Stephen: I hope everyone rested well.
Stephen: So this morning we're going to
Stephen: begin looking at.
Stephen: The more, the most explicitly active dimensions of this
Stephen: worldly eightfold path. survival
Stephen: work and voice
Stephen: usually translated as livelihood, action.
Stephen: and speech.
Stephen: But before I get on to that, I'd like to
Stephen: say a little bit about how I arrived at this, these formulations, and also
Stephen: what has helped me to at least begin to think about them within the frame of the Dharma.
Stephen: And this goes back to
Stephen: A figure from the twentieth century called Hannah Arent.
Stephen: I'm sure some of you are familiar with her work, others may be less so
Stephen: for those of you who don't know who she is. She was.
Stephen: or she described herself as a political theorist. She was reluctant to use the word philosophy.
Stephen: She was born in the early part of the twentieth century in what is now East Germany.
Stephen: In the Jewish family she was extraordinarily bright.
Stephen: She studied philosophy with 2 of the greatest thinkers of the last century.
but Martin Heidegger
Stephen: initially.
Stephen: and then she did her doctorate with
Stephen: Carl Jasper's.
Stephen: with whom she
Stephen: remained alive, and he remained her lifelong mentor, also
Stephen: as a Jew, she was forced to flee Germany in the 19 early 1930, S. When Hitler came to power. and she stayed in Paris, and again she was involved with some of the greatest thinkers of the French existentialist movement.
Stephen: When the Germans, the Nazis invaded or threatened to invade France, she had to flee from them. Eventually
Stephen: she was able to get passage to New York.
Stephen: I think in 1 41 with her husband, and she spent the rest of her life
Stephen: living in New York. She died in in 1,979,
Stephen: and so she lived throughout some of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century, and she was right at the heart
Stephen: of the conflict. and she was engaged with
Stephen: some of the most influential thinkers and activists during that period.
Stephen: Her life itself is extraordinarily rich.
Stephen: if you're interested in her, there's a very good biography by
Stephen: Elizabeth Levy Brewer. called for love of this world.
Stephen: and that title, I think, too, captures very much.
Stephen: I rents passionate concern for how to live on this earth.
Stephen: she wrote to 2 main
Stephen: works, which
Stephen: are clearly philosophical.
Stephen: One is called The Human Condition.
Stephen: which he published towards the end of the 1950 s.
Stephen: And the other is called the Life of the Mind. which she was still working on when she died in the late 70 S. And she didn't, in fact, complete it.
Here.
Stephen: I was very struck when I read the opening pages to the Human Condition, which was written. published, I think, about 1,958,
Stephen: and in the preface she reflects upon an event that had just happened that really struck her, and that was the launch of the so first Sputnik.
Stephen: the Russian spacecraft that managed to
Stephen: go around the to make an orbit around the globe.
Stephen: and you get the sense very clearly that she sees this as a dangerous and unwelcome move.
Stephen: particularly because she sees it as an abandonment of the earth.
Stephen: She sees it as a step towards leaving the earth behind.
Stephen: and
Stephen: she makes this remarkable comment.
Stephen: which he doesn't really extrapolate or explain. She says earth
Stephen: the earth is the quintessence
Stephen: of the human condition.
Stephen: The earth is the quintessence of the human condition.
Stephen: I find that very striking. And of course, when we read this stuff now. 70 years later.
Stephen: It resonates in ways that it could not possibly have resonated with
Stephen: at around.
Stephen: Now, I remember last summer I was actually sitting out on a hillside in France one evening, looking at the stars, and we saw Elon Musk's train of satellites.
Stephen: Okay.
Stephen: going off into space.
Stephen: a very different association in our minds now, probably, probably, and of course, the notion of the earth is the quintessence of the human condition, and yet we seem to be running away from it
Stephen: is all the more poignant in the conditions under which we find ourselves today in which we have been talking.
Stephen: you know, with passion and concern and worry
Stephen: as to how to deal with the crises we're creating.
Stephen: Like her teacher, Martin Heidegger. who is a problematic figure in many ways.
Stephen: particularly because of his association with the Nazis.
Stephen: She was also very concerned about the power of technology. and I think this could have been in the background of her concern about the Sputnik
Stephen: Heidegger, although he didn't, hadn't actually formulated this idea by that time. Saw technology not so much as a threat
Stephen: because of its machinery and tools, and so forth, although that's obviously part of it. But what worried him more
Stephen: was how technology was beginning to form and shape the way
Stephen: in which we saw the world
Stephen: in our language. On this retreat
Stephen: he saw us
Stephen: as becoming
Stephen: completely captivated by a technological perspective.
Stephen: He called it an attacklogis of Gestalt.
Stephen: Gestell means a frame. a technological frame.
Stephen: And yet the danger of this is, we're not aware.
Stephen: Arendt remained close to Heidegger again through after after the war period they continued to meet and correspond. and clearly she would have been influenced by his concerns.
Stephen: and
Stephen: a technological frame is one in which we. we see error, error, we, we, we. we live our lives as though it's a question of just solving problems.
Stephen: And technology is basically a generic word for
Stephen: figuring out a series of logical steps whereby the problem can be solved.
Stephen: Joanna Mason once said regarding climate change.
Stephen: she says, you know, we think technology will get us out of this mess.
Stephen: But technology is not to be depended on.
Stephen: It's what got us into this mess.
Stephen: And I'm concerned also how meditation, mindfulness is often presented as a technology. A technique
Stephen: in it in German is to serve more does tech technique
Stephen: is the same word technology technique. We miss that connection in English, perhaps. and we quite unthinkingly assume that meditation is a kind of science of the mind.
Stephen: a phrase much used even by figures like the dialogue. as though it's a kind of spiritual technology that can fix our problem of suffering.
Stephen: Failing to recognise that suffering, that birth, sick, this aging and death are not problems to be solved
Stephen: effectively. They are. They are mysteries to be embraced.
Stephen: But I'm going off my subject
Stephen: so around clearly, even 70 years ago. was concerned about many of the same issues that we're concerned today.
Stephen: And what we
Stephen: are now witnessing is, in a sense.
Stephen: the the magnification
Stephen: of the question of how we live on earth, how we seek to avoid, deny, escape the earth, and how we are great, more and more enthrall
Stephen: to technologies
Stephen: that are threatening to sort of take over
Stephen: humankind. AI being obviously the one that may concern us particularly today.
Stephen: Now.
Stephen: Rent also.
Stephen: Following. What Winton said yesterday afternoon was, was very much a civic Republican.
Stephen: One of the things she admired about America.
Stephen: The founding of America were how the Town Hall meetings.
Stephen: now, of course, subverted by the figures like Donald Trump.
Stephen: but, in other words, participatory democracy on a small scale, where political events
Stephen: are discussed in dedicated spaces by the people they conserve.
Stephen: She was a passionate
Stephen: admirer of this way of doing politics likewise. She was very much rooted in
Stephen: the ancient Greek idea of the polis
Stephen: that she continually goes back to that.
Stephen: But in in some ways
Stephen: Renz, work was trying to figure out how we can. you know, recover some of these lost values as a means of
Stephen: mitigating, if not preventing, some of the
Stephen: potential crises she kind of intuitively foresaw
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): now what she does in in the human condition.
Stephen: Her first book
Stephen: is to focus on what she calls love, the vita activa, the active line.
Stephen: the second part of what we're exploring here today.
Stephen: And she thinks of it in terms of 3 main components, labor work and action.
Stephen: And that's basically the model I've adopted in thinking out
Stephen: survival work
Stephen: and voice. So I'm very much following her there
Stephen: in her second book. The Life of the Mind. He also does the same thing with the Vita contemplativa, the the contemplative life. the inner life, if you wish.
Stephen: by
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): considering, thinking.
Liane (Gumbaynggirr country): willing. judging.
Stephen: she doesn't finish this book, she never writes the section, judging.
Stephen: and she leaves off
Stephen: at the end of the second part, which she completed with a certain sense of failure. I feel she seems somehow disappointed. do you? She was trying to do in her 2 philosophical works was to
Stephen: present
Stephen: picture of how human beings could live in a way in which the contemplative life
Stephen: and the active life were integrated. She was very much aware of how.
