I'll introduce these two in a minute. First of all, I'll just say there are handouts of this talk and quite full notes, so you don't need to worry about taking notes. And it's a sort of talk that people kept saying to me, "What is it about?" Even when I'd written it and I said, "Oh, I don't really know." So it hasn't got that much content. So, first conceiving an eye, we cling to an ego. Then conceiving a mind, we cling to a material world. Like water in a wheel, helplessly we circle. I bow down to the compassion that arises for all beings. So my brief for this talk was the problem of self and world, the first two lines of the verse. And there are two threads that I want to draw out. So one is that all of this, me in all my complexity and wondrousness, which you've just heard about, and you lot who are all endlessly fascinating. And all of this is all one gorgeous mistake. The other thread is this. That which veils reality from us, so my sense of self, you lot vividly out there, this world of very real things, this all veils reality, yet it also shows us reality. So this is all one big mistake, an illusion that hides reality from us, yet it is this mistake that shows us reality. If eyesight fails, find a railing to follow. So this is going to be a railing in the dark. We're going to be going into the mystery that lies just beneath the surface of all that seems to exist. So first of all, I want to introduce Nagarjana. It's 1,800 years ago. Nagarjana is a great scholar and practitioner, but he hasn't yet got to the emptiness at the heart of the Dharma. Then one day the nargas guide him to the bed of a lake where he finds the Pranya parametale texts left by the Buddha 700 years earlier. He discovers emptiness. Emptiness as a deep, intuitive understanding of contingency, of co-arising of self and things, and he composes his verses from the center. Contingency is emptiness, which, contingently configured, is the middle way. Everything is contingent, everything is empty. Reality and unreality can't sleep each other out. So that's Nagarjana. And then I want to introduce Jhaal Aldin Rumi. So a thousand years after Nagarjana, he's living in Konya, Turkey, and he's a well-respected teacher of Islamic law and head of what becomes known as malevi order. He was also a mystic and poet, as was his father. But at the age of 40 he meets shams, and shams is an uncompromising, fierce god-man, who throws Rumi's books into a pond and tells him to go further. He too discovers emptiness. I saw you and became empty. This emptiness, more beautiful than existence, it liberates, it liberates existence, and yet when it comes, existence thrives and creates more existence. So Nagarjana and Rumi are both poets of emptiness. And poets of emptiness need very subtle translators. Translators who understand that poems don't explain reality, they disclose it, they show us reality. Rumi and Nagarjana have these subtle translators in Coleman Box for Rumi and Stephen Bachelor for Nagarjana. So I'm basing this talk on a poem by Rumi, and for me it's a poem about the order, or how I like to think of the order. We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups, that's fine with us. Every morning we glow, and in the evening we glow again. They say there's no future for us, they're right, which is fine with us. Don't worry. So wine is essence, it's emptiness, it's what causes us to glow, and the drinking of wine was forbidden in Islam, but for Rumi wine is a symbol of divine mystical intoxication. There are thousands of wine that can take over our mind, don't think all ecstasy is the same. So wine is the mystery of God's presence in the heart and mind for Rumi. It's not knowledge of God's law through conventional study. There were those who worshipped out of fear of the Lord, and those who lost themselves in the dizzying effects of loving God with abandon, Rumi was the latter. Drink from the presence of saints, not from those other jars. Every object, every being, is a jar of delight. Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it's being untied, and is just ambling about. For Nagarjuna, the wine is emptiness. An emptiness means he can find no trace of anything anywhere. Each isolated thing that he seems to come across turns out to be utterly untraceable. Were there a trace of something? There would be a trace of emptiness. Were there no trace of anything? There would be no trace of emptiness. So it's 600 years ago. Sankapar is reading versus from the center. He falls asleep, and he dreams that Nagarjuna visits him and hits him on the head with the text. He wakes up and turns to the verse he'd been reading just before he fell asleep. Were mind and matter me, I would come and go like them. If I was something else, they would say nothing about me. At that moment he has a full and sudden, non-conceptual understanding of emptiness. It's like having his world turned upside down. This vision of emptiness is exactly the opposite of what he has imagined until then. So for Sankapar, every notion of emptiness up till that point has been mistaken. And it's not that he's been slightly missing the mark, but that this emptiness is completely the opposite of what he expected. A gorgeous mistake. So Aloka says, "In 1976 I formally committed myself to a course of action, ordination, about which I had a whole jumble of ideas. None of these have really turned out to be of much use, except their gradual abandonment has provided a path of debris, offering the consolation that I have actually moved from where I started." So we can see the spiritual life as a path of debris, of abandoning mistaken ideas. And this doesn't mean that we were on the wrong path. It's more