No Blame: Dharma Talk

Welcome everybody in person, welcome on Zoom, welcome if you're watching on YouTube later. This talk is in a series of talks about the liturgy that we recite in practice. So we've already had talks on the refuges, the precepts, and the bodhisattva vows, which are all on YouTube. This is the first in a series of 3 talks about the 3 active virtues, no blame, Be kind, love, everything that we said earlier in practice. They come from Terry Keenan. Terence Keenan was a Zen monk that Satya was friends with, and those were three— you could call them precepts if you like— that he held close to his heart. He writes about them in his book Saint Nadine in the Wintertime, and he's got very good thoughts in there, but I'll be sharing my thoughts about no blame, how I found it helpful to work with this idea of no blame myself. So I would encourage you to go and see what Terry says about it in his book as well. I will just say that it was given to him by his teacher at the time, Roko Ni Osho, uh, who's also known as Reverend Roko Sherry Chaat from Syracuse Zen Center. And when Terry died a few years ago, and his wife died a few years before that, but going back many years when their marriage was more tumultuous, their Zen teacher said, I want you to practice, both of you, no blame. That's the practice that she gave them. So that's where it came from. And, um, in the book Terry says, we deny nothing, we give ourselves away without ceasing, and we admit everything into our hearts. Hearts that are, as my daughter once said when she was quite small, so big. Why is no blame one of the precepts that we hold here?

No what?

