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What to do with Dukkha ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

In this piece I would like to briefly restate my understanding of the Four Truths. This is already set out in my books The Feeling Buddha and Not Everything is Impermanent and will be familiar to those of my students who follow my work closely. It will however be new to those who follow conventional ideas about Buddhism. The former group may also find it useful to have a succinct statement.

Basics

The Four Truths are dukkha, samudaya, nirodha and marga. They are often referred to as the Four Noble Truths, but a better translation is Four Truths for Noble Ones.

The commentaries generally take the four to be following the model of a medical prescription or a problem solving formula. On this basis the four represent, respectively, the problem, the cause, the goal and the method. If you follow the method you will defeat the cause, overcome the problem and arrive at the goal. I disagree with this interpretation. I will say why later.

In my understanding, there is a better way to understand this, namely that the four represent, respectively, the stimulus, the response, the alternative and the outcome. Dukkha is inevitable. It spurs us to respond. The response could be better. When it is better we get a better outcome.

Dukkha is the Existential Situation

Let’s clarify that:
Dukkha: Dukkha is our existential situation. This is the starting point. You cannot eliminate dukkha without eliminating sentient life. Dukkha is not something you can get rid off in this life, it is this life.
Samudaya: When we are aroused or disturbed there is energy. We respond. Commonly we deploy that energy to try to get rid of the disturbance. We seek distraction. If that does not work, we seek personal security. If that too is frustrated we become destructive, either to ourselves or others or both. All this tends only to make more dukkha. These three options are included in the original text. The way humans respond to trouble tends to make matters worse.
Nirodha: There is an alternative. When the samudaya energy arises it can be turned to more sublime purpose. This means not letting the energy run wild and not being obsessed with the original dukkha. These details are also mentioned in the text.
Marga: The outcome of nirodha is that one is on a noble path. This is the so-called eightfold path. It is the outcome of using the energy stimulated by our existential situation in a constructive rather than a self-serving manner. That is Buddhism in a nutshell. Humankind, in its scramble to eliminate dukkha is destroying itself and its world. There is an alternative, but few are ready.

An Example

Let me give a strong example. Two babies die. The parents experience dukkha. The dukkha is that we live in such a world where babies sometimes do die. The parent of the first baby goes into a depression from which they never really recover. They seek to distract themselves, but it is never enough. They seek personal security by becoming a workaholic or having materialistic obsessions, but it does not succeed. Often they just long for oblivion. Such a person can be a suicide risk.

The parent of the other child is just as distressed, but turns this energy toward some positive purpose. Perhaps they start a service to help parents who were similarly bereaved or a campaign to find a cure for the disease that killed the baby. Perhaps they enter the religious life or in some other way devote themselves to the service of others. Such a person experiences dukkha just like the other one, but it has a very different outcome. In this second case the outcome is a life with a good vision, good thoughts, good words, good deeds, a right livelihood that involves constructive effort, that keeps good things in mind and that is well-focussed. In other words, they are on Buddha’s eightfold path.

Reasons for the Better Interpretation

1. Formal Reason: I think the better interpretation is more likely and better for a number of reasons. First among these is that we can see that Buddha’s teachings are often given in list form and always the order of the list is important. It says what leads to what. One leads to two leads to three leads to four. The commentarial interpretation does not conform to this pattern. It has two leading to one and four leading to three, In my interpretation, one comes first. Two follows. Three is then a possibility and if it is followed, four results. One two three four is the Buddha’s usual way of talking.

2. Buddha's Own Case: The second reason is that it fits Buddha’s own case. He encountered dukkha. Firstly his mother died giving birth to him. Secondly he saw the “four sights”. That was his starting point. He then tried distraction through the luxuries of palace life, followed by a quest to make himself into a spiritual master who would be immune to suffering, followed by realisation that he was getting nowhere, whereupon he broke his relationships with teachers and fellows and went away and tortured himself. Then he had a turn around and realised an alternative. Thereafter he lived a sublime life. Buddha himself did not become enlightened by following the eightfold path, he found the eightfold path by becoming enlightened.

3. Etymology: A third reason for the better interpretation is that it follows the meanings of the words closely. To begin with the tight translation “truths for noble ones” implies that noble ones do not get rid of dukkha nor samudaya but they do have nirodha and marga too. Samudaya implies “what comes up”. Marge does not mean path in the sense of a road that leads somewhere so much as track in the sense of the trace left by someone who has gone somewhere. The eightfold path is not a prescription, it is a list of the characteristics by which you can identify the animal that left the track. If a person leaves a track with those characteristics then they are enlightened. Only an enlightened person is on the eightfold path. Unenlightened people cannot follow the eightfold path - they are incapable.

4. Common Sense: A fourth reason for the better interpretation is that it makes better sense. As a matter of fact, dukkha does not go away. The commentarial solution only works in the sense, drawn from Indian popular spirituality, that if you totally overcome desire and become extinct you will not be reborn and so will not suffer dukkha any more. Modern Western people want to overcome dukkha, but they don’t want to be extinct. The commentarial goal occurs when you die, not in the midst of life. Only in that sense does it make sense. The modern hijacking of Buddhism as a path to happiness by overcoming desire is misplaced. No matter how much you meditate you will not thereby stop babies dying and parents grieving, nor should you. Buddhism is about living a noble life, not a supine one. Buddha was interested in the “end of dukkha” in the sense of “what is it for?” not in the sense of “how do we get rid of it?” “End” has both meanings in Sanskrit just as it does in English and one can readily be mistaken. All the great religions have to face the question of the meaning of suffering. Buddhism’s answer is that one can make it meaningful by deploying the energy that it gives rise to in positive ways. Then the suffering is not in vain.

5. How Buddha taught: A fifth reason for the better interpretation is that it is in line with Buddha’s other teachings, and especially his method. When Buddha met Kisagotami whose baby had died, he did not tell here how to feel better. He told her to go and listen to the stories of many other bereaved people. No doubt she suffered hearing those stories. She suffered more, but it redirected her energy. She had been trying to get dukkha taken away but now she recognised it fully and this enabled her to turn her life in a new direction. Buddha does not tell people how to escape from suffering, he turns them to face it fully, but then to find a way onward. The same is true when he meets Angulimala the killer or Patacara the mad woman. It is also notable that in none of these three seminal cases did he tell the person to go and meditate, nor to follow the programme of asceticism that he himself had engaged in. None of them were meditators. They did ot get awakened by applying a methodology, but by facing existential reality while inspired by a wise and compassionate helper.

