(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. - Every year I have this practice of going on solitary retreat. And I've been doing this for about 20 years, actually. You're trying to make sure every year I make some time to go from solitary retreats, if possible for a month, but at least a couple of weeks, something like that. And the idea of going on solitary retreat is to live simply, to meditate, to go for walks, maybe read a book, and also just have lots of time just to sit with a cup of tea and look out the window and just be. And yeah, it's like any retreat. So it's a way of just stepping back for one's life and kind of gaining perspective on one's life. And yeah, recharging one's batteries, recharging one's inspiration and spiritual batteries as it were. But I suppose particularly on a solitary retreat, well, it's solitary, you're on your own. So it has that particular ingredient of being by oneself and experiencing oneself in a particular way, and being thrown back on oneself on one's own thoughts and feelings in a particular way. And I think I can say that going on solitary retreat is a very, very important part of my life. I think I can say that some of my happiest memories, some of the highlights of my life have been times when I've been on those solitarys. And you might think them from what I've said, but going on solitary, it's a very inward-looking thing. It's very introspective. It's about retreating inwards as it were. And it definitely has that dimension. But what I've realized is that just as important as that, maybe even more important part of the experience of being on those retreats, is also about kind of turning out to the world. It's just as much about turning out to the world as it is turning in. And I think it's becoming more like that. The more of these retreats I do, the more I experience. The experience for me is about coming into a different relationship with the world, turning out to the beauty of the world around me. And I've been on some solitarys in very, very beautiful places. And so, for example, I once spent a month on a little wooden shack on a beach in northwest Scotland, right up in the top of northwest Scotland. And it was very simple. You know, I got water out of the stream. There was no electricity or anything like that. And, but the whole time I was there, this whole month, only one person ever came down on the beach. The rest of the time I had the place completely to myself, this very, very beautiful, magical place. And I was there in June. So of course, that meant it hardly ever got dark. You know, I just, I would just watch the sun slanting down towards the horizon. And about midnight, it would just kind of skim under the horizon for a couple of hours. And then two o'clock it would start coming up again. And, you know, the whole sky would be full of this golden light. Very, very beautiful. Another time I did a solitary in a place called Wayne Gap Cottage, which is on the edge of the late district. And so that was just being in rugged, hilly farming country within the distance with snow-cut to mountains of the late district. And more recently, I did a, I spent some time at a place called Truin. And that's an old fireman's cottage on the Welsh coast, on the mouth of an estuary in Northwest Wales. Once upon a time, a fireman lived there apparently and took people backwards and forwards. And again, it was a beautiful magical place because when the tide was out, you know, one could just see the sea in the far distance on the horizon. But twice a day, you know, the water would just come up and then you'd be living with water all around you, just complete transformation going on all the time. So I love being in these places. And I just, yes, for me part of the experience of being there is tuning into those places to plants, the animals, the atmospheres, and all the rest of it. And I remember one experience I had at Wayne Gap Cottage was I, there was a railway line about two miles that way to the east. And I remember part of my way, part of the way of my time there, I sort of realized that if I heard the train in the distance, that meant the wind was coming from the east and that meant certain weather. And if I didn't hear the train, it meant the weather was coming from the other way and that would mean different weather. And there was something really interesting about that experience because I hadn't worked it out for myself. It was just, I just kind of intuited it. I just, I just tuned into the place. Somehow by being there, I'd kind of tuned into that and I realized that I knew that's what hearing the train meant or not hearing the train meant. And when I noticed that, there was something about it that I really loved. I just, that just felt right. It just, I just thought that's how I want to be. I want to, that's how I want to live my life somehow, that I feel connected to places, kind of connected to what's going on in that kind of way. And then sometimes when I'm on these solitary retreats, just more occasionally, I have another kind of experience, a kind of magic happens. And well, how it feels is that one momentarily enters into