(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. - I woke up one morning and there was a thought in my head, or rather if there was a knowledge in my being. I am in a cave. I woke up and I knew I was lying in a cave in an old sleeping bag with a broken zip. It was a cold, damp, drafty cave high on the rocky edge of a mountain. (upbeat music) I woke up and I knew here is a body. Here is a human body, a human being lying in a bag on the hard floor of a crack in a massive lump of granite. Here is a turning world, a world full of people and here is one of them, high in the mountains, alone, cold and hungry. And the really surprising thing that struck me, he's here by choice. So, I love my friends. Got a lot of friends having Birmingham, I love music. I'm old enough to appreciate comfort and comfortable things and here I am choosing a cave, choosing a boulder for my company. I also love the mountains. And three years ago, I was wandering in the Pyrenees. I was alone with a heavy rucksack. I was far from many paths. And I stumbled across the cave. I stumbled across this cave, high in the mountains. There was a lot of snow around and I just really liked the cave. I really liked it. It's not a comfortable cave. It's jagged, it's got, it's floor is a 45 degree slope covered in boulders and it drips. I went there once and there was 200 icicles hanging from the ceiling, which means when it rains, there's 200 drips from the ceiling. So, the cave floor is very steep and rock-strewn, but right at the back of the cave, there's a small flat bit about the size of a single bed. It's a narrow single bed and you can sit on that, you can lie on that and you can stand on that. So, that's why I found the cave and that was three years ago and two years ago, so the next year, I went back and that time, three friends came with me. So, it was a force and we carried between us 50 kilograms of food. So, I could stay there for about two months and that time, two years ago, I talked about that two years ago and I got back. It's a talk on three-bitus audio called cave full of snow because then it was full of snow. It was a bit of a snow inside the cave. And what I did that time, I meditated. That was almost my main activity, well, it probably was my main activity. The main meditation I was doing was sadner. It was a sadner meditation and I'll say a little bit more about that. The other thing that I was doing on that trip was I was engaging really intensively with the mountains. There was something about being up there high above where people go, high above the clouds quite often and I just was really immersing myself in that wildness and in that nature. I found a small ledge on a cliff that was high up above a rocky lake and I could sit on that ledge and meditate. And as I said, there was lots of snow around. There's also lakes as the snow began to recede it with little small pools by the sides of this room and I would swim in those lakes and there'd be icebergs floating in them and I'd be just getting into closeness with nature and with that wildness. I remember watching insects. I remember lying for hours on my belly with my nose just above the water, watching insects in the water. I remember sitting in the cave looking down on eagles, looking down on vultures as they circled around the valley and I think the thing that struck most people about my last talk was the mouse. There was a mouse living in my cave with me and as I was meditating he'd come out and he'd lick my trousers or he'd lick my feet and I'd just open an eye and watch him. So being part of nature was a very important part of that last trip. The other important part was sardana, sardana meditation. I'm a member of the tree ratna Buddhist order and one of the main elements for me of joining the order was being given a sardana practice. So a sardana practice is a type of meditation. Generally we reserve them for when people join the order when they make a decisive spiritual commitment and there's enough integration to help you to engage with them. A sardana is an introduction to a yiddam. A yiddam is a Buddha or a Bodhisattva that one visualises and one gets into a relationship with there's certainly a visualisation that sometimes there's words or mantra. Stuff happens in sardana. So the last time I was there I was engaging a lot with sardanas. Buddhism is a difficult thing to do. Buddhism is difficult. It's very open. You could call it a religion if you want. It's a very open religion, it's a very open tradition. One thing that a sardana can help with, it can help to give you a direction. It can help to show you where you're going. Sangarachto says in, I'm going to quote a few times from a couple of new papers by or new year or two ago by Sangarachto and Sabouti. If one is to orientate oneself towards and open up to one's ultimate aim, it must take a vivid embodiment somewhere in one's experience. So if you're going to have a goal in any part of life, but if you're going to have a goal in life, you need to have a sense of what it is. You need to have a sense of where you're going. So Sangarachto calls this the transcendental object, a transcendental object, a bit of a clumsy term, but that's what he calls it. He says if you