Attenuation
Winton: of the theme of imagination. Sankapa
Winton: which Stephen
Winton: began as this morning.
Winton: and as he pointed out
Winton: the amount, this
Winton: path factor of imagination follows on from
Winton: perception, from perceptive verb perspective.
Winton: And so there's a logical, sequencing, sequencing going on here.
Winton: And
Winton: as he also said, this imagination is what
Winton: feeds into action. It gives us a sense of what we are to do in
Winton: at morally significant situations.
Winton: It isn't the same as action. It isn't even the same as intention, but it is leading up to that point where we have to make take deliberate action.
Winton: So
Winton: Why is imagination important when we explored that to large extent
Winton: before lunch. But one of the things it's it's one of its direct applications, if you like, is in Buddhist ethics.
Winton: In in feeding directly into
Winton: what philosophers call moral emotions and in in the Dharma, of course.
Winton: these
Winton: metta lovingkindness, Karuna
compassion and mood guitar
Winton: sympathetic joy. So it's only really in being able to
imagine other people's situation.
Winton: other people's feelings.
Winton: other people's way of being in the world that we can really really relate to them
Winton: in these ethically important ways.
Winton: So they're no longer abstractions, they actual. We can. We can feel the presence as
Winton: life in blood pigs. It's what
The Greeks called ecstasy. So, being
Winton: outside one's own body to be in in the body of of another person to whom we're relating
Winton: and so this business of being inside the skin, so inside the body of other people is
Winton: what is going on in tragedy, in Greek tragedy, and I want to come back to that now to tease out a few other ways in which it is. It is a kind of converging tradition
Winton: to to Zedhama
Winton: and to get back to the philosopher I
Winton: was quoting yesterday Simon Critchley.
Winton: who wrote tragedy, the Greeks and us. he says, tragedy is thinking in action.
Winton: thinking upon action and thinking for action. So it's all very much. It's about hard thinking about hard situations leading into
Winton: actually doing something about
Winton: a particularly particularly critical predicament.
Winton: And, as he also points out, it's it's sort of
Winton: the unethical version of skepticism, because
Winton: we've we don't know in a lot of
Winton: situations we find ourselves in. We only partially understand them, and yet we have to. And and yet we have to act.
Winton: So that's some. This is how imagination is firing
Winton: through the
through the Greek
Winton: tragic situation, tradition, and one of the interesting things like actually
Winton: touched on yestane relation to the October referendum here. The there's there's a lot of shame going on
Winton: in Greek tragedy, and and you know it's shame in a sense, as a
Winton: as a response to
Winton: a situation where where action has been taken has been unsuccessful and the situation becomes intractable.
Winton: So
Winton: as he also argues.
Winton: tragedy offers the most powerful template.
Winton: but diagnosing, seem seemingly intractable conflicts and sinking beyond them.
Winton: What? How? Even though they're intractable, we've got to deal with them.
Winton: And
again, this is where
Winton: the practice of the imagination is taking is taking us on what seems to be
Winton: a barrier to
to her agency. Really.
Winton: our agency is always only partial, and that's
Winton: part of the problematic in tragedy. But for what it's worth we've got to exercise it.
Winton: Towards the end of his, spoke Simon Critch. Lee refers to an incident
Winton: which has always amused me, that he is an English philosopher temporarily living in Brooklyn, New York.
Winton: and he somehow manages to bail up
Winton: none other than the the great French actor, Isabel Upair, who's just come off stage from appearing in the leading role of
Winton: Thamedra, which is another ancient tragedy which was obviously staged at the time in New York. Fidel was actually written by the Roman
Winton: philosopher Seneca, but it's based on an original by Euripides, one of the Buddhist contemporaries.
Winton: And he's sort of badgering Isabel Ubert about what is what's the magic with tragedy? And what's what's at the heart of it all, and she gets
Winton: more and more frustrated with this seemingly thick philosopher. and she eventually burst out she said, it's about aliveness.
Winton: Everything on stage is about aliveness. Nothing else matters. Ideas are just ideas. It's the fleshly presence that really that really matters.
Winton: And of course, she's referring to the intensity of these
Winton: situations being enacted in the same
Winton: room, in the same air and same light in which the public is, is viewing them.
Winton: So again, we come back to this issue of that have that we have to confront a world that we are only partially
Winton: can understand in terms of our own. And I think you know, this is this is a great way in which to understand the climate crisis. And indeed it's it's
Winton: ugly twin, a crisis of inequality in the world today.
Winton: And
for this reason, because we can see, we can see
Winton: our own predicaments
Winton: in the analogies presented by the ancient.
Winton: tragic, traditional. Indeed, the early modern tradition which Shakespearean can go
Winton: so Crichly, Crichley.
Winton: it more or less comes a conclusion that ancient tragedy is not ancient.
Winton: It is quintessentially modern and
Winton: The the one of the reasons is that
Winton: all these. the concern with tragedy
Winton: is part of a wider concern in Western thought. It is sometimes called the Death of God. Literature.
Winton: Because in 1881 nature write God's death certificate.
Winton: and not that he wasn't arguing for atheism. He was just saying, people have stopped
Winton: referring everything back to God. And and so God is dead. And
Winton: and that meant a massive shift in the way in which
Winton: Western people had to think in terms of. You know
Winton: the origins of meaning. It was no longer
Winton: God up there, but something we ourselves had to
Winton: had to take responsibility for
Winton: so
Winton: on a personal note, I mean, I've done it than a bit of
Winton: fretting and strutting on the stage. like the poor player in Macbeth for a group called Sydney University Dramatic Society.
Winton: which, just just before the pandemic
Winton: head hand.
Winton: it celebrated its 100 thirtieth birthday
Winton: by putting on a fantastic production
Winton: of Aeschylus's
Winton: Agamemnon. which is the first in note
Winton: Aristium trilogy. And it's a wonderful play about domestic violence. If you want.
Winton: if you want to see it in? In a modern context. you know, there's King Agamemnon who sacrifices his daughter Ifiggenia, too.
Winton: the god responsible for wins. So he'll get a fair wind to Troy.
Winton: which he's about to attack. leaving his
Winton: a wife clutch, seething with rage and grief.
Winton: So several years later he comes back a conquering hero
Winton: to his loving wife.
Winton: who has plans for him.
Winton: thank God! So
Winton: there's a lot of blood and guts on stage. But it's again. I was just really moved, by the way, that this undergraduate.
Winton: very modern with that sad dramatic society, should should we.
Winton: celebrating its existence by putting on this play, which was
Winton: first staged in 4 58 Bce. During the Buddha's lifetime.
Winton: He wasn't in town, of course, but it's just. It's just an interesting.
Coincidence!
Winton: big! There was also a few decades ago
Winton: just getting back to Isabel Uppaya's statement
Winton: something called living theatre. you know, even one stage up again and living theatre was about some.
Winton: the audience actually participating in the performance. and I have a wonderful memory of
Winton: of it of going to a production like this in
Paris or Van Sein.
Winton: is near Paris.
Cool! 1789.
Winton: It was back in the days when my French was in better repair than it is now.
Winton: And there was just this huge room, and with a kind of boardwalk
Winton: running through it.
Winton: And the You, you know, you bought a ticket to the performance, but there were no seats, and and you and the audience played the Paris mob in 1789, of course, was the first year of the French
Winton: Revolution and
Winton: And then, during the play, these identifiable historical characters in Dante and
Winton: and Marha and Robespierre and I all
Winton: come up in turn and harangue the crowd with their inner, their spiel, and at the same time
Winton: you have agitators coming through among the the
Winton: Paris mob, ie. Ass, grabbing us by the lapel, saying, Don't listen to him, you know he's a he's a counter revolutionary rat, and or you must follow him. He's got the good oil. And and so everyone was being seriously agitated. And it was a terrific way
Winton: to get across that historical moment when
Winton: you know these, when the revolutionary leaders
Winton: had galloped a radical horse into power. And then they were trying to rein it in
Winton: because they were bourgeois gentlemen.
and suddenly their property rights were in danger, and they're trying to
Winton: drag the crowd back.
