Love, Karma, and Healing

Okay, so tonight I want to weave a few strands together and talk a bit about love, and a little bit about karma, and about healing. From the outside, for someone who's new to practice, new to meditation, etc., or someone who has sort of read a little bit but not really started, if they would hear a little bit about emptiness and the kind of things we've been talking about, it would be very understandable for them to really, if they had a sense, "Well, does that -- would that bring about love?Would that lead to love?" It sounds -- it's very easy for the mind to get hold of it and go very quickly to the extreme of nihilism, that what's being said here is, "Nothing exists, nothing matters" -- very, very common, even for practitioners. And so it might not seem at all obvious that these practices and understanding emptiness and going deeper in this way leads to love, that that would be an outcome of it. But time and time again, the testaments of practitioners, that actually it does. It really, really does. There is an inescapable movement towards a deepening of love as you go deeper in the understanding of emptiness. So just to pull one quote. I could have pulled many out. Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Dzogchen teachers of the last century (I'm not sure when he died; it wasn't that long ago) says:

When you [realize] the empty nature [of phenomena], the energy to bring about the good of others dawns, uncontrived and effortless.^[1]

Lovely. And so this is what I want to -- part of what I want to explore tonight. And when he's saying "the emptiness of phenomena," he means both the emptiness of self, the lack of inherent existence of the self and other selves, but also all phenomena. This is somehow all part of opening up the doors of love in the heart. And you could say, if as a human being I want to live a life, I want to grow in my life towards serving love, to living a life that is in the service of love, if I want that, and if I want that deeply, then understanding emptiness, realizing emptiness, questioning about emptiness is probably going to have quite a big part in that, or at least to say, enormous amount of help that it can provide, a support for a life that really wants that, that really wants to have that aspiration, wants to live out that aspiration. Immensely significant.

Let's look at this. Let's go back again to basics, where we started, really, with the retreat. What do we see when the clinging gets less? Well, one of the first things we noticed was that the self-sense gets less. Yeah? We went through this. Cling less, self-sense gets less. In the self-sense becoming less, less built up, less solid, less exaggerated, what also gets less? Well, the sense of separation. Self and other, again, form another kind of duality. There's a self in relationship to the rest of the universe, in relationship to other selves. So as the self-sense gets less through less clinging, the sense of separateness from other also begins to quiet, to become lighter in the consciousness. And with that comes love. You could say that one aspect of love is actually a sense of less separation or a feeling of less separation. So there's a very, what should be, what can be, a very clear connection, a very, very clear connection. And our job as practitioners, part of our job as practitioners, is to see that, and see it over and over again, and to feed that, and feed it in the practice by letting go of the clinging, seeing the self-sense die down, seeing the separation die down, and see the heart open up, over and over, and get very, very clear about that, and nourish that, that movement and that process.

Now, actually, I just wanted to drop in something that came I think in the question and answer period the other day. And a couple of people were saying, "Well, sometimes when I do that, what I end up feeling is kind of blah and a bit disconnected." So I just -- not taking anything at all from what was exchanged in the interaction or what I said then (which I can't remember what it was now, but anyway), one other little piece: it's possible (I thought about it afterwards) that sometimes that sense of blah-ness and disconnection is more a matter of kind of effort and intensity levels. Going back to right what I said at the beginning, working with samādhi, etc., sometimes we're too intense in the practice, too efforting. And it's almost like there's a real sense of -- well, it's not good or bad, but there's a real sense of sharpness in there that's part of the effort/intensity. And it may be at times -- this is quite a subtle point -- but it may be that we actually need more sharpness, more effort, more intensity at a time to convert the blah-ness into a sense of aliveness and connection. Or at other times we actually need less. So it's not obvious what we need, but that might be a factor. Does that make sense? It can be something quite small like that, like just needing to sharpen the focus, and then the sense of disconnection quietens and we feel more connected.

So when we're working with all these practices, and these insight practices -- whether it's anattā, or whatever it is, relaxing the relationship, or looking at things as empty, whatever -- you can be quite intense about it. There's a real sense of the present moment. You've got it right there in the consciousness, right in front, and you're quite intense in the lens you're using -- it's 'not me, not mine.' It's very intense, which is fine and lovely. And at other times it's a much more spacious and relaxed sense. It's just kind of opening up and resting in this lens of "It's just not me, not mine," or just relaxing the relationship, or just letting it be part of the spacious awareness -- all the different things we talked about.

