INSIGHTAotearoa
A newsletter for New Zealand's insight meditation practitioners and communities
98 Riverside Road, Gisborne, 4010 Aotearoa New Zealand
deborah @ insightaotearoa.org | ISSN 1177-5076
OCTOBER 2009
IN THIS NEWSLETTER YOU'LL FIND...
1. EDITORIAL: Dharma Aotearoa
2. Aotearoa Buddhist Educational Trust
3. Being Still for a Change
4. POEM: Slow Dance
5. Questions ... questions ...
6. The Last Word: Whanaungatanga
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1. EDITORIAL: DHARMA AOTEAROA
Spring has arrived awakening the earth with her abundance of renewed life. The season of dharma is also blooming in Aotearoa. A variety of events, retreats, and the new educational trust are featured in this October edition of INSIGHTAotearoa. It is with deep gratitude that this edition is dedicated to all the people whose wise effort support keeping the dharma available in new and creative ways. INSIGHTAotearoa bows to you.
This October edition of INSIGHTAotearoa opens with a feature article about the Aotearoa Buddhist Educational Trust (ABET) dedicated to bringing dharma teachers to New Zealand. Learn how to support this Trust and how it supports your practice. Two articles about the International Day of Climate change on 24 October follow. There are extensive lists of events and retreats in both the Sangha news and the Insight meditation retreats sections. A local Maori elder offers the last word about oneness.
We are still seeking someone with a laser printer who is willing to copy and post the newsletter each month. Please note subscription and email address changes can now be processed via our website: http://www.insightaotearoa.org. Click on "subscribe" from the column of choices on the left. Thank you.
This month INSIGHTAotearoa has been moved to offer dana to two worthy organisations: the Aotearoa Buddhist Educational Trust and the Red Cross. Blessings go to both for their skillful work.
The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, And let it spring from love Born out of concern for all beings.
-- Buddha
With Metta,
Deborah White
Editor
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2. AOTEAROA BUDDHIST EDUCATIONAL TRUST
-- by Ramsey Margolis
Four dharma buddies from around the country have come together to launch a charitable trust, Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust (ABET), to raise funds to bring overseas insight meditation teachers to this country. They are asking Aotearoa's insight meditation communities and individual practitioners to cover a visiting teacher's airfares. Doing this, New Zealanders will then be able to taste the Buddha's teachings more affordably, leaving more in their pockets and purses to offer as dana.
Seeing as the four dharma buddies are spread geographically – Vivien Blackshaw is on Auckland's North Shore, Ramsey Margolis is in Wellington, Brigid Lowry in Nelson and Christine Dann in Port Levy – INSIGHTAotearoa interviewed them by email.
IA: What was the origin of this charitable trust? How did you work together creating this project?
ABET: The idea of a charitable trust arose out of conversations among a number of insight meditation practitioners who were concerned about the affordability of retreats that were coming up which are to be led by overseas teachers.
Starting with our desire that as many people as possible might be able to benefit from these teachings, we talked about the fact that those individuals and communities who organise retreats need to be fiscally responsible, which means to at least break even, and wondered how we might help in the process.
When Stephen and Martine Batchelor came to New Zealand in 2004, there was a big fundraising effort through your newsletter. This lowered the cost of their Otaki retreat and allowed free entry to the public talk Stephen gave in Wellington, but it didn't help towards the Christchurch retreat, and in hindsight this was unfair to South Islanders.
So the question arose: how can we raise money in a coordinated, national way to bring teachers over? The answer was a charitable trust which appealed for funds through a website from those who know the benefits of these teachings and who appreciated that this was a way to help others discover those benefits.
IA: Why just fundraise for their travel costs?
ABET: Good question. What could we appeal for, we wondered? Well, the first thing to go for is a teacher's travel costs, as it's a huge part of the cost of a retreat.
If we are wildly successful and more than cover their air fares, the cost of the retreat goes down even further for everyone. If we don't raise enough, then the trust has a general fund which can be used to top up what has been donated for a particular teacher.
Another, major, thread of our conversation was about generosity; how this develops in Asia through the culture, but which we as westerners need to cultivate, and how this charitable trust might be part of a practice of generosity.
Following on from these conversations and wanting this to be a national initiative rather than one which simply came out of Wellington's insight meditation community, Ramsey took the initiative and, with agreement from Brigid, Christine and Vivien to be trustees, got to work and set up Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust.
IA: How will you let people know about this wonderful initiative?
ABET: This newsletter, INSIGHTAotearoa, is the most important way that people will learn about Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust. We have a website at http://www.abet.net.nz, which we encourage everyone to take a look at, and of course there will be links and mentions on http://www.insightmeditation.org.nz and http://www.insightaotearoa.org.
We also ask that people share info on the trust with their sangha and friends. If anyone wishes to do a fundraising activity themselves, ABET has registered with http://www.givealittle.co.nz and this means that people can set up their own fundraising page for the trust there. Already there's a teenager who may do a sponsored run for one of the teachers, and there's even talk of a sponsored weekend sit!
