Sister True Dedication: Don't Wait For Science to Tell You Where Consciousness Is

so good morning dear sa today we are the 8th of December in the year 2024 and we are in the middle a little bit past the middle of our 90day Reigns Retreat and we are studying our teachers teachings on how to be a soulmate of the Buddha so this is something we're studying together and today I've been uh requested to share about the Dharma talk that we watched uh on Wednesday in the hamlets and which is available on YouTube in the playlist for those who just arrived on Friday and in this Dharma talk which is from the 6th of December 2012 Tai said a lot of very interesting things I think I after watching ing it I realized I think this is probably one of the top 20 most important Dharma talks our teacher ever gave so it is worth uh studying looking deeply into and uh taking time to digest and today I will share about two lines two lines um from uh this Dharma talk and uh Ty Ty said this if we want to share the teachings of Buddhism with the West so that the West can benefit from the insights of Buddhism we must be very careful because if we're not careful the West will introduce dualism into Buddhism and will denaturalize Buddhism just as they have denaturalized Christianity okay so there's kind of two um two two uh thesis here one is that the West has denaturalized Christianity and that perhaps by learning and understanding how we might have done that we can avoid the danger of denaturalizing Buddhism so uh this morning there's quite some ground to [Music] um um The Encounter of Christianity with the West I will try to share a little bit about this um I did some reading and research so that you don't have to um but so that we can really uh feel what Tai is saying when he's pointing to this as we know our teacher is a scholar was a scholar and studied comparative religion um uh at uh Princeton Theological Seminary and then at Colombia so when he's saying these things it's really from a place of um understanding and also ongoing dialogue many of his closest friends were Christian theologians priests and monks um of the Christian faith so when Tai is saying this he's not saying it lightly so this morning um I will share with you my my journey of understanding what might have happened to Christianity in its encounter with the west and to see how um these Tendencies maybe to be dualistic in our way of relating to spirituality um might inform our Paradigm and Consciousness today how today do we sit within a kind of dualistic way of seeing and interacting with the world and then hopefully uh I will take some time to explore how we can practice um and how the dador and practices of Plum Village can help us uh transcend that kind of dualism in our very way of practicing we can kind of break free from it and truly touch the healing and liberating insights that Buddhism has to offer and finally I will will uh share a little bit and expand in a more contemporary way on maybe some ways sort of in society that Buddhism might already be being uh denaturalized or taken from its true context okay so I should also say um one of the challenges in talking about dualism as someone who grew up in a western dualistic context is that I really find it hard to not be dualistic myself and uh we have sister langum in the hall I believe somewhere and I thought I need to give her a kind of bell or buzzer so that every time I'm dualistic she can make a sound okay she's there so we can have some kind of signal um but then I thought maybe this will um could interrupt the flow because it might happen um too often um so I'll just share a disclaimer that um this is not something that I have transcended myself um I'm using a language that has emerged in a western dualistic context our our grammar our ways of speaking and thinking about things carry this dualism within it um but I will um try to be vigilant to this so um this is a work in progress and I believe this is the first time um since Tai first taught uh or gave this uh message or this Insight it's the first time we've tried to unpack it in the community um in a sort of uh more detailed way so this is the start of in a way the work of Our Generation to really understand what Tai was pointing towards and um how we can truly um embody and carry the authentic insights of Buddhism forward so a little moment on the history of Christianity um and I will go through this quite quickly but this is just to lay the landscape for us to understand what time meant when he says the West might have denaturalized Christianity oh yes for the word denaturalized so um of course nowadays it's used more in terms of like nationality you can be denaturalized and you use lose your citizenship um here t using in a kind of technical way it could be denatured like to take away the true nature of something so that it becomes something else so to remove the essence so um as we know um Christianity emerged 2,000 years ago uh within the context of Judaism in what is today um modern day Israel and Palestine and at that time that region in the Middle East was under Imperial rule the under the Roman Empire and as over the centuries starting 100 150 years after the emergence of uh Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings uh the faith uh following his teachings began to spread Beyond these Jewish roots and it's spread in three directions it spread south into Africa it spread East well first sort of North into Central Asia and then East along the Silk Road and it spread sort of north and west into Europe and that is where it had the S if you like the deepest encounter with what was then the Empire um um that and the philosophy of that Empire that was really defined by Greek philosophy and what you see over the first