I’d like to take a little look at what is implied by the phrase ‘being human’ and its relevance to yoga. Of course ‘being human’ is a very multi faceted experience or phenomenon. But so many of the facets of being human we share with other phenomena. Many of them we even share with plants and animals, certainly with mammals and primates. And even though it’s surely not possible to draw a clear line between this species and that and say ‘here it ends and here it begins’, there do seem to be certain characteristic that seem to be uniquely human in terms of their significance to being alive.

I’d like to suggest that at the heart of what makes being human something particular is a particular capacity. This capacity which may well, and I’m sure does, exist in other forms of life, but not to the same degree. It doesn’t make quite the same contribution to those life forms existence. That capacity is making conscious choices. If the word ‘choice’ is qualified by the word ‘conscious,’ that implies that there is such a thing as unconscious choice. Some people would say this is not so; that choice is always conscious. But I’d like to use the word more widely and to say that, in a sense, a jelly fish moving away from whatever they move away from is a choice even though maybe it’s an unconscious one. In any case we assume it to be unconscious. I don’t want to make those distinctions: that the only choices are conscious ones and there is only one species that make them.

Prince Charles, as you may know, has a conscious relationship with his plants so that they will thrive better. Now you may laugh but it seems that it makes a difference. Whether this suggests consciousness in the sense of making conscious choices or not is, I suppose, a matter for debate and a matter of opinion. But I say that it’s the role of conscious choice in our lives that most distinguishes human psychology from that of other forms of life. Especially the amount of conscious choices that we make. Many of the choices that we once made consciously become unconscious and this is why I don’t want to say that the only choices are conscious.

When you’re first learning to drive a car, you’re not 100% clear about the location of the three pedals on the floor and which thing they do. In the beginning you have to deliberately make sure that you put your foot on the right one in order to stay alive. So you’re making conscious choices. But it doesn’t take long before those choices become unconscious. The unconscious nature of those choices rests upon them originally being conscious. Somebody says: ‘this pedal does that and this pedal does the other and you use pressure on this one under these circumstances and pressure on that one under those circumstances.’

You could say the ability to make conscious choices is what human beings have instead of having mainly instinctive behaviour. Behaviour that is governed by instinct. But when our conscious choices become deeply embedded they begin to look like instincts. So for example if I start to fall over I instinctively broaden and lengthen my hand and this gives me balance. It’s not really an instinct, it’s been trained into me and is somatically recognised by my body that this helps it become more stable and more comfortable. Those of you who are here next week will have the pleasure of meeting my youngest daughter who is totally obsessed with riding horses. I was sent some pictures of her not very long ago of her riding a horse without holding the reins. In order to keep balance her arms were extending into her fingers, and her palms were broadening. Nobody’s told her to do this. This is the inherent integrity of her body still functioning instinctively.

It could be perhaps that making choices is really the essence of being human. It could also be that that’s why Patanjali uses the word ishvara as the key word in the yoga sutras. As one possible root meaning of the word ish is to choose. So in order to understand being human, in order to be fully comfortable with being human, the process of choice making needs to be clearly understood and recognised. When we are doing our yoga posture practice and we’re being asked to make particular shapes and to enter them in particular ways you could say that we have to make lots of choices, conscious and unconscious. How strongly to do this, how far to do that, how much to do the other? These choices are being made through the interaction of many levels of our being: the interaction of many layers of the nervous system and many layers of what it means to be human.

When you learn to drive a car, for example, or when you learn to cut carrots effectively you start by being very conscious of what you’re doing. And eventually it’s done unconsiously. You can have a conversation while driving a car; you can have a conversation while cutting carrots and not cut your fingertip off most of the time. This is because the process has become unconscious and within that process you’re constantly making judgements. You’re selecting the right degree of pressure with which to engage the texture of the carrot with the knife and if you use a different knife you use a different degree of pressure and on a different carrot you use a different degree of pressure but you don’t consciously talk to yourself about this. You’re just feeling it through your wrists, thumb, fingers and forearm.

So I’m using the word choice very broadly, narrowing it somewhat by saying conscious choice. Ash asked me something the other day about choice and I deferred so I’m laying the ground for beginning to answer the question. But the process of choice making is pregnant with paradox. Everybody present on this platform, I hope anyway, is not present on this platform because they were coerced or bullied or somehow intimidated into being here. Because this is not likely to have been the case, one of the easy ways to point to what apparently was the case is to say that you all freely chose to come here. You not only freely chose to come to La Croce but to come to class this morning.

