Jnanavaca: The Human Predicament

for me my interest in buddhism started when i was very young well reasonably young i was in my teens and uh i think i was um interested in this human predicament even before my teens i think i was a kind of precociously existentialist kind of challenged child uh i think um even when i was about nine well i came across a school project recently that i think was probably written when i was about nine called the meaning of life and uh or what is life or something and in that project i i sort of was inquiring why we're here and uh go through the various stages of life from birth to death uh imagining what it's like to be born and conclude that it's probably quite unpleasant for the mother and for the the baby uh go through sort of childhood where you want to do things but you're always told not to to adolescence where nobody quite takes you seriously but you want your place in the world i don't know how i imagined all this to uh young adulthood to middle age to elderly i drew a bar chart where i imagined a man living to a hundred and um in the bar chart every decade had a blue little bar for unhappy times and a red bar for happy times and then i added them all up and concluded that there were more unhappy times than happy times in in one's life and that if one uh could choose one wouldn't bother living at all uh i got the little kind of the teacher just gave me a tick so so i was i was questioning life from quite an early age and then when when i was 11 uh my dad died and he died very suddenly there was just one night when he had a heart attack he was only 45 and there was no sort of warning of this and um of course my world changed it it sort of a bit of an exaggeration to say it turned upside down but it it was uh sort of never going to be the same and um i think this sort of existentialist i mean there are lots of aspects to how that affected me but this existentialist kind of questioning was accelerated by his death uh i i you know after some months i have large extended family who are very very supportive and kind to my mother and myself and my sister but after some months people get on with their lives well after some days probably and uh you have to don't you uh but i find myself questioning how could adults around me just go on with i don't know work and entertainment and whatever they did with their lives when you could just drop dead why weren't we all like up in arms at this this fact why did we pretend that it was just normal why did we worry about houses and cars and mortgages and holidays as my father had done trying to earn enough money because we didn't have a lot of money what was the point of it all so this as a 11 year old i was able to i don't know if i i don't know how i formulated it but i was able to ask such questions and felt that quite sort of deeply felt that life as we normally are told to live it was not adequate uh uh that couldn't be right and then then something further propelled this questioning which was that i was quite interested in um the supernatural the occult uh i would read ghost stories and whatever you know uh and i kind of so i'm still 11 or 12 and i start to wonder if i can communicate with the spirit of my father his consciousness and uh i you know i well i create a method that was through a pack of collect playing cards i would ask questions of him and he would show me answers uh a yes or no or i don't know and i devised a little ritual around this i'm not recommending it i'm just saying that this is what i did uh as a as a young team and um uh he would communicate i mean i was convinced i still am coming and convinced that he was communicating with me there were consistent responses and i didn't have any trouble believing that what it did for me was make me even more convinced that death of the body wasn't the death of consciousness the consciousness and the body were not exactly the same thing it couldn't be just that the brain created consciousness and and something of consciousness something of us survive the death of the body and that made me question even more well if that is the case then what is life about because i knew then that i wasn't i didn't have the whole picture i i couldn't see the whole journey i didn't know what happened after death but i knew that it wasn't the end so surely that meant that this life meant something in a bigger context and what was this life for and i knew it wasn't about acquiring more possessions or getting wealthier or status or even finding your life partner and having a a family and and then getting somewhere to live and then paying the mortgage and the job all of that stuff i knew it wasn't about that i didn't know what it was about anyway that led me to buddhism eventually well it led me into studying physics because i thought that physics might have some answers and it doesn't really but what it does do not not to these existential questions actually it doesn't have any answers anyway but what it does do as ratna prabha said is open up your your mind to the fact that common sense reality is not real i mean our ordinary perceptions of the world of ourselves of of matter of time of space are not how things really are they're just how our senses pick up experience of the world that's not what's really going on that's what physics did did for me anyway it really uh blew apart any notion that common sense reality was was true yeah so that combined with a a knowing a deep sort of