In this moving talk Jnanavaca relates events in Joe Simpson’s popular mountaineering book ‘Touching the Void’ to aspects of Buddhist practice.
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Touching the Void
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. So there are some words by T.E. Lawrence, here of Lawrence of Arabia fame from his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And I chose those words because they're used in the prefix of the preface of a book called Touching the Void by Joe Simpson, and well, I'm going to talk about that book in this talk. But before I do that, I just wanted to reiterate something that Vedanya was saying yesterday, that the archetype of the hero or the heroic quest is in a way just one way of talking about the spiritual life. And I've come to realise that every time I or anybody tries to say anything about the dharma or the spiritual life, it's partial. It's almost like you have to keep correcting yourself. You say one thing, then you have to say, "Oh, I don't quite mean that," or at least not in all circumstances, or actually there's this opposite view as well that's equally valid. So it's always partial. But nevertheless, I think the heroic quest is a very, very good and apt way of talking about the spiritual life. So I'm going to use the story of, yeah, Joe Simpson, who is a man from Sheffield, wrote this book, Touching the Void. You might have read the book. You might have seen the film. It was recently made into a film. And he's a, well, he's a mountaineer, a writer, and now works also as a motivational speaker to businessmen, I believe. And his story, together with his friend and colleague and fellow mountaineer, a man called Simon Yates, their story is, well, it's a story of heroism. It's a story of a heroic quest, not necessarily a spiritual quest. But I think it's a very good metaphor or analogy for the spiritual quest. So if you'll sort of indulge me, I want to use it as an analogy. Don't take it literally. I'm not saying we all have to climb mountains. I wouldn't be here if that was what the spiritual life was about, frankly. But I think it's a fantastic, fantastic illustration. And if you give me poetic license, I'd like to try and draw out some of the analogies of the spiritual truths. So yeah, Joe Simpson and his friend Simon Yates, in their 20s, I think they were probably about 25, 26, young, adventurous, confident men went to Peru and decided to scale. This particular mountain, which I'm not sure I had to pronounce, I think it's something like the Suela Grande. They decided to scale this mountain that had never been scaled by this particular face, the west face of the mountain had never been conquered. And this particular mountain was, well, it's 21,000 feet high. And the west face was seen to be particularly treacherous and probably impossible to climb. So they prepare for this ascent. They realize that they need to prepare, a bit like Swansang was preparing. Perhaps they do it a bit more consciously, and less sort of mysteriously than seem to happen in Swansang's life. But they prepare for this ascent. They realize that it's full of danger. They're good friends. They trust each other. And they trust each other's abilities. When they do lots of, from their base camp, they establish a base camp, there's a third man called Richard, I can't remember his second name. He stays at base camp looking after their possessions. And they, well, they do little sort of furries into, you know, little short, I don't know what you do, run up a mountain, you know, walk up a mountain to become acclimatized and test their equipment, et cetera. Yeah. So in some ways, I was just thinking, well, climbing a mountain is a good analogy, isn't it, for the spiritual life? It's used, you know, it's often used as an analogy for the spiritual life. You see this goal, you see this mountain in the distance, you're attracted by the beauty of it, and then you move towards it, and you have to start climbing. In other ways, it's a very simplistic and simple metaphor that probably doesn't do justice to anybody's life and certainly doesn't do justice to the sort of complexities of the spiritual life. But what I think it does do is illustrate, as an image, it illustrates idealism, I think. Something a mountain illustrates something to do with having an ideal, a sort of impossibly lofty ideal, an ideal that seems sort of crazy and, well, anti-confusionism. It's not the sort of thing that you would normally, out of common sense, choose to do. And I think that's fantastic, that's fantastic. Partly, because, well, we don't live in a very idealistic age, do we? We don't live in a very idealistic age. This is why I think it's important to sort of try and reemphasize ideals, because even us Buddhists or Wayfarers in the spiritual life, I think we're influenced by the fact that we don't live in a very idealistic age. In fact, I think we live in a rather cynical age, but it's so much around us that I think it's even hard to see the cynicism for what it is. And it's interesting when, well, my experience of going to India, for Daniel was talking about India, and, yeah, I was ordained in '99 in India, and one of the most moving things about being ordained in India was the uncinical nature of the response that you have there. It's just fantastic. It's tremendously powerful at my public ordination. Well, it was all sort of advertised in a bit of a hurry, because I think the dates have been chosen at the last minute, et cetera. And this retreat centre was somewhere outside of Nagpur, and digressing, but indulged me. And my public ordination, so they hurriedly put up some notices and posters. And between five and 10,000 people came from surrounding cities and neighbourhoods and villages, and they were all Buddhist, and they were all celebrated, now they didn't know me or the other men, probably who were being ordained, there were six of us. But they were celebrating, well, partly they were having a picnic, but they were celebrating the spiritual ideal, and you don't get that in the West, not in my experience. But also, it's not just a cynical age that we live in, is it really? It's also an age that's almost defined by our