Teachers: So I'll be continuing on this theme of
Teachers: the path factor of perspective
Teachers: deceit carry on from Stephen's talk this morning
Teachers: I had an interesting experience of perspective when I was in Europe in February. There's apparently a yeah, a major motorway that runs north-south throughout Europe.
Teachers: called the and many, many roads feed into it and out of it.
Teachers: and the E. 6. And the southern end
Teachers: ends in Rome, thus
Teachers: reinforcing the wisdom of the Roman Empire, that
Teachers: all roads lead to Rome.
Teachers: and I guess it was a convenient thought for the many popes that all roads lead to Rome, but in February I was in Chicago.
Teachers: which is a battling Arctic town of 5,000 souls.
Teachers: On the Norwegian side of the Russian border, and right next door to North Cape, where Europe ends this wonderful.
grandly bleak
Teachers: headland, looking straight across at the at the North Pole.
Teachers: and the people of Shoe Canals assured me that the East, the northern end of the E. 6
Teachers: is there in Shoekanes, and that all roads lead to Shokanes.
Teachers: and I thought this was a wonderful conceit. And, after all, why not? You know, if you get on the a 6, and you're going in the wrong direction. That's presumably where you
Teachers: in that so it's a question of you know your own situation. Where? How you are
Teachers: perceiving reality.
Teachers: Another somewhat more important example of perspective
Teachers: that I've come across is a little memoir of about 3 or 4 pages, written by Sigmund Freud.
Teachers: and the occasion that he is remembering is in the high summer of 1,914, just a couple of months before the catastrophe. The First World War breaks out.
Teachers: So Freud and 2 companions
Teachers: are hiking in the Italian Alps in the Dolomites, and it's high summer. It's a beautiful day. The flowers are out, the birds are singing, the bees are buzzing, and
Teachers: Freud just gets completely blissed out by the sheer beauty around him.
Teachers: But then he notices that his 2 companions aren't on the same page, and one of them he describes as a young, already established poet of taciturn disposition, and these 2 characters absolutely refuse to engage with the beauty around him.
Teachers: and the the reason they state is. Look! In 3 months time it'll be autumn. The flowers will have shriveled, the leaves would have fallen off the trees, the birds, the migratory birds will have
Teachers: moved south, and it'll be just a nasty, bleak hillside.
Teachers: and Freud says he found this reaction unfathomable.
Teachers: You can imagine him. You read between his lines, and he's rolling his eyes, thinking what the hell is wrong with these people.
Teachers: And he puts on his diagnostic hat as he is want to do, and figures out that their problem was a refusal to mourn
Teachers: that they they it was a fear of mourning, and therefore a refusal to engage with anything that would cause them to mourn when it proved to be transient, and is.
Teachers: you say it's called on transient on transients
Teachers: which should prick many a Buddhist ear. Given the title. So Freud Freud is sort of saying, if you you, you can't fully be fully alive
Teachers: to to life, and particularly the joys of life if you are not prepared to mourn when they come to an end, as of course everything does, so that you find that in
Teachers: Volume 14 of the collected works, and also in that volume you will find what I guess is the carry on of that notion. In his, in his much more famous essay called Mourning and Melancholia.
Teachers: And here again we're right in the heart of the first task, as Stephen has explained it, you can take it as embracing life or embracing suffering. But from the point of view that Freud is opening up, it doesn't matter which one you choose.
Teachers: because, if you are fully alive. If you're fully engaged, if you are fully in touch with others, particularly intimate others.
Teachers: then you are going to suffer this
Teachers: intense suffering of mourning, assuming you get to middle aged and middle aged, and your parents die, or your friends die, or even your children die, or you are forced into exile from your beloved home aid.
Teachers: Any form of serious loss will occasion a mourning, but the morning can be can be refused.
Teachers: and people who, like these 2 characters on the Italian mountains. So I say, we're not going there.
Teachers: and there was the effect of that
Teachers: is that if you don't choose mourning, you choose melancholia instead of mourning the dead, you join the dead is essentially what Freud is is saying, and so what does it mean to mourn? It means really to
Teachers: enter into that experience fully to embrace the suffering, and it will be so intense in particular cases, whether you know a beloved spouse or a beloved parent, or someone like that, that you will go crazy.
Teachers: And he makes this quite clear that if you exhibited these symptoms
Teachers: in any other state you would be diagnosed. But this is not a diagnosable problem, this one. It's something that
Teachers: you need to go through in order to make the enormous psychic adjustment, because we are all you know, we live in relation to other people, and when significant others are lost, it means a substantial shift in the whole architecture of of our minds. And so you go through this process
Teachers: process and at the end of it, and it can take 12 months or much longer. He
says you will recover your Eros.
Teachers: and by Eros he meant, I suppose, what we would call Mojo, your Joard Vivre.
Teachers: It's odd that English doesn't have a word for it so the Germanic languages
Teachers: have it, and I think all the Romance languages have one. But we don't. The joy of being alive. You recover that. He's not saying you'll find closure that ghastly cliche these days that you find closure as if it's never happened. You will never do that. The grief will always be there, but it won't be there in a way that will inhibit your full participation
Teachers: in life and your enjoyment of life.
So
Teachers: There's a wonderful dramatization of this process in
Teachers: Joan Didion's book.
Teachers: The Year of magical thinking.
Teachers: and she was married for about 40 years from memory. and it was a
Teachers: to a man whom she loved dearly, and who was not only a husband, but her partner in her creative endeavors as a writer, as a screenwriter.
Teachers: and so on.
Teachers: and suddenly he just dropped dead at the dinner table and
Teachers: she went into. Fortunately she'd read Morning melancholy, because you keep one eye on the text, but she goes through the extraordinary, extraordinarily violent convolutions of her emotions during this period. I mean, she knew she was crazy, but she knew she would come out of it. She knew it was
Teachers: a normal craziness.
Teachers: And it's she is a brilliant writer, and it's a it's a wonderful example of how
Teachers: a mourning process occurs, and through letting it be as Stephen was talking about in these terms of letting it be in terms of Heidegger's Galassan height that you don't try and stop it. You just let it run its course.
Teachers: I think that that whole idea of going through that
Teachers: and returning to life
Teachers: this time as a somewhat deeper kind of person, probably
Teachers: almost inevitably is, is one that we need to keep in mind in thinking about
Teachers: that first task of embracing.
Teachers: of embracing life or embracing suffering whichever way you want to put it. Obviously we don't need to do anything about
Teachers: periods of exceptional happiness. But we do need to do something about periods of significant loss which we are
Teachers: all going to experience. If we, you know, live to be a certain age. So
Teachers: hold that sort, and I'll come to another memory. In 2,005
Teachers: I was listening to the encounter program which was celebrating its year on ABC. Radio National.
Teachers: and there was a
Teachers: an American Catholic priest and emeritus professor of divinity from University, the the school of divinity in Chicago, who was
Teachers: doing an interview on the subject of tragic vision, the abandoned vision of the West. Now, what Tracy was criticizing very forcefully was the whole modern Western mindset
Teachers: which sort of starts with a default the default position
Teachers: that life should be, you know, plain sailing that we get what we want and we do what we want, and nothing much
stops us.
Teachers: But then something does stop us.
Teachers: It could be a car. Accident could be losing a job or something like that.
