(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - The theme for this autumn at the North London Buddhist Center is solidarity with self and world. And that word solidarity is a word that I really love. I've always loved the feeling of it, the sense of solidarity. I don't know why it is. It might be vaguely left-wing politics. I was involved with when things were happening in Poland with the minor's movement there. But what it means for me is standing together, shoulder to shoulder, socially distanced, of course, shoulder to shoulder, with a rich diversity of other people and facing the issues that challenge us as human beings. And that solidarity, I guess, with the world. But what it says is solidarity with self and world. And I thought solidarity with self. And what does that mean? I mean, surely, how could you not have solidarity with yourself? But if you've done some meditation or if you've got to know yourself well, you've probably found that in a sense, you seem to be different people at different times, if that makes sense. And these different people can be even in conflict with each other. So we have that experience of internal conflict. If you've ever done therapy, it's one of the first things that usually turns up is, oh, dear, you know, I'm not entirely integrated. So let's develop solidarity between the different sides of ourselves, our rebel and our conformist, maybe our child and our adult, our receptive side and our assertive side, even the lazy side, the lazy me and the judgmental me that's telling myself off all the time and all that kind of thing. So that's the theme, solidarity with self and solidarity with world. And as part of this theme, what we're going to do at the talks every month on Saturday mornings is to delve into the Buddhist tradition to find some helpful teachings. And what we've chosen is what are called the four reminders. It's a very simple name for it, it's actually coined by an American Tibetan-style teacher called Reggie Ray. And traditionally, they're called the four reflections that turn the mind or the four mind-turning reflections. I'm going to go into just one of them today, but I want to give you a bit of background about the whole thing. They originate in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. So the earliest references I've found are to the great teacher Nagarjina, sometimes known as the Second Buddha, but they're best known from the Buddhist tradition in Tibet. And so I thought I'd give you a poem from Tibet, from medieval Tibet, 1400s by Tsongkapa. Now Tsongkapa, if you studied Tibetan Buddhism, you're bound to have come across Tsongkapa. He was the founder of the Dalai Lama's school, the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. And it's a lovely little poem. I think, which is used very often on retreats in the Tree Ratna movement, the movement that we're a part of. And this is what he says. "The human body at peace with itself is more precious "than the rarest gem, cherish your body. "It's yours this time only. "The human form is one with great difficulty. "It's easy to lose. "All worldly things are brief, "like lightning in the sky. "And this life, you must know as the tiny splash "of a raindrop, a thing of beauty "that disappears even as it comes into being. "Therefore set your goal, "make use of every day and night to achieve it." So that's Tsongkapa's poem. And what he's mentioning there in a poetic form is the four reminders. So I'll just say what they are. The human body at peace with itself is more precious than the rarest gem. That's the first one. And that's the one I'll be talking about today. Our life as a human being is a precious opportunity. This is the reminder. This is the reflection. It's suggested that one just looks at that. My life as a human being now is a really precious opportunity. But then secondly, everything changes. Death is inevitable, so don't lose your opportunities. You can't just be complacent and say, oh well, I'll do it all next year. You're gonna be around next year. And the third one is you do make a difference. You do make a difference. He doesn't mention this so much in the poem actually, but the way you live, the way you act now will change the future for yourself and for the world. And this is the area of karma. And then finally, the fourth reflection is that ordinary life, a self-centered life, a habitual life that most of us leave most of the time, it's a bit of a trial, not just for us, but for everyone. So it's worth living a meaningful life, finding a meaningful life, taking your opportunities, making a difference. And this fourth reminder basically says everyone can liberate themselves from whatever habitual mental states trap them and so on. So during the autumn on the second Saturday of each month, like this one in September, we'll have a talk on each of these themes from a Buddhist point of view. And these four reminders in Buddhism in a way are the facts of life. They're things worth really worth knowing about worth remembering and they're quite encouraging. Now next month, October, we've got a special guest, Dana Priya, who will try to convince you that you do make a difference. This is actually the third reminder, but we're putting them out of order because of the availability of the speakers. You do make a difference and he'll give a talk on karma. In the following month, my trinita, who's an ordinary active, particularly in Brixton, we'll talk about death and impermanence. And then in December, we'll have Pranya Devi and she'll be looking at number four, can life without a spiritual meaning really work out for us in the long run or is it