Winton: And so, instead of
Winton: Yvite Egalite fraternity, they were trying to
Winton: replace all that with the slogan. Oh, there's gonna be order! And the reason why the play was doubly effective, because not only was the audience actually
Winton: playing in it, but because it was
Winton: an attack on the Pre, on the existing French government
of the time, but
Winton: under the presidency of Georges Ponville, who was doing precisely what these characters on stage was doing, trying to rein in the the radical currents from
Winton: the upheavals in 1,968 in Paris. But it was a you know you
Winton: you couldn't actually get the the sensations of living.
The living experience
Winton: have that kind of legal moment without this dramatic presentation.
Winton: But another way, of course, that you can
Winton: to some extent bring aliveness to an historical understanding is through historical fiction, and I've had a bit of a guard that myself in there
Winton: last few years. But the the absolute master of this of this genre is Hilary Mantel.
Winton: and some of you may have read.
called trilogy.
Winton: In twenty-sevent. She gave these Zaris lectures on how she went about
Winton: creating this amazing
Winton: re-animation really, of Thomas Cromwell.
Winton: who was Henry the Eighth's fixer
Winton: characters. It's not really yeah. In the history books.
Winton: People like this are regarded as sort of villains, but they're only stick figures wandering through the history books.
Winton: and her. She describes her task as
Winton: as liberating people who happened to be dead from the archives. so take away the stick figures and replace.
Winton: replace them with flesh and blood. Human beings, you know, who have their domestic problems and
Winton: and and face their predicaments. And
Winton: Thomas Allen Thomas Cromwell was an amazingly
Winton: multi-dimension character, because he was a you know, and a loving dad and husband.
Winton: He was a pretty handy street fighter. He was a great diplomat. He really understood about money and trade and and all the while he was having to
Winton: manage this
disturbed manchild of a King
Winton: Henry the Eighth's, and try and prevent catastrophes the whole time, and in the process he created the world's very first modern nation, state
Winton: bye, bye.
Winton: shopping officer. connection to the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.
Winton: England became a nation state as of the kind we now recognise without. with switched borders and a sovereign power inside Britain.
Winton: not beholden
Winton: to any external external authority.
Winton: And so
Winton: the way it it, just as the the extraordinary predicaments that we find Cromwell in there, like
Winton: in at the time there was this
Winton: disease called the sweating sickness struck very quickly.
Winton: and the expression was merry. In the morning, dead. In the evening it was set fast. He comes home from work one day, and his 2 small daughters
Winton: have just died of this of this disease, you know, and
Winton: having had myself 2 small daughters in the household. I thought that, you know that is.
Winton: that is psychically survivable, that sort of thing. But he.
Winton: bing Tom Cromwell, managed to
Winton: dust himself off and get on with it, and but seeing, seeing, seeing a character like that going through these experiences
Winton: with her magnificent imagination, her and her
Winton: er RAM
Winton: her attention to detail, which is part of part of Zimb.
Winton: The business of liberating people from the archives was just was just stunning.
Winton: So
Winton: One of the.
Winton: It's interesting to look at her modus operandi, too, that one of the things she insisted on was. if you're writing
Winton: people in the past. You must never, ever condescend.
Winton: Chisholm.
Winton: you know, leaves poor simple selves who didn't, hadn't read Darwin or something
Winton: said, you know that they they made their decisions
Winton: and faced their predicaments with all the intelligence that we ourselves can bring
to
Winton: to our issues.
Winton: And so one has to recreate
Winton: the mental world I had is getting back to
Winton: to to perspectives.
Winton: Now they lived in a time that we seem to be entering into where they assumed
Winton: the the end of days was
Winton: pretty close.
Winton: and they also believed that they had no sense
Winton: of the holiness of
progress and development
Winton: as we've had for the last few centuries had none of that. that for their from their world view
Winton: everything was in decline from a golden age, and that's, you know, so that the end of days would be the end
Winton: end of that process.
Winton: so you know, there's lots of ways in which I think we can
not only exercise our own imaginations. But
Winton: piggyback on the imaginations of people like this
Winton: in in getting a sense
Winton: I've helped
Winton: of of where we're at, but also what the possibilities are for action as well as a very clear understanding of the limits to our agency.
Winton: Okay, I think I might leave it at that. It gives us
Winton: 20 min for a preliminary. and around the country, and and after
Winton: afternoon tea will come back and have a full out
Winton: Q. And a session. But questions. Now
Winton: he still had pale reflections.
Winton: How this applies in the age of waiting for Goddo.
Winton: where it's much less clear what the terms of the predicament are
Winton: let alone what one might do in it.
Winton: I'm not sure that it's I mean, I would have thought
Winton: the predicaments were fairly clear today.
Winton: and this is obviously conversation. We're going to be continuing sorry I meant in in waiting for goddess. So you're looking at Greek tragedy, and that's a reflection of her time, and in a way waiting for Goddough is a reflection
Winton: part of our world, or, yeah, sorry it's you have been a disadvantage, and it's a long time since I saw
Winton: waiting for goddess. I just remember
Winton: there were 2 characters. Was that the one, whether in garbage beams and
Winton: and just waiting for they're on the stage. They're just waiting for goddess. They're not quite sure why goddess said he might come today, but not quite sure whether he'll come and and they pass time by telling feeble jokes
Winton: and hitching their trousers up.
Winton: and occasionally talking about suicide, but not actually doing it.
Winton: And then, at the end of the day.
Winton: at the end of the second act, when
Winton: goddess doesn't come that says, Oh, we'll just go on. We have to fail. We have to fail better.
Winton: Which is that wonderful quote?
Winton: I had no idea how.
Winton: how to answer your question. Would you like to answer it?
Winton: Well, well, I suppose a reflection is, and it goes back to something that you said yesterday. The question of moral ambiguity and uncertainty
Winton: is that
Winton: in Greek tragedy
Winton: there is uncertainty within a kind of
Winton: agreed frame of a story being played out. It's just that people don't know their place in the story and play it out in a way which brings all
Winton: death and destruction to them, but also it ensures the continuity of that
Winton: stormy
Winton: Ingotto is just very uncertain what stories going on, whether you're in the right place at the right time, what sort of thing you should be trying to do, and when Godo turns up, no idea who he is or what he's actually going to do.
Winton: So it's a world in which the
Winton: scaffolding within which it's like the difference between having a map and not knowing where you are on the map
Winton: and not having a map at all.
Winton: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the that that situation. That situation is around the foreign, too Greek tragedy. In that things were always moving forward in Greek tragedy.
Winton: and the characters are fairly Leah. that whatever whatever it is they're doing. It's significant but they just
Winton: don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Winton: so I think that'd be the difference? I can't. I mean I have trouble seeing weight of God as a tragedy. Well, I suppose my question is, are we? Is our predicament the predicament of a Greek tragedy, or the predicament of goddess of waiting for God, where it's just very uncertain what's going on.
Winton: who we are and what we might expect to happen.
Winton: and I suspect it's a little bit more like that than the Greek tragedy
Winton: picture. where
Winton: the terms of engagement are fairly clear.
Winton: The association that comes to mind now is that is
Winton: late, unlamented Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying.
Winton: don't worry about climate change, because technology.
Winton: we'll have the answer to it. Can't say technology I'm thinking of.
Winton: I don't think it's been invented yet, but it is going to fix the problem. We don't really have to
Winton: stop doing business as usual. I think that's
Winton: that would be that. That would be The association I'd make.
Winton: And of course it's not the association anyone in this room. I mean, we wouldn't be thinking, God, I like about
Winton: about climate change or
Winton: other forms of environmental disfallation.
Winton: Anyone anyone want to.
Winton: you, Cigarette.
Winton: coming back to. I hope I wrote it down correctly, Simon Critchley. Sort of
Winton: thesis that
Winton: you you paraphrase this, even if conflicts are seemingly intractable. we still have to deal with them.
Winton: The question I'd ask you is.
Winton: how do you see yourself
Winton: dealing with him
Winton: by extension us?
Winton: I'm sort of aware of my age, and in, I guess my days of doing
Winton: daring pieces of protest and that sort of thing are over. But I certainly do
Winton: go on the Demos, and
Winton: make a few donations to
Winton: causes, I think, are directly associated with those twin crises that I've mentioned.