Teachers: All those catastrophes occur in Yuppie catastrophe films like changing lanes. Something happens and that becomes a problem and a problem invites a solution. So we have a problem. We look for the solution, we apply the solution, and that should be the end of the matter.
Teachers: And he's saying that this is an extraordinarily superficial way to live, and also, of course.
Teachers: delusional, because a lot of the problems. I simply do not have solutions.
Teachers: So he strongly argues for the resurrection of tragic vision which he sees as something that the West has had since the Greek tragedians of the
fifth century, Bce. In other words, contemporaries
Teachers: of the Buddha. And
Teachers: you just pointed very crudely. The tragic vision says you simply
Teachers: embrace you. Accept the really bad stuff that is coming your way. Shit happens. Suck it up if you like, in in our terms these days, but
Teachers: not only that, but one should respond to it, that this is what you find in the Greek tragedies, and you find in Shakespeare that that there's there's a requirement to respond. You can't just lie down and take it or pretend it's not happening. And Tracy was very much
Teachers: enamored of the French philosopher, Simon Veil, on this subject.
Teachers: Now, even if you know your response is hopeless, like hers fighting against the Nazi regime.
Teachers: You've got to respond. You've got to say yes to life. And this was, I suppose, his fundamental point. The tragic vision teaches us to say yes, to life, embrace life, no matter what. And he also quotes the great Catholic Meister Eckhart, and saying, Learn to live without the why
Teachers: WHY. Learn to stop arguing with what
Teachers: happened, and respond to it in the best way you possibly can. And this is, of course, where the human dignity of someone who's happened to whom tragedy has occurred is that it's in their response. And they're saying yes to life. In their assertion of their agency.
Teachers: no matter how ineffectual it might be, and certainly none of us have more than partial agency in our life process. A very important lesson in the in the tragic.
Teachers: in in the tragic tradition.
Teachers: I'm just reminded of something that the Norwegian novelist, Karl Ulver Knalskord said, indifference is one of the 7 deadly sins.
Teachers: and then he corrects himself and says, actually, it's the greatest of them.
Teachers: So this is again a message, you know, from the past, I guess, about
Teachers: how to be a human being asserting your dignity, and what agency you have in any situation.
Teachers: So
Teachers: I'll probably be saying a bit more about about the
Teachers: the the tragic tradition. And of course it's not just the Greeks. It comes to us as English speakers through Shakespeare. The the 4 or 5 great tragedies that that he deals with. I tend to throw Coriolanus into the
Teachers: into the mix there, too. But what? What? It's
Teachers: the themes that are coming through.
Teachers: and I think there are themes that we can really relate to Dharma. Practice, too, is precisely grappling with our
Teachers: partial agency, that there are things there are causes and conditions that limit what we can, what we can do or how we can respond, and that is something we really have to grapple with
Teachers: a second one which is absolutely connected with the themes of this retreat, the ethics of uncertainty
Teachers: that the you know, the protagonists in tragedies don't know what to do. They're in situations that are intractable or uncertain where you know where things are going. And so they're constantly asking a question, and even the chorus is asking a question, what shall I do?
Teachers: What is going to happen to me? So that sort of uncertainty is something we can
revived today.
Teachers: after many, many centuries of
Teachers: people in the West, believing there was a big daddy up there who had a plan, and everything was going according to plan, and everything was under control, even if it was awful, and that what we had to do was follow the rules you know what God wants and what we have in common
Teachers: with the ancient Greeks, and
Teachers: we see with
Teachers: Gotamar Adi's contemporaries is, we have known that we don't have a big daddy. We don't have anyone who's even in our world's imagination in control. And yet we have to respond to what is going on.
Teachers: So this is this, this moral ambiguity runs through the tragic tradition, and it's certainly something we all experience in our complex world today.
Teachers: so I think I'll just mention
Teachers: I, the philosopher's whose book
Teachers: on this subject. Both Steven and I have read by Simon Critchley on Perspective and the tragic tradition, and and he also is raising these these issues out of it about our fragility, our vulnerability, the snags that threaten to derail our lives.
Teachers: our projects. and so forth.
Teachers: and the other thing that is so important to to the Greeks in particular is that the that the the tragedies play out in a civic
Teachers: dimension? What is at stake is that not just the it's not just the
Teachers: well being of the individual, but the wellbeing of the city.
Teachers: and particularly in a story like that of Oedipus wrecks.
Teachers: who is bringing pollution into civic affairs, and that is the great issue that is being staged when when that when that particular play is presented.
Teachers: so
Teachers: What Crichly says is that each generation has the responsibility to reinvent the classics.
Teachers: And I guess that's what we're doing at this retreat. We're reinventing the Apefo path. So this is this is a reason why we should never let go of the past, as he also, as he also says, we might think we're through with the past.
Teachers: But the past is not through with us.
Teachers: so maybe I'll leave it at that, and we've got 20 min for
Teachers: Q&A. And discussion. Then we're going to have
Teachers: half an hour for afternoon tea, and then we come back again. 2,
Teachers: yeah. I'll talk about this further.
Teachers: So over to you.
Teachers: Gavin, could you just say a bit more about. Could you just say a bit more about what you mean by moral ambiguity in the way you've been talking about it.
Teachers: Well, it's just the problem of what is the right thing to do in any particular situation, because it's it's not clear. I mean, if we were, if we believed in God, and and thought we knew what God wanted, we would do it.
But we're in a situation where we don't know what to do.
Teachers: and that's often because of the way we ourselves are in a gray area between knowing and not knowing.
Teachers: And that's something I think I'll talk about
Teachers: in a later session. But
Teachers: that's part of part of the ambiguity is whether we are prepared to know what we have constructive knowledge of.
Teachers: You know. I mean, you think here, in the case of the ghost, in many stories. what is the function of the ghost it is to
is to remind us of something
Teachers: we oh, we did know and forgotten, or we hope we've forgotten. and to remind us to do something about it. So
Teachers: princes, the ghost tells him what he already knows.
Teachers: that his uncle has murdered his father, and he has to do something about it, but he doesn't know
what it is is to do.
Teachers: and he's in that.
Teachers: In in that situation of moral ambiguity, you know, this is now
Teachers: his mother's husband, and killing is wrong. Killing the king is wrong, and so on. There's a moral ambiguity there.
Teachers: There's another. There's only one up there that
Teachers: no.
Teachers: yes. Andy
Teachers: Andy, thanks, Wenton a lot to digest
and really appreciated the
Teachers: Sigmund Freud story at the beginning, because I'm in my own reverie around the grounds at the moment
Teachers: I guess
I was shaping in my mind this idea of what the moral ambiguity
Teachers: question would be. Actually, last night I was shaping that in my mind.
Teachers: That if the people I had lunch with would permit permit me, was just asked a question about this teaching. Environmental science students
who are between the ages of.
Teachers: you know, 18 and mid 20 s.
Hey?
Teachers: Are starting to know as much as I do about
Teachers: how messed up the
Teachers: earth is that a lot of people don't see and saying. What do we do? And how do you keep going
Teachers: in the work that I do as an environmental scientist
Teachers: and
Teachers: my early days of teaching. I used to struggle to know what to say, thinking that
Teachers: I had to be the daddy in the sky and give them the answer because I was the teacher.
Teachers: But over the years I've
Teachers: now come to really think about my answer, and it's twofold. One is
Teachers: I don't know.
Teachers: and the second one is. I can't give up. There is no option but to act.
