So thank Samachita. Samachita said, "One of my ways I sort of pay my rent is a work, not for the communications office, but the communications office used to deal with like the press and so on. The reason office is Samachita says, mainly talks to other Buddhists." I am the liaison office by the way, it's not actually some big staff somewhere, I mean my bedroom. I also got some in a faith dialogue that I'm involved in. But remember last year we were invited to the General Synod of the Church of England. So I went along along with a number of other sort of Christian denominations and quite a sprinkling of Muslims actually. And the Church of England, very, very sophisticated and impressive organisation explaining to a number of people who were coming across it pretty much for the first time. It's not that I shouldn't have bothered to offer my accent on that for now, you were the Church of England myself. But they had this very sort of elegant little PowerPoint presentation about how the Church of England was organised. And people started asking them questions about some of the fine points of the organisation that at one point one of the bishop says, well actually frankly it's still work in progress, we're still figuring this out. And basically since the 1500s they've been tweaking their organisational structure. And I thought if the Church of England haven't completely nailed it down by now, we've been at it quite a bit less long. So this is work in progress, it is me still trying to kind of think a little bit about some of the main strands of the FWBO. And actually one of the things, one of the points I'm going to make is the almost essential conceptual idea in Buddhism is that things change. And part of the problem I try to understand the FWBO is that it's a moving target. Every time you look at something has shifted the enemy, let me say a little bit. It's how much it has asked me to look at her email to get some of my reflections on what the FWBO is and what makes us distinct. So I'll try and say a little bit about that though, I'm not sure that's quite a good end up talking about. And I was writing the talk actually, for some reason the Bob Dylan's song "A Hard Rain is Going to Fall" came to mind this was today when I was thinking about the talk. And realising the thing about "A Hard Rain is Going to Fall" probably a number of us are old enough to remember this, but it was written around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And each verse is a song that Dylan thought he wasn't going to have time to finish. So in a sense every verse points to a song that you think he thought he didn't have time to write out in its fullness. And I was thinking one of the reasons it came to mind the thing is that there's so much to say about this. I think I'm going to touch our number of different topics and actually a lot of them deserve talks on their own. So I hope that I don't sort of stray too far down some of these pans, or it could be quite a long talk. That will try and give you a little bit of a quick run through the verses and at least go to give you that some of the, what I think is some quite sort of spiritually significant themes about the FWBO. Since we're in the Church of England, I've been reading a book recently by, what's his name is it, Richard Holloway? Is it the Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh? His cathedral was just an extraordinary sister flat, but it's just by the way. But reading is very interesting right at Holloway, he's definitely on that deconstructive end of the Anglican Church. And he's written some very, very interesting stuff around ethics, for example, but he's written a book about spirituality after religion. And he quoted a Russian poet called Rosano of Hurdov, but the verse that he quoted, which I thought was very interesting coming from an Anglican bishop. The little couple that he quoted was that all religions will pass, but this will remain, he says, simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance. The book actually is called Looking into the Distance. And the point that Holloway was trying to make is that every system, this systematization of spiritual teaching has its job to do. But actually, what it's pointing to is something much more fundamental, much more human, if you like. So the image that Rosano used is that the religion has passed, but you're still going to have somebody sitting there and looking into the distance trying to see clearly. I really like that image actually, I think that the whole of the Dharma, the whole of the teaching of the Buddha, I think, is quite a weight of itself like that. That what it's trying to address is not its own organizational clarity, if you like. It's trying to point to something much more fundamental and much more human. One of the lines of the Buddha that I came across, maybe the shortest definition, the shortest explanation that the Buddha gave of what he thought he was trying to do. He said, there's one thing that I teach, there's suffering in the end of suffering. And I think that it doesn't get much more fundamental than that. The whole of the Dharma is trying to point out. I think this idea that it's the Dharma, not Buddhism in a sense, is a bit of a Western translation. The Dharma is something much more fundamental. The Dharma is trying to look at the nature of things and trying to give us a way of supporting out a weirdness. So we are seeing more clearly, more in line with the nature of things, living more in line with the nature of things. So this description that what the Dharma is