Embodied Mind Day 5: What Then Is True? | Maitreyabandhu

okay so we'll start um yeah welcome everyone welcome those of you zooming in and welcome to those of you watching this um recording later on and already quite a lot of people are watching these lead meditations and meditation teachings so welcome to you in the future as it were so yes we've been exploring um the work of ian mcgill chris for the last in this first kind of cycle of events in the nature of mind so we posted uh two conversations with ian mcgilchrist uh where he was in conversation with myself and john of archer later on in the year he's going to be doing an in-person conversation at the london buddhist center so we'll we'll be hosting more with ian miguel because he's his thought it is i think really important and then we had a seminar exploring in mcgill chris thought more deeply and then this week we've been trying to put at least an element of his thought into practice which is to do with moving from an over reliance on the left hemisphere of the brain and its tendency to think of the world in terms of parts in terms of categories in terms of abstractions it tends to be more literal minded um it's the detailed part of the brain i mean ian mcgilkin's um example of it is in it in birds you know when a when a bird is whether with a bird's brain they have a part of their brain literally as attached connected particularly to a particular part of the eye so it's to do with finding that little tiny breadcrumb on the pavement but they have another part of their brain that's always watching out for the whole context you know obviously to do with um you know to do with um you know possible prey being prayed to something or a possible mate yeah so we have brains like that we have a brain that can focus in on particular details it needs a particular kind of activity and a brain that is also open to the whole context of experience um and actually the two sides of the brain kind of almost work in quite different ways can almost work against each other there's a whole question of why the brain is divided for instance um so what we've been exploring in this week is this important matter of going back into this whole experience an embodied whole experience a unified contextualized experience um that's to do with meaning and value you can't forget meaning and value from the left hemisphere of the brain that's to do with detail category abstraction and parts meaning is always to do with the whole yeah it's always to do with context and what things come to mean as i said when i was young i was at art school and we all talked about the fuco and deredar which was all about at least what people said it was about was about deconstruction taking holes apart into bits and then of course we said that those bits didn't mean anything so we created a meaningless universe by taking the world in apart into bits and then showing that those bits didn't work like it was like taking apart a car and then showing you that you couldn't drive it so we've been exploring that through the body and i've been trying to really emphasize that the foundation of meditation remember i haven't been teaching any particular practices i've been trying to teach an approach to meditation which we can bring to any practice but the foundation of meditation is whole experience what you're always looking for every time you sit to meditate is firstly you're going to be working with the nevarinas with the so-called hindrances and you're going to be work you need to work with them i need to work with them creatively um patiently respectfully um i need to sort of be waiting on my experience rather than waiting for something to happen as heidegger said and as ian mcguire points out so we're going to be we try we've been trying to have a whole body experience uh where in mind awareness and the body are unified that you're not sort of looking at your body from the part of your brain which is so often what we're doing even when we're trying to become aware of the body we're becoming aware of the body if we're not careful as category and part rather than as a unified kind of spirit and cloud of sensation which is a little bit more accurate but even that's the sort of bit clumsy um and then i was saying that that experience the other way of thinking about that is this sense of well-being so we've been exploring um this very important matter of well-being meditation deepens when there's wholeness and well-being yeah so you you and those two they're not really two elements as experienced as one experience a whole experience that is uh complete and uh warm yeah in the in the in the emotional sense yeah um whole and a sense of well-being and in a sense of intrinsic interest you know that's what we've been trying to find that you're intrinsically into your experience that you're not meditating for some good reason i mean it's fine to do that of course and that's what gets you to this zoom call or that's what gets you to your cushions or your chair in the morning to meditate probably because it's you know it's a good thing to do and it's good for you and has all these benefits and so on but that's still a secondary as it were left brain reason to meditate um you know anything that's valid valuable becomes valuable in and of itself as an end in itself friendship the experience of beauty meaning meditation all those great matters virtue generosity they're good in and of themselves they're not for something else so you're trying to get supportive meditation where you're just intrinsically into meditation you value it you want to be there you're not doing it because some valuable but secondary reason like it's good for you um because then what if you've experienced things that don't feel so good for you you're gonna tend to give it up so we're that's where we're trying to get to this intrinsic interest in our experiences this respectful curiosity in about the nature of our experience which is the nature of our mind um and that this cultivating or unearthing