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Facing Uncertainty | Otter.ai

Facing Uncertainty

John Pulleyn46min

John Pulleyn

00:06

This morning is March 10 2024. And I want to start by congratulating everybody in making it here after springing forward. Some day, our politicians will get their act together, and will do away this ridiculous system that we're stuck with. There's so many problems in the world. And that's what this teisho is about. It just, it sort of grew on me after a number of different encounters with people, in person through email.

John Pulleyn

00:57

People feeling a real discouragement and anxiety, angst about the condition of the world and where we're going and what's going to happen. So many aspects of it just seems, maybe it's because we're all indoctrinated by the media. But it just seems there's so many things that are on the verge of going drastically off the rails it's hard to believe that everything can be held together

John Pulleyn

01:42

let me name a few of them. First, of course, in my mind, anyway, is climate change. Just the fact that this climate that we've enjoyed for centuries with variations here or there, is gradually getting hotter and hotter. And when it does all kinds of balanced routines are going to be thrown out of kilter. You know, one of the one of the interesting ones is the Gulf current goes through the Atlantic Ocean and keeps England warm. If enough ice melts up north, it's going to change the salinity of the ocean. And it in the past, during times of of great heat, that sort of circulation of water has broken down. And Europe will then ironically, become very cold. Sea levels have risen drastically in the past, and they're on track to rise drastically again. Sea ice ice in the Arctic, and the Antarctic is melting at an unprecedented rate these for modern times. And many areas of the world that are barely above water will soon be below water. Not sure exactly how that will all play out. Everything is so interconnected.

John Pulleyn

03:32

It's been a recently in the last year or two a really dramatic spike in the in the temperature global temperature. And some of it is the result of containerships cleaning up their pollution. So they're no longer pumping tons of particulates into the air and screening the ocean from the sun's rays. It's a very delicate balance and we're in there mucking things up pretty drastically and with not a whole lot of insight about the effects of what we do. And people worry they worry about even having children, what kind of a world are they going to come into? I can't go through all of this could make this teisho really, really difficult to listen to. But there let me just mention some of the other things. The political polarization that we're seeing in this country and other countries. The generation of outrage as a means of persuading people and and getting elected. So many things are feeding into that and so many people are feeling just tremendous outrage or discouragement or It seems like to everyone that they're surrounded and opposed by idiots. And they may not be wrong. Because once you once you buy into the outrage and once you start saying things should be different than they are, you do become a bit of an idiot

John Pulleyn

05:29

we see the outrage rising. One of the things that's really picked up is what's we could call a variable into nationalism, or maybe tribalism is a better word. Definitely playing out in the Middle East, as well as many, many other places. The incredible antipathy between Palestinians and the Israelis and the atrocities now that have been committed on both sides are just stunning.

John Pulleyn

06:21

In a speech that Netanyahu made you referred to the biblical tribe the Amalekites got that right. Who apparently attacked the Israelis, when they were leaving the leaving Egypt and returning to their what was then their homeland. And in the, in the Old Testament, God through the prophet Isaiah or some Prophet says to kill every man, woman, child, livestock, of the Amalekites. And Netanyahu then made the connection between the Palestinians and the Amalekites calling for the same thing

John Pulleyn

07:28

moving out of the Middle East war in the Ukraine, now we have Vladimir Putin actually making explicit nuclear threats. Saying parts of Ukraine which Russia now controls, those are taken back, Russia will use its nuclear weapons. It's crazy. How long can the world avoid a nuclear conflagration when people are using it as overtly as a bargaining chip? Sooner or later one of the various crazies that come into power is going to pull the trigger it seems and then we'll just stop with the disease we probably all feel about the incredible explosion of artificial intelligence we have no idea where that's going to take us I for one, welcome our machine overlords.

John Pulleyn

08:37

So many so many things that can come out of that no doubt the military is going to be using it it's going to be our own version of the Terminator. It's there's a lot of things that are that are there to worry about. And it's not quite so bad when you're old like me, you know, I've had a good run. What about my children? What about my grandchildren? What about the human race? Going over the centuries? Had a good run. A few 100,000 years, dinosaurs made it. Remember over 200 million years that everything blew up for them.

