(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. - Often, I have made living in the present moment to my holy grail, something legendary, which if not exactly unattainable, can only be found by the purist of heroines. Because having realized that I spend most of my time in the past and even more in the future, I've romanticized the notion of being more fully aware in each passing moment. Being present in the here and now, even dwelling in the gap can almost become a mirage, longed for, but illusory when approached. Each time I consider the value of living in the present, but see it as something difficult to do, my longing pushes the present off into the future. In this way, I doubt that such awareness is possible for me as if I'm a special case immune to the medicine of the Dharma, too greedy, too hasty to be still and quiet and know each moment as new. Now, back in 1996, I captured something of all this in a poem. On solitary retreat at Christmas, I have come here to be alone, to reflect, to understand, I wait for something to happen, like a child hoping to catch a glimpse of Father Christmas, wanting to believe in him, but not knowing if being good and a plate of mince pies are enough. The wind blows outside. I stop and listen, and then I understand this is what now feels like, this very moment when nothing is hoped for or remembered. I grab at the moment's poise and it's gone. Head in hands, I miss the sight of two large black boots going up the chimney. (audience laughing) Why does the present moment matter? Because where else will we become wise? I long to inhabit the here and now, because I long to be wise. I want to see things more truly, unobstructed by hope or memory, unhindered by well-rehearsed reactions from the past or endless planning for the future. Recognizing past conditions and preparing for the future are necessary. We have a sense of continuity, can learn from mistakes, create better conditions for health and happiness. This sense of time past and time to come provide a broad canvas, a sense that life might be short, but we can place ourselves in context. This junction between a then we've experienced and a then that is yet to come. We call it now, but all too often we are living not now, but then, back then or in a future then. The theme between past and future is so infinitesimally small and so endlessly repeated that we find it easier to try and fix and measure things in more manageable chunks, an hour, a day, a week or even a year. But look at how much past and future that just one hour contains. Yet we do know the present instant. Now, sometimes arrives unannounced and unasked for and just demands our attention. I'm sitting by the side of a hospital bed. My great aunt Harriet has just quietly died. I'm holding her hand, and for a few minutes I'm alone with her in the room, and I'm there in each successive moment. I'm really there because I want her consciousness to hear me wishing her well. After a lifetime of various kinds of pain and difficulty, I don't want her disembodied consciousness to be afraid. So I'm present. Death has a way of clarifying everything. This moment is the one that counts. And yet it includes all time. My present experience is concerned with what will happen to her consciousness, how my family and I are going to feel. And this is a woman I've known all my life. So countless memories are attached to her like the neatly tied apron she wore. Now, sometimes just turns up when we only realise how present we were afterwards. I'm sitting in the olive grove at Hill Convento on a green fold-up chair. The sun is warm, the grass is yellow. I'm staring at the trees. I'm making spidery marks across a sheet of paper, a second sheet of paper, a third sheet. I'm staring at the sky. I'm writing a poem. I'm absorbed, thinking neither of what I did earlier nor what I will do this evening. I am present. But the question that concerns me is how can I experience the present moment all the time? I'm reminded of a significant moment for Siddhartha, the Buddha to be. You remember that in order to understand the causes and solutions to human suffering, he tried various methods, including fasting. At the point where he'd nearly starved himself and was still none the wiser, he wondered if there might be an alternative approach. He spontaneously recollected a time when he was a boy, watching his father plowing a field. As he'd sat there in the shade of a rose apple tree, watching the ox draw furrows through the soil, he became deeply concentrated, experiencing profound states of absorption and contentment. After this recollection, he chose to take food again and subsequently entered into the same absorptions, from which he then attained enlightenment. This rose apple tree incident seems to me to be almost an archetypal present moment. Siddhartha's breakthrough came when he relinquished his supreme effort and then something else happened. His effort was an integral part of his achievement, but so was his ability to let go. So, as well as the fortuitous moments of clear awareness, I also need to train myself to be more present in two apparently contradictory ways. I need consistently to make the effort and find the knack of repeatedly letting go. I want to do this because I want the freedom and happiness that comes from dwelling in the present moment. In Hapayas enjoying the present article in May's chapter, he refers to a chapter in Pierre Hado's philosophy as a way of life, called only the present is our happiness. This beautiful phrase comes apparently from Gerta's