(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. - Hello. Well, I know that some people this evening here have divided loyalties. So I think it's important to acknowledge that as we speak, Paul Aradcliffe is in the process of the 10,000 meters. So this talk is dedicated to Paul Aradcliffe. (audience laughs) So, standing on notice. I don't know how I'm gonna get on with this, actually. At all. We'll see, 'cause I can't see what I'm trying to read. Well, the last few days I've been thinking a bit about, well, that my last year, actually. I'm realizing that one way or another, in quite a number of different areas of my life, I haven't known where I stand. In my relationship, in my new job, after seven years or so in the old one, in the face of old age and sickness in my family, and also in the consultative process, by private preceptors. In many ways, I haven't known where I stand. So when, well, yeah. At times, I haven't known which way is up even. And that's been quite difficult. As sort of straightforward confidence that I think I'd got used to being able to reach relatively easily, hasn't been so readily available for me. And instead, I felt a lot of confusion and fear and frustration and grief. And one other thing, it's not the whole of the story, but it is part of it. And I'm kind of saying this, because when Diane Amdi said, how about giving a talk on Stanley on emptiness? It felt like, hey, just hit the spot, like that's what this is asking me to do in my way. 'Cause it's been a time of the unfamiliar and challenge and unhappiness some of the time, but certainly the unfamiliar in lots of ways. So, yeah, Stanley on emptiness, I thought, I better do it. I better just do it. I thought probably that's all I said, yes, so quickly. So, unfortunately, I didn't really clock that she was asking me to give a bit of an overview of viewed meditation and action. Because as the weeks went by, I got more and more gripped, although that's the wrong word, by view, view, and that's really what I want to talk about. But I will talk a bit about the rest of it, and I'll refer you to this book, Reginald Ray's book, all about view, meditation, and action. It's really great. It's got plenty of technical detail, and it's also really heartwarming in lots of it. So, if you want to know more, look at that. This is called indestructible truth. It's really great. So, I haven't really come across viewed meditation and action as such before starting to prepare for this talk, so I'm no expert. But I do want to kind of look at it in a number of different ways, and hope that by doing that, you might find some different ways into it to guide yourself into it as a topic. And I'll be dropping in some pieces of what seemed to me to be pure view, or something that touches it, to try to give us a bit of an experience, not just of listening to my voice, but a bit of an experience of what it is I'm talking about. I can only share with you things that you've walked that in me, thought, "Let me have a go." The view, meditation, and action. And I want to start with Reginald Ray's opening paragraph, because that instantly shows us the ground that we're on. And he says, "Truth makes little sense, "and has no real impact "if it's merely a collection of abstract ideas." Truth that is living experience, on the other hand, is challenging, threatening, and transforming. The first kind of truth consists of information collected and added from a safe distance to our mental inventory. The second kind involves risking our familiar and coherent interpretation of the world. It is an act of surrender for complete and embodied cognition that is seeing, feeling, intuiting, and comprehending all at once. Living truth leads us ever more deeply into the unknown territory of what our life is. So living truth, what the view shows on demands risk, surrender, being in the unknown, without our familiar and coherent interpretations of the world, it asks us to stand on emptiness. As Robert Thurman puts it in his introduction to the Vermalikerti Nandesha, he talks about being able to bear not having bearings, having the coordinates of the familiar removed, and instead finding and developing the faculties you need to move into unknown territory. So in practice, what is the territory of our lives? Well, according to Buddhism, it's Sanzara. Bilgo Kensorimishi puts it like this. He says, "Sanzara is the condition of beings "who, by acting under the influence of obscuring emotions, "perpetuate their own suffering." He says, "View is about firstly clarifying "our understanding of Sanzara, "and inspiring and deeply felt sadness towards it." And sort of heartfelt response, because we see the facts of existence as faults, and then we hit ourselves against them. So as he says, "First conceiving an eye, "we cling to an ego. "Then conceiving a mind, we cling to a material world, "like water in a water wheel, helplessly, we circle. "I bow down to the compassion that arises for all beings." So there's this sadness in response. Traditionally, that leads to a strong motivation to free ourselves from the habitual patterns and the ignorance that perpetuates suffering. We all know this feeling, this get me out of here feeling, or that there must be more to life than this feeling, or even just a brief, that