The Way Out Is In / Bringing the Ultimate Dimension Down to Earth (Episode #40)

00:00:00

Dear listeners, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In. I am Jo Cofino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems evolution.

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And I am Brother Pha Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the community of Plum Village.

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And today, Brother Phap Huu, we are going to be talking about how to stay centered in difficult and dark times. How do we keep our joy? How do we keep our happiness when we know of all these troubles in the world? And we’re going to look at one particular deep teaching within Buddhist philosophy, the two dimensions, the ultimate dimension and the historical dimension.

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The way out is in.

00:01:17

Hello dear listeners, I am Jo Confino.

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And I am Brother Phap Huu.

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And today, brother, we have an honored guest, Brother Phap Linh. And do you want to just, he’s been with us once before, but do you want to just introduce him to those who haven’t heard about him before?

00:01:31

Yes. We have a returning guest, Brother Phap Linh, or some of us we call him Brother Spirit because that’s what it means. And Brother Phap Linh has been in our community for a long time. He’s a Dharma teacher and he was a composer and still is a composer, but now under the brown robe and the bald head. And the music that you just heard was produced by Brother Linh, as well as a lot of the chanting that we do in Plum Village was produced by Brother Phap Linh. And it is a wonderful, wonderful honor to have him as a guest, to go in through this philosophy, this teaching, this insight of the historical dimension and the ultimate dimension. Because Brother Phap Linh is much smarter than I am.

00:02:16

Well, both of us together actually.

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And that is why we needed his support, because we both felt quite clueless when we looked at this topic and, hmm, we need help.

00:02:26

Speak for yourself, brother. I completely understand this teachings.

00:02:31

Sure you do. We took about 30 minutes preparing for this episode right before this recording, so.

00:02:38

Yeah, thanks for that. So, Brother Phap Linh, do you want to just say hello and say how you’re feeling today?

00:02:45

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me back. It’s great to be with you again. And yeah, I’m feeling a mixture, in fact, the perfect mixture of historical and ultimate knowing that, you know, Russia is in the middle of a draft, you know, hundreds of thousands of young men getting pulled from their families and their workplace and even their studies and being forced to go and fight a war that most of them don’t want to fight in. So I’m with the grief of that. I’m really feeling it since yesterday, actually. And at the same time, you know, getting to live this amazing life in Plum Village where we have so many opportunities to take care of ourselves, to keep coming back to the present moment, to keep going, going deep. We have sitting meditation in the morning and then silent meals and then we get to sit with and, you know, offer teachings to people who are really inspired to go deeper and understand themselves and understand the suffering and their joy. And then we have walking meditation and we have another meal in silence. And it’s just kind of so many opportunities to actually put these teachings into practice that somehow, with all the grief I actually feel, yeah, I feel that I can touch a kind of peace in the midst of all of that.

00:04:06

Great. And thank you, Brother Phap Linh, that’s such a wonderful example, isn’t it, of this idea that a lot of people feel that if they’re seeing, if they’re feeling grief, that that has to be all of them, that you can’t be you can’t grieve for something and find happiness or joy. And I think the purpose, in a sense, of this podcast is to help people and rethink it ourselves of how can we actually, as you say, feel a deep grief and also feel a joy, that they are not in conflict with each other. And so understanding the relative historical dimension and the ultimate dimension is such a beautiful way to sort of draw us into that. So, brother, you want to start off with a little bit about just to give people a flavor. What do we mean by two dimensions?

