Time for another talk from Vajradarshini. More poetry, more Rumi, more listening joy. Actually, we just liked the title so much we had to go for it this month – but, in fact, it’s another splendid journey around the idea of Enlightenment, using the languages of surrender and discipline from the Sufi context. It’s as heady as a sumptuous wine, but also sobering and down to earth, whether we’re “following a railing in the dark” or walking lost “inside the red world”. Drink up!
Talk given at Taraloka Retreat Centre, 2005
Contents
01 Starting with a poem by Rumi – not a ‘sensible’ talk
02 ‘Enlightenment’; following a railing in the dark; wine in Rumi’s poetry; the Dharma as studying the self; surrender and discipline
03 The Tavern – pushing off for Truth; ‘managing’ samsara and settling down
04 Fermentation; being cooked – slowly
05 How we are cups; two ways we limit ourselves – i. literalism; a quote from Aloka – abandoning ideas of what the ‘path’ is
06 Sangharakshita on literalism and craving; effective Going for Refuge and giving up limited ideas; the antidote to beauty
07 ii. Utilitarianism; Sangharakshita’s idea of the Greater Mandala of Uselessness; literal takes on aesthetics; breaking the cups
08 Pushing off into truth; kinds of connection with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; Reality and form and emptiness; visualistaion practice and life – things arising and disolving
09 ‘Fana’ and ‘baka’ in Rumi’s poetry – two streamings across the doorsill; Shams-e-Tabrizi – Rumi’s teacher
10 The importance of reflecting on form and emptiness; the eight-point mind training – taking all obstacles with you on the path; the Bodhisattva Ideal from the perspective of emptiness; spiritual practice in a world neither real nor illusory
11 Pema Chodron on how to avoid burn-out; shunyata and unrealistic ideals; a quote by Dennis Potter near to death; the trivial and the important; birdsong
12 Hsuan-Tsang’s ‘trusting mind’; introducing the dirt we buy to the dirt we already have
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I've never given a talk in a skirt before. So that's a first. And I've never given a talk with Kavi City before and she's going to be my beautiful assistant so she's going to do some reading for me. So the talk's got quite a lot of poetry in it and a few sort of quotes and things and I thought I'd ask Kavi City if she would read for me because it sort of helps to have two voices I find it's quite engaging. So we have a huge barrel of wine but no cups. That's fine with us. Every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again. They say there's no future for us. They're right which is fine with us. So this is a roomy poem and if you've been on retreat with me you probably know that I like roomy and I love this poem and it's one of those poems where you love it and you don't have any idea what it means. So I read it before meditation and people sort of say oh that was a great poem you know. What does that mean? I've got no idea but it's fantastic isn't it? And I just had this sense that there was something in it that I really liked that it was trying to communicate something that I really liked that I couldn't kind of understand. So when you give talks on these things you often have to come up with a title long before you've any idea of what you're going to talk about. So I just read this poem recently and I just thought well I'll use this poem so I put the title in and I thought well I'll just use this poem and I didn't really know what was going to come out of it. Giving it a talk on enlightenment is a bit tricky really. Yeah so because I started with the poem I thought well it's more a very sensible poem and I started pulling together a few ideas for the talk and I thought actually this really isn't going to be a very sensible talk and roomy says whoever's calm and sensible is insane. I thought well that fits. But now I do wonder if it's become a bit too sensible so I apologise if it ends up being a bit too sensible and I was thinking how you have to be really brave to not be sensible don't you? You have to be really brave to not make sense so I think I'm kind of getting there but I'm still kind of working on it. So the theme of enlightenment well I have to say that it doesn't really mean very much to me enlightenment. I don't think in terms of enlightenment I don't really use that word at all. Yeah obviously there is something yeah I do believe there is something or at least I do believe that this isn't it. So roomy says if eyesight glurs find a railing to follow and I really like that image of kind of following a railing in the dark and I often feel much more like that but I'm kind of following a railing or I get like I'm following some kind of thread but it's very kind of misty and mysterious yeah it's quite definite anyway there's definitely something to follow. So I'm just going to use some poems and symbols from roomy so roomy is a 12th century Sufi poet so it was Sufi mystic which most people are probably familiar with room but I'm not consenting else about him and in a way the whole talk is a bit like following a railing in the dark that's what it felt like just following this kind of railing in the dark. So we have a huge barrel of wine so wine appears a lot in roomy's poems and we can't say what wine is we can't say oh when when roomy talks about wine he means such and such it means a lot of different things I think you realize this with symbolism in general and in roomy is that the symbols that he uses he uses in