Our FBA Podcast today brings us to the core of our practice: “The Heart Sutra, Sangha and Spiritual Death” by Kamalashila. Beginning with a shared understanding of spiritual practice that is Sangha, we are led through a revisioning of our practice that includes the deeper, darker more mysterious perspectives of insight and wisdom. This talk was given at the London Buddhist Centre’s Tuesday evening drop-in meditation class on 6th Dec 2011.
Free Buddhist Audio
The Heart Sutra, Sangha and Spiritual Death
(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. - If you've been to one of the two days I did here recently at the LBC, you'll already have heard some of the things I'm gonna say. I mean, and since I was here, just last week, Sabouti has written another of his papers, his famous papers, and I'm, it's on his new website and it's covering the same material in a similar way. So you can check out with Sabouti what I say, right? - Well, basically it's a new, a much richer perspective on the stages of the Buddhist path and in particular, the approach that we've evolved in Sri Ratma, in our movement. In fact, Sabouti and I have been in dialogue about this perspective for a whole year because this time last year I needed to write it into the forthcoming rewrite of my book. And it's the material he was talking about when he was here at the LBC recently. So maybe some of you caught up with that when he was here. And it's stuff I've been going on for about for many years. And right now I gather that it's the subject of just about every retreat and special event that's going. So I hope you won't mind hearing my take on it. And to me, it's a very important milestone in our Sangha. It's something that touches on our whole idea of who we are as a Sangha, a community of practitioners of the teachings of the Buddha. And we often talk about Sangha as though Sangha was defined by the practice of Kalyana Mitratar, spiritual friendship. But I'd say that spiritual friendship is its atmosphere rather than what actually defines what spiritual community is. It's more like the atmosphere of spiritual community. Kalyana Mitratar is how we do Sangha. That's how we do it. What Sangha is, is our being practitioners of the Buddhist path, of ethics, meditation and wisdom. And true spiritual friendship is reminding one another of that path when we can. Collectively exemplifying and clarifying the practice of ethics, meditation and wisdom. And practicing the path of ethics, meditation and wisdom is what actually defines Sangha. And that's what I'm talking about tonight, this practice, this refreshed overview of our practice that includes the deeper, darker, more mysterious perspectives of insight and wisdom. I think up until now, it seems that we haven't had the language to discuss these things very usefully. I think we needed to shrug off some attitudes that weren't helping such discussions very well. For example, the idea that if you were gonna share an experience that seemed to be about insight or wisdom, it was somehow in bad taste. You know, it was inappropriate because then the assumption would be, you'd be making some kind of a claim to some kind of a transcendental attainment. Well, I think the thinking now is that it's better to try and talk about all about every kind of spiritual experience. And if there are problems with that, meet those problems and find a more creative way through that. Another attitude, there used to be that somewhat confusing perception that only order members could be ready to practice deeply. Or even, but only an order member could have deep spiritual experiences. I mean, I don't know if anyone really believed that. It was a perspective. You know, maybe once upon a time, as a generalization, it worked to a tiny extent. Maybe in the 1970s, when Buddhism was virtually unknown in society, but it couldn't be more difficult, it couldn't be more different nowadays. When people coming along are mostly mature people with loads of life experience and quite likely meditation experience as well. And quite, you know, quite possibly, they've got more Dharma experience than the newly ordained Dharmachari or Dharmacharini, who's leading the class. You know, we really live in a very different world. So that, I think that's quite a big change. Maybe you haven't seen that happen, but I have. Ordination, I think ordination itself is a great thing. I think nowadays it's underappreciated. I think people can find it hard to see the point when everyone's practicing the same Dharma, everyone's practicing the same Buddhism. But what makes the difference is the training for ordination, when you really enter into that wholeheartedly and come up against your deeper, subtler views. You know, that's what's going to put you in a position where your practice can deepen. And then there's the initiation aspect of it. And that's really the point. And when it comes, the initiation is a very powerful, positive condition for spiritual progress. You know, the initiation that's involved with ordination. That's what ordination is, in a sense. So that's why we promote ordination in our movement as the main kind of practice, the main way to deepen the practice. I mean, it gives you a tremendous spur to your practice, because after you've done that, after you've got the ordination, you still have to put in the work. You still have to do the practice. If you don't practice, you know, you'll have the white quesar, you'll have all the connections, you'll have the amazing Dharma name, you know, but that's not going to be impressive. And it's not going to feel good either without some sense that you're working on yourself. So the whole business of getting ordained can be very transformative from that point of view as well. Anyway, although ordination is a great thing, but still, ordained or not, everyone is practicing the same Dharma. We all participate in that Sangha, and we all practice, we can all practice as intensively as we like, as thoroughly as we like. We can appreciate and we can be inspired by others' Dharma practice, whether they're ordained or not. And the reason