Blame. Blame is far away from enlightenment. No blame is close to enlightenment. Compassion, understanding, seeing things clearly. These are the qualities of a Buddha. A Buddha doesn't blame. But maybe it's helpful to say what I'm thinking of when I say the word blame. For me, blame is, uh, it's a contraction, it's a narrowing. There's sharpness in it, usually, often some heat. Or anger, some meanness, some criticism of ourselves or somebody else in the kind of harsh way, in a harsh way. And it's also pretty unskillful, like it rarely works. It works a little bit, actually, if you blame somebody and you are vocal about that. Sometimes they will stop what they're doing in the moment, and sometimes it stops us from what we're doing in the moment. Oh, I'm such a terrible person. But we lose something of ourselves when we do that. We cut a piece of ourselves off every time we fall into blaming, and we increase the amount of shame in our system or in somebody else's system when we're blaming in that way. And I also have been reflecting, you know, when I use the word contraction, there is a— there's an embodied feeling that blame has, which is of a tightening and a tensioning in the body and also the mind as well. Some of you who are in my practice the other day know I've been kind of reflecting on this a little bit recently, the difference between a kind of embodied openness, an open awareness, and an awareness that is closed down and narrow and sharp, and that the, the body sort of sharpens and hardens in that. And in that, there's echoes of Uchiyama Roshi, a Zen teacher from the last century, who talked about enlightenment as the open hand of thought rather than the closed hand of thought. So that speaks to something of the difference between blame and no blame in the form of a gesture. Maybe it's helpful for a moment to think about the purpose that blame serves in our inner world, or the purpose that it thinks it serves. So I'm drawing on IFS here, Internal Family Systems. Usually when we investigate the motivation of blame what it wants for us. Uh, so let's start with self-blame. When we investigate the notion, the motivation of self-blame in our own systems, usually what it wants for us is to avoid being shamed. Ironically, because when we speak to ourselves in that way, we often then feel shamed, uh, inadvertently. And yet it's an attempt to avoid shame. If I blame myself, if I get in first and feel bad first, and maybe particularly if I demonstrate feeling bad, I won't be shamed by the outside world. That's one way it can help. It, it tries to help us. If people see that I'm really castigating myself, they're more likely to be sympathetic. I'm I'm avoiding the harsh judgment of others, but I'm judging myself harshly. So it's, it's kind of a— doesn't really work. The other intention it can have is the other way it can help us avoid shame is by trying to stop us doing it again. If I make you feel bad enough, you won't do the thing that you did in the first place that led to this blame and shame cycle. And as I said earlier, like, that can work a little bit. It, but it does increase the amount of shame and it takes us further away from enlightenment. It increases the kind of tightening, the closedness, the shutdownness in our system. It's an attempt to avoid feeling shame, but usually it doesn't work. In a moment I'll say why it thinks it works. But let's look at the same thing, but blaming others. If I'm blaming others, what's the motivation of a part that wants to blame others? Usually it's, if I can get you to change, then the thing, the thing that I'm upset about won't happen again. And usually the reason I want that to happen is because I've been triggered in some way by something that you've done. Maybe, uh, maybe it's a project we're both working on, and I think the mistake you've made is going to reflect badly on me, so I need to stop you from doing it again. Maybe I'm just really stressed out and I can't bear the idea of things not going to plan because my capacity is like 1%, so I need to be really in control of everything, so I'm going to try and shut you down and stop you making the mistake again. So although I'm trying to change you, actually it's still about making me feel better so that my system is less stressed. And of course it doesn't work completely when I blame somebody in that harsh way, um, introduces more stress and tightness into the system. And although maybe in the moment things are slightly more likely to stay on track in the short term, but in the long term resentment can build up. And certainly when I'm engaging in blaming, I'm not reducing my own stress, I'm increasing my own stress. So I can quite easily get caught in a cycle of making things worse for myself and others despite the fact I'm actually trying to solve that problem. I'm just using the wrong tool over and over again when I fall into blaming. And we lean on blame. I think we lean on blame because we live in an authoritarian society, in a society that has some authoritarian tendencies, that has some power-over tendencies. Whether you're at work or maybe more powerfully as a child at school or as a child at home. Um, what we learned was when somebody gets angry with me and is blaming me for something, I can stop that really unpleasant experience by, by changing my behavior, by making myself smaller, um, by being a good child or a good person or a good worker. And there is a loss in that as well, to become a good child. I remember being told I was a good boy quite often when I was little, but that was because I was too scared to be myself most of the time. So I was, I was a good boy, but I wasn't joyful. I was playful in a very limited set of contexts. I wasn't necessarily happy, but