All Posts (310)
Sort by
I'm posting on your blog here, but see no one else posting or responding. Is it ok to post here? Is it ok to post some of my art work here? I'm not sure, so please tell me if there is any protocol I should be observing here. I hope all of you are safe with your families and your respective sangha communities. Thank you, Robert.
As you read this, your lungs are working - the soft sponge-like pores that give you life moment by moment are expanding and contracting. This breath is not yours. You do not possess it. It is given to you by the generosity of the earth.
And in this extraordinary moment when many of us have sequestered ourselves in our respective homes, the earth is a little healthier. The air is cleaner and the waters clearer. Because collectively we have stopped much of our activity from cars, trucks, planes, trains and factories, there is less carbon being released into the earth’s atmosphere.
The great coral reefs are like the lungs of our oceans. They are living sponges that support life. And they are dying, turning white and hard. The trees are like the lungs of our forests, creating the oxygen your lungs need to breath, and sequestering the carbon which helps regulate the earth’s carbon emissions.
When the earth’s lungs are healthy, so are yours.
And now we face this extraordinary moment when the COVID19 virus has arisen killing many human beings across the planet. It respects no boundaries or political ideologies. It robs humans of their life by hardening the mucus in their lungs.
So in this moment, take time to be still and listen. Notice how easily you slip into busyness and distraction and bring yourself back to your fear, your grief and your gratitude for the life this earth gives in every breath you take. The earth is breathing so you can too.
@ Roshi Robert Joshin Althouse
Some wise words about listening and learning from the COVID-19 Virus.
En l'absence de Darmavidya, j'ai - en ma qualité de voisine et d'amie - le privilège de m'occuper (un peu) de Tara, la petite chatte. C'est un bonheur de la voir me faire la fête chaque fois que je me rends à Eleusis: elle s'étire, se roule sur le dos au soleil ou saute sur mes genoux. J'ignore si elle a profité de l'enseignement du maître des lieux, mais j'ai comme l'impression qu'elle me donne une belle leçon de sagesse: elle se réjouit quand je viens et ne semble nullement attristée quand je pars: sagesse féline et sagesse de l'équanimité. Mais est-ce étonnant? Elle s'appelle Tara après tout.
OM TARE TOUTARE TOURE SOHA
At the moment I am feeling very sad for the state of the planet. As I write the great forests are being consumed by fire, both the tropical forest in Brazil and the tundra forest in Russia. The great forests are the lungs of the earth. I myself have lung problems. When there are parts of the lungs that don’t work anymore one can run out of energy. It can strike suddenly. We will probably not do anything serious about climate change or wildlife extinction until some major disaster occurs. Perhaps when New York is under water, people may sit up and ask, “Say, how did that happen?” but I imagine it might be too late by then. Anyway, nobody wants to do the kinds of things that might actually make a real difference. We just want to carry on as normal, do a little bit of recycling, try to reduce carbon output by 1% or so, and then fail to achieve even that. We do not want this crisis to change our way of life. Meanwhile species are going out of existence and life teems no more. We are indeed foolish beings and the Buddhas must weep to see us so.
My medical condition continues to be a mystery. It is clear that I do not have any of the big nasty things - brain tumour, cracked skull, stroke, etc - as these have been ruled out by MRI investigation. Nonetheless I continue to have persistent, continuous head pain that varies in intensity and I become exhausted by the least effort so that I am functioning like an invalid incapable of doing very much. There is always a possibility that the whole syndrome is a side effect of the blood thinning medication that I take to counter my lung embolisms, but a recent change of this medication has not made any difference to my symptoms and ceasing all medication might put me in a different kind of jeopardy as the embolisms can be fatal. It is also possible that the head pains could be related to a fall and head injury that I sustained at the end of February. The fall was itself the result of fainting due to lack of oxygen due to the embolisms. More fundamentally, we do not know why my body makes embolisms in the first place. I am in on-going discussion with a variety of experts and hope eventually to make some sense of it and, hopefully, find a solution. My general debility is making me less than normally productive. My faith means that I have no worries, but I would like to solve the mystery and restore my full ability to contribute to life.
This is a short video of a Buddhist monk and his family.
It raised questions on parenting and Buddhism - does detachment (or perhaps quietism), as practiced here, lead to demotivation and disengagement with the world around one?
His children find the detachment practised by the monk disquieting. They appreciate the irony of detachment, which is supposed to prevent suffering, leading back to it.
