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. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, my job is simply to introduce our speaker just now, who is a very good friend of mine. So I'll spend a minute or two doing that, because it's always a real pleasure to introduce a friend of yours, and then hand over to him for his talk, and I believe there'll be plenty of time afterwards if you want to kind of stick around, ask questions, debate, whatever So, the title of the talk is quite a unusual, but kind of catchy title. I won't say a word about that, apart from tell you what it is. The title is Beyond Hope and Hopelessness, Dancing in the Ruins of Time. I know nothing about what he's going to speak about, but I'm very happy to introduce a friend of mine, Guichia Patti, member of the Western Buddhist Order, who lives high up in the Spanish mountains in a small kind of retreat community that he has founded, called Eco-Darma, Eco-Darma. And it is kind of what it says on the tin, it's a community dedicated to living and practicing and teaching Eco-Darma. Maybe more of that will come into his talk, I don't know. I've known Guichia Patti many, many years, I visited him up in the mountains and it's a truly beautiful place, and it's quite an achievement, I would say, to find and create a retreat centre in some way as high and inaccessible as where Eco-Darma is. Fantasticly beautiful, very, very elemental, but I knew Guichia Patti more from when he lived in London, and over the time I've known him, he's kind of transformed himself several times over, you know, like some, you know, caterpillars turn into butterflies and then butterflies turn into some health, you know, he's done that. So I knew him when he was, I believe, a very successful modern artist, which I know nothing about modern arts, but he was, he then became a kind of communications media person working for the FWAO in our communications office, and just very successfully kind of helping producer magazine, helping deal with the media and so on. But then I have a feeling, you know, a kind of deeper, longer lasting, truer location opened up for him, and he kind of disappeared for quite a few years, and I, you know, you know, many people and don't touch with all of them, and I didn't really know what had happened to Guichia Patti. The last a third of him, he's got, he got arrested, he left our communications office and got arrested. Specifically, he got arrested for climbing up onto the balcony of the Chinese Embassy in London, and unrolling a banner, which I think said free to bet, something like that. And that was the first I knew, actually, of Guichia Patti's love of mountain climbing. By the way, the artist, journalist, whatever, whatever, but it turns out he'd had a long standing love of mountain climbing, and then he disappeared, I didn't really know what had happened, but I kind of became aware of him again more recently, and just came to know he'd spent the last five years more or less living or working up in the mountains of Spain. First of all, running a mountain climbing guide business, but, you know, that's just as a vehicle for founding ecoderma, this retreat center high up in the Pyrenees of Spain. So it's a good friend of mine, he's fantastic, and I will hand you over to Guichia Patti. Thanks, welcome Andy, thank you. So I've been thinking about this talk for a little while, but I found myself on my way here from Catalunya, really wondering what the motivations were for giving such a talk. And when I came here before popping up to London for a few days, dropped off a trailer, went to London to see some friends, and when I got there, I kind of remembered for what the deeper motivations were, because I was visiting a good mate of mine, you know, someone who, well, we've been friends for a very, very long time, and we haven't seen each other for a few months, so we're just catching up on bits and pieces that we've been doing, and I was asking him about an action, a direct action that he was involved in recently where a group of people boarded a ship, which was coming from Amsterdam carrying coal for a coal fire power station in the UK, so they boarded the ship with the intention of stopping it from unloading, and, well, various things happened, and of course, eventually everybody who was involved in that action was unrested, so who is telling me about the various things and outs of what had gone on and this and that, and eventually, you know, I was talking about going into custody, and so I said, so, you know, how was it this time, and I think custody, you know, he spent twelve hours in a cell, and he said it was great, you know, there was this bed, I just laid down, I relaxed, chilled out, and no one was going to come and disturb me, you know, they'd look on in me every now and again, and he said it was fantastic, you know, it was the most relaxing time I've had in months, right? And so, well, you know, that's, that's pretty abysmal in a way, isn't it, when, you know, some of us have finally got the most relaxing experiences, the most nourishing moments in our lines at the moment, are hanging out in police cells, right? And on the other hand, you know, there's loads of people going around saying, but what can you do, you know, like, well, here's a list, right? So anyway, you know, there's, we're in this situation at the moment where we're going through this terrible transition, none of us really know what's coming up, where we're going, how do we respond to it, you know, how do you respond to it in a way that's sustainable, that we can kind of, you know, keep doing, how can we sit, how can we respond to it in a way that, you know, doesn't kind of, in a way, betray our sort of values, betray our own lives in a way. So those are the kind of issues that this talk is going to look at to some extent. I'm going to say, don't know that, you know, giving a talk, you should tell people what you're going to say, then say it, and then, you know, tell them what you said, which is pretty formulaic and duller, but, you know, maybe it's a good advice. So what I'm going to say is that, you know, hope and hopelessness are these two responses to the crisis we're in, but they're, you know, they're the sort of, you know, the two sides of the same coin, and actually none of them are particularly useful. We need to find a way to get rid of this sort of, you know, the oscillation between hope and hopelessness and find a more sustainable engagement which is rooted in our present time. And in order to do that, we need to look at some of our fundamental assumptions about time, understand the way that our response to time, our understanding, and our experience of time, how that's conditioned and how we can undo that conditioning to free ourselves into a more effective engagement in the present time. So, yeah, none of us know quite where we're going. But, you know, the idea of this being an end times is, seems pretty reasonable in many respects, you know, who we got, climate change, peak oil, kind of peak, everything, right? But rather than rattle off a list of evermore statistics, as we're wanting, as we're prone to do, I'm going to tell a short little story. It's not a very