second Faust. The spirit looks not forward nor behind, only the present is our happiness. Hapayas wonders whether we attach enough importance to the practice of living as fully as we can in the present moment. I found myself reflecting on this practice over the years in different ways, but I also noticed how I veer off from fully engaging with it because, well, if I succeed, then everything will be different. I'll gain insight, and nothing will be the same again. But then nothing ever is. In this talk, I'll be looking at how we can train ourselves as Hapayas put it to enjoy the present, and I will look at the story of Bahia of the Bach garment using the framework of the five object-determining mental events and refer to my own experience, particularly the practice of writing poetry, and I'll finish with some thoughts about pauses. Reading the story of Bahia, it seems to me that this story is not just relevant to the practice of living in the present moment because of what the Buddha said to him, but in other ways too. So, are you sitting comfortably? Bahia of the Bach garment was a dedicated seeker of the truth who was apparently well respected and even revered. At the time of the story, he was living by the seashore at a place called Suparaka. He became preoccupied with a question to which he could not provide the answer. Am I, he wanted to know, one of those in the world who is an Ahat, or who have entered on the past Ahat ship. Now, in a previous life, Bahia had been one of a group of monks who had climbed the top of a mountain, a precipitous mountain, in order to attain enlightenment. Kicking away the ladder they had used to get there, they sat down to meditate. There was no going back. Five of them, including Bahia, died without breaking through. But one of them became fully enlightened, and another became a non-returner. This non-returner now appeared to Bahia as a devator. Out of his infinite kindness he told Bahia straight, "You are neither an Ahat nor practicing a path whereby you will become one." Bahia, undeterred, asked the devator who in the world was an Ahat or on that path, and the devator told him about the existence of the Buddha, and that the Buddha was currently staying a very long way away in the town of Savati. He is indeed an Ahat and teaches the Dharma so that others can become Ahat also. These words affected Bahia profoundly. There and then he set off for Savati. Legend has it that he completed the great journey in just one night, helped by the devator. Now, whether or not this is true, he wasted no time in getting as quickly as possible to where the Buddha was. The Buddha was staying in the Jettagro at Anatopindika's monastery, and when Bahia arrived there, he asked some bhikkhus where he might find the Lord. They told him he was collecting arms food in the town. Bahia promptly left the Jettagro and entered Savati. He soon saw the Buddha and knew him immediately by his poise and calm. His mindful walking was lovely to see. It was clear to Bahia that this was the perfected one. Bahia approached the Buddha directly and threw himself down with his head at the Buddha's feet and said, "Teach me Dhamma, Lord. Teach me Dhamma's Sugatar so that it will be for my good and happiness for a long time." The Buddha said to Bahia, "Now is not an appropriate time. I am collecting arms food." Again Bahia said, "It is difficult to know for certain how long the Lord will live or how long I will live. Teach me Dhamma, Lord, so that it will be for my good and happiness for a long time." Again the Buddha replied that it wasn't a suitable time for him to give a teaching. A third time Bahia asked the Buddha to teach him. With that, the third time of asking, the Buddha gave Bahia what he had come all those many miles for. Bahia, you should train yourself in this way. In the scene will be merely what is seen. In the herd will be merely what is heard. In the sense will be merely what is sensed. In the cognized will be merely what is cognized. In this way you should train yourself Bahia. For when for you Bahia, in the scene is merely the scene and so on. Then you will not be with that. That is not bound by that view, by attraction and repulsion. And when you are not with that, then you will not be in that, not in that situation of being deluded and led astray by views and emotions. When you are not in that, you will be neither here nor beyond, nor in between the two. That is not reborn into this world or another. You will have stepped out of this mundane world. Just this Bahia is the end of suffering. Immediately Bahia's mind was liberated and he became enlightened. The Buddha, having given this brief but powerful instruction, carried on his way. And then something tragic happened. A cow with a young calf was threatened by the sight of Bahia and charged him. He was killed outright. When later on the Buddha returned from his arms round and discovered that Bahia had died, he asked the bhikkhus to carry the body away and to burn it and to build a stupor for the ashes. And although Bahia had not been one of their number, the Buddha referred to him as "your companion in the holy life". Afterwards the bhikkhus returned to the Lord and asked him about Bahia's destiny and future rebirth. The Buddha told them, "Bhahia of the Bhagama was a wise man. He practiced according to the Dhamma and did not trouble me by disputing about it. Bahia has attained final nibbana. Then he described Bahia's experience of the Arahats illumination and freedom from all planes of conditioned existence by uttering the following