I was asked to do this talk quite a long time ago, must have been at least six months ago, possibly nine months ago. And I, not forgotten about it, but I'd put it on hold for a while, you might say. And I happened to have looked at it on the internet one night and came across the Norwich Buddhist internet website. This advert for my talk, which is apparently about shamanism. And I thought, "I don't know anything about shamanism at all, but I'm giving this talk on it." I was half expecting the Norwich Shaman Society to sort of show up tonight and then the beets at the back with the long hair, so I brought my beets. I sort of rattle these out every so often, just to sort of excite things with it. The thing I do for a living is I run a Buddhist audio archive, and this means I listen to an awful lot of talks on Buddhism. In fact, I probably listen to more talks on Buddhism than most people, even in the world I'm probably listening. And it's quite an interesting position to be in, working with Buddhist talks all the time and then being invited to give one. You have to think, "Well, how am I going to make this interesting for me? Never mind for it for all of you." There's a sort of seminal talk by Sangarach to the guy who founded the western Buddhist order on the subject that I'm going to be speaking about tonight, which is the Enlightenment of the Buddha. It's at number 43 in the catalogue, and it's called archetypal symbolism in the biography of the Buddha. This is a very interesting talk for quite a lot of reasons. It was given in the 60s. I think it was 1967. And it's very much, I think, of its time, which doesn't mean it's irrelevant now, but it's very much of its time. Sangarach takes the Buddha's story and talks about it in terms of Jungian psychoanalysis, which isn't the sort of first thing that probably springs to mind when you think about Buddhism. He talks about it in terms of the process of individuation, as it's known. So this is the kind of the way that you integrate the different archetypal presences and figures into your own being and become a more whole person as a short-hand version of it. So he looks at the Buddha's story, and he draws out the main archetypes, according to Jung, so you get the shadow figure, and then you get the anima figure or the animus, if you're a woman. The wise old man figure and the young hero figure. And he does got a lot of interesting things with this. He then relates that quartet of figures to Christianity. So you get the devil, the Virgin Mary, God the Father, and Jesus Christ. And I was thinking that's definitely always time, because the first thing that springs to mind for me is Star Wars being kind of that generation. I went to see episode two the other night, so this is going to be fully in my consciousness. So I thought I'd give you Jung's four figures in Star Wars, just in case you don't relate to Christianity as much. So if you're of the older generation of Star Wars movies, the devil figure is Darth Vader, sort of shadow figure. And the anima figure is Princess Leia. And the wise old man is obviously Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the young hero's Luke Skywalker. And if you've been to see, has anybody actually seen any of the new Star Wars films for the last couple of years? Well, I was thinking that I was trying to work out what the characters were in them, and I think the emperor, the evil emperor, is the shadow figure. Queen Amidala, who's now called Padme, is the anima figure. Yoda is probably the wise old man. Interestingly enough, I don't think they have a young hero, and that's presumably why everything's going empire shaped in the universe at this particular point in time. So I do say we'll find out in the next episode what happens. So anyway, that's the theme that Sanger actually takes when he looks at the Buddha's life story. And I think, I hope that, you know, as I go through my take on this, you'll be able to see those themes emerging. But I'm actually going to take a different tack. I don't really propose to go over that ground. If you want to order the talk, with a very useful website, you can access and order the talk. It's well worth listening to. But a few months ago, I had a couple of weeks to go away and just spend on my own. Not be with anybody, reflect, meditate, do some reading. And I decided to go away and think about this talk because I wanted to get an idea for what I would say to you tonight. And I decided to go to go away in the west of Ireland where I've been before. It was in mid-winter, which probably isn't the best idea if you want to have a holiday in go away, but I wanted to have a retreat in go away. So it was extremely stormy, it rained every single day, and it was the wind blue nine to the dozen roundhouse the whole time. And that you couldn't go down to the end of the road without getting completely soaked, so I had a lot of opportunity to stay indoors and think about this talk. And I had to spend quite a lot of time over two weeks just considering different aspects of the Buddha's story and reflecting on them, meditating on them. And I was aware that the title I've been given was "Visions of the Buddha", and I sort of came away thinking, well, I've had some sort of vague glimpses of the Buddha somewhere. And maybe I hope they'll open it into some visions through the course of this talk. Visions of it are a necessarily limited kind from my perspective, but still some sort of vision. So I guess some of you probably don't actually know or aren't fluent with the whole story of the Buddha, is that the case people haven't heard the whole story of the Buddha's enlightenment? Is there anyone who's never heard the story of the Buddha's enlightenment? Great. I was dreading, like, they've been full of old times, and I haven't cut like three quarters of my talk. So what I'll do just to begin with is I'll run through the basic sort of mythical elements if you like it in the story of the Buddha. I think I should probably say at this point, it's good when you hear this kind of stuff not to listen to it as if it's a sort of literal rendition of what happened. It's not like the New Testament of Buddhism where you're supposed to believe that this actually happened in this order in this way at a certain point in time. It's not quite like that. In a way what you're hearing is like a super condensed version of reality, or version of truth, that comes in a very poetic and symbolic form. And the myth that's formed, in a way it's a bit like listening to a dream. Like, when you wake up from a dream and it's particularly intense, and you remember all the different characters, and actually you're all the characters, and you're the landscape that dream happened in, and you're, you know, you're the whole thing, you're the whole world of that dream. Well, I think this story of the Buddha's a bit like that, it could be the Buddha's dream, it could be your dream, that's part of the challenge of it. So the story of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, I'll just run through the main aspects of this a bit like the sort of reduced Shakespeare company, I'll sort of skate over, you know. Years and years of intense spiritual practice in five minutes. So, probably it begins with Siddhartha Gautama at home, legend has it a prince of noble birth, he's ostensibly completely happy, he's rich, he's successful, he doesn't have to work, he's got a beautiful wife, he's got a young son, he's devoted to, he's probably got lots of concubines and dancing girls. He's got lots of amusement basically, he's a man of leisure, and at the same time he's very intelligent, and he has, it seems quite a refined sensibility. So he has although he's got this ostensibly easy life, he's quite bothered, sometimes even plagued a bit by a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that there's something to be understood as a human being, that he doesn't quite understand. And this stays with him and eventually it drives him to make some investigations outside of the kind of walls of his palace, and he has, in the course of these investigations, what are traditionally called the Four Sites, so he sees basically four different things. The first thing he sees, the first person he comes across as an old man, and he's quite, you know, legend has it, he's never seen an old man before, he's completely unaware that you grow old. So he meets this old man and this old man makes quite an impression on him, he's quite shocked at the state that a human body can grow into. The next site is that he meets a sick man lying by the side of the road, and again he's quite shaken by this, the fact that, oh, he has a human being just like me who's grown ill and is no longer able to look after himself. The third site that he has is a dead man being carried to his funeral, which is a very common sight in India, but it wasn't a common sight for this particular prince, and this was the most shocking thing of all that actually life comes to an end, just the sort of coming face to face with mortality. And the fourth site he has is a wandering monk who seems to embody a certain kind of peace that resonates with this sense of dissatisfaction, he's got that it sort of reaches out to, there's that sort of movement from him towards this monk. So he's impressed, haven't had these three shocks in a way he's quite impressed by the baiting and the statute of this monk. He forms a resolve, quite a strong resolve to leave his life and to go out and lead the kind of life that this monk