It includes a meditation diary, so you can have a different question to explore every day during your meditation for 6 days each week (Wednesday to Monday) for 6 weeks (36 questions). Plus there are some very deep and useful teachings on our two meditation practices that are contained in the notes.
If you use them as guidance before and after you meditate, they will help you go deeper into the practices.
In my last monthly email I wrote: “I am hoping to restart face to face classes at the Millbridge Rooms in Hertford just after Easter on the 19th April, and then start a 6 week meditation course there the following week on the 26th April. That is the plan anyway. I will let you know for sure at the beginning of April.”
I was sort of hoping that covid risks would continue going down, but since then the BBC reports “about one in every 16 people is infected, . That’s just under 4.3 million people, up from 3.3 million the week before.” And numbers continue to rise.
I know omicron is not as bad as previous versions, and we can’t stay in lockdown forever.
But it can be pretty bad. One of my boosted friends had it recently and was pretty ill for a couple of days, one horrendous night and she still has some post viral fatigue and coughing. Another boosted friend in her late 60s was ill for two weeks with it, and now still has post viral fatigue.
Although I am really looking forward to face to face classes again, and I know that many of you are too, I am thinking it might be a bit prudent to wait just a bit longer till the warmer weather starts and hopefully the covid risk is down again. So we will stay on zoom a bit longer.
I am thinking of reverting to face to face classes some time between end of May and mid June. I will give you a better idea next month.
So this means we will start the meditation course a week earlier on the 19th April.
Coming up:
05 April 2022 Amarachandra (female mitra convenor at Cambridge Buddhist Centre) 12 April 2022 Amber
then Easter
19 April 2022 Keith (week 1 of 6 week meditation course) 26 April 2022 Paramajyoti (week 2) 03 May 2022 week 3 10 May 2022 week 4 17 May 2022 week 5 24 May 2022 week 6
Our thoughts continue to go out to everyone suffering at this time whereever they are in the world – especially in Ukraine.
In any case. I hope that you have a lovely Easter break and enjoy the rest of April. Hopefully see you soon.
We could say, putting it simply, that there are two ways of practising, two basic Buddhist lifestyles. One could be called ‘practice in the world’, and the other, ‘practice apart from the world’.
Practice in the world means living in the midst of society. Maybe we have a job, or we’re bringing up a family, or we continue participating in society in some other way. But we are also, at the same time, trying to put Buddhist teachings and practices into effect.
Practice apart from the world means we leave society to some extent. Perhaps we live in a retreat centre in the countryside, or a monastery, or a hermitage. We have deliberately isolated ourselves from the world in order to be able to concentrate solely on Buddhist practice. We spend as much of our time as possible in this environment, leaving it only when we need to.
Both these are valid forms of practice that have been present in Buddhist traditions right from the start. The Buddha left society in order to pursue a spiritual quest. He went deep into the forests to seek out spiritual teachers and to meditate on the mysteries of existence. This is often the popular image of the Buddha: a solitary, meditating figure.
But that was not the whole story. After the Buddha gained Enlightenment, he returned to the world. He travelled all over north-east India, teaching and communicating his experience of Enlightenment, so that others could experience that freedom for themselves. He founded an order, so that his followers could support each other in their practice, and so that his teaching could be passed from generation to generation. The organization of this order, and all the teaching, meant he was a busy man. As he travelled around, he would often have been accompanied by a retinue of followers, with hundreds of people coming to hear him talk and ask questions. He also went back to his family, and many of them became his followers – some also gaining Enlightenment. He met and taught all sorts of people, from a wide variety of backgrounds.
So we can see that there was a stage in his life when the Buddha did practise apart from the world, but then he returned. We can see both ways of functioning exemplified in his life.
I am hoping to restart face to face classes at the Millbridge Rooms in Hertford soon.
That is the plan anyway. I will let you know for sure at the beginning of April.