we can appreciate that is because we understand what they're doing. Because it's being a practitioner that defines the Sangha. And in our particular Sangha, in the Sri Ratna community, in addition to the more general practice of ethics, meditation and wisdom that we share with all Buddhists, there's a shared understanding of spiritual life in all its various degrees, stages and dynamics. And we all have that understanding to some extent. You know, you'll have taken that in, to some extent, through what you're learning here. And that's what we educate ourselves in, here at the centre on a retreat, and in all our Dharma activities. We used to call it the system of meditation, but of course it's not just meditation, it applies to the whole of the Dharma life. So tonight, I'd like to contemplate this understanding that shared within our Sangha, I'd like us all to enter into that mandala, to get into our experience of that territory. And I present it as a mandala, because we need to be able to enter it imaginatively. You know, a mandala is a way of imagining something. I don't know whether you know what that is, it doesn't really matter, in a way. A mandala, because I can tell you, a mandala arrangement allows something to be viewed in the round with all its aspects shown. It's a bit like the way we draw mind maps. You've got your central issue, whatever it is, and around it you draw all its associated aspects and conditions. And like a mind map, any object or idea can be imagined as a mandala in three-dimensional space. So it's got its sides, it's got its top and its bottom. It's got a northern side, a southern side, an easterly side, a westerly side. It's got an upside, and it's got a downside. But so that's the spatial orientation of it, of this thing, whatever it is, don't need what you have in your mind. But whatever it is, it's got some kind of spatial orientation. But that's not the only thing, much more important, more important probably, is the issues, nature, whatever that is, whatever its meaning for us is, it's relevance to us. It's connection with all the other things in our world. So you end up decorating it with all these aspects, you know, putting them in the north, in the south, and so on. So in this way you create a mandala, and this gets you intimately involved with your issue. You focus your energy upon it, and in that way you bring it more alive in your mind. You know, a mandala manages to express what everyone does in their mind with every object that they experience. It's a spatial model of memory, you could say, like mind mapping, which can feel a lot closer to our actual mental processes than when things are set out in a linear way. So this mandala is our shared understanding of what we're doing when we practise the Dharma. That's the mandala I'm going to introduce you to, or remind you of. And just imagine that you're entering something like a temple, or maybe it's outdoors, maybe it's something grand, like stonehenge. So if you like, you can even close your eyes and just go into that space, and there are four entrances. You're going in at the blue door in the east. You're following the sun. You're following the sun. The east is where the sun first rises, and its first pale beam sends light into that doorway. So I think stonehenge is quite a good image for this, really. You know, you're waking up, it's dawn, it's quite chilly. It's dawn, it's time to start your Dharma practice. I don't know if you've noticed, but very often, at that time of day, there is a pale blue sky. Often it's a little later, but the clouds start gathering. Anyway, this first quarter of the mandala is where you start the practice. Here's where the practice gets its first focus. It's where you touch bass. You sort of get your act together, become an individual. It's that kind of place. It's the phase of basic integration. That's what we call it. And you come back here again and again in your practice. I'm quite sure that that's what you do. You know, for example, this is where you do anapanasati, the mindfulness of breathing, meditation. It's that fresh breath that starts to wake you up. And if you stay a while in that quarter of the mandala, you eventually become very tranquil, you become imperturbable, very peaceful, like a perfectly still lake that reflects perhaps the surrounding mountains in its blue surface. And in the tradition of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, you approach the mirror-like wisdom of Atchobia, whose element is water. Water because water's distinctive quality is its cohesion. The fact that liquids hold together, they integrate. I know we generally think of water's quality as its flowing aspect, but actually that's not what distinguishes water from the other elements. I mean, air flows as well, so does fire. But water is a quieter element, and its quality is the way its material always sticks together, always holds together, like a bit like a drop of dew when you see it on a leaf or on a blade of grass. It holds together mysteriously or some great unified body of water. It's a body that's sensitive everywhere within itself. That's the quality of water, yet it's one thing, it's unified, it's integrated. And that's why water is the elemental symbol for that quarter of our practice mandala. It's concerned with the whole issue of integration, holding together, coming together as one being, if you like. And we spend loads of time there, as much time there as we like. It will be hard to have too much integration. Although it is possible to become very integrated at a low level of development. You could say, in other words, you can get stuck to the kind of integration you don't want, right? So there's more to our practice. There's more to our practice. As the day unfolds, this symbolic day unfolds and warms up, we naturally find ourselves moving around inside this great circle with the sun towards the south. And entering the southern quarter of the mandala, it's a bit like a self-facing garden, a lovely self-facing garden that traps all the warmth of the sunshine. Even in the winter, it traps all that