verses. "Where neither water nor yet earth nor fire nor air gain a foothold, there gleam no stars, no sun sheds light. There shines no moon, yet there no darkness reigns." When a sage, a Brahmin has come to know this for himself, through his own wisdom, then he is freed, freed from form and formless, freed from pleasure and from pain. I've recently begun to look at the five object determining mental events or vinyatas as preparation for meditation. Maybe it's more accurate to describe these as preparation for life, a way of motivating myself to practice, including being more present to the moment. Although these are chiefly concerned with meditation, what are we doing if we don't regard our lives or what am I doing if I don't regard my life as itself one long meditation practice? So I'm going to use these vinyatas as reference points for Bahia's story. To begin with, the first object determining mental event is chunder or interest. We need to want to be more present. We all have desire. We all have our likes and dislikes. But that very desire that trips us up and causes countless difficulties and disappointments is the very thing that sets us free. To be free of our limitations, we must want to be so. If we desire freedom, we can liberate ourselves. The same energy that gets us into trouble will save us. We just have to choose between Karmachanda and Dharmachanda. Bahia has this Dharmachanda. Even though he's well respected, honored even, he wants to know whether or not he is in our hat. And when he finds that he isn't, his interest or eagerness is such that it compels him to make a long journey across India to find the answer. He doesn't rest on the laurels of his status amongst those that know him. In Know Your Mind, Bante talks about laziness, the opposite of interest, really meaning being busy doing something that is not conducive to skillful mental states. Bahia isn't spiritually lazy. And he asks himself, "How is he getting on?" Now while my spiritual development isn't at the level where I'm asking myself if I'm in our hat, it doesn't make me wonder whether I ask myself enough how well I'm doing. I put the emphasis here on how well I'm doing. Because I know all too often that some of us can focus on duly on where we are failing to reach our spiritual goals. As Bahia says in his article, "While confession is of great benefit to us, shouldn't we perhaps have progress coolers as well as confession coolers? A place in our chapters where we report in on our conquests as well as our defeats." In my chapter, along with a number of you I'm sure, we do have a rejoicing in merit section, but I usually choose to rejoice in someone else. Rejoicing in myself still smacks of some old injunction not to get too big for my boots. But I'm experimenting with turning that particular spotlight on myself. In this way we can cultivate an appreciative mode that supports our enjoying the present. I'll say more about this mode later. What happens next for Bahia is that he gets help. In this case it is a God that helps him. And symbolically speaking, this resonated with my own experience of occasional deeply significant assistance from my spiritual friends. I think that this is important in relation to our resolve, or Addi Moksha, the second object determining mental event. If we are wanting to be more present it does require resolve and in the absence of divine intervention we can call on our friends to encourage and support us in keeping our interest focused. And I mean this quite literally. If we notice a friend spends an unhelpful amount of time caught up in the past or the future, maybe we could tell them this. I'm also struck by Bahia's resolve that it is so focused that he pays no heed to the fact that the Buddha is doing something else. And the Buddha even tells him twice that it's not an appropriate time. Now I'm not reading this as an encouragement to be rude or inappropriate. But it made me think of the many interviews that I've listened to with famous and successful writers, musicians and actors and so on. It seems to me that it isn't just talent that makes these people special. The truly great as opposed to the transient celebrities seem to be marked out by their desire and determination. They want to succeed and they are resolute in doing so. Bahia's resolve means he literally can't wait to hear the Dharma from the Buddha's mouth. He is aware that time might not be on his side. It is difficult to know for certain how long the Lord will live or how long I will live and how right he was. Do I have that sense of urgency? Apparently having looked at the chapter in philosophy as a way of life that Abhaya referred to, it was Horace who gave that advice about living each day as if it were your last. "Believe that each new day shall be the last for you, then each unexpected hour shall come to you as a delightful gift." There's also an alcoholics anonymous phrase which goes, "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is reality. Today is a gift which is why it's called the present." And the fact that Bahia's story includes a sudden and unexpected death underlines the necessity that we grasp the fact of our own impermanence. Since last June's National Order Weekend, when we were introduced to the four preliminary practices, I've been using these reflections as my preparation for meditation. They include considering the impermanence of the or my human body. I deliberately remind myself that I don't know my own sell-by date. All I can be certain of is that there will be an end sooner or later. On