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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
Speaker
Qapel
Speaker
Dharma if you Dare podcast
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Subscribe to the podcast below on any of your favorite platforms.
Cultivating Patience: The Ksanti Parami
Ask Impossible Questions: Accessing True Creativity
Free Yourself from a Life of B-Movie Reruns
BONUS Perfecting Our Morality: The Sila Parami
BONUS Practicing Generosity: The Dana Parami
Astrology + Buddhism: Introducing AstroDharma
Basic elements of an astrological chart.
BONUS: Submission vs. Surrender
The distinction between submission and surrender
Turn Every Moment into a Meditation: The Practice of Karma Yoga
Karma Yoga: Awakening in Action
In this talk, Doug and Catherine discuss Awakening Through Action, traditionally known as the practice of karma yoga. Karma yoga is a practice that transforms even mundane activities into paths of spiritual growth and awakening. In this practice, every moment is turned into an active meditation. It is an ideal spiritual path for action-oriented modern people, that takes us beyond ourselves. In the talk, you will hear them refer to ‘Buddhas in Action’. This is their 2-week intensive program on karma yoga that they are currently offering every second year.
If you find the teachings of Planet Dharma resonate and are wondering how to explore them further, we recommend our free online course called Wake Up: 4 Paths to Spiritual Awakening. This self-study course introduces the main approaches that Doug and Catherine employ with students to help them find their speediest path to spiritual awakening. It includes a module on the path of Awakening Through Action discussed in today’s episode. You can learn more and register for free by visiting planetdharma.com/wakeup.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma if you Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug Duncan and Catherine’s Facebook Livestream series Enlighten Up. In this talk Doug and Catherine discuss Awakening through Action. Traditionally known as the practice of karma yoga. Karma yoga is a practice that transforms even mundane activities into paths of spiritual growth and Awakening. In this practice every moment is turned into an active meditation. It is an ideal spiritual path for action-oriented modern people that takes us beyond ourselves. In the talk, you will also hear them make reference to Buddhas in Action. This is their two-week intensive program on karma yoga that they are currently offering in alternate years. This coming spring Planet Dharma will be running an insight retreat at clear Sky center entitled ‘Mastering the 16 Stages of Insight’. The program will be led by Doug Duncan. Don’t miss the chance to undertake this training with a true master of this practice. You can learn more about this retreat at www.planetdharma.com/insight and now here’s today’s recording.
Catherine Sensei: Today the theme is Buddhas in action, transforming every moment into meditation and this is something we’ve had a lot of practice with. We run a retreat center and live and work and play together in community, and so we’ve had a lot of practice about bringing our meditation practice to all those different scenarios and vice versa.
Qapel: Buddhas in action, which basically means karma yoga. Traditionally in the past, hunter-gatherers didn’t actually have temples or monasteries they practiced in the wild, and only after they had moved into agricultural kind of conditions did they start building monasteries. So practice in the old days was out in nature. It was a meditation and hunting and gathering was their occupation while they practiced and that’s called a yogic tradition.
Then with the development of cities and towns and markets, monasteries developed and people moved inside. So now with the separation of the church from the agricultural community, the spiritual life, and the practical life, the material life separated although the churches certainly ran businesses. But nevertheless, if you wanted to be spiritual you went to the monastery, you didn’t stay in private life, generally speaking.
CS: Yes, that’s right. So let’s take a look at karma yoga. When we think of the spiritual life, we think of prayer and meditation a lot of the time and there are actually very different kinds of disciplines of which meditation is one. I guess prayer would fall under meditation?
Qapel: Uh-huh, contemplation, prayer.
QS: So devotion is another path. Scholarship is another path and these are – dhyana yoga is meditation, bhakti yoga is devotion. Scholarship is jnana yoga and karma yoga is the path of action or service. And we’ve found that most of us living in the contemporary world are so busy and want to do so many things, including really good things, with our spiritual life and our spiritual practice. Graced On bakery comes to mind: in New York started by Roshi Bernie Glassman. That’s like a social enterprise or social venture where they hire homeless people to work in a bakery and give them job skills and life skills. So we found that karma yoga seems to be a really fantastic fit for this day and age because we are so active and we can turn that into our spiritual practice.
Qapel: Right, and returning for a minute to the monastery idea – that if the spiritual life and practical life separated, then you had this separation between church and state, between the practical or active life and the meditative or contemplative life. So the word yoke is exactly that, the word yoke is to join or to join together like oxen.
So we’re trying to join the action part of our lives with the spiritual part of our lives which is more contemplative.