Teachers: And
Teachers: for me, that actually brings me quite a lot of solace. It actually helps me go on as an environmental scientist and not get depressed, and it helps me be. And now you've just completed the puzzle. It helps me be Sigmund Freud.
Teachers: not knowing that you know.
Teachers: whatever it is that I'm looking at, will die, be it by land clearing or oil spill or climate change, or just natural causes.
Teachers: but loving it anyway. And it's that love or that reverie or joy, or
Teachers: I'm going to call it sympathetic joy that
Teachers: spurs me to act. I guess it's not really a question. It's it's an observation with respect to
Teachers: the moral dilemma in one's own brain about the death of something close to them versus
Teachers: the existential crisis of the earth, I suppose, bringing it to a bigger frame.
Teachers: Just an observation. Really.
Teachers: Thank you.
Teachers: Thank you. I'm Tessa.
Teachers: The quote from. I can't remember who it was, but even if you know your response is hopeless, do it, anyway.
Teachers: I'd love to hear from you a little bit around the concept of hope. It's a word that I hear used a lot and
Teachers: given a real pedestal like it's so important to have hope. And it's what drives us on. But in response to your comment and in response to how I often feel is I
Teachers: I don't feel it's useful for me to kind of cling on to a sense of hope. Or I suppose.
Teachers: in some spaces around environmentalism, I don't really have hope, and not in a nihilistic way, but perhaps in a clear, seeing way. Yeah. And I'd love if you could comment a little bit around Hope and its role.
Teachers: Well, I suppose hope is psychologically healthy. It makes you an optimist rather than a pessimist. But other than that, I'm not very fond of
Teachers: of of it as a concept. Associate it with.
Teachers: you know, with established religions, sort of saying, Well, it looks. Everything looks terrible. I just hope
Teachers: it gets better. It seems to be a rather
Teachers: flaccid way of approaching things. I mean one can, I mean, certainly one can hope in certain situations of a high risk.
Teachers: I mean, when I was involved in a bit of amateur theatre, and and the the dress rehearsal went very badly, you'd say, oh, it'll be right on the night
Teachers: that was sort of the hope, and sometimes it was.
Teachers: But essentially, I think hope is
Teachers: associated with other power. It's you know, it's it's not. It's something magical. It's going to make it okay, even though it it looks. You know it looks the the outlook is really bleak.
Teachers: But, as I say, I mean, if if you a hopeful person, you probably you're happier than a hopeless one. So
Teachers: yeah, but it's not part of my working vocabulary, I'm afraid.
Teachers: Thank you.
Meg: Hello! One question that I have is that in Japan the primal role of the Buddhist community is working as to commemorate ancestors. So basically, the grieving process that they are really working in
Meg: in the society.
Meg: And then listening to your story, I started to think that
Meg: we actually really don't give a certain space for grief or loss. For, for example, I have been working in a business environment in the corporate restructuring optimization, whatever they call it.
Meg: We actually do not have the moment to really to grieve well about the loss that we have just had to do.
Meg: And so my question is. could Buddhism or the Buddha Dharma of
Meg: the teachings or transients of the life. Work well for the various types of losses in the war that we have today. It is really the error of uncertainty to them.
Meg: How do you think
Teachers: you just repeat that last thing? I didn't quite catch the last phrase? Ok, the error in the error of uncertainty, not to the level of
Meg: losing someone quite intimate. But we have so many losses like business restructuring, or the
Meg: societal changes.
Meg: There is a roses that we have systematically inside our society. And so what I am thinking is that could the Buddha Dharma
Meg: contribute to those losses or the grieving process.
Teachers: Hmm!
Teachers: Look! I think
Teachers: the dharma, to some extent
Teachers: ameliorates mourning and grief through the fact that it's always
Teachers: in our faces, that that everything is impermanent, everything that that is alive will die, and so on. So I think there's a certain
Teachers: preparedness for that goes on there.
Teachers: The the other thing that I think has happened. But I certainly in the in the Western world.
Teachers: in terms of social history, is that
Teachers: mourning is no longer socially supported.
Teachers: And it may be that in Buddhist societies it is but the usual.
Teachers: The conventional social history is that before the First World war mourning was honored in in Western countries that yeah. Women who'd lost their husband would wear black, and
Teachers: men who'd lost their was or were black armbands. There was a whole etiquette around around caring for and taking
Teachers: taking care around people who were in mourning, I mean, or even in etiquette books.
Teachers: that you could. You could, you know, if you, if you had a friend who was in mourning, you could look at your etiquette book, and you knew what to do, you'd go round and tell the cook to only make light meals. In small meals, because
Teachers: mourning affected your digestion. That the blinds should be pulled down, because harsh light was bad for the person in mourning and all these sorts of things. But with the First World War there's just so much mass death that that this just went out the window along with, you know, proper funerals, I mean people
Teachers: just buried where they fell in the battlefield, and so on.
Teachers: And so a lot depends upon just how a community does
Teachers: handle morning.
Teachers: And and I mean and I
Teachers: I've never lived in a in a you know Buddhist society, so I don't know what sort of funeral arrangements they they would have, but it would seem to me that they would be much more geared to
Teachers: the idea of impermanence. So this would actually mean it wasn't quite
Teachers: the blow that that it is in the West.
Teachers: It's about all I can contribute on it.
Meg: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Teachers: Thank you.
Teachers: So I'm Susie, and apologies to people I've already talked to about this, but there's an excellent podcast. By a woman called Rebecca Solnit, which talks about hope. I was just curious about that question before
Teachers: and I guess I'd always had a bit of a concept of that thing. Oh, people hope! Oh, let's hope! Just everything turns out, or whatever, and probably had a slight cynicism about that. But the way she describes it is that hope is. It's almost like fits into that context of intent
Teachers: for action that when you develop a sense of hope. You, then she hasn't put it as an obligation, but you inevitably are on a path to taking action, and she gives a whole lot of examples around things like the holocaust when things were hopeless.
Teachers: But people knew what was worth doing as opposed to doing nothing, or at least good people. People that, you know, tuned into what seemed like the right thing to do. So I think within that around the idea of uncertainty and impermanence, and everything else for me. Hope does actually resonate more clearly now that
Teachers: we don't know how things will turn out, and if we do nothing, then it won't turn out too well, if we do something, there's a possibility that something will turn out better than it is as it stands, so I guess that just reframed my thoughts around Hope, which
Teachers: probably had been somewhat more negative, probably in that sort of more Christian way of just hoping for the best, or someone will save me, or whatever it is.
Teachers: Thank you for that.
Teachers: At the moment, under the sway of Rebecca Solney herself
Teachers: just read.
Teachers: There's a book about the roses. Yeah.
Teachers: but I guess I wouldn't want to leave behind a species of humanity that I really liked called battling pessimists.
Teachers: And are we probably raising the case of a battling pessimist later in the retreat. But I think I guess I would see Simone Veil as a battling pessimist. I mean, where there is absolutely no hope. But you go on, anyway.
Teachers: and I'm also reminded of a case of a of
a rabbi who was
Teachers: in the
Teachers: You know one of the people in prison in a death camp, and he had the pastoral care of people with 100%. Certainty were going to be gassed.
