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Attenuation

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Winton: of the theme of imagination. Sankapa

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Winton: which Stephen

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Winton: began as this morning.

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Winton: and as he pointed out

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Winton: the amount, this

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Winton: path factor of imagination follows on from

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Winton: perception, from perceptive verb perspective.

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Winton: And so there's a logical, sequencing, sequencing going on here.

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Winton: And

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Winton: as he also said, this imagination is what

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Winton: feeds into action. It gives us a sense of what we are to do in

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Winton: at morally significant situations.

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Winton: It isn't the same as action. It isn't even the same as intention, but it is leading up to that point where we have to make take deliberate action.

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Winton: So

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Winton: Why is imagination important when we explored that to large extent

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Winton: before lunch. But one of the things it's it's one of its direct applications, if you like, is in Buddhist ethics.

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Winton: In in feeding directly into

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Winton: what philosophers call moral emotions and in in the Dharma, of course.

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Winton: these

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Winton: metta lovingkindness, Karuna

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compassion and mood guitar

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Winton: sympathetic joy. So it's only really in being able to

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imagine other people's situation.

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Winton: other people's feelings.

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Winton: other people's way of being in the world that we can really really relate to them

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Winton: in these ethically important ways.

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Winton: So they're no longer abstractions, they actual. We can. We can feel the presence as

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Winton: life in blood pigs. It's what

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The Greeks called ecstasy. So, being

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Winton: outside one's own body to be in in the body of of another person to whom we're relating

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Winton: and so this business of being inside the skin, so inside the body of other people is

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Winton: what is going on in tragedy, in Greek tragedy, and I want to come back to that now to tease out a few other ways in which it is. It is a kind of converging tradition

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Winton: to to Zedhama

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Winton: and to get back to the philosopher I

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Winton: was quoting yesterday Simon Critchley.

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Winton: who wrote tragedy, the Greeks and us. he says, tragedy is thinking in action.

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Winton: thinking upon action and thinking for action. So it's all very much. It's about hard thinking about hard situations leading into

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Winton: actually doing something about

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Winton: a particularly particularly critical predicament.

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Winton: And, as he also points out, it's it's sort of

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Winton: the unethical version of skepticism, because

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Winton: we've we don't know in a lot of

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Winton: situations we find ourselves in. We only partially understand them, and yet we have to. And and yet we have to act.

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Winton: So that's some. This is how imagination is firing

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Winton: through the

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through the Greek

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Winton: tragic situation, tradition, and one of the interesting things like actually

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Winton: touched on yestane relation to the October referendum here. The there's there's a lot of shame going on

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Winton: in Greek tragedy, and and you know it's shame in a sense, as a

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Winton: as a response to

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Winton: a situation where where action has been taken has been unsuccessful and the situation becomes intractable.

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Winton: So

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Winton: as he also argues.

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Winton: tragedy offers the most powerful template.

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Winton: but diagnosing, seem seemingly intractable conflicts and sinking beyond them.

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Winton: What? How? Even though they're intractable, we've got to deal with them.

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Winton: And

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again, this is where

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Winton: the practice of the imagination is taking is taking us on what seems to be

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Winton: a barrier to

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to her agency. Really.

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Winton: our agency is always only partial, and that's

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Winton: part of the problematic in tragedy. But for what it's worth we've got to exercise it.

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Winton: Towards the end of his, spoke Simon Critch. Lee refers to an incident

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Winton:  which has always amused me, that he is an English philosopher temporarily living in Brooklyn, New York.

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Winton: and he somehow manages to bail up

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Winton: none other than the the great French actor, Isabel Upair, who's just come off stage from appearing in the leading role of

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Winton: Thamedra, which is another ancient tragedy which was obviously staged at the time in New York. Fidel was actually written by the Roman

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Winton: philosopher Seneca, but it's based on an original by Euripides, one of the Buddhist contemporaries.

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Winton: And he's sort of badgering Isabel Ubert about what is what's the magic with tragedy? And what's what's at the heart of it all, and she gets

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Winton: more and more frustrated with this seemingly thick philosopher. and she eventually burst out she said, it's about aliveness.

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Winton: Everything on stage is about aliveness. Nothing else matters. Ideas are just ideas. It's the fleshly presence that really that really matters.

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Winton: And of course, she's referring to the intensity of these

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Winton: situations being enacted in the same

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Winton: room, in the same air and same light in which the public is, is viewing them.

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Winton: So again, we come back to this issue of that have that we have to confront a world that we are only partially

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Winton: can understand in terms of our own. And I think you know, this is this is a great way in which to understand the climate crisis. And indeed it's it's

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Winton: ugly twin, a crisis of inequality in the world today.

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Winton: And

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for this reason, because we can see, we can see

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Winton: our own predicaments

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Winton: in the analogies presented by the ancient.

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Winton: tragic, traditional. Indeed, the early modern tradition which Shakespearean can go

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Winton: so Crichly, Crichley.

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Winton: it more or less comes a conclusion that ancient tragedy is not ancient.

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Winton: It is quintessentially modern and

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Winton: The the one of the reasons is that

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Winton: all these. the concern with tragedy

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Winton: is part of a wider concern in Western thought. It is sometimes called the Death of God. Literature.

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Winton: Because in 1881 nature write God's death certificate.

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Winton: and not that he wasn't arguing for atheism. He was just saying, people have stopped

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Winton: referring everything back to God. And and so God is dead. And

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Winton: and that meant a massive shift in the way in which

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Winton: Western people had to think in terms of. You know

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Winton: the origins of meaning. It was no longer

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Winton: God up there, but something we ourselves had to

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Winton: had to take responsibility for

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Winton: so

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Winton: on a personal note, I mean, I've done it than a bit of

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Winton: fretting and strutting on the stage. like the poor player in Macbeth for a group called Sydney University Dramatic Society.

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Winton: which, just just before the pandemic

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Winton: head hand.

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Winton: it celebrated its 100 thirtieth birthday

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Winton: by putting on a fantastic production

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Winton: of Aeschylus's

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Winton: Agamemnon. which is the first in note

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Winton: Aristium trilogy. And it's a wonderful play about domestic violence. If you want.

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Winton: if you want to see it in? In a modern context. you know, there's King Agamemnon who sacrifices his daughter Ifiggenia, too.

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Winton: the god responsible for wins. So he'll get a fair wind to Troy.

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Winton: which he's about to attack. leaving his

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Winton: a wife clutch, seething with rage and grief.

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Winton: So several years later he comes back a conquering hero

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Winton: to his loving wife.

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Winton: who has plans for him.

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Winton: thank God! So

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Winton: there's a lot of blood and guts on stage. But it's again. I was just really moved, by the way, that this undergraduate.

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Winton: very modern with that sad dramatic society, should should we.

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Winton: celebrating its existence by putting on this play, which was

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Winton: first staged in 4 58 Bce. During the Buddha's lifetime.

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Winton: He wasn't in town, of course, but it's just. It's just an interesting.

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Coincidence!

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Winton:  big! There was also a few decades ago

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Winton: just getting back to Isabel Uppaya's statement

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Winton: something called living theatre. you know, even one stage up again and living theatre was about some.

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Winton: the audience actually participating in the performance. and I have a wonderful memory of

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Winton: of it of going to a production like this in

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Paris or Van Sein.

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Winton: is near Paris.

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Cool! 1789.

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Winton: It was back in the days when my French was in better repair than it is now.

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Winton: And there was just this huge room, and with a kind of boardwalk

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Winton: running through it.

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Winton: And the You, you know, you bought a ticket to the performance, but there were no seats, and and you and the audience played the Paris mob in 1789, of course, was the first year of the French

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Winton: Revolution and

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Winton: And then, during the play, these identifiable historical characters in Dante and

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Winton: and Marha and Robespierre and I all

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Winton: come up in turn and harangue the crowd with their inner, their spiel, and at the same time

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Winton: you have agitators coming through among the the

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Winton: Paris mob, ie. Ass, grabbing us by the lapel, saying, Don't listen to him, you know he's a he's a counter revolutionary rat, and or you must follow him. He's got the good oil. And and so everyone was being seriously agitated. And it was a terrific way

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Winton: to get across that historical moment when

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Winton: you know these, when the revolutionary leaders

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Winton: had galloped a radical horse into power. And then they were trying to rein it in

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Winton: because they were bourgeois gentlemen.

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and suddenly their property rights were in danger, and they're trying to

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Winton: drag the crowd back.

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Winton: And so, instead of

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Winton: Yvite Egalite fraternity, they were trying to

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Winton: replace all that with the slogan. Oh, there's gonna be order! And the reason why the play was doubly effective, because not only was the audience actually

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Winton: playing in it, but because it was

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Winton: an attack on the Pre, on the existing French government

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of the time, but

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Winton: under the presidency of Georges Ponville, who was doing precisely what these characters on stage was doing, trying to rein in the the radical currents from

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Winton: the upheavals in 1,968 in Paris. But it was a you know you

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Winton: you couldn't actually get the the sensations of living.

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The living experience

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Winton: have that kind of legal moment without this dramatic presentation.

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Winton: But another way, of course, that you can

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Winton: to some extent bring aliveness to an historical understanding is through historical fiction, and I've had a bit of a guard that myself in there

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Winton: last few years. But the the absolute master of this of this genre is Hilary Mantel.

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Winton: and some of you may have read.

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called trilogy.

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Winton: In twenty-sevent. She gave these Zaris lectures on how she went about

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Winton: creating this amazing

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Winton: re-animation really, of Thomas Cromwell.

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Winton: who was Henry the Eighth's fixer

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Winton: characters. It's not really yeah. In the history books.

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Winton: People like this are regarded as sort of villains, but they're only stick figures wandering through the history books.

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Winton: and her. She describes her task as

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Winton: as liberating people who happened to be dead from the archives. so take away the stick figures and replace.

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Winton: replace them with flesh and blood. Human beings, you know, who have their domestic problems and

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Winton: and and face their predicaments. And

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Winton: Thomas Allen Thomas Cromwell was an amazingly

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Winton: multi-dimension character, because he was a you know, and a loving dad and husband.

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Winton: He was a pretty handy street fighter. He was a great diplomat. He really understood about money and trade and and all the while he was having to

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Winton: manage this

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disturbed manchild of a King

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Winton: Henry the Eighth's, and try and prevent catastrophes the whole time, and in the process he created the world's very first modern nation, state

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Winton: bye, bye.

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Winton: shopping officer. connection to the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.

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Winton: England became a nation state as of the kind we now recognise without. with switched borders and a sovereign power inside Britain.

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Winton: not beholden

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Winton: to any external external authority.

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Winton: And so

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Winton: the way it it, just as the the extraordinary predicaments that we find Cromwell in there, like

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Winton: in at the time there was this

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Winton: disease called the sweating sickness struck very quickly.

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Winton: and the expression was merry. In the morning, dead. In the evening it was set fast. He comes home from work one day, and his 2 small daughters

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Winton: have just died of this of this disease, you know, and

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Winton: having had myself 2 small daughters in the household. I thought that, you know that is.

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Winton: that is psychically survivable, that sort of thing. But he.

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Winton: bing Tom Cromwell, managed to

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Winton: dust himself off and get on with it, and but seeing, seeing, seeing a character like that going through these experiences

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Winton: with her magnificent imagination, her and her

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Winton: er RAM

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Winton: her attention to detail, which is part of part of Zimb.

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Winton: The business of liberating people from the archives was just was just stunning.

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Winton: So

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Winton:  One of the.

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Winton: It's interesting to look at her modus operandi, too, that one of the things she insisted on was. if you're writing

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Winton: people in the past. You must never, ever condescend.

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Winton: Chisholm.

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Winton: you know, leaves poor simple selves who didn't, hadn't read Darwin or something

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Winton: said, you know that they they made their decisions

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Winton: and faced their predicaments with all the intelligence that we ourselves can bring

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to

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Winton: to our issues.

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Winton: And so one has to recreate

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Winton: the mental world I had is getting back to

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Winton: to to perspectives.

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Winton: Now they lived in a time that we seem to be entering into where they assumed

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Winton: the the end of days was

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Winton: pretty close.

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Winton: and they also believed that they had no sense

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Winton: of the holiness of

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progress and development

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Winton: as we've had for the last few centuries had none of that. that for their from their world view

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Winton: everything was in decline from a golden age, and that's, you know, so that the end of days would be the end

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Winton: end of that process.

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Winton:  so you know, there's lots of ways in which I think we can

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not only exercise our own imaginations. But

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Winton: piggyback on the imaginations of people like this

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Winton: in in getting a sense

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Winton: I've helped

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Winton: of of where we're at, but also what the possibilities are for action as well as a very clear understanding of the limits to our agency.

