Hello, thanks very much to Pyrami for our model introduction. Just going to feel like the Iraqi Information Minister behind all these mics. It's a difficult brief, I think, an FWBO day talk. First of all, because it's tempting because of the nature of the day to talk about the FWBO. Pyrami was suggesting that I was going to talk about the FWBO. Actually, I'm going to try and resist the temptation to talk about the FWBO. It's not that I don't like talking about the FWBO. Actually, I love to talk about the FWBO. It's what I do for a living, actually. And for a lot of the last couple of years, I've been involved with a lot of order members in looking at the FWBO. And as Pyrami said, in particular, one theme that's been running through a lot of our discussion for the last couple of years is, I mean, what's the real gist of the FWBO, like the spiritual vitality of it, and what conditions support, create, spiritual vitality. And in a sense, that's what I want to talk about. I don't want to talk about the FWBO. I want to talk about spiritual practice. Another temptation of an FWBO day talk is, you feel you've almost got a certain official duty to eulogize and to celebrate the FWBO. And in a sense, that's a completely appropriate function of a talk like this. I was just sort of reflecting that the FWBO is the medium that has given me access to the Dharma. And the Dharma, beyond the shadow of a doubt, has changed my life. It's the thing that gives my life meaning. And it's had to overstate how grateful I am for that. But actually, I don't want to talk about that either. I was thinking, I think my natural tone of mind is quite a skeptical one. I'm much, much more afraid, naturally, at ease expressing my doubts and my criticisms than I am, singing the praises of anything. And I see this as a spiritual shot coming, but there you go, I'm stuck with it. Luckily, luckily, the Buddhist tradition welcomes skeptics. Somebody says somewhere, "The bigger the doubt, the bigger the Buddha." And this goes back to the earliest days of the Buddhist tradition. In the Kalama Center, which is one of my root takes, it's the sort of doubters' manifesto, the Buddha having gone through a whole set of grounds on which it's not appropriate to have blind faith, encourages the people that he's talking to, to test his words like a goldsmith, tests gold. I think that attitude of testing belief against the touchstone of your real experience is completely characteristic of the Buddhist tradition. I'm taking a completely traditional position in arguing this. And to the extent that the FWBO grows out of the Buddhist tradition, it welcomes the same approach. Actually, that same critical intelligence brought to bear to the conditions that we're using to support our spiritual practice. I was really visiting some of those languages as lectures. Over the last couple of days, just in a way, sort of refreshing my own memory. And there's a lecture from the "Vimalakirti Nardesha" series called "The Transcendental Critique of Religion". And in the lecture, Bang is saying the whole purpose of a spiritual tradition, certainly from a Buddhist point of view, is the teliberias, it's the set, it's free. And he points out this paradox that actually, more often than not, the effect of religions to trapeze. He says that the idea of a spiritual tradition liberating is almost laughable, that if we're not careful, it becomes the very thing that constrains us. And what he says is that Buddhism is a means to an end. Religion, he says, is a means to an end. And the end is the spiritual development of the individual. And he goes on to say that it's because Buddhism has been aware of the difference between means and ends, that it remains spiritually alive, that it remains spiritually vital. And he says for the same reason on the whole, it has not been dogmatic or intolerant. That Buddhism applies this critique to itself. And what he's saying basically is that the key test, the key question that you bring to any spiritual practice, any spiritual organization is, is this supporting the experience of freedom? Is this supporting the experience of liberation or not? The very bank he puts it is, is this helping me develop? That's the test. And whether or not our experience is developing is the measure of how spiritually healthy, how spiritually alive the tradition that we are using as a support for our practice is. So in the end, if I was to be talking about the vitality of the FWBO, actually really what we're talking about is the vitality of our own individual spiritual practice and the conditions that support that, bounty in the same lecture, says that really what the Buddhist tradition is conserving itself with is the individual's development from ignorance to enlightenment. I was staying last night around a corner, number seven sugarloaf walk with my friend Atala. Atala's, some of you wouldn't know him, he's a psychotherapist, and it insisted on the authentic experience. It would be very, very emphatic, but it was a very point he made, he banged the arm of the chair, I'm not going to do this because I'm aware of the man from Dharma Chakra tapes with his headphones on. What he was saying was that if you're talking about spiritual practice, he's not Scottish by the way, but if you're talking about spiritual practice, the crucial thing is to keep it real, he says, keep your feet on the ground. Now, I agree with that, but my friend's my skepticism kicks in again. I don't think it does justice to the Buddhist tradition, actually. I think the Buddhist tradition is, in a sense, it is completely concerned with what your actual lived experience is, but in a sense, it's equally concerned by trying to articulate what your experience could be. And I think we have to take seriously this idea that we're trying to move from ignorance to enlightenment, and actually the Buddhist tradition is set in a bar high, right? What Freud talks about the goal of psychotherapy is being moving people from neurosister to ordinary unhappiness, something like that. And it's far, far too modest about what the Buddhist tradition is trying to do. We're talking about enlightenment. And I think to understand, in a way, to sort of take the Buddhist tradition seriously, we have to try to understand not just what