(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 all the talks are online. If you have Miss Staney, you can go to our website. I think you can go to portsofbuddacenter.com. These days I know forward to our usual website. You can also find us on Facebook and on Twitter. And all the talks are up and a whole bunch of other resources around the talks. So if you want to get more into it. And as usual, a little plug for our Sanga space where you can sign up and really take part in a much fuller way, make your own contributions, show things that inspire you, ask questions. So religion without God is the series. This is part four. In the first part of the series, we really just looked at what are the basic propositions of the Buddha. What does the Buddha say about the nature of reality? What's the basic Buddhist paradigm? And where do we stand in a universe that doesn't start and end with God? Where do we stand? In the second week, we looked at ethics. And particularly, we looked at them in depth. The relationship between our way of taking in information from the world, the input that we get, and then our response, which is usually either desire or aversion. I like that, I want that. I don't like that, I don't want that. Yeah, that whole dynamic. And we looked at it in terms of ethics because we were exploring the relationship between that basic way of behaving and seeing the world and your subsequent experience of suffering. Exploring the connection there. Last week, week three, we looked at death. And it was really the kind of wisdom tradition in Buddhism around the nature of reality, which is our nature and how that nature plays out through life and through dying and through death. The Buddhist tradition shows us how we make the world of their minds. And it offers a picture of how that usually goes for us, but it also offers a vision of how it might go for us. Beautiful, complex area, again, who are thoroughly spending time with on the website. Now, those of you who've done a bit of Buddhist study before might notice a little pattern there, ethics, wisdom. One of the earliest patternings of Buddhist practice is ethics, meditation, wisdom, the big three. That's what you're kind of looking for to have going. All at the same time, they feed each other, ethics, meditation, wisdom. So as you can imagine, the one we haven't quite touched on fully is meditation. And this week, we're going to look at meditation as magic, practice as magic, and particularly in the sense of being a magical training discipline. We're going to look at it from various angles. We're going to touch on the relevance of magic in the Western theistic Judeo-Christian traditions and also in the pagan religious history. We're going to look at magic's place in Buddhist history and teaching and how it's evoked within our own Tri Ratna community. And all of this is really to help give us a flavor of why I think it's helpful for us to have a certain kind of magic as an ideal for what it is to practice. So when you reach into the mysteries of the universe and into the mysteries of this life and this world and you don't find God, what do you find? And why is magic relevant to that? I'm actually quite excited about this. This is the one I was looking forward to most. Death was the one I was looking forward to least. So that's gone. I can agree up with magic. Not in the sense that anyone in my family was a magician, but one of my earliest memories is going to the public library in Glasgow with my mum. And my mum had a pink library ticket and I had a green library ticket. And pink library ticket's got you six books for grownups. And green library tickets for kids got you three books. And I used to always pick three books and then have a pile beside me. And I would think, how can I get another book and then I'd go and see my mum? (audience laughs) And she would give me one of her books. You know, she'd take one of them out for me. And the books I remember getting out when I started writing this talk, I just had the sudden strong memory of these big, thick books called things like The Big Book of Wizards and Warlocks. (audience laughs) The Big Book of Dragons. And children's literature, particularly Victorian British children's literature was a really big part of growing up too. Classic things like Peter Pan. That kind of brutally beautiful thing. Two is the beginning of the end. (laughs) Peter Pan. Also, with classic literature, let the Narnia books that I mentioned in one of the talks by C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The Silver Chair, The Magician's Nefia. The Voyage of the Dawn trainer, all those books. Of course, Lord of the Rings. Big, thick Lord of the Rings on The Hobbit. Gandalf. Sort of rampaging through my 14 year old mind. But probably the books that I think, if you sort of said to me, pick one book that you really remember to do with magic, it would be A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. Very popular books, very strong trilogy of books. And the thing that really struck me about A Wizard of Earthsea was that the hero was a kind of apprentice magician. The idea of an apprenticeship and doing a training in magic was really important to me. And I think that's a really important aspect to a lot of what we'll talk about this evening, is that thing of taking on a discipline and a training and sort of apprenticing yourself to the Buddha, to the nature of reality, if you like. And it's very important in both Western and Eastern magical traditions. Later on in life, I got really into the idea of the Familists. I don't know if you know this word Familists. It just means an apprentice to a mage or a scholar, but it was used in the alchemical tradition in the West. You would apprentice yourself to the alchemist. But let's head east first. Let's head east into Buddhist country. And I want to do a kind of quick magical dance through the three major phases of Buddhism in like 10 minutes or something. The three major phases of Buddhist development and these are traditionally known as the Hinnayana, the Mahayana and the Vajrayana. And I'll explain what each of this is as we go. So the Hinnayana is kind of early Buddhism. So the text I read at the start of meditation was from the Pali Canon. It's supposed to be the kind of words of the Buddha himself, the earliest texts that were written down recounting the teachings of the Buddha. And the Hinnayana, this early phase of Buddhism, is based around those texts, those suttas as they're called. Sutta means thread. So it's like a thread that you can draw from the Buddha right through time. So the Hinnayana is based around the early suttas and also based around the monastic code that developed as people settled and began to practice in a particular way. That's called the Vinaya. So it's a set of monastic rules that are designed as ethical tram lines to help you steer