dramatic story, actually. It's a very, very everyday. In fact, when I thought about it this morning, I thought, well, am I going to, why am I telling that story? That's pretty dull, really, right? And actually, that's the point, right? This is a very, very everyday kind of story. And being everyday in a sense, for me is quite emblematic of where we're at. So, it starts off in a situation which is fairly everyday for me, not for lots of people, but it doesn't, it's not an adventure story, it's not about the mountains as such, right? This is where it starts. It starts with me being up in the hyperinities with a friend of mine, and we've gone climbing up in the high mountains. We're, you know, we're crossing some snowfields and where we're climbing these big granite faces. It's spring. It's like early June. The snowfields are starting to melt, the rivers are filled with this beautiful kind of melt, ice melt, snow melt, water, crystal clear, little flowers are starting to come out here and there and patch it between the snow. And we're climbing this big granite face and, you know, when you're climbing, you kind of, you make your way up and you find maybe a little ledge and you build an anchor for yourself, then you start bringing your friend up on another end of a rope, you know, and then so for a while you're doing that, you kind of have a big luck around and, you know, on this occasion, way down below me, there's this big field of snow with its hearts, which are kind of like small antelope come, dig, type animal that live in the Pyrenees, kind of, you know, making their way across the snow, jumping from sort of boulders that are kind of emerging out these melting snowfields. And, you know, a few minutes later, a hawk kind of gets lifted up on a thermal and kind of flies right up past me and hits this gust of north wind flying across the ridge above. And, you know, in those environments, you just have this, you know, well, you know, this extraordinary sense of the wild, it puts everything very, very much in perspective. People very mistakenly assume that people who climb are often doing it to conquer peaks, you know, it's a kind of very male, sort of phallic, patriarchal kind of activity that we're conquering nature. But if you do it, you realise that it doesn't feel like that at all, you know, it, you know, nature kicks you in the teeth more often than not, right? It's a very, very humbling experience. And in that humbling experience you come to sort of, you know, close to an intimate sense of just how far from the central things humans really are. You know, it's, it really challenges the kind of anthropocentric assumptions underpin how culture, you know, I don't think it's any surprise that most sort of deep ecological thinkers and writers have a lot of experience of wilderness, a lot of them are mountainous. Anyway, there we are from the mountains. We finished the climb, it's all, you know, no great sort of adventure, so like I said. And after a few days up in the mountains, we were in bigening out, we, we start walking, walking back down, right? Back across the snow fields, we cross kind of fields through a few valleys. As we make our way down the little path to start opening up a bit more, and eventually we're doing quite an obvious path, and then we come down to a little, you know, little four by four kind of dirt track. Well, we've got a vehicle parked up, so we start driving back home down the dirt track. Eventually, we hit the sort of a rough sort of asphalt road, still very windy and small, and then it goes a bit bigger. And just on the right hand side of the road there, there's this very odd looking building which is apparently sort of built in accordance with local planning regulations, which say that a certain percentage has to be built in the granite rock of the area. So, you know, the bottom two thirds of it, this nice granite stone building, then on top of it, it's this big ugly free-fab factory you can kind of throw in on the top there. There's a bottling plant, a place that, you know, live out of water, because this valley is just filled with springs, natural springs, the snow, the snow meltwater is pouring down this fantastic river. So, the bottled water on the tenant. Anyway, we carry on down past the bottling plant through top of the villages, through the first town, and the road gets bigger again, but it's still very, very windy, and as we go down, we get caught behind this truck. Big lorry, no juggernaut, and they're carrying water from the bottling plant and we've just come past. And, you know, it's pretty slow sitting behind this truck down these windy roads, so we're looking around and I know it's, you know, the river is still sort of pouring down the snow melt from up above, still sort of running down the beautiful, clear, clear, crystal, pure water. Any kind of reflect, isn't it odd, you know, that there's this sort of this wonder of sort of modern sort of industry, this big truck burning fossil fuels to slow down thousands of liters of water from getting down the hill, you know, the river's doing a much better job, right? Anyway, so a little bit after that, we slow down even more, and there's another truck trying to come up the hill, passing this one on the way up, what's it carrying, bottled water, from springs, maybe hundreds, possibly thousands of kilometers away, and it's taking a spot of water up the hill, so the villages we've just come from, where there are, of course, all these wonderful springs coming out in the mountainside, right? And you think, well, there you go, that's the, you know, the logic of the market at work, you know, fantastic evidence, right? So a little while later, the story goes on a little bit, a little while later I got hold of a bottle from this particular brand that was going up the hill. Here it is, says on the front aqua bona, so good water, okay? And on the side here, since Spanish are translated for you, it says we have good water, we believe that it's possible to reduce our impact on the environment, and this is why we incorporate in the design of our plastic bottle microcurves so that we can optimize the amount of plastic we use and its design, right? And then lower down you find here that aqua bona are a subsidiary of Coca Cola, right? Who are at the moment involved in these illegal battles with present farmers in India, because their factories are pumping all the ground water out, and the ancient wells that have been irrigating their fields are running dry, right? So good water, right? And why is it good water? Because, well, you know, when we drink it, it keeps our skin a bit purer, it's good for our health, all that kind of stuff, right? You know, we buy this stuff because actually we're so concerned with our own personal health that we can, you know, in a way forget the fact that in producing and distributing that, the bigger body of the planet that our health depends on is actually getting destroyed, right? Then the production of this kind of stuff, contaminants in the atmosphere, are getting into those lakes in the high mountains and causing the highest build-up in some places of sort of heavy metals and toxins in the sediment of those sort of alpine