Taking Refuge: Part III- Sangha

This is a talk given by Lloyd Burton, to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado, on one of the Brahma Viharas - Metta (Loving Kindness). This is a highly insightful talk that covers topics including: compassion, selfless joy and open heartedneess. Gain a greater understanding on the beauty and merit of traditional Buddhist practices, and learn how to implement the practice of Loving Kindess into your habitual reality. Note: This is a live recording so, contains some minor background noise.

Transcript

Okay,

So as I said at the beginning of our time together,

This is the third of three sessions that we are devoting to inquiry into what does it mean to go for refuge in the Buddhist tradition.

It's a practice,

A ritual that dates back as nearly as we can tell pretty much to the time of the Buddha.

So the English translation of the Pali phrases that we chanted at the beginning of our time together this evening,

Take refuge in the Buddha.

And in our talks,

Our discussions over the last few weeks,

We reflected on how there are both outer and inner aspects to that,

In terms of refuge in the memory of the historical Buddha who said,

You know,

I am not a god,

There is really nothing special about my wiring that's different from your wiring,

What I have done in terms of discovering the sources of suffering and how they might be brought to an end is something that you can do as well.

So he emphasized how he was alike,

Each of us,

Rather than separate or distinct from him.

And then the inner aspects of taking refuge in the Buddha has to do with taking refuge in what might be called our own Buddha nature,

Okay?

Our capacity for the cultivation,

For the arising of the cultivation,

For the continued strengthening of compassion,

Of selfless joy,

Of equanimity,

Of openheartedness,

Okay?

We had a look at what does it mean to take refuge in the Dharma,

Okay?

The outer aspect again,

Which is the literal teachings that the Buddha shared in terms of origins of suffering and cessation of suffering,

You know,

The fact that suffering exists,

That its origins have to do with craving and clinging,

That the end of suffering,

This form of self-generated suffering is possible,

And then the means by which to do so,

The eightfold path,

Okay,

Of establishing mindfulness as we are here with concentration and effort from which arise the wisdom factors of,

Or the insight factors,

One of the reasons that we call it insight meditation,

Insight into your own nature.

What is it about your own nature that sometimes gives rise to suffering,

And what is it about your own nature that might help bring it to an end,

Especially in terms of developing insight into intention,

In terms of how we speak,

How we act,

How we live our lives?

And then these aspects of speech and action and how we make our way in the world,

You know,

That,

Literally speaking,

Insofar as the teachings of the Buddha is the Dharma,

Okay.

The inner dharma that we also reflected upon,

You know,

Is,

You know,

The truth of our own experience,

You know,

And it's what the Buddha taught when he shared his teachings.

He said,

You know,

There are many traditions out there in which you are encouraged to worship an external deity or being,

You know,

And to surrender to that deity or that being and his priests or whatever,

And come into the fold of that gathering,

Of that way of looking at things,

That teaching.

He said,

This tradition is different,

Okay.

This tradition,

While we can certainly learn a lot from those around us who have been on the path for a while or whatnot,

Is mostly about the discovery of what is true for you.

Don't believe what I tell you.

Don't do the practices I tell you,

Just because I tell you I'm the doer or because somebody told you I'm hot stuff or all your friends are doing it or whatever.

Does this,

These teachings only have meaning if they can be validated through your own experience?

So if your goals are the same as mine in terms of inquiring into the nature of self-generated suffering and how it might be brought to an end,

Then by all means,

I recommend you to study my teachings.

I recommend you do the practices that I teach and see if it has the same effect for you.

If so,

Then the dharma becomes your dharma.

It becomes the truth of your being,

Okay.

And this transformation of consciousness that the dharma is capable of begins to happen for you.

But it's literally learning to trust the truth of your own experience.

And that's not just the experiences of sweetness and light and the things that are somehow sort of advertised that would happen for you when you do this practice,

But all the yucky stuff too,

Right.

Learning to experience to be with the difficult without aversion and the pleasant without clinging.

So that's our inner dharma.