With three writers and an artist as trustees, the website text is an object lesson in plain English. Bruce Staples has built a beautiful website, and Adam Shand is taking care of the hosting. We are very grateful to Bruce and Adam.
There was a piece on our intention to form the trust in the July INSIGHTAotearoa. Following this, we were offered a significant donation, which we gratefully used to open a bank account at the SBS Bank in Nelson.
IA: How will teachers be selected to come to New Zealand, and who qualifies for funding?
ABET: We've started off raising funds for those teachers we have invited to come here: Gregory Kramer, Stephen and Martine Batchelor, and Eric Kolvig; as well as a teacher that one of us wants to bring here: Pracha Hutanuwatr.
Should a community or an individual want to bring over an insight meditation teacher they should contact us with the name of the teacher, some information about them, their website, and so on. If ABET is to raise funds for a teacher, we will all have to agree to this happening.
Could we say that we're keen to support teachers who are predominantly from, or who have worked with the insight meditation tradition, at least in the first couple of years, rather than spread ourselves too thinly.
IA: How do we donate?
ABET: Okay, now we are officially launching Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust to the world! The flags are flying and the fireworks will be going off after dark!
We ask readers to visit http://www.abet.net.nz and we hold out our bowl for your dana. You can contribute by cheque, using online banking and by credit or debit card, and your donation can go towards a particular teacher, or into the general fund.
As we are a registered charity you can make what they give even larger by claiming tax relief on their donation if you pay New Zealand tax. We are encouraging people to claim that tax and then give that also to Aotearoa Buddhist Education trust.
IA: Tell us a little about the trustees.
ABET: Sure. You'll want to know who's looking after this money, so here's some information about the four of us.
Brigid Lowry has been meditating for 30 years. She lived at Wat Buddha Dharma, a theravadan Buddhist community near Wiseman's Ferry, NSW for seven years, and was a key member of the Zen Group of Western Australia for eight years, where she took the role of tenzo. She has sat with many insight meditation teachers, including Joseph Goldstein and Sharda Rogell.
Christine Dann lives in Port Levy on Banks Peninsula, and has been practising insight meditation since 2000. A member of the Waipapa sangha which sits weekly in Diamond Harbour, she is variously a writer, researcher, teacher, and Green activist.
Ramsey Margolis started a sitting group in 1999 which developed into Wellington Insight Meditation Community, and put out a newsletter for the group that is now INSIGHTAotearoa. Since 2006, he has been working for the New Zealand Cooperatives Association as executive director.
Vivien Blackshaw is an artist living on Auckland's North Shore who has a love for insight dialogue as a meditation practice. She spent some time involved in the building of Bodhinyanarama Buddhist monastery in Stokes Valley, and first learned to meditate there under the guidance of Ajahn Viradhammo.
As trustees, we serve as volunteers, and we welcome your feedback as to how to improve the work of the trust.
IA: How do we contact Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust?
Visit our website at http://www.abet.net.nz, you can send an email or skype via the website. Our postal address is:
Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust
PO Box 6626
Wellington 6041
Aotearoa New Zealand
To speak with Ramsey Margolis phone 04 970 3531 evenings and weekends, while at other times you can call and text him on 021 211 3531. He's happy to answer any questions you may have, especially the thorny ones about tax relief!
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3. Being Still for a Change – Why Meditating is a Response to Climate Change
-- by Christine Dann, writer, researcher, teacher and Green activist
October 24, 2009 is a day with a difference, one that will go down in history as the first international day of grass roots action on climate change. Hopefully it will be the last such day, because the world leaders meeting at the December climate change conference in Copenhagen will get the message – stop protecting the profits of big business and start protecting people and other living beings by committing to big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions now.
All over New Zealand groups will be taking action – you can read about them at 350.
In Wellington, some members of Wellington's insight meditation community plan to hold a space in meditation, contemplation and silent prayer for 350 minutes, and they are hoping to have 350 people participating throughout the day.
Why 350?
Because 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the upper safe level for a stable climate. It is already at 387 ppm – and rising. But what is the connection between meditation and stopping climate change? Is it more than just a cute way to get publicity for a good cause? How could sitting still and being quiet ever change anything? Of course it won't do so by itself, but think about this – when the 350 people who participate in this action in downtown Wellington on October 24 are sitting still, what will most of the other people downtown at that time be doing?
They will be engaged in acts of consumption – buying and selling things, eating and drinking things they have bought, filling cars with petrol, and so on. Now up to a certain level, consumption is a good and necessary thing – everyone has to eat, and we also need clothing, housing, fuel for cooking and heating, transport, medicines, tools and cultural treasures. But at a certain point – the point at which the atmosphere went above 350 ppm of carbon for the first time in history – humanity reached a global tipping point where unfettered consumption ceased to sustain us, and has started to kill us.
By this point, unfortunately, the industries devoted to producing massive amounts of consumption goods as cheaply as possible (cheap only because they do not pay labour a proper wage, or pay the true social and environmental costs of the energy and resources used in production and distribution) had been joined by an industry devoted to stimulating consumption by using every psychological trick in the book.
