Can I See Myself and the World as One Self

However, something which does not exist in the first place cannot cease to exist. Neither are we going to cease thinking, which is a natural activity. The Mind which is clear and vast is already clear and vast, and it is not the (small) mind which thinks it needs to clear itself. The only thing which can change is the ignorance of thinking this small I is who I am. This can happen when we remember to take up residence in open awareness, bring attention to the process of selfing, see through it and recognise reality. I don’t know about you but in my experience this is a circular, or maybe a spiral process, repeated again and again, and probably a never-ending process. For most of us some form of education or guidance is vital.

This way of self-knowledge is beginning to become more easily and widely accessible than at any time, I think, in human history. One out of the many ways that this is happening is in the spread of training in mindfulness, which is an area I have become involved in. Forty-five years after Akong Rinpoche worked at the Radcliffe Infirmary, the hospital has moved up the hill and a training in mindfulness-awareness is available for National Health Service patients at the John Radcliffe Hospital; almost impossible to imagine back then. A colleague runs an established programme for people with chronic fatigue/ME in another part of the hospital, and I have just begun a programme for neurological and neurosurgical patients, with the first group completing the 8-week programme a few weeks ago. The initial group went well, and in line with evidence from elsewhere there were significant reductions in symptoms of stress. Several group members experienced big changes in major life problems or in how they coped with them. Perhaps most interestingly, the majority of group members described what sounded to me like a life-changing experience.

 
The Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme was developed 30 years ago at the UMASS medical centre in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose life work this has been. It has become available in hundreds of hospitals and health settings around the world. It has a critical mass of evidence behind it, enabling it to be provided by medical institutions, and in the form of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) it has NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) approval in this country. In Oxfordshire Professor Mark Williams (one of the originators of MBCT) and his team provide a mindfulness programme to patients of the mental health service. The MBSR programme is potentially suitable for all hospital specialties, and indeed beyond. It has been provided in prisons and inner-city settings. It has been adapted and is applied in the fields of childrens’ education and in business. 
 
To give an idea of what this looks like, the programme consists of a systematic training in mindfulness through daily meditation, yoga and mindfulness in all aspects of every-day life. Participants practise bringing moment-to-moment non-judgemental attention to present experience. In weekly meetings participants are lead in guided practices, and then we speak about the experience afterwards, allowing reflection and insight into the developing practice. Stability and flexibility of attention are developed through practising with different foci of awareness, bringing attention non- judgementally and over and over again back to the current focus when distraction or dullness develops. This is then expanded to include progressively all aspects of present experience, inner and outer, including thoughts and emotions, and finally, letting go of all scaffolding, resting in open awareness, in which whatever arises is witnessed without attachment or distraction, or maybe in which there is just being. This awareness is all-encompassing, and intrinsically loving, accepting of all experience, self and other. 
 
Although put to work as a healthcare intervention, this programme is no other than the authentic Buddha dharma (way, teaching), without Buddhism or any religion, or spirituality, and presented simply as training in discovering and developing the natural capacity for awareness which is the birthright of all human beings. Bringing this to bear in the full appreciation and facing of the present moment, whatever form it may take – so finding a way of living life rather than enduring or escaping it. 

It was Jon Kabat-Zinn who posed the question in the exchange I mentioned earlier, in which the Dalai Lama was asked “Is there any difference between the Buddha dharma and the Universal dharma?” and answered, “No”. Another time he had an audience with a venerated Zen master in Japan who showed deep interest for his work. Talking about the way this practice has been taken up by all sorts of ordinary people with no interest as such in spirituality or Buddhism, and whether mindfulness could be properly presented outside the teachings of Buddhism, this master said, from my memory of the story, “Throw out Buddha! Throw out Zen!” 
 
People, through direct experience, are discovering their own nature, and that their own nature is the same as everybody else’s. This movement is apparently expanding, and there’s a lot more room for expansion. 
 

