In this talk “Loving What Is” Vajrapriya shares his own nitty gritty practice of dealing with hatred, clearing the way for a more mettaful response. “Metta is what arises when you realize that being human isn’t easy.” With an introduction by Jnanavaca. To read about some of our volunteers who helped make this talk available, please see our post on Triratna News.
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Loving What Is
(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. - My name is Niana Varchan. I'm just going to introduce Vaidra Priya. Not that you haven't met Vaidra Priya, all of us have met Vaidra Priya and you've probably had a sense of him already, even if you don't know him very well. But I said that I'd chair the talk that he's about to give. So I just want to say a few words about Vaidra Priya. Vaidra Priya, his name means devotee of the Vaidra. I just asked him whether I could say it was lover of the Vaidra. And he said I could rather sheepishly. So lover of the Vaidra is Vaidra Priya. Priya is this beautiful word, meaning devotion, love. It's a very sweet Sanskrit word. And Vaidra, of course, is the thunderbolt, the diamond thunderbolt of reality. And Vaidra Priya, I think, is very well named. The Vaidra side of him is, I think, particularly obvious in his mental clarity, in his determination, in his clarity. And something about his no nonsense attitude to the situation, to life, to whatever he finds himself in. I mean, this weekend, he was asked to step in and leave this weekend at, I don't know, 24 hours notice. Well, he only found out the day before yesterday. And it's not untypical of him just to say, yes, I'll do it. And then do it with more than competence, with real care, concern, and flair. He's a very, very devoted man in the sense of devoted to whatever the situation is. For a long time, he was the center manager in Cambridge, in the Cambridge Center. And he worked largely on his own to keep Black Center going. I'm sure lots of other people contributed. But Vaidra Priya had a major, major role there, before he became Mitra Convener in Cambridge. And the other aspect, the tenacity, Vaidra Priya won't let go of the truth. We were recently studying last year with Bante Sangerachita. And it's a bit daunting to study with the great man. Most of us were a bit sheepish about asking questions more than once, do you know what I mean? And if you ask something, and then Bante says, nah, you sort of say, okay, not Vaidra Priya. Vaidra Priya said, but what about, and what about again? And how does that square with this? And he had this tenacity, which was delightful, courageous and delightful. So there's something of the Vaidra in all of those things. The Priya is in his care and concern, I think, for people, for the situation, for the Dharma, for the truth. And there's a real love in that, there's a real love in that. Despite what he was saying yesterday, he's a very, very open-hearted, warm-hearted man. I've known him for about 14, 15 years. And I know that. So Vaidra Priya is a very, very suitable, eminently suitable, to talk about Meta. And his title is, "Loving What Is." (audience applauds) - Thank you, that's a very generous introduction, Nana Vaidra. Last year, I spent a fair bit of time in Spain, or actually, this was 2006, fair bit of time in Spain, in the mountains of Spain, at what is now called Akashavana. My partner was opening up the retreat center, that is the Ordination and Retreat Center for Women now. And I learned quite a bit about springs. If you live in the mountains of Spain, you have to know quite a bit about springs. And when the spring isn't used, when it's not kept maintained, what happens is, it sort of slowly turns down into a trickle, and it gets clogged up with bits of moss, and earth, and the spring loses its life. And what you do when you open up a new spring, is rather sweet, really, you, it's a very gentle operation. You sort of, it's usually coming out of some fissure in the rock, and you sort of reach in, and you sort of find out where they sort of earth, and bits of moss are, and you very gradually remove these accretions of organic matter. It's tempting to take a bulldozer to it. Sometimes people do this, or take a jackhammer, or something, and sort of tear it back, and get a nice new fresh wall for the earth, for the water to come through. But springs are mysterious things, and sometimes they don't like this. Sometimes they decide to find a new route, and they just go, and end up somewhere completely different. They find an underground route, so they're completely different. Also, interestingly, you meant to do the opening up of a spring in the full moon, I love that. Not quite sure what to make of it, but that's what they say. So, I think matter is a bit like this. I think allowing a matter to flow is a little bit like this. It's a very organic, very delicate process. And I think that matter is like the water table. It's like a high water table. It's as if there is this infinite capacity of matter present. It's just trying to find a way through all these fissures in our being, trying to find a way to express itself. And all we need to do is find these routes and find out how to de-clog them a little bit. And we've all got these routes. I'm sure we can all find ways that matter expresses itself. Sometimes it expresses itself in a particular way or to particular people. And they just need to find and encourage these modes of expression. So, as I was saying last night, I think it's quite easy to look the matter in the wrong place or in the wrong way. As speaking, there's such a nama. And you said it's a little bit like a panto. We've got a panto going in the Cambridge tonight. And it's