Teachers: So I'd like to start by just sort of stepping back and looking at the broad picture of this model of the Eightfold Path.
Teachers: a worldly 8 vol. Path, as
Teachers: I've named it.
Teachers: and you'll also notice, if you have read the Handout, that the eightfold path is divided into 2 sections
Teachers: into the contemplative life and into the active life.
Teachers: so by rearranging it, by putting mindfulness, and then
my
Teachers: collectedness. and then perspective. and then imagination
Teachers: into the first
Teachers: 4 steps that, as it were.
Teachers: brings together the contemplative
Teachers: aspects of the path. and then the latter 4 steps
Teachers: are the active dimensions of the path.
Teachers: Activation
Teachers: can't even remember what I call them now have application, survival work, and voice.
Teachers: Now, this is a distinction that we don't find so explicitly stated in traditional Buddhism, but it's an idea that goes back to the Greeks
Teachers: who called it the Bios theoreticos.
Teachers: The Lamb was translated into Latin as the Vita
Teachers: contemplativa. the contemplative life.
Teachers: the theoretical life in Greek more, and then the
Teachers: because politicos.
Teachers: and again, the word politicos is obviously the root of our word politics. So that's emphasized far more clearly than in the English, the active life, or in Latin, the Vita
Teachers: activa.
Teachers: Now the danger with any kind of binary split
Teachers: is that you think that they're 2 quite separate things? Well, they're not. And we have to remember that the eightfold path
Teachers: in many ways a sequencing of a set of practices, some of which are.
or to do with what's going on inside ourselves.
Teachers: others to do with what is going on in the world outside us and our response to it.
Teachers: But that doesn't mean that they are somehow segregated.
Teachers: and as we'll see tomorrow, so I'm not going to go labor this point. Now there is a seamless continuity
Teachers: from the contemplative dimensions of the path into the active dimensions of the path. And in practice, of course.
Teachers: we're always contemplative beings. even if we're engaged in. you know some.
Teachers: you know.
Teachers: active political
Teachers: work. We're totally involved in a situation in the world that doesn't mean that we suddenly stop being
Teachers: conscious of what's going on in our minds.
Teachers: any more than when we are
Teachers: sitting quietly in meditation? Are we somehow cut off or severed from the
Teachers: world around
Teachers: us. Other people here, for example, the the songs of the birds.
Teachers: everything else is going on around us. We cannot, we cannot in real terms, ever
Teachers: separate these 2
Teachers: dimensions. In other words.
Teachers: be cautious not to absolutise them.
Teachers: Think of them as 2 different things. They're not the different ways of engaging with a continuum
Teachers: of of thoughts.
Teachers: words, and acts that run through everything.
Teachers: Someone brought up a question. I think it was Gowan yesterday about how the classical idea of right view, and, like Winton, I'm very, very wary of using that word.
Teachers: but nonetheless it is widespread, so we may as well acknowledge that.
Teachers: That in different Buddhist traditions do we get different emphases on? You know what that means, and we do
Teachers: in my Tibetan tradition, the Gallupa right view is clearly the the understanding of of Shunyata, of emptiness
Teachers: and the absence of inherent existence. That's right view, and pretty much everything else is peripheral to that
Teachers: in the Pali. In the Terravada tradition, right view is, as has already been mentioned, often said to be understanding, impermanence. suffering, and not self the 3 marks of being.
Teachers: But
Teachers: as is the
Teachers: emphasis, at least for me in this secularization or this secular dharma is to go back to the root sources
Teachers: to go back to the Pali text and see what the Buddha says.
Teachers: and he actually says neither of those 2 things
Teachers: emptiness, or the 3 marks of being as constituting right view. This is often the case we take on board.
Teachers: What a Buddhist tradition has told us in perfectly good faith.
Teachers: and when you check in back with the earliest sources we have, we find we don't find it.
Teachers: All Buddhist traditions, for example, are committed to the notion of there being 2 truths, relative truth and absolute truth or ultimate truth.
Teachers: Go back to the Pali text. It's not there.
Teachers: It's just not there that when I discovered that came as a bit of a shock.
Teachers: and we'll also, and I could give other examples. But I don't want to digress. But when we go back to samadhi.
Teachers: Right view, or in this case simply
Teachers: our perspective on our practice.
Teachers: We find one Suta.
Teachers: It's the ninth discourse in the middle length discourses the margins. It's called summer dietiti. Suta
Teachers: looks like a good place to begin.
Teachers: and like many of these palite texts, it's probably grown over time, it's expanded, and in those cases it's always useful to see what's the first thing the Buddha says.
Teachers: The first thing the Buddha says about Samadhiti
Teachers: is the the person. The one with samadhiti is the one who's able to differentiate and distinguish between what is skillful and what is unskilful.
Teachers: That's completely different to what you'll find in most standard
Teachers: Buddhist presentations of this topic. And what's striking about it, and I think particularly pertinent to what we're doing here. Ethical living summer ditty here is understood as ethical.
Teachers: It's not understood about as how to get reality right to understand things as they really are, which is an ontological truth claim
Teachers: whether that be emptiness, or whether it be in permanence and suffering, and not self. It's ethical.
Teachers: and my hunch. And of course I might be wrong is that
Teachers: the Dharma started out as primarily an ethical practice. How to lead a good life, how to live well in the world, with oneself, with others with everything else.
Teachers: and at a certain point it took a kind of ontological turn. or, we might say.
Teachers: in a slightly similar way, an epistemological term. It started to become Buddhists, started to become interested in the nature of reality.
Teachers: and particularly how we get reality wrong.
Teachers: So it's about correcting our misconceptions, our misperceptions till they accord with reality.
Teachers: And in the history of Indian thought
Teachers: Buddhists contributed a huge amount to epistemology, ontology, and logic.
Teachers: They really help develop these fields of knowledge, and they're not irrelevant. These are.
Teachers: you know, universal human fields of inquiry and and Buddhism has contributed a great deal to that in ancient and medieval India.
Teachers: But arguably, in doing so, it kind of lost sight of the ball. It lost sight of the priority of ethics, which
Teachers: in the Samadhiti Suta is right there at the very first thing to pay attention to
Teachers: samadhi, a perspective that one's perspective on life is that which helps you make better judgments.
Teachers: What's the good thing to do? What's the the not good thing to do? Skillful, unskilful Kusalah Akusa?
Teachers: So, in other words, perspective cannot be separated from ethics.
Teachers: It's important, not because it gets you in touch with reality. It's important because it helps you live better. And you can say the same thing in what I believe, and I might be wrong.
Teachers: that the dharma started out as a set of 4 tasks or paths, as I suspect they were originally called.
Teachers: and turned into 4 truths.
Teachers: The tasks are about what to do.
Teachers: to embrace life or suffering, to let reactivity be to see the stopping of reactivity and to respond appropriately according to the framework of the eightfold path that is entirely ethical.
Teachers: The 4 noble truths
Teachers: are once again ontological
Teachers: life is suffering.
Teachers: the cause of suffering is craving. And so.
Teachers: in other words, what is starts out, I believe.
Teachers: as an ethical set of ethical injunctions turns into a set of metaphysical truth claims.
Teachers: and rather than
Teachers: just craving, we now get ignorance plugged in prior to craving.
Teachers: So, in other words, is getting reality wrong.
