Transcription
The theme for the talk tonight is: what are we doing here? This is actually quite a good question, and it being the end of the first full day, it might have been a question that has gone through your mind at some point today. Oftentimes the first day of a retreat is quite difficult. Sometimes it's very lovely, but sometimes it's difficult, and one can wonder, what is this all about? And struggling with pain in the back, or the legs, or a mind that's like a mosquito or whatever it is. I think it's important, even if today felt lovely -- and I know that for some people it did -- even if it feels lovely, or if it feels difficult, it's still a really important question: what are we doing here? How is this working? I think that's a question that actually takes a lot of time for us to really understand the process of what we're doing here. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it often takes decades. I don't want to put you off, but just to say, there's a lot to this practice. On one level, it's extremely simple. On another level, there's a lot to it. And I have seen, in working with hundreds and thousands of people, that it often takes decades for people to really see how it fits together. So I want to try and do it not in decades but in an hour tonight if I can. [laughs]
As human beings, we have, I think, the right to explore whatever direction in spirituality, whatever path or practices we want to. That's one of the real fruits of living in our culture in this age. There's so much available to us spiritually to choose from. There's a lot we can explore there. And that is our right. It's our right to be able to explore that, to kind of go shopping spiritually. No problem. But I think we need to give something a good shot, and whatever practice we choose or we choose to try out, we need to kind of make it our own. We need to digest it and assimilate it and make this my practice. Already from tonight and today, we've thrown out all these concepts of mindfulness, and today I used the word samatha, and yesterday sīla. Already there's a bunch of concepts. It can sound quite foreign. We're even using foreign words. Through practice and through our interest, that needs to get digested, translated, and made to mean something here in the heart: "This means something to me. This is how I would explain it. This is what it means in my life, in my sense of things." That's really important, to make practice our own.
That process of making practice our own actually takes some experimentation. As much as we need to have an attitude of diligence to practice -- showing up and doing it and being patient -- we also need to have an attitude of a little bit of playfulness and exploring; "What's this like? What's that like? What way is better?" So like I said earlier today, we've given three possibilities for working with the breath. And to encourage an experimentation and see, "Yeah, if I do it this way or I do it this way, what feels best?" So we need to experiment. We also need to understand practice. This is what I want to go into a little bit tonight, understanding practice. But as I said, that takes time. It takes giving ourselves to, for us here in this case, it takes giving ourselves to the form. So the form is sitting and walking and showing up and kind of trying. If we want to make practice our own, and if we want to understand it, that takes a kind of surrender, surrender to the form, just for the sake of experiment so then we can see. Really total encouragement to just surrender to the schedule. When it says sit at 9:30 or whatever it is, we just sit. We come to the hall and we sit. When it says walking meditation, that's what we do. There's that attitude of surrender. And through that, we can actually discover and assimilate the practice for ourselves.
And it takes patience. It takes patience. As I said, end of the first day, it can feel like a very long day, a long day of practice, a long day of silence, a long day of sitting and walking. It takes patience. Maybe anything worthwhile in life comes slowly. I don't know if that's true. I have a sense that it's true. If it's a really worthwhile thing, maybe it takes patience, and we need to have that patience. Cheap things come easily. It might also be that anything worthwhile stretches us, stretches us in terms of what we think is possible or what we think we are capable of. And practice certainly does that -- it stretches us, it can stretch us. Again, it wouldn't be much of a Dharma, it wouldn't be much of a teaching if it didn't really stretch us, if it didn't really stretch our minds, stretch our hearts, stretch our being. "It's okay. You can kind of just pick it up at the supermarket or something."
So there was a conference of monks, of monks and nuns from different traditions a few years ago, and I was hearing about it. I think it was a very old Catholic monk, very old, in his eighties or nineties even, been a monk for years and years and years, talking to a very, very old Buddhist monk, also like ninety-something and been a monk for ages. The Catholic monk said, "You know, it's the first twenty or thirty years that are really the hard ones." And the Buddhist monk said, "Yes, yes. That's true." [laughs] It's a little bit over the top, but it gives you a sense of the quality of patience one needs to have. That patience and willingness to be stretched has to be balanced by a kindness. So we're not just, "Right, I'm really going to stretch myself," not responsive, not taking care of ourself and our sense of our own limitations. So yes, challenging ourselves, yes, stretching, yes, patience, but also kindness and respect for where we are.