Let me know what you think - I find these real-world dilemmas very stimulating.
My children, Floor and I have been at Eleusis for a week visiting Dharmavidya. He had had another attack of new embolisms in his lungs a few weeks ago, and had gone to see a specialist at the hospital who then kept him in the hospital for just under a week and was back home the day before we arrived.
When we arrived, he told us of another serious blockage problem. He lives in the countryside, quite remote, and is on a septic tank system. He asked Floor to get in touch with his Buddhist neighbours, Patrick who is a builder, and Annette who speaks English fluently so that she can translate. We had no idea what the problem was, and just assumed that the pipes were completely blocked. This is not the first time that we have had problems with the sceptic tank and were already accustomed to putting toilet paper in a bin rather than flushing it down the toilet from previous visits, however, this time was worse. You could see that the water was bubbling back and that nothing was draining away properly, so similar to the clots in his lungs, we were being redirected away from the blockage if nature happened to call. Nothing like visiting your teacher to give you a lesson on the earthy nature of existence.
Blockages or obstacles are disruptive. They can upset our normal habit patterns and make us see what we have taken for granted. As human beings, we are remarkable because we can chug along slowly with a bit of blockage, ignoring the fact that something is wrong until it is actually broken and needs attention.
The first time Dharmavidya collapsed, roughly 3 years ago, was a shock, but after a year of blood thinners, not travelling and working around the grounds of Eleusis he recovered back to better health than he had had in a while. One learns one’s limitations and at the same time we learn how resilient we are too. So, when the symptoms came back he knew to get it checked out and because of not wasting time the doctors found news small ones that could be treated with blood thinners. As for the septic tank, Patrick came over and dug away all the top soil until all the pipes were uncovered and that was when we could see that Dharmavidya was in better health than the first time because he was in there with Patrick digging away, not to mention that the pipes that we all assumed were blocked were actually broken and had come away from the tank completely. No wonder the flowers and the strawberries over the tank were so healthy.
It took Patrick two days in total to remove the old pipes and replace them with new ones and now everything is working properly. Mary Midgley, the great philosopher, said that philosophy is like the plumbing in your house. We don’t know that we have one until it stops working. And when it stops working we have to do something about it, sometimes a complete renovation is required and sometimes just tweaking the system will do.
We have just had our first Eleusis Seminar on the theme of the Philosophy of Taoism.
Sixteen people took part and from immediate feedback it seems to have been a great success.
We shall do more.
There is a second meeting of a more open kind this evening.
This is a podcast on Buddhism and Buddhist psychology
Interviewer: Kaspalite Thompson
Speaker: myself
I’ve always been interested in groupwork. Recently I’ve been facilitating a rather challenging group. It includes an older man who is enjoying his retirement, an outdoor type who does not say so much but clearly regards the other members as wimps, a writer who has an irritating obsession with etymology, one I think of as the wanderer whose life problem seems to be that of never having learnt to settle down, who tells endless entertaining stories of travels, love affairs and so on, and I was able to rope in a Buddhist priest and a psychotherapist, of course, who I thought might be helpful but who spend most of their time talking to each other, then there’s a chap who has been divorced several times who now acts as a consultant on relationships, would you believe? - and there is a dreamer who seems to have had various spiritual experiences, and, I almost overlooked, there is an introvert who stays in the background, but seems to be willing to do the catering and housekeeping tasks. That makes ten of us which is a fairly good size for an encounter group. I don’t know what mysterious force of the universe drew them all together, but working with them is never dull.
We have done all the usual groupworky things - a futile search for identity and common purpose leading to various power struggles finally settling down to a fairly productive modus vivendi as I try to get them to realise that everyone has limitations and encourage some mutual respect for different roles. On the one hand, one aims for compassion and understanding and on the other one hopes that the inevitable tensions will prove creative and productive. It’s work in progress, of course, and one trusts that some more fundamental wholesome process is guiding at a deeper level.
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/12/13/full-speech-sir-ivan-rogers-on-brexit/
I found this piece tremendously sensible, well-reasoned, and above all, realistic.
Carol drove me into Ottawa at midday on Wednesday 12th. I had spent the morning being interviewed and making a short film. In Ottawa we had lunch at the vegetarian restaurant and then went on to the airport where she dropped me off. I was to take a local plane to Montreal then fly to Paris and on to Bilbao in Spain with Air France, due to arrive at nine in the morning local time the following day. F would meet me in Spain and take me back to stay with him in a village near Vittoria. Including the car trips at each end, a total journey of about 19 hours - challenging but not out of my experience as I often make similar journeys two or three times per year.