John Pulleyn

09:42

It feels like everything is worse, doesn't it? That that objectively may not actually be the case. I remember a few years ago reading a book by Steven Pinker entitled enlightenment now. Sounds like something from Seinfeld. serenity now that's it. Enlightenment serenity

John Pulleyn

10:19

here's a blurb for the book says if you think the world is coming to an end think again. People are living longer, healthier, freer and happier lives. And while our problems are formidable the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science is the world really falling apart is the ideal of progress obsolete. In this Elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectuals Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which played to our psychological biases, and instead follow the data. In 75, jaw dropping graphs, pinker shows that life health, prosperity, safety, Peace, Knowledge and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force, it is a gift of the Enlightenment. This is of course the scientific enlightenment. The conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

John Pulleyn

11:37

And, and I read the book and it is it is quite persuasive. Except that doesn't really address the basic anxiety, the basic problem, that it can all go to hell in a handbasket in just a moment of time. One conflagration or another. And all of a sudden, we're seeing starvation and desolation. Seeing on a worldwide scale what Palestinians, Ukrainians, and many others are suffering today.

John Pulleyn

12:18

There was a period starting right about when the Vietnamese War ended. And running up until about two years ago, when the number of deaths in war related. mortality was at an all time low. When you look at the graph, it's just stunning.

John Pulleyn

12:44

In this country, there was a period of getting along politically which when you look at the history of the country, going back to the beginning, going through the Civil War and whatnot, was actually kind of unusual. We kind of got used to it. Back in the days of I like like

John Pulleyn

13:17

every measure of the anxiety that people feel, especially young people, shows that skyrocketed kind of coinciding with the introduction of the iPhone, interestingly, and social media. But there's no that's not the only reason for people to feel anxious. anxiety depression it's interesting. If you traveled to the Third World, people's condition of life is so much more difficult. And yet to an outsider at least seem happier. See more energetic

John Pulleyn

13:58

that's the result of a very limited survey of me getting on a bus in Mexico

John Pulleyn

14:07

with with people hanging onto the outside, there's just there's no safety rails anywhere. It's crazy. The other thing that's really gotten worse is just our our general level of skepticism. Our credulity as far as conspiracy theories go really is crazy town.

John Pulleyn

14:37

You could never have convinced me that something like the q&a and phenomenon would get legs and we'd end up with representatives in Congress. Pretending at least to believe that swill.

John Pulleyn

15:00

People looking for the pedophile cult in the basement of a one story pizza place. It's just It's just remarkable. And beyond everything else, just the rate of change is accelerating. It's like a hyperbolic curve. You know, things changed a bit back in the Middle Ages. And then they started to speed up a bit, as the Enlightenment washed over Europe and the Industrial Revolution took hold. And that curve just keeps bending up and up and up.

John Pulleyn

15:43

Some ways, it's wonderful. The advances in medical technology and science, or ability to cure diseases that used to be death sentences. So much potential potential for cheap and abundant energy which would solve so many problems.

John Pulleyn

16:09

But for us, I think it's fair to say, each of us has very little power to make things work out one way or another. We really are dust in the wind. No reliable way we know to ward off disaster. There are other disasters I haven't even mentioned. Look what did in the dinosaurs. One Meteor in in one day, everything was turned upside down. I read that after the meteor struck for a few days afterwards, the entire surface of the Earth was at the temperature of a pizza oven. Nothing could live there was an underground I understand. Somebody said that asteroids are nature's way of saying how's that space program coming along

John Pulleyn

17:23

there's things we can do collectively, obviously, and each of us can can can play our part. But individually, really, the dice have been rolled. We don't know how things are going to come out. We can't know the basic inevitable uncertainty of life for each of us the certainty of death, the uncertainty of the time of death

