(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. - Take you all in. - Yeah, I was saying to my community of the last few days, why do I say I'll give a talk? Don't ever let me do this again, sort of thing. Of course, the momentum in me to give talks is probably a bit stronger even for my community to stop me, but the process is not very pleasant for me and possibly for the other people living with me. So I do apologize for that. Yeah, the theme, for the attainment of enlightenment, I accept this ordination. It's a rather big theme, isn't it? I was very keen when I first took it on. I thought, great, that'll be great. I wouldn't mind speaking about that, but I've got a bit overwhelmed and it brought up all my kind of, God, does enlightenment really exist? How on earth do I think like that? Why do I think like that, yeah? So I've had to sort of work through quite a bit of stuff in myself, yeah? Yeah, so it's been quite a difficult talk to write and I think it might even be quite a difficult talk for me to give, but here I am doing it. So one of these peculiar things, when you give a talk, it's a bit like stepping into an aeroplane. You're not going to get off until it lands, yes? I feel a bit like that with this talk. You know, I'm up here now until the end, OK? Yeah. Yeah, so my talk is called, "Enlightenmenters' hearts, a life as whole." Profound, isn't it? This is like me and Shuba Viewer came up with when she said, "Subnandy, as your publicity manager, "I need to have a little title for your talk." So I said, "Oh, God, I don't know." We played around with a few things. I said, "Oh, enlightenmenters' hearts, life as whole." "Cop has fantastic." I said, "Yeah, now I've just got to write the talk, haven't I?" Anyway, so that's what it's called. And the first section of the talk is about enlightenment as hearts, yeah? So in this part, I'm going to be talking about a few particular points. The importance of having faith that enlightenment is possible, that enlightenment is possible for us, yeah? That is the crux of it, the heart of it. Now let's talk about how to hold a vision. Then talk about the relationship between that aspiration and joining the order. And then talking about the significance of saying those words in a ritual, yeah? And then under the section, life as whole, I'm going to talk about why this aspiration needs to manifest in our daily lives and how we can keep the heart of our spiritual life alive within the whole of our lives, yeah? Okay, that's the only bit that's neat about this talk. The rest of it's all a bit chaotic, okay? Tonight, I've got it all in blue that bit, yeah? So the importance of having faith in enlightenment as a possibility, yeah. So something has to provide us with a heart, a heart to our spiritual life, yeah? And basically it's up to us to find out what that is and really stand on it and develop it, yeah? This could be something like a personal myth or a particular inspiration for us. So interesting that a lot of bodhisattvas and Buddhas that we visualize or practice in the movement hold something to their heart, yeah? I find that a quite interesting image. It was a bit of a shot one day when I realized, well, I hold Shaq community to my heart and he holds a begging bowl to his heart, which was a bit kind of God, what on earth does that mean for me, yeah, in relationship to him? (crickets chirping) So the quote here from Banti. "Doubt is a kind of camouflage. "If you don't take up a clear position, "no one can attack you. "You are beyond criticism, or rather, "you haven't reached a point where you can be criticized. "You might not be certain, but at least you can never be wrong. "And this is a comfortable position "or non-position. "Doubt is essentially resistance to the positive, "forward-looking spirit of the path. "As soon as you are convinced that the Buddha was enlightened, "you have to take what he said seriously enough "to do something about it. "If, on the other hand, you give yourself the luxury "of doubting whether the Buddha was really enlightened or at all, "or at least postponing committing yourself to a view "until you're really sure you don't need to take his teaching "so seriously, and best of all, "you don't need to do anything about it. "The ideal way is to free yourself from doubt, "and thus to thus clarify your thinking. "Not necessarily in a bookish or abstract way, "but simply by reflecting on what you know of the spiritual path." It's very interesting, Banti, talking there about the luxury of doubt. When I was given the name She Who Delights In Faith, and Sangha Devi, when she gave it to me, said, "Sudnadi, I want you to take your faith into the order." And as the first woman with faith in her name, I felt that was my duty off I went, yes. Off I went into the order. But actually, what I realised was I couldn't now have the luxury of doubt. I couldn't have the luxury of thinking, "This is rubbish, this is meaningless." I couldn't actually have the luxury of being under-confident, actually. Because doubt and under-confidence is often just an easy way out of what really needs to be done, what we need to do. Actually, on that note, I just remember a little story between me and Sangha Devi. I'm sure she won't mind me sharing it with 85 other women. LAUGHTER It's your... She had a big shock one day on her retreat that it was possible to be enlightened. She really saw it was possible to be enlightened, yeah? This was her just only in a few months, you know, it goes on, no one does it. So just a few months ago, she was thinking, "It really is possible for me to be enlightened." And it was a very profound experience for her, yeah? But then a few days later, something sort of caved in. And she