Civilisation as a Shared Trance

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Let's start at the beginning. A legend says that Gautama Buddha spent eight years in the forest with the yogin teachers, and in his eight years in the forest, his task was to sit in the posture of zazen and rise through the levels of consciousness until, at the ninth level of consciousness, he was told he would be able to see the particles of the universe coming into existence and going out of existence. That was supposed to be the highest attainable level of consciousness. You could see reality itself. So, a kind of very simple atomic physics. Of course it wasn't.

We don't know exactly, but he left the forest. Maybe he was fed up. Maybe he was disappointed. We have to imagine why he left. And I don't believe there's any record to say what he attained, whether he got to the seventh or eighth or ninth level. But he left, so I like to suppose that he got tired of it, because the legend says he had a drink of milk from a girl who was looking after goats and realised that his body needed nourishment.

Then he sat down under a tree in the same posture, the yoga posture, and realised that this world, here and now, is reality. That means he gave up what he was doing before, what he was trying to get before, what he was believing before. Because unless we give up what we're trying to do, we can't sit peacefully in the present. Then, the story goes, he talked to his friends who had been studying with him, and gradually more people came to listen to what he was saying, and what he was saying must have been rather revolutionary. He was saying, There's nothing to attain.

The ultimate attainment is already here and now. That must have been a really revolutionary thing to say. In the sutras there are stories about groups of people who gathered around Gautama Buddha and listened to him, and they practised zazen with him, although it was called dhyāna in Sanskrit or jhāna in Pali. But it seems that the first groups, the first of what we call sangha, lived in the forest. There were cities in India in those days. They were very simple, small cities, but they chose to live in the forest.

Then, as this practice and this teaching became something which we now call Buddhism and spread, we're not quite sure exactly where it went first: from northern India down to southern India and then to other places. But the people who were studying always kept apart from society. If we go through the years after Gautama Buddha's teaching and his death and all that history, we find that people who were practising those practices and that teaching always lived apart from society. And the places they built to live in became known as Buddhist temples.

Now we're practising the practice and studying the teachings, which we hope may be the same as Gautama Buddha's, 2,000 years later. But to do it, we come away from society. So I'd like to talk about why it's necessary to come away from society. Dogen — you all know I've studied him for a long time, and some of you have studied him — said it's necessary to leave family life, necessary to leave home, shukke in Japanese. Why is it necessary? Everybody's been doing it, and we're doing it now. So why is it necessary, or why is it useful?

I'd like to give you an explanation. It's my explanation. When we live in society, society, or civilisation, is what human beings have put together from their minds. So the whole of society and the whole of civilisation is a creation of the human mind. Of course, after creating something in our mind, we then make it. That's called design. You think something, then you make it — everything around us.

Tables, that thing, tissues, iPhones: it's all the result of humans' ability to think and then to create what they thought. Fantastic. It's amazing that our nearest relative may be the chimpanzee, or a dog or a cat, and what can they do? Compared with humans, they can't do anything. A chimpanzee can use a stick to poke into the hole in the tree. A dog can pick up the newspaper and bring it to you.

And we can discuss the latest app on the iPhone or whether these tissues are better than thicker ones or thinner ones. It's ridiculous how developed we are. However, that fantastic ability of human beings, our fantastic ability to create this civilisation we live in, has two sides. One is the fantastic side. The other side is that we live in a kind of dream, which is also a kind of prison. And that dream or prison is the human condition. I'm using noises that I make from my throat, and you are understanding me. I mean, in your brain you are making understandings and ideas.

But all these tools that human beings have developed have the ability to trap us in a kind of dream. I say dream. Another nice word is trance. I don't know if you have the word trance in Czech.

Boris: Yes.

Mike: We live in a trance. In that trance, we share ideas, beliefs. For instance, if I say to the tree, What is a bank? the tree doesn't answer me. If I say to you, What is a bank? you know what a bank is: a place where you put money. What's money? It's pieces of paper and pieces of metal. Okay, paper and metal. So what's it for? We can use it. It has great power. So where does that power come from? The power comes from our minds. So this powerful civilisation that we create from our minds is getting more powerful.

At the present time it's getting a bit crazily powerful. We are so influenced by the concepts, ideas and beliefs that are in society. I think that was exactly the same in Gautama Buddha's time, but society was different, the ideas were different, the beliefs were different. Okay, great. What's the problem? We can just live with our tissues, iPhones, cars, coffee. In the teachings that I studied, the Zen master Dogen talks about pursuing the truth, trying to find out what is true or real. But to find out what is true or real, we have to escape from this dream or trance.