There's also an inner and outer aspect to taking refuge in the sangha.

And over time and in different traditions,

That word sangha has different meanings.

And literally a collection or a assemblage or gathering or community.

One of my teachers in the program that I went through,

A Westerner who has been a Theravada monk for,

I guess going on 40 years now in the Thai forest tradition,

Adhan Anaro.

He spoke once about the nature of sangha and how that term and that concept has changed over the years both in Asia,

But more especially as we've come to regard it here in the West.

Said,

You know,

You can have a sangha of birds,

Right.

Which I found kind of interesting.

And initially it gave me the impression it was just a heap of anything,

Right.

But in fact when he used that simile,

If you observe birds that flock together,

Whether it's geese or other birds that live together in community,

If you see them in flight,

It looks almost like a single consciousness,

Doesn't it?

You know,

How they have this extraordinary situational awareness of the position of every other bird in flight.

And how there is very clearly something that connects them and that coordinates their movements,

Their consciousness,

That goes quite beyond just trying not to bump into the other folks.

And so this sense of a collection,

A coming together of the like-minded,

All right.

And originally historically there was,

The term was used,

It was for number one,

The collection of those who had achieved the fourth stage of enlightenment.

They'd become arhats,

At least in that terra vata system of spiritual scorekeeping.

And then later extended to the sangha of monks and nuns,

Of renunciates who had abandoned daily life to follow the Buddha's path with every fiber of their being,

To enter into monastic spiritual community.

And that entails people doing so,

Taking a vow to abide by about 235 precepts,

Governing literally every waking moment of every day of their lives.

And not only the waking moments,

The moments that you experience as you're going to sleep and the ones that you experience as you're waking up.

And eventually the content of your dreams as well.

So it's an extraordinarily high bar.

And the reason that they have all these precepts is that so there is nothing that you do in the day that is not subject or that does not necessitate serious mindfulness.

So moment to moment to moment,

Every aspect of your existence on earth is governed by a set of rules.

And those rules came about through 40 years of people trying to live together in community and follow the Buddha's teachings.

And they blow it left,

Right and center.

And as soon as they did,

Just with the aspects of speech,

Action and livelihood.

So they'd get off the track and they'd come ask the Buddha for advice.

And he'd present a case to him and he would help them resolve it and advise them on how to apply his teachings to that situation.

And somebody was sitting there listening and they started remembering every one of these teachings that he gave and eventually it was collected into this set of basically case law for behavior in Sangha called Vinaya.

Which still governs the behavior of monks and nuns in monastic Sanghas in the Theravada tradition today.

In Asia historically and on the present day,

Lay people who support the monastic Sangha referred to as the Parissa.

And it's just that,

It's communities of lay persons who have devoted their lives to following the path of the Buddha,

But doing so as householders rather than as monastics.

And they whittled down the number of precepts to at least be able to manage the core of living the Buddha's teachings to five.

You know,

The five precepts that one takes when we go on retreat of not taking that which is not given,

Not killing lay human beings,

Not engaging in sexual misconduct,

Not lying or speaking truthfully and not ingesting anything that inhibits the mind's ability to be mindful.

But it was the monastic Sangha that was doing the practices,

The rituals that were,

It was the place where one came to learn the Dharma.

That was the repository of study of the teachings of the Buddha.

It was all maintained by the monastics.

Coming to the West,

That began to change somewhat.

And it has gone through,

And I'm talking now only about the Theravada Buddha's tradition,

It varies with the Tibetan and the Zen traditions.

But instead,

With the exception of the Thai Watts,

You know,

The Thai temples here in the West,

For the most part,

The transmission of the core teachings from the Theravada Buddha's tradition in the West has happened by a combination of monks and nuns,

But to a considerably greater extent of lay teachers who perhaps served as monks and nuns in Asia for a while,

Spent many years with various Asian teachers,

Learning this body of the Dharma and learning all of these various practices and bringing them back home again.