trying to address is everything that frustrates our experience of not being fully alive. And given as the support that we need, structures that we need, that allow us to live deeply, to live fully, to see clearly, you're immediately into sort of language that is going to resonate for some people, but doesn't quite hit the mark for everybody. But there's something in the depths of anybody who thinks their way through the door of a Buddhist centre that's trying to be addressed, that's trying to be answered. And that, I think, is what the Dharma is trying to do. Another teacher, I think, said that the methods of Buddhism basically are the methods of life. So what it's trying to address is something much, much more fundamental than just a sort of a sectarian definition of Buddhism far less than the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. And before I talk about the F.W.B.O., I went in a way just to evoke that context of what we're trying to do. There's defined ways of practicing in the lives that we live, in the city that we live in, the culture that we live in. That supports that process of, well, that the language of Buddhism is the process of body, the process of awakening. They're just sort of waking up to a real nature of our lives. So that's the context. And I'm interested in this for a number of reasons. I'm interested in it, urgently, because it matters personally. I don't get much to anybody who's got a spiritual practice. But speaking a wee bit more professionally, to begin with this so much that I was saying, I've got some responsibility for our ordination process. And it definitely changes the way you think about the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the Order itself, as a whole. One of the reasons I'm just trying to think, what is it that I'm ordaining people into? What's the nature of our practice community? See, my friend down here has lived at the women's ordination center for years nodding. But I think just when you have that kind of responsibility, it makes you think a wee bit more broadly than just your own personal practice. So, apparently, I'm interested in what it is that's really characterizing the Dharma, how we practice the Dharma in this day and age. Because I'm involved in preparing people for ordination, and really what ordination is, is just committing yourself seriously to practice, to practice the that process that supports or to those practices that support that process of awakening. So, from that point of view, I'm interested. I'm also interested, as I say, because I work for the liaison office. And one of the very, very interesting things about liaison office is that you do talk to other people who are trying to practice the Dharma in the West. And it's a fantastic way of learning what other people have found works, what other people have found effective, the mistakes that they've made, the things that we have in common, the differences. So, very, very interesting, very kind of privileged, better works. Not always completely easy, actually. At my experience a lot at the time, you get a lot of Buddhists together. And you've got this instinct of goodwill, or something that you just simply recognize. And still you start and tell you start to have doctrinal discussions. And it's like watching people trying to build a tower of Babel. It's just this incredible capacity for confusion and difference. But if you sit quietly for a minute, you start to get back to the common ground. So, a very, very interesting process. It really is a work in progress, I think, not just for the Western Buddhist order, but for the whole Buddhist tradition coming to the West. A couple of people I know quite well, for example, and who are a bit here in the Theravadne tradition, who's starting to do serious training, a strain fairly seriously with the Zogchen teachers from the Tibetan tradition that he's finding parallels between Theravadne and Vipassana practice and Tibetan Zogchen practice that those two traditions would not previously have been aware of, really because they grew up in such geographically isolated ways. A Tibetan teacher I know well has been asked by his teachers to start the study of the Pali canon, which is not something that his tradition would traditionally have done. So, you're watching this whole process of different Buddhist traditions coming to the West, and counting each other, encountering Western culture, and trying to think how do you practice effectively, how do you support this process of awakening in conditions very, very different from the ones that each of those traditions grew up in. The culture is very differently from the ones that each of those traditions grew up in. I have to say, I'm reminded of that famous chow and lye joke. Chow and lye was asked about the French Revolution. He was asked whether he thought the French Revolution had been a good thing and a bad thing, and his answer was it was too early to say. This is somebody I think speaking in the early 70s. And I have to say, I think it's a bit like that with Western Buddhism. I think you're watching something still, taking its shape, still finding its expression in Western culture, but are certain fundamentals, I think they're already cleared, but a lot of the detail of it, quite what the whole thing is going to look like in a couple of hundred years. I think there's anybody's guess. But as I say, there's a sort of deeper reason, I think, quiet. I did want to talk about what's this think of a bit of this particular practice tradition. In a sense, it just comes back to that whole