Secret #23: Good vs Evil with Stephen Batchelor
In this enlightening Life's Dirty Little Secrets episode hosts Emma Waddington and Chris McCurry delve deep with the Buddhist philosopher, Stephen Batchelor on navigating ethical dilemmas in a world bound by societal norms. In this episode, Stephen challenges listeners to find courage and clarity in uncertainty, and to embrace radical self-acceptance as a means to thoughtful, compassionate living.
Touching on the need for like-minded communities amid the decline of traditional institutions, this episode encourages individuals to consciously forge new support systems. Stephen's call for a personal approach to spirituality and ethics resonates throughout the discussion, advocating for a non-binary grasp of morality.
Tune in to explore the balance between individual beliefs and societal pressures, and how meditation groups can anchor us in a turbulent sea of systemic issues. "Good and Evil with Stephen Batchelor" is a must-hear for those wrestling with life's complex ethical questions.
Highlights:
The Nature of Ethical Choices
Personal Values vs. Societal Pressures
Inner Values and Intuition
Stress, Binary Thinking, and Language
Self-Acceptance and Growth
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00] Striking similarities in inner struggles, liberating experience.
[05:07] Overwhelmed by thoughts, emotions, habits, regrets, grudges. Ethical uncertainty.
[06:35] Striving for best intentions often leads astray.
[12:58] Ethics is about becoming the best version of oneself.
[14:25] Ethics is about shaping and forming oneself.
[18:29] Tradition must adapt to the changing world.
[23:45] Ethics and imagination crucial for societal change.
[26:02] Encouraging tough questions, creativity, and ethical change.
[28:20] Marvel at the mysterious complexity of human society.
[33:07] Influential counterculture can inspire real societal change.
[36:22] Challenging binary thinking for ethical understanding.
[41:35] Language reinforces binary habits, rooted in evolution.
[43:58] Radical self-acceptance is vital in ethical training.
[46:48] Focus on non-reactive attention, ethics, community bonds.
[50:27] Navigating questions, offering support, creating understanding.
About Stephen Batchelor
Stephen Batchelor is a former monk in the Tibetan and Zen traditions. He has translated Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and is the author of Alone with Others, The Faith to Doubt, The Tibet Guide, The Awakening of the West, Buddhism without Beliefs, and Verses from the Center. He is a contributing editor of Tricycle magazine, a guiding teacher at Gaia House Retreat Centre, and cofounder of Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies and Contemporary Inquiry in Devon, England. He lives in southwest France and lectures and conducts meditation retreats worldwide.
Related Resources
Learn more about Stephen Batchelor
Order your copy of the Art of Solitude and Living with the Devil
Past Episodes mentioned in this episode
Secret #2: We Are Not Alone with Martin Wilks
Secret #17: Adolescenting - How to be an Adolescent with Dr. Louise Hayes
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Reach out and let us know you are listening and what you would like to hear on the show - email:lifesdirtylittlesecretspodcast@gmail.com
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Chris McCurry: Hello. I'm Chris McCurry, and this is Life's Dirty Little Secrets.
Emma Waddington: And I'm Emma Waddington, and today we have the incredible Stephen Batchelor. Stephen Batchelor is a Scottish Buddhist author and teacher. He's known for his [00:01:00] writing on Buddhist subjects and leadership of meditation retreats worldwide.
Emma Waddington: A noted proponent of agnostic and secular Buddhism, and incredibly at the age of 17, he traveled to India, which took you six months, interested in the big questions, like the meaning of life. And he found himself a monk for many, many years, and then came back to author numerous books. I think it's eight in total, is that right?
Emma Waddington: How many books have you written?
Stephen Batchelor: I'm afraid I lose count, but something, something about like that, yeah, ten or so, maybe,
Emma Waddington: I don't know. Yes, incredible, incredible amounts of writing, including the very well known bestseller Buddhism without beliefs, which was my introduction to your work and living with the devil and our paths have crossed a couple of times about 20 years ago.
Emma Waddington: Actually, I came across your [00:02:00] work when one of our previous guests, Martin will actually gave me your book living with the devil as I was finishing my PhD. And he told me, you must go and see Stephen Batchelor at Gaia House. You must do one of the retreats with him. And I couldn't get into one of the retreats with you, but I went on to another retreat.
Emma Waddington: I can't remember who led it. Helen, a yoga, anyway. Yes, that's it, that's it. It was a seven day silent retreat, which was incredibly challenging for me at the time. And then I remember seeing you speak in Waterloo a couple of years afterwards and a really small gathering and being really struck by, at the time I was introduced to the model that I now use acceptance and commitment therapy, and it was, I was struck by the similarities.