Teachers: And his point was that it is important that you go to your death
Teachers: as
Teachers: a fully integrated personality. It was really important to keep your faith. Stay who you are right until the last moment. There was no hope anywhere in that. But there seems to me a very powerful kind of kind of message that, whatever happens, you don't lose what agency you've got and what you yourself stand for.
Teachers: Yes.
Teachers: okay.
Teachers: Be interested to hear a few more reflections on the notion of taking action.
Teachers: It seems to me one of the things with the dilemmas that we face now is. It's actually often not at all clear what is going to be helpful. Action and action that we think is going to be helpful can turn out to be profoundly unhelpful.
and you see it in tragedies. So, for example, in Ibsen.
Teachers: standard thing that happens in Ibsen, very clear in the Wild Duck, is that a secret is discovered, and there's the kind of impulse to tell the secret within the family, and it ends up really, really badly. It wasn't a good idea to take action.
Teachers: and I wonder how we deal with moral ambiguity when it's not so much.
Teachers: I mean, there's there's different flavors. But sometimes you just don't know if what you're going to do is going to be helpful at all for anything except relieving your own distress at not knowing what to do.
Teachers: and whether that is a useful motive for action I don't know so
Teachers: and so the moral ambiguity is. One version is, I'm not quite sure I know where I want to get. I'm not quite sure how to get there.
Teachers: Another version is, I don't even know what I'm facing here, so I have no idea what I should be trying to get. All I know is this is no good.
and I wonder how you think the tragic view
Teachers: instructs us as to how and when we should act, when so often what we face is situations where we just don't know what to do, and sometimes don't even know what would be a good outcome.
Teachers: I mean, I guess what the protagonists do is do their best, but often what their best is, of course, colored by
Teachers: grief or rage, or something like that. But you know, doing one's best means
Teachers: to the greatest possible extent, getting perspective, which is going to be the best guide for you. In other words, letting go of let letting go of, as far as as possible with one's own psychological conditioning, prejudices and habits of mind that are going to
Teachers: prevent
a clear sighted
Teachers: assessment of the various paths one can take, but certainly the one not to take is not to do anything.
Teachers: That's what puzzles me, because it may be that if the odds are that whatever you do is not going to be.
Teachers: if what you're going to do doesn't have a very good percentage chance of being helpful, then it may be the wise thing is to do nothing.
Teachers: And are we not often frequent quite often in that situation nowadays?
Teachers: I guess so. Yeah, that's true, but they're probably fewer than we would like to think. We would like to think that our inaction is the wise thing to do when in fact, it's driven by something else fear or
in in our little group. This morning we were talking about the
Teachers: of the Good Samaritan, and wondering why the people, the people who walked on the other side of the road. What was their problem?
And
Teachers: There they they would presumably have had a moral alibi.
The thing, the thing was that they
Teachers: something.
Teachers: really had to be down. It's like that sign down down the garden.
Teachers: never
or past a need without responding.
Teachers: But you know, apart from that, I think it's it's a case of it would be a matter of making
oral judgment in and in every unique situation.
Teachers: Yep. And then we have T.
James: Hello, Winston. Going back to what you were saying earlier about grief and mourning, and and specifically, when we lose someone close to us.
James: I was wondering if you could speak to. How do we spot in ourselves the difference between
James: what might be a sort of a Dharma informed acceptance that the you know the lives of our loved ones are as transient as anything else.
James: The difference between that and the the less healthy avoidance or denial of grief that you touched on.
Teachers: Look if you can, if you. If if that sense of acceptance, of transience, etc. Goes deep enough, then it's presumably the way to go. But there can be an awful lot of
Teachers: of suppression going on there.
Teachers: you know. It's something that we might rationally like to do. But the thing is that our rational selves are not masters in their own house. They're still this.
Teachers: your unconscious undercurrent, which, of course, was what Freud was on about that you've really got to let that run its course. And and it's easy to rationalize that that's not happening. I mean, in one of his
Teachers: much later followers. Today Darian Leda talks about how
Teachers: A sudden loss can
Teachers: unleash a mourning completely out of proportion to what the loss is, and that's usually because there is a previous loss that you haven't dealt with, and what has happened is being triggered. And his example
Teachers: was Queen Victoria, who mourned the death of Albert lavishly over many, many years, and Darian Leda's explanation was that she was actually mourning her mother, who
Teachers: who died much earlier, with whom she had a terrible relationship, and nothing had been resolved before the mother's death. So you know, there's all these
Teachers: booby traps in the unconscious that can come up, which is
Teachers: why we need to be able to loosen the knots in the mind while you know, in real time.
Teachers: Hmm!
Teachers: I'm sorry. Well, why don't we break for tea? And then we come back in half an hour?
Teachers: Continue this. But there's a question. Do we want to break into small groups. Or do we want to continue
Teachers: as we are? But so I'll put it to the vote.
Teachers: There may be more people coming, but let's start.
Teachers: So
we're gonna
Teachers: look how much you know
this is correct.
Teachers: Is that right?
Teachers: I can say, here's here's cats as an expert.
Teachers: Oh, okay.
Teachers: So while we're waiting for the screen. Comrades. Do we have any questions from the floor? There? They are right.
Teachers: Yes.
it's
Teachers: so. Okay.
Teachers: Who was Judith? And I wanted to? Comment on the
Teachers: Sorry I'm I missed his name. Talked about transients, and
Teachers: you know, with the whether that can help with grieving. So what sort of the
Teachers: the person on screen last? Who was it James James James James James talked about? When you talk about transience as a Buddhist concept? Can that help with grieving and with mourning?
Teachers: And your your response was, well, if it works for you, then that that could that could possibly be okay
Teachers: to me what it triggered was a sort of
Teachers: the whole notion of spiritual bypassing. And you know it's kind of rendering ante Caesar what belongs to him. and effectively. And even Freud, you quoted mourning and melancholia
Teachers: before he wrote that paper he was quite convinced
Teachers: that the attachment pattern that one had with the deceased had to be broken, and that was the only way he had to go cold turkey almost until his daughter died.
Teachers: And that was what instigated writing that paper.
Teachers: So it's
Teachers: it's and as someone who's who's worked with grief and loss for many years.
Teachers: the notion, and in terms of letting be is the only way to go in my experience with hundreds of people that I've worked with, it's
Teachers: because there's no possibility to move on.
Teachers: And you you noted that even though people give you that advice. But it's spurious advice.
Teachers: So the the wisdom is how to move forward
Teachers: and carry your load as best possible.
Teachers: So it depends on the contents of your Ganisak. How quickly you'll move, how heavy it will be! How difficult! But the process of grieving is moving forward
Teachers: unless you get completely stuck into it, then you go in. It becomes like depression, so it becomes like melancholy becomes melancholia, and then you are the whole range of things what they call prolonged grief, disorder, or complicated grief. Where you're stuck, you're still in the acute phase.
Teachers: Some people forever.
Teachers: Yeah.
Teachers: thank you, Dave. Thank you.
Teachers: Hi Winton, Joseph. One thing that came up in our group discussion in between breaking and morning tea was the invisible nature of a lot of perspectives, and we don't really realize we're in water
Teachers: because we're all fish. So I had a question for you kind of the expert panel, so to speak. What are some of the ways that?
Teachers: What are some of the invisible things in your life that have shaped your perspective? And how do you go about making them visible.
