Ocean of Patience

This evening I would just like to offer a few reflections on patience and the quality of patience. Patience is one of those qualities, one of those things that is universally recognized among the different Buddhist traditions as having a pretty indispensable place in our practice, really a necessary ingredient of the path, both in general terms, in terms of recognizing and addressing the currents of impatience that run through, percolate through our lives, and also very specifically in terms of how we relate to our practice. Are we relating to our practice with patience?

So I want to talk about those two areas. I should take the practice piece first and then more general. It is very much acknowledged that this is a practice that needs patience, that our practice needs patience. We can see this very much the end of the second day of a retreat, the second full day of a retreat. Some of you have said we have the image of coming on retreat, and everything's going to be blissful and fine, and often it isn't. This is aching, and that's aching, and this hurts, and that hurts, and the mind is misbehaving, etc. John talked this morning about the hindrances, and we meet them -- very common part of retreat experience.

Most of you are probably aware of this, but there are two kinds of emphases of meaning of the word 'patience.' One is (actually wrote down the dictionary definition) 'tolerant and even-tempered perseverance,' meaning a steady kind of perseverance in practice. And the other is 'capacity for calmly enduring pain,' calmly enduring pain and difficult situations, trying situations. And both those aspects are involved in what it means to be patient with our practice, definitely. So Ajahn Chah, one of the great Thai Forest masters of the last century, said there are two kinds of suffering. He said there are two kinds of suffering. There's the kind of suffering that just leads to more suffering. It just spins more suffering, weaves more suffering. And there's the kind of suffering that actually leads to the end of suffering. He said, if you're really interested in practice, you have to be willing to open to that second kind of suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to the end of suffering.^[1]

So this retreat and the retreat environment we set up -- there are a lot of very lovely things here. Very lovely space we're in here, and the environment and the food, and very nice -- eight wonderful managers looking after us. There's also a lot that's quite difficult with the form and the all-day sitting and walking, etc., and the silence. We could have set it up differently. Tonight, instead of the Dharma talk, we could have put a huge screen and all watched, you know, Celebrity Big Brother, or ... [laughter] That would take a lot of patience. We could set it up differently. There's a reason it's set up like this. It's that, if we can call it 'suffering,' it leads to the end of suffering.

So sometimes, I'm aware, being up here, sometimes I just say, or we say, "Be patient." You know, in the middle of a meditation, just drop in, "Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the mind, patient." And sometimes it's just enough to hear that little reminder. It's just enough. We remind ourselves, or a friend, or someone reminds us. It's just enough: "Be patient." "Oh, yeah." Something softens. And that's great. That's wonderful. Enough said. But oftentimes it's not enough, so I want to explore a little bit more the whole area.

Gampopa, one of the great Tibetan teachers, defines patience as

accepting joyfully and without regret all the sufferings involved in achieving highest [awakening].^[2]

Okay. And another text, the Bodhisattvabhūmi, said it is to accept joyfully and without getting discouraged whatever difficulty, tiredness, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, mental stress and other sufferings entailed in meditating, striving in meditation, early in the morning, late at night, studying the Dharma and listening to teachings, giving Dharma teachings, explaining the Dharma, etc., working for the welfare of others.^[3]

And some people might hear that, and they just hear that -- what was the first line? "Accepting joyfully and without regret all the sufferings involved in achieving the highest awakening." Some people will hear that, some people in this hall will hear that, and it just goes straight in: "Yes!" And there's a real -- it just touches something inside. There's an alignment there, and it's "Yes!" And everything else falls into place around that alignment. Wonderful, really wonderful if that's the case. And if it's almost the case, you know, to allow it through a devotional sense, etc., to let it be the case, to encourage it to be the case.