desire, our need for comfort, for security. It's an age of comfort and complacency, in a way, isn't it? And consumerism, of course. The three Cs are probably comfort, complacency and consumerism. That seems to be, again, an endemic thing. And certainly, I recognise that in myself. I'm not as cynical as perhaps some people around us are, but I am really, really drawn to wanting comfort, and I do get very, very complacent, and well, consumerism doesn't pass me by either. And yeah, I think that's partly the age we live in, partly it's my temperament. So I think there's possibly deeper reasons, though, for perhaps when we've encountered something like Buddhism, the Dharma, perhaps we've overcome at least the hump of our sort of cynical age, or at least to some extent, but I think there are deeper reasons that stop us being idealistic, and I think we kind of encounter them again and again in our spiritual lives. So I'm just thinking about, well, we can have fears of, fears of failing, so we don't hold on to an ideal because we might never achieve it, or we have fears of rejection because being idealistic means opening up to other people, to being receptive to something that might be higher than ourselves, and perhaps we have fears to do with, yeah, being vulnerable, being rejected. Perhaps fears of admitting that we don't have all the answers, to be a successful man today, perhaps we feel that we need all the answers, we need to have life sorted, and while spiritual life isn't about having life sorted, quite the opposite. So yeah, Joe Simpson, to go back to Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, I think they were naive, yeah, they were naive heroes, they were young, how could they not be naive? They didn't have a lot of life experience, they didn't have a lot of mountaineering experience, but they were idealistic in a very inspiring way, and cynicism is kind of no answer to that naivety. Let me read you something about ideals from another man. To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence, or of creation generally, has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view, and yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavours and his judgements. In this sense, I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves. Such an ethical basis, I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been truth, goodness, and beauty. Throughout the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary objects of human endeavour, property, outward success, luxury, have always seemed to me contemptible. So they have very, very strong words from another man. They are words by Albert Einstein, and well, Einstein is a sort of, yeah, hero of mine. I have been reading about him over the last wee while, and he has some very, very sound things to say about life, about the spiritual life, actually. In some ways, he is a mature hero in the way that perhaps Joe Simpson, as he was setting out for his time, certainly wasn't at the start. So I am going to keep coming back to Einstein as a sort of thread running through this talk. But I just want to touch on, well, my own experience of idealism. As a teenager, I used to read about Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, mostly. And be very inspired, be genuinely inspired. But mixed in with that, there was quite a lot of, well, not just naivety, but egotism. I fancied myself as a Zen master, wandering around, hitting people with sticks every time they moved and pronouncing on the nature of reality at every opportunity. I sort of thought, oh, yeah, well, that's kind of what I'll be when I grow up. And I can remember when I was like 19 or so, I did join a Zen group for a while. And it was run by this, well, a very impressive man called Clive Sherlock. He was a doctor, and yeah, he ran this Zen group. And I used to go along of an evening and just wait, just be convinced that he was going to recognize me as the next Zen master in his lineage. And I was just kind of waiting for that. And of course, he never did. And I can remember one occasion where he, well, I used to part my bike outside his front gate. And my bike padlock got locked or something. And so I had to go back and knock on the door and ask for some hot water so that I could put it onto the padlock to thaw it, to put the key in, et cetera, et cetera. And he gave me some hot water and then patted me on the back. And for days afterwards, I thought that was a sign. He patted me on the back. That was a sign that I'd been waiting for. So yeah, that's a little aside. Just about idealism, that I guess we do think that we have to look at how we hold ideals. And there's been much, much talk of this in our order and movement over the last few years, a couple of years, particularly. And, well, it's true that you can hold noble ideals in a sort of unhelpful way. You can hold them so tightly and so sort of harshly that they stop being helpful, either to ourselves or to other people. And I think that's something to watch out for if we find ourselves in a situation, for example, where we're just getting angry or resentful with ourselves or with other people in the name of idealism, then something's doing wrong. Something's not quite right. If we find ourselves getting angry with ourselves because we can't feel enough matter in the meta-barfner, then something's doing wrong, hasn't it, something's very amiss. So that's just the sort of warning caveat about, well, holding ideals. It's not an easy thing to do. Anyway, to resume the story of Joe Simpson and Simon, they managed to, well, they navigate their way through incredible dangers. And remember, it's uncharted terrain. They don't really know what the layout of this west face is. They find themselves on crevasses, on powder snow that crumbles as soon as you touch it. Huge walls of this powder snow that are completely unnavigable. Anyway, they manage to sort of find their way using all their skills and resources up to the top of the summit. They scale the west face, a huge, huge sort of achievement. And then, of course, they start to descend. They start to come down again. And the descent proves not as straightforward as they might have thought. They're trying to come down