another realm or just for a while ones on the edge of another world, ones on a kind of threshold between the worlds as it were. And the kind of meeting happens. So I want to relate a couple of times this has happened to me. So once was, I was coming down a Welsh mountain, I was about halfway down and I saw something kind of moving in front of me, so I was looking out for it. And eventually, I came face to face with a fox. And we're about 20 yards apart, something like that. And but we just kind of met each other and we just looked at each other. And it went on for quite a while, just us, me looking at the fox, the fox looking at me. And it looked a very old fox. It looked like a real mountain fox, very old and wild and long, wiry hair. And it was intensely alive. Its eyes were wide open. Its ears were really perked. Every, it was like every nerve in its body was on red alert, just kind of looking at me. It was like a fox made of electricity. And yet at the same time, it just stood there. Kind of was quite steady and grounded and just kind of held my gaze, carried on looking at me. And it was only a fox. It wasn't a bear or a lion. And yet, I sort of really valued that experience. It felt like a kind of meeting. It felt like a, yes, sort of entering into another realm somehow. And another time at Wayne Gap Cottage, the place in the Lake District, I was just walking up the lane and I saw a bird over here, just sort of start and fly off. And so I was sort of interested. So I started looking to see what it was. And then I realized it was flying towards me. And I thought that's interesting. And then it kind of carried on flying towards me. And it was flying very fast. And then my mind went, you know, when your mind goes into sort of everything seems to go into slow motion. And you sort of notice everything very slowly and you notice every thought that comes into your mind and passes away. That happened. So I was sort of thinking, what is that bird? And then I realized it was a bird of pride. It was a hawk and it's still flying towards me. And it's flying very fast. And then I remember having a thought that a sparrow wouldn't stand a chance with it. It was a sparrow hawk. And I just could watch how it pulled its wings back and just shot through the air so powerfully, so fast. Till eventually it got to here. You know, the hawk was here. I could see its black eyes. You were kind of looking into its eyes. And then at that point I went, "Ah!" (audience laughing) And stepped back. And the hawk also just suddenly just twisted in the air and bolted over the head row in that direction. And I was just left there. You know, well, I kind of realized what the expression's stepping back in amazement then. 'Cause that's literally what I did. I was literally taken aback. Walking backwards like this. I couldn't believe it. But again, it felt like a kind of blessing. It felt like a meeting somehow. And then more recently, I... Well, you know that experience when you come across a poem which really expresses an experience you've had, much better than you could ever express it yourself. And also the poem expresses it so well that you sort of realize things about the experience that you never fully had realized yourself. Yeah? Well, I came across a poem like that. So I'd like to read the poem to you. 'Cause it really encapsulates something about those experiences for me. And the poems by Ted Hughes, and it was from a book called "More Town Diary" which is poems that he wrote when he had a farm in North Wales. So he had this practice of going out in the day. And anything, you know, anything happened. He would write a poem about it at the end of the day. So one day he went out in the winter. I think either in a car or walking, and he came across some deer. And this is the poem he wrote. "In the dawn dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year, two blue dark deer stood a road, alerted. They had happened into my dimension. The moment I was arriving, just there. They planted their two or three years of secret deer who'd clear on my snow screen vision of the abnormal and hesitated in the all-way disintegration and stared at me, and so for some lasting seconds. I could think the deer were waiting for me to remember the password and sign that the curtain had blown aside for a moment. And there were the trees, were no longer trees, nor the road, a road. The deer had come for me. Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs away downhill over a snow lonely field, towards tree dark. Finally, seeming to addy and glide and fly away up into the boil of big flakes. The snow took them, and soon they're nearby hoofprints as well, revising its dawn inspiration back to the ordinary. So that's a wonderful poem. And yes, I can just really relate to that idea that you could think the deer were waiting for you to remember the password and the sign, the curtain blowing aside for a moment. And then they suddenly gone and you're just back to the ordinary. So yes, I've found those experiences quite special somehow, and I've spent time thinking about why that is, why do they seem significant experiences? And I suppose what I've realised is that part of what happens in those places, those magical places that one goes to, and part of what happens in those encounters is that you meet something non-human, you meet a different kind of psychic energy, you meet a different sense of presence. So yes, that was the experience of the fox and eye, just looking at each other intensely, staring at each other, kind of wondering about each other, looking at each other from our different worlds, as it were. And if I'm honest about that experience of watching the fox, yeah, if I'm honest about what I felt, actually I felt afraid. That's what I felt, I felt an element of fear. And you know, rationally I knew that the fox was probably far more wary of me than I was of it, but nevertheless, that was a kind of an aspect of the experience of a kind of fear. And yeah, it's like that poem, maybe some of you know the poem Snake by D.H. Lawrence, where he encounters a snake, and he's fascinated by it, but at the same time, there's a kind of fear that he feels. He feels the fear of the alien, the unknown, and the non-human. And yeah, those kind of experiences throw you back on yourself. You're more aware that you're human, that you belong to the human world, that you're sort of from another dimension. And this seems to be something yet magical and precious about this experience. It feels like a privilege, like a blessing. That's what it feels like. So yes, I've kind of realized that being on these retreats, being in nature, it has a very strong effect on me. And it feels right. It feels something good about that. It sort of seems to be teaching me something of what life should be about. And there's a well-known little quote from a Buddhist Zen teacher called Dogan. Apparently he was once asked, "What would it be like to be enlightened?" And his reply was something like, to be enlightened would be to be intimate with all things. To be enlightened would be to be intimate with all things. So in a way, it's a bit like, I kind of get a glimpse of a glimpse of a glimpse of that. Just being in the world with the barriers down, turned out to the world, attuned to the world, opened out and connected to the world in that kind of way. And then at the end of one's retreat, one comes back to the city. And so I just want to tell you about an experience I had coming back from Wayne Gap Cottage. So that was the place where I saw the Sparrowhog. And I'd actually been there for some months. I was there on sabbatical. So it was a bit of a longer time that I'd been there. But eventually I came back and I was living in the urban environment. And I was walking into town one day in the place where I lived, just to do some shopping or something. And the place I was walking was quite ugly. There was this rather ugly ring road that had been built around the town. There was this, you know, fairly hideous, concrete multi-story car park. There was another kind of ugly council building over here. And, you know, I was walking amongst people who just looked a bit bored and a bit dull and a bit kind of turned in on themselves in that kind of way. And at some point, walking along the road, and I can remember it exactly where it is. I could take you and see sort of his at point. I just felt in my heart something did that. Something kind of shut down. Something I kind of barrier came back down again. It was very, very sort of real and tangible experience. And painful, it was painful and regrettable. And a bit shocking, because what I realized was I was going back, I was going back into my usual mode of existence, my usual way of being, my usual mode of being, as it were. So I realized I'd had this experience of kind of opening out and being in a different way, but I couldn't sustain it. And I was just, I was also just kind of closing in on myself and kind of going back to that way of being. So a retreat, going on a retreat. It's not just the temporary relief, it's not just escaping into some nice space for a while. What a retreat should really be about is giving one a sense of possibility, giving one a sense of how you can be at your best, how you can be when you're most alive. And you want that sense, you want that kind of glimpse of your potential, so that you can learn to be like that more of the time. You can be more like that more of the time, eventually be like it all of the time as it were. So I realized that was the practice for me that something had happened in that experience of being in the beauty of nature, but I needed to learn to kind of integrate it into the rest of my life. I wanted to learn with that, I wanted to learn to live with that sort of open heart and that kind of turned outness more and more of the time as it were. And I had an interesting experience again, a couple of weeks later, I was walking into town and pretty much in the same spot. Do you know what I saw? I saw suddenly shooting over the rooftops, a sparrow hook, which was lovely. It was quite out of place, you know, it just kind of bolted over the rooftops and away again. So it was like a, again, it was like a kind of a message or a sign. So I just want to try and explore a little bit more about what it is that experience of turning out to the world. 