don't have a transcendental object, then spiritual path can be a refinement of self-identity at best. So you need something that you're aiming towards. Sangarachto also says in that paper, re-imagining the Buddha. The Buddha and his enlightenment are the object of one's aspiration. They represent the mystery that lies beyond one's present understanding, and that one is seeking to penetrate. So on the one hand, they're vivid, and they're direct, and they're concrete. On the other hand, they represent the mystery that lies beyond your present understanding. So by definition, you can't know them exactly, or definitely, but they can give you some direction. So just to explain that a bit more with a spiritual life, well, what is a spiritual life? We have a direction. We're trying to live by moral values. We're trying to understand spiritual truths. You cannot get into a healthy, strong relationship with an ideal, or with an idea. It needs to be embodied in something. And for me, that's what the sadhana always represented. A clear sense of the goal and the enlightenment. And so my last time, two years ago, in this cave, I was often sitting on cliff ledges, or sitting in the mountains, or sitting in the cave, visualizing the Buddha, with a heart of the mind. Visualizing the Buddha, with a heart full of love, a heart full of openness. But recently, Sankarachta has been emphasizing some other perspectives on the yiddam, on the sadhana, some aspects of that relationship. So I'm going to read now a couple of passages from a short text called Buddha for me. I'll give you these readings at the end. The various images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas emerged in a natural and unself-conscious process of historical unfolding, as Buddhists imagine enlightenment. They represented their imaginative experience of the Buddha and his enlightenment, in forms from their own cultural imagination. It is this process of imaginative unfolding that should be our inspiration, not primarily the forms it created. So that struck me very strongly, those statements. Sankarachta goes on to say, the development and engagement of imagination is one of the keys to spiritual life. Our effort should be, especially, to allow the imagination to unfold naturally, not to force it into any particular iconographic mold, especially one from a culture not our own. So this was ringing in my ears this time, as I was up in the mountains. So I woke up one morning and I realised I was lying in a cave. I was cold, I was hungry. I had less food this time because I'd gone alone. And I felt I'd been stripped of some of my practices. Some of the yiddam that I was relating to as a goal had been questioned, questioned by my teacher. And that was quite a strong experience. That left me feeling, well, I didn't mean I was a bit alone. I was unknown. So what happened, I was inspired by a phrase. A phrase came to my mind which inspired me. And in a sense guided me through the whole retreat. The phrase was, "Breath by breath," which is the title of a book, "Breath by breath." So there was that. And there was the mountains, there was the beauty, which always has an effect. There was nature. And I think nature has got a lot to tell us. It's got a lot to communicate to us. Nature is stillness. If you look at the tree in your garden, it's still. It's there year after year after year. But it's also change. It's also changing. It's never the same from one moment to the next. So nature, stillness and change. But nature is also indifference. When I got home this time, nature struck in a very tragic way, taken into life of the daughter of some of my friends in London. She was washed into the sea, and her grandparents tried to save her, and only one of them got out. That happened as soon as I got back, just within days, and we were getting back from the solitary retreat. And when I tried to remember my time away, it's like looking up a river, and there's a bend in the river that I can't see around, which was that experience. I can feel the water coming around the bend in the river, and the water feels good. It's clear, it's strong, but it's hard to see much around that bend. If I sit still, I can see some landmarks. I have my divers. I can remember some of the things I did. There was a particular mountain that, in my previous trip, I tried to climb it, I think, three times and failed. It was very steep, it's very rocky. It's like a jagged, broken tooth. It wasn't massive, 2,600 meters, I think. And I tried to climb it two or three times and failed. This time, I succeeded on my second attempt. I found a way up it. Not many people go up it. There was a few sort of marks of where people had been, but I was really pleased to get to the top of that. There was another mountain, Balochus, which is famously difficult. I didn't know it was famously difficult. I just knew it was a mountain. I could see from my cave, and I thought I'd have a go at it, and I thought I could see a way up it. And I set off one evening, intending to get to the mountain's toes, camped by the toes of the mountain. But I got within about two miles of the toes of the mountain and couldn't get any closer, difficult mountain, even to approach, let alone, to