it suited some of the adults around me, made their lives easier. I became smaller, I became further away from enlightenment, further away from being myself, and my suffering increased. But It's what, what you notice, what you unconsciously notice in that moment is, oh, somebody was upset with me and I changed. And parts of us can learn, oh, if I want people to change in the future, I can do the same thing. I can be upset with them and try that out. Um, and the part that thinks that isn't aware of the loss to my own system. It just is suddenly desperate for things to be different. So there's this sort of transmission of blame and shame from one generation to the next. I've been reading The Dawn of Everything, which came out in 2020, and, uh, I'm reading it very slowly, but it's, it's really good. And it's comparing the French society to the society of a few Native American communities in, in the north part of what is now the United States and Canada, because that's where the French colonists went, mostly French soldiers. And then what we've got is records of dialogues from those times between those two different communities. And, and the thing that comes up over and over and over again is how the Native Americans notice that everybody in French society has somebody who can tell them what to do. Or they'll get punished. I mean, of course, that what they're mostly seeing is soldiers, so they get a very strict version of that. The soldier has to follow the order or they get punished. But it was true in the whole of French society, because you, if you're a serf, you know, you're beholden to your landlord, your lord, who's beholden to other more senior nobles, who's beholden to the king. He's pretty beholden to the Pope. Maybe the Pope gets away with no one telling him what to do, but I wouldn't like to have that job. And in these Native American societies, the, what the French called the captain of those societies, they were soldiers, right? So they just kind of mapped ranks onto their societies. They didn't have that position of authority. What they had was a voice. So the captain of those Native American groups would speak, "This is what I think we should do next as a community. This is where I think we should move next. We should be thinking about the harvest now. We should be doing, you know." And if they spoke well, the people in their community would say, "We think you're on to something there. Let's go and do it." And if they spoke badly, they'd go, no, you know what, today we are not gonna do that. We're gonna do something different. There's a real sense of freedom, autonomy, and there wasn't this culture of shaming and blaming in this at all in the same way. Now, I don't know where, I can't put my finger on where it comes from, what exactly the causes and conditions are that lead to us having that in Europe, but here we are. Um, and we've, you know, we've managed to transmit that to all the places that didn't have it previously. Moving closer to awakening, the risk of letting go of blame and shame and moving closer to awakening is that we then have to feel sadness regret, regret, maybe even grief. Because those— when we feel compassion for somebody, or compassion for ourselves in the kind of situation where something has gone wrong, often we're moved to those feelings. Um, I guess this is something else blame stops, is it stops us from having to feel things that might be a bit painful. As we begin to let go of blame, our heart opens. The bigger our hearts are, the more space is for those feelings to rise and fall. And actually, when I'm in a feeling of sadness that feels appropriate, it doesn't feel too much. It doesn't feel overwhelming. It doesn't feel distasteful. It feels like, oh, this is like— sadness can be a loving response to something that's gone wrong in the world. Regret can be a loving response to something that's gone wrong in the world. Actually, I feel more joined up with myself. I feel more grounded. I feel less like this with the closed hand and more like this with the open hand of thought. Thinking about what blame is trying to do for us suggests one way of moving closer to no blame. If we can catch it— sometimes we catch it in the act, sometimes we catch it later— but if we can realize, oh, this is trying to serve me, it's trying to avoid shame, it's trying to avoid other painful feelings, it's doing it in a way that isn't skillful, but it's got good intentions. Then I can feel kinder to the blame itself. I can bring some compassion to the blame itself. There's a softening also that creates more space. If I'm able to notice the blame and its good intentions, I'm not in the blame. So knowing how it serves us and maybe even taking some time to notice 'in my own system, what is it trying to do for me?' can help free us from it and move us closer towards compassion. And all of the, all of the ways, all of the good ways of working with blame are about reducing contraction and moving towards expansion. Our heart's opening, our body's opening, our feelings feeling more joined up, our thoughts feeling lighter, more fluid. In a moment, I'm going to talk about another way of working with blame that's been really helpful for me. But maybe before I do, it's helpful to notice the difference between blame and responsibility. So I'm not saying we let ourselves off the hook. For everything. Norman Fisher is fond of quoting— I don't think he was the first person to say this, but I've heard him say it a few times— it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility, which is, which is pretty much the Buddhist position on blame. We know that we're beings that act out of greed and ill will and ignorance quite unconsciously most of the time when we're