Some years ago I remember imparting some ‘definite knowledge’.  At the time I was talking to someone else as well as James, and i had my back to him. However I remember noticing that the quality of his attention had changed. Because, at the time, i was pleased at knowing something a little unusual, i could have imagined that this was because he was surprised or impressed.

Since then i  have had the experience of listening to many people telling me, and other people, the truth about me, about others, and about how things are, or how they should be done, and I suspect that he was in fact  noticing the tightening of the voice and body which goes with having the sense that ‘this is how it is, I know! ‘.
At that point i had lost touch with the ground and gone into a ‘world of one’… speaking out my confident assertion, with actually no particular regard to the listeners. So he was more likely to have been registering that change in me… from an openness to closed certainty.

There can be an artificiality, a tightness and lost disconnectedness, when someone is regurgitating ingested ‘facts’ with a desire to be the ‘one who knows’.  Although its quite understandable to want to be someone who knows, particularly in our culture where becoming a library of information is confused with wisdom, and especially if one’s ‘offerings’  have been disparaged in the past…however it is the discourse (monologue!) of the ego seeking recognition/affirmation.  It can be not very welcoming to others and can come with a, not very tasty, seasoning of pride.

Communication which is really addressed to the other, attuned in seeing and feeling how they are and what is helpful, cooked just for them… not too much and not too little… Even if it perhaps needs sometimes to be directive, it will be received and digested much more readily than a shower of ego driven ‘spears’.

BTW There is something very uncomfortable about the visual image of having a point of view and sitting rigidly upon it (oh…brings tears to the eyes!)

a nice flat bed of nails seems inviting by comparison.                  

Thanks to Tessa Rose of Arcturus publishing who has given permission for the use here of  these lines from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. 

The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.
The ordinary person seeks to do good things,
and finds that they cannot do them continually.

The master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish a task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find they accomplish nothing.

The kind person acts from the heart,
and accomplishes a multitude of things.
The righteous person acts out of pity,
yet leaves many things undone.
The moral person will act out of duty,
and when no one responds
will roll up his sleeves and use force.

When the Tao is forgotten there is righteousness.
When righteousness is forgotten, there is morality.
When morality is forgotten, there is the law.
The law is the husk of faith,
and trust is the beginning of chaos.

Our basic understandings are not from the Tao
because they come from the depths of our misunderstanding.
The master abides in the fruit and not in the husk.
She dwells in the Tao,
and not in the things that hide it.
This is how she increases in wisdom.

This is from the arcturus publication of the translation by John H McDonald.  It’s a beautiful version of a brilliantly clear translation which is sadly out of print… however a few copies are are still available from Abe books.

So…flapping about when wasp are near really disturbs them and increases the chances of being stung. Understanding this can change our behaviour  and so decrease the chance of being stung. Having a benevolent attitude towards them either because we see them as helpful, or in a bigger way as part of what is, may also help. Creatures certainly can be sensitive to our attitude towards them.

Perhaps we have a similar approach to other human beings who we feel are a threat and may sting us – maybe we flap about in our anxiety – but if, either on a relative or ultimate level, we can understand the conditions operating in the situation then this can soften our tension and, if we are stung, allow a quicker release of the pain.

A dharma investigation will take us back to fundamental ignorance and the arising of the five poisons on the basis of that misunderstanding.

With that, the Buddha’s story about the man hit by a poisoned arrow is very helpful. How much time do we want to spend working out who fired the arrow and why, what the arrow – shaft and tip – is made of, and what kind of feathers the flight, before we pull the arrow out?

Our sense of injustice, with questions like ‘don’t they know?’ and ‘why can’t they see?’ and ‘how could they?’ can often simply answered by… ‘no, they don’t’, ‘because they haven’t looked’, and ‘because they are them’, respectively. The conditioned nature, with egoic centrality, does not invite a questioning tentative approach and, if we had their conditioning, we would behave exactly as they do. The spinning around these questions takes up a lot of time and energy, often to no good effect, and can keep the wound from healing – it’s like scratching the top off  a scab.

So perhaps there is something useful to be said or done, perhaps not. If there is then it is likely to work out better if we truly know who we are and so have the space to be curious about the other, holding gently in mind the question of who they are – both in their true nature and its current precise expression. With that approach our response will be to be more attuned to the actual circumstances prevailing at the time rather than a defensive reactivity based on the past or imaginings.