You could say that Chris and Pelle have made a choice not to be here right now. When you look at the choices that they had to make to not be here right now then a slightly different perspective starts to come into view. Neither Pelle nor Chris were threatened that they should leave here, they weren’t forced to leave the platform. I’m not sure, I’m making some assumptions about Chris but not about Pelle. Pelle left the platform so that he could make our breakfast and I imagine that Chris left the platform to help him. At a certain point, each one of them chose to get up and go into the kitchen. Therefore you can easily say it was a free choice. But especially in this kind of situation, you could say that it might have been more comfortable for them to stay lying on their mat. It might not have been; of course we don’t know for sure as they are not here to tell us. Or let’s take the free choice that you made to come here this morning. You might well have been tired, you might have felt a little cold, you might have really wanted, if not to roll over and go back to sleep, at least to have a piping hot shower before you went out. And yet you still came out.

So in order to see clearly the true nature of choice making we need to be able to look at things that are very easy to see. They’re not actually hidden even if they’re not noticed. Which is: what is it that contributes to the making of a choice besides the decision to move, or to get up, or to leave a room and go outside onto a platform? Lets look at an action, even a simple action like that, or a simple action like taking a drink from a flask. I imagine that Paul didn’t make a conscious decision to drink from his flask but sometimes we do make conscious decisions to do something like that. I’m including that kind of action, and what brings it about, under the implications of the word ‘choose’ or ‘choice’. When I open my mouth like that, no differently from anybody else, and vibrate my vocal chords and make a particular shape with my mouth, it’s very easy for people who are hearing to say: ‘well he’s chosen that word rather badly today’ or ‘he’s choosing his words rather well today’ or whatever.

But as you probably know, very rarely do you make a conscious choice about the words that come out of your mouth. Sometimes you do but most of the time you don’t: they just come out of your mouth. Very often the words that come out of your mouth come out as a result of thoughts that are passing through your brain. Especially if you’ve sat in silent stillness and not tried to manipulate your mind into a special state, whether it be silence or superconsciousness, but just sat with the activity of your mind, becoming friendly and intimate with the activity of your mind. It must begin to dawn on you that perhaps the thoughts that go through your mind have a life of their own. However much you may be able to now and then shape that life, that flow a little bit.

Honest observation reveals eventually that you cannot choose the thought that will bring you out of silence. You cannot choose the thoughts that are running through your mind, the thoughts that are running through your mind producing words. But not only producing words. The thoughts running through your minds producing actions. You’re lying in bed on Thursday 4th August 2005 and your thoughts are: ‘oh it’s a bit cold this morning; I’m going to go back to sleep.’ Thoughts that you didn’t invite, that are there because it’s cold, because you didn’t sleep well, or whatever. And then into your mind, thoughts that you don’t invite like this might come: ‘oh I’d better go to the platform; I’ve spent hundreds of euros to be here. I might as well get my money’s worth.’ And eventually you get up so you come. It seems like you’ve done so freely because nobody has actually put a gun to your head and driven you here.

But on close examination, such as we’ve already made of how thoughts come into your mind without so much as an invitation from you, this idea of freely choosing begins to look more and more spurious and dubious. And yet we’re faced by conscious choices all the time. Every one of us always will be. So it’s not really a question of saying: ‘oh we don’t make choices’ but of finding out: what does it mean to make choices? How are these choices really made? This is the significance of the word, the terminology ishvarapranidarna.

Making choices. You may have heard such things as: ‘You can choose to be well! You can choose to be healthy, happy, free.’ Of course anybody who has heard such a statement is bound to say: ‘Well I choose to be well. I choose to be happy, free.’ You’d be crazy to deliberately choose otherwise. Of course you’re going to choose to be happy, well and free. But making that choice doesn’t necessarily make you happy, well or free. Now does it? Can we admit this. That telling ourselves that we are can be or should be happy or rich does not make us so. But of course if we get fed up enough we might just start to do something about it. But, as you know, doing something about getting rich or happy doesn’t actually work for most people.