And so the majority of teaching in the West,

Some of these core teachings from the Theravada tradition,

The practices of Anapanasati and Vipassana,

Or Insight Meditation,

Metta,

Loving Kindness Meditation,

The Jhanas,

The Meditative Absorptions,

The great majority of that teaching happens on the part of lay teachers.

And Dharma study groups,

The deep inquiry into the scholarship of the Buddha-Dharma,

Increasingly is happening within meditation sitting groups and places like the Sati Center and the two great meditation centers here in the United States.

It's Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society in very Massachusetts.

So over time,

The functions that for the most part are carried out by the monastic sagas in Asia are to an increasing extent being carried out by the sitting groups in the West.

And so the Western teachers,

As well as some of the Asian ones,

Have come to start referring to us and what we're doing in the West.

To us,

What we're doing here tonight,

Likewise is sagas.

Some of the Western teachers in the Theravada tradition who are really keen on trying to apply the Buddha's teachings to taking action on climate change,

For instance,

Have set up an organization called One Earth Sanga.

And it's about that.

It's about a coming together of like-minded people who wanna try to figure out how to apply the Buddha's teachings to our environmental relations.

Within the Insight Meditation community of Denver,

Sangha,

Us,

We also have Earth Sila Sangha,

Which is a collection of members of our group who have a particular interest in devoting our efforts to learning more and sharing that learning on the Buddha's teachings with regard to how to live in harmony with the environment and with others.

So that term now has a broader meaning than it did in the past.

But the underlying intention is the same.

Communities who come together to practice at a pretty deep level what the Buddha had to teach.

Okay,

About the origins of suffering and the cessation of suffering.

But more importantly,

Just as importantly,

And just as is the case in the monastic Sangha,

It's an opportunity for us to start figuring out for ourselves in conversation with each other how to likewise go about applying the Buddha's teachings to being and living in the world.

What does right speech consist of?

How do we practice it?

How do we know when we're junked a trolley in terms of whether our speech is truthful and beneficially intended and timely and kind,

Right?

And what to do when we realize that one or more,

Perhaps all of those agreements are missing,

Right?

Let's start over.

How to help each other recognize when that's going on.

How do we judge an action that we're contemplating taking in terms of whether it's skillful or wholesome,

Which is conducive to the end of suffering rather than the perpetuation of it.

So mutual support in developing this understanding.

Anyone who has experienced the healing power of something like a 12-step program knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Those are spiritual communities devoted to healing,

Devoted to the attainment of certain goals.

As I first began to regularly teach the Dharma here in the greater Denver area,

I was invited to a non-residential retreat being hosted by all of the 12-step meetings in the greater Denver area.

And then I was held down at Ilof School of Theology.

So I gave some teachings,

I led us in some meditations and whatnot.

And I'd also decided to teach an introductory course on insight meditation,

So I had some flyers there.

And so when I held the class,

About three-fourths of the people there were all from that 12-step retreat.

And so we had my first introductory class,

That was about 1997,

Something like that.

And so the final session came to an end,

And I said,

Well,

It's really been nice,

See ya.

And they all said,

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

That's not how it works.

What are we gonna do next week?

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

And that is how the sitting group got started.

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh.

They would say,

Hey,

We go to meetings.

We do meetings.

What are we gonna talk about next week?

And then we're off to the races and we still are.

So the power of the sahaja is amazing,

You know.

And if you have a sitting practice at home,

And then you come and sit here together,

Sometimes maybe you can feel the difference between the two.

If you've ever been on retreat,

Then you certainly have.

Okay.

So,

Um,

Sangha,

The importance of sangha cannot be overestimated.

You know,

We had a discussion when we were last together about these,

You know,

What seems to be a,

Kind of a seeming conflict within the narma between the teaching of the Buddha as he was dying a part of the vallasuta,

When everyone was kind of lamenting him and they were,

His passing,

And they were kind of freaking out and saying,

Where are you gonna get these teachings once you're gone and whatnot.

And what he said to them was,

You have within you everything you need to achieve final liberation.

He said,

It's not beneficial for you to rely on me for that.

Okay.

