The Victorious One

This is the fourth talk in a series of six given in the summer 2016.

This is the fourth talk in this series of six talks. The first talk was an overview of the Five Stages of Spiritual Life. The second talk explored the topic of integration and the third talk was about positive emotion or skilfulness.

In this talk I will be exploring the topic of Spiritual Death. The phrase “Spiritual Death” is obviously a metaphor. Subhuti has said he doesn’t like to use the word ‘spiritual’, because he teaches a lot in India and there the word ‘spiritual’ can have Hindu connotations. So he speaks of Dharmic  Death instead.

Actually I am not too keen on the word “death”, because although we are speaking metaphorically of a kind of death of egotism, the word death implies something sudden and also the word itself doesn’t have many positive connotations. But what we are talking about here can be very gradual and is highly positive – we are talking about seeing through our delusion of having a fixed and separate self. This seeing through manifests as a movement away from self-centredness to greater and greater selflessness. The wisdom of seeing through our delusion of ego identity manifests as the compassion of selfless activity.

So we could use other metaphors for this process, this vision, as well as the metaphor of death. We could talk about Spiritual Victory for instance. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says: “though one should conquer in battle thousands upon thousands of men, yet he who conquers himself is truly the greatest in battle. It is indeed better to conquer oneself than to conquer other people.” Verse 104. We could talk about  ‘freedom of mind’ (cetovimutti), the term the Buddha uses in the Meghiya Sutta, also translated as ‘the hearts release’. When Bhante talked about Spiritual Death in a seminar back in the 1970s he began by referring to it as the Stage of Vision.

Whichever images or metaphors we use the important thing is to understand what is being expressed and sometimes it’s best that we have a number of expressions to guard against literalism and a descent into jargon, where every little expression of generosity is referred to as a Spiritual Death. What we are talking about here is a victory over all kinds of self-centredness and selfishness and pettiness. We are talking about the death of the delusion that we have some kind of fixed permanent essence, a self, which needs to be defended and nourished. We are talking about a release from the prison of isolation that is egotism. We are talking about a vision of complete selflessness known in the Mahayana as the bodhisattva ideal. Although we are talking about Spiritual Death separate from spiritual rebirth, really there is no separation. When you are released from delusion you are released into a vision. When you let go of selfishness you let go into selflessness. When you are victorious over ignorance you gain the kingdom of wisdom and compassion.

This whole business of “self” is very central to Buddhist thought and practice but it is very easy to become quite abstract and alienated  from concrete experience when we talk about it. It doesn’t have to be complicated or abstract. It is really quite simple. It is innate to our experience to perceive ourselves as separate from the rest of the world. We are ‘subject’, the rest of the world is ‘object’. This is deeply ingrained in us, it is how we have evolved. What the Buddha is telling us is that this is not Reality. In Reality there is no separation into subject and object. Because we have this experience, this perception of ‘me’ or ‘I’ as subject and the rest of the world as object, we also tend to fix both subject and object. We give substance to subject and object, self and other, me and you.

But Buddhist practice shows us quite clearly that everything is impermanent and everything is insubstantial; this includes whatever we think of as ‘me’. Everything about us is changing all the time – body thoughts and emotions – we are change. We are change and everything else is change. Reality is one mass of change, of movement, of energy. Everything is constantly arising and passing away, arising and passing away. Everything is arising because of certain conditions and passing away because of other conditions. All of those conditions are constantly arising and passing away. Reality is a constant interplay of constantly changing conditions arising and passing away. Everything about us is part of this constant interplay of Reality, everything about others is part of this constant interplay of Reality. In Wisdom Beyond Words, Bhante says: “for an illustration of this idea we may turn to the Gandhavyuha  Sutra, in which the Reality of things is compared to the intersecting of beams of light. If you have rays of light of all different colours, flashing in all directions, crossing and criss-crossing, what you find, obviously, is that one beam of light does not obstruct any of the others. They all shine through one another,  they are not lost or merged in one great light – they all maintain what you might call their separate individualities – but they offer no obstruction to the penetration by other individualities. They are all mutually interpenetrating. In Reality things can be perceived neither is being chopped up into mutually exclusive bits, nor as being absorbed into a unity. When we see into Reality we see all things as interfusing and interpenetrating one another. There is both individuality and unity – neither obstructing the other – at the same time”. p. 78. But our attachment to self is part of how we have evolved as self-aware beings and it takes effort and time to go beyond it.

The first step is to just recognise that we do have an attachment to self. It is quite healthy and wise to simply recognise this. If we recognise and acknowledge our attachment to self then we can enter into the game of noticing how that attachment manifests in the world. We can be quite light about noticing.  One of the unfortunate consequences of attachment to self is that it leads to suffering. Because of attachment to self, which the tradition calls ignorance – avidya – we try to avoid what we don’t like and grasp what we like. Aversion and a grasping becomes the constant activity of our whole psycho-physical being. Aversion manifests in illwill, anger, aggression, preferences and hatred and grasping manifests in greed, envy, addiction, obsession and comfort seeking. Because all of this can never be successful there is always an undertow of fear and anxiety.

When we transcend attachment to self, which means attachment to aversion and grasping, then we begin to manifest in the world as a flow of wisdom and compassion, which is expressed as mindfulness, kindness and energy for the good.

The practices which lead us beyond self, which lead us to transcend all self-centredness, can be seen as wisdom practices and compassion practices. In other words we can approach the task of going beyond self via the path of wisdom or via the path of compassion or preferably via both paths. The path of wisdom practice will involve clarifying our views and getting a thorough understanding of teachings such as pratitya samutpada (dependent arising) and the three Lakshanas. As well as understanding the concepts, it means reflecting on and deeply contemplating these teachings.Bhante says somewhere that the ‘spiritual life is an interrogation of Reality’. It may involve going deeply into teachings like the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. It will include meditations on the six elements, the five Skandhas, the three Lakshanas. Other elements of the way of wisdom are silent retreats and solitary retreats where you can see more clearly the workings of your own mind, the contortions and subtle tricks it delights in; the grasping and aversion in their undiluted state.

In meditation practices such as the Mindfulness of Breathing and Just Sitting, your mind will reveal itself – we sometimes use the phrase “things coming up”. This is an image of something that was hitherto hidden or buried being brought into the light of awareness. This is all part of getting to know ourselves in our fullness and learning to accept ourselves in our wholeness, so that we know what we are trying to transform and transcend. Other meditations such as meditations on six elements, the three Lakshanass, the five Skandhas and the Nidana chain are all about going deeper and challenging our existential assumptions. In his essay on Conditionality, Kulananda talks about the need to challenge all our assumptions. He says: “the principle of conditionality shows the impermanent and insubstantial nature of all phenomena. A consequence of this is that they cannot, of themselves, provide us with any lasting satisfaction. And yet we constantly treat the world as if it were permanent, substantial and ultimately satisfying. Thus deluded, we are wedded to a nexus of suffering. Not recognising the impermanent and insubstantial nature of phenomena, we cycle between the twin poles of attraction and repulsion: endlessly unsatisfied, grabbing onto this, pushing away from that. And so it will go until we replace wrong view with right view, until we cease to behave as if phenomena are permanent, substantial and satisfying and start to behave as if they are impermanent, insubstantial and incapable of providing ultimate satisfaction.” Western Buddhist Review 1, p. 99.

We need to build a strong basis of positive emotion and the context of spiritual friendship before embarking on these practices, because they can be deeply unsettling and disturbing. As Bhante Sangharakshita says in Wisdom Beyond Words: “things may start going badly for us not as a result of unskilful behaviour, but in consequence of our exposing ourselves to a higher vision. We may even find ourselves thinking that everything was going rather well for us until we took up the spiritual life. We tend to expect that adopting the spiritual life should make everything go much more smoothly for us, but that certainly does not always happen. The spiritual life may be a happy one, but it is by no means necessarily easy or free from difficulties and suffering. A properly functioning spiritual community will help to carry us over these hurdles. It is as well not to study the Diamond Sutra in isolation, at least not without knowing who and where our spiritual friends are.”  P. XX  What applies to studying the Diamond Sutra applies to all of these wisdom practices.

In this path of practice – the way of wisdom – I want to especially highlight the practice of reflection and the practice of retreats. It is important to develop the habit of reflecting; both reflecting on the ideas of the Dharma and reflecting on the events of our own daily lives. We need to study and reflect on the Dharma so that we understand what the Buddha is recommending to us. Fortunately, Bhante Sangharakshita has done a huge amount of work to elucidate, clarify and contextualise the teachings of the Buddha. That doesn’t mean we have nothing to do. We need to listen to Bhante’s talks, read his books and go back and look at his seminars. We need to read and reread and reflect on what we read. I would like to recommend four books in particular – which are a series – they are: Living with Awareness, Living with Kindness, Living Ethically and Living Wisely. If you read and study and reflect on and practice these teachings you will be propelled forward on the spiritual path.