[6:51] But just like samādhi practice, you can be intense or you can be restful within the samādhi, and it's part of being aware of the effort levels and the intensity levels. Same thing with insight practice -- it's really, really helpful to be aware of that, because dependent on that, different constellations in the energy system and the consciousness will come about, or not.

And sometimes what we need is actually to drop the emptiness practice and to just, in terms of this disconnection piece, go to a very simple mindfulness practice, just being present and being with and connecting in that way, not trying to do anything sophisticated in terms of emptiness, just meeting the experience and being there. And in that, a connection can re-establish itself. So whatever is going on, can I just open to it? Can I just be with it? And not all the time trying to do something kind of clever and fiddly with the experience. That simple practice of mindfulness, of meeting the experience and just connecting -- we never lose that as practitioners. It's never something we ever leave behind. We're always going to keep that, always going to keep it as an option.

What else? When we're practising love and compassion, it's actually very possible -- I'm not going to talk too much about this, because it's actually not a love and compassion retreat -- it's actually very possible to bring a lot of these emptiness approaches and lenses into the practice of mettā or karuṇā, love or compassion. So just in the most simple way, how often, if you do mettā practice, have you sat there feeling pretty bad in one way or another, feeling not very well either physically -- there's an illness, there's an energy blockage, there's a headache, there's a pain -- or some kind of sadness or something going on? This is just a normal part of the waves of life. But there's something about an attitude in the mettā practice that can be really helpful, and it's just kind of, "It's not about me. It's just not about me." I can sit here and feel ill and crappy, and it's just, "It's not about me." One lets go of that, what's actually a kind of contraction of self-interest. And you see, actually, the mettā practice is about other people. One just gives it away, gives it away, and it's not about how I'm feeling.

In a way, the self-sense and how the self feels at any time -- over time, with practice, we realize it's actually not so important. Now, usually, for an untrained mind, the self-sense is at the centre of everything. How I feel is at the centre of everything. With practice, what should happen is we just see, "It's just the self-sense. It's just the self-sense." And it gets stronger, and it gets less, and all that's a dependent arising. And it's just that, and it's not that significant, and it doesn't always have to be the centre stage. So we can kind of nourish that attitude in practice. As one of my teachers used to say, it's just like a storm in a teacup, all this self stuff. It's just a storm in a teacup. Now, I'm going to qualify that, because I'm kind of assuming that we know how to be with ourselves in a caring way. We know how to hold ourselves, hold our difficult experience, meet it with mindfulness, meet it with care. So that statement about letting go of the self-interest, it kind of rests upon the assumption that we know how to take care of the self, we know how to meet our needs and get our needs met. Okay?

Right, going back to one of the beginning talks -- again, it's a matter of picking up different approaches and different views at different times. Sometimes the language of 'me' and 'what I need' and 'what I'm going through' is really, really important. And other times, it's like it's not. It's not. And one just lets it go because it's just the self-sense. It's just the self-sense. It's just a perception of something which is actually empty.

Sometimes in practice, and in mettā practice, compassion practice, any practice really, one kind of has to have the attitude of being a -- almost like imagining yourself as a hero or heroine. So, "I feel really bad." It's like, okay, in steps the [hero]. Someone was saying Wonder Woman or Superman. In steps the hero. And use the imagination, actually. What would it be to be a bodhisattva? It doesn't matter what happens to me. I just throw it away. I give it away. I'm not talking about unhealthy co-dependency, etc. As I said, I'm just assuming that piece is there and it's okay. But after we're able to do that, what about this? Just, "It doesn't matter how I feel."

And the same -- one starts on the cushion, but in a way, it applies in life. One's engaged in service or giving in some respect, and it just doesn't matter how I feel, just throwing it away. And somehow, using the imagination at times in practice, and actually, like I said -- I don't know what talk it was -- but the malleability of the story, and how the Buddha actually framed himself as a hero, to himself and to others. Why can't we do the same? We can actually be the hero, the heroine, the bodhisattva, right there on the cushion, when it feels really bad. Something about engaging the creative imagination of the spiritual journey -- very powerful. And we throw away, we throw away self-concern. In a way, we throw away the aggregates. We throw away the aggregates that we take ourselves to be. To me, there's something so beautiful in that throwing away. Like at the end of the evening in here -- come to the late sitting, and we do the dedication of merit. In a way, it's a similar thing. It's like all this effort, all this trying, really trying for the samādhi, really trying for understanding and everything. And then you just throw it away.