How the Alternative is Possible

When we consider all this we might still ask, how is it possible for a person to come to adopt the alternative rather than just do what most people do? When we look at the three seminal cases we see that they all became inspired. A new spirit came into them. They found faith where previously they had had bitterness or despair. This is the basic character of the spiritual life. It may be framed in a diversity of names and concepts, but truly spiritual people are full of faith and inspiration. It is also notable that they got it through an encounter with Buddha. Throughout the history of Buddhism, when we look at the famous stories, people rarely get enlightened by meditating or doing some formulaic practice; they mostly get enlightened when, after seriously struggling with an existential problem, they have a significant encounter with an enlightened person. Enlightenment is transmitted and encounter is a very important part of this. It is not awarded like an exam result to those who worked hard at a syllabus. It is transmitted when a person in deep existential dilemma finds the light, usually through another person, but certainly through something that comes from beyond themselves. It takes some other power. The idea that everything comes from within is mistaken. Nobody gets enlightened by cutting themselves off except those who, like Buddha, after doing so, realise the mistake they have made.

When Buddha realised his mistake he saw that dukkha is inescapable but that the reaction he had to it did not have to be a disaster, there was an alternative and by taking it he was able to turn his life around. This turning around - paravritti - is the real prescription of Buddhism.

Collective Application

This last point is a rider to the above, but an important one. Thinking on these things one may well see that they apply to humanity as a whole as well as to individuals. Human culture seems desperate in its attempts to eliminate dukkha, be comfortable and find happiness, yet mostly these attempts just make matters worse. Humans are now less well adapted to life on Planet Earth than they were ten thousand years ago. Even then they were already causing a good deal of trouble, disturbing the natural balance. If we cannot turn around, there is a real danger that the remaining species of life that we have not already exterminated will also be lost and we shall painfully go with them. We want comfort so we accumulate things. To get things we want money. To get money we need economic activity. To have more economic activity we make things to  decay quicker so they have to be endlessly replaced. Thus we become  frantic for more, more, more, while squandering what we already have. As we get more glitter we become more shoddy, as we subdue nature we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on. Buddhism is rarely properly understood. When it is there are "some few with but little dust whose lives are turned around. Yet this is not enough to save humanity. There is a hole in the boat and our efforts to avoid getting wet are only tending to make the hole bigger. Will we wake up in time?

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Meditation Sickness ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

OUTLINE

The medical metaphor is used a lot in Buddhist studies. The Buddha is sometimes referred to as “the great physician” curing the dis-eases of the world. The Four Truths which are fundamental to Buddhism - dukkha, samudaya, nirodha and marga - are often explained (wrongly, in my view) as analogous to a medical prescripion. Among these medical metaphors we also find the idea of meditation sickness. I would like to take this notion seriously here and see what we can make of it.

Firstly, I think we should distinguish between meditation sicknesses, meditation obstacles and the corruption of meditation purpose. Meditation sicknesses are states that can come about as a result of meditation, generally meditation that has, in effect, been practised with an unsound motivation (though, necessarily, nobody has perfect motivation at the outset). Meditation obstacles, by contrast, are conditions that make it difficult to meditate in the first place.

Types of meditation sickness:
The following list includes the major and most common forms.
1. Unsustainable infatuation: The practitioner falls in love with the practice in an unsustainable way that in due course often leads to an equally sudden rejection or loss of faith.
2. Pursuit of visions and emotional high: The practitioner pursues the practice primarily in a quest for visionary or psychodelic experiences and is endlessly looking for such novelties.
3. Attachment to heavenly states: The practitioner makes some progress and attains to one of the higher dhyanas and becomes strongly attached to it, wanting only to dwell there.
4. Emptiness disease: The practitioner, having had an insight into emptiness loses all sense of purpose or direction. At an extreme this can become a kind of psychopathy.
5. Self-inflation: The practitioner believes him or herself to be enlightened and in possession of super-normal abilities in a way that leads to recklessness or abuse of others.
6. Reactivation of extreme ego states: Meditation can trigger neurotic or psychotic symptoms in persons already so predisposed.
7. Loss of connection with instinct: The practitioner may become so detached from bodily processes that he or she loses the ability to respond naturally to somatic messages.
8. Accidie: The practitioner becomes weary of spirit and can see no point in the practice or in any other activity.

Types of meditation obstacles:
There are any number, but the following are well represented in Buddhist teachings.
1. Worry and flurry: The person has an aggitated mind, preoccupied by a multiplicity of concerns that will not allow them the repose in which to settle to a contemplative exercise.
2. Over intellectualism: The person is too caught up in theory to be able to get down to actual practice.
3. The Five Hindrances: sensual desire, hatred, sloth, restlessness, and doubt.
4. The three poisons: sensuality, wrath and pride.
5. Presence of overpowering emotions: such a grief
6. Lack of suitable ambient conditions: Thus, in the texts,the meditator is advised to go to a secluded spot.

The obstacles can be considered to be things that good meditation practice might cure, whereas the diseases are things that faulty practice may bring about.

The Corruption of Purpose
I mentioned above that the sicknesses may be the result of pursuing meditation with inappropriate motivation and qualified this by adding that it is more or less inevitable that one has the wrong motivation at the start. I want to stress this point because the rectification of motivation is one of the prime objectives of Buddhism. If a person can attain to right intention they have done nearly everything that Buddha asks. Buddhist ethics are framed largely in terms of intention. The blind man who steps on insects is not at fault because he intended no harm and did not know he was inflicting any.

Meditation has become popular in recent years. This popularity owes a little to individuals becoming genuinely spiritually inspired, but a great deal more to others exploiting it as a path to physical and mental health benefits, as a form of personal effectiveness training or escape from the stress and melancholy induced by modern life. The development of utilitarian mindfulness practice falls into this category, and we have all heard that “it has nothing to do with religion”. However, if meditation does not have a fundamentally religious intention, it may well contribute to a spiritual sickness of one kind or another.

SICKNESSES

Unsustainable Infatuation
Sometimes, when a person “discovers” meditation, they take it on with a great initial enthusiasm. This enthusiasm may be powered by fantasies of what meditation is going to do for them. These imaginings may range from the utilitarian motivations just mentioned - reduce stress, bring unassailable happiness, solve personal problems, or cure depressive symptoms, etc - to various forms of self-enhancement including the idea that one is soon going to become a great Zen master, be enlightened, and have mental powers that will confound one’s rivals and generally make one immune to the slings and arrows of fate. These fantasies, being exaggerated, cannot be sustained indefinitely and when the evidence of non-attainment becomes unavoidable the person may sink into a kind of despair.