our experience is, but what the Buddhist tradition is trying to articulate as what's possible in our experience. And it becomes a real problem, I think, like it's something that the Buddhist tradition, Sangra Chit Adanti, has said that the tradition has managed to stay vital and alive. One of the outcomes of that is that over the centuries, it's tried to find languages that are alive, that do communicate something of this experience, that it's trying to point to an experience that's been described as beyond language. How do you talk in a way that's meaningful, that gets your feet anywhere near the ground, about an experience beyond language? And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the topic that I want to address myself to in the next half hour. And to begin with, I'm going to try and duck the question. One of the ways that the tradition has tried to do it is not in concepts, but in images. I've got an art school background, then I found this language of images very congenial, actually. And, again, it's a very traditional approach. I was thinking that the Buddha's biography sort of started at least in the spiritual biography, doesn't start with a line of abstract thinking. It starts at least the way tradition tells the story with the four cents. It starts with a Buddha not reflecting abstractly about impairments. It starts with, I'm seeing, first of all, somebody who's old. It starts with, I'm seeing somebody who's sick, somebody who's died. And then the fourth sight he sees a mendicant, who is somebody in the middle of this old age sickness and death, looks like he's at ease with it. And the rest of the Buddha's biography follows from that little narrative. And I think I'm quoting James Hillman. Somebody said that a good image brings together a concept and an emotional response to the concept. And I think what you've got in an image like that, it's not just a translation into pictures for those of us who are too slow to follow the ideas. It's actually something that's got more emotional power than that. I was going to say it's a way of presenting an idea in images, but it's more than that actually. It's a way of presenting an experience that gives emotional even existential meaning without just reducing it to a concept. A concept's a poor vehicle for trying to communicate the real living meaning of what this tradition, or even this image of the four sights, is trying to point to. And the tradition's used images very, very articulately to try to talk about what it's indicating to try, like the moon that it's trying to point towards. To use another image. I was in Paris last week in the Musée Gime. And one of the main images that the Buddhist tradition is used is the image of the Buddha. In the Gime, which is reopened after quite a long time, shut. You've got more or less three floors full of images of the Buddha. And if you want an articulate description of what the Buddhist tradition is pointing to, the words you can do by yourself are returned on Eurostar to Paris and go and walk around the Gime. So it is surrounded by images that the Indian tradition, the Japanese tradition, the Khmer tradition, the Chinese tradition has produced of what the experience of enlightenment. In some ways, I wish I was giving you a slideshow rather than a talk. I'm going to very kind of inadequately try and describe a couple of the images. A lot of them were really good what men like images. Some of them stood out. There was a Khmer image of a bust of the Buddha's face and surrounded by a halo of nagas, nagas or serpents. And this line of nagas had come up over the Buddha's head and found over him to shelter him, to protect him. And the face of this image is remarkable. I can't do it just this, right? But the eyes are half closed and there's this experience on the face that at the same time is ecstatic and completely still. It's a smile, it's an ecstatic smile, it's a still smile. And this image of the nagas, something that's erupted from the very depths and found itself around them in a protecting way. This beautiful image, setting when I went this dimension was a Tibetan tanka in the setting floor. And at fresh glance, it was an ordinary Tibetan tanka, just a lovely little image of the Buddha's enlightenment. A very small Buddha figure, incredibly fine, so a fully gritty look. And it was only when you went up really closely and looked at the face of the Buddha. Most of the tankas in that room, the eyes were, the face was composed, the eyes were half closed. This face had its eyes wide open and I mean like startled. And it was a fantastic expression, I was trying to describe it to Naga Mudra. Last night he got a great phrase for it, he said, "The experiences, who would have thought it?" And the Buddha's sitting there and he's astonished, he's going, "Who would have thought it?" So there's something in these images that I think as articulately as anything else gets the flavour of what it is we're trying to do with spiritual experience. One last set of pictures for you, a year ago was it something like that at the Royal Academy. An exhibition of Chinese Bodass that used which were exquisitely beautiful. I mean like literally, if you went there'd be that same stuff and there'd be that receptor, you'd be moved to tears by them. I remember sort of standing in front of this little set of three energies and they looked so happy. And they looked just so delighted to be alive and just so delighted that I was alive was the experience of it. I was thinking it was an experience of standing in front of a three bar electric fire. Just the warmth kind of these images. One of the lovely things about the set of images was they were buried for the best part of a thousand years. I think that's something like that, a long time anyway. So these things had been wrapped up, buried, forgotten about and then recently rediscovered, dug up again and sent through the waddles to be seen for the first time in a millennium. It's a wee bit of synchronicity, more or less at the time when that exhibition was on. Back home we were doing some study on a tank called the Thagata Gaba Sutra. And this image of a Buddha wrapped in rags, buried, forgotten about and rediscovered, is a metaphor straight out of that sutra. It was just lovely studying