(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. - Okay, yeah. So I want to talk about the alternative to God. I'll explain why I've been, I wanted to, I call it that because I've been particularly interested in this argument that's going on seemingly more and more in the whole of the world about whether God exists or not. A while ago, I was invited on a Christian chat show that they do exist and I was asked to debate with the theologian whether God existed or not. And people kept on ringing me up and saying, that God does exist. And I keep basically kept saying, well, how do you know? But the thing that brought to mind is in our community, we have, we club together in our community, I live with the Eye of the Watchmen, Simon and a few others. And we club together and we buy the London Review of Books. Don't know anyone who's read the London Review of Books. It's really, really good. It's what you always hope journalism would be. Very, very intelligent. We usually start with reading the personals, the personal comments 'cause they're so clever and so funny. In fact, sometimes they're so clever and so funny, you can't actually work out who's wanting what, whether the person wants a male, a female, wants anybody at all, they're just very, very, they're like little gems in themselves. It's well worth reading just for the personal column. That's where we always start, when we get to go straight to the personal column. Well, yeah. (audience laughing) When I thought to do this talk, I thought I could come and read some of the personal column just to warm the atmosphere up. But I thought that would just distract me, so on. So one of the articles I was reading recently was an article, very much criticizing Richard Dawkins' book, recent book, which is his sort of very, very strident what attack on the idea of God. He's quite clearly saying he wants to convert people with this book. He wants to convert them away from a belief in God to a non-belief, yeah. And the review was by Terry Eagleton, a massive weighty academic. And he was very much arguing against Richard Dawkins in fact in a letter of the next issue, said that he argued so much that he'd managed to create a miracle by actually making the reader sympathetic with Richard Dawkins. So you've got this sort of argument between absolutely not, no God, and it's nasty bad, doesn't help you, it's been a negative presence, that's an other idea. And then Terry Eagleton trying to say actually, theologians have never said what Dawkins is saying. If you read Thomas Aquinas, if you read Saint John of the Cross and so on and so on, you get quite different picture than the picture that Dawkins is trying to criticize. In other words, he's saying that Dawkins is really sort of evoking a kind of cartoon of God and then saying how stupid that cartoon is. And what struck me again, and I've been struck by this more and more recently for some reason, is I think that both of them are wrong. I think that Dawkins is wrong. And I think that Terry Eagleton's wrong. I think that the attack on God in a certain sense is wrong. I think his then ending up with his solution is materialism really. Sometimes a quite happy materialism, but basically without God, all you have is this, this stuff, this thing. This might be a cartoon of his thinking actually, but basically he's tending towards that pole of saying without God, you have no spiritual world, no world outside of things outside of material, outside of gene pools, outside of brain chemistry and so on. That when we're talking about the human situation, we need to remember that that's what we're talking about. We're talking about brain chemistry, we're talking about DNA molecules and so on. We're talking about material and how material interacts. I think that's wrong. Terry Eagleton was saying, but actually no, if you read Thomas Aquinas, if you read The theologians, they're arguing for the presence of God behind all phenomena that God is the only, well not the only, but is the real possibility behind phenomena and so on, that God exists basically. He doesn't quite say it like that, but he seems to have swung from his Marxist position, into something tad more Christian. And I think he's wrong as well. He's less funny as well, but that's another matter. (laughs) We shouldn't blame him too much on that. But I think he's wrong as well. So I thought I'd talk about the alternative to God. So basically what you've got in that argument is an argument between material, even very complex material like brain chemistry, versus the immaterial, God, some kind of spiritual realm that transcends material. And you've got them arguing against each other. And I think this may become more and more of an issue in contemporary life and culture, is an argument for and against God. I've been finding it surprising that God's coming back to center stage again. For me, it seems a really silly question to be asking you in the first place, because you don't know. I don't know whether God exists, you don't know whether God exists, that's it. I tend to believe he doesn't, you might believe he does, or you might also be like me and tend to believe he doesn't. But you don't know, and nor do I. So when I was on this radio program, there was always question, I said, let's hang around. So my friend here at the theologian, he believes that God exists. I'm a Buddhist, so I believe that God doesn't exist. Neither of us actually know. So let's talk about something else. (audience laughing) Because we don't know, we