Stephen Batchelor was a buddhist monk in the Tibetan and zen traditions for ten years. Known for his agnostic and secular approach to the Buddhadharma, he has written several books, including the bestselling Buddhism Without Beliefs. His most recent book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, was published in March 2010.
Martine and Stephen live in France and teach seminars and lead meditation retreats worldwide.

Martine Batchelor lived in Korea as a zen nun under the guidance of Master Kusan for ten years. She is the author of Meditation for Life, The Path of Compassion and Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits
Her latest work is Spirit of the Buddha.

Stephen Batchelor was a buddhist monk in the Tibetan and zen traditions for ten years. Known for his agnostic and secular approach to the Buddhadharma, he has written several books, including the bestselling Buddhism Without Beliefs. His most recent book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, was published in March 2010.
Martine and Stephen live in France and teach seminars and lead meditation retreats worldwide.

Martine Batchelor lived in Korea as a zen nun under the guidance of Master Kusan for ten years. She is the author of Meditation for Life, The Path of Compassion and Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits
Her latest work is Spirit of the Buddha.

Stephen Batchelor was a buddhist monk in the Tibetan and zen traditions for ten years. Known for his agnostic and secular approach to the Buddhadharma, he has written several books, including the bestselling Buddhism Without Beliefs. His most recent book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, was published in March 2010.
Martine and Stephen live in France and teach seminars and lead meditation retreats worldwide.

A 6 week mindfulness meditation course led by Stephen Archer

How much and what kind of effort do we need to make to truly embody mindful presence? This course is for people who are familiar with the principles and practice of mindfulness and wish to develop their proficiency in its application, in either their personal or professional life.

Course content

Discovering and deepening our shared understanding of mindfulness
What is right effort?
Aspiration, intensity and application
What we don’t do is more important than what we do
Self-effort, trust and letting go
Activating the vital life force
Working with our personal tendencies

Each week Stephen will present various themes, lead participants through a guided meditation and open a space for discussion.

To Register send $120 to S. Archer, PO Box 27015, Wellington or to make an internet payment contact stephen@originalnature.co.nz for more details or call him on 0274 356352

However, when we really inquire, feel and sense our bodies, we realize that our body is not a thing, fixed in time, but an ever-changing expression of life itself. Sensing it in this way opens up a field of previously hidden possibilities. As we begin to sense the body as a part of nature itself, our fear, shame and blame are relaxed.

It also dawns upon us that the mind is not ‘somewhere up here in the head’, but rather suffuses the entire sense of being in and of a body. We begin to sense that this is the ground where real awakening and release can happen.

In this course we will explore the following themes:

• Sensing beneath fixed views of our body
• The interface between mind and body
• The seamlessness of the body and nature
• The body in the context of aging and death
• Control and letting go in the bodily realm
• The body as the ground for awakening and deep knowing

Cost: $120

Discounted rates are available

to register please email peter@originalnature.co.nz

In this course we will explore ways of re-kindling our trust in the Great Heart that is within us, all the time, underneath the apparent limitations of our conditioned minds. We will look at pragmatic pathways into the qualities it manifests, and inquire into how we can practice with them in our everyday lives.

Most importantly, we will reconnect to the trust that living from the Great Heart is the only thing that truly makes sense in this life.

Topics for investigation and discussion will include:

• The harmless heart
• The benevolent heart
• The powerful, autonomous heart
• The undefended, spacious heart

Cost: $90

To register, please email peter@originalnature.co.nz

The Buddha emphasized a dimension of everyday consciousness, or a resonance of heartfulness called sila as essential for living an awakened life, and as an indispensible basis for liberating the heart from suffering. His teaching was pragmatic, rather than based on arbitrary standards appealing to outside authorities. In essence he encouraged: ‘Do beauty, get beauty. Do harm, get harm’. Not only that, but he emphasized that the potential in activating and abiding in a beautiful resonance of heart is actually immense, and can have very powerful results. On the other hand, the resonance of harm, or damage, has equally powerful effects – no matter how we rationalize it, argue for it, get off on it, or claim that we are not attached to it.