Winton: at.
Winton: We'll be talking a bit more bad
Winton: strategy and tactics later on in the week.
Winton: But I think it's
Winton: as has never been accounted before, I think, in any form of mobilisation like someone had just come from the
Winton: confrontation in Newcastle last weekend. I mean, I think that sort of thing is really important.
Winton: Get some television.
Winton: and it's highly visible.
Winton: and same goes for things like
Winton: extinction, rebellion, but at the but I think
Winton: it has to be complemented bye
Winton: much more targeted kind of political action
Winton: to try, not
Winton: not beside the other kinds of
Winton: action, but as a way of focusing
Winton: on certain ways in which to dismantle the system
Winton: that is producing these these twin evils.
Winton: Thanks.
Winton: I have a question about the ordering or the reordering of the eightfold path.
Winton: It might be more suitable to Stephen, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it when I think about the metaphor of the egg shuffling hen
Winton: which is lovely. I always thought about it more as a in a single practitioner or a single singer's lifetime, as in you know, we
Winton: maybe an appropriate work is more prominent at one part.
Winton: but in the beginning of your talk. you know, reflecting on the
Winton: the clear order, or reordering in the way the perspective proceeds. Imagination.
Winton: are we not sort of
Winton: pinning it down
Winton: again. And
Winton: is that egg shuffling
Winton: sort of being interpreted on a broader timeline as within the different traditions, rather than within a single person's capacity to focus on any one area.
Winton: The
Winton: the the global Aol path in the conventional sense, was always a feedback feedback move.
Winton: Anyway. I mean. It wasn't as if
Winton: one d yeah.
Winton: one fully practiced the first path factor and then moved on to the next part.
Winton: It was always a question that they should all be present.
Winton: In one's practice
Winton: they can be all be practiced at once.
Winton: just like the eggs
Winton: that they they're all there at the same time and to and it's a feedback loop that will continue.
Winton: Throughout
Winton: our lives for us on the swing as long as we are practicing.
Winton: So, in a sense it doesn't matter where you start.
Winton: The only reason that they've been
Winton: put in the particular order they have by the tradition is
Winton: and this is Stephen's conjecture, and I agree with it is because
Winton: it has been put in that order
Winton: by monastics to make sense of their
Winton: of. There were have practiced.
Winton: And so that's this is just kind of a logical sequence. No.
Winton: an actual practical sequencing. So
Winton: if we, if we want to
Winton: re-re-sequence them.
Winton: So it makes more sense to us.
Winton: then it does. It seems to be much more sensible to start with the contemplative aspects
Winton: before moving on to the action
Winton: aspects in practice. We're going to be all over them all at once. you know. So
Winton: as far as the hen and the eggs are concerned.
Winton: I kind of
Winton: translated it in
Winton: Australian terms to the brush turkey approach.
Winton: you know, with the brush
Winton: turkey mail
Winton: makes this huge mound of
Winton: a bluch. and in a female counsel lies the eggs in the mulch
which.
Winton: as it as it writes it, warms everything up.
Winton: so the female leaves the same. and the male leaves are seen. and the eggs
Winton: hatch themselves.
Winton: I think you can.
Winton: You could probably rewrite the
Winton: rewrite the story in that way. But but the point is that all the eggs are being warmed
Winton: at the same time by this huge
Winton: but much, most much to the despair of, you know the North Shore gardener
Winton: whose whose garden has been ripped apart in the process. But
that would seem to me to be
Winton: one another way of thinking about. You know how
Winton: we are working on all the path factors
Winton: all at the same time.
Winton: Hello, Vivian!
Vivien Langford: Oh, Hi, Winton! I like that image of that theatre in Vincent, where the demagogues are on a platform above the crowd and haranguing us.
Vivien Langford: and the crowd is getting stirred up by the agitators very hard to see what's happening when you're in the crowd.
Vivien Langford: I feel that our tragic situation, all the different frontiers of it. is a bit like that, and it gets more and more alarming as people are elected who are even more
Vivien Langford: ridiculous than the last. One kind of thing in the political world.
Vivien Langford: But I remember a talk you gave to us, and also on radio about the people of Neu Chambon.
Vivien Langford: and in your holocaust studies you said to me, at least, you said it was a tiny percentage of people
Vivien Langford: who took that sort of action to save
Vivien Langford: persecuted Jewish people and help him get into safety very tiny
Vivien Langford: minority, even though a lot of Hollywood films about that period show a lot of heroic people hot, hiding people in their
Vivien Langford: attic and helping them. But you said it really was a tiny manner. It was really so brilliant to me to think about that, that maybe in any situation it is only a tiny number, because
Vivien Langford: I think with well, the one I focus on is climate change. It's a swelling crowd, and people talk about building the movement, but I always think surely it has to double and double again, and double again until the politicians and the
Vivien Langford: business class take notice and and get frightened a bit.
Vivien Langford: and I just remember about the Leu Chambon. You said the people there had been persecuted themselves for centuries as Huguenots, and they knew what to do like they were ready. They knew what to do.
Vivien Langford: And that's what comes out of
Vivien Langford: tragedy. Do you think.
Vivien Langford: in that sense of knowing what to do, because when we watch tragedy we get a very refreshing feeling of
Vivien Langford: life like Isabel, who Pierre says it's aliveness, it's not.
Vivien Langford: can't do anything about life. You can't, you know. It's
Vivien Langford: trying to take on
Vivien Langford: the tragic in the tragic situation. Try to take something on. You might fail, but
Vivien Langford: you do your best to know what to do.
Winton: Yeah, it's it's again it's hard to make a comparison between
Winton: you know what was going on
Winton: in the holocaust and
Winton: forms of resistance. To that
the chambal experience was
Winton: a very exceptional experience.
Winton: but it still involved, you know, an enemy you could see and outwit and defeat.
Winton: Whereas
Winton: there's something quite unique about the situation. With
Winton: climate change it's one that's been
Winton: beautifully analysed by Amata.
Winton: gosh Geo is such. It was avitab
Winton: called the Great derangement. and the great derangement is referring, not just to
Winton: the derangement of you know. The biosphere. but in our minds that we can't.
Winton: It is extremely hard for us to get our heads around this kind of omnipresence
Winton: threat. You know we we can get our minds around
Winton: a genocide, a war.
Winton: a flood, an earthquake whatever, but
Winton: because they hear they
Winton: they kind of
Winton: isolatable historical events.
Winton: This is a process that's going on all around us. and partly it's perceivable. Now. I mean 1 one of the things that's happened since
Winton: he wrote that book in 2016, or whatever it was.
Winton: Was that most people in the West couldn't see it.
Winton: you know there was Hurricane Katrina, and but
Winton: that again it's a one-off, but now we are now we are seeing it. To some extent the great derangement is
Winton: is visible, but it is still so big.
Winton: so often in presence.
Winton: So difficult to think of a specific answer to it.
Winton: that it it is
Winton: it. It immobilizes resistance in that way?
Winton: Unfortunately not totally. But it. It is the reason why it is quite different to any other
Winton: catastrophe that humanity has ever faced.
Winton: Hi, my name is Libby. I was hoping we could come back to this concept of non-binary
Winton: thinking.
Winton: and it's sort of where I end up is a question on climate change. So it's all bit circular. But I've really been mulling it over since Stephen
Winton: raised or talked about this morning, and that the quote about
Winton: a person who can
Winton: can avoid
Winton: saying it is, or it is not. But my first question is.
Winton: I, in my understanding of of
Winton: Buddhist doctrine till now has been that impermanence and suffering, and not self
Winton: kind of like doctrine, you know law.
Winton: And yet this concept of non-binary thinking is asking us to to
Winton: to avoid saying, you know, or to avoid the extremes of not self
Winton: and extremes of of impermanence.
Winton: So I'm wondering. I mean, it helps me with the not self concept, because I've always found that hard that that does this mean the middle way approach is to think of
Winton: self as somewhere between being, you know, self
Winton: self being a lot and not self.
Winton: I mean is that is that the message? And or is it just saying, Don't worry too much about self, just, you know, just be
Winton: so that that's that's my
Winton: sort of
Winton: first question, how to kind of think about these key concepts in Buddhism
Winton: within that non binary framework. And then the second question that came to me is like when it comes to
Winton: action.