leads and try and work out what it is he wants to know. There's quite a toss-over zone between him and his family in terms of doing this, he'd be leaving a lot, but eventually he feels constrained to do this, he has to go to sort of go forth from his home and find out what there is to be found out. So, you know, with a great deal of strain and reluctance in some ways, but also a great deal of pull towards it, he goes and does that. Initially he goes in search of some teachers, some meditation teachers, and he learns everything that is to learn from them, but still feels the sense of dissatisfaction, he hasn't got to the root of it or the nub of the matter. So he falls in with a group of ascetic practitioners, guys in India, who were quite common, apparently, who used to go in around doing ascetic practice, starving themselves, holding their arm up in the air until their arm withered, that kind of nonsense, I was going to say, that kind of thing. So stuff that was spiritual practice in the sense that it really put a lot of pressure on your sense of self, and he practiced that intensely for six years, more intensely than anybody else, and gathered a small group of disciples around him. At the end of six years he was nearly dead, he wasn't any closer he felt to finding the truth, and he had a bit of a mini insight one day when he realised, this is all a bunch of nonsense, I don't know why I'm doing this, it hasn't got me anywhere, and he had an arm at death store and, you know, what's it all about, what have I done. So, bravely in a way, he decides to leave that whole practice and leave the people he's been practicing with, or rather they decide to leave him, he decides to take a little bit of food, and they think he's sold out, so they leave him, and he's completely alone, and presumably not in a tremendously happy state at this point of time. He is bathing in the river, and it's so weak he can hardly climb out of the river, he comes out and he meets a young goat herd, a girl who's sometimes known as Nanda Bala, was her name, and she just shows him some kindness, she gives him some milk, sometimes some rice milk in the stories, and he takes this and feels refreshed just by taking food, and then kind of wanders off and isn't really sure quite what to do. At that point, he has a memory of when he was a child, that once when he was a child, his father had organised a plowing match between some of the local plowing in a sort of local sport. I don't know if he'd been bored during it, or he'd just like a kid he just hadn't particularly involved, so he ended up sitting down under a rose apple tree, and he'd remembered that he'd started to focus on his breath when he'd been sitting under this tree, and very quickly he'd got into a very concentrated, contented state of mind, and he just memory just wells up in him. So he sees a tree and decides that he's going to sit down and meditate, and he's going to stay there until he's worked out what it is he wants to work out, and he doesn't care if he drops dead, he's had enough, he's going to sit down, he's going to do it. So he does, he sits down and starts to do what he did when he was a child, to concentrate on his breath, and very quickly a state of quite a lot of contentment and concentration comes over him. In the myth, at this point, Mara, a character called Mara, who's kind of like the lord of the world of desires, the sort of mischief maker, sometimes equated with Satan, but I think that's a wee bit misleading, he's not evil in that sense. Mara is quite worried because, you know, he figures out that the Buddha's about to make some sort of insight into the realm that Mara's the lord of, and he doesn't want this to happen, so he goes and sort of tempts him with all sorts of promises of pleasure, etc. And the Buddha is completely resolute, he doesn't flinch in the face of Mara's efforts. Mara then attacks him with an army, traditionally again it evoked his goblins, demons, all that kind of stuff. And again, the Buddha isn't moved by this, they hurl stones out and the stones turn into flowers, monstrous beings appear in front of him and shake their teeth at him and he doesn't flinch. And eventually Mara slinks off because he's defeated by this. And the Buddha at that point is free to break through to what it is he's been looking for, so he has what's traditionally called the Enlightenment experience. He has a profound, in a way, an understanding of reality, of his situation existentially, if you like, that completely transforms his being, he's no longer the same person, he's no longer a human man, Siddhartha Gautama. He becomes the Buddha, one who is awake, one who's enlightened. What the content of that is, is really what I'm going to be talking about tonight, that particular experience. But it happens, he has the Enlightenment experience, he spends the next seven weeks sitting there, I'm assuming being fed while he's doing it, but let's just say he's sitting there for seven weeks and he's absorbing this experience and working out what it means and how it applies to being alive in this world. Some other things happen, he's challenged again by Mara as to what gives him the right to sit in that particular place and be a Buddha. And he doesn't say anything, he just taps the earth and the earth goddess comes out of the ground and bears witness to his achievement. He then has a sort of peach where he's under the impression that actually nobody's really going to understand this, nobody's going to understand what I've done. I don't know what a Buddha thinks he's going to do privately, is it where he's thinking about that, he's thinking well, nobody will get this. And a figure called Brahma Sahampati appears to him, a sort of benevolent, fatherly god type figure appears to him and says to him, no look, anyone who's ever done this before has decided to teach. And the Buddha has a vision of human beings at different stages of development as lotus flowers growing out of a lake, so some lotus flowers are sort of just seeds that are stuck in the mud in the bottom of the lake. Some lotus flowers are growing up through the water, some are breaking the surface of the water, some are fully flowered into the air. And he thinks, ah right, there are some people who are like lotus flowers who either nearly fully flowered or fully flowering, they're going to be able to understand the content of my experience, I'll be able to communicate this. That's quite a revelation for him, the fact that he's now got in a way a mission, almost, he's got a vocation there. The last mythical element that I'll mention just before I go on is that at one point in this page there's a huge rainstorm a bit like the ones I had in Goaway but more intense. And the Buddha's sitting under the tree, and this immense storm comes down, I don't know if it was the rainy season or not, but traditionally the king of the snakes, the king of the work called the naga serpents, muchalinda, comes through the grass, goes up behind the Buddha, wraps himself around the Buddha seven times and places his hood, the hood of his head, like a viper I suppose, over the Buddha's head to protect him from the storm. Quite a strong incident, quite what it means, I'll come back to later on. After he's done absorbing the experience, he goes off and refines the five ascetic disciples he'd had before and manages to slowly and painfully over time convince them that he's not a charlatan, in fact he's achieved something that they have some sort of raisoness with to and in time, they come to be enlightened themselves. And that's the beginning of a long, long period of teaching, which I think, is it 60 years that it lasts, 40 years, 60 years, I can never quite remember, it's a long time anyway. So that's the sort of Shakespeare company version of the Buddha's life story. There are some very long accounts of the Buddha's life story, which are interesting reading. The one that I like best actually is by a Buddhist poet from the 7th century called Ashva Gosha, who wrote the Buddha Charita, the Acts of the Buddha, and it's really really flowery poetry, particularly when it's translated into English. Probably very beautiful in the original Sanskrit, but some late Victorian got older than translated it into English. When it's really flowery, but it's got fantastic detail, I'll read a little bit later on. So that's the basic myth. So now that we're familiar with it, at least you've heard it. I'll keep coming back to it, but again, try and bait it in mind as this kind of world of a dream that in a way this talk happens within. And I hope throughout the course of the different elements will start to become a little clearer. I was thinking about myth quite a lot when I was thinking about this talk. I think it's probably useful to have a basic definition of what a myth actually is, since I'm going to be referring to myth quite a lot. So I'd say that just for the purposes of this evening, it'd be good to consider a myth as a fundamental vision or model of reality. So any myth that we've got is a fundamental vision or a model of reality. To give a little more introduction to Buddhism generally for people. In Buddhism you've got a poor tradition called the Three Jewels of Buddhism. The first Jewel of Buddhism is the Buddha himself, something precious, something to be cherished in a way a Jewel. The second Jewel is the Dharma, which is the Indian word for the Buddha's teaching. So the Buddha himself is the first Jew, his teaching is the second Jew. And the third Jew is the