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Winton: Okay, I think I might leave it at that. It gives us

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Winton: 20 min for a preliminary. and around the country, and and after

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Winton: afternoon tea will come back and have a full out

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Winton: Q. And a session. But questions. Now

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Winton: he still had pale reflections.

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Winton: How this applies in the age of waiting for Goddo.

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Winton: where it's much less clear what the terms of the predicament are

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Winton: let alone what one might do in it.

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Winton: I'm not sure that it's I mean, I would have thought

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Winton: the predicaments were fairly clear today.

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Winton: and this is obviously conversation. We're going to be continuing sorry I meant in in waiting for goddess. So you're looking at Greek tragedy, and that's a reflection of her time, and in a way waiting for Goddough is a reflection

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Winton: part of our world, or, yeah, sorry it's you have been a disadvantage, and it's a long time since I saw

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Winton: waiting for goddess. I just remember

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Winton: there were 2 characters. Was that the one, whether in garbage beams and

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Winton: and just waiting for they're on the stage. They're just waiting for goddess. They're not quite sure why goddess said he might come today, but not quite sure whether he'll come and and they pass time by telling feeble jokes

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Winton: and hitching their trousers up.

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Winton: and occasionally talking about suicide, but not actually doing it.

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Winton: And then, at the end of the day.

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Winton: at the end of the second act, when

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Winton: goddess doesn't come that says, Oh, we'll just go on. We have to fail. We have to fail better.

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Winton: Which is that wonderful quote?

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Winton: I had no idea how.

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Winton: how to answer your question. Would you like to answer it?

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Winton: Well, well, I suppose a reflection is, and it goes back to something that you said yesterday. The question of moral ambiguity and uncertainty

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Winton: is that

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Winton: in Greek tragedy

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Winton: there is uncertainty within a kind of

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Winton: agreed frame of a story being played out. It's just that people don't know their place in the story and play it out in a way which brings all

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Winton: death and destruction to them, but also it ensures the continuity of that

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Winton: stormy

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Winton: Ingotto is just very uncertain what stories going on, whether you're in the right place at the right time, what sort of thing you should be trying to do, and when Godo turns up, no idea who he is or what he's actually going to do.

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Winton: So it's a world in which the

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Winton: scaffolding within which it's like the difference between having a map and not knowing where you are on the map

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Winton: and not having a map at all.

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Winton: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the that that situation. That situation is around the foreign, too Greek tragedy. In that things were always moving forward in Greek tragedy.

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Winton: and the characters are fairly Leah. that whatever whatever it is they're doing. It's significant but they just

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Winton: don't know what the outcome is going to be.

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Winton: so I think that'd be the difference? I can't. I mean I have trouble seeing weight of God as a tragedy. Well, I suppose my question is, are we? Is our predicament the predicament of a Greek tragedy, or the predicament of goddess of waiting for God, where it's just very uncertain what's going on.

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Winton: who we are and what we might expect to happen.

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Winton: and I suspect it's a little bit more like that than the Greek tragedy

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Winton: picture. where

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Winton: the terms of engagement are fairly clear.

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Winton: The association that comes to mind now is that is

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Winton: late, unlamented Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying.

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Winton: don't worry about climate change, because technology.

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Winton: we'll have the answer to it. Can't say technology I'm thinking of.

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Winton: I don't think it's been invented yet, but it is going to fix the problem. We don't really have to

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Winton: stop doing business as usual. I think that's

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Winton: that would be that. That would be The association I'd make.

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Winton: And of course it's not the association anyone in this room. I mean, we wouldn't be thinking, God, I like about

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Winton: about climate change or

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Winton: other forms of environmental disfallation.

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Winton: Anyone anyone want to.

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Winton: you, Cigarette.

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Winton: coming back to. I hope I wrote it down correctly, Simon Critchley. Sort of

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Winton: thesis that

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Winton: you you paraphrase this, even if conflicts are seemingly intractable. we still have to deal with them.

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Winton:  The question I'd ask you is.

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Winton: how do you see yourself

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Winton: dealing with him

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Winton: by extension us?

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Winton: I'm sort of aware of my age, and in, I guess my days of doing

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Winton: daring pieces of protest and that sort of thing are over. But I certainly do

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Winton: go on the Demos, and

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Winton: make a few donations to

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Winton: causes, I think, are directly associated with those twin crises that I've mentioned.

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Winton:  at.

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Winton: We'll be talking a bit more bad

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Winton: strategy and tactics later on in the week.

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Winton: But I think it's

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Winton: as has never been accounted before, I think, in any form of mobilisation like someone had just come from the

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Winton: confrontation in Newcastle last weekend. I mean, I think that sort of thing is really important.

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Winton: Get some television.

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Winton: and it's highly visible.

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Winton: and same goes for things like

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Winton: extinction, rebellion, but at the but I think

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Winton: it has to be complemented bye

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Winton: much more targeted kind of political action

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Winton: to try, not

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Winton: not beside the other kinds of

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Winton: action, but as a way of focusing

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Winton: on certain ways in which to dismantle the system

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Winton: that is producing these these twin evils.

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Winton: Thanks.

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Winton: I have a question about the ordering or the reordering of the eightfold path.

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Winton: It might be more suitable to Stephen, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it when I think about the metaphor of the egg shuffling hen

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Winton:  which is lovely. I always thought about it more as a in a single practitioner or a single singer's lifetime, as in you know, we

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Winton: maybe an appropriate work is more prominent at one part.

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Winton: but in the beginning of your talk. you know, reflecting on the

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Winton: the clear order, or reordering in the way the perspective proceeds. Imagination.

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Winton:  are we not sort of

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Winton: pinning it down

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Winton: again. And

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Winton: is that egg shuffling

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Winton: sort of being interpreted on a broader timeline as within the different traditions, rather than within a single person's capacity to focus on any one area.

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Winton: The

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Winton: the the global Aol path in the conventional sense, was always a feedback feedback move.

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Winton: Anyway. I mean. It wasn't as if

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Winton: one d yeah.

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Winton: one fully practiced the first path factor and then moved on to the next part.

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Winton: It was always a question that they should all be present.

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Winton:  In one's practice

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Winton: they can be all be practiced at once.

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Winton: just like the eggs

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Winton: that they they're all there at the same time and to and it's a feedback loop that will continue.

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Winton:  Throughout

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Winton: our lives for us on the swing as long as we are practicing.

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Winton: So, in a sense it doesn't matter where you start.

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Winton: The only reason that they've been

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Winton: put in the particular order they have by the tradition is

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Winton:  and this is Stephen's conjecture, and I agree with it is because

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Winton: it has been put in that order

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Winton: by monastics to make sense of their

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Winton: of. There were have practiced.

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Winton: And so that's this is just kind of a logical sequence. No.

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Winton: an actual practical sequencing. So

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Winton: if we, if we want to

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Winton: re-re-sequence them.

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Winton: So it makes more sense to us.

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Winton: then it does. It seems to be much more sensible to start with the contemplative aspects

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Winton: before moving on to the action

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Winton: aspects in practice. We're going to be all over them all at once. you know. So

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Winton: as far as the hen and the eggs are concerned.

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Winton:  I kind of

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Winton: translated it in

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Winton: Australian terms to the brush turkey approach.

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Winton: you know, with the brush

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Winton: turkey mail

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Winton: makes this huge mound of

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Winton: a bluch. and in a female counsel lies the eggs in the mulch

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which.

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Winton: as it as it writes it, warms everything up.

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Winton: so the female leaves the same. and the male leaves are seen. and the eggs

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Winton: hatch themselves.

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Winton: I think you can.

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Winton: You could probably rewrite the

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Winton: rewrite the story in that way. But but the point is that all the eggs are being warmed

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Winton: at the same time by this huge

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Winton: but much, most much to the despair of, you know the North Shore gardener

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Winton: whose whose garden has been ripped apart in the process. But

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that would seem to me to be

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Winton: one another way of thinking about. You know how

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Winton: we are working on all the path factors

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Winton: all at the same time.

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Winton: Hello, Vivian!

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Vivien Langford: Oh, Hi, Winton! I like that image of that theatre in Vincent, where the demagogues are on a platform above the crowd and haranguing us.

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Vivien Langford: and the crowd is getting stirred up by the agitators very hard to see what's happening when you're in the crowd.

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Vivien Langford: I feel that our tragic situation, all the different frontiers of it. is a bit like that, and it gets more and more alarming as people are elected who are even more

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Vivien Langford: ridiculous than the last. One kind of thing in the political world.

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Vivien Langford: But I remember a talk you gave to us, and also on radio about the people of Neu Chambon.

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Vivien Langford: and in your holocaust studies you said to me, at least, you said it was a tiny percentage of people

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Vivien Langford: who took that sort of action to save

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Vivien Langford: persecuted Jewish people and help him get into safety very tiny

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Vivien Langford: minority, even though a lot of Hollywood films about that period show a lot of heroic people hot, hiding people in their

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Vivien Langford: attic and helping them. But you said it really was a tiny manner. It was really so brilliant to me to think about that, that maybe in any situation it is only a tiny number, because

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Vivien Langford: I think with well, the one I focus on is climate change. It's a swelling crowd, and people talk about building the movement, but I always think surely it has to double and double again, and double again until the politicians and the

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Vivien Langford: business class take notice and and get frightened a bit.

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Vivien Langford: and I just remember about the Leu Chambon. You said the people there had been persecuted themselves for centuries as Huguenots, and they knew what to do like they were ready. They knew what to do.

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Vivien Langford: And that's what comes out of

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Vivien Langford: tragedy. Do you think.

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Vivien Langford: in that sense of knowing what to do, because when we watch tragedy we get a very refreshing feeling of

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Vivien Langford: life like Isabel, who Pierre says it's aliveness, it's not.

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Vivien Langford: can't do anything about life. You can't, you know. It's

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Vivien Langford: trying to take on

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Vivien Langford: the tragic in the tragic situation. Try to take something on. You might fail, but

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Vivien Langford: you do your best to know what to do.

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Winton: Yeah, it's it's again it's hard to make a comparison between

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Winton: you know what was going on

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Winton: in the holocaust and

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Winton: forms of resistance. To that

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the chambal experience was

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Winton: a very exceptional experience.

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Winton: but it still involved, you know, an enemy you could see and outwit and defeat.

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Winton: Whereas

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Winton: there's something quite unique about the situation. With

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Winton: climate change it's one that's been

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Winton:  beautifully analysed by Amata.

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Winton:  gosh Geo is such. It was avitab

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Winton: called the Great derangement. and the great derangement is referring, not just to

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Winton: the derangement of you know. The biosphere. but in our minds that we can't.

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Winton: It is extremely hard for us to get our heads around this kind of omnipresence

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Winton: threat. You know we we can get our minds around

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Winton: a genocide, a war.

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Winton: a flood, an earthquake whatever, but

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Winton: because they hear they

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Winton: they kind of

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Winton: isolatable historical events.

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Winton: This is a process that's going on all around us. and partly it's perceivable. Now. I mean 1 one of the things that's happened since

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Winton: he wrote that book in 2016, or whatever it was.

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Winton: Was that most people in the West couldn't see it.

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Winton: you know there was Hurricane Katrina, and but

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Winton: that again it's a one-off, but now we are now we are seeing it. To some extent the great derangement is

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Winton: is visible, but it is still so big.

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Winton: so often in presence.

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Winton: So difficult to think of a specific answer to it.

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Winton: that it it is

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Winton: it. It immobilizes resistance in that way?

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Winton: Unfortunately not totally. But it. It is the reason why it is quite different to any other

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Winton: catastrophe that humanity has ever faced.

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Winton: Hi, my name is Libby. I was hoping we could come back to this concept of non-binary

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Winton: thinking.

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Winton: and it's sort of where I end up is a question on climate change. So it's all bit circular. But I've really been mulling it over since Stephen

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Winton: raised or talked about this morning, and that the quote about

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Winton:  a person who can

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Winton: can avoid

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Winton: saying it is, or it is not. But my first question is.

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Winton: I, in my understanding of of

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Winton: Buddhist doctrine till now has been that impermanence and suffering, and not self

434
00:40:06.030 --> 00:40:09.719
Winton: kind of like doctrine, you know law.

435
00:40:10.010 --> 00:40:17.110
Winton: And yet this concept of non-binary thinking is asking us to to

436
00:40:18.090 --> 00:40:24.269
Winton: to avoid saying, you know, or to avoid the extremes of not self

437
00:40:24.540 --> 00:40:27.480
Winton: and extremes of of impermanence.

