Transcription
I'd like to, this evening, in a way draw out some of the principles underlying what we've been doing here, and how that builds equanimity, and also go some way towards painting a bit of a bigger picture of how it is that equanimity develops for us, develops in the heart, develops in the mind. We'll see how we do. It might be that this talk actually ends up getting split in two, and I finish tomorrow morning sometime. I mean, not right through! [laughter] Some of you know me and might be wondering. [laughs]
Last night, briefly, I talked about these eight worldly conditions that the Buddha talked about. And just review them briefly. Four pairs of opposites: praise and blame, success and failure, gain or profit and loss, pleasure and pain. So one side of positives, and one side of what we usually regard as negatives, things we don't want. And there is no being, no human being whose life is not subject to a kind of oscillation, a movement between these poles. Not anyone. So the Buddha himself came under a lot of criticism at times, even assassination attempts, etc. Jesus, quite clearly. Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, whoever. Britney Spears. [laughter] It doesn't matter, it actually makes no difference what we do. You might be a parent or a teacher. And you can give your blood at something and there may be not what we would like coming back. It may not be praise. It may not even be gratitude or appreciation or recognition. We have very limited control over this, these oscillations between these poles. Somehow, the Buddha says, it's possible to be equanimous with all of that.
Equanimity is built in different ways. Many factors lead towards it, like I said last night. One of the first -- and these are in no particular order, but one of them we've already touched on in one of the practices, and that is the contemplation of impermanence. The key thing here is that this is a practice. It's a practice. So everyone, or most people, would agree with the fact of impermanence. You could stop anyone on the street in Newton Abbot and ask them, "Are things impermanent?" And everyone would agree with that. But we actually have to practise tuning the attention into that for it to make a difference here and here [in the head and heart], make a difference in the way we see and feel ourselves in the world and feel life. It really is a practice. In a way, we want to keep tuning into seeing impermanence, deliberately, like we're doing in the first practice here. And seeing impermanence, seeing this change, seeing this fluctuation on all kinds of scales in our lives, all kinds of levels. From the morning to the evening, are we in the same mood through the day? Some people have been talking, just watching the vedanā, it's so quick you almost can't decide whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. So every possible kind of scale.
With the attention to the impermanence, with tuning into the impermanence, the mind, the heart should let go. It sees that things are not worth clinging to because they don't last. Now, I say "should," and I'll come back to that. But we can tune the perception, and we can also reflect. That's quite important. Some of the ways transformation happens is that we tune our awareness into certain things over and over. Another way is we cultivate the heart, cultivate the qualities of the heart. And another way is the place in practice for reflection -- actually using the mind and reflecting.
So some of these eight worldly conditions, which I'll sort of weave into the talk at different times -- thinking about gain and loss. Is constant gain, is that a possibility? It's, I think, an interesting question given the current economic climate. Something sort of got into the collective mindset since -- what was it? -- '92 or something. It's just been kind of like that. Is that even a realistic possibility for a system, of constant gain?
Or we can reflect on praise and blame. We are on the receiving end of praise and the receiving end of blame. And this is very interesting. If we reflect, that's a thought that someone else has about us: "Oh, they're an idiot," or "You're fantastic," or whatever it is. And if we watch our own thinking process, and kind of extrapolate from there, what we see is a thought comes into the mind, and then it disappears. We think something about someone, and then we forget about it. We get preoccupied with something else. We don't carry around a thought for the rest of our lives about this person. What's true for this mind is true for other minds.
Sometimes reflecting on, for instance, the age of the universe. Current estimates have the age of the universe at about 13, I think it's 13.6 billion years old. And that's about half, about middle age of the universe. It's suggested that it's going to last another 13.6 billion years. In that span of time, unthinkable span of time, how many thoughts have there been? Total collected number of thoughts of humanity? How long have they lasted in that huge span of time? We're reacting to something that's an almost insignificant blip, relatively. Somehow the mind extends things and imagines that other people are going to be carrying this thought of praise and blame around. The mind actually extends things in time that are not extended in time.