the text and then going to see the thing in life as it were. And I want to talk a little bit about the Thagata Gaba Sutra. I've ended up actually saying more about the Thagata Sutra than I meant to when I started writing this talk. And basically the Thagata Gaba Sutra is another set of images. It's built around a set of metaphors. But just before I give you the metaphors, let me give you a little bit of context. So in a book that collects, this is an introduction to the sutra by a man called Grosnik. Grosnik says that the Thagata Gaba Sutra is a short but extremely influential sutra. Introducing the Mahayana idea that all beings have latent within themselves the qualities of a Buddha. But those qualities are hidden by a covering of passion and anguish. The central message of the sutra is that Buddhahood, as potential in all beings will be revealed. So this is the introduction. A couple of bits of etymology to Thagata is basically a synonym for the Buddha. So it's one of the names of the Buddha. And it literally means thus gone, meaning going to Nirvana. You can also sort of analyze it so it means thus come, which was the Mahayana take on it. Not only do you go to Nirvana, you're aware of the suffering in Sanghara, and you can back again. So Thagata means thus going, Thagata means thus come. And Garba is a fantastic word. The language needs words like these. Garba, its primary meaning is womb. It means literally the womb of a woman, something that nourishes, something that gives birth. It can also mean a fetus, so it can mean something that is given birth to something that is born. It can also mean that the leaves of a flower that protect the blossom. It can also mean a hidden room. It can also mean essentially where something precious is hidden. It can also mean the husk that covers a seed. And then Grosnik says, well that extension actually finally Garba can refer to the inside middle interior of anything. So this is Garba. And basically the Thagata Garba Sutra just takes this word with a cluster of images around it. And it builds a set of metaphors that spell out those meanings. So let me just tell you some of the methanata forms. Basically metaphores about what it is in us that gives birth to the Thagata, to the Buddha. So the text starts by saying all beings have hidden within the glaciers, hidden within the defilements of greed, desire, anger and stupidity. Something that is seated still and dignified. And this is the Thagata's vision, the body of the Thagata. So within the glaciers something still dignified, the vision of the Thagata. And then the Sutra just gives you a whole set of pictures of what this is like. And it says, it's like honey in a cave surrounded by bees. It can be taken by someone who knows a clever technique. And he can take the honey and eat it or give it away far and wide. So the Thagata Garba is like honey in a cave surrounded by bees. It's like a kernel of wheat that's not yet had its husk removed. Though the outside seems useless, inside is food to fit for a king. It is like gold falling into a pit of waste. The gold does not decay but nobody knows that it's there. It's like a store of treasure hidden behind an impoverished house. When you have treasure but you don't know it, this causes poverty and suffering. It's like the pit of a mango fruit. The pit does not decay but if you plant it in the earth inevitably a great tree grows. It's like a man with a statue of pure gold. He wraps the statue in dusty, worn-out rags. Then loses it in an unused field. Someone with the vision sees the statue, tells the people they remove the rags and rejoice greatly. It's like an impoverished woman who bears a son who will be a wise king but she does not know his future. And then finally it's like a great foundry with countless golden statues. When we look at the outside, we see only scorched earth molds. But when we break the mold of the glaciers, we reveal pure shining gold. So these are the images from the Tathaka Tagadha Sutra. And also the image finally that gave me the title of my talk. Those of you who came here expecting a reorganisation of the FWBO. I'm sorry if I'm letting you down. But this idea of breaking something that when the surface is dirty in the field and revealing something precious and valuable inside is the sort of recurring image of this sutra. And I want to make a number of points arising out of this attempt to articulate the experience that the Buddhist tradition is trying to point us towards. This is another attempt to articulate the experience of enlightenment. And first of all I want to mention a couple of questions. I hope I am right when I say how tolerant and non-bodest tradition is. I'm concerned that I'm giving you a heretical text here. This is a text that bits of the Buddhist tradition have been extremely cautious about. And it's also fair to say, I think, this teaching of Tathaka Tagadha or the teaching of the Buddha nature, which is how the later Buddhist tradition described it. It's a teaching that Bante has been extremely cautious about. And there are two reasons for that caution. One of them is philosophical and one of them is practical. So the philosophical caution is this Buddhist, really. You've got a Buddhist tradition that talks about Anata. You've got a Buddhist tradition that talks about not self. You've got a Buddhist tradition that talks about impermanence as the fundamental mark of existence, the fundamental nature of existence. You've got a later Buddhist tradition that works this up into the idea of Shaita, of emptiness. And then you've got this text that's saying all beings possess the fundamental nature of the Buddha. So are we smuggling in a bit of Hinduism here? Is this actually reconcilable with the mainstream Buddhist tradition? So a bit serious philosophical question, first of all. Something I think that exercise is Bante even more is its implications for practice. And his concern is, well, if you're already Buddhas, why would you feel you had to do any practice? There's been a real debate going on in the F.W. Bill meditation teaching circles about acceptance. So that's something that I've had meditation teachers say, and I've found very moving. It's this idea of, well, you start your practice by accepting yourself. And I've had