When the Buddha talks about practice, or when we talk about practice, and we say, "What's it for? Where is it going?", the most common answer to that, where it's going, is freedom, liberation, release. Those are the words that are most common. And what that means, in a nutshell, is freedom from suffering, freedom from this word dukkha -- it's another Pali word, dukkha. Suffering is not so good a translation; probably there isn't a Finnish word either, because it's such a broad word. It encompasses any kind of sense of dis-ease, or dissatisfaction, or lack of well-being, or even just a slight "mm, something's just not quite right," actually even more than that. It's a very, very broad word. Sometimes these words are better kept in their original form. Dukkha, any kind of dis-ease, of dissatisfaction, from extreme pain and suffering and torment to just the most subtle thing. And the Buddha said, "I teach one thing and one thing only." Because people came to him with all kinds of questions. He said, "I teach one thing and one thing only. I teach dukkha and the end of dukkha. I teach suffering and freedom from suffering." That's all he was interested in.
[8:50] So that's kind of where it's going, the path, where it's going. And just coming back for a second to that issue of patience, the patience that it requires, there was a teacher, Ajahn Chah, in the Thai Forest tradition, the Forest Meditation tradition in Thailand. He was one of the great meditation masters of the twentieth century. He used to say, actually, there are two kinds of suffering, two kinds of dukkha: there's the suffering that just keeps going round and round, just leads to more suffering, not leading anywhere helpful. And then there's also the kind of suffering that leads to the end of suffering. He said if you want to tread this path, and you're really interested in a very deep and lovely freedom in life, then you must be willing to open to and experience the kind of suffering that leads to the end of suffering.[1] So this means the back that's aching from many hours sitting in meditation, the restlessness, the sleepiness, the mind that doesn't behave, and just the willingness to put up with that and to go through that because it's heading somewhere much deeper, to a much deeper freedom, much more complete freedom.
So this notion of freedom, as a teacher I find myself using it a lot as a word, and just to reflect on it a little bit -- what does it mean? In our life, all of us here, living in the West in these times, we have quite a degree of outer freedom. All of us in this room experience a certain amount of political freedom. We were just talking at dinner how English culture is a very complaining culture, and so there's a lot of complaining about the whole political system in England, but actually there's democracy there, etc. Same in Finland. We also experience a large degree of economic freedom. We can go where we want, buy what we want, to a certain extent, to a very large extent. Some places in the world don't even experience those levels of freedom, those levels of outer freedom.
But the Dharma is really pointing to inner freedom. What does that mean, inner freedom, a freedom inside? It's not to do with what's outside. This is, in a way, a little bit more subtle. We may not even realize the ways that we are not free inside, the ways that we are kind of imprisoned or enslaved, in a way. We may not even be aware. In fact, the truth is we are not actually aware of all of them yet. So we experience dissatisfaction in life, we experience dis-ease, we experience unhappiness and problem and suffering of all kinds, and how automatic it seems, how natural for us to then blame something that happened. I blame that event. "If that thing didn't happen ..." Or I blame this thing, whatever it is. "This is causing me a problem." Or I blame another person. "They did something wrong. They treated me this way," or whatever it was, "They didn't do this." Or I blame my personality. "I have a problem with my personality." Something in the environment.
It seems very normal and obvious to blame what's out there as causing me the problem. But Dharma teachings and, in a way, the promise of the spiritual life, says, "Look again. That's not quite right." It's actually possible to know a freedom in life that is not dependent on what's happening in the environment. It's not dependent on conditions. So that's a really tall promise, we say in English. It's like, "Wow, if that's really true, that's really something." But that's the promise. That was what the Buddha promised. And that's what every, to my feeling, every great spiritual teacher of whatever tradition -- it's the same promise. It's that promise of freedom that's not dependent.
So we find ourselves saying in life, "Oh, if only my body were a little different. If only I didn't have this backache or this knee ache, how great I would be at meditating." Or, "If only my body were more attractive, I would attract better relationships." Or, "If only this or that ..." This is all very normal. "If only my wife were just a little bit different," or "my husband," or "my child," or "my parents." "If only they could change just a little." "If only I had a little bit more money, or a better job, or a better place to live." We can see the mind believing, getting caught up, completely seduced by this idea that if we change the environment we will feel a sense of release from our dissatisfaction, release from dukkha, liberation from dukkha. "If only my childhood was different." "If only I was raised differently."
