The Four Enlightened Activities

The Four Enlightened Activities

Lightly edited dictation transcript. Questions from the other person in the conversation appear as blockquotes.

So we're talking about the four types of enlightened activities. These are activities that Buddhas do, Bodhisattvas do, enlightened beings do. But of course, they're also what we can aspire to do ourselves.

When we're faced with some situation — what should I do? — whether it's at work, or the political situation, or whatever it is in our life, we can look at this journey of: going in first and then out. That's the path that I teach about: instead of just acting, reacting, we first have to go inside, look at our values, look at our truth, look at the fundamental truth, the dharmic truth. Try to go past our fears and our ego and our grasping and fighting against people, all of that — try to get through that to what is really, at the core, true, what is aligned with wisdom. Then go out from there. Act from there.

And these four are the four different styles of going out, of acting from our true nature rather than our habitual, reactive, fearful self.

1. Magnetizing

So the first - in no particular order - is magnetizing, or inspiring. A leader standing up and speaking truth to power, or speaking spiritual truth, like Martin Luther King. Like Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, speaking against Trump, calling for a coalition of middle countries, middle-sized countries, to replace the dominant authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and now the United States. That's an inspiring enlightened activity — a magnetizing activity, calling for a coalition of good.

We can magnetize, or inspire people through our own actions. This is living a clean and clear life, if you will — a life outside the Matrix. It is inspiring to others. Our actions can create all sorts of ways in which we can inspire people, we can magnetize people. And when they see you doing it, there's a magnetizing effect, they are pulled towards you: they feeloh wow, I didn't know I could do that. Wow, look at the way he handled that, instead of devolving into fighting, he spoke out — or he just did something honest, true, kind.

Q: Would that process make somebody go inside? Would that cause the person to go inside?

Well, it depends on the person, of course. All these things depend on the person; it's not just one way. But what it does — and this is a lot of the way I work with people — is it lays down a wisdom matrix. It shows people: oh, that's what clarity looks like. That's what honesty looks like. That's what standing up for your values looks like. And so it gives them this alternate view from their corrupted, fear-based, tangled, all-tangled-up structure that they're caught in. Now they see an example of something that is not that — something clean and clear and wise — and so they get the chance to go, oh, I didn't know that was possible. There's a moment of awakening.

And then what they do with that, of course, will be different, and up to them. But it gives them the opportunity to go, huh. And they start thinking about themselves and the actions they're taking, and ask themselves could they be more like that person. Which is exactly the process of going in.

So that's Magnetizing.

And of course, there are negative versions of all of these enlightened activities. You see that everywhere in our culture — Trump is extremely magnetizing, as a nemesis, neurotic, samsaric quality. People are magnetized to his way of doing, and they go in the other direction. But the enlightened activity of magnetizing is what we’re describing. So that's the first.

2. Cultivating

The second one is cultivating. This is the activity of nurturing, growing. Looking after a young kid is cultivating them, growing them. And I think a lot of what you do in coaching, is that. Like the way you work with Connor: cultivating, helping, growing, showing people what's inside them. You're growing their inner light. You're showing them what's inside them, and culturing and growing them. Taking care of it, watering it, feeding that spark of inner light.

And that would create a structure as well. In them, they're growing their own structure, and you're helping them do that. Culturing and cultivating. So a lot of elder cultures, and mentors, and guidance, and coaching, is a lot of cultivating a wisdom structure. So a lot of that kind of coaching and guiding would be this type of activity — you're cultivating something, culturing something.

Q: Is it cultivating a wisdom structure, in your teachings? What is it cultivating?

Yes, we can say that. Well, the light and the wisdom structure. You grow the amount of light you have through the process of looking inside. And as the light grows bigger, you start to see the places where your structure is not clean and clear. You run into walls, you run into problems, entanglements — you start to see the edges of where your light becomes not so clear.

A very typical one on the spiritual path as an example: as you go down into the spiritual path, you start to see — huh, is eating meat in alignment? Is the way that animals are treated kind? That is not something that you saw before. Before, you just eat meat; everybody eats meat, it's normal, it's good, it's fine, no problem. And you might even fight strongly for it, you think vegetarians are stupid, they're just weak, weak and stupid, right?

But very typically, as you look inside, as you start to look at kindness and love, and as that light grows inside you and starts to take over more and more of your life — you start to look at the structures of your life. What activities, what structures, what discipline you have in your life. You start to look at your own actions. And you start to see a contrast: huh, I thought that was perfectly okay, but now I'm not so sure. And maybe you start watching a movie about the way animals are treated, and you start to see — huh, that's really not in alignment.

So you run into the edges of your existing wisdom structure as the light grows and lights up those edges, those walls. And then, in order for the light to travel further, you have to realign, you need to grow and extend the wisdom structure so that the light can run along strong aligned channels. And helping yourself, and others to that, that is cultivating.