The Pali word for impermanence is anicca. And it actually has a few different shades of translation. One of them is 'uncertain.' Things are impermanent, but they're also uncertain, which means we don't know how long they're going to last. We don't know when they're going to change, when they're going to fall apart. All things are anicca. They're all impermanent, and they're all uncertain. And in the uncertainty, we as human beings have some degree of control over things, but the controllability of things is actually very limited. So the teaching is: see this, see this, see this. See change, see uncertainty, see the limits of our control, so that there can be a letting go. We have to see this over and over for it to really work into the heart.
But anyone who's practised a while and practised with impermanence will report that it alone rarely does the trick. So we talk a lot about impermanence in the Dharma, but oftentimes it's not enough just to see that things are impermanent and they change and they're uncertain. We need other factors to be there in order for the heart to be equanimous. One of those is a kind of reservoir of inner resources that gives some leverage and some kind of a reference point, a place of resource from which to let go. So inner resources, and the other is a different way of seeing things. We need to understand things differently. So these two are important. I'll be going into them.
For example, you get diagnosed with a terminal illness. Now, we could say, "Well, everyone's got to go sometime," or "Things are impermanent," or whatever. That's probably not going to do the trick -- I mean, in some cases it might -- in terms of really finding some peace with that. Something else needs to be present to make that -- I'm not saying we don't have feelings about it, but to make that, at some very deep level, okay. Or we're in a relationship and the partner leaves, the spouse leaves, the boyfriend, the girlfriend leaves. What does it need? Again, not that there isn't the emotional richness that I was talking about yesterday. What does it need to make that really okay at a very deep level? One of the things is happiness. Happiness, joy. What I mean by that is, sometimes it's a word that pushes the wrong buttons in people, but a sense of inner well-being, a sense of joy, as something that the heart feels like more and more, slowly and slowly in practice, it has enough of in life. There is a reservoir here. And that begins to change our relationship with everything. That we are developing an inner reservoir of a more independent happiness begins to change our relationship with everything in life.
The Buddha talks an enormous amount about cultivating qualities. And these lists he goes through, it seems so boring and so dry: ten of this, and four of that, and seven of the other, and da-da-da-da. Partly because these things that he's suggesting we cultivate lead to equanimity, but they also lead to happiness. So just take a handful from those lists: aspiration, loving-kindness, generosity, renunciation, familiarity with joy, wisdom, concentration. All of those qualities lead to equanimity. Some of them, it's obvious. It would be obvious how wisdom, for example, leads to equanimity. But something like aspiration or renunciation or even generosity -- not so obvious. They also all lead to happiness. And again, some of it's obvious, or more obvious, and some of it's less obvious. But all these qualities lead to a kind of development, a deepening of an inner reservoir of happiness. It's really, really important.
So let's take the example of generosity. When there's the movement of the heart outwards in generosity, the opening of the heart outwards in generosity, to notice, to experiment with this: that heart that moves that way, that opens that way, is a happy heart. It has the quality of happiness in it. To experiment with this. To play with the quality of generosity in one's life for the sake of discovering something about happiness and so about equanimity.
Generosity brings with it happiness. And with that, in that process, if we're really willing to explore this over and over again in the life, really question this, bring our integrity, bring our passion to it. We will repeat this insight over and over: generosity brings happiness, generosity brings happiness, generosity brings happiness. And a point is reached -- and it may be a sudden point; it's usually a more gradual point -- a tipping point is reached where it's like a coin has dropped in the heart, and there's enough conviction, a very deep, unshakeable conviction that generosity leads to happiness and these other qualities lead to happiness.
Now, sometimes we can understand that intellectually: "Oh, yeah, I know, it's good to do that." But something is quite rare about this having dropped into the heart so that we are living our life from that place, making choices in our life, everyday choices, small and big, from that place, from an absolute, unshakeable conviction. Something has tipped. Something has broken open in the understanding, and we know that, and we're basing our life on that -- not because we should, but because we know in our heart.
And then the perspectives begin to shift. When that conviction is rooted in the heart, there is less fear about loss, because I know where happiness comes from. Less fear around money. We don't buy into those fears so much, so we don't feel so vulnerable and likely to be upset by the gain, the loss, etc.
