Thank you, thank you, thank you. Until very recently this talk was advertised simply as a Dharma talk, mainly because originally I didn't have much of an idea of what I was going to say. And in a way, having been working on it this last week, it's ended up as a bit of a promotion for the retreat I'm leading at Butterfield in May. And I think this is because, you know, analysing myself a little bit, I think this is because ever since my recent solitary retreat I've been so desperate for communication of any kind that I'll do almost anything to get some attention. And for getting attention, what's especially good about Butterfield is that the numbers are virtually unlimited. I mean, you can always put up a few more tents in any one space. You can always fit in a few more tents. So if the retreat attracts 100 or more, I'm sure we could manage it. And I think that would be great, you know, 100 or two men, women, I don't know about angels, but last time I led something at Butterfield. One of the most committed retreatants on that retreat was a dog called Brian. And I don't know if Butterfield usually allow pets, especially not dogs, but Brian was given a place on this retreat because of the depth of his meditation practice. I know it's not easy to assess these things from the outside. Not in anyone at all, but Brian really was. He really was an exceptionally relaxed and peaceful person. I mean, he would sit. He really would sit hour after hour in the shrine tent with all of us, just quite still radiating what appeared at least to be metar and wisdom. And anyway, I emailed Brian this week. So I hope that he's going to be able to attend this coming retreat. And as you'll have gathered from what I've said so far, Brian, in fact Butterfield itself represents something very, very serious, something very profound even because he represents nature, the natural life lived in the open air on solid ground by flowing waters in the sun and in the rain as well, and under open skies. It represents the way the Buddha, Shakimuni, lived for most of his life. In fact, the Buddha, as probably a lot of you know this, but the Buddha was born under a tree. He gained enlightenment under a tree and he passed away under a tree. I don't know about you, but I really like trees. And as soon as I connected up with the Butterfield community a few years ago, I realized that I want to live like that myself. And a little bit more recently when I had that opportunity to take a long break from things and do a personal retreat, I suddenly realized, well, I can do it like that. I can do my retreat that way. Maybe in Britain, it's not really advisable to live under a tree, especially at my age, but I could build a hut on a hill somewhere. So that's what I do. That's where I live for 18 months in fact. In fact, I still spend most of my time in that hut. I like so much living right in the midst of nature. Well, I think it's reasonable to ask why. What is in fact the advantage of living so close to the elements? After all the elements of earth, water, fire and air are not necessarily so pleasant to live with. They find to look at, you know, it's lovely to drive through the mountains or we take a train to the seaside or watch a documentary about wildlife. But why live in it? In real life the earth, I can tell you, the earth is stony, hard or muddy and dirty. Water, as you know, it's wet, it's damp. And in this country it's cold. Why forsake ones, carpets, hot running water, bathroom and mains electricity? Why go somewhere with just an earth toilet where water has to be carried in buckets and where the fire keeps going out? Well, if you've ever been away in the country or down by the sea or up in the mountains, you know why. I mean nearly everyone these days lives in a highly artificial environment. There's a sense of well-being and beauty simply being where things are not man-made. Where at night you can look up and you just see the moon and the stars and instead of a ghastly electric glare, that's why. It seems to me that contact with nature in itself nourishes some kind of human need. I wonder if that's true though. I sort of think about this. Why should it matter? How artificially we live? Why should it matter? I can't easily answer this. But I think meditation might help us understand it. Just doing meditation because meditation works I think by exposing our artificiality and then somehow dissolving it through a process of awareness. It purifies us of our artificiality simply by our paying attention to our experience as we were doing just now. And I think that's meditation in a nutshell, giving attention to experience. The attention isn't just mental. The attention we give is also something we do with our heart. I think this is very important. The heart, what is the heart? You know the heart is all about what we wish and hope for. It's about what we want and what we want in meditation I think is to find the truth in some way. Find some kind of truth. So looking at meditation in that way meditation becomes something like a kind of prayer because in our heart we want authenticity. It's because we badly need something real, something genuine. That's why we give our attention in meditation. And this very heartfelt attention that is meditation brings new awareness. Our awareness of ourselves, of others, of our senses and of