can't ever know. It's a question of belief, it's a question of faith. It can't be secured as an object of knowledge. Therefore, it'd be better to get on to more, to questions that are more fruitful, which you can actually make progress with. Anyway, I then kept on getting more and more, phone calls saying, but hang on, human beings have been made in the form of God, God created human beings, and then made in the form of God. Now, I say, well, from a Buddhist point of view, we'd say that God is made in the form of human beings. And so, and so on and so on. But actually, you just don't know, and we should just admit, we don't know, I don't know, you don't know. So let's move on, yeah? So I thought we'd move on to what I believe is the alternative to God. The problem with God, from my point of view, and the problem with any external, well, any crude idea of an external power, is that morality, ethics, conduct, behavior, attitude, symbols, meaning, all of those things are imposed upon human beings from outside. They're given to you, and you have to either submit to them, learn how to understand the wisdom of them, ask for help from them, obey yourself, obey instance to them, you have to do something in relation to what is basically an authority. That whole kind of idea is broadly alien to Buddhism, that there is anything outside in that literal sense, certainly that there's anything outside in the literal sense is alien to the spirit of Buddhism. What Buddhism is saying, which I believe is much more interesting and much more fruitful to think about and practice, is that our mind itself is, how could you put it? Our mind is predisposed to the spiritual. You could say, indeed, that from a Buddhist point of view, Buddhist think of human beings as primarily spiritual. In the sense that, what we need, all of what we need, all of what is most important to us is already inscribed in our consciousness. It's already there. It's part of what being a human being is, and the task of spiritual life is to discover that, and in various ways, develop it, nurture it. We teach here a practice called the metabhavana. Bhavana means bringing into being, but it also can be translated as ripening. So, all of us have the potential, don't we, to feel love and kindness, to feel sympathy? And sometimes it's surprising, sometimes something happens, and you just feel this instant of sympathy, or you feel an instance of generosity. And from a Buddhist point of view, that's already in your consciousness, yeah? All that Buddhism is saying is you can ripen that. That instinct of sympathy, and so many other aspects of the psyche, for instance, our capacity to imagine, our capacity to reason, our capacity to think, our capacity to love, can all be ripened, yeah? So, there's no, there doesn't need to be an external agency, telling us to be ripening, that ripens us from outside, or that there is something in us, that is profoundly spiritual. And actually, from a Buddhist point of view, we won't be happy, fully happy, until that something is given full expression, from a Buddhist point of view. So, I think that's a radically different starting point. So different, I think it's actually quite difficult, to really see how different that is. We're so used to ethics, morality, behavior, meaning, qualities, to be something to do with outside of the psyche, yeah? So, I want to just very briefly, talk about three qualities, that we all have here and now, and which can be ripened, all the way up to Buddhahood. And I want to try and show you, how at least in a short talk, and at least discussed fairly simply, and possibly even crudely, it makes very simple sense. There's nothing weird or spooky, there's nothing you have to, nothing you have to believe in a certain sense, in a certain sense. In other words, it is the alternative to God, yeah? So first of all, here we are in this room. And if we were to really stop it, what actually do we have now? At this moment, what do we have? What actually do we have an experience? Never mind our ideas about experience, and our theories about experience, but what do we actually have just now? So, I won't be asking you, don't I? (laughing) I have my socks. (laughing) The first thing we have just now is clarity, some degree of clarity. Now you know that you've got that just now, in your consciousness, because presumably you can understand what I say. And even you have a sense, that I'm now about to make a particular point, and I'll be continuing to make this point, then I'm going to make a second point, and then I'm going to make a third point, and probably I'll try and wrap it up at the end. You have some clarity, in other words, I'm giving a talk, and you know what a talk means. So you know, for instance, I'm unlikely to suddenly get up and leave the room, without telling you why. You know, there's also things that you're fairly clear, what is happening here. It's not a performance, I'm not suddenly going to remove my clothes, God forbid, so to speak. (laughing) You kind of know where you are, you're clear, yeah? If I was to ask you the color of a number eight bus, the old question, most of you, probably assuming you've not drank too much, will be able to give me the answer that it's read, yeah? I could ask you, your mother's maiden name, and so on. There's clarity, your mind has clarity. The very fact that you can understand what I'm saying, the very fact that you'll be able to find your way home without thinking about it very much, means that you have