00:04:56

Right. So part of the difficulty with this teaching, I think, is that it sounds like a description of reality. It sounds like we’re saying, you know, that reality is made up of these two different dimensions. But I understand it more as the sense in which our minds interpret reality in two fundamentally different ways and apparently contradictory ways. But reality is just itself, is just getting on with being itself. And it’s perfectly fine with, you know, having this apparent contradiction at the heart of it. It’s just our brain that struggles to reconcile these two things. So the apparent contradiction is actually sort of throughout Buddhist teaching, it’s really there, because when you first come to a Buddhist monastery, they tell you you have to practice. You know, you have to, you know, you only have one lifetime. You have to use your time. Well, don’t waste your time. Practice sitting meditation like your hair’s on fire. You know, break through your illusions and transform all your afflictions. And, you know, time is running out. Time is short. So there’s that aspect. And then as you go deeper in the teachings, they say nothing to do, nothing to worry about. Everything, you know, the work has already been done. You can just relax. Enjoy the practice of non practice… You already are what you want to become. Everything is already complete since the non beginning, you know. And so it seems very strange. So it’s like, what do I have to do? Do I have to work really hard and struggle and strive and try to, you know, understand my suffering and transform? Or can I just sit back and, you know, lie in a hammock and relax and, you know, just enjoy like that? So those that kind of sums up a little bit these two contradictory, apparently contradictory attitudes. Another way of seeing it is that, you know, in the historical dimension, we understand that there is time. Time is passing. We are in the present moment. The future hasn’t yet come. The past is already gone. And things are outside of each other. You know, I’m sitting over here. You’re sitting over there. Phap Huu is over there. And we are apparently separate. You know, I’m separate from my father, from my mother, from, you know, from the world. I am myself. There are things outside of me. You could say, you know, Thay once said that, in that world, like the cow is outside of the ice cream. You know, that’s the historical dimension. Things are made up of other things. Things are composed of parts, right? So that’s what we learn in science. So everything is made up of, you know, atoms and molecules, and all down, you know, beyond the atomic to the subatomic, you know, to the quarks, the gluons, the all that other stuff. It seems to be made up of ever smaller things. And that can all be ultimately sort of teased apart and separated and identified. And so that’s the historical. And then the ultimate is this sense in which we start to… which, you know, which many poets, I think touch, poets and artists and meditators all touch this sense that everything is interconnected. The all is in the one. You look into an oak leaf, you see the tree. You see not only the tree, but you see the whole forest. You see the whole Earth. You see, you know, the sun, the moon, the stars, time, space, consciousness. It’s all there, somehow implicit in whatever you look at, whether it’s a leaf or a, you know, a block of concrete, honestly, you know, it’s like everything is in everything else. So this kind of a… And that’s in the realm of space, but also in time. So in this moment, this present moment, from the point of view of the ultimate, we can see that the whole of the past history of the cosmos has given rise, has brought about this moment. And so, in a sense, all of that past is in this moment. And this is the interbeing of the past and the present. And then the interbeing of the present and the future is that this moment gives birth to the entire future of the cosmos, according to what we do, how we speak, how we think, how we act in this moment. That determines to some extent the future of the entire cosmos. And so the future is also present in this moment. So it’s the interbeing of the three times: past, present and future. You know, you look deeply into it, you see the whole of eternity in the present moment.

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Now we know why we invited him, don’t we, Brother Phap Huu?

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We do.

00:10:02

Should we just stop there?

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I think we’re done.

00:10:08

So Brother Phap Linh, okay, so there are these two ways of seeing our lives, the world, everything. And this podcast is all about the Zen art of living. It’s about saying, Well, by knowing these, there are two dimensions, by understanding them, is that just going to confuse me or actually is going to help me? So bringing that sort of those two ideas down-to-earth in the sense of what that means for someone living their daily life, how does it help to understand those two dimensions?