Emma Waddington: in the work that you [00:03:00] were talking about in your sort of more secular Buddhist texts about really living with. Our inner demons and I remember at the time I was having quite a difficult time with my own inner demons and being able to read about in your text, this idea that, you know, being able to make space for being open to versus this battle and turmoil that we can have.
Emma Waddington: With our insides was, yeah, really liberating. So yeah, so today I'm really delighted to be speaking to you finally in person after having wanted to be at your retreat 20 odd years ago. And really to talk about this internal struggle. Why is it that as humans, we find it so hard to hold both. The good and the bad inside of us.
Emma Waddington: So welcome.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, thank you very much, Emma and Chris. I'll do what [00:04:00] I can to try to shed some light on this matter. But what we're really facing in many ways is the, is the fundamental conundrum of being human. I, this is, this is the, the question of good and evil. something that human beings ever since they started to think have struggled with.
Stephen Batchelor: And whether you go back in the, in the Asian traditions, back to the bud, back to the Vaers, back to Swang Sur the ancient Chinese, or whether. You do the same in the Western tradition, going back through Christianity and Judaism or returning to Socrates and the Greeks, all of these people, and I consider them to be far more intelligent than me have, have tried to get to grips With this you know, fundamental ethical conundrum of how to lead a good life.
Stephen Batchelor: And, I guess, one of the biggest paradoxes is that [00:05:00] everybody wants to be good. Everybody likes to think that what they do is good. And yet we find sometimes it completely irresistible to do the very opposite of what we Aspire for we want to be kind and the next thing we know, we're talking to our partner and we're being anything but kind.
Stephen Batchelor: Mm-Hmm. And we find ourselves so easily overwhelmed by by thoughts, by emotions, by habit patterns, by grudges, by anger, by all of these powerful forces that just rise up unbidden within us. And we find ourselves saying and doing things that we, we subsequently, you know, deeply regret, we don't, you know, hurt people or whatever.
So I've been, I've been grappling with this not only when I wrote the book Living with the Devil, which tries to take this topic head [00:06:00] on. A book which was published now actually 20 years ago, it was published in 2004, and I've self now, in fact, this morning for the last three years since COVID, I'm now also working on another book, which is addressing very much the same themes about what I call an ethics of uncertainty.
Stephen Batchelor: And I'm trying to frame this, dilemma really now in terms of how. You know, we, we, we are caught in a, a sense of being in a world that we don't fully understand. When we make ethical decisions, when we have to, you know, make a difficult choice that's gonna affect other people, we can never be sure of the outcome.
Stephen Batchelor: We can think about what we would, we would be the best way to respond. The best thing to say, the best thing to do. And no matter how much we think about it, we can never foresee exactly what consequences it will have. And [00:07:00] so we can, as a word, I think it's a Bob Dylan song says, you know, we try to do our best, but we end up making things a whole matter, a whole lot worse.
Stephen Batchelor: So we, we so we have a double problem we have on the one hand. These unbidden urges and ideas that we can't resist sort of blurting out and causing pain. And even when we have, you know, time to reflect and contemplate and sit and meditate about how to resolve a particular issue we do our best and end up making things worse.
Stephen Batchelor: So good and evil, I think, are issues that we'll be confronting and struggling with as long as we live. And yet at the same time, I don't think we should thereby just give up, can't do anything about it, because as moral and ethical creatures, we are, I think, deep down [00:08:00] driven to make the best of our three score years and 10 on this earth.
Stephen Batchelor: And not, you know, add to the misery that's already there to try to make the world a slightly better place. And, you know, that's kind of the frame in which we're holding this discussion now. But of course, for all three of us. It's also something that probably affects us, you know, throughout the day, every day we wake up till the moment we fall asleep.
Stephen Batchelor: There's some issue at work, probably, you know, what do I do say, how do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? That is going to be continually you know, a struggle of some kind. Sometimes we make a good call, things work well, other times we think we're well, but it doesn't work out that way. But that's what human life is about and I think it's the, it's this ongoing consciousness of being aware of [00:09:00] this struggle that actually serves as the kind of.
Stephen Batchelor: There's a kind of catalyst really that enables us to refine our moral compass and hopefully in the process become better people.
Chris McCurry: idea of uncertainty, I think, is intriguing and important because so often we don't know what. The actual consequences of our behavior will be, you know, BF Skinner talked about this, you know, in the fifties about how society is becoming so complicated that, you know, you can do something and, you know, you just don't know what the consequences will be on the other side of the world or 20 years down the road, whether it's.
