Day 8: Engaging on the Path

So, we have been speaking about what we could call the awakening life, the life of the bodhisattva, the awakening being. The being who is practicing, who is intent upon manifesting their own complete awakening which is already present in their own minds, at least according to the tradition that we're working with, the style of practice that we're working with. Now in this style of practice, as we noted at the beginning, we can speak about the ground, the path and the results. The ground is the nature of things. The path is how we practice based upon the way things are so as to achieve the result which is the manifest awakening itself.

And our goal is not to, in this context of this style let's say, but also especially of this particular course, we are really focusing just on the path, on the practice. Not fixating on achieving the goal, not doing too much work with the philosophical analysis of the nature of reality, but really just sort of, you might even say some practical aspects of how this style of practice might be useful for us even if we're not going to commit full-blown to Buddhist practice or to the Buddhist office way of life. There are certainly things that I think all of us can see in this style of practice and in the perspective that it brings to our lives that could be useful. So part of that, of course, in a very important way when we think of this style of practice and we think of the path itself, and of course for most of us, again maybe some of you are already fully manifest Buddhas, but I am not, and generally in Asian cultures the attitude will be that if someone says they're a Buddha already, then that probably means they're not. There's a tremendous emphasis on humility, a tremendous emphasis therefore on the path itself, that we're going to be on the path for a long time, for a very long time, and of course in that perspective, in the narrative universe of traditional Buddhism, this is a multi-life perspective, so it's not just one moment, it's many moments, it's not just one lifetime, it's many lifetimes.

So that very vast temporal perspective and also a vast universe in which that's occurring can be very helpful actually to really emphasize to us that the point is not the goal, it's really to be on the path. Of course we're heading toward that goal, part of the path is keeping that goal in mind and having a motivation to achieve that goal, but holding that motivation itself is a kind of practice. Fixating on the goal, I'm going to get there, I'm going to become a Buddha, when am I going to be an Arhat, what level of the path am I on, how many realizations do I have, that's not so useful, and in some ways can really become a tremendous obstacle to our practice. Now when we think about the path, we also spoke about another famous list, which is the view, the meditation in the life or the conduct, the way in which all of this unfolds within our actual lives, in our behavior, and in terms of the view, we touched briefly on some of the philosophical aspects of this practice, but the key issue is that wisdom is what we cultivate so as to counteract the confusion that is causing our suffering, not just our suffering, but others suffering as well. So wisdom is what sees the way things truly are and it enables us to counteract our own confusion and to the extent that we've done that, it enables us to become more and more empathetic to see more clearly how others are confused, not to judge them for it or to blame them for it, but actually to help them as well to the extent we are able to remove their confusion.

And also through that interaction to learn more, to gain more wisdom. So wisdom is key. Wisdom is actually, in a sense, the most important aspect of the path. And what does wisdom come down to? Well in this style of practice you could say wisdom comes down to understanding the nature of experience itself.

What is experience itself? Another way of putting that is, what indeed does it mean to be conscious? How do we know? We've explored some of that. There's so much more that we could do.

There's lots of philosophical analysis, for example, that could be involved in that. There are many other experiential practices that touch into wisdom. But for the moment I just want to bring us down to something that's a kind of very key idea that we've already spoken about last time and I think perhaps in other episodes as well, if I recall. And this is the idea of what we call bodhicitta, the awakening mind. So what makes one a bodhisattva, which is to say one who is a being, a sattva intent on bodhi, awakening, so as to become the kind of being that is capable of helping all others to eliminate their suffering and achieve genuine happiness.

In order for one to do that, become a bodhisattva, one has bodhicitta, the awakening mind. And we can talk about this in terms of, there are many, many lists, I've been trying to spare you from too many lists, but here's another list here, which is the ultimate bodhicitta, the ultimate awakening mind, and the conventional awakening mind. So the ultimate awakening mind is the Buddha mind itself. And remember, there is a way in which the core nature of our own minds is already Buddha mind. And this is actually, the nature of that mind is free of, in its essence, it's free of all of the confusion.