doing so. There's a whole load of causes and conditions in our life that mean suddenly in the present moment we're choosing to do some— maybe not choosing, we find ourselves doing something harmful rather than something compassionate. The more we can notice those causes and conditions, the more we begin to realize, oh, I can't find any fault in myself. Of course I've given my life. Of course I behaved like this in this moment. This person really reminds me of that abusive teacher I had at school, and when they said something that was a bit harsh You know, and my, and you know, maybe I've had a bad day as well, and suddenly a whole load of things, and that's the last straw, and I just explode, and I'm like a bull in a china shop. But of course, because of all, all those, you know, in dog training they call it stacking, where you have one little thing that goes wrong in your day, and then another little thing, and another little thing, and you don't notice until like the last domino falls, and suddenly it's like stea— you know, the kind of steam comes out your— the top of your head. So fine, it's not my fault, but it is my responsibility. Every time I'm able to notice myself being unskillful, being harmful, I have a responsibility to restrain myself, to make repairs if repairs need to be made, to try and be more compassionate next time, and even a responsibility to practice working with the precepts on an ongoing basis, um, so that I'm not adding to the stress in the world, and I'm not adding to the stress in myself. I'm not taking myself further away from enlightenment. I'm not taking other people away from enlightenment. I'm not producing more of this, but more of this. That's the responsibility of every Buddhist practitioner. And actually, the Buddhist position is, is when you look at Buddhist ethics, what you find is they mostly don't talk about how the world should be organized. What they talk about is each person practicing taking responsibility for their own actions. So we're responsible, but we're not— it's not our fault. We're not to blame for it. It's a compassionate view, but it allows us to think about how we can be different in the future. And this phrase suggests another way of working with blame, which, um, which Rob Babier also speaks about, which is taking stock of the actual causes and conditions that are present in the moment of causing harm. And, uh, Rob suggested that you look at the internal conditions in the present moment and the internal conditions in the past, and the external conditions in the present moment, and the external conditions in the past. And that the, the more you're able to clock how many different things there are in each of those realms, the more softening there will be, because the more you, you see how constrained your decision-making is in any given moment. So the internal present might be, oh well, what, what mood have— what emotional mood have I arrived in this moment with? What are my stress levels like? Am I ill at the moment? Am I a bit under the weather? That's something that makes it more likely that I'll be unskillful. How tired am I? Am I in physical pain? If so, I'm more likely to be irritable. And when you sort of examine, did I, did I create any of those things? Well, I didn't create being ill. I didn't create the injury in my foot. In this moment, I didn't create the mood that I arrived into the present moment with. Maybe I had something to do with it in the past, but we'll get to that in a second. But I, I didn't in the present. So it's hard when we really examine all the things that condition us. It's hard to find fault. And then we look at the conditions in the internal world, in the past, inherited Beliefs like the idea that we should have power over somebody in order to control them. Beliefs that we swim in all the time in society, misogynist beliefs, racist beliefs, all sorts of harmful beliefs that we internalize quite unconsciously that condition how we arrive in the present moment. Maybe things that can be quite personal, like, oh, I believe that when I please people, that's going to create safety for me. Uh, ironically, uh, it often isn't the thing that creates safety, but fine. And, and, and you can, you can even trace that back. Okay, so if I believe that, why do I believe that? Is that something everyone in my family believes? Is it something I learned in school or in my family of origin? Like, oh, if I'm— like I was saying, if I'm a good child Everybody's happy. Uh, I have a belief like that, uh, if I do something perfectly, I'm more likely to be valued by others. Not true, and sets me up for trouble. The more caught in that— and again, I can feel it in this embodied way— the more I get caught in perfectionism, the more likely I am to cause trouble to myself. And others. But I didn't choose to be a perfectionist. I can't blame myself for being a perfectionist. When I notice, oh, I was acting out of that belief again, there's a softening, there's a more— an increase in acceptance. And we can do the same in the world around us. What's present in the external world in the moment of me causing harm. So it might be like, maybe I'm at work. So what is the atmosphere of the institution that I'm in? Is that increasing everybody's stress levels? Like, are we all sort of scrambling over each other to please the boss or the shareholders or to meet targets or to please the congregation or to get more congregation? What's in the news at the moment? What am I aware of in the world that might be affecting me? Um, what are these wider systems that I'm a part of that, that create the conditions where I'm more likely to cause harm for myself and others? The more I'm able to notice that, the less likely I am to blame.

