(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. - I've been a practicing Buddhist for over 30 years and a psychotherapist for 20 of those years. And the reason I became a psychotherapist has relevance to the questions I start with tonight. You need to know that my approach to these issues will be colored by my perspective as a practicing Buddhist and psychotherapist. So, yeah. The title of the talk's the entire integration, isn't it? Yeah, I'm not going to mention it, but what I understand by integration is the understanding of that process by which one's life comes to be a natural reflection of one's insight. But this is far from easy. But as anyone who's practiced for a number of years, we'll know. Er, I just recently, I was very saddened to hear that two people that I've known for God knows how many years were in a real polarized conflict with one another. Now, I've kind of felt my, I heard that and I just felt very, very sad. And then it's not as though those two people have not practiced and put the work in. So, I think it sort of points to how difficult the role that you've chosen to do to actually try to, well, develop in a world that works against that development. It's not that people don't gain quite a lot from meditation because you can see people do become healthier. Even dare I say it, happier. That it's not a quality that I'm particularly interested in. But real change, or should I say transformation? Well, that's a question I bring tonight. And those questions are, how come I, how come we get stuck and deadened in our practice? I have to allow for the fact that I might be the only one. That is just me. But I'm assuming I'm not the only one here. So, unless anyone tells me to stop, I'll just continue. So, years ago, when I first practiced, I started practicing and came across freedom. I felt, well, everyone does quite a novice. I would listen to people talking about their experience and end up feeling as though my inner world was like a lump of concrete. It was though everybody was up in the attic as it were. And I was left down in the basement. And not only that, but someone had taken a saw and cut the stairs down, leaving me stranded in that basement. And since that time, to use that metaphor, I've spent my time with so much trying to get into the attic, but trying to understand and rebuild the stairs who understand in the middle ground that lies between basement and attic. Okay, I saw the thing here. Quite, quite good to stop here, in a sense, in the presentation of this image of myself. I'm implicitly revealing to you a number of things about what, like, self. What I am betraying to you is a particular ego perspective that is up and down inferior superior. A view that I towards inflation and deflation. Perhaps I was trying to get you on my side. Suggesting a deflated ego is better than an inflated ego. But whether it's an inflated ego or a deflated ego, it is still an ego position. How did this, you would intuit from what I presented to you, the shadow that works quite close to the surface? This would be a tendency that manifests from a deflated sense of myself toward envy of those that I perceive to be up in the attic. It would be a judgment of those in the attic. No doubt, if you had poked around enough at me, you would have since smelled the stench coming from a murky reservoir of resentment. Nevertheless, the stairs still need to be fixed. My first point, then, is that for integration to really take place. We need to find a non-judgmental relationship to our particular ego perspective and the shadow it casts. So my belief, my fantasy, if you like, is that until the ego, the habit of self is bandicorded, or the selfhood, as Blake referred to it, is really recognised in the septic. It stands in an obstruction to the door of the emergent self or the possibilities in the psychic. Until that selfhood is recognised, objectified, it locks the door against real progress. So, what is not on continues to determine who I am, who we are and how we act. What is not on controls are conscious and unconscious life. What is kept out denied controls us. So, I'm putting three things together to a mention three of us. It is ego perspective, self-view, shadow, and I would say the acknowledgement of acceptance of those is the acceptance of your 'I, my, your, karma'. The situation we find ourselves in the 21st century is very different from the context in which the Buddha lived. India, at that time, even today, as far as I'm told, and I've been there, I think would kill me if I went there forever. It's very rich in its understanding of other dimensions of being beyond our human sense world. There is and there was an acceptance of these other dimensions and the need in all of us to search for meaning and value. So, even today, I think, well, Ben T himself is an example of that, you can still wander in India. I think it must be getting harder because of the influence of the West, but nonetheless, there is still an acceptance of that perception of life. There are other dimensions and that the man seeking or the woman