So we also need to understand not just what comes before a choice but what comes after a choice. I’ll take myself as an example. I do occasionally eat chocolate but a few years ago I used to eat quite a lot of chocolate everyday. And of course the inherent integrity of my body was still functioning and every now and then it would produce a thought in my mind: ‘You’d better stop this Godfrey!’ And so I would make a choice: ‘Yep! I’m going to stop eating chocolate.’ The next day I was eating chocolate. There doesn’t that often seem to be a correlation between a choice and its intended outcome. Sometimes there is but very often not.

‘I’m going to be nicer to my husband/wife/employees.’ ‘I’m going to be more generous to the tramps on the street. These are the kinds of choices that people are constantly making and not experiencing them being fulfilled. So when you say you can choose to be free, or you must choose to be free/happy, this is definitely true if you just take choice to be a simple verbal process in the brain or in the mouth. ‘Choose to be free.’ ‘I choose to be well/happy.’ Anybody of course can do that. If they had any sense they would do that if there is any sense or belief that it might bring it about.

What I’m saying is that although there is some kind of relationship between what we do and the process of choosing, it’s not necessarily what we’ve been led to believe. I don’t mean that we’ve been misled by anyone or anything in a deliberate sense. I’m not sitting here thinking that we’re in the middle of some conspiracy to subjugate us to the will of some hidden secret minority. It’s just the impression we get. We get this impression that we make free choices all the time. We get this impression because of the cortex, because we have such sophisticated machinery inside our skull.

Because the cortex is so rich in its possibilities of association, and of simulation, the human cortex is richly imaginative. It can imagine all sorts of things that are not actually here. You can remember things, anticipate things, even totally invent things like J K Rowling, because of the human cortex. And of course this is a great gift. This is not inherently a burden. But like the knives that Pelle might be using right now, in order to make his job easier in the kitchen, that knife needs to be razor sharp. Therefore he could easily cut the tip of his finger off. Most cooks do eventually cut part of their hand off, if they’re serious about cooking, a few times. So just as that sharp knife can provide nourishment, it can also provide pain and suffering. Likewise the cortex.

If a cat finds itself in miserable circumstances, it leaves, it goes somewhere else. It doesn’t sit there for weeks and months pondering whether it ought to, whether it would be the best and right thing, whether anybody would be upset with it or reject or misunderstand it. It just gets the fuck out of there and finds somewhere it can be warm and get some food. But human beings, because of their cortex, can’t behave with such freedom as a cat because we can imagine all kinds of consequences of all kinds of possible course of actions. So you can lie on your bed on Thursday morning, 4th August, and you can imagine: ‘If I don’t go to class, they’ll all talk about me behind my back.’ ‘If I don’t go to class Godfrey will think that I’m x,y,z.’ Or ‘If I dont go to class I won’t be able to show everybody how brilliant I am.’ Imagining all of these possible scenarios is the gift and the burden of the cortex. Because we can imagine so many options and looking at these options say: ‘Well this is the one that I would prefer, but because of my mother/father/the laws of the land, I’ll go for this one instead.’ And then actions follow that choice.

When we’ve made a choice to do something, that we think will win us approval and then we don’t win that approval, its really easy afterwards, to say: ‘Fuck I think I shouldn’t have done that. I should have just stayed in bed. He wouldn’t have given a fuck if I’d been on the platform or not.’ Of course, this happens to some people more than to others but I think it would be either a very rare or dishonest human being who would say: ‘Well I’ve never had a thought like that. I’ve never thought that I shouldn’t have done that/said that.’ Well what does it matter if you say that? What does it matter if you say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ It doesn’t matter really does it? It’s just noise going through your brain.

I don’t know what you’re like but there was a Catholic here last week who has a real problem with her body: with being comfortable with it and the sensations that it produces in her. She feels guilt very easily. Of course this is not exclusive to Catholics. It’s exclusive to religion. Any kind of code in which there is an indication or suggestion of how you should behave if you want to win some kind of approval whether it’s from God, or a priest, or your mother, father, is an invitation to feeling guilty. But guilt’s not too much of a problem. We all have loads of it but we still can get to work. We still can draw money out of a machine in the wall.

So guilt is not too much of a problem. So what is the problem of saying: ‘I shouldn’t have done that’? Obviously there’s not such a big problem until you change the pronoun to: ‘he/she/they shouldn’t have done that.’ And very soon the Twin Towers are not standing. Very soon millions of Jews have been slaughtered in death camps because they shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Why? Because they shouldn’t be like that, because they shouln’t look like that, think like that. They shouldn’t have such dark skin, such thick lips, such big buttocks. And all of a sudden this tendency to say: ‘I/they/he should orshouldn’t’, this tendency to assume that you could/should have done something differently looks a little bit more dangerous than it does at first glance. These are very, very dangerous words: ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ when they refer to human interaction and thought.

