This weeks FBA Podcast is a thoughtful, inspiring talk by Khemasuri titled “The Spiral Path – The Great Escape.” Faith, joy, and delight in the spiritual life. Sharing experiences from her own life, Khemasuri expounds on the importance of the Spiral Path, a fundamental teaching in the Triratna Buddhist Order.
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The Spiral Path – The Great Escape
(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So I expect you haven't explained each time you do a on a Tuesday, but we're having a whole year on three jewels, and we did quite a lot on the Buddha, and we're going to do quite a lot about the Sangha, and at the moment, we're going to talk about the Dharma, the teaching of the Buddha. So this is what this talk this evening is going to be about. A teaching known as the spiral path, or it's also known as the 12 positive Niddanas, but I like the spiral path, and I've drawn a picture of a spiral. I'm ready, in case you can't tell. (audience laughing) I thought you were making a model, but I didn't have enough time, that was a big deal. It would be a big deal, maybe one of these days. So, the talk this evening, I called the spiral path "The Great Escape." And the reason why I called it that is because I remember that big film about it. It was a kind of a war film, which I'll talk about a little bit more later on. But also, this path is a way of escaping from Samsara, a very clear way of describing the movement from mundane existence to enlightenment. And so, what we escape from in "The Great Escape" is that we escape from suffering. We all know that this world is quite a difficult world to live in, and the Buddha was very specific about what his teaching was about. He said, "I teach suffering and the cessation of suffering. "I teach that the world is not an easy place to live in, "and I teach a way of moving from that world "to another kind of existence, "which does not contain suffering." We all know what suffering or unsatisfactory in this feels like. It's a universal experience. And yet, all our experience is not all suffering. Okay, so we do not suffer all the time. There's also happiness and contentment and joy and thrill and dancing and all those sorts of things. And what I want to talk about today is actually a spiral path which talks about spiritual development in very positive ways. It talks about happiness, delight, joy. And I just love it. I just love it. I have a very strong personal responsibility to teaching. It's the movement. We're not only moving away from suffering, but we're moving towards these extraordinary, lovely mental states. And there can be the form of the Buddhist teaching that comes down to us most strongly in the Teavardan Pali Canon. They just happen to be the people who wrote the teachings of the Buddha and they survived because lots of stuff has happened in the last two and a half thousand years. Can be read as a lot of don't do this, don't do that, restraint, cessation, snacking out. It's all very kind of stop it. (audience laughing) This is less stop it and more go for it. (audience laughing) Which I really like. That's how I really like. So this has a very different flavour in this teaching and it's a formulation of the spiritual path which talks about more and more refined and pleasurable states of mind. And I'm just going to quote Sandra Rachter, who's the founder of throughout the Buddhist movement, about enjoyment. So, Sandra Rachter said, the main point is that enjoyment is not a luxury, something peripheral to the main business of practicing the dharm. It is not an element to introduce if there is time, it is central to the whole business. Only joy will keep us going on a spiritual life. If you can only practice the dharm if you have the energy, the spark, the zest for it. You need to be able to relish it for what it is, a feast for famished heart and mind. I feel like I don't have to say anymore. So this teaching comes from the polycanum and I'm not very good at pronouncing things, but it's the Upana Isa of Sutra. Not good. (audience laughs) And it translated into the discourse on supporting conditions. It does look boring, doesn't it? But it isn't. And the reason why they're supporting conditions is because each stage of the path supports the one that comes next. Okay? And each stage is dependent on the one preceding it, yet it is not fixed and rigid. The straight stages grow out of each other as a plant grows with a constant upward movement. So we start here. I actually have had it very difficult to work up a page such as the conditioning that I've been, you know, I think if I was a little girl, I was taught to write down. So writing that's been quite hard on this page. So it has this constant upward movement. And I'm not gonna talk about the entire path because there will just be too much of it. There are 12 stages in the path. So I'm going to talk about the most important and exciting bits, how we get started, how that leads to radical change, and a bit about where it can take us. (clears throat) So, vintage of anything. (audience laughs) (audience laughs) So Sankarashita says there are two very important teachers that he has re-emphasized and brought into the world. One is the centrality of going for refuge. And the second