(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. - Of course, it's been extremely difficult at times. I'm not gonna sit here and say it's been pleasurable or easy 'cause it hasn't, it's a very difficult path in many respects. But it is interesting in the last while, and I don't know how long this while is, 'cause I'm not quite sure really. I have been increasingly in touch with the freedom that comes from letting go. And I can't really explain why it's difficult to put into words, but I'm definitely happier and more content than I've ever been, which I find amazing and sort of mystifying that through letting go, one can find freedom. In fact, I think it's probably the only way one can find freedom, ultimately, is letting go of all those things that we cling on to and are attached to. I think that when there's reduction of choice, that's an interesting thing. In the modern world, we've got so much freedom. And in my life, in a way, my freedom has been very curtailed in many respects. The options available has been curtailed. And actually, that's simplified my life in a really good way. So I'm left with the choice of, do I make the most of what I've got, or do I not make the most of what I've got? But I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about all the other things I might do or might have, because they're not options. So I think it's interesting how reduction of choice, I think, can also lead to freedom. So the more we compare our lives down to the essentials, that can be liberating. It's tempting just to go in there. (audience laughing) Go for burn. (audience laughing) It's exciting, isn't it? Look there. (audience laughing) Got some nurses here. (audience laughing) So don't miss my arms, really. Happy to give this talk. Is, because when I got ordained, I really loved this six element practice. I remember being on that retreat, right in the local, in the shrine room, sitting at the back at the right-hand corner, I think. Somehow these things get sort of seared into one's memory, sometimes, don't need these important moments. And doing the practice, and it felt such a relief to have got to the point where I could turn and contemplate reality directly without completely freaking yourself out, which is what I've been more likely to do previously. As Diana Andi said, I've always been very drawn to this idea of penetrating through to the truth of trying to see things as they really are directly. I've always found that really motivating. I've always really wanted it. I wanted to know what is life about? What is it all? What is reality? How do we see things? But previously to that, I hadn't really been integrated enough to cope. And I'd had very good friends at Tara Loke. I would sometimes do things like go on solitary and weird myself out. Thinking when is a tree a tree and has a sheep got put in nature and these sorts of things. And I had very good friends who said, "Pru," as I was called then, "do the metabhavana "and the mindfulness of breathing as taught in the stages. "Go back to basics." And it was really, really good advice, I have to say. So I'm going to put a little plug for the system of meditation as a progressive path. Let's just lead a spatial model for a moment. Because I think that for me, doing insight practices prematurely wouldn't have helped me at all. I think I probably would have had a psychotic breakdown. In fact, I'm rather surprised I didn't anyway. So, but I think I was prevented from doing so by having really good friends, and really good kalana mittress and people at Taroloka, who knew me well, he said, "Develop positive emotion, become integrative, "do the basic practices, don't run ahead of yourself." So, I just thought I'd make that point. But I do think that these insight practices do need to be handled with care. And one does need to know that what you're dealing with is really strong stuff. It's the human mind and not to rush into it in the wrong kind of way. But anyway, so I thought those are the two reasons. One is that my personal practice is very much about spiritual death, and I've been excited by that. And also, I love this excellent practice, and I've done it on and off. Ever since I've got ordained, I can't say I've done it. I've done it regularly, let's say that. Regularly is a lovely, loose term. I'm not saying I've done it frequently, but I've done it regularly. And a lot of what I'm going to say reiterates a lot of the points from the Vakers and Kudaprabha's talks. And I don't think that matters. I think it's good to hear the same things over and over again from different viewpoints. And interestingly enough, we've all focused on fear. All three speakers have drawn out fear as a major topic, as we'll see when they do my talk, which I don't think is any coincidence, because it is such a... it is going to come up when you meditate. I also thought it was a bit of relief, actually, that we're all talking about more or less the same thing. I thought, well, that's good. We are all on the same spiritual path, and we are all meditating in the same way, more or less. Okay, so, apparently, I'm going to launch into the written version now, so you can stop. So, I'm going to start with a poem from Gavinda to Amitabha, which I think it is a very good poetic sense of spiritual death. "Give me the strength to burst the sheath of selfhood, and like the seed that dies in order to be reborn, let me fearlessly go through the portals of death so that I may awaken to the greater life, the all-embracing life of thy love, the all-embracing love of thy wisdom." So, I think, essentially, spiritual death is all about letting go. Letting go or going beyond a fixed sense of self, and this means letting go into the present moment and investigating our experience there that we discover in the present moment, and we find that there's nothing that's fixed and unchanging who's just a constant flow of change. And this means that it's empty of anything whatsoever that's fixed, including our sense of self. And as Bante said in his original lecture on this stage in the system of meditation, quote, "Meditation is a vardo, an intermediate state, because when we meditate, in the true sense, we die." In other words, the subject-object distinction itself must be transcended. The mundane individuality, pure and perfect, though it may be, must be broken up. Here, the key practice is a recollection of the six elements, involving the giving back of earth, water, fire, et cetera, elements in the universe, relinquishing and turn earth, water, fire, airspace, even our individualized consciousness. This is the key practice for breaking up our sensibility of individuality. And as outlined in Chittapala's booklet, he also mentions other practices that are very relevant to this stage. For example, the recollection of impermanence, the recollection of death, including the contemplation of the decomposition of the corpse, reflection on the root verses of Tibetan book of the dead, meditation on change, and the Shunya time meditations, including the Nadana chain, meditations on conditionality. There's quite a lot in there that one could do if one wanted to. But Bante's strongly favored the six element practice as being the most concrete and practical way of practicing this particular stage. So this is the stage that the practice we're probably most familiar with, shall we've all been given this six element practice, ordination, and specifically linking this with the stage of spiritual death. However, in this talk, I'm going to approach it slightly differently, going to broaden it out as a topic. And I'm going to look at what spiritual death means as actual experience in meditation and how we can bring this attitude into