one level, I think that this daily reflection has become part of my meditation wallpaper, something I don't always register properly. But on the other hand, I've noticed that my resolve to meditate has increased, even when I'm experiencing chronic distraction. That reflection is sharpening my resolve, if somewhat slowly. The third vinyata is shmriti, or mindfulness. This seems to be the content of the Buddha's instruction to Bahia. This is the core of the story. It's an uncompromising and simple message, but so profound that Bahia's limitations and wrong views dissolve instantaneously. But as John Ireland points out in the notes at the back of my edition of the Yudhana, Bahia was clearly ready to hear the teaching. It's as if what happened in Bahia's experience was identical to what he was being told in the herd, only the herd. He did not question or have doubts. He just attended to what was being said and did what was being described. And so was not separate from the reality of pure awareness. He was fully present. Since mindfulness was introduced to me, I've been excited by its possibilities. I have watched myself be changed by it. Mindfulness, the word, conjures a sense of openness, clarity, a warm blue sky with layers of indigo that I saw once over the sea in Greece. And this sense lingers even when I am failing to count ten breaths in the mindfulness of breathing. I remember working in the Jambala gift shop as it was then called in the late 80s with Ratnavandana and others. It was a busy situation in a small space. Sometimes it felt like being in a food mixer. I remember one day being on the shop floor arranging soap dishes or something on the shelves and then being asked to fetch something from the stock room. On my way through the narrow space by the stairs, a customer asked me the price of something that wasn't marked. It was too much. I just wanted to run. But I called to mind an exemplar of mindfulness, an unusual shop assistant in my mind, Bante. And I pictured the way he would move about the little shop. It did the trick. Suddenly there was time and there was space. We also did things like use the handling of 20lb notes as a kind of mindfulness bell, which reminded me to note the sensations in my body, becoming briefly aware of my breath. I didn't particularly like the shop work itself. But for me we were metaphorically raking gravel into simple lovely patterns outside a temple. Practicing mindfulness, I knew where I was, what I was doing and how I felt about it. And it was like magic to me. It was so exciting because it was so different to how things had been before, where I had stood lopsided, leaning on one hip and not known it, sat with legs and arms knotted and didn't know it, didn't know how tangled my mind was, smiling when I was angry, laughing when I was sad, crying when I was happy. I didn't know I was asleep. Smitty is also defined as recollection. Mindfulness is about holding an object in mind, which may include something from the past. In terms of living in the present moment, this is fascinating because the present moment will often include elements of the past and the future. The secret seems to be to slow things down enough to find the stillness that exists at the heart of every moment. Then the moment is big enough to hold past, present and future lightly. We're all familiar with the four foundations of mindfulness, but I don't seem to hear them talked about much these days. Hopefully it's because we've taken in the practice so much that there's nothing to discuss. Still, I find mindfulness of the body is like an anchor. When I remember to note how I'm standing or sitting, I'm usually more present to the other foundations too. I sometimes think of my sitting bones as the plug for the socket of my awareness. If I become aware of them as I sit at my desk or computer, I plug myself in to the present. So presumably Bahia experienced samadhi or intense concentration, the fourth vinyata. His mind chose to be and remained perfectly focused on the content of what the Buddha said. The Buddha was instructing Bahia and us to give our bare attention to the objects of our senses, including our mind sense. It's an exhortation to simply do one thing at a time, to note what we perceive, just that. It's about slowing down the tumult of our impressions, thoughts and feelings so that we sit in that quieter place before we react, before we jump to our hopes and fears. It's another way of talking about that part of the niddhana chain on the wheel of becoming between feeling and craving. If we are simply with the sense impressions, we are not caught up in what we do or don't want from those sense objects, maybe people, things or places. We're not involved with our views and expectations. Our experience is not about our likes and dislikes, we're just bearing witness to what is. This is how we dwell in the present moment. Anything else whirls us off in the vortex of memories and resentments, plans and desires. And by observing our sense impressions in this way, our chanda or desire can become desire for the Dharma through the experience of the senses. Bahia's experience started with his hearing and sight of the Buddha, but the fourth vinyata is concerned primarily with the mental object of perception. On hearing the Buddha's words, Bahia was transported beyond being a subject experiencing the Buddha or his words as object. He became not different from the Buddha or his words, nor the same, nor presumably neither or both. And this was his realization of pranya or analytical appreciative