We will carry on with zoom for the next few weeks, but thankfully the risk from covid appears to be diminishing at last.
coming up the next few weeks we have:
08 March 2022 Amber 15 March 2022 Keith 22 March 2022 Keith 29 March 2022 Paramajyoti 05 April 2022 not known 12 April 2022 not known
The zoom link is https://hertfordbuddhistgroup.co.uk/zoom Tuesdays – log in to zoom 7.15pm to 7.30pm beginners and newcomers always welcome.
Then after Easter we will probably stop zoom and go back to face to face classes in the Millbridge rooms
19 April 2022 Relaunch of the face to face class in the Millbridge rooms 26 April 2022 6 week meditation course starts in the Millbridge rooms.
After we revert back to real life I imagine we will still have occasional zoom events as I know some of you can’t come face to face. More details in future newsletters.
I feel I ought to write some words about the war in Ukraine. Many of us are struggling at the moment with the horrific suffering there. I am trying to witness it with compassion and some equanimity, without becoming overwhelmed with pain and anger.
It is hard to know what to say, so I will paste here a quote from the Dalai Lama who speaks with much heartfelt wisdom :
“I have been deeply saddened by the conflict in Ukraine.
Our world has become so interdependent that violent conflict between two countries inevitably impacts the rest of the world. War is out-dated – non-violence is the only way. We need to develop a sense of the oneness of humanity by considering other human beings as brothers and sisters. This is how we will build a more peaceful world.
Problems and disagreements are best resolved through dialogue. Genuine peace comes about through mutual understanding and respect for each other’s wellbeing.
We must not lose hope. The 20th century was a century of war and bloodshed. The 21st century must be a century of dialogue.
I hope all is well with you. Our course is going very well. We have been averaging about 25 attendees which is not bad for zoom.
Also several people on the course have been giving great feedback about how attending is helping them experience a positive change in their lives. Each week is self contained, so it is fine to drop in any week, and it does not matter if you have never been before, or don’t know anything about Buddhism.
We also always try and have breakout groups in our zoom sessions to give people more of a chance to get to know each other and explore the course content. Also, if you want to find out more you can always google “The Journey and the Guide”, you might find versions of it on youtube, mp3s, and also of course the actual book, if you are interested.
Coming up we have the final 4 weeks of the course: 08 February 2022 Week 5 – Amber 15 February 2022 Week 6 – Keith 22 February 2022 Week 7 – Paramajyoti 01 March 2022 Week 8 – not yet known
We are staying on zoom for the moment, but will go back to face to face at some point when covid rates drop a bit more.
Anne Donovan has written a funny and perceptive novel called Buddha Da.16 It is the story of a Glaswegian family: Jimmy, a painter and decorator, his wife Liz, and their daughter Anne-Marie. Jimmy has become interested in meditation and started going along to the Buddhist centre. At first, Anne-Marie wonders whether it is just one of his practical jokes, but she gradually realizes he is serious. She and her mother find it weird that dad, who used to spend his evenings sitting with them watching telly and cracking jokes, now goes upstairs to sit for hours on his own in a darkened room. Liz cannot understand why Jimmy comes home from the centre in such awe of what the lama said that night.
To her, it sounds little different to what the priest says on Sunday – but Jimmy has never been interested in church. Anne-Marie’s religious education class at school goes on a visit to the Buddhist centre and she is in terror of the potential embarrassment: what if her dad is there, or one of the lamas recognizes her? You can see that something has awoken in Jimmy, albeit imperfectly – he is at times rather oblivious of the effects he is having on his family. He struggles to explain why it is so vitally important to him, but he can’t quite put it into words. Mutual incomprehension abounds, and the novel goes onto tell us the results.
Where there is such conflict and difficulty, we usually, in time, work through it. In the end, relationships are often stronger and closer as a result. My parents were understandably wary when I got involved in Buddhism. They had brought me up as a Roman Catholic and must have wondered why I was rejecting that faith. They had done their best to explain and teach me their faith – why wasn’t it good enough for me? In time, however, they saw that I was happy and that what I was doing suited me. They are now very supportive of my Buddhist life, and I feel very close to them and grateful for all they have done for me. My father sometimes comes and stays with me in the Buddhist community where I live, and I am glad he’s able to get a closer glimpse of my life in this way.