a path through reality. And I want to read you a magical story because magic comes in right from the get-go with the Pali Canon. You may have heard this before, it's called the Mitchell and the Sutta. It's a very short text and it describes a particular magical happening. To say the scene, the Buddha's just gained enlightenment. We read some stories last week from the Buddha around the time of enlightenment. We'll have some more again tonight. And the Buddha's just gained enlightenment and this is his good friend Ananda, which is remarkable photographic memory, recalling what happened. I have heard on one occasion, the blessed one was staying at Uruvella on the bank of the Narangira River at the root of the Mitchell industry, newly awakened. And on that occasion, he sat for seven days in one session, sensitive to the bliss of release. And on that occasion, a great out-of-season storm cloud rose up with seven days of rainy weather, cold winds, and intense darkness. Then Muchalinda, the Naga King, leaving his dwelling place and encircling the blessed one's body seven times with his coils, stood with his great hood spread over the blessed one, thinking, "Don't let the blessed one be disturbed by cold. "Don't let the blessed one be disturbed by heat. "Don't let the blessed one be disturbed "by the touch of flies, mosquitoes, "wind, sun, and creeping things." Then, with the passing of seven days, the blessed one emerged from that concentration. Muchalinda, the Naga King, realizing that the sky had cleared and was free of clouds, unraveled his coils from the body of the blessed one, dropped his own appearance, and assuming the appearance of a young man, stood in front of the blessed one with hands before his heart, paying homage. So, you know, there you are, early Buddhism, a giant cobra comes and wraps itself around the Buddha, puts his hood over the Buddha's head to shelter him from the storm, and when the Buddha's emerged from his meditation, transforms himself into a handsome young prince or man and bows to the Buddha. I don't know if that happened at the end of your meditation tonight, but that's a magical story from the early Buddhist texts. And I suppose when I was reading it, it was very obvious that one of the key things here is protection, the magical rite of protection. I'll come on and talk about this a little more in a bit. Protection and transformation together, the kind of safety of how it feels to sit mindfully, particularly when you're in a sangha, shared community of values, and you sit with people, and that kind of stillness that's bigger than you, and even bigger than the sum of all the people in the room. This is a certain, I suppose, deep comfort in reality there. It's also interesting, medically and magically, because it's a positive image of a snake. Now, most religious traditions don't have a particularly positive images of snakes. Certainly Judeo-Christian ones don't. The image of the virgin crushing the serpent under her heel, the garden of Eden, and the origin of the sinfulness of your body, that kind of stuff that we talked about in week two. The serpent is associated with lust. Now, again, there's some very valuable things in that image that, you know, if you've got the time and the energy and you make the effort, you can get a lot from it, but it's also great to read a kind of unashamedly positive image of the energy of the snake, the energy of the serpent rising up and being a figure of protection. That's a brief look at magic in the very earliest Buddhist texts. So the next developed phase of Buddhism is the Mahayana, which is called the Greater Vehicle. The Hinnayana that we just looked at means lesser vehicle, or depleted vehicle, something like that, and it's really a kind of pejorative term that was used by later Buddhists. It's probably a bit unfair, actually. In fact, it's definitely a bit unfair. But historically, one of the reasons it happened was because later Buddhists came along and realized there was a tendency to real selfishness and a kind of practice that focused very much on solatreness, and me, I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna gain enlightenment, and it's gonna be me and me. And actually, what's the Buddha saying all along about that kind of me-based attitude? Let it go, let it go, let it go. So along comes the kind of next wave of Buddhist history, and another wave of sutras. And these sutras are even more cosmic and magical than the one we just heard. All sorts of crazy, miraculous things. In a way in the Mahayana phase of Buddhism, the miraculous is evoked as the metaphor that you should go and live inside. The whole thing is miraculous. Now, I don't have time to really expose this tonight, but I'd really recommend the various series of talks by Sanger Akshta, looking at different sutras. The Vimalakirti nardeshya sutra, the white lotus sutra, the sutra of golden light, these fantastical texts where thousands of millions of Buddhas through eons and eons and eons, and it's all trying to undermine a certain kind of very internal, narrow practice and connect you with the universe, connect you with other people through the vocation of beauty, sometimes really fantastic poetry and imagery and magic. Key to the Mahayana is this idea of being other regarding. So move away from being self-regarding in your practice, to being other regarding. That's the main way that you practice. And the figure that comes up is the figure of the Bodhisattva. And the Bodhisattva is a deeply embedded figure. He's embedded in Buddhist practice. In some traditions, he's kind of almost enlightened or even enlightened, but it's enlightenment for the sake of all beings. So this very open-hearted bundle of love is there and is practicing just for the sake of all beings. Now again, in this area, there's a guy called Padma Vadra, who I very happily apprenticed myself to when I got ordained as a Buddhist. He ordained me. And Padma Vadra is really fantastic at talking about this figure, the figure of the Bodhisattva and what makes the Bodhisattva tick. There's a series I can't recommend highly enough called The Alchemy of Love. The Alchemy of Love, which you can find on free Buddhist audio. I'll put the resources for this up after the talk. And in this series, Padma Vadra looks at the figure of Shanti Deva. Now, Shanti Deva was, I think, a seventh century Buddhist scholar at Nalanda University in India. And Shanti Deva's same as for texts called the Bodhi Chariya Vatara. The Bodhisattva's guide to awakening, where he lays out this path of being other regarding as the whole of the path. And the key thing with Shanti Deva is a practice called the exchange of self for other. It's what you're looking to do all the time, exchange self for other. The Padma Vadra thinks that this evokes Alchemy, Alchemy. The great work to conjure the philosopher's stone, the philosopher's