Ordinary Magic Page 1 of 19

Intro

Surata: I used to have a very stereotyped idea of what a friend was really and I think that’s expanded now to the point where I don’t really know if I can give an answer to the question. My own experience is I get on with all sorts of people in all sorts of different kinds of ways.

Max: I don’t know we are quite different but in some ways we are the same.

Sam: It’s weird we are like aspects of one personality, it’s really weird.

Max: Strange.

Sam: If Max or I were, if either were to die, it would be so, so weird.

Subhuti: You are much less likely in the modern day to see friendships that last a lifetime. Partly because circumstances against it but those circumstances are also against the development of a really serious attitude to life as containing high values which need to be worked at.

Aloka paints Alaya’s portrait

Surata v/o: I think the best way to get to know someone is to spend time with them. Even though Alaya, Sam’s dad, and Aloka, Max’s dad, have a Buddhist connection going back twenty years, more recent changes in circumstances mean they can spend lots more time together. The results are several paintings and a closer friendship.

When I was growing up in the East End of London in the late forties the effects of the war were still around. The deep social bonds and friendships necessary for survival were an ordinary part of daily life.

TITLES

(Music: 'Down at the Old Bull and Bush')

PART 1 BONDING

Sangharakshita: I think human beings are innately social as, from the very beginning of life, we are in contact with other human beings. We are in contact with our mother, father, siblings, family. It is very difficult if not impossible for us to grow as human beings without contact with other human beings. Whether we are infants and quite helpless or whether we are a bit older and need to acquire education and culture we are very dependent on input from other people. It is very difficult to get very far on your own.

Bhante walking round lake with Anomarati

Surata: My dad would take us fishing; take us on long walks across fields and things. He’d sort of take us up to the library and he’d meet other men on the street. And it was obvious he was friends with them. He was pleased to see them, they were pleased to see him and they would spend the time of day together.

Pub ext. & int. Ordinary Magic Page 2 of 19

Pramudita: Our fathers used to meet down the pub so there was a sort of extended thing. There was a sort of inner circle of people I would hang out with…there were three or four of those…and we'd do lots of stuff together. Yeah. I started going round, playing with them, going round their house and their parents would sort of adopt me. I remember one of my mate's mum saying, ‘Well, you're part of the family, son, you can come anytime you like’. Really nice.

Surata: My dad in a certain sort of sense would befriend my friends. He would ask them about themselves, what they were interested in and where they came from and things like that.

Sam/Max: We've always been there, because our parents were living in the same house when we were first born. In the eighties we were doing mud fights. In the nineties running round the country shooting people. (laughs)

Country

Sadhujivin: We used to go out and climb trees, sit round fires baking potatoes. Generally it was building dams in the stream, pond dipping, building dens, the usual thing that children do.

Cubs

Pramudita v/o: I used to really love the cubs. I loved the thing about the Jungle Book.

Surata: Being in nature, ‘Be Prepared’, that sort of stuff, there was a shared ethos.

Cycling

Surata: I also got involved with a cycling club, an all male environment so I have always tended to feel at home in large groups of men.

Boy watching TV

Movie: Hi-Lo Country

Cowboy v/o: The pure simple joy of a cattle drive, all that sky, all that land stretching out to the horizons, there's no sense of freedom that sets a man so high, makes him feel this is what I was born to do.

Surata: You'd get a cattle drive, a bunch of men, going off into the wilderness, sharing their lives, up against the elements, learning how to survive on the edge. And that very much appealed to me.

Suburbia

Sadhujivin: The family wasn't really a happy one. (An argument, doors banged). The most significant memories in my early childhood were of going to the long meadows. I always went on my own and lie and gaze into the vault of heaven.

Sky Ordinary Magic Page 3 of 19

Sadhujivin: There were times when I would experience a sense of bliss and oneness. And when I came out of them I felt a sense of loss, it was a burden for me to have to go home.

Pramudita: Football was a big part of our life, play Sunday, watch it Saturday. We always came on this green here, pick up sides and just play until dinner was ready. I did a paper round an that’s where I met John Wilkie who’s still a friend of mine now.

Pub. Men pass round old photos

Man: This is too much…note the drop shoulder, Trev!

Tree

Sadhujivin: There was one tree, I'd get right to the top and sing into the wind and imagine a beautiful girl in another land and she would sing them back to me and I felt there was some other person who felt the same as I did.

Indian

Surata: There was the whole business of blood brothers took my fancy as a young boy: the idea of being in a close relationship with somebody from a different society.

Blood ritual at public school. Movie: If!