That's what you do when you're working with somebody: you're encouraging them to see their own actions, and the contrast between them and wisdom, and giving them options. You're not forcing them to do something — you're cultivating their own choices. They can retreat back into the existing structure, or they can take the opportunity given by the enlightened activity that is helping them see that there is something beyond, something to grow into, by giving up who they thought they were.

3. Wrathful (Powerful)

The third type is wrathful, or powerful. A lot of people react to the word wrathful, because our take on it is that wrathful is bad, like angry. I like to use the word wrathful because it encourages that questioning: wait, what does that mean? Why is that an enlightened activity?

You can look at a father rushing across the road, yanking the kid by the scruff of his neck and pulling him out of the way of a speeding truck. That's wrathful love. If you took the truck out of the picture, and you just saw the father yanking the kid, almost pulling his arm off, you would say: oh wow, he's assaulting that kid. But when you see the truck, you're like: oh my gosh, he's saving that kid.

So that's wrathful love. It's powerful. This is Manjushri's sword, cutting. We cut off your arm to save you.

So it's protector energy: wrathful, powerful. In Buddhist temples, you'll see there's the main shrine, and then at the back of the room there are the protector shrines. And they've got all these arms, and they're really angry and red, and smoke and fire — so they look like they are evil, but they're not. They're wrathful protectors.

And protection is very practical: today this is something that's usually missing in our culture: our own enlightened protector energy. We have huge amounts of neurotic protection activity, but not much enlightened protector energy. When we spend all this time talking about Trump — part of it is useful and good, but part of it is also very negative, we are sucked into the neurotic magnetizing effect. The same with watching the TV and our phones. We’re not protecting our inner calm and equanimity and love. We're not building a lot of protective structures. TV and culture have built these interfaces into our minds, to pump all of this aggression and horribleness into us, and we don't protect ourselves from it.

Same with food — all the Matrix pipes, the entirely fake food (not-food) that's coming into us. We don't protect ourselves against it. We don't build structures of protection and go: no, I'm not going to eat that. I'm going to eat real food. Or: I'm not going to watch all this violent TV, these movies. I'm going to watch something directly uplifting for my own life — or: I'm not going to watch anything at all. I'm going to live, be involved with my life.

So I think there's a huge lack of enlightened protector energy in our culture.

So, that's the third enlightened activity: wrathful, powerful.

And again, we see lots of the opposite of that. You see the unenlightened power all over the place. And we're very enamored with power in a negative sense.

4. Pacifying

And then the fourth enlightened activity is pacifying.

A traditional meditation practice is pacifying the mind. This is calming somebody down. Somebody's about to do something terrible and you calm them down. You offer them a cup of tea. This is pacifying of a chaotic or unruly energy.

Q: Is it accommodating?

It's not accommodating. No — well, I mean, I don't know. But calming.

Q: Or pacifying Trump by giving him awards?

Well, that could absolutely be. If it prevents him launching a nuclear bomb, give him an award. Absolutely. Because he's a baby, right? He's this chaotic, completely emotionally unregulated agent. So to pacify him with an award? Absolutely. That would be a very enlightened activity — to avoid him bombing like a billion people with a nuclear bomb. So yeah, that could absolutely be an enlightened activity.

All of these, right? The same activity can be an enlightened activity, or it can be neurotic.

Q: So a college giving him a million-dollar settlement is pacifying him. That's unenlightened activity.

It could be. It could be, But you can't say just from looking at the activity. Again, you take the truck away, and you think the father is trying to murder the kid. So you can’t really tell from the outside.

Q: Because there's a lot of pacifying and accommodating that's happening.

Yeah, absolutely. People are just kind of pacifying. He's going to change the structure of the White House, so they're pacifying him. But much of that is out of fear. They are scared that he will hurt them, so they coddle him from fear of what he will do to them.

Q: But a lot of that is out of fear. Is pacifying out of fear different?

That's different, yeah. Because it's mostly fear. You're afraid of him, of what he'll do to you. So you pacify, you accommodate, you allow, and all of that.

But a lot of the pacifying needed is for us. We are not calm. We do not have equanimity. So the traditional meditation practice — the first fifty years of your meditation practice we could say :) are typically calming, pacifying: shamatha. Most meditation practices that you see are all this activity. They're all calming, pacifying our own mind, our own nervous system. Anxiety needs calming.

So all this breath meditation — focusing your mind on your breath, on a piece of music, on a candle — all guided meditations, all of those are pacifying. There are different types of meditation practice that I've done that are not that. But unless you have pacified the mind — it's a necessary first step. If you try and do the activating or powerful meditation practices, you'll just be chaotic. So you have to pacify the mind first. And that's where people run into problems with spirituality.

On the words themselves

Q: And are these translated words?

Yeah, from different roots.

Q: Is there a possibility that the original root word meant something else?

I mean, I'm trying to express the quality of it. They can be translated differently. A lot of people won't use the word wrathful — I like it because it causes you to think, but some people say powerful, or strength, or these other versions of it. But the words are just pointers. You try and get at: what is the quality of it.