More generally we can say that this is a case of the meditator being in flight from the suffering in life. The infatuation is a form of samudaya - an energy that arises in reaction to such suffering. Samudaya can be a stepping stone to spiritual progress - a wake-up call - but more commonly it leads us into patterns that ultimately only multiply the original state of affliction. These are detailed in the textual descriptions of the Second Truth as resorting to sensual distraction, to self-enhancement, or to destructive behaviour. Thus, in this case, the neophyte meditator thinks to gain a sensual benefit and self-enhancement but ends up in despair.

This kind of disappointment is a first instance of meditation sickness - an unfortunate state induced by undertaking the path of meditation with a misguided motive.

Pursuit of Visions and Emotional High
While some are seeking utilitarian benefits, others are looking for “high” experiences. The current wave of popularity of mindfulness is largely driven by utilitarian concerns. However, the wave of popularity that meditation enjoyed in the 1960s and 70s was substantially driven by the idea that meditation could give one experiences even better than psychodelic drugs. Sometimes it does. Then, just as with such drugs, it is possible to become addicted to obtaining such states. This can become an obsession. This is clearly not just a problem of the 60s and 70s in the West since there are many admonitions in Buddhist writings against talking too openly about such experiences. This must be because ancient masters also perceived the danger of people being drawn into the practice for such purposes. If a culture grows up in which people start swapping stories of the particular highs that they have experienced, then new practitioners will be led to think that getting such experiences is the purpose and that having them is evidence of progress.

Ecstatic states are sometimes experienced during meditation, but the purpose of religious contemplation is not that of obtaining such highs. They are an incidental. If one becomes addicted to them, it can become a distraction that corrupts one’s purpose and wastes a lot of time and energy. The vision quest can be a stepping stone, but if one falls in love with the stepping stone one will remain isolated in the middle of the river and eventually, when the flood comes, one will be washed away.

This kind of obsession is a second instance of meditation sickness.

Attachment to Heavenly States
Just as meditation may lead to sensual or emotional highs, at a deeper level it may lead the practitioner into the experience of heavenly states. The difference between a heavenly state and a high is that the high lasts a few hours at most whereas heavenly states can take over one’s whole life. The person who has fallen into a heavenly state may drift around blissed-out not just when performing a meditational exercise, but all day long. Such people may appear to be terribly spiritual. Nothing breaks through their bliss. To them everybody is wonderful and life is wonderful and everything that they encounter is wonderful. Such a person is generally completely unproductive, like a sleep-walker. In fact, they are in a kind of sleep - a pleasant dream that goes on and on. They often have a slightly sleepy or floating manner. They can be pleasant to be with for a limited period of time because their attitude toward one will be something like: “Oh darling, you are so wonderful. You have such a lovely halo,” but if you ask them to do something they will be too preoccupied with listening to angels to be able to cooperate.

This kind of ethereality is a third kind of meditation sickness. In this case it may not be so much a case of wrong initial motivation as of being high-jacked along the way.

Emptiness Disease
Many meditators seek and some obtain insight into emptiness, shunyata. This can also be called “non-duality”. This can seem like a kind of final revelation. Such people may now believe themselves to be enlightened. They have a watertight way of thinking about everything. All distinctions are void. There is only oneness. This compelling notion seems to cut through every dilemma. It is a kind of Parmenidean vision that transcends time and space. It is intoxicating. Now nothing matters. All moral dilemmas are invalid because there is no separation between good and bad, right and wrong or any other dualistic dichotomy.

Emptiness disease in the spiritual context is not the same as people mean when in common speech they talk of feeling empty. That is more similar to accidie which we shall come to below. Here emptiness disease is an attachment to an experience of oneness that initially seems intoxicating, but which has the effect of rendering everything in life pointless. In its milder form it shows as an attachment to a clever intellectualism, but in more developed form it results in a supreme indifference. Such people can appear to be terribly wise and have an answer to everything, but it is not an answer that is ultimately satisfying.

Since the body and physical conditions do not yield to this kind of ultimate logic, the person may start to live a double life. They become blind to many aspects of their own real life, being too taken up by the transcendent enthusiasm to notice their own contradictions. If confronted with them, they will just dismiss the matter as illusory dualism.

This kind of false superiority is a fourth kind of meditation sickness.

Self-inflation
This condition can be linked to either of the previous two or can occur independently. As a result of whatever experiences the pertson has had he or she comes to believe that they have attained to a superior condition in which karmic consequence no longer applies in their case. They have transcended karma. A Zen story tells how such a condition can lead to a hundred rebirths as a fox. Like the Emptiness Disease, this is basically a form of self-deception, but can be compelling to the sufferer. There have been notable instances of spiritual leaders going off the rails and abusing their disciples in various ways while still themselves believing that they were being God’s gift to the world.

Sometimes self-inflation can take a more specific form, well documented in the writings of C G Jung where, as he would put it, the personality becomes inflated by an archetype. The person starts to act as though they themselves embody and incarnate a particular archetypal energy. This might be the saviour, the earth mother, the eternal child, the trickster, or whatever. The person is now, as it were, living directly off a particular instinctive energy without any filtering by anxiety born of experience. Such people can be charismatic and compelling to others. They may readily draw a following of people who enjoy the vibrant energy that surrounds such a person. Some meditation practices involve the practitioner in self-identifying with a deity. If such identification becomes “real” for the practitioner, inflation of this kind can sometimes occur.

It is worth noting that this kind of meditation disease is not the same as charlatanry. The person is genuine in his or her self-belief, even though it may be misguided. The charlatan is somebody who deliberately contrives to pretend to a position whereas the self-inflated person is not consciously tricking anybody.

Reactivated Ego Extremes
Any pre-existing ego state can be reactivated or even amplified or exacerbated by meditation practice. In modern thinking such states can be broadly divided into mild (neurotic) and severe (psychotic). This is not the place to give a full tabulation of such conditions. Simply put, neuroses are conditions characterised by unnecessary or inappropriate fear, worry or depletion of energy whereas psychotic ones are states of more severe detachment from ordinary reality. The former can include obsessions, phobias, anxiety states and melancholy. The latter may include paranoia, megalomania, hearing voices, hallucinations, ideas of reference, mania, so-called endogenous depression and other conditions in which the person lives to a substantial degree in a self-generated illusory world. All such states can be considered to be exaggerated ego responses and, only excluding those who are totally spiritually enlightened, everybody has some such elements in some degree.

