(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. - Good evening all. I'm very glad to be back in the north London centre. I feel a bit as if I'm in India. I've just given a talk at the London Buddhist centre in East London and got in a car, come over and back on the stage again. Which I'd rather enjoy. Not quite a minute for people in East India. I wish I would like to go around India and move from platform to platform. So I'm going to talk to you about a nidana chain that's found in the party canon. There's especially concerned with social strife, how social strife develops. And in the course of going through this nidana chain, there are a few points about Dhamma that I think are relevant to us as individuals and as as individuals in society, in a collective situation. So in the time it's available, I'll try and draw out something from it. I want to tell you the context in which I relotted it. It's a sutta called the honeybaw sutta, the mudu pendala sutta, from Majima Nikaya, Majima Nikaya 18, anybody who's interested. And I brushed off this sutta, which I hadn't looked at for a long time, when I was recently in Hungary. I've been visiting Hungary to support some metrics of ours. Who are mainly from a gypsy community. All of them are from a gypsy community, apart from one. And they're working together to create educational opportunities for gypsy youngsters who basically evade the education system. Partly they evade it because they are, until quite recently, the great majority of gypsy children were declared mentally subnormal and were given separate classes where they were supposed to get special teaching for which money was provided. But of course what it meant was they got less teaching and the money went to the ordinary schools. This truth is really is like that, it was like that. So a lot of gypsy children just drop out of the school system very early on. It's also because of the whole history of the gypsies in relation to the wider society. Quite strong sort of sense of alienation and separation. You'll be familiar with it from Romania, seeing what sort of things there. Very poor relations both ways. And a lot of suspicion from gypsies are mainly and in contact with gypsies that don't know so much about how Hungarians view it. Why do Hungarians? But to tell you that, make the point clear, gypsies refer to the white people as Hungarians. They don't consider themselves Hungarians. So it's quite a high degree of separation. So our friends from gypsy community are trying to get young people back into the education system. But they're doing it in a way that's sort of appropriate to them. Which means pretty wild, lots of music and very lively. It's quite difficult teaching, but very rewarding. More and more students are coming through high school and leaving certificates. And therefore able to get jobs because 90% of gypsies in Northern Hungary are unemployed. So I went to, I've been going to Hungary once or twice a year for the last four or five years. And just trying to keep connection with our friends there, our mittress there, encourage them to look on. They connect very strongly with our work in India. And they identify themselves with that work. They consider themselves to be in the equivalent position to the Dalits in India. So they identify very strongly as opera and medical. When I went this time, we were travelling from Budapest up to the place where our friends work. And there's a phone call from the local police chief who said that there was going to be a political rally in the village where we work half the village of gypsy, half nor gypsy. And this political rally was by a, what really from our point of view is a fascist party. It has its own militia. It's been involved in a lot of violence against gypsies. The sort of thing that makes you glad to be British. We haven't been MP, but they're pussy cats compared with that. And this party, Yopic, which has had 30% of the vote in the last European elections coming to the village. That recently visited a nearby village and there have been a riot. And it ended up with quite a bit of property damage and 100 gypsies arrested. So the police chief very sensibly wanted to try to get a dialogue with what they knew was a, something of a local gypsy leadership, which they knew was likely to be more reasonable than so on. And a meeting was arranged with the police chief, the mayor of the village and the local gypsies. It was horrific, it was awful. It was quite interesting for a start that the gypsies that our friends have been working with were very measured and sort of, well, they're putting their point of view quite strongly, but quite recently, but others absolutely want shouting Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. So no mutual incomprehension that the authorities didn't sort of display sympathy. They didn't sort of engage in a some sort of dialogue, which would have made the gypsies feel that they would have had some protection. It was just a sort of classic miscommunication. I've seen a lot of bad things in India, but there's something about it being in Europe that makes it more kind of pinching. The conditions people live in, it's terrible. And afterwards, I was talking to our mittress and I said, "Well, it's strange that there are..." Oh, no, one of them says something, "Well, what is it got to do with this?" So I said, "Well, as it happens, there are a number of symptoms in which the Buddha gives an analysis of social