CS: That’s the route, that’s how these six yogas developed for different aspects of that. So when we talk about the East, they have a long tradition of being pastoral people or herder people. So they spend a lot of time sitting in nature observing and witnessing without having to do too much. So they became meditators. Whereas in the West, colder climate, a more difficult environment, we had to carve ourselves out of the wilderness as it were. We became agriculturalists and that made us more settled, which produced churches. So now the idea with karma yoga is because we’re Westerners and because we do so much action, our easiest access to spiritual yoga, union, is through what we’re good at which is action, whereas in the East they have been historically better at contemplation. So they use meditation work. But you need all of them to integrate.
CS: We started out as meditators and have, with the founding of our retreat center, grown into our karma yoga practice in addition to meditating. And so this is really something that we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on and developing as a practice and mapping as to how it works, what works well and what doesn’t work well.
Q: So you have this linking between the body which is action, doing stuff. You have the mind which is contemplation or reflection and then the communication between these two objects, or these two spheres. And that communication between those two spheres is the land of emotions and relationships. So you can see that when people get into a lot of conflict or difficulty in relationships or in their careers with their employers and so on, it’s a communication problem. And the communication problem is because, in that sense, the body and the mind have split off. They either want to be meditating all the time and have nothing to do with the world or they want to be making a fortune and getting rich and successful and not having anything to do with contemplation.
CS: Or switching back and forth between those two, like a binary system, and we’re talking more about integration.
Q: So that yoke again, that union again, and that linking and the path of karma yoga is to take meditators and get them acting and take actors and get them moving towards meditation.
CS: Right, awakening for busy people basically. Or meditation for busy people or action for meditators, we can look at it from all these different ways. So this is Buddhas in action, how we turn every moment into a meditation.
Q: So with karma yoga, you’re accomplishing a number of things, you’re taking your action into an observation place rather than just a production place. So when we go to work we work to get things done and to make sure we get paid and to make sure that we get the results and how we get it is often irrelevant and companies and corporations are finding that their biggest cost now is employee dissatisfaction and part of the reason the employees are dissatisfied, I think, is because their spiritual life and the material life are too far apart. That their working life is too far from their spiritual life.
CS: Yes. We need to live according to our… or we thrive when we live according to our values, and this is why the path of karma yoga is so helpful. Can I just go back, you were talking about the body, the action in the body and then the mind, the reflecting on the action and then the speech which is the communication between those things, or the expression of what’s happening – and that’s the traditional ‘body, body speech and mind’ that meditators may be familiar with – those are three lenses through which we approach our meditation practice. And our karma yoga practice.
Qapel: So from the spiritual part of the equation, what you’re really trying to do is get towards spaciousness, emptiness, and openness in the field of the mind, which gives you peace, bliss, and clarity. So that’s kind of the spiritual statement. And then from the action statement, what we’re trying to do is work together, get things done, produce, create, develop, grow, imagine: science fiction at its best.
CS: So this is very much what we’re sharing with you about karma yoga, and what Buddhas in Action, the retreat, is all about – is very much from our own personal experience, because as meditators we struggled. We had a retreat center to run and retreats to offer to people and we would get really focused on success or the results we wanted or the particular project we were working on and we had to say, hey, how is your state? Are you still managing to have some awareness while you’re focusing on getting these goals? And in the beginning, the answer was No! We were like “Ah no, I’m just trying to get this done.” And so we’ve had a lot of practice bringing these two together. And then the reverse was also true. We kind of wanted to escape from the responsibilities of running a retreat center or hopefully somebody else can put on that retreat, so I can just go meditate. And meditation can be a sort of excuse to escape from the world. And so we have really… it’s been very much a part of our path and required for what we do to bring these two together in ways that are mutually supportive.
Q: Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a big buzzword in the community these days. Everybody’s talking about mindfulness, mindfulness training, and mindfulness is fantastic because it makes you mindful, and when you’re mindful you are usually a little calmer, a little clearer, a little bit more relaxed, a little bit more with what you’re doing. However when we talk about meditation and mindfulness or karma yoga and mindfulness, we’re kind of upping the volume a little bit because we’re now talking about mindfulness about mindfulness.
So with karma yoga, you’re doing work, mindfully. But more importantly with the karma yoga practice, you’re learning to be mindful about how you’re doing the work, the state you’re in doing the work, the processes that are going on while you’re doing the work, and because you’re in a retreat situation in this case, you don’t have to worry so much about getting it done or being right or whether you’re gonna get into trouble or so on. Although we want you to do the best possible job you can, our goal is fundamentally to help you see how to be in a clear, blissful, radiant state while you’re up to your neck in alligators, trying to drain this one.
CS: That’s right. So Buddhas in Action, you’re talking about – the retreat is the dojo so that you can practice here and then take that, take what you’ve learned back to your own life wherever and however that may be.