Reflecting on the Dharma gives us a rich array of tools with which to reflect on our own lives. We can reflect on our lives from the perspective of the ethical precepts and the law of karma. We can ask ourselves questions about our observance of individual precepts, we can question our understanding and application of the law of karma. Or we can look at our lives from the perspective of impermanence and the context of the impermanence of life. We can reflect on how egotism manifests in gross and subtle ways in our lives; our fears, our animosities, our greed, grasping after security and so on. Nothing is too trivial for reflection and nothing is too great. If we feel grumpy because it’s raining or somebody has forgotten a meeting, we can reflect on the nature of our grumpiness and on our expectations and look for other perspectives. Or if we are worried about sickness or death, whether our own or somebody else’s, we can reflect on that – what are we really concerned about? Why? Are there are other ways of looking at a situation? What would be a more creative and helpful response? Reflection is an important Buddhist practice, which you can use at any time wherever you are, whatever the situation. Some people find that writing about some topic is the easiest way to reflect and go deeper.

Retreats are a very specific practice and the kind of retreat which I think of as part of the way of wisdom are those where you are alone with your own mind, your own habits and responses. These are silent retreats and solitary retreats. Silent retreats are usually meditation retreats and you gradually move into deeper levels of experience, below or beyond the usual level of everyday consciousness. This can be difficult at times. One may encounter resistances or unpleasant states of mind, but it can also be blissful and Insightful. If you don’t get on so well with formal meditation then solitary retreats are indispensable. On solitary retreat you can create your own program and have as much time as you want for reflection. Whatever you do, the mere fact of being alone and silent, means that you have to experience yourself very directly. This can be uncomfortable; you may experience boredom, fear, craving of all kinds, but if you stay with it you will get beyond these choppy waters of emotional turbulence and enter into more tranquil and creative states of mind. If we can’t get away on retreat, we can introduce shorter periods of doing nothing into our daily life. In his book The Art of Reflection, Ratnaguna suggests this as a practice. He says: “first of all, you have to learn how to do nothing! This is absolutely essential. By doing nothing I don’t mean watching the TV, listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper. I don’t even mean reading a good book, not even a Buddhist one. I mean literally doing nothing. And turn off your mobile phone and computer. Make time to do nothing everyday – perhaps start with 10 minutes a day, then, once you get used to that, extended to 20, 30 minutes, even an hour! Make time or it probably won’t happen. Put it in your diary.” p. XX

So that is something about practices on the path of wisdom that lead us to transcend self. The path of compassion leads us to the same place. And the tradition recommends that we follow both paths, wisdom and compassion, simultaneously. That is a balanced approach which prevents us from falling into lopsided errors.

Practices on the path of compassion will include generosity, Metta, rejoicing, communication, friendship, and Sangha. It will include retreats that involve communication, reflections on teachings like the Bodhisattva Ideal, the Metta Bhavana, Building the Buddhaland, Puja and mantra chanting and taking responsibility within the spiritual community. I mentioned generosity briefly in the last talk on positive emotion. Perhaps we can go into it a bit more here. I think we often relegate the practice of generosity to a fairly low level among practices. This may be because it often gets entwined with fundraising campaigns or requests for volunteers. But really the practice of generosity is much more demanding than that. The practice of generosity is not about giving money to charity or volunteering your services, it is about giving everything, giving your whole life. Now that may sound extreme, but actually most people give their whole lives to something; they may give their lives to the pursuit of wealth or security or the pursuit of power. They may give their lives to the project of raising a family. Some people give their lives to crime or to a political ideology. Some people give their lives to sport or the arts or adventure. Many many people are incredibly wholehearted in the pursuit of their goals. There is a presidential election campaign going on in the United States at the moment and we can see how people – even in their 60s and 70s – give huge amounts of money, time and energy to it. They are giving themselves fully and completely to their pursuit.

The practice of generosity in Buddhism, Dana Paramita – the perfection of giving – is really about giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the Dharma. There may be all kinds of obstacles, our own doubt and indecision, life circumstances and so on, but we carry on nevertheless, we give ourselves wholeheartedly. All the different kinds of giving, whether giving money, possessions, giving time and energy, giving culture, giving education, giving confidence, giving the Dharma – all the different ways of giving are expressions of the giving of ourselves wholeheartedly to the path. This giving could be talked about as Going for Refuge to the three jewels of the Buddha, the Dharma and Sangha.

Going for Refuge is a wholehearted giving of ourselves to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The more wholehearted and generous we are the more we will encounter our egotism and the more we encounter our egotism the more opportunity we will have to directly experience going beyond self. We will see clearly that going beyond self is not an abstract idea it is an experience and a liberating experience. The practice of generosity directly confronts our deeply felt sense of “I”, “me” and “mine”. We encounter our egotism in the form of attachment and resistance. Have you ever had the experience of having a generous impulse but not acting on it? And as time goes by you discover all sorts of reasons why it would not be such a good idea to act? This is resistance born of attachment. Attachment is the tendency to grasp and hold on to something or someone to bolster our sense of security and our sense of self. Nonattachment is the opposite, it is an openhearted letting go of wants and preferences. It is an expansive feeling of equanimity. According to Bhante Sangharakshita “the traditional image for the condition of nonattachment is that of thistledown blown on the wind. One is serene, confident, balanced in oneself. One doesn’t settle on or stick to things, because one is self-contained. One doesn’t feel the need to reach out for something to make one feel better, to make one feel whole and complete. One doesn’t need to be appropriating things or people so as to feel fulfilled.” Know Your Mind, p. 130. So generosity is one of the most important practices on the way of compassion. Generosity has no limits and is an Insight inducing practice.

The other practices I’d like to concentrate on, under the heading of compassion practices, are the practice of communication and the practice of taking responsibility within the spiritual community. Communication is a crucial Buddhist practice in many ways. There are the five kinds of skilful speech outlined by the Buddha. There is the importance of hearing and listening in the teaching of the three wisdoms and there is the practice of Kalyana Mitrata, spiritual friendship, which the Buddha declares to be the whole of the spiritual life in a couple of discourses to be found in the Samyuta Nikaya – the Collection of Connected Discourses of the Buddha.

The five kinds of skilful speech are outlined in the Anguttara Nikaya like this: “Bhikkhus, possessing five factors, speech is well spoken, not badly spoken; it is blameless and beyond reproach by the wise. What five? It is spoken at the proper time; what is said is true; it is spoken gently; what is said is beneficial; it is spoken with the mind of lovingkindness. Possessing these five factors, speech is well spoken, not badly spoken; it is blameless and beyond reproach by the wise.” AN, p 816.This is what ethical speech is – it is speaking the truth – which means not exaggerating and not understating, not omitting things that are important. But it is much more than speaking the truth – speaking the truth has to be in the service of Metta, kindness. Our speech needs to be kindly and helpful and we should use speech to create harmony. This use of skilful speech is a very powerful practice; words create worlds.

As the poet William Wordsworth put it: “words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers  a dominion over thoughts.” Essay on Epitaph III, P85. Words hold a dominion over thoughts. When we think of Buddhist ethics, we often say that the state of mind is primary – but here Wordsworth is saying words have a dominion over thoughts – in other words, words can change our state of mind. This is our experience too. If someone praises us we feel good, if someone condemns us we feel bad. There is an interplay between states of mind, words and actions; they all influence each other. So one of the ways of generating positive mental states is to act positively and speak positively and to mix with people who are trying to do the same. And as the Buddha says this means being truthful, kindly, helpful and harmonising in what we say and how we say it. The Buddha also mentions speaking at the right time, the appropriate time, timely speech. It is very hard to give a rule for what timely means. But if we ask the question – is this going to be helpful? Would it cause harmony or disharmony? Is it going to be helpful to the person on the receiving end? Is it going to be helpful to the wider situation? These questions may indicate whether something is timely or appropriate from the standpoint of Buddhist ethics. In the Bhaddali Sutta, Bhaddali asks the Buddha: “venerable sire, what is the cause, what is the reason, why they take action against some Bhikkhu here by repeatedly admonishing him? What is the cause, what is the reason, why they do not take action against some Bhikkhu here by repeatedly admonishing him?” Bhaddali is asking is why are some monks immediately admonished when they commit a transgression and other monks are treated differently and not immediately admonished. The Buddha’s answer, which is quite long amounts to saying that people are very different, with such differing characters and temperaments, that it is not appropriate to say the same thing to everyone, in the same way and at the same time. He says that some people can be told quite quickly if they have done something wrong, but with other people, those who are more defensive, it is best to take it very slowly.

The point is that speech needs to be timely and appropriate, as well as true, kindly, helpful and harmonising. These are the five ways to communicate skilfully. There is another important element to communication and that is listening. Listening is probably the most crucial element of communication – it is where awareness and empathy grow. Without listening there is no dialogue – just competing monologues. On a number of occasions I have mediated between people who are in some kind of conflict and most of those conflicts happened because of people not really listening to each other – interpreting what someone is saying is not the same as actually listening to what they are saying. The only time when the mediation didn’t work was when somebody was unwilling to listen. Listening is also crucial to the whole spiritual endeavour. It is only by listening carefully and repeatedly to those who are more experienced than us that we learn. This is the first stage of wisdom – i.e. sruta mayi prajna. Listening in this case also includes reading and in our case this means especially reading and listening to the works of Sangharakshita.