strife." So they were very interested in wanting to hear that. And I, as I say, dusted off a sort of that I've looked at a long time before and presented it to them. Because some of the people I was presenting to are really very poorly educated, indeed. Many of the people that our friends are working with don't really know where Hungary is. They don't know their own country. They don't know where it stands in relation to Romania or Germany or whatever. They just have a very, very limited view of the world. So not one education doesn't, of course, they're not intelligent, they're extremely bright. Something I've learned to India, but intelligence and education don't always go together. You get some very, very highly educated people who are frankly stupid. And you get some very, very uneducated people who are extremely intelligent. So I had to do what I'm very used to doing in India, but I had to do it even more, which is get to the heart of the matter. And the sutra is quite complex. It's got sort of chains within chains. It's not exactly straightforward presentation type. Sort of boil it down. And as always, in doing that, who gained most from it, me, I learned more from it than I'm sure they did, although they were very interested. And I think quite impressive the way that their situation was clearly sort of analyzed, you know, 2,500 years ago. So what I'm going to present you is an epitomized version of that sutra, which in the first place shows how disharmony arises, or in the words of the sutra, how the taking up of stick and sword, quarrels, disputes, arguments, bad words, in general, kerfuffle, the use of full party term, how they come about. But on the way, I think it's, well, of course it explains our quarrels with each other, even probably here at the North London, would have said to you, have your quarrels, I don't know. But it also, that gives us a bit of an insight into what goes on in our own minds, which is particularly applicable in meditation, which I think gives us a quite valuable, well, a sort of moral for thinking about what goes on very often in our own meditation. So I'll take you through it and then try and draw some morals from it. So the nadana-chef, and you're familiar with nadana-chef, you know, the outside of the wheel of life, the 12 nadanas, it's actually a sequence that you get in different combinations, in quite a number of different places, and there are three supers which do roughly the same analysis as this, which look at the way in which from our basic experience, we get into dispute and strife and trouble. So that the sutta begins with, or rather than a nadana-chef begins with a triad. It begins with sensation, feeling and interpretation. For those of you who know your Pali in Sanskrit, sensation is spasha, or fasa. Feeling is vedinar, interpretation is sanya, or sanya. So you're familiar with that from the 12 nadanas, you get, it's spasha, vedinar. You don't get sanya in that sequence, but it comes in earlier, in fact. But here it's dealt with as a subsequent to feeling. Of course you get it in the five scandas, which, again, some of you will be familiar with. Those are basic ingredients and experience. So first of all, we come into sensory contact with the world. Our senses engage with the world around us, which produces sensory impressions. To begin with, those sensory impressions are more or less mechanical, you might say. It's the interaction of the organ, the object in consciousness. But very, very quickly mixed up with that primary identification of an object, or sorry, that primary sensing of an object, or data, let's say that sensing of data, is a feeling. That is a feeling of pleasure pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. Most all, according to Buddhist theory, psychological theory, all our sensory input has some hedonic tone. It's either pleasurable or painful, or somewhere in the middle, a bit neutral. To sense is to have a pleasure pain response, even if it's a very dull one. It's quite significant, quite important, because often we're not aware of that, but it's impinging on us. Our sensory feeling response to our sensing is present to us, but largely unconscious, not made conscious. And it can often lead to responses without you really being aware of it. So it's a sort of thing where you see somebody for various reasons, you just take a dislike to them. And you can't put your finger on it. Maybe nobody else does this. But it's almost immediate automatic, it's visceral, as you would say. You just immediately know that you dislike or like. We don't even know you do it, you just do it. That can then determine your interaction with them the way you talk to them. I thought they then respond to you and then the way you respond to them. So, but to everything, you know, the floor has some sort of impact on you. You like it or you don't like it or you could care less. And so on. Every element of our sensory experience has some idonic response. And a neutral response is considered a response. It's a sort of normal response if you like. But so that non-response has a consequence. It can lead to a sort of dullness. Anyway, we won't go further there. So what happens then? You take in information, you have an immediate response to it. And then you identify it. Of course, it's not nice and neat and sequential as I'm putting it, but in principle, it's like this. So then you say floor, ceiling, light, what's the name? Shouldn't matter, et cetera. You, some