Living on The Edge

Good, so welcome everybody. This talk I called Living on the Edge, and I guess you might take that in a number of different ways. We sometimes, we think of living on edge physically, either when we feel on edge, or you might think of like 'Oh, I'm living close to the edge,' like there's some element of danger involved, like, 'I'm gonna take up BASE jumping.' I'm not gonna take up BASE jumping. Or you might think of psychologically living close to the edge, maybe that actually things are a bit much and you're worried you might tip over into madness. And some of that might come into what I'm talking about, but what I'm talking about is the edge between being trapped, spiritually trapped, and being spiritually free. The edge of possibility, of allowing something new to emerge, something new to appear. The edge between doing the same thing over and over and over again and being fluid and supple and responding to circumstances. In different ways. I'm reminded of that old joke about the difference between the disciple and the master is that the disciple makes the same mistake over and over again, but the master makes a different mistake every time. Because they're learning, but, you know, they're still learning, so they have to learn again. A lot of what keeps us in that circle is picking and choosing, or I heard someone phrase it the other day as approving and disapproving, which I quite like. And it's not, um, it's not ordinary picking and choosing or ordinary approving or disapproving, or picking and choosing. You know, you came in today and you decided whether to have a hot drink or not, and if you decided to have a hot drink, what was the drink going to be? So we do need to pick and choose things, otherwise we'd just be stuck. It's about picking and choosing what we allow to be real for us or not. Or as you could say, it's about denial. Something appears, in our minds, "Oh, I don't want to think about that. I don't want to see that be part of myself." So we push it away. Something appears in the world, "Oh no, I'm not interested in that." We push it away or we skip over it. And every time we do that, we're limiting our choices, and it means that we tend to go around in circles repeating the same thing. Of course, it also, when we do that, it sets up a conflict, and that actually can lead to a feeling of being on edge. And you see this in, if you do a meditation practice, when something appears in your mind and you think, "Oh no, I really don't want to be thinking about that." And suddenly half your brain is thinking about it, and the other half of your brain is saying, "I shouldn't be thinking about this." And then you spend all the meditation practice wrestling with yourself. Which doesn't lead to feeling easy, it doesn't lead to having more energy, it doesn't lead to being more compassionate, it just leads to being tired out and exhausted from fighting yourself and a bit, ugh, whatever, I don't know what you call that feeling, but that sort of ugh. So the edge that I'm talking about is that place where it feels like, "Oh, maybe there's some— a different way of doing something here than what I used to do." And I read a paper of Donald Widger's recently about psychology, and he was actually talking about some other things, but some of the examples he used could be framed in this way. And one of the examples he used was the Buddha's life story. So when the Buddha was born, 2,500-odd years ago, his mum died in childbirth. Dhammavijja suggests that maybe the Buddha had some feelings of guilt around that, or certainly it would have created some sort of emotional turbulence for him. It certainly did for his father, who just put him in a cotton wool. And as the Buddha grew up, you know, he was surrounded by all the nicest things. His dad kept him insulated from the world. He made sure he'd got the best teachers, the best food, the best dancing girls. And you can, if you don't mind thinking of the Buddha as being human and having human tendencies, you can see maybe there's a movement towards greed in that, to trying to assuage his feelings by just taking in the good things in life. It's set up by his father and by the conditions around him. But actually, for most of his life, he doesn't. He's happy to keep trying that medicine out until he's a young adult. And then he goes into the world and he sees the four sights: the old person, the sick person, the dying, the dead body that's being— that he sees, and the holy person. And that shakes him up a bit. He realizes there's more to life. Than this medicine that he's been— this sensual medicine that he's been sipping at. So he goes off into the forest and finds a teacher, and he finds several teachers, and he practices ascetic practices, different yogas, physical yogas. Maybe, well, we know that he practiced starving himself right at the end of that period, but he probably practiced hatha yoga, you know, putting himself in positions, all those things that we associate with the sort of, you know, there may have been some flagellation, there may have been lying on hot coals, we don't know exactly, but that sort of extreme end of the opposite of greed, really trying to reduce, reduce, get rid of things, reduce the body, reduce the mind. And that didn't work either. And if you wanted to broadly classify that, you could say there's a mix, there's a sort of, um, there's obviously an impulse towards something holy, but there's maybe a bit of a hate impulse in there as well, because he goes right to the opposite extreme. And then once he receives some kindness from Sujata, when she feeds him after he's passed out from starving himself, one of these ascetic practices that leaves him faint at the side of the road, he goes and sits under the Bodhi tree. And when he's sitting under the Bodhi tree, he sees Mara, he sees