Reflections: Ajahn Sucitto

Co-operation: Taming the Dragon

2012-01-06T07:01:00.000Z

There’s something very sensible, magical, and confusing about working together. Sensible because you get more done that way and you learn from others; and magical because it makes work into a recreational activity: you get to feel part of a group in a comfortable rather than conformist way. The confusing thing is that, although it makes sense, it doesn’t happen so often. Despite needing other people in order to get born, fed, educated, sustained, nursed and even buried, one of the most difficult things for people to do is to co-operate without domination, infantilism or resentment. In fact human history and organisation is mostly about people not co-operating but either being coerced, or coercing others, into submission, or seeking self-centred ends. Co-operation means we give up our individual opinions voluntarily because we notice that it makes us more grounded and empathic (and that feels sane). But by and large, even relatively peaceful societies operate on the ‘trade-off’ principle. That is the person gives up his/her preferences and negotiation rights in order to have security, wages and convenience. And however much he or she continues to dislike and feel frustrated by the boss or the government, that corporate power retains control. Moreover, membership of the corporate state is not a voluntary matter.

At this time, I’ve been or am about to be, part of two large co-operative efforts commemorating the life and teachings of Ven. Ajahn Chah. The first was a weekend of talks and meditation organised by lay supporters in Malaysia, and the second, around the date of Ajahn Chah’s death (16^th January) is a gathering of monks, nuns and lay people for Sangha meetings, Dhamma-talks and commemorative rituals around Wat Pah Pong in N.E.Thailand. The Malaysian event drew 21 monks and 500-600 lay people in a very well co-ordinated and shared occasion; the gathering in Thailand will number tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands. These are fitting tributes in many ways, not least among them being that they require considerable degrees of co-operation. And co-operation, working together, was one of Ajahn Chah’s most constant themes of practice. Out of this there are currently about 300 monasteries jogging along approximately to the same step but with a lot of variety, and monastics meeting on occasion with a good deal of harmony. There is no strong political will or Beloved (=feared) Leader holding it together; there is no world mission that we’re all signed up to; there isn’t even any wish to increase the membership of the communion. (An abbot has to ask and wait and be checked for several years before the monastery is accepted. And with 300 already in the group, there’s some reluctance – because how many can co-operate while retaining the loose ‘family-feel.’?) Forest monks like to live in forests, meditate, work on their monasteries and not be bothered with too much organisation. So the communion works primarily through shared loyalties, gratitude, and respect for Ajahn Chah and the Sangha ideal set up by the Buddha. Indeed: working together was also something the Awakened One felt to be essential.

As long, bhikkhus, as bhikkhus gather in harmony, break up in harmony and attend to business in harmony, the Sangha can be expected to prosper and not decline. D 26.1.6

The magical part of co-operation (rather than coercion) is that through everyone voluntarily adding their individual bit to the mix, a wider empathic sense arises. This allows us to drop our self-conscious anxieties and self-centred views, because shared sanity feels better than inflation and the shadow of deflation that it dreads. Co-operation tames the dragon of egocentricity, that energy that arises in us that favours individual perspectives and tends towards righteousness and grandiosity. And it does so without cutting each other down. So to do that taming is another of the motivations behind entering a co-operative. It’s not just about efficiency or conformity, but based on wisely reflecting how the egocentric dragon is a part of our psyche and it needs to be carefully harnessed for our own well-being. Tamed that is, but not slain.

Isn’t it wonderful when you do something well, when you bring forth your creative or caring potential, you’re really on the ball and you get a result that you’re pleased with? Arts, crafts, pulling off the good deal, scoring the goal – this is the sweet spot that we will sacrifice hours of time and most of our energy for. We light up. And the bigger the field that we affect, the brighter the light. ‘A thousand people came to my talk, ten thousand people came to my performance, I have a following of twenty-thousand! But so and so has a following of a million – so I have to try harder.’ (Ah yes, the pleasure and the glow are dukkha too. They arrive at no final satisfaction and require stress to keep them going.)

Take a look around at dragon careers: politicians and celebrities are immersed in that energy; those who are captured by it will even die for it. Gaddafi was still glowing with righteousness up to the moment they dragged him out of the drainage channel; rock stars survive on drugs and rehab to keep their dragon flying. And when it comes to the spiritual arena, the same creature can spread it’s glorious wings.

The way it goes is that through spiritual practice you develop some skills, your mind deepens and your clarity improves. You feel you’ve learnt a few things and yes, out of compassion and concern, and often on the invitation of others (or encouraged by your teacher), you attempt to teach. It isn’t great, but somebody appreciates it, and you get invited again, and somewhat encouraged you try again…and over time you get ‘better’ at it and more people express appreciation. Meanwhile of course, this encourages you to deepen and intensify your practice and so this is all good stuff. At a certain, unspecified point however, you're likely to ‘become’ somebody. Your name starts to attract people. Still, you allow that, because it’s good if people have some example that they can feel trust in and get inspiration from. And you like to help. (Or maybe by now you have a mission.) Anyway there’s a point where supporting the public persona becomes more important to you than meeting the realities of how much it’s costing your private person. Dragons demand a lot of energy; they don’t want to bother with looking after your body, and with doing the laundry of life. They don’t want to meet others out of role, they don’t want to deal with petty details; consequently it gets so that you only feel assured and in the right place when your dragon is out there in the public eye pouring out the grand vision with limitless compassion and so on. Eventually there isn’t the time to do the practices that you started with; you get cut off from your fellows in the practice and there isn’t the requirement of critical (or concerned) feedback.

Have you ever met someone on a dragon high? Notice that they can’t really hear what you’re trying to say; that every topic is referred to through their own perspective. And that, sometimes with calm and effortless logic they demonstrate that how right they are, or what kind of a person you are, rather than address your concerns. Pretty weird and frustrating isn’t it? The best thing is to avoid a challenge or confrontation (dragons have a lot of energy, and a wounded dragon is very nasty), remain non-committal on what they’re getting off on, and, if there’s an opening, ask, with some concern, how they’re feeling. You may reach the human who’s carrying it all.

It’s because of our tendency to get lost in our success (and our failures) that, for training the mind, we need each other. We need Sangha. For instance, I get back to the monastery after teaching a retreat which people were grateful for; they said some pretty complimentary things. It’s good to feel that, working from a ‘don’t know’ position and trusting practising together and tuning in, some teachings can come forth that have been helpful. I feel warmed by the energy that the occasion has brought forth. However, on returning to the monastery, if there was any potential for inflation, it's soon over. The monks and nuns are polite and respectful, but not adoring. Now there are a few matters to deal with: ‘Can so-and-so visit his parents?’ ‘Somebody’s had a small accident with the monastery’s car.’ ‘What are we going to do about the sewage problem?’ ‘Mrs X is letting her dogs run around the monastery’s woodland and disturbing the wildlife.’ ‘Ajahn B wants to talk to you about Sangha policy on internet usage.’ And so on. Home again.

Meetings with other community leaders for Sangha business is another levelling occasion. Here we are all 'number ones', with an awareness of the grandiosity (and the anxieties) that the role can bring. Some of the meetings extend over two days; there are a range of topics and a range of views, agreements and disagreements. Yet, throughout the process, if one is tuned into the process of the meeting rather than only the items on the agenda, what becomes apparent is an increasing capacity to meet, to stay connected and not get lost in a view. We disagree, we debate, we listen – and it dawns that none of us are here to get our own way but rather to clear the mind of delusion. For many items there is no 'decision' reached, but the real business, that of living in harmony as a Sangha (the only fundamental topic), gets lived out.

At other times it’s just the simple experience of someone looking at you with bemused compassion as you’re about to take flight. That gives you the message: you don’t need to do that, you’re all right as you are. So right here, on the shared ground of life, is where dragon-energy can transmute into something more even and steady. Over time I’ve come to see the benefits. How I’d express that now is that I accept that I am somebody but who that is changes and I don’t have to know who I am. Sometimes rather wonderful energies can arise in my mind, and at other times I’m just tired, or mistaken, or plugging away at the washing-up of life. But whatever the state, the Dhamma can still comes through: just deal with what’s in front of your nose and don’t make a person out of any of it.

Even when he became a renowned teacher, Ajahn Chah still operated within Sangha. He made a point of taking groups of monks with him to pay respects to monks, such as heads of Sangha administration, who had no spiritual realizations and were often of a patchy Vinaya standard. He had his monks attend on grouchy senior monks who didn’t respect or were jealous of Ajahn Chah. And when someone wanted to mint an Ajahn Chah medallion/amulet, Ajahn Chah asked the Sangha what they thought. His chief disciples thought it was a bad idea, so the project was dropped. On another occasion someone claims to be a stream-enterer and Ajahn Chah says ‘It’s better than being a dog.’And so on. No great flights of glory. Instead steer your energies towards direct application to the here and now. That’s what’s respected.

This is why experienced practitioners appreciate the chance to just be a group of people folding up a large awning; or clearing up after a big meeting with everyone helping out as best they can and nobody having to prove that they're enlightened. Senior, junior...maybe someone’s giving the instructions, there are a few opinions, but we get on with it, it’s no big thing. We’re just sharing energy, levelling into a group norm. Co-operation: it’s the gold-standard of Dhamma-training.

Original Openness

2011-11-24T19:08:00.008Z

So you’re in the rainforest of N.W.Congo looking for wildlife – and then one of them finds you. What do you do? What do you do when a large male gorilla comes towards you, in fact draws very close? Well, in this case, a friend told me, you just stay open. ‘I was out of my comfort zone,’ he admitted, ‘but I just had to be there and trust.’ The gorilla slowly moved in, placed a kiss on my friend’s neck, and then moved on his way. Welcome to the open world.

Admittedly such an attitude can often seem inadvisable with our fellow humans. But there are times when there’s really nothing else you can do. In my case the trust in openness was most dramatically demanded of me when a group of bandits, brandishing axes and cudgels jumped me near Rajgir in Bihar, India. What do you do when four armed men have grabbed you, and in the heat of the moment, one is grimacing and waving an axe at your head? Fortunately there’s not much else to do but to stay open. For me, in that moment, the reflection arose that everyone has to die, and maybe this was my time. The only choice that was available was to go without fear. So instinctively, I bowed my head to the man with the axe and drew the blade of my hand across the top of my skull to indicate where to hit. ‘This won’t take long,’ I thought. The bandit paused and his energy and body language softened. I stepped forward, again offering my head. The heat in the situation dropped like a stone. The man with the axe looked confused and lowered his weapon, and the other men released my arms. I slipped my bag from my shoulders, placed it before them and slowly walked away. No kiss on the neck, but enough for me to trust the power of openness. *

Opennness is an attractive quality. To feel open-minded and open-hearted is beautiful; to be free from the burden of anxiety, mistrust and planning the future; to be simply present. In that willingness to be here with no preoccupations, defence or alternatives, we can rest in a world which suddenly, surprisingly, feels like home. With openness there’s the ability to learn, even from mistakes, and a basis for healthy motivation. It’s a quality that I frequently assess in myself: in a position which entails management and tradition, how do I stay open to the erratic, the uncertain and the experimental? How do I stay fresh?

It’s a wide-ranging enquiry: for most people the process of growing up is generally one in which, as stability and convenience increase, wonder and appreciation fade. The domesticated management of our lives can render us dull and clumsy; we don’t see or respond in a fresh way, and the magical domain of childhood flattens into a world of named knowns and functions. The individual gets bound to performance – even in sport or relationship – society is limited to a network of obligations and ownership, and religion becomes associated with claiming ultimate superiority. In such a world, motivation gets turned towards maintaining and enhancing the present status quo – although the consequent effort to maintain all the social connections, legal structures and appurtenances causes us nearly unmanageable degrees of stress. None of this is new: from ancient times the energetic and spiritual costs of a managed life in the society has always been one of the reasons for Going Forth. So can we find a way to live on the planet that doesn’t involve burying the spirit? How do we find stability in a world of uncertainty and change without going rigid?

Since change is a fundamental ‘law,’ the question around accommodating it calls for an examination of what openness entails. In the Buddha’s dispensation, openness is the faculty of faith (saddhā). This openness is an innate faculty, part of the original potential with which we’re born. A crucial point to emphasize is that it doesn’t stand alone but is part of a set of five innate faculties (indriya) which we are encouraged to develop and which are said to ‘merge in the Deathless.’ So this is major stuff. The other four faculties are application-energy (viriya), mindfulness (sati), collectedness (samādhi) and discernment (pañña), but faith opens the set. It’s not a belief – belief-systems tend to close the mind by locking it into an imposed structure – but a potential we all have. So openness is not an ideology but an original and authentic faculty. Its bottom line is the everyday faith that we have that there’s something worth living for, that the future holds a potential for development, and that in the tangled skein of what’s arising in the present, there is a meaningful thread. Faith, as openness, is already available – and essential. It’s worth remembering that the first words the Buddha spoke to his five first disciples were: ‘Wide open are the gates to the Deathless, let those who can listen, bring forth their faith.’ In this statement, he wasn’t asking for belief, but pointing to our innate potential for faith – because it’s with this as a foundation that the mind is most capable of accessing the other four original faculties. And to emphasize again: although it’s the opener, faith isn’t enough – the crucial detail is that we need to place it on people or circumstances that can support it. Therefore throughout his life, the Buddha kept encouraging people to consider, assess and carefully discern what to place that faith in.

Openness then is a careful practice rather than an ideology that insists on openness to all people at all times. Misplaced faith, openness or trust which isn’t backed up by discernment and a mindful assessment of what is worth putting your faith in, is subject to being abused. What is skilful, however, is to be open to yourself about what’s happening to you in the here and now, and checking it out – in your body and heart. Maybe there was a threat, but that’s passed. Maybe you’ve reached the edge of our capacity to be open and accepting of another: then something has to be said to let them know that. Thus you replace a pathology with wise navigation. And this wise openness naturally supports application-energy; when there's that inner balance we’re naturally curious and empathic and we move into our environment in a positive way.

Environment alone provides adequate causes for what I’ve called ‘spiritual burial.’ In a world in which moral integrity is not a guarantee, confused self-interest often overcomes interpersonal respect. Abuse – verbal, sexual and physical – gives numb hearts a fleeting surge of power, release and even pleasure. And for the abused, as every instance of abuse diminishes self-confidence, the ability to take initiative, feel that there’s anything good or true or beautiful, and anything to be motivated by all fade. Hence we lose trust, get cynical and close down. The experience of a closed heart is deadening – it loses its natural empathy and joyfulness, and therefore seeks surges of power and pleasure to feel alive. Thus the cycle of abuse (of oneself or others) keeps going. And the remedy, the breaking of the cycle, can’t be affected by punishment; it takes the presence of empathy – within one's own mind, or provided by another – to offer acceptance and safety to the numb or embittered heart; that’s how the pattern unravels. In everyday human terms, what has to be done is to open up the hurt, feel into it and talk it out.

Another cause for spiritual burial is acclimatization to comforts: we insure them, defend them, and are unwilling to step out of the haven of the known. The traditional remedy is that every now and then, you undertake a pilgrimage (which is how I came to be in Bihar in the first place). It’s a chance to shed some wrappings. And that’s a constant requirement in order to counterbalance domestic life. Because whether it’s caused by phobias or addictions, closure of the heart reduces our confidence, and thereby increases the anxiety that the closure is supposed to protect us from. Thus begins another downward spiral. A friend of mine, embarking on a trip to explore wildlife in Mauritius, found that his companion couldn’t go because there was no alcohol on the ship. Another person couldn’t come to the monastery because she couldn’t handle the idea of sitting on a toilet seat that other people had sat on. The phobia barred her from companionship in Dhamma and an ideal environment in which to work on addictions and phobias. We’re up against a very agile demon.

In the world in general, the same spirals occur. People also close down with the presence (or the idea) of strangers, the immigrants, the radicals, the new wave. Those who are unsettled unsettle us, and one of our reactions to that is to lose empathy and increase security. But in keeping things safe, systems of security generate loss of liberty and opportunity – hence there’s protest, and hence the tear-gas. Most repressive systems use ‘law and order’ to block change, and however responsible government sounds, any response that isn’t at least open to change tends towards repression. Let’s not be pessimistic, but if you’ve reviewed any social or religious revolution, (or just read Euripides’ Bacchae) you’ll get a grim picture of how the forces involved and how volcanic that change can become when it eventually happens.

Milder but chronic degrees of spiritual burial get triggered by fear of the uncertain, which triggers the security behaviours which the Buddha summed up as ‘attachment to systems and customs’(silavattaparamāsa). These peak as obsessive-compulsive disorders, but whether it’s a fundamentalist view, a need to have everything planned in advance, or knocking three times on the table before you can eat breakfast, attachment to systems and customs is about being able to establish personal control in a world that is experienced as tipping into chaos. Watch out for the signs: whenever there’s that wobble of feeling that you have to control life, and that there are others that you have to struggle against, and a mass of things you have to sort out – it’s time to pause and take a long outbreath. Pause, come into the body, sense its texture and energies and take a long slow outbreath; then pause some more. Even lengthen that pause; it helps the mental energy to shift and find ground in the body. With the support of a firm centre (most usefully aligned to the spinal axis) opening can begin. Then if you let your awareness feel its way into the felt sense of your body in an open and unpressurized way, the areas of tension can melt and areas that are stale brighten up. You get to feel whole, present, not driven forward and not hanging back. The neural connections for irritation and greed aren’t getting engaged and what remains is empathy and balance. If you stay with that, thoroughly, samādhi arises. This is not a matter of ‘getting concentrated,’ it’s a matter of giving your original openness a valid support by bringing it into your body and fully living it. Then you get perspective: the first ‘other’ that you have to deal with is living under your ribs; the mess that you have to sort out is the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Uncertainty is more chronically embedded as the personality’s relationship to the world. Because personality is a social interface and not a central support, it can only manage what it has been programmed by society to handle. Hence chaotic urges, irrational moods, and psychological imbalances are beyond its scope. So all that gets closed; and it needs a blur of pressures and distractions to hold down the lid. Like the princess with the pea under her mattress, you wonder why you’re not able to rest, but the source of all that activity is the need to be something (bhava) and the need to annihilate or purge oneself of something (vibhava) – although what the ‘something’ is is of a mirage-like nature. Within the shifting shapes of the mirage of need for approval/success/ performance credentials or the need to get away from or eradicate some basic stain (Lady Macbeth lives on!) is the unsettled state of being in a large something that sees and can accept or reject us. Hence the anxiety of what might happen if ʼ(people really knew/ when I get old/if I can’t do.../ if I’m not...enough). So our lives get busy with wrapping our sensed vacuity in agreeable and useful skins. And that blocks openness, with its ease of being.

Someone was talking to me recently about moments – particularly on waking up in the morning – of not knowing who or where he was, and of the panic that sets in. That’s the anxiety that comes with depending on personality. The point to work on, I suggested, is not to hastily establish who or where you are, but to find peace in the unknowing. That is, if you stabilize the response to the unknown by coming into your bodily presence, maybe setting up a small calming movement and sensing the space around you receiving you, then this opening out of the identified world is enjoyable and insightful. Although it’s a raw edge to negotiate, when we can establish an embodied openness, it’s a relief to have the personal world replaced with clear open space. When the movie of who we are turns off, there’s just the open mystery – and that’s wonderful. It’s well worth practising with, because that’s the threshold to cross at death.

So: safety and management versus freshness and immediacy, Apollonian versus Dionysian. The dilemma is classic and embedded in the human psyche as the see-saw between super-ego perspectives of what is useful, proper and acceptable, and the heart’s need for the free, the brave and the immediate. The first swings over into cold-hearted control, the latter into recklessness. Balance is crucial, and it takes the development of all five spiritual faculties.

But that's how you really wake up; life is most alive when you can be present at the edge of the unknown. And if there’s one way in which the property of ‘the Deathless’ can be experienced right now, it’s in the ability to living free of the heart-contraction of fear, depression and holding on that comes with the loss of the known. Death, separation, uncertainty – they’re all part of life. The Buddha’s teaching is that we have the original potential to handle, and in fact blossom, in the face of these. We don’t have to feel threatened, anxious, needy or inadequate. With wise openness, the main causes and conditions for human misery cease.

The gates to the good life are open. It’s only because we place so much emphasis on knowing what can’t be known – like the future (you can't even know the next moment) and how other people are – that we close them. But when all is uncertain, all is possible. In such a light, wise openness is the most obvious faculty to develop, because the unknown is right here within and around us.

* The fuller account of this is in 'Rude Awakenings' available via Wisdom Publications or via www.forestsanghapublications.org

Spiritual Friendship: Include It All

2011-09-30T14:01:00.012+01:00

Three of the monks went to a funeral recently. This in itself isn’t unusual, although we do limit the amount of funerals we attend – to those of people associated with the monastery – on the grounds that there are only so many that we can cover and still be able to keep the monastery (and the monastics) in reasonable working order. Still, having monks and nuns at funerals meets a need: that at the end of a life, there is a calm recognition of a person’s life and value – and from that, by extension, a chance to review our own lives in that light. So the formality of the occasion, and the presence of those Gone Forth, signals a shift from the normal aims and perspectives of social life. Those in attendance can consider: ‘What are we aiming for? What do we take with us; and what do we leave behind?’ The very fact of gathering becomes one sign of what it means to be human: that this person’s life touched many, he or she was known, respected, cared for by sons, daughters; that colleagues, friends and others drew benefit from their example.

The case of the recent funeral was exceptional however in that there were no sons, daughters, or colleagues – and very few friends. Just the three monks, the two lay associates of the monastery who had facilitated the hospice care in the last days of the deceased, and a funeral official. The deceased, I’ll call him ‘Harry,’ did have sons and a sister who knew of his dying and death, but they'd parted company years ago and obviously wanted it kept that way. It’s easy to understand their response – Harry, himself the subject of abuse as a child, had a potential for rage, a physique to back it up, and a history of violence. A split personality, one side of him was drawn to monasteries because of the acceptance they offered him, and by some genuine insights, aspirations and commitments. He’d spent time in prison, but in the last decade or so, association with Sangha had kept him on a course whereby the rage (which generally blew up at any sign of rejection) only manifested in occasional verbal storms. Still, whatever he’d done to his family had left such scars that even in his dying days, none of them would accommodate him. The monastery was his only fall-back. Although we couldn’t give him a place in the guest rooms – we have a responsibility to guests who seek some peace – the elderly monk who lives near the workshop, being a man of seasoned gentleness and ‘heard it all’ patience, would spend hours with Harry when he blew through. And in Harry's last days, the monk would find him a place to bed down by the fire in the workshop. Then, as Harry’s cancer progressed, some of the lay people around Cittaviveka managed to get him registered by a doctor and housed in a hospice. The message was becoming clear even before his funeral: even more than family and colleagues, spiritual friends are your most fundamental resort.

Friends? It wasn’t as if we particularly liked Harry – he generally created an edgy atmosphere around him, on account of his threatening manner. But the monastery is an open place for those who are genuinely trying to find Dhamma. And he kept coming, attending the meditations, listening to teachings and engaging in discussion groups as much as his relational difficulties and the tolerance of the other participants would allow. One of the monks in particular made a point of engaging with him in conversation; and the workshop monk, being about old enough to be his father, would listen. What they brought, more perhaps than any specific advice, was an accepting presence and the willingness to relate. And if we look again at the idea of friendship, even more than affection, it is that willingness to relate, the non-rejection of the other, which is the bottom line. In Harry’s history and with his character, this was a rare experience.

Perhaps this state of affairs, or something like it, isn’t uncommon. For most people, the empathy just gets switched off in the case of a disagreement or because they've parted company or hurt each other. A small wall is created in awareness, and the 'other' is on the other side of it. Over a lifetime, those walls can develop and place a big restriction on the mind – 'no go areas,' memories that have to be moved away from, tense pauses in the conversation when one of the others' names comes up. And a mind with shadows. But its not just an individual phenomenon, the empathic limitations of a society that rates individual performance and progress more highly than supporting and caring for others cast a shadow over much of daily life in the West. Let alone each society's acts of war, enslavement and abuse of others, there are the everyday signs of the loss of our potential to share and be free from fear. People connect via Facebook and texting, yet the three-dimensional living together, of knowing neighbours, or of even having a neighbourhood, is dwindling. A few years ago I read of a woman whose job it was to attend the funerals of people who died unknown. These were people who had been found dead in their homes by neighbours or police, but who had no connections to friends or relatives. This woman, working in London, attended a thousand funerals each year.

We might ask whether attending funerals is going to do such departed ones any good. However they're part of a value that we abandon at our peril: a society surely needs to acknowledge the empathic sense in order for there to be a society at all. Moreover, this sense is not a matter of affection, but of knowing how human beings are and what is the only sane way in which we can operate. Without empathy, we're left with shadows.

Of course the Buddha has his sights on this topic, and in several instances describes friendship in point-by-point detail. Here’s an example:

A good friend –
gives what’s hard to give;
does what’s hard to do;
endures what’s hard to endure;
shares their confidential matters with you;
keeps your confidential matters confidential;
stands by you in the hard times;
and doesn’t give up on you when you’re down and out. (A.7.35)

Monastic life is based on spiritual friendship. This may not be immediately apparent, as monastics seem notably cool in terms of relationship. Community membership is more obviously based on each individual’s ability to keep precepts and standards, to be part of an ethos of offering service and to have the self-reliance to manage dwelling in solitude. It doesn't sound that chummy. The lack of socialising and group entertainment is a challenge, especially when combined with the pressure of sense-restraint. People are coming and going all the time, and individuals haven’t chosen to be in the community on account of complimentary personalities. In fact, interpersonal dissonance isn’t unusual and there can be numbness or unspoken pain in the relational field. And yet, there can also be a learning and an emotional readjustment in all that. The pragmatic leverage for that shift is that, unless you disrobe, these others are bound to be part of your life “‘til death us do part.” It's hard to build walls. So, as we haven’t come to be with specific individuals, nor have many socialising events, nor have the possibility of excluding people we don’t get on with, something has to change in terms of how we relate.

The readjustment is essentially an emotional and perceptual broadening. The relational field has to widen to include a range of felt senses, from ‘I associate with you because I like or respect you,’ to ‘because I can learn from you,’ to ‘because I want to offer support,’ to ‘because I respect what you’re doing despite not always being on the same wavelength,’ right down to ‘because being with you pushes the buttons in me that I need to be aware of and work with.’ Spiritual friendship has to go deep and accommodate many flavours. If we can do this, it definitely strengthens and matures the heart. In fact one notices over time that ‘because I like you’ doesn’t have the same deepening staying power as ‘because there’s benefit in terms of Dhamma.’ The meaningful questions are: ‘Does this relationship bring support, or provide an opportunity to be generous with compassion?’ ‘Does it at least cause me to become resiliently patient?’ Spiritual friendship can only occur if it is conducive to our mutual development.

Without a mutual benefit, there’s no relationship. If we’re just doing good as a duty, then the heart isn’t available and so it can't grow. If we can’t meet somehow from a place of authenticity, even if it’s in coming to terms with our dislike or mistrust, then the association has no Dhamma in it. But when there is dissonance, if there can be a mutual acknowledgement of that, friendship grows – amazingly enough. This is the opportunity in human life. It isn’t always taken – the skill of listening to and handling emotions and perceptions takes careful inner and external development – that’s why we need the company of the wise and our own wise attention. To learn from these sources is indeed ‘the whole of the holy life.’

But we're not always in the company of the wise. Then there's the grist that has to be milled with wise attention. It begins with reflecting that other people and how they affect us keep us in touch with where we're stuck or at peace. Many samanas find themselves irritated by their colleagues; and on the other hand there are occasions of falling in love. That's how it goes: you can't just learn by theory. You get wise through being touched by it all – salty, sweet and sour – and allowing that redefines what is meant by ‘learning.’ It's a non-verbal process in which you reveal and move through all kinds of emotional territory. Rather to my surprise, it has showed me that fondness has its drawbacks; it agitates and disappoints. Getting fond of people may be part of the story, but only inasmuch as it supports getting free of pettiness, self-obsession, fear and ill-will. Then there's an increasing capacity to witness and relate to whatever arises in my own mind and heart, and that's the heart-intelligence that bears fruit in release. So often the learning point is just where that intelligence can meet the mundane human ‘other.’ Without that ‘other’ who, like it or not, touches the heart, I doubt whether any of us can be sure that we have finished our work.