thing of what it is that we're trying to address in our own experience, again, using the Buddha's language of suffering and the end of suffering. I think that end of suffering part of it's quite unimportant. In terms of the mix actually, Buddhism still thinks sometimes it's hard to talk about suffering without even going on a good idea. We go again together. And I think sometimes pally modes of expression don't help. You know, they're not talking about what was some of the later traditions. See, I can sort of find this actually. It talks about potential samutpada, conditionality, absolute unboundedness. And that's the length of tradition, speaking that the pally doesn't tend to use quite a level of exuberance in its language. So to talk about suffering, you've already got a negative, and then the end of suffering, it's the end of a negative, and you've really got to get that if you look in detail at what the Buddha's talking about, it's this waking up into a weirdness and joy, which is that you don't perhaps always get it from the language. So there's that fundamental question of what supports that move. And, well, and I mean, I guess that is the question. How do you practice? How do you structure your practice? What supports that process? The whole of the dharma, I think, is the attempt, or starting with the Buddha, to communicate that experience of waking up and trying to find ways of supporting that process in us. So in a sense, I think what my main line of interest in the FWB was what supports that level of change rather than what makes us distinct. I think there are things that make us distinct, and some of those things are important. But in a sense, we've got a lot that we share with the whole Buddhist tradition, and in a lot of ways what we share is more important and more fundamental than what makes us distinct. Having said that, I think what makes us distinct is important. There's a text that we've been looking at recently, a text that's about having one of the broader members has been studying called the Cetokila Sita. And in this text, the Buddha is basically saying there are five things that you need to support this process of change. And without these five things, he says, change isn't possible. Part of phrasing, but that's the gist of it. And the five things are confidence in the teacher, confidence in the dharma, and confidence in this, are so far so good. If you know anything about Buddhism, we're on a pretty solid ground, a Buddha dharma-sanga. But then an interest in shifting the text, the Buddha then was going to say, you also need confidence in the sassana, which gets translated as the training, and confidence in your companions and the spiritual life. And the point that Sibiti makes about this, and what it seems the Buddha's getting at, is that you've got these fundamental principles. The dharma says things are impermanent. But for that to make a real impact on our experience, it has to get translated into a structure of practice. So you don't just deal with the dharma in the abstract. You deal with certain ways of thinking about the dharma in certain practices that support a shift in our own awareness. So this shift from the dharma is the second thing, to the training, the sassana, as the fourth thing, is this shift from the univetial down to the specific practices that we share with each other. And then the fifth one is not just the sanga in the abstract, but the companions in the spiritual life, the real people that we have relationship with. And I think the sort of point that I'd like to take from this is that the universtals have to get grounded in real, specific, lived experiences. They get supported by the practices that you do. They get supported by the communication that we have with other people who are practicing. And a very interesting discussion that we had recently at European Buddhist Union meeting was a hell of a meeting, actually, but again that's by the way. But one of the interesting discussions was by a Tibetan, introduced by a Tibetan teacher around this idea of samaya. Samaya gets translated some things as bond. But she was saying basically what is the Tibetan traditions talking about is samaya, is the commitment that you make to a definite community of people in a definite framework of practice. And that specific structure is the thing that really supports the change, that can be good will across the boundaries. But the fact of the matter is you're not going to get somebody from the nature and tradition chanting nam yoherengikyo in the same room as somebody whose main practice is sitting quietly. The fact that their practices are different means that you've got to do a boundary for either of the practices to work without going into better or worse. Just there are different ways of supporting that shift. And that the practice that you share is one of the main sort of media that you have, one of the main ways of communicating and supporting the shift that you're trying to make in your own level of awareness. So I think there are things to say about what it is that we share, also things to say, about what it is that makes our own particular practice community distinct. So I want to say something about that. And there's a few ways that you could have gone into this. I think there's a very interesting thought to give just a bit of the name of this particular community. I think you could have quite an interesting discussion about frames, about Western, about Buddhist and a bit order. I think you could say something quite substantial about each of those. But actually