Faced everyday, every hour that we’re awake, by the need to make choices we find that most of them do bring about more or less the outcome that we intended. You put the key in the ignition and the car starts over and over again. It’s very rare the car doesn’t start. Hopefully. Let’s say you decide to clean your teeth. Normally, I imagine, you just clean them. Or at least you go through the motions of cleaning them and this is happening so often, so consistently, that it’s almost impossible not to be left with the impression that conscious choices are made by humans freely. But this is only an impression.

To make such a statement as: ‘making choices freely is only an impression’ is a very dangerous thing to do, a very contentious statement. Because on the one hand it may be taken to infer that there’s no such thing as a free choice. But there definitely is: we’re making free choices all the time. We’re making what we call ‘choice’, what we call ‘freely’ all the time. The other danger is being able to choose freely is for many human beings at the heart of what it is to be human. Martin Luther watched hundreds, thousands of people dying under the sword in good conscience as a result of his insistence that every individual be free to choose according to their own conscience how they should believe.

This is at the heart of Protestantism. This is why Sir Thomas Moore died, even though he was a Catholic. Because he believed that he must choose according to his own conscience what he should say. He would not lie under oath. Very deep in the heart of human beings, as a result of the Reformation, is the sacrament of making choices freely according to your own conscience. And so when a statement is made such as: ‘Free choice is only an impression,’ then this deeply cherished belief in what is supposedly the heart of being human is being challenged or threatened

Why am I doing this with my stick? You can come up with all kinds of reasons, just for the sake of argument to speculate about out why I’m doing this. Well let’s just say for the sake of argument, it’s to dissipate excess nervous energy so that I don’t shout too loud, so that my words don’t become too excessive. To dissipate the huge amount of energy that happens to normally reside in this organism, some movement is necessary. Just holding this stick deals with some of it and then moving it releases more. So you could say: is this being done freely? At first glance you’d have to say: ‘Yes, of course Godfri’s freely moving his stick across the mat. But actually he’s not. He’s driven to move it across the matt so as to stay a little bit calm whilst talking about these things.’

And is this movement to pour a cup of tea being made freely? Or has Michelle’s equivalent action suggested into Godfri’s brain strongly that he’d better listen to his body’s signals of dehydration now and do something about them. Because he did make a conscious decision before he started to talk that he would not drink and he made that choice freely because he didn’t want to get up and go to the toilet like he did yesterday. But you can see how much that free choice was worth. Absolutely nothing. Perhaps a little suffering to his cells as they sat there deprived of water for however many minutes it was.

The significance of what I’m saying is not whether or not you, or I, or Kant, or Hume, or Martin Luther knows whether or not there is such a thing as free will. This is all, as far as I’m concerned, irrelevant. What is relevant is: how do human being feel and how do they relate to each other on the basis of how they feel? Take that woman walking past me, or take that bloke over there with dark skin. I don’t like people with dark skin, so I’m going to be rude to them, get rid of them, make them feel so uncomfortable being in my presence that they’ll fuck off and never bother me again. This is how people behave, isn’t it? Especially in England! Maybe other countries too but England is what I’m used to.

This is what I’m concerned with. Not academic arguments about whether a table has any existence before a human being looks at it. Which of course you can argue either way and be totally right. It depends on how you define your terms. But yoga is not philosophy, not about coming up with some unchallengeable definition of anything. Yoga is about life, human life, being human, what it means to be human. And it may well be that Descartes or Kant spent hours and hours considering such questions as: is a table really there or is it just a figment of my imagination? Or: does time really exist or is it just an impression created in the cortex? I’m not trying to belittle these questions. But these kinds of questions don’t bother most people, not deeply enough for people to dedicate their lives to them.