Bante say in as many words. The last thing you want to do is accept yourself. Look at yourself for goodness sake. You should be doing some serious work. His take on the "I'm okay, you're okay." A couple it, by the way, is from the Buddhist point of view he says, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, but that's okay." So a serious point is that if you've got this statement in some sense we have a Buddha nature, does this undermine the need to practice? Or even most subtly, does it take away a certain sort of urgency, a certain vitality from practice? And these are real concerns that they're not just sort of Bante and Biming and worrying about this. It's actually something that developed in the Buddhist tradition itself, and something that the Thagata Gamba tradition had to explicitly address and explicitly try to answer. So I want to say a little bit about the Thagata Gamba tradition and how it tries to address these concerns. Then I want to say a little bit about its implications for practice. Another text that we studied was a later Indian text called the Buddha nature treatise. And the Buddha nature treatise tries to argue some of the implications of the Thagata Gamba structure, which tries to sort of in a respell out the philosophy a little bit more. And it's really explicit in seeing first of all that it accepts the teaching of Śūyata, that accepts the teaching of emptiness. And I want to sort of quote something from the Buddha nature treatise, which I'm sure will cast light on this. The treatise itself says that Buddha nature is the thusness revealed by the emptiness of personings and things. So just in case you were concerned in some ways this contradicted the idea of Śūyata, I want to reassure you, the Buddha nature is the thusness revealed by the emptiness of personings and things. So just in case that's not immediately transparent. I'm afraid much though I would like to avoid this. I'm going to have to do a wee excursion into Buddhist philosophy and the history of Buddhist philosophy. The teaching of emptiness, the teaching of Śūyata is not saying, it's absolutely explicitly not saying that nothing exists. It's a restatement of the basic Buddhist teaching of Paticha Samuupada that things arise and dependence on conditions. They're empty of what the Buddhist tradition calls own being. That's the nature of the emptiness. So it's not that they don't exist and it's not that they do exist. There's a process of becoming. Sally King in her exposition of the Buddha nature treatise says that emptiness is not a truth. It's a means. It's almost like what the emptiness tradition is trying to do as far as I understand it. It's not putting forward emptiness as a metaphysical explanation of reality. It's something much more experiential than that. It's saying, well, it's not this and it's not that. And what it's asking you to do is to withdraw all your preconceptions about the nature of reality and to create the still open space. And in that space you try to ensure it or you start to ensure the nature of reality itself. Stephen Bancho puts it in more articulate way. He says that Shunita challenges the habit that we have of trying to fix our experience, thus obscuring our real nature. Emptiness is a shorthand for freedom. And it's a connection to the dynamic fluid process of life. Emptiness is a way of point-interred experience that connects us to the dynamic fluid process of life. And if I get a Garbitra tradition completely accept this, it understands why you have to move back from any dogmatic formulation of what reality is. But then it says, if you will talk about emptiness, you can be surprised if people misunderstand you. You might not mean it like this, but it sounds nihilistic. What you're trying to talk about when you're talking about spiritual practice is the Buddha in Nagimi. It's an overwhelming, positive experience. And from some points of view, emptiness as a language does not completely do justice to that experience. So, but he, when we were studying this text, put it very well. He said that what the Tathagata Garbitra is arguing is that rather than use the idea of emptiness, which inevitably leaves you with a subtle idea of nothing, it's better to use the language of Buddha nature, which leaves you with a subtle idea of something. So, it's not that it's nothing and it's not that it's something, but you're trying to point to something the nature of which is overwhelmingly positive. And as long as you've got in the back of your mind all of the cautions about the teaching of Shunita, with that as a context, you can see there's still something positive to say about this, right? Atchancha puts it very concretely, a Thai meditation teacher. He says, he was asked why some of his teachings seem to contradict each other. And he says, look, from that point of view, I'm looking at people walking down a road in a fog, right? And some of the people are veering off to the left and they're about to fall in a ditch on the left. So, I shout to them, go right. And he says, and there's other people, and they're wondering off to the right, they're about to fall in a ditch to the right, some shouting to them, go left. And if you have to try and take these two positions, they sound like contradictions, but from the point of view, a practice. It makes complete sense. And actually, this idea of Shunita and the idea of Buddha nature, it's not that you've got two contradictory positions, you've got a go right and a go left. As soon as you start to take it literally, break it up again, it's empty. As soon as that starts to depress you, right, there's something positive and constructive you can say that the nature is spiritual experience. I will leave you to decide for yourself whether you're about to fall in a ditch on the right or fall in a ditch on the left. So, the tradition accepts this notion of emptiness. And then it says, we want to have a go expressing the positive nature of this. So, it gives you this whole set of metaphors. The later tradition tries to spell out the relationship a little bit more. It's like, what are you saying that's positive that still includes the idea of emptiness? So, one last attempt to sort of square this circle. Sally King says that the tafagata god by tradition is not