Spiritual Friendship: Part One

2011-08-03T18:39:00.004+01:00

(I’ve titled this ‘Part One’, because I can’t believe that one posting is going to adequately sustain the focus on this topic)

Here’s a shot from the most recent bhikkhu ordinations at Cittaviveka. It depicts the closing piece in the procedure, when, with the new candidates being accepted into the bhikkhu Sangha, that community gathers closely around them to chant blessings. (The same thing happens at the siladhara ordinations). The entire ceremony is a very tight-knit thing – it requires all the bhikkhus to sit within a forearm’s distance from each other, to ensure that everyone is right there and fully present with the procedure. It is very much a gathering into the community – in fact although people call the ceremony ‘ordination,’ the literal meaning of the term upasampadā is ‘the process of gathering into’ or ‘acceptance’ for short. ‘Ordination’ is a term for entering the Christian priesthood, meaning ‘being empowered with religious authority’; upasampadā on the other hand isn’t about empowerment from a divine source, but the illumination of three key frames of reference that support spiritual growth. These are: aspiration, respect and acceptance. There is obviously the uplift of being fully accepted into a communal way of life that has persisted in some form or another for more than two millennia, but upasampadā includes these two other themes, which are reiterated throughout the ceremony in bodily and verbal ways. The personal aspiration, the ‘Going Forth’ is a personal avowal to step out of carelessness and ignorance in order to ‘cross over all suffering and to realize Nibbāna.’ It’s personal, because we ourselves can only know and supervise our minds. Respect for the Buddha’s use of community as a vehicle for liberation is essential to hold the mind under a guidance that you personally honour. Someone might like to count the number of prostrations, and paying of respects in the ceremony – I haven’t, but the point is clear: you really have to want to do this in this teaching and discipline. It’s not going to be imposed on you. So in the course of the ceremony, not just the ordinands but everyone gets a living reminder of a heart-direction for spiritual growth. This is perhaps why lay people always outnumber the Sangha on such occasions; I’d suggest it’s because the meanings of aspiration, reference to the Sangha vehicle and acceptance go beyond monastic relevance.

Acceptance is a big thing. When any of us dig down through all the layers of trying to get it right and wondering what others think about us, it’s likely that we’ll stick at a level of the murky but familiar self-judgement: ‘Not good enough.’ Have you ever wondered what it would take to be ‘good enough?’ Would it arise through having more of this quality, or less of that? Or is it a matter of trying harder? However, the likelihood is that all that doubt and struggle is going to hamper one’s performance or cramp one’s heart – so that the end result is more ‘not good enough.’ So it’s just downright pragmatic to begin with self-acceptance: ‘At this time, this sense of being me feels like this.’ There’s clarity and calm in that. Right now we can’t be any other way, but we’ll certainly operate at an optimum and run a lot smoother if clarity and calm replace that nagging ‘not good enough.’ Then with the arising of confidence and goodwill, we bring forth our best in a natural way. We can then isolate any specific blemish and bring clear attention to that before it mushrooms into an overall ‘I am…’ Self-acceptance is a powerful thing; without it, aspiration, the motivating wish (chanda) to bring forth one’s best, turns into the driven need to prove oneself (bhava-tanha) and doesn’t address the points that need looking at.

It’s also the case that, as much as we can attempt to accept ourselves, what is truly transformative is being accepted by others. Because to have that happen, we have to trust that we could be more open, more fully seen – and not get dismissed. Also for such a mirroring, we need to have a mirror in the form of a person or a group that is fundamentally benevolent and that we can respect. If we don’t respect others, their standards and opinions don’t count. So acceptance by others isn’t a matter of going along with the most popular trend in town, it’s about being willing to refer in an open way to that in ourselves and others that we respect.

Well that’s what the ‘acceptance’ into a community is about. And it starts with recognizing that whatever the aspiration, acceptance comes before complete purity – that those newly-accepted into the community aren’t fully enlightened. Using Sangha as a mirror above any individual teacher, means that the mirror is the example of many wise practitioners; and that keeps things clear in the likely case that most, if not all, of one’s immediate companions aren’t fully enlightened either. There’s a meeting and a mirroring in terms of shared aspiration, know-how and acknowledgement of the pitfalls. Acceptance and aspiration precede purity. This is why any genuine spiritual community is the lopsided thing that it is. In Sangha life, there are the misunderstandings, dissonances and failings as well as the purity, the virtues and the blessings. There are those who have let go of a lot, those who are still carrying confusion, and those who are looking for somewhere safe enough to begin the healing. Like the monk whose mother tried to kill him when he was two, and who beat him relentlessly up until the age of eleven…or the anorexic nun, for whom the greatest challenge, and the point of healing, was being offered alms-food every day by benevolent people. Obviously, these good people had difficulties in being with others, as well as being with themselves. But living in a community based on acceptance provided a crucial a turning point.

Sometimes the process is very slow, and it doesn’t always work. It’s also the case that the resources that a community has to handle and guide others is dependent on the degree of health in its relational field. If we’re all carrying unaddressed problems and not addressing them, then there’s not much scope to take on more. And in this respect, the archetype of the ideal samana practising in solitude on his or her own is a hindrance. Being left on one’s own may be the holy grail of any mystic, but it isn’t the model that the Buddha laid down. There’s the fortnightly confession of transgressions, the ongoing invitation (pavāranā) that samanas make to each other to receive feedback on their behaviour, and the system of tutelage by attending on an Elder. The suttas illustrate this clearly. One time when an attendant monk decided against the Buddha’s advice to go off on his own, he found his mind overwhelmed with ‘evil, unprofitable thoughts.’ When he returned to the Buddha suitably chastened, his mind was in a humble enough state to receive some sound advice. And it began with:

When the deliverance of heart has not yet ripened, Meghiya, the first thing that leads to its ripening is to have good friends, good associates, good companions. A.9.8

So there has to be a balance between solitary and group scenarios. That’s what Sangha – ‘assembly’ – means. On our own, relational difficulties don’t arise, and old habits can be nurtured, and blind-spots ignored. In the training style that Ajahn Chah used, there’s an emphasis on operating according to group routines and with continual reference to one’s peers and Elders. Moreover, it’s important to keep the standards of the enlightened ones in mind to counteract the all-too human tendency of bickering and fault finding, or of letting the full acceptance decline into ‘putting up with’ and leaving the rough patches alone. The bhikkhu sangha as a global institution has an amount of dead wood and failings that come with large corporations, so the Sangha that one refers to is the Sangha of the enlightened ones, and on a direct face to face level, the sangha of ones peers and Elders. Then the fine balance of correction with kindness can be sustained. This blend takes the sting out of what is the case – that one’s behaviour is indeed sub-standard , from time to time. We need wise beings to deflect the depression of ‘not good enough’ into the aspiration ‘carelessness tripped me up there, I’ll use the training to work on that one.’

A contemporary western Ajahn told me of one of his great ‘cover-blown’ moments when he was an anagārika (trainee) with Ajahn Chah in Thailand. As a trainee, his duty was to prepare the Ajahn’s bowl for the daily dawn alms-round. But he’d overslept, missed the 3:30 am morning chanting, and dozed through the period in which one is supposed to be sweeping up and getting the monastery ready for the day. Suddenly he woke up, glanced at his clock and panicked. It was ten minutes before the monks were due to leave on alms-round! Throwing his wrap-around clothes on, and with a head thick with sleep, he hurtled over to the meeting hall with the Ajahn’s bowl, to where Ajahn Chah was waiting. My friend bustled around preparing the bowl making out like it was a normal day, and then…Ajahn Chah looked at him with a clear and calm gaze and remarked: ‘Sleep is delicious, isn’t it?’

No judgement, no putting the anagārika in the sin-bin, no talking down. Just that ‘Sleep is delicious, isn’t it?’ It’s like asking you: ‘What do you think?’ That mode of questioning (one of the most frequent teaching approaches of the Buddha) respects our own innate wisdom to come up with the answer. So, yes: delicious at the beginning, and maybe in the middle, but then it segues into carelessness, grogginess, loss of responsibility and the desperate attempt of the self to cover up its lack of authority. And when one reflects further, that profile covers quite a few ‘delicious’ things – most sense appetites take us down that track. (Check it out.) And yet there can be the seeing through this, a gaze that is clear, calm and void of judgement. In this case, Ajahn Chah by seeing through the furtiveness of the anagarika, gave both acceptance and correction. To me, that’s uplifting.

What the Sangha vehicle can bring to the fore is just this spiritual friendship. Spiritual friendship, or assoc iation with someone you respect is one of the two factors that the Buddha felt as primary for spiritual development (the other is one’s own wise attention) (Itivuttaka 16, 17; M 43.13). In fact he famously declared it to be ‘the whole of the Holy Life.’ To tease that out a little, let’s go back to the Pali for spiritual friendship – kalyānamitta. ‘Mitta’ is the friendly bit. ‘Kalyāna’ is a term that is used in one of the recollections of the Dhamma as being ‘kalyāna in the outset, kalyāna in the middle and kalyāna at the end’ – here it’s generally translated as ‘good’ or ‘beautiful.’ So we’re talking about a quality of goodness that gladdens the heart; I offer ‘uplifting’ to the pile of renderings. In the sutta on kalyānamitta (S.45.2 ) the Buddha goes on to say that through this one will make much of the Eightfold Path, dependent on non-involvement, dependent on dispassion, dependent on cessation and maturing in complete relinquishment.

Now this latter sequence may sound like a trajectory that heads towards divorce rather than deep bonding. However the point is that for liberation, the most useful relationship is one that remains steadily clear and benevolent while lessening one’s attachment to an identity that one has to defend – as being the wonderful, the strong, the obedient etc etc etc. So the kalyānamitta is not a relationship that affirms any self-view, but rather allows one to see, as they do, all the behaviours, good and bad, as dependent on causes and conditions, as not-self. There’s something very freeing about having one’s blind spots come to light, and being received with a calm openness, and maybe a friendly query: ‘Can you see how you got caught in that? Can you let it go?’ Other than offering correction, the attitude of care and respect helps us to address how we make lasting identities – our own and others – out of interpretations of behaviour. An action then becomes a solid person – ‘that’s who I am,’ ‘she’s like that.’ When one thinks of it, it seems so unrealistic, especially when people start forming views of others on the other side of the planet – and yet, that’s how it goes. It’s the process of perception that no rules or standards can eliminate – except that of spiritual friendship.

If kalyānamitta is the whole of the holy life, it has to include living within the principles of Dhamma-Vinaya. But in such uplifting friendship, there are no lists of skilful categories, and no mention of planes of absorption; there are also no rules and protocols, other than the encouragement to maintain such association as furthers one in letting go of the habits, dependencies, in fact of that very ‘not good enough’ judgement that dogs the sense of self. Kalyānamitta provides the overview that checks disputes over Dhamma and Vinaya. Not only did the Buddha know that disputes were inevitable in community life, but he also taught what to do when this happens. Sāmagāma sutta (M104) illustrates this in a dialogue between the Buddha and his loyal attendant, Ānanda.

A dispute about livelihood or about the Pātimokkha [training rules] would be trifling, Ānanda. But should a dispute arise in the Sangha about the path or the way, such a dispute would be for the harm and unhappiness of many…
As with the four noble truths, the presentation of the problem is then followed by the analysis of the cause:
…a bhikkhu is angry and revengeful. Such a bhikkhu dwells disrespectful and undeferential towards the Teacher, towards the Dhamma, and towards the Sangha, and…does not fulfil the training…’

And then comes the cure: specifically this entails meeting together to respectfully discuss the source of the dispute, and so arrive at a group consensus. But the sutta makes clear that this has to be backed up by the ongoing practice of acts, speech and thoughts of goodwill, of sharing one’s companions any material gains, of living virtuously and of maintaining focus on right liberation. This is exactly the path and way of kalyānamitta. It’s not that the training rules are trivial, but that disputes about them, or about any community business, can be easily settled if one lives in that fashion. And it illustrates the fact that for deep learning, for the learning of the heart, it’s from fellow humans that we get the whole picture. No mere picture either, but an involvement in a living drama in which the stage is unfolding around you every day and the only script is your mind. When you commit to spiritual friendship, you can’t just dress up as a Buddhist and learn some new part to play; instead there’s a careful unwrapping that one finally allows and feels blessed by. Because in that nakedness of spirit is the joy and the freedom of the Buddha.

Out on a limb

2011-06-08T11:23:00.017+01:00

Here are some shots taken during the project of building a new sala (meeting hall) at Wat Pah Nanachat, N.E. Thailand. The old sala, built when Luang Por Sumedho was abbot in 1976, had to be torn down and replaced, and this was just the kind of job in which the expertise of Laung Por Liem and the monks from nearby Wat Pah Pong would be of immeasurable value. To put it another way: without them it wouldn’t have happened. Luang Por Liem has been masterminding building projects – including the chedi and huge sala at Wat Pah Pong – for over 20 years. Even at the age of 70, he was on site every day throughout the construction work, in his work robes, climbing the scaffolding, pouring cement: very much hands-on.

Luang Por Liem works without any drawn plans, and without input from professional engineers. It’s all in his head and hands. In a Thai Forest monastery, there’s no need for planning permission or building codes: this is Sangha property, and if the building falls down, that’s just the law of Nature. Also as you’ll see, the safety equipment – hard hats, protective footwear and overalls are all absent. It fits the theme of monastic training: stay alert! In the monastery, one learns the skills of mindfulness, of patience, personal initiative and persistence from the ground up, and work is very much part of the practice. Making robes, looking after senior monks, building and maintenance work, finding one’s way through a forest without a map, knowing what plants to use to combat what diseases – these are all considered ways of generating what we would call ‘spiritual’ skills. You learn from observing your elders and from trial and error. This approach, rather than any text-book technique, leads on to the development of the inner work of meditation.

The building work is on a voluntary basis; it’s a matter of personal interest and initiative that draws in people from who want to tap into the joyous camaraderie and make a contribution. The hours are irregular – some days the work, beginning after the meal in mid-morning, will continue on well into the night – so the organizing principle is one of willingness to bring forth one’s effort and follow the monk who’s heading the project. In Forest monasteries this is the principle that underlies just about everything. There’s no equipment but your own resolve, initiative and persistence to combat the hindrances of the mind, so spend every waking hour developing them. If you’re stuck in sleepiness when you meditate, sit on the edge of a well or a cliff; if lust is your problem, go visit a decomposing corpse. In the old days, the forest monks would seek the haunts of tigers, or ghost-ridden cemeteries as places to develop their minds. It’s a style that encourages the practitioner to move out of the safe and the known; Dhamma is best realized when one is out on a limb.

The main problem that some of us see is that with the forests gone, and with a management body evolving to oversee the 300 affiliated monasteries of the Wat Pah Pong community, finding a limb to go out on may become a rare opportunity.

Or perhaps it’s found in a different place. I’ve just returned from a teaching tour of New England and New York. Here, retreat centres are very well and thoroughly organized by resident staff or experienced volunteers. There is little room for trial and error. As practitioners will need to be up to the standard required to meet health and safety standards and in-house protocols from day one, there’s no novitiate during which one will be coached by, or learn from, elders. Gently informative signs abound informing one of everything from adjusting room temperature, the degree to which windows may be opened, how to identify deer tick (and what to do if grabbed by one) to how to grate carrots. The organizational principles of the society – impersonally transmitted and presented in abstract – feed into the retreat, and for good enough reasons: a hundred people who are used to being informed of rules and regulations need guidance. Apart from the possibility of subsequent litigation if a retreatant gets harmed, the collective of individuals needs to work as a unit, even though they are strangers both to each other and to the set-up. Also this collective has to work in silence.

The benefits of such situations are profound. People get to put aside their daily duties and habits, meet and come to terms with their minds (with resident demons) and experience a sense of belonging to a safe and non-competitive collective. This is, in many cases, life-changing. Compared with a Forest monastery, a Western retreat centre can look tame; but being void of conversation, foot massages and communal work, it presents challenges that monasteries don’t. Retreat centres can be situated in beautiful surroundings, but the retreat is sealed off from the outdoors and those nasty bugs and changeable weather in a way that just can’t happen in a Forest monastery. The result is isolation from humans and nature. Which may sound ideal in theory – but considering the narrow psychological edge that the practice is played out on, and that the support is mostly the rickety scaffolding of intentions and moods that swing to and fro, such isolation makes it easy to get dragged into deep water by an emotionally charged rip-tide. It’s quite a limb to go out on. Balance through social and environmental contact isn’t available – for most of the time.

Interestingly enough, one of the most appreciated aspects of the monastic retreats is just the daily opportunity to offer food into the bowls; it brings simple and warm (if silent) human contact into the situation. And for myself, I always appreciate the way in which, just through being together in shared endeavour, a sense of empathy and group presence grows over the time of the retreat.

So I have no doubts about the validity of these intensive retreats as long as they offer people a handful of resources to take with them as they navigate their edges. However in this respect, I do see drawbacks in external organization. It can make the individual forget the importance of developing resources through initiative, resilience and trial and error, and instead encourage the search for a meditation system that will do the practice and get the results. Looking for the right system (and the right place to practise it in) can become a lifestyle of restlessness and doubt; whereas just following a system will lead to attachment and conceited views. The truth of the matter is that no system will get you to samādhi, let alone nibbāna, without personal initiative, alertness and persistence. Moroever it’s in accessing these and applying them that the essential and innate faculties of confidence, mindfulness and discernment get brought to the fore. Rather than whether one watches the breathing at the nose-tip or cultivates choiceless awareness, the important point to bear in mind is :

the faculty of confidence...persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed and cultivated, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal and consummation. [S. 48.44]

Any system that encourages these will have a fruition.

Another sore point about organization of any kind is that it brings with it The Organisation. Like many Westerners I have an innate post-Orwellian mistrust of anything that smacks of it. The law is that the bigger the number of people, the more remote each individual is from the centre of the organization: hence the more abstracted the decisions and systems become, and the less the sense of personal initiative. Most nations now attempt to form a social unit from a pool of millions of people; if there isn’t a strong degree of local authority, ideally connecting household to town to district to county and so on up to the national level, the system lacks local relevance, becomes unresponsive to local needs, and rigidifies. But even in the best secular society, values, or at least ones that connect the individual to the collective in a healthy way, aren’t necessarily part of the equation. Individual initiative then boils down to how to get what one can out of, or to buck the system. Moreover, even within the system, the self-interest of the elite gets to take over: for every Mandela, there are several Berlusconis, with the occasional Mao and Stalin to emphasize the point. Organized religion has just as bad a profile: in the West the death of direct mystical experience, and indeed the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, is due to the authoritarian attitudes of the established Church (the great Christian mystics survived their realizations by keeping a low profile or otherwise being quiet about them).

So Sangha as a governing body carries an ambivalence: for the Thais, the Sangha may be likened to a good family, with its strong bonds of loyalty and collective identity; whereas a Western default is that the monastic ‘government’ is made up of remote powers-that-be. This can raise uncertainties within the Wat Pah Pong group, whose parish is of 300 monasteries throughout the world. How can the differences between East and West be comfortably bridged in way that doesn’t drag either continent out of true? Already there is a good degree of local autonomy – different routines, clothing and subtle shifts in the relational protocols. What about the position of nuns, or the value of therapy, or harmonizing with other Dhamma traditions? Should there be more flexibility and local adaptation; or is that an inevitable process anyway, and one that needs to be balanced by staying true to the shared values and practices? Because although initiative may get swallowed by group conformity, the opposite extreme – of free-form individuality – isn’t going to support a harmonious group either. Maybe finding a way between these positions is the edge that we have to navigate.

Therefore, over the last decade particularly, national and international monastic get-togethers have become part of what us elders have to do. It’s about more than making decisions, it’s primarily to touch base together, to know each other directly as aspiring contemplatives. What do we as individuals really care about anyway? Where do we move together and settle in harmony? How can we live the Dhamma-Vinaya at this time?

In this respect, it’s recently been enormously helpful to have visits from a few of the senior Thai Ajahns (Luang Por Liem, Luang Por Anek, and Luang Por So-pha). ‘Earthy,’ ‘accessible,’ and ‘profound’ are the adjectives that most readily come to mind with these elder bhikkhus. But what also gives me confidence and trust was their unpredictability and quirkiness; gravity, restraint and a puckish sense of humour seemed to co-exist in a natural balance. The Dhamma they taught had great lived-out validity, but it was folk music, rich because it was improvised, rather than being a classical piece played from the sheet. It was also salutary to note how us logistical organizers often feel overworked and tired, the boundless, steady energy of these elders pointed to inner organization based on staying in touch with spiritual faculties.

Monasteries work best, in my estimation, when they operate organically. This may look irregular, because the routines change, people come and go, and ‘nothing-happening, no routine’ days are built in to allow for individual choice: go for a walk, do some drawing, have a snooze, contemplate Nature…Stepping out of straight lines keeps us in touch with holistic intelligence, one that is in balance with nature – human and otherwise. But this isn’t purely a monastic option: how about making a to-do-list of items such as: switch off the mobile phone, study this moment, learn how to tie knots, make friends with the fox or groundhog that invades the garden?

A timely reminder was on the last retreat I taught in USA was for a dozen people. As the group was small, I allowed a looser structure and let people find their own time boundaries to a greater degree. I sat the full scope of the sessions, but even so, the retreat was a refresher for me because there wasn’t so much to hold. It was held on a farm on which a lot of the food was home-grown, and the children home-educated. Part of the education was about each individual taking responsibility, and accordingly the retreat was ‘managed’ by the owner’s 14-year-old daughter, while her 11-year old sister sat the five-day session. The youngster experienced deep stillness in her sitting meditation, and it was wonderful to see that when she did walking meditation, one of the chickens would hop onto her wrist for a mindful ride. There's a rightness about the natural approach; it encourages connection to place and ease of response. As a balance to the large group retreats (which had laid down the template of the practice for the older retreatants) it felt very useful. And it reminded me of the need to keep that natural feel for Dhamma; do some aimless wandering, put habits on hold, look out for the marvellous and keep on my toes.

To come out of the systems that bind us to the abstracts of time and duty, we need to go out on a such a limb. But better make sure it’s connected to a living tree.

Fields of Merit

2011-03-27T21:25:00.015+01:00

One of the themes in Buddhist practice that I get questioned on by Westerners is that of ‘making merit.' What they see is people coming to the monastery with bags of food and other requisites, making a formal offering to the Sangha (sometimes with Pali chanting) who then responds with some chanting in Pali. Some of these people will ask that the merit (puñña) of their act of generosity (dāna) be shared with their departed relatives, some say it’s for their birthday or just for no special reason. For people who understand Buddha-Dhamma to be mostly about sitting still and quietly in meditation, this merit-making is a mysterious and even superstitious practice. Merit-makers, although generally happy and friendly, aren’t necessarily that quiet or introspective. So what is this about?

Well, in brief, kamma is what it’s about. The experience of good kamma is that when you act on an ethically wholesome intention it makes you feel bright. And the opposite is also true. Furthermore, if you consistently act on a good intention, you establish a pattern in terms of mental behaviour, you set your moral compass. That guides your values and actions; and the consequences of that are you tend to associate with people of good intent, people you can rely upon, and who can help you when you’re down. It’s a simple logic: as we’re bound to create kamma for good or bad that will shape our lives, better do the good and arrive at a better state. In this case, the good can be defined by a series of questions that the Buddha-to-be asked himself as he was practising for liberation: ‘Is this action, or mind-state for my welfare, the welfare of others and does it lead to Nibbāna?’[M19] (That is towards the elimination of greed, hatred and delusion.) If the answer’s ‘Yes’ for all these, then this has to be the good. Acting in these terms is the path of merit.

Merit begins (and sometimes ends) with generosity – but there are further developments. The good feeling of substituting self-interest in terms of possessions for self-interest in terms of bright mind-states is the learning curve; it progresses from generosity on to ethical and compassionate intentions – so people often use a visit to a monastery as an occasion to take moral precepts. From there the development goes on to renunciation (people will on occasion enter monastic life for a period to make merit); and finally on to the insightful examination of the four noble truths. ‘Does this mind-state support craving, regret and suffering, or lessen it?’ To know that is the highest kind of merit, that of stream-entry (which is the initial realization of Nibbāna).

There are external results too. One of the results of making merit is the support of Buddhist monasteries. Monasteries and hence the Sangha, and the Dhamma, would not have survived through these millennia if people didn’t have a sense of setting their own minds upright through acts of generosity. However in there, with the addition of delusion, lies the problematic aspect of merit-making. It can feed the supposition that you can ‘buy a place in Heaven’ with a hefty donation – and that message can be encouraged by the monastery for obvious reasons. However from the point of view of kamma, if you act with a manipulative mind, the result is that you foster the devious aspect of the mind and your future will be among manipulative people. Also it’s the case that generosity is not as meritorious as morality, which is not as beneficial as insight. And it’s only through insight, through letting go of self-view, that you can clear the traces of bad kamma: you can’t buy your way out of Hell. (Which has a corner reserved for manipulative monastics.)

In Buddhist theory, kamma is one of the five ‘niyāma,’ organizing principles that govern the manifest cosmos of inanimate and animate systems. Utu-niyāma would includes the laws of gravity and thermodynamics; bhija-niyāma deals with growth and heredity in living systems; citta-niyāma is the principle whereby the mind forms and organizes thoughts and memories to represent the ‘external’ world; and dhamma-niyāma is the principle of change and dependent arising that determines all manifestation. What they organize is a coherent pattern of behaviour that we call a 'field.' That is, everything within that field operates in accordance with the niyāma that governs it, wherever and whenever – it extends in space and time. You don’t find one star doing something that others don’t; they can’t ignore gravity and other laws of matter. Fields are found throughout the world of nature: we can observe stars in galaxies held by gravitational energy; and we know that the earth has a magnetic field that migrating birds tune into to guide their long flights of passage. Those birds will fly in flocks as a field, functioning as a single unit without the need for communication between its members. So fields are holistic: in a field every individual part is affected by what the others are doing by being in touch with the field to which they both belong. Similarly our bodies arise in their electro-magnetic field in which every part is connected. If you take two heart cells place them apart and stimulate one, the electro-magnetic field of the other will register the change; the two will entrain.

The intelligence of a fields in living organisms is organized around the bhija (‘seed’) principle: ‘Grow and multiply!’ That’s its fixed law. So whether it’s a cabbage or a squirrel, that’s what its life-force inclines to do above all else. And being intelligent, it ‘learns’ – it develops the best way of doing that in response to its environment. With mammals there comes the principle of looking after their young, while some will operate as part of a pack or herd, and some learn to use tools. In us humans, this field has fine-tuned its messages to instances like ‘make some friends,’ ‘get power,’ or ‘wear fashionable clothes.’ The learning field of humans, the mind, has the nature to receive input and organize it into stored meanings; it has attention as its organizing principle. It also responds, which makes it an agent in the field of kamma. So the mind is covered by two principles: citta and kamma. It surveys; it forms mental objects – that’s the mental law of ‘attention’ – and it can choose and determine – that's the kammic law of ‘intention.’ However, problems can occur around attention, in that the mind can only hold a very small fraction of data in attention at any given time, and that it is also inattentive or highly selective as to what it notices. The other problem is that desire and aversion add biases to intention. Therefore the untrained mind comes up with the wrong message as to how to get greater well-being.

For example, when a thief sees a sage, he notices the sage’s pockets and doesn’t pick up on their wisdom or compassion. And in this case, it’s clear that intention and attention determine the mental 'snapshot,' or contact impression that we make. And on that we act, with skilful or ‘meritorious’ intentions or the reverse. That’s kamma. Intention and attention determine contact; and that contact (the sight of pockets) triggers intention. In this way, the field of kamma intensifies: as your mind acts, so a mind-set or attitudinal bias is generated that perceives reality in a particular way. If you incline towards stealing, pretty soon all you see are pockets, bags, locks and half-open windows. As in the above example of erroneous merit-making, intention and attention shape your mental field and create your future. That’s the fixed law of kamma.