But there is a kind of question that all human beings are faced with and it’s this kind of question that yoga is designed to help us find the answer to. And if you put it a little bit in the abstract it’s: how do choices come about? But it’s not that. That’s too abstract; it becomes too academic very quickly. The question that yoga seeks to answer is a very simple question: what am I supposed to do now? What should I do now? This is the fundamental human question. This is not the fundamental question of being a cat, elephant or tree. This is the fundamental question of being human. It’s the most asked question and it’s the one that creates a need for an answer more instantly than any other. You can ask yourself: ‘what’s the meaning of time?’ You don’t need to answer it today do you? You can wait a little bit. But if you ask yourself: ‘What should I do now?’ you have to answer it now. And you are always asking yourself that and answering it, even if unconsciously. Even, for example, Michelle asked herself, unconsciously or consciously: ‘shall I drink some more water?’ Answer came: ‘Yes I shall.’

At a certain point this question: ‘Shall I get up and go now? is going to come up isn’t it? Some of you might be a little timid and you might not ask yourself that kind of question until a few people have already answered it by getting up and going. But this is a question that life is constantly asking of us. Shall I get married, or not? Shall I change my job or not? Shall I go to Italy, or not? Shall I practice, or not? Shall I do Tai Chi or yoga? Shall I eat chick peas, or lentils? Shall I eat rice or quinoa? Especially when you string all these questions one after another, they don’t seem to have any kind of significance. They’re just the kind of questions that you’re asking all the time and that you’re answering all the time.

But what happens if somebody you love stops loving you? Then it becomes a more significant question: what should I do now? Or if you lose your job: what should I do now? But it’s the same fundamental question. What is the next action that I can take that will make me feel as comfortable as possible? And it is on that basis that we answer all of these questions. We answer all of these questions so that we can become as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. And this is actually an organic and cellular imperative arising from your cells. Every cell in your body needs to be comfortable, it needs to have enough liquid, salt, heat, contact etc. And if it doesn’t it feels uncomfortable. And then you start to feel uncomfortable.

But you’re not just an agglomeration of cells are you? You’re a human being. You also need, to one degree or another, contact with other forms of life. You need physical contact, verbal contact. You need to be understood, to be recognised, to be seen, heard, loved. You need to be able to eat, to keep yourself warm. These are all imperatives, these are not neuroses. We need to eat, to sleep, to be warm, to be touched, seen, heard, touched, loved. We need to love and we need to touch, to hear. And when we become deprived of all these things, then we realise that we need them.

But because we’re never totally deprived of them we can think: ‘Well I don’t really need to be heard, to be seen, to be loved.’ But try it for fifty years being neither loved, seen or heard. You know what happened to the masai warriors when put into a prison: they died within days. Not of any disease; they just died because they have no sense of time and they think they’re there forever, in that strange environment where there isn’t a tree or a rustle of wind or a reebok to be seen. So they die. Can you imagine that the Buddha would have been perfectly happy to have never been heard or understood. You can only imagine that; it’s your fantasy. It has nothing to do with what actually happened. The Buddha was understood. The Buddha was heard. The Buddha was deeply loved and still is.

When we ask ourselves the question: ‘What should I do now?’, the asking of the question implies a choice, that we must select between options. But this is nothing more than that: an implication, an impression created by the cortex and the narrowing of our attention onto our need and its fulfilment. ‘What should I do now? Should I marry him? Should I divorce her? Should I go and eat or sit here a little longer? The pressure to resolve the question narrows our attention so much that we become unable to see actually where the question arose from, where the answer will arise from and where the answer will lead to.

On the bottom of this stick, there are some marks: one, two, three, four, five, six. Now I don’t know how those marks got there. I don’t know who, with what kind of implements, put them there. I’m not very happy that they’re there. It ruins the aesthetic beauty of this stick that Kim so lovingly made for me. So when I find out who put them there, I’m going to put this stick to another use. I might be joking, but you can imagine that that could be the response of somebody, who finding that their treasured possession had been defaced by some brutal and insensitive person. It was not a cat: too regular. It was not a dog or a bird. It was a human being that did this. Perhaps. And if that perhaps were not able to insert itself into that sentence then I might be quite angry. Perhaps you can understand that. Perhaps it’s happened to you: you come back to your Ferrari or your Porsche parked very nicely outside Harrods, a very nice well to do area, and it’s been scratched all the way down the side. It certainly happens to me every time I take my Porsche out. It’s likely to make you angry, isn’t it? What’s the world coming to?