Chris McCurry: You know, climate change or some, you know, societal issue or something like that, or even with within a family, you know, you say something that you think is supportive of. You know, your [00:10:00] child and they, they hear it as criticism and that may have, you know, immediate and short term impact, or they may be chewing on that 30 years later.
Chris McCurry: So, yeah, I like the idea of uncertainty and I will be looking forward to your next book.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, I think the other thing that comes with the recognition of uncertainty. Is that we realize that every moral and ethical choice we make contains an element of risk. In other words, we could call it an ethics of risk.
Stephen Batchelor: In fact, I do sometimes call it an ethics of risk. Which is to acknowledge that we can never have the kinds of moral certainties we would like. It would be so much easier if we could convince ourselves that we're right in something and then we just sort of charge ahead and do it. But [00:11:00] as you've pointed out, the reality will kick back in ways that we can't foresee and very often have consequences we absolutely didn't want.
Stephen Batchelor: And so how, therefore, do we live morally with this uncertainty, with the fact that risk is inevitable in any kind of, of moral decision we make? And I guess really what that comes down to, in some senses, is courage. I think, you know, you can only, you can only, you need the courage to take the risk, lot of moral issues I find myself facing, I can sometimes sort of get round or avoid.
Stephen Batchelor: By basically just going along with the consensus, going along with what people tend to say, going along with what my Buddhism might be, have told me to do and so on and so forth. And but I [00:12:00] find that that's also a cop out. In many ways, because we're not really attending to those deeper intuitions we may have, which is sort of niggling away saying, well, actually, no, I don't think that's right.
Stephen Batchelor: You know, I know the Buddha might've said this or Jesus or Socrates or someone deep down in this particular situation here and now. I don't feel that works and yet it's so much more convenient to play the good Buddhist or the good act therapist or whatever, embodying, as it were, a kind of role that we've taken on for the sake of, you know, convenience sake of being part of a community or a society or religious group, whatever, rather than actually tapping deep down into the very core of, of our own.
Stephen Batchelor: You know, moral intuitions, our own sense of of how, of how, how to be good as it were. Well, that's, that's a lot more, that's a lot more work. Well, that's [00:13:00] the trouble that's exactly right. And unfortunately ethics is work. And to, to, it's so much easier just to, just to give in to the norms.
Stephen Batchelor: of our society. Whereas I think really at the heart, ethics is how we become the kind of person we aspire to be. But to lead an ethical life, it's not about following the 10 commandments or the five Buddhist precepts or some list of. Of rules in some books, some to become an ethical person means to be able, in a sense, to put aside moral rules and constraints and norms of society and to, had the courage and the willingness, to, in a sense, find your own voice, to be the kind of person that you, you, you, you implicitly, aspire to become.
Stephen Batchelor: And this, I think, makes ethics far more. [00:14:00] About, you know, how do I live my life as a whole, rather than how do I, you know, how, how do I function in a morally, you know, acceptable way in the society in which I live? And I don't hurt people's feelings and I don't upset the boat, which is very often what we choose to do.
Stephen Batchelor: So in that sense, I think ethics is about is, is about creating ourselves in some way. It's about, stepping out of the box of conformity and convention and rules and, and, and, and really having the courage to, to experiment to trust in intuitions that perhaps go against the, the norms that we've been brought up with.
Stephen Batchelor: So yeah, it's very much about shaping and forming oneself. Ethos ethics is work rooted in the Greek. [00:15:00] Ethos, as you probably know, an ethos, that means something like character and ethics is really the formation of character. It's about the building of a robust, but also, you know, a vulnerable sense of, of, of being a particular person and seeking to somehow cultivate and develop.
Stephen Batchelor: That person that we aspire to be, it means also paying attention to those we regard highly in the world, a historical figure, temporary figures, taking our cues from those. People we admire who are very often not the people who have followed the rule book, but people have really taken a risk to respond to the situation as it is now rather than it was at the time of Jesus or whenever.
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah,
Emma Waddington: I mean it is, it is quite, it does take quite a lot of courage to go against. The grain, [00:16:00] like our sort of tribal tribalistic tendencies and wanting to be a part of the group make it very hard for us to stand out and to develop that side of us that really like in, in acceptance and commitment therapy, we talk about our own values and they're very much a felt sense.
