(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. - Thank you, Saden Andi. - Can everybody hear me? That was very enjoyable. That was almost worth it, just for that. Now, just for that introduction. I'm just going to introduce somebody who's helping me with my talk. So this is my good friend, Kavi City. And she's going to do some reading of poems for me. Partly, it's just, I feel a bit braver when she's here. And it's also, it's quite nice to have a mixture of voices when you're listening to something. I think there's just a change of voice that is quite engaging in a way. And also, I was thinking about Kavi City. Whenever I see Kavi City, I feel really happy. And I thought, I shouldn't really keep her to myself. So I thought I'd share her with you. And she's like the best things in life are free. She comes free. Well, actually, I have got to cut her hair for a later. (audience laughs) Yeah, so I really enjoyed Nyanne Vachsh's talk yesterday. And I did think afterwards, I was chuckling to myself because I realised that he ended up talking about matter, a lot, didn't he? And he talked about how everything isn't matter. We shouldn't see things in terms of matter. And I thought, I wonder if people think I'm giving this sort of counter-argument. Everything matters. So obviously, I'm not, I just say I'm not giving a talk about the fact that everything is matter. I'm using the term matter in a different way. Everything matters. So recently, my mum got quite ill, quite seriously, potentially seriously ill. And she had to have a series of tests and scans and things. And we had to wait for the results of each of these tests. And I went to stay with her. And she lives in a place called Galston on Sea. And there's not much to do in Galston on Sea. There is lawn bowls, I think. And I've got a sort of limited tolerance for murder mysteries. And I was wondering what I was going to do with my time there. And I decided that I would ask her to teach me to knit. So it'd been something that I'd been wanted to do for ages to learn how to knit. And I decided that I would ask her to teach me to knit. So I've got my knitting with me. Actually, this is tank top number two. So the first tank top that I started to knit was a red tank top. And I just wanted to tell you a little bit about that tank top. So, yeah, I decided to get her to teach me to knit. And it just felt very significant in a way. I was there with her. I was aware of her mortality. She's nearly 70. And there she was passing on this craft to me, which was something that she'd learned from her mum. And it just felt very good in a way that she felt very right. So I was just there for her. And she was able to teach me something that she knew how to do. And a few weeks later, I ended up with this red tank top. And the ribbing around the bottom is slightly erratic, I have to say. There's one or two holes in it where I used them, what's called a stitch holder. And it ended up creating a few holes. And strangely enough, you have to do this decreasing thing. And I obviously decreased in the wrong place. So the waist ended up somewhere sort of under my armpits. So I've got this great tank top. And it's not a perfect tank top. It has something more than perfection. It has something called wabi-sabi, which I'll come on to talk a bit more about later. So something ordinary, this red wooly tank top, becomes a priceless object. It's got meaning and love and ancestry knitted into it. It's a living object, it's telling us something about life, about being human, and about all the sort of the beauty of the imperfections in a way of humanness. So it's very different from a tank top that I might have been able to buy in a shop there. And to begin with, I wrote quite a complex talk for this retreat, or a series of complex talks, all about consumerism and consumerism in the realm of ideas and ideologies and spiritual consumerism. And all those talks are now in the bin. And I decided that what I really wanted to talk about is things. Very simply, I just want to talk about things. Yeah, things like wooly tank tops, potatoes and trees and various other things. So that's what this talks about. We live in a world of things and there's a world of practice in things. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. So first of all, before I get on to talking more about things, I'm just going to say a little bit about consumerism. So the definition of to consume is to destroy, to use up, to eat or drink up or to devour. So I thought that was quite interesting, that to consume means to destroy. And to some extent, it's our nature to be consumers, we have to consume. We need food, we need warmth and we need shelter. But what I was wondering was, why do we need to consume so much or why do we find ourselves consuming so much? And there seems to be two elements that come together. So first of all, in us, there's often this sense of a basic sort of wanting, a basic restlessness or a searching light, we're continually sort of looking for something that isn't in our experience right now. That can be quite subtle, but it's very rarely not there, I think. But what we actually decide that we want doesn't really come from within. It's sort of given to us from without, we're in a way we're told what we want. And I read this book by Richard Layard called, "Happiness", he's an economist, I don't know if people have read it. And he concludes that there are two main factors that determine what we want. And they are what others around us have and what we've become accustomed to. So the fact is that we are happy if we have a little bit more than the people around us. And we're unhappy if we have a little bit less than the people around us. So it's very much to do with who we're around. And in England, we call it "keeping up with the Joneses". I'm