[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, Anichata, in permanence, change, transience, fleetingness, evanescence, the demon yah. I've been using the prospect of standing before you at this very minute as a lever to motivate myself to reflect on Anichata regularly and systematically for the last few weeks. I must say, I've found it very useful. I don't think I've thought about Anichata as much and for as long as I have in the last few weeks. It's been very useful to me, but at the very moment, I'm a little bit concerned that I may have got the best of the deal rather than yourselves. But I do have some things to say, and I hope that some of them will be of some interest. The other thought I've been having is that it's actually quite difficult to think of anything new to say about Anichata. Take this for example. Seeing conditioned things as impermanent does not mean seeing them first as actually existing and afterwards as no longer existing, but rather in reducing them to an absolutely continuous flow or pure becoming in connection with which the terms being and non-being are meaningless. So that's what I found when I reread Chapter 11 of the Three Jewels, which seemed to me to say almost everything that one could say about Anichata. And I must have it, it still feels quite hard to talk about something which is not a thing. Well, I'd like to start off by saying a little bit about what I've been thinking in relation to why the Buddha taught Anichata. I suppose I believe that he was offering us a metaphor, temporal and spatial metaphor, which, as it were, stands below the concept of conditionality, or it takes a particular sum of powder. Anichata is therefore a concept we can use more easily, I think, than Prajit Ramapada. Prajit Ramapada is harder to get at, to put it mildly. So Anichata signifies the flux that we and our terrible insecurities try to fix, try to pin down. I'd like to paraphrase the Buddha's conditional teachings about Anichata. I can summarize this in three ways. First of all, if you watch your experience very carefully, you'll be able to hear, touch, taste, smell, see, mentally perceive phenomena changing, and maybe get an inkling of conditionality. Secondly, if you try to fix, to appropriate a bit of this flux, sooner or later, you'll come off badly. You'll suffer. Now, I know that this is a very popular, very well-known quotation, but I hope you'll forgive me for reciting it to you since it's his birthday on the 28th of this month. The old Kaja William Blake. He who binds himself to a joy, duff the winged life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sunrise. And the third point, what is more, if you look really carefully, you'll see that you as the observer are subject to the same process to Anichata too. So we can provisionally think of the perceptual situation as consisting of the witness and the witness, both are involved in continual change. So I've been reflecting on Anichata and I received some encouragement with this when I read that it is said to be the most effective reflection that you can do. It's the elephant of meditations, of reflections and finding the words of my perfect teacher. Dr. Rinpoche says, "In the jungle, the elephant has the biggest footprint, and in meditation, the greatest mark, the greatest effect is left by meditating on impermanence." So I've been doing some of this, bringing my chitter to bear upon it as best as I can. I've been looking at many questions which have been occurring to me as I've been thinking about it. And indeed, I still have got quite a few questions and I haven't been able to answer. But such questions as this, it's said to be one of the three marks of conditional existence of samsara. So if it's a mark of our narrow experience of reality, is it not a mark of reality itself? And if not, how do we know? So that's one of my questions that I've been asking. Okay, so for longer than the last few weeks, longer I've been thinking about this, I've been cycling around the antisystem of meditation. That means I've been trying to do the six-element practice every week on a Friday as it happens. And I know that it's a practice which is often thought of as being the most useful for addressing the matter of anatar. And of course, anatar is very much bound up with it. I've had some quite useful clues from doing the six-element practice, how I could best approach the reflection on anatar. Just as we do with the six-element practice, we think of what's happening in here and we've got something happening out there. And what seems to be happening in those two areas of our experience, I've been doing the same with reflection on anatar. And also, of course, I've been looking to see what reflections arise from those two contemplations. So out there, well, I've really been enjoying this lately because I've been watching the changing beauty of autumn. A week before last, I went for a few days' walk on the office-dike walk near Knighton in Paris. And it was a beautiful experience. I really had a lovely time. The smell of the woods, the colour of the trees, the sunshine coming through the trees. So it wasn't great enough sunshine, but when it did, that sort of happened. And a member of some other things, like a mat of crab apples doing what crab apples do when they've fallen off the crab apple trees in the autumn below the tree. So I was struck by lots of beauty as I did that walk. During that time, during that time, I reminded myself how much I used to enjoy reading Kitz's "Ode to Autumn". I'm sure many of you will know it, probably by heart, for all I know. But it did take on quite a strong significance as I walked that walk. It