Sometimes, however, such a resolution and understanding is not possible: friends or partners realize that their paths through life are diverging. They simply have different goals and aims, so they may decide to part. Though this is sometimes sad and painful, they feel it will be better for all concerned in the long run.
How can we negotiate this difficult territory? There are obviously no easy answers or simple formulas. We first need to be aware that if we start getting involved in meditation and Buddhism, it might seem strange to people who are close to us but don’t share our interest. They might not be able to understand why it is meaningful to us. It might even seem alien and threatening to them; they fear our new interest will come between us and them.
We need to attempt to understand this and to communicate what meditation and practice is all about and why it is significant for us. We do our best to help them understand. At the same time, we try not to ignore the call of our heart, even when it causes difficulty for others. We can only remain true to others if we are first true to ourselves, so we try to listen to that voice within that tells us how we really want to live our lives.
From one point of view date and time is totally arbitrary and cultural. We are always in the eternal present. The past no longer exists, and the future is just imagined. Also if we were brought up in a different culture, our “year end” might be totally different.
But from another point of view, something really significant happens at midnight tonight as the old year ends, and the new one begins. The reality is every moment is actually a new beginning. But we experience this most strongly at midnight tonight.
In any case it can be a useful opportunity to just take a step back and have a look at our lives. Are we happy? Are we going in the right direction? What were the highlights of the last year – the highs and the lows? From this heightened level of awareness, we may decide to try and shift direction a bit, to jettison some bad habits, and take on new ones.
This is the momentum that drives us to take on new year’s resolutions. Unfortunately these often amount to nothing, as our heightened level of awareness dissolves, and we are very soon back in our familiar unconsious and reactive mind embracing our old bad habits.
One thing we might consider is to look around for external conditions, or people that support us in keeping this expanded consciousness. This is one of things we are trying to do at the Hertford Buddhist group. We are trying to create a supportive community of friends (aka sangha) that help us maintain this perspective. It is very hard to do this alone.
Why not join us for our 8 week course (8 Tuesday evenings) starting on 11th Jan.
The first half of each evening will be meditation with full instruction – both mindfulness of breathing and also loving kindness (metta bhavana) meditation.
The second half of each evening will be based around the amazing book “The Journey and the Guide: A Practical Course in Enlightenment” by our friend Maitreyabandhu. The “Guide” refers to the Buddha.
The blurb of the book says “How can you make the most of your life? Maitreyabandhu, a prize-winning poet who has been sharing his experience of practising Buddhism for over 20 years, sets out to answer this most basic question. With humour and profundity, mixing poetry and myth with down-to-earth instruction, he describes what it means to set out on the Buddha’s journey and how you can follow it day by day and week by week. ‘The natural mode of consciousness is to expand. In every moment we can either allow consciousness to unfold or we can make it me and mine and feel it shrink back to the level of egocentricity. It’s as if we’ve identified with a tiny ripple on the surface of the ocean. Once we let go of that identification there’s the whole ocean: centre-less, edgeless, completely free.’”
Also here is a message from several of our sangha about an event on Tuesday 4th Jan:
“We are very pleased that, thanks to Zoom, Smritratna will be joining us on Tuesday 4th.
For the last eighteen years he has lived in a forest hut near the Dhanakosa Retreat Centre in Scotland. His talk is called ‘Sangha in the World: A Vision of the Future’ and is based on a discourse in which the Buddha tells a parable to express his vision of the profound value of sangha in the world, even after years of widespread misrule’ – how apt for our times!
If you would like a preview, you can see Smritiratna talking about climate change with Analayo during the recent Triratna Earth Sangha Conference https://youtu.be/bw50O7uk46o
Recently five members of Hertford Sangha attended the launch of the Cambridge Earth Sangha which was very inspiring. A number of other friends have expressed an interest in exploring a conscious approach to climate change which may involve study, discussion, meditation, devotional rituals and activism. More information to follow soon.”