well-being um this creative attitude to yourself yeah but right at the start i mentioned in the gilchrist for past truth which i was really struck by especially when you're you know reading a book about the the you know the great first section of is all about neuroscience and he said there are four paths to truth excuse me and they are science reason imagination and intuition and he importantly says that without all four you're going to go wrong yeah without all four you're going to go wrong if you don't have science reason intuition animation and imagination in your exploration of truth you're going to go wrong now we haven't been doing much with science apart from this zoom core um we've been exploring really in terms of reason intuition and imagination but what struck me as well about that what he says there is that it's a it's a path path to truth and that's what obviously what buddhism is interested is they're interested in the truth the truth of things what is the truth of things what is the truth of the mind what is the truth of this human experience so in this final section session i want to try and have us meditate on the truth of things and um but his meditation is not about the truth of buddhism uh it true it's about the truth of life uh what how things really are is often how it's support so our buddhism would talk is in terms of this those are the the sanskrit words so sila just means how you behave so the buddha would say to us if you want a past truth you start with looking at your behavior how do you treat other people um how do you behave what do you do including what do you do in your mind in the in the privacy of your mind how do you relate to your own experience so his great insight one of his great insights was how you relate how you behave what you do how you act including and importantly how you act in your mind those tiny nanoseconds of thought that is creating you all the time those human beings aren't a given that you are just a as you are but you are constantly creating yourself by how you behave so if you behave in a way that's mean uh indignant um petty uh et cetera negative then you'll you'll end up with a certain kind of experience primarily an unpleasant one um you'll end up with an experiences contracted isolated and so on if you behave from generosity from gratitude um if you take an interest in people if you connect with people if you don't um i don't know take refuge in a sort of pseudo-status then what you experience is is a a different kind of mind a different kind of view and the buddha's saying that's available to us all the time every moment we're shaping ourselves um we're like a potter shaping a pot we're constantly shaping ourselves so the experience we're having now is to do with how we've behaved in the past how we've behaved in our with our body how we've behaved with our speech and how we behave with our mind on the if we can behave in a way that's fruitful and um expansive that will lead us into meditation yeah and the word for meditation is samadhi and samadhi sometimes translated as energized calm we feel incredibly calm at the same time full of energy really what what i've been teaching all week is ways into samadhi which are to do with wholeness and pleasure yeah but well-being buddha would say well that even that's not enough that's not the truth that's not the if we want a path to truth we we need to go beyond that so he says and we use that mind that we've created we've uncovered in meditation a mind that's unified where thought imagination intuition are all running together in a new unity and therefore a much more powerful the reason our mind is so weak is because it's not running together it's very often our mind is divided against itself in conflict with itself disintegrated the more our mind is running together the more we we're intrinsically into value and meaning in our life and living that out the more our mind becomes as it were powerful i don't mean powerful in the sort of pejorative power over sense i mean powerful in the sense of power too power to go into life more deeply to experience life more fully when you turn that more powerful mind to the truth you know after all i see him mcgilkin says we have a path to truth now in the his new book it's a huge two-volume um doorstep of a book which i was waiting on my shelf at home for me to read for the next interview um i might need to go on holiday with a very large bag um the second volume of it is called so what is true yeah um so the buddha would say okay well if you're interested in the truth you need to you need to apply your mind the mind that you've cultivated through celer and samadhi through how you behaved and through meditation you need to apply your mind to what he would say would be like the weak spot in reality i mean there's lots of ways of talking about this but i'm not careful i'll talk too long and i want to make sure we got enough time to meditate fully he he would say look there's there's a weak spot in reality we we're liking the matrix i mean in a way when the matrix first came out everyone kept telling me with the buddhist film what they didn't quite notice is that there's a reality it was horrible you know you were in a bathtub plugged to a computer one or something like that um and there are these weird spider things over you know um but nobody seemed to have noticed that but anyway the metaphor was brilliant you know that there's that moment isn't it where somebody's eating a steak and saying it tastes really lovely but i know it's not real you know that's about as close to buddhism we've got somebody had obviously flicked through some buddhist texts when they were writing that um but yeah the basic idea of the matrix was that the reality that you experience that i experienced just now sitting here in addis darnown hereford in england the reality that beck is experiencing over there in melbourne um the reality maria elena is experiencing 3 a.m in the morning in venezuela which feels so complete so so believable that that