yard means interpretation. Basic identification of the elements of your experience as a this or that. The applying of a label to them. And of course, simultaneously, the placing of them in a pattern of memory and so on. All of this is at a very, very basic level here. It's what I call primary reality, primary experience. Well, you're just taking things in. You're just in a very ordinary way, a very commonplace way, identifying things within your experience. Yeah, basic experience, what is in the most ordinary sense. But of course, the feeling that's present in your experience gives it a charge. You want to keep having the pleasurable experience and you want to know how to get it again in the future. You want to end the painful experience and you want to know how to avoid it in the future. And that the neutral experience, well, you sort of want to liven it up, if you like. You want to engage a bit more. Neutral experience is sort of boring, I suppose, you could say. So there's almost instinctual. Well, there is an instinctual response to the pleasure and pain content of our experience. A charge. And well, we're human beings, which means that we have a self-conscious intelligence. We have the ability to use reflection to deal with our experience and work out how to continue with the pleasurable, avoid the painful, get the pleasurable in the future, avoid the pleasure and the painful in the future, et cetera. So the distinctive human advance evolutionary terms is the ability to identify ourselves and to reflect on our experience with the aim of avoiding. Pleasure, no? Getting pleasure. Getting pleasure, avoiding pain, et cetera. So I called it thinking here that the Pali word is "Vittaka," or "Vittaka," which some of you would be familiar with from the description of the "Jarnas," the first one I have, "Vittaka, Michaya," in it. Come back to that. So a basic reflection and taking your experience, standing slightly separate from it and using thoughts, concepts, to try to resolve it in the direction that you want. But what happens usually, then, is if there's any substantial charge behind it, it gets out of hand. And it begins to-- well, the word in Pali is "papancha," or "papancha," which means to spread out. It sometimes translates as proliferates. So the initial experience, which is quite simple in a way, then gets reflected upon in the light of previous experience, memories, culture comes into it, the language that you're using, to some extent, has connections and associations, underlying tendencies that you've got, which go very, very deep. Some of them go right down to a basic green Haitian delusion. Some of it, which is more personal unconscious. They get caught up in this reflection on your experience. And yes, it spreads out. It connects with previous experience. Ah, it was like that before. Or he or she was like that before. They're connected with them. That's why that. So a whole sort of proliferating, complicating, spreading out of thought takes place, which tries to find a way of explaining and therefore dealing with the charge that's in the initial experience. And that proliferation of thought then simplifies. It's a little advice into a sort of system, which provides a body of explanation and a sort of project for action. That can be highly personal. You know the sort of thing. Something's bothered you. Somebody said something to you. You sit down to meditate. And your mind goes to work. Often you can't do anything about it. It just sort of goes to work. And you start thinking about this. You start thinking about that. Old swords get reopened to take a horrible one. You end up with a sort of a kind of resolution, which is basically a manifesto, a project, a plan, a what to do. I'm going to say this to you. I'm not going to, et cetera. So you have a sort of complete pattern of exploration that excuses you, that avoids you having to take responsibility, which provides you an explanation of why they behave like that, and which gives you a course of action to deal with it. So it can be highly personal in that way. It can be group social, a group of people explain their common experience in similar terms. It can be cultural, so it can be on a very large scale, whole societies have built on patterns of proliferation that explain things. I've just been researching the Xi in modern Iran and Iraq. And just looking at the way they were trying to use their whole historic doctrine, theology, and explanation of history to explain what was happening to them now, where the Americans fitted in, and the British, too, Google, what I'm going to say. And trying to validate their own preferred course of action in the life of that explanation, horrific. Again, you could see with the yogic members, the fascists in Hungary, the way in which their experience of the collapse of communism with, suddenly, the Hungarian economy, which was one of the best of the Eastern Bloc, couldn't stand up to West competition. Whole swathes of industry just disappeared. I've seen it going through northern Hungary. You just see it probably the same in the remaining. You just see coal mines empty, steelworks empty, factories just closed, nothing, huge, huge unemployment. Whereas, for all its vices, Hungarian communism had provided a full employment. Gypsies were fully employed, suddenly gone. So, deep insecurity, then a deep sense of humiliation. Hungary is a terrible history of 400 years of being trampled on here, there and everywhere. Done