Today’s FBA Podcast, “A Personal Talk On the Bodhisattva Ideal” is just that – a moving and personal talk, by Vidyamala, given at the 25-year jubilee retreat (of FWBO activities in Stockholm) in a beautiful setting in the archipelago north of Stockholm, Sweden, September 2005.
Free Buddhist Audio
A Personal Talk On the Bodhisattva Ideal
(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. - One of the lovely things about being in the FWBO is the connections that one has, that transcend all sorts of boundaries. So here I am on this retreat with Pitya Shuri, who is a friend, a good friend from England. Kulinandi, who I lived with at Taraloka. Ulrika, who I lived with at Taraloka. I've never met anyone else. But it's amazing that the way you'll find it, if you get involved in your travel, that you make these connections with people that last a lifetime, maybe beyond, you know. So I just wanted to say before I begin that I'm very, very happy to be here. I was saying in the team meeting that I'm not quite sure how I ended up being here, because I've never done anything with a Swedish Sangha before. And Sona and I, Sona and I are in a relationship and I'd sort of become, I knew I'd come something to do with him, but I wasn't quite sure what. And then I'm doing a talk, but I'm not quite sure how I've ended up doing a talk. But anyway, I'm here. And it feels fantastic. It feels one of those magical things where somehow I've ended up here, because Sona suggests that I came, I think. And here I am and I've loved it. I felt very, very moved and inspired by you all. So I'd just like to express my gratitude to you all for giving me this opportunity to be here with you. And it really reminds me of New Zealand. I've said that to quite a few people, but not only the countryside, the countryside is very, very similar to New Zealand, but also the Sangha, because I got involved in New Zealand, where it was quite a small Sangha. And we would have retreats in places just like this, where you'd have to hire it and get there and turn. We often went to a scout camp. So it was turning a scout camp into a place of Buddhist practice, which took a very particular kind of energy. And I think you've all got that kind of energy, both fresh, very creative, tremendous attention to detail. So I felt very, very inspired by that as well. It reminded me a lot of my early days in the movement. You know, one of the things which I might be reflecting on is I've been in England now for 15 years, and there's many, many fantastic things about the Sangha in the UK. There's opportunities to go on great retreats and hear great talks, be with very, very good teachers and so on. But because it's also established and so big, you also lose something. So I think you've got something here, which is very, very precious, to do with the fact that you're still relatively small. Sense of engagement, a sense of community. I think what happens with a very big situation is it's very easy to become a consumer. So you just turn up to something and you hear the talk and you go away again and you know that everything's just going to roll on without you. So there isn't that sense of needing to involve oneself so much in the actual maintaining of the Sangha. So, yeah, I'll just invite you all to recognise that you've got something very, very precious here at this particular time in your history. Anyway, I wasn't going to say any of that. Time. Sona's going to go like this if I'm going on too long. That's good. So I'm going to talk a bit about my own life, really. My own personal journey. And how I see the Bodhisattva ideal these days, and I have to say it's changed enormously. I see the Bodhisattva ideal very, very differently now from how I used to, my idealistic youth. I think it's become for me very much an investigation of suffering and the human predicament. You know, that's the thing that has ripped my interest and my energy. And the question, what is freedom? I think I used to think that freedom was somewhere else. I would get out of this to go somewhere else and there I would find freedom. And, but these days I'm thinking much more that freedom is here and now right in the midst of things if we change our attitude. But that's been quite an important shift for me. So in 1976, when I was 16, I injured my spine for the first time. And I was living in New Zealand then. And I was extremely active young woman. Used to climb mountains and go jogging and cycle. And in fact, I very rarely set still. (laughs) I think becoming a meditator wouldn't have been one of my career choices at that time. (laughs) So I was, you know, I was one of these people that woke up early, you know, wide awake. And I would do things like go swimming before school and play tennis and the lunch break and go for a run after school. And very competitive and not entirely pleasant when I think that was probably not a very nice person to be around some of the time because I was so kind of on the go and always wanting to beat people at sport. And basically I'd had, you know, a fairly normal, relatively privileged life. So I think I did think up to that point, it was possible to keep suffering at bay largely. If I kept on, if I kept myself on the move, kept on moving the bits around in my life, I did think it was possible to get a life on my own terms and I was fairly successful at it. Fairly successful at getting life on my own terms. And I was certainly quite intolerant and impatient of other people's weakness or my perceived, what I perceived as weakness in others. I would think, pull yourself together. You have that expression in Sweden. You know, get a group, pull yourself together. So I didn't really, I was not at all willing really to engage with the real sort of difficult side of life. Mainly because I didn't have to. And then I had this accident and my life changed very dramatically, very quickly. It wasn't that I had an accident and suddenly I couldn't walk. It was more that I had a lot of pain and then I had to have two operations the following year. So I missed a whole year of school. So interrupted my education and suddenly this, I was