the armies of Mara, which are associated with hate, these figures that come to him in the meditation. And he sees Mara's daughters, these very sensual visions that are also sent to him. And in this moment, he doesn't get trapped by either of those things. And in the sutra, it says actually the arrows turn into lotus flowers when he's sitting under the Bodhi tree. And a sort of modern psychological way of looking at that sequence might be to think that he was really looking into his own life, into the circumstance of his own life, and then into the circumstances of what it means to be human. Seeing his own bambú nature, seeing, "Oh yeah, actually I was drawn into greed at some times in my life, and that didn't work out for me." And, "Oh yeah, I was drawn into these other really harsh, hard practices, and that didn't work out for me either." and what other— we don't know what other parts of the Buddha there were, but that these things manifest, you know, from a psychological point of view, you might see those as things emerging from the unconscious. And he just was able to sit with it that evening and that night and remain still just noticing the greed, the hate, the delusion, and noticing something universal about that. Until the morning star rose and he touched the earth. And in that touching the earth, there's the possibility of something new, which he then went on to teach. But you could say that possibility of something new actually was just, for him in that moment, was just being still in the midst of those impulses and not getting caught up by them and not following them, not listening to the daughters of Mara, not getting frustrated by the armies of Mara. And I think in that moment the possibility of something new emerged for a couple of reasons. One is that he was able to be honest with himself about the human condition, about his own human condition. Another is, this is a bit of speculation, you know, we're looking back on something that happened a long time ago, but that in receiving that kindness from Sujata who fed him, actually it gave him a bit of faith in something that wasn't his own turbulent mind. Oh, look at me, here I am passed out with my hair falling out, my fingernails blackened from the starvation practices I've been doing, and my ribs showing, looking for all the world like somebody to be ignored, and this milkmaid comes and feeds me until I come round again. Oh, maybe there is a possibility of kindness in the world. Maybe there's a different way of doing things. Maybe I just feel a bit held in that moment in a way that I haven't I'd never really felt before, because my dad was a bit smothering and— and that little bit of kindness, I think, allowed him to sit and be still and to face the truth of his own life. So there's something about receiving kindness or having faith in a bigger process than your own turbulent mind. And there's also something about being able to be honest and really deeply looking at the circumstances of your ordinary life. And maybe even something about a movement towards looking beyond that. Oh, if this is how it is for me, 'How is it for other people?' And that's what allowed him to teach, that he saw it was about the human condition. It wasn't just about Siddhartha Gautama, it was about, 'Oh, this is how it is to suffer in the world.' So that's one example of that sort of movement towards possibility of something new. And the other two examples that were in the paper that Dhammavici used, I'll also use, were the two women whose stories are reasonably well known in Buddhism, who both lost infant children and then later in their life went on to become ordained as Buddhist nuns and become enlightened. And there's a similar sort of pattern, I think, in their stories. I'm just wondering whether to tell the whole of Patakara's story because it's quite long and involved, but maybe it's enough to say that it's very tragic. She, um, Rather than having an arranged marriage, she chose to take a partner from a lower caste and run away with him. And they had a baby, she became pregnant. And the custom in those days was when you're pregnant, you go back to your parents' house until, and you have the birth there in that sort of safe, surrounded by the maternal. Forces, I suppose. Anyway, her husband didn't want her to go home because he was a bit worried about the in-laws, because obviously this wasn't the arranged marriage, this was the person she'd run off with. So they left a little bit late, and she ended up giving birth on the side of the road, so they went home again. And actually, that, that was fine. A couple of years later, the same thing happened, and again they left a bit late, and a big storm whipped up in the night. When they were walking along the side of the road, her husband said, "I'm going to see if I can find some shelter," and he didn't come back. And when the sun came out the next day, she saw that he'd been bitten by a poisonous snake, and he didn't make it. Anyway, so she thought, "Well, I might as well just carry on and go home then." Oh, she'd given birth. The other part of the story is she'd given birth in the night again. So she'd suddenly got this newborn child and this toddler with her. They come to the river and it— there's been a flash flood. The river's very high. She ends up, the infant somehow ends up going in the river. The 2-year-old goes after to try and get the baby out and they both get swept away. And when she gets to her parents' village, she discovers that they've been killed by this same flood that swept through the village as well. And she's just, she goes crazy with grief. And it's said that she sort of walked around for years until she met the Buddha, who was able to meet her. And if this is the— hopefully I'm not getting the two stories confused. I've brought a little reference.

Yeah.