clarity. If you had no clarity at all, you probably wouldn't be able to get back to the tube station, because you just want, you know, one thing would take your interest in another, and you just have no clarity, that's actually what you need to do is go to the tube station. So that's part of your consciousness just now, is that there's clarity. But we're more or less clear, aren't we? So I don't know whether you've ever had this experience of somebody waking you up first in the morning and asking you where the car keys are. So they, no, knock on the door. Do you know where the car keys are? And you have this really sweet, weird experience of your mind thinking car. - Coo. - Car key. - Car key. (audience laughs) - For a while they're floating around and then there's a road in your mind and a pit person and sleep. And then gradually where all the car keys make sense and you can say something. You say to me, but you have this moment, don't you? Where it takes your while to re-establish clarity, to know what car keys are and to know what the question means, but you usually do it. As long as you've not drunk too much than that before. So clarity has depth. You can be really, really unclear in that like that experience when you don't know where the car key is. If you're completely off your face and drugs or if you're really drunk, you're gonna have less clarity. That's why you're not allowed to drive is because you don't have enough clarity to drive. To remember which side of the road you're on or whatever it is, yeah. And then when we get very tired, you lose clarity, don't you? If you're very tired now, it'd be more difficult to follow what I'm saying because you won't have the clarity to do so. But if you were to then have a sleep, you'd probably be able to follow it more easily. But also emotional things affect clarity, don't they? So if you're in a very, very bad mood, it's difficult to think clearly because your thinking is affected by your emotionality and is pushing you away from real clarity. So clarity is an aspect of consciousness now and it can be developed. We already do develop it without noticing it and what Buddhism is saying, it can be developed all the way up to wisdom. So that all you need to do is become more clear and at least in this first quality. All you need to do is become more clear. So there's lots of things I could say about this, but the first thing I want you to say is that basically I think what this means is you become more clear about life, about what life is and what you can expect from it. You become more clear about what makes you happy and what doesn't make you happy. You become more clear about the consequences of your actions. You start to even think, aha, I'm feeling really horrible this morning. I wonder whether it was 'cause I drank too much last night. You start to be able to become more and more clear about the relationship between your experience and your actions. Did you see what I mean? Children are not very clear about that, aren't they? You can see with children, again, it's quite clear, they're not clear with a baby. They're not clear or they come to a point where they really think that the mother is part of themselves and apparently if that a mother will have a haircut so drastically so it changes the profile 'cause that's mainly what babies can focus on. It can be really traumatic 'cause they don't recognise you. But then later on you think, aha, no, that's my mother. I recognise that with any hairdo, even with that absurd hat, that's definitely still my mother. And there's clarity there, particularly about the hat. So in our human life you see how we develop clarity, don't we? So all that Buddhism's saying is that that process of maturing clarity can continue and in fact needs to continue. In a sense that's one of our great tasks in life from a Buddhist point of view is to continue to develop in clarity. And that's one of the reasons why Buddhism puts so much emphasis on meditation because that's one of the primary ways that you develop clarity. You become more and more clear about your experience. So for instance, one of the things that people discover when they meditate, sometimes some people discover this, I discover this, is that they're not as nice as they thought they were. This is what I discovered anyway. I was a nice, like a ball, kind of funny chap. I sat down to meditate and there's all kinds of other things. I went bore you with the details. But you start to notice all sorts of other aspects of your mind, all sorts of other aspects of your volition. And you can start to become clear about that. And what becomes even more important is you start to take responsibility for that. So this I think is that the first great stage of clarity is you become clear, and I know this sounds really sort of straightforward, but actually it's very, very difficult, you become clear that your life is your own and that your actions are yours, and that what happens to you is largely to do with you. So that you really are clear about your actions. You see what I mean, that you really own your life. So you see that if you're in a really, really bad mood, it has these consequences on you, it has these consequences on people around you. And that is you, yeah, that is you, this is your life. So in this moment now, just as in all moments, we can decide to develop our life, or we can decide to ruin our life, we can do that. And the human mind has capacities for that, doesn't it? It feels like we have wormholes in our