the whole world is continually refreshed as we practice. And in the long term after much practice and reflection we come to what we can call a more philosophical awareness, a kind of sensitivity to reality itself, of the ultimate truth of the nature of existence. And that's the beginning of wisdom. I think obviously it takes a long long time for our wisdom to come to fruition. But still I think some of it starts sprouting in this right from the very beginning. So just to summarise what I just said we can say that on the Buddhist path our artificiality gradually drops away and we become more natural and real. A meditation that's especially focused on this approach of nature is the meditation on six elements. Earth, water, fire and air are known in all pagan traditions and they embrace everything we can possibly experience. And then for Buddhist tradition experiences itself embraced by space and consciousness or awareness to elements which in a sense are even more elemental. Meditation on these elements can bring us closer to an experience of our real nature. But we're not usually so closely in touch. Naturalness doesn't come as easily as we'd like and it's partly due to our history. Here in Europe at least, pagan or natural values were suppressed for centuries by authoritarian religion. And we're only just starting to see the damage that that has caused. Let alone start to break free from it. Our connection with nature can't actually be broken but emotionally we're so deeply involved very often with authoritarianism that it's hard to see much value in being more connected with nature. We can't really see the point very often. The only way is to experience natural reality for ourselves. It's an issue not a theory but of practice. So I'm going to take you through this meditation on the six elements. I might digress a little on the way. So bear with me and be curious. See if you can experience what I'm talking about. It's a practice that can be done any time at all. Sitting formally in meditation, it can be done in walking meditation, it can be done in working meditation. So for most people the earth element is the easiest element to experience directly. Everyone's body has parts that are hard, firm and durable. Earth is our muscles and our bones, our fingernails and our toenails, our hair and our skin. And of course it's everything out there that's solid as well. So when we do this practice we try to get an increasing sense of that nature, that quality of earth that's everywhere. We can feel it bending and stretching as we breathe. We can feel it in the ground under our feet. In the chair we're sitting on. We can feel it in our homes and our kitchens and on roads and in cars and among fields and trees and up mountains. And finally you can feel it. You can see it in the white cliffs as they run down to the golden sandy beach. And when we walk out from there that golden sandy beach gets wetter. It gets gradually wetter and finally we're paddling. And we've finally arrived at the edge of a vast ocean. We've arrived at the element water. I don't know about you but for me there's an enormous shift when we get to that point. Water isn't just a different element. The next on the list, element number two, it's another world. Water, water. See the water flow. It sparkles and it dances. There's a kind of magical touch that comes in. The quality of liquid is utterly different, isn't it, to that of earth. The dry solid forms of earth are hard edged and rigid by nature. Liquid things, you know, you're going to have to use your imaginations here. Liquid things are not shapeless but their shapes always come from what contains them. Water runs down this channel and that channel. It forms into pools and puddles and it flows on and on down and down and down until finally it reaches the ocean and even in the ocean the flow never stops. The ocean flows within itself. So the practice is to appreciate this. It's to get involved in the sensation, the world of water. Not just H2O, you understand, but the whole liquid dimension of things. Rain, oil, tea, soup, mud, porridge, everything that flows and we ourselves, of course, carry wherever we go a whole range of liquid substances. You know, we always take, for example, for some reason, we always take along some urine. We always have lots of blood with us and plenty of saliva and digestive juices. We absolutely take all that for granted and we hardly ever even think of them as they just carry on tirelessly pumping around, doing their work, keeping us alive. We don't generally feel much in the way of gratitude. In fact, I think we tend to think of our bodily fluids as a little unclean or a little indelicate somehow even to talk about. I think there's a definite taboo against mentioning our bodily fluids to others. Isn't that the case? And I think that that feeling that we have reveals some of the conditioning that we've inherited. The conditioning that draws us into an artificial way of life. But in this meditation, we start undoing all those rather anxious, fearful complexes that we have and we start simply accepting the elements as they are. We enlarge our awareness to include them. We remember that the elements are simply what's there all the time and how truly odd it is that we find it so difficult to accept them. Yet our oddness, we really do have that