lakes. So as I said, it's a really undramatic little story, right? But the absurdities that are sort of bound up in it, for me, are very, very emblematic of our time. So here's our sort of artefact, archaeological artefact of our moment, right? In good water. So in that little story, there are three sort of basic elements that come out for me. One is the sort of structural irrationalities of our moments, right? These sort of economic industrial systems that were involved in just how irrational, how absurd they are. Secondly, there's sort of the erosion of meaning, the kind of perversion of values, obfuscation, right? The falsity and language of this stuff they call good water, right? And thirdly, it points to this kind of individualistic narcissistic obsession where we can put our own personal health above the health of that which we actually depend upon. So there's the emblem. But of course, this bottle sits here in the Budefill Festival. And the Budefill Festival now is yet an emblem for something else. It's an emblem for an alternative. It's a kind of, you know, it's a story of, of renewal, the Budefill Festival in some ways. Alongside against, you know, the sort of structural rationalities of our current system, the Budefill Festival, many of us here are kind of championing ideas of relocalisation and sustainability, you know, learning again the importance of honouring the ecosystem. Alongside the kind of erosion of meaning that Bonagua stands for, we've got a renewal of values, a kind of renewal of a cultural context. And then alongside and against the sort of individualistic or narcissistic kind of obsessions, we've got here a renewal of the importance of community, the desire to kind of re-establish a kind of culture based on compassion. So you got these two emblems, the bottle of water, Budefill Festival, right? And there's this kind of, you know, there's this, there's this clash of values there. There's this clash of sort of future visions. But none of us know how or which of these values they're going to kind of, you know, which are going to win out in this apparent conflict. And, you know, they are pretty irreconcilable at the end of the day, right? So we don't quite know where we're going. But at least getting a bit of a clearer sense of where we come from, you know, a bit of a sense of our history. We can get a much clearer sense of where we are. And then we can actually, you know, get a bit of a clearer sense of what options might be opening up ahead of us. So I haven't got my PowerPoint set up, but, you know, we're all kind of quite imaginative people. So the next slide starts down, you can sort of walk down that field there, past the Catholic quiet camping area, all the way down to the end of the far, far field and through a few woods, right? Down at the bottom there is the first point on the X axis of a graph. That's a timeline, right? That's running all the way down through the through, finishes about here, right? And the Y axis here is, you know, the levels of consumption, production consumption, population, and pollution, right? And way down the end, like I said, you know, through those fields is the start of, you know, the human species, right? Our great, great ancestors. And we follow the timeline through those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years up until the present, right? The level of consumption and population and pollution just continues to kind of skirt along the top of the blade of grass. A hundred and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years until it gets to here, right? Just here, we're just 10,000 years ago, we get the agricultural revolution. And at this point, from the top of the blade of grass, we get the slight rise in population, slight rise in pollution, slight rise in consumption, right? Until we reach a moment very, very recently where on the back of sort of mercantilism, we had the sort of the trading exploits of sort of the western, you know, the western empires, and then the rising of the industrial revolution and the birth of the fossil fuel age. And then, of course, what happens, and it's a bit of a story, you know, isn't it? This curve, right, just flies up, right? It's really, really steeply, how it's so population, consumption, pollution, just fly. So we reach this point here now, where we reach this climax, where we know that, you know, actually it's totally unsustainable. But what happens next? Well, the vision of views that have sort of informed this rapid sort of growth. If they had their ways, well, we'd carry on flying into this sort of infinite, you know, fantasy future, which of course we know isn't now going to happen, right? What else might happen? Well, as many Hollywood films are keen to portray for us, we might have this terrible crash into a Mad Max, a popular future where, you know, a few kind of rugged and burly survivalists sort of battle it out for the last bits and pieces, right? Kind of between these two kind of extreme views, these two extreme visions, there are a couple of other competing visions around as well at the moment. One is the one that sort of seems to be very, very much sort of on the tables in big sort of global summits, like, you know, the current climate change talks that are going on under the auspicity of the UN, which is the idea that maybe we could have some sort of, you know, green techno future where we could sustain these apparently ridiculous levels of consumption with some very clever kind of technological ingenuity and just, you know, maybe have a slight downturn for a few years and then just level out nicely, you know, at the sort of levels that we're out now. But there's another sort of vision as well, which is one that, well, actually, you know, that seems a little bit unlikely, a lot of people are saying what we need to do is realise that we've got pretty limited resources and if we're clever, we could use those to plan a decline, plan a descent to a level that's genuinely sustainable, it levels much, much lower than the ones we have now, right. So we've got these four, these four kind of scenarios, techno, future, utopia, like green tech, capitalism, basically, or whatever, and a man-max apocalyptic kind of stuff and something that is much more modelled on a kind of permaculture sort of idea or sort of transition tones by ideas. And what kind of future we're going to have is very likely just going to be a rather confusing mix of all of these things, right. It's not going to be a kind of a simple, you know, the future isn't going to fit into any one of those visions, particularly, right. It's going to be a mix, a competing mix of these various things. Sometimes they'll come from each other, sometimes they'll go complete through each other. It remains very, very uncertain, but at least by kind of thinking through, recognising there is that range, we can begin to adapt, you know, begin to bring flexibility into our own strategising, our own ways of organising to deal with a situation. So we need some flexibility. But it's so uncertain. So how do we cope with that uncertainty? How do we face this sort of uncertain future? Well, this brings us to a hope, right. People say, you know, they need