Living in Impossible Times

Namaste.

Welcome everybody to the talky bit of our mindful day. Satya Robyn gave a good sort of primer in practice this morning, but not everyone was here then, so I will I'll cover a little bit of the same ground. I called the talk Living— initially I wanted to call it Living Well in Impossible Times, and I think in some of the descriptions it still says Living Well in Impossible Times. And then as the talk approached, I felt that was very fraudulent because I didn't feel like I was living particularly well as more and more bad news came out. Satya Robyn in practice this morning mentioned the IPCC assessment report. I just wanted to read some of the highlights, which are actually from a Reuters news story that summarized it. So they said key takeaways from the report include widespread damage is already occurring We're running out of— and we're running out of time. The report itself is substantial, highlighting the current and future effects of the climate crisis and how the crisis affects the Global South much more than the minority wealthy countries. And the report concludes any further delay to action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future. For all. So very serious headlines in the middle of a week where our attention has been on the suffering in Ukraine and how moved we've been. As Satya said, moved for the people of Ukraine and for ourselves, fear for ourselves. I've also been very aware of peace activists in Russia and how they're being arrested and taken off the streets, and, um, of ordinary Russian people whose lives are being made much more difficult by all the economic sanctions that have been placed on them, who haven't chosen to take part in this. And my mood was heading down through the first half of this week, and I found that I was tired and exhausted and self-soothing in all sorts of different ways. Hello, darling. This is a very healthy form of self-soothing. You can't see on the video, but a little dog has appeared to come and say hello to me. This is Mrs. P, one of the— not one of our dogs, but one of the other dogs that lives here. She's been especially friendly this morning because I haven't seen her for a very long time. Yeah, so some forms of self-soothing are healthier than others, or we can say some have more— are more impactful than others. Like reading lots of trashy novels is a fairly innocuous form of self-soothing. It just eats up time, whereas eating too much birthday cake has other slightly more uncomfortable consequences, and so on. And there's a whole spectrum of different ways that we self-soothe in, and I think, you know, that's okay. So when I was feeling In the middle of feeling quite fraudulent about describing this talk as Living Well in Impossible Times, I was listening to a talk by Osho Zenju Earthling Manuel, and she described Buddhist practice as not trying to be kind, trying to be calmer, trying to be better, but simply trying to be. I thought, okay, well, I can manage that. I can exist in these times as myself. On Monday night, Satya Robyn and I were at samba band rehearsal. And I was really tired. And I was just hoping when I got there that some of the rhythms and claves would come back to me because I couldn't remember anything at all that we'd done in any of the previous weeks. But I thought, oh, maybe when I've got the surdu, the big drum in my hands, my body will just know what to do. And it basically didn't. And Sam kept coming over and showing me on the drum and correcting me in very gentle and wise ways. Ways. And I thought, well, I don't know how to be a good samba player this evening. I don't know how to be a good surdu player, but I can be a really tired samba player who doesn't know what they're doing. I can do that really well. And somehow I just thought, well, that's, that's what I'm going to do tonight. I'll be an exhausted beginner.. And I just settled into that. And most, apart from one moment where I suddenly froze and thought, oh, this is really bad, mostly I was able to settle into being a not very good samba player who was very tired. And I think there's a bit of a clue in that into how we live with much bigger catastrophes and suffering. That the challenge maybe is to let go of trying to be anything in particular and really land in how we are right now in this moment. How am I doing with all of this that's happening and unfolding in the world? How am I doing right now? And that 'how am I doing' is an invitation for deep listening, deep listening to ourselves, really noticing what am I carrying right now, what's my feeling, what emotions are around, what thoughts am I telling myself. Where am I carrying tension or movement in my body? And that means creating the space to ask that question, and ideally it means cultivating at least some loving kindness to bring with that question. So we're just— we're not just being coldly analytical. And we're not trying to fix ourselves, just in the way that we might sit with a friend who's suffering, sitting with ourselves and really being curious. So what's it like to be me right now? Sometimes we can manage that for ourselves, sometimes we can't. Luckily other people exist, so we can find other people to share that experience with. How are you doing? How am I doing? And not only that, we can also bring ourselves into relationship with the Buddha, trusting that there is a loving kindness that exists beyond our own minds, beyond our own self. That we can be accepted by that just as we are. As Inagaki's haiku says, just as we are, really just as we are. Because it's kind of, to people who have been trained in performing to please others or cut off parts of ourselves to make ourselves acceptable, which we all have to some degree, It can be quite