saying that something simply is. On the contrary she says that the tafagata, the Buddha nature, is essentially constituted by action. It's not a thing. It's a kind of doing. And rather than it being a type of being, it's a series of actions. It's a practice. The nature goes on to say that the relationship between Buddha nature and ignorance, the relation between tafagata god by and the clashes, the defilements, is not the relationship between two substances. It's the relationship between two behaviors. She accepts that the tradition accepts that the fundamental nature of your mind is that it's moving. A nature is transformation, she says. But the tafagata garba and the cliches are fundamentally the mind behaving in two different ways. An earth task is to shift our mind from the behavior that expresses the crepe, the cliches, to the behavior that expresses an underlying potential in each other, the food within the husk. There's a behavior that expresses that. And far from undermining practice, Sally King argues, the whole point of the tafagata garba sutra is to underline the absolutely critical importance of practice. It's practice in the sense of behavior expressing skillful mental states that makes the Buddha nature to use that language manifest rather than just some abstract potential. So, I hope that's enough to address these two concerns of a substantial nature in undermining practice. It's not a nature, it's a behavior, and it's not a calling into question and necessity for practice. It's saying that if you have to act and you do have to act, the nature of your mind is that it moves it to acts. You have a choice, and that choice is whether that action expresses confusion and craving, or whether that action starts to express awareness and emotional openness. And it's an active choice that we make. Spiritual practice by me says somewhere is essentially a growth in consciousness. And because of that, it must be consciously directed. What we're being faced with in the tafagata garba sutra is a conscious choice between two behaviors. And it's saying it's critical that we choose an inevitable actually that we choose. If you don't choose one, you choose the other. So, I want to just spell out briefly some of the implications of this for our individual practice. But the first one is, maybe an obvious one, it's an extremely affirming view of human nature. It's an extremely optimistic view of human nature. In the metaphor of the king born to the impoverished woman, the sutra says, do not consider yourself inferior. Your bodies contain the light of the world's salvation. So, the basic view of the human being from the tafagata garba sutra is that you don't consider yourself inferior. Your bodies contain the light of the world's salvation. Now, first, the main point I want to make here is that our views affect what we do. What we think affects how we live. Right, there's a little cartoon that I saw in the New Yorker. And it's these two little lines of what look like rats, little furry animals. This line of two by two furry animals come to a cliff edge and then they ascend into the sky. And the caption to the cartoon says, "What lemmings believe." The ideas that we have affect what we choose to do, right? There's some discussion that the tafagata garba sutra, a rose in India, one time when part of the discussion in the Buddhist tradition was "Can everybody attain enlightenment?" Part of that background, apparently, was the background of caste society, which was starting to stratify human beings and regard some human beings as very, very inferior, indeed to the point where the languages that they were untouchable. So, incredible reflection back at you to think, well, this is your potential. Actually, this is what your life is a human being. There's some argument that the tafagata garba sutra comes into that context and it's saying every human being has the potential to be a Buddha. But this is the cultural context that emerged from some suggestion. And I think we're not always obvious, we're not always aware of how we're reflected back at ourselves. But on the whole experience of ourselves, I would like to suggest, is not that our bodies contain the light of the world's salvation. I think we live in a nihilistic culture, we live in a culture, in our sense that the most desirable experience that can articulate is pleasure. And I don't know how you feel, but going through your day on the whole, the quality of what's being reflected back by your own lived experience, I would suggest there's something less than this expression of Buddha nature. How we see ourselves affects what we choose to do and affects how we act. And I think this is the meaning in the Buddhist tradition, this idea of listening, reflecting and meditating. What's being said is, if you take on an idea, it directs your attention to certain qualities of your experience. So the idea that you have potential, direct your attention to those qualities in your own mind that seem to express that potential. To begin with, it's going to be incremental, it's going to be very, very marginal, but it happens. And on the basis of that slightly clarified experience, your understanding of what the idea is deepens. And out of that deeper, clearer idea, it feeds back into your lived experience. You start to see more of the implications, which feeds back into the depth of your understanding of the idea. So you start to get a feedback between the listening to the concept, the reflecting on the nature of the concept, the meaning of the concept, and that feeding out into lived moment-to-moment experience you create, as it were, a sort of virtual circle, or virtual circle, that's what I'm looking for, isn't it? There's a relationship between the ideas that we have and what we choose to do. So one thing that this approach is trying to see is you practice because you get the potential to practice. That anything short of that actually isn't doing justice to your own deepest nature. That's why you practice. A lot of your experience is difficult, a lot of your experience is painful, but what you're looking at is a Buddha wrapped in rags, fundamentally. Bounty says somewhere that the task of Buddhism is not to teach any particular formulation, but it's the point out to people