Real Freedom by Kaspalita

Welcome to real people in the room. Welcome to anybody watching the video. It's, um, it's the beginning of half term. I think some people are away because of that. But still my ego is pricked by 4 or 5 people in the room. 6 or 7 probably would have been fine actually. That's how much less short it is. But you know, given the talk I gave in service this morning, there's an invitation there for me to step out of my own point of view and to meet real other people and allow them to have their own lives that aren't Frustratingly aren't just about serving me and making me feel better. So I'd called this talk 'Real Freedom' before I had any idea what I was going to say. The title just arrived to me, with me. But I was in the middle of reading a lot of teachings by my own teacher, Jalaluddin Rumi, Satya Robyn, David Brazier, whose photos are in the shrine behind me, that he wrote about 2 years ago. He was recovering from a thorn in the emblazon, and essentially he wrote a teaching every day for the first few months of 2016, and then it tailed off that it wasn't every day, but still pretty consistently. So there's a lot of short teachings that I'm putting together in a collection. So a lot of what I'm saying comes out of that, my reading and my inspiration out of those teachings that I've been reading. And I'm starting with an unusual way of translating the Sanskrit word 'śruti' that Dharma Vijja took to using at that time. Śruti is usually translated as 'mindfulness,' which is often taken to mean awareness. I'm aware of this, I'm aware of that, I'm aware of the present moment, I'm aware of my arm moving, I'm aware of my breath. In the Sutra on Mindfulness, one of the oldest teachings about mindfulness, if you go back to the original text, it actually says something like, 'With my mindfulness in front of me,' I'm aware of my breath. With my mindfulness in front of me, I'm aware of my arm moving. With my mindfulness in front of me, I'm aware of folding my robe and cleaning my bowl. With my mindfulness in front of me, I'm aware of the Four Noble Truths, which is teaching about being in the world. So it isn't simply pure awareness. There's an implied difference there between, with my mindfulness in front of me, I'm aware of my breath. Well, if mindfulness was just awareness, you wouldn't need to mention it because that's already implied. So Dhammavijja takes mindfulness to be mindfulness of the Buddha, particularly keeping a holy object in mind. For us, that's Buddha. Amida, sometimes Shakyamuni Buddha, or Konyen, but something sacred, having a sense of something sacred in your heart, which is the essential meaning of the word 'nenbutsu,' which describes the practice that we did this morning. The chanting that we do is about having, inviting something sacred into your heart. And the phrase that Darvijja used The English phrase Dhammajji used to translate this in 2016 was 'religious consciousness,' which I quite like because it implies something about how your mind is all the time, or the potential for how your mind could be all the time. Can your mind carry this idea of sacredness into the world? All the time. Can you step into this place? And I'll just read something he wrote, actually, as a way of introducing this. This is from what was originally a blog post but will be a chapter in a new book called Dead or Alive. Mindfulness means to have your heart or mind full of dharma, which is to say love, compassion, joy and peace. It means the faith and courage that one has acquired by being loved by the Buddhas and being protected by the gods, which is to say, by the universe. The universe is made up of myriad gods, unseen powers that protect us. This is the traditional way of seeing it. The modern way is to see the universe as dead matter, a big ruthless machine, and even to see see living beings as just more sophisticated machines. In the modern view, everything is dead, really, just a big clockwork. In the traditional view, everything is alive, which is to say, in one sense or another, loving. When I lie on my bed, the bed god is loving me. When I breathe in and out, the air god is loving me. When I see that it is light and time to get up, the God soul is loving me. This is mindfulness, to know oneself to be the object of love from every direction in everything that happens. To know this is to know what has been known from of old. So this is quite a different way of seeing the world. I don't know if it's a way of seeing the world that an ordinary human being can maintain, actually, because the reality of being human is that we are flawed, foolish creatures. Our minds do cling on to things. We do create greedy thoughts. We do create harmful thoughts. We do fool ourselves into thinking that we're the center of the universe. We fall back into those things. Particularly when something in the world or a person touches a sore spot in us. Often then we trigger into thoughts and feelings slightly outside of our control. We lose that sense of 'I am being loved by the world.' Sometimes it's really obvious and clear that we're being loved by the world. We can think of examples where we've received received kindness from people, or perhaps even at times when we've been in the natural world and had a