by a slightly different route, you know, look like an easier route. And actually, it proves pretty precarious and dangerous. And quite early on in the descent, there's a disaster that happens, and Joe Simpson falls. And he breaks his leg in really quite a nasty way. The knee breaks, it breaks at the knee. And he talks about the bone sort of going that way, it sort of slides up his leg. So that his knee is, yeah, it's just completely contorted. And the bone's trunched on bone and slid up his leg. So nearly at the top of this mountain, they haven't descended very far, and he's broken his leg. And immediately, he realizes that actually this is it, this is it, he can't get down, he's not going to make it. All his mountaineering knowledge tells him that he's dead now, this is it. And Simon Yates catches up with him and says, "What's wrong?" And they look at each other, and Joe just says, "I've broken my leg." He's an agony, of course, but he manages to hold it together and say, "I've broken my leg." And there's a look, they don't say anything, they just look at each other for a little too long, and they both know what it means. And neither want to actually say, "Well, this is it." They're waiting for the moment where, well, Joe's waiting for the moment, where Simon will say, "Okay, mate, I'm going to go down, I can't help you, I'm going to have to descend on my own and leave you here." And there's no way that rescue party could have got to them in time, et cetera, et cetera. They're waiting for that, he's sort of Joe's waiting for that moment. But it doesn't happen. That moment doesn't happen. Instead, well, what Joe starts doing initially is hopping. So he hops on the route that they were trying to descend, and of course, he falls at every hop. And when he falls, he can't but help fall on his broken leg, which is agony, and he gets up and hops again and falls again, until he works out a way of hopping that enables him to stay upright long enough, using axes as sort of sticks, walking sticks, et cetera. And then they get to this point, and Simon's sort of waiting for him, they get to this point which is more of a sheer kind of drop or more of a descent, but there's no way that you can hop down. And what they do, what Simon says, is that they've got rope, he's going to tie, well, he ties himself to Joe, digs himself a little sort of seat in the mountain snow, and lowers winches Joe down, you know, down 300 foot, which is what the extent of their rope is. So he sort of winches Joe down, and they decide that they're going to do this, they're going to lower themselves down the mountain, and then Simon would follow climbing down, as it were, and then winch him down another 300 foot. And of course, you know, Simon's risking his life in this, because he's literally, well, there's no, there's nothing holding him, he's literally tearing Joe's weight, the weight of his body, as he's winching him down, sort of holding on to snow, digging himself a seat and holding on to snow. And there's 3,000 feet to go, yeah, and they can do 300 foot at a time, because that's what their rope allows, and it's getting dark, or it's getting towards dark, they've got a few hours to dark. So Simon's doing this as fast as he can, meanwhile Joe is in agony, every sort of lowering, he's banging his leg against the mountainside, and he's in agony, screaming out, and Simon's just doing as fast as he can. And they do this, they do this nine times, they do this lowering nine times, and each time then stopping to dig a snow seat, their fingers are becoming frostbitten. So Simon's having trouble holding on to the rope, let alone taking any kind of weight. So yeah, I just want to pause there in the story, I find this, I find this, well, it's incredible, isn't it, all common sense would say that he's dead, and neither of them give into common sense. And it's very moving the way that while Simon is willing to risk his life, literally tie his life to the life of his friend. And it's done in a very unsentimental way, they're both, I don't know if you've seen the film, but you get a sense in the film of them being both very unsentimental, practical men, not given to displays of very much emotional, talking about their emotions, you know, they're from Sheffield. Sorry, cheap, Joe. Fair enough. But I think that this lowering, this tying themselves together and lowering is the first stage in their idealism being matured. No longer is it such a laugh to climb this mountain, and no longer is it such a glorious adventure, now actually they're up against something far more dangerous and real. So it's an image for that. It's also, well I find it, a very powerful image for our interdependence. For the first time they're realizing that actually they have to rely on each other, or at least Joe has to rely on Simon, he can't do it alone, he isn't a single endeavour, which is, you know, very, very true, isn't it, of the spiritual life, and probably of any thing that we want to do in our lives. So the other thing that it reminds me of is, well just not quitting at the first hurdle, how tempting it would be to have just given up then and say, okay, well that's it. And well heroes don't do that, do they? Heroes don't do that in their stories, and they stay with it against all the odds, they find creative solutions against all the odds, and they're intelligent in how they do that. So it's not just a bludgeoning arm, although it does come to that later on, but it's an intelligent way of working. I was just thinking in terms of my own life, how actually tempting it is to quit when the going gets tough, I left my job, well a few years back, about seven years back, and joined were worked in the centre team at the London Buddhist centre, raising money at the time for a retreat centre, for Jarsana retreat centre, and for Jarsana retreat centre was just an ideal that, you know, we in the centre at the LBC talked about, actually Rat Nagosh had held it up as an ideal, it was his dream, it was his vision, he decided that we needed a new retreat centre that was going to be beautiful, it was going to be capable of holding a hundred people, it was going to be instrumental in spreading the Dharma in London, it was going