Opened up this morning.
and.
Winton: as usual, take it off in a slightly different direction, but still
Winton: hopefully.
Winton: There is a continuity there. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is. So I want to start off with
Winton: and really
Winton: interesting book that was published 3 years ago by
Winton: Martin Hegelund. a Swedish
Winton: philosopher, who works at Yale University in Connecticut.
Winton: and the book is called this Life Secular Faith and spiritual Freedom.
Winton: and he certainly gives each of those terms a really good shake out in the book. It's a very, very interesting book.
Winton: and When he talks about secular faith.
Winton: he is contrasting it to religious faith.
Winton: and I'm grateful just there because it really annoys me when
Winton: I hear people say, we welcome people of all faiths and of no faith.
Winton: and I think they imagine that secular people have no faith. Well.
Winton: it's 1 one of the many virtues of Hegel's book is to lay that one to rest.
Winton: what is that means by so faith is that it? It refers to commitment. loyalty, fidelity.
Winton: and it's it's often confused with belief.
Winton: but they're 2 entirely different things. Faith is really about
Winton: about commitment and loyalty and reliability.
Winton: You know, you talk about a faithful friend that doesn't. That doesn't mean they believe something, but they you, but they're people you couldn't rely on.
Winton: So our secular faith is about committing wholeheartedly
Winton: to a mortal life. to a time-bound life to a life that is fragile and vulnerable
Winton: and unpredictable, and the only thing that is utterly predictable is it will. and within a finite time.
Winton: So often. You see, this sort of idea referred to
as finitude.
Winton: Venitude is the bottom line, if you like, of secular faith.
Winton: And he's saying, you know, this is this sort of life is the only sort of life that one should commit to, because it's always at risk. It's always at stake.
Winton: and it really needs care care to sustain and care, of course, to
Winton: to project out to those people and those things who make that life meaningful.
Winton: as it as against that. He talks about religious faith as being
a commitment to life elsewhere, or after this life.
Winton: a commitment to things that are supposedly eternal and permanent, that are not at risk
Winton: that are not at stake. And these things would go on whether we've assuming we believe in them, they'll go on whether we have any faith in them or not.
Winton: as it's important to realize that these 2 conceptions of faith pure models!
Winton: He's not talking about religious people as opposed to secular people.
Winton: He's referring to different ways in which we commit spiritual quest
Winton: in this life. And so a number of his examples
Winton: of secular faith
Winton: are, in fact, prominent Christian figures, like Augustine and Martin Luther, and closer to her own time. Cs. Lewis, who
demonstrated their secular faith.
Winton: With the through the intensity of their mourning of lives that were lost to them.
Winton: In Augustine's case. a close friend in Luther's case
Winton: his daughter Magdalena, and in CS. Lewis's case his wife and CS. Lewis wrote a very moving book called A Grief, observed, or a morning observed, I can't quite remember the exact title.
Winton: but he's saying, if you, if you, if you were to take religious faith seriously
and exclusively, then you you wouldn't be
Winton: moved by the death of death of mortals close to you, because your
Winton: eyes and your
Winton: your loyalty would be elsewhere. But he said that all these people found these 3 found it impossible
Winton: to sustain that kind of religious faith in the face of the predicaments. We human beings face
Winton: life on earth. So one of the and getting back to the survival issue, he's saying.
Winton: instead of thinking about or worrying about or working towards eternal life.
Winton: we should be
Winton: instead concerned with living on. So saying, instead of eternal life. the aim should be to live on. Our
Winton: our lives are measured out in time.
Winton: and and we should try and extend that life
Winton: as much as we can.
Winton: I, in my own internal
Winton: working vocabulary.
Winton: I think, in terms of how long I can remain a going concern. A friend of mine once said she had a 94 year old dad, who was still a going concern, so that meant, you know, he could still walk around. He could still
Winton: talk and read books, and have a conversation and a beer, and and you know he was. He was contributing and participating
Winton: in in life.
Winton: So I'm hoping to extend
Winton: my
Winton: status is a going concern as long as possible, and after that all bets are off. But
Winton: but it's a it's it's together with that is the concept of distension of life. It's actually
Winton: an idea that comes out of August day
Winton: when he was writing his multi-volume
Winton: memoirs, or, as he called them, confessions, and they are an extraordinary moment in Christian writing, because he he's he put so much labor and so much ink and vellum into
a minute.
Winton: They
Winton: recall
Winton: of his life his life as a child, and so on.
Winton: and
from Hegel's point of view this is important to
Winton: to
Winton: to not only extend one's life by living on, but by but by living it intensely.
Winton: and looking back on it
Winton: in order to really figure out what was going on, and and to understand
Winton: oneself. So and there's been a and a number of
Winton: people who have done this, who've who've distended their previous
Winton: previous lives. Marcel Proust is a classic example, and Carlberg, now scored, is another. The contemporary Norwegian.
Winton: Novelist!
Winton: So one of the things that canal score says is, one must pay attention.
Winton: Festa Blicken
Winton: it. It means, you know, we again, this, this, this theme of intensity of life, and the intensity of attention to it, comes out
in his work and that of many others. In fact.
Winton: a few years ago someone called Peter Watson
Winton: wrote a book called The Age of Atheists. how we have lived since the death of God. and I was referring to
Winton: the death of God in 1881 earlier on. But it's that insight of Nature's name, nature, insight, not on God's mortality, but on the fact that people had
Winton: began began to
Winton: neglect God as the starting point of their ruminations about the meaning of life.
And it's unleashed a whole literature in
Winton: fiction, in philosophy and art, etc. About where do we find meaning now
Winton: that we can no longer find it
Winton: in the Bible? And there are many, many answers. But, as
Winton: Watson points out, there is one common theme in this death of God, literature, and that is
Winton: the the need to live intensely.
Winton: to fasten the gaze. As Carlos Gordon says.
Winton: and Headland is making the point that our loves and lives only makes sense
Winton: in the light of mortality. Our most most intense human attachments are intense, precisely because they are vulnerable.
Winton: because, you know, they really are at stake. We can lose them.
Winton: We can't take them for granted.
Winton: and this is rather an old insight.
Winton: How
Winton: one of my favorite writers is Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England after the break with Rome
Winton: and in the burial service. He was a great liturgist and a great poet. There's this wonderful sentence
Winton: in the midst of life we are in death. so death is always there, giving meaning to life.
Winton: And this is a fundamental point that
Winton: that Hegel and he's making.
Winton: And so one of the
Winton: more interesting things that.
Winton: becoming an octogen octogenarian is this, this all
Winton: becomes sort of silent
Winton: and
Winton: the! As as I moved into the 80 s.
Winton: I had a sense of danger.
Winton: No wheels have fallen off, or you know any particular red flags appear on on the blood test. But but you know.
Winton: you just have to look around and realize that
Winton: it's a bit of a mine mine field. At this stage 2 of my old friends and colleagues have died in their sleep.
Winton: have, for you know, with completely, unpredictably, and you think
Winton: is the less than happy repo coming after me at some stage.
Winton: But preparing for it
Winton: means that we that that
Winton: one becomes particularly
Winton: interested in this issue of lineage that we were dealing with this morning. and the issue of
Winton: of of having a sense of you know, not just little old me, but of that there are all these ancestors.
Winton: That
Winton: I represent, or and who have prepared to pass for me. And that means, of course, that
Winton: I've got to prepare to be a good ancest.
Winton: If you've read to the end of the handout, you'll see that
Winton: Steven says talks about it's striving to be a good ancestor
Winton: for those who are not yet born. and I think that's a really important
Winton: task.
Winton: and certainly one that Hegeland also goes into. I've seen oneself as part of a part of a continuum part of a human continuum in first instance, probably
in family terms, but by no means
Winton: just in those terms. So we all
Winton: are going to be ancestors to people who
Winton: who we're not related to
Winton: so we're all kind of in training to become ancestors where
Winton: the ancestors of the future.
Winton: And one of the things I've been doing then is is
Winton: what there's a wonderful Swedish concept of durst deadening, as it's called in Swedish means.
Winton: Tidying up in contemplation of death.