behind you. We can sort of be desperately looking for matter somewhere. But actually, it's right behind us. We might be looking for some huge torrent, some really strong feeling, pouring out. I remember my first meditation, or F.W.B.E.O. meditation teacher, a very wonderful man. And whenever he gave a talk on the meta-bavana, it was so inspiring, I heard many of them. And I used to sit there completely enraptured and he'd speak about meta, not as being this piddly-tiddly little emotion. It's this huge volcanic emotion that pours forth. And sit there and be all inspired. But it's great to hear that. And at the same time, it can also lead us to looking for the wrong kind of thing. That's no criticism of his teaching, it definitely had the right effect. But maybe that's not actually how we experience it. So I want to look at ways that different people might experience meta. And I want to look at ways of starting to clear these blockages. And one way of looking at the different styles is by considering the five Buddha mandala. Some of you will be familiar with this. Maybe others aren't. It's an illustration, both of enlightened consciousness and how enlightened consciousness gets distorted by ego clinging into the samsaric forms that we know so well. So it's as if the totality of the Buddha, the totality of the Buddha mind, is so awesome and multifaceted that the Vajrayana decided to refract it into particular components. And over time, it got refracted by into at least five forms. The five forms I'll look at today. It's a very complex symbol of five Buddha mandala. So I won't go into it in anything like any detail. So there's these five Buddhas, the five jinnas that are each associated with a particular set of qualities that include both nirvana experience and also samsara experience. I'll try and explain this a little bit. So they each express the way that enlightened energy expresses itself and the way enlightened energy gets distorted into samsara energy. And each of these Buddhas can be said to be the head of a particular family, a particular Buddha family, that in some way tie together a set of qualities. So we can be said to belong to some of these families more than others. It's a bit like a sort of Buddhist personality or psychological analysis in a bit like a sort of Buddhist māya's Briggs or something like this. And I'll skirt through them fairly quickly in terms of the type of love they may express. I would summon in this particular Buddha family express love maybe. This isn't traditional. The way I'm looking at this isn't traditional. I'm just trying to draw on what I know of the tradition to imagine how these families might express love. So we'll start off in the east of the mandala with akshobia. Akshobia is the blue Buddha. The blue Buddha associated with the Vajra. He's the head of the Vajra family. He's said to have a particular wisdom, the mirror-like wisdom, a objective, clear wisdom. Very steady. He's got the touching the earth, mudra, very imperturbable, steady figure. So maybe the way that's akshobia or that's a member of the akshobia family would express wisdom is a bit more like equanimity, very reflective, objective. This can sometimes be a bit infuriating. I think especially for maybe more passionate people, maybe especially for women, it can be a bit infuriating, question mark. Other people can find it very invigorating, can really appreciate it. Can come across a bit cool, maybe even a bit grisly. It's worth remembering that the Vajra is not only a symbol of reality, it's also a symbol of compassion. So there's something compassionate in the very compassionate and the purity of the mirror-like wisdom. So members of the Vajra family are steady people. They're good people to have around and affix. As I said yesterday, there may be the sort of person who you don't necessarily think of as a good friend until you find that in a particular fix, your good friends have vanished and you're left with this steady, Vajra friend. It can be a bit pokey. Maybe they call the spade a spade, be a bit brisk, and they may let you know if they think you're harming yourself. This is maybe something a bit like tough love or what used to be called fierce friendship. And of course, we can see the kind of dangers that this leads towards. Xshobia is associated with the poison of hatred. So Vajra family people tend to be given to ill will, irritation, criticism, judgment, hatred. These are the kinds of ways that the mirror-like wisdom gets distorted, and I'll be saying more about this. Let's move on to Ratna Sambava. The Buddha in the south means jewel-born. He is the head of the jewel family, the Ratna family. So the jewel, the wish-fulfilling jewel, in fact. Symbol of generosity, Ratna Sambava is a sunny character, a yellow, bright yellow Buddha, associated with bounty and abundance. So Ratna people, jewel people, are sunny, generous, effusive people. They tend to delight in the people around them. They appreciate the world around them, they appreciate the people around them. Generous with praise and appreciation. They've got an eye for beauty. They tend to really encourage the people that they need. It could all get a bit self-indulgent maybe. It could get a little bit too much. A little bit too lovey, lovey. Who knows? Trogram Trungpa talks of Ratna people as being fat. The sort of certain psychic fatness. And Ratna Sambava is also associated with the poison of pride. So maybe there's a certain kind of pride associated with having all this to give. They can give and they can give, and the ego can appropriate that, that of bounty. Moving on to the Padma family in the West. And Amitabha is the head of the Padma family. The red Buddha, the ruby red