After meditation, and a great meal cooked by Aiden,we then looked at extracts from the lecture ” The Stages of the Spiritual Path,” -Sangharakshita (see below).
A very good discussion, brought to life by Dh. Taradakini, who just happened to be visiting. Finished off with chanting the White Tara mantra, sitting, and transferring merits. A very lovely evening which all eight of us enjoyed.
This being a core teaching, it will probably keep us occupied for a few weeks.
It is discussed in depth in the lecture “Mind reactive and creative ” https://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/talks/details?num=31
A paragraph to ponder on for next week, written by Vajradevi on her blog http://www.uncontrivedmindfulness.wordpress.com/. She leads an “Awareness to Insight ” day on Sunday 25th Feb.
Because the reward is the winds of freedom and the cool breeze of equanimity. Awareness supports this freedom of mind and heart and there is nothing else that feels quite like it.
The wheel, the spiral, non-grasping, faith, joy.
From aimlessness to purpose, from enjoyment to satisfaction
(Extracts from the lecture ” The Stages of the Spiritual Path,” -Sangharakshita )
These twelve links, these twelve nidanas, explain how the whole process of life, death and rebirth takes place.
Now if the cyclical type of conditionality can be compared to the round, to a circle, then the progressive can be compared to a spiral. That’s why sometimes in the past we’ve spoken of the spiral of the spiritual life, the spiral in which one gets a progressive reaction, as it were, from a certain factor to another factor which augments the effect of the preceding one.
Now this is important because all versions of the path, all versions of the spiritual path, the path leading to Nirvana or Enlightenment, are based upon this law, this progressive type of conditionality or this spiral.
But it’s very important to understand this before we go on to specific exemplifications of the path,
As we go through life, as you all know, we experience various kinds of feelings. Some are pleasant, some are painful, some are just neutral, neither pleasant nor painful.
Whatever gives us pleasure, we tend to want to cling onto and when the experience is painful we try to escape from that painful experience into something pleasant. So we oscillate between pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. And in this way the Wheel of Life continues to revolve.
But suppose, Buddhism says, suppose we adopt a different attitude. Suppose we take a more objective view. Suppose we look out over the whole of conditioned existence, as we call it.
Suppose we look out over our whole lives, all human life, all that we’ve ever thought or known, we see, if we have sufficient experience, if we’re sufficiently thoughtful, that the whole of it, basically, fundamentally, is unsatisfactory. It’s not that there are not pleasant experiences. It’s not that there are things we don’t enjoy. But there’s nothing we find deeply and permanently satisfactory, however happy we may appear to be.
So it’s people of this sort who start taking an interest in religion. Or we might say that these are the people who start seeking after spiritual things
So at first a sort of vague confused searching and striving. Perhaps at first a person doesn’t know what he’s looking for, or what she’s looking for. Perhaps almost by accident they latch onto something, follow it up and find that it’s leading them, perhaps, in a direction that they really deep down wanted to go. But as time goes on, as they latch on, as it were, to more and more clues – they might read a book, might even see a film, might meet someone – it almost seems as though a pattern is starting to weave itself. It’s as though they’ll be starting to come in touch with something which is becoming more and more tangible, so that they get a certain awareness of a different dimension that they weren’t aware of before. And they start developing a sort of intuitive feeling that there is something there, something behind the veil, as it were, something that they were blind to before, that they weren’t sensitive to before. They start developing a stronger and stronger feeling of and for and towards this.
Now all this is very vague and very confused at first, but eventually it sort of sorts itself out. It develops, it clarifies, it becomes stronger, clearer. And it develops eventually into what in Buddhism we call faith in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha: the Buddha representing the ideal of Enlightenment, the Dharma representing the path leading to that state, and the Sangha, the spiritual community of those treading the path.
In dependence upon vedana, feeling, in this case of the unsatisfactoriness of the world, there arises not thirst, not craving, but faith – faith in something above, beyond, the world, higher than the world.
In other words, when, in dependence upon one’s experience or one’s feeling there arises not thirst or craving for the perpetuation of the pleasant side of feeling, but faith or confidence in this sense, one has reacted not in a cyclical order, but one has reacted in a progressive order. And the spiral of the spiritual life has begun to unwind. So therefore one has come to the first stage of the path, the stage of faith. In dependence upon dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, there arises not trsna, not craving, but faith, in the sense of that sensitivity to a whole new world of higher spiritual values.
So as a result of this practice, as a result of giving, as a result of an ethical life, and as a result especially of this arising of faith in the sense of sensitivity to these higher spiritual values, one feels light, one feels happy, and one feels contented. One feels that there’s now some definite aim in one’s life. Before one was just swept along aimlessly; `driven’, perhaps, would be a better word, aimlessly, in pursuit of this and that. One didn’t really know what the aim of one’s life was.
Then we say `in dependence upon saddha, upon faith, there arises pamojja.’ This means a sort of tranquillity, a sort of feeling of being at peace with oneself; or we may translate it more approximately `satisfaction and delight’.
Friday EveningTaste of Freedom 