The whole practice of communication finds fruition in spiritual friendship, especially friendship between someone of greater experience and someone of less experience. This is what we sometimes call vertical spiritual friendship or vertical Kalyana Mitrata – spiritual friendship which involves an element of guidance and exemplification by the more experienced person. Spiritual friendship is one of the practices that is particularly emphasised in Triratna and it is a very beautiful and life enhancing practice. It is recommended by the Buddha in a very wholeheartedly way – in the Mahavagga of the Samyutta Nikaya there are two particularly striking conversations about spiritual friendship– one conversation with Ananda and another conversation with Sariputta. Here is the conversation with Sariputta: “then the venerable Sariputta approached the blessed one and said to him: venerable sire, this is the entire holy life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. Good, good Sariputta! This is the entire holy life, Sariputta that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. When a Bhikkhu has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the noble eightfold path.” SN II, p. 1525.

Spiritual friendship is also praised in the Meghiya Sutta where the Buddha says to Meghiya: “Meghiya when the hearts release is immature, five things conduce to its maturity. What five? Here in, Meghiya, a monk has a lovely intimacy, a lovely friendship, a lovely comradeship. When the hearts release is immature this is the first thing that conduces to its maturity.” Woodward trans, 1935.

Spiritual friendship and communication are important at every stage of the path. It progresses from being a practice and an aid to growth to being an expression of Insight – a compassionate activity. Intimate communication is an essential part of the spiritual path for everyone whether beginner or a Buddha. In friendship we can experience a victory over self-centredness. Friendship makes it easier to be other regarding. Friendship forms the experiential basis for expanding Metta – the expansion of Metta is the road to Insight. As Bhante Sangharakshita puts it in Living with Kindness: “forgetting the self as a reference point, no longer asking what any given situation means for you alone, you can go on indefinitely and happily expanding the breadth and depth of your interest and positivity. This is the essence of the spiritual life: to bring about a state in which the whole movement and tendency of our being is expansive, spiralling creatively outwards and upwards.” Page136.

The other area I want to talk about as an element of the way of compassion leading to Insight, is the area of taking responsibility within the spiritual community. There are different aspects to the practice of taking responsibility. Firstly, there is taking responsibility for ourselves. This means taking responsibility for our actions and taking responsibility for our states of mind. It also means taking responsibility for creating and using the conditions which conduce to spiritual progress. Although it is essential that we have guidance and spiritual friends, we must not expect that our spiritual friends do everything for us. We have to act, we have to make our own conditions, we have to examine our own hearts and minds.

The next aspect of taking responsibility is understanding that the spiritual community is not something external to you that you dip into now and then. It can’t be a hobby. It is only a spiritual community for you to the extent that you are part of it. So it’s important to feel yourself as part of the community – not as a customer or passenger or client. This means engaging in whatever way you can, being involved in classes and study groups, helping out in one way or another, listening and responding, learning and sharing. Sometimes I see people very excited and inspired becoming mitras and everyone is uplifted and happy, but then some people just fade away. Without contact there is no community – just the idea of a community. So taking responsibility here means seeing and understanding that your participation is important to the existence of the spiritual community and acting accordingly.

Another aspect of taking responsibility is sharing whatever understanding, inspiration, happiness or perspectives we have gained with other people; that is, with other people who are interested. Taking responsibility is another way of talking about compassionate activity and it is worth noting that there isn’t really any other kind of compassion than active compassion. Buddhist compassion – karuna – is an activity rather than a special feeling or emotion. So practice in the way of compassion is active whereas practice in the way of wisdom is more inclined to be contemplative. We need both the way of wisdom and the way of compassion, contemplation and action.

These are the two broad paths of practice that lead to Spiritual Death and Rebirth and they also give expression to Spiritual Death and Rebirth. So this aspect of spiritual life is called the Stage of Spiritual Death or Spiritual Vision or Bhante has also referred to it as a Stage of Openness and the Stage of Reality. Whatever words we use, whatever images come to mind, the important thing is to have a sense of this expanding consciousness that is less and less concerned with self and with personal preference and personal security and more and more consumed by the activity of compassion. I believe it is better to understand this as a direction and a tendency that is continuously clarifying and strengthening in your life and which over time opens up new perspectives, new vistas of spiritual understanding and new levels of letting go of self concern. These new perspectives, new understanding and vision, manifest in greater clarity, greater commitment and a greater creativity.

 Commitment is a wholehearted engagement with the spiritual path, spiritual practice and spiritual friends because we have seen and experienced enough to know that if we continue it will bear fruit in a meaningful life of wisdom and compassion. Creativity is the expansive, other regarding activity of someone who has some Insight into the nature of Reality. Bhante contrasts it with habit and reactivity which is how we behave when we are still concerned to protect and defend and enhance our ego identity, our sense of a separate, vulnerable and fixed self. Creativity is about breaking the habit of being a particular kind of person. It is about creating yourself afresh. As we become more committed and creative this will manifest in our lifestyle and in our relationship to Dharma practice and to the spiritual community. Our lifestyle will become simpler, less complex and frenetic and more integrated with our deepest values. It will become more an expression of what we truly understand to be meaningful and worthwhile in life. Sometimes this means making quite big changes, perhaps for ethical reasons or simply in order to bring more sanity and tranquillity into our lives. This is not necessarily a painful, disruptive eruption in one’s life; it can be more like growing up and leaving behind the things of childhood, which in this case might be things like status and instant gratification.

As we become more committed and creative we are also likely to find that Dharma practice has much more of the flavour of positive emotion and expansiveness, and is less and less about our problems or emotional upsets. And as that happens we will find ourselves wanting to serve the spiritual community in whatever way we can, by giving ourselves wholeheartedly and supporting the institutions of the spiritual community in all sorts of ways.

When we reach the Stage of Spiritual Death or Spiritual Victory we will naturally want to devote our lives to the service of something greater than ourselves. We will find that we can say the Transference of Merits and Self Surrender at the end of the sevenfold puja and really mean it: “my personality throughout my existences, my possessions and my merit in all three ways I give up without regard to myself. May I become that which maintains all beings so long as all have not attained to peace.”

All Things Great and Small

This is the second talk in a series of six given at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre in the summer of 2016.

Integration is about wholeness and completeness, it’s about bringing together all aspects of our psyche,our life, our values, all aspects of ourselves great and small. Each one of us is like a bunch of different people with conflicting desires, conflicting drives, conflicting behaviour, even pulling in different directions. Spiritual practice can accentuate our experience of this – but it also helps to bring it all together – in awareness. Awareness is the key to integration.

When we embark on the journey of spiritual life we want and need to take all of us on the journey or as much as possible. This means becoming aware of the different pulls, the different desires in us, how we conflict with ourselves. Knowing what is best for us and actually doing what is best for us  is not quite the same thing and doing what we want is not the same as doing what is best. Sometimes we are too weak, or too unintegrated, to fully pursue our highest values, our spiritual goals. So we need to become more aware of ourselves aware of those different tendencies in ourselves, aware of our character and temperament, aware of our habits, and aware of how we have been conditioned by our upbringing, our family, our schooling, and the society around us. When we get to know ourselves, when we know what we’re like, then we know the raw material that we’re working with on the spiritual path. We know what we are trying to transform.

So the question arises how can we become more integrated. I tend to think of integration as broadly covering three areas. These three areas are simply a way of approaching the topic of integration. The three areas are psychological integration, life integration, and spiritual integration. Psychological integration is about knowing yourself, life integration is about being yourself, and spiritual integration is about challenging yourself. So first of all psychological integration.

Psychological integration, as I said, is about knowing yourself – having no secrets from yourself. In order to know yourself you have to look closely at your conditioning. You have to look at how you were conditioned by your family. This can reveal our attitudes to such things as money, sex, religion, career, politics, race, nationality and all sorts of other areas of life. So becoming aware of this conditioning and becoming aware of our attitudes gives us the choice to retain or change our attitudes. These attitudes will have been conditioned not just by our family but also by our education, our religious training, if any, and the whole tone of the society around us and what is accepted as normal and what is rejected. For instance our society is very much a consumer culture and children are trained in consumerism from a very early age. According to the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood,  “Children ages 2-11 see more than 25,000 advertisements a year on TV alone, a figure that does not include product placement. They are also targeted with advertising on the Internet, cell phones, mp3 players, video games, school buses, and in school.”  http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/resource/marketing-children-overview

This may seem quite normal to us but future generations may view it as a form of child abuse, in the same way that we view the 19^th century practice of sending children up chimneys. There are many things which our ancestors took as a matter of course which we find rather strange today In the same way there are many things which we take to be acceptable which other nations or future generations will consider to be ridiculous or appalling. . In some countries this kind of conditioning of children is outlawed. For example in Sweden it is prohibited to advertise to children under 12. In order to become free of our conditioning we need to try to have a bigger perspective on what is considered normal in our families and in our societies. It is possible to be parochial in our attitudes to the times we live in as well as in our attitudes to the place where we live. Scientific and technological advances may have led us into the arrogance of thinking we know and understand more than we actually do. Of course conditioning continues all the time, it is not just something that happens in childhood. We are being conditioned every day, we are conditioning ourselves every day. The shops you visit, the news you hear or read, the attitudes prevalent in society, in our workplaces, on TV, in films – all of this is having a conditioning effect on us and we need to bring awareness to this and try to exercise some choice in our conditioning. I have noticed particularly how people pick up ideas and behaviours from workplaces, which they then assume to be a standard for life.  Of course many workplace norms may be just a bureaucratic over-reaction to particular events and may even have the opposite of the desired effect when applied in a blanket fashion.