different ways so you can't quite pin them down and just say oh this means this as a symbol it kind of defies definition but we do get a sense of what the wine is so this wine that continually appears in his poetry is something to do with essence or spirit or soul yeah so we have to use soul obviously in inverted comments but this kind of essence or soul or spirit it's not inside of us it's neither inside nor outside. Last year I admired wines this I'm wandering inside the red world gone inner and outer no moon no ground or sky don't hand me another glass of wine pour it in my mouth I've lost the way to my mouth. So if I were to ask you what you think enlightenment is and you tell me what you think it is and I wouldn't find out anything about enlightenment but I would find out something about you so you would tell me something about yourself in telling me what enlightenment is and in this talk you're going to find out more about me than enlightenment. Go on you know an outer. So Dogen says this is one of my favorite little quotes Dogen says to study the way is to study the self so that's what we're doing when we say we're studying Buddhism we say we're studying the Dharma we're studying ourself so there is no way or path outside of ourself wine in Rumi is also the experiences that we have drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it's been untied and it's just ambling about. So in Rumi we find themes of drunkenness of surrender and abandon but we also find that these themes go these themes and symbols go hand in hand with strong themes of discipline so in Rumi there's a lot of staying up all night he says don't go back to sleep you know stay up all night keep knocking at the door so there's this kind of persistence fasting meditating do you get these two threads in Rumi of surrender and discipline. Last year I admired wines this I'm wandering inside the red world so he's inside the red world so for Rumi this means that he doesn't admire God yeah he sees nothing but God he is in God. I want to feel myself inside the arc of your mallet when you work. So in our case it means that we don't talk about Buddhism yeah or our practice as if it's something outside of ourselves but it's about being completely immersed in our practice seeing nothing but our practice and I always remember my nanny when my nanny was alive I used to go around there and she used to um she used to say or how's your Buddhism? Just things really funny yeah it's like you know my Buddhism like it was this thing that I kept in the box under my bed. There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds don't think all ecstasies are the same drink from the presence of the saints not from those other jars every object every being is a jar full of delight drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it's been untied and it's just ambling about. So where do we find this wine this essence this experience? So we find it in the tavern so if you know Rumi you'll know that the tavern appears in Rumi as well and the tavern is a sort of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer and then push off from in search of truth and I really like this image I used to sail a little bit I used to go in boats for a little north abroad and that sense where you kind of push off from hard land you know in a boat where you just kind of push off and you slide out I really like this idea that you kind of push off in search of truth from this world this glorious hell this tavern that we live in so the tavern is our human condition so it's joy and suffering and Bjork has this image or this song called I carry my joy on the left I carry my pain on the right and I really like it it's just very much like that that is the human condition there's joy and there's pain and they go together and I think sometimes what can happen is that we think Dharma practice is about fixing samsara so to some extent I think that we can fix samsara we come across the Dharma and maybe we become happier healthier and in a way we become better at life we become better at doing our own life but because of that we can then stop that continual pushing off in search of truth because life becomes more comfortable so well I suppose I think there's a bit about people being an agarica and this idea of resisting settling down like not settling down what does it really mean to not settle down it's not on a superficial level that we need to not settle down it's that we need to not settle down anywhere comfortable where we're not going to be pushing off tempting to push off into the truth so this is why we say for the attainment of enlightenment I accept this ordination it's not so that I can be more confident more happy so that I can get on better with people all those other things that are really important and they do happen and it's great that they happen but that's not what we're doing anyway we're trying to push off into truth so what is wrong with samsara that's quite a good question what is wrong with samsara well I would say that there is nothing wrong with samsara samsara is perfect yeah so let's not try to fix samsara let's appreciate it so samsara is this glorious hell yeah but we're in the middle of and because of that because of pain and suffering because it is this kind of glorious hell it is the ideal place for us to push off in search of the truth the wine we really drink is our own blood our bodies ferment in these barrels we give everything for a glass of this we give our minds for a sip so the wine in these barrels