a hope, they need hope to hang on to. But other people say, "But it's hopeless." You know, a good friend of mine, sort of talking about this sense of hopelessness. He put it very, very politically the other day. He said, "We're fucked." And this relationship between the two, you know, hope and hopelessness, this is a crucial problem for us. It's a central problem. In Buddhism there's a saying which has got hope, hope and fear chase each other's tales. You know, when we swim, we oscillate from one to the other. And, you know, it happens sometimes on a daily basis. Recently we had a guy come and stop off at our place one of his way to Barcelona. He was going there to give the first ever transition town training in Barcelona, where, you know, people are there thinking about developing a transition town in Washington. So, well, great. You know, that's a really positive thing, right? You sort of think, "Yeah, you know, excellent. You know, he's going to go there. You know, people are getting power. People start organizing, start doing things." The next day, you're driving past the newly opened airport terminal in Barcelona, you know, and you kind of, you know, from one moment of the sense of, "Wow, you know, great." You know, these sort of, you know, green shoots. You're then passing something that represents the capacity of the dominance system to mobilize millions and millions and millions of euros to build something that's completely heading in the other direction. And, you know, so we oscillate between these two. How we deal with that? How we negotiate this kind of tendency to oscillate between hope and hopelessness is really important, because you get a hold of. Now, there's a guy called Derek Jensen. I don't know. Some of you I know have read Derek Jensen. Some of you gave me the books. Joe Jensen's a writer and an activist. And he's recently written a little article in which he kind of challenges us to give up on hope. He says that hope can be, or is deeply disempowering. Boy, he describes it. He says, "Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. It means that you are essentially powerless." And he says, you know, "Don't just hope that salmon survive. Don't just hope that the old growth forests don't get cut down. You know, organize yourselves. Do something about it. You don't just hope that tomorrow you're going to get fed. You make sure that the foods in the cupboard one way or another." So he says, "When we realize the degree of agency, we actually do have. We no longer have to hope at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes. When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself. When we stop hoping that the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free. Truly free to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins. So he's saying that hope functions to support the dominant system in the same way that in the past people have spoken about, you know, the idea of heavenly salvation, you know, being in the interests of the current power structure. He kind of feels that hope has a way of kind of keeping us in our places, you know, it's a way that you stop us from mobilizing. Because we're very, very deeply conditioned to look to the future for our happiness, very deeply conditioned to look to the future, to the kind of salvation. And hope is part of that tendency to look to the future is actually very life-denying. Looking to the future is a way of turning our backs on what's actually going on, about rooting ourselves in the present. So in a sense, giving up on hope is actually a way of coming to life, to way of affirming life. We're giving up on hope without falling into hopelessness. Very much depends on how we understand time, where we are, how things are unfolding. And so that's why for the rest of this talk I'm going to look at different understandings of time, have a sense of how our sense of time is conditioning our responses to the situation we're in. The one thing I think we need to be very careful of to work is that our responses to our current crisis, if they simply repeat the kinds of assumptions about our world that have got us into these problems, then we're just going to repeat those problems again. And because time, our understanding of time is such a fundamental part of the framework. It's such a fundamental underpinning to our worldview. It's really valuable to reflect on our experience of and our intuitive understandings of time to recognize the conditioning that informs our worldviews. So you're just going to spend the rest of that talk looking at some of those issues. So the dominant experience of time in the modern western world has two particular aspects. One is to do with its linearity, the assumption of progress and its future orientedness. And the other is to do with the sense of fragmentation, the sort of shrinking and compression. So first of all, that sense of linearity, the idea of progress, is absolutely essential to the western project, the modern project. It's essential to the dominant western worldview. The idea being that the history of humanity is one of progress. And that for every solution that may come up, there is every problem that may come up, there is a solution. And that progress need never cease. The modern ideas of time are sort of grounded in this. And there's an interesting historian called David Noble who writes a lot about technology and he explores this idea, this sort of future orientedness, this idea of progress at the heart of our culture. And he traces it back particularly to the 11th century. He says in the 11th century there's this big shift in the Christian tradition towards a kind of apocalyptic millenarianism where the idea that we can actually prepare for the coming of Christ really galvanizes people. There's this idea that rather than salvation being otherworldly entirely, actually we can prepare socially and spiritually here for the arrival of Christ in the inauguration of the new millennium. And so energy starts going in to kind of sorting things out down here on this earth. But after a while he says, the idea of the second coming starts to, well it didn't happen. So the idea of the second coming becomes less important than the sense of confidence that really we can change things down here and people get very, very carried away with that in a sense. He says this really, really underpins a lot of approaches to sort of technology and economic growth today. He says, while today's technologists in their sober pursuit of utility power and profit seem to set society standards for rationality, they're driven by distant dreams. Spiritual yearnings receive a natural redemption and their true inspiration lies in an enduring otherworldly quest for transcendence and salvation. And actually our hopes for salvation, both secular and spiritual remain largely locked in this sort of spiritually inspired future orientation. And with that everything gradually becomes reduced to a means to an end. The value of our lives depend upon particular future outcomes. So everything becomes reduced to a means. But unfortunately gradually we forget what the ends those means are supposed to serve actually were. So that now we're finding