John Pulleyn

17:57

we we certainly have hopes, hopes and prayers. But a lot of it is just like putting body English on a bowling ball after you've let it go headed for the gutter and you're trying to lean it over. Physics doesn't work that way. There's I remember at some point, people have this idea that if you really concentrated you can make clouds disappear. And if you're on the right kind of a day when the clouds are kind of you know fading from the sky you can look at them and think you're making them disappear next thing you know we'll be levitating the Pentagon which if you didn't live through it, people tried to do Yeah, it's not just today that people are crazy

John Pulleyn

18:56

want to read something from Pema children, she is the Vajrayana teacher has a monastery in Nova Scotia.

John Pulleyn

19:17

And she's talking about how we handle our upset our confusion, our fear.

John Pulleyn

19:36

She says when we realize that the path is the goal, there's a sense of workability Trungpa Rinpoche said, Whatever occurs in the in the confused mind is regarded as the path everything is workable. It is a fearless proclamation, the lion's roar. Everything that occurs in our confused mind, we can regard as the The path everything is workable. Roshi Kapleau said everything is grist for the mill just to stop running away, stop trying to deflect, stop drifting into despair or anxiety or anger. Name Calling fingerpointing are called upon to open ourselves to remember our connection with everyone on Earth to shut down our compassion because of our fear or our anger. Pema says, if we find ourselves in what seems like a rotten or painful situation, and we think, Well, how is this enlightenment, we can just remember this notion of the path, that what seems undesirable in our lives doesn't have to put us to sleep. Nor we could say, doesn't have to make us react automatically doesn't have to trigger us. What seems undesirable in our lives doesn't have to trigger us. Good one doesn't, doesn't have to trigger habitual reactions, we can let us show us where we're at. And let it remind us that the teachings encourage precision and gentleness, with loving kindness toward every moment. When we live this way. We feel frequently, maybe continuously at a crossroads. Never knowing what's ahead. It's an insecure way to live. We often find ourselves in the middle of a dilemma. What should I do about the fact that somebody is angry with me? What should I do about the fact that I'm angry with somebody? Basically, the instruction is not to try to solve the problem, but instead to use it as a question about how to let this brief situation wake us up further, rather than lawless into ignorance. We can use a difficult situation to encourage ourselves to take a leap to step out into that ambiguity. This teaching applies even in the most horrendous situations life conditio out. Sean Paul starch said that there are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free or not free. This is our choice in every moment. Do we relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness? That is why it can be said that whatever occurs can be regarded as a path and that all things not just some things are workable. This teaching is a fearless proclamation of what's possible for ordinary people like you and me.

John Pulleyn

23:17

There's that an old a prayer, not just a I guess, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Similar to what the Buddhist, my great Mahayana Buddhist Shantideva said, said if you can solve the problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying? It's really a question of where we put our attention. Something really dramatic that that Carl Jung said in a radio interview. Not sure that I agree with it completely, but something there. He said I'm not concerned about the world. I am concerned about the people with whom I live, the individual. The other world is all in the newspapers. My family and my neighbors are my life. The only life that I can experience what lies beyond is newspaper mythology does not have vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine in me that if we were all to live that way, we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. Who would have a meaningful life and not what we have now, madness was 90 years ago. Candy they did have mandus think this was may have been after or just before Hitler came to power? Well, I would not say that I'm not concerned about the world or that I would recommend that position to anyone. Because there are different kinds of concern. We have to have empathy for the suffering that we see. Even if we only see it through the newspapers, even if it is, in a sense newspaper mythology. It's not as immediate and direct as the people in front of us as the clerk in the drugstore or the grocery store. person we pass in the street. Friends we meet with every day, family, parents, children.

John Pulleyn

26:13

But it's real.