But for many people, or for people at a certain time, that's not going to be the case. That can sound almost like a starched white statement. It's just too, like, "Whoa! Highest awakening ..." And that's okay. Can we just remind ourselves of our sense of aspiration, though? Can we have a trust that we really are involved in something beautiful here -- that to be here, to practise together, to try together is something really precious, really lovely, really beautiful? That we're interested in cultivating what's wholesome, what's good. We're interested in being with life, in touching life. We're interested in understanding that that's going to -- whatever our degree of aspiration, we can just trust the beauty of that, trust that it's serving our direction. Sometimes just reminding ourselves of our aspiration is enough to allow, to encourage, to invite in a sense of patience.

[7:43] It's probably too much of a generalization, but maybe because of the culture and technology and the way things are set up, we've come to want things pretty quickly. We can get a lot of stuff from all over the world pretty quickly just googling it, Amazon, whatever, and there it comes. And in a way, our lives, for many of us, there's a real momentum set up of doing things quickly and getting things quickly. And it's hard, when we come on retreat. It's hard to stop that momentum.

I was reading or I heard about this conference of monastics from different religious traditions. I think it was a very old Catholic monk, who'd been a monk for years and years, talking with a very old Buddhist monk, who'd also been a monk for years and years. One of them -- I think it was the Catholic -- said to the Buddhist, "You know, it's really the first twenty or thirty years that are hard." [laughter] And the Buddhist monk said, "True, true." [laughter]

So to have a bit of a big picture involved. The things that are really worth it in life often take patience. Things that are really worth it don't come that easily. You see this in all kinds -- practising an instrument, a musical instrument, takes hours and hours and hours, years of practice. Or Bob Dylan was talking with Leonard Cohen; he asked him about -- I forget which song -- a particular song, how long it took him to write. Leonard Cohen said it took him fifteen years to write it, a three-minute song.^[4] We heard some lovely poems last night from Mary Oliver. She said at least fifty or sixty drafts before a poem reaches, even begins to look like it's approaching, you know, acceptability for her.^[5] Fifty or sixty drafts -- a lot of patience involved in that. And patience in all kinds of areas -- perhaps being involved in a relationship or a commitment of marriage or a partnership, perhaps partly what we're committing to is patience, maybe. As much as we commit to another person, we're committing to just being patient with whatever comes up for them in the relationship, whatever reactions, or whatever they get into; whatever we also get into. There's a commitment to patience. And it's interesting in our lives to see, what are the areas where perhaps we do have a lot of patience, and other areas where perhaps we don't? Where are we impatient? Where are we patient?

In terms of practice, we can get very impatient to some degree with our sense of our process, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, or the process of another. It really wouldn't be true to deny the possibility that some transformation in our lives and the lives of others, some transformation -- spiritual transformation, etc., emotional, psychological -- is sudden. That is the case, that huge chunks of things can fall away, etc., very suddenly. It's absolutely -- it's really possible. But, my experience is most transformation, for most people, is very gradual. It's a very gradual process and not a very linear process, often. It's often, as well, not particularly dramatic. Transformation is often not that dramatic. So we may want a kind of, you know, very sudden sort of sexy enlightenment experience. Just boom, and there we are. Bada-bing, bada-boom, it's done. Or healing -- oftentimes we have a sense of some emotional healing that needs to happen, and there's a sense of it persisting for years. And again, we want some big catharsis, and a big thing, and then it's going to be over. Oftentimes healing isn't like that. It's not very dramatic.

A lot of this practice is about actually reconditioning our habits. Reconditioning our habits -- it doesn't sound that glamorous. We have a lot of habits, and we're just gradually reconditioning them, setting up different habits. Impatience, too -- we have to, in a way, be patient with impatience. In a sense, impatience is a manifestation of aversion. It's a kind of aversion, a kind of pushing away. And as such, it won't disappear until we're almost -- well, until we're totally enlightened or almost completely enlightened. So it's going to probably be around for a while, and we need to be patient with the fact of that.

[13:11] So what helps? What's going to help? One aspect I think is important is, are we able to see the value of what it is that we're experiencing? And we might not like it. It might not be going according to plan. But are we actually able to see the value of this time that we're going through, of this experience that we're going through? So for example, these first two days, we worked primarily with the breath. And we could have, it would be very easy to have an idea of practice so far as, "We're developing attention on the breath. That's what we're doing. And when we're attending to the breath, that's it, and when we're not, that's not it."