If you’re in a football crowd and you happen to have gone to the wrong end and you’re wearing the wrong colours and somebody kicks you in the ankle and breaks it, if you’re a bloke anyway, you’re quite likely to be angry. And if you don’t want to get the rest of the shit kicked out of you, you’re going to have to curtail the rest of your testosterone response very effectively, because youre surrounded by dedicated sjitkickers and youre wearing the wrong colour. But if you’re walking up this mountain and you slip and break an ankle, you may get a little bit angry. It’s not the same, is it? You may not even get angry at all. You might just be in pain, a little upset, a bit worried that you might not be able to get down. And then you worry that everybody else is going to worry about you.

But a similar condition in your ankle can produce totally different reactions and responses according to who or what you think is responsible. If you think that within that responsibility there’s something that could be called ‘choice’ or freewill, you’re more likely to be angry. Like if someone chooses to kick you and break your ankle because they’re wearing red and you’re wearing blue. And then you become angry. That’s small scale. But larger scale, like the Twin Towers being blown up with thousands of people being killed, is the same process: “these fucking murderous heathens”. And believe me I totally sympathise with Osama Bin Laden’s interpretation of western culture. But it doesn’t make me so angry that I want to blow up the victims of it. For that’s what we are, victims as much as perpetrators of the evils of the civilisation we so ostentatiously enjoy. You could say yoga is an enquiry into the possibility of not participating in your own, personal Twin Towers, in your own acts of vengeance, in your own indulgence of blame. Including self blame or guilt. And this invitation is extended through the clarification of the true nature of choice, which involves the clarification of the true nature of action.

I’d like to say something about true natures now before we go any further so we can be clear perhaps about what I mean by true nature. True nature is a word that’s used a lot in Zen, in Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is all about ‘awakening to your true nature, living from your true nature.’ The implication of this kind of phraseology is that you are already asleep to your true nature and living from your false nature. This is a very dangerous implication, that there is something else that is more really what you are than what you already are. This is what Nietzche’s whole life was about, telling us from the past: “don’t do that to yourself”. “Don’t tell yourself that there’s something other than what you are, that’s what you should be, that’s better than what you are”. Because if you do that you can but suffer. There is no way out from that little, very dangerous, story. There is no ‘happy ever after’ in that popular story. So what I mean by true nature is not that which stands against or opposite to so called false nature, but the wholeness of the both, the fullness of the spectrum.

Ramana Maharshi was fond of saying that the deadliest forms of suffering come from believing the ‘I am the body’ thought. That when that thought takes effect we act as if it were true. The implication of that is of course ‘I am not the body,’ if the ‘I am the body’ thought is not true and considered dangerous. But this flies against the face of our experience. If we are not the body then what on earth are we? Who is speaking? What is speaking? A body is speaking. A particular body is speaking and that particular body is Godfrey isn’t it? It’s not Sara, it’s not Michelle. Now playing with the belief that I am the body is no more dangerous than playing with the belief that I am not the body. Or being played with by those beliefs as the case may be.

So, what I mean by true nature is at one end: ‘I am the body.’ At the other end: ‘I am not the body.’ And everything that’s in between, all together. So what this means with regard to making choices is: we make choices, we do. This is undeniable. We make choices in a particular way according to our cortical activity which we call ‘freely making a choice.’ So we freely make a choice in terms of our feeling, our experience, our day to day sense of how life unfolds, we’re making choices all the time freely but when we stop and step back and look more closely at how these choices are made, we see that we don’t make them freely. We see that they arise as a result of a huge network of forces and factors, of conditions over which, it turns out when we look closely, we really have no control. And therefore the choices were not made freely.

So really when I say true nature, the true nature of choice making doesn’t mean that we don’t make choices and it doesn’t mean that we do make choices. It means that we make choices from a certain level of our functioning or a certain level of our awareness or a certain perspective. And from another perspective we don’t. And you can’t deny either and expect to survive without guilt and without blame. But if you deny the perspective that choices do not arise freely then you will be burdened by guilt and blame forever. But if you deny the perspective that you don’t make free choices, you will be abandoned by your brothers and sisters forever, because you will be refusing to take responsibility for the actions that you actually take, even if you did not take them freely.

So let’s go back to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, to their political and religious battlefield. Both these gentlemen are under the impression that they are humble and righteous servants of God. Not only are they humble and righteous servants of God, but they are favoured by God. God speaks to them, guides them directly. And they both speak of the Will of God. They both speak of the actions that they’re involved with as the Will of God. And they’re probably both convinced that the other one is not a humble and righteous servant of God, that the other one is not fulfilling the Will of God. Therefore we are all subject to their warfare as if God were so limited and narrow that he couldn’t have multiple so-called Wills, or multiple so-called intentions or agendas. What kind of God is that, that he can’t handle two things at once. Must be a bloke, after all.