References 

• Austin, J.H. (2009) Selfless Insight: Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA 
  

• Farb, N.A.S., Segal, Z.V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., Anderson, A.K.  (2007) Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. SCAN 2, 313-322 

• Gusnard, D.A., Akbudak, E., Shulman, G.L., Raichle, M.E. (2001) Medial prefrontal cortex and self-referential mental activity: Relation to a default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98(7), 4259-4264 

• Raichle, M.E. & Mintun, M.A. (2001) Brain Work and Brain Imaging. Annual Review of Neuroscience 29, 449-476

Peter Young, Educationalist, Principal of the Beshara School (b. 1949 London). He studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, and subsequently mental nursing. He has also studied Ottoman Turkish at Oxford.

His interest in education was kick-started by studying Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi’s work at the Beshara School in 1975. From this time on he adopted education, or perhaps it was vice-versa, for his life’s work, and he has been closely involved with the Beshara School since.

He is currently the Principal of the School at the Chisholme Institute, and has run Beshara courses and lectured worldwide. He lives with his wife at Chisholme House, and has four children and four grandchildren.

Peter Young Part 1	Peter Young Part 2
Peter Young Part 3	Peter Young Part 4

 
That was a little introduction to a perspective. A perspective to which we are invited by life itself and by this school and by the grace of the great teachers who have come to this perspective. As Bulent said, ‘This is the purpose for man on earth’, why he should be respected and revered, not because of his behaviour, which may be from ignorance, but because of his potential.

  

So this man who comes to himself, this is the man who knows his reality as being the reality, and it seems that this is where real responsibility begins.  Responsibility taken in its strict sense of meaning, that is, the ability to respond.  So, to the extent we know our reality to that same extent we are able to respond to what has to happen.  To respond to people, to respond to nature.  We haven’t been responsible.  We have regarded nature as other than ourselves rather as our mother and we have exploited things for our own ends because we perceive ourselves as islands and don’t see our magnificent potential, our true nature, and, I believe, the only place we can really be happy.  We look for happiness in all other places but we can find it right there in ourselves.

 
So that is my hope for the future.  I think it is a real hope.  I think that this can be found, can be communicated.  It is completely available for everyone here but also everyone elsewhere.  It is accessible.  It’s so close.  It is there when we just stop, the moment we stop what it is we are doing. 
 
I believe it is a real hope and that hope is real.  Hope is one of these qualities which belong to the inner world.  The world of the interior, which we have come to think of as some kind of an invention of the human mind.  This is really very far from the reality.  That we think that this reality, hope, which we are born with, we have made up.  Some kind of an invention.  Just like we think we have made up the idea of god.  And of course we have, in a way, until we come to know what it is, really.  But this perspective regards the reality, this reality the Being from which we all derive, the Origin, First Cause, God, Buddha nature, whatever we call it, this reality the mind perceives.  It does.  But it then says, if it is not educated, ‘I made it up’.   It thinks of it as its own creation. But the mind, ordinary human consciousness, is a receptor like everything else.  Like my hand is a receptor and it receives sense, feeling.  The mind also is a receptor of the reality but of course it can only receive according to its own nature and its own limit.  Just like I can’t touch the reality as it is in itself with my hand.  I have all these different receptors.  Why on earth should I limit my reality to my mind?  This is really strange!  Or why do I think I have to be full of feelings and right ideas to be a proper human being?
 
Q. You used the term ‘as if’. Can you say more?
 
I think this idea of ‘as if’ goes very deep indeed.  Just on a purely practical level, if I am chopping wood I don’t know that the axe is going to go through the wood but I have to chop as if it is.  If I don’t, if I doubt, it’s going to bounce of the wood and sprain my wrist.  So chopping wood with certainty, even though you don’t know that the axe is going to go through, you have to chop as if it is.  It’s like that with anything that you do.  You don’t know that you are going to succeed but you have to proceed as if you are.  So we don’t know what is going to happen with the world.  We don’t know that there is not going to be some awful catastrophe but we have to proceed as if life will continue in the best way it can and that we can participate in that. 
 
This goes with hope because hope, real hope, is a kind of an appreciation of reality but from behind a veil.  It’s a kind of knowledge.   We can’t say, because we don’t know with absolute certainly, that this is going to be so.  But this hope can really inform and instruct the way we go about things.  It’s quite paradoxical because it’s only when we really know we are going to die that hope comes into full play.  I can’t explain that. 