came to my room and she said, "Oh, I'm going through all this sort of, I can't possibly do it, "and it can't be me and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, I'm not up to it." And I said, "Yeah, that's easy. It's easy to go through that stuff." That's so much easier than carrying on believing that it's possible. Because if you believe it's possible, you have to apply yourself, yeah? So much easier just to go, "Oh, it's not really up to it." So everything like that, yeah? That was shocking, wasn't it? Yeah, she'd come to me for a bit of encouragement. Well, that was encouragement, wasn't it? Yes. I just didn't put any sugar on it. That was the problem. So my own experience, yeah, in a few months leading up to my ordination, yeah, I was going through some very... I just moved to Taraloka, and I was going through quite a lot of, well, I suppose just very positive emotion. And I remember sitting, actually, in my room, saying to Diane Andy, "I'm just having this really strong experience of something, "really strong experience, she was going, "Is it faith?" I was like, "No, no, no, it's deeper than that, yeah?" And I say that because I think it was faith, but I think faith isn't as tidy or as conceptual as we think it is. It's just a very deep resonance with something, yeah? And it feels quite elemental and very, very strong and very basic, yeah? And out of that, or within that, I read these particular words, which I'm going to share with you. So this is from Badu Bandu. "I think of Shaq Muni and of other enlightened beings, and I reflect. "As they were, so am I. What they became, so may I become. "They started off as human beings, and so do I. "They started off with weaknesses and imperfections, so do I. "They started off with all sorts of limitations, and so do I. "But then look what they achieved. "They transcended their limitations. They became budders. "They were human. I am human. What they achieved, I too can achieve. "If only I make the effort." So I read this paragraph. I don't know if I'd read it before. You can find it in the Bodhisattva ideal series, so at some point I would have studied that. But I had a very strong response when I read this. I thought, "Surely, if I really believe in that, "everything else of my spiritual life will follow. "I won't need to tend to anything else. "In a way, that will just drag me behind it." Do you see what I mean? It will be the main sort of force in my life. And within a week or so of hearing that and reflecting on that, that Bodhisattva community started to appear in my mind. And I lived in his presence very, very strongly for about maybe for several months after that. And I think it was really like he just personified that verse. What he started personifying was the possibility, the real possibility of enlightenment. For me, when I visualise that community, I'm not visualising perfection. Perfectionism, root it out. I'm not visualising perfection, I'm visualising potential, I'm visualising possibility, possibility for me. And he arose, I think, out of that verse. And that had, actually at that time it had such a momentum that the relationship was dynamic. It wasn't just one sided, I didn't just sort of conjure him up. He had a life too. I remember once I was, I was trying to do the mindfulness of breathing and the Buddha was appearing like lots in my mind. And I was trying to do the mindfulness of breathing and I was feeling very kind of a bit heavy-handed and trying to follow my breath. And there was the Buddha doing his thing, you know. And I was thinking, "Oh God, what am I going to do?" And eventually he just said to me, "Look, why can't you just be happy sitting in the presence of the Buddha?" I was like, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." So, at a very day if you might carry on a mature side, you're just like Nagia, only twice as headstrong, I don't know. Yeah, I also had another, just going with a sense of perfectionism and how it's not about perfectionism, it's about possibility and how we really must believe in that, the enlightenment is possible. I remember after I got ordained a few months later, I was stepping to a shower in Tauraloka here and I suddenly thought, "Oh, insight is easy." I thought, "Oh God, what are you doing now, suddenly? What are you up to now?" And I thought, "I don't have to be perfect, I just have to see things the way they are." Yeah, to be honest, the second one is easier. Yes, and I had another experience also, a few months after being ordained in a similar sort of theme, where I was on the Transcendental Principle retreat and on the first night I was sick in the middle of the night, which I just thought maybe I was just a bit anxious about something. And then after that, throughout the retreat, I'd be studying something, and some of you might have studied the Transcendental Principle, being on that retreat, so studying a lot of content from the survey Buddhism and it's a lot about the Buddha and enlightenment, and also our condition of co-production. And Sangha Devi was noticing that I was going pale and getting quite sick quite often. And eventually she said, "What is going on, Sajjanandi?" And I said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I don't know, all I'm doing is reading this stuff." And she said, "It's just your receptivity to the Dharma that's making me throw up." And what was going on was that insight really was possible for me, and it didn't feel that far away. And that was actually making me go white, throw up, all sorts of things. So what does it mean to believe in enlightenment? Okay, so I've got a few points here from Vanti, and then I'm just going to go back to my own story. So Vanti talks about enlightenment