feeling of the potency of sadness in response to how we're finding one. But of course, by itself, that's not enough. We need to know how, to actually be ourselves from Sanzara, how to practice the Dharma. So for today in Buddhism, you meditation and action is the sort of A/B/C of practice. Unlike your A/B/C, you go over it again and again and again. So according to the Tibetan tradition, the teachings of the three jhanas were all given by the Buddha during his lifetime on specific occasions and particular audiences in line with his practice of skill. And each of the three vehicles has its own view, meditation and action, or view, practice and result. You sometimes come across it as, you hear about the nine jhanas, and that's what that's talking about. Reginald Ray lays it all out. Anything got a very nice table, if you like, that sort of thing. So I'm not going to go into that, really. But just very briefly, view is the conceptual understanding that gives orientation to the practice. Meditation outlines the concrete methodologies of transformation, so what you actually do. And action points to what entertained by faithfully practicing. So how do we do that? How do we thoroughly experience samsara as it really is? How do we unconditionally accept the conditioned as I do could say? Well, according to the Tibetan tradition, by learning to recognize it. That's what we have to do first, and this is the practice of view. So as Dogo can't say, we should say, it's absolutely necessary to establish the correct view. That is to acquire complete certainty about the absolute truth. But the phenomenal world, though obviously appearing and functioning, is utterly devoid of any ultimate reality. This is the seed from which the perfect fruit of enlightenment will grow. And again, he says, what does this mean? It means we've got to, first of all, establish proper understanding of the teaching about reality, and secondly, incorporate that view into our inner experience. Remember Reginald Ray, it's not just information added from a safe distance to a mental inventory. We've got to live it. It's an act, surrender, of complete and embodied cognition. So secondly, meditation, again, Dogo principle shape, he says, this means put the view into practice over and over again. Why? Why? Well, why should this work? What is meditation? Why is this appropriate for meditation? Reginald Ray says, meditation is definitely not healthy for the ego. He says, it's not possible to meditate unless you're more interested in finding out what is going on than in maintaining a particular idea of who you are. The first thing you begin to notice is that things are not as solid and substantial as they previously formed. There are gaps in those thoughts and feelings. Things appear somewhat random. One may see things about oneself not previously noted, perhaps one's pretensions or unconscious. Meditation itself involves looking into one's own experience. If we honestly look at ourselves in the world, we see that ego is basically a bad idea with no future. And this kind of looking sounds its death now. A bad idea, no future. So meditation aims at an experience which is free from complexity, free from the complexity of the game of the ego. So then thirdly, action. Again, the local cancerum shift. Maintain your experience of this view at all times and in all circumstances, that's action. Well, Fajar Darshan is going to talk about action tomorrow. So I would say much about it now, but in the meantime, I thought I'd just tell you one of the things that yes, she told me we'll have to say about action. She says action is the activity of the Dharma. What does it mean? Whatever happens, remain continuously and incontrovertively with the experience, using the experience for spiritual advancement. In truth, whether walking, moving, sleeping, eating or sitting, on all the paths of action, remain in contact with your practice. Never allow yourself to be separated from your practice. By such action, you are endowed with the very capital of action. More from Fajar Darshan. More. So deal with what Fajar Darshan says through the constant combination of these three, new meditation and action, the fruit of the practice of Dharma will fully ripen. And experientially, say, gentleness and self-discipline she'll understand in the view. Freedom from obscuring emotions shows meditation. And these, rooted and effortlessly expressed, show action. Tall Lord, pulls middle again. Gentleness and self-discipline show understanding of the view. Freedom from obscuring emotions shows meditation. And these rooted and effortlessly expressed, show action. So it's a path, a complete path. And it comes down to us through the impassioned, these impassioned Tibetan voices. That sounds to me. Yes, you joke on Padma Samba, Millaropa to name but three. And it's a teaching about totality. And in that characteristic Tibetan way, it demands total commitment, total mobilization of our energies, terrific determination and watchfulness, a strength of receptivity and of applied will. In this little phrase, this little verse from the Kadampa Masters really said that to me. I hold the spear of mindfulness at the gate of the mind. And when the emotions threaten, I, too, will threaten them when they relax their grip, only then will I