(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So I'm gonna talk about a stance or an attitude towards what we know. Really, that's kind of what I'm coming from. And it's gonna be, I hoping to leave with some personal experiences, which will illuminate what I wanna say and give me a chance to share some reflections of my path over the last 10, 15 years particularly. I'm gonna start with a quote from Dogen, master Dogen. He says, "The confusion of intellectual ideas "is like imaginary flowers who center tracks us. "We hear about the 12 this and the four that "and the three this and the seven that. "And think about whether we have a Buddha nature "or whether we don't. "The list is endless. "Following these intellectual ideas is not the right way. "But when we sit in exactly the same posture "that Gautama Buddha sat in and let go, "all images and ideas, "then the area in which we feel deluded or enlightened, "feel emotional or think about things disappears. "Then there is no difference between what is sacred "and special and what is ordinary. "We are free from our intellectual cage "and can access that state of great wisdom. "How can being caught up in the trap of words "and their meanings compare with this?" So, that's just a little quote from somebody who could do this better than I could. So, doubt is a path. Well, I suppose my first thing is a path to what? A path is somewhere, something you go on or whatever. How is doubt a path and what, too, is the question I started with, really? So, as I said, I'm gonna explore this question a little bit with some personal moments. And I wanna make some connections with some basic dharma, which you all know, really. I'm very conscious, I'm sitting in a room with probably about 200 years of dharma at practice experience here. So, you know, I've got nothing to tell you in many ways. So, the first thing I wanna say is I don't really know very much about anything. Not really, not really. I sort of think I do, and I'm always caught out, always, always caught out with what I think I know. And in fact, 20 years ago, I started out on my path, this path of dharma practice, with the keen wish to understand. I wanted to know, I wanted to be certain. I was brought up in a Catholic family, and Catholics are famous for being certain, and famous for not really thinking for themselves, a little bit, at least that's what I saw. And everything is sorted out for you in a certain sort of way. So, the clarity is presented to you as a kind of set of ideas and a set of beliefs, and you just go with it. And so, I was brought up with a desire for certainty, I think, and having lost faith in that, I spent a number of years without that certainty. So, when I came across the dharma, and I'll tell you how I did that in a minute, I think it was the desire for certainty that really attracted me most. I did want to know reality. I wanted to understand what was going on. And my biggest fear was absence of meaning. And I don't know, you might go to relate to some of this. And I think I was threatened by the changeability around me all the time, that things were changing. This wasn't very conscious until, in a way, this talk was a chance to reflect back on, you know, 20 years of trying to do this. So, how did that show? Well, I just want to talk a little bit about painting, about art. 20 years ago, well, let me go back a step before that. Since I was 12, I had the certainty that I was an artist with a capital A, okay? That's what I wanted to be. And if only the world would give me the chance, I would prove how good I was at it, and how special I was at it, and I would just go ahead and do it. Well, actually, life has shown me that I'm not with capital A, and I might have a talent, but that's a different thing. It's not the same. But that's what I believed about myself, and it was a certainty, and I built a lot of my life around it. Now, about 20 years ago, I thought, well, I'd better investigate this. Part of my mid-30s, late-30s crisis, what am I doing with my life? There was art with a capital A, sitting on the doorstep, saying, me, me. So, I went out and did a lot of looking at nature and a lot of painting, and I wanted to understand what I was looking at. It wasn't just enough to go, that's nice, I'll make a picture of it. I was using it to interrogate, that's the word I used then and now, to interrogate reality, to get it to tell me what it really was, to get it to tell me what it really was, so that I could feel safe again or something. I don't know what it was, but it was certainly a sense of, now I know my place, I know what you are, I can relax, you know, it's that sort of feeling. So, I did a lot of work over three, four years, folders and folders of watercolours and drawings, attempting to do that, to grasp it and understand it and know it. And of course, you know, this was before I even got into the Dharma. Of course, I couldn't do this. It was impossible. And I reached the point where I could see all of a sudden, and it was all of a sudden, it was one summer and it was a few days in the summer that I realised how impossible this particular quest was, that I was never gonna get it. You know, a tree out there. What was it really? You know, in one light, it was bright green, a cloud would come over, it would go dark green and fade. You'd go out the next day, it would be misty and disappear. If you go right up to it, what are you seeing? It's completely different from what you're seeing, you know, 10 yards back, half a mile back. So how could I ever possibly, ever possibly grasp and understand this thing? A very simple thing, like a tree. Years later, I went on a retreat with San Geketu in France and I was sitting on a veranda and we had a little bronze bowl. I don't know what it was, it was in the house. I thought, I'll draw this, so I started to draw it. And as I was drawing, I thought, there's only one point of view that I can see this from and it's mine. I can never see it from everywhere else. So how can I ever really draw this thing? How can I ever really understand the grasp of it? So it's a similar kind of experience, really. The very simple things that were out there seemed to me to be beyond comprehension. So that's why I say, I don't really know much about anything. You know, when you look at things or when I look at