whatever meditation practice we might be engaged with at any given time. So I think, from this point of view, that the stage of Bante's system of meditation can be approached in a really broad and inclusive and creative way. So in the talk, I'll be covering three main areas. I'm going to talk about death and fear, first of all. Then I'll talk about death and love. And then I'll look at how we can look for this experience of spiritual death within the different practices that we do in the movement and the order. So death and fear, first of all. Well, I think it is interesting that Viveka and Kylo Prabha also talked quite a lot about fear. And it does seem to me that when we meditate, we are all of us going to, at one time or another, have to experience and face fear. And I think we can ask ourselves, often, is it fear that's stopping us going deeper? Certainly my own experience. Often when I back off into distraction or don't meditate at all or find ways of avoiding my experience, it is fear at root. That is the problem. And I think it's a totally universal human experience, fear. I think Bante said that all fear is fear of death. But I haven't had to find a quote. People are nodding, so that's good. All fear is fear of death. So obviously, it's very related to this topic of death. Now, thinking even the word sounds similar, I don't know, fear and death has sort of got the same quality to them. So it is good to just look at it quite simply, I think, some of this is quite basic. I'm going to state the obvious, but I don't think there's any harm in that. So it is good to ask ourselves, why are we so afraid of death and letting go? What is it that's triggering this fear? I think there's lots of things. But partly, it's the sheer incomprehensibility of it. It's so beyond the rational mind going into the unknown. It's not something we can think through or think about. Because if we did that, it wouldn't be the unknown anymore. So the very nature of it confounds the rational mind. And I think this is true of actual physical death or the death in the moment, the journey into the void, which is at the heart of our practice. And it's interesting that physical death is one of the few things in life that is certain. It's the one thing we've all got in common. And yet, paradoxically, it's shot through with uncertainty and the unknown. And so we're frightened because we just don't understand it in that level. So I just want to tell you about my first encounter with death, with physical death of a loved one. I was about 20, which I think is extraordinary. At what time in history can you get to be 20 and not have experienced much death in your life? I think that's interesting in the age that we're living in in the modern world. We were quite protected from death. So I'd managed to get to 20 without having any members of my family die. And my granny had died. She was aged 94. This fantastic old New Zealand matriarch in the house by the sea, didn't mess with my nanny. And my father invited me and my twin sister to go to her house, where her body was lying in her bed. And he wanted us to see her body, and he wanted us to say our goodbyes. And I feel very grateful to my dad for knowing that that would be a good thing for us to do, not just to be at a funeral with her body in a coffin. And again, I got this whole scene embedded in my memory. She had this amazing house. One of these colonial houses all on-- they're all bungalows in New Zealand. They're really big and sprawling, and it was just over the road from the sea. So they were all his sand hills across the road, and you'd go across the house and across the road. And there was this house, and it had a porch of a randa that was always full of sand, because the sand always blew in, and these windows that were always really salt stained. And then the house was very quite dark, lots of oak paneling. And her bedroom always seemed particularly mysterious. Nanny's bedroom with these sort of silver brushes on the bedside table, old-fashioned things that people had. And I remember standing on the right side of her head and looking down at her body, and the smell of the room, all these evocative things in the memory. And it just seemed completely foreign. Where had my Nanny gone? So she was lying there, and it was the shell of her body, but I knew it wasn't my Nanny anymore. But of course, that then raises the immediate question, well, who was my Nanny? If this body isn't my Nanny, then what makes a person who they are when they're alive? And I remember standing with a tear streamer down my face, just thinking, where's my Nanny gone? You know, where? What is it that makes a person alive? And I stood there for a while, and I just was trying to figure this out. And then eventually, I realized, oh, what it was, is it was a light in her eyes that had made her my Nanny. It was a light in her eyes that had made her alive and made her this person that I really loved. So of course, this may raise another question, well, what is the light in the eyes in a person that makes them alive? And actually, that's one of the questions that got me on a spiritual path. I wasn't a Buddhist then. And I remember thinking, I've got to find out what is, that's the light in a person's eyes. And I haven't answered that question really yet. I'm still working on it. So of course, the other aspect of death, which is frightening, is the loss that accompanies death. And when someone we love dies, we not only have to cope with the loss of them as our companions in life, but we also have to cope with the knowledge that one day we too will die. I think that's one of the very frightening things about being with someone when they're dying is where confronted with our own insubstantiality and impermanence. And when we're Buddhist, we're also confronted with the fact that well, actually, death isn't a fire of event. It's happening right now in this moment. So we're thrown back onto the fact of our own impermanence in the here and now. So again, these questions, who am I and what am I? Continue to sort of burn into us when we're around death in any form. So what we've done now, I think, is we've arrived at what is basically our core spiritual problem, the truth of the nature or impermanence and the truth of anatar or insubstantiality. So if everything is changing, then this must, by implication, include my sense of self. So I am therefore empty of anything fixed and unchanging. So back to this question, who am I? How do I make sense of my life? And is this death and life a bleak thing, a loss, or is it a gateway to freedom? And I think these are very important questions for us to face to try and figure out and explore. And I think to do that, we do have to be able to sit with fear, not to turn our back on the fear that's going to come up in those moments when we ask those questions. And I think fearlessness is a really interesting word. I'm quite just to know what it is, I suppose it's a buyer, isn't it, in Pali? But it's obviously a word that's very praised in the Buddhist condition, but I used to think fearlessness meant an absence of fear. And that meant every time I experienced fear, I felt I was failing. So if I'm feeling fearful, then obviously I'm not fearless, and obviously that means I'm just not getting anywhere. But I don't really think anymore that fearlessness does mean an absence of fear. I think it means an ability to face fear, to be with fear, and to not react, to not immediately ricochet into aversion or craving. Because after all fear is going to be so fundamental to our experience all the way to enlightenment, I would have thought. I don't think it's something which is just going to disappear. You know, if we meditate