Transcription
First just some general things. That, you know, it's okay if there is not equanimity there. It's really okay. And sometimes the way equanimity comes is by just being with the non-equanimity. So we are learning equanimity. We are on a path here. And at times, there's going to be non-equanimity. And at times, there's going to be suffering. And it's totally okay. It's really okay. It's not something to judge. The presence of suffering or the absence of equanimity is not something to judge. This is really, really important. So can there just be a recognition of that? "This is just what's going on." Can that be met with compassion? The Buddha's path is talking about suffering, drawing our attention to it, not for the sake of judging ourselves, but for the sake of compassion. Can there be some compassion, and just a seeking to understand when there's not equanimity there, when there's suffering there? Can our practice kind of evolve, can our path evolve in a climate of warmth, a climate of kindness, just as much as possible? A climate of acceptance, of gentle self-encouragement. All that, we could call all that loving-kindness. And equanimity rests very much on loving-kindness, very much. That's kind of a basis for it. We need to really feed that level of our practice.
The mind can get very sucked into suffering, can get very sucked into difficulty. That's very much a characteristic of the mind. It gets sucked in. And I just want to drop one thing in: that sometimes there can be suffering going on on one level of the being -- someone's said something that hurts us, or criticized us, or we're criticizing ourselves. And it's almost like that's going on at the surface or near the surface, or even further down. But sometimes there's a sense that diving deep, deeper in the being, there's a sense of real okayness. We can contact that. The mind gets sucked into the suffering, and it begins to take up everything, all the space of consciousness. But sometimes it's possible, just diving and sensing, in the depths of the being, you can taste an okayness; there's a sense of deep okayness. That's actually available to us as human beings.
So not to underestimate the power of the tools that we're learning, these approaches that we're talking about. Not to really underestimate those at all. They can seem insignificant, like little moments. But they really will be, hopefully, something that you can take away with, and begin to implement in the life. Not to underestimate the power of that at all.
Sometimes just knowing the vedanā, just knowing it, just tuning into impermanence brings some equanimity. And as I said, we're developing skills here. We're developing skills. And slowly, slowly we learn more. We learn to incorporate other factors, and relax the aversion, etc., the things I've been talking about.
And a final, general point: all the -- well, not all, but a lot of this retreat has been taped, thanks to the managers. So the talks and the instructions, etc. There's a lot of information. And some of you I know will be feeling overwhelmed by it and inundated or even saturated by now. That's part of the reason why they're taped. So that if you want, if there's something that feels, "Oh, I want to check that out again," or "Hmm, didn't quite get that" or whatever, and if it feels like it's calling to you, well, they're there on the tape. They're something you can revisit many times, pick out that piece that didn't quite make sense or we lost or whatever.
So in the talks, do use them to fill out the whole path. The instructions are very specific, kind of "This is what you do, da-da-da," and the talks to fill out the whole path. Sometimes in doing that, because one's talking about the path and the extent of the path, and talking sometimes about the end of the path, it's very easy in listening for some people -- some people are going to be inspired; some people to use that, what's being heard, as just another way to beat oneself up. I just hear about this thing, that I'm not there yet, and it just becomes another, just another in a kind of series of things in the life to kind of get down on oneself about.
And this kind of inner critic can come so much and so dominatingly into the way we approach our practice -- actually the way we approach life. It can be such an authoritative entity within us. It's a difficult one. It's not something that disappears -- well, sometimes it does disappear like that [snaps fingers], but oftentimes it's going to be around for a while, it has been around for a while, it's going to be around for a while. And if it's here as we listen to the Dharma, as we listen to certain teachings or whatever, you know what? It's okay. It's really, really okay that it's here. It's not a problem that it's here. And it can be here as part of the consciousness, as a voice in consciousness. It can be quite a healthy voice in consciousness. It's there, and it's doing its thing, and it's saying its opinion, and it's putting us down, and da-da-da-da-da. And it doesn't actually need to take up the whole show. It can be there, it can be healthy, it can be strong, it can be doing its thing. And it's okay, it's really okay. So in a way, you can just let it be there if it's there.