reality is knit um yeah it just it's not like that you know that it's like the matrix it's com it all fits it's completely believable but it's not the truth of things so buddhism would say well for instance the main thing that you do that i do that we all do is we when we talk about reality we think of ourselves as a really existing person real me in a real world yeah and that that's our basic view it's so deep that view that we take it to be a description of the truth um what we have is belief disguised as fact so we think so once you have a real self in a real world what happens is that real self will one die will one day die um leaving the real world without you and that's the end of you um and we can smugly believe that that's actually just true um we we our belief in real self in real world is so deep that we're like um we're like victorian christians you know uh in the 18th century who just saw that god was a an absolute given an unquestionable given um that not believing in god was kind of mad yeah we we like to be sort of hahaha about the victorians and how silly they were but we're just the same we have belief which we disguise as a fact so we think that there's a real self in a real world and then we have we create in that the horror of death because all we've got to lose is everything um so the buddhists say well we need to investigate that belief and the buddha would see it's clearly a belief of you and if you have that view yes that's life will appear to you in certain ways you'll want to defend your real self from threat and that sense of threat can be endless one of the things that the covid pandemic has done is set so many of us off into this endless sense of being threatened that i must protect this real self from you know countless threats um some of my friends just can't get quite out of that mindset you can provoke that endlessly that you're always under threat and also you'll you'll tend to try to pull towards you anything that you think will strengthen this sense of a real self from the real world so you'll want money you'll want status you'll want sex appeal you'll want power you'll um you'll want to you know use your elbows as they used to say you'll want dominance over people so that your real self feels secure and embellished from the real world and their consequences of the view that we have yeah if we didn't have that view those experiences wouldn't appear experience itself is not a bedrock view creates experience um my example of this i've been not going to but my example of this is a friend of mine who didn't get into oxford university in england and you know his teachers he said he'd get into oxford and he thought he'd get into oxford and he didn't get in and it was a major turning point in his life that he didn't get in and he you know many years later he was talking still talking to me about that moment and how he then felt you know how he felt his life came and stitched from then i didn't get into oxford didn't have the slightest effect nobody expected i would do i never expected i would seem to i never even been there seemed to explain you know the idea of me getting to oxford would be like you know pigs could fly kind of thing so it was fine it was no big turning point in my life i never got upset um so you know my friend's upset about not getting into oxford to see how it's real but it's based in a view it's only because he thought he would and others thought he would that it becomes at all perturbing if you didn't think you would and if you if nobody has thought you would not getting into oxford doesn't upset you so is it upset real or not it's based to see how it's real it's real in one sense and it's unreal in another yeah um and all of our experiences like that it's really one sense but unreal in another and it's based on this unreal uh belief we have of a real self in a real world yeah so the buddha said it's all very well to talk about it but you need to have some kind of insight into that you need to see that that you're actually in a view of reality and he said look that that view you've got has got certain kind of weak spots he might even say there were three but let's just for today just talk about one's weak spot in reality and that weak spot of reality which if you kind of press on and if you investigate this reality that we've got which is a deluded reality which is a um based in a wrong view can open out into a new reality about which we can say nothing reality itself is beyond the reach of words and reason beyond the reach of all kinds of or any kind of understanding is beyond time and space it's beyond self and other is beyond causality as we normally experience it um beyond the physical senses and the rational mind so we can't say anything about it but what the buddha could say is never mind what so what is true as in mcgood said he said well the buddha would say well just apply yourself to this weak point of reality and that weak point as he as some of you know as many of you know hopefully many of you don't know because you're new to meditation and buddhism and that wig spot is is the fact that all experience is impermanent yeah that everything you experience is is doesn't pedura doesn't go doesn't produce through time it um is inconstant yeah so even your headache your bed bad mood the pain in your knee uh even those things that you tend to make i tend to and you tend to make into a constant they're inconstant that everything you experience is it is an inconstant flocks yeah and the buddha said that that was where you needed to apply your attention but it wasn't worth applying that attention to that fact with your normal scattered divided chattering trivial mind because all you'll do is you'll you'll apply your mind in a chattering trivial kind of way to this massive matter you first of all need a mind that's fit enough to be applied to the nature of reality but let's let's nevertheless have a go you know so today what i want to do is try to meditatively see that all of your experience is inconstant