But in a way, that may be too narrow of a view of what's going on. What else is being cultivated just in this simple act of being with the breath? It really helps to have a broader view, to broaden the perspective. Every time the mind goes off from the breath, that could be a moment of impatience. If I can soften around that, I'm letting go of the habit of impatience. It could be a moment of self-judgmentalism. Again, if I don't get caught up with that and believing that, it becomes a moment of letting go of the habit of self-judgmentalism. Every time I notice that the mind is off the breath, it's a moment of wakefulness. It's a moment of knowing where the mind is, a moment of mindfulness. It's a 'success,' if we want to use those terms. I'm strengthening the muscle of the mind every time I pull the mind back to the breath. All that is happening, and more. And if we just say, "It's just about attending to the breath. That's the only thing that we're interested in," it's like putting a noose around the practice. Sooner or later we're going to feel like we're choking, and the whole thing dries up. And just, ugh, pack it in.

So it's really important to see what else is going on. Not just with the breath -- we could be involved in a work situation here or elsewhere or working in service or whatever, and maybe it's just very rote and very dry, or this is too much stuff. What else is going on? There's never just one thing going on. There's always how we're seeing it and our attitude and what else is being cultivated. So we can ask ourselves, what other qualities of heart am I developing here? Any time anything's difficult in the body or the mind, there's more than one thing going on. What else is possible? What else is being developed? This is really a question: am I seeing this experience, this period of time, of difficulty, whatever it is in practice, am I seeing it as an opportunity for growth, for learning, for transformation? Or have I just got caught in a spinning of complaining and negativity? This is a real question to ask in the moment, to ask ourselves: what's happening here? How am I seeing it? The view, Right View -- the Buddha talks about Right View -- it's absolutely crucial.

Again, very, very common, we can come to meditation, it's just not going how we think it should, and we think, "I don't have the right kind of mind to meditate. I don't know, something happened when I was born or something, and the connections ... Maybe other people can, but I just don't have the right kind of mind." But the mind as such is actually -- you could say the mind is a collection of habits. That really doesn't sound very appealing or glamorous, perhaps. It's a collection of habits, of impulses, of responses, of views, of perceptions. As such, being a collection of habit, what that means, although it doesn't sound that sexy or whatever, as such what it means is that the mind is a shapeable thing. It's a shapeable thing. This collection of habits can morph, can be shaped, is malleable into something else. The Buddha talks a lot about the possibility that humans have for developing skills. We can develop the skill of learning to calm the mind. We can develop the skill of loving-kindness. Thinking of it in terms of skills, and that we can develop these skills, the same way as we can develop countless other skills that we have in life.

So whatever the state of our habits of mind, it's actually possible to develop skills. It really is possible because the mind is not a fixed, solid, finished product, entity. It's shapeable. It's fluid. It's like something that's moving.

Now, it's also very important to see that patience in practice stands kind of alongside our sense of urgency. And Christina spoke last night about this sense of urgency. So it's not that we just kind of put up with stuff, and, "Well, that's okay. It's okay that I kind of have this aversion, and it's just gone on festering there. It's okay." Somehow we have to hold them both together. We're patient with our process, patient with our unfolding, and there is still this sense of urgency. Life is short. It's uncertain. It's anicca. It's uncertain when it's going to end, what the conditions that will arrive for us will be. Life is uncertain. Are we using it well? Do we have that urgency? And they both are there together, the patience and the urgency.

[19:43] Patience does not mean indulgence, indulging in what's not helpful. Patience also has to be informed by wisdom in our practice, by understanding. This tradition, this practice is not so much a practice of someone else doing it for us, or expecting a guru or some blessings or something to transform the heart. We can sometimes be aware of that energy. We want to feel rescued, or some little part of ourselves wants someone else to do the work. We want to feel, "Yeah, just rescue me from my situation." This is a normal part of being human, that that still exists in us, perhaps left over from childhood or whatever. But very much the thrust of this practice is not about that. 'Understanding,' at the sort of basic level, what it means Dharmically is, do I understand what to do? Do I understand what to do in terms of moving towards freedom and happiness and well-being? Do I understand what to do? And am I doing it? That's the basic level of what it means to understand.