For someone cultivating the mind, the point is that whatever you let your attention get taken by will shape your mind-field and reality accordingly: ‘whatever a bhikkhu frequently thinks and ponders, that will become the inclination of his mind’ [M19] If you’re a worrier, you’ll see a world of things to worry about, and that pattern will intensify. If you’re a depressive, those signs and energies will dominate. Now if you incline towards meditation, it’s often because you want to find a still centre within – but if you don’t develop beyond that inclination, it becomes difficult to be with external processes. Of course an initial and important aspect of meditation is centring; however, if one sustains the (justifiable) view: ‘It’s bad out there, don’t touch it’ – your mind gets shaped by that view. But then where are you going to live, and who’s going to help you when you’re down? Another tendency of meditators is to try to order the environment to make it a tidy field that supports the inner centre. This too makes sense – but it has an effect, which is to centre the mind around ‘me in control mode.’ Furthermore, both of these attitudes are based on the assumption that what’s around our centre is a world of otherness. Actually, if you observe what you notice and what your mind sticks on, in comparison to what other people notice and stick on, you see that beneath the outer appearances you’re in the field of your mental kamma, of the results of how your intention and attention have formed the reality that then bothers or blesses you.

The principle is: don’t let your intentions get captured by what pops up in attention, internally or externally. Instead, establish an intention to counteract negative forces such as bitterness, aversion, fear, doubt and craving. Without this approach, we just obsess with what’s in our minds – and doing that will increase the power of the obsession in the mind’s field. If you can’t disengage from obsessive thoughts in meditation, the practice is counter-productive, even harmful. But, whether meditating or not, if you can shift out of the reflex patterns of the mind, you’re going to establish a field of benefit, for yourself and others.

Once you get this point, you try to sustain that field in daily life. And it’s not through trying to make the world fit your mind. The way it works is like this: one of our local Thai supporters has a food shop which reputedly sells the best noodles on the South coast. One day, and not for the first time, some folk smashed the window of his shop with thieving intent. Our supporter was mightily peeved. However he went with colleagues on a shopping expedition to a local Cash and Carry to buy a stock of produce. Here the checkout girl, probably more through incompetence than design, overcharged them to the tune of £60, thus triggering much debate and an earnest review around the checkout. However, this was concluded by our supporter saying ‘Never mind, I’ll cover the costs!’ Later, as when friends asked him why he undertook to shell out £60 rather than go through all the bills and find out who owed what and where the mistake was, he explained that he was feeling so fed up because of being ripped off that he needed to make some merit to set his heart straight. His friends, being Thai, immediately understood. Let down by the forces of the world, he’d felt the best thing to do was to regain his own centre by means of an act of relinquishment and largesse.

To take another example. When I visited Sri Lanka in 2008, I was taken to a monastery in Rambodogalle, in the district of Kurunegala. Behind the buildings, work was in progress on carving a Buddha-image in the cliff-face. Incomplete at the time, it stood at over 67 feet tall. The senior monk, Ven Egodamulla Amaramoli, explained that the project began in 2003, shortly after the Taliban demolished the giant Buddha-statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. The local village children, saddened by the news, came to see him with the wish to create a new Buddha as a replacement. He thought it was out of the question, but they’d gathered a handful of rupees and wanted to donate them to such a project. And so it began. Hearing of the children’s faith and largesse, other people got inspired; donations came in. An Indian architect also got interested and he offered his services. This brought people from the Tamil community into the project...and so on. When there is a common sense of value, there is a field, and in that any small act of goodness snowballs into an avalanche. It’s the same principle that gives rise to the yearly Kathina and other alms-giving occasions: hundreds of people come together, share, meet, feel good, listen to Dhamma and get to sense their ordinary up and down lives within a supportive context.

Of course these events can seem tumultuous and disturbing, but the way the Buddha taught meditation was to release the mind from its tendency to get thrown by circumstances – not to ignore or annihilate the field that forms around us. (How can we?) His encouragement was to keep inclining the mind towards more skilful intentions, until eventually the clinging that generates a sense of self is eased out of occupying the organizing centre. That is, as we find our axis, say through the steady and calming energy of breathing in and out, we gradually widen the awareness to include the whole body, and sense the breath energy through that entire field. This ‘bodily formation’ then holds itself, and the sense of holding it, of me being the centre, can relax. There still is a sense of centre, but it’s the quality of composure, of single aim and intent called ‘one-pointedness’ (ekaggatā). Through contemplating and clearing that of tension, defence, ambition, conceit and all the rest, this centre lets go of location and self-centred purpose. It holds a pure field, a field of benefit. By staying connected to that pure and strong intention, the sense of unruffled ease covers whatever it contacts. And that definitely changes the ‘feel’ of the world around and within you: you’re not getting organized by confusion, reactivity and deluded views, the heart is untroubled and you can respond with wisdom to what comes up.

In this way mind-cultivation then moves beyond the initial centring techniques of meditation to take on a larger significance and application. It entails shifting intention, attention and contact out of the me-mine habitual mind-field; the one that has the magnetic pull in it and organizes itself around a personal centre. To keep working on that shift is Dhamma-practice: the consequence is that instead of connecting to our field of demerit, the one that shapes me and the world I’m stuck in, there’s an opening to the noble field.

Because of this blessing field, people like to be around those beings in whom it has developed. And that’s evident. In Thailand, one of the main duties of the Ajahn is to ‘receive guests.’ People gather round to share time and sense the quality (‘palang’ from the Pali ‘balam’ - ‘strength/ power’) of his field. And the visitor’s part in that is to extend their field of benefit by making offerings. The sharing is a happy and unforced one; the disciple’s mind is open and receptive and simple teachings go deep. Values such as ethics, kindness and restraint are re-affirmed; faith in the Dhamma is strengthened; a current problem gets resolved; stillness and calm are lifted up; and there is the happy sense of being able to offer support to something worthy.

Kamma is a fixed law. And on top of intention, the factors of attention and contact play their part. So if you associate with the wise with good intention, you get good results. This is what the Buddha meant by Sangha (not necessarily monks and nuns, but realized beings); and called it an ‘incomparable field of merit.’ The point is that we have to be in a field: that’s the law; so what field do you belong to? Who’s going to be there for you when times are bad? And what in yourself is going to stay at peace when that happens? In a time when so many social structures - family, career, home, neighbourhood – are getting threadbare, it’s advisable to work on the field of merit.

The Low Point

2011-02-05T15:08:00.008Z

Winter’s the down time in more ways than one. In the monastery, we get a chance to have an extended retreat, like bulbs gathering energy for the coming year. But it’s also the time of death and long grey vistas. Around the winter solstice the energy is particularly low, hence the custom in Britain of burning a ‘yule log’ during the period, bringing in boughs of holly, (which bear the only bright fruit at this time of year) and holding festivities — anything to get some energy going and fend off the dark spirits.

Nevertheless it’s a down time. This year one of the friends of the monastery committed suicide. A great thinker and first-class university graduate, he’d suffered from depression for twenty-five years; finally, having raised his children to the brink of maturity, he had no reason to keep on living through these troughs of feeling worthless and essentially bad. About 150 people came to his funeral; and if their presence wasn’t statement enough, the anecdotes that flowed forth showed that he was well-liked and creative, with caring brothers, sisters, wife and children.

It was much the same with the long-term resident at Amaravati who took his own life a couple of years ago. Not only was he well-liked, a really helpful all-rounder, but also a juggler and clown who delighted the children at the monastery’s summer Family Camp. A day or two before he died, hearing he wasn’t so well, the children brought round trays of sweets and gifts and left them by his door.

Monks too. Last year, a man who’d spent seven years in training, five as a bhikkhu, took his life a year after disrobing. He’d been a solid and steady member of the community, and a diligent meditator, but then started having anxiety attacks and depressive symptoms. We looked after him as best we could — company throughout the day, and people in the next room at night whom he could call upon, and visits to a psychiatrist who prescribed medication. However after a few months, he decided to disrobe and return to his native country to be admitted to a hospital. But despite drugs, phone calls and visits from monks, and even electric shock treatment, the malady continued. Eventually he couldn’t bear it any more.

To see and be with this man was a blow to the heart. It’s like our friend was somewhere else, on the other side of misted glass. You could see, speak but not really gain access; one time holding his hand and leading him to a psychiatric unit, I could almost feel him slipping away. And yet walking together, and physical contact, seemed one of the best ways to get through. Particularly if he had to do something. Better than massage was doing exercise together. It was as something that vigorous, and entrained to another person, was what was needed to break the shell that the depression erected around him.

So one might conclude that good friends and family aren’t a conclusive help; that living in a community doesn’t work, and that a life of mindfulness has no effect. But I’d qualify all that. What’s more crucial is whether the mind can receive what’s offered: as I’ve said, the depressed state weaves a trance that’s difficult to break. In the case of the layman, attention and emotional support were constantly offered. And in the case of the monk, the only reservations that people made about him concerned his meditation practice. He called it ‘letting go’ into what he felt was samadhi. The results (seen from the outside) were that his body would start to manifest involuntary movements, and he’d come out of meditation slightly groggy. I questioned his mindfulness, but no-one could shake his belief that this was valid practice.

It seems to me that one of the key features of mindfulness is that it’s about bearing something in mind. You don’t exactly do letting go: what occurs through carefully holding and moderating attention around a specific theme is that the stuff that the mind projects is deprived of a foothold. So it lets go of its pre-occupations. To me, appropriate meditation practice is about aligning one’s attention to a specific object (breathing, body, mental image) and out of the store of moods, phobias and desires that the mind holds in its archives. There’s a danger of drifting into states without your steering.

I suppose we all have our store of downers; and my own experience of ‘melancholy’ is probably as close to the serious depression as a sniffle or mild cold is to pneumonia. But, having experienced this since my teens and into monastic life, I perhaps have an inkling of an inside view of the depressed state. What I notice in myself is an isolation, like being in another world — either the world’s a dream ‘out there’ or I feel like a ghost wafting through it. The sense of being ‘out of contact’, of ‘not feeling’ makes it seem like one is on the dark side of the moon — a frozen and dead landscape with no atmosphere. And this is independent of being alone ( which I am by and large very comfortable with). Essentially it is an existence with no heart.

A couple of ways that I dealt successfully with this state ( rather than just enduring its thankfully passing duration) offered a reflection on how the heart in perceiving the world places us in touch with it. One was a hunch that came through as I felt the descent to moonscape beginning: no-one was around, so I hastened to a drawer in the office where I often leave letters, and grabbed one from a dear friend. Holding the paper and reading the familiar spidery handwriting, with phrases that brought his voice into my mind, just checked the mood at its tipping point. Using the letter (ah, how much richer than e-mails!) grounding myself in the body and holding the sense of communication didn’t produce a comfortable mood, but it did mean at least feeling the sense of separation and being able to focus on it. Then it was just a matter of weathering through. And feeling connected to some existence outside the current frame of reference; so I could come out of the trance and back into present embodied experience.

Reading a letter, moving the eyes, interpreting handwritten forms, and ‘hearing’ a voice arise as I did so, a voice that my actions were contributing to, all seemed to have a mediating effect. It was also that the experience was loaded with unique and specific items: hand-written, tactile and conversational, not some typed-out screed (or even sound advice) that could have been written by anyone, to anyone at any time. It touches the heart.

I’m saying this quite literally; heart is not just a metaphor for emotional sensitivity. Some clinical researchers in the field suggest that the physical heart is an important contributor to the affective-response intelligence that we call ‘mind.’ So mind is not exclusively in your brain. (Traditional Buddhist cultures place mind in the heart, and in bygone centuries, no-one knew what the blancmange in the skull was for.) Apparently, the entire nervous system — but principally the intestines, the heart and the brain — contributes to this intelligence called ‘mind.’ For example, there is a constant exchange of nervous information between heart and brain. Heart ( which is about 60-65% nervous tissue) also emits an electro-magnetic field that extends around the body for more than 10 feet; and it produces hormones that affect the mind in terms of stress, ease and arousal. So apparently there’s this constant radar sweeping around us detecting things like changes in pressure, and more important, the electro-magnetic fields that every other living being is putting out. Without that, no matter what you see, there’s no felt sense of something ‘out there.’ Which is one of the salient features of the depressed state.

When the heart’s messages get ‘reported’ to the brain, the brain mostly filters them out ( too much to handle) and processes a small proportion with great dexterity to produce a meaningful and conceivable reality and figure out what to do about it. This is all in abstract of course, and ‘brainy’ people can do wonderful things with concepts: politics, maths, management, philosophy, and every theory under the sun. Heart-receptivity on the other hand deals with specific details of sense- experience. So if you want to develop the 'heart' aspect of mind you observe, listen, smell, or touch something to find out exactly how this is right now. And then ask yourself how it feels: is it pleasant or unpleasant? Do you incline to staying with it, or to moving away? This process, called 'mindfulness and full awareness’ would better be called ‘heartfulness’ if we hadn’t decided that heart was just a matter of irregular emotions with no sensible intelligence at all.

Now you can dismiss all this as mystical twaddle. However, mindfulness is now widely recognized as being of assistance in cases of depression; and it’s salient feature is to take the mind into the specific, into the here and now. It’s in the abstract, the assumed, the possible and ‘what others think’ that the mind hold its phobias, as life messages of abandonment or inadequacy (and on the other hand entitlement and egotism). Those qualities aren’t there in specific direct experience: there’s painful and pleasant moments, but there are no life messages. However our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact from the Buddhist perspective, any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization (papañca). It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.

On another occasion as I felt the ‘down and out’ fog coming over me, and, again on a hunch, I used the breath. I knew I had to get into my body, so I just breathed out and stopped the in-breath from happening. I had been given guidance in a system known as ‘Buteyko’ after its Russian originator, which basically works on lengthening the pause between the out- and the in- breath. The reasoning behind it is that this increases the carbon dioxide in the lungs, and this improves the rate at which oxygen is metabolized — with remedial effects, particularly in the case of respiratory problems like asthma. Having been taken through some exercises under guidance, I also noted that this brought around a very high degree of focus on the breath (no wandering when your life depends on it) and a shift in energy ( as well as taking you through the experience of panic). So as the downer moved in, I held my breath. With this you have to resist the push of the vagus nerve, so there’s a point at which the exercise becomes a struggle. However you work with that for as long as you can, then let the breath in as slowly as possible (against an instinct that wants to gasp and suck). Then wait for everything to settle down and repeat the process. So this is what I did, observing the effects. What occurred was that the emotion — a kind of hopeless ‘nowhere’ bleakness — steadied and separated from the energy. By controlling the vagus nerve temporarily, and passing through the emotions that that brought up, the spin-out was avoided. Instead what was experienced was a level of inner ground that was sober and flat, but at least grounded. As I sensed and sustained awareness of that, the downer slowly faded, and I gradually returned to specific awareness of where I was.

One of the most common ways of dealing with depression is to use drugs. Of course humans have been using drugs to shift their consciousness since time immemorial — mushrooms, peyote, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine all have had popular usage. Without denying that prozac and valium etc may be the best option for a lot of afflicted people, it strikes me that the best chemicals to use must be the ones that the body manufactures, the ones like serotonin, that cause happiness and ease. And the autonomous nervous system (which includes the heart, vagus nerve and intestines) plays a part in all that. Its triggers, wired through the whole body, send the message to the glands to produce the neuro-chemicals in our sympathetic ( fight, flight) and parasympathetic (ease, relax) nervous system. Hence when you sense something dangerous, you don’t have to think about it, the adrenalin starts flowing.

So I wonder if getting the body to produce appropriate neuro-chemicals is part of the answer. And before this all gets too scientific-materialistic, just recall how the sense of being here and being coherent can flow through simple acts of kindness like writing a letter. The chemicals start flowing with anything that evokes responsive feeling. For example, in the book that he wrote to chart his own journey through severe depression, William Styron wrote that what prevented him from killing himself at a crucial moment was suddenly hearing a piece of music.* It jogged the emotional memory into acknowledging that there was such a thing as happiness, and he had experienced it. At that moment he came to enough to recognize that his life depended on getting into a hospital —and that it was worth saving.

I speculate that in looking for help to ease or cure depression, a study of the heart as well as the brain may help us understand ‘mind.’ And also that one of the causes of depression may be a diminished sense and importance that the heart’s sensing is given in modern life. By which I mean that a lot of training goes into the abstract and the individual, and not much into observing and being with the specific and immediate and responsive. Maybe as a preventative at least, more heart-centred activities — like paying mindful attention and knowing how it feels, just now — should be balanced against our development of abstract thought.

To have been encouraged and trained in mindfulness, I am indeed grateful. As I stood by my fellow-human’s grave while people were throwing rose-petals over the coffin, I wondered where I’d have been now if I hadn’t picked up Dhamma-practice some thirty-five years ago.

*****
*William Styron: Darkness Visible
For more on the science, I’d recommend looking into Heartmath;
and at Stephen Buhler’s book: The Secret Teachings of Plants ( Bear, Vermont 2004).

Sacred Africa

2011-01-03T16:58:00.007Z

This picture was taken at Emoyeni, a retreat centre north-west of Johannesburg. Thato and I were two of the retreatants placing rocks in a pile that will one day be a stupa. To be building something sacred on the soil felt like a significant step; especially as the retreatants included a range of the ethnic hues that make up the ‘Rainbow Nation.’ Yes, there’s Dhamma in the soil: it became clear from the retreats at Emoyeni and Dharmagiri that interest in Dhamma as a practice and as a culture is growing among the black and Indian communities. Dharmagiri is also helping to induct black teachers as part of its Dhamma community leaders' program. And the energy also goes back to the wider community: Dhamma communities such as Dharmagiri and The Buddhist Retreat Centre both support HIV/AIDs projects in their respective neighbourhoods (Woza Moya and Khuphuka respectively).

On another front, the image of a nation traumatised by the crimes that the apartheid government committed against its people can bear some adjustment. The darkness remains, perhaps for another generation, but the forces of reconciliation and goodness keep breaking through. Not that it’s an easy process. At Dharmagiri and the Buddhist Retreat Centre an image that depicts the process for me is presented by the land. Hillsides that were once thick with non-native and water-demanding pines have been clear-cut and gradually the original native flora has either been deliberately planted or is re-establishing itself. The change is slow ( in human terms) and meanwhile involves stripping everything back to bare soil. For a while, the scene is one of naked devastation. Not a pretty sight.

When it comes to meeting human ignorance, including our own, the process is even messier and takes greater skill. Nature has no shame, no image to protect, no fear of being seen as ugly and raw. It doesn't do denial. Humans do, quite naturally: a good part of our brain activity is about filtering out what is unnecessary or intolerable. And particularly among societies where the assumption is that our personalities can be in control of our instinctual nature, there is an additional reflex of ego-defence against acknowledging greed, selfishness and anger when they arise. (Along with the denial of our pain, death and dependence.)

Earlier societies found a place for the sub- (or pre-) personal instincts by placing them under the supervision of gods and spirits. Managed by cathartic or healing magic, evil could be met as a force ‘out there’ and propitiated or warded off - although never eliminated. So it lurks in the shadows of the psyche. In the Buddhist context however, meeting and overcoming the host of Mara is the defined and graduated goal, and one which demands self-revelation. The first responsibility for a Dhamma-practitioner is to check acting on harmful impulses. Then to witness the seeds of evil in the heart, and how they have established roots in behaviour. This full acknowledgement of corrupting tendencies in the heart/mind deflates the drama of evil: it’s not self, not a demon, at this level, it’s just ignorance with a swagger. Normalising the corruptions in this cool and matter-of-fact way disengages the reflex of denial, and allows the mind to study how corrupting tendencies arise and therefore how they cease. In fact, the Buddha declared that a person couldn't be called wise and accomplished person until he or she had completed this process:

I say, it must be understood thus: ‘These are unwholesome habits’ and thus: ‘Unwholesome habits originate from this.’ and thus: ‘Unwholesome habits cease without remainder here...’ M.78.9, trans Ven Nyanamoli, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Pubs.

The process is all in a day’s Dhamma-work. Moreover, the frequently repeated comment is that someone who acknowledges a shortcoming is making great progress in Dhamma. And further that for one is ‘broken up and ruined’ if one cannot accept admonishment. So Buddhism is wise as it is merciful in acknowledging that what others call 'evil' is not self, not absolute, but unskilful kamma based on ignorance. If it’s kept under contemplative lock and key, evil is not to be covered up. And as for correcting it, the emphasis is on a pragmatic trust in the healing power of our innate honest awareness.

The further responsibility is to understand the self-view that supports ignorance and blocks that healing. Then to have clear awareness dismantle that. Full, non-judgemental awareness is the only way through the wall of defence; but it entails gaining enough support from Dhamma-practice to let go of the distractions, the shields and the attachments that self-view creates. Self-view, in its more accessible form of sakkayaditthi, amounts to a belief in a coherent immaterial entity that is roughly supervised by our personality. But because it’s held in place by reflexes of attachment, our personal self is incapable of eliminating the grasping which is the basis for defence and denial. So there has to be a shift, and a surrender to awareness. The resources of steady strength, good will and clarity that are features of this awareness make the defences and demands of self-view unnecessary.

Reviewing mind-states with full awareness is mostly a matter of relationship. It takes compassion and humility to accept that we are subject to ignorance and passion and have reflexes that automatically defend us from any accusation or perceived attack. Can we at least acknowledge that this reflex exists in all of us? Can we stop denying that we deny? It gets frustrating when you sense that someone else is denying their flaws or complicity, but having one’s corruptions laid bare to another's gaze is, for a mind based on self-view, devastating. In South Africa this was always the biggest obstacle to resolving the past: even now, politicians deny knowledge of the atrocities committed in their name. ( And South Africa is just one example). But to bring it all home: I'm generally OK at acknowledging that ten years ago, I was pretty heavy on someone, or arrogant or defensive, but to have someone present an accusation asks me to restrain and swallow a defence-reflex before we can look squarely into what is being said. So maybe it’s the case that where the crimes have been huge, the floods of guilt and pain that wash in are perhaps too much for an unresourced mind to bear.

When it comes to atonement, guilt is as much an obstacle as denial: it merely freezes the ego in the results of its immoral actions. Righteous rage against others who have committed evil may ward off further actions and motivate deep inquiry, but anger doesn't penetrate to or resolve the heart of the matter. When evil has been committed, anger and the numb weight of guilt both bring up the defence/denial reflex. For healing, what has to occur, what the Buddha recommended and what the Truth and Reconciliation Committee attempted in South Africa, was an activation of truth, of an acknowledgement of transgression that had no punitive intent. Then in that collective witnessing of the truth of human nature, genuine remorse - which is accompanied by the emotional shifts of grief and trembling - can occur. This is the beginning of the healing.

I read an account of a series of interviews with Eugene de Kock, a renowned assassin-in-chief of the apartheid regime who is currently serving 212 years in prison for murder. The account, written by a black female psychologist, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, forms the focal theme of the book A Human Being Died Last Night*. In the book, de Kock, who develops a first-name relationship with Gobodo-Madikizela, is presented as well-mannered and ordinary, hardly living up to the nickname 'Prime Evil' that the Press bestowed upon him. Although his legs are chained to a chair that in itself is bolted to the floor, de Kock stands up when Pumla enters the room and offers her a seat; and he speaks mildly, reflectively and with candour throughout. He is a father whose children believed that he went to work as a businessman every day, rather than head the counter-insurgent commando unit against the ANC. Pumla's inquiry throughout the book is ‘How does a person with an ethical sense participate in acts of brutality towards other humans?’ - and the special quality she brings to this is that she does not allow her own fear and other feelings to blur that inquiry. At one point in their conversations, de Kock started to literally shake in his chains as he recognised the murders he had committed. Seeing the wave of pain run through him at touching into the truth of what he'd done, Pumla's immediate and unpremeditated impulse was to reach out and hold his hand. It is an image that will stay with me as a sign of what human beings are capable of when meeting evil: the hand of a black woman laid gently on the 'trigger hand' of a man who has assassinated dozens of her people.

That remorse discharges the results of evil through the body (whereas guilt stores it in the heart and mind) is perfect embodied logic. And what a full thought/heart/body awareness, rather than a reasonable excuse/apology, brings to the fore is another innate impulse in us, that of empathy. ‘Empathy’ or anukampam in Pali, is the emotion that the Buddha felt that inspired him to teach. Literally it means ‘trembling with’ (or in modern parlance ‘resonating’). Empathy begins in the body, in the cellular knowledge of pain and dukkha, bonding separation and death. And it is this that rises above right and wrong to offer healing. This is part of the reason why mindfulness of the body is such a central meditation theme - all our reflexes, corruptions and healing resources are embodied. Of course, the head is part of the body, and definitions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ play an essential part in calibrating our innate moral sense. We need to learn, as infants, that some behaviour is not to be carried out even against people who we don’t need, know, or even like. These abstract definitions moderate our reflexes and protect us from impulses of grabbing and attacking. They set the compass needle of skilful shame or conscience ( hiri-ottappa). What they, and any head system, can't do however is atone for wrong, or re-set the moral compass when the mind has seriously lost touch with its empathy. Moreover right and wrong can become so abstract that they get politicised and lose touch with our common humanity (to kill the enemies of the State/Church is right). Such as in the case of de Kock and any soldier. What we do to our men (and women) when we send them off to war is to override the sense of empathy with a politicised version of right and wrong. By many accounts, the results are traumatic for those involved; left with a frozen moral sense, they lose an important part of what it means to be human.

As the ancient societies knew, the cleansing of sin is a full-bodied process. When Priam goes to Achilles to beg for the body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles has slain, there are no legal arguments as to whose fault the Trojan War is; there are no political gestures, justifications or apologies for collateral damage. Instead, in a moment of empathy, the great warrior and the king embrace each other and weep together for all the killed, the killers and the killing that make up their field of action. A recognition of the powerful impulses that govern most humans then arises as Achilles reflects on the gods who rule their fate. In the Classical Hellenic world-view, it is Zeus who bestows the 'two urns' on humans - one full of evils and one of good fortune. To surpass these bestowals, to overcome ignorance, we have to meet them in the fullness of our embodied awareness. Then a transfiguring response can occur.

A South African example is offered by Anthony Osler in his book Stoep Zen**. He gives a brief account of an Indian doctor whose brother had been murdered for a mobile phone. The family was so traumatised that the only way they could overcome their despair was through a 'forgiveness that matched the horror.' So they decided that while their brother's murderer was in jail, they would provide the financial support to put the killer's little sister through school. Just so. Without referring to a Holy Book or sitting on a cushion, the human truth is that when push comes to shove, we have to enact the sacred. The sacred isn’t a belief or the provenance of one religion. It’s where word, heart and body are not set apart. To be fully human, to be able to meet evil, death, pain and our own blessing, we have to touch into that sacred. Nothing else is big enough.

One afternoon, when I visit the local AIDs relief centre, there is a celebration. The HIV rate is 60%, and the room is full of orphans. They are surrounded by a ring of adults. Swaying as they do so, men and women, Zulu and white, are singing.
******
*A Human Being Died That Night: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Pub:David Philip, Claremont, S Africa 2003.
**Stoep Zen: Anthony Osler. Pub: Jacana Media, Auckland Park, S.Africa 2008

Stop thinking and chant ( and listen, of course.)

2010-12-05T10:00:00.002Z

At the end of November, Ajahn Sumedho, Sumedho Bhikkhu, Luang Por Sumedho, or Tan Chao Khun Rajasumedhacariya, retired. Can monks retire? From what? Well one can put aside the duties of running a monastery (although no-one really runs monasteries). One can bring down the curtain on an aspect of group participation, and one can trim the threads of involvement. But no-one retires from kamma through a formal act; and no-one suddenly stops meaning anything to anyone else through an announcement. So when it’s time to leave, change gear, or die, we need a ceremony to summarise and contain all the unfinished stuff. Love, regret, misunderstanding, gratitude and disappointment – that’s relational life, and we need to place it. Once placed, we can each carry it away like a pebble or a gem, take it out on occasion, rub it and hear how it speaks to us as time goes by. For years afterwards, it can say some useful things.