We don’t have to make the kinds of choices that George Bush or Osama Bin Laden makes in terms of their socio-political economic impact, the impact on the lives of millions of human beings. But nevertheless, actually we make the same kinds of choices all the time. And we make them in exactly the same way, that both of them make theirs: according to the forces generated upon us by the circumstances, external and internal, within which we find ourselves. All of our choices, that we appear to make so freely, along with all of those choices that happen unconsciously, are the result of a specific configuration of internal and external circumstances meeting in that moment. A configuration of circumstances which extends back and out in time and space further than you can ever find a beginning or an end to.

Seeing this doesn’t take away the need to freely make choices; it doesn’t take away the fact that those choices were made in a particular brain. And that those choices made in that particular brain produce particular actions in a particular body; and that particular body and brain bears your name therefore conventionally speaking they are your actions. They cannot be said to be anybody else’s. Yet, at the same time, they had to happen like that. They had to happen like that because the network of causation, the network of conditions that brought them about already existed and impinged upon that moment of that decision exactly as it did. To turn round afterwards and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that!’ is meaningless. Except for its ability to produce guilt and blame. Just as to say “ i didn’t do that is absurd. You did, i didn’t. Simple as that. It’s the doing that’s not so simple. The instrument is beyond doubt.

To say ‘I/he/they/we should not have done something’ is pure speculation. It’s not true, it’s wishful thinking, it’s fantasy. The truth is that you did what you did, you said what you said and so did everybody else. This is what I mean by truth. I’m not seeking to define absolute truth. I’m just telling you now what I mean by truth. Truth is what we can all agree upon if we’re honest and open. It is true that we are, each one of us upon this platform. This is what I mean by truth. This is what I don’t mean by truth: ‘Well actually we’re really butterflies dreaming that we’re human beings and that this can be proved by Chuang Tzu if you listen to him carefully.’ It’s true that my stick just came down upon the mat. It is not true that it might not have done. That is not truth, that is speculation, fantasy, invention. That is the recognition that the human brain could imagine that it didn’t have to have, according to academic functional possibilities. But it did. And it’s going to do it again now, I think (thump!). Now this stick is on the mat. To say: ‘It doesn’t have to be on the mat’ is pure speculation. To say: ‘You could lift it up’ is pure speculation. Because to lift it up I need to intend to; I have to choose to. And if I don’t intend to, if I don’t chose to it will not lift up no matter how much you can argue: ‘But it could be up, you could choose to lift it up.’ I’m not going to lift it up until I choose to. No amount of speculation can make me lift it up. Now I’m going to lift it up.

TS Eliot, God bless his reactionary soul, will be so used to me misquoting him by now that he may stop turning in his grave every time i open my mouth on this subject. But I am going to misquote him again. Perhaps I’ll get it right this time. The beginning of what to me is the most enviable poem ever written, as somebody who always fantasised about writing just one poem that was really, really mindblowingly brilliant. To be faced with the Four Quartets is very easily to be triggered into envy, if you have such aspirations. Do you know it?

Joe: ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future.’

Note the perhaps, note the emphasis that Joe gave to the perhaps. That’s exactly where I got the perhaps in my teaching from, from TS Eliot. Realising how great it is to be a poet instead of a teacher. You don’t have to make any categorical statements. You can just say: ‘what if…’ and then follow through with beautiful imagery. So it goes something like this:

‘Time present and time past are both perhaps contained in time future and if all time is eternally present then all time is eternally unredeemable. What could have been, what might have been remain always a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point always to one end which is now.’

You could say this is the most technical part of the poem and the rest of the poem takes you off into different levels of your sensibility to invite you to understand the implications of that opening, perhaps the most profound and potentially liberating opening of any poem. The use of the word ‘if’ and ‘perhaps’ is very, very clever. By using ‘if’ and ‘perhaps’ you don’t have to disagree; you just have to consider the flow of the words and take their implications freely without having to give up your cherished belief in free will. What TS Eliot is saying is that only what happened, happened. What did not happen did not happen. To say that it could or should have happened is to move away from truth, from reality, into a realm of perpetual possibility that is pure speculation and irrelevant. It does not change what is actually happening; it does not change the now. What is actually happening is actually happening because what actually happened before it actually happened. What actually did not happen before it actually did not happen.