centuries of Christianity is everyone trying to explain the teachings of Jesus in these Greco Roman terms and even sometimes borrowing the language of um the Greeks and the Romans to explain the spiritual message of Jesus of Nazareth and in so doing the result was that it absorbed essentially principles from Greek and Roman philosophy and we will go into a bit what those were but it's important to understand that as the early teachings of Jesus encountered kind of Imperial rule essentially a spirituality is encountering a system of power um uh little bit of a translation problem there's no more French okay so as the spiritual tradition or spiritual teachings of Christianity are encountering an Empire that is very concerned with power with control um also an Empire or a civilization that has normalized violence so the teachings of Jesus were very nonviolent and they encountered and ended up being integrated into a uh a logic a worldview and a philosophy that had normalized violence and had normalized patriarchy and a lot of other things and okay we were we were 2,000 years ago we were at the encounter between an Empire and a very grounded and simple Grassroots uh spiritual teaching the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings were very straightforward they were very relational very egalitarian and he emphasized um many things the importance of um ethical living and um living in community um but also the importance of love and repentance and also the relationality with a very um close and warm and intimate God and a kingdom of God that was present and available here on Earth in this moment a kind of sacredness that is there in the human body that everyone can touch the Common People everyone can touch and that's really the kind of the the essence um of early Christianity and as it encountered kind of what we can call Greek rationalist philosophy um the thought of Plato of Socrates and then later Scholars um the sort of essence of these core teachings of Jesus were transformed into a sort of doctrinal system that was very abstract and there was some very key dualisms that really got um strengthened um exaggerated defined and Tai in his talk on December the 6th 2012 he spoke about these and in many talks he speaks about these and I'll just write them on the board so we can bear them in [Music] mind one is the spirit the strict dualism in division between spirit and matter whereas in Jesus's teachings it's very clear that the Divine and the human are interwoven inter intertwined which is sort of linked to a division between soul and body and the Soul being something disembodied and something Immortal which came from the Greek philosophy the teachings on immortality and a vast great perfect Divine and very importantly in Theology and f a difference between the Creator God and His creation us and the Miracle of Life also borrowed from the Greeks a very clear distinction which comes with this between heaven and and Eart --- ther Earth was alive there was magic and mystery and huge reverence for creation but unfortunately with the impact of Christianity that that is that sort of sacredness and Divinity is banished from creation and then that's what leads then to an the extractive exploitative actions we have then done to the Earth in Christianity there are some forms that um merged with local indigenous traditions in Africa and also here in Europe where we have a very interesting uh Christianity in uh uh the Celtic regions and uh we can see the Celtic Earth Earth religions really connecting with um Christianity and there are still today um poems and prayers that are preserved where you can see how Enchanted the natural world was for um Celtic Christians and some of these poems and prayers that are really um Earth connected they were uh still being recited by people right up until about 150 years ago um when they started to be collected and written down and um I say this because Tai also said that part of our mission is to go return to the roots of Christianity and to restore the non-duality that is there in our Christian Roots and there is a wonderful poem that I learned uh from Celtic Christianity which is about the moon and so in the past our ancestors just like we have meditation poems that we call gatas here in the monastery our ancestors also had poems that they learned by heart for every time they encountered the natural world every time they set off on a journey every time they mil the cow every time they lit their fire and I really love the poem um for the Moon and it goes something like this as soon as you see the moon so in the night sky when you see the Moon you say I lift to thee my eyes I bow to thee my head I send to thee my love thou glorious Jewel of all ages I lift to thee my eyes I bow to thee my head I send to thee my my love thou glorious Jewel of all ages so we know that we can interact with the moon like that and uh I invite you to try it I practice this G with the moon and I find it very enriching so there are many ways that we can see the sacredness in in our environment in the natural world around [Music] us a comment on alien from the body we may have inherited from this world view a sense of guilt and shame towards our body that is there in the dominant thought and Paradigm of this dualistic um worldview and that may be an obstacle for us when we come to practice uh Buddhism in terms of the dream of Heaven and the afterlife this has entered our Collective Consciousness as a deep sense that this moment is not all there is that there is something better later that this moment is mundane this moment is normal this moment is uh Fallen the Earth is fallen and humans we are Fallen this is the idea of sin that is also introduced in Christian dualism and that may get in the