It's free of all of the sticky negative mental states, what we call the kleshas. It's free of all that. It's free of anger and attachment, free of craving. So even though we are living our lives in a way in which we are filled with these types of experiences, the standpoint here is that the nature of our minds is free of all of those, what we can call defilements. They are just temporary, they're not essential to what it means to be conscious, what it means to be a being, to be aware.

And yet, at the same time as it's, that's our true nature, of course, we are experiencing all of these negative mental states. So while we have this idea that there is ultimately an awakened mind, which is our ultimate bodhicitta, our ultimate awakened mind, we also then need to practice in a way that helps that to become manifest and that puts us on the path, maybe for a very long term. So sometimes we say that in this style of practice where we're dealing with the Mahayana, the great vehicle, the practice of the Mahayana that is the style that we've been talking about here, in some contexts it's said that this takes three incalculable aeons. So this is not immediate gratification. And that's again part of the point.

We're on the path for a long time. So what does it mean then to be dealing with this idea of the awakening mind, not from that ultimate standpoint, but from a conventional standpoint, to be cultivating that awakening mind? Well, one of the key ways in which we develop that is that we develop it through the cultivation of compassion. And we touched on the cultivation of compassion last time. I want to talk a little bit more about that before we move into an ending discussion on the life of the bodhicitta, if you like, of the awakening life.

So when we speak about the cultivation of this conventional bodhicitta, the kind of awakening mind that we have on the path, there are in a sense two different approaches. We mentioned these last time as the exchange of self and other and the sevenfold cause and effect practice to cultivate bodhicitta. One of the insights in the exchange of self and other, which we find in the great text called the guide to the bodhisattva's way of life, the bodhichariyavatara of Shantideva, the great Sanskrit poets, Buddhist Sanskrit poets, who wrote his text probably around the seventh century or so. One of the great insights here is something that we also find in contemporary cognitive science and anthropology and so on, connected to that notion of humans as cooperators that we discussed last time, is the insight that we have a spontaneous reaction, a spontaneous urge actually to help other humans who are suffering. And there's even some research that suggests, and I'm thinking some of this was done by David Rand at Yale University, for example, there's even some research that suggests that what we learn is, it's not that we learn to become kind to others, we have to actually learn to not be kind to others.

What I mean more specifically is that it seems that we humans, and probably other species as well, are born with an innate urge to help when we perceive difficulty, and there's some great studies that have been done, some of them by Michael Tomasello's group, that show the way in which there'll be a young child who's brought into a room, and then there's the experimenter, and the experimenter pretends to be stacking some books, and then books fall over, and the experimenter goes, oh, you know, and then the child sort of spontaneously, a very large percentage of children just spontaneously help to put the books, to stack the books up. Or the experimenter drops a pen, and walking to the table drops the pen and goes, oh, and the child just walks over and picks it up spontaneously. Interestingly, even chimpanzees actually seem to do some of this. There's a spontaneous helping behavior that we find in primates, but it's especially acute in humans. And again, this is not with kin.

This is the experimenter who's completely unknown to the child, so it's not a matter of just helping those who are close to you. So we have this, we seem to have this spontaneous urge to help, but what we may have to learn, this is not totally established experimentally, but there's a suggestion that what we learn is to not help strangers. So we develop this distinction between our in-group, those who are sort of cooperators with us, who are not competitors, and the out-group, those who are, in some sense, competitors, or at least not, we don't know that they're really going to cooperate with us. They look different, maybe they speak different, or they're just from a different tribe. So that sense of in-group, out-group distinction may be something that we actually have to learn as humans.

So part of the point of the practice is not necessarily to enhance our connection with the others. It's more like to suppress our disconnection, our sense of disconnection. And a very straightforward way of doing that is just to ask, where do you end? Where is the boundary of you? How do I have a sense of this is me, and that is you?

