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About Dharma If You Dare
A Planet Dharma Podcast
Dharma Teachers Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat with to share with you the journey to a life of clarity and bliss. Join them on this podcast of excerpts of their live teachings. They share ancient wisdom updated to speak to the current and evolving paradigm of spiritual awakening in our modern age.
Meet the Speakers
Dharma Teachers Qapel (Doug Duncan) and Sensei (Catherine Pawasarat) are spiritual mentors to students internationally and at their retreat center, Clear Sky, in BC, Canada. They are lineage holders in the Namgyal Lineage, both studying under the Venerable Namgyal Rinpoche and other teachers.
Having lived internationally for many years and traveled extensively, Qapel and Sensei draw on intercultural and trans-cultural experience to broaden the range and depth of their understandings of liberation that they share with others.
Catherine Sensei
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Qapel
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Dharma if you Dare podcast
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Chenrezi and Tantric Deity Practice: Transforming Our Reality
Today’s episode is our third in a row exploring the topic of leveraging archetypes for our spiritual unfoldment. In this talk, Doug Qapel Duncan discusses archetypes specific to the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition: tantric deities. He talks about the representations of body, speech, and mind in the forms of Vajrapani, Chenrezi, and Manjushri. He also introduces the 5 Buddha Families and the 8 Bodhisattvas. Qapel explains how tantric deity practices transform our experience and help us move through negative patterns. The recording ends with a closer look at the Chenrezi practice, including an explanation of its symbology and mantra.
If you are interested in doing a deep dive into tantric deity work or learning how to get the most out of your work with sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices, Planet Dharma is about to run a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power. There is still room for virtual participants, so check out planetdharma.com/sadhana to learn more about the home retreat.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. Today’s episode is our third in a row exploring the topic of leveraging archetypes for our spiritual unfoldment. In this talk, Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan discusses archetypes specific to the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition – Tantric deities. He talks about the representations of body speech and mind in the forms of Vajarpani, Manjushri, and Chenrezi. He also introduces the Five Buddha Families and the Eight Bodhisattvas Qapel explains how tantric deity practices transform our experience and help us move through negative patterns The recording ends with a closer look at the Chenrezi practice, including an explanation of its symbology and mantra. If you are interested in doing a deep dive into tantric deity work or learning how to get the most out of your work with sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices Planet Dharma is about to run a weekend-long course called Practices for Power, There is still room for virtual participants. So check out Planetdharma.com/sadhana to learn more about the home retreat. And now here’s today’s recording:
Qapel: So the Buddhist archetypes, before they subdivide into individual kinds of emanations, they start as a group of five, and these five basically operate as overview wisdoms. The wisdom is being approached here within each family – there’s a whole bunch of sub-deities that work on particular things. So the main point with these is the kinds of wisdom – I mean there’s a whole lot of stuff about this and we won’t do this here – but what is your big wisdom in life?
So you’ve got the Operating Wisdom – that you have to use to get around in the world. You have your Discriminating Wisdom – discrimination isn’t a very popular word these days, but it could just be translated as discernment, recognizing the difference between things. “Oh, if I do this this way I get a better result than if I do this this way.“ – that’s Discriminating Wisdom or Discernment Wisdom There’s Mirror- like Wisdom – you know, what’s wrong with Duncan anyway, what’s his problem? Well, who’s pointing the finger? So Mirror-like Wisdom shows us that when we’re upset with somebody – why are we upset? The reason we’re upset with somebody, other than from the transcendental point of view which is it’s suffering – for them, insofar as they are behaving in a way that demonstrates ignorance, then the lama acts as if they’re upset in order to move you out of the ignorance part of it. But in the ego’s position with it, it is like – I’m upset with you because you’re showing me my blindness, you’re showing me where I’m not cool, where I haven’t found peace. So you’re upsetting my wah, my harmony. So Mirror-like wisdom is saying the mirror is looking at you. When you are in a hate state you are what you hate. If you hate racists then at the moment that you hate a racist, you’re being a racist about a racist. That’s not saying you support racism. It means basically that you don’t hate it, you don’t put yourself in a negative state about it. You remain in a clear state and then try to address the error in any way. You can either through discriminating wisdom, operating wisdom your like wisdom, then last The next one is the Wisdom of Equality. This is the opposite of the wisdom of discernment and the wisdom of equality, everything is the same, and everything is equal. No thing is better than any other thing, no thing is above or different than any other thing, because they’re all made up of particles, they’re all made up of elements. There is no Karen distinct from a Duncan other than in the discernment aspects. But in the Wisdom of Equality, Duncan and Karen are made up of the same atoms, the same work, the same conditioning, the same patterns; they have different chemistry here and there, but in essence, the consciousness of every human being is equal to the consciousness of every other human being. Any human being can be ignorant and any human being can be awakened, pretty much. And then All-Accomplishing Wisdom. So you see these big five categories, these big five spans cover the whole thing. Then you go, well, “okay, that’s a bit abstract. How do we work with that?” And you fall into the next set called the eight Bodhisattvas.
Now the Eight Bodhisattvas bring it down from the more abstract level into the more practical level. So, for instance, Manjushri embodies wisdom, Avaloktieshvara compassion, Vajrapani, who we were supposed to do this weekend – we were going to do a Vajrapani initiation in Calgary this weekend, so now we’re doing a Vajrapani initiation via words – the body of the Buddha. Vajrapani represents the body of the Buddha, power, and archetypes are power. So if you can apply conscious archetypes, you can develop your power. You want more power, apply the archetype. Manjushri, by the way, is the mind of the Buddha and Avalokiteshvara, which means basically ‘space traveler’ of whom Chenrezi is kind of the embodiment, represents the speech or the emotion. So body speech and mind. Speech here is also feeling, so the mind of the Buddha is Manjushri, the speech or the feeling of the Buddha is compassion and the body of the Buddha is Vajrapani. So archetypes are a great way to empower your body to manifest the speech and understand the state. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling chart which is of course what every system is. Every system is a self-fulfilling program, including medicine. It runs its own loops, its own archetypes.
So the Eight Bodhisattvas… There are two kinds of people there, there are visual people and tactile people and then there are mental people. So for the mental people, these classes are probably a lot of fun because it’s got a lot of ideas and a lot of concepts and a lot of systems and structures. We can have great fun analyzing everything to death, and right back to life again. We can create new models and big models. But not everybody’s verbally or mentally orientated, remember those nine intelligences – we have people who are aesthetically or spatially motivated, and so that’s why tantra is there. You can work with the sensing function, the images – the images, the mantras, the sounds, the rosary, the mala, the embodiment. You can dance it, that you can act it out. Nine Emotions of the Dance. We did a retreat once in Japan that worked through the archetypes in terms of theater, did the Demchog challenges and the Vajrayogini challenges and acted them out in real-life situations as part of our retreat, which I think was a lot of fun. Yeah. Two people that were there are saying yes.
Alright, so those are the Eight Bodhisattvas circling. Maitreya embodies love. The Maitreya is the future Buddha. Sarvanivarana Vishkambhin – say that real fast – Sarva-Nirvarana-Vishkambhin – purifies wrongdoings and obstructions. No wonder we can’t purify wrongdoing and obstructions in the world. We can’t pronounce the name! Kshitigarbha increases the richness and fertility of the land. Samantabhadra displays special expertise in making offerings and prayers of aspiration, which is why Samantabhadra sits on the top of almost every Thangka – because he’s saying through the prayer through the meditation, through the repetition, I am going to embody these principles. And the funny thing about it is if you meditate on compassion, you know, and you work it, you actually do get more compassionate, in the same way if you go to the bar and you keep drinking, you get drunk. it’s not magic. You know, you go to the bar and you drink all night, you know, you’re gonna go home drunk. Sit on your cushion, meditate all night, you’re gonna go home clear, or clearer in any case.