So life with Luang Por has left gems and pebbles. Monastic relationships have their own flow. Sometimes you seem to go deeper with your fellows than you ever thought, to places where polite personalities don’t go. At other times the connections are sideways, rather than head-on – you’re just sharing duties or sitting beside that monk in the Hall. And then he’s gone – off to some other part of the planet, or out of the loop into lay life, or dead. There are the disagreements which at times seem to block the flow - until relational energy being what it is, the flow eventually moves around them like water around a mound of sand. You look back a decade later and find the mound’s got slowly washed away. A lot of the time awareness of the fragility of personal connection hovers over the relationship. And along with that, there is the understanding that what we experience as self and other are not mine or yours, but a shimmering dependently-arisen play of perceptions, emotions and appearances.

Part of all relationships is the unspoken. It sits right there under the ribs. Then what can you say that’s real, at a time when you have to say something? One answer is: you stop thinking and chant. With Luang Por, there were probably all kinds of things that each individual would have liked to say, but the ‘impersonal’ communality of monastic life doesn’t accommodate – at least among the large numbers of the extended community. Instead you close, or open , all that with chanting. And that’s how we took leave of Luang Por: chanting, offering blessings and asking for forgiveness. When you chant, especially as part of a group, you have to listen - to tthe timbre and tonality of your own voice and to that of others. And in that timbre is where the emotions are sensed. Chanting carries the resonances of about all that can be expressed on an emotional level; and you hear in it what your kamma brings up.

Chanting has an impeccable tradition. All the original Buddhist teachings were formulated and transmitted orally. (I expect much is the same for other religions.) The pragmatism of that is that when a group learns to recite a teaching, the transmission is less likely to err than if it was written down (copyist’s errors, fires, termites). But it’s also the case that the chanted voice comes from and touches a different place in us than the visual word. With the written and read, you can pore over the words, take them as separate units one at a time and mull over their meaning. It excludes the speaker, it is non-relational. Then we subsequently employ the faculty that has read and ‘understood’ the meaning to guide us in a life that is holistic and relational. What often occurs then is an attachment to views, or fundamentalism, or at least an awkward handle on life. It’s not that the words aren’t true, but the organ that receives and uses them is the organ of abstraction for which things stand still as discrete entities. And living experience isn’t that way.

On the other hand, for the system that speaks, chants and listens, meaning is resonant, shifting, and nuanced. What is said rides on a wave that is not separate from the speaker, the listener and the context in which it happened. Then even simple words go straight to the central nervous system and cause a shift. Ajahn Chah taught like that. And this of course is also the essence of Zen teachings – enigmatic on paper, right on the mark in the flesh.

So even though writing was known in Buddhist India, no-one used it for teachings; for accounts and lists maybe, but not for the sacred. Sacred words have to come with the breath through the body: then they carry the ineffable quality of lived-in experience. They are heard and given added meaning by their resonance, by who spoke them and when. They’re not frozen and fixed as squiggles on a sheet to be read out of the context of their utterance.

In a literate culture, we are in danger of losing our meanings in words. Of course the great writers can pull it off, can use rhythms, spaces, metaphor and character to get across what this flat medium of ink on paper can barely convey. But most of what is written is far from great. Moreover we neglect a skill that is perhaps even more sacred than utterance: deep listening. So life in the public sphere becomes dangerously remote and disconnected from our human responses. When I travel on an aircraft and they go through the safety routine, it’s like nobody’s speaking and nobody’s listening. It’s just flat words. It feels so bad that even though I know the drill backwards by now, I listen deeply again, just to respect and acknowledge the presence of the stewards. While I’m alive I want to be here. Perhaps because of that, on this last flight I ended up cushioning an invalid as he was laid on the three sets next to me, and unwrapping sweets for him to suck. But it felt a lot better than being boxed in my seat looking at the screen.

Some Dhamma-friends of mine even formed a group whose practise was to chant – not for luck or promotion, but just for people to feel their way into Dhamma. It brings us together out of the books and into participation in which every voice offers something. And every ear has to listen to its voice and resonance as part of the whole. Once you’ve got that ear, you keep it cocked all the time to hear those truths that words stumble over; that ear connects to the heart. Moreover you get more clued in to when the words are complexities that are missing the point. For example, when I do dialogue, it’s often the case that after someone gives out an extensive and intelligent metaphysical question, the first response that pops up is ‘It sounds lonely where he’s at,’ or ‘She’s struggling to find self-worth.’ I really can’t get the bit about the nature of the Cosmos or the Self, because other nuances are speaking so loudly.

Maybe one of our most basic needs is to speak and be heard. When you don’t know relational logic, that sounds like an overwhelming duty. ‘Surely there’s so much to say, this is going to go on forever...’ However Marshall Rosenberg, the founder-teacher of Non-Violent Communication, used to say that most of the time people are trying to say one of two things – ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you.’ I might add two more: ‘Hello, I’m here’ and ‘Goodbye: blessings and forgiveness.’ Then we can move on. Perhaps this is what our life together is all about.

A Handful of Almonds

2010-11-11T21:02:00.004Z

In the world of Theravada monasteries this is the ‘Kathina’ season. Kathina is a big event, in many monasteries the biggest event of the year. At any place where a Kathina is being held,
you can hear the explanatory story: in the time of the Buddha a group of bhikkhus were making their way to where the Buddha was staying in order to spend the three-months Rains Retreat with him. However the monsoon rains had swelled the rivers and made the land impassable, so, deeply disappointed, the group had to spend the three months during which a bhikkhu is barred from wandering in a place nearby. Still, they settled into the situation as it was, and spent the Rains together in harmony. However as soon as the Retreat had concluded, they hastened to meet the Buddha before he started to move on. Hearing of their difficulties, the Buddha recommended that they make up a frame on which cloth could be stretched out to assist in sewing robes. This frame was called a ‘Kathina.’ He also stipulated that they should choose one of their number to receive a robe from this cloth, a robe that the others would all help in making. As the cloth would only accrue through the free-will generosity of lay people, this Kathina-event would set a happy seal, one of giving and working together, on the Rains retreat.

The tradition has carried on as a yearly event. The Sangha aren’t allowed to initiate it; so the Kathina is organized by the lay community. Therefore it has become a festival that celebrates both the harmony of the Sangha and the bond between the lay and monastic communities. I’m attending four Kathinas this month, but wherever you go in Theravada-land the scenario is much the same every year. The organizers themselves have generally been planning and inviting and gathering funds for the best part of a year, so that along with the robe-cloth there will be offerings of the range of requisites, including money, that the monastery may need to keep going. There will be free food and drinks for all, and in less strictly focused monasteries some light entertainment on the side. For bhikkhus and nuns it’s also a warm and lively occasion to which they often travel from afar just to visit their Dhamma-companions, ordained or not. So the social aspect of the event is a major factor - rather like Christmas or New Year, the aim is to bring together family and friends, as well as parties who have become estranged. In years gone by, a Kathina at Cittaviveka was held as an occasion for the various groups in the Cambodian community – supporters of the Khmer Rouge, Prince Sihanouk and Hun Sen – to find common ground. After a civil war in which a third of the population had died, the one thing they could get together around was offering alms to the Sangha.

In the West it’s also an occasion for Westerners to participate in a culture (as distinct from meditate, or study Dhamma). At first, the more serious types feel out of place: Kathina is anything but quiet - it’s crowded, and the overall mood is one of good-natured chaos. But as newcomers start to merge into the general flow of it all, a sense of belonging, of gratitude and of participation in a living tradition start to rise up. And this sense offers a precious heart-perspective on monasteries, Buddhism, and human beings in general. None of these, as one finds out, are ideal or perfect. And we can itch to understand them or set them straight. But when we meet the human experience through the focus of non-harming, generosity and participation, our minds turn around. Rather than fixing and judging, we can meet the good within this human condition and celebrate it. That brings up something precious and joyful in ourselves, and there’s a chance for a new start.

A friend of mine sent me series of reports from his travels in India; of which one small event in Ladakh stays in my mind. He was walking down a hillside-track and came across a woman standing doing nothing much (which is something you come across in places where there’s nothing much that can be done). As he passed by her, she reached out her hand and opened it. In it was a handful of almonds. My friend wondered what she wanted…money presumably - but he didn’t have any on him and made signs to that effect. But the woman just laughed a little and proffered the almonds. My friend took a few, cautiously at first; she gestured for him to take more. Eventually he got it: she just wanted to give him a handful of almonds!

Events like this, and the attitudes that they bring up are wonderful teachers. We can see on one hand, our own notions of payment and our nervous response to ‘free offers’ (‘Where’s the catch?’). We can calculate who deserves what and how much; we can feel embarrassed by generosity, or under an obligation to pay it all back somehow. And when those attitudes are seen and found to be unpleasant, as well as unnecessary, something realises how much we gain from meeting another person in a straightforward benevolent way. You feel stopped in your tracks, opened out of your calculating mind-set, and blessed with a new perspective: being here as a human is a co-operative project - join in or get stuck in yourself. The choice is to open up or be wretched.

Alms and the giving of them is not exclusively Buddhist. It’s one of the five duties of a practising Muslim, was the axis of the life of Christian friars, and as hospitality to the traveler (‘the guest is God in your home’ is the Indian maxim) is/was the norm in pre-industrialised cultures. In the wages- culture of course, giving alms doesn’t make sense. Claude Thomas, the Vietnam Veteran-turned Zen monk commented that on his cross-continental peace walks, he received greater welcome in Cambodia than in Ohio. It’s not that people are that different, but in societies where there’s an emphasis on being paid for work, on earning, deserving, and being independent, a stranger evokes unease. (‘What do they want from me?). In cultures where what counts is relationship to other people, where that rather than the company or the bank, is what sees you through, giving and sharing is common sense. It’s also a source of self-respect, and joy.

On this point, the Buddha was very clear:
Bhikkhus, if beings knew, as I know, the result of giving and sharing, they would not eat without having given nor would they allow the stain of meanness to obsess them and take root in their minds. ( Itivuttaka, ‘Ones’, 6).

However, people have to come to that conclusion by themselves; the spirit of Buddhist alms mendicancy is to make no demands. To the samanas the Buddha’s exhortation was to share whatever is freely offered - ‘even the contents of your alms-bowls’- with one’s companions. So an alms-culture is a special one. And once you appreciate the play of it, monasteries start to shine. For example, in the Kathina ceremony, all of the requisites ( sometimes truckloads) are offered to the one chosen individual. There is a great affirmative ‘Sadhu!’ - then an acknowledgement is chanted…and then the chosen individual announces that all the requisites he has received are to be shared out, or kept for the use of the entire community and for anyone who comes to practise in the monastery. So in the alms-culture, material stuff is steered away from gains and jealousy. Instead it gets passed around and brings people together. In the larger world, monasteries in Asia will channel their resources towards supporting hospitals, schools, orphanages or improvements in the local village. In the West, support goes towards producing free-distribution books and CDs, whilst surplus food, clothes and toiletries go to shelters for the homeless, hospices and the like. And the vast majority of all donations goes towards supporting these amazing places where you can stay and receive teachings free of charge.

This year’s Kathinas in our group of monasteries will also be the last occasions when Ven. Ajahn Sumedho will preside as Abbot of Amaravati. His immediate future at least is going to unfold in Thailand. So there is a prolonged leave-taking, and obviously a very poignant mood: sad, grateful and wishing him well. People are gathering to express their gratitude; and for the more elderly there is the sense of farewell. Having been with him in England since 1978, I’ve seen huge developments that have resulted from his teachings, and the places that have sprung up to support their being put into practice. He has offered a massive handful of Dhamma. But as he himself acknowledges, he and his Sangha have just tapped into and given full occasion for a flow of goodness that is triggered by examples of morality, renunciation and benevolence. And even more useful, when that flow starts generating good feeling and freedom from isolation, it doesn’t have to stop with supporting monasteries. It may be that as the global financial system totters around the edge of collapse, and as societies fragment into factions, giving and sharing will make fully clear the value of a handful of almonds.

Boundary Issues

2010-08-26T16:58:00.009+01:00

This arrangement of stones sits on a lawn outside the Main House of Cittaviveka. What it represents is the boundary of a sīma (pronounced ‘seemah’), established by Ven. Anandamaitreyya Mahanayaka Thera in 1981. A sīma is nowadays understood to be a precinct within which formal acts of the Sangha (sanghakamma) such as ordinations and recitations of the Rule can be performed; a consecrated area if you like. There’s more to it than that, but I’ll go into that later. The current news is that this sīma, which was the first one to be formally placed in the West, is about to be deconsecrated so that we can replace it with one inside the Dhamma Hall. Howls of protest? This is understandable - Theravada, in line with the British psyche, greatly venerates the past: part of its meaning stems from the sense of tradition and continuity in time. So just as in this country we have settled on a monarchy that has no functioning power in the affairs of state, but remains as some token of the national identity (and a tourist attraction) we have after years of deliberation, decided to shift the ‘consecration’ to a place where we can perform our formal business in the dry and out of the cold, but keep the marker stones there as a memorial. A vote for functionality over venerability! Actually I think Ven Anandamaitreyya, a pragmatist keen on breaking out of ritualism, would be fine with that. The most important marker remains, one which is more than a matter of location: the slab set flat in the ground is labelled with his chosen words (translated as ) ‘Vinaya-discipline is the life-force of Buddhism.’ Fittingly placed outside the sīma, it describes the greater boundary that the Sangha should dwell within.

Still it may sound odd to make so much of the system of rules, protocols and procedures that constitute Vinaya - what about spirit? What about all-embracing kindness and compassion - with an intent that is measureless ‘to others as to myself?’ True enough...and the goal of the Unconditioned, the release from all definitions, is itself signless, without mark or boundary, and an escape from the constraints of any time or place. No stones and squares in Nibbāna. The short resolution to the apparent ‘boundary/boundless’ paradox is I think most succinctly expressed in Suzuki Roshi’s aphorism, ‘If you want to be a circle, you must first be a square.’ The release from greed, hatred, delusion, views and identity - all the forces that the mind gets stuck in and fired up by - comes around through restraining their influence and through working on them. For that you need exclusive boundaries; restraints around those physical and verbal actions that sweep you into consumer fever, into fixed views, or into ego-building. Also, for contemplative work, a sacred space, a ‘temple,’ is needed; in physical terms, that means a boundary marked out on the ground within which one stands observing these forces of nature. So this is an inclusive boundary, one whose function is to gather in. In this respect, the Buddha offered the four boundaries of mindfulness - mindfulness of body, feeling, mind-states and spiritual processes. Within these there can be a gathering of potency and one-pointedness which informs (literally gives form to) and decides how and whether to act. Furthermore you have to abide within the boundaries for as long as it takes for qualities of sensitivity, spaciousness and strength to arise. Otherwise you don’t stand still long enough to fully know anything, and the mind chases (or are chased by) thoughts, emotions, sensations and energies.

So the boundaries of Buddhism are Dhamma-Vinaya. Vinaya, which it is a samana’s duty to live out and bring alive, is a teaching on the boundaries around action; Dhamma is the centring principle and practice which nourishes contemplation. Together they guard against and dismantle the overflows of passion, opinions, self-conceit and ignorance that well up in the mind. Thus held, without judgement, the pulls and obsessive grasping of our minds are acknowledged; thus acknowledged they can be looked into; thus held in awareness they resolve - and that which is boundless can be realised.

However, to return to the sīma: originally a sīma was a defined territory (which could be the size of a city park or a woodland), the boundaries of which were designated by a group of bhikkhus or bhikkhunis who lived within that territory, with the consent of the local lay community or king. It was a mutual thing, not necessarily owned by the Sangha, but comprising their catchment area - the point being that if you lived within that sīma, you were a member of the governance body of that group. This governance might allocate robes to one member, vote on their various officers who would act on behalf of the group, deal with accusations made against a member, or settle disputes. This then is a local sangha, not a boundless community of all spiritually inclined beings, but a governance body that works in accordance with established standards. Some of the principles of that governance, or ‘sanghakamma’ are: that a vote has to receive unanimous consent before it is passed; that the group can’t make a decision about a person or another group without that party being present; and that in cases of accusation over behaviour, the standard (except in extreme cases), is that the accused party themselves has to confess to a misdemeanour. In such a case, after repeated questioning and evidence to the contrary, a miscreant doesn’t come clean, all that the group can do is declare that that party is no longer a member of the group. Which I guess is reasonable enough. You’re still a member of the wider Sangha, but if the rest of us have no confidence in what you’re doing, then you’re not really part of our local group. The recognition is that in conventional terms, the ways have parted.

One of the most important features of sanghakamma is that the ‘presence’ of all members including accused parties and opposing factions is defined as being ‘face to face’ (sammukhāvinaya) when a topic is being discussed. So as decision-making became more important, sīmas themselves shrank in size to the small precincts that we have today to ensure that everyone’s presence was immediately verifiable. This is wise because the human nervous system responds to messages holistically. That is, only between 7% and 10% of the meaning of any spoken words is communicated by the words themselves. The rest is by voice tone, body language, pauses, and having background understanding of the nature of the people involved. So if you aren’t there ‘face to face’ you don’t fully know and you can’t make a truly informed judgement. Moreover, any reporter on what has occurred will also add a similar percentage of their own meaning to the report via their voice tone and body language.

This is a wake-up reflection: when so much communication is via report and speculation, and is prone to exaggeration, what can we really know for ourselves? Few people are deliberately lying, but the less direct access you have to a topic, the more relevant is the Buddha’s encouragement to the Kālāmas:

...do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in your scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with liking for a view after pondering over it or with someone else's ability or with the thought ‘this person is our teacher.’...When you know in yourselves, ‘These things are unprofitable, censurable, condemned by the wise, being adopted and put into effect they lead to harm and suffering’ then you should abandon them... When you know in yourselves, ‘These things are profitable (etc)’ then you should practise them and abide in them.
Anguttara: 4. 65

How we ‘know in ourselves’ has to be through a fuller means than accepting the truth of a report. It seems to me that to ‘know in oneself’ implies establishing the inclusive boundaries of mindfulness. That is being aware of the embodied feeling and mind-states that arise in the context of the topic in hand. Then we really get what it means to us, and an appropriate response can occur. For example, when I read articles on the rights and wrongs of the world or of Buddhism, I consider ‘What’s the assumed basis, the body of this? What’s the context? Is a range of views expressed, or is this one-sided? What mind-state is this coming from? How is the article trying to include and affect me?’ and with no-one being present, when there are no common boundaries, all I get is a sense of the mind-state of the reporter and a ‘maybe so’ to what they’re saying. Nothing has really fully taken form apart from a set of reactions. Yet this kind of communication, an ‘uninvolved inclusion’ in which no-one is apparently excluded, but few reliable factors are included, is the means whereby most of us make up our world.

So I don't go in for internet discussion, because there are no clear boundaries. Operating within boundaries however means there is the factor of involvement. You can fully express, deeply listen and also get a good feel for what’s going on. Views can be expressed and hammered out or soothed in the spirit of confidentiality - particularly important when settling disputes and accusations. Having local boundaries also allows room for diversity. If you don’t like this groups’s observances or allocation of robes, you step outside that boundary. So whilst the major issues would be resolved by the Buddha (and after him by Sangha Councils) local decisions around in-house matters could occur without causing a schism.

One result of this was the creation of various schools and lineages that have never formally split, but whose boundaries arose through following decisions made dependent on climate, specific customs and other factors particular to the location. However, as the Sangha was primarily a group of wanderers, as the members moved the ‘territories’ became internalised and moved with them. This has led to oddities such as the veneration and continuation of customs that make sense in their native land, but don’t fit elsewhere. There’s a confusion between the territories as the mind-set of the group, and the territory of the local culture. Which is generally resolved by referring to the greater boundary of the Dhamma-Vinaya and flexing the local boundaries until a fit is mutually arrived at.

So local boundaries should not be brick walls; there has to be the ability to include. For a start, anyone who can live up to the requirements of the life can enter the Sangha, bring new attitudes to bear and vote. Furthermore, far from being deaf to the concerns of others, the Buddha made many of the rulings that govern the Sangha in response to lay people’s complaints. The lay community can further keep the local sangha in check by refusing to feed them (as in one noted occasion in the time of the Buddha). Where appeals to reason fails, appeal to the belly may yet succeed. So if Sangha works it’s through the grace and co-operation of a fourfold ‘assembly’ (pārisa) of lay people and of samanas living under the Vinaya. That’s the largest human boundary. The Buddha saw this four-fold assembly as a development that would allow him to pass away in the peaceful knowledge that the results of his work had a firm place on the earth.

However to qualify for inclusion there’s the need to deal with one’s own pain and not dump on the group. And part of that is about working on boundary issues. Through friends, territories, walls and inner spaces, we establish boundaries within which each of us feels comfortable and stable - so we can gather and rest in ourselves and also be present with another without feeling overwhelmed and invaded, and without invading and overwhelming others. People get bruised and abused when boundaries around time, place, and confidentiality aren’t there. And if this is chronic, there is a corresponding mistrust, fear or resentment of ‘them’ ( the power group, the rebels, the others).

Yet part of what life brings us is the experience of ‘them’- when another is not included. Moreover there’s ‘it’ - internal boundaries form around what aspects of our consciousness we can’t bring to light and accept. And until I can be present with my own ‘it’ of fear and anger, then I can’t be present with yours, or with what happens between us - and then my ‘it’ becomes ‘you/him/her/them’. Accordingly much of Dhamma-work is about clearing the difficult stuff - but that entails consciously establishing the boundaries of mindfulness, and even then knowing ‘this as much as I can handle of grief/rage/ lust before I get lost and start dumping it on others.’ Doing this personal work is what entitles us to be members of the group.

So something to reflect on is whether we're aware of each other’s boundaries, or check: ‘Is this a good time/place to talk about this?’; ‘Shouldn’t we include so-and-so in this topic?’ ; ‘Do you think that you could give the two of us a few minutes to talk about this in private.’ We can get bashful about placing reasonable boundary markers, such as ‘Sorry, I don’t have the energy to do this right now’; ‘ It’s late and my mind’s not clear - can we talk about this in the morning?’ ‘I need to consult so-and-so before I can give you an answer on that one.’ Frustrating? In my experience with Sangha, it can take months, even years, until everyone has settled and the potency gathered to arrive at a decision: but if a decision gets forced, it generally doesn’t last. Meanwhile an unbounded discussion becomes incoherent and shallow - no-one’s going to go into the deep stuff if what they say is going to be blabbed to the world. So pointing out and mutually determining boundaries is a vital part of the process of decision-making. It’s a good understanding to arrive at.

And also that in all of this the non-differentiating intent of good-will is essential; it allows for the boundaries, by encouraging kindness to all that which feels other, weird or unacceptable ‘as to myself.’ It doesn’t remove the boundaries, but it respects our limitations at this time. ‘May you be well and may I be well - and that works best if we take a break from being with each other at this time...’ Or, ‘You can lead in this area and I’ll take care of this.’ With such an acknowledgement - and the trust that we can still share what is beyond differentiation - anger, fear or the sadness of being excluded don’t have to occur.

On the other hand, blind inclusion - a ‘we’ that doesn’t respect the different ‘me’s in it - is conformism not harmony. I remember an account that Ram Dass gave on this theme. He was teaching a group of social activists on spiritual themes, and began with the view ‘we are all One.’ However, being activists, the group was quick to set him straight. First the black, Afro-Americans members got up and spoke with passion about their own particular history of slavery and discrimination: ‘We’re not all One, we're the oppressed.’ Then the women got up and talked at length on the problems that were peculiar to their group - misogyny, male domination, etc.: ‘It’s not all the same - we’re an oppressed group.’ Finally the white males got their chance - amid a rising tide of emotion they recounted their history: centuries of domination by Church and State, co-opted as slaves by the forces of capitalism and industrialisation, and now saddled with the projections of every other group. ‘We’re the oppressed.’ Finally the entire group could settle: ‘We’re all oppressed. We’re all One.’ In the clear expression of differences - within a safe boundary - qualities of the heart arise that recognise the unity.

We’re all One in suffering, and in the wish to get free of it. To realise that wish requires working within supportive boundaries - who, what and how to exclude, and who, what and how to fully include. We can move the boundaries, but boundaries are needed. It’s only then that we can find our place and settle down in it to do the real work of knocking down the walls of delusion. Then what remains has no boundaries, because there’s no me or you in it.

E Pluribus Dhammam

2010-07-12T19:26:00.008+01:00

Here I am with an old Dhamma-colleague, Dharma Master Heng Sure. Note the guitar. Rev. Heng Sure is a member of the Sangha of The Sagely City of 10,000 Buddhas in Ukiah, California, a vast establishment that was formerly an asylum/prison for the criminally insane. It was converted into a Dharma Realm (containing monasteries for monks and nuns, a school for children and a University) under the leadership of the Chinese Master Hsuan Hua. So this, as you might deduce, is Mahayana. A day in the City begins with paying homage to innumerable Buddhas, bodhisattvas and patriarchs in all directions; proceeds with transforming the anguished souls of the departed through the blessing power of Kwan Yin Bodhisattva, earnest sutra study and practice, and closes with a group recitation of the Surangama Mantra every evening to ward off demons. From time to time, there are Repentance Ceremonies to clear the bad kamma of previous lifetimes; the overall vision is one of transmitting the countless blessings of the Dharma throughout the Cosmos. Solid Great Vehicle stuff. To clear some kammic errors and up the merit a tad, Dharma Master Heng Sure himself did a bowing pilgrimage with another monk back in the 1970’s. They proceeded (very slowly) up Highway 101 along the coast between Los Angeles and Ukiah (to the amazement of passing traffic) at a rate of three steps, one bow. He also refrained from speaking throughout the two years and nine months that it took. It’s a practice that goes beyond some stress-reduction and personal integration - although of course there’s room for that too. But the Great Vehicle doesn’t do things in a small way. The place where this photo was taken is Abhayagiri Monastery, situated on land that was originally gifted to our community by Master Hsuan Hua.

The guitar? Since leaving the City to reside in Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, Rev Heng Sure has concerned himself with transmitting the Dharma in ways that may reach those whom sitting quietly doesn’t. He has worked extensively on translating the Sutras from Chinese to English; but the guitar is another medium of translating the Dharma to which he turns his mind. You can hear samples of his Dharma songs at www.paramita.org.

I’m still poking away at watching my breath and a few wholesome etceteras, but I am moved by the aspirations and outreach of the multiple forms of Dhamma. And USA, from which I’ve recently returned, certainly gives you the sense of celebration of plurality. Amongst a few other things, I taught a retreat at Spirit Rock with Ajahn Metta which was attended by a multi-faceted gathering of 92 - a full house of retreatants. As the retreat was held on a ‘no charge, give what you can’ basis, it allowed for a greater diversity ( younger people, people of colour) than retreats that by their entrance fee tend to be limited to the more affluent - in which the middle-aged professional white strata predominate. So this was great, and one of the offerings one can make as a ‘no-fees’ mendicant.

USA interests me by its diversity and its struggles and successes in that. Notably on the cosmopolitan coasts, the surnames of those who attend retreats reveals the breadth of origins that make up the national mix. While the heartland of the continent leans towards the conservative and fundamentalist end of the spectrum, the fringes proudly brandish options in all things. Including the diversity of kamma. The questionnaire that each retreatant has to fill in includes blanks to write in the range of previous retreats one has had (often an eclectic slew), along with three options for gender, and enquiries as to one’s therapist, current medication, record of abuse and any attempts at suicide. Here is 21st century humanity; and about the only stand one take towards it is one of awe and compassion.

Such diversity catalyses a unifying principle in the mind. For example, when I go for a cup of coffee and am conducted through a process of dialogue to arrive at a ‘Colombian medium-roast, semi-caffeinated soya latte, tall’ (= American for ‘small’, a no-no concept) and my mind starts to go numb, I know I have to find balance in intention. I can’t expect the world to be simple, but I can find a still centre in simply letting go of my views. To be with how it is without making anything of it. Then a quietness opens that can include, but doesn’t partake of things. It sounds small, but for me it takes an intention focused on letting go of the push, pull and proliferation of the mind. A major practice.

To back that up: in the first sutta of the Long Discourses (The Supreme Net/Brahmajāla), the Buddha, having sketched out his impeccable standards of behaviour as a ‘minor matter’ goes on to expound the 62 kinds of views that contemplatives held over the nature of the Cosmos, the Self, the relationship between the two, and what occurs after death. And to all of these he adds the statement:
This, monks, the Tathāgata understands: These view-points thus grasped and adhered to will lead to such-and-such destinations in another world. This the Tathāgata knows, and more, but he is not attached to that knowledge. And being thus unattached he has experienced for himself perfect peace, and having truly understood the arising and passing away of feelings, their attraction and peril and the deliverance from them, the Tathāgata is liberated without remainder. (The Long Discourses of the Buddha, Maurice Walshe, Wisdom, Boston.)

