We are spirits in the material world

I resisted a friend's advice to give Micheal Roads a 'wide berth' and dragged myself along to Arnhem on a warm Saturday evening. A(nother) friend had recommended him and I thought 'yes lets go get some soul food'. Quite apart to another else it led me to sit next to a stream of audibly flowing water (in the Sonsbeek) - a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands and something that curiously I had talked about that very afternoon as something that I really miss in this country.

He said two memorable things in the course of the evening- neither was new to me - though it is good to be reminded of these things sometimes - to keep a balance of information input.

First thing. 'We are spirits living in a body' (rather than bodies with a soul). I first heard this from a tai chi teacher - some ten years ago. It gave me a new perspective on things. Instead of seeing oneself as a person who thinks about spiritual things once in a while and spends the rest of the time concerned with seeking pleasure and avoiding pain it gives you (gave me!) a stronger sense of purpose and a certain sense of freedom. Buddhists call this physical world the world of samsara (illusion) but I don't subscribe to the point of view that the way to free oneself from suffering is to sever the chains (attachments) that bind us to this world. Equally I don't hold with the empiricist view that physical realities are the only ones that exist (or matter). We also carry around and make up our own realities (in deciding for example if the glass is half full or half empty). Buddhism expresses this duality as 'manifest' and 'latent' effects (your external and internal environments) and sees the two as intertwined - constantly reproducing each other. It also teaches that it is more logical to work on changing what you can change (your internal environment) than what you can't so easily change (your external environment) and that changes at the latent level manifest themselves in the external environment. (I nearly wrote easier to change the internal environment- but of course its not - because we are often very resistant to looking into those dark holes and would rather focus on changing the outside world or our position in it).

Which brings us to Michael's second point. Make a daily commitment to feeding your soul. Of course its not enough to just to know that you are a spirit in a material world. You have to develop that knowledge, remind yourself of that fact every day. Its easy to forget it on really bad days (when you can't get a plane to an important business meeting) or really good ones. Its very easy to be swayed by what Buddhism (once again) calls the eight winds (four of which, like fame and fortune blow from the 'warm' south, the other four, like ignominy and misfortune, blow from the 'cold' north). After a while of making that commitment you become a bit more grounded (after almost ten years of chanting -almost- daily I will say it takes a very long time to even make a little progress in this respect). I have to struggle against my own ignorance and foolishness. But slowly the things that scare you become less scary and you become less attached to your desires. Which makes me very grateful that I met Nichiren Buddhism and was much more able to enjoy Micheal's lecture - seeing the truths in it, without looking to him to provide me with truth or the path for pursuing it.

Grace Slick famously sang 'feed your head'. I prefer Micheals' line 'feed your soul'