Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte is brought to us by the delightful Saddhanandi and#8220;How to Hold a Visionand#8221; from the talk and#8220;Enlightenment as Heart, Life as Whole.and#8221; Are we nourished or are we burdened by our ideals? Ideals need to be well-rooted in our heartsand#8230; beyond the worldly windsand#8230; not an abstraction, our vision is our direction and our orientation that guides us along the way.
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How to Hold a Vision
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] How to hold an ideal or a vision. At our heart, there cannot be an artificial ideal or an artificial vision. It has to be authentic to us. It has to be a real possibility. When we hold a vision, we're often cynical about it. We're often just cynical about ideals. They might seem too abstract, we don't relate to them. Or they're too global, they're too big, and we just get overwhelmed by them. Or they're too high, which I think just indicates they're a bit artificial for us. If we don't connect with an ideal, it could be that we're using the wrong words. Here's a question. Are we nourished, or are we burdened by our ideals? Do we use our ideals as a form of self-criticism? So how can we hold an ideal? It has to be well-rooted in. Yeah, rooting, rooting the ideal. Not an abstract, empty concept. It has to be our heart. It has to be a true ideal, not an artificial ideal. It needs to be beyond the worldly winds. And we need to see it as more of a direction, an orientation. And we need to expect it to continue to mature and deepen. Yeah, it's not finished just because we had an experience of it once. So I'm just going to look at these a bit more. It has to be well-rooted in, not an abstract, empty concept. It has to be our heart. It has to be a true ideal, not an artificial one. Banti goes into this quite a lot in a little talk called "The Ideal of Human Enlightenment" in that little booklet. I don't know if you know it. Fantastic lecture. It talks about two kinds of ideals, a natural ideal and an artificial ideal. A natural ideal takes into consideration the nature of the thing or the person for which it is an ideal. And an artificial ideal does not do that. It imposes itself from the outside in an artificial manner. Actually, sometimes when I've been thinking about this, I've been thinking about the artificial ideals that we as women can have. I remember when I was a little girl, I swatched this world sometimes. You know what I mean? They've always got, I mean, hair. They've got tons of hair, haven't they? I know some people do have tons of hair. And they've got a sort of shape, haven't they? You know, it's easy to think really, ideally, I would be 34. What is it? It's 26, 34, with a lot of hair and blond, yeah? But actually, it was a bit disheartening. Because, well, to be honest, it was a bit hard to know how I was going to accomplish that. Yeah? You know, and actually, well, it was just, I will just say, I think it was a bit of an artificial ideal. It wasn't a natural ideal for me. And in the same way, I mean, actually, we'd get that a little bit with us responding to order members. There are some order members who actually do embody a more natural embodiment of the ideal for us. I think that's why it's so good that the order expands and that we're in contact with a lot of different people. So that we, I suppose, we don't just take on, I think it's so easy to take on the behaviour of somebody in an artificial way thinking that's what mindfulness looks like, yeah? I used to have this idea that I couldn't be mindful because I told jokes. I've been told I'm quite a mindful person and told I tell jokes, so that's good, isn't it? So, you know, it's just like working out what is a natural ideal for us, yeah? So then, Banti talks about enlightenment is not an artificial ideal. And then he talks about why he thinks we should relate to it like that as a natural ideal. I'm going to try and summarise. "There is nothing artificial or arbitrary," he says. "It corresponds to our nature and to our needs." It's very beautiful that, isn't it? "It corresponds to our nature and to our needs." I've been thinking about recently how a lot of people in the movement are very attracted to the Thug of the Garba teaching at the moment, yeah? The Smith of self-discovery. And I think a lot of that is to do with maybe the way that we've related sometimes to our ideals has been an artificial way. It's been more from the outside, yeah? And we're now trying to re-establish again that experience on the inside. So it's not a natural and not arbitrary ideal. The Thug of the Garba is teaching where you would discover something from within, yeah? The Buddha seed is in you already, yeah? So it's like we're not looking out there, suddenly the reference point is in here. The reference point should have always been in here, but we lose that a bit. When I was on a solitary maybe about 13 years ago, I was struggling a lot for several weeks on this solitary. And at one point I just asked myself, "Why am I doing this?" "Yeah, why am I doing this?" And I thought, "Well, what else is there?" "That's just too vague." "Why am I doing this?" "Well, it's what puts me in contact with people that I really value and can communicate with." "No, that's got too many people in it." "Why am I doing this?" And at that point I said, because I gave up after a while, at that point I said, "This is the only thing that gives my life meaning." And in a sense what I'd done was I'd finally arrived at my own reference point, yeah? When I got home actually, I was talking to Sirajoti, who's my boyfriend at the time. He said, "Great, I've been waiting for years for you to arrive at that." Which is quite, I wish he told me that earlier, but anyway, it's quite, I think that's what we need. We really do need our own reference point, yeah? That's where our own vision, our ideas are going to come from. Everything else after that is just surely an amplification of it. But we must arrive at our own heart. So Banti says, "How do we know that enlightenment is a natural ideal?" Well, he says, "Though it's intelligible, enlightenment does seem to be something very rarified, very remote for our present experience. But the qualities that constitute enlightenment are already found in all of us, in German or form. They are not completely foreign to us, they are natural to every human being." So he's saying that, "We can respond to enlightenment because we already have a bit of a glimpse of it. We already have in German or form that experience. That's why we can relate to it, that's why it's a natural ideal for us." He also says that, "In the long run, we're not satisfied by anything else." Okay, another of my points. This ideal, our ideal, needs to be beyond the worldly wins, the eight worldly wins. So the worldly wins are these pairs of opposites, yeah? Happiness and sorrow, praise and blame, loss and gain, fame and infamy. In other words, our aspiration or ideal needs to be beyond the opinions of other people. That's just putting it simply, yeah? We need to be in touch with a much deeper motivation, our motivation, that has integrity and congruency with it. I've got a little quote here, "Our human life includes both successes and failures. If we allow ourselves to be caught up by feelings of either shame or pride, we will limit the scope of what we might do and who we might be." In other words, we're going to get it wrong. We're sometimes not going to do it very well. Sometimes we're going to be great. All of those things don't really matter. What matters really is that we're just building on something else that's beyond the reach of other people's opinions. I mean, beyond the reach of, well, those worldly opinions. I mean, obviously, some people are going to have a sense of whether we're heading in the right direction spiritually and we can't be beyond that. That's a very complicated area. We'll just stay with them. Basically, we've got to have our own motivation. We've got to see this desire for enlightenment or higher aspirations or higher ideals as more of a direction that continually orientates us. It's not a concrete reality already. It's not that we're there already. I think sometimes if we hold an ideal badly, we think we've already got there. Norman Fisher says, "Ideals are reflections of our own deeply religious nature, but as we know, ideals can be poisoned if we take them in large quantities or if we take them incorrectly." In other words, if we take them not as ideals but as concrete realities, ideals should inspire us to surpass ourselves, which we need to aspire to do if we're to be truly human and which we can never actually do exactly because we are truly human. "Ideals are tools for inspiration, not realities in themselves." And if rightly understood, ideals make us light-hearted and give us a sense of direction. Another point, expect to hold an ideal, holding an ideal to be a process of deepening and maturing. Don't be frightened of making a mistake. There was a time here at Taraloko when I was team manager of one of the teams and I talked about us developing a culture of mistakes. And it's just because I just didn't want people to hold back if a fear of getting it wrong. Who cares? It doesn't really matter that we get things wrong. I don't know. What's the big deal? We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this screen. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny and thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]