starts, you may remember, where are the songs of spring? I, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too. I was talking about the music of autumn, and I found that a very compelling metaphor, and I returned to it in a moment. And after that, I came across a poem by Thomas Hood. He had also written a poem to autumn, and he says, "I saw old autumn in the misty morn, stand shadowless, like silence, listening to silence." And silence was very much a feature of that walk. It was lots of times, it was very, very quiet, and there was nobody else around, and just very, very quiet, and very good conditions for contemplating the change that I could see in autumn. So I've been having a good time looking at that part of what is out there. In here, I mean that's, in a way, that's pretty mysterious, but we have pretty good guidance, don't we, from the project of the Mahasati Patana? Sutra, body, breath, feelings and thoughts, and of course we've got much more detail, highlighted detail in that meditation in the thirteenth stage of the Anapana Sati Sutra, which particularly applies to, which particularly recommends reflection on impermanence. So during this period, when I was thinking about autumn, I was thinking about the waning and waxing of the seasons, the ebb and flow of human experience. And yeah, lots of thoughts, some of them quite melancholy, some of them quite invigorating. I was thinking how flowers fade, bananas go black, food goes off, mechanisms seize, files corrupt, hands wrinkle, people and places become scarcely recognisable. And the flow, the growth, the waxing, spring, which is also very much celebrated by poets. Thanks also, Anitra Ta, flowers grow, children grow, acorns grow into oaks, and was that fun, that lovely line in Kabir, translated by Tagore, the flower blooms for the fruit. Now we can try and, this is my experience of the waxing and wailing the ebb and flow. And of course, what we often do as I have been doing is we can try to fix either of these processes. We can, uhm, appropriate, try to appropriate either of those processes. I suppose we do try to, we do get attached to Anitra, we do get attached to impermanence. We do get, we bank on our children growing up, for example, we expect them to, we're very attached to the idea of their growth. I'm less clear how we get attached to decay, although I have got some ideas about that. But it's occurred to me that this self-centered melonically, that you can see in some poetry, is a little bit like that, it's a sort of attachment to decay. But when all said and done, the very use of the term decay as a concept in this, in this relationship to this, is really a way in which we try to fix it. Because, we're even constructing the ebb and flow, the waxing and wailing. There's not really an ebb and flow, it's really just change. We ascribe the attributes of ebb and flow. And we can see that in our experience sometimes, can't we? When we look at the two sides of an experience more closely, that's, for example, when old habits die, maybe in the habit we've been trying to eradicate, or one which just goes on its own accord. And we experience a change for the better. So that experience contains within it both the waning and the waxing. And of course, what we try to do in our practice is to channel that flow towards positive transformation. I think this indicates how much, how much I need to try to move beyond conceptualization, to move beyond the ideas of ebb and flow. My view is hinting me, obviously. They're deeply ingrained and they're going to take some digging out. But it is, I think it is important to me to try to move beyond, to get a sense of what it's like to move beyond conceptualization. And here I'm talking about moving from wrong view to right view to what we might call no view. The example of wrong view in connection within each guitar is what happens, it's the eternalist version, change doesn't happen universally. There is something a bit left untouched, a bit left untouched, but it's perennial, eternal even. And I've been hugely enjoying Richard Dawkins' lambasting of the God delusion in his book of that name. And more recently, oh, no, not more recently. In fact, a long time ago, I came across a four page essay by a journalist called Menken, H.L. Menken American conservative journalist, S.A.'s, a four page essay called The Funeral March. Unity lists 138 powerful gods who are dead. They were gods of the highest standing indignity, gods of civilized peoples, worshipped and believed in by millions, all were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal, and all are dead. So, yep. Osmondius wasn't on the list, but he could have been, maybe he's just made him up. Him and his cold smear. But I think, yeah, and of course, that's kind of a line of argument. Very much of P.E.R.S.A. Dawkins, when somebody was talking to somebody about his polemic recently, he was explaining that, yes, he does believe fervently that those 138 gods are dead, but he's just gone one more. So, I'm trying to move from the wrong view to right view. The right view here would be described as, well, change is universal. I believe that change is universal. As far as I can see, there is nothing that doesn't change, even if it changes extremely slowly. And then, come to no view, this will be represented by this statement. There is no such thing as change. You can't even say it just is. And in the poetic version of the heart sutra, of course, we have, nor does it wax or wane. Which is a poetic, but perhaps some people's view are not a very sesvectly translation of annula, paripurna. Okay, so most of us need to operate on the level of conventional