warmth. And it's the place where growth and maturation happen, where your growth, your maturation in the dharma happens, where the roots of your experience go down into the warm earth. And from there, the green leaves can unfold and receive the sunshine. And the whole organism, the whole of you, if you like, grows and develops in that sunshine. That's an aspect of our practice, where we're being nourished, if you like, by the practices, by the dharma, by the people we're in connection with. And something you do in the southern quarter of the mandala, the practice mandala, is to explore meditation in more depth. You know, this is where, for example, you might explore the dhyanas, very, very deep integrated states, or also explore the brahma viharas. That is, develop your capacity for love, for empathy and compassion. You know, for skillful behavior, skillful relations within the world, that's what empathy is all about. Developing that skill, developing that awareness. You know, you eventually start to radiate, warmth and love yourself. You yourself become like the sun, if you like, in a small way. And in that process of love, there's a little bit of insight coming through all that. There's a little breaking through of self and other, because finding empathy and compassion in your heart involves change. It involves a change in your self view. And that's a kind of insight, you know, when you change that self view. So in this way, there naturally arises in this southern quarter of the mandala, in this warmer part of our spiritual practice, quite some real reflection on the dharma, some real reflection on the nature of things. You know, your understanding of the dharma matures in this quarter through studying, through listening and reflecting on the core insights of the dharma. You start to look into the deeper issues of impermanence and insubstantiality. And this is the initial phase of insight practice. That is, it's the phase of reflection. Reflection matures us alongside our development of warmth, empathy, and compassion. And eventually, both of these qualities merge in some of this wisdom of equality, even mindiness and equanimity. And we spend a lot of time, loads of time, in these two parts of our practice mandala, the East and the South. Morning and midday, symbolically, into the afternoon, this time of year, into a little bit of the afternoon. It's, you could say it's the worker day aspect of our practice. It's our general practice routine. You know, and a general practice of mindfulness is tying this together in our lives, integrating the concentration, integrating the positive emotion, and the skillful action and the dharma reflection that we're generating. And this process of integration and maturation is something that's ongoing. But after a while, for some reason, we can be dissatisfied with this. And that's the positive thing. We can have the positive dissatisfaction. Actually, there's a sense of lack within all this growth and development, this wonderful growth and development. There's a certain irritating sense of complacency. And this draws us towards the western quarter. It's like teenagers who get interested in dangerous lifestyles, you know, in everything their parents disapprove of. You know, they can feel that sense of complacency. You know, they want a bit of danger. And our interest is drawn towards the evening and towards the night, yeah? And the western sky is supremely attractive. You know, it turns pink and orange. And the sun starts sinking in the sky. And you can really see that this time of year. I know, and we arrive at that kind of awe-inspiring space of nightfall, where the red sun is dipping down, down, down. And it's right at the horizon. It's almost like a crisis moment, isn't it? When it's right at the horizon. And then it finally slips down into darkness. And it totally disappears. Yeah, the sky at that point becomes sublime, glorious. You know, gold and peachy orange colors. Deep reds, really deep reds. But at the same time, there's something unsettling about that moment, because then it all goes. You know, the reds are replaced by blues, then really dark blues, kind of indigo, blue. And then it's just dark, and you can't see anything. So in this western quarter of the mandala, but the sunset point, that's the vipassionar aspect, the inside aspect. And that's where it really comes into its own. That's where you look at the bits and pieces that make up your world, and you see more and more that you don't own them as you assumed. You never have done so. Reality is totally other than you expected. And here, Amitabha's wisdom of discrimination starts to really kick in and insist that it really is so. Everything truly is impermanent. And there is no escape from that. And then there's the little death, if you like. There's the collapse of any confidence in the mundane world. This is really big thing, right? It was a false confidence. It was a false confidence, because Samsara is always going to let you down. You do know that, don't you? Nonetheless, Samsara is totally what you are used to. So it's a difficult, conflicted transition, if you like. There is resistance. There is resistance to it inevitably. There is a struggle. The sun goes down. And for a while, everything is rather strange. Something has happened, but it's not possible to say what has happened. And this is the quarter of the mandala associated with what we call spiritual death. In terms of our tradition of spiritual practice, it's linked to the vipassionar meditations, like the six-element practice and the reflections on impermanence and conditionality. Preteacher Sampada. But this is a stage on from active reflection in the sense of ruminating and pondering and studying. That's what you do in the southern quarter here at the center when you study and reflect on the dharma. This is-- what I'm talking about now in the western quarter is the experience of directly seeing it, where you look deeply and actually see the impermanence and the insubstantial nature of everything. Not just think about it, but look right at it as it is in your experience. You