What part of you is completely just you? For example, let's consider, you know, I'm thinking now in various thoughts, and I'm speaking and so on. And I have a completely independent thoughts, one that is just mine, so to speak. The way I think involves the English language, and it involves some other languages, too. But I don't have my own secret inner language that I speak in, that I think in.

Doesn't work that way. The very capacity for me to have thoughts of this kind, thoughts that are structured by rationality and so on, is actually all caught up in the history of my own upbringing with various languages. So how could I even think without, in a sense, the languages that we share in common? Just the capacity to do that means that, in a sense, this mind, which seems to be just mine, is already fully interpenetrated with so many others. We know from there's lots of research that suggests that even the way in which I think about time, the directionality of time, how I think about myself in space, all of this I've actually acquired from those around me, from my culture.

In what sense? Where do I end? Where do you begin? Where do you end? Where do I begin?

Here's another interesting point. Why is it that when I experience a pain in my hand, for example, that I respond spontaneously to that pain to fix it? Why? Because I have a sense that this is my pain. It's not like I sort of say the left hand says to the right hand, well, you're in pain, but I'm the left hand.

So I think we'll just leave the, whatever, you're in pain, I don't really care. When I see someone there to me, close to me in pain, it's as if my hand is in pain. That sense of the connection, it's actually in a sense the extension of my identity into that close group where their pain becomes my pain, sometimes to the point of empathic distress. So why? Where does it end?

Why do we draw this boundary? Is it just mere historical accident? So simply going through those kinds of contemplations, and there are many more in Shanti Deva's text, and I've written something that we can make available to you if you're interested in learning some of those details, but the main point here is that there are many of these contemplations. The contemplations are not so much meant to convince us that we need to be compassionate as to convince us that the partiality of our compassion is kind of silly. Why do we discount other people?

Now, of course, one of the ways in which we discount other people is that we can blame them for the pain that they've caused us, and this is a very key part of the practice, which is that when we have ourselves done something foolish, when we've made a mistake, like if I cut my finger while I'm making food, I may get mad at myself like, boy, that was dumb. But obviously, to be constantly berating myself, I'm never going to help you again, I say to my other hand, because you got in the way when I was cutting. It's more like, gee, I better learn how to cut better. Maybe I should take a course in cooking. So this attitude of blame is an attitude where we are trying to, in some sense, in a way, create our problems by categorizing others as just a source of suffering and then trying to ignore them or push them away.

But that's really, as we all know, that that's inaccurate. It's not that people are necessarily doing their negative deeds deliberately. Sometimes they do them really unknowingly. Even when they do them deliberately, though, most importantly, the idea here is that they are driven by confusion. They're actually in our group.

They're in our ingroup. They're in our tribe, so to speak. They're one of our cooperators because they want to be happy, we want to be happy. And the only way for us to be happy is to be happy together. There's no way for us to be happy on our own.

As Shanti Deva says, when we're angry at others, we might think we should just destroy all of the evil doers. And so he says, how many of the evil doers can I kill? They are as numerous as space is vast. But if I have put an end to my own angry mind, then all of my enemies are defeated. So it's really a change in attitude that is key here.

Telling us to connect with others is not, therefore, such a matter of enhancing connection from Shanti Deva's point of view as suppressing or inhibiting that sense of disconnection, the reasons why we've learned, in a way, to disconnect. But there is another style of practice that we spoke about, which we did a little bit of last time, which is this sevenfold cause and effect practice. And this is a practice that is actually about enhancement. And in the Tibetan traditions, they actually practice both of these, both a way of sort of inhibiting, unlearning the way we've learned to disconnect from others, to ignore their pain. And on the other hand, this other practice, the sevenfold cause and effect practice, that is about enhancing, enhancing the connection.

And one of the ways, both of these practices start out with that sense of us all being in the same in-group, that we're all on the same team, which is the team of let's be happy, let's not suffer. Right? And that when people aren't playing the game well, it's because they're confused. Not because they're being, not because that their anger or the way in which they are mean is something that they're doing because they think it's going to make them happy. They're doing it because they're just confused.