Yet 21st century media ecourages the opposite. Computer games ecourage participants to kill and enjoy killing. Mainstream movies often promote ‘righteous’ violence (the more dramatic the better) – and arthouse movies often dispense with ethical justifications and just go straight to the blackness. You will very rarely find síla in music. Mostly we will find themes of craving, if we are lucky, and just outside of the mainstream (and even in it) we’ll find revenge, malice and pain.

The media is also obsessed with a kind of beauty – physical beauty. It is a testimony to our innate longing for the good, the fortunate and the bright. However, this longing mostly remains on the level of appearance, and fools the mind into believing that there is an ideal world in which we should be living – where everything is glossy and perfect, and we can have what we want (if we try hard enough). When we attend to the ordinariness of our lives, the imperfections of our bodies and the reality that even though we actually have quite a lot, we still feel like it’s not enough, we may begin to contract around a sense of ‘there must be something wrong with me’, ‘I’m not one of those people’, and ‘I don’t measure up’.

Sila offers us a way out of this. It is an attuning to and bringing forth of an intuitive intelligence that can actually manifest good fortune in our lives and our relationships, by being beauty, rather than seeking it as a particular ideal, a particular person, or anything ‘outside’. And it does so through an intimate inquiry into the nature of cause and effect itself. It also takes a kind of courage – to step outside of the conditioned packages, limitations and stigmas of popular culture and dig deeper for that which has more profound value than quick fixes or the illusion that I am getting ‘ahead’ in the world.

The Buddha taught five ways of training, sikkhapada, that he said were fundamental to living our lives within a resonance of harmony, happiness and ease. While often framed up in terms of the negative, I have found great benefit in inquiring into the positive potential to which they are pointing.

Underlying the first four of these is an invitation to begin to open to an empathetic consciousness that feels others in the same way that we feel ourselves. Within this is also a sensitivity to the principle of karma – that actions done towards others ultimately bear fruit in their mirror image in terms of our own stream of being. So, me harming others is me harming myself. As our meditation practice unfolds, and we begin to clear some of the hardened negative patterns of constriction and suffering in the heart, we automatically begin to value our own well being, and also begin to see the pain or happiness of others in a much clearer light. From this place we can start to sense into what effects our actions generate – in others and in ourselves. The world begins to look quite different.

The first training is to respect all life, and to refrain from harming other people, animals, and even insects. To dwell in this quality fully there has to be a sensitivity alive in the heart that can first feel into the question: ‘What is this other being?’. It is a heart inquiry, rather than a conceptual one, and depends upon an open, responsive awareness. I have found it useful to spend time looking at beings I was conditioned to disregard in my youth. Take the ordinary housefly, for example. If we take the time to look at what a fly is, close up, we will begin to notice that it is alive, and sensitive, just like us. We may notice how it washes itself with its feet, or how it looks around sensing for danger. When we open to this perspective, the perception ‘fly’ begins to dissolve, and there is less of a sense of seperation between ‘me’ and ‘it’. If we can do this, the heart naturally recoils from the impluse to kill – we realize that there is a living, breathing consciousness there, and it is almost as if reality finally becomes three dimesional, rather than just a static projection of my own mind. This feels very good.

The second training is to only take only what belongs to us, what is given, and to honour the boundaries and possessions of others; to be cirumspect in this area. I myself have experienced directly the pain of muddying this aspect of human life – in my teens I, like a lot of other boys surfing their newfound testosterone, had a few powerful experiences of taking what wasn’t given. When I was caught, the result was feeling mistrusted by others, being looked upon with suspicion, and ultimately not feeling like my boundaries were safe. On one occasion I even had a large amount of money stolen from my bedroom… Even then, before engaging in meditation practice, I had a sense, a feeling, that this was the result of my own attitude to the world, and could feel the bitter taste of that misfortunate resonance. So, on one hand, stealing leads to unfortunate results on the social level, while on another something in us begins to doubt that we can trust others, and ultimately, ourselves. If this feeling isn’t understood and cleared it can become a major obstacle when we come to sitting meditation – we will come across edges of self-doubt, guilt, or just an underlying feeling of ‘it’s not safe’. It is a wonderful thing to be free of that particular pain.