well, we're not going to have fear anymore, because we're always going to be going into the unknown. So in the way of our practice is being effective, we will experience fear. It's often a sign that our practice is actually getting somewhere because we are going into the unknown. And given that the higher fetters include conceit and ignorance, there is going to be this trace of fear I would have thought all the way up to enlightenment. So I would prefer to think of this great quality of fearlessness as being courage in the face of fear, and an ability to stand firm in the face of fear, rather than an absence of fear. To be with fear in the face of impermanence so that we can truly live. Payment children says that being afraid of death is being afraid of life, which I think is a really good thing to reflect on. If we aren't willing to be present to the truth or the flux of the moment, and the fear that will inevitably arise, then we will continually find ways to avoid being present at all. Which I'm sure many of us can recognize. And if we don't face the fear of death with awareness to experience it, we will never be fully alive. And the Kasha Shuri told me that Vajrayra Gini, who lives in Spain, has a phrase that she used to use in her works of therapist. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. Which is really good. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. So that's a good one to chew over as well. So of course when we're unwilling or unable to stay with the truth of impermanence and substantiality, then we're going to have all sorts of strategies, very high developed strategies to ricochet into, which are basically eternalism, nihilism, the past and the future. And so these are all habitual reactions and ways of avoiding being with the naked truth of whatever we are experiencing in the moment. So in a way they're like a blindfold that prevents us facing what is staring us in the face. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about eternalism and nihilism. I know this is probably pretty basic stuff to lots of you, but I think it's quite good just to look at what we do. You might recognise. You might recognise a few things. So I think when we're under the sway of eternalism, that we bargain with life. And we turn our spiritual practice into an insurance policy, approach the spiritual life. So we're building up credit that we're going to reap later on, hopefully. And I think what we often do is very subtle, but we think if we follow the spiritual life, we'll avoid suffering. So we're wanting a payoff of avoiding the difficulties of life. We might avoid reactive suffering, hopefully we will because we won't be reacting, but we're not going to avoid things going wrong in life because things do go wrong in life. We're all going to be subject to sickness, old age and death. We're going to have money in a stock market that goes down the panel, maybe. We're going to have family that die. We're going to get ill. We're going to go out at the end of the convention to discover our cows got a flat tire. You know, there's all kinds of things that Sanghsara throws at us, and no amount of Buddhist practise is going to stop that happening. So there's a question to look at, do you have that as a subtle motivation for your spiritual life? That somehow you're going to be able to get things on your own terms? So it's the view of the optimist who follows the spiritual life to strike some kind of deal with reality that will protect from harm. They also think it's the view of the person who lives under the tyranny of hope as a refuge. Hopes are a very, very interesting area to look at. Hope in a sense of always being in the future, wanting some different experience and what's in the present. I think hope can be good sometimes, but I think it's also not a terribly spiritual quality, actually, hope. And I think if one's eternalist, it can lead to a lot of mental and physical strain and attention because you're straining to be in the future when things are going to be better. And I know that because I'm an eternalist by nature and it does lead to a lot of tension. And I think just to talk a bit more about this, I think actually we can be remarkably successful at manipulating Sanghsara. We can get really adapt at it, particularly a bit of awareness, we're Buddhist, we're kind of basically healthy, probably, we're probably quite happy. We've got more confident. So we're able to negotiate with Sanghsara often very well very effectively, but this is the point, picking up on Pankula Prabha's talk, that being happy isn't enough. So I do think we need to also guard against settling down, we're just being able to manage life quite a lot better than we used to be able to. And going to sleep a little bit. And I think the subtle eternals can be very, very seductive and hard to spot. So we think life is okay today, more or less. And tomorrow, it might be even better if I juggle a few things around, do a little bit of shunting around at the different aspects of my life. And when you do that, you're not really facing up the fact that Sanghsara is never going to be totally okay. So you can spend, I think we can spend years trying to just get it all working nicely on its own level and not really plunge deeply into the fact that, hey, this is never gonna be completely navigable on its own level. And I think it's interesting that maybe for us, we have, there's an interesting paradox as women, western women on the whole, sitting here, 21st century. We've probably got, for many of us, historically unrivaled conditions of practicing the Dharma as women. Which is worth thinking about, we've got material comfort, we've got enough food, we've got enough money. I would say all of us have probably got enough money to get by, even if we feel poor. We live in a free democracies, most of us, with religious freedom, particularly if we're not Muslims at the moment. So as Buddhist, we've got religious freedom. We've got access to contraception, which means we've got choice about childbirth, which is very recent. Women have never had that before the last 50 years. We've got the possibility of financial independence. Really, we can do what we like. My conditioning as a New Zealand girl, growing up was you can do whatever you like with your life. The world is your oyster, get out there, grab it, make most of it. I don't think that's true of many women in history. But I think paradoxically, that makes it easier for us to settle down. Because actually, it is relatively quite easy, even if we might feel it's hard. Relatively, it's not that hard a life most of us have got in practical terms. And so I think this can allow us into false sense of security, because actually turning around and looking at reality in the face, that's really hard. That's presence in spiritual life is really hard. So if we've got the option of doing that and maybe thinking actually this isn't so bad, you know, what I've got isn't so bad, it's a quite a hard choice to make. So I think it's an interesting paradox that the opportunities that we've got are the very things that can also allow us to sleep as modern practitioners. I mean, I see this myself, you know, can I really bother getting out there to meditate? And often, well, not often, sometimes I don't get out of there to meditate. If I really was serious about, you know, really wanting to see into the truth, I would get out of there to meditate. So I think, you know, it isn't just a look at this area. And sudden Andy raised a question and a little talk she gave a few days ago, where she wondered whether we're not demanding enough with ourselves. So I think that he's also a good thing to think about. Okay. So neelism, of