She came to where the Buddha was teaching in Jetta Grove, and the crowds tried to discourage her from coming because she looked so crazy and so mad. And the Buddha saw what was happening and invited her in. So there's that moment of kindness and of being received again. Even in this crazy state where everybody else wanted to turn her away, the Buddha was able to say, "No, no, no, come on in." 'Come and sit here and tell me your story.' And she did. And the Buddha, in the sutra it says the Buddha said to her, 'Come to your senses.' And I'm laughing because it sounds like, 'Oh, just pull yourself together.' And I'm sure it wasn't of that tone at all. And then he said, 'I can't, actually I can't take your loss away from you. I can't fix you.' but what he did do was deeply acknowledge the hurt. And in that moment, I think the way that Dharma Vidya put it was actually she was able to begin grieving. She stopped being mad and moved into the grieving process. And the madness is going around in circles. That's a really good definition of madness. Circles perhaps that are quite far away from reality. But that's what she was doing, running around the same stories in her head over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And we know that grief is a process, there's a rise and fall of different emotions that happen. But she just got caught in the first part, spinning around. But in being received and in also being able to face, or begin to face, some of the reality of what had happened, happened, she was able to start to move into something new, which was also difficult. Sometimes new things are difficult. But it took her out of that circle and into something a bit more fluid, and ultimately towards acceptance. And later on she became a leading figure in the nun's community, and you can imagine that actually she was probably able to transform that grief into a great capacity for sympathy and holding other people's wounds in the way that she was held by the Buddha. So again, there's those three elements of being received, looking at the circumstances really honestly, and a move toward, towards something bigger. Kisagotami also lost a child. I mean, you know, that wasn't unusual to lose infant children in India 2,500 years ago, and it's not unusual now still, but it's still an aw— that doesn't take away from the emotional impact of it just because it was something that happened more frequently than it happens Today. So Kiswetawi's child died, and it doesn't say at least in that book it doesn't say the circumstances, but what it does say is that she carried the child with her for a long time after he died, or she died, until somebody said, "Oh, you should go and see the Buddha. He might be able to help you." So again, there's that moment of being received. "Oh yeah, actually, let me listen to you. What's going on? Okay, you're really upset about this." 'Yeah, that does sound tough. The Buddha's in town today, why don't you go and see him?' And some of you would have heard this, this is when the Buddha says to Kisagotami, 'Maybe there's something I can do for you,' because she wants him to bring her child back. 'But first of all, can you collect a mustard seed from the house of somebody who hasn't experienced death, who hasn't had a relative die. And so she goes to every house in the village, and of course everybody knows somebody who's died, so she isn't able to find the mustard seed. And that's how she is able to move towards this universal sense of loss rather than this deeply personal sense. So actually for her, the move, the looking to something bigger sort of almost happens earlier for her, and that's what allows her then to see her own circumstances in a different way and start to grieve again, because she sees it out in a context of, "Oh yeah, this isn't just me, actually." And later on she becomes ordained and she becomes enlightened. And her en— this is a sort of aside really, but her enlightenment experience is quite interesting. She spills some water on very dry earth and she notices that the rivulets of water are all different lengths before they seep into the cracks in the earth. For her, that just shows her something about impermanence. So some lives are this long before they sink into the earth, and some lives are this long, and that's just, that's just how the world's set up. And seeing that image of this water that's been spilt, sort of release, is the final moment of release that allows her to completely enter this really big context of 'Ah, this is what the world is like. This is samsara. This is the world of suffering. And here I am in the middle of the Buddhist sangha being held and loved, and both of those things are true together.' And she then goes on to be, you know, a teacher in the nuns' community. So again, there's the these similar elements connecting with the bigger picture, being received or receiving kindness or being received, and looking into the circumstances of your own life. And each of those, and even the Buddha, both of those women and even the Buddha might say that the times they learned the most were the times when they were suffering the most. I remember reading, oh, who was I, who was it, this is ages ago. It was an account of somebody whose teacher was very ill and potentially dying and they were really upset and whether their friend told them this or another disciple or whether they remembered something their teacher had said, but it was about 'Oh, when are the times that you've learnt the most?' And her answer was, 'Oh, actually, the times when I've suffered the most.' But it isn't just suffering on its own that acts as a teacher, because suffering sent paticāra into circles, and it sent the Buddha into sensual pleasures and then into ascetic practices, and it sent Kisagotāmī into wandering the streets with a dead child on her chest. So suffering on its own isn't necessarily a good teacher. Don't just throw yourself into the deep end of the swimming pool. Or if you do that, don't let it be the only thing that you do. Suffering, when you've got some faith, can be a good teacher. Or suffering when you can also see the big picture can be a good teacher. Because it allows you to