Winton: If if you're
Winton: if you're sort of sitting to some extent, you could be sitting on the fence. If you're being non-binary, you're not saying you're saying you're not choosing to say it is, or it is not so. If you talk about climate change. Does that mean? Is it better to say.
Winton: I mean, is climate change a problem, or is it not?
Winton: So? It's just kind of yeah. An interesting kind of intellectual exercise, if nothing else.
Winton: The only yeah.
Winton: Mr. I mean, on the first question of not sell.
Winton: Alright, I it's much easier to
Winton: live, not self or experience, not self, directly than it is to
Winton: you. Argue about it in ontological terms. It's one of the values of
Winton: doing a ten-day. The passenger in
Winton: intensive retreat is that you really do
Winton: experience, not self, that if they
Winton: that you know you've if you've done, if you've been a diligent
Winton: participant in the inner retreat.
Winton: And you've noted
Winton: around a hundred 1,000 experiences over the 10 days. and you've had
Winton: something's missing from it.
Winton: it doesn't refer to anybody.
Winton: and none of this refers to anybody
Winton: in the sense we would understand somebody.
Winton: so that you, you experiences. Well, this is my experience that you experienced
Winton: a kind, a kind of an absence. that this, that this character you thought was there.
Winton: He is a director of the choreographed referred.
Winton: Think. Of course it was not there, this everything was happening without
Winton: without being choreographed by somebody.
And
Winton: so that that's essentially it, that that
Winton: as I would understand it. That not self is, is.
Winton: it is the unreality of the conventional concept we have of self.
Winton: It is not a denial of
Winton: another sense of self which Stephen has used the expression soul
Winton: in
yeah.
Winton: document, you will read.
Winton: And so there is a continuity that needs to be accounted for and needs to be followed. I mean, I think of it in terms of moral agency. You know the Selfies.
Winton: What comes on a trait.
Winton: The self is what goes to sang every week.
and this anger is, you know, the one it doesn't
Winton: dogs, and it's it's that, and and the self that is in some sort of
Winton: on some sort of puff.
Winton: but it's not a self with certain, you know, certain
Winton: fixed characteristics, or anything like that. What we would usually think of as
Winton: yeah in your classic papassine
Winton: instructions. you know. Anger
Winton: not. I am angry, or my anger, but just as anger, anger is a
Winton: disidentified phenomenon that arises and passes away, you know. So it's a disidentification in that sense.
Winton: But I think it's much more useful to think of, not self in those operational terms as a meditator.
Winton: Try and figure it out, you know, philosophically.
Winton: And the second point, just to remind me, was
Winton: in the the non binary thinking context, like like climate change. Yeah, look, II mean. the Buddha was quite clear about things like that.
You accepted
Winton: expert opinion. You know.
Winton: He didn't put it that way. But I mean, for instance, he
Winton: in his mid fifties or so he had a number of medical
Winton: problems, and he went to a doctor I mean a friend of his, and there was no sense in which he was going to argue with the doctor about easily, is not. He was just.
Winton: you know, certain things are evident.
Winton: and so, and and there are people who are more or less expert in certain areas of life, and
Winton: and you accept their opinion.
Winton: If the wise says, if the wise say something exists, I say it exists. If the why say it does not exist. I say it does not exist, so
Winton: I'm sure you know, if he was here now, he'd say.
Winton: believe the climate scientists.
Winton: I don't think there'd be any chilly shelling around it.
Winton: we're 5 min overdue for tea and coffee, you know. We'll so let's come back. At 25 to 4,
Winton: yeah, 5. Just come back 5 min. like, huh.
Winton: unless you want to shorten the coffee and
Winton: have more time for Q. And A. Now let's have half an hour.
Come on.
Winton: Okay. So we've got 50 min
Winton: to yeah.
Winton: possibly drive up
a lot of
you.
Winton: I'm I'm interested in
Winton: some observation on numb
Winton: cultural context
Winton: for the discussion and perspective that's been framed to date.
Winton: We've we've had some, I think. Stephen was mentioning, for example.
Winton: the more recent acceptance of discussion around
Winton: a secular approach in Japan.
Winton: You've spent winter, a reasonable amount of time referencing Greek tragedies.
Winton: it seems, and Stephen is currently working on a book relating
Winton: the teachings of the Buddha and the teacher and those of Socrates.
Winton: We live in a multicultural environment.
Winton: and I I'm wondering
Winton: whether some of the framing to date
Winton: has been really quite circumscribed in terms of cultural relevance to a broader Western population.
Winton: so I'm wondering whether you see it in the same way, or whether you see
Winton: the discussion around
Winton: Greek tragedies as having
Winton: much greater relevance than, say.
Winton: bringing in the Mailana from Indonesia or or other cultural reference points for other subgroups within the broader population.
Winton: It it
Winton: I guess, from my own perspective.
Winton: the issue is really
Winton: What does it mean in the West
Winton: that you know the
Winton: dummy is has landed and
Winton: is putting down roots in Western culture.
Winton: It's not a process. It's not about multiculturalism.
Winton: It's we're we're just repeating what the Chinese did, what
Winton: you know the
Winton: Japanese Koreans.
Winton: Tibetans.
Winton: the Sri Lankans. They've all done it. They've all received. They've all
Received
Winton: had done from outside.
and they've all
Winton: it, in a sense put helped it to find roots in their own culture.
Winton: So you know, in Thai Buddhism, for instance, there's lots of
Winton: ghosts and goolies and ghosties and things that go wamp in the night
Winton: going on. You know the spirit houses, together with
Winton: with high temples. And
Winton: and that's fine. I mean, this is, this is a way in which the number becomes intelligible
Winton: to the people of those cultures.
Winton: And I guess I'm treating him
Winton: Western culture matches.
Winton: you know.
Winton: the other cultures have treated themselves as being fairly unitary. and and it's been a matter of of re-expressing the dharma
Winton: in the native genius, you know, with the, with the, with
Winton: thee. all the associations, the convergences. the affinities
Winton: that one can find in the host culture to help the the Dharma express itself more fully, but also to
Winton: gather the insights that can be made in comparing.
Winton: you know. The Dhamma way of experiencing
Winton: issues in the human condition to those that are already native to that tradition, and I regret, you know the Greek
Winton: Greek tragedies and Greek thought in general as being
Winton: native
Winton: to people growing up in the West.
Winton: Hello!
Winton: I'm not had to follow up.
Winton: So if, as individuals, we have other significant points of reference is the lesson that since we should be grappling with
Winton: teachings that we're talking about here
Winton: to come up with our own variation. the reference out
Winton: key cultural influences, and so on.
Winton: Yeah, as I was saying, they were kind of you know, they see the idea of the mouth of tongue.
Winton: And and in a way, the culture is just an extension of that. It's what what resonates most deeply.
Winton: you know, within you
Winton: and And so yeah, we are the heirs of Greek culture or Shakespeare, whatever it is.
Winton: and and these have very strong resonances, perhaps
Winton: much stronger resonances.
Winton: The
Winton: people of Maya antiquity because we were given much more of a grounding in school.
Winton: you know. You know.
Winton: I matriculated in Latin, and there aren't many people
Winton: who do that. And with that went a reading of
Winton: you know, Roman classics, and so forth. So
Winton: I've got, you know, in a way, a yeah. I feel uncertain about
Winton: how to. If I mean.
Winton: if this retreat
with the people under the age of 25, I don't think I'd be teaching it.
Winton: What is why?
Winton: Because
Winton: I really even know I've got. Children are now in their early forties. and I,
Winton: who really have no idea how how much
Winton: historical dip series in the schooling
Winton: collectors.
Winton: Yep.
Winton: go through it.
Winton: James.
Oh, me! Hi, hi! Winston! II had a question related to what you were talking about just before the break about the self?
James: which is, how do we avoid? Or do we need to avoid. an identity as a secular Buddhist be becoming part of a constructed self, because in the past I I've met people who will, you know, say I am a a secular Buddhist of capital S. Capital B kind of thing, and that's that's their badge
and
James: whilst I saw some really good things about them. you know, and real things, good good behaviors and and good activities that I think probably were informed by by Dharma practice. So I also saw things that I thought were not great and
James: not particularly skillful.
and.
