[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] So, finally, may none of this ever be solid by thoughts of the eight worldly concerns. May I see all things as illusions and without attachment gained freedom from bondage. So with this verse you move from the action and practice to the view. Remember we started talking about that five days ago. The danger is that when you take on a practice it's solid by ordinary worldly concerns. The eight worldly concerns are the Lokadomas, that is the four pairs of gain and loss, fame and infamy, happiness and misery, praise and blame. Gain and loss, fame and infamy, happiness and unhappiness or misery, praise and blame. So we're usually strongly motivated by a desire for gain, for fame, for happiness, and for praise. And we're strongly motivated to get away from loss, infamy or bad reputation. Unpopularity you could even say, unhappiness, suffering, misery and blame. And if we allow ourselves to be motivated by those, we're blown around by them. That's why they're called the worldly winds, because they just blow you all over the place. You just sort of motivate yourself to achieve happiness or popularity. But it'll all change direction. What's popular today is unpopular tomorrow. You know I noticed that sort of in the movement even there are popular characters, popular figures. And it lasts for a while. I've been popular, unpopular, unpopular, unpopular, you know, till you're sort of spinning and dizzy. And you know the best thing is just to sort of forget it and just get on with trying to do your best. I still haven't learned. If you're driven by these, you're just blown around. And the danger is that even your action and practice is motivated or affected, tainted by these worldly winds. And really I think looking at myself for my own spiritual practice and my own attempts to practice in the world, especially through the movement, I can see that that's been the case. And I think this is probably the great dilemma for all of us who take on this bodhisattva practice, especially through trying to spread the dharma and to create the conditions for others to practice it. I think it's a very, very important and noble practice, but it's so easy for that to become tainted by the worldly winds. And it will be. It will be because we're amphibious beings. We've got a spiritual motivation, but we've also got an egoistic motivation. So those worldly winds will affect us, and our egos will appropriate even our efforts to help others in spiritual practice. We'll give our talks and, you know, want to get praise for it or want to be wealthy from it. I've never found that myself, but you can live in hope. You can sort of try to, you know, it's very, very difficult not for your ego, not to be caught up, even in your efforts to build a movement, to spread the dharma. And I don't think that can be, in a way, I could say, can't be helped, but you know what I mean. I don't mean that you shouldn't try to stop to work beyond it. It's going to contaminate, and as it were, sully as the word is here, what you do. So there's got to be a constant effort to go beyond that worldly egoistic motivation, even as you're trying to practice in the world the Bodhisattva way. And I think this is actually a very, very important point for us at this moment, because there is a sense of disillusion in the activity of the Bodhisattva in building a movement, in trying to help the world. I can't say I feel at all disillusioned in this respect. I'm still quite determined to continue with that effort. But there are those who are sort of almost tempted to give up on it, or even have given up on it, apparently. Well, I think that's a shame. And I don't think it's necessary. I think one just has to realise that worldly motivation will sully your work, but you have to constantly work against it. You have to recover from it, because life will constantly also be feeding back to you that you have studied it. At the same time, you need to be working on yourself in order to try to undermine that ego sense and to that ego attachment rather. And you do that by seeing all things as illusions and, well, it says without attachment, gain freedom from bondage. So, at the same time as you're engaging in the action that's outlined here, which, of course, itself undermines that ego sense. And engaging in that practice, you're also attacking, so to speak, the ego from the view angle by reflecting on the illusion of all things. Well, you could put that in traditional terms as reflecting on the three actioners. You reflect that the things that seem so solid, so real, so crucially important, that seem worth living your life for, aren't, you know, like piling up money, so that you can buy yourself a nice house so that you can retire and die. So, you know, most of the things that you sort of put your effort into, when you really examine them, are quite insubstantial, they tied you over during the course of this life, or they may tied you over during the course of this life, but insurance policies, even in solid old Britain, can collapse as those who had equity life insurance policies will know. The oldest insurance agency in the world missold policy, so people who thought they had something solid didn't get it. That's a very trivial, but actually, in a way, quite pertinent example. There are solid institutions, there are solid things around us that we believe in so strongly, but they're really illusory. They have no solidity, no reality. What do you think of people setting out for work from Alcantara to Madrid? It's an ordinary day, just setting out, and actually, what they thought was going to happen didn't happen. So, that all the time we rest ourselves upon an illusion of what the world is, of how it's going to be, of what's important in it, but because of impermanence, because of insubstantiality, it's not like that, it's not dependable. The word that probably illusion distantly translates. I don't know what it would be in Tibetan, but it's probably Maya, which means something like, well, it's root meaning, it's something like a magical show. It's something that appears to be substantial and real, but isn't. So, the conjurer throws something up in the air, a scarf up in the air, and an elephant appears. But it isn't really there, it's somehow or other, he's made you think of it as there. Well, the boy climbs the rope and disappears, but he didn't really. So, this analogy is struck for our ordinary experience. The things seem to be solid and real, they seem to have inherent existence, Artman, but they don't. They seem to be fixed and solid and dependable, but they're not, they're impermanent. So, as well as the action to overcome a self clinging through cherishing others, using opportunities that difficulties present us with, and working to help others to practice the dharma, as well as engaging in meditation practices that really evoke our sympathetic, and well, even more than sympathetic responses, that evoke a transcendent response within us, the response of the Bodhicitta. We need to be constantly working at undermining our fixed attachments, our belief in ourselves as independent, solid, permanent reality, relating to dependable, solid reality around us, and doing that by reflecting on the electioners, meditating on shunya-ta, whatever it may be. We hope you enjoyed the talk. 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