So what is kindness in that? Obviously we can't force a plant to grow. You can't plant a plant and then stand there growling at it. [laughter] But at the same time, we really do have to take care of the conditions. We absolutely have to know, what are the conditions that this plant needs? And am I taking care of it? Absolutely. And it's the same thing with practice. Are we taking care of the right conditions? Because there's an awful lot of wrong conditions that we can build and take care of. It's important to know what's what. I think it was the Buddha who said you can squeeze all day on a bull's horns, but you ain't going to get any milk.^[6] [laughter] I'm not sure if it was the Buddha, but ... [laughter] I think it was the Buddha.

This one I'm sure is the Buddha. He had another analogy. [laughter] Just as a good farmer takes care of the ploughing of the field, the turning of the earth, takes care of sowing the seeds, takes care of watering, so a good practitioner, a person who's practising well (that's what it means to understand, to have wisdom, is to practise well, to know what it means), takes care of sīla, of ethics, of how we are with each other, of how we live together, the respect, the care, the love we have for each other -- takes care of that. Takes care of samādhi, the inner climate of the being, the inner sense of nourishment, of calmness, learns how to do that, to develop that gradually, slowly over time. Takes care of sīla, of samādhi, takes care of paññā, of understanding, asking the right questions, investigating, drawing close to life so that we can understand. To take care of that is to do the right thing. Am I doing the right thing? Taking care of sīla, samādhi, paññā.

So the patience very much is allied with wisdom. I'll speak a little bit more about patience in a general sense, not just about our practice -- this kind of impatience we find running through our lives in huge ways or in little ways, whatever. So impatience, like anything else, like absolutely anything else, can become a habit. We can have a habit of impatience. And actually we, most of us, do have a habit of impatience, to some degree or other. You know, I notice myself: I have to go into town to run an errand or whatever. And there I am, Totnes high street, and at the pedestrian crossing, and waiting. And there's just this sense of, "Oh, come on," until the little green man comes or whatever. And how long do we have to wait for? It's less than a minute, really. And I don't really have to be anywhere at a particular time. But yet there's still this -- it's just the impatience has become a habit. That's not really remarkable, but still, one feels this. It's become a habit, the impatience.

Now, it's important, too, when we're investigating qualities like patience and impatience, to actually see the effect of it. What is the effect the impatience has? So, again, as I notice in myself in Newton Abbot or wherever it is, and I've got my list of things that I need to do -- I've got to go to the bank, and I've got to buy this or do whatever it is. And I'm there in Newton Abbot on Newton Abbot's whatever it's called street, and with my list, which is basically my summary of what I want. That's my list of things to do. And I'm moving down the street, a street full of people, with my agenda of what I want. What happens? The heart actually closes. The heart closes when I'm driven by that, and then it's all these people in the way of what I want. And then the impatience comes in. It's important there to see the heart connection. If we're too driven, if we're seeing too much in those terms, you can actually feel, you can literally feel, when the mindfulness is developed and the sensitivity is there in the body, one actually feels the energy centre in the chest area close. And the heart closes. And how does that affect the perception? What then do the people feel, seem like even more? Versus, if it's possible to drop that agenda and just be there, and it's the miracle, the beauty of life unfolding and people going about their business, and children and ... There's something -- the whole perception changes. It's really important to see the effect of impatience.

[26:29] It's also important to see the suffering in impatience, that the suffering, the sensed difficulty, is not so much in the thing. It's in this quality of impatience itself. So we can investigate it. What actually is it? What is impatience? It's this -- we all know kind of what it is. But what is it, when we go deeper into it? For myself, when I look at it, what I find is it's barely findable. Actually, the experience of impatience -- there's barely anything there. There's some sort of sensations, but they're not even really strong. They're almost like -- well, where are they exactly? And there are sort of vague thoughts, or maybe a few very clear thoughts, but just a few. It's almost not there. It's important to see this because -- well, for a number of reasons. One of them is somehow a kind of feedback loop has kicked in. We're responding to this feeling of impatience without seeing it for what it is. So what is it? Asking and knowing, understanding the experience.