John Pulleyn

26:23

And a lot of people when they're acutely aware of all these things, all these problems just walled themselves off. You can take what Jung said and use it as an excuse to just whistle past the graveyard. But all of us are in a precarious situation. It's human life. It's never been any other way. Helen Keller said security is mostly a superstition does not exist in nature. Nor to the children of man as a whole experience it avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

John Pulleyn

28:01

I have an article that I want to read from it was given to me by a Sangha member talking about some of these things. It's by another Tibetan another Pema actually her name is Pema Khandro Rinpoche. And this is an article that was published in lion's roar, and it's entitled, The four points of letting go in the Bardo. I'm not going to have time for all four points, but I'm going to try to get through three of them. And let me start out by saying a little bit about this word, Bardo. Traditionally, this is the Tibetan word for the state that is believed to exist between this life and the next. Traditional Buddhism, the belief is that after you die, you're not done. Even though you might wish to be done, that we have the state. Sometimes they say it lasts 49 days, clearly there is no such rule. But there is a state between this life and taking whatever the next life will be. And what happens there is extremely important in terms of determining where the next life will be how the light next life will be. And so that's why you had the people may be familiar with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Basically, a lot of the services that we do for people who've recently died, is to encourage them to remember their practice and to realize the contingent nature of things, the emptiness of all things, so that they can have a good rebirth. so that they can go to some more conducive place then descending into the lower worlds, so to speak. But the word Bardo can be used really for any kind of rupture, any kind of dramatic change. And so she says here reading from the article, we are always experiencing successive births and deaths, we feel the death of loved ones most acutely. There's something radical about the change in our reality. Many of us can say this, from our own experience, we are not given options. There is no room for negotiation. And the situation cannot be rationalized away or covered up by pretense. There is a total rupture of our who I am nervous, and we're forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.

John Pulleyn

31:28

Says later on farther down, she says in American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty, are what is being referred to by the term Bardo. But to be precise, Bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality, and it is no longer available to us. Certainly, in the case of losing someone, there is that constant. Thinking that maybe they're not gone. And then of course they are. Maybe we see them in a dream, wake up the next day, they're still gone. We think of them, forgetting that they've died. And then there's the shock of remembering.

John Pulleyn

32:25

She's She says, Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, to be in tune to between birth and death. between death and rebirth, we often label that state of that a state of shock. We lose our grip on the old reality and have no sense of what a new one might be like. She says this has always been the entry point in our lives for religion. Because in that radical state of unreality, we need profound reasoning, not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non conceptual way. Say something for the heart. Mill rapa Milarepa is a famous Tibetan addict. Milarepa referred to this disk eruption as a great Marvel singing from his cave, the precious pot containing my riches, becomes my teacher, in the very moment it breaks. And she says, this is the Vajrayana idea behind successive deaths and rebirths. And it is the first essential point to understand rupture. The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that precious pot to slip out of our hands. Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment. As soon as we see our life in terms of the succession of successive deaths and rebirths we dissolve the very idea of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life. We start to see how conditional who I am this really is, oh even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.

John Pulleyn

34:36

Ursula lucquin writer wrote the left side of dark Left Hand of Darkness, said there is no safety and there is no end. That word must be heard in science, there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place above the terrible abyss

John Pulleyn

35:05

Pema Kandra says, At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are our default mode, then we can get to the business of being. Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent content continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are. So many of the disasters that happen in our lives turn out to be gifts. They do serve to wake us up big things, little things. Remember, when I got my DWI, sort of stung the next day thinking, Maybe this will be good. And it was, in the end it was

John Pulleyn

36:13

you, you feel something different in people who have suffered great losses. It's a depth to them that we don't achieve when everything goes our way. Because when everything's going our way, we can keep our fond ideas about what sort of a person I am alive.

John Pulleyn

36:39

Sometimes the lucky people are the unlucky ones.

John Pulleyn

36:47

Just in my mind picked up the Enlightenment account of the Canadian housewife. DK who's actually de Lancey, Roshi Kapleau His wife her whole spiritual quest began with the suicide of her previous husband went into a Great Depression ended up on the floor, crying out if there's anybody anywhere who can hear me please help me.