mind that go back down into darker places, don't they? Yeah, sort of passages that take us back into early habits. And that's always kind of there, isn't it? I think they're set up very early. And you can sort of disappear down one quite quickly. The further that you go down one of those wormholes, whether it's into, I don't know, self-pity, that's always one that comes to my mind, whether it goes into bad temper, whether it goes into sort of getting almost addicted to loss or lack, the more you go down them, the more difficult it is to get out of them. That's these kind of wormholes, aren't they, in the mind? And one of the great, the great stage of clarity is realising that this is me, this is my mind, this is what I'm doing. I could do something else, but this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm choosing to do. That choice is pressurised by the world, and I'm not trying to deny that. But the first great stage of clarity, which is really just a stage of maturing, human maturing, is to realise that our life is our own. And growing out of that, I think, very importantly, is trying to be clear what actually makes me happy and what do I simply think makes me happy. The world is constantly bombarding us with things that are making, it should be making us happy. What we're being told all the time is this will make you happy, and you start to think that that's true, even if you have a critique of it, you start to think that buying this will make me happy. So one of the things that clarity does, you develop clarity in your experience to see whether that's true, whether that does make you happy, and if it doesn't, what does really make you happy? You try and become clearer and clearer and clearer about that. So you start off with an unclarity, a mind perhaps fogged by sleep, where you're trying to remember where your khakis are. Then you become clear, ordinarily clear, like hopefully we are now, and then you try to develop that clarity. Particularly you try to take responsibility for your life and become clear that it is your life. And then in meditation, you try to develop that clarity beyond that so that you become super clear, as it were. You become crystal clear. I don't know whether you've experienced this yesterday in meditation, but sometimes in meditation, you have these moments or even whole practices where experience feels really clear. It's a lovely, lovely state. I remember and one retreat I was on, just feeling like I was made of glass or crystal. I felt exquisitely clear. It's like my whole mind had cleared. Probably you've had those moments in life where something occurs to you that's meaningful or important, and you can feel your mind clear. It just gets clearer in a moment. You suddenly feel like you know what thinking is, you know what life is. It's like when I experience it, so it's almost like my mind is waking up and looking around itself. So you try to develop that kind of clarity more and more. And it's just the same clarity as you've got now, but it's just developed. Just like we've got to develop clarity than we were a child. And then in meditation, particularly, you become clearer and clearer as to what your experience really is. In a sense, this is what clarity is about all the way through. It's becoming clearer about what your experience actually is. So when, what is going on just now? You just become more and more clear about that. And then in the meditation, you become more and more clear about what your experience is in this precise moment. So you're watching the breath perhaps, or you're just sitting there, and you just become more and more clear as to what's really happening. What you really know at all. I mean, don't know very much, actually. So the whole question of God is way out there. I don't even know much about blackbirds. Never mind God. Or wiring. Or how you make a CD, for instance. Nobody's ever managed to explain it to me. So in the meditation, you become clearer and clearer about what's really there, what you really know. And for a Buddhist point of view, if you do that deeply enough, the only place you can get to, the final place you can get to, is to realise that what is really there is changing. It's not that there is change. What is really happening in your experience, all the time, is always changing. And it's not just that you're clear about that externally, in the sense of you might look at something changing, you actually experience that what you really are, is changing, all the time changing. Now, if you were to see that, you can imagine perhaps what would happen to your mind. So, for instance, if you look at clouds, when a cloud's forming, as you watch them, their shape is constantly changing, constantly altering. And perhaps when you're a child, you might say, "Oh, that looks like a dragon or a horse or a boat." But you're only doing that to sort of abstract, it's abstracted out from experience, isn't it? It only looks like a boat or a dragon for a moment. And it's already changing from a boat into a dragon. So, if you could watch those clouds completely clearly, you couldn't say anything about them, because they're never fixed to make a thing out of them. They're never a boat or a dragon or a horse. They're never anything, not even clouds. They're constantly sort of changing. So, if you could really be clear about your experience, or your conceptual, your crude conceptual machinery would drop away, because you can only talk about things. Words only apply to things. They say this and