Subhuti: I went to a boarding school…to begin with it went well, I had friends just like I had in my life up until then. A prefect took an interest in me and that was very helpful just because he'd expressed confidence in me gave me a lot of confidence and helped me through a very difficult period in my school life. Home movie, school games I found myself out of the group. To this day I do not know why. Perhaps it was I was late in developing physically, with the cruelty of adolescent boys they picked on me. I think popularity and unpopularity are nothing to do with moral worth - adventitious factors, extremely unfair, some of my best friends just seem to be unpopular, somehow they attract other people’s dislike.

Walking round a Dublin housing estate

Padmadaka: I was hanging out with gangs of 20 blokes who were sniffing glue and robbing cars. And it was boring.

Jason: If you didn't rob cars you were ostracised.

Padmadaka: Gary White a very good car thief ended up a drugs runner and going to prison.

Jason: I don’t know anyone from my school who went to prison - most have gone away and have careers. Here's the school I went to. Ordinary Magic Page 4 of 19

Schoolboy: I went to England. I went to Spain. Are you from London?

Padmadaka: Yep.

Irish park

Ratnabandhu: In the seventies things were very violent in Northern Ireland… and when I was about ten I came home one day and the place was swarming with army: there was a bomb. The army came in one night…they arrested 150 guys. I remember listening to a a gun battle right outside my house and this was right in the middle of the countryside. It’s funny a kids response to violence, we were curious and a bit excited.

Air raid footage

Sadhujivin: Well then war broke out.

Plane falls from sky

Sadhujivin: I remember on one occasion looking out of my bedroom window and suddenly they picked out a German plane. I found myself just crying because I realised that in that place was somebody’s father and they wouldn’t see him again. And he was just spiralling down totally out of control with only a few moments of his life. And it seemed to me that the world had gone crazy. Children need to feel there is somebody they can turn to, generally an adult, but the adults were busy killing each other.

Kid’s drawing of plane

Sadhujivin: I used to write poems - I found that helped. When I first went to the grammar school I met a soul mate. He was the English teacher, he introduced me to the Romantic poets and classical music. I just fell in love with him totally.

Irish park

Ratnabandhu: I had a couple of friends, they were like surrogate grandparents to me they owned a farm. And through the farmyard connection I met a guy called John Devlin. When I was eight or nine, maybe a little later. And John and I developed a friendship with each other. His family was quite cultured, relatively speaking. My first contact with a protestant was via John actually. I used to think that protestants were like an another species of being. All very innocent. We used to go for long cycles, usually to go fishing.

Dublin 'den', teenagers

Padmadaka: I remember sitting up late in your parents hours really late, we would have been 18 or 19, and we’d be talking about the meaning of words. What does ‘where’ mean, what does ‘is’ mean, what does ‘what’ mean? Out of that we began questioning things. I remember thinking strongly, ‘What is the point?’ Ordinary Magic Page 5 of 19

Home movie of the teenagers

Colum v/o: Do you agree with Jason’s description of ordinary people?

Padmadaka: Livers. People whose sole purpose in life is to live and die. They are not in touch with the finer things even though I’m not in touch with the finer things, yet, but I will be (laughs). I am floating along on the river of life. I am not going anywhere. Something is going to happen to me and then I’ll change (and then I’ll be what I want to be. Yes something IS going to happen. I am waiting for some sort of religious event.

Colum v/o: A kick up the arse!

Padmadaka: Something spiritual is going to happen to me I know and it’s going to change me and make me what I really want to be (Interruptions) I am not really me yet but I’ll be some day.

Cycling images

Surata: I got bored talking about bicycle wheels with the guys, I wanted to talk about broader issues and often they were not prepared to do that. Part of the glue was you were interested in bicycles and you couldn’t move outside of that. There was one guy in the cycling club, we had this conversation about being slightly outside of society. We both grew up in Ilford more or less working class East End type families. I used to go round to his family, we got on well together, they liked me and my parents liked him so it was a natural sort of affinity.

Dublin flat

Padmadaka: We all had an affinity: we were all taking the same drugs in the same quantities, drinking in the same pub, Grogans. None of us had any money, well we did have a bit.

Jason: We liked it that way.

Parent's house, Norwich

Sam: I don’t have an obsession with records - that was a couple of years ago. And now I have an obsession with guitars.

Max: Unhealthy. They don’t breathe, Sam, and they don’t move. They are not women. Women are good.

Sam: You don’t have a woman, Max, deal with it.

Max: But I am pleased about that.

Sam: Can’t I be pleased about it but I am not. I could pretend I am.

Max: No. I can be pleased because I know how much hassle they are.

Sam: Yeah And I can be pleased ???? Ordinary Magic Page 6 of 19

Max: No, women do come and go. They tend to do a lot more going than they do coming. (Riotous laughter.) That wasn’t meant to sound that bad, really wasn’t.