Teachers: misaligning your perception with what is that becomes the problem rather than
Teachers: whether your response to suffering is appropriate or not?
Teachers: 2 very different ways of
Teachers: looking at the world.
Teachers: and
Teachers: one of the phrases that to me is is is totally central
Teachers: to this way of thinking is to recognize that the problem with craving
Teachers: and grasping and ignorance, all of those things is not that they cause suffering, although they very often do.
Teachers: I don't think that's a big secret. We know that from experience that they clearly don't help us
Teachers: be happy much of the time.
Teachers: But the real problem with craving and ignorance and so on, is not that it makes us unhappy or suffer. but that it prevents us from responding appropriately and wisely and compassionately and kindly to the world in which we live with others.
Teachers: That is the turning point, or has been the turning point. In my own thinking, this through over the years
Teachers: is to recognize that the problem is craving is not that it's the origin of suffering, but the problem with craving is that it impedes or hinders
Teachers: prevents us from
Teachers: responding in a non-reactive and thereby compassionate, loving
Teachers: and kind way. In other words. the problem with craving and ignorance is ethical.
Teachers: First and foremost, it's not ontological
Teachers: or epistemological.
Teachers: I know those words are sort of fancy philosophical words, and you may not be too happy with them. But I hope the point
Teachers: is clear.
Teachers: The other point about the eightfold path that we haven't really touched on, although the term has come up, I think, in all. in what all 3 of us have been talking about
Teachers: is that the eightfold path is what is how the Buddha initially defined the middle way.
Teachers: Now, again, the middle way is not an idea that's exclusive to Buddhism. We find it pretty much in most traditions whether we call it the Golden Mean or the middle way. It doesn't make too much of a difference.
Teachers: My friend Robert Ellis, who's a British philosopher, an ex-buddhist Buddhist.
Teachers: He's written. He's developed a whole middle way philosophy. Some of you might be familiar with it, and he's he's written a book on the Christian Middle Way.
Teachers: He's written a book on on the Buddhist Middle way. He's explored the idea of the middle Way. We find throughout pretty much every human culture.
Teachers: So the middle way is not an exclusively Buddhist thing, but it is nonetheless an idea that the Buddha laid out very, very clearly at the outset of his teaching as central to what he was about.
Teachers: And, in fact, if you look at the Buddha's first discourse. that's how it begins, he says, because I have found a middle way. And what is that middle way? It is this noble eightfold path.
Teachers: The middle way is sometimes used rather sort of glibly, as a kind of a Buddhist slogan. But if we think more deeply about it as Robert Ellis has done.
Teachers: we find that it's an incredibly rich idea. And in the
Teachers: in the first discourse the middle way is is described simply as a middle way between sensory indulgence. On the one hand
Teachers: and self-mortification on the other, in other words, indulging one's one's passions, one's lust, one's desires to getting what you want on the one hand and leading a life
Teachers: pure hedonism! And, on the other hand, sort of swinging to the other pole, and starting to engage in in the sort of self
Teachers: self punishing activities.
Teachers: whether that is literally like the ancient Indians who would stand on one leg for 2 days at a time, or whether it's, you know, following some extremely severe dietary regime.
Teachers: any of these activities could become
Teachers: a form of self-mortification, a form of self-punishment which very often has at its root a kind of self-hatred. I don't like myself. I don't like the way I live I live, whereas self-indulgence is about in a sense, a kind of a craving to fulfill one's basic desires, and to leave everything else
Teachers: as of no importance.
Teachers: But as the as the Buddha continues in his teaching. He expands this notion of the middle way, or, we might say, deepens this notion of the middle way.
Teachers: so that we get a text which again, I think, is very central to this secular Buddhist practice, and is called the Kachana Ghota Suta.
Teachers: The discourse to Kaca Ghoto.
It's found in the connected discourses. I think it's
I think it's Section 12, number 15. But I'm not not entirely sure I can look it up.
Teachers: But this is an important text, because once again the the interlocutor, a man called Katanagota. Asks the Buddha. You say? Samadhiti samadhiti? What do you mean, Samadhitti? You say? Right? View right view what do you mean? Right view?
Teachers: And then and then we get a very, very succinct. It's a very short text, but I think a very, very revealing text as to what the Buddha means by
Teachers: this true perspective, we might say this complete perspective.
Teachers: I'm not going to go into detail, but the again. The first thing, he says.
Teachers: which is the piece that's least likely to have been elaborated later
Teachers: summer ditty is leading a life that is no longer enthralled to binary, thinking
Teachers: no longer enthralled to what he calls Ati and Nutty
Teachers: is and isn't
Teachers: in the text that Lenora cited. Last night this very same phrase comes up. The Buddha says something like the most of the people in the world are dependent upon the ideas of it is, and it isn't
Teachers: into a and not a
Teachers: that's not the Buddha that's Aristotle, but it's the same basic idea. We tend to conceive of ourselves, to conceive of the world very easily by splitting it into binaries, into dualities.
Teachers: And so again, there's a danger when we introduce
Teachers: a binary like contemplative life, and active life is a very readily so think of these as 2 separate things.
Teachers: and there are many examples. There's self-mort, self-indulgence, self-mortification is obviously one, but we can extend it to things like permanence and impermanence
Teachers: these are. This is a binary way of thinking. Well, self
Teachers: and selflessness. It's a binary way of thinking, certainty, and uncertainty.
Teachers: We're plumbing for uncertainty here, but that only makes sense in contrast to certainty.
Teachers: any more than self only makes sense in contrast to what is not self.
Teachers: All of this is binary thinking one of the philosophers or thinkers that animated the Buddhist tradition after the Buddhist death
Teachers: is Nagarjuna. I'm sure you've all heard of Nagarjuna
Teachers: and Nagadiana's key work is called
Teachers: in my translation verses from the center verses on the Middle Way.
Teachers: and in this text he only cites one Buddhist discourse by name.
Teachers: and that is the Kajana Gorta Sutter. The discourse to Kachana Gorta. the one I've just cited
Teachers: not to be so get stuck in binary thinking
Teachers: binary thinking in many ways splits the world in 2
Teachers: into 2 separate things, and they are usually then valorized as one is good and one is not good. One is good, one is bad, you know. Self is bad, not self is good uncertainty, that's
Teachers: that's good certainty. That's problematic. That's not to say that these distinctions are not useful, they can be. but they become problematic as soon as they're absolutized.
Teachers: So the middle way, and by implication the eightfold path. because, after all the eightfold path is
Teachers: this middle way has to be understood as seeking to find a balance, find a course, a way of life
Teachers: that is ever alert to the dangers of slipping into a binary position.
Teachers: Nowadays we we might talk of, say, gender issues, for example.
Teachers: you know, gay or straight again, that's a binary opposition. And now there's an increasing awareness of the fluidity of gender.
Teachers: and I think that's a very middle way. Ish.
Teachers: Understanding that things the world is not
Teachers: dividable neatly into these opposites.
Teachers: Another example that's come up already in our discussions here. Is the question of hope. hope, and despair
Teachers: in French. The connection between these words is much clearer. You have Espoir and des espoire
Teachers: despair is, is, is, is is a lack of hope. or the opposite of home.
Teachers: hope, and despair.
Teachers: and in my conversations with my friends in Israel this came up a lot. People are experiencing despair, and they feel that they've lost hope
Teachers: been in extreme existential crises that one might
encounter.