the wine ferments in the tavern so fermentation is one of the oldest symbols of human transformation to ferment so if wine is our spirit then this fermenting is a kind of maturing it's a kind of aging of our soul or our spirit or our essence and roomy also talks a lot of cooking and I think this is user's symbol in zen this idea of to be cooked yeah so the ego is cooked softened with discipline and with experience the chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it's being boiled why are you doing this to me the cook knocks him down with a ladle don't you try to jump out you think i'm torturing you i'm giving you flavor so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being eventually the chickpea will say to the cook boil me some more hit me with a skimming spoon i can't do this by myself so this is roomy and the cook that is hitting roomy with the skimming spoon is roomy's teacher so the teacher is seen as the cook and the disciple is seen as the chickpea that's been cooked and i think it's a really good symbol of transformation particularly when you think about things that are cooked slowly this kind of slow cooking and i was thinking about when you roast peppers like really slowly and you get hungry and they become like soft and sweet and completely different from how they started off so they're completely transformed yet nothing's really added to them the mystery doesn't get clearer by repeating the question nor is it bought with going to amazing places until you've kept your eyes and you're wanting still for 50 years you don't begin to cross over from confusion so it's a slow process of being cooked and i also like this symbol of cooking because it falls somewhere between a developmental model and a more kind of imminent model so there is transformation but we don't add anything on and we don't go anywhere new yet something is transformed we are transformed so i quite like it in that sense so we just need to ferment to cook and eventually to burn so we have a huge barrel of wine our essence our experience we live in a tavern which is a glorious hell in which we ferment gradually becoming softer and deeper i was leaving i was pushing off in search of truth and i was returning to the tavern we have a huge barrel of wine but no cups that's fine with us every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again they say there's no future for us they're right which is fine with us but we have no cups these forms we seem to be our cups floating in an ocean of living consciousness they fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any goodbye spring what we are is that ocean too near to see that we swim in it and drink it in don't be a cup with a dry rim so these forms we seem to be our cups so we're like cups floating in an ocean of living consciousness we're cups floating in surrounded by drinking in reality and yet we don't see it so don't be a cup with a dry rim drown yourself pubnosembova talks of reality not as an ocean but as a clear light but in a similar way although it's evidently visible yeah there is no one there who sees it amazing even though it exists in everyone everywhere yet it has gone unrecognized amazing nevertheless you hope to attain some other fruit than this elsewhere amazing even though it exists within yourself and nowhere else yet you seek for it elsewhere amazing so to be a cup with a dry rim is to limit ourselves so a cup is a container and in a sense we're contained we're limited we limit ourselves to be cups with a dry rim now there's hundreds of ways in which we can limit ourselves so i'm just going to talk about two things two ways one of them is literalism and the other is usefulness so i'm just going to talk a little bit about those two so first of all literalism i don't know if people know our loca or if most people are familiar with his paintings he lives in Norwich as an artist and our loca says in 1976 i formally committed myself to a cause of action ordination about which i had a whole jumble of ideas none of these have really turned out to be of much use except their gradual abandonment has provided a path of debris offering the consolation that i have actually moved from where i started so i really like this image our locus image of the spiritual life as a path of debris so this is we just look behind and there's just this path of debris and we think oh well i've come from where then and it's a debris of what we've abandoned along the way and i think that sometimes we think of the spiritual life we can think of the spiritual life as abandoning things but we think what we abandon is like worldly values or material things whereas actually it's more a path of continually abandoning our wrong ideas of the path yeah and that that is the path i mean it's quite absurd you can see why people when they do gain insight or do become enlightened often responses just to burst that laughing really with these end stories or so there's this path this path of debris is just a path of abandoned wrong ideas of what the path was so we could kind of think well that's not very good is it you know i've just had this continual wrong ideas of what the path is that i've been abandoning for the last 15 years but that is the path that's good you know that is what we're trying to do and whatever i think now i think i i think i am beginning to realize this more and more actually that whatever i think now whatever i hold as a truth now whatever my understanding is now at this moment about what it is we're trying to do what it