I want to, in a way, extend some of what I was going into last night. One of the teachings from the Asian spiritual traditions, the Eastern spiritual traditions, that has sort of found its way into Western culture and become kind of popularized is the teaching of karma. If something bad happens to us, "Oh, it's my karma" or whatever, or "It's your karma." I remember one senior teacher in the West studying, meditating in Asia, and getting a lot of physical pain in the meditation, and went to the teacher. The teacher said, "Well, in a past life, you tortured animals. You probably tortured animals and pulled their legs off and things, and that's why you're getting, that's why your knees are hurting in the meditation." And there's a way that this teaching of karma has become grossly oversimplified. The Buddha actually said only Buddhas can understand the totality of karma. That means not just fully enlightened beings, but Buddhas. It's like a whole other level. Only they understand the totality of karma. And there's a way that even what the Buddha taught about karma is a lot more complex than, "Well, you're suffering because it's your karma. This pain that you're going through, this whatever it is, is your karma."
What he taught is actually much more sophisticated than that, and I'm just going to touch on it, because it's quite important in relation to what we've been talking about. There is this teaching that we plant the seeds of karma in the past, and they bear fruit in the present. So there's a momentum coming from the past. But the fruit in the present, what actually happens in the present, depends also on what we are doing in the present. So, for example, can be sitting -- let's take that example from the teacher: sitting, and there's pain in the knees in meditation. Now, I could say that's my karma ripening and I just have to sit it out and let it purify. But if we play with what we've been talking about on this retreat, watching, or rather being aware of the relationship with unpleasant vedanā in this case, unpleasant vedanā. Seeing, "Okay, here's unpleasant vedanā, and there's aversion to it." Is it possible to be aware of that, and then to relax the aversion, soften the aversion?
What we notice as the path progresses, what we notice is that not only does the suffering, as I said last night, go out of experience -- we suffer less when there's less aversion -- but the actual unpleasant vedanā itself softens. The unpleasantness gets less unpleasant. And I notice that, I see it over and over again, in relationship to how much I'm aversive, how much I'm pushing away, how much I'm rejecting, recoiling from, turning away from, resisting. The more I do that, the more unpleasant the experience; the less I do that, the less unpleasant. And I could actually keep going with this to the point where even the most subtle aversion is not there, and then the thing actually doesn't even appear at all. Doesn't appear at all. So karma needs both the past and the present. And they kind of meet. They meet to give rise to something in the present. This is a much more sophisticated teaching than this simplistic notion, "Ah, it's your karma. It's their karma. They've got to go through it. I've got to go through it."
So we can see -- just another small thing about karma -- we can see this, how our attitudes and actions, they build the world that we're reborn in every moment, so to speak. So let's take the examples of two of the qualities I've been talking about, generosity and loving-kindness. As I said, when the heart has generosity, when the heart acts with generosity, opens with generosity, when the heart is imbued with loving-kindness, in those moments, in those stretches of time, one is living in a different world. One is literally born -- I mean, it's the same world, but one sees it differently, one experiences it differently. To experiment with this. One is, so to speak, born into a different world.
So there may be rebirth and all that, and I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I really don't know. That's, for most people, in the realm of belief. But we can see this: karma ripening in our life because of the qualities of heart that we are cultivating. When I cultivate harshness, criticism, judgmentalism, coldness, indifference, etc., I am then reborn in this life into a different world -- a world of criticism, coldness, harshness, disconnection, etc. When I cultivate generosity, loving-kindness, etc., the world, the actual sense of the world that I am in, is different, very different -- can be, depending on how much we've cultivated. And that different world that I'm then in, if the heart is full of loving-kindness, the texture of that world is softer. The texture is love. The texture is brighter. The texture is more positive.
And then the karma of whatever pain is ripening, it ripens in that context. As the Buddha said, a thimbleful of salt in a glass of water compared to a thimbleful of salt in a huge freshwater lake. The same pain, felt differently. Is this making sense? No? The whole thing? The Buddha has this analogy of a grain of salt, a rock of salt dissolved in a glass of water. When you taste that water, it's going to taste very salty, bitter. You take that same salt and you put it in a big, huge freshwater lake, the expansive state of generosity and loving-kindness, you barely notice it. The same pain, you understand? The same experience.
Let's dwell a little bit longer on this aspect of generosity. When there's generosity, we notice a lot of things. It's really something we can play with in our lives and kind of take risks with, explore. When there's generosity, notice something else: the sense of self, when there's generosity, gets less built up. It gets less solidified. This sense I have of me being something solid, that actually begins to unbind a little bit, begins to open out a little bit, begins to get a little less solid, heavy, built up, dense, compacted. And the sense of self, as we practise generosity, in that time, begins to just open out, expand, get lighter, more refined. If we talk about -- let's backtrack: in a way, that opening out of the sense of self, the sense of self is less narrow. It's less separate. When we practise generosity, we're actually practising connecting. We're connecting with those that we give to or what we give to. There's a sense of non-separation. And the sense of self, instead of being narrow here and separate, begins to span, to expand, to open out, and it's less of a centralized sense of self.