The third training encourages us to apply this same principle in the domain of sexual relationships. If we are connected to what is really of benefit to our partner or spouse, and what is not, it will become heartfully clear what the effects of infidelity are. Although we can adopt theories and justifications as to why this ‘shouldn’t be true’, the Buddha was again just pointing to a natural law of causality – it hurts. While relationships have the potential to bring blessings and nourishment to our lives, they also have the potential flip-side of immense hurt, fall-out and broken-ness. So it is a great gift to ourselves and others to be careful, to feel clearly, and to value compassion and concern for our loved one’s welfare over the primal urges, impulses and dreams of ‘what could be, somewhere else’. Of course, we can choose to end our relationships, for a variety of reasons, many of them compassionate – these trainings are pointing to the way in which we do this, and encouraging us to protect and nurture a field of blessings for ourselves and others in this life.

The fourth is around speech. In it’s most simple form it suggests: ‘Be truthful’. Sounds easy… But many of us will know how sneaky the mind is at telling the odd little white lie, particularly when our self-image is at stake. When we do this, how does it feel? If we are sensitive, we will feel the unease that arises with such speech – the sense of having acted upon the intention to deceive, and therefore feeling like we have deceived ourselves. In terms of karma, when we are not truthful it generates a quality of consciousness that means we will either be told untruths, or on a more subtle level, will be on the lookout for others, believing that they are lying! This doesn’t feel good, and can lead to a lot of confusion in the mind, and even states of paranoia. Of course the arena of speech has many shades, from coarse, blatant lying to the more subtle knee-jerk reactions, but the invitation here is to pay attention to how we speak, why we speak, and equally important, what the effects of our speech on others are. As with the other trainings this requires us to dwell in and open to a sensitivity of heart that is beneath the stories and rationalizations that can so easily plague our conscious mind. Our speech then becomes a vehicle for bringing about happiness and connection, and is a powerful way to manifest beauty in our relationships and the social fabric of our lives.

The fifth training is to value and protect our clarity of awareness. While this differs slightly from the others, in that it doesn’t necessarily involve other people, or other beings, it is said to be an essential foundation to avoid the blurring and disregarding of the the other four. There are many views on what this means in terms of putting things into our systems – from total abstinence from any form of intoxicating substance, to mindful awareness and caution around their use – but the essence of it refers to cherishing and protecting a particular quality of mind: appamada, or heedfulness. We know when we’ve lost it. So it is a wise training to begin to look into this quality of heart and to sense its preciousness, its immense value in terms of the practice of awakening and of manifesting beauty in the world. When we are heedless we lose touch with the sensitivity that can hold another being in full awareness and resonate with their pain, their happiness, their sadness or their hurt. We close up into ‘my world’, and things once again become a means to my gratification rather than an opportunity to open into and nurture a field of blessings. And we may even forget that it was possible to even be open at all. There is great tragedy in this.

So sila, then, can be seen as a potential that lies within the causal fabric of human life already – if we attune to it with sensitivity, we begin to experience a positive feedback that invites us to open some more. When we taste the effects of living from a place of love and respect for ourselves and for the other beings with whom we share this planet, we begin to sense how it supports our aspiration to be free of suffering and dis-ease. By connecting to the ground where we can stop planting the seeds of suffering in our relationship with others, and with all forms of life, we bring great benefit to the world, and in turn, ourselves. In the words of the Buddha:

‘One gives to all beings freedom from fear, freedom from hostility, and freedom from oppression.
In doing so one also enjoys freedom from fear, freedom from hostility and freedom from oppression.’

This is the great blessing of síla.

This is most obviously seen in the fundamentalist mindset, which is a total rigidification around ‘my way’ as absolutely right, and therefore involves a souring, looking down upon and fearing of everything that is at odds with it. In the most extreme cases this can lead to aggression and violence, even though the ideal at its root may have been quite lofty, as an ideal. In subtle ways we can also become quite fundamentalist about our spiritual practice, scorning and belittling a ‘them’ who practice in different ways, and use different appraches to our own.