begin to climb. Another very strong memory is towards the end, there was a river that I came across as I was wondering. And it was one of those wonderful mountain rivers, very powerful, very strong, crashing river, a beautiful crystal clear water. And it would occasionally spread out into a pool, a fast flowing, but clear pool there. And I could dive into this water and swim with my eyes open underwater. It's like you dive into the water, and suddenly you're going faster, and you can ever swim because of the force of the water. So that's a very strong memory of just the invigoration of the energy of that water. Another memory, another little story. As I said, I didn't have much food. Because I'd gone alone, I had to carry more and eat less. And I hadn't taken any fresh vegetables. I took dried fruit, dried vegetables, and rice lentils, spaghetti, all that sort of stuff. But I didn't have any fresh vegetables. And after a couple of weeks, my bowels were starting to say, "Zaha, get some fresh vegetables." I was eating greens off the hillside most days, but I doesn't substitute for a potato or a cabbage. So I walked to the nearest shop, which was in the nearest village, which was a three-day walk round trip. And that was a very, very delightful walk. That was a very delightful-- through some parts of the Pyrenees where there's no paths, there's no-- a few shepherds might go there. So it reminded me of Bedouin tribes in Morocco that I was wandering around more than 20 years ago. On the way back from that shopping trip, the shopping trip was a disaster. Some of the shops in the villages in France, they devote more shelf space to smash and they do the vegetables. So I found myself-- as I was approaching the shop, I was like cabbage, potato, broccoli. I was just like-- and they had a few potatoes, a few bendy carrots, and lots and lots of smash. So I bought lots of smash and some vegetables. And on the way back, I came across a small pool, a small lake. And the cave, I was beginning to realize that the cave is actually a very harsh environment. It's high. It's facing the oncoming wind. It's on a steep slope. Going out for a pee in the middle of the night is actually pretty dangerous. Water wasn't very easily accessible. Two years ago, there was lots of water because there was lots of snow. This time, there was less snow. So the water was a bit more of an issue. On the way back from the shopping trip, I came across this pool and it was absolutely perfect, flat ground, sheltered from the wind. The pool was one of those wonderful pools that it's got a sort of peat bottom. So it's got a black bottom and it's shallow. And there's very little water coming in, very little water coming out. So it gets relatively warm. You can not quite bath temperature, but you could swim in it and then you could lie around in the sun. And there was a spring. There was also, there was perfect, though. There was a cliff here so I could meditate in the shade in the morning and there's a cliff here so I could meditate in the shade in the afternoon. And so I camped that, I had a little tent with me. And one day I was sitting beside my tent and I noticed a little ada in the grass. And this ada was just coiling through the grass and it went on to the little rock next to my tent but a meter for my tent. And so I stayed there for about five days. And there's my tent here and there's a little rock with an ada living under it. And that's really delightful. Every time I went out I sort of noticed this ada and he'd come out and bask in the sun and then he'd go back into his rock and just leave his tail sticking out in the sun to keep warm. So there, stories of things that happened. I was alone in the mountains. For nearly two months I didn't see a human face or a human footprint. And there is something very raw about that experience. I wrote in my diary one time. I feel like a rag doll. Sometimes gripped, sometimes dangling in jaws of life. Around that time I also had what I think of as a near death experience. As I mentioned I was eating greens for hillside most days. And as a routine you go through, if you find a plant that you want to eat and you don't know if it's poisonous or not, as a routine you go through all the textbooks on the subject say this. And there was one plant that it looked delicious. It was fairly plentiful. And so I thought I would try and see if it was poisonous. So I followed the routine to the letter. And I've not had a problem with this before. And it even tasted delicious. Which is quite rare for a wild plant. And it ticked all the boxes of what edible plants are supposed to tick. And so I cooked up a dozen or so leaves for my evening meal. And woke up in the middle of the night vomiting. And I spent almost the whole of the next day vomiting bile. And I did actually think I might die. I did actually think that my body had received a poison that was quite serious. And wasn't that a good experience? Yeah. There you are thinking, OK, this might be it. What does that mean? Yeah. And the overwhelming sense was, well, there was a very strong sadness, a very strong grief for my parents. I thought for them this will be an unimaginable suffering. Yeah. This will be very tragic. But for