one is this, the spiral path. This is what I'm talking about today. So this is a very significant central teaching to throughout the Buddhism. So it starts here. Okay, we start at the bottom of where it says suffering and the word for it is traditional word for it is dukkha. We are told at the very first teachings that the Buddha gave to his disciples after his enlightenment, which was beautifully called turning the wheel of the dharma, was about the four noble truths. And the very first of these is the truth of suffering. So what does this mean? The truth of suffering, it's just a sort of statement that makes people think that Buddhism is all doom and gloom. So I wrote past of this talk when I was on retreat, Tara Loka, which is women's retreat center last week. And I remembered that many years ago, I asked Satinandi, the woman who's the chair there, what kind of women went to the retreat center? And she told me there were two kinds. She said, one kind of women who came to the retreat center, who were women who had had pretty difficult lives, had experienced physical or emotional distress of various kinds. So they were people who had experience of life of being quite hard. And the other group of women who came to Tara Loka were women who had done very well in all this post-industrial society. They had the job, they had the man, they had the car, they had the house, they had the holidays. And for them, it was a question of and, it just wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough. And having it all was not enough, and they saw their lives as empty. So all those these two groups of women looked quite different from the outside. They had, in fact, the same problem. They were experiencing Dukkha. They were experiencing dissatisfaction. They had a degree of suffering in their lives. So one lot didn't have what they wanted, and the other had what they wanted, but it wasn't enough. And of course, I was there for my own reasons. And I was there, 'cause I belonged at that moment to first lot of women. I had two very small children, and I had a partner who'd been diagnosed with cancer. And I was just not managing very well. It wasn't a manageable situation actually, but I was not only was there the obvious emotional stress of having someone so little, who is very close to you, but I also had another layer of upset, which was it was not what I wanted. It was not what I wanted, and it was not what I had brought into. So I'd want to live in Wales to start my family with a nice man in a cottage which was almost built. In a field, what I thought I was going to get was cottage in the country, roses around the door, and happy families. And that's not what was happening, not what was happening at all. So not only was my obvious situation quite difficult, but also I brought to it another degree of satisfaction, which was, this is not what I wanted, this is not what I wanted, this wasn't in the bargain as far as I was concerned. So I had what I didn't want, and I didn't have what I did want. So here I was down here, very clearly. And the usual response to suffering, when something bad happens to us, is that we is described in the Buddhist tradition as craving. We not only reach out for something pleasurable that will take away our experience of suffering, but be push away everything that we don't like. We don't want to think about it. We want to forget that that's going on. And even where we get something we like, we don't have enough of it, or it comes to an end, and we suffer that lack again. So everything, we've got to talk that everything, actually, that is conditioned, that belongs to this kind of way of life, has its disappointments and limitations. We usually go from pleasure to pain and back again, as we crave, grasp for something, that we want to take the craving away, the suffering away, and then we're disappointed again. So this Buddhist word here, dukkha, that is translated as unsatisfactoriness or suffering, it literally means an ill-fitting chariot wheel. And we can all imagine what that's like, if you're being a chariot, okay? It's something that doesn't work very well, and it jolts us, it jolts us all the time. We can't get comfortable, you know, we're just not in a good state. It's not a pleasant place to be. Unfortunately, in my favour, I had not only the suffering, but I also was aware of my suffering, and that was really important. So I knew that I wasn't doing very well, and I wanted to do better. And I looked around for a way of managing something that was not going to go away. I knew it wasn't going to go away. So I thought, well, how can I just do this differently? So I had an elderly man friend who was very nice bloke to talk to. He was just very open and just gently encouraging to me whatever I was like. And so I took my awareness of my suffering to him, and I talked to him about it. And I explained to him that I was just really, really upset, and I wanted to run away and have another life. And I wanted to stay and see it through too. And that tension was just kind of pulling me apart. And I felt a bit like a caged animal that I felt my back was right up against the wall. And I had no room for manoeuvre. I felt really trapped by my circumstances. And he looked at me a bit. And he was a