Emma Waddington: That we develop and we start and we learn about these values and what we hold true through experience. But it is a very bold move to step outside what everybody else is doing or saying or thinking. It, you know, it, it feels sometimes that it goes against our DNA. And like you said, often the group isn't doing that.
Chris McCurry: Well, by definition, the group isn't doing that and, but it can be, it can be costly, to, you know, if you're, if you're part of a tribe or if you're part of a religious [00:17:00] sect or political party, and you're not orthodox enough, or even, even within psychotherapy, if you're not, if you're, if you're not adhering to this particular model or school of, you You know, I mean, the psychoanalysts are fighting all the time about, you know, who's, who's orthodox and who's you know, a rebel.
Chris McCurry: I've been doing that for over 100 years, but even within our community, there's sort of like, that sort of the purists and the, and the rebels and such, but yeah, the forces are, are aligned against individuality and non
Stephen Batchelor: conformity. No, that's absolutely right. Yes. Well, I mean, in my own life, I have stepped out of conventional existence.
Stephen Batchelor: I did not pursue a career in England where I grew up. I went off to India. I became a Tibetan Buddhist monk and then a Zen Buddhist monk. And then when I started writing about Buddhism, I started [00:18:00] criticizing some of the standard Buddhist beliefs like reincarnation and stuff like that. But I feel that the, you know, the, the, any tradition that is worth its weight, it has any real worth to it, has to be one that's able to embrace and tolerate criticism.
Stephen Batchelor: It's able to somehow give rise to people who think ahead of the founder figures, let's say, who's able to realize the tradition as a dynamic tradition, something that's not Sort of fixed in stone but something that is constantly on the move because the world is constantly on the move. We're experiencing a world quite different now to the one in which the Buddha and Jesus and Socrates live.
Stephen Batchelor: Many of the basic issues remain the same, but the actual specific. Issues that we encounter would have been unimaginable for many of these people. [00:19:00] So no matter how much we can carry from the tradition, that tradition can never tell us exactly, you know what I have to do now, we may be attuned to our own values.
Stephen Batchelor: And I, I agree with you, Emma. I think it's. Important to not just think of values as things that we import from some tradition, but actually we, as we grow up as, as, as young people, we become, we, we become aware of what really matters for us. So what really are things that we would or wouldn't do in difficult situations, we become more conscious of.
Stephen Batchelor: Of what is really important about which we really passionate and we seek to live by those values and norms. And that often takes us into conflict with with the society from which we came from our family and our parents and so forth and so on. And in, in my own case, you know, leading a very unconventional life, has been one that's been at times been very, very [00:20:00] difficult.
Stephen Batchelor: It's been very challenging. It's meant I've had to accept a lot of insecurity. I don't have, you know, bodies or institutions that can back me up. I don't have the support or didn't have the support of my family for a long time. I lived in poverty for many years and I, but I think to put one's values to the test like that is probably the.
Stephen Batchelor: The probably the best way to really strengthen them to really get yourself to be confident and somehow in tune with what it is you think you believe, or say you believe, or feel you believe. And I think, you know, we live in a world, especially in the West. Where we have enormous privileges, enormous comforts, we're very well taken care of.
Stephen Batchelor: And in some ways, we don't have many opportunities these days to to really test ourselves. At the moment [00:21:00] I'm writing about Socrates, I'm making a comparative study between the Buddha and Socrates and primarily in terms of ethics. So how did, similar, how did they differ on ethical scores? And for Socrates, what's important in philosophy is not arriving at some kind of truth.
Stephen Batchelor: What's important is constantly examining and critiquing your own assumptions and views that you've inherited from your family or your religion and so on. It's all about, in a way, learning how to think for yourself, learning how to live life autonomously. The Buddha said the same thing that they were contemporary, exact contemporary.
Stephen Batchelor: So the Buddha too is pointing to how we need to become independent of others in our practice. And yet, however appealing that might be on the surface in practice, it's actually the most difficult thing in some ways, because you [00:22:00] somehow let go of so much that sort of gives you the sense of privilege and well being and safety that.
Stephen Batchelor: Our societies do at the moment still provide identity, identity. Yeah, that's exactly identity. And that of course is something we cherish. It's identity, belonging, a certain assumed respect that we can garner those that we've been brought up with our teachers, our friends, our societies, our communities.
Stephen Batchelor: And this is obviously something that has been largely generated through our biological evolution. We are social creatures. We have adapted very well, at least from the human point of view to this planet. And as a result, we've become very communicative animals whoa, very well together in groups.
