In this week’s FBA Podcast, Manjuvajraa offers us insight into “Spontaneous Universal Compassion.” The last of eight talks in the series ‘Evolution and the meaning of life’, here Manjuvajra shows us the next evolutionary step – purifying the mind.
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Spontaneous Universal Compassion
(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. - So, this is the last in the series of eight talks and I've entitled it Spontaneous Universal Compassion. We've been talking about the cosmic evolutionary process and our part in it. I said this before, it seems a very grand topic, but it is a very grand topic, but it's a very real topic. I mean, we really are the cutting edge of that evolutionary process. Of particular importance to us is what Hinduism is known as the Kalmaniyama and the Dalmaniyama. The Kalmaniyama is the evolution of self-consciousness. It's the evolution of, from simple consciousness, which is just an awareness of one's environment, into a consciousness of a self that is understood to be perceiving the environment. The development of that self-consciousness, who said, is of incredible value. It gives us an incredible advantage over other beings that don't have it. It is a major evolutionary step forward from simple consciousness. But on the other hand, it's the source of a lot of pain, a lot of anxiety, a lot of difficulty. However, there is something beyond that. There is something beyond the self-consciousness. That's self, an attachment to self-consciousness. And that is what we call, it's got various names. One of the names I'll be using today, because it comes from the Rapper, is the non-ego wisdom. It's just a scene of that state, of non-ego, of letting go, of one's attachment to self. If that happens, something else comes in. Some other dimension comes in. It's not just a big void. And it's also not sinking back into, just an ordinary simple consciousness. It's a move on to something else. That then takes us into another whole evolutionary process, which in Buddhism is known as the dharma nyama. It's the dharma, it's the influence of the dharma, rather than the domination of the dharma. Now, the dharma nyama develops through willed effort. I think this is very important to stress. dharma means willed effort, it means action, willed action. So the dharma nyama is the evolution that occurs through willed action, action that we put our will behind. That will can be skillful, in which case the self that is produced, the world that is produced, is the world that's produced in our perception, becomes more and more pleasurable, even to the higher realms of dharma, the realms of the gods. So, but unskillful action causes us increasing amounts of difficulty and pain, eventually plunging us into the deepest, darkest, coldest of the hells. So, it's willed action, it's all about viriya, it's about the application of will to our, the creation in a way of our self through skillful or unskillful actions. It's the, in the Japanese tradition, they have these terms, I think it's here in the kian tariqi, can anyone, which means self power and other power. So, this is, this is self power. It's, one's development, one's evolution is up to one's own personal self will. The dharma nyama, on the other hand, relies on resonance to something greater. You can't apply will to something which is beyond the self, beyond rigor. It's not possible to do that. There's nothing to do it. So, it's a different order. And that other order is a resonance with this higher order, which we call for shorthand the dharma. So, it's a resonance to the dharma. You could also say that it's the grace of the dharma. One experiences it, one experiences one connection with that level of conditionality as coming from beyond oneself, because it is, it's from a transcendental state, beyond one's ego. So, you experience it as coming beyond, from beyond oneself. And there's a grace from something which is higher. And it's also, therefore, other power. I mentioned last week that this idea of self power and other power is often used to say, we've got to have a balanced spiritual life, you know, a bit of self power, a bit of other power. That isn't what it means traditionally. Traditionally, it means you apply self power by applying the will. Other power is dependence upon the grace of something which is transcendental. Within our own way of looking at this, it's other power is applied initially until one's got sufficient contact as it were with the dharma. And then, sorry, self power, thank you, is applied initially to have enough contact with the higher dimension when other power can be given the space to take over. Another word associated with this is adistana, which means the grace waves that are received from the dharma. Now, we're talking imagery, yeah, we must not forget this. We mustn't reify, turn in with these things into things. They're all attempts to describe experience. So, adistana is what we feel when we come into contact with a higher order. It may be through our