(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 what I've got written here actually is the blurb that Satya Leela's written to introduce this. I've just sort of looked at it on the website today to see what this term is about this theme and this evening. And she says quite rightly that one of the defining characteristics of Sri Ratna, our order and community is our practice of Sanga and the spiritual friendship, Kalyanamitrata, which would have famously described as being the whole of the spiritual life. And she says sometimes this can seem really obvious, it's quite easy, it's just about being friendly, being together kind of forming relationships. And sometimes it's really baffling. It's like how on earth is this supposed to lead me to wisdom to insight, what are we really doing here? And she says, well, you just have to try it and see in a way which is true. So that's what we're doing. Really this theme for this season came out of us talking on the team and saying, well actually Monday nights is a lot, just it is Sanga night. There's often things we need to put into the program. We need to inaugurate our new president. We need to have a Metro ceremony, we need to have, you know, these are things about our Sanga and this is the place where that happens at the Buddhist sector is on a Monday night. So we need it to be a space for that and then we could kind of do more with that. We could do more that's about being Sanga. So I'm hoping we will have more talks this term on things to do with Sanga. But we've also got evenings that are about sort of doing things together. So it's a chanting evening, we'll have a writing evening, we'll have just different sorts of ways of being together for days to explore. So as well as all the other events, Sachali has been telling you about, you know, I do invite you to just come along on a Monday, whatever's going on and just try that out and see what that's like really. But yes, this evening it says Sanga is much more than just a nice friendly bunch of folk to hang out with. It can be a radical insight practice. This term will be exploring how. Which one of them all me introduces the theme. So I was on retreat last week and time to time, I said, I really should be writing this talk. I'm supposed to be saying how, you know, I've got this right up and that's what I'm supposed to be talking about. So anyway, I didn't really, I did kind of come up with a structure for it last week, but then I read it sort of for a talk this afternoon. So we'll see. There is like lots of talks I could give in a way. There's lots of talks I'd like to give on Sanga and maybe I will do some more of them in the weeks to come. You know, I would like to do a whole evening on why Kalyanumikrata, spiritual friendship, is the whole of the spiritual life. What sort of sense can we make of that? I'd like to be talking to about how it isn't just about a nice friendly group of people to hang out with. It is, you know, something much more than that. It's something much more individual than that sounds. It's not about being part of a group, sort of joining up with something. It's something much more challenging and radical than that really, ultimately or ideally. That this is a bit more of a broad thing. It's not the most practical of talks. I've got a feeling you're still going to be really baffled. You're still going to go away again. So how is us chanting together going to lead to insight? Or, you know, I'm not sure it's really kind of addressing those questions. But I just thought I'd just think about how Sanga is necessary for us at sort of the various stages of our spiritual life and our spiritual practice. So I'll kind of work my way into how it's a radical insight practice, eventually starting a bit further but back from that in a way. Yeah. But yeah, I do think we really do need Sanga, but all sorts of different levels, really. We do actually have a need to belong, most of us, in some way, which is perhaps more about group membership, this other talk I'm not giving tonight. But it is like we've all got kind of feelers out all the time, just looking for a kind of good match with people that sort of share our values or see things like we do or that are helpful for us. And so if we find here, in Sanga here, people who are a fairly good match, it's natural that we will just want to hang out and that will be a kind of comfortable place for us to be. If it seems like the best fit of sort of people we can find, I think that's quite natural. And it does matter who we hang out with. It does matter where we decide to belong, where we put ourselves, who we're going to concern to align ourselves with. We're often saying the Dharma is caught, not taught. So you need to sort of hang around people who are going to be catching the things you want to catch from them. I suppose you're going to catch the Dharma. And so in a way, there is this sort of just hanging out with folk with a nice friendly bunch of people. But that does sort of blend into an experience which does change us as we catch the Dharma from each other. That does change us, so, you know, be careful. It's a bit like you can't really see where that dividing line comes. You can slip in perceptibly from hanging out with people who are nice to actually being changed by that experience. So it's all kind of all a continuum. Yes, I do believe