that the myth of more and more and better and better is actually crashing on the rocks of never enough. So part of that experience brings us to this other aspect, this other sort of central experience of time in our contemporary world, which is that sense of fragmentation. What social scientists talk about as the compression of time, the sense that there's less and less time to do more and more things. Because the Americans kind of epitomized that, there was a couple of statistics from American social science suggested that something like 38% of Americans sort of claim that they always feel rushed. And that since the 1980s the average American household now works 500 hours a year more than they did in the 1980s. So the technological and economic forces that our industrial society have unleashed have really transformed our sense of time. We feel increasingly trapped in a smaller and smaller space, increasingly on the treadmill. And we lose a sense of connection with the past and we lose a sense of connection with the future. And the now that we're not even in gets shorter and shorter. One of the things that one of the dangers here of course is a lot of a sense of history. And in terms of strategizing, in terms of working to respond to the situation we're in now, it's very very important that we renew our sense of history that we realize that there's a lot to learn from other generations. There's a lot to learn from the generations of people who have involved in social movements over the centuries, through the sort of the combatting or working to either through feudalism and working to respond and develop workers' rights and working to establish universal suffrage, all these things that people have organized to do over the centuries. And we're kind of lost to sense it out. There's lots of people, particularly people I meet with a sort of younger generation, have no sense at all of the history that as sort of social activists, they can plug into and be empowered by all of the tools and experience that they can draw on. It's very very important. There's lots of a sense of history, a lot of a sense of just how much, how experience of today is conditioned by social and historical forces, and that's something that's important to reclaim, I think. But along with a sense of fragmentation and time compression, we've also lost a sense of the autumn time as an organically measurable experience. Time, the term environment by mechanization, time determined by some digitization is so out of sync with the ecosystem. The ecosystem works in much, much slower ribbons. The ecosystem involves much slower, longer feedback loops. And because they're not built into the kind of time we operate by, we're actually blind to them. And being blind to them, we're causing extraordinary damage. And we don't even notice it. One of the most significant things going on on this planet at the moment is what's called the sixth-grade extinction. People suggest that some of that 25,000 species are going extinct every year. Any evolutionary terms, this is massive. It's massive. And we just wander around as though, well, you know, okay. Anyway, we're blind to that. And we're blind to it because of the kind of time. I think it's John Amacy says something like, you know, the metabolism of our society is like a hummingbird. You know, this sort of vibrates. They move so fast that the movement, you know, the hibernating grizzly bear is completely invisible to it. In the same way, the metabolism of our society, this kind of, you know, the instantaneousness of our lives means that we're actually blind to be slower, figure, cycles, and processes upon which we depend. And so we're sort of undermining them. So in this contemporary sort of view, you know, experience of time, the predominant experiences, the predominant understanding is that of linearity, the idea of progress, future integration, and then the sense of fragmentation and the compartmentalization and the compression of time. But that isn't how time is, right? These are just socially constructed experiences. That isn't actually how time is. These are experiences that come out of our worldviews and the kind of technologies that are bound up with our worldviews. Other experiences of time are available to us. And in responding to the failure of our dominant culture, we need to not replicate these views and values and experiences, but find and be nourished by other types of, in other modes, other dimensions of temporal experience. There's another quote. This is Spengler, the kind of the west. He says, "It's by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to time that one culture is differentiated by another." You know, the intuitive understanding of time is so central to culture. So if we're going to build, if we're involved in this project of building a new culture of compassion, what kind of time are we going to use? What framework are we going to base that on? What are the alternatives? We're going to talk about three. We're going to talk about deep time, talk about rerouting ourselves in the cyclical and the organic mode of dimension of time. And third, I'm going to talk about a deeper experiential sense of time and its ineffability. So first of all, deep time. So against this tendency to compress and fragment time, we can draw on a renewed experience of deep time. We can re-identify it with our sense, our place in the great narrative of the unfolding of this universe, you know, the 15 billion years from the great primal flaring forth through the birth of soap, supernovas and stars and planets and, you know, the beginning of life. We can kind of reroute ourselves, reconnect ourselves into that web. I think it was, was it clear yesterday that the, that the Caesar Daygig sort of talked about as as being, you know, the crashing wave on the, you know, the edge of this sort of evolutionary journey and sort of, you know, the importance of re-experiencing ourselves in that way, being empowered by that connection? Or the Ekadama Center, we've been kind of exploring that, particularly in terms of trying to get us into the evolutionary story in the landscape, in the place where we are. Towering above the center are these big limestone cliffs, thick limestone ridge, and it, you know, it's, you know, 100 metres higher this big limestone face. And it started its life at the bottom of an inland sea. It started by an inland sea that was around about 200 million years ago. And at that time when there was an inland sea, the rain falling on granite was gradually, you know, eroding the, the, the granite higher up. And atmospheric carbon that was sort of drawn by, drawn in by the rain would, would unite with calcium molecules in the crystal matrix of the granite rock and create the substance called calcium carbonate, which is like a chalky sort of liquid, right? And this chalky liquid would be sort of flown, you know, within, from the rain, you know, 200 million years ago, gradually sort of flow down the river systems down into the shallow inland sea. And there, in this inland sea, what is these tiny little beings, these incredible beings called cockalyphopause. And cockalyphopause, they're about four thousandth of a millimetre