me I thought my life has been great. My life has been brilliant. Staff felt good. It felt good to think that. And I thought, well, if I don't get back, if I don't survive this, is there anything that I'd regret not doing with the rest of my life? And two things came to me. I'll just mention one of them. For if I live longer, I want to learn better the art of friendship. That struck me just as a-- that's what I want to. I want to learn better the art of friendship. So nature is cold. Nature is indifferent. I wouldn't say nature is immoral. One wave crashes on the beach. The next wave crashes on the beach. The next wave crashes on the beach. The next wave crashes on the beach and takes the life of a beautiful five-year-old girl. And the next wave crashes on the beach. If I had died, I knew that, well, nothing would change around me. The life of the mountains would go on. The vultures would find me far quicker than any man would find me. Nature is-- nature just does what it does. It doesn't have empathy. It doesn't have feelings. Animals and humans could be just as cold, just as indifferent. Consciousness, especially self-reflective consciousness. With that, we have a choice of becoming kind. We have a choice of empathizing. I believe that humans, that we humans, as a whole, are gradually getting better at this. That's what I believe. We gradually getting better at this. Over the last two or three thousand years, possibly more, we're gradually getting better at this. Some religions teach that human beings started off good and at some point turned bad. I don't agree with that. Nor do I believe that we started off bad and are turning good. We started off indifferent. We started off natural. We started off a moral, not a moral. But we're becoming aware of ourselves and of other people. And this is a wonderful battleground, really. I think a lot of us experience it as a battleground. Next time, you find yourself upset or griping that somebody's unkindness. It might be an institution's unkindness, like a government, or it might be an individual's unkindness to another human being. Well, just reflect. This is wonderful. We are the first species of the whole of evolution who's developed this sense of a moral standard, a moral expectation that we could be kind, we should be kind. I just think that's remarkable, that's wonderful. And a lot of us experience it as a battle. Our evolution, or what we've come from, has led to us, well, the survival of the fittest. The survival of the fittest. The survival of the fittest at the expense of whatever gets in the way. That's where we've come from. And now we're beginning to think, well, not the survival of the fittest. The survival of everything that wants to survive. Let's start caring about things that's a less fit than we ourselves. We're by no means perfect of this, but we're getting there. We've got for the first time in the history of evolution that awareness is beginning. And I think that's wonderful. So, ever since I came across, but isn't, ever since I came across the example of the Buddha, I was very struck by his natural kindness. He seemed to have an ability to empathize. To empathize with every being that he came across. Human or animal. Or even plant those suttas in the canon where he's advising not to harm plants. The classic statement is not to harm things that breathe. Or not to harm things that don't want to be harmed. So the Buddha has this empathy to everything he needs. And he's relaxed and happy. Now those two things together is quite a remarkable combination. And I've always been intrigued by this. And I've, well, ever since I came across Buddhism, I've tried to gain enlightenment. That's what I've been trying to do. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see the world as the Buddha sees the world. I want to see the world just naturally with kindness, with empathy, from a relaxed, happy background attitude. That's what I want. The Buddha seems to be able to do it. And he says, "I can do it." He says, "All of this can do it." Right. I'm going to try. That's been my mission for the past number of years. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how I have been doing that. I'm going to talk about two ways of doing that. So two ways that the Buddhist tradition recommends for gaining insight. The first way, and this is the way I focus on mostly through my practice. Use your intelligence. Use your imagination to understand the way things are. And then emotionally try and connect with that. Emotionally try and see that. So use your intelligence to try and work out. But what is the nature of this? What is the world? What are the laws of nature? What is going on? What's real? What's true? So the Buddha mentions three elactions. The three marks of conditioned existence. The first one is all things are impermanent. Nothing lasts forever. All things are impermanent. We sort of know that, don't we? We know that. We can intuit that. All things are ultimately unsatisfactory. Nothing is going to finally tick that box of "Yeah, now I'm happy forever." Nothing is ultimately satisfactory. And finally, thirdly, nothing has a fixed ultimate self. Nothing is exactly what it is. Everything is a process. Everything