Sacred Presence - a talk by Kaspa

So welcome everybody, welcome if you're joining us on the recording later on. This is the talk bit of our retreat day on sacred presence. I partly chose this topic because I'm giving a talk on the same theme at Buddhafield in a few weeks, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try some things out and think, get thinking about it. And it was inspired by reading an essay by the Zen teacher Doshō Port, who was a disciple of Katagiri Roshi over in the States. And he was writing about this movement in Buddhism from when it flourished in the States in the kind of late '60s and '70s. Through to the present day of secularization, so that like in Europe, huge amounts of mindfulness programs teaching people to be calm, to be at ease, to manage anxiety, to be better employees, all of these things, and to be better, to be well, more well-adjusted into society. But that something had gotten lost in that, and the thing that that he said had gotten lost was this idea of awakening. And when all the hippies got into Buddhism, actually awakening was just part of the language. People were taking psychedelics to open their minds. There was a whole movement around, there's something more going on than what we can see and touch and ordinarily feel in this universe, in this lifetime. And we want to wake up to it. And spiritual practice seems to offer an approach to do that. And very serious practitioners, that was one of the things they were interested in. And it's kind of disappeared from a lot of Buddhism. We're quite lucky in that as a devotional, more devotional tradition, there is some quality of our practice which is about waking up to something sacred. So we're bucking the general trend. The other thing that I read around the same time was Tsenju Earthling Manuel's book Zen: The Shamanic Bones of Zen, which also hinted at this kind of slightly otherworldly aspect of practice that was experienced by practitioners who would have experiences of a deep sense of being connected to the whole world, or insights appearing in their practice, sometimes very vividly as visions or through dreams. This sense of, yes, some slightly otherworldly quality beyond the mundane experience of life that appeared in people— in the lives of people's practice throughout the Buddhist generations, but wasn't talked about. Very much. And I remember her saying at a talk recently that she was worried that when she started to write about this, other Buddhist teachers would say, no, you can't really talk about this stuff, it's too esoteric, or it's not really Buddhist. But time and time again, speaking to Buddhist teachers, they said, yes, that is what it's like, you should be talking about it. So there does seem to be something in the air of recapturing some of this spirit of waking up. And I'll circle back around to what we wake up to in a moment. This time last week, I was listening to David Loy speak, who runs the Eco Dharma Retreat Center in Colorado. And he was traveling through Europe, partly to see family and partly offering some talks. So I went down to London to hear him speak, and he was speaking about, particularly about Buddhism and the climate crisis, and what he describes as lack projects. That's his diagnosis of why things have gone so wrong in society, that we're all engaged in lack projects. And what he means by that is that we experience some sense of lack and we try and fill that by doing all sorts of things, by grasping at some things, or by becoming angry and trying to move the world around and filtering out the things that we don't like, or by trying to kid ourselves that things aren't the way they really are. And he was talking about how these three things had manifested in society at large as consumerism, as systemic racism and militarism and colonialism, and as fake news and advertising that we're being sold things that aren't quite real. So we're swimming in this atmosphere of everybody being involved in trying to prop themselves up and feel okay, feel safe, feel like I exist. Because fundamentally, somehow, we all have a deep sense of lack. That's his diagnosis. Oh, it's his take on a Buddhist diagnosis, the delusion of the separate. Self, or the delusion of separateness, I think is the kind of technical term, that I am here and I'm isolated, I'm on my own. And that kind of existential loneliness leads me to acting out in the ways that I described, the swimming or the thrashing around in Satya Robyn's analogy. Or pretending that you're not even in water, I guess, is another. No, everything's fine. And we had some conversation about where this comes from, because what Buddhism teaches us is that we are fundamentally beings of connection. We are connected to each other. And to all living things in lots of different ways. And yet we forget that over and over again for some reason, and various people have got various ideas about where that split occurred. I don't think I want to have that bit of the conversation here, but it's enough to recognize that there is a kind of feeling of isolation that is built up in individuals and societies, and there's this forgetting of how connected we are. So one of the things we wake up to is this sense of interconnectedness. And interconnectedness, I think, exists on a number of different levels. One of the first practices the Buddha invited his disciples to practice, to meditate with, was the idea that they were physically made of the same stuff as the world around them. So in those days it would have been earth, water, air, fire, rather than the elements as we understand them now. Noticing, oh, the solid places in my body are made of the same things as the solid places around me. The wet things in my body have the same qualities as the wet things in the world. I'm breathing air that comes and goes. There is heat in me. I'm alive in the same way that fire is alive and that natural processes are alive. So physically and biologically, there's this sense of connection. And we know there's that kind of fact that floats around about how long, how many years it takes to replace every cell in the human body. So that's one level of