00:10:44

Right. Well, first of all, I think I want to say something which is that this doesn’t, it’s kind of not the property of Buddhism in a sense, right? It’s not just because we have this teaching of the ultimate and the relative that it’s… or the ultimate and the historic, that this is kind of that only Buddhism has access to this. I think you can find this in every spiritual tradition. It just comes with different names. And I even encountered scientists who I think are starting to touch this kind of sense of the possibility of consciousness, kind of touching oneness, touching this profound connection with everything in the sense of meaning, the sense of deep, deep meaning and yeah, that it’s not all for nothing, that it’s not all, you know, that we’re not living in a kind of big clockwork cosmos that’s just kind of mindlessly going through its motions, but that there’s something up, something is going on, it means something, and it matters what we do, it matters what we say, it matters what we think. And so, in a sense, I see it as it’s, first of all, there’s an aspect of good news, right? Because it means that there is something afoot. You know, there’s something going on, there’s something deep, there’s something mysterious, there’s something wonderful that we can all touch in our daily lives. And that’s pretty good news because I think, you know, it would be easy in this day and age to think, you know, the more we know about the world, the more we see about what’s happening in the world, the more overwhelming it can feel and the more kind of terrifying and sometimes meaningless it can feel. It can feel like we are, you know, our societies falling apart. The planet is falling apart, the environment’s falling apart. The economy is falling apart. Politics is falling apart. Nothing means anything anymore. We don’t trust each other. We don’t believe what we read in the newspapers. We don’t, you know, there’s this feeling of, yeah, things coming apart at the seams a little bit. And so, what can this practice bring us? How can we sort of ground it in our daily lives? I think it’s exactly when we encounter those feelings of everything is not okay, you know, I’m not okay, the world is not okay. I feel disturbed, but I feel scared, I feel maybe desperate or some aspect of despair or anxiety, of stress. You know that what is going to happen? You know what does my future look like? What does my children’s future look like? You know, is there a future for us as human beings on the world? These are very, very scary thoughts. And I think they are rising in the collective consciousness. People are talking about the possibility of collapse, you know, of our civilization collapsing. And that’s kind of normal now to just kind of throw that into conversation. I see it in the news. Before it would have been a pretty fringe thing to say. Now it’s fairly ordinary and that’s scary. That’s really scary. So, knowing all that, knowing, you know, when we have these feelings, which can be every day, you know, can be frequent, the question is, how do we… What do we do? How do we respond as practitioners of meditation? And I just feel incredibly lucky to have met my teacher and to have been given all of these different ways to touch, to go deeper, to go in search of the ultimate within myself. Because, you know, whether you call it the ultimate from the Buddhist point of view or whether you call it God or, you know, kind of cosmic consciousness or life itself or, you know, the life spirit or, you know, yeah, there’s this feeling that there’s more to life, there’s more to what’s going on. And we have to be able to touch it. And when we can touch it, that gives us the feeling of a great, a bigger purpose. We are in touch with our kind of ultimate concern, like, why are we even getting up in the morning? You know, why do we go through the motions every day? Why do we do what we do? Why do we strive to try to understand ourselves more deeply or to love more deeply or, you know, there has to be a kind of bigger underlying purpose that kind of fills us with with energy, that can carry us through all of these daily difficulties that we face. So that’s kind of the, for me, the part of the why of it, the utility of it, the ultimate dimension. You know, saying, Oh, you know, you should get in touch with the ultimate dimension, it doesn’t mean kind of spiritual bypassing. It doesn’t mean learn to touch these kind of wonderful states of bliss in your sitting meditation, and then you can ignore all of the terrible things that are going on in the world and you’ll still feel fine. That is not touching the ultimate. That is, you know, well that’s, yeah, that is spiritual bypassing. So touching the ultimate means that you are able to contact this sort of deeper level of meaning, of significance, of love, ultimately, in your life, and in the world. And that nourishes you, gives you energy, gives you peace to come back and kind of stay in the game, you know, to do the daily things, but with the freshness and the freedom of the ultimate dimension.