that own nature and their own potential. So what this is trying to push us towards is the most generous possible glimpse of what our own potential is. I've seen at the start of the talk that the term of my own mind was skeptical, and I'm suddenly anxious that I'm starting to sound culpably optimistic. But something else that Sally King says is that the topic of the Gabasutra is optimistic, but it's not naive. Another bit of James Hillman. I know James Hillman because I had already done a lot of James Hillman, and I really try to understand what he's getting at. One of these days. But Hillman, who is an archetypal psychologist, is very, very suspicious of the language of spiritual practice. He's very suspicious about the splits that it brings into experience. He's very suspicious of a language that affirms the heights and ignores the depths. And he's much, much more argues for a sort of pantheism of the psyche. Very, very cautious of its spiritual language. And I suppose I'm sort of struck here. How are these the tafangas of Gabasutra is with difficult experience? All of the metaphors are to do with that. The bidders wrapped in rags, you've got gold in a pile of waste. Or you've got something in a scorched, if mold. You get this idea, you get it in shanty diva as well, don't you? The jewel and the dung heap. It's completely values the jewel. It's completely cool with the fact that you're going to have to stick your hand in a dung heap to extract it. And what I'd like to suggest here is that, again, we're back to this relationship of what your experience actually is and what it is that you're trying to move towards and what's the relationship between those. I'm not going to exhaust this, I'm not going to do it just this. But just to get you one little quote from an American Tibetan teacher called Pema Chodron. She says, "The real spiritual quality that you're looking for is not the avoidance of pain in the maximising of pleasure." She's saying in a sense it's pathetic if you go through your life motivated by that. What you really want is a vivid curiosity that's interested in every experience. And she says, "You want an awareness that's the ease with the heat of the fire as well as the warmth of the fire. You want an awareness that's the ease with the turbulence of water as well as the smoothness of water. You want an awareness that's so still and so stable that it can welcome that full range of the experience of our own minds." And this is, I hope I'm not speaking too much into this, but this is something I think of what the Citrus suggests. It's like saying it's possible to be open to your full range of experience actually necessary. It's necessary to get awareness in there. People don't see the Buddha buried in the rags. It takes somebody with vision to see that, to get through it, and to expose the goal. The awareness is necessary. But you're not possessed by the clashes. You're able to take awareness so deeply into them that you see the fundamental nature. Again, I hope I'm not being too glib, but the "the fundamental nature" is no nature. That every other mental phenomenon, they come into being in the past. And if you don't get caught up in it, you can let it go. And not moving to this or to that, you're left in a space that's bigger than anything that you were trumped in before. So that's the first point. It's optimistic, but not naive. A second point is a connected point actually, but it's realism. Salikin says that it's not teaching that you're born fundamentally good. It's not a sort of ruthless romantic position. It's not saying that actually take away the damage that's been done to by your parents and your life with a sort of fundamental innocence. So it's not as naive as that. What it's saying is that you've got a potential, but for that potential can mean anything. It's imperative that you manifest it. It plays into all intents and purposes. It's not part of your living experience. For it to become living experience, you have to start to notice the behaviours that you give it expression, that bring it into being. Final point is the effects of approach to practice, or a final point of practice at least. There's a reason, an aphorism, that says you can't make a mirror by polishing a brick. And what it's trying to say is that if it wasn't that your mind had the potential for awareness, there wouldn't be any point in practice. I think quite often our approach to practice is that we don't have it and we're desperately trying to bring something into being. And after all these years, our efforts still fall to scargently short of what we thought was possible. Hope I'm not speaking too personally here. And I think one of the implications for this, and one of the practical implications for this, is that we're not working against the grain of our minds. We're working with the grain of our minds. It's a book he says that Buddhahood is not something that we're strenuously inclining towards. In some sense, it's an act of force. It's the act of force in our own minds that you can start to be receptive to, and start to notice the behaviours that express and uncover. What you have to start to do is to start to notice the actions of body, speech and minds that uncover that potential, that express that potential. Every nature fundamentally has changed, this is what we're getting at by it being a pleasure. A nature's pushing to change, it's not even though it's pushing to change, it is change. In every act of confusion puts a wall around that push to change, every act of craving puts a wall around that push to change, every act of awareness gives it space. Every act of emotional opening gives it space. And what would be nice to do in practice is to learn to tell the difference between the two. What is it that you do that you can feel at rapture? What is it that you do that you can feel liberature? And the whole of Buddhist practice is trying to articulate the two options open to us. It's an approach to practice. And out of that, I think, comes this whole Zen emphasis of you don't sit again enlightened, you sit to sit. I think what this means is that it's not that there's something that you don't have, you're desperately trying to cobble a behaviour together that gets you there. It's more like what you're doing