stone that turns ordinary things into extraordinary things, that turns base metal like lead and copper into gold, that turns ordinary human beings into immortals with the elixir of eternal life. Go and listen to the talks, absolutely fantastic stuff. Now, in the ending, alchemical tradition, which is a bit different from the West, the thing that is used in the great work, the thing that helps you make and find the philosopher's stone, the agent for it is Quicksilver, Mercury. I don't know if you've ever played with Mercury, they probably don't let school children do this anymore, but when we were children, reading the big book of witches and warlocks, you could also get, remember somebody giving us, doling out a little bit of Mercury and sitting playing with it on the desk. I just, wow, what's that stuff? No, I never ate it, I never ate it. Did you eat it? Yeah, I never ate it. But you know, that thing of just watching it move, is it solid, is it liquid? What is the nature of this elusive, beautiful stuff? You know, absolutely turned my ideas of what things were on its head. The Padma Vadra evokes something called the Bodhi Chitta, and the Bodhi Chitta is what makes a Bodhi satva tick. It's the kind of engine of a Bodhi satva. And the Bodhi Chitta is like a faculty of heart and mind. It's heart and mind, in a way, completely fused. You've got a crystal clear seeing of the nature of things, and it's been fused with the deep love for all beings. And this is the Bodhi Chitta. It wants enlightenment for all sentient beings because it knows that we all share that sense of possibility. It's not only the elect who can break through and see things clearly, it's all of us. And the Bodhi satva's completely motivated by this. Padma Vadra compares the Bodhi Chitta to this quicksilver that's used in alchemy, in India, in the great work. So if you can hold fast to that very slippery elusive element, which is very tricky in itself, it's very hard to handle. It's very easy to lose possession of quicksilver of Mercury. But if you can hold fast and stick to your practice, you will be transformed. You will be made new. And the practice to do that is Chantadva's exchange of self and other, which you just do in your everyday life. You know, now, if there are two pieces of fruit and one of them is a bit manky, and the other one is nice and fresh, you give the manky a bit to yourself and you give the fresh bit to somebody else. That'd be a very basic exchange of self and other idea. The meditation we did earlier, the meta-bavana, where you sit and you hold yourself and then you gradually bring these other beings, these other consciousnesses, into your consciousness. And you try and, in a way, hold them as dearly as you hold yourself. It's a really beautiful practice and it really makes a difference to the way you feel and the way you see things. And that's the exchange of self and other. You can imagine that in all sorts of ways. The word for the exchange of self and other in the Indian tradition in Sanskrit is parivartana. And parivartana is the same word that's used in Indian languages for magical transformation. So it's rooted in the Indian magical tradition and genuinely not making this up. This is the case. And this magical transformation, this is the alchemy. Pamavadra gets very warped up over this, it's great. This is the alchemy, he says. We are the great work. We are where it happens. We are the olympic. We are the cauldron that the magic potion gets brooding. So it's well worth exploring Pamavadra's talks. He goes into this at great length. For me, what it calls to mind is, again, this idea of transformation and of change. And particularly ovid, you may or may not know this text, but there's a classical Roman author called ovid and he wrote a famous book called Metamorphosis. You may not know the book, but you've probably heard some of the stories in passing. All sorts of great stories, like a mother and a son transformed into bears, the great bear and the little bear that you see in the sky at night time. Ovid's book Metamorphosis is kind of at the heart of the Western secular artistic tradition, which I actually think is a kind of religious spiritual tradition in its own right. And there's one particular story that I was thinking of when I was relistening to this stuff around Parivartana and the magical transformation. There's a blind seer, a blind prophet called Tyresius. And Tyresius has had two experiences of being changed from a man into a woman and then from a woman back into a man. And he's accrued acquired a certain amount of knowledge based on this dual experience of being both masculine and feminine. And Jupiter and Juno are having an argument and it's about the nature of gender and they decide they better ask Tyresius because he's had these strengths of both. And Tyresius makes what you might argue is the mistake of disagreeing with Juno, who doesn't suffer disagreement very gladly. And she strikes them and blinds them. She strikes them and blinds them. Now Tyresius goes on through all classical tradition, texts that predate of it to be a really central figure. He's always seeing things. He's always seeing into the future and seeing what the nature of things is like. And Ted Hughes, who we visited a bit last week, Ted Hughes translates the story of Tyresius and is a fantastic bit at the end where he has Jupiter consoling and comforting the newly blinded Tyresius. And he says to him, "Your blindness has opened your inner eye like a night scope. The secrets of the future, they are yours." And that kind of magic after suffering, the magic that can come about when you look inwards and look deeply, particularly when you look into the nature of your suffering and into that kind of darkness, that's a beautiful navigation of it. Your inner eye will open like a night scope and the secrets of the future are yours. I could say a lot more about that, but alas, no time. We're dancing through the Mahayana. And we're dancing on into the Vajrayana, which is the last great developed phase of Buddhism, or at least the last kind of acknowledged phase. Some people think that the current time is a new phase of Buddhism as Buddhism's come to the West. Personally, I think that's a little premature. I can see their point. But the Vajrayana, the Tantra, you've probably heard of Tantric, the Tantra, the Vajrayana, is the last phase. And Vajrayana means diamond thunderbolt way. You're deep into magic country already, with the diamond thunderbolt way. Reality as it just impacts only like a diamond thunderbolt and changes you. Changes you utterly, as the eights would say, all changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Terrible in the good sense of the word, and that's the Vajrayana. That kind of beauty that's born. So I'm going to particularly look and brief at Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan Vajrayana. Tibetan Buddhism, I don't have time to go into fully this evening. Again, fantastic series of talks on Tibetan Buddhism by Sangerajita. You can get on free Buddhist audio. All sorts of crazy, exotic, wonderful, magic stuff. In Tibetan Buddhism, it's basically the meeting of Indian culture. Indian developed practice that's got its roots in that Indian magic tradition that I talked about. Meeting, shamanistic, Bonpo religion, which is what's in Tibet before Buddhism arrives, this very, very colorful, exotic religion. And Buddhism then kind of adopts all its shapes and crazy figures and tropes and all the rest of it. And you get this meeting of it all into Tibetan Buddhism. And apart from Sangerajita's talks, there's a really great book by an amazing lady called Alexandra David Neal, called Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Or if you get really old copies called with magicians and mystics in Tibet. And it's really worth looking at that as well. Again, many strange, terrific tales of magic in Buddhist Tibet. But in Sangerajita's series of talks, he does a really interesting thing, which he looks at some of the magical rites in the Indian tradition, and then how they pass into Vajrayana, Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, and they become Tantric rites, these magical rites. So, I'll just run you through a few of these rites, okay? So, we have the rites of pacification and destruction. So, if you imagine in Indian village or Tibetan village, indeed, with some magic going on, rites of pacification and destruction, black magic. The kind of stuff that people might want to use against each other. The kind of stuff you might want to use in a presidential debate against the other person. But instead of killing, when this meets Buddhism, the Tantric practitioners take all this in and they transform it, they are the cauldron where it gets brewed and turned into something else. And they turn it into the rite of destruction that calms and destroys ignorance and confusion. So, again, you get this movement, the classic movement in Buddhism between samata, shamata practice, which is calming and laying the groundwork. And then the passing insight breaking through into something that Tibetans and the Tantric practitioners of Northern India take these rites and they turn it into something that destroys ignorance in themselves, destroys confusion in themselves about the way things are. And they use it in their practice in that way. The rite of fascination, the rite of fascination, otherwise known as a love potion. How do I get that girl to fall in love with me? How do I get that boy to fall in love with me? Put mushrooms in your cup and herbs in your cup and you drink and all will be well. All your problems will be solved through love. Now, you may have noticed that that doesn't always work out quite as intended. So, again, the Tantric practitioners take the rite of fascination and of conjuring love and they do this thing where it's like, the rite of fascination and Buddhist practice, charms the hearts of all living beings. And it makes reality, as the Buddha evokes reality, the most attractive object of all. That's what you want to set your heart upon. And what you set your heart upon, that you become. And that's the magic that they do with the rite of fascination. This recalls about the stuff we've touched on most weeks with the Platonists and the Neoplatonists swear. There's an idea that behind every object in the mundane world, there's an absolute beautiful object, a world of perfect form that can somehow be reached. And in a way, you're taking that sort of energy and trying to say, okay, okay, you want the beautiful, you want the beautiful as the ultimate, charm the heart of all beings, charm your own heart and move towards it in every single way, with every fiber of your being, every thought, every moment, you fascinate yourself with the possibilities. The rite of prospering, the rite of prospering wealth, riches, King Midas, what wish would you like? I'd like everything to turn to gold, everything I touch to turn to gold. The King Midas is treated in Ovid's metamorphosis quite without mercy in a way, you get this fantastic, story of Midas going around and touching everything foolishly, he touches his daughter, she turns to gold, he touches his food, it turns to gold, he touches his wine, it turns to gold slush in his mouth. He can't get love, he can't get nourishment. And when eventually the God, Apollo, takes it from him in pity, he doesn't really learn, he doesn't learn. So beware the rite of prospering in the mundane world, but in the Buddhist tantric diamond way, the rite of prospering is the mind's capacity to mature and develop. You can go beyond your inner Midas when it comes to what makes you wealthy and what makes you wise. And the last rite that I wanna look at in a bit of detail is the rite of protection. Again, you could imagine in a mundane sense, the rite of protection, protection from bullies, protection from local feudal lords, warlords, opposing armies, that kind of stuff. When Sanger actually talks about the rite of protection in the tantric world, in the tantric cosmic realm, he evokes something called the Dharani. And you might recognise that word from the Pucha that we do here sometimes. When we do the Pranya Paramita Mantra, its evoked as being the radiant, peerless mantra of the great Dharani. And Dharani is kind of like a spell of protection. Usually a bit longer than a mantra, but sometimes it is a mantra. And it's a touch of magic that you weave around. It's the transcendental kind of conjured into the air, as it were. The transformative element in your experience that can see beyond words and thoughts and concepts. It can see beyond even the kind of way you experience things, even spiritual experience. It can see beyond that to something that's not centered on you. And that mantra that we chant in the Pucha, it's Gati, Gati, Para Gati, Para Sanghati, Bodhi Swaha. Now you can't really translate it, but if you were translating it, it would be something like, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond all what an awakening. So in a way it's like a kind of evocation of reality and conceptual terms, but you chant it and you sing it. And the words don't quite mean that. And actually you chant it because it's the name and form and presence of a female buddha figure called Pranya Para Mehta, who holds all wisdom in her hands. And in a way it's kind of bonkers, but it's designed to be a bit bonkers, it's designed to bypass your rational stuff altogether. It's not interested in what your intelligence can do with it. It wants your emotional intelligence to engage with it. So you chant it, Gati, Gati, Para Gati, Para Sanghati, Bodhi Swaha, all what an awakening. And in that sense it's like a magic spell that's been woven around you. And