The Buddha has a fundamental question that he asks over and over and over again about many different aspects of our life. And it's, what is feeding this? What is feeding this quality, this experience? And so we need to ask as well with impatience, what is feeding this impatience? One of the things that feeds impatience is this not seeing it for what it is, not seeing that it's just this very insubstantial feeling that somehow kicked in and started looping, feeding back on itself. So we need to see it as it is to stop feeding it. Sometimes impatience is just fed by very ordinary factors like tiredness. We're not feeling calm, or we just don't have a sense of well-being. And they're just feeding in to create a sense of impatience. But they're important to see. So we tend to blame the object -- "This situation or this thing that I'm going through, this event -- that's making me impatient" -- rather than, "Impatience is a condition. It's a condition of mind and heart that's brought about by other conditions." And we need to understand what those conditions are.

So could be, I find it very interesting, very fruitful to spend a day -- could be a day here or a day in our life outside of retreat -- just a day exploring patience and impatience, noticing when it's around, how it is. What is it? What's feeding it? Fascinating. And there are all sorts of angles we can come at it from. A little while ago in a work retreat meeting, one of the retreatants said patience meant having respect for the present moment, which I thought was a lovely way of putting it. To have patience is to have respect for the present moment. One part of this practice is exactly that: respecting the present moment. It's just one part. What is it to respect the present moment? What would it be to go through a day and really remind ourselves, have an agenda: "Everything's equally worthy of respect"? Everything, everything, everything. We tend to prioritize this over that, raise this over that. What would it be to remind ourselves: "Everything is equally worthy of respect"? One possibility.

But this question, this question from the Buddha -- what is it that's feeding, what is it that's feeding impatience? A really important question. We can question ourselves. We can start probing at this whole experience, this whole structure of impatience. Very simple, very direct question we can ask ourselves: "Is this situation really as bad as it seems? Is it really as bad as it seems? Is it inherently bad? In and of itself, is it really that bad? Or is my perception of it being coloured, being shaped by aversion and by the time-sense itself, by my sense of time and my aversion? Is that colouring and shaping the object and giving rise to the impatience?" It's a very direct question, an extremely important question.

Might also ask -- here's this situation, here's this event, here's this experience I'm going through, whatever it is -- "Which moment is so terrible?" It seems, "Oh, it's awful, this thing. This thing, it's just terrible." Which moment is so terrible? Really shine the light of attention, very, very bright attentiveness and ask. Actually dissect it. Put it under the microscope. Which moment here is so terrible? The mind -- you could say the principal activity of the mind is to build things, is to kind of glom things together. It sticks things together and creates things and builds things. Are we doing that? And is it creating impatience? The answer is yes, we are doing it. We want to see this. One way in is by asking these questions. Or another question: "What exactly am I waiting for?" I'm waiting for this thing to happen: "Come on, come on, come on!" What exactly am I waiting for? What exactly am I waiting to experience? So I might be standing in a queue somewhere: "Come on!" Is standing really that bad? Is it that awful?

Can take this further. And it's a much more comprehensive way. We are here, and we want to be there. We're there, and we want to be here, whatever it is. We're now, and we want to be then. Wherever we are, whatever's going on, what's the experience composed of? What comprises that experience? There are going to be sights, shapes, visual forms, colour; sounds; body sensations; pleasant, unpleasant, not too much; emotions; feelings, etc.; thoughts. When we go somewhere else, there are going to be sights and visual forms and colours, and sounds, and emotions and feelings, and pleasant and unpleasant. Is it really that different? Is it really that different -- here from there, now from then, this from that? Is it really, really, really that different? How different can it be? There's going to be all the same ingredients. Is now really bad, and is then going to be really great?