in meditation. When you sit down, when you become still, when you stop the distractions, when you allow that awareness to settle, you're doing something that more appropriately and more fully manifests your fundamental nature than what you were doing before. When you act ethically, you're doing something that manifests your fundamental nature. So it's not that you're trying to bring something into being, you're just aligning yourself with something that's trying to express itself. You're trying to find the behaviours to allow that impulse in your own depth to express itself more and more fully. Sibiti and one of these talks in the states that I had said that the most important responsibility that we have is a spiritual practitioner is to guard our sources of inspiration. When I first heard that, I was thinking we should be studying the wisdom to talks and all the rest of it. Actually, this has got me thinking about that a little bit differently. It's like if you're, I don't know if I'm explaining this quite articulately, but if you're practicing to get something, there's always a strain in it, there's value in that language. But if you see it, the activity itself is meaning. You know this from your experience of meditation. You sit down, you become aware of yourself. It has a flavour to it. It's a flavour of your psyche joining up, a flavour of wholeness, a flavour of something fuller, deeper, richer than your habitual experience. And actually guarding the sources of inspiration, I think, from this point of view means starting to plug in to that sense of what you're doing when you're acting ethically, when you're acting out of awareness. In itself, feeling meaningful and satisfying. And when you're plugging into something that all of the time is not confronting you how far short you're falling, you're starting to notice what is it in this act of attention. The flavour of it, the fundamental nature of it, is that it's an experience of unification, it's an experience of wholeness. And guarding a source of inspiration, it's starting to become sensitive to that flavour, that nourishing flavour of a rare experience. And I think this is crucial, actually. I think after a wee while, if your practice is not actually leaking you happier, why do it? I think you need to be looking for this flavour that your experience is meaning, that this is worth the bother, actually. So there's an approach to practice that's just starting to welcome the meaning of the process, rather than always end-gaming it and competing yourself for a really full short. A couple of years ago, Wintour's publications brought out a bit by David Smith. And the book was called Record of an Awakening. And a very moving book by somebody who really had dedicated himself to meditation practice and was reporting very deeply uplifting, inspiring experience. A few weeks after it was published I was walking around Canon Hill Park and burning them with Banting. And Banting was thinking of getting a lot of mail from people. And one of the big questions that kept on coming up was, is there enough meditation in the movement? People were asking. And he said that's not the question at all. That's not the question that we should be asking. The question that we should be asking is, you're doing enough meditation. And I want just to finish off coming back to this point, that the glaciers in the Buddha nature is the mind behaving in two ways, right? And that we have a choice between them. And it seems to me that the real implication of this sutra is that we're being asked to notice the quality of our mental states from moment to moment. We're being asked to notice when what we do, what we think, what we feel is expressing confusion and craving. And being asked to notice when what we do, what we think, what we feel is expressing awareness. And for spiritual practice to go anywhere, it's got to get off the cushion. And I don't mean in this, in any mystical way at all, right? But right now, what's the quality of our mental states? In a sense, it's no big deal, right? It's not that on the side of the whole, people with the good mental states, they say, no people with the bad mental states. Right? It's just starting to take awareness in there. What's the quality of our mental states and how do you start to shift? It was on a mindfulness retreat a couple of years ago. And one of the really productive suggestions that the meditation teacher made was that as you went about your day, you just noticed when your experience of egotism was strongest. Right? And for me, it was the lunch queue. Right? It was not in the meditation cushion at all. I'd be completely cool, completely open and spacious. And then the lunch meal would go, and I would just feel my mind's organized itself around getting there in time to make sure I'm not quite a big depotion. And it was this really interesting catch in that and just realizing I could sleep with that and I could drop it. And it was a fairly, very tangible experience of whenever you dropped it, you weren't left bereft. Right? It was just suddenly you got to relax and something that actually fundamentally was more deeply meaningful than how much carrots you were going to get. You just relaxed on a bigger experience. And if we are going to get anywhere in our spiritual practice, what would be a nice thought? It's not dramatic experience. I wish you some dramatic experience. Good luck. Enjoy. But critically, it's starting to notice that tightening up and the opening up and just encouraging, setting and train a move towards the opening up. Like a step. It doesn't have to be fast. It owns apparently it takes. But you set up a direction towards the more aware, the more attentive, the more responsive and so on. That's the crucial change that has to happen for our spiritual life, for us as a spiritual movement to have any vitality. And it says somewhere that if you've got an acquaintance with the basic practices of Buddhism, you already know enough to take you most of the way down the path. And acquaintance with the basics is all you need. Actually, I hope I've not pandered too much to a first for novelty by bringing in the takata god, etc. Actually, all you needed really was the mindfulness of breathing in the meta-bavana. This is just a skillful