interconnectedness. And there is something really valuable about waking up to that. Oh, we are all in the same boat in this way. It can begin to create some sense of fellow feeling. Our compassion. But there's also something important about waking up to what is sacred, not just the practical ways that we're connected. And this is the thing that is a little bit more tricky to speak about. Lots of spiritual traditions have put different kinds of words around this. In Pure Land Buddhism, we talk about Amida Buddha being the embodiment of loving kindness, of compassion, of wisdom, like all Buddhas are. And the, the quality that Amida has is that he sees each living thing as it is and loves it just as it is without inviting it to change. And that the light from this Buddha permeates through the whole universe. Everything is illuminated by that love. And that is not really a visual experience, although sometimes we can experience it in that way. When I came out of a 5-day chanting retreat, when I was saying the name of Amida Buddha over and over again all the time that I was awake, about 120,000 recitations, everything seemed brighter when I came out of the essentially garden shed with a heater in that I'd been living in for 5 days. And it was a nice day. It was autumn, but it was a bright autumn day. So things were actually very bright, but something about the kind of joy that I'd experienced and the deep sense of peace and the lack of that thrashing around or trying to achieve things meant that I really was seeing things as if there was more light around. And of course there wasn't, but there was a particular kind of clarity in that experience. And alongside that clarity, there was a very easy compassion arising in me for everything that I met, for everybody that I met. Um, I was much more easily moved to tears in a tender way for a little while following that retreat. And you know, there's lots of different ways of explaining how that experience might have occurred. I'm sure you could create some kind of materialist explanation with chemicals in the brain and not seeing anybody for 5 days and doing this kind of slightly trance practice. But Buddhism tells us that there is something that we wake up to that is fundamentally true about the universe, and that, that this interconnectedness isn't just material, but that when we really wake up to it, naturally compassion starts to flow and, and everything becomes illuminated. In that way that I described. As we said in the refuges this morning, the word Buddha means one who is awake. So of course, when the Buddha looks at things, they look with eyes that are always loving. And when we come into their presence— and when I say when we come into the presence of the Buddha, I guess you might take that metaphorically, or we might also think about real teachers who are sometimes in that state. We feel received by that love and it begins to shift something in us and it begins to show us something fundamental about how it is to be human and about what is true in the universe. One way of describing what we wake up to is the presence of Buddhas, or that there is a pure land. That there is this quality, this field of love that exists that we can tap into. And when we're in that place, we see the universe differently. And some would say we see the universe more clearly. Tatagata is one of the words that Maria read when we did the morning, uh, verse before walking this morning, which is an epithet of the Buddha, meaning one who has gone or one who has come. But is also trans— Tatha is also translated as the way of suchness, the way things are. And the way things are is the way a Buddha sees them, not the way that we see them. One of the things that a Buddha wakes up to is how difficult it is to be a living being, and, and that the things that we do, the ways in which we act out the greed, the hate, the ill will, the delusions, that all of those are based on fear, that they are based on that fundamental sense of lack that we have. And when you see a living being and see through the greed, the ill will, the bluster, the, the kind of the delusion to that experience of lack that they are having, naturally we feel easier towards them, we feel more compassionate towards them. In the early days of this community— why, I guess even probably now to some degree— occasionally somebody would move in who I would find a bit tricky, and Satya wouldn't be affected by that at all. She would find it very easy to be warm to them and compassionate. And vice versa, you know, Satya might find somebody tricky, and I would be the one holding the quality of compassion towards them, because it's not something fundamentally about the person in front of you that is difficult, although some people are more difficult than others. Um, it's also to do with the way that we see them. And when we wake up to the suffering and that sense of lack that is powering that person, actually we see them differently. We see them with the eyes of the Buddha. That's one of the things that the Buddha wakes up to. Something else about this sacred quality that we're putting ourselves in relationship to to, which I think is talked about in other spiritual traditions more than in Buddhism, is that, that practitioners often have a sense of being guided or receiving very particular wisdom that suits their life. And because it sounds a bit like a higher power speaking to us, or a bit too religious, religious or spiritual, we kind of shy away in Buddhism in the West from talking about those experiences, but some teachers do. Reverend Koshin Schomburg, another Zen teacher from the States, speaks explicitly about asking what he calls the eternal for guidance. And he says when you ask, you have to have no expectation of what the answer might be. You have to be prepared to really receive what arrives in you. But there is something somewhere which he just calls the eternal that will meet that question in you and provide an answer and provide some guidance. And when I was reading, um, Senju Athyamanuel's book and attending her talks, there's a real sense that practitioners sometimes have these mysterious experiences