So you know, me on one side of the street at the pedestrian crossing in Totnes, is this side of the street really better than that side of the street? Or very common, people have pointed out, you're on a retreat, and you're sitting in meditation: "Come on, come on, ring the bell, ring the bell." [laughs] "Maybe he's fallen asleep. Ring the bell. Ring the bell, or I will scream." [laughter] And the bell's going to ring, and it's going to be walking time. And then we're walking: "Come on, come on." [laughter] And we're going to go back to sitting. This is a quite common observation on retreat. There's just flipping back and forth.

Then there's lunch. Okay. So then we're standing in the queue at lunch. One of our wonderful cooks is here, and very lovely food provided. But actually, how good can lunch be, really? [laughter] No, every huge respect to Richard and the other cooks. [laughter] Wonderful service and lovely food, but really, really, really, how good can lunch be? You're standing in the queue, and "Come on. Is there going to be enough? And why am I at the back of the queue always?" Is it really that different? Is standing in the queue so bad? Is lunch really that fantastic?

So the direction of this is a contemplation. It's not to then say, "Okay, Buddhists, they paint everything grey. Everything's got to be, you know, take the joy out of everything." It's not about that. It's not about this kind of making everything grey, and just kind of, "Oh, God, right." It's a tool. You can pick up this contemplation and use it as a tool, when there's the suffering of impatience, to take away this elevation of one thing and putting down of another that's part of the fabric of impatience. At the same time, a lot of practice is just the opposite. It's very much about keenly noticing and becoming sensitive to, developing our sensitivity to the particular, to the uniqueness and the miracle of every moment. There are no two moments the same. Both these two, again, they're together. They move side by side. They complement each other. And one's for a certain situation, another's for another situation, and it's fine. They're just tools.

But this aspect -- how different can an experience really be? "This thing -- I need this thing to happen. Got to get through this thing. Come on, come on!" Do I believe I'm going somewhere? Do I believe I can go anywhere? Anywhere? Can I really go anywhere? Can I get somewhere? If I believe that that's really the case, then impatience will follow -- to use the Buddha's analogy -- as sure as the wheels of the ox cart follow the ox that pulls it.^[7] It will come out of that believing: "I'm going to get somewhere. There's somewhere else to be."

Now, just briefly to go back to practice, because it could be that we hear this, or we, for different reasons, want to apply this to practice. So I'm going to explore this a little bit. It is true to say, if we have a notion, a concept, of progress, there is such a thing as progress in practice, whatever, that very notion and concept automatically, automatically brings with it the concepts, the notions of regress, going backwards, or stagnation. They come with the concept of progress. That's true. We can't deny that. But you have to tread very carefully here with practice, very, very carefully, and I think with a lot of integrity, really deep and almost ruthless integrity. It would be silly, I think -- I don't know another word for it -- silly, premature, perhaps immature, to not think somewhat in terms of progress in the practice. Otherwise why are we practising? We are moving towards our aspirations. We are moving towards goals. It's an interesting area. The notion of calm, the idea of calm, the aspiration of calm, the aspiration of concentration and collectedness, the aspiration of mindfulness, wakefulness, attentiveness -- all of them bring with them their opposite notions. Calm brings with it opposite, agitation or whatever you want to call it; concentration, scatteredness; mindfulness, distractedness, inattentiveness. When we set something up (which we do in practice; we do set something up) the very talking about it and setting it up, it sensitizes us to the presence of that thing. We become sensitive to when calm is around, when mindfulness is around, when loving-kindness is around, and all the rest of it. But we also, then, we have to become sensitive to when that thing is not there. It's part of the process.