Winton: Hum! Durd means death, and steadening is tidying up the house.
Winton: and so next month I'm going to pull out of
Winton: our shed. Our storage shed the 8
Winton: boxes of what I regard as memorabilia or my archive, and I'm going to reduce it down to about half of one plastic box, because I've asked my daughters, who are in their early forties.
Winton: What say would like me to leave behind by way of physical Memorabilia.
Winton: and they have told me very clearly that a few significant letters and a few photographs, and that would be more than ample.
Winton: So all all that memorabilia from my own. from my own childhood family will make its way to a museum, or a
Winton: or a landfill, or to an antique shop, or something like that.
Winton: It seems it will be a useful spiritual exercise. I will have to
Winton: confront my fetishization of physical objects deal with my nostalgia, and I've had a lot of help with that with that wonderful
Winton: book by Svetlana poem called The Future of Nostalgia.
Winton: So My nostalgia won't have a great deal of future, I think, after January.
Winton: so
Winton: the another way of
Winton: thinking about it is, you know, who who are we? There's there was a a great book published many years ago, called Who Dies
Winton: and the issue who dies? Question Mark.
Winton: and a Buddhist book, and it was sort of about
Winton: as you as you have approached death, or as a lot of people approached death. Thoughtfully and mindfully
Winton: they begin to get, have less of a sense
Winton: of the drama and tragedy of
Winton: one individual death. And I had a tremendous teaching in this regard.
Winton: 2 years ago, when
Winton: a good friend of mine died of cancer she'd been. She died. She died about
Winton: 9 months
Winton: after diagnosis. And she was a very energetic person, with lots of causes. She was a physiotherapist. She did a lot of work around domestic violence, and she was a member of
Winton: our long-standing writing group.
Winton: So you know, and that this writing group was also the a
Winton: scene of very close friendships of great trust. and as she was dying she did what I suppose a lot of dying people do. They let go of more and more people in their lives, and the circle around them shrinks.
Winton: And that's quite.
Winton: you know. It still seems to me a skillful thing to do, and and when it had reached a certain stage she called
Winton: a meeting.
Winton: and she asked each of her networks to send one representative to it. So we in the writing group selected one of our number
Winton: and the other group sent theirs, and they met over tea and coffee. And you know we could deliver our last messages, and she could respond
Winton: And then as As death approached, she, the people around her shrank to her daughter and 4 or 5 really close friends who were looking after her. 24, over 7,
Winton: and at her funeral
Winton: these people
Winton: reported that she kept saying to them in the last days, this is not about me.
Winton: So yeah. When I heard those words, I thought.
Winton: Wow, now, that's a teaching.
Winton: you know that it's obviously what was going on in those last days
Winton: was about them.
Winton: all of them, about their relationship, about the meaning of
Winton: what was happening. And of course they were there then, at the funeral to report
Winton: on how these how these last days had unfolded
Winton: so
Winton: That also seemed to me you know that what she was getting at was that that it is these relationships that is so important that we are, after all.
Winton: about our relationships. This is what
Winton: being a fragile, vulnerable, mortal human being is about. And
Winton: Then there's this question of ancestors.
Winton: and and
Winton: just to dip back into ancient Greece for a moment there was a and yet another philosopher. contemporary contemporary of the Buddha, called Biogenes, who was the founder of
Winton: the philosophical school of Cynics.
Winton: and Diogenes said.
Winton: when I die
Winton: I just want you to throw the corpse over the city wall, so the vultures and other carrier, needing creatures, can have a bit of fun with it, and that will that will dispose of it, and that's the end of it.
Winton: The corpse has absolutely no meaning. It's just
Winton: a lump of inanimate biological matter.
Winton: and in a magnificent time by Thomas Lacur he begins with this story, and then says.
Winton: every known human culture
Winton: violently disagrees with Diogenes
Winton: that the care of the dead is really important. and his book is called The Work of the Dead.
Winton: a Cultural history of funerary Practices.
Winton: and the point that he's making is that that every human society takes care of.
Winton: I was a dead
Winton: because they have work to do. Their work is to is to be
Winton: the stable foundation for the community of the living. and that is why, you know, however, they do it.
Winton: These societies do take care of the living and keep them close.
Winton: So one of the most fascinating aspects of his discussion was the
Winton: the the gradual decline of churchyards
Winton: and the rise of cemeteries. I'd never, ever thought of the distinction. But a churchyard like the one next door
Winton: is really for the people of the parish.
Winton: The people of the of the immediate community, defined in terms of their
Winton: religiosity, of their religious adherents, and being members of a parish. So you know, in Britain, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century there was an enormous amount of litigation going on about who had the right.
Winton: You know whose corpse had the right to be told through the gates of a churchyard and buried facing Jerusalem
Winton: and because, you know, some people inconveniently died outside their parish, or they had decided to become Protestants or something like that, and they were
Winton: initially denied
Winton: access to a burial club. The other problem with churchyards was, they filled up, and you had no.
Winton: you know you could be dug up after 50 years. What was left of you and someone else could
Winton: be buried in your place. So that went meant led to the development of cemeteries
which were good capitalist commercial operations. Where you could buy
Winton: a plot for yourself or for a loved one, and you owned it, and and it didn't matter, you know, whether you belong to the parish or not, or didn't belong to
Winton: anything, you know you're the the entry ticket was money
Winton: so oh, yet it was still important. It was still important. And and the book Thomas liquor is an American historian, but he's really onto Rookwood, our huge necropolis in Western Sydney, which was
Winton: designed and built in in the late nineteenth century, is now
Winton: approaching capacity.
Winton: But is, is an extraordinary place to visit in terms of the you know, as as a sign of the the growth of Sydney.
Winton: the diversity of people that you know this. There are
Winton: sections, special sections for all manner of
Winton: faith, some people and historic characters who obviously didn't belong anywhere, so
Winton: it it again, it is making.
Winton: What will occur is that the point that liquor is making is the
Winton: extraordinary importance of
Winton: how the ancestors
Winton: looked after and kept in sight. as it were. And of course there are
Winton: quite a few cultures.
Winton: and where ancestor worship is A
Winton: is a formalized and very important practice. So
Winton: I'll just end on the note on the importance of
Winton: going into training as future ancestors.
Winton: even though we're still on the road to survival and living on.
Winton: Okay, we've got quarter now for some questions.
Winton: Comments.
Yeah.
Winton: thank you very much, Winton, and just to to to
Winton: to say something about the good ancestors. This is an idea that I borrowed from
Winton: a writer called Raymond Kushnerik, who's a philosopher in Oxford.
Winton: and he's written a book called Good Ancestors.
Winton: which I haven't read in its entirety, but I've had a look at it, and I was recommended it by my friends in Japan.
Winton: Who have been in contact with the Raymond Schnarick.
Winton: He was even invited to the meetings we had last month in in Japan.
Winton: and one of the things that really struck me during the last month, where well, the whole of October, we were there in Japan. Was it November? Where are we now? December.
Winton: November
Winton: last month. Whenever that was, that was the extent to which
Winton: Buddhist temples effectively serve as
Winton: places where the ancestors come to rest. and they're very much honored and held.
Winton: And there's, I think, a much, much deeper sense
Winton: in these in these. But Buddhist temples of the importance of the ancestors
Winton: that, I think, is also reflected in East Asian culture, Chinese, Korean, Confucian, Japanese. And it really
Winton: struck me very powerfully. This idea and the project that I'm involved in in Japan is called the Camphor Tree Village. Ruriko, who's in the group online in Brisbane.
Winton: very much involved in that, too. And this is again really an attempt to sort of
Winton: come back to this importance of
Winton: becoming good ancestors, to try to somehow tease out the implications of what that idea
Winton: really means for us, rather than just a kind of a cultural habit of respecting grandpa. And I think what you said very much illuminated that very idea.
Winton: And
Winton: so just to say that really and to thank you for somehow having picked up on that idea.
Winton: got the second question on premise and one in the cloud the second.
Winton: Thank you very much, Minton.
Winton: It
Winton: feels as though it could be a bit of a flippant comment. But it's
Winton: it's not living on raises the big existential
Winton: question of
Winton: To what end? Why.