what came to mind was a little question and answer session that was involved and recently with Sanger Akshita, where he talks about the FWBO in terms of four lineages. And what lineages means, I think, again coming back to this thing, the whole Buddhist tradition is the Buddha, it just starts with the Buddha trying to communicate his experience and to find ways of supporting that in us. What lineages is the specific way that a particular community tries to pass on and support that experience in people who are training within it, who are practicing within it. And Sanger Akshita recently talked about the FWBOs having four lineages. And they are the lineages of teaching, lineage of practice, lineage of inspiration. And then they paused for a minute and he said you could talk about fourth lineage, which is the lineage of responsibility. I want to say something about each of those. So first of all, the lineage of teaching. And again, we're on pretty fundamental ground here. You know, I live round in Changshiro's a couple of streets away with Saramati and Sagramati, who have academics, who have done an academic study of Buddhism. One of the real fringe benefits of living there is sitting at breakfast, they're sitting at lunch and listening to, I was going to say, either of them sounding off its own, only Sagramati that sounds off. Saramati is far more considered. But you get a lot of Dharma just crosses the table over dinner. And there's not a lot, I realise, I've been practicing Buddhism for 35 years. And listening to those guys, I'm still... ...ongoingly humiliated about how little I actually know about the tradition. But there's a lot you could say about the teaching, a lot you could say about the F.W.B.O. teaching. But the risk of having people better than I am contradicting me. I think if you were to go for one central teaching in Buddhism, it would be the teaching of the earliest formulation of it, the earliest description of its Pititya Samutpada, which gets variously translated. But I think it gets translated as conditionality, condition co-production. But the idea that things arise in dependence on other things. A nice little quote that comes from... ...Sari Pitra, one of the Buddha's main disciples, having his first contact with Ashvaji, who is one of the first people the Buddha taught. And Sari Pitra asks Ashvaji to explain the teaching. And Ashvaji says, "Of all those things that arise from a cause, the Buddha has explained the cause. And how this ceased to be not true, he has explained." And at that point, Sari Pitra attends stream entry and decides the practice. So that is probably one of the most succinct descriptions of the central Buddhist teaching. If somebody doesn't agree with that, you can discuss it next week. Well, let's just take that as a given this week. And it's one of these ideas. When I first came across that, I thought, "Is that it?" That's the secret of the universe. And I have to say, it struck me after fairly years of having now and coming back to it and thinking, "Why is that so central?" And I think one of the really, again, slightly humbling things and beautiful things about Buddhist practice is that the doorway into them is absolutely simple. And they just keep revealing another level of depth and another level of depth and another level of depth. It's true of the practices, it's true of some of the essential ideas. In this idea, the whole Buddhist tradition on the whole would agree that this idea that things arise and depend on some conditions and they pass is a central idea. And I guess I first came across it, not quite in the raw form, but in a form that Sanger actually has used where he talks a bit mind-reactive and creative. I hadn't realized how traditionally rooted and mind-reactive and created was. But what Sanger actually is saying, again, this is going to guess for not only is it the central teaching in the Buddhist tradition, I guess it's the central teaching in the F.W.B.O. for the same reason, but it's so central in the Buddhist tradition. But that, basically, you've got this process of unfolding, this process of change, this process of becoming, not just going on out there in the world, but going on in her own minds. And then he goes on to say that you've got two options, and the two options he talks about is in terms of reactive and creative. Basically, you could talk about it more traditionally in terms of, you can move towards confusion, but you can move towards awareness. In any moment, you've almost got those two choices. You can move into something confused, self-referential, you can move into something aware that's starting to kind of open out or attention or connection. And the whole tradition basically states and restates that basic idea. So, for example, the Tibetan Kaju tradition in Gampopa and the introduction to his sort of manual of practice in the Kaju tradition talks about samsara and nirvana. And he says, this is the nature of samsara, this is the nature of nirvana. Samsara, he says, its fundamental nature is conditionality. It's characterized by confusion, and its outcome is suffering. And nirvana, he says, is characterized by conditionality. It's characterized by the disappearance of illusion, and its outcome is the liberation from suffering. And I just think it's the most practical descriptions I've ever come across of samsara and nirvana, so they're not things out there. But basically, what samsara is, is the mind operating out of bewilderment as one of the translations. And as we operate out of bewilderment, it causes this pain. We misunderstand