When such conditions are acute meditation is counter-indicated. Thus a person who has recently suffered a major bereavement should be weeping, not meditating. In many cases, however, it is impossible to discern the underlying condition. A person may present as completely “normal” yet be carrying within all manner of hang-ups. The discipline and sensory deprivation of many meditation practices may trigger old patterns. Such ego structures are essentially defenses against internalised passions and meditation is a process that accesses and investigates such internal formations, bringing to the surface content that may have been repressed in the past.

Reactivated extreme ego states are a sixth category of meditation sickness..

Loss of contact with instinctive signals
Meditation may increase conscious awareness of bodily signs and signals but increased consciousness may interfere with a more natural connection. It is a common mistake in spirituality to over-value consciousness as though it were the goal of practice. At certain times and phases, one needs conscious awareness and it can be an important stage in learning, but it should not be taken as a goal in and of itself. In excess, it can be counter-productive. Most bodily processes work best without conscious interference. One’s heart, liver, stomach and so on all function perfectly well without instructions from the conscious mind. A central element of consciousness is doubt and an excess of awareness problematises processes that should proceed naturally. A condition can thus arise in which the person loses a natural, unthinking connection with hunger, thirst, the impulse to sleep, feelings of heat and cold and so on. Such detachment from the body can, in some ways, be a spiritual gain, but it can easily also become a handicap. Zen stories that depict enlightenment as a state in which “When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep,” are seeking to guard against this pitfall.

The person who has excessively sought conscious control of bodily processes through yogic or meditational exercises may arrive at a state in which their embodied existence has become endlessly problematic to them. Such a person may easily ruin their physical health by adopting an outlandish diet, disregarding the response of their own body, may deprive themselves of sleep to a degree that induces other physical or psychological symptoms and generally may become a psychological wreck. Typically such people are resistant to any sane advice because they judge that the person who advises healthy living is still a slave to the body and in an inferior spiritual condition to themselves.

Confusion or destruction of the body’s natural “wiring” is thus a seventh kind of meditation sickness.

Accidie
Accidie (from the Greek akēdia) is a state of jadedness or carelessness. This is a meditation sickness that can afflict practitioners of long standing. They may have made some progress in their spiritual life, but arrived at a staleness. Nothing seems to matter anymore. Why practice? Why bother to do anything? There seems no answer. This may afflict the person who lives in solitude. It can also affect the person who lives in a monastery, who goes through the motions of monastic life but for whom it has all become meaningless. This kind of apathy can be regarded as a deficiency of love. Spiritual disciplines may seek to reduce passion and eros but when this goes too far, accidie is the result.
One sometimes sees a similar condition in refugees or people who have been uprooted from or lost connection with the people and conditions that gave their life meaning and purpose. In this latter case the connections of meaning have been broken by traumatic circumstance. In the case of accidie they have been ruptured by the erosion of meaning brought about by deconstructive meditations. Meditations that deconstruct worldly circumstance can be valuable in revealing impermanence and showing the connection between physical being and the natural elements, but carried to excess they leave the practitioner in a state of helpless anomie.

Accidie is a meditation sickness.

CURE

It would be satisfying to be able to produce a corresponding list with remedies for each of the above conditions. This, however, is not appropriate because in general those suffering from such states do not see themselves as having a problem and do not seek a remedy. The condition may be recognised by others and sometimes they might be able to intervene in helpful ways, but most of these maladies are, as one might say, dead ends.

Calling them illnesses or sicknesses is only a metaphor. They have in common with medical conditions that they can lay a person low and interfere with ordinary life but they are not spread by germs or viruses and cannot be cured by the administration of a medicine.

The table below shows some of the structure and correspondences of these conditions. However, it is generally of no use to tell a person that they are suffering from such-and-such a condition, are deficient in this or that and need to rectify the situation. The person will dismiss such information and it may even serve to alienate them and make them more resistant to change. A longer, more oblique or subtle approach is needed. This is all clear from the parable of the prodigal son in the Lotus Sutra,

If we can talk of a cure at all then it must be, in every case, some skilful combination of wisdom and compassion. This is because, when we examine the ailments closely, we see that they each involve some combination of, firstly, alienation from reality and, secondly, misunderstanding. The former is a deficiency of love and the latter of wisdom. One or other of these deficiencies generally predominates. If the guide remains humble, patient, empathic and intrepid, well-grounded and full of fellow-feeling, then he or she will provide a loving example and this will create good conditions, but such humility and patience begins with the awareness that we all suffer from all of these problems in some degree. They are considered “sicknesses” when they run to an extreme, but we all are prey to similar delusions at times.

CONDITION	CATEGORY	LACK	DEFICIENCY
Unsustainable infatuation	Mistaking the purpose	Patience	Wisdom
Search for highs	Mistaking the purpose	Inspiration	Compassion
Heavenly states	Mistaking the goal	Fortitude	Wisdom
Emptiness disease	Mistaking the goal	Empathy	Compassion
Self-inflation	Ego excess	Humility	Wisdom
Old ego states	Ego excess	Faith	Compassion
Loss of instinctive connection	Eros deficiency	Grounding	Wisdom
Accidie	Eros deficiency	Love	Compassion

The above table provides a rough outline of correspondences. In reality nothing is so neat or organised. People are complex. It is never the case that a person is fulfilled in all qualities except one in which they are totally deficient. In reality they have innumerable qualities each in some degree, none fully developed but none totally absent. Consequently, there are rarely simple solutions. Each person is on a path and they may have become stuck for a time, but it is like a stick floating down a river. It may get caught in a backwater, but sooner or later something will change and it will be back in the flow. As in this analogy, the thing that moves a person on is not necessarily something that appears benign at first sight. The winter flood may carry the stick down stream. In the same way, it may be some crisis in life that overwhelms the practitioner's delusion and forces him or her back into the current.