Winton: and that's all I wanted to say.
So.
Winton: James, you can go
James: just to quickly follow on from what Steven was saying. Because I'm I'm in Japan, which is where I live, and it's very typical to have a a small shrine in your house for departed family members.
James: So, for example, when my, when my daughter visits her Japanese grandmother's house we go in, and we like some incense. And we we say hello to her, her Japanese grandfather, who passed away a number of years ago. And it's it was interesting that when, because my daughter, you know, I'm British, so she sort of straddles both cultures.
James: And what was interesting was that when her British grandparents passed away. Everyone on my side of the family coped how commented on, how well she coped with it, and and how and I don't just mean in a sort of a stoic, got through it way. She she genuinely seem to have some sort of understanding and acceptance of what it was, and I do think that the point Stephen makes actually feeds into how people accept and understand death as well. It's
James: I think it does go beyond just a sort of a cultural ritual, and it does actually influence one's attitude and understanding of death.
James: But just a sort of a personal
James: add on to Steven's point. Thanks.
Winton: just continuing that theme, Sivan, you said, it's not just about being a good grandpa.
Winton: but actually, I mean in the limited connection I've had with cultures where ancestors are important for most of them. It's not for having been remarkable people or done good things. It's just for having been ancestors in the lineage.
Winton: and I suspect that's a little bit different from the sense in which we might strive to be good ancestors by leaving the globe in a better state. So I wonder if either of you might want to comment on whether
Winton: there really is quite such a strong connection between the ancestor link in traditional cultures
Winton: and what we might think of here.
Winton: Well, I certainly think there's a distinction to be drawn there that if if one is honoring ancestors just
Winton: because you've inherited their genes as a word.
I think that's
Winton: That's that's not usually how we think of ancestors in the West, but we rather think of them, and in terms of
Winton: how they have somehow embellished the life we're living now.
Winton: and I guess that that is part of the aspiration of being a good ancestor is.
Winton: as they used to say in my school, to leave
Winton: leave the world a better place. So there is a kind of a performative aspect to being a good ancestor
Winton: in the West. At least, that may not have been the case in
Winton: other societies.
Winton: I'll just briefly add, in a couple of points.
Winton: first of all, Diogenes of Sinope, who you referred to. did end up with a grave in Corinth. which apparently was placed right by the main gateway of the Agora of Corinth. It was a pillar, and on the top of it was a dog.
Winton: because the cynics were basically the dog like people. That was their idea. but I think it works both ways, Gowan. I think it is, on the one hand, an acknowledgment of
Winton: you know your love of your grandparents or whatever.
Winton: But I also feel that in these cultures there's an acknowledgement of the fact that I wouldn't be here if it had not been for them.
Winton: And that goes further than a kind of cursory acknowledgement that I've got the same genes.
Winton: I think it also brings to mind also, maybe your living parents, who are very old, or whatever it it it it calls you to reflect upon those who have gone before, whether or not. They were good or bad people, or you liked or didn't like them.
Winton: Nonetheless.
Winton: without them you would not be the person you are, but also, of course, it means that people we do, you know, in a sense.
Winton: hold in high regard.
Winton: They're still around, in a way. When I was in Kamakura we went to the the grave of Dt. Suzuki.
Winton: who was buried there. When we were in Kyoto I went to the grave of a
Winton: kooky Shinzo. who, you probably haven't heard of.
Winton: but he was the person who most influenced Heidegger in his
Winton: understanding of East Asian thought.
Winton: And, in fact, there's a late text of Heidegger, in which it is a dialogue between Heidegger and
Winton: Kooky Shinzo. So I wanted to see his
Winton: grave, and it turns out
Winton: this was completely by chance that his grave was in the grounds of the temple where we were holding our dialogue.
Winton: and then, as we were walking away from Kukie Shinzo's grave.
Winton: We looked at. We saw another one just behind, and it turned out to be the grave of Tanya. What's his name?
Awesome?
Winton: Go, Africa, Junichiro Tanasaki. who wrote the very famous Japanese novelist.
Winton: who I also greatly admire. So it serves both purposes. I think it serves as the ancestral
Winton: referring to the ancestors of your own lineage, but also the ancestors of your own culture, your ancestors of the
Winton: of of of of you know, who who somehow give meaning, not through any blood connection, but through serving as a spiritual ancestor. In a way.
Winton: Hi, Judy, here, can you hear me? Okay. yeah. Probably really leading on from the earlier question living on, why.
Winton: really, I just want to raise the question about assisted
Winton: dying, and in terms of legislation has just passed in New South Wales to enable assisted dying, and I think it's the last state in Australia to do that and
Winton: and maybe assisted dying. Where does it fit in the framework? Or is that a personal, a personal question based on your own circumstances? How you wish to? You wish to have a choice over the end of your life.
Winton: So was that, were you asking a question about that? Yes, does it? The does, the I guess the practice, or the making a choice about assisted dying? Does that fit into the framework? Is it part of the framework in terms of the concept of living on living intensely, or or it's not really a question for the framework, because it's just a personal question that you answer for yourself.
Winton: Well, in
Winton: terms of my own framework, the going concern framework. I think it's I think it's
Winton: it should. It should be a right issue, and and the the current legislation hardly scratches the surface of that, because you actually have to be diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Winton: So you know, Parkinson's, for instance, is not a terminal illness. And yet it's it's an appalling, especially in advanced stages. It's an appalling condition to have, and I think it certainly should be
Winton: that that voluntary assisted, dying so it should be available to people
Winton: in that situation, or any other situation where they feel.
Winton: you know that they are no longer going concerns. Oh, it's absolutely too too painful to try and be one. I certainly think that you know that right should be should be extended to all those sorts of people, not just ones with a
Winton: you know, a certain category of of disease. I think it has not only has to be a terminal disease, but one where you expected to die within 6 months, or something like that.
Winton: Thanks, Mitchell
Winton: over to Margaret. I think my first is an online, I think, or would they please?
Winton: We're not online.
Winton: We call that a 9 region.
Winton: What's your name? Bruno?
Winton: Rena? Rena? Oh, Rena! Hello.
Winton: Reena! Are you going to speak to us? I see. Maybe she. You're on mute, Raina. You need to unmute yourself.
Winton: We'll we'll come back to reader in a minute, maybe. Can you unmute yourself, Rena?
Winton: She's still muted.
rena czaplinska-archer: Why don't you go, Margaret? And I got it. I got it. I got it.
rena czaplinska-archer: Let me just add to this conversation on ancestors. I come from culture my ancestors have been. I talked about every day in my life, in my childhood because of the story of the family coming from Armenian background and
rena czaplinska-archer: continuous string of migrations, forced and otherwise from originally Cowcast Mountains. I don't know anybody in my family that came came from there, but the last ones that I heard about were in Turkey. That's before the holocaust in Turkey genocide happening in Turkey.
rena czaplinska-archer: I and
rena czaplinska-archer: My
rena czaplinska-archer: just wanted to say that
rena czaplinska-archer: our practice at home as Catholics, active Catholics, was not going to church, but going to cemetery.
rena czaplinska-archer: And I was. I was
rena czaplinska-archer: sort of quite like this, because that was at a weekly every Sunday, a walk to the cemetery to talk to grandmother.
rena czaplinska-archer: My mother had conversations with her mother
rena czaplinska-archer: and we were witnessing, not not officially, not doing priest things is like us. But let's pick up some flowers for grandma.
rena czaplinska-archer: and that gave an opportunity to the whole family to go for a walk and park.
rena czaplinska-archer: and what can talk often was about the ancestors, and otherwise about whatever. When I went to London, came back from London. I had to report during those walks
rena czaplinska-archer: what happened there.
rena czaplinska-archer: I have
rena czaplinska-archer: I have since I semi around over 70 now and have semi-retired. I have
rena czaplinska-archer: if well.
rena czaplinska-archer: first of all, I have been part of the writing group as well, which has been with Joyce, which has been focusing on ancestor stories for ever, and I have really enjoyed itself, being part of that for about 15 years.