Sangha really can be or is a really radical insight practice. And so I said I'm going to work into that. So I thought I'd just go through, again, our system of practice, those of you who've been coming for a while on Mondays will be familiar with this hopefully because we can seem to keep on about it. Our system of meditation, our system, the stages of the spiritual path. And just look at sort of where Sangha comes into all of those. So there you go. [INAUDIBLE] So we have these four aspects. They're actually just sort of four aspects of the awakening mind. They're four things that do develop or happen as your mind becomes more refined. Your consciousness becomes more refined. You can look at them as sort of mandalers, complementary things. In a way, you need all of them for any of them to happen. It's not like they're really sort of separate stages. I can certainly-- if I think of any moments when I think I might have a glimpse of getting somewhere, I have my practice really being effective. I probably could look at them and say, oh, yeah, I can see why that's got integration in hand, positive emotion, and spiritual depth, and spiritual rebirth. So it's not really a sort of linear system. But for the purposes of the talk, I'm going to go through it sort of in order. I'm going to talk about each of these in term as sort of stages on the path in the process of progression. So starting with integration is the first step. So this is about being able to sort of gather our energies together so we can focus. It's about developing wholeness. It's sort of sense that-- well, I certainly have. I don't know about you, that there's a lot of sense in me who all want different things. They're all heading off in different directions at different times. Being able to kind of rope them in a bit more and kind of get them heading where I ought to go, that's kind of what I think of integration as being about, so that I can kind of direct my energies and focus a bit more, and have some sort of continuity of purpose. Being able to-- it's about being able to commit ourselves really being whole-hearted enough to be able to do something, whether it's committing ourselves to doing the mindfulness of breathing for the next 10 minutes, or whether it's waiting out to really commit our whole lives to going to a refuge, going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. You need to sort of have enough of you behind that to be able to do whatever it is you're setting up to do. If it's going down to the shop, you need to not get diverted all the way. If you're going to do that successfully. So you need to be able to kind of all head in the same direction. So, classically, we develop this sense of integration through meditation, particularly the mindfulness of breathing is always mentioned. So it's that sense that you can actually get yourself to kind of all come together onto something like the brain. When you go off, when you kind of train yourself, you get to focus more, be more fully behind something more whole-hearted. Ethical practice certainly helps as well. It brings a certain sort of clarity and simplicity to your decisions in life. And I certainly think we need Sangha. We need relationships. We need friendship to help us with this. To start with, we do need teaching. We need instructions. If you can imagine, there wasn't nobody's center to come to at all anywhere to learn to meditate. Maybe you could read about it in a book, but there isn't a sense still learning from somebody. You learn from communication with people who have practiced already. That's really what you need to get started at all. It's really crucial. There are other people around who have done a little bit more practice than you that can teach you and help you. And I think we do. We learn much more in communication with each other. It's this kind of catching the Dharma thing again, really. I think that's really important. But more and more, I'm beginning to think that integration is not so much about actually resolving in a conflict, but about knowing all my different sounds better, being more aware of them, just knowing myself well enough to know what sorts of things I tend to do and what sorts of circumstances. I've got a bit more chance of being able to set circumstances up in a helpful way or kind of direct things a bit differently. A little bit more chance of kind of just directing. And for that, I think we do need other people to get to know ourselves, really. I think if I set up on a mountainside by the south of months on end, I've learned certain sorts of things about myself, but there are other things I only learned by bumping up against other people in a way. It's only by, often, my differences with other people, but I find out what I really like. So often, it's uncomfortable, it's often disagreement. But also, sometimes I can just see that other people are different from me in a way I would like to be more like that. Now, I've been thinking recently of a couple of friends here. I can just see that they're not so sort of defending. They're a bit softer around things. They don't come at things in quite a hard-edged way that I sometimes do. And I come at things like, oh, I'd like to be more like that. I don't really want to be quite so kind of tight around this thing that I'm talking about. Just, yeah, I can even learn that by other