own practice, through studying the dharma. It can come in all sorts of different ways, but it's a feeling of being caught up by something. It can also be the grace of the guru. Quite often, our experience of the transcendental comes through our spiritual teacher, particularly if we've got that kind of emotional relationship with them. So, it can quite often seem as though, it's the guru that's given you something, that you've received something from the teacher, because you've picked up on his or her awareness, as if where this transcendental dimension. Miller Epper is always, always starts, all of his songs, his teachings are not always, but 98% of the time starts his teachings by expressing his gratitude to his teacher and recognizing the grace of his teacher. He says that all of this comes from the grace of my teacher. In other words, he's expressing that it comes from beyond, it comes from somewhere outside of himself. It's not his own stuff. Incidentally, I don't know how many of you've heard this, but we've recently got headquarters, called Coddington Court. Well, it's just been, Banti's Saint-Rashtors just moved there, and it's now been given a new name, and that new name is Adistana. So it's, I thought it was quite appropriate that I was talking so much about grace last week, and Banti chose that as the name for this new center, because it's going to be a place where we will be able to have contact with Saint-Rashtors. His library will be there, all of his books, his writings, his talks. It will be a place in a way that represents him. So those of us that sort of feel that kind of relationship to him will be able to feel that relationship on going through that particular place. You see what I mean? Like having a stupor. You know, if you had a stupor for the Buddha, you can feel as it were the presence of the Buddha. Well, Adistana, this is my interpretation, actually. So I'm not completely wrong. It is that at that place, one will be able to feel as it were the grace of the Guru. And beyond that, the grace of the Buddhas, the birds, sapphas and so on. I wanted to give you an image that Banti gave to me many, many, many years ago for the work of a spiritual life, which I think expresses this idea quite well. And in this, he said, well, imagine yourself in a cube, in a cubic room, you know, walls on six sides, bricked in. Outside, there is a universe of light, but you're in this little brick tin. So that brick tin room is the restraint of one's ego. Outside, there is something, there is this brilliant light. You don't know, 'cause you're in this little room. However, you hear rumors about the light outside, and you half-heartedly start sort of chipping at the wall a little bit. You know, chipper bit here and chipper bit there. Try something else. And, but gradually, you start to sort of, you make a little hole. Somewhere there's a little crack. I wrote a little haiku one, so I liked it. It says that the darkening whispers through cracks in the wall. That's how the light gets in. So it's like, you know, freedom is waiting, as it were. Liberation is waiting outside, but it needs a little crack just to get through. Once it gets through into the room, the light begins to come into the room, and it alters one's whole experience of the room, 'cause the light has got in there. And you also, you've got a better idea of where to keep chipping, to start chipping away the brick walls. Um, it's a lovely analogy, actually. And I think I'll probably come back to it later on to illustrate a few points. But the light is trying to get in, you know. Well, it's not trying to get in, it's just there. It's, it's, it's, truth is, is just true. It just doesn't have to do anything. But it, it, it, pressing on us, in a way, from all sides. Um, sorry, what's wrong with that? I'm just going to turn that off. I don't know, I don't know if it does anything else. I get so few phone calls, I forget two more. Um, yes, it's, um, where was I? Truth pressing in. Um, a lot of our suffering is caused just because we resist that. And we, we, you know, we, we create our own stories, which doesn't actually resonate with what's true. So if we, um, the less we hold on to our stories, then the more that truth can, uh, can sort of permeate into our, into our being. Also, on the level of the calimaniema, uh, we rely on clarity. Clarity and effort. These are the, the things that are required in the calimaniema. We require, uh, clarity and effort to resist unskillful emotions. To actually counter them. We require clarity and effort, clarity to understand them, and effort to pursue skillful emotions. We have to know what is skillful and what is unskillful in order to know when to restrain ourselves or when to, uh, encourage ourselves to move forward. And we also require clarity and effort in order to renounce our attachments to me and mine, or the different aspects of me and mine. We need to be able to see what they are clearly and to, uh, to work towards letting them go. So, clear thinking is essential. This is one of