sense of it meeting us or holding us in a particular way, where it seems more than usually alive. Sometimes people say to me, 'Oh, but all acts have got selfish— all human acts have got some selfishness them, haven't they? And the example that I often use is actually from quite a few years ago now, so I probably think of a more recent one. But a friend of mine and I had been walking in the woods near Dhammajji's place in France, in Samoaya, and she found a cèpe mushroom, which are these really delicious mushrooms that you can cook and eat. And I hadn't tried them before, so I was starting to look forward to it being prepared and eating it in the evening. And then on the way back, we stopped off at a friend's house, Derek, and he saw this in Samaya's hand and his eyes lit up, and she just sort of handed it over. And I was like, "No!" But there was a moment of pure willingness, pure compassion. There wasn't any self in that moment. It was just, 'Yeah, of course, this is something that's going to increase your well-being. I can see that it's going to bring you joy, and take it.' Those moments do happen, and it's obvious in those moments that something lovely is occurring. It's much harder when we're being triggered or when we feel hurt to imagine that the universe is still tending to us and loving us. I'll come back to that thought in a moment. I want to briefly touch on the idea of dead and alive world. In the summer this year, I went out to Davidji's place in France, and I was— at the time I was reading one of David Abrams' books. He's the philosopher. His books are called The Song, The Spell of the Sensuous, and Becoming Animal. It's about returning to this traditional way of seeing the world, essentially, that Dharma Midget is hinting at here. And in the morning, I've been mowing the lawn, and my mind had been wandering. And really what I've been focused on is kind of how much of this can I get done in the time that I've got. And then I went and I read some of the book and I came back to mow the lawn. It's like, oh, okay, how is it to mow the lawn with a sense of the world being alive? Imagining— not imagining, the reality is that in that act I'm being witnessed by living creatures. I mean, even in the morning I was conscious to go slowly enough that the crickets could jump out of the way, but I became hyper-aware of their experience. What is it like to have this machine coming towards you? What is the earth's experience of that? And how is it to be shaken in that way? Where is the sound going? I still mowed the lawn because I was preparing the area for people who were going to come and camp, but there was a tenderness that arose in response to being in a deeper kind of relationship with the universe. I really felt like I took that sideways step in that moment to being in a world of alive others rather than just my agenda, my agenda, my agenda, my agenda. The example that David Abrams used that I'd read actually is a really nice example. He talks about being— I can't remember exactly which country he was in, somewhere in Southeast Asia. He was researching the native magic in the native cultures using his own sort of sleight of hand that he'd been practicing, card tricks, to sort of get him from one village to the next village. And he was staying with one family, and every morning he would notice the woman of the house, the mother of the house, rising and taking little rice offerings around the edge of the property. They were living on the edge of the jungle. And one day he said, 'Oh, can I come and—' 'Oh, Satya Robyn, can I come and watch you making these offerings?' So they went together. A little bit of rice here, a little bit of rice there. Here in a very tender, devotional way. And as he observed, ants came and took the rice back to their nest. And he was like, oh, maybe the spirits are the ants. It's not that there's a kind of ghostly spirit that's around that she's being devotional to. She's literally bringing herself into a close relationship with life with these other creatures that maybe would find their own way into the house and into the rice sack if she wasn't making these offerings. So in that moment, he stepped closer into relationship with the world. You know, as I said on service on Wednesday evening, which was after I'd been— you know, the moon was also very beautiful Wednesday evening, so was Tuesday evening. We think of the moon goddess perhaps as being the figure of Kuan Yin or other traditional moon goddesses that look like a figure in human form, but one traditional way of— and that feels a bit separate from the moon— but a traditional way of seeing the moon in many cultures is that the moon is the goddess. It's— the moon doesn't represent the goddess, that the moon is the goddess climbing through the skies, filling their body with this soft light which they experience as tender and loving and kind. The reason for this— well, I suppose it's twofold. I mean, once you start experimenting with Satya Robyn or trusting that it's true, actually you have a much richer experience of life. It's good for its own sake, but it does begin to bring yourself into a deeper relationship in the world. And appreciating the world as loving begins to wear away the edges of anxiety, of self-protection. Because