that speak to something happening beyond this world that you might call simply, um, the unconscious mind speaking to you in different ways, that you become more receptive to that. That you might call the sacred appearing in different ways in your life to guide you or sustain you. But there are these kinds of mysterious experiences that people have that suggest there's more going on than we usually allow for. A few weeks ago, I've been feeling a lot of anxiety and I was really, couldn't work out where this was coming from. So I put some time aside to sit down and really look inside my own system using some of the tools that I know as a psychotherapist, asking myself questions, slowly peeling back the layers and following the thread of this anxiety through my memories And to my surprise, what I discovered was this place within me that was saying, I'm a pre-birth experience. I'm— this anxiety has its roots in the time before you were born due to things that, that you experienced in the womb. This, this kind of Yeah, I guess the stress of the world that somehow got transmitted to me at that time that I reacted to, which a few years ago I would've thought, oh, it's not possible to, to access that kind of really early experience. But my work with clients suggests that it is possible, or at least something is speaking to me using that language that I need to pay attention to. So I just stayed with this experience and the image, some, some kind of very diffuse image came to mind of a, of a slightly unformed, very young child, uh, fetus, I suppose. And I just stayed with that and with the embodied experience of anxiety that I was feeling myself. And started to let it know, I see you, I hear you, this anxiety makes sense given what was happening around you. I'm just sending you loving kindness. And I was, as I was sitting in that state with my eyes closed, spontaneously I had a sense of a very bright light appearing next to me in my mind's eye, in my imagination, if you like. But I hadn't conjured up, I hadn't willpowered it. More like a waking dream, I suppose, in the way that things unfold without us knowing what's happening. And I had such a strong sense of, oh, this is Kuan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who has come to lend me some of her loving kindness and send it to this place, this very early place that is holding this anxiety in me. So I sat there feeling very grateful and moved that this energy had appeared that I couldn't really explain. And the anxiety began to settle. And as it settled and calmed down and relaxed, this light and the vague— which had a kind of vague sense of the figure in it in my mind's eye— started to fade and disappear, and something me was like, oh, you could stay for a bit longer, maybe there's more that I can get out of this relationship. And she was like, well, no, this is what you needed, and I've appeared and I've done that. Now I'm off. And it disappeared. And if I'd been— if I'd been able to control that, or it'd been something of my own creation, definitely I would have pinned it down. But it appeared and disappeared. Spontaneously. And like some other experiences I've had, certainly 20 years ago I would have found psychological or explanations that, that would have explained it all away. And yet the, the lived experience of it was this was not something of my own creation. This was something outside of my mind, something outside of my experience that appeared and disappeared and had very good intentions for me. And I'm very grateful for that. And most of the time my spiritual practice isn't like that. I'm saying the name of the Buddha and my mind is wandering, or I'm sitting meditation Sometimes I get a feeling of deep peace. Sometimes I'm distracted. Sometimes I get a sense of being deeply physically rooted and grounded, and that's very reassuring. And a sense of a very, um, subtle or faint quality of something sacred or mysterious that isn't coming towards me in that way, I guess because I don't need it. But a vague sense of, well, it's kind of around somewhere. And the practice then is about trusting that I'm held, that there is something sacred. I'm not sure we're designed to be awake and in that place all of the time as human beings. To that kind of intense experience of loving kindness. Pure Land Buddhism often talks about the sun being beyond the clouds. Like when the clouds come in, you just trust that the sun is still there. We kind of know it's still there and we go about our lives. And spiritual practice is a bit the same. A lot of what we do is reminding ourselves that these— that there is something sacred there, even if we're not having an embodied experience of being connected to it moment to moment. And often the clouds are described as that— those kind of greed, hate, and ill will. That's what gets between us and the Buddha. And that's true, those things do get between us and the Buddha. But I think Also, there's something quite normal about having a thin layer of cloud between us and that very intense experience of light, because a lot of the time what we're called to do is pay attention to things down here and get on and tend to the garden or paint the walls or do our taxes, and it's hard to do that if you're spiritually enraptured. But we can do those things, and we, and we do those things in a different way if we remember that that light is always there, whether we're tuned into it or not. It, it can take away the edge of anxiety, and it speaks directly to that, those lack projects that David Loy describes, because when we trust that there is some sacred presence that we are connected to, that begins to undermine that sense of lack and isolation and loneliness that drive all those behaviors and thought patterns that usually are the things that bring us to spiritual practice because they're causing so many problems. So I think that's probably all I wanted to say, or at least it's all I can remember that I wanted to say, which practically is the same thing. No mo me dabu. So I'll pause if there's any questions or comments. I'll keep an eye on Philip if he wants to wave as well from Zoom. No pressure. Yeah, sure.