As well as exploring and understanding our conditioning, we need to learn about our personality, our temperament. What kind of person are we – are we an extrovert or introvert, do our interests lean more towards the arts or towards the sciences, are we very practical  or are we more of a dreamer, are we decisive or indecisive, are we someone who is only interested in the big picture or are we concerned with the details, do we plan or do we prefer to be very spontaneous and impulsive, are we lazy, are we always busy, are  we an active or a passive person? In Buddhism traditionally there are three types; greed type, hate type and deluded type. We could ask which predominates in us. We could also try to become aware of our habits; our habitual ways of thinking, our habitual ways of seeing the world, our habitual ways of seeing ourselves, our habitual behaviour, our good habits and bad habits. Sangharakshita has said we are essentially a bundle of habits loosely tied together, more often than not bad habits.

We also need to become aware of any inner conflict. Are we being pulled in different directions – e.g. wanting to concentrate on accumulating wealth in order to be happy and secure and at the same time wanting to lead a spiritual life in order to be happy and secure or perhaps less conscious conflicts around the whole area of wanting to make an effort to change and not wanting to make an effort to change. Bhante talks about two aspects of himself that were in conflict in his younger days – the monk and the poet. One part of him wanted to be very disciplined and just meditate and study the Dharma and another side of him wanted to laze about dreaming and writing poetry. I have experienced these kinds of conflict in myself too – an aspect of me that was very strict and disciplinarian and another which was lazy and rebellious. Firstly it is necessary to become aware of these kinds of polarity in ourselves and then that awareness helps to resolve the conflict – usually with some sort of internal compromise that allows for different kinds of expression.

Integration is not about a forcible denial of some aspect of yourself. It’s not about getting rid of aspects of yourself; it is about creating a large field of awareness which can contain or hold all aspects of yourself. It’s about being big. I coined an aphorism some years ago – don’t be good, be big – which perhaps captures some of the spirit of what we are trying to achieve with integration. There is a Zen image which talks about controlling an animal by giving it a large field and similarly we don’t control our minds by restricting them but by allowing them a large field in which to roam. The task of our awareness is to watch, to notice.

The next area of integration is what I have called life integration. This is about integrating the external with the internal. How are our higher values, the values which we hold most dear, lived out in our work lives, in our home lives, as well as in the privacy of our own hearts and minds?

Here's what the Sangiti Sutta says about the practice of spiritual community, for instance:

“ Six things are conducive to communal living. As long as monks both in public and in private show loving kindness to their fellows in acts of body, speech and thought,…. share with their virtuous fellows what ever they receive as a rightful gift, including the contents of their alms bowls, which they do not keep to themselves,… keep consistently, unbroken and unaltered those rules of conduct that are spotless, leading to liberation, praised by the wise, unstained and conducive to concentration, and persist therein with their fellows both in public and in private,… continue in that noble view that leads to liberation, to the utter destruction of suffering, remaining in such awareness with their fellows both in public and in private.” Digha Nikaya 33.

There is this interesting repetition of the phrase "in public and in private" which reinforces the idea that spiritual community is a practice. In this case it is a practice of loving kindness, generosity, ethics and right view.

So this area of life integration is about being the same person in private and in public; the same values, the same behaviour. And it is also about bringing our external life into line with our internal life. For instance we may need to ask ourselves does our work or living situation support our values and suit our character. For example Siddhartha before he became the Buddha lived a life of luxury which he found did not support his aspirations. It is said that he lived in a Palace or a number of palaces, but to him they were like prisons. What are our palaces? What in our lives supports our aspirations? What doesn’t? Many of you will have created personal mandalas at one time or another. You draw a circle on a piece of paper; one side of the circle is what is important to you, the other half is how you spend your time, money and energy, what you put closest to the centre of the circle is what is most important to you on one side and on the other side is what you spend most time and energy and money on. This simple exercise tends to show us if there is a discrepancy between what we aspire to do with our lives and what we are actually doing with our lives. So the question for us then in terms of integration, is how to bring the two closer together. How to integrate the external and internal, how to integrate the public and private, how to integrate our lives at work, at home and at leisure with our values and our temperament. Or to put it more simply how can we be ourselves as well as knowing ourselves? We could also talk about this kind of integration in terms of taking the iniative to create the conditions which will be most conducive to making spiritual progress, most supportive of living a spiritual life.

 The third area of integration is what I’ve called spiritual integration. Spiritual integration is about integrating around spiritual ideals, spiritual practices and spiritual qualities. We sometimes speak of spiritual integration in terms of putting something at the centre of your life and arranging or aligning everything else in your life in relation to what is central. Going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha means having the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha at the centre of our lives and everything else is arranged in relation to those ideals. So your ethical practice, meditation, study, going on retreat, spiritual friendship etc would become the priorities and other things would be more or less important depending on whether they supported the central ideals and practices. This is challenging. It might mean going on retreat instead of on holiday. Or studying or attending a study group instead of going to the cinema, or spending time with friends instead of with a partner, or meditating rather than watching the TV or surfing the Internet.

We also speak of spiritual integration in terms of commitment. Making a commitment can be very challenging for some people. It can be seen or sensed as a restriction of freedom. Making a commitment is basically about making a choice, making a decision. It’s about deciding to do one thing rather than something else, it’s about choosing one direction rather than another. As the poet Robert Frost says: “two roads diverged in the wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” The spiritual path is the road less travelled, the path less trodden. Although commitment can be conceived of as a restriction of freedom – in practice it is the opposite. Let’s take a very mundane example – you want to buy a new pair of shoes, you need new shoes. Now you can go online and spend several hours researching to find just what you want. Then you could visit several shoe shops and department stores and in each place you could try on several shoes. There is no restriction on your freedom here – and you could keep on expanding your choices for a long time. But when you decide, choose a pair of shoes and pay your money then you have restricted yourself, you have chosen, you have made a commitment. But although you have restricted the freedom to keep on looking, to keep on expanding your choices, you have created another freedom for yourself. Firstly you have freed up all the time and energy you were wasting on endless indecision and secondly, you now have the freedom to wear the new shoes – which was the whole point in the first place.

In our world you could also keep your spiritual options open indefinitely. There are different religions to choose from. When you have settled for one of these – there are many different varieties within each religion. In Buddhism you have Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana,. You have Theravada, Tibetan, Zen, Pure Land and so on. Within Theravada you have Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai. Within Tibetan there are Gelug, Nyingma , etc. Within Zen there are Soto and Rinzai. And of course there are new Western variations on these and many different teachers to follow; Ole Nydale, Pema Chodron, Joseph Goldstein, Daniel Ingrams, Sharon Salzburg, Rob Burbea and many many more. Just as with shoes, you could keep on expanding your choices, visiting places, trying out new things. We all have that freedom. It is really the freedom to waste our time and run around in circles. Making a commitment liberates us from that dubious freedom and sets us on the path of spiritual integration.

When you decide, when you commit, your time and energy is freed up to actually practice wholeheartedly (to wear the shoes), you can now give your time and energy more fully to the practices which give rise to the qualities which will lead in the direction of the ideal.

In our case in Triratna these practices are ethics – the Five or Ten Precepts, meditation – mindfulness of breathing, the Metta Bhavana and just sitting, study – Bhante’s elucidation of the Dharma, reflection, friendship and Sangha, ritual and devotion, retreats – both collective and solitary.

In his exposition of the first three fetters – the fetters which hold us back from stream entry, from entering fully and wholeheartedly into the stream of the Dharma, the stream of spiritual vision and spiritual Awakening, Bhante Sangharakshita talks about clarity and commitment as the antidote to indecision and superficiality. Clarity is what helps us to decide what direction we want to travel in, commitment is actually undertaking the journey. As Bhante says: “Growth and development is often a painful process – even though it is enjoyable! Therefore we tend to shrink back. We tend not to commit ourselves. We keep our options open, as we say. We keep a number of different interests, or a number of different aims, on which we can fall back, and we allow ourselves to oscillate between them: even drift between them.” Taste of Freedom, p. 32.

Spiritual integration is about challenging yourself to make a choice and following through on that choice with commitment. You have to ask yourself; “Am I serious about this – do I really mean it? If so – what holds me back? Why do I hold back? That leads to an exploration of fears, resistances and conditions and a growing awareness of the way forward.