that this abandoning of mistakes is the path. So Rumi is imagining this community with a huge barrel of wine but no cups, while our wine is held in cups. These forms we seem to be are cups, floating in an ocean of living consciousness. So these cups are anything that fixes, contains, or limits. But the cup wants to be lifted and used, not broken, but carried, carefully to the next. The cup knows there's a state for you beyond this, one that comes with more vast awareness. The cup looks still, but acts in secret to help. Sometimes you pour cup to cup, nothing happens. Pour instead into your deep ocean self, without calculation, if eyesight fails, find a railing to follow. So conceiving an eye, we cling to an ego. Conceiving the cup of self, we find ourselves contained, fixed, limited. Yet this cup does not want to be broken, it wants to be lifted and used. Nagarjuna too encounters this cup of the ego to which we cling. If you are what you grasp, you would not be here. For what you grasp becomes and goes, it cannot be you. How can the grasp be the grasper? For Nagarjuna, clinging to self is to insist on being somebody. To be empty is to no longer be full of oneself, to be willing to be nobody. So emptiness for Him is about easing fixations. And this ease comes with an awareness of contingency, awareness that all is co-arising, interdependent. And with this awareness we pour instead into our deep ocean self. So fixing is our way of dealing with an unpredictable world, with uncertainty. It's a way of coping with anxiety. But these cups we create, cut us off from the ocean of existence. Our fixed sense of self veils us from a bigger, more vast awareness of self. But if we look closely at self, it shows us reality. The cup looks still but it acts in secret to help you. That which veils reality from us also shows us reality. So Dogen says to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. So when we study the Dharma we study the self. And in studying ourselves we forget ourselves. I think it's more that in looking for ourselves we lose ourselves. And this losing of ourselves is when we can be enlightened by all things. So what does it mean to lose ourselves? It's literally we look but we can't find ourselves. So Viveka, people that have been in Viveka's workshop, had us looking for our mind which was quite hard to find earlier. But I just want you to look for your arm. Yeah just look and see if you can find your arm. So you've got your arm it's there. And then I just want you to look and find your shoulder. You can sort of find it through your clothes if you haven't got to show. So you found your arm and you found your shoulder. And now I want you to find the exact point at which your arm becomes your shoulder. So we find ourselves losing our arm and losing our shoulder and losing our mind perhaps. And if we're not careful we can lose our whole selves. So enough poetry and enough tricks we're going to get scientific with Joanna Macy. So with radical impermanence we find it's not that things are impermanent it is that there are no things. If we go deeply enough into interconnectedness all we find is relationship. Not even things to be in relation. Just this flow of relating. Just change. So all there is is change. Not things that change. No gardener calls it emptiness. Roomie is intoxicated by it. There is no otherness in either you or me. Without otherness there is no me or you. I do not connect with me nor do I connect with you. No connecting, no connections, no connectors. So our grief comes from creating a self out of this flow and then and then trying to protect that self from change when its very nature is change. Vazibandu would say there is just experience. He shows us the mechanics of self. How mind creates self and world out of just experience. And he also shows us that it isn't our fault. We are just wired up wrongly. So that on a very deep level we create this split between self and world and from that countless other dualities pleasure, pain inside, outside and so on. Where there is one the mind makes two and it's one big mistake. So we may want to ask why. I wanted to ask why. Why am I made like that? Well why not. Now I may well know that this so-called self does not exist but I don't believe it for one moment. So everything is telling me the opposite. I've even secured my arm again. So the trouble with reality is that it's counterintuitive. Sankapa found it was the opposite of what he expected. Yet we need our intuition to find it. When eyesight fails find a railing to follow. So can we trust our intuition? The Buddha did not teach that you do not exist. Only that you can't find yourself. I didn't say that your arm does not exist. Only that you might lose it. It's not that there is no me. There most certainly is. It's just that this me is empty. If you are what you grasp you would not be here. For what you grasp comes and goes it cannot be you. How can the grasp to be the grasp? You're not different from what happened then. If you were you would not need a past. I was here before. No you weren't. I was and I was. You neither were nor weren't. I will survive. No you won't. Opinions are absurd. So if this self this cup this fixation is what I have grasped then where is the grasper? And if this self this cup is the grasper then where is what has been grasped? Where are you going? There is still me still you but no grasping. We're going beyond fixations. Were mind and matter me I would come and go like them. If I was something else they would say nothing about me. So I want you to just close your eyes for a moment and I'm going to tell you something that Rumi says about the self. Even if the veil of self is