course, at the other extreme of this trying to get it all just hanging together nicely, so it's all okay, is neelism, which I'm sure we're also probably familiar with. And it's very easy to get into neelism around this area of spiritual death. It's a definite trap for many of us to fall into. And of course, this is more pessimistic and hopeless. It's an absence of hope in the negative sense. Where we think of everything as changing, and I'm just going to die one day, then what's the point in bothering? What is the point in practicing the spiritual life? What's the point in embracing life because it's all just going to end and dust? So this is an interesting thing to look at as well. And it can seem as if everything we touch turns to dust as it is empty of security. And this does become very life-denying and bleak. And taken to its dreams, it can include a sense where one can start to doubt one's very existence at all. You can start to think, am I making myself up? I mean, I've gone there a bit, I must say. So you can start to get quite heady and think, well, if everything's in permanent, everything's in substantial, then who am I? I'm making myself up. It's all just a figment of my imagination. And then you can get really in a bad state. Let me tell you. So it can be very destabilizing and scary when you go down that route. But I think it's interesting to realize that's a viewing, that's ideas that are not grounded in your experience in the moment. 'Cause if one gets out of one's head, these thoughts, who am I? Am I real? Am I making myself up? Et cetera, et cetera. You think, well, what is my actual experience? Then relatively, one is breathing. One's got a body. There's the body on the chair. So that all these sensations on a moment thought they are very real. You know, we're not making those up. Those are absolutely, actually grounded, actual experiences in our body. And I think this comes to the interesting point that we need to remember that Anatar doesn't mean that one doesn't exist at all. It just means that we haven't got a fixed and unchanging essence. Which is obviously a very important distinction to make. And I often use the phrase, all things are full of emptiness to help me counter views that are realistic. Why it really, really helpful, all things are full of emptiness. So there's a kind of fullness aspect to it rather than an annihilationist aspect to it. So apart from eternalism and nihilism, we of course have a multitude of other strategies to avoid facing spiritual death. Mainly around the future and the past, I think. So we fantasize about the future where everything will be nice and secure. We agonize about failings and if onlys from the past. We buy lots of nice things to make us feel more substantial and important. And we try to turn the pleasures of life into a safe refuge. And we tell endless stories about ourselves to ourselves and often to anyone else that will listen. And we do things like we take our laptops and mobile phones on retreat. It's another area that a sudden Monday touched on the other day. Do we really need to do this? I mean, we might. I think the main thing is that we're making choices. We're not just doing these things as an automatic distraction, but we recognize, "Do I really need to do this?" "Okay, I do really need to do this." So I will, or "I don't really need to do this." So I won't. I mean, I've got a really interesting example of being here, actually, where I was a bit bored the other night. There's a few things, actually, down the medical centre of Adjok up to an eye. There's quite a watch of Marie Claire's invokes and that sort of thing. So I tell you, that is a problem. So I know I've got to stack them in the loon now. So I'm sort of trying to take them out of certain places where I might lapse into that and put them in other places where I've got myself permission to read them in the loon. And also the other night I was lying on my bed and I was quite bored. I think I was not going down the Marie Claire read at that time. I thought, "No, just stay with your experience." And I thought, "Oh, I know what I do." I said, "I check the weather forecast on my mobile phone." Because my mobile phone's got this ability to search the internet, which is really a major temptation. And it was raining, so I thought, "Well, that's sort of justified because it's raining." And I want to know, "Well, it'll be raining tomorrow." So I did that on Sunday, on Friday night. In the weather forecast, let me tell you. Maybe a little weather update. The weather forecast was it was all going to improve. It was a bit rainy today and it was going to be sunny and sunny, and I thought, "Great." And then I thought about this yesterday, and I thought, "Why did I do that? "Did I really need to know what the weather was going to be like?" And then, you know, I did it again last night. And I've got this whole thing that he didn't need to do that with you, Mark, that it was really not staying with your experience. You should have stayed with being bored, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought, "Oh, but it's raining again." I said, "So I did it again last night and I'm afraid the weather forecast is pretty bad now." So then I thought, "So they weren't even the same." You do have two days and you run the weather forecast, it completely changed. So that made the whole thing a complete waste of time. And I said, "Do I really need to know what the weather is going to be like?" It's really interesting, you know, why did I do that? I mean, I did it quite a bit of a laugh, but it's not at all helpful to my experience of life to know whether it's going to be rainy tomorrow or not. In fact, it sets up again the sort of disappointment if the weather isn't what the weather forecasted it was going to be. And also, I thought, "Well, that's probably what I do with my internal weather." I'd probably try and give myself a weather forecast internally of how I kind of hope I'll be tomorrow. I hope it's going to be sunny tomorrow, you know. Whereas if we can just stay with our weather, you know, as it is in the moment, without bothering about having to forecast it, then that is a much better way to live one's life. And the other thing that's interesting is I said to someone, "I've done this." And, you know, why was I using my mobile phone here when I didn't need to? And she said, "Oh, but it's not a retreat." And I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting." So the convention is not a retreat, so therefore it's okay to use my mobile phone. And I thought, "Oh, why don't I make this as intense as I possibly can for myself?" I mean, actually, I'm doing quite well. I don't want to give the impression I'm checking the weather and reading my re-clair all the time, because I'm not. I have my little lapses, but I am really doing quite well, that turnness into a retreat for myself. But it isn't interesting that we kind of have these little times. You know, you go to Tarolo for 10 days, and that's a retreat, so I'll really try and be mindful and aware. And the rest of the time, I'm sort of off duty. So I think it's very interesting to look at these things that we do with ourselves. So, okay, how do we gradually learn to face the truth of spiritual death in New Year and now? Now, how do we pull ourselves away from these incredibly seductive strategies that we've got for keeping us out of the present moment? And I think the key, the whole key, is staying with actual experience in the moment. Not our ideas about our experience, but our actual experience, the constant ebbing and flowing of sensations, feelings, and thoughts in the moment. The tantra says, in relation to the wisdom of exsopia, reality is