as he describes enlightenment as a state of pure, clear awareness, extending in all directions. Yeah, it's a state of knowledge, not in the ordinary sense, but as a direct, unmediated spiritual vision that sees things all, that sees all things directly and clearly. He also talks about it as a state of intense, profound, overflowing love, love and compassion for all sentient beings, a desire for the well-being of all sentient life. And he talks about it being a state of inexhaustible mental and spiritual energy. So it's a state of tremendous energy, of absolute spontaneity, continually bubbling forth, a state of uninterrupted creativity. And he says also it's a state of perfect, unconditioned freedom from all subjective limitations. Yeah, you don't have the luxury of subjective limitations any longer. I think in my experience, I stopped thinking so much about the nature of enlightenment when I was mulling over all these thoughts when I was getting ordained. I started looking more at my response, my relationship to the belief that enlightenment was possible. I just started looking more at how I responded. I didn't try and work out what it was. I think this is partly because while I am a more of a faith type, actually I meant to bring a little postcard with me that Banti had written to me maybe 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of long, long letters to him from a solitary and he wrote me several postcards in response to those letters. And in one of my letters, I'm obviously struggling as to whether I'm a faith type or not, and it's beginning to emerge in me that maybe I am. And he writes to me saying maybe you are a faith type and he talks about all of us needing an aspect of beauty but also of suffering in our lives as a way of motivating us. So I am just simply more of a faith type. I'm also an extrovert. So I look at relationships and I experience myself very strongly through relationship. And that's what I began to look at in terms of my response to enlightenment. I began to look at the nature of that relationship, me and how I related to it, rather than what it was in itself. Does that make sense? It's so abstract, this language, isn't it? So what I began to see was there is a certain way that I respond to things that I could trust. There was a sensation in my experience. There is a kind of experience that I can trust, and I began to use that experience as an authority. I didn't dismiss it. I didn't disguise it. I just looked out for it. I began to learn what it was like. So this response is a much fuller response than my usual experience or my usual feelings. Yes, it's emotional, but it's got clarity to it. Because sometimes it seemed terribly deep and urgent. It was always very pleasurable, and it could sometimes feel quite basic. But it's an integrated response. I can feel it within the whole of me. And eventually I learned to call it a faith response. And I began to see that I just live my life a lot within that landscape of faith response. When you just say yes to something with your whole being. And I will say that that faith response, it is, I mean, Banti sometimes talks about it, has talked about it in the surveyors. It's like when you get a tremor in you that vibrates with another tremor. So you know, like a musical instrument, when you play the violin, the glass tremor slightly. It's almost on that level. You feel yourself, your whole being responding to something. I stopped worrying about what the something was, and I just looked for the tremor. And I will say that what I respond to, I mean, eventually I did start looking a bit more at what I was responding to. But the fact that I could respond, the fact that I could respond like that became my guiding principle. That's what I began to look for in my experience. And actually that is what gives my life meaning. If I didn't respond like that to something, I don't know how I'd get up in the morning. I mean, I can be quite nihilistic. I can look at anything. Is there anything out there that's meaningful? This response is the thing that's meaningful to me. At the front of Banti's book, History of My Going for Refuge, she quotes Middleton Murray with this verse, which I love. To discover that within myself, which I must obey, to gain some awareness of the law, which operates in the organic whole of the internal world. To feel this internal world as an organic whole, working out its whole destiny, according to some secret vital principle. To know what acts and utterances are a liberation from obstacles and a session of strength. To acknowledge secret loyalties which one cannot deny without impoverishment and starvation. This is to possess one's soul indeed, and it is not easy either to do or to explain. To discover that, which within myself, which I must obey, it's very beautiful, isn't it? So I'm going to ask you, well, can you recognize your own faith response? And do you live in a landscape of faith? If not, then what is your landscape? So our heart essence, if you like, our spiritual life, has to be based on a faith response that something is possible, that that's what you're moving towards. Faith is a very interesting response, actually. Sabouti calls it in the mythic context talks that he gave. He calls it, he says, "Well, emotion blindly responds, and reason can only analyze and relate. It has no impetus of its own." Faith is a combination of the two, or faith is drawing on them both, yeah? It's a higher faculty. And he uses the word authority, so this is very interesting. So I began to use faith, my faith response as an authority in my life. So that would be a very interesting idea, like, what do you use as an authority in your life? Yeah. Yeah, I think sometimes