really worth it to find a direction of spiritual meaning in your life? I'm deliberately saying spiritual in general in this talk rather than Buddhist because it doesn't seem to me that Buddhists have got a monopoly on spirituality, but it's the one I've chosen. So that's what I'm keen on as opposed. And these four reminders are part of what's called in Tibetan Buddhism, the Lamb Rim, which means the graduated stages of the path to awakening. And they're known as the ordinary preliminaries. In other words, they start the path, but they do continue to be relevant throughout the whole of life. So they're worth memorizing. If they seem useful to you, then consider them carefully, make sure you understand them, apply them to your own personal circumstances and then deepen your feeling for them. They're a very, very useful set, I think. So first of all, and this week, my theme will be this precious opportunity. And what is so special about being human? Why is this really emphasized in Buddhism, the value of being human? Well, we can be self-aware. That's the meaning from a Buddhist point of view of the human state. It's the state where you can be self-aware, where consciousness can bend back on itself. And we can stand back, we can look at our lives, we can make choices. So for Buddhism, the human state, isn't a biological definition. It's not to do with how many legs you've got and what your DNA says. It's more a consciousness definition. It's a type of consciousness. And so if there are other consciousnesses like that, on this world or anywhere in the universe, from a Buddhist point of view, they are in the so-called human state. So as well as having self-awareness as human beings, we can communicate. And now all animals can communicate, but we can communicate in particular ways. We have a language that we can talk about experiences with. And we can even talk about things that are not actually now in the present moment. And this is incredibly valuable for the process of reflection to be able to think about these things, but also to communicate about them. So it's wonderful to have these abilities so we can communicate. The other thing is that we're not completely subjective. We're not completely caught up in our own personal inner experience. We can hold an object in our hands, for example, and we can realize it has its own existence. And this must have been incredible for early human beings when they started making tools. Then they could say, "Here's a thing. I can do things with it." And it changes and sometimes it's recalcitrant. It doesn't do what it's supposed to. It won't obey my will. And similarly, we're capable of empathy. We could, as you were imagine, we're holding another person in our hands looking at them in front of us. And we realize they're not us. They're not subject to our own will, but they do have their own subjectivity. They have their own inner life. And this is valuable, and it's a precious thing, and it's worth taking seriously. And we can also, I think this is the last thing about the generality of being a human being from the Buddhist point of view. We realize that all of us have a mixture of pleasure and suffering in our lives. Now you might say this is a shame, but from a Buddhist point of view, it's really valuable not to have, but it's obviously wonderful not to have unalloyed suffering the whole time. And there are people who are in those hellish states, which is awful. But funnily enough, it's also good, as I'll say later, not to have unalloyed pleasure the whole time. And I'll try and explain that later on. And so we have this mixture of pleasure and pain. And I can't resist my favorite poet, William Blake, in the late 18th century wrote this. Man or humanity was made for joy and woe. And when this we rightly know through the world, we safely go, joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine runs a joy with silk and twine. So the Tibetans talk about this precious opportunity of human life in terms of what they call the eight freedoms and the ten endowments. They love these long lists. And if we're very fortunate, these are qualities that we have as human beings. I've already told you some of them, capabilities that all humans have, but there's a danger in being human that we can fall into what are, from a Buddhist point of view, non-human states. So you can be a sort of a non-human human. And I'll explain this. In particular, we could become dominated by what are known as the poisons, for example, greed and hatred or pain or craving and addiction or ignorance. So pain and hatred is the first one of those. Craving and addiction, ignorance, but also complacency and selfish competitiveness as well. And if you're aware of the Tibetan wheel of life, you'll know that these are the non-human realms depicted around the wheel of life. And in a moment, we can step over the border between our human realm into one of the non-human realms and become a creature of craving or of paranoia, extreme subjective mental states. We lose our ability to stand back from experience and realize that it's a mixture. And if we're not dominated by these, we're incredibly fortunate, we've got the freedoms. But how long will that last? So it's said to be it's a precious opportunity that we have now. And it's good to just imagine what it might be like if we lost our human type awareness, if we got trapped in mental illness, in extreme obsessions, if we were trapped in anguish and distress, maybe to do with illness, if that was our dominant experience. And it's like sinking, it's like sinking down into the dark depths of the ocean, far below the sunlit surface. And in