I had a thing about neatly folded bedsheets in my early years of practice. I couldn’t leave my room unless the bedsheets were folded so neatly that they looked like a photograph from a home decor magazine. Sometimes I would get up to leave my living quarters and upon turning around notice that the bedsheets weren’t impeccably folded. I would feel a pinching in my heart. A current of energy would run through my body, with the message ‘you’re not spiritual’. This wasn’t overt, but rather a subtle tone, or mood of self. The ‘me’ just got less spiritual. Marks off for slack behaviour. So I would rush back in and make the sheets perfect again. ‘Ahhh – spiritual ‘me’ has returned. Excellent’. It took a while to begin to feel the inherent limitation of this mindset. And it wasn’t just my bedsheets! Views about ‘right practice’ would permeate my conscious mind, formulating black and white projections of how ‘I should be’, as well as the hope that I was being seen as ‘the spiritual guy’.

Around that time, when this obsessiveness around spiritual practice reached its zenith, (or perhaps it’s nadir) I began to hear about one of the first three fetters[1] the Buddha taught. The pali phrase is silabatta paramasa which is most commonly translated as ‘clinging to rights and rituals’. That’s an OK translation, but I prefer a more literal take: paramasa can be translated as ‘fondling’, while sila and batta refer to behaviour and duties respectively. So it’s an activity of fondling. That sounded familiar at the time… From the perspective of self view the mind tends to fondle images and ideas of ‘myself’ projected into the future, ‘their eyes’, or most subtly into abstracted takes on the present moment. And it refers to certain activities or ways of doing things that we use to prop that up. That’s the basic activity of silabatta paramasa, and it always generates an underlying sense of disconnection to the present moment and a loss of freshness and vitality in our practice and in our lives.

The basic assumption within this ‘fetter’ is that forms, views and behaviours in themselves are liberating. If I just do this thing, or be this person, at some point in time there will be this wonderful thing that’s happening to ‘me’… It’s not that these are wrong in themselves, it’s just that there’s an inherent limitation and out-of-touchness that comes through seeking identity in them, and identifiying with them as absolutely real in themselves.

Of course there are certain principles and qualities of heart that are indispensible to authentic practice. But one can begin to notice that these qualities, such as humility, generosity, and harmlessness aren’t dependent upon particular forms to be activated. They are independent of a view of ‘myself’. In fact, the activity of clinging to views, even the most noble ones, even the purest ideals of how we should be, inhibit freedom and release of awareness and therefore inhibit the arising of the very qualities we love themselves. So instead of love and harmony we get the opposite – the ‘me’ that has to defend my view of what is ‘right’.

This doesn’t mean that forms and systems can’t potentize our minds, hearts and bodies for beautiful qualities and for awakening  – they can, and do, of course. But the reflection on sila batta paramasa points to the reality that all they can do is channel specific energies, and in themselves they are not absolutely true. They can be very good, but not absolutely true. They can be highly beautiful, but if the resonance of beauty in our own hearts is dependent upon them to arise, and withers in their absence, then there is a place of clinging that we haven’t unhooked in the heart.

So as one begins to see that freeing oneself from hardening around practices and fixed ways of behaving (while not being averse to them either) is necessary for unhooking the mind from the pain of self-contraction, one begins to sense that human life will always have the flavour of diversity to it. People have different characters. We have different proficiencies, proclivities and talents, and from a Dharma perspective, we need different skilful means to free our hearts. This is not wrong. This is life on earth. One can get a sense from the early Buddhist suttas that the Buddha was not at odds with this. He taught a variety of different, and sometimes seemingly conflicting skilful means to a whole range of people, dependent upon where they were at, how they were conditioned, and what would be useful for them at that time.

The path to freedom is based on a direct sensing of what is wholesome and what is obstructive in the heart, in this moment – and that is our guage for practice. This may not look particularly impressive in terms of ‘me’. We may look very ordinary – even boring from the outside. Or we could look wonderful. Or we could look wonderful, but actually be subtly getting off on the sense of ‘myself’ that our activity is generating. In the end it’s not how we look, but how we are that makes the difference.

So the practice, then, is experiential and direct, rather than abstract and idealistic. The mind that is obsessed with ideas of myself as ‘spiritual’ only hurts. Beginning to unhook from its hypnotic stare can initially feel disorienting and even confusing. If I’m not doing my spiritual stuff so that I can prop up the idea of ‘me’ as spiritual, then what am I in this? If we stay with that question we can also begin to attend to another question: ‘Is this suffering?’ Then we find that more and more, a tight contracted heart is just not worth it – even if it’s fondling and feeding off the most tantalizing spiritual view, there’s something we have missed. This is an edge I am very interested in exploring in my own practice. When I tighten up around a take on ‘Buddhism’ – what’s happened there? Sometimes it takes a while, but usually the deluded mind has to concede, sometimes after putting up a valiant fight, that ‘I don’t know… Ah, yes… I don’t know. That feels so much better.’ And that opens the door to that place in the heart, in our being, where not knowing feels absolutely right.