Now, it's really true that, at some point, we need to really investigate this whole area of duality and what we're setting up. But not, not, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, absolutely not. And as I say, to keep a real integrity around this and a real honesty around this. Again, it's one of those things -- we kind of have to hold both of them together, both these aspects together. We actually need to develop our practice, and develop the kind of subtlety of seeing that comes out of that development of practice, because we can pick up this idea of non-duality -- "Oh, there's nowhere to get to, nothing to do, nowhere to get to" -- we can pick that up and use it at a level that doesn't really have that maturity of understanding. And what happens is we've just fallen back on our default concepts: "This is how I am. This is how it is, this situation. This is how life is. This is how it is right now." That's a default, normal human perception. And I say, "That's okay. It's okay. I'm just going to accept that because it's just non-dual." That's not what the Buddha was talking about when he was talking about awakening and enlightenment. The whole notion of 'how I am' and 'how it is' undergoes a complete dissolution and re-understanding. So to use these ideas of non-duality without really understanding that is a bit premature.

Okay, so this question of feeding, feeding -- how can we feed patience? How can that get fed, this beautiful quality of patience? One aspect is sometimes a simple allowing that we talk about. I was speaking with a retreatant some months ago, a few weeks ago, and long history of feeling tyrannized by the inner critic, the self-judging quality -- decades, decades of that kind of pain. And just realizing, she came to the realization, just that part is a suffering part. It's suffering. It needs patience. It needs a kind of allowing. Somehow she was able to do that, and the whole thing began to soften. Some softness came into the thing for the first time literally in decades. Some softness came. So it's just allowing. Interesting -- the question was, that came up for her was, "Maybe I'm suppressing something?" And we talked about, how could there be suppressing in allowing? One's literally just allowing.

And certainly the importance of allowing, but it needs to be balanced by the emphasis on cultivation. So a lot of emphasis in this practice on learning to cultivate qualities of loving-kindness and compassion and generosity and calmness, etc. When we're going through something difficult that needs patience, when it lands in a context, in an inner climate or environment of that kind of inner resource and well-being, of having developed all those qualities, it's landing in a very different place. Patience is a lot more accessible then, based on that cultivation -- huge importance of cultivation. I'm not going to say much more about that now.

So this allowing factor has to be, again, supplemented with this attention to cultivation. We need to understand patience and impatience. Some of you are, I know, you experience chronic illness. It's a very interesting thing to experience chronic illness. And what is it that something like a chronic illness asks of us? What is needed to kind of manifest, to be brought forth from the heart, from the mind, when there's an ongoing illness, and you can't really see the end in sight? What is it that comes forth from the heart, from the mind, that makes that bearable, okay?

One of the things is, one of the approaches, so to speak, is not building things up in time. I'll explain what I mean. When we have a sense of impatience, we've given that solidity and substance to something in time. "It's been going for so long. It's going to go for so long in the future" -- we have that thought, those thoughts, about past and future. This thing, instead of being an experience in the moment -- which is actually all anything can be, is an experience in the moment -- instead of that, it's become something big, enlarged in time. Is it possible (this is a practice) to kind of snip off the past and the future and just come to this moment of experience -- just this moment? So a moment of experience is always handleable. It's handleable. A moment is something -- even if it's difficult, it's something that, in a way, awareness can accommodate. It can get around it. A moment is always handleable. We tend to build up a thing or a situation with our time concept.

So again, the mind is glomming things together. It's building things into a big thing, a big situation, a big problem with a long history. On one conventional level that might be quite true, but sometimes in practice, it's not the skilful way to look at it. When the mind does that, it gloms things together. And we have this big problem, and we get overwhelmed. We get overwhelmed. So a real practice -- can we just practise snipping off the past and the future, and just really bringing ourselves to the moment and seeing, feeling the handleability of the moment?

Sometimes as well, when we're going through some difficulty, emotional or -- yeah, let's say an emotional difficulty that seems to have some history to it, some persistence to it, oftentimes, again, it's more than one thing involved. And if we can just draw closer to the experience, we actually begin to see there are strands to this. So there may be just some feeling of grief or pain or stuckness or whatever, and if we draw closer, look closer, more delicate, our attention more delicate, you see, "Well, there's grief. And there's some anger as well. And there's some ..." You know, all these different strands to it. And that also enables something to, it breaks down this glomming process. It enables us to just pick up this strand and work with that. Let's just work with this piece, this particular energy.

