More listening joy from Vajradharshini in todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Enlightenment is Different for Each of Us.and#8221; From the talk and#8220;We Have a Huge Barrel of Wine But No Cupsand#8221;, this is another splendid journey around the idea of Enlightenment, using the languages of surrender and discipline from the Sufi context. It’s as heady as a sumptuous wine, but also sobering and down to earth, whether we’re “following a railing in the dark” or and#8220;wandering inside the red world”. Drink up!
Talk given at Taraloka Retreat Centre, 2005
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] So in a sense, this is literalism, holding these ideas, is literalism. Bante talks about literalism as when our intellect, powered by craving, grasps an idea of the path. So it's really our craving that grasps the idea of the path, but we think it's our kind of intellect. Or our intellect is kind of not as objective as we'd like to think it is. So we all want something, we all want all sorts of things. And then when we come across the Dharma, our intellect will grasp an idea of the path, which fits nicely with what it is we want. So that's why if you ask me about enlightenment, you find out more about me than you do enlightenment. And that's why enlightenment is different for each of us, because we each want something different. So it's really good to explore what you think enlightenment is, because I think although you might not find out about enlightenment, you do find out something about yourself, which is the way to enlightenment. So a measure of effective going for refuge isn't so much that we are transformed. So it isn't so much that we become completely different when we're effectively going for refuge, but that we continually confront the limits of our understanding. So we're continually forced to abandon our limited ideas of what the spiritual life is. And I think that is effective going for refuge when we're continually willing to, and in a sense forced to, by the momentum of our own practice, to just keep giving up our old limited ideas of what the spiritual life is. Often when we hit a crisis, when we have doubts, when something goes wrong, we think something isn't working. But often I think what's happening is that we're just faced with a bigger vision of what it is we're actually doing. Yeah, bigger than we thought, and maybe less comfortable than we thought what we were doing. In a way we've hit our own literal mindedness about the spiritual life. And that's a really good thing. It's good to keep coming up against that and the literal mindedness about the spiritual life. And in a way I think the whole movement recently has had this crisis in a sense. And I think what's happened is that there have been kind of ideas of what the spiritual life is about, which we collectively have had to kind of give up and embrace something bigger, something less literal, something less comfortable in a way. So Aloka says that an antidote to literalism is beauty and myth. So I think for me, Rumi is an antidote to literalism. Because in his poetry, in his symbols, there isn't really anything that you can get hold of. You can't really take Rumi literally. He slips out of your grasp time and time again. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebutestaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