Teachers: What do you mean by visible? You mean conscious? Yeah. So the kind of the simple idea is that if there are 2 fish talking, and the third one swims by and says, How's the water? The first 2 are very confused because they don't know anything that isn't water until you meet another culture or another perspective. You don't know that your perspective is one of many perspectives. It just is
Teachers: so reflecting on your life. What are some of the ways that your perspective has been challenged, whether that's through self-power, your own kind of analytical motivations to do so? Or when have you been confronted with some of
Teachers: some other kind of perspective. And what are some skillful ways to kind of bring that about? What are some unskillful ways that has kind of fallen upon you. Yeah, just your kind of
Teachers: some advice on that, please.
Teachers: I guess most most of the changes in my life have been by being intellectually convinced of certain things, but
Teachers: but the things that have
Teachers: and and stuck me, and say to me, first of all. I guess the Vietnam war.
Teachers: for instance. you know, I was
Teachers: on my way to becoming a member of the establishment, and then suddenly well, not so suddenly, there was.
Teachers: We were involved in a war that we shouldn't have been in, and
Teachers: even if we should have been in it, we should have been on the other side. And it was it it just meant.
Teachers: you know, I felt deeply disgraced in terms of you know my national identity by that. In fact, I physically left the country, and I mean that caused Chad chain reaction of
Teachers: went and lived in Sweden for a year, where.
Teachers: you know, life was very different to what I was used to, and and to my mind much more appropriate. And then but it just then it triggered a chain reaction of
Teachers: seeing things working differently, of then understanding why they were working differently.
And
Teachers: what? And I suppose in ways the story of my life is just curiosity. That.
Teachers: for instance, you know, and in when I was in my 40 s. My very stodgy
Teachers: Gp. Said, in a few years you'll need to go on to permanent medication for your blood pressure.
Teachers: and so
Teachers: said, I'll hell with that I'll I'll meditate. I read somewhere that you can meditate and bring your blood pressure down.
Teachers: So II
Teachers: didn't know how you learned to meditate, but there was something called the Meditation
Teachers: Centre. I went along to that, and it turned out to be a a Hindu sect. who said the way to meditate was to recite the names of God.
Teachers: and I said, but you know I don't believe in God, and so this isn't very helpful.
Teachers: And this bloke said.
Teachers: Well, you know, it's much better than what the Buddhists do. They just believe in emptying your mind. And I thought, Oh, that sounds good. So I went to the Sydney Buddhist center.
Teachers: Where?
Teachers: And yeah, I learned to meditate. My blood pressure went down, but being an academic, I wasn't good enough, you know. You have to know why I couldn't live without the why, so
Teachers: I then did. The next course they were offering on on the dharma, and and it was just a
Teachers: conversion process. I mean, it was a it wasn't just an intellectual
Teachers: process, but it it was one of those things that starts as an intellectual process, but feels intuitively
Teachers: right to the point where it becomes quite euphoric, you know. So I guess that's
Teachers: how conversion processes work. But then the curiosity kept going, you know about in terms of questioning the kind, the way that Dharma was being pitched
and practised, and
Teachers: gradually finding my way to here.
Teachers: Yeah, I guess there was nothing more dramatic than that, you know.
Teachers: and
Teachers: never coming close to death or any of those near-death experiences that often turn people around.
Teachers: Thank you.
Teachers: That's fine. Thank you.
Teachers: Climate change and environmental destruction have kind of been part of what's happening for a long time, and on my mind. And this morning I was walking
Teachers: in the gardens. And there's this absolutely magnificent tree, and I was looking at it, and the thought went through my mind.
Teachers: maybe this was all doomed to die, and it was kind of like the feeling that went with that was was not a very nice feeling. And then I thought, but in the present moment
Teachers: there's just this experience of beauty. And with that thought just a lot of gratitude arose.
Teachers: and I'm just wondering what the dharma has to say about the practice of gratitude in as part of our response to the challenges of life.
Teachers: Hmm.
Teachers: I can't see the specific text on gratitude, but it seems to be very, very much implicit in the dharma
Teachers: partly because of the the way that generosity is
Teachers: is encouraged. The sharing
Teachers: and the way in which that
Teachers: that focus makes you very conscious of
Teachers: the flow of goods and energy and time
Teachers: between people, and particularly, you know, when I was first looking at
dharmic ethics.
Teachers: about that the
Teachers: the second precept, not taking the non given.
Teachers: and was, you know, explained that this is not just not stealing. It's a question of being conscious the whole time of what you're receiving
and what you're giving. So
Teachers: you know that
Teachers: if you meet someone who
Teachers: wants to bend your ear the whole time and talk and talk at you. That is really a breach of that preset, because they're presuming on your time and you
Teachers: and your attention. And I guess these days, you know, we've got the attention. Economy where attention is is a scarce resource. This is. This is quite important to know what's going on to know if you're talking to someone.
Teachers: and you get a sense that you're talking a bit more than they are. And maybe there's something there's an ethical issue going on here that they may not want it to hear. You may not want to know
Teachers: and and just being aware of what what we're receiving the whole time from people that we often take for granted. So it's a way. This sort of sensitizing
Teachers: of practicing even, you know, the 5 precepts is a way of sensitizing us to our relationship of giving and taking. And particularly as kids, we grow up just automatically taking and taking from our parents. Never.
Teachers: And it's only sort of looking back with saying. Gee, I got a hell of a lot from my mom, or from my dad, or something like that. It it becomes you become conscious of what?
Teachers: What was actually going on, that flow of
Teachers: time, energy, and goods. And I think that that is where where I mean, there's, and very much. An implicit idea of
Teachers: of gratitude comes about. Thank you.
Teachers: yes, and
Teachers: do. Either you or Father Sigmund have some practical advice. If you're reflecting on your life, and you think shit there's a huge unmawned event that is contributing to my current duka of how to unpack that
Teachers: other than a full blank course of psychotherapy.
Teachers: and no, not really. I mean I think so. So. I mean my probably by morning of both my parents was a bit truncated, and particularly my father, because
Teachers: I was overseas when he died. I knew he was going to die. I knew he was going to die, but nobody knew when
Teachers: and when we said goodbye for the last time, I mean he was still walking and standing and and but we both knew kind of thing.
Teachers: It was a kind of
Teachers: a mourning process there.
Teachers: but I also think when Freud talks about other forms of loss.
Teachers: and I guess right now I'm in
Teachers: deep mourning about
Teachers: the the outcome of the referendum
Teachers: in October, and
Teachers: what it means for this country. You know that we're
Teachers: back in a in a in a sloth of dishonesty and
Teachers: misery that yet we're still pretending the indigenous population wasn't here when
Teachers: all our white fellow heroes arrived here. You know. I mean, I just find that
Teachers: that that is a kind of mourning. I think a lot a shame.
Teachers: I think shame is very much, you know, very, very close to it, and it's a shame that can't be easily overcome. There's nothing that's going to happen. It's going to redeem the situation.
Thanks.
okay.
Teachers: thank you. I don't want to hold the microphone, but no one else had their hands up. I was just wondering when you referred to people bending your ear.
Teachers: thinking of it in an ethical sense. And so how do you work with that? As someone kind of working professionally in this area, I suppose?
Teachers: well, I guess I just try and put out cues. But there are people as we know, who don't pick up cues readily, but
Teachers: that basically is is sort of as
Teachers: quickly as possible to, you know.