people's examples. So, there's that. And I think we do also just need a lot of help with this continued-to-purpose with remembering what we're trying to do, because we tend to be quite scattered a lot of the time. We need to remind us, and mark us in our lives, just as in the mindfulness of breathing. It does help, there's a bell now, and again, that can be good to meet you. Oh, yes, I was supposed to be meditating. It's sort of like, we need things to remind us what we're trying to do with our lives if we're trying to practice. So, we need a class to come to. A friend who thinks that is trying to do the same thing as we do, that we can have a conversation with somebody else who knows what it's all about, that we're trying to do, or a treat to go on, where we can get away from all the distractions of our lives. And it's just those sort of things that reset, reset my direction. And so, we need a Sanger for kind of being part of all that, we need to kind of provide those things, those opportunities, those reminders, but not. And yeah, we need to just put ourselves under the influence of other people, doing what it is we want to do. What's Sanger and integration? So, the next stage of our path is positive emotion. So, positive emotions like met our love, generosity, compassion, delight in other people's success and joy, equanimity, faith, gratitude and appreciation. All those nice, warm, positive, fluffy heart feelings. Actually, lots of them aren't fluffy at all, they can be pretty erratically definite at times. And faith in this context, it's not a sort of blind belief, it's something which is sort of tested in our experience. A confidence, a trust that comes from our experience of trying out practice and seeing what happens. So, again, ethical practice is really important, really essential. Clear conscience gives you a happy mind, positive mind that can relax and expand. And meditation is really important. Classically, we met a partner in this stage in the systematisation, which obviously is very directly about developing positive emotion and met all. But again, I think we just really, really need other people. In some of the same ways, I said already, we need that help, we need inspiration. We need people to teach us, but we need people to set an example as well. We need other people that we can see sort of working out how to apply the principles of spiritual life, who can inspire us and kind of, we can catch how you do it from. So it can be, you know, hearing a talk that you find really inspiring, that makes you just kind of go, "Oh, yes, I really want to do that." It can be just really watching other people kind of grapple with things in their lives, things that are really difficult and kind of finding a positive creative way through that can be really inspiring. It can just be seeing somebody who's on a bit of a role. There's a time earlier this year, or perhaps at the end of last year, there was a time, there's actually a little of us. I was just really inspired by this kind of positive energy that was coming from. It's just really kind of clearly flowing. "Oh, that's really good. That's a good one to go." Different people, different sort of ways, different times. We need that inspiration. And I think we can gain a lot of faith again, a lot of shred-hard confidence from seeing the practices working for other people, if we're sort of feeling a bit kind of grungy and doubtful ourselves. You can see other people doing all right. And I think as you develop spiritual friendships, other people can kind of hold a confidence in you, in me, when I'm doubtful. Sometimes other people continue to treat me seriously and assume that I'm practicing at all. And if I'm not really sure that I am, that can really help. I've been very grateful lots of times for other people's confidence in me, people who are more experienced, particularly. They just sort of reflect me back in a way that lets me sort of see, "Oh, yeah, okay, I'm still kind of on tracking, but it doesn't quite feel like it at the moment." That's a reminder. And there's just a sense of other people's positivity, positive emotion sort of rubbing off in a way. You just hang around with positive people. It's hard to keep really gloomy. Actually, it does help, just being with positive people. I was thinking about the new veterans. We're going to welcome next week as our president next Monday evening. A couple of times I've met up with him, and I've just come away feeling quite sort of bouncy and kind of subtly uplifted. Just in quite a nice sort of easy way. And it's hard to sort of say what that's about. I mean, I don't know that there's anything terribly mystical going on. Perhaps there is. But he's confident in his practice. He's been practicing for 40 years or something, and he's just quite sort of easy with that. It's not a kind of angst thing for him. And something of that just rubs off. And he takes me seriously. I was saying to John the factory when I saw her after him recently, "Oh, he's just like he treats me as a grown-up, and so I kind of feel like one." In a kind of spiritual sense. It's sort of like, oh, yeah, that just kind of, you know, he just talks quite easily, and it's just something about that that kind of leaves me feeling better. Then we also need to be in a relationship. We need friends. Sort of as recipients of all our positive