Buddha. His primary quality is love. So normally when we think of love of meta, we think of Amitabha. He just seems to speak of love, of warmth, of strong emotion. So it's very easy to think of love, to think of meta in these terms, strong emotion, radiating. Padma people, not only very warm, very attractive. It's really lovely to be around Padma people because you sort of, you just can get off on all this warmth that they're giving you. And you know that they want to be with you. This is the great thing about Padma people. You don't have to wonder about it. It's as you do with a Vadra person. With a Padma person, you know they like you. And that's great. That's just great. But it can get a little bit engulfing or a little bit attached. Amitabha is associated with the poison of craving. So this is the flip side of this strong warmth. Is it can get a bit attached? It can, the ego likes this and it wants and it wants more and it wants more. And maybe Padma people get a little bit attached by what they want in this other person. They're giving all this love but actually maybe they want quite a bit from them as well. Maybe when they don't get what they want and maybe things change. So moving on to the north and we've got Amoga City, the green Buddha of the north. He's associated with the karma or he's the head of the karma family, the action family. His emblem is the double Vadra. He has the energy, the accomplishment. His name means the accomplishment that isn't obstructed. Somehow he knows exactly how to cleave through reality to bring about the most beneficial results for everything around him. So karma, family people are very responsive. They see what's needed and they act. This is a way that love can express itself simply through action, simply through responding to the situation. I'll tell you a story of one new year that I spent with my partner. At the time we didn't see much of each other and we had I think about five days down in the south coast over New Year and this was much looked forward to. And on the drive down she got illa and illa and illa and then we arrived there and she just crushed out with flu and she stayed that way for the full five days. And she felt terribly guilty about this, our wonderful holiday, "Oh, what a shame." And actually I loved it in a funny sort of way. I loved it because I knew exactly what I needed to do. I just needed to look after her. I didn't have to decide where we're gonna go today and what we're gonna do and what we're gonna read and where we're gonna read and all these sorts of things actually get me a little bit kind of anxious and edgy. All I had to do is make the food and look after her and read when she's asleep is very simple. I was personally feel happier when I know what I can do to help and I do some voluntary work at the hospice and some surrounded by all this suffering, by all this pain people in these most appalling states of physical discomfort and psychological pain. Most appalling things that can happen to the body, I didn't realize and I can't really do very much but I can make them a cup of tea and I can sit and chat if that's what they want. So this is the Karama family. So what's the sort of danger of the Karama family? Well, maybe the danger of love expressed in this way is it can get a bit busy. It can get a bit too focused on doing things to people, sorting things out, making sure everything's just so. And not quite noticing the fact that these objects that you're tending to are actually people. You can get a little bit too superficially objectively focused on people as objects rather than as living human beings. Also, Amoga City is associated with the poison of envy. So people who are quite focused on accomplishments, focused on activity, focused on having effects out there in the world, they sort of, the ego can appropriate that and start to run a size up. How am I doing in relation to other people's achievements in the world? And then to the central Buddha, Virachana. Virachana is the white Buddha. And in a way, his qualities encompass all the other ones. He's the central defining figure of this particular mandala. But he does have some particular characteristics. He's head of the Buddha family. So he's a central principle. He encompasses all the others. And so there's a sense of spaciousness, of all encompassing. So Buddha family people tend to be very spacious people, very accommodating, unreactive. They sort of don't, somehow, that's a bit curious to me. They somehow don't feel they have to get into judgments about things. They don't have to come down on one side or the other. And because of this, they can have a kind of pacifying effect on the people around them. Even if people around them are caught up in strong feelings or strong conflicts, internal conflicts or external conflicts, the sort of accommodating spaciousness of a Buddha family person can somehow just hold all this together and pacify the situation. They'd be quite contemplative people. The tendency, the possible danger of the Buddha family people, is maybe a bit more spacey-ness than spaciousness. Varuchna is associated with the poison of ignorance. So Buddha family people can maybe be a bit kind of vague. People like myself can call them flaky because they seem so kind of open to anything. They just don't seem to want to make any kind of critical decision about anything as in the taxi on the way up here. And as talking to the cab driver, a really interesting guy is telling me all about his spiritual experiences. And he was just great because there is this kind of sense within me that I wanted to decide whether he was a complete flake, whether he was lying, or whether he was all true. And he's telling me about