Stephen: in the ancient times, whether it be ancient Greece, or whether it be the Christian Middle Ages.
Stephen: The contemplative life was considered very much to be. you know, the best kind of life, the life to which you would aspire, where the really a
Stephen: crucial human
Stephen: questions and abilities were cultivated and refined, and the active life was somehow seen, as
Stephen: you know, inferior to that.
Stephen: She also notices how in the nineteenth century, and certainly into the twentieth century, that kind of gets turned on its head.
Stephen: Primacy is given to the active life. and the contemplative life is sort of parceled off into university departments. studying philosophy, and so on.
or monasteries or spiritual places, and it becomes
Stephen: really rather marginalized. and I think what she wanted to do was not to replace.
Stephen: you know, restore the priority of the contemplative life, but to find a way to integrate the 2 to balance the 2 out.
Stephen: and that's very much
Stephen: what I'm trying to do in this worldly eightfold path is to not to restore meditation as the be all, and end all of human life, but rather to try to find a framework in which they can both
Stephen: provide a
Stephen: a framework for how we can fully flourish as persons and as societies.
Stephen: and I think the eightfold path. as the Buddha laid it out, is likewise
Stephen: quite, I think, irrespective of
Stephen: the way I'm presenting it here. It's composed of active and contemplative dimensions.
Stephen: Buddhism, however.
Stephen: certainly gave priority through most of its history to the contemplative life.
Stephen: Hence the afol path culminates in
Stephen: contemplation, in mindfulness, in samadhi.
Stephen: as though that's kind of where it's all going.
Stephen: And a lot of Buddhism, historically, has
Stephen: had that emphasis.
Stephen: There have been exceptions. There have been movements against that.
Stephen: Shin ran in Japan, Nietzsche, and likewise in Japan.
Stephen: began to push the other way.
Stephen: and in our twentieth century. We also find figures, particularly
Stephen: and Boomeral Ambekar in India. who saw the Dharma as a way of social justice. political empowerment.
Stephen: and figures of the engaged Buddhist movement like Tiknat Han
Stephen: trying to push things back.
Stephen: But
Stephen: I feel that this can only really be achieved if we rethink the foundations of the whole
Stephen: dharmic
Stephen: philosophy, as it were.
Stephen: And that's what we're trying to do, what I'm trying to do to do here
Stephen: now. Hannah Arant had no interest in Buddhism whatsoever.
Stephen: There's never not a single mention of it in her work.
Stephen: And she seems
Stephen: she she doesn't even express an opinion about it. She totally ignores it. Now you might think that that's characteristic of those kinds of philosophers in
Stephen: at that period.
Stephen: but is particularly odd in the case of Hannah Arant.
Stephen: because both her husband. Heinrich Bluffer.
Stephen: and her teacher and mentor, Karl Yasper's, were very interested in the Buddha.
Stephen: Bluka Blucher, who was a
Stephen: he was a member of the Spartacus. He was.
Stephen: He was part of Rosa Luxemburg's group in the early part of the twentieth century, and she was a radical activist
Stephen: Communist.
Stephen: He came to develop a course that he taught in Massachusetts at Bard College for much of his life, in which he focused on trying to articulate a kind of global philosophy
Stephen: in which the Buddha and Socrates.
Stephen: and to answer. and Jesus would all be given equal status.
Stephen: And this was done in concert with Kaliaspus. Karl Yasmus is the philosopher who invented the term the Axial Age.
Stephen: in which he he recognized a period around the time of the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius.
Stephen: Jesus.
Stephen: where humankind sort of made
Stephen: a radical shift into a life
Stephen: that essentially framed what we now would call, you know our history, our culture right into modernity.
Stephen: And Yasper's wrote a little book
Stephen: called Buddha.
Stephen: Socrates. Confucius. Jesus.
Stephen: and.
Stephen: as a way to, as it were, recognize that we're moving into a global
Stephen: community
Stephen: in which these figures are no longer just the
Stephen: belong to particular forms of human culture that actually
Stephen: are what, in the English translation of the subtitle are paradigmatic individuals.
Stephen: 4 paradigmatic individuals.
Stephen: Now the word paradigmatic
Stephen: is a translation of Yasper's German phrase, Mess Gabund
Stephen: and Nes Gaband means really something
Stephen: quite different. Mess means measure, mess gave and means individuals
Stephen: that allow the become the measures for our lives. In other words, we can we measure ourselves against Socrates, against the Buddha, against Confucius, against Jesus.
Stephen: They're Mess Gaband, which is much better than paradigmatic
Stephen: and a rent
Stephen: who ironically, was the editor of this book, even though she showed no interest in it.
Stephen: clearly saw as her mess Gavin.
Stephen: Figure Socrates.
Stephen: Socrates for her was the figure she keeps going back to. She wrote an essay called Socrates. which was not published during her lifetime. It's collected in a volume called
Stephen: The Promise of Politics. It's it's a brilliant essay.
Stephen: I found it enormously helpful. in which she she frames Socrates as the kind of person against whom she measures her life.
Stephen: And here, whether we're secular Buddhists or religious Buddhists.
Stephen: Gautama. the Buddha. is perhaps most deeply valuable to us. because
Stephen: we can somehow measure our lives against
Stephen: his.
Stephen: The problem, I think, at the time of Jasper's and and Blucher is that the notion of the Buddha was still really rather vague. He hadn't really assumed
Stephen: clear sense of being an historical figure.
Stephen: more sort of quasi divine kind of figure. Recent scholarship enables us to get a slightly better sense
Stephen: of his historical world, and how he was an an you know, an actor within that world.
Stephen: and thereby, I feel.
Stephen: enables us to measure ourselves
Stephen: more adequately
Stephen: against him.
Stephen: So what I want to do now is to to pick up on these 3 main themes
Stephen: of survival.
Stephen: of work
Stephen: and voice, and they will that will take up the
Stephen: remaining through presentations that I'll be giving.
Stephen: So today we're going to look at survival.
Stephen: you're you're used to hearing this as livelihood and livelihood we tend to think of with the kind of work we do.
Stephen: This is this it, I think, is a problem.
Stephen: I'll explain more about this tomorrow how this differentiates itself from work.
Stephen: But the word R. Jiva is almost literally the word survival. Jiva is the Pali Sanskrit word for life.
Stephen: And Jiva! It's a long a.
Stephen: It means 4 live.
Stephen: It has to do with those activities we undertake in order to survive
Stephen: uber Laben, sir. Vive Bieber life
Stephen: to to live on.
Stephen: It's about how we live on, how we keep going. It's very, very fundamental to our existence on Earth.
Stephen: Sometimes, of course, that's through our work.
Stephen: But in many senses as arant makes quite clear.
Stephen: we need to distinguish between work and labor.
Stephen: Survival is
Stephen: primarily about labor.
Stephen: So, no matter how much you want to cultivate a life of the mind. whether that's becoming a philosophy professor. or whether it's becoming a Dharma practition.
Stephen: You won't even be able to start
Stephen: unless if you lack the necessary material conditions again, we because we've been brought up in such a privileged society
Stephen: as we experience here in Australia or in in the West. In general. It's very easy to forget that.
Stephen: you know. Theoretically, we know.
Stephen: but really to recognize that we're only able to do these things
Stephen: because we have the material conditions that support it.
Stephen: If we don't have enough shelter, if we don't have a home. if we don't have enough to eat or drink
Stephen: if we don't have enough clothing.
Stephen: and that doesn't mean just, you know, in some vague general sense, I mean, it means every single day.
Stephen: and I find it in a sense remarkable. The for the last 70 years
Stephen: I've never gone for a single day without enough to eat
Stephen: without having a place to have shelter.
Stephen: and without having adequate clothing.
Stephen: totally take that for granted.
Stephen: But, as we know. that's still probably the privilege of a minority of people on earth.
Stephen: I once mentioned this even in the United States, and there were people in the audience who says, Well, I don't have the security of a home
Stephen: to pay rent. I don't know how I'm gonna pay next month's rent.