What I've been teaching you over the years is that I'm no different from you and you have within you what you need to achieve complete liberation.

Be islands into yourselves,

Is what he meant by that.

That you are self-sufficient,

You have the wherewithal to achieve enlightenment.

And how do you put that against the story where Buddha's attendant Ananda says,

You know,

Buddha occurs to me that,

You know,

Being in community with good friends and wise elders is fully half the holy life.

And then Buddha of course has to step on and say,

Oh no,

Ananda,

Do not say this is so for indeed good friends and wise discourse in community constitutes the entirety of the holy life.

He very carefully used the phrase holy life,

How we live life in the world.

Okay,

We have all that we need within us to achieve Buddhahood,

But kind of necessary but not sufficient because what makes that possible is doing it in community with others,

In community of others who are likewise devoted to that same goal.

Okay,

Just exceedingly difficult work to do on your own.

Okay,

It's made measurably richer and more powerful whenever you can do it in community of whatever sort.

Community however,

As the Buddha later on taught,

Has not only its powerfully beneficial side,

But also its shadow side.

When it comes to people who are like-minded,

Who all see things one way,

It's what in neuroscience now is called the epistemic bubble.

That means it's what happens when you only hang out with people that see the world in exactly the same way you do.

And you tend to shun or have aversion to any view that does not accord with your own.

And the way this came kind of pointingly,

I think probably painfully into focus for the Buddha is a famous incident that in the discourse referred to as the quarrel at Kasambi.

And this was after the Buddha had been teaching for many years and he had various of these little regional communities set up here and there in Northeastern India where he lived.

And he would kind of circuit ride.

He'd go around and he offered teachings to one of these communities for a while and go to one another and another one.

And there was one of these communities at Kasambi,

A monastic community that kind of got itself jammed up.

Within this community there were two senior elders.

One who is the master of the teachings,

Who is the acknowledged senior expert in everything having to do with the content and the meaning of the nakayas or the collections of the Buddha's discourse.

It's what the historical Buddha's actually thought to have taught.

And then there is another senior member of that monastic Sangha who was the master of conduct,

Whose job it was to oversee behavior,

To implement the Vinaya basically.

He was kind of the supreme judge of when somebody was or was not in accord with the Vinaya.

And these are both pretty powerful personalities and they had not really quite achieved the fourth stage of enlightenment yet as we shall soon see because they had some real attachment to their respective roles.

And each of them had their own disciples.

Some who thought that all that needed to happen was to get the dharma right and you were there and the others who believed that scholasticism meant nothing if you weren't actually putting stuff into practice.

And so on one occasion the master of the dharma did something,

I think it had to do with using the toilet or something,

Where there was something where he didn't quite follow the rules but there was some,

Not gross as which hand you wipe with or something,

But some aspect of the ablutions I think it was that didn't come down quite right.

Somebody from the other camp saw him do that,

Ratted him out to the master of conduct and said so and so,

Hey,

He screwed up,

He's under.

And so there was this sangha meeting and the master of conduct called out the master of the teachings and said,

I understood that you did so and so.

And they said,

Well,

I think I did but I also thought that rule is kind of subject to interpretation and there is no element of volition at all in my behavior.

It was an altogether inadvertent.

Therefore,

No offense has been committed.

And the master of conduct says,

Nah.

He said,

My judgment there is and in as much as I am the final judge on matters of conduct,

Then you basically need to admit your error to me.

And the master of the dharma basically responded,

You know,

Why don't you sit on your thumb and rotate?

That's it,

That's not gonna happen.

Flip them off,

Right?

And so what happened as a result is that the sangha became entirely polarized.

And so they were the disciples of the master of conduct and they're the disciples of the master of the dharma and they got very solidified in their positions and they got to the point where they're barely speaking to each other.

And so somebody said,

I think we're getting some trouble here.

So they ran off and got the Buddha and asked him to come in and say,

Okay,

Here's what happened.