'Cause I'm sure that's, you know, that's something that a lot of people can relate to, to some extent or others. You don't have to be a Buddhist on a solitary retreat to have those kind of experiences to kind of feel connected and opened out in that kind of way. But yeah, just want to try and reflect on that a little bit from a more Buddhist point of view. So part of what's going on, I think, is in those experiences of nature is once having an experience of beauty. So I recently read an ancient Indian definition of beauty as that which is always new moment to moment. So the beautiful is that which is always new moment to moment. So in other words, because it's always changing, it's fresh and momentary, it transports you, or it helps you to see things in that way as well. But you start seeing the freshness and the momentriness of things. And so there's a kind of an aliveness and a kind of beauty to that. And I think often nature is like this, nature is always changing. And so it can transport you into seeing things in that kind of way. And I think that's why I love being true in this Farinman's cottage. Because I was just there. You know, I could just sit for hours and hours watching the tide come in. And at first, it's thing like nothing was happening. And then there just be this little kind of snake of water making its way up, particularly part of the estuary. It's like it was trying to kind of find the way up, find the easiest way in as it were. Just slowly, slowly kind of creeping up. And you know, an hour later, it could be a great big lake in front of you. And it did that twice a day. And every time it was different, because every time it was a slightly different time of day, sometimes it was a high tide or a low tide depending on the phase of the moon. And it changed according to the wind and the sun and the light and all the rest of it. So it was just so beautiful, so absorbing, so fascinating. And it was always changing in that kind of way. So yes, we can have that experience of that kind of beauty that's just there. It doesn't have any point. It doesn't have any meaning. It doesn't have any purpose. And that, again, transports us. It just helps us into a different mode of being, where we're just in a kind of non-utilitarian mode of being, where we're being rather than doing, you could say. Or we're in a state of contentment rather than a state of craving and wanting things and doing things. So yes, in a way, this experience of beauty gives rise to a kind of increased sensitivity. That beauty refines and purifies the emotions. So so much of the time we caught up in things. We're caught up in worries and concerns and projects and fantasies and irritations. We're trying to do things. We're trying to get things done. We're trying to get somewhere. But being in a place like that and being transported into that different kind of mode frees all that energy up gradually, gradually. And yeah, one of the effects of that is when there's more energy available to one and one starts feeling things more strongly and purely, as it were, and deeply. One's emotions and feelings become stronger and deeper. And but also, yeah, in a way more subtle. They're less diluted, less dispersed. So yeah, there's a kind of sensitivity and strength of feeling that can arise out of this beauty. And then also, it can give rise to a sense of empathy. So yeah, in a way, that's just my experience. That you're in these places, you tune into them. The kind of beauty draws you out. So coaxes you into a different way of being. And part of that is a sort of empathy starts to emerge. So there's beauty and therefore there's love, there's care, there's appreciation. There's just that awareness of things as they are in themselves. I remember someone a few years ago talking about their experience of being on solitary retreat, which I found very moving. It was a guy who used to go onto Dartmoor, just going to the middle of Dartmoor and live in a tent, which is probably about the wildest place left in England. And he would just be there and just feel that same affinity with the land around him. And he said that after a while, if he was walking along a path and he accidentally kicked a stone, he would stop and pick it up and put it back. Which in a way sounds bonkers, but I just find it very moving. There's something about that, which I find very moving, that he just, there was just a kind of care and empathy that he didn't want to kind of change anything or damage anything in any kind of way. And recently I was on a retreat in Spain, not a solitary retreat, but with other people, living in a very simple place out of doors, washing facilities out of doors. So you'd fill a bowl of water and you'd wash and then you'd just throw the bowl of water to one side. And that was what I was doing at first, just chucking the water away. But eventually I realized, when I was doing that I was throwing it on all sorts of insects, ants and things. And so after a while I just couldn't do that anymore. I just had to sort of find somewhere to kind of