I’ve talked about integration in terms of psychological integration – knowing yourself, life integration – being yourself and spiritual integration – challenging yourself.

How do we go about becoming more integrated? Well as I said at the outset awareness is key. Sometimes we equate the practice of the mindfulness of breathing meditation with integration but that is just part of the practice. The mindfulness of breathing is an important practice in the process of becoming integrated, but it is not the only practice and probably not enough on its own. We need to work on integrating ourselves all the time. It can be like a game we play – a game of noticing, a game of awareness – a kind of “I spy with my little eye game”. We need to notice our responses to situations, and to people and reflect on them, ask ourselves questions. We need to notice when we blame people, situations and events for our state of mind. We can ask ourselves – what if I didn’t blame? How does blaming feel? What purpose is served by blaming? And so on. We can notice when we are complaining – we can ask is it habitual? We can notice when we are content – and ask ourselves – what gives rise to contentment, happiness? We can notice our energy and aliveness. We can notice what our preferences are – what we like and what we don’t like. We can notice what really interests us and where our energy goes. We can notice what moves us. We can try to be aware of how our conditioning is at work in our lives all the time – in our responses, in our likes and dislikes, in what we approve of and don’t approve of, and so on. We can also bring awareness to our body, because body and mind are not divorced and our body carries our conditioning too.

And in all cases – positive or negative – we can ask ourselves – what gives rise to do this? In dependence on what conditions is this arisen? When we have clarity about the conditions that give rise to contentment, energy, aliveness, creativity etc, we can put energy into creating those conditions or strengthening those conditions in our lives. There are conditions for a healthy happy mind and there are conditions for a healthy happy body. Proper food, exercise and rest is good for your body. By noticing and being aware you will discover what conditions affect your mind most – what gives rise to happiness and contentment and what gives rise to grumpiness, blaming and complaining. There are external conditions that you can try to be objective about – for instance which is better for me – Facebook or fresh air, the Internet or exercise?

Integration is about knowing yourself, being yourself and challenging yourself. The two key practices I would like to highlight as the most effective practices for becoming more integrated and whole are friendship and going on retreat. They can of course be combined – go on retreat with friends.

Integration is not a solitary affair. We need other people to help and encourage us and they need us. We can get to know ourselves via our friends. We need to be open to how they see us – especially the positive qualities they see in us. If we have people we can confide in, confess to and be open with – it will be an enormous help to us. Friendship can free people from the burden of secrets and shame and provide a context of warmth and understanding which we all need as a basis for progress on the spiritual path. I have often encountered people who experience a lot of guilt and shame but usually it is not a shame that is of any spiritual value. We need only be ashamed of unskilfulness.

Some people blush a lot and feel embarrassed easily – but often this is just a matter of early conditioning and has no spiritual significance or importance. I was like that when I first came to Triratna. I used to even get embarrassed on behalf of other people. My friend Atula told me once that I’d have to follow the path of embarrassment. In other words, not allow a response of embarrassment to get in the way of communication and friendship. It’s the same with fear or insecurity or feeling inadequate – don’t let them get in the way of friendship. Friendship is crucial to spiritual life, and communication and listening are crucial to friendship. You develop a friendship by being a friend to others: think of others, listen to them, try to see their point of view, stand in their are shoes, be helpful, be encouraging, take an interest in people. Friendship is a mirror, a mutual mirror, in which you can see both sameness and uniqueness.

Going on retreat is important because it is in retreat conditions that we go deeper and become more aware. We become more aware of ourselves at deeper levels while on retreat and this greater self knowledge enables more integration to happen. Going on retreat is really an indispensable practice for anyone who is serious about making progress on the spiritual path. For the first four or five years it is most important to go on retreat with others to build friendships and share experiences. This kind of mutual support is the foundation of spiritual community. Later we can add to this by going on more silent and meditative retreats and eventually some solitary retreat time will be very helpful. Of all these kinds of retreat the most important are the retreats where we build friendships and are mutually supportive with our peers – whatever level we perceive ourselves to be at.

If we practise consistently and persistently our awareness will grow and we will gradually become more and more integrated and whole. Then, integration will naturally give rise to positive emotion and skilful action and that is what I will look at in the next talk.

Choosing the Best

This is the third talk in the series given in Cambridge in the summer of 2016.

Today is Tuesday 14^th June. The 14^th of June was on a Tuesday in 1988 too. I know that because it was the day I became an Order Member, the day of my Public ordination. That was a choice I made which has had many consequences and it’s a choice I have never regretted. I feel both proud and fortunate to be a disciple of Sangharakshita, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. There are lots of choices we make in life – some big and life changing like the decision to join the Order and some small.

We tend to associate freedom with choice and choice is all around us. Choice is seen as a very positive thing in our culture. You will often hear politicians saying “what the people want is choice”. Choice in the National Health Service, choice of jobs, choice of lifestyles and so on. And supermarkets certainly follow the idea that the people want choice. However choice can be problematic. Too much choice can lead to misery. In the book “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz he says: “when people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and the liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannise.” He goes on to quote various studies that show that when people are faced with a large number of options they are less likely to make a decision then when faced with a smaller number – also there are various studies which show that too much choice makes people unhappy.

Fortunately for us on the spiritual level there is only one real choice we need to continually come back to – that is the choice between skilful and unskilful. Just to be clear what we mean by skilful and unskilful here is how Bhante Sangharakshita puts it: “unskilful actions are defined as those which are rooted in craving or selfish desire; in hatred or aversion; in mental confusion, bewilderment, spiritual obfuscation, or ignorance. Skilful actions are those which are free from craving, free from hatred, free from mental confusion; positively speaking they are motivated instead by generosity, or the impulse to share and to give, by love and compassion, and by understanding.” When we speak of positive emotion we mean the emotion which motivates us to act skilfully. Emotion is what motivates us. By emotion here we don’t mean moods. This is not about moods. Moods can come and go and we can go through lots of moods in the course of a day or even an hour. What we are talking about here is the overall flavour of your mind and heart – the overall emotion, the deeper emotional flow that motivates you – is it bright and clear or dark and cloudy? Is positive or negative? Is it high-energy or low energy? Is it characterised by fear or joy or cynicism or sentimentality?

Cynicism is dark, caustic and undermining and can come out in cynical attitudes and cynical humour and arrogance. A lot of what passes for entertainment is deeply cynical. As is a lot of what passes for intelligence. Sentimentality is about responding to events or people with more emotion than they warrant – it is mistaking emoting for emotion and often it doesn’t motivate – it enervates or overwhelms us. Positive emotion is a more joyful attitude that can see the good and the beautiful without being blind to suffering.

There are a whole plethora of negative emotions that can rule people’s lives. For instance, some people are very fearful or anxious, which can lead to an inability to act or being too diffident and cautious. This was a big problem for me when I was in my teens and twenties. I went on an ordination retreat in Tuscany in 1986, but Bhante decided not to ordain me because I was too meek and timid. Other people can be predominantly filled with illwill, which leads to blaming, complaining, slander, gossip, anger, impatience and resentment. Others can be predominantly greedy and selfish, which leads to always being on the lookout for advantage – financial advantage, status advantage, power advantage or petty things like bigger portions of food or special offers in the shops etc. Some are optimistic, some are pessimistic. Some people are predominantly positive, which leads to generosity, helpfulness, empathy, thoughtfulness and friendly and pleasant speech and behaviour. For myself, I would say that for much of my early life the overall flavour of my emotional life was one of anxiety. Even when I was happy I was anxious about it not lasting. Nowadays I would say the overall flavour is one of happiness or perhaps contentment is a better word.

Whatever our emotional flavour we can cultivate positive emotion. If we are predominantly negative that may be due to conditioning from our early years or the circumstances of our life or the effect of the people we mix with or the ideas and opinions we expose ourselves to. But if we want to change and become more positive we can start to condition ourselves positively. We need to make use of positive practices like Buddhist ritual and devotion and meditation. We can expose ourselves to uplifting art, whether music painting, poetry, literature, theatre, or similar. And we can mix with positive happy people. The natural world also has a positive affect on our minds – the countryside, the ocean, the night sky. If the news media or the views and opinions we encounter on TV etc. have a bad effect on us we can choose not to expose ourselves to thoses views and opinions.

Often of course we are a mixture of emotions – even contradictory emotions. We might be fearful and diffident until some event or circumstance draws out our courage and decisiveness. Or we can be both greedy and generous, resentful and empathetic. In the film Philomena, the journalist Martin Sixsmith is portrayed as being cynical and angry but also thoughtful, empathic and kind.

Whatever mixture we are, whatever the emotional flavour of our hearts and minds, we can decide to cultivate positivity. We can decide to nourish and tend and give attention to the seeds of positivity in ourselves and we can decide to put ourselves in conditions that will nourish and encourage the growth of positive emotions.