So sometimes, of course, there is something in all these conditions, and we do need to address the conditions in life, and we do need to look at our childhood and heal that, and all of that, of course, and think about how we're living and our living situation, our money situation, all that. But, in a way, the Dharma is pointing to another level of freedom, not dependent on conditions. It seems like in our life we can have a problem with, we can feel a problem with, we can feel suffering with, we can feel an imprisonment with something that's in the past that's gone, or something that's in the present that's a situation, or something that's in the future, and we just feel imprisoned, not free. Somehow the past is still weighing on us, still binding us. Somehow in the present there's something we're not free with, or in the future this thing will happen, or maybe it won't happen.
If we look -- and part of what meditation is is exactly that: looking at our life, looking at our experience deeply, as deeply as we can; that's what meditation is. Can I look at myself and look at my existence as deeply as is humanly possible? And when we begin to look a little deeper, just a little deeper, we begin to see all the different ways that we're imprisoned. We see, "Gosh, I'm a prisoner to my reactivity. Someone says something and I just find myself reacting, or they do something and I find myself reacting. I don't even seem to have much of a choice in it. I'm a prisoner. I'm caught up in this reactivity." Or, "I'm a prisoner to my fears. I've got to perform something or say something or do something, or something's going to happen, and there's a lot of fear there. I can't seem to get free of the fear. The fear says, 'Do it this way,' 'Do this,' 'Don't do that,' 'Don't go near this.'" And the fear has such authority, such power, I'm not free in relation to my fears.
So this is all totally normal human stuff I'm talking about. My thoughts -- just a day of meditation, the first day of retreat, how we can feel totally imprisoned by the thinking mind, that the mind is just so thick with thought swarming around. We say, "When am I going to get some peace from this?" Or certain thoughts that feel like, "These are really not helpful, and they just keep coming over and over." Our habits. All of this we can feel bound by. Or we find ourselves obsessing about something. Again, someone says something, and we just can't get, "How could they say such a thing?!" We can't get it out of our mind. We can obsess about all kinds of things -- how we appear: do I look okay? Do I seem okay? Do I seem stupid? We can't stop worrying about it. Or we are a prisoner to the kind of views we have about ourselves. So we feel, "Oh, I'm a bad person. If only people knew deep down I'm not a good person." Or "I'm a depressed kind of person," or "I'm an angry person," or "I'm like this." We bind ourselves in these kind of self-views and then we can't move. We're literally wrapped up in it. Sometimes we don't realize that we're doing that to ourselves or to others.
We can feel imprisoned in roles -- a job that we're in and we can't seem to get out, and it feels like a situation, a form that we're imprisoned in. Or relationships -- sometimes we feel stuck in a certain kind of relationship with a partner, or with parents, or with children even sometimes. We're just stuck there. On an even more fundamental level -- I know all this sounds pretty dark [laughs], but hang in there; we're getting to the good stuff. On an even more fundamental level, we are, in a way, imprisoned through our senses, so through sight and sound and taste and smell and touch and the sense of the mind. In Buddhist teaching, the mind is the sixth sense, so what comes to us through the mind, thoughts and images and mood and emotions, etc. All that's coming through the senses is arising and passing. Some of it very lovely, some of it not very lovely at all. And we find ourselves trapped in this body with six senses, and kind of victims of what comes up. If it's lovely, it can disappear, and we find ourselves wanting to chase after it, imprisoned by that chasing. Or we find ourselves -- here's this horrible body sensation I can't get rid of now I'm ill or whatever it is, or the whole conglomerate of what can come to us in our senses, it's just not always pleasant and we feel trapped by that. And trapped by this movement towards what's pleasant and away from what's unpleasant. We're just shuttling back and forth. We can say we don't even realize that on one level, that's maybe what our life has become. Is that a freedom, just moving back and forth as best we can on this line -- pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, unpleasant?