It feels like to me I've spent quite a lot of time on retreat not being in very good health, in different sort of states of not such great health. And again, using the creative imagination at times. I remember, here actually, when I started doing it, feeling really not very well at all, and then just using the imagination to say, "Okay, let's imagine that right here, I'm on my death -- you know, on death's door." And what is it then? In that moment, it's like a kind of anattā practice -- just throwing back the aggregates, giving back the aggregates to the universe: "They're not me. This body is not me. It's not mine." And I just give it back to the universe, just before stepping over that threshold into death. Just give it back, give back the consciousness, give back the thoughts, give back the emotions, give back the feeling crappy, give back the feeling good, give it all away, give it all away. The Buddha has this word, paṭinissagga, I think it is in Pali. It means this kind of throwing back, or giving back, or releasing, relinquishing, giving the aggregates back to the universe because they're not mine.

Something in the sort of magic and mystery of practice begins to unfurl and unfold over time. And we -- most people, not everyone -- but a lot of people, quite normally and understandably, begin practice with the sense of, "What can I get for me?" I think a person practising, truly practising with dedication -- at some point, that begins to morph and shift, and it's not just for me any more. It's really not. And one absolutely, genuinely has the feeling that one's sitting down and walking, etc., for the sake of all beings. Something happens in the heart. It breaks it open. And to me, we need to encourage that. But it's also a natural movement as practice deepens.

[15:34] So again, not to talk too much about mettā and compassion practice, but it's quite possible that one gets skilled enough in these kind of practices of seeing things as 'not me, not mine,' or in other practices, that you can actually bring them in and mix them with a loving-kindness practice or a compassion practice. So here I am, sitting or walking, and, "May you be well," but at the same time having a sense of, "All this is not me, not mine." And because of the less self at that time, it really deepens the mettā and the compassion practice. When you say it out loud, it sounds really complicated and sophisticated. It is developable -- put it that way. It's definitely possible.

Or similarly with the chariot and the sense of the self lacking inherent existence, and then taking that sense a little bit of less inherent existence, and using it as the kind of centre of the love that's going out, or rather, putting that in the mix of the love. The whole thing can go to another level. That might sound far-fetched, but it's not, for a person that takes the time to develop these practices. I'm just throwing that out. Not that anyone needs to develop that on this retreat at all, but I'm throwing it out because I know one or two people will probably pick that up, if not on this retreat, certainly at another time in their life.

So it's interesting. When we think about this relationship of compassion and love, and the self, and emptiness, most human beings, the general kind of way of thinking about or feeling about compassion -- not even a thought necessarily -- is seeing it as and feeling it as a kind of burden and a sacrifice. So we feel, when we open the heart, and the eyes open to the enormity of the suffering in the world, very easy to feel like, "Whoa, I'm supposed to kind of hold that in some degree." And we might really aspire to it, but as long as we have that sense of the self holding it, it's going to feel like a sacrifice, and it's going to feel like a burden, and there's going to be a real felt sense of limitation and a boundary to how expansive and full our compassion can be.

This is something, even if we're not conscious of it as a thought, it will probably be there. And it's something we need to kind of explore and pull apart a little bit. So we tend to think of compassion as a burden. But what if we think of a life of non-compassion, of lack of compassion? To me, that's actually, that would be a life of suffering. There's a kind of suffering involved in the heart not opening, not melting. That kind of insular-ness and self-protectionism, separation, is a life of suffering. It's not the compassion that brings suffering; it's the opposite. We'd actually be imprisoned, not with the burden of other people's suffering, but we're imprisoned by our own self-interest. Our self-interest is -- again, it's counterintuitive -- it's our self-interest that imprisons us in life.

[19:02] So this attitude of self-centredness, automatically, it can't help but eventually lead to suffering. I mean, we might get short-term gains by being self-centred. But eventually, automatically, it just moves in the direction of suffering, either in the present or setting it up in the future in different ways. And again, this is something we want to get really, really clear about, because the knee-jerk reaction is self-centredness and self-protection. That's just part of the human condition. To be really, really sure about where the suffering is and where it comes from -- it comes from self-centredness. The release of that self-centredness actually allows the freeing.