fact, this is the image that the Buddha gave in early Buddhism. He talked about the blind turtle. You might have heard of this. So he said, "Imagine you were a turtle." If you can imagine that. Swimming in the depths of the ocean, an old turtle blind, nuzzling about in the mud and the weeds at the bottom. And just once every hundred years, this is probably not biologically quite accurate, but once every hundred years, you came up for air. You came up, you surfaced. And this represents emerging briefly into the light of human consciousness. But then the turtle, uncomfortable in the light, quickly dives down again to the familiar darkness and the familiar mud at the bottom. However, floating somewhere on the huge ocean, there is a golden life boy. It actually says an oxy is yoke, which is probably the nearest thing that would float on the ocean that the Buddha could think of. But now we've got life boys made of gold or golden color. And something that will enable the turtle, if only you can grab the life boy, he can stay at the surface. And you can get used to that light. In other words, he can practice mindfulness, he can practice awareness. So if we put our head through that golden life boy by finding the circumstances for spiritual life, according to the Buddha's simile, we're incredibly fortunate. It's not often that we surface and how much chance is there of us actually finding the golden life boy of mindfulness or a spiritual practice when we do so? So that's what makes it not just a human life, but a precious human life. We found something in our life that makes it precious. So we can ask ourselves some questions. At the moment, is extreme distress my main mental state? We may have experienced that at times in our lives. We may know what it's like. We may know other people who've been in states of extreme depression, for example, and they've been trapped there. So remember, that is possible. Especially the distress of feeling that we're a victim, everything that goes wrong is other people's fault or it's the fault of a malevolent universe that's always making things horrible for us. So it's easy to sink into a really murky state like that. It's not probably not beyond us. Alternatively, we could ask ourselves, am I overwhelmed by addiction? By feeling of need or of lack, constantly seeking more gratification, more stimulation, constantly feeling inadequate, feeling unfulfilled in an extreme way we're talking about here. And if not, we know about that, I'm sure it happens sometimes, but if it's not with us the whole time, that's a great gift. But those states of craving are never far away. And then what about willful delusion hiding from reality, hiding from the starkness of reality, like the turtle at the bottom of the ocean, only seeing what's immediately in front of our snout, just seeking the fulfillment of basic needs and seeing no higher possibilities in life. Just food, just shelter, just sex and procreation. I mean, these are all genuine necessities, but there are also other possibilities in life, bigger ones. And then another danger is complacency. And we can ask ourselves that. And on the wheel of life, this is represented by the davers, as they're called, the long-lived gods in their heaven, sitting around on their clouds, strumming their harps, eating grapes, listening to a chorus of angels. Sounds great, doesn't it? Maybe, maybe, sounds great. And for some religious people, this is actually the goal to get into that sort of state, to be in the presence, maybe, of a superior God, have everything provided, being upbeat, being blessed and being blissed, being blissed out the whole time. But from a Buddhist point of view, heaven is a dead end. It's where we forget that everything changes. Everything seems to be fine. We don't need to do anything about it. We don't need to be actively involved. But according to Buddhism, only mental liberation, only deep wisdom, only very deep changes to our own consciousness, will leave us genuinely free from suffering, rather than just in a temporary state of everything seems fine. So some people are in those heavenly states, maybe everything is going well for them. They're popular, they're beautiful, they're perhaps wealthy, they're very talented. But Buddhism says, don't envy those people. It's not necessarily a good place to be. It's very tough to escape from the complacency of success. And the danger is that when it goes, which it will, sooner or later, you're horrified. You're so horrified that you've lost everything, that you descend into one of the other realms, a realm of paranoia or addiction or ignorance. So this is what's meant by the freedoms. If it's true that we're not in those states, we're free from them, that's fantastic. It's a great opportunity, we have these freedoms. And some of them are just because we're a self-aware human being. And others because we're now in a reasonably good state, I hope, a reasonably good state. And we're not overwhelmed by desperate emotions of self-clinging. And then the Tibetans go into, I mentioned, so that they're the eight freedoms. And then there's the endowments. And if you're interested, by the way, at the details of all these lists, there are some wonderful old texts on the Lambrim. The, if I do them in sort of date order. Liberation, the dual order into liberation by Gampoper, a disciple of Miller Rapper from nearly 1,000 years ago. And then we have liberation in the palm of your hands by Pobonco Rinpoche, 20th century teacher. And a 19th century teacher, I think, Patrick Rinpoche, the words of my perfect teacher. These go into the whole Lambrim and all the things around