Stephen: So I think we really have to bring this notion of survival back to these primary, fundamental requirements, that
Stephen: on which the rest of our life are all of our interests, and in Buddhism, and so on.
Stephen: are able to to happen
Stephen: that we can have periods of leisure like this, where we can just stop doing our jobs or whatever.
Stephen: and come here and do these things. And if we didn't have those things, we'd be obliged to spend most of our waking life acquiring and maintaining
Stephen: these basic necessities simply in order to survive, and millions of people over the world
Stephen: have little choice but to labour
Stephen: from dusk to to from dawn to dusk, just to get enough food on the table
Stephen: to feed their families.
Stephen: And to have sufficient energy for themselves so that they can continue their labor the next day.
Stephen: And if you're a woman
Stephen: your life will be very often taken up with bearing, raising.
Stephen: and caring for children very often, because in a society without.
Stephen: you know, sufficient social supports. you need children to provide for you in your old age.
Stephen: And so you have you. You get caught up in this relentless cycle of
Stephen: labour, reproduction, consumption, and rest.
Stephen: and you're tied to these routines.
Stephen: they'll give you very, very few opportunities
Stephen: for contemplation, creativity.
Stephen: or even active participation in civic life.
Stephen: You don't have the education. You don't have the time. You don't have the space
Stephen: now in in ancient times. How how did the Buddha deal with this? How did the Greeks deal with this the Greeks overcame these obstacles, basically by confining women to the home.
Stephen: so that they could raise children, weave cloth
Stephen: and supervised servants and slaves who performed all the household tasks until the soil.
Stephen: This was the the ancient Greek solution.
Stephen: probably not one, you know, you'd be willing to adopt today.
Stephen: and that
Stephen: though that social organization is what allowed
Stephen: the male citizens exclusively. with one or 2 exceptions. to be able to engage in political life and to pursue their interests in the arts and philosophy.
Stephen: and the Buddha did pretty much the same. I mean, he created a
Stephen: celibate communities of men and women. I mean, that's one of the big differences
Stephen: between the ancient Greeks, Socrates and his friends and the Buddha is that there was not the exclusion of women.
Stephen: The Buddha treated men and women equally
Stephen: later, Buddhism lesser.
Stephen: but the original vision of the Sangha.
Stephen: the the assembly
Stephen: included men and women, lay men, lay women, monks, nuns
Stephen: as equal as I pointed out yesterday.
Stephen: and so he created these celibate communities who renounced family life. Domestic life subsisted on arms.
Stephen: which was only possible because there was a surplus of agricultural production in that
Stephen: region of the world
Stephen: and reduce their needs to a bare minimum, led incredibly simple lives.
Stephen: But what this meant was that a privileged minority were able to free themselves from daily toil
Stephen: and dedicate themselves to a life of the mind.
Stephen: But they were only able to do this. because others remained unfree from those constraints in order to provide either for
Stephen: the male sitons and rear of Athens.
the monastics and renunciation
Stephen: who wandered across the Gangetic plains at the time of the Buddha.
Stephen: This situation has now become global.
Stephen: and so those of us who have the education and the leisure to study Plato
Stephen: and Nagarjuna
Stephen: can only do so because of the labor. Numerous other unknown men and women who grow our food. who make our clothes.
Stephen: who provide the raw materials
Stephen: that we need to erect our houses and cities, and so on.
Stephen: And so there are many, many people in this world today
Stephen: who live under conditions of grinding necessity.
Stephen: that give them little, if any, freedom to enjoy the kind of privileges we that we take for granted.
Stephen: So we might aspire to human flourishing. which is a term I'm quite fond of. I think it's it's a beautiful idea. It's a Greek.
Stephen: originally a Greek concept, Eudaemonia, a good life.
a happy life.
Stephen: But we have to recognize that this is achieved
Stephen: at the cost of other human beings being unable
Stephen: to flourish.
Stephen: So what does the Buddha have to say about this?
Stephen: As you're aware? If you've read the Harley discourses and so on.
Stephen: There's very little reflection on on economics, on politics, on
Stephen: organizing society. There is one Suta, one discourse that stands out here, and that's the Sigilavata Suta. the discourse to Siegeala.
Stephen: It's found in the long discourses
Stephen: which does, in fact, lay out the sort of outlines of how you should lead your economic life. It's directed at, not at monks, but at lay people.
Stephen: And it's quite interesting.
Stephen: It shows that the Buddha was was very much aware of the of the conflicts, the needs.
Stephen: He talks about levels of investment
Stephen: from profits and things like that.
Stephen: and that affords us a very valuable glimpse
Stephen: into the working world of his time. He talks about, you know how much free time you should give your employees.
Stephen: but it's not sufficient to really build, as it were. You know, a you know, a Buddhist economics. Let's say
Stephen: it's helpful, but it's not really enough.
Stephen: I think the the text that
Stephen: is perhaps most pertinent when it comes to this question of survival
Stephen: is a short passage
Stephen: where he talks of
Stephen: what? What what he calls the Aryan family, or the Aryan tradition, or the Aryan lineage.
Stephen: And remember, Arian has nothing to do with how that's understood in Germany in the last century, but it has to do with nobility. To to literally, it literally means to be raised up to to have a sort of, and it's not a racial
Stephen: nobility or a social mobility. It's it's it's an inner dignity
Stephen: and an inner sense of
Stephen: of standing upright
Stephen: with nobility and confidence.
Stephen: Pride, perhaps.
Stephen: and he lays out 4 conditions
Stephen: under which such a nobility is able to come about.
Stephen: The first of these is that you contentment with your shelter.
Stephen: that you are contented with your food.
Stephen: then you're contented with your clothing.
and fourthly.
Stephen: that you delight in letting go and cultivation.
Stephen: I first came across this
Stephen: doctrine when I was studying as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Switzerland, and we were.
Stephen: We're actually
Stephen: studying a text on the Buddha nature
Stephen: very much a Mahayana idea, the Buddha.
Stephen: And this short text, which was a textbook in so for Sarah Jay Monastic College in Tibet.
Stephen: identified the source of the concept
Buddha nature
Stephen: here.
Stephen: and that came as a bit of a surprise
Stephen: because you don't normally associate Buddha nature with having enough to eat, having a roof over your head.
Stephen: having
Stephen: enough clothing.
Stephen: But that's where the Tibetans understood
Stephen: the notion of Buddha nature to begin.
Stephen: And one of the reasons for that is because. although we use this word Buddha nature.
Stephen: there isn't actually a term in Pali or Sanskrit or Tibetan for Buddha nature.
Stephen: They tend to use this word
Stephen: Buddha, Gauta.
Stephen: Buddha, Gortra. which means, The Buddha's lineage or family or tradition.
Stephen: Yesterday I mentioned how the Buddha described himself as belonging to the Adicha Gortar.
Stephen: the lineage of the Sun. SUN.
Stephen: And this is a very important idea in ancient India. The idea
Stephen: that you are not just a sort of so a standalone individual as we might think very much in our society.
Stephen: but rather that your existence is rooted in a lineage. in ancestors that goes back a long, long, long way.
Stephen: So once again there is a sense that this Arya Vanz, or this aria Gotra. This
Stephen: noble lineage is something
Stephen: of which you are simply one member amongst myriad.
Stephen: others going back into the past. that your life is a
Stephen: is rooted in that past. It's rooted in the
Stephen: history of living in that way. and thereby
Stephen: that's they are the roots that enable you to flourish
Stephen: in your own nobility in your own becoming awake.
Stephen: Mayana. Buddhism, you know, expands that idea a bit further. But I'm not going to go into that here.
Stephen: But the point is that Buddha nature suggests some kind of sort of inner potential that we might have to become awakened, and that certainly does develop in in later Buddhism.
Stephen: But there's the notion here that in becoming part of such a community of secular Buddhist, let's say that you acknowledge the fact that you're rooted in the past.
Stephen: and a tradition is only a lie
Stephen: in some ways, if
Stephen: it engages in an ongoing conversation with its past.
Stephen: That's an expression that comes from the Scottish philosopher. Alistair Mcintyre.