we can think, well, it's very hard to believe in anything, isn't it? You want concrete facts, don't you? You want concrete proof that the Buddha was enlightened before you're going to believe in enlightenment, yeah? But you believe everyone hates you if someone hasn't said a load to you in the morning. There's loads of things that we use as an authority in our life, which has got no facts at all, yeah? It's just based on a simple experience of probably pleasure or pain, yeah? And out of that experience of pleasure or pain, we built up a whole network framework or experience, yeah? And then you come, you know, you come start looking to say, oh, I find it very difficult to believe in anything. What are you believing in right now? Yeah. What are you using as an authority in your experience right now? Yeah. And how is it informing and dictating your behaviour and your relationships with others? So learn about your own faith response. Learn how to recognise it. Watch out for it and feed it, yeah? Become specific in your language. In fact, actually generally become specific in your language about your experience. Don't say, I'm feeling a bit stirred up. When what you mean is, I've just had a faith response to something you've said, yeah? Because if you don't get specific, you don't really know what you're dealing with, actually. It's just another way of camouflaging our experience or keeping a distance with it. And I think we have loads of very positive experiences which do not have their full impact on us because we don't give them their true names, yeah? Use the language of the dharma when you talk about your experience or when you reflect on your experience. Don't fall back on jargon. I've got a whole talk in here about jargon which I'm not going to give today. Jargon alienates us from our experience. Don't use it. Use your own language. Mall over your own experience and choose your words carefully. Words carry power. They are like keys. It's like hitting the note, the note in the middle. Yeah, when I was yeah, for a while I was sharing a room with Vidya Shuri here at Tauraloka and Vidya Shuri is a flutist, yeah? And we were exploring together what it was to experience a faith response or what it was, what is to experience a really true response to something. And she said it's like hitting the note in the middle when you play flute. Yeah, I think when you're playing an instrument you can sometimes tell. You get the note sort of right but you don't get it right in the middle. It hasn't got the purity of the sound that you're really looking for. When you have a faith response you just hit the note in the middle. When you choose the right words you hit the note in the middle. Okay, how to hold an ideal or a vision? So at our heart there cannot be an artificial ideal or an artificial vision. It has to be authentic to us. It has to be a real possibility. When we hold a vision we're often cynical about it, yeah? We're often just cynical about ideals. They might seem too abstract, we don't relate to them or they're too global, they're too big and we just get overwhelmed by them. Or they're too high, which I think just indicates they're a bit artificial for us. If we don't connect with an ideal it could be that we're using the wrong words. Here's a question. Are we nourished or are we burdened by our ideals? Do we use our ideals as a form of self-criticism? So how can we hold an ideal? It has to be well-rooted in, yeah, rooting, rooting the ideal. Not an abstract, empty concept. It has to be our heart. It has to be a true ideal, not an artificial ideal. It needs to be beyond the worldly winds and we need to see it as more of a direction, an orientation and we need to expect it to continue to mature and deepen, yeah? It's not finished just because we had an experience of it once. So I'm just going to look at these a bit more. It has to be well-rooted in, not an abstract, empty concept. It has to be our heart. It has to be a true ideal, not an artificial one. Banti goes into this quite a lot in a little talk called The Ideal of Human Enlightenment in that little booklet, I don't know if you know it, fantastic lecture. It talks about two kinds of ideals, a natural ideal and an artificial ideal. A natural ideal takes into consideration the nature of the thing or the person for which it is an ideal and an artificial ideal does not do that. It imposes itself from the outside in an artificial manner. Actually, sometimes when I've been thinking about this, I've been thinking about the artificial ideals that we as women can have. I remember when I was a little girl, they swatched Miss World sometimes, you know what I mean? They've always got, I mean, hair. They've got tons of hair, haven't they? I know some people do have tons of hair. They've got tons of hair and they've got a sort of shape haven't they? It's easy to think really, ideally, I would be 34. What is it? It's 26, 34 with a lot of hair and blondes, yeah? But actually, it was a bit disheartening because, well, to be honest, it was a bit hard to know how I was going to accomplish that. Yeah, you know, and actually, well, it was just, I will just say, I think it was a bit of an artificial ideal. It wasn't a sort of natural ideal for me, yeah? And in the same way, I mean, actually, we'd get that a little bit with us responding to order members. There are some order members who actually do embody a more natural embodiment of the ideal for us, yeah? I think that's why it's so good that the order expands and that we're in contact with a lot of different people. So that we, I suppose, we don't just take on, I think it's so easy to take on the behavior of somebody in an artificial way thinking that's what mindfulness