come to that, although it would be very difficult for a woman, I suppose, to find, to go wandering. So, there is a very rich mythological and archetypal perspective that includes the cosmology of many gods, davers and spirits in relation to all aspects of life and death. There's a polytheism. It's very, very different from the situation we find ourselves in. The situation we find ourselves in today to repeat myself is very, very different. We live in a world on a faggain to everything, post this and post that. A world where Christianity is still a force, but very much struggling in the face of a scientific critic and the ravages brought about by a Christian world tearing itself apart in two world wars. But there is still life in the old dog yet. We should not underestimate that its monotheistic perspective on a single god has on us, even though we're Buddhist. It was responsible for treading underground the gods of the Greeks, the Celts and the Norse deities. Until we finished up with a monotheistic universe dominating our imaginal landscape. So, this is my second point, which is an absence of cosmology. That is germane. Is that the right word or natural to the soil in which we are trying to work with ourselves? I hope this makes sense to you. I'll say this twice, and sorry, I'm sorry about it, but I'm trying to put something into words. Whereas normal cognitive thinking cannot comprehend these events. Mess encompasses and heals a sort of cognitive dissonance, which is usually understood as the soul, and which is understood in the language of metaphor or allegory for a person within this process. This in itself can contribute valuable lessons to our understanding and maturing of the spiritual life. That is if we want to call it that these days. I'll read that again. Whereas normal cognitive thinking cannot comprehend events. Mess encompassing and heals a sort of cognitive dissonance, which is usually understood as the soul, and which is understood in the language of metaphor or allegory for a person within this process. This in itself can contribute valuable lessons to our understanding and maturing of a spiritual life. To put in another way, we are lived by powers that we pretend to understand. Personally, I think it would be worthwhile to understand those powers. (sniffling) Really, really much in a secular world. I'm aware of cameras on every street corner, don't know if you are, but we have this fantasy that we're free. We've watched everywhere. Am I paranoid? I think I'm my favorite. We're left with remnants of a Christianity, a religion quickly by science and the rational mind, plus a powerful, consumerist culture, which is rapidly appropriating any spiritual symbols and images that we have left for its own ends. I think personally, it would be useful to look at some of the work of poets that have been concerned with these events and how they have actually approached the underbelly that is marked under our society. And under minds are the attempts, I think, personally, to grow. But first, a nursery rhyme. (sighing) Very good. Ampty Dumpty sat on a wall. Ampty Dumpty had a great fool. All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put poor Ampty together again. You remember when you kissed him? Well, your kids love it, don't they? Couldn't have another. But who is this Ampty Dumpty that children do? The thing about which such glee, really, is the original wholeness that some philosophers, or more like the alchemists, talk about in terms of a cosmic egg. Which starts off whole and unbroken. That experience is like Lucifer, the great fool from grace. Fragmenting into an individualized soul, spitting at different levels, bringing exile, and that sense of brokenness that so many of us would attest to. All the kings horses and all the kings men can not put poor old Ampty together again. It seems that in the nursery rhyme that it's irreversible. What we do now is, what it's pointed to is the split that we live in around here is around us. The kind of conversation was reported to me of someone talking about, well, I think someone, one person would say, well, it seems to be a lot of trauma around these days. Then the other person, I think, was much, much older, probably come through the wall or the wall. Yeah, which is more or less referring to, more or less saying, well, we probably just had to get on with it in those days. You couldn't afford to be the son. And my response at that time was, I wonder if anyone's put two and two together. Perhaps there is so much trauma today, precisely because people have to get on with things in the last generation. In other perspective, or should I say vision, this time from the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, by a poet who could see the horror, where the philosophy that made the industrial revolution possible was taken mankind. Thumbed up in one of his songs of experience as the mindfulness of materialistic philosophies I read them. I wondered through each chartered street, near where the chartered temps has flow, and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of