knowing that death of the body wasn't the end you can imagine why that would lead me to to to want to explore buddhism so then fast forward about 41 years and i find myself on a um long solitary retreat so i'm on my own in gukilota which is a retreat center that tree ratner owns in the mountains in southern spain and part of that retreat center is also some solitary retreat facilities and i was doing a six-month solitary retreat and i would get up every morning go downstairs it was a two-story little stone cottage uh beautiful i'd go downstairs and i'd um uh [Music] evacuate the spiders and the bugs the insects that crawled in like there was big spiders in google lotto and they would come in every night and i had a zero tolerance policy of uh so i had a little beaker i would scoop them up i would take them outside so one morning i'm i'm doing my you know evacuation routine and uh i sort of hear this rustling and it's a stag beetle i think it's a staggered or a spanish equivalent a sort of big black two-inch kind of beetle shiny sort of you know just sort of crawling along on its legs doing its thing and uh so i scoop it up into a little plastic beaker a bit like this this glass it's a bit smaller than that and it immediately it it's quite a slow moving thing it doesn't sort of tend to respond very quickly but immediately it's in this little plastic cup beta it starts scuttling around it's trapped it knows that it's trapped it's potentially in danger i don't know if it knows that it's potentially in danger i mean it's not in danger but potentially it could be for all it knows and it's trying to to climb out of the the beat of the car keep sliding back anyway i'm about to take it outside to tip it out uh when i see another one of these stag beetles so i just kind of scoop it up as well and and suddenly immediately that there are two in there they start mating so so this dangerous potentially trapped situation is completely forgotten the fact that one's life could be in in mortal peril completely forgotten that they're happily on top of each other and uh very still they don't they don't make much movement they're completely still i i i sort of smile and indulgently tip them out onto some grass where they are completely oblivious to any change in environment uh i i reflect to myself i find myself sort of smiling to myself and then then reflect that well isn't that kind of what we do uh as human beings i mean if the buddha could see us i think there might be a wry kind of smile at times at how instead of realizing our human predicament with death that could happen at any moment danger potentially and and this narrow trapped confines of our normal mind instead of realizing that what we're after is gratification of the senses sex being maybe one of them but whatever it is whether it's that danish pastry downstairs or or whatever it is we're sort of trying to as soon as we've got what we want in terms of sensual pleasure or or satisfaction or comfort or whatever it is i guess it's not just the senses because you should extend that to gratification of the ego you know if somebody uh likes us or or we have some sort of status or we feel successful or powerful as soon as we get all that we forget this predicament that we're in and we're completely um what's the word well like those beetles they became almost numb to their environment and i think human beings of course we've got a rational faculty that the stag beetle doesn't have of course our minds are more complex and more involved evolved but in a certain sense do you see the similarities do you see how we don't use that capacity to reflect in a in a very creative way much of the time i mean i'm i'm taking an extreme kind of view here and all of you here and online at home you obviously have reflected on uh things otherwise you wouldn't probably be here so so excuse me for parodying uh our predicament but i think there's something in it so so what did the buddha have to say well he said that life was life as we ordinarily live it in in this way that we try and just gratify our senses and the way that we perceive the world our common sense perceptions of what's going on all of that he said was ducker and dukkha is a word that is difficult to translate but i'm going to use one translation which is unsatisfactoriness but all of this ordinary way common sense way of living with our ordinary common sense mind although frankly sometimes a common sense mind would be a good thing but our ordinary mind and our ordinary sense experience and trying to make life work all of that he said won't completely fulfill it's unsatisfactory it's always unsatisfactory it's dukkha and uh yes as ratna prabha in his introduction said that sometimes people then think oh buddhism is kind of pessimistic uh and just got a downer on life it's not it's not pessimistic it's not saying that there isn't pleasure in life it's not got a downer on on sex for example or danish pastries or anything else that is pleasurable it's not that it's just saying that those pleasurable things yes life can offer them but they won't last and they won't completely fulfill they won't completely fulfill the deepest yearnings of the heart and uh somewhere we know that don't we and what buddhism is saying is that it will eventually end in the death of the body our own but probably before our own others that we love will pass away uh the death of the body is is is uh an inevitable and we don't know when that might