James: for example, they were quite dismissive of people who happen to have a more traditional religious faith quite dismissive of people who might vote a different way, etc., and given the magnitude of the kind of problems that we're talking about this week.
James: it seems to me none of this is going to get solved or addressed in any way, unless we're bringing all kinds of people together. So how do we avoid?
James: Secular Buddhism itself becoming an unhelpful and to some extent unskillful, constructed self.
Good question.
Winton: I mean, even before
Winton: I practised secular Buddhism, I practiced Buddhism.
Winton: and I always said it in that those terms. It wasn't a badge of identity, but it was an orientation. It was. It was a practice.
Winton: and it didn't exclude other kinds of practices or orientations. I think that the whole thing about
Winton: wearing a badge as a badge of identity is is really fundamentally suss.
Winton: and no matter what what you do, I mean in in certain situations, of course, religious identity is, it is important from the point of view of
Winton: the outside world where it becomes, you know, in some countries religious identity is the foundation of national identity.
Winton: like it's very hard to be a Pole without being a Catholic and
Winton: and and you know, I guess some. You can't be an Afghan without being
Winton: a Muslim these days.
Winton: but that's just just unfortunate. We live this most Western countries
Winton: don't operate like that. That you, whatever whatever religious adherence you have, is not part of your national identity or social meaning.
Winton: And So we shouldn't have any kind of temptation, I think, to where our orientation or our practice
Winton: as as a badge of identity. I just think it's it's nunskilful and unhelpful.
Winton: Why, not only inner wave signals to other people, but it signals to ourselves that we're somehow.
Winton: you know, in in essence
Winton: a particular thing when we don't have any essence whatsoever.
Winton: Does that help?
James: Yeah, it does. It does.
James: I think.
James: I mean, I think, to paraphrase you very crudely. What you're saying there is. Don't do it. But is there a way to sort of. you know? Are there other checklists or things, you know? So booby traps. User phrase the other day that we can sort of keep. Keep a a a an eye out for so hang on a minute, am I,
James: you know is, is that a
James: a a kind of a trap that I'm falling in into?
Winton: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I suppose there's I mean, it's always a trap of fundamentalism
Winton: that you know, because you're one thing, you can't be another, or you're excluding, excluding other things. It's a bit like.
Winton: you know, Mary Douglas, son.
Winton: purity and pollution
Winton: she was is wonderful.
Winton: Anthropological study of
Winton: purity and purism, and sort of saying it's always it always ends up being impoverishing.
Winton: And
Winton: so in part, it's it's a question of what you do
Winton: like, you know it. I've teach from time to time
Winton: an Indonesian, an Indonesian Buddhist group who are just regular terrorists, and the
Winton: the talk is pat comes after Pooja. So I just go through the Pooja with them, and
Winton: I don't understand any of the Indonesian. I but I do understand a bit of the pali, and that's fine. I mean I bow with no bowel, and
Winton: and everything is an Auntie Dorian, and I give my
Winton: talk, which is usually
Winton: of secular Buddhist persuasion. I think that's interesting and everyone's happy, and that it seems to me that you know, being able to go with
Winton: the flow is in whatever situation you're in, I think is is a way to signaling a way of signaling to yourself
Winton: and to others that that you're not being exclusionary? Are you not tying yourself down to a particular identity? I mean I go to. because if
Winton: my age. I spent a bit of time in funerals, and they're often Christian funerals. Singer, I sing along with the hymns. I know some actually
Winton: and
Winton: you know it's I think it's just important to blend in. you know, around to
Winton: to look to blending in, unless something
Winton: towards going on, than it is to say, look, I'm different.
Winton: Hey? Look at me.
James: Okay, thank you.
Winton: Winton. I just wanted to circle back to
Winton: when you were referencing Hilary Mantel's warfall trilogy, and the the sort of
Winton: historical context around that of the sort of
Winton: sixteenth-century sort of pre-enlightment kind of end of days. Concept
Winton: in in 2019, when I was sitting in front of my television in Sydney.
Winton: and was looking at my where my daughters were in Maruya sort of, you know, in flames, and it was really kind of scary.
Winton: and they'd been evacuated from a a bush block. They'd got away, which was great. But
Winton: basically.
Winton: all the systems. All the systems had gone down, and they were relying on a
Winton: a friend's mother who was using a wind up radio and a battery driven torch to light the way, and it was around that time
Winton: I came across
Winton: the work of a social scientist from Cumbria University, called Jen Bendell, who posited. He! He wrote a paper which was
Winton: positing term he coined, called Deep adaptation, which was his argument was that we've we've passed the tipping point
Winton: and we need to be preparing ourselves to live in a way that is.
Winton: to how to live a good life
Winton: in what is essentially, I guess you know, end of days, and that you know, I mean, there is an argument that we have. We've had a good run as
Winton: humans on this planet. And you know, maybe it's time for somebody else to have a go. Some other organism might do a better job. But I mean, I'm sort of on. I'm a bit nonbinary about about the, you know. I have sort of walked back from my original panic in 2,019, when this kind of came across my my
Winton: my computer screen. But I did some sort of due diligence in sort of looking him up and
Winton: reading about his work, and saw that some, you know, he's not a climate scientist, and that there were climate scientists like Michael Mann who who did not, you know, they really sort of didn't agree with him. But increasingly, I'm seeing him, or you know, his arguments being sort of promulgated
Winton: and you know
Winton: there are. There are huge kind of Facebook threads relating to deep adaptation and people who are trying to find ways to live. And I'm just, I'm just really interested in in your perspective from a you know, secular Buddhist point of view. How you how you would sort of view this
Winton: this argument, this idea.
Winton: I've got a feeling it's the wrong starting point. You know we we're not at the stage where
Winton: we should give up in in resignation like that. and often, and seems to me that sort of thinking is aligns with
Winton: the kind of policy that
Winton: the previous government here was following, which has been described as the strategy of the armed lifeboat. So you know, when we we can hold out longest tear.
Winton: and we'll make damn sure that nobody tries to clamor aboard. Because, yeah, we're okay? And
Winton: one of the things that certainly is coming is a lot of climate refugees. and I'll be presumably coming
Winton: trying to come here as well as
Winton: to other temperate
Winton: and reasonably affluent countries.
Winton: and the policy of the armed lifeboat is going to become more and more attractive. And so that seems to me to one needs to on moral and political grounds.
Winton: Oppose that kind of thinking and and really make sure the focus is on
Winton: It is on turning
Winton: climate change around.
Winton: and all it requires is systemic change. You saw it. This whole thing that we all have to drastically change our lifestyle
Winton: is something that flows on from the oil Company's invention of the carbon footprint.
Winton: Yeah, which was a way of of shifting the blame from their activities
Winton: to our lifestyle. So while we're, you know, worrying about our.
Winton: it must be all our fault because we've got carbon footprints. They're still churning away
Winton: selling oil and
Winton: cow and gas.
Winton: It's a classic diversion.
Winton: And so it seems to me that this is the reason why we need to really focus on what is the cause of this.
Winton: and I hope part of it will be a massive critique of what's going on in Dubai this week, you know, with
Winton: all the Petro estates and 600 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, deciding how to
Winton: how they're going to look better.
Winton: And I think that's you know. So it's got to be politically, very much more targeted than
Winton: talking about, you know, in survivalist terms, for instance.
Winton: it is essentially the old survivalist survivalism.
Winton: The people were running around with. Yeah, when we were worried about nuclear extinction.
Winton: there are climate scientists who are, I mean, like Joel Gergis, who's a really brilliant Australian climate scientist, I mean the sort of the grief that you hear articulated by these scientists. I hear what you're saying, but I just do.
Winton: I do wonder. You know, it's
Winton: what to do.
what to do?
Winton: Join extinction, rebellion! Probably I'm one of the extinction drummers. I bang bang my drum outside banks every Tuesday.
Winton: Well, I think you're doing. I mean, I think you are doing you. That's you're doing the right thing.
Winton: Thank you.