will, in every cry of every man, in every inference cry of fear, in every voice, in every band, the mind-forged miracles I hear. How the chimneys sweepers cry, every blackening church appools, and the happiest soldiers sigh, runs in blood, down palace walls. But most of the midnight streets I hear, how the youthful harlot's curse, blast the newborn infant's tear, and blights replay the marriage. So, blaking up first first, is making a wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered temps has flow, and marking every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of will. Bringing the two together, the limited, constricted, measured world that we kind of try to work out, we try to control, creates the very marks of will, that we then end up complaining about. We could go on with the poem, but we're gonna take ourselves beyond time, but every verse is in relationship to that vision. Wonderful poetry. In another place, Blake says, he says, he says now I have fourfold vision C, he'd more happier with the end part of the punchline. The fourfold vision is given to me, it is fourfold in its supreme delight, and threefold in soft blue as night, and twofold always may goddess keep from single vision and Newton's sleep. No. So William Blake's vision consists of four states, the fourfold vision, and the fourfold is equal to Eden, the state of mental artistic fight and endeavor. He's not keen on detachment, he kind of has recommended that creative fight, not fight in terms of war, not corporeal war, but mental fight. All I would say, mental wrestling was the things that are coming at you. And he calls his state divine imagination. Below that is what he calls a threefold vision, so there's the lover, the loved, and the child. Okay, three elements. He calls Bura, so it's taken from the Hebrew word, meaning the married land. And Bura is very much that place where we experience in dream, where the masculine sleeps, and it's very feminine world. And we can have a sort of experience, momentary insight as it were, and the trouble is that if you try to hold onto it, Blake says, well, if you try to hold onto it, you just go, you go through the self-gate and you go straight down to single vision. If you take on the mental fight, you go up into golden years of the city of art. We better not say too much about it, but it's such a fantastic vision. So the married land is very much a state of merging with the other, it's a dream state. And twofold vision, he calls generation. And this is where a single vision is a general generation, is that that kind of reciprocal relationship with nature, the world around you. And whereas single vision Blake calls, where it's Blake's archetypal realm of hell, really. And so, of course, we lived through the vision the other way round as it were, he's coming down. It would be worthwhile to pause and then briefly explore the first two of these states in relation to our theme of integration. If we were to understand what Blake means by single vision, Newton's sleep, we have to confront the view that Newton embodies as an image for Blake. We have to confront the modern view that our culture is caught in, that is the view that the idea of subjectivity is confined to human persons. Only they are permitted to be subjects, to be agents and doers. The psyche is too narrowly identified with the ego personality. Also basic to this view is a person who's the psychology of take-out. If you imagine the universe divided into living subjects i.e human beings and dead objects, a dead world outside the human subject, everything is dead. Added to this perspective, like a red rag to a bull, was Newton's idea of the universe at a clock and the human being at a clock. A predictable, measured, marked out universe. And to add insult to injury was the philosophy of someone called Locke at that time who claimed that there was nothing beyond the five senses. The rigid single vision we can see is that experience of an isolated human being, living in a dead and cold world. The image that Blake creates is of an old man with frozen features, cold, remote and controlling. An isolated experience of the world and others as abstract beings, dead out there. Reading to the hatred of the other. I can't even read a book recently where the author, who I can't remember, was suggesting that hatred is not something that is germane to the instinct or nature. It is very much a culturally produced experience. Which is a good discussion. (sniffling) So, Euryzen, who he came to name this figure of the ego, the self-view. And if you take the word, Euryzen, you just kind of play with it. It's your horizon. Your horizon. And that horizon is, if you can imagine yourself in an egg, but we look at and see the blue sky. And yes, Euryzen's view is that he's inside that egg. That's our world. Nothing beyond it is wanted to be seen or acknowledged. And we live in a world with beings in lots of eggs, little empty dumpties, don't we? And we all bash up against each other. So, how are we doing for time? All right, okay. So Blake painted an