what we're protecting against is the idea that the world is unsafe, and we've experienced that at some point in our lives. So to find places of safety, to bring ourselves into communities where kindness is more common are good ways of encouraging a different kind of worldview and encouraging a relaxing self-protection. So I suppose that takes me back to that thing about it's obvious. It's easy when people have been kind to you to fall into that way of thinking. It's harder when you're in a cruel situation. So I guess the there's two things to do in that. One is to go out of the cruel situation. If we're just being triggered enough that all we can be is on the defensive, or all we can be is nerves, that isn't a helpful situation to be in. Go to community that's supportive, go to a place that's supportive, a natural place, or a relationship. And the second is to wonder Is it possible to receive even this as a blessing, or as an invitation to a blessing? How is it to experience something, to look back on something that we resented deeply at the time and understand that still in that moment we were in a loving universe? Is that possible? Quite a challenging invitation. It maybe begins to redefine exactly what love is. It's something that leads to our liberation, offers us the potential to deepen our compassion. Our compassion, to deepen our fellow feeling, to deepen our skillfulness of being in relationship with others. I'm just thinking of situations in my own life that I really not want to wanted to be. And as I said before, I don't think it's helpful to stay in those situations when the resentment or the hurt is very high. But later on, if I look back at those times and try and feel my way into the shoes of the people around me— usually it's people, occasionally we're traumatized by the natural world or non-human animals, but most of the time it's people, unfortunately. Actually, the more deeply I see them as existing from their own side, the easier it is to have compassion for them. In his book Love and Its Disappointment, Dharma Vijja suggests that everything a human does is motivated by love, but that disappointment closes us down so much that by the time that impulse to love comes out into the world, it comes out in— potentially can come out in a twisted or destructive way. There's always an impulse to connect, to be received, and yet because of past hurts, it often comes out in ways that have the opposite effect. I know that from my own life as well. So my habits in the past would perhaps not be to lash out and hurt people in that way, but it would be to withdraw, which is a more subtle way of causing harm in the world, but can be just as powerful, particularly when there's people that need support. You can probably speak to this pattern in me. And even in that moment of withdrawing, in me there is a deep desire to be received and to connect to other human beings, and there is also a deep fear of being disappointed by them, and that fear contaminates the compassion and turns it into something that isn't necessarily the most wise way of being. In that moment. So beginning to appreciate that other people have got that loving impulse in them, it's one way to start to soften resentment towards them. Now I do want to use an example from the natural world because I think it speaks to the subtlety of what I'm beginning to hint at. This is from a book called Wildness by Gerald May, who's speaking about his experience of receiving love, which he calls presence, and sometimes goddess, and sometimes God, or God as as a sheikh, he's operating in a Christian context, but he gets calls to go to the mountain, and he responds to that call, and he receives something profound from that natural setting. But one night on the first trip to the mountain, maybe even the first night, I'd have to go back and check the book, he's woken by a noise. He's in his and he's woken by an obvious— and it's a bear! And his heart starts going, and he realizes, oh, there isn't anything I can do, I can't outrun the bear. You know, it's one of those situations really where you just have to wait and see what happens. And he says in that moment he experienced pure fear in a way that he had never experienced experienced before. It wasn't tainted. In a way, it wasn't tainted by any ego strain. We often think of fear being the thing that taints the ego, but his experience was just, I am in this moment, I'm wholeheartedly afraid, and this is an entirely appropriate response to having a bear crashing its way through my campsite and sniffing at my truck. And And the bear sniffed around for a bit and then left, and eventually he went to sleep. And the next morning he woke up and felt extremely grateful to be alive. But there was also something— there wasn't just gratitude for being alive, there was also gratitude for that moment of wholehearted fear, which was also— er, in that moment he was completely alive and he received the threat of the bear as a blessing because it put him in a state of, 'I am an animal relating to another animal. We're both part of something much greater than ourselves. This is an entirely appropriate response for me as a prey in this moment to have, and I'm completely alive.' And there was something he experienced