I remember, years ago, one teacher saying, "It feels like if we're going to serve and be compassionate, we're actually sacrificing the self somehow." But then he said, "Well, actually, if the self doesn't inherently exist, if the self is a bit of an illusion, how can you sacrifice something that's just an illusion?" So this delusion is going to be very deeply entwined in consciousness, and it's our job as practitioners to expose it as an untruth. It's hard work, but we want to break that open, because it's a totally upside-down way of seeing. It's totally reverse of the truth.

So in the development of love and compassion, I also need to be interested in releasing the opposite -- so releasing when I'm angry, when I'm tight, when I'm irritable, when I'm judging. Now, we already talked in one of the talks (I think it was the chariot talk) about, who exactly am I angry with? To me, that's a really, really helpful practice. It's like, go through. Am I angry at this part of the body? Or am I angry at that thought? Or am I angry at that intention, or that knowing, that consciousness, or that vedanā, that perception? What, exactly? Really go into it in a way, piece by piece, that you feel that actually, there's nothing there that I can really be angry with.

It's almost like the eyesight of a human being is often -- not all the time, but often programmed to see differences and separation. And in a way, when that's the case, we want to re-educate the seeing to begin to see commonalities, what we share in common, instead of just being, again, mesmerized and sucked into noticing differences. Actually, it's not differences per se that are a problem. I remember being in a class in Boston. And I can't remember exactly -- there was homework, and it was like, it was something about noticing other people's bodies or something. We had to go through the week and just notice everyone's bodies. And about half the class came back and said, "Wow, isn't it amazing? It's like, basically, everyone's body is pretty much the same. Like, we all have ears, and we all have noses, and da-da-da-da." And the other half came back saying, "God, it's amazing. Everyone's so particularly unique, and this amazing diversity!" And something about actually holding both of them. But the important thing is, is the way we're seeing leading to appreciation and love, or is it leading to a sense of separation and difference?

You can actually take this anattā practice and direct it towards another. So we look at, I look at my aggregates and I see them as 'not me, not mine.' What about sitting opposite someone -- particularly if you're having a problem with them, particularly if there's judgment or some kind of irritability or aversion, or whatever it is -- and you don't have to tell them you're doing this, but ... [laughs] Begin contemplating their aggregates. So there's body there, there's body here; there's vedanā there, there's vedanā here; there are perceptions there, there are perceptions here; there are all the different kinds of mental formations there, there are all the kinds of mental formations here; there's knowing there, consciousnesses, and there are consciousnesses here. And what was held in place by this perception of separation -- you begin to see, "It's the same. It's the same. I've got this. You've got this. We both have it."

So sometimes it's almost like we put -- what are they called? Like a jack, you know, those things -- in between, and we make separation even more because we focus on what makes us perceive separation. We actually need to focus on what brings a sense of commonality.

Let's take this a little bit further. Śāntideva, one of the great, great Mahāyāna teachers -- I think the eighth or ninth century. If a brutal person wields a stick and goes around beating people with it, should I get angry with the stick? Of course not, the stick had no choice in the matter. He goes on to say:

Disregarding ... the stick, etc., if I become angry with the one who impels it [the one who wields the stick], then it is better if I hate hatred, because that person is also impelled by hatred.^[2]

So it's this sense of, when we look, when we do the anattā practice and you look inside, it's almost like -- as someone was saying in interview today -- it's like bits floating loose, you know, a bit of this and a bit of that just floating loose. And you see, we see intentions and thoughts, and mind states, and all as anattā, 'not me, not mine.' We can transfer that seeing to another, and see what's actually running the show in that moment for the other person is hatred. There's a mind state of hatred. There are the intentions of hatred. You could say, "Okay, so I'll hate that."

Now, again, to take this in context. All of this is about ways of looking that we pick up and we put down. So at another time, it's totally appropriate to say to someone, "You need to take responsibility for what you're doing." You need to bring self, the language of self, and that kind of sense of, "Here's a self, and the self is responsible." But when we're caught and stuck in the suffering, in the judgment, in the blaming, in the guilt of our self or another, then we can use the way of seeing of anattā to loosen that. Always, as I said in one of the early talks, the deciding factor is, what's going to release the suffering here? What's going to release the suffering? A state of judging, of me judging another, is a state of suffering for me. There's no question about it. It's totally a state of suffering. We're interested in this malleability of ways of looking and what's a skilful, helpful way of looking at any time.

