CD#01 Connecting, we create communities

Can a newsletter help us develop a diversity of overlapping communities?

JULY 2020

Can a newsletter help us develop a diversity of overlapping communities?

By Ramsey Margolis • Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand (The Tuwhiri Project) and
Brad Parks • Santa Barbara, California, USA (Sati Sangha)

Humanity is facing a swathe of existential crises. Developing resilient communities is now such an important aspect of a creative dharma practice that it’s been suggested we reverse the order of ‘the three jewels’. When the last comes first we have: community, the teachings, and the example set by Gotama, the historical Buddha.

Our practice communities may be unable to meet safely in person for some time. But our desire to be with each other, to share, to laugh, to dream, to awaken has survived, with many of us transitioning successfully to connecting online. There is no ‘right way’ to do this; our diverse communities will develop in creative ways, and we need to cultivate these relationships with the utmost respect for our differences.

Our interest is in the intersection of the arts and meditation practice, in how creativity and awareness cross-pollinate, how we build democratic communities which honour our individual expressions.

Rather than create a website, we chose a newsletter as the means to introduce and discuss the notion of a ‘creative dharma’ because experience shows that when a newsletter arrives in our Inbox on the last day of the month, it can be something we look forward to and engage with.

A newsletter won’t be all things to all people, but it does offer a wealth of potential for those who choose to engage with it. For this newsletter to help generate a community – actually, a diversity of overlapping communities – what would make it inspiring and useful to you? We offer the ground. You provide the seeds, the nutrients, the sun and water necessary for a vibrant ecology.

We are grateful for your responses to the pilot issue, all of them constructive. Taking to heart what each of you found the time to write, we particularly welcomed the more critical observations.

Wherever you are in the world, we invite you to take part in this conversation, either in an email to the editors or in the more public way of commenting on the newsletter’s website. Being new to Substack (the platform through which this newsletter goes out), we didn’t get this right in the pilot issue, so here’s how it works:

To take part in the conversation

• CLICK or PRESS on the ‘Leave a comment’ button and your message will be posted as a comment to this issue of the newsletter; you can also leave a comment on the web page for this newsletter here:
  https://creativedharma.substack.com

• EMAIL newsletter@creativedharma.org, or reply to this email and what you send will be seen only by the editors ⁂

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ART & DHARMA

Free form dance as a lockdown practice

By Lorna Edwards • Llanbradach, Wales (Cardiff Secular Dharma Study Group)

On reflection, I’ve been free form dancing since the age of ten on the farm in North Wales where I lived at the time. We were given a second hand record player and a Tchaikovsky record, and I started to dance.

In September 2019, I suggested a free form dance group to three friends, and we became a team of four. We hired a room in our South Wales village community centre and held two live sessions before Covid-19 appeared. Since then, we’ve been meeting weekly via Zoom.

The four of us each choose three tracks to produce a Spotify playlist with 12 tracks, and share it with ten people in and around the village. Encompassing a wide range of music, we’ll all dance at home on our own – there’s no choreography, dance leader, planned steps or moves – just allowing our bodies to respond to the music.

Having danced in our own spaces for an hour on a Saturday morning, we join up for a half hour share on Zoom. During a recent share, we focused on Black Lives Matter and the need to acknowledge and work with our unconscious racism.

We end with a reading and a short sit. The poem ‘Punnika the slave’ from The first free women, poems of the early Buddhist nuns by Matty Weingast (Shambhala, 2020) is an example of a reading.

¶ Lorna Edwards dancing amid the waves

Free form dance offers a creative way to have an embodied practice. I often wonder at the lack of any movement, other than walking, during meditation sessions and retreats. Rick Hanson in Neurodharma (2020) writes of a spectrum of temperaments:

At one end … there are focused and cautious ‘turtles’, and at the other are distractable and spirited ‘jackrabbits’ [hares], with lots of tweeners in the middle.

As a ‘jackrabbit’, free form dance offers a way to move mindfully and become grounded in the dance. If you too have a practice like this, whether on your own or with others, do please leave a comment and let us all know about it. ⁂

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‘We don’t know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many … shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil, which is called the present day; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life – if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living [being] – that is, a [being] who grows.’

– Karel Capek, from The Gardener’s Year (1929); thanks to Jenny Taylor (Alice Springs, Australia) for sharing this

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¶ An orchid, spotted while walking in a wood (photo Lorna Edwards)

BLACK LIVES MATTER

A statement from the editors

Those of us involved in Creative Dharma, a newsletter declare our solidarity with the struggle against unjust and murderous actions inflicted upon black and indigenous communities and other people of colour.

Can we respond to prejudice – institutionalised racism, the violence of mass incarceration and economic disparity, systemic exclusion in housing, health care and employment – as a tragically unskilful response to the difficulties we all face? This is no small task.