Q: And for instance, in meditation, you get to see your interior processes a lot. You get to recall through memory how your emotional meetings with people or with your parents or your family or with your partners or your work function. But it’s in isolation. That’s fine, that’s perfectly good because that quiet space gives you the room to make a connection you might not have had before. But the advantage of karma yoga and it’s not an ‘or’, it’s an ‘and’ – the advantage of karma yoga is you get to practice it in situ. So you’re actually working with somebody else who’s different than you and you’re trying to accomplish a task of some kind and you have to learn to cooperate and communicate perhaps better than you ever have to do at work, which hopefully through learning it, you can take back to the marketplace, you can take back to your careers and your relationships with newfound insight and understanding.
CS: So I ask you where else are you going to get the opportunity to be going about a project or a task and have somebody check in with you and say, hey, how’s your state? And of course, that is probably quite an irritating question. And then how often do you have the support from other people and from the environment to say, okay, so let’s look at this irritation? Why is this irritation coming up? Where is it in the body? And how would you like to communicate that or how would you like to work through that? So that’s the the ‘body, speech and mind’ components and why that’s such a powerful approach and why we think this retreat or this path is so powerful, of karma yoga, because it’s a very rare and precious opportunity to be able to examine those states as they’re happening while still carrying on with the project and reaching the desired goals.
Q: We talked earlier about yoga, joining the spirit to the mind and in meditation of course you can meditate anywhere you know, out in the woods by yourself. And so with that observation of the interior functioning of the body, because it’s meditation, you’re not moving much, you can watch the energy flows and energy shifts within your body while you’re meditating and because you’re not talking and you’re not interacting with people, you can watch the interior processing of your mind in it and how that’s unfolding as we said before. So when you transfer over or you shift over to the karma yoga side of the practice you learn to do the same thing, but more exteriorly. So now you’re watching how things move with others. So for instance, you can learn that it is actually easier with others, which is more about the container of the community than it is about the individual practice.
So, with karma yoga, you’re moving over more to community, and with individual practice, it’s more about the individual so it’s easier with others and what else, and both are so important.
CS: We need to have our own shit together but we also need to be able to interact with other people and more and more important all the time.
Q: You learn that in the union, the yoga of spirit and mind or body and mind, is that there are some really important cornerstones of your practice and one of them is honoring your space – is being able to be at one with your environment. You think of a Chinese painting where the Chinese guy walks through the forest with the clouds. You feel that sense of unity because he’s in harmony with the space. That’s one.
CS: That’s right – ‘It’s easier with others’, we mentioned. Structure and routine are your friends.
Q: Another aspect that we are going to go to work and you’re going to see: structure and routine in your office or your workplaces, and rather than think of them as limitations or interferences you can learn how to work with them as energy dynamics.
CS: That’s right.
Q: Another aspect of that dynamic is: clearing up big areas of your life liberates huge amounts of energy and joy. So this touches on another aspect that we do called ‘ Working with the Shadow’. So in terms of how we go to work and how we involve ourselves and our interpersonal relationships, there are often hidden forces at work that are kind of polluting or corrupting how things work out. You often find things don’t work out so well in certain situations. So this is another aspect of karma yoga, that in that karma yogic engagement with your activity, you see these big areas of your life and you do have the opportunity and the room to work on them.
CS: We provide the support to go where we have not gone before and to the Shadow areas where we may feel some trepidation about leaning into it. So we have support from other people and we have other people around us who have been through that process themselves or ourselves. And I know what it’s like to be scared of what we might find there and know also that it’s going to be okay.
Q: So again, this is all by way of introducing perhaps you to, or maybe adding a few ideas to your understanding of karma yoga.
CS: Qapel was teaching in Berkeley California and someone in the audience, someone about Qapel’s age asked very poignantly, what was the question he asked? If meditation is so great, why aren’t more of us awakened?
Q: I’m not sure he put it that way. I think I recall the question as: we’ve all been in this teaching of Awakening for 20/30 years and why aren’t more of us Awakened?
CS: Right. It was a very poignant question. I suppose this was the first time we’ve met this person, so we don’t know his story, but it seemed like he’d probably been meditating for 20 or 30 years and was wondering, you know, why it wasn’t working. And I think that is really one of the things that karma yoga addresses, although it is totally possible to awaken through meditation or through devotion or through scholarship or through a combination. It’s also totally possible to awaken through the path of karma yoga, the path of action. And as we mentioned, we found that it really helps contemporary people combine our spiritual practice with what we’re doing for the rest of our waking hours which it’s challenging to have a daily meditation practice let alone a significant one, where we’re able to meditate for – you meditated for two hours a day at one point in your life. And our teacher said, oh, maintenance.