as thin as an eyelid it will blind us to the reality of things as they are. You can open your eyes again then. So where do we find this wine? Gone, inner and outer. No moon, no ground or sky. Don't hand me another glass of wine. Pour it into my mouth. I've lost the way to my mouth. The wine is in the tavern. The caribat and caribat it means literally ruin. So that's the name of a tavern would you'd call it a ruin. So in the tavern of ruin we find not only wine but music dancing girls and prostitutes and pious Muslims would not set foot in these places but when crowds of people became too much for Rumi he would go to the tavern to meditate. And once he was supposed to be giving the Friday lecture and nobody could find him anywhere and it was reported that he was in the tavern and his disciple Hosem goes to find him and he so like doesn't want to set foot in this tavern especially on a Friday. So he covers his eyes up and he somehow manages to find Rumi in the dark and doesn't open his eyes until he's right in front of Rumi's face so he doesn't see anything else that's going on there. So the tavern is Sanksara. It's a glorious hell that we human beings enjoy and suffer and push off from in search of truth. So I like this idea of pushing off like in a boat from firm land we push off from Sanksara in search of truth. The tavern is the human conditioning condition. It's happiness and suffering. There's a Bjork song which says "I carry my joy on the left and my pain on the right" and that's the human condition. I think sometimes as Buddhists we can think that there is something wrong with Sanksara. We can even try to fix it. There is nothing wrong with Sanksara. Sanksara is perfect. So Sanksara the tavern of ruin is the perfect place created by us from which we push off in search of truth. So perceiving a mind we cling to a material world. Does this mean that there is a material world which we cling to or more that clinging creates our world. With our help existence arises in emptiness. Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence. This place made from our love for that emptiness. Yet somehow comes emptiness. This existence goes. Praise to that happening over and over. This world which is made from our love for emptiness. So how is it we make our world? We create our world through perception. It isn't that there's no world out there. It's just that self and world are interdependent. So we shape the world through perception while the world shapes us. Consciousness is coloured by what it feeds on. So for Joanna Macy insight is insight into the very process of perception. To understand perception would be to understand how self and world co-arise in emptiness. The Buddha therefore tells us to pay close attention to the world of our senses. So what happens when we perceive an object? There is a co-arising a co- igniting of self and object in that moment in emptiness. They arise together. Self arises with object. So for this lectern to exist three things needed to coincide. So there needed to be a sense organ. If I was asleep there would be no lectern in my world unless I was having an anxiety dream. So there's the eye. There needs to be a sense object that comes within range of my sense organ. So if this was outside, well it wouldn't exist again in my world. And then there needs to be impact. So there could be me with my eyes open and a lectern and the lectern would still not exist unless there was some contact which was either deliberate or accidental. I might have just bumped into it rather than been looking for it. So because of this perception itself is a relationship of mutual dependence between these three things. We co-arise co-ignite with the world of things. In a sense self and world create one another or at least depend on one another. So these three organ object and attention they constitute a sensory sphere or a sort of co- they co-ignite and that co-ignition is a sensory sphere. So when the Buddha says there is monks that sphere where in there is neither earth nor water nor fire nor air, wherein there is neither this world nor world beyond nor sun nor moon. Monks there is a not born and not become, a not made, a not compounded. Monks if there were not there would be no stepping out here from what is born become made compounded. So there is monks that sphere and the sphere that he's talking about, nirvana, is not a place or a realm but a way of perceiving where senses and world drop away. Yathabhuta Njana Darshana, seeing things as they really are, and Padma Shuri said that my name means that really. And in a way it's always that's always been a kind of my thing I suppose, this idea of seeing things as they really are. But I think it's also been quite misleading in a way. It's not that one day I'll see things as they really are. It's not that there's a real world that's at their hidden behind this illusory world. Insight is a way of perceiving. So it's not that we will have insight into things as they really are but we'll have insight into our own process of perception. That's what we'll see. We'll see our process of perception. And when we can deeply understand the way we experience, when we fully see the process of our own perception, that will be seeing things as they really are, which I guess is just like this. Where everything not empty nothing would happen. Nivana would be a letting go and stopping of what? Nothing let go of, nothing attained, nothing annihilated, nothing eternal, unceasing and unborn. That is Nivana. So emptiness for Nogarjana is contingency. To see dependence, connectedness and relatedness in everything, and to ease our fixations. So as we ease this fixation of self we also ease