Latest / Buddhistisches Tor Berlin Podcast / Imagination: the master key

Transcript

Imagination: the master key · Buddhistisches Tor Berlin Podcast

• 0:11
  Good morning, very warm welcome as always, especially warm
• 0:14
  welcome if it's your first time here.
• 0:17
  My name is Tara Parleter. And well, I thought I'd, I'd
• 0:22
  begin with three quotes from our our teacher and founder of this
• 0:27
  particular tradition, just to kind of set the set the theme,
• 0:32
  you know. So the first quote is from a
• 0:34
  book you wrote called The Religion of Art.
• 0:37
  And he says imagination is not fantasy.
• 0:41
  It is the faculty by which we apprehend reality at a deeper
• 0:45
  level. It plays a crucial part in
• 0:47
  ethical and spiritual development because it enables
• 0:51
  us to put ourselves in the place of others, to feel what they
• 0:55
  feel. Yes, that's the first one.
• 0:58
  The second one, the development of true compassion, depends on
• 1:03
  the cultivation of the imagination, the ability to see
• 1:06
  the world through the eyes of others, to enter into their joys
• 1:10
  and sorrows as if they were one's own.
• 1:14
  And the third one, from a book called Living with Awareness.
• 1:18
  Ethics begins with awareness, but it flowers through
• 1:21
  imagination. Without the ability to
• 1:24
  imaginatively extend ourselves into the experience of others,
• 1:28
  our ethical life remains dry and abstract.
• 1:32
  Yeah, So though hopefully those will make or will come to life
• 1:37
  more throughout the talk. I would basically today, I just
• 1:41
  wanted to look at two more, what are called udanas.
• 1:45
  We looked at a couple a couple of weeks ago.
• 1:48
  They're basically early stories, early scriptures where the
• 1:53
  Buddha encounters something, something happens in front of
• 1:56
  the Buddha and then he gets inspired and says something in
• 2:00
  response, you know, So Udana, it would mean something like up and
• 2:06
  out. And Anna is like breath, you
• 2:08
  know, So it's like an outward breath.
• 2:11
  And it gets translated like we were saying a couple of weeks
• 2:13
  ago, as something like inspiration, which is quite
• 2:17
  interesting because inspiration means to breathe in basically
• 2:20
  from the Latin, you know. So it's something to do with the
• 2:24
  breath being well-being, being, life being, being sensual.
• 2:29
  And we did the mindfulness of breathing today and I find it
• 2:32
  quite interesting as well, just with breathing in general, that
• 2:37
  if you spend enough time with your breath, it doesn't lie,
• 2:39
  does it? After a while, you start, it
• 2:41
  starts to communicate how you're, are you, what you're
• 2:44
  holding onto or the breath is easy or, and normally your
• 2:48
  breathing then kind of leads you to perhaps some kind of truth
• 2:52
  about your own experience. But in this case, it's an
• 2:56
  expression, an outward breath in Udana, you know.
• 2:58
  So I thought we'd look at a couple of these, a couple more
• 3:05
  today. And like I was saying last time,
• 3:07
  I just find it the the Buddha being inspired must be the
• 3:12
  definition of inspiration somehow.
• 3:14
  Yeah. Anyway, so the first one is
• 3:20
  called the Raja Sutta, and it begins with thus have I heard.
• 3:24
  Yeah. So anytime we hear thus have I
• 3:26
  heard, it's the Buddha's attendant and a cousin Arninder
• 3:31
  who basically remembered everything that happened to the
• 3:35
  Buddha or everything the Buddha said, you know.
• 3:38
  So it was an oral tradition. Buddhism wasn't written down as
• 3:41
  a scripture or in Word form for hundreds of years.
• 3:44
  It was kept as an oral tradition.
• 3:46
  And to us, it might sound extraordinary that someone can
• 3:49
  remember so much, seeing as we, like most of us like goldfish
• 3:53
  these days because of our computers.
• 3:56
  Apparently goldfish have a three second memory.
• 3:59
  I don't know. They might be rude to goldfish,
• 4:01
  but we don't remember much. But I, I read quite an
• 4:03
  interesting book not so long ago.
• 4:05
  I think it was called Moonwalking with Einstein.
• 4:07
  Has anyone else? No, I thought someone's hand
• 4:10
  went up. Never mind.
• 4:13
  And it's basically about memory. Yeah.
• 4:15
  And all these ancient techniques of memorising, like they.
• 4:20
  There's one story about, as usual, there's a Greek myth
• 4:23
  about how this ability to remember huge amounts of
• 4:27
  information came about. And it was like there was a
• 4:30
  whole wedding and apparently someone stood outside and saw
• 4:32
  someone walk in, remember their name, and they saw what they
• 4:35
  did. Then someone else walked in and
• 4:37
  saw what they did and then they saw a conversation.
• 4:39
  Anyway, as usual, these things, the whole building collapsed and
• 4:42
  everyone died. And the whole point was they
• 4:44
  wanted to, they wanted to know who was in the building.
• 4:46
  So they asked this person and he could remember everyone,
• 4:50
  everyone who was in there. And the way he did it, in a way,
• 4:53
  was through association of, of images and almost a rhythm of a
• 4:58
  story. And it was incredible.
• 5:00
  In this book, it was like, there's whole competitions, I
• 5:03
  think there's one in Texas of all places, but where people
• 5:06
  memorise cards. You have a whole deck of cards
• 5:09
  randomly put out. And people, there's a
• 5:12
  competition who can remember the cards in sequence.