carefully pull them off. So there was a kind of, yes sort of empathy and care that just gradually emerged in that kind of way. I just became more aware of the impact of my actions, more aware of the everything else around me was also alive. So there was a sort of, yeah, an ethical, other regarding dimension starting to unfold in my awareness. And then also sometimes there's a certain sense of mystery that unfolds out of these experiences. You can start to experience the world as a bit more mysterious and wonderful. So I was talking earlier about these experiences and encountering other animals. And I was sort of describing that as it's like being on the borderlands. It's like being on the threshold of another realm as it were. And yeah, I think part of what's going on in those experiences is it's realizing one as a human being and therefore as a human being you have a particular way of experiencing the world. But you're encountering another animal who has another expert, the way of experiencing the world. So yes, if one's a human being, one has particular sense faculties, eyes and ears and so on. And they work within a particular range. So our ears can hear certain sounds but not other sounds. Our eyes detect certain frequencies of light. And so, yeah, we experience the world via our senses and then processed by the mind in a very human kind of way. So that means we have a very particular experience of the world conditioned by the equipment that we've got on the mind that we've got. But of course, there's a very, very strong assumption, an incredibly strong assumption to think, well, that's what the world is. The way the world is the way I see it. Perhaps what's out there kind of thing. But of course it isn't. Actually, we don't know what's out there. Actually, what's out there is rather mysterious, rather unknown. We just have a particular take on it conditioned by the equipment and the mind that we've got. So sometimes, yeah, when you meet these other creatures you have a sense that they're, you're kind of looking at each other but you're looking at each other from a different world, as it were. Because they've got a different kind of mind and a different kind of makeup in that kind of way. So that fox on that, well, yeah, we were looking at each other but he was also listening and a fox can hear a much higher frequency as it sounds than humans can. And of course, he also would have lived in a whole world of scent and smell. Yeah, he would have been smelling all sorts of things about me and kind of working out all sorts of things about what was going on around through smell. So there was a whole dimension to his world which was completely unavailable to me, yeah? We were really worth sort of looking at each other from other worlds as it were. There was a whole dimension that I just can't inhabit. It's not there, it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned but it exists from the other point of view. Recently, I was reading about barn owls who hunt at night, you know, virtually in the dark and they can find mice in the dark. And apparently, the way they do this is through hearing. So they've got this incredibly acute system of hearing. And part of the way it works is, or first of all, you know, the way it now has all those feathers around its face. That's all designed to direct as much sound as possible into the years. And then in their head, the way the eardrums are placed. So we have one eardrum here and one here so that we can kind of get some sense of whether a sound is over there or over there. Well, an owl and a barn owl has that but also one eardrum is slightly higher than the other and one is slightly further back and the other slightly further forward in the head. So that means when an owl detects a sound, it can pinpoint exactly where it's wrong in three dimensions. So it's like we've got sort of roughly two-dimensional sound as it were, but the barn owl, it just hears in a different way. It just knows exactly where the sound is from to the extent that it can just stop in in the air and crash down and catch the vole or the mouse or whatever. So again, there's a whole other dimension, a whole other kind of dimension of the world that just isn't available to us that we can only sort of imagine or dream somehow. So I find all this stuff fascinating because it shows, it kind of gives me a kind of glimpse of how the world is only known throughout our senses in our mind in a way that the world is mind-made. We're kind of making it up in our minds as it were. All we know is a particular take on the world as it were. And it's so strongly counterintuitive. We so strongly assume that this is the world, this is how it is. I don't know why it's understandable that we assume that 'cause it's the only world we know. It's the only world in a way that we can know, but actually it's not like that. Yeah, in a way the world is mysterious, in a way the world is unknown. And we just kind of get a sense of something out there, as it were, but what it really is in itself, we don't know, we can't know, we can't possibly know. So yeah, it's not a case of me in here observing a kind of