revelatory to think, really, just as I am? Even these really kind of mean-spirited bits, can I bring those here? Can I acknowledge those? And coming into relationship with the Buddha, who accepts us completely just as we are, begins to undermine our own judgment and critical thoughts about ourselves and allows us to notice, oh, this is here, oh, this is how I'm doing today. A kind of softness appears and we can rest and relax in that. So I'll briefly mention the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha. That's how I say it. You see, he asked me yesterday, do you say dukkha or dukkha? I said, now you've asked me, I can't tell you the answer to that because both of them are stuck in my head. Today I can find out. Something going past the window that Mrs. P doesn't like. That's— well, yeah, I'm about to. Thank you. And dukkha is a word that is usually translated as suffering. Or discontent. And the Buddha defined it specifically as birth, old age, sickness, death, not having what you want, being separated from people that you love, being associated with people that you don't like. All the things, all the kind of crisis points. That's one way you might think of it. Spiritual danger, I've heard it described as the moment where you might tip over into being unskillful because something has upset you. So that's a great example. Something goes by the window that you don't like and you start growling. That's a reaction to dukkha. And the reaction is called samudaya, what rises up. We have some emotional response. Something happens in the world and we feel something. So that's the first two noble truths of the Buddha's teaching. Something happens and we feel something. The third truth, nirodha, containment or cooling or easing. The possibility that the heat of our initial reaction can be softened or maybe redirected. That we can choose to do something different in that moment, and that if we're able to do that, it leads to Magga, the Eightfold Path, the description of how enlightened beings behave. So there's something that happens in that samadhiya space. Well, how do we go from growling to having a compassionate reaction? And that is where the deep listening comes in. Because if we can really bring that spirit of self-acceptance— oh, this is the reaction I'm having right now— it creates some opportunity. It's here, but I don't have to be controlled by it. I'm angry. It's important to recognize that I'm angry with what's happening in the world.. And if I can really see that and acknowledge it and let it know, of course you're here, angry reaction. It makes complete sense. You don't want things to be as bad as they are. That creates some space when I bring that non-judgmental attitude to it, and it gives me some options. Okay, I'm angry. The anger begins to soften in being recognized. And that leaves some energy for acting. What am I going to do? How can I respond? Satya Robyn went to Glasgow before Christmas for the COP26 conference. Some of the people who are joining us on Zoom were there as well, sitting in vigil, joining that march with tens of thousands of other people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Satya Robyn, I'm looking at you, Jamy, as if you know the answer to how many people on the march. Jamy says a lot, roughly quite a few. Yeah, so there was all this, this energy around COP26, the big climate conference. We did lots of things, we witnessed, and very little progress was made. Some progress was made, but very little, particularly around the issue of climate justice and making reparations to, you know, putting money into a fund essentially to help countries in the Global South who are going to feel the effects of this, having contributed the least to it. I was reading about an island nation the other day which I'd never heard of before. Kiribati, I think, is the name. Forgive me if I get that wrong, so I've only read it once or twice. They're very low-lying islands. The sea level has already risen a few inches. They're there, and thousands of people have already left because either there's nowhere to live or they're anticipating that there will be nowhere to live. If we stop using fossil fuels right now, maybe there will be 1 or 2 feet of sea level rises, which would mean probably most of the people would have to leave. If we don't, it could be 2 feet or 4 feet by 2100, which is Yeah, you know, which will take away the spaces that people live in and the animals live in. So of course they say to the Global North and the minority wealthy countries, can we have some help please? And little bits are forthcoming, but not much really. So I came away from that conference feeling very powerless and feeling some of the despair that Satya mentioned this morning. And I went through a process that lasted at least weeks and probably months, really, of continually coming back and checking in and asking that question, how am I doing? What am I feeling right now? Sometimes doing it on my own, sometimes doing it in groups like in the Exile Buddhist check-in circles. And the more that I was able to ask that, and the more that I was able to trust that I was held by this field of loving kindness that is the Buddha, there was a kind of settling in the way that I settled in samba on Monday evening, settling into, oh, I am a being of very limited power in lots of ways. And things are very troublesome, and I really don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how much more suffering there will be in the world. And as I settled into that, space appeared in between and around those feelings. They began to soften, and in that softening, in that calming and cooling, which is the Third Noble Truth, something else began to appear, my own sense of loving kindness and compassion. And