438
00:40:27.680 --> 00:40:39.930
Winton: So I'm wondering. I mean, it helps me with the not self concept, because I've always found that hard that that does this mean the middle way approach is to think of

439
00:40:39.950 --> 00:40:44.839
Winton: self as somewhere between being, you know, self

440
00:40:44.860 --> 00:40:47.809
Winton: self being a lot and not self.

441
00:40:48.190 --> 00:40:57.200
Winton: I mean is that is that the message? And or is it just saying, Don't worry too much about self, just, you know, just be

442
00:40:57.310 --> 00:41:00.990
Winton:  so that that's that's my

443
00:41:01.140 --> 00:41:02.140
Winton: sort of

444
00:41:02.280 --> 00:41:07.959
Winton: first question, how to kind of think about these key concepts in Buddhism

445
00:41:08.010 --> 00:41:15.279
Winton: within that non binary framework. And then the second question that came to me is like when it comes to

446
00:41:15.290 --> 00:41:16.400
Winton: action.

447
00:41:17.610 --> 00:41:19.430
Winton: If if you're

448
00:41:19.560 --> 00:41:34.020
Winton: if you're sort of sitting to some extent, you could be sitting on the fence. If you're being non-binary, you're not saying you're saying you're not choosing to say it is, or it is not so. If you talk about climate change. Does that mean? Is it better to say.

449
00:41:34.470 --> 00:41:39.119
Winton: I mean, is climate change a problem, or is it not?

450
00:41:39.430 --> 00:41:45.639
Winton: So? It's just kind of yeah. An interesting kind of intellectual exercise, if nothing else.

451
00:41:47.510 --> 00:41:49.280
Winton: The only yeah.

452
00:41:50.370 --> 00:41:54.489
Winton: Mr. I mean, on the first question of not sell.

453
00:41:55.600 --> 00:41:59.859
Winton: Alright, I it's much easier to

454
00:42:00.720 --> 00:42:05.900
Winton: live, not self or experience, not self, directly than it is to

455
00:42:06.200 --> 00:42:11.770
Winton: you. Argue about it in ontological terms. It's one of the values of

456
00:42:12.580 --> 00:42:16.470
Winton: doing a ten-day. The passenger in

457
00:42:16.650 --> 00:42:20.279
Winton: intensive retreat is that you really do

458
00:42:20.670 --> 00:42:24.020
Winton: experience, not self, that if they

459
00:42:24.160 --> 00:42:29.420
Winton: that you know you've if you've done, if you've been a diligent

460
00:42:30.320 --> 00:42:33.249
Winton: participant in the inner retreat.

461
00:42:33.530 --> 00:42:35.620
Winton: And you've noted

462
00:42:36.360 --> 00:42:42.840
Winton: around a hundred 1,000 experiences over the 10 days. and you've had

463
00:42:44.700 --> 00:42:46.659
Winton: something's missing from it.

464
00:42:47.300 --> 00:42:50.229
Winton:  it doesn't refer to anybody.

465
00:42:50.630 --> 00:42:52.490
Winton: and none of this refers to anybody

466
00:42:53.110 --> 00:42:56.229
Winton: in the sense we would understand somebody.

467
00:42:56.850 --> 00:43:03.189
Winton: so that you, you experiences. Well, this is my experience that you experienced

468
00:43:03.670 --> 00:43:09.470
Winton: a kind, a kind of an absence. that this, that this character you thought was there.

469
00:43:10.020 --> 00:43:12.869
Winton: He is a director of the choreographed referred.

470
00:43:12.930 --> 00:43:17.220
Winton: Think. Of course it was not there, this everything was happening without

471
00:43:17.970 --> 00:43:20.499
Winton: without being choreographed by somebody.

472
00:43:21.280 --> 00:43:22.030
And

473
00:43:22.320 --> 00:43:25.770
Winton: so that that's essentially it, that that

474
00:43:25.820 --> 00:43:30.110
Winton: as I would understand it. That not self is, is.

475
00:43:31.190 --> 00:43:36.530
Winton: it is the unreality of the conventional concept we have of self.

476
00:43:37.090 --> 00:43:40.580
Winton: It is not a denial of

477
00:43:41.060 --> 00:43:47.430
Winton:  another sense of self which Stephen has used the expression soul

478
00:43:47.870 --> 00:43:48.670
Winton: in

479
00:43:49.210 --> 00:43:49.960
yeah.

480
00:43:50.500 --> 00:43:52.299
Winton: document, you will read.

481
00:43:52.700 --> 00:44:05.089
Winton: And so there is a continuity that needs to be accounted for and needs to be followed. I mean, I think of it in terms of moral agency. You know the Selfies.

482
00:44:05.370 --> 00:44:07.080
Winton: What comes on a trait.

483
00:44:07.220 --> 00:44:10.829
Winton: The self is what goes to sang every week.

484
00:44:11.390 --> 00:44:13.749
and this anger is, you know, the one it doesn't

485
00:44:14.500 --> 00:44:22.629
Winton: dogs, and it's it's that, and and the self that is in some sort of

486
00:44:23.700 --> 00:44:26.740
Winton: on some sort of puff.

487
00:44:27.950 --> 00:44:30.669
Winton: but it's not a self with certain, you know, certain

488
00:44:31.260 --> 00:44:36.080
Winton: fixed characteristics, or anything like that. What we would usually think of as

489
00:44:37.670 --> 00:44:41.030
Winton: yeah in your classic papassine

490
00:44:41.220 --> 00:44:45.740
Winton: instructions. you know. Anger

491
00:44:46.090 --> 00:44:51.089
Winton: not. I am angry, or my anger, but just as anger, anger is a

492
00:44:51.500 --> 00:45:01.010
Winton: disidentified phenomenon that arises and passes away, you know. So it's a disidentification in that sense.

493
00:45:01.820 --> 00:45:07.990
Winton: But I think it's much more useful to think of, not self in those operational terms as a meditator.

494
00:45:09.230 --> 00:45:12.099
Winton: Try and figure it out, you know, philosophically.

495
00:45:13.340 --> 00:45:15.910
Winton: And the second point, just to remind me, was

496
00:45:16.810 --> 00:45:28.590
Winton: in the the non binary thinking context, like like climate change. Yeah, look, II mean. the Buddha was quite clear about things like that.

497
00:45:29.250 --> 00:45:30.899
You accepted

498
00:45:31.200 --> 00:45:34.920
Winton: expert opinion. You know.

499
00:45:35.030 --> 00:45:38.420
Winton: He didn't put it that way. But I mean, for instance, he

500
00:45:38.650 --> 00:45:42.360
Winton: in his mid fifties or so he had a number of medical

501
00:45:42.490 --> 00:45:51.250
Winton: problems, and he went to a doctor I mean a friend of his, and there was no sense in which he was going to argue with the doctor about easily, is not. He was just.

502
00:45:51.450 --> 00:45:54.380
Winton: you know, certain things are evident.

503
00:45:54.600 --> 00:46:01.240
Winton:  and so, and and there are people who are more or less expert in certain areas of life, and

504
00:46:02.330 --> 00:46:04.659
Winton: and you accept their opinion.

505
00:46:04.790 --> 00:46:13.499
Winton: If the wise says, if the wise say something exists, I say it exists. If the why say it does not exist. I say it does not exist, so

506
00:46:13.730 --> 00:46:17.099
Winton: I'm sure you know, if he was here now, he'd say.

507
00:46:17.640 --> 00:46:19.650
Winton: believe the climate scientists.

508
00:46:21.690 --> 00:46:25.020
Winton: I don't think there'd be any chilly shelling around it.

509
00:46:27.690 --> 00:46:39.840
Winton:  we're 5 min overdue for  tea and coffee, you know. We'll so let's come back. At 25 to 4,

510
00:46:40.780 --> 00:46:44.290
Winton: yeah, 5. Just come back 5 min. like, huh.

511
00:46:45.820 --> 00:46:48.160
Winton: unless you want to shorten the coffee and

512
00:46:48.900 --> 00:46:52.470
Winton: have more time for Q. And A. Now let's have half an hour.

513
00:46:52.990 --> 00:46:53.670
Come on.

514
00:47:20.180 --> 00:47:24.129
Winton: Okay. So we've got 50 min

515
00:47:26.630 --> 00:47:29.060
Winton: to yeah.

516
00:47:36.620 --> 00:47:38.050
Winton: possibly drive up

517
00:47:42.350 --> 00:47:43.030
a lot of

518
00:47:55.340 --> 00:47:56.100
you.

519
00:47:57.420 --> 00:48:00.149
Winton: I'm I'm interested in

520
00:48:00.750 --> 00:48:03.330
Winton: some observation on numb

521
00:48:05.140 --> 00:48:07.000
Winton: cultural context

522
00:48:07.710 --> 00:48:12.839
Winton: for the discussion and perspective that's been framed to date.

523
00:48:14.270 --> 00:48:21.649
Winton: We've we've had some, I think. Stephen was mentioning, for example.

524
00:48:21.710 --> 00:48:26.320
Winton: the more recent acceptance of discussion around

525
00:48:26.510 --> 00:48:29.090
Winton: a secular approach in Japan.

526
00:48:31.050 --> 00:48:36.470
Winton: You've spent winter, a reasonable amount of time referencing Greek tragedies.

527
00:48:37.520 --> 00:48:44.180
Winton: it seems, and Stephen is currently working on a book relating

528
00:48:44.390 --> 00:48:48.900
Winton: the teachings of the Buddha and the teacher and those of Socrates.

529
00:48:50.660 --> 00:48:54.230
Winton: We live in a multicultural environment.

530
00:48:54.710 --> 00:48:58.040
Winton: and I I'm wondering

531
00:48:58.930 --> 00:49:02.139
Winton: whether some of the framing to date

532
00:49:02.170 --> 00:49:11.679
Winton: has been really quite circumscribed in terms of cultural relevance to a broader Western population.

533
00:49:13.500 --> 00:49:21.639
Winton:  so I'm wondering whether you see it in the same way, or whether you see

534
00:49:22.010 --> 00:49:24.200
Winton: the discussion around

535
00:49:24.830 --> 00:49:27.610
Winton: Greek tragedies as having

536
00:49:27.770 --> 00:49:30.630
Winton: much greater relevance than, say.

537
00:49:31.040 --> 00:49:41.449
Winton: bringing in the Mailana from Indonesia or or other cultural reference points for other subgroups within the broader population.

538
00:49:44.460 --> 00:49:45.500
Winton: It it

539
00:49:45.630 --> 00:49:49.109
Winton: I guess, from my own perspective.

540
00:49:49.640 --> 00:49:52.819
Winton: the issue is really

541
00:49:54.670 --> 00:49:57.410
Winton: What does it mean in the West

542
00:49:58.330 --> 00:50:00.430
Winton: that you know the

543
00:50:00.550 --> 00:50:03.669
Winton: dummy is has landed and

544
00:50:03.910 --> 00:50:07.530
Winton: is putting down roots in Western culture.

545
00:50:07.770 --> 00:50:12.499
Winton: It's not a process. It's not about multiculturalism.

546
00:50:13.590 --> 00:50:20.120
Winton: It's we're we're just repeating what the Chinese did, what

547
00:50:21.330 --> 00:50:22.699
Winton: you know the

548
00:50:22.780 --> 00:50:25.550
Winton: Japanese Koreans.

549
00:50:25.890 --> 00:50:27.460
Winton: Tibetans.

550
00:50:27.810 --> 00:50:33.439
Winton: the Sri Lankans. They've all done it. They've all received. They've all

551
00:50:34.690 --> 00:50:36.090
Received

552
00:50:36.160 --> 00:50:38.049
Winton: had done from outside.

553
00:50:39.010 --> 00:50:40.470
and they've all

554
00:50:41.280 --> 00:50:46.739
Winton: it, in a sense put helped it to find roots in their own culture.

555
00:50:47.400 --> 00:50:52.360
Winton: So you know, in Thai Buddhism, for instance, there's lots of

556
00:50:52.810 --> 00:50:57.680
Winton: ghosts and goolies and ghosties and things that go wamp in the night

557
00:50:57.760 --> 00:51:01.559
Winton: going on. You know the spirit houses, together with

558
00:51:02.750 --> 00:51:05.690
Winton: with high temples. And

559
00:51:06.050 --> 00:51:12.139
Winton: and that's fine. I mean, this is, this is a way in which the number becomes intelligible

560
00:51:12.580 --> 00:51:15.770
Winton: to the people of those cultures.

561
00:51:16.180 --> 00:51:17.860
Winton: And I guess I'm treating him

562
00:51:19.010 --> 00:51:21.149
Winton: Western culture matches.