fixed, objective, separate world out there. The world, you know, what we call the world is much more of a relationship. It's a kind of mediation, it's much more like that. And it's, yeah, it's all rather mysterious, really. So I just wanted to tell you a little bit about a Buddhist practice, which in a different way explores this sense of relationship and connection and non-separateness with the world. So it's a Buddhist practice called the six element practice and meditation practice. And yeah, in this meditation you contemplate, you reflect on the elements which are earth, water, fire, air, space and consciousness. And they're not elements in the way that we might understand them in physical elements of Western chemistry or Western science. They're more like qualities. So it's more like the quality of earth. So something that is solid and fixed and firm, or the quality of water, something which is fluid and in motion. So they're more elements in that sense as in qualities of things. So in this meditation practice you just reflect on how the elements are always changing and flowing. So for example, say I've had an apple for my lunch, I might think about an apple and where an apple came from. So it's solid, it's got form, I hold it in my hand. But it's arisen out of a whole process of different elements. So growing a tree, the tree needed sunlight. So there's the fire element of the sun allowing the tree to grow. There was the rain which the sun evaporated up from the oceans and was carried over by the air element and fell again on the tree and allowed the tree to grow. So there's the fire and the water and the air element in this apple. And then there's, well, a way a tree grows is it photosynthesizes. So it takes in air, takes in carbon dioxide from the air and energy from the sun and is able to kind of from that create branches and leaves and flowers and all the rest of it. So there's this magical process going on all the time. In my garden back home I've got a buddly a bush which at the moment is huge and full of leaves. And every winter I prune it back because that's what you're supposed to do apparently with buddly a bush. So I prune it back and every year I think, well, maybe I've overdone it this year, prune it a bit hard. But no, every year it just shoots back into life and all this foliage and wood and organic material just comes in a matter of weeks out of the air. It just arises out of thin air. I mean, it's extraordinary, isn't it? And this is going on all the time. So that's where that apple came from. And then I crunch up the apple and it turns to water mostly and it becomes part of me and that process of the elements changing carries on. It goes on and on like that. So in this way, yeah, we just reflect on the change and transformation of the elements, how we're always borrowing and giving back. So that's an important part of it. We just borrow things and then we give them back. So yes, I eat, I take in the elements from the world around me but then I give it back, I defecate, I shed skin, I have my hair cut, the elements are always being taken in and given back, yeah? That's what life is. It's this ongoing process of taking and giving, borrowing and returning. That's how life works, just that ongoing process. So in this meditation, we explore this, we reflect on it and we just start to see what it really means, yeah? And maybe what we start to see is that there's actually nothing that I can really say is mine. So I think this body is mine, you know? But it isn't really, we just start to see that it's just something that's being borrowed and is being given back. And then I'll borrow something more and give it back. We just start to see that actually it's not mine, it's a process in that kind of way. And there's even nothing that I can say is me. You know, I have this idea of me in here but the more you look at it, the more you realize, again, that's just a process of change. Everything is just borrowing and giving back in that kind of way. And everything has just come from somewhere else and sooner or later it will be going somewhere else again. So there's just this momentary appearance of things. There's just this dance of the elements, there's just this flow and process of change going on and on and on all the time. So in other words, if you kind of follow this meditation practice, if you really kind of go into it, you're led into an experience of selflessness. You're led into an experience of realizing that there isn't really anything which is me or mine. There isn't really a me that's sort of separate from everything else in the kind of middle of all this. Actually, everything is connected, everything is part of this flow in that kind of way. And if we're ready for it, we experience this actually as a relief, actually as a liberation, actually which is something expansive. It's a selflessness which is, yes, expansive. It's a consciousness which isn't narrowed down but which is opened out. It's consciousness without a sense of ownership, without a sense of self. Yeah, but it's opened out, it's unbarried, it's kind of connected to the world around it. And yeah, that