feeling of oddness. We really don't like to think, do we, of that blood pumping around? Yet it never stops pumping. And so it seems to me that we need to find a way to befriend the elements. I know this is going to sound a bit peculiar, but my experience is that the elements will reciprocate our friendship somehow. And that isn't quite as bad as it sounds. I'm quite aware that the elements are not people, but they aren't things either. The elements are qualities, qualities that never exist alone. The elements coexist. They're all together. They're all of a piece. Earth and water, for example, are always warm or cold. The earth of my bones and the water of my blood are warm. Now this is the fire element. The temperature of things like my bones and your bones is governed by the presence of the sun, the ultimate source of all heat. When the sun isn't around, it gets cold. If there was no sun at all, there couldn't be life. I wonder if there's a limit to how hot or how cold things can get. I don't know. I suspect that the potential, either way, is infinite, which is quite a thought. Physical heat. Physical heat is important emotionally. If it's too hot, I feel oppressed. I feel dull. I can't do anything. I'm definitely a cold climate sort of person. I love snow and mountain air. That's me. That's the way I notice this element. Fire is another world with its own particular associations, myths and images. So can we get into that world? Can we learn to experience the fire element all around, understand how basic it is? That's the practice. Experiencing it, relating to it, understanding it and learning from it. Personally, I find it's harder to engage with the fire element. In the days when we used to worship the sun, I think we were more in touch with the elemental aspect of fire. We used to rejoice in the fact that it just keeps coming up over the horizon unfailingly every morning. There's that Rolf Harris song, isn't it, with the didgeridoo. Sunarize. I can't do this Mahasukta thing, but sunarize every every morning. Actually, we don't really feel that. When the sun comes up, we don't feel grateful or secure, do we? I don't think so. Maybe we do deep down, but I think very, very few people feel very much about the sun. And very few people that I know actually even light a real fire to warm themselves. People just switch something on and then it gets warm and it stays warm until they switch it off. That's our simple life, if you like. But behind that simple switch lies an enormous amount of complexity. And it comes, I think, at a price. Okay, the fourth element, that was fire. The fourth element is that of wind or air. These days I call this the wind element for a couple of reasons. First wind is what the word 'vio' actually means. The Sanskrit Pali 'vio' comes from Vata, which is connected with the Latin 'ventus', and from there we get our English words like 'ventilation' and 'vent'. Vio doesn't mean air in the usual sense of our atmosphere. It's air in the sense of wind. It's moving air. In fact, it's not the air, but the movement itself. Vio is the element of motion. In Indo-Tibetan meditation, yoga and medicine systems, there's a great deal that's based on the notion of wind or the experience of moving energy inside the body. Obviously, you've got the circulation of the blood, the digestion of food, et cetera. This movement is all 'vio', along with all the literal winds in the body, the burps, the farts and the rumbling intestines. That is also wind, of course. But there are subtler energies moving around as well. For example, there are the nervous energies that move in correspondence with our emotions, that are moving right now in correspondence with our emotions. And just for example, when we're aroused by hatred or craving, even very slightly, something physical happens in the body. And we can notice these physical changes. In recent years, I've learned that when my body heat starts rising in a certain kind of way, it's because I'm starting to feel oppressed somehow. Next thing, I start noticing that I'm feeling irritated or upset. But if I can notice that subtle sign, that subtle heat first, then I can say to myself, "Whoa, Kamala Sheila, be careful. Protect yourself. Watch out, you don't do something silly." And on my good days, when I can actually listen to my own advice, I can save myself some trouble. Usually at that stage, it's not hard to make an adjustment. For example, maybe I'm cooking or I'm doing some kind of task, but I'm feeling a bit impatient for some reason, and my mind is only half on the job. If I see the signs, the physical signs, it's quite obvious that if I just get more impatient, I'm just going to suffer. And seeing it catching it, if you like, at that stage, I can quite easily relax. It's when it goes past that stage and I've already got into an impatient, irritated mood, but it's much more difficult to relax it. And for me, the transformation of emotion isn't just a case of avoiding causing trouble. It's also about staying with the Dharma, staying with reality itself. If I get too upset and I can, it's much harder to recall the Dharma. I just get stuck in that upset state. I know that in theory, I should be able just to look straight into any mental state, even the most extreme negative state, and just see that it's something conditioned, it's something