563
00:51:21.660 --> 00:51:22.720
Winton: you know.

564
00:51:23.230 --> 00:51:31.760
Winton: the other cultures have treated themselves as being fairly unitary. and and it's been a matter of of re-expressing the dharma

565
00:51:31.790 --> 00:51:36.619
Winton: in the native genius, you know, with the, with the, with

566
00:51:36.990 --> 00:51:43.760
Winton: thee. all the associations, the convergences. the affinities

567
00:51:43.820 --> 00:51:55.710
Winton: that one can find in the host culture to help the the Dharma express itself more fully, but also to

568
00:51:55.980 --> 00:52:00.899
Winton: gather the insights that can be made in comparing.

569
00:52:02.250 --> 00:52:05.760
Winton: you know. The Dhamma way of experiencing

570
00:52:05.940 --> 00:52:14.979
Winton: issues in the human condition to those that are already native to that tradition, and I regret, you know the Greek

571
00:52:15.380 --> 00:52:18.839
Winton: Greek tragedies and Greek thought in general as being

572
00:52:18.860 --> 00:52:19.960
Winton: native

573
00:52:20.040 --> 00:52:23.290
Winton: to people growing up in the West.

574
00:52:25.580 --> 00:52:26.350
Winton: Hello!

575
00:52:26.700 --> 00:52:28.610
Winton: I'm not had to follow up.

576
00:52:30.710 --> 00:52:43.949
Winton: So if, as individuals, we have other significant points of reference is the lesson that since we should be grappling with

577
00:52:44.690 --> 00:52:48.640
Winton: teachings that we're talking about here

578
00:52:49.220 --> 00:52:56.560
Winton: to come up with our own variation. the reference out

579
00:52:56.600 --> 00:52:59.270
Winton: key cultural influences, and so on.

580
00:53:00.560 --> 00:53:06.360
Winton: Yeah, as I was saying, they were kind of you know, they see the idea of the mouth of tongue.

581
00:53:06.860 --> 00:53:14.379
Winton: And and in a way, the culture is just an extension of that. It's what what resonates most deeply.

582
00:53:14.760 --> 00:53:16.479
Winton: you know, within you

583
00:53:17.200 --> 00:53:24.779
Winton: and And so yeah, we are the heirs of Greek culture or Shakespeare, whatever it is.

584
00:53:25.050 --> 00:53:29.570
Winton: and and these have very strong resonances, perhaps

585
00:53:30.370 --> 00:53:32.240
Winton: much stronger resonances.

586
00:53:32.790 --> 00:53:34.100
Winton: The

587
00:53:34.180 --> 00:53:41.040
Winton: people of Maya antiquity because we were given much more of a grounding in school.

588
00:53:41.580 --> 00:53:43.110
Winton: you know. You know.

589
00:53:43.240 --> 00:53:47.820
Winton: I matriculated in Latin, and there aren't many people

590
00:53:47.980 --> 00:53:51.189
Winton: who do that. And with that went a reading of

591
00:53:51.550 --> 00:53:57.180
Winton: you know, Roman classics, and so forth. So

592
00:53:57.530 --> 00:54:03.000
Winton: I've got, you know, in a way, a yeah. I feel uncertain about

593
00:54:03.470 --> 00:54:05.830
Winton: how to. If I mean.

594
00:54:06.460 --> 00:54:08.130
Winton: if this retreat

595
00:54:08.710 --> 00:54:12.940
with the people under the age of 25, I don't think I'd be teaching it.

596
00:54:13.400 --> 00:54:15.250
Winton: What is why?

597
00:54:16.140 --> 00:54:17.500
Winton: Because

598
00:54:17.630 --> 00:54:24.330
Winton: I really even know I've got. Children are now in their early forties. and I,

599
00:54:24.490 --> 00:54:27.710
Winton: who really have no idea how how much

600
00:54:28.360 --> 00:54:32.470
Winton: historical dip series in the schooling

601
00:54:46.890 --> 00:54:47.810
Winton: collectors.

602
00:54:48.990 --> 00:54:49.680
Winton: Yep.

603
00:54:53.520 --> 00:54:54.380
Winton: go through it.

604
00:54:58.640 --> 00:54:59.600
Winton: James.

605
00:55:00.260 --> 00:55:09.059
Oh, me! Hi, hi! Winston! II had a question related to what you were talking about just before the break about the self?

606
00:55:09.250 --> 00:55:32.830
James:  which is, how do we avoid? Or do we need to avoid. an identity as a secular Buddhist be becoming part of a constructed self, because in the past I I've met people who will, you know, say I am a a secular Buddhist of capital S. Capital B kind of thing, and that's that's their badge

607
00:55:32.930 --> 00:55:34.470
and

608
00:55:34.790 --> 00:55:49.660
James: whilst I saw some really good things about them. you know, and real things, good good behaviors and and good activities that I think probably were informed by by Dharma practice. So I also saw things that I thought were not great and

609
00:55:49.760 --> 00:55:51.540
James: not particularly skillful.

610
00:55:51.580 --> 00:55:52.690
and.

611
00:55:52.900 --> 00:56:07.589
James: for example, they were quite dismissive of people who happen to have a more traditional religious faith quite dismissive of people who might vote a different way, etc., and given the magnitude of the kind of problems that we're talking about this week.

612
00:56:07.690 --> 00:56:15.479
James: it seems to me none of this is going to get solved or addressed in any way, unless we're bringing all kinds of people together. So how do we avoid?

613
00:56:15.980 --> 00:56:24.839
James: Secular Buddhism itself becoming an unhelpful and to some extent unskillful, constructed self.

614
00:56:27.430 --> 00:56:29.209
Good question.

615
00:56:29.240 --> 00:56:31.330
Winton: I mean, even before

616
00:56:31.430 --> 00:56:36.090
Winton: I practised secular Buddhism, I practiced Buddhism.

617
00:56:36.470 --> 00:56:44.579
Winton: and I always said it in that those terms. It wasn't a badge of identity, but it was an orientation. It was. It was a practice.

618
00:56:44.870 --> 00:56:53.250
Winton: and it didn't exclude other kinds of practices or orientations. I think that the whole thing about

619
00:56:53.750 --> 00:57:01.399
Winton: wearing a badge as a badge of identity is is really fundamentally suss.

620
00:57:01.740 --> 00:57:12.370
Winton: and no matter what what you do, I mean in in certain situations, of course, religious identity is, it is important from the point of view of

621
00:57:12.490 --> 00:57:23.850
Winton: the outside world where it becomes, you know, in some countries religious identity is the foundation of national identity.

622
00:57:24.240 --> 00:57:29.780
Winton: like it's very hard to be a Pole without being a Catholic and

623
00:57:29.860 --> 00:57:35.250
Winton: and and you know, I guess some. You can't be an Afghan without being

624
00:57:35.420 --> 00:57:37.120
Winton: a Muslim these days.

625
00:57:37.160 --> 00:57:44.490
Winton: but that's just just unfortunate. We live this most Western countries

626
00:57:44.630 --> 00:57:55.269
Winton: don't operate like that. That you, whatever whatever religious adherence you have, is not part of your national identity or social meaning.

627
00:57:55.640 --> 00:58:06.019
Winton: And So we shouldn't have any kind of temptation, I think, to where our orientation or our practice

628
00:58:06.340 --> 00:58:11.670
Winton: as as a badge of identity. I just think it's it's nunskilful and unhelpful.

629
00:58:11.780 --> 00:58:17.510
Winton: Why, not only inner wave signals to other people, but it signals to ourselves that we're somehow.

630
00:58:17.690 --> 00:58:20.129
Winton: you know, in in essence

631
00:58:20.230 --> 00:58:23.670
Winton: a particular thing when we don't have any essence whatsoever.

632
00:58:26.550 --> 00:58:27.590
Winton: Does that help?

633
00:58:29.980 --> 00:58:32.620
James: Yeah, it does. It does.

634
00:58:32.820 --> 00:58:35.380
James: I think.

635
00:58:36.920 --> 00:58:55.229
James: I mean, I think, to paraphrase you very crudely. What you're saying there is. Don't do it. But is there a way to sort of. you know? Are there other checklists or things, you know? So booby traps. User phrase the other day that we can sort of keep. Keep a a a an eye out for so hang on a minute, am I,

636
00:58:56.010 --> 00:59:00.030
James: you know is, is that a

637
00:59:00.140 --> 00:59:03.580
James: a a kind of a trap that I'm falling in into?

638
00:59:04.300 --> 00:59:08.569
Winton: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I suppose there's I mean, it's always a trap of fundamentalism

639
00:59:08.740 --> 00:59:17.550
Winton: that you know, because you're one thing, you can't be another, or you're excluding, excluding other things. It's a bit like.

640
00:59:17.810 --> 00:59:20.229
Winton: you know, Mary Douglas, son.

641
00:59:20.260 --> 00:59:22.650
Winton: purity and pollution

642
00:59:22.740 --> 00:59:25.510
Winton: she was is wonderful.

643
00:59:25.760 --> 00:59:29.289
Winton: Anthropological study of

644
00:59:29.340 --> 00:59:37.529
Winton: purity and purism, and sort of saying it's always it always ends up being impoverishing.

645
00:59:37.950 --> 00:59:38.890
Winton: And

646
00:59:39.010 --> 00:59:43.819
Winton: so in part, it's it's a question of what you do

647
00:59:44.350 --> 00:59:47.450
Winton: like, you know it. I've teach from time to time

648
00:59:47.460 --> 00:59:54.610
Winton: an Indonesian, an Indonesian Buddhist group who are just regular terrorists, and the

649
00:59:54.660 --> 01:00:00.210
Winton: the talk is pat comes after Pooja. So I just go through the Pooja with them, and

650
01:00:00.300 --> 01:00:08.109
Winton: I don't understand any of the Indonesian. I but I do understand a bit of the pali, and that's fine. I mean I bow with no bowel, and

651
01:00:08.230 --> 01:00:12.720
Winton: and everything is an Auntie Dorian, and I give my

652
01:00:12.760 --> 01:00:14.059
Winton: talk, which is usually

653
01:00:14.820 --> 01:00:22.640
Winton: of secular Buddhist persuasion. I think that's interesting and everyone's happy, and that it seems to me that you know, being able to go with

654
01:00:22.680 --> 01:00:32.670
Winton: the flow is in whatever situation you're in, I think is is a way to signaling a way of signaling to yourself

655
01:00:32.830 --> 01:00:43.429
Winton: and to others that that you're not being exclusionary? Are you not tying yourself down to a particular identity? I mean I go to. because if

656
01:00:43.760 --> 01:00:53.210
Winton: my age. I spent a bit of time in funerals, and they're often Christian funerals. Singer, I sing along with the hymns. I know some actually

657
01:00:53.320 --> 01:00:55.230
Winton: and

658
01:00:55.620 --> 01:01:01.660
Winton: you know it's I think it's just important to blend in. you know, around to

659
01:01:01.760 --> 01:01:04.209
Winton: to look to blending in, unless something

660
01:01:04.590 --> 01:01:09.159
Winton: towards going on, than it is to say, look, I'm different.

661
01:01:10.050 --> 01:01:12.300
Winton: Hey? Look at me.

662
01:01:14.740 --> 01:01:15.909
James: Okay, thank you.

663
01:01:18.490 --> 01:01:21.579
Winton: Winton. I just wanted to circle back to

664
01:01:21.810 --> 01:01:27.919
Winton: when you were referencing Hilary Mantel's warfall trilogy, and the the sort of

665
01:01:28.610 --> 01:01:32.270
Winton: historical context around that of the sort of

666
01:01:33.240 --> 01:01:37.609
Winton: sixteenth-century sort of pre-enlightment kind of end of days. Concept

667
01:01:38.080 --> 01:01:45.119
Winton:  in in 2019, when I was sitting in front of my television in Sydney.

668
01:01:45.200 --> 01:01:55.020
Winton: and was looking at my where my daughters were in Maruya sort of, you know, in flames, and it was really kind of scary.

669
01:01:55.170 --> 01:02:00.409
Winton: and they'd been evacuated from a a bush block. They'd got away, which was great. But

670
01:02:00.600 --> 01:02:02.510
Winton: basically.

671
01:02:03.600 --> 01:02:08.390
Winton: all the systems. All the systems had gone down, and they were relying on a

672
01:02:08.490 --> 01:02:19.889
Winton: a friend's mother who was using a wind up radio and a battery driven torch to light the way, and it was around that time

673
01:02:20.120 --> 01:02:22.179
Winton: I came across

674
01:02:22.900 --> 01:02:32.270
Winton: the work of a social scientist from Cumbria University, called Jen Bendell, who posited. He! He wrote a paper which was

675
01:02:32.320 --> 01:02:38.749
Winton: positing term he coined, called Deep adaptation, which was his argument was that we've we've passed the tipping point

676
01:02:39.410 --> 01:02:46.730
Winton: and we need to be preparing ourselves to live in a way that is.