Note that in the Brahmajāla, the Buddha makes his only statement that of the way to release; he doesn’t concern himself with a rebuttal of any view. We can learn from that how to handle the relative rights and wrongs of life, and get them in perspective. In my little world, many of the people I teach enter Dhamma through sitting in meditation; such folk tend to discount chanting, repentance, and rituals. There are those who advocate compassionate action and getting off the cushion; and I’m also in touch with scholars writing papers on the finer implications of the word ‘sacca’ ( is it truth, is it reality, is it honesty?) Then again there are those who celebrate the feminine; there are movements towards liberalising the tradition, and there are those who want to get back to the roots. My head spins if I try to fathom or syncretise it all; and my heart contracts if I dismiss any of it. Accordingly, I teach and practise intention: what is your awareness doing now, where is it taking a stand? Is it absolutising the relative? Or on the other hand, do we dismiss the validity of having a relative point of view? By which I mean that there’s an error in avoiding a point of view or in adopting a definite practice (such as it’s a good idea to spend some time every day sitting quietly focused on breathing). We can hold to the view that ‘all views and relative positions are invalid.’ No, attachment to that view is madness. Whilst a life bound to a point of view has little scope and growth, a life that can’t make good use of points of view has no foundation and no direction.

Hence I teach intention, and of making intention much more than an idea, but of an alignment that is clearly conceivable, heartfully felt and backed up by one’s felt embodiment. One has to stand one’s ground, such as it is, feel it down to one’s nerve endings, and know it in the gut. And for Dhamma-practitioners, that means first of all bringing body, heart and thought into connection and into harmony. Often the first step in this is to keep turning the mind in a sincere and peaceful way to the sensations in the body, or more specifically those associated with breathing. As the connection gets made, as we feel the energy and effects of our thoughts and emotions on our body, we learn a few immediate things about skilful and unskilful by the tension or buoyancy of the felt body. Then you know you have to live in a way that keeps you in touch with the wisdom of that. To walk your talk, and know it is purely and humbly your own. This is the entry to a life of ‘three steps, one bow.’

Then within diversity of experience, there is a central guide, or Dhamma. You realis that not only are we living in a diversified world, but each of us is a diversity - my body feels like this, my mind wants that. The mind itself is no thing, but a changing presentation of states that come and go and don’t always harmonise. Nor is there any final sublime state, or unifying self to distil out of all this. Because of this being-diversity, we can only find balance through non-attachment to any single position or statement. And that means we can meet them all, and use the ones that currently can support our intention towards peace, truth and goodness. ‘I assert and proclaim such [a teaching] as does not quarrel with anyone in the world’ says the Buddha (Honeyball sutta).

The Buddha's teachings offer ways to specifically find that centre of non-attachment and non-contention, both in ourselves and in relationship to others. Through such work there can then be a release from the diversity of mind - but not into any single state, level, or attitude. If that release can stand as our unifying intention, there’s room for action, room to work out kamma, room for you and me, and a way to the Beyond.

Who We Really Are

2010-06-07T18:42:00.005+01:00

This was in Kyoto. The two ladies are maiko, apprentice geisha, who offer their services as entertainers and evening companions (to those who can afford it). I was visiting Japan with a fellow-monk, and at the sight of this strange confluence of paired males and females wearing iconic robes/dress, someone took a photo.

I’ve never been that comfortable with self-presentation, but I’ve learned to get used to being photographed. After all it’s not me that’s in the frame, but the monk. We can’t avoid presentation, so maybe the safest way is to make it clear that this is what it is, and abide with the integrity to live out what it refers to. That means taking on the responsibility of carrying such an iconic form, and of living within its outlines. As a theme for Dhamma-practice, it also highlights and challenges one’s personal inclinations. In my novitiate, the doubt I had about taking on bhikkhu life was not about celibacy or not handling money, but more to do with a loss of individual freedom. Such as having the possibility of taking a walk in the park with my dog if I felt like it. Or of having a lie-in and reading the papers in bed, if I so chose. Or of hanging out with a few buddies playing music in the evening. Of being me-or what had become me anyway. And what’s the harm in that? Fortunately, one isn’t expected to make a life-time commitment to bhikkhu training, and I thought the experience, notably the meditation, would do me some good. I might even get enlightened, and then disrobe, and then take an enlightened walk in the park with my dog…

At first, being a monk isn’t that demanding in terms of presentation. As a junior monk, one isn’t in the spotlight, and having one’s robe fall off, eating chocolate with unrestrained glee, and making verbal gaffes are met with a few sighs by one’s elders and smiles from the benevolent laity. However the criteria get more exacting as the years go by. As one becomes a spiritual representative, one’s facial expression is scrutinized for signs of the disapproval that, as the projection of people’s relentless super-egos, one must surely feel for all beings. Humorous asides are recorded and examined for signs of disillusionment, repressed sexual desires or misanthropy. Twist your neck to relieve a painful cramp and whoever your slightly strained face points towards will feel condemned, perhaps for a lifetime. (In Thailand it’s the mention of numbers that gets noted: a sure sign that the Ajahn is dropping a hint as to the winning number in the national lottery).

As a Dhamma-practice then, presentation then becomes an exercise in relational mindfulness. And even though the relationship is centred on traditional and impersonal qualities of faith and aspiration, the skill is to fill that with the personal warmth, calm and understanding that direct application to Dhamma has brought to light.

Personality and presentation. For a samana (or any Dhamma-teacher), if we don’t act in accordance with what we represent there is a weakening and even a betrayal of the faith that others place in us. Obviously one’s moral standards must be reliable - but what about those personal interests and talents? What does one do with one’s historical, individual personality? I’d say it’s a long process, not cosmetic surgery. And it’s a deep process, one that involves handling the kamma that has made me ‘who I am.’ In the crucible of awareness, there can then be a transmutation of all those inclinations, a gathering and filtering of those energies and know-how, in which nothing valid is lost, nothing unique and truly joyful has to be abandoned. It is perhaps the most attractive accomplishment of realized beings - that their warmth, stability and wit can be directed towards liberation. Because the rich humanity of a selfless person is a lasting inspiration, even when the texts run dry and the meditation gets stuck.

There’s a lot of confusion around about being a person. The word itself comes from ‘persona’ which in Roman times was the mask that an actor wore to represent the hero he was enacting; it was the means of ‘sounding through’ the character of that part. A persona was certainly not a representation of who the actor thought and felt he was. Personality, as each individual’s definitive character - which we’d call ‘ego’ - dates from the late 18th century. No wonder the scriptures make no mention of the personality of the Buddha or his disciples - it just wasn’t a reference. Our confusion around this ‘definitive character’ is to make it definitive, a statement of who I am, rather than a collection of programs that best meet the world. We imagine ego to either be an essential and lasting self, or to be connected to it. The ‘right’ (understandable, popular) ego-personality can make people vote for it, and open the door to fame and power. However it costs. For each individual who holds personality as a true self, as a motivating and essential psychological centre, there is pressure. This self expects freedom of expression; it needs to be original enough to stand out from the crowd, but not so different that it confuses people. If it makes the right impressions, all well and good- if it doesn’t, there’s a problem. Yet no matter how well it goes down, does such an ego-bound self give it’s owner any real assurance? The big names often teeter on the brink of anxiety, depression, drug abuse and suicide. Supporting a public personality is a demanding task.

Yet everyone has a personality. It’s a natural development of mental behaviours that facilitates our lives as social humans. When we’re born, we’re born with the potential for its development because personality- how we look and present ourselves - does the vital job of acting as an interface. It’s an interactive display that summarises what behaviour or performance you, the other, can expect from it. But in a populous society, the criteria for performance and behaviour get more exacting and the personal self becomes highly stressed: if you don’t do good (fun, efficient, sexy) enough, you aren’t good enough. This stress is the dis-ease that receives due attention in spiritual circles.

One theme that comes out of attention is that of being true to yourself, or of knowing who you really are, beneath or within the personality. It’s an approach that’s aimed at authenticity; at presenting an interface that most accurately aligns itself to what is happening in the mind. For that, you have to both be in touch with your ‘inner life’ and be prepared to stand by it as you present it. There’s something worthy in that. After all, if you can’t bring it out, shouldn’t you discard or shift what’s there? However, it can rightly be argued that a lot of social interaction is based more on convenience than about being aligned to truth; about getting through the day of functions with as least snagging and conflict as possible. In many of the workaday meetings we have, personal authenticity is less important than keeping your act together. And in the wide sphere of interactions in the workaday world, superficiality is important: get on with the play of events, don’t get bogged down in depth of presence. So to what extent is it appropriate to present one’s inner life?

Furthermore we can also consider whether one’s emotional and psychological profile as if it is of a higher or truer order than one’s surface presentation. What if, as the Buddha suggested, all that deeper, inner stuff is also conditioned and subject to stress, and not a true self at all? So when we come to Buddhist practice, the quest to know who we really are meets a few major challenges. First of all, the Buddha didn’t teach anyone to know who they really were and then to align their personality accordingly. His emphasis was to know stress, pressure and suffering and to eliminate that. One of the results of doing just that is that the personal dynamic shifts by itself: through mindful enquiry into stress and its cessation, one’s behaviour, disposition and energies change. So the approach differs from the ‘true self’ perspective in that it is these dynamic elements of self - moods, energies and inclinations - that occupy the focus of Buddhist introspection rather than a quest for a unitary picture of ‘this is what I am.’ In fact any notion of, or search for my true self biases the enquiry. Attention is applied with an angle: one takes up an attitude of ‘this is what I am, or need to be, or am not ashamed of being.’ This may have some healing effects, but that attitude contains a pressure; that there’s something other than wisdom that must be brought out, protected or referred to for guidance. Furthermore, any sense of being that something requires its continuation in time - so what happens when we (apparently) die? Where does it go then? Back to the cosmic melting pot? Even more to the point, where, when and why did what I really am get into this changing and mortal show? If it chose to climb into the ring with struggle, sickness, ageing and death, ‘my true self’ wasn’t that smart, was it? Maybe one places the self on an epic stage: ‘There was something I needed to work out, and was meant to be in this lifetime.’ On the other hand, if there is a sublime presence that is here and accessible to me, but isn’t an identity - why call it a self in the first place? Why does it need to be labelled? Therefore, perhaps through seeing these pitfalls, the Buddha wouldn’t affirm identity as a goal of the path of liberation. He just taught a practice-path out of suffering – which includes the agitation that comes with conceiving of self. The practice-path itself will develop resources that come to light at the personal interface – actions and dispositions that aren’t bound by the fears and needs of the ego.

Well, that’s a relief. ‘So my messy old self is to be let go of; and maybe with some effort I could disband the whole thing.’ That’s the way Buddhist practice may seem, especially as heading the list of major ‘fetters,’ obstacles to enlightenment, is ‘personality view.’ This fetter flags the ‘superficialist’ tendency - the assumption that this sophisticated but programmed personality system is a real and lasting identity; something that you have to worry about or rely upon, or assume to be the lasting truth of another person. However, the way to check that view and inclination is not through denying, suppressing or being careless, but through handling and purifying the impulses, attitudes and energies that mould our personality. In other words, to know it for what it is, not to eliminate it. (After all it does a vital job.) For this reason, the Buddha advocated the skill of self-reference, of personal integrity, self-respect and skilful relationships with others. He emphatically didn’t teach self-annihilation.

The difference between identifying with a personality and handling it skilfully is an important one, something that meditators some times fail to grasp. On a long retreat that I taught a while ago, three practitioners had experiences that they equated with losing their sense of self. What this meant was that their sense of being in a shared context, or of connection to personal history, was highly reduced. For one of them this was source of concern and even distress, whilst the other two associated the experience with a state of realization, a glimpse or penetration into Nibbana. After all, ‘no-one in here and no-one out there’; no sense of being affected or interested in functions and identities, sounds like an experience that has left superficiality behind.

Although one of the three was rightly distressed by this sense of losing connection, it took a while for the other two, who had studied and practised Buddhism for a longer time, to recognize that their minds were losing balance. For these two, despite weeks of intense introspection, it was the disorientation in their behaviour, accompanied by fairly minor transgressions, that blew the whistle on the ‘non-self’ experience. In other words, the concerns of the personality level, of how we act and interact in the external world, sounded the wake-up call. Because that’s the other aspect of the Buddha’s teachings - Vinaya - a training in correct or appropriate behaviour. The realm and concerns of the personality are not to be abandoned; it’s just the making of a righteous, anxious or obsessive self out of it that is to be seen through as stressful, and consequently put aside.

One of the shortcomings of intensive retreat situations is that the emphasis on ‘going inwards,’ on being on your own and refraining from interaction, can displace the personality energies rather than purify them. That mode of experience may indeed lead to a magnification of the picture of what’s happening in the mind; and one might even experience unusually heightened states of calm or rapture or concentration. However, one is in danger of losing the balance between inner and outer, between self and other; a balance that is the essence of full (holistic) awareness. As the Buddha succinctly put it:

he abides contemplating mind-objects ( dhamma) internally, or..contemplating mind-objects externally, or..contemplating mind-objects both internally and externally. ( Satipatthana sutta, M.10)

If we keep angling the mind to disconnect from the interactive personality level ( an understandable way of side-stepping stress), it gets difficult to change the habit. And it’s also the case that disconnection, rather than awakening, is what some people want. But with that there’s no correct attention to one’s kamma, no proper handling and easing of its confused energies, and no complete integration. Such a practitioner attempts to cut off their kamma through avoidance, rather than transmute it through wise attention. Knowing this tendency, meditation masters may include work duties or discussion periods as part of the practice. Actually, in monastic life there are generally a whole range of duties - such as walking out on alms round, cleaning the monastery buildings and learning to chant together - that are a standard. One is also often living with a range of personalities some of whom one has no affinities for. Although this may not support my manifesting who I really am (because not everyone is interested) it does provide a practitioner with a rich source of mindful practice. We learn to stay in touch with a world of which we aren't the centre. So mindfulness has to be balanced internally, externally and at the interface where the sense of ‘self and other’ arises.

Of course in order to acquire that holistic awareness and balance, requires checking and moderating the connections with the social world. So how to not lose balance? It seems to me that this requires us to enquire into and mindfully cultivate what makes up our apparent self, including where it meets others. When you go to the source of it, what this self arises from a threefold basis: bodily presence ( being fully and attentively here) heart (the intelligence of empathy and response) and object discernment (how a thing appears to be, not how I feel about it). In brief, for mental consciousness to fully sense and organize experience into ‘me being in the world,’ takes body, heart and head. And whether we want to get out of the world or find our true place in it, first of all we have to know what that experience of ‘being in’ is about. If you try to cut off that experience, you get unbalanced, or even go crazy.

Bodily presence gets developed through bringing attention to posture - standing, sitting, and walking; a basis for meditation. This keeps grounding the mind in being here. And as the practice develops, it attunes us to the body’s intelligence - of which the sense of balance is the most apparent aspect. But along with comes an enhanced kinesthetic sense, that restores the body’s co-ordination, agility and sensitivity. These two alone give meditation a suitable ‘non-sensual’ pleasure that is yet fully embodied. I emphasize this intelligence in meditation practice because it is often lost - through propping the body on convenient surfaces, sitting passively in chairs and abandoning feet in favour of wheels, people lumber and lurch around, and get to live in their heads. Also, a lot of the emotional agitation that powers incessant thinking comes from not fully inhabiting where we are. So there is an ontological insecurity that throws everything out.

To counteract that insecurity, many people will rely on their heads. It’s a common inclination anyway, because the head tell us what to do, and societies in general are focused on the doing side of life, rather than the being/relating side. The thinking mind is the educated and valued job-winner; so I am the thinker, and the thinker tells me what to do, and how well I’m doing, and what I should have done etc. Which means pressure and restlessness - and pain if we get to feel how incessant thinking feels. Thus at a certain level of stress the reaction is to cut off thinking, by fair means or foul. And if I can’t do that, I cut off the heart. Hence the loss of joy, empathy and wholeness that ‘know your true self’ spirituality rightly sees as a source of suffering.

However, addressing the problem from a Buddhist perspective doesn’t require bringing in a true self, but is a matter of balancing the energies and intelligences of body, heart and head. To feel grounded in your body, so that there’s a source of calm. Further: through tuning in to the steady flow of the body’s in- and out-breathing, how we are gets to feel good. With a steady bodily presence to relate to, the heart sense doesn’t get wound up in its emotions, and how we are doesn’t solidify into who I really am. And this is good news. Because then there can be empathy with others rather than projections and reactions. We’re less needy and therefore less disappointed by other people being the way they are. There is presence, empathy and clear thinking, and they support each other. That’s enough. As for who I really am - let other people argue about that.

Knowing Where You Are

2010-03-14T17:51:00.008Z

‘You know where you are.’ The elderly Western woman was passing comment on her few days as a guest at Wat Pah Nanachat, N.E. Thailand – the forest monastery for Westerners that was founded by Ajahn Sumedho under the auspices of Luang Por Chah back in 1974. In one respect ‘knowing where you are’ meant living in a section of the monastery walled off and reserved for women; it also meant that she would by and large not meet with the monks; and in the ‘colour-coded’ mode of dress that is the norm, she would be wearing a white blouse and long black sarong. Brown for monks and samaneras, white with a wrap for nuns, white without wrap for ‘pa kow’– long term eight precept men – and white and black for female guests. And that would be the order of the line-up for meals. Thais are firm on outward form and boundaries. You know where you are.

As we knew each other from England, we were conversing. It was her first time in a Thai monastery, so I’d wanted to know how it was going. Admittedly I felt apprehensive as, apart from the oddness of being in a foreign culture, the placing of people in terms of gender and the stratification of one’s position in the group can be a sensitive topic. In the West, we look towards equalising the relative positions – male and female politicians, soldiers and newsreaders; equal pay; Gender Discrimination policies etc. Moreover the woman I was talking with had been a campaigner for women’s rights in the 1960’s. Now, much to my surprise, she was finding the clarity of the discriminative positioning calming and peaceful.

You know where you are. For Thais and perhaps for Asians in general, that brings the benefit of knowing how to relate to others and what one’s duties are towards family, employers, and the society in general - irrespective of the changeable and risky area of personal feelings. If you’re a taxi-driver you know that you’re up a notch from a rickshaw driver, but you’ll use the appropriate terms and gestures of respect to a doctor or a businesswoman. There isn’t the need to make assessments, check each other out, or decide and negotiate around who goes first – that’s all sorted out. Supporting this is the fact that, like many of the East Asian languages, Thai is rich with terms of respect that are to be used dependent on where you are in the social scale; correct speech is not the ‘PC’ that we’ve adopted in the West, but based on using the social placement gracefully. This can make Thais uncomfortable in addressing monks in English because they can’t use the ‘correct’ terms of respect – my language doesn’t have them. From our point of view, even when one has some skill in speaking Thai, it’s still difficult at times to really get the meaning of what is being said, because the style of address will contain hints, nuances and invitations rather than direct expressions of wants, dislikes or opinions. Confrontational speech is a complete no-no, and one has to listen carefully for signs of reluctance, evasiveness or low enthusiasm.‘Probably could do’ is more likely to mean ‘Don’t push further on this topic’ than ‘Great idea.’ This sense of personal modesty and understatement is especially a keynote in the monastic sub-culture: whereas Western novices find it stimulating to express a difference of opinion with their teachers (after all this will promote inquiry), among Thais disagreement with one who is senior has to be handled cautiously through hints.

Even more confusing for them, the body language of the West is a monotone. We all sit at the same height; we take whatever seat is available in a room or on a bus; we don’t address others with our hands in anjali; we queue up on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. On the other hand, in Thailand, it’s us Westerners who get confused. I remember shortly after taking on robes as a samanera, being introduced to a Thai lay supporter – who pressed his hands together in the anjali ( prayer-position) to greet me. So of course I made anjali back to him – with resultant confusion and embarrassment – and apologies from the monk who was supervising me. Now on a recent trip I noticed the similar scenario on the plane: the steward greeted all the passengers with her hands in anjali – the Thai passengers filed past her along the aisle with no response, and without even making eye-contact. In their eyes, I imagine, she was just showing that she was a properly cultivated person who knew where she was. Therefore things were in order and they could feel comfortable. The Western passengers all responded to the steward’s anjali by making anjali back and looking at her directly – thus establishing in their way, that they were friendly and were appreciative of her service. The steward retained a bright and even expression throughout. In her upbringing it was important not to show uneven or disturbing moods. This evenness is a social grace; it keeps whatever’s happening within from spilling out, and it preserves a safe sense of separateness. It’s quite the opposite from the West where expressing how you feel is considered a sign of being open and willing to meet the other person on an emotional (or even physical) level. A day in California without being hugged, giving or receiving direct feedback, or divulging intimacies is not quite hitting the mark on being real.

I’d say there are advantages and disadvantages to any social model. Brought up in the West, after graduating from university, I was free to travel and explore what I wanted to do with my life – which meant that at the age of 25 I could enter a monastery in Thailand and subsequently take up monastic training. In accordance with the standards laid down by the Buddha, I did have to ask my parents for their permission – which as Westerners they readily gave: this was what their adult son wanted to do, there was no expectation for me to support them, and no duty to produce children. Mentioning that in Malaysia to a group of ethnic Chinese, I could almost hear the jaws drop. Welfare state, free education, social security if you can’t find work, marry who you like and go where you want – such freedom! At times Asians do comment on the difficulties of being fixed in the family/social grid, with its emphasis on obedience and duty; it's that grid however which provides their guidelines, welfare state and source of warmth and belonging.

To make a simplification: the traditional Asian norm is to fit in with the norm, the Western one is to choose the norm that fits your disposition and needs. Over here it’s individual freedom, equal rights and opportunities. In the East, the terms are duties, responsibilities and respect – especially for elders. Actually, ‘respect’ is too limited a word to convey the range of qualities that establish this all -important social medium. Showing respect honours the one who gives it as much as the one who receives it; it establishes a relationship based upon responsibilities in the social order, rather than any personal merits or moods. It isn’t ‘fair’ – I pay respect to my ‘seniors’ who should not pay respect to me. However, it is orderly – and the senior has his/her duty to offer support, and be an advisor and guarantor for the ‘junior.’ Furthermore, where you are isn’t to be held as who you are. In fact ‘who you are’ is not so much a mystery as a wrong view. There isn’t a ‘who’ to it; there’s the ‘how’ of one’s dharma – one’s duties, actions, roles and responsibilities. There’s kamma, not self; there’s the occasion to perform according to the proper order, and the belief that true benefits, mundane and spiritual, will come from that.

Respect encompasses a range of actions and attitudes. Firstly there’s conventional respect – to one’s seniors. In monastic circles, respect to one’s teacher means that monks will generally go or stay where their teacher sends them. In Malaysia I stayed at a monastery which was being looked after by one Thai monk who spoke none of the local languages. My Thai is minimal, but I got to ask how he managed and why he was here. ‘Duty’ was the matter-of-fact reply. I don’t find this way of looking at things ro be common among Westerners. Then there’s also respect in terms of acknowledgement of the individual’s goodness or achievements; and there’s also respect as gratitude. All these aspects may come together in the relationship to one’s teacher, wherein massaging and even bathing him is the norm. While Luang Por Chah was being bathed by an American monk, Luang Por asked him: ‘Did you bathe your father?’ ‘No, Luang Por, we don’t bathe our fathers in New York.’ ‘That’s why you have problems.’ An inadequate sense of respect.

The stratification allows for bonding, but keeps the distinctions. Address to a ‘senior’, especially to a senior monk, generally involves adding the term ‘krap’ (‘ka’ for women), a word that implies acquiescence, at the end of each sentence. At times this is repeated, or strengthened with the more deferential ‘krapom,’ which one utters with one’s hands in anjali – and there are even more deferential and flowery ways of address that can’t be replicated in English in a way that doesn’t seem absurdly obsequious. But although ‘krap/ka’ can mean ‘yes, indeed’ or ‘aye-aye, sir/ma’am,’ it also can be ‘meaningless’ and used as a ‘marker’ of respect. This is a usage that’s found in other Asian countries. For example, when I was walking in India I might ask: ‘Does this road go to Patna?’, and almost certainly receive ‘yes’ as a reply. I would assume that this meant that the road does go to Patna. But not so; it might mean you could get to Patna via that road, just like you could go from London to Athens via Stockholm, but in general what the ‘yes’ really meant was something like ‘I’m attentive to your needs and wish to be helpful.’ What comes first is establishing the relationship, which now makes complete sense to me – we used to do this in England years ago with polite ‘meaningless’ conversation and cups of tea. So in Thailand when someone says ‘krap/ka’, both parties understand that this denotes the appropriate attention and even intention – but that doesn’t necessarily imply firm agreement, or mean that circumstances will allow that apparent agreement to be carried out. How could something so uncertain as the unfolding of the future be something we can expect to establish? But the relationship, which will determine how we interact, is clear and established time and time again through bodily and verbal marks of respect. Conformity to the letter of the decision isn’t expected; but a proper affirmation of the spirit of loyalty, regard and correct relationship is. That’s the basic duty.

The distinctness is also gender-based, and men and women don’t intermingle as freely as they do in the West. Like paying respect, this separation is emphasised in monastic life. For a start the wall around women in the monastery moves with them wherever they are in relationship to the monks. The need to support celibacy is part of it. Distance keeps things cool and clear in an area where people are liable to emotionally flow and merge into each other. A distance of at least two metres is the expected minimum; preferably if one’s voice can manage it, even more. Better still, don’t see each other at all. And then there’s the body language. When there is a need to communicate, the woman will be down a step, maybe even kneeling on the ground, and addressing me with hands in anjali. This threw me at first, but now I can switch to the Thai channel: the woman seems to be quite happy playing her part, and often seems more confident in that than I am in mine.

However the notion of not seeing women doesn’t stand a chance in a typical monastery whose lay congregation is largely female. Women’s familial sense – people first, functions second – and love of serving get channelled into devotional forms through a stable relationship with the group of monks (who as individuals remain unknown and who come and go). Men’s relational sense on the other hand is more ‘social’: to know what people can do and form teams and connections to achieve those aims. For men it’s vital to know who the team leader is – then we know who we are going to follow. For women that’s not so: following is optional, but relating is essential. Interestingly enough, both those modes operate amongst the monks: when the arrangement is social, it’s hierarchical and ‘male’, when it’s familial it’s more ‘female.’ By this I mean that there’s a lot of physical contact, and taking time to be at ease and hang out together. In my monastery, the monks will follow a monk for work, but take advice from the nuns when it comes down to a person’s mental or physical health. A woman applying as a candidate to the sisterhood will be thoroughly screened; for the men as long as you keep the rules, turn up to the right things at the right time and can work in the group, you’re in. The monks will give talks to a silent congregation, the nuns will shine in terms of addressing and counselling individuals or teach smaller groups in which there’s the opportunity for dialogue. There are distinctions that form quite naturally; but it’s not that one is more valid or necessary than the other.

I don’t know enough to say how it all works for Thai nuns. They seem to miss out in terms of the attention of the (female) lay congregation; and also in terms of any social relationship with the monks. This doesn’t mean that they don’t have any authority – I’ve been to monasteries where the practical arrangements and finances were run by experienced nuns. And there are certainly many dedicated, skilful and wise nuns in Thailand. But for cultural and historical reasons, it’s the monks who are the Sangha and the bearers of the Dhamma, for the nuns, there’s just the opportunity to practise. This just isn’t a valid set-up for the West.

Here it's natural for nuns to have a more prominent role in Sangha affairs and in contributing to the Dhamma. In my opinion this isn't just to be fair, but because it's part of our conditioning. And transcendence has to include the conditioning – personal and cultural – of the practitioner. Otherwise one isn’t bringing one’s stuff into a Dhamma focus; we’re sidelining our kamma rather than owning it, inquiring into it and purifying it. So while we can draw great benefit from the long tap root (and still magnificent flowering) of Buddhist Thailand, we can’t ignore the norms and history of our local culture. In Britain, ‘knowing where you are’, also known as ‘knowing your place’ died out around the time when the First World War made such concerns irrelevant. In times of universal and senseless annihilation, one’s place in the social hierarchy doesn’t mean much. A generation of men were wiped out, women got the vote, the empire entered disintegration and the politics of the common man and woman became established. Nearly a century following on from all that, we’ve gone global and multi-cultural. Knowing (and staying) in your place is a thing of the past; and it doesn’t bring our current Western conditioning to light. I doubt if my English friend would have remained contented in her place in the Thai monastery for long.