[27:05] Many of you have probably done mettā practice, actually, over years. It's probably been a little bit something you pick up and put down, or do relatively continuously over a while. And have you noticed, when you do mettā practice, how easily, how fluidly a person can move between categories? So one day they're your friend, and the next day they're down there in the difficult category. They've put their foot in it, and they get sent down there. And then the difficult person can -- you can make it up, and they get promoted, whatever, to ... It's all totally fluid and totally malleable. People change, or rather, our perceptions of people change.

Even more than that, have you seen, have we seen how much we assess others dependent on our past conditioning and dependent on our experiences, and even more so, depending on our sense of whether we benefit from them or not? Oftentimes, what a person does to us is -- again, the way the self is impacted ends up being how we assess them in the totality of what might be their life, or the totality of the universe. The self-sense ends up being, in a way, disproportionally significant in our perception of another. Or we just have a certain feeling for someone, an opinion, and kind of support them in a difficulty or an argument with another person just because we're identified with them. We just take their side. It's all just conditioning and self-identification.

But the more important point is, again, how someone appears to me depends on what? It depends on this: depends on my heart and my mind. This is what we're getting at over and over in this retreat. How someone, in this case a person, appears depends on my heart and my mind and the state of my heart and my mind. So we need to see that over and over, and see it also in the context of difficult relationships -- partnership or a parent or whatever it is. Have you seen this, how the actual perception of even a partner can change? And it changes depending on the heart state, depending on the mind state.

So if that's the case -- and it is the case -- it means, again, that in a sense, they are empty. And if they're empty, and if it's malleable, why not just view them as a friend? Why not just incline the seeing that way? The more sense we have, the more deeply we've seen the emptiness and the dependent arising of how they seem, the more able we are to not get so locked into a certain view. And then it's malleable, and we can change it. And to view someone as a friend becomes a really possible choice for us, and it's a choice that brings happiness, that will bring happiness.

So the view is malleable. Over and over we see that the view is malleable. And in a way, because of that, you can also say, in a kind of way, the person is not separate from my heart. I only know the person in terms of my perception of them and my sense of them, and they're not separate from the way I'm viewing them. And some people will hear that, and they'll think, "That sounds pretty naïve. That sounds pretty Pollyannaish." But actually, I would say, to believe in the inherent existence of a person being a certain way is actually the naïve one. In terms of Dharma understanding, that's what's naïve. You really think a person is like this or like that. That's naïve.

So there's something in here, and it has a lot of implications. It has massive implications. The view, the sense of another, depends on the heart and the mind, the citta. But the view and the sense of the world, the world that we are inhabiting at any moment, also depends on the heart and the mind. What a huge range of worlds a human being can occupy! Same world, shared world -- what a huge range! So we can, because of the state of the heart and the mind, this world can become a living nightmare. And at the same time, it can become a heavenly field, a deva realm.

So this is really important. It has to do with karma, and I just want to say a little bit about karma. Karma is a very difficult subject, and very, very complex, and it's actually said that only Buddhas can really fully understand karma. But we want to notice -- and I think this is really, really important to notice -- that when we act with generosity, when we act out of kindness, when those qualities are in our heart, we live in a certain world, we feel the world a certain way. We experience a certain kind of world when there's compassion, when the heart is open in generosity and mettā. The world that we're in then is one, usually, of openness, softness, brightness, warmth. Do you see that?

This needs to be really, really clear, because there's something, again, very deep here about karma, about emptiness, about dependent arising. We make our world to a large degree. To a large degree, we make our world. So if I live in, if I have qualities in my heart of stinginess, self-centredness, irritability, judgmentalism, irritation, agitation, anger, what kind of world do I live in in that moment? One of the lovely things about meditation retreats, you go through so many mind states, you actually see this. You can see it as you go into the lunch hall, how different things are as you go out onto the front lawn. It's a different world -- same world, different world.

So again, going back to what we said about dualities, how we can prime the perception in a certain way, and that's part of making our world. We prime our perception by this believing in one pole of a duality. When there's acquisition and wanting to acquire for the self, when there's self-centredness, etc., again, it primes the perception towards separation, towards fear, towards anxiety, towards coldness, towards all that. It takes a lot of sensitivity to see that, and a lot of kind of subtlety of mind. But if you begin, if we begin paying attention to it, you begin to really see there's something very, very clear there, very clear that's really, really important.