emotion. It would be a bit hard just developing positive emotion in the abstract. And also ultimately, of course, we want to feel quite a lot of sleep full of metaphor for the whole universe. So it's kind of easier to start with you best, frankly, the second stage of the metaphor, isn't it? That sort of makes it a bit more sense. And in itself, that can be quite challenging. I was remembering the time that I was on retreat, and much Nandi was doing my meditation reviews, and we were doing a lot of met at Wagner, and much idea. I was just sort of developing a friendship in a way. But I started contacting a lot of metta for her, very, very strongly, in a way that I was sort of slightly embarrassed about. I wasn't really quite sure it was all right to feel quite that strongly. It was sort of quite... Oh, is that okay? I'm not sharing so much your heart into what you like with it, or something like that. It was quite sort of easy. But it's like you kind of need a context that can hold those strong feelings. You know, it's kind of not like that at work, because it's not kind of that easy to be able to develop really strong positive emotions. So I think we do need a... Yeah, for the particular... We need the same gift to give us the container for that, in a way. Okay, so it's Sangha and positive emotion. Sure, there's more, but that's a little run through some of that. So then there's what we call spiritual death, which is really about letting go of what holds us back. All our sort of unhelpful old habits and limiting ways of being in views, ultimately letting go of our whole sense of ourselves as being separate and fixed and sort of small and limited, so that we're able to, in a spiritual river, so we're all very tied up with each other, so we're able to kind of open up into a much bigger way of being into our full potential. Yeah, so again, you know, we do need to be integrated for this. We need enough of us collected and present for this to be able to happen, to be able to really see in meditation, for instance, the flow of our experience and see that that does keep changing, although it's not really fixed and always the same. Just enough awareness to really see what's going on with ourselves at the time, actually, just to really follow what's going on. And we need a lot of positive emotion. It can be scary. We're talking about moving into a really radically different way of being with ourselves and really just letting go of everything we can rest our security on about what we think we understand at ourselves in the universe. So you need a lot of positive emotion to hold that. And I think you do really need friends. You really need friends to help you feel sort of supported and positive enough to be able to move into that. On our sort of ongoing, you know, on my level, if you'd like, I think practicing this is a lot about looking at my views and letting go of all views. So views are all our kind of ideas and constructs in ways we see the world, really, all the time. We're making sense of the kind of sensory data we get by kind of having an explanation. You know, I've decided this is a table because it's always been a table. I don't have to keep making the effort to work out that there's a kind of thing that's kind of this hardness and this size and this color and this texture. And it has these such properties and things with it to kind of know what I can do with that. I can kind of look at it and go, "Yeah, that's a table. It's probably going to be fun to put my papers on because that's what always happens." So we do need to kind of have a view of this here as being a table to be able to kind of operate in the world. And that's the sort of way we make sense of our world and operate where we're effective. But it's sort of not ultimately the truth either that this is a table and will always be a table in quite such a fixed, definite way as I think it is. And we tend to just sit sort of trapped in these ways of seeing things. It's sort of limits our experience of the mystery of life. And we're limited by that. So we have views about everything really. We have views about the world, about how things are, about how other people are. And we have loads of views about ourselves. And most of them are what Buddhism calls "wrong" views. And they're wrong because they are limited and limiting because they're partial. They're often sort of generalizations that we kind of extend further than is really warranted by the evidence we've got. Or just things we've kind of learned when we're very young that don't really apply to ourselves anymore. It's fair enough to know this is a table, but not some of the beliefs I have about myself. They don't really have to still apply in a helpful way. So yeah, you get a sort of partial picture sort of generalized, inaccurate picture of the world in your views. And we tend to hang on to them really tightly. It's just like that is how it has to continue to be somehow. That's sort of where we hold our security. And we do need the input friends who aren't in quite the same framework of seeing the world as we are to be able to get out about. Meditation helps. Meditation sort of softens our sense of us being separate and fixed and sort of attenuates that kind of... This is how it all is. It lets you kind of be able to look at things differently. But I think you also do really need friends