So oftentimes, part of being human and having a mind, sometimes, is that we create abstractions out of our lives and our sense of life. We create abstractions, and we believe in them. And then we get befuddled by our own abstraction. So for instance, a person can say, "I give up. I'm just a failure. I'm just a romantic failure. I'm a failure at relationships," or whatever. And that can become -- it's a kind of abstraction, "because I was wounded in the past" and whatever. Maybe, again, it's more a matter of skill. Do I understand what's needed here? Maybe what's needed in, say this example of relationships, is that I need to learn the skill. I need to develop the skill, gradually, of relating, of communicating, of working with that with another person, instead of dumping this abstract label of just being a failure at relationships. Just, ugh, to think that. Just being more clear about what is needed.

We create these abstractions, and then we believe them. Many years ago, for years, I had an abstraction that I needed to "be with myself," to be with myself. And I either was with myself or I wasn't. And gradually, over time, that "be with myself," the s in it started to have a capital S, like it actually became more significant, like it was really important, to "be with my Self." After a while, it was like, what do I mean by that? Or a person -- "I don't know myself." They have an abstraction: "I don't know myself. I just don't know myself." Or, "I am lost. I'm lost." Or, "I'm not mature. There's not a maturity." All these are abstractions. We need to probe, not settle for these abstractions. Actually probe: what does it mean? Is it actually true? What am I talking about? To be quite precise, so that very much there is a quality, there's the importance of the quality of heartfulness in our practice -- but again, balanced by a kind of quality of intelligence. We need to practise with intelligence. What actually do I mean when I say that? So I'm not getting impatient about something that's not even that real, that I'm not even sure what it means, impatient with my process.

Just finally, when we really go into this, this experience of impatience, really kind of check it out -- what is going on there? What is going on there? You could say, metaphorically, when there's impatience there's a kind of (metaphorically) leaning forward, leaning forward towards something. The mind is kind of leaning forward towards something -- "I want to get this thing" -- or towards the end of something, anticipating the end of it. It's just, "Come on, come on!" When we really check this out and check out its effect, begin to see that the very leaning, this very leaning forward is actually giving substance to some thing, and giving substance also to time itself. It's giving substance to a thing, an event, a situation. It's giving substance to time. It's building them up. It's actually making -- this very leaning forward is making the thing and the time-sense, making them stand out in consciousness more. It's making them prominent. We build these things. We give them solidity and substance -- things and time -- through this leaning forward. When we give things and time substance, then the problem is right on the heels of that, right on the heels of that. So it's another very common experience to be sitting in meditation, and it's, "Come on, when's the bell going to ring? When's the bell ...?" Really, really -- it's real uptightness. And then the bell goes, and then it's like, "Oh, it's okay now." I feel I can just sit, you know, endlessly now. Somehow we've built up this situation, and it goes, and the problem's gone out of it.

So this aspect, we really need to see very, very clearly and very deeply, to see this giving substance to, building, see it over and over and very deeply. Krishnamurti said:

True patience is not of time.^[8]

What does that mean? It comes when we begin to see this building of things, giving substance to things. We begin to see that things and situations and time -- they're empty. They're not real in the way they seem to be. They're unbounded. And then even the word 'patience' begins to lose its meaning a little bit, because things and time have lost their meaning a little bit.

So this area of impatience, this experience of impatience, there's a tremendous amount to discover here, a tremendous amount. It's a very rich area. And we start by noticing it, noticing that feeling or that sense or those thoughts of impatience, noticing the experience, noticing what it is, when we're impatient, where we're impatient. Is it possible to soften around it? Is it possible to just soften, just remind ourselves? Do we need to remind ourselves of our sense of aspiration, of the goodness, of the beauty of what we're doing? Do we need to have a bit of a long view, a bit of faith there? Or do we need to question, probe a little bit more, find different ways of looking?

Impatience can then become -- an experience of impatience can become a time of possibility, a time of possibility instead of a time of imprisonment.

Shall we just sit together a couple of minutes?