And he realized that the degree of schism in the sangha that occurred and that there are these two,

You know,

Very learned,

Very powerful personalities who were also,

You know,

Became,

Even though they may have intended to become the figureheads of this very bad conflict that occurred in the sangha.

And so the Buddha reminded them of his teachings.

He said,

You know,

All the things of which the mind,

It is possible for the mind to become attached.

He said,

There are four that are particularly powerful and particularly pernicious.

And they're the most difficult to let go of.

And once you've been able to do so,

The rest becomes much easier.

One of them is attachment to sense desires and sense gratification.

Now there is attachment to rights and rituals as if the conduct of the rights or rituals is gonna get you to your ultimate goal rather than simply understanding them as gestures of remembrance,

You know,

That have a deeper meaning.

Another is attachment to the notion of a permanent and abiding self.

Me,

Me,

Rather than understanding me to be a fluid,

Continuous fabrication of the discretes of mind,

Okay?

And the fourth one is attachment to views and opinions.

And he said,

You know,

It kinda looks to me like you all are deep in the throes of attachments to views and opinions.

And the only way out of this is for you to be able to let go of that attachment,

Apologize to each other,

Realize that nobody holds absolute wisdom,

Okay?

And that we have to have some tolerance for diversity of views within this song if it's to remain robust.

And I thanked him very much.

And he returned to where he was staying.

Within about a week,

There was a monk running back to the Buddha again and said,

They're at it again.

And he came back and he basically gave the same Dharma talk and he said,

You know,

I would taught you nothing.

You know,

I can see,

You can hear my teachings with your ears,

But you can't hear them with your heart.

You can't put them into service in a way that will heal the Sangha.

Please try.

And this time they're good for another 10 days or so maybe.

Somebody brings them back one last time and say,

You people are hopeless.

You know.

Ha.

He said,

One last time.

And at this point he gave this teaching that is the first,

It's the first stanzas of the first set of verses in the Dhammapada one.

You've heard me recite in here perhaps more times than you wish you.

And we become what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we create the world.

Speak or act with unwholesome intention.

And trouble will follow you as surely as the wheels on the cart follow the ox and the draught.

You become what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we create the world.

Speak or act with wholesome intention.

And happiness will follow you as your shadow ends where it ends.

He was telling them,

You know,

Again,

What you are doing is creating these two worlds in conflict with your very own thoughts.

You're creating a world in which your side is right and the other side is wrong.

And he said to me,

As long as you keep doing that,

You know,

What you're doing is completely opposite to my teachings.

And it will lead only to more trouble.

And then he said,

You know,

That's the best I can do.

I'm out here,

He left.

And what happened next was that they couldn't get it right.

They kept up the conflict in the way they had.

The community,

The priests,

The community of lay followers that had been supporting the monastics at Casanbi said,

These people don't have a clue.

You know,

We don't really have anything to learn from them anymore because they could not actually literally live the Buddha's teachings.

And so they stopped giving any dawn out of the community and it collapsed as a result.

So one aspect of Sangha as the Buddha taught it,

Was the importance of sun tolerance.

You know,

We're brought together by a common intention to study the Buddha's teachings in terms of origins of suffering,

Cessation of suffering,

Means by which we do so,

How to cultivate compassion,

Loving kindness,

You know,

Selfless joy,

Generosity in the heart.

But within that,

There's always gonna be a diversity of views different ways of understanding or looking at things.

So it's not trying to keep the diversity from happening.

It's how we express our diversity,

How we listen to each other that makes for a strong Sangha.

So,

So that being said,

A few years ago,

You know,

This seminary program I went to,

We have reunion retreats every year.

They're kind of in-service training retreats at the same time.

And so we,

I remember one that we held back at the Bari Center for Buddhist Studies and the two teachers there,

One Andy Olinsky,

Who teaches the Theravada tradition,

And one Moo Sang,

Who's a former Zen monastic and teaches the Mahayana side.

You know,

Buddhism is just as rife with sectarianism as any other Buddhist tradition.

And they wrote schools of this and schools of that.

You know,

The whole split between the Mahayana and the Theravada,

You know,

Is a huge schism.