it in great detail. And they enumerate the four reminders and they enumerate their freedoms, they enumerate the endowments. But I'm not gonna be too systematic. I don't want to go into that in a listy sort of way. I hope you don't mind. So the other ones, the endowment are a bit more specific. And we remind ourselves that although things could no doubt be better, they could also be a lot worse. So it's not just that we've got a great opportunity because we're basically an okay human being not stuck in one of the other realms. It's also that for most of us, that opportunity has become especially precious for certain reasons. It's as if we've inherited a very sound and well-situated house from our grandparents, if you imagine that. So that's great, we've got the house. But when we look around the house, we find that not only we've got a house, not just a nice house, but it's full of treasures. It's got a beautiful library of books. It's got a music collection with instruments. It's got a wonderful garden with fountains in it. And it's got a perfect little granny flat in it. And all that, we say, wow, I nothing new. It was like that. So ask yourself whether you do have any of these precious endowments. We definitely got the house, the human body, but do we also have it furnished with the possibilities of real spiritual growth? So here are some questions. Do you live in a reasonably civilized country or general situation where you're free to lead a spiritual life? And if you reflect, you might be living in where there's an oppressive government who's cracked down on the type of spirituality that works for you, or there's a big dominant religion that finds it threatening and bans it, or maybe you live in a country where there are criminal gangs. I know someone who lives in a place like this, criminal gangs making life so precarious that there's no time or opportunity for meditation and so on. So I'm sure that our country is not perfect, but it's possible, it is possible to practice here. And what about our own personal life? Does that leave room for practice? Or do we have to work every hour of the day just to keep going? Or are we struggling with a very serious disease or a serious disability that requires the whole of our energy just to overcome that, to deal with that? Or are we looking after dependents whose needs swamp our own needs and don't leave anything there? And of course, many people are in those situations. And it's worth remembering that, you know. And in the future, we may find that we face these challenges. So compassion is to be sympathetic to that, but the endowments is to realize if we don't have those, we do have some space, some energy for practice. Let's make use of it. And then the next thing that they talk about is our beliefs, our opinions, our attitudes, our assumptions, our expectations, if you like. And do they get in the way of spiritual practice because some basic views do inhibit spiritual practice according to Buddhist tradition. And here are some very common restricting beliefs. And if you have them in a mild way, but if you have them in a dominant way, they may prevent you from practicing. And maybe we've started to free ourselves from them a bit and it's good to reflect on that. So the first obvious one is I can't change. If you believe you're stuck and can't change, you know, you may get a bit of calmness from meditation, but you won't allow it to really affect you deeply. Or it may be the main thing for me, my main value is accumulating money or gaining status or raising children who provide my meaning in the next generation or finding a dream of romance and togetherness or some other alternative value, an alternative vision, which in a way displaces the possibility of a complete spiritual life. Or it might be that there isn't any vision at all and the belief is that life has no meaning. The cosmos is dead, human beings are insignificant, specks who don't matter at all. And then similar to that is the view that ordinary life is all there is. Just ordinary everyday humdrum life is all there is. An ordinary person is all you can be. There's nothing beyond the ordinary personal and self-centered ego and we've got to put up with it. That's all there is. And then finally, in the blue, I can't have an effect. This is similar to I can't change, we're all living. I can't have an effect on my life or my surroundings and whatever I do ultimately makes no difference, makes no difference. So these are all quite tempting beliefs. And I'm sure we've probably got them all to a little bit of an extent and we probably know people who are dominated by them and who might never even consider spiritual practice because they definitely think, you know, there's no meaning in the world and there's nothing you can do. And they can block the chance to lead a spiritual life. So to be free from them or at least partly free from them is said to be a precious endowment. However, of course they might actually be true. You know, I can't just assert that they're not the case and they need to be considered carefully. The thing we can do as a human being is we can reflect, we can think for ourselves. We don't have to swallow what other people tell us. So don't reject them just because they're inconvenient or because you sort of have a sentimental idea about the wonderful Buddhist practice or something. Consider them carefully. Is money and status really the most important thing in life? Can you find meaning and existence or do you think there's no meaning? Can your actions make a difference? That kind of question to ask yourself. Okay, another precious endowment is to have your