The first leg went fine. I arrived in Montreal having flown over the snow covered land from Ottawa and caught my connection to Paris. The flight was full. Once we were all boarded, there was a delay and then an announcement. There had been a medical emergency, somebody was ill and they had had to get a doctor, then decided the person had to leave the plane and they were searching for the luggage. We were an hour late leaving Montreal. I wondered if I would arrive in Paris in time for my connection.
The flight to Paris was eventful for further medical emergencies which happened to occur just by where I was seated. The man in the next seat across the aisle from me started vomiting and was clearly in a bad way. Several staff crowded round attending to him for much of the flight. While this was happening, a woman two rows back started having what I think was an epileptic fit. She was on the floor, also being attended to. The two patients did slowly recover some normality, but the flight staff clearly had a difficult time.
We arrived in Paris late. In fact the plane that I was supposed to be on going to Bilbao took off as we were disembarking. My baggage was booked through to Bilbao, so I correctly assumed that they had not loaded it. I went to the Air France desk and they rebooked me onto a flight leaving at 7pm that evening and rerouted my luggage accordingly. This would mean arriving in Bilbao more than half a day late. I needed to phone and tell F not to come to the airport in the morning. Then I discovered that my phone was not working. I assumed the battery must be flat. I went and logged onto the airport wifi with my computer and tried to make contact by e-mail and skype but it was too late. He was already nearing the airport expecting to see me.
With no phone, I was now limited to communicating when I was in a wifi area which made for further difficulties later in the day. I sat it out in Charles de Gaulle Airport. You can say a lot of nembutsu sitting in an airport. They had given me a voucher for some food, which helped. Meanwhile, my friends in Spain made new arrangements for me to be met when I arrived late at night.
At seven in the evening, we all got on the plane and sat there for some time until there was an announcement that there were technical problems with the aircraft. They would fix it, but we would be late taking off. As there was no wifi in the aircraft, I could not let the people in Spain know. This was frustrating. After waiting an hour or so there was a further announcement that we were now ready to take off. The plane started to move. Then it came to a halt again and the pilot announced that the same fault was still occurring. We would all be sent back to the terminal while they fixed it.
In the terminal, we were told that they would find another aircraft and we would fly later that night. Passengers milled around the announcement boards, waiting for further information. Then came the announcement that there was no other plane available. There would be solutions for each passenger, but first we must reclaim our baggage. We went and waited for the carousel and then queued to be individually seen. The airline desk woman drew me a map and sent me to an Isis Hotel via two bus journeys, equipped with vouchers for a meal and one night stay. However, it was only half a night as I had to get up at 3am to continue the journey.
I got to the hotel after 10pm but still just in time to get some dinner. I got to bed about midnight. At 3.30am the taxi took me at high speed the three quarter hour drive across Paris from the hotel to Orly. As it turned out I could have gone an hour later and still made the flight. The plan was to fly me, along with a number of other passengers in the same plight, to Biarritz in the south of France and then put us all on a bus to Bilbao.
We got on the plane and were all seated on time. Nothing happened for a while. Then came the announcement: there were problems with the aircraft and there would be a delay while they got it fixed. This was getting to be the normal. Eventually, however, we were airborne. I had a window seat and looked out over silver clouds that seemed to cover the whole of France. When we got to Biarritz we collected out bags. There was a big white bus waiting. Before getting on I managed to send a message about the delay.
The two hour or so bus journey was uneventful, passing through the towns and green country of the Basque lands. I fell sound asleep on the bus. When we arrived at Bilbao somebody gave me a shake to rouse me. I got off the bus and wandered into the terminal building, anxious to communicate with my friend who was coming to collect me. Still very sleepy I managed to do so and then remembered my bag. I went back outside and the bus had gone. There was no sign of my bag.
I started making enquiries. My friend arrived and helped. We went to different desks and made phone calls. The lady at Bilboa Airport was very helpful. It all took time until we worked out that the suitcase with my clothes had been stolen. Fortunately my passport, computer, camera, phone and money were not in it, but quite a few other things that travel with me are now gone.
I did make it to my final destination after a total of about 46 hours travelling. Well, that’s life. I shall get some rest and then start planning my new wardrobe! Namo Amida Bu.
I'd like to try to say something about real life, which is the only thing that is really interesting.