In our humble way, we invite each of you to share your perspective on these matters – central to our history and the present unstable moment – so that our understanding of the suffering of others and our ability to respond appropriately can expand and deepen.

On a practical level, we intend to encourage communities of practitioners to work creatively toward acknowledging and reversing exclusion and unfairness wherever they arise. ⁂

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CO-OPS, JAZZ, AND CREATIVE DHARMA

Going from rules to living with care

By Ramsey Margolis

In my last full-time job I worked for New Zealand’s cooperatives as an advocate, a lobbyist. During these seven years, I was approached by many people wanting to know whether a cooperative might be the right model for what they’re intending to create, and what makes a co-op different from other forms of enterprise.

I’d offer a number of definitions of a cooperative, go through the five cooperative values, and explain the seven co-op principles. Every time, people struggled with this. There was, they’d tell me, something different about their particular project which meant that the information I’d given them wasn’t that useful.

‘What are your members wanting from their co-op?’ was my response. Working backwards from their goals, we’d see where co-op values and principles could be useful.

What does this have to do with dharma practice? Well, consider the lists many of us as practitioners have tried to incorporate into our lives. Here are a few:

• the three jewels or refuges

• the three poisons

• the four immeasurables

• the four noble truths

• the four foundations of mindfulness

• the five aggregates

• the five hindrances

• the five precepts (or eight perhaps, or could it be ten … or 227 for men but 311 for women?)

• the six sense spheres

• the noble eightfold path

• the twelvefold chain of dependent origination … and so on.

When we’re new to the dharma it can be comforting, necessary even, to follow a set of prescribed rules. We often find, though, that trying to put these rules into practice can be challenging. As our practice matures, can we establish a more useful approach, a more creative approach in which we set aside sets of rules and train ourselves to respond to each situation as it arises? Can we leave the raft on the riverbank once it has served its purpose of carrying us across the water?

How does someone proceed on this basis? You can sit, establish a meditation practice. Recollect what happened while you were sitting, still and quiet, and reflect on your practice, journaling what you can recall in your own words. Get to know yourself, from the inside out, and as your practice deepens and an understanding of how you’d like to be and behave in the world develops, you may find it easier to discern which aspects of the wisdom of previous generations make sense in your life, today. Make the teachings your own.

Let’s look at this in the art of making music. At first, we depend on the notation as our guide. Learning to play an instrument or to sing entails getting to know the language of music, its rules, and the subtleties of an instrument. By means of that constraint we discover in a new way how our hands, our voice, our posture and our breath work together. Synchronising our movements and responses with others seems to require that we’re ‘all on the same page’ (sorry, couldn’t resist that). We ‘play’ together, in the truest sense.

As our confidence with an instrument or our voice grows, we begin to bring some creativity into our playing, moving beyond the printed page, introducing a creative touch to a piece of music. Eventually, we might let go of fully notated music and collaborate with others within a looser musical structure, such as jazz. We take in a tune and embody its movements and nuances in our own way.

If we’re scared of getting it wrong, we’re more likely to keep to the straight and narrow. We constrain our natural talent out of fear of making a mistake. But what is a mistake in music? By talking through examples with his jazz quartet, vibraphonist Stefon Harris offers us a profound observation: many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don’t respond to them appropriately, with such qualities as curiosity, trust, confidence and close attention.

ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand

What exactly are you wanting from your meditation practice? What’s going to be the end result of your art? With what Stefon has to say in mind, how might we be more responsive in our practice? ⁂

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho

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CREATIVITY IN MEDITATION, CREATIVITY IN THE DHARMA

This is the second in a series on creative dharma and its connection with the creative arts

Four fundamental elements of a creative dharma practice

By Ramsey Margolis • Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand (The Tuwhiri Project) and
Brad Parks • Santa Barbara, California, USA (Sati Sangha)

In the pilot issue of this newsletter we asked whether there have been additions to and deletions from the Buddhist canon over the centuries. In other words, has the practice of ‘creative interpretation’ entered the transmission of these teachings? Our answer is yes, most definitely. The dharma is a work in progress and each of us needs to participate in this vital, creative, transformative process.

Stephen Batchelor suggests a way of approaching this disputed terrain: what do we find in all the early teachings that is wholly original and doesn’t replicate other teachings of their time? Which of the observations, reflections, guidance and instructions attributed to Gotama are most likely to have been his unique contribution, and are they relevant today? In other words, what did Gotama create using the material of his own personal experience?

A close examination of the historical record suggests that there are four basic elements which are not found in any other tradition of that period and place, a time rich with philosophical discussion and multiple approaches to the practice of meditation.