sure in France and Germany, you keep up with somebody else. So we turn up on retreat and we put our tent up and we're very happy with our tent. Until somebody comes along and they put up a tent next to us, which is a little bit better. And suddenly, we're sort of disappointed with our tent. Yeah, it makes all the difference what people around us have. And one of the problems, I think, of the way we live is that often, because of TV and magazines and other media, we're actually surrounded by celebrities. Yeah, we have our life is made up of celebrities. I can't believe how he's treated her. It's disgusting. Yeah, but she knew what he was like and you just look at him, you can tell. Footballer, yeah? Yeah, but it's just so embarrassing, her private life, all over the papers. That is a shame. Oh, exclusive interview, page four, great. So then if you've had this experience where you find yourself on a bus and you overhear a conversation about people's personal lives, and you assume that the people are talking about somebody that they know quite well, and it turns out that they're talking about somebody off the telly. So we're surrounded by celebrities in a way, the homes that maybe, for some people, the homes that we most often go into are the homes of celebrities if we watch much television. So this gives us a distorted view of the world and how people live and makes us less happy, because we surround ourselves with people that have maybe got a lot more than we have. So we also, our need to consume is also affected by what we've become accustomed to. So living standards are a bit like drugs. Once you have a certain new experience, you need to keep having more of it in order to sustain the feeling, in order to sustain the happiness. So the pleasure that we get from certain things doesn't last very long. And like Sudden Andy said, I've been building this house in Spain, or helping to build it, this house in Spain, and for about eight months we had no bathroom and no toilet. And if we were upstairs, we had to climb down a ladder as well to get out of the house. So if we wanted to go to the toilet, we had to climb down and make our way to a makeshift toilet, and we used to talk about how, can you imagine when we've got a toilet and a bathroom? I'm just going to be so happy when I've got a toilet and a bathroom. And this went on for about eight months, and then we got, we finally, the day came, you know, where we got to sit on the toilet. And I enjoyed it for about a day. And then I was like, oh, you know, I'd be so happy when we got some stairs, instead of climbing up and down the ladder. So it's like our enjoyment of certain things just really doesn't last compared to what we perhaps think, you know, the difference we think that they're going to make. And in contrast to that, I've never really become accustomed to the light on the mountains there. I don't sort of wake up in the morning and think, oh, I wish there was a different mountain outside the window. Yeah, I wish the sunrise looked different to this, or I've never become accustomed to the smell of walking on the herbs, you know, the smell of the herbs on the foot. So there's certain experiences that don't sort of pale in the same way as material things. So one thing that we can do is we could start to observe these two sort of laws in our life. We could sort of test them out. Notice how do we feel when others have a bit more than us? How do we feel when others have a little bit less than us? It was interesting. I found this quite useful reading this because I had this experience that Nandi said I've worked in right livelihoods projects for quite a long time. So this experience of living on what we call support, yeah, so living on a sort of, you know, having on my expenses paid and then having pocket money, having a certain amount of pocket money. And for quite a long time, I lived with a bunch of people who none of us had any savings. So we all lived on this 25 pounds a week or 30 pounds a week. And I remember being quite happy in a way. We were all in the same boat. So I didn't have any money to spend, but nobody had any money to spend. And then I remember later on living with people with some savings. And in a way it's like it made no difference to me and what I've got. But I had to sort of really work with that with that sort of sense of like suddenly I didn't feel I had enough because others around me had a bit more. And I think just reading this I found that quite helpful in a way to realise that. That's the effect it has. And it also made me think well when we find ourselves having a bit less than other people, having a bit less than people around us, we could reflect that we're actually contributing to their happiness. So if you've got a really rubbish tent, you can think I'm actually contributing to the happiness of those people that have got a better tent than me. Whereas, yeah. And we can notice what in our lives really gives us satisfaction and how long that satisfaction lasts for, how long that enjoyment lasts for. I think the thing that came to mind for me was growing things, growing vegetables, which just seems to be endlessly exciting, doesn't it? You put your little seeds in and then, you know, every day you go out and you think, I think it's grown a little bit more, you know. And you never, yeah, the enjoyment of that never really kind of runs out in a way. So what about this sense of wanting that we have, this sort of restlessness? So often we experience a sort of inner poverty or a sense that something is lacking, something is missing. And this is actually an intuition into the truth, yeah, that the fixed and substantial somebody that I'm looking for is actually missing, yeah. So we sort of have an intuition into the way things are. But actually, what we do is we panic, yeah, we