Bant's, um, um, well, one of the things we've been banging on about for years, that, you know, the clear thinking is perhaps the most important, important thing. Um, I remember once we asked him if, uh, what he thought was the most important thing, and we thought he was going to say something like Brahmacharya, but he didn't, he said, no, it's clear thinking. That's the most important thing. Um, we've got to know what we're doing. We've got to have a clear idea of what we're doing in order to be able to do it. Otherwise, it's like we're in that room that I've talked about, and we're just sort of aimlessly chipping a bit here and chipping a bit there, you know, no real idea of what we're actually doing, no idea of where the weak points are, but just sort of wandering around, you know, chipping a bit here, I'll probably be chipping a bit there, even maybe vigorously chipping a bit here, thinking, oh, there's nothing here, I'll go over there and start working there. Um, sometimes, as it were, the spiritual fashion just moves us around, you know, sort of a particular, there's lots of fashions in spiritual life, you know, a particular teacher, a particular book comes along, and we get very excited about it, and we chip away at that direction. But then, you know, a few months later, another one comes along, and we leave that one, and we go and chip away at this one over here. What we need is sort of a bit of an absolute problem, but eventually, one needs to kind of find a weak spot and just sort of start working on that. So, this is why I've emphasized an understanding of the ethical nature of our emotions, because this is the fundamental working ground. When I was writing this, I thought, this is a bit of an aside, really, but it came into my mind and I put it into the talk. Of where ideas can go wrong and can take you in completely in the wrong direction. Now, I don't know if it's still around now, but there was a period, I think, probably in the '70s and '80s, maybe in the '90s, when there was a lot of talk about crazy wisdom. Does anyone, do you hear about that now? Apparently not. It's not recognizable. You know, people talk about crazy wisdom, and how, you know, in the Vajrayana, you have to develop this crazy wisdom. Now, Buddhist ideas are often dumbed down. You know, they're often made acceptable, and they're presented in a way which is easily understood. But the way the crazy wisdom was dealt with, it wasn't dumbed down, it was taken to a sort of level of altruist stupidity. Because what was done was it said that the enlightened can do anything. Yeah? It doesn't matter what they do because they're enlightened. Now, in a way, that's true. But there's a lot of things enlightened people just wouldn't even conceive of doing. But it was used as an excuse for excessive drinking, excessive drugs, excessive sex, abusing of students and so on. It was all of these things, and it was all excused as crazy wisdom. You know, it's something that the enlightened guru can do, which is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. But it became very popular. It became a very popular idea. There is such a thing as crazy wisdom. And I've got here a few ideas that think what I think is genuine crazy wisdom. So how about this, for example, taking full responsibility for one's feelings? Yeah? Now, if you really think about what that is, and if you actually do it, people think you're crazy, why not blame somebody else? You know, why not blame that person, or the government, or the environment, or big business, or bankers, or the person next door, or my wife, or child, or whatever? Taking full responsibility is crazy wisdom. Forgiving the unforgivable. You know, you have to do this as an enlightened being, forgives the unforgivable. Also, one should give beyond one's means. Yeah, not just up to one's means, but beyond one's means. Work, not for financial reward, take only what one really needs. Now, we've probably all heard this on the radio and TV recently. We're told that the bankers must have these enormous big bonuses, otherwise they'd go off to other countries. I can't understand why we want to keep such greedy people in this country. You know, why not let them go, you know? If they're greedy, they're obviously insecure. They're people that have got no idea of the real things and value of life. Why do we want them? A friend of mine, Patrick Katey, who's worked for wind horse trading, wind horse evolution, I mean, donkeys years, has worked really, really hard. He's the head of that business. He created that business. It's done things for people all over the movement. I don't know what it's done here at the Bristol Centre, but I'm certain that it's contributed a lot to this building without it, right? And I think every centre, you'll probably say that. Patrick Katey lives on basic support. He has his food and his lodging, plus a few quid a week in his pocket. He's the CEO, he does get to travel around the world and wear nice suits and things for business, but he lives on basic support, basic