[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 the importance of having faith in enlightenment as a possibility. Yeah. So something has to provide us with a heart, a heart to our spiritual life, yeah? And basically it's up to us to find out what that is and really stand on it and develop it, yeah? This could be something like a personal myth or a particular inspiration for us. So it's interesting that a lot of bodhisattvas and Buddhas that we visualise or practice in the movement hold something to their heart. Yeah. I find that a quite interesting image. It was a bit of a shot one day when I realised, well I hold Shaq community to my heart. And he holds a begging bowl to his heart, which was a bit kind of, "God, what on earth does that mean for me?" Yeah, in relationship to him. [Music] So the quote here from Banti. Doubt is a kind of camouflage. If you don't take up a clear position, no one can attack you. You are beyond criticism, or rather you haven't reached a point where you can be criticised. You might not be certain, but at least you can never be wrong. And this is a comfortable position or non-position. Doubt is essentially resistance to the positive, forward-looking spirit of the path. As soon as you are convinced that the Buddha was enlightened, you have to take what he said seriously enough to do something about it. If on the other hand, you give yourself the luxury of doubting whether the Buddha was really enlightened or at all, or at least postponing committing yourself to a view until you are really sure, you don't need to take his teaching so seriously. And best of all, you don't need to do anything about it. The ideal way is to free yourself from doubt, and thus to clarify your thinking. Not necessarily in a bookish or abstract way, but simply by reflecting on what you know of the spiritual path. It's very interesting, Banti, talking there about the luxury of doubt. When I was given the name She Who Delights In Faith, and Sanga Devi, when she gave it to me, said, "Sadhnandi, I want you to take your faith into the order." And as the first woman with faith in her name, I felt that was my duty off I went. Off I went into the order. But actually, what I realised was, I couldn't now have the luxury of doubt. I couldn't have the luxury of thinking this is rubbish, this is meaningless. I couldn't actually have the luxury of being under-confident, actually. Because doubt and under-confidence is often just an easy way out of what really needs to be done, what we need to do. Actually, on that note, I just remember a little story between me and Sanga Devi. I'm sure she won't mind me sharing it with 85 other women. She had a big shock one day on her retreat, that it was possible to be enlightened. She really saw it was possible to be enlightened. This was her only in a few months, it goes on, no one does it. So just a few months ago she was thinking, it really is possible for me to be enlightened. It was a very profound experience for her. But then a few days later, Sanga sort of caved in and she came to my room and she said, "Oh, I'm going to all this, I can't possibly do it and it can't be me and blah, blah, blah." I'm not up to it and everything and I said, "Yeah, that's easy. It's easy to go through that stuff." That's so much easier than carrying on believing that it's possible. Because if you believe it's possible, you have to apply yourself. It's so much easier just to go, "Oh, I'm not really up to it." So everything like that, yeah. That was shocking, wasn't it? Yeah, she'd come to me for a bit of encouragement. Well, that was encouragement, wasn't it? Yes. I just didn't put any sugar on it, that was the problem. So my own experience. In the few months leading up to my ordination, I was going through some very, I just moved to Taraloka and I was going through quite a lot of, I suppose just very positive emotion. I remember sitting actually in one of my rooms saying, "Oh, in my room saying to Diane Andy, "I'm just having this really strong experience of something, "really strong experience, it's just going, is it faith?" I was like, "No, no, no, it's deeper than that." And I say that because I think it was faith, but I think faith isn't as tidy or as conceptual as we think it is. It's just a very deep resonance with something, yeah? And it feels quite elemental and very, very strong and very basic, yeah. And out of that, or within that, I read these particular words which I'm going to share with you. So this is from Bazu Bandu. "I think of Shaq Muni and of other enlightened beings and I reflect. "As they were, so am I. "What they became, so may I become. "They started off as human beings and so do I. "They started off with weaknesses and imperfections. "So do I. "They started off with all sorts of limitations. "And so do I. "But then look what they achieved. "They transcended their limitations. "They became budders. "They were human. "I am human. "What they achieved, I too can achieve. "If only I make the effort." So I read this paragraph. I don't know if I'd read it before. You can find it in the Bodhisattva ideal series. So at some point I would have studied that. But I had a very strong response when I read this. I thought, surely, if I really believe in that, everything else of my spiritual life will follow. I won't need to tend to anything else. In a way, that will just drag me behind it. Is that what I mean? It will be the main sort of force in my life. And within a week or so of hearing that and reflecting on that, the Bodhisattva community started to appear in my mind. And I lived in his presence very, very strongly for about, maybe for several months after that. And I think it was really like he just personified that verse. And what he started personifying was the possibility, the