rena czaplinska-archer: Every month. Once a month, we meet and write about stories from childhood, and from what we remember my sense about when the various rumors were happening in my life has always been
rena czaplinska-archer: asking the question, throwing it at the net. I call it like a cobweb cobweb of ancestors out there, and I have in my improvised theatre performances which I have been doing for the last 1015 years with my group of people, I have actually used that
rena czaplinska-archer: imaginary situations of my ancestors getting on the boat and troubling
rena czaplinska-archer: up to
rena czaplinska-archer: past Africa, which I don't know anything about, but I know that there was ancestors from from S,
rena czaplinska-archer: from Strasbourg, who were very involved in Prussian prank of Prussian war, and which caused me to then become very interested in the history of that.
rena czaplinska-archer: discovering lots of things, and wanted to spend time during covet. Now, what I am doing is I have been
rena czaplinska-archer: well, I've been teaching in architecture, faculty, design, and history, and so on.
rena czaplinska-archer: Think that I became very interested in is teaching art and drawing. The art of seeing, I call it the art of seeing, and part of these courses was always about
rena czaplinska-archer: identifying that what we draw, what our hands draw.
rena czaplinska-archer: and not just coming out of us, as with saying, those bones have been formed by generations of ancestors, and when you turn your line this way or that way.
rena czaplinska-archer: they speaking
rena czaplinska-archer: and
rena czaplinska-archer: Some people who have done this, I have had people from different countries coming to my workshops who have really
rena czaplinska-archer: commented on the fact that when we were doing those exercise very simple exercise, but gestural jetral response to what we drawing
rena czaplinska-archer: from the imagination or otherwise? That suddenly the room filled in with
rena czaplinska-archer: the room filled in with with ancestors, and they felt very different. I do myself now what I have been doing for the last few years, 4, 5, 6 years
rena czaplinska-archer: is going to the desert. I have found this whole thing about English
rena czaplinska-archer: adopt by by accepting Australian passport. I have accepted the Australia, the English.
rena czaplinska-archer: the English. Oh, sorry.
rena czaplinska-archer: Somebody's calling me no can you hear me.
rena czaplinska-archer: Can you hear me? Yeah. So by accepting Australian passport, I have actually
rena czaplinska-archer: got myself
rena czaplinska-archer: into the mud of what the English
colonists have done coming here. and my
rena czaplinska-archer: my questions with my friend Maori about my
rena czaplinska-archer: racist attitudes, who, I was thinking, oh, well, the aborigines that I worked with asked me to work with them because they called me clean skin, which meant I didn't have these stories. But my Maori friend was saying, Well, you you better check it out. Not necessarily that you killed anybody or did something nasty, but
rena czaplinska-archer: starting, and so I'm digging it up. I'm going to the desert. I have just come back from
rena czaplinska-archer: Flinders, which I have been first time. Otherwise I go twice a year to file this gap, which is a research station where I search for a history of aboriginal background by looking up local people and their stories, and looking at the stories of the
rena czaplinska-archer: explorers, which are quite like fairy stories.
rena czaplinska-archer: not as good as Tolstoy.
rena czaplinska-archer: It's very superficial the way that they were put together, and quite strange and and kind of trying to find myself with all my network of
rena czaplinska-archer: Drasnette, whatever it is, cobweb of my ancestors in here and find somehow.
rena czaplinska-archer: yeah, like looking. Who am I with in that sort of soup is a soap
rena czaplinska-archer: which I which I'm now that I have been more time I'm spending. I go to the desert painting, so that's the reason. But the painting gives me opportunity. I run workshops there for people who are interested I call call it desert calling. The the desert is calling. It's not just the desert is calling. It's ancestors calling.
rena czaplinska-archer: and not necessarily, you know. It's like we are in their land.
rena czaplinska-archer: and to discover what they saying and to actually discover who you are, who we are.
rena czaplinska-archer: We need to get into conversation.
rena czaplinska-archer: maybe, with Buddha. I've done that for years 10 years at the what. But maybe.
rena czaplinska-archer: you know, bit more grounded in the reality of where I am now, which is file is gap broken heel every we every year, every April, every September.
rena czaplinska-archer: October. I am there for 3 weeks
rena czaplinska-archer: and the questions I've been asking is
rena czaplinska-archer: desert calling. Why is it calling? What does it say? And
rena czaplinska-archer: II just wanted to contribute this because this conversation has really stood up my
rena czaplinska-archer: kind of intuitive sense about what I'm doing there
rena czaplinska-archer: and here.
rena czaplinska-archer: and my sense of feeling
rena czaplinska-archer: been lost in all this.
and my sense of finding something
rena czaplinska-archer: finding myself.
rena czaplinska-archer: And now suddenly the conversation about the ancestors gives me a whole
rena czaplinska-archer: bunch of people in the room, sinking on similar wet wavelengths and helping me to articulate it
rena czaplinska-archer: probably a bit better. So when my right, my next flyer for next April fifteenth.
rena czaplinska-archer: it might actually say more clearly, why, we're going there, and what we are looking for. Thank you. Thank you, Rena.
Winton: It was.
Winton: I'm just wondering whether we should we, whether we should break, and we come back to Ben.
Winton: Margaret. Hmm.
Winton: okay, so you'll be the person
Winton: horses off the rain close Texas, off the rank. Okay? So let's come back in. let's get come back in 25 min. It's 3, 30.
Winton: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Winton: so we had some questions left over from
Winton: before the break margaret Tim, yeah.
Robert, migrant. aye.
Winton: the question for your own.
Winton: I just wanted to say something about
Winton: the importance of cultural heritage
Winton: taking
Winton: the Japanese music as an example. I've been studying the
Winton: Japanese bamboo flute, the Shakohaci in the last 20 years, and
Winton: there are a number of lineage, and they're taken very seriously. So
Winton: the repertoire, the the similar repertoire, but each lineage plays the style and the approach is quite different.
And
Winton: for my the lineage I'm studying with. We're kind of a new lineage, but but actually, for every lineage you know who the masters are who started it, how it's evolved.
Winton: and with ours.
Winton: We
Winton: with my teacher. I'm constantly reminded of how Peace Teacher
Winton: and his teacher's teacher taught. and what their philosophy was, and what their approach was.
Winton: and the gratitude is always there that some how this lineage was started? Wasn't our teacher a genius? How he managed to transcribe the music because it was all a
Winton: it wasn't a written tradition to start with. Yeah. So lineages are really important. And I'm just thinking that
Winton: much the same in the Buddhist
Winton: lineages and we may be forming a lineage right here.
Thank you.
Winton: and winton, we have someone in meg's household over there
Winton: fe for everyone still appreciate it. Makes household. There are 6 people, one from Japan, 2 from New Zealand, one from Queensland, one from New South Wales, and one from South Australia, so they've got their own little workshop center. Hi, everybody! We could see all you waving to us, and we're kind of waving back.
Winton: so you'll have to tell us the name of the person who's asking the question, so we can relate to
Meg: thanks with, yes, I'm the one from adelaide. In this
Meg: we yes, we're really delighted to have our Sangha here all together, and being able to zoom in into this talk that this week, and thank you all for the great talks, and so on. So my question is in relation to the notion of the ancestors. And
Meg: I speak as a person who is part of what Rena refer to before Colonial.
Meg: You know a colonial society I live in. I'm one of those settlers, and in my
Meg: my family. We never talked. All the ancestors, I,
Meg: you know, disappeared, and there was no speak speaking of them.
Meg: and secondly, the in a way. I'm sad about the lack of ancestors, too, I think.
Meg: with the referendum those of us who live in Australia had
Meg: had an opportunity in a way to and and deepen the connections
Meg: with the people of this country peoples of this country. And and it said that we, you know, find ways around with what to do with that.
Meg: And that's part of my question is, I understand from what you've been saying. Winton, and also others have been saying, too. Is that in part? Yes, it's not just one's blood kin.
Meg: But I have this experience of once knowing a man from Cairo who he, you know he was a Coptic. And he said to me one time, you know, it means I. That's what he's told me, anyway, that it was like 6,000 years old, and I said, Do you have any idea what it means to be outside? You've got that, and you know, for mine. I don't know, he said.