way of us seeing the miracle of the present moment it may be a very subtle sense that there is something more later that we can't quite put our finger on that prevents us from seeing the fullness um magic and mystery of this momenta okay so what is happening here and Tai said there are two very human tendencies that are going on here um the first is to believe in an immortal soul and the second is to believe in a higher power oh God yeah and in the series of teachings we've been watching and studying this Reign's Retreat we've been learning that these Tendencies were also there in India at the time of the Buddha there was also a tendency to want to believe in a soul that reincarnates a soul that is unchanging and eternal and to delegate responsibility to kind of gods to feel that there are gods in charge of our life it's not us and that's a very interesting question why why we have as humans this tendency to want to believe in higher Powers because maybe it's too confronting to think that we do have loads of agency that we could be responsible uh for our actions and we would yeah we would like to Outsource to delegate that so here in this Hall I don't know how many of us identify either as Christians or can see ourselves in some of this landscape of Consciousness um that we're surrounded by here in the west um I mean some of us might be sitting here thinking [Music] um uh this doesn't apply to me I'm a I'm a clearth thinking [Music] individual and one of the things about this Paradigm especially because of the Decat step and the scientific materialist step is um that we think we're freethinking individuals who are really choosing and separate from the collective Consciousness around us so to say a little bit more about that um okay so we we need to add into the pot uh scientific materialism which has utterly shaped our society our culture and our education here in the west and this leads to a sense that um it's building on everything that deart kind of opened up it's that that only the physical world is real only the measurable world is real um and there are Scholars who say through the door of De and then the rise of scientific materialism that is how we can get to a point where we've reduced through this whole journey we reduced God made God so far away and so small open the door to Scientific materialism and then God is something that can be deleted then we have nihilism so we go from the extreme of eternalism to the extreme of nihilism and scientific materialism is telling us that we live in a dead universe but it was very interesting when we had this science retreat in 2012 we had a astrophysicist here who had a little bit of a dialogue with Tai and it was only at the end of the dialogue when they were talking about the origin of the world he then just like well that's [Laughter] God so somehow there some people managed to they still have a they leave micro percent of the Dead nihilistic materialistic worldview and then God is still hiding as a final or first course okay you according to uh brother fabin so I prepared for this Dharma talk by having a lot of conversations with different monastics so you're all in this Dharma talk according to brother fabin the scientific materialistic world makes or Paradigm makes a nondual experience of the world impossible if we're still inside the scientific materialistic Paradigm we will not be able to allow ourselves to touch the Insight of into beinging to experience a truly um yeah non-dual way of relating and partly it's because of this thing that everything must be measured um so for example we might be coming on this retreat and we might already be having a metric of measuring our experience of the retreat um H how am I you know how am I doing according to what I thought I would come to learn how can I optimize The Retreat to have the things that I want to touch and so that that that measuring frame is is creeping in to everything and it's also telling us that there are things that are no able and things that can't be proven so we then have this sort of burden of proof that [Music] um if our um heart is moved by a sunset science can't measure that if uh we have a really deep encounter with a tree we might we might even doubt ourselves because it's not measurable and we may invalidate these deeper experiences and I'll just give one example from a kind of scientific materialistic Paradigm we had a neuroscience Retreat here in 2019 and as part of the 5 days uh we had a dialogue with them in the transformation hall and then kind of question and answer and one of the female neur neuroscientist asked a question and she said yeah but can you have you ever identified a feeling that didn't originate in your mind so she's very much here she was like that that can arise from the body and not from the mind and I was I was really it really I had like a real shock moment and then I thought well what can I share with you so then I said well as a woman I have a monthly cycle and every month my body experiences some really profound things and it took me quite some time of practice to finally identify that the feeling I had a few days before my cycle was a profound feeling of grief and sadness and I was explained to her that I was very happy when I had this Insight because I tended to think that I was sad about what was happening around me or that my mind mind was sad or that I was in grief or tension with whatever was happening but actually there was a struggle going on at the cellular level of my body and grief was coming from the cellular level of my body the woman she was just smiling from ear to ear and I'm sure many of the women here in this Hall we have our embodied lived direct experience and we don't need science to measure and tell us about how we're