Some of the factors in that brief list I reeled out, something like concentration, we're not really talking about that at all on this retreat, but what's called samādhi in the tradition. Samādhi is the Pali word. I'll just briefly touch on a few things that we're not really covering on this retreat. The Buddha talks about equanimity based on multiplicity, and equanimity based on singleness.[1] It sounds a little funny. What we're working on in this retreat is equanimity based on multiplicity. In other words, here are all the different experiences that we're having: pleasant, unpleasant, all this -- "Like it," "Don't like it." And in relation to that, in relation to that multiplicity, we're seeing if we can develop an equanimity, if we can encourage an equanimity.
There's another kind of equanimity -- it's not really another kind; it's coming from a different angle -- called equanimity based on singleness. The mind gathers in collectedness, in concentration and samādhi. And as that develops, it deepens, the consciousness deepens, and actually deepens into joy -- quite a marked and strong joy. And that joy deepens into equanimity. Very, very strong, powerful equanimity. And that equanimity then can be used in relation to the multiplicity of events. We're not really approaching it that way, but I think in terms of painting the big picture, it's important to know what's available on the path.
We have to realize, as practitioners, as human beings that want to be conscious, to realize deeply, deeply in the heart that our happiness and our well-being are actually not, in a great way, dependent on this or that condition, the presence or the absence of this or that condition. That understanding, again, we can get it intellectually: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that." But there's something about that going right deep into the bedrock of the heart. And that, I feel, comes slowly. It's almost like we need to wean ourselves off our dependency and off our belief that this or that is going to upset me or give me a kind of happiness. It's a slow process of weaning ourself off that, and we do that by cultivating these other qualities that bring with them a deeper, more lasting, and more independent happiness. And so we wean ourself off this outer dependency.
This is a slow, non-linear, gradual process for almost everyone. The more there is in the heart this reservoir of independent well-being, happiness, joy, the less these eight worldly conditions seem to matter to us in any great way. So for example, if I have a reservoir of joy, it's not going to be there all the time, because it's impermanent like everything else, but if it's something that the heart is dipping into regularly, regularly feeling the heart is washed in joy, touching joy, blessed by joy, how much impact, then, is the praise or the blame of others going to have on that kind of heart? I'm less dependent because of that. Or gain and loss.
When there's more happiness, more of this independent happiness, something else happens, as well, in terms of the self-view. The more happiness I have, the less tendency there is for the self-view of failure, of being a failure. It's almost like the heart doesn't go there. The more joy there is here, the less likely I am to view myself as a failure and get wrapped up, entangled, ensnare myself in a view of being a failure. And most things in the Dharma feed each other. The less caught up I am in viewing myself as a failure, the more happy I will be. It liberates the capacity for happiness. It liberates joy. So there's a positive feedback loop going on.
To actually just dwell for a few minutes on success and failure -- it's quite interesting. If we really reflect on this, this is something we all go through, success/failure, success/failure. How much do we actually invest the significance in success, in a success or a failure? It's something we give the significance to. A relationship doesn't work out: "I'm a failure at relationship." Or not succeeding in business. Or not succeeding academically or whatever it is. We invest the significance in that. A lot of it is actually culturally agreed, and we're being bombarded night and day by certain messages about what it's important to succeed at and what you really don't want to fail at because otherwise you're just a loser. I used to think, because I got sent to this very academic high school with a lot of pressure on it, and quite interesting, dividing people into streams and everything, and some people would feel really bad about themselves not being in the A stream, or in the B, D, E stream or whatever it was. And I used to reflect: what if we just rewind the clock 12,000 years? It wouldn't be, you know, how you could decline verbs in Latin or whatever. It would be, "Can you spear this sabre-toothed tiger with your spear?" It's culturally conditioned, what we consider a success or failure. There's nothing inherent in that.
The more inner reservoir of well-being I have, the less swayed I am by the force, the unbelievable force. Never underestimate this force of what's being fed to us by the culture. But the less swayed I am when I have enough inside. It's interesting -- sometimes we're swayed by things we don't really care about. I'm failing at something, and I might get upset, but if I really look in my heart of hearts, it's not something I really even care about much at all. Somehow I've been persuaded by the culture or the environment I'm in. Do I really care about what I'm succeeding or failing at? This is actually quite an important question. Now, sometimes I do really care about something and I'm failing, but then, something else -- I'm failing at something and I do really care about it, but that thing is meaningful to me deeply, deeply meaningful to my heart. And in a way, there's another level going on there. There's a kind of, I don't know what to call it, a piece of the sort of integrity of knowing you're aligned with and committed to what you really value.