empty, it's something which I simply don't need to get involved with. I should be able to see it, but it actually was never like that in the first place. And on a good day, that can be done. But it's still very difficult because I'm often so attached to my emotions and I forget the spaciousness of everything. And the practice which helps me create spaciousness is this recollection of the elements, including this vile dhatu, this element of movement, of continual ceaseless movement. The practice helps me to stay in touch in a friendly way with my real nature. In my meditation book, I wrote about the absent-minded professor, sort of person, who's always thinking and he forgets, or she forgets, the physical world around. And if I'm not careful, I get, I get rather like that. I can get cut off from the nature in me. I need to stay aware of the wind element, which is so vast, it's so extensive, and so somehow multi-dimensional. And I've not told you the half of it because as well as subtle physical images, there is the movement of the mind. As it darts here and there, there's the movement of the mind within itself in the form of thoughts and perceptions. And all that is also the vile dhatu. But we'll come back to that later because we actually still have two elements to go. So I hope you're staying with us, and managing to connect with us in some way. Because the next element, the fifth element, is of course the element of space. Space being the great container of all things, everything's in space. All this incredible diversity, all these amazing formations of earth, water, fire, and wind. Every single thing, even movement takes up its place in space. Each of us is occupying space. This room, these seats and these walls all fit perfectly, perfectly into their own specially shaped spaces. Each one of our in-breaths and our out-breaths is making it a unique, unrepeatable shape in space. When we consider the whole of London, the whole of Britain, the whole planet, the sun and the moon, and the whole galaxy of forms, the stars, the whole universe, we see for a moment just how incredibly accommodating the space is in which everything is moving around. And it's more than just vast. Space is boundless. It's beyond all measure. There's no end to it. And that's such an extraordinary thought. It'd be an even more extraordinary reality to comprehend if we could really comprehend it. But we can't actually comprehend anything infinite or boundless. All we can comprehend is the idea of boundlessness. And that's amazing enough. To really comprehend boundlessness, we'd have to be boundless ourselves, I think. We'd have to become completely enlightened. And of course, as we know, we can in fact do that. Anyway, I'm not going to that right now. Because finally, we need to get onto the sixth element that of consciousness. While I've been speaking of earth, water, fire, and wind, and space too, I hope you've been able to make some kind of contact with each one in your experience. These elements which exist in space, even air that's a movement in space. But space itself, the boundless space itself, and the four great elements which take up the boundless space. Space itself happens in an even more basic element. The four great elements and the space they occupy are all experiences. They are all something that we're conscious of. That is, they're all embraced within the element of consciousness. What is the element of consciousness? Is there a particular thing that it is? How do you measure consciousness? How do you even catch hold of it? I mean, where is it? These questions are a very hard to answer. That's why this term element is very useful. It just refers to the fact of consciousness. Whatever consciousness might be, it's there. It's a fact. Whether we are conscious of a thought or a feeling inside or of something physical outside, it's undeniable that we are having that experience. Our bodies are something we experience, what we see through our eyes and taste with our tongues, our experiences, our thoughts we experience, our feelings we experience. It's all an experience. Our whole life has been an experience and even death will be an experience. Thus, everything takes place in experience, in the consciousness element. This is what it means. And in this meditation practice, we don't try to work out what consciousness is because we just end up with some theory or other. And it's hard to experience a theory, but it's easy to experience consciousness. It's simply true always that we are having yet another experience. And that is the practice. To be fully aware of the reality of each moment of experience, just as it comes and goes, arises and disappears. We can then gradually start seeing into what experience really is. So that's the start of the sixth element practice, experiencing the elements. And it's a point, I think, where questions quite naturally start to arise. And we start asking things like, "Why am I doing this? And what is the point? Where is this leading?" And this is good that we start to question because it shows the practice is having an effect. We're starting to go a bit more deeply into it. We need to recall that the reason for any Buddhist practice, any Dharma practice, is to develop liberating awareness. We would all of us be more used to other people. If we were happier, more