Teachers: It's very understandable how you slip
Teachers: very easily and spontaneously into one of these binary oppositions.
Teachers: and some of my Israeli friends were also saying, Buddhism doesn't seem to work here. My practice doesn't seem to work. I'm I'm finding myself caught up in precisely the things that I thought I'd sort of freed myself from.
Teachers: But when the proverbial shit hits the fan. then your practice is really put to the test.
Teachers: How often is any religious practice a way of simply providing you with a degree of consolation and comfort?
Teachers: It's often when things really get bad when you're facing death, for example. or violence.
Teachers: whatever it might be, then your practice is really put to the test, and arguably, it's only in those occasions that you can really get the measure
Teachers: of your practice.
Teachers: I remember very. very vividly
Teachers: a conversation I once had with a Tibetan llama. I got to know quite well I was his interpreter for a couple of years in Hamburg, and we lived together, and it was a very small community at that time, so we had long, long conversations.
Teachers: and one thing he told me, that always stuck. He said he was in Lhasa
Teachers: in the 1950 s. When the Chinese invaded, and then in March, 1959,
Teachers: There was an uprising amongst the Tibetan people against the Chinese, and the Chinese did as most
Teachers: totalitarian regimes do. They just turn the guns on the protesters and and set them off to start killing people. And since one of the bases of the
Teachers: uprising was in them in certain monasteries around Lhasa. The howitzers were aimed at the monasteries.
Teachers: so from one day to the next, almost these monks, who had been leading this Buddhist life for all their lives or most of their lives, suddenly found that they had a
Teachers: they faced an immediate existential threat.
Teachers: and my friend Geshee took to Nawan said
Teachers: he could not have foretold.
Teachers: 24 h earlier. how any particular monk would have behaved.
Teachers: he said, some of the monks whom he held in great esteem
Teachers: completely lost, it fell into despair, and killed themselves
and other monks. who he may also have held him as in a
Teachers: esteem or not. I can't remember, said, Okay, I'm not going to give into this. So they pick up their bag of thumper and a couple of books, and head off for a totally unknown exile across the Himalayas in India.
Teachers: In other words, it was only when their practice was put to the test.
Teachers: Was it somehow then able to be truly measured.
Teachers: And again, I think I certainly need the humility
Teachers: to recognize if my practice were put to the test like that.
Teachers: To be perfectly frank. I don't know how I would respond.
Teachers: and that was very much the experience of some of my friends in Israel.
Teachers: You know. They found themselves responding or reacting in ways they could not have foreseen in the abstract.
Teachers: So this has led me to reflect that if hope and despair are simply
Teachers: pairs within a binary set.
Teachers: in other words, poles of a spectrum.
Teachers: rather than absolutes that exist in and of themselves. Then what would be a middle way
Teachers: between hope and despair.
Teachers: I think a useful way of getting out of binary thinking is to think in terms of spectra.
Teachers: It's not to deny that there's hope and deny that there, there's despair. But to recognize that they're the extreme points on a range of
Teachers: human
Teachers: possibilities that go from one to the other. There's a. There's a kind of kind, a spectrum of
Teachers: of gradations like a rainbow.
Teachers: And we usually find ourselves hovering around the middle somewhere. Probably.
Teachers: So the middle way is basically learning to live in this spectrum, and a spectrum is uncomfortable because it's already been pointed out. It's uncertain. You don't quite know where you are. It shifts, it moves
Teachers: provisional. it's tentative. it keeps moving around. and that's like live.
Teachers: So
Teachers: how would what would a middle-way approach to the binary of hope and despair be.
Teachers: I wonder if it wouldn't be something like creativity.
Teachers: And
Teachers: this is an idea that we do find in Buddhism, although it's been largely buried.
Teachers: But the Buddha describes 4 steps of creativity. You'll find them in my roadmap. The colored chart.
Teachers: Creativity is our capacity to imagine another way of doing
Teachers: or making, or being something. and the Buddha presents 4 steps whereby this creativity can be nurtured.
Teachers: the first of which is aspiration
Teachers: or literally desire.
Teachers: in other words, to, to, to, to clarify. What is it that I want?
Teachers: Let's say I'm in Israel or Palestine.
Teachers: you know, to resolve to get out of this binary opposition. What could I imagine as
Teachers: something
Teachers: that would be desirable?
Teachers: A solution in this situation?
Teachers: Secondly,
Teachers: Courage!
Teachers: Where can I find the courage to actually commit myself to living a life in the light of that solution. How can I get there?
Teachers: I might want peace, for example. But
Teachers: how do I
Teachers: get to that piece, and how do I find within myself the courage, the determination, the resolve to work
Teachers: for that piece? The next step, the third step is intuition.
Teachers: The word impali is cheetah, usually translated vaguely as mind or
Teachers: something, but it's more like
Teachers: it's it's a soulful quality of
Teachers: tapping into a source of knowledge, of insight that's not that of the the rational mind.
Teachers: The intuition fits quite well, Psyche, in Greek.
Teachers: so to be able to to tap into into a pre-rational.
Teachers: intuitive source, the sort of source from which
Teachers: poetry and art and even great scientific insights come from something that is perhaps more unconscious.
Teachers: But that's the source of so much
Teachers: creative thinking, creative
Teachers: behavior. And the fourth step
Teachers: is experimentation.
Teachers: Try things out. learn from your mistakes.
Teachers: So that I mean, that's very, very roughly sketched.
Teachers: And unfortunately, although this is a key, these are 4 key virtues. Amongst the 32
Teachers: virtues the Buddha
Teachers: encourages us to cultivate. There's nothing on them in the Pali discourses.
Teachers: They list it, but never explain. And worse than that, they're turned into.
Teachers: they're understood. They've come to be understood as as achieving magical powers.
Alright.
Teachers: So that would be one example. Again, referring to a situation that
Teachers: recently had to, you know, try and respond to, and that's I found that a useful way to thinking about creativity as a practice.
Teachers: and I, perhaps one of the challenges of a secular
Teachers: Buddhism, is to reinstate the centrality of
Teachers: creative practices.
Teachers: not just art and poetry, and so on, but actually learning to live more creatively.
Teachers: Martine speaks of creative engagement.
Teachers: which is again very much
Teachers: an acknowledgement of how this is. This. Practice is not just following a set of instructions and getting them right, and then getting enlightened.
Teachers: This practice is very much
Teachers: one in which we need to exercise our own creative imagination in order to respond appropriately to the situations in life which are very often unprecedented are things for which you cannot legislate.
Teachers: You have to imagine solutions, and that's what brings us somewhat late in the talk
Teachers: to the topic of the day. But I hope
Teachers: that those preliminary reflections have set a context for how we now might understand
Teachers: imagination. which is the fourth in my iteration of the eightfold path. Imagination.
Teachers: Now, how does imagination tie into what we were talking about yesterday as our perspective.
Teachers: a perspective, and as an example, the perspective of the 4 tasks
Teachers: and the 4 facts. That's a perspective
Teachers: that provides you with a kind of an orientation or a framework. But it doesn't tell you what to do.
Teachers: In other words, you can have very firm commitment and belief in
Teachers: certain set of primary values and principles, and so on, and so forth, and be heartfelt, committed to them. But that in itself is not going to actually
Teachers: provide you with
Teachers: the response. You know what to say, what to think, what to do in a concrete situation in life.