relax my love. That's one for the warrior queens of mindfulness. We've got to get our inspiration from somewhere and our Lord of the Rings are finishing. So there's this constant combination of the three. But they also get talked of as a unification or becoming unified as a meeting point of view, meditation and action, which had a sound of a particularly talked about, showing the view and conduct as a unity. So you get these phrases about descending with the view while ascending with the conduct. Or in terms of a Tibetan proverb, "As we mature, the sky comes closer to the air." And I can also open that. Well, I've been trying to think about this note and we have our relate to that. This descending with the view and ascending with the conduct. And I think the closest I've come to it as a sense, a sense of this is in two short dreams. I had quite a few musicals, but I thought I'd just tell you them. So in the first one, I was lying on the ground and staked at my feet. There's this sky blue cloth at me lying on the ground. Staked at my feet is the cloth which is soaring over me like that, very close. Lying over me, this sensual, pure, clean, rickling, silken cloth, moving, always in motion. Deeply affecting and sort of kinesthetic without me ever actually touching it. It's so close, it's showing me something without me grasping at it or even wanting to touch it. In the sense of all my inner senses, the bite of the line, the bite of the line. And then not long after that, I had another dream about its sky blue cloth. But this time, I had to wash it. And I had to wash it, not in water, but in the air. I had to dig a hole with my hands in this red air, no water, dig a hole with my hands. And I had to rub the cloth in this air back and forth, back and forth. And as it got streaked with the ochre, my heart sort of expanded with joy. And this sense that this was the cloth, this was it coming clean, it's coming clean. It got more and more streaked. So I wanted to mention these dreams because somehow they evoke in me something of a feeling for view, something about a sort of deeper alignment and also a unification somehow, kind of unification, whether it's sky and earth or sort of inner senses coming together and being experienced, something like that. But also to sort of say something about view being not just heady. It's not just about thinking from home. Although I reckon thinking gets a bad name, actually. I'm not sure we do enough of it. According to Edward the Bonable, thinking is exploring experience to a partner. And if we don't do that, we're sunk, so let's not get too polarized with thinking from home. But I want to explore view under three heading. So study, faith in the sense of deep conviction and also a little bit about reaching and metaphor. So these themselves, as practice, would be view because they'd be trying to put the view into action. They all give rise to awareness and to openness, to a kind of vivid noticing and perceiving that can bring stability to our practice. But also a loosening of view and an experience of openness to the view that we encounter, the unknown in each of them. So objectively, okay, view is doctrinal explanation. The general way we ought to regard reality. But subjectively, in my own experience, it seems to me more like or as much like coming into contact with and refusing to yield up on home, my own sense of what I truly deeply value in life. What is any of us want to live out in our practice? What it is according to Chinese Buddhism that there is already in us that's pushing to be lived? As Rilke says, your innermost happening is worth all your love. You must somehow work all part. The view as an expression of reality is literally your innermost happening. At the level of your sales, if you're innermost happening, but your innermost experience of yourself. But as a touch dawns for the direction of your practice, view keeps you in touch with what, with the particular expressions of reality, that fascinate, that guide, that inspire, that keep you reflecting, that keep faith for you in what burns in you and what burns for you. So views a tool for working out the secret of your blood. Because that lengthens into the unknown territory of one another. So view as a word, just as a word itself. So I thought it was interesting because it combines the present moment. You mean seeing, serving, contemplating, watching? The present moment, but also with what we make of that moment. Because view also means opinion, thought, intention, expectation. So what you see and what you make of what you see, combined, make up your viewpoint. The mental attitude that determines your opinions, your judgments, your point of view. And to me, a place to start anyway, might be, what I see when I stand in a particular place. That's my view. Especially an habitual plan, like the ego. But more specifically than view, is the general way we should regard the existential truth about life, independent of our filters and our craft and things. And this is not just how we should regard Buddhism as truth, but how we should regard Buddhism's way of describing what the unknown territory of our life is. But why do we suffer? Well, traditionally, because of the ex-obscuring emotions, the glaciers and the other glaciers. Our constructs for