In what classes are these about? Well, skilled means or methodical ways of applying the archetypes is how we put it to work. How do we put these classes to work? You know, the five and the Bodhisattvas, how do we put them to work? By skilled means. The skill means is applications like repeating the mantras, undermining the root of the suffering that’s locked in the absence of that architect. So if we’re working on compassion we’re not only developing the power of compassion, we’re undermining its opposite. We’re undermining our tendency to go to negative emotion or hypercriticism, or anger or resentment or ill will or ill feeling. And that’s what happens if you don’t do it. If you don’t put in the archetypes, you’re gonna find yourself sliding, don’t you? Don’t you find yourself sliding into resentment, or ill will, or boredom, or whatever your story is? what’s wrong with them? Are they Americans or women or men or poodles? I don’t know whatever you’re going on about on any given day.
So the thing is that if you’re not doing that and you’re doing, say, compassion or Tara for healing or Demchog for blissful union or Manjushri for clear seeing, you’re also undermining the tendency to go to the negative – without any effort to fight against it. You’re not fighting against negatives, you’re creating positives. And eventually, because the positives actually feel better to you and the negatives feel worse, eventually you get bored with the negatives, you just stopped going there, it’s not worth the effort. So you stay in the positive. So you transform – you’re basically transforming yourself. If you were a house, you would be renovated. We took you down to the basement and redid all the foundation work. We rebuilt all the walls, took out all the old plumbing, took out all the old wiring, rewired it, re-windowed it, put in better windows, put in better insulation, and created a more beautiful space – not a bad idea? or that old thing?
So now the question you may have all been asking, is: What, how do the archetypes work? And we just answered it – repetition repetition, repetition. So when you go to Chenrezi you start looking at the detail. Now Chenrezi is an example – in China, she’s a she and in Japan, she’s a she which is four she’s it must be she-she I guess, and in Tibet or Vajrayana , he’s a male, so he’s a he. So the gender you can see is secondary, kind of beside the point and if you look at the pictures it’s hard to tell anyway. So now you look at the picture and you go, ‘okay, well, I’m a complicated person. I have a college education. I have watched the internet, you know, I’ve seen movies and read books. I’m a pretty smart dude. This picture is really boring after the first 10,000 mantras.’
So we put more stuff in to think about. Well let’s see, how do you think you could get more compassionate in a practical kind of way? Om mani padme hung, which means – that’s the mantra by the way – om is a universal means total mani means jewel and padme means flower and hum is integration. So from the universal to the integration. The jewel sits in the lotus. This is a metaphor or an image for your consciousness sitting in your body. Padme is the body of your being and mani is the jewel of your consciousness. So basically you’re saying,’ wow the jewel in the body, the jewel in the body. That’s pretty cool. The jewel in the body I feel better already, don’t you? The jewel in the body. I am a jewel in my body, or my consciousness is a jewel in my body. So now if you’re feeling like that, are you going to go out and be mean to anybody? there’s no motivation. So, the image then – he’s got or she, Kwan Yin as I said in China and Kannon in Japan, it’s basically the same idea and he’s dressed up. This is the Tibetan version. So we call him a he – he’s dressed up, he’s got stuff on. So the way that the thinker-analytic type people get your attention if you’re not an analytic-type person, if you’re not a thinker kind of person, they put stuff on you, they put stuff on the image for you to think about. So, you know, the thinker types will say “okay how do you get more compassionate?” Well, the first thing you’ve got to be is generous, right? You’ve got to be generous to people, and they go ‘oh more words, more words, more words.’ The earrings are generosity. So now if you’re not a thinking type you don’t have to go generosity, generosity, generosity you can just look at the earrings but you’ve been told that the earrings are generosity So you know, I guess you should have really big earrings which is why they give the Buddha really big ears – because he’s really generous.
What else do you need to be compassionate? Maybe you need some patience, patience? That’s the long necklace, right? But you know, you’re a bit selfish, you’re always running around thinking about what’s in it for me, what’s in it for me? A bit selfish. Right? So then you’ve got the short necklace there which is about discipline. It’s about not letting your desired mind run away with the spoon, not getting so lost in your desires that you forget what you’re really trying to do is learn how to be transcendently archetypically compassionately aware, not just lost in potato chips, or sex, or even things that are good perhaps, like yoga and it’s like – yoga isn’t meant to like just make you happy and feel good. Yoga is meant to wake you up, and unfortunately, it doesn’t get taught that way much anymore, I don’t think. But there are people, there are people who are doing it, teaching, using yoga as a way to transcend the ego. Long necklaces, patience. Anklets and bracelets are meditative concentration, kind of like handcuffs and leg irons and cutting yourself to the practice, paying attention. The belt that you can maybe see around his waist represents energy. So you’ve got your root chakra, you’ve got your lower chakras moving. You’ve got that power from the hara and the root chakra. Has anybody written a book Kundalini Rising? That’s a great title. Anyway, I just thought it’d be a great title. Is it a book? Aw, too bad? Okay and then the crown, the crown represents wisdom. So now when you’re meditating on the deity you also have these principles to remember. And these six ornaments or principles are called paramis in their ways of practicing. So you start to see how the spiritual path is using the archetypes and making it richer and embodying it and filling it out more to get to this place where you start to transcend your own ego identification.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma if you Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device, Looking to engage with cutting-edge 21st century Dharma in a way that’s right for you? Each year Planet Dharma offers a variety of programs and retreats to catalyze awakening for spiritual seekers. Over the course of this year, Planet Dharma will be offering a variety of in-person and online retreats of various lengths, including the upcoming weekend retreat on tantric sadhana practice. These offerings will be complemented by online courses and Enlighten Up dharma talks.
There is also a dharma trip being planned for the fall pending pandemic travel restriction reductions. To learn more about these events and to see the diversity of material being offered, visit planetdharma.com/2022. See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
BONUS Intentional Celibacy
Today’s recording is bonus content from Sensei & Qapel’s audio course Conscious Love. The course explores many aspects of intimate relationships, including the unconscious patterning that influences them and how to turn partnerships into opportunities for deep transformation.
Podcast listeners can download the entire course for free at planetdharma.com/podcastlove.
Podcast Transcription:
Chris: Welcome to this Dharma If You Dare bonus episode. We hope you enjoyed today’s sound bite, a bonus track from Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei audio course Conscious Love on the topic of Intentional Celibacy. And stay tuned till the end of the episode to learn how to get the whole course for free.
Sensei: We do, by the way, recommend celibacy as a kind of part of the process and it’s important. Usually when we say that like half the room goes like, “oh yeah, I’ve been celibate”. There’s a difference between intentional celibacy, which has a starting and an end date, right? And just sort of like, oops, I’ve been celibate for 18 months. How did that happen? Right because when you’re committed to celibacy, a number of interesting things happen. First of all, like everybody is interested in you all of a sudden sexually,
Qapel: It’s true,
Sensei: I was available until yesterday You know, everybody just knows
Qapel: This is very typical for monks
Sensei: I mean if you’re not, you haven’t told anybody even, right,
Qapel: That’s right. They, they sense it. Yeah, I have a number of friends and myself who have been monks, right? And like the girls like weren’t interested in you the women, right? And now you’re a celibate monk, wow!
Sensei: Okay, so that’s just the kind of,
Qapel: She’s not talking about lifelong celibacy necessarily. She’s talking about terms.