So what do we do? How do we respond to that? Well, one way is we move beyond the sense that their immediate behaviors are the problem. And we tap into that sense of their long-term goal of happiness, a goal that actually is very long-term. We might even say it's not even about just this life.

And this is where happiness is not an individual enterprise. It becomes a kind of enterprise of all of us and not even just humans, like all sentient beings, an enterprise that is over many, many, many generations, many, many centuries, many millennia that we are building together a kind of world of flourishing where we are living lives of our kind of authentic, sustainable happiness. So that attitude is an attitude where we're really thinking very, very long-term. And we focus especially on the sense in which over that very long-term we have connections with all beings. Now the traditional way of doing this is quite easy in a way because you take that narrative principle, remember within the narrative universe, the kind of narrative universe of the traditional Buddhist world is a narrative universe of rebirth.

So we recognize all beings at some point since beginning-less time as having been one of our benefactors. The Tibetans like to use the mother because this is a real prime example in their culture. I often work as a Tibetan translator and I've been in many contexts in which there are people from various other cultures, non-Tibetan cultures who say, I don't really like my mother. So Tibetans are shocked by this, by the way. So that's fine.

You find someone who you really connect with. There's always somebody, that kind of benefactor, someone who has a spontaneous sense of kindness toward you. It might even just be a pet. So that spontaneous sense of kindness, just the minute they encounter, you know there's this sense that they are kind, that they will respond to your needs, and that you are safe in a sense, not just safe but held and sustained by them. And then one visualizes that person, and at the same time one visualizes a neutral person, someone a stranger you don't know, and also a person who's challenging.

And I like to think of that challenging person as someone who's like a sort of unruly child, someone who's kind of maybe being naughty in some way, but really if you have an unruly child the response to them is not a vicious desire to punish with pain, it's to correct because they're confused. So we bring those people up, we did this practice at the end of our last session, and then the key actually here is to see that all of them in a sense over this very long term are just like that benefactor. They've all been that person. Now with that multi-life perspective it's really quite easy to do that, but even without the multi-life perspective there is a way in which of course all of us have been interconnected through the eons, through the languages, through our cultures, through our genetics, where all ancestors, evolutionary scientists would tell us, were all ancestors of those who came out of Africa. In a sense we're all in the same tribe actually, we humans.

So connecting in that way, seeing that all of us could have been every person you meet you could have been in that kind of relationship with them. It's just happenstance that we are not. So whether we use that multi-life perspective or this perspective of evolutionary science it's this sense in which every being that we encounter we could be in this kind of relationship with. And that relationship has to do with receiving that kindness. So every being has that potential for us.

So seeing that in that way we're now moving beyond just this kind of limited sense. We begin perhaps by really wiping out what's inhibiting our, the way in which we've learned to disconnect and then we start to enhance in this way. And as we enhance we first have that sense of the great kindness that we've received, the spontaneous response, responsiveness of the other toward us. And interestingly, and this is again a kind of genius of the Buddhist practice here, is that we also know from primatologists and others that when we have that type of, when we have that sense of someone really being responsive to us it creates a sense of reciprocity. We want to respond back.

So it creates this interdependent sense of caring for each other. And when we have that sense we recall how they're so kind to us, how all beings could be in this place, that's the first step. The second is recalling that responsiveness, the kindness. And the third step then is just noticing that you don't really have to do anything, you'll just notice that there is this sense of reciprocity like well I also want to be responsive to this person. If this person is suffering I certainly know that I will respond.