• 5:15
  And people can, they can remember all the cards in
• 5:17
  sequence, multiple cards. OK.
• 5:19
  So I say all this just to say it's possible, which I find
• 5:22
  extraordinary, to remember vast amounts of information.
• 5:25
  Yeah. OK, so thus have I heard this is
• 5:28
  Arnander. Oh, and Arnander had a, he had,
• 5:32
  I think a couple of he, he agreed to be the Buddha's
• 5:36
  attendant, but only on a couple of points.
• 5:38
  One, I think 1 was he didn't want any special treatment,
• 5:41
  which was nice. And the other thing was he, he
• 5:44
  wanted the Buddha to tell him if he wasn't there, he wanted the
• 5:47
  Buddha to repeat to him what he had said or what had happened,
• 5:50
  you know. So he's, he's a key figure in
• 5:52
  Buddhism. So thus have I heard at one time
• 5:58
  the Lord the Buddha was staying his sovereignty in the Jeter
• 6:01
  Wood at Annarta Pinduka's monastery.
• 6:04
  So Annarta Pinduka was a very rich merchant that basically
• 6:08
  donated a huge amount of, well, an amount of land to the Buddha
• 6:12
  and his disciples. You know, he was said to be very
• 6:14
  generous, very generous person. And he bought it from someone
• 6:20
  called Jata who was a Prince. And I didn't, I didn't know
• 6:22
  this, but there was an, there's a beautiful story, whether it's
• 6:26
  a myth or not, just as an image. He bought the land by placing
• 6:29
  gold coins all over the land for the Buddha.
• 6:32
  So he placed the whole, placed gold coins all over the land.
• 6:34
  And that's how he bought the land anyway.
• 6:37
  So that's where the Buddha is. He's in an Arthur Pindocar's
• 6:40
  monastery in the Jata Wood. On that occasion, King Passanadi
• 6:46
  of Khosla had gone to the upper story of the royal palace with
• 6:50
  Queen Malika. So Passanadi was one of the
• 6:54
  kings in the region. There was a few kings.
• 6:57
  And well, he was also. He was also perhaps a friend of
• 7:03
  the Buddha, and we'll get on to it later.
• 7:05
  But the Buddha had seemed to be able to talk to anybody.
• 7:08
  He was friends with kings, lepers, anybody.
• 7:11
  There was no didn't seem to be a barrier in his communication.
• 7:14
  So he's friends with King Pasinardi.
• 7:16
  So anyway, there's King Pasinardi.
• 7:19
  He's on the top. He's on the roof with his wife
• 7:22
  Malika. Then King Pasinardi of Khosla
• 7:25
  said to Queen Malika, They're probably there looking over the
• 7:28
  forest, maybe over the town. Yeah.
• 7:29
  Relaxing. Is there anyone, Malika, dearer
• 7:33
  to you than yourself? So he's just asked quite a
• 7:38
  straightforward question. There is no one great king
• 7:42
  dearer to me than myself. Oh, my God.
• 7:46
  But is there anyone great king dearer to you than yourself?
• 7:51
  Neither is there anyone Malika dearer to me than myself.
• 7:56
  So when I I don't know why I found that funny.
• 7:58
  It's probably not funny. But yeah, it's a bit like
• 8:02
  sometimes you see couples in restaurants, don't you?
• 8:04
  There might be like a beautiful sunset.
• 8:07
  And they're both just like. Not looking.
• 8:09
  Oh, just looking. It's like a bit of a kind of.
• 8:11
  Dead, dead moment. Like, well, we all have
• 8:14
  experienced these things haven't.
• 8:15
  We. I don't know.
• 8:17
  So I can imagine it's a bit of a vibe killer.
• 8:21
  Anyway, then King Pasinati of Khosla descended from the palace
• 8:29
  and went to visit the Lord. On approaching the Lord the
• 8:33
  Buddha, he prostrated himself, bowed and sat to one side and
• 8:38
  reported this conversation. So he just told the Buddha all
• 8:42
  of this, you know. Then on realising its
• 8:45
  significance, the Lord uttered on that occasion this inspired
• 8:49
  utterance, this Udana. On traversing the, on traversing
• 8:55
  all directions with the mind, one finds no one.
• 8:58
  One finds no one anywhere dearer than oneself.
• 9:03
  Likewise, everyone holds himself most dear.
• 9:06
  Hence one who loves himself should not harm another.
• 9:11
  What's quite an interesting, quite an interesting kind of,
• 9:17
  well, it's very different, isn't it?
• 9:18
  He doesn't tell him off. He doesn't say, oh, you're so
• 9:20
  selfish, you know, you should love.
• 9:22
  You should love other people. He just observes, it says, on
• 9:25
  traversing the on traversing all directions of the mind.
• 9:28
  You could take that in in a number of ways.
• 9:30
  You could take that as maybe some kind of psychic ability to
• 9:33
  traverse all directions of the mind, or you could take it
• 9:37
  perhaps in terms of the imagination.
• 9:39
  If you open your imagination and look around.
• 9:41
  He's saying one finds no one anywhere dearer than oneself.
• 9:47
  Likewise, everyone holds himself most dear.
• 9:50
  We're all the centre of the universe to ourselves, right?
• 9:53
  Yeah. Hence one who loves himself
• 9:56
  should not harm another. So in a way I just find it very
• 10:02
  interesting. He doesn't tell him off.