Teachers: bring things to an end and then
Teachers: be on guard in case it happens. Yeah, we get back into that into that sort of interaction with a person
Teachers: know. I know there are people who can do who can break things off more brutally. But I'm
Teachers: not into that I try to be nice.
Teachers: Yes.
Teachers: interested in your comment on growth
Teachers: as a contributor to changing perspectives, and you touched on it just a little bit when you talked about the things that had affected you.
Teachers: But it strikes me sometimes thinking about the Buddha having birth, old age, sickness, and death.
Teachers: They're not for him. It doesn't sound like stages in a life cycle.
Teachers: It just sounds like things that happen. And there's some bits about them that aren't so good. So we need to understand that we're going to have to deal with this. Whereas the reality we now understand much more deeply through psychology and very much through Freud, and people like him is that the process from birth
Teachers: is a continual cycle of growth. which is a continual cycle of leaving things behind, which is a continual cycle of reimagining the things that we have and the world becoming bigger or different, and so on.
Teachers: And I don't know if you've got any comment, either about how that fits into, as it were, developing maturing perspectives. or whether we
Teachers: emphasize this notion of personal and secular growth enough when we think about Buddhism and Dharma, a lot of Dharma practice you could do at the age of 15 or 50,
Teachers: and yet the experience is quite different, and the fruits might be quite different.
Teachers: So I don't know if you've got any comments about how just that secular process of moving from birth to death through the cycles of becoming
Teachers: is a vehicle for evolving wiser and better and
Teachers: more
Teachers: constructive perspectives.
Teachers: Well, I think yes, it does. It certainly helps in terms of.
Teachers: for instance.
Teachers: thinking about dying, and I'm 82, and and notice that a lot of
Teachers: my fellow octogenarians think a lot about death, and I do. I think a lot about death, too. So presumably we're doing. You know what's a great
Teachers: sixteenth century
Teachers: skeptic, Montene said about death. We rob it of its strangeness by constantly thinking about it. But but there's another aspect to that that these aren't just things that the the bad stuff that happens to us
Teachers: isn't just. you know. coming at us, we are. And this is this is a great trope in the tragedies. So we are
Teachers: often complicit.
Teachers: We're often contributing to these situations in ways that we're not
Teachers: prepared to acknowledge a lot of the time. I was thinking of edifice edifice
Teachers: kills an older man in a road rage incident at an intersection. But he's on, I mean. Oedipus grew up.
Teachers: He didn't grow up with his biological parents. He was fostered out to some other. But and then he came back into into the world, and and he and he kills this man
Teachers: Where there's a possibility that it's his father.
Teachers: but he is full of rage, as a lot of characters are in the tragedies, and he doesn't.
Teachers: He doesn't ask any questions. Shoot first.
Teachers: ask questions like that sort of thing, and then he marries an older woman. And again, there's the possibility that this woman who's his mother. But he doesn't.
Teachers: Again. He doesn't ask squish. It doesn't. I mean in law. You have this, this concept of constructive.
Teachers: constructive notice that if you, if you you know you do something
Teachers: that
Teachers: in the event is wrong. But there's a vital element that you haven't been told
Teachers: about you. But, on the other hand.
Teachers: everything points to that element being there, and you ignore it, and you then commit the mistake. And this is what you find a lot in the tragedies, and it's a real
Teachers: it's a real prompt for us to
Teachers: to look at what's happening to us.
Teachers: or what what we perceive as happening to us, and and inquire into what part we've actually played in bringing this about.
Teachers: I don't know if that helps. But
Teachers: very interesting. Yes.
Teachers: hmm.
Teachers: yes.
Teachers: my name is, John, can we move from just 1 s from when you talk about us as singular versus plural like in Latin? There's U, and there's you
Teachers: and Stephen introduced the notion of engaged Buddhism last night, and then we had a good exploratory now on perspective.
Teachers: so is is there
Teachers: some innovative emergent way of looking at perspective from a collective stance
Teachers: rather than just an individual stance.
Teachers: Well, certainly
Teachers: mean. I guess this is the role of public history, you know, is
Teachers: whether and this gets back, I guess, to our recent experience in October.
Teachers: Whether we, whether we can shift
Teachers: towards an admission of I'm just taking that example. that the foundations of modern Australia
Teachers: consists of a genocide and genocides not only like I mean this.
Yes.
Teachers: the aboriginal genocide was a real classic of
Teachers: settler colonialism, where there's
Teachers: starts off with large-scale massacres which occurred here, and and then the erratic, the cultural genocide.
Teachers: stealing children.
Teachers: suppressing languages, suppressing culture, destroying sacred society all those elements
Teachers: which
Teachers: which a multifaceted genocide occurs. Now, if we could.
Teachers: if we could understand that, I mean, if we could acknowledge that it doesn't take much to understand it. But you know, if we could overcome what
Teachers: Bill Stana in 1 68, called the Great Australian Silence about all that
Teachers: if we could give up the the strategy that that was quite explicit in the early twentieth century of drawing a bale over our history, so we didn't have to face it. If we could overcome all that.
Teachers: you know, we could collectively, I think, make enormous progress. Not only
Teachers: it's closing the gap of indigenous disadvantage. But in
Teachers: just being honest about about what sort of history we've had, and what sort, and you know where where this might teach us to try and
Teachers: take the country from now on.
Teachers: See? So I think there's there's certainly very much a collective element. And this was again going back to the Greeks. This is, I mean there. When they staged a tragedy, literally staged a tragedy in open air theatre. It was
Teachers: a kind of civic seminar. Every people came. It was a spectacle. It
Teachers: made people think it turned people's heads.
Teachers: Hmm, hmm!
Teachers: If we go back to the as understanding of right view.
Teachers: there's often a focus on recognizing to occur
Teachers: suffering, impermanence, and emptiness as being the characteristics of experience. And the kind of right view is is
Teachers: right view about those things is particularly important, because that cuts very deep. I wonder if you've got any comments about the elements of right view that you think cut particularly deeply. Now.
Teachers: is it the same ones? Are there others that we should have our eyes and ears open for? Well, I think that
Teachers: I mean as, as I remember, the kind of classical view of right view it meant. That you first of all, I mean, acknowledged
Teachers: the 4 noble truths as they are taught in the classical tradition, and in particular dependent, arising.
Teachers: I mean the whole, you know, process of cause and effect.
Teachers: what I guess, where
Teachers: proposing type
Teachers: speak from Stephen, too, is a much richer idea, a richer idea of
Teachers: the kind of perspective
Teachers: we can bring to our practice the sort of things that we've been talking about because we are
Teachers: inheritance of 2 extraordinary
Teachers: cultural movements over the last 2,500 years.
Teachers: And and I think that that can be that that becomes part of our perspective.
you know, and and our understanding of
Teachers: processes like stereotype, you know that we can get. We can free ourselves of hi prejudices that are out there and being supported by social media and the Murdoch press and the rest of it.
Teachers: And we can that that we have
Teachers: antidotes for
Teachers: Michauditty. Wrong view.
Teachers: Yeah. I guess I'm thinking of Goethe's comment that
Teachers: whoever it
Teachers: cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth.
Teachers: And as long as we have these cultural lineages we're not living hand to mouth because we're.
Teachers: you know, just today, we've been. you know.
Teachers: drawing on cultural
Teachers: cultural developments from the fifth century Bce. In both cases. So. But I think that that feeds into it's not just
abstract.