bit like Yoder in Star Wars. He was very small. (audience laughing) He looked at me, he looked at me for a while, and he went, you could learn to meditate. And I think that that would give you some space. And I thought, why not, why not? So I didn't know anyone who meditated. My friend blessed me didn't meditate. And so I couldn't go to anybody 'cause I didn't know anyone. So next best thing, buy a book. So I bought a book and I read it. Didn't really understand it 'cause it was about meditation. Difficult to understand. But it had instructions in it for mindfulness to breathe in the metaphor. So I started meditating. And I just had enough momentum in my desire to do things differently, to deal with what I was feeling differently, to get me going. I just had that momentum. Somehow I had that momentum to get it going. So in fact, I'd actually started my first stage of my spiritual life. I didn't know that. I didn't want it. But that's what had happened. And it was just a quest for another way of being. It was being able to see that my life, as I ordinarily experienced it, is just not enough. It wasn't enough. I didn't have enough to help me deal with that situation. And that was a huge advantage I had. That was a huge advantage, like dissatisfaction. Sonya Ratcheter says that we should respect and take good notice of our dissatisfaction. It would lead us to searching and discovery, but it might take a bit of a while. So we're aware that our life is not as satisfied as we would like, and can't be sorted out by the usual attempt at a quick fix. Two beers and a cigarette didn't make it any better. Yeah, it just didn't make it any better. And I thought, well, you know, what else can I do? What else can I do? There must be another way. So although it is confused and inarticulate, it may be confused and inarticulate at first, and we don't really know what we're looking for, we start coming around with something else. And if we look long enough, we'll get a glimpse of something higher, something that's a bit different from the way that we do things. And perhaps another kind of truth or reality. In my case, I had never met anyone who was meditated, but somehow it made sense. It just made sense to me, and I responded very intuitively. It sounded like it could work, and I decided to give it a go. It was a big experiment, and it was also a bit of a strange experiment because for the first year or so, I just felt even worse because in bringing attention to how it was, I realized just how difficult my life was. I'd stop covering it up, so it wasn't like a magic wand or anything like that. The good thing was that although it was difficult and upsetting, there was nothing else to do. And somehow, I sensed that it would work and it would help me somehow long-term. So, I'd actually gone, I've a bit of a shuffle down this bit here. Now, I didn't know it was faith. I didn't know it was faith at all, but there was something in that word meditating and the book that I got, which was quite a long time ago, and there weren't very many good books around it, but I actually got a very good one, which I was like, no, that's not Buddhist. So, I kind of shuffled off down here a bit, shuffled off, and towards faith, the second stage of the spiral path, path. The Buddhist word for faith is shred-hard. As faith is a bit of a bad translation, because when we think of faith, we often think of blind faith. Somebody telling you what to believe, and it's certainly not that, it's certainly not that. It can be, it more literally means lifted up, if it is lovely, or it can be translated as placing the heart upon. So, it's something you can, it's something you have a bit trusting, although you might not know why. And the faith is absolutely crucial. Absolutely crucial. It's a bit of intuition. It's finding something that makes sense. It's doing something that works for you. It's really, really important, because you can't do any of the rest without it. You can't do any of the rest without it. It's a kind of a first insight. We just have a feel for something of a bit of a different order, and it comes into our lives. And also, the other thing I wanted to say is that for Buddhists, faith also means coming across the Dharma in some respect. Now, the book on meditation that I bought was written by a Buddhist. It wasn't an overtly Buddhist book. He talks about God in it, not the type of Christian in the world. But, you know, I did have that flavour, it had the flavour of the Dharma. And without the flavour of the Dharma, this faith would not be Shraddha. It would not be Shraddha. So, for me, this was the beginning of a long journey. And I had another bit of luck. So, after it'd been meditating for two years, I lived in this really small community in Wales. It had its own little library, and one day went to the library, and there was one leaflet for Tara Loka, who really used the Buddhist retreat centre, and it had opened six months previously, and I looked at this leaflet, and I thought, aha, someone I can ask, important question is, what do you do with an itch? That's one of my major difficulties. I'd have an itch, and I'd scratch it, and then it would just go somewhere else. So, you know, I just thought this was a report. I had to go and talk to somebody. I