At the instigation of Fabienne Phillipart we went to a lecture given by Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and interpreter to H.H. the Dalai Lama. It was organised by the "Ligue des Optimistes du Royaume de Belgique", an organisation dedicated to combating the corrosive habit of negative thinking. It's difficult to argue with the basic idea that optimism is its own reward. There is clearly something profoundly unhealthy about the public's morbid predeliction for bad news. It must be that there is something smugly reassuring about the "Isn't it awful/I told-you-so" position. At the same time there is nothing quite so depressing as strained jollity - like a hats and hooters party on the Alzheimer's ward!

The lecture sought to address some of these questions from the point of view of Tibetan Buddhism. Matthieu Ricard was a fluent, natural and amusing speaker, touching very delicately on issues of profound existential import. You could criticise him for purveying a sort of user-friendly Buddhism "light", but for a mass audience he could hardly do much else. Why do the Tibetan Buddhists enagage in what is effectively a mass P.R. exercise? Apparently the Dalai Lama himself packed in some 20,000 in the Sportpaleis in Antwerp! They're hardly likely to recruit great numbers to an extraordinarily demanding monastic way. Presumably they do it out of a desire to offer some hope, some sustenance to the great mass of people, who instinctively sense that the Tibetan tradition remains one of the last genuine repositories of a spiritual way of life. Nevertheless, there is always a suspicion that it is Buddhism's aura of the exotic which constitutes its draw on the public, rather than the attractiveness of meditative practice as such. And after all the jokes and the discussion of the advantages of optimism over pessimism, the "take-away message" was that unceasing meditation on the reality of impermanence can bring the adept to the realization of Universal Love and Infinite Compassion.
And if you really wanted to get there, where would you start? Would you need to do as Matthieu Ricard, abandon everything to live in the Himalaya in a monastic community about the Dalai Lama? Isn't that just an exotic fantasy? Surely Reality is always Here, always Now, it's just that we cannot "realize" it.

It was interesting to see a number of familiar SCIC faces in the audience, slightly embarrassed perhaps at having revealed the fact of their search for the true meaning of life. How foolish! How ridiculous as to still have a question as to what it might mean to be a human being alive on this earth!

Istanbul. The very name is evocative of a different, exotic world beyond our pedestrian workaday experience in the colourless, odourless, sanitized West. A world of the mysterious Orient, a skyline of soaring minarets, a street scene of seething bazaars, the recurring sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, stretches of water bearing magical names - the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, alive with a thousand craft of all sizes and shapes, plying to and fro on countless errands of business and pleasure, a city of almost inconceivable antiquity, steeped in the history of two great empires, two great religions, the city at the very crossing point of two great continents, Europe and Asia, a vast conurbation of perplexing contradiction, deeply traditional, brazenly modern, shamelessly commercial, profoundly devout...
And yet not so exotic as not to retain a sense of the familiar. In Beyoglu, North of the Golden Horn, with the wide boulevard of the Istikal Caddesi and its fancy stores, trendy cafés and upmarket restaurants, one could be in any Southern European city.
We stayed in a little hotel in Sultanahmet, the old city, with a view from our room directly onto the Blue Mosque. Taking breakfast on the hotel balcony looking out over the towering domes and soaring minarets of the mosque was one of the highlights of the trip. With only four days, we busily ticked off the major sights: the Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi palace, the sacred source of all power within the Ottoman empire, the Grand Bazaar with its dizzying quantity and variety of goods, the Sufi Mevlevi monastery, home of the whirling dervishes, the Archeology Museum, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and a fabulously romantic boat-ride through the Bosphorus, including a delicious lunch in "Asia".
Each of these locations really require a diary entry or, for that matter, a whole book of their own. However, there was one experience which we found particularly intriguing - our attendance at a whirling dervish ceremony. Our guidebook described the Sufis as a mystic sect of Islam practicing forms of worship which combine elements of pre- and early Christian practice, Buddhism and neoplatonism and resisting the legal regulations of Islamic orthodoxy. A brochure from the Mevlevi monastery sets out the principles behind the "Semâ", the turning ritual:

The Semâ ceremony represents a mystical journey of man's spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect (Kemal). Turning towards the truth, he grows through love, deserts his ego, finds the truth and arrives at the Perfect. Then he returns from his spiritual journey as a man who has reached maturity and a greater perfection, so as to love and to be of service to the whole of creation, to all creatures without discrimination in regard to belief, class or race...The dervish with his head-dress (his ego's tombstone), his white skirt (his ego's shroud) is spiritually born to the truth. He removes his black cloak and journeys and advances to spiritual maturity through the stages of the Semâ. At the outset and at each stage of the Semâ, holding his arms crosswise, he represents the number One and testifies to God's unity. While whirling his arms are open, his right hand directed to the sky ready to receive God's beneficence, while his gaze follows his left hand turned towards the earth. He turns from right to left, pivoting around the heart. This is his way of conveying God's spiritual gift to the people upon whom God looks with a divine watchfulness. Revolving around the heart from right to left, he embraces all humankind, all creation, with affection and love.

As the performance ended, there was a breathless interval of silence in the audience, a moment containing a natural humility in the presence of a Great Unknown, beyond the powers of our ordinary comprehension. Then it was too much. To break the, for him, unbearable tension, someone started clapping frantically and everyone else followed - a great mystery reduced to an entertainment for bored tourists.