Essex suburbia

Pramudita: There was about 7 or 8 of us that would do things all the time. Sundays we’d go to the coast and drink, go on holiday together, go to football. That stayed together until my best mate, Dave Rowsell, got his girlfriend pregnant it started falling apart. Even those who were married there was lots of time to do what we were doing. Steve Terrell was quite clear with his wife, ‘I like my beer, football and friends and that is not going to change.’ Although she tried to change him (laughs) for about 10 years.

Surata: There was this thing in the cycling club every now and then a woman would appear with her bicycle ride along with us for a few weeks when one of the guys would disappear with her. (There was this sense of) It was taking one of the blood brothers away. If you were a healthy young woman looking for a man you’d go into a man’s environment, find one, take him out and domesticate him.

South Park, tree house with girls

Sam: We used to climb some of these trees, hide in them and just play.

Pramudita: I’d say it was 20, 21 when it started dispersing a bit ‘cos you get into careers: work becomes more important ‘cos we are supposed to think about the future and what we’re going to do although I resolutely realised it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted something else.

Essex pub

John Gowland: That’s Des, that’s Trevor, that’s my brother David with his new cardigan. That handsome chap is me. Probably the best 20 years - something I say to my sons now, ‘If you can look back on your footballing career and say you had fun then that’s what it is all about.’

Steve: John I see every Monday. The women go line dancing so we go and play darts. John Wilkie I’ve seen once or twice in ten years. Trevor I met for the first time in ten years at his fiftieth party and then he came and joined us on our Monday night evenings.

Trevor: I went into the room and some of us hadn’t seen each other 15 or 20 years. We walked into the room and it was as if nothing had happened.

Steve: So, basically we don’t see each other as much as we used to but we’ve never lost touch really.

Norwich

Max: Adults are wrong, wrong. Ordinary Magic Page 7 of 19

Essex

Pramudita: But I think it’s work and people got into relationships that separated us. I did feel quite a sense of loss at the time ‘cos we did drift apart. But there was a time when it felt quite magical for about five years. We just used to do everything together. Everything was an adventure and fun. When I think about it I feel quite tearful and it was a quite magical time.

Rain in suburbia

Surata: It definitely left a gap in my life. I felt sad about it. Obviously his family was taking up more time. I did go round and visit a couple of times but I found the whole business unpleasant because things hadn’t worked out with his family the way he’d have liked them to. His wife had changed after he got married and he wasn’t as happy as he was before.

Irish park

Ratnabandhu: In the summer of ‘75 John’s parents were murdered. They were gunned down one night and also his sister was in the car, she was wounded, she survived. And that was a terrible shock, I had no idea how to respond to it. John and I used to go to this disco. I was there with some other friends one night, John was there. John started to drink very heavily, he was only 15 but he was drinking really heavily, he became an alcoholic actually. I remember late at night after the disco had ended being in the car park. And I saw John lying n the ground fully clothed, drunk sobbing his eyes out. It had only been a few weeks before that his parents had died. And I remember walking past him, ignoring him. And immediately after walking past him and ignoring him I intuitively knew that it was a really wrong thing that I did. I should have just responded to him. BT I didn’t, I just got into the car and drove off. But it was a very impactful experience for me. I instinctively knew that I’d failed John as a friend. And that memory is still with me. So somehow I failed as a friend and I decided after that that wouldn’t happen again, that no matter what I would stick by my friends.

[Fade to black] Ordinary Magic Page 8 of 19

PART 2. FREE CHOICE

Sangharakshita: In childhood I certainly looked up to my father - I had a very positive relationship with my father all through my childhood and until I left England for India. But in the case of my spiritual teachers I looked up to them in a different sort of way. I saw them as embodying the spiritual ideal that is to say the ideal of enlightenment at least embodying it to an extent. Embodying that is to say the ideal to which I was myself aspiring.

Books to gurus

Surata v/o: As a youngster Sangharakshita’s spiritual interest was aroused by books like ‘Isis Unveiled’. And after leaving the army in India he made contact with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, he got ordained and subsequently founded a Buddhist movement.

Subtitle: ‘=spiritual fellowship’

Surata v/o: In the nineties Ciaran and Jason were out looking for something more enduring than family life or working career.

Dublin streets

Padmadaka: Now your mother found the place for us in the newspaper.

Rider and horse pass

Padmadaka: Horses. The Lone Ranger. That was John Clark’s room. That was yours. I was downstairs. Mark was at the back.

Sofa in Jason's flat, Dublin

Jason: I can remember moving in quite clearly and the sense of relief.