Q: Maintenance. If you want to awaken through the path of meditation, you should consider that you’re probably going to need to meditate 19-21 hours a day, probably three or four months a year, two or three times a year for a number of years. So like anything, to be good at it, it’s a profession and you need to work at it. So most people’s meditation practice in the West is not enough to really create the breakthrough through the path of meditation.
CS: If we think of that aphorism of needing 10,000 hours, I think, that’s to be good at something. And so to actually spiritually Awaken, one would need more.
Q: And if you do go by the path of karma yoga or one of the other paths, meditation is still required, you still need to do it.
CS: An important part of it.
Q: But you don’t have to do quite as much and you don’t have to be quite as professional about it to get there. Because, to answer the question from the guy from Berkeley, why aren’t more of us Awakened? Fundamentally, the reason Westerners have a hard time Awakening is that they’re over-identified with their ego structures, they’re over-identified with their self, their sense of a separate independent self. And meditation helps you to see through that illusion, and drastically and dynamically, karma yoga helps you see that very clearly, very quickly.
CS: Especially when you’re doing it with other people who are on the karma yoga path. That’s what we find is very powerful, the power of sangha. It’s one of the triple gems, the buddha or the teacher, the dharma or the teachings, and the sangha, the community of practitioners. When we have those three working together, it’s very powerful.
Q: And what’s even better in a way is that meditation is go nowhere fast, which means you have to have a fair bit of time to go nowhere very slowly, right, and we live in a busy fast world.
So the point of view is: no matter how fast karma yoga happens, no matter how quick the changes are, you can still be practicing mindfulness of mindfulness in a meditative way through the action. So that’s a big plus for modern life.
Cara: Okay. We have a question from Michelle, she said you shared that often. We get into trouble around communication as we split from mind and body. What would be an example of integrated communication?
CS: Yes, that’s a great question, Michelle. I think integrity. Actually sharing what is coming up for us and doing it in such a way that is – ‘this is what’s coming up for me’, not necessarily you know, ‘it’s because you’re making me feel this way’, right, owning our own feelings. And I think the most challenging thing about that is we may not be aware of our own feelings, we may be aware that we’re uncomfortable, but often we’re so busy we don’t take the time to check in and see what’s happening, so then it’s hard to share it skillfully.
Q: Can I just maybe add a dimension to it a little bit. You know, one of the big issues in the spiritual life for modern people, especially since they maybe don’t have teachers or they don’t have a close enough relationship with the teacher to keep them honest, is a thing called spiritual bypassing. With spiritual bypassing it’s basically what Catherine just said – is that what we think we should be presenting and how we think we should show up is different than how we’re actually feeling or what is going on with us. And so a huge element of that isn’t that you’re gonna dump your negatives on anybody but that you acknowledge them and recognize them as present and you communicate the fact that they’re present to whomever you’re talking to.
So you can go: “Look, I’m in a terrible mood today, everything’s going wrong. I’m really kind of a grump, It’s not your fault. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not you, it’s just me and now let’s talk about that loan you wanted to make.” Right then everybody knows where it’s at, more than thinking, oh you’ve got to behave in a certain way.
CS: And that relieves the tension that everybody is feeling anyway.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on Apple podcasts 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. If you find the teachings of Planet Dharma resonate and are wondering how to explore them further we recommend our free online course called Wake Up: Four Paths to Spiritual Awakening. This Self-study course gives an introduction to the main approaches that Doug and Catherine employ with students to help them find their speediest path to spiritual Awakening. It includes a module on the path of Awakening through Action discussed in today’s episode. You can learn more and register for free by visiting www.planetdharma.com/wake up
See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Embrace Your Nakedness: Understanding the Diamond Sutra
Diamond clarity is our natural state of being.
Break Through the Status Quo: Embracing Crazy Wisdom
Crazy Wisdom
Podcast Transcription:
HOST: Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawaserat`s Facebook livestream series, Enlightenup. In this talk, Doug and Catherine explore the topic of crazy wisdom, also known as divine madness. These are energetic and unpredictable teachings that help shake the student’s fixed views about their reality. The stuck nature of our egos requires a breaking through the status quo in order to access a place of open spaciousness of possibility. They also explore the paradox that we actually feel more in control and secure when we let go of our ego`s need to be in charge all the time. This coming February, Doug and Catherine will be in Los Angeles for the Conscious Life Expo. While in LA, they will also be teaching at various locations around the city. Planning to be in the LA area at that time? Stay tuned for more details so you can come join them at one of their events. And now, here’s today’s recording.