It's not saying that that kind of feeling -- 'integrity' isn't the right word; 'alignment,' I think, is a good word -- that feeling of alignment is a total equanimity, but there will be more peace there because of that even if you fail, even if we fail. So it's different. When does success and failure get wrapped up -- it's almost like there's so much cultural conditioning and fear around it, that it kind of reverberates onto another level, and it becomes about self-view and not about actual success and failure; about seeing oneself as a success or failure, or what others think of me, and then fearing their blame for being a failure, or their disregard, or getting their praise for being a success. It's compounded with a whole other level. It's a bit more frantic, a bit more superficial, in a way.
So if we talk about joy, this quality of joy, inner reservoir, etc., I would actually add the word 'fulfilment' there. There's something about, in our lives, knowing we are living aligned with what is really, really important to us at a deep level. And there's something fulfilling about that, that even if it succeeds or fails, there's a kind of, yeah, I would call it a joy there. It's fulfilment as a face of joy, something that is important in terms of equanimity.
Perspective is really important with this. Perspective, as I said before. Something in the way that we see things. Happiness, joy, this inner reservoir affects the perspective. That's what I'm trying to say. The heart affects the seeing. The state of the heart, the openness or closedness of the heart, affects what the eyes see, affects how the eyes see.
So, for example, the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the partner, the spouse leaves. They walk out. It's ended. It's over. They reject you. Or we can't get one; we're alone, and we can't find one. What would that be, how would that reverberate -- this is an open question; I'm not saying, just asking -- how would that reverberate, that state of affairs, in a heart that had a lot of loving-kindness in it? This practice of mettā that many of you will have heard about, developing the loving-kindness, this deep well-wishing and friendliness toward self and other. That has been cultivated over time, really given some nurturing care so that the heart is actually full, full of loving-kindness a lot, unbounded, boundless and unconditional and to all beings. That's the state of the heart -- not always, but a lot of the time. And in that, it has a kind of radiance and a kind of joy. Where does the partner leaving, how does it impact on a heart like that? It impacts in a different way. It won't be so devastating. It won't be so upsetting.
That's not to say, again, that we don't have the feelings and the richness of our emotional life. But there's something about what we've done with the context of it. Again, actually in terms of this, just to dwell on that, romantic love, there's a kind of, I would say, a bit of a cultural indoctrination been going on for a few hundred years around this -- that romantic love is actually necessary for our happiness or fulfilment. It's so easy for us -- we're actually bombarded by that in the culture. How many Hollywood films, how many books, how many posters, how many adverts, da-da-da-da? It's there in obvious ways and in more subtle ways. And we're drinking this in as a message. Just a question: is it? Is it necessary?
Just going to drop in two very brief things we haven't talked about at all, but again, I'm painting the big picture. Contemplating death as a way of gaining perspective, of opening the perspective. This is something that we tend to shy away from as human beings and practitioners. What would happen if every day we spent a little time contemplating death, we lived in a way with that remembering? It can be scary at first, but something opens up in the perspective, and a lot of things are relativized in that perspective, just knowing death. One of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff, used to say, "Contemplate the infinite every day. Contemplate infinity every day." It could be an infinity of time or space. Just let the mind go there and just dwell there a little bit. The thing is to do it every day, and get the mind a little bit used to this opening out of the perspective. And then the joys, the sorrows, the ups, the downs, take their place in a much bigger picture, much more vast sense of things. Those were just two little things dropped out.
We talked about impermanence, and talking very much about the necessity, as well, alongside contemplating impermanence, of developing this inner reservoir of well-being, of happiness, of joy, whatever word works for you. Then the second practice that we introduced is around non-reactivity and equanimity. We said last night, one of the definitions can be non-reactivity, or rather, a calming of the reactivity of the mind and the heart.