Sensei: Yeah, like, like I’m gonna do this for six months or a year or something. And the other thing, the interesting thing that happens is when you know that you’re not going to get together with somebody, right? You just see all of the machinations. In a way, all of a sudden it’s all in like three D. Whereas you know, yesterday before I committed to being celibate, all of that same stuff was happening. But somehow I didn’t see it so clearly and it’s very enlightening, it’s very very interesting to both see our own patterns and to see the other patterns. It’s like, wow, humans really do this kind of mating ritual. Like we’re almost sort of, you know, like flapping our wings
Qapel: and wiggling our butts!
Sensei: Yeah. And somehow when we’re in the game we don’t we don’t see that as clearly.
Qapel: One of the other aspects that celibacy is really good for is you because you’re not in the game, you’re like the guy up in the press spot up in the stand that watches the game from above and sees all the strengths and weaknesses of the other team. What do you call that? The spotter? I think they’re called. Right, so you get off the field, and then it’s really fascinating to watch how women do their dance and how men do their dance.
And if again if you’re the same gender orientated it doesn’t change the game, right? The game still got a male-female element in the sense of a back and forth if that makes sense.
Sensei: Oh, and if you do try that for yourself, I recommend you have a little transition period. It’s okay if you have sex at the moment you’re six months and like nothing terrible is going to happen but we don’t really recommend it. It’s better to sort of ease out of it and I hope that’s kind of self-explanatory
Qapel: and it’s a useless waste of time if you don’t use it for conscious study, study, conscious examination of the dialogue of a relationship. If you just kind of go through it, wait for six months and get back out there, you might as well at least get a rest.
Chris: We hope you enjoyed today’s sound bite. Today’s recording is bonus content from Sensei and Qapel’s audio course, Conscious Love. The course explores many aspects of intimate relationships, including the unconscious patterning that influences them and how to turn partnerships into opportunities for deep transformation.
Personal and Psychological Archetypes: Wearing Whatever Hat You Want
In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan continues to dive deeper into the topic of archetypes, which he introduced in the talk we heard in Episode 11. He explores how archetypes operate at the personal & psychological level, and why we are drawn to them in contexts like storytelling. Qapel also explains the difference between what happens when these archetypes are operating consciously vs. unconsciously.
Spiritual archetypes, which we will hear more about in an upcoming episode are a vehicle for accessing higher states of consciousness. Arising yoga, also known as tantric deity practice, is one such manifestation of how to use spiritual archetypes as an awakening tool. If you are interested in doing a deep dive into arising yoga or learning how to get the most out of your work with Sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices, Planet Dharma is running a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power for both in-person and virtual participants. Check out planetdharma.com/sadhana for more information.
Podcast Transcription:
Introduction
Welcome to Dharma if You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk Doug Qapel Duncan continues to dive deeper into the topic of archetypes, which he introduced in the talk we heard in episode 11. He explores how archetypes operate at the personal and psychological levels and why we are drawn to them in context like storytelling. Qapel also explains the difference between what happens when these archetypes are operating consciously versus unconsciously. Spiritual archetypes, which we will hear more about in an upcoming episode, are a vehicle for accessing higher states of consciousness. Arising yoga, also known as tantric deity practice is one such manifestation of how to use spiritual archetypes as an awakening tool. If you are interested in doing a deep dive into arising yoga or learning how to get the most out of your work with sadhanas, the texts that describe these practices, Planet Dharma is running a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power for both in-person and virtual participants. Check out PlanetDharma.com/sadhana for more information.
And now here’s today’s recording:
So anyway, we’ll see they apply at every level of our being: There are personal archetypes, psychological archetypes, and spiritual archetypes. And first, we’ll talk about the personal archetypes and we’re not going to talk about them long. The reason we’re not going to talk about the personal archetypes long is you spend your whole life there and I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on stuff that is holding you in place. But, I will point them out a little bit for you to see whether or not you can move past the personal to the psychological and the spiritual, you’re still gonna have to function from the personal, you understand, you still have to function in the world, so let your personal manifestation also represent an archetype and we’ll go through a few of them.
In literature an archetype is a typical character and of course, literature is about life. Most stories are about love or death or relationships or struggle or good and evil or what else… journeys, adventures, they’re all about our personal stories. Our personal stories are contained in literature as personal archetypes,right? Anyway a character in action or a situation that seems to represent universal patterns of human nature, fair enough? the love story. An archetype is also known as a universal symbol; maybe a character, a theme or even a setting, like nature. Many literary critics are of the opinion that archetypes have a common recurring representation of a particular culture or an entire human race and shape the structure and function of the literary work and the literary work shape us .The movies shape us. The stories on the T. V. shape us, were shaped all the time by what’s going on around us now.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, argued that the root of the archetype is in the collective unconscious of humankind. The collective unconscious of humankind doesn’t mean that it’s not accessible. It just means you can’t access it because you’re too busy with the… with the personal. You’re too busy with the personal to access the unconscious, but the unconscious one is there.
And if you look at your daily behavior, it would be very interesting for you to come up with what archetype am I doing. What archetype am I playing out here? What archetype am I playing out here right now? Teacher, know it all, smartass, humorist; there are a few archetypes that I’m pulling on to make it interesting for you, hopefully. Now, the phrase collective unconscious refers to experience shared by race or culture. So there’s an Asian archetype, there’s a caucasian archetype, a black archetype and these archetypes include things like giving birth and struggle and life and loss and gain and praise and blame and fame and shame and pleasure and pain.
These experiences exist in the subconscious of every individual and are created in literary works or other forms of art, like music or art and then acted out by the population. I remember years ago I went to a movie with that 90 lb weakling who became a 200 lb muscle guy. Sylvester Stallone, Sylvester Stallone when he was a kid, was that weakling on the beach where all the big guys kicked sand on. So, he went to the gym and he got buffed up and he got really strong and then he spent the rest of his life being the tough guy. Talk about getting caught in an archetype struggle, always trying to win the game, not seeing that you’re being played by playing it. Now, these are unconscious and called collective because they’re true to everybody, and they’re unconscious because we don’t know them. So, like women are playing out unconscious archetypes about what it is to be a woman. Or what that looks like and it’s not like just one, but there, you know, there are a variety, and the same thing with men. They’re playing out archetypes, which one are you playing out? But more on this later.
Now there are many, many, many archetypes and as I said earlier, I think Shinto has 2000 and Buddhism has more than, but fundamentally you should understand there are as many archetypes in the world as there are atoms or molecules or quarks. An archetype is a… is a way to bring what is unconscious and conscious, that’s the key figure. Okay, now you have archetypes and situations, the journey, you know, the literature, the story might be about the journey -the main character takes the journey which challenges him emotionally and psychologically and the nature and he develops his personality and that unfolds in the world. So there’s that kind of story; there’s the initiation, where the main character undergoes experiences that wakes them up or leads them to greater maturity, could be in love or it could be in work or could be in career, there’s good versus evil, right
Which represents goodness and what represents evil? So, what, from our point of view, what is good? Samadhi. What is bad? The absence of samadhi, the lack of jhana, which is a form of ignorance. Why are you not in Samadhi? Because you’re clinging to your unconscious archetype. And then there’s the fall, the main character falls from grace because of his actions or her behavior and she learns through her evil ways, or she learns through the fall what higher truth is. So that’s about it. That’s all we’re gonna do really on the personal archetype, you can flesh this out on your own. There are endless amounts of literature on it all. You can go on forever. But the key point here is to recognize if you’re not conscious of the architect you’re manifesting, you’re manifesting one. And if you aren’t conscious of it, you’re drifting to old age sickness, decay, and death.
And when you go, the whole thing goes with you and what we’re interested in from a spiritual point of view is using archetypes to wake it up. First to the personal, then to the psychological which we’ll talk about. And then to the spiritual, which is the whole point of this talk.