our experience with no ideas out of dawn, which I really love that. I think that's fantastic. Reality is our experience with no ideas out of dawn. So we can let go towards our experience as it is with neither grasping nor aversion and be thoroughly grounded in our experience. And it's only on that basis that we can begin to really see into the impermanent, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory nature of things, rising and falling like waves on the ocean in the here and now, and not as things to cling on to or things to deny, but just as experience and an expression of reality. So I thought, I'll get you all to close your eyes now. You just order a little exercise. So the baker's been saying in the meditations this question, "What is happening now?" So just say, "Are you breathing? Are you aware of your breathing? Are you aware of your body on the chair?" And what are you thinking about? And try not to judge it if you don't think, "Oh, I'm distracted." Just think, "Oh, I'm thinking about lunch or on board or whatever." Just note the thoughts. And just allow it to change. [ Pause ] Okay. So I think we can actually do this sort of thing a lot in our daily life. Just ask ourselves, "What's happening now? What am I thinking about? Am I aware of my breath? I mean, it's shocking when you start doing it, how often you're not aware of your breath? Am I aware of my body? And you realize you're very tense? Is my face relaxed? Are my hands relaxed? Is my throat relaxed? Just ask ourselves these questions. And then that will help us stay with what's ever going on. And just notice if we're judging it and noticing it if we're thinking it's bad and I shouldn't be doing this or that. Just let it be as it is and learn from that experience. We can learn a lot about ourselves by where our mind goes. So if we discover when we do this sort of exercise, we're always thinking about the same sorts of things. Then we can learn, "Oh, that's a tendency I've got. That's what my mind does." And that's very good information that we can then work on. So obviously, crucially, I think, in a spiritual life, it is in sitting meditation and formal meditation that we get an unparalleled opportunity to train ourselves to do this sort of inquiry. I was thinking, in a way, meditations a bit like a laboratory situation because we go into the meditation space, we close our eyes, we reduce the input from the senses we don't move about. And we are in a quiet place and we stay still and we try to create the conditions where we can simply be with our experience in a naked and under-stranded way. There's probably not possible any other time, actually, because any other time there's always going to be some kind of sensory input. And I think, for me, when I'm doing this kind of investigation and meditation, just who am I, what am I, what am I thinking, what am I feeling, what's happening now, I find it really helpful to think of letting go. But I think for some people, the phrase being present might be more helpful. So I think we can use either of those phrases, either let them go or being present with our experience in the moment, and just allow it to continually come into being and pass away, and just notice all the times that we tighten around it and react to things and fix things, and then just let it go, and just practice this art of being with change in the moment. So this is very much the sort of approach to meditation that OCD and I are doing in our work in Manchester with pain management. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about that now, because I think it is relevant to the topic of spiritual death. So what we run is a seven-week program for people who have got generally chronic physical pain, chronic ill health, acute ill health, or chronic fatigue, these sorts of things. We don't tend to take people with mental health problems because we're not trained to do that. And we teach relaxation and meditation and awareness strategies for daily life to these people. So it's not just formal meditation, but it's how can you take awareness into daily life to improve your quality of life. And everything we do is oriented around being more aware of the present moment and learning to respond, not react to what one finds there. So it's all about trying to be totally present to experience in the ways I've described, and realizing that there's always choice. If we can be present in the moment, know what's going on, there's always the opportunity of choice of how we respond to that experience. And so many of us ricochet through life, blindly reacting to stimulus. And of course, it's certainly true for many people whose lives contain a lot of unpleasant physical sensations and illness. It's very difficult to be present about which is so unpleasant. So I'm good to think that this would be a very difficult group of people to work with, highly reactive group of people to work with. But in fact, we've found the opposite to be the case. And I think it's because people are very, very motivated. So by the time people get to book themselves on a meditation course, they've usually exhausted just by every other option available to themselves. They're often quite desperate, which means they're really motivated to put in the effort, because it does take effort, as we all know, the spiritual life meditation does take effort. And they're usually tired of running away. And that's what's so interesting. They've worn themselves out running away, and they recognize they have to turn around and face the demon if they're going to find any peace. So they've seen the futility to some extent of trying to avoid the very experience that is so dominating their lives. And we may have that on mental and emotional levels, many of us, that we've got something which is very strong, but we spend all our effort trying to avoid that very thing. So they're a very courageous group of people who are willing to turn around, look at the demon in the eye, and try to make peace with that experience. So inevitably, spiritual death is a large part of their path, both in terms of losses, but also the potential liberation when they're freed from the tyranny of past and future, because it's a very liberating place to exist. And for people to do well with meditation, and I think it's true for any of us, they have to have let go of hankering after their old selves. So we often put it quite bluntly while I do, that the option of turning the clock back to their pre-accident or pre-ilness self simply doesn't exist. And actually, people don't do it all well if they're still thinking somehow they can do this course and they'll go back to being 16. And young and fancy free, well, they won't get anywhere. If they realise that's not an option anymore, then they do well. So basically, they've got two options. One is to be in pain and be miserable, and one is to be in pain with a sense of initiative in their lives. And that's also true for many of us. The ducker is always going to be there for many of us in one way or another, looking at an aging order up there. So you can put it another way. And I think that this phrase comes from Christopher Reeves, actually, who's the guy who broke his neck, Superman, where he said pain is inevitable, misery is a choice. Which I think is a very, very good little phrase. And of course, this isn't easy. It's all very easy to sit up there and say it, but it's incredibly hard to hear, and incredibly hard to put into practice. But it's the only way to move forward honestly. And actually, there's a sort of relief when it gets stated bluntly. Something OK, that's the deal. I can work with that. Whereas if you sort of try and soften it all, it can all leak away somewhere. So