to be tremendous, and I was going to raise money for it, I had no experience of fundraising, and I don't really have that sort of talent actually, and I went in it full of gung ho kind of glory, or at least as much as I could muster, and well it didn't work out as we hoped, all the funding that we applied for didn't come through, I knew a few rich influential people, and they didn't feel very inspired to give, and well the Sanger was inspired, but nobody was able to give very much, we were trying to raise half a million pounds, and after the first year we were struggling to reach a hundred thousand, and we had given ourselves two years to do it in, and well I just, I just decided we weren't going to do it, yeah I just thought, we might as well give up now, let's cut our losses, let's not embarrass ourselves further, I could go back and get a job, and well Ratnico didn't sort of give up, and I'm just very very grateful for him for not giving up, but not only did he not give up, he just kept on coming up with creative, inspired sort of solutions, intelligent solutions that kept reframing the project, kept reframing what we were doing, and carrying on, and actually, well yeah it was just over two years, we did have a retreat center, that did cost us, well just under half a million pounds, probably half a million pounds by the time we got it up and going, and it's a very beautiful place now, not quite for a hundred people, but nevertheless it's been very very important in the life of many many people around the LBC and further afield, just a little example that came to mind from my own life, of somebody not giving up, but I want to read a little bit more about Einstein, he talks about this interdependence, this recognition that his life is inextricably dependent on the lives of others, in a very very eloquent and lovely way, what an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals, each of us is here for a brief sejourn, for what purpose he knows not what, though he sometimes thinks he feels it, but from the point of view of daily life, without going any deeper, we exist for our fellow men, in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally, whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and I'm still receiving. Very lovely, very lovely, well humble sentiment from after all somebody who is an outstanding figure. Okay, so there are nine of these lowerings, actually they haven't reached the bottom of this thing, yeah, so they start, but they know that it's roughly three thousand feet, so the tenth lowering might be the last lowering, they're hoping, yeah, but it's getting dark now, and actually common sense would have said stop, in fact good sense would have said stop, dig yourself a snow hole and bed down for the night because it's not only dark, it's snowing, they can't see very far, they can't hear each other, more than a few feet, so as soon as the lowering starts they've lost sight of each other and there's lost hearing, you know, sound of each other, but they think, oh yeah, one more lowering because it might be the last one, three thousand feet, ten lowerings, and so on they go, and they're rushing now, the frostbite etc is getting at them, Joe talks about Simon's hands being black, or two of his fingers being black, so they're rushing, and well another disaster happens, unbeknownst to them, there's a sheer drop, a cliff actually, it's overhanging, so it's not even sheer, it's doing the sort of other way, and Joe has just dropped over this drop, and falls completely into space, and he's left hanging there by this rope, too far away from the science of the cliff to try and crawl back, too far away, well he's gone over a drop that Simon can't see, and can't, you know, there's no way of communicating, so he's just left hanging there, and if Simon were to follow him, they'd both fall, they'd both die, so it's a sheer drop, into as far as you can see an ending space, you can't see where it's going, so he's just left hanging, and of course Simon doesn't know what's happened, he's going upwards, standing up there thinking why have I suddenly felt, you know, he realises Joe must have fallen, because he's now got the full body weight that he's carrying at the end of this rope, but doesn't know why there's no movement, why there's no tugging of the rope to say, you know, come down, etc, etc, there's no, he's nothing, he's stuck, and of course it's getting harder and harder to hold on, he's been dragged, pulled, sliding from this snow seat that he's sitting in, okay, so I'll stop there for a bit, so, so what came to mind was, well this image of hanging in space, hanging for dear life at the end of a rope in what might as well be infinite space all around you, and maybe that's an apt image for what can happen in the spiritual life, actually it's probably an apt image for what can happen in life generally, probably we're all going to encounter a time when it feels like we're hanging at the end of a rope off a cliff with nothing, no way to move, no where to go, perhaps it's sort of more acute when you're trying to live the spiritual life, because you're committed to developing awareness, to facing your mind, and not fudging issues, not hiding in, well not, not hiding from reality, yeah, so perhaps it's kind of worse, and the other thing that came to mind is, well things go wrong, things go wrong, I know that I still have this naive notion that well I'm trying to practice the Dharma so things won't go wrong, yeah things will be fine, life will work out because I'm trying to be a good Buddhist, you know I'm doing the metabhavana surely that should be enough, things won't go wrong, but actually life promises us dutta, the Dharma says that doesn't it, life promises us dutta, samsara will go wrong, and we're still in samsara, so that got me thinking, that reflection got me thinking about Amoga City, because one of the things about Amoga City is that he's said to promise you unobstructed success, yeah, Amoga City is said to promise you unobstructed success, so you hold on to Amoga City as your archetype, as your ideal, as your vision of the embodiment of the Dharma, and there should be unobstructed success, so what does that mean, what's