that which separates us from our world. So we are freer to enter into the shifting beautiful tragic flow of the world which we are creating and being created by. So we'll have an intense awareness of life in all this complexity and beauty. Yet when we look to find the person absorbed in that life, there'll be no one there. So it's not that self and world will disappear. In fact our experience will be all the more vivid, but there'll be an easing of our grip. Self and world but no longer grasp and grasp. So it's not that we go beyond experience, it's just that we let go into experience. And although I create create my world with complete seriousness, fixing me, fixing you things, that which I try to fix is utterly unaffected by my efforts. However much I define, label, dissect, analyze, I leave no trace on the seamless web of life. Your muddled conclusions do not affect emptiness. Your denial of emptiness does not affect me. It is all at ease, unfixable by fixations, incommunicable, inconceivable, indivisible. So we find the wine of emptiness in the tavern of ruin, Sanghsara. Last year I admired wines, this I'm wandering inside the red world. So as you know wine is not to be rushed, wine has to ferment to age, to mature and fermentation is one of the oldest symbols for human transformation. And another symbol of human transformation is cooking. So in a lot of Zen stories, you hear about people being cooked. And Rumi also talks about being cooked. He says, "My life in three phases. I was raw, I got cooked, I burned." A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it's being boiled. "Why are you doing this to me?" The cook knocks him down with the ladle. "Don't you try to jump out? You think I'm torturing you? I'm giving you flavour, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of the human being." Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook, "Boil me some more, hit me with a skimming spoon. I can't do this by myself." So the cook is Rumi's teacher and the cook is discipline. Rumi's intoxication starts in discipline. He cooks himself, then burns with his love for God. His practice starts in the sphere of self and world. He fasts. "There's a hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness, the emptier and cry like the reed instruments cry." He goes without sleep. "Don't go to sleep one night. What you most want will come to you then, warmed by the sun inside. You'll see wonders." And he lives in poverty. "Last night my teacher taught me the lesson of poverty, having nothing and wanting nothing. I am a naked man, standing inside a mine of rubies, clothed in red silk." And shams Rumi's friend and teacher is a dervish. And dervish means one who is poor, so one who is poor in God. And it's very interesting that shams keeps his poverty secret. I really like this idea of keeping your poverty secret. So he stays in merchants accommodation and he has this great big padlock on his door and then when you go in he's just got this straw mat on the floor. So the cup wants to be lifted and used, not broken, but carried carefully to the next. For Rumi the body isn't an opponent. There is only love in such an abundance that it leaves no space for food, sleep or shopping. Joanna Macy tells us that me and mine is an obsessive trick of the mind, where it sets itself apart from its physical experience. It is the mind itself that needs to be freed. So this liberation comes not from us separating ourselves from the world of things, but from increasing our awareness of it. So the very notion of tathatar, suchness, is the suchness of things. The reality that we are looking for is the reality of things, the emptiness of things, of the phenomenal world. So it is the particularity of matter, the thingness of things that is helpful to the mind, returning us again and again to immediate and real experience. So Wabi Sabi, my favourite subject, Wabi Sabi is a Japanese term for an aesthetic in which the so-called faults of conditioned existence are its beauty. So in Wabi Sabi we enter into a relationship with the world which allows the world to show us reality. We coax beauty out of ugliness. And Wabi Sabi is the beauty of things that are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It's a beauty of things modest and humble, of things unconventional. So it's the shape worn into an old stone step. It's the lid of a China sugar bowl that's been very carefully mended. It's a scar on my knee. It's old glass in windows that distorts the view. With Wabi Sabi the beauty is transitory. Things are either emerging out of nothingness or disappearing into nothingness. Therefore it shows us the nothingness that lies behind all things. Wabi Sabi is spring time and autumn. It's buds and shoots, seed heads, leaf skeletons. It's dusk and dawn. It's every kind of becoming and dissolving. So the mind is to be freed by this disciplined attention to the suchness of things, to the here and now. In these moments the mind can break through fixations and perceive the living process of which it is a part. For Nagarjana emptiness is the fasting of the mind. When emptiness is possible everything is possible. Were emptiness not possible nothing could be possible. Some nights stay up till dawn as the moon sometimes does for the sun be a full bucket pulled up the dark way of a well then lifted out into the light. When Shams met Rumi he threw his books into a pond. He told him that though the saints don't fail to pray and fast. It wasn't enough. One must strive for the inner truth of these outward practices. So you probably remember the same happens to Rachungpa. He goes off to fetch water while Millirepa is lighting the fire but he ends up