is changing. You are changing. The tree in the garden is changing. It doesn't have a tree-ness. You don't have a "you-ness." You are a process. So we know a lot of this stuff. We know that we're changing. We're told that every cell in our body changes. What is it? Every ten years. Give a take. Some of the cells in our body change every few days, if not more frequently. But after ten years, pretty much every cell in your body has been chucked in the bin and a new one created from somewhere. Yeah? That's what it's like. We eat food. We think of it a bit like petrol, don't we? You eat food. That's energy. Yeah? And then the waste comes out. And that gives your body energy. Which is true. But it's also, every time you eat food, that food, part of it is becoming the cells of your body. Your body is being regenerated by that food, by that very material. So rather than your body being a thing like a car that you put fuel in and the exhaust comes out, it's more like a pool of water. There's a stream flowing in and there's a stream flowing out. So the stream flowing in is the food, the air, the water that we drink that we eat. And if the stream flowing out, well we know what that is. Including the skin falling off our bodies, our hair falling out. So your body's more like a pool of water than a fixed thing. Imagine you're in a cafe, and you order a bowl of soup. So behind the counter there's a big pan of soup. It's not your soup, it's just soup in a pan. And you say I'll have a bowl of soup, please. And so they lay it like a soup. And it still isn't your soup. It's on a tray being walked through the cafe. There's a few bowls of soup on the tray being walked through the cafe. It's just soup. You don't mind if someone touches one of the bowls or whatever. But then one gets put in front of you, suddenly it's your soup. And if someone touches the bowl, you can be really offended. It's not strange. When does it become your soup? Well, everything in your body is like that. Why is it yours? I heard recently, or my dad heard recently, and he told me that he listed this thing on the radio. Apparently, for every cell in your body, there are ten bacteria in your body. It's not remarkable. So for everything in your body that's good, you've got a bit of your DNA in it, there's ten things that haven't. This radio program apparently went on to say that it's like you. What you is, is from one knee down. The rest of you is other stuff. There's nothing to do with you. It's frightening, really, if you think about it. So we use our intelligence to understand the way things are. But what is my body? Is it permanent? Well, it's changing. We use our intelligence and our imagination to understand that. And then we try to emotionally connect with it. And we try to emotionally connect with the consequences of it. So try it now. So tune in now to your body. How does your body feel now? Feel your weight on the cushion or on the chair. Can you feel the contents of your stomach? Try to feel inside of your body. So try not to use your head. Try to feel in your body. Try to feel your body. What is your body like now? I'm going to ask you a question. Try not to answer it with your head. Your head probably will answer it. Let your head answer it. But try to listen to your body's answer. Life is short. What is important? Are you attached to your body? It won't be yours forever. Worse than that, your hair will fall out. Your teeth will fall out. You'll lose the ability to balance and to be stable. Life is short. What is important? Life is short. What is important? Life is short. What is important? You'll lose the ability to balance and to be stable. Life is short. What is important? Really though, we can be forgiven for thinking that our body is ours. We can be forgiven for thinking that our body is static. We look in the mirror and we recognize ourselves. But we're meditators. Is your mind solid? Have you ever sat in meditation and your mind has done what you expected? Have you ever been able to understand what your mind is? What is this you? You can be forgiven for thinking that your body is you, but your mind is your mind now. Is it separate from the words that you're hearing? Is your mind separate from your awareness of the people around you? So mind, consciousness. According to Buddhist tradition, and I think modern science would agree, but in a sense language agrees with this, consciousness is always consciousness of something. It's no consciousness without an object. What does that mean? What does that mean? What is your mind? What is your experience? It's always experience of something. So, as I say, this is a way of reflection that I've been trying to grapple with for many years. And I've been particularly interested in this mind side of it, rather than the body side of it. The five scanders are a way of trying to understand that mind, and understand your experience. You're meditating on the experience of your mind. What is this? What is happening? What is this process of your mind? One thing you can do, sit in meditation, wait for a distraction, wait for something to happen. But where did your mindfulness go? Where did the breath go? And then the thought that you haven't changed, where does that