If we talk about equanimity, and one of the definitions of equanimity being balance -- we talked about, it's this non-swaying, it's a balance -- just as a sort of visual metaphor, we'll be more balanced, more equanimous, when we have a less narrow base. So when the sense of self is less narrow, less tight, when it's actually more expanded, more open. Do you see that? Does that make sense? If we give, if our generosity is just limited to a few people that we really care about, our family, you know, that's wonderful, and that's great. But in a way, then, our base, our sense of self, so to speak, is not widened very much, because we're already identifying with these people. What happens if we're willing to practise a generosity that goes, giving to people and things and places that we're actually not identified with? Something's happening to this whole sense of identity that has everything to do with equanimity.
This self-sense is actually very important. It's crucial in how equanimity either grows or doesn't. We build this sense of self in different ways. We consolidate it and solidify it. But we also build other people's sense of self. Let's take, for example, praise and blame. Recently I taught a retreat, and for a couple of reasons, it was actually a quite hard retreat to teach. I was quite tired by the end it. It was quite challenging for a number of reasons. At the end of the retreat, a woman came up to me who had been on the retreat, and she said, "I want to thank you, Rob. One or two of the things you've said have been useful. But mostly I want to thank you because you really irritate me." [laughter]
So ... [laughs] You can see the mind in that moment, and it just begins to contract a little bit in response to this! [laughter] Just then coming in with some reflections. Now, it's actually important, as I said yesterday, it's important to be open to blame, because sometimes there's some real truth in that. Other times, people are just kind of throwing their stuff at you. But one way to reflect is, who is it possible to actually be angry with? Who am I actually angry with here? Am I angry with a mind state? If the inclination, if the seed there, if the movement begins to be to feel a contraction of anger or aversion in response to that, am I angry with a mind state? With her mind state, in this instance? Am I angry with a moment's decision to communicate something, perhaps? Perhaps in a way that maybe wasn't that skilful. Where was it, the thing that one might begin to be angry with? It's a bit like what Grace was saying when she was walking in the rain: where's the awfulness here? Where is it? Someone's blame, in some instances, and their feeling, and their perception, that, too, arises out of a web of conditions. Past -- so a person has a history with certain things -- and present conditions, and out of that comes a certain sense, a certain sense of perception, certain feelings, and boom, the blame or the praise. We see that in ourselves and we see it in another. When we solidify other selves, we feel their blame or their whatever one of these eight worldly conditions, we feel that more solidly.
So self. Yesterday I was talking, in the end of the talk, I was talking about aversion being a builder. It builds up experience, and makes our experience more solid. This pain in the knee -- the more aversion there is, the more solid it gets. This situation I'm in -- the more I'm swirling with the aversion, the heavier, the more burdensome, the more compacted, the louder this situation. Aversion is a builder of experience. The less aversive, the less that experience even impacts in consciousness. It's a continuum -- less and less and less and less and less.
Now, the self-sense is also a builder of experience. We see with these eight worldly conditions that we've been talking about, it's the self that they're in reference to. It's the self that's invested in these. The self-sense wants praise and doesn't want blame, wants success and doesn't want failure, wants gain and doesn't want loss, wants pleasure and doesn't want pain. The self-sense is kind of the hinge pin at the centre of these poles. It's the self that's invested. This self, we feel it wants shoring up, it wants pumping up through praise, through success, through da-da-da-da. And in a way, this sense of self is very much at the core of, understanding this sense of the self is very much at the core of the teachings. There's something about kind of seeing through the sense of self, puncturing the image of it. So much rests on that.
This typical human condition sense of self: here I am, little old me, and the rest of the universe. Self and other. And if that's the sense of self, which is the human condition sense of self (and this is partly what the Buddha is ultimately getting at), if that's the sense that I'm walking around with in the world -- and this is the human condition sense. This is something that needs compassion. This little sense of self in a vast universe of six and a half billion other human beings, let alone what else, this little sense of self against all the uncertain forces that may or may not happen in the present and in the future. How can that little sense of self feel anything but insecure, anything but wobbly? It's bound to. So at some level, this equanimity rests on a kind of really understanding something very deeply about the sense of self.