So again, in terms of these dualities and how we prime the perception, when there is possessiveness around -- which is, you know, again, very much part of the human condition -- to the degree that there's possessiveness in the heart, there will be fear, either in that moment or on its tails, right on its coat-tails. Possessiveness breeds fear. I'm going to be afraid of losing what I have. And we can have that sense of possessiveness in relationship to anything. It's interesting. Even something so basic like the life force itself -- we tend to think, "I somehow own this life force." Actually, it's part of nature. I don't own it. It's going to go when it goes.

What we have in the heart, the qualities that we have in the heart and the movements of the heart are a kind of mental karma, okay? They're a kind of mental action. They're not neutral. They're actually a kind of doing, and we're always doing one thing or another. And they're shaping the world we are born into, in the next moment or the next whenever. So you begin to see how karma and dependent arising and emptiness are not different things. They're actually one thing. The mind shapes all this, and it's all part of one thing called 'karma' -- call it 'karma,' call it 'emptiness,' call it 'dependent arising.'

So it's absolutely not the case that emptiness, or an understanding of emptiness and dependent arising, leads to this kind of "Nothing matters. Ethics don't matter. It doesn't matter how I behave. It doesn't matter if I have love or not. It doesn't matter if I'm generous or not." It's quite the opposite. Karma and emptiness, karma and dependent arising, are like two sides of the same coin.

Now, the other day I talked about -- take this a little bit further -- I talked about this fading, and this possibility, sometimes, when we either contemplate the emptiness of something, or let go of clinging in relationship to that phenomena, there can be, at times, if it goes deep enough, there can be this kind of fading of the phenomena, blurring or fading. Just to say about last night's talk and the talk on the chariot, etc., a lot of reasoning stuff, and it's not everyone's cup of tea, and it's actually hard to follow and hard to grasp it. I'm quite aware of that. It's said -- I think it's in the Prāsaṅgika sort of stream, system -- that dependent arising is what's called the 'king of reasonings.' It's the king of reasonings, meaning that if we can understand the dependent arising of things, of phenomena, it kind of trumps, it's better than understanding all those logical reasonings that Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti came up with.

So different people are different, and I really want to stress that over and over. Some people will really be using the logic and using it, and other people won't. But there's something, I think -- if that fading piece, if you can find your way into it, it's extremely powerful. It's one of the clearest and deepest ways in to understanding emptiness. It's not for everyone, but it can be. And right there, it avoids the extremes of nihilism or reification. You understand, "What does it mean for something not to be inherently existent? Oh, it depends. It depends."

But people are different. And as I said, going back to the opening talk, we talked about this pizza, and people nibbling from different edges around the circumference. And that's fine. But it would be quite possible, for instance, to understand dependent arising through this phenomenon of fading, and still to hear some of these logical reasonings from Nāgārjuna and Chandrakīrti, these huge, brilliant intellects, and not actually need those reasonings, because you've penetrated it through the dependent arising. You've penetrated it through seeing the fading. So someone -- I think I was reading a scholar -- was analysing the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā from Nāgārjuna and said, if I remember, there are between eighty and a hundred separate logical reasonings in there about emptiness in the book. So it's dense with these really complicated logical arguments. Do I need to understand every piece of logic in there to ...? No, I don't. And some of it, it might be that you don't even follow the logic, or that you follow it, but it's not quite convincing to you. But the piece about fading, to me -- it's not for everyone, but to me, it's quite simple and goes very, very deep.

[39:57] Okay. There's something about this. Oftentimes we are sitting in meditation or walking or just having a cup of tea or whatever, and minding our own business. And then it feels like a storm comes up. Something moves through the being. Stuff is coming up. Okay? And the energetic systems get agitated, or some big pain or something. Something comes up. And it's difficult, and it's painful. And it feels like some 'stuff' is coming up. That's the language that we use nowadays: 'stuff is coming up.' Something from the past, some injury, some sense of hurt, some trauma is being released into consciousness through the psychophysical system, through the body, through the mind. And it's there, and it's difficult. And as practitioners, again, we can learn how to accommodate that kind of difficulty. We can learn how to be with it. And so, again, I'm kind of taking it as a given that you know how to do that, that we know how to do that. Something difficult is coming up into consciousness, seemingly out of the blue. Can I hold it? Do I know how to hold it? Do I know how to be with it? Do I know how to meet it simply and nakedly and with kindness? Really, really important.