And then along with that there is a kind of another thing that you recognize at that moment first so that's the third step, you're recognizing how you wish to respond to them. But then also there's another kind of emotional state that this can bring up which is just a sense of fondness, what's sometimes called yeong ki jampa in Tibetan, yeong ki jampa, it's hard to translate that, kind of almost like a sense of warm loving, I just care for this person. Now I think it didn't have to be terribly dramatic but just a sense that this is really a person I truly enjoy, a person that I delight in and that there's a mutual delight with. And with that comes then also naturally what we call love in this context, maitri which is the urge for the other to be happy. So that all emerges then, this is the fourth step and then the fifth step is actually one that can be very intense sometimes which is to bring up then, to bring up the suffering of the other.

Now everyone has all us humans, unless those, setting aside those of you who are fully awakened whose Buddhahood has manifested, the rest of us have issues, we have sufferings big and small and here it can be useful to bring up a suffering that you are really aware of, a suffering that it doesn't have to be with that particular person, it could be anyone actually because remember we're seeing all people as being like that, all beings not just people as being like that person and just bring up the image of this suffering and when that image arises there will be at this point that spontaneous urge to do something, to see their suffering, their pain, seeing them as an old person, seeing them as a sick person, seeing them as a person who has suffered some great disaster, who is running out of water, running out of food, in the middle of a war zone, whatever it might be, then there will be this spontaneous urge to do something and that's what's called the special mind, the intense mind, it's not just a kind of like oh I wish they could be happy, I wish they could be free from suffering, it's like I'm going to do something, something has to be done and I'm going to do it. So that is the step that then leads to bodhicitta, the awakening mind because what can we do? Remember we said that in empathic distress, one of the reasons we get stuck in empathic distress is we feel, we resonate with the suffering of the other and we really want to do something but we feel like nothing can be done and so that state of hopelessness can really be very distressing for us but what can we always do is we can work on ourselves to become more and more capable of creating a world in which that kind of suffering can't happen. So that is our responsibility, no one else will do this, it is our responsibility to cultivate our own capacity and to learn more and more to become more and more sensitive to what the other truly needs. You know sometimes the way in which this kind of compassion works out is actually a little dysfunctional right, where people really want to help somebody, I remember when my dear mother passed away in 2012 and she actually lived quite a good life for seven years, she had a great life overall I think but you know ups and downs of course but she had stage four lung cancer for seven years which is a long time and she was quite immobile at points but as she was in the hospital at one point, someone came in and really wanted to show their care but completely missed what my mother needed and was just kind of projecting their own imagination of what my mother's suffering was and my mother was just annoyed by the whole thing, she was polite but when the person left it's like you know I don't want to be the object of your compassion because there was no sensitivity to what my mother needed, it's not saying that person was evil or wrong, they were unskillful, so how do we become skillful and this starts to get into the life, the aspect of life, what kind of behavior, what way of being really enables us to realize this goal of living the life of great compassion, the life of the awakening mind, so what we can always work on which is really key is that sensitivity to the need of the other and one of the needs that's always available there for us to be helpful about is that shooting of the second arrow, everyone it would seem does that at some point or another but it manifests in different ways and not everyone is going to be ready to just engage with it directly, so how can we help indirectly is there something we can do, can we create a better environment for someone, can we make it possible for them to see outside and if they're in a hospital can they see the trees, can we find some way of enhancing their environment, would that be something that they would appreciate?

Being sensitive to where they are is so key and this is something that we can always do to be sensitive and to respond with that sensitivity and the other thing that we can always do beyond just cultivating our own capacities is we can also always just be there for someone to listen, to have them know that you are like that caregiver, you're like the one that you yourself are visualizing at the start of this style of practice, the one who truly cares unconditionally no matter what it is, it's not going to blame, it's not about punishment it understands confusion, understands that we're all confused, we're all a bit crazy in a way but that one is there to be responsive, so this is bodhicitta, the awakening mind, that is to say it is one that is responding in this way to the needs of all sentient beings, what makes it bodhicitta, the awakening mind is that it's not just partial, it's coming not just out of compassion but what we call great compassion because that universality and impartiality and that complete openness is what enables us to really activate and enable to one day fully manifest our own awakened mind. So thinking now in terms of how we do this in our actual daily life, there are many ways in which we can you could say realize bodhicitta, the awakening mind in our life and remember we talk about the view, the meditation and then life, the engagement, the application, how we actually engage but there are some very basic points I think that we can keep in mind. One of them of course is that whatever we might be doing, you know again one could have a good diet, that's obviously a good thing, get enough sleep and exercise and all of that but we know that all of those things in and of themselves are not going to solve the problem so the main issue here is really one's mind. We need to have those basic conditions in place but the key issue is what's going on with one's own mind. As we know we can sometimes have lots of resources, we can be quite wealthy, very healthy, very fit and yet miserable and why is that?