00:17:28

Thank you, brother. Can I just talk a little bit about how it’s helped me, actually, which may be useful. Because when I was working at The Guardian, I interviewed Thay on a few occasions, but on one occasion I interviewed him about the historical and the ultimate dimension. And I found, actually, my limited understanding fundamentally shifted the way I was able to be present for the work I did. And, as you say, to really feel the depth of the grief and pain out in the world, as well as staying happy in myself. And the way I understood it is that sort of, you know, as you explain very well, you know, the historical dimension is, you know, me, I’m living this life, I’m feeling these things, I have my sufferings, etc., etc.. And the ultimate dimension, my sense of it was that actually, you know, everything, you know, I’m living in this moment. And so this moment feels the most important for me. It’s my kids, my family, my friends, my community. And so in a sense, I’m deep in the wood, amongst the trees. I see basically what I perceive out of my own sense. And then that old thing of when you rise above the trees and you get to see that actually all the pathways and the trees in context. And for me, the ultimate dimension helped me to understand that actually everything on the long arc of history, going back to the very beginning of time, going through to find the future, you know, things always rise and fall. Things always… There’s happiness and there’s suffering, that civilizations all through history have come and gone, that there is this deep sense of impermanence, but actually that beyond impermanence, everything is okay. That, you know, that if we understand that everything is impermanent, everything can be destroyed, that in a few billion years the Earth will get too close to the Sun and itself will be destroyed. So I want to preserve what’s beautiful in this planet, but also I recognize this planet itself is impermanent. And what that helped me to do was let go of my attachment to being a certain way. Because in this lifetime, what I see and the difference I want to make sort of fills my mind. But actually when I step back from it, it’s saying, I don’t actually know what needs to happen. I don’t actually know what would be the best thing for this earth, whether humans disappear or whether we flourish, whatever… I don’t know that. And so by letting the ultimate take care of itself, I can actually just focus on being here in this moment without a need for it to be a particular way. So what I’ve been trying to do with, brother, and I don’t know if this makes sense, is, in a sense, have you see the interplay between that. To see that, yes, I want to do everything I can, as Thay would say, to sort of protect this beautiful blue jewel in the cosmos. And at the same time, this jewel in the cosmos has its own life, has its own sort of rises and falls, of which I don’t need to know. So I can be fully present, fully engaged, do everything I can, and also let go of this need for it to be that. And I think the most difficult thing when I talk to people about it, they say, but what about all the suffering? They say, it’s all very well you saying that, but actually, if, you know, we talk about the end of civilization, you know, or the extinction of human beings, and that is intense and enormous amount of suffering at a scale we can’t even begin to imagine. And that’s where I think people get a bit stuck. It’s because they say, is all very well saying, oh, well, I’ll do everything I can, but I let go of that. And people say, But look, there are people suffering now, there are people dying now. How can you almost be so cold? Sometimes people say.

00:21:50

Right. So I think the key is to understand that touching the ultimate doesn’t mean that we become passive or indifferent or cold. On the contrary, it means that we become more free to actually engage in a more helpful way. If we only concern ourselves with the historical dimension, then there’s a big risk that we get into a state of panic, basically, of sort of frenetic activity, because it is overwhelming. There is, you know, more than any one individual can do or can handle. The suffering is already immense, let alone what may be coming in a decade or two. So if we stay at that level, it’s just sort of tasks and to do lists and it’s never enough and we can never be enough and we can never do enough. And that’s just very stressful, basically. That’s very stressful. And that stress then causes us to behave in a stressful way. And maybe we are so panicked by the impending doom that we see coming that we actually bring it on sooner, because our actions may contribute to, you know, spreading panic and fear