Someone asked me recently on a retreat after a group interview, she just left me a quick note, "Is equanimity the same as acceptance?" It got me thinking. It's one of these really simple questions that sort of, "Hmm, that's interesting." And in a way, it is. Non-reactivity, acceptance, is a big part of equanimity. But not to exclude our capacity as human beings to respond. So it's not just that we accept everything, accept everything: there's a lunatic, psycho axe-murderer in front of us, and we just accept, etc. We're responding to a situation. And if we have a difficulty as two human beings, what does that need? How do I need to respond to that? What's the place of acceptance and non-reactivity, and what's the place of responsiveness and response-ability, my ability to respond? So really seeing this non-reactivity and acceptance in context. The vedanā practice that we've been doing is emphasizing the non-reactivity. So that should be pretty clear by now. We've been doing it.
To reflect on this: how much trouble, how much havoc and mischief in the world is caused by reactivity, by our human reactivity? Just see for yourself. If we just think back in our own life, and then we just expand that and think about global situations, political situations, wars, etc. Something gets said, something happens, something comes out of the mouth in reactivity. The hands move. We do something. Once it's out, it's out. Once the hand's done that, it's done. And we see this, as I said, on a more global, political level: a country actually reacting to another country or to another political ideology. There's the kind of build-up of reactivity.
It's interesting as meditators, taking something at the total other end of the spectrum, like an itch. An itch is a fairly insignificant event in the course of human history. But there's a lot we can learn from an itch. Paying attention to it, is it pleasant or unpleasant? We tend to think it's unpleasant, and just go scratch it. Immediately there's the reaction: just go scratch it. Actually, if we give attention to it, is it even that unpleasant, for a start? What we can learn in the shallow end of the swimming pool with things like itches, it's the same principles, it's the same principles when someone's standing in front of you and insulting you. It's the same principle. There's a kind of reactivity going on that we need to understand and we need to develop a skill with. The amazing thing is that we can do that as human beings. The Buddha used this word 'skill' a lot, and it's a great word, because what it implies is that we can develop this. You and I can develop this. We can grow in this capacity.
So how much of my life -- this is not an easy question -- but how much of my life am I pulled towards things, or am I trying to pull things towards me? Am I repelled by things or pushing things away? Am I dragged around by my reactivity? How much is that going on in my life? We talk about free choice. But once one really looks into this -- we say I'm free to have this or that -- how much free choice is there if there's a strong current, a strong habit of reactivity? Not looking into the reactivity, we close the door on a very deep level of peace in our life. There's something absolutely profound and amazing about the nature of existence that we will not understand because we haven't explored the reactivity.
One of my teachers, his teacher -- he was a monk in Thailand, and his teacher Ajaan Dhammadaro, I never met him, but the story was that he used to carry in his monk's bag a little metal human stick figure and a magnet. And he used to set it up sometimes in talks, and move the magnet around this stick figure in different polarities, and the stick figure would sway and move this way and that, this way and that. He said this is what we are like as human beings. We're just being pulled this way and then that way, and reacting, and this way. Where's the freedom in that? Not easy things to reflect on. To really bring an honesty and an openness and integrity to these things.
Part of what we've been doing in the practices is also simplifying. There's a kind of strategy of simplifying, a simplifying strategy. We've talked about this a little bit in the question and answers. In insight meditation, we talk about mindfulness, and particularly we talk about bare attention -- giving attention to the very simple, basic, raw material of the sense data. So meeting life, and meeting an experience as directly as possible, with as little overlay and complication and view and image and concept, etc., overlaid. The encouragement is to meet life with this bare attention, to explore meeting life with this bare attention. And in so doing, in that kind of mindfulness, we're not building things. We're not compounding things. We're not complicating things. There's a kind of simplicity in that, in staying at that level.
Again, this morning we talked about the vedanā, and working with the vedanā, and that level. And I was saying, if we can stay at that level -- and it's not that we always stay at that level, but if we can stay at that level, how much are we simplifying? Here's all this raging complexity, and Kate's question, all this raging complexity, and the sea bubbling away, etc. We dive to a simpler level for the sake of seeing something more clearly. And that simpler level is always available. It's not that we miss the moment: "Now there was that moment where something happened. There was a contact, and I saw it, and then there was some vedanā, and I reacted. Now I'm spinning with a story, and it's all spinning, and it's really complicated, and my mind has made it ridiculous," etc. In that moment of the complexity, we can dive down and touch a simpler strand, the vedanā strand. Really, really important to realize that. There's, in a way, no such thing as missing the moment. It's always available to us. It's a level of experience that we can always tune into if we want to. We can develop that. We can always tune into that simpler level.