Question: What if one identifies with wholesome archetypes, how can one sidestep this pitfall?
Answer: You can identify with wholesome archetypes, but in order to carry them sustainably you got to find out all the ways they’re not there. You can’t just take all wholesome archetypes and paste them on top of yourself. In order to do the journey you gotta, you gotta meet the demon, you got to meet the devil, you gotta meet the greed, you gotta meet the anger, you got to see how that is manifesting in your life and how it is unconscious. And when you see how this is manifest in your life and unconscious, then you can call that the devil archetype. But the devil’s job is to transform you. The devil’s job is to show you ‘re in false clothing. It’s not a bad guy. Devil is not a bad person, woman. The devil is an archetype of misunderstanding, not understanding the archetype you’re in, where it’s leading you, or where it’s not leading you more to the point. And so the wholesome archetypes are for good states and the wrathful archetypes are to cut through the ignorance. So, it’s not about just being good, it’s about understanding your fear of the bad, not because you’re gonna go act on it, but once you see it, you don’t do it. The only person who’s not capable of killing another person is the person who is fully cognizant of the fact that they’re quite capable of killing another person.
Now they can’t be trapped, they can’t be fooled into that archetype because they’ve already seen it and made it conscious. The person who thinks- oh, I’d never hurt a fly- is the most dangerous because once they get triggered, they lose it. So you need to bring the whole thing into consciousness.
Question: So archetypes are a means to make the conduct conscious, but they are still an illusion. So is it even possible to get to emptiness with archetypes?
Answer: Yeah, If the archetype is an illusion, so is the person thinking that the archetype is an illusion. It’s the illusions all the way down Thinking that she’s got an archetype, that’s an illusion. She is the illusion that’s working with the illusion of the archetype, to see the illusion of herself in the mirror of the archetype. You follow that? Now, if she sees herself as an illusion, then what should she be manifesting?
Well, from my point of view, she should be manifesting the Bodhisattva vow, she should be helping everybody wake up to the illusion. And if her big illusion is say.. I don’t know …getting love, then she should be demonstrating every chance she can that there’s no such thing to get .That everybody she comes in contact with, who loves her, is loving, an illusion and she’s not helping by letting them love her. Not showing them it’s an illusion.
Why are we interested in archetypes? Well, fundamentally the use of archetypical characters in situations like literary etcetera, help us relate to the characters and the situations and the social and cultural context in which they apply. Helps us understand our culture, helps us understand who we are. A good novel will inform you about some insight or understanding about how the culture works. We read novels, for this reason, anybody still reading?- by the way -rather than… But even if you’re watching movies, it’s the same thing, your characters and movies are showing you architectural behaviors that help us see who we are, used by the writers and situations to draw from the experience of the world to try to get a common understanding or to get an understanding of what wasn’t there before, you know?
So, until say, for instance in America black literature or black movies or more characters, you know, the white person’s view of the black person, is very stereotypical and narrow. They’re like one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Well now is finally we’re moving past that. Hopefully, I’m not sure. People of color in the U. S. still feel their cardboard cutouts from the white point of view. It’s like we help to understand other people, help to understand other cultures, and others conditioning what’s going on. So this is what literature does. Archetype molds our values and our behaviors. We live by them. Think of, I don’t know, this goes back away, but think of Farrah Fawcett’s haircut. Remember? Are any of you women old enough for Farrah Fawcett? Everybody had a Farrah’s or Lady Di everybody had to have a Lady Di haircut, anybody has a Lady di haircut out there? Long hair hippies, right?
You know that you know. Hippies were so archetypically constrained or same, like hippies were supposed to be free and they all… you have to look exactly like all the other hippies. Your pants had to be the right length, your hair had to be the right length, you had to talk the right way, you had to be equally dirty, had to be equally stoned and equally carefree. And if you weren’t, you were excluded or the hipster or the punk, right? It’s like club membership. Even Jesus and Buddha are archetypes, archetypes from the spiritual point. Typically, we are influenced by them unconsciously, but if we don’t know what we’re influenced by consciously, then we are being influenced by mom and dad. And mom and dad by their grandparents, and so on. And as we get older, we may decide that these are not the best examples of archetypes for ourselves.
We have way more universal archetypes. What should a man be like? What should the female be like? So, as the culture moves forward, the black understanding moves forward, and the understanding of women moves forward. The understanding of men moves forward, right? Gradually. The unfolding of being more conscious brings us more conscious of the different ways that we treat people; than the idea that women aren’t as smart as men, which- I don’t know- that was around until yesterday. I’m not sure men even believe today that women are as smart as women, I mean in their heart of Hearts. And ladies, No, your ideas about men aren’t right simply because of you’re ladies? Oh, well, I must be right because I’m female.
Anyway, this is why we don’t recognize ourselves and who we are, because we’re not recognizing the archetype that we’re doing even as we’re doing it, we’re kind of just thinking, well, I’m being myself No, you’re not. You’re being a product of a culture and conditioning and a set of archetypes. And so making it conscious is a long way to getting freedom. So why do we take on archetypes? So they connect us, they give us form, they connect us to this world, they make us feel we belong and make us feel loved. It hides those four deep fears, abandonment, annihilation, being evil, or being crazy. If I can’t put on an archetype that fits in with you guys, I’m gonna feel insane. If I can’t put on an archetype that makes me connect with you, I’m gonna feel abandoned.
These are what you meet at the college level with the inner refuge. You recognize these archetypes are covering fears, they’re not bad. They’re covering fears. So then you get to the psychological archetypes. Holy sh**, there’s this stuff and you’re- okay, that’s it for me,- or you go post-grad and you go, oh, archetypes are empty as well, hmm.
Question: How do we live in a relationship if we are both gone or one of us is gone?
Answer: Well, you don’t, I mean you do, obviously you do it, but you’re just bounced around by the forces. If the job goes, you’re like panicked or stressed or you’re -I mean- all these things like worry and panic and stress and insecurity and are all because the archetypes are unconscious, you haven’t made the fact that you’re trying to live up the good life as written by father knows best in 1950 or you’re trying to live out the good life is written by Cheers in 1970 or you’re trying to live out the good life as typified by Friends in 1980 or for your millennials, you’re trying to live out the good life as depicted by Sex in the City.
It’s like I watched Sex in the City for the first time, not so long ago, a few episodes and I go-oh now I understand millennials, now I understand what the young women are doing, they are, they’re manifesting this new freedom- which is an archetype. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying, be conscious of it. So if you’re not conscious of it, then you’re gonna bounce back and forth all over the map. Like your parents did, but you’re gonna do it in a 2000 version. So you have to make it conscious.
Question: Yeah, she’s saying, is a relationship only possible between the illusions of two or more identities? I think, like gone, like, as in shinyata, if we’re both in shinyata.
Answer: That will be the relationship that you understand to be the true relationship, which I’m sorry, but that relationship is no relationship at all.
That’s the emptiness. But that’s the highest truth. The psychological truth is that I am in a relationship with somebody else in order to function and work in this world in a way that supports my vision and my dream and my understanding and they’re there to do that for themselves and together we’re gonna support each other to try to do that vision. That we’re going to understand that all the things that upset us and get us angry and get us worried and they’re all based on unconscious views and assumptions, hurts, held hurts, held views and the relationship is going to make those conscious hopefully, or we’re gonna learn not to talk You know, the place where the no-fly zone, the place where you don’t talk about because you’re gonna fight so that will be in shadow and then functioning in the world well, you got to show up at work somehow.
So if you’re going into the office dress as a woman of power, if you’re going to the mountain dressed as the mountain climber of Everest, if you’re going to the dance hall, Adora Duncan lives or whoever, then you put on the costume.