maybe I'll just talk through, maybe I'll just name specifically some of those emotions. I think initially there was a kind of numbness, actually a frozenness. And then beginning to recognize some of those powerless feelings that I talked about. And I guess powerlessness itself isn't a feeling, it's a judgment. I'm powerlessness, I'm powerless. The feeling is fear that goes along with it. It's a fear of what's to come. It's a fear for my own safety. And in recognizing the fear, that puts me in touch with a kind of feeling of being heartbroken. That's another layer, maybe one of the bottom layers, the deep sense of sadness. And as I recognize that heartbreak and that sadness and drop beneath that space for loving kindness appears. And then in that space, the possibility of acting appears. And it is the possibility of acting not to try and change anything in particular. There can actually be a great liberation in hopelessness because it really frees you to do what is right without worrying about how it's going to make the world a better place, and you just start doing what is right occasionally, maybe for its own sake, and trusting that even if the world collapses, there is something spiritually valuable, emotionally valuable for myself and for the people around me and for the whole world in taking actions that are congruent with that sense of compassion, with that sense of loving kindness. And those actions include sitting in town, as we're going to— some of us might do later on. We do that on a Tuesday lunchtime as well, and most people don't notice that we're there. Maybe they just glance up. Quite a few people put their thumbs up or beep their horns. Occasionally somebody shouts, I think just twice. That's— yeah, obscenities. Yeah, just twice that's happened actually in all the weeks that we've been doing it. But holding a space very visibly and saying, this is happening and I'm here in the middle of it, grounded and centered, more or less. It's very powerful. Or it might be like we were on Saturday outside Barclays Bank. Satya dressed as a cleaning, a cleaner with a fluorescent green headscarf and badly applied lipstick, dancing around to music and washing the side of Barclays Bank. And I was there dressed as an oil executive with a big carton on my head, supposedly an oil carton. Or it might be taking care of something very personally, taking care of a little bit of the garden, encouraging wildlife. And my experience is that the more I take those actions, actually it feeds back into that process of allowing me to exist in a way that feels okay. It increases my sense of faith, I suppose. It, it feeds back into the space around the difficult emotions. I've brought along a story from ancient China that I've— that I enjoy. It's used in koan practice. Which has its own rituals around it, but I'm just going to use it as a story. Story is perhaps— it is perhaps too grand a word for it— a moment where two people meet. I'll read it and then I'll talk about it, because if I don't talk about it— well, I suppose in koan practice you would just read it and then you eventually, you take it into your meditation practice and you find the meaning within yourself. But because this is a talk I'm going to point to a little bit of the meaning that it has for me. Yun Yan asked Dao Wu, how does the great Bodhisattva of Compassion use so many hands and eyes? So Kuan Yin, the great Bodhisattva of Compassion, is in the tanka to the right of the mirror, has I think 8 arms, I can't quite see, or 4 arms, but is often depicted as having 10,000 arms. And in each hand, there's a an eyeball, and her name means one who hears the cry of the world. And she responds to suffering by going and doing something about it. So Yunyuan asked Dao Wu, how does that bodhisattva use all those hands with their eyes in them? Dao Wu said, it's just like a person in the middle of the night reaching in search of a pillow. Yunyuan says, oh, I understand, got it, thanks. Dao says, really? How do you understand it? And Yunyan— they're testing each other all the time. Yunyan says, all over the body, all over our bodies, our hands and eyes. Dao said, well, what you said is— what you said is all right, it's pretty good, but it's only about 80%. And Yunyan said, I'm like this, elder brother. How do you— but how do you understand it? And Dao says, throughout the body are hands and eyes. So we'll take the two bits separately. It's just like a person in the middle of the night reaching in search of a pillow. You're not really awake. This happened to me last night, actually. But you notice, oh, my head's just lying on the mattress. 'Now I'm comfortable again.' You do it instinctively and without thinking. It's the right thing to do in the moment. It's not calculated. It's just a moment of being kind to yourself, or maybe fluffing up somebody else's pillow, being kind to somebody else. So this is the compassion of the Buddhas. They don't usually sit there and work out what the right thing to do is in any given moment, although of course There is a place for planning and thinking, and there are countless lists of ethics that you can apply in lots of different situations in the Buddhist canon. But the heart practice is, I'm moved, here is love, I'm going to act just like that without thinking about it. I see your glass is empty, I'll pass you the water jug. And Union says, all over the body are hands and eyes. Hello again. So he's sort of— he's nearly got it. He's still slightly in that— what it's hinting at is he's still slightly in that mode of calculation. They're covering me, and here I am, set slightly separate for them, using my hands and my eyes. And the senior monk says, no, It's in your body when you practice for a very long time, and occasionally at other