it's a protection. It's a protection from seeing things foolishly and behaving foolishly. So that's the Dharini, and that's the rights of pacification and destruction, fascination, prospering and protection. And that's the end of our little dance through Buddhism and magic, through the three great phases. So let's head west, let's head back into the west and into the magical tradition in the west. Again, I was really looking forward to doing this, but because this is one of my favourite things, one of my favourite periods. So you might remember that a couple of weeks ago we looked at the whole business of desire, sexual morality, morality in general, all behaviour that's based on moving towards what you want because you like it, because it feels good, because you've built up a habit of that. And then everything that can go wrong when everybody tries to do that at the same time as if they are the centre of the world. Something gives eventually, reality comes up and hits you on the face, like a comedy floorboard. We stand on it and off it goes. So we looked at that in the context of St. Augustine. St. Augustine has been one of the key points where the Theistic Christian tradition takes the platonic idea of there being some kind of reality beyond this one, some kind of world of perfect form and perfect beauty beyond the mundane, and ascribes that to the relationship between the human body and the exalted body of God. And then the problems that start to come in when it comes to relating to your natural desires, which are all perfectly fine and valid. Now, Augustine partly gets that idea from the Neo-Platonists who are third century guys who rediscovered the works of Plato and this idea of another beautiful reality. And I think it gets a little bit twisted in Christianity, it goes wrong somewhere. Again, that's from a certain point of view. If you've got the time and the inclination, you could probably go and work with all that stuff. But it is quite hard work to make it into something positive. There are much easier routes to the positive moment with all this. The path of least resistance as the Zen people would say. And we're gonna fast forward from that time to early 16th century Italy, and to the city of Florence. Now, in the city of Florence in early 16th century, a guy called Lorenzo de Medici, he founds an academy. And this academy and the people who work through it go on to become known as the Renaissance Neo-Platonists. Again, some fantastic books on this. If you'd like to know more, you can ask me online or I'll try and post some resources. And Lorenzo de Medici has got lots of wealth and he is a patron of the arts and he decides to find this academy that's gonna promote a deepening of human learning and a raising up of human beings out of the dark ages. And he puts a route of the young man in charge of his academy called Marcellio Ficino. It's a bit of a hero of mine, of a certain kind. And Ficino's making the academy a place where you can study and rediscover the works of Aristotle and of Plato and of Plotinus and the early Neo-Platonists. And they're doing all that in the context of Christianity. But Ficino has a young apprentice, like August very Star Wars at this point, he's got a young apprentice called Giovanni Pico de la Mirandola. Pico de la Mirandola, could you imagine that was your name? Oh, we call him, that's called him Pico. Pico de la Mirandola. So Pico de la Mirandola eventually does kind of fall out with his master a little bit and goes his own way. But Mirandola is a bit of a genius and one of the areas that he promotes through his own study of Aristotle and some of the greats that have gone before him, including figures like Roger Bacon in 13th century England. One of the things that he promotes is something called natural magic. And I want to look at natural magic as a basis for looking at meditation and a basis for the kind of work that goes on in Buddhist practice. So here's a definition from Pico de la Mirandola of natural magic. Natural magic is a science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces and their effect on each other. And on their natural dependence. What the human magician produces through art, nature produces naturally by producing man. So Pico de la Mirandola. Natural magic is a science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces and their effect on each other. And on their natural dependence. What the human magician produces through art, nature produces naturally by producing man. So hope that's all clear. I shall read a bit more. Let's read a bit more Pico de la Mirandola. He wrote a really famous text to a bunch of church fathers called "An Eration on the Dignity of Man". This is free, you can get it online. I'll put the link up. And this is what he goes on to see about natural magic. And again, he's gone back and looked at all the pagan traditions and all the non-Christian traditions. And he's attempting to bring it into the Christian fold, but he doesn't want to compromise his intellect. And he doesn't want to make fools of people. But he's also got to make sure that he doesn't stray too far because then the church fathers will object. So this is his great text where he writes to the church fathers and tries to seldom the idea of magic as a valid part of his tradition. So he says natural magic, filled as it is with mysteries, embraces the most profound contemplation of the deepest secrets of things. And finally, the knowledge of the whole of nature. This beneficent magic, in calling forth as it were from their hiding places into the light, the powers which the largest of God has sewn and planted in the world, does not itself work, Miracles, so much as sedulously served nature as she works her wonders. Scrutinizing with greater penetration, that harmony of the universe, which the Greeks with greater atness of terms called sympathya and grasping the mutual affinity of things. She applies to each thing, those inducements most suited to its nature. Thus, it draws forth into public notice the miracles which lie hidden in the recesses of the world, in the womb of nature, in the storehouses and secret vaults of God, as though she herself were their artificer, as the farmer weds his elms to the vines, so the Magus or Magus unites earth to heaven. That is the lower order to the endowments and powers of the higher. It's very interesting stuff because he's looking into the mysteries of things and he's finding this beautiful process in nature that seems to reveal hidden wonders and all the magic that you kind of need, but he's got a problem. He's coming into tradition that says no, no, no, there's something beyond all that. He can't actually see any evidence of anything beyond all that, so he says, it kind of looks as if it's just nature doing its stuff, but it can possibly be, can it? So we have to assume that there's the largest of