Padmadaka: It was summer.

Jason: Oh yeah, remember we kept saying, ‘This is going to be a good summer’.

Padmadaka: That was our summer, the summer of ‘92. (Steam f/x) I can remember we got into this thing that we had a joint and an orange in the bath. And people would be pouring water over one another. Do you remember that?

Jason: Yeah, I do.

Padmadaka: That was really great!

Jason: The four of us were close for a period for an extended period of four months. Definitely there was harmony - a definite sense of camaraderie.

Essex warehouses Ordinary Magic Page 9 of 19

Surata: I was an apprentice in a workshop with about 50 men of all ages from 16 to 65. Some took me under their wing and that's where I met my first mentor a strange little man interested in Scientology, everything and anything. The other guys had the Mirror, he had the Bible, astrology and science fiction, Worlds in Collision by Velikovsky.

Dark magic

Jason: There was definitely something going on next door. Next door was derelict.

Padmadaka: But I can remember we all felt there was some sort of spirit that lived above through the wall from your room. Do you remember that?

Jason: I remember very well. It was haunted - that was my experience of it. There were at least two ghosts in there. The woman didn’t know she was dead and she was very vicious, very confused and very antagonistic. And I remember we went in there and I was, in my amateur way, trying to exorcise the place.

Padmadaka: We found a notebook and in that was a diary and it said Mrs Murphy next door said such and such and someone was found dead in Bray facing 20 degrees north or something. And that we found was really weird.

Jason: My last experience there was getting attacked by one of those ghosts one night through the wall.

Garden at Padmaloka

Surata: Through my then girlfriend I learnt about this summer school in Kent. It was an academic study of basically and there were eight students and one of hem was Alex Kennedy who I subsequently realised was Subhuti. A seemed to me to know what he wanted and how to go about getting it. And within days of meeting I thought whatever this man is into I want. He’s onto something and I want it too. At the end of the course it led to 5 Balmore Street and the Pundarika centre.

Room at Padmaloka, tantric look

Padmavajra: Way back when I was at school I can remember writing this piece. I think I called it ‘Invocation’. I can’t quite remember now. You’ve got this very bare monastery and you’ve got these purple robed monks walking in procession going into this great hall and the monks recite this invocation and it begins something like, ‘I know and believe in the infinite truth and it goes through all these clauses. What is interesting about that is there’s a yearning for contact with ‘reality’, something higher, something mystical but it’s interesting it happens in that collective context. There was a sense of a spiritual brotherhood. Yeah.

Dark magic

Jason: We were all bonded significantly because we had a keen curiosity and interest in Other. There’s also this experience of being Ordinary Magic Page 10 of 19

brothers in adventure in that we were going to take the next step psychically. Have bigger experiences, deeper experiences and more colourful visions.

Sam & Max playing in park

Garden room, Madhyamaloka, Sangharakshita sitting with Anomarati

Sangharakshita: Sometimes people complain they are lonely and they don’t have friends but sometimes it’s as though they expect the friends to come to them, they expect other people to take the initiative. But if one wants to have friends one must be a friend. And if one takes a liking to someone well just get to know him, that you’d like to see him a bit more often. Arrange to meet them, have a coffee together, have a meal together, go to a film together. I think nobody really needs to be lonely. Of course if they are bedridden, if they are blind or deaf or dumb well one can understand them feeling lonely and not having much contact. But if they are normal reasonably healthy human beings there’s no reason why they should be lonely. There are always ways of meeting people, and getting to know them and in that way becoming friends.

TITLE: LETTER FROM NZ

NZ countryside

Taranatha: Until about 15 years ago I thought friends were those people that one met at a sports club or academic meeting or maybe one worked with. It never occurred to me that there might be people to whom I could open my heart. That sort of friendship had never been part of my experience. Not until I began to practise Buddhism with Buddhists. I’d like to tell you about Brian because Brian was a very important person in my life. It’s only about four years since I first met him. His son is a member of the Order. Close friend. Brought Brian to a Buddhist festival. I don’t know quite why except that Brian was depressed. When I first met him he just seemed crushed. And I felt some empathy because he’d led an active life with lots of people about, run his own business. Now he was long since retired The prospect ahead was sharing the rest of his life with a wife with whom he didn’t communicate deeply. It wasn’t very long before I found we had a few things in common: Brian enjoyed walking. So I suggested perhaps we might take a walk together. Which we did. Brian was very quick to tell me he wasn’t a Buddhist and didn’t have any real idea about spiritual things and wasn’t I wasting my time. Well no I wasn’t because he had a very deep love for the forest and he knew lots of places I hadn’t met. So we developed a habit of going walking together, perhaps once a fortnight. We would meet, walk two, three or four hours and find some little cafe on the way home. As time went by something rather more important began to develop. I found to my surprise that looking forward not only to being out in the bush but to being with Brian. There was something about him I found deeply attractive, something important. I wondered what life would be like without Brian. It definitely would have been much Ordinary Magic Page 11 of 19