Aliya Ryan

Aliya Ryan fell in love with the Amazon rain-forest whilst traveling in South America in 1999, and moved to Peru in 2002 after completing a degree in Social Anthropology. There, with friends, she helped found the indigenous rights organization Shinai, working with indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon. Over the last six years she has worked with the Nahua, Matsigenka and Achuar peoples and gas exploration on issues including illegal logging, oil and gas exploration and territory management. She also ran campaigns defending the rights of indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.

Aliya has produced articles, reports and maps on indigenous land rights issues and is currently co-authoring a book about the Achuar and their relationship with their ancestral territory. Aliya left Peru at the end of 2008, but still involved in indigenous rights issues in Peru and Latin America.

Unity of Being: Examples from the Amazon

The stories I am going to tell to you today were told to me by indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. They could tell these things themselves with much more eloquence and clarity than I am able to. However in their absence, I hope to convey to you some things I have learnt from them, and a little about my own experiences in Peru.

First I would like you all to close your eyes, and let me take you far from this tent in the Scottish Borders, out of Europe and away to the depths of the Peruvian jungle. I am going to tell you an ancient story, told by old men and women to their grandchildren to pass the time on long boat journeys,

 or in the magical hour before dawn, sat around the fire. It is the story of how the moon came into existence.

Once upon a time moon was a man, Nantu, who lived upon the earth with his wife Ayumama and their children. Every day Nantu would go hunting in the forest and Ayumama would stay at home making clay pots, gardening in their small farm and cooking dinner. Before leaving the house in the morning, Nantu would go to the garden, pick the ripest squash fruit, and give it to his wife to prepare for dinner. But Ayumama was greedy, she would cook the squash early and eat it all herself, and then go and pick another, unripe squash to cook for her husband and children. Nantu asked her, day after day, why the squash wasn’t ripe, and she always had an excuse “your mother came to visit and I had to give it to her”, “I slipped when I was taking it off the fire and it spilt out” etc.

Eventually Nantu began to get suspicious and one day when he left the house he doubled back and climbed up onto the roof to spy on Ayumama. He saw her prepare the squash and eat it all herself and then go to the garden and pick another, green, squash to cook for him. Nantu, furious, climbed down and went hunting as usual. That evening he came back and sat down for dinner. Ayumama served him a bowl of unripe squash. “Why is the squash not ripe?” he asked. But before she could answer he stood up and said “That is enough, I have watched you from the roof, I know you eat all the ripe squash yourself. I am leaving. Don’t even think about following me”. And that said he stormed out of the house and began to climb up the rope ladder that connected the earth to the sky.

His children ran and started to climb after him, but he pushed them off the ladder and as they fell they turned into birds. Ayumama quickly gathered together all her clays and pigments and started climbing after her husband too. But when Nantu reached the sky at the top of the ladder he turned around and cut the rope. Ayumama fell off the ladder, she dropped the clays and where they landed is where today there are deposits of clay which the Achuar women use to make pots. Ayumama fell and fell, until she too turned into a bird. And today, when there is a full moon, you can hear Ayumama, owl, calling, crying for her lost husband, as she flies through the moonlit forest.

This is an Achuar story. The Achuar live in the northern Peruvian Amazon, on the border with Ecuador. And this is a story from the old times, the time of myths, when animals were people and shared a common language, and when the world they lived in, and the worlds below the waters and above the clouds, were joined. However this world slowly underwent a transformation to become the world as we know it today.

Different Amazonian indigenous people tell different stories about how Moon went from being a person upon the earth, to living in the sky; about how animals, birds and humans lost the ability to communicate with one another; about why birds were given beaks and feathers and fish scales and gills, but for many of these peoples, one thing holds true: this transformation is only partial. People, animals, birds, some plants, stars, hills and rocks, are believed to have souls, manifesting different aspects of the same essential being. Their different appearances now, fur, scales, feathers, are just like covers, enveloping a common essence. And their different voices, calls, grunts, songs, are just like different languages.