happen uh it could happen we like to think that we'll die peacefully like the queen did uh at the age of 96. we like to sort of think we'll have this really graceful peaceful exit but it might not be like that my dad didn't die like that he was 45 and died in agony and when he died i can remember him holding my hand on his deathbed and there was remorse because he felt he hadn't lived the life that he would like to have lived and i don't know he couldn't say very much because he was in such pain but he did say as he was holding my hand that he had not been kind uh enough and that really stayed with me because i think i think we kind of know that there are values beyond acquisition and power and pleasure and maybe kindness starts to point to something that is more to do with what life could be about maybe should be about it's interesting isn't it with the queen the eulogies are [Music] very consistent in saying or things like she served she did her duty she was stoic she was kind she was um uh hard working and and so forth there are values here that we do realize are important but sometimes we don't put them at the front and center of what we're doing with our lives there are three types of document i just want to just run through them very very briefly buddhism has lots of lists and it's fond of categorizing our experience i'm not very fond of that but it is useful because one can one can one needs to actually be able to understand what buddhism is saying about unsatisfactoriness and what it's not saying about unsatisfactorina so the first type of dhaka is called and that is the dukkha the unsatisfactoriness of actual physical pain yeah or at least that's that's one way of talking about it so uh having a human body will mean that at times there will be physical pain if you trip over and you hurt yourself if you break a bone uh if you are ill in any way it will be physically painful and that is some of that is inevitable from having a human body um uh we try and sort of look after ourselves and avoid it as much as possible of course and that's a good thing to do it's not like you go looking for it but it is inevitable and buddhism says that even an enlightened being will experience that that physical pain there's no avoiding that once we've got a human body there's no avoiding that but the other two types of occur start to move into the territory where we don't have to have them uh we we don't have to uh suffer in this way if we find uh the dharma and and a path that that this course will eventually uh talk about the noble eightfold paths there is a way out so the second type of tutter is the dukkha to do it's called vipari namadaka and it's the dukkha to do with impermanence that things change that things will not stay static it is always as if life is running through our hands like water they will not stay the same even if right now you have got the perfect life it will not last i can remember having a really good job i could remember when i got this promotion then into this job in the corporate world i thought this is my dream job this is the ideal job it's made for me it's not my name written all over it and guess what happened uh my boss changed i mean not not physically you know not emotional another person stepped in and it was hell his job suddenly became really really difficult did you said i mean there's always unsatisfactoriness around the corner at least in potential because things change uh uh things don't last including uh death and loss and more cataclysmic uh change there i think buddhism is starting to say look you can start to come to terms with this you you do have to accept change in order to uh well whether you like it or not whether you accept it or not it's gonna happen uh do you remember this this phrase um uh um how does it go uh pain is inevitable but suffering is optional uh in a way it's one of those slightly cheesy phrases and you want to particularly if you are having a hard time it's not very helpful so don't go around saying that to people suffering is optional but but but there there is um a way of living where we don't have to uh maybe i'll come on to this don't have to create more data for ourselves but i want to come on to the third uh type of tudka which is even more fundamental still and that is saying well it's called um uh sankara dukkha or sometimes it's called candidate or standard which is that our ordinary senses and the world that we experience through our five or five physical senses and the world that we experience through our what i'm calling ordinary mind our ordinary uh unenlightened common sense mind the world that we experience through those means will always be unsatisfactory i mean not that nice things can't happen but it will never never completely fulfill never completely fulfilled it's an existential kind of gutter have you had this sense ever i have where things have really worked out well like this job i got this job or you go on holiday and it's your perfect kind of holiday destination with your perfect holiday companion your partner have you ever had that situation where you arrive in what you were looking forward to and then you find it's yeah you're not completely happy why are you not radiantly blissful when everything's gone completely as you wanted it to do do you have this sense that actually it's still not quite working yes yeah i was gonna say good but it's um it's inevitable that it weren't completely fulfilled and this is what the