poorer. Then a few moths ago it all changed. I was on a meditation retreat at breakfast on the first morning when the phone rang. To my surprise it was my friend wanting to speak with me. And then I heard his voice rather uncertainly saying, ‘I thought you’d like to know dad died yesterday.’ ‘Oh no! Not Brian!,’ I said. But, yes, it was Brian. He’d been swimming his lengths in the local swimming pool when his poor old tired heart stopped. I put the phone down, I needed to be alone, walked out of the retreat centre into the adjoining farm land looking at the sea. And I wept. I wept deeply for my friend. But it wasn’t for Brian really. He was OK, that was the way he wanted to die. I was weeping for me. He’d been a friend, a very deep friend and it was only know I realised how much I loved him. And he’d gone away and left me without so much as a by or leave or farewell. Well fair enough old friend it’s the way you wanted it and I guess I’ll get along without you. It’s not going to be all that easy because I’m getting on in life a bit and finding another friend like you is not very likely. I rang my friend, Brian’s son, back that evening. And he said, ‘I’ve talked with the family and we’d like you to conduct the funeral’. I said to him, ‘Here hang on a minute I’ve never conducted a funeral for a personal friend before, it wouldn’t be easy. I don’t think I’d keep my dignity very well’. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about that we won’t either’. I conducted the funeral, a very important occasion for me and for many other people. There were many people there. Brian’s friends from so many different parts of his life. Now in my diary for the following day was a note which said meet Brian at 9.15. We were going walking together. And I thought I’ll go anyway. So I walked deep, deep into the forest to where I knew there were some of the most beautiful, most noble Kaori trees. I stood there under those trees absolutely lost in their majesty with a sense of deep worship for such noble beings. I could almost see, I was very aware of, Brian beside me, standing in his usual pose with his hands folded over the top of his walking stick like me lost in admiration for magnificent trees. I turned very quietly so as not to disturb them and I walked back the way I had come.

TWO KINDS OF MAGIC

Bewley's Coffee Bar, Dublin

Jason: We also used to play psychic games in here, did we not? At least we thought we did as there were always people willing to play. That was the subtext for us.

Padmadaka: Do you reckon any of it was real?

Jason: Some of it was real. I think the stories we told ourselves weren’t accurate. They were just stories trying to create significance and meaning, some kind of direction. But the essential experiences themselves I think were real. As real as any mundane experience.

Garden room Madhyamaloka

Sangharakshita: From being acquaintances we became friends and when we happened to travel around together on pilgrimage in 1956 we saw a lot of each other we saw a lot of each other and we Ordinary Magic Page 12 of 19

became closer. The more I saw of Dhardo Rimpoche the more I admired him and the more I saw in him some very genuine spiritual qualities. And so I was looking up to him and respecting him more and more even though he was still a friend. But a time came when I became so aware of those higher spiritual qualities that he had, especially the qualities of awareness and compassion that I felt I can really regard him as a teacher. And at that point I asked him for the ordination because I felt he did exemplify in so many ways the qualities of a real bodhisattva. So, yes, I took the bodhisattva ordination from him so I became his disciple but he still continued to relate to me as a friend so there was a rather unique combination in my relationship with him of horizontal friendship and vertical friendship one might say.

Court Lodge, Kent

Subhuti: I got an enormous amount of benefit from my communication with him. He seemed to understand me, he seemed to have confidence in me and I found him tremendously inspiring. Above all I found him somebody I could talk about the concerns, Dharmic concerns, philosophical concerns and he could lead me much deeper.

Garden at Padmaloka

Surata: Maybe in the early days I wanted to be mates with Subhuti but fairly early on it became obvious to me that probably we wouldn’t because our interests were different in lots of ways. Not the fact that he’s probably slightly more middle class and I was working class. I don’t know that ever came into it. There was just the sense we were interested in different things in different kinds of ways, outside of the spiritual life of course: that’s obviously a shared interested. Yeah, we are not mates. I love him dearly and there is no doubt he loves me, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. It’s lovely to see him, spend time with him, be in study groups with him listen to him give talks. I love it but I wouldn’t say we were mates in that sense. There’s definitely a vertical element that I enjoy and need.