The Metta Bhavana is of course a key practice. But we need to start from where we are and not try to force ourselves to feel kindness or sympathy or compassion. We need to acknowledge and experience what is really going on, what is really the emotional flavour of our hearts and minds and then introduce gradually the idea of what is in our best interests and the idea that we do indeed want what is best for ourselves and others. Gradually with awareness and patience the seeds of love will begin to sprout. Outside of meditation it is important to mix with people we find uplifting and inspiring,  people who won’t undermine us, people who will encourage the best in us and avoid those who have a depressing or bad effect on us. People are an important factor, perhaps the most important. The natural environment of sea, mountains, night sky and so on can also raise us up emotionally.

Then there are the arts. When I first got involved with Triratna I had come across poetry and literature but I thought paintings were a kind of wallpaper for the upper classes and classical music was the sound equivalent of wallpaper for the aristocracy – aural wallpaper.

However over the years I have learned more about art, especially visual art and some of my strongest spiritual experiences have been because of paintings. There is a painting by Botticelli in the Uffizi in Florence which had a very strong effect on my spiritual practice. This is what I wrote at the time:

The painting which spoke to me most directly and most forcefully on this trip to Florence was "The Madonna of the Magnificat" by Botticelli. In this painting , which is a tondo, the Madonna is seated with the infant sitting on her lap facing forward. She is about to write and an angel is holding the ink-pot for her. Her other hand is touching the infant's hand which is holding half a pomegranate. Two more angels hold a crown above the Madonna's head. I stood before this painting with joy and laughter welling up in me and felt uplifted and inspired by its beauty and its message. Having recently had a brief sojourn in a little spiritual desert, my own spiritual quest was invigorated by this encounter. This painting and the whole cycle of images I had been engaged with seemed to answer questions about the spiritual path on an imaginative level that I had been unable to unravel conceptually. It was as if I had stepped through a doorway into a different realm where the questions that had been bothering me were no longer relevant. I also realised that I was fully free of the Christian indoctrination which had played such a large part in my early years and felt grateful to Buddhism for helping me to understand the spiritual significance of images which were so much part of my cultural inheritance.

In the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge there is a Madonna and Child by van Dyck which also had a profound impact on me. But of course the arts are different for different people and we need to just be receptive and allow ourselves to be affected. I have always been deeply affected by the written word. Before I came across Buddhism I was very strongly affected by Henry Miller’s trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, which influenced me greatly when I was about 19, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for me. Later in my twenties before I came across Buddhism, I was very strongly affected by Walt Whitman’s long poem, Song of Myself. Especially passages like this:

 “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

Looks with it’s sidecurved head curious what will come next,

Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.”

This described for me an experience of awareness which I would never have been able to describe for myself. In another poem – Song of the Open Road – Walt Whitman gave voice to aspirations that I hardly knew I had :

 “Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I am myself good fortune.

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.”

But I think friendship has been the greatest help and inspiration to me and it still is. People are the biggest conditioning factor in our lives. Therefore we need to be careful who we spend time with, especially in the early years of our spiritual life. Emotion is what motivates us and positive emotion motivates us to act skilfully.

In the Dvedhavittaka Sutta (MN 19) the Buddha talks about his life before Enlightenment. He says that his practice was to notice skilful and unskilful states of mind and to choose the skilful over and over again. In order to do this we have to be interested, motivated. We may be motivated by reading about ethics or by hearing talks or by seeing more experienced practitioners. If we are motivated then we can make an effort and be patient. We will have to repeat the same practice again and again. Our mind will want to follow its usual pattern and we will need to be gently persistent in turning towards the skilful, choosing the skilful. That means choosing honesty when we are tempted to rationalise or obfuscate or avoid the truth. It means choosing the generous impulse when we want to have second thoughts. It means choosing to be kind rather than harsh or greedy. And it means of course maintaining a kindly attitude towards ourselves as we try again and again to go with the positive and to let go of the negative. The key to all practice in Buddhism is to repeat it again and again. Persistence will plough deep furrows of skilfulness in our hearts.

As well as being motivated and persistent we need encouragement. We get encouragement by reflecting on how our practice has changed us and what we have gained. We also get encouragement from others. The practice of rejoicing in merits is a very important one to both generate positive emotion and to encourage us to keep going. Rejoicing should be happening frequently throughout the Sangha – in study groups, in teams, in communities, in going for refuge groups, in order chapters, on retreats. It’s a good idea to write down rejoicings to refer to them and reflect on them as a way of nourishing ourselves.

So if we have an interest in spiritual life, in spiritual ideals and practices we will be motivated to practice. If we repeat our practices over and over again that repetition reinforces the fruits of our practice and leads to more habitual positive mental states and positive routines. And encouragement, whether from ourselves or from others keeps us going and leads to interest in going further and further along the path. This is a positive spiral path to freedom.

Progress on the spiritual path requires faith – shraddha – especially faith in the law of karma. Shraddha is not about believing in something for which there is no evidence. Shraddha, is translated as ‘faith’ and ‘confidence’ or ‘placing the heart upon’ or Bhante has talked about it as “the response of what is highest in us to what is highest in the universe”. Shraddha is the basic positive emotion, it is what motivates us to undertake the spiritual quest, it is what motivates us to carry on practising even when things are difficult, it is what gives us the energy to be disciplined and the inspiration to act. Shraddha is the basic positive emotion and it is supported by reason and experience.

To have shraddha in relation to karma, to have faith in the law of karma means to understand and accept deeply that our actions have consequences; that skilful actions have beneficial consequences and unskilful actions lead to suffering. Karma means action. And action here encompasses thought and speech as well as our physical activity. The law of karma is that our thoughts, especially our habitual ways of thinking, our words and our deeds all have consequences. And these consequences, karma vipaka, these consequences are the world and the life we are creating for ourselves. This is relatively easy to understand but not so easy to put into practice and live by.

The first two verses of the Dhammapada say: “experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of the ox. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.” In other words what we think, especially habitually, what we say and what we do creates our world, our reality.

If many people think the same thing, imagine the same things, they create a world together. For instance there is no such thing as a country or nation. This is a purely human construct, an idea which has taken on such a life that it is almost impossible for us to imagine a world without borders and boundaries. When the astronauts first saw the Earth from space they were quite forcibly struck by the fact that there are in fact no nations – there are landmasses with people living on them and all the barriers tend to be in our minds. The point I’m making is that humanity is capable of creating a mind-made reality. And this can be on a very large scale – the whole global community or it can be on a smaller scale, as in the case of a spiritual community like the Triratna Buddhist community. We can create a world between us. A realm of wisdom and compassion, kindness and awareness that transcends national and linguistic boundaries. And individuals can create their own world – a world that connects with others or a world that isolates.

We create our world by choosing the skilful or the unskilful. If we choose the skilful over and over again; choose kindly thoughts, kind words and acts of kindness, choose generous thoughts, generous words and acts of generosity, choose awareness of thought, word and deed; if we choose the skilful we will become skilful – it will become how we function spontaneously and that leads to happiness, contentment and a life rich in meaning and purpose. We create a happy, joyful, meaningful world.

Skilfulness purifies us and prepares us for the next stage, the stage of insight, which I’ll be exploring in the next talk.

We don’t need to worry about reaching any goal or breaking through any barriers. If we are able to become continuously skilful then the barriers and resistances will just fall away and the goal will emerge, the insights will dawn upon our purified minds.

Although we speak of the spiritual path in terms of successive stages, such as the fourfold Path of giving, ethics, meditation and wisdom – although we speak like this and although this division into stages is very helpful and aids our understanding we must not make the mistake of thinking that spiritual life is really like that – first you practice generosity and then you practice ethics and that prepares the ground for meditation and meditation prepares the ground for wisdom. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that generosity contains within it wisdom, and meditation and ethics are wisdom manifesting in the world, and a continuous flow of positive mental states that is meditation at its best is the psychic equivalent of giving and ethics. So these stages are all one conjoined practice – a great flow of energy in one direction, the direction of Awakening or Enlightenment. That great flow of energy is our whole life as we become more and more integrated. And when we can develop and maintain this great flow of positive energy throughout all the different aspects of our lives then the karmic consequences follow quite naturally – the law of karma is a guarantee of success on the spiritual path. This is what we need to have faith in. This can be our inspiration and our motivation. If we choose the skilful again and again we will be spiritually successful.

But we should not expect to be perfect. That expectation would only get in the way. If we expect to be perfect we set ourselves up for constant failure. The best thing is to strive for perfection but don’t expect to be perfect. In fact the ideal of perfection can continue to be our ideal, the spiritual horizon, however far we travel. Expecting to be perfect leads to disappointment and discouragement, but there is no need for expectations. We can just allow the law of karma to work for us and the results will take care of themselves. As the Indian writer S K Paul says in his commentary on Tagore’s poems: “no hurried path of success, forcibly cut out by the greed of result, can be the true path.” S K Paul, The Complete Poems Of Tagore’s Gitanjali,P. 302.

So what does it mean to choose the skilful? What should we choose? What is the skilful?

In terms of our minds this means working in meditation to develop the awareness and sensitivity which will enable us to speak and act skilfully. It means bringing that awareness and sensitivity to all our mental and emotional states, which means not blaming other people or situations. It means not thinking – “they made me angry” or “having all this food around makes me greedy” and so on.