and doom if we’re not careful. So what is the alternative? The alternative is not just to sort of go off into some fairyland and, you know, just hide ourselves in caves and go into full lotus position and go on for the rest of eternity and everything’s fine. It’s actually just to have a way to be in touch with wonder every day, every moment. To refresh ourselves with the sense of mystery, of wonder, of love that is available to us. And yes, also to be at peace with our own death. You know, fundamentally, that’s a part of it, to have a kind of, to be able to touch a non fear, to be able to see that we are not limited to just this life span, that we continue in important ways. That gives us non fear that not only we continue, but every action continues. Every action resonates sort of throughout time and space in ways that we can’t really fathom. And so every action matters. And so there’s a sense in which, you know, you could say, well, okay, so human civilization may come to an end. It’s important to realize that, to accept that even, that doesn’t mean that we by accepting the possibility of the end of civilization, that we don’t do anything about it. It means that we are able to be at peace with the possibility that our civilization will be extinguished. To see that we… And that peace comes because we see our profound interbeing with the Earth. So if you see yourself as just human, then the end of civilization is pretty scary, right? Because then that means the end. The end. The end, you know, it’s all over. Game over. But if you see yourself as the Earth, well, the end of civilization is just it’s, yeah, it’s tragic and it’s not something, you know, trivial, but it’s only the end of a part of you. And so much of you continues. Like, if we are the Earth, well, we will continue. We will continue in other forms, in countless other forms. The Earth will regenerate herself. Maybe she takes 100 million years, you know, to restore the richness of biodiversity that we enjoyed, you know, a couple of hundred years ago. But she’ll be able to do that. And even if this planet is ultimately swallowed, you know, engulfed by the Sun, when it grows into a red dwarf, a red giant, sorry. And then… But the Earth also is only a part of what we are. We are the cosmos. We are, you know, the Earth is a flower of the cosmos. And there are many flowers, you know, that will bloom elsewhere. And so it’s kind of yeah, it’s kind of mystical. It’s hard to make it, you know, to convince ourselves just with logic alone, you know, that that sense of continuation beyond humanity, beyond even planet Earth is a meaningful one, is a refuge. But that’s why you have to not just talk about it. Right? It’s not just an idea. It’s not enough. You can’t convince yourself with logic. You actually have to do it. You have to have a practice that gives you the possibility of touching that experience directly, beyond words. And then you get it. And then you feel that peace. It’s not that you kind of think your way to it. You actually touch it and and then you’re free to come back. And, like I said before, to stay in the game. And then you see the preciousness of everything we have, the preciousness of everything that still remains of our civilization. And you want to do everything you can to save everything that you can, even if we are in a collapse, you know, situation. Doesn’t it still matter that we are kind? You know, doesn’t it still matter that we express love and compassion? I believe it does. I believe that that love and compassion can’t be extinguished. They’re not extinguished by death or even disaster. And I can’t explain to you why I’m so sure of that. It’s beyond logic. But you can, I think all of us can feel it deep inside us. And sometimes you have to have a way to quiet the noise, you know, in your mind, and then you feel that there’s something inside of you that just, that is just connected to… That there’s this powerful force that tends towards love and beauty and goodness and kindness. And it’s not really logical in a sense. It’s way beyond, you know, anything that you could justify by logic. It’s completely mad in a sense. It’s just totally bonkers. It’s not anything that, you know, to give you an example, like if you do something kind and nobody knows. Right? Does that matter? That nobody knows? No. You still have the sense that that kindness is important, even if nobody else ever sees it or understands it. It’s still important. You don’t only do it to get other people’s praise or approval or acceptance. It’s because there’s something intrinsic in us that just wants to help relieve suffering in the world. And that, yeah, I think that transcends all kind of explanations and logic.