Teachers: And this is where the Vita contemplativa.
Teachers: the contemplative life now begins to engage with the active life. It's, in a sense, the kind of bridge.
Teachers: So perspective gives you a frame. but imagination
Teachers: has to fill in and flesh out
Teachers: that frame. It has to replace or, let's say, instantiate abstract norms
Teachers: with concrete, unstable. ambivalent situations in the world.
Teachers: What we're called upon to do, which is a great challenge very often is to imagine solutions to problems
Teachers: that are both in accordance with our underlying values and principles, our perspective. and yet can also serve as effective responses to a real real world dilemma.
Teachers: That's the middle way. Again.
Teachers: finding a middle way between principle and
Teachers: concrete situations in life.
Teachers: Roughly speaking, imagination is our capacity to picture to ourselves situations, things, people who are not physically present.
Teachers: Our imagination
Teachers: is interior. It goes on inside our own minds. It goes on very vividly sometimes when we're sitting in meditation, all kinds of images.
Teachers: ideas, words, memories. come to mind.
Teachers: Unfortunately, imagination is often somewhat treated negatively in Buddhism. It's a it's a distraction.
Teachers: and it can be.
Teachers: If it's in a sense not integrated into a form of training. It's just what the mind throws up. We imagine all kinds of stuff, fantasies, daydreams. This is all
Teachers: the consequence of the imagination.
Teachers: but that's really the kind of uncontrolled imagination just the the mind left to its own devices will just pour forth this stuff.
Teachers: Imagination, as a practice has to do with
Teachers: establishing a context, a framework. And this is not just a context of ideas. but a context in which we are more embodied.
Teachers: And we're embedded in a sangha. In a community. imagination needs to be somehow contained
Teachers: and formal contemplative practice, like mindfulness, like collectiveness.
Teachers: these are ways to achieve a degree of inner stability within which the imagination is not to be controlled so much as to be held within parameters that can then direct its energy and power to working with real problems.
Teachers: issues, conflicts in our actual life. And the same is true of of Sangha.
Teachers: Community
Teachers: community is embedding one's life in a set of meaningful friendships.
Teachers: of people who we can trust as being there for us
Teachers: who are supporting us in our practice.
Teachers: So that, too, is is, is is a able to hold
Teachers: somewhat the otherwise. Frequently, you know, turbulent eruptions of our
Teachers: imagination.
Teachers: Imagination is also indispensable for empathy.
Teachers: Our capacity to imagine what the other person feels.
Teachers: Empathy is a form of imagination.
Teachers: It may not feel like pictures going around in our mind, but it's our capacity to imagine what it's like to be in the other person's situation.
Teachers: And again, we might think of empathy more as a feeling as maybe even an emotion.
Teachers: It's only possible because we're able to picture
Teachers: another person's experience of being in their shoes.
Teachers: and whether that's a close, intimate partner or friend, or whether it's
people bombarded
Teachers: with weaponry on the other side of the world.
Teachers: it's that same capacity to be able to imagine what it's like for them.
Teachers: Mahayana Buddhism has some very good meditations. Shanti Deva particularly exchanging self for others, is a
Teachers: is a well-known practice, where you consciously, you know, take it into your meditation to think of yourself
Teachers: into as being the other
Teachers: in that sense, breaking down this
Teachers: binary self, other
Teachers: literally feeling, thinking, imagining what it's like to be somebody else.
Teachers: And imagination is also, of course, utterly essential for what we call creativity.
Teachers: that I've just mentioned.
Teachers: A creative solution is something that arises through the power of our imagination to come up with
Teachers: a new way of thinking or looking at something, and this very often requires, you know, just sort of some. Some are sometimes sort of entering into a kind of creative reverie.
Teachers: You're just letting the mind mull over and ponder
Teachers: picture. And also when the mind settles and is less caught up in reactive patterns.
Teachers: that non reactive space also becomes a space in which
Teachers: intuitions
Teachers: ideas! Almost magically, it seems.
Teachers: rise up and appear to us
Teachers: in my work as a writer, and also to some extent. As an artist I do visual art.
Teachers: I've become over the years more and more aware of how the work, the book.
Teachers: the collage. will come to me if I let it?
Teachers: If I stop being worried about, am I going to be able to? Am I going to have anything interesting to say about the next topic.
Teachers: or getting letting the rational mind somehow get anguished about trying to control the
Teachers: the the way the writing's going to go. or the next collage I'm going to do.
Teachers: I've I've learned now through basically through time and experience.
Teachers: I don't have to worry about. If I can let go. If I can let that
Teachers: those anxious, neurotic ideas just be
Teachers: and allow a space in which I can trust
face in really
Teachers: that that will provide an adequate source for the next chapter of the book. The next collage I'm going to make
Teachers: it will happen.
Teachers: So I think that imagination is something we have to allow but to allow it within a safe
Teachers: and trusted space
Teachers: that's both contemplative, held in a sense of community held in a sense of principles and values like the 4 tasks.
Teachers: but once we secure that space.
Teachers: the imagination, I think, instead of being chaotic.
Teachers: can start to become, as it were, more
Teachers: More rich and more focused on the projects that we're engaged with.
Teachers: and I'm sure you've all had the experience, you know we say in it, say in English. Well, I have to sleep on it. We struggle all day with some problem at work.
Teachers: How are we going to fix this? How are we going to fix this, and it's often when you stop worrying about it. Sleep on it. Let's say you'll go off and jog for a mile, or go and do something completely different. And then suddenly
Teachers: the solution arrives almost by magic. But it's not by magic. It's because we've somehow let go of the very things that were impeding
Teachers: that idea to be imagined. Worrying, anxiety-ing.
Teachers: if that's the right word, actually get in the way
Teachers: of our natural capacity to imagine
Teachers: solutions.
Teachers: Imagining, of course, is also very much tied up with thinking. Some people think in images, some people think in words.
Teachers: and the word in in pali for imagination, which is Sankapa
Teachers: can. Also SIM can simply simply mean thinking.
Teachers: In Tibetan, when they translated Sunkapa they translated it as Dogpa, which is the
Teachers: also the translation of Vitaka, which means thinking.
Teachers: And again, like imagination. Thinking can just be a kind of muddled rush of ideas and thoughts
Teachers: or thinking can be a conscious contemplative practice.
Teachers: and
Teachers: in many forms of Buddhism, and also in other religious traditions. I think of, for example, the the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.
Teachers: which is basically a sequence of ideas and images that are consciously brought to mind.
Teachers: But in Tibetan Buddhist practice, for example, the first meditations I ever did were basically a thematic step-by-step
reflections on a series of themes.
Teachers: the precious human rebirth, you know 18 points, and you go through each one. You think about them.
Teachers: You don't just think about them in the sense of just naming them.
Teachers: But as the mind settles as you get quiet.
Teachers: you take those points and you come back to them day after day in your meditation, and you deepen them, you you think through them, around them, you mull over them, and as you do this, that also.
Teachers: Not only embeds those ideas more in your felt sense.
Teachers: but it also engenders fresh perspectives and insights the new ideas about
Teachers: these same topics.
Teachers: so imagination and thinking in that broad sense. what Heidegger calls denken with. You know, with a lot of kind of weight. To really think
Teachers: deeply and clearly and persistently about something.
Teachers: These all are included under the rubric of imagination.