Our thoughts and our emotional states are what get expressed in our speech. Speech is the intermediary between mental states and physical actions. Speech conveys ideas that change the world both for good and ill. For each of us individually what we say and how we say it can have a big impact on ourselves and on other people and in that way what we say creates the world around us. Triratna Buddhist Community began in 1967 in a small basement in London, and it’s genesis and development were all because of the talks, lectures, study seminars, retreats and so on that Bhante led .  Bhante Sangharakshita talked our Buddhist movement into existence. Such is the power of words.

If we complain a lot we may find ourselves in the world of those who like to complain – a world of grumblers. If we are harsh or abrupt in our speech we may find that others avoid us and we become isolated. In the Bodhicaryavatara it says: “even friends shrink from him. He gives, but is not honoured. In short, there is no sense in which someone prone to anger is well off.” Crosby and Skilton, p. 50.  If we are grumpy and slanderous we will find ourselves in that world – the realm of back biters. And of course if we are kindly and harmonising in our speech we find ourselves in a realm of goodwill.

Speech may be the most important practical area when it comes to choosing the skilful. Our thoughts and emotions may to some extent be kept private if need be. Our actions can sometimes be reversed or compensated for, but speech seems to have a very long-lasting effect and unskilful speech can sour relationships for a lifetime. In order to be able to choose skilful speech we need to train ourselves to introduce little gaps of mindfulness into our flow of words and we need to listen. Introducing little gaps of mindfulness, little gaps of awareness, into our speech is a way of training ourselves to become conscious of the impact of our words. It is very easy to assume that what you say doesn’t have much effect, doesn’t matter, but it has a very big effect. If you are friendly and hospitable and welcoming you create an atmosphere of friendliness and joy which others enjoy and it becomes easier for everyone to be friendly. If you are grumpy and caustic you create a frosty and tense atmosphere which nobody likes and everybody starts to get irritable and tense. What we say and how we say it matters a lot and by choosing the skilful we can have a big impact on our immediate world and indeed the wider world.

One way to introduce gaps of awareness into the flow of words is to learn to really listen. Often when someone else is speaking our minds are busy formulating a response – but we don’t need to do that and indeed if we are busy formulating a response, rather than listening, then our response won’t be a response. So we end up with a dance of two monologues, rather than a dialogue. This is what happens – if you listen carefully to some people’s conversations you will find this dance of monologues is what often passes for conversation. Political discourse can be like this since it often emerges from preset ideological positions. If we listen, really listen, to what another person is saying – listen with our ears and eyes and hearts, then we can really respond. In the spiritual community we can slow down our conversations, allow periods of silence even, and listen to each other. I think listening is about 80% of communication. There is no ethical precept about listening, but perhaps there should be – with wholehearted listening I purify my speech. So skilful speech is honest, kindly, helpful and harmonising. It is also timely, spoken at the right time, appropriate. And listening enables us to communicate more skilfully.

As with all ethical practice we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be perfect. It is not so much a matter of watching every word we utter – it is much more about training ourselves to habitually speak in a kindly, harmonious, helpful and truthful way. Being truthful is not just about stating facts – although being factual is very important being truthful also involves not exaggerating and not understating or omitting things. It’s probably obvious what harsh speech is. One area that Bhante has mentioned in relation to harsh speech is swearing. We may not think of swearing in this way but it is a form of harsh speech. It is the equivalent of a bad smell. If someone swears in the Buddhist centre, it is as if they were leaving deposits of excrement about the place, it fouls the atmosphere. Swearing is not necessary and we can give it up. As a teenager and young man I used to swear a lot – no sentence was complete without a swear word. In my early twenties I mixed with Irish building labourers in the pubs of north-west London and there no sentence was complete without several swear words – in fact some sentences were just a string of swear words. I am well aware of what it is to swear and swear copiously. But I gave it up a long time ago and now swearing always sounds very strange to me – a bit like baby talk, as if people don’t know enough words and swearing is the equivalent of the gurgling of a baby.

Harmonising speech is speech that brings people together rather than causing divisions. It’s the opposite of slander. It is about rejoicing in people – especially rejoicing in people behind their backs and it’s also about passing on to people any rejoicing you have heard. This creates a trusting and harmonious atmosphere. I won’t  say anything about helpful speech and timely speech – hopefully they are obvious. I have written about these before and published a little booklet called Just a Word the contents of which is also available online (http://ratnaghosa.fwbo.net/) .

When it comes to actions perhaps it’s easier to see what choosing the skilful means. It means non-violence, generosity and contentment. Most of us are not violent and don’t kill people. However we can of course take the practice of non-violence  further and permeate all of our actions more and more with kindness. For many people non-violence means being vegetarian and for increasing numbers it means being vegan. This has the double effect of not harming animals and not harming the natural environment. The Buddhist position on abortion is that life comes into being at conception and therefore abortion is harming living beings. This does not mean that Buddhists would necessarily want legislation banning abortion – it means it would influence one’s own actions. With any of the ethical precepts of Buddhism there is no question of trying to force or coerce others into adopting them – that would in itself be a kind of violence. The precepts are guidelines for our own behaviour and they are a training, a process of learning how to be more ethically sensitive in all areas of our lives. Non-violence does not necessarily mean being passive or refusing to defend yourself from attack. How we behave in any particular situation cannot be predicted, but if we train ourselves in skilfulness, then how we respond in any situation will be influenced by that training.

Generosity is the basic Buddhist virtue – it is at the beginning, middle and end of the path. Generosity is quite a big topic and a lot has been said and could be said about it. It is basically about developing an attitude of non-attachment. Non-attachment is the mental state out of which generosity comes. By practising generosity we help ourselves to become less attached to things, possessions, money et cetera and by working on our minds and gradually understanding on a deeper and deeper level that ownership is a delusion – we don’t even own our own bodies, never mind cars and houses and so on. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada: “the spiritually immature person vexes himself thinking ‘sons are mine riches are mine’. He himself is not his own, even; how then sons? How then riches?” Verse 62. As we gain deeper insight into the true nature of reality and the true nature of life, generosity should flow quite naturally and spontaneously. At one level giving is a training, and discipline, because we still experience resistance to it. We are still in the grip of the ego clinging delusion. Later generosity becomes con-joined with wisdom as in the practice of the Paramitas, the six perfections, practiced by a Bodhisattva. This means that giving is the natural expression of wisdom. And later still generosity is one of the four means of unification of the spiritual community – one of the Sangrahavastus – this means that generosity has become a complete giving up of yourself to enable the creation of spiritual community, building the Buddhaland as we sometimes say. Choosing to act generously therefore has huge ramifications for ourselves and others and should be one of the main practices of any Buddhist.

Another aspect of choosing the skilful is choosing to live a simple life and not buy into the philosophy and practice of consumerism. For some of us living in residential communities is about choosing to live a simple life, sharing resources as well as being about creating spiritual community. This is traditionally the monastic ideal. As the Dhammapada says: “let the silent sage move about in the village as the bee goes taking honey from the flower without harming colour or fragrance.”  Verse 49. Of course not everyone can live like this, although probably more could. But whether you live alone or in a family or communally, you can still move in the direction of simplicity of lifestyle. How many pairs of shoes and overcoats does a person need? How much of the stuff lying around our houses or rooms do we really need?  We can ask ourselves ‘Do we really need what we are about to buy?’ Could the money be put to better use? Again this is about training ourselves to move in a particular direction gradually. Is not about dramatic gestures that we may regret later. Although sometimes a dramatic, big clear out can show you what you really need.

Positive emotion is the emotion that motivates us to act skilfully and when we choose skilfulness when we act skilfully we generate more positive emotion. We generate shraddha, faith, and we generate Metta, Mudita – sympathetic joy and Karuna - compassion. We even generate equanimity, Upeksha, as we become less and less attached to worldly concerns. Here is how Bhante put it when he spoke about this stage of spiritual life in a seminar in the 1970’s:

 “ By positive emotion I mean friendliness, compassion, joy, equanimity and faith and devotion. In as much as positive emotion is something that moves, not something static, this is also the Stage of Energy. In this stage one tries to make oneself as emotionally positive as possible. One overcomes all negative emotions. One tries not only to develop one’s emotions but to refine them. One develops not simply positive emotion but even spiritual emotions. And here the whole question the whole subject of spiritual beauty becomes of importance.”  

When we train ourselves in the ethical precepts, when we train ourselves to choose the skilful, we are training ourselves to choose the best for ourselves and for the world. Choosing the best is the life and practice of a Buddhist.

From Getting Going to Letting Go

This is the first in a series of six talks on the theme of the five stages of spiritual life given at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre in the Summer of 2016.

Any undertaking which involves training and learning is a progressive process. Whether it’s athletics, mathematics, chess, a new language or learning to drive; they all involve a graduated path, a progressive process. First you have to learn the basics and gradually you begin to see how everything connects up and by degrees you gain mastery. When you have really gained mastery you can let go of everything you’ve learned and all the training manifests in an ability to be creative.