panic when there seems to be nobody there. And in Buddhist terms, what we're experiencing is something called the three-lactioners. So the three-lactioners are the three marks or the three characteristics of conditioned existence of being un-enlightened. And those three marks, those three characteristics that we experience is that everything is impermanent, everything is insubstantial, and everything is unsatisfactory. So we experience impermanence, we experience the passing of time, and we panic. We want to buy youthfulness, yeah, we want to buy clothes that are going to make us look youthful. We want to buy makeup, plastic surgery. In fact, I bought these headphones, I want to see if they work. Just checking. It's actually young people, I don't know what young people are doing here in this, is that now it's a tree ratna? So what young people are the audience, isn't it? Or have I just styled it, yeah. Do I like young people? Yeah? I've started hearing myself in French then. Yeah, so we buy, we try and buy a sense of youthfulness. We also try to secure our future with properties and pensions, and maybe we don't have to. I am a landowner myself after all. I've got 12 acres of white silence up at the back of my skull. So then we experience the insubstantiality of life, of our own being, and again we panic. We want to build up a self. So we attempt to build up a self of possessions. We buy books, we buy gadgets, we buy clothes, and in this way we create this sense of self. We try to become somebody. And advertising works like this. Basically what advertising does is it shows you a bunch of people that you want to be like. So I'm quite susceptible to this sort of advertising. So it shows you this bunch of people that are all very kind of creative and independent. Yeah, just like they look like they've got the life that you want to be leading. And the advert tells you people like this wear G star jeans. And you find yourself having to go out and buy, save up all your pocket money for two months and buy these jeans. So you can be like these people. So this is how advertising works. And apparently in Sweden they ban any advertising that is aimed at 12 years old or younger. And I was thinking well in terms of advertising, it's as if we're all 12 years old or younger. What is that response? So thirdly we experience Dukkha, the third of the Lakshmanas. We experience the painfulness of life. We experience the dissatisfaction. The fact that shopping doesn't really work. And what happens is we just try harder. We just think well we just didn't buy the right thing that Saturday. So we just think if only I had this I would be happy. And we try to buy that sense of pleasure, of comfort, of security. And in the Buddhist tradition there's the image, well in a lot of traditions there's the image of the renunciant or the hermit. And the hermit has nothing or has very little. And the hermit has no thought for the future. The hermit doesn't save anything for the future. I think there's a tradition of the monks not even saving food for the next day. And they have no resistance to what is, they have no resistance to what is happening. They just live this very beautiful simple life. And they write poems like this. The man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish. That was a very small beetroot by the way. Artistic life and smaller. So what does it really mean to practice this kind of renunciation in the midst of life? What would it mean for us to bring the flavour of the hermit into our lives? And I think often the renunciation can be seen as a turning away from the material world. Even sometimes they sort of disdain for things. And the renunciation that I want to talk about is one where rather than turning away from things we turn towards things. We turn more towards things. We turn towards the world. So we live in a world of things and there's a world of practice in things. So if we just look around us there is so much to enjoy. Right now there's so much to enjoy. I've been particularly enjoying the sound of the tent which feels, I think it's Dharma Day today isn't it? It feels like we're on this big ship on the ocean and it feels like the sound of the sails in the wind. There's so many useful things, so many beautiful things, so many strange things to wonder about. And recently I was on retreat with somebody and they said to me we had a small group, a small discussion group, it was one of these wabi-sabi retreats so it was looking at beauty in that. And they said to me I've got a confession to make. I haven't told anybody this before. And I said oh what is it? And she said I adore life. This is her confession that she adores life. She adores things, the things of life. And it's not just that we have this amazing backdrop to our lives and our practice. I think it's much more than that. I think it's that all of these things are actually showing us reality. There is a shimmering excitement in being sentient and shaped. The caravan master sees his camel's lost in it, nose to tail as he is himself, his friend and the stranger coming toward them. A gardener watches the sky break into song, cloud wobbly with what it is, bud, thorn the same, wind, water, wandering this essential state, fire, ground, gone. That's how it is with the outside. Form is ecstatic. I love this phrase, form is ecstatic. This is a very different talk to me on a mattress talk and a different subject. But there's a few points where I felt like the talk touched on mine. One of them was this area of form being ecstatic. I think you used the term ecstatic, didn't you? So in the Buddhist tradition it said that there are pure lands which we can be born into. And one of the characteristics of a pure land is that everything in it, everything in a pure land, is communicating the dharma to us. And in a