Teachers: It's an imagination thinking in pictures, in words
Teachers: we need to think of as as somehow coming together.
Teachers: Imagination also
Teachers: allows us to engage more
Teachers: more fully, perhaps, or more meaningfully, with the myths, the archetypes, the symbols
Teachers: that constitute the great narratives of human culture.
Teachers: It's difficult to appreciate a a play by Shakespeare, or a poem by Keats, or a painting by Picasso.
Teachers: without engaging with them imaginatively
Teachers: that they not only trigger associations in the mind.
Teachers: but they tell us something about ourselves that perhaps can't be communicated just in.
Teachers: in, in in doctrines and words and theories. They're useful, too.
Teachers: but I find myself in a way more deeply moved and engaged by
Teachers: a painting.
Teachers: We went, Martine and I to an exhibition in Sydney at the moment, which is a sort of retrospective of the art of Vasily Kandinsky.
Teachers: It's it's largely abstract. but it somehow engages me in a way that I can't actually describe. but it speaks
Teachers: to me in a way in the way that you know music speaks to you theater, cinema literature.
Teachers: You engage with these media through your imagination.
Teachers: and they allow us a kind of engagement with a much broader wealth of human experience and tradition
Teachers: that we could, though, that we could sort of have access to just
Teachers: within the sphere of our own personal experience.
Teachers: So imagination is a form of
Teachers: of communicating with tradition, with other cultures
Teachers: being open to a non-verbal, non-rational language.
Teachers: Now the word Sankafa. which I translate as imagination
Teachers: comes from the pali word kapeti sang kapa kapeti.
Teachers: and the dictionary definition of Capetti is to create.
Teachers: to build, to construct. to arrange, to prepare
Teachers: to order.
Teachers: In other words. imagination is crucial to the way in which we construct and organise ourselves and our world.
Teachers: It allows us ethically to conceive and to imagine the kind of person I aspire to be.
Teachers: Imagination allows us access to. You know, figures we admire. whether they be the Buddha and Jesus, or whether they be contemporary figures
Teachers: from different walks of life. People who somehow embody those things we intuitively feel to be worthy of the greatest respect
Teachers: and attention.
Teachers: It also allows us to imagine the kind of world we wish to share with others.
Teachers: to imagine a better future for
for our descendants, for those who will follow us.
Teachers: to become, as
were a more responsible ancestor
Teachers: when we're long gone.
Teachers: But perhaps through our participation in a collective imaginary. we've helped contribute to the world that will come.
Teachers: Now, all of this might sound a bit strange to you if you're used to hearing Sankapa translated as intention.
Teachers: And that's a very common translation, if not the normal translation
Teachers: that we find in the broad Vipassana community of right view. Right? Intention. I think that's completely mistaken.
Teachers: I don't think it has anything to do with intention.
Teachers: and I find it very so weird that that has become so.
Teachers: The standard
Teachers: Everything I've said so far has not brought in intention one bit. and yet it's I hope it has brought out something very rich to our lives.
Teachers: I think the reason that traditional religions, Buddhism, being no exception, have
Teachers: tend to avoid words like creativity and imagination is because creativity and imagination can be subversive.
Teachers: Creativity and imagination are dangerous.
Teachers: Religious orthodoxies don't want you to think differently. They don't want you to imagine another way of doing this practice. They don't want you to imagine the Buddha differently from the way
Teachers: that the tradition presents the Buddha.
Teachers: Hence you don't find this language very much, but both philologically
Teachers: and through
Teachers: very much through our own experience. I think all of us value creativity. We value imagination, and I feel it can be found there in these early strata of Buddhist texts.
Teachers: in a way that
Teachers: can allow us to rehabilitate these qualities into the eightfold path itself.
Teachers: But this does not mean that imagination has nothing to do with intention.
Teachers: Imagination has a huge amount to do with intention, because it's through imagination that we then arrive at making a choice.
Teachers: particularly if we're imagining what to do in a particular situation.
Teachers: Imagination is that which prepares us enables us to arrive at what is hopefully
Teachers: a good judgment, a good choice, a cheetah.
Teachers: It's very odd that intention is used as the translation of Sankapa, because intention. There's a perfectly good word in Pali for intention.
Teachers: It's Chet Chetna and the Buddha makes great importance of Chetama.
Teachers: He, in fact, he says, what is action? He says action is intention. He doesn't say Sankapa. He says, Chetam.
Teachers: and that's what we're going to look at tomorrow.
Teachers: So I'm not going to even start on that now. But hopefully, this helps us to at least consider
Teachers: how imagination and a kind of deep reflection and thinking aren't integral practice, every much as
Teachers: important as
Teachers: mindfulness, collectedness, perspective.
Teachers: imagination, which then brings us to the threshold of
Teachers: action, which, as the Buddha said, is intention.
Teachers: choice decision.
Teachers: That's where I'll continue tomorrow.
Teachers: Okay, I spoke longer than I thought I would.
Teachers: we have
Teachers: about 45 min to go if you'd like to stand up and shake around. We've been sitting for an hour.
Teachers: It might be good, and if you'd also like to go and use the restroom, please do
Teachers: got till about half-past 10, and again for those of you at home. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, just
Teachers: press the
Teachers: think they call it reaction button.
Yeah.
Teachers: Otherwise. Yes.
yeah. Back.
Teachers: My name is Bernard and
Teachers: to ask my question. I'd like to borrow the image that used last night of this recycle
Teachers: the 3 concentric cycle
within the middle. The problem which
Teachers: concerning myself in the second one.
Teachers: me and the others, and the third one.
Teachers: So
Teachers: I can perfectly imagine and sense
our imagination
Teachers: and mindfulness before correctness. Whatever contemplative
Teachers: virtues works for addressing issues in the first cycle, the one in the middle.
I can also
Teachers: understand how it works for the second cycle. and
Teachers: in the second cycle we are going already very far, and we can have situations where
Teachers: we can run for our life
Teachers: life like your friends in in Israel.
But in the third cycle
Teachers: we are facing a kind of
Teachers: anthropologic threat. It is the
Teachers: energy crisis, the climate crisis. It is AI. It is
Teachers: anything which is threatened our humanity. How do you think that imagination can work to address
those issues
Teachers: in the third cycle.
Teachers: I think I would phrase it slightly differently. I can't see how we could address those crises without
Teachers: the capacity to imagine an alternative.
Teachers: or to imagine some kind of solution. And I don't think this will be something that would be so much a personal practice, my imagination me.
Teachers: but I think it will have to be an imagination of a community.
Teachers: a political imagination, in other words, something in which individuals come together to thrash out these problems. And this is what's happening. I feel
Teachers: if you look at the, you know, various activist movements
Teachers: were concerned with climate crisis, or whatever it might be.
Teachers: so much any one person
Teachers: whose imagination is is addressing these issues. But it's the fact that we can work together. So once again, I think it's a call for community. The people with shared concerns coming together.
Teachers: There may always be one or 2 spark points.
Teachers: I think of someone like Greater Toonberg, for example.
Teachers: and it's probably going to come from the younger people, not from old fogeys like me. And so to hear those
Teachers: those spark points.
Teachers: But really it has to be a work. I think, that engages communities rather than individuals.
Teachers: and those communities may
Teachers: evolve or may organize themselves into explicitly political movements or economic movements or social movements.