Court Lodge, Kent

Subhuti: Well, we speak in terms of vertical and horizontal friendship. In horizontal friendship the two friends are more or less the same age, the same level of experience in life and the same level of experience in the if it’s a question of friendship in that context. With vertical friendship there are those who have greater experience and those who have less. Perhaps not in all things but taken overall generalising etc. And I think that applies just as much outside the sphere of the Dharma as within it so that in life in the ordinary sense it is good to have somebody who is more experienced in life you might say. In ethical matters for instance or just in worldly experience you can derive a lot from that. I think that element in friendship is much overlooked nowadays.

Madhyamaloka garden room

Sangharakshita: We should have an all-round experience of friendship. Have continuing friendships more or less on the same Ordinary Magic Page 13 of 19

level as ourselves, and with those more experienced especially within the spiritual context and with those who are learning more from us than we are able to learn from them.

Anomarati: What sort of qualities come to mind with the young learning from the old?

Sangharakshita: To begin with they need to recognise they have something to learn. Especially young men can be very cocky, even within spiritual tradition. The young need to be receptive, recognise there is something they can learn from older people. Young people, as I said, can be very cocky but they are also very lively and even if they are wet behind the ears there is something attractive about that. If you like to teach it is a stimulating experience to share your experience with young eager people. Sometimes, though they don’t have much experience, they might ask quite searching questions, which the mentor hadn’t had to answer before so is obliged to dig deeper into his experience before he can give some answer. I think it is a valuable experience for the mentor to be in contact with 1, 2 or 3 young people who can challenge him from time to time.

Dublin flat

Padmadaka: We were dabbling in things and for a lot of the time we were bordering on schizophrenia and insanity. We’ve ended up all right but there’s one guy who’s ended up completely insane. There's one guy ending up completely insane - he heard voices in his head telling him he had to kill somebody and he murdered his father. That was John. The two of those guys ended up insane. So, although we can talk about magic and wizards and all the rest of it can sound a bit light weight and airy fairy. But it actually ended up getting very very serious.

Jason: It was very real for us, very significant.

Graphics

Aelred: ‘Wherefore, friends,” says Cicero, “though absent are present, though poor are rich, though weak are strong, and - what seems stranger still - though dead are alive.’

Sangharakshita: For many years I didn’t see Dhardo Rimpoche so when he died it didn’t make a great deal of difference because even when we were physically separated when I was in England and he was in India I thought about him quite a lot. In fact when I was in India I had received from Dhardo Rimpoche the initiation into the sadhana of the White so I always associated Dhardo Rimpoche with White Tara. So when I do the sadhana of the White Tara I think of Dhardo Rimpoche and when I think of Dhardo Rimpoche I think of the White Tara. So in a way he is still as much alive for me as when he was still on this earth and we were physically separated.

Jason: There was a shared vision to some extent, at least there was an overlap and a kind of vision. There again I am thinking particularly of myself and John because I don’t know how much is was your vision. Ordinary Magic Page 14 of 19

Padmadaka: No, it didn’t bring us closer together, it drove us apart.

Jason: I think we became less and less in touch with reality and the speed at which we were transforming in a downward spiral increased. And no matter how much I pursued it it wouldn’t lead to anything positive, there would actually be no positive change.

Padmadaka: We were getting into Buddhism particularly then.

Jason: Buddhism came along and it was clear the Buddhist vision of the world was far most sophisticated and beautiful than my own. And then a rift started to appear between myself and John. And I think John just continued along that road. They both continued along that path and ended up crossing a line mentally. They went so far there didn’t seem to be a way to come back.

Padmadaka: Well, they were very competitive towards you. John Clark wanted to outdo you, be better than you. And I can remember visiting John in the mental hospital a couple of years ago. It was the first time I’d been in to see him since he’d committed the murder. And I went in and I said, ‘What are doing here? What happened?’ And he said, ‘I heard voices in my head saying, “Your father has abused you as a kid and you’re going to have to kill him and that’ll stop it.” So I went home, got a knife, stuck it in him, went to the police station covered in blood and said, “I have killed just my dad”. And they put me in this mental prison thing.’ And I said, ‘How did you end up here? Where did you go wrong?’ I was trying to relate to him as an ordinary person. He was very overweight because he was on a lot of tranquillisers. And I said, ‘Was it all the acid you took?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t actually take that much, I lied about how much I took. I don’t know how I ended up here.’ And he wanted to get out. But he crossed that line, that social line. He committed a major taboo and he’s probably never going top come out.

Jason: He’s gone. John Connell as we knew him doesn’t seem to exist. Maybe. I don’t see it. Ordinary Magic Page 15 of 19

PART 3. BOUND AND FREE

Garden room Padmaloka

Padmadaka: He came back to Dublin raving about you and we all wanted to come over and meet you.