the world, we misunderstand ourselves, we must communicate with other people. And to the extent that we're misunderstanding our own fundamental nature, our own fundamental relationship, to that extent, it's painful. And what nirvana is, I think this is a very, very exciting idea. It's not a fixed state. It's a tendency within the mind. Of the mind moving from confusion to awareness, from awareness to deeper awareness, from being trapped and craving into contentment and from contentment into love, if you like. And basically, nirvana is that tendency in the mind. It's starting to become more and more the shaping tendency. And basically, it's back to this simple thing. If you look at your mind, you're watching, you get this metaphor in so many of the traditions that just you're looking at a stream, you're looking at a flow. And in any moment of that flow, you can choose the shape that it takes. And actually, the conditions that you need to move from confusion to clarity are simple. You already know how to do that. And all practice is gradually shifting the habit of moving into confusion into the tendency, more and more established, into just paying attention, not defending, not blocking off, just letting the mind connect, engage, open up. So fundamentally, reactive and creative are in terms, again, poor passing, sara and nirvana. You're looking at those two tendencies in the mind and that possibility. So the only age of teaching, if you really have to go for the essential, that's the teaching. There are those two possibilities in this fundamentally unrestricted flow of experience. So that's the teaching. How do you do that? You already know all that you need to know, but it doesn't. If you know that, it's just going to take you a little bit in the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years to completely get what that's pointing at. Actually, maybe 40 years now, look at more than practice. So that really is the question. Brings us on to the second point, which is the lineage of practice. I want to say something about that. One of the great metaphors in Buddhism is what it calls, I think, the 84,000 Dharma doors. And it's basically seen in almost any moment of experience, the possibility for liberation is there. And Buddhism has this incredible capacity to come up with practices that support that process. You can pick your favorites, basically. But I don't know if you get anything very much different from, I've got a friend who practices in the next year in tradition, which is a fascination for me. The whole practice, literally the whole practice, is chanting, "Nam, yo, hooring, gekyo." And I'm looking at this guy, and it works. I can see change in somebody. I can see his understanding of what that's pointing to. I know somebody from the Rinzai Zen tradition, you know, and he gave us the answer to some of the co-ins, and I carried through it. He says, "We don't practice in this Zen tradition. I can tell you." So he was giving up and being right in there in the answer to co-ins. So if you want to know the sound of one-hand clapping or whether or not the goose is out of the bottle, see me later. But I suppose the point that I'm making is this. There's not an orthodox teaching in Buddhism. There's this incredible creativity about how you support that move towards waking up. But you can get help if I can fuse. If you've got eight-four thousand practice options facing you. So actually, practically, you have to choose a member bank you've seen recently after reading a book by a woman called Deepa Ma, who says that basically pick a single practice and stick with it. And he was saying that's good advice. So forget the other 83,999. Pick the practice that is the most impact and stick with it. Actually, I'm going to be a little more flexible than that. There's a framework of practice within the FWABO that gets a fair bit of emphasis. It's the basic framework of practice. I want you to see just something briefly about that. The briefest description of it that I've come across was in what Dante called the five great stages of the spiritual life and the spiritual path. And he said basically this is what spiritual practice looks like. He says every day you've got five things to practice. Keep up the effort to be aware. Stay in as positive a mental state as you possibly can. Don't lose sight of what's fundamentally important to you. Try to apply at every level what you've realized at your highest level and do what you can to help other people. And then he says basically that's spiritual practice. If you're doing those things on the practical side, he said that's all you really need. So just give you them again because that's quite an important teaching. If you want a spiritual practice that covers all the bases, keep up the effort to be aware. Stay in a positive mental state. Keep connected what's fundamentally important to you. Apply that at every level of your experience and do what you can to help other people. That's what spiritual practice fundamentally is. Or at least that's a particular structuring of spiritual practice. Each of those, I don't want to identify the reason I gave that list first. As I think when we talk about practice, it's two tempting to talk about meditation practice. I think actually, spiritual practice is broader than that. In a sense, the whole thing is staying aware. The practice that you do, the formal sit-in practice is an indispensable support for them. But fundamentally, it's something you can do at any moment. You can actually learn how to be a bit more attentive to your