this contradiction between the Dharma promising you dutta, and this figure of Amoga City, and the conclusion I've come to tentatively is that it sort of depends on what you mean by success, and that sort of depends on what you mean by your goal, and if our goal is enlightenment for the sake of all beings, then actually everything that happens to us can be used to further that goal, yeah, we can use whatever difficulties arise creatively, and the Dharma sort of points to that, doesn't it, because on the arising of dutta, we can either go round and round this wheel of life, or we can respond creatively with strata, and move up the spiral path, so perhaps it depends on how we respond, maybe there is unobstructed success, if our goal is really enlightenment, awareness, kindness, growth, maybe there is unobstructed success, maybe everything that happens can be turned into an opportunity, it can sound like a blip thing to say, it's easier said, isn't it, it's easier said, but maybe that's the symbolism of Amoga City's unobstructed success, okay, so Simon is wondering what to do, it's dark, there's a snow storm, he's not sure that he can hang on much longer, and if he falls, well he'll die, and Joe will die as well, Joe's at the bottom of this rope waiting for Simon to fall, yeah, he knows that sooner or later Simon won't be able to hang on, and they're both going to go tumbling down into this void, and then Simon remembers he's got a knife in his pack, and he decides to cut the rope, and this has been the crucial point of the story in a way, this is the crucial, the pivotal point of the story, in the book Simon says that actually it was instinctive, he didn't have to deliberate, he realised that he had a knife, it was obvious, it was obvious what he needed to do, which was to cut the rope, and it was also obvious to him that that meant that Joe died, that he let his friend drop and die, and perhaps it's a bit like the Daniel's Jade Gate, what's one Simon's Jade Gate, this is the point of no return in a way, this is the decisive moment, and it's interesting, I find it interesting that this rope that had been in a way a symbol for their security interdependence, their friendship has now become a tie that threatens to kill the both of them, and what has to happen is that it needs to be cut, it needs to be cut, so that at least Simon can live, one of them can live, and so he touched the rope, in the book it said that he just has to touch the rope with the knife, and it's so taught and told it just snaps, there's no effort almost needed, you just touch the rope with this knife and it snaps, so I had a few reflections on that, well the first one that came to mind is just our need that for decisiveness, sometimes we need to just act don't we, sometimes you can hang on not acting until it's too late, it becomes too late to then do anything creative, so sometimes even though the decision doesn't seem easy, or even you don't know if it's the right one, sometimes we have to act, the key thing though is that Simon takes responsibility for his action, throughout the rest of the book you see that he takes responsibility for cutting this rope, he knows that it's an action that he'll be criticised for in this mountaineering community, he knows that people will say you lived, so you saved your own life but killed your friend, and this solidarity which is so essential in the mountaineering community, you broke that, you transgressed some sort of unwritten rule in doing so, he knows this, but he takes responsibility, he decides that this is the sensible thing to do, and so all I'm saying is that perhaps at times, at crucial times in our lives where we do have to make decisions that we don't know are going to be the right ones, perhaps all that we can do is take them and try and take responsibility for them, for the consequences of them, even though we can't foresee them, if we find ourselves getting into blame, blaming ourselves, blaming other people, blaming the situation, then probably we've not taking sufficient responsibility, I think there's something critical about the spiritual life in that, because we wanted all to be worked out for us, don't we, we want somebody else sometimes to make that difficult decision for us so that we can blame them later when it goes wrong, yeah? And Simon does make it back to base camp, he does make it back, he's racked with guilt at times, he doesn't know what to do with himself, he's racked with guilt, he does actually look for Joe but can't see him, so on his descent he looks for Joe, can't see him, decides he's dead and makes it back to base camp, on the way back he considers telling, well he considers lying to Richard, remember who's back at base camp, he considers lying and saying look Joe fell, fell into a crevasse, and that's all that happened, yeah? Because if he did that, then he wouldn't have to face all this criticism, all this awful publicity, he keeps thinking of Joe's mother, what's he going to say to Joe's mother, I cut the rope, is he going to have the guts to say that to her, so he considers lying and then decides to tell the truth, he decides that actually he has no choice but to tell the truth, to have a wee aside again, and then they go back to me leaving my job, the reason I want to go back to that is, well you'll see the reason why I want to go back to that, when I left the job it felt for me a critical decision in my life, it felt like a point of no return, I'd been working in this secure job in IT for a large, large retailer earning a very decent wage for 10 years, and I remember this, well I decided to leave over a couple of years period, and I was trying to take responsibility for my decision, not realizing what I was doing as it were, but I remember this moment where I had to go and tell one of my bosses, he wasn't my direct line manager, but he was one of my bosses, I was going to go and tell him that I'd resigned, his name was Steve, and I was frightened of Steve, Steve was, well a corporate bully actually, very very intelligent man, but he could be incredibly nasty, I've never met anybody who could be as bullying as he was, outrageous, outrageous ways that he'd lose his temper, humiliate people in