Question: It sounds like archetypes can be worn like hats?
Answer: Yep,or underwear or bathing suits or.. yep, exactly. And they should be. Namgyal Rinpoche gave his student heck, in a class once. She was a new student and another student who had been around for a very long time, came up to him after class and said but you know, Rinpoche, she’s brand new, she doesn’t know anything and he said, I’m not responsible for what archetype shows up. Now, the only way you can separate that from a psychotic is the motivation. The psychotic doesn’t care how she feels. The bodhisattva cares exactly how she feels. So that’s the difference between those two things. Like the bodhisattva cares that your archetype is unconscious and you need to make it conscious and the psychotic has no idea about archetypes and doesn’t give a sh* about it.
Yes. Any hat you like dear, can be anybody you want, male, female, or in between. So there are those archetypes found in the literature that inform our lives, the movies, art, and music. There are the archetypes found in psychology that tell us who we are inside ourselves and in our world and then there are the archetypes that are found in spirituality and that show us where the deathless lies where freedom lies, the only freedom you’re ever gonna really find is in the archetypes or through the archetypes of the spiritual, you won’t find them in the psychology because it’s still probably rooted in personal identity- clinging. You won’t find them in literature because they’re rooted in the culture, but they can help you there, they’re bridges, building blocks.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma if you Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. And don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content, sent directly to your device.
There are many ways to experience this modern formulation of the teachings. Planet Dharma offers a diverse range of in-person and virtual programming to meet spiritual seekers where they are. From online courses and classes to full-length meditation retreats on topics ranging from buddha-dharma to Western mysteries. You’ll find an offering that works for your context to speed up your spiritual unfoldment. Visit planetdharma.com/events to see which experience will help you with your awakening this year. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
BONUS The Power of Sadhanas & Arising Yoga
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei on how arising yoga sadhana practice can help us move to more responsive and liberating planetary models of being.
If you are interested in learning more by doing a deep dive into arising yoga or learning how to get the most out of your work with Sadhanas, Planet Dharma is running a weekend-long retreat called Practices for Power for both in-person and virtual participants. Check out planetdharma.com/sadhana for more information.
Beyond the Cushion: Bringing Monastic Life to the Modern World
In today’s talk, taken from their course Beyond the Cushion delivered in the early days of the pandemic, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explore the idea of the modern monastery. They explain what traditional aspects of the monastic model are being carried forward and what new approaches and structures are being introduced to make the model relevant and effective in these times and beyond.
Qapel and Sensei discuss how they are working with students in community at Clear Sky Center as well as virtually to bring these approaches and structures into focus through the idea of a living lab. They touch on the topics of dharma training, karma yoga, study and other modalities to help support people’s spiritual awakening.
There are many ways to experience this modern formulation of the teachings. Planet Dharma offers a diverse range of in-person and virtual programming to meet spiritual seekers where they are. From online courses and classes to full-length meditation retreats on topics ranging from Buddhadharma to the Western Mysteries, you’ll find an offering that works for your context to speed up your spiritual unfoldment. Visit planetdharma.com/events to see which experience will help you with your awakening this year.
Podcast Transcription:
Host:
Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk taken from their course, “Beyond the Cushion” delivered in the early days of the pandemic, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explore the idea of the modern monastery. They explain what traditional aspects of the monastic model are being carried forward and what new approaches and structures are being introduced to make the model relevant and effective in these times and beyond. Qapell and Sensei discuss how they are working with students in community at Clear Sky Center as well as virtually bringing these approaches and structures into focus through the idea of a living lab. They touch on the topics of dharma training, karma yoga study, and other modalities to help support people’s spiritual awakening. There are many ways to experience this modern formulation of the teachings.
Planet Dharma offers a diverse range of in person and virtual programming to meet spiritual seekers where they are from online courses and classes to full length meditation retreats on topics ranging from buddha-dharma to the Western Mysteries. You’ll find an offering that works for your context to speed up your spiritual unfoldment.
Visit PlanetDharma.com/events to see which experience will help you with your awakening this year.Now here’s today’s recording.
Qapel:
Welcome to our 3rd online course of 2020 in the year of Clear Vision and what we’re calling the Year of Meditation. I must admit that we couldn’t have made the year of meditation any more appropriate than a pandemic to kind of keep you all in your house. But we did not do that. We take no responsibility for isolating you in your homes!
Sensei: Hopefully that helped everybody to meditate more than usual.
Qapel: Yeah, so it’s kind of ironic that in the year the Corona Virus where people are being quarantined to prevent illness we’re promoting a kind of quarantine called the meditation session to foster health and unfoldment.
Anyway, We invite you to take advantage of this time, to do more practice and to study and to develop your strength of being alone and comfortable in your own skin, alone, and that will get you ready for death as well.
The four pillars in a modern monastery.. We’ve talked about traditional buddha-dharma of the sutras, emotional intelligence, astro dharma and other dharma teachings that focus on theory and practice. But how do we live it? How do we embody it? How do we make it reel? How do we make it part of our lives? How do we actualize it?
Sensei: This was one of the great gifts of buying and developing Clear Sky. Founding and developing Clear Sky, we had a lot of good practice behind us, and we had a lot of great learning behind us. And there were some situations where it just didn’t count for shit in practising and living and working together 24-7, 365. And so it’s really caused us to add these new dimensions to the teachings of how we really bring it to our ongoing life and every kind of situation that comes up.
Q: Yeah so let’s be clear about it. I guess listening to dharma, trying to apply it in our daily lives is admirable and can create great states, but like any discipline one needs to walk it and be trained in, basically, the great stages. We’ll talk about that more later. So like a doctor or an electrician you have trained. So it’s an apprenticeship model. And so the idea of the modern monastery is also an apprenticeship model.
That’s the idea of getting trained in the discipline as you would, being a doctor or electrician or any other field that is a hands on living thing that you embody. It’s not a college course, particularly, it’s not just knowledge and information, it’s how do you apply it day in and day out in your daily lives? And that’s the idea of the pillars of a modern monastery that we’re going to go into over the next few weeks.
S: You may have heard us talk about this in calling it dharma training.
Q: So there’s no real training going on in dharma outside of the traditional monasteries and most people don’t want to basically live in traditional monasteries for obvious reasons; It is too narrow a life. And so we are in the process of adapting a more open view of a monastery so that you can get the same kind of monastic training, but in a more open form that appeals and suits a more modern sensibility, particularly Western.
And so it involves a lot of karma yoga, a lot of study, a lot of dharma training, a lot of meditation and a lot of service. In order to strengthen the muscles and build the muscles you need to embody it beyond just intellectual knowledge. And so it’s our offering that helps lead that discussion forward. And of course it’s always subject to revision.
S: Right. So this is an important point. This is very living, constantly evolving and when challenges crop up, then we have to figure out a way to adapt how we practise and live and work together in order to learn how to transcend these challenges. So, always a work in progress and that’s what makes it sometimes frustrating, like, “ why can’t we just figure it out?” But it also makes it very exciting.
Okay, so what is a modern monastery? What do we mean when we talk about a modern monastery? Well, we’re embodying that concept here at Clear Sky together with everybody who’s living on site and people who come and stay with us for extended periods of time.
Q: So we consider that there are four pillars to a modern monastery and we’ll talk about those in a minute. But first of all, what makes a modern monastery modern?
S: Well, we may still have a career,
Q: we may still have a personal life,
S: that touches intimate relationships. We have an interactive, supportive community which is, some in person, and some long distance, some virtual.
Q: We can have an interactive and supportive community that might also involve going dancing, having a glass of wine, watching the odd movie. Starts to sound like, “ what do you mean by monastery?”