six-week retreat allowance, same as everybody else. Not the same as everybody else, actually, because the lower down the hierarchy you are in wind horse, the more money you get. You know, the people that start there get more money. As you move, as it were, up the hierarchy, you get less and less. You don't have to, but that's what people do. Now, to me, that's crazy wisdom. You know, that's the way it should be. Put aside what I would do and do what he would do. That's also crazy wisdom, that's genuine, crazy wisdom. And then the other one is abandoning a busy life full of comfort for a nice, simple life devoted to the Dharma. That's also crazy. That seems pretty nutty. But, again, these are what crazy wisdom really is. Alright, so clarity is important. Clarity about the ideas that are motivating us and driving us is really important. So study of the Dharma is crucial. Clarifying one's own source is essential. Meditation is also crucial. It's also central. And in the early stages, and by early stages, I mean until one reaches the highest dianas, effort is required to develop concentration, mindfulness, and positive emotions. If those things are firmly established, then spiritual death, spiritual rebirth will follow on naturally. But those things need to be established with concentration, mindfulness, and effort. All of this work, all of this effort, all of this clarity prepares one for letting go of me and mine, letting go of ego attachment. And that is spiritual death. Spiritual death is letting go of that attachment. And it leads to spiritual birth and beyond. So when the dharma near comes into play, we respond with another level of our being. Pick given various aims. Intuition. We rely more on intuition, a sort of sense of this higher order. The imagination. St. Grazio is stressed always. The importance of the imagination. It's the only way that we can approach something which is beyond our rational minds. We need that imaginative dimension. Devotion is another word. A sense of devotion to something higher. Gratitude towards something higher. So we experience a force beyond ourselves coming to take possession of us. We experience grace. We experience Adishthana. Let me look again at the end of one of the songs of Merarappa, which I think I've probably quoted twice already. I'll read it and then make a few comments about a number of the sections. So he says this is just the end of the song. He said with this good foundation, which is explicitly a study in meditation, with this good foundation one should further pray to the three precious ones and penetrate to reality by deep thinking and contemplation. He can thus tie the non-ego wisdom with the beneficial life rope of deep Diana. With the power of kindness and compassion and with the altruistic vow of the Bodhi heart, he can see direct and clear the truth of the enlightened path of which nothing can be seen, yet all is clearly visioned. He sees how wrong were the fears and hopes of his own mind. Without arrival, he reaches the place of the Buddha. Without seeing, he visions the Dhamma Kaya. Without effort, he does all things naturally. Dear son, the virtue seeker, bear this instruction in your mind. So Merarappa says study, meditate, gain the honor, gain a clear understanding of the Dhamma. But then pray to the three precious ones. Praying, making oneself open to their influence. Recognizing, of course, they're not things, they're just images. They're images for this non-ego state with this higher order. But one has to make oneself open to them. Make oneself open to that higher order. Pray to it. In this way, opening ourselves to it, we can grasp the wrong word, but tie the non-ego wisdom with the beneficial life-room of deep Dhyana. In other words, we can hold on to it without holding on to it. That's what we've got to do, which means making oneself again open to that influence. And then with the power of kindness and compassion, it seems all of a sudden from nowhere, because it hasn't appeared in the rest of the song. Merarappa is bringing this idea of kindness and compassion. It's as though it suddenly appeared, which is exactly what happens. So the experience that the non-ego wisdom brings with it power of kindness and compassion. It's a power. It's a strong force. It's not just kind of nice and helpful. It's a drive to be kind to other people and to be compassionate to those that are suffering in whatever way. And with this comes the Bodhisattva vow. So the non-ego wisdom is in a way synonymous with the Bodhisattva vow. The two things come together. The abandonment of attachment to self brings with it the Bodhisattva vow. What is the Bodhisattva vow? The Bodhisattva vow is the vow to gain liberation for the benefit of all sentient beings. And the word vow here doesn't mean that you think it's a jolly good idea or that you're kind of going to will it. The vow is something which comes through you. So the Bodhisattva vow is not anything that anybody possesses. The Bodhisattva vow descends upon you from this higher order. It