Sangha or spiritual community. The people who come together to practice the Buddha's teaching. That's the third Jew. These are all things to be cherished. Now, I was thinking about the Three Jewels and I thought, well, the myth as a model of reality, you can look at each Jewel as a different model, a different vision. So the Sangha Jewel, the spiritual community, is an ideal of human fellowship. It's a vision of how we might live together in some sort of harmony, in some sort of broad community. The Dharma, the Buddhist teachings, the Buddhist teachings which come from a sort of unmediated experience of reality, of what it is to be alive, etc. When we hear about them conceptually, it forces us in a way to look at what we actually believe, what we think about reality, what we think about our experience. So in a way, you've got an ideal of how you might see the world. You've got a vision of how you might see the world. In terms of the Buddha himself, which is mainly what I'll be talking about this evening. I suppose the Buddha is a vision of existence. He's nothing more than that. And the vision of existence that he represents is simply the possibility of change, the possibility of growth, the possibility of development. And the possibility of the evolution of a personal consciousness, your consciousness, to beyond the limits of what you know. The Buddha himself becomes fully part of reality. He's not separate from reality. He's not a part of reality. The Buddha in a way becomes reality, and that is the scope of consciousness, and that's the vision that I'll be focusing on tonight. The visions of the Buddha in a way are visions of how to live your life. It's not a vision of God. It's not a vision of a sort of symbol of unattainable glory. It's a vision of unattainable stillness. The Buddha achieves a certain kind of stillness that is attainable. It's a vision of an elegance of being that can also be learned by us. There's a good thing Gary Snyder, the American poet in Buddhist says, he says, "The spiritual life is one that is mindful, mannerly, and has style." In a way, the Buddha is mindful, mannerly, and has style times, a million kind of thing. He lives with a simplicity that is constantly reassuring, constantly encouraging, but also constantly challenging us. He exemplifies a kind of way of living that whatever life throws at you, there is a realistic hope you can have, rather than a blind faith and things being okay, or a despair that things are useless and can't be changed. So, I'm going to present three visions of the Buddha. They'll take up any cool amounts of time, but I'm going to give you three specific visions of the Buddha. And I'll talk about each in terms of reflections on an aspect of the Buddhist vision of spiritual life, and I'll try and draw these reflections from the actual story that we've started with, the myth as it comes down to us. And yeah, I hope I'll be able to either introduce for the first time, or for the old time, as re-light some of the basic Buddhist teachings in the process, and show how they can be made to be vital in the world that we live in today. Before I do that, I want to just reflect for a little while on the central image in Buddhism. I think central images are actually quite important when it comes to trying to work out what a spiritual tradition is about. The central image of the myth that I just described, the image that everything flows into and flows out of, is just simply the Buddha sitting under a tree. That's the image. And in a way, try and imagine it yourselves right now. You can close your eyes, you can keep your eyes open. But try and imagine the Buddha sitting under a tree. If you can't imagine the Buddha, imagine a figure sitting under a tree. What kind of tree is it? What is the landscape like around it? Is it a great English oak in a field, in a sort of blue bellwood? Is it a Scots pine in the highland forest? Is it a virgin spruce in the Californian hills? Or is it a great banyan tree in an Indian jungle? Is that what you see when you think about a human being sitting under a tree? Or a human form rather, sitting under a tree? That's the central image for Buddhism. I'd like to sort of compare that with the central image of Christianity, at least as it's come down to us, which is Christ crucified. In his talk on archetypal symbolism, Sandra actually says some very post of things about the image of the crucifix in Christianity. In a way, he draws out the comparisons between the tree in the Buddhist tradition. Between the tree, it drizzled the world ash in the Norse tradition. And the piece of wood that Jesus Christ is crucified on. And there are some post of things to be said and it's worth exploring them. I suppose it did occur to me that you can get away from one main difference, which is that the central image in Buddhism is a living human being sitting under a living tree. And the central image in Christianity is a dying and then a dead human being nailed to a piece of dead wood. I don't want to sort of diss Christianity or, you know, get into any of that. There isn't really time for a full analysis to do justice to the Christian image. One thing that is good to know, I suppose, or to be aware of, is that the crucifixion in Christianity is always viewed by a good Christian in the light of the resurrection. So you can't really have one without the other. It's not just about death. And actually there are several very important pre-Christian myths that the crucifixion is very strongly related to. There's the old pagan myth of what's called the Amor Cruciatus. Basically this is Eros, the god of love, appealing as the god of death. I'm quite often known sarcophagi and things like that. There's the tradition of the sacrificial killing of the king. Now all these things are very strong. They've got a lot of strong resonance within our culture. And I think we do need to own them. We do need to bring them back in. But I suppose all the same, I think you do have to work very hard to render the crucifix in Jesus' nearly as a positive image. It's an immensely complex and we have a very political image in the sense that it's on the world's own terms. You need an awful lot of sophistication to do something with it that I would say is unashamedly positive. This is a central thing in the Buddha's teaching. He said very early on that it was much better to have explicit teachings rather than implicit teachings. In a way you're presented with a whole lot of staff. You're presented with a whole lot of teachings and Buddhism. But the ones that matter most are the ones that are the most explicit. The easiest to understand. Now I actually have quite a lot of difficulty with that. Sometimes I write poetry. I read a lot of poetry. Poetry is nothing if not implicit. I mean it's all implicit. Western spiritual tradition is full of implicit mystery traditions. The great thing is to be arcane, to not try and pretend you understand. So you're mysterious. But I would say that actually the important thing is that your central image at least is very explicit. So if you look at the Buddhist central image you've got a very simple and conscious response to suffering. In a way you've got the most quietly courageous response that you can have. Someone who can walk away from the world of suffering but not turn his back to use that metaphor. It's not necessarily an easy image. Somebody sitting under a tree. What do you do with it? But it's certainly difficult to mistake it for a negative image. It's difficult to doubt the intention. And I think it's also important that the tree supports the Buddha in his efforts. It supports Siddhartha Gautama in his efforts. And that the first act that the Buddha does on enlightenment is to thank the tree when he's going to leave. He thanks the tree. Does that relationship goes on? As I said, Jesus on the cross. At best it could be a vehicle for penetrating the mysteries. But I think it is an extremely violent image. And it's very likely the usual hopeless world response that we have to suffering. And you can see that around us today in Bethlehem. You can see it in Jerusalem, all you need to do is listen to the news. Something goes on. A certain kind of violent interaction goes on. And I think at worst the crucifix does risk tapping into and sustaining a certain kind of barbarism in people's afraid and guilty hearts. So during the rest of this talk, please try and bear in mind the Buddha under the tree. That image is the context. And if I go on too much or you drift off or whatever, just try and bring yourself back to the Buddha. The Buddha sitting under the tree as you see. So there's a lot to get through. It might be over an hour. It might actually be towards an hour and a half. So we'll see how we go. I can speed up. I can talk faster because I'm from Glasgow. Because there's a lot of things to consider. Quite a complex of things to consider. I decided I needed a structure, a sort of basic structure. Now one of the earliest and most basic structures in Buddhism is another threefold division. You get all these divisions of things. And the threefold division of the Buddhist spiritual path that is most commonly cited is ethics, meditation and wisdom. That's the Buddhist path in a nutshell. Ethics, meditation and wisdom. So I'm going to give you three visions of the Buddha. A vision of the Buddha for each one. One for ethics, one for meditation, one for wisdom. And I'll give you an evocation of what we mean as Buddhists by ethics, meditation and wisdom. And