look repeatedly and persistently with faith in the Buddha's insight into reality. So faith confidence may be a better word. Confidence is what's essential at this western horizon and at this sort of dipping down in darkness point. Confidence that what the Buddha realized really does go beyond conditioned existence, that there really is a positive reality beyond your idea of what existence is about, beyond your idea of life conditioned by worldly preoccupations. In this quarter of the manly, you're clear that all that needs to go, right? But you need a lot of faith. You need a lot of confidence in the dharma because you're going towards where you radically don't know and radically don't understand. So hence the emphasis in the red quarter of the manly, in the west with Amitabha on faith. And as I say, the sun goes down and for a while everything is very strange. You fall unconscious. And then later, talk the symbol here, right? You fall unconscious. And then later, when you awaken, the darkness of the northern sky is really profound. It's profound darkness and hanging everywhere throughout the depths of this dark sky are countless stars. They're sort of pinpoint bright and they're sort of twinkly stars, and this is the living light of all the Buddhas, as masters who've realized the nature of existence, the way things really are. It's the light of wisdom and compassion. And you can tune in and align with that. In a mysterious way that can only be experienced, you can connect with all the Buddhas in a personal way and receive the Buddhas Adishthana, the blessing that flows out of his realization. You know, the mandalas northern realm is that of the dark green Buddha, Amogasiddhi. And it's where you undergo that phase of spiritual experience known as spiritual rebirth. It's a process that grows eventually to fill the empty space that's opened up by the collapse of yourself view in the previous phase. And it's like the positive counterpart of that collapse. So still talking symbolically here, looking at the mandala overall, you've got this dark half of the mandala, which is characterized by what we can call the resultant aspect of spiritual experience, where the path manifests in a way that's completely beyond your personal efforts to make things happen. Subhouti calls this the dhamma niyama, the conditioning process of transcendental dharma. And the bright daytime half, with more familiar daytime half, which you get at the center and so on, that's the karma niyama. It's characterized by personal effort, striving and active cultivation, like in the metabhavana. You're cultivating something, creating the causes for transformation. Making the path happen, whereas now, in the dark part of the mandala, it's post-insight. And the growing mood in this dark part of the mandala is receptivity. Hence the opening up to the twinkly stars in the symbolism. It's receptivity. The path happens to you. Or better, it arises within what has been seen as not you, you could say. So experiences associated with this resultant phase can't be cultivated directly, but they come as a natural result of insight. Whatever method or situation, originally, spark that off. However, there is one meditation method that's especially associated with that phase's combination in spiritual rebirth. And this is sadhana, or imagination, of the Buddha. And in this kind of practice, the Buddha is imagined before you, or maybe his above you, or maybe he even is you. It can be quite a different way of doing this. And along with mantras and flowing sonant light, sound light, this bestows the blessing of his or her realization. And this is how spiritual rebirth feels. Again, it's symbolism. It feels like that. Adhisthana is a bestowal of the entire lineage or culture of the dharma, coming down from the timeless realm of reality. Arrizing originally from your own trust in the dharma, the light now makes you feel as though you are trusted yourself, even that you can be trusted with the dharma. It's like that. Spiritual rebirth, this phase of spiritual rebirth, has degrees, and it can be partial, or it can be complete. A complete experience will be equivalent to the Buddha's own awakening. The particular experience that comes in this area of our practice mandala isn't easy to express well, partly because it's going to differ for everybody. It's going to differ from everyone. You've quite likely experienced various kinds of insight into the nature of reality, or you wouldn't have been interested in coming along in the first place. Some of that happened, I imagine, before you even knew about Buddhism. Such experience is almost certainly contributed to your interest in the dharma and to recognising it when you saw it as well. That's quite an interesting thing. How did you recognise that it was valid or interesting to you? The quality I'm talking about is a post-insight experience. Spiritual rebirth, to give it slightly clunky sort of a name, is what members of the Sangha value most of all. I think in their heart of hearts, they live by. It's a deeply felt quality that connects them in a personal way to the Buddha, to the awakened mind. However, that appears to them, and however they connect with it. Hence the association with meditating on particular Buddha forms. So that's the sadhana meditation or the imagination of the Buddha. If this is you, you've probably been inside this mandala of spiritual life for years, without knowing it. Walking around, reflecting, sitting, and meditating, building up good qualities, gradually dissolving that forced sense of a fixed self, and opening up to the influence of awakening that pervades the whole mandala, and which comes from the Buddha at the centre. Because I hadn't mentioned the centre. The centre of any mandala, actually, like a mind map, is always occupied by what is of central importance. Something that really is crucial to the whole thing. And the whole of Buddhist practice stems from the timeless influence of the Buddha's original awakening. You know, and the centre, for example, the centre of the mandala of the five Buddhas, upon which I've