These boundaries of form and language that seem to separate people from beings
in the natural and spiritual world, can be crossed by certain people at certain times.
For example, young children,menstruating women and warriors are often believed to

have particularly vulnerable bodies. The special state they are in makes the

envelope of their physical body weak, almost malleable, and they have to have

special defenses to protect them from attack by malevolent spirits, and keep their

particular humanity intact.

For example, parents of recently born babies have to eat a special diet so as not
to attract spirits to the house, and babies faces are often painted to provide them
with extra protection. One indigenous people I have worked with, the Nahua,
believe that the souls of their small children are not yet strongly attached to their
bodies, and when they travel they sing songs upon leaving places to call the souls
of their children back to their bodies, and make sure they are not left behind when
they move on.

The beings with whom the Achuar share their world may be dangerous, but they
can also be a source of knowledge, power and things, and people’s desire for
these can make them cross the boundaries intentionally.

The most skilled travelers are shamans, who, through drinking or eating certain plants, and singing special songs, acquire the power to see and converse with the spirits of plants, animals and other beings in the forest. Their relationships with these other beings enable them to cure illnesses and protect their people. For example, some shamans have a seemingly unlimited knowledge of medicinal plants, however when a friend asked one shaman how he knew and learnt which plant would cure any given illness, he told her that he did not know. He said that if someone came to him ill, then he would take ayahuasca (a powerful hallucinogen, made from a vine which is used all over Amazon for its vision giving and healing qualities). Hewould then ask the spirit of the ayahuasca what was wrong with his patient, and the ayahuasca itself would tell him which plant to use, and indicate where exactly in the forest it could be found.

Another people, the Shipibo, live in the central Peruvian Amazon. Shipibo women also ask the ayahuasca vine for advice. They use it in combination with other plants, and certain spider webs, which they put in their eyes in order to get the special sight they need in order to design the intricate patterns they paint on their pots and embroider onto their cloths.

Simply put, what these examples show, is how the Achuar, and other Amazonian indigenous people accept the connectivity between people, things, natural resources and spirits, as normal. Unity is the common denominator. And the space in which all these interactions and meetings take place is territory.

For indigenous people, territory is much more than a physical space with geographical and ecological features and landmarks; its dimensions include space, but also include time. They can recall and remember their history when they visit places referred to in myths, or places that their parents and grandparents tell stories about. And there is one more dimension, that in which all these other interactions take place, where shamans talk to jaguars, mermaids cure morning sickness, and stars people teach us how to build houses.

However, the level of unity and connectivity, which they feel about territory is so deep, that it often makes no sense even to divide it up into these different dimensions. These are divisions, which I have made in order for it to make sense to me, and my questions to them about these issues often resulted in frustration as they make little sense to most Achuar. Only those with a Western education, or who have had to learn to explain their notions to politicians or anthropologists in the past, were able to grasp what I was trying to ask. They would explain to me the futility of my doing so, and of trying to explain their view of the world with terms and references rooted in such a

fundamentally different world-view. To really understand them, we have to accept
that this unity is a whole that cannot be divided. Everything is so integrated that
things do not make sense, and are of no use on their own.

Territory for the Achuar is a supermarket, a chemist, a history book, a DIY store, a
cathedral. But it is much more than the sum of its constitutive parts – remove any
one part, and the whole system collapses. Just like fragile ecosystems that depend
upon the contribution of the tiniest ant and the greatest tree to keep in balance, so
too is the balance inherent in their territory between all the different aspects.

This may be their view, but indigenous peoples across the world live within societies
and nations apparently founded upon very different beliefs and rules. Societies that
celebrate the cult of the individual and the triumph of reason and logic and rationality:
the reduction of the world to facts and numbers, cause and effect. The mainstream
world we live in does not merely fail to recognize integrity but it often tries to negate it.
And so when the two worlds meet, it is not surprising that conflicts and
misunderstandings arise.

For the last few years I have worked with indigenous people in Peru living with the
impacts of petrol exploitation, mining and other mega-projects within their territory.
These projects, and the visions of the Amazon they result from, belong to a world
view opposed to that of the Achuar. The Peruvian Government divides space, and
jungle, up into different layers: subsoil, forest, water etc. It then sells the rights of
use of these layers to different companies to exploit, even if indigenous people also
have land rights.