to come in and go, "No, I can't quite see why you see that like that." And you need to know them. They need to know you to see. And you need to trust each other enough for you to be able to actually listen to what they're saying. You need to be able to kind of be receptive to them coming from somewhere else. So I'm giving you a couple of examples that might make a bit more sense of this. One's one I've quoted quite a lot in talks, so you might have liked it at all. It's many years ago when I was wanting to be ordained, which was quite a long process as it usually is, and getting to know the woman who eventually did all day meet at the diary. And I used to write to her regularly. And there was one letter where I was kind of grappling with something. And I was saying, "I'm just not a carer." And I do have this view that I'm not really altruistic. I don't really want to respond to the world suffering in the charitable sorts of ways I see other people do somehow. So I'm sort of carrying around this, "Oh, I'm not caring. I'm not altruistic." It causes me a bit of suffering, actually, because sort of when it keeps running. And she wrote back and said, "Well, is that really true?" She did it very sort of carefully and tentatively. She said, "I hear reports of you being caring to your friends. I'm sure you are with your mother, with your, as an author to your children and your work, with your patients. Is that really true?" And she said, "Could you really be a tender, hearted being with a strong stroke, a streak of poetry in you?" And so it was like, it was a really nice thing she was saying, and I really kind of wanted to hear that, but and it felt really shattering. It was like, you know, I was so sure. I was this sort of person. And she'd seen through that kind of shell and go, "No, actually, I can see something else going on." And it was like, "Oh, she's seen. Oh, perhaps there's a point in me keeping up to kind of pretense anymore." And it was like a kind of soften into something that was more caring and more kind of open from that. But yeah, but there was also a sense of something shattering around it. It was quite, it was very strong at all. Another one that's more current for me, so I think how much sense I can make of it because it's more recent or more ongoing. I have this strong, wrong view about myself that if I express how I really feel, I'll be rejected. If I say what I think, if I say what I want, especially, then there'll be something that matters with that, and I'll be kind of cut off from people through it. So recently, I had something where I said something about how I felt and what I wanted, and I didn't get back quite the response I wanted. And from that, I just went into this whole state, really, where I was just re-running this whole thing about how that means that they are trying to stop me saying anything, and they didn't like what I said, and they're trying to set things up like this. And I could kind of see myself doing it, and I'd keep sort of stopping thinking, is that true? And I'd either get no, or I don't know yet till I've talked to them. But it still kind of kept going round again, nevertheless, different sort of variations of it. So it's like a really painful view. It was painful kind of running those stories. But it was also painful, whenever it was challenged. So when I talked to people who'd say two or three different friends did, well, I don't see why you're seeing it like that. That's not what's going on. I kind of go, "Oh, that actually must be!" Because I know it is, because that's how, you know, this is kind of real kind of like, "Oh, but I don't, that doesn't fit!" And my whole picture of what's happening, if you say it's different than that. And I was really, really painful too, really, really sort of uncomfortable. It's like we hang on so hard even to the things that are painful, because that's how we think the world is and how we are, and it's really hard to sort of shift it. It's only really eventually when Karina Barpey said, "That's the wrong view." I kind of went, "Oh, that's going on!" "Oh, come on, is that all?" And then that whole thing I do there, and that thing I'm getting angry about, and they're all being talked about. It's all because I keep running with this, that everything else is kind of coming from her. I could say thank you to her. That's a shame! Anyway, so yeah, you need French. You need people outside your own views, people with their own different wrong views that you might help them with. So, spiritual rebirth. So, all this practice of ethics and meditation and developing integration and positive emotion, it does soften us up. It refines our consciousness so that we can start to soften and let go of our views. And eventually, this starts to let something else come through, something different come into play. Except it's not a something that all gets very difficult to talk about. It's not actually a thing, it's a sort of a different way, different means of development, a different unfolding of our consciousness, a different order of conditionality, a different way in which things are going on. So, it's like a non-egoistic stream of energy manifesting through us for the good of the world. It's something bigger than our limited little selves that we normally keep ourselves bound in coming through. But yeah, it's not really a something. So, we