The advertising industry is in the business of creating not products but desires – endless desires, insatiable cravings – for the newest, flashest, sweetest, biggest, fastest, whatever stuff. Watch The Story of Stuff to see and hear just how much damage all this unnecessary stuff is doing to society and the environment.
Even if over-consumption weren't trashing the climate and endangering lives, ecosystems, homes and livelihoods through droughts, floods, storms, sea-level rise and the rest of the climate change catastrophe, would it be a good thing?
Are we, for example, happier if we have lots of stuff, and can easily get more? All the scientific research on this subject finds that having a materialistic approach to life and being focused on getting more stuff, rather than being content with enough, leads to less overall happiness, not more.*
Why is this so?
Over 2,500 years ago a man living in what is now northern India worked it out.
Coming from a very privileged background, where he had been cosseted and protected, he had all the stuff he could possibly want. Yet this did not seem to him to be a truly satisfying or worthwhile way to live. He went to the opposite extreme, depriving himself of food and all creature comforts, and realised that didn't make any sense either. He went around asking others for their opinion on how to lead a good life, and was not convinced by their answers.
Eventually he decided to sit down and not move until he had sorted it out for himself. He inquired into the nature of reality, and saw that all things born or created are impermanent, subject to death and decay. Nothing stays the same forever, while some things change very quickly.
Yet we try to cling to things, both mentally and physically. We desire objects, people and experiences, and we suffer when our desires are not met. But we also suffer when they are met – and then the novelty wears off, or we lose what we had.
We live in the past, where we had a toy, a pet or a lover that was perfect but is now gone, or in the future, when we will have the object or person of our desire, that will be even better than what we had in the past.
We have very little experience or training of being fully in the present and appreciating what is here now, in all its totality. Consequently we have little understanding of how the cultivation of desires is the surest route to unhappiness, while the cultivation of contentment with what one has, and more especially of what one can offer to others, is the source of true happiness.
The man who uncovered these truths (and others) so long ago shared them, and he also shared the technique by which he uncovered them, so that anyone could experience this for themselves and not have to take his word for it.
The technique is called insight meditation, or vipassana, and it has been passed on by teachers in the Buddhist tradition for over two thousand years.
An experienced insight meditator knows how the mind works. But so does the advertising industry, which uses the latest findings from academic psychology –“ and it has your mind in its sights. It has you surrounded – on billboards, in magazines and newspapers, on TV and radio, in shops and cafes, in schools and hospitals. By sitting still and doing insight meditation on October 24, or any other day, not only are you not shopping, you are also doing the best possible thing for strengthening your mind against the illusion that more discretionary consumption will improve your life, and that of others.
The best possible thing, therefore, for strengthening your resistance to what is – ultimately – causing climate te change. Too much greed and craving for too much money – and too much stuff.
See, for example, Juliet Schor's book Born to Buy and Susan Linn's Consuming Kids on how the US advertising industry targets children to get them onto the over-consumption treadmill, and how this negatively affects their wellbeing. Plus Benjamin Barber's book Con$umed on how adults are being infantilised and citizens disenfranchised by the ideology and practice of marketing.
JOIN IN WITH WELLINGTON'S CLIMATE ACTION DAY:
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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.
-- Rumi
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4. POEM: SLOW DANCE
-- Anonymous teenager with terminal cancer
Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
Do you run through each day
On the fly?
When you ask How are you? Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done
Do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?
You'd better slow down
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
Ever told your child,
We'll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time
To call and say,'Hi'
You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won't last.
When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
It's like an unopened gift
Thrown away.
Life is not a race.
Do take it slower
Hear the music
Before the song is over.
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5. QUESTIONS ... QUESTIONS ...
Do you have a question about your practice or about Buddhism in general? Send it in, and we will put it before a teacher. If it can be answered easily, it will be in a future INSIGHTAotearoa. Send your question to deborah @ insightaotearoa.org or by post to Newsletter, 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010.
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6. THE LAST WORD: Whanaungatanga
Whanaungatanga links us into the oneness everything that exists. The whole of humanity is one family known as Ngati Ra. We are one large family, with kinship ties to all living things. Our traditional Maori hongi (the pressing of noses when we greet each other) reminds us that we are related and that we come from the same Divine Source through the one breath we have between us. Our eyebrows remind us of the wingspan of the birds, our brothers and sisters who can fly; the eyebrows also remind us of the tail of the whale and the nose symbolizes the whale's body, the whale reminds us of our brothers and sisters of the spaces of waters who can swim. The forehead reminds us of the crown of the tree, and the nose reminds us of the tree's trunk, the trees are our brothers and sisters, they are the lungs of Mother Earth. I celebrate this ONENESS every day, as I link into the eight directions across all. Peace, Love, Joy and Truth to all universes, all galaxies.
-- Dr Rangimarie Turuki Rose Pere
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With Metta,
Deborah White, Kanya Stewart, and Peter Fernando