recently, at a continuation class, we did have a discussion, a really good discussion about why do people keep meditating when their experience contains so much better, unpleasant. And the question we ask actually on the course is, isn't meditative and masochistic thing to do if you've got pain. What a bizarre thing to do to sit there and experience it. But when we talked about it, and these people have just kept on meditating for several years, some of them, very, very committed and courageous. And they were all unanimous in talking about the relief of no longer running away. So their experience of life had been enriched enormously because they weren't running away anymore. So they may not have found happiness in any simple sense, but they have found contentment, peace, and a deep sense of authenticity. And these are all qualities which are priceless in their own way. And this ties in, I think, with Winkula Prabha talked about satisfaction, the satisfaction of not reacting to unpleasant mood and love. I don't particularly like happiness as being a goal, but I like satisfaction and contentment. I love those words as being a goal. So the other aspect of dying into the moment, which is really worth exploring, is that our experience can then be so much broader and richer in the moment. There's a Zen Buddhist in America called Darling Cohen, who's got rheumatoid arthritis, and she's written quite a bit about working with physical pain. But I think these principles apply to any dukkha, be it mental, emotional, physical. And she talks about these two poles. And one pole is to acknowledge pain and the burden that has on us. So don't deny it, don't pretend it's not awful. Acknowledge, yes, this is my experience in this moment, honestly. And the other pole is to enrich life so that dukkha or pain can no longer commandeer it. So you've got these two different aspects. And what she means by enriching life, so pain can no longer commandeer it, is broadening out our experience with a present moment. So that rather than pain or unpleasant burden being one of ten things you are aware of in the moment, you make it one of a hundred things. So we all have unpleasant aspects to our experiences, but if we're sensitive, there will also be a multitude of tender, pleasurable, donations to the moment as well. So for example, a sun on the skin, the brush of the hair on your skin, feeling love for a friend, even having enough food in your stomach. There's lots of pleasurable things in the moment. If we rest there long enough to experience them and we're not trying to push things away, so the moment broadens out and becomes very rich and inclusive. So if we live our lives like this, then it can become a succession of rich multi-dimensional sensitive moments where we're less reactive to lights, dislikes, pleasure and pain and so on. And I was thinking in the workshop yesterday when Vakar was talking about rapture, how probably we've all got a little subtle experience of rapture going on all the time, but we just don't find it, we don't look for it. So I thought that was a really interesting point in relation to this as well. So this is where spiritual death becomes liberating. When we die through our old identities and our old selves from the past and we let go of our fantasies and our hankerings for the future, we can come to rest in the here and now and we can discover that this here and now is very rich and textured and it's always changing and capable of being changed through choices and our actions and I do believe this is the path of liberation. So I'm going to talk a little bit now about death and love which runs on from this. It's very important that we don't just look at death in this kind of slightly cold way, but we also look at what the implications of being able to love and be loved more if we are present and alive in our lives. So seeing the truth of interconnectedness I think is another fascinating and important aspect of letting go into the present moment. If everything is changing then this means the boundaries between things must by implication be more porous and insubstantial than we usually realize and it's worth remembering that the gateway to liberation when you see through impermanence is the animator samadhi or the imageless or the sineless. So this suggests that there is no fixed and unchanging image to cling onto when we see things as we really are. So in other words if we have no fixed self then this means that any sense of absolute separation from other also by implication ceases. We are interconnected where in this way we're interconnected. So what does this mean? Because I think sometimes when we hear the word interconnectedness we can think it's some sort of bland merging into a sort of soup of interconnectedness. But this and know your mind band has brilliant on this sort of thing so I've got a couple of quotes from there that really explains hopefully what this means. So he says quote, if one thinks of matter in terms of energy the whole universe can be considered as consisting of life or energy that coagulates into more or less separate forms of conscious life. It is as if the whole of life is a stream within which more concentrated currents flow. So in building up a mental picture of the universe we should think neither in terms of mutually exclusive interlocking parts nor of a sort of undifferentiated mass. The reality is somewhere in between. We are separate from each other and from the world but there isn't a hard and fast distinction between us. What I think of as me and what you think of as you is in each case the centre of a particular coagulation of the common stream of life. It is difficult to tell where I come to an end and where you begin we shade into each other. And he also says in No Your Mind, when you attain enlightenment you no longer have a will that is separate from that of others. You don't experience another person as a sort of brick wall you are coming up against and you no longer experience yourself as a separate and conflicting solid force. You experience others in a completely different way. They become diaphanous or transparent because your will is not coming into collision with theirs. This completely different, more relaxed, lighter, freer attitude taken to the nth degree is something of the nature of enlightenment. The world is the same that you see it differently. So hopefully I have pointed here to a clear link between spiritual death, letting go of identifying with a fixed sense of self and love. And it's not an immediately obvious connection but I do believe it pays a lot of reflecting on it's helpful. And I bring this aspect into my amitaba sardna very directly. So I have a phrase that I say to myself in the practice that invariably softens my heart. I say we are not separate so the only responses to love. We are not separate so the only responses to love and then that makes sense to me of who amitaba is and why he exists and why love is part of wisdom. And I quite systematically track through the relationship between impermanence, interconnectedness and love. And over the years this has become much more intuitively obvious to me. Initially I had to really sort of think it through with these impermanence and I've tried to train myself to have a sort of facility to have that relationship at my fingertips between impermanence and love because it's a really good way of trying to bring that into your life. And in my meditation I often get an image of myself and others being like waves on the ocean. As I breathe in and out I get a sense of us all coming into being and passing away just like waves. There's the constant gentle ebbing and flowing of form in harmony with the movement of