CRAZY WISDOM
Q: Today’s topic is so-called crazy wisdom. You could substitute in energetic wisdom, you could substitute in innocent wisdom. And the reason for this is because the ego, that’s you and me and everybody else, is fundamentally and absolutely alone. We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone, and inside the ego of our own minds, we are alone. And because of that, we are separate. We are divided. We’re insecure, we’re vulnerable, we’re in a universe way too big for one little ego to manage. And because of that it’s traumatized. You could say perhaps that the ego doesn’t get traumatized, you could say perhaps that the ego is the trauma. So in that sense, as egos we`re all suffering or struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, you need some energetic energy and some energetic mind states to break through that to the other side of that, which is a sense of unity.
CS: So what does that look like?
Q: Well, with crazy wisdom, you need to embrace the technology or methodology that helps you break through the isolation of the ego`s trauma and to enter into this altered field, which is by definition bliss, clarity and non-clinging. But because the ego’s traumatized, it doesn’t want to do it. It wants to stay comfortable or safe inside its separation, and at the same time it feels separate and isolated. So that’s kind of the dilemma.
CS: The nature of the ego is to settle into some sort of status quo. And the nature of the breakthrough is really revolutionary, which is where the crazy part comes from. And so, if we want to transcend the ego on our spiritual path, on our path to spiritual enlightenment, then that’s going to require some breaking through the status quo. And that’s certainly going to appear crazy to somebody, maybe to our own egos.
Q: To our own self in a way. In a sense, we all live on one side of the wall in our egos and this transcendent thing, this Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, divine union, is on the other side of the wall. And whenever you come up against the wall, you go, no, no, no, I can’t go over that wall. And so the crazy wisdom or the energetic wisdom is actually, as Trungpa said (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche), recovering the innocent mind, the vulnerable mind, the open mind, the trusting mind, and the ego has a big problem doing that.
CS: Not every tradition embraces crazy wisdom, it’s kind of a special feature of Vajrayana, or also known as Tantrayana, which we see in Tibetan Buddhism and in Shingon in Japanese Buddhism. And our spiritual tradition really embraces what we’re calling here, crazy wisdom. It’s also called divine madness. And it’s this spontaneity, it’s sort of like a Rinzai Zen koan – what is the sound of one hand clapping? It’s these ways of speaking or ways of being, that our ego just can’t fix, that our ego just can’t get a grasp on and therefore we have to move beyond this everyday status quo reality and consciousness and break through ourselves into something that’s beyond that.
And we know that the universe, that the cosmos, is not limited to just the rationale that our ego knows. We know that that is tiny in comparison to the wonder and the wisdom of the cosmos. And that’s something that crazy wisdom or divine madness gives us a taste of. It is the wide open spaciousness of possibility. And that, our friends, is an essential element of what we call spiritual liberation.
Q: Just so, just so. From the point of view of the ego, it’s crazy wisdom. From the point of view of the ego, it’s energetic intervention. From the point of view of the ego, it’s a struggle or difficulty or scary or fearful. But from the point of view of the transcendental, it’s no such thing. It’s spacious. It’s clear, it’s open, it’s lovely. From the point of view of the ego, it works on some very strong powers that are holding it in place and this is called the shadow. These are areas of our psyche that we have pushed out of the way or underneath in order to get along with our egos in the world.
THERE IS NO CORRECT OR RIGHT IDENTITY
And when you’re in a situation where you, the ego, feel threatened or challenged or vulnerable, it’s going to revert to its program in terms of money, sex, and power as a place to hold on and grasp onto, which puts you solidly on the struggle side of the wall. To meet the energetic transformation of those things into the sense that the universe has given you everything you’ve ever had, therefore, there is no shortage. That your identity is whatever you put on, whatever you make up, and there is no inherently correct or right identity to have. And therefore your self-image isn’t so important. And when you realize that the whole system together is in control and that we honor that, for instance, say in biomimicry or nature’s processes, that we don’t need that much control most of the time, then it makes it much easier to enter into that surrender, which makes it curiously almost a paradox. The more you let go and the more you surrender into this other side of the wall, the more resources, the clearer the sense of identity and the clearer the sense of control, in terms of your own being, and therefore in your community, and more security you feel. And it’s kind of a paradox. It’s not just negatives.
A large part of the spiritual life is people attempting to get into a good clear space. And the thing is they don’t really have to work at that because that is there naturally underneath the ego surface. So what the spiritual life focuses a lot on is the negatives, how to get rid of the greed or the anger, the confusion, and so on. And part of the problem, from our point of view, is that this is not all of humanity’s task. It’s not all of humanity’s task to remove the negatives. It’s also to explore the positives. But as long as the ego is in control, the negatives always have kind of an over-weighted power or control of this. So by letting that go, we encourage the ego to explore its positives, which is exploration, discovery, experimentation, curiosity, engagement, and a sense of trust that the universe isn’t going to blow up and my ego will get hurt.