Sometimes when something hurtful is being chewed over and over I suggest this is a bit like picking up a poisoned dagger which someone has thrown towards you and sticking it in yourself over and over again. There is the possibility just to leave it on the ground where it fell ( if you’re not so ‘solidly defined’ then what will it stick to?).

And  while we are talking about what we and others get up to there is a saying I like which is – as one points a finger at the other there are three fingers pointing back at oneself or, as the Buddha said, ‘a man winnows the faults of others whilst hiding his own like a crafty gamester covering his throw.’ Turning the mirror around to look at what we’re up to is challenging, and sometimes we are too close to the mirror to see clearly, it’s all a bit blurry or we focus just on what seems attractive or unattractive to ourselves – which can be where a teacher comes in very handy – but it’s by altering our own way of being that we really can make a difference. Trying to be helpful while being tangled up is hard to do… we may just become more entangled. But if we can see that happening then, as we are trying, we are learning. To offer to help someone being swept along in a river is a kind expression but it’s more likely to be effective if you are standing on the riverbank with a rope and a lifebuoy than if you are being swept along beside them.

Which leads to Dharma practice… and the old Zen saying if you haven’t got time to meditate for twenty minutes you need to meditate for an hour!

The lads in my village take every opportunity they can to practice their tricks on their skateboards…. I talk with a young woman who is a keen rower and she makes sure to go to bed in time to get up for training…and we who are practising the dharma and trying to turn around the course of, or our relationship with, the supertanker of our conditioned habits and beliefs…how much effort/precision do we give to this?

There was a queue of people outside the bread shop – wasps and humans were wanting the sweet things inside. One minute I was looking to see if there was any of the bread I wanted left for sale, the next I was watching the lady in front of me twisting the ball of her foot on the ground, grinding a wasp into the pavement. She turned to me and said ‘they do no good you know, they are completely pointless.’ I can get hooked by incorrect statements and i mildly observed that, maybe surprisingly, wasps pollinate flowers just as bees do. She retorted that bees were okay but wasps were not because they were malicious and stung out of spite.  ‘In your story-book’ was my quiet response ….and she was in agreement with this saying that I was about to be stung by the one on my wrist!

I left the wasp to walk about on my wrist and then fly off. I bought my loaf of bread and left but afterwards I thought about the wasps and how we can soften our certainties by becoming more conscious of our limited views and so becoming more curious… and also how treating the small creatures of the world with respect is a softening practice to start with, and one which, overtime, can make harshness less and less likely to arise inappropriately – whether for insects or humans. Some of us can become hugely tender to the lives of little creatures but unsurprisingly find the bigger (speaking) ones much more challenging.

Wasps are used in great numbers by farmers in agriculture for pest control, they are predators for all the world’s insect pests. The greenfly in the garden  are eaten by them but at this time of year they are very hungry as their main food source, a sugary secretion from the wasp larvae in their nest, is no longer being produced. That’s why they quickly gather round food and are very persistent! The wasps didn’t know that the shop’s air-space and its contents  was supposed to be off-limits to them, for them it was suddenly ‘manna from heaven.’

Stinging is their defence mechanism. If a wasp is in trouble it will emit a pheromone which will disturb all the nearby wasps and put them into defensive/ attack mode. So its really best for all concerned to let them be. In my experience, usually, if you are still and calm then creatures can sense that you are no threat.

I think that, from the wasps point of view, suddenly being crushed could well be seen as a malicious act… and as for these humans, do they do good?… What is the point of them? Projecting out anger and hatred onto the other and then reacting violently to what we see is common human behaviour …do wasps behave like this?