looks like, yeah? I used to have this idea that I couldn't be mindful because I told jokes. But I have been told I'm quite a mindful person and told I tell jokes, so that's good, isn't it? So that, you know, it's just like working out what is a natural ideal for us, yeah? So then Banti talks about enlightenment is not an artificial ideal. And then he talks about why he thinks, why he thinks we should relate to it like that as a natural ideal. I'm going to try to summarize. There is nothing artificial or arbitrary, he says. It corresponds to our nature and to our needs. It's very beautiful that, isn't it? It corresponds to our nature and to our needs. I've been thinking about recently how a lot of people in the movement are very attracted to the Thug To Garber teaching at the moment, yeah? The Smith of self-discovery. And I think a lot of that is to do with maybe the way that we've related sometimes to our ideals has been an artificial way. It's been more from the outside, yeah? And we're now trying to re-establish again that experience on the inside. So it's not a natural and not arbitrary ideal. And the Thug To Garber is teaching where you would discover something from within, yeah? The Buddha seed is in you already, yeah? So it's like we're not looking out there, suddenly the reference point is in here. The reference point should have always been in here, yeah? But we lose that a bit. When I was on a solitary about maybe about 13 years ago, I was struggling a lot for several weeks on this solitary. And at one point I just asked myself, why am I doing this? Yeah? Why am I doing this? And I thought, well, what else is there? That's just too vague. Why am I doing this? Well, it's what puts me in contact with people that I really value and can communicate with. No, that's got too many people in it. Why am I doing this? And at that point I said, because I gave up after a while, at that point I said, this is the only thing that gives my life meaning, yeah? And in a sense what I'd done was I'd finally arrived at my own reference point, yeah? When I got home actually and I was talking to Sirajoti who's my boyfriend at the time, he said, great, I've been waiting for years for you to arrive at that, yeah? Which is quite, I wish he told me that earlier, but anyway, well, it's quite, I think that's what we need. We really do need our own reference point, yeah? That's where our own vision or our ideals are going to come from, yeah? Everything else after that is just surely an amplification of it, but we must arrive at our own heart, yeah? So Banti says, how do we know that enlightenment is a natural ideal? Well, he says, though it's intelligible, enlightenment does seem to be something very rarified, very remote for our present experience, but these, the qualities that constitute enlightenment are already found in all of us, in German or form, they are not completely foreign to us, they are natural to every human being. So he's saying that we can respond to enlightenment because we already have a bit of a glimpse of it, we already have in German or form that experience, that's why we can relate to it, that's why it's a natural ideal for us, yeah? He also says that in the long run, we're not satisfied by anything else. Okay, another of my points, this ideal, our ideal needs to be beyond the worldly winds, the eight worldly winds. So the worldly winds are these pairs of opposites, yeah? Happiness and sorrow, praise and blame, loss and gain, fame and infamy. In other words, our aspiration or ideal needs to be beyond the opinions of other people, that's just putting it simply, yeah? We need to be in touch with a much deeper motivation, our motivation that has integrity and congruency with it. I've got a little quote here, "Our human life includes both successes and failures. If we allow ourselves to be caught up by feelings of either shame or pride, we will limit the scope of what we might do and who we might be." In other words, we're going to get it wrong, we're sometimes not going to do it very well, sometimes we're going to be great, all of those things don't really matter. What matters really is that we're just building on something else that's beyond the reach of other people's opinions. Beyond those worldly opinions, some people are going to have a sense of whether we're heading in the right direction spiritually and we can't be beyond that. That's a very complicated area. We'll just stay with them. Basically, we've got to have our own motivation, yeah? So we've got to see this desire for enlightenment or our higher aspirations or higher ideals as more of a direction that continually orientates us. It's not a concrete reality already, it's not that we're there already. I think sometimes if we hold an ideal badly, we think we've already got there, yeah? Norman Fisher says, "ideals are reflections of our own deeply religious nature, but as we know, ideals can be poisoned if we take them in large quantities or if we take them incorrectly." In other words, if we take them not as ideals, but as concrete realities, ideals should inspire us to surpass ourselves, which we need to aspire to do if we're to be truly human and which we can never actually do exactly because we are truly human. "ideals are tools for inspiration, not realities in themselves." And if rightly understood, ideals make us light-hearted and give us a sense of direction. Another point, expect to hold an ideal, holding an ideal to be a process of deepening and maturing. Don't be frightened of making a mistake. There was a time here at Taraloka when I was team manager of one of the teams and I talked about us developing a culture of mistakes. And it's just because I just didn't want people to