their own bit of tracking, that's another matter. So a sense of humiliation, as a human being, as a nation, and a seeking for explanations of what's happening in terms of who's responsible, try the Jews, but they're not so many of them left, and gypsies are an easy target, and so on. So you build up a whole political agenda, social political agenda, which helps to explain what is actually a quite personal experience, albeit one shared by a large number of people, which then forms into a program, a political program, in this case. I won't go into what it means, but it's pretty horrible. So you've constructed an interpretive framework, either on a small scale, on a moment-by-moment scale, or a day-by-day scale, or on a sort of macrocosmic scale, a shared, common explanation, which is embodied in language, in structures of authority, in social structures, and so forth. That then itself orders new experience. So the things that you now experience are filtered through the construction that you built out of your initial thought proliferation, and so on. So you build what I've called a secondary reality, which deals with the experience of the primary experience in terms of an explanatory model, which is all, what, mostly artificial, mostly constructed, which, of course, comes into conflict with other people's constructed realities. So in the case that I was talking about in Northern Hungary, gypsies have their own constructed reality. And I heard them doing it when I was talking, obviously. The two then come to conflict, and you get, well, there'd be murders and violence, bloodshed further. You have problems for all parties. You can see that on that scale of two groups within a single society, you can see it within your own immediate family or personal environment that you've got a different construction of reality, which then conflicts with somebody else's construction reality. You can see what happens on a grand scale, on a global scale. You can see what's happening in the Middle East as these constructions of reality, which just cannot but conflict. One of the things that's come out of my recent reading is the extraordinary failure of the American administration to recognize the reality of Iraq when they went in, and failing to plan for it, a naive belief that democracy and shopping were enough to save the world, and not realizing that they were dealing with a tribal society with a very powerful religious belief, which is a strong supporter of violence under certain circumstances, which is built. Sheism is built upon martyrdom. So this complete mismatch, the Americans are very fluent in believing that the benefits of liberal market economy and democratic political system would generate a new Iraq overnight. And it's completely wrong. The situation in Iraq is awful, far worse than we're allowed to hear from what I've been reading with. So you could sit on that scale. I'd just let a history of the three bollocks who were, as it were, involved in the first world war-- the King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Tsar Nicholas-- and their personal interpretations of their respective positions in as rulers and of each other. I was a strong factor in the personal war. Wilhelm's relationship with his mother, who was English, had a lot to do with the first world war-- mothers, terrible things. So the system of moving from primary experience to a construction of that experience in terms of patterns of interpretation that move steadily away from the primary experience, which end up with a sort of constructive lens, which then distorts what you see. So that, for instance, a Yolpik member in Hungary, when he sees a gypsy, will see a threat. They will move in a particular way, which communicates anxiety or hatred or content. So gypsy starts to play out to that. I've seen it. And vice versa. So our constructions then shape reality, because the Americans had a particular view, the British Americans had a particular view, possibly the British out of it. When they went into Iraq, they shaped the experience of the Shia. The Shia then responded, in a particular way. Of course, it's another whole story with the Zullis, and then the Kurds, and so on. So discharges a disharmony violence conflict disaster. So what this then tells us is that the problem starts here. Problem starts when we allow our thinking to get out of control. You probably get some experience of this, especially when you start to meditate or try to apply mindfulness. You see that something bumps you. And when you sit and meditate, it's very difficult to stop it getting into your brain, getting into your mind. Sometimes, suddenly usually, it's out of control before you've even seen it. But sometimes you can see that it's getting out of control. I had a very strong experience of this sort of law of solitary, I remember mentioning that last time I was here. So there's no outside stimulus, really. There's only memories. There's a lot of sheep, but they're pretty harmless on the whole. And what I'd noticed is I'd remember something that had happened to me, something of somebody who'd gone to be a bad, awful thing. Then I'd sort of imagine a conversation with them. And I'd imagine what they would say to me. And then I would get upset about what I'd imagine, that they were going to say to me. The only person who does it doesn't say that. And you can even get to a point where you're actually accusing the other person of a certain attitude, which you've simply proliferated into existence. They haven't had a chance yet for tears to fling at you. So you can sometimes see yourself building patterns of proliferation, which then affect the way you relate to people. That's why sometimes you get sort of miracle, don't you, when you manage to generate matter towards an enemy. And next time you see them, they behave differently towards you. And maybe you're directing matter to them does affect them. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that you are approaching them in a different way. So they respond in a different way. So our proliferation creates self-fulfilling prophecies. And it's something, I think, very important to learn to notice in one's own mental activity. You notice a lot in conversation that you're talking about something, which perhaps is a problem, or something that you like. And you can notice, if you listen, you can usually notice it better with other people. The sort of thinking gets less and less realistic. It moves away from what actually is, and becomes more and more constructive and interpretive. Some people are very, very good at it, and can build very, very sophisticated architectures, cathedrals of interpretation. Some people, it's more obvious, more clunky. It becomes the same thing. It's what, in Buddhism, we call views, interpretive structures, which are not a direct reflection on reality, which are a construction of reality for purposes of self-preservation, as it were, but very inefficient. So the problem is here, a point at which you're engaging with the primary experience gets out of hand. A lot of what we need to do in meditation, I think, is learn to get a grip on it, to stop it from happening too soon, but to stop it happening at all, to stop it, to notice it happening, and if you can, rain it in. And the primary antidote is to come back to basic experience. When you find yourself getting out of control in that sort of way, you come back to those things that are beyond doubt. In other words, touch, sensation, even floor. So just come back to those elements of your experience, which are primary, without too much. So to put too fine a point upon it, you could even question your interpretation, when is a table, a table, and when is it a floor for dancing on? We've had too much to drink. But just a primary identification. In other words, mindfulness. So what we call mindfulness is, to some extent, learning to come back to and stay with absolutely basic experience, particularly mindfulness in the form of body mindfulness. [INAUDIBLE] Just being aware of your basic sensations. You'll find if you're sort of off on that track, coming back to your basic awareness does sort of diffuse the trend of tendency. It brings you back to something much more solid, much more real. You're going to see the problem with this is constructive. It has a sort of quasi-reality, I call it secondary reality. But yes, it's abstracted from your direct experience. So you come back to your direct experience. Your vitaka, your thinking, directs you back to your primary experience. So you sort of tell yourself, we're just watch your sensations. Just watch your breathing. Just see what your immediate feeling is. So vitaka there, instead of proliferating, takes you back to what's really going on. Vitaka also, it's intelligent to appraisal. Gives you a possibility of an intelligent appraisal of how to act. After all, you are in a situation. You are unemployed. You are threatened by a fascist organization or whatever. So you need to act. You can't just sort of say, oh, it doesn't exist. You have to act, but you need to act in a way that's going to be of the greatest possible benefit to you. And indeed, the greatest possible benefits to everybody. In other words, you need to introduce Shila. Reflection on the situation in terms of what actions will provide the greatest degree of benefit to the greatest number, starting with yourself. So you're thinking, instead of zooming off into proliferation, reflects on the situation with a helpful intention, with the intention of providing the best possible solution. The thinking faculty, which are distinctive human faculty, first of all, yes, it brings us back to primary reality. Secondly, it allows us to choose a skillful course of action. It also takes us into a deeper experience of what is actually going on, a deeper experience of what's going on through meditation, through aesthetic exploration. So that's-- yes, it's these primary sensations and feelings and interpretations. But they're given greater richness and depth through the turning back of our reflection upon that experience and a deepening of sensitivity to it. Also, of course, thinking has the function of reflecting on the real nature of that experience, in other words, of Pragya, or the Pashina, of reflecting what it really means to sense, what the nature of the objects that we're sensing is, they're impermanent, the devoid of substantial existence. So that if you like, you've got a cycle, a wheel. But you've got also an implicit spiral by breaking the chain here, by not allowing thinking to go on through proliferation, but getting your thinking faculty to bring you back to mindfulness, getting your thinking to enrich-- I don't know to think about the most skillful action possible within that situation, by using your thinking to enrich your experience, and by using your thinking to discern its real significance, its deeper meaning. You have a spiral emerging at this point. So I've skipped you through it. There's a lot in there, but I've given you at least the outline of the pattern. And I've been interested for a few minutes to see if there's anything that anybody wants to ask or comment or disagree with or quarrel with, but remembering not to proliferate in the core. I'd just like to tell you that I do the same thing you do. Oh, good. Thank you. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, yeah, and then argue. Yeah, thanks for that real sure is. Thank you for that one day today. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are you getting upset? They haven't actually done it. But the emotions justice really-- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do it too much. It's confession time. Now I've got that out of the way. Could you just remind us of the name of the sutra again? It's the mudopindela, sutra. And it's usually translated as the honey ball. Ball. Ball, yes, a ball of honey. I think of it paklava. But I like paklava. So it's a sweet made of honey. So at the end of the sutra, somebody says, oh, that's a wonderful sutra. It really tasted so sweet and things. So everybody said, well, we'll call it there, et cetera. And one thing, don't let me just ask you one other question. It'd be interesting to know how our friends in Hungary actually responded to that. And was there an outcome? Well, I couldn't say that in a way what I'm still at the stage of showing people that the dumber actually is relevant to them. But the outcome that I noticed was that some people were able to use that to defuse other people's proliferation. So before somebody who said it's been reported that somebody works at the police station has said that the police are colluding with the yopic to come and burn our sutra. So somebody said, wait a minute. Look, that's up here somewhere. Particularly it's one of these rumor. What's the evidence? What's the facts? So some people got it and sort of realized what it was getting at. Others didn't believe it, but some got it. And I'm sure it will help them. But really at the moment, we're at the sort of stage of learning that the dumber is relevant to desperately poor, marginalized people. Unfortunately, I've got a lot of experience of that being the case in India. But I was impressed myself at the power of the sutra to talk about their experience. There's something I've always felt we need to do is to address what's really going on for people. So for instance, I remember arriving in Valencia just after the Madrid bombings. And I started to talk a bit about I can't go on without saying something intelligent about that. I gave a talk in India on the night after the Bombay Paris attacks took place. So I gave a talk a bit along these lines on the causes of violence and what we can do about it and what wants response to horror in the world. So I think it's very, very important to sort of take the issues that are really hot for people. First one I tried to do in that situation. And indeed, I won't say that they all were able to deal with it. But it made quite a big difference to some. And they're getting more and more of an idea of just how potent the dominant is. They're supposed to. Jesus Christ. That's not a story. It brings us back to what Pudders is about. And it's kind of just the way you talk about it. It's kind of really in thinking in relationship to what you're experiencing. Exactly, yeah. In that kind of way, because a lot of people think about this, a lot of people talk about it. And it's not a point of thought thinking. Exactly, yeah. And also, so it's actually that real, kind of, putting togethers of our reflective nature in relationship to experience. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, somehow, I don't know if it's still-- Yeah. That's negative by that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, what I said about the tucker taking you back to Schwerty and meditation, so forth, is my own. Well, it is there in the scriptures, but it's not worked out in those terms. But it's to me, the only place where you find a kind of a way of seeing the positive value of thinking. And what we want to stop is proliferation. So when they want to stay, we want to stop thinking. What they really mean, or they should mean, is they want to stop proliferating. This is a compulsive spreading out of thought, which is very strongly emotionally driven. And again, what is called in the scriptures, drishly, of used, did you? Well, what I'm thinking about, I suppose, is the silent practice for example. You're thinking that you're actually doing-- your brain is up closer to your sensation. Yeah. So in a way, there's proliferation there, too, because it's a deep thing, and then broadening up, in a kind of way. But it's in a very different way than that. It's made a nation of yourself, of yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I suppose it seems to me that the issue is that proliferation abstracts you from the situation, and it creates increasingly a false veneer, or the asthma, on top of experience. But whereas Vitaka probably used, as within meditation, it directs you to the deeper qualities and the richer qualities of the experience, of experience. And I think this one is very distinctive about Buddhism. But it has a very, very deep view of the possibilities of human experience. But it refuses to abstract them beyond a certain point. Yeah. Just like a different question. And you were saying