Teachers: and I think it also requires us a degree of humility to recognize that the scale of these issues is maybe not something that we can consider, you know, as solvable in the next
Teachers: 5 years. Say.
Teachers: I think we're confronted here with a long future.
Teachers: and the imaginary, therefore, needs to be extended. Beyond, as you say, those first 2 circles, but also beyond the third circle, too.
Teachers: it needs to include the past. It needs to include the future
Teachers: which extends it in time, and I think the concerns that the level of threat
Teachers: to humanity
Teachers: is such is one that's not just of concern to our generation people on earth. Now, if anything, the consequences will affect numerous generations after
Teachers: us, and therefore to somehow
Teachers: you know. Get out of the inner circles the inner bubble of me and my friends and my fellow
Teachers: Buddhist to whatever. and somehow extend that both over space and over time and In some ways, I think if we go back to Buddhism.
Teachers: traditional Buddhism believes that Sansara has had no beginning, that there is an endless earlier rebirths that we've had, that go back almost infinitely, and a recognition that there's also endless
Teachers: future rebirths that we can have that will go on indefinitely into the future. Now for many of us who consider ourselves secular Buddhists, we have difficulty with the idea of rebirth
Teachers: and karma, and we tend to, maybe just put those politely to one side, or less politely to one side. But I think we might be risking, throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Teachers: and by that I mean that we risk forgetting the sense of grandeur, the sense of great time spans and world systems that are implicit in the doctrines of Karma reincarnation. So the challenge, I think, for that is to imagine another way of representing to ourselves these vast expanses of time and space.
Teachers: but not within the classic form of Indian cosmology.
Teachers: and I think modern astrophysics, evolutionary biology. I think these fields of knowledge provide us with precisely that grand scale
Teachers: the way we understand now from the Big Bang until the first forms of life on earth, until the evolution of creatures like ourselves, and the understanding that you know human beings are probably a very temporary, you know, form of life within this big picture.
Teachers: To take that into consideration, too, to consider. You know, the time spans that will unfold on this earth until it becomes a red dwarf or becomes uninhabitable. So I wonder whether those we need to take those those images.
Teachers: those pictures rather more seriously and incorporate them into our sense of this Dharma practice that we're doing now. So to replace Carmen rebirth
Teachers: with evolutionary biology, astrophysics, cosmology, and so forth, and so on, I think, can actually enrich
Teachers: and and provide us with a you know, a fray
Teachers: that actually has the advantage of being somehow empirically verified
Teachers: to some extent.
Teachers: so, and to thereby, you know, recover that sense of time
Teachers: and space that is lost when you simply discard the notion of
Teachers: rebirth and karma.
Teachers: You were talking about the spectrum of hope and despair, and what the the mean might be, and what came up for me was some sort of acceptance.
Teachers: And so I think
Teachers: part of my way of of dealing with things is to kind of imagine the worst case scenario. I think that that might happen. And then, if it doesn't happen, then that's great. But if it does happen, how do you actually prepare yourself for that?
Teachers: And so
Teachers: my thinking has taken me to actually study nursing, to do palliative care to do training in pastoral care. How do we offer
Teachers: support, care
Teachers: for people who are dying and their families around them? So this is kind of the way that I'm
Teachers: sort of preparing myself for what might be a really calamitous outcome. Because I think we have to be realistic, that where we are with climate change and all the science behind it. We're at the beginning of something that's unstoppable for the time being.
Teachers: But maybe I'm missing something in my imagination that kind of
Teachers: gives a different approach. I'm just wondering what you might have to say about that.
Teachers: Well, the only thing II would say is that
Teachers: perhaps part of the problem in these issues is our failure to be able to imagine some kind of other way of living. But of course, to imagine something is one thing, to somehow realize it
Teachers: is something else, and we can have all kinds of nice ideas.
Teachers: world peace, and so on and end of the fossil fuel era. But the real challenge is how you actually, individually and collectively.
Teachers: you know, do something that might actually make a difference.
Teachers: And I think yes, we also do need to be realistic and recognize that we also need to prepare ourselves, for.
Teachers: you know a very likely outcome. given the way human beings are behaving right now.
Teachers: but the danger with that is, we kind of just accept the status quo and just complacently say, well, we can't do anything about it. Let's just try and figure out how to care for people when they're living under. You know
Teachers: incredible levels of heat and rising oceans and so on. I do think that needs to be part of it. But I do think we must be careful not to lose
Teachers: sight of the
Teachers: of the need to actually
Teachers: imagine and act upon
Teachers: what we've imagined in a way that stands some chance of making a difference, not the degree of difference we might hope for.
Teachers: with a degree of difference that will at least prevent it, lead to it being less worse than it might otherwise be.
Teachers: Thank you. Oh, okay.
Teachers: Vivian. Oh.
Vivien Langford: hello! Thank you for that, Stephen. That was a real masterclass.
Vivien Langford: that long talk.
Vivien Langford: I'd like to come back to the idea of Sangha.
Vivien Langford: Martine came to our Sangha just before this, you know, few weeks go, and
Vivien Langford: it
Vivien Langford: was wonderful because people who were on the list of members, you know, arrived and came from far away, and I could see the absolute resource that Asanga is. Normally, we're a small group, but it's actually growing. Since
Vivien Langford: we've sort of decided to do our best, you know. It's that courage that you mentioned. Just have a bit of courage. Don't take it as impermanent. If maybe it'll just dissolve this, Sangha. Maybe we can just
Vivien Langford: give it a bit of energy, which is what Martine talked to us about. But going into the next year, I would like to see it continue, even if the numbers are small. But certainly we've got young people coming. It's not all people with grey hair, and I find it
Vivien Langford: very wonderful each time the rich conversation that follows the talk and just the sense of meditation together. I just think there's something unique about it.
Vivien Langford: whether it contributes to the greater well-being at all. I don't know. It just feels like it's something solid there. And
Vivien Langford: I wanted to know
Vivien Langford: what sort of curriculum you know what sort of framework you mentioned. Framework of thinking
Vivien Langford: would be a good idea. I don't want an you know, a 10 point plan or an 18 fold
Vivien Langford: thing to think about, or you know all these long lists of things that usually are a kind of curriculum. I feel that would be heavy, but and people are coming from different points of learning, too, and and different time like I'm retired. So I have a lot of time. But other people extremely busy and don't have time. But
Vivien Langford: like, are there sangers in this secular tradition that have
Vivien Langford: worked out like
Vivien Langford: a path, and it could always be a loose one, where, if a guest speaker comes and talks about something else that will be good. But I'd like it not to be random. What do you think?
Teachers: It's a good point, and I have to confess that it's not my strong suit, designing curricula and running educational programs?
Teachers: I think of myself more as a kind of a theologian, a theorist, as it were.
Teachers: I, you know. But you know that's a that's a bit of a cop out. Answer. Aware of that. I do feel quite strongly that if we are to really engage with ideas
Teachers: that are hopefully coherent, that are, you know, comprehensive in addressing the issues that we face.
Teachers: we need to develop curricula. We need to develop study groups, we need to, you know, spend maybe more time thinking about these things, really thinking?
Teachers: And of course people will say that they're busy, and they don't have time but again to question that too, or to get people to question that. I mean, if you really are concerned
Teachers: about some of these issues we're talking about, maybe you can make that more of your priority, and that might be making certain sacrifices in your life.