meetings, in public, reduce people to tears, and think nothing of it, he was also a very very good businessman, probably because he just frightened people in some ways anyway, I mean he was successful, a lot of things that he did, and I hadn't been working for Steve that long, I'd never really crossed swords with him, we've had a reasonably okay relationship thus far, but I knew that he was going to blow a gasket when I sold him, I was going to leave, he would go ballistic as far as I could tell, and I decided that the decent thing to do was to go in and tell him myself rather than wait till he heard, maybe that was a safer thing to do, but I really didn't want to do it, and so I booked an appointment, I went into his office, and it was, it was, it was, it was then that I noticed that on, on a shelf, on a bookshelf in his office, I've been in his office, you know, lots of times or several times, but never noticed this, there was a, a ruper, a figure of a modus city, just sitting on this bookshelf, and Steve had, Steve I knew he'd travelled, you know, in, in, in the Far East, in, in East Asia, and obviously he, he'd got this ruper from somewhere I didn't, and instantly I felt it was all right, actually, I did feel fearless, just for a little while, and I told him what I was, that I was resigning, his face changed colour as I told him, he went, starlet, literally, as I said, Steve, I've come to say that I'm, I'm going to be leaving, because he thought I was going to come and, you know, update him on the project that we were working on, and his first question was, where are you going? And of course I realised that his concern was that I was going to go to another competitor retailer and, and, and, you know, several of our secrets as it were, so the secrets of how we did things, not that I knew very many, but that, that was his fear, and I, I just said, look, I, I, I've been a Buddhist for a few years now, and I want to make that more of a full-time commitment, I'm going to go fundraising, do fundraising for the London Buddhist Centre, and he, he just melted, this man just melted, and became the most delightful, charming presence, offering me, what he said, he said, he'd built up this, this direct selling business, and he said to me, he said all this that we've been working for is nothing, it's meaningless, and what you're doing has more meaning than anything I've ever done, and I wish you well, and I thought, oh my goodness, and he said, and he said, he said, if you ever need any help, if you need equipment, computer equipment, whatever you need, don't hesitate to come and ask, and I'll see what I can do, and I just, I was, I was speechless, anyway, that was my little encounter with Amoga City in Steve's office, but I thought I'd bring in. Okay, I've got quite a bit to do, so I'll, I'll, I'll move on. The ropes cut, and, and Joe just falls, he falls, as far as he's from centre, his death. He, he screams into, into this void. It's actually worse than just falling, because he hits snow, and falls into a crevasse in the ice, he falls into this crack in the ice, maybe about 25 feet wide, but the next thing he knows, he hits ice, he hits hard ground after having fallen about 100 feet, and he's still conscious, he knows he's conscious because he's in agonizing pain, he's fallen on his leg, he's in agonizing pain, it's dark, all he knows is, is in this travass, he doesn't know what he's, you know, what, what he's sort of around him, he can't see around him. It turns out he's on a little ice bridge in the travass, there's a little bridge, a thin, narrow little bridge that he's fallen on and landed on, and is lying on, sprawled on his front actually, and in precarious danger of falling off, and looking down, it's just blackness, unending blackness, and he spends the rest of that night clinging to this bridge, thinking okay, so it's going to end like this is it, I'm going to die in the dark, in the cold, in this travass, on my own, this is how it's ending, and he sobs, and he streams, and he knows that nobody can hear him, Simon will think he's dead, he can't be seen in this travass, even though he's only fallen about 50 feet into the travass, yeah, there's nothing he can do, he has this little torch, and he thinks maybe I can climb out, maybe I can climb out, and he has four attempts, remember he's got this leg that's twisted in an agony, he has four attempts at putting his eye screw into the ice and trying to heave himself, hold himself out, each time sliding back onto the ice bridge, and finally gives up, there's no way up, there's no way back, so he spends this night on this ice bridge, it feels like a spiritual equivalent of a dark knight of the soul, there's nothing he's alone, it's the existential nightmare writ large, and then, well he waits until dawn, he waits until light, he can see light above him, and he decides that he can't stay there, if he's going to die, he wants to die on the move, not sitting, waiting to die of cold and hunger and thirst on this ice bridge, so he decides that he's going to take what rope he's got, and abseil down, because he can't go up, so he's going to go down, and as far as he knows, the drop is perhaps thousands of feet, his rope is a few hundred feet, at the end of the rope, he's going to let go, there's nothing else he can do, so he starts to trawl or abseil down, descend into nothingness, and well it's obvious, this is an archetypal image isn't it, the soul's story seems to be full of archetypal images of descent, they've climbed this mountain, they've achieved this incredible feat, but actually what's difficult is the descent, and he has to go deeper into the darkness, because he has no choice, he has no choice, he's put himself in this situation, he's walking or abseiling into the unknown, being prepared to lose everything, being prepared to die, and I was just thinking that in the spiritual life it does seem often to be the case that things get harder before they get easier, or perhaps they just carry on getting harder, it depends on individuals, it seems to be different, but often after we make a commitment, after we pass a point of no return, things seem to get harder, Vadanya was talking about the sort of