experiencing the world and this is a very importan --- wer Hamlet would be a different Hamlet without these two great oak trees just as upper Hamlet would be different without the Pine Tree by the Buddha or without the linden tree and one thing I discovered in being here in Plum Village is that it's one thing to intellectually know that the natural world is a miracle and a Wonder but it's quite different to take the time to be in Silence with the natural world and to pay attention to what it is telling us in the silence and I remember I um this was a few years before that um I was here as a longterm and I went home for Christmas as some of you will be doing and the departure day was uh the 21st of December and I was sitting out waiting for the van to go to the train station and I just heard this little sound I have to do I to do and it was a completely silent morning and there was this and and I turned around and the oak leaves were covered in Frost and they were just falling one by one onto the frosty ground and just making the most beautiful sound and I was like ah 21st of December like the day the oak tree is releasing its leaves like that was that was an event that was an event for the oak tree but it was happening entirely in silence and I sat there for it must have been about 20 minutes witnessing the oak having its experience of that cold peaceful morning where it was just letting go so peacefully and I will say the oak tree was having an experience was radiating and expressing its experience did it have feelings did what was its Consciousness like how would how would it feel to be a tree letting go of all your leaves in that morning and I thought why have I never noticed this before so I think there was a very rare set of causes and conditions that led to the release of the leaves that morning and I I give this example because I think our mind projects so much onto our lived world that we're not really listening to the diverse experience of the more than human world around us because science tells us it's not important science tells us that a tree is just there it's like Furniture can become Furniture it's there to be cut down it just is but we don't think of the the trees in the living dialogue with everything that's happening we've just had some beautiful Autumn weeks and the maple trees have been a beautiful Reds and gold and the The Oaks have been beautiful burnished gold and I always like to for some reason the phrase always comes to me they're singing their song of autumn in silence it's like they're singing a song it's so radiant but it's a silent song but that's their moment you know there's something really going on for the tree in that moment just like in in in spring with the blossom it is also a kind of song a delight of the tree so kind of one question I would have for us on this non uh non dualism of interacting with the natural world is to ask ourselves can we see the sacredness all around us can we allow the natural world natural world can we allow well we can say if you like the Buddhist way the objects of our perception to be deeply alive deeply sacred deeply conscious uh deeply mysterious and Tai used the phrase that one of the in a different talk he said one of the problems in the west is that we have put God in the wrong place we have put God in the wrong place so we put him up in the sky and then so far away and then finally we let him go but to put God where Spinosa put God in every living thing God here being the ultimate being what is sacred what is um um beyond words I have to be so careful in what I said we haven't had many signs from sister langum but she's she's just biting her tongue and a further point on how we can transcend this um dualism around Consciousness like so we might say the material world is not Consciousness or um our our our mind is not Consciousness this idea that Consciousness is only in the brain and this is a kind of dualism that all of us can transcend every day in our lived attentiveness to our whole body and in in Buddhism we speak about mindfulness of the body from within the body it's not that the Mind comes out and then says oh yes I know I have arms I can see my arms I know I got my body and intellectually experiences the body but we can train ourselves to become aware of our body from within the body and we know um from Modern Biology so science is sometimes helpful that our body is I was going to say is sending a lot of signals so part of biology knows that our body is sending a lot of signals but also we might then think to the brain but there are some functions of the body that are taking place even without time to go up to the brain and back again so there's this is like fields of research at the moment might be measuring where Consciousness is happening but we could just free ourselves from that immediately which is saying we don't need to Outsource our Consciousness to whether a scientist has or has not proved something in our own practice of walking meditation we can feel the Earth with our feet we can awaken all the awareness and Consciousness in our legs in the soles of our feet in like the experience of gravity through the whole body and our body can have a full kind of conscious mindfulness of every step we are taking on this beautiful planet so it's not that our mind is doing walking meditation but allow every cell of our body to do walking meditation and I want to mention here that not only did this dualistic worldview encounter scientific materialism it has also encountered uh capitalist individualism and so when we are wanting to be a true soulmate of the Buddha truly penetrate the teachings on no self truly touch the Insight of into being we are doing so within a capitalist we could say hyper individualistic society and