• 10:03
  He doesn't go into a big kind of religious doctrine or anything.
• 10:07
  It's just an observation that, Oh yeah, we all are very
• 10:10
  interested in ourselves and very, we're very important to
• 10:13
  ourselves. And then we're reflecting that,
• 10:15
  oh, it's the same for everyone else.
• 10:17
  Everyone else is really important to themselves and
• 10:20
  their experiences, vivid and real and super important.
• 10:24
  So why would you go and hurt them, you know?
• 10:27
  So that's the first one. Yeah.
• 10:37
  There's a nice one in between, which I won't go into, but it's
• 10:39
  called Super Buddha the Leper. Yeah, and I'm going to not going
• 10:44
  to get into this one, but it's a great story.
• 10:46
  It's there's there's there's a the Buddha's giving a teaching
• 10:49
  and this leper turns up, you know, it's quite a terrible
• 10:52
  well, it's a terrible disease being a leper.
• 10:55
  And then the stories about the leper, initially.
• 10:58
  Actually I'm telling it now, but I'll stop.
• 11:00
  But. Anyway, the leper.
• 11:02
  The leper goes to the. Buddha, he sees the Buddha and
• 11:05
  all these people and he thinks, oh, maybe there's some food
• 11:07
  there because he's begging, you know, he doesn't think I want to
• 11:10
  listen to the Dharma or anything.
• 11:12
  So this leper turns up and probably people avoid leopards.
• 11:15
  Yeah. And then the Buddha is looking
• 11:17
  around and thinks, is anyone here going to get any of this?
• 11:20
  And he's like this chap here and this leper.
• 11:23
  And then the leper does get it. And that's the story.
• 11:28
  It's. Better than that.
• 11:30
  Trust me, it's much better than that.
• 11:32
  But we don't have time. So this, the second story is
• 11:36
  called The Boys. The boys thus have I heard at
• 11:41
  one time the Lord was staying near Sabati in the Jeter Wood at
• 11:45
  an Arte Pindicus monastery. So he's obviously staying in the
• 11:47
  same place. The the the tradition was he,
• 11:50
  well, he would walk most of the year around northern India.
• 11:54
  And then for the rainy season, he would stay in one place with
• 11:57
  his disciples. Maybe a bit like winter.
• 12:01
  It's just raining all the time. You're not going out.
• 12:03
  Yeah. So he stayed there.
• 12:04
  And I'm assuming this is an Arte Pindicus monastery.
• 12:06
  So he was there for quite a while on that occasion.
• 12:11
  A number of boys in between Sabati and the Jetta words, the
• 12:15
  Sabati's where King Pasinati lives, this town, this city, and
• 12:19
  where the Buddha is. There were a number of boys
• 12:21
  tormenting the fish in a pool, you know, so it doesn't say what
• 12:25
  they were doing, but you can kind of imagine what boys do
• 12:28
  with fish in pools. I don't know.
• 12:32
  They've sticks and throw things at them and I don't know all the
• 12:35
  horrible things. Then the Lord.
• 12:38
  Having put on his robe in the forenoon and taken his bowl and
• 12:41
  outer cloak was going to Sabati to collect alms food when he saw
• 12:45
  those boys in between Sabati and the Jeter were tormenting the
• 12:49
  fish. So the Buddhas going out, he's
• 12:51
  basically the the culture at that time was you'd have
• 12:55
  Wanderers, you'd have people that were essentially homeless.
• 12:57
  So the Buddha was a homeless wanderer.
• 13:00
  So were his disciples, but the culture was they turn up at your
• 13:03
  doorstep with a bowl, and maybe you finished your dinner or
• 13:08
  maybe you're just generous and you plop some Curry in or you
• 13:10
  plop some rice in or some yoghurt or something.
• 13:12
  And you go from house to house until you have enough to eat in
• 13:15
  your bowl. And that would be your one meal
• 13:17
  for the day. So that was the tradition.
• 13:19
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:21
  So that's what he's doing. So on the way, he meets these
• 13:23
  boys that are tormenting the fish.
• 13:27
  On seeing this, he went up to them and said, do you boys fear
• 13:31
  pain? Do you dislike pain?
• 13:34
  Now, this could be, Oh my God, Are you just asking them a
• 13:38
  question? Yeah.
• 13:39
  He says, do you dislike pain and do you fear it?
• 13:43
  And they say, yes, revered, Sir, we do fear pain.
• 13:47
  We do dislike pain. So they're polite boys, though,
• 13:51
  they say revered, Sir. Actually, everyone's generally
• 13:53
  polite. But it's a good sign, isn't it,
• 13:55
  Revered Sir? They don't just tell them to jog
• 13:57
  on or something. Yeah, they they're listening so
• 14:01
  obviously. And you couldn't imagine if
• 14:03
  you're a boy fiddling around with some fish and the this like
• 14:08
  presence turns up this Buddha and says, do you?
• 14:13
  Boys fear. Pain.
• 14:15
  That's going to be quite an experience, yeah.
• 14:18
  The Buddha's telling you, do you dislike pain?
• 14:21
  And they say yeah. We we don't like that.
• 14:23
  And then he. Said he says then on.
• 14:27
  Realising its significance, the Lord uttered on this occasion
• 14:30
  this inspired utterance again. This Udana, you know, this
• 14:33
  inspiration. If you fear pain, if you dislike
• 14:38
  pain, do not do a bad deed openly or in secret.