But if we stay in society, the power of society, of the ideas and the beliefs, is so strong that we can't see what the real situation is. So it's necessary to come away. We experience this quite often. For instance, if you have a problem in a relationship, afterwards you can look from outside and you can see what happened. Or if you're having a lot of stress at work and you go away from work and you look back, you can see more clearly. So when we leave something, we have the ability to see what it is we left.

I left British society in 1977 and went to live among alien people from another planet. That's what it felt like for a long time. Strange little people, you know. But the one fantastic thing was that I could see what the country I came from was, and what the culture was. So I could see myself: a tall Englishman, big nose, long neck, you know, very arrogant. When we stay in something, we can't see. When we come out, if we want to, we can see more clearly.

The reason why sesshin — in medieval times living in the temple, in Gautama Buddha's time living in the forest — was so helpful is that it may be the simplest way to find out what's going on. When we're immersed in our family, our jobs, our relationships, we can't see. We get pulled this way, pulled that way. We get disturbed. We get tired. We get anxious. We can't see what's going on. Dogen said that you have to leave family life. So for him it was necessary to live outside society permanently. No family.

No visiting his cousins or uncle, no going to a coffee shop with his aunt or his nephew or whatever, but staying in this isolated temple with lots of other people who did the same. That's one way to do it. But we don't need to do that these days, because we have the ability to free ourselves. We have free time. We can live in society, but come out sometimes. And only when we come out can we see what's happening, where we came from. What's happening at the moment in society is a bit crazy.

Personally, I think that society is a little bit mad as a whole, because it's based on beliefs which don't work, for instance constant growth.

Boris: Constant growth.

Mike: Constant expansion.

Boris: Sustainable growth.

Mike: It should be, yes. We believe it should be.

Robert: It should be, yes.

Mike: Yes.

Robert: Almost, yes.

Mike: Yeah.

Robert: Until the death of the universe.

Mike: Yeah.

Robert: But this is quite a long time.

Mike: Yes, yes.

Robert: Sorry. I just can't.

Mike: No, it's okay. What's the most powerful value in the world? Maybe money?

Participant: Power.

Mike: Yeah. How do you get power? Usually with money. You can say power, yes, but power comes from money — usually, not always. But in our normal life, money. And everybody can see that money has stability. It's like hot air. It rises up like this. So the people down here don't have much, and the people up here have a lot. I'm not criticising, but this seems to be the way our society works now. We have lots of people trying to understand the economy, society and so on. We have the ability to share our opinions on our phones or computers.

And to spread memes of belief. You know what a meme is? A meme? It's like a little abstract virus: a thought which is a virus.

So society is how it is. The teachings of Buddha were not related to changing society, but to seeing what reality is, seeing the truth. And the truth of reality may be that most of the time we live in a trance, which is shared with all of us. But the teachings of the Buddha say that if we practise this very simple practice, which we call zazen, we step outside of the trance. Of course we don't. Sometimes, even in zazen, we're sitting like this, our eyes are closed and we're thinking about next week. So the trance is still there. But sometimes we are just sitting.

At the times when we are just sitting — I don't mean sitting with something happening inside, or feeling some powerful force, but just sitting — the floor in front is the floor in front. The other people are the other people. The air is the air. Nothing special. In that state, we've stepped outside the trance of civilisation, which is an amazing achievement, even if it only happens for one minute during our zazen, or even during the weekend. But usually we find that we're back in our trance again, and then we come out of it, then we go back in, then we come out.

But in this process of going back in and coming out, we notice: I see. So I live here most of the time. When we're here, we get a feeling: I see, I'm going into this dream and this trance. That's where I live. And that's called finding the truth. This is why Dogen writes that when we sit in zazen, whoever it is, whether they're an expert or a beginner, the activity that happens in zazen shows us the truth. And to see the truth is to be enlightened. So he says everybody who practises zazen is enlightened. Our difficulty is that the word enlightened is part of the trance now, because people believe that it means something special. Language is part of our trance, so we step out of language. Thinking is part of our trance, so we step out of thinking. Imagining is part of our trance, so we step outside of imagining. So Dogen writes: drop off all our thoughts, feelings, images in our minds and so on. Then what we see is the real situation in which we live. And then we go back to that situation, because that's the only place human beings can live. We can't live in reality.