Meg: Decades, or maybe a hundred years at most.
Meg: I understand, too, that what you're saying is, it's the ancestors, in a sense, that we acknowledge who have contributed.
Meg: but it feels to me something really
Meg: fragile about that creation of the ancestors. There is a sense
Meg: in which the blood ancestors or the long standing cultural ancestors
Meg: kind of have a strength that the ones that I might recognize as my ancestors of the
Meg: you know of the feminists, for example, who, I feel really strongly, have been ancestors for many and contributed
Meg: world I now inhabit.
Meg: I I'd like you to talk a little bit more, if you if you would, about the experience of being, you know, in the mud of the colonial but in the and in its sort of
okay.
Meg: you know, a lack of opportunity to claim, you know, to live with that as part of the conditions of our
Meg: how wise of living now. Thanks.
Winton: thank you. Suzanne.
Winton: as she was speaking at theory, jumped into my head. That one of the I mean II have the same experience. I mean, I'm fifth generation
Winton: born in New South Wales. And
but
Winton: there's something incredibly discontinuous about my family history. My parents
Winton: never talked about their parents. They never showed us with our where their parents were buried, and it was. It was as if they just sort of full fallen from outer space, and
Winton: I mean, my theory is that it has to do with but as so much else in this country, with the aboriginal genocide which has been very effectively swept under the carpet.
Winton: You know the the bill standards coinage. The great Australian silence. Comes to mind, you know that that you don't really want to talk about, for instance, what our ancestors were doing in the nineteenth century, because it was horrendous.
Winton: and in the 19 forties. There was quite a campaign, you know, to to, as it was put very genteelie
Winton: to draw avail over the past. Because the past was very upsetting.
Winton: And
Winton: it it. This is. This is a very common post genocide situation. It it's a very you know. It's a very clever like clever. It's probably not the right word, because it suggests intention, but but it is a very effective way of denying.
Winton: What what has happened often think of
Winton: you, the the the kind of counterfactual of what the what many progressive Germans have done
Winton: with the movement of what they call the gang and hearts for Beltigum, which is
Winton: coming to terms with the past in a way they had no choice.
Winton: That, you know, is after the Neurovote trial.
Winton: It was absolutely clear beyond any doubt what had happened. During the Nazi period there was no room for denial, and after the Cold War, when
Winton: the Western Allies allowed it, they could actually look at their past, they could actually try and come to terms with it.
Winton: and, you know, often look for signs of a if the Gangenheart's Vaveltigum here in Australia, it's some of it's coming up now.
Winton: you know, with Dean Ashton's book last year on my old town.
Winton: Hometown, Tennant Creek, and then, more recently, David Mars account of his great great grandfather's mass murders
Winton: in in Queensland, and
Winton: but it seems to me that that you know our our set of colonial ancestors
Winton: may really be a very disruptive influence if we
Winton: let them, if they let if we let them speak, if we if we get their stories out. And so maybe you know this, this may be something that's common to other settler Colonial society
Winton: in North and South America, but I don't know, but it certainly seems to be the case here that that our nineteenth century ancestors might be very dubious characters.
Winton: and we really don't want to know. You know, they used to say in in the Goon show. I don't wish to know that. and I think it might be that may have something to do with it.
Meg: So thanks, Wynden, and so what do we do in the
Meg: no, that's it.
Meg: What we do in the face of that, of course, is
Meg: it? I think you're? I think I just wanted to add to it. I think we are in a much better position away that people are doing the work.
Meg: and and people like Linda Ryan, as well, you know, are doing doing that work of bringing those stories to live, but those in in this context, where we want to use your own.
Meg: the value of being able to honor ancestors.
Meg: we end up being very selective about them, don't we?
Winton: Yes, yes, we do.
Hmm.
Meg: thank you.
Winton: And I'm Carol. Thank you.
Winton: Tim. Tim wants to. Tim's been wavering
Winton: all this to make you feel better. Sorry. I just listening to Rina, speak oh, and a few others reminds me of
Winton: kind of a turning point in my life when I
Winton: had this experience of speaking to my descendant, if you like. It was one of those Joanna may see workshop things where you had to sit in pairs, and
Winton: the person opposite me had to act like.
Winton: you know, she was born in 2090 or something, and she had to read out. She had to speak to me about what it was like living in my time.
Winton: and she said, Oh, you know, ancestor, you know I'm alive now. We we don't have anywhere near as many species that you had on the face of the earth.
Winton: You know we have
Winton: very limited water supplies, but we have them.
Winton: you know. Our our forests are very diminished, but we we still have them.
Winton: And anyway, you can get the picture she describes what their life is. And she said, You know we we heard that during your time.
Winton: It was a time of great, the great turning where life on earth was threatened. and it looked like it would become extinct.
Winton: But we hear that you and or your the people of your generation got together and prevented this great destruction, this great echo side.
Winton: And I just want to say I'm grateful for that. We we have a very changed world. But
Winton: some of us are still here, and
Winton: but what I want from you is to hear, what did you do in order for the world to be still here, and all these creatures not to be extinct. What did you do?
Winton: And this was back at the dharma gathering in. I don't know 2010, or something.
Winton: and you know I still get shivers thinking about it, of talking to this younger person than me.
Winton: saying, What did you do to save the world. and all I could say is, I recycled
Winton: and rode a bike occasionally and signed petitions. You know it was.
Winton: It just got me in the solar plexus. And I tell you often I fantasize about that. I imagine my descendants
Winton: saying to me, I'm getting emotional thinking about it. What did you do, you know. And
Winton: I wanna say I've got arrested multiple times.
Winton: Philip.
I don't take them
Winton: alright. Thank you.
Winton: There's a 2 part question. Okay, is there anything in the Buddhist literature being a data bank that forbids
Winton: suicide.
Winton: No, in fact.
Winton: let's put it back. No, in
Winton: Stephen might correct me about this, but there were a number of cases in the parley cannon
Winton: where people
Winton: did as it was called. Take the knife
Winton: that means presumably slash the wrist and I did so
have
Winton: apparently with the with.
Winton: without any
Winton: objection from the Buddha, because they were incredibly sick and and in pain, and they had. They were, in my language, no longer going concerns, and they were in in extremists, and they
Winton: took the knife. And indeed, there was a case of someone whose influence.
Winton: I suppose now to Vera, who did? Who? Who committed suicide because he was in an impossible situation
Winton: that was in 1965 memory. So there's there's there's no Clearly there would be
Winton: a Buddhist objection to someone who was fully functioning and okay, committing suicide. But someone
Winton: who was in a position like the ones you know, recent legislation
Winton: who want to type, use voluntary, assisted, dying services. I can't imagine to be any Buddhist objection to that. Sorry I can't imagine there might be institutional Buddhist voices raised against it. But I don't think there's anything
Winton: in the Buddhist tradition that would object to that
Vivien Langford: the second part of the question is is based on that is that
Winton: with the difficulty of exercising your own personal choice about your death.
Winton: mostly based on Christian
Winton: values. Okay, of preserving life, no matter what
Winton: isn't there the option possibility of freedom of religion and using Buddhism as a way of
Winton: getting choice in how you die.
Well.
Winton: II think
Winton: the choice your ability to choose is not going to be based on
Winton: religion, anyway. It's going to be based on, you know, secular law.
Winton: and and really your own personal. your own personal ethics. I mean it it.
Winton: I unless you're unless you're really rusted on, adherent to some
Winton: religion or or other, in which case it really really matters to you. I don't see why
Winton: religious attitudes should play in at all
Winton: like I just went through a a a year and a half struggle with the administration over taking a particular drug.
Winton: and it was horrendous, all right of knowing that the drug was very, very beneficial and slightly dangerous.
Winton: No amount of me
Winton: signing off responsibility, nothing, nothing was changing their mind.
Winton: and I can imagine what that's like. If you've got somebody that's
Winton: personally knows that there.
Winton: what? For whatever reason, their life is
Winton: at an end, and wanting to end it before it drains the family ex bank account.