tipped off the conveyor belt of life. Do you understand conveyor belt? Yeah, maybe just sort of going along and everything's falling into place. And I was tipped off that. And I really had to look at my life and some of my attitudes and to find different values. Maybe that's what was important at that time. However, after I'd had these operations, I've also got a very strong will. So I rehabilitated myself pretty well and I got back to being pretty active. I went on a bike ride six months after I'd had this second operation and I rode 140 miles one day. And this was before the advent of 10 speed bikes. So I think I just had three gears and I climbed this really big hill mountain during this bike. I just proving to myself and anyone else who was interested and probably there wasn't really anyone else interested. (audience laughs) Just proving I could do at proving that I wasn't defeated by these problems. But actually it was very, very deluded looking back on it and I did cause myself quite a lot of harm. I didn't go back to school and I developed a love of photography. So it's interesting how life turns out. I've been very into science at school and I was going to be a vet because I wanted to be a wildlife officer. So I decided that's what I wanted to do is in New Zealand they have these people that live on islands more or less on their own and preserve endangered species of birds because the islands are predator free. So they aren't any rats or possums that's what you get in New Zealand. So these officers go there and they live this. What I thought, I really wanted to do very solitary life in the wilds and I think you have to swim on and off the islands because there wasn't jetties or anything and I really wanted to do that. And the wildlife service didn't take any women. So I was told, well, you can't do that 'cause then it took women. So I thought, well, I'll be the first. And I went to see someone quite half in the government and said, well, what would I need to do in order to be the first woman in the wildlife service? And they said, you'd have to get a very, very good degree like a veterinary degree. So I thought, right, that's what I'll do. I'll get a veterinary degree. But because of my accident, I lost the very critical time of my education. And obviously I couldn't do this work. And I became very interested in photography. So I got a job working in film when I left school and I was managing okay, but I did have constant pain. So ever since the time of those operations, I have had pretty much constant pain, which is nearly 30 years now. So at that point, I did have the pain, but I was managing to override it with my will and I suppose I had youth on my side and I could sort of get away with it. Then when I was 23, I had a car accident. I wasn't driving, but I often think that something was going to happen because I was living this very kind of split life where I had this reality of this pain and this injury. And then I was trying to override it with a sort of fantasy life. So anyway, I had this accident, which again very much shook me up, where I fractured another part of my spine and got a lot of other injuries. And I went back to work after a few months. And then when I was 25, which was two years later, I think what was really a breakdown where I just got to a point where I couldn't keep going anymore. So I think that the tension of trying to live the kind of fantasy life became too much. I went to see a consultant who said go to bed and had a complete bed rest. And basically I didn't get up for about four months because I was so exhausted. So I had to give up my career and so on at that point. And during that time, I had a period in hospital where I was really very ill and I had some very significant insights during that time. I won't go into that now, but I do feel that was a pivotal turning point in my life. I sort of feel I've had a life up to that point and I've had a life since that point. And essentially the insights were about taking responsibility for myself. I realized that that's what I needed to do, that there was not gonna be any solution outside of myself. It wasn't any medical solution to my situation. And yeah, it was like I really saw, oh my God. It's up to me what I make of my life. No one else is going to do it for me. So I started to change some of my attitudes. And I also had a very significant experience about living in the present moment. In terms of managing my pain, all I needed to do was live in the moment that I didn't need to, a lot of the difficulty with pain is one caught up in the past in the future. And oh God, I'm gonna have this forever. Oh no, I've had it for years. And I had this very strong experience about just living life one moment at a time. And at that point, I didn't have any spiritual life at all. I had been a nominal Anglican. Do you get, do you know what that is, Anglican? Church of England, person, growing up, but it was very nominal. So I didn't have a spiritual life. And I didn't have, I'd never really thought about time and space and these kinds of issues. So I had this experience about sort of time deconstructing and dropping into the moment. And I knew I had tasted something true. I knew I had tasted something important. So that's when I started reading spiritual books and searching, trying to find what that was. What was that thing that I had tasted? So I gave up my career and I started reading a lot, meditating in my bed. And about a year later, I started doing yoga, which also included meditation. And felt that I was sort of getting a bit of a grip on myself, as it were. And then when I was 27, I went on a Buddhist retreat. So a friend of mine from the yoga class said that he was going on a weekend retreat with the Buddhists. And why didn't I go? So I thought, well, okay, I was up for anything at that point. So we went along to a place really like this. It's quite uncanny, actually. A place called Kiwanis, right by the sea. Little kind of chalets around the courtyard. We'd go swimming in the sea in the morning and in the evening. And I really thought I'd come home. It's a very common experience