image called Newton's Sleep, where other people'd see it. Whereas there's this young man in the bottom of the sea. And he's been, you know, completely tight, you know, right, curry most in this map he's got in it. And all around him, he's always beautiful sea creatures, have you? And the other image he created was what he called the Ancient of Days, where you see this figure leaning over the clouds down onto you. And again, he's got compasses measuring things out. But the sun is behind him and it's totally blocking out the sun. So, a thing that I'm going to be returning to time and time against, we can develop twofold vision. Threefold, and possibly fourfold vision. But the most important is twofold vision, isn't it? It's moving into the world of... I'll begin to give back. I'll begin to come into relationship to a live human, human, universe, where, given me sort of life, animating the world around us, things. To Blake, he was not a bad world. The world was alive, dynamic, and he kind of talks in many places. I have different ways he responded to things, just a couple of examples. When I see a sizzle, he says, I see an old man gray. When you look at the sun, you do see a round disc or a host of angels singing, "Hallelujah." So, I think the most important thing about Blake, and unfortunately, we can't spend too much time on it, but I think it's very relevant to what we're trying to explore, Blake was the first poet to recognise the connection between the inner person and the inner dynamics of the outer events of history. Like the ancient Greeks, he asserted the different powers that live in us and through us. So, I'll just briefly, and it's not really doing any favors to him, but he did about it as time went to different characters. And the first two were this character that we've seen, if you were a self, you are a keenly monotheistic self that wants to control the world. And the first one he came up with, this is orc character, which is orc is very much a being of the underworld, isn't he, especially in the Roman texts. But for Blake, he was the adolescent rebel. And at first, in terms of historical events, Blake was very much for the revolutions that were taking place in the world at that time. But inevitably, he saw that those revolutions turn. And so, you've got humans at 12 o'clock, and then as time goes on, you get orc at six o'clock, and then orc becomes at 12 o'clock. So the oppressed becomes the persecutor, and so it goes on. And just with those two elements, that's what we've got. We've got this conflict, doesn't we? There's nothing else. So, he, what came in, he says, 'cause he was being dictated to, was this figure of loss, which is the soul turn back to front, isn't it? So, where we got souls, you got loss, the character. And this character is very quick with his artistic creative, engaging with these regressive forms that the monotheist ego creates. And he does that, because he's a blacksmith, and he does it within the space of what he calls this other, for Captain Completely, Mandela, his character, who she's called any tharmon. So, any tharmon is, if you can take that, it's in harmony. So, we need to be in harmony with the world around us in order to create within ourselves, so I'll leave it there. But any tharmon is that feminine space in which the creative works. So, another poet, or when we were on now, another poet, just to kind of add a bit more, is the poet at the T.S. Eliot, at the beginning of the 20th century, towards, mostly towards the end, and the end of the First World War. So, I'm just gonna read you the opening image of a poem set to mark the beginnings of what we know as modern poetry, although that's a century ago, over a century. So, this was the love song of J. Alfred, proof of. And it reads, "Let us go then, you and I, "when the evening is spread out against the sky, "like a patient etherized upon a table. "And let us go through certain half deserted streets, "the muttering retreats of restless nights "in one night, cheap hotels, "and sawed us restaurants with always the show. "Street that followed like a tedious argument "of insidious intent to read you to an overwhelming question. "Oh, do not ask, what is it? "Let us go and make our visit. "In the room, the women come and go, "talking of Michelangelo." (inhales) Well, an incredible economic piece of writing. So much packed into that opening image, that's just the first three lines. Let alone the rest of our lives. The city at twilight, like a patient, etherized on a table. The city is etherized, put to sleep, like a patient undergoing an operation. The harsh lights of the city overwhelming the darkening sky. So that the twilight blue and the stars are lost to views of shown by the industry and the light of the modern city. We lose any sense of the stars of the gods. The light of the stars, the archetypal heavens, the gods are totally lost to the patient. The city has lost its soul. The living connection with the gods and the archetypes has been lost leaving the city solid. Not only has the patient been etherized, but also he's given