[20:40] It may be something much more vague, that we just feel something is lacking in life, something is unfulfilled, but we can't put our finger on it. It could be -- and it is, actually -- something so fundamental, that we're actually imprisoned by the very fact of birth and death. So all of us here were born a few decades ago, basically. All of us will die at some point in the future; who knows when. And it seems our existence is kind of trapped between birth and death. There's a real imprisonment in that form. Just the fact of the finiteness of our life and the finiteness of things, on a very deep existential level, there's not a freedom in that. It's a finite form. It's a cut-off form. And we don't even control it. We can't even control it. In fact, the Buddha -- it was that level of problem that really grabbed him. Many of you know the story. He was a prince in a palace with every possible comfort and pleasure that his parents could provide him, everything to protect him from any discomfort. But he realized he was going to die, and he said, "Why should I who am subject to death, subject to ageing and decay and death, why should I seek refuge in that which is also subject to ageing and decay and death?", all these pleasures and whatever it was. "Why should I do that? What's the point?" He was a very young man. He was 28, really going through a major questioning period. "What's the point? Is there something that's deathless?" People said, "No, don't even try. It's pointless. Look, you've got a great palace. You've got a great wife. Why give up all this pleasure in the pursuit of something that probably doesn't even exist?" But the Buddha said, "What's the point of staying if life isn't free? I want something that's a whole other level of freedom."
He left and he, as I'm sure everyone knows the story, he experimented. He experimented with practice for six years, full-on, and he discovered a freedom in life. That's the promise I was referring to earlier. The promise is this freedom in life that is available. So all of those, that long list of conditions that I was describing, long list of ways that we can feel imprisoned, the promise is that it's possible we can feel a freedom with all of that, in and through all of that. That's possible for us. We can also know a freedom that's beyond death, beyond birth and death. That's the promise. This path, this practice of insight meditation is very much about looking at life, as I said, looking really deeply at our existence so that we begin to understand. We begin to understand a truth, truths about life. To quote Jesus, a beautiful passage from the Gospel of St John, "You will see the truth, and the truth will set you free."[2] It's lovely. It's the same idea here.
Now, to me -- I just want take a little aside -- that's quite interesting. When we hear something like that, just right now, right now in the hall, there's twenty-whatever people in here. What's the reaction? Just to notice. Not any 'shoulds' here, but just to notice what the reaction is. Something occurred to me recently, actually coming out of something I read about Indian history around the time of the Buddha. This piece said that for Indians, before the time of the Buddha, the time of the Upanishads, which is at least 300 years before the Buddha, the idea took root in Indian culture that it's possible to train the heart and to train the mind, for a human being to train the heart and train the mind, train the whole kind of perceptual process, so that we can literally see the truth and know the truth, with a capital T, the ultimate Truth of things. That idea came up in Indian culture and it really took root. Even nowadays -- or it's beginning to change now that India is so much being Westernized and stuff -- but that idea is very common. Your average Indian person believes that. They may not sign up to do the training, but they believe that it's actually possible for a human being to do that. Whereas in the West, just because of how we've developed, that kind of view, the belief that that's possible for this human being and this kind of cognitive apparatus to understand the truth and see the truth, it's only really mystics (and very few mystics) that really believe that's possible.
I was struck by this because we had, where I live and work, at Gaia House, there are managers there, and I do a group for the managers. We were talking about seeing -- a very deep level of practice -- seeing that time doesn't actually exist in the way we think it does. Someone was talking about, "Oh, well, that sounds like relativity theory and quantum theory and all that." And my point was, "Well, actually, you can also discover it through practice." I was so struck by some people -- didn't think that that was at all possible with practice. It was just -- "No, if I want to understand that, I go to the science. Even though I don't understand the science, I'll just trust that what they're saying is true." It's just interesting. Do we even believe it's possible to train the mind and heart to see that deeply, to understand life that deeply? So that's actually just a question, and I'm not going to argue with anyone or try and convince anyone at this point. But the point, the bigger point, I think, is that it's possible to transform our lives. It's possible to transform our lives in practice -- certainly a little bit, certainly a lot, and also kind of completely. We can decide what we're interested in. We can decide that. But transformation of our life, of our whole sense of life, is possible. So that whole list I gave of what's difficult, we can begin to feel freedom with at least some of that, and more and more of that. That's possible. The Buddha said he taught a gradual path, a very gradual path. What's involved is practices, as we're doing. Practices. And what comes is a gradual sense of freedom. That comes, as well as a gradual sense of developing certain practices that bring freedom, that bring a sense of ease in life.