superimposed this mandala of spiritual life, in that mandala it's presided over by the white Buddha, Varochina. He's the illuminator who is associated with the sun, actually. The sun that lights up the practices were engaged with. And the practice associated with the centre, which is also like the sun, the single source of the Dharma's light, you could say. It's the crucial practice of mindfulness. It's the practice of mindfulness. You know, the Buddha taught mindfulness in the famous Satipatana Sutra as the one way. That's because it's the centre of everything, it's the central Dharma practice. Mindfulness, again, also in its most essential form, is the just sitting meditation, in which you simply sit and experience what is. Just sitting is the very essence of mindfulness. It's that simple, very basic receptivity to reality. Just sitting in that, if you like, fresh, immediate awareness. That itself is the crucial point of the practice. And so we call the central aspect of the mandala, which isn't a phase, actually. It's spiritual life's ongoing, sort of beating heart, you could say. We call that spiritual receptivity. That's at the centre, along with the Buddha, you could say. So we've associated mindfulness of breathing with integration in the east, metabhavana ethics and reflection with positive emotion in the south, insight of a passion with spiritual death in the west, sadhana meditation with spiritual rebirth in the north, and mindfulness and just sitting with spiritual receptivity at the heart of the mandala. And this mandala of our practice, looked at in the round, shows us what we have in common with other practitioners. If you can get this, so much of our understanding and confidence in the dharma depends on sharing and comparing with others. Not just with anyone, of course, but with peers and trusted teachers. And to do that, we need some kind of common understanding and language. And this mandala, with its emphasis on principles and stages of spiritual life, rather than practices, offers the beginnings of that kind of language. And essentially, a mandala of spiritual life is about people and their experience. Its principles are applied. They're not abstract. That's why I have to talk in terms of symbol. All spiritually minded people are looking for integration, positive emotion and skillful intention and all the rest of it. We all experience spiritual death and spiritual rebirth, and we all need to make sense of that kind of experience. It's very, very important to us. You don't have to be a Buddhist or any kind of a vowed practitioner to have experiences of this kind, and or to need to make sense of them by sharing them. You don't even have to be an adult. I mean, you've got your own stories, but when I was 10 years old, I came out of school in my short trousers, my violin case under my arm. I got this peat cap and horrible school uniform, and I'm standing shivering at the bus stop. I'm shivering because it's freezing cold and it's pouring down with rain. And it's a bus stop. It's not a bus shelter. It's a bus stop. And the rain is really driving down, as it can be. Clearly, I was going to get soaked right through my clothes to my skin, and I felt intensely being that age. I felt intensely the reality that this was actually happening and I couldn't do a thing about it. In fact, I wasn't just shivering. I was rigid with resistance and anger. My whole body was trying to not be present. You can understand that, feeling. You know, I was twisting this way and that with my mind in knots as well. I mean, it's cursing the bus, cursing the bus for not being there. It felt very, it felt so unfair that this was happening to me. And I felt trapped in a state of total aversion by the painful physical reality of my body having to be there, the lashings of rain also being there, and the bus not being there. It probably has similar experiences. And I was also standing there completely on my own. And I think in terms of this being an experience of spiritual death, which it was, I think that really helped because there were no witnesses to my confusion. I was free to experience my confusion much more intensely, and also to think a bit more clearly. It was a much more concentrated experience. And all of a sudden, I really, I truly saw my situation. I saw that I was totally creating this situation myself. It was a real Eureka type of moment. I saw that it wasn't the rain, it wasn't the bus, or even my body that was causing my suffering. It was my attitude that was causing it. It was just my attitude. You know, I saw that my suffering was based entirely on the way I was interpreting these experiences of cold and wet. I interpreted them as bad, as terrible, as unbearably humiliating, as experiences that definitely should not be happening. You know, but for a healthy 10-year-old, getting wet isn't life threatening. It's just another kind of experience. It could even be fun, you know, and suddenly I saw that I could just let the interpretations go. I could relax. Hey, I could let the rain do what it liked. I could even take a kind of pleasure in it soaking through my coat and my trousers and my hair, and in other words, I could allow my mind to stop being so rigid and let in some new kind of thoughts. Instead of being so painterly fixated or not wanting this ghastly thing to happen. And I actually did that, and it was a profound experience. I was amazed at what just stopping could achieve. I felt really quite, I felt so liberated. And, you know, when the bus finally arrived, I was really on a high, you know, and I was elated all that evening. And for a while I realized that I never have to feel trapped by circumstances. You know, this had never happened to me so clearly before. And after that, it was always possible to ask, could there be some other approach to this unsupportable situation? Um, whatever it was. Am I just reacting blindly and getting tense instead of simply being here in the present and allowing my experience to unfold more naturally? So that really was an experience of spiritual death. It's that collapse of self-view. It really