[1] The three fetters are said to be the obstructions to the the first taste of the Unconditioned, in the early Buddhist teachings. They are: Self View, Skeptical Doubt, and Clinging to Practices and Precepts.

But what is important is not so much trying to predict in what way, or when our actions will come back to us — it’s more about having a deep connection to the principle itself, and so taking responsibility for our intentions moment to moment. If Karma is based on our own volitions, then, it suggests the possibility of a kind of mastery – if the wellness or illness in our lives depends on how we act, on our intentional actions, then that implies that we are at the hub of this cause and effect process in every moment. However, that’s not how it feels a lot of the time, is it?

Tragically, our consciousness can get quite far removed from the actual quality of intention itself — like for example in an argument where one wants to prove that one is right. We can get so caught up with the details or the content of what’s being said, that we lose touch with ‘Hey, what am I wishing for his person? Am I wishing to hurt them in some way, or put them down, just so that I can feel like I’m right?’.

So the realm of intention is an interesting one. When one gets inside it, things begin to look quite different. If we walk the Buddhist path sincerely, our orientation quite naturally changes, the deeper we see how pertinent the Buddha’s teachings on karma are. That every moment, our own intentions are shaping this very consciousness in terms of well-being or stress. To me this is a revelation all in itself. It opens up a sense of curiosity, of wonder at this thing called ‘mind’.

Our attention can then stay centered at the hub of our experience, rather than being fixated on the details themselves. It’s like tuning into a heart consciousness rather than a head consciousness. The head is always getting pushed around by images and ideas and a particular ‘take’ on this situation or that situation — and being caught in that realm leads to a lot of confusion. Perception and feeling can configure experience in many ways – and if we take those fragmented constructions as absolute, we can get quite pushed around by our own thinking.

Instead, it can be very useful to ask ourselves, ‘What would it be like if I rested in a sense of dispassion towards the thinking mind? What would that be like?’ It’s a kind of friendly suspicion. Knowing that the reality of any situation won’t necessarily be found in the mind’s ideas about it. We can bring forth this attitude of ‘not sure’ in the way we relate to the mind’s thinking and perceiving. The mind is very powerful at concocting images and views about ourselves and others, and when you’re right in the middle of them, they seem so convincing. Whether it’s about ‘me’ in the form of self-criticism, or ‘them’ in the form of judgments and views, they can seem so absolute. But with this trusting in ‘not sure’ we can begin to disengage from the storylines themselves, and bring our attention to the quality of heart itself, asking ‘is this bringing harm to myself and others?’

With that question we come into our true spiritual strength. We can then act or not act according to what we know in our gut. The more intimately we feel how closing our hearts to another, or to ourselves, closes ourselves off from our own well being, the less inclined we become to follow this habit. And the more we feel the fullness and vitality of the open heart, the more inclined we become to treasure whatever brings about its fruition. Harmlessness is then felt in the heart as an opening into wholeness and peace, a letting go of pain, and an alignment with our deep aspiration for well being. The more we trust in its power, the more the path joyfully opens up before us.

Peter: The most recent article on your website is around the theme of vulnerability – I found your writing on the subject very moving and powerful. Could you say something about the capacity to trust in not-knowing and also opening into a vulnerability on the emotional and spiritual levels? Would you say that it’s an essential counterpoint to the more linear or goal oriented ways in which we can conceive practice?