wits about you, to have your wits about you. Not to be so dull or so unimaginative that you can't see your potential at all. So if you do have a bit of imagination, a bit of that sort of intelligence, if you like, to notice that, oh yeah, yeah. Doesn't quite how, but it is possible. That is a great precious endowment. And then are you seriously unethical, really seriously unethical? Because that gets in the way. It might be that you have a huge weight on your conscience from parts of your life that you really greatly regret. And they overwhelm all your optimism about leading a spiritual life and they just become a great blockage. Or worse than that, if you imagine you had such dishonest, such malevolent tendencies that your life was devoted to your immediate selfish ends or even devoted to causing suffering to others. This is possible. Now, none of us are perfect. We do make mistakes, of course. We tell on truths, we hurt people sometimes, but we can probably say that we're not a demonic, malevolent person. You don't look like it anywhere there's. So if we can say that, if we can say that we don't have those extremes of antisocial behavior, then we've got a precious endowment. So most of these endowments are personal qualities. Are you free to follow a spiritual path or does your society or your economic demands or your infirmities prevent it? Do your attitudes, your opinions leave you free to practice? Do you have the intelligence, the imagination? Are you ethical, reasonably ethical? But there are more endowments that you can ask yourself about. And these are the ones concerning the availability of spirituality in your life. Is it possible for you to find a viable spiritual path? Is it possible to find a viable spiritual path that works for you? Are there inspiring, awakened heroes and heroines in the past, maybe, in the present, who found a way through all their afflictive emotions, as they call it, through all those negative emotions that mean that we are unfree? And have they made teachings available for dealing with this? Is there a path that we can discover? Is there a path that we can tread? And is it a version of the path that works here in the real world of modern Europe? And also, is there a sanger? You may have come across this term, the sanger, the spiritual community. In other words, are there communities of people who are genuinely practicing, who are keeping the path open through their own spiritual practice? Now, of course, I could just be very glib about this and say, yes, yes, yes. Buddhism is such a path that have been great teachers. We have a living community, but that is just my belief, my assertion. It's something you need to consider yourself, whether that is the case in your life for you, because we're all different from each other. The four reminders, they're also called the four mind-turning reflections. They're not assertions of eternal truths, they're questions, they're ways of turning the mind, they're things to turn the mind to. So, can you answer yes to any of the questions I've been asking about the freedoms in the endowments? And every time you do say, yes, you can raise a cheer. All right, hooray, yes. Something of enormous value is in place in my life. So it's a very, very, in a way, optimistic viewpoint. Buddhism, in that sense, is very optimistic. And if you can say, yes, to quite a few of them, not just one or two, what a fortunate person you are. And are you going to take the precious opportunity? And that's what's being said. So just a little reminder, once again, hope you don't mind me mentioning it, have you got the freedoms that keep your head above the surface of the ocean in a balanced human type of consciousness? And if so, do you have that golden life boy of the endowment, such as being free to practice, not blocked by self-limiting beliefs with your wits about you, not a wicked person, having encountered teachings that spring from a may, awakens men and women, teachings that work for you in the real world, have you found a community that you can practice with? So if you say yes to some of them, a consequence of the endowments is a sense of confidence, an emotional state that reaches beyond the boundaries of your ego that has faith or trust in a bigger universe, a universe that does allow spiritual practice. Now, you might say that this last little set of endowments, the one to do with whether spiritual life is available to you, is the most important of all. The availability of a viable spiritual path of people who can share that path with you, even teach it to you. But I think there's a last one that I haven't mentioned, a last traditional endowment, which is bracketed with that last one, which is also of critical importance to us, I think. And I found this really interesting and even moving when I read it. And what it says is that in our lives, there is some kindness. In our lives, there is some kindness. We do encounter caring and love from some of the people around us. Human warmth. And this is a true and a deep human need to encounter that. And without feeling that there's some caring and warmth in our lives, it's very difficult to practice spiritually. So it's just worth reflecting on that. Again, there may not be enough caring and warmth and love from others, but is there some? Is there at least some? 