experience. It's something that has the spill-out of the structured practice for it to be transformative. Each of these things has a meditation practice that supports it. It's not the only practice that supports it, but I think there are some key practices. So for the move into awareness, you've got a very simple practice of mindfulness of breathing. For the move into more positive emotional states, you've got metabarvana, from the move into not losing sight of what's fundamentally important. This is a little more special. It's maybe then to the whole area of what the Buddhist tradition talks about is insight practice. And the key practice that we do there is a practice called the six-element practice. And basically, with six-element practice, what you're doing is you're starting to look in your own direct experience at this process of impermanence. You're just looking at the element of earth, and you're just recognizing that every day you're eating, you're defecating. You're just part of a process, of a flow of elements. It's the same with what you drink and what you pee. It's the same with the air that you breathe and that you breathe out. It's starting to notice, I think one of the important things is that it's not a theoretical argument. It's not Buddhism trying to persuade you that everything's impermanent. It's just saying look at every aspect of your experience and just watch what it is that's happening in that. So gradually, it's that you're learning to look at these fundamental characteristics of the nature of things, if you like. And then this idea of applying every level, what you've learned at the highest level, that the main image that supports that is visualization of the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures. And basically, it's a metaphorical approach to the whole thing. And after ordination, one of the main practices that most people will take is the visualization of a Buddha. And you get some very, very beautiful images, for example, that are a figure called Bodhisattva, who represents this fundamental purity of the mind. And rather than coming at it conceptually, what you visualize is this pure white figure above you. You visualize white light, white liquid coming from that figure. Gradually filling you, and purifying you. And then at the end, you're just asked to reflect that you've never been impure. There's never been anything fundamentally that needed to be purified. So again, not coming at it conceptually, but just literally you're watching the whole of your body fill with this white light. And the metaphor has quite a strong experience, quite a strong impact on experience. In itself, it's not enough. Like I think one of the implications of this whole thing is what does that look like in action? You know, if you come out of a meditation that will read that beautiful, and then immediately an irritated mental state, I've literally done that. I remember sitting in a shrine room, having this blissed out meditation, opening my eyes, watching the guy who was leading the meditation walk across the shrine room, and just thinking what a ridiculous way you walked. And immediately irritated that you should be walking the way you was walking across. And I'd been completely blissed out just moments before. So a lot of the practice is what's happening in a certain practice? What does that look like in terms of your relationship with somebody else? So you're looking at this sort of process of transformation. And then this other area of doing what you can to help people, I'm going to come back to that later. I think that's a little bit different. The point that I wanted to get across here was there is a whole framework to practice. There's a number of possible frameworks to practice, and there's variation within that framework. But there are certain key practices that support these key experiences of the mind becoming a bit more aware. The emotions becoming a little bit less tight and self-referential. Or identification with a tight area of experience becoming a little bit softer and a little bit more inclusive. And just practices that support now, it's not a mystery. A American cycle is William James said what you give attention to becomes real. And you start taking energy and effort into, well, don't even want to make too much stuff a bit of effort. But you're just sitting here right now and just notice what your body's doing. What do you feel like? Are you excited? Are you interested? Are you bored? Is it cold? Is it hot? Or just any moment that you're in, you've got the possibility of being a little bit more awake within it. And there are practices that support now. So there's a framework of practice. And I wanted to make just one other point about practice. One of the things that is distinct about the FWBO is an emphasis on what's called going for refuge. And the basic point I want to make is even more fundamental than that structure of practice is the choice to make the shift. You've got a habit of, we've all got a habit of confusion. There's an easy, accessible possibility of waking up. And what going for refuge is basically is the decision to move from confusion to waking up. And for that to be sustained as a choice that we make within our experience. So basically going for refuge, even the practice doesn't help unless we engage with the practice. So what going for refuge is just that decision for the mind to move from confusion to attention, or from craving to contentment, or from a version to love. I don't want to get too kind of mystical, but it's just literally