Basically, for all of the above, all you need to do is just turn up on zoom on Tuesday evenings between 7.15pm and 7.30pm for a very prompt start at 7.30. The zoom link is https://hertfordbuddhistgroup.co.uk/zoom . There is no need to book, or pay anything. Beginners are always very welcome.
04 January 2022 Smritiratna 11 January 2022 Keith Week one of course 18 January 2022 Amber Week two 25 January 2022 Paramajyoti Week three 01 February 2022 Mangala Week four
That is all for now. I hope you have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and 2022.
You are warmly invited to come to an eight week (ie 8 Tuesday evenings) course for anyone wanting to learn how to meditate and live their lives more mindfully and positively.
All are welcome including total beginners, people who know nothing about meditation, as well as seasoned meditators.
The class will start promptly at 7.30pm – so best to get there at least 5 or 10 minutes earlier Each class will finish at 9.30pm. We normally have a 5 minute break halfway through.
The first half of each evening will be meditation with full instruction – both mindfulness of breathing and also loving kindness (metta bhavana) meditation.
The second half of each evening will be based around the amazing book “The Journey and the Guide: A Practical Course in Enlightenment” by our friend Maitreyabandhu. The “Guide” refers to the Buddha.
The blurb of the book says “How can you make the most of your life? Maitreyabandhu, a prize-winning poet who has been sharing his experience of practising Buddhism for over 20 years, sets out to answer this most basic question. With humour and profundity, mixing poetry and myth with down-to-earth instruction, he describes what it means to set out on the Buddha’s journey and how you can follow it day by day and week by week. ‘The natural mode of consciousness is to expand. In every moment we can either allow consciousness to unfold or we can make it me and mine and feel it shrink back to the level of egocentricity. It’s as if we’ve identified with a tiny ripple on the surface of the ocean. Once we let go of that identification there’s the whole ocean: centre-less, edgeless, completely free.'”
It is recommended (but not compulsory) that you buy the book, and read it while doing our course.
You do not have to “be a Buddhist”, or know anything about Buddhism. There is no God in Buddhism, and it is not about having to believe in anything. It is a very practical spiritual path.
Many people have found these courses extremely useful and have made massive shifts in their life from them (if they carry on practising and attending after the course).
People report these shifts especially in areas such as more happiness, less anxiety and less negative emotions. The general goal is to be more content, more mindful, have more loving kindness, joy, connection and ultimately more freedom from our reactive mind.
Repetition is important because there are different levels of depth, experience and understanding. If you have been before you will build on what you have learned and be able to go a bit deeper this time, so it is also suitable for experienced meditators.
If you want more information about the styles of meditation we teach you can go to https://hertfordbuddhistgroup.co.uk/meditation/ where there are also links to downloadable mp3s that can guide you while you meditate, as well as youtube videos etc.
It’s fine if you can’t manage to come to every week, each one can be enjoyed independently so just come along and drop into any that you can make. Although like anything, the more you put into it, and the more you attend, the more you will get out of it.
The classes will be very friendly, welcoming and a lot of fun.
There is no need to bring anything apart from an open mind and willingness to explore your experience.
If you cannot come to this course, you can also come any Tuesday throughout the year as we always warmly welcome any newcomers and beginners, and give full instruction. Every Tuesday evening is run as a drop in class.
If you have any questions, please leave a message below, or alternatively direct message me on Facebook .
December is a really weird month, and it is almost impossible to think about it without thinking of the elephant in the room (i.e. Christmas).
Hertford Buddhist Group is going to have its own festive celebration with another Sangha Soiree zoom evening, where several of us are going to have a go at doing some kind of performance – last year we had singing, playing an instrument, reading poetry, presenting artwork, presenting a youtube video etc, and this year we might get a dance performance as well. Just a bit of fun where we can let our hair down and enjoy each other’s company.
If you want to watch it, just turn up on zoom on Tuesday 21st December at the normal class time of 7.20pm for a prompt 7.30pm start.