Teachers: And, you know, abstract, eternal truths, like
Teachers: dependent arising. But it's these kinds of these kinds of insights that we are the heirs of, that we can bring to our practice
Teachers: as the basis upon which we understand it and and make our decisions around it.
Teachers: Jeff. Jeff. Yes.
Teachers: just picking up on that. You know. I'm not a theologian. I've I've read a range of of things in this area. But I wonder, you know, we're we're working from a point of view that Buddhism has been adapted to a range of different cultural contexts.
Teachers: And we're we're now endeavoring to adapt it to
Teachers: a Western cultural context. And, as you pointed out, you're now drawing on
Teachers: the the western
Teachers: lore. And and you know from
Teachers: you're referring to the great Socrates, and so on in blending it with
Teachers: the teachings that have come to us from the Buddha question that comes to me as you saying that though, is whether right view has been framed differently
Teachers: in the different cultural contexts
Teachers: where it has arisen. So far. So the Tibetan versus the Japanese versus
Teachers: the other variations of the of the the theme that we're grappling with here.
Teachers: I don't have enough understanding of those 2
Teachers: really answer mine
Teachers: question as to whether bringing in the Greek heritage, and such is novel or where
Teachers: doing something that has already been done in these different versions that have arisen so far.
Teachers: let me just say, to start off with that I'm not really comfortable with talking about right view. I think it's
Teachers: it's pretty dodgy, anyway, but I think it's much better to be talking about perspective, and which includes
Teachers: the reality construct. You know that we that we, as
Teachers: as
Teachers: modern Westernists, have, like, we believe in evolution.
Teachers: we, we believe in neuroscience. I mean, these are just part of the
Teachers: part of the wallpaper for us was these things were, of course, these ideas, particularly, I think, of evolution, and for matter, all the
Teachers: ecological science that we're now using is is
Teachers: is very recent and also very important.
Teachers: But what I mean in terms of what secular Buddhism means for me, it might be slightly different to what it means, for Stephen is
Teachers: that this is
Teachers: the Dharma putting down roots in the west, and we're almost exactly following the precedent of how it.
Teachers: how the Dharma
went to
Teachers: China and East Asia. I mean it. Just the tone of it changed so much from the you know the rather pessimistic view that was of human life that was built into the ancient Indian culture to something that was much more.
Teachers: if you like. Optimistic. I saw so saw a human life in much more positive terms. So you know, there was a de-emphasis of all the
Teachers: you know
Teachers: the Karma rebirth stuff, and much more emphasis on
Teachers: you know, as a here and now
Teachers: as much. It seemed to me that, and and in doing that they were drawing on their preexisting civilization and Taoism, and even Confucianism to some extent, but particularly Taoism, had a strong influence, and that seems to be
Teachers: absolutely appropriate. I mean that you're bringing the dharma into another culture, and that culture is. It is already quite developed.
Teachers: and you draw on whatever resources are in it to
Teachers: flesh out to sharpen up Dharma Dharma's theory, if you like, and practice
Teachers: video
Teachers: drive.
I'm not
Vivien Langford: meeting. I wanted to ask you
Vivien Langford: about the establishment
Vivien Langford: yesterday
Vivien Langford: Stephen mentioned that he had tried to raise these ideas about the secular dharma with the Buddhist establishment, and
Vivien Langford: eventually found these quietly closing doors.
Vivien Langford: And I think
Vivien Langford: that's what we're up against. If we try to be engaged Buddhists or Quakers, or even people in solidarity with
Vivien Langford: suffering people or species, you're up against a sort of cultural establishment.
Vivien Langford: It's very firm, and it's very bolstered. And yeah. you know, it's not exactly that you want to be a battering RAM and fight it.
Vivien Langford: You don't want to go away and be defeated by it. I want to know how to approach it. That solid wall of the establishment. You could even say it with the Yes
Vivien Langford: or No referendum. You know there was this kind of establishment view that prevailed, but didn't seem that that was very permanent to me. It might might crumble eventually. But
Vivien Langford: what's you know? We only have such a small lifespan in the time we've got. What's the way to
Vivien Langford: think about the the given establishment, who usually to me. being in the media as I am, they seem to have their fingers in their ears. They don't want to hear what we have to say.
Vivien Langford: Various people have to say.
Teachers: Are you talking about religious establishment or not? Really? No. But Stephen mentioned the religious establishment. But
Vivien Langford: I mean the political establishment, the social establishment, the gender establishment.
Vivien Langford: Yeah.
Teachers: Well, I think they're 2. I mean, I would see them as 2 separate establishments, I guess.
Teachers: in terms of religious establishments. I mean, I think that probably
Teachers: secular Buddhism began as a kind of critique of establishment.
Teachers: I've got an idea I might be simply quoting Stephen on this. But more recently
Teachers: secular Buddhism has has developed
Teachers: in a suite generous way, whether we're no longer critiquing the orthodoxy. But we're actually developing along our own lines. And the orthodoxy. Can.
Teachers: you know, look after itself? We're not. We're not engaging with it anymore.
Teachers: might be putting it a bit crudely, but it seems to me, anyway, to be what's happening now?
Teachers: As far as the other establishments are concerned, I will be dealing with them in later days, but it seems to me we have to be much more tactical and strategic about them. But it depends on which. Yeah, which one we're talking about.
Teachers: and what the opportunities are to do that. But I that's I think a conversation a bit further down the track in this retreat.
Vivien Langford: Could I just say, look you also mentioned that word establishment when you said the Vietnam war sort of pushed you out of the country.
Vivien Langford: and you were on a path to the establishment, presumably a certain career or persona that you would have become. And now you've become something different. Yeah.
Vivien Langford: And I think a lot of people have that experience. There's either suffering or
Vivien Langford: some wake up experience where they just can't look away. They just can't. Say, I don't know. There was even a film once, you know French film where he said once, you know.
Vivien Langford: it obligates you and
Vivien Langford: yet there's always this lumpish establishment who says, no? Well, not yet. We'll do it later. We'll delay. or this is not the way we do it. And
Vivien Langford: I want to know how to think about it. I feel very hostile to it, but I don't want to batter my head against her.
Teachers: Yeah. Well.
Teachers: I guess it really is a question of strategy and tactics as opposed to simply.
Teachers: you know, simple critique, are easy. I really think you know, when you, when you're up against
Teachers: and establishment.
Teachers: You've got to understand exactly how it works.
Teachers: I mean, someone said.
Teachers: in order to gain freedom, one has first to understand exactly how one's bondage works.
Vivien Langford: Hmm.
Teachers: okay, so I'll be hopefully getting into that a bit later, because it's a more complicated issue.
Thanks.
Teachers: It's Tessa. Again. I have an experience that differs from the one just described, and some of the other ones as well, which I'd love. Your opinion on. I came into this
Teachers: whole world through a space that was offering secular mindfulness, such as Mbsr courses and
Teachers: things like that sort of scholars and studies through academia. And initially, when when I came to all this no one was mentioning the dharma. No one was mentioning the Buddha, but it was.
Teachers: you know, a variation of the teachings, and I guess I'm sitting here going is that, like the other end of the scale, where the Buddhism is completely gone from the whole picture. And it's a really big scene. Obviously the mindfulness or whatever it's huge. And where does that fit in like? I'm curious about that.
Teachers: Well, I mean, there's a number of different approaches to teaching, developing, and teaching that.