God hidden behind the scenes. He's writing to Orthodox Church Fathers and he makes this distinction, but you get the sense with Pico that he doesn't quite believe it all the time. And he wasn't the only one to notice this. In fact, Pico de Limorandela got into really hot bother from the Christian authorities in Rome and he had to escape the Paris because he was definitely flirting with stuff that really upsets the apple cart when it comes to religion with God. You can't have both, you can't exalt nature in that kind of way and then have recourse to God. It doesn't quite hold together. Now, he got into trouble for it, but actually the work he did from the basis of a lot of the art and culture that flowered through the Renaissance and has come down to us now, Michelangelo, Leonardo, all the great artists who came to the academy and were influenced by him. In a way, it's great that his text has got the word dignity in it. Dignity is a sometimes mixed concept, but it's a real human dignity. The arts is a kind of flowering of human dignity. So, Pico is a bit caught between two poles, nature and reality. And nature and reality is an old chestnut in philosophical terms. If you look at any area of human life through history, you eventually come up against a fight between nature and reality. There's an argument going on. There's even a war going on between nature and reality in most philosophical traditions. It's something people grapple with. It's nature different from reality. How is it the same? How is it different from reality? If you look at poetry, if you look at the arts, Wordsworth and Blake, for instance, had a whole barn, either whole lifelong about how nature and reality related to each other. If you look at religious and secular philosophy, it's one of the fundamental questions that people keep turning over. And of course, it doesn't just happen in ideas. People have fought wars over the skin of stuff about definitions of the nature of reality. Different Christian traditions who disagreed about this question have got into real difficulty with each other. I was thinking earlier, it's slightly tangential, but I heard that a news item today about it would be Senator who'd said something that seemed a bit unwise about rape. Something in the area of, even though he was recognizing that rape was a horrible thing, he was saying somehow the creation of life that comes through that must be God's will. Of course, the world's up in arms about this and in some ways so it should be. But I was thinking about this and I thought, well, if you want to understand how somebody gets there, this is the area, this is the area. This is why this stuff's important. It's not abstract and divorced from normal life just because it's rooted in history. Now, ultimately, from a Buddhist perspective, this is a false dichotomy. Buddhism goes for the middle way. And the middle way doesn't mean you steed a path in between. It means you steed a path over and above. It just doesn't accept the terms of the proposition. It says, no, no, no. You're seeing the whole thing wrong. You don't have to reconcile nature and reality as if they're opposing. You don't have to justify one or the other. So I want to explore this with the help of a guy who I find inspiring. He's a professor, again, sadly, probably much neglected these days, called Edgar Wind. And he wrote a famous book in its time called "Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance," where he looked at the Neoplatonists, and he looked at Pico de la Mirandale and Marcellio Ficino. And he said, what were they trying to get at? And why is it still important to us? Why is it still important to us? So here's what Edgar Wind says about Pico de la Mirandale's definition of natural magic. So remember, natural magic is a science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces and their effect on each other and on their natural dependence. What the human magician produces through art, nature produces naturally by producing man. And this is what Edgar Wind says. This explains why magic is a moral force. It makes man recognizing himself, the forces of nature, and in nature, the model of his own force. By inserting his magical art into nature, he can release forces that are greater than his own. It's slightly erotic. This was masculine erotic image. But you insert your art into nature, and you release forces that are greater than your own. And Edgar Wind's saying, this is a moral thing. This is a moral action. So magic in Pico de la Mirandale's sense is seen as an ethical process. What you do with your mind matters. What you do with your thoughts matter. Because when you see things in a certain way, when you perceive the world in a certain way, you make a world that you take part in through thought and through action. We looked at this last week with the dhammapada. The world is made up of mind. It's led by mind. It's guided and shaped by mind. It's the very start of the Buddha's suttas. That's what the Buddha sees. As soon as he gains enlightenment, it's that you're making this up as you go along. I'm making this up as a cool thing. But you're all making this up as we go along. So what you do with your mind really matters. And it's an ethical issue. And the flip side of that is it's also an opportunity. That's why it's a magical art. It's what we did in meditation earlier. You have a choice. Each moment. Things arise in your experience. You've set up the arising of them in the past with the way you've seen the world and the way you've habituated yourself to behave. So you take an information through your senses. You have your habitual feelings that arise. You can't really do much about them at this point. But if you can slow the process down, you can start to see the possibilities for change. It's pretty to summit pada, basic Buddhist doctrine. Things arise in dependence upon conditions. And when those conditions are no longer there, they pass away. And so it is for you. So it is in your mind and with the world that you make. It's actions and consequences as they play out in your inner world and as they play out in the outer world and really looking to see how those two things are not unrelated. It's not always easier to see. We explored this last week looking at karma. Preteacher summit pada on the level of karma, on the level of human behavior, is sometimes complex. It's particularly complex when you look at it through life and through dying and through death. But nonetheless, you can look and see and observe. How does what I do with my mind affect the world that I perceive? How does my behavior set me up again from another experience that rolls on and rolls on and rolls on? And then, once you've done that, once you look at it, how can I slow all this down? How can I sit still and quiet and notice the arising of things? And when I notice the arising of things, how can I