If our own concept of functionality is a prerequisite for the continuation of existence of the other then we really have taken over the role of gods (of the ‘all knowing’, ‘all powerful’ but not ‘all loving’ kind). Nevermind this arrogance, at this point in time we seem very close to losing the plot in many different ways.  We can now genetically modify mosquitoes so that they will not breed, some would think that this is a very good idea but fortunately there are people who realise that the mosquito is an essential food source for many different creatures. More troublingly  the normal molecular structure composed of the four amino acids – the basic building blocks of lifeforms – can now be altered and replicated using other substances. This creates a completely different lifeform and, as a commentator said, ‘this could be quite scary as we have no defences against this organism’…..’err yes indeed!’ i thought … he went on to say ‘but on the other hand if in the future we want populate Mars then producing lifeforms  which can cope with radiation etcetera could be very helpful’…. Sometimes I find it very hard to believe my ears – going to another planet, that’s possible,…creating new and potentially dangerous life-forms that’s also possible,… we know so much yet do we know how to be truly alive… what do we know about how to live together, how to care gently for ourselves, each other, and the suffering world that supports us? (link to National Geographic article)

As I remember it, one of the patients in the l’Arche foundation’s first home was bedridden and could do nothing more than move an eye, yet the quality of his being was such that people wanted to spend time in the room with him, not from pity but for grace. Was he pointless? Maybe, but he surely had value. Many activities and qualities like altruism and patience could be deemed pointless…. and tolerance is such a precious quality for living together in this strange world… we are all here, we belong, so how shall we be with each other?

Maybe, for starters, we have to see, to sense, to feel, to be open to the field (you plus me plus the context)… that’s hard to do with hands full of the book of, and both eyes glued to the story of, ‘Me!’.

…and when you see that the wasps persistence is due to hunger and their drowsiness to ‘hypoglycaemia’ then its easy to give some beings what they need – a teaspoon of jam in a dish outside keeps about twenty wasps happy for the day (and it does keep them outside which makes me happy)! The three which looked drowned in the dish this morning, after the rain, surprisingly  sprang back into life when I gently emptied it out, but a flat surface would be safer.

Five major rivers, vital to the existence of millions of beings in Tibet India China Myanmar Burma Laos and Thailand, all have their origin high on the Tibetan plateau. The water there is as fresh as water can be but by the time these rivers reach the sea their colour has changed from blue to brown and levels of pollution are disturbing.  The energy of the rivers is increasingly being used to generate electricity so the flow of water and migration of fish is disrupted by dams. The silt release, in which sediment is periodically released from behind the dams to prevent them from silting up, is a phenomenal event which has a devastating impact on the life in the river downstream. So human interference with the flow of these waters – as with other rivers in Africa – and around the world, is having an impact which sadly resonates through time.

The streams of dharma are like this. Most of you will know this so please excuse me but there are some dharma teachings and books which are, one way or another, very close to the source – fresh and with minimal pollution – and others which are so heavily impacted by human interpretations and ignorance that, like the water from the yellow river, they should carry a dharma health warning.

I started my studies with ‘Teach yourself Buddhism’ and without a teacher they would have ended there, it was not dharma …..apart from which its too easy to read a lot and think you ‘know’ as the story of Naropa shows… and little bit of this and little bit of that, like mixing colours in a paint box, ends up with a muddy brown.

How to  pick your way through the minefield… unless you are already an expert how will you know whose advice to trust?

The internet is helpful here as you can check and cross-check very carefully. Keep looking and finding out all you can about the validity of the source of dharma which you are using for your own life transfusion…Look outside and inside the tradition and listen to other teachers. Gradually you’ll get a sense of where your connections lie and the difference in qualities. You matter too much to just cross you fingers and spit, trusting to luck or happenstance. Who taught the teacher? Who gave them authorisation to teach? How qualified are they? What have others said about them? Is there some kind of ‘group think’ going on?

If they write, can you see how much of what they write is dharma and how much is personal opinion. If you are reading a translation what are the translators skills in both languages… maybe you can check for bias and differing interpretations by reading other versions. Two english translators of the I-ching had a judeo-christian bias and used a little respected Chinese version as their source; one of the versions of the Tao te Ching i have i find completely unreadable while another seems very clear and beautiful.

Are they open to questioning….some are straight down the line…take it or leave it…and if they are straight down the line that will do no harm. They may have other ‘fish to fry’  but can you work with that? – there’s a  song Leonard Cohen wrote about how he and others tried to persuade his zen teacher to say ‘just a little bit more’…unsuccessfully!

Observe their behaviour for many years, do they embody what they teach, what can you learn from them? Do they want you to wake up, or to use your energy, or are they confused. Is there an agenda involving the worldly dharmas– is the dharma running the show or the ego?

Whichever the stream you drink from… may the water be clear.