We can't live in the world of mesons and neutrons and muons; we have to live in this dream that we've created. That's it.

Boris: What exactly do you mean, we can't live in reality? Because if you go out of the trance... Dogen maybe was still, most of the time, not involved in the trance.

Mike: I don't know. I don't think so.

Boris: You don't know.

Mike: No.

Boris: Okay, that's okay. It's not impossible.

Mike: Impossible. To realise the truth is not to get out of the trance and live somewhere else, in nirvana. That's not it. The truth is to realise that we live here, from here, and to be able to move between the two.

Pavel: Still the moment.

Mike: Yes, and this is why Nagarjuna wrote that daily life — by daily life he means the trance in which we live, the dream in which we live — and nirvana, which is the place where there are no words, no concepts, no beliefs, no society, no civilisation, are the same. He says they're exactly the same. For those of you who know the Heart Sutra: the Heart Sutra says the same thing in a different metaphor. So people want to escape from one thing and find this wonderful other thing, but that's an illusion. People who say you can leave the normal world and become a perfect enlightened being are deluded.

But if you can notice how stupid and deluded we are, and must be because we're human, that's enlightenment.

Robert: Mike, I have a question about feeling good. I think many people in society even realise that money is just a convenience, and they accept other things in society because they want to feel good. Money and the customs of society are practical, a practical way, with some downsides. And honestly, if I look at myself, I also think I practise zazen because I want to feel good. Yes, I know it's not about that, but if I'm honest with myself, it's probably there at the bottom. As far as I can see, this concept of what's good, or of feeling good, evolves a bit with time. I don't know, but it seems to me that this feeling good is like the motor of most of us.

Mike: Yes, you're right. Most people who study the teachings of Buddha have reasons like: I want to feel good, I want to be better, I want to join a club, I want to be in a theatre. These are all the reasons. Most people who study the Buddhist teachings have those reasons. But a few people want to know what it's all about. What is life about? What is the truth? But only a few. That's why there are lots of big, huge groups of Buddhists who like to dress up as Tibetans or Japanese or whatever. Great, you know, come, come.

We make a cafe here, a Buddhist cafe, and over there we can have a bookshop and so on. Whoa, great. But ‘people who are pursuing the truth’ is what Dogen writes. A strange phrase. People who are pursuing the truth are driven by something different. And if you're driven by something different, that's nice. If you practise zazen, you can find a motivation or a drive which is something different from feeling good. I mean, to feel good is, you know, America's biggest hope for everybody.

To feel good, to feel right, to feel strong, to feel American. Of course people want to. But it's not about that. The teachings of the Buddha were not about that.

Participant: It's true that in doing zazen the need to feel good comes and goes like everything else. It's just something which happens and then ends, and then comes again, like everything else.

Mike: If you feel good, that's great. But it's not necessary to have the need to feel good or the intention to feel good. What do you think?

Participant: How do you think it will be with this, let's say, leaving society? Because it seems to me that society is more and more complicated, like the social networks.

Mike: Yes.

Participant: Maybe in future it will be even more difficult for most people to kind of leave the...

Mike: Yes. Leave the machine.

Participant: Leave the machine, yes.

Mike: Yeah. And the machine is an emergent property of all of us. All the people make up society, but society has its own character, and it wants to keep you. It doesn't want you to leave even for a little while.

Participant: Like family.

Mike: Family, job, everything. If you leave for a little while, it pulls you back. That's an emergent property of this, what we call society. And it has its own targets or aspirations. I'm not judging. I'm not saying it's bad. Obviously there are some bad things about society. There are some good things about it, very good things, and some things we need. Work, for example, is very fulfilling. To work, to do some job and create something, and that something is useful and people enjoy it, is a wonderful feeling. So it's not about judging: this is good, this is bad. It's about seeing.

How things are. If you don't want to see how things are, fine. If you do want to see how things are, then it's a very difficult thing to do. But to do it, it's necessary to take yourself out — not completely, but to look from the outside. Then you can go back. In the ancient sutras there's a description of a bodhisattva who leaves society to attain enlightenment, but then doesn't attain enlightenment and goes back into society to help society, so that society can attain enlightenment before the bodhisattva. So that ancient metaphor is something about leaving, understanding or realising, and then going back.

Boris: Can I ask about the question of time? Because we are still doing this coming in and coming out of sesshins, for example: one sesshin, ten sesshins, a hundred sesshins. What about time? Is the situation still the same situation, with nothing changed? Is there only the coming out and coming in, or is something changing in our situation, in my life or something? Does something happen? No?