satisfied, wiser, kinder, more patient, and more at ease. Unfortunately, we are all of us at times, and to various degrees, unhappy, frustrated, unwise, unkind, impatient, and ill at ease. I'm sorry, but it's true that we are. And to that degree, and there are all kinds of degrees, of course, at different times, we are only of partial benefit to other people. And I haven't even mentioned ourselves. And it's all because we're relatively unaware. All that is because we're relatively unaware, because we don't give, we're not able to give enough attention to what actually happens. It's that unawareness that binds us into habit patterns that are frustrating, unwise, unkind to ourselves, unkind to others. Of course, we don't like being like that. No one does. But we are like that. And sometimes we feel the trap that we are in, that we've put ourselves in. We've become trapped in a kind of fuzz of habit. And developing awareness of what really happens, just at a very basic, simple, elemental level, developing that awareness just starts opening all that out, just starts unsticking all that fuzz. It unravels it. It, that awareness, relaxes it. It's like when the sun comes up over the horizon, or between some clouds, that the fog and the mist, they just begin to disappear. And everything just becomes completely clear and straightforward. So we need to understand that this is what the Dharma does. We need to trust it. We need to make friends with it. Otherwise, we won't be able to let it in. We won't be able to let it expose and dissolve our artificiality. Because many a person has started out on the Buddhist path and stopped short, at least for the time being, because they just couldn't let the Dharma in. They hadn't, at that point, befriended it. Indeed, I think we've all done that. We all do it. We often do it. But we just pick up our confidence again. I think that's how it works. We pick up again, again, and that's, that's very natural. Buddhist practice causes radical change in our lives. And it's natural sometimes to feel a certain resistance to that. There are times when we need to ask questions, do necessary study, do research, do retreats, see teachers and talk to other people a lot. You know, we need all that to establish and re-establish our confidence in what we're doing in our practice. And it's after that that we can go more deeply, again, into meditation or into our Dharma practice. The essence of any Buddhist meditation is realizing the natural state of things and being changed by that realization. Realization is the point of all our practices. Mindfulness of breathing, metabhavana, sadhana, also puja, study and spiritual friendship. Realization is something wonderful. It should be why one does any Buddhist practice. But how do we recognize it? How can we have confidence that we have it to any degree whatsoever? Well, again, it's not an easy question just to give an answer to because realization is something very profound and it's also something very individual and personal. So it can't properly be explained even in words. But let's just try to see if there's anything that we can notice is there in our experience already. I think there is. After all, we all have a mind, which is amazing enough. We all exist. We are all real. Aren't we? This is happening, isn't it? The mere fact that we don't realize the nature of mind or the ultimate nature of reality, it doesn't obstruct that reality. That reality is still going on. There isn't anything going on, but reality. It's just that we don't see it properly. We don't know it. We don't recognize it. And so we can't have confidence in it sufficiently. Obviously, it's there all the time. We just don't know what to look for. But we can learn. Over time, we can train ourselves through the practices that we do. We can train ourselves in looking into the nature of reality. It isn't so hard to recognize to some extent at least what Buddhism calls the emptiness of things. In other words, the spaciousness, the magical, elusive quality, liberating quality of everything. We've probably all had some kind of glimpse, though we may not have realized what it was. There are many, many different ways into this, and I'm going to mention two of them. One very good way is to take notice of all the inconsistencies, all the incongruities and irregularities that there are all the time. These are opportunities for liberation. They create gaps. They make spaces we can use in ways I'll show in a minute. Normally, we prefer not to look at inconsistencies. It's more comfortable and convenient to ignore them, or at least that's how it feels. But then, of course, our delusions just continue causing us problems, so it's not really so comfy to ignore them. Anyway, let's take a prime example of the kind of incongruity I'm talking about. If we take a cool look into our experience, we'll catch ourselves constantly thinking, "This is me," or, "This is mine." It's totally normal to do that. We all do it, but actually it's highly incongruous. It doesn't fit reality at all. Things are never, ever like that. Yet, it's how we always relate to things. My house, we say. My garden, my car, my trousers, my glasses, my hair, my checkbook, my husband, my country. Of course, there is usually a sense in which it's accurate to think in such terms. In the case of my house and