not that, such or not such. If something is changing, you can't say it's this or that. You can't say it's a horse or a dragon. Do you see what I mean? And your conceptual mind just drops away, it seems. And all you experience is this play of change, this play of change, which you can't say anything about, but which you completely experience. And you can imagine doing that with clouds, couldn't you? When someone said, what are you looking at? You couldn't say anything, and you couldn't say why its experience is beautiful, and it is experience is beautiful. You just have to look, look, just look. So, that's the first quality of our mind. It's the quality we've got now, and it becomes wisdom. It becomes wisdom in the moment that the ordinary conceptual mind drops away. And what you're left with is this patterning of change, which is experiences being rapturous and pleasurable and satisfying and everything you've wanted, but you can't say anything about it. Because you can only say things. Even the breath, when we talk about the breath, we've been doing the mindfulness of breathing today, the breath is nothing. It's a constant changing pattern of sensation, none of which are things. They're all shading into and churning into each other. So, you can't really say anything about it, but you can experience it. So, that's the first quality, I want to talk too long about that. So, let's move on to the second quality. The second quality that we have now is sensitivity. So, as you're sitting here, you'll be finding this experience either pleasurable, or not very pleasurable, thumpingly dot boring, or somewhere in between. Somewhere like, it was kind of all right, but in a way that I would have watched rather gone to see Casino Royale after all. (audience laughing) And if you just notice your physical experience at the moment, it might feel either vaguely pleasant, or vaguely unpleasant, and perhaps we'll be uncomfortable sitting here, or kind of a bit neutral, bit numb. So, all of our experience at this moment, and at all moments, has this sense, has sensitivity. What's technically called a hedonic tinge. In other words, it's tastes of something. It's not just your body. Your body is always slightly pleasurable, or very pleasurable, not very pleasurable, or somewhere in between. And even that somewhere in between, you can feel. Life is always felt, you know? So, if you don't believe me, if I could just lean forward and pinch you very hard, and that sensitivity, you'd go ouch, and that experience of ouch is to do with an unpleasant sensation. And you know that if you pinch anybody else, hard enough, they'll probably do the same, that we all have sensitivity, and that's with us all the time. It's encrypted into consciousness. It's part of our consciousness. We always have, we even have it in dreams. Just as we have some degree of clarity, interestingly in dreams, you can have very lucid dreams, for instance. So, we even have sensitivity in dreams. Consciousness is sensitive. So, when we think about maturing as a human being, we need to mature in this sense. So, just as when you take a biscuit away from a child, they cry, or if you knock down their sand castle, or if the sea washes away their sand castle, they can be beside themselves of grief. And it's just because they don't remember that things change, and that we can build another, and da da da. Just as our sensitivity when you're a child, for instance, you're not very sensitive about your parents. In fact, you're not at all. In fact, it takes you a long time to use it to about 37, until you realize that they are actually people in their own right, and actually don't like you, continually trying to get them, blag them for money, or it is. So, just as you, we don't have much sensitivity then. So, we can develop that quality we all have, and we have it now, of sensitivity. Especially, we become more and more sensitive, about our emotional life. There's no human evolution, no human change, no human development, without development of the emotional life. Recently, I've been a bit involved with some academics, and some academics, you really think this is really not healthy folks. The great danger of our Western approach to thinking is that the intellect splits off, almost disastrously, from the rest of the psyche, especially from our emotions. So, any real development of the human being, including a development to think deeply, I believe, involves a development of emotion, because emotion is encrypted into our mind. Feelings are our mind. The distinction between thoughts and feelings is to do with a Western distinction. It's not a distinction in Buddhism. It's to do with our weird Western conditioning. So, if we're going to change, we need to develop this sensitivity, and this is developing our heart, really. Especially, it means becoming more and more sensitive about the suffering of others. It's really as simple as that. All human beings have some sense that their actions impinge upon the world, in some ways, don't they? In a sense, human beings are always creative, because they're always interacting with the world. And we can interact with the world, usefully or not usefully. So, this always reminds me of the whole question of ecology. It says to do with how we interact with the world. And if we're not careful, we'll just destroy the whole place, because we're not interacting with the world usefully. But you can't not interact with the world. You have to decide how you do that. You can't actually not interact