S: Singing karaoke
Q: singing karaoke, charades. The modern monastery is more about how you engage in your life more than the rules that you’re following.
S: So what is it that qualifies it as a monastery? It is that everybody who is together on site is dedicated to awakening and in our case awakening in this lifetime.
Q: or virtual. So it’s about a community of people dedicated to awakening first and foremost and sharing and practising and living in relationship to other people that are doing the same thing with the same intensity or the same focus, whether they’re in a physical situation like Clear Sky or whether they’re joining virtually through online classes, online study online practices and even online retreats, which is a new twist in the pretzel.
S: In the Mandala. The pretzel, right.
This is an important point. We talk about Clear Sky is a physical place and a physical modern monastery and we’ve also talked a lot about developing a virtual monastery because we know that not everybody can or wants to live here and that’s a different kettle of fish. The idea is that at Clear Sky, we try to develop it so that we create a culture, we create a container, and our desire is that when people come here, they can be immersed in that and then take that back to where you live and the sanga where you are and spread the benefits of what you’ve learned and experienced here. They’re kind of like a yoghurt culture or a keifer culture.
Q: Again, it’s basically a training, what a monastery provides in the same way a university or apprenticeship provides, as training. So the training is, how do we train virtually and how do we train online and how do we train in person?
Well the first thing you have to know is what your goal is. So if you’re apprenticing as a doctor as an electrician you know your goal, you want to be a licensed electrician or a licensed doctor. So when you train in a monastery you need to know what your goal is as well. And from our point of view, that goal is awakening. It’s that transcendent state that the Buddha and Christ and everybody trained to do through their various associations and have developed that over time. So from our point of view, the training is for the purpose of getting your papers for being an awakened being.
And that’s not just knowledge based, it is experientially based of course. This will be the aim or intent of a living monastery. So we can talk about different kinds of training. Traditionally, the training in North America and Europe in the last 60 years since the 1950s or 40s has been what we would call drive-by training. You have a teacher, you see them occasionally and they point out to you not only the teaching in terms of its theory and practice, but also they point out personal or individual characteristics that are tripping you up, sometimes known as conflicting emotions or primitive views in the sense that views, they get you in trouble with yourself in terms of being in a good state.
S: That’s spontaneous and that’s periodic when you’re with your teacher or Sangha members and when it arises. People can help that arise by, for example, having an interview with teachers.
Q: My teacher taught about 90% drive-by training, you got the training when you were with them and then you went home and you applied it as best you can without any real structure except your practice or your study to do that. But there was no real feedback in the community because there wasn’t any community. So you never really got called on where your underwear was showing in terms of your dharma practice.
S: By your sangha members?
Q: By your sangha members.
S: Rinpoche was not really strong on questions and answers. Not a lot of elaboration if you didn’t understand.
Q: He left it to you to figure it out. and that was the time he lived in, and that’s the time Chogyam Trungpa lived in. Chogyam Trungpa worked a little bit more at community, but he died awfully young.
S: he was 49 when he died.
Q: So it has its issues today because of that. Then there’s another kind of training.
S: Another kind of training works very well together with karma yoga. Karma Yoga is also a service. So if someone is doing service or karma yoga for either for the teachers or for a sangha member over a period of time, as an ongoing project, then that creates a container for the different patterns and views to arise in and for them to be addressed on an ongoing basis. And that’s what we call dharma training.
Q: This is kind of how we’re working it at the moment, you come in for a few months and so various people have spent time here in this sort of organisational new training of karma yoga and service, which we consider to be fundamental to maturing the dharma in the 21st century, it’s the missing piece that hasn’t showed up till now.
Q: And so here we go. So, you know, you go, “why do I need dharma training?” Well, you remember the day not so long ago, when you say, why do I need to recycle? So, I don’t think we need to go much further than that. It wasn’t so long ago that, “recycling? why bother!” You know, just throw it away. Now with the world being the way it is, you say, well recycling is really necessary.
From our point of view, dharma training is important, more important than recycling. Using scarce resources carefully, and basically limiting the extent of your appetites by way of consumerism and overpopulation to try to create a healthy balance on the earth ecologically, but also to create a healthy relationship between people in terms of our social structures, which needs fast help because of capitalism, which has basically fractured them.
S: We have a leg up because we have all taken the Bodhisattva vow and I think one of the key lines in the Bodhisattva vow is: I dedicate all my life energy to the benefit of all beings.And so what does that look like? It’s such a nice concept, but what does that really look like on a day to day basis? And that’s what we experiment with here. And that’s when community becomes really important because we can sort of sharpen our swords or temper our steel in answering that question better and better all the time.
Q: So the idea in this spiritual monastery, we don’t really have a name for it, because it’s both virtual and in place, this new collective monastery. You can still have a personal life, but the idea that makes what makes it the monastery is that the spiritual aspiration for awakening is the horse in front of the card of your personal life.Insofar as you put your spiritual eyes in front of your personal life, then you are, in a sense, halfway to living in a spiritual monastery. But if your personal life is in front of your spiritual life, then I guess you’d be called a layperson, historically. You might still have aspirations to want to grow, but the idea is that you’re not ready for the training because it’s either not for you or it’s not your time or it’s not your interest and that’s okay too.
S: I just like to clarify here, the horse is our spiritual life, our spiritual practice, and the cart is the rest of our life, our, our personal life, our careers and our relationships and so on. So as long as the horse, the spiritual life, is leading the rest of our lives, then things should work out well.
Q: So this doesn’t mean you can’t have personal ambition, but the idea of your personal ambition is, it is in the service of the Bodhisattva vow. It is in service of trying to make the world a better place and working in such a way that it has a framework and a structure to make that happen.
The problem right now is that everybody is fractured in their own corners and we can’t really bring that power together because there’s no structure to hold it, the framework. So the purpose of the monastery is to get people being able to function as a group of people with a strong base, like the catholic church was, or like the buddhist church was in the days to transform the society towards those goals. But if everybody’s out on their own doing their own thing, it doesn’t have enough stickiness or cohesion to counterbalance the downsides of capitalism. So this is why we’re pushing this one so much.
S:That’s right.
Q: So what does this mean? Historically, when you joined a monastery, you gave up earning your individualistic money, you gave up nuclear family, you gave up children, you gave up a personal life, you withdrew from the world. You didn’t go to shows or entertainment or festivals. You worked on a schedule determined by the organization.
S: You gave up your hobbies.
Q: Hobbies came second.
S: you gave up coming and going as you like. You gave up a lot of control in a traditional monastery.
Q: So what do we say the modern monastery might look like?
S: The sanga becomes more like a family, as well as friendships and sometimes intimate relationships. In terms of loving kindness, we may have special relationships with people that were closest to or most intimate with. But in terms of our loving kindness practice, loving kindness extends to everyone equally, and that is a practice.
Q: And so no one person is more important or more valuable than another. That’s central to a monastic tradition.
S: We also really practise that it just doesn’t work for us to put refuge in another person, whether that person is our partner or our teacher even, because our refuge needs to be in the triple gem, in the enlightened mind itself.
The teacher might be a representative for that. But having refuge in the person of the teacher is really a mistake. Our refuge needs to be in the enlightened mind which is just kind of renting space in a person’s body. You know, it doesn’t belong to any person. It’s everywhere.
Q: I like that, renting space in a person’s body. I’ve got a house for rent. Maybe we could put a sign in your head saying, “house for rent.” Buddhas Welcome. Or, Fully Awakened Beings, Welcome or something.
Anyway, entertainment becomes infrequent, rather than the appetite. Your entertainment becomes occasional rather than your entertainment being a major part of your life when you’re not working. We work for a common good and a goal and a common schedule. But your career path, whatever that is, feeds and supports that rather than being in conflict with that.