I'll reference the whole lot to some episodes of the Buddha's life. So the first part of the talk then proper is ethics, Buddhist ethics. And the image for this is the Buddha as lover. The Buddha as lover. You just have to sit with that and become clean in time while the Buddha is a lover. Before we can have an adequate idea of what Buddhist ethics are and of how Buddhist ethics relate to love or how they relate to how we love the process of how we love. I think we need to look at what ethics is not. Again, it references Christianity maybe implicitly because that's the context we come out of whether we're Christians or not. That's the dominant cultural context. So Buddhist ethics are not to do with right and wrong, good and evil in any sort of black and white way that you might have expected. You know, for all its attraction, it's not Star Wars. It's not good versus evil, good will overcome, but it's not like that. There are some things in kinship with it, but it's certainly not like that in any simplistic kind of way. An extension of that would be that in Buddhism, the sense of personal evil things that you might do that aren't very good are not sins in relation to some higher power. That is no good. It's not anything that involves the necessity to feel irrational guilt and a fear that somebody's going to stop loving you or you won't get to heaven or you're somehow doomed or downed or somewhere in between. So none of that has anything to do with Buddhist ethics and it's good to be clear about that because I think when we hear the word ethics or the word morality, it's almost impossible not to just have certain kinds of cultural assumptions that we bring to them. So all you can do is try and be aware of those assumptions as they come up. In a way, you know, those of us who do know that Buddhism might say, well, that's all quite obvious, but I suppose I'd actually challenge that and say, well, I'm not sure it is that obvious. And that's one of the questions that's going to come up over and over again tonight is what is it to actually know something? What is it to actually understand? Here I am saying to you, hope Buddhist ethics are not, but somewhere I probably believe otherwise because sometimes I act in a way that implies a belief otherwise. So, you know, hold that question as well. What is it to understand? What is it to think you know something? So what is Buddhist ethics? The best place to start is with the Buddha under the tree. So as I said, at a certain point, the way opens for him, he has what is generally called an insight, a vast insight into the nature of reality. A vast sort of breakthrough into understanding of the mind, understanding of existence. And he comes up with a very simple formulation for his experience conceptually. So he says something like, or it could be condensed down to, all things arise and pass away in dependence upon conditions. Quite simple. All things arise and pass away in dependence upon conditions. Which again seems very obvious, but I think when it starts to unfold itself, it's very soon becomes a part that it's not at all obvious that we understand that. The main implication of things arising and falling away in dependence upon conditions is that when you act, you are a set of conditions at that point. You are bringing things into being. Things will arise in dependence upon the set of conditions and your actions are a strong part of those conditions. So what is implied is that your actions have consequences. Which again we all know, but you could probably not have to look too far into your own life to remember an incident where you acted and didn't really see that it had consequences. Now what's maybe most important is that actions of consequences isn't just to do with what you do physically. And it's not even just to do with what you say to somebody. It's actually to do with what you think, to do with the whole nature of how you think. How you think in Buddhism is a matter of action and those actions have consequences. This is important because our desires, our fears, all of our emotions, we tend to experience as things that happen to us, sort of from outside. You know, we see somebody and we have a certain kind of feeling, "That's just happened to me. I couldn't do anything about it." In Buddhism, the takes the other way around. It says, "You may not know it. You may not be doing it consciously, but you're actually acting. You are doing fear. You are doing desire. You are doing whatever the emotion is." And whether you like it or whether you don't, it has consequences. And I suppose the challenge is to say, "Well, if I can get in top of that process, there can be a more dynamic engagement with it." In a sense, you might have heard the idea in Buddhism that the world is mind-made. The world's made by your mind. And this is what it's talking about. It's saying that your subjective experience of how you think creates a world in which you move. You create the world in which you move. Our views, our habits of mind, our ideas, our ideals, all of these shape who we are. The shape the world we move in and the shape who we will become, the world we will move in in the future. It maybe sounds like a complex idea. I don't know. I've not heard it for the first time for a long time. But it bears thinking about that actions have consequences in your mind and you actually build a world out of that. We'll see as we go on some examples of how you might get at that experience. Once the Buddha has seen this, that he's seen that this is what things are like, he looks at experience and says, "Well, given that everything's conditioned and that we act as part of those conditions, what marks human experience? What are the characteristics that you could list?" And he comes up again with a nice, useful threefold list for us. He ascribes three different characteristics to the experience. The first is that all things that are conditioned are impermanent. They don't last. Things arise and they pass away. Again, it might seem like a very simple and obvious truth, but that's the first mark of existence in our experiences. Things arise and pass away. People die. We lose things. Things break. And that's just a fact. The second mark of existence that he talks about is that things are insubstantial. Nothing, no person, no object, no planetary system, no little dust moat or speck of anything has a fixed and permanent self. Nothing. Everything's conditioned. Everything in a way is just a flow of conditions. You could see it as a flow of energy. There is no fixed center to anything, especially not to you. This is just a consequence of things being conditioned and being impermanent. If something's made up of other things, how can it possibly have a center? He gives a great example. He says, "If you've got a cart, you can say there's a cart. If you take off the wheels, is it still a cart? Maybe it still looks a bit like a cart. If you take apart the seat, if you just take the whole thing apart, then you've got the pile of wood. If you chop that wood up, or if you set fire to that wood, is it still wood? Is it still a cart? When does something stop being something in our experience? And yet we always tend to ascribe a certain kind of permanence to it. And he says, "Because this is the case, because you particularly don't have a fixed center, because nothing you interact with in effect has a fixed center, everything is unsatisfactory in a certain kind of way." That's the really important bit. That there's a sense of unsatisfactorness about life. We don't necessarily have it all the time, but probably at some point everybody has experienced a sense of unsatisfactorness. That unsatisfactorness can be much stronger. It can be out and out suffering. That's what people tend to experience. The Buddha sees in a way that we don't really understand reality. No matter how clear our grasp, we've got conceptually or intellectually of these kind of ideas that I'm talking about just now. And we do suffer. That's just a fact. We do suffer. We find life unsatisfactory. Our views and habits lead us to build a world. And then we act in that world with certain expectations and assumptions of how things are going to be. And at some point reality contradicts us. Somebody does something we don't like. Somebody we love dies. We don't get what we want, and we suffer. And that's all the Buddha says. That's the basic paradigm of life. We build a world. We act in it. And at some point it opens up the rails in big ways or in small ways. It may be something like this. This appears over a wee evocation of it. I am a person. I experience my consciousness, so I experience myself as a person. I have fears and I have desires. I believe in my fears and desires as evidence of myself. I can make things happen by following my fears and desires in relation to objects that I perceive outside of me. Objects that may be things. Objects that may be people. Somewhere I think I can control the consequences of my actions in relation to the things outside of me. Sometimes I forget there will be consequences at all. I experience myself acting at the centre of the world. I like, I don't like. I want, I don't want. I forget I'm going to die. I grow attached to myself more and more each day. I forget others are going to die. I grow attached to them more and more each day. I don't always think wisely, speak wisely, or act wisely. I don't always love wisely. I suffer. Other people suffer and it colors the heart for years. So it's quite a sobering insight that