keeping the world in play, keeping it in line with our habitual interpretations. Particularly our notion of being, our notion of the ego. But for Asanga, Asanga says that for ordinary being, this notion of being is the root of all discursive thought and mental proliferation. This notion of being is what keeps us away from mindfulness. Being is determined, he says, to have essential nature solely by virtue of verbal designation, and is such as clung to by the world for a long time. So our world is as it is, partly because we insist on saying it's song. Actually, too simple that, doesn't it? I don't think it is. Partly it's how it is because we insist on saying it's the certain way. And then we believe ourselves. But this seems to me as the imagined reality, the paddy kaltata of the yoga-jama. And it's also the complexity of the game. And compare that with the relentless simplicity and the paired-downing quality of this. Base your mind on the dharma. Base your dharma on a humble life. Base your humble life on the thought of death. Base your death on a lonely cave. Now, in contrast, that's pretty tough. But I did want to ask is how simple can you bear it? How simple can you bear in life? I'm quite struck by this sort of surge in the order towards pure awareness. Actually, pure awareness and meditation practices. And I think that flex, a desire for simplicity, a real desire to get below complexity, a recognition for our need for simplicity in our minds and in our lives. And I was remembering that when I learned to meditate, Millareca and Padmasanda were the presiding deities of the Glasgow Center. So Buddhism first came to me in legal cries and mountain fastnesses, that kind of thing. So with this view, meditation and action coming more into our parlance, I'm quite excited if you get any taste of that again. So the first way I wanted to talk about view is through studying. And again, according to the teacher, the way we take up view is to combine three things. The practice of the Brahmani horrors, a fearful study of the Dharma and direct experience. And like a well balanced, perfect program. And you might be concerned that this means head down, no nonsense, wall to wall, magiarmica when I say careful study. And I think you should be so lucky. And just because I'm standing here and you're all sitting there, I wanted to give you my favourite, crazy example, just to show how much fun you could be having to listen to this. Something else is something else based on something else. Something else is not something else without it's something else. Something is not different from that something on which it depends. Something else as such is not found in something else. Nor is it found in something that is not something else. And the editor, hopefully, has here in itself. Since something else in itself is not to be found, something else and that something in relation to which it is something else certainly do not exist. But I don't know. But the aim is not just wackiness, although it is that well. But it's meant to stretch our minds further than they can go. Because if you can make concepts, cancel each other out and hold your mind there. And according to Jung, you find out what supports you when you can no longer support yourself. And that's what the protection of wisdom takes around. And I had a little experience a bit like this, that thing of getting things to cancel out and holding your mind there on a tiny scale very recently. And I wanted to thank her for this publicly, that Anne-Rigita and I were involved in a chapter day on a particular discussion recently, and she did help me get taste of this. Because she was willing to be a sort of brick wall of reality in relation to what I was saying. She just kept confounding it. I thought what I was saying was so reasonable. But she just kept confounding my view. She just kept saying it's not like that. It's not like that. Yeah, yeah, but it's not like that. And I went through this whole kind of series of mild irritation, restoration, disbelief. Come on, you must be kidding me. Agree me with me. Agree me with me. Whatever it was. But she just kept saying it's not like that. It's not like that. And just being a complete brick wall, appropriately, I love it. We just ended up laughing. But also I did have this sense of kind of softening around it. It was a bit like I just hit my head off it. I could see for myself. I began to see for myself the limitations of what I was saying, but that I was instilling on in spite of myself. And it just kind of broke. It just broke. And gave way to a kind of softness, a kind of sympathy. And of openness. So thank you. I'm going to give that. So careful study and this coming up against the limits of what we think. But as Mama Givendah says, we must first have reached the limits of our thinking before we are qualified to transcend them. So if thinking is exploring experience to a packet, do we do it now? Do we think? No. What does that mean to us? Thinking. I suppose by that I really mean, well, how seriously? You see how much fun you can have. But how seriously do we take study? You know. How seriously do we really take finding out what the Mama says? Okay, the voice of the perfection of wisdom is the product not only of correct understanding, but of profound reflection