truth. We're trying to move, I suppose. I don't want to make presumptions on your behalf. I'm trying to move, I'm trying to move away from wrong view towards to embrace right view. And I'm trying to get some sense of how I can keep the door open to move towards no view. To keep that way open seems very important to me. I don't want to get stuck with right view. And I need to do this with as warm a heart as possible. Because it's rather like pulling, continue trying to pull the carpet from under your own feet. It's actually, you know, it feels quite scary. Now, in the course of my reflections on autumn and change, I have been feeling quite a lot more opened up by this reflection. I'm particularly more opened up to some of the poetry I've been reading, particularly some of the poetry about autumn. Poetry, after all, works by metaphor. I know all language does, really. But poetry uses metaphor ambiguously. It uses ambiguity. There's more often more than one meaning. Concepts are more loosely held in poetry than they often are in common speech. And poets are very good at this, very good indeed. And lots of poets have, of course, autumn has been an irresistible topic for most of the poets that you can name. And mutability also. So I've mentioned that one of Keats. And I particularly like that instead of that metaphor within a metaphor where he talks about music. Autumn having its music too, because it's a metaphor within a metaphor, so I think. And also discovered, I've been looking at poetry, which goes into this area, that Shelley is remarkable in this respect. He really does seem to have some handle on this that I didn't always believe he had. This from Shelley and his hymn to intellectual beauty. The day becomes more solemn and serene when noon is passed. There is a harmony in autumn and a luster in its sky, which though the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been. A bit more from him in a moment. And I'm sure most of you all know Lawrence's kind of polemic, really, about the ship of death. He says, "Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. Have you built your ship of death, though? Have you built your ship of death that you will need it?" I think I've got so many of these, because I've got so into it, that I think I'm going to use up all my time with these quotations. But I can't pass on without mentioning Shakespeare's that that time of year that I may as to be behold when yellow leaves or none or few do hang. That one's for a buy. Heaps again, the human seasons. And this says a lot, I think, about the bad pensiveness, the mood, the pensive mood that one can get into as one contemplates change at this time of year. Quiet coves his soul had in its autumn. When his wings he fur left closed. Contented so to look on mists in idleness. To let fair things pass by unheeded, unheeded as a threshold brook. I said I'd get back to Shelley, and this is for a particular reason, because I think he does seem to understand. He seems to be sort of pointing towards no view. He says this is in his little poem "mutability". He says "We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, embrace fond woe or cast our cares away". It is the same. For be it joy or sorrow, that path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may nair be like his morrow. Not may endure but mutability. So that particular line, that path of its departure still is free. Basically saying is that we can't predict what's going to happen next from what's happened so far. So, oh dear. Okay, I'm going to go into a coder now. I want to, I talked about poetry, I just want to say something about music. I don't understand how music has this effect. I think it's something to do with its evanescence. It does conjure up images. It is suffused with emotion. I become suffused with emotion as I listen to music. It changes, its moods change. And it is, I think, it's easy, easier to hold music loosely in that way. So I find music a very helpful pointer. Meditation. I just want to say something about meditation. I've mentioned six element practice already. I've been interested in what Sona and Vegemala have been doing in their breath works project. I've produced a number of meditation CDs and I've also heard Sona talk about them and lead through them. It seemed to me that the kind of awareness practice that they've recorded and that they introduce people to is a very clever synthesis of the Brahma-Gaharas. What they invite people to do is to recognize the ingredients of one's experience with a pain or joy and hold them lightly in the whole context of one's experience from moment to moment. Pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain. And sometimes when I've been doing that practice and reflecting on it, I have had a sense that, well, some kind of sense of a picture towards Anicheta. Some kind of sense of being able to hang loose to it, not to take sides with it, but being no up or down, so to speak. I had wanted to say something about ritual, particularly in the context of music and poetry, but I hadn't got time. Except to say I think it's got huge possibilities for reflection on Anicheta. I've begun and I know other people who are doing things with this. I think it's a great deal, still one could do. So I do like just to close with one more quotation. This is also from Patrick Rinpoche. He says in words of my perfect teacher, "Impermanence is everywhere, yet I still think things will last. I have reached the gates of old age, yet I still pretend I am young. Bless me and misguided beings like me, that we may truly understand impermanence." Thank you. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out]