buddha was pointing to in this last type of dhaka and this is the type of dukkha it's existential duterte i really do think that we could ignore because you can sort of get away with it you can say oh well never mind that holiday i'll have another one or i'll buy another house or another car or change partners that's what we kind of do didn't we and hope it's that sort of triumph of hope over experience we hope that next time it will work out just right just perfectly but it doesn't it really doesn't so why is that why is that buddhism says that there's something going on that's very uh deep and difficult to identify and get to there's something going on that's fundamental about our experience that is the root of this unsatisfactoriness and i'm going to try and um uh articulate it a little bit um oh no let me just pause before i i go on to articulating a sort of the root cause let me just pause and see if there are any thoughts or questions we could take a couple if there are before i move on so any any questions or thoughts yes tell me your name matt matt why do you feel dukkha is hard to translate and what are some other translations so matt is asking why is dutch i'm just going to repeat the question for our people online matt's asking why is that difficult to translate and what are some other words that could point to well some other words are pain suffering i used unsatisfactoriness suffering is a common translation um uh uh what else is there lack is david black which is a good one actually that there's a sense of lack i like that one suffering is a common translation but can be misinterpreted because if i go around saying life is suffering i don't know a lot of the time it isn't and for a lot of people it isn't uh me right now i'm not suffering i'm really happy to see you and be here i'm not in any particular suffering but if i look deeply nor am i completely radiantly blissful i mean lovely though it is there is a lag does that make sense um i think we have got equivalent english terms um but perhaps not with all the connotations that docker has because dutcher goes from a lack in um ordinary sense experience like the holiday didn't quite go well all the way to an existential lack in our lives what is it that we're really meant to be doing with our lives why am i here why am i doing this nine to five job that i don't really enjoy to pay off to pay my rent or or or if i'm lucky enough to have a property probably that i'm paying a mortgage for decades why am i there's a subtle sense that there ought to be more that there should be more and delta covers all of that it covers the entire range i i think um this settles the subtle sense of there ought to be more uh what we do often is ignore it maybe we have it at three in the morning when we wake up and we kind of think oh my life's not where i wanted it to be but often we just say oh well just go back to sleep don't don't worry this is what or what we do is we become slightly bitter or resigned or resentful and even cynical um or you look at how much mental health how many people in in in the world are suffering from depression and acute mental health crises because uh often because i mean there's obviously a number of reasons different range but sometimes it's because they just doesn't feel like there's meaning in in their lives and they can't see what what meaning there is to be had in life yes and do you find that the existential lack [Music] because we um just walk out of our 9-5 jobs yeah yeah yeah i know or is it sometimes that we use it almost as a excuse because we saw sometimes i find myself so entangled in the day-to-day yeah yeah obligation yes relationships yeah [Music] yeah how does one manage that well let me just uh repeat the question as best i can i'm going to paraphrase it and then move on to how so um the question is first of all is this existential lack worse as it were in our current modern kind of world uh and and if it is and even if it isn't how do we manage it given that life is quite complex and we can't just walk away from our jobs even if we're not happy in them we can't just disentangle ourselves from all the commitments of our lives how do we how do we kind of manage this so the first part of that question i think um the existential situation is the same as it was in the buddha's days as the same that it's always been in in essence it's the same because uh we're alive we've got this body we will eventually die and we don't know what that means in some ways it's the same however what i think is also true is that our modern world has got better at ignoring this it's not better at covering it over because all you have to do is um uh turn on your phone and and even i do this i find myself doing it on the tube yesterday of course there was no internet signal or whatever but i still sort of wanted to look at what my phone was telling me for no reason whatsoever just to distract myself the possibilities of distracting ourselves are greater than ever and and also there's particularly if you live in london or a city like london there's so much um uh well it's frenetic uh uh we can feel isolated even though we're surrounded by millions well particularly because we're surrounded by millions of strangers that all this technology that we have to use can be alienating we can feel um i don't know feel kind of ridiculously um alienated from our experience and this makes it worse but i want to move on to how how well first of all