across. They're very, very little fellows, you know? And they would absorb the, the calcium carbonate, it's out of the water. And they would create these microscopic shells, exquisite, delicate little chalky shells for themselves, little body plates, right? And over the course of millions and millions of years, these little cockalyphopause, as they would die, would float down, rain down through the water of the shallow ocean, the shallow sea, down into, to create sort of sediments, right, which would build up over a very, very, very long time. You can imagine how long does it take for, you know, a few centimetres of sediment to be created by tiny shells of beings that are 4,000th of a millimetre across quite a long time, right? So anyway, so slowing down these little shells of dying cockalyphopause and the sediment building up, and the sediment gradually turning through chemical processes and through pressure and so on, turning into rock, turning into limestone. So all this is going on, you know, up to about 100 million years ago, and at that time you've got, you know, the first little mammals wandering around on the, on the, on the banks of this sea, the first birds, you've got the first flowering plants, angiosperns like oak trees and sycamores are starting to go, and the first bees are also flying around pollinating these little flowering, the flowering plants and trees, and at that moment, through tectonic plate movement, the, the Iberian microplate starts to push up against the European, European continental plate, and as they push together, the Pyrenees are sort of pushed up, and this shallow sea starts to rise up as well and begins to drain, the water starts flowing out of it. Panjia, the primal continent, is all formed, but it's starting to sort of divine out, the Atlantic Ocean is starting to be born at this moment as well, and as the microplate, the Iberian microplate pushes up this little inland sea, it's the, the bed of this inland sea rises up, rises up, and the grant eventually starts kind of breaking, you know, plates and limestone pushing over one another until you have these ridges and cliffs, which now sits, you know, two kilometers higher up than they were before, up above the houses where we live, you know, we look out at our windows at these ancient sea beds towering above us, and it's extraordinary, the experience that one gets from really explores that geological history, that evolutionary history in place, and make it kind of a material reality, you know, and of course, it's all here as well, right, it's not just death in Spain, right, all of this land has that kind of ancient geological evolutionary history about it, the cells of our body can contain those stories, and we can familiarize ourselves with those stories, and through that, really regain a sense of the journey that we're part of, you know, break out of this fragmented experience of, you know, this small moment, instantaneous and so experienced, and we root ourselves in the evolutionary story, so the buildings we live in are also built out of limestone, so it's kind of interesting when you sit in the kitchen, you're aware that, you know, actually, here we are involved in this extraordinary collaboration, yeah, you know, it's collaboration with the terrain and weathering processes, the collaboration with Cockalithopause and Tectonic Plate Movement, but also obviously a collaboration with peasant farmers who kind of, you know, cut these stones and sort of started building these buildings that now we're renovating again, and you're connecting with hanging a sense of how, you know, the lives that we live, not just in a limestone building now, but, you know, here and everywhere, are built upon the work and the labor of generations and generations of people is also very, very important, you know, to reconnect and that continue, that sense of a continuation of generations, and that's not, you know, people, a few people recently saw me about, you know, the idea of reconnecting with the ancestors and stuff like that, and, you know, shrines and indigenous practices and so on, and I think that's really, really valuable. I mean, I think those sorts of ideas, those practices can be very rich and rewarding in an emotional sense, but it's not just a sort of a vague, you know, ritual kind of sense, our connection with the evolution, our connection with ancestors is absolutely material, right, and it's really worth us studying natural history, it's really worth us studying social history, like political history, as I was saying before, you know, where in touch with a sense of, you know, how these, how our world today came apart, came about, empower ourselves and arm ourselves with tools of understanding what other people have done, and of course, you know, with that as well, a sense of oral history, you know, renew a sense of oral history, talk to our elders in many different ways. So as we reconnect with that sense of deep time, we also revisit and recognize, again, kinds of dimensions and modes of time that were sort of prior to the kind of civilization we're in, we reconnect with a sense that, well, you know, there are, there were indigenous and traditional times that weren't so determined in a linear way. Time, time which respected the cycles much more, you know, whereas, you know, rather than time being some sort of mutual framework which we used to measure is sort of the passage of the sun or the passage of the moon, and in an indigenous and traditional sense of time, an organic sense of time, you know, the passage of the sun, the passage of the moon actually are time, okay, time is a patterning of the world. And in traditional time, in indigenous time, we don't sort of try to get through time to reach a point of salvation, you know, salvation actually is achieved through honoring that patterning, you know, which of course is an idea that fits with the whole kind of idea of permaculture, the idea of sustainability. And we actually do need to reroot our souls in that cyclical sense of time, in order to reroot our souls in organic time. Only when we do that, we start to realize our human potential, you know, that's, that's kind of, it's a fundamental part of our identity, our ecological identity is one of the most fundamental sort of dimensions of who we are. And at the moment, there's actually a kind of time war taking place on the planet. There was, you know, from this sort of moment, 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was born, an empire sort of began to spread across the face of the world. And people sometimes think, well, you know, agriculture spread because, you know, it was a good idea. But it seems much more likely that what happened was that agriculture's community has just wiped out people who weren't interested in taking on the great idea in the same way the industrial society now is just wiping out other civilizations and people who aren't sort of, you know, inclined to take on our great idea. And so, you know, the empire from the beginning of the agricultural revolution through the industrial revolution has just spread and spread and spread until we've reached the point now where there are a few tiny, tiny pockets, which