Winton: and that there's no way to do that
Winton: legally. I'm sure there's lots of
Winton: times where the
Winton: morphine pump was left on the patient's bed. Okay, that kind of thing. But there's no legal way
Winton: to end your life that doesn't require a terminal illness. 2 doctors approval, and 6 months.
Hmm.
Winton: and there are, should be.
Winton: And it this should be, you know, if you ask most people about what their preferences is they? They want the choice to be able to choose when it's time for them to die.
Winton: So what is stopping
Winton: that overall
Winton: population desire to get those kinds of laws in effect.
Winton: And and is Buddhism, who, as is it? Part of the Buddhist
Winton: part part of their Buddhism, is that there is no
Winton: what? There's no laws. There's no rules that says you can't commit suicide.
Winton: No? Well, as I said, is, I don't think there's any inhibition in. There's no inhibition
Winton: built into Buddhist doctrine that would say, you can't. You can't take your life when
Winton: your life has become unbearable, and you know there is no
Winton: worthwhile future to it. As to why there aren't laws what laws
Winton: are against it, I mean, that's just a really religious lobby. It's a what the religious mob religious lobby. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I mean
Winton: Australian Christian Lobby, for instance, which is held held up
Winton: these voluntary assistant dying laws for years and years and years, because they they command a sufficient number of votes to worry legislators that they may not be re elected if they passed
Winton: the appropriate legislation. Eventually, I mean, this was despite the fact that for
Winton: for a long, long time a majority of the population has wanted these laws according to opinion polling.
Winton: But lobbies are very powerful things, you know, when they're when they're well organized. And the the Christian lobby held things up for quite a while. Yeah.
okay, that is good.
Winton: I just wanted to give a a different take on the ancestors. So a couple of years ago, I did a short course on the origins of life on Earth
Winton: and how the earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago by 3.9 billion years ago did cool the enough for life to start developing and looking at self physiology. The biologists, the self physiologists, biologists that concluded
Winton: that everything alive to day has descended from one
Winton: individual cell. That was our single ancestor, that the first, the first primitive cell that actually gobbled up a vitro Chadrian kind of set the scene for the cell biology cell physiology that were all descended from that first cell.
Winton: And so we share 50% of our genes with bananas. We we, we share 99.9 point something of our jeans with chimpanzees.
Winton: And so our ancestors go back to the beginning of life.
Winton: and we are related to every other life form on this planet. And I kind of you know, when you think of the interconnectedness of all things and our relationship with all things that's just such a beautiful perspective to actually understand.
Winton: Thank you. And we will go to Vivian online.
Vivien Langford: Yes, Hi, Winton, I'm a bit alarmed at your bonfire in January, January.
Vivien Langford: We had a big bonfire in our family several generations ago, and there's no letters or diaries or photographs from some of my ancestors which I would love to have now.
Vivien Langford: So, no matter what your daughters say, make it a bigger box, that's all I can say to you. But I also think this thing about. Like David Ma, writing, you find things you don't want to see, and we're well hidden for several generations.
Vivien Langford: There's not just holocaust. It's all sorts of
Vivien Langford: since, you know, the Empire Building. An Empire was terribly destructive, and people just patched it over.
Vivien Langford: but I found that a way around that is sort of writing fiction, because I don't have so many documents of my family not just have this intuitive thing, even though part of me thinks there's going to be no future ancestors, they may be not many generations ahead. That's what I really feel. Looking at at the way things are going. So
Vivien Langford: I have amused myself in the library, and the archives reading around where my ancestors came from, and what they
Vivien Langford: what they would have been doing, and I've sort of constructed them as a series of letters to each other, you know long lost letters that were never received. It's sort of addressed to me in a way, and I'm sort of channeling.
Vivien Langford: and some of them were missionaries. One of them was Black Bird, from the islands to the Queensland gold fields. No sugar fields, and I'm just trying
Vivien Langford: to do that. And it's it's very instructive, because I find a huge compassion for all of them, because trying to look at the historical context.
Vivien Langford: reading the newspapers of those days. And it's really.
Vivien Langford: I just sort of realize we're all wandering in a sort of a
Vivien Langford: a mist. Don't you know people in their own time don't get it. What they're doing, really. I you know this culpability is so easy to judge when you write history.
Vivien Langford: villains, and so on. But I just feel if if you're looking back trying to think what the ancestors were trying to send to you.
Vivien Langford: There's a lot of room for compassion as well.
Winton: Yes, I'll just to put your mind at rest. I won't be.
Winton: you know, burning anything. I live in a flat, so I can't third anything anyway but the but the
Winton: I won't be burning anything that of, you know historical words. But if you read
Winton: David Marr's book killing for country about his great great grandfather. and look at the sources he's used, you you can certainly find out what they were up to. You know, he he used a lot of
Winton: Yeah, archived local newspapers. You know that these newspapers quite frankly, recorded the massacres that
Winton: great great granddad had perpetrated. And
Winton: and and it's all there in black and white, you know, I mean people how
Winton: they weren't covering their tracks
Winton: back then. But I think you know, even when you've got innocent
Winton: and antecedents, you can find out what was going on in the newspapers, I mean, I dug up from
Winton: Trove a few years ago.
Winton: an anonymously long article about
Winton: how would my grandfather cease to be the town clerk of Naranda and the mayor and the local member, and everybody had a big dinner party, and there were speeches which were jet just were, which were recounted more or less, word for word in the local Reg, and it's on trove, you know. It's it's like
Winton: so there's there, there, you know, no matter how much of personal stuff you burn, it's probably on trove, anyway.
Winton: Oh, thanks, thanks very much. Yeah. I want to talk about the the ancestor
Winton: ideal concept in in relation to chosen family, where, as I do. I'm married to a woman. We have 2 daughters who are not genetically related at all. And so we have kind of constructed our own family, and we have a a broad network of people who
Winton: constitute our family. And just
Winton: again. don't burn too much in the box, or whatever you do with it, because because the the sort of those kinds of
Winton: that kind of information and knowledge can get lost really easily when there is not the sort of conventional genetic
Winton: thread to follow. And just one of the things that's been really kind of
Winton: fantastic. Certainly in Sydney is the gay and Lesbian archive which has got this incredible trove of of material. There's been donated by people, and I was just talking to Amy talking to Amy earlier. You know just just about how much, how much history there, which which is about things, you know, shared history like the Aids crisis, where? Which was an absolute coming together and creation of family that was non-biological where people were caring for people. And it's just.
Winton: I think those sorts of
Winton: archives also, whether whether they're familiar and then get get donated to something like the gay and lesbian archive. It's it's just such a crucial history. And I think increasingly in in, you know, this, this
Winton: gender fluid non-binary
Winton: world we are developing. That is developing where, increasingly, people are choosing their own families. I think maybe there'll be new ways of of recording those sorts of lineages. And yeah, I just so, yeah, I just wanted to.
Winton: yeah. put that on the table as something that's really, really kind of important to to factor in.
Winton: Yes, thanks, Jessica. And arena online.
rena czaplinska-archer: am I unmuted? Can you hear me?
rena czaplinska-archer: Can you hear me?