seeing people's past lives side by side, like a sort of movie screen alongside people, and seeing lights on people's bodies depending on where their illnesses are, and having spirits inhabiting him, and going away again. And it's a fantastic conversation. And for once I could sit there and really enjoy him without thinking flake, or loony, or natural, or whatever it is. He managed to get a little bit of a Buddha family wisdom there, maybe. So that's the five families. So I've said that meta is like this kind of high water table. So do you believe this? Do you believe that meta is there for the having, if you like, there for the expression? If there's nothing in the way, do we believe that it can just flow? I just want to say that I'm talking about it in this one particular way. There's many different ways of talking about meta. So I mean, very often it's talked about as we sort of we find the little seeds of meta and we water them with awareness. And let them grow in this way. That's another perfectly valid model. I'm not making any critique against that model. I just felt inspired to bring in a different model. The more models we've got, as long as they're vaguely correct, the better I think. It's not a metaphysical statement, the sense that meta is there waiting to express itself. Maybe it's a bit poetic. But it does seem to me that when superficialities occasionally get wiped aside, then meta is there. I like a story that Stephen Covey tells about being on the train. This is the man who wrote the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He's on the train and next to him there's a guy with a few kids. And the kids were just running right up and down the train. And Stephen Covey was trying to be all good and saintly and being patient and so on. Eventually he just got so riled. He leaned over the sky and said, "Excuse me, sir. "Do you realize that your children are causing a lot of distress?" And this guy said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. "My wife, their mother, just died and I don't know what to do with them." And suddenly the whole mental shift shifts and he just says, "Oh, I'm really sorry. Is that anything I can do?" Suddenly compassion, meta, was just there. It's just available. But it just needed to, a little bit of understanding, just get rid of the superficialities of the situation. "Do you really want people in the fourth stage of your meta-bavana to come to harm?" Don't answer that. Would it be easier to forgive them, to love them, if they were terminally ill? So I'll come back to this. So what I'm going to do now is speak a little bit more personally about what I feel blocks meta for me. And I'm a bit more of a vadra type. So this isn't a public, it's not meant as a public confession. I just want to give you something that may stimulate your own reflections. And hopefully some of the things I say will be true for you. Maybe that's not the right way to say it, but maybe some of the things I say will be true for you. And that will sort of ring bells. But I'm sure each of us have got our own particular patterns that we need to look at as well. So I'm going to talk about the ways I work with my particular patterns. In the workshop, hopefully you'll have the chance to reflect on your own particular patterns. And how you can work, share ways that you work. Reputation is an arch-critic of NBC, non-violent communication. Because I abhor the idea that everyone's self-declared needs are valid. What if people are just deluded? What if they're neurotic? They need to be told. They don't have a need for space, they're just lazy. So there's much that could be said about the wise use of the critical faculty. I'd love to give a three-hour talk on it. About judging behaviors and not people and all this sort of thing. But I think the main thing to say is simply to notice the pain associated with judgment. That probably tells you if it's wise or unwise. Notice the quality of contraction or expansion. That will tell you the kind of mental state that you're in. So this moves on to ways of working, ways of working with these patterns. The first way I think is simply mindfulness. It all boils down to mindfulness in the end, as someone said. So it's a well-known psychological fact, I think, that that which we can't accept in others is usually some aspect of what we have a difficult relationship with in our self. So this is where there's bits of the mirror missing. It's like weakness, I don't know, I'm just talking about myself now. Weakness, especially in men, is just not allowed, I'm sorry. So if I meet someone who comes across as a bit kind of weak, then I just don't want to go there, thank you very much, because you know, there's some aspect in myself that just, well, you know, we're talking sort of psychological conditioning here, but sort of feels like I don't allow myself to be weak, it's not on. Someone once asked me if I'd ever lost control, and I said no, and they said, oh, oh, I'm sorry. It took me by surprise, allowed people, are taboo, I'm afraid, in my world, talkative up to a point, but then beyond that point, no, not allowed, not permitted in my world. People who are unafraid to blow their own trumpets, not allowed in my world, I'm quite happy to be praised, but I won't do it myself, you know, I find it very difficult to sort of say anything very sort of constructive and positive about myself. So I dislike it and I see it in others. I find it very humbling to see how instinctive these responses are, it's just so deeply conditioned, and I'll just go on to talking about the way that our, well, my responses to people seem to be immediate, you know, when I meet them for the first time, there's usually some kind