real possibility of enlightenment. For me, when I visualise that community, I'm not visualising perfection. Perfectionism, root it out. I'm not visualising perfection. I'm visualising potential. I'm visualising possibility. Possibility for me. And he arose, I think, out of that verse. And that had, actually, at that time it had such a momentum that the relationship was dynamic. It wasn't just one sided. I didn't just sort of conjure him up. He had a life too. I remember once I was trying to do the mindfulness of breathing and the Buddha was appearing like lots in my mind. And I was trying to do the mindfulness of breathing. And I was feeling very kind of a bit heavy-handed and trying to follow my breath. And there was the Buddha doing his thing, you know. And I was thinking, "Oh God, what am I going to do?" And eventually he'd just say to me, "Look, why can't you just be happy sitting in the presence of the Buddha?" "That's not sorry. I'm sorry." So, at a very day if you might carry on a mature side, you're just like Magia, only twice as headstrong, so I don't enter. Yeah, I also had another, just going with a sense of perfection. Perfectionism and how it's not about perfectionism. It's about possibility and how we really must believe in that. The enlightenment is possible. I remember after I got ordained a few months later, I was stepping to the shower in Taraloka here. And I suddenly thought, "Oh, insight is easy." I thought, "Oh God, what are you doing now?" Suddenly, "What are you up to now?" And I thought, "I don't have to be perfect. I just have to see things the way they are." Yeah. To be honest, this second one is easier. Yes, and I had another experience also, a few months after being ordained in a similar sort of theme, where I was on the transcendental principle retreat and on the first night I was sick in the middle of the night, which I just thought maybe I was just a bit anxious about something. And then after that, throughout the retreat, I'd be studying something and some of you might have studied the transcendental principle, being on that retreat. So studying a lot of content from the survey of Buddhism. And it's a lot about the Buddha and enlightenment and also real condition, co-production. And Sangha Devi was noticing that I was going pale and getting quite sick quite often. And eventually she said, "What is going on suddenly?" And I said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I don't know. All I'm doing is reading this stuff." And she said, "It's just your receptivity to the Dharma, that was making me throw up." And what was going on was that insight really was possible for me. And it didn't feel that far away. And that was actually making me go white, throw up, all sorts of things. So what does it mean to believe in enlightenment? Okay. So I've got a few points here from Vanti. And then I'm just going to go back to my own story. So Vanti talks about enlightenment as he describes enlightenment as a state of pure, clear awareness, extending in all directions. Yeah? It's a state of knowledge, not in the ordinary sense, but as a direct, unmediated, spiritual vision that sees things all, that sees all things directly and clearly. He also talks about it as a state of intense, profound, overflowing love. Love and compassion for all sentient beings. A desire for the well-being of all sentient life. And he talks about it being a state of inexhaustible mental and spiritual energy. So it's a state of tremendous energy, of absolute spontaneity, continually bubbling forth, a state of uninterrupted creativity. And he says also it's a state of perfect, unconditioned freedom from all subjective limitations. Yeah? You don't have the luxury of subjective limitations any longer. I think in my experience, I stopped thinking so much about the nature of enlightenment when I was mulling over all these thoughts, when I was getting ordained. I started looking more at my response, my relationship to the belief that enlightenment was possible. I just started looking more at how I responded. I didn't try and work out what it was. I think this is partly because, well, I am a more of a faith type. Actually, I meant to bring a little postcard with me that Vanti had written to me maybe 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of long, long letters to him from a solitary. And he wrote me several postcards in response to those letters. And in one of my letters, I'm obviously struggling as to whether I'm a faith type or not. And it's beginning to emerge in me that maybe I am, yeah? And he writes to me saying maybe you are a faith type. And he talks about all of us needing an aspect of beauty, but also of suffering in our lives, yeah? As a way of motivating us. So I am just simply more of a faith type. I'm also an extrovert, yeah? So I look at relationships and I experience myself very strongly through relationship. And that's what I began to look at in terms of my response to enlightenment. I began to look at the nature of that relationship, me and how I related to it, rather than what it was in itself. Does that make sense? It's so abstract, this language, isn't it? So what I began to see was there is a certain way that I respond to things that I could trust, yeah? There was a sensation in my experience. There is a kind of experience that I can trust. And I began to use that experience as an authority. I didn't dismiss it, I didn't disguise it, I just looked out for it. I began to learn what it was like, yeah? So this response is a much fuller response than my usual experience or my usual feelings. Yes, it's emotional, but it's got clarity to it. Sometimes it seemed terribly deep and urgent. It was always very pleasurable and it could sometimes feel quite basic, but it's an integrated