Myself.

And then the external past, that might be looking at the life stories of others, understanding that people that I'm upset with have also got their own life history, their own traumas, their own inherited beliefs. The more I know where my harsh edges come from, the easier it is for me to imagine where those come from in other people. This last couple of weeks, my, my stress systems have been quite high, affected by things in the world. So the ERCH guidance on public, on public single-sex public spaces came out a couple of weeks ago, uh, the final version, which is, seems very harmful to trans people and non-binary people. And also to me suggests a creeping edge of oppression of all sorts of minorities. The people who are leading the charge, some of the people who are leading the charge on that are going after abortion rights and are beginning to go after abortion rights in this country, for example. And that left me feeling quite wounded and quite stressed. And I noticed the, the kind of contraction that I'm speaking about in my body as, as I was just sort of braced against the world. And then the riots in Southampton a couple of days ago that I kind of watched playing out on social media and in the news had a similar kind of effect on my system, sort of more scared of the world again. And I know actually from that place I can get quite angry with the people who are cheerleading those things, which really is, you know, really blaming them quite personally for the harm that I imagine people are experiencing, that I know some people are experiencing, that I'm experiencing. Lots of blaming. And then maybe if I blame them hard enough, they'll stop doing it. That seems unlikely, right? And I know it moves me further away from awakening. I know it moves me further away from the Buddha. I'm less present in my daily life. I have to work harder to be present with clients. So my day job is more tiring because I'm in this state of being braced against the world and blaming the world. I can't completely understand what makes somebody lead the charge on those oppressive policies, or, um, want to create more agitation, more anger in society, more division in society. I can't completely understand it, but I know something about it, right? Because I just wanted to be really upset with people, so I know what that feels like. Um, and I know from examining my own life story and from sitting with lots of people as a therapist and listening to how the choices they make are conditioned by the lives they've had, that something of that will be true for the people that I'm upset with. And I'm even thinking of a specific person. Some of us went to a counter-protest a few weeks ago when there was a, a far-right— what I would describe as a far-right rally, uh, that was protesting, um, outside a hotel that was housing asylum seekers locally. And one, someone really from the, from the, from that protest was looking me in the eye and sort of shouting, I'm gonna get you, and was really like, I've got your, you know, he's really sort of taking my face in and clocking me for later. Quite scary. But when I— I don't know anything about that person, but I, I know something about the lives of human beings. And remembering that creates a softening in my system. It moves me more in the direction of compassion and further away from the direction of blame and shame. I don't know if this is entirely relevant, but I want to tell you about an episode of Star Trek. There's an episode of The Next Generation called "I, Borg," and the Borg, as some of you may remember, are these kind of zombie-like cyborgs. That have a collective consciousness. They don't have any independent thought, and their only thought is to consume more and more cultures and grow themselves so that everyone becomes just like them. They look quite scary. They have these very pale faces that are supposed to sort of indicate dead flesh and kind of various tubes sticking into them.. And in this episode, the crew of the Enterprise managed to capture an individual Borg, and they've been tasked to— that's their mission. And they've been told, what we want you to do is get one single Borg, load him up with a virus, like a computer virus, send him back to the collective, uh, which will shut everybody down, and we'll all be safe again. And what the crew discover is that outside of the collective, this person begins— this drone, as they call it to begin with— begins to become a person thinking and feeling and making connections and feeling affection and slowly making friends and beginning to enjoy the world and chooses a name for himself, Hugh. And slowly the crew begin to realize, we can't inject this guy with a virus and send him back. That's pretty cruel. So they just— they let him choose it. They ask him what he wants to do. He chooses to go back. And the hope is that actually his experience of humanity will sort of filter back into the collective And I think probably in, in the later storyline something of that happens. But the reason I'm thinking about the Borg and how of one mind they are is because I think there is something a bit emblematic of how deeply conditioned we are by the world that we live in. Now we do have some choice, I believe, as human beings. We probably have the illusion that we have more choice than we do in reality. But like, uh, like Hugh and all the other drones, much of what we do is decided by the causes and conditions that we find ourselves in, whether that's like the wider movements in society, like capitalism, whether it's the immediate culture of our families or our towns or our communities. You can see in the way discourse happens online as well, right? Like, oh, everybody on my team thinks this, so I, I'll also think this because then I'll be okay, whether or not I really think that or not. So I just think it's a good illustration of, of We're, I think we're more like the drones than we like to think we are. And the more we realize that, two things happen, right? One is the more we notice it, the more freedom is possible. 'Cause we go, oh yeah, I don't think I have been choosing to behave in, in certain ways. I've just sort of been reacting to the world unconsciously. Maybe I can get some more choice, but also I can't really blame myself. The more I understand that I can't blame myself, and I can't blame others. So that's when that kind of softening happens. And maybe I printed out— some of you will know Thich Nhat Hanh's poem, Please Call Me by My True Names. Maybe I'll read the poem, but I want to read what he says about it. Which is, um, you know, he was a young monk during the Vietnam War. He was a peace activist during the Vietnam War. Those are the sort of important things. And after the Vietnam War, he set up the monastery in France, Plum Village, where other people could come in and train in the ways of peace. He did a lot of work, um, both in Vietnam and around the world in in helping people find peace, but also people come to terms with the kind of things that he'd been through and his community had been through. And he writes, he wrote, after the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It said that half of the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean. Only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia. There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand to prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only 12 and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. Once you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. The you here, I guess, is Thich Nhat Hanh talking about his own emotion. As you look more deeply, you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it's easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can't do that. It takes us further away from awakening. In my meditation, I saw that if I'd been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions that he was, I'd now be the pirate. There's a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can't condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day. And if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in 25 years, a number of them will be sea pirates. That's certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in 25 years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us because we're all to some extent responsible for this state of affairs. After a long meditation, I wrote the poem. In the poem, there were 3 people: the 12-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is Please Call Me by My True Names because I have so many names. When I hear one of those names, I have to say yes. That's pretty challenging. And you might think, well, I wouldn't be the pirate. If I'd been born in that village, I would have somehow— I'd have made different choices. And, and maybe that's true. I think we do have some measure of free will. But if we'd experienced the kind of exact ping-pong ball of life that that pirate had been through, or that guy on the far-right protest, or, you know, Nigel Farage stirring up agitation in South Southampton or Southport, wherever it was, a few days ago. Who's to say where he would end up? Who's to say what choice he would make? So when I call you the sea pirate, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, you have to say yes, because, you know, he's going further than saying It could be you. He's saying on some level it is you. Like, we have got parts that, that cause harm as well. We're not all as equally— we're not all equally responsible for the harm that was caused, but we all have some responsibility. It's sort of what the bodhisattvas hint at when they say you have to save all sentient beings. It's like, actually when we're introducing harm into the world, when we're acting unconsciously, we're taking the whole world away from awakening, from compassion, from kindness, and closer to cruelty. So it takes me back to that quote that Norman Fisher is so fond of, like, it's not, it's not your fault that you're doing that, but when you begin to notice it And it's not even that you then— it's not like the responsibility is a heavy one. As you begin to notice it, you're, well, I don't want to make the world more cruel, so of course I'm going to try and take care of myself and my own behavior. And that means not blaming myself, it means not blaming others, but it does mean seeing these things clearly and doing what I can to make a difference. It's quite a rich topic, this no blame. There's, there's quite a lot more that I could have said about it, but I'm sure the Buddha, the Buddha lived his life from a place of no blame. He still gave people instructions and feedback and, and set up the rules for how people lived together, but he didn't blame anybody. I'm sure that the more we free ourselves from blame, the closer to the Buddha we get, the closer to awakening we get. And the more we fall into blame, the more we're introducing harshness and cruelty and contraction into our own lives and into the lives of others. So I will pause. Well, I won't pause. I'll stop there. No more me to boo. Thank you. So we've got some time for questions. I'm actually, I'm gonna leave the recording on for a little while and then, and then at a certain point I'll turn it off if anyone feels shy and wants to ask a question that isn't going to be recorded. And maybe there aren't any questions at all, and that's fine, but we will leave some space in case there are any. And yeah, if you want to— if you're on Zoom, feel free to unmute if you have a question, or just shout up if you're in the room.