Vincent: Yeah, I think so. It’s both a counterpoint in that it undermines the tendency to want to be the ‘knower’, which itself can become a fixed position that we can take, or a kind of new identity that’s not seen clearly – which in that sense, isn’t actually in alignment with the way things are! (laughs)

And it’s also a counterpoint in that it is actually directly from the first person perspective when I look in. For example, I was taking a walk the other day and I asked myself the question, ‘Can I see any of the stages of enlightenment in my experience right now?’ And the answer was, ‘No’. I can’t see enlightenment period, and I also can’t see these stages or conceptual maps in the present moment experience. So in that sense, I’m always forced to acknowledge that I don’t really know what’s happening on this level. It’s just this open experience. Or, sometimes closed! And it’s just the raw moment of experience – and in that sense it is very vulnerable, because I can’t say ‘I’m enlightened’ or “I’m this, or I’m that’. Those are all useless in the face of this moment.

At the same time, when I move to stepping out and looking at my first person experience, as it’s progressed over time, which is more like the scientific or objective perspective, I can really see a difference over time, and I can really see certain patterns that have played out, and also that my experience of the first person moment has become more open, more fresh, more alive, more

mysterious. So I have to acknowledge that this is also true. I don’t want to discount the capacity to step back and look at things over time from an objective perspective. If I were to discount that and say that it’s completely invalid, then we wouldn’t have a lineage of teachings, we wouldn’t have a history of the world – there’s so many things we wouldn’t have! We’d just be walking around going, ‘Wow! Look! It’s all open!’ (laughs)

So I really see both of those perspectives as being important. And in my practice and my teaching I have been looking to find the appropriate way to acknowledge these perspectives, and not to over-emphasize either one. So, that’s where I am in terms of working with how to maintain a dynamic relationship between the two. And it feels to me like in that dynamism, or even tension, that’s actually where a lot of personal growth happens. That’s where a lot of maturing or wisdom seems to flower. At least for me that seems to have been the case. I have to kind of keep going back and forth between looking at things and seeing patterns, and also opening up to new knowledge, and on the other hand just having to drop it and let it go. There’s a saying from Zen Master Dogen that comes to mind.

He says, ‘At first you raise the bodhi mind and seek enlightenment’, which is when you get in touch with that deep longing to know what’s true. And then the second phase is to ‘Practice and attain enlightenment’, which is to really get it on a deep first person experience level – to really know what it is you were looking for in a direct way, even though you could have never predicted what it would be beforehand, which is the nature of enlightenment – it’s always something other than what we think it’s going to be!

And then the last phase, which is so interesting to me, is to ‘Cast enlightenment away, and raise the bodhi mind again’. Which is to let some new level of longing or seeking emerge. Some new subtletly of something we didn’t see before – a slight obscuration, or something we didn’t see before… So his perspective is that the process just keeps going.

Peter: So you’re saying that it’s about having a balance between the direct or intuitive approach, while also having a compass of the direction we’re going in, or what’s possible.

Vincent: Yeah. Those three phases give room for all the different parts of the process – so we can talk about ‘seeking’ – we don’t have to make it wrong. When one gets a glimpse of a ‘something else’, and that ‘something else’ seems other, then there’s a gap, and a natural seeking emerges in that gap. It’s like, ‘Oh I want to get there. I want to bring all of me over to ‘there’ wherever ‘there’ may be… ‘ So we don’t have to ignore this phase. It’s something we can honour. We can honour that there’s a process involved in going from where I am now to where I an trying to go. But it’s both a linear and a cyclical process, in that a lot of progress is about dropping, or letting go as opposed to gaining something new.

And it’s also that awakening does happen. It really is hard wired into our biology to be able to discover something that isn’t really touched by any kind of experience, what we call Nirvana, and then to be able to integrate it into all aspects of our life, so that there’s no separation between the two, actually. There is that phrase, ‘Nirvana and Samsara are one’. I have found that to be an accurate description of where the spiritual path is heading.

For me the profundity of this process is that it doesn’t have an end. There’s always some new horizon. One of my teachers has a saying: ‘The closer you get to the horizon, the further out it goes’. So that to me brings an incredible sense of humility and awe, actually. That I can continue this path, maybe forever! (laughs).

For more wonderful teachings by Vincent, please visit his website

Vincent Horn is a Buddhist Geek, teacher, and explorer. In 2006 Vincent helped start, and now runs, a popular Buddhist media project called Buddhist Geeks. And with the encouragement of his teachers — after nearly a decade of intensive meditation practice in the Burmese and Thai Forest Theravada tradition — he teaches both online and in Los Angeles, CA at the InsightLA meditation center.