and practice. And we can't leap to that point. But I find it interesting how much we can resonate with it if we try. And at least at the level of being clear about the content, we can understand, I think, a lot more than we think we can. And if these texts contain truths about life as they claim to, that we need to know, and surely is worth making the effort. But view view. So in Buddhism, knowing what our teacher has taught, or what the texts actually say is necessary. But why? Well, partly because Buddhist teachings have emerged out of countless generations of meditators and point us to our innermost, most subtle, most personal experience. Your innermost happening. That's worth all your love. And secondly, because the first Pranya listening, which was part of what study is, provides us with something reliable to reflect on in the second Pranya. Reflection. Because if we don't know what the teachings say, we'll just fall back on our preconceptions, on the very preconceptions that it gets into message in the fact of death. So it's important that we really know what the teachings say. But also so that we can fall back on them later. What we learn, what we put in, we can come back to much later. So that when we encounter things that we list see in our experience, we're more likely to recognize them. So the whole path is this kind of moving backwards and forwards from words to experience and back again, back and forth, back and forth. So another one for the warrior queens. Yes, she's children again, and it seems to me to apply well to study. She says, spread the world of illusion before you, and pierce it to the man. Search every part of it. Drive into it with your mind. Let vitality itself pervade your mind. If you let the signs of vitality lessen, it is like killing a Buddha. But humbly because you're killing your own potential. But she also says, carefully guard the naturalness of experience. Protect your commitment as if it were your life and body. If you let it go, there is no explanation. Take all this to heart. This is the teacher. And I find it important to remember that because I think it was on the occasion of falling down the beatbook. I remember my trays saying to me that I needed to have not just a pure gung home, I applied gung home. So carefully guard the naturalness of your experience. So according to Asanga, it is vitally important that the practitioner is well-grounded and firm conviction in supreme voidness. Which might kind of sounds like the same as study. It might even sound like dogmatism, or like something you insist upon, or something you think out. But in fact, firm conviction, deep conviction is things fade. And I expect that that's the next thing I want to talk about. As Dilpa can't see Rem, she says, "Expecting to attain realization without having faith would be like sitting in a cave facing north, waiting for the sunshine to pour in. It will never happen." And as Dante says, "Faith, confidence, trust, has to come first." It's the indispensable, emotional, or volitional element of any experience of insight into the nature of reality. Aswan Tsang's faith is deep conviction about what is real, lucidity as to what has value, and longing for what is possible. These are listed in the Pali canon, and you encounter them again and again and again. So as we know, Buddhism is full of lies, but life is really so obviously structured. Even so, having the view, we've been taking our stand on a sustained interest in these descriptions being true, and testing them out by looking for them in our own experience, and recognizing them, acknowledging them in our own experience if we find them there. So they're not imperatives or instructions, but ways of recognizing what life is actually saying to us through our experiences. So deep conviction about what is real is an aspect of the youth, and it's also an aspect of the youth. So what do we deeply know? What do we believe? What do we orient by? We're all oriented by something. Again, Padma Sanva says, "Faith arises when reading the secret teachings of your inclination, as well as the mother." Now it's my advice to never be parted from the causes for faith to align. It prevents the unfree state and earns the freedoms and riches. It makes you transcend objects of attachment and gain trust in total surrender. He says, "Faith arises when causes and conditions coincide, and you take impermanence to heart. Faith arises when remembering cause and effect." So according to Yeshigeltsen, the object of this deep conviction is the law of karma. It is Praticha Sanapada. That's what we must totally surrender to what we unconditionally, what we must unconditionally accept. Fundamentally, the view is faith in conditionality. In what Joanna Nasey calls the spaciousness and workability of Praticha Sanapada, we're realizing the openness and the consistency in life, and that it's pregnant with karma. So I've been exploring conditionality with the help of my next major recommendation. That's this book. Mutual causality and general systems theory sounds great, huh? It's really, really fantastic. You've already encountered it. Hydrodation has been looking at it, too. I'm sure you do more from heart. You'll buy this book. And more than that, read it and study it. It's fascinating. Mutual causality