or even if you don't believe me didn't just see buddhism's not saying believe this it's just saying well have a look at something that you think is constant is it constant um have a look at this world you really think it exists you you experience everything of it through mind there's no way of experiencing anything from a tractor to your knee that's not through your mind um my buddhism would say mind precedes world that the world you experience is based on the mind you expect you you have um so we'll investigate mind and in the final retreat of this whole um what i hope to be the first six months of the nature of mind and we'll be particularly exploring this in more depth but we need to investigate mind because all we experience is through mind yeah so today we're going to again try to explore um some rd meditation and then we'll turn our mind to at least a little bit of the nature of things which well the nature of the weak spot of reality is not sometimes people say impermanence is how things really are it's not how things really are we can't say anything about how things really are including whether they're permanent or impermanent what we can say is that impermanence is the weak spot in reality which if we were to understand deeply enough it reality would open up in an unimaginable way that we we can't talk about as being permanent or impermanent none of those words would um apply to reality okay so let's have a go at uh doing that so setting yourself up so you can be completely comfortable [Music] and as usual i'll read a poem at the start and near the end so give yourself enough time to set up [Music] and then when you're ready closing your eyes as soon as you close your eyes bring in your awareness into your body so opening out to how your body feels just now and your body might feel comfortable or uncomfortable or perhaps you just don't feel very much in your body and that's all fine you're just opening out to that whatever it is just like the weather just opening out to your whole body hmm having a sense of your whole body sitting here we're all sitting together around the world 100 more than 150 of us so we connected with each other just now c foreign once again softening your face softening your eyes [Music] softening your jaw and your mouth [Music] foreign hmm i'm thinking if you can let go of yourself breathing into your shoulders imagining the breath soothing out and smoothing out muscles on your shoulders uh do so you could even imagine that you're breathing through your shoulders soothing out smoothing out any discomfort hmm and again softening your belly you're often holding on with our belly without noticing it see if you can find ways of softening your belly you might just imagine it or you might breathe into your belly um c calming the body calming your mind everything is going to be all right how should i not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling they will be dying they will be dying but there is no need to go into that lines flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart the sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright i lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying everything is going to be all right so first of all extending your awareness to include your whole body in the ways that i've been teaching see if you can nurture well-being a sense of the whole body so playing with that sense using the breath if that helps using your imagination it helps you are trying to be aware of the whole body and trying to imagine the state of well-being of unified well-being c so keeping opening your awareness to include the whole body and moving between that and cultivating a sense of well-being of richness of contentment c c when your mind goes off you'll be going into one of the new foreigners so see if you can feel what that feels like and then stretching your mind down to include the whole body to waiting on your experience patient respectful curious way oh okay and staying in touch with your body imagining your brain to mind remembering feeling well being kind of of inner plenitude and warmth just bringing that to being by remembering something by imagining that something foreign the opening up again to your whole body and we're just going to bring to mind all things are inconstant small things from our point of view at least are impermanent and all fixed and stable you don't need to ponder over that fact or prosely discuss it with ourselves just just drop that reminder in so opening out the sounds around you traffic outside the boat song the thing of the heater particularly tuning into this it's in constant nature so sounds come into being and go out of being never the same one moment to another you don't need to think about that you just try to open to that fact tune into the inconstant nature of sound you and you don't need to even listen to sound sound just appears in your mind and it's inconstant foreign [Music] keep on opening up the sound just noticing it's in constant nature and then bring your awareness to an area of the body that feels stuck or constant so you might feel very tired just now and you might feel that that's just a given that that's a kind of constant or you might have sore shoulders or a sore belly just now and you might be relating to that as if it's just a constant sort of soreness so see if you can take your mind into those sensations and see if your sense of discomfort in the body or tiredness or [Music] perhaps light illness or whatever it is constriction in your body is it actually constant or is it like the sound around you inconstant constantly changing [Music] okay hmm keep bringing your attention to an area that feels stuck or constant in some way try to see that it is an inconstant um foreign um and opening up again to your experiences sound and the constancy of sound so everything is going to be all right how should i not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and the high tide reflected on the ceiling they will be dying they will