677
01:02:47.840 --> 01:02:49.630
Winton: to how to live a good life

678
01:02:50.390 --> 01:02:59.069
Winton: in what is essentially, I guess you know, end of days, and that you know, I mean, there is an argument that we have. We've had a good run as

679
01:02:59.160 --> 01:03:16.440
Winton: humans on this planet. And you know, maybe it's time for somebody else to have a go. Some other organism might do a better job. But I mean, I'm sort of on. I'm a bit nonbinary about about the, you know. I have sort of walked back from my original panic in 2,019, when this kind of came across my my

680
01:03:17.170 --> 01:03:24.049
Winton: my computer screen. But I did some sort of due diligence in sort of looking him up and

681
01:03:24.130 --> 01:03:42.850
Winton: reading about his work, and saw that some, you know, he's not a climate scientist, and that there were climate scientists like Michael Mann who who did not, you know, they really sort of didn't agree with him. But increasingly, I'm seeing him, or you know, his arguments being sort of promulgated

682
01:03:43.460 --> 01:03:46.890
Winton:  and you know

683
01:03:47.260 --> 01:04:03.579
Winton: there are. There are huge kind of Facebook threads relating to deep adaptation and people who are trying to find ways to live. And I'm just, I'm just really interested in in your perspective from a you know, secular Buddhist point of view. How you how you would sort of view this

684
01:04:04.190 --> 01:04:06.730
Winton: this argument, this idea.

685
01:04:11.130 --> 01:04:16.920
Winton: I've got a feeling it's the wrong starting point. You know we we're not at the stage where

686
01:04:17.280 --> 01:04:28.439
Winton: we should give up in in resignation like that. and often, and seems to me that sort of thinking is aligns with

687
01:04:29.760 --> 01:04:32.760
Winton: the kind of policy that

688
01:04:33.110 --> 01:04:46.389
Winton: the previous government here was following, which has been described as  the strategy of the armed lifeboat. So you know, when we we can hold out longest tear.

689
01:04:46.580 --> 01:04:55.819
Winton: and we'll make damn sure that nobody tries to clamor aboard. Because, yeah, we're okay? And

690
01:04:57.500 --> 01:05:06.070
Winton: one of the things that certainly is coming is a lot of climate refugees. and I'll be presumably coming

691
01:05:06.150 --> 01:05:08.009
Winton: trying to come here as well as

692
01:05:08.110 --> 01:05:09.800
Winton: to other temperate

693
01:05:09.950 --> 01:05:13.570
Winton: and reasonably affluent countries.

694
01:05:13.710 --> 01:05:24.540
Winton: and the policy of the armed lifeboat is going to become more and more attractive. And so that seems to me to one needs to on moral and political grounds.

695
01:05:24.980 --> 01:05:33.270
Winton: Oppose that kind of thinking and and really make sure the focus is on

696
01:05:33.360 --> 01:05:35.259
Winton: It is on turning

697
01:05:35.830 --> 01:05:38.559
Winton: climate change around.

698
01:05:39.580 --> 01:05:49.429
Winton: and all it requires is systemic change. You saw it. This whole thing that we all have to drastically change our lifestyle

699
01:05:49.620 --> 01:05:58.220
Winton: is something that flows on from the oil Company's invention of the carbon footprint.

700
01:05:58.360 --> 01:06:05.480
Winton: Yeah, which was a way of of shifting the blame from their activities

701
01:06:05.540 --> 01:06:11.170
Winton: to our lifestyle. So while we're, you know, worrying about our.

702
01:06:11.430 --> 01:06:18.549
Winton: it must be all our fault because we've got carbon footprints. They're still churning away

703
01:06:18.640 --> 01:06:20.379
Winton: selling oil and

704
01:06:20.500 --> 01:06:22.020
Winton: cow and gas.

705
01:06:22.130 --> 01:06:24.720
Winton: It's a classic diversion.

706
01:06:25.040 --> 01:06:33.599
Winton: And so it seems to me that this is the reason why we need to really focus on what is the cause of this.

707
01:06:33.680 --> 01:06:40.920
Winton: and I hope part of it will be a massive critique of what's going on in Dubai this week, you know, with

708
01:06:41.800 --> 01:06:49.639
Winton: all the Petro estates and 600 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, deciding how to

709
01:06:50.230 --> 01:06:52.790
Winton: how they're going to look better.

710
01:06:53.460 --> 01:06:57.519
Winton: And I think that's you know. So it's got to be politically, very much more targeted than

711
01:06:57.740 --> 01:07:01.609
Winton: talking about, you know, in survivalist terms, for instance.

712
01:07:02.330 --> 01:07:06.529
Winton: it is essentially the old survivalist survivalism.

713
01:07:06.770 --> 01:07:12.130
Winton: The people were running around with. Yeah, when we were worried about nuclear extinction.

714
01:07:13.210 --> 01:07:28.490
Winton: there are climate scientists who are, I mean, like Joel Gergis, who's a really brilliant Australian climate scientist, I mean the sort of the grief that you hear articulated by these scientists. I hear what you're saying, but I just do.

715
01:07:28.890 --> 01:07:31.219
Winton: I do wonder. You know, it's

716
01:07:33.970 --> 01:07:36.709
Winton:  what to do.

717
01:07:37.070 --> 01:07:38.030
what to do?

718
01:07:38.800 --> 01:07:51.490
Winton: Join extinction, rebellion! Probably I'm one of the extinction drummers. I bang bang my drum outside banks every Tuesday.

719
01:07:52.120 --> 01:07:56.909
Winton: Well, I think you're doing. I mean, I think you are doing you. That's you're doing the right thing.

720
01:07:58.690 --> 01:07:59.550
Winton: Thank you.

721
01:08:01.870 --> 01:08:08.720
Winton: Thank you, Linton. I haven't come across the idea of imagination in Buddhism before.

722
01:08:08.850 --> 01:08:17.869
Winton: And I think it's a really rich area of thinking for me. I also look to teachers for personal stories about how they

723
01:08:17.899 --> 01:08:19.380
Winton: use the teachings.

724
01:08:19.840 --> 01:08:35.620
Winton: and particularly in this retreat, there's a focus on ethics. And for me ethics is applied. It's never just theoretical. It's always boots on the ground. So I was wondering, could you please share with the group some ways that you've used imagination.

725
01:08:35.630 --> 01:08:37.270
Winton: especially in

726
01:08:38.029 --> 01:08:45.180
Winton: changing your own behaviors, changing or seeing other people's behaviors change, making it

727
01:08:45.210 --> 01:08:51.390
Winton: not just the theoretical thing that we could imagine many futures, but how we embody them.

728
01:08:51.569 --> 01:08:53.989
Winton: and how we help other people embody them, too.

729
01:08:55.189 --> 01:09:00.609
Winton:  okay. Well, I do write about these things.

730
01:09:00.920 --> 01:09:06.520
Winton: I teach about them. I tried to like, I suppose everyone else in the room.

731
01:09:06.779 --> 01:09:09.019
Winton: You know. Try and

732
01:09:09.149 --> 01:09:10.180
Winton: link. Nope.

733
01:09:11.180 --> 01:09:21.699
Winton: God help me reduce my carbon footprint and put the plastics in the right place. But I mean it's not

734
01:09:22.250 --> 01:09:24.899
Winton: once again, it's not a question of

735
01:09:25.149 --> 01:09:28.020
Winton: our individual lifest.

736
01:09:28.090 --> 01:09:32.409
Winton: It is a question of taking on as a system

737
01:09:32.939 --> 01:09:42.740
Winton: which has become a system of production and distribution which has become completely disassociated from human use.

738
01:09:43.370 --> 01:09:55.500
Winton: That's the point. I mean that we that we right from the beginning of capitalism, particularly industrial capitalism, has been this radical disassociation

739
01:09:55.820 --> 01:09:59.139
Winton: between R from producing

740
01:09:59.480 --> 01:10:02.070
Winton: use values, you know.

741
01:10:02.560 --> 01:10:10.830
Winton: I would like a motor car. So I go and make one. Because they were going to use it to. I'm going to make Femme 5 million

742
01:10:11.630 --> 01:10:20.880
Winton: T model fords and hope to God that someone is going to buy them, because then I can become rich. I mean, this is, it's a completely

743
01:10:20.910 --> 01:10:24.160
Winton: as a logic. And

744
01:10:24.360 --> 01:10:29.520
Winton: if you look at, for instance, Martin Hegel's wonderful book, I think

745
01:10:29.720 --> 01:10:33.699
Winton: all Buddhists should read. Martin Hegel's book lives.

746
01:10:33.840 --> 01:10:38.469
Winton: He goes into this in terms. He starts off with

747
01:10:39.150 --> 01:10:46.229
Winton: the idea that we are finite beings, and, what is especially finite about us is time.

748
01:10:46.920 --> 01:10:49.669
Winton: We all. We all have finite

749
01:10:49.810 --> 01:10:50.780
Winton: time.

750
01:10:51.200 --> 01:10:56.749
Winton: Obviously about a third of it's going to spend asleep. But then we have.

751
01:10:56.920 --> 01:11:04.369
Winton: We have a time when most of us will need to earn a living, stay alive.

752
01:11:05.920 --> 01:11:08.360
Winton: keep the house in repair, etc.

753
01:11:08.460 --> 01:11:17.430
Winton: And then we have free time, which is really, really valuable, really important. And and what is happening with this

754
01:11:17.870 --> 01:11:22.990
Winton: radical disassociation between just producing what we need

755
01:11:23.370 --> 01:11:28.399
Winton: and are producing for unlimited profits

756
01:11:28.840 --> 01:11:30.920
Winton: is that we are.

757
01:11:30.990 --> 01:11:33.620
Winton: We are losing more and more

758
01:11:33.960 --> 01:11:44.479
Winton: have that free time. And so we need, we need a system which is going to mean that we produce what we need.

759
01:11:44.930 --> 01:11:52.060
Winton: and we distribute it as it should be produced, distributed so that everybody has a secure.

760
01:11:52.290 --> 01:11:54.200
Winton: a secure, loving hood.

761
01:11:54.680 --> 01:11:59.379
Winton: And we push back the amount of time

762
01:11:59.490 --> 01:12:00.759
Winton: we have spent

763
01:12:00.860 --> 01:12:07.560
Winton: doing productive things. I mean, people have been saying this for a long time, John Maynard Keynes

764
01:12:07.670 --> 01:12:12.139
Winton: said. We have we have conquered the arts of production, we should now.

765
01:12:12.160 --> 01:12:15.400
Winton: I developed the arts of life.

766
01:12:15.850 --> 01:12:27.219
Winton: by which in first hand, he meant ballet. He was married to a ballerina, but he meant, you know, he meant things like music and literature and theatre, and all that sort of thing. It's a

767
01:12:27.440 --> 01:12:30.770
Winton: it was, you know a great insight from

768
01:12:30.990 --> 01:12:34.419
Winton: an economist. They're not known for their insights like this.

769
01:12:34.540 --> 01:12:36.590
Winton: And

770
01:12:36.650 --> 01:12:41.610
Winton: And it's true, you know, we should be thinking in terms of the arts of life.

771
01:12:42.440 --> 01:12:46.470
But you know, here we are stuck in a system.

772
01:12:46.560 --> 01:12:49.029
Winton: that is, that is, producing

773
01:12:49.180 --> 01:12:53.010
Winton: an enormous amount of monetary wills.

774
01:12:53.020 --> 01:13:03.749
Winton: which is being more and more mal distributed. So you know, even in a country like this, you've got 10 or 15% of the population, those living in poverty.

775
01:13:04.140 --> 01:13:13.450
Winton: And meanwhile, you know, we've got we developed. We've got billionaires appearing with their fancy yachts. And

776
01:13:13.530 --> 01:13:18.500
Winton: always it's it's the system that is the problem.

777
01:13:18.870 --> 01:13:25.350
Winton: And, as Hegelund says, you know, if you imagine oh, the world with power.

778
01:13:26.350 --> 01:13:34.039
Winton: or a society without level of human productivity, through the technology we've got.

779
01:13:34.240 --> 01:13:37.990
Winton: We could be, we could actually go back.

780
01:13:38.360 --> 01:13:45.939
Winton: And oh, always think about this living in Sydney. You know someone has figured out that the people of the

781
01:13:46.130 --> 01:13:54.730
Winton: Aurora Amin, an anthropologist, and the people of the Aurora nation. The inhabitants of the Sydney Basin before

782
01:13:54.900 --> 01:13:56.060
Winton: invasion.