in Buddhism and general systems theory. That good. Don't be put off. It's really exciting. The conditioned core production is a deep analysis of reality. It leads us deep into the unknown territory of what our life is. So what does it say? I mean, it's so familiar in one sense of how we hear about it, how we talk about it. But do we recognize it as our innermost happening? That's the point. That everything is radically impairment. That everything is mutually conditioned. That's assisting in relationship and having no independent self-existing. Well, this reminded me of John Dunn. No man is an island. Entire to itself. Every man is a piece of the continent. A part of the name. If a clawed be washed away by the sea. Europe is the less. As well as if a promenter you wear. As well as if a man or friends of thine own wear. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for whom? And more cognitiously. But with just as much aspiration and recognition is George Bernard Shaw. This is the true joy in life. The being used for a path that's recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being thoroughly worn out before you've thrown on the scrap poop. The being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clawed of ailments and grievances. Complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. Ouch. So unless we want to carry on being like that or unless we want to be like that. It's essential that we immerse ourselves in trying to understand what this emptiness is and what we stand on. But with the help of Joanna Macy I realize that it's exciting to read scientists talking about the world. Those new and invigorating life for me on traditionality. And also familiar in many ways. So the self in process they talk about. Okay it's like a stream we're used to that. Stream of beings, stream of consciousness, flowing, not able to be isolated or fixed. But the self in process is also like a fire in constant interaction with its environment. Consuming and constituted by its impressions. Fueled by sight, flames, touches, tastes, smells, mental images. And driven by the voice that they awaken. That's just the theme of the Buddha in the fire ceremony. So co-igniting with what it proceeds and on which it acts. The self cannot be considered apart from the environment. I just think that's such a fresh way of thinking about co-igniting. That's what our consciousness is doing constantly. I sometimes think of it as being like spark plugs. You know how spark plugs work in a car. Like that. But also these scientists to listen to them talk. It's the pattern maintained by our transactions with the surrounding world which is the touchstone of our personal identity. We are about whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abimes, but patterns that perpetuate the power. We'll put more simple. I seem to be a verb. And as Reginald Ray keeps on saying, remember, the deeper truth is relational. The deeper truth is relational. So listening to scientists talk about the world is often beautiful. The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone. Of a form rather than a bit of substance. Structure is a result of function and the organism resembles a flame rather than a crystal. A living cell can be compared to a flame. Here is matter going in and out and being burned. It cannot be defined because it's not a system at rest. Not a system at rest. It's a flow. It's a mystery. It's alternation. Alteration. It's exchange. Remember having sandaloff. Faith helps you gain trust in total surrender. And it's surrendering to this as a primary fact. Alteration exchange. And it's vital to realize it because the conventional notion itself has narrowed the horizons both of our cognition and of our compassion. So liberation, according to the Buddhists, is liberation of mind, for it is mind that is enslaved. It's liberated not through setting itself apart from the normality, but increasing it so we are less old. So it all comes back to mindfulness and matter in memory. But in practice having faith, having faith that your efforts will be a fruit, but it's worth making their backs, even when you can't see their results. So as I remember saying in the top last year, having faith that force will find shape, but no shape can hold. Today's solutions, how often are they tomorrow's problems? I was thinking of the interest system question. I thought that. I'm just thinking how it calls for patience, for perspective. Having faith in the forces we cannot see in our yiddance, but also in intangibles in many ways, intangibles in communication. The thing that came to my mind was being able to give the benefit of the doubt. So the deeper truth is relational. And that brings me on to the last thing I wanted to talk about. The last way I wanted to approach for you. And that's ritual and metaphor. And I realise that I follow you by pursuing my sense of fascination about what is real. That essential emotional quality that makes you want to pursue something. As we've been saying, that's the same as faith. What fascinates me is what keeps me on the path, what gives direction and momentum to my practice. Shores the truth that sounds for you. And it's essential this fascination, this quality of fascination. Because as Vantage says, nothing that is thoroughly amenable