this is affecting everything so many countless causes and conditions before we even come to our spiritual practice of mindfulness and Buddhism it is a affecting for example how we all relate to time there was a big shift in society about um from being a very religious societies towards what they now call a more secular society and so religions were just part of life spiritual practices were part of life and then at some point they became an optional choice and so how can we um how do you say ReDiscover time outside of time so that when we are investing time in our spiritual practice see I use the word investing when we when we are [Music] um choosing you see very capitalistic we choose everything and we choose how we will spend our time rather than spirituality being a part of our life and our economic um activity being kind of secondary actually to our spiritual Dimension but now it's the other way around our economic activity is the dominant part of our life and then we opt in to uh spirituality that then it's now this this era of like absolute choice so then it's a different relationship to our spirituality when we are actively choosing it by some measurable criteria um and that may get in the way of a really uh natural kind of authentic direct experience of um spiritual practice and um connection with ourselves and the Mystery of Life I love the work of um the author urula leuin and she has a a fantastic book called The telling and in this book [Music] um people and people citizens are known as producer consumers and uh does our production and our consumption kind of Define us um and how to relate in a way that is beyond producing and consuming um there's a word like because of the um infinite choice we have in our society and not just like the supermarket and not just what channels you open on the screens but like sort of everything is chosen um and then we sort of we're trying to customize our life experience and we might even plan our years in our time tailor made for us and these are these are all ways in which we are um yeah like how to say we are somehow consuming our life our time and our choices and then and then we want to to optimize so we want to optimize our Retreats we want to optimize even the present moment I mean it's a huge demand on the present moment the present moment must set us free the present moment moment must be a gateway to all of these things and and that is because we haven't yet sort of um freed ourselves to have a kind of denatured direct experience um especially in relation uh to time and to the present moment how can we like give the present moment a lot more space I was going to say a lot more value so this is one of our challenges as children of this age children of this Collective Consciousness and um in combination really with the scientific Paradigm also there may be practices that we kind of decide oh that practice is not --- hools sometimes it's to optimize students performance so the scientific measurements are to show that it makes the children perform better by these other scientific measures whereas for us when we speak in Plum Village of bringing mindfulness into schools it's to make the classroom uh well in TI's language a second home so that the class can be a true Community where people can be present and show up as themselves where children who have difficulty at home can feel heard by their peers and by their teachers to for the classrooms to be a place where we learn about how to relax the body how to handle strong emotions how to um listen deeply so our um a sort of a um a not denal ized way of bringing mindfulness to a certain setting is to yeah not have these measurable um outcomes of success and using mindfulness as a way to get there sometimes Ty says mindfulness is a path not a tool okay okay I I want to mention something here about um okay no we will continue so another word that Tai used on the 6th of December is that we may dilute Buddhism um to remove key teachings or practices and this we might see in particular with the encounter with West psychology there may be a tendency to kind of cherry-pick certain aspects of Buddhist psychology and bring them into a dualistic Western psychological frame and if we dilute the teaching then it can't be transmitted to Future Generations another word is to extract and in particular Ty said we shouldn't distract mindfulness from its ethical context of the eight-fold Noble Path so mindfulness is just one part of the broader Buddhist teaching and this becomes important because for example um there are people who are bringing mindfulness into military settings so teachings from Buddhism are extracted um diluted of course instrumental in order to make soldiers better Killers now actually if that is happening we would say that what they are learning is not actually what we would call mindfulness so we would have maybe a distinction between right or full mindfulness and a kind of extracted extracted wrong mindfulness also mindfulness and Buddhism are already being appropriated um to sort of become property appropriated taken out of the spiritual context um put into apps to make uh large profits and then sometimes the apps have huge research budgets to then prove that prove that mindfulness but I don't want to say here that um what if a little bit of mindfulness can help people so isn't that okay like maybe some people they can't handle the whole teaching but maybe a little bit of mindfulness can help or maybe we say we have to dilute it because um skillful means so you know if we mention the Buddha or Buddhism if we use those words um people won't be able to access the Insight um of the Dharma so we kind of say that we need to do it even using Buddhist language like it's an appropriate means to help