[29:04] So I think this retreat was called an insight meditation retreat. Is that what it's being called? Insight meditation? Okay. To my way of thinking -- I probably shouldn't say this, but I'll say it. I was going to say there's no such thing as insight meditation, but I don't want to say that. What I want to say is insight meditation is not really a technique. It's not a technique. Sometimes people say, "Teach me the technique." But, in a way, it's not really a technique. It's a whole kind of approach to practice, to a life of practice in meditation. So what I want to do is give a little bit of one possible way of thinking about an overview of that practice. Just one possible way. There are many different ways. I want to give one possible way of thinking of an overview.
That way is to think of meditation practice having three strands, three aspects, and they're all important. All three are important, and they also kind of cross over and intertwine with each other. It's not really that they're separate, but it can help to think of them a little bit separate. What they really are is different modes or approaches that we can use in our meditation life, in our life of meditation. I'll explain what they are as I -- well, I'll just say them first. The first is cultivation. So this means learning how to develop beautiful qualities of the heart, beautiful qualities of mind. I'll explain in more detail. I'll go into this. Cultivation. The second one we might call mindfulness. So just learning to be present to life in a very simple, very beautiful and direct way, very open way. So cultivation, mindfulness. The third one is what we might call investigation. Investigation of life and investigation of what it means to be free in life.
These three really work together. It's not the case that you do one and then, right, you finish that, and then you do the other, and then you finish that. It's not like that. It's more like we can dip in and out and use all three. We might be using all three equally at one time. We might be emphasizing one of those for a stretch or period in our practice or whatever. They're different kind of tools or approaches that are available to us. And again, as part of our experimentation in practice, as part of our playing with practice, we can feel free to shift the emphasis here as time goes by.
Okay. So let me talk a bit about each one in a little more detail. The first one, cultivation. What does that mean? It means gradually, slowly, learning how to develop a sense inside of what the Buddha would call wholesome nourishment. That means feeling a sense of well-being inside that's coming from a good place. It's not because I feel not-so-good, so I need to go get a beer, or I need to go eat a snack from the refrigerator or whatever it is. Actually learning wholesome ways of nourishment, of having the being feel good.
We talk a lot in this practice about suffering. I talked -- I don't know how many minutes -- just about everything that could be really terrible. [laughs] The Buddha said, "I teach one thing, suffering and the end of suffering." You think, "Oh, goodness," you know? But the other side of the same coin is joy, happiness. As much interest and emphasis on developing a sense of happiness or joy in life, or if those are too strong words for you -- sometimes they push people the wrong way -- well-being, just developing a sense of well-being, of inner nourishment. That's a real journey, and again, a very gradual journey. It's not a linear journey. In other words, it has its ups and downs like everything else. But that's really, really important in a life of practice, developing a sense of joy or well-being inside, a sense of peace inside, learning how that can be more and more accessible to us, more and more somehow a reservoir that we can draw on, that we have inside us this reservoir and we can be nourished there.
I spoke last night about sīla, about the ethics. Taking care of the ethics, taking care of living in relationship to others, with love, with care, with respect -- that's feeding, the Buddha's words, literally feeding our sense of well-being. It's feeding our sense of well-being. Now, we're talking so far in the retreat about calming, about this samatha, calming the mind, calming the body, calming the heart. That's also going to bring with it, in a very gradual way, very gradual, very non-linear, it's going to bring with it a sense of inner well-being, a reservoir of inner well-being, even joy and peace. All these lists some of you may be familiar with, the Buddha has all these lists -- eight of this, ten of that, five of this, seven of this. It can seem amazingly dry, amazingly boring, and part of the point of the lists is that they're all qualities that lead to joy, that lead to this nourishment, this inner well-being. So it is actually a small wonder to me how the Buddha sometimes can talk about something that's so lovely and juicy and make it sound like chewing cardboard or something, but there you go.
When we begin to cultivate some of what's on those lists -- the calmness, the generosity, the loving-kindness, the equanimity, the patience, the mindfulness; it goes on and on -- we begin to understand really clearly where is happiness. It's in those qualities. When those qualities are in the heart, then the happiness is there. Those qualities are also important because they bring with them a sense of strength. They bring with them a sense of strength. How often in life we feel a sense of lack of strength, of fragility. Anyone who's just been alive for a certain amount of time realizes we need a certain amount of strength. Anyone who's been practising for a while realizes if we're really going to look at life, look at everything that life involves, we need a certain amount of strength. Not a hard strength, but a pliable strength.