In the story in the sutra, a young man leaves home and goes out into the world and loses his way and his fortune and becomes impoverished. Meanwhile, his father has become rich and successful. One day the son wanders into the town where the father now lives. He sees the father but does not recognise him. He immediately thinks that such a superior man would have no time for the like of himself and fears being captured and enslaved, so he runs away. However the father has seen and recognised the son. For years now the father has been missing the son, but he realises that the son is now frightened of him and unable to recognise the true situation. The father sends one of his men to befriend the son. The man does so and tells the son that there is a menial job going at the big house. The son starts to work in the father’s stables. The father then, from time to time, comes and works alongside him, reducing the son’s fear. Gradually the father advances the son, giving him new responsibilities. Eventually there comes a day when the father jdges that the true situation can be revealed, the son is acknowledged and there is general rejoicing.

We can see many important elements in this story. The “father” here is the spiritual guide and the “son” is the practitioner who has a meditation sickness. The father sees the son but the son does not recognise the father. In other words, the practitioner does not see the problem. The guide sees the problem but cannot do anything about it directly. He has to find a skilful means. The father ponders the matter and finds ways to involve the son based on the son’s existing knowledge and attitude. He gives him things to do that correspond with whatever motivation or felt need the son already does have. The son’s deficiency must be exploited in a way that ultimately leads to a cure. Involving the son provides opportunities for the father to get closer to him. The practitioner gradually comes to trust the guide more and in new ways. Initially, the practitioner may admire the guide from a distance, but tends to view him as belonging to a different species. The father comes down to the level of the son, working beside him. There is a touching moment in the diary of my teacher when she is working with other trainees in the monastery grounds gathering leaves into sacks when she notices that the man wearing the same working clothes working alongside her is the supreme abbot. This moment breaks through one of her stereotypes and releases her to think in new ways. It takes time, patience and care for the father to gradually coax the son into a new perspective. All this is somewhat like approaching a timid animal. The practitioner is not yet ready to understand the true nature of the compassion of the guide which is not based upon superiority but upon a deep family feeling.

Underpinning both love and wisdom there is always faith. It is an act of faith to love and it takes faith to face the truth of life and not run away. We can see the story as one in which the faith of the son is gradually restored and builds until it is strong enough to take on progressively more responsibility, overcome fear and draw closer to the father. The spiritual guide should be amply provided with these three qualities - faith, wisdom and love-compassion. However, even were one as equipped as Buddha himself, one could not heal every case immediately. There are times when a person can be moved along and there are times when they are stuck and nothing can be done until a change of conditions provides an opportunity. In such therapeutic work timing is a vital factor. When he is dying the Buddha says that those who were ready for it he has helped to cross over and those who were not yet ready must await another time. The great sage Honen, in one of his writings, lamants “Where was I at the time of Shakyamuni Buddha. I must, at that time, have just been one of the ignorant masses unable to benefit from the precious gift of the Dharma.”

CONCLUSION

Meditation sickness is different from obstacles to meditation. Obstacles can be overcome by actual meditation practice. Sicknesses are the result of meditation that has gone astray. The practitioner can be expected to fall sick in this sense from time to time and for periods along the way. A skilful guide or good spiritual friends may be able to help the person get back on track or it may be a matter of waiting for a change of life circumstance or divine intervention. However, in this dark age of the Dharma, we are the sick treating the sick, the blind leading the blind. The teacher is, as Chogyam Trumpa said, only a more advanced student, another mortal vulnerable to the same plague.

In this essay I have not addressed the question of obstacles as there is much written on the subject elsewhere. Nor have I spoken about different kinds of meditation and their specific advantages and characteristic pitfalls. Clearly different styles of practice attract different types of practitioner and each has its advantages and its risks. That is material for another essay another day.

The eight kinds of sickness sketched out here may give a rough and ready framework for thinking about the pitfalls of the path and, hopefully, this may help the practitioner to beware and the guide to be patient. Sometimes we are in the one role and sometimes in the other. We are all students and there are always other students to be helped along. If I help you with your homework, perhaps you will help me with mine.

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Reflections on a spiritual life ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

I am a devotee of Amitabha Buddha. Amitabha, or Amida, is the Buddha of all acceptance. This is thus an inclusive creed. This web site, La Ville au Roi (Eleusis) has members who follow at least a dozen formally distinct spiritual paths, but we seem to all get on fine together.

Spirituality has innumerable dimensions. The main practice of Amidism is to recite an invocation of the Buddha. It's main philosophy is to view the person as a fallible mortal in receipt of infinite grace. This is really a pretty generic approach.

We can say, then, that Amidism has three pillars. Firstly reverence for the Buddhas as ultimate, spiritual and/or in-this-world exemplars and benefactors, secondly humility of the person as seeker, pilgrim and practitioner caught up in the conditions of the world, and thirdly the practice of calling. This matter of calling is both on the one hand a "please" and a "thank you" to the greater powers and, on the other hand, a sense of being called, called to do good, to live the spiritual life, to explore the path in as authentic a manner as possible, and to be mindful of age-old wisdom.

This is an approach to spirituality that is orientated to peace in the world and authenticity in the heart. It is not about pretending to be good, nor about suppressing what does not fit. Thus it embraces thought, emotion and action in a balanced way and finds expression through arts and ritual as well as love, work and daily life.

Calling can take many forms and over the centuries many specific practices and styles of ritual, reflection, and contemplation, both individual and in gatherings, have developed as aids to the practitioner and the community. This site often carries discussions of such.

The central scripture of Amidism is the Larger Pureland Sutra which is both a legend and a manifesto for the ordinary person on the bodhisattva path. There is also a Smaller Pureland Sutra (the Amida Kyo), the Contemplation Sutra and the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra. However, Amidists respect all Buddhist texts and those of other faiths insofar as they speak of wisdom, compassion and awakening.

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A few more reflections on being here now ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

Currently, the idea of “being in the here and now” is à la mode. and I find it a truly interesting matter to reflect upon.

Here and now I am sitting in the middle room in my house in France. The walls are white. The wood stove is black. Observations of this kind seem to introduce a simplicity into my existence and this is something to treasure. In the precise moment that I am making such an observation I am not thinking about whether the car insurance bill needs to be paid, whether the cat needs feeding, what work I am going to do later today and so forth. Thus, to focus upon the here and now can provide a welcome distraction from other thoughts that might be relatively more stressful. This is true notwithstanding the fact that I appreciate my car, love the cat and will probably enjoy the work I shall do.

When I call it distraction I am referring to the fact that the mind always has a focus, broad or narrow, and that when we focus on one thing we inevitably exclude other things. This is a strength and a weakness. It enables concentration and introduces a corresponding and complementary blindness. The things that I am not thinking about remain and will draw my focus sooner or later. My here and now will suddenly be filled with the sound of the cat at the door demanding attention. So we can say that being in the here and now does not, of itself, solve problems; it simply gives us a break from them. Such breaks, such moments of stopping to look, are certainly valuable.