Padmavajra: You came with all the Dublin posse all walking around the garden together. And you had a meeting with Sona and me, didn’t you?

Padmaloka garden

Surata v/o: Some twelve years ago Subhuti brought a team together at Padmaloka to help men train for ordination and it included people like Padmavajra, Sona, Aloka and myself who were naturally friendly you could say. We found we could always learn something more about friendship from the different traditions that Sangharakshita had already explored.

Subhuti: We studied with him a text by an Arab author, Al Ghazali, called the Duties of Brotherhood in Islam. It’s a very inspiring and noble text

Al Ghazali: Ata said, ‘Seek out your brothers after three occasions. If they are sick, visit them; if they are busy help them; if they have forgotten remind them.’

Subhuti: After that I made an explicit commitment to friendship with Sona who’s one of my greatest friends now, and probably the one I’ve kept in closest contact with since then. And we explicitly committed ourselves to a friendship making it quite clear what we were undertaking for each other. And we’ve kept that. Our friendship developed at a time when Sona was in Sweden and I was in England and we decided we would write to each other regularly and that we’d keep each other in mind daily. And we also made an undertaking to each other that if either of us needed anything from the other we would immediately ask and if necessary just take. And I remember I made Sona a signature to my bank account and made it clear if he needed to he could take the lot. He never did but we have certainly helped each other financially and in other ways from time to time. In some ways the commitments we made to each other we have never had to call upon. But the main thing is we did make them and we meant it. I am sure that if Sona had cleaned out my bank account I would have trusted that he’d have taken me into account and done it out of great need himself.

Aelred: There is nothing more praiseworthy in friendship than loyalty beholding with the same eye the poor and the rich, the strong and the weak, the healthy and the infirm. A truly loyal friend sees nothing in his friend but his heart.

Sangharakshita: One could say in a word that fidelity is the special flavour. Well sometimes the fidelity expresses itself in being really honest with your friend and pointing out something that may be quite difficult or even painful for them to have that pointed out but it’s your duty as a friend to exhibit that sort of fidelity. You’re Ordinary Magic Page 16 of 19

faithful as it were to your friend at his best. You don’t let him fall below what he is at his best.

Anomarati: And that is your act of kindness towards him.

Sangharakshita: Yes. Sometimes people are very easily hurt and it is not always possible to tell them the truth straight away. But at least one leaves the way open to telling them that truth later on.

Subhuti: My observation there was a lot we had learnt from Bhante in the early days when we were very close to him, doing a lot of seminars with him and having a lot of personal contact with him which was just not being passed on to people coming into the movement. And these weren’t to do with the , and so on. The skeleton of the Dharma was being transmitted. Perhaps not as effectively as it should be but it was being transmitted. But these more deep personal issues were not being transmitted and so in organising the men’s ordination process I made a point of trying to bring these issues out and a I gave several series of talks but most notably on the subject of spiritual friendship. I had no plan. I just gave the first talk. And I remember I made notes for the first talk and at the end of an hour and a quarter I found that I’d got a quarter a way through my notes and I pretty much found that my notes lasted me for eight lectures. And I found that quite spontaneously I had constructed what I think was a fairly comprehensive and systematic exploration of the theme of spiritual friendship. And that did seem to have quite a big influence and it did very much set the tone for the ordination team and the ordination process. We had a very fine team at that time consisting of seven of us I think all of whom were old friends. I got Sona to come from Sweden and join the team. So I was living with my closest friend. And we put a very high premium on friendship and the quality of the team and the quality of the communication between team members. And we felt that that was the heart of the whole process and that we were not so much teaching people or something like that people who came up to our retreats for the ordination process but we were including them in the field of friendship and we were trying to excite in them a greater desire for friendship with each other as well as with us. And I think we were pretty successful at the time.

Music sequence

Aloka's kitchen

Aloka: I tell you, I tell you what I like best about Surata and Padmavajra and that’s the fact that everything is so incredibly ordinary. You know it’s incredibly unspectacular and it’s been like that ever since I first met them.

Surata: It was there though from the word go. I felt incredibly at ease. I described it to Suryaprabha the other day. I have said this to you before it’s a bit like discovering a brother you didn’t know you had. We just seemed to, at some deep level, click, don’t we. We always have always have. (Turning) Padmavajra? It was directness. I always felt met by you from the communication exercises. Ordinary Magic Page 17 of 19

Padmavajra: As often happens on retreat we did communication exercises. You have to remember in those days my appearance was rather different. I had a beard, I still had glasses, longish hair. Anyway I sat down opposite this chap who also had a beard, glasses and longish hair.