Because that which is actually happening is actually happening. I’m actually lifting up my stick again. What is actually happening is actually not a matter of opinion, whether it’s observed or not, whether it’s understood or remarked upon or not. What is actually happening is actually happening and it’s actually happening as a result of things that happened beforehand. This beforehand goes back as far as you can imagine time extending and beyond the limits of your imagination. The past happened in exactly the way that it happened and that is the way that it happened. The past did happen in exactly the way that it happened. The path did not happen in any way slightly differently from the way that it happened. This is so obvious isn’t it? The past happened the way that it happened. And because the past happened exactly the way that it happened, the present is happening exactly the way that it’s happening.

Some of us can have belittled thought and mind so deeply that you could say: ‘yes, but that’s just the mind.’ But it’s the mind that’s saying that. It’s in the mind that you make your choices, live your life, feel guilt, create blame. The mind creates blame and guilt when it’s not seeing clearly. When the mind sees clearly, blame and guilt dissolve. All the mind has to clearly see is that that which is actually happening is actually happening because of what actually happened beforehand. That the past actually did happen and it actually did happen exactly how it happened.

Olivia’s getting up to walk off the platform. We don’t know why but what we can say is that she’s getting up because of forces and factors that were already in place. Maybe it’s her bladder. Who knows? And her bladder was given to her by her mother and her father and then it was messed about, distorted by her alcoholic binges as a teenager. As a result she’s not able to stay here listening respectfully to my talk. She’s a bitch! A rude, insensitive, irresponsible bitch! Disrespectful, thoughtless, arrogant. This is how the mind works isn’t it? When people do things that we think that they should not have. When we think that they could not have. When we think that she actually should have been able to stay there longer. This is where so much human suffering comes from. So much completely unnecessary human suffering based on total delusion. The delusion that things could have been different. They were not different. She did get up. She is now coming back, maybe. She hasn’t got here yet. Until she gets here we don’t know.

Of course, this does not mean that they are not going to change. Of course they are, and we can maybe participate in those changes according to our desires, attachments, preferences. But what is happening, what has happened can not be changed. You have to be able to hear this clearly, and then see it clearly, and not just give it over to your belief systems and their need to uphold themselves. If you do manage that guilt and blame will become a thing of the past. But not the desire to change things, to make the world fit your preferences, attachments, desires more snugly. I mean we’re human beings after all, we can’t seem to help but be arrogant. Its not just actors and footballers who are arrogant is it. Its presidents, priests, immams, and yoga teachers too. Arrogant enough to act as if we can make the world in our own image, and that everyone else should particpate in that. It would be quite funny if it were not so fucking tragic.

Yoga, you could say, is an invitation to clarify the true nature of choice making, to clarify the true nature of actions, to see their conditioned nature. To create such a big space in you that you stop blaming anybody, whether it’s yourself, your father, mother, lover, children, employer, teacher. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you like them all. It certainly doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you like everything that they do and say or that you enjoy it. It just means you see its conditioned nature without being afraid of the implications of that word ‘conditioned.’

You are being conditioned right now by the wind, sun, turning of the earth, my voice, the words that I speak. We’ve got no idea quite how you’re being conditioned and you’re all being conditioned uniquely. Nevertheless to be human is to be constantly undergoing conditioning, to be constantly changing, responding to circumstance, changing your understanding, your body temperature, attitude, behaviour. You’re conditioned by the food you eat, by the sounds that you hear, by everything. Everything affects you. You are a hypersensitive organic radar system being conditioned. You’re not just a radar though; you’re not just perceiving like a radar. You’re also an action configuration. You’re expressing the implications of what you perceive. You’re moving this way or that, at this speed or that, with this intention, or that.

There’s no doubt that it feels good to be flexible and strong. There’s no doubt that it’s useful to be able to concentrate. There’s no doubt that many, if not all, the things that can be given to you by yoga posture practice are beneficial and it feels good to have them. But I doubt whether any of them are as fruitful in terms of human happiness than the absence of blame and guilt, which comes necessarily, inevitably as a result of seeing clearly the conditioned nature of all choices, all actions and all perceptions. But you wont see this clearly, you wont be free from guilt and blame, if you just stay cosy with your unproven and unprovable belief in freewill, in volition.

La Croce, Toscana 2005