archetypal forces in the universe that seem to come to help us, and that's true, but there also seem to be very often forces that come to resist, forces within ourselves and forces outside, that seem to resist us moving towards our ideals, and I don't really have very much advice to say apart from what we have to carry on, we have to carry on, in the hope that we can become more integrated in ourselves, can overcome the obstacles, see those obstacles as somehow opportunities, use our friends, use whatever resources we have, and not despair. On Joe's case he runs out of rope and looks down and actually there's a floor, there's a floor below him, the rope hasn't run out and there's a floor, snow covered floor, and he can't believe his good fortune, and he sort of rests lands on this floor until he realises it's a false floor, so it's this floor of snow, but actually it's like a false ceiling, the crevasse is still dropping away under him, but nevertheless he's able to rest on it, and looking up he can see that in this sort of chamber that he's in, in this ice chamber, there's a way out, there's a cone shaped tunnel of ice, and through the end of it he can see sunlight, and he decides that he might be able to crawl out, so this is what he does, he starts crawling towards this light, and it is crawling, every step is agonisingly slow and painful, let me just read a little bit of what he says, I was resting on my axis, this is one step, he's describing one step, I was resting on my axis looking at my good leg buried in the snow, I tried lifting the injured leg up parallel with it, and groaned as the knee crunched and refused to bend properly, leaving the boot about 6 inches lower than the good foot, pain flared up as I lint down and dug a step in the snow, I tamped it down as much as possible, then dug a smaller step below it, when I had finished I planted both axes in the slope above, gritted my teeth, and heaved my burning leg up until the boot rested in the lower step, bracing myself on the axis I made a convulsive hop off my good leg, pressing my arms hard down for extra thrust, a searing pain burst from my knee as my weight momentarily came onto it, and then faded as the good leg found a foothold on the higher step, I shouted an obscenity which echoed comically around the chamber, then I bent down to dig another two steps and repeat the pattern, so that's one step, it takes five hours of those steps for him to crawl up this cone which is at 45 degrees up into the light, and he makes it, he makes it, yeah, okay so he gets down, he gets down almost to the point where the base camp was, doesn't know whether Simon will be there, whether the tents will be there, doesn't want to know actually, he doesn't want to look just in case they're not there, he can't face them not being there, actually he does look but can't see, because it's dark when he gets there and there's another snowstorm, so he can't see, so he collapses, he collapses in exhaustion, he gives up, until he wakes up to the smell, to the accurate smell of excrement and urine, yeah, and this is, it answers a sort of smelling salt for him, he wakes up and thinks why am I covered in excrement, and he realises to his sort of humiliation that he's crawled through his own excrement, because he's crawled through the latrine area of the base camp. Perhaps I'll just say very, very briefly that that humiliation seems to be another part of his maturing, again, archetypal, it feels very significant that this is what wakes him up, all that, all that egotism has to crawl through excrement to be saved in a way, and I remember Padma Vadrya giving a talk saying that he felt that humiliation, in this talk he said at one point, that humiliation, experiences of humiliation were close to experiences of insight, I remember thinking rubbish, I don't want to, and what it was was that I just didn't want to acknowledge that, I don't know about the truth of that, but I do know that I have experienced humiliations, and they have led to some sort of growth, I think, they have led to some sort of maturing, I was going to talk about one of my key humiliations, I think I've run out of time, so, all right, I'll just, it's actually not a very big humiliation, it's a sort of embarrassment, it's a very public embarrassment, I was on a winter retreat, the LBC holds these big winter retreats, which some of you may have been on, 120 people every year over Christmas, I'm doing one once soon, and I was a Mitra, very keen, idealistic Mitra supporting this retreat, the last night of the retreat we have a big festive pooja, it's New Year's Eve, we stay up till midnight, it's a confession pooja, so people write down things that they want to leave behind, we burn them in this big bonfire, we got to the pooja, there's people sitting standing, or sitting here, on both sides of the shrine with this sort of walkway, gangway in the middle, and I'm sitting quite close to the front, somebody points out, whoever's leading the pooja points out to me that we haven't got a big bowl to burn to hold the confessions in, you know, the piece of paper room, so I say no worries, I'll go and get one, go off, rush to the kitchen to get a bowl, as it were, and go to the loo on my way and come back, and by the time I come back they're getting ready to salute the shrine, so everybody's standing, facing the shrine, what happened was that I'd been sitting in meditation, I hadn't done my trouser belt up, I hadn't done my trousers up, my trouser button, or whatever was undone, but I hadn't noticed either, and so I'm carrying this bowl, which is quite a large bowl, it took both hands to carry this bowl, and I start walking towards the shrine, so I'm coming up this gangway with this large bowl, walking and I suddenly think, my goodness, my trousers feel like they're slipping, they're a bit loose, and I'm halfway there by now, and I think, well, I'm not sure I can do anything about this, do you stop, put the bowl down, what you do, so I kind of, in a fit of panic carried on, and I got to the shrine, and I'm carrying this bowl, and they just went zoop, so I'm facing this shrine with my trousers around my ankle, this huge bowl, 120 people in the room, 120 people, all