discrimination or wisdom, which is the fifth object determining mental event. His awareness was complete. He saw things as they really are. Because he died almost immediately, we don't get to hear his inspired utterance, but the Buddha offers a couple of verses instead. Where Bahia is, there shines no moon, yet there no darkness reigns. He is free from pleasure and pain. So maybe by reminding myself of the vinyatas, I can develop my awareness, not just in meditation, but in life, in my day-to-day activities. As I deliberately cultivate my interest, resolve and mindfulness, I can also create the conditions for intense concentration and hopefully a little pranya. So speaking of verses, I'd like to turn now to writing as practice. For me, writing poetry is an extension of the practice of mindfulness and meta. It's a key way for me to live more in the moment. Writing poetry may sweep us back and forward in time, remembering and imagining, but it happens in the moment. The past taps us on our shoulder with memories to share, leading us to rummage in the cellars and attics of our history. Or even trips us up, insisting that we pay attention and make good our neglect. But meanwhile, up ahead is a future, a confusing array of dreams and fears that seduces us into stumbling forward with its sweet promises, or drags us unwilling towards our obligations and destiny. Yet if we choose to write or make other kinds of art, we can find ourselves standing or sitting still, and the present moment offers itself like a gift. Everything starts now, but we forget, spinning forwards and back in our vortex of time. Making art, we can sit undisturbed in the eye of the hurricane. What's needed to write is not so different from what is required for a meditation practice. I have found that by trying to develop a writing practice, I often need the same conditions and tools, including receptive or balanced effort, and the willingness to sit with tension, self and others. And other inner and outer dilemmas of various kinds. And it's a practice both on and off the chair. It's important to practice poetry at all times, not just when sitting with a notebook in a cafe pretending to be Natalie Goldberg. Writing poetry is about seeing more clearly, and it's also about love. Writing poetry is about appreciation, trying to see things as they are, in and for themselves. While at the same time because of where I'm at, noticing what is I want or don't want from them. It's about opening my eyes and ears, about attending to the world closely, and about asking questions. It's a means of reflection. It's often the most effective way for me to really think. Where does a poem start? Here and now. That's why it's an awareness practice. Because poetry is there all the time, like enlightenment and reality, it's there all the time. We just need to pick up the end of the thread in front of us and wind it into a ball to draw us close. Some of you will be familiar with this idea of the golden thread that the poet William Stafford talks about, borrowing the image from William Blake. You can find this written about in Robert Bly's introduction to the Weatherlight edition of Stafford's poetry, "Holding onto the Grass". A poem is the thread, the ball, and where it leads you. And the end of the thread may give no inkling as to where you will end up. The secret is to just follow the thread and to not hold it too tightly or too loosely. The end of the thread can be any detail of our experience in the scene, only the scene. I may notice the ring I'm wearing and write about the experience of amber and silver. I may start with the noises I hear out on the street, or it may be that the end of the thread is a memory or a dream or a thought that comes to mind. We can start anywhere finding the flavour of the moment. My senses are reading the world, noting the signs, smells, sounds, touch and taste of the endless moments. I can begin to record these, and in so doing, other impressions, thoughts or feelings arise, and then become the next part of the thread. Of course what I'm usually aware of first is my response to these impressions, my likes, my dislikes, my views. But the act of trying to record my first impressions means that I move closer to my initial contact with the world through my senses, and that in turn gives me great opportunity for choosing what happens next. Writing, describing, recollecting, slow down the process of experience, which means that it trains me to approach life more directly. Like after a meditation retreat, as a result of attempting to look with a poet's eye, I have a more vivid experience of life. Colors are brighter, people seem more interesting. And what follows from that enhanced awareness is a greater appreciation. That's why I say writing poetry is about love. Choosing to describe the world and some of its inhabitants can be like doing the metabhavna. By giving my attention to a garden or my great-aunt sis or my stepdad, I find my heart opens just because I'm holding them there. And I suppose that what makes a big difference is that when I try and write poetry, I do see myself engaged in a kind of authentic communication, which is informed by the ten precepts. But the result is that I feel that writing poetry is about appreciation, because I'm describing how things are, at least in my perception, and trying not to be clever or unkind. This means that sometimes at least, I get out of the way. This is of course connected to what Bante caused the greater mander of uselessness. Butters and bodhisattvas experience everything