of immediate response or reaction. So sort of still working along the lines of mindfulness, I want to tell you about Grafton Centre practice. Now the Grafton Centre is a local shopping centre in Cambridge, covered shopping centre, and something I like to do there is get a sandwich and sit down on the little bench, and you have hundreds of people per hour, probably thousands of people per hour, pouring past you, it's constantly coming. And it's a fantastic opportunity because they don't really notice me sitting there eating my sandwiches, but I can kind of clock them. Actually what I tend to clock, if my eyes are allowed to do their own thing, is all the pretty girls, so that's the first thing I clock, just sort of track the pretty girls. And they just sort of sit there and noticing that, oh yeah, there's another one, and notice the aversion either to ugly girls or to brutish guys, there's a bit of fear that arises with brutish guys, it's not just simply a version. And I notice how semi-invisible old people are to me. So what I try and do is bring attention to everyone, you know, roughly equally, and just notice this completely knee-jerk response, and it just seems to come, just flows over me as the people flow past me. And noticing the little stories and the little judgements that come as well, I find it quite sort of humiliating again, when I can tune in to this sort of sotto-voché little storyline that goes on in my daily life, all the judgements, all the stories that are going on in relationship to the people around me. So as a practice on this treat, I encourage you just to notice that as far as you can. Just notice your reaction to people on the retreat, people you've drawn to, people you want to move away from, people in your study group are saying stupid things, people you say, fantastic things, just notice what's going on there. Is there any relationship between, or any connection between your relationship to yourself and what you notice in these people? So this is a basic level of psychological understanding I'm talking about, using mindfulness to bring attention to our responses to the people around us and learning. We can learn from these responses about ourselves, we can take learnings about ourselves back out into these responses. Just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with liking and disliking people, forming initial impressions. This is all the results of past conditioning, it's not karmic in this sense. What is significant is being able to hang loose to them, to notice them but not let it affect our behaviour significantly, and for that we need awareness. And this leads on to another technique, so to speak, the Buddhist technique par excellence for this practice is Metabarva, of course. Metabarva is like a laboratory of awareness in which we can start noticing these blocks, start noticing the missing bits of the mirror, start noticing the distorting bits of the mirror. So, practically speaking in Metabar practice, I encourage you not to be doing so much that you don't notice your reactions, especially at the beginning of each stage. I recommend quite a lot of time just to be receptive, just to bring the person to mind as fully as possible, and just come into relationship with them and just notice what's going on. Be curious, is there anything in the way here? Just try and get a feel for them and is there some view of them? How am I feeling with this person? Is there something in the way here? And in the fifth stage, something I occasionally like to do with the universalising when we're spreading out normally, well, I've started to geographically spread out geographically. Sometimes what I like to do is find different ways of spreading out so like different stages of say everyone who's really very poor, people really suffering through extreme poverty one stage and then people who are poor, but just about getting along and people who are reasonably well off, and then people who are filthy rich and see, you know, where does the matter flow easily, where does it not flow easily, or children and then young women, young men, middle aged women, middle aged men, old women, old men, just see if there's any blocks, any areas where it's very free. So the Metabarvener and awareness generally in our life, we can bring this semi-conscious operation of disliking, judging, liking and allowing transformation to take its place. So I'll tell you a little experience of a carina appeal, and I imagine most of you know about carina appeals, they are a very strong practice where you go door knocking, it's part of the community for six weeks, raising funds for the carina appeal for the carina trust, and it's a very strong experience, I think most people find it a strong experience, and on the first appeal I did, I was sharing a room with someone and it sort of didn't quite hit it off, we didn't really get on very well, you know, we were polite and all that, and I noticed that whenever I came in the room he wouldn't make eye contact with me, and I started doing the smiley thing, trying to get eye contact and all that, and after a while he gave me this very strong feedback, it was a bit over the top actually, but anyway, very strong feedback, about how he experienced my hatred, and I thought "uh-uh, I've been rumbled here", I thought I'd been covering it over with a nice little smile, but actually I was getting quite irritated and annoyed with him, and he just said "look, I don't want anything to do with it, thank you very much", and I sort of found myself in this complete crucible where, here I was sharing room with this guy, I had quite a few weeks to go, he didn't want anything to do with me, thank you very much, I was feeling all this