This will take years to develop. But we start now.
S: Yeah, it does take years to reconcile that. But it works and it’s exciting to see it working.
Q: Then personal interests become part of the path. So if you have a particular interest in, say, macrame, then macrame becomes a craft that serves the monastic community. Or maybe you have an interest in golf, for example. Then you use golf, if you happen to be a teacher, as a teaching vehicle more than you use it as a game. I can prove to you that my game does much worse when it’s a teaching vehicle than it does when it’s an entertainment. But we’ll leave that aside.
And time away is scheduled. In other words, it’s not like you have time scheduled to come to dharma and participate. Your time away is scheduled so that the dharma life is again the horse. Your time away is the scheduled part where you take that into the world and share. Remember that when the Buddha taught, they wandered for nine months and sat still for three. So, for three months they really focused on their practice and develop and then the rest of the time they wandered out in the world and taught. Well, we can’t really do that anymore because the society is in such a degree of fracture, we need to spend more time together and less time apart for the next period of time, probably the next 20 years. We have a serious ongoing crisis that’s going to last from about 2015 to 2050. And so this is the time we really need to develop the strength of the community.
S:Crisis? You mean just, everything?
Q: Everything.
S: We don’t need to go into that because everyone’s living it.We used to have to explain that to people.
We’re in the process of developing this modern monastery and it’s really exciting to be a part of this, especially since it’s our 15th anniversary.
Q: We were gonna have a big anniversary party party this summer, but covid kind of kawashed that.
S: We can have it by ourselves.
Q; We’ll have a Sweet 16 next year.
S: The point is, after 15 years we can see very clear progress and that is exciting. So what we’ve done is to maintain the commitment of a traditional monastery but adapted to modern times and modern interests and modern needs, as we’ve been describing.
Q: And of course the key part of all this will be the manifestation. It’s very hard to see the manifestation of it at this time other than in genesis form, because it’s going to take many years to develop, past my lifetime, for sure, to develop this new monastery idea that can embody personal interest and a personal life, yet at the same time, the dharma and the community being foremost.
Host: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma if you Dare on your favourite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. And don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus contents sent directly to your device.
It is the beginning of the year, so I thought it was appropriate to begin by reconnecting with the guiding approach that Planet Dharma takes in forwarding the goal of spreading spiritual awakening in this lifetime. We will hear more in future episodes about the specific practices and frameworks that make up the Planet Dharma pillars. In the meantime, you can always learn more about Planet Dharma’s approach by visiting PlanetDharma.com and clicking on the “first time here” button. See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
BONUS Setting Intentions: Where Will Your Refuge Be This Year?
In this soundbite taken from his Enlightened Archetypes talk, Doug Qapel Duncan outlines the three levels of refuge. For many of us, just getting to the point where we are taking refuge in the buddha, dharma and sangha can feel like our biggest challenge, but it is important to be aware that in a way this is just the first step in the taking-refuge process.
Right now there are lots of things going on in the world that are challenging physically, emotionally and mentally. Reflecting on refuge reminds us that we will never fully resolve any of these challenges because, as phenomena rooted in samsara, they are inherently unresolvable. When we deepen our wholesome refuge we are actually able to address the challenges, without allowing our relative level of success to affect our clear, blissful and radiant state.
Taking a moment to rate and review Dharma if you Dare on your favourite podcast app is a great way to reinforce your aspiration to support wholesome, awakening activity and helps us connect with more people.
And check out the programming that we have on offer for this year: there’s a wide variety of opportunities for in-person and virtual learning and retreats. Check out planetdharma.com/2022.
The Program That‘s Running: Introducing Archetypes
In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan introduces the topic of archetypes. He gives an overview of what archetypes are, how they operate in our lives and explains how to harness their power by making them conscious. In the talk, Qapel touches on the topic of refuge and its connection to how we relate to archetypes. He also briefly talks about samadhi, states of absorption, which you can hear more about in last week’s bonus episode.
This recording was made during the first course that had to switch to online only during the early days of the pandemic. Catherine Sensei was in a writing retreat at the time and so Qapel led this course on his own.
Interestingly, Sensei was finishing her book about the Gion Festival. If you would like to learn more about this fascinating and beautiful 1150-year-old month-long purification ritual focused on warding off epidemics, check out Catherine Sensei’s book, The Gion Festival: Exploring Its Mysteries. Sensei is the world’s foremost English language expert on the festival, and has used this position to help reintegrate people’s understanding of the festival as a massive spiritual ritual. You can find it, and some videos on the topic at gionfestival.org/book.
BONUS The 3 Types of Absorption in Samatha Practice
We hope you enjoy this soundbite from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan on the three forms of meditative absorption: kamma samadhi, upacara samadhi & appana samadhi.
If you are looking to incorporate more activities into your life to support contemplation and introspection, I recommend our weekly reflection series called ‘52 Reflections’. Sign up for free and once a week you’ll receive a short passage and follow-up prompt that you can use to frame your day, your week or a meditation session. You can learn more and sign up for free by visiting planetdharma.com/52reflections.
Freedom from Unconscious Patterns: Uncovering 4 Contemporary Secrets
In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei go over 4 secrets that make up a core part of how we orient ourselves in the world. Drawing on material from their bestselling book, Wasteland to Pureland, Sensei and Qapel explain each secret, how they operate in our lives and what possibilities open up when we integrate them into our conscious awareness.
Today’s episode covers ideas that Qapel and Sensei explore in detail in their bestselling book, Wasteland to Pureland. If you’d like to explore these ideas further, you can visit the Planet Dharma website to receive a free copy of the chapter entitled ‘Protecting Against Hurt Is What Hurts’. Podcast listeners can download this free chapter of the book by visiting planetdharma.com/purelandchapter.
Podcast Transcription:
[Introduction]
Welcome to “Dharma if You Dare.” I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s talk, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawassarat Sensei go over four secrets that make up a core part of how we orient ourselves in the world. Drawing on material from their best-selling book, “Wasteland to Pureland,” Sensei and Qapel explain each secret, how they operate in our lives, and what possibilities open up when we integrate them into our conscious awareness.
Looking to engage with cutting-edge 21st-century Dharma in a way that’s right for you? Each year, Planet Dharma offers a variety of programs and retreats to catalyze awakening for spiritual seekers. In 2022, Planet Dharma will be offering a variety of in-person and online retreats of various lengths. This will be complemented by online courses and “Enlighten Up” dharma talks. There is also a dharma trip being planned for the fall (pending pandemic travel restrictions). To learn more about these events and to see the diversity of material being offered, visit planetdharma.com/2022.
And now here’s today’s recording.
[Sensei] Okay, so we came up with four big secrets that we keep secret in the collective.
[Qapel] But we’re only telling you about the first one, right?
[Sensei] But we’re only telling you one, because of the other three-year secret right?
[Qapel] At least right now.
[Sensei] Okay, so the secrets that we all hold in common. The first one is that the ego is always alone. That’s just the nature of the ego.
[Qapel] How many are surprised by that statement? The ego never acknowledges that it is absolutely and totally alone while it’s going around talking to people going, “I’m not alone, I’m talking to Cara.” “Cara and I are talking, we’re having a nice time, I’m not alone.” Yes, you are. The ego is always alone by definition. Nobody can get in there, you are alone in there. But if we accepted the fact that we’re totally and problems and difficulties with people because it wouldn’t be worth it. Or if we did it, we would do it out of compassion because you can’t undo their aloneness. I can’t get into Dave’s ego. Well, let’s say I can’t get into Dave’s ego and mess with the pieces. Only Dave can do that, right? Only Dave can change. Even if he was a slave, I can’t reach him, only he can reach himself.