the breath. So it's very harmonising and beautiful and helps me get a sense that our separate yet temporary forms are rising and falling from the vastness or big mind of the ocean. It's another way of working with form as emptiness and emptiness as form from the heart sutra, trying to see that relationship. It really pays a lot of time I think, reflecting on these sorts of things. I've got a little piece here from Diane and Katagiri in a book called Returning to Silence which I really like. If you cast a pebble into the quiet ocean the ripples extend on all directions and finally melt into the ocean. This is really human life. So from this vantage point whatever kind of ripples you see, suffering up and down waves, whatever kind of things come up, remember they're happening in the vastness of the ocean and sooner or later they're melt back into the immense ocean. So as well as reflecting on the image of the waves and the ocean to try to get a sense of interconnectedness, I do also use related questions in my meditation such as why is compassion and expression of wisdom and what is the loving aspect of the unconditioned. And I think all these approaches and reflections help alleviate any tendency we might have to sing spiritual death in a sort of cold, dry, nihilistic way. So they do bring in a very warm, heart-based aspect of practice which I think is essential when we're dwelling on impermanence or death. So we balance the two things out. So I'm going to talk a bit now about spiritual death in different practices. It's the third section of the talk how we can bring this way of practicing into the various meditation practices that we have in the order and the movement. So firstly the mindfulness of breathing. So I think in the mindfulness of breathing we can be aware of the three latches in relation to the breath and I think the breath is an absolutely brilliant object of mindfulness in this respect and that is always present as a felt sensation. So it's inherently grounding and real. So it's a very good thing to work with and we can explore the impermanence, the insubstantiality of the breath. So I think it's a tremendous amount of scope for investigating the breath in this way which are the anapana, the APS does very well on the panasticity whatever is. We can also ask ourselves who is breathing, that's a good one, who is breathing. As a way of beginning to break down the separation from breath as experience and self. It's a very good bit from Suzuki and then my beginner's mind where he says, "If you think I breathe, the eye is extra. There is no you to say 'I'. What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale, it just moves, that is all. That's lovely, that bit. And we can also explore any element of control within the act of breathing and practice letting go very fully into the breath. And I find a good way to explore this edge is to use the phrase 'Let the breath breathe itself'. I find it very, very helpful. The metabhavana and the Rambhavaras. So I think in the metabhavana we've got an enormous amount of scope to explore and see through the false separation between self and other. If we ask, 'Who am I?' we can also ask, 'Who are you?' of the other people in the practice. And we can see that both self and other are empty of a fixed and unchanging self and in that sense they're not ultimately separate and isolated. And the whole quality of meta when we start to develop meta includes this opening or releasing of the heart which can help us loosen up our sense of self and become a lot more emotionally compliant and fluid. So I think the metabhavana is a particularly good context to reflect on spiritual death if we do have a tendency towards annealism or a sort of cold attitude to death. I would suggest you use the metabhavana as a way of exploring spiritual death. One can reflect on interconnectedness loving others as much as self as a way of seeing through attachment to a fixed unchanging isolation of self. We can exchange self and other reflecting new idea to yourself as I am dear to myself and so on. We can think what might it be like to be you to really try and enter another person's shoes in the metabhavana practice. So I think there's lots and lots of ways where one can investigate the self-other conundrum in the metabhavana or the brand new horrors practices. Then the six element practice. So obviously this is an excellent practice for training oneself to loosen the mind in its identification with the elements and the senses. And as I've said already it's the main practice that Bante recommends for overcoming pride and the wrong view that one has a fixed and permanent self. So before I had a big operation last year on my spine my systematically embarked on a training. I thought I'm a bit like training for a marathon or something or climbing a mountain I thought I'm going to do a mind training as a sort of experiment. And I did review it later. So interesting. So I decided I'm going to do the six element practice as training for this operation and how I manage afterwards. So I did this experiment practice most days for several months beforehand where I concentrate particularly on letting go of identifying strongly with the elements as being exclusively mine. So I reflected a lot on how all the elements of all the experience of resistance both internally and externally are the earth element. Experiences of movement and fluidity are the water element. With the air element I would sometimes sit and I'd listen to the wind in the trees and I think that's no different from the air in the forest of my body. So I've got the wind in my body I did that a lot. That was really beautiful actually. And in the consciousness element I simply tried to loosen my identification with whatever my mind was getting up to and reduce my identification with the internal and external sense organs. And an image I find really fantastic for doing this sort of thing is you know in our country estates, Chateau they had these massive tapestries that cover a whole wall. I don't know if everyone's familiar with that but they depict an image of tapestry. So it looks like it's solid from a distance. The image of people out hunting where it might be. But when you get closer you realize that it's made up of millions of interwoven colored threads. And between each thread there's a tiny space between each thread. So in my meditation it's like I try to rest in that space. Like the space between the threads of the tapestry. So in my case it's the threads of the resting and the space between the threads of the thoughts that make up the story or the tapestry of my life. So when I do that there's often this really tangible sense of like teasing apart the dense web of meanness and coming to rest in a much more fluid experience of mind. So I find that really evocative image. So the reason why I was doing all this before my operation was I wanted to try to develop some habits some positive habits of opening out towards my experience in a receptive non clinging way rather than habitually tightening against it. Because I knew it was going to be difficult after the operation and I'd have all sorts of from physical things to deal with that I wouldn't necessarily have the where with all to be able to practice but if I had some habits in place maybe that would be useful. So I want to in a way that was the experiment could you set up a momentum of habit that would stand you in good stead when you weren't able to practice in a dynamic way or an active way. And on the whole I would say it did help. So that was good. I reviewed it and I thought yeah that has helped actually. So I'm pleased to have to say that. And I was generally quite positive and mentally