Stephen: I think it's a very helpful way of understanding what we mean by tradition
Stephen: or lineage. It has to do with A living engagement with the past. So by going back to the early Pali text
Stephen: by going back to the writings of Plato. by going back to the Biblical texts.
Stephen: and not just passively accepting them as the truth.
Stephen: actively
Stephen: engaging in a dialogue, a critical dialogue, a dialogue that asks of them, but what do I do now.
Stephen: That's a living tradition.
Stephen: and it is, is dependent on
Stephen: the presence of the past as it is upon our own ability to try to.
Stephen: you know, figure out how to live on Earth. Now. we're always in a tradition.
Stephen: It's impossible not to be, in a way.
Stephen: But I think for individualistic Westerners.
Stephen: We need to be reminded of this.
Stephen: and at the same time this
Stephen: is an acknowledgement that we, too will become the past. What we do now
Stephen: will likewise be something that people in the future
Stephen: we'll talk about will argue with.
Stephen: We're too part of that tradition, and that, I feel, is a very
Stephen: you know, it's a very challenging responsibility to assume
Stephen: that we will become the ancestors
Stephen: that others will look back to and honor
Stephen: revere, revile. However, it plays out.
Stephen: So the Buddha has this idea.
Stephen: That we're part of a lineage. We're part of a family. We're part of a we're connected to a past, and thereby we are
Stephen: beings who will contribute to the future.
Stephen: But such a lineage, he says, is one that's based upon how to be content to be content with the basic needs of our life.
Stephen: have, have have have have have enough shelter to have enough clothes to have enough food.
Stephen: and only then will we have the time. the opportunity to
Stephen: delight in letting go
Stephen: and cultivation, now letting go, and cultivation refer explicitly to
Stephen: the second and the fourth
Stephen: task. The second task is letting go of reactivity.
Stephen: The fourth task is cultivating the eightfold path.
Stephen: So, in other words. the practice of these tasks requires
Stephen: basic material security.
Stephen: So this would follow logically that a community, or extended further a society
Stephen: which was founded on dharmic
Stephen: principles
Stephen: would be one that would seek to ensure these necessities for its members.
Stephen: Buddhist society, a dharmic society
Stephen: would seek to assure that each member of that society had access to food, clothing, and shelter at the barest minimum.
Stephen: and the duty of the State, therefore. would be to secure
Stephen: the conditions under which men and women
Stephen: could realise their
Stephen: fullest potential as human beings.
Stephen: Now, in some ways a modern welfare state
aspires to precisely these goals, if not more.
Stephen: it would include healthcare education as well.
Stephen: But what I think is the most difficult term to clarify
Stephen: is the word contentma.
Stephen: that it's difficult to find any objective standards
Stephen: for judging what is enough.
Stephen: What in in in in the world we live in today.
Stephen: What would be the barest requirements you would need to feel that I've got enough.
Stephen: We live in a society in a consumerist society is designed in such a way to convince us all the time that we don't have enough.
Stephen: and that, I think, is pushing very, very powerfully against the notion of contempt.
Stephen: Consumerism can't accept the idea of contempt.
Stephen: It's just not possible. It's just not in the equation. You have to feel that you don't have enough.
Stephen: That's what advertising is all about. And the people who run the advertising industry are brilliant psychologists.
Stephen: They understand these mechanisms which the Buddha saw as craving. you know, craving basically is this sense that I don't have enough.
Stephen: I need something more. It's a deep instinct. And consumerism is basically premised on
Stephen: and acts in such a way that it's constantly stimulating the crane.
Stephen: the sense that I don't have enough.
Stephen: So again, what is enough for a monastic ascetic.
Stephen: it might be enough to be content with a thatched hut and a threadbare robe, and a bowl of rice, and a bowl of dahl once a day.
Stephen: But that's not going to be enough for, let's say, a mother of 5.
Stephen: She's not going to be content with that. She needs education, healthcare transport culture.
Stephen: and I think many of us would not be content with a sort of ascetic existence. But then, where do we draw the line?
Stephen: And I feel these are the kind of fundamental questions about creating the conditions under which we can. You know we can live, live a contented and satisfying life.
Stephen: Winton referred back to
Stephen: the, you know, the aboriginal societies, and it would be true of many, many indigenous societies which we would disparagingly call hunter-gatherer societies.
Stephen: But actually, these people probably live far more contented lives than we do.
Stephen: They only had to work 3 or 4 HA day to get the food, clothing, shelter the rest of the time.
Stephen: Enough fun can hang out with their kids. They can get involved in culture and so on. So in many ways we haven't advanced in these terms
Stephen: from society, hunter-gatherer societies. Things have actually got worse
Stephen: in terms of providing the basic contentment that enables us to lead a life of human flourishing.
Stephen: So again, we have to leave that as a question, and that's a question. I hope perhaps we can reflect on ourselves. What would be enough.
Stephen: Do I really need the kind of car I've got, for example, or whatever it might be? These are hugely difficult questions.
Stephen: So I think I'll leave that today. Here at this point.
Stephen: we still have nearly an hour to go, so we've got plenty of time for further discussion.
Stephen: But let's stand up and have a 5 min break
Stephen: yesterday.
Stephen: I'd like first to invite those of you who haven't contributed or spoken
Stephen: in these sessions, to have the first opportunity to do so if you wish. and likewise for those of you online. we'll just open with that invitation, and
Stephen: then we'll move on. Yes. Bernard.
Stephen: good morning, everybody.
Stephen: I believe there is some merit in survival.
Stephen: Oh. because when you are in this
Stephen: mode, you have to think, to run.
Stephen: to think for your life to to do something which in terms of active. It's exactly what what we are aiming at.
Stephen: and I am particularly thinking of some
Buddhist community in the South East Asia, like, yeah.
Stephen: The forest Monk with a zhan jiang.
Stephen: they have no shelter except the forest. I'm sorry they have no shelter, no shelter, no shelter except the forest, and they have to walk around the village
Stephen: to get their food. and that doesn't prevent them from
being in a
Stephen: also contemplative
Stephen: and produce producing live.
Stephen: So
Stephen: survival is necessary, I think.
Stephen: for, for for for action. without survive, without the need to survive.
We don't act.
Stephen: No, I agree completely. No, that's kind of what I was trying to say. The I mean the in ancient India. You had the advantage, as you do in Thailand today is the much of the year. You can get by on very, very little, and you don't need to.
Stephen: You don't need to have actual shelter. You need shelter during the monsoon. That was the case with the Buddha as well. But so shelter is needed but a lot less than say, if you live in.
Stephen: you know, in Norway
Stephen: Place is very hot. It creates the potential to move.
Stephen: Yes, exactly. That's the potential that we need to move.
Stephen: If we are hungry. If we are not hungry, we we don't move. we just we just pick up the food from
Stephen: train.
Stephen: So we need a potential
Stephen: exactly. Thank you.
Stephen: Yeah. Cheese my name's Tritton, just to join the conversation. No, not at all. Kind of a more inexperienced, I guess, in the space. So it's nice to sit back and to listen, to to learn. The kind of academic
Stephen: level of this is in some ways beyond me. But I'm really enjoying it. And at the point now where we're talking about getting into action is really where my interest area is.
Stephen: And I'm kind of I love the transition away from this idea of intention towards
Stephen: imagination. I think that's a really important shift in my understanding of of what's being described before
Stephen: in the way that we use English language. Intentional is almost dead on arrival, you know her best intentions are and tend to get up and meditate, but you know it's almost a foreseen thing that it's it's not going to occur.
Stephen: So that's kind of. And I pick up on that idea of kind of flaccid intentions as you spoke about, I think, is a good term for it. So I'm really interested in. And how do we?
Stephen: I guess, in my role back in Adelaide. But I guess this group being a microcosm of an aware and well resourced group that has the ability to to make action. What's the
Stephen: what do you perceive as the kind of the key barriers in this? Because it's not around labor we're we're kind of. We're benefiting off of, you know, history, past, etc. To come to this place.
Stephen: It's not around a lack of care. It's not around a lack of mindfulness, I guess, in in the context of what we're landing in, but I still see and feel barriers both in myself and in the people here and in the community that are late at home.