Buddha has. It's not radiant with joy at this point in time. In a way he's answered his questions. He's got to the root of it. He's got to the nub of it. So what do we do? What does he do? What do we do? Well the first thing that we do is recognize, recognize that this is the case. We might not understand it in a way we don't need to understand it right now, but we need to recognize that this is the case. You need to find evidence for yourself. We're driven along by our desires. Fear in a way is just the flip side of the same coin. So let's just talk about desires. We're driven along by our desires. Now our desires are not inherently bad and they're not inherently sinful. They're nothing to do with going against the will of God or, you know, disobeying some sort of eternal commandment. They're not bad. They're not sinful. But neither are they without effect on us and other people. And Buddhist ethics is just about engaging with that fact. It's just about engaging with this whole process that I've been describing. It's about engaging with the mechanics of your mind. The mechanics of a consciousness that makes a world that it lives in. In more post of terms it's about learning to sit with yourself. It's about learning to be yourself and to be with yourself. It's about becoming more conscious. It's about becoming more discerning and more positive in the area of your actions. In a way it's about learning to see the deep roots of your habits, to see the often invisible connections between what I believe and what I experience. Yeah? So you become more accepting of yourself in some ways and in some ways you become less accepting of yourself because you see how certain ways that you behave abitually hold you back. That's what Buddhist ethics is about. Now the Buddha, when he was thinking what to do about this, came up with two terms that he thought were useful for helping along this process of learning to differentiate and discriminate the actions of your mind. So he posted two different kinds of actions, skillful and unskillful. He doesn't say good and bad. He doesn't say right and wrong. He doesn't say evil and holy. He says skillful and unskillful and I think that's an important distinction. Skillful and unskillful helps clarify. Skillful actions basically are those that take account of reality and can just to happiness. Unskillful actions are those that don't. And he posits an ethics of intention. It's not the action itself. It's the mental state. It's the mental will in a way behind the action that makes it skillful or unskillful. So if you act with a mind that's driven by hate or if you act with a mind that's driven by a desire that too far exceeds itself, then the action is unskillful in the sense that sooner or later that's going to get you into trouble. You're going to come a cropper. If you act with a mind that rests in contentment, suffering doesn't follow and the action is skillful. So that's the ethics of intention in a way. But he does also say it's important to consider your actions, so he posits an ethics of action. He says if your basic state is confusion and you want to purify your mind of confusion, change the way you behave, don't try and sort out all the stuff first. Create new and maybe better habits for yourself. Recognize that everything you do happens and depends upon conditions. So see what conditions lead you to act unwisely and avoid them. And if you can't avoid them, amend them. See what conditions lead you to act wisely in ways that lead to your happiness and cultivate these as a context for your life. I think it's quite important. The Buddha, in a way, he's not being judgmental in the way that we tend to understand that word. It's quite cool. It's quite calm. There's no sort of book of revelation. There's no great apocalypse that's going to happen if you don't understand this or you don't think it matters or anything. The Buddha just presents a series of observations from his experience. And he always, you know, gives along as a writer with it, the injunction. Don't believe this just because I've told you it. Don't believe anything just because somebody's told you it. He always says, "Go away and test what I've said in the fire of your experience." And that's what's important. The Buddha provides a cool set of observations. You provide the fire in your experience to assess whether what he's got to see has got relevance. So I want to bring all this together. I want to illustrate it, taking a slightly different tack. This process of a self that believes in itself and desires to have control over what it experiences other, whether that's objects are people. I want to try and illuminate the idea of Buddhism that through a certain kind of effort of mind you can hold back that process. It can become much more attenuated than it's effect on you. Anyway, you can train yourself to hold that process at bay to observe it and to choose not just to go along with it. And that through that you can slowly change your life. You can change how you experience life because you can change the world that you create in which you experience life. And you can do that up to the point of enlightenment, up to the point where suffering and even the terror of death have been overcome. Which is quite a grand idea, but I want to look at a particularly ethical activity that is particularly explicit with this, which is sexual ethics. I want to look at sexual ethics. And I want to look at sexual ethics and bring it to the Buddha's story as I give you at the start. I started a progression that I thought about when I was in Ireland in the Buddha's story. So, desire desires what we're talking about in a certain kind of way. Desire is the ethical arena. It's the meeting of self and other. And what's important is what happens when those two armies clash, the army of self and the army of other. Ethical practice is what happens when perfectly natural desires rise into your consciousness. But they rise into consciousness that's capable of suspending action, of not just going with something, of sitting within the experience in an active way rather than just giving into it passively, if you see that distinction. Sexual ethics, I think, is the clearest paradigm of this kind of thing. In a way, where can you see more clearly the interplay of self and other? Where can you see more clearly the interplay of like, don't like? And where can you see more clearly the interplay of the kind of confusion that seems to, in people's experience, arise when those two particular armies get together in a certain kind of way? So, in a way, the whole paradigm of ethics is writ large in the sexual arena. It's the strongest form of desire that most of us probably experience. I think that's probably fair to say. I want to look at this by looking at a connection that personally I've felt for years that is, you know, much documented in various spiritual traditions. Between the erotic and the sacred. It's quite an old chest, not in a way, the business of the erotic and the sacred. You know, centuries of Avila has had erotic visions, you know. There are records of erotic visions that seem to have some sort of spiritual content in most world faiths. If you look at the very popular Sufi tradition at the moment, if you look at the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, there's always the sort of reaching out to the beloved. There's a sort of interplay of language there. Now, I'm not going to say too much about it, but just a couple of things about the erotic and the sacred. Or the erotic moment in a way, and the spiritual moment in practice. In the sort of way that I'm talking about it, the spiritual moment being desires arise and you hold them at bay. You don't push them under the carpet and say, "I'm not having this experience." Nor do you just give in and end up, you know, with four lovers and whatever it is. So, this kind of heightened moment, I want to explore that heightened moment. I think both the erotic moment and the spiritual moment involve the basic excitement of having a choice. That's what's in the world. There's the meeting of a conscious mind capable of action or inaction. It's the meeting of that mind with unbridled, unconscious desire coming up. It's a bit like a hunter in a jungle that's really thick, catching sight of a fast animal going past and the sense of will I go after it? Will I not go after it? The sense of kind of the possible entry into excitement and the possible entry into danger. Both experiences are sort of pregnant from one of a better word with that sense of possibility. A delicious, exciting tension when you're tempted to rush headlong into a world of suddenly widening opportunity that's opened up. And yeah, at the same time, you're sort of inclined to sit back and prolong and savour the process of semi-detached engagement with an object that has caused a new opening world to arise in the first place. It seems to be from my experience anyway, and there are also my studies, my reading around the theme, certain kinds of studies. It seems to be that if one holds off consciously from acting on one's desires as they come up, but you manage to hold the experience in itself and watch it in your mind. Watch it move and sort of work on you, look at like a shape shifter or something, just watch it change shape in your mind. Try to get you to respond to that kind of thing. The experience that can come for you is a sort of heightened sense of personality, a heightened sense of engagement with the world. Things open up, the