Firstly, the principle of contingency, often translated into English as dependent origination, or conditioned arising. This is the fluid, unfolding, interconnected nature of life. So when Gotama was using words like karma, he was not referring to past and future lives or a simple, mechanical process of cause and effect, but rather to the complex, dynamic interconnectedness of all things through time and space. One fundamental condition of human experience, in the midst of all other conditions, is our own creative engagement with the situation in which we find ourselves.

Secondly, what have been institutionalised in English translation as The Four Noble Truths – the familiar initial capital letters reminding us of the supposed authority of this proposition – are actually, in a more practical and immediately available sense, the practice of four tasks. We are called to act rather than speculate.

This perspective has been developed by Stephen Batchelor, in part using the writings of Ñāṅavīra Thera (Harold Musson). It suggests that we engage with the ethical foundation of our practice, focusing on our actions and their outcomes in our shared world, in contrast to the more elusive efforts of ‘seeing things as they really are’, somehow divorced from our humanity. While we aim to see clearly and deeply, we are embodied beings, embedded in a world of others.

Actually, there are sound reasons for suggesting these shouldn’t be considered ‘noble truths’ at all, in the sense of formulas that we need to believe. It’s widely acknowledged that when ariya sacca was translated into English in the 19th century as ‘Noble Truths’, this rendering is back-to-front. A translation that’s closer to the Pali would be ‘truths of the noble ones’.

The inference here is that if someone were to aspire to be a noble person, then these are truths they would commit to in their everyday life. Everyday life, though, consists of choices, interactions, uncertainties, experiments and risks; by comparison, the idea of finally ‘discovering the Truth’ is somewhat arid.

Taking this one step further. the Cambridge academic K.R. Norman argues that ariya sacca was not in the original discourse. On the basis of linguistic analysis, he proposes that it’s a later addition. He puts forward no suggestion, though, as to what noun this phrase may have replaced.

From a careful reading of what is considered to be Gotama’s first discourse, the one known as ‘The first turning of the wheel’, it’s clear that we are directed to the dimension of human intent and action rather than the territory of speculative assertion. Each of these four tasks, we see in the text, is to be ‘recognised, performed and accomplished with utmost urgency and care’.

It’s not at all clear how anyone might ‘perform or accomplish’ a truth. Tasks, on the other hand, demand our full attention and a commitment to proceed, despite an unknown future.

With his dry wit, the Sydney secular insight meditation teacher and Tuwhiri editorial board member, Winton Higgins, proposes, that conventional Buddhism has downgraded these tasks to ‘truths’. Our responsibility is to respond to what is before us, not shroud it in dogma.

So, in light of this new (and old) perspective, when we recast these four ‘truths’ as tasks, do they provide a workable context for creative dharma practice?

–> Task # 1
Is to embrace the difficult and unavoidable aspects of the human condition, through a willingness to be with the full spectrum of our own physical, mental and emotional experience. We sit in meditation, where we embrace the difficult and unavoidable aspects of the human condition – for example, sickness, old age and death. And, as in any heartfelt embrace, we do so with warmth, attention, kindness, curiosity, and the intent to do no harm to ourselves or others. This is a creative act.

–> Task # 2
Is to let our reactivity be. This includes our deeply conditioned habits in the face of the urgency to survive at all costs, responding to the world as if a sabre-toothed tiger is crouching, about to pounce. Or, perhaps, when a harsh conflict with friend, family member or spouse seems to threaten our very existence and we sink into anger, fear or despair. In our practice, we develop a capacity to pause, reflect, observe, and reduce the pressures that fuel our unskillful habits and views. Rather than avoid or repress these elements of our experience, we learn instead to restrain their compulsive expression by allowing them to be, and seeing how the fires that feed them can cool of their own accord.

–> Task # 3
Is to stop … and experience the calm and clarity of spaciousness. One practitioner in a weekly meeting described these as her ‘stillness moments’. We develop the ability to appreciate the moments that offer a refreshing absence of passion, aggression and ignorance, while at the same time introducing us to the quiet joy of friendliness, compassion or equanimity. We can often feel these qualities in our very flesh and bones, sometimes when we least expect it.

–> Task # 4
Is to continually refine our working assumptions and act with care in each situation, cultivating creative engagement as our way of being in the world – a way in which our humanity can flourish in each of its aspects. Now we choose to walk the eightfold path as the path of transformation, bringing our clearest commitment to developing the full range of our human capacities: from the way we see things, think about them, speak, work, survive, apply ourselves, pay attention and focus our minds. These are the categories of the eightfold path expressed in terms we can immediately understand and practise. Some of these challenges are encountered as we sit in meditation, but many we practise in the world, in our personal relationships, in the natural environment and in our most intimate and public encounters.

A positive feedback loop, these four tasks, and their mutual reciprocity, are the second totally originally idea taught by Gotama. They’re not found anywhere else in the India of that period.