be dying but there is no need to go into that the lines flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart the sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright i lie here in a rioter sunlight watching the daybreak and the clouds flying everything is going to be all right [Music] [Music] so when you're ready coming out of the station so once again we've got a little bit of time more questions if you've got any questions if the unconditioned is permanent outside space time does that mean consciousness and meta are also permanent it's only five past eight i've got to be honest i don't know i mean [Applause] what we have to remember what sangra chavanti um the founder of tree ratna keeps on reminding us is that language is metaphorical um all languages metaphor um and um if we don't remember this we get into trouble with language so unconditioned is a metaphor um outside there's a metaphor you know when we say something is outside time and space outside as a metaphor beyond is a metaphor um you can't say anything about the nature of reality um you can't say whether it's permanent or impermanent um whether it's inside or outside so the the suggestive ways of exploring um experience yes um the thing to remember is never mind conditioned or unconditioned or they're all terribly grand words non-duality uh the nature of reality they're huge kind of abstractions what buddhism is saying again and again and what he what ian mcgill christ without quite realizing he's pointing to actually after his interview with john of archer and i he was talking to somebody and apparently i happened to know and he said to him it looks like i'm a buddhist um inadvertently if you've become what it's saying is that this experience we're having of real self in real world is not real it's not it's not a complete sense of life yeah that there is much more than that um [Music] and you you don't need to say what a word for that much more fantastic actually he says that what we're trying to do is go from less to more and from more to most you know [Music] less less life to more life and more life to the most life yeah buddha represents the most life you don't need words like the transcendental or non-duality or unconditioned you could just say more life i don't mean more life in the sense of more fun more cappuccinos more sex more money because they're often less life but more uh life here our life as we experience is a diminished narrowed thing and that there is always more life yeah um again i remember reading marilyn robinson whose work i'm very inhabited and a character in her novel gilead uses the metro as a cat there's a cat in gilead little common the name of the cat and this character says well just as we know that there's more to life than the cat's experience you know that we can see the cat is having an experience but we we have a larger experience that includes the cat but goes beyond it so that's the case with us that you know we're like the character there there's an experience that includes everyday consciousness that goes beyond it no way of saying that ever quite gets it right um and every way of saying it has got strength to it a way of understanding like the unconditioned shows you that it's quite beyond um everyday consciousness but it's also got problems to it it suggests that there's a place where things aren't conditioned um any way of speaking creates uh opportunities and threats to use them to use a swot and listen yeah um the buddha would say never mind about that never mind about that first of all let's um the buddha's kind of is an enlightened pragmatist he'd say first of all you haven't got a mind that's ready for this so let's develop your mind let's make sure your mind is radiant be positive unified you know if he if he was talking to ian mcgill chris did say make sure your mind is wonderfully balanced across the right in the left hemisphere of the brain and then apply that uh clear lucid luminous warm mind to this weak spot in reality that all things are impermanent that all things are in constant and then things will start to open out in their own way i can't tell you how they'll open out you'll just need to explore yourself um so he's pragmatic in that sense he's not he's not sort of metaphysically telling you how things actually are he says here's where you need to work to find out how things actually are yeah helen is asking could you please say something about why we would create this weak spot in reality by what's the purpose of trying to see or experience this other reality from the one that we usually usually experience yeah well that's a that's a very good question why would we do it um i don't know the answer um because well then why would you do it well because this life is unsatisfying really because everyday consciousness doesn't work it's like um it's like those airfix toys i don't know if you're old enough to use it by you know a jet plane and you had these great hopes for it you'd be able to build this jet plane that looked like on the cover you got the glue and you know you look at all the little plastic bits and as you put and try and put them together and as you do it you get more and more frustrated with it and you get then you lose something and you get glue on your hands and then you know the whole thing just won't quite click together the bullet is saying well your life is like if you're honest about yourself your life is like that you will never quite go together there's something unaccounted for that means that you can never quite fit so the job that you really hope for when you get it strangely doesn't make you a happy content confident person that you think you will the relationship whether you've always wanted when you get here you then end up feeling slightly bored you're not in love all the time um the um the success that comes to you actually you get actually the more success you get the less it means to you so that you get um diminished returns and you have to have a bigger and bigger success to have the