Then we can consider what we experience when we do stop and look. To perceive is also to construe. We are programmed to make sense of things. Why do I call this a room and not a cave? Why my home and not a prison? Why in France? I am sure that the lizard on the wall does not think that he is in France, nor that he is in David’s house, nor, probably, is “house” at all a meaningful idea to him. You might say that that is because lizards are differently constructed to us, but this argument does not stand up to much scrutiny. I do not know for sure what goes through the head of the lizard, but we can reliably assume that it is mostly about food, sex, warmth, protection and bodily well-being. How different is that from you or I? The differences arise when we consider experience. The lizard is probably acutely aware of certain contours in the wall surface, certain cavities where more than once it caught a fly, certain spots where the angle of sunshine is most pleasing, and many other details that I do not notice and have no feelings about; or if I do notice, probably have quite different feelings about, such as, “I really should mix up some lime and fill in that hole one day.”

I experience this as “my”, “house”, in “France” because of my history as a member of the human tribe that has created the useful fiction of countries in order to keep large numbers of our kind organised in a moderately civilised manner, that constructs shelters in a certain way and allocate another useful fiction that we call ownership - this one mostly designed to distribute responsibility - and these things that I construe make a huge difference to how I feel about what I perceive. Sitting in my home in a country that is organised and at peace feels very different from sitting in a prison in an anarchic land, but the walls might still be white and the stove black.

We now, perhaps, start to see two important things about here-and-now-ism. The first is that it can be useful, and an important spiritual discipline, to be able, when one is in prison in an anarchic land with no certainty that one will not be executed tomorrow, to be able to stop and look and see that the walls are white and the stove is black and that the concrete realities of this moment are actually no different from when one was sitting at home elsewhere. Such a reflection can save one from panic and is one of the great “consolations of philosophy”. To be able to be as much at home in a cave as a palace and as much at ease in a palace as in a cave is a mark of spiritual maturity. It is a kind of sublime indifference that marks out the more enlightened person.

The second thing is that we can see that what one construes the here and now to be is a function of past experience and an imagined future. The here and now is given meaning by the there and then. It is only because of my past experience that I now experience this as a room in a house and it is only because of an imagined future social stability imparted to me by the concept of “France” that I have particular feelings and emotions at this moment. These feelings, these spontaneously arising thoughts and these emotions are also a highly significant part of my here and now experience, yet they are formed by the there and then. Thus the actual visceral experience of here and now is a function of there and then, just as it is for the lizard on the wall.

Now we might say that the person who is spiritually illuminated is emancipated from this circumstance of being a function of the past and future. He or she is able to be at ease even in the prison cell with death about to be inflicted tomorrow morning. However, this consolation of philosophy is itself also a function of an experienced past and an imagined future - merely a different one from that of the common person. The phrase “consolation of philosophy” (De consolatione philosophiae) comes from Boethius who, in 523CE, wrote a book with this title while he was in prison awaiting eventual execution. The book is one of the most important books of Western philosophy, bridging the classical and medieval ages and laying down a great many principles that are still to this day the foundation of enlightened thought, here using the term “enlightened” in the Western sense.

Boethius was able to express the consolation of philosophy so clearly because he had absorbed the wisdom of Christianity and of Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato. It was these perennial truths that he kept in mind that enabled him to treasure virtue over circumstance and continue to believe in the goodness of God in the midst of corrupt and treacherous human practice. When one has such a stock of wisdom in one’s heart, one is so much better equipped to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Hamlet should have read Boethius.

The idea of being in the here and now is currently connected with the fashion for the practice of “mindfulness”, but we should not lose sight of the fact that mindfulness - sati in Pali, smriti in Sanskrit - in its original Buddhist context, was essentially no different to the philosophy of Boethius, that one is protected by what one keep in mind. To have one’s mind or heart full of the right stuff will ensure that when one looks at the white walls and the black stove one will feel the joy of life and not the misery of despair.

So, I am still sitting in the middle room of my house in France. By most people’s standards it is a little chilly as I have not yet lit the big black wood burner. Perhaps I’ll go and do that now. After all, it has remained there patiently all the while that I have been philosophising and deserves to be fed. Of course, I am perfectly aware that such thoughts are all nonsense, but they too are a charming part of my here and now… or is it my there and then?

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Spontaneity ~ Dharmavidya

QUESTION: What is spontaneity?

SHORT ANSWER: Acting without conscious motive.

ANSWER: Spontaneity, nowadays, tends to mean setting aside one's plan or schedule when one is moved or touched emotionally and allowing oneself to respond directly to those feelings. Originally the word meant to do something by one's own will. The essential idea is one of direct connection with immediate conditions.

We can therefore say that spontaneity occurs when self-consciousness is absent or over-ruled or reduced to the role of a secondary observer. We can imagine the position of a person who arrives intending to make a speech that he or she has rehearsed who, when they go to the rostrum to speak, feels a strong connection to the audience, puts the prepared script aside, and speaks freely from the heart directly to the people present.

Another nuance of spontaneity, therefore, can be to do with originality. To do something that one has never done before, or to do a familiar action in a new way, constitutes a kind of spontaneity. Such an act, whether great or small, has a freshness about it that will not be present when the act is repeated many times. In this sense, 'spontaneous' is the opposite of 'habitual'. In a conversation it is often quite noticeable if a person is saying things that they have said many times before or if they are thinking on their feet and expressing new ideas. This aspect of spontaneity is closely connected with creativity.

Then, again, spontaneity can refer to situations where one did something more or less involuntarily. One might say, for instance, I was feeling sad but when my friend walked into the room there was a spontaneous smile on my face. In this case the person’s own action surprises them. Another example might be: I did not think that I knew that song, but somehow, spontaneously, when the music played, the words came to me. Here, a distant memory or long forgotten experience might be being triggered. In this sense, spontaneity is close to intuition. What we do intuitively we do without conscious motive.

Thus spontaneity generally means without prior contrivance. Thus spontaneous acts can, inter alia, be due to an upsurge of emotion, enthusiasm for a new situation, the triggering of forgotten memories or the expression of unconscious intention. A person who is spontaneous can be either fun or alarming to be with and neither boring nor predictable.