Teachers: I think some of the people who
Teachers: who started it. We actually had training in Buddhist establishments, Buddhist monasteries, etc. But they're selling it on a completely different basis. I mean.
Teachers: it's it's being sold as a fee for service. It's commodified a fee for service. There's no requirement to be in communication, in, in.
Teachers: in a sanger sense. there's no requirement to
Teachers: follow an ethical, an ethical teaching at all.
Teachers: So
Teachers: as far as far as I'm concerned, it works. It's got therapeutic runs on the board.
Teachers: If it works, do it. You know, it's it's it's relieving suffering, particularly when when it's genuine therapeutic uses.
Teachers: It's a different story when it's when we're talking about military mindfulness like it's part of the basic training of us marines.
Teachers: and I think that's quite mischievous.
I know there's a counterargument that it means they
Teachers: commit less domestic violence when they come back from their operations. So that's good. But I still think it's mischievous use, and also use as a way of increasing productivity in corporations by making employees more docile.
Teachers: a theory and practice of management. That's all about
Teachers: hierarchy and
Teachers: and exploitation. Exploitation. Ca, yeah. And I guess the question under my question. Sorry I didn't realize it. Is that what's what's your ethical like. Stance on on that.
Teachers: on that sort of
Teachers: I guess some people would call it an an extractive
Teachers: you know. Take on the teachings to use them, you know, for those means. And then, of course, you said, it's helpful for some people, but it's devoid of an ethical path.
Teachers: Well, look as I say, if it in in therapeutic applications.
Teachers: It does seem to work, and if it it's just like
Teachers: any other therapeutic development, if it will, if it works, go for it.
Teachers: and I don't. I mean, people go into things like Mbsr. Or Mbc. With their eyes open. They pay their money, they do the course. And a lot of those teachers are very skillful, particularly, you know, when I
Teachers: where I'm in Sydney, I think you know she does a terrific job. And and it's relieving suffering. So there's no ethical problem there, because he's not being marketed as a road to Nirvana. It's a question of becoming a more integrated and happy human being. But obviously, I've got concerns about
Teachers: the corporate
applications and
Teachers: and the military applications, and and those other kind of organizational applications.
Teachers: So I mean, in some cases they might be they might be good. And then a lot of people who do these courses in whatever in whatever framework
Teachers: are going to, probably a small minority. But if they're going to become curious and
Teachers: end up here, or some in some similar kind of setting, and that's again a great, I mean a great outcome. But but it's not one that's planned for or happens often. Probably.
Teachers: Yeah.
Teachers: I want to excuse everybody in this room for what I'm going to say. Okay, because I know it does not apply to them. And I'm coming from my American experience. And we were talking before about change
Teachers: and climate.
Teachers: and I have just I've given up on
Teachers: I've become a pessimist about it.
Teachers: and a lot of it has to do with with the inability of people to even make small change. A lot of what's happening in the oil industries and all that in America is financed by the banks.
Teachers: You could stop that overnight
Teachers: if people would withdraw their accounts from it and move to a credit union or some other thing. But the answer is, oh, I've been with that bank for 20 years. Oh, that bank is right around the corner.
and people do not.
Teachers: I guess there's the thing about homo sapiens that they deal well with emergencies, but they don't deal well with slow disasters.
Teachers: I go around with slogans on the back of my car.
Teachers: One of these days I'm gonna get my tires slashed. Okay.
Teachers: During the last election I had
Teachers: put up trump, you know, there's a format for this 3 stars a bar, the President, vice president, a bar, and 3 stars, and I put that on the back of my car and I put on it
trump, Slash Putin. When I was parked outside of a grocery store I came back out, and somebody had erased Putin.
Teachers: but that was the point of it is to get people thinking about it. But I offer these signs to other people. No, I'm not going to put that in my car.
Teachers: And and it's all those little tiny things.
Teachers: and no one's willing to do them except for the people in this room.
Teachers: I know it's very. It's very dispiriting. I'd seen.
Teachers: I mean, just what's happening right now in Dubai.
Teachers: where you know, the a Petro state
Teachers: is hosting a global meeting about how to meet climate change, and the President gets up and says there is no science to indicate. There's something wrong with using coal and gas.
Teachers: I mean, yeah, it's that sort of thing makes you, brother. Take your hair a bit.
Teachers: but I think I think it's part of the tragic vision is to
Teachers: say we're still going to respond. Anyway.
Teachers: we're still going to respond. Anyway, we've still got to do what we have to do. But there's going to be backsliding, and there's a lot of backsliding going on on that issue of climate. Now you know where the emphasis is
Teachers: is going from? How do we stop it to? How do we live with it.
Teachers: and that, you know, seems to me a dreadful kind of.
Teachers: and obviously A shift in emphasis that's been driven by fossil fuel industries and and their political enablers.
Teachers: But we have 2 keep going, anyway. This is why
Teachers: I'm on the battling pessimist team.
Teachers: you know. There is the other side of this is that if you
Teachers: there's a term for it which I can't remember. But if you can see a disaster coming.
Teachers: hmm!
Teachers: And no one's willing to do anything. Then what do you do to take advantage of the disaster coming?
Teachers: Hmm! Don't buy beachfront property.
Teachers: If you have it, sell it. teach your children how to deal with with grandchildren and
Teachers: great grandchildren, how to how to deal with
Teachers: this kind of issue.
Teachers: You know where, what kind of jobs to look for where to live.
Teachers: and and all kinds of other things that you can do that you know that your children don't know.
Teachers: Yeah.
Teachers: course they won't listen but
Teachers: tell it.
Teachers: but they will have their own experiences in time.
Teachers: Yes.
Teachers: sorry for my back with the microphone. I don't have answers to all what you've just put forward there.
Teachers: I've just come from the Newcastle coal ship blockade, and the young people there were incredibly well organized, well informed. 19 year old, was one of the key organizers. I know the odds are enormous, but it was just so heartening to see the level of understanding and appreciation of what they're facing and their determination.
Teachers: I'd strident, quite well informed, well-presented talks and things that went on there.
Teachers: and there was also a lot of joy in what was happening there, too, which I thought was marvelous because it wasn't just. This is all terrible. People were actually bringing music and creativity, and a lot of fun to it as well. So I think we have to see that young people are really leading us now in this area. I'm not saying that what's happening in Dubai, which is where my partner's headed tomorrow is fantastic, but
Teachers: I feel that there is a lot of intelligent campaigning going on. We are going to face a lot of difficulties, but are not going to be comfortable. We may have enormous bushfire season this year. That's the way the Weather Bureau is predicting it. There's a lot of things, a lot of consequences. But I don't think we should just
see that it's only that we live with the consequences, because we won't. If it just stays on the trajectory it is. It means for me, anyway, I just feel that it's this scene of hope and and the inherent action that is required of all of us.
Teachers: whatever the odds, because what else?
Teachers: What else are we going to do? Are we going to just give up and pretend it's not happening or yeah die of sorrow.
Teachers: Anyhow, it's just my take on it.
Teachers: I think that's that'd be a great point. I think it's terrific that we go away and think about that.
Teachers: because it is now time we
Teachers: broke up. I'm sure we're going to come back again and again to these. We're, after all, looking at ethics in a world in crisis, and we'll keep this conversation going. But
Teachers: now we need to
Teachers: have a bit of free time before we sit again. Say. thank you all.