realised I had to go and talk to somebody. So, I went off to my very first weekend at Tara Loka, as my birthday present, the money and the weekends pass from the children. So, and I was terrified. I was terrified I was doing this weird thing, and I shook most of the weekend, but it was really good. It was really good, and I saw I went to Tara Loka for the next couple of years, probably about three times. And then I had a job, which meant that I had worked at the campus, and I couldn't go. So, I didn't go for another year and a half. But I kept meditating. I just kept meditating. It was kind of what I could do on my own, on myself, for myself. And it was very important to me. And then I found some local classes, local meaning and hours drive away across the hills. But that was good enough. And I was very, very lucky, because I went to some classes in Trangotan, which were run by the Men's Meditation Retreat Center at Fajaloka. And I just stepped in to some of the best meditation teaching that our movement had to offer at the time. And I was away. That's all I wanted. I wanted someone to teach me how to meditate and support my practice. But of course, the Middle Buddhist. I didn't do that. I teach me how to meditate and leave all that weird stuff. They're not interested. So, I didn't see myself. So, when we're talking, I'm probably going to be meditating for about five years by then. And I wasn't the Buddhist. I was a meditator. That's what I was interested in. But I could see it was making a difference. I could tell it was making a difference. And then I had a bit of a moment. And in fact, I was converted to Buddhism by the Labour Party. [LAUGHTER] I believe it all happened. This is exactly what happened. So, we're talking about Mrs. Thatcher now. And I was always a bit of an activist as a young woman in various ways. But I refused to join any political party in order to be tied down to anything. And Mrs. Thatcher just drove me into the arms of the Labour Party. And not only did you drive me into the arms of the Labour Party, but myself and a friend of mine actually started a branch of the Labour Party where we lived, where they hadn't been won before, which became really successful, and I became the chair. So I'm now the chair of the Labour Party in Righte, Ichmochenant. And so I'm in a very seedy pub in Rexham, an actor there, which is an ex-mining village, outside Rexham. And we're mandating our representatives for all the party conference, ever so exciting. And I'm in this news meeting. And it's just like, you know, we're trying to get people to decide how our-- this is not branch. Its area, Rex, will vote at the party conference. And it's very heated. It's very heated. And then suddenly, it sort of switches from being heated to debate into personal recrimination. And I can't do it. I can't do it. I just can't do this anymore. And I just walked out to that meeting and I resigned from a local party. And I was not-- you know, I was not a favourite person. Actually, quite a lot of people came round in the end. But I just thought, I'm not buying into this. This is what my meditation did for me. It changed the way I looked at things. So I'm just thinking, I am not buying into this polarisation, this building of hatred, people being unkind to each other. I'm out of here. I'm just out of here. I'm not doing this anymore. So this is a kind of point of conversion. This is where my faith in Buddhism took over from my faith in the Labour Party. And it was very clear. You know, it was sudden and it was clear for me. Not everybody has this kind of experience, but it was for me. Sometimes I think I'm the sort of person that has to get into a bit of a crisis before I'm kind of motivated into another stage. So this is the point of conversion, a point of conversion, returning away from ordinary things in life to give satisfaction to faith in the Buddhist path, faith in the three jobs, the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And it's an emotional, intuitive, even a mystical response to our life. We don't really know what it means. We hit this and we really don't know what it means. But it's also very real. We haven't made it up. It's very real. And it's about a desire to live a life that has meaning and significance, which is often outside the kind of cultural expectations of the society that we live in. Sangha Rachita describes this as a moment of conversion when we've entered the spiral path for real. And if we stay on course, it will lead us to enlightenment. So I'm now going to talk about this bit. OK, so faith to joy, peace to joy, love to joy, love to joy, love to cry, bliss. OK, I'm going to do the next four stages. So from here to here, faith is the motivator that takes us through these stages of the spiral path. It's the driver, actually, of our spiritual life. So it's really important. It's really important. It's the motivating force for the whole of the lower part of the spiral path. It's very important that we recognize our faith, that we nurture it, and sustain it, and allow it to grow and deepen. We need to give our faith attention and care. But that's all another talk. That's all another talk, but it is really very important. So independence-- faith arises into-- this is the traditional way