haven't been taken over and colonized by the empire of industrial growth society. And even those tiny communities now, you know, in places that we used to think, you know, the land wasn't that interesting to us. It wasn't very prime agricultural land. And now we find there's oil there, or there are other resources to be got out. So, you know, even those tiny pockets that have been left alone are now on the siege. And one of the things that's involved though is this kind of time war, you know, a particular way of understanding time, about productivity and all the rest of it, and efficiency, this beginning is, you know, eroding and challenging and colonizing this other ideas of time, the ideas of organic time. And one of the things we need to do in that war, I know some people don't like the idea of war, but, you know, that's what it is. One of the things we need to do is actually, you know, resist that colonization through rooting ourselves in other kinds of time, through honoring different understandings and different modes of temporality, through honoring the organic, through honoring the cyclical. Resist that. The hegemony. There's after teachers have this phrase, don't they, which is, you know, we're making a world in which many worlds fit. And of course, a world in which many worlds fit, needs to be a world in which many times fit as well. So, we need to ourselves in organic time. And in rooting ourselves in organic time, we can also start to become to a deeper, a deeper sense, a deeper experience of time. We can start to notice some of the motivations. We need to recognize some of the motivations that kind of causes to turn away from time. And Buddhism has quite a lot to offer us in this. There's an entity to call the Dogen Zenji. He's recently rather fallen out of favor in the Western Buddhist order. But Dogen's an incredible teacher. And he has this funny little saying. He says something about, you know, the Buddha, the Buddha is always, you know, the Buddha is being enlightened. The Buddha is always becoming enlightened. He always is enlightened and always will be becoming enlightened. And it's a funny little phrase. It's like, you know, this idea that the Buddha's enlightenment is happening right now, and it will always be happening sometime into the future. And one of the things he's kind of getting out with this idea is that, you know, the present moment contains all of the past, and the present moment contains all of the future. And when we're caught up in our sort of future orientation, when we're looking for salvation somewhere up ahead, we're denying everything, we're denying all of life. Because unless we fully, fully embrace our present, we don't really embrace any part of life, because our present contains all of it. To affirm any part of life, we need to embrace the totality. This is what Dogen's trying to get to. And the Buddhist idea of salvation is very, very different to the one which, you know, the Christian millinarian idea or the sort of the modern western idea of sort of, you know, this sort of happy ending somewhere. I mean, Buddhism doesn't suggest that, you know, salvation isn't somewhere out ahead. It's actually right here, it's right now, you know. It's not by sort of running away from suffering, imagining some future without suffering that we sort things out. It's actually by turning to look at suffering, by looking at its true nature, you know, really being prepared to turn our face towards suffering that we find liberation. Buddhism points to the fact that the conditioned world, the conditioned experience has these three very particular characteristics. You know, it's insubstantial, it's impermanent, and it's permeated by Dukkha or suffering. And Buddhism asks us to look at these marks of conditioned reality to turn towards them. And in turning towards them, we don't kind of, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not trying to, well, by turning towards them, we're changing our relationship to them. We're trying to, we're trying to sort of sink through those experiences, allowing them to influence our tendency to try to hold on to, to, to try an image, right? One of the central images in Buddhism is the image of a lotus. And the lotus represents unfoldment, it represents spiritual unfoldment. But for me, the beauty of the image of the lotus isn't the fact that it's, you know, it's, it's this pure form that somehow floats up in the air, right? The beauty of the lotus is that yes, it has this purity, this sort of extraordinary exquisite beauty, it's unfoldedness, right? But it's also an organic form, it's an organic image. It's an image where the stem of the lotus runs down, back through the water and down into the sludge and the mayo at the bottom, from which it actually draws its, it draws its nourishment. You know, it's only when we sink our roots deeply into insubstantiality that we find that the lotus of interconnectedness flowers, there's only when we sink our roots deep down into the sludge and the muck and the mayo of impermanence that we find the resources for really radical change. There's only when we sink our roots deep down into the mayo and the muck of suffering that the lotus of compassion unfolds. I think Buddhism is a tradition that helps us to see that you don't get one without the other, okay? There's no running away, there's no salvation up in the future. It's here we have to turn ourselves to the rather complex and messy type of existence and bring an attitude to that that's freeing, that's creative, that's liberating. In a flamenco tradition, they say something like, you know, that our capacity to experience joy is only equal to our capacity to open up to pain and the suffering. Buddhism has a lot in common I think with flamenco. So our own response to our current ecological crisis, you know, I think has to try to integrate this other kind of model, this idea that it's not about running away, that we don't want to repeat the future-orientedness, the future direction or idea that's brought us here, that's so sort of fundamental to our civilization that's now failing us. We need to try to bring in new ways of thinking, new ways of experiencing that are more liberating. And this involves as well a shift from time which is about quantity to quality. Much of time today is about measuring things. There's sort of a sense of there's an objective time which we can use just to measure stuff. And of course this reliance, this emphasis on the measurable and the quantifiable means that we've lost very much a sense of the experience on the qualitative dimension of time. As I said before, you know, in traditional organic time, the passage of the sun across the sky and the moon through its phases isn't something you measure with time but it is time. You know, here we're making the move from sort of mechanistic fragmented time to the organic and from that into a sense of, you know, from the quantitative to the qualitative. I just want to come back to Dogan one moment. We're not going to go on that much longer. I want to come back to Dogan for a moment. And there's a quote from him which I find very helpful in trying to get a sense of the qualitative dimension of