pleasure from success and then when you're not successful you feel really indignant um the buddha would say simply the ordinary everyday consciousness the way we try to live doesn't work we want to be happy and fulfilled all the time we're the most ambitious creatures in the universe we want to be permanently happy and satisfied and the buddha would say yeah that's fine and you do want to be there everybody does and you can be and that's called buddhahood i mean the zenpo raikkonen says if you want to go south when you when you want to go north when you mean to go if you point your count if you point your cart north when you mean to go south how will you arrive so what he means by that is that that what you want is right you want lasting happiness pleasure meaning value and living from that all the time but if you try and find that in career relationship status money um and so forth you're just going in the opposite direction they're kind of distorted versions of what you're really of what you really want and you know that because they don't work i wish they did if they are all those things are working for people please let me know um so then because life seems unsatisfactory and i think what buddhist meditation and of course there's lots of good reasons to meditate without doing buddhist meditation but buddhist meditation assumes that you have a kind of positive dissatisfaction with your life i don't mean a neurotic dissatisfaction that you you're simply neurotically unhappy and you need to work with that i need to work with that we all do but that somewhere there's something positively dissatisfied about the life that you're given and presented with that you feel that that is not enough that it's it's not truthful it's not honest enough it's not a solution um they're false solutions and you know that because when you have you when you take get that false solution it doesn't work yeah um i've been particularly reflecting on how achievement doesn't work it really feels like it should that once you achieve something you'll then feel confident you'll lengther someone you'll then feel so confident of that party and you won't feel like diminished by other people and you just know yourself because you've published this book or you've you've got this amount of income just doesn't work it's weird in consciousness it's like it just for a moment you get this lovely feeling of i'm a someone and the next morning you're back to being diminished you again you know and that's just how life is and the buddha's quest to enlightenment or siddhartha's quest was enlightenment to enlightenment was that same issue you know he was supposed to be a prince and so on but it didn't work and he knew it didn't work he was strangely sort of precociously honest about his own experience he could see that there was no such thing as lasting happiness so and he knew that there was going to be old age and death so you needed to go looking for the truth um any he really do genuinely human life is like that isn't it you you're honest and you think well this isn't worth stop working so i need to look for what does work i need to search for the truth not for the untrue and i need to search for real solutions not mock solutions not um phase solutions not false solutions that's what um any genuine life is about whether it's greek you know the greek philosophers or uh whether it's evil gilchrist exploring the brain or schopenhauer exploring thought or marilyn robinson writing her novels about um the poor in america you're always trying to think well this what is real what is truth or is really valuable um and that's the same as the buddha yeah um some people don't feel that some people don't feel that life doesn't work particularly or at least it doesn't bother them very much it doesn't bother them in a way that it bothered me and of course that being bothered by it can be as i say a neurotic thing and you know you need to work on that and find ways of being happier and so on but for some people the fact that life doesn't work bothers them auntie sangra should have thought it was about ten percent of the population it's quite a lot um he was coming back from a book shop in london here looking around on the tube and he thought yeah about about 10 of people will be interested in this quest for truth [Music] anyway that's my attempt [Music] to answer that very large question emma's asking um in relation to you mentioning foucault and derrida and deconstruction she was wondering about the relationship between what we've been practicing this week and a practice like the sixth element practice which seems to be about deconstructing oh yes that's a very good question i mean just basically i've never read foucault or deuteronomy um we didn't read about we didn't actually read the sources we just talked loosely about them you know i had an argument with a friend of mine about foucault and i had to admit that i didn't think about him and he had actually read him um so put them aside but yeah in that we're in them when you're ordained you're taught the sixth element practice which does seem to be a deconstruction practice you're trying to see that things are empty um the whole you know sort of approach to the experience of non-self is conceived like that and in a certain sense in our new context that's rather a danger i think um buddhism is always if if it's done that deconstruct the self as it were by going through the elements of experience it's not doing that to show you that none of that means anything it's trying to show you um that all of that means something it becomes impossible to talk about but it's not a deconstruction in this modern sort of ironized sense where you rather in a way that's rather pleased with yourself you take things that are meaningful and show them to be made up of parts that don't mean anything that's a very that's absolutely alien to a buddhist approach even if that's a apparent exploration of non-self that's nothing remotely like buddhism buddhism is trying to let go of self so