[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, so much for the way in which we regard religion, for the way in which we've come, almost insensibly, to think nowadays in the West of religion, including Buddhism, in terms of experience. Now, what about the way in which we regard life itself? In other words, the organized life of the human community, social life in the very widest sense, along with its various aspects, political, economic, cultural, domestic. How do we feel about this? Now, often it must be confessed that when it comes to life, many of us don't feel very much at all. If we feel anything, when it comes to life, if you like life with a capital L, life in general, or just life, we feel confused. We feel bewildered. Life is so very complicated, or has become so very complicated. And I'm sure many of us feel at times as though we had become caught up in a vast system, even a vast machine, which had become far too big and far too complex for us to understand or to do anything at all about. All sorts of things happen all over the world, all the time. We, it seems, have very little, sometimes absolutely no control over them, whatever. But there they are happening all the time, all over the world. And with no control over them, usually, almost always, even when they most deeply and most intimately affect our own lives. In respect of those events, we are powerless. We are impotent. We can do nothing. We're helpless. The jargon orders, it were, of events, of world events, global events, were rolls on. We can do nothing, even if the wheels are crushing us, crushing the life out of us, we can do nothing. And very often, that is the sort of feeling that we have about life, that we can do nothing. So we feel helpless, impotent, frustrated. At the same time, very often, for many of us, life seems a very dull and very routine affair. We go along. We rumble along, or we creep along. Tracks, which have been laid down for us, not by ourselves, but for us, before even we were born. Perhaps, before even our parents were born. You know the round? School. You didn't ask to be sent to school, usually? School. Well, when school ends, well, what? Work. One, four, more, another. One level, one another. Then, inevitably, marriage. And as inevitably, for practically everybody after marriage, mortgage. And not quite so inevitably nowadays, of course, for reasons I need not mention, children. And of course, still more work. Perhaps promotion, if you're lucky, which of us means more work again. And then retirement, redundancy and death. And this, of course, is what life, ordinary life, social life, human life, means for most people. Certainly for most men. I think the women sometimes at least have it a little easier than that. And apparently, was a protest or right accepted. And apparently, there's no alternative. The wheel has caught you. The wheel has got you in its grip. And it rolls on and on. I saw today, this just turns into my mind, a very striking picture. A painting, in the Burn Jones exhibition, I think it was called the Wheel of Fortune. I think it should have been called the Wheel of Misfortune. A vast wheel turns by a rather stern looking female figure, with helpless male figures strapped onto it. It was just turning and turning inevitably and inexorably. So this is what life means, for most people. For men and let us say, for women too, usually, unfortunately. Now, I've mentioned work. Work in the sense of gainful employment. And it's quite a thought that we devote more time and more energy to work in this sense than to any other single activity in our lives. Whether of course, one exception, sleep. And for only too many people, work is dull, repetitious, exhausting and boring. There's no joy in it for them, for the people who do the work. No sense of fulfillment, no feeling or creativity. And no real outlet for their energies. People sometimes feel as it were bursting with energy, but they can't put it into their work. Their energy is not appropriate to their work, it's not needed in that work. So there's no outlet very often for their energies. So what is the result of all this? What is the result of this sort of experience of life? The result is the overall, the overriding effect is that people, too many of them these days, feel frustrated, they feel impotent, and they feel deep down, very resentful. But again, only too often, they are not in a position to express that resentment. The expression of a resentment only too often is a luxury that the worker cannot afford. Only too often, of course, there's no one around anyway, these vast, impersonal concerns, to vent it upon. Can't express the resentment without, and sometimes this does happen, engaging in criminal activities, criminal violence as a small minority of people sometimes do. So gradually, what happens is, gradually, we lose contact with our feelings, and when we lose contact with our feelings, we lose contact with ourselves. And when we lose contact with ourselves, we lose contact with life. We become dull, tired, mechanical, dead. We become walking corpses, zombies. And we all know this very well. We've seen it quite often enough. We've seen it at least something of it, to some extent, in our own selves, from time to time, and also in others. And that great point, that great visionary William Blake, saw it nearly 200 years ago, at the time of the grimy dawn of the industrial revolution in this country. And he says, "I wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe. And we can see those same marks on the faces of the people in the tube as we go home tonight. Marks of weakness, marks of woe, if we look. And the only difference is, 200 years after Blake, the only difference is that those marks are now, if anything, graven, deep. So the situation, we may say, is bad enough. But of course, we are human. We do have energy deep down. However perverted, whoever distorted, and we don't always take things lying down. And quite rightly so. We try to do something about the situation, something about our lives. So we look about us for something to relieve the border. To relieve the darkness, the sense of frustration, we look around us for something that will give us a bit of excitement, a bit of amusement at least, a bit of a thrill, something that will make us feel more alive, something that will take us out of ourselves. Something that will help us forget everything, at least for a while. So in this way, we turn to food, glorious food, we turn to sex, we turn to alcohol and other drugs. We turn, of course, to that famous institution, the TV sector. And we turn, in the case of some people, to the more expensive dress, or the bigger and better car, or the more powerful and noisy motorbike. And we turn even, almost in desperation, to spectate our sports, including blood sports. I heard a woman on the radio saying that she lived for hair-causing. She loved to see it. It was the only thing in life she said worth living for. Life would be nothing without hair-causing, she said. And she said it over the radio. And in the same way, we turn to the passive. And I underline this, I emphasize this, the passive enjoyment of music and art. And we may even, as I suggested earlier on, turn to sadism and to violence. Turn to all sorts of things. We turn, in our search for relief from our boredom, to all sorts of things, from the sublime to the sordid, from Beethoven to Bingham. Now, some of the things I've mentioned, of course, are not bad in themselves. It's the use that we make of them, which is bad. It's the use that we make of them that could be described probably as neurotic, or in more traditional Buddhist terminology, as unskillful. And because the use we make of these things, even those things which are not intrinsically so, because the use that we make of them is neurotic, is unskillful, they don't really work as reliefs for boredom and frustration. So in the long run, what happens? We feel more empty, more frustrated, and more drained, more exhausted than ever. Now, there's no need to insist on this point. There's no need to flog the horse, it will. In one form or another, to a greater or lesser extent, what I've been describing is a familiar phenomenon of modern life, of all of our lives, to some extent. So the way in which we regard life is rather ambivalent. On the one hand, we find life, we feel life, oppressive, burdensome, frustrating, stultifying. But on the other, we expect from life something that will alleviate that frustration. Expect something compensatory, expect an experience in the modern sense of this term. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC]