is i'm trying to do it's wrong and i will abandon it and i will look back at that time when i gave that talk on really and i thought and i think oh how embarrassing but so it's this continual kind of abandonment of maybe not wrong ideas that at least limited ideas of what we think the path is so in a sense this is literalism holding these ideas is literalism bante talks about literalism as when our intellect powered by craving grasps an idea of the path so it's really our craving that grasps the idea of a path but we think it's our kind of intellect or our intellect is kind of not as objective as we'd like to think it is so we all want something we all want all sorts of things and then when we come across the dharma our intellect will grasp an idea of the path which fits nicely with what it is we want so that's why if you ask me about enlightenment you find out more about me than you do enlightenment and that's why enlightenment is different for each of us because we each want something different so it's really good to explore what you think enlightenment is because i think although you might not find out about enlightenment you do find out something about yourself which is the way to enlightenment so a measure of effective going for refuge isn't so much that we are transformed so it isn't so much that we become completely different when we're effectively going for a future but that we continually confront the limits of our understanding so we're continually forced to abandon our limited ideas of what the spiritual life is and i think that is effective going for refuge when we're continually willing to and in a sense forced to by the momentum of our own practice to just keep giving up our old limited ideas of what the spiritual life is often when we hit a crisis when we have doubts when something goes wrong we think something isn't working but often i think what's happening is that we're just faced with a bigger vision of what it is we're actually doing yeah bigger than we thought and maybe less comfortable than we thought what are you doing in a way we've hit our own literal mindedness about the spiritual life and that's a really good thing you know it's good to keep coming up against that and the literal mindedness about the spiritual life and in a way i think the whole movement recently has had this crisis in a sense and i think what's happened is that there have been kind of ideas of what the spiritual life is about which we collectively have had to kind of give up and embrace something bigger something less literal something less comfortable anyway so our loca says that an antidote to literalism is beauty and myth so i think for me roomy isn't antidote to literalism because in his poetry in his symbols there isn't really anything that you can get a hold of yeah you you can't really take roomy literally he slips out of your grasp time and time again the cup wants to be lifted and used not broken but carried carefully to the next the cup knows there's a state for you beyond this one that comes with more vast awareness the cup looks still but acts in secret to help sometimes you pour cup to cup nothing happens pour instead into your deep ocean self without calculation if i cite blurs use a railing to follow so another way that we limit ourselves or contain ourselves is through being useful so it's another way that we keep our rim dry is to take a utilitarian view of the spiritual life when what we're really trying to do is weigh beyond any kind of usefulness in the ordinary sense of word so banti talks about this in wisdom beyond words as the greatest amandela and it's really i mean it's just pure genius really this chapter on the greater mandala which some people don't know about i think so if you're interested do look up so he talks about this greater mandala and he says that the bodhisattva operates within this greater mandala it's a mandala of relishing of enjoying of taking delight it's a mandala of aesthetic appreciation tavi siddhi what are you doing today well vagidogeny are mainly just relishing people taking delight and enjoying what arises within that i will be you know earning money washing my clothes having a run but that's by the by really so often i think it's the other way round isn't it we uh we get all the things done and then if we've got time left at the end of the day we'll relish something maybe relish going to be for the company so we put first all the kind of useful things and then we kind of add in these little treats and i think also you know it's interesting this word aesthetic which is a hell nother talk my tray said that i'm quite into you know music and art and things like that and she didn't say what sort of me she didn't say that she hears me in my room listening to icky pop i think we can sometimes have a bit of a limited idea of what is aesthetic so we have this kind of useful life where we do all these very worthy things and then as a tree you know we do something aesthetic which means like going to a gallery listening to music preferably classical going for walking country yeah it's a bit of a literal way of thinking well what does it mean to have aesthetic appreciation in our lives every object every being is a jar full of delight so we need to kind of turn it on its head and we need to see that aesthetic appreciation is an attitude it's an attitude that we can take anywhere the cup knows there's a state for you beyond this one that comes with more vast awareness the cup looks still but acts in secret to help so the cup our