that people say when they come across the F.W.B.O. that they feel they've come home. And it wasn't the teachings. It wasn't, what is it? It was the people. There was this extraordinary sense of how kind these people were and how open. They're very open to me and other people. And I was in a group with a woman called Annikaita who has since died. She was quite an elderly woman. And in the group, one of the women was talking about her upset. I can't even remember the content. I think it was something to do with she worked because her brother and his wife had split up. She could no longer see her nieces and nephews that she was very, very close to. So she was communicating her distress about this. And Annikaita was sitting there with tears streaming down her face because she was so open to what Ann was saying. She was so in sympathy with Ann. And I remember looking at that with wonder and just thinking, is it possible to be so open-hearted? How is it possible to have that level of sort of fellow feeling with another human being? And I really admired that. It felt quite alien to me because I was too sort of blocked. But it felt so exquisitely beautiful that that was possible. So that was a very, very important moment as well. She was a very unusual woman, Annikaita. No, it was a very, very heartfelt, loving woman. So from that point on, I came to everything I could at the centre. And I had my pain, I had my difficulties. But I think I was still seeing Buddhism. I was still seeking escape. I heard the third Noble Truth. Somehow I skipped over the first two Noble Truths. It's amazing what one does. We just hear what we want to hear. But I heard there was an end to suffering and I thought, fantastic. (audience laughing) So I think on some level, it's embarrassing when one says these things out loud 'cause it sounds so naive. But I think I thought if I practiced, my back pain would go away. I think it was that kind of deluded and that kind of simplistic. So I was seeking Buddhist practice to make my back pain go away. There was a definite payoff that I was seeking. So that, of course, led to quite a lot of strain. But I think I also knew if I stuck out at something would happen, I intuited that this was a path of truth. I didn't chew with that very, very strongly. And a year later, I came over to England and I visited Tara Loca on retreat. 'Cause I think we're probably first met Ulrika and Philanundi. Catherine, if you will. And this is embarrassing as well. I remember going into the kitchen and the Tara Loca community and again, having such a strong intuition that I needed to go and live in this place. Really, really strong. I didn't know why, but it was just like, I need to come here. This was on the other side of the world from where I lived. I didn't know anybody. And so I wrote this really long totally embarrassing letter to Sanke David, who was the chairwoman, telling her all the reasons why I wanted to go and live there. Very, very kind of, um, over the top, I think. I remember years later, I said to her, "God, do you remember that letter?" And she said, "Yes, well, we can choose to forget certain things." Which I was pleased that she had forgotten it. But actually, there was something very genuine, very, very heartfelt. And the community said, "Yes, after a few months, "I stayed in England for six months, and they said, "Yes, I could come and live there." So I went back to New Zealand for about a year to tie up my affairs. I was finishing off a community arts project. And then I came back to live there. So that was a real leap, talking about leaps, because I didn't know anybody. It was the other side of the world. I was at this back injury that I was in complete denial about. And it was on a hunch. It was on an intuition. And I'd asked to go and live there within about five days of my first visit. And I've never regretted that, you know. I think that was one of the best things I did. I've done with my life. But from certain points of view, it was completely insane, you know. So I arrived in 1990 to live there. And one of the things I was remembering in other days, I've met Ulrika the previous visit, and we'd stayed in touch. And we'd live together in London in a community. And when I arrived at Taraloka, I was really, really nervous. Really shy, really nervous. And in my bedroom, there was a parcel waiting. And it was some pajamas that Ulrika had sent me. Because I remember I'd liked your pajamas. And you sent me these pajamas. And I see, I remember that. So it's those little moments of, it sounds a little thing. But it was like someone in England had made a gesture of welcoming me. Which I really appreciated. And Colonel Nandi was really kind and welcoming. And so I lived there for five years. Got to know people. One of the things which you realize, just because you speak English, doesn't mean that you're very similar. So I came from very, very different conditioning from the people who have been brought up in England. And I found that, you know, I just felt... You know, I felt too loud and too gross. And my sense of humour was all wrong. Anyway, and then I went through this phase of trying to make myself English. That was quite funny. So I started speaking very, very... That's what you do, isn't it? You know, one wants to assimilate. So I tried doing that and then I had this big blowout on a winter retreat. I was swearing and cursing. And then I started just being myself again. That was a relief to everybody, including myself. So it was very stinky. Here I was in this very intense situation, very, very... You know, you've got ten women stuck in this house in the middle of nowhere from all sorts of different nationalities. And why you're there is because of a shared ideal. You're not there because you've chosen to live with each other. And you're not there because you necessarily like each other. But you're all there because you share this very strong wish to penetrate the truth. It's a very strong wish to walk alongside others on a spiritual path. So it's a very challenging but a very rewarding situation. And of course, I was still very blocked. I