of saying it, OK? Faith rises in dependence or suffering. And the next stage is of the path rise in independence on faith. OK? Interpenance on faith, we can live out the Buddhist path more fully. So when we get here, we go, oh, think I'm a Buddhist. I mean, we can-- I'll linger to you for about six years or something, perhaps a bit longer. But once we decide I'm in that, then we start to say, well, what is it? What does that mean? So, you know, the next thing I came across was ethics. I mean, it was kind of around here somewhere. But it became a bit more important. So we begin to practice ethics. We see the point in the meditation more fully. We may study. And to learn in more detail, the Buddhist teachings, we come across devotional practice for the result of it anyway, although I got to learn to like it quite quickly. And all of this strengthens our emotional resolve. Because that's what we need. We need a lot of resolve. And our resolve will come from the way we feel about what we're doing. So the next stage, four stages of the path are mental states that arise out of meditation. And each is supported by the one previously. So these are known as the meditative absorptions, OK? And it's mainly talking about what happens in meditation, although it does sort of sit in to the rest of your life, OK? So faith, when it's supported by ethical practice, leads to a clear conscience. Nothing to regret. Being able to learn from the mistakes. Forgiving both yourself and other people for making mistakes. The three jewels, the Buddha Dharma of Sangha, are beginning to shape our lives. And joy arises from the knowledge that we're living in accordance with our highest aspirations. Or we're doing our best to do that. We are enacting our faith. And that is really important that we put our faith into action in our lives. Because if we don't do that, everything just remains as a good idea. And it just stays as a good idea. And it will continue to be a good idea. But it won't come to any fruition until this will act on you. And the independence on joy. And that's a very strong experience that we might have in meditation. Some people don't experience it at all. Some very good, strong, effective meditators never experience it at all. And some people fall into it the first time they sit on a cushion. And it's a very physical kind of feeling that you have in meditation. So the tradition is described as anything from the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. So you get to be like sugary or poogly, goose cooglyphs, and like that, to meditation. You can feel rapture so strongly that you're swept up into the air that's not happened to me. By is, it's a very, very pleasing, strong physical sensation. And they're meant to be five degrees of this. And I think this sort of classic quote is better than sex. And it's just like sex or anything that pleasurable. It can be accompanied with strong craving, which will not do you any good. OK, so it can just be as destructive as a strong sex struggle. Because you just, you don't want to go any further. You just want to stay there and have them from. [LAUGHTER] And as your energies become integrated, it will fade away. And what comes next is even better. It's calm. So it has a tranquility aspect to it, which is not found in rapture. It is still characterized by feelings of intense pleasure. Deeply satisfying mentally, thinking becomes much more subtle. So the kind of chatter that we have in our minds a lot of the time just kind of gives up because what's the point? We're not going to do that, and that is lovely. You'll still have some kind of thought, but it won't be that kind of incessant chattering. So mentally, thinking is much more subtle and non-discursive. And independence of calm, we have bliss. And this is apparently even nicer. So these aren't necessarily things you're going to be able to decide which one you're in. OK, because they come as a kind of clump. And it's just increasingly refining your mental states. And so you're not going to be able to say, or I tipped over a bit from calm to bliss. It's not really going to be like that because it's all kind of one movement really. So bliss is described as balancing and fine-tuning of effort. Again, characterized by intense happiness and this dissolution of thought. So these stages of the path, we've just become increasingly integrated. Whatever we do, we have more and more energy behind. Our ethical practice has more energy behind it. Our meditation on a good day has more energy behind it. And we just become more and more who we'd like to be. Our good idea of being a practicing with them comes more and more into our lives. And this is very important. These stages are a very important part of the spiritual path because we tame our consciousness and come to grips with our distractions and habits. And it's very important that we do that because it's a process of progressively letting go of our tightly held ways of seeing the world. OK, so we're going into the heart of your meditation experience more and more until destruction and mental complexity fades away. So in these mental states, we have increasing simplicity of mind and there's less and less going on, greater openness, less and less interest in the pools and dramas of all of you. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Sounds good to me. So out of these increasingly refined mental states, we have concentration or samadhi. Concentration is a rubbish translation. It really is a very weak and kind of just useless actually. So I've never come across it described as everything else really. So it's just not good enough. And the concentration, as we know it, is a complete understatement of what this stage is about. So the previous delightful mental states of the path that will lead to a freer mind which is flexible and concentrated, your mind becomes very malleable. You can move from one thing to another. But this stage is even more than that. When we enter samadhi, we can do so from any situation. Our meditation is so thoroughly interwoven into our being that we can meditate, to have that kind of mental state, whatever is happening around us. And I've had one taste of this. I've had one taste of this. I have talked about it here before when I missed my bus and decided that I had an hour and a half to wait in Bill Bell's bus station and decided the best thing to do would be to meditate. And Bill Bell's bus station was the best place in the world. There was pneumatic drills going, building sites. I had to keep my eyes open so nobody stole my luggage. The woman next to me started smoking. I'm next smoker. And I start, first off, I went, oh, no, I'm not going to smoke a shit. And then after I went, that's quite nice. [LAUGHTER] And I can just watch my mind just go craving, craving for this, craving for that. How dare they do this? What are they up to, you know, the whole business? And then I just became very concentrated. And no, that mattered. It just didn't matter at all. And I could become very concentrated. I just think if I could become concentrated in Bill Bell's bus station, I'm doing well. So this is a deep concentration in a very natural spontaneous way of smarting. And our whole life becomes a preparation for this form of meditation. And at this stage, we have access to wisdom, which is a bit of a mysterious thing to say. And what we're doing is we're learning to exist and experience from a much deeper level of being. And so there's a story in the body scriptures. And it's an integrated flow of pure happiness. So there's a king-- it's always the same. The king goes and sees the Buddha. And the king wants to ask the Buddha something. In this case, this king was determined that he could be happier than the Buddha. So the Buddha was sitting with his monks in the forest. He didn't own anything, he didn't have a refurbished head. He didn't know where his next meal was coming from. And he was just sitting on the ground on the Buddha way. And the king with his entourage and infants and dancing girls and everything like that. He said, well, of course, I must be much happier than you are. And the Buddha just talks to him. And he said, oh, well, I can sit here for an hour. I'll be quite happy. And the king said, well, I can do that. And the Buddha said, well, I can probably sit here for 6 hours and be happy with that. And the king went, yep, I think I could do that. And then the Buddha said, I can do it for a whole day at night. And the king went, mmm, probably not. And the Buddha said, I can sit here for seven days and nights in complete and perfect happiness. Doesn't need anything. Doesn't need anything. And the king thought he probably wouldn't be able to do that. And the Buddha was indeed happier than he was. And the Sankarashit says, a happy mind is a concentrated mind. And a concentrated mind is a happy mind. So here we have, from this point, we have access to wisdom. And another kind of understanding of the fundamental teacher of the Buddha. So in dependence on concentration, we have this strange stage, which is known as knowledge and vision of things as they are. And it's also known as stream entry. So up until now, the main force of movement upwards through this final path has been faith. And at this stage, a huge change in consciousness takes place. And from now onwards, wisdom, the direct knowledge of the truth of the Buddha's teaching takes over as the motivation force as the driver on the spiral path. And it's just formulated in lots of different ways, because all the Buddha was trying to do is trying to get people to understand what he was trying to tell them. Because this is singing our existence in a way that none of us have ever seen it before. It is something completely different than anything we know about. And my favorite description of this stage of the path is from a different school of Buddhism. And it's called, let's call it, the turning around in the deepest seat of consciousness. And it reads out the goose pimples. It's just that phrase, just something for me. It tells me that there's something really new going on here. This stage is known as knowledge and vision of things as they are. And although it sounds strange, this is exactly what it is. It is about knowledge and vision of things as they are. We see the world it is as it is. We penetrate the truths of conditioned existence with our whole being. It's not a mental response. It's an embodied experience. It's like we know something with every single cell in our body. It's completely different from