limited self knows more than we think it helps us to go beyond limitation i think this is one of the things that came out of said and and his talk for me is this idea that it's in us yeah we can trust ourselves so the cup the cup is acting in secret to help i really love that idea so to say that we have no cups in rumours poem is to say that we are useless and limitless that's fine with us we have a huge barrel of wine but no cups that's fine with us every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again they say there's no future for us they're right which is fine with us so in the morning we glow in the evening we glow again so what would it be like for us to break the cups the half measures i have a firsty fish in me that can never find enough of what it's thirsty for show me the way to the ocean break these half measures these small containers so wine and cups emptiness and form form is emptiness emptiness is form so this is the truth that we're attempting to push off into and every time i've felt myself to any extent or push off into the truth it's been into an experience of seeing through things of dissolving of fluidity of seeming to be less real than they thought they were of things becoming alive and breaking up becoming less fixed but i think to see this to whatever extent that we see it is just one side of the truth and i don't think that the truth has sides so one side of the truth is not true yeah you can't have one side of the truth so again i think that this experience it tells me more about myself than about reality so to study the way is to study yourself in roomies terms it tells you that i want to merge with the ocean be the moth annihilated by the flame that i'm drawn to nothingness so it tells you that i have a tendency to towards nihilism in realizing this it's also helped me see something about why i've never really connected with buddhas and bodhisattvas at least not in anything but the most abstract sense so in a way i've sometimes used that fact that i don't make that connection even with buddhas and bodhisattvas as a way of sort of undermining myself and thinking well therefore i don't you know i don't have connection and in a sense i do know that i have quite a deep connection in my sardina practice at shovia and i do know that i have a deep connection with at shovia it's just that he doesn't have any arms and legs so for me there's always been this question he doesn't have a body either actually in case you've got a funny image you know there's never been a question really about act shovia you know the existence of act shovia or whatever it is that i think of act shovia as being or thousand longer or whatever it might be so there's never been a question about that but it was in my mind was this question why would reality take form why would reality take human form so i just kind of know it wouldn't you know it doesn't make sense to me i haven't really believed it so quite a lot of you know that my dad died at christmas quite suddenly and i was with him when he died i saw his cup fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any goodbye spray so i felt like i had very strongly an experience of form becoming emptiness and something's happened which in where i can't talk about yet because it's very sort of recent but it's obviously had a very strong effect on me and now i feel like whenever i have that sensation that i'm sort of pushing into the truth it's full yeah there's there's like forms appearing in a sense there's a kind of fullness there a continual sort of manifesting it's almost like i've seen one side and therefore something else is showing itself the kind of fullness of life is showing itself and since then i've just very strongly had this sense that there is this play of form and emptiness all around us all the time and that that is the greater mandala our sort of appreciating our relishing in this form and emptiness this play of form and emptiness is the greater mandala it's reality just showing itself to us all the time and just recently we did a retreat on lineage and we were doing the going for refuge and frustration practice and i was talking i gave a talk about the practice and i was particularly talking about visualization visualization practice and it just struck me that it was spring time and it just felt like oh oh yes it almost sort of felt like we're living inside this visualization practice yeah it's spring it's like form is appearing out of nothingness out of nothingness trees appear out of nothing leaves appear flowers appear and it just what just have quite a strong effect on me of just realizing that is continually being shown to us and then it comes to autumn and things will dissolve things will disappear and in fact actually as things come into being they are disappearing the closer we look the more we see that they are they disappear as they come into being and that this is the truth so when we do a sardin practice when we do a visualization practice this is the truth that we push off in search of this manifesting dissolving creating letting go so they go hand in hand and it's just happening everywhere yeah so once i started seeing it in spring i was just seeing it everywhere and i was thinking only we prepare a meal and it's there and then it's eaten and then it's gone and then all these dishes 30 dishes have appeared they manifest and then we wash them we put them away and i think you can also see it through time how you anticipate something you anticipate a meeting with somebody and then