Hmm!
rena czaplinska-archer: We can hear you. Oh, good! So
rena czaplinska-archer: I just wanted to go back to something we talked about yesterday which was or maybe couple of days ago, about connection to country
rena czaplinska-archer: and our disconnection from country. our disconnection from the earth, our disconnection from the body
rena czaplinska-archer: disembodied.
rena czaplinska-archer: There! There is a lot of practicing which I benefited from sitting for years at the what. And all this meditation practices, where
rena czaplinska-archer: first thing was mindfulness of the body. I really liked it being hyperactive, I had a lot to watch
rena czaplinska-archer: a lot of movement and and I took it further. But
rena czaplinska-archer: My particular interest in desert is that
rena czaplinska-archer: And aboriginal culture is
rena czaplinska-archer: that
rena czaplinska-archer: that disc! I have found myself
rena czaplinska-archer: really suffering, disconnect, severe disconnect. coming in here again as an adventure
rena czaplinska-archer: at the age of 31. With a phg. From from Europe, from London, and
rena czaplinska-archer: and in architecture and history of architecture. And so I'll just play.
rena czaplinska-archer: But I found myself grounded in here and now this is my country, and I'm wanting to befriended and to befriended. I need to put bit more roots and to put bit more roots. I want to sense it. What it is. I don't want to put my roots into some stuff that I don't want to be.
rena czaplinska-archer: but of course I have no control over that. But you know, we we choose where we live and how we live. I have written about problem of heritage, and people
rena czaplinska-archer: having problems with heritage. They have people have heritage.
rena czaplinska-archer: a background when they come from Italy or Greece, or somewhere. They like the stories of their families, but they find very hard to relate to heritage here now, when I when I've been dealing with Heritage and here people were telling me oh, you know that prison that's a heritage building. I'm not interested in
rena czaplinska-archer: doing anything that's prisoners
rena czaplinska-archer: or portals or something else. I'm more interested in modern architecture, and also in just ideas about this thing. But in particular, all these things. I just wanted to also mention the aboriginal welcome that we have been reciting every time is that we respect for eldest past.
rena czaplinska-archer: present, and future.
rena czaplinska-archer: So this is aboriginal. Traditional knowledge. Aboriginal knowledge is being aware of the ancestors
rena czaplinska-archer: all the time.
rena czaplinska-archer: and the biggest one is the earth
rena czaplinska-archer: where I have just been in
rena czaplinska-archer: Flinders, there is
rena czaplinska-archer: a point of I can't remember what's called plates moving
rena czaplinska-archer: and so there's a small graph recording around wiping out pan.
rena czaplinska-archer: Just sort of old volcano. According to some, according to aboriginal, is not, according to aboriginal people. This is where the first
rena czaplinska-archer: living cell was formed.
rena czaplinska-archer: and
rena czaplinska-archer: the geologists are researching it, and they are actually confirming.
rena czaplinska-archer: I can't remember. I thought it was 4.5 billion or 5 billion years ago.
rena czaplinska-archer: And I'm going to those places. And I tell you what, something else like the echo echo is big, very, very, very different. II really like the idea that Stephen was talking about.
rena czaplinska-archer: And that is a big
rena czaplinska-archer: perspective, big perspective.
rena czaplinska-archer: global view round the earth part of the whole creation. I'm yeah.
rena czaplinska-archer: and the other thing is, somebody was talking about, how do we? How do we apply it? How do we apply our caring for the earth.
rena czaplinska-archer: though caring for the earth when we don't? Yes, it.
rena czaplinska-archer: Yeah. We have to. We have to experience and feel it. We have to fall in love with the earth.
rena czaplinska-archer: and then, if we can, if we have no answers in here, we nobody told us we we slowly, slowly, and we might get it. That.
rena czaplinska-archer: and of course one of the ways of doing it is Buddhist practitioners is sitting silence in an empty place. Not so empty, cousin. You found out you find when you go in the desert. It's not that empty at all. It's full
rena czaplinska-archer: full of sounds and insects and everything else, but it allows their bigger perspective to reach me to touch me.
rena czaplinska-archer: And there is this sense of the earth being able to whisper through my feet.
rena czaplinska-archer: and I get something. It doesn't come straight. It doesn't come logically, doesn't have a good grammar, and doesn't don't know what language it is, but it comes. Something comes, and II don't know what it is, but something is talking, and I am really
rena czaplinska-archer: wanting to share
rena czaplinska-archer: learning that.
rena czaplinska-archer: But because one thing is sitting on my own, I'm going crazy, perhaps because it's pretty kind of different.
rena czaplinska-archer: When I come back from organizations. I am very much feeling different. Coming back to Sydney, I think. What
rena czaplinska-archer: by comparison, you know.
rena czaplinska-archer: it's anyway, something like that.
Winton: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, rayna
Winton: natissa
Winton: I thank you, Rina, for that. I
Winton: that was very powerful for me, and I want to thank. It's okay for what you said as well, I've carol beg your pardon. I've really struggled with this idea of ancestors. I was at a conference where
Winton: 2 of the main speakers, who was a Compassion Conference, and they they were really into ancestor practice, and they put up these pictures of their grandparents, and they spent a long time
Winton: talking about their grandparents and their history. And then they put up pictures of their kids and talked about their kids. And and you know how important parenting is for them.
Winton: And I was at a table with on one side of me was this incredible transgender woman who'd been kind of severed from their family, and I don't have ties to my grandparents because of the
Winton: complexity of family life and history, and I felt really excluded from the conversation about ancestors. Cause I was like, well, I don't know mine, and
Winton: I don't have descendants directly, and it's felt really sad for a while, and I think something that's really landing for me, especially with this idea of like a deep time. Perspective on ancestry is giving me a lot of solace
Winton: and making me feel again like I have a place, or I can belong in the chain of
Winton: belonging or existence without it needing to be a kind of a personal family or an individual
Winton: place, and I think. sort of responding to what Reno is saying, like
Winton: coming back to a sense of kinship with like the more than human world, or decoupling our human centric way of thinking about ancestry and descendants for me opens this big kind of floodgates to well, then, you know I can be part of all of it, and my impact is can be part of all of it, like the big kind of misty everything.
Winton: And that for me is like thank God, you know, because I think my grandfather was a real dickhead like.
Winton: And I, yeah, that less human centric view, I feel is part of the answer to the question. Maybe Reno is giving about, how do we care again? And how do we bring
Winton: life all of life into our moral circles?
Winton: Yes, thanks very much for that. Yeah.
Winton: thank you.
Winton: It kind of follows on from Tessa and various people's comments.
Winton: But it it's also getting back to. It's a question for both Steven and Winton. I guess.
Winton: something that you talked about, Steven 9 years ago when you were here quite a bit in quite a lot of your talks. You talked about having a sense of urgency.
Winton: even when you sit down to sit like there's this minute, and only this minute. And then there's this minute and a sense of urgency.
Winton: and I never, I guess, because it wasn't a talking retreat. I never got to really tease apart the essence of that. But then, hearing your your talk. both yours, Steven, and and your talk today, Winton, I guess my question is for for both of you, in whatever order you choose, is is really
Winton: to what extent.
Winton: in terms of being
Winton: a good ancestor. Do you do? You have a sense of urgency.
Winton: still
Winton: relative to 9 years ago? Or have you just sloped off and said I might just, you know, I'm gonna bow out, and that's it. Or is that sense of urgency? Now, to be good ancestor, and to think about your legacy and and your teaching beyond just your lin, your direct blood lineage. But
Winton: to
Winton: the world?
Winton: Do you have that sense of urgency to be a good ancestor? And what what does that feel like being a sprightly 56 year old. I don't. I don't understand what it's like to be a
Winton: septo. And Octo.
Winton: of course I don't actually remember what I said 9 years ago, so II have to take your I take you for your word.
Winton: II mean, I'm sure I did say those things.
Winton: I don't think I'd use that language now.
Winton: I think I'd probably use the language that Winton brought up this life. The idea of living life with greater intensity.
Winton: That is something that I think becomes more and more
Winton: urgent if you wish, in other words.
Winton: and I don't think it's something that I consciously think about at all. I just find that
Winton: think it has to do with the approaching of death. And of course the
Winton: we have no idea when it's going to happen. and that was an idea that was drilled into me by my Buddhist training at a very young age. His certainty of death, uncertainty of his time.
Winton: and that's the practice. I mentioned this morning that it probably had the greatest impact on me of all the meditations I did as a young Buddhist monk.
Winton: And
Winton: I would explain that now I would express that now far more as just a deep sense of the
Winton: of the, of the, of the preciousness of life. and the sheer wonder and mystery of being alive rather than not being alive.
Winton: That to me is is very central to my practice, as it were.
Winton: again
Winton: refined and enhanced by my Zen practice. You know. What is this?
Winton: I don't know. and the more that I do those practices.
Winton: however, I formulate them that
Winton: leaves me with, really a sense of joy in many ways. At the sheer extraordinaryness of having this opportunity to be here at all.
Winton: and in terms of my work. I no longer think so much in terms of
Winton: of of writing a particular book, or making a particular collage, or whatever it might be. But I do see my work now as a body of work.
Winton: and I don't really see it is lots of separate projects. I see it now as a kind of home of a continuum.