'Cause that's so important. And the great conclusion that strikes me from that also is that with our precious qualities, with our opportunities, with our endowments, we can provide a bit of warmth, a bit of caring to others. What a difference that makes. Can we make our lives more truthful, or at least can we make their lives more fruitful? Or at least can we help them to make their lives more fruitful, even if we can't do it for them? And then we ourselves will be encountering friendship, but we'll also be providing it, especially friendship with others who are practicing. And we'll find mentors, we'll find teachers who care about us if we're setting up that environment of care and love and warmth. So the greatest gift, the greatest endowment that a human being has, it seems to me, is the ability to respond in a caring way to others, to see them as they are, at least to some extent, to respond to them as beings of enormous potential, to take seriously the difficulties and the pains in their lives, just as seriously as we take our own difficulties and our own pains. So that's altruism, that's compassion. And in the later stage of the land room, that comes back, we come back and back to compassion. So what can we conclude from reflecting on this precious opportunity, from the freedoms that we have, the abilities or the endowments that we have? Well, perhaps we can conclude, this is the intention of them, with a sense of urgency. If we have an opportunity now, we don't know how long it will last. And I think it's fair to say, I've been practicing and teaching Buddhism for a long, long time now. I've encountered a lot of people who've come across it and tried it. And I think it's fair to say that almost everybody, I know who's got involved with Buddhism, or even got involved sincerely with another deep spiritual tradition. They've done it through what is known in China as the path of irregular steps. This is completely normal. In other words, they've encountered the spiritual tradition. That's a quite a young age. They've responded to it, they've tried it. And then something else has become important in their lives, or they became disillusioned for some maybe very good reason with it, or they just forget about it. And then it turns up again, maybe several times, as if there's a sort of a magical angel who's waiting for you and their face appears before you at unexpected times, saying, is it now? Is it now? Is it now the time? Are you gonna really go for it now? And I think there's no shame in not being in a position to respond the first time or the second time and so on. But these mind-turning reflections can conclude with a feeling of urgency. Perhaps now is the time when I can really commit to spiritual growth and to compassion for others. So that becomes not just one thing, but my main priority. Maybe now it can become the highest priority in my life. There may be, not one thing I do on Saturday mornings. I come to a meditation class and I do other things at other times. But the thing that informs every day of the week, not just Saturdays, every activity I'm involved with, mindfulness always matters, compassion, metal, loving kindness, always matter. And the other three mind-turning reflections, the other three reminders, they bring home this sense of urgency. So we'll hear next month about how it really matters, what you decide now. It makes a difference. And we'll look at the whole idea of karma. And then the following month on death and impermanence, the urgency is highlighted by a sense that everything changes. We're constantly gaining things, but we're also constantly losing things. Life is short, opportunities never last forever. And then in the fourth and final reflection, December, we'll look a bit more starkly at the human predicament and how only a path based on deep authenticity can resolve the dilemmas and the problems of life. Ordinary, habitual, self-oriented behavior doesn't work in the long term. It simply fails to deliver the goods. So that's the suggestion. So we have these opportunities and we have a sense of urgency. And here's a poem by a great Buddhist sage called Shumbka, where he gives a few little stimulus for this. While a sailor has a boat, he should cross the ocean. While a commander has a company of brave soldiers gathered together, he should defeat the enemy. While a poor person has a wish-granting cow, they should milk it. While a traveler has a superb horse, she should ride it to far away places. Now, while you have a precious human life and a teacher who embodies the Buddha's, think with great joy and enthusiasm how you will travel the highway of sacred dharma, drawing ever closer to the ultimate goal of liberation and enlightenment. So that's Shumbka. So urgency. But there is a problem with urgency, it seems to me, because urgency can be a bit of a bully and it can make us feel bad about ourselves. We can feel oppressed by that. And there's another much more uplifting side of the coin and that is the sign of rejoicing, of appreciation. And maybe that would work better for you to go to that side. Well, is there anything really to cheer about in our present situation? We're in the middle of a nasty pandemic when freedoms are being restricted. For example, for months, I wasn't able to spend any intimate time with my partner and many friends I could only see as little squares on the screen, as some of you are at the moment. And I'm 66 years old. I've got a heart condition. That sounds a bit anxious about what would happen if I caught it. But on top of the pandemic, there are millions of people in danger from climate change. Millions are being governed by people who seem selfish or despotic or just plain foolish. Millions are in war zones or millions are subject to racist oppression. So let's acknowledge all these imperfections in the world in our lives. But you probably know people who, for whom those things are so predominant, they're so vivid that complaint is