THE POSITIVE AND WHOLESOME IS OUR NATURAL STATE
We don’t have to find the positive or the wholesome or the imaginative or the creative, that is our natural state. But what we do have to do is knock out the blocks that keep our wheels spinning in the air. And one of them is, the way our Western ego is very much rewarded and honored for its successes. So every small child learns by the time they’re in grade three, that they’re in a competitive market. And so from a very early age, our family competes with the family next door. And so this whole sense that the ego and by extension, the nuclear family, and by extension, your company and your corporation, are all competing against each other, which is fair enough and true in some ways but isn’t the whole picture. There’s another picture going on that is more cooperative and engaging.
And so here again, at Clearsky, we’re trying to undertake the four bottom lines to restore the sense of cooperation – environmental and social and economic and spiritual integration, a generative way of being. It`s part of what we do to meet the opposite side of crazy wisdom which is bright shiny, sane wisdom. One of the ways, and in a very powerful way in which we hold this whole thing in place, is through communication, and communication is based on my language and my language is based on my parents and by extension my community and society and so on.
WESTERN LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IS `I` FOCUSED AND ISOLATING
And communication in Western terms is very much `I` focused. I did this, I’m going to do that, I am this. And then by extension, identifying Catherine as mine and me as hers. It becomes a `we`.
CS: `My` partner in this case or `my` co-teacher.
Q: And then my kids, my family, and my tribe working its way out. So that the communication aspect structures around the language and the language in English anyway, is noun, subject, verb. So it’s very much a dichotomy in the language that separates and divides, which is wonderful for naming birds and species of mushroom, classification and communication. It’s a wonderful, wonderful tool.
But from the point of view of the ego, it’s also an isolator. So that what you think you’re going through and what you think you’re experiencing, you think is just you! You don’t see that you’re in a group of people who are all probably at some point having the same feelings and the same thoughts and the same ideas and the same sensations about all sorts of things. But because of the language, we feel thE separation, which is in that sense artificial.
CS: And this is somewhat unique. Not every language has this. So if we look at English as an example, English was a language invented or developed for commercial and military conquest, and in this sense, it’s very linear, it’s subject-object-oriented. So it has a built-in subject-object, what in Buddhist philosophy we call duality.
If you have a subject-object then you’ve got this polarization from the very roots of your language and not every language has this. Chinese for example does not have this. For many years I read the Heart Sutra in English and could not make heads or tails of it. And then I got a book with translations and read it in Chinese and it made a lot more sense because in Chinese it doesn’t have the subject-object linear orientation. It’s a much rounder fluid kind of form of expression and then the meaning becomes much clearer. This is one of the reasons why we embrace a planetary consciousness. It’s not the purview of any particular kind of people or socio-economic class or elite or educated people, it’s really a union consciousness and that’s why we call ourselves Planet Dharma. We should be Cosmic Dharma. Why limit ourselves to the planet?
Q: So you could say in some ways that English is prose and Chinese is poetry. And so you can also in some ways make that association between this side of the wall, which is the struggle side of the ego, the prose side, and the other side of the wall which is the transcendent side, which is more poetry. So if you’re a very analytical, structured, economic, mechanical, scientific kind of person, which most of us in the West are by the way, the way we work and function, you could say the problem that we’re stuck with is that we’re just doing prose all the time, when in fact the transcendent side is dismissed as poetry, which has no economic or mechanical or scientific value. You can’t bake bread with poetry, particularly.
THE ALPHABET PEOPLE, NON-FIXED LABELS
So you might want to think that way as well, that the shadow also holds itself by its definitions in its language, like what is my sexual identity? Now in the modern age, we’re talking a lot about the alphabet people like the L G B Q T and so on. So by extending the non-fixed labels about our resources or about our identity or about our power and control, we are in a sense also allowing ourselves to let go of the prose side and have a more poetic relationship to our identities. This would be a very useful thing for community, if not a great thing for fixing the tractor. For that you want prose. Although, there’s a poetry element too.
CS: And this is another reason why it’s so valuable to be exposed to diverse cultures and why we really embrace a planetary view. Because if we look at the world’s traditions, there are other cultures that embrace numerous different kinds of so-called gender or manifestations of sexual orientation that are a part of their culture and they believe that to be natural. Some islands in Indonesia have seven, I think. Thailand has three that I know, at least three. And an indigenous tribe in North America has five. And so it’s excellent to be exposed to these different kinds of paradigms as opportunities to reflect on them and expand our own way of thinking, which can get really quite small in such a vast universe.