universe starts to colour itself. And to do that, engage with that process can even lead to entry or the possibility of entry into a world of archetypal presences. A world of archetypal forms, a bit like the ones that Jung talks about. And these are archetypal forms that you need to integrate. If you're going to have a spiritual life of any kind, whether it's Buddhist or whatever, you need to integrate this level of experience because whether we like it or not, this goes on. And this is the chance to do it. And in a way that's the good news, that's the positive spin on the slightly sobering sense of what we have to engage with. If ethics was just a matter of abiding with suffering, gritting your teeth and beating it and hoping that something might happen, nobody would do it. There would be no particular reason to do it. We also need to cultivate a sense of an ethics of joy. The sort of 100% pure headlong intoxicating rush to the head that you get, the first time you experienced the freedom of saying, "I have choice when I didn't think I had choice." The first time you think, "Oh, I've just broken an old habit. This means I can change my life. I can build on that. Something can happen." You know, it can be very, very strong. People's lives can be transformed. They learn to meditate. Something happens and it's almost like learning how to breathe properly again. Just a sense of possibilities open up. You know, that thing that says, "I can change. I can have an effect on myself and on the world in a positive way." It might not be a huge way, but it can be a positive way. It's not always easy for us to do. But when we consider that we can't access that, when we make conscious the whole process, the whole dynamic process of desire, whether it's sexual desire or any kind of desire, when we're able to hold our appetites at bay a bit and just abide with a contented heart and a contented mind, it's easy to see the possibilities for joy that one could feel motivated. If you look at sexual desire, in sexual desires was, I'd say, in shorthand, we're being driven on by some extremely complex psychology that's been overlaid, you know, thousands of years of consciousness developing, some very complex psychology overlaids and at the service of a very primal and basic arch, if you like. It's the primal force of the universe, the tendency of life, of forms of energy to reproduce themselves. It's, you know, the biological imperative to prolong the life of the species. That's the force that is behind personal desires, whether the big ones are small ones. And it's little wonder that we can feel pulled around by something like sex. But if we can engage or even imagine a time when we might engage with that strength of desire, make it conscious in our lives and actually feel we have choices to make, consciously harness that moment and feel the choices. What an endless source of energy and motivation we can tap into. And I think that's, that's the thing we have to aim at when it comes to the practice of mind, the practice of Buddhist ethics. And of course, it's not possible, even very much of the time, for most others. And that's okay. That's okay. You know, you don't have to be pure as the driven snow. And if you're not, you're some sort of condemned sinner. It's not like that. It's not an all or nothing thing. There's no sense of repressing your desire or any of that kind of thing. The body and the spirit in Buddhism definitely don't have to be separate if you have a meaningful spiritual life. But we do have to remember the area of desire. We do have to consider it as one of the prime areas in our lives. The ethics of our desire are important. And they're important, for all the reasons I've said. They drove the Buddha. It's what was behind his whole quest, didn't we? And the questions that came up for him burned him for years. They burned him all the way out into the wild. So, as I said, I'm going to look at a sort of progression in the story of the Buddha now. The ili straits all this, I think, quite nicely. I'm going to give you a little quote first from a guy called Frank Kermod. Frank Kermod is generally cited as England's foremost literary critic. And this is something he says. He's talking about Shakespeare at this point. But he's talking about Eros, the god Eros, and he's talking about the god of love. And he says this little quote. He says, "Love is a means to grace as well as irrational passion." And it may be suggested that the two are not ultimately separable by the reason. So love is a means to grace as well as an irrational passion. And when I'm talking about love or when I'm talking about the erotic in a sense, that is what I mean. It's that part of human experience that is either an irrational passion or a means to grace. And Buddhist ethics would be saying, "It's up to you which it becomes." So again, let's consider the poster of the Buddha as a dream world. Where you are all the characters, you are the landscape, you are the tree, you are the bit of grassy sits on, you are the sky overhead. Or consider all as the heightened dream of the Buddha. A sort of swirl of forces coming together in an unusually blind and conscious mind. The very stuff of life, the very energy of life is there. The basic symbolic forms of human experience from ages past are there. So the first stage, as I outlined it earlier, is the Buddha deciding to leave his comfortable life and go forth and try and work all this stuff out. I want to give you some quotes here that will help set the mood for this progression I'm going to take you through. The sort of mood I imagine the Buddha being in is obviously quite a sober one. He's thinking about leaving his wife and child. He's thinking about leaving his family. In a culture where family is everything. Now, he's doing that in a certain context. I want to read you a couple of quotes. He's about a French writer called the Harbin Jolloon. He's a French alphabet character. And he's writing about two artists, Jean-Gienet and Alberto Giacometi. And he says both these guys had similar experiences to the kind of experience I think the Buddha had before he left home. So this is what he says on Jean-Gienet. "He did not like to possess anything, lived in great deprivation with no fixed abode, no luggage, no objects to encumber him. He would slip a bit of paper on which he wrote down the few telephone numbers he needed into his spectacles case." That's how Jean-Gienet lived. And this is Jean-Gienet's friend, Giacometi. The day Giacometi discovered the absurdity of death he decided to live in the temporary. And this is what Giacometi said about that experience he'd had of the absurdity of death. It's on account of that dramatic event that I have always lived in the temporary. That I have always had a horror of all possessions, of settling down, of finishing a house, arranging a nice life for oneself, when there's always that threat. No, I would rather live in hotels, cafes, places of passage. In fact, he lived mostly in his studio. I think in a way Giacometi's studio is the Buddha sitting under the tree. That's where the work happens, that's where the art happens. That's the somber side of it. This is a slightly more positive, it's still quite strong side of it. The Buddha leaves home and he goes into the wild. You know, he comes from a situation where he has a wife he loves, a child he loves, in a certain kind of way. And he goes into the wild where he's friendless. Now, what's that got to do with the progression of love? Well, this is Gary Snyder's evocation of someone going into the wild. One departs home to embark on a quest into an archetype of wilderness that is dangerous, threatening and full of beasts and wild aliens. This sort of encounter with the other, both the inner and the outer, requires giving up comfort and safety, accepting cold and hunger and being willing to eat anything. You may never see home again. Loneliness is your bread. Your bones may turn up some day in the riverbank mud. It grants freedom, expansion and release, untied, unstuck, crazy for a while. It breaks to boo. It verges on transgression. It teaches humility. Going out, fasting, singing alone, talking across the species boundaries, praying, giving thanks, coming back. I should say that in the end, the Buddha does come back to his home, he comes back and tries to pass on to his family, what is he's experienced. In a way, leaving his wife and child is not as much about their limitations as it is about his own. The Buddha has a realization that he's got too caught up in one set of particulars, and he's had his comfortable view of life shattered by the sheer surprise of reality, of things happening around him that he can control old age, sickness, death. But in terms of desire, he does actually set out to break his attachment to the views that have led him to get comfortable. And in that sense, his relationship with his wife and child and his family is inextricably bound up with that. After a while, he's practising as an ascetic, and there's a certain kind of alienation from love, I think goes on with Siddhartha. I don't think he's in a particularly healthy relationship with himself or with other people. He's not at that point, it seems to me, fully at home with the fact that he's a creature of desires. There may be some very post of things about ascetic practice, but I think his own realization that it wasn't ultimately useful bears out what I'm saying. I think the point it makes is that it's important when you're dealing with whole area