go? What exactly is the contents of your mind now? What exactly is the process of your mind now? Every moment does response. Every moment your mind, your experience is responding to stuff around you. Is that true? Pay attention. Your personality, what's your personality? I was unsolically the treat once I was camping in the mountains in Scotland, and I realised quite strongly, and it felt very positive. I realised I don't actually have a personality. I'm just a collection of other people's personalities. The way I turn my gas cooker on, well that's just the way my brother does it. The way I talk to myself, well that's the way a friend talks to himself. They're just learned behaviours. There's nothing that's unique to me. It's just learned behaviours, it's stuff that I've picked up from people around me. And that's great in the sense, that's positive. It felt like a really positive thing. So personality is circumstantial, suffering is real. But it's also empathy. And it's also arising out of delusion. Goals, goals in life, worldly goals, spiritual goals, any goals. They're real, they're important. But they arise and change independence upon surroundings. So try it now. Life is short, what is important? Ask that question at different times. Ask that question when you're at work. Life is short, what is important? Ask that question when your child is ill. Life is short, what is important? Ask that question when you get a letter from the bank manager. What is important? Different things at different times. So that's the first method. We use our imagination and our intelligence to see what's going on and then try to emotionally connect with that. In the dhammapada, the Buddha says in the sixth verse of the dhammapada. Others do not realise that we are all heading for death. Those who do realise it will compose their quarrels. So the second method of trying to gain enlightenment. Well, the three laxiners, all things are impermanent. All things are unsatisfactory. All things are devoid of solid selfhood. Well, that's just the way it is. You don't need to specifically look for that stuff because that is just the way it is. So just relax, just trust that to reveal itself. Pay attention to your experience, to your breath, and trust that those truths will reveal themselves to you. I noticed a billboard yesterday, a big billboard, very simple. A glass of beer and a caption to taste is to know. And I thought, that's fun. That is it. That's what Buddhism is saying. To taste is to know. Don't think about it, just taste it, taste life. Taste this current breath. So in this method, we don't try and develop insight. We just try and develop awareness. Listen with devotion. Mind in its insubstantiality is like the sky. Is this true or false? Confirm it by relaxing completely and looking directly at the mind, gazing with your entire mind free of all tangy. The emptiness of mind is not just a blank nothingness, but without doubt there is awareness and knowledge. Is this indeed true? Confirm it. Relax completely, looking directly at the nature of your mind. There is no doubt that it is impossible to objectify or grasp thought or the movement of memory. This changeable movement is like the wind. Is this indeed so? Confirm it. Relax completely, looking directly at the nature of mind. So I was inspired by this phrase breath by breath. And that is largely what I was doing. I was sitting there watching my experience. Here is a breath. Here is a breath. Trying to develop awareness of that. Letting go of any idea of where that might take me. And simply just trying to be aware of my breath. I felt that perhaps I should throw up all practices, all spiritual practices, all knowledge, just throw it all up and question it. But what is happening? Here I am. All I can hear is the sound of a man breathing. Our effort, Sango actually says, should especially be to allow imagination to unfold naturally. Not to force it into any iconographic mold. This process of imaginative unfolding should be our inspiration. As I say, I did feel very challenged by this. I felt very naked. I felt the rug had been pulled out from under my feet. Not knowing my direction, not knowing a goal. I find myself sitting in a cold damp crack in a mountain. There is nothing man made except what I have taken. The storms roll in. The storms roll out. Sometimes the cave is full of cloud. Sometimes the cave has birds flitting around. Sometimes the cave is full of drips. I meditate and there is nothing but the sound of a man breathing. To quote or to misquote, R.S. Thomas. On this solitary, on this trip to the cave, I turned round in the cave. On the previous trip, I sat facing the mouth of the cave. I opened my eyes meditating. I was looking down in the mountain. This time I turned round. So if I opened my eyes right in front of me was a boulder. A granite boulder. Quite a beautiful granite boulder. Nonetheless, just a piece of rock. I'd wake up. I didn't take a watch, so I didn't know the time. I didn't know the date. The sun was my watch and the moon was my calendar. I would sleep when I was tired and get up when I was rested. I was hungry and meditated until I'd finished. My routine often I would wake up with the light and I would sit