burst out in spontaneous applause, it was time to perfection, anyway, I'll stop, that was one of my embarrassing moments, it's not particularly in some ways humiliating, it's just embarrassing, and I'm sure I've had worse humiliations, they're just not so public, anyway, so Joe wakes up, covered in his own instrument, and shouts out in agony and despair, Simon, he just shouts Simon, anybody actually, but he shouts Simon, he says he didn't want to die alone, that's what was what so despairing, he knew he was going to die, he just didn't want to die alone, he wanted to be held, didn't even want to live, he even says that at that point, it was as if, well, living and dying didn't seem that different, actually, it didn't seem to matter whether one died or not, he just wanted to be held, he also says in the film that when he cries out Simon, when he actually utters that cry, he felt that he lost something, and what he lost he says is he lost himself, in that moment of trying out, he lost himself, that's what he says, I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but it seems to me very, very significant that after, you know, this three and a half day, well, it's actually a six day journey if you counted the up and down, he lost three stone in these days, yeah, so you can sort of imagine the physical endurance that he had to put up with, he loses himself, there's a death, there's a spiritual death, the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained deliberation from the self, that's Einstein again, and of course he didn't know whether Simon would still be there, actually there was no reason for Simon to be there, it had been at least two days since he'd, Simon would have reached base camp and they would have gone, but Simon was there, something had kept him there, but he didn't know what, Richard had been saying to Simon, let's go, there's no point, Joe's dead, let's go, and Simon keeps saying let's just wait a little bit longer, one more day, one more day, and he hears, Simon hears Joe cry out, he's finally heard, and of course he's found, and health, and a very, very moving description of the mutual empathy, the love, the concern that they show for each other, Joe's just breaking down in sobs, and Simon's sobbing in between its pleatives, and, but what I found even more moving is that one of Joe's first responses was to thank Simon, and to reassure him that he did the right thing in cutting the rope, that he was grateful, and to not feel guilty, that was one of his first responses, and it's just very, very, very lovely, he's, he's exhausted to the point of, you know, he can't, he can't think, and he's about to fall asleep, and he says there seemed to me something important still to do before I slept, but I was losing the struggle to keep my eyes open, then I remembered, Simon, I said, what, you saved my life, you know, it must have been terrible for you that night, and I don't blame you, I don't blame you, you had no choice, I understand that, I understand why you thought I was dead, I understand what you did, you did all that you could have done, thanks for getting me down, she's, you know, just tremendous, and then sleep overtakes him, although he looks at Simon, and, well, there are tears in Simon's eyes, as Simon describes what it was like for him, and, well, Joe says it's over now, it's over, and Simon says yes, he said it in a choked whisper, and I felt the unstoppable flood of hot tears filling my eyes, how much he had been through, I could only guess that, a second later I was asleep, find it very moving that his concern is for Simon, how much he had been through, I could only guess that, that's Joe talking of Simon, and he also talks about, well, that's in a way the end of their adventure, I mean, more happens, but what I find significant is he talks about writing this book, in this book, and he says that he wrote it, because Simon came in for a lot of criticism, from the mountaineering community, from mutual friends, for abandoning Joe, for cutting the rope, and then abandoning him, and Joe wrote this book to tell the story and to stop the criticism, to show to people that actually Simon did what any sensible mountaineer should have done in that situation. It's dedicated to Simon Yates, to Simon Yates for a debt I can never repay, and what Joe says is that it was writing the book that changed his life, actually after all this adventure, his life didn't seem to significantly change, but he wrote this book, and it changed his life, and he says that he feels incredibly fortunate for what happened, he's now a successful writer and author, a public speaker, he could never have imagined, he's on a winning streak, and he actually says perhaps it was a small price to pay, what he had to endure, was a small price to pay, for such, well, he says an inspiring adventure, almost losing everything in Peru was a sensation quite as life enhancing as winning. So that's something incredible, and I think that the reflection I had was that actually when he started to think about Simon, when he started to, well, thank him, and then to write the book, and to reflect on this whole episode, that's when I think that the maturing process was complete, he seems to me to be, have completed something in that maturing, it had to involve other people, it had to involve an altruistic, outward-don't-dimension for other people, and I think that that's what heroism in Buddhism is about, it has to involve all the Bodhisattva ideal, it's, well, if you don't know about the Bodhisattva ideal you'll have to ask, but that's what is the hero ideal in Buddhism, and Sankarachita, band his life, is a sort of living example of the Bodhisattva ideal in action, his life and his work are the reason why we're here today, it's touched, his work has touched the lives of thousands of people, it's affected us all, to some degree or another. And I thought I'd end with, well, Einstein again, talking about the Bodhisattva ideal, although he doesn't use those terms, the human being is part of the whole, called by us, universe, a part limited in time and space, he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and the foundation for inner security. [Applause] [Applause]