over the responsibility for his consciousness to doctors and professionals. There's always someone who is still specialized in something or other. I could go on, but we've got to move on. But I just want to acknowledge just how much is in that poetry. How much is communicated to us about life in the modern secular world. Showing of its living connection with the soul of the world. And you're right with me. You're right. I've got one more poet. My final poet, it really is relatively modern and American, in fact. The idea, say, would cringe at my introducing you to him in this context. His name's Charles Bekowski. I say that because you like to portray himself as a gritty, hard-bitten realist. But every now and again, something slips out that betrays the sense of a deeper sensibility. Listen, what do you think about this? He says, "There's a blue bird in my heart "that wants to get out. "But I'm too tough for him. "I say, stay in there. "I'm not going to let anyone see you. "There's a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out. "But I pour whiskey on him "and he'll stick a great smoke. "And the whores and the bartenders "and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there. "There's a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out. "But I'm too tough for him. "I say, stay down. "Do you want to mess me up? "Do you want to screw up the works? "Do you want to blow my book sales in Europe? "There's a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out. "But I'm too clever. "I only let him out at night sometimes. "When everybody is asleep, I say, "I know that you're there, but don't be sad. "Then I put him back. "But he's singing a little in there. "I haven't quite let him die. "And we sleep together. "Like that, with our secret pact. "And it's nice enough to make a man weep. "But I don't weep. "Do you?" Both Blake and Elliot are like prophets roaring in the world. They present us in poetic form or vision of conditions of the world and how it impacts in our sense of self. "Bakowski presents to us a pure image of self "in relation to a deeper sensibility. "It's also an image of a subject self "in order with that sensibility. "The subject lived in a world where such sensibility "is on one hand dangerous and on the other, "embarrassing to the environment. "The emergent self, in terms of the poem, "must be kept out of sight, must be kept down "and starved of visibility and therefore kept vulnerable. "There is a fear that if it gets too strong, "it will mess up the force of the force self "that lived in the world. "If it comes to the fore, it will mess up his book selves "in which he has carefully crafted an image of himself "in his environment. "Do you have a renaissance with this "in terms of living in a family, in a society, in a job? "Of course, this can happen in any context, "where the environment and the subject are in conflict, "in the family, in the work environment, et cetera, "it can also happen in a community "or a right and right and right view of the situation. "In fact, these situations, if it can be made conscious, "it will be for the good of the process of individuation. "So, I thought it might be useful to speak "about my own experience of this. "And my early life, I was, "well, I trained as a carpenter and joiner. "As opposed to a certain extent, "I identified with being a carpenter and joiner "and worked for a long time "and people used to relate to me in that way, "understandably, through your job, "well, you know, well, you know the story, don't you?" And then I, after a while, I did a, I went to, I decided, and I would try to go to college, and I did, I went to college, and I studied for three years, and I'd, you know, well, happy, happy. (laughs) Best time of my life, anyway. And, you know, I just, I was challenged to actually, to read in that sort of environment was fantastic. And to actually be pointed in directions where I never know, and it was a whole world that opened up to me. But anyway, you know, it's a big thing, things come to an end. And I didn't feel, I had done well enough to actually continue. I would love to continue and do more. But I got talked into, I didn't know what I was gonna be doing, I got talked into going back to being a carpenter, and to run a carpenter company. And, but I hadn't really acknowledged Bluebird. I hadn't really acknowledged it through that, during that time in the, in the, doing the study. Something had changed in me. And it was no longer comfortable with that way. I could, I found I could not work in the same way anymore. Something has changed in every piece. And yet, people were very reliant on me. To, to, to, to get set up and to actually work. So, I kept quiet. I kept quiet, I didn't tell anyone. And, well, I started doing incredible difficulty, pain. Conflict, really kind of, I just answered with myself that something in me wanted to become visible. And, yes, at the same time, my ego perspective was forcing it down, pushing it down, and creating more and more with pain. And it got to the point where I would go into work. I'd only have to look at a hammer and I would feel sick. I'd feel physically sick. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was obviously psychological, but it was physical, yeah. And it, like, it was down here. And some days I would go in, I'd go in and look at a trestle, or, or a piece of wood. And my whole body would go into, you know, go into production, to paint it, I just couldn't do it. And I'd come away from work and I'd perfectly all right. I'd go and get a good old greasy spoon. I was eating away perfectly all right. But go back to work and the same thing happened. So there's something which emerged in there that, up some point, I had to take notice of, and other people weren't gonna be able to take notice of it until I, I did, really. So, there you go, it's a good example. But it can become quite physical, yeah. Bluebird. (coughing) Does anybody else have that experience? Yeah, yeah, good, yeah. It's a, it's, it's a painful process, but a necessary one, yeah. In some ways, perhaps it couldn't, it doesn't mean to say that as to how some people are lucky they're able to, to fully kind of become visible with what is so central value. But I think for a lot of us caught in the world, caught in that sort of environment with that, perhaps working in jobs that really work against it. It's a very important process that has to happen, unfortunately. I got a friend, Dan Mratty, who hates the thought of that. He really used to get angry with me for suggesting that everybody has to go through it. Years ago, I remember being struck by a book by Edward Conzer. You don't hear him much these days, he's a very famous Buddhist scholar. Well, we're reading. The book was called "A Short History of Buddhism". And at the time of reading this book, I was trying to write an essay of my own. And in this essay, I was attempting to explore some of the ideas I was wrestling with around the importance of ritual in everyday practice. In particular, how the ritual form of calling response plays such a crucial part in ritual and creative art of life. For example, the passing of knowledge. It must be placed. I've lost it. Anyway, the passing of knowledge from culture to culture from generation to generation, and from poet to poet. And yeah, in jazz. In particular jazz. Anyway, what comes, I'm going to that. Anyway, what comes about to say, got constant Tina, in my mind, into an image? So, I'll just go through the, in the first 500 years after the Buddhist power in Iran, and this is a very, very, very short, this is even shorter than Conzer. After the Buddhist power in Iran, it was mainly the tinnitus, mainly the teaching was mainly centered on the figure of the Arahant, and self-development. So, in this way, we could say it's focused with mainly psychological, and included a period of analysis of mental states and a classification of texts and rules. That's the first 500 years. In the 6th second period, it gave rise to a different attitude, embodied in what is known as the Mahayana, the great real Yana. The Mahayana is felt that the doctrine has become stale, that it needed renewing. It both moved out to and was influenced by other cultures outside of India. New texts were produced, new literature appeared, reaching out to other cultures. Whereas the first period was an oral culture, the second period was one that reflected the movement over to illiterate culture. Culture, so you've got many, many, many new texts appearing. So, we get the Arahant and make it. So, you've got earrings in each phase of New York. The Arahant? Mahayana, the body's sat for a little. You've got the Arahant? And then the third period that called a state is that of the emergence of the Vajrayana. And I think it was seen by the Arahant in that country. And the main hero of that was the city, wasn't it? He had powers. But I think in terms of spirit, matter, soul. Anyway, bigger. Nice image, I think. So, the third period that comes to the states is that of the emergence of the Vajrayana. The most important part of being spent in India in this third period was the Tantra, which, as you know, moved to, spread to and became. So central to Tibetan culture. Well, it was an enrichment by way of the appearance of magical practices for the purpose of facilitating the search for enlightenment. So, along with its development was also the absorption of ideas from Aboriginal tribes. So, nothing was kind of left out as it were, always included in some way. In this, the Tantra tried to assign an honoured, although subordinate role to spirits, sprites, fairies, fiends, demons, all cogas, and ghosts, which were in the local and popular imagination. In our sense, all our regressive factors, they all need to be included somewhere in our practice. This further step in popularizing the religion aimed at providing it with a more solid foundation in society. But as far as the British practitioner is concerned to make a difference between a quality of power and freeing oneself from the powers, or either regressive factors in one life, I'm using basement language, you'll notice. The quiet