783
01:13:56.490 --> 01:13:59.809
Winton: The active members of the clan would

784
01:13:59.930 --> 01:14:11.110
Winton: probably have to work 3 HA day to produce all the food and all the closing, such as was that they needed.

785
01:14:11.640 --> 01:14:17.720
Winton: What do they do with the rest of their time. They spent it with their kids. Imagine that

786
01:14:18.090 --> 01:14:23.970
Winton: spending time with kids and teaching them playing with them. They

787
01:14:24.070 --> 01:14:38.740
Winton: they sang a sang a lot of songs. They made a lot of music. They did a lot of dancing. They told a lot of stories. You know this, we could. We could live like that with. Still, with our it, gadgetry.

788
01:14:38.950 --> 01:14:40.360
Winton: if we only

789
01:14:40.720 --> 01:14:43.450
Winton: controlled in, controlled the

790
01:14:43.600 --> 01:14:47.099
Winton: the production and distribution in a completely other way.

791
01:14:50.490 --> 01:14:58.939
Winton: Originally, in this Buddha's context? Can we point to the 3 poisons greed, hatred, and ignorance as being the bad incentives that lead us to the system we have. Now

792
01:14:59.250 --> 01:15:01.950
Winton: look II don't.

793
01:15:03.140 --> 01:15:09.969
Winton: I have a real problem with meta-historic hall causation like that just as I am.

794
01:15:10.050 --> 01:15:16.649
Winton: you know, with metaphysical ideas. I mean, you're quite right, we need to think about in ethical terms rather than

795
01:15:16.980 --> 01:15:23.980
Winton: though certain meta-historical ideas or metaphysical anti. So greed, hatred, and delusion is okay now.

796
01:15:24.160 --> 01:15:36.100
Winton: DNA, but we can. Certainly, I mean, we are malleable creatures, and we can say, I think you know, we probably develop those

797
01:15:36.890 --> 01:15:47.439
Winton: evolutionary trays as a way of surviving in a dangerous world of scarce resources. We we don't have to live in that sort of world anymore.

798
01:15:47.900 --> 01:15:52.839
Winton: And I think they can be just just allowed to fade away if we

799
01:15:53.160 --> 01:15:54.930
Winton: if we weren't

800
01:15:54.990 --> 01:15:59.879
Winton: in a system that is generating in security.

801
01:16:00.220 --> 01:16:03.040
Winton: I mean, this is the whole point about capitalism

802
01:16:03.120 --> 01:16:10.269
Winton: is that it's through a Holland people had immediate access to a livelihood, and they had a little plot of land, even if they.

803
01:16:10.660 --> 01:16:16.800
Winton: you know, rented it from a lord or something. They had immediate access

804
01:16:17.120 --> 01:16:18.700
Winton: to a livelihood.

805
01:16:19.010 --> 01:16:25.439
Winton: and the whole trick of getting capitalism going was to was to cut them off from an immediate

806
01:16:25.770 --> 01:16:26.890
Winton: access

807
01:16:27.010 --> 01:16:31.720
Winton: to a livelihood to create massive insecurity.

808
01:16:31.770 --> 01:16:37.939
Winton: so they had no choice but to sell their labor. The only thing they had left.

809
01:16:38.360 --> 01:16:41.169
Winton: To, you know.

810
01:16:41.230 --> 01:16:44.070
Winton: at any price and under any conditions.

811
01:16:44.680 --> 01:16:49.090
Winton: and to, you know, return to a state where people had

812
01:16:49.810 --> 01:16:58.629
Winton: access to livelihood in many ways. To do that, you know, guaranteed minimum income ideas, and so on.

813
01:16:58.730 --> 01:17:06.749
Winton: Then people, people would be in a position where like so only want to work 3 days a week or 2 days a week, or

814
01:17:06.830 --> 01:17:12.450
Winton: something like that. I'm not going to ask for amazing luxuries or

815
01:17:13.040 --> 01:17:23.310
Winton:  conspicuous consumption. and we'd be living in a different kind of world we wouldn't be

816
01:17:23.750 --> 01:17:30.179
Winton: we. We wouldn't feel insecure, and therefore we'd better be less greed, hatred, and delusion going on.

817
01:17:30.830 --> 01:17:46.460
Winton:  yeah, James, you're on again.

818
01:17:46.560 --> 01:18:01.779
James: Me again. No, it's just following up from that winter. So this idea of right livelihood, I mean, it would seem to me most of the people probably attending this. And you know the age groups that seem to be represented. For the most part, we've probably made

819
01:18:01.840 --> 01:18:07.169
James: more or less made our decisions about our livelihood and hopefully made good ones.

820
01:18:07.280 --> 01:18:08.549
What what about

821
01:18:08.740 --> 01:18:20.110
James: the generation of people who are children or at university at the moment? How? How do we target them and try and get that conversation going because they're the ones who are going to be

822
01:18:20.250 --> 01:18:31.330
James: steering the ship in 1520 years time. So we want to start having conversations with them about right right livelihood. Now tell me.

823
01:18:34.020 --> 01:18:38.730
Winton: Well, it's really up to those those generations, and I think they're doing it.

824
01:18:38.780 --> 01:18:44.070
Winton: that they that they are actually looking at alternatives.

825
01:18:44.250 --> 01:18:48.319
Winton: In in terms of creating, I mean, right livelihood is.

826
01:18:48.780 --> 01:19:01.179
Winton: as far as I know it's specifically Buddhist idea, and it usually ends up in cooperatives. And that's great, you know, I mean. But cooperatives at the moment are a very niche part of the

827
01:19:01.610 --> 01:19:05.310
Winton: economy as great for people who are in them in that they can.

828
01:19:05.930 --> 01:19:08.519
You know they've got control. They've got

829
01:19:08.550 --> 01:19:13.609
Winton: immediate access to the means of their livelihood collectively.

830
01:19:13.760 --> 01:19:17.940
Winton: and and that will probably be B,

831
01:19:18.020 --> 01:19:23.010
Winton: a model for a new kind of society which is not

832
01:19:23.120 --> 01:19:31.080
Winton: just producing vast amounts of money to send to offshore tax havens.

833
01:19:31.160 --> 01:19:36.589
Winton: but is actually, you know, being represented by food on the table and

834
01:19:36.700 --> 01:19:39.230
Winton: vehicles, or whatever I need.

835
01:19:39.590 --> 01:19:49.770
Winton: Again, you know Peter am Martin Hegel goes into these sorts of things at the end of his book this life. But.

836
01:19:50.370 --> 01:19:55.360
Winton: as someone was saying here yesterday, you know, it's marvellous to see what

837
01:19:55.520 --> 01:19:57.750
Winton: the younger generations aren't doing.

838
01:19:58.010 --> 01:20:03.629
Winton: and we should give them every support. I'd like to see a lot more

839
01:20:03.740 --> 01:20:06.909
Winton: grey-headed folk joining the

840
01:20:06.990 --> 01:20:08.560
Winton: schoolchildren's

841
01:20:08.730 --> 01:20:15.609
Winton: strikes on Fridays. You know that, Greta Toon, Barry began years ago.

842
01:20:16.970 --> 01:20:17.770
Winton: Hmm.

843
01:20:20.110 --> 01:20:20.990
James: thanks.

844
01:20:23.410 --> 01:20:28.479
Winton:  if if the problem is

845
01:20:28.670 --> 01:20:33.109
Winton: not so much individual is systemic, I'm sure it is.

846
01:20:34.600 --> 01:20:43.519
Winton: Then we know that the systems that have evolved to run the capitalist system

847
01:20:43.740 --> 01:21:00.220
Winton: very intricately interconnected and built so that you can't pull a PIN out. and if you do, it won't make the difference. You hope, because, as other, that the machine will reorganize itself in ways that are going to maintain its its modus operandi.

848
01:21:00.310 --> 01:21:02.570
Winton: So I suppose a question I have is

849
01:21:05.570 --> 01:21:13.360
Winton: the sort of secular Buddhism we're talking about is very much about the action that individuals take whether it's focused on them or the system.

850
01:21:13.460 --> 01:21:21.310
Winton: But how do we imagine what we need to do at a system level that is not going to get simply

851
01:21:21.350 --> 01:21:23.710
Winton: co-opted or lost.

852
01:21:23.810 --> 01:21:33.249
Winton: It seems as if the skills we need are sort of bomb disposal experts rather than anything else. People who can find the fuse and take it out.

853
01:21:33.760 --> 01:21:36.429
Winton: But that's a

854
01:21:36.450 --> 01:21:43.330
Winton: for most of us. We don't even know how to start doing that sort of thing. So I wonder if you got any comment on

855
01:21:43.680 --> 01:21:48.269
Winton: the implications for us as individuals who are trying to find the right way through.

856
01:21:48.550 --> 01:22:04.039
Winton: if the problem doesn't lie directly with us and what we're doing, and if the place where it does lie is a very complicated system, to which we have neither the plans nor the right size, screwdriver to take it apart.

857
01:22:05.480 --> 01:22:11.840
Winton: Maybe we have to acquire the screwdrivers, and etc. And

858
01:22:12.600 --> 01:22:22.239
Winton: I mean, if you go back to basics, these problems are caused by institutions

859
01:22:22.550 --> 01:22:33.440
Winton: at the heart of any institution is a form of calculation and the form of calculation. Now, in neoliberal capitalism.

860
01:22:33.610 --> 01:22:34.660
Winton: ease.

861
01:22:34.790 --> 01:22:36.560
Winton: that

862
01:22:36.980 --> 01:22:47.069
Winton: the thing that matters is increasing is interesting sheer value. and the share value has increased

863
01:22:47.180 --> 01:22:49.240
Winton: by increasing profit

864
01:22:49.800 --> 01:22:56.340
Winton: and on a national level. What is important is to growth in

865
01:22:57.580 --> 01:23:05.840
Winton: in national income, which is a function of the growth in share value. Right? So

866
01:23:05.990 --> 01:23:14.559
Winton: so that's the form of calculation that is going on in the minds of treasury, and in the minds of

867
01:23:14.900 --> 01:23:18.870
Winton: boards of directors, everyone's doing lots of

868
01:23:19.590 --> 01:23:29.190
Winton: virtue, signalling and talking about in terms of the really old going back to the 19 thirties, being a soulful corporation, being socially.

869
01:23:29.390 --> 01:23:35.009
Winton: socially accountable, and so on, and assisting social auditing that goes on.

870
01:23:35.360 --> 01:23:44.099
Winton: And it's all just nonsense, because what is really what really counts is growth in share, value and growth in

871
01:23:44.570 --> 01:23:56.050
Winton: national income. And so what is important, I think, in terms of organisations. Sociologists call this institutional bypassing.

872
01:23:56.650 --> 01:24:03.459
Winton: So I mean, one way of doing that, for instance, is looking at pension funds.

873
01:24:03.840 --> 01:24:12.709
Winton: And there's been in in recent years this politicization of pension funds where pension funds have been saying.

874
01:24:12.910 --> 01:24:16.130
Winton: well, we're going. We're going to disinvest in

875
01:24:16.270 --> 01:24:18.440
Winton: everything to do with fossil fuels.

876
01:24:19.160 --> 01:24:28.960
Winton:  And that's terrific. I mean, you know, it's hurting because the government is trying to stop them doing that. They're trying to stop pension

877
01:24:29.400 --> 01:24:33.459
Winton: people who, in charge of placing

878
01:24:33.660 --> 01:24:37.150
Winton: placing investments, who are saying we're not going to invest in.

879
01:24:37.380 --> 01:24:42.770
Winton: It ain't anything to do with fossil fuels any more. That's against the rules.

880
01:24:42.960 --> 01:24:45.059
Winton: and even though

881
01:24:45.340 --> 01:24:55.640
Winton: you can, probably you can. Probably those people in charge of the pension funds could probably make just as good, or nearly as good a profit somewhere else.

882
01:24:55.970 --> 01:25:05.420
Winton: You can tell. You've hit a nerve when the government is saying, Don't do that, don't even think it.

883
01:25:05.620 --> 01:25:09.380
Winton: That would be just one example of a way in

884
01:25:09.470 --> 01:25:20.240
Winton: to say, well, you know, we're not going to. Actually, we've got another. We've got a different form of calculation here. and if all the pension funds were to become politicized

885
01:25:20.430 --> 01:25:24.860
Winton: like that. A pent the fossil fuel industry would be

886
01:25:25.320 --> 01:25:28.290
Winton: would be buggered factory. in fact.