Stephen Batchelor: And so, it's very easy to sort of get into a kind of a stasis sort of [00:23:00] space, whether it's individually or socially or politically. And we just try to feel that when we just sort of hold on to the idea that As long as we can keep these institutions and these structures and these beliefs intact as long as no one rocks the boat, then we'll be okay.
Stephen Batchelor: But unfortunately, the world doesn't allow that. The world is constantly throwing new situations like climate change, for example, or injustice in the south and the north, or whatever it might be. And these do not have ready-made answers. People on religious belief or political belief try to keep imposing the same answers onto different situations, but that usually doesn't work.
Stephen Batchelor: And so ethics, therefore good and evil, as it were, is also very much a matter of the imagination. How can we imagine doing something differently? How can we imagine a society that does not just keep repeating its same [00:24:00] mistakes, but actually has opportunities for, for another way of being in this world?
Stephen Batchelor: And I think we're at a point in our history, perhaps human beings have always been at a point in their history where, you know, the crit, the crit, the critical situations we face are becoming extreme and somehow individually, collectively, socially. We need to find another way of being good and mitigating as best we can the damage that we endlessly see causing to ourselves, others, the environment, animals, whoever it might be.
Stephen Batchelor: But yeah, that has a lot to do with identity, a lot to do with a sense of belonging, a lot to do with implicit in all of that is the sentence that we're right. We don't. There are many of the views of our society. We just take that as given
Emma Waddington: and we get educated in that way. I mean, listening to you, I'm just thinking, you know, so much of what we create, [00:25:00] like even conversations with our children, you know, as we speak to our children or even in the education system, giving them the freedom to really question, you know, like Socrates, we use Socratic questioning as part of our, as one of our interventions.
Emma Waddington: And this sort of ability to be curious and to be open to being a different perspective and really to being willing to receive a different perspective is a big challenge for most of us. To be, we feel attacked. We feel criticized. We feel challenged when somebody has a different perspective and really it's through that education.
Emma Waddington: I think it begins with our children making it say to ask the difficult questions, to have those questions be placed upon us too, and. Start to open to, [00:26:00] like you're saying, a creative alternative. So thinking about this idea of, of ethics, and how to do things differently and really needing sort of a radical change in the way we think of things in the way in the, in the sort of paradigm that inevitably as part of our evolution, that we almost need to continue to evolve.
Emma Waddington: Into a different way of being it, it sounds like you're suggesting that we need this really to be able to tackle some of the huge problems we have and that we face today that there's no real alternative that going the same way we've always gone is going to keep delivering what we currently have, which is a very polarized, you know, wards.
Emma Waddington: Climate change
Stephen Batchelor: horrors. No, this is true. There is, of course, another side to this. I mean, I'm glad I didn't live a hundred years ago, for [00:27:00] example, in terms of dental care, all kinds of stuff. I mean, it's easy, I think, to become preoccupied with the, with the challenges we face. And there's clearly a reason for that because they're the things that are, you know, about most importance at our time.
Stephen Batchelor: But I think also it's worth occasionally looking back and the development of the course of human history, and looking at some of the upsides to, I mean, I think human beings have done an incredible job in many ways. I mean, I think of many things that I haven't done so terribly well, but the fact is we have created societies, we have created education systems.
Stephen Batchelor: I mean, I live in France and, you know, it's an extraordinary achievement to have created a society. Like the French Republic that I live in, you know, it's, it's really quite staggering how the whole thing works at all. I just sometimes in a supermarket and you know, I just stop and I think, well, how did [00:28:00] all this stuff get here and how does it get every single day of the year?
Stephen Batchelor: How come every day of my life, I've always had enough to eat. Just imagine the complexity of bringing, of getting all of that to happen, of having education systems, I was recently at a hospital check up, and you just get overwhelmed by how the systems of care have evolved. So, you know, you go on and on and on, but the point is that You know, human beings and human societies have, I think, in good ways, that doesn't mean there is lots of places that are clearly in need of a lot more work and including our own society too.
Stephen Batchelor: I wouldn't dismiss that, but there is something profoundly mysterious, I feel about how, how any of this world works at all, at the level of complexity that we. Experience. And now we have this basically, you know, you're in Singapore Chris is [00:29:00] in Vancouver. I'm in France. We're at totally different points on the globe.
Stephen Batchelor: And yet that doesn't prevent us from having a conversation without any glitches or technical bleeps at all. It's just. Perfectly doable. We don't even notice it any longer. Whereas even 20 years ago, we couldn't have had this conversation. So the world is coming together in some ways that people are connecting with others more.