feels expansive and liberating. (paper rustling) So that's basically my talk. And yeah, the reason I was saying to Surikha was I wasn't sure whether it was the talk people were expecting was I thought maybe people would expect me to talk about, you know, Buddhism and ecological crisis and global warming and environmental issues like that. But when I started preparing the talk, I realised this is what I wanted to write about. I wanted to take it right back to our relationship with the world, our relationship with nature. And because I think a lot of environmental stuff, there's a danger that it's not really based on a different relationship with the world. Yeah, it still arises out of human self-interest. It still arises out of human beings, realising that if they carry on the way they go and they're gonna make it harder for themselves to live the kind of lives they kind of want. So maybe we better change a few things. But it's not really deeply or profoundly about changing our relationship to the world, changing our relationship to nature. So a truly different kind of relationship to the world around us, I think comes out of that deeper sense of awareness that gives rise to that sensitivity, to that sense of empathy and connection with the world. And ultimately from a sense of non-separateness with the world, from a sense of selflessness. So in other words, it comes out of actually feeling differently, actually experiencing yourself and the world differently. And then that informing and then affecting how you want to interact with the world. So yeah, when I was preparing this talk, I realised I wanted to try and explore that and evoke that in some way rather than talking about the bigger issues straight off as it were. And yeah, what I'm talking about isn't a kind of idealised or sentimentalised relationship to the world. You know, it's all very well me talking about not hurting ants when one's on retreat at Gugiloka in Spain. But you know, what if a load of ants have invaded your kitchen? What do you do then? Or what if you're a gardener? You know, anyone here who's a gardener will know that especially if you're growing things to eat. You know, nature is a battle. You know, if you grow lettuces, either the slugs are going to eat your lettuces or you are. You know, it is a battle, yeah. Nature is a kind of struggle for survival amongst the different forms of life. That's what it is, yeah. And, you know, that's going on on those sort of small scales and it's going on on a big scale all the time as it were. So, yes, I'm not talking about some kind of idealised, romantic idea about being in nature. I suppose I'm just talking about having that sense of connection, having that sense of empathy and trying to move in that direction in our relationship to the world. I suppose trying to come from the values of non-harm and non-exploitation. Those are the kind of underlying values, I guess. And it's not like you can live in this life perfectly without causing any harm at all. I don't think you can. But you can definitely come from those values. You can definitely try and act from those values as much as possible. You can try and move in that direction. You can try and think, well, how can I live as harmlessly as possible? Are there ways in which one doesn't need to cause harm? And just, yeah, just let those, that awareness and that sense of empathy and those values inform how you are as much as possible? So, yeah, in a way, that's what I wanted to try and evoke in this talk. Try and try, just encouraging us to develop that awareness. And maybe, yes, we can do that partly by being in nature, maybe by being, particularly by being alone in nature, just going somewhere preferably with, you know, an element of wildness and being there, just kind of really trying to be there and opening up to what's around us in that kind of way. But even if we can't go somewhere wild like that, we can still experience it in other ways. You know, we're very lucky in England, actually. English countryside, it sort of has those borderlands. It has those pockets of wildness. It isn't completely kind of agribusiness, the English countryside. So, yes, I think we can still experience an element of that there. And maybe even in the city, you know, the Sparrowhawk flying over the rooftops. It's kind of there. We can try and experience the world in that kind of way, even in the city, too. So, yeah, that's my talk. Just encouraging us to develop that deeper awareness of the world around us. And, yeah, in a way, that's an important contribution Buddhism can make to these kind of issues because it encourages that kind of awareness. It teaches that kind of awareness. It teaches those values of non-harm and non-exploitation. And it also teaches practices, meditation and so on, which actually help people live like that, live a life of deeper awareness of the world. And, yeah, the more we do that, the more we'll actually experience for ourselves those qualities of empathy and connection and selflessness that are embodied in the very nature of life. Thank you. (soft music) We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