sense, I think we can say that we already live in a pure land. Everything is communicating the dharma to us. And we just need to pay attention to everything. So the world that we live in shows us reality through these three actionists, these three marks of conditioned existence, impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. So these are the very things that we're turning away from. These are the very things that we try to avoid through our constant consuming. But they're the very experiences that we need to go into. They're the very things that we need to turn towards. So I'm just going to go through them one at a time. And with each of these, I try to well, for a long time, I suppose I've just been thinking, what is impermanence like? You know, what's the sort of symbol for impermanence? What is impermanence? And one of the things I thought is that impermanence is as if everything is on a journey. It's as if everything is on a journey. And one of the things that I really love for some strange reason is speed it up photography. You know, when you sometimes get a bit of film, and it may be it's a kind of view, and you just see this view, this vista, but the film is speeded up. So you see the weather changing really fast here, and you see the clouds coming over, or you see the sun coming up, or you see it getting dark. And I think because we've got used to the speed of things, we don't see that happening. When you get a bit of film and it alters the speed, you suddenly see, oh, there is this passage of time. It's like you're being shown this passage of time, you're being shown impermanence, you're being shown change. And I remember once having a dream as well about seeing crocuses growing out of compost. And again, you can see that on film, can't you? That idea where you've got this film, where you actually see something growing. Yeah, there's something that I really love of that, like we're being shown the passage of time. And objects, too, show us time passing. So objects show us impermanence. And recently, I've been looking at some old photos of me and my brother, I was putting something together for his 40th birthday, and came across all these photos. So this is a photo of me and my dad, and I'm about seven, and he's probably in his early 30s, I suppose. So it's obvious that in a way, it shows us the passage of time because of the subject. But then what I had a sense when I was looking at these photos is that as objects, they're so beautiful in that they show us the passage of time. So there's a certain beauty of old photos. It may be wonder about all my digital photos, really. There's a sort of beauty in old photos, which is to do with the fadedness of the colours, you know, the quality of the colours, the creastness, where they've been stuck in albums and taken out of albums, where they've been handed around, where somebody, maybe my grandmother's handwriting on the back of them, it's like the object itself shows us impermanence in such a beautiful way, shows us the passing of time. And then there's insubstantiality, the second of the electioners. So what's dislike? What's the kind of image for this insubstantiality? And I started to think of it as if everything is a pattern. And I mean that in not so much a sort of mathematical sense, maybe, but more of a sort of aesthetic sense. It's as if everything is a pattern. So rather than things having an essence, we find that they're a pattern. They're a sort of coming together of various elements. They're coming together of shapes, of colours, of textures. And when we encounter all those things together, that's what we think of as that object. But it's not only a coming together of kind of physical characteristics, but there's also in any object. There's a coming together of memories, associations, sensations. So all of this is part of the pattern that makes that object what it is. And whenever you go very high up, so if you go up in an airplane or you climb up to a tower, I find this. This is another thing that I really thought. This or you see photos taken from high up and you see the planet or you see a town, you see a town that we live in. And you just realise, God, we're constantly creating patterns. Not knowingly, but we've just are living together, our humanness, our living together on the earth creates these amazing patterns. And you could zoom in to like one part of that street and you realise the whole street is a pattern of houses and a pattern of trees. And you could zoom in on a particular roof and realise that roof is a pattern of tiles. So you sort of get this sense of like patterns within patterns. And we can do that from a long distance or you get the same sense when you see those really microscopic close-ups of cells in the body. Again, you find like these patterns. So this is coming together. And in my red knitted tank top, there's a pattern. It's not exactly as a pattern should have been, but there's a pattern of stitches, but there's also a pattern of meaning, of skills passed down, of associations that I now have with that particular object. So in a way, we can say this is the insubstantiality of life. This patterning, this coming together of things. And then thirdly, unsatisfactoryness. So human life has pain woven into it. There's a Bjork song in which she says, "I carry my pain on the left, my joy on the right." And I think this is what it means to be human in a way. We carry our pain on the left and our joy on the right. They come with being human, pain and joy. And much of our of our painfulness comes from a resistance to impermanence and unsatisfactoryness. Sorry, impermanence and insubstantiality. But how do things show us? How do things in the world show us this unsatisfactoryness or this painfulness? There's a Latin phrase called laprimé reyrum, which means the