in order to understand the how i think we have to understand the root problem because if you don't have the solution if you don't have if you don't understand the problem you can't really apply a solution what the buddha said is that our whole way of perceiving our experience our world even how we perceive ourselves and think about ourselves is completely wrong we've got something completely wrong upside down wrong uh uh not just a little bit wrong it's not like we've just a little bit sort of missed the mark and the world is just a little bit different to how we perceive it and think about it it's like we've got it completely wrong so i want to just refer back to uh physics modern physics says that we've got our perception of the world is completely wrong that's not how reality is it's fine for navigating the world that we want to navigate and getting breakfast and eating my danish pastry and things but if you want the truth of what's going on of what matter is or what time is or what space is of what consciousness is then our common sense mind and our sense perceptions don't give us the truth and the the fundamental wrongness the delusion as buddhism talk talks about it the fundamental thing that we've got wrong is that we believe that there's a real fixed and separate me somewhere in here maybe in here some little me maybe like i don't know a little entity or maybe it's some immaterial entity that is somehow fixed and separate from the world separate from the world and fixed in that it never changes so that that 11 year old nyan of archer is somehow the same as this middle-aged man and we know that that's not true we can't if somebody were to say to me which bit of you is unchanged from that 11 year old existentially challenged child i couldn't tell you which bit of me is the same yeah and similarly we think that we're separate from the world we think we're separate from each other ultimately separate i know that we've got a separate body in and my body and my true tomara's body are not you know melding into some sort of weird soup i i kind of know that but ultimately separate we're not we know if we think about it i mean even common sense things like we're breathing this air together uh we're exchanging gases with these plants where where we know this that we're not completely bounded with our skin uh even more mysteriously uh like you're all looking at me now hopefully and at home so somewhere in your awareness is an image of me but i don't know how many people are in this room if there's 50 people in this room there are 50 images of me in each of your awarenesses where is that image happening because we know that visual perception happens by light entering your eyes and and forming an image or some sort of thing on the back of your retinas two of them and then that causing electrochemical kind of signals to to the brain when neurons are firing there's actually no light in the skull in the cavity that the brain is in so there's no actual light entering where the brain is and then the brain is doing something to combine those two i don't know what it does it's doing something and then somehow consciousness whatever that is creates an image and it appears as if that image is outside of you not in the brain not in consciousness but outside of you hear me weird it's really weird this ordinary common sense perception of sight sound is the same taste is the same touch is the same smell is the same i haven't got time to go into how they're do you see that we're constructing our experience of the world all the time we're not really separate how could am i is this image of me separate from you and your awareness uh it's the sound of my voice really if it's entering your awareness through your sensory apparatus your ears your mind your whatever is are we really separate what what's happening here so buddhism saying look this notion that we're fixed that there's a real fixed entity inside and that that entity which we think is real is somehow separate from everything else all of that is wrong that's a delusion and if we think the world is completely separate to us that's a delusion and the world is well buddhism says all we've got is appearances you've got images you've got sounds you don't actually know what's behind those images and sounds and tastes and touches but we assume that there's a real me navigating a real world and as soon as i've got a sense of real me fixed and separate from real world i will want to protect myself defend myself from any ducker that comes my way from that world i will want to secure my environment ideally i'd like to secure it once and for all and keep it still and static and you know make it last forever in that comfortable way but actually all those there is is something more mysterious that could be described rather loosely as flow there is some flow of experience some of that flow is what i call me and some of it is what i call world including you but actually there's nothing fixed and graspable and and static and stable and separate there is just flow going on it's really mysterious what's going on but rather than flow with the flow we want to fix our world and it will always elude us that fixing it will always elude us so i'm gonna have to start wrapping up but buddhism is a path in undoing this delusion in learning how to live more according to how things really are which is this flow it's sometimes if you think of a river flowing i mean maybe this isn't a very good