can only really allude to it poetically as being something like a stream of energy or something like something. In a way, we get more of a suggestion of it from images and symbols. You know, sometimes you might look at some images of the Buddha or of Adisaphra. That might just communicate something of his qualities, something of what enlightenment might be about. It's the sort of thing we call the transcendental. That might mean that there isn't a lot of transcendental with a big T out there coming down to get us. It's that there's some other sorts of qualities, some other way of being coming through, symbolised by the Buddhist and Bodhisattvas, different unfolding of consciousness with unlimited wisdom, compassion and energy. You might just wonder if you could let go of all our limited and limiting views of the world and ourselves. What would you see? What would the world look like? Or perhaps how would we see? How would we perceive anything? You might like to sign up for the wisdom course that starts on Thursday. Here are some of the ways that the Buddhist tradition kind of tries to explain that experience, that way of being perceiving. What might it be like? I don't know, but perhaps some of the images of Bodhisattvas suggest something of it. I think we do glimpse it sometimes. We do get those times where there's a little bit of a sense of just getting yourself out of the way you're not really so caught up in yourself and something different is going on a bit. Perhaps that time's a crisis. There's sort of times, probably when people can do those really altruistic things where they really do risk their lives for someone else in a really big crisis. It's like they probably wouldn't do that if they were coming from their normal way of operating. It's just like something else comes through, something else goes on. Something more than your small limited self has to come through. It's not just all about being a little bit kinder and a little bit wiser and a little bit more sort of together and capable on its own level. It's sort of a different level of something that comes through. Something over and above you, your small limited self. And at this stage of practice, I think one's effort becomes more about just sort of opening to that and letting it happen. And aligning yourself with it more and more. And for this to be possible, I really, really think so, because it's essential. Part of our delusion, part of our wrong view about how things are, is that we're separate. That we're fixed and we're separate and we're cut off from everything and everybody else and we can kind of do what we like or independently. But we can do this practicing, developing, spiritual life thing on our own. But we're not separate and we can't do it on our own, actually. We're so conditioned all the time but everything that happens to us every moment, all the time. That's kind of what makes us in in moment to moment, all the time. And so it matters who we're with. But just because the whole thing we're trying to see through is this sense of separateness, the need people to be less separate from and it's kind of be in relationship for that to change. So all the time we're constructing this sort of divide between me and not me. It's sort of me here and there's the whole world and you're not out there. And all the time we're just kind of recreating our idea that that's how it is. That that sort of whole divide between me and everybody else just isn't really there in that sort of way. So insight is that breaking down that's sort of softly and eventually breaking down of that division that divide. And so how could we do that without others? We have need other people to do that with. Yeah, so in doing that it just it's like we start to open to whatever else might come through to our full potential in this sort of non-egoistic stream of energy coming through. And I'm sure it, you know, we need someone to sort of transcend ourselves in relation to. So I'm sure this must happen more in a sangha. Also communication does seem to just be part of the nature and enlightenment part of what it's about. So you need people to communicate with for that sort of development incrementally. The Buddha, when he was enlightened, he hesitated. His experience, his realisation was so profound. He wasn't sure anybody else could get it really. He just spit that away at his start. But he was immediately looking. He was looking for what he could still revere. That might be another talk again, what he could worship and look up to. Even though he'd achieved this realisation that nobody else in the world had achieved, he was still looking for lots of what can I really be grateful for? What can I look up to? But he was looking for who he could communicate with his experience. So again, there's that sense of sort of feelers out. Like I was saying about we're looking for people with a good match for our values. He was looking for like how he could communicate. Where was he going to go with this? And eventually he thought about the people he'd practised with his teachers who unfortunately had died. So they were not so useful to communicate with. And the people he'd practised, ascetic practises a long sign he thought, 'Right, they might get it, so you wouldn't look for them to talk to.' And once some of them did understand, then Sangha came to be. There were