It’s also the case that a valid spiritual culture also has to provide opportunities for the religious to feed their insights into a living form. Otherwise not only does the society not benefit, but the religious feels stifled and their development is hindered. Respect, duty, a strong familial sense and order established through distinct roles are all laid down in the early Buddhist scriptures as worthy values, but it would be a mistake to try to make how they are expressed culture-specific. Those ‘Gone Forth’ have to feed the conditioning of their own culture into the practice, clear the defilements and bring out the results; otherwise something precious is lost. How this is going to take form in the West is an ongoing exploration. We live in interesting times.

Travelling On

2009-12-29T07:14:00.003Z

I do quite a lot of travelling every year, on teaching tours and Sangha business. There is a familiar pattern: packing documents, the standard requisites - with clothing adjusted to suit the climate zone I'm moving into - and a stack of books or CDs to give away. I generally travel alone; sometimes I'm dropped at a railway station with a ticket pressed into my hand, but more usually now it's an airport - where after the check-ins and farewells I move into 'Departures' through the security checks and glitzy shopping malls to make my way to a gate and wait. Once through the entrance to Departures, I am in a different world until hours later. If all goes according to plan, I will be greeted by someone, often unknown, as I leave 'Arrivals.' In between the two poles where I am seen as an identity with a personal profile, I'm in something like a Bardo (between-birth) state where my personhood means nothing. Having passed under the judgemental gaze of security, I move through arcades presenting the glories of the material world and am then herded into a cabin and sealed off from familiar contact.

I spend ten to twenty hours in this nether-world, with time going very fluid and reduced oxygen, more often than not unable to eat, sleep or move around until the stewards, having expressed their pleasure at our company, allow us off. Then an identical passage through ranks of Johnny Walker, Chanel, Gucci and Rolex and more scrutiny occurs until, having retrieved my bag, I enter again a world where I may be more than an item in transit. Even then, there is often a period of time during which I am standing in a foreign place, unable to speak the language, waiting for an unknown person to find me amidst the thronging crowds, and knowing that that's all I can do. It's a very open experience.

The whole process is a meditation on placement and identity, one in which a scenario in which I act, speak and am seen in a particular way gets radically shifted, re-arranged and assembled into another pattern. At 'home' what I am and am formed by is a mixture of duties, routines, concerns, projects and personal relationships that start falling away as soon as I leave the monastery. At the airport, my identity is reduced to a few documents and a seat on a plane. I have no money - the key to the 'ordinary' world - and therefore no choice but to go with whatever happens. The helplessness has a liberating and truthful quality to it: I take note of the throng of people from all nations as we transit through all going somewhere else, and consider - well who belongs anywhere anyway? Even the airport itself is an alienated territory whose familiar scenarios of official check-points, coffee bars, jewellery shops, diners and newsagents are so global that they don't belong to anywhere in particular. Each one is just another sealed-in human environment that nobody is born in, lives in or dies in; having no social life, no heart, no history. In these way-places all that we take for granted as being part of the fine web that sustains who we sense we are is suspended - except for passport, ticket and money.

So my contemplative nerves light up to explore this presentation of how relative and conditioned 'Ajahn Sucitto' is. It continues when I arrive - in the non-Buddhist West, I may be related to as a Western male, whereas the average person is uncertain about who I am as a monk. In Thailand what I am as a (senior) monk is known and related to in a very confident and familiar way; who I am as a person isn't known, isn't even important. So who, or what, do I sense myself as being? Isn't that also in transit? Isn't that estimation of nationality, value, relationships, and history just another boarding pass - like Gate K2, Economy Class, seat 43F, time 18:30 - on Kamma Air? And where is all that going?

In brief, it's all wandering on in the great mirage of samsāra. But as I consider why I'm on a journey - to support faith and understanding in others, to help maintain a lifestyle and fellowship that may point to a way out of samsāra - then the voyage has an Awakening intention within it. That intention is the vehicle and the carrier - and it even absorbs the passenger. Intentions dominated by good-will, anxiety, confusion or self-abandonment; it's only intention that carries consciousness on. Who else but that semi-conscious drive is going anywhere? That reflection helps to steer my mind out of the confusing array of gates and numbers, tickets and times into a steady non-abiding aimed at nibbāna.

Then there's a radical difference to the 'wandering on' of samsāra. Although in neither samsāra nor nibbāna can a substantial independent entity be found ( Nāgārjuna's point when asserting them to be 'no different'), they are far from the same intention. The samsāric consciousness travels on sustained by the belief that it is a real entity going to real places, whereas in an attunement to nibbāna, we sense it is appearances that travel on - and there is a non-moving that doesn't abide in these. The 'real entity' of samsāra is a weave of relative and fragile conditions, behaviours and appearances; and the places that they arrive at never quite fit what they were aiming for. But as one acknowledges and cools down about all of this, a sense of steady openness becomes a more constant abiding. No-one is really going anywhere; but no-one is staying anywhere either.

What is constantly remarkable about living in openness, is that goodness seems to break through and flow around it. Personally, I find that the vulnerability and the separation from a fixed environment encourage the mind to stay connected to its essential ethical and meditative values. That is one stays focused in the present, doesn't get distracted by the sound and the glitter, and inclines towards gentle friendliness to officials and fellow-passengers. So this intention is really helpful when some electrical storm results in getting stranded in an airport for ten hours with people getting angry and upset. But when there's no real destination; and when the intention that is your carrier is to be with what arises and to let go of suffering - the route is straightforward. And occasionally someone else gets on board: a customs official who has just barked at me for stepping over a red line in front of her booth, suddenly shifts into a gentle sense of wonder as she goes through my details. ' Teaching meditation, eh? Does that make you peaceful...?' etc. Or a steward notices that I'm not going crazy over being parked three hours on the runway waiting for permission to fly, and we get to talking...Such meetings are delightful.

Maybe this is nothing much. But in times where global appearances are indeed disheartening, it's wise to keep one's head and heart clear. What flows around the Awakening vehicle are awareness and values that can affect others. Then travelling isn't a wavering trajectory between one imagined thing and the next, but an abiding in an energy-field around which the good keeps circling. That's where we really need to get to.

Getting in Touch

2009-11-10T22:36:00.002Z

This is photo of a special interest group that meets in Cittaviveka monastery. The qualification for entering the group is that one has to be at least 65 years old (as host, I'm an exception). I suggested that an elders' group form because many of the monastery's Dhamma functions occur in the evenings when it's a risky and arduous journey for people whose sense-faculties and energy are in decline; and because old people get very little attention compared (for example) with children. Yet these are often the people who have learned from life, and who have served and supported society (and the monastery) for years. It seemed an appropriate gesture to me to offer them an occasion in which as ‘Village Elders’ they could share their understanding, and be recognised. So the group's been meeting for five or six years – though during that time certain members have died or become too frail to attend. Sometimes we talk on a pre-arranged Dhamma topic, at other times the session just begins with a check-in as to how people are and what's happening in our lives; themes such as joy and duty, and almost inevitably ageing and dying, are explored, and we go on for an hour or two. There is a beauty to any occasion when people share the meaning of their lives, and these long-term Dhamma practitioners often sound notes that are deepened by the struggles around letting go, by loyalty and pragmatic compassion, and by that often unsung virtue – resilience.

Rocana, who travels some 25 miles to get to the meeting, also offers her services as a Buddhist chaplain. What this means in practice is that hospitals in her area phone her up to visit the dying, or the bereaved, or assist with funeral rites. Most often it's just a matter of offering presence – such as by holding someone's hand in their last hours. In our last session, she spoke of a recent occasion in which a local hospital had contacted her: a mother had died in childbirth, and the just-born baby was also dying – could she come? So of course she went to the hospital and on coming to the cot, gently held the child so that it would at least know some human contact before it passed away. The father was there too, obviously very distraught: ‘Can I touch my baby?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ said Rocana – and as the father moved his hand towards the little one, the baby moved its finger to make contact with him. Somehow it had sensed the parent and reached out. That movement towards contact was the only thing that baby did in its life.

The primary nature of such a gesture heightens the meaning of ‘getting in touch’: it's obviously a lot more than making a few social acquaintances.

It's been shown in some of those ghastly experiments that scientists perform on living creatures that if you take two cells from the same heart, and send a small electric current into one, the other will also respond even when it’s several feet away. Living tissue knows contact and retains its sense of connection even when it is separated from the body. Widen the focus and we can note the flock patterns of birds, and the herd instincts of other animals. They don’t stay in touch through mobile phones and e-mails. Instead there’s primary empathy: a knowing of connection that creatures experience at various levels of consciousness. For humans it’s the sense (not the notion) of ‘we.’ That is, it’s not the idea of ‘we’ – which is often assumed for ‘political’ reasons – but a felt sense that occurs when we see another human – which is different from seeing a tree. It's that basic a sense that even in the case of the Buddha, an all-transcendent one, it remained the fundamental focus of his life after Enlightenment. The story is that in that sustained state of bliss and clarity after his Awakening, he was moved by empathy (and the imprecation of a high divinity) to present the Dhamma to his fellow humans. Before his Awakening he had moved out of home and family, and even out of spiritual companionship, to deepen his practice in undisturbed solitude; but one effect of this practice was that his relational sense purified from one of attachment to one of unfettered empathy. And realising the power of the relational sense, he subsequently strongly encouraged spiritual companionship and a harmonious Sangha. Solitude and companionship; he encouraged and lived them both.

So it's not a simple matter of ‘we're all one’ or of ‘just be a guide to yourself.’ (Both of these are self-views when you come to think of it.) There is connection. But just as connective tissues bind the body into a single unit, and just as the faculty of hearing connects my mind to what others say, this ‘we’ connection can come apart or be impaired or blocked. Nor do the instincts around connection represent unfailingly healthy states of mind: there are urges to own others as part of my ‘we,’ as well as demonization of the not-we. So although the instinctive reflex of contact is there, it’s necessary to purify it.

In practice then we have to contemplate and inquire into how contact and connection get established, and what gets made of them. In terms of our personalities – the series of programs and habits through which an interface forms between the mind and the social world – everyone is different. But what we all have in common is the fact of having, and having to operate through, a personality. That's the structure at the interface between mind and the world. If someone says they aren't relating to you through their personality, that's about as valid as saying they don't taste things with their tongue. It might be a personality that's void of manipulative or abusive programs, but to deny that there is one can be a prologue to absolutising a personal perspective, or making a selection of ‘facts’ (i.e the ones that conform to one's views) into the Truth. Dangerous; there is no such experience as ‘objective reality.’ It all depends on contact; and that’s bound up with what one gives attention to, and that’s bound up with the motivation behind one’s attention. Ask a burglar and an architect for the facts about a house and you’ll get different presentations. The classic illustration is the parable of the group of blind men who each touch a different part of an elephant: one assumes the elephant is a column (because he feels a leg); another that it’s a serpent (grabs the trunk); another, a fashioned ornament (a tusk); another, a fan (ear). Are any of them lying? Are any of them getting the Truth of the elephant?

To get in touch with how things are being experienced is a valid approach. We can then contemplate our attitudes, knee-jerk responses, and life agendas, reflect on what we’ve noticed, how we’re affected and purify our response. This is where meditation gets integrated into insight into our mental kamma – and a subsequent release.

I've just finished leading a meditation retreat in Provence, France. It was much the same as many other retreats that I've been part of: aspirations, struggles, crises, breakthroughs. What strikes me about these retreat situations is the sense of solidarity that almost always prevails, even though, and maybe because, there is very little personality contact. Often the degree to which that has occurred has been a source of irritation – she talks in the kitchen, he insists on leaving his shoes in the wrong place etc….Somehow, just holding a form where we sit and operate in silence as a group for ten days generates a relatedness in which personal resonances can settle. Furthermore, that relational sense, as it strengthens, deepens the meditation: we grope around our mental kamma looking for peace, and as we do so, the mind tunes into a surprising sense of empathy. Often it’s with others, but most necessarily it’s with aspects of ourselves that we’ve lost touch with or banned.

A situation on the retreat which assists the process is the Interview – during which the retreatant, or often a handful of retreatants, sits with the teacher and expresses what's coming up. So for a period of an hour or more, people about whom all one knows is their names speak of areas of their experience. These areas often contain a lot of unknowns to themselves. Disturbing energies, unaccountable emotions, and memories from situations that are now apparently beyond resolution mingle with current dilemmas that present no clear way forward. In this last retreat, the odds were stacked up against any sense of connection: my French is basic and patchy, so most dialogue goes through a translator. My lifestyle and experience is different from that of the retreatants. I don't have kids, parents, or a partner who's on a different wavelength. Nor in the space of the small time that there is for dialogue is it possible to arrive at any answers. Actually this brevity is an asset: we get to a point that is accessible, now. And through naming an experience to a trusted party, the relational sense gets activated. Through staying with that, what can eventually crystallise is the relationship that the person has with his/her experience. Our relational sense will always search for the optimum resolution in any situation; and the mistake that most minds have made (often unconsciously) is that the optimum way to deal with a difficulty is to disconnect from it. That is, we blame someone (or ourselves), or shrug it off, or overlay a pain with some pleasure, or leave the feeling and go up into the world of ideas where everything is clear. From that place of black-and-white and facts, we find a resolution of sorts, but it's often in the form of ‘he's one of those’, ‘I'm this way’, or ‘that’s all past, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Such resignation isn’t a release: it still carries the flavour of anger, grief or despair. However if these tendencies can be exposed and held in awareness, if the pain of that can be touched, then there's an opening to a fuller, healthier relationship with it, one which will be the source of any resolution. We may find an ability to learn and be strengthened by insecurity and loss; we may realise the need to cultivate a broader sense of compassion – and so, through getting in touch, our lives can move on.

In the Interview there’s the underlying sense that a resolution can be, should be arrived at – but most of the time all I can offer are a few suggestions of how to hold the irresolution/problem/mystery. I sit in an openness to maintain the sense of connection, and keep one eye alert to my own attitudes and how the connection can get lost through trying to fix things, or through telling people how they should be. The relationship to the state – which itself may change from anger to fatigue to sadness to tenderness and calm – is about all I can help to facilitate. Sometimes this is through suggestions as to how to support awareness of the state, or by encouraging an investigation, or by asking for clarification. Quite often ideas or intuitions arise, but I am on guard against presenting pat solutions which take the authority away from the retreatant's own relational sense. By staying in touch with that sense, the Interview encourages me to not feed my own abstract notions. As such it is a gift.

Abstract notions are however another aspect of what I’m involved with: management, plans, and ‘Sangha business.’ It’s quite a practice because it entails leaving the contact with the direct experience of people and situations and entering discussions as to what is for the welfare of the Sangha/ the monastery, or for the nuns/monks/lay people. The more people or resources it entails, the bigger the elephant that an increasing number of half-blind people grope towards a clear definition over, generally with laudable intentions. What’s often also the case is that the aims and intentions stir up differences of opinion – because they’re never fully translatable into specific actions. For example: is giving ordination to this (naturally not fully-realised) candidate a worthy gesture of faith and compassion, or is it taking on someone who will be a headache and possibly bring the Sangha into disrepute? Should we judiciously supervise access to the Internet, or is that just control-freakery? Which is for the welfare of the Dhamma, the tradition? Etc. etc. Though this kind of debate is often around matters that I am not directly in touch with, it has made me more aware of my own limited eyesight, and of being more cautious of the leap to form a clear picture. Up in my head it can all seem bright and simple – and why are other people so awkward, uninformed, and biased? Then I notice how that judgement feels. Furthermore, witnessing how other people are when they grab hold of their bit of the elephant – and get impassioned, judgemental, insensitive and impervious to the perspectives of others – has led me to a small rule of thumb: the harder the facts, the harder is the heart that holds them as Truth. And in that hardness the flexible hand of aware contact contracts into a fist.

Using the abstract is essential for the politics of life. By ‘politics’ I don’t mean to malign the function. Politics is the process whereby people, events and possibilities get grouped around an abstract unity – such as a ‘nation’ or a ‘monastery,’ and that unity becomes the decisive factor for action. We do this on behalf of our country, or our tribe. (And that excludes others.) I used to think politics occurred whenever three people got together – then that it was when two people got together with that organisational intention. Now I’m aware that it only takes one person to try to figure out what to do and how things should be in order to get polarisations occurring between their ideals, emotions, and loyalties. Hence ‘what is the best for me?’ becomes a political debate – it depends on who you mean by ‘me.’ Abbot, bhikkhu, citizen of planet earth or what?

With any of these I’m left trying to get a feel for how they are held in my mind. Experienced directly, the me, the monastery, or the Sangha is a changeable diversity of memories, aspirations, problems, and needs …But when I hold onto the concept as the reality, I do so with an expectation it be a certain way – which brings up grasping and disappointment. So I try to look into what these concepts mean for me right now. And I wait on rushing into clarity about what I’m going to do for them or about them. First of all, is their current state of affairs something that exasperates me, makes me anxious, or harsh? That first affect is going to colour what ‘facts’ I find and how I act on them. And as I sustain that focus, I start to feel for my fellow part-sighted men and women as we fumble with a range of elephants that come stampeding through – how is it for him or her, how is it for me or for you, friend? How is it when we grab hold of our bit of the elephant and lose touch with who is doing the holding? How is it when we go up into our heads? How is it to be grasped by an idea? Isn’t something precious lost?

Politics is part of life. It must therefore be covered by Dhamma-practice. And in this case an arrival at a truth which will always be relative to each situation most readily occurs through dialogue. By and large people this is a process of feeling out how our elephants affect us, even as we handle them. It means throwing ideas into the air and maintaining faith in each other. This may seem limp, but it’s something the Buddha strongly recommended in order to maintain a healthy Sangha life. For me, one result is that after decades of living in communities of wide-ranging views I’ve got a bit freer from the tendency to form more of my own. Instead I acknowledge that my view has to sit within something larger and more shareable than that. So I trust and value doing the work of staying in touch. Moreover as the elephant of Truth continues to morph through changeable forms, I know why the Village Elders exchange slow and knowing smiles.

The Movement to Stillness

2009-10-02T17:23:00.004+01:00

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few weeks in solitude, on retreat in the monastery. The phrase ‘in the monastery’ may give the wrong impression, because most of Cittaviveka monastery is woodland. And that gives us access to a degree of wildness and simplicity that is a refreshing break from the evolved complexities of human communal life and all that it takes to support it. It takes a lot for a woodland to go wrong, (though it had done so through mismanagement when we were given it), and they don’t have bad days (though the hurricane of 1987 could be construed as such). Suffice it to say that you get the strong impression that there’s nothing here to sort out and set straight and the relief of that gives rise to a quiet happiness. This is the kind of happiness that is a thread that runs through all forms of Dhamma-practice. It’s a no-push, no-grab kind of happiness that’s based on release.

However to assume that there’s absolutely nothing to do in living in the woods, is as limited a view as to say that meditation’s about doing nothing. Certainly these places of simplicity and undoing the driven-ness of our lives aren’t about frantic activity; but action is needed. In our woodland, decades of careful clearance and planting have been needed to re-establish a natural balance. And in everyday woodland life things go wrong if you don't look out for dead trees or branches that might fall on the kuti (hut), or sweep around the kuti to make sure that dry inflammable dead-wood is brushed away from the immediate environment. Then it's necessary to check the rain-barrel filters so that insects don’t breed larvae in the water (which might get destroyed when one uses it); and in general to keep the dwelling clean and in good repair. And this kind of duty is something that you bear in mind every day. Similarly Dhamma-practice is about surveying, checking, and tidying up – and of appreciating the results. The actions of finding one's own space, tidying up, and feeling the happiness of doing so are all needed to live in a harmonious relationship with the world and oneself.

So for me the beginning of a period of retreat is a time of finishing business – actually the whole of the practice is analogous to that – but at an obvious level it’s about handing over duties, sending off the last letters and e-mails, and putting the current projects on hold. Then it’s about setting up a supportive environment. Also (this isn’t really a temporal sequence) it’s about leaving other people on a good note, and about checking in with my own bodily and mental states. They all benefit from some tidying up, and it helps when I’m conscious of and interested in doing that and see it as an ongoing theme in the practice. So it’s not ‘I have to get this sorted out and then I can get on with the stillness,’ but that the very process of a mindful tidying is the practice that leads to stillness. Otherwise, all action is marked with impatience and niggardliness – and so leaves wrinkles in the heart.

How does action lead to stillness? Doesn’t it just get fussy and obsessive with straightening out every imperfection? Moreover considering the nature of what we live in, will that tidying ever end? The key point that distinguishes the mindful response to changing and innately chaotic conditions from neurotic fussiness is that it’s supervised by wisdom. And wisdom in this sense isn’t intellectual knowledge, it’s the ability to discern, the function that leads to clarity and release. The most important function of discernment is to know one’s capacity: How much is do-able and how much is essential at any given time? So it’s important that we don’t get lost in the external details of ‘what needs to be done,’ but instead assess ‘what can I do right now.’ This discernment punctuates the ongoing script of life, and at every full stop/period, or end of paragraph allows the mind to integrate the meaning of that piece of script. Through this process we feel balanced, centred in knowing the mind as it is right now. So from the sense of centring, of knowing one's space and tidying it comes simplicity; from simplicity comes contentment; from contentment comes joy; from joy comes ease – and when the mind rests in that, this is the samādhi that supports release.

I suppose everyone’s life sprawls out into this and that. So it generally takes me a few days to clear the most obvious pieces of my internal environment. There’s the shift of energy from being quite active in terms of external duties to being more focused on breathing, and on impulses, attitudes and resistances. By and large it’s a slowing down, a change of gear that needs patience and skill. Sometimes I realise I need to rest a bit, rather than sign up to the meditation Olympics. But taking a rest isn’t a careless thing – it means putting to rest the things that should be done, and putting to rest the relational tangles of community life. And it also means steadily breathing through the somatic or subtle body energies (which tend to adopt a more contracted form when I’m in active mode). Then, or alongside that, is clearing restless worry, irritation, planning, fantasising; and its opposite – dullness and indifference. It may seem a lot, but there’s not much more to do in spiritual life. And it’s a satisfying process when it’s done mindfully.

Some tidying, like sweeping the kuti, is relatively easy; other matters take a lot more patient work. But for me the key point is to tune in to the quiet happiness that comes from doing the things that can be done, the simple chores, or the suitable bodily exercise, and integrating that. By that I mean that I focus on the ease that these actions bring and dwell in it. Then the happiness acts as a foundation for the mind to stand on as it sorts out the other tangles. So when I straighten out my dwelling, I sit and reflect on that: what’s become very apparent is that I have a shelter from the weather, from intrusion. Which is great when you come to consider it. And as such I appreciate it more when it isn’t cluttered, because then the beauty of its sheltering quality isn’t obscured by stuff that reminds me of this or that, or things to pass the time with. Because as a shelter, a dwelling isn’t about doing things, it’s about not having to worry about the rain or be on guard against undesirable intruders. It’s about a relief from doing. And unless we do the tidying and checking in, we don’t get that impression, we don’t feel rested and at ease.

That relief and settling (and why it’s not there) is pretty much what I look out for. It hinges around being realistic. Relationships are about being willing to relate; that’s all. They’re not about always living in agreement and never being separated; they’re about being conscious about the differences and the losses and holding that sense with all-round compassion. Bodies are for being embodied in, not for looking beautiful, being painless or staying young. Minds are about cognising, remembering, planning and rejecting. All these are prone to complication and proliferations, and a loss of stillness and ease. But a wise handling of them, breathing through, and spreading heart-energy through the aches and the pains and the jangle – that does lead to stillness. And it often takes doing the simple cleaning up things to get a feel for that.

Of course, you can miss the realism. When I was at Wat Pah Pong, Ajahn Chah's monastery in Thailand, I felt I really had to do my best to live up to the standards of the place. So I set to, working away in the sandy soil, sweeping a wide area around my kuti – until a resident monk came along and gently suggested that a little sweeping would do fine; the clouds of dust that I was stirring up were rolling through the windows of the dining hall. Tidying can become an obsession. Obsessiveness kicks in when we don’t integrate our impressions and actions into the wider picture; either that or we keep tidying up one thing because we’re not dealing with the real tangle. Obsessive-compulsive disorders are like this: you have to straighten out the table-cloth five times and arrange the cutlery in rows of mathematical precision before you can eat breakfast. More usual are the nervous fidgets, the brushing of the hair, smoothing out the clothes, or apologetic verbal behaviour that goes on when we feel awkward, embarrassed or under pressure. Actually the real tangle is a sense of insecurity, of not being comfortable in oneself. This comes from losing a sense of centre. With that we lose clear boundaries and we get agitated by the irregularities in the world around and within us. So when we’re not in touch with the bodily centre of breathing in and out, or with the conscience and compassion that rightly centre the heart, we don't know our own space in the world. In such as scenario we get agitated by the scruffiness of the landscape. If this insecurity gets long-term and acute, people develop OCDs in order to feel secure and settled. But there’s no sense of long-lasting ease that comes with any of that.

For most people, for most of the time, mental awareness is held in place by energies (sankhāra) that flavour it with bias – we expect, we want, we’re disappointed. Because of this, the mind can lock it into anxiety, overreach, and defence. Although the flavours change, the sense of being held by some mind-state or another becomes the norm of ‘how I am.’ I may feel spacious or under pressure, tight or scrambled or flowing. All these refer to the energy that’s holding awareness; most of the time it’s restricted. Accordingly, as the mind’s responses get limited to the habitual psychological/emotional actions, attitudes and resistances that we live by, that bounded mind becomes the norm, my self. It’s that restriction, that ‘self-centre’ that blocks integration: no matter how much we order our world we remain prone to dis-ease and stress. This ‘me’ gets challenged even by aspects of mind – irrational, chaotic and obsessive – that lie outside of its control or in contradiction to our more fully conscious intentions. But it’s not a matter of finding a better stronger self or eradicating the one we seem to be, but of getting in touch with an awareness that is held relationally rather than from a tight contracted ‘self’ position. And that’s what mindfulness does: it gives awareness a place, a settled and conscientious place in relationship to what arises. In this way it enables our way of being with the world to be free of compulsion and contraction. Even more curative: if we sustain mindfulness in relationship to the tense and self-conscious tangle that we take ourselves to be, that unbiased awareness can start to unravel it. And with that comes the happiness that is the feeling- flavour of release. Then an integration can occur, because an easeful mind can open and receive the understanding of what has been released. So understanding comes around after the ceasing of stress – not from a conceptual grasp of letting go.

Meditation then is about finding a centre, and carefully sweeping awareness out into the wilds of the mind, until there is a sense of space, relief, and subtle uplift. We can’t clear the whole wilderness in one go. But a little release is a precious thing; and every time we come out of being the problem to seeing and being with the problem, every time we come out of being entranced by a memory or fighting with it to know – ‘oh, it feels like this, and it’s there’ there’s a shift to a free centre. Every time we widen with kindness and awareness to see that the self-position I’m coming from, or the self I’m trying to get rid of or defend are objects over there and not a subject, something stops and there’s a touch of release. That’s the process. And it’s marked by happiness.

Direct Pleasure

2009-08-24T14:25:00.002+01:00

Books, ideas, talks, words are a constant source of information, entertainment and guidance in our lives. And they carry bias, speculation, dogma and propaganda. We’re conditioned to pick up the word as ‘fact’ – something that every advertising agency, news reporter or professional speaker knows. Particularly when something is written down, it acquires the authority of being ‘in black and white,’ clear, legitimate and established. So a newspaper can splash a rumour over its front page that stains someone’s character and, although it prints a small apologetic declaimer a few days later – the damage is done, the idea is seeded and the character whom the rumour is about will for many people remain a fool or a villain. Politics is worse: the convenient stirring phrase gets coined that caricatures the enemy, the trite ‘feel-good’ campaign slogan is reiterated time and time again until it acquires the power of a mantra – and all-too few people examine the substance of what the words refer to. The words have created an alternative reality of clear-cut heroes and villains, futures rosy or under threat, and we in our hunger for simple certainties believe it. After all, the certainty of ideas is easier to hold in one’s mind than reality.