hold back if a fear of getting it wrong, yeah? What? Who cares? I mean, does it really matter that we get things wrong? I don't know. What's the big deal, you know? Okay, I'm going to now look at the relationship between this ideal or this aspiration to gain enlightenment and joining the order. First of all, I just looked at it as a line in the order and ceremony, ordination ceremony. For the attainment of enlightenment, I accept this ordination. Well, it has to be there, doesn't it, in the ordination ceremony? I think without it, the ordination ceremony itself wouldn't have the heart that it needs to have. And it does give us a voice. It gives a voice to our highest aspiration within a ritual of commitment. And this will give us support and inspiration over the years of practice ahead of us. I say that rather poetically. What it means in reality is you're going to be caught between a rock and a hard place, quite a lot. It means when you come to think, I don't know, do I want to do that? No, it'd be much easier if I didn't. You feel that commitment at your back. So, is this just a Scottish race to be caught between a rock and a hard place? No, okay, okay, good. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You have it in America as well. Thank you, Carol. Thank you. Yeah. So, you've given voice to your highest aspirations within a very strong and very simple ritual. So, I've got a lot of questions here, which I then I haven't answered. I've sort of covered it by doing lots of questions. But anyway, they're all the same question. How is the order a context in which we can gain insight? How does being part of the order help us to gain enlightenment? Well, we must think it must help. Otherwise, why do it? We must think that joining the order will help us to move in the direction of enlightenment. Otherwise, why do it? So, I stepped into the kitchen when I was at this point in the talk. I stepped into the kitchen at Toreloch and I said to the two people standing in the kitchen, Monica was one of them, why do you want to join the order? So, if Monica said, I felt the order would be a context in which all my strengths would blossom. I don't think you use the word blossom, but all the strengths would be drawn out. Yeah. So, I saw it as well, she was waiting to it as a situation where she was going to really flourish. Yeah. And Fiona, I knew what I wanted most of all was to deepen my commitment to the spiritual life. And I saw the only way I could do that was to be in contact with light-minded people. So, I saw this as an expression of, well, needing support, that joining the order would be like having a context which would support and encourage us to maintain our commitment, to maintain our fidelity, if you like, to our ideals. At some point, they and I have asked myself the same question. Spiritual development, this is what came up, the spiritual development gives meaning to my life. I can suffer a lot from nihilism and meaning is just actually really, really important. Real communication gives meaning to my life. And that meaning is also echoed on a mythic level. I can have meaning, I can have deeper, more meaningful communication with others who also hold the same values and practices as myself. On a mythic level, I can see that my personal myth coincides with that of other order members and with the order. It gives me a mythic context. And finally, it also gives me a context in which I can give and serving is a very strong tool against nihilism for me. You know, Vooru Devi once said to me, "When your personal myth coincides with the myth of the order, then you get ordained." Which is a lovely phrase, isn't it? So maybe my personal myth was to do with, I had a lot to give. I just needed something to put it into. What am I going to give myself to? Yeah? And I wanted meaning in my life. What was going to give my life meaning? That was probably going to be connected with giving. And that's how I function in the order. I'm just seeing it as a context in which I have a lot to give and I can I'm used well, I give a lot to it, to the situation. So I think joining the order from the point of view of this talk, and there's lots of reasons why one would join an order, but from the point of view of this talk, it helps us anchor our belief in enlightenment and it helps us hold a vision and to apply it within the path of transformation. But I've got another connection with it. Yeah, many, many years ago when I was on one of my first retreats or early retreats at Toreloka, I met up with Sanga Devi and she asked me at some point what Bodhisattva I was interested in and I said, "Mangi Sri" at that time. Partly I think because I was living with Kula Sri and she'd just been ordained and taken that practice, yeah? So what year would that be, Kula Prabha? When? 88, so 1988. And she sort of, I said, "Mangi Sri" and she went, "Oh!" That's one does, yeah? And in that moment I caught a glimpse of something. I thought one day I'm going to join the order and I'm going to bring into that situation my own strengths, yeah, and my own qualities. And who knows what impact that's going to have on the other people in the order, on the order itself, yeah? It was like I just suddenly saw this whole interconnectedness of us and we all add to that basket if you like, yeah? And in another way you could say that we're agreeing to undertake to gain enlightenment for the whole world. It's just a whole direction that we want to just add into this world, yeah? It's like there's a big set of scales in the world and you're just tipping those particular set of scales, yeah? Moving it in that direction. Gandhi writes, "I believe in the essential unity of all that lives. Therefore I believe that