And these qualities, like loving-kindness, generosity, equanimity, all those lists, the calmness, concentration, the mindfulness, bring with them gradually a sense of strength to the being, and it's our resource, it's our treasure. They bring with them also calmness, clarity, energy to the being. We really, really need these qualities -- for the sake of well-being, but also for the sake of looking deeply. With the cultivation, our inner climate begins to be changed. Our inner climate moves from a sense of fragmentation and confusion and agitation, unhappiness, to one of brightness, energy, calmness, clarity, peace -- very gradually and very non-linearly; it's not a smooth transition.
So this cultivation, we might already feel so far on the retreat, "Maybe other people's minds can calm down, but you don't know what's going on in my mind. I don't think my mind is capable of that. I think I've just got a different kind of mind." And this is actually quite a normal thought. But to see, on one level, the mind is just a kind of set of habits. It's just a set of habits. This was one of the things that the Buddha had insight into. The mind, being a set of habits, is actually malleable. It's shapeable. We can learn, however we feel our mind is, we can develop it, we can learn the skill of calmness, the skill of collectedness.
Just one little aside. If we're talking about breath meditation -- so far we've just talked about breath meditation as a way of calming the mind and being in the present moment, developing our attentiveness -- it's very tempting to shrink our view of practice to being just that, that we're here to learn how to concentrate on the breath and to be attentive. If our view of practice shrinks to that, it's going to get very tight and very dry. We have to have a bigger picture of what's going on, as big as we can.
So what else is going on? Say, "I'm trying to be with the breath, and my mind keeps going off." When the mind goes off and I notice where it is -- I'm thinking about something that happened a week ago, or I'm thinking about two weeks, wherever it is -- and I realize, "Oh, I'm thinking about something," that's a moment of mindfulness. It's a moment of wakefulness. And we're really interested in those moments of mindfulness. It's not just about staying with the breath. So we're interested in these moments of mindfulness, knowing where the mind is. It's a moment of success. It's good. It's very good -- every time the mind is off, and I notice it and I bring it back, and I bring it back, and I bring it back, and I bring it back. Over time -- this is not a very good example -- over time this becomes a big muscle here. It's not really. Imagine. [laughs] We're interested in developing the power of the mind. So that's something else that's going on.
Seeing the bigger picture of what's going on. Every time the mind is off, I could get impatient with myself. But if I can just not feed the impatience, if I can just have some patience with myself, I'm developing patience as well. The mind goes off and I could judge myself. If I can just let go of the judgment, not get so caught up in the judgment, then I'm feeding non-judgmentalism as well. All that is going on. It's not just about, "Ah, I'm a failure if I can't stay with the breath." If we have that view, it will get too dry and too tight and we'll just be unhappy in the whole thing. So try and have this bigger picture of what's going on. So this cultivation, this cultivation of all these beautiful qualities.
[41:07] We talk a lot in practice about letting go: "Oh, I need to let go of this, and I need to let go of the way I obsess about the past, and I need to let go of this habit, and I need to let go of my addiction to whatever. I need to let go of this, let go, let go, let go, let go." How much harder it is to let go when the inner climate is not one of well-being, when we actually feel, in a way, impoverished inside. So this cultivation makes the letting go of what's not helpful so much easier. We feel we have enough and we can let go of what's not helpful. So when we develop this inner well-being, we don't need to be involved with drugs or drink or eating, or, now, in England for the last few years, we've had this shopping addiction thing. I don't know if you have it in Finland. But England is the country in the world with the highest credit card debt. That means people are taking their credit cards and going shopping to feel good. They buy things they actually can't afford, and they build up these massive credit card debts. It's the highest in the world. Part of it's coming out of this sense of not having enough inside, and get a little bit addicted to this feeling of -- it's the only way, this article was saying, people who were doing it were saying, "It's the only way I knew how to take care of myself, to spend money that I didn't have. I feel like I'm treating myself." When we learn cultivation in this gradual way, we feel I have enough, there's enough, I don't need to do all that other stuff. A mind that's developed in that way, a heart that's developed in that way, that's cultivated what's beautiful is a non-sticky mind; it's easy to let go. Things that are difficult don't tend to stick.