Where here the key kind of behavioral manifestation of that is the grasping, is the fixation. So behaviorally just noticing grasping and fixation is key. Otherwise when is going through the day, when is this happening? When am I fixating? When am I grasping?

And then how do we respond to that? So one way we could respond and not that I've ever done this, is you could respond to fixation with more fixation, right, we can respond to that grasping with more grasping and that might look like, you know, let's say, I don't know, I'm fixating on some desire and then I notice I'm fixating on some desire and now I fixate on my fixation of desire as being bad. So I'm just like fixating on the fixation and then I notice that I fixated on my desire as being bad so I fixate on my badness about the desire as a fixation and then you can see how that will go. So we just get fixation on top of fixation on top of fixation. What enables us, the first step here is that awareness just noticing that this is happening.

This is why awareness is so foundational in this style of practice. We have to notice and how do we notice, how do we notice fixation and not respond to fixation with more fixation is we have to notice not so much what is happening, we need to notice that too, let's say I'm, you know, I really want to get some work done and there's some noise or something happening. So I'm feeling annoyed and I'm really fixating on getting this work done and then instead of responding with more fixation, what I need to notice is how I am responding to the situation. So there's a content like an obstacle to work and then there's a way that I'm responding to the content. So I'm knowing something, I'm knowing what is happening, you know, disruptive noise and now I also need to know how it's happening which is with fixation.

So there's knowing what and knowing how and then knowing what of course is easy for us especially those of us who do lots of work and are well educated and have learned to sustain focus and so on. Most of the time that's not really the major issue, it's the how that can be a big issue and how do we cultivate this sense of knowing how we are responding? That's through meta-awareness, remember that? So meta-awareness is something that we cultivate on the cushion by doing those practices where we are doing our kind of mindfulness practice where we are noticing even the breath but even while we are on the breath we are aware of how we are on the breath. And then we even let go and are still sustaining that kind of meta-awareness.

So when we get off the cushion, remember we have times on the cushion, when we are doing formal practice and then off the cushion between sessions, when we get off the cushion that meta-awareness is enhanced. So part of the style of the Bodhisattva life is a life that is much more filled with this kind of meta-awareness where you are kind of aware of the background, not so stuck on the foreground, not so stuck on your focus but much more broadly aware. So that's one key element of the Bodhisattva life. Another key element of the Bodhisattva life actually is also you could say cultivating, but once we start to recognize how, well then what do we do when we get stuck? Well I am stuck, now what?

Now sometimes one of the things that's really interesting about meta-awareness itself is just being meta-aware sometimes kind of solves the problem. You just notice oh I'm stuck and then that's it. One way this can happen for example is when we are fixating on some, we are doing that mental time travel we spoke about before. I'm fixating on some kind of content mentally, I'm worried about a conversation I'm going to have tomorrow and I'm starting to have a stress reaction and then I just notice that I'm doing that, that I'm thinking about the conversation and I say oh I'm thinking about that conversation and automatically it enables me to see that it's just a thought. So this is that de-ratification that we spoke about, seeing thoughts as thoughts, but sometimes just meta-awareness alone can do that for us, just noticing that we're thinking.