garden, it's accurate in a legal sense. But in real terms, there is just a person here and a house there. The relationship is purely legal. When we die, someone else will have just the same relationship with it. Unless it's a completely new house, there will have been many others who have already had that relationship. So, the way that it is ours, and this is important, the way that it's ours is not firm and fixed as we tend to assume, our assumption is incongruous. It doesn't fit. It isn't true. We're pulling the wool over our own eyes. And the same goes not only for houses, but absolutely everything in our experience, including our own bodies. In what accurate sense do you own your body, even legally? I know it feels as though you do, but in reality, who exactly owns what? There's a habitual notion there which we can just open up. It's not as though we have to say, right, I don't own it anymore. But we need just to open up that area and learn from it. In truth, the idea is very incongruous. What is happening just isn't like that. How it is is not easy to say, but it's not like that. Now, you may think that this is a very strange kind of pursuit. But the really strange thing is the delusion that the practice is exposing. It is truly strange if we can bear to consider the issue to regard things like our body as mine. But the feeling is very strong, isn't it? I mean, it's perhaps the strongest set of feelings that we have. Indeed, our notions of me and mine are so loaded with potential for unclarity, confusion, and powerful emotion. We all become enormously distressed and enormously elated as well when the feeling of me is gratified or threatened. Of course, we do. But if, even for a few moments, we can relax that tendency to get so emotionally aroused and simply experience the situation as it actually is. If we do that, then something somewhere relaxes. Life becomes simpler somehow. Life becomes more elemental, more natural, more real. So here's something already very much in our present experience that we can use to bring the Dharma to life. Of course, it's something very subtle and awkward to get at. It's hard to recognise our ego grasping because we don't want to let that go. But when we start noticing the suffering that it causes everybody, not to mention ourselves, we start, I think we start getting truly interested in liberating ourselves from it. Once we get genuinely interested, we start seeing it much more often. And once we start seeing it, we'll naturally want to let it go. And then at last, we can really relax. What do we actually see when we do this? I think this is very interesting. There's that grasping I've just mentioned, grasping at artificial ownership of things for the sake of an artificial sense of security. But we only have to stay with that realisation for a little while to see that things can never actually be grasped in the first place. This is the magical aspect of emptiness. Actually, things in themselves are completely free. A house is just a house. Trousers are just trousers. Food is just food. There is never anything extra. If we relax the tension we bring to every situation with our ego grasping, it's already liberated. And this is something that is both totally amazing and totally ordinary. Now wait a minute, you may think. My relationships with those things may be empty. The relationships may be messy and painful sometimes. But at the same time, they are my life. They are everything to me. Does Buddhism want to take my life away from me? Well, of course it doesn't want to do that. It's just saying that the more we grasp, the more unpleasant and unreal life becomes. Ego grasping is what turns life into samsara, as it's called. But life can be nirvana, can be liberation. We can come to see that the whole of existence is intrinsically free in its own nature. So we can start to realise this by looking at the little incongruities that pop up all over the place and seeing how they point out the nature of things all the time. Okay, that's if you like the indirect method. But there are also more direct ways of seeing emptiness. And this is the second approach I had in mind. We can learn to look at anything, anything whatsoever and simply see directly its free and spacious nature. For example, earlier on, we were discussing the wind element, the element of movement in the universe. And I said, well, the mind also moves. There are winds, if you like, in the mind, or there are winds of mind. The mind is sometimes relatively still, perhaps in deep meditation it becomes totally still. Certainly the winds become very subtle. At other times there are breezes, there are gusts and gales, there are even whirlwinds and tornadoes coming our way. We can be overwhelmed by the power of our own thoughts and perceptions. We usually take them to be very concrete and real somehow. We get very, very affected by them. But they are not concrete and real, actually. They are just empty. You can look at all these moving thoughts and perceptions and see directly how empty and spacious it all is. And you can try this now as I speak, if you like. At least I find that when I'm listening to a talk, I'm fairly aware of my thoughts. Sometimes I'm thinking about what the speaker is saying. Sometimes not. I get involved in my own responses. For the purpose of this practice, it doesn't matter