remember Rat and Shuri, who was my preceptor, some years later. She said to me, "You were so blocked!" And what that means is, you know, I'd obviously be in loads of pain. And some would say, "How are you?" And I'd say, "I'm fine!" You know, so I wasn't able to drop into my actual experience. I was too frightened of it. I didn't even know what my actual experience was. So I was still living my life on these two sort of idealistic level and the realistic level. And they were not really talking to each other very much. But it's very interesting. And this is one of the points I want to make, that practice gives surprising results. So I was presumably thinking, if I kept practicing as a Buddhist, my pain would go away. This pain that I wasn't really acknowledging would somehow disappear and I would be happy all the time. Yeah, I think probably that's what I thought I'd signed up to. But of course, what happened is my practice started working and everything started sort of splintering apart. I had these dreams. I remember I went through a phase of the Earth opening up. I'd be walking along and these great chasms would appear before me and I'd fall down into the Earth. And dreams of earthquakes, dreams of seeing faces that were splitting apart, sort of splintering. And that was a very positive stage, very, very uncomfortable. It was when the cracks were appearing and my fantasy, my kind of parallel universe. Yeah, that's what I think many of us do. We have our reality and we have a kind of fantasy parallel universe that we're trying to inhabit all the time, which leads to the most phenomenal strain. And fortunately, I was in these very supportive conditions and I could talk about it. And so I'd say, "Oh, I had these awful dreams. You know, where the Earth was opening up?" And people like Rat in a shoe would just go, "Yes." Everything at last. Something starting to give, you know. And during that point, I went on an ordination, a pre-ordination retreat for people that were thought to be ready. I mean, when you hear my story, you might think it was obvious I wasn't ready. But I thought I was ready and the people around me thought I was ready. So I went on this retreat, thinking I was going to be ordained for a month. And I didn't get ordained. I had a really awful time, actually. Just massive fear, huge fear. A month of art. I would say, looking back on it, a sort of month of panic attacks. Sweating. I remember someone used the phrase of mulching under the duvet. You know, when you sort of go to bed at night and you just kind of feel like you're sort of sweating away. You know, the word mulching, that's what compost does. Yes. The composting under the duvet at night. And I think the reason I couldn't do it, I could not say yes to the three duels. I could not say yes, I could take the step. It's because I was still, I still thought if I got ordained, my back pain would go away. I mean, none of this was conscious. But, you know, I knew it was impossible to take that step. So I didn't get ordained, which was caused for those extremely humiliating, extremely, you know, I'm a very ambitious person. And I wanted to come to England, get ordained quickly, be some kind of star. And here I was, the ultimate humiliation, having to come back to the community and say, well, no, actually, I haven't got ordained. I found my friends. And that was one of the best things that's ever happened to me. You know, I can honestly say that. That was what really started to get through my ego defenses. It was extremely difficult. But then what came from that was I had, I got ordained two years later, three years later, but the year after that was such a creative year. You know, it was very, it was really unpleasant in some ways. You know, I wasn't happy, happy, but it was so creative. It was amazing. I think because the defenses had, you know, the defenses were starting to break down. So I was very, very open to something new, emerging. It was very creative. I remember I had this whole thing about fearlessness. I felt I needed to be much more fearless. And so I got this big bit of paper and I lay down on the paper. And I got someone to draw around my body on this paper. And then I painted a spear and I hung this on my bedroom wall. So when people walked into my bedroom, what they saw was this naked, completely naked, I put seven person holding a spear. And I think the spear was something to do with integrating the earth and the heaven. It was an interbe that you've got a symbol of the cut hunger, which is the staff, which is sort of a symbol of vertical integration, bringing together the heights and the depths. That was amazing. That was such a great thing to do. I lived with this life size naked, completely open, bigger. I think it was a bit alarming for the people that visited me. And I did loads of stuff with cauldrons. You know, the cauldron is like a bowl. So you know, when you're into bat and Buddhism, you have these two very strong symbols of the cut hunger and the... I can't remember what it's called. The bowl, basically it's a bowl, bowl of transformation. So I did a lot of ritual where if I didn't know the answer to something, I would put it in this bowl on my shrine, which in a way is a symbol of just trusting the depths. You know, you can't work it all out in your head. So I did a lot of stuff with that. I live, instead of having a shrine in my bedroom, I turned my bedroom into a shrine room. So I had about eight different shrines around my room and my bed was in the corner. That was amazing. That was such a powerful thing to do. So it was like living in a space of transformation that was not based on my head. It was based on something sort of alchemical and deep and non-rational. I had a moment on a retreat. I can't remember exactly when this was, but very strong again. But a moment of like crash landing here, now, and this thing of this is it. Yeah. It was like, and I really didn't know, everything I'd done up till then had been like a dress rehearsal. I was doing all my spiritual practice for some time in the future when I would be happy, when I'd be free of suffering. So everything