up. I'd wrap my sleeping bag around my legs and meditate often until mid-afternoon. I'd sit there. Just paying attention. Just trying to be aware of this current breath. Always on solitary retreats, I had a distraction. I have something that comes to me most days and takes my mind away. In the past, it's often been things like the desire to own a house or the desire to own land. My last solitary retreat, the craving was to buy a vehicle that I could live in. This retreat, it was to fly. I wanted to learn to fly. I wanted to buy a paraglider. That was a distraction that came to me most days. Sometimes I'd be sitting there with really vivid imaginative flights going on in my mind. The other main feature of this solitary was my dreams. In the morning I'd often wake up and I could remember two or three dreams from the night. So that image of flying struck me quite strongly. The Buddhist tradition offers us a wealth of descriptions of the spiritual goal. A very classic one is a Buddha, is a man sitting still. Sitting under the tree, not moving. When I tune into that on this retreat, it doesn't do it for me. A man sitting still under the tree, yes, is perfectly balanced. Yes, he looks good, he looks content, he looks still, doesn't do it for me. A man striding from village to village in ancient India, trying to help people to overcome suffering. That doesn't do it for me. Flying. A finger next to one said, don't try and copy a Jackson Pollock painting, just get some paint and throw it around. One of his texts that I had with me says, don't concern yourself too much with other people's descriptions of enlightenment. What you use is somebody else's description of the taste of treacle when your mouth is full of treacle. Just pay attention, just pay attention. We do need a clear sense of enlightenment, we do need a clear sense of what the Buddha experienced. I've often thought, I don't know what enlightenment is, I do know which direction it's in. More awareness, more kindness. That's the direction, that's the way to go, more awareness, more kindness. There's nothing prescriptive about that, it's so open as to be terrifying. What do you do with that, more awareness, more love? Great. And yet, you can somehow keep treading. Sangarakhta in Bhurofni says, the successful Dharma life requires an imaginative connection with the goal, some definite sense of reality beyond self clinging. To try it now, what would you be like, what would your life be like without any clinging to self? What would you be like, what would your life be like? If you didn't think of yourself as a self, you're a process. If you didn't think of the person in front of you as a person, they're a process, they're changing, they're not fixed, because nothing here to defend, there's nothing there to attack. There's no need to be competitive except for fun. What would life be like if we saw everybody as a process? Everything we do influences ourselves and the people around us. It gives us an enormous, power is not the right word, it gives us an enormous responsibility. Everything we do affects the people around us. What would life be like without any clinging to self? The Buddha's assertion that you can get to that state and the way to get to that state is simply to pay attention to your experience. Here is a breath, pay attention to this breath. So after years of very rich imaginative meditation practice, this was like having a cool sorbet after a rich meal, cleansing my meditation palate, just breathing. Very simple, two months in the mountains, no people except for someone selling me smash. My life, my mind was fairly content, it was fairly absorbed, it was fairly clear. Rather than flapping, my mind felt like it could soar. I'm one of these people who has a lot of doubt. I've always doubted Buddhism quite strongly. As far as I always doubt all religions, including Buddhism, presumably I doubt Buddhism slightly less than I doubt other religions, otherwise I wouldn't be calling myself a Buddhist. But I have always doubted Buddhism. And I've always believed that there is something to be gained by radical simplicity. If you want to understand anything or put it in a simple place, bring some space around it. If you want to understand something, you want to be able to see it and look at it from different angles. So try that yourself, give yourself ten minutes every day where you do nothing. Not even meditate, you can maybe just sit, if you want to sit in meditation posture fair enough, but just do nothing, just sit. Try and let some space evolve around your experience. Any moment of your life you can stop, any moment you can pause, you can pay attention to your experience. What is happening? What is this experience? Why can't I sit still? Why am I dissatisfied? Why won't the mind rest on this current breath? Why don't I feel free? Or just sit there? Here it is, here's your life, this is your experience. It's a breath, it's an opportunity, a freshness. What women said, don't seek good fortune, you yourself are good fortune. Reality is nowhere else in here, and if you're going to see it, it's no other time than now. So I find my body could be still, my mind could be still. It's possible to be a happy, healthy human