00:29:28

Thank you, brother, that was beautifully spoken. And I just want to bring you in here because I just want to go a bit deeper into what Phap Linh just said about the difference between intellectually knowing something and touching something. And, you know, I recognize that, I mean, I’m not a practitioner like both of you, but I do know in my own life that, through Thay’s teachings and interviews and whatever, I did touch that. It’s not… And it is quite hard to explain because actually if you’re just thinking about it, then it’s still spiritual bypassing because it’s so, if you’re not in touch with the suffering as well as touching the joy, then it becomes an exercise of spiritual bypass. And so it’s only when you deeply touch it that one is able to sort of hold both in the cusp of your two hands. So, Brother Phap Huu, help us take a bit further on this journey of what it really means to touch this, to know it in a deeper way, where it becomes embodied within us.

00:30:45

I was in the ultimate. Now you’re bringing me back to the historical.

00:30:49

Sorry.

00:30:53

This is a very deep conversation, and I’m really enjoying it because everything that has been shared, I’ve also been contemplating and one thing that has been coming up for me is that this insight of the historical and the ultimate dimension, it is old, but it is new, but it is also very ancient, meaning that if I… We’re sitting in Thay’s hut right here. And we’re surrounded by forests. I’m just looking at the trees. And when Brother Phap Linh spoke about the kindness aspect, I think about the tree. The tree has the deep insight of ultimate and historical, because the tree is doing the best it can as a tree to offer itself in the present moment for this environment, this cosmos, this Earth. But ultimately, it is also teaching us how life is. When the season changes, it knows how to let go because it has a deep understanding of continuation. It has a very profound understanding that by being the tree that it is, its transmission of its lifespan is continuous. And for us, humans, we’re very young, we’re a very young species. But we think we’re the best and we think we are the boss. And because of this ignorance, we like to divide and separate and have a lot of distinction. And so this teaching of the historical dimension and the ultimate dimension is to see that we inter be with everything. So when we talk about our way of being, even though it has a contribution to just the people that are around us, it may be a small family, three people, four people, two people, or maybe just yourself, but you think that you’re by yourself. But actually every action that you’re… Your way of life, you’re offering it to the ultimate dimension. So, practically, I always come back to the practice of the present moment, because that is the core teaching of the Buddha and the core teaching of Plum Village in order to be in touch with the ultimate and the historical. In the historical, I am Brother Phap Huu. I have my talent, I have my shortcomings, I have my way of speaking. But if I start to remove you, Jo, Brother Phap Linh, Brother Niem Thung, my teacher, Paz, my community, I start to lose myself. And I remove my parents, I remove my ancestors, I remove my education. Then who are you? So in the historical dimension, just by this understanding, you start to already touch the ultimate. So once you see that all of these conditions have come to allow you to be the you that you are, you start to see, Oh, my eyes are not just mine. My voice is not just mine. So the kind of words I want to say, it can be not just in this… It doesn’t just have impact in this moment, but it will trickle into the future. And by the historical dimension, we can touch the ultimate. Let’s talk about the Buddha. The Buddha, 2600 years ago, by his understanding of suffering, he embarked on a journey to find a way out of a suffering, to help free himself from notions of discrimination, notions of right and wrong, good and bad, and to have breakthrough and to touch interbeing and to touch emptiness and to liberate himself. And then, now, transmit all of this teaching to his community, the students that came to him, and for it to have an impact till now, that is the ultimate. So every word, every action has an impact because there are some things we cannot put our finger on because there’s a transmission of energy. When Brother Phap Linh spoke about love and compassion, there are people that you meet that somehow you just feel so drawn to them. Right? Like what? What is it? Like, why? And we can put words to it, but sometimes it’s maybe it is an energy that they have been cultivating, such as kindness, such as stability. And it just brings you into them. Such as, I’ll never forget the first time sitting in a Dharma talk with with Thay. I had no idea who this man was, but the moment he came into the hall and we all stood up to join our palms to greet Thay, just his way of walking. Historically is just a walk, but ultimately it is the cultivation of inner peace, transformation and insight. So in that particular moment, you get to be in touch with the historical Thay, but you get to be in touch with the ultimate of love, understanding, suffering, even. What he went through and how he embodied in this moment. And so that is a teaching for all of us that even in the most difficult situation that you can find yourself in you can still not lose yourself. You can still meet the chaos, meet the war, meet the death, meet the suffering, and still be an energy of love and compassion. And such honor to be able to be in his presence through so many years with Thay. And so now coming back to the historical, to us, sitting here listening, speaking about it, we have to cultivate the practice that the Buddha and Thay and many ancestors, spiritual and blood, as well as land ancestor, have been showing us that the life span that we have, even though it is short, but there is the ultimate that helps us see that we’re not limited to just this life span. So it gives you responsibility, mindfulness, the energy of awareness when you practice it and you start to identify the suffering that you’ve gone through. You start to have understanding. And if you have real understanding and you really touch Buddhism, the teachings of the practice, you wouldn’t want to make others suffer because ultimately we are the energy of love and compassion, healing, transformation, also the energy of anger, anxiety, fear. All these emotions are in us and in everyone. But ultimately we’re also free because we are more than just one emotion. We are more than just one experience. And so in our practice of dwelling happily in the present moment is where you meet the ultimate and you don’t get lost in the ultimate. Some of us we may practice and we may feel trapped into the practice of being bliss, of feeling you’re floating in a cloud because you enter a state of stillness. And that can be a trap itself. But you have to see that that experience there touches your inner peace to say, Oh, I do have inner peace in me. And you can see it as an experience that can give you trust in the practice. But you have to let go of that experience in order to experience a new historical and a new ultimate, because it’s a living, for me, the historical and the ultimate is a living dimension. And we are in it without knowing or knowing. And but it’s easier to come back to the historical because we feel. It’s easier to talk about the feelings, what we’re feeling in this very moment. And looking at habits, one of the most fundamental practices that we were train is to call our habits by its name. So if we realize that we’re always anxious, we are always in a hurry, so the way we walk, the way we move, the way we speak, it carries this energy. And if we don’t come to the present moment in the historical dimension, to work on it, to recognize it, transform it, ultimately we’re going to transmit this energy to our children, to our continuation, our friends, our colleagues. But then let’s say you meet someone who is still like a lake and you open yourself and you tap into that person’s stillness. It mirrors back to you that I can also be still like this, like this person. And you start to tune your habit, transform your habit. So in the historical you’re also taking care of the ultimate and sometime it has helped to see the ultimate to work in the historical. Because I want to be a Buddha, I want to be liberated, you know, I want to be free. That ultimate aspiration allows me in this present moment to have the determination and the energy to see where I will arrive into the future. But by doing it now and recognizing I know where I will be because of the present moment.