was kind of preparation and I was missing my life. I was missing all these moments because I was always, everything was always seeking a result. So this thing of oh my God, this is it. This is my life. This is not a dress rehearsal, it's the real thing. So then what I did is I drove up to the peak district and I filled the car full of rocks. And I came back and I made this whole shrine out of rocks in my room. And that was because, that was earthing, it was grounding, it was being in the present. It was very, very bad for the car, I think. And that was amazing. And I just had these rocks in my room all the time. And then I kept, I would put things like flowers on them to the beauty in amongst this. It's now, it's now, it's now, this is, this is your life. So I would say in a way that's probably the most creative time of my life. That period of being, of not getting ordained and having all my ideas about the sort of person I was smashed up. That was an incredibly creative time, because I was much more open to magic, I think. Magic and mystery and otherness and that solutions arise in the most mysterious ways when I'm not trying to control it all from my head. So then I got, I did get ordained eventually, obviously. And, but I got ordained when I could bring my suffering with me into the order. I would say that was what made me ready. Yeah, it was when I realized, oh, I have to, this is part of me, this is part of my life, I have to bring it with me. And at my ordination ceremony, I had to lie down, and that felt really significant. Humiliating, embarrassing, but it was my reality, having to lie down, because I couldn't sit through the whole thing. Very tender, yeah, very, very true and honest. I moved to Manchester in '96, and I made some videos on women and Buddhism. So I made one on women in motherhood, and one on women in ordination. And that was a very good thing to do, but that was also a time of forgetfulness. I got back into being driven, and I'm the filmmaker, and I didn't manage my energy very well. So then in '97, I had another big crisis. I'd have done it really with the video work. And my back got a lot worse, so that was really the beginning of this latest phase of my life, where I had a severe deterioration of my condition. And I was back in hospital and lots of things got worse. And then in 2002, I had another big operation to try and stabilize things, which it has done that to some extent. So since 2002, it's been a bit more manageable and stable. But really what I've got now is what I... This is the way it's going to be now for the rest of my life. But anyway, so looking at thinking about all this, it was very interesting that this period from '97 until the present has been very, very rich again. Because I have been, again, grounded literally. Quite interesting what happens in life, isn't it? Literally brought down to earth. And I feel what I've done this time is I really have turned to face the demon. I really have turned to look suffering in the eye, which I don't really think I had done before then. And to investigate it and to get to know not just my suffering, but what does it mean to be human much more intimately? To get to know the human condition much more intimately than I had. And that's enabled me to walk hand-in-hand with others much, much more. It's been much more human alongside other human beings, much more open to others and the truths of others' life. Because all of our lives contain suffering of one sort or another. And to open out to life as it is, that's been such a relief actually. To stop interfering all the time. And to let life be, this is my life, this is your life, this is it happening right now, this is the spiritual life. And to stop so incessantly trying to manipulate Sanghsara, which I think is what many of us do in the name of the spiritual life. We get adept at manipulating Sanghsara and that when we're adept at it, we think we're doing well spiritually. That's quite a little pitfall for many of us. But to open out to life as it is has been a great relief. And I think for me that's what the Buddha started for idealists these days. It's to be real with my own experience and try to be real with the experience of others. And to walk hand-in-hand with others in the ordinary, the ordinariness of humanity. And I noticed that as soon as I resist, as soon as there's a resistance in my being of wanting things to be different, hanging on to something, then that leads to separation, then I'm less close to others. And when I let go into things as they are, then I'm closer to others. So that's been a very important thread for me. And then about four years ago I started this project, that video Shira mentioned, of teaching pain management. Which I say a little bit more in a bit. So I think that this issue of suffering is very, very important. And I'm not just saying that because I live with pain. I think that it's probably why most of us come to Buddhism in the first place. It's because there's some level of discontent, satisfaction, frank unhappiness in our life. So the problem of human suffering is very deep. And it's really what I think most of us are grappling. And if you're not, if you manage to juggle things around in such a way that it's all working for you, it won't last. Because you're going to get old, things are going to happen. So that we can never, ever get samsara on our own terms in a way that's sustainable. So the problem of human suffering is really the heart of the matter, I think. So I'm just going to tell you about a sutra, which is really good on this. It's called the Salatha Sutra, from the Samutta Nikaya. Sutra of the arrow, and sometimes called the Sutra of the Dart, and it's extremely good on... I thought that was you tapping your watch. It's extremely good on investigating what do we mean by suffering. So it goes into different sorts of suffering and distinguishes suffering that we need to accept from suffering that we can alleviate. And I think often we get those muddled up as well. So I'm just going to read you the main part of it. Monks, an unstructured run-of-the-mill person feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. A well-unstructed disciple of the noble ones also feels feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. So what difference? What distinction? What distinguishing factor is there between the well-unstructed disciple of the noble ones and the un-unstructed run-of-the-mill person? Okay? So whether you're a run-of-the-mill person, i.e. all of us, or a noble one, i.e. I think someone who's gained insight is what is meant by that. We're all going to have feelings of pleasure, feelings of pain, and feelings that are not strong, you one or the other. The blessed one said, "When touched with the feeling of pain, the un-unstructed run-of-the-mill person, sorrows, breathes and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow, and right afterward were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel a pain of two arrows. In the same way, when touched with the feeling of pain, the un-unstructed run-of-the-mill person, sorrows, breathes and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. As he is touched by that painful feeling, he is resistant. Any resistance obsession with regard to that feeling obsesses him. Touched by that painful feeling, he delights in sensual pleasure. Why is that? Because the un-unstructed run-of-the-mill person does not discern any escape from painful feeling aside from sensual pleasure. As he is delighting in sensual pleasure, any passion obsession with regard to that pleasure obsesses him. So now he's obsessed by pain and he's obsessed by pleasure. Or she causes this including women. Sensing a feeling of pleasure, he senses it as though joined with it. Sensing a feeling of pain, he senses it as though joined with it. Sensing a feeling of neither pleasure nor pain, he senses it as though joined with it. This is called an un-unstructed run-of-the-mill person joined with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses and despairs. He is joined, I tell you, with suffering and stress. And of course, the one-unstructed noble one, just abbreviating, when he's touched with a painful feeling, he doesn't grieve and so on. So he feels one pain, physical but not mental. And he's only shocked with one arrow, rather than two arrows. He's not resistant and he doesn't become obsessed. And he is disjoint, I tell you, from suffering and stress. There's a little verse at the end, which is lovely. "For a learned person who has fathomed the dhamma, clearly seeing this world and the next, desirable things don't charm the mind, undesirable things bring no resistance." So a very, very good little suitor. And I'm just going to pull out a few key points. So basically, as long as we're human, as long as we've got a body, as long as we're in this world, we're going to have painful feelings, sexual feelings. I never quite know what they mean by neutral feelings, but I think anything that's not strongly one thing or the other. So we're going to have the gamut of experience, yeah? And it includes the mind. So it's all any sense experience, which includes mental experience. And what we do, because we're not wise, most of us, when we have a painful feeling, we resist it, straight away. It's completely built into our equipment, that there's a resistance that arises. A pushing away. And then the suitorate says, "Then what we do is we seek sensuous pleasure." Now, this is interesting, because Son and I talked about this quite a bit. And when I'm in pain, I thought, "Well, I don't actually do that. I don't reach for the biscuit tin or want to drink." I tend to argue, or, you know, I'll get into more aversive behaviour. So I thought, "Well, you know, that's not sensuous pleasure." But then when we went into it in quite some detail, having an argument is actually more pleasurable than experiencing the pain. Yeah? So that's interesting. Any kind of destruction, even if it's aversive, is more pleasurable than being with the pain. So I think the Buddha, I thought, "Maybe the Buddha's got so wrong." He probably didn't have very much pain, so maybe he got there wrong. But no, I think the Buddha got it right. So any form of distraction, anything that we do to take us away from our experience, I think would fall under the category of sensuous pleasure. But then what happens, because we've got resistance to one thing and we're wanting something else, we become obsessed by them both, which is very interesting. Because we're not being with the painful experience, actually, it starts to obsess us. Yeah? And I think that's what happens. Energy gets tied up in avoiding something, which I think is a form of obsession. And we, of course, get obsessed by the pleasure. So we're running. Yeah, we get into this running away. We're doing this. And at the same time, we are obsessed by the thing we're running away from. Or else we wouldn't be running in the first place. So there is this kind of conflict of energies. And so we then become joined with the pain, which I think is very interesting. That's what the Buddha says. Sensing a feeling of pain, he senses it as though joined with it. So the whole thing starts to build. So you've got the basic pain. And then you've got all this kind of reactive pain, which becomes more and more complicated. And what this does is it leads to suffering and stress. So this was, you know, the Buddha taught two and a half thousand years ago. This is such a good teaching for the modern world, I think, where so many of us are stressed. And suffering and running, running, running to avoid things or to get things that we think will bring us happiness. I've heard an American teacher called Carol Wilson talk about the sutta. And she says that if none of these things work, you know, you're chasing the pleasure and you end up, it doesn't work, which it never does in the end. Then what we do is we blame ourselves or we blame others or we get angry. And I thought that was pretty fair assessment of the situation. Covered the basis, you know, it's like, what have I done wrong? Or it's what have they done wrong? Or it's just really pissed off about the whole situation. So, I think it's a very, very important