Now, going back to what I said in terms of general points, we can hear something like that, and we feel like, "Ugh. There's another thing to do. Now I feel really overwhelmed. I'm never going to ...", etc. It's rare that a teacher would say something about the sense of self and [snaps fingers] that would be the end of it for someone. Sometimes people have that feeling, but it's rarely the end of it, even if they have that feeling. What usually happens is I'll say this, someone else says it, someone else says it, you read something, you see something in meditation. They're all like little seeds, and they all gather momentum together and begin to dislodge, to upset, to uproot this sense of self. Please hear what's being said -- I'm talking about the far reaches of the path, but hear it as possibility rather than burden of something. And something comes together in terms of seeds being planted.
One of the practices that one can develop as one goes into meditation is actually learning to see experience as not-self. We usually see the body and the emotions and suffering and not suffering and thoughts, we see the whole show as self: it's either me or mine. One can develop a practice, as we deepen in meditation, of deliberately choosing to see experience, all experience, as not me, not mine, not belonging to myself, not who I am. And there's a kind of non-identification, ongoing, with experience in practice. Lovely freedom opens up from that. But also you get this same effect, like with the aversion: the less aversion, the less prominent that experience. There's a kind of fading, a dissolving of experience in the depths. Same thing with this practice of letting go of the self. There is correspondingly a kind of dissolving, a blurring, a fading, a quieting of experience.
So all this, this question I left you with last night, what's the significance of all that? Is it just a kind of neat meditation experience that's sort of okay, but let go of it because it's impermanent? We believe as human beings -- when the Buddha talked about delusion, and delusion being a kind of root property of a human being; it's like something that's really there very strongly. We believe in a world that's somehow independently real. We believe in a world of independently real experiences: "This pain is how it is. This experience is how it is. That's how it is. And I can choose maybe how I am to be with that, but that's how it is." And begin to see, begin to just slowly, slowly get more of a sense in practice that actually it's not that way. We don't live in a world of independently existing things, independently real things, independently real experiences.
Something begins to kind of, I don't know, be shaken at the roots of our sense of what reality is. And a person begins to actually disinvest in both poles: praise/blame, success/failure, gain/loss, pleasure/pain, the whole thing. Begin to also see that the more I invest in one pole -- and as a human being, I'm going to be invested in praise; I'm going to want pleasure; I'm going to want gain -- the more I'm investing in one pole, by that very act of being invested in one pole, it can't help but also invest in the other pole. You can't take one side of things without the other. The more I invest in praise, the stronger impact blame has. The more important success is to me, the stronger the impact of failure, the louder the failure. To invest in one is to invest in both.
One begins to really get a sense of this, and begin to see: if I want to let go of what I don't like, I actually have to let go of the whole package. I have to let go of both ends of the stick, both ends of a duality. These are four dualities, four polarities. This, too, is a practice. Some of you will be familiar with teachings about non-duality, etc. It's a practice. We actually have to practise, like all this. We practise looking a certain way. You practise looking a certain way. You can have a lightbulb goes on, and a realization -- fantastic! And keep practising, and keep trying to see that way.
The Buddha, the myth, the story/myth, is that he spent the whole night at the end of six years of searching in meditation, and right at the end, as the dawn was coming, he was completely awakened, completely and utterly awakened. He sort of uttered a spontaneous poem at that point. I can't remember exactly, but it's something like, "Housebuilder, you've been seen. Your ridgepole has been shattered, your roof-beams are scattered. I've seen you and understood you, and that's the end of housebuilding." So what's this housebuilding? This housebuilding is seeing how the mind, in the movement of aversion, in the movement of craving, in the movement of identifying, of selfing, builds the world of experience, and then believes in that real world of experience. It builds houses. It's doing it all the time. What can happen is that we can learn to just not build so much, not believe the craving so much, not believe the aversion, not believe the identification so much. And we're actually building less. The problems are being built there, and we're building them less. Meditatively, actually, the experience gets built less and less and less and less. And ultimately, meditatively, there's actually no building at all; there's no experience at all. It may sound nihilistic and bleak and scary. But actually there's something there that's -- one opens to something that's completely unconstructed, completely, you could say, real, Unfabricated, Deathless. That's where this is all going ultimately.
Let's just sit quietly together for a couple of minutes.