tears in things, or the tears for things. It just seems like a really beautiful sense of the tears in things. And it reminded me of a story. Somebody took me to Winchester Cathedral, and they have this massive, massive stained glass window there. And hundreds of years ago, there was a civil war, and this cathedral was attacked, and this stained glass window was completely destroyed, completely smashed. And when the soldiers had disappeared, all the people from Winchester came out, they bought with them boxes and baskets and so on, and they collected all the glass out of this window, and they took it home, and they put it under their bed, they put it in their closets, and they just kept it, they just looked after this glass. And many years later when this civil war was over, the people of Winchester decided to rebuild this window, this stained glass window, and so they got everybody to come with the glass from the window. So as you can imagine, like people just turn out with these boxes of broken glass, these baskets of broken glass, all these people turn up with all this glass, and presumably the window had like, I don't know, stories from Christ's life or whatever, and they've just got this massive, massive jigsaw, you know, this massive jigsaw puzzle, and there's no way that they can put this jigsaw together, you know, there's no way they can recreate this stained glass window, but rather than commission a new window, they decide they're just going to put all this glass back in a random way. So when you go to Winchester Cathedral, you see this completely random massive, massive, it's about as big as this tent probably, stained glass window, and it does have a certain beauty, a certain sort of abstract beauty to it in itself, but the real beauty is when you know the story, yeah, and the real beauty of the window is that people cared enough to take this glass and put it under their bed and keep it, that's the sort of beauty of the object. So I think that's very much a sort of story of humanness in a way, the painfulness of being human and the tenderness, the love, the care of being human. And in terms of Wabi Sabi, which I'm not going to, Vasika did say, she's got a copy of my talk, she said, "Are you going to explain what Wabi Sabi is?" And I said, "Oh no, I can't, it takes about a week," usually, but you'll get some sense of it, but in terms of Wabi Sabi, when something's been mended, it has a particular sort of beauty. And when I was at my mum's, one of the things we watched when the murder mysteries went on was Antiques Rocho. And on Antiques Rocho, you know, people take things along and they say, "Well, it would have been worth, you know, X number of thousands of pounds," but actually it's been broken and it's been mended, so it's just worth 20 pounds, whatever it might be, it's worth a lot less. And I was thinking that in Wabi Sabi terms, if something's been mended, it's worth a lot more. If we have something that's been mended, it has more value because somebody's taken the time and cared enough to mend it. So things that are mended, I think, also communicate something about our humanness, the scars and imperfections of being human, along with this care and love that is part of our humanity too. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in. So there is a real beauty in imperfection and maybe you can even say there's a real perfection in imperfection. Finding beauty is very important. Finding beauty in our lives is very important, not as something to sort of soothe us, but because it helps us to turn towards reality. So this is one of the reasons why I think beauty is really important and finding beauty in the ordinary because it helps us to turn towards those experiences of impermanence, insubstantiality and painfulness, rather than turn away from them. The loveliness is everywhere. Even in the ugliest and most hostile environment, the loveliness is everywhere. In the emptiest areas with no place for hope, the loveliness is there. It emerges incomprehensible, inexplicable. It rises in its own reality and what we must learn is how to receive it into ours. So we need to move towards these experiences because there is treasure in them. We need to trust that if we move towards these experiences of the Latinas, we'll find treasure in there. When we go into our experiences of impermanence, insubstantiality and painfulness, we come to three doorways, doorways to liberation, doorways to freedom. And these doorways are called the Vimoxia Mukher. So mukka means doorway or gateway and Vimoxia we usually translate as freedom or liberation. But the term is just very beautiful, it's got beautiful associations. So the wider definition of Vimoxia is being loosened or undone, release, giving up, shedding as in the shedding of tears and letting flow. So it's just a really beautiful, I think it's a really beautiful term. I love that being loosened or undone. So yeah, if we go into our experience of the Latinas, we come to these three doorways and we experience this freedom through these three different doorways. So the signless doorway opens into a freedom from labelling and fixing and we perceive the beauty and vividness of everything. The openness or emptiness doorway leads into a freedom from all limitations or divisions and we see into the mystery of all this. And I think this is what Nyonyvacho was talking about, this sense of this particular doorway. And then the third doorway is called the wishless doorway and it opens into a freedom from wishing that things were different than the way they are. A willing to be with whatever is. And this is a really beautiful, I think this has a really beautiful flavour to it, in a way it is that flavour of release or letting go or giving up. But it's also very creative, it's not passive, it's like a very