But sometimes we need that very deliberate movement where oh this is just a thought and then it dissipates or at least fades away. So that's another aspect of the bodhisattva practice here is to notice when we're fixated if we're fixated on thoughts that those thoughts are simply thoughts. And another way of saying this is that that space that opens up then is a space of letting go. So one, the antidote in a certain way to all of the fixation is to just let go and in a situation when we can do that it is the best way to respond, to just let go, to even stop, to stop speaking, to stop moving, to stop doing anything, we can't always respond that way sometimes it's not safe but when we can just simply stop and just notice and let go, stop making the effort, stop engaging in whatever game it is. So that also can be a very helpful way of living out this awakening life, of cultivating that sort of clarity and openness that enables us to change and transform.

All of this also requires however a certain set of kind of goals and this is that other aspect of mindfulness that we spoke about of mindful awareness which is that what we call heedfulness that we have in a certain way like you might call it a kind of ethic actually and indeed ethics is one of the baseline bodhisattva practices. We have not gotten in this course into what we call the six perfections which are one way of articulating the bodhisattva path that could be an occasion for another time, content for another time but the second of these six perfections the first is that generosity which we mentioned before and the second is actually ethics. So having a sense of in a way what it is this bodhisattva path is about that is more important than anything else we do actually, it's more important than our jobs, it's you know more important than our victories and this and that context. What is it? Well the baseline is always non-harm that's the baseline of all Buddhist practice in terms of ethics to not cause harm but for the bodhisattva more importantly it is to benefit, to respond to the needs of others, to be responsive in this way.

Of course we will always fail, there will be times when we will harm others, there are times when we could have been beneficial and we will not and then we learn from those. Again we're not going to fixate on that, first of all why did we, for what reason were we harmful because we thought it would make us happy and we're confused about that. The great Shanti Deva also has another wonderful verse in which basically he says we all want to be happy but we run away from it as if it were our enemy and instead run right toward our suffering as if it were our friend, so we're confused and we will harm others out of that confusion and why will we sometimes not benefit, not seek to benefit when there is an opportunity, same reason we're confused. So there's no need to be judgmental about it, there's no need to punish oneself but what there is a need is to recognize the confusion and to start to counteract it with more and more wisdom. So that baseline of non-harm but more importantly of benefits also points to something else that's really key for us in the Bodhisattva practice that I think in our contemporary time actually is especially maybe important and this is that the baseline of that cultivation of benefit is actually sensitivity, empathy, connecting with others.

So part of the Bodhisattva life especially now is simply being there for other people but simply noticing them actually. When you're in a coffee shop and someone's sitting next to you, you don't have to strike up a conversation necessarily but you also don't want to just be totally narrowly fixated on let's say a device for example where maybe one is connecting to others digital entities that are maybe people on the other end, if they're not Russian robots, let's hope not. So being aware in that way in whatever space you are in, the sort of social connectivity and enhancing that social connectivity, it doesn't have to be dramatic, we certainly do not want it to be like the well-intentioned person who annoyed my mother in her hospital room where we're like oh how can I help you, a sort of projection of our own sense of compassion and suffering onto others but just the sensitivity and openness, a sense of connectivity. To be aware and again this requires a certain kind of more panoramic if you like awareness, the capacity to come into a room and notice more broadly what is happening. So that's also a key aspect of this awakening life and part of all of what this does especially is it starts to weaken, to undermine our fixation and grasping on the one hand but it also starts to enable us to see things that perhaps we've never seen before, to notice what we haven't noticed before, to tap into not just our own wisdom but in a sense the wisdom that is human connectivity itself.

Remember we're all humans in the sense that we're all cooperators, we're all working together, it's not about our own individual wisdom in a way, it's that wisdom that arises from all of our interactions and that's what the awakening life is tapping into. So let's just end now with a brief practice of just letting go, remember we learn to let go and by letting go it enables us to open up of just settling the mind. Sometimes letting go enables one to notice the connections, no need to make anything happen, no need to stop thoughts, simply being aware. The precious awakening mind where it has not yet arisen may it arise and where it has arisen may it increase ever more.