Teachers: and not just sort of going along with the flow. And that to me, is the question, to what extent are you really willing to prioritize
Teachers: some of these concerns? We all accept that this is a major catastrophe for humankind. But we say, oh, well, I'm too busy. Next Thursday I've got to go to my, you know Pilates class or and so and I see this a lot. In fact, Tim brought this up.
Teachers: You know, we have all these grand, you know, aspirations and ideals, but we maybe don't really make enormous amount of changes in how we actually live.
Teachers: and I would hope that meditation and self-awareness and mindfulness
Teachers: could be tools that will help us not only perhaps see our own.
Teachers: you know the fact that we're not. Really. We don't really have the courage of our convictions in many ways, and to create communities and learning environments that can strengthen
Teachers: our sense of of the importance of these issues, so that we might actually make some radical changes in how we live. and that might be at a cost of our own comfort and well-being
Teachers: at some level.
Teachers: and so many people that in history and even today that we admire are people who have been willing to actually, you know, put aside.
Teachers: you know, conventional comforts.
Teachers: I mean, this is virtually true with everyone that I can think of, that I admire is that they've willingly taken on hardship.
Teachers: and I think if we're not willing to do that, then I think it's a really is a question of how
Teachers: committed we really are
Teachers: to these kind of issues.
Teachers: And so any kind of training or educational program would not just be about providing more information. but more crucially about providing and the training in contemplative skills.
Teachers: the training in practical skills, the raising of questions about how to actually organize ourselves. This will be covered later in the week, particularly by Winton.
Teachers: so yeah, your questions are very. It's a very good question, and I don't really have an answer for it. As things stand at the moment.
Vivien Langford: I think so far we could. I just say one more thing. We I had once before done a course with the parameters. So II clutched at that, you know, to keep this group going. So I said, we'll start with that each week a different parameter, and that's how Martine gave the talk on energy, and that gave a little bit of a framework, and it was. It is very wonderful what is unleashed, because each person.
Vivien Langford: you know, takes a different approach to it, and it has unleashed a kind of imagination among us, and I don't think everybody's politically. People are frightened of talking about politics, so it doesn't come up literally as political things. But I feel that
Vivien Langford: if you have some sort of framework it might be just a very hmm modest framework. Not this, as I feel with Buddhism. There are so many very
Vivien Langford: like. It's for monastics, you know, these long lists of things to learn. The novices, and so on. I just
Vivien Langford: feel and attentively, I would like to just have something as a framework.
Vivien Langford: and
Vivien Langford: you know it will, it'll definitely unleash things. I trust that just as you say, you let go when you want to do some your art, you just let go of the anxiety about it, and it'll come.
Teachers: Okay. Okay. Well, that sounds good. But
Teachers: draw my mind. Oh, yeah, right. Thank you, Martin. I'm actually developing something. Well, not me. I'm not developing it so much. Other people are developing it on my behalf. But last year I gave an online course to a group in Germany
Teachers: which we called mindfulness-based ethical living.
Teachers: And that's now being developed into a program. And it's it's founded on mindfulness.
Teachers: But it's not.
Teachers: It's not focusing on mindfulness as a way to heal some pathology.
Teachers: You know, stress or
Teachers: cognitive or panic attacks with him, but is trying to frame a mindfulness training that has a positive outcome, namely, how to live ethically.
Teachers: and it's structured around the 4 tasks. And this other and this roadmap thing that I've included in your handout. And and that's a program that hopefully next year will launch online
Teachers: through the Buddhist Tfton in Heidelberg, in Germany. So if you're interested in that.
Teachers: I can. Certainly we could certainly make available links, and that is an attempt to create a much more comprehensive program that goes on over a sustained period of time.
Teachers: and in doing so helps form
Teachers: a bonds of a community that are doing it together.
Teachers: Yeah. So so thank you for reminding me much.
Teachers: Yes, Tim. Sorry, Mike, or Oh, do you have a different? I was next. I was next already. Oh, I already had my hand up. I'm invisible down here, Stephen, I've got a kind of double barrel question. One is a clarification and a question based on my clarification. So am I correct in understanding that you take imagination to be the precursor to intention.
Teachers: Yes, right fantastic, very interesting idea.
Teachers: I wanted to know, though, in Buddhist ethics intention is incredibly important. It's one of the linchpins that differentiate from unskillful action. How do you see intention, which is very volitional.
Teachers: contrasting or working alongside imagination, which we can imagine things and not intend to act on them, but when we intend we really the kind of the cogs are in motion, so to speak, so could you kind of help me tease that out.
Teachers: Maybe, as I said in the talk, I feel that imagination is the context within which we can arrive.
Teachers: and hopefully better choices
Teachers: by imagining more possible outcomes, by imagining more clearly how other people will be infected by having a capacity also to imagine. You know, yeah, all of those things.
Teachers: I think sometimes in Buddhism intention is given too much priority. I'm going to touch on that tomorrow, so don't want to go into that in detail now.
Teachers: I've often heard, but teachers say, you know, if your intention is good, then everything will follow. If you have the body cheater intention, then
Teachers: that, I think is somewhat dangerous to think in those ways.
Teachers: If you look at Songkopa.
Teachers: who's the the the founder of the Gallup tradition in which I train.
Teachers: He sees intention as as just one of 4 elements within an ethical
Teachers: as the intention and object, the act and the outcome
Teachers: have to be, in all considered, equally
Teachers: intention is, of course, important, but you can have
Teachers: the best of intentions and make a terrible mess of things, and, as we say in English, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so I think an ethic that's too strongly weighted on intention
Teachers: is liable to not connect sufficiently with the repercussions of actions in the world, and how they infect others, and also a conceit that if I'm operating out of a loving kindness, then it's a good act.
Teachers: I think that's very naive.
Teachers: Frankly.
Teachers: I could have good intentions and do something really awful.
Teachers: So I think we need to, instead of giving intention the sort of priority it sometimes has. We need to see it as one element amongst several others that together
Teachers: condemned
Teachers: be a framework within which we can make ethical choices
Teachers: responsibly within
Teachers: context that we understand
Teachers: as well as possible. But we'll come back to that tomorrow.
Teachers: Who was there. We'll get 2 mics going through the cue ATM. And who was Arthur?
Teachers: Thanks, Stephen.
Teachers: I
Teachers: I found this morning's talk from you really quite a step change in my brain, because imagination has
Teachers: tended to be a problematic word for me. I have not
Teachers: been able to imagine what imagination means. Well, I probably have. But there's always been this fuzzy line between
Teachers: imagination and fantasy and rumination overthink
Teachers: and I today, when you talked about the Suta that it's sorry the practice that is in. I think the Tibetan tradition, where they are empathizing, imagining being in somebody else.
Teachers: Suddenly the penny dropped for me there.
Teachers: because I feel that, like we had a discussion about rumination in our discussion group yesterday morning, and how you can get a sticky problem like a stuck record.
Teachers: Could you talk a little bit more to the middle way between knowing where imagination
Teachers: ends and rumination stops without it being a binary solution. Well, I mean, that's kind of what I was trying to do in the talk actually was trying to, in a sense, swing the pendulum back to the middle.
Teachers: I guess I had never heard about this practice of imagining being somebody else.