In a way, when we are doing the impermanence practice, as well, it's also simplifying, because instead of getting caught up in the complexity of what's going on, just giving a simple attention and noticing change, change, change. It's something actually quite simple. All we're noticing is change, the texture shifting and changing. When we talk about mindfulness, as well, and we say, "Be here now. Be in the present," etc., there's something simplifying there also in terms of time. How easily we spin forward into the future: "Ugh. Don't like. How's this going to be?" Or "This is going to be fantastic!" And spin, extend backwards into the past: "This has always been this way," or whatever it is. And something about just snipping off the past and the future. When we say, "Be mindful, be present in the here and now," it's also letting go of a whole mass of complicating, or complexifying. So one of the strategies is very much about simplifying the attention, simplifying the level of attention.
Okay. When this morning we talked about working with the vedanā, and talked about watching the relationship with it, we can see there's pushing away of what we don't like -- very normal, very human. And trying to hang on to or pull towards myself more of what we do like, craving. If one explores this in the practice, and explores it in all these little ways, with the chocolate we had and all that stuff, begin to see, explore it with knee pain, explore it with whatever, an emotion, begin to see that it's the aversion and the craving, the pushing and the pulling that hold most of the suffering; that aversion and craving are suffering. They go with suffering, and suffering goes with them. Stress, dis-ease, discomfort, unhappiness goes with them.
This is really important to see. This is one of the key insights. We need to be really, really sure about this by seeing it over and over again, feeling it over and over again. When there is aversion, there is suffering. When I relax the aversion, the suffering relaxes. It drains out. Correspondingly with craving.
So craving's interesting. If you've ever smoked cigarettes or had another addiction, which most people have some kind of little addiction or something -- alcohol (I'm not saying everyone), or some food or whatever it is. Watching the movement of craving is really, really interesting. What happens is, we have a thought: "Oh, I need a cigarette." I'm just using that as an example. And a feeling starts rising in the body, actually, and in the mind. A feeling starts rising. It's the feeling of wanting. And in a way, in that craving, there's a kind of leaning forward, leaning forward for something. I'm waiting for this time to come. I'm waiting for the bell to ring. I'm waiting to ... whatever. Something in the future.
And the mind, the heart, is off balance. It's in a state of non-equanimity. It's off balance. We're actually, interestingly, intolerant of the experience of craving because craving also feels a certain way. To want something -- Dave touched on this in his question today -- wanting something feels a certain way, and it feels unpleasant. So sometimes when we're wanting something, we think we're after the object, but what we're actually after is a relief from the feeling of wanting.
So actually the craving has aversion mixed up in it. Aversion, too, there's a kind of intolerance. It's a hard feeling to, it's a hard sense to -- how does aversion feel? It's not comfortable. We don't tolerate it very well, and we want to get rid of it by rejecting the object that we think it's about. But it's interesting. If we can take the time to explore this meditatively and in our life, what we notice is the feeling of craving begins to rise, and it begins to rise. Now, if we don't give it any attention at all, what happens is it begins to rise, and we try and get what it is we're after. And in so doing, hopefully, the craving feeling dies down.
But then we don't understand something, we don't see something: that the feeling of craving will rise and rise, and if we just watch it, and just watch it, it rises, and it reaches a point where it peaks, and then it will naturally die down. The natural movement of craving and aversion is like that. The thing is, we can just sit back and watch that. We can just sit back and watch that, and develop our capacity for not having to grab that rising curve and be dragged by it. We can just watch the whole movement. Practice, practice.
So that, again, takes skill. It takes development. It takes work and practice. It's totally possible to learn to see this, to actually feel this movement of craving and to allow it. We can really do this, or [with] aversion. Learn to tolerate it, and in that more spacious just feeling of that sense, it's building, it's building, and just holding that, just allowing that in the system, in the energetic bodily system, just feeling that and tolerating, giving it lots of room, developing that capacity. In that allowing, we're not feeding it. We're not feeding that rise. And then it can just rise as much as it does, and it will fade. It will fade if we don't feed it.