and pound freeing oneself and the powers that are alien to or against one's own being. That's we find in the Tantra, an emphasis on ritual. Ritual rights, a purification, an initiation, bringing with it a whole array of images and archetypes, figures of all shapes and sizes, which sees the imagination. So I'm suggesting that you've got this working with those powers that have been kept outside requires a mutual element of, and what I would say over and over again, it requires a relational attitude, doesn't it? It means a movement from seeing things just in terms of self. It means kind of creating a whole attitude that is very, very different to our tendencies. Not only our tendencies, but the culture in which we live. I'll pass them all because of how we do it. It might be worth pausing here and just say what I mean by ritual. What I'm referring to as ritual is a ceremonial form in which the eye or ego personality is brought into relation to the ideal spiritual will, drama or drama of enlightenment, et cetera, through the medium of poetry, music and/or dramatic enactment. Central to this enactment is the element or the pattern of call and response, whether ego or eye responds to the call of a spiritual will, higher self, et cetera, whichever way you want to put it, thereby through the response and the communication of it connecting a soul connection to the world. If we look at our very, very, very short history, what we see in the development away from the Arahant ideal by the Mahayana, from the perspective of the Mahayana, the shadow of the Arahant ideal, is over concerned with self development. You can almost see our imaginary Mahayana's wagging his finger at the Arahant and telling him or her that they are too psychological. They need to get out more often. In other words, they need a bigger perspective. But perhaps the Mahayana itself got a bit too concerned with the enlightenment of all beings, is this heresy? And its desire to spread to drama, in its desire to spread to drama, it loses sight of those intractable, I think, perhaps, and regressive aspects of the individual and the collective psyche, which if neglected polarised with and work against the ideals. Perhaps the shallow side of this attitude is a tendency towards inflation, an individual with a very full phytopax, getting overextended and losing ground, and carrying on running on low fuel of spiritual, psychological, and emotional resources, commonly referred to as a burnout. How the Vajrayana responded was to put an emphasis on direct experience. So it would bring the elements to come together in terms of the drama, or the music, or the poetry. And play, that's the other one, isn't it? Play very much. Perhaps the shadow of the Vajrayana is a dependency on the exotic nature of its expression, while losing sight of the values of meaning that it's pointing towards. So what we saw in our look at the different perceptions of the conditions that make up the secular world was the poet's growing sense of lack in the world of the support for spiritual aspiration. The poems that we read show a great concern, show a concern, of the wearing away of the archetypal mythological supports to a vision of soul. In a nursery rhyme we became aware of the brokenness that emerges on that sense of separation. In blanks work we become aware of a critique of the rational and scientific philosophies of his age and our own. In blanks we touch the daddy of request factors, a monastic ego, or as he calls it the selfhood or no-bo daddy. Now it was a tendency towards a singleness of vision, a need to control its world, leading to a cold, grim, isolated self that lives in a dead and abstract world. Blake shows in his vision a way out of that world by building a relational attitude to the world and relating to it as a living and holy organism. A live world that mirrors back to our spiritual qualities rather than dead matter. And he says, "How do you know that every bird that cuts the air away is an immense world of delight closed by your senses' pride, somewhere in you you know that there are more than the five senses. There is a call to us to move towards what he called the divine imagination. T.S. Eliot also recognized the eroding of the mythological and archetypal perspective in his world. His image recaptures the starfish of a world caught in the grips of war, or perhaps a post war. The image that we explore was from a poem he wrote looking at the world through the eyes of what he calls or what comes across is a very ambivalent self. And in this you can, as a reference back to Hamlet, actually in the poem. This poem anticipates what he was to explore in the wasteland and the full quartet, which is an incredible example of a poet really exploring the shadow, while capturing moments of the eternal breaking into, into a deprived and desolate landscape of our world. Still recognizable today. Then we call glimpse of the relation of the emergent self, and it's neglect by a poetic persona more identified with a false image in the world, an experience which many of us would recognize. These