fundamentally starting to learn the experience of being awake and open. It's a much more deeply satisfying way of being alive than being confused and defended. And it's your mind starting to learn the taste of each of those experiences. And just basically saying, which one do you prefer? What's the choice that you're going to make within your experience? There's a definite emphasis in the FWB on going for refuge. This is just one other point I wanted to make about it. I think something that is very distinct to the bit there, the BBO, is this idea that you can practice regardless of your circumstances. You start where you start, basically. So for some people, like when I got involved in Buddhist practice, I was in my early twenties, I didn't have a job, I didn't have a family. It was easy to get involved in a very kind of full lifestyle. For other people, they've got vocational work, or they've got families that they're responsible for. And the fundamental idea is that any situation that you're in has that possibility for a shift in the quality of your awareness. Remember when I was in the States this year, speaking to a friend of mine who's got a couple of young kids. And he was talking about taking his eight-year-old boy rock, climbing. And the kid was completely roped up. They had done whatever it is you've got to hammer into the rock. So there was no risk of the boy falling, or not falling, so in a way that he was going to hurt himself that he fell. And wasn't aware of what ropes do and what they call the big bits in there. What do you hammer in anyway? What do you do? So he's hanging there and he's going, "Dad, is this okay?" And listening to this guy talking about his dialogue with his kid, and he's saying, "So what's going on right now? So what is it fueling? Was it like to be the scared?" And just very kind of reassuring, very supportive, but very inquiring. Just getting the kid to think, "I'm scared, I'm nervous." So it's that opal, "Yeah, it's holding you." So it's not "Okay, yeah, it's okay." You just really get a sense of coaxing this eight-year-old in a bigger attention than you would have had. Before, I suppose you're sort of thinking, this kind of support of waking up, the support towards awareness isn't limited to what happens in the Shrine Room. So any situation that you're in, this possibility to go for refuge, to move towards the mind being more awake is there. And I think that is something quite distinctive about the F.W.B.O.'s attempt to say, "Oh, what does practice look like in the West?" It doesn't, well, a really obvious difference is it doesn't have to be monastic practice. On the other hand, it doesn't rule out monastic practice. Just it's basically saying that possibility is there, whatever circumstance. So that's the first two lineages of teaching and of practice. The other two I want to deal with kind of more briefly, but the third one's the lineage of inspiration. And the basic point of there is you're learning from other people, picking up this thing about going for refuge. One of Sanger's little aphorisms is that going for refuge is caught, not taught. So it's not something that you're going to get conceptually. Basically, it's the experience of what you're learning when you're around somebody who's a bit more awake than we are. I was thinking like an example is I read a bit meditation before I came along to a meditation class. And when I've turned up at a class and listened to somebody explain it, I actually watched them have been fun explaining it. The whole thing just seemed a whole lot less uptight and tight-asked than it was when I read about it. And it's almost like you don't get the full human implications of some of these teachings until you see them being explained by somebody who's practicing them. So there's something that gets communicated about the deep meaning of the teaching that comes through your relationships with other people who practice. So a very strong emphasis in the F.W.B.O. is connection with people who are practicing. It's one of the strongest things that supports everyone practicing. And it's not even that people are always giving you teaching, like I'm thinking, a live for a while with somebody who I've got a very high regard for. And first of all, watching the seriousness of his own practice, how regular he was in meditation had a big effect on my meditation. But especially watching how able he was in dialogue with somebody to really move out of his own biases to get a sense of what was important for somebody else and to respond to that in a helpful way. It's almost like you can read about compassion, but watching somebody that able to take another person in just gave me a sort of level of understanding of what was being got by the more abstract teaching. So the third lineage, the third thing that communicates that experience is being around other people who practice. And the fourth one, just to finish this off, is the lineage of responsibility. I was glad Banti mentioned this personally. There's a few of us who something was asking me earlier what it is I do, and the short answer is email. I spend a lot of my time in dialogue with people across the world, basically, through the medium of email. What did people do before email started anyway? One of the points, and quite a kind of significant point I think, is something that Chugam Trungpa, to that teacher, talks about spiritual materialism. And one of the points here is that one way of thinking about spiritual practice is that we are too identified with our own concerns. It's emotionally true, and