that the proper thing we do is come back to the elements in that experience, which we now are a rail. I don't know if they're here, exactly. But we cannot be doubted, aren't we? Yeah. Beyond that, one way or the other, let's come back to physical experience, which is fat quality. Are there other things that we can come back to, elements where there are expenses, things that we know are true. But aren't maybe just on physical, sensory level. That can act as a kind of a, well, I guess as a refuge, in a moment, I'm finding this out for a bit for anything. Somewhere else that we can come back to. Well, traditionally, it's said, for instance, that you can come back to the Buddha. So you come back to the Buddha as the one who has attained transcendence. And that awakens your faith. It's so that you move away from the false construction of things to do something that, or to the experience of faith, of faith in the possibilities within reality. So that would be another way of thinking about it. It's not quite so easy to fit into the interpretive framework that I've given, but yes, you could think in those terms. But traditionally, again, you can use any of the four second tones. So you can use body awareness. You can use awareness of feeling. You can use awareness of the condition of your mind, of Jitha. Or you can use a reflection on the quality and nature of your experience in the life of the dhamma. So you could use any of those things which direct you back to what is real. In a sense, you could say the Buddha, reflection on the Buddha, directs you back to what is real, because the Buddha is the one who sees what is real. But I think that probably a strong tendency to proliferation needs to be accompanied, at least to some extent, by kai-an-shu-ti, coming back to the body. I think that probably is for most people, at least a quite strong element to it. You may need to remember the Buddha in order to motivate yourself to do it, because frankly, it's not that interesting if you're not that type. Sense is always the last thing I refer to. There's a good theory I'm going for that. Perhaps it could be-- it's grassy, isn't it? Well, it's certainly a grasping element, isn't it? Yeah. It's a composite. Because the word proliferation could just mean rich, couldn't it? Yes, I see what you mean. No, it's always used in a negative sense. Yeah, it's a word that's much debated in the various translations given. That's a traditional word to use at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Both of them, it's used in my honor, as well, that the gardener uses it, especially the form of niskra-puncha, which is equivalent to shundra-tara. From the image, it does overlap. It's a compulsive grassy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for instance, it's pushing and pulling. It's supposed to leaning at that, letting it be what it is. Yeah, yeah, in the Madonna chain we're more familiar with. You remember, you moved from Weylinart to Trishna, and from Trishna to Upadana. Am I right? Yes. And under the heading of craving and of grasping, one of the things you grasp onto a Drishman views. So you could say that that is sort of an underlying interpretive structure for proliferation. There are two sides to it. One is the tendency to go looking, if you sort of mean, you're searching for a solution to a problem that's been stated here. And your mind goes looking within the rag bag of its memories and thoughts and so forth. And in what it's reading and culture and so on. You're looking. So the proliferative tendencies, first of all, yes, a sort of exploratory, but not in a very healthy way, because it's driven by a strong reaction to feeling. Then solidifies, really, what I call construction. Strictive, papancha, sanyar, sankha, which means a construction of proliferation and adding together, adding up of proliferation into a sort of a clunk that's a system that you then grasp onto. So do you see what I mean? The proliferation initially is the search for a solution which gets out of hand. And it's not a careful sort of controlled inquiry. It's an instinctive, driven process, which, again, you can see so easy as your mind drifts. And then once you arrive at some sort of solution, apparent solution, then there's a clicking. Sometimes I notice it, there's a sort of, ah, ah, that's what it is. And the immediate sense is of relief. So for instance, you're to take the negative example. You're thinking about somebody's upset you. And you're going searching for a-- you need to explain your own upset to yourself. You need to explain why they've done it. And you need to find a way of dealing with it. And there's a certain point you go, ah, that's what it was. That's what I'm going to do. And you feel some sort of relief. You feel some relief from the pressure as it were. And you have a sort of temporary sense of, ah, I've sold it. And you're quite then attached to that. Difficult then sometimes to shift that. I think I sometimes confuse proliferation with intuition. I think sometimes I do think and I do put things together. I do have the R, that's why. And sometimes I'm right. You sure? But sometimes I'm wrong. I think sometimes it's intuition. Sometimes it's just not a very good idea. I think it's got the wrong name. But it's not just, that's just making the same. So now I wonder for either of them, whether it's proliferation or intuition, maybe for both of them, there's a sort of a benefiting sort of going back to what