00:41:28

Does that help?

00:41:30

Yeah, that’s immensely helpful. And as you were talking, Brother Phap Huu, it brought up an old memory of mine, which is, in my early thirties I was doing some self-development work. And I was on a ten-day sort of, in a sense, retreat is one way, not like a Plum Village retreat, but an experiential group. And, in a sense, every day we were working on stripping out our beliefs, our judgments, our views. And then on day six, we hit this place that the facilitator called the terror of nothingness. And it was experiential, some people were chosen to represent something. And I was chosen to represent the terror of nothingness, because that’s probably what I was feeling, because actually what was going in, you know, I was probably 32 at the time, what was going through my head was, well, if I’m not this and if I’m not this and if I’m not this and if I’m not this and if I’m not this, then actually who am I? Which of course, it’s the deep question we all ask. But actually it came across as a terror. And so maybe Phap Linh, you just… you know, because it’s very nice to say, isn’t it, that you let go of the self and you recognize the ultimate and bring that in. But for some people that can also generate fear. Can’t it? That they’re saying, Well, actually I feel much more secure that this is me and these are my thoughts and these are my views. And in a sense, that’s what we’re seeing in the world, that in difficult times, a lot of people actually, rather than expand into a new space, shrink deeper into an old space and actually say, Well, no, I’m just going to actually stick with the people I know and they’re my tribe, and actually everyone else is wrong. And we see all this division and what have you so… So I don’t quite know what my question is, but it’s sort of saying, how can we work with this in a way that it doesn’t generate fear and retraction, but more sort of openness?

00:43:33

Yeah, that’s a very good question. So I think it’s a question of what is our true security? Because of course we can, I mean, we do instinctively in times of danger, we kind of do collapse back on to our small selves, onto our immediate concerns. Can I just look after number one or look after my family, look after their immediate security? Do we have enough? And, you know, it’s a little bit like the bunker mentality, which we’re starting to see amongst some billionaires these days. They’re kind of like, you know, prepping, just saying, Well, as long as I have enough money, land, you know, facilities, resources, food, whatever, guards, I don’t know, and I have a big tract of land in New Zealand and I can build a big enough bunker, then I’ll be fine. You know, and I’ll be able to look after my family or the people I invite to my bunker. But I don’t think, you know, I think if you look a little deeper, it’s easy to see that there’s no security in that because we’re still dying. You know, you can insulate yourself as much as you like, but you’re going to die. Sorry. That’s bad news.

00:44:47

That’s the reality. That’s the game of being human.

00:44:51

Not only are you going to die, but before you die, you’re going to get sick, you going to get old, you’re going to be infirm, you’re going to have physical pain, you’re going to have…. And, I mean, imagine you are in a collapse scenario and you’ve got your beautiful bunker and, you know, you’ve assured your little island of security for you and your people. But can you really have peace if you’ve abandoned the rest of humanity? You know, what kind of happiness is that? What kind of security is that? I just don’t believe that anybody in that situation could for a moment feel well. It would feel horrendous. Just it would be horror, utter horror. So there’s no security there. There’s no security. And so, you know, of course, that’s an extreme example, and we can say, yeah, but you know, most people are not building bunkers, they’re just trying to get through their daily life and trying to pay the bills and make ends meet. And, of course, that we seek for some semblance of security or stability in our daily lives as well, but I think, again, it’s not hard to see in that scenario too, in any scenario, we’re all subject to old age, sickness, death, to separation, to pain. And so we have to ask ourselves, where is my refuge? You know, am I looking for a small, a little moment of peace, which will then be snatched away? Or am I going for the ultimate peace and freedom? And I know which one I’m going for. You know, and the wonderful thing is you don’t have to wait. It’s actually available now. And it’s true, there is, I think, in meditation practice when we really start to still our minds, I mean, you can just do it by following your breath. You know, you just, I mean, the very basic teaching actually goes all the way, it’s the whole thing. You just sit in stillness and you start to follow your breath. And if you are sufficiently determined or maybe stubborn and you managed to stick with the sensations of the breath, the whole of inbreath, the whole of the outbreath, and every time your mind gets pulled away, it goes into thinking and distraction and fantasizing or, you know, worrying, regretting or whatever happens to do, you gently bring it back over and over and over again until, if you’re lucky, maybe it becomes completely still and you reach a kind of effortless concentration where your mind just stays there. And if you continue, there’s a point which I find… There is a kind of fear that comes up because the fear is to abandon our inner monologue. The part of us that we kind of tend to unconsciously identify with is the little voice, the me that ta da da, you know, the nonstop thinking radio that’s narrating our experience to ourselves and saying, Are we good? Or Did I like that? Did I not like that? Do I like him or did I like that situation? Did I say the right thing or the wrong thing? Did I impress them? Did I disappoint myself? Did I realize my potential? Am I good enough?