Stephen: and you're someone who's been in this space for a long time like you stuck your neck out, and you've kind of worn this for a long time. So I'm really interested to kind of learn from your experience, what are the
Stephen: I guess. Yeah, what are the conditions, or what are the things that you've created within yourself.
Stephen: you know, because we're talking about orate
Stephen: you know, or oratees like the from the Eudarmonia kind of aspect. That kind of living orite is like excellence. Yeah, in the ancient Greek. And I'm interested in that that process that you seem to have created that for yourself, and being able to sustain that over a long period of time.
Stephen: And so in this kind of not the theory of practice, but the practice of practice. How have you sustained it?
Stephen: but I think in some ways it goes back to what Lenore was speaking of last night, which is courage.
Stephen: basically having the
Stephen: the you know, the the strength commitment being clear about what really matters for you most.
Stephen: it's difficult to speak so, you know, totally personally on this, but that's what you ask. I think I was fortunate in growing up.
Stephen: I grew up in a single parent family just with my mother. but my mother was a person very much concerned that her 2 sons would
Stephen: be able to have to lead the kind of lives that they wish to lead. to be independent. and not to stand in their way in doing what they most deeply wanted.
Stephen: I think she felt that this would mean we'd become doctors and architects, but when I chose to become a monk, and my brother chose to become a penniless artist.
Stephen: she started having second.
Stephen: That wasn't part of her subliminal game plan.
Stephen: But in the end of the day she was very proud of us, because we did actually succeed more or less in what we set out to do. And so I think.
Stephen: and that to me is. I think you're the way you're brought up.
Stephen: Suzuki. Roshi. Is a
Stephen: a Japanese teacher in America of the 1960 s. 70, he was once asked, how can we make sure that our children are interested in the dharma like we are
Stephen: what behave like your parents behave to you
Stephen: so I wouldn't underestimate parenting
Stephen: actually. And I'm very, very grateful.
Stephen: you know, to my mother for having taken those risks, I mean stuck a header.
Stephen: but I also grew up in a culture the the 60 s. Which had a kind of what we would now call naive optimism.
Stephen: But that was also an incredible.
Stephen: you know inspiration
Stephen: that gave you the courage to take risks. travel overland to India.
Stephen: which probably young people today wouldn't do
Stephen: so. I don't think you can put it purely in terms of, you know, inner psychological elements like strength of mind, or whatever I think you do have to see it in context.
Stephen: But that again points to the need for our practice to be one that. as we were saying yesterday creates the conditions that will optimize human flourishing. And that means for our kids, for example.
Stephen: our children.
Stephen: our friends, our students.
Stephen: It's an enormous responsibility. but I can certainly acknowledge it myself. And the other source of that kind of
Stephen: in a sense, strength of mind. was with my Tibetan teachers.
Stephen: You know these were people who were refugees in one of the poorest countries in the world India.
Stephen: and yet they somehow embodied
Stephen: quality of humanity!
Stephen: The
Stephen: was certainly far in excess of anything I'd come across amongst religious leaders I've met in the West
Stephen: Christian priests, and so on. who left me very uninspired to be frank.
Stephen: So again.
Stephen: you know.
Stephen: relating to people who seem to embody what you most deeply admire.
Stephen: That's not nothing to do with me. It has to do with the fact that such people are around such communities are around.
Stephen: So again, it points to the importance of establishing.
Stephen: you know, communities that support that kind of
Stephen: of life
Stephen: follow on, perhaps just while there's a bit of movement around the room like I'm interested then in in communities like this, like Lenore's been putting up. What are the 2 most kind of obvious leverage points around eating less meat and switching our super. And I'm interested, I guess, in a group which
Stephen: for ostensibly like this would be a good quality. Sangha. This is a group of people that are kind of, you know, high on that level. But even within our group.
Stephen: I'm sure there's people that haven't engaged in action. And I'm I'm interested in what you kind of diagnose as that issue of
Stephen: of where we are to where the action needs to actually begin.
Stephen: Well, in that in that sense, I mean I would the reason I
Stephen: the reason I committed myself to Buddhists. Philosophy and practice
Stephen: is because for me. I find a template for living
Stephen: like I've mapped out on my cartography of care
Stephen: that I feel does provide us with at least an outline of how to live
Stephen: in such a way that we will overcome those barriers, and we use the word barriers. Buddhists tend to use the word hindrance or obstacle.
Stephen: and they understand these really, as in some sense, is almost instinctual. Reactive patterns
Stephen: are not just psychological, but are probably deep down, stemming from our biological past. You know this deep, you know, instinctive need for security
Stephen: for safety.
Stephen: for having enough food for getting, you know, being safe all of those things. And that's allied with a deep kind of visceral fear
Stephen: and anxiety that we're not going to be safe.
Stephen: And the Buddha, I think, and I'm sure that's true of you know. All great
Stephen: paradigmatic individuals.
Stephen: Is that they've somehow been able to transcend those barriers to not
Stephen: lead a life that's hemmed in by by fear. by the need for security. by the unwillingness, therefore. to take a risk
Stephen: and
Stephen: I guess if I look at it in my own case I was willing to take risks.
Stephen: you know the more that I when you're 18. Yeah, you've got
Stephen: your whole life ahead of you. You can take all kinds of crazy risks, but when you get to be, you're in your mid twenties and you're a Buddhist monk living in the Himalayas, and you don't have any money. You don't have any education. You don't have any career opportunities.
Stephen: And my. My mother's big anxiety was how you're going to get a pension.
I think.
Stephen: she once said to me when I came back on a visit to England, she said. You know, darling, you can't live in Nirvana forever.
Stephen: We're not.
Stephen: I don't know what her theology of Nirvana was, but she clearly was she.
Stephen: You can see the point.
Stephen: and I feel also
Stephen: again following on from what Lenore was saying last night, is that
Stephen: the more you take, the more you have the courage to take a risk, and you actually realize it.
Stephen: you can do it.
Stephen: That strengthens that muscle, as it were, to take more risks.
Stephen: So.
Stephen: so I do think it has a lot to do with what in my cartography is called resolve
Stephen: result.
Stephen: you know, meditating and reflecting and thinking deeply by yourself with others about what really matters
Stephen: one of the meditations. probably the meditation that was the most effective of all the Tibetan Buddhist practices I did over 7 years. was the meditation on death
Stephen: every day. half an hour or so. you know, meditating on. The only thing that's certain in the future is I'm going to die. We all know that. but we don't know that really
Stephen: it's just an idea.
Stephen: Contemplative meditation is about revisiting these
Stephen: home truth almost in such a way that they begin to sink in
Stephen: emotion and climate change would be one of those right now. Yeah, yeah, I think so, would she? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. II guess the people that are probably most active are the people that are potentially meditated most on what this future that we're moving into looks like based on science. Yeah, exactly. And so it's kind of whatever cost. I'm willing to endure any discomfort. I'm willing to move out of my comfort zone because of
Stephen: being out of hold
Stephen: that end point or that that discomfort? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's not enough just to sort of follow. You know, we can all say, Yeah, there's climate change is going to happen. But the question, I think from a Buddhist perspective, would be, how deeply that insight actually
Stephen: embedded in your emotions in your bones.
Stephen: and that I think contemplative practice can do.
Stephen: And but it's a commitment. It takes time. It takes commitment. You have to do it day after day after day after day. Sometimes it's really boring in some places. What more interesting things to do?
Stephen: So it's about, you know, staying true to your fundamental principles and values
Stephen: consciously. not just as an idea, but something you feel in your body
Stephen: that is very important, and that's I'm very grateful to my training was a monk for that.
Stephen: I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but it it serves as a sort of paradigmatic example.
Stephen: I would like to imagine a world in which
Stephen: young people had the opportunity, in celebrating university to spend the same amount of time in
Stephen: contemplative training in a monastic set.
Stephen: I think that would be a great good for our world.
Stephen: We've got a question from online from Lesley. If we've finished online.
Lesley Synge: Hi, is it from me?
Stephen: It's for you. Yeah. Who are you?