So there's something extremely interesting going on here. Aversion and craving -- this pushing away and this pulling -- they, I don't know how to say, they build things in the mind. They build things in our mind's eye and in our perception. So we had today this guided meditation, a little time with some chocolate and all the rest of it. What did you notice eating the chocolate and the raisins? Was it, for anyone, when you had the chocolate in your mouth, the raisin in your mouth, was it for anyone totally uninterrupted pleasure? Or was it the fact that the pleasure, there were sensations of pleasure, but they were very intermittent? Or sometimes a person will report, if they're very honest, "Well, I put a lot of work in chewing, and om-nom-nom, but the sort of work-to-taste satisfaction ratio was pretty small," or the other way around. In other words, the payback wasn't that great. What happens is, with craving, the mind builds up the idea: "This meal is going to be fantastic!" And we imagine that it's going to be something that it's not. We imagine this solid experience of pleasure. The mind builds through craving; aversion also.
A person could be in a situation with a job, a work situation, and there's aversion to some aspect of the work. And then what happens? What kind of building goes on through the aversion? The mind starts spinning into the future, taking the aversion in the present and colouring the future as unpleasant with aversion. Very normal there. From aversion to the present there's projected aversion to the future: "Oh, my goodness, I'm going to be stuck in this situation." Aversion is colouring the future, but also building it in the sense then that the weight of the future, the future in this job, in this situation, is felt by the heart and the mind, by the being, as a burden. It's become more weighty because the aversion has built it, in the same way that the craving has built this experience to be "Going to be fantastic!", and therefore more solid, more prominent in the consciousness.
It's almost as if by spinning off into the future and also back into the past -- and aversion can colour the past, and we selectively remember, "Oh, yeah, there was that, and there was that, and when he said this, and when she said that. Oh, yeah." And it's almost as if instead of carrying the moment, we're then carrying this big, long plank of wood extending to the future and extending back to the past. And of course we're out of balance with it.
When there's aversion to the future, then, built from aversion to the present, it then feeds back and the aversion to the future causes an increasing aversion to the present. Because somehow the sense of the present has become coloured by the sense of the aversion to the future as well. And then we're reacting somehow with aversion to that whole built-up perception, and we just say, "Forget it. I'm going to leave. I'm out of here," or some other expletive. In some sense, there's a kind of knee-jerk going on. It might be built up over some time. This process can happen very quickly, or really over quite some time of building. But at some level, it's kind of a knee-jerk reaction. There's a level of it that's not quite fully understood and explored. And again, a caveat: not to say that there aren't situations that are just not right and not appropriate to be in; that the best thing to do, the wise thing to do, the skilful thing to do is to remove oneself from the situation. I'm not saying that. We include that.
But the mind builds things. It builds things for itself through aversion and craving. Talk about loss and gain. We can lose money, etc. Or we have the prospect of losing money. Or we can lose some aspect of our health. About a year ago, I taught a retreat in Finland, a week retreat in Finland, and I caught some virus there, some digestive virus. It was fairly nasty. I had already a slightly sensitive digestive system. I was already very allergic to milk products. And it's now left me allergic to not only milk but gluten and sesame and eggs. So quite a range of restricted food possible for me.
It might be possible to -- you know, obviously that could shake me up: how am I going to travel? What am I going to do when I teach, da-da-da, in other places? But sometimes asking another question: what, actually, if I lose this money, if this relationship is lost, even -- and this is hard; these are not easy questions -- if this aspect of my health is lost, what is the change in the actual experience? What's the change in the actual experience? I'm not dismissing anyone's difficulties, but asking quite a difficult question for all of us. For myself, in terms of the health and the food thing, what's actually changing? It's just a little bit inconvenient, really. And some infrequent taste sensations will be, well, a lot less frequent.
Or if we go back to Grace's beautiful insight earlier, out in the rain, "This is awful." And then, what actually is awful? Where actually is this experience? What actually is the change in experience? Something about asking these questions, difficult questions, probing questions, challenging questions. In a way, taking things apart, because the mind has built them, stuck them together, until we've got this big snowball thing that we're suffering with. The mind has stuck it together. And in a way, the mind has to take it apart.