Okay. So these three strands. The first one was cultivation. Second one I said was mindfulness. Mindfulness is a word with a lot of different meanings, but the meaning that has become the most common and popular -- I realize people are from different, if you have meditation backgrounds, different meditation backgrounds, but in the Insight Meditation tradition, the meaning of mindfulness that has become most popular is this being intimate with our experience. Very beautiful. Really meeting life as it is, really touching our experience, direct experience as much as possible underneath the words and the labels and the judgments and the preconceptions and the ideas we have about experience. Just going and really touching life as it is. In the tradition, they talk about 'bare attention.' It's not a word the Buddha used, but this meeting life nakedly -- what does the breath really feel like? What does this footstep on the earth feel like? What does it feel like to walk? Not my ideas about it, my likes or my dislikes. What does it actually feel like? Are we really living life, are we touching life, are we being touched by life? Something so precious and beautiful.
And with that, this idea of mindfulness has also the idea of acceptance, of not trying to manipulate one's experience. So we can be also a little bit addicted in our life to trying to change something: it's too hot, it's too cold, too this, too that, keep changing everything in our environment, changing everything in our life. And the thrust of this mindfulness is actually learning to be with what is, learning to let go of that compulsive manipulating, and just to be with what is, to open to what is, to open to what the moment brings, to open to the fullness of life. Can you sense the beauty of that? Something really, really precious.
It's a little bit of an acquired taste, this mindfulness. Some of you, I know, have already acquired it. But it's a little bit something that at first can seem, "Well, pff. What's so nice about sitting and watching a pain in my knee or my back? What's that?" But little by little, over time, we come to feel this quality -- it's a very peaceful and, in a way, undramatic loveliness in the awareness, in the watching, in the witnessing, in the mindfulness. That comes to give a sense of fulfilment in life, from that, from the aliveness of the watching.
So this being with, this non-manipulating, brings a sense of connection with life, brings a sensitivity to life, brings opening to life. When the Buddha talks about mindfulness, he talks about being mindful of everything. Absolutely everything. Everything, everything, everything is okay to be mindful of. It's in the arena of experience, and we can be mindful of it. But in particular he talks about the four foundations of mindfulness. In this retreat, we're going to go through that, those four foundations, and explain as the days go by what they are. They're basically the body, mindfulness of the experience of having a body, mindfulness of the feeling life, of the emotions, of the mind, of thoughts, etc., of all of that -- and we'll be unfolding that as the days go by. But this point very much depends on what kind of meditation background you have. Many people from the Insight Meditation background, it can come to be that our practice is almost just about mindfulness, and we believe in the miraculous power of mindfulness, that all I need to do in practice, all I need to do is be mindful, all I need to do is be with, open to, accept what is, to be intimate with life, and that's my practice. All I need to do is be with things as they are.
That's a very lovely practice. It's a very lovely attitude, a very beautiful aspiration, even. But it's only one of these three strands. It's only one. And I cannot count any more how many people I have worked with, people who have been practising, many, many years, decades sometimes, who have just practised in that way. It's only about being with what is. It's only about opening to and accepting. And they find, okay, some things have shifted, but some things it's just the same old problem coming round and round and round, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. Why? Because there isn't the attention to the other two strands of the path, the cultivation and the investigation so much. So mindfulness has tremendous power, tremendous power, but not complete power. It's only one part.
[48:54] So cultivation, mindfulness. Third one is investigation. We can sum up the investigation. What does it mean, investigation? It means asking a question in our life, in our practice. What is it that leads to suffering, to dissatisfaction, to dukkha? What is it that leads to that? How does it come about, this thing? It's not random. It's not random. And how can we be free? So that's the investigation, in a nutshell, to sum it up. That's it. How is it that dukkha, the dissatisfaction is being supported? Maybe in some way I'm supporting it. So, for instance, we have a pain in the knee again or in the back -- how easily the mind can come in with story: "Oh, everyone else is probably in total rapturous bliss by now, and it's just me. If it wasn't for my parents giving me the wrong kind of jeans, I would have a different experience now" or whatever. The story comes in. Or, "Maybe I have some big problem that needs to come out." The story comes in and it actually adds to our suffering. We're, the Buddha says, compounding, we're adding unnecessary suffering. This is the investigation. This is a question. How am I adding suffering? How am I supporting suffering?