that you experience something that goes beyond the self but which includes it which is beyond you but not separate from you that's why in traditional buddhism you'd always imagine that you're you're meditating and you're meditating in a world animated by consciousness and that can be the trees around you the mud around you the floor underneath you and the buddhas and devas in the in the universe around you that if you let go of self what you let go into is a world of beauty and majesty and consciousness that's not yours it's not strictly peace speaking not yours either yeah so um that would be something more like a bullish person that's frankly something more like a healthy approach i really don't like this habit of taking meaning and unscrewing it all and saying look it's not it's unmeaningful it's actually been immensely destructive in culture what we need to do is re-assert the meaning of meeting but we need to do that in a much more subtly way than saying god for instance which personally i've never been able to believe um but like all metaphors perhaps you know wallace stevens the american poet thought that god was the greatest metaphor that human beings had come up with but like all metaphors it was getting at something um something majestical something that feels like um a solution to the human situation i think buddhism does that in a much clearer less problematic way than using a grand abstract metaphor that god but look we better draw things to a close i do want to once again ask you to give us money quite boldly at 20 past eight in herefordshire um thank you for those of you who have given us given to the project already and what we want to do is continue this project on we've got a six-month project and in that project we want for a start-off to support nick who's in the room just now but we want to actually be able to keep on doing this for free for as many people so that um someone on the ivory coast can tune in someone in venezuela can tune in someone in melbourne can tune in actually there's no reason why that we can't have a thousand people on this call but to do that we'll need to raise money but we really don't want to start charging for it that doesn't feel right either i really want to make it so that you can just click on your own you know you're you're learning meditation from day one you're joining you know soon we're going to have other very very um very wonderful meditation teachers like vidyamala likes had an andy like sona you know and we'll cont we can continue doing that if we can raise the money to support it you know we've already bought lots of cameras so that the the interviews that we're going to be posting are as good quality as possible we need to do a lots of advertising on social media we're asking you to help get the word out yeah we will really need quite a quite a bit of money well we always do don't we but wouldn't it be wonderful if i don't know this time next year we've got 2 000 on this call and uh people who have never even thought about meditation before have never really thought about the fact that they could um do something about their suffering but the buddha said that i teach suffering at the end of suffering in other words that's all i'm interested in yeah that's all i'm interested in i'm not interested in philosophy i'm not interested in metaphysics i'm not interested in political science i'm interested in helping individuals suffer not to suffer and one of the things he'd be saying is the reason they suffer is to do with their mind it's not just you know there are political reasons there are social reasons but they're great reasons to do with their mind yeah so there are millions upon millions of people out there who are suffering and we can help them with their mind we can but to do that we i want it to be free of all moments and to do that we need to raise funds so so do give what we're suggesting is if you could give a sort of 50 pound donation which covers all of these classes and the interviews within the gilchrist and the seminar and the morning meditations that's you know that's that's a sort of guideline anyway if you can give more than that that'll be fabulous if you can get let give less than that that's no problem [Music] but it's been really yeah so i'll get um nick to post the link um yeah so it's been really really lovely meeting you all on the in this it's funny that this this format does mean i feel sort of meet you i think i met murray maria elena in venezuela i've met becky in melbourne i've met so many of you amy and you know it's just really really good um so let's let's see if we can all give to the project and that means that we can spread the project much much further um the the the sky is the limit with this form so um i hope i see you again i'm sure i will i hope i will tune in for the what will happen is once nick has got around to it we'll send you all an email with the link to all of these um all of these meditation teachings with the link to the seminar the link to our conversations within the gilchrist and then if you haven't watched those do watch them and then we can really really explored quite deeply in mcgill chris thought about the hemispheres of the brain and then we can start to explore question of near-death experiences and what do they say about the nature of mind yeah and that will be our next step in this exploration of the nature of mind [Music] okay so let's do the traditional unmuting really lovely to see all your bedrooms with your blankets with your dogs and cats and your cups of tea and um yeah really lovely to see you so see you soon we can now all a mute i think bye thank you thank you thank you you thank you nick show yourselves [Music] thank you nick thank you to nick he is the tech he is the brain behind look forward to seeing you again soon

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 727

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Id: ti5O22dBDsM

Length: 89min 7sec (5347 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022