other people who shared his realisations understanding. So it just seems to be part of what we're doing that we'll be communicating with that. That's kind of where we're, what it's all about. But yeah, basically we can't really have insight as our own personal attainment because that isn't the nature of insight. Another way of talking about what is given birth to spiritual rebirth is the bodhicitta. It's sort of will to enlightenment as momentum towards awakening for the sake of all and the sake of helping everybody to do the same thing. And as Sangha Achita says, there is only one bodhicitta in which individuals participate or which individuals manifest to varying degrees. So you can't sort of have it on your own, it's not mine or yours, it's just something we would all partake in. And he says this means the bodhicitta is more likely to arise in a spiritual community, a situation of intense mutual spiritual friendship and encouragement. So for this to happen, we all need to deepen our individual practice. It's not like we can all just hang out together and somehow something mysteriously will happen. We've all got to really be practicing. And we need to deepen our connections with each other. We need to really be getting to those places where we can start to challenge each other's views and start to break down the divisions between us. We need to become a true Sangha, a real spiritual community of true individuals, really deeply linked to each other, really connected, becoming ever more fully ourselves individually and in real, sort of, direct, naked communication with each other. And it's only, I think, by doing that that we can really be a force for good in the world. It's only then that we can really reach out more and more to more and more people and really make a difference in society and in the world. I really can't do that on my own. I really can't do much at all for the world's suffering. But, well, we have this image on the shrine there. It's a big yellow circle that is evolocation for both a separate of compassion who has a thousand arms. At his heart, he holds the bow to jitter. This momentous desire for enlightenment, the jewel, wishful feeling jewel that sort of wants enlightenment for the sake of all. That he has a thousand arms so he can reach out in all sorts of ways. So this is often given as a symbol for our tree retina Buddhist order. So each of us in the Sangha could be an arm with this one bow to snap them, this one bow to jitter, expressing in all sorts of different ways. So we've got some chance of really reaching out, sort of, between us collectively if we're all linked in strongly enough with this jewel at our hearts. And for all that to happen, I think we really do need to keep open to the mystery and wonder of what it is we're doing. There's sort of mystery and wonder of who each of us is and can be. And what the nature of our connections is, what really does happen when we're really, really communicative, when there's a real spark of something going on. What is that, to really keep alive to that mystery, that wonder? What happens when you're really getting close to a really good friend? What happens when you're thinking of a friend and you're not with them? What sort of communication or connection is that? Is that something real or isn't it? What's going on there? And just in the Sangha generally, what is the nature of our relationship of our connections with each other? I think there's something far more to it than we might notice when we're drinking tea out there or preparing to come in and do a chanting workshop or something. Something very significant in us all sharing these values and being here together. But it is ultimately quite a mystery. I think we just need to keep that openness about to keep really engaged and really interested and allow something greater to come through us. This stream of energy of all potential manifesting. So I've got a couple of little quotes that kind of came to mind for me thinking about a mystery for people. And these are both for Sangha and Chittor again. It says getting to know another human being. It's like exploring a new continent or another world. One plunges into abysses, wanders among lofty mountainous, is lost in the depths of mysterious forests, rests in bowers of roses with the brooks sparkling beside one, and the birds singing in the branches overhead, and stands on lowly shores, gazing out over the indimitable expanse of sunlit waters. What is that one? It's called pieces of fire. It's got lots of different little quotes and poems and little things. Yes, I don't know that I often experience getting to know somebody is quite like that but it would be wonderful if I did. How did that be to just be open to that kind of sense of somebody? And then thinking about what we can be collectively as a true Sangha working together, practicing together. I've got a quote from Sangha Ratcha's recent paper, "What is the Western Buddhist Order?" It was an interview with him given last year. He says, "There is something about the movement, the order, and even about me that is not easily definable. There is a touch of something that cannot be buttoned down, something that cannot, in the end, be defined." We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeputus.io.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music] [ Silence ]