with each other, with other people. And if you try to, that itself is an interaction and has consequences. So, one of the things that human maturity needs, and that spiritual maturity needs, in a certain sense, for many of it for a long time, are the same thing, is an increased sensitivity about the reality of others, especially about the reality of suffering, and their suffering, that human beings suffer. So, if you're harsh to them, they will find it painful. If you write unpleasant emails to them, in the height of a bad temper, and present, they'll find it painful, so on and so forth. You start to develop your capacity to be sensitive to your own suffering and to other people. In other words, grow your heart so that you care more. Recently, a friend of mine was doing a demonstration around an arms fair that was in Docklands. What he was doing, he was going up and down the tube quite nicely, and he'd sit down next to people going to the arms fair, and he'd say, "Do you see how, if you put all this money into an arms fair, "what will happen is people will buy arms, "they'd go like guns and things like that, "and they'll kill people with them." You're aware of that, and that's all they'd say, is just, "Do you see what this means?" It ends up killing people. And he'd talk to the one guy, and this guy said, "I don't care about that, I don't care about that." What I do is I look after myself and my family, and if we all did that, it would be fine. I don't care about the fact that people are going to kill people. That's what I've got, I've got, I need a job, I need to pay for my family and kids, I don't care about that. And that's quite shocked when I heard that, but then I thought about myself. So, for instance, I thought about the suffering that cows undergo by having milk. I'm just like a wee square of green and blacks before I came down, but actually that caused this suffering. And actually, I don't want to be a vegan, I'm a Victorian, but I don't want to be a vegan, and there's no moral reason for that. So really, I could say, I don't care about that. Somebody said, "What about all those cows?" If I was a sort of, if I was non-sophisticated and non-nice, I could just simply say, "I don't care about that." 'Cause that's my actions, that's what my actions show, in fact. And if you think of it all the different ways, so I was trying to tell my friend that my another friend had been telling me that I need to turn my computer off, not leave it on, save, and not save and stand by, because of the damage to the environment that causes. And he would say, "Oh, no, not another thing I have to do. "Gah, it's all done." And I was thinking, and again, it's just like saying, "Well, I don't care about that. "I just want to leave my computer on." And actually, so many are not areas of a life. We'd actually have to say, "I don't care about that. "I just look after myself from my family." It's actually a basic human position. But it's not a very developed one. It's not a very mature one. And actually, it's not gonna last. It's a short-term one, isn't it? So, especially this development of sensitivity is about seeing, just seeing how we all have this potential to suffer. And wouldn't it be good to try to limit that as many as way as possible? And becoming more and more sensitive to that. Not as an ideology. That's what I get nervous about, is that there's a political ideology around ecology. There's a pressure group around veganism. There's a whatever about this and that. There's always a politics about it. I'm an utterly unpolitical being. I mean developing a sensitivity. And you can't be bullied into that. You have to develop it yourself. It's your heart that you need to grow. And that will, from a Buddhist point of view, make you happier in the longer term. And it'll make other people happier. Eventually, you then meditate. You then meditate and you do the metabravanna. Next week, we'll be teaching the metabravanna practice. And in this practice, you develop loving kindness. In other words, you develop your sensitivity. You develop your heart. You develop your heart in the meditation to the greatest possible extent. To which you try to imagine feeling love and kindness for all beings. You try to mature your heart in the moment of the practice. Not as some kind of idea in the moment of the practice. Then, having done that, you then try to feel this sensitivity more and more. That there's this underlying, all of our feelings and emotions is a wishing, a wanting. Human beings want, if an alien came down to human, took to earth and said, what are they basically like? The alien would say, they want things. They want ideas. They want thoughts. They want nice things to happen to them. They want nice, horrible things not to happen to them. They want things. That's what human beings are. And then you become more and more sensitive to wanting. And then you start to actually see in the depths of meditation that that wanting itself is causing you unhappiness. As soon as we want, we're somewhere else. As soon as we want something, we're not in life, we're kind of throwing our mind into a fantasy of the future. We're not really in life as soon as we want. Like, when we're happy, when we're really happy, you forget to want things. And actually, you could just put it the other way around and say, forgetting to want things is being happy. When you're content, you just don't want. As soon as you want, you're kind of outside of the world. You've gone somewhere else. You've stretched