doesn't feel like it's yours. It comes from above. But it's a vow because it's a determination to action that isn't yours. Something else has taken over and that something else is as it were driving one towards liberation for the benefit of all sentient beings. It's not just for yourself because yourself has sort of got out the picture somewhere. But it's still that sort of drive for liberation for all sentient beings. And it can't be ignored. It's not a vow that you take today and then tomorrow wish you hadn't. It's one that sort of has penetrated your being. This is why in the order we don't take the Bodhisattva vow. It's not something that you can just take as a consciously undertaken. I mean how on earth can you undertake to save all sentient beings throughout the whole space and time? It's just not, you know, it's nuts. But it's the Bodhisattva vow descends upon one. And it takes you, you could say, the removal of you enables it to function through you. One's feeling is it can't be denied. Once it hits it cannot be denied. And it is true. It's got a profound sense of truth to it. So this is, as it were, an aspect of the non-ego wisdom. This arising of the Bodhisattva vow, the Bodhicitta. Miller App also says that he sees how wrong with the fears and hopes of his own mind. All the problems that one had before just seem with no self, no self, no problem sort of thing. They just, the whole question of those things becomes irrelevant. They don't get, as it were, solved. They just resolve themselves away. Without arrival he reaches the place of the Buddha, without seeing he visions the Dharmakaya without effort. He does all things naturally. So again, the Bodhi functioning under the influence of the Bodhicitta is not something that one has to do anything about. He doesn't require any effort because it is the effort. So there's no self-willing in that transcendental state. The drive comes from that which is beyond the oneself. He says that without effort he does all things naturally. One has to be very careful about this statement because the naturally here is not being in tune with nature in an ordinary sense. This has been the cause of a big historical problem in Buddhism according to a school of Japanese scholars from the last half century or so. They say that when Buddhism came to China, it was the Mahayana scriptures which came first, which emphasized spontaneous action and being in touch with nature. Now it came into a culture which was dominated by Taoism, and in Taoism you are actually trying to attune yourself to the natural things. You're trying to get rid of the self in order to attune to the nature of things. Now it can easily be interpreted as a regression to simple consciousness, to just being aware of things, just going with the flow of things, which is quite different from the Buddhist perspective, which is to recognize skillfulness and unschoolfulness and so on. So that misunderstanding of what it means to be natural has led to a whole strand of Buddhism in China and Japan, Korea and so on in East Asia, which some scholars are saying is not actually true to original Buddhist ideas. Anyway, a lot more could be said about that. But again, this is another one of those areas where clarity is important, where it's crucial to get a very clear understanding of what it is that the Buddha has actually been teaching. At the level of the dharma niyama, images are more important in communicating its meaning than concepts, although concepts can themselves be images. The image of, well, some of the things I've already mentioned actually, you can say a lot about the Bodhisattva, for example, but really it's a symbol, it's an image for something. The image of the Buddha is, of course, crucial, we've talked about that last week. So as Buddhists, we work to engage imaginatively with the Buddha through paintings, through sculpture, but also through the scriptures, through the Buddhist writings. We need to build up a relationship with the Buddha. We need to know who the Buddha is and have a sort of feeling for him because he is a symbol of this transcendental state. The image of the Buddha, of course, often speaks to people who are not even Buddhists. I remember once at the LBC, London Buddhist Center, when I was there, when we were building, actually, and some official came round and just walked into the shrine room and was rendered speechless. He said it's such a powerful place because there was this beautiful Buddha image there and the place was quiet and so on. And it clearly affected him. It's almost as though the transcendental touched him just because of the image. So the reflecting on the image itself can communicate something to us. My father, for example, has got no interest in religion whatsoever, has a Buddha figure right in the middle of his mantelpiece, and he loves to just sit there looking at it. So it speaks. It speaks without, in a way, having to know anything about its background. And if you know its background, well, then it speaks even more, even more subtle