To say I have loved books from early childhood is, I realise now, a wrong understanding of love. I began devouring words off the back of packs of cereal at the tender age of four and it took another twenty-five years to recognise that they were devouring me. The turning point came during my first year as a bhikkhu in England. Recognising how rabid my verbal appetite was, I decided to fast from reading for the three months’ Rains Retreat. At first my mind got extremely bored and dull, but then I began to notice the other senses more, and enjoy just looking at life as it happened, without it having to fit some map or system or agenda in my head. This lead me to an all-important connection to being embodied – to feeling the breathing steadily and sensitively, rather than ‘trying to meditate and get concentrated’, and to sensing what happens in the body when it walks, rather than ‘doing walking meditation.’ It was a movement to something more whole and present: experiencing directly rather than through the medium of ideas and strategies.

This change manifested in a clear-cut way: at the end of the retreat, I was notified that a donation had been made in my name – and was there anything that I needed/could make use of? So with money-holding attendant in tow, I went into town on a book-quest. At that time, our small group of samanas was living near Oxford, which, as a seat of academic learning, naturally has some impressive bookstores. We dived into Blackwells in Broad Street, which was indeed well-like, with a basement like an Aladdin’s cave, walls encrusted with books. I moved into the section on spiritual literature, eyes boggling at the cornucopia of words. Even reading the titles was intoxicating – a dazzling range of works on global spirituality throughout the ages, enough to set the mind on fire. But after an hour or so of hopping around with my neck twisted to read the titles, browsing through this and that, clawing up to the top shelves and rummaging through the floor level shelves, the firework spark and glow of concepts in my mind started to feel – well, as unsatisfactory as a fourth mug of something sweet and sticky. My mind was spinning and I could sense that a resolution to this quandary wasn’t going to come through any of these books. So telling the steward there was nothing here that I wanted, I suggested that a more satisfying fulfilment of the donor’s gift would be to buy a few pounds of toffee for the Sangha. If we’re going to devour, let’s be direct about it. And even better, let me have the joy of making an offering. It was a shift, however worldly, to the realm of direct experience, a realm that is always shareable with others.

At the end of June this year, I concluded my two months’ walk through southern England at the Vipassana Teachers’ Conference at Gaia House in Devon. (For those of you, who like me aren’t sure what ‘vipassana’ means, it’s about meditation in which the aspect of inquiry is given more prominence than that of calm.) It was a welcome chance to come out of days of trudging along with 32lbs/15kg on my back and with every step on the earth directly felt (along with the repeated jab of a few blisters). A conference: keen conversations, inquiry, the eager human engagement that comes with discussions – and hot showers, and a four-walled room to sit and sleep in. It was strange, though familiar, to spend so much time with the voice of the body subdued and drowned out by the voice of thought and concept and plans and options. It was delightful too, if a little dizzying, to feel the emotional flows and flushes, or witness the verbal tussles and the merging over a shared insight, that such company brings. However abstract, idiosyncratic or dissonant the ideas, handling them has some very direct and sharable effects.

In fact one of the topics, concerning keeping the teachings in a true alignment with the ancient Buddhist texts, moved through discussions over whether the ‘true’ Dhamma can be spoken at all. Doesn’t all that conceptual stuff take us away from our direct ‘real’ experience? But how ‘real’ is a changeable feeling, how reliable is an emotion? And isn’t the movement and effect of an idea also a valid experience, one that is uniquely granted to humans? Then again, isn’t there an irreducible ineffable that words can only point to? (So surely we should use whatever words point that way for contemporary people, and not be bound to language and terms that have become archaic or academic). On the other hand, it’s equally important to treasure what the Buddha has given us and not dilute or skew its meaning in order to make it go down easier. Isn’t that a responsibility of any Dhamma-teacher? Thrusts, parries, agreements, disagreements – but all of us could get the feel of the concerns, and most of us felt better for the exercise I’m sure.

The item that aroused the greatest amount of participation was, wait for it, the place of the erotic in Dhamma-practice. No, this wasn’t about Tantric sex, but about people’s struggle with the theory-forming mind and its over-strategising of meditation. It was also about how to open to and accommodate the pull towards enjoyment. Various discussion groups came up with the same pattern – of being attracted by the idea of Dhamma, but finding themselves losing motivation and heart through dutifully gripping a system or a technique. The grip being that one was presented with clear and valid points that one should attend to, loved the certainty of it all, but bought into the ‘should do this right’ ‘should be clear and at this stage by now’ syndrome. In that scenario, meditation becomes a joyless slog to get somewhere, and people get grim and disappear into the abstracted realms of theory (losing their hearts and bodies on the way). Either that or they give up on insight and get devoted to a guru who tells them to relax and be happy, because enlightenment’s already where you are.

The lust for graspable certainty, and the fear of not doing it according to the book, cuts the mind off from the direct experience of enjoyment that the Buddha regarded as essential. He is reported as saying that a skilled contemplative is one who fashions his/her own pleasure; and mindfulness of body, far from being a practice of screwing your attention into a brow-knotted state of concentration is one of making ‘the rapture and pleasure born of seclusion drench, steep, fill and pervade this body’ (M 119, 18). This sounds unequivocally erotic, and it is, with one necessary proviso – it doesn’t arise through external contact, but through the mind attending to the process of breathing. The Buddha understood pleasure as such a primary motivation for us, that he made use of it – shifting its arising from what he termed the ‘dung-heap’ of grasping the external senses to the skilful craft of meditation, through which he claimed he could spend seven days and nights in unbroken bliss. This was pure enjoyment, a happiness that doesn’t proliferate into greed and attachment, the skilled unification called samadhi. You don’t get that doing ecstasy at a rave.

The ‘feel-good factor’ has been a real issue for the Vipassana movement. Having learnt a meditation practice in Asia, many Western teachers, in bringing it back home, felt they had to leave behind the Asian cultural baggage of ritual and devotion and just present the technique, pure and simple. In fact they had little choice: how could they have introduced a Buddhist culture as Western lay people in a Western culture? However something got lost in the translation. Happiness, embodiment, devotion: my sense is that the loss was of a skilful attendance to the eros-principle. In its own cultural setting, Buddhist practice gives room for the enjoyment, celebratory, and shared feeling experiences. There’s the beauty and vigour of chanting together, the tenderness of making offerings to shrines, the go-for it drive of pilgrimages, and the easy intimacy that you find in monasteries where massaging each other is a standard practice. Buddhist culture doesn’t dessicate the heart and ignore the body; it finds ways of handling the erotic to bring about a unified and contented mind.

Without that skilful handling we either put eros, fun, and celebration in a cage – as dangerous, silly, or having no purpose; or we go down the track of attempting to integrate it by following its pull outwards into sexuality. The root of the problem is often associated with a Western attitude that is sometimes called ‘Judeo-Christian,’ sometimes ‘Catholic guilt’ or ‘Protestant/Puritan repression.’ However it’s universally human. In all cultures, if you don’t know how to handle feelings and impulses, you have to put them in a cage and let them out in ‘allowable’ occasions of licentiousness: parties, brothels, drinking binges etc. It takes a skilled mind to neither repress the pleasure principle, nor get lost in it. But, if there is mindfulness, inquiry and right aim, the mind’s pleasure centre can be known directly and comprehensively. That is: in the direct experience of meditation, you can notice that every feeling of pleasure or displeasure carries a movement of energy. Then instead of spinning out on that, you practise putting aside the sensation, idea or impression that the feeling is tagged to, and instead focus on the energy that it arouses. If you calm and steady that in your body (try breathing through it and widening the focus) the pleasure cools to a sustainable and suffusive ease, and pain softens to a manageable degree. Without messing with the feeling, the mind steps free of it and into a unified energy.

But you play with such fire at your peril. Even though my intellectual lust has calmed considerably in the past thirty years, nowadays I keep my books behind curtains, like thangkas. They remain valuable maps and sources of information, but like those spiritual paintings in the Tibetan tradition, they are not for gobbling or casual affairs. Their titles remain modestly veiled except on appropriate occasions; then like true spiritual friends, they are brought forth and treated with respect. And consequently they don’t demand rapture or romance. Like sober guides they perform their sacred duty – which is to translate the one book that it’s essential to read: the ongoing tragi-comic epic of this body and mind.

Alms and the human

2009-05-31T16:00:00.008+01:00

Just as the willingness to both give and receive is a mark of any sound human relationship, the giving and receiving of alms ( free-will offering of material support) has always been a part of most cultures. It centres people around kindness and humility and reminds us that although we are all subject to the changeable fortune of the world, our values and relatedness can remain constant. For this reason, alms-round ( 'pindapada'= 'scrap-gathering') is the heart of the livelihood of a Buddhist monastic (or 'samana'). We are alms-people, not 'monks' or 'nuns', and certainly not priests. To rely for sustenance on what arises through bringing one's presence as a Gone Forth person into the market place takes trust in humanity. In fact just being in the market place and yet not a part of it entails the faith that the disturbance of one's presence will generate some positive ripples. So alms-rounds set a lot of nerve endings twitching - for both the samana and the townsfolk. Maybe out of what turns up, one's needs will be met. And if not, then through being open and upright, one's mind will at least be clear, undistracted and free from craving. Because when you practise this, any craving for food, or even to get away from the public gaze, stands out so starkly as the creator of suffering and stress that you have to let it go. Instead you just maintain presence.

A lot of the time in modern monasticism, the edge is taken off the alms-faring by living in a monastery where food is almost certainly guaranteed to be given by its supporters, and where food is often stored up by lay attendants living in the monastery. (And thank you all very much.) This means that with not having to walk to the town, spend an hour or so on an alms-round, and then walk back again, there's more time to do other things - meditate, teach, manage the place, have meetings, etc. So faring out for alms frequently gets put aside. However in terms of the 'tudong', the long-distance unccompanied walk that I'm currently in the middle of, the alms-round is frequently the only way I'll get food for the day.

On some days it's the case that I've been hosted by supporters...but on others the routine is to wake up in my tent at dawn, meditate to gather my energies for an hour or two, brew up a hot drink to get the cold out of, and the energy into, my body...Then break camp, stuff everything into a backpack and walk the few miles to the nearest town. It can be a slow walk, partially because the pack is heavy and the body is empty, and partly because there's no point in getting to the town much before 11am as the majority of shoppers who may provide me with food won't be heading for the shops until around that time.

Eventually I find a street with some shops in it, and a spot near a food outlet, a supermarket or bakers. According to the training, one should not intrude in the human flow of the street; one should not solicit alms by any gesture or speech or eye-contact and one should hold one's alms-bowl 'well-covered.' In other words, one should not beg, but merely be available for those who are inspired enough by what one represents to wish to offer food. This is all quite appropriate in a country where people know what a shaven-headed person in brown robes carrying a bowl is about. In England, the first thought that regularly comes to mind as I tuck myself back from the main flow of the street and haul my bowl out of my backpack, is that there is no way that this is going to work. No-one knows who I am, no-one knows what I'm doing - and even if they did, why should these hardworking townsfolk pause in the flurry and bustle of the street and getting their shopping done to offer me anything? Yet, here I am with no other way of obtaining the food to get me through the next 23 hours and the next twelve miles of walking. So this is a great 'out of the bubble' occasion, a time when I can't do my thing and go my way at my pace; I can't demonstrate wisdom or give an inspiring talk, I have to just be here, conspicuous but impotent. Ah well.

I settle into standing. Walking up and down looks suspicious, and standing presents who I am in a clear and simple way. I stand in my boots, trying to relax my stiff legs and sore feet, and look on with a soft focus. It's easy to feel compassion for all these people hurrying to manage their lives, thronging past in the ongoing human comedy. It's a 21st century version of Breugel: mothers trying to steer their children ( some of whom are asking who that funny man is); teenagers with their iPods inserted; men making deliveries; styles of dress, of gait, of manner; dogs doing embarassing doggy things. Everyone is busy going somewhere, getting something done, making purchases. Everyone except me. Thirty, forty minutes pass by; occasionally someone makes a friendly remark, but for most it seems I'm not on their screen. And yet...in the course of this last month, I've been prayed over, joked with, engaged with in inquiries about the Dalai Lama, and yes, greeted with curious joy and given food. Or rather the robes and bowl have triggered off a range of responses, as surely they were meant to do. However and whoever I am, I'm a break in the pattern, a snag in the flow of the daily human business - and that moves minds. I find all this deeply engaging and very much a space to drop into. It's both intimate and anonymous, discreet and revealing at the same time. Interesting to sense what it brings up. It's a real bubble breaker; it tips me out of my self-involved world...And others too.

Here's one story of how an alms-round affects the human world. It's set in a shopping mall in a small town near Bristol. At first, the arcade looked like the prime place for an alms-mendicant: a tide of people moving along the spacious pavements between several major supermarkets. Plenty of space to tuck away in a corner without bothering anyone. So, suitably parked near a shop, I stand and let a half-hour wash over me. Then a woman stops and asks me if I went to school with a friend of hers called Deirdre - I say 'No,' so she says: 'I'll get you some food then' and ducks inside the supermarket. It's like that: the donors often express no spiritual inclinations or interest, but somehow dare to break through the membrane that forms around strangers in the street. Once even a minimal human contact is made, they inexplicably dive into a nearby store, or ask what they can get me. Slightly bemused I await this woman's return - but then along comes a man in a uniform. 'Do you realize that it's against the law to collect money in this area?'

'I'm not collecting money. I'm standing for alms-food.'

'Do you realize that it's against the law to collect food in this area?'

'No, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. I'm a monk and have no wish to transgress the laws of the land or cause problems in any way.'

(He softens a tad.) 'Well, I'll have to ask you to move on. This precinct is privately owned.'

He is a security guard, and this area of town, like many in Britain, has been bought by a property developer and turned into a shopping mall over which they have rights of access - and the right to evict anyone considered 'unsuitable' (i.e. not shopping). Naturally I agree to move but as I'm packing, I ask him how his day is and whether he has to deal with many problems on the street. He softens a little more and talks about his day. Nothing much happens - a kid on drugs yesterday was the event of the week. What a job. I notice he has studs in his ears and try to imagine his life outside his uniform. He is quite young and has a local accent; probably grew up in this town. He asks me what I'm doing in a genuinely interested way, and I talk about how I've walked up from Sussex and am heading towards Wales. He takes all this in, along with the robes, and seems receptive. Could he recommend a place where standing for alms would be permitted? (I'm starting to worry about the woman in the shop - what if she emerges to find me gone?) He recommends the High Street, then pauses, thinks again and mentions another large supermarket nearby - but outside of this arcade. Just then my donor turns up, plonks a sandwich and some fruit into my bowl with a brief 'Here you are then!' and scurries off. The security man grins: 'Well that's helped you on your way for today!' he says. Then he helps me get my pack on my back and we part company amicably.

Outside the other supermarket the show is much the same. Someone stops by and talks to me about his visit to Nepal, Tibetan tea and how hospitable and cheerful the monks had been. 'You've made my day!' he exclaims as he hurries off. Well that offering, although immaterial, is something. I'm starting to feel happy at being around: that the sign of a samana can be a source of uplift in the world. Maybe one sandwich and a banana is enough for the day. Then a woman hastily pops a small pack of tomatoes in my bowl. Perhaps that is enough...Anyway I move further away as I might possibly be too near the entrance to the store - and as I do so, right on cue, the manager appears.

'Excuse me - some of the customers have commented on your standing here, and apparently collecting...This area does belong to (...) and I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to move along.'

'Fair enough. I have no wish to cause a disturbance.' Suddenly feeling like a bum or a drunk panhandling for coins, I stuff my bowl in my pack... but as the manager walks away, an elderly woman stops in front of me: 'You are a monk! Can I get you some food? I'm a Christian, what can I get you to eat?'

I mention maybe something small will do just fine, but she interjects: 'No, no, they make hot food in here, I'd like to buy you a proper meal.' So, with her late teens' daughter shouldering my pack, we march in to the cafeteria area of the supermarket that I've just been shooed away from. The ripple effect is palpable. Large, bald, robed being striding down the aisle following two women, one of whom is carrying a bulky backpack. The servers behind the counter give me guarded looks, but make no comments as I order up a breakfast and take a seat.

My sponsor explains she is a lapsed Catholic. 'Everytime I went to church I would just weep and weep. So I stopped going. Now I sit at home, let my eyes rest in the middle distance and empty my mind. This is my way of praying.' I commend her on her meditation...'But I have a problem with devotion. I suppose I need to find other people to pray with.' An engaging conversation ensues. I refuse more food (I still have the sandwich to complete the meal) and give her a list of contact addresses that might help. Suddenly she's off. Then her daughter re-appears with bags of nuts and dried fruit, offers them with a smile and, like her mother, hastens off.

I don't need this extra food. I can't store it. What to do? Meanwhile wondering if I have been a nuisance to the store, and feeling unhappy about the contact I had with the manager, I decide to seek him out and explain things. It seems like the proper thing to do. So I head for customers' enquiries.

'I'd like to speak to the manager, please.'

They phone him up. 'He's busy right now, can you wait ten minutes?'

'Sure.'

Eventually he comes bustling along.

'Hello. The last time we met I was standing outside your store, and I'd just like to apologize if I was causing any disturbance to your customers. That was not my intention. Why I'm in here is because shortly after you left me, a woman came along and invited me in to have a meal. As it happened, her daughter also offered me some food, which I don't need and am not allowed to keep, so I'd like to offer it as a gesture of apology.'

He didn't blink, but seemed to be regaining his breath.

'You see, I'm a monk, and I live on alms food. I'm not allowed to ask for anything directly or even make a sign. I'm supposed to stand in a way that doesn't interrupt whatever's going on...but still some people, one in two hundred, see me and feel inspired to offer me food. Actually your store has made out of my standing outside it.'

The manager found some breath and sighed: 'I feel really crestfallen. I should have asked further what you were doing and given you a chance instead of jumping to conclusions.'

I say I sympathize with his situation and that he has to care for the effective running of his store ( 'Nice store you have here, by the way') and that some his customers might find people like me a bit disturbing. He appreciates it that I can see his point of view... and we get to talking...

'I'm really grateful that you've taken the time to come back and explain this to me,' he says. 'I could never do what you're doing,'( we're on first-name terms now) but next time you or any of your fellows are coming through, phone and let me know and I'll arrange it so that you can collect food.'

Much hand shaking and so we part.

Humans! Sometimes all this practice is about is getting people to come out of their roles and programs for a moment and trust being human. It's an awkward, nervy kind of process, but this alms-mendicant sign is meant to instigate just that. Come to think of it, I'm supposed to be a disturbance.

Afer I've eaten, I find I still have the small pack of tomatoes. On the way out of town, I try giving it away. After two sets of people have reeled back in shock at being approached by a robed man with backpack bearing down on them proffering tomatoes, I find an old people's nursing home and hang them on the railings of the front gate. There the bag dangles, suspect emissary from a human world, until someone dares to peek inside it.

Belonging

2009-04-02T18:00:00.010+01:00

Here I am sharing an intimate moment with a distant relative. This was last December, in Sri Lanka. Some friends had been inviting me for years to tour the country with them – and December is a great time to be out of Britain. Unlike Thailand, where everything get eaten, there are a lot of wild animals in Sri Lanka. Many such as elephant are very accessible, and the monkeys sometimes invasively so. Some of the bigger ones will rip food out of your hand – but not this little fellow, who tagged along with our small group as we were visiting Mihintale. (Mihintale is where the enlightened monk Mahinda first met the king Devanampiya Tissa back around 230 BCE. It's a special place even set against the standards of the many other Buddhist sites, and the monastery that I stayed in – by which I mean caves and rock overhangs – had been continually lived in since the time of Mahinda. )

Anyway, this small macaque was on his own and kept following us. I think one of our party had made the mistake of feeding him a banana, but he showed little interest in any further food. As we made our way across the forested land and up the hills where the caves are, he followed along – but every now and then pairs of monkeys would rush our party screeching, baring their teeth and fluttering their blue eyelids. Clearly he wasn't welcome. Clearly he was invading their territory. By the time we made it to the small dwelling built under a rock, he was hanging on very close. Hence our bonding moment.

After a while we descended to where the rest of the monastery buildings were, repeatedly stormed at by hostile monkeys, with our adopted monkey becoming ever more panicky. Just as we neared the dining hall, the roof of which was covered with monkeys, he lost his nerve and made a break for it....There was a blur of monkeys jumping down from the roof, a flurry and a screeching – then fortunately for him, the monks came out and threw a bucket over the lone monkey. Otherwise he would have been shredded. Later they transferred him to a sack and took him away to safer territory.

Belonging's an issue. If you belong to one tribe or group you don't belong to the others. And as long as there's the sense of others, the rule of nature is that, for your own welfare, you'd better belong to a group of kin. Through this kinship creatures like wolves, monkeys, and humans hold territory and resources, and preserve the safety of themselves and their vulnerable young. For that advantage a social order, often with explicit or implicit hierarchies has to be established and maintained – through the use of power, or force if necessary. Yet although belonging binds us, that very binding, or bonding, has an attraction that extends beyond material need: what or who we belong to helps us to know ‘who we are.’

Of course we all already have a ‘me’ sense, a sense of inner presence, but on our own its expression and form gets moored to feelings, energies, emotions and attitudes. Which aren't always so pleasing, and which do always change – often many times a day. For the sense of solidity, of a constant orientation around which to organize a life in the world, we need an external reference, a ‘mine.’ So we seek places to own, people to belong to, ideologies or religions to dedicate ourselves to. For such intensely personal creatures as humans, the need to find a personal form gives the belonging sense a huge power. We're even prepared to sacrifice individual liberty in order to be a person.

In contemporary Western society, there are all kinds of groups and sub-groups that overlap: family, friends, the organisation, the church/temple, the team, or the club that supports a team. Then there are chat-rooms and social networks like Facebook. They delineate a range of conscious territory, and create us as many-faceted selves: our working self, our play self, our spiritual self. Sometimes getting the selves to co-habit can be a struggle! Bringing your newly beloved, or your old buddies, into the family orbit can be awkward; but acknowledging that, although I’ve not been to a football match since I was ten, I’m a Chelsea supporter – that’s disturbing. My father was as an active supporter, and so some aspect of my heart is bonded to their welfare – and I don’t even like them!

Groups create outsiders, and tend to be highly focused (to the point of obsession) with their inclusion theme – say my group enjoy cross-country walks, or follow a particular team, or go to school reunions where we re-enact the old rituals that give us that sense of being in something and being connected to a past. There are delinquent groups, held together by fear and aversion whose bonding is around ostracism. These are groups of those who don't belong to the mainstream, and as long as you back that up by anti-social behaviour, you're in. Or you can belong to a religious group which holds prime territory in the divine consciousness, held by faith and whose ‘others’ are the lost, the fallen. Or to a missionary group which wants to include everyone. (And therefore holds as other and threatening those who wish to be distinct, or any differentiation within the group.) So belonging generates biases that create us in terms of what we hold onto and creates others who are marked with a negative sense as lesser, more advantaged, or not included.

There’s something to look into in this belonging and ‘us’ sense. The Buddha freely worked with the sense of self and other as real and valid references; and also encouraged the ‘we’ sense. ‘To others as to myself’ is the basis of Buddhist ethics, compassion and generosity. But I can't recall him ever mentioning ‘belonging’ in any positive light. Mostly that kind of connectedness is presented in his discourses as attachment – a prime condition for anxiety and bereavement. The standard of connection that is praised is to maintain empathy with others. This quality isn't exactly kindness or compassion but something prior to those – the word is ‘anukampati’ literally ‘being stirred in the presence of,’ or ‘resonating.’ It was this resonance, a sense that others are in a predicament that I can share or relate to, that the Buddha experienced soon after his Awakening, even whilst fully enjoying the happiness and clarity of a liberated mind. Because of this, he decided to teach, and moved freely amongst all kinds of humans from rogues to matriarchs, from ascetics to kings. He did so until his last breath.

I don't think it was because he needed someone to belong to, or had to absorb himself in a mission and gather disciples in order to feel solid. I’d say it was a genuine altruism: the Awakened mind sees this world, and can encompass all of it with compassion. And I’m sure that the Buddha, ever a pragmatist, advocated group/relational structures like Sangha and the Fourfold Assembly to generate a mutual support system for those who travelled his Way. But also the group of disciples help us to contemplate attachment – it highlights the interest we have in being part of a ‘we’ and belonging to others, or of being a ‘me’ belonging to my own views and being separate from others. The interest swings to and fro, but it never fully accomplishes either position. I don't fit in with everyone else for very long; but my own views and self-interest get as tedious as they are cramped. In all this taking and swapping of positions, the acknowledge has to arise that we exist in a world of others, and there are gaps (or boundaries) between us. We're distinct and stand apart.

As long as we fill in what stands on either side of a boundary, as long as we assume that the sense of ‘me’ or ‘you’ defines solid entities, there’s trouble. A lot of confusion, fear, abuse and pain can get generated around that assumption, because with that comes the projection of my needs, anxieties, and fantasies that blocks a relationship from forming in true, a moment at a time. With the firming up of ‘me’ and ‘you’ (and even worse ‘them’) there's always the juggling with identities that issue from our semi-conscious imagination. (What do you really think of me? How am I and what will I be? You know what they’re really up to…I can’t stand people like her). And there’s also the false ‘we,’ whereby someone assumes that ‘we all think this’ without checking it out with the range of individuals involved.

The truth is that there’s the experience of self and others; and there’s a shifting boundary that can include the two or five or more of us within an activity or a shared joy - and then move to divide us into two or three groups around a point of view. There’s always that; but we can at least try to keep the boundary clear of fear and bias: as in ‘Here’s where we meet and agree and here’s where we don’t. Do we have to hold on or fight over that?’ Boundaries and limitations are part of what incarnation does – maybe if we accept and manage that, we can also appreciate the empathy and good will that are also part of the package. Then the boundaries don’t have to be absolute and fixed: right now I’m not where you’re at, but that can change. There's room for the sense of difference.

That doesn't mean that there's room for all kinds of behaviour – greed, tyranny and manipulation are unacceptable because they don't accept boundaries. But at a level of being, of being a human with degrees of suffering and degrees of delusion, there's a ‘we’ sense that allows separateness and acknowledges us all as real, valid and unknowable. The beauty of this is that I don't have to try to ‘know’ someone – whatever that's supposed to mean. Nor is it a matter of always understanding others, or agreeing with them or having them like you. (Though all these tend to happen more often when the boundary is held with respect and compassion.) For me it's about acknowledging the sense of separateness and saying: 'Yes, I have that too.' There's a resonance that means that it's ok for you to see things differently and be a thousand miles away.

Broadly speaking, I am knitted in to a clearly definable group – the monastic Sangha – and probably belong to more than most people do. Belonging to this highlights some of the fallacies, needs and clarification around the ‘we’ sense. For a start, as I'm sure that most people acknowledge, belonging is only ever partial. We all have the experience of areas of dissonance with, or occasions of just not being on the same wavelength with, people in ‘our’ group. So this moulds the social culture of the Sangha. One feature of this is that we hold the sense of dissonance internally and give each other space – he’s different, leave him be.

Giving each other space. It sounds very allowing and tolerant and that is definitely part of it. But within that generosity, there's the shadow of fear of contact, or of living within one's own self-oriented bubble. It takes time and careful attention in oneself and with others for the space not to be a wall. Even then it doesn’t always work. A while back, a well-liked monk in our community had a breakdown that sent him suicidal with depression. Ones and twos of us would be with him throughout the day to try to keep him out of his tailspin; which just about worked. But you get to see the wall, and how it doesn’t necessarily seal off empathy – we didn’t give up or lose faith in the man. Yet, the results seem meagre. At one time I was holding his hand and leading him across a road in order to see a psychiatric nurse, with him saying that he couldn't take another minute of this state. We were physically so close and yet all the training in mindfulness, all the friendship and kindness in the world was barely keeping his mind from disappearing down its black hole. All this was pretty alarming from my point of view - what do you do?- but all I can say is that without that contact and the concern that lay behind it I’m sure he’d be dead by now. And for myself, experiencing the involuntary nature of the wall made me a lot more sympathetic towards people who hitherto I’d felt frustrated with because they were ‘so closed down.’ Maybe we don’t always have the choice. In the case of this monk, the wall was so obviously not-self that it became something that had to be accepted. There had to be room for that too. You can't demand openness.