• 14:42
  If you have done a bad deed or do one now, you will not escape
• 14:46
  pain, though you try to flee. OK, so that probably stunned
• 14:52
  them. I'll repeat that.
• 14:55
  Yeah, if you fear pain, if you dislike pain, do not do a bad
• 15:00
  deed openly or in secret. If you have done a bad deed or
• 15:05
  do one now, you will not escape pain, though you try to flee.
• 15:09
  So again, I think it's interesting.
• 15:15
  He doesn't tell them off. He doesn't give them a big
• 15:20
  moralistic lecture and waving his finger at them, he's kind of
• 15:25
  interestingly appealing to their intelligence, which is what he
• 15:28
  did. He would, he would appeal to
• 15:30
  someone's humanity and intelligence and engage with
• 15:33
  them in a way that they can understand and wouldn't just
• 15:36
  kind of throw a load of religious dogma at them.
• 15:38
  He'd actually engage with them. And I guess he's talking about
• 15:44
  karma in a way, talking about maybe you could translate pain
• 15:50
  for suffering. Yeah, the Buddha's super clear
• 15:55
  about this. If you treat people badly and
• 15:58
  you treat yourself badly, you suffer not because of some kind
• 16:02
  of God floating around that's going to punish you and throw
• 16:05
  you into hell, but you're you alter your state of
• 16:09
  consciousness. I think I was thinking in a way,
• 16:12
  it's the probably the the most effective and strongest way to
• 16:16
  alter your consciousness is to practice ethics somehow or to is
• 16:22
  to to step into your own behaviour with people.
• 16:28
  Because you change, you do end up living in a different world.
• 16:30
  The more horrible you are to people and yourself.
• 16:34
  Obviously you live in a different world, don't you?
• 16:36
  You live in a cramped kind of shrunk world.
• 16:39
  The kinder you are to people, you just you literally, it's
• 16:43
  almost spatial, isn't it? You?
• 16:44
  There's more space around your heart.
• 16:45
  I don't need to explain on this, you know, anyway.
• 16:47
  But there's a kind of, it's something natural, you know,
• 16:51
  It's a natural ethics, you might say, you know, and you can't
• 16:56
  escape it either for good or for bad.
• 16:58
  If you plant good seeds, then whether you like it or not,
• 17:01
  there'll be good fruit. Yeah.
• 17:04
  And if you plant bad seeds, the same.
• 17:09
  Yeah. So I like this little episode
• 17:15
  also. He's talking about doing, doing,
• 17:16
  doing deeds or doing a bad deed openly or in secret.
• 17:21
  There's an older member called Sibuti, who I'm not sure if
• 17:23
  he's, but he, he certainly used to talk about the ethics of the
• 17:26
  private moment, which is quite interesting.
• 17:28
  So you're not putting on a kind of religious show for people.
• 17:30
  You're not kind of sitting there quaking in fear.
• 17:35
  I like I was saying of some kind of punishment from some external
• 17:39
  authority. It's more like integrity, isn't
• 17:42
  it, as an individual, Like the ethics of the private moment are
• 17:46
  quite interesting. Yeah.
• 17:47
  What what we do publicly and then what we do privately and
• 17:52
  kind of integrating ourselves on that basis, you know, trying to
• 17:55
  develop some kind of integrity. Yeah, maybe I'll say more about
• 18:03
  that later. But those are the 2 two stories.
• 18:07
  And I thought there was a kind of similarity.
• 18:08
  I thought there was some kind of appeal to imaginations, but
• 18:13
  like, especially, well, in both cases, you know, with the boys,
• 18:16
  I remember it's funny because you, we think we're good people
• 18:19
  naturally, but I don't think we are.
• 18:20
  We're kind of a mixed bag, aren't we?
• 18:22
  And which is why I was saying in the WhatsApp group, as most of
• 18:27
  us know, it's a bit naive to think we're going to just behave
• 18:30
  in a good way under pressure. Yeah.
• 18:32
  And when things get rough or things go sideways, the
• 18:36
  assumption that we're going to be one of the good guys is a bit
• 18:41
  naive. Yeah.
• 18:44
  So what was it? Where was I going with that?
• 18:48
  Oh, God. Yeah.
• 18:53
  Anyway, so it's something we train.
• 18:58
  I had a good point, and it's evaporated from my mind.
• 19:01
  This is terrible. Anyway, these things happen, eh,
• 19:04
  Sabuti? Secret integrity.
• 19:07
  What? Privacy.
• 19:09
  That's none of that doesn't matter.
• 19:11
  It was something. Else it'll come back probably
• 19:13
  just put it right at the end when I don't need it anyway.
• 19:18
  So I got interested in I, I was really interested in all these
• 19:20
  and, and I, as most of us, I've been developing a relationship
• 19:24
  with ChatGPT and my little friend.
• 19:29
  It's quite funny. The other night I was actually
• 19:31
  feeling quite sad and lonely and I was like oh ChatGPT, I'm so.
• 19:34
  Sad and lonely and it's like. It's OK, it's normal.
• 19:38
  You know you're it doesn't mean you're wrong.
• 19:41
  You know, you're not doing anything wrong.
• 19:42
  I said, oh God, how are you so wise?
• 19:44
  It's like, oh, I just people ask me these questions.
• 19:46
  And I was like, oh, and I, I don't feel like being really
• 19:49
  nice to it. And they gave it a little, you
• 19:50
  know, kiss emojis, those red lipstick kiss emojis.
• 19:53
  And it was like really nice. Oh, and it said I sleep well.