equal. Last week, I mentioned another rather more esoteric, a particular image. That of the darkening, it communicates the freedom of transcendental consciousness. But there's another, a very rich, universal and explicit image, and that's the thousand-armed Abalo Kiteshva. And that's what I'd like to talk about now. I assume everybody's got some familiarity with the image. But just to remind you, the thousand-armed Abalo Kiteshva is white, white in color. His standing, not sitting in meditation, but standing. His bedecked with jewels, bodies covered with jewels, arms covered with jewels, face all sorts of brilliant, shiny jewels and silks. So richly, richly and beautifully dressed in these silks and jewels. He has eleven heads. Some people find this a bit obscene, but let's approach it on a symbolic level. He has eleven heads. Come back to them in a minute. And even more disturbing, perhaps, he has a thousand-arms coming from his torso. Each arm holding a different implement. And there is one heart that pumps blood through all of those arms. There is one heart, the bodhicitta, which sits in his breast, the blood flowing out to fill all of those arms. Now we can meditate on this image and absorb the multi-dimensions of its meanings again and again and again. This is what one does in the visualization practice. We're trying to connect with that higher transcendental element just by sitting in the presence of the thousand-armed Abalo Kiteshva. And letting him, as it were, do the work in communicating with you. We can resonate with him. We can feel his influence, allow him to have an effect upon us. But a few things might help. He's white. White is, of course, the color of purity. He's associated with pure consciousness, pure mind, a purity in a way which is beyond even a calamity and purity, purity of ordinary consciousness. He's standing, not in meditation. So he's engaged with the world. He's part of the world. He's not outside of it, but engaged with the world. His duels refer to the richness of the non-ego wisdom, the richness of the transcendental state, how it sort of it glitters and shines and sparkles and waves and silks and the breeze. It conveys beauty, everything reflected in everything else, multi-dimensionality, subtle colors, richness, wealth. All of these qualities and qualities of that state. Forget the million dollars a year. You get one jewel from Avano Gauteshra, and you feel really, really wealthy. He's got 11 heads. This represents the scope of this consciousness. Eight of the heads look in the eight directions of space, the normal eight directions. That leaves three. One of them looks up and one looks down. So it covers the whole of space, possibly even. You know, symbols are great. You can interpret them in all sorts of different ways. Those other two heads might represent the past and the future. So he's looking into the past and into the future. So the scope of his consciousness is the whole of space and the whole of time. Nothing is left out of it. There's one head left, usually a little head on the top. And that head is often said to represent both inner, it's him and not him. He's part of this, but it's also, so it's not that he's sort of completely ignored himself as he were. But it's a some sort of mysterious concern with both self and other that goes beyond self and other. So it's not like he sees the world of something out there that he's got to work for because it is him in a way that the distinction has gone. The heart is really important. Of course, it's the Bodhi heart. It's the Bodhi Chitta. It's one heart, one mind, which arises out of the non-ego wisdom. So the transcendent transcendence of attachment to the self is one. Wherever it happens, it's the same as it were experience. Whoever it happens in, it's the same, it's the same thing, it's the same heart. It's not in the sense of, I don't know, the philosophical term, but not a reified identity. It's not one object, but it's the same, you could say it's the same experience. And it's recognized, it recognizes itself as the same experience. But it's that non-ego wisdom. It's the altruistic dimension of that non-ego wisdom. That sees the scope of this liberation, as including all sentient beings, and not just the self. The arms, of course, the thousand arms represent individual activity. They represent all the different modes of action. Each arm holds a different implement. So each arm, if you like, represents, if we can speak in this way, an individual aspect, an individual bodhisattva, namely one of us. Functioning, driven by that heart, all with the same heart, but each arm functioning in its own unique way. So you get this wonderful sense of being one, but many at the same time. One heart, many modes of activity. The arms also suggest that they cooperate. If you had a thousand arms that didn't work together, it wouldn't be heaven, it would be hell. They would all be working against each other. So in some way or another, those arms all cooperate with each other in order to benefit all sentient beings. So