Teachers: So maybe that was that empathizing pass oh, so that you hadn't heard that. No, oh, no, I hadn't sorry for everybody who had, but I hadn't. No, certainly in in the Tibetan tradition a lot of the practices are basically imagining you visualize stuff right?
Teachers: There's a much great, there's a much more positive value valuing of the imagination. There's not much value of creativity.
Teachers: That's another issue. But then no Buddhist tradition really pays much attention to creativity.
Teachers: but imagination is is actively used in a lot of mahayana and Vajayana practices as very, you know, it's not a problematic thing at all. But at the same time they're fully aware that the mind can go wandering off into all kinds of
Teachers: la la lands.
Teachers: and can also. you know, get caught up in cyclical, ruminative thoughts. I mean, these are well understood as the danger side.
Teachers: but I think often, maybe in the Vipassana community it's more widespread. Imagination tends to get negatively biased.
Teachers: There's a broadly negative bias or suspicion about it
Teachers: with some justification. Yes, the imagination can go all over the place.
Teachers: But that's why it needs to be embedded within a framework of of stability and clarity and a clear set of values and a
Teachers: communities holding. Then you can actually, really. I think it really can then become something very, very positive
in your practice.
Teachers: Lenore.
Teachers: I ran leadership programs for many years, and we used to, if issues were coming up, and it wasn't right to write in the moment to address them, we'd put them in the parking lot. And so I want to raise an issue, maybe that we put in the parking lot. But it's already come up a couple of times. This issue of Sangha
Teachers: Ruriko raised it on the first night. The question about in secular Dhamma, what replaces
Teachers: the function of Sangha, which the question befuddled me at first, because my answer to it was Sangha. But then I realized she was probably talking about monastics living in monasteries. Sangha
Teachers: and I've been running Hassanga for 15 years on the northern beaches of Sydney, and the issue of Sangha just came up again. About how do we harness
Teachers: make useful.
Teachers: Sangha? And I wonder if it's an issue that may be alive for a lot of people. So whether or not we might have time to talk about that at some point over the rest of the week, do we park that now there's probably some some wisdom and practical tactics. And what have you that can be shared
Teachers: from among the group.
Teachers: So, for example, in the question that was just asked, I could offer some experience from that. But I wonder if now is the right time? Should we really think?
Teachers: Well, we've got 5 min here. I don't think we're going to cover it adequately, but I think you're right. It's a theme that's already raised its head. And it's clearly on many people's radar. I mean, I've also been. It's been flagged, and I've picked it up, too, and I've brought it into this talk, which I otherwise may not have done to be honest.
Teachers: My sense is that as we continue through these things, particularly as we get towards the end.
Teachers: I think it will naturally
Teachers: become part of the conversation far more. But why don't we appoint you as guardian of the idea? You can bug us here. Thank you. We've got a couple of online questions as well.
Teachers: The end?
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Yes. Hello! Can you hear me? Yes. Hello, Steven. Yes. So I'm going to start with the word praxis. So my question will be around praxis
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): in relation to shipped to
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): what you've talked about this last session and the the path of creativity.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): And just if I may express that I had an incredible sense of confirmation. Now, as a result of your talk, because earlier in the year I came to a place a stalemate
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): within my dharma practice within the sungar I was involved with. and in a total sense of retaliation. I threw my hands up. And I just said, enough of all this self-analysis, this psychotherapy, this psychology.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I need to do something different. So I wrote a play.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and it was called Lilith, the evolution of a Difficult woman.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): And if you know about the archetype, Lilith, and of course, if you sort of then move on to the evolution of a difficult woman. I think it's fairly self explanatory.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): but what I realize and reflection is that that was the bridge that I was looking for, that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): that that the praxis that was required in order to move forward because I was really stuck, and I didn't know how to, but at the same time there were all those feelings of doubt, as you have mentioned with regards to Well, is this the. Is this the right thing to do, you know? Is it too ego orientated, etcetera?
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): But I I'm so I just feel such a great sense of satisfaction on hearing your talk, and I guess to finish that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): I read in your article that you sent us pre-reading. You mentioned Praxis, and I've been very, very
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): interested in practice for many, many years, being a person myself on the spectrum, and also working with children with autism, and recognizing that praxis.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): The ability to to make ideas happen and become something is something that we
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): need, some, a lot of guidance and and so I was just wondering if you'd like to make some comments about Praxis, which, of course, has been talked about in the with the Greek philosophers as well. It's a very important part of what they include in their discussions.
Teachers: Well, thank you very much, Anna, is it, Leanne Leanne?
Teachers: Well, I completely sympathize with what you're saying, and it echoes other feedback I've had over the years from people who have read my books and stuff. But one thing I didn't mention in the talk which you brought up is. It's not just about appreciating
Teachers: literature and theatre and art. It's about making
Teachers: literature and theater and art. And my sense is that if
Teachers: Buddhism in general secular Buddhism in particular, is unable to find a way to express itself through the arts, then I think it will always remain in a relatively small
Teachers: circle of people who are interested in certain ideas.
Teachers: I think it's wonderful that you've written a play. and I would hope that we could form communities that wouldn't just be studying stuff.
Teachers: who would actually be creating stuff
Teachers: and plays which you can do, you know, with a small cast, relatively short text is something you can do. It's something you can.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Well, I actually performed it myself. It was a one woman show, so it was sort of a monologue. So it was. I created the character, the costume, the music, you know. It was dance, there was movement, there was, there was poetry, and there was a text or a do a a narrative that I wrote as well. So I performed the whole thing and did 9 performances. So yeah, it was a huge undertaking
Teachers: that's fantastic, and and II would hope there'd be more of that. And also, you know, writing novels, for example, or you know, any kind of art form that is able to speak to a community that's not familiar with, or even interested in Buddhist ideas.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): because it communicates beyond concepts. In that way. It certainly did, because it was an archetypal. It was a personal. It was, I mean, it came through me. It was like you were talking about the creative process. It came through so easily.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): but it was personal, but it was collective, and therefore it was very profound and relatable was the feedback that I got.
Teachers: Oh, fantastic, wonderful! Now you have now many, many more.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): But can you just finish off by just mentioning the about praxis, please, if that's relevant.
Teachers: Well, yeah, I think everything that we're talking about here is really about praxis. It's the the Vita activa. If you wish is about moving into praxis. It's about recognizing that ideas.
Teachers: meditations and so forth, can only take you so far. And they're never, really they never. They're not realized in the literal meaning of that word made real
Teachers: until they're embodied in some kind of practice, some kind of practice. And that's possibly the most challenging part of our work really
Teachers: is to convert theory into praxis.
Teachers: And without that, I think we'll we'll have minimal impact on
Teachers: the wider world.
Teachers: And that's a good point to stop. Wonderful. Thank you. sah. Thank you very much, Leanne.
Teachers: There were a number of questions after that, so we might have to pick them up in the future. Yeah. Oh, okay, all right. So why don't we start the next? What is the next session?
Teachers: It's meditation. At 12 the next year there's a meditation at 12, or there's a session, a talk and dialogue session at 2 15.
Teachers: Alright! Well, those of you online who haven't had a chance to ask your questions. Please hold them for a later occasion, either with Winton or with Lenore
Teachers: myself.
Teachers: and it's also a good chance they'll so they'll answer themselves
Teachers: if you think about them and let them just just percolate.
Teachers: Thank you very much. It's coffee now, right.