00:48:27

How do you know what I’m thinking, brother?

00:48:33

That’s what we call the nonstop radio thinking.

00:48:35

Yes. Yeah. So I know what you’re thinking because I’m thinking it too. It’s very natural, it’s just, it’s part of the human condition. There’s part of us which is anxious, it’s part of us which worries about our social standing, how, you know, are we liked? Are we good enough? Are we, you know, do we have what we want? Do we want something else? It’s always pushing us out of stillness into getting something else, getting some other experience. I want a piece of chocolate. No, actually, I don’t know. I want a cup of tea. No, I want to stand up. No, I want to sit down. I want to lie down. I want to turn on the TV. No, I want to go to sleep. I want to read a book. You know, it’s like always something else. I want a diploma, I want a car, I want a, you know, it’s like I want I want I want this, this, this, this. Now. Whatever this happens to be generally feels unsatisfactory in some way. And so the tendency is when you actually touch that unsatisfactory experience to think that to get out of it, you have to have something other than this, something else. Whether it’s, you know, a partner, you know, a job, a career, an achievement, an accomplishment, or a sense of pleasure of some kind or another. Just something else, not this. So that’s very, very normal. And that little voice is always telling us what the next thing to get, to grasp at is. And we’re very identified with it. We have a tendency to think That’s who I am. That’s me. And in meditation if we are able to still that sufficiently to really settle into concentration, this is mindfulness of the breath becoming concentration. That voice starts to slow down. The volume goes down and maybe it starts to stop from time to time. There’s spaces and it’s slightly terrifying. It says, Well, if I’m not that, then what am I? Can I actually let go of that? It’s a kind of death. It’s a kind of, it should be slightly terrifying, you know. So you asked me, like, how can you, you know, touch the ultimate without it being terrifying? Well, I’m saying maybe you can’t, you know, maybe there is a little moment of it’s a little bit terrifying, but if you can go through that and sink into it even deeper, what you find is this vast oceanic peace and joy and wonder, because actually that little voice is a cage, it’s a trap, it’s very narrow and it’s very stressful, you know. So the the whole point is we are trying to, we’re always trying to be. You know, who do you want to be? I want to be someone, you know, I want to be the best, I want to be myself. You know, we’re all trying to try to be, which means we have to kind of define ourselves against everything else. We have to say what we are, what’s special about us, what’s unique about us. We’re trying to consolidate being, but it’s very stressful because it’s not the truth. Right? So it’s not that you have to sort of let go of self or dissolve self or something like that, because it was never there in the first place. It isn’t there. It’s an illusion. So it’s actually just relaxing and relaxing and relaxing into what is already the case, which is our interbeing, our interconnectedness, which is a much less stressful, fearful, anxious place to be because this is it. It’s already everything. We are already what we want to become. You know, we were already free, we were already in touch with the ultimate. You know, that’s the weirdest part is this kind of very famous statement of a Zen master whose student asked him, How do I, you know, where do I go to find no birth and no death? And he says, You find no birth and no death in birth and death. So where do I go to touch the ultimate? The historical. You touch the historical deeply enough, it already is the ultimate. It’s actually the same thing. It’s just our way of looking needs to open up a little bit. We need to relax the part of our mind that ratifies things, that cuts reality into little pieces, into names, and names everything. Thay once said something, at the end of a Dharma talk, that has always stayed with me. And it was just a throwaway line. I think it’s, for me, one of the most profound things he ever said. And that one line is still resonating in me.