Lesley Synge: Well, again, Stephen, I just want to express my gratitude to you for coming to Australia.
Lesley Synge: This is my first time I've actually met you in person, even though it's only in zoom. Oh, no! I had met you once before, but it was for such a brief time. And I'm so
Lesley Synge: I'm I'm so grateful for your intellect and sharing it with us. So I wanna ask you a little bit about
Lesley Synge: how you would tease out lineage in relationship to Australia. because we are quite stuck at the moment in that our foundational story
Lesley Synge: is stuck in 90, 1788, as a white settler society. And I'm a white settler
Lesley Synge: descendant, obviously, and I'm also a writer trying to grapple
Lesley Synge: with meaning in our society.
Lesley Synge: So I just wonder.
Lesley Synge: do you feel that one of the
Lesley Synge: things that we can do as white settler descendants is to deepen our understanding of our lineage to something greater than what our civic leaders are telling us, which is, that it all began with the wonders of British colonialism in 1788.
Lesley Synge: If we deepen our sense of lineage to our far, far longer
Lesley Synge: dwelling ancestors like in my case, it's Irish and English and German. Would this help in some way for us to understand ourselves as
Lesley Synge: less shallow human beings who are just defined as, say.
a post-colonial
Lesley Synge: consumer society. Thank you.
Stephen: Thank you. I like the yeah. The the short answer is, yes.
Stephen: I think that would be a good idea. And I think, as I was saying just now, I think there is a great importance in delving back into not only our, you know, history of our let's say, of our
Stephen: being British or whatever it is, but
Stephen: which, frankly, I don't pay an awful lot of attention to attention to.
Stephen: I'm interested in my lineage of being a European
Stephen: but also of being a human being. Really my lineage I trace back to
Stephen: not so much to, you know, within Great Britain or
my, though that immediate past, as it were.
Stephen: Although recently, I yeah, that's true. Actually.
Stephen: anyway, the
Stephen: I find it valuable to go back into deep history.
Stephen: It's helpful. I found it very rewarding just to think of ourselves as
Stephen: part of a species, a homo sapi sapiens, who's been around for a relatively very short time
Stephen: 200,000 years, 250,000 years is the current estimate.
Stephen: Since there have been on this planet people who are anatomically identical to ourselves
Stephen: really little. It's very no, it's almost nothing. tiny.
Stephen: So I think that's worth reflecting on, too, that we are a
Stephen: a species
Stephen: that has burst onto the scene has become.
Stephen: as we know, totally dominant
Stephen: on the earth's surface. And we now know that, following our instincts and our skills and our language abilities and our big brains when you know we're now potentially going to.
Stephen: you know, ended all for ourselves
Stephen: that is in. And I think with the climate change issue that's in. We really do need to accept the kind of beings we.
Stephen: the the that of which we have the race, or the species of which has evolved, of which we are members.
Stephen: Following that I feel it's important to go back to what Jaspers calls these these masks gave, and
Stephen: Individuals, these paradigmatic figures in
Stephen: human history. Remember, human history only goes back about 5,000 years. He was tiny, really.
Stephen: but there are examples of humanity from across the different
Stephen: cultures that we can use as ways to measure ourselves. But prior to that, of course, we have indigenous cultures
Stephen: which in Australia
Stephen: you have the aborigines in other parts of the world, native people in the in the Americas
Stephen: there's really very little. And Africa, of course.
Stephen: and I think to actually go back and reflect
Stephen: and to honor
Stephen: those pre. You know that those non-european
Stephen: nations and peoples.
Stephen: which again, is a way to reconnect very much to the earth.
Stephen: But how we do that, I think, is something we have to sort of figure out for ourselves.
Stephen: But I do think we have to get out of an identity of being.
Stephen: you know, a, you know, a white European settler on
Stephen: a foreign continent that starts in 1,788. I think it's just way too narrow a perspective
Stephen: to have on the lineage
lineages
Stephen: of which we are a part.
Lesley Synge: Yes, I truly agree, but I do think the debate in Australia is quite stuck there at the moment.
Lesley Synge: and as a person who's actually writing some history about aboriginal people in
Lesley Synge: Central Queensland.
Lesley Synge: I tell you what, it's a pretty hard path to tread, because
Lesley Synge: they just feel so little support. I feel as if I'm silenced by you know this dichotomy in Australia going on so your words are very helpful for me.
Lesley Synge: and I thank you again.
Stephen: Thank you. But have the courage to speak out. I mean, you're right, and that suggests that you know you want that. You want that voice to be heard and so stick at it.
Stephen: Get the word out, and the more of us who do that, the more those voices are going to be heard. If we just give up and remain silent. I think we're somehow failing. as we'll see at the end of this course in really
Stephen: finding our voice.
Stephen: which is for Hannah Arendt. The voice was the key to action.
Stephen: I think that's
Stephen: got another question from Kirsten.
Stephen: Oh, yes, Hi. My question is about
Stephen: survival and the focus on shelter and food. And What was the last one. Clothing
Stephen: and while things like
Stephen: illness, health, care is seen to be
Stephen: more of a challenge. You know birth, illness. I've just been reading Martine's book. Let go about the, you know, sort of the.
Stephen: I suppose the hindrance that something like depression can be, and
Stephen: and what? A barrier that can be for people to have a contemplative life before. That's something that they
Stephen: can can sort of breakthrough in a sense.
Stephen: So my question is, why do you think that
Stephen: health isn't more an aspect of survival
Stephen: in the dharma? Well, actually, if you look at the
Stephen: what are called the 4 requisites for a monk.
Stephen: It's food, clothing, shelter, medicine.
Stephen: so it is tough.
Stephen: is not in the text that I read out. but
Stephen: at the very least.
Stephen: It's just the first next thing that you need to sort out. And obviously, if you are.
Stephen: you know, in ill health, whether that be depression, or whether it be some chronic illness, then that's clearly going to.
Stephen: you know, inhibit
Stephen: your ability to to live fully. So you know I get. And and my, I really left you with a question like this morning is, you know, what? What today would be considered to be the basic requirements.
Stephen: what what would be enough? And I think many of us would probably
Stephen: also add something. I think education is not there. For example, health care, education, a justice system
Stephen: likewise, in a rule of law.
Stephen: and I would also add, you know, culture of some kind.
Stephen: Know, I think we can't, what the Buddhist, what what we're finding in these early Buddhist texts
Stephen: is referring to.
Stephen: you know, a culture 2.5,000 years ago in North India is not today.
Stephen: So I think we have to take these texts as kind of guidelines rather than the final word on the mat.
Stephen: But so that's to me. It's more important to take that as a starting point.
Stephen: and then.
Stephen: you know, consider it in terms of how it would be for us today.
Stephen: both personally and in terms of the society and the communities in which we live.
Stephen: There's
so
Stephen: can you speak up a bit? I will get the mic. Sorry. Can you turn the volume up. Oh, that's good. Now it's good. Okay? So you know your comments yo, you re retelling your mother's comment on Nirvana reminded me of
Stephen: Jeffrey Miller, a KA lamasuria. Thus walking into his mother's Sixth Avenue apartment during a bridge game in his flowing robes, and she said, Oh, meet, my son, the Deli llama!
Stephen: My question is
Stephen: with regard to both Hannah and and the Buddha in terms of human nature. as a basis for developing
Stephen: exposes on the human condition. She
Stephen: went through such a terrible period in the thirties and forties. and then I think this book was written, you say, in 58, something like that
Stephen: sorry human condition, human condition which was before she attended the Eiffman trial. And you know my, my! My memory is rusty. I did read a book once on totalitarianism in the sixties.
Stephen: And of course she saw what she coined the been the banality of evil
Stephen: that
Stephen: it was because, administr administratively, people were incredibly. The Germans were very, very good at what they were doing.
Stephen: And that the technology was there to aid and abetted because you couldn't destroy millions of people in Auschwitz if you didn't have the trains to get them there. And you didn't have Cyclone B, which was developed for agriculture and pouring out of the gas chain into the gas chamber. So it was kind of very simple
Stephen: but did she have an underlying view of human nature that then helped her develop? Her view on how we should live?