Thirdly, we have the emphasis on self-reliance, on becoming responsible for ourselves. The Pali word aparapaccaya can be translated as ‘becoming independent of others in the teachings’. This suggests that if we do find a teacher, we don’t sacrifice our critical intelligence. Although we are each interdependent in our very being, we are called upon to develop our innate sense of ethical agency.

Gotama talked of finding a middle way between luxury and penury; here we’re looking for a middle way between solitude and dependence. Personal strength and self-confidence can be built on a foundation of receptivity and humility, but not without work. It is work we do, in some sense, alone, and that work is creative.

Fourthly, the cultivation of mindful awareness – being fully present to what is taking place, right now – a fully embodied presence, embedded in the many worlds we encounter both in meditation and daily life. This is not a vague awareness of some theoretical ‘now’, but a dynamic connection to the whole range of movement, silence, stillness, noise, discovery and surprise which our experience offers.

This introduction to the mindful cultivation of awareness was a novel and unique suggestion. Instead of seeking solace from the world by retreating into the mind, we are challenged to become aware of this world, and everything in it, both within us and outside us.

These, Batchelor suggests, are four totally original ideas that are found in the early teachings. When considered together, could they underpin a coherent and creative practice? Actually, yes, if we have the courage and commitment to live fully.

So while we love the myth, the romance, the mythology found in the early teachings, we recognise myth as myth, and history as history. These four elements underpin, for us, a creative dharma practice in the complex world in which we find ourselves today.

What’s missing in this approach? For a start, rules or precepts. In next month’s Creative Dharma, a newsletter we’ll compare rule-based ethics (aka morality) with situational ethics, and situate this contrast within a creative approach to dharma practise. ⁂

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You may wish to recommend that they subscribe.

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We are not what we say, nor what we believe, nor how we vote (or don’t), but what we give our time to. We are what we do.

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Reflective meditation – a creative practice

By Bill Cooper • Bellevue, Washington, USA (meditationinbellevue.com)

One of the unique aspects of practising reflective meditation is that the instructions are minimal, and they tend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, no-one is prescribing a behaviour, such as following the breath, and stating that as a result, ‘you will have the following kind of experience – usually peaceful’.

¶ Bird in car mirror (photo Christian Stefanescu, Flickr)

A reflective meditation approach is more like this: ‘practise sitting, and after a time you may want to follow your breath, and you will probably have a variety of experiences’. The difference is significant, and I think one that can help improve our experience of meditation practice.

The most significant aspect for me is that in reflective meditation the authority of one’s experience is the meditator, not the teacher or the book we’re reading. This makes sense since the meditator is the one who is having the experience. Many of us have been taught that certain kinds of experience – such as wandering thoughts or drowsiness when meditating – are wrong, so when they do occur we try to change them. In essence, we are trying to change something that probably won’t change – it’s in the nature of the mind to wander.

So when we meditate using prescriptive instructions, we may feel ‘less than’, because we’re not having the experience we’re ‘supposed to have’. And if we’re in a group, all we have to do is look around at the others who are sitting perfectly still – they must be experiencing bliss! And we know that we certainly aren’t having that experience. We’re falling short again.

Reflective meditation addresses these issues, offering us a gentler, more creative way to meditate. ⁂

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And then the day came when the risk to remain tight, in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom – Lassie Benton

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LETTERS

I

Starting a newsletter is an energetic surprise for me. Since a secular dharma came my way, I’m looking for any form of platform to exchange. Happy to find your initiative next to Bodhi College. It’s rather hard to find a ‘live’ sangha, even around Amsterdam. So thank you, and looking forward to next month!

Piet Hazelebach, Koog aan de Zaan, Netherlands

II

If you thought you’d signed up on seculardharma.net after reading about the site in this newsletter, but were unable to log in, this is because the site was hacked shortly after the newsletter went out. It’s now back online and you may need to re-register.

Rupert Bozeat, London, UK

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Okay, that’s it for this issue. Let us know what creative dharma (the notion) and Creative Dharma, a newsletter suggest to you. As for us, we’d like to see contributions from a more and more diverse range of artists and practitioners.

What would you like to see in future newsletters? Is there anything you’d like to write, or you’d like us to write about?

¶ Next month – painter Scott Vradelis on his process

Expect articles on ethics and creative dharma, interviews with artists who meditate, why The Tuwhiri Project is supporting this newsletter, and ‘Perception’, an intensive, long-term course offered by Barre Center for Buddhist Studies out of which a community of artists and dharma practitioners meet regularly.

You can share our content on social media (we’d appreciate it if you would) and send your feedback to newsletter@creativedharma.org. Looking forward to seeing you again in a month from now. ⁂

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Creative Dharma, a newsletter, is an initiative of The Tuwhiri Project. There are 213 people on this list. Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) unless otherwise stated.