other ways of liberating.

If we just talk about soulmaking briefly, it might be that in making the very dukkha, in relating to the very dukkha, the very pain that I feel when I'm blamed or criticized or whatever, and letting that become a focus for my soulmaking, that I'm actually liberated to stay much more steady with that. That's quite a different thing than expecting I'm going to have some experience of emptiness or something or other and I'm just going to be like a piece of wood -- everything's just going to bounce off. But in terms of the capacity to keep going, and the capacity for courage and for standing in one's truth, etc., it might be that there are other approaches, apart from emptiness, that are equally powerful, or differently powerful where emptiness falls short, or all kinds of things. But I kind of feel like I wonder whether a little more sensitive listening and looking might be a good thing in terms of what you want, and what you're really called to, and where you feel that in people, and where you see that, and where it's less so. The answer might come more from that. Is that okay?

Yogi: Yeah.

Q4: how to tune more to the sense of peace and refuge that came out of an experience of complete fading of perception

Yogi: I got the time zones wrong so I missed the beginning of this, so I may be repeating myself here. But I would like to ask a question around the topic of stream-entry. I'll preface it by saying that my own understanding of stream-entry -- I would say that I'm uncomfortable using that language, but my sense of things is that they are these experiences that are available to us when fabrication or the perception that is fabricated stops. And in my own practice, there was a period where I was very much interested in stream-entry, nibbāna. That's kind of shifted a little bit after a certain experience that I had. What I remember, when I was on retreat, I had this really kind of profound letting go experience, and it was sort of this everything fading kind of thing, and not really even being able to recognize it until after the experience, and then coming out of that, there was this perception of home. I think home was a very big feeling. And celebration, and joy, and peace. And it was not just around the experience but around the sense that the entire world was sort of always, eternally conspiring and supporting and opening to that experience.

But I think after that my practice changed a lot, probably more along the lines of soulmaking in the way that you speak about it -- which also means that my life hasn't been particularly peaceful; it's all kinds of things, and oftentimes very intense. What I notice is that (A) I can hardly even remember that experience, particularly if I try; (B) the only time that that experience becomes something that's lived in, rather than like a sense of "That happened some years ago" are these sort of moments usually when I'm struggling with something in my life, and it's almost as if it just dawns in a flash, and it feels like a kind of -- the sense of refuge, the sense of coming back home comes back, and then that dissipates. The last thing is that my kind of relationship to that experience, apart from these dawning moments, is more like losing -- it's more like having less and less, at least during certain periods of my life, less and less definition around where I am, who I am, when I am. And sometimes that feels like this quality of awakening, but I wouldn't say it feels peaceful, and oftentimes there's a kind of -- I'd say it's very rare that I experience those feelings without a sense of being disoriented or slightly afraid. I think at the best I'll experience it in a really, really intense way, and there will be some kind of doubt that comes up, but enough groundedness to just say, "Okay, there's doubt here, but what else is happening?" But one of the things that I feel would be really beneficial for me, particularly as I go through all of these intensities and challenges in life and really try and meet them and participate them is being able to tap into that kind of real peace and refuge. But I don't really know how to do that. Does that ...? I guess that's the question. Does that make sense?

Rob: I think so. I've just got a message we're at nine o'clock, so I'm going to have to be brief in what I respond, just to honour the time. But thank you for that, yeah. It sounds a little bit like this experience came and it needs a bit more integrating and digesting and care in your relationship to that experience. So I wonder -- it kind of depends: either we might have access to an experience like that, this total fading, as a full-on experience again, be able to do that deliberately, in which case, if you can, that would be great, and you can dip in. But you have to kind of -- two things: see it contextually. I mean see it in terms of dependent arising, what the relationship is of that experience with the world and the self, and how it comes about, and how it goes, in terms of fabrication/unfabrication. What that does is it weaves together that realm and this realm, the world of the fabricated and the not. It weaves them together. When they're a bit pulled apart, it can be a bit disorienting.

But secondly, you can also have -- it might be accessible for you now to get intimations of that kind of experience, that kind of unfabricated realm. It's not the full immersion, but it's the intimations. And those kinds of middle-ground experiences, where it's almost like the backdrop, or it's in relationship with all this, that's actually really helpful. Then you've got both together, both the Unfabricated and the fabricated. It's not a full-on, 100 per cent experience, but both are together. That actually can be really helpful for the integration and the healing and the steadying, yeah? But in addition to that, it might be that you can also, a little bit, if there is the capacity to have those intimations, a little bit steer where your attention goes within that whole gestalt, and steer it more towards the peace that's there. There is peace there; it almost just asks you to look for it and tune to it and feel it seeping through, feel the implications of that Unfabricated as it kind of radiates through the fabricated and the world.

Sometimes we can get a little bit into a habit of missing the peace, and more into the kind of groundlessness, and that's a bit startling, yeah? So sometimes it's just a little micro-adjustment of what I'm tuning to, where my antennae are tuning to within that whole experience. And in time, then, what we tune to spills out more, and spills over us and over the experience more, and over the world more, so that the flavour, the gift of that sense of the Unfabricated becomes more one of peace and liberation as opposed to just disorientation and groundlessness. So I could say a lot more, but maybe that's one thing for now. Does that make sense?

Yogi: Yeah, that's super helpful.

Rob: Yeah, so it's asking for a little bit more practice and kind of nuanced stuff. You might be in a different place in your practice, and saying that's actually not the main thing I'm doing now, but it needn't actually be the main thing; it could just be something that's going on a little bit. If you've got enough of a flavour of that, that can really steer things very gently in a certain way and allow things to ground more, integrate more, digest more, be helpful more. So, big subject. I think that's all we have time for now, if that's okay. Okay, thank you everybody for being here, and your curiosity, and openness, and questions, and listening. Bless you all. Thank you very much. Goodnight.