Q: So returning to the idea of crazy wisdom for a minute, the teaching speaks about two inherent problems. One is conflicting emotions and the other is primitive views. Using what we’ve been talking about so far, you could say that a fixed `I` language is a primitive view. It’s holding reality in a very useful and functional but small box. And then the emotional conflict we suffer from this small box is because we identify so much with the small box, we’re in emotional conflict almost all the time because we see others as a challenge or a threat or an interruption to the `I` moment.
And so the crazy wisdom is simply to bring your attention to the analytical wisdom, the energetic wisdom. It is simply to bring your attention to what is already going on in your being and that you don’t really acknowledge because it seems so much like just being `me`. We say, okay look, it’s a wider picture and the ego goes `no thank you, it’s scary out there!`
CS: It’s hard to defend our little me box all by ourselves. So to take on more feels even more frightening.
Q: So by relaxing your issue around resources rather than `my` money… people will talk to us about some of their problems and people are much more revealing about their sexual issues than they are about their economic issues because economics, money, is more fundamentally important than sexuality. So you can see how the secrecy or the containment gets closer the deeper you get to the ego sense of separation. In community businesses and so on, you have mutual support, resource-wise, and more loosely defined relationships and you have more support there, and therefore your control and power are shared and there’s not so much weight coming down on you, right?
CS: Not so much stress on such a small number of people.
THE STRESS OF BEING RESOURCE INDEPENDENT AND IN CONTROL
Q: Exactly. When we speak about the shadow, we’re not talking about some evil power. Mostly, what we’re talking about is an unconscious relationship to these issues. We’re unconscious about our sense of resources. We just kind of go out and try to get the money to be alive and to take care of ourselves. But we’re unconscious of the stress that comes from the idea that we are resource independent or I am solely responsible for my resources. And the same thing when it comes to relationships or community or communication, which is like sexual identity – any feelings or desires I have that don’t fit into the mainstream have to be pushed into the unconscious lest they get rejected. And money and control, or money and sexuality and identity.
And then the control issue is about, well, if I’m not in control, I’m losing. If I’m not in charge, I’m annihilated or defeated. Rather than, if I’m not in control, I’m relaxing. It doesn’t have to be me, me, me all the time. Should we see if there are any questions?
STUDENT: I guess my question is around what comes up if you’re not in control. It’s like my parent’s voice – If you’re not in control of your own life, then no one else is going to be, so take care of you, right? So you’ve got to be super in control and take care of things.
COULD YOU LET GO OF CONTROL IN THE PREVAILING PARADIGM?
Q: And that’s true in the current structure of society, that’s a true statement. If you’re going to live in the prevailing paradigm, that’s true. So it’s a very true statement.
STUDENT (Cara): So, is the kind of letting go for transcendence, that kind of letting go, does that really then require community? So that you have the support to let go? Because, could you let go, say, in the mainstream paradigm?
Q: Extremely difficult. That’s a very good question, and in fact, it’s extremely difficult to do it on your own. Almost everybody who is awake has awakened through some kind of paradigm. Saint Francis, in spite of Christianity, and in a way, you can say the Buddha awakened in spite of Buddhism. So the traditions are there to provide a raft and support, but they’re not an end in themselves. It’s a way of supporting and fostering the ability to surrender, and when one person surrenders they surrender into a totality. But the methodology, in a sense, bridges that wall.
Say, for instance, in Buddhism, it starts on this side of the wall, but it leads you over to the other side of the wall. But the idea is once you cross over to the other side of the wall, you don’t need so much the support of that tradition. However, in order to support and live in the community and to embrace it in a more worldwide spectrum, which would be better for humanity itself, including the environment, then you need community and you need strong community. Because the law of large numbers is that it’s very hard to do anything on your own anymore. It involves the community to do something. So the community then gives you the support to help other people to do it. Otherwise, you have to go get a job.
CS: Yeah, it’s a great question and there are two layers to that question. Of course, I agree with everything that Qapel said, and I think I’m just saying what you said in a different way, but spiritual awakening is an interesting thing. It really comes down to the individual. It’s the individual that takes the steps to spiritual unfoldment, and only the individual can do that. And in that sense it’s kind of the ultimate in self-determination. And on the other hand, boy, it sure helps if there’s a lot of support and role models. Support from other people can really speed up the process and make it less intimidating as well. And so there’s this kind of back and forth between the role of the individual and the role of the community and that’s always true, I think.
I just get super jazzed… and the second level of that question, I think most of us know that capitalism pretty much sucks and isn’t working and is putting us on a path that is not looking promising in the future and we can say the same for consumerism.
CREATING ALTERNATIVES TO THE EXISTING PARADIGM
And so I get very excited about creating alternatives to that. I’m not waiting for someone from the government or some global or national organization to present me with this solution. But I get very excited about trying to create solutions. It’s a big challenge and it is a lot of fun. It’s a great adventure.