if one person gains spiritually, the whole world gains, and if one person falls, the whole world falls to that extent." And Tiknhat Hanh says, "The next Buddha may not appear in the form of a single awakened individual. As our understanding of independence grows, the next Buddha may be the Sangha itself." Yeah, which is also Bantis vision, which is why the thousand-armed other Kiteshra is an image for the order, yeah? It's the compassionate aspect, but it's also like, well, maybe the order itself could become the bodhisattva at work, yeah? There's the significance of saying these words within a ritual. So, as I've said before, words have power. So, we're saying the words for the entainment of enlightenment, I accept this ordination. So, we're saying this within the ordination ceremony. So, we've ritually set up an overall direction for our lives, an overall commitment to our spiritual progress. Without our ordination ceremony mentioning enlightenment, it would not have a real heart. It's this line of acceptance that sets up our guiding principle. Okay, I'm moving on to the next bit of the talk, which isn't as long, life as whole. So, why this aspiration needs to manifest in our daily lives? Our aspirations need to manifest in our lives because that's how we become complete. It makes us whole. It's what makes our hearts whole. We have to embody our higher values. It gives life to our heart and gives heart to our life. When our heart is strong, our life becomes whole. There's continuity. There's this Chinese teaching, which I've recently learned about, called essence and function. Essence is what we value in ourselves, our inner values, if you like. And function is just how we are, what we're doing, how we're functioning in the world. And the art of essence and function is to make sure those two things are balanced. That our functioning isn't so dominant that we lose contact with our essence, or that our essence isn't so dominant we can't function. Quite an interesting model, actually. So, when our hearts and our life meet truly and well, we no longer compartmentalise between what's spiritual and what is not. So, speech practice just becomes what we're doing now. Anything else is just fantasy. It's just what we think we should be doing. We're not looking for anything special. We've just got a sense of things that are spiritual. I've just been quite ordinary. I think sometimes the way we sort of hold spiritual ideals can put us at odds with our life, yeah? It kind of separates us from our life. But really they're just this complete thing. We need to embody enlightenment. It doesn't mean that we have to make big grand gestures. We just have to keep stepping forward. Yes, keep progressing. Small acts are equally important. So, just get on with your life, but gather your life around this aspiration and allow that heart of aspiration to make its own demands on your life. So, how to do this? I want to just talk about two aspects, mindfulness of purpose and effort. I'm not again going to go into mindfulness of purpose too much because I'm hoping that the workshop on Monday is actually going to give us a bit of a taste of that and help us with that area. But mindfulness of purpose, when we have a mindfulness of purpose, we've got, if you like, a golden thread running through our lives. It stops us from compartmentalizing our life. It stops us from separating the spiritual life with the rest of it. And it stops us from over-identifying with particular spiritual practices as it were. So we might see that thread particularly through as certain actions or aspects, like study or meditation or communication and friendship. It could be any of these things. Or it might be just very much your own inner values, your own inner world, creating its own golden thread that you're just in touch with, like a touchstone. But whatever helps you stay in contact with your essence, with your heart, with your aspirations, you've got to place in your life basically. And one way of placing it in your life is also to give expression to it. So don't disguise it under cynicism. Don't be cool. It's quite fashionable, isn't it, to have a sort of language of coolness or of aloofness. But just be passionate about things that you really believe in, really. Otherwise, actually, what you believe in will just gradually submerge beneath your persona. And effort. So if we recognize the possibility of enlightenment, then we have to do something about it. So it's all this inviting bandus verse where he said, "You know, we see that the Buddha is human and I'm human and he starts off with all sorts of weaknesses and so do I, but I can become like him if only I make the effort." Yeah. And then bandus said, "Well, once you see the possibility of enlightenment, you have to do something about it and that is going to require effort." Recently, I've been reflecting a bit on effort in my life, particularly around the, this is going to sound quite funny, around the process of trying to lose some weight. Now, just to say, I'm not trying to accomplish the big hair, you know, sort of certain kind of figure, but it would be good to be a bit thinner somehow because I feel sort of, well, I won't go into that, actually. It's my best one. Okay. So basically, I need to exercise more and eat less. That's roughly it, isn't it, really? You can't argue with it. That's what you've got to do. And I think, well, you know, I just, you know, I can believe in conditionality. I can believe that all you need to do is just do these things and then these, you know, the results will follow. Can I do it? No. So it's a bit sudden end you do believe in the law of conditionality. And I think, well, it's so much easier not to believe