then are what I would call regressive factors that we need to become aware of, our own particular brand as it were, and even learn to love them. We need an ego in the world, but we also need to be able to choose to hang loose to its tendency towards identification with views, its tendency towards denial, repression and defensiveness. There's a need to hang loose to watch his eye and mind, to learn to wrestle with ideas and things that we find threatening, and have other to our self image, and see them as gods crossing our path. Doesn't mean to say you've got to take them on, but you can wrestle with them. The angels come to play with us, are calling to us, to disidentify with some of our deeply entrenched habits. There is a real need to recognize the ego tendency towards defensiveness, anxiety, and therefore a repression of anything that threatens our self view. There's kind of anything in your hand. The ego is like, you know, where is the issue? It's like I can either be, face the world with a fist, or I can begin to open, I can begin to open it. The ego is still there, but it's a whole different relationship. I can shake your hand or I can come with a fist or a open hand. Well, I'm trying, I've been trying to, in my book very long, is suggesting, it's a very simple message with, is that we make an effort towards internalizing a ritual attitude. I believe in order to really acknowledge the ego view, we have to shift the focal point of consciousness towards the other, moving the centre of consciousness towards nature, towards things, towards others, giving the world back its life, respecting honour in it, loving it. We can work on this via via the dream, can't we? So many times you hear a dream and we're so identified with the dream ego. And that's usually the one that's closest to conscious life. So it's worth stopping when you have a dream, is to just have a look at what the other aspects, the place, the context, the other people in the dream, what that perspective is. In this way, encouraging us to disidentify with the monotheistic attitude of the ego self. Jung says somewhere that whenever he felt crossed or obstructed in the world, he asked himself what God was calling him. So worth moving into that call and response attitude to the world around him. What's calling? What is the tantra suggesting, or what the tantra seems to be suggesting, where he asked us to see an enemy as a body sapphire? Perhaps in psychological sense, he asked us to see our projections onto others as part of ourselves. And to begin to move from you doing this to me that I, I am perceiving this, to return the relationship. We need to look at these projections from a relational perspective. In Blake's language to move from a single abstract view of others towards a twofold appreciation of what they might be saying about ourselves. What the tantra seems to be saying from our basement perspective is to bring these regressive forces and inject onto others into relation to our aspirations. To take the ritual out of the shrine room, so to speak, into the world. Perhaps ask, perhaps we can, I was very well, my message is very simple really. Recently I thought I had a little experiment, so I got a tree out of my house. I thought I need to try and get that worked out in the morning. I take, I take my peanuts, take them down, I bow to the tree, and I put peanuts there for the spirits of the tree. But then I found that the pigeons were coming in and got it. And I felt right and incredible resentment towards these pigeons. A real prejudice against them, a real prejudice I had to really, really work hard with. And gradually until someone told me, in the end, well, if one way looking at them, they would pigeon their duffs. They'd one way, but they're not really duffs, they're pigeons. But then apparently there's a story where Miller Rapper is with these pigeons and he sees them as, dark eenies didn't he or something. So I felt better off that, but I started to work really hard with the, you know, that seeing that and recognising that prejudice. Well, that's the point I'm making. And it's important that, you know, that I just don't do that to it. And they're all very relatable that it is there. It is part of who I am and what I am working with. So we're in relation to events in our lives all the time. And so I think to end, I'm sort of suggesting it were asking what this event, what this conflict, what this, what this obstruction, what this kind of thing is happening in my life, is asking me in terms of the development of those three attitudes. So I started on one. It was this event mean in terms of my development. The second one is what does this event mean in terms of my aspirations to serve in the world. And then the third one is what does this event mean in terms of serving the quality of soul in the world. I think if we could ask those questions each time, then we might find ourselves with the right timber to mend the stairs. So the main point is becoming more relational. Thank you. We hope you enjoy the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
