Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;What is the Spiritual Community,and#8221; is an extract from the well-loved talk and#8220;The Individual, the Group, and the Spiritual Communityand#8221; by Sangharakshita. Posing the questions: What is individuality? What is the difference between a group and a spiritual community? How can an ordinary group support our efforts to transcend the group?
Talk given in 1971.
[music] Dharma Bites 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] And then secondly, what we call vichikitsa. This is usually translated as doubt, perplexity or uncertainty, or even sometimes by some scholars as skepticism. But these aren't very helpful renderings. Vichikitsa is much more volitional than intellectual. Vichikitsa is really inability to commit oneself. Or even we may say unwillingness, even reluctance to commit oneself. Or perhaps we can say that one does commit oneself, but then one changes one's mind. And what does this mean? It means really that one is not integrated. One isn't a self, isn't an individual yet. One is a sort of loose association of selves. I've spoken about this before. It was like the waves of the sea, one wave rising up, another sinking down. And there are hundreds of waves doing this all the time. So in the same way, we are sort of conduits, a sort of loose association, a sort of loose collection of selves that are sort of coming into operation alternating with one another, and so on. So one self happens to commit the whole personality as it were. But then that self-subsides, another self pops up, and that self receives the commitment. And this is what is happening all the time. One self decides something, another self decides against it. And we're certainly all familiar with this sort of state of effects. And it's one of the reasons we know why some people can't meditate. One self wants to meditate, another doesn't. One self sort of gets going and is meditating, dragging along the rest of the personality and all the other protesting selves. But then it sort of weakens and it goes under. And some other self or collection of selves even arises, gains predominance for the time being, and you can't meditate anymore. You're sort of distracted, you're mind wanders and so on. So this sort of thing, this inability to commit oneself totally, because one is not fully integrated, is a spiritual fetter. And this particular spiritual fetter is responsible in people's lives for a great deal of drift, a great deal of indecision, and a great deal of sheer waste of time. And if one doesn't break this fetter, one can't be a real individual. Being an individual means unifying all one's selves. An only a unified person can really and truly commit himself. An only one who has committed himself through the higher evolution can progress. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