open up the kind of space with mindfulness that allows me not to just repeat the same habit? In a way, you're kind of reprogramming yourself. If magic doesn't work as a metaphor, well, computer science, you're reprogramming yourself. Computers are magic. iPads are magic. I have no idea how an iPad works. I touch it and light comes out of it and I can talk to people. And my mom is in the iPad sometimes. She lives in Scotland. I mean, it's magic. I think it was Azimaphosan who said, at a certain point, there are certain kinds of technology that become so removed from your normal experience of understanding that they're akin to magic. In terms of seeing practice and meditation as magic, what we have to see is that every moment in our mind, every day, we have the opportunity to make that kind of conscious intervention, to insert our magical art into the nature of things and release forces that are greater than our own. I would say that it makes sense to equate this with meditation because meditation is the supremely accessible way of trying to enter into reality, consciously, to some degree or other. You try and enter into reality and try and be true to nature at the same time. So if you want to see why they're not different, you have to go and do something. Buddhism is not interested in an abstract path. Buddhism is not even interested in Buddhism. It's only interested in what is the case. W.H. Auden, the English poet, once said, "Nothing is beautiful, not even in poetry, if it's not the case." And the Buddha is only interested in what is the case. So you've got a chance when you meditate, all you need to do is sit down and, for goodness sake, it was nothing special. And look into the nature of reality and find your own nature. And again, we looked at this last week. We looked at it in meditation this evening. We are not different because we take part in the same kind of nature. We're not different from stars because we take part in the same kind of nature. Everything is subject to perteacher summit, Pada. All things arise. All things pass away. I arise. I pass away. We arise. We pass away. And meditation is the kind of ground zero where you sit down, and you sit with that, and you look, and you see what can be observed, and what can be known, and how. In Pico de la Miranda'l's terms, and in Edgar Wind's terms, mindfulness is what you insert between the experience of the world you've made and the experience of the world you're about to make by responding to it and by setting things in motion again. Let's do it now. Let's do a little exercise. Pretend like we're going to meditate. [LAUGHTER] Just for a couple of minutes. Just for a couple of minutes. OK? So close your eyes. You just picture yourself as if you're like a bundle of grass or a bundle of wheat, a sheaf, tied, and standing there. You're a bundle of things you're made up of a bundle of things. And then someone comes along and just cuts the tie. And then she falls apart, just let go. So we sit still with that sense. Feel the breath moving through us with that sense. We try and stay open to that sense, that letting go. The bundle falls, and it's OK. We slow down. And we notice the space that's there in awareness, the space of mindfulness itself. And we continue to breathe, and we bring in an awareness of kindness, and this is how we want to respond to all things that arise in our experience. The hand that opens rather than the hand that's closed. And in small ways, and in quiet ways, and in subtle ways, we work on ourselves as if by magic. We change ourselves, and we change the world. And the bundle doesn't have to hold, it can fall apart, it can let go into that kind of spaciousness, and that kind of change. Just opening your eyes, and your own time. The first part of that little exercise is from an order member called the Santa. The Santa is a great guy, and he's just come back from a three year retreat, which he was doing in France. And he's very fond of that little exercise. And one of the things he talks about is trying to be wary of having projects all the time that show up your sense of yourself. Even good projects, even Buddhist projects. We're looking all the time to show up our sense of ourselves, our whole being is bent upon it, like sowed on upon the one ring. I didn't actually write that, it just came. And the Santa is very good, just that image, just that little exercise. He suggests that you do it several times a day. You're sitting at your desk, and close your eyes for a minute. Stop. There's the bundle of wheat, the bundle of grass. The whole thing fall. Breathe. Get on with your day. He says, trying to give 10% of your energy, and your awareness to that kind of sense of things as you're doing everything else. Whenever you notice you've lost track of it, come back to it. Suttly, subtly, subtly, it works on you. Drop by drop by drop. So I think this stuff is actually quite, quite mundane, and we were quite profound. It's like a shot at radical transformation. You don't have to sell a product. The product is not radical transformation, it's just a process. And you've got a real shot at it. And that is natural magic. It's the opportunity that you can take to decide to intervene in your own process in that kind of way, and to effect change in the world in that kind of way. A man into a woman, a girl into a river, a boy into a star. In all of its terms, those kind of magical transformations, you get a feel for that. You get a feel for why that literature works. It works on the heart when you read it, 'cause you recognize something. The longing, come back to Bodhi Chitta earlier on, the longing of the Bodhi Snapper. The all beings will attain what it's possible for all beings to attain. Transformation has to follow, and it's bound up with this kind of magical art that I've been talking about. There's one thing you have to be careful of. And maybe this goes back to the Mahayana's warning to the Hina Yana. When you're doing this work at your desk, as you, as a project that you've taken on, when you're sitting in your meditation, and all those other people that are knowing you by doing what they're doing, if they're meditation, or not, you have to be careful that you don't decide, oh, all I need to do is be mindful and look and observe in some sort of analytical way. And I will be doing the observing, and I will be observing the thing that's to be observed. You've already strayed from the path, my friends, if that's what's happening. You have to be careful with that. So, come back to Edgar Wind's thing. You insert magical acts into nature, and you release a force that's greater than your own. I don't think you're just releasing a kind of dry mindfulness, or a dry analytical observation. There's another component to it. We act on our own mind. We look at the universe, we look, and we observe, and we come to note more deeply. And then, as