things, well, they're not quite as they seem. So you could say that that's the experience of the three elections. You know, there's an insubstantiality there, there's an impermanence there and therefore a sense of dissatisfaction. I didn't have the language for it, but that's what I think I touched on, really, all that time ago. So then I came into contact with a movement which had and has a culture of clarity. This is what things are, this is what you do. You start here, you go there, you do this, you do that, you do that, I'm like, okay. I'm all right now, that's all right. And for 10 years, I tried to do that and got completely lost, really. It didn't work for me. And you know, that was for my own reasons. I'm not blaming it or anyone. It's simply my needing, you know, a certain way of having things around me. And that had to break down, really. So I suppose my process of getting involved with Zen practice, which I've done for 10 years now, has been a way of undercutting, of undermining my tendency to want certainty. And this is why I think doubt as the path is important, I guess. So it's entirely subjective. It's entirely from my point of view. You know, I'm not necessarily recommending this, but I think there may be some things in it. So think about today. So those three lecturers are basic building blocks of reality, as we all know. And for me, that says there's a basic not knowing at the heart of our existence. There's a basic not knowing. We can't really know what things are. We have our sense experience and that tells us something which we sort of trust. But, you know, you can close your eyes and touch things and they feel differently if you don't know what they look like, for example. There's all ways in which we can trick our senses. So, you know, what do we really know? And furthermore, think about when you fall out with a girlfriend or a partner or a friend. This not knowing is very, very painful. And we run about trying to say, what's the matter? What can I do? It's okay. Try to put it right again. So there's something in us that wants to know. There's something in us that needs that kind of certainty about good. I'm okay now 'cause I know where I stand in relation to person X or, you know, idea Y or path, Z or whatever it is. So those basic facts of existence are very hard, I believe, for us to face up to and sit with. We struggle to sit with and face these on a daily basis. At least that's my experience, anyway. And I see people around me doing that, too. We hunt for meanings all the time. That's another thing I just wanted to mention in a minute about this search for meanings. But we struggle to sit and face these basic raw facts of reality. And I think what I did, and maybe you might consider whether you do this, too, we can use our faith in the Buddha and the Three Jules and the Movement and our teachers and all the practices to feel safe. Good, that's all right then. There's something between me and that raw experience. I'm all right, I'm saved, I'm okay 'cause I've got the right ideas, that kind of experience, that kind of feeling, okay? Even the language we use going for refuge might indicate we find a place of safety from these terrors that we can use that set of ideas and beliefs to make ourselves right and other people wrong. To think we've been saved in some way. Now, I'm not saying, we're doing this, I'm saying that, to a certain extent, that's what I've done. And I've seen how these things can happen. So I'm proposing an angle, if you like, on Dharma practices that will undercut this. I think we're always searching for ground to stand on, really. And actually, if you read, you know, the heart sutra, there isn't any, not really, not really. Maybe we need some temporarily, temporarily is the word. But I think what we do is we try to make it more permanent than temporary. And we stand there and think, good, I've got my ground now. And usually someone else pulls it from underneath us and go, ah, oh dear, don't do that, I was comfy. And it was just right. How dare you tell me I'm bigger than I thought I was or something? And I've got to rearrange my old being to kind of take that into account. So usually it's other people that whip this rug from under our feet, that we constantly put there to save us from feeling insecure and terrified by those raw realities. So as I see it, Dharma practices, I've come to understand it for the moment. Provisionally, through Zen practice, particularly, is about training our minds, my mind, to question the beliefs, the states, the experiences that I have, because they're probably conditioned by my own responses. They're probably accidental. They certainly feed into what I think I want from my life. So for me, they need to be, you know, kept loose. We've got to avoid this thing of appropriating certainties, I think, to avoid that unease. And the restlessness that sits at the heart of our experience. Bante in wisdom beyond words, little passage, I'm not very good at quoting, but I remember him saying, question the motives for the way in which you look at enlightenment. So if you see enlightenment as peace, maybe because that's what you need. If you see it as, you know, love, then actually, it's because there's something in your life that is reflecting. And that rather than chase after it in that way, reflecting on what it is that you're coming from is more likely to lead to that very state of enlightenment than to chase it. So, you know, that paradox of question, what it is that you're coming from, I think, was quite interesting. So, for me, I think we're inherently open. And I think that's very hard to be. Because that means we've got to let in things we don't like. What are those things we do? And that is very difficult. And we are always choosing not to have and to have. And that's the basic movement of a human being's mind, if you like. That's what it's built for. That mind, if you like, has helped us survive as, you know, individuals, as human beings for centuries, and that's great at its own level. But we're talking about going beyond that, really. So, for me, Dharma practice is about living in that space between form, which you could see as materialism and fixed, and things out there, trees, and emptiness, which means there's no such thing as a tree, really. But neither are really fully true, are