look at it with a different eye, a little bit of a more tender eye. Maybe not while it's happening, maybe it's later. But it's those two things together And actually, we don't need to create any more. Those are really dramatic stories. We don't need to create, we don't need to force ourselves into those sorts of situations. We've got enough wounds already that we can learn from. But we only learn from them when we feel received. Being as pure land Buddhists, being held by the Buddha, receiving the loving kindness of Amitabha gives us a certain sort of freedom. It takes away, or begins to take away, a sort of existential anxiety. And the more that we're able to receive that loving kindness and feel a bit settled in our faith, the easier it is to look at the circumstances of our life, whether that's big suffering or whether it's just small tangles that we don't quite know what to do with. And ultimately move to a position of taking responsibility for our life, which doesn't mean that we think we've created these conditions necessarily, although sometimes we will have contributed to them. It just means a deep acceptance of, "Oh, so this is what's here at the moment." Not picking and choosing, not approving or disapproving of what presents itself. Okay, this is happening. Can I do anything about it? Do I just need to sit with it? What choices can I make? And the more faith we've got, the closer we can get to that edge of the possibility of making a new choice. And doing something different in that moment. Hello, darling. Good girl. Satya Robyn, say anything else? Well, I guess it's worth saying that when we're going around in circles, there is something psychologically comfortable about that, because even though we're maybe gonna make the same mistakes over and over again, at least we know what the mistakes are. We go, "Oh yeah, this is familiar. Okay, I can handle this." Whereas when we move into the possibility of something new occurring, we don't know what the next mistake might be, and that can be a bit more anxiety-provoking. So that's part of what keeps us from making that transition. And that's why Being rooted in faith or being rooted in being received by a community or by a Buddha allows us to start to make that transition. Earlier this week there was, I sent out some course materials to a group of people that I'm working with online, and I'd put a sort of lightly framed message at the beginning saying, "If you find this material is a bit of a stretch, then just don't worry about it. But if you feel like you want to, it's just a little bit of a stretch, or it feels okay, then go ahead and really dive in." And actually, Some people really found it was completely outside their comfort zone, or they were worried that other people would find it outside of their comfort zone, and that the light words that I'd put around the exercise didn't feel like enough permission not to go into that place, or they were worried that it wouldn't feel like enough permission for other people to go into that place. In the past, if I'd received that sort of feedback, I'd have been up all night thinking about it, flipping between either taking complete responsibility for it, like, "I've done something awful, I shouldn't have done it," or projecting it all out onto the other person, "Oh, they obviously don't know what they're talking about, it's all their stuff, what I've done is perfectly fine." And maybe even that process would have lasted for days. But actually what happened was, there was a disturbance and I did sort of wobble around those positions. But because of my experience of faith, because I feel received by the Buddha and by a community, I was able to go, "Oh, well maybe there is something here," and look at the circumstances of what had happened. And actually I thought, "Yeah, they probably should have— I could have framed that in a clearer way. I could have given some better signaling around it." And that felt edgy because I didn't know how the person— people would respond when I said, "Actually, I think you're right." I should, I could have done that differently, and I've taken that feedback on board. And they responded very graciously. But there was that moment of, "Oh, I'm going into something new here. What's this going to be like?" And it was faith that carried me from the circle into the, across the edge of possibility into something new. Faith which allowed me to look at what had actually happened. And when you look at what's actually happened and you feel a bit supported, like, oh yeah, the Buddha's also having a look alongside me, usually some response to those conditions presents itself. Sometimes we have to wait longer, sometimes we have to wait shorter, but usually some response presents itself. Sometimes we're not brave enough to follow through with that impulse that comes up, but often we know what the impulse is. So again, it's those things together— looking at the circumstances, having faith. And for me, I guess the bigger picture that I'd got in mind as well, or being drawn to the bigger picture in that moment, was something about 'Oh yeah, actually this is how it is to be human. We don't get things right all the time, even when we've got all this experience behind us.' And I've, you know, I see that in my teachers. Oh, they don't always get things right. And sometimes people do get hurt when we try and do things even with the best intentions, because we're a bit clumsy. Oh, and that made me feel a bit sad. But it also freed me from the particular circle that I was in, that was a self-protective circle. And so there was a bit of sadness for a while, and then the sadness left and I was free to go on to something else, or to go around a different circle, as the case may be. So I think, I think that's probably my talk on living on the edge. Having a bit of faith or being received, looking into the circumstances of your own life and also a movement towards something more universal about how it is to be human. In this world, about what the big picture looks like. And maybe you could even say having some faith in the big picture, but that might be another talk. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.