Stephen Batchelor: The younger people in, as they grow up now, however much you berate cell phones and so on, they are exposed to a world they are. Able to potentially have communication and conversation they can learn about people from all over different parts of the globe and I think that's all a positive thing. And it's something that exactly how that all happened is very difficult to explain at some level, it seems to have almost happened by itself in a strange way so that's the positive side.
Stephen Batchelor: And I [00:30:00] think it's helpful when , we're peering into the abyss of human evil and all of the disasters that may be. Coming a bonus in the next decades to also take stock of, you know, what we have to achieve as a, as a species. I think that it balances things out a bit.
Stephen Batchelor: It maybe gives us a little bit more room for confidence, a little greater trust in the human family. And that I think is, is, is important as well. So,
Chris McCurry: And I think it also creates opportunities again to do that self exploration around values and ethics and virtues, because, you know, the, the teenagers who are doing all the, the tick tock messaging and stuff, and they're getting some very strange, you know, scary offensive stuff coming across.
Chris McCurry: Their phones and they have to decide, you know, they have to [00:31:00] make a choice, but am I going to participate in this or am I going to stand up against, you know, cyberbullying or whatever it may be. So these create opportunities that people can step up and see them as
Stephen Batchelor: such. Well, I'm often very impressed by the younger people I meet.
Stephen Batchelor: We don't have children. So, apart from my nephews and nieces, of which there are quite a number, I've never really had the experience of parenting, of really having to, you know, help a young person grow into adulthood. And I think I've missed something very. You know, quite central to human experience and not having had that, but I guess, you know, you can't be a monk and a parent.
Stephen Batchelor: So, but when I do encounter young people and that, you know, I wish I do quite a bit now and again, I'm often very impressed by, okay, they spend a lot of time glued to their phones, but when you actually start entering into a. Meaningful conversation with them. They're very thoughtful. They're very concerned.
Stephen Batchelor: The ones I [00:32:00] meet about world as it is now. They're very much committed to connectivity. Obviously, a lot of that is official and so forth and so on. But I think we should discount the fact that these young people take these issues very seriously. And that it's taking your life seriously in the end that I think is the foundation for an ethical existence.
Stephen Batchelor: In other words, not just as sort of mindlessly go along with what you've been told. And you know, there's a lot of pushback against conventional thinking amongst the young. There always has been, I think, and perhaps we live in a time now where, you know, that sort of pushback, you know, can really build up a body of.
Stephen Batchelor: A counterculture as it were like we in the sixties, for example, which at least Chris and I will remember very well, and but it was, it was that period, in fact, I mean, I don't slightly getting distracted here, but one of the things for me that was [00:33:00] really important in the life that the, in, in what I ended up doing was the fact that I grew up in a culture that felt that change was possible, whether it was through the music, whether it was through the, the examples of, of, of, of, of, of certain political and other figures, I grew up in an atmosphere in which you know, I had a very strong, you know, my feelings of what I could do with my life were really far more, expanded than those would have been the case with my parents, for example.
Stephen Batchelor: And I like to think that when I think of a young person like Greta Thunberg or others, you know, these are young people who have taken a stand, a moral, ethical stand, and they've had an enormous impact on the world. And I like to feel that we are perhaps on the cusp of a counter cultural generation that we'll be able perhaps [00:34:00] to imagine, more effectively, perhaps we can how to respond to some of these crises.
Stephen Batchelor: And not just by words, but what they do, how they act, how they live, their lifestyles, all of those things. That to me is another positive thing. It's so easy when you talk about good and evil to sort of just look on the evil side of it.
Emma Waddington: Yes. That's what I was just thinking that, that we've kind of come around, you know, circle back to this, because as I was thinking about everything that I want to change in the world and focusing on the evil of the world and how.
Emma Waddington: We want to change the way we think and adopt this more curious and open minded stance. We dismiss everything and we do, as humans, have that tendency to be very black and white. And being able to hold both, how hard that is. It's really hard for us to hold both and not want to shut the door on one or the other.
Emma Waddington: If I'm sort of finding myself struggling with, you know, what I [00:35:00] see as the darker sides of myself, I tend not to look at the lightness and, and vice versa. When I'm feeling quite positive, I don't want to look at the darkness and, and being able to hold those two does like you're describing open up the more possibilities.
Emma Waddington: Cause holding them both, can allow us to be more creative. Like you're saying in some of the sort of younger, the youth of today, they're, they're, you know, thank goodness for adolescence. We've had a podcast on adolescence and the fact that they are able to hold duality, I think much better than we can, or at least I said it can and a much more creative.