in it, isn't it? Because if you believe in it, you really have to do something, don't you? You have to apply effort. I think God, it's so much easier to think, "No, no, I don't read, oh, no, it doesn't really work." No, no, no, no. More of conditionality, no, no, no. And it's such a simple law. And you see it out there and it's really doing its thing, isn't it? You see how conditions lead to other conditions. But it's so much easier to keep that vague and to experienced doubt. And actually, it's so much more spiritually, what's the word, justifiable, to experienced doubt rather than blind, obstency or unwillingness to apply effort? Yeah. It's easy to own up to it. That's what I'm trying to say. It's easier to own up to having doubts than to actually put your cards on the table and say, "I know what I need to do. I just don't want to do it." Yeah. And I suppose actually if we don't want to do it, we have to say, is it because we don't really want the thing that we're saying we do want? Or is it just that we're unintegrated and don't know ourselves? As far as I can see, that's the only two options. You might come up with some others. Yeah. Dispondency is easier. It is actually, isn't it? Dispondency is easier than applying effort. I've been thinking about that in relationship to nihilism and eternalism. So these are views that we can hold in life and the Dharma being the middle way between the two. And I've just been thinking, "God, both eternalism and nihilism are lazy ways of holding a vision." That's what I've been thinking. Both resist the impact of having a vision and of taking responsibility for it. So in nihilism, we have a vision. We apply it. We apply what needs to be done briefly and it doesn't work. Few, we let go into despondency, meaninglessness, hopelessness, and the freedom to do what we like. It was quite a short track and it can be a bit more convoluted than that. Eternalism, we have a vision. We bargain with the universe that if we make a lot of effort now, we will receive a reward. The future will be pleasant. We invest in a future pleasure and we carefully apply immediate effort. And we experience pride because we're doing it before we fall. So the outcome is not how we hoped. It's different from our expectations. It's more demanding than we'd realized. And as far as we can see, it hasn't worked. The universe, the God, the guru, the best friend, the lover has not kept their side of the bargain. So we feel justified in our despondency resentment and we look for another guru, God, religion, situation, lover. And we feel sad because but we feel justified in giving up our commitment as a sort of rough sketch. I do think some of that's going on a bit in the movement at the moment. Yeah, it's like sometimes I think it's quite a lot of us in the movement. We just have to learn again how to hold a vision or how to hold an ideal in a more mature way and in more of a way that's aligned with the law of conditionality and less aligned with nihilism or eternalism. Yeah, recently, myself and Kura Prabha were leading a retreat based on these the three myths of self-development, self-discovery and self-surrender. So we were looking at three different teachings on in Buddhism, the law of conditionality, the Devagata-Gabha teaching and the Pure Land School. And well, I think all three myths, all three different aspects, all three different schools show us, if you like, a different way of holding a vision. So self-development asks us to hold a vision by making steps towards it. And self-discovery, that's the Devagata-Gabha teaching, asks us to hold that vision by having the confidence to believe that we are already in possession of it. It's just a case of revealing it, uncovering it. And self-surrender asks us to hold that vision by believing there's nothing we can do but surrender to the compassion of the Buddha and ask for help. And it was a fantastic retreat because what we were going to realize, it was like we were sitting within this mandala of tools, spiritual tools, if you like. We were sitting in the shrine room over there with three different rupas symbolizing each of these different myths. But I did feel like more and more we were sitting within a circle of different ways that we can hold a vision. And if you like different ways that we can apply efforts. So you might apply effort quite differently if you believe you've got to move towards it, or you might apply effort if you've just got to reveal it and discover it. Or if you've just got to surrender to the Buddha that you're in contact with, that's a different kind of effort again. I'd be able to see more and more how crucial effort is in the spiritual life and how we need a mandala, if you like, of tools and equipment, I suppose, for us to work with that area in our lives. I'm just going to finish with a quote from Banti. And it's from the little talk he did the ideal of human enlightenment, which my community hear me quote over and over again. Nowadays we have to recognize that many people are skeptical about ideals, especially so perhaps about spiritual ideals, about the possibility of transforming the real into the ideal. Buddhism, however, is not skeptical. It has faith in the spiritual ideal, faith in the ideal of human enlightenment, and it has faith in the ideal because it has faith in man, in the creative potential of man. And because it has faith in humans and human beings, it asks us to have faith in ourselves. It does not ask us to believe, least of all to believe in Buddhism. Instead, it asks us to take the ideal of human enlightenment as a practical working hypothesis. It asks us to make the experiment. It asks us to try. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