For more fortunate people, the space between us can open. It takes time and care but an important feature of commitment to this Sangha, is that you’re in it for a standard of at least five years. Within that period, inspiration, desperation, alienation and conviction – all the ways in which we mark the space – will have rumbled through so many times that you get to recognize that this process isn’t really about any of those. For some, that’s an opening to an undetermined space that leaves us either in awe or guessing. In terms of relationship, this space means that we find a way to live with others, sincere and good others, who will yet always remain others. What struggles with that is the need to belong, the need to find oneself - either through others or apart from them.

So one gets to contemplate belonging – to a group, to another, or to one’s own attitudes and emotions. I don’t see getting out of belonging by rejecting it – in that stance, I belong to non-belonging, just like any other delinquent. What comes to me is the need to contemplate what arises as me and you, and find a truer centre within that. The bit that I’m getting is that it’s not about having things go my way or your way; it’s not about being fair or good. It’s not about agreement, or bonding, or doing someone a favour – it’s where I’m ok and there’s room for you too. A true ‘we’ requires at least two genuine ‘me’s. When the boundaries between us are suitable and flexible, there’s less projection, and a genuine warming to the mystery and the potency of the other. The ‘we’ can be resonant rather than habitual, and can include a huge range of near and far, alive and dead; that very resonance becomes a centre. And it feels better than hanging on to the ‘me’ bit.

To remind myself of the true centre, every day I share blessings, good-will or acceptance with others. Sometimes I just sit with that notion in mind and attend whoever comes into the space of awareness, other times I focus on particular people that I’m in dissonance with or just plain missing. There's room for you too. If I include it all, including the ‘me’ bit, I’m not sealed inside a bag of skin or a fixed view or a mind-state. All that, and the rest of the universe is within the space: resonance can include and transcend the differences and allow the mystery.

A few days before I left Sri Lanka, I visited a turtle sanctuary. The man in charge had dedicated his life to the welfare of marine turtles. He and a few helpers would dig turtle eggs out of the sand on a nearby beach and hatch them in tanks. After a few days (or weeks) he'd then carry these young turtles down to the shore and set them free. This method ensured that a greater proportion of turtles would survive their precarious and unparented infancy. As you may know, Sri Lanka was badly affected by the tsunami a few years back, and this turtle sanctuary on the south coast was one of the places that had been completely destroyed. But when the tsunami hit, this man grabbed a turtle under each arm and ran.

Two was all he could take away from that terrible disaster, but that's what he did. For me that expresses something fine about humans. With all the limitations we feel in helping others in this world, as a human, I'm one of the kind that is interested in rescuing other creatures, creatures that wouldn't rescue me. It's my privilege to be one of the ones that acknowledges and transcends the pang of otherness. And through that I might be able to set one or two others free – from the grasping of my mind at least.

A walk into openness

2009-02-07T16:15:00.000Z

Towards the end of April, I'll be going tudong – that is taking a walk through southern England for a couple of months, living on alms' food and sleeping outside. It's an interesting opportunity that a monk's life offers – to be in the world in an open way, very much in the body as it lumbers along, and dependent on the good-will of the towns and villages that one passes through. It's a movement into a relatively empty space – one that will fill with whatever the day brings in.

Even in the lead-up to the walk, there are psychological places to move through that present questions and insights. Having teetered around the 'How much to plan?'/ 'How much to let it happen?' intersection for a few weeks, a direction and a vague route has established itself. So yes, I'm taking maps, yes I have a few addresses to stop over in, yes, I'm doing some exercises so that when I roll out of the three-month retreat there is a modicum of muscle fibre still clinging to the bones. I'm taking it not as an ordeal, but more as a practice to keep touching into and living in the openness and 'emptiness' that a lot of our habits shun.

Another major intersection is the 'How heavy?/ How comfortable?' debate. The more of the comfort-making gear you carry ( tent, sleeping bag etc.) then the more uncomfortable the carrying of it gets. But, the less you carry, the more cold damp nights etc you have to endure. So being of advanced years, I'm wimping out with a very light tent, two-season bag and even a gas-burner to boil water on. Resolution – walk less each day and make it a pleasant trip. Yes.

This intersection is one that I come to at other times. How much stuff do I want/need in my dwelling-place? Being a mendicant at the time and place I'm in is certainly not about impoverishment. Often my concern is to not get so cluttered that I can't find things, or that my living place feels too busy. At the 'Do I need this?' traffic-light, thoughts arise – ' Just let it be, there are more important things to do...', ' This could be useful one day...', 'Dear so-and-so gave me this, I ought to hang onto it', ' Oh, I must get round to fixing/repairing/reading this in my spare time' etc. But how much cleaning and tidying and rummaging occur as a consequence of being overweight in terms of possessions? So, various resolutions arise: one is – every time I'm given something, then I look for something to give away. Another one is the 'two-year rule': if I've had something – say a book or a sweater – without making use of it for two years, it must be meant for someone else. In a community which connects to other communities, there's often someone who can make use of my stuff. And for myself, one result is that the bustle of the mind fades out. Which is a major aim of the whole operation – at the intersection where belonging crosses being, it's possible for a restful space to open up.

A friend of mine who was going through a divorce found herself in a house full of stuff from the marriage, many items that she didn't need...but the prospect of emptying and of thereby accentuating an already-present emptiness was too uncomfortable to take on – at least for a while. I suggested a tactic of moving items into another room – not so much a complete divorce from them, but more a trial separation. That helps moderate the effect. As you let go, there's that empty sense – but if you sit, and through whatever process, become fully present in that open and strange place, gradually the system will adjust to the new configuration. Done sympathetically rather than through aversion or idealism, the result is very light and freeing. Then you can decide how many, if any, of those moved items you want to take back into your living space.

Things become part of us, through the medium of perception and resonance. When we're not really clear, the subtle energy that is our felt presence gets glued to objects by the meanings and feelings they trigger. Then they keep the mind cooking with voices of need and comfort, obligation and identity. And when the objects go, we feel lonely, lost or 'disconnected.' This is because there's an energy/presence that accompanies perceptions and feelings – this energy/presence is what citta (mind/heart) is. So to release the mind, we have to gentle or haul its energy/presence out of its glue. When we do that, there's a realignment – after the release our heart can settle into a new form. This experience, of a relative emptying, does also point out that we're not really any shape or configuration.

My attachments and addictions haven't arrived at that understanding yet. They want to hold me into a familiar shape. So it takes time and practice. It means getting to the edge of the empty sense, whose bleak feel is due to the mind's energy/presence being unable to fill it. That's where there's a kink in the system, which the energy of unfulfillable attachment creates and its object compensates for. So to address that means patiently being with the itch and the ache of the hole and relaxing – which allows the energy to flow.

For myself, substances such as tobacco and other social drugs have been easy to give up. The big empty hole has been loss of people – maybe that's the one that yawns in front of and behind many of us. There are a lot of losses, particularly as you get older. Perhaps three or four times in a life there are losses that feel like losing a whole chunk of heart, mind and nervous system. Grim indeed. And of course the Buddha laid it on the line – 'All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me'. Get it? 'ALL' is the word. With the energy-bonds that occur in relationship, whereby we form and 'inform' each other, that separation can feel like amputation. Moreover philosophizing about loss and grief shoves you into the 'you should snap out of it' mode. This may rapidly shift one away from the hole, but it doesn't fill it – the heart just becomes like Gruyere cheese wrapped in cling-film. It's still full of holes, but covered with a membrane, and that splits under pressure.

The other extreme is to plunge or topple into the hole, brood and wallow for years. And the middle way...is to stand on the edge of and 'breathe' into that empty hole. By which I mean not so much moving air around but keeping an alive energy around the sense of loss. This isn't always so easy, because the mind wants to run away from, 'get over' or deny the emptiness; or it goes numb with shock.The practice then is about bearing a lost one in mind in an almost tactile way, like they're beside you.And then letting them go. With bereavement, there's a need to do that often, perhaps with ritual or meditation, for a good while.To give them blessings. Above all, to let them go on their way; not to hold them back.

The inevitability of loss makes it sensible to keep rehearsing letting go in many areas – possessions, positions, goals – so that at a somatic and energetic level, the system knows that an accommodation of that empty hole is possible. Otherwise the system locks, and there is bitterness. Hence, it's good to live life as a tudong – as an ever-opening space.

However in any experience of being someone doing something, there's the need for a personal shape. And letting go is then a means that allows the system to move into a suitable form. In my case that means getting wider and more grounded. It means taking on roles and actions that will cause some stretching. So the other side of letting go is picking up – to fully pick up what one is with. For example, however I plan it, my bag still weighs something. My body doesn't really even want to carry a straw hat, let alone drag a dozen kilos over hill and dale. And there's something in me that doesn't want to carry responsibilities...and 'I don't want to have to waste my time with this' – and so on. So picking things up entails checking out some resistances and withdrawals. Not that they're necessarily unwise – I've erred on the side of blindly picking up every thing, responsibility and duty that comes my way. Picking up with wisdom should fit in with letting go – letting go of obligations, expectations and self-imagery. I learn mostly through checking out where I know I can get snagged. So – can my project be a failure, can the community that I try to respond to ebb flow and spasm through harmony and dysfunction – and yet all that be a condition for widening, grounding and emptying out? Can the sense of taking people on in the bond of monastic relationships be accompanied by the understanding that we have to separate? In this domain of time and place and (sort of) being someone, it seems vital that the energy of presence willingly reach out, move through forms – in order to empty out its gluey snags and numb places. It's an emptying that means being fully here and debunking the voice that says 'Onwards! Either success, or failure!' Maybe this is what love is – to take on being human, and get over the anxiety and pain of it all.

When I land in that, it feels like a rich and lasting, rather than transient, emptiness. But I'm still learning. So it'll be good to take a walk.

Out of the bubble

2009-01-12T13:27:00.013Z

Winter. So far this is one of the coldest winters in Britain for a while: hard frost and frozen pools, birds and squirrels frantically scrambling for food during the daylight hours. The community here look radically different - swaddled to rotundity with layers of fleece and wool, they look more like large plump birds than their normal angular selves. It's the winter retreat so the silence and the stark format of the day - chant, sit, walk, eat - reduces us to anonymous outlines in a grey landscape. Which is one of the ways it should be: all the fire and juice of our lives has drawn inwards. Like tulip bulbs we're gathering up nourishment for the spring.

Much of the time I'm in the Dhamma Hall, whose underfloor heating keeps the temperature at a steady 19 degrees Celsius ( 67 F). Just right. But I also go back to my own dwelling for breakfast and a hot drink in the evening, and to retire for the night. Where I'm typing this is pretty cool: I keep the heat turned down, and choose to bundle up in a fleece jacket with a woollen scarf draped around my throat and head. In the mornings it's the same, as I wrap my hands gratefully around a bowl of hot porridge. The heat's electric and I could turn it up with a flick of a switch, but...it's winter. It's supposed to be like this.

I wonder: is my motive frugality? ( Living dependent on free-will donations does impart a sense of conscience.) Maybe it's carbon guilt? Or to experience a sensitivity to my fellow (feathered) sentients, whose feeder I cram with nuts every day? Maybe I just enjoy austerity, or perhaps I'm making my gesture against the extravagant use of resources that is killing this planet. All quite likely.

Actually I don't like being cold. When I was growing up in London, we lived in a high-ceiling Victorian house with no central heating. There was a coal fire in the main room around which we'd huddle, roasting at the front and cold at the back. (Maybe we should have turned on a spit.) The bathroom I particularly remember, as it was a converted conservatory – no heat, with the windows painted over. (Modesty counts for more than comfort, how English!) Dad used to bundle my brother and myself in and out of the bath tub, wrapping us in big towels and briskly rubbing us dry. The water in the tub, if left, turned to solid ice.

Does it brings up something of that, the nip of cold? Well, I've experimented with cold immersions, with other monks - one of whom was very keen on jumping into a lake on his birthday ( in January). There's an amazing bodily buzz that happens when you're undressing with the cold wind blowing across the water and the mind going numb with horror. Everything starts racing. Then as you dive in and surge a few strokes, the body takes over. Kicks, thrashes - and as the mind shocks still, the body (mine at least) hastily scrambles out. It feels like it's on fire. It's much the same with bathing in the snow, which I did quite regularly in my forties. I used to leap out of my sleeping bag before dawn - and before I could think twice, jump into the snow rub it into my skin and then pour a large basin of cold water over my body. My mind couldn't handle this at all - so it just dropped hold of the actions and events. Which was interesting. And it certainly wakes you up, and warms you up for a while. You feel great (if your body's in good enough shape, that is).

But all this seems a bit violent now, and it smacks of the artifice of creating a challenge for the sake of it. So more to the point for me at this time is not about overcoming resistance to cold, but about abiding in an understanding of working with nature - my own and that around me. That I'm not living in a bubble, but on the planet in this season. Being human, I can shelter, much as other creatures do, and I can put on extra coats - so right now I'm not cold. But I want to be conscious of doing that and conscious of what I'm in. I don't want to forget that this room is a shelter, not a dislocated Sucitto-sphere. I want to learn about living this life from living on the earth that it arose in. I want to learn through the skin, the and the nerves. I don't want to just park my mind-set in a convenient corner and shut life out.

Because as well as being too cold in Britain, I've been mind-dissolvingly hot in several tropical countries, for months on end. I've also gasped my way up mountains that were too steep and too high, and gone leg-numb on trails that should have ended hours previously. I didn't like that either. (And these are just a few of the offences, wounds and injustices that life has wrought on me - and I haven't even had a really hard time). Yet here I am. And as the attitude around feeling relaxes, there's an adjustment that happens by itself. The mind steps back and goes quiet and spacious, and the body works in accordance with nature - as if it belongs here, among heat and cold and the comings and goings of feeling. And isn't that so? And that when what's here until we die actually is here, a chunk of suffering stops?

Respect

2008-11-28T09:36:00.013Z

This is a comment on the reference in 'Following the Moon' to 'self-respect and respect for others.' For me, the issue of respect is a major one -it touches into what can be a chronic lack, a lack that we experience as having no worth. This sense whirls one's along a track, in a semi-conscious way, of seeking accomplishment, security or the approval of others. And as with all confused needs, no matter how much one gets, it isn't enough. This is because we're looking for an inner foundation of self-value without which we are prone to anxiety and depression . But racing along the treadmill of external accomplishments doesn't allay that need. And one's fellow racers are too busy to applaud.

This 'self-value' stuff may sound odd in a Buddhist world-view which doesn't see or seek any permanent and lasting self. What self is there to be valued anyway? However the contradiction is more verbal than experiential. The realisation of non-self is based upon having a very solid foundation in mind-base, citta. And this mind-base is experienced (for those not completely enlightened) as 'my basic self' beneath the role-play and the thoughts and moods of mental behaviour. You can't realise that this doesn't have to be held onto as me and mine until you've accessed it, nourished it, strengthened it and cultivated it. In other words you train your behaviour to access your (apparent) self, and you explore this apparent self to realise something that stands up for itself and doesn't need holding onto. For most people, denying that they have a self just gives rise to a 'self' ( a program of mental behaviour) based on denial. And if we don't seek a healthy and balanced self, we don't arrive at not-self, but rather at an unhealthy and imbalanced self.

Self-respect is a sign of psychological health. It's a primary factor in the Path: the sense that I have worth, that I have potential for improvement, and that I can move towards the good and the true. Without that sense, you don't have the confidence/faith to get going. In Buddhist cultivation, this self-respect is largely derived through reference to our ethical sense. We can refrain from harming, from stealing, from lying and so on. The factor that supports that is not fear of punishment or moralising righteousness, but 'conscience' (hiri). That is: because one values oneself, one doesn't act in ways that aren't worthy. One doesn't stain the ethical clarity that we are all heirs to as human beings.

This sense also covers other actions such as generosity: in the suttas the layman Isidatta when questioned by the Buddha, realises that he is 'free from the blight of stinginess, open-handed, a friend to ask a favour of.' But only then. It's poignant but true - many people don't notice or value the many acts of kindness, thoughtfulness that they do every day. Or the many small choices they make to do to put aside an unskilful impulse or to put themselves out to benefit another. It seems that sometimes it takes the attention and concern of a wise being before we realise what we have lost sight of in ourself. And we don't see a wise being unless we have a mind that can look out for, attune to and respect others. Some people couldn't even 'see' the Buddha.

So the other part of the equation, that of respecting others is also essential. Who are you going to rely on? Often in the suttas, disciples will comment 'It is a great blessing for me to be associated with a worthy companion such as ....' This is the development involved with 'concern', ottappa: that is, one so values and respects others that their opinions are a source of concern (and gladness) to you. With ottappa we hold ourselves as responsible and accountable - so much so that we seek out the comments and feedback of other people: their opinions count. And if we can't respect others, what kind of blindness is that?

Sometimes people assume that the Buddhist message is 'Think for yourself, be a Refuge to yourself.' Or (mis) intepret the Kalama Sutta (Anguttara Threes, 65) as advocating that we shouldn't follow a teacher, a tradition, but know for ourselves. True enough, it does say something like that, but also adds that one shouldn't follow one's own reasoning or view. The point is that one shouldn't follow anything blindly. And how does one with some dust in their eyes not follow anything blindly? The Buddha points to the sense of 'to others as to myself'. How would I feel if others harmed or abused me? This moral sense, that in us which can acknowledge the pain caused through abuse, physical, verbal, sexual or substance based - that conscience is our guide. Then from that place we can check out any view that we hold about ourself or the world. What does it feel like? And where does following that view take you? If it takes you to cynicism, depression or righteousness, then it's to be abandoned, isn't it?

The other reference in the Kalama Sutta is the acknowledgment that actions are praised or censured by the wise. The moral sense isn't just a personal opinion, it links us to a shared ethical sensitivity. And it’s only when you can place your actions within this twin focus of conscience and accountability that you can really know 'for yourself' that what you're doing is skilful. So I find it a great blessing when someone points out one of my blind spots in a kind and concerned way. When the sense is ‘Because I see you as a person of integrity, I feel that you’d want to know where you’re tripping up’ - that’s empowering rather than crushing; it strengthens my trust in the sense of value.

This twin focus invigorates the 'we' sense: 'to others as to myself'. It was a guiding star for the Buddha in his own Awakening. ' I understood thus: "This [thought of sense-desire, ill will, cruelty] leads to my own affliction, to others' affliction and the affliction of both...it leads away from Nibbana"' (Majjhima 19). But it' s a 'we' that is a guide for relationship, not an accumulation of identities, or of belonging to a club. And as relationship is a big part of life, it's good to get clear what that 'we' is and what it isn't.

As an example, the monastery where I live has

a mix of solitude and communality. We sit together and on our own, we work together and on our own, people come and go. Meanwhile, people from outside the monastery bring food: some cook the food and offer it to the monks, nuns and the rest of the community. Some people come to participate in the life for periods of time. So, although in many ways each of us are on our own with our bodily feelings, energies and mental states, in other ways we’re together in the wider field of spiritual friendship. There's the overriding sense that 'we're in this together,' a heartful sense that replaces the judgmental world of 'him' 'her' and' them.' This 'we' sense gets generated through making like commitments to moral standards and acknowledging each other in that. It doesn't begin with being fond of each other, or through trying to hold everyone into some model community. In fact people often need a good amount of space as much as affirmation and bonding, space in which they can establish their autonomy and self-respect. If it does ( and it doesn't always - people can just dig themselves deeper into their misery or conceit) then it's more possible for them to see and respect others as aspirants. And that leaves us with the right to have different angles. The 'we' sense is more about harmony than conformity.

This sense aligns us to being part of a flexible

community of purpose and Awakening which is located all over the world and stretches through time. It’s a community of value (puñña) : more than just a group of people, it’s a ‘field’ of the skilful actions and skilful results that people have cultivated. Which is how of course it's 'not-self.' It's not people's personalities that we're respecting but the values that they are living or have lived. (Even if they fell away from them at times.)

Meeting and interacting puts this 'we' sense into practice. We can get very idealistic and righteous when we're on our own and don't have to meet the enigmas of other people. The problem with being on your own is that the default is to operate through one's own views and angles. Then when we meet others, what arises is 'Why can't everyone be normal like me?' We come in with expectations of how the other should be, how they should fit my agenda or view; we get conceited and judgmental; we take or expect an individual to be void of defects or idiosyncrasies. Idolisation then leads to demonisation. Or we claim that my group, my lineage, my tradition is pure and true and everyone who sees things otherwise is deluded or corrupt. Or we dismiss and scapegoat others through focusing purely on their flaws - or even just the bits that we don't like. Messy stuff indeed. So why bother with communities, or interaction at all?

To me, interaction exercises hiri-ottappa; it stretches the 'we' sense. Respecting people who I'm not on the same wavelength with is part of growing up. Ignoring or putting up with others isn't enough - for Awakening, I don't what to have any numb or stale patches in my awareness. And the most useful acccess point at the place of contact is the ethical sense: 'this is a being like me who has a feeling for right and wrong.' When there are difficulties between us, can I help us get back to that 'we' sense that I believe we all cherish? And still it takes confidence in that focus for me to be with others without feeling nervous and trying too hard to make it work. Because sometimes it takes time and trust to gt through the complexities and the personality views to the place where we're just fellow humans. But it's one useful thing about Sangha life - you have to handle the impressions of self. You have to meet peope whom you wouldn't have chosen to live with. Then again, sometimes you have to become someone, in terms of role, that you don't want to be - you don't like to tell people what to do, and you get put in that position; you're rather introverted and shy, and you have to be a public figure. So the sense that 'he's weird' and 'she's one of those' and 'I'm supposed to be this' keeps coming up at the point of misfit.

But the beauty of all this misfit is that the latent tendencies, the projections and preferences and views, get laid out naked. They form some interesting patterns: ‘Is it just my fault-finding mind that finds you loud-mouthed and insensitive, or is it something you need some feedback on?’ (Irritation and conceit). ‘Then again, what do people really think of me?’ (Doubt and conceit) . Or how about: ‘ I have forgiven you the terrible injustices that you have wreaked on me with your unacknowledged authority issues.’? (Just plain conceit). Not much 'we' in any of that. But the weirdest twist in community interactions is the realisation that other people haven't noticed the shadows and defilements that I feel I have, and seem to like and even value me...Other people blow out the opinions I have about myself.

At any rate, because the play of self-impressions is pointing to some powerful and deluding tendencies it’s worth being in an averagely dysfunctional community. It asks us to hold the sense of respect more firmly than the fears and fantasies of the mind. Then the big learning that comes through in glimmerings and dawnings, is that behaviour, function and so on are kamma and not self. So finally, it's not 'your' fault or 'my' fault, just the unsatisfactoriness of the kamma of personhood. Whew! Then, more than approval or disapproval, what counts is to get out of forming a self out of action and behaviour. And to get there, I find, comes through tuning into that which is worthy of respect, and to that which can do the respecting.

Along with a good grounding in compassion, what helps is to keep widening the mind's energy and focus so that there is a lot of conscious, inactive but alert, space. This stops the contraction that always accompanies a judgemental mind-set, and checks the tightening and solidifying that forms a self-view. That 'we' sense is more than an idea, it has an energetic basis. Of course widening and checking do take a fair amount of patience and mindfulness. But that's what we're here for, and thank you world for being such an exasperating place.

So the reflection and practice of not-self' facilitates a relationship rather than denies that there's anyone to relate to. It's the kind of relationship in which there are no good or bad people, there's just bright and dark kamma - yours, mine, whoever, it doesn't really matter. Because with the understanding and compassion that that brings, we don’t get stuck with self-images, and we can let it all change. And a field of wisdom and compassion is going to support the best kind of change. In this way we set up the possibilities for our own and other people’s release. This is the highest form of respect, respect for the Dhamma as it is lived and breathed.

Following the moon

2008-11-01T09:05:00.029Z

This photograph is of a full moon over the western end of the meditation hall in the monastery in which I live. In accordance with our tradition, these full moon days are the days when we recollect our rules and ethical guidelines and meditate through the night. The full moon acts a wonderful time-piece for a human endeavour that is cool but persistent.

In Buddhist monasteries we follow the lunar calendar. Actually the one we follow doesn't quite synchronise with the full and new moons. It's a calendar that's devised in Thailand, and it follows a pattern of fourteen and fifteen day cycles. In any one season there will be two fourteen day gaps between the the ‘moon days’ and six fifteen day gaps but it's still an imperfect match with the solar calendar. Every few years we have to add an extra lunar month to fit the lunar calendar within the solar year. And every now and then an extra day gets thrown in for good measure. The result of this is that the great Buddhist festivals, which all occur on the days of the full moon, change their solar dates every year in a way that's impossible to predict. So, Vesakha Puja, which is the major Buddhist festival, can occur on more or less any day in May, or even in June. The three months' Rains Retreat which marks the time when we're not allowed any major travel, has a different day of starting and finishing each year. Trying to balance between solar and lunar and between the West and Thailand is an aspect of the peculiar dynamic we find ourselves in in bringing an Asian tradition to the West. And there are many more....

But then, before you get too convinced of the rational and regular standards of the West, notice that the solar calendar with its leap years and months of differing days doesn't fit the cosmic order either. And why have seven days per week, and why have days and months named after Norse gods and Roman emperors? What's the logic in having months named 'seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth' ( September, October, November, December) which are lined up as the ninth through twelfth months of the year? And where does the day go when we cross the International Dateline?

It gets more uncertain the further you go. No sunrise and sunset, just a ceaseless turning. The earth neither flat nor spherical but a lumpy pear-shape in an irregular orbit around a seething and explosive ball of gas. Then you realise: it's not the cosmos that doesn't fit, it's the measurements.

That brings us back home, if slightly queasy. Where is the firm ground? How can we know anything? 'Mind is the basis,' is the Buddhist response, 'and somewhere in there a still centre of knowing.' But it doesn't measure things in terms of hours and minutes, kilos and grams, euros and dollars. All you can really know is cause and effect - which means that everything I do and say ( and even think) affect everything in 'my' cosmos. In fact these behaviours become who I feel I am, and form the world that presses in ( or wraps around me). And, although the patterns are reliable, the specific details of that self and world are always changing. My thoughts, feelings, relationships and material resources, are all as subject to change as the political and economic climate. Hmm.

How to know what to do, and who to be, is something I started asking myself in my mid-teens ( in the saner moments). What are we here for? What is a valuable way to live? How do we weigh it up? Money, status, happiness? From my standpoint, the social norm, at least in my family, seemed to be to get a 9-5, 5 day a week job, get a car, get a marriage, get a mortgage, work fifty years, and get a heart-attack. How did imagination, joy, stillness, awe and above all freedom, fit into that? But to others, what counted was a good house, a steady job, and a way to raise children in financial security. And that made sense if you'd lived through a war and a financial depression. It all depended on where your sense of value lay.

But if there's a universal value to guide our lives, it has to be broader and more fundamental than the career we take on, or the state of the society we're in. The real thing isn't a matter of what road we travel, but how well we drive. And learning to do that...well that has to begin with touching the ground you're always on. One way of doing that quite literally is by plunking yourself down on the earth, sitting upright and breathing out...and breathing in....Those of you who do just this know what guidelines and skills evolve out of that. When your purpose is just sitting and being with breathing, the habitual mind doesn't have anything to play with. It spins loose, reveals itself as a mad monkey - and requires us to generate vast patience, firm kindness, and clarity. Not even to control it, but just to develop a wonderful and world-changing response. Because this monkey-mind has grown out of my responses ( and reactions) to the wobbling world around me, it's time to develop a saner response. And then we touch the true human ground: care and respect for self and others; tolerance and compassion for self and others; and the equanimous humour that knows none of this is lasting, or our true centre. This is the guideline, wherever, whoever. It's a light of knowing that is gentle and cool as moonlight, an inner light that is a personal reflection of the Buddha's brilliant sun. Whatever the life-journey, what else can you follow?