Winton: Thank you, Linton. I haven't come across the idea of imagination in Buddhism before.
Winton: And I think it's a really rich area of thinking for me. I also look to teachers for personal stories about how they
Winton: use the teachings.
Winton: and particularly in this retreat, there's a focus on ethics. And for me ethics is applied. It's never just theoretical. It's always boots on the ground. So I was wondering, could you please share with the group some ways that you've used imagination.
Winton: especially in
Winton: changing your own behaviors, changing or seeing other people's behaviors change, making it
Winton: not just the theoretical thing that we could imagine many futures, but how we embody them.
Winton: and how we help other people embody them, too.
Winton: okay. Well, I do write about these things.
Winton: I teach about them. I tried to like, I suppose everyone else in the room.
Winton: You know. Try and
Winton: link. Nope.
Winton: God help me reduce my carbon footprint and put the plastics in the right place. But I mean it's not
Winton: once again, it's not a question of
Winton: our individual lifest.
Winton: It is a question of taking on as a system
Winton: which has become a system of production and distribution which has become completely disassociated from human use.
Winton: That's the point. I mean that we that we right from the beginning of capitalism, particularly industrial capitalism, has been this radical disassociation
Winton: between R from producing
Winton: use values, you know.
Winton: I would like a motor car. So I go and make one. Because they were going to use it to. I'm going to make Femme 5 million
Winton: T model fords and hope to God that someone is going to buy them, because then I can become rich. I mean, this is, it's a completely
Winton: as a logic. And
Winton: if you look at, for instance, Martin Hegel's wonderful book, I think
Winton: all Buddhists should read. Martin Hegel's book lives.
Winton: He goes into this in terms. He starts off with
Winton: the idea that we are finite beings, and, what is especially finite about us is time.
Winton: We all. We all have finite
Winton: time.
Winton: Obviously about a third of it's going to spend asleep. But then we have.
Winton: We have a time when most of us will need to earn a living, stay alive.
Winton: keep the house in repair, etc.
Winton: And then we have free time, which is really, really valuable, really important. And and what is happening with this
Winton: radical disassociation between just producing what we need
Winton: and are producing for unlimited profits
Winton: is that we are.
Winton: We are losing more and more
Winton: have that free time. And so we need, we need a system which is going to mean that we produce what we need.
Winton: and we distribute it as it should be produced, distributed so that everybody has a secure.
Winton: a secure, loving hood.
Winton: And we push back the amount of time
Winton: we have spent
Winton: doing productive things. I mean, people have been saying this for a long time, John Maynard Keynes
Winton: said. We have we have conquered the arts of production, we should now.
Winton: I developed the arts of life.
Winton: by which in first hand, he meant ballet. He was married to a ballerina, but he meant, you know, he meant things like music and literature and theatre, and all that sort of thing. It's a
Winton: it was, you know a great insight from
Winton: an economist. They're not known for their insights like this.
Winton: And
Winton: And it's true, you know, we should be thinking in terms of the arts of life.
But you know, here we are stuck in a system.
Winton: that is, that is, producing
Winton: an enormous amount of monetary wills.
Winton: which is being more and more mal distributed. So you know, even in a country like this, you've got 10 or 15% of the population, those living in poverty.
Winton: And meanwhile, you know, we've got we developed. We've got billionaires appearing with their fancy yachts. And
Winton: always it's it's the system that is the problem.
Winton: And, as Hegelund says, you know, if you imagine oh, the world with power.
Winton: or a society without level of human productivity, through the technology we've got.
Winton: We could be, we could actually go back.
Winton: And oh, always think about this living in Sydney. You know someone has figured out that the people of the
Winton: Aurora Amin, an anthropologist, and the people of the Aurora nation. The inhabitants of the Sydney Basin before
Winton: invasion.
Winton: The active members of the clan would
Winton: probably have to work 3 HA day to produce all the food and all the closing, such as was that they needed.
Winton: What do they do with the rest of their time. They spent it with their kids. Imagine that
Winton: spending time with kids and teaching them playing with them. They
Winton: they sang a sang a lot of songs. They made a lot of music. They did a lot of dancing. They told a lot of stories. You know this, we could. We could live like that with. Still, with our it, gadgetry.
Winton: if we only
Winton: controlled in, controlled the
Winton: the production and distribution in a completely other way.
Winton: Originally, in this Buddha's context? Can we point to the 3 poisons greed, hatred, and ignorance as being the bad incentives that lead us to the system we have. Now
Winton: look II don't.
Winton: I have a real problem with meta-historic hall causation like that just as I am.
Winton: you know, with metaphysical ideas. I mean, you're quite right, we need to think about in ethical terms rather than
Winton: though certain meta-historical ideas or metaphysical anti. So greed, hatred, and delusion is okay now.
Winton: DNA, but we can. Certainly, I mean, we are malleable creatures, and we can say, I think you know, we probably develop those
Winton: evolutionary trays as a way of surviving in a dangerous world of scarce resources. We we don't have to live in that sort of world anymore.
Winton: And I think they can be just just allowed to fade away if we
Winton: if we weren't
Winton: in a system that is generating in security.
Winton: I mean, this is the whole point about capitalism
Winton: is that it's through a Holland people had immediate access to a livelihood, and they had a little plot of land, even if they.
Winton: you know, rented it from a lord or something. They had immediate access
Winton: to a livelihood.
Winton: and the whole trick of getting capitalism going was to was to cut them off from an immediate
Winton: access
Winton: to a livelihood to create massive insecurity.
Winton: so they had no choice but to sell their labor. The only thing they had left.
Winton: To, you know.
Winton: at any price and under any conditions.
Winton: and to, you know, return to a state where people had
Winton: access to livelihood in many ways. To do that, you know, guaranteed minimum income ideas, and so on.
Winton: Then people, people would be in a position where like so only want to work 3 days a week or 2 days a week, or
Winton: something like that. I'm not going to ask for amazing luxuries or
Winton: conspicuous consumption. and we'd be living in a different kind of world we wouldn't be
Winton: we. We wouldn't feel insecure, and therefore we'd better be less greed, hatred, and delusion going on.
Winton: yeah, James, you're on again.
James: Me again. No, it's just following up from that winter. So this idea of right livelihood, I mean, it would seem to me most of the people probably attending this. And you know the age groups that seem to be represented. For the most part, we've probably made
James: more or less made our decisions about our livelihood and hopefully made good ones.
What what about
James: the generation of people who are children or at university at the moment? How? How do we target them and try and get that conversation going because they're the ones who are going to be
James: steering the ship in 1520 years time. So we want to start having conversations with them about right right livelihood. Now tell me.
Winton: Well, it's really up to those those generations, and I think they're doing it.
Winton: that they that they are actually looking at alternatives.
Winton: In in terms of creating, I mean, right livelihood is.
Winton: as far as I know it's specifically Buddhist idea, and it usually ends up in cooperatives. And that's great, you know, I mean. But cooperatives at the moment are a very niche part of the
Winton: economy as great for people who are in them in that they can.
You know they've got control. They've got
Winton: immediate access to the means of their livelihood collectively.
Winton: and and that will probably be B,
Winton: a model for a new kind of society which is not
Winton: just producing vast amounts of money to send to offshore tax havens.
Winton: but is actually, you know, being represented by food on the table and
Winton: vehicles, or whatever I need.
Winton: Again, you know Peter am Martin Hegel goes into these sorts of things at the end of his book this life. But.
Winton: as someone was saying here yesterday, you know, it's marvellous to see what
Winton: the younger generations aren't doing.
Winton: and we should give them every support. I'd like to see a lot more
Winton: grey-headed folk joining the
Winton: schoolchildren's
Winton: strikes on Fridays. You know that, Greta Toon, Barry began years ago.
Winton: Hmm.
James: thanks.
Winton: if if the problem is
Winton: not so much individual is systemic, I'm sure it is.
Winton: Then we know that the systems that have evolved to run the capitalist system
Winton: very intricately interconnected and built so that you can't pull a PIN out. and if you do, it won't make the difference. You hope, because, as other, that the machine will reorganize itself in ways that are going to maintain its its modus operandi.