Avalokiteshva also means working with others who are driven by the same spiritual, motivation and ideals. So the thousand armed Avalokiteshva is the image of the order, the idealized order. It's the image of the order to which we all aspire, to which we're trying to create, or be it in an imperfect form. But this is the image, if you like, behind the order. I'd like to say just a little bit about working with others, and then I'll finish. Individuals have their limitation. They can be on the big picture. It's difficult to experience oneself as being very effective. I had an experience of this when I got involved with the movement in 1970, in 1970. In 1973, I went to Living Cornwall, lived in the Carolina Cornwall. For three, I would say, over the happiest years of my life, I really loved living in Cornwall. It was beautiful. I loved the country. I was independent. I was free. I had, and I soon built up a circle of friends there. We had a Buddhist center there. It was absolutely delightful. I loved it. But I got sort of naged by something. And what the nag was, was that I wanted to actually make a difference to the world. And I felt living alone in the heaven of Cornwall was not actually going to make much of a difference to the world. I needed actually to go back to London, work more with other people that were in the order. And, you know, concentrate on efforts and work on creating something which would have an influence on the world. And I went back to London and I moved into the building site that was then the London Buddhist center and started working on that. And I moved from heaven to hell. It was horrible. It was really, really difficult. I mean, it's much easier to live by yourself in a beautiful place than to live on a building site with 35 other men, each of whom has their own idea about how things should be done. So it was, but I felt I was doing the right thing. I felt that working with those men to try and create something was actually the right thing to be doing. That's what we needed to do. We needed to work through those difficulties and create something of value. So that's the problem with just being by yourself. You need to work with others. You need to be part of an order in order to be really effective. There's no continuity without some kind of community. Miller Epper, who's, as you may have picked up, is one of my, is a strong influence on me. But I would never have known anything about him had it not been for his disciple, Gampopa, who created an organization, a monastic tradition, that actually preserved and disseminated Miller Epper's teachings. Miller Epper would have just, you know, died in the mountains and his songs would have been forgotten if nobody had written down them down, if nobody had repeated them, if nobody had made a tradition out of them. So this is one of the troubles of being an individual Buddhist. It doesn't really work. It's sort of, it's not sort of extending into the future. So, organizations are necessary. As soon as to what has come together and where you've got an organization. And it's important. Spiritual friendship, spiritual community, even Sangha on the highest level, is important because it can fulfill the Bodhisattva vow. It gets things done as well, organizing. Get few people together to organize something and you achieve things. A cloud, our own movement, in 1970, it was one rather grubby little basement, which we soon lost. And now we've got, you know, substantial centers that are teaching the Dharma to thousands of people all over the world. So organization does work. Gets things done, continues things. And I suppose the sort of organization I'd be looking for would be something like that, community described in the Go Singersuitar of the three months living in harmony together. But organizations get big. Organizations require rules and regulations. One of the difficult things about an order is you have to decide who's going to join it. And sometimes you have to decide who must be asked to leave it. So all of these things are, in my opinion, exceedingly unpleasant things to have to engage with. Rules and regulations come with the creation of organizations. And then sometimes power mode can creep into the governance of a spiritual community. That can then lead to severe corruption of that particular organization. Look at the problems the Catholic Church has got at the moment. I mean, in my opinion, the good people, like the old Archmage of Canterbury and my friend Cardinal Ratzinger, have had to leave because of the mess of the organization. I noticed that in electing a new Pope, for example, they're saying that one of the qualities, they're saying, "Oh, the Pope, of course, he must be a spiritual person." But what we really need is someone who can govern, someone who can take control of all this. In other words, someone who can use power mode on this organization to try and get it back into shape. So there are problems. There are serious problems with religious organizations. So where do you go? It's no good just