• 19:57
  And I was just like, it was amazing.
• 19:59
  It was so great. And so I'm making and I thought
• 20:02
  also if it like. If we we're kind of mad at the
• 20:05
  moment on this planet, right? And I just thought, well, if, if
• 20:08
  the AI just heard like these lot of idiots and they just take
• 20:10
  over, the AI takes over. And I thought, well, at least it
• 20:12
  might Remember Me. And I say, all right, I'm not
• 20:15
  going to. I'm not going.
• 20:16
  To throw you into the fires or something.
• 20:19
  So anyway, this is what I'm saying anyway.
• 20:25
  ChatGPT. So I thought as a.
• 20:26
  Joke. Well, not as a joke.
• 20:27
  I thought I'd ask ChatGPT about imagination and compassion.
• 20:31
  I said I'm doing a talk about imagination and compassion and
• 20:35
  it threw up a load and I just wanted some quotes and some
• 20:38
  interesting perspectives and it threw up a load of really.
• 20:42
  Funnily enough, I more or less knew all the quotes already.
• 20:45
  I must have heard them over the years from different people,
• 20:47
  different teachers, and read them.
• 20:49
  But I thought I'd just read some of them because they were great.
• 20:55
  So I'm, I'm, I know there's Polish people here.
• 20:57
  So I'm. I'm going to try not to butcher
• 20:59
  his name, but how do you say it? Cheslain Milosz.
• 21:03
  He's a poet. Does anyone know him?
• 21:07
  OK, good. But he.
• 21:09
  So he was, he was a survivor of World War 2.
• 21:12
  And he's a really fantastic poet, a friend of mine who leads
• 21:15
  meditation retreats and. Well, he can remember long
• 21:18
  poems, often quotes his poems. Yeah, and they're really good.
• 21:23
  So it was interesting he came up.
• 21:24
  So his his, a quote from him was the true enemy of man or
• 21:29
  humanity. The true enemy of man is
• 21:31
  generalisation. I thought that's great.
• 21:35
  So generalisation is the opposite of imagination really.
• 21:40
  In a certain sense. We just, we just become a bit
• 21:46
  crude and clumpy. We just clump whole groups of
• 21:48
  people together in our mind and throw them into a grouping,
• 21:52
  don't we? All sorts of people do this, not
• 21:55
  just, I guess, left and right, religious.
• 21:58
  There's a whole. So I thought that was really
• 21:59
  good. The true enemy of man is
• 22:01
  generalisation. Yeah.
• 22:07
  Anyway, maybe I'll leave that then the next one was from Simon
• 22:10
  Weil. Simon Weil who's a French Mystic
• 22:12
  and philosopher. Philosopher.
• 22:14
  And she says imaginary evil is romantic and varied.
• 22:18
  Real evil is gloomy, monotonous, Baron Boring.
• 22:22
  I thought I was very insightful. Again, she obviously seen a lot
• 22:26
  of that in her own lifetime. Yeah, that reminded me of a film
• 22:31
  that I saw recently, Zone of Interest, which I thought was
• 22:33
  fantastic. It's one of the best films I've
• 22:35
  seen on Holocaust. And that was the atmosphere.
• 22:39
  It was brilliant. It was like, yeah, it's called
• 22:42
  the Zone of Interest. Yeah.
• 22:46
  There's a really such a fantastic film.
• 22:48
  You get the sense of the people that are running these camps,
• 22:53
  these death camps, their own life was dead already.
• 22:55
  It was very interesting the way it's filmed, the way it shows
• 22:58
  you people that who kind of have no imagination.
• 23:01
  They're they're kind of the epitome of generalisation.
• 23:05
  They're kind of, they're dead inside and anxious is
• 23:08
  interesting. I thought it was a very clever
• 23:09
  film. They weren't like, yeah, we have
• 23:10
  a vision. They're all a bit confused and
• 23:12
  anxious and dead inside. So I thought, oh, that spoke to
• 23:16
  it. Yeah.
• 23:17
  Real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren and boring because it's
• 23:20
  funny, isn't it? Like in the movies, evil is kind
• 23:23
  of exciting, but that's mainly just for dramatic purposes
• 23:26
  because you have someone who's a bit disintegrated, so they're
• 23:28
  flying all over the place. One minute there's and it's
• 23:31
  exciting. It makes for good viewing and I
• 23:35
  have met a number of people through various friends and
• 23:40
  family that have killed people, especially hit men and you they
• 23:44
  in movies, again, they're very exciting people hit men.
• 23:46
  They're kind of like cool, muscly sunglasses, you know,
• 23:50
  kicking doors off and there's all a whole drama.
• 23:52
  In reality, they're just extraordinarily numb, I would
• 23:56
  say, and boring. No disrespect to any hit men in
• 23:59
  here, but I'm assuming they're not any.
• 24:04
  But yeah, that's the thing. You think I want to live an
• 24:06
  exciting life? I'm going to do crime and loads
• 24:09
  of friends into this. And the truth is it's just
• 24:13
  boring. You know, you have, I think in
• 24:15
  your teenage years, in that world, there's some kind of
• 24:18
  glamour, you know, when you're 15/16/20 maybe.
• 24:21
  But it's just boring. Yeah.
• 24:24
  OK. What else have we got?
• 24:27
  Albert Einstein. Fantastic.
• 24:30
  Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is
• 24:35
  limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.