Stephen: And likewise with the Buddha.
Stephen: even though he managed to get some quite cruel people into become enlightened and to become his allies.
Stephen: is his view on human nature.
Stephen: one which it's basically good, and that one day he'll get Mara to join the club.
Stephen: Well, first about Hannah Rant
Stephen: I read Eichmann in Jerusalem quite recently, and I was struck by a remark she made, she said, when she.
Stephen: the first time she witnessed Eichmann in the courtroom in Jerusalem.
Stephen: she said to herself. his problem, is he? He doesn't know how to think he doesn't. Well, no, he doesn't think.
Stephen: and I think she's and that's a theme that comes back again and again in her last book, The Life of the Mind starts out with thinking.
Stephen: and she doesn't. By thinking she doesn't mean just letting your mind chatter away.
Stephen: It has to do more with Heidegger's Denke.
Stephen: in other words, thinking deeply, consciously, critically, consistently. Again and again
Stephen: she saw the floor
Stephen: in Eichmann, and perhaps the flaw in much of human nature is our failure to to really think
Stephen: what we're doing. We become sort of just cogs in a machine.
Stephen: We just follow orders. I mean. Eichmann didn't think he'd done anything wrong
Stephen: at all. he said. I'm just like any other government function. And
Stephen: and yet, of course, here it comes to epitomise in a way the evil of the regime.
Stephen: Hence the banality
Stephen: of evil in a way that evil doesn't
Stephen: is not only performed by people who are ostensibly nasty at all. and that, I think, is the is the great power of that state is that we can all be complicit in evil.
Stephen: And this again goes back to climate change.
Stephen: We're all complicit. And we shouldn't kid ourselves
Stephen: each time we take a plane or drive a car, or you know, we are actually, you know, using up, you know, we are contributing to the very problem we're campaigning gets.
Stephen: And you know the fact that we are willing participants in the consumer society. You know we're complicit.
Stephen: and that's difficult to to acknowledge. I wouldn't go so far as saying, you know, we're evil any more than icon is evil. But we are.
Stephen: We are complicit to some degree
Stephen: in the very thing we are seeking to
Stephen: to remedy.
Stephen: But as for human nature
Stephen: human nature is, is a relatively recent, somewhat Western idea, and I don't think you can really
Stephen: find a
Stephen: comparable term
Stephen: in Buddhism except when it is the word Suavabova
Stephen: in later Buddhism, which means nature. of which there is, you know, considerable critique. The Majamica philosophers particularly, were very suspicious of any claim that
Stephen: anything has a nature or an essence, or a true being.
Stephen: Nagarjuna's philosophy is basically nice Suava Vaden. It's the the view that there is no essential nature.
Stephen: And I think the Majamika Critique
Stephen: of essential nature here, and that would include an essential human nature. Human beings are essentially good.
Stephen: For example.
Stephen: That's an idea that I find difficult to
Stephen: either understand or to, you know, to to be able able to accept. I've noticed in a lot of Buddhist discourse
Stephen: today there is this tendency to think of I mean Chungpa Chugyam. Trumba uses this expression fundamental goodness
Stephen: and certain ideas of Buddha. Nature. as they developed.
Stephen: you know, in the in the centuries after the Buddha spoke of Buddha nature as being somehow an essential goodness that all of the virtues are already present within us, not just in potential, but in actual fact.
Stephen: that the the our Buddha nature is covered by
Stephen: a layer of
Stephen: defilements in the same way that the sun is hidden by the clouds, and if we could just clear away the clouds, then we would arrive at a sense of our essential goodness.
Stephen: It may be a very useful idea. In other words, it can give people a sense of
Stephen: of confidence in themselves. but I think to take it as literally true. I do find that difficult
Stephen: for me when you clear away reactivity, this non-reactive space we speak of.
Stephen: It's not so much that we arrive at some essential goodness. but we arrive at
Stephen: have a certain kind of freedom. Freedom to make choices which will be in alignment with our values. But are those values already somehow hardwired into us.
Stephen: I don't know if I'm really honest, I don't know.
Stephen: Or are they? Simply as some somehow potential?
Stephen: They're possibilities
Stephen: that we can realize. I have to admit ignorance on this point. I don't know but if you look at the way
Stephen: human beings behave. if you look at the way
Stephen: as a species, we are destroying the very
Stephen: foundations of what gives us life.
Stephen: where? What? What role has fundamental goodness
Stephen: being in preventing that if we were fundamentally good and virtuous and wise, and all these things would we be in the mess we are in?
Stephen: That would be my counter argument to that point, though I like to think of myself as essentially a good guy. But
Stephen: philosophically. I'm not so sure.
Stephen: Thank you for
Stephen: talking so saying that we are complicit in, because I think that's the nub of the problem that we
Stephen: we get so involved in the process
Stephen: that we, no longer generating the process. The process demands that we continue to generate it, say text control.
Stephen: And
Stephen: and even if that's not our intent. my intention, I'm reading
Stephen: American Prometheus on Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. And it's
Stephen: it's exactly what happens. They just the process runs away with them to a large degree.
Stephen: Thank you. Des, we've got got a question from Elena online. And then Anna over here. Okay, Alina, online.
Stephen: I'm Lina. Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, Samena.
Stephen: yeah, I thought I recognized, huh.
Lena: yeah, II was it. Maybe this is a bit gib, not the the first one. But when I think it was this who was
Lena: talking, and you would in that question about complete
Lena: complicity. And I often feel sometimes, and I think about the German society. And you know you said it's not
Lena: II can't remember if you said it was evil or not. But I often think about us here, you know, and I feel sort of I feel like I can't do anything, but I feel complicit in the way that we treating the asylum seekers. And
Lena: there was, you know, several years ago
Lena: we had I think it was one of the things that started the whole thing with the boats as well. There was a a Norwegian
Lena: ship that came. It's called Tampa.
Lena: and the captain had picked up a lot. A boat of refugees. Boats have, you know, almost were about to sink, and he took all the refugees on board.
Lena: He came, and he was going to deliver them to Australia because they were going to Australia, and and I don't know if they were exactly just on international water or on in Australian waters.
Lena: But he he had. It was a standoff for days with the Australian Government, who was refusing to take them.
Lena: and you know they were. The boat was just lying there with the refugees. This ship, which was a commercial ship.
Lena: and he he said that he was following the laws of the sea, and that is that you help the people that are in distress.
Lena: and eventually the Australian Government had to give in and take them and then put them into detention, of course. And
Lena: It was, you know. I sort of feel all the time when we're treating that he was a good person, the captain. or or it was a good action, a right action.
Lena: and
Lena: I think he was actually given being given an award for it later, a sort of a piece award, or something I can't remember. But anyway, I was thinking, and
Lena: how how bad you can feel when you feel complicit. This doesn't that just came to mind when this was talking about
Stephen: our sort of evenly government in that sense
Lena: and but I also wanted to make a comment about what you said about the society that are built on dharmic principles. This is a bit glib. It just made me
Lena: recall, you know, Marx, vision of society from each according to their ability.
Lena: to each according to their needs, and that is very, very similar.
Stephen: Umhm.
Lena: So he was a bit. He had Buddhist ideas. I don't know. But yeah, I enjoyed your talk immensely.
Stephen: Thank you. No, thank you very much, Lena, and also des
Stephen: question. Thank you. Debt. Yes. thank you. Yeah. I don't think I need to respond. It's not really a question there, but thank you very much for sharing.
Stephen: and I'm sure we can all come up with examples
Stephen: of people who have stood out and acted well
Stephen: and often, you know, met a lot of kickback from
Stephen: the powers that be. and I admire in those people not just. I don't think this captain was just
Stephen: following the law of the sea. I feel there was more to it than that.
Stephen: you know. He was reaching out to people in suffering. Basically. I would like to think that was his primary motive.
Stephen: And I think it's you know, it's important to acknowledge and to celebrate such acts.
Stephen: sure, you know, I mean, there are moments of hope in our world. Sometimes you think things are in a pretty bad way. where sometimes sometimes a person will just
Stephen: like the the Jewish lady who shook have the hand of her Hamas kidnap.