887
01:25:28.500 --> 01:25:36.680
Winton: because they constantly need pension. Funds are now institutional investors are a huge part

888
01:25:36.910 --> 01:25:39.150
Winton: of the general.

889
01:25:39.390 --> 01:25:53.199
Winton: the general circulation of capital. So that would be that would just one example, as well as, for instance, the growth in the in, in the cooperative sector. Are we talking about

890
01:25:53.340 --> 01:25:57.100
Winton: few minutes ago? That's another thing. I mean that

891
01:25:57.220 --> 01:26:02.929
Winton: culpritives don't have the same forms of calculation. They're they're interested in.

892
01:26:03.080 --> 01:26:09.530
Winton: Usually. If you take Mondragon in Spain, for instance, is large

893
01:26:09.800 --> 01:26:21.070
Winton: cooperative sect and the Basque speaking area there. We've got many industries, and they're owned by the people working in them.

894
01:26:21.260 --> 01:26:23.369
Winton: And what they're concerned about is

895
01:26:23.470 --> 01:26:30.200
Winton: is keeping their jobs and obviously concerned about the environment that they're living in.

896
01:26:30.530 --> 01:26:34.569
Winton: So they're going to be making whole other kinds of decisions.

897
01:26:34.650 --> 01:26:35.990
Winton: Then

898
01:26:36.310 --> 01:26:40.170
Winton: people who are you? You just want to make a quick buck

899
01:26:40.260 --> 01:26:41.770
Winton: in the Stock exchange.

900
01:26:51.490 --> 01:27:00.199
Winton: Yeah, and in terms of our own practice. and how that extends out into the world. So that

901
01:27:00.340 --> 01:27:09.980
Winton: I'm not quite sure you know whether. as a community. What kind of steps we take to get involved in

902
01:27:10.170 --> 01:27:24.329
Winton: the bigger picture, or in the organizations in er or whatever is out there at this point in time. Certainly I think that from where the practice helps me is because I can

903
01:27:24.610 --> 01:27:28.320
Winton: focus on my agency

904
01:27:28.470 --> 01:27:32.160
Winton: and how I feel

905
01:27:32.220 --> 01:27:33.450
Winton: Congress

906
01:27:33.460 --> 01:27:40.630
Winton: in my life. If these are the things that I really believe in and concerned about my children and my grandchildren.

907
01:27:41.270 --> 01:27:47.290
Winton: can I take those small steps, even though they seem inconsequential.

908
01:27:47.560 --> 01:28:03.899
Winton:  and but do them regularly, and hope that that sets an example, because II do believe that the small things work as well as the large things. So, for example, when I do my walk on a Sunday afternoon

909
01:28:03.920 --> 01:28:06.610
Winton: in the evening on Bondi Beach.

910
01:28:07.220 --> 01:28:14.029
Winton: remember always to bring that bag with me and pick up any plastic bottles there, so maybe save one dolphin. I don't know

911
01:28:14.110 --> 01:28:15.680
Winton: but the

912
01:28:15.840 --> 01:28:21.120
Winton: and another example is, my my partner started a

913
01:28:21.310 --> 01:28:27.530
Winton: a not-for-profit called tree rights, and part of it is re wild bondi.

914
01:28:27.580 --> 01:28:33.180
Winton: and she started converting verge gardens into native gardens.

915
01:28:33.190 --> 01:28:46.210
Winton: and so we did it with our with our property, and then people down the road copied us, and she helped them do it. So they organized native plants, and after a year and a half. The lorikeets are back in bondi.

916
01:28:46.230 --> 01:28:50.950
Winton: so you know, don't underestimate the small things that you can do.

917
01:28:50.960 --> 01:28:52.070
Winton: and I think that

918
01:28:52.820 --> 01:28:57.020
Winton: the dovetails very well end with the individual Buddhist practice.

919
01:28:57.220 --> 01:28:58.860
Winton: But I

920
01:28:58.950 --> 01:29:02.120
Winton: completely agree that. And it's not just

921
01:29:03.490 --> 01:29:09.780
Winton: the small impacts on the environment. It's also that you're

922
01:29:10.790 --> 01:29:17.850
Winton: The you're taking actions that other people notice. You know, you're setting an example

923
01:29:18.410 --> 01:29:22.890
Winton: and an example of care for the environment

924
01:29:23.320 --> 01:29:25.470
and of

925
01:29:25.500 --> 01:29:31.340
Winton: taking direct action. But it would be great also, if you've got a superannuation fund.

926
01:29:31.420 --> 01:29:34.170
Winton: If you went to the annual general meetings

927
01:29:34.410 --> 01:29:40.579
Winton: and said, Hey, I'll notice you know you've got shares in bhp, what's what's going on here?

928
01:29:40.970 --> 01:29:44.420
Winton: You know, start agitating

929
01:29:44.620 --> 01:29:56.709
Winton: around those sorts of things that we're in in. A number of. I have the guts guts to pull my money out and put it in a super fund that only invests in green investments.

930
01:29:56.740 --> 01:30:00.750
Winton: Yes. 63

931
01:30:01.050 --> 01:30:02.649
didn't want to step.

932
01:30:04.770 --> 01:30:05.500
Winton: Yeah.

933
01:30:10.290 --> 01:30:22.709
Winton: I just wanted to change the focus to another crisis that humanity is facing, which is the spiritual crisis which I guess

934
01:30:22.840 --> 01:30:31.959
Winton: and and with the secularization, with the loss of faith in God. Nature's God is dead.

935
01:30:32.120 --> 01:30:36.090
Winton: Then you've got this loss of meaning.

936
01:30:36.160 --> 01:30:45.239
Winton: And so you know, as the existentialists say, we have to create our own meaning. We have to create our own purpose. And I was just wondering.

937
01:30:45.830 --> 01:30:57.210
Winton: you know, facing an existential threat is actually a great way to provide a meaning and purpose. But what you were saying about imagination and

938
01:30:58.340 --> 01:31:02.170
Winton: also coming into retirement age, you

939
01:31:02.340 --> 01:31:11.190
Winton: stop your job you've got. How do you create. How can we use this imagination? How can we use these teachings to

940
01:31:11.790 --> 01:31:15.060
Winton: actually provide meaning and purpose?

941
01:31:15.440 --> 01:31:20.429
Winton: Both in your working life after your working life

942
01:31:20.700 --> 01:31:26.009
Winton: is actually this humanitarian crisis a great vehicle

943
01:31:26.250 --> 01:31:32.440
Winton: for us to when we're talking about ethical living, it gives us a purpose, it gives us a meaning.

944
01:31:32.520 --> 01:31:38.949
Winton: Are there other ways? We can use the imagination to derive a meaning that we have lost

945
01:31:39.310 --> 01:31:42.980
Winton: with the secularization of the modern era?

946
01:31:45.080 --> 01:31:47.829
Winton: I mean, have we really lost

947
01:31:48.160 --> 01:31:56.079
Winton: many. I mean, we. This is the interesting thing about going back to the Greeks. I mean that they didn't have.

948
01:31:57.240 --> 01:32:06.749
Winton: You know they didn't have a monotheistic view of the world. I mean, if you're into a monotheistic tradition.

949
01:32:06.980 --> 01:32:09.950
Winton: the meaning is just laid out for you.

950
01:32:11.010 --> 01:32:13.460
Winton: A. By God, do what God wants.

951
01:32:13.840 --> 01:32:25.370
Winton: and they met a completely different challenge. So they were the ones who who framed the basic original questions, how should I live?

952
01:32:25.700 --> 01:32:28.300
Winton: What sort of person should I become?

953
01:32:29.360 --> 01:32:31.030
Winton: And

954
01:32:31.730 --> 01:32:33.219
Winton: I would have thought that

955
01:32:33.410 --> 01:32:37.279
Winton: there's a lot of meaning going on when you start asking

956
01:32:37.450 --> 01:32:42.849
Winton: that question. I mean their answer to that was the development of the virtues.

957
01:32:43.120 --> 01:32:46.219
Winton: For instance, I was always the the major

958
01:32:46.280 --> 01:32:52.630
Winton: answer of to those questions. So if you develop the virtues, you become

959
01:32:52.780 --> 01:32:54.860
Winton: a different kind of

960
01:32:55.060 --> 01:32:59.139
Winton: a fuller and deeper kind of human being.

961
01:32:59.490 --> 01:33:04.249
Winton: and also, of course, this has social kind. They all saw this

962
01:33:04.600 --> 01:33:07.640
Winton: in very much in terms of the city.

963
01:33:07.800 --> 01:33:10.830
Winton: You know their city, their community.

964
01:33:10.910 --> 01:33:15.350
Winton: how that, how the civic, how one contributed to that

965
01:33:15.370 --> 01:33:20.259
Winton: civic development, you know it was all wonderfully

966
01:33:20.540 --> 01:33:22.009
Winton: summed up in

967
01:33:22.310 --> 01:33:29.400
Winton: Pericles funeral oration during the Peloponnesian war. What Athens stands for.

968
01:33:29.500 --> 01:33:35.790
Winton: It's a great breed, and I think you know there's one gets meaning from

969
01:33:35.910 --> 01:33:38.280
Winton: those sorts of sources, but that I mean

970
01:33:39.020 --> 01:33:41.739
Winton: here and now you're right, that

971
01:33:42.230 --> 01:33:44.910
Winton: a lot of their meaning in life would be

972
01:33:45.020 --> 01:33:46.670
Winton: to Ham

973
01:33:46.760 --> 01:33:50.110
Winton: simply save the planet and save civilization.

974
01:33:54.090 --> 01:34:05.400
Winton: In a sense, it's kind of like. Yes, the saving civilization saving humanity does become a great source of purpose.

975
01:34:05.540 --> 01:34:09.680
Winton: And

976
01:34:11.750 --> 01:34:31.570
Winton: yes. So the coming together in times of catastrophe in times of great challenge, can can provide that  So so maybe that's one positive way of kind of looking at the situation that we're in, that it does bring people together. It does bring a certain dynamism.

977
01:34:31.640 --> 01:34:35.860
Winton: certain goals to be met. Yeah.

978
01:34:41.030 --> 01:34:46.920
Winton: we're getting close to time. Yeah, but maybe that'll be the last 2 questions. Hmm.

979
01:34:47.240 --> 01:34:57.109
Winton: following on from that. It's something I've been wondering about as well. Tessa, here, by the way, in relation to perspective. And

980
01:34:57.240 --> 01:35:08.780
Winton: I kind of work adjacent to this wellness, industry, and spiritual scene, where it is secular, and in that sense there isn't

981
01:35:08.900 --> 01:35:21.219
Winton: a prescribed moral code in the way that religion would have, and it's really hot right now for everyone to speak their truth. So you have all these different people speaking their truth.

982
01:35:21.250 --> 01:35:25.940
Winton: And I guess that's related to this non binary spectrum. But

983
01:35:26.550 --> 01:35:28.569
Winton: I feel like there's then

984
01:35:28.690 --> 01:35:43.960
Winton: a lack of well, what is the truth, and we try and be tolerant and say, well, your purpose is to fight for what you believe is important, but some of those people are in the whole conspirituality space, where

985
01:35:44.000 --> 01:35:50.540
Winton: you know, they might be fighting for the opposite of what I think is important. So I guess perspective versus truth.

986
01:35:50.610 --> 01:36:02.159
Winton: And I was thinking Libby's question before the Australians would remember when Turnbull did the interview with someone, or rather in the Murdoch media, and and he was saying, you know.

987
01:36:02.330 --> 01:36:17.949
Winton: the the media guy was like, we have to report both sides of the climate change argument and the response that was, it's not a two-sided thing. But do you know what I'm do you get my like truth versus perspective

988
01:36:18.130 --> 01:36:20.620
Winton: and tolerance and

989
01:36:20.850 --> 01:36:25.250
Winton: non-binary thinking? Yeah.

990
01:36:28.190 --> 01:36:31.609
Winton: yeah, yes.

991
01:36:31.910 --> 01:36:34.820
Winton: look, II think I think there's a sort of

992
01:36:36.710 --> 01:36:47.200
Winton: a gremlin called relativism going on there. I mean, this whole thing about, you know, everyone should have their truth. I remember, many years ago

993
01:36:47.570 --> 01:36:54.100
Winton: a colleague of mine was. we work in a politics department at university, and a colleague

994
01:36:54.200 --> 01:36:58.799
Winton: wanted to start a course on on the holocaust.

995
01:36:59.180 --> 01:37:03.280
Winton: And there was this character called, you know.

996
01:37:03.620 --> 01:37:12.310
Winton: fundamentalist Christian, who who was saying, Well, I don't think I think think that would be a very biased course.