you meet you connect and then you part and then you forget even you know it's like this continual things coming into being and dissolving continual approaching being letting go dissolving and this truth is so obvious it is so in front of our eyes and yet we don't see it amazing praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence existence this place made from our love for that emptiness yet somehow comes emptiness this existence goes praise to that happening over and over in Rumi's poems he uses this what he calls fana and baka and they are these two screenings across the door sill Rumi talks about a dervish doorway which is often in his poems as a round door appears quite long so there's this round door and doorway and it's the dervish doorway between the human and the divine or the doorway between the secular and the sacred and across this doorway across this door sill there are two streamings one coming towards one going away yeah there's two streamings continually across the door sill so fana is the streaming that moves out from the human into mystery it's a magnificent disintegration it's the drop dissolving in the ocean it's us pushing off from the tavern into truth and fana i think we can sometimes mistakenly think of as the spiritual bit and then there's baka so baka is a streaming that comes the other way across the door sill so it's a return from an expanded state into just the work that we have to do that day yeah it's like a return to the tavern to the glorious hell a return to pain and effort to confusion and ordinariness so baka we can sometimes mistake as the worldly but actually there are just these two continual streamings across the door sill and in Rumi's terms what happens and in our terms as well is that we realize that these two streamings are one yeah we realize that there aren't really two streamings across the door sill there is just experience so shams is a bit of an example of this shams is Rumi's teacher well he's taught of as a fierce god man that Rumi needs and they have a very interesting relationship because he is a teacher but he's also very much a friend it makes me think i often think of bante as shams actually it's very much like a personal relationship that he has with Rumi a very kind of mutual relationship but he is his teacher or his inspiration shams and shams would spend half of his time in ecstatic trance and then the other half his time working as a stone mason and i really like that combination that you do both those things you're either you know in ecstatic trance or you're working as a stone mason it's a kind of bringing together in a way of formal emptiness so i think unless we really try to understand something about formal emptiness i mean i know it's not easy things to try and understand but unless we can kind of really reflect on that underneath everything else that we reflect on in the dharma i think it can be really easy to kind of get the wrong end of the stick with a lot of different things i remember standing at a bus stop when i was probably still a hairdresser but i had come across the heart suit try to come to us in there it says in the heart sutra form is nothing but emptiness emptiness is nothing but form and i was standing at this bus stop thinking about this and it just hit me you know it still seemed easier in a way to grasp the you know form is nothing but emptiness that's what we try and work on so if other people are like that yeah trying to see that form is empty but then trying to see that emptiness is formed in a way it again it's a bit like an streaming back across the door cell that's what it makes me think of and we really do have to try and push off into that truth and it's not something that we're going to be able to grasp with our intellect or our mind but we do need to let a sense of that inform how we think about the dharma and one of the things that i've been thinking about recently which i wonder if in some ways we've sort i've got the wrong end of the stick a little bit is the bodhisatt fry deal and recently domed in a retreat studying the eight-point mind training and order retreat at t-rat maloka so the essence of these verses probably some of you have come across them so the essence of the verses is to take all difficulties onto the path so it's all to do with you don't see obstacles to your practice you don't see obstacles on the path because whatever you see which we might call an obstacle we take it onto the path so it's taking all difficulties onto the path in a way it's another way of not having Buddhism in a box under your bed you know that you get out when you've got time or when things are going okay it's like everything is your practice nothing lies outside of your practice and we've been studying this all week and at the end of the week we had a sort of question and answers discussion thing and somebody said they said well yeah but you know wouldn't people practice in this this taking all difficulties onto the path you know wouldn't they be studying within the bodhisatt fry deal so it raised the question of well are we you know do we think that we are practicing the bodhisatt fry deal is that how we see our practice and in a way these verses they don't make any sense if you don't think you're practicing the bodhisatt fry deal so they say when someone out of envy does me wrong by insulting me in the like may I accept defeat and offer victory to them even if someone whom I have helped and in whom I've placed my hopes does great wrong by harming me may I see them as