yourself from now to this idea in the future. And you try to experience that with sensitivity. You try to feel that that's what your heart is like. And you just let go of it. You just let go of all wanting whatsoever, including wanting to be happy and including wanting others to be happy. You don't not want to be happy. You just let go of every wanting. Now, just imagine what would that would happen if you did that now. And you could do it now. If only we could decide. If only we were convinced enough that this is a truth. We could just let go. We could just stop wanting now. And time would stop, wouldn't it? Not literally stop. It's not in the sense that (laughs) we all go, we all freeze frame. But if we didn't want anything now, if there wasn't a part of our mind thinking, how long is it gonna go on about this? And then I need to get the tube home and then I get how many to send the email. And then tomorrow I go, if all that disappeared and you stopped wanting anything else I was going to say, anything else to happen. Anything else but this. What would it be? It's me. What would this be? What is there here? If we didn't want anything. For a Buddhist point of view, this would be heaven. We'd have got there. We'd feel completely content, a supremely content and completely connected with others. It would be our hearts wish, finally met. And the tragedy is that that's what we always want. That is what the wanting wants. It's to be completely content, always happy, deeply in connection with other people. But our wanting it at a certain point gets in the way of it. So that sensitivity, the simple sensitivity we have now, which I could come and pinch you to prove, the simple sensitivity we have now can be developed all the way up to the compassion of the Buddha. So if clarity becomes the wisdom of the Buddha, the sensitivity on natural, inbuilt conscious sensitivity that human beings have by their birthright, that becomes compassion without any other outside agency. And then lastly, and this is more difficult to talk about and therefore I should talk about it less, is the quality, third quality of our mind, which is openness, openness. So we have clarity, don't we? As we see here, as I'm sitting here, I have a sense of the structure of what I'm saying. So I know that I've gone this far and I know now onto my final point and then I'll say something to finish off. That's my clarity. You know that as well, not sure clarity. We can develop that. Then there's our sensitivity. So I, if I was to stop and just notice how I feel, after the right. (laughing) You just notice what it feels like to be here now and that's your sensitivity and that can develop all the way up to being compassion. And without any breaks on the way, I'd gradually feel more and more for you. I'd gradually feel and more and more that suffering exists and that I can do something to help him. I can do it a little bit at least. But we have this other quality and this is much more, it's almost the quality within which those two qualities appear in our mind. And that is this quality of openness. So that as you're sitting here, your mind is open. My mind is open. So that if you stop attending to what I'm saying, thoughts will come into your mind. Oh yes, I must remember on the way home to get a weave jug of milk 'cause I've not got milk at home. And then I won't have milk for tea in the morning. So I'm just, I'll go past it and I can get it. And that'll just come into your mind, won't it? I suppose we'll just, oh, what was he saying again? Something about openness? Is that the place we'll be on? You can really do things just come into your mind. And they come into your mind because your mind is open. Memories can come into the mind. You might think, oh, he looks a bit like so and so. (laughing) Where do we get that shirt? I don't think so. We always wear a special shirt for talks. (laughing) She doesn't get you any notice. (laughing) Things have come into your mind, yeah? And that's 'cause our mind are open. Even open is a wrong metaphor because it suggests like a window that's open or a jug that's open at one end. But it really is, our mind is open. It hasn't got, our mind isn't a thing. It doesn't have any boundaries. It doesn't, I can't find out where the boundary of my mind is. Because it doesn't have any boundaries, it can't have any number 'cause you can only number things that are things. Things have to have boundaries, otherwise they don't count as things. So because our mind isn't a thing, it hasn't got boundaries. It doesn't have any number. I can't have one mind and I certainly can't have two and et cetera, et cetera. Because our mind isn't a thing. Actually, the more clear you get about the nature of mind, the more mysterious our mind is just as it is just now. So also, as you're sitting here, you're in my mind, don't you, somehow? How did you get in here? Are you in here or are you out there? Does it mean I'm seeing you? If I close my eyes, you're not there. You're there again. That's fantastic. Oh, you do that. You've gone again. You're all back again. He says, so are you in my mind? Oh, you're out there. Now you think, no, no, don't worry, 'cause I'm out here. It's you. But where do you end where, you know, where's, what's going on? What is going on? So the mind is open. You're in my mind. We know, don't we, that the eye, as I'm watching you, is I'm talking, the eye is creating two images of what's happening, and they're upside down in the back of my retina. And my mind puts