997
01:37:12.630 --> 01:37:13.990
Winton: and

998
01:37:14.360 --> 01:37:16.749
Winton: and my colleague,

999
01:37:16.980 --> 01:37:20.049
Winton: who was Jewish, said, got up and said.

1000
01:37:20.220 --> 01:37:23.350
Winton: Yes, well, we're looking forward, you know.

1001
01:37:23.440 --> 01:37:32.400
Winton: That's a former commandant of a death camp to come and give a guest lecture, so to keep the powers it was that sort of

1002
01:37:32.420 --> 01:37:35.479
look, I really do think there is.

1003
01:37:35.720 --> 01:37:39.669
Winton: That it isn't true that we all have our own little

1004
01:37:39.710 --> 01:37:44.040
Winton: truth, you know. I mean that that really is just narcissism.

1005
01:37:44.310 --> 01:37:46.960
Winton: and and it needs to be

1006
01:37:47.460 --> 01:37:50.950
Winton: gently and diplomatically called out

1007
01:37:51.150 --> 01:37:52.160
Winton: of thought.

1008
01:37:57.350 --> 01:37:58.200
Winton: and

1009
01:37:59.780 --> 01:38:00.740
Winton: thank you.

1010
01:38:01.290 --> 01:38:07.359
Winton: Do we have time for this one? Just a little bit? Okay. It was it

1011
01:38:07.440 --> 01:38:10.459
Winton: a question that has been brewing for the last.

1012
01:38:10.900 --> 01:38:18.149
Winton: Sorry it's Andy. It's a question that's been brewing in my mind for the last half-hour. Actually, no.

1013
01:38:18.410 --> 01:38:28.590
Winton: since Sunday. But it's also partly a response to you, Carol, about a spirituality and a sense of purpose and meaning in

1014
01:38:28.750 --> 01:38:35.750
Winton: one thing that I did actually mention to you on Sunday that I feel is still missing.

1015
01:38:35.980 --> 01:38:43.049
Winton: You talk about the twin crises of climate change and the social injustice

1016
01:38:43.310 --> 01:38:50.080
Winton: your more eloquent term for it. I can't remember. But I actually feel like

1017
01:38:50.280 --> 01:38:57.549
Winton: climate change and ecological or biodiversity loss, or I'm going to call it ecological catastrophe

1018
01:38:58.870 --> 01:39:03.120
Winton: that is not associated with climate change.

1019
01:39:03.510 --> 01:39:05.669
Winton: I think there is a source

1020
01:39:06.050 --> 01:39:20.220
Winton: that began with industrialization, and whatever components of greed, hatred, and confusion that you want to impose on, that the source happened back when it did, and I think it's all bound up in

1021
01:39:20.230 --> 01:39:24.080
Winton: the twin, and my opinion there's more than that

1022
01:39:24.130 --> 01:39:25.440
Winton: crises.

1023
01:39:26.480 --> 01:39:29.689
Winton: But but what we have, I think.

1024
01:39:30.830 --> 01:39:41.470
Winton: with reducing it to climate change. It's the same as reducing the solution to climate change to reducing a carbon footprint. I think

1025
01:39:41.590 --> 01:39:44.660
Winton: that reductionist approach

1026
01:39:46.470 --> 01:39:52.890
Winton: in the gates. or neglects to really understand what I think

1027
01:39:52.960 --> 01:39:57.059
Winton: is going on. With respect to our disconnect

1028
01:39:57.790 --> 01:40:03.220
Winton: as human animals from the earth.

1029
01:40:04.960 --> 01:40:11.540
Winton: we are, as somebody pointed out as to Jermain Greer said, Earth dwellers, was that you?

1030
01:40:11.880 --> 01:40:14.329
Now? Obviously, everybody knows I'm a

1031
01:40:15.030 --> 01:40:35.450
Winton: an ecologist. I'm walking around with binoculars, so yes, sure I'm biased. But there's a reason for that. I mean, there's been work written on Biophilia, where you know I've been sitting here looking at you, talking and thinking without the 2 bunches of flowers either side of you. That would be a more deprived scene.

1032
01:40:35.500 --> 01:40:37.959
Winton: Right? We we.

1033
01:40:38.450 --> 01:40:43.600
Winton: we have lost connection from nature.

1034
01:40:44.430 --> 01:40:48.570
Winton: and if you talk to our oldest living culture

1035
01:40:48.660 --> 01:40:55.510
Winton: in the world. as you know, I know I'm preaching to the choir with you, Winton, but we

1036
01:40:55.530 --> 01:41:04.590
Winton:  and I talk to people a lot on country about this. Their spiritual heart is country.

1037
01:41:05.700 --> 01:41:07.380
Winton: you know, they

1038
01:41:07.910 --> 01:41:20.020
Winton: and they don't want to work 7 days a week, because they are. They are working 24 HA day, 7 days a week, caring for and being on and with country.

1039
01:41:20.530 --> 01:41:30.909
Winton: They don't take more than they need, and that's just in our country. And if you listen, if you read Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wallace Wall, Kimmerer and I

1040
01:41:31.620 --> 01:41:36.409
Winton: heartily commend it to everybody if you haven't read it, and a bunch of other indigenous

1041
01:41:36.710 --> 01:41:40.879
Winton: Australian books of the same ilk.

1042
01:41:41.550 --> 01:41:50.310
Winton: That is the source of being alive. That is the tragedy that we are disconnected from.

1043
01:41:51.780 --> 01:42:07.469
Winton: My feeling is that. And I teach students every year environmental science students. This is people who have enrolled in a course in environmental science that I naively assumed

1044
01:42:07.750 --> 01:42:12.279
Winton: would be connected to country, have not left the Cbd

1045
01:42:14.310 --> 01:42:26.950
Winton: right. And I'm having to teach them. I started teaching at this level that I thought, I'm just going to assume knowledge. It no, do not assume that they'd even know

1046
01:42:28.760 --> 01:42:31.029
Winton: what a plant looks like.

1047
01:42:31.170 --> 01:42:40.609
Winton: what a bird looks like. So hmm! I know I'm going a bit circular here, but I guess my imagination

1048
01:42:41.540 --> 01:42:44.849
Winton: to take today's theme up is to imagine

1049
01:42:45.480 --> 01:42:51.130
Winton: not just being in the shoes of another, but being in the

1050
01:42:53.000 --> 01:42:56.940
Winton: being that magpie that I saw die this morning.

1051
01:42:57.750 --> 01:43:00.570
Winton: torn apart via Raptor.

1052
01:43:01.510 --> 01:43:06.830
Winton: standing there this morning before breakfast. and weeping

1053
01:43:07.020 --> 01:43:10.929
Winton: because this magpie that I'd been looking at yesterday was dead.

1054
01:43:11.400 --> 01:43:22.200
Winton: understanding the tragedy of that life standing there in the landscape. That is what we're disconnected to. I believe that is our tragedy. So

1055
01:43:22.880 --> 01:43:28.840
Winton: I think that we need to be getting this sort of thinking into schools

1056
01:43:31.700 --> 01:43:33.499
Winton: should be in our curriculum.

1057
01:43:35.130 --> 01:43:37.559
Winton: We need to have everybody connected.

1058
01:43:38.220 --> 01:43:40.900
Winton: And and that's our tragedy.

1059
01:43:41.750 --> 01:43:47.450
Winton: It is very much connected with the tragedy of the disassociation of

1060
01:43:47.850 --> 01:43:52.379
Winton: the real economy from human need. You know that

1061
01:43:52.550 --> 01:43:55.999
Winton: we're not producing

1062
01:43:56.430 --> 01:43:57.610
Winton: for human

1063
01:43:57.830 --> 01:44:01.970
Winton: use and human need. But we're producing

1064
01:44:02.370 --> 01:44:05.539
Winton: to make the gross national product bigger or the

1065
01:44:05.970 --> 01:44:09.170
Winton: share. Chevrolet Bay, and

1066
01:44:10.690 --> 01:44:22.520
Winton: they're connected, but they are connected because it means that land becomes just an old factory. And I were talking about this earlier, that.

1067
01:44:22.790 --> 01:44:27.029
Winton: And in Kate Holden's book you know the winter road about the destruction of

1068
01:44:27.380 --> 01:44:30.490
rural land in Australia since invasion

1069
01:44:30.710 --> 01:44:34.920
Winton: is because the soil has been regarded as a factory.

1070
01:44:35.080 --> 01:44:38.770
Winton: It's not a living organism. There are no more earthworms. No.

1071
01:44:38.820 --> 01:44:42.779
Winton: you know, the whole thing about graphs is required for re

1072
01:44:42.890 --> 01:44:43.650
Winton: are

1073
01:44:43.870 --> 01:44:50.629
Winton: revival of the of the sort. None of that is just Shubin shabbing her arm

1074
01:44:50.740 --> 01:44:58.430
Winton: a crop and rip it out at harvest time. Burn this double and start again, and the soil just dies.

1075
01:44:58.790 --> 01:45:07.339
Winton: And so there's no, there's that that disconnection. I'm thinking also of the horrific, so-called sacrifice zones in

1076
01:45:07.630 --> 01:45:10.270
Winton: developing countries, you know.

1077
01:45:10.580 --> 01:45:18.489
Winton: ripping out natural resources in the mining industry or the creation of monocultures, palm

1078
01:45:18.920 --> 01:45:21.340
Winton: palm oil plantations that are

1079
01:45:21.360 --> 01:45:25.189
Winton: completely destroying millions of hectares in Indonesia.

1080
01:45:25.470 --> 01:45:27.820
Winton: It's all this because

1081
01:45:29.010 --> 01:45:35.909
Winton: of share banning gross national park. It's the same dissociation from human need and human

1082
01:45:36.240 --> 01:45:38.460
Winton: require and and and

1083
01:45:38.500 --> 01:45:43.860
Winton: human choir animal requirements to be connected to the land.

1084
01:45:44.290 --> 01:45:48.750
Winton: I would suggest without wanting to participate.

1085
01:45:49.530 --> 01:45:50.220
Winton: But

1086
01:45:50.350 --> 01:45:59.689
Winton: I think that to me I'm just flipping it around a little and saying the solution is not necessarily to tell people to stop being greedy.

1087
01:46:00.080 --> 01:46:05.329
Winton: It's to teach people to value what they are ignoring

1088
01:46:05.680 --> 01:46:10.050
Winton: the connection. I think it's just a it's a slight flip

1089
01:46:10.380 --> 01:46:12.519
Winton: it, in my opinion.

1090
01:46:13.070 --> 01:46:17.789
Winton: if you've if you, if people value it. if they have the imagination

1091
01:46:18.900 --> 01:46:22.260
Winton: to value that, then then they won't want

1092
01:46:23.230 --> 01:46:24.730
Winton: to rip it apart.

1093
01:46:24.840 --> 01:46:35.429
Winton: That's one talking about learning from the cultures that still don't do that. Sorry, I'll shut up. Okay. Well, look, I certainly think this is something we need to carry forward during the week. And

1094
01:46:36.400 --> 01:46:41.870
Winton:  it's now 20 to 5. Is there a question we can?

1095
01:46:49.470 --> 01:46:50.580
Winton: Okay, sure.

1096
01:46:51.490 --> 01:46:55.900
Winton:  the notion of. We've got to stop

1097
01:46:55.950 --> 01:46:58.460
Winton: doing something.

1098
01:46:59.240 --> 01:47:00.839
Winton: it often doesn't work

1099
01:47:00.870 --> 01:47:03.510
Winton: being told to stop

1100
01:47:04.690 --> 01:47:14.840
Winton: I'm sorry it often doesn't work when we're told to stop something. but if we are inspired to replace it

1101
01:47:15.150 --> 01:47:20.790
Winton: with something better. That seems to work

1102
01:47:21.690 --> 01:47:26.680
Winton: my dog trying to train my dog and telling her to stop

1103
01:47:26.830 --> 01:47:35.169
Winton: barking at the birds. If if I give her a job, she loves it, and it's just worked so quickly. It was radical

1104
01:47:35.300 --> 01:47:44.919
Winton: service dog training, just, you know, and humans as well, stopping, smoking, inspire to how it's going to feel

1105
01:47:45.030 --> 01:47:57.800
Winton: rather than being told to stop. So there's imagination. Thank you. A new, a new commercial advertising campaign.

1106
01:47:58.380 --> 01:48:04.390
Winton: Okay? Well, thank you for participation this afternoon, and we'll see you in

1107
01:48:04.580 --> 01:48:05.920
Winton: 48 min.

1108
01:48:07.700 --> 01:48:08.440
Winton: Proceed.