analogy you know well i don't know if you get this but imagine a sort of little vortex a whirlpool in a flow of water yeah or imagine several of them it's more like that's what we are we're like a little vortex in the flow of water in the flow of life in the flow of consciousness in the flow of energy these words are metaphors i'm not using them in a philosophical precise way it's like we're in a little vortex so that we do have some degree of definition but you see how it would be ridiculous to say a little whirlpool or vortex is separate from the water surrounding it it is the water do you see it is part of the flowing nature of things buddhism saying look you can learn you can practice through practice you can learn to undo this very deep-seated wrong perception it's very deep-seated it's not just a conscious thing it's not just like you can hear a talk on buddhism like i'm doing and then you'll be all right it's not that it's pre-conscious it's instinctive it's very very instinctive but you can break it you can break the spell of this delusion through or first of all through changing our behavior so that we don't act in such a self-centered way and keep reinforcing the sense of me me me me and my mind my like the stag beetles do we can learn to change our behavior to be less self-centered and of course we do that through generosity through kindness and so forth we can then on on the basis of that meditate and meditation will develop these qualities of kindness and generosity and well-wishing and connection with each other which is more how things really are but it will also help us introspect and see what is it really what's really going on is there a real fixed entity called nyan of archer and if so where is that meditations like part of meditation is like an inquiry into what's really going on and it's said that if you if you practice in these ways sometimes you you glimpse through the veils of this this delusion it's like the light can break through and when that happens to whatever degree it happens even if it's a tiny thing and maybe you've had these sorts of experiences you experience a completely different type of knowing a different type of awareness qualitatively different as different as human awarenesses to the stag people's awareness it's completely different what what i i don't live in this quality totally different awareness but i've glimpsed it enough to know that it's real and uh you feel how do you feel does anybody want to hazard some guesses as to how you might feel yes peaceful uh peaceful in a in a way that is so deep so um satisfying that it's as if nothing could shake that it's not dependent on anything external to you yep so peaceful anybody else free sorry free the buddha said that all his teaching was characterized by the taste of freedom you feel ecstatically free he said that if you become enlightened and and live in this awareness that it would be like being released from prison a prison that you didn't even know you're in like those stag beetles didn't know they were in prison you would feel ecstatically free yeah anybody else connected who said that yes connected so this sense of separation would have broken down and and this sense of separation that we have causes so much pain because then we we want to feel connected somewhere we know that we should be connected and suddenly you would be connected not just connected in a nice kind of way connected so that you feel you are part of the whole universe and the universe is you and you are the universe i mean deeply connected anybody else one more two more uh yeah yeah there would be this sense of complete wonder because buddhism doesn't give you answers as to what's going on it would just allow you to see the incredible incredible mystery of what's going on there is no way to describe experience just as i was trying to say look when you're looking at me it's not straightforward what's going on there would be this sense of wonder sometimes we have this looking at the night sky sometimes not in london but in in when you're on retreat you look at the night sky and you think oh oh this there's vastness and wonder and i'm part of this it's not just that the stars are out there when i look at the stars those stars that are billions of miles away that image of that star is happening in my awareness well there you go well i recommend then that you look for because if in london as well if you look with the right eyes you can see beauty you can see beauty everywhere and that would be another another aspect of this type of awareness now what buddhism saying is that that awareness is our birthright we've all got the capacity to experience it if we let go of this usual way of perceiving and to let go you've got to see through the delusion if you can do that this radiant luminous vast awareness that is no longer characterized as being me or mine because actually it's not in this dualistic world of subject and object it's not even in time and space all of that is our birthright and it's that that is the real freedom from unsatisfactoriness if you have that then even the death of the body even loss of everything that you love in this world and everyone you love in this world wouldn't shake you because you would know that you're part of this flow and the flow itself is enough so i'll leave it

Channel: North London Buddhist Centre

Views: 438

Keywords:

Id: sYykGvpM6rA

Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 10 2022