Mike: It's impossible to answer this question in general. What about you?

Boris: Okay.

Mike: The other thing is, time is also part of the dream, the trance. Time, as we understand it, does not exist in the way we understand it.

Boris: I mean, in my life, coming in and coming out.

Mike: Yes, so your life is only a story.

Boris: Okay.

Mike: The story is called Boris. Where is Boris last year? Doesn't exist. Where is Boris next year? Doesn't exist. Where is Boris? Here. This is Boris. This is the only Boris. There is no other Boris. But we create and share a belief in a story: ‘Oh yes, Boris, I know, he lives in Bratislava.’

Boris: Yes, but how do we understand each other if we don't create the story?

Mike: Yes, we have to create.

Boris: There's no way to understand each other.

Mike: I'm not criticising.

Boris: Okay.

Mike: We need the story. We can only live in the story. But the story is only a story. But the story is so powerful that we hold on to it. If we are unsure, we like to make our story stronger: ‘I'll show you some photos of when I went on holiday last year.’ This is reinforcing. Or: ‘I've done lots of sessions over the years, and I lived in Japan’ — this is reinforcing my story. Why am I reinforcing my story? Because without a story, who am I? Who am I?

So it's scary not to have a story. And our story goes into the future. It includes our dreams and our hopes. If we don't have any dreams or hopes, it feels terrible. So it's not about getting rid of the story, but about accepting the story. This is what we do. A story called Boris, a story called Pavel.

Boris: And you can make your story consciously.

Mike: We can change our story. Nobody knows. This is called lying. We can be honest and tell people our story honestly. It may still be wrong, because our memory is so poor. Anybody who lives with a partner knows: ‘Three weeks ago we went—’ ‘No, we didn't. That was four weeks ago.’ ‘No, it was three weeks ago.’ Memories... my memory.

Boris: Doing good, not doing wrong, no? It's still a rule, and if you create something by lying or by a story...

Mike: Doing good, not doing wrong is another part of the story, another part of the trance. In reality, there's nothing good or bad or right or wrong. There are just things that happen. There are events that happen. Event is a nice English word, because it doesn't talk about things, just an event. An event happens, and then another event happens. The event might be caused by my behaviour, which I say is wrong or right, but that's only my belief.

Boris: Okay, but in your personal situation you still decide by something to go this way or that way, no? It's not that you are thinking it's a story and objective.

Mike: Yeah.

Boris: You somehow decide.

Mike: Yeah. How do we decide? When I was small, people told me: think before you act. So I believed that we have to think, and when we think, we can think what we're going to do next, and then we can do it. Think before you act. And I think that's a common belief, that we think and then we act. But there are several neuroscientists who have made nice documentaries showing that this is not true. Pause for Robert.

Boris: Spider story.

Robert: The spider story.

Mike: Yeah, the spider is tomorrow, Robert. Don't worry.

Robert: The squirrel.

Mike: The squirrel, yes.

Boris: Ralph the squirrel.

Mike: Tomorrow, tomorrow. We can't do it all at once.

Participant: So what are other people, from this point of view? Okay, we communicate a few stories and conventions and I don't know what. But what are other people really, for us? I mean...

Mike: They are us.

Participant: They kind of are?

Mike: I only know myself through other people. There are many ways to talk about other people, but one important thing for me is that other people show me myself. It's impossible to be alone. We can imagine being alone, but where would that be? Where is our imagination? Because it's difficult to find anywhere you can be alone; there's always nature or air or wood. So we're always with other people or other physical things, and they all teach us. They teach us if we notice that they're teaching us. Dogs, cats, people, children, partners — they all teach us something. What do they teach us?

It's all part of the trance. This is a sesshin we went on last week in Humpolec. This story is Štepán, and here the story is Roman. That story is Pavlína. I don't know her story. I know his story.

Robert: Yes, I take a lot of photos, so I can remember what is me.

Mike: Yes.

Robert: But I realise I really forget, and then I look back two years with the photos, and I remember what is on the photos. Yes, that's my history.

Mike: Yes, and that's you, and you feel secure. And sometimes, if we look back, we feel, ‘Oh, hmm, I'm okay.’ Or (laughter) we look back and we feel, ‘Oh.’ So we record our stories. People with cameras everywhere — it's incredible. If you go to a tourist place, you just see people with little black things. (laughter)

Boris: And I went to the Tibetan sesshins, four or five years, and it was forbidden to take photos. Only one photo of the whole group afterwards, one photo.