anger and ill will, and what was I going to do, and I was sitting with this in extreme discomfort for a few days, and then something happened, I don't know what happened, I can't tell you, but I knew it had happened when one morning I was sitting in the kitchen and there's a guy doing a washing up, now the washing up, you know what washing up's like, I'm the only person in the world who knows how to wash up, okay, and the same is probably true for you, I know how to wash up, without too many suds, you know, just enough suds and you know, rinse it all off properly and not use too much hot water and there's your efficiency and all that stuff, and he was standing there with this hot water pouring away, suds up like this, and he was sort of throwing the crockery and plates in and you know, sort of gimmicky, quick, squidgy, and I sort of looked at this, and I realized, actually I'm not annoyed, and when I realized that I wasn't annoyed, all this love came up, and I thought this is the perfect expression of him, this fantastically exuberant over the top way of washing up this suds and hot water and noise, it's just the perfect expression of this fantastically exuberant person, and something changed from then, it's hard to say what, but it was a very significant moment for me, in fact I think that that appeal was the most transformative experience I've had in terms of working on hatred and harshness, so I think that judgement and criticism seems to be a deep pattern, maybe it's fairly typical of a badger family person, it's a bit like the mind ticking over, the mind's not really sort of very aware of itself, just tends to sort of settle into these patterns, another technique that I try to use to work with this is conscious appreciation of people, voiced, and joys in people, so it's a very simple practice, just noticing the positive aspects of the people around me, that I just take for granted if I'm, you know, again part of sort of ticking over the mind is just to completely take for granted everything vaguely sort of positive and praiseworthy that people around me do, and focusing on the things that are wrong, so yes, very simple practice of rejoicing, appreciation and rejoicing, which is of course, conducive of moodita, I'll be referring to how the Brahma Vahara is related to the different techniques, so moodita sympathetic joy, a little quote from someone called Mark Rutherford, "It should be part of our private ritual to devote a quarter of an hour every day to the enumeration of the good qualities of our friends. When we are not active, we fall back idly upon defects, even of those whom we love most, so rejoicing in merit as a way of dealing with that." We could ask, "What causes hatred?" And that's quite a big question, isn't it, "What causes hatred?" You could have a very short answer, which is hatred is one of the poisons that's been associated with Samsara since beginning this time at full stop. You could have a very long answer to do with psychological condition effectors, looking at different behaviours in the past and so on, how we've been conditioned, how we were raised. I was struck by quite a short Buddhist answer in a way that's completely blinding you obviously, but it sort of hit me in the talk, I think it's by Vijayash Sri on hatred. She said, "Very simply, all moments of hatred are conditioned by the moment of dukkha." It's as simple as that, "All moments of hatred are conditioned by a moment of dukkha." The simplicity of that and the impersonality of that were quite shocking to me. Independence one dukkha arises hatred in this particular form. So the implication of this is very wide ranging. If we can notice the initial dukkha, we don't have to follow through with hatred, staying in the gap, as it's often said. So another technique still related to mindfulness, but slightly different. So I'm trying to get very interested in the various ways in which I miss dukkha and spin off into a version of one kind or another. So typically, moment of dukkha arises in me, and immediately there's a sense of blame. Who's responsible for this? This doesn't belong in my reality. Who put it there? So this brings about anger, judgmentalism, hatred, ill will, all the rest of it. And I get so much of this working at the Buddhist Centre, I sort of deeply care about the Buddhist Centre. I can care too much in my own particular way because I might just happen to hear a phone being answered in a way that I judge to be badly. I might hear the phone not being answered. I might see the leaf that's aren't out or whatever it is. What happens is immediate. Who's not done that? Who's responsible for that? Siking on my bicycle. It's extraordinary the amount this happens. Someone gets in my way. Would you believe it? Someone gets in my way. And I just noticed those little moments of who dare you? I dare you pull across me even if it was there right away. Still, how dare you? It's not sort of a voice but it's just this little kind of, you got in my way. This is the egocentric mind that thinks everything should revolve around me. Everything should allow me to have a smooth ride through life. Or alternatively, witnessing someone else's pain. If I'm with someone and they're telling me about something that's difficult in their life, different things can happen. I can go into my head and try and find the right words to fix them. Say the right thing. And that blocks me from actually noticing. Here's a real human being who's suffering, tuning into them and just really being aware of them and connecting that way. Or something else that can happen when I witness someone else's pain. So this happened with a friend of mine, must try and show them how to use the computer. And