Bhikkhu Bodhi and others just referred to it as Northern Buddhism and Southern Buddhism.

So it's not as if,

You know,

The Buddhist tradition itself escaped the Buddhist teachings on this,

Right?

So I asked Moo Sang and Andy,

I said,

How could this be?

You know,

The very core of the Buddhist teachings is,

You know,

Attachment of youth,

You know,

Is corrosive.

And will,

You know,

Will lead to the schism of,

You know,

It's absolute,

Attachment of youth is the absolute antithesis of what the Buddha taught,

And yet,

Buddha taught was full of it.

And basically,

They just said,

It's the nature of mind.

It's a continuing koan,

It's something we sit with.

And one of the important things about Sangha is being able to tune the air to hear attachment of youth.

Okay,

It's to have ardent faith,

Or,

You know,

Realized faith in the truth of some of these teachings that is true for you,

Beautiful,

Okay.

But when you start believing you're seeing as the only way,

That's a problem,

Right?

We have these different teachers that teach the Dharma in a different way.

And some of them have less than totally positive things to say about those who do it another way or a different understanding.

And how to reconcile all those for me,

Just as for my teachers,

Was a matter of essentially saying,

Well,

You know,

They're teaching the truth of their experience,

And they're teaching the truth of their knowledge of the Dharma.

And that's basically all any of us can do.

So,

The power of Sangha.

When,

If you happen to go on a retreat,

Especially a residential,

An intensive residential retreat in this tradition,

Four or five days,

Week,

Two weeks,

Three months,

The opening ritual is one where we take these five precepts,

Five precepts,

Vow to not kill living beings,

Vow to not take that which is given,

Not given,

Vow to abstain from sexual misconduct,

Vow to speak truthfully,

Which in this case is the retreats are in silence,

So as not to speak at all,

Vow to remain clear-minded,

Not just anything that impedes mindfulness,

Okay.

There's a really,

Really important reason why we do that.

Because what it is is the co-creation of spiritual community.

If you think about the things that we're kind of hardwired to fear or be concerned about,

You know,

It has to do with things like,

Am I gonna get enough to eat?

Is somebody gonna steal my stuff,

Right?

Do I,

Should I be fearful of my safety by virtue of the behavior of somebody around me?

Can I live in a way where in community I don't have to worry about getting hit on,

Right?

Can I live in community in a way that I can trust others and they can trust me in terms of truth of speech?

Can I live in a community where people do not absorb themselves in deluded states of mind through the use of various substances?

Dangerous,

Right?

And so what we do is come together and we promise each other to behave in that way in order to create a place of refuge,

In order to create a place of sanctuary.

So we'll be safe.

The other thing that does is when you start practicing insight meditation in community,

In this place of safety,

And you see all your stuff come up anyway,

All your fears and anxieties and angers and everything that those vows,

That co-creation of community is designed to protect you from,

You're still afraid of it.

Still afraid of those things because the mind has been kind of hardwired to eventually always be anxious or concerned about those things.

And so what you get to do is sit and watch the mind grinding away with no need.

Because all those things that you were concerned about are not concerns when you're in the sanctuary,

In the refuge of retreat sangha.

So it really makes that much more powerful,

The kinds of insights that can arise.

When I did my first insight meditation retreat in 1975,

It was in a little redwood,

It was in a redwood forest in a little summer camp up in Mendocino County in Northern California.

And the three teachers on that retreat were Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Seltzberg.

They had just come back from Asia,

Years of sitting and practicing in Asia,

And had just begun to teach together.

It was before there was a spirit,

It was long before Spirit Rock,

It was before there was an insight meditation society.

They were just kind of mendicant monks,

They were just kind of traveling from town to town and teaching retreats where everybody,

Anyone would organize one for them.

And it was a two-week-long silent retreat.

And so we just kind of,

My wife and I did this retreat,

And we both kind of jumped in the deep,

And they had just finished teaching at Naropa.

These kind of summertime Dharma fairs that Trungpa Rinpoche would hold.