I have been a bookworm ever since I learnt to read, which was not until I was seven years old. By that time I had already had important spiritual experiences. I was a rather odd child. Many ideas went through my head that tended to set me apart from other children.
Now, much older, I still like to read. I enjoy travelogues, history and biographies, especially when they give some glimpse of real life. This matter of real life is what I want to try to say something about here.
When I go into a bookshop, I often browse the philosophy and psychology books, including not just the Buddhist one’s but those of other faiths and the modern genres of spirituality and of self-help. I have noticed, however, that I rarely find anything that grips my attention.
Reflecting upon this I had something of an insight. This was that I really have no interest in self-improvement. I have no ambition to be a good person. This thought sent me off on two further lines of speculation, one being morality and the other being the question, what is it, then, that I am interested in?
Sometimes, investigating what is true about oneself is not easy. We are so immersed in widely popular and endlessly repeated or implied principles that it is difficult to be scrupulously honest and not just fall into fracks that have been laid for one by others.
Certainly I am interested in truth, and, in particular, in real life. We seem, with our modern education and science, to have arrived at a point where we mostly deal in abstractions and this insulates us. We take the measurement for the thing itself.
When I think of morality, I am aware that many people might think me to be at least a moderately moral man. I do not consume alcohol nor meat. I do not indulge myself much. But, from my own side, I do not experience this as having anything much to do with morals or goodness specifically.
I feel sorry for those who are addicted to things that are likely to do them harm, shorten their lives, make them smell unpleasant and land them with unpleasant cravings. Why would one want such?
However, my musings then led me on to the fact that while I prefer to avoid things that obviously make life difficult, just as I am not trying to be good, nor am I in pursuit of happiness. This seems to be the other target of most of the popular “spiritual” books. It seems to me to be a hollow and pointless notion.
I do want the people that I know to thrive, but thriving is by no means the same thing as being happy, and it does not always and automatically coincide with the normal idea of being good.
It is rather more a sense that we each have some part to play and, although we only find out gradually what it is, it pulls us along. The gods arrange things and we find ourselves on some sort of path. We can fail, for sure. We can lose faith or courage or whatever it is that keeps us going, or we can persevere and keep saying “Yes.”
How do we do this? The answer brings me back to this matter of real life, but I think I need another digression first to explain what I mean.
The question: what I am actually interested in, brings me to another question about the nature of my real religion. If my religion is not about self-improvement and it is not about happiness, what is its core?
The answer is that my religion is the sense that I am loved. I am accepted and held. I have lived my whole life in a state of grace. This does not mean that everything has sailed along easily. I have had the same challenges of adolescence, rebellion and reconciliation with parents, love affairs that have gone well and badly, economic ups and downs including periods of considerable poverty, illnesses and accidents, and so on as human life is universally endowed with.
Yet, as a child I knew that I had come from a heaven of light and carried a palpable sense of it with me. Sometimes the glory broke through and filled my environs with a celestial radiance. Occasionally I talked with an angel and these encounters gave me a sense of meaning and purpose, though the actual content thereof remained to be gradually revealed.
I grew up and got educated and enjoyed my studies. I am always learning. As I got older, celestial visitations got fewer. I have read that this is the case for many of those who have had such experiences. However, the halo of it remains always.
This gives me a sense of slight otherworldliness, as if I were a visitor from elsewhere. Certainly, I do experience myself as often not quite fitting in, as really belonging to another context. This has helped me to unhook from conventional perspectives and has sometimes made me into a relatively original thinker. However, my “original” thoughts generally come from the contrast. I encounter something in this world of common meanings and it jars and sets me thinking. This present piece of writing is of the same ilk.
So I am still an odd child and, now, an odd adult too. As I said earlier, I am interested in seeing others thrive and to me this means experiencing their real life. I sometimes get a glimpse of my real life when I am completely accepted and it is my understanding and real sense that I am so accepted by the best of the divine, those that I call Buddhas.
This inspires me to be interested in the real life of others and the path to encountering this is this same acceptance. My ability in this area is small, but such as it is it must be some reflection of what I receive. We are all more loving when we feel loved, more generous when we feel benefitted, more peaceful when we feel protected. Thus, we are made by the grace that enfolds us.
This means that when that divine acceptance enfolds two of us together something remarkable happens. At such moments, the real life becomes clearly apparent. This is something quite different from all the conventional little smiles and mutual smoothings by which we buffer our social jostling. It may include some sharp edges and prickles as well as a radiant intimacy.