creative, responsive state. And we all have, we all know a flavour of these doorways, we've all experienced a sense of these doorways, a flavour of these doorways. So we've all had experiences where suddenly things seem very beautiful and vivid to us. We've all had experiences of the mysteriousness of life, the mysteriousness of things of ourselves. And we've all had that experience where we stop resisting, we stop resisting, we stop wishing that things were different and we just let things be as they are, which is usually a huge relief. So we all have a flavour of these and these are the doorways that we find in our experience of the Lakshmanas. So you could say that the path is a path of doors opening one after another and in everything there is a doorway, there's a doorway to a deeper truth. What I used to regard as a glory shut in my face was a door opening towards this clarity, country without a name. Nothing can destroy it, this road of doors opening one after another, always toward reality, life without calculation. So this idea of finding beauty and meaning in simple everyday objects is the foundation of much of the aesthetic of Zen Buddhism and Zen culture and in the 16th century there was a monk called Riku in Japan and he introduced this kind of beauty to other people in the form of the tea ceremony. So the tea ceremony is very simple or became very simple. They took the most ordinary activity that you could imagine making cup of tea and they turned it into something sublime and the catalyst for this transformation was mindfulness. So by taking ordinary objects and handling them as if they were of unimaginable value they became exquisite. So this isn't a beauty that sort of transcends the ordinary, that transcends our everyday experience, it's a beauty that we can find within our experience and we can find it just by handling things, treating things as if they were exquisite, as if they were valuable. And this experience of beauty came to be known as Wabi Sabi and it's summed up by Andrew Juniper as the love of life balanced against a serene sense of its passing distilled into form. So I should say that again because it's such a good, the sort of pith of Wabi Sabi I think, is the love of life balanced against the serene sense of its passing distilled into form. So in a way that photo has Wabi Sabi, yeah, in that photo what I see is the sort of love of life and this sense of time passing distilled into a form that communicates that. And the life of the hermit was known as Wabi Zumai, the life of Wabi really, a life of simplicity and aloneness. And I was wondering could we live the Wabi Zumai a little bit more. So if consuming is to destroy then how can we turn that on its head? And I came up with three things that we could try practicing. We could practice experiencing things, creating things and cherishing things. So first, the experiencing things, could we experience things a little more fully than we do? And I don't know if you've had this experience where you're sort of hungry and you fancy a piece of toast and then you make a piece of toast and then you're eating the toast while you're on the internet and then you're like did I eat that toast or not and you're still hungry because you didn't actually experience yourself eating the toast whereas if you sit down and you actually taste the toast and you actually have fully have that experience of eating the toast, you just feel completely satisfied don't you for at least 10 minutes or something but you just you feel satisfied you feel like you actually ate that toast you actually had that experience of eating that toast. And I think it's a bit the same with our whole life it's as if we need to really taste the world it's as if we need to really relish the flavor of everything. And in a funny way if we if we do experience something more fully when we do that it in a sense what we're doing is we're letting go of it this is a sort of strange thing but but to fully experience something is to sort of let go of it we let go of it as an object because we let go of ourselves as a subject. Yeah what happens is we're sort of taking out we're taken out of ourselves and there seems to be no barrier between us and the object. And this is this is a little bit again as Nyanna Vacha was talking about with the Fox Club it made me think of this those moments where you just see something as it is in itself and there's no sense of grasping that as an object and there's quite a strong sense of self forgetting you're not particularly aware of yourself it's as if all the barriers between you and that object fall away and this is what freedom feels like it feels as if well we're suddenly free of everything that separates us from everything else that's what we're free of we're free of everything that separates us from everything else. And I was on retreat in Finland a while ago and we were talking about perception and the way we perceive things and somebody said somebody said oh could you imagine if you'd never seen a tree before yeah so we could sort of think oh can we imagine if we'd never seen a tree before there we are in this forest surrender by trees and then somebody else said but you never have seen that tree before so like we are constantly encountering things that we have never seen before and really we should be wandering around going wow look at that tree yeah because we're constantly encountering things that we haven't seen before but our sort of habitual mind thinks we've seen it so it doesn't even really you know just puts it in the box marked trees and doesn't really even take it in but sometimes we have that sense that we are seeing something as if for the first time yeah and really seeing what's there. In the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone never should I forget this event in