they were doing something really stupid. And they were getting really fed up with this and frustrated. And I was getting frustrated at their stupidity because it's obvious how you do this. And I was getting a bit frustrated trying to show them what to do. And they were getting more frustrated. And I thought, "Oh God, they're suffering, aren't they? This is really painful for them. It's really painful for me." And it's so unnecessary. It's all so unnecessary. And just trying to kind of notice the dukkha in the situation diffuses all that frustration and aversion. So the practice here that I use to try and get in here, just noticing dukkha as dukkha. And I'm trying to use a very simple technique of breathing. Breathing it in. You might have heard of Tom Len. It's just simply a way of approaching dukkha for what it is by taking it in. Just breathing it in and noticing it. Not avoiding it. And breathing out a sense of spaciousness, patience, accommodation. And this is the most fantastic practice because as soon as you do this, you're immediately connected with the rest of humanity. Because the whole of humanity, the whole of sentient existence experiences dukkha. And if only I can rest with that, then there's a immediate connection and compassion. This is the raw material of Bodhi Chitta, the quicksilver elixir. So yes, this is a royal road to compassion, to Karanar. Just another quick thing about dukkha. We don't need to be ashamed of dukkha. I think there's a sense that there's something wrong with feeling dukkha. I think this is one reason why it's so easy to spin off into blame and all these other things, or self-blame. There's the dukkha of self-blame. There's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with my practice. There's something wrong with the practice that's been given me. There's something wrong with me. I'm put together wrong or something. Now this is what can happen if there's a sense of dukkha arising internally. We don't need to feel ashamed of it, and we don't have to put on a brave face. It's part of being human. Kathleen Rain says, "To make the imperfect perfect, it is enough to love it." So this leads me on to the title of my talk, "Loving What Is." And it brings me to my name. This devotee of the Vadra is one where it can be translated. A loose translation I think is loving what is. The Vadra is what is. It's just reality in its simple starkness. So Vadra preers simply loving what is. It's actually the title of the book by someone called Barren Katie, that I've not read to run this. So I want to tell you the story of how I got my name. It was given to me by Kula Nanda, and he explained to me, "Vadra, creator of the devotee of the Vadra." And he gave a little kind of addendum, a little kind of appendix in a very kindly way, which was quite a teaching that's been with me ever since. He said, "To know you must love, to know you must love, to know your friends, you must love your friends, to know reality, you must love reality." This has been an ongoing time. I've been struggling with this. I don't want it to be true. Surely I can know just by knowing, meditate like mad. I don't have to do all this messy loving stuff. But the thing is, while there's not love, there's always going to be imbalance in the mind. There's always going to be bits of the mirror missing. It's the only thing that can approach what is fully. With that love, we're always going to be relating to others in terms of our view of the world, or what we can get from them. What we really need is a willingness to really imaginatively occupy someone else's world, and that takes love. That is love really. We can't explore the territory of humanity like a scientist, because other people aren't objects. They are whole worlds unto themselves. Iris Murdoch says, "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." So yes, this is the the territory of compassion, and maybe equanimity. Someone once said to me, "Metar is what arises when you realize that being human isn't easy." I love this. "Metar is what arises when you realize that being human isn't easy." That really is imbued with the flavor of care and art of compassion. So my final technique, if you like, isn't really a technique. It's all about perspective. I've called it the perspective of life and death. So ultimately, a lack of love is a failure of perspective. It's a failure of vision, or it's a diminished perspective, a diminished vision. To understand all is to forgive all. I mentioned Stephen Covey on the train. Once he understood, he not only forgave these noisy children, he felt great compassion. So this is in the way the flip side of my name, to understand all is to forgive all, to understand all is to love all. There's a reciprocal relationship between loving and understanding. So Banti says, "One can only love people in so far as one understands them and be ready to love them more when one understands them better. And the perspective of life and death is the ultimate vantage point." Alaka says, "All negative mental states are a failure of perspective." So how do we take the perspective of life and death? Well, I was on a retreat with Prakash a while ago. He was on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and he did some very powerful rituals and reflections. And on one of the rituals, he killed us all, which comes to shock. And we thought as a game, but he assured us it wasn't actually. And he read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bada Todol. And he got us to reflect on being in the Bada, in the Bada where we meet Yama Raj of the Lord of Death, who reflects back our life, he reflects back our karma. And he got us to imaginatively enter this world of having our life