The implications of this clash of views can be seen if we examine how companies try to deal with issues arising out of this. Let us take the example of the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam, something that has happened, and is happening, all over Amazon basin. In one case the indigenous people living on the land where the dam was to be built were relocated about 200km South, so that it could be flooded.

Now within our world-view, this is a perfectly practical solution: like is replaced with like. But it fails completely to be adequate compensation for indigenous people as the equation by which “10km squared of forest = 10km squared of forest further South” should really be “10km of land where our people have lived for generations, where every stream and hill has a name, where our grandparents are buried, where the sacred waterfall is that we visit to which come from lakes where evil spirits lurk at nightfall… DOES NOT EQUAL 10km of empty, historyless, nameless, anonymous rainforest”.

International law makes some inroads and concessions for indigenous people. One important international convention, Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation, signed by the Peruvian Government, talks about how States and Governments must “respect the special importance for the cultures and spiritual values of the peoples concerned of the relationship with their territories or lands … which they occupy”. This “special relationship” with territory is the sum of all the parts I discussed previously, and countries around the world (but significantly not Canada, USA, Australia or the UK), have signed this agreement. Yet how do you legislate something or put it into practice, if the rest of the legislative and political system is missing a field of referents.

Laws contain ideals and ideas that we have a hard time putting into practice. If you try to explain the significance of territory for indigenous people to someone working for a petrol or mining company, or someone within the Peruvian Government, more often than not you will be met with utter confusion, misunderstanding and often condescension, and, frequently, hostility. It is as though people are afraid of what an acknowledgment of unity and integrity would do to their nice neat packaged world-view of individuals and free market liberalism.

In many cases the political systems within which indigenous peoples live do not merely lack the legislation needed to support indigenous land claims, but they go out of their way to try to deny indigenous peoples rights to land and territory. I am going to tell you about one of the most recent examples of this.

In 2008 Alan Garcia, the current President of Peru, started to pass a series of laws in relation to the free trade agreement that Peru was signing with the United States. Many of these laws had serious consequences for indigenous people, stripping them of land rights. The aim was to divide the jungle and communal territories up into blocks, individual parcels of land, so as to facilitate the entry of mining, petrol, agricultural and forestry companies. Such activities would have huge implications for indigenous cultures, and yet they were not even consulted about the laws.

Last year indigenous peoples across Peru protested against these laws, and to quell the strikes the Government set up a special committee in congress to analyze them. The committee ruled that the laws were unconstitutional. However the laws were not repealed and this year in April, indigenous peoples protested again with road and river blocks lasting almost two months across the Amazon.

On June 5^th the Government sent in paramilitary police to clear one of the roadblocks and “restore order to the country”, which they did by throwing tear gas and firing live rounds at protestors. The result was violence, which spread to other areas and by the end of the weekend there were 24 police dead, and at least 9 indigenous peoples and locals dead. The numbers for indigenous dead may be much higher as they have alleged that the police stopped them from recovering bodies that later ‘disappeared’.

The problems in Peru are not over yet. The Peruvian Government was forced to back down, repeal some of the laws, and start talks with indigenous peoples; yet given the level of political will at present, it is sad but easy to see this situation leading to more violence. However the Achuar I have spoken to know that, in the end, it will be successful, because they know that their fight is based upon vision, and this knowledge enables them to act without fear.

In a way the Peruvian Government’s continued negation of indigenous rights will perhaps speed their ultimate failure. It seemed to me that in moments of crisis, such as that which occurred in June, our values and beliefs and all that we take for granted, lose meaning; we lose external points of references, and have to look for answers internally. And, if we overcome our fear, our underlying humanity shines and people going about their ordinary lives, who may never have thought twice about indigenous peoples, get strength from becoming a part of this vision.

Look out for:

UK, October 9^th 7.35pm, Channel Four, Unreported World “Blood in the Jungle” a documentary made in July 2009 about the recent violence in the Peruvian Amazon, with visits to Achuar communities.

Lima, October 15^th – 25^th, Amo Amazonia is a festival aimed at celebrating the biological and cultural diversity of the Amazon, and so raises awareness within Peru and elsewhere about the issues facing indigenous peoples and their forest home. www.amoamazonia.org