always the first instinct, always finding faults, always seeing what's wrong. And if you think about how you find it, when you're with such a person, I'll also maybe think, well, sometimes I'm like that, sometimes complaint is where I go first. And Sue Badramati, who's a woman who teaches at the London Buddhist Center in Bethel Green, she has a favorite story of the old man sitting on a bench on the path that leads into a town and a traveler questions the old man and says, I've come from a town back down the road and people like there, back there, they were out to get me, they were haughty, they were unkind and they fleeched me whenever they had a chance. It was a terrible place. I'll never go back there again. Now tell me, what are the people in your town like? And the old man says, I'm really sorry to have to tell you that you'll find them just the same, haughty, unfriendly and dishonest. Little later, another traveler stops to speak to the old man, a traveler with a jaunty step and she says, I've just been in the town back along the road. People were so kind to me. They were cheerful, they were friendly. I had a wonderful time. Tell me, what are people like in your town here? And the old man says, they're just the same. They're lovely people. So I think that's quite a good reflection of what we expect. The way we look at the world is how it actually turns out. So I'd rather be the traveler that saw the good in people and minimised the bad. And I honestly think that probably all of us have got a lot that we can rejoice in. We can do one of those little gratitude lists first thing in the morning when we wake up. We've got many pleasures, we've got many opportunities. We encounter many people who are wonderful in their own ways, despite their imperfections. And can we start to recognize that? Let's look at ourselves as well. According to Buddhism, everybody is a potential Buddha. It's quite a thought. Everybody, all of us are potential Buddhas. And you could say we all have a shimmering image of the Buddha that we could be in our hearts. So be proud of this. Be proud of your freedoms. Be proud of your endowments. I do have the circumstances needed to practise, to become awakened. Try reflecting on this. I do have the personal abilities that can flower into the wisdom and compassion of Buddhahood. Do you think maybe you think no, not me. I'm an exception to that. I can't do it. And when somebody said that to my teacher, his response was, "So you think you can't make spiritual progress." What is so special about you? What's so special about you? So acknowledge your qualities, acknowledge your astonishing potential. And in Buddhism, this is known as Buddha pride. It's a really good kind of pride to have. The assertiveness of seeing our extraordinary potential. And if we can see that potential, then perhaps we can do something to make it happen. So I'll be brief so I can finish fairly soon, but I'll just mention that we can start actualising that potential, how can we make it happen? You need to find out how to do it. Everybody has a next step, but it's different for each person. Here are a few suggestions that you might want to try. One of them, get in place a daily meditation practise. Yeah, make friends with a Buddhist or another deep spiritual practitioner. Go on retreat, go on retreat, go on retreat. I'd say this several times, the residential retreats are beginning, but there are online ones as well. Find yourself a realistic personal goal and maybe take a vow in front of a friend that you're gonna do it. Consider what your life priorities are and consider changing your priorities or making them more conscious. And see what the implications would be. And finally, seize every moment to be mindful, to be kind and to be clear-sighted, to behave ethically. So we've seen the first of the four reminders, the first of the preliminary practices. These are called the ordinary or the outer preliminaries in the lamb rim. And they're followed by the inner or the extraordinary preliminaries, which are meditation and ritual practices, particularly going for refuge, generating the bodhi heart, those are the two big ones. And then, internet and Buddhism come the tantric generation and completion stages. Generation is elaborate in imaginative meditation practices. And from them, you emerge into the completion stage and open an effortless space of insight. So just, if you want to look into it and I grossly oversimplified it and if there is in the different Tibetan schools, but just to give you an idea of how that path continues after the preliminary, ordinary preliminaries. But the four reminders are always relevant throughout life. So bring them to mind and then you'll generate a feeling of solidarity with the world and with yourself. And I'll finish with a poem written by Damacharini, a female order member in America, Viveka, and her poem is based on the poem I read at the beginning from Sankapa. It's a reminder of the four reminders and what they signify. So this is what Viveka says. This human birth is precious, an opportunity to awaken, but this body is impermanent. Ready or not, one day I shall die. So this life I must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being. The karma I create, the actions I do, shapes the course of my life. But however I act, life always has difficulties. No one can control it all. Only the Dharma can free me and others from suffering forever. Therefore I recall my heart's longing for freedom and I resolved to make use of every day and every night to realize it. - We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. (upbeat music) (gentle music)