The other big news is that we are going to start an 8 week course based on Maitreyabandhu’s excellent book “The Journey and The Guide”. If you look on Amazon, you can find some reviews from around the world, and the following blurb from the back cover:
Building on the success of Life with Full Attention, Maitreyabandhu offers a challenging but profoundly useful work on how to practice Buddhism in everyday life.
Train your mind to be healthy and calm through learning from the life of the Buddha.
Drawing on examples from the life of the Buddha, Maitreyabandhu gives an easily understood outline of the system of spiritual life as undertaken by Buddhists in the Triratna Community.
Maitreyabandhu shows how the journey starts with our own mind, particularly when we begin to look into the truth of things — the truth of the old man on the escalator, the friend in hospital, the coffin we carry to the graveside.
What we find in our guide, the Buddha, is a man with a fit mind: a healthy, happy, non-neurotic, honest-to-goodness mind. To get fit, we need to work on becoming a happy healthy human being. We need to integrate our thinking faculty with our emotions. We need to wake up to thought and tune in to direct experience. And we need to work against the ever-rising tide of trivia, dissipation, and over-stimulation of the modern world.
Maitreyabandhu takes us on this journey with practical week-by-week exercises, focusing on cultivating mindful awareness, being happy, integrating and simplifying our lives, and knowing ourselves.
I am personally very excited about engaging with this material. If you have some free time, you might want to get hold of the book and start reading it now.
That’s all for now. Have a great December and Christmas!
We’ll be looking at how we can live a radical and meaningful spiritual life in the midst of the world, and how this can, in fact, be a strong and effective way of practising. But we’ll also be considering the supportive conditions we need to maintain the depth and momentum of such practice. In other words, we’ll be trying to get some sense of what a Buddhist lifestyle might look like. We’ll see that it involves learning to combine both calm and activity. We will also explore the topic of ‘right livelihood’: how to approach working life from the point of view of Buddhist ideals.
But first, we will look at some areas of conflict that can arise as we start to get more involved in the Buddhist life. Perhaps we have been attending a Buddhism class for a few months, we find we enjoy meditation, and notice we that we are starting to change. We begin to make friends at the class, and appreciate the contact with people who think and feel as we do. But we are also worried about certain questions. Isn’t it selfish to be spending so much time meditating? How can you justify all that time for yourself? What will your family think? Is this meditation business just a form of escapism? Do your friends secretly worry that you’ve gone weird and joined a cult? Do they even think that you’ll soon be clearing out the bank account and disappearing in the middle of the night to join some mystical guru with seventeen Rolls-Royces? (Maybe you recognize versions of these, or similar areas of conflict and uncertainty?)
Some people do seem to worry that meditation is a bit selfish. The fact that it involves taking time out and going into our inner world leads some people to feel guilty about meditating. But if we are doing it in order to live our lives better, in order to interact with the world with more awareness and loving-kindness, then it is far from selfish. It is an investment in ourselves now, so that we have more to give later: not necessarily more in the quantitative sense, but in enabling ourselves to do what we do with a better quality of mind. This will affect how well we are able to do it. Such an investment is wise, not selfish.
Meditation is the exact opposite of escapism. Escapism is avoiding oneself – perhaps by losing oneself in an activity that allows us to forget our lives. But when we meditate we are looking into our minds and trying to be aware and honest about what we see. We are taking responsibility for our minds in a radical and uncompromising way. Meditation is a challenge, but a worthwhile and rewarding one.
The cold weather is really starting to kick in, and a sense is rising of the calm before the storm (i.e. Christmas!).
Our meditation course is now complete, and we will have a bit more Buddhist content in our Tuesday night classes and another course starting early January.
No need to wait for that though, newcomers and beginners are always welcome, and will always be given full meditation instruction.
The photo above is of the Hertford Sangha at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre Sangha Day in 2019
Coming up:
09 November 2021 Mangala 16 November 2021 Amber 23 November 2021 Padmajata 30 November 2021 Paramajyoti 07 December 2021 Keith
There is no news yet about when we will start in person classes again. Just waiting to see what happens with the covid (and flu) data.