Emma Waddington: And willing to fight.
Stephen Batchelor: No, I agree with you. And I think this is one of the, the, the topics that I'm, funnily enough, I was writing about this morning. It's about how can we somehow stop living in a binary war? How [00:36:00] can we somehow step out of this deeply ingrained habit? To split everything into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, and not that those distinctions are, without any grounds, there are, there are, you know, there clearly, there are clearly two.
Stephen Batchelor: Differences here, but the problem I think is that rather than thinking of good and evil as somehow polar opposites, there are in a kind of perpetual conflict with one another to recognize that in reality, they're really just two poles of a spectrum, and I found it helpful in particularly Addressing ethical questions is to be aware of how we so easily switch or jump or hold on to one of these polls, take a stance and a position, and then we basically have no longer any kind of openness or capacity to hear another point of view.
Stephen Batchelor: We're stuck into that sense of, I [00:37:00] am right. And instead, I feel that we need to perhaps live. In a way that embraces the spectrum of possibilities, in other words, to see good as that I'm not like a rainbow is too pretty a picture, but I was basically a spectrum that the shades from one extreme into the other and most of our lives.
Stephen Batchelor: I'll probably spend somewhere in the middle band of that spectrum. It's rare that we do something that we would consider to be undeniably evil, any more than it is rare that we would do something that we consider to be, you know, indisputably good. Those do occur, but they're exceptions rather than norm.
Stephen Batchelor: The norm is the kind of fuzzy mid zone. Where the messiness of human life takes place, where things are not binary or unambiguous. They're [00:38:00] ambiguous. They are uncertain. They are, bewildering. They're multifaceted, and that's the world. That we encounter from moment to moment. We live in a world of situations that we're called to respond to, that we cannot but respond to because we are airing beings.
Stephen Batchelor: And yet every one of these situations has never, ever happened before precisely in the way it's happening now, and it'll never happen again in that way. And this gives rise to what some people have called a situational ethic, an ethic that recognizes the uniqueness of each situation, and we can't.
Stephen Batchelor: There's no rule book, a Christian rule book or a Buddhist rule book that's going to give us the answers to how to, how to deal with every single one of these situations. We have to call upon our own inner values, our own intuitions, our own [00:39:00] experience the example of others who we admire and so forth and so on.
Stephen Batchelor: And in the end, we have to take a risk. We have to say something to do something, and we may not be totally confident in what we're doing, but we cannot. Not act. That I feel is often the dilemma we find ourselves in situations where it'd be much more comfortable for me to not do anything, to just sort walk away.
Stephen Batchelor: But
Chris McCurry: no walk walking away is, is, is an action?
Stephen Batchelor: Well, walking it would be an act, but I'm, I mean it in the sense of walking away in the sense of ignoring the situation. Right. Completely washing my hands.
Chris McCurry: Avoiding it
Stephen Batchelor: in some way. Yeah. At times walking away might be the best thing to do.
Chris McCurry: Exactly. That in the years. That I spent, you know, working with, with kids, watching them develop cross sectionally and longitudinally, you know, it, it seems like people under stress become 4 [00:40:00] year olds, 4 year olds are working on the back from the back brains. And it's very binary.
Chris McCurry: It's very egocentric. It's very all or none black and white. And when people get stressed out, they revert back to that style of thinking. And so, to be able to hold both, to tolerate the ambiguity, the uncertainty, it really is an act of courage, and we have to be able to hold our anxieties about that lightly so that we can proceed in a positive direction.
Chris McCurry: But I think it's almost. a biological drive to, to divide the world into this and that, black and white, all or none.
Stephen Batchelor: think language also reinforces it too, because we, the grammar of language is again built up on things either being a or not being a, the law of the excluded middle, which again reinforces the [00:41:00] binary habit.
Stephen Batchelor: And I agree with you, I think binary ism, is presumably a. Result of our evolution, it's provided survival advantages and what you say about it being the default mode for, say, four year olds makes an awful lot of sense and, you can see how, you know, I mean, I can see sometimes when I really lose it.
Stephen Batchelor: And I do sometimes become a, I become a bit of an, I've become an angry child again in a way. You know, I, I become, I have a sort of a tantrum. Of course I don't show it, but that's basically what's going on. So all of that does all fit together rather well. But I imagine there's very few four year olds listening to this podcast.
Stephen Batchelor: So , we can assume that it's, it's, it's not our demographic. Not your demographic, but it's worthwhile holding picture in mind. I feel it's all. I think a certain [00:42:00] humility is required of us as so called adults, as it were to recognize that these forces from our childhood, these forces from our back brain, from our evolutionary past are still very much at work in us.