time. He sort of wants to remind us that flowers, it's not that flowers bloom in the springtime. He says it's that flowers blooming is the springtime. He's trying to sort of get us to escape from this idea that time and events are somehow separable that we can separate the two out. So that actually says the time we call the spring blossoms directly as the existence called flowers. The flowers themselves in turn express the time called spring. This is not existence within time, existence itself is time. So he wants to point to the fact that objects don't endure, that they're impermanent, they don't exist in the way that we think they do. And time itself, the time only manifests as sort of the ephemeral process that we call objects. He wants to break down the sense that there's time as this framework and events that happen within it. But this is something that's quite difficult to get a sense of without stealing our minds a little bit. When we caught up in the kind of the making of the world that we're doing all the time, particularly conditioned by the kind of world we live in. It's very hard to get to this sort of qualitative sense of time, this qualitative sense which involves sort of moving from the digital countdown of a wristwatch back to a sense of time in terms of the experience of breathing or experience of time in terms of clouds and rainfall and the unfolding of ferns and mosses. Too difficult to do that. And we need to use kind of practices like meditation, we need to kind of create those spaces in our day to enable to tune in for these more qualitative experiences, these more qualitative dimensions. I want to just read actually a little bit more from Dogen. This is kind of an unusual environment to try and do it in. But let's see if we can just, for a moment, listening to Dogen's world kind of drop into the kind of qualitative experience that he's trying to point us towards. So we're trying to sort of listen really without our heart minds. We're not thinking too much about what kind of idea of time is this. We're going to listen to his words, listening with our heart mind. He says, time being means that time itself is being. And all being is time. Time is not separate from you. And as you are present, time does not go away. Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not see clearly and understand time being is that you think of time as only passing. People only see times coming and going and do not thoroughly understand that time being abides in each moment. Time being has the quality of flowing because flowing is a quality of time. Moments have passed and present do not overlap or line up side by side. Do not think flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west. The entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows. Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows, there is nothing outside of spring. The time we call spring blossoms directly as the existence called flowers. The flowers themselves in turn express the time called spring. This is not the existence within time. The existence itself is time. So we started with the sense of sort of the mechanistic time, the time of the industrial growth society, its linearity and its fragmentedness. When we move towards a deeper sense of time, we sort of mind ourselves of the importance of the organic dimension of time. And as we bring ourselves into an appreciation of the organic dimension of time, we can come back to a much deeper experience of the qualitative nature of time. And out of that deeper experience, one of the things that arises or what arises out of that deeper experience is the mystery. In the end, time is deeply, deeply mysterious. And there is ours going around thinking that we can control it, that we can divide it up into these little bits and pieces, right? The idea of trying to control is essential to our civilization. You know, we've domesticated animals. We've tried to tame or cut down the ancient wild forests. We're now in some places chopping the tops of mountains. We're dredging the bottoms of the ocean, all in our attempt to control, to dominate, to make it fit our will. And we do the same with time. We try to make it fit our frameworks, our abstract interpretations. And of course, in the end, it can't. And it won't. So we do ourselves a big favor and we do the world a big favor. We do the whole universe a favor, if it minded. If we could start to open up to the mystery of time around us a little bit more, find a bit more space in our lives to allow the mystery to kind of resonate, of course. So finally then, so what's the relevance of all this? You know, in a time where there's perhaps a need for urgent action, what's the point of fear, the sense of deep time? What's the sense of the sort of the sense of the mystery? Well, firstly, I think we need to notice one of the challenges that's in front of us is that although it's a particular approach to time that's got us into trouble, it's sort of analytical, scientific, linear ideas of time have got us into a lot of trouble. It's that same sort of approach, that scientific and analytical approach, that's also enabling us to realize that we're in trouble. You know, it's giving us the data, it's giving us the analysis, it's enabling us to anticipate where we're at, right? So one thing that's important is that whilst we need to rebalance and reintegrate the sense of organic time and the sense of cyclical time into our experience, we ought to just slow out the other stuff, right? It's not about one time or another. We need to bring a great flexibility to our understanding. You realize that time is a construct, okay? And it can be constructed in different ways. And the different ways we make it has a value in application in different ways. So we need to hold on to our modes, our instruments of time lightly, recognize there are many, many modes of time. And many of them have validity in a particular context, in a particular application. So, flexibility. Deflexibility will allow us to make more choices about the kind of world that we want. It will enable us to come back and recognize that, well, you know, our life has value in and of itself. You know, the our actions aren't evaluated just on the basis of their outcomes. Our actions have a value in themselves. They're not just a means to an end. And perhaps, you know, if we can get a sense of reconnecting with this sense of deep time, then we can also find a way to sort of be empowered to stay in this current tension that exists between our need to act, you know, be disciplined, right, to engage, to organize, right, to get involved in a lot of kind of busyness, right? And at the same time, hold on to a sense, these other modes of time that can actually nourish us and enable us to do that in a sustained way, that we can endure the kind of tension between the apparent objective demands towards urgency and the real need to sort of sink our roots into something, you know, much deeper that will feed our engagement so that, you know, that says, in a title, you know, we can try to come to a sustained engagement beyond hope and hopelessness. So, plus rush. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [music] You You