John Pulleyn

37:27

We can if we can take it to heart, if we can take can stand in the pain we can change and the main thing that changes is what Pema here calls the contrived self. She says, the cause of all suffering can be boiled down to a grasping into a fictional contrived existence. But what does that mean? If we really come to understand then there is no longer even a container to hold together our normal concepts to make them coherent. The precious pot shatters, and all our valuables rolled away like marbles on a table. Reality is we thought we knew it is disrupted, the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant. This is shunyata which gets translated in various ways most commonly as emptiness. But there is no real correlate in our language, no single word or idea that can cover this ground of disrupted reality. Because emptiness in English has negative connotations. shunyata is sometimes translated as voidness, open spaciousness, and even boundlessness.

John Pulleyn

38:51

In the context of birth of death, and birth, shunyata refers to a direct experience of disruption felt at the core of our being, when there is no longer any US manufacturing, artificial security.

John Pulleyn

39:14

We're not talking about giving up our precious human life here, of course, we're talking about giving up on this subtle game. We hold pictures of our ideal self in an ideal world, we imagine that if we could only manipulate our circumstances or other people enough, then that ideal self could be achieved. And in the meantime, we try to pretend to have it together. It's the game we all play. We keep postponing our acceptance of this moment, in order to pursue reality as we think it should be.

John Pulleyn

39:50

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can't play that game anymore. The Bardo teachings are really about recognizing the value of giving up the game. In which we play without even giving it a second thought. But when we are severely ill, or in hospice, and we have to cede control over our own bodily functions to strangers, holding it all together is not an option. So was a minister named Sydney Smith who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, who said, there is not the least use preaching to anyone, unless you chance to catch them ill.

John Pulleyn

40:39

Similar similar thinking and a can't get someone you can't summon into sobriety, until they're suffering, they have to hit some sort of bottom as they put it. So, back to pemra, she says the value of such moments as this, we are showing that the game can be given up and that when it is the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the Void is not what is there, what is there is the bare fact of being simple presence remains breathing in and out, waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand, is compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases, or compulsive manufacturing of contrived existence stops. Perhaps, in that ungrounded space, we are not even comforting ourselves, not even telling ourselves either everything is okay, we may be too tired to even do that. It's just total capitulation, we're forced into non grasping, of inherent reality, we can say we're forced to let go.

John Pulleyn

42:03

She puts it this way, the contrived self has been emptied out, along with contrived existence, and the tiring treadmill of image maintenance, that goes along with it. What remains is a new moment, spontaneously meeting us again and again. There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps if we do not just reject rupture. In fact, if we have some reliable idea of what is happening in that intermediate groundless space, the rupture can become Rapture.

John Pulleyn

43:07

So I thought I was going to do three of her four points. So let's briefly just skip ahead. And she says this. The third principle we can learn about death, birth and reincarnation is this. The extent to which we know what's underlying everything, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, that which we can control that which we can't, is the extent to which we can relax. To the extent that we know our presence of awareness as reality, it becomes bearable to become intimate. She says, once we gain intimacy with that ground, we can have even have sanity when life is hard, even when knowing that an experience is going to be painful. Think how willing we are to bear that pain for someone we really love. How life begins after all with our mother, through love, and during the pain of childbirth.

John Pulleyn

44:23

Further on, she says, What makes death and impermanence so painful is our idea of the strict dichotomy between existence and non existence. Knowing something beyond that dualism is paramount at the moment of death instead of being caught between the idea of existence and non existence, instead of this crisis of having everything that matters to us, taken away all at once, something else can open up entirely. We shift our attention to the nucleus of being to presents itself, experiencing itself Here's what we can come to know through practice the what we are that can't be defined can't be put in a box that is truly beyond birth and death just just experiencing it a little bit brings a fearlessness something that isn't even a thing it can't be hurt. Most important thing there is

John Pulleyn

45:42

sometimes the slings and arrows work like a Kiyosaki who wake us up. Empty us out. Make us willing

John Pulleyn

46:07

help us to open okay have used up a lot of time going to stop here and will recite the Four Vows

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