Spiritual life, which is a training, ( a metaphor used by the Buddha –e.g. see Bhaddali Sutta)is very similar; it’s a graduated progressive process. The major difference is that when it comes to spiritual life we are not talking about gaining knowledge in an area of expertise, we are not concerned with mastering some particular discipline; we are engaged in transforming all of us, the totality of our being and contributing to transforming the world. Spiritual life is not an aspect of life, it is the whole – it is a response to the existential dilemma facing every single human being – the inescapable fact of death. This is brought out in the story of Siddhartha and the four sights: his encounters with old age, sickness and death represent this existential dilemma facing every human being.

When we talk about following a spiritual path we are talking about teachings and methods which seek to explain our situation to us and tell us what to do about it. Following the path is mastering the teachings and practising the training methods. However that is not the whole of it, because mastering the teachings and practising the methods means allowing them to transform us, root and branch, and that means that as we learn, as we train, we become a new person, a different person and as that happens our whole perspective on what the training and practice is about also changes. The more we master the training and practice, and more fresh and new and meaningful it becomes.

Although Buddhism is often neatly packaged in a list of stages of a path, it is never quite that simple – but at the same time it is not complex – it’s just surprising.

We have the threefold path of ethics, meditation and wisdom; the six perfections of generosity, ethics, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom; the Noble Eightfold path – perfect vision, perfect emotion, action, speech, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and meditation and we have the five stages of spiritual life. All of these and many others are helpful and if we thoroughly engage with any of these teachings we will find that they all contain each other; they are just different formulations of the path – not different paths.

Bhante Sangharakshita has given talks and lectures on all of these formulations of the path and more and in more recent years he and Subhuti have been emphasising The Five Stages of Spiritual Life, perhaps because this formulation brings out the graduated progressive nature of spiritual life even more strongly than some of the other paths, and also because it can be more easily correlated with our practices of meditation, ethics, spiritual friendship and so on.

Over the next few months I will be exploring this five stage formulation of the path in a series of talks.

The main obstacle to spiritual life is an unwillingness to change or an unwillingness to change completely. Sometimes we want to change, but only on our own terms; we only want to change what we find uncomfortable. But sometimes it’s even more important to change what we find comfortable. The main requirement for spiritual life is not intellectual ability, it’s not ability as a meditator, it’s not the ability to give talks, it’s not about being articulate or clever or sociable – the main requirement for a successful spiritual life is the willingness to change – the willingness and ability to change and keep on changing. We need to be willing to change our behaviour, our ideas, views and opinions, our ways of thinking, our habits, our circumstances, our lifestyle, everything – everything is in the melting pot. We may not have to change everything, but the willingness is a key factor in making progress.

If we are really willing to change then the training and practices will work their magic on us and the caterpillar will emerge as a butterfly, the acorn will become an oak tree, we will emerge from the shell of our ignorance and soar into the skies of wisdom and compassion.

For all of this transformation to happen we need to pass through the stages of growth and development as laid out in the path of five stages – integration, positive emotion, spiritual death, spiritual rebirth and spontaneous compassionate activity. The first three of these stages are active, they are something we do, they belong to the realm of karma. The last two stages are the results of our practice. However we can also see all of these five stages as aspects of spiritual life, all of which we need to practice all the time. We could imagine them as five steps of a stairs – that is the five stages ascending and we could imagine each step of the stairs as having five different colours – that is the five aspects – integration, positive emotion, spiritual death, spiritual rebirth, and receptivity. The Five aspects are what we practice ongoingly – the colours on the steps – and the five stages are a map of what spiritual life looks like overall, over a lifetime.

I will be giving a talk on each stage. This introduction is the first talk. The second talk entitled All Things Great and Small is about integration and in that talk I will talk about three kinds of integration, I will talk about how we can become more integrated and I will tell you what I think are the key practices in relation to integration. The third talk is called Choosing the Best and is about positive emotion. In that talk I will talk about the basic choice we have in life, about how we can cultivate positive emotion, about motivation and faith and about karma. The fourth talk is on spiritual death and it’s called The Victorious One. In that talk I will go into what that particular metaphor, spiritual death, means to us and what it signifies for us spiritually. I will talk about the two paths and their associated practices and I tell you what I consider to be the key practices associated with spiritual death. The fifth talk is called A Buddha like No Other and in that talk I will go to the theme of spiritual rebirth and what that means for us. I will talk about the place of imagination in spiritual life and that talk will end with a special surprise. The sixth and last talk is called Getting Out Of the Way and in that talk I will talk about dharmic responsiveness and Spontaneous Compassionate Activity. I will have some more to say about faith, karma niyama and Dharma niyama and the importance of pauses and empty spaces.

Although the path is laid out like this and is gradual and progressive, the reality can be different. We might start with a spiritual death experience and then need to go back and integrate ourselves and develop positive emotion. We may have glimpses of the nature of reality right from the outset and then need to understand the conceptual framework, to contextualise our experience. Some people have a facility for meditation and find it easy to shoot up into the higher dhyanas and have wonderful peak experiences, even insight experiences and that is good for nurturing faith. However there is a danger and that is the danger of misinterpreting experience. Most serious wrong views are based on misinterpretation of strong meditation experiences. According to the Buddha in one Mahayana Sutra, we must always check that our experiences accord with the Dharma before giving them spiritual significance. He says “check whether what you have experienced accords with the Sutras. If it does not, you should regard it as a false mental construction.” So this is a recognition that meditation experience needs to be checked against the teachings of the Buddha, because wrong views are often wrong interpretations of experience. This also comes out in the Brahmajala Sutta, where the Buddha lists 62 wrong views which were around at the time. Many of them were based on meditation experiences.

The Noble Eightfold path starts with Vision, which could be some kind of Insight or glimpse of reality, and then comes the transformation. We never really stop needing to integrate, practice skilfulness, see reality more clearly and so on. Gradually the stages change from being a discipline or practice to being the spontaneous expression of our spiritual creativity.

Any formulated path is a helpful map and compass. We need to travel the path and we may get lost from time to time or get distracted by detours and interesting side streets. That’s why it’s not enough to have the map and compass of the formulated path – we also need friends and mentors to remind us and to guide us. Our friends and guides may be able to re-inspire us when we lose our motivation or remind us of our overall purpose when things are not going well. Our mentors may be able to guide us when we are confused or even when we are over enthusiastic about some particular method or aspect of training. If we are to benefit from friends and mentors we need to be receptive. If we are to benefit from a Dharma talk we need to be receptive.

Listening or hearing is the first level of wisdom - sruta mayi prajna. We have to listen and to hear the Dharma first, before we can reflect and meditate on it and begin to embody it. In order to listen or hear something we need an open mind, not one full of predetermined ideas and interpretations. We don’t want to be like the professor in the Zen story – when he went to see the Zen master, the master invited him to have tea and while pouring out of the tea the master just kept on pouring even after the cup was full. The professor cried out “my cup is full” and the Zen master said “yes indeed your cup is full and you are not ready to receive any teaching come back when your cup is less full.” When we hear these stories we like to identify with the Zen master, but the point of the story is that we are more likely to be in the position of the professor. Our cup is too full.

As well as an open mind we need to be interested and want to learn. But listening is not just a passive thing. We are so used to being entertained by movies and soap operas and box sets that it can be easy for us to approach Dharma talks in the same way. We sit back and wait to be entertained or informed. But listening to Dharma talks is part of the first level of wisdom and that means it is in itself a spiritual practice. We have to bring as much of ourselves as possible to the practice and actively engage. We will need to find our own way to actively engage; some people take notes because taking notes sharpens your listening, some people listen again to the recording, some people discuss the talk afterwards with friends. However we do it, if we are to make the most of hearing Dharma talks we need to actively engage with them. And of course it is much better to be actually present when somebody is speaking than just listening on Free Buddhist Audio later.

So the right spirit or attitude is important as we listen to Dharma talks, not just these talks but all  Dharma talks. The right spirit is one of active engagement and receptivity. Receptivity is an essential ingredient on the path which I will visit in the last talk. But it’s worth mentioning it here at the beginning so that we can all approach these talks in the right spirit, with the right attitude. The spirit of openness to the Dharma and the keenness to learn and get different perspectives on things. It’s not about the speaker of the style or delivery. The speaker also has to have the right spirit and be receptive to the Dharma. Every Dharma talk is a good talk because the Dharma is good. Our task is to stay open to that goodness and allow it to touch us.

If you have an open mind and heart, if you want to learn or as the Scriptures say if you’re ‘eager for instruction’ and if you are willing to change, then you will have a stimulating few weeks as we go through this series of talks from getting going with integration and moving all the way through to the final letting go of the path and practitioner in the great wave of energy that is spontaneous compassionate activity. This is the road we are taking, the journey we are embarking on and here is a quote from Walt Whitman to get us started:

 “Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you,

you must travel it for yourself.

It is not far… It is within reach,

perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,

perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;

wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,

and in due time you shall repay the same service to me;

for after we start we never lie by again.”