the life of my fatigued retinas never should I forget that in the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road in the middle of the road there was a stone so if consuming things means to destroy them then I thought one of the things that we could practice more is creating things and one of the things about consumerism is it's very passive yeah we're not we don't even decide what we want really we're told what we want and then we go out and get it and then we feel disappointed with it you usually work something like that and yet there's something about creating things which I find just the opposite of that just very satisfying that I find that I'm really happy when I'm creating things it could be anything really okay a garden or whatever it might be and one of the things about creativity is that it's really helped by a little bit of poverty yeah so a little bit of poverty is a great spur to creativity and I think that the best example of this I can think of is what we in England called allotments yeah Debbie I'm sure you do have allotments so little gardens little plots of land where you can grow your own food or you can grow flowers and there's a sort of unwritten rule with allotments which is you mustn't spend any money if you've gone allotment the whole idea is you're saving money it's felt all about being frugal having an allotment you're growing your own food to save money so you mustn't spend any money so if you have an allotment and you need a new shed you know there's no question of going to being cute and buying a new shed you don't you don't do that yeah what you have to do is you have to go round all the skips in your area and you have to collect an assortment of like old doors and car doors and bits of corrugated metal and you have to create your own shed out of all these things that you've found and that's why if you go onto allotments you find this it's almost like you know there's that whole movement called outsider art people have heard of that outsider art which is like artists that don't know their artists well there's a lot of these artists that don't know their artists on allotments and it's a great place to go if you want to sort of be inspired to a bit of creativity so I think that we could sort of yeah use this a bit more you know we are in a time of financial and ecological crisis to some extent and I think that yeah this just being creative with what we what we have can bring quite a lot of enjoyment into our lives quite a lot of pleasure into our lives there's a quote from roomy where he says he says the whole world is nothing but a tell actually a tell is a hill apparently so the whole world is nothing but a tell under which the treasure of poverty is buried a mine of rubies so the whole world is nothing but a tell under which the treasure of poverty is buried a mine of rubies so we can just think about is there yeah is a treasure to be found in poverty in a little bit of poverty obviously not extreme poverty so thirdly we can practice cherishing things so instead of turning away from life and our humanness we turn towards it we live a life in which everything matters everything matters more so the more we cherish things then the wealthier we are the more we can our blessings the more we seem to have you could say that thankfulness is the door to richness shams is roomy's cally on the matron and sham says this i'm amazed at this hoodie the world is a prison to the believer i've seen no prison i've seen only pleasure i have seen only precious things i have seen only fortune so we can practice living in a world where we see only precious things and something that came to mind was a bit of um fashion advice but i once got um and the unlikely source of this fashion advice was somebody called our loca few people will know are like he's an artist and he once said um if you love each item the outfit will work and uh there's something about this i really like you don't need to worry you know whether your shoes match your handbag um or whether your hat goes with your trousers if you love each thing the outfit will work and i think it's a little bit like that with life if we love each thing life will work so if we can do these things more fully if we can experience things more fully if we can be a bit more creative with what we have and if we can cherish everything a little bit more then we'll be rich you know we'll be wealthy and i started the talk um with a woolly red tank top and i want to finish uh the talk by saying something about potatoes so this is a story from somebody called Barbara Kingsolver while a dialogue that she had with a friend of hers what's new on the farm well the peas are coming up so the potatoes and spin it well wait a minute when you say the potatoes are coming up what do you mean what part of the potato comes up uh well the plant part you know the stems and the leaves wow and then i knew a potato had a plant the simple truth i bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes i took them home boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt some things you know all your life they're so simple and true they must be said without elegance meter and rhyme they must be laid down on the table beside the salt shaker the glass of water the absence of light gathering in the shadows of the picture frames they must be naked and alone they must stand for themselves can you taste what i'm saying it's onions or potatoes a pinch of simple salt the wealth of melting butter it's obvious it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong it stays unspoken made of the dirt we call earth the metal we call salt in a form we have no words for and you live on it thank you we hope you enjoyed the talk please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community and thank you [BLANK_AUDIO]