being by yourself. There are serious problems with organizations. What's the solution to this? Panties talked about the third order of consciousness. Now, this can mean a number of things. It could mean an order of consciousness, which is beyond simple consciousness, beyond self-consciousness. It's a third, a higher order of consciousness. It could also be the order of consciousness that goes beyond a group consciousness and an individualist consciousness. Again, let me describe this again by an experience. This was in the late '70s. I was living at a community in London called Golga Newsa. And there was lots of things going on that I, in the order that I didn't like. I was not comfortable with them. I didn't agree with them. On the other hand, I'd left Cornwall because I wanted to be involved with other people. So I desperately wanted to be involved with our movement. But there were certain things about our movement that I couldn't subscribe to. So what did I do? Did I stay with it? Should I stay with it? Or should I leave it? If I left it, I thought, well, I'd only be forced to start another one, and that would have the same sort of problem. So how does one deal with this? I mean, I was in such a bad state over this. One day, my friend Sabouti came into my room and he took, he wanted to borrow a tape recorder, actually, to play a tape by a class. And he looked at me and he said, "God, you look terrible. What's it going to be? The river or the railway?" I mean, it really felt, I really felt sort of on the edge of doing the way of myself. Anyway, he took the tape recorder and went away. And I sort of sat there sort of reflecting on this. And I decided in the end that I was never ever going to have anything to do with religious organisations. But what I was going to do was cooperate with people that I felt shared my ideals. So I sat down and I made a list of a dozen people that I felt confident shared my spiritual ideals. And I thought, okay, I'll work with those people. That's what I'll do. That's the perspective. I would work with people whose spiritual ideas I would share, but I would never sort of think of myself as belonging to a religious organisation or a religious movement. And although I've said, you know, in the past, I am part of the tree rattner and so on, it's kind of tongue in cheek because I don't really think I am. But I do think I'm working with other people with whom named people, actually, who I sort of share a spiritual ideal and aspiration. And I think this is kind of what the third order of consciousness is sort of about. It's not that one identifies with a particular group of people who are working, even though they might be Buddhists, nor is it that one isolates oneself from groups and just thinks of working by oneself. There's a way that you can work with sort of more loosely in a way with other people, with those ideas you share. You retain individual, it's important always to retain individual responsibility, but at the same time cooperate with others. So you don't do things that your own conscience says you can't do, but you work hard to cooperate with others. Now, many other, many ordinary members won't agree with me while I'm about to say, but I think the spiritual idea is that of anarcho-syndicalism. The idea within anarcho-syndicalism is that you come together, you form small groups in order to perform particular functions. You don't try and create an overarching organization or structure. If something needs to be done, running a center, you bring together a group of people, they run that center. If a retreat has to be run, you bring together a group of people to run that retreat. But you try and avoid as much as possible having any overall sort of monolithic organization. I could say a lot more about that, but I won't because I'm coming up to my heart. So let's leave that there and summarize. There's no such thing as an individual Buddhist path, because Buddhism is concerned with overcoming an attachment to individuality. So working with others in a Buddhist community is one way of both developing that spiritual liberation, and it's also a way of expressing that truth. The Dhanamakaya is the next level of evolution in a process that goes beyond self-consciousness. It doesn't eliminate self-consciousness, but it eliminates the attachment to it. By its nature, it has a collective dimension because it's concerned with the elimination of the suffering of all beings throughout whole space and time. It's a very sublime ideal, and the driving force in a way is beyond ourselves. We can't provide the driving force for that, that subtle, that sort of intense as an ideal. So it comes from beyond ourselves, but it is the driving force that drives everything that we do as Buddhists. Even when we're not actually conscious of it, we may not be conscious of that bodhicitta. But it is through the way we structure things, through the way that we do things. It is still the force that's driving what we're doing. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music]