Winton: So I suppose a question I have is
Winton: the sort of secular Buddhism we're talking about is very much about the action that individuals take whether it's focused on them or the system.
Winton: But how do we imagine what we need to do at a system level that is not going to get simply
Winton: co-opted or lost.
Winton: It seems as if the skills we need are sort of bomb disposal experts rather than anything else. People who can find the fuse and take it out.
Winton: But that's a
Winton: for most of us. We don't even know how to start doing that sort of thing. So I wonder if you got any comment on
Winton: the implications for us as individuals who are trying to find the right way through.
Winton: if the problem doesn't lie directly with us and what we're doing, and if the place where it does lie is a very complicated system, to which we have neither the plans nor the right size, screwdriver to take it apart.
Winton: Maybe we have to acquire the screwdrivers, and etc. And
Winton: I mean, if you go back to basics, these problems are caused by institutions
Winton: at the heart of any institution is a form of calculation and the form of calculation. Now, in neoliberal capitalism.
Winton: ease.
Winton: that
Winton: the thing that matters is increasing is interesting sheer value. and the share value has increased
Winton: by increasing profit
Winton: and on a national level. What is important is to growth in
Winton: in national income, which is a function of the growth in share value. Right? So
Winton: so that's the form of calculation that is going on in the minds of treasury, and in the minds of
Winton: boards of directors, everyone's doing lots of
Winton: virtue, signalling and talking about in terms of the really old going back to the 19 thirties, being a soulful corporation, being socially.
Winton: socially accountable, and so on, and assisting social auditing that goes on.
Winton: And it's all just nonsense, because what is really what really counts is growth in share, value and growth in
Winton: national income. And so what is important, I think, in terms of organisations. Sociologists call this institutional bypassing.
Winton: So I mean, one way of doing that, for instance, is looking at pension funds.
Winton: And there's been in in recent years this politicization of pension funds where pension funds have been saying.
Winton: well, we're going. We're going to disinvest in
Winton: everything to do with fossil fuels.
Winton: And that's terrific. I mean, you know, it's hurting because the government is trying to stop them doing that. They're trying to stop pension
Winton: people who, in charge of placing
Winton: placing investments, who are saying we're not going to invest in.
Winton: It ain't anything to do with fossil fuels any more. That's against the rules.
Winton: and even though
Winton: you can, probably you can. Probably those people in charge of the pension funds could probably make just as good, or nearly as good a profit somewhere else.
Winton: You can tell. You've hit a nerve when the government is saying, Don't do that, don't even think it.
Winton: That would be just one example of a way in
Winton: to say, well, you know, we're not going to. Actually, we've got another. We've got a different form of calculation here. and if all the pension funds were to become politicized
Winton: like that. A pent the fossil fuel industry would be
Winton: would be buggered factory. in fact.
Winton: because they constantly need pension. Funds are now institutional investors are a huge part
Winton: of the general.
Winton: the general circulation of capital. So that would be that would just one example, as well as, for instance, the growth in the in, in the cooperative sector. Are we talking about
Winton: few minutes ago? That's another thing. I mean that
Winton: culpritives don't have the same forms of calculation. They're they're interested in.
Winton: Usually. If you take Mondragon in Spain, for instance, is large
Winton: cooperative sect and the Basque speaking area there. We've got many industries, and they're owned by the people working in them.
Winton: And what they're concerned about is
Winton: is keeping their jobs and obviously concerned about the environment that they're living in.
Winton: So they're going to be making whole other kinds of decisions.
Winton: Then
Winton: people who are you? You just want to make a quick buck
Winton: in the Stock exchange.
Winton: Yeah, and in terms of our own practice. and how that extends out into the world. So that
Winton: I'm not quite sure you know whether. as a community. What kind of steps we take to get involved in
Winton: the bigger picture, or in the organizations in er or whatever is out there at this point in time. Certainly I think that from where the practice helps me is because I can
Winton: focus on my agency
Winton: and how I feel
Winton: Congress
Winton: in my life. If these are the things that I really believe in and concerned about my children and my grandchildren.
Winton: can I take those small steps, even though they seem inconsequential.
Winton: and but do them regularly, and hope that that sets an example, because II do believe that the small things work as well as the large things. So, for example, when I do my walk on a Sunday afternoon
Winton: in the evening on Bondi Beach.
Winton: remember always to bring that bag with me and pick up any plastic bottles there, so maybe save one dolphin. I don't know
Winton: but the
Winton: and another example is, my my partner started a
Winton: a not-for-profit called tree rights, and part of it is re wild bondi.
Winton: and she started converting verge gardens into native gardens.
Winton: and so we did it with our with our property, and then people down the road copied us, and she helped them do it. So they organized native plants, and after a year and a half. The lorikeets are back in bondi.
Winton: so you know, don't underestimate the small things that you can do.
Winton: and I think that
Winton: the dovetails very well end with the individual Buddhist practice.
Winton: But I
Winton: completely agree that. And it's not just
Winton: the small impacts on the environment. It's also that you're
Winton: The you're taking actions that other people notice. You know, you're setting an example
Winton: and an example of care for the environment
and of
Winton: taking direct action. But it would be great also, if you've got a superannuation fund.
Winton: If you went to the annual general meetings
Winton: and said, Hey, I'll notice you know you've got shares in bhp, what's what's going on here?
Winton: You know, start agitating
Winton: around those sorts of things that we're in in. A number of. I have the guts guts to pull my money out and put it in a super fund that only invests in green investments.
Winton: Yes. 63
didn't want to step.
Winton: Yeah.
Winton: I just wanted to change the focus to another crisis that humanity is facing, which is the spiritual crisis which I guess
Winton: and and with the secularization, with the loss of faith in God. Nature's God is dead.
Winton: Then you've got this loss of meaning.
Winton: And so you know, as the existentialists say, we have to create our own meaning. We have to create our own purpose. And I was just wondering.
Winton: you know, facing an existential threat is actually a great way to provide a meaning and purpose. But what you were saying about imagination and
Winton: also coming into retirement age, you
Winton: stop your job you've got. How do you create. How can we use this imagination? How can we use these teachings to
Winton: actually provide meaning and purpose?
Winton: Both in your working life after your working life
Winton: is actually this humanitarian crisis a great vehicle
Winton: for us to when we're talking about ethical living, it gives us a purpose, it gives us a meaning.
Winton: Are there other ways? We can use the imagination to derive a meaning that we have lost
Winton: with the secularization of the modern era?
Winton: I mean, have we really lost
Winton: many. I mean, we. This is the interesting thing about going back to the Greeks. I mean that they didn't have.
Winton: You know they didn't have a monotheistic view of the world. I mean, if you're into a monotheistic tradition.
Winton: the meaning is just laid out for you.
Winton: A. By God, do what God wants.
Winton: and they met a completely different challenge. So they were the ones who who framed the basic original questions, how should I live?
Winton: What sort of person should I become?
Winton: And
Winton: I would have thought that
Winton: there's a lot of meaning going on when you start asking
Winton: that question. I mean their answer to that was the development of the virtues.
Winton: For instance, I was always the the major
Winton: answer of to those questions. So if you develop the virtues, you become
Winton: a different kind of
Winton: a fuller and deeper kind of human being.
Winton: and also, of course, this has social kind. They all saw this
Winton: in very much in terms of the city.
Winton: You know their city, their community.
Winton: how that, how the civic, how one contributed to that
Winton: civic development, you know it was all wonderfully
Winton: summed up in
Winton: Pericles funeral oration during the Peloponnesian war. What Athens stands for.
Winton: It's a great breed, and I think you know there's one gets meaning from
Winton: those sorts of sources, but that I mean
Winton: here and now you're right, that
Winton: a lot of their meaning in life would be
Winton: to Ham
Winton: simply save the planet and save civilization.
Winton: In a sense, it's kind of like. Yes, the saving civilization saving humanity does become a great source of purpose.
Winton: And
Winton: yes. So the coming together in times of catastrophe in times of great challenge, can can provide that So so maybe that's one positive way of kind of looking at the situation that we're in, that it does bring people together. It does bring a certain dynamism.
Winton: certain goals to be met. Yeah.