of desire, love, ethics, all that stuff, to try and not swing between extremes. Complete overindulgence and sort of over sentimentalization and all that kind of stuff, swinging to a sort of unrealistic denial of your basic human wants and desires for intimacy and warmth and all the things that are perfectly reasonable and okay. You don't want to move from a sort of overindulgence to a repression of things that are perfectly natural. And I think the Buddha eventually realises that this is partly what he's doing, he's sitting on a whole aspect of human experience. Now, the next thing that happens, this is a possibly slightly controversial, but the next thing that happens is he meets the goat herd, the young girl called Nanda Bala. I said I'd read a little bit from this long poem about the life of the Buddha. This is what the poet has to say about Nanda Bala. She was wearing a dark blue cloth and her arms were brilliant with white shells, so that she seemed like Yamuna, best of rivers, when it's dark and the blue water is wreathed with foam. That was Ash, the goshu, getting very nearly carried away. But actually, I'm not sure he is getting carried away. If you think about it, the Buddha has been fasting for six years, he's probably had no contact directly with women, with someone who's very significantly other to him, to something he'd experienced as other in that way. He's just seen through a denial of the senses after all these austerities, and in a way, I'd imagine that if he met a beautiful young girl who offers a milk after that. He'd probably have a sensuous experience, it would be sensuous, he'd be taking that through his senses. You know, a glance, a smile maybe. Certainly the meeting, strong meeting of a self with another, and the dynamic for me is pure enough with that. I think it's quite important, I don't think we should have a sort of Christified or Christianised idea of Siddhartha before he's enlightened. I would actually make a comparison between Nanda Bala, the girl who gives some milk, and Mary Magdalene in the Christian tradition. And it's quite interesting, when the film The Last Temptation of Christ came out, and it was suggested that Jesus may have had some sort of perfectly human, erotic experience around Mary Magdalene. People blew up cinemas in Paris. That was the strength of repression of the very notion that someone who's founded a spiritual tradition might have had a sort of human sexuality, or even a sensuality, that they might in a way have experienced other as a self. Now, I can see why that happens when Jesus is the Son of God and you can't be like him, it is problematic to consider him as a man. It's not problematic for us to consider the Buddha in that way. It's important though, she smiles at him, she gives him the milk, he thanks her, and they're satisfied, and he goes off alone. It's a much healthier response to the whole issue of self and other enough desire. He keeps what might have been a very strong experience from overwhelming him, but he doesn't squash it either. And in a way he goes off to turn over and finally crack the whole question of desire and its relationship to happiness. In my mind's eye, the milk that she gives him nourishes him the way that breast milk might nourish a child. In a way she's quite a motherly figure in that sense. And the motivation to practice, you know, his body's nourished, but the motivation to practice, the new found energy that he has given that he's been fasting for so long and is completely wasted in a certain sort of way. I think that energy, symbolically at least, comes from the spiritual moment of his meeting with this very significant other person. He has a feeling basically of the blood starting to flow again, of life starting again, of energy flowing again, of the whole dynamic of being a human being, coming on stream again. And it happens in relation to another person who happens to be of the opposite sex. And well, actually I think that's quite significant and is sometimes a part of the story that people tend to skate over. She just appears and then she disappears and I think she's more than just a feeder in the sense of food. In a way, I think Nanda Bala as a figure turns into the Earth goddess that comes up later for the Buddha. It's quite interesting that the Earth goddess comes up, you would maybe be surprised at that. She says, actually what the Buddha is doing is fully in line with nature. You know, she loves him as a mother. His apparent rejection of natural reproduction of that kind of desire is okay with her, with mother nature. It seems that he's achieved something that's fully part of her scheme of things. The next episode that we talked about was this vision of this old gold figure, Brahma Sahampati, coming up. And in terms of love, well that's the point where it really gets going for the Buddha. There's a flowering of love. You know, it's going out from him, it's unbounded. He has this vision and his response is for his heart and a way to just break open and something starts to happen. The energy starts to really move in a certain direction. He's started to harness something. And in a way, the episode of the giant snake who comes up and shrouds him, well the snake, as Sanga actually points out, is the collective forces of the unconscious. And it comes and protects him. It doesn't bite him, it doesn't crush him in his coils, it protects him. And at that point I think the Buddha has complete control over all his unconscious impulses, urges, drives. They're fully at his disposal, they're fully conscious and off he goes into the world to teach. Now you could also look at the progression of other in the people that the Buddha interacts with, but there isn't really time to do that. The important thing is that I think it's a paradigm of ethical life. The Buddha's story is a paradigm of ethical life. Of how we can harness the tremendous forces of the mind. And in the process, learn not only to suffer less, but also to love more wisely and more fully than we maybe ever thought possible. So that's all on ethics, which is by far the longest section you'll be pleased to hear. I've actually not got too much to say on meditation and I've got even less to say on wisdom. I'm going to carry on the same theme as I've been talking about. And the second vision that I'm going to give you for the Buddha in relation to meditation is the Buddha as master of enchantments. The Buddha's master of enchantments. So I've talked a lot about ethics as a paradigm where natural desires meet a conscious mind. This implies quite a lot. The first thing that it implies I think is that the reality you can get closer to through Buddhist practice is somehow separate from nature. Now this is an old chestnut again that gets talked about. You know, is nature separate from reality? Is reality separate from nature? Wordsworth and Blake had a real sort of ding-dong about this over years and late in Wordsworth's life. I do have time to go into all that now, but I'll give you a comment that Zen master Dogen says when he talks about nature and reality. He says, "Blue mountains are neither sentient nor incentient. You are neither sentient nor incentient." So I hope that's clear enough for you there, but I'm going to just pause it all. Actually, I will explore it a little bit indirectly as it were through talking about meditation as a way to enter into reality, which is still remaining true to nature. It's not actually possible to do one without the other. You can't fully understand reality and be out of line with nature. That just doesn't happen. So I'm going to do this by talking about meditation in a particular way. I'm going to compare it to something called natural magic. This is where the enchantment split comes in. So what is natural magic? Well, in Florence in the early 16th century, there was a school of young men and young women, actually, as it comes to it, who rediscovered the works of Plato, and they rediscovered the original people who'd rediscovered the works of Plato, and it had a huge impact on the whole intellectual and spiritual life of those particular Christian times. It produced some of the great art that people associate with the Renaissance. It produced, in some senses, some of the works of Raphael, of Michelangelo, Leonardo, all those people. Renaissance neoplatonism was kicked off by the founding of the Platonic Academy by a guy called Lorenzo de Medici, and a school was run by a young man called Marcellio Ficino, who had a young disciple, a bit like Star Wars, actually an apprentice called Pico della Mirandola, and just like Star Wars, Pico della Mirandola turned on his master after a certain amount of time. But Pico della Mirandola was a genius, and he was the person who talked most about natural magic as a kind of spiritual practice, so I'm going to give you his definition of natural magic, and I hope you'll see what this might have to do with meditation. So, Pico said about natural magic. Natural magic is a science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces, and their effect on each other and on their natural dependence. A science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces and their effect on each other. He went on to say, "What the human magician produces through art? Nature produces naturally by producing man." A guy called Professor Edgar Wind, who writes a lot with this, says about that, "What the human magician produces through art? Nature produces naturally by producing man." And Professor Wind says, "This