Real life is something miraculous. Most of the time it is in hiding, covered over by a protective shell. In our civilised behaviour we cooperate or collude with one another to keep the shell in place, but occasionally it is possible to have moments of real openness when the deeper truth becomes apparent.
This real life is not necessarily good, not necessarily happy. In fact, in my experience, it often isn't. But it is real and that is the miracle. It has something of the radiance of heaven.
When I go, I expect that I shall return to that realm of light, but if it turns out that I am called elsewhere, so be it. I am up for whatever. If this is my last, then I shall go to rest peacefully. If I go on, it will be with the same grace. This is the assurance that keeps my heart alive.
Namo Amida Bu.
Born: September 13, 1919, London, United Kingdom
Died: October 10, 2018
Mary was a dear friend and inspiration. I first met her when she came to a meditation class I was leading. Her husband had recently died and she was grieving. She did not need meditation, she just needed to grieve and that be OK, which it definitely was, but she continued to come to meetings and made a great contribution to the discussions afterwards. I got to know her well and when our house got to be too overcrowded with people who came to stay, my then wife, Caroline, and I moved down the street into Mary's spare room. This proved to be a very satisfactory arrangement all round. When I was writing "The New Buddhism", Mary was writing "Science and Poetry" in the next room. We both wrote all morning and then I would hear Mary shout "Soup, David?" through the wall, in her characteristically strident voice, and we would have lunch together and chat about what we were writing, about, about philosophy, about the state of the world, Buddhism, language, science, so many things! ... While she talked, her cat, a large tom, would sit on her knee. When Mary made a point she had a habit of giving emphasis by patting the cat. The pats varied in force according to the degree and sometimes the cat looked quite pained. Occasionally, when Mary was particularly animated on some important point in the argument, the cat would get off her knee and sit at Mary's feet on the floor until it judged that it was safe to return to the lap.
Mary had a very incisive mind and I learnt a great deal from her about how to think, how to examine and consider an argument, to admit unconsidered aspects and to avoid being caught in the fallacies, prejudices and tramlines that commonly bedevil popular discussion. One was not so much being persuaded to a particular point of view, but more induced into a deeper consideration of the matter in hand from which we might both glean new understanding. In this way, she was passionately dispassionate.
She was primarily concerned with ethics, but in a very broad way. It extended to politics, human-animal relations, the origins and meaning of life, the role of science and technology, what we can and cannot know from history, and what it means to actually be a living conscious - and unconscious - being. The Gaia hypothesis interested her as did such issues as whether we have a duty to far away people we do not know, and what it is, and why? An active mind, always inquiring, always intriqued by important questions. Also, a sharp sense of humour and irony. She was a great believer in the importance of science, but deeply lamented the way in which the common confidence in science had lead to it being taken as a source of authority on subjects that did not fall within its ambit - hence Science and Poetry and her battles with Dawkins and others who followed him. She thought the idea of memes lamentably imprecise.
Once I asked her, "Who influenced you most, Mary?" and, without hesitation, she said "It would have to be Aristotle, David". Like the Greek, she would start by thinking about commonly held ideas, or common ways of thinking, but then proceed well beyond them. This meant that she was a good listener, but not really in the empathic way, so much as in her own style of analytic. After a discussion with Mary one thought more deeply and more carefully and often came away realising, in relation to the subject of discussion, that there were dimensions one had not suspected and that one was attached to certain lines of thinking more than to others. This could be sobering, but also was a springboard for creativity.
People commonly make a polarity of head and heart and this can lead to a decrying of intellectualism. Mary was supremely intellectual without being intellectualist - her heart was always engaged even in her most abstract thinking and the reasons of the heart were her bedrock. Being with her I always knew I was in the presence of love. She was practical and moderate, seeing many perspectives and weighing them judiciously - not an easy position in this age of extremists and soundbites. A truly great soul for whom the wellbeing of humanity, and not just humanity, but all forms of life, was not a distant abstraction, but a matter that informed thought, decision and judgement in all areas. She was and remains hugely important to me.
I am currently leading courses on Buddhist psychology here in Seoul, Korea, but as I am putting the course onto this site as we go along, members of La Ville au Roi (Eleusis) are also responding so it is a bit as though the course is going on in several countries at the same time which is nice.
From The Paris Review:
For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this June. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.
Of these 45 notes, no. 7 stood out for me:
"7. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests."