Where I work a little while ago, one of the people -- I work with her, but I'm not in a teaching relationship to her. She's a staff person. I went into the office one day and was talking to her. She was very upset about -- I said, "What's the matter?" and we were just talking. She was telling me about some stuff that happened with her boyfriend. She was crying and a lot of stuff. She explained what had been going on. And then at the end she said to me -- you know, I'm a meditation teacher -- "I know, I know. I just need to feel it. I just need to be with it. I just need to open to it." I actually thought, no, that's not what you need to do at all. You've just described all this miscommunication and assumptions about how the relationship should be, da-da-da-da. All the suffering is based on that. It's not to do with whether you're willing to feel it or not. It's to do with this -- in the way that you're communicating, you're actually supporting the suffering. You need to look at that and change it, let go of it. I didn't say that; it wasn't appropriate, not being her teacher.
Or we find someone says something to us and we just shout right back. Is that a reaction that's actually supporting more suffering, or is it helpful? This is very obvious stuff at one level. What am I doing, what am I doing that's supporting suffering, that's adding any unnecessary suffering? So there's no judgment in this. Actually we're adding unnecessary suffering until we're completely, completely awakened. So it's going on. It's going on at all kinds of levels. So what's supporting it? How can I look differently? How can I look at this experience or this suffering differently? How can I learn to see it differently, in a way that I can dissolve some of that suffering? So it's not just about being with. It's not just about mindfulness. It's also this investigation. What the word 'insight' really means is learning to see in a way that takes some of the suffering away. We can say, "Oh, I had an insight" when we see something that takes suffering away. Some of it is extremely obvious. Like I said, if someone says something to you and you just shout right back -- I mean, sometimes that's actually exactly what's needed, but rarely, rarely. That's something that one is doing that's supporting suffering. And to see that. So some of it's quite obvious. I say 'obvious,' but actually a lot of times in the world we don't see that kind of thing.
Some of it's extremely subtle. And this is where the practice can just get deeper and deeper. Some of it's so subtle, the way that consciousness supports suffering in the present moment. Extremely subtle. The promise of the Buddha is that we can actually uncover that, we can understand that in a way that the whole thing just dissolves. Just very briefly, because time is getting on: we can talk about insights that arise in practice. So we're sitting here, going about our day, being in the silence, being wakeful, being mindful, paying attention, developing calmness, looking at our experience, and out of all that, out of all that climate, listening to teachings, an insight arises. Something -- "Aha! Now I understand something." And there's a feeling with it, there's a release of suffering. That's one meaning of insight. But there's also the kind of insight that has to do with learning to look in particular ways, learning to look at experience differently so that the suffering goes out of it. Over the days, we'll talk a bit about that, how to look differently at experience.
What can happen, what does happen over time -- and again, very gradual, very non-linear way -- this process, the calmness, the cultivation, the mindfulness, the being with, the investigation, all of that kind of works together. Sometimes we emphasize one, and sometimes we emphasize the other. All of it works together and brings with it more and more of a sense of freedom in life, more and more of a sense of being in life and moving through life with a real sense of freedom. Again, just a little bit, or to really radical senses of freedom. More and more an understanding or a sense of the truth of things. Sometimes that's a very -- we really do understand through asking questions how things come to be and how suffering comes to be, and we actually understand, understand the true nature of things. Other times it's more of a sort of -- we're just receptive to a truth, almost like sensitive to a truth that we can't even put into words. Just somehow in the openness, in the stillness of the being, we grow sensitive more and more to a truth that brings with it freedom.
With that freedom, with that truth, and again, over time, in a very gradual way, love comes. Love comes more and more into the life. More and more the life becomes one that is filled with love. The heart is filled with love. And love as a quality is more and more a visitor into the heart as a feeling. We have a feeling of love, a feeling of heart opening. But actually not just as a feeling, because feelings are impermanent; they come and go. But love comes in a way at an even deeper level, on the level of choice. We begin more and more to be able to and to want to, to feel drawn to choose out of love. We make our choices in life out of love. So am I choosing in my life to just look after me and a few people around me? Or are my choices embodying and expressing a very wide, very boundless love? More and more, gradually, that comes into our being, that we're choosing love in what we do and in the way we live.
So all this that we're doing and all the difficulties that we go through this day and any other day in practice -- it does get easier as the days go by -- but they're all in the service of that, in the service of freedom, to whatever depth we wish for, in the service of truth, and in the service of love. That's really where all this is heading. And there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better. In life there is nothing better than that. You cannot beat it. There is simply nothing better than that, a life of freedom, a life lived in the truth, and a life open to love. You can't have a better life.
So let's sit together for a minute or two in silence.