Mike: Okay.

Boris: Finished.

Mike: Okay.

Boris: It was so interesting.

Mike: Wow.

Boris: Okay, he was not saying it was forbidden, but it was a common feeling,

Mike: Don't do it.

Boris: a common rule, or I don't know.

Mike: Well, it's nice to have photos.

Boris: I mean, it's okay, but somehow we switch to reality now, to making, to image-making.

Mike: Well, maybe some people: ‘I lost my camera. All my photos have gone.’ You know, stress. They feel like somebody's died.

Participant: You need to have online backup, instant backup. Instantaneous.

Mike: So society has its own character. It wants to preserve everything. This is a big machine called society, which is you and me, but it has its own character. It's like a big living being. And it's: okay, we mustn't lose anything. We mustn't lose any part of the story.

Participant: There will be cameras everywhere in the future.

Mike: Cameras everywhere. Yes.

Participant: Everything will be backed up online to the cloud, so it won't be possible to lose the camera.

Mike: No. Everything will be clear. Knowledge will be complete.

Participant: Everyone will be happy.

Mike: Everyone will be safe.

Participant: It's becoming more complex, more complicated quite quickly, if you, for example, compare with your childhood, or if you say 200 years ago, then it's incredibly...

Mike: I grew up in the 1950s — the 1940s, 1950s — and it was like a different world. The trance became so much stronger.

Boris: The first clock put up in some public place was in 1840-something, in Köln, and it changed the life of people completely, because they had to go to work at eight and work till four and so on. Before, there was no time like this. It was time like sun or no sun. So it's not such a long time. 1840.

Mike: That's right.

Participant: That was about eight times a day.

Mike: So we like to go to societies which are not so developed, like undeveloped nature or people who live in the forest.

Participant: You mean the Czech Republic?

Mike: And we look at them, and they remind us of a more free place. So lots of tourists go to the Amazon, okay, and they see native people in small boats like this, and it reminds them.

Participant: Having iPhones in their pockets,

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Boris: making videos of this,

Participant: because most of them also have them now.

Mike: They can't resist the trance. I'm sorry to use the word trance so much, but I love it. It's a perfect description for me. Dogen says: a dream. He writes a chapter, ‘A dream within a dream’, in—

Boris: Shobogenzo?

Mike: Shobogenzo, yeah.

Boris: What's the name of the chapter?

Mike: Muchu-setsumu. Mu is dream. Chu is inside.

Boris: And mu is also emptiness.

Mike: It's a different mu.

Boris: A different mu.

Mike: Yes, a different character.

Boris: Cow, like moo.

Mike: Not cows. That's a joke.

Boris: A cow might make moo.

Mike: Yes, yes. So Dogen uses mu, but I found the word trance a few years ago, studying a bit about hypnotherapy, which I didn't understand, and I thought it's a very nice word. It describes being in a state which traps us. And we're always in a trance. You fall in love — that's in it. You can't see anything. When you fall in love, you can't even see the person you fell in love with properly. That happens later. Oh. Oh. We go to a new job; we're in a trance for a bit, then we come out. So I love the word. It's a very good description.

What's the word in Czech?

Participant: Trance.

Mike: Great. I'm not criticising society. Well, of course there is some. It's getting more complicated, and people are more stressed and everything, and it's faster and faster. Even Pavel rings the bell faster than he used to.

Pavel: Really?

Mike: Yeah.

Pavel: Okay.

Mike: Ding, ding, ding.

Pavel: Maybe we sit faster.

Mike: Maybe. Ding, ding, ding. It may be true.

I'm fortunate that, stupidly, I've been practising zazen for a very long time, and slowly I moved outside of normal society. Not from my own decisions: I don't live in a family. Not from my own decision, I don't have to go to work. I don't live in my own country. It happened to me; I didn't plan it. So fortunately it's easy for me, or easier for me, to live on the edges, which makes it easier to see. But for you, as younger people with families, jobs, futures and so on, it's more difficult. It's true, it's more difficult, but it's not impossible.

And if you practise dhyāna, zazen, every day, that will steer your life in a direction that maybe you didn't expect.

Boris: It's not the usual direction. Steer?

Mike: Steer. Guide. Steer the car.

Boris: It's stuck now.

Mike: Stop now. Okay. There's no other time we can stop.