in and for itself. They're not driven or stressed by the job in hand, that is saving all beings. It's a joy to them. Their work is their play. They have this light touch because they see things for themselves, rather than what they can get out of them. When I'm not wanting something from someone I meet, when I don't feel the need to push away something because I don't like it, when I'm free of these usual pushes and pulls, the world can stand in itself, and I don't get in the way. As Singh Sam says, "The perfect life is only difficult for those who pick and choose." If I don't pick and choose, I can simply appreciate. Appreciation is at the heart of wisdom. Bante, in wisdom beyond words, refers to Gunther's definition of pranya as analytical appreciative understanding. In other words, when we don't get in the way, when our prima donna egos don't get to come onto the stage, we see things as they are, when our experience is in the scene, merely the scene, and there there is delight. The artist Odion Redon said, "With my eyes more widely opened upon things, I learnt how the life that we unfold can also reveal joy. Note the life we unfold, stand to us." And William Blake talks about kissing the joy as it flies, which is a beautiful image for letting go. It's the old message, "We need to love and let go." As I try to write poetry, I find it enhances my delight and appreciation, and in attending more closely, I seem to see a bit more clearly how impermanent everything is. I know that everything changes. We discuss this. Intellectually it makes sense. We even witness it. The weather changes, things break, seasons pass, people die. But for many of us most of the time, we do not act as if we know this. I was annoyed when my camera broke recently. I felt let down when a Mitra friend forgot our date last week. I felt cheated when it rained and was cold on part of the convention. In my mind the camera shouldn't break. I should be able to rely on my friend turning up when I've cooked for them, and the order convention should always be sunny. Why was I so disappointed? Because I wanted and expected things to turn out a certain way, which is particularly foolhard in relation to objects, people and the weather. They are all subject to change, but sometimes I only know this in my head. But I can know this with my whole being if I simply attend to my senses, and writing helps me to do this. Then I start to see a glimpse of the truth as put by Bante in an essay in the path of the inner life. It is not so much that reality changes as reality is change. What is also important is that as in naming the hindrances in meditation, finding the right words for poem, I get to name my own desires and fears. For example, I describe my partner sleeping while I'm still awake, and I find myself writing that I'm not ready for his death. I write about Vermeer's painting "Young Woman with a Water Picture", and what I attribute to her, her lips part with the taste of uncertainty, is a fundamental flavour of my experience. I even saw how I used writing to deflect direct experience when I was in Tuscany and wrote about the night sky. Against the loneliness of the owl cry, and the weight of invisible stars, I build this house of words. For me, writing is like meditation. Meditation is like life, and they are all hard to do. Because I get distracted, I want things to be otherwise than they are, and I simply look away. And as I said in a verse from a poem from a few years ago called Copper Beach. Can I allow the magpie of the moment to fly into me, like the bird to the tree, to store its bright treasure? Looking back over the things I have written, I've found that a number of times I've written about this search for the present moment, and I've expressed a lot of doubt about doing that, and admit to the ways that I trip myself up. Yet the present moment, often because I'm writing, presents itself anyway. Practice. To quieten my mind, I sit with my thoughts, and I'm deafened by the noise. Trying not to achieve anything, I'm trying to achieve something. I want to relax into the moment, and I'm tense with the effort. Yet, over the grass, beneath the trees, evening sun shines through golden spray from the sprinkle, and water falls. What do I end up with after all this writing? Pieces of paper. It's not just paper, it's the record of various individual moments. And of course, these pieces of paper are precious to me because they're my moments. I worry. What if there is a fire, and my scribblings and computers should be lost? That image of leaves of paper curling up in flame feels relevant here, because of course, here I am finding that writing aids my appreciation of the present moment, and simultaneously I want to fix those experiences. Although I haven't consciously thought it before, these scraps are aware of cheating death, because if I'm lucky, some of them might outlive me. So then I remember that the paper was once a tree, now long gone, and that I'm no different, but this is just an exercise saying that, because I know I'm writing this to say to all of you, and what you think matters, because I desire your approval and then stop. Where are my sitting bones? Where are my feet? A black bird suddenly presents itself to my hearing, and even though I'm in London in August, I can smell burning leaves and autumn. This is this present moment, and it's already over. This is reality. It's not somewhere else. All we need is bare awareness of the present moment. What helps is practicing slowing life down enough to register what we're