we saw in the meditation this evening, something else arises. And I think what arises is kindness. It's impossible to look and see properly, if you're not absolutely rooted and anchored in a sense of kindness, in a sense of empathy. Because actually, what you're trying to look and see is that there is no distinct me, as opposed to you, in a way that's ultimately meaningful. It's useful to get yourself through the day. You know, you're gonna go home to your house tonight, and you're gonna get into your bed. I'm gonna do the same. And that's provisioning the useful on a psychological everyday level, completely fine. But what you're trying to see is that that is not ultimately meaningful. So kindness comes in when you do that, and it comes in as a full part of the bargain. It's not optional. It's not optional. And stock doctrines that you might learn as a Buddhist, then turn into something different. The flower is enchantments in your heart. They're protective daronese, that's what they become. Magic spells that unbind you the way the sheath of wheat is unbound. Nirvana's quite often compared to an unbinding of yourself. Very beautiful image. It wakes us up. Kindness, that kind of love and deep empathy wakes us up in ways that we've long imagined. Seats to do harm, learn to do good, purify the heart. That becomes a mantra. That becomes a magic spell of protection. And it's very, very good to try and carry that through your days. As you try to align yourself with the nature of reality in this way, nature and reality. Notice two distinct things. You're taking part in meditation as natural magic, and you're tapping in beyond words to something that's the most beautiful, deep thing that you can. And it's the simplest thing. The Buddha just sits down under a tree, and he remembers what it was to sit down under a tree as a little boy. He has this experience of remembering, well, once I sat down under a tree, and all I did was breathe. And he remembers that, and he sits down under a tree, and he sits there and breathes and looks into his experience. And when he looks, and when he sees, he's just looking, and he's just seeing, but then something else emerges, and there's this incredible blossoming. Again, we did those readings last week of the Buddha, and there's a vision of the lotuses. He looks out over the whole world, and he sees human beings as lotus blossoms, and some of the lotus blossoms are stuck in the mud, and some of them are managing just to emerge, and push up through the mud, and some of them are rising up through the water, and some of them have broken the surface, and they're flowing into the sun. And he thinks, "Yep, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to pass this on to other people." And that's the kind of magical blossoming. It's transformative empathy, you could say. Meta that we were looking at earlier this evening. Meta is transformative empathy. And the word for compassion, quite often the Buddhist tradition talks about wisdom and compassion as the two wings of the insight experience. The word for compassion is anu kampa. An anu kampa means something like shaking with, vibrating with, resonating, or trembling with. Very beautiful word. The Buddha resonates with the whole of reality, when he sees what things are like, and he trembles with you, thoroughly and deeply empathetically trembles with you. And his vision is completed by love at that point, and it's the most natural thing. And it's the most natural thing because it's possible for any human being. So one last magical episode to finish off. Just before the Buddha gains enlightenment, there's a very famous thing where Mara, who's the kind of mischief maker, comes to challenge the Buddha and say, "What right do you have to sit here on the diamond throne at the center of the universe?" And the Buddha doesn't say anything. He just reaches down and touches the air. You can see it on the shrine, the statue of the Buddha reaching down and touching the air. There are different accounts of this, but in the classic account, the Earth goddess Drata comes up out of the Earth and says, "This is fine. What he's doing has always been done, and it's completely fine." In other versions, the Earth roars, so it's completely fine. But I like it when the Earth goddess comes up. Buddhism is the Earth. In that way, it's completely Earth. The way that we are when we sit in meditation, we're in touch with the Earth. We're in touch with our bodies. Our bodies are the same nature as the Earth. They're the same nature as all the elements, and it's the most natural thing. Nature doesn't reflect some unearthly hidden reality or will somewhere else. This is religion without God. It's not religion of saints and angels and gods. It's as fascinating as they can all be. Nature is just fine as it is. And we're part of it in a very unromantic way. We're not elevating it into some sort of heightened, fanciful thing. It's just the case. But the marvelous, the magical element, is there for us at any moment. It's just worth carrying that around with you as you leave tonight and as you go home to your normal lives. The marvelous is just there. Natural magic. The magical art is yours. And that's the kind of training you're taking on. And that's what meditation practice and Buddhist practice generally is. Nature doesn't just produce human beings. It produces Buddhas. That's what the Earth goddess is saying. This is not against nature in any way. You're becoming fully part of something. So you've got mindfulness and love fused in you, working on the world through you. And it's the only enchantment you need in a religion without God. And that's why I wanted to finish with this subject and this series. Because religion without God has got a challenging thing. There's no easy comfort in it. You really have to make something of yourself and of the world you find yourself in and of your community, hopefully a community of values to get something out of it. But the only enchantment you need is mindfulness and love fused and working through you on the world. And the Buddha I would see as the master of enchantments. Somebody you can readily apprentice yourself to. Until you're ready. Until you're ready. Buddha is shot through with love and he shows the way, one of the traditional epithets of the Buddha is the shore of the way. It's like pointing to the horizon and saying, "There. It's not another world. It's not somewhere else. It's there. Go there. And this is how you go." And it's beautiful and it's natural and it's wonderful and it's magical and it's mysterious. The mysteriousness of the horizon where there's no meaningful separation anymore between self and other, between self and world, between you and me and between us and the Buddha. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhustaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [Music] [Music]