explains why magic is a model force. It makes man recognize in himself the forces of nature, and in nature the model of his own force. By inserting his magical art into nature, he can release forces that are greater than his own." And that probably sounds a bit complex, but basically what he's saying is, "Magic is an ethical process." And it's an ethical process because you have to take account of the forces of nature when you take account of yourself, and when you make a conscious intervention with your mind into what you experience, you release a force that's greater than your own. I think, you know, as I said in the last section, this is what happens when the Buddha sits down under the tree. This is what he sets out to achieve, this kind of magical enchantment that releases a force greater than his own. It's interesting both the definition of natural magic and the insight the Buddha has at first deal with actions and consequences. They deal with things arising and falling away in some sort of set of relationships where they affect each other, causes and affects. It deals with conditions. You get a science concerned with the virtues and actions of natural forces and their effect on each other. You get the Buddha saying, "All things arise in dependence upon other things. All things fall away in dependence upon other things." I think the point would be though in terms of meditation that just considering these things are not enough, even visions are not enough. Transformations in real life have to follow. In terms of natural magic, magical acts have to follow that release a force greater than your own. That's what we have to do in terms of meditation. So, a magician or a meditator, whichever you prefer, has to act on his or her own mind in order to act on the universe. Meditation, magic, is a moral and an ethical process. It's the main ethical tool we have, reflection and meditation, throughout your whole life, for purifying the mind, for purifying the heart. The basic teaching of Buddhism is quite often given as cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify the heart. Meditation, magic, it's the way to see most clearly the processes of reality at work and how to align yourself with them. As I said, it's an achievable way for you to loosen all the ties that bind you. There's infinite energy to tap into for that purpose. It's energy that made the universe. I don't know if you've heard this thing recently that we're apparently made from stars, from the debris of dead stars. That's one of the buzz things in science. I think that energy that goes to create stars is latent within us and more. That's clearly there. And the question is, for the Buddha, what do I do about it? Why do I sit under the street? What am I going to achieve? The question for us is, with all these realizations, what can we do to actually effect a change? What can be released through meditation? What can be released through magic to use the terms of the neoplatonists? What enchantment might be produced in your own consciousness, in your own heart? I've no time to go into meditation techniques. If you want to learn to meditate, go to the Knowledge Buddhist Centre and learn to meditate. They're very good teachers. They've been around for a long time. They're all smiling right now. But for me, to do what Siddhartha Gautama did, to sit down under a tree, having left home and everything he knew, and watch his breath and calm his mind after six years of hunger to the point where he's nearly dead. And to maintain his emotional positivity in that context and in the face of such strong realizations, it's kind of like a sort of vision of how you might be that I find quite humbling. For me, that's real courage, is the ability to face up to that level of pain, even that level of experience, where you see yourself related to everything through the whole of time and not just caving. I mean, when I was on retreat, as I said, there were times when I experienced a little glimpse of something, and sometimes it was quite joyful, but actually sometimes I felt really threatened. In a way, my sense of who I am and my belief in myself couldn't quite cope with that level of insight, and you could certainly feel it folding on itself like space when it becomes too heavy and create a sort of black hole almost. And I think that that's where we sort of are, is we're not really able to hold and contain the insights that are there, but it is possible for us to do so, and the Buddha, as a meditator, is a kind of ideal of that, a vision of that. He's a master of enchantments, I would quibble a bit with the tradition and say that when he first realises all the stuff about reality, in a way he's not fully enlightened, that's not canonical, just to say, but I would say he's not fully enlightened. I would say that doesn't really happen until something else comes about. I think what happens is the Earth Goddess comes and she says, "Nature is okay with this. Nature is okay with what you've done." This thing that Professor Winn says about nature being the model of your own force. I think the end point of nature is not in a way to produce human beings, it's to produce Buddhists. That's why what the Buddha achieves is not out of line with nature, but any Buddha is going to be in relationship to other human beings who are not enlightened. And when Siddhartha realises this, he has a vision, he has a vision of lotuses. And what actually happens to him in that experience is that something blossoms in his heart. He gets this fire that comes out of him almost. He literally shakes with a certain kind of empathy and a certain kind of love. The word in Sanskrit for what he feels is Anu Kampa and it means a shaking with, a bit of shakes with love, and it's unbridled love, it's unrestrained love, but it's fully mindful. And fully conscious, and it comes to him like a revelation that his wisdom is not complete without love. And that's what I'd say is the enchantment that the Buddha is the master of. Love is the enchantment that takes you beyond self and other. It's a strong enough spell if you like to conquer fear, and it's a strong enough spell to lift you clear of the sufferings of life and even of death. In a way there's not much more to say other than that. The third aspect, wisdom. What comes next once you've had that kind of experience, an insight that's turned into a sort of radiant love of that strength, what comes next is impossible for me to say. In the best tradition of all the talks that I've ever listened to, all the good talks, I won't try and say very much on wisdom at all. I'm really not qualified to speak about it. What is it to go beyond life and death? I just don't know. I'm sorry, but I don't know. Is that different from partaking wisely in nature or living in harmony with the processes of reality as the imbue nature? I don't know. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it's not. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's the whole experience. Do I want to know? Well, sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't, and I think that's okay. I think that's where we tend to be. If you do want an image of wisdom, if we want a third vision of the Buddha, then, as you did earlier on, imagine the Buddha under the tree, just like you did at the start of the talk. See where he is, now bring him to mind and see what it looks like now. And once you've got an image of the Buddha seated under the tree, imagine him seated in an endless blue sky. It's above him, it's underneath him, it's all around him. The tree and him are in the blue sky. And look from the sky to the Buddha's face, and look from his smile to the blue sky. And that's the final vision of the Buddha for this evening, is the Buddha as a vision of the sky. Try that before you go to sleep tonight and see what effect it has on your dreams. But where do we know? The Buddha's self in a way has fallen away, he's completely shot through with love. But what about us? I think all we can do, certainly all I can do, is try and sit with this experience of not knowing. Sit with the blue sky, have the questions without the answers, and try and hold and feel the tensions that arise, the conundrums that won't solve on our own terms. All the terms of resolution for this kind of thing are just like sand through the fingers. We were left, it's where we've always been in reality, and reality is indefinable. It's properly unimaginable, and it's totally ungraspable. It's something that I want, and I like, and I'll have, can't, appropriate, can't get hold of. It just will not correspond to that way of doing things. And we're left after that experience, we're left not knowing. And not knowing is the most profoundly challenging, and the most uncomfortable, but also the most fruitful experience, I think, that is possible for us to have, as people who've got conscious minds, and who think, at least, that they believe in themselves. People who, as Samuel Beckett says, always seem to find a reason that gives us the impression that we exist. We always come up with that in the end, and not knowing is the one thing that's an effective challenge to that. And if we can let ourselves have that different experience, if we find the sustained, or the momentary, courage to let go enough into that experience, then in that space, and in the blue sky, we'll find a compassionate Buddha. Sitting with us under a tree, whatever kind of tree it is that we imagine, and the Buddha will be smiling, and he'll know what it is to know.