sutta, this very, very significant sutta. Because we talk about getting rid of suffering in a very broad sense in Buddhism. But what we're meaning is we're learning ways of eradicating reactive suffering. And that's the second arrow. Yeah. And of course, it's not just one arrow, is it? You know, we have something we don't like and it's as if a whole quiver of arrows are the salting one. So, really what the sutta's saying is we need to learn to live with the first arrow. Accept our humanity. Be deeply, deeply with our humanity, which takes a very deep level of acceptance. And then to prevent the arising of the second arrow. That's how I see it, it's a bit like the four right efforts. Prevent the arising of distraction, aversion, craving, seeking sensuous pleasure. So, really what we have to learn is how to change our relationship to the events of life. Rather than thinking we need to change the events of life themselves, themselves, themselves. Events plural. So, I think again we make, this is an error many of us make. We think we've got to keep on sort of rearranging life and that will ease our suffering. Often we need to leave life alone and look at our reactive suffering and ease the reactive suffering. And of course what's really central to this, how do we do this? We need to practice mindfulness. The only way we can even have any chance of preventing the arising of the second arrow is to know what's actually happening right now. To be mindful and that's where the Buddhist practice of mindfulness I think is so important. We can't possibly prevent this assault of the arrows if we're not being really honest with our moment by moment experience. Not what we'd like to be happening, not what we think should be happening, but what is actually happening right now. And this is the bare experience, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts, the emotions. And that's different from the stories that we tell ourselves, it's different from the fantasy. So, trying to pair all that back to being really honest, what am I feeling right now? And it might be that you've got pain in the body. It may be something that someone has been doing in the meditations in the afternoons is help guiding us so that if we've got some kind of mental distress finding it in the body. I think that's very, very good because then we can work with it in the body. Sometimes we can't work with it in the mind. So, to feel it in the body, accept it in the body, relax around it in the body, take the breath to it in the body. That can help us work with the mind. So, mindfulness helps us be honest, be present. And it helps us begin to catch the arising of these two tendencies in life that we all have going on all the time to hold on or to push away. That's basically what we're all doing all the time. We're either pulling towards us or pushing away. No wonder we get so tired. You know, it's such hard work. Mindfulness takes us to the heart of this. And we will still do it, but we can catch it much sooner. And if we catch it sooner, it's got less momentum, less volition caught up with it. There's a few descriptions of mindfulness that I find very helpful. One I really like is mindfulness is the middle way between suppression and over-identification with experience. The middle way between suppression and over-identifying with experience. So, one can just honestly say, "I'm feeling guilt." You're not suppressing the guilt and neither are you thinking, "Oh my God, I'm a terrible person because I'm feeling guilty." It's just like this is guilt in this moment and then it will pass possibly. Deepa Ma, who's this Indian teacher who lived in the 20th century, a fantastic woman. A book that Windthors have just bought out on Deepa Ma, which I'd really recommend it. Yes, fantastic. She says quite simply, "Mindfulness is knowing whatever you are doing, know you are doing it." That's very good, whatever you're doing, know you're doing it. John Cabot-Zinn, who's a teacher in America, he says, "Mindfulness is attention plus intention." Which is very good, but attention, paying attention in the moment. And I think intention is knowing the sort of thread of one's life. Knowing the movement from our moment to the next. What's your intention behind your actions? And mindfulness gives us choice. Yeah, this is really probably the most important thing. We can only choose our responses to the moment. If we know, I can choose whether to kill this mosquito or not. Who's not to? We can only really choose how we respond. And preventing the arising of the second arrow is a choice. It's an active choice to not go into being reactive. We can only do that if we're present, if we're honest. So we can choose whether to respond or react. That's a good little phrase that you can find, remember, respond, don't react in the moment. And the other thing about mindfulness, which often isn't really talked about, but I find particularly moving actually, is what I call the other regarding interconnected aspect of mindfulness. The dimension of mindfulness, which is kindness. Because when we're really present, when we're really mindful, something happens. I always find it difficult to talk about because I can't really articulate it. But something happens where something drops away of the hard edges and you realize there's all these beings around. If one's in the moment, we're in the moment with others, and then it's completely natural to be kind, completely natural to be loving. You have to try and figure that out for yourselves, but that is my experience. Another thing that Deepa Ma says, the American teacher, someone asked her, "Should I be practicing mindfulness or meta?" It's a question that often we ask, "Should I be doing practicing mindfulness or meta?" And she says that ultimately they're the same. And she says, "Think about it. If you are truly loving, are you not also mindful? If you are truly mindful, are you not also loving?" And when I read that, I thought, "Oh, yes, that is so true, actually." You know, that we can't really love if we're not present and we can't be present without there being this awareness of the greater