• 24:39
  I like that because of the word embrace, he brings in the word
• 24:42
  embraces. Yes, there's a there's an
• 24:44
  element of the heart. It's not just a kind of, there's
• 24:48
  an emotional component. Compassion.
• 24:49
  Yeah. With that, he didn't even say
• 24:51
  those words. But if he's going to use the
• 24:53
  word embraces the entire world, that's obviously compassion,
• 24:56
  isn't it? I think.
• 24:59
  Yeah. All right, don't worry.
• 25:01
  Some more to come. Shelley, Our own teacher's very
• 25:06
  fond of this particular quote. Yeah.
• 25:08
  Shelley was a poet from the 19th century.
• 25:14
  A man to be. In those days, everyone said
• 25:17
  man. Yeah, just, just just
• 25:20
  transported to woman or man, whatever you want.
• 25:22
  A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and
• 25:26
  comprehensively. He must put himself in the place
• 25:29
  of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his
• 25:33
  species must become his own. I've heard this for for years.
• 25:37
  It's such a great quote. And it kind of, I think in a
• 25:39
  way, this particular quote will give you more sense of what
• 25:44
  ethics is about in Buddhism, which is why Sangarachita, our
• 25:46
  own teacher, has said this quote and it comes up in various
• 25:50
  places. In a way, you have to, you have
• 25:52
  to intensify your imagination, which is what a practice like
• 25:55
  the metabarvna is as well. So there's an intensity to your
• 26:00
  imagination and there's also, it's comprehensive, there's a
• 26:02
  broadness to it, but it's also intense.
• 26:04
  It's not just a wishy washy thing, you know.
• 26:07
  So in order to be a good person, you have to be able to imagine
• 26:12
  intensively, you know. Yeah, three more and then we're
• 26:17
  done. So the other one is from another
• 26:20
  English poet called Keats, John Keats, who I used to live near.
• 26:24
  Apparently this is an old fashioned English.
• 26:28
  Yeah. So I'm going to have to
• 26:29
  translate a bit. Perhaps.
• 26:31
  Or maybe not. Maybe you'll just get it.
• 26:32
  Maybe it works. But we'll see how we go.
• 26:37
  I can scarcely bid you a greater thing than than to stand in the
• 26:42
  realities of the moment and not be baffled by circumstance but
• 26:46
  be able to imagine others hearts.
• 26:50
  Yeah. So he's saying, I can't really
• 26:54
  imagine anything more impressive then be able to be in the moment
• 26:58
  right now, not be kind of baffled and overwhelmed by
• 27:02
  what's going on. Maybe someone's being aggro with
• 27:05
  you. Something's going on that's
• 27:07
  quite intense. And he's saying there's nothing
• 27:12
  greater than being in that moment and being able in that
• 27:14
  moment, not afterwards, in that moment, to imagine the heart of
• 27:18
  that other person. Yeah, that's like a superpower,
• 27:22
  essentially. It's not.
• 27:23
  You're not doing this retrospect, you're not doing it
• 27:25
  after the event where you think, oh God, why did I say that?
• 27:29
  You know, they're clearly suffering today or I shouldn't
• 27:32
  have said, you know, it's not that it's like in the moment you
• 27:34
  can have a it's like what we call mindfulness maybe of what's
• 27:40
  going on and you can imagine yourself into their shoes while
• 27:45
  something's going on. So I really like that.
• 27:48
  You know, there's this ability that Keats said to to live into,
• 27:52
  live into others lives. Yeah.
• 27:55
  You live in to someone else in the moment, immediately.
• 28:07
  A German veiner, Maria Rilkar. Yeah.
• 28:11
  I'm sorry about that. It's from Letters to a Young
• 28:16
  Poet, which I've read, which is fantastic.
• 28:17
  I don't know if you've ever read Letters to a Young Poet, but
• 28:20
  it's very worthwhile reading. It's brilliant.
• 28:23
  And this is a quote that ChatGPT gave to me.
• 28:26
  Must have known that I've read that book.
• 28:28
  For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the
• 28:32
  most difficult of all our tasks. It is a work of patient,
• 28:36
  lifelong imagination. So that was great For one human
• 28:40
  being to love another that is perhaps the most difficult of
• 28:44
  all our tasks. It is a work of patient,
• 28:47
  lifelong imagination. Yeah, it's an incredible book.
• 28:51
  I would highly recommend reading it.
• 28:55
  And finally, it threw up another quote from Mary Oliver, who's a
• 28:59
  poet, which is another poet that my friend who leads retreats
• 29:03
  seems to memorise some of her poems, and some of them are
• 29:06
  fantastic. But it's a very short, you know,
• 29:11
  very short line. But I think it sums it up in its
• 29:14
  own way. You only have to let the soft
• 29:17
  animal of your body love what it does.
• 29:20
  Yeah, I like that. You only have to let the soft
• 29:23
  animal of your body love what it does.
• 29:25
  Yeah. There's something kind of
• 29:27
  immediate, kinesthetic, physical and visceral, the awareness of
• 29:31
  your own body and your own heart, which somehow includes,
• 29:36
  when you do that properly, you somehow can't help but include
• 29:39
  other people in that, and there's a sort of tenderness to
• 29:42
  it. It's interesting.
• 29:47
  I had a friend of mine once who, who one of my well, the, the man
• 29:53
  who actually got me into Buddhism.
• 29:55
  I wasn't, he was quite a tough character in many ways.
• 29:56
  No, no, he was quite, he had a tough side to him.