was that. What died, at least for a while, I'm not saying that it was a permanent realization or anything like that. Not at all. But what died for a while was my rigid view of who I was and what kind of world I live in. It was painful. There was a really difficult inner conflict and it was letting go my rigid self-view that released that conflict. It was also an experience of emptiness, of the teaching of conditioned arising, even though it was quite a long time before I encountered any Buddhist teachings. It was intense experience in which I saw that I was in a situation. A situation where there was a very strong sense of me and a very strong sense of something happening to me. You know, isn't every moment of our lives a situation in that sense. It might not always be intense in that way, but the strong sense of me and my world, that view of things, is what always determines our experience and generally makes it a mundane, sub-saric, unsatisfying experience. That's the crux of it. You know, sometimes we get a glimpse like that. I don't think I was very lucky to have that glimpse. We get a glimpse like that that life can be radically different because in truth it is always empty of self. It's always empty of all we are putting onto it. You know, let that reality in and that same unsupportable, horrible situation, or whatever it is, it may not be horrible actually, it can become full of rich potential, become full of awakened awareness. Yes, it might not be horrible, it might just be very ordinary. But it's the horrible situations that often put you in conflict. So very often those are the transforming ones. Anyway, before I finish, I just want to mention the perfection of wisdom or pregnant pyramidal, the teaching of insight or spiritual death through seeing emptiness. Same stuff, but different way of looking at it. This teaching came just a little later than the written down parley canon in history, it came down later. That's where most teachings on spiritual death are focused on impermanence and conditionality. And I mention it because the pyramidal message is encapsulated in the heart sutra, which a lot of you will know we recite in the sevenfold puja. So it's an important text for us and a very useful one. You know, where we say the bodhisattva of compassion, when he meditated deeply, saw the emptiness of all five scunders. So if you learn that and reflect on it, think about it, it becomes an easy way to develop spiritual death in your own experience. It's a pointer into that, if you like. And it's very important for us all. We all need to find ways to make for passion or insight, something that is very real and concrete. And it's important we don't water this down. Now that we're encouraged to think in terms of spiritual death and spiritual rebirth, I'm already hearing watered down versions of what that means, actually. Spiritual death does mean experiences where we are a bit challenged. You know, where, for example, we've had to accept that we've been unskillful or arrogant or wrong. But there's far more to it than that. There's a profound depth to it. And I think we're all very capable of entering into the full depth of it. And this is the territory of the great mother, Prandana Paramita, the female bodhisattva of wisdom. And this idea of the great mother, bodhisattva, can be a helpful one. It can only be a helpful one if we ask why. You know, why is she called a mother? She's certainly not a mother in the ordinary sense. She's the great mother because without this perfection of wisdom, there's no realisation. And so there's no Buddha. So metaphorically, symbolically, Prandana Paramita gives birth to all the Buddhas. And of course she also gives birth to our own insights into impermanence, into not self, into the great emptiness of things that removes the suffering that comes from our substantialist views. Our wrong views that there are things that exist as such. And she gives birth at that moment when we open to the fact that this thing we're seeing is actually not like that. And that's enough as a start. We may not be able to see what this apparent thing actually is in the fullness of its real nature. But just to open a bit and recognise it a bit, that this is not anything substantial, that there's just a great mass of conditions holding it, holding the apparent it together, that the situation is actually live and dynamic, that it's not fixed and solid as it appears to be. That moment is the birth of wisdom. The wisdom is incomplete perhaps at the moment, but it's still the real thing. And as I stood at the bus stop, my view was I am getting wet and the rain is doing this to me. The bus not appearing is doing this to me. And then I saw I was an idea. Me getting wet was another idea. The bus not appearing, the suffering of being wet and cold, the delay, the sense of subjection, the sense of being trapped. These were all ideas, not realities because when the great mother gave birth to a new way of seeing, those so-called realities, those apparent things all changed. I was not what I assumed. The wet sensation, the being trapped, all of it totally changed. My attitude, with my attitude. I was free. I was not trapped. I was not being subjected. I was not even wet in terms of my previous idea of what wetness was about. Wetness could be fun. It was all something else. I was someone else. And we all have such moments. I hope you could recognise that, though we might have forgotten them. I only remember that bus stop experience about 10 years ago. I was meditating on my long retreat. I got completely forgotten about it. And in the tree rat in the community, we practise to bring about such moments from time to time. I don't mean just to bring them about, but also to understand them and assimilate them into our lives. It's also about seeing those moments. It's not just about having them. It's about seeing that they're there. And sharing them as well. Because through sharing experience, we understand better. And we need to find people who are likely to understand us. People we can trust with our deep experiences. Otherwise, it'll get