anything that we know about. This stage is also known as stream entry. We have entered the stream of the Dharma. We are under the sway of enlightenment, and life will never be the same game. I'm just going to give you the Sankarashita's got fantastic description of him trying to describe what this might be like, what this might be like. So Sankarashita says, imagine a day of unfettered inspiration and free flowing energy, a day in which you were able to be completely true and clear in your communication, a day in which you felt so real, a connection with your others, that your own concerns ceased to loom so painfully in your life, a day in which you never felt you were hitting your head with a brick wall or getting stuck in the right. Imagine such a day of creative freedom, and then imagine that freedom doubled or trebled and continuing to expand, and you will start to get the idea of the nature of enlightenment. So the most important quality at this stage of this path is that you cannot fall back. Up to here, you can just slither down again, such as snakes and ladders. You can just slither down the path again. But having reached this stage that is no longer possible, it's no longer possible. Enlightenment is assured, so this is the real conversion to the Dharma. This is the real conversion. This is where there is no going back. From this stage onwards, ordinary life as we know it is just a mirage or a child's game. It's something that goes on around us, that we take part in. But we have such a different perspective. We're not caught up in the drama of it. We can play, and that's what they say about Bodhisattvas, that they just play. Nothing is like hard work or difficulty. Helping others consistently through many lifetimes is play. And that's the sort of feel that that teaching is trying to give us. We're not caught up in the drama of all your existence. We just let go. And I'm just going to stop there because of the next stages. We don't need to know about it. We just need to know this. When we get to this stage, we all know what the rest are like. So my father died in November. And I thought, after a while, what I really need to do is I need to go on retreat. I need to go on a quiet retreat. And I need to do it and support it, because I'm about expected to be a universal experience. But I was quite rocked upon my father's death. And I needed to go away in supportive conditions. And I thought, I'll go to Toronto later. I've been there for many years. It feels like my other home. And they cook my dinners. So that's how that's been happening to me. So I went on retreat there for 10 days. And I just didn't know what was going to happen. And it was a bit of me, it was a bit scared in case I got very distressed, or I just had no idea what was going to happen. And it was just very strange. It was just very strange because what happened on that retreat is I just contacted enormous amounts of faith. I just was in touch with why I do this at a very kind of big level. And I experienced a very concentrated and flexible state of mind. So somebody would be leading the activities in the shrine when they could do this. And my mind would just go and do it. And then they'd essentially say, do the other. And it would go and do that. And I thought, it's fantastic. I've got my experiences, real flexibility of mind. When I got home, I rang my mum, so she was all right. And she asked how I was. And I was a bit surprised because I said to her, actually mum, I am really very happy. I'm very happy. And she went, I'm very pleased to hear that. And then a couple of days later, I was talking to a friend in the order about my, you know, go on the retreat. And they said, oh yes, okay. She said, so our independence on suffering arises faith. Independence on faith arises joy. And then the meditative of sortsness leading to flexibility of mind and concentration. And I thought, hmm, I've read that somewhere. But I hadn't actually put it together. I hadn't put it together. That is just really what happened. So my experience of spiritual craft is that I need a strong sense of what I need to leave behind. And a strong sense of something delightful and beautiful to draw me on. And this teaching just doesn't form me. I know it to be true. And I can experience it again and again more strongly. It's not done once and for all. Sangharashita says it's possible to reach the stage of stream entry there. In this lifetime, with commitment and dedication to Dharma practice. And I believe that to be completely true. And not only that, but I'm not only that, but I'm also up for the challenge. And this is the reason why I call this great, this taught the greatest game, is that there's this very old war movie of this name. And the minute it's, I think they escape from a castle or something in the fact of the World War and they're all terribly British. And the film depicts these men as men of vision. They have a plan. They're very determined. They cooperate. They work hard. They show heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. And after their escape, there is release, joy, a new way of life and no going back. And these are the qualities we will need in a seed ever. And just some of the rewards. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]