Often our socialisation has the effect of inhibiting spontaneity. In order to avoid infringing social rules one strives to stay in control of one’s thoughts, feelings and actions. As a young person I was terribly shy, always feeling out of my depth in social situations. I still often find them quite challenging. As I have come to take myself less seriously this handicap has lessened.

A spiritually cultivated person is spontaneous much of the time in that the fundamental principles of life are so deeply integrated in him or her that they no longer think about them but simply act well in immediate response to each situation that arises. This is more or less the original meaning of 'mindfulness' - that one's heart/mind be so full of love and compassion that good comes 'naturally'. This, however, is rather different from acting according to rules - such a person is not easily predictable, since there may be a number of possible good responses to any particular situation. Here, ‘situation’ often means what was done or said by another person, so this includes the kind of repartee that one encounters in zen stories.

Spontaneity is associated with high energy states. We form habits as a means of limiting our expenditure of energy and minimising risk, However, if the amount of spontaneity in our lives drops below a certain level everything starts to feel dull and meaningless. Therapy and spiritual practice are, inter alia, concerned to bring spontaneity back into our lives. The times when we feel most engaged in an activity are when we are being most spontaneous.

 

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The Burdens Posed by Invisible Physical and Mental Illnesses ~ Toni Berhard

Toni writes:

I look healthy. My friend, whom I’ll call Gail, also looks healthy. The difference is that I suffer from a physical illness and she suffers from a mental illness: depression. The similarity is that both of our conditions are invisible to others.

Despite the different source of our illnesses, our lives are parallel in several ways. I want badly to be able to go places and to socialize, especially at night when visiting with others is often at its richest. But I can’t. My body’s limitations keep me housebound. And Gail? Her body doesn’t keep her from these activities, but her emotional state does. She finds it hard to leave the house. She finds it hard to socialize. Some days, she wants to curl in a ball and stay in bed. I do that too, but for a different reason.

The fact that both of our conditions are invisible to everyone but those we’re closest too imposes many of the same burdens on us. This piece will discuss four of them.

1. How to manage others’ expectations…and how much to share with them.

This can be a major problem during the holidays and at family gatherings. We may be suffering terribly, even though we look fine. As a result, people may expect us to pitch in more and be more social, but it’s not healthy for us to put ourselves in a situation where we’re forced to do things that make us feel worse physically or emotionally.

Psychotherapy: Evolution or Decline: The misuse of 'evidence' ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

I am at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Copnference in Anaheim, California. This conference attempts to showcase the best practice in psychotherapy. The presenters are exemplars for the profession and the information presented is intended to shape the thinking of the thousands of practitioners who attend. The amount of academic data presented is huge.

The net result is unfortunate. The work of being a researcher and that of being a therapist require very different mentalities. As the divide between the two activities erodes, so psychotherapy deteriorates. Psychotherapists now have their eye on generalisable evidence, not on the uniqueness of the client. The data mountain is mostly a distraction and a barrier, only rarely an aid.

I have now watched a number of clinical demonstrations. These are what the thousands of people here are learning to imitate. In all cases, in my view, the practices has been poor, ranging from excruciatingly bad to simply inappropriate. I would not be happy to see this kind of practice by my own students.

The fact that you know, or think you know, from having read piles of statistics, that 60% of successful people or couples do X, Y & Z gives you no right to try persuade the client or clients in front of you to do or say those things. Even if you know that 90%, even 99%, of supposedly successful people do X, Y or Z, that does not tell you anything about the unique, precious soul that is undressing in front of you and as soon as you start to pressure him or her to fit into your predetermined idea of what the right people do, you have stopped doing psychotherapy.

There is a fundamental philosophical divide between research that looks for generalisable conclusions and psychotherapy which looks for what is uniquely precious in the particular case. The therapist should be treasuring and being in awe of precisely those ways in which this client deviates, not trying to get them to fit in. Of course, getting them to fit in will help the therapist increase his or her ‘evidence base statistics’ and this means that the modern therapist tends to be self-justifiying rather than truly client-centred. A real therapist approaches the client in humility, confident of meeting something he or she has never encountered before, something that is not to be found in the statistical generalisations. It is that uniqueness that is the focus of true therapy and the increasing focus upon statistics is making modern therapists blind.

This trend is not the evolution of psychotherapy, it is its decline.

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Something has gone wrong with psychotherapy ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

I am currently at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Anaheim, California. This conference is organised by the Milton Erickson association, though there seem to be few people here who really practice as Milton Erickson did. It has been interesting for me to see a sample of contemporary psychotherapy practice, though I feel rather disappointed with what I have seen.

PSEUDO-SCIENCE
The dominant methods showcased here are ones that follow a philosophy of 'the therapist knows best'. This is a product of the pressure on psychotherapy to present itself as 'scientific' and 'evidence based'. There are, for instance, a range of methods that approach the problem by conducting the kind of research that looks for 'the five, seven (or whatever number you like) things characteristically done by successful people, couples or therapists', isolating and defining these 'elements', and then either imitating them or teaching them to clients. If we think we know what successful people do, then surely we can make people be successful by getting them to do these things - isn't that scientific? Well, no, actually it is nonsense.

Rohingya ~ Dharmavidya

QUESTION: In light of Medecin Sans Frontiere’s recent comments on the Rohingya, and the backlash against Aung San Suu Kyi, I wonder if you might be able to post on the site about your thoughts. 

SHORT ANSWER: Violence springs from delusion and we strive to overcome it and bring compassion into the world, but understanding the roots of particular delusions is complex and difficult.

LONGER ANSWER: I have no solution, but I can, as you ask, post some thoughts. This is not a situation that I have followed in detail so there is a danger that I may be misinformed. That said, it appears that the Myanmar government decided to drive the Rohingya out of their country and set about doing so in a brutal manner, but have now agreed to let many of them back in, though understandably many are frightened to return as there has been killing and persecution. The Myanmar government has a different version of events, but most of the international media are not taking that account seriously. Although the recent dreadful events are suddenly shocking there is, presumably, a long history to this problem and it is difficult to understand the whole situation without knowledge of this.

The Buddhist view is easy to state in regard to immediate events: hatred is not overcome by hatred, by love alone is hatred overcome. This is a clear principle. On this basis, one prays for an end to the killing and ill-treatment and some reparation for damage already done. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, lethal violence is not the answer. But where is the love?