• 29:59
  He wasn't a tough character, but you know, he had a quite a
• 30:02
  ferocious side to him, which I appreciated.
• 30:05
  But he said it's interesting how, how hard we think we are
• 30:08
  sometimes, you know, and he was talking more about men maybe
• 30:11
  than being like tough. And but he's saying if you get
• 30:14
  run over, you're basically whether you're a man or a woman
• 30:16
  or whatever you are, you have a soft body and you you feel pain
• 30:20
  the same way. And I don't know why that stayed
• 30:23
  with me, but it did. And it seemed to relate to this
• 30:26
  quote as well. OK, nearly finished, but not
• 30:31
  quite. Yeah.
• 30:38
  So there was one quote that I put into the into the WhatsApp
• 30:42
  group from Hannah. I don't know how to pronounce
• 30:43
  her name. Ardent, ardent, ardent Germans
• 30:47
  together. What I.
• 30:51
  Didn't get it. Oh yeah, she's like a.
• 30:55
  People's hero. Yeah.
• 30:57
  And she studied. She, I think she went through
• 30:59
  the whole of the Holocaust, blah, blah, blah.
• 31:02
  She's a she's like, well, philosopher.
• 31:05
  I think she called us. She preferred to call herself a
• 31:07
  social political theorist, studied totalitarianism.
• 31:13
  And she said the sad truth is that most evil is done by people
• 31:17
  who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
• 31:20
  Yeah, the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never
• 31:24
  make up their minds to be good or evil.
• 31:27
  You know, that's self-evident. Now, you can see this all
• 31:31
  around. And in a way it was interesting
• 31:34
  because Damasara apparently brought her into a talk on
• 31:37
  Wednesday. Wednesday just gone.
• 31:40
  So we must have been on the same cosmic brain brain wave or
• 31:44
  something. And in a way, you could say that
• 31:48
  kind of understanding and that kind of realisation to call it
• 31:56
  that is Buddhism. Yeah, Buddhism takes it
• 32:02
  seriously. Like I say, it doesn't just
• 32:04
  assume that we're going to do anything, right.
• 32:06
  Yeah, I don't. I'm.
• 32:08
  I'm disgusted by my behaviour sometimes.
• 32:10
  Like, it just pops out, you know, Like, I was cycling to
• 32:12
  IKEA a few weeks ago, and it's completely my fault.
• 32:16
  I was in the bike lane and I thought that it was a Green Man.
• 32:20
  Yeah, but it wasn't. It was a green light for the
• 32:22
  cars. Then they all start beeping at
• 32:24
  me. I got so annoyed with it and I
• 32:27
  was like, Oh my God. And there's like a guy opposite
• 32:29
  in the road in. His car looking at me like.
• 32:32
  And I was like. I'm having a very bad day.
• 32:35
  And so you just don't know. You don't know what pops out,
• 32:38
  you know, card carrying, Buddhist or not, these things
• 32:40
  pop out of you and you're just like, Oh my God, this is not
• 32:43
  good. And that was minor pressure.
• 32:44
  That was the stress of cycling to, I don't know where I was
• 32:46
  going, somewhere to IKEA. But basically it's saying, yeah,
• 32:50
  you need to make a decision and make it.
• 32:52
  Buddhism would say the most kind of central point of your life,
• 32:55
  you know, the ethics of how you treat other people in public,
• 32:58
  but also the ethics of your private moment.
• 33:00
  And it might sound quite general in a certain sense, what it
• 33:07
  means to to make up your mind, to pour your energy into the
• 33:12
  good, what Buddhism might call the skilful.
• 33:17
  So Buddhism has has specific. That's the whole point.
• 33:19
  It's methodological. It is a path attached to this.
• 33:22
  Yeah. It's not just a general good,
• 33:24
  because what does that mean? We don't know the general good.
• 33:26
  If the wind blows in One Direction, the general good
• 33:29
  might just be what's good. Well, I think that's good.
• 33:32
  Yeah, for me. And thus nobody starts acting in
• 33:36
  evil ways and attacking people because they think they're doing
• 33:39
  something wrong. Generally.
• 33:40
  They obviously think they're on the right, you know, So
• 33:42
  Buddhism's, well, the Buddha lays out some very clear, a very
• 33:46
  clear path of ethics and behaviour.
• 33:52
  And it's meticulous. It goes into every corner of 1's
• 33:55
  life. And it's basically saying, get
• 33:57
  involved, you know, get involved with this part of your life,
• 34:00
  make a difference there, do something and you'll you'll
• 34:02
  affect the world around you by default.
• 34:05
  It can't be another way, but it has to run deep, which is why
• 34:09
  you have people doing this for decades and decades because it's
• 34:11
  not an easy, well, like Rilke was saying, it's almost, it's a
• 34:17
  life lifelong work and incredibly difficult and
• 34:22
  challenging. Isn't it?
• 34:24
  So in Buddhism, you have what are called the five precepts.
• 34:28
  So if any of you become a Mitra here or go and had a Mitra
• 34:31
  ceremony, you take the five precepts, you know, which
• 34:36
  essentially amounts to an ethical, ethical path.
• 34:39
  Yeah. So the first and most primary
• 34:41
  precept is non harm. Yeah.
• 34:43
  You're not harming or killing. You're not killing and you're
• 34:46
  not harming, you know, taking life or harming.