you've called the primary, to check them out. Well, it depends on what intuition, you know, is not a neutral faculty as it were. So what is the interest behind the intuition? Why is intuition going back? Well, you may be right that they're all out to get you. You may be right that this, that or the other. Your intuition may be accurate. But what's the motive behind that? So that even the intuition can be part of a proliferative process which ends up with a construction. I'm very, very familiar with this in India because it's a low trust society with the legacy of Kant's. And people constantly know other people's motives. And not infrequently, they're right. But the knowing of other people's motives and the building up of the systems of dealing with that interpretation are not at all helpful. So then the intuition can be simply a part of the process of constructing a program, a manifesto, a platform, to deal with the exciting cause. Listen, it's just back down to skillful thinking because I was going to say that I can get the arm and I'm going to relieve when I thought skillfully. Yeah, yeah. So isn't it just using intuition for the good or the bad? That's how he hears it. Yeah, well, that would be the point here, wouldn't it? That you need to check. Check the motivation. And well, that almost always is going to involve checking out what's at the bottom of it all. I think you know the difference. I think you know the difference in the R, one way or the other. You may do. You know the kind of, well, I think you sort of know the more peaceful one. Yeah. That's what I've got to do. But it's actually the more skillful. I'm afraid I can ever say speak for yourself, my dear. I think I sometimes convince myself that it's an intuition when it's just a prejudice, if you say what I mean. Do you say what I mean? You may have a very accurate intuition. No, I'm not saying always. I just say, I think there are quite often times when you say what you're missing in life. It's got you've got a better feeling around it. Of course, the key thing is the feeling, isn't it? It's the motivation. Is it a skillful motivation or not? What do you do with your intuition or your even, what do you call it, induction? That there's bad motives coming at you, because it were. What do you do with that? How do you feel about it? You do have a point, because I mean, the extremists will say, yes, it's a feeling. And I mean, in fact, it's keeping asking the question, isn't it, or keeping flexible, or keeping reassessing, that's the point. Well, what do we really know? We just got an important question now. It doesn't put us to say something about intuition being like a blind elephant. It's very, very big and very, very powerful and can achieve that, but it can't necessarily see where it goes, but reason, it has a smaller answer or something like that, but that kind of, it can see very clearly if it doesn't necessarily want something terrible. You become a person somewhere around you. No, that's all. I thought that was good. Yeah. I can't think what the party for intuition would be. It's really into the intuition. Isn't it really the intuition you find by being in London's reality somehow, where was proliferation? Intuition is such a slippery word, isn't it? I feel a little uneasy about the trend of the word, if you said to me, what do we mean by intuition? It means such different things. This is sort of grasping of something as a whole. That was Jung's use of it, wasn't it? It's the seeing of the pattern of things, but sometimes it's used for a kind of, or a guess at what's going on or whatever. Sometimes it's almost extrasensory reaching out to what's going on. So you're just looking not rational, isn't it? It's legitimately not rational in intuition. Yes, it's arriving at a judgment about things by non-rational means, I think that's the point. As a ground of faith, as a ground of faith, it needs to be in combination with experience and reason. Yes, yes. Otherwise, if you had a citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously, in the progress of faith, there's a point at which you can utterly rely on your intuition. It's not really intuition, actually. I think it's just, I don't know if that's the word that Bante uses, but I think it's a response from what Bante talks about, and what is it? Faith is a response of what is ultimately new to what is ultimate in the universe. It's a point of which you can rely on that, completely, presumably the point where you've understood the dramatically enough. I think we're talking more here about a non-rational judgment about situations or conclusion about things. I think when you're right, some people have that sort of capacity, but it should be checked with other faculties. And you always need to be looking at the spin that you're giving you, because it can become part of a proliferative process, which ends up with a constructive program. I just want to say I appreciate you investigating this, and I think you're thinking about the certification. Do you think when the stock processes are easily maintained to go by and lie tendencies to have that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to come back to the body, to come back to the body. Yeah. Yeah. And to use intelligence to bring you back. There's a lot in the model, but I've sort of set it all out for you, and you can work with it if you want to, if you have a intuitive input. OK. 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