Q: It’s also important to remember that even people who you think didn’t have a community like, say, Buddha or Jesus Christ, in fact, did. Buddha had a community of wanderers and aesthetics like himself, and he went from teacher to teacher and engaged in different communities in his process and Jesus did the same thing. Jesus was part of an ancient tradition and we don’t know what Jesus did before 30, but there was some talk that he was studying with other teachers in other places. In Kashmir perhaps.
STUDENT (Maureen): I’m wondering what other words you might use rather than crazy or what you would suggest when speaking about this wisdom to others?
GIVING UP RELIGION AND TAKING UP SPIRITUALITY
Q: Another way to put it is basically, do you fit in or not? If the average person fits into the paradigm that we’re currently in, the current model, then you have religion. Religion is just basically a set of rules about how to live in a community. But if you don’t fit in or you feel there’s something missing in your world then by their standards you feel crazy or they think you’re crazy. Or you are a bit odd. If you don’t fit in or you don’t want to fit in or you can’t fit in, then you have to give up religion and take up spirituality. And spirituality by definition is religion with a ladder to the other side of the wall.
Religion by itself will not take you to the other side of the wall, but with a ladder, with a bit of challenge or exploration or courage, that ladder takes you to spirituality.
CS: What’s the wall again?
Q: The wall is the ego’s fear or the ego`s terror of transcending its own separation and isolation.
CS: Which keeps us in those little boxes.
STUDENT: How do you communicate in higher self to people who are in the bully mode, especially as someone they see as controllable for being kind or female or spiritual or whatever they see as weakness from their perspective? How do we become enlightened when there is a disbelief in the spiritual or when we are told that we’re separate and that we must be crazy to be following anything of a spiritual nature?
Q: Well, the brief answer for me is you need different friends. You need to find a different community, and you need to be dialoguing with different people. And you can’t tell somebody who’s up to their neck in alligators that your plan is to drain the swamp because they’re too busy with alligators.
So my short suggestion for such a long question is to find a community and find people around you and work with them. And for the mainstream, just keep your focus contained in your spiritual life, keep that contained within yourself and work within the normal paradigm according to the rules of that paradigm. So give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and let them worry about that, and you get on with it somewhere else.
WHEN UNWHOLESOME STATES CATCH US OFF-GUARD
CS: Yeah, I’d agree, that’s a great question, and this is where the spiritual community can be so valuable because there is a real learning curve about how to respond skillfully to unwholesome states or unwholesome actions. And the nature of unwholesome states and actions is that they can catch us off guard or they can come in with the force of nature, like a cyclone, and we’re kind of caught off balance and it can be challenging to know how to respond at the moment.
So it’s great to be around other people who have experience doing that and see what they do under those kinds of conditions that certainly arise in any community, including spiritual communities. We can see how different people handle it. We can also ask questions: this happened to me, and what could I have done that would have been more skillful? We make extensive use of that living here in the community at Clearsky; it`s a tremendous resource and that’s why spiritual communities are considered one of the triple gems.
PEOPLE ARE LIKE FRUIT, EITHER READY OR NOT READY TO FALL
Q: Perhaps just to correct a possible error that might be creeping in – it’s not an `us and them` dialogue. It’s a bit like fruit on a tree. On this side of the wall, the struggling people, on the other side of the wall, the awakening people. It is not an us and them dichotomy. The important thing to remember is it’s like fruit on the tree – this fruit is ready to fall. So if you’re a fruit picker you go out and you go `oh I can pick this fruit and I can pick that fruit and I can pick this fruit`. These are people who are already either involved or seeking or working to awaken, and this one is not yet ready or this one is not yet ripe. So we wait. So it’s not an us and them dialogue. It’s a `ready or not ready` dialogue. I think it`s an important point.
CS: That is a very important point. Here at Clearsky, this part of the world is world-renowned for hunting and there are a lot of hunters in this community. It’s really a gun culture and I’m not from… well, I am from a gun culture. My mother is a crack shot, and I’m from the US. But I have not handled a gun myself. And that’s something that I try to reduce in my world. And so the point about it not being either or is so great because when we meet hunters, the best thing that I love focusing on is what we share. We share a love of wildlife and we share an appreciation of the importance of a healthy habitat, and we can have really wonderful connections based on that and promote the health of those values. And if we came at it from what our differences are, then we could really just fall into conflict very easily.
HOST: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on apple podcasts 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 Doug and Catherine explore in detail in their bestselling book, Wasteland to Pureland. The third section of the book is entitled Crazy Wisdom and covers a wide variety of topics, including the shadow, tantra and money, sex, and power. Podcast listeners can download a free chapter from this section of the book by visiting planetdharma.com/crazywisdom. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
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