reflected back to us. And I don't know if he asked this question or if this is a question that arose for me, but the question was, have I loved well? It seemed to boil down to this question. If I was in this position, it sort of raised this question, have I loved well? If I were to die now, will I have loved well? Am I loving well? So I just think this is a very fruitful reflection to take. The Dhammapada, one of my favourite quotes from the Dhammapada, others do not realise that we are all headed for death. People who do realise it will compose their quarrels. Others do not realise that we are all headed for death. Those who do realise it will compose their quarrels. If we can take this perspective from the ultimate vantage point of death, then all the superficialities of our life, all the particularities that seem to call on us so strongly, they can just recede a little bit and take their true place with the humanity just simply relating to humanity as the most important perspective, the most important aspect of life. So with all these different techniques that I've mentioned, I just want to bring it back to a very simple practice, a very simple practice that integrates with all of them. In any moment, especially when you notice something blocking meta, but in any moment, you can simply let the heart and mind be as spacious as possible. There's almost a kinesthetic flavour of meta, sort of felt bodily experience of meta that is expansive. One has to do this to express if it is expansive. It's almost physical. Open chest, it seems to reflect itself in an open chest and opening the chest can help to encourage it. So that's something we can always come back to a very simple practice. So I'd like to summarise. So I've said that meta is a little bit like a high water table. So in other words, there's this huge body of meta, like a huge body of water, and our task is simply to unblock gradually, unblock the various channels, open up increasingly of the channels that let it flow. I've said that it expresses itself differently for different people, and one way we can have a flavour of that is by looking at the five Buddha families, how might meta express itself through members of those different families, and some of the possible blockages as well. Instantly, I don't want to give the impression that we all belong to a family, and that is us. It's like any psychological classification. It's much more fluid than that. There's aspects that we'll relate to more than others. Maybe we belong to a few families, so to speak. Then I'll look more personally at my own typical basic blockage, what I refer to as 'Astrobeas Broken Mirror', a broken mirror, which doesn't allow some aspects of reality to be reflected. It distorts other aspects of reality. And the way I work, through mindfulness, noticing judgments, views, reactions, arising. Noticing them kindly, we always develop meta with meta. Meta-bavana is a crucible, is a lab laboratory for doing this kind of work. I mentioned conscious appreciation and rejoicing. It encourages moody-tah, sympathetic joy, sympathetic appreciation. I talked about staying with Dukkha, noticing Dukkha, staying with Dukkha, trying not to let it spin off into a version as far as possible, and loving what is, this loving life as it presents itself to me. This gives a sense of karana. And then finally I mentioned the perspective of life and death, the ultimate perspective, what really matters in this perspective, which leads to a flavour of Upekha, of equanimity. And in all of these we can come back to a simple, kinesthetic sense of opening of spaciousness. I'll just mention one more practice which we'll be doing tonight, which is puja. The blockages, these habits, these patterns that can stifle meta, they're often bigger than us, a bit more bigger than our conscious mind, if you like. It's like we can't necessarily work at them very directly in our conscious mind. So as part of this opening up into the bigger mind, we can call on something bigger than us, call on the Buddhas if you like, call on the Bodhisattvas, however you want to think of them, call on higher aspects of ourselves if you wish. So we open up to the larger reality. And when we do that, then it's as if our mind, our heart and mind, is meta. We become that high water table. This is a quality of heart and mind that we can bring to any experience. It's not something that we have to sort of generate consciously in an interaction. It just is us. And ultimately, it is us. We can just bring this quality to any experience and it flows completely freely, depending on how it needs to flow. And when that happens, then we can really start being a people of loving kindness. We can really start bringing this quality of meta into a people of loving kindness. And we can really be said to be loving what it is. Thank you very, very much, Patrick. I felt it was a gift of a talk, actually. There was this incisive clarity about the Dharma and an incisive clarity about how to apply it. Very, very candid talk about how Vajra Priya himself applies it. And I think what I felt was you had an experienced Dharma practitioner teaching from his experience exemplifying how to how to practice. So it was a real gift of a talk rich with practical suggestions that were also challenging. I think there's much material in there to reflect upon and discuss in our groups and try and see what's relevant for us. So it was a real sort of gift of a talk of sharing very generously his own experience, as well as putting the Dharma into real, clear perspective. So thank you very much, Vajra Priya. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebutestaudio.com/community. And thank you. [end] . [BLANK_AUDIO]