I've got a more of a comment, actually. It's a bit of a sort of paradox that just paradox has just popped into my mind when you said things about Buddha. How would Buddha have thought about no blame? And I immediately thought, well, no self, you know.

Yeah, exactly. Essentially, there's nobody to take exactly blame. That's right.

Paradoxically, there is somebody to take responsibility.

Yes, that's right. Yeah, it is. There is a— yeah, there is a paradox in that. Yeah, because we feel like a real person that has some agency. So if we feel like we've got some agency, we should use it when we can. When we really deeply investigate, we don't find— it's hard to find a self. And maybe, you know, I, I know there are some Buddhists that would say actually, um, the only reason we take responsibility or do good is because we've landed in better conditions than somebody else. So actually, you can't— when you even look for taking responsibility, you can't find the one who takes responsibility either. What you can find is the one who happens to come through the doors of the Buddhist center because they read this book, because the Buddha— a Buddhist monk visited their school when they were little, you know, whatever the cause is. Um, but I don't know personally whether I believe like that the only thing we are is the product of our causes and conditions. I do have a sense that there is a sort of beyond that, there is something that is outside of causes and conditions that is this sort of loving presence that can well up in us. And that is the one who can be responsible as well. I think we can create space for that. But even if you think all, all we are is the product of causes and conditions, It can still be like skillful means to, to think about no blame, but it's my responsibility.

I'm, uh, thinking about one of my old supervisors who was really brilliant at, um, when I maybe shared something that I thought wasn't skillful she would always, um, recognize the value of the part that had done that thing and praise it.

Yeah.

Um, like, oh, uh, that part, brilliant, that that part was really trying to keep you safe from that wall. Um, and I'm wondering, I'm wondering about the opposite of blame. I'm wondering if it's gratitude.

Yeah. Uh, well, As I said, oh, you know, Terry's book speaks to this from a different point of view, or says different— not a different point of view, but he just obviously says different things about it because we're different people. And he writes very eloquently about the antidote to blame being gratitude. Yeah.

Yeah.

Or an antidote to blame being gratitude. Yeah. And I think you can practice it directly, like, oh, what can I find to be grateful for in this moment? Or you can undo the blame. And what you will tend to notice is things that, like, the gratitude comes up naturally. So either the top-down or the bottom-up, both are very good ways. And, and, and to go back to my point about contracting or expanding, you know, actually Blame is a, is a point of view that focuses on one thing, one part of a situation in quite a harsh way. And what gratitude does, it invites us to notice something else that is true. So there's an opening out of our awareness. And what the, the noticing the causes and conditions does is the same thing. It invites us to take a step back and have this wider awareness. So there's a sort of similar thing happening as well.

I'm thinking about this morning when I was blaming someone who done blood to the computer, and then I'm also— I also heard later on that the same person cleared the paths this morning to allow us to walk around the shrine room and probably was involved in cleaning the shrine room and, you know, all kinds of other things.

Yeah.

And then when that kind of narrow— ah, this person did this thing— and it was about not wanting to feel embarrassed myself. It was about wanting them to be at fault for my—

so you didn't have to feel ashamed.

So I didn't have to feel ashamed.