Did your anxiety disappear instantly, or did it take a few days for the experience to kind of filter down?

Yeah, I would say— thank you. Did my— did the anxiety I was talking about change straight away, or did it take a few days to filter down? Appear. Oh, sorry.

Did it appear or disappear? I was thinking more of a sort of taking the experience in it.

Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say both in some ways, that there was a, there was an immediate shift that happened in that moment. And I believe that kind of immediate transformation is possible, that the brain rewires itself in light of that. And that maybe that doesn't happen completely because it's still true that it was triggered in the same kind of situations but to a much lower degree. Yeah, so, so, and some of the finishing up of how it had to be worked out was me being in that situation and finding out actually this is, this is actually okay to be in this situation. So yeah, so there was something immediate and some and something that took some time.

Um, is it okay to share with you?

Yeah, sure.

Um, so when you're talking about the sacred presence that you experienced, it just reminded me of a recent one of mine. So earlier this year, I was going through a very stressful process of naturalization in the UK, and my mind was absolutely full wrapped up in that. Um, so one of the days before I went for to submit my application, I went away for a day to have an event, just to take my mind off things. And I climbed this hill up there. I usually do that, climb the hill and then sit down to meditate. It's very good when you have a bit of physical exercise. It takes some of the noise out of the way. And it was just like a random side path that led to a closed gate. It was absolutely like nothing special about that place, basically, but nice view. So I sat down exhausted and started to meditate, and I was listening to music very good, so not in silence, but and suddenly felt this light coming at me, um, and it wasn't the sun, it was the light within, it was very clear, and I saw a sort of figure of light that to me looked like Siddhartha. Of course it could have been my perception because I'm closer to that tradition, um, and I was just sat there absolutely astonished just receiving that, and kind of went closer to me and said, 'Music is now the path of something,' and then just kind of slowly disappeared. And I was sat there, 'What do you mean?' Because of course it's my hobby, but, um, you know, it's got the rest of the job and all the other responsibilities and And I was absolutely so cast by that experience, and I sat there thinking, well, okay, what do I do with this now? But I guess it did open me up to a few things. And when I came home, I started explaining, you know, describing this to Steve and saying, it's not just about the music. Of course, I just trust the Buddha to Let me know what exactly that means, and I'll continue practicing and of course pay more attention to it. But I think it's also about committing to the path. And the fact that I had that experience and I saw this figure of light that appeared as Siddhartha, to me also means that— because I'm also— because I was Christian, was Orthodox, you know, or this has no tradition in my country. I think this also means that I'm having this dialogue with the divine, and it gives me that path, it gives me that sort of way that can lift me out of the noise and the everyday struggles that we go through. Some smaller struggles, some larger struggles. The one I was going through at the time was a very serious one, and it just kind of gave me that big hope, I guess, and reassurance that I'm doing the right thing, even though sometimes we kind of fall over and step a bit away from the path and we have to just gradually pull ourselves back. And I was just— when I was going through some are the tough times with everything that's been going on with the war recently. I just sometimes try and remember that while, you know, engaging into these kether experiences of being lost in mundane stuff, to try and shut this anxiety down. I think what I was sometimes lacking is just going back to that and reminding myself that Kṛṣṇa is there to to hold us. And eventually, gradually, when we work through all that, you know, we go back to that. And I was drawn back to that experience. And of course, when I practice, of course, when I play, particularly when I kind of try to improvise or play my own pieces, I feel that presence sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. And it's about the most amazing thing that I've felt in my life. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing.