something deeply loving about that interaction, even though potentially he was going to come to great harm. And the bear, you know, if the bear decided that Gerald May was for dinner, that wouldn't have been an act of hate, actually. It would just have been an act of the world unfolding. It's all good stuff. That's a chocolate. So I could just read the whole thing instead of speaking, but it's a little bit less spontaneous. Obviously I'm a human being, so everything I'm saying is filtered through my own consciousness and awareness and provisional. One of our precepts is to understand holy texts as fingers pointing to the moon, the moon representing enlightenment, the finger representing the provisional nature. The teaching, and this is provisional, something human about it. In another teaching, Dhammavicca said, you know, the Buddha wasn't so interested in pinning down the details of is the world really like this, or is the self really like that. Occasionally people would come to him and say, is the world like this, or is the world like that, and he would often say, no, that isn't the right view, but he wouldn't necessarily suggest what the correct view was. He was just bringing and creating humility in people and encouraging a sort of open-heartedness. And the important thing in this sense of religious consciousness is not that we have got it all exactly worked out. It's not that we go, 'Of course.' You know, you can see in that moment with the ants that David Ayeridge is still coming from a slightly materialist perspective, 'Oh, it's the ants that she's being devotional to, there isn't anything more than that.' Well, you know, who knows? I don't know the answer to that question. The important thing is to have some sense of what the Buddha means, that there is a benign process in the world unfolding, that there is a dance that we can step into more or less willingly that will hold us, that we are in receipt of great love already, if only we can remember it and give our minds and our hearts to it. Knowing exactly how to cross all the t's and dot all the i's is less essential. While we were away in Yorkshire a few weeks ago, we listened to a set of CDs by the Franciscan priest Richard Raw, and he was talking extensively, he was talking about addiction, although he kind of spiraled out into so many different areas throughout the 5 hours of talks. And the main addiction he was talking about was the addiction to self, and so in some ways very Buddhist. But at one point he mentioned— this is where I heard of Gerald May, we heard of Gerald May from First Touch in the talk— but that The book that Richard Rohr mentioned was about the dark night of the soul. I haven't read the Gerald May book about that, or Satya Robyn, but I know about the dark night of the soul. This is a piece of writing by the Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross, and it is a description of the experience of in his Christian context, of God being absent. It's often— we often think of the dark nights of the soul as just being when things go wrong or circumstances conspire to make life difficult for us, but it is particularly when we feel an absence of God, or in this sense, when— well, let me stay in that Christian context for a moment. And the The explanation that St. John of the Cross gives for that is actually that all of that time, in his understanding, we are being worked on by God. But to know that we were being worked on would be overwhelming. To know how deeply we were loved in that moment might be overwhelming to really know. That's why our edges were being brushed off. So he works subtly and in quiet. Ways. And at one point we look back and go, "Oh, I've let go of something that I didn't even know I was holding on to, and I'm stepping into the light again." So from a pure land Buddhist point of view, we wouldn't necessarily say that the Buddha has gone away, but that something in our own mind turns away from the Buddha. We close our eyes and maybe some of that is to do with self-protection. In the Majjhapurlan Sutra, which is the teaching about the Pure Land, beings with heavy karma are born inside closed lotus flowers. And my understanding of that is actually, if you imagine a huge lotus petal in front of you, it acts as a diffuser for the great light of the Buddha. So it's softens the intensity of love, and we just receive as much as we can take. And I think sometimes we do this in our lives as well. We need to turn away in order to just, well, just take as much as we can take of the loving universe. I think John said, 'Pindatal'— And the reason I wanted to mention the long dark night of the soul is because that is part of the human experience. It isn't that just because I've given this talk you're all going to go out— you might experiment with this, you might go for a walk on the hills and feel like, 'Yes, I'm really— the world's loving me, the sky's loving me, the trees are really singing today.' But eventually something will happen and and you'll start thinking about something tricky, or what you're going to have for tea later on. And in my own life, I've gone through periods where I've known that something is keeping me out of that mode of consciousness. And sometimes I know that because of tension that I'm