confusing. But there are people we can trust. And we are a community whose practice is deepening. It's important we're grounded in the eastern and the southern parts of the practice mandala. That we have a good deep experience of integration, empathy, positive emotion, and reflection. Along without improving our connections within the sanger. That's important. But the real sanger, the real sanger, rises out of familiarity with spiritual death and the spiritual rebirth that comes out of the collapse of spiritual death. And if these kinds of meditation reflections seem abstract, anti-intuitive, or even a bit intellectual, it's a result of not looking into what it's really about. Actually, the issue is deeply emotional and it affects us all the time. The image of me arriving around at the bus stop trying not to be there is emblematic of so much of our lives. We all need to stop and relax our resistance to reality and let it in. Let in the blessing influence of the enlightened reality that all the Buddhas have realized and which is there all the time. And in the words of the heart sutra, this is a red pines translation of the heart sutra, we need to go for refuge to the perfection of wisdom and start living without walls in the mind. Without walls in the mind and thus without fears we'll see through delusions and finally enter nirvana, says the sutra. Just as have all Buddhas past, present, and future also taken refuge in Pragnya Paramita and realized unexcelled, perfect enlightenment. That's the quote. That's the end. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Uh, yeah, one or two, one or two. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. There's so much there. It is quite a lot of news. And modern technology, we're uploading it to all people, since they're very surely. I've just made some, uh, some notes here, some things that just really sort of struck me and it's really just without that idea of the shivering at the bus stop, those early experiences. The form of practice, making sense of that, and the courage of Pragnya Paramita, that he's giving us the confidence and the sharp art to move forward, you know, the mind without walls. And it's this wonderful idea of a new cosmology with the son, the son of mindfulness. I really love that. The, uh, the four quarters and the five jimmons and this three-dimensional model, uh, what we're trying to, to practice. And, uh, there's a lovely quote that you came up with, that Mandel is the shared understanding of practicing the Dharma. I think I'm, I'm going to make that off you for my name. [Laughter] It's not copyrighted. It's not even very original, then. [Laughter] Just the passing on the lineage there. And being a practitioner, which defines the standard, that was the only one that I really loved. So we have got some fun, there's questions from the student's work class. [INAUDIBLE] Do you think you were talking about the, um, the, um, water and all your aspects of it? I wonder if you thought that this was a kind of an image, a metaphor or an archetype, that can transcend the kind of different cultures or pieces of the United States. I think very often find difficult connections and kind of things that they don't connect with. Do you mean the metaphor of the elements? Yeah, yeah. For some of the times, just to be back from the retreat at Rippendell, people say that they connect much more with, um, uh, things like our theory of legends, which are our British and Muslim culture, rather than say something comes to birth. And I'm wondering if you kind of think, this, this metaphor, this kind of image that what you've outlined can actually transcend something about the water is not particularly cultural to participate with, um, beyond that, so I'm just wondering if you can-- Well, whatever, whatever, whatever way, we need to find something that works really. I think sometimes people, uh, prefer to use something from their own culture just because it's from their own culture. But I think very, very often people do manage to connect with other cultures. I mean, we live in such a, a mixed-up culture anyway. We hardly know what's part of our own culture. Very often, you know. So I think whatever works, use it. I mean, not everyone's going to connect with images like the elements, even though you could say it's therein in our pagan culture. But who is in touch with their pagan, our pagan culture? Who is the we? You know, it seems much more, um, culture just seems to be almost universal now. So I, I, I think it's what, whatever helps to connect with, with it, use that. I mean, a lot of people won't know what the Arthurian legends are, or have much of a sense of, of, uh, some will have very strongly a sense of that. You know, it's just, it's quite a lot of variation, isn't it? So I don't know. So, or Madam, rather. So, um, you're probably, but I thought, what if you're in a situation where you see something actually horrible or happening to someone else? Yeah. Well, you try to draw something positive out of it for yourself or lesson. I hope you deal with that conflict, like, still in a way, or like drawing a positive self-experience out of someone else who's supposed to be so extremely. Uh, well, it was my misery. Um, I don't think you can go, I, I think it's, uh, would be, you'd be being quite hopeful if you could think you can transform, form every single experience into an inside experience, or even into a positive experience. I think it's not like that. I, I think, um, experiences like that are quite unusual. Um, but at the same time that the opportunity for them is they're all the time. You know, the little conflicts that we have, if, if you, if you really practice mindfulness and notice what you're doing with your mind daily, it becomes very interesting. You can, you can see that a lot of these little conflicts that we have are actually about ego and actually about, um, basically about our view of ourself. And I, I think the practice of mindfulness can really reveal that and turn all kinds of experiences into mini, mini inside experiences. We don't have to have to be massive