means. I came across a VX strike somewhere and I thought you were saying that you have to think of the path. You're practicing a path. Most of the fun relations of the path he says don't always seem to square with her experience. And the path he said could be expressed in five essential elements. I'm going to go here from the sublime to the completely work of the five elements of the path that he suggests are that you keep up an effort to be mindful. That you remain in as positive a mental state as you can. That you don't lose sight of what's ultimately most deeply important to you. That you start to apply that to every aspect of your life and that having done all that you do, you can to help other people. And it goes on it says if you do those five things, you don't have to worry about where you are on the path. All you have to do is to be aware of where you are and intensifying your effort in those five directions. It sounds completely simple and it's back to this old adage again of it works when we apply it. Again from this introduction it's lovely wee phrase of Buddhism is selling water by the river. We're surrounded by water and we're thirsty. So the Dharma says yes, we'll sell you a glass of water. We're surrounded by practice and if we choose to engage with them, it's not rocket science. What we have to do to stay emotional is deepening spiritual experience. I want to finish with one example of mindfulness. We're thinking mindfulness. I don't want to caricature it too much but it means being a bit quiet going through those carefully. The most it means a little bit more sort of a tend to open awareness to what our experience is. We've got some glimmering of what mindfulness is. We've been looking at a text recently called the Anapanasati Sutter. What the Anapanasati Sutter does is it talks you through what happens with mindfulness matures and it says it starts off your aware of your breath. It goes from there to awareness of your body. If you're aware of your body, that matures and your body calming. If your body calms, it's pleasurable in matures and in experience of pleasure. If that pleasure starts to calm down, you move into an experience of bliss. On the basis of the experience of bliss, you start to be very very precisely aware of all the movements of your own mind. You take awareness into that and the same thing happens to your mind that's happened to your body. All the mental processes start to calm and distill. On the basis of that stillness, the verse says, gladdening the mind, I breathe in. Gladdening the mind, I breathe out. On the basis of that experience of gladness, the vida, the nagas around them. There's the experience of studying the mind, I breathe in. Studying the mind, I breathe out. From there, studying becomes liberating. Liberating becomes awareness of impairments. You start to notice the impermanent nature of all your experience. Because it's impairment, it's ridiculous to hang on to. So relinquishing experience, I breathe in, focusing on relinquishing. I breathe out, you let it go and it moves from there to finally liberation. I'm sorry for holding in a whole new sutra. The one point that I wanted to make is we're completely familiar with mindfulness and we've hardly scratched the surface. There's an experience there. It's presenters a technique, but in a sense it's not a technique at all. What it is is a description of how mindfulness matures when it's a sustained experience. When we start to manage to establish ourselves in a sustained, attentive mental state, you set in motion a process that moves from simple awareness of your experience into something that unfolds this deeper nature. It's true of the other four things, it's true of positive emotion. You know the metababana. And what it's seen is that there's a spectrum that goes all of the way from a little bit more emotional sense of everything to the completely sincere feeling that the well-being of other beings matters to as much as our own well-being does. There's a spectrum there that we can move down. And that spectrum is there in all those dimensions. What is it that connects us to other people? What connects us to the sense of our own unfolding nature? How does that express itself in all of our action? How does it affect our relationships with people, our response to them? A very strong or trueistic streak runs right through the tathagata garbasa. There's one little phrase in it where it says, "If you don't spend too much time in the meditation hall and dedicate yourself to liberating beings, you'll reach the highest attainment." But there's a whole spectrum of experience that what we have to do is start to just engage with step by step. Banty concludes his lecture on the transcendental critique of religion by saying that first and foremost, actually, if we're going to apply this transcendental critique, we have to be applying it to our own spiritual practice. That we have to be looking to the extent that our spiritual practice has started to become habitual. And to the extent that it's still, well, his language is still helping us develop. And it sounds like a truism. I suppose I'm just asking you to take it seriously for a minute. Applying the transcendental critique to our own experience does our practice in our moment to moment, lived experience, feel like it's moving us into that growing, opening, deepening, unfolding of our nature. And it's not an abstract question. I don't seriously expect an answer, actually. What it is is an act of attention. It's a growing sensitivity to that potential in our own minds. And in that the end, we have to start to notice whether or not our practice is a growing thing, and whether we really do have a sense of the vitality of it. In the end, coming back to the FWBO, the real vitality of us as spiritual movement is the vitality of our own practice. And the real vitality of our practice is this growing sensitivity to that unfolding awareness, or growing awareness that we have that choice, or growing experience of the conditions that support that growth. In the end, coming back to the title of the talk, "Breaking the Mold" is moving past what's obscured that deeper experience and unfolding something that in our direct experience we know to have value. (Applause) (applause)