holding in my body. Recently, it's sort of eased off in the last couple for a couple of days, but I've had a period of grinding my teeth at night, so I know this is something deep in my unconscious or my karmic history trying to be released and let go of. And that experience sometimes is so present that it keeps me out of the state of mind when I experience the world as loving me. But what I can do in those is remember that I have experienced that and trust that it is still true whether I happen to be seeing it in that moment or not. And this is the real meaning of mindfulness. It means actually something closer to the English usage, you know, be mindful of your manners means remember your manners. So be mindful, put your mindfulness in front of you, means remember that the world is loving you. It doesn't necessarily mean experience, have the felt sense of that in every moment. That isn't how it is to be human, but it is possible to remind ourselves that that is true and to go forward trusting that it is true, and that even when we don't have the felt sense of it, there is something working on us, something smoothing off our edges, something something carrying us forward. And for me, actually, the act of trusting that somehow almost creates it. There's a koan, the most famous koan of all, which I only understood because Dhammijja spelled it out in one of his posts: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' Well, if nobody comes to meet you it doesn't sound very loud, but the point is actually, you know, it's still good to put your hand out even if you don't know when somebody's going to come back and clap on it. The example that Don Richard uses is if you're leading a service and nobody comes, you still light all the candles and sit and do your practice. You play your own part in the dance, you do your footsteps. And trusting is a bit like this. Sometimes the felt experience of being loved comes back and meets your hand, and sometimes it doesn't, because actually another part of us is feeling a bit protective or whatever. Or maybe the Buddha was really giving his attention to somebody else and not Dhamma. I don't know, dot your i's and cross your t's and make your own philosophies. But there is something important about trusting that it's good to be in the sound of one hand clapping, trusting that we go forward knowing that we are in a universe that is alive and supportive and ultimately encouraging us to grow all the time. Okay, I think that's the end of my talk this morning. Namaste. So if there are any questions, I can take them now and attempt to formulate some kind of answer. There might not be, might just go away and sink into you and come back with a question at another time. You can always drop me an email. I like getting questions because then I can send the answer to everybody, so it's a nice way of inspiring teaching.

I wonder if you could say something about When we— knowing the difference between— you said that difficult things are blessings, can be blessings. Knowing the difference between receiving a blessing that's a difficult thing and discerning between receiving a thing that's a difficult thing and saying no.

Well, sometimes saying no is the appropriate response to a blessing. Blessing. You know, that is your hand coming and meeting the other hand in that moment. That's the invitation. Yeah, it's a blessing. It's an invitation to, to become somebody that can say no. But in terms of how you tell what's a helpful place to stay and a helpful place to leave, which I guess is related. It's that workshop that we did 3 years ago with Nick and Michael called The Edge of Chaos, which is a psychotherapy training workshop. And it's, you know, each of— it's about comfort zones really, but they describe the edge of your comfort zone as the edge of chaos, and if you tip over it, you go into a place where growth isn't possible because either it's re-traumatizing or your defenses just come up completely and there's no room for any— there's no space in that, there's no way of finding a loving response. And if you're so far in the comfort zone, also there's no— not necessarily any learn— space for learning or growth. With me because we just tend to go around the circles. And you sort of learn intuitively where that is for yourself, and you can let you check out, am I just feeling resentful all the time? If so, that isn't a helpful situation to stay in. Am I just feeling hurt all the time? If so, that isn't a helpful situation to stay in. And different people have to draw the line in different places. And the other thing to say is, you know, from one point of view, this is just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle of spiritual practice. It's a bit of sky, and there's also bits of ground and a lake and a tree that you kind of need. And from another point of view, you know, our practice is one one practice. Our practice is remembering the Buddha in Sangha faith. In the practice that we read this morning, it says the Nembutsu is a window into the universe of the whole of Buddhist teachings. Actually, if you deeply practice trusting that this is true, you don't need to do anything else. But it still could be nice to explore and learn from other places. Both those things are true.