So they'd come out there,

And a bunch of people who'd sat with them there just followed them up out to California to do this retreat.

Big percentage of them were deadheads.

So it was like,

It's interesting,

It's an interesting retreat.

But it's always like-minded people,

A lot of them are students of Ram Dass,

They're into this Bhakti Yoga and all.

So we got the retreat underway,

And just a few days in,

What I had started experiencing was heavy-duty symptoms of what 12 years later the VA would start talking PTSD from my time in Vietnam.

I was a medic with the Marine Corps.

And it was really,

It was bad.

I'd start having these flashbacks when I was sitting that I used to only have nightmares,

I was freaking out,

Afraid I was losing my mind.

And when I interviewed with the teachers,

Especially Sharon Salzberg,

Who would later on to become one of the leading teachers in the West of loving kindness meditation.

She was like 23 years old at the time,

And she said,

Well,

You know,

There's nothing in my experience that comes close to what you're describing in terms of these memories.

She said,

What I can tell you is that this practice is about catharsis.

It's about developing the courage to be with what is,

To learn the truth of your dharma,

What is literally coming up for you in your mind.

She said one thing that did occur,

That did happen to me when I was practicing in Bogota with Menem,

It was at the Rama Vahara there,

As really intensive practice week after week and whatnot.

Said my boyfriend came over to visit me from the States and I was just so overjoyed to see him and my heart was wide open.

We were walking together in the compound out there and I was just so,

So joyous at being with him.

I looked over at him and I watched all the flesh melt off the skeleton.

She wasn't on psychedelics either.

This was the power of very,

Very deep concentrated practice because what,

And there are these things called the insight knowledges and basically they come up and the mind gets to a certain stage of concentration and they show you that you experienced the truth of what the Buddha said in terms of all that arises must pass away.

All of this mind,

Dear and delightful,

Will change and vanish.

And she was being shown,

She was experiencing the reality of all that which we were attached to will pass away and death will come to all.

And she said,

Sort of what happened for you is that you got that teaching right between the eyes when you were in Vietnam.

You know,

The mortality of life.

And that's what happened for me.

She said,

All I can tell you is that if you can stay with it and let it continue to flow forth,

Eventually,

You know,

You'll rid yourself of it.

And so I had to take her at her word and I got home a week later and I didn't have any more nightmares,

Not after a month.

They'd stopped.

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injury basically melted away as a result of that first retreat.

Which is why I'm doing that.

Well,

The thing that made it possible for me to stick with the practice through this rather horrific experience was retreat sangha.

If it just had been me one on one with a therapist back in Berkeley or something like it,

There was something enormously powerful about the fact that this was happening in spiritual community.

You know,

It was safe where Jack and Joseph and Sharon all understood what was going on,

You know.

Stayed in silence at the end of the retreat when we were talking to each other.

A lot of people had had similar kinds of experiences.

Really rough traumatic stuff that had happened in their lives that they got to see.

But in coming to see it clearly for what it is,

It had a healing moment.

The memories are still very clear,

But the emotional charge,

The rage,

The terror,

Whatever was largely dissipated.

So there is power beyond words in sangha.

Back on the table there was a flyer for something that we sponsored here within Insight Meditation Community of Denver called the Care Circle.

And it's for people who,

It's a group of people within our sangha who volunteer to be with others in times of crisis.

You've gotten where there's some kind of medically related pain or something like that,

But where they would basically just very much appreciate having someone to be with them who likewise understands the dharma,

Can witness their,

Whatever rough time it is they're going through in a companionable way instead of running in a direction because most of us are aversive to the suffering we see in others.

I recently heard a snippet of a talk given by a physician named Abraham Bergeese.

He's the associate director of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University Medical Center.

And in his talk he spoke of a conversation that he had with somebody in,

Stanford University right there in Silicon Valley is probably one of the world's foremost centers for the development of and the use of the most sophisticated medical instrumentation that's out there.

And diagnostic instrumentation,

Treatment instrumentation.