context that one's living within. So I certainly see awareness, mindfulness and kindness as being two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different perspectives in my experience. And I think that's something that has come out in the kindly awareness practice the way Sona's been leading it, this thing that we're all basically the same. We all get so caught up in my little life and my little dramas and my stories and my uniqueness. I mean, I am unique because I'm different from everybody in some, in one respect, but I'm also the same. I'm much more the same than different. My experience of suffering happens to be back pain, but actually, it's really much the same as someone else's experience of suffering that might be grief for a parent that's died or pain in their knees. It's probably, you know, what we're living with is pretty similar. And that's very, very, very helpful because it opens the whole thing out to a much more interconnected dimension of mindfulness. A reflection that I sometimes do in meditation, I try and think, well, where is my edge, really? Where do I end? And the next person begin. It's a very good thing to sit with. And you'll find you can't find it. There is not a line in space where, you know, we're in this room right now where far more interconnected than we realized. There isn't these little sort of hard shells around us the way we think. Bante talks about this in wisdom beyond words. He says, it's not as if we're a big soup. I don't think he uses that word, but it's not as if it's a big sort of mush, you know, we're all just in it in a big sort of sludge. Neither are we completely separate, but it's as if we're diaphanous. I love that. Do you know the word diaphanous? Can someone translate that? It's like we sort of see through the light is shining through all of us and so we're much more interconnected. So we are separate, but we're also the same. And I think that's a very, very rich field of reflection in most practice. And something that I say, I do the amitaba practice and amitaba is the Buddha of love. And something I say to myself and my sardina once I get into it is we are not separate, so the only response is to love. And when I say that every time I go, I kind of go, something drops away, we are not separate, so the only response is to love. So love becomes natural, becomes a natural response. Time's up. That's all right. I can wrap it up. So, okay, on the convention, with the order convention, we just had someone go to talk and she said something really good. You know, we usually think about developing compassion. We're developing compassion as if right now, here, right now, I don't have any compassion, I need to develop it and then I'll be compassionate. And she turned the whole thing on its head and she said compassion is natural. Compassion is the way things are. Compassion is natural when we stop creating self, self as in the sense of a hard rigid identity. So, compassion is natural when we stop creating self. And then I sort of developed that a bit that connectedness is natural when we stop creating separation. So, right now, if we kind of relax back out of this kind of what do people think of me, am I doing all right, am I good enough? I don't like myself. You know, all these sort of things that we get tangled up with, if we could drop that, relax back, it's completely natural to be connected. It's completely natural to feel care and kindness and concern. And I think that's another quite helpful way of thinking about it because it can stop the straining and the struggle to constantly want to be somewhere else, be someone else, have a different moment. This is the only moment that we have and it is a deeply interconnected moment. It's a deeply, yeah, we are deeply together more than we realize. So, something I've often thought about is it's the nature of life to move towards the light. I don't know that the Prabh is a scientist saying, it's treading on very shaky ground here. But this is my experience. It is the nature of life to move towards the light. If you put potatoes in a dark room with a crack of light on the other side of the room, the potatoes will move towards the light. This is true. And I find that amazing. How do they know to do that? And I think we're like that. It is in our nature to move towards the light. That's why we're here. Each of us has come here because of some deep inner knowing. I do think it's a knowing. We know everything that I'm saying is just that we keep forgetting. We're all here because we know it's our nature to move towards the light. And that's what is so amazing about this kind of retreat because here we all are and we're able to engage in that a bit more fully with one another. Yeah, so I think I will stop there. So I think when you look at it from this way, it is really very, very perverse the way we live our lives. So you know how we usually think, I need to develop compassion. I need to develop wisdom. I need to do all this work and then I'll be a better person and then I'll be happy. Actually, what we're doing all the time is we're inhibiting something that's natural. So the effort that we expand in life is this really weird thing of getting in the way all the time. It's a bit like we spend our lives building these walls that keep the light out. So let's just turn the whole thing on its head, which is just something for you to think about. And I think again in a retreat like this, the walls come down a bit and the light is there. Yeah, it's, I mean, in the team meetings it's been amazing on this retreat. That's the level of generosity and kindness and rejoicing and appreciation. It's all very natural because we're in these conditions and I think that's been the flavor of the whole retreat that maybe for a few days we've stopped putting all that effort into keeping the light out. And that's quite easy to stop keeping the light out. It's probably a much easier thing to think about them. I've got to become this perfect person in order to be enlightened or what. So yeah, I'm going to stop there. 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] [BLANK_AUDIO]