an excellent spiritual friend so these verses go on like this becoming more and more outrageous until you're just thinking no way you know no way it's like you know the worse the more awful someone is to you the more you think that they are a treasure trove and the more you appreciate them and you do feel like everything in your whole being going no way you know forget it that's beyond the call of duty so anyway I started doing a bit of a survey an informal survey about the bodhisatt fry deal asking people what they thought about the bodhisatt fry deal and it started off with all the members because it was an order of cheating then I've been asking a few other people and I don't think it's exactly flavor of the month bodhisatt fry deal it is a t-rat and licorice in a way I do think that's one of the things I've been struck by joining the team there is just how inspired everybody is by the bodhisatt fry deal in a very kind of real ordinary sort of way that that is their kind of informing principle but anyway it doesn't seem like it's flavor of the month although the last year or two the retreats that we've done on the bodhisatt fry deal people have really loved them love them actually and other people have really loved them because I think it's filled out the picture a bit of what the bodhisatt fry deal is about so what I've been wondering is to some extent if we haven't grasped the bodhisatt fry deal wrongly in the sense that we've grasped it without the emptiness aspect I think the bodhisatt fry deal is easy to grasp wrongly in a way and it's easy to end up with thinking about it in terms of compassion but not necessarily in terms of emptiness and without emptiness there is no real compassion so it's not compassion then that we're practicing I think it's quite dangerous because it's so easy to think that it's good to be good you know it's good to be good and it's good to help people so when we come across the bodhisatt fry deal I think we can grasp it in that sense oh yes of course it's good to be good and it's good to you know hold the daughter nirvana open and you know don't you worry you go through I'm all right here I'll be all right and actually to miss the emptiness aspect of the bodhisatt fry deal and I think it's controversial but I think maybe particularly as women it can be easy to kind of fall into a kind of martyrdom you know of just doing everything for everybody else and genuinely aspiring to practice bodhisatt fry deal but we've kind of missed the crucial link so in when we go through these eight verses the people that were studying this from being practicing this they probably were really rooted in the bodhisatt fry deal but there is a little bit at the end of the verses that says may I see all things as a illusion that's what it says or in another translation it says aware that all things are illusory so it just kind of brings in this little bit of shunutah of emptiness just at the end by which time you're really grateful for it so it's slightly tacked on the end but it's absolutely crucial because without that kind of perspective without the perspective of emptiness I think the bodhisatt fry deal well it isn't the bodhisatt fry deal and not only is it not the bodhisatt fry deal I think it's a bit off-putting you know so I think we've been a bit off-put by the bodhisatt fry deal maybe by grasping it a little bit too much one end of that particular stick so Banti says in wisdom beyond words the bodhisatt fry doesn't think here I am a bodhisatt fry or here I am coursing in perfect wisdom the bodhisatt is absorbed to the point of self-forgetfulness all the time so Dogen says as I said before to study the way is to study the self and the next line of that Dogen throw is to study the self is to forget the self when you're totally integrated when your reason is your emotion and your emotion is your reason it's then quite difficult to say whether you're doing something for a particular reason or simply because you feel like it you're aware of why you're doing whatever you're doing and you're emotionally engaged in what you're doing but they seem to come to the same thing that is intelligence so every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again because there's nothing to be done so in the highest sense the spiritual life is an illusion in the sense that it's beyond duality the two streamings across the door cell are actually one but this can only be realized through leading the spiritual life so all of this yeah well this is neither illusory nor real so because all of this isn't illusory we do have to act here we have to practice we have to practice the bodhisatt for ideal we have to practice bearing in mind other people bearing in mind the planet bearing in mind the effect that we can have on the world because it's not an illusion but it's not real so because it isn't real we can't get hung up about it yeah we can't control it but that's the kind of balance that we're trying to strike we have a huge barrel of wine but no cups that's fine with us every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again they say there's no future for us they're right which is fine with us so they say there's no future for us they're right which is fine with us so what does it mean to have that kind of perspective that kind of attitude some of you might know Vadrosaki she's been living at Gampo Abbey Pematrogren's place and she's an ordinary member she writes him to Shabda so it's been really interesting reading her Shabda reports from Gampo Abbey in just