times as well, but it helps. Practice helps. It's in your body. It's not about thinking. It's— and maybe you don't even notice that you've done it until somebody points it out later on. You just make the offering and forget about it. And that's something that happens with your whole being. Not with your eye, not with your mind. So I really like that as an illustration of the kind of way that we are moved to act. That's the sort of culmination of that process that's supported by all kinds of different Buddhist practice of how am I doing? There was one more thing that I wanted to mention. I'm— I don't know, it's not exactly a conclusion, and maybe it doesn't even fit into the sort of narrative of the talk. You could think of it as a sidebar perhaps, but something else I heard from Osho Zenju, she was talking about awakening. And really what she means by awakening is coming into an embodied experience of vastness. That's the word that she used. Lots of Buddhists talk about interconnectedness, this sense of how deeply embedded in the world we are. One of the gifts, one of— and for her, perhaps the most important gift of practice is awakening to vastness. And she said that might not be a moment of clarity. It might actually be confusing because the world— well, that's what she said, I'm adding— because the world is so complex. There's so many things in us and in the world, and how could we not be overwhelmed by the complexity of of that when we awaken to vastness sometimes. And I guess I'm naming that because something about the flow of the Four Noble Truths and even this process I've described of getting to know yourself with the Buddha's support, with people's support, then moving to action, there's a kind of neatness to that. But life is bigger and more complex, and we don't always move through these stages in a very neat way. So it reminds me of that. And it also reminds me of that initial experience of being tired at the samba band. There was something when I deeply accepted that that was true, there was also a settling into vastness. Here I am, a being that I don't completely understand. I know I'm tired and I know some of the reasons I'm tired in a space, in a world that is so much bigger than me. And there's just something really profound about that. And I think, I think that experience of vastness and having some sense of, oh, this is meaningful. It's meaningful to be myself. To really be myself here in some way actually supported the process of relaxing and undermining those critical parts and allowing me to be more deeply myself. And that's not the fully worked out bit of the talk, but I wanted to share it anyway. It feels— that feels important to my practice right now, that idea of vastness and clarity and confusion. So I'll pause there. Well, I'll finish there, and maybe I just invite you to tune into yourself for a moment and notice how you're doing right now. Noticing how is my body doing? Noticing any feelings or emotions that are here right now. Noticing anything that you're telling yourself, and if you can, bring a spirit of loving kindness to that noticing. And if that's not where you are right now, trusting or experimenting with trusting that the Buddha is offering that spirit, that kind of attention, even if we can't manage it for ourselves. Namami Tabu. So there's a little bit of time now if there's any questions. Or anything that people would like to share. You, if you raise, uh, you can raise a hand if you're on Zoom. I'll keep an eye on that. Or if you're in the room, you can also raise a hand and I'll keep an eye on that as well. Shirley, do you want to unmute?

I was hoping somebody else would say something first.

We just enjoy listening to the birdsong.

I just want to thank you so much, Casper, for that. Talk, which just sort of resonates so much with what has been happening within me, that the suffering of just seems overwhelming. And this sense of— I see it as be— I like to see it as beyond hope rather than hopeless. And what you said about losing hope because there isn't. I mean, the Buddha says suffering is endemic, and it's a truth, it's a noble truth, that there's suffering in the world. And those were the heavenly messengers that woke the Buddha up, that there's no satisfaction here. And this is what I'm sort of not grappling with, it's just sort of what's— but the fact that, you know, really that I think when you said that this, when you let go of hope and just act in the way, or just trust in the fact that you try and be as kind as you can, that this has some value. We don't hold on to expectations. It's what's in our, it's having, it's coming from this heart space, trying to cultivate this heart space. Which, um, and I want to thank you for your honesty and, you know, this acknowledging of our frailty and our weakness and actually making friends with that. And it's just very much along the lines about how I've been, what I've been working with, but you've put it together so beautifully, and, um, I'm not nearly there yet, but It's— I just want to really, really thank you for, for your talk, uh, and for what you said. And just as I say, just trusting in the process and trying just to be kind and gentle there in the moment. And maybe that's the best we can do. And maybe that is the very best that anybody can do. I just wanted to share that and really thank you and this community, uh, from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you, Shirley. Lovely to hear from you. Nice to see you this morning as well. Well, thank you everybody. Thanks for joining us on Zoom. Thanks for joining us in person. Um, the rest of the things we're doing today are outside, so you can't join us for those on Zoom, I'm afraid. But, um, Lovely to have you here for this bit. Namaste.