[Sensei] You mean he was a slave and you were the master?
[Qaple] Yes, only he can reach himself, right. No matter what I do or what I don’t do or say or don’t say or beat him or whatever, right? Nevertheless, he is autonomous onto his own inner sense of himself.
[Sensei] No matter what.
[Qapel] And that self remembers that the sense of ego is how big relative to the iceberg? Ten percent. So that means the ego is always terrified of the other 90% of its being because it’s hidden, it’s unconscious. Therefore the alone ego is a little, little bit of a thing, sitting on top of the iceberg all lonely going “fuck!” But we hide it, we just skip right over it and we have ego parties.
[Sensei] Yeah, we spend a lot of time trying to hide that. Yeah ego parties, right? Lots of popular music is dedicated to …
[Qapel] Yeah, popular music. “I love you, I love you, I really, really, really …”
[Sensei] We’re describing the anguish of being alone. We expend a tremendous amount of energy trying to cover this up, trying to hide this truth from ourselves. But we have a resolution. The resolution is that the transcendental treat aloneness as a benefit.
[Qapel] A boon, s bliss, a paradise.
[Sensei] If each of us is alone, we’re all alone together.
[Qapel] Because the transcendental doesn’t live in the ego. The transcendental lives in the whole self. It is a very contented iceberg. It is not an isolated tip. Therefore, aloneness, from the point of view of the transcendental, there is no such thing as “alone” because the ego feels separate, where the iceberg feels the water.
[Sensei] The ocean.
[Qapel] Something like that. Maybe not the best way to put it.
[Sensei] All the rest of the ice. So this reveals peace, bliss, spaciousness, and clarity and then the world is fascinating and joyful. We might be alone, but we don’t feel lonely, which is kind of the opposite of the ego.
[Qapel] So there’s another big secret we keep from ourselves which is that the self is an illusion. There is no such thing as a “Dean.” We can put a label on Dean and call him Dean, but you can’t go find the Dean anywhere. There’s no such thing that makes a “Dave” a “Dave.” It’s just a bunch of programs, just a bunch of thoughts and feelings and sensations thrown into a bowl and stirred around. And Dave goes “well, but I have to, I am me, I gotta be me!” There’s no such thing, it’s just ingredients.
[Sensei] We write about this at some great length and with much humor, I like to think, in “Wasteland to Pureland.” So if you’d like to explore that topic further, it’s one of our favorites. The self is a compost heap.
[Qapel] The self is compost. And remember: “it’s an illusion” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t exist the way we think it does. So all the things that we get up tight about ourselves, all our states that we get uptight about, these are like storylines, it’s plot lines. But when we’re having them, we don’t see them that way, do we? We don’t say, ”oh, I’m having, I’m pretending to have an anger state.” But we are, we’re just making it up. Sorry. “I’m pretending to feel overwhelmed.” You never say that. “I’m pretending, I’m overwhelmed!”
[Sensei] You’re taking on the appearance of being overwhelmed.
[Qapel] That means that when you get married, you’re marrying an illusion and you’re an illusion and the illusion is marrying an illusion. So don’t take marriage seriously. You want to do it, do it, fine, go ahead. But it’s a joke, doesn’t mean anything, right? What means something is how you feel inside your being and how you communicate that to others. That’s the important part, the whole organization of how the self puts itself together with other selves and the stories, they’re made up. So just recognize that. What’s the other one?
[Sensei] So the third secret that we all love is “I’m getting old and I’m going to die.”
[Qapel] Not a big surprise anyway. Right?
[Sensei] Right. Not rocket science.
[Qapel] How do you mean this is a secret? How can this be a secret? I know I’m gonna die. But on any given moment of time, you know, one good way to know that you don’t think you’re gonna die? One good way that you’re denying that you’re gonna die. You’re living this moment on gear down, turn down, volume down, energy down, worried down, problem down, yada, yada, yada … If you knew you were gonna die right there, you’d be wide awake right here.
[Sensei] That’s really true.
[Qapel] So it’s a secret even though it’s in plain sight.
[Sensei] And if you don’t have a living will yet, we really highly recommend it.
[Qapel] Please get a living will.
[Sensei] Because nowadays you end up in the hospital and they just do whatever they do. So make your wishes clear, please. And relieve your loved ones of having to make those decisions. And another reason we sort of deny the fact that we are gonna die.
[Qapel] And if you can, just drop dead real fast. Work for that.
[Sensei] That’s right, yeah, we pray to go quick.
[Qapel] Okay. And our last one.
[Sensei] We’re addicted to what’s being called nowadays “limbic capitalism.” It is capitalism designed to keep your limbic brain in a fight or flight modality as much as possible. Shop or drop mentality.
[Qapel] Addiction by design. That’s the society we’re living in. They’re creating addictions for you by design. They’re designing the addictions so that you’ll get addicted to them.
[Sensei] And one of the unintended consequences is something called “anomie.” You see this a lot on maybe social media. The definition is “a state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values.”
[Qapel] So what is the social norm and value by which we live? What would you say is the overarching social norm that we sort of live by? “If I like it, I’ll do it; if I don’t like it, I won’t.” How do you decide what you like and what you don’t like? You don’t – it’s been decided for you. Limbic capitalism. What you’d like has been sold to you and you don’t know it. What you don’t like has been sold to you and sold to you and you don’t know it. This is limbic capitalism. Addiction by design in order to keep the system turning it out.
[Sensei] We’ll post a link about that on the Pureland forum so you can learn more about limbic capitalism and how can we be free of limbic capitalism.
[Qapel] Ah. How can we be free of limbic capitalism? We have to see that it’s happening when it’s happening. Where does that desire come from? Why that desire? And do you question the desire that you have or do you just go chase it? Are you just following the road you’re being led down or do you step back and say hold it, hold it, hold it? This is a manufactured desire. This is a manufactured idea of what is valuable, what’s necessary, what I need, where I want to go, and what I want to do. Do I have present awareness and am I in a blissful, clear, present, spacious frame of mind? If not, don’t move until you are and you’ll break free. There’s nothing wrong with any of the products, particularly. There’s nothing wrong with any of the things being sold, particularly. The problem is is that you’re being possessed by it. That’s the issue. So meditation, meditation, meditation, meditation.
[Sensei] Yeah, what a really kind of fortuitous thing that the whole spiritual path also frees us from limbic capitalism and liberation from all sorts of stuff. All sorts of not nice stuff.
[Qapel] And we go back to the root problem. The desire is not the problem. The unreal expectation about what desire can fulfill is the problem.
[Sensei] That’s right.
[Qapel] Desire itself is a passion for life, it’s “jivetindrea”. But focusing that jiventindrea, that life force onto an object that you transpose outside of yourself – that’s going to do it, it’s the beginning of insanity. So you gotta pull it back home, bring the energy back home. You don’t need anything and you don’t need anybody. You’re now in a position to enjoy everything and communicate with everybody.
[Sensei] That’s right. So liberate oneself from suffering. Help others get liberated from suffering. Practice diligently, support others to practice diligently.
[Qapel] And open those secret doors.
[Sensei] Open those secret doors.
[Qapel] Enter the secret garden through the secret door.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review “Dharma if you Dare” on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings, and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device.
Today’s episode covers ideas that Qapel and Sensei explore in detail in their best selling book, “Wasteland to Pureland.” If you’d like to explore these ideas further, you can visit the Planet Dharma website to receive a free copy of the chapter entitled “Protecting Against Hurt is What Hurts.”
Podcast listeners can download this free chapter of the book by visiting planetdharma.com/purelandchapter.
See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
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