being. This is possible, happy, healthy human being. For some people, this is the natural result of maturity and growing up. For some people, it's the natural result of an effective result of therapy, good therapy. We become happy, we become integrated, we're quite together. But I'm a Buddhist, and the Buddha goes on about peace. And this is a question that I often have, this has been one of my primary doubts about Buddhism. What's the Buddha just actually a good bloke? Was he just a happy, healthy individual? The sort of person you become to, you come to be, if you go to therapy regularly and think about your life and have some nice friends. Is that it? So what I found on this solitary retreat, spending a lot of time looking at my mind, rather than usually I'm looking into a pool of muddy water when I look into my mind. On this solitary, I find myself looking into crystal clear water. And that is blissful, that is bliss. But once you've got used to the bliss, once that's become normal, I started to notice a very subtle level of disquiet or craving underneath everything. I could look into the crystal clear water of my mind, but I can see on the bottom a tangled web of craving, of bias, or of the suffering that that causes. It's like looking into a big lake. You can see the crystal clear water. And once you've got over the excitement of all that beautiful crystal clear water, you notice the bottom of the lake is littered with rusty shopping trolleys. Worse than that, broken down tanks, and old weapons of war. Through the crystal clear waters of mind, a mild, gnawing, claustrophobia. If unnoticed or unaccepted, then we tend to expect everything in life to be lovely and nice. This causes us to struggle and fight. Not only does this stir up the mud of the mind, it also causes us to make a complicated mess of our lives, of our relationships. Meditation is about stealing the mind, so we can see clearly. Meditation is about getting into the actual life and experience of our consciousness. Meditation reveals how wonderful life could be, how free we could be. Meditation and a simple, ethical life reveals the deep habits that have been a vital condition for evolutionary success. The single-minded urge for supremacy over other members of our own species. The survival of the fittest, the quickest, the strongest, the roundiest, the survival of the most cunning and selfish. Of the best at supporting and promoting one's self and one's kin. And of course the selfish exploitation of other species. Probably all currently surviving species have been a condition in the extinction of other competing or edible species. We are the first species to attempt to enforce fishing quotas and to limit our urges to hunt. Meditation and an ethical life increasingly reveals another possibility. A life beyond self-clinging, beyond self-promotion, a life of empathy. As Shanti Davis says, "When fear and suffering are disliked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I protect myself and not the other?" All of us need to respond to the suffering in the world. Are we going to respond more like an animal or more like a Buddha? I've gained so much from sadhana, from meditation on the Buddha. But now I was opening the lid. I feel I've got a glimpse or taste of the sublime profundity of the Buddha. The radical simplicity of life led to a simple, clear mind. I could see the subtle, deep bias and a taste of what life might be like with that still. I left the cave and I walked the last couple of weeks. I walked perhaps a hundred miles through the Pyrenees. I saw paragliders. I realized that the flight, the energy I experienced in meditation, in mind, can be far more free and ecstatic and peaceful than jumping off a mountain with a parachute strapped to your back. The reason one goes on the treat, at the end of the day, is in order to come home. I've come home. I realize that the mystery of Buddhism, the mystery of life is far deeper than I ever dreamed. The Buddha is not just a happy, healthy individual. There is a freedom. Somehow the stuff on the bottom of the lake, through awareness, will dissolve. A total freedom of life, like crystal, clear waters pouring down a mountain. I came home. One of the benefits of living in a community is that occasionally someone will say, "I'm going to do a puja. Anyone want to join me?" So a few days after I got home, Matt, Matt Patterson, said, "I'm going to do a puja. Anyone want to join me?" And joined the puja, he read a reading from the Dhammapada. This reading has never really made sense to me in the past. I've never connected with it. But this time, when Matt read it, my body was just saying, "Yep, that's right. That's true." So I'll read this, and that will be the end. That enlightened one, whose sphere is endless, whose victory is irreversible, and after whose victory, no defilements remain to be conquered, by what track will you lead him astray, the trackless one? That enlightened one, in whom there is not that ensnaring, entangling, craving to lead anywhere, and whose sphere is endless, by what track will you lead him, the trackless one? We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebootestaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