to rational analysis will satisfy us for you. That's why wisdom is not just analytical or in, but appreciative, aesthetic and understanding. So I find myself, unlike the E.S. is, I find myself fascinated by poetry, metaphor, ritual. Standing on emptiness is itself amenable. But standing in the view we see that there's a poem at the heart of the world. According to the view, reality has a nature and we can pursue it. And it's the same reality for the mind and the heart. Faith and conditionality is deep conviction in the view. The heart's release is a total release, a release into totality, pointing to the boundlessness and unbroken upness of reality, like space, without a break or crack. But it's also an unknowable totality, it's a mystery. It can't be approached very closely other than through poetry. Yet we can be happy in it. I was thinking with Mallaretha, happy is the mind, powerful and confident, steeped in the realm of totality. You means anything to me, means that, that's how I'm going to be. Happy is the mind, powerful and confident, steeped in the realm of totality. And also with a healthy body, I glorify the mandala of the whole. So, Reginald read tells us that the deeper truth is relational. And this is also the basis of ritual, because the essence of ritual is communication. Why do we need to communicate with other beings? Because communication is the exchange of energy and experience. And we need to continuously to be in a process of exchange with others. Other beings have things to give to us, and we have things to give to them. The only way that this occurs is through the give and take of communication. The pathways of this exchange are interconnectedness with other beings. And ritual opens these pathways and allows exchange and communication to occur. So, like ritual, metaphor makes connections with which language. Just an openness or perception, a shift of perspective, at best a generous rejoicing quality. I think metaphor is important for you, because if you is seeing the relation of things, an imagination stepping beyond a particular view, is our means of perceiving it. View is seeing consequences, and seeing relations, not just with the corporeal eye, as Blake calls it, but with an eye for a connection to something deeper. So, we must use our imagination. It requires the vivid immediacy of Samata, and the presence, the felt's connection of the pastina. So, in the recognition of a connection, you give value and loving attention to something. You transfer quality, you link, you connect, you see things in relation, and with openness. An example that came to my mind was from Canada Girl. Do you remember that bit where they talk about the women of Yorkshire are like flowers? Well, the women of Yorkshire are flowers. That's the example that came to my mind. That's a metaphor. The women of Yorkshire are flowers. And as you watch that movie, and you listen to that poem, you know what they're all about. So, it's valuable, because it resists the easy option of habitual responses and interpretations. In one sense, it's a form of projection, metaphor, and poetry. Literally, a thing made, a making up, a making of connections. But in another sense, as Subity once said for me, you don't make connections. You recognize them. And if, as in the Dalmatata, as in the Yogachara, we constantly create a world, then why not create a positive one? So, thinking metaphorically, we begin to build ritual into the world. We begin to reveal the ritual in the world. Through ritual, one's led to take a larger view of one's life and one's world. So, metaphor, looking again, looking for connections, is the re-admission of the familiar in a new way. Without dwelling in the safety of our habitual interpretations, but dwelling in the gap between simple sense consciousness, simple sense perceptions, and the judgments we saw quickly make about things based on pre-existing variables. So, in another way, if metaphor, we can re-enchant the world. So, to conclude, if view is the general way we should regard reality, that way is to recognize the three legends and work towards unconditional acceptance of them in our everyday life. This would mean standing on emptiness, acknowledging that we too are subject to the laws of conditionality, impermanent and insubstantial, and our evil-bound responses to those facts lead to self-generative suffering. But view is also being open to what an open mind notices. It gives a looser way of seeing one more appropriate to a world of patterns, not substances. This phrase just kept coming back to me. There is a poem at the heart of the world. There's a poem at the heart of the world. I thought I'd finished the poem. A poem about view, actually, is a countryside, and it's called a high blue day on scale pain. If I've remembered all the language, this is the summit of contemplation, but no art can touch it. Blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago and the sea, shimmering, shimmering, no art can touch it. The mind can only try to become a change to it, to become quiet and still, and space itself out, knowing itself in the diamond country in the ultimate unmet art light. [applause] We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebutestaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] You You