fluid. There was a sense of pliancy in my mental and emotional experience after the surgery on the whole. And what was striking was for a period of two days about two days I completely lost it. So I completely went down the pan and it was like I went from being in this quite open space into this tiny little crout prison cell mentally. Which was really fascinating. The contrast was remarkable and nothing had changed really except my mental states which for me really proved the first verse of the Dama Pardhan that the world is the creation of the mind because nothing had changed except my I'd lost it basically. And the way I got out of that was through recognizing what had happened. Being humbled by that. I felt very sort of ashamed of myself actually. It was interesting. And apologizing because I'd had a real mind to somebody. So the next morning I got the nurses to bring this pay phone to the bed and my friend is the person that would apologize. That was really good actually. And gradually it passed. So what was interesting is the contrast actually was what showed me how useful a six element practice had been because relatively speaking I was. I had been in a spacious and open state of mind quite a lot of the time. So I do think it's a really fantastic practice to do from this point of view. And then a visualisation side. I mean maybe I won't say much about that because Karina Mai is going to be talking about that somewhere she is in a couple of days. But obviously in visualisation side of it the practice as we get the ordination from Tibetan tradition there is a strong shunita aspect of those practices where we have both the form and the emptiness, the form coming up the blue sky emerging back into the blue sky. So there's tremendous scope there to reflect on spiritual death. But I won't say anything more about that now. And I think one can apply these principles of the passion of avana or cultivation of insight to any practice that we might be engaged with at any time. The Mouli Yogis walking meditation, clarimetry, yoga, whatever we're doing. So I'd just like to conclude now. So in this talk I've investigated a number of ways how the SEMA spiritual death runs through our spiritual lives and our practice. Looked at fear. The fear we may feel when facing death and how we can react to this by retreating into nihilism, eternalism, the past and future on our strategies. Talked about how I encourage people in pain or who are ill to see the present moment as a moment of freedom. There is just this moment and it contains a wealth of experience both pleasant and unpleasant when we release ourselves in the tyranny of past and future and die at the moment. I've looked at the connection between death and love. One could say that we have to die from narrow egohood if we are to truly love. And I've looked at how we can bring an ash to the spiritual death to any meditation that we're engaged. So I think that the system of meditation we've got in the western Buddhist order is very rich and contains a tremendous amount of scope for investigating spiritual death. But in my experience it does seem to take time to work at all out, how to apply oneself to the different practices in a helpful way. And it seems in the end to come down to confidence, each of us having the confidence to work that out in our own way. So having the confidence to be creative, creative and flexible, but not becoming too woolly and vague, those are obviously the two extremes to work with. And a couple of years ago I went on a retreat with John Kabat-Zinn who practices meditation with the Insight Meditation Society. It was a training retreat. It wasn't sort of a full-on thing. It was a training retreat for people who work or have worked with people and pain or people who have pain. But he did teach us meditation with his method, which is very similar to what Vadra Devi has been doing in the workshops. Where one has different objects of concentration at different times, the sensations, the breath, feelings and emotions, thoughts or choiceless awareness. And with each of these awareness methods, one simply watches the object of concentration coming and going and you investigate its true nature. So the whole approach is very much one of non-striving, non-doing, just resting and being and the moment. And I decided when I was there, I'd just pretend I didn't know how to meditate before and I'd just do what I was taught, not sort of mess about with my other practice. Just think, okay, I'm just going to give this a go. And what was really interesting was by the end of it, I felt much more relaxed and less tired than I normally did when I'd be non-intensive meditation retreat. So this showed me that I've developed habits over the years of trying too hard in more overtly bhavana practices. So rather than thinking, I've got to throw out the overtly bhavana practices, I thought, well, I've just got to bring this attitude of non-doing into my bhavana practices. So I used the discovery as an opportunity to bring in a much more gentle hands-off approach to my usual meditation. So I could see it wasn't the methods that were the problem. It was my approach that was what was making you tired. So over the subsequent couple of years, I've explored a lot this dynamic between more active or overtly bhavana practices and more receptive or non-doing practices. So one can also describe this as transcendence and in two different approaches. And personally, I find that I need both attitudes in my practice at different times and within each sit, actually, on the whole. I seem to need to do something quite active at the beginning to get myself going and then to back off and rest more in pure awareness later on. Viveka and her talk quoted something from a book by Alan Wallace, what is in what attitude where he called these two approaches control and release, which is quite interesting. So control is where we focus and sustain attention on the chosen object at will and releases instead of applying antidotes to the toxins in the mind stream, sorry, instead of applying antidotes to the toxins in the mind, we stop polluting the mind stream, settling the mind in its natural state. So those are the two different ways we can work in meditation. So I'd say since I've been exploring those two different approaches, my meditation has become a lot richer and more open without becoming sloppy because I still keep the structures there also in quite a specific way. So I'm grateful for the structures of the practice I've been taught in WBO and I'm now grateful that I've got the confidence to relax within the structures and try to find that spaciousness to be present as much as I can with honesty in each moment. So personally I feel I've got everything I need and really it's just up to me to do it. I think that's the great difficulty for many of us, isn't it? It's actually just doing it, applying what we know in a helpful way and getting on with it. So I'm going to finish with a poem by Kathleen Rain which I think sums up really well what I've been trying to talk about and this poem is called The Moment. To write down all I contain at this moment I would pour the desert through an hourglass, the sea through a water clock, grain by grain and drop by drop, let in the tracklish, let in the trackless, measureless, mutable, seas and sands. For earth, days and nights are breaking over me, the tides and sands are running through me and I have only two hands and a heart to hold the desert and the sea. What can I contain of it? It eludes and escapes me, the tides wash me away, the desert shifts under me. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community and thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