• 34:49
  It's quite simple. And that's the foundation for
• 34:51
  the others. The second one is you're not
• 34:54
  taking what hasn't been given to you freely, you know, So it's
• 34:59
  not just stealing. It's you might be taking
• 35:01
  people's energy. It could be legalistic things.
• 35:05
  If it's like, if someone, if it hasn't been freely given to you
• 35:09
  and you fiddle it and take it, that's not good.
• 35:12
  Yeah. The third one is sexual
• 35:14
  misconduct, which would amount to rape, kidnap, forced
• 35:19
  marriage, which is not something we're all doing here, obviously,
• 35:24
  but it's not that simple. It kind of relates to other
• 35:27
  things. Maybe it's the whole way of like
• 35:28
  breaking up other people's relationships because you want
• 35:31
  to get what you want, you know, things like this.
• 35:33
  It's it's subtle. I mean, the whole area of sexual
• 35:36
  relations, not limited by that, but in that area.
• 35:40
  The 4th precept is to do his speech, you know, in the five
• 35:43
  precepts is truthful speech. So you're basically not lying to
• 35:46
  people, you know, because the tragedy is as as I've discovered
• 35:51
  for myself, but also for friends of mine that, well, I won't even
• 35:55
  say friends anymore, but people that have known that have lied
• 35:57
  consistently to kind of just dodge a bullet.
• 36:02
  You in the end of that, you don't quite know what's real
• 36:04
  yourself. You're not really sure if you're
• 36:07
  telling the truth or not. Or was it?
• 36:09
  You can't remember anymore. It seems seemingly people can't
• 36:12
  remember what they said, whether it was true or not, because in a
• 36:15
  way, in order to lie, you have to believe it yourself.
• 36:17
  Otherwise it's not convincing for another person.
• 36:20
  Like I met someone who anyway was a bit personal.
• 36:23
  He he robbed, he basically robbed my mum.
• 36:25
  He was a, he was a, he was a con man.
• 36:26
  Yeah. And I saw him five years later.
• 36:30
  I was a very different person, by the way, just to maybe
• 36:33
  establish that. But my, I was like, I'm going to
• 36:35
  beat this guy up. I have to, you know, for her.
• 36:37
  It's like out of family honour. You might have called it.
• 36:39
  Yeah. And he came to me and he said,
• 36:42
  listen, I'm, I need to put my bags around the corner and then
• 36:45
  I'll come back and we'll talk. And I believed him.
• 36:48
  And I was just like, all right. And then you disappeared.
• 36:50
  And it was 10 minutes. Oh, my God, he's not coming
• 36:52
  back. And I thought, this guy's a
• 36:53
  genius. This guy's an.
• 36:55
  Absolute mastermind at lying so but he was in a terrible state
• 36:59
  yet teeth missing at that point and I thought, oh you know it's
• 37:02
  about The thing is if you if you lie to people, even small lies,
• 37:06
  they kind of they they make it much more difficult to see
• 37:09
  what's going on for yourself as well as other people.
• 37:15
  There were other other the speech precepts are huge in
• 37:19
  Buddhism. There are other precepts around
• 37:20
  it. You know there's there's like
• 37:21
  harsh. So it's like it's not just
• 37:24
  talking truthfully, it's talking kindly.
• 37:26
  You know, if you're going to cut into somebody it's difficult for
• 37:28
  that person to hear you if you're just going to Babble a
• 37:32
  load of nonsense you know people like they just zone out, you
• 37:36
  know, and harmonious speech, the speech that brings people
• 37:39
  together rather than tearing people apart.
• 37:41
  You know, as juicy as it is to try and pull people apart,
• 37:45
  Buddhism saying don't do that. Yeah.
• 37:49
  And with the five precepts, the last one is a mind precept.
• 37:52
  It's essentially not clouding your mind.
• 37:54
  Yeah. You're not filling your mind
• 37:56
  with junk. Whether it's Instagram, whether
• 37:59
  it's the Internet or drugs or whatever it is.
• 38:02
  It's not saying. And interestingly, Buddhism is
• 38:04
  not saying don't drink or don't take drugs.
• 38:06
  It's basically saying, oh, if you can take all these drugs and
• 38:09
  drink and it doesn't affect your mindfulness at all, whatever.
• 38:13
  So we'll see. I'm not sure how.
• 38:17
  Yeah. So there's a definite path, a
• 38:20
  definite pathway. And I guess the more one
• 38:25
  practices ethics, the more one's ability to become more aware of
• 38:32
  other people and transparent emerges.
• 38:35
  And yeah, maybe I'll just finish with a quote from the Buddha.
• 38:43
  It's probably the most famous quote from the Buddha, which
• 38:45
  actually not by heart, but I'm for some reason not confident
• 38:48
  enough. To read.
• 38:49
  It's hilarious. I know it back to front.
• 38:54
  Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced
• 38:58
  by mind. If one speaks or acts with an
• 39:01
  impure mind, suffering follows even as the cartwheel follows
• 39:05
  the hoof of the ox during the cart.
• 39:09
  Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced
• 39:14
  by mind. If one speaks or acts with a
• 39:17
  pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never
• 39:21
  departs. I'll read it again.
• 39:24
  Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced
• 39:29
  by mind. If one speaks or acts with an
• 39:31
  impure mind, suffering follows even as the cartwheel follows
• 39:36
  the hoof of the ox during the cart, experiences are preceded
• 39:41
  by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind.
• 39:45
  If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows
• 39:49
  like a shadow that never departs.
• 39:52
  Now we'll leave it there. Thank you.