experiences. So I, I think the principle is that it's practice mindfulness and that sort of thing becomes a natural thing. Um, but there's no way you can kind of magically transform every difficult situation into something wonderful. I think that would be a bit unrealistic really. If I understood your question, yeah? Okay. Okay, good. Yeah. That's quite a lot to absorb, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Real ones. I don't know. It depends. I think I don't think I might. Yeah. Sorry, I missed a word there. How was this approach to applied to situations which are really painful, very tragic? And is it possible in those situations to get what if it's more difficult? Well, I think, I think that's very difficult. I think that's almost making it the most difficult as you, making things too difficult for yourself. You know, um, I mean, as a 10 year old, or even as a 60 year old, being soaked to the skill of a bus stop is much more, affects me much more, even than something really, genuinely tragic that's happening in the next street. Because it's happy to me. And that's how it is for us. You know, we might have compassion in the abstract, but what it comes down to is our own actual feelings and responses. So those are the things we need to look at. I think nowadays, we're so, you know, we're so, this is a huge onslaught of information and we think we're in touch with it. It's just information, you know. We know about what's happening in Egypt. We know what's happening in Russia. We know what's happening, but, um, and we have feelings about it. But it's different, isn't it, than something that's actually happening to you. Or something that's happening to someone else who you're with. But I think the principle is, as I was saying just now, develop mindfulness of what your actual responses are, what your actual thoughts are, and what you're actually doing with your mind. And it comes out of that, really. Does that make any sense? No. Yes, I would find it hard to reconcile with that, because that seems to be a quiet and discussion that enters interest. But I know it's not, but that's kind of something to say. On the other hand, reconciling that with a, you know, culturally seeing that sort of amount of feeling, you know, kindness, and that's a difficult line to draw, I guess, isn't that? You could, you know, empathy, you know, you're kind of feeling what someone else is feeling, feeling their pain. You're trying to feel that. But you've got to try and maintain a distance at the same time without letting it. I don't think you need to maintain any distance. I think a lot of the art of developing empathy is removing that sense of distance, you know. If I'm getting what you're saying. There are a lot of issues in there, in the whole business of clarifying what our response is to us really is, etc. So, that's the point of this sort of good one style of life where you're very removed from, not from society, but removed from sort of modern world and a lot of the sort of social relationships which most people here have to deal with their day. And then also moving into this world. Can you describe your sort of maybe insights about how you walk a man in this side of the world and maybe just some of the lessons you've learned recently. Just because I think what's sort of practicing in a social world can be sometimes a bit far removed from a lot of the sort of the public comment and sort of imagine it to say the day-to-day, walking in the path is, I think it can be quite difficult and quite trying when you're in the movement there is almost a focus on, yes, keeping an arm's length. Well, maybe that's something that I feel of, but you know, it's creating a practice with your life and it makes sense. It's such a big question, I don't know what to say. How to integrate your practice in the one world? In a social world, yes, from where you were in your class to practicing as you are now, sort of some of the lessons you've learned recently. I don't really know what to say. I'm sometimes wondering what lessons I have learned. In some ways, living in a city where you're in contact with a lot more people, a lot more of the time, seems a really good place to practice because I don't know, your actions are tested more. If you live in the country or in some place that isn't social, you don't get the same amount of feedback from other people and that can be quite a positive thing, very positive thing actually. Is that any use? It is, it is. It's such a big area, you're opening up. We haven't got time. Now, I'm afraid I haven't got any choice little examples of something I've learned recently. I shouldn't have, I suppose. Just a quick one. Since I've been, since I've been meditating blindfully, the situations that happen all the time, I'm a lot more awake now. And for example, if a car never hits me on my angry one day and the next day I'm like, well, and you become really aware of your emotional state. Yes. And sometimes I can't analyze it, but it's the pause with it, it's future whether I'm just tired. Does it get kind of easier just being mindful of the now? I think you can get used to how many? Yeah, it was analyzer, but it's just that the emotions are very... Well, it sounds like you're learning that you change a lot, you know, you're in very different mood day by day. I think you get used to that. That's a positive thing, you know, accept that and become easier about it and that makes it easier to work with it. Is that enough? Because in a way it's very simple. It's very simple. I think Buddhist path is a very natural thing, just to sort of unfold. You just do it and it happens, you know. So I hope that doesn't sound trite, but I think it's like that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's the boss. Here's the boss, yeah, okay. I really hope you'll come back and speak to us soon. Thank you. Back in West London. Thank you. Not so far away. Possibly around about April time when the book comes out. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're right, yeah. That's all I know for. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]