Stephen Batchelor: And in some ways, whether we talk of Mara or Satan, these are mythological ways of really talking about. The legacy of our own past, our own deep past that has formed us to being the kind of creatures that we are. And in Buddhist practice, it's very much about learning to recognize Mara. The first thing is, is to, is to be able to sort of see this happening.
Stephen Batchelor: And when you sit in meditation and you're trying to be nice and mindful and loving and so on, and you find instead that your mind is throwing up all kinds of stuff, usually which is not loving or mindful, and you [00:43:00] have, rather than thinking, I can't do this, I'm a hopeless meditator, you have to say, yes, this is what's happening right now, and that's a very, very important part, I feel, in the training, Inethical awareness is radical self acceptance.
Stephen Batchelor: And then we come back to action and commitment therapy and other such movements that are very clearly aware of the starting point of this process is to be able to radically accept the person you are, warts and everything, and don't, and stop pretending and get into therapeutic situations or contemplative experiences in which you are able to say yes.
Stephen Batchelor: And I know yes to this is who I'm, there may be parts of this I really don't like. I may even suffer from self-loathing, but this is who I am and it's opening up that space a a non-reactive space of [00:44:00] presence of attention, of care that begins to establish within ourselves a basis from which we can then.
Stephen Batchelor: Begin to think and speak and respond to the world from another position, not from a position that's driven by the back brain or habit or conditioning, but one that is grounded on a capacity to accept ourselves for the kind of beings we are and and to try there upon to found another basis from which to live in this world.
Stephen Batchelor: That
Emma Waddington: really is this, this. This place on which we can only get to a getting to the place where we can do good means that we need to see the evil. And make space for those parts that we don't like the harder we struggle with them the less creative the less. [00:45:00] Loving and good. We can do in the world in a way.
Emma Waddington: It's a paradox.
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And I the, the, the ways in which my writing has developed since I wrote living with the devil has been very much to look at that. And one way of framing it is to recognize that on the, on the one hand, we need to be able to embrace the situation we're At the same time, we need to be able to let go or just let be those patterns that we recognize to be destructive, to be egocentric to be uncaring, and at the same time to then notice as we do when we do any kind of act of mindfulness, that mindfulness itself can be aware of all this stuff, but it's not in itself reactive.
Stephen Batchelor: Mindfulness is a non reactive attention. And it's that non reactive attention that gives us the foundation for [00:46:00] then being able to respond. Caringly wisely, compassionately, courageously to the world rather than just to go along with the familiar patterning of habit conditioning and so forth and so on.
Stephen Batchelor: and to give some sort of framework ethics that can be reduced to some fairly basic, simple principles. Seems to be at least a way to begin. Trying to open up a space, an ethical space in our lives from which we can learn to live differently and speak different, to relate to other people in another way, but it's hard work.
Stephen Batchelor: I mean, it's not, this is, this is not a, there's no quick fix solution to any of these great issues. It's a slow, sometimes frustrating and challenging way to. And that's, I think it's why it's important to find people of like [00:47:00] mind people we can empathize with and sympathize with who seem to have share the same sorts of passions that we do and to create community.
Stephen Batchelor: I think is important in this regard, and that's something that's also getting lost in our very atomized society of these bonds of shared value and interest that keep communities together. Churches are largely disintegrating in Europe, at least. And nothing much is coming along to replace them. And I worry about that, I must admit, I think, so, and again, we can celebrate the wonderful connectivity worldwide that people have access to now, but at the same time, it's always on a one to one basis to rule.
Stephen Batchelor: And I feel without having this, you know, without more consciously creating a communities and again, act is a community at one level, [00:48:00] you know, a Buddhist meditation group is a community at another level. The, that also I think is a crucial element to somehow healing these largest issues that we face as a, as a species and which.
Stephen Batchelor: You know, other non human forms of life suffer from as a result of our, of our behavior. Absolutely.
Chris McCurry: I'm mindful of the time.
Stephen Batchelor: I think we came to a fairly good sort of concluding point. I
Chris McCurry: think we did. I think we did. any final words wrap up?,
Stephen Batchelor: I think it's been, we've covered a lot of ground. And I hope we've given the listener a sort of a sense of how to negotiate some of these questions without laying or having laid on any kind of answers particularly, but hopefully. They can perhaps feel, you know, supported in being part of this kind of [00:49:00] conversation.
Stephen Batchelor: Thank
Emma Waddington: you.
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