Yeah.

And actually they did it because they think it's better with computer.

Yeah, and I suspected it is better.

Maybe not actually.

Well, I think, well, I think, I think it can help the battery, but what you need, what that means is you need to know that it's happened so you can turn it on and plug it in long enough before practice so it's awake by the time you come to do anything. Yes, but the point is that it was a good intention. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the more you can notice that, the softer you feel about the situation.

Exactly.

And that person either has a good intention for others or a self-protective intention, which is still— yeah, the intention is self-protective and good.

Or a bit of both.

Or a bit of both.

Usually, usually a bit of both for human beings.

Yeah. Good.

I think what you just said helped me, like, make a little link. Like, when I was listening to you, I was thinking about that drum playing, and my daughter had a really difficult experience, and she stuff about his causing conditions and nature and all of that. I know that too, and I believe you. I think about it sometimes when I walk in town. I think, 'Sì, Monica, yeah.' And when I heard somebody say gratitude I thought, "What I can do for my children." That's not terrible. Yeah. And it— that made me feel softer when I've been trying to think, "This person, you know, had a hard childhood and you had, and you're very lucky." Yeah.

Trying to like put myself into it. That's okay.

It makes me go, Yeah.

So there's also something there, maybe, I don't know if this is true for you, about how like we can pick up this teaching in two ways, right? We can also use this as a way of trying to blame ourselves subtly. Oh, I'm not really taking all these causes and conditions into account, or I'm still upset even though I know this and I should be thinking differently. So actually what it's like, the Buddha talks about picking up the snake by the tail, you know, it ends up biting you. Um, yeah, there's, there's, you, it's like, oh, I need to do, I need to, there's another layer of this going on. So I need to step back and like begin with, oh, I'm blaming myself for not feeling kind to this person.

Mm-hmm.

So how can I, how can I work with this blame? And you know, one really powerful way is gratitude.

Mm-hmm.

And is noticing the good intentions. Like, what is this blame? Trying to do me okay. And then maybe I can clock all the other stuff, not trying to change, not trying to shame myself because I don't see it, but like, oh, okay, yeah, of course, of course that's true.

Yeah, it feels different in my body. Yeah, like there's a sort of just my thoughts about him.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's why I keep talking, because I've been really aware of that in my own body, and it's a really helpful clue. If I'm doing this, in even in a really subtle way, it tells me that something unskillful is happening in my system I need to pay attention to. It's a really good clue. Am I doing this? Am I doing this? Or, you know, somewhere in between.

I'm thinking about the making amends process in the 12 steps that, that sometimes that can take 10 years.

Yeah, to do it from this place.

And sometimes you never manage it.

Yeah.

And that's— yeah, just because we're human.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's not about spiritual bypassing, it's about just being bamboo.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a— there's a— with any spiritual practice, there's a danger we can use it for spiritual bypassing. With any precept. Oh, I shouldn't blame people. Okay, all I'm doing then is, is going back to being the good child that I was at school. I'm not actually doing the work, which can take a very long time.

Yeah.

And maybe we don't get there.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

I, I just want to say I found the talk, um, very, very relatable. I've been in similar situations and I've got Asperger's, which is a mouthful of horse shit. I've been in the nearest bit pulling. I've often been judged by people a lot in the past, but learning of the world today where my new generation counterparts are coming into this planet, there's more, more sort of solutions of helping next generations of my junior counterparts to make it kind of different social groups and understanding to help them, education, which is a positive—

absolutely—

step forward. And also another thing is whenever I've encountered somebody who's either bullied me or I've not got on with, and I sort of learned as I've got older that people believe that person from a dysfunctional background can change and I learned all about this when I was watching Cobra Kai on Netflix. Karate Kid, um, uh, sort of follow-up Netflix series, and, and it explains why do people become villains, and it explains the villain's, um, or antagonist's backstory. And I learned that also when I was watching Disney's Maleficent, um, what made her that as well. So you end up feeling—

yeah, it's the power of art is really powerful in that way, isn't it? It's why it's so important. It can be—

children's, um, films, they're quite good at injecting those moral, philosophical— yeah, sort of messages, which I find quite heartening. Yeah, a work, a good work amongst all the mayhem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good.

Well, thank you everybody.

Namamit bhū. Namamit bhū.

No, well, we just finished with the closing verse again. Blessed by Amitabha's light, may I care for all living things and the holy earth.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.