watching the goats and comes back hours later. And when he gets back Millirepa is in the process of burning all his books and Rachungpa is furious and Millirepa just tells him that it's his own fault because he'd been gone for so long he thought he was dead. And anyway if Rachungpa wanted entertainment Millirepa could have provided it at which point two suns and moons shone forth from his eyes and ears. From his nostrils stream lights of five different colours his tongue became a small eight petals lotus and from his heart raid forth beams of light which turned into numerous small birds to which Rachungpa showed no interest but continued to demand his books back. So don't be a cup with a dry rim. These forms we seem to be are cups floating in an ocean of living consciousness they fill and think without leaving an arc of bubbles or any goodbye spray. What we are is that ocean too near to see though we swimming it and drink it in. Don't be a cup with a dry rim. So Rumi is already a teacher of Islamic law already a mystic and a poet but Shams wants Rumi to be empty. Try to be a sheet of paper with nothing on it be a spot of ground where nothing is growing. He tells Rumi want more want more than each thing that comes before you. The intellect and the senses perceive cause and effect whereas the spirit perceives wonder upon wonders. He teaches Rumi Samma the turning of the whirling dervishes where inside one is like a mountain a whole range of mountains and outside like straw. Walk to the well turn as the earth and moon turn circling what they love. Whatever circles comes from the center. Go deep go beyond books beyond thought beyond partial truths. So Nagarjuna knows the difference between the sublime truths and the partial truths. He warns without knowing how they differ you cannot know the deep. Without relying on conventions you cannot disclose the sublime. Without intuiting the sublime you cannot experience freedom. The Buddha finds himself suspended in silence between a yes and a no between self and no self suspended in an empty silence. This deep and empty silence is the middle way. Emptiness is not a place or a state it's a way of living of living in the middle of not settling down anywhere. So Bante has another term for Shunutta for emptiness he calls it mysteriousness everything is completely mysterious and the middle way means staying inside the mystery of life the mystery of self and world. Two Zen monks. Can you grasp emptiness? Yes. How do you do it? You don't know how to grasp emptiness. How do you do it then? Oh you're hurting me. Believers in emptiness are incurable. Let go. Buddha say emptiness is relinquishing opinions. I am free I cling no more. Liberation is mine. The greatest clinging is to cling like this. So we don't get to emptiness to mysteriousness through mystical abstraction we have to find our own way to cross over the gap between reason and experience between our head and our heart. In the true bewilderment of the soul he went out beyond any seeking beyond words and telling drowned in the beauty drowned beyond deliverance don't be a cup with a dry rim. Waves cover the old man nothing more can be said of him every moment the sunlight is totally empty and totally full. So what has shown you emptiness? What has shown you mysteriousness? Where have you seen it? Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. This is the truth we are attempting to push off from the tavern of life in search of. In the past every time I felt myself push off into the truth it's been into an experience of seeing through things of a sort of dissolving a fluidity of emptiness. I was with my dad when he died a few months ago and I watched his cup fill and sink without leaving an arc of bubbles or any goodbye spray. I saw form become emptiness and since then it's hard to explain it but it's like when I push off into the truth there's a fullness there. Forms appear a continual manifesting. So all around us form plays in emptiness. Reality showing itself everywhere night and day. So it's spring time and out of nothing all this manifests blossoms before our eyes and then in the autumn it will dissolve and if we look closely enough it's dissolving now it's either coming into being or it's dissolving. When we do sardna practice this is the truth that we push off in search of manifesting dissolving creating letting go they go hand-in-hand the same with pure awareness. So the whole universe is appearing and dissolving all around us. In the most ordinary things we prepare a meal it appears it's eaten and gone lots of dirty dishes have appeared we wash them up and put them away. So there's this continual becoming being letting go dissolving. This truth is so close yet we do not see it. It's as close as our jugular. Keep wanting that connection with all your pulsing energy the throbbing vein will take you further than any thinking. So don't be a cup with a dry rim. Don't look elsewhere for emptiness when it's pulsing at your throat. The dissolving of objects and easing of fixations is peace. The Buddha never taught anyone anything. When Buddhas don't appear and their followers are gone the wisdom of awakening firsts forth by itself. So all of this is neither an illusion nor real. Yeah? You, me, things is neither an illusion nor is it real. Because it isn't an illusion we respond with compassion. Because it isn't real we don't get hung up about it. Just don't be a cup with a dry rim, drown yourself in truths and beauty. We have a huge barrel of wine but no cups. That's fine with us. Every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again. They say there's no future for their right which is fine with us. [BLANK_AUDIO]