Winton: we're getting close to time. Yeah, but maybe that'll be the last 2 questions. Hmm.
Winton: following on from that. It's something I've been wondering about as well. Tessa, here, by the way, in relation to perspective. And
Winton: I kind of work adjacent to this wellness, industry, and spiritual scene, where it is secular, and in that sense there isn't
Winton: a prescribed moral code in the way that religion would have, and it's really hot right now for everyone to speak their truth. So you have all these different people speaking their truth.
Winton: And I guess that's related to this non binary spectrum. But
Winton: I feel like there's then
Winton: a lack of well, what is the truth, and we try and be tolerant and say, well, your purpose is to fight for what you believe is important, but some of those people are in the whole conspirituality space, where
Winton: you know, they might be fighting for the opposite of what I think is important. So I guess perspective versus truth.
Winton: And I was thinking Libby's question before the Australians would remember when Turnbull did the interview with someone, or rather in the Murdoch media, and and he was saying, you know.
Winton: the the media guy was like, we have to report both sides of the climate change argument and the response that was, it's not a two-sided thing. But do you know what I'm do you get my like truth versus perspective
Winton: and tolerance and
Winton: non-binary thinking? Yeah.
Winton: yeah, yes.
Winton: look, II think I think there's a sort of
Winton: a gremlin called relativism going on there. I mean, this whole thing about, you know, everyone should have their truth. I remember, many years ago
Winton: a colleague of mine was. we work in a politics department at university, and a colleague
Winton: wanted to start a course on on the holocaust.
Winton: And there was this character called, you know.
Winton: fundamentalist Christian, who who was saying, Well, I don't think I think think that would be a very biased course.
Winton: and
Winton: and my colleague,
Winton: who was Jewish, said, got up and said.
Winton: Yes, well, we're looking forward, you know.
Winton: That's a former commandant of a death camp to come and give a guest lecture, so to keep the powers it was that sort of
look, I really do think there is.
Winton: That it isn't true that we all have our own little
Winton: truth, you know. I mean that that really is just narcissism.
Winton: and and it needs to be
Winton: gently and diplomatically called out
Winton: of thought.
Winton: and
Winton: thank you.
Winton: Do we have time for this one? Just a little bit? Okay. It was it
Winton: a question that has been brewing for the last.
Winton: Sorry it's Andy. It's a question that's been brewing in my mind for the last half-hour. Actually, no.
Winton: since Sunday. But it's also partly a response to you, Carol, about a spirituality and a sense of purpose and meaning in
Winton: one thing that I did actually mention to you on Sunday that I feel is still missing.
Winton: You talk about the twin crises of climate change and the social injustice
Winton: your more eloquent term for it. I can't remember. But I actually feel like
Winton: climate change and ecological or biodiversity loss, or I'm going to call it ecological catastrophe
Winton: that is not associated with climate change.
Winton: I think there is a source
Winton: that began with industrialization, and whatever components of greed, hatred, and confusion that you want to impose on, that the source happened back when it did, and I think it's all bound up in
Winton: the twin, and my opinion there's more than that
Winton: crises.
Winton: But but what we have, I think.
Winton: with reducing it to climate change. It's the same as reducing the solution to climate change to reducing a carbon footprint. I think
Winton: that reductionist approach
Winton: in the gates. or neglects to really understand what I think
Winton: is going on. With respect to our disconnect
Winton: as human animals from the earth.
Winton: we are, as somebody pointed out as to Jermain Greer said, Earth dwellers, was that you?
Now? Obviously, everybody knows I'm a
Winton: an ecologist. I'm walking around with binoculars, so yes, sure I'm biased. But there's a reason for that. I mean, there's been work written on Biophilia, where you know I've been sitting here looking at you, talking and thinking without the 2 bunches of flowers either side of you. That would be a more deprived scene.
Winton: Right? We we.
Winton: we have lost connection from nature.
Winton: and if you talk to our oldest living culture
Winton: in the world. as you know, I know I'm preaching to the choir with you, Winton, but we
Winton: and I talk to people a lot on country about this. Their spiritual heart is country.
Winton: you know, they
Winton: and they don't want to work 7 days a week, because they are. They are working 24 HA day, 7 days a week, caring for and being on and with country.
Winton: They don't take more than they need, and that's just in our country. And if you listen, if you read Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wallace Wall, Kimmerer and I
Winton: heartily commend it to everybody if you haven't read it, and a bunch of other indigenous
Winton: Australian books of the same ilk.
Winton: That is the source of being alive. That is the tragedy that we are disconnected from.
Winton: My feeling is that. And I teach students every year environmental science students. This is people who have enrolled in a course in environmental science that I naively assumed
Winton: would be connected to country, have not left the Cbd
Winton: right. And I'm having to teach them. I started teaching at this level that I thought, I'm just going to assume knowledge. It no, do not assume that they'd even know
Winton: what a plant looks like.
Winton: what a bird looks like. So hmm! I know I'm going a bit circular here, but I guess my imagination
Winton: to take today's theme up is to imagine
Winton: not just being in the shoes of another, but being in the
Winton: being that magpie that I saw die this morning.
Winton: torn apart via Raptor.
Winton: standing there this morning before breakfast. and weeping
Winton: because this magpie that I'd been looking at yesterday was dead.
Winton: understanding the tragedy of that life standing there in the landscape. That is what we're disconnected to. I believe that is our tragedy. So
Winton: I think that we need to be getting this sort of thinking into schools
Winton: should be in our curriculum.
Winton: We need to have everybody connected.
Winton: And and that's our tragedy.
Winton: It is very much connected with the tragedy of the disassociation of
Winton: the real economy from human need. You know that
Winton: we're not producing
Winton: for human
Winton: use and human need. But we're producing
Winton: to make the gross national product bigger or the
Winton: share. Chevrolet Bay, and
Winton: they're connected, but they are connected because it means that land becomes just an old factory. And I were talking about this earlier, that.
Winton: And in Kate Holden's book you know the winter road about the destruction of
rural land in Australia since invasion
Winton: is because the soil has been regarded as a factory.
Winton: It's not a living organism. There are no more earthworms. No.
Winton: you know, the whole thing about graphs is required for re
Winton: are
Winton: revival of the of the sort. None of that is just Shubin shabbing her arm
Winton: a crop and rip it out at harvest time. Burn this double and start again, and the soil just dies.
Winton: And so there's no, there's that that disconnection. I'm thinking also of the horrific, so-called sacrifice zones in
Winton: developing countries, you know.
Winton: ripping out natural resources in the mining industry or the creation of monocultures, palm
Winton: palm oil plantations that are
Winton: completely destroying millions of hectares in Indonesia.
Winton: It's all this because
Winton: of share banning gross national park. It's the same dissociation from human need and human
Winton: require and and and
Winton: human choir animal requirements to be connected to the land.
Winton: I would suggest without wanting to participate.
Winton: But
Winton: I think that to me I'm just flipping it around a little and saying the solution is not necessarily to tell people to stop being greedy.
Winton: It's to teach people to value what they are ignoring
Winton: the connection. I think it's just a it's a slight flip
Winton: it, in my opinion.
Winton: if you've if you, if people value it. if they have the imagination
Winton: to value that, then then they won't want
Winton: to rip it apart.
Winton: That's one talking about learning from the cultures that still don't do that. Sorry, I'll shut up. Okay. Well, look, I certainly think this is something we need to carry forward during the week. And
Winton: it's now 20 to 5. Is there a question we can?
Winton: Okay, sure.
Winton: the notion of. We've got to stop
Winton: doing something.
Winton: it often doesn't work
Winton: being told to stop
Winton: I'm sorry it often doesn't work when we're told to stop something. but if we are inspired to replace it
Winton: with something better. That seems to work
Winton: my dog trying to train my dog and telling her to stop
Winton: barking at the birds. If if I give her a job, she loves it, and it's just worked so quickly. It was radical
Winton: service dog training, just, you know, and humans as well, stopping, smoking, inspire to how it's going to feel
Winton: rather than being told to stop. So there's imagination. Thank you. A new, a new commercial advertising campaign.
Winton: Okay? Well, thank you for participation this afternoon, and we'll see you in
Winton: 48 min.
Winton: Proceed.