Stephen: and wished in peace. I thought that was a very, very moving moment.
Stephen: In this horrible crisis.
Stephen: because a humanity or the best of humanity shines through in such moments.
Stephen: and I feel that those sorts of examples are crucial
Stephen: if we're to keep us sanity in a way. and our our hope
Stephen: difficult work. But I think pertinent here
Stephen: got a question from Anna.
Stephen: Hi, thanks, and you know, I just want to add to the the gratitude on the importance of this discussion.
Stephen: Yeah. And you know, I'm really interested in that moving
Stephen: to big picture from small picture, or from inner to outer, etc. So I guess this question's bouncing around off
Stephen: of what Des and you were discussing. And Triton's question, too.
Stephen: and that is in a way, what stops us. So even though I'm interested in big picture stuff, this is this is a practice question in a way. So you know, what are the barriers? And
Stephen: you know, in in kind of really interested in activism myself. But you know, also running retreats. You know, things like
Stephen: guilt and overwhelm, etc. Really cripple people. So you know, II think it's it's
Stephen: important. These are places in our practice that we can.
Stephen: We can work. And you know, having a practice for a start that you're inviting us into, that has that movement from inner to outer is really important.
Stephen: I mean, I think, in extinction, rebellion that I'm in. They really
Stephen: try to do that. We have minutes of. We have regeneration, etc. But
Stephen: you know, I
Stephen: before Covid, we had a retreat, basically asking that question, knowing what I know, how am I to live? What am I to do? And we ended up
Stephen: realizing the fact that guilt and overwhelm shame can. Really. It's just where people started.
Stephen: So we ended up really working with not just the scandals. But Sankara's. Actually. you know what you spoke about when speaking with Des. Really those things that
Stephen: those habits of mind, those proclivities we have.
Stephen: that which we inherit from our ancestors, or our culture
Stephen: for our birth, for our
Stephen: who we played with as children, etc. It really pays to well, it said, as a question to you, really, but we found accidentally in that retreat that it really
Stephen: helped people to look at their own Sankaras.
Stephen: If you're wheelchair bound, if you have a hearing problem, if you have depression.
Stephen: if you are frightened of police, for whatever reason, then, these are the boundaries that you work in in your activism in taking your concern for the planet
Stephen: from the Earth.
Stephen: There, you know, it's really important to be in touch with what helps you or hinders you.
Stephen: and they can be the Sinkara's. So we spent. I don't know 5 days
Stephen: not totally, but in that conversation, and people found
Stephen: great solace may be confidence
Stephen: in telling themselves. I have these and kind of awareness, mindfulness, whatever all these skills that we're talking about really help in that process of thinking. Well, II can't do this because of my depression, or because of my blindness.
Stephen: However, I can do this.
Stephen: Then, adding on what Lenore said, just a little bit of extra courage, because this is an emergency.
Stephen: What you do when your house is on fire, you know you might swear, or you might run faster, but when your house is on fire you find out what you can do, and you do a little bit more.
Stephen: So I guess I'm asking you who's a sort of
Stephen: we question. But you know that importance of being in touch with your Sankaras, your habits.
Stephen: Thank you. Yeah. Well, II completely agree on that, and
Stephen: the the word I. You use a Sanskrit parley word Sankara, which some people here might not even be totally clear. What that means. It means habit patterns or something.
Stephen: But one of the reasons I
Stephen: I've chosen to to not use those technical terms anymore. But just to speak of what I call reactivity. I take that as a kind of a a catch-all term for Sankara's, for the 3 poisons, the.
Stephen: you know, craving even the whole lot. I find reactivity
Stephen: for me works. And
Stephen: it also plays very well with the idea of fires, the things these things that flare up
Stephen: and those habit patents.
Stephen: I
Stephen: are not just neutral data. Habit patterns actually invade us. And this and and another way to think of of Sankara's or habit patterns or reactivity is in the mythological figure of Mara.
Stephen: And that's very helpful, too, because Mara gives us a kind of mythic way of handling this stuff. And Mara, you know, Mara, it says, Mara comes up to Buddha and says.
Stephen: right, there's it's as though a person
Stephen: intervenes. Another voice comes into your mind, and literally starts whispering in your ear, as it were, and is very seductive and very, very
Stephen: persuasive. and I really do think we need to find a much richer language
Stephen: to be able to talk about this stuff rather than you know, just citing technical Buddhist term.
Stephen: because I think these things are absolutely crucial and and the very core of the task model is letting go of reactivity and seeing reactivity stop.
Stephen: There's steps 2 and 3
Stephen: in reactivity. Mara Sankara's craving, ignorant, whatever it is.
Stephen: Is basically that which you need to be most closely aware of. You can't let reactivity be or let reactivity go. If you don't know what reactivity is, and I don't mean that in a theoretical way, but you know what it feels like. And the meditation I guided yesterday was.
Stephen: didn't explain anything like that. But the point is the more that you learn to recognize that non-reactive dimension of yourself
Stephen: that I've found
Stephen: allows you to notice the reactivity much more clear
Stephen: that it's that non-reactive space that paradoxically
Stephen: makes you more alert and attuned and sensitized to the first whisperings. The first
Stephen: tremors, the first. as Montaigne calls it, the first little gust of wind that that are the precursor of a storm!
Stephen: Shanti Deva speaks brilliantly about this, too, being like a piece of wood.
Stephen: he says, that's what enables you to have the stillness to see the the very, very
Stephen: stirrings and movements and shifts in these reactive patterns. And these reactive patterns are not just your reactive pans. It's not Anna's problem. We so many reactive patterns are
Stephen: are built into us through our social and political and religious condition.
Stephen: like racism, for example.
Stephen: is, is is a pattern of reactivity. It it rises up
Stephen: unwitting
Stephen: people here trying to work out what they're actually going to do in the next. However long we've got then becoming familiar with your own, because mine are very different to deserts or garins.
Stephen: So to me, the dama for myself and my community, and we call them proclivities. The word that we prefer because it's like a fun word sounds like a swear word.
Stephen: But you know, I think no no matter how many talks we listen to, we're not going to know what we are going to do out there until we know our own, you know. So this practice of knowing your own proclivities and just taking a bit of courage to them, I think, is something that the dharma and retreats can offer for people who do want to become active.
Stephen: No, I completely agree. I actually translate Sankara as inclinations.
Stephen: But again, we're groping towards a language I feel when we speak about these things. But no, you're right. And and that's why, in the 4 task model. It's only when you can see these inclinations, these proclivities clearly
Stephen: in in an embodied way.
Stephen: from a contemplative perspective that you can achieve the kind of understanding and acceptance and freedom from them, such that you're able to act from a non
Stephen: reactive
Stephen: space. And to me the whole point of the Dharma practice is to culminate in action.
Stephen: The eightfold path is basically a sequence of contemplative and then active steps, and it culminates
Stephen: in finding
Stephen: a way to
speak.
Stephen: If you wish to act
Stephen: in that sense.
Stephen: And the clear and the the recognizing. the acknowledging that they're not repressing and pretending these things are not there
Stephen: to have that kind of free and empty space, I think, is the source of of all creativity. whether that be artistic creativity, whether it be having the imagination to.
Stephen: you know.
Stephen: to come up with another kind of action in a protest, whatever it is
Stephen: that to me is the source, and if we can't tap into that, we're likely to be just keep running on. you know, maybe better sets of habits and inclinations and proclivities that we, you know, that are around us, but we've not really internalized
Stephen: our own capacity to act from a non-reactive space. That, I think, is what
Stephen: the Dharma practice actually provides for us
Stephen: reactivity. What I started with with which is what is a barrier which is often shame or guilt, or overwhelm.
Stephen: That kind of practice you speak of
Stephen: is an antidote.
Stephen: felt it. And people in my community that from knowing their proclivities or tendencies, or whatever, and stepping a little bit beyond them.
Stephen: It has really helped them become active. Yeah, exactly.
Stephen: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do we finish at 1030? We do. And it's tea, coffee time right now.
Stephen: Thank you all very much.
Stephen: Enjoy your tea, coffee.