they? You know, first there is a mountain, and there is no mountain, then there is this. That famous Zen practitioner, Donovan, said in 1964. (audience laughing) And there's some truth in that. And what I'm talking about here is a path by which we question the existence of the mountain, because we have to move through the stage of there is no mountain. Otherwise, we are stuck with what we know. And if we're stuck with what we know, how can we let any kind of wisdom in? That's my question. So, the process of questioning and doubting as a path is to say, what is this really, this tree, this thing that I've already labeled, and I think I know, or this state, or this thought, or this thing, or this being that I appear to be. What is it really? Yeah, and I think this is the middle way between materialism and nihilism. And for me, the key quality is questioning. The key quality is to bring a creative edge of provisionality and doubt to everything that we think we experience a certain, because it's so easy to make a meaning that we'll then believe in. This capacity for meaning-making has come to me very clearly over the years as I've been doing a lot of training and working with people in communication skills. There was a great example on TV recently in a PG Woodhouse story. I'm a bit of a fan of that. And there was this chinless wonder chap. He was in this lounge, okay? And there was a girl that said, "I've got something in my eye. "Would you take it out without you?" So, he bends over to take this thing out. And his fiance comes into the room and goes, "Charts!" and runs out, okay? (audience laughing) So, she's already decided he's gonna laugh with her. No question of persuading her. That he was doing something quite different. She sees what she sees. She decides what it means. She then behaves as if it were true, and a whole life from there on is built on that as a truth. Now, how dumb can you get? But let me tell you, I think we do that all the time. I know that I do, yeah? I look at something and say, "Oh, that's what that is. "Not going anywhere near that. "It may not be that at all." But unless I have this question in my mind that says, "What is it really?" I've got no chance of finding out anything except my reactivity. Okay? So I'm suggesting that we take this, if you like, issue of doubt really seriously, that we really look at incorporating doubt as a way of practicing the Dharma. I'm not gonna talk about certainty as the basis of faith. We can explore that in the groups. Paradoxically, I believe you need a certain amount of confidence to do that, you know? But nevertheless, I'm talking about this end of it really, this ability to question. There's a Zen master who is, I think it's Korean, called Song Sam, and he's written a book called Only Don't Know. There's a little quote here, which I want to read. "Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed, that is human. "When you are born, where do you come from? "Who can tell me that? "Where do we come from?" When you die, where do you go? You can tell me that, I don't know. I don't need that, but between those two comings and goings, do you really know what's gonna happen? Have you any idea what might happen? I don't, and furthermore, when it does, I'm usually very surprised, whatever it is, because the next moment could be just about anything. I could run away right now, and that would surprise you. (audience laughing) In fact, I wondered about doing that as a teacher, but... Maybe it would have been better, I don't know. Anyway, so he says, don't understand, don't know. That's the place to be. The Buddha himself wouldn't answer questions about what happened before and after life, you know. That wasn't really his point. The point was, can you act now with any kind of confidence? Can you act for the good of beings now? Can you save yourself through your own efforts from suffering by steering this path between extremes? Life is like a floating cloud, which appears. Death is like a floating cloud, which disappears. The floating cloud originally does not exist. Coming, going, death, life are also like that. But there is one thing which always remains clear and pure, not dependent on life and death. What is the one, pure thing? So, I'm saying embracing doubt is the way to move in the direction of the provisionally held response that reality demands of us. We could argue that any kind of view is an attempt for certainty, any kind of view. And sure, we need them provisionally, and I'm not saying we can live without any view. I know that within less than half a second, I've made a view about something in somebody. I can't stop it, you know, that's what my mind does. Question is, do I live as if that were true? Do I come off that or do I say, okay, thank you for that information. Now then, let's see. So, I'm not talking about cynical doubt that paralyzes that chokes off the possibility of being creative. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how to live in the open dimension, which is what Zen practice comes from, if you like. You sit with the knowledge that everything is provisional, really, that everything is just beginning. There was a great phrase. Everything is always just beginning, just beginning. So, at no point can you say, good, that's that. Something is beginning, and then something else begins. Realizing that we're inherent meaning makers, and that's our tendency. We'll make patterns where we see them. We make them in the stars. We make them between us. We make them in everything that we do. Our language is about pattern. And it's necessary to survive. But we must see past that. And that's what we're doing here as Dharma practitioners, to grow wise and compassionate. Our meanings and patterns left of themselves will divide and separate. We see this all over the world. And it will strive to ensure our survival is ego-centered beings. Which, of course, we're trying to go beyond. Sometimes that very trying is another topic for a talk, I think. Doubt and questioning the very meaning maker will eventually lead to its collapse and let in freedom, and the ability to simply act for the benefit of all life, with no more uncertainty and no need to find certainty. There is just open, compassionate action. And that's what I aspire to. - We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