them around the right way. I've been going to stick them together to make one image of you just now. My mind must be doing that in time. It can't, it must take time to do that, but I never have access to that time. So although I feel in direct contact with you, I can't possibly be in direct contact with you. Because just as one example of my mind's doing that, and it's doing that in a time that I never, never have access to, and could never have access to. So it's all a bit mysterious. Our mind is open. In a sense, you're in my mind. If I close my eyes, you're not there. I'm open to you, and you're open to me. My mind is, I can't even say, my eyes are all disappearing. It's open, isn't it? It's really rather weird. When you start to think about it, what Earth is going on? How am I perceiving you? There's all these kind of studies about this, aren't there? So the mind is open. Because the mind's open, thoughts can come into the mind. Because the mind is open, I can, my words are appearing in your mind. You don't even have to listen to me, do you? And so all you need to do is just be in ear shot, and my mind, my words are in your mind. So again, that can be developed. It's not even developed really. This is where it gets a bit more mysterious, because all you need to do is realise it's there. All you need to do really is see that there's this massive space in which sensitivity arises and clarity arises, and that sensitivity and clarity move through all the time. There is just this openness all the time. And for instance, I might think, "Oh, that's that person." I'd say, "That's Jackie. "There's the honor of Roger. "There's Fiona, there's Simon." But they're just names, aren't they? This isn't really Jackie. If we were to sort of slook under a skin, you wouldn't know lots of this. My name is Jackie, written in all over him. It's just that it's a name that Jackie's parents happen to decide to give to her. There's no one called Jackie, really, and so on and so forth. Yeah, they're just names. So you try to actually develop this openness that actually everything you experience is rather mysterious. One more than rather mysterious is really mysterious. The reason we don't experience it as mysterious is because we live in a level of theory. Human beings make theories all the time. We have predictive theories about what's gonna happen next. So you and your mind will have an idea about how you're gonna get home and what will happen and what experiences you will have and when you'll go to bed. But none of that might happen at all. You might die on the way home. You might decide, "Oh, I'll go to the pub after all." You might change, but in your mind, you have a predictive theory about what's gonna happen from now. But if we're not careful, we just live in theory. And we live so much in theory, so much in these predictive ideas, in expectations, in beliefs, in theories, that we don't notice that actually the mind is open, that they're just labels that we're attaching to things, they're just names. They don't really exist yet. So in meditation, you try to experience that more and more deeply. You try and let go more and more into openness. And what you find is even you don't exist, at least you don't exist in the way you think you exist. You don't exist literally. There's not, in the middle of you, a little I, never mind Jackie, there's not even a little I behind that. There is just sensitivity, openness and clarity. They don't belong to anybody. They just dance. They just strangely are intimate to us. They're like the intimate aspect of reality, but they don't belong to us. They're this strange thing of being universal and intimate at the same time. In fact, you can only have the two things almost. So that becomes wisdom and compassion conjoined. So clarity is wisdom of the Buddha. Sensitivity becomes the compassion of the Buddha. Openness becomes, I want to say, the transcendence of wisdom and compassion, but probably better to say wisdom and compassion conjoined. It's on the out. You may as well just put X. You know, it's like you count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, 10, and nobody's ever heard of 11. But you just say, what is it when I was 10? And you just go, you know? You just get into X, which you could call wisdom and compassion combined. You just call it in one tradition. It says, everything is taffetal. And this means such as it is. It is just such. So when you say, what are these flags? You say, the flowers are taffetal. They're just such. And you'd say, this experience is just such. It's just as it is. In other words, it's indicating, here we are, without saying anything about it. It's taffetal, it is just such. It's just such. Yeah, that's perfectly clear. So, there we go. That's what Buddhism's saying, is that human beings have in their mind the very qualities which eventually become the enlightenment of the Buddha. If they didn't have that, human beings couldn't develop. It's not that Buddhism is trying to put a sort of floppy disc into our internal computer, and you press Buddhism, and you suddenly become a Buddhist person. It really is, it's just trying to say, see here, look at your mind. Notice that there's clarity. Notice that there's sensitivity. Notice that there's openness. You can deepen those qualities, and you can deepen them to the point that you become a Buddha. - We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com forward slash donate. And thank you. 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