Surata: And we just looked at each other and burst into howls of laughter and we spent the whole of the exercise just having a very strong exchange of positive feeling. I suppose I felt I was being met by a kindred spirit, you know.

Aloka: But the thing is that it is very sort of natural. A complete not a big deal. If you stand back from it you think, I think I am incredibly lucky, I am incredibly fortunate. But it’s not actually like that. You can’t keep actually it in focus because it is just the environment that you exist in.

Dublin flat

Jason: Certainly myself and John, were living in a world which was very real for us and wasn’t so much for you and so that over that period we had less and less in common all the time. And I am sure I did things that hurt you. And we ended up just not talking and I think it was just coldness on both sides for a period.

Padmadaka: I remember feeling resentment towards you for spending more time with John. I started to not like you because I thought you didn’t like me ‘cos you were spending more time with John, which was true. And I think then when I moved out it was a bit easier. I think I needed my own space and then we could pop around to one another and it was a bit more amicable. After about three months we went on a week long retreat over Xmas and I particularly remember we walked up the top of the hill in the dark. Do you remember?

Jason: Very clear. I was thinking about that earlier.

Padmadaka: Were you? We looked at the moon. The moon seemed to be very big and low and we were looking at that. It was a cold January night.

Jason: Oh I remember very clearly,

Padmadaka: And after that you built a shrineroom in the shed when we got back.

Jason: There was that sense of returning to friendship in a healthy positive way. We were going positive things. And we had a way of doing friendship ‘cos we’d this new thing and we were both having these experiences together. Meditation was new to both of us and … the world opened up for us, we were on retreat and so our experience and universe opened up for us again. There was all like, wow, back to the way it used to be. We would be like ‘What is what?’ with wonder. (Moon) We both had that wondering and that was significant. And we were hugging each other and looking at one another and we’re like ‘we are doing it, we are there, we really are doing it’. There was that sense of Ordinary Magic Page 18 of 19

returning to something and of having broken through something at the same time.

Padmadaka: Yeah, yeah.

PALI CANON

Excellent, Lord, excellent! It is as if someone were to set up what had been knocked down, or to point out the way to one who had got lost, or to bring an oil lamp into a dark place, so that those with eyes could see what was there.

Housing estate

Pramudita: It’s still happening, it’s got its own momentum. It’s not something you think about and in a way it’s just very ordinary. You meet up and you enjoy being with people. And I think it’s got its own momentum. As far as I’m concerned it’ll carry on. And the others, some of them anyway, feel the same. Getting back in touch in March - there’s two of them I am quite close to and we’ve been through a lot and you don’t lose that, I think. That stays.

Puja at Padmaloka

Aloka's kitchen

Padmavajra: Do you remember the time by chance we went to make those offerings in that puja and how independently we were all very moved by it. And it seemed to me like a very eloquent expression of friendship yet we weren’t looking at each other. We were shoulder to shoulder worshipping the shrine. And I think Bhante’s very important and the Order, what the Order is trying to be, trying to become.

Aloka: Well, I think that was very strong in the group of people who became the ordination team. One of the things was you’d got group of people who were completely committed to Bhante, completely committed to the Order and loved it in that kind of way. If you’ve got that in common you are laughing.

Padmavajra: It is very easy to form friendships on that basis I think. You can really relate through that.

Aloka: Well you can even make connections with people you don’t like - not that I don’t like either of you two, but you can.

Padmavajra: He doesn’t like us.

Aloka: I have definitely made connections with people because of that common bond with people I wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole under any other circumstances. Not at all.

Padmavajra: That’s clear.

Aloka: Yeah. Extraordinary. Weird business

Surata: Mysterious.

Court Lodge, Kent Ordinary Magic Page 19 of 19

Subhuti: It’s obviously possible that friendship could develop and flower very beautifully and deeply completely spontaneously. That one never even thinks, ‘Oh, he’s my friend I must develop my friendship with him, that I must work at it’ or something like that. That is at least conceivable and perhaps for some people it is like that. But I think for most people there is always a bit of a struggle because friendship contains an element of idealism, certainly when we can begin to talk of it as spiritual friendship. And ideals are always at odds with other drives and forces within one. So there is perhaps the question inevitably for most people of thinking about their friendships and in Johnson’s famous phrase, ‘keeping their friendships in good repair. So that friendship is something to be, in a sense, ‘worked at’. Not that it is mere work because a vital part of friendship is delight, delighting in each other. But yes you do need to work to keep your friendship alive and honour you friend and not to betray your friend to your own baser drives and motives. To forgive your friend when your friend hurts you as he inevitably will and as you will inevitably hurt him. So I think it is not practical for most people to think of friendship without thinking of work and of conscious evolution of friendship.

(Music: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free)