a completely different set up and completely different training and recently she had a interview with Pematrogren and she wrote about it in Shabda and one of the things that she asked Pematrogren is how do you avoid burnout in intense situations so Pematrogren said well you need to have a stabilized realization of Shunutta so I read that I read the first bit how do we avoid burnout oh interesting and then I read the second bit you need to have a stabilized realization of Shunutta and I just I just caught myself doing this thing which is just like forget it you know out of my league not even consciously actually because I don't think I lack confidence in a certain sort of way but I just realized that I can very easily just go not for me I'm not going to do that and I call myself do that and I think well hang on you know why do I do that yeah why do I assume that Shunutta is like so it's like it's a different planet or something it's like it's you know there's no connection between me and it as Padma Samlava says in the quote earlier it's like we're often looking elsewhere for what is right under our noses and you know more and more I've been thinking well maybe we do have experience of insight I mean I definitely think my dad died I mean I wouldn't mainly claims about it but it was a very very strong experience and what is insight if it isn't those experiences where we just see something in a very real way you know I thought well maybe I do have some experience of emptiness or fullness and maybe I just don't recognize it you know maybe I'm continually having these experiences but I don't really I don't really recognize them and then I was thinking well what would it mean to have a sustained realization of Shunutta presumably I could do that and still be on this planet you know presumably it wouldn't be so way off that it would be unrecognized by that it got me thinking I'm not going to go into it now but it just got me thinking well what would I be like if I did have more of a realization of Shunutta you know maybe I'd be a bit more flexible maybe I'd be this maybe I'd be that it isn't like I'd be completely other than what I am now again I think Sudden Andi drew that out in her talk that we can have unreal ideals and between us and them there is this gulf that is just impossible to even think about crossing because they're unreal there's a quote from Dennis Potter when he was dying he was being interviewed and he knew that he was dying of cancer and he says the blossom is out in full now it's plum tree it looks like apple blossom but it's white it's the whitest frothiest blossom-est blossom that ever could be and I can see it things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous so Shradda Gita sent me this quote just after my dad had died and there's just been on my mind a lot since then and I think there's a certain kind of perspective that comes with death with being close to death and you do see the world differently and I suppose I do believe that what you see is a bit more close to reality than what we usually see and one of the main ways that I would explain that feeling how it felt to me that change of perspective was seeing that there is little difference between the trivial and the important in a way there is no such thing as trivial and no such thing as important but when I came back to Tuaniloka after my dad had died there's all sorts of things that normally I would think was so important that needed to be done or that were just not important and then there were all these little things just like listening to the bird sing I mean I lay in the bath one day thinking I couldn't bear the thought you know like if I was going to die I was thinking about like you know what would happen if I sort of knew that I was going to die I think it was trivial and important and I think you've got to can bear the thought of never hearing the bird sing again that seems like an unbearable kind of thought yeah I hardly ever noticed the bird singing yeah I just my long book goes off and I get up yeah I don't I don't sort of really give the time to all those little things so I still don't really know what Rumi is going on about in his poem but it does feel like finding a railing to follow in the dark yeah thinking about that poem there's like following a railing in the dark and why get a sense of that poem being about is to do with trust I think it's to do with trust and it's what Swansang calls the trusting mind it's about trusting ourselves and our experience I think it's about trusting that reality is manifesting all around us and that we can trust that there is reality and there is our own sense of that and our own experience so Swansang says emptiness here emptiness there for the infinite universe stands always before your eyes one thing all things move among an intermingle without distinction to live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection to live in this faith is the road to non-duality because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind so the non-dual is one with the trusting mind so I'm going to finish with a little story and it's a little story that you can think about when you're washing your clothes so is the dirt we buy we introduce it to the dirt we already have these two dirts are so pleased to see each other that they mingle and swim around in the water together amongst our clothes until when the moment is right we lift the clothes free of both soap and dirt Buddhism is the dirt you buy introduce it to the dirt you have