people suffer less so uh these are now Sister Lang's insights on this um it is true uh that Buddhism has always used skillful means and it is also true that Buddhism has adapted with every culture that Buddhism has um expanded into um and it is also true that Tai said to us the teachings need to evolve and adapt and stay relevant to our times so some change is kind of inherent and the challenge for us especially the of us as teachers is how to do so without removing the essence the true nature of mindfulness or Buddhism how to be brave um but also Vigilant um and how to do so always with kind of insight and Tai himself said that Buddhism is only made of non- Buddhism elements and he also said once when a little child in the UK asked him Ty do you have any kind of precious thing that you have been able to let go of because they'd been learning the story about letting go of your cows which is a long story um and uh Ty took some time to breathe and then he said yeah I've let go of my idea of Buddhism I am free Ty is very happy that the thing he was most proud of letting go is he's I'm now free of Buddhism maybe Buddhism the sign but not Buddhism the essence and and Tai has also said that we don't need to call ourselves a Buddhist to practice okay but still we must be vigilant not to make it mindfulness or Buddhism into a tool not to dilute it especially those of us who are transmitters um not to extract to appropriate it or to let ourselves be appropriated to other ends an interesting story when we um Tai was invited to the tyan sister CH Kong invited to the Vatican in 2014 and they sent a bishop here to invite us to go and to deliver the invitation in person to meet the pope and participate in an event and Tai said no and then he said no and no and [Music] um I didn't want to give up so I kept trying and then uh sister Chang Kong sat with me I remember on the Bell Tower trying to explain why Tai was saying no and there's a long history of uh um the Christian world uh appropriating um and uh mistreating um Buddhism especially in Vietnam but I didn't want to give up because I thought it would be fantastic if Ty and the pope met so I created a whole dossier briefing and then we went and sister Gina and I um went and interrupted Tai in his Hermitage when he was lying on his hammock and we said I said oh Ty I'm here to talk about the Vatican invitation he said no no no no no no no seven times I was said no but look at my document look at all of these things this is why we need to anyway and I didn't give up and went on and on and on and it went on for a number of weeks and I just I felt I don't know where it came from in me such a wish to make this happen um and finally it was when we were at the EAB and then we were a group of us coming and we we had gone back to the Vatican and we said you know you got to try and make it um work better cuz T said he we don't do photo opportunities you know they just want us there for the shaved heads and the robes to be in a photo to sign a document but we actually want to offer our practice and especially as a monastic community Community to offer our practices to the Catholic monastic community so then we came up with a new proposal and I negotiated with the bishop and I was like the only way this is going to happen is the day before the event we have to have a whole day of mindfulness in the Vatican and this is quite hard with the bishop but it was interesting because he came from the faculty of of Sciences and so we got in through the science to our skillful means and um and we created an event for everyone involved in that topic which is actually um to end modern slavery and human trafficking everyone involved including the religious orders involved in that around the world to have a day of mindfulness and Dharma sharing together and relaxation and walking meditation right in the heart of the Vatican so that we would then uh participate in the event and that really um I learned a lot from that experience of TI freedom in not letting us be appropriated without a a true reciprocal kind of exchange and a meaningful way for us to show up with all of our Buddhism not just the outer form but to really bring our heart our practice and our world view to to the dialogue and the interaction I'm aware that I have ran out of time um okay I will just finish with one thing which I think some of the translators might have so I would like to read a quote from shringer uh scientist that Tai included in his book The Son my heart and uh I love this it's a very um Vivid quote and it's also an invitation for all of us to help us um transcend our dualism and uh get in touch with the living sacred and Enchanted natural world thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground stretched out upon Mother Earth with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you you are as firmly established as in vulnerable as she indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable as surely she Mother Earth will engulf you tomorrow so surely will she bring you forth a new to new striving and suffering and not merely someday later now today every day she is bringing you forth not once but thousands upon thousands of times just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over for eternally and always there is only now one and the same now the present is the only thing that has no end and in the later years of Tai's teachings he said we don't need to put our faith or our refuge in something far away something hard to grasp but we can take refuge in the earth herself The Living Earth as a sacred realm and us as miracles of life um that are truly one with this beautiful planet with this manifestation of uh Cosmos all around us thank you for [Music] listening [Music] for for for