And he was having a conversation that he talked about with this relatively young venture capitalist there in Silicon Valley who was putting a lot of money into R&D and taking up to the production phase of medical robotics.

Again for diagnostic and treatment purposes.

And this investor was saying to him,

And so this investor was somebody very well-prized of what the cutting edge of the technologies were and where they were likely to head and whatnot.

He said,

It's starting to look more and more like the role of physician is getting smaller and smaller to the point of superfluidity.

Pretty soon it seems like the way things are going,

You guys are just gonna essentially be the minders of the machines.

And Dr.

Burkes responded,

It sounds to me like you haven't suffered enough.

Most of his research right now in this kind of world center of medical robotics and instrumentation and whatnot is on the healing capacity of human caring and human touch.

Nothing to do with medical technology.

They're doing research on the quality of care,

The laying on of hands,

Okay.

And how powerfully therapeutic that can be in terms of accelerating the healing and the caring process.

And that's what he was trying to get at.

He was saying,

If you have ever really found yourself suffering,

The instrumentation is marvelous and so far as finding out what's literally going on in the body and coming up with the right meds and all that and robotic surgery and whatnot.

But what's always going to be core to the process of enabling the human body to heal itself is the presence of and the contact with another human being.

Whether it's your healthcare provider or friend said,

We ignore the importance of that at our peril.

And that is the kind of thing that is provided in a sound guy.

There are some practice communities.

My wife is happily able to be a member of one of them.

She's on the midwifery faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center School of Nursing preceptor.

They are the ones who train midwifery students how to actually go about the process of delivering babies and conducting exams and whatnot.

It's amazingly a supportive community.

They're there for each other.

They cover call for each other.

They are basically a OBGYN Sangha,

Essentially.

And believe me,

Not all OBGYN practices are.

This one happens to be.

That kind of community really can come about in a variety of settings if we allow it to do so.

So there's enormous power,

Enormous power in our ability to help each other through difficult times.

And finally,

A few words about the inner Sangha.

Adhan Amaro also gave a wonderful talk one time.

I remember he said essentially what our consciousness is,

What it's like to be in our minds on a day-to-day basis,

This kind of governance by committee.

He said our mind is actually made up of many voices,

Like little mini personas that are always bubbling up from what we might call our sankaras stew,

All of our memories and grudges and sweet feelings and whatnot.

Byron Brown has a book called Soul Without Shame and he refers to the principle of kind of overlord as the judge,

The one who is always telling us how we're blowing it and how we can try as hard as we can and maybe get a little better,

But we're never actually gonna measure up.

And he talks about the moderator of the committee as our kalyanamitta,

Our spiritual friend,

Our basically our Buddha nature.

And so he says you need to listen carefully to all the voices in your Sangha,

Your inner Sangha.

There's this phrase you hear in this tradition,

It's called put no one out of your heart.

And that includes putting no one of your inner voices out of your heart either.

But instead of opening to them,

Letting them all be there,

Including the crazy uncle in the attic.

You know,

There's all kinds of voices that work in there and to be able to listen to them respectfully is so important because otherwise,

If they're left in the shadows,

That's when we kind of tend to get ourselves in trouble.

So our inner Sangha is essentially cheered by our inner Buddha just as the Buddha was the spiritual advisor and guide to his own Sangha during the time he was alive.

Okay.

So,

The inner Sangha,

I know we all have one.

Next time when you're sitting and you hear the voices,

Do what Ajahn Amaro said,

Which is let each of them speak its mind and then say thank you for sharing.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Put none of them out of your heart.

That's what it means to honor the inner Sangha.

So,

Before we go our separate ways this evening,

I brought this guitar for a purpose and that is for us to share a song.

Reviews

And, I'm curious about the song that was going to be enjoyed at the end of the talk. 😊. Thank you for your thoughts, your stories, and the encouragement they gave.

Great guy, and great lesson. Thank you.

Lloyd presents his insights and experience with humour and intelligence. This talked helped me understand what it means to take refuge in the Sangha and to understand more about myself.