emotionally we feel that it's craving or aversion. You've got these emotional boundaries, and you've got it more cognitively. Where your attention can go has quite tight boundaries around it. It's one of the revelations of something like doing the mindfulness of breathing. And it's not to find out what your breath is like, it's not to find out what your feelings are like. And you're moving out into a level of aliveness about your own experience that we don't have a lot of the time. So one of the basic tendencies of spiritual practice is away from a very tight self-referential focus, and it's something much more inclusive, much more attentive, much more permeable. One of the problems is you can start to get self-referential about your own practice. And basically what we're back to here is this idea of one of the important things in spiritual practice is help other people. And just do what you can to consciously make sure that your attention is including other people as well as ourselves. And there's a number of ways that you can think about it. A lot of the very, very simple thing in the Mahayana traditions is that the end of every period of practice you dedicate merits. So just give me the merit gain to my acting, let's go to the alleviation of the suffering of all beings. So there's always a kind of move out into including other people. But one of the really pragmatic ways, like another one, something I found very, very helpful, is a set of verses called the mind training. One of the slogans is train with slogans. We've got habits to break. We've got a habit of not being aware. So how do you start to work with that? And we've got a habit of being self-referential. So one of the things that these little virtues try and do is to give you a couple of tools that point your key elements and your experience. One of the mind training verses is may I cherish all beings and wish for them the highest good. So it's as simple as that, but just like something every now and again to remember when you're talking to somebody and you notice that most of your awareness is on this end of the exchange. Just a reminder that your awareness could be a little bit broader and that you could be as attentive to that person as her habit tends to make us of herself. You can go the other way actually, you get some people who show attentive to other people. You get no idea what's happening at urine. And in that case, make sure that you're included. But basically it's just a reminder to not create a self-referential relationship to your own practice or in the garginess words the medicine becomes the poison. It just becomes something else that gives you a slightly subtler sense of her own self-importance. So one of those things about responsibility is just saying you've got your own practice. How does your practice spill over into helping other people? I don't even want to make it as dramatic as that. It might be as simple as you see somebody in the shop who's in a hurry, you let them go ahead of you. You know, just alive enough. I had a humility in an example. The other day I was in a bus in London and a real rite of passage for me for the first time ever. A young girl got up to give me a seat. And I honestly thought she was getting off the bus so I would never have dreamed of taking the seat otherwise. But she got up, I sat down and she stood there for my last clinging to a sense of myself as a young man has gone. It was an insight practice. The enemy, the point I was going to make it was only when I was getting off the bus that I realized I was a pregnant woman standing behind me. And I didn't need the seat, and she did. But my awareness was not only enough focused for me, not only had they been humiliated by this young girl getting off. It's pure bloody pregnant women standing behind me while I'm sitting on the seat. So I think that was a point I was trying to make, but that's not just getting off my chest. But just this idea that in very, very simple ways you can respond, what was it on this head, love is the idea that other people are real. Just starting to respond in a way that's genuinely aware, responsive to other people, but it can go deep. There's a fantastic image from one of the later Indian texts. And it's, because Sagramati is not here, I can mention the Bodhisattva ideal. But it's an image of the practitioner as the Buddha actually is the first chick hatched from a set of eggs. And it's saying that what this elder chick has done is take its way through the shell and it's out of the shell. I don't know if this is biologically true or not, but the image is that the first chick out starts to peck on the shell of the chicks that haven't hatched yet. So you've got the chick on the inside pecking to get out of the shell and the chick on the outside pecking the same spot to break the shell open. And fundamentally what you've got here is this idea that this process and your own mind of moving from trapped to liberated is something that's going on in every mind. And that we benefit from the moves that other people make. They peck on our shell and that our effort to move into that open, aware state of mind actually can be passed on. We can communicate that in a way that supports the same process and somebody else. So there's things distinct of it after BBO, but I think those lineages need to give you some sense of at least some of the elements that are spiritually significant. Some of them are distinct, some of them we share, but the fundamental thing is back to that human process of moving from suffering to liberation from suffering.