response. I can feel it within the whole of me, yeah? And eventually I learnt to call it a faith response, yeah? And I began to see that I just lived my life a lot within that landscape of faith response. When you just say yes to something with your whole being, yeah? And I will say that that faith response, so that sort of, it is... I mean, Banti sometimes talks about it, has talked about it in the surveyors. It's like when you get a tremor in you that vibrates with another tremor. So like a musical instrument, when you play the violin, the glass tremor slightly, yeah? It's almost on that level. You feel yourself, your whole being responding to something, yeah? I stopped worrying about what the something was and I just looked for the tremor, yeah? Yeah? And I will say that what I respond to, I mean, eventually I did start looking a bit more at what I was responding to, but the fact that I could respond became... the fact that I could respond like that became my guiding principle, yeah? That's what I began to look for in my experience, and actually that is what gives my life meaning, yeah? If I didn't respond like that to something, I don't know how I'd get up in the morning. I mean, I can be quite nihilistic. I can look out there and think, is there anything out there that's meaningful? This response is the thing that's meaningful to me, yeah? At the front of Bante's book History of My Going for Refuge, she quotes Middleton Murray with this verse, which I love. To discover that within myself, which I must obey, to gain some awareness of the law, which operates in the organic whole of the internal world. To feel this internal world as an organic whole, working out its whole destiny, according to some secret vital principle. To know what acts and utterances are a liberation from obstacles and a session of strength. To acknowledge secret loyalties which one cannot deny without impoverishment and starvation. This is to possess one's soul indeed, and it is not easy either to do or to explain. To discover that within myself, which I must obey. It's very beautiful, isn't it? So I'm going to ask you, well, can you recognize your own faith response, yeah? Do you live in a landscape of faith? If not, then what is your landscape? So our heart essence, if you like, our spiritual life has to be based on a faith response, that something is possible, that that's what you're moving towards. Faith is a very interesting response, actually, Sabouti calls it in the mythic context talks that he gave. He calls it, he says, "Well, emotion blindly responds, and reason can only analyze and relate. It has no impetus of its own." Faith is a combination of the two, or faith is drawing on them both, yeah? It's a higher faculty. And he uses the word authority, so this is very interesting. So I began to use faith, my faith response as an authority in my life. So that would be a very interesting idea, like what do you use as an authority in your life? Yeah. Yeah, I think sometimes we can think, well, it's very hard to believe in anything, isn't it? You want concrete facts, don't you? You want concrete proof that the Buddha was enlightened before you're going to believe in enlightenment, yeah? But you believe everyone hates you if someone hasn't said a load to you in the morning. There's loads of things that we use as an authority in our life, which has got no facts at all, yeah? It's just based on a simple experience of probably pleasure or pain, yeah? And out of that experience of pleasure or pain, we build up a whole network, framework or experience, yeah? And then you come, yeah, you come to try and look and say, "Oh, I find it very difficult to believe in anything." What are you believing in right now? What are you using as an authority in your experience right now? And how is it informing and dictating your behavior and your relationships with others? So learn about your own faith response, learn how to recognise it, watch out for it and feed it, yeah? Become specific in your language. In fact, actually generally become specific in your language about your experience. Don't say, "I'm feeling a bit stirred up." When what you mean is, "I've just had a faith response to something you've said." Yeah? Because if you don't get specific, you don't really know what you're dealing with, actually. It's just another way of camouflaging our experience or keeping a distance with it. And I think we have loads of very positive experiences which do not have their full impact on us because we don't give them their true names, yeah? Use the language of the Dharma when you talk about your experience or when you reflect on your experience. Don't fall back on jargon. I've got a whole talk in here about jargon which I'm not going to give today. Jargon alienates us from our experience. Don't use it. Use your own language. Mull over your own experience and choose your words carefully. Words carry power. They are like keys. It's like hitting the note in the middle. Yeah. When I was... Yeah, for a while I was sharing a room with Vidya Shuri here at Toreloka. Vidya Shuri is a flutist, yeah? And we were exploring together what it was to experience a faith response. Or what it was, what it is to experience a really true response to something. And she said it's like hitting the note in the middle when you play flute. Yeah, I think when you're playing an instrument, you can sometimes tell. You get the note sort of right, but you don't get it right in the middle. It hasn't got the purity of the sound that you're really looking for. When you have a faith response, you just hit the note in the middle. Yeah? When you choose the right words, you hit the note in the middle. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. Thank you. You You You [BLANK_AUDIO]