So again, to reiterate: we've touched on this kind of thing before, but there's a flexibility of view here and a flexibility of strategy. Take the case about my food situation. I could pick up that view -- what's the change in the actual experience? It's not really that big a deal. That will lead to equanimity. But that doesn't deny that -- "All food is rubbish and da-da-da." We can also look at food as something absolutely beautiful and mysterious. In a way, when we're tasting food, we're tasting something of the, I don't know, the mystery of the fruit of the earth. And can we see it that way? Can the heart feel it that way too? So that we're free with ways of seeing. Free to see it this way, and free to see it that way. And when is it helpful to see it this way? When does that feed the heart and bring a sense of beauty and bring a sense of nourishment? And when to see it the other way, and that brings equanimity, and that brings letting go, and that brings spaciousness? And am I free to do both? Or am I locked in to one or the other?
So what's true for ourselves is true for others too. It's true for others too. And the aversion and craving of others and their reactivity also colours their perceptions, of course. What goes on here, goes on there. And their praise and blame towards us is, in a way, also built. That's not to deny, that's not to leave out that we're not open to receiving praise and blame. That's quite important to receive that and to be able to receive that. Both open to the praise and open to the blame, and what's true in there, and responding to that. Definitely. But do we get overly caught up and too much out of balance with this because we haven't seen that another person, voicing praise and blame, is also caught up in their aversion, in their reactivity, in their building? So perceptions are conditioned. They're conditioned. Mine and others', they're conditioned.
On this retreat, we're emphasizing a couple of approaches to practice, but we could, if we were here longer, just talk about mindfulness and bare attention and being with, and in that would be included this awareness of impermanence and this kind of letting be, acceptance, relaxing the relationship with. And it's interesting when we cultivate mindfulness. At first when we cultivate mindfulness -- and this 'at first' could be quite some time -- what can happen slowly, gradually, is that there's a coming alive of the senses. Oftentimes it's almost like we have a film over the senses. We don't really meet the world directly, fully, in an alive way. We begin to practise mindfulness, begin to inject some sensitivity and energy into our attentiveness, and it's as if the world becomes alive. The senses start to come alive, and actually there's more vividness there, more life there in the seeing, in the tasting, in the smelling, in the body sensations. And as we begin to kind of take the seat of awareness, and just notice the impermanence, and soften the reaction, it's almost as if that seat becomes the place from which we watch this show, arising and passing. And there's a seat that doesn't move there. There's a place that doesn't move in all of this.
There's a beautiful passage from T. S. Eliot, and he's pointing to this. Some of you will know. It's from Four Quartets. It's pointing to what we're talking about with equanimity and the sort of vantage point of equanimity. It says:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.[2]
We begin to get this sense as the equanimity deepens, as the mindfulness deepens, the non-reactivity deepens, the awareness of change and just allowing change deepens. The consciousness opens to a different perspective. But in a way, actually, as we practise, we go beyond even that. (I'm filling out some of the path.) We go beyond even that. And at the beginning when we cultivated mindfulness, there was this kind of things coming alive and more vivid. Things were standing out more, getting more clear, more kind of defined in our consciousness. The more we practise and the more we practise letting go, things actually, again, it kind of rises, and then they begin to fade. As the mindfulness deepens, as the equanimity deepens, as the letting go deepens, the experience of things begins to fade, begins to soften, to lose their definition, their boundaries, to blur, to dissolve a little bit. It's not that it does that forever, and then we walk around walking into walls or something like that. But there's a fading going on. Why? Because we're not feeding it. We're not feeding experience. We're not building experience. Partly through simplifying, partly through non-reacting.
What does this imply? What is this fading of experience telling us? There's something here. It's very common for a person even to have a bit of this experience, or this sense, as practice deepens, and not to take out the insight from that. There's an incredibly profound and incredibly important insight there. What does it imply about reality? What does it imply about the nature of things? In a way, the depth of the Dharma rests on this question. What does it imply?
I think I'm actually going to leave you with that question. [laughs] And I will schedule some time in tomorrow morning at some point to finish what I want to talk about. I really want to talk about the sense of self and something about emptiness and non-duality in relationship to equanimity. I will put up the time tomorrow morning when I'll be talking about that. I'll just finish. I don't know how long; not very long a talk.
Let's just have a few quiet minutes together, shall we?