experiencing. We all know this works, whether it be through solitary retreats or sitting doing nothing for 10 minutes, say. Deliberately introducing silence and stillness, preferably on a daily basis for those of us who seem to prefer to keep moving, is invaluable. We are on a revolving wheel, and we all know what spins the axis, the cock, the pig, and the snake. Chasing each other's tails, our world spins. And yet where they are is where the still point is. So I was talking to Dhamma Chandra about how we can let these animals eat each other, because of course they can get transformed. Greed can provide the raw material for compassion. Hatred can provide the impulse towards wisdom, and as Dhamma Chandra explained to me, delusion, ignorance can lead to equanimity. If we let them all eat each other, the wheel will disappear. So let's slow it all down by introducing more pauses. Bante tells us that when Mozart was asked what was the most important part of his music, he didn't say the melody, or the harmony, or the orchestration, but simply the pauses. Music is born from silence and needs its internal silences to prevent the succession of notes being an unbearable cacophony. Our lives are the same. Without our pauses, we are a victim in a horror film, being inexorably taken towards a huge circular sore. Got carried away there. Pause is not only allow us to be more mindful, but to question reality. Why are we experiencing this? What is going on? Through this combination of observation and reflection, insight can arise. I don't know if this is true, but I was thinking meditation is a kind of pause, but I think that sitting doing nothing is even more so, because it gives the ego a break from the relentless performance of itself. It can't even say, "I'm meditating." Personally, I have sometimes found making a full stop too big a contrast, so I've gone for a comma type pause. This might mean going for a walk in the park, so that the utilitarian part of me is satisfied that we are doing something useful, and that seems to be the rest of me free to relax and just take in the sights and sounds, picking up the random thoughts as I go. Gardening is the same. By journeys, these can be deliberate bardos in our experience. Indeed, part of the pleasure for me of train and plane journeys is that I'm neither the person I was when I left home during the journey, nor the person I will be when I arrive at my destination. Of course, every moment is a bardo like this, but on a journey I can perhaps be more aware of it. These halfway houses, these comma type pauses, as well as the full stops of actually doing nothing, are training grounds in emptiness. In these pauses, we can move towards an appreciation of the ebb and flow of life, including the ebb and flow of ourselves, as we watch the stream of sense impressions. We can find T.S. Eliot's still point of the turning world, and according to him, what do we find there? The dance. In the stillness there is movement, because all is flux, changing. When we're not asserting our views and personality, it's easier to see how things are. We see the flow, the conditionality. By creating pauses, allowing some moments to be consciously experienced as a gap, we start to be more in tune with reality, that is emptiness. The title of this talk, Becoming a Citizen of the Present, came from a piece of writing that Gina Rumsi showed me by a musician called Manu Chow. A citizen is a member of a city or state with attendant rights and duties. And I like the idea of being a citizen of the present, not just dwelling in it, because the word citizen implies a responsibility towards others. When we are aware in the present moment, we are aware of others, too. We're aware of the law of karma, and so it naturally follows that we take responsibility for our actions in this web of existence, this net of interconnection. When in the scene there is merely the scene, we forget ourselves, and no longer grasp at or push away things and people. In this emptiness we appreciate others in themselves, which brings people closer as we identify with them, and we feel care. In our pauses, with our sense of delight and responsibility, we discover our compassion, for as Bante says, in the way of emptiness in the path of the inner life. Strangely enough, the remembrance of emptiness, far from decreasing one's power of spiritual activity, increases it enormously, it becomes easy, effortless, spontaneous, full of joy, because the obstacle to activity, which is the self, has been removed. The activity of emptiness is compassion. By seeing the arising and passing of our experience, discovering that reality is change, by having our questions held in an open heart, we become wise, and with that wisdom comes compassion. Virginia Woolf describes the essential thing, that is life or spirit, truth or reality, as being dependent upon the manner in which the mind is subject to myriad impressions. Trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with a sharpness of steel, from all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. When we're aware of this, giving our attention to this incessant shower, we know life to be what she called "aluminous halo". This is a more true perception than life is something hard and fixed. That which is hard, like our fixed views of ourselves, is often brittle, but that which is radiant by nature, like pure awareness, like Bahia's illumination, cannot be broken or dimmed. Only allowed to shine more brightly. [Applause] We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [Applause]