Thank you. Can I share something, please? Yeah. Um, I've had for quite a long time, um, overpowering sensations before events have occurred, um, tragic events quite often. Death of various people, or like the 9/11, things like that, where a few days before I can feel this immense sadness come. Well, I just feel very, very low, very depressed, very tearful. And I've got so used to it now that I can usually predict that something is about to happen or that has happened. Um, and I deal with a lot of dying patients and I can quite often get a feeling when somebody's going to die. So, and I know that's probably part of what my, my job is part of that as well. I feel that there is a thread, definitely, and I've sort of got used to it now. I can embrace it. I know that there's something that is, you know, out there, conscious collective or whatever.

There's a sutra called Indra's Net Sutra, which describes like a fishing net, and at each knot where the ropes cross contains a jewel, and every jewel contains the reflection of every single other jewel in the net. And that speaks to that kind of very deep, mysterious connection, which somehow something you were saying sort of gave me a sense of that.

Huge connection to something which is far bigger than sometimes I can cope with. But I don't struggle with it anymore because I know that there is just something coming through. Yeah, thank you. You can take it as something positive, I guess, if you want to sense with it. Be a bit more, I don't know, cautious, I guess. Yeah, sometimes it's a bit scary because when I'm overwhelmed, yeah, I think something's afoot, something's happened. And it usually takes a couple of days and then I'll think, ah, and then I start calming down and then I can internalize it. Why did that come? I've had a similar experience about quite a while ago, and now I'm beginning to realize that what I felt, what I saw then, was actually that you're always— yeah, you can't always understand what happens. It's almost like you can connect to this collective suffering. You know, we talk about it isn't just individual sufferings, it's a collectiveness of it, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And that's helpful, isn't it, to remember that what we experience, particularly as a therapist, I can really try and feel, well, where's that come— what's this, where's that come from, you know? But, but a lot of it, as you say, actually it's just what's in the field around us that we're picking up and resonating with. Some of us resonate with some aspects more than others, but it is a bit like, you know, an instrument where you pluck one string and the other ones, some of the other ones around make a sound as well. We can be a bit like that.

It would be great if we could maybe, I don't know, maybe a little technique to move off of People seem to have a lot of resonance around the negative events. Maybe people also resonate with some of the good events. I don't know how to evoke that because, like saying, you have a little premonition about the bad things, and it's sometimes hard to cope with, but not so much about the good things. I don't really have premonitions about, like, friends and children being born.

Yeah. Maybe because it's easier to experience those as they're unfolding, so we don't, we don't need the gift of anything extra. Because actually, when you're celebrating a child being born, we're just able, we're just kind of naturally celebrating it and kind of in tune with it, whereas some of these other things are a bit more overwhelming.

So it's Maybe that would explain the overwhelming kind of empathy that we collectively have as well.

Yeah.

But I think it's something protective. Yeah.

Yeah. Suzuki Roshi talked about the great grief. That's part of what spiritual practice opens us up to, is moving from personal grief to an experience of the great grief. And, and part of that is a deep sense of empathy for all living beings. And I think when, when we cultivate loving kindness, or when we plug into loving kindness, or have a sense of the Buddha being present with us, that allows us to be with the suffering without being overwhelmed, because it's like our heart gets bigger. We still feel the suffering, but we're able to be with it in a different kind of way.

Maybe we also get more mudita when we open up in that way.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Which is the joy that we feel when we're alongside someone else's joy. Like that, you connect to their joy.

Yeah, it's one of the gifts of spiritual practice, sympathetic joy.

Yeah. It's also interesting what what you said about the Western approach to practice and it all being about mindfulness and how it makes us better employees. Maybe there's a lot of that happening at work, which of course is great, but that's— it's like some yoga teachers teach you the movement without actually linking to what spiritual practices came from. And then straight away tell the difference that when you're in a class with somebody who's just teaching you movements physically, you feel better, but you don't get that, you know. You go to shavasana, you don't get the kind of connected feeling. But when it is a teacher who actually opens up with a chant of Om, told you a bit about what we're actually trying to do. It's a completely different effect, so it is great to see that we actually have an issue here that does— is called— there's obviously bits like advocacy in our everyday lives, but there's also this spiritual way that we link into Well, maybe we'll pause there unless there's any final thoughts.

Namomi to boo.