at all what the thought is. What matters is that it's better. Now don't you find that when you look into the actual thought, it somehow disappears so that you wonder where did it go? Isn't there an elusive transparent quality to our thoughts so that they somehow seem to slide out of our grasp? There may have been some actual content to the thought, content that one could perhaps express in words. But in the actual experience of a thought, any thought, where exactly is the content? And this is just very interesting to look into. You start to wonder, was it ever actually there? What was there? And what would it have meant for it to be there? I mean, where would it have been? And where is all this happening? I hope you don't think I'm trying to confuse you. I mean, I find that if I really try to stay with the actual experience of thinking, the more I have to abandon my assumptions about what's happening. Thoughts may don't stop being meaningful by doing this. One's experience isn't reduced or negated at all. But the actual display of meaning in our thoughts is never concrete. We can never get hold of it somehow. I mean, what would get hold of what? And if you've ever tried to write thoughts down, you'll know that actually what you write down is never thoughts. What you write down, obviously, is words. Words are something quite different from thoughts. So in all these ways, thoughts are what Buddhism calls for one to the better word, empathy. They just can't be taken hold of. We can't even say that they really exist. But at the same time, it's absurd to say that they don't. And this is a reality that we can experience anytime. And it's the same for all other objects of consciousness, feelings, emotions, and our entire perception of the material world. They all have this elusive, ungraspable quality. It's their magic quality. They are there, yet not there. Isn't this amazing? That existence is really so unexplainable. But even though we seem so much in control of things, we have so little idea of what things are. And this magic, empty quality, is the nature of all things. Emptiness is in fact the ultimate element, you could say. It was even mind, even consciousness, the most inclusive of all the elements, the element in which all other elements take place. Mind is itself embraced by the nature of emptiness. Emptiness, the unobstructed freedom of everything, is nature. It's the real nature. And if we could see that consistently, we'd really be living naturally. That naturalness would be what Buddhism calls nirvana. And the Buddha himself described nirvana in just these terms. The natural state of nirvana, he says in the udana, Buddhist scripture, is where the elements of water, earth, fire and wind find no footing at all. There's no place for them, really. They are totally ungraspable. They are already liberated quite naturally and always have been. So on that note, we can bring our meditation to an end. But before we finish, I think we need to return to earth. Even though we never really left it, we need to befriend the earth and the other elements as well. The elements can guide us into more natural ways of living. Meditating, we may start noticing how the artificiality of our present culture is really quite extreme. Probably not as extreme as it could get, but it is quite extreme. Sometimes we hardly go outside a building or a car for weeks on end. We use electric machines to do every conceivable task, even to clean our own teeth. And we do less and less physical work. And because of this, we easily get overweight or we have to invest lots of extra time on special exercise regimes. I mean, I don't have anything at all against machines or technology. Not at all. I've got a car, I've got a mobile phone, I've got two computers. I think technology is magical. I love it. But I do think it can be much better used. And for me, Budefield, probably isn't the real Budefield, but the Budefield in my mind somehow symbolises this whole issue. I don't see Budefield as a crude escape into a kind of romantic primitivism. A place where you just take off your clothes and bang drums. I mean, some people, some people might do that. I mean, I might do that too. But doing that is nothing in itself. It's only a step on the way. It's an experiment in simplicity. That word primitive comes from the idea of primacy. It's what is primary, what is first, what comes first, what's essential, what's elemental. It's an attempt to find true simplicity. True simplicity is whatever allows more space, more awareness, more room for compassion and for wisdom. It doesn't mean you live in the town or in the country or you live in a house or in a tepee or even in a cardboard box. It doesn't matter. The idea of simplicity is a search for what is truly valuable and beautiful and free. And what is truly valuable, beautiful and free, is enlightenment or liberation from tunnel vision as it's sometimes called. That liberation is all I've been talking about this morning. The liberation of becoming more natural, more in tune with our true nature, our enlightened nature. And the ways we can dissolve the artificiality in our lives, especially through the practice of awareness, of the universal elements of the earth, the water, the fire, the wind, the space and consciousness. [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]