Also coming up on the afternoon of Sunday 21st November (2pm to 5.30pm) is Sangha Day at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre. This just comes once a year, and is always a very heart warming event.
We have some fantastic news which is that Katey and Meridith from our Hertford Sangha are going to become mitras then, as well as at least three other people from other locations.
It is a hybrid event (in person and also zoom). You have to book if you are coming in person, and there are not many places. it is suitable for regulars and sangha members. https://www.cambridgebuddhistcentre.com/sanghaday .
Chopping wood, fetching water Water to draw brushwood to cut greens to pick – all in moments when morning showers let up.
When they encounter Buddhism and meditation for the first time, some people feel it rekindles something deep within them, something that may have been lying dormant for a very long time. In the busyness of everyday affairs we can lose contact with that deeper sense of ourselves and the potential creativity of our lives. But the inner spaciousness we discover in meditation brings back the feeling of dwelling in possibility. We may feel we have rediscovered something precious that we don’t want lose sight of again.
But then we wonder whether, with our current life and responsibilities, it is possible to stay in touch with all this. Can we fully implement Buddhist ideals and really change ourselves? Can we really make significant progress in the midst of bringing up a family, or a busy job, or both? Can we do it in a world driven by consumerism, which seems intent on distracting us? Or is serious practice only for those who can gonad live in the mountains, far away from worldly concerns?
exercise – is it really possible for me?
Take a few moments to sit quietly and consider the above questions, and unravel your feelings and beliefs as to whether the path of self-transformation is possible for you. Try to be just as honest in acknowledging your underlying attitudes, regardless of whether they express doubt or confidence. You might find they are a mixture of the two.
Another question that might help you to think about this is, ‘What prevents me from practising more fully? What holds me back from making more progress in meditation, ethics, and the process of self-transformation?’
Make notes about your responses to these questions.
It is important to know because, if we are subconsciously telling ourselves it is not possible, this will obviously influence the effectiveness of our practice!
Why not drop in to one of our Tuesday evening meditation evenings on zoom? For the next 4 Tuesdays we are doing a meditation course, and then after that (from November onwards) the evenings are first half mediation, and second half Buddhism.
Each evening is self contained, so it does not matter if you just drop in for one of them. Newcomers are always welcome. All classes are free of charge. Go to the home page for more info and the link.
Meditation is really a fantastic thing to add into our daily schedule. I know many of you use headspace and other apps, but I have found it is much more powerful when we get in the habit of meditating in silence on our own, without an app.
This makes it a lot easier to access these states at any point during the day, even for just a few seconds. And the more times we do this during the day it just shifts our awareness and positivity, and colours the rest of our experience (in a good way) during the other parts of our day.
I know this requires a bit of effort and discipline, and coming to a meditation class and meditating with others is a great way of supporting ourselves with this.
Another purpose of our evenings is just to build community, and connect with like minded people trying to grow spiritually. We usually have breakout groups so we can get to know each other a bit.
So this is what is coming up:
05/10 – meditation course by Keith 12/10 – meditation course by Padmajata 19/10 – meditation course by Paramajyoti 26/10 – meditation course by Keith 02/11 – meditation and Buddhism by Jnanadaya 09/11 – meditation and Buddhism by Mangala etc
This final precept is about taking mindfulness into everyday life. It suggests we avoid anything that intoxicates, or detracts from, our mindfulness. We have to decide for ourselves what these things are, and where we want to draw the line. We might find that we can have the odd drink without affecting our awareness too much, or we might decide that even one glass of wine mars our clarity. Our experience might be that there are other things that detract from our mindfulness.
For example, we find that spending too long in front of the computer spaces us out. Again, there are no hard and fast rules, but a principle that we have to apply in the world.
However, one could argue that a strong characteristic of our culture is our over-reliance of drink and drugs. Karen Armstrong, a writer on comparative religion, has recently suggested that many are seeking ecstasy through drink, drugs, sport, sex, dancing and clubbing, art, and even shopping.