One then comes to the really difficult question of what should be done. Stop the killing, certainly, but what then? How ease the tensions that led to the killing in the first place? Is it better for the Rohingya to go back to Myanmar or to go back to Bangladesh? Where did they come from in the first place? Why did they go to Myanmar? To the Burmese, I gather, they appear as interlopers, unwanted illegal immigrants. The USA is currently trying to get rid of illegal immigrants and this is causing a lot of social friction in that country. They are not shooting people, but they are breaking up families in many cases. The problems caused by the strong feelings people have about immigration are troubling many countries at the moment and passions can run very high indeed.

I would prefer a world in which people were free to move from country to country as they wished, but I can see that when this happens on a large scale with people of a culture deemed alien by those already resident in a country, it is experienced as invasion, and the historic response to invasion has generally been armed resistance. My ideal, therefore, may not be attainable in the real world. This means that many real life situations actually require delicate diplomacy and compromise. This leads me to ask how it has come about that this situation has got so bad that nobody notices until people start being slaughtered. The international community - if one can make such a sweeping generalisation - seems not to have seen this coming and not to have done much, if anything, to avert the catastrophe.

Issuing condemnations rarely does much good. The popular media want to have heroes and villains and when somebody seems to have switched from one of these categories to the other it causes great confusion, but this confusion is really the result of a way of thinking that was wrong from the beginning. People are people and they have to deal with the situations that come before them and in those situations there are often a complex balance of forces in play. What decisions has Aung San Suu Kyi actually made? What were the influences that she was juggling when she made those decisions? Why did the pope not even mention the Rohingya during his visit to Myanmar? How is a newspaper reader in a country on the other side of the planet to make sense of what is happening? What is needed is not the passing of moral judgements. What is needed is for help to be mobilised, informed by an in-depth understanding of the full situation. I myself cannot claim to have such an understanding, but there must be people in positions of authority who do.

The resolution of complex international problems requires more than knee jerk reactions. It requires in-depth understanding and resolute compassionate action that somehow helps all the main parties. This is, however, asking a lot since all the players who have the power to assist also have vested interests. These comments do not just apply to the Rohingya crisis - they apply to refugee problems all over the planet and all the other actually or potentially lethal political situations - N Korea, Syria, the stand-off in the Gulf, Ukraine, and so on. We pray and work for a wiser, more compassionate world, an end to bloodshed and enmity, reconciliation and repair, while all the time knowing that there are few certainties and real progress requires the wisdom of Solomon.

Who actually loves the Rohingya? Where will they find a secure home? What have they themselves done to make this development more likely? Who else can help and how? Why do the Burmese feel so angry? What can bring peace? These are the kinds of questions that need to be understood.

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The Wish to Practise a Religious Life ~ Dharmavidya

Commentary upon the Summary of Faith and Practice, part two.

Text: wishing to practise a religious life

A Foundation
The wish to practice a religious life is the foundation of meaning and happiness. Nowadays, many people have no idea about living a religious life and view religion with suspicion. This is basically because religious institutions have, in many cases, been corrupted and this has got religion a bad name. A further cause has been the fact that throughout history there has been an on-going tension between secular and religious power and in modern times the secular state has very much come out on top, so that religion has become a personal matter, often seen as something of an eccentricity. Secular administration is good and necessary, but it can never yield the kind of ultimate satisfaction that the heart longs for. In the modern world, a religious life is certainly the kind of eccentricty that we should adopt.

Beyond Anomie
In parallel with the decline of the religious sense, there has been a general increase in narcissism, with its accompanying discontent, and, most importantly, in anomie. For the narcissist nothing is ever quite good enough and whatever satisfactions there might be pale very quickly. Anomie is the sense that nothing means anything, that there is no fundamental reason to bother about anything. Anomie can easily lead to a broad degeneration in morale. In order to prevent anomie leading to chaos, governments now have to keep the population happy in a secular way by holding up for our imitation a life of self-indulgence and distraction, delivered by big business corporations. All this is, however, circular. More distractions make life even more meaningless and more meaninglessness calls for more distraction.

Ultimacy
Religion cuts through this futility. By a religious life, one means a life directed toward ultimate purpose. Even if one only has a hazy notion of what the ultimate purpose of life is, the sheer fact of trying to turn toward it, even into a thick “cloud of unknowing”, can have a radical effect upon the tenor of one’s existence. Often enough, a religious life is substantially a search: a serious attempt to penetrate the mystery of ultimacy. In fact, a first and vitally important step can be the act of admitting to oneself and huge extent of one's ignorance. Strangely, it is by admitting that we are hopeless cases that new possibilities open up.

The Teleological Eye
In this search, however, we are not completely at a loss. We have some strong intuitions. We realise that what we are looking for has some close connection with beauty, truth and unconditional love. Simply knowing that what we are talking about is an End rather than a means tells us a lot. We could say that a religious life is one lived teleologically: it has in view ultimate ends. We cannot define ultimate beauty, ultimate truth or ultimate love, because ‘define’ means delimit and the ultimate does not have limits. Nonetheless, we can let the intuition of it into our lives and letting it in turns everything upside down.

The Big Picture
All of this naturally means taking a much longer and larger perspective. The self-indulgent approach looks for gain or profit immediately, or in the very near future. The religious person looks for a benefit that exists ultimately. This means that such a person will not “sell their soul” for a short term benefit. They live their life according to what they understand to be of ultimate value. I say, “what they understand to be” because we are in a process of discovery. Our understanding is continually being extended by experience and later may be better than it was in the past.

Faith & Experience
The truly religious person is not the one who clings to an unchangeable dogma, but rather the one who is willing to really experiment with his or her life in such a way that faith evolves on the basis of what is found out through the test of putting life on the line. Faith and experience feed each other. According as we put something to the test, so we come to have more or less faith in it, but we only take on such tests because of the faith that we have in the first place. The truly religious person is, therefore, always finding out more about what is true and beautiful, about love and what lies beyond conditions.

Nirvana
The Buddhist term nirvana refers to what is beyond conditions. In ordinary life we are surrounded by conditions, depend upon conditions and do what we do conditionally. This is inevitable. However, while we are inevitably living in the conditional world, it is possible to have a vision that goes beyond it and to make that the anchorage point of our life. A person who has such a sense of the beyond and takes that as the centre of gravity of their life is a religious person. Such people may have different terminologies, different ways of conceptualising what they are doing, different theories or philosophies, but they have something fundamental in common, and such people, if they are true to the ultimate vision rather than to the words and concepts that it is wrapped up in, can never be fundamentally at odds. Nirvana is, therefore, also peace in this world.

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