Winton: and I'm beginning to see where the end of that continuum might be. Actually.
Winton: And so
Winton: I do have a sense of urgency in the sense that I you know, I want to complete that body of work.
Winton: But I also realized that if urgency becomes a kind of a putting, a putting myself under a lot of unnecessary pressure
Winton: that's actually going to be counterproductive. And that's, I think, the probably the
Winton: reticence I would have about using the word urgency, as it can often lead to kind of
Winton: forcing a pushing that actually prevents the flow of life itself from
Winton: doing these things in its own time, and allowing me to trust that
Winton: that that's, you know. That's the way it really should be.
Winton: I don't want to interfere in that process, and I'm letting go of that urgency in some senses I feel now.
Winton: Yeah, II agree with all that, and I think the reason reason why I feel
Winton: that that that I wouldn't
Winton: enter into a feeling of urgency is that that disregards process, and I think the process is important. If I can go back to
Winton: Canal scored, you know. 6 volume
Winton: memoir, my struggle. One of the things that's interesting about
Winton: how he did that was that he he was living his life while he was writing it. So
Winton: you know, while he's having
Winton: flashbacks, he's also dealing with you know problems it that are going on while he's writing. so he isn't. He doesn't putting his life on hold. But, on the contrary.
Winton: the the life in in the present is helping him to sift
Winton: and interpret
Winton: what what happened in the past.
Winton: and when Hegelund talks about this, he
Winton: it contrasts that with Proust, too.
Winton: who more or less went to bed
Winton: and wrote to put his life on hold while he wrote.
Winton: So while he was writing about the past there was virtually no present
Winton: happening, and that
Winton: didn't really
Winton: help the help the process at all. So I mean, I haven't made much more of a sense, I mean, the intensity
Winton: remains where I think the intensity is important. But there's a sort of
Winton: unfolding that is going on when I mean of I'm writing memoirs to nothing like.
Winton: But I'm I'm writing, you know, selective memoir memoirs of specific events, so
Winton: specific topics.
Winton: And it really does need to unfold it needs to, it needs to emerge. And every I mean just on a practical level. When I've written 3 or 4 5,000 words, I take it, to the right's group and kick it around, you know, and that helps me to get a
Winton: get a foothold
Winton: on the next on the next piece.
Winton: So I think. Yeah, the intensity. Yes, I don't have a bucket list. I'm very happy not to have a bucket list to get in the way
Winton: so you know, I and it could all end anytime.
Winton: And obviously, that's okay. If it wasn't okay, would be okay no choice but there's but this kind of I don't really have.
Winton: and horizon in terms of my my production. Obviously, I've got a
Winton: you know, a horizon in the sense that in a recent conversation with my GP. She said, well, you can probably manage yourself
Winton: well enough to get to 90, but after 90 all bets are off, you know, dropped it on the street. You can spine your sleep. We wouldn't have a clue what was going on, so you know I've got that sort of horizon. But I don't have a sense that
Winton: that is that that any that I've got to complete anything.
Winton: We've got 2 people online that have got a question first, is Leanne
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): so thank you, and gratitude for being in the company of so many wise voices.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Really inspired with the depth of the conversation today.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): With
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): talking about ancestors, and then, of course, following on from Renner's
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): experiences. And the what I've interpreted
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): from listening to her to day, and also based on experiences I've had. Is that transmission that's possible
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): when? You
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): on country? In nature.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and very receptive
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Years ago, when I started working in the Northern Territory with aboriginal communities, I read this book called Why
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Warriors Lay Down and die.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): And one of the things that really struck me about that book was
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): about language, and how, with the loss of language, is the loss of the intellectual knowledge, and that spiritual knowledge. That high knowledge, whether a a. And like we've been sharing a lot
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): through the philosophers here.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and or the reference to many philosophers here.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): moving on to something that happened recently, I was at Bob Brown. Gathering
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Bob Brown foundation gathering for end for us and native forest logging.
and Sue Higginson was there, and
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): John Seed was there, and Bob Brown was there. But the day started with a local band, a group of musicians led by
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): one of our local aboriginal men.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and they were singing in the Gambangia language. and I had never experienced
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): in in a live performance before.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and I was up
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): the back of the Marquis sort of very sort of indiscriminately under the radar starting to move like I've I've and I couldn't stop the movement in my body. It was like, you know, the the great
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): Dream Time Serpent Razor, the great rainbow serpent was actually moving through my body, and I couldn't have stopped that movement if I wanted to, and it was quite an interesting experience, not an an unfamiliar one, but it was interesting in that I hadn't had it for a while, and
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): as a result of that
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): language, and that those rhythms, and you know the moving through my body. I felt something on a cellular level. You know, there was this activation on a cellular level, and there was a transmission of something which has
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): changed me in the last month. With regards to my commitment
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and my willingness to.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): as a solo traveller, integrate back into community and society and and really take this next step forward.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): So I just wanted to share that experience as once again. you know, one of the ways where the change can be
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): catalyzed.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): and that Gambangia language, and that music did it, and it was it bypassed all
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): thought process. It was happening from the ground up.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): So thank you.
Winton: Thank you very much for that.
Winton: Lina. Yeah. Lena had one question as well. If you have got time.
Winton: Okay.
Lena: yes, II just wanted to go back to what Rena said. I really related to
Lena: what you said, Rena. and your experience of the outback. When I
Lena: when I first arrived in Australia, I lived my first year in Montisa. and I had a lot of contact with the Royal Flying Doctor service, and I went out to mine small mining communities
Lena: and aboriginal settlements, and particularly one
Lena: that was fantastic was going to Mornington Island. and I
Lena: I felt like this is for me. This was real Australia. That's what I've found, because when I first arrived I came to Sydney, and that felt very strange to see, and a a sort of European city in the middle of Asia
Lena: and I've stayed for a few months in Sydney and Melbourne, and then went to Mount Isa. and I thought that I was ready to leave if we didn't. If I didn't go to the outback
Lena: and
Lena: yeah, I had some wonderful experiences up there.
Lena: and felt that sort of made me feel more connected to Australia as such.
Lena: and but also when I bent back to Stockholm to visit and longing for my country. I'm longing for that nature as well, which is so different. It's completely different. And
Lena: I stay so I feel like not disconnected. I used to find, you know, when I mean one play place. I'm disconnected from the other, but I also have my now in in both it feels
Lena: and but II did think that I could. I really got also the
Lena: how the aboriginal feels so connected with a nature. When I went back to Stockholm to a city, and I walked my childhood streets, and I think in
Lena: when I Miss Sweden it's not so much the people. It's the nature it's being, you know, just being there, in a sense.
Lena: And
Lena: well, now, what what I do now is just in a very small way. Oh, what what was that? It felt like? I had magnets in my feet when I was walking the streets.
Lena: and and that's when I felt it in my body, how it feels being so connected to the earth, even what? Even though I wasn't a city.
Lena: And now I'm very involved in land care in the area where we live in Pyramont with that group. So that's just a small way of trying to care for the
Lena: for the earth and where we live, even though it is in the city
Lena: we're trying to bring back the bush to the city.
Lena: So I did. That was just my comment, I don't have question.
Winton: Thank you, Lena.
Winton: it's a time to be free. Free time.
Winton: so. and a
Winton: guys waving at me. What? What? Yeah, I just wanted to make a quick announcement. All right. Okay,
Winton: At the on the last day of the retreat a number of us are travelling back to Sydney by a train, and I'm sure a number of us are also heading back to car, are heading back to Sydney by train, and will be going past Wyong. Sorry Gosford train station. I put a sheet up on the board there
Winton: for people to put their name down, either as someone who would like a lift back to Gospel station, or would be driving past Gosford Station, and could take one or more people with you and drop them off on the way. So if people, if they can
Winton: take care of that, have a look at that. If you see people, if you can sort it out yourselves. Just cross your name off the list. In a couple of days time I will see who's still on the list, and talk to people and arrange. But if you can sort it out between monks yourselves
Winton: right?
Winton: Well, if you're driving back to Sydney, the most direct route is via Gosford Goss. The trains leave from Gosford, and go via Wild to.