We are looking for an experience that takes us out of ourselves. This is natural, and what humans have always sought. In the past, many did this through religious experience, but these traditions have today lost their vitality. Much contemporary religion has lost touch with its mystical roots, and may even be suspicious of them. So today we use different means. The problem is that this is often not grounded in ethics. This can lead some people to dependence on, or addiction to, drugs, or to the violence one sometimes sees on the football terraces. Also, the satisfaction it can give us just doesn’t go very deep, nor does it last very long.
This is because true ecstasy is a product of a way of being, not something we consume. So we either have ethics that is wary of ecstasy (much contemporary religion), or ecstasy not grounded in ethics (much of modern culture). Karen Armstrong suggests that the current western interest in Buddhism is connected to this search for an ecstasy that is firmly grounded in ethics. With this precept, we are also exploring the whole area of mindfulness in everyday life as discussed earlier in Chapter 2.
If we are not mindful, we cannot be aware of our actions, words, and underlying motives. In other words, mindfulness is the necessary condition for practising the other precepts, for dwelling more fully in the possibilities of our lives, for bringing more loving-kindness into the world.
We are keeping things on zoom at the moment while we are seeing what the next wave of covid is going to look like.
This is what is coming up in September and beyond:
07 September – Rob leading a class on karma and the positive precepts 14 September – Paramajyoti 21 September – 6 week meditation course starts lead by Keith 28 September – Week 2 of the meditation course by Mangala 05 October – Week 3 of the meditation course by Amber 12 October – Week 4 of the meditation course by Padmajata
On our download page https://hertfordbuddhistgroup.co.uk/downloads/ where you can download a few things including a 32 page pdf of notes and a meditation diary that the upcoming course is based around.
The fourth precept asks us to communicate truthfully. Before we can speak the truth to others, we need to be in contact with the truth ourselves. Truthfulness is an inner attitude, as well as an outer quality. As we go about our lives, we tell ourselves a story, we interpret and process our experience internally. We need to do this. We need to construct for ourselves a healthy sense of who we are in relation to the world. But sometimes, if we look closely – and this may even shock us – we find we are telling ourselves a lie. We subtly tell ourselves a version of reality that shows us in a good light. We don’t want to admit, even to ourselves, that we act unkindly, that we have ungenerous thoughts, or that other people sometimes get the better of us.
One of the great qualities connected with truthfulness is authenticity – being seen as we truly are. To be authentic is no small achievement – it takes a great deal of courage and confidence and may take sometime to develop. The first stage in being authentic is to be so with oneself. Only then can we be authentic with others. The more we have this quality, the freer we are. When we are not afraid to be seen as we are, others cannot manipulate us.
When we don’t speak the truth, it is often because we want to be seen in a good light. We don’t exactly blame our colleagues for the mistake we make, but we omit to put our boss right when they assume it was someone else that was in the wrong. Or we exaggerate the details of a story we are telling because we want to impress. Sometimes, when you overhear a conversation between friends, it sounds more like a competition in which each is trying to trump the other with a better story, or a funnier joke. There is very little real communication. You might say that a little bit of exaggeration isn’t that serious. From one point of view it isn’t, but, on the other hand, it is a missed opportunity to be more truly ourselves, rather than merely keep up the pretence.
Ethically skilful communication involves more than just factual truth. To quote William Blake, ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent.’ We are trying to communicate not just truthfully, but also with loving-kindness. We try to avoid harsh, unkind comments. I once heard about a woman who worked in an office where there was a lot of gossip behind someone’s back. She was eventually asked what she thought of that person. She replied that she knew she had plenty of faults herself, so she tried not to dwell on the faults of others. The gossip stopped.
When you are with someone who habitually speaks kindly and appreciatively of others it is very uplifting. I have a friend with whom I spend time every few weeks. When I was first getting to know him, I noticed that each time I returned home I would almost feel inspired, and I’d wonder why. We’d only chatted about ordinary things. I realized it was because he always spoke in a positive and appreciative manner. Negative words poison the atmosphere, but positive words are just as potent in having the opposite effect.