So I'm kind of assuming that. But if we go a step further -- and again, what do we see here? If we practise letting go of clinging -- just moment to moment, letting go of clinging, or moment to moment, letting go of identification, anattā, 'not me, not mine' -- what do we notice in the unfolding of experience? What we notice, for the most part, is that there is a dying down, a decrease of difficult experiences coming up. With the letting go of the clinging, with the letting go of the identification, the general inner space is actually more spacious, less difficult, less problematic. And if I keep doing that, just letting go of clinging, just letting go of identification, actually less stuff arises at all. And what arises is less substantial. And I keep doing it, and it's less, and I keep doing it, and it's less, until almost nothing is coming up at all. Almost nothing is coming up at all. And eventually, nothing comes up.

This has big, big implications about how we view the healing process and how we, for instance, might view an idea of purification. Massive implications about this. If I have the notion that I can kind of sit here in meditation or be in my life, and things can come up and out -- up from a sort of reservoir, a store in the psyche, or lodged in the body somehow, in the energetic system, and they can be released and come out. Usually, what comes out, to be regarded as a purification, needs to be a little bit difficult or a lot difficult. And we tend to have this sense of, when it's really difficult, "That was a big piece. That was a big chunk -- big chunk of something being released, big chunk of something coming up and out."

How does this square with our experience, though, here? If I'm just sitting and just letting go of clinging and just not identifying, that process happens less and less to the degree that I let go of clinging. Yeah? And again, then if you add to that the sense that actually, if you think about -- what is it to let go of clinging? It's not a doing. It's a non-doing. I'm not doing. I'm actually stopping doing what I usually do, which is I usually push and pull and cling. I'm actually stopping doing that. So I can't point to anything in the meditation and say, "Yeah, well, that stuff's not coming up because I'm blocking it, or because I'm doing this other funny, weird stuff which is preventing it." I'm just letting go of identification and not clinging. And again, if we say that letting go of identification is actually more of a true vantage point, kind of relatively speaking, it's a deeper and more true, Dharmically speaking, vantage point. Do you understand what I'm getting at here?

And again, that question which I keep throwing out in different circumstances: how much clinging, how much self, reveals the real piece of purification, or the real emotion that needs to arise, or the real knot that I need to feel in my energetic, bodily system? How much? Again, it's going to be a spectrum. If there's a lot of self, a lot of clinging, what comes up will be very knotted, very difficult, etc. A little less, a little less; a lot less, a lot less, etc., less and less -- how much is the real one? What's really there inside, needing to come out, come up, waiting to come up? A lot of us tend to think in this way about purification and the healing process. So I don't want to land anywhere yet with this; I'm just exploring something still.

What the Buddha says about the arising of experience is that it needs past conditions and present conditions, and they come together kind of like this. So there's the momentum of conditions from the past, and the momentum, or rather what we're putting in, what the mind is putting in, in the present. And together, they make what we then experience as the present experience, the present moment of experience. So, "What am I putting in in the moment?" is something that I can actually play with. And that's partly what we're doing on this retreat: we're learning to play with what we're putting in in the present moment. And what I see is, if I don't put in clinging, if I don't put in identification, nothing difficult comes up, or less and less difficult, then nothing difficult, then less and less substantial, then nothing much at all, and then nothing. Is it true that anything inherently existing in itself is kind of waiting there or stored there to come up?

So one could go even a little notch further or deeper and say, the very belief, the very belief that there is something stored there that needs purification, that needs to come up -- there's stuff inside somewhere that wants to come up -- that very belief is also a kind of mental karma, a kind of mental action. The very belief, at a subtle but very, very powerful level will influence what happens. So you find that to the degree that I believe in that process and the actuality of that, is the degree that it happens. I, for one, have spent years, years and years, with the willingness to go through really, really heavy storms and emotions and a lot of catharsis, but in a way, partly propelled just by the view, just by the view, because it's not a neutral thing.

[47:40] So can we see the place of dependent arising in understanding all this? It's really, really crucial, because that purification process and that healing process could quite easily be never-ending, never-ending. And I know people, decades and decades and decades and decades, thirty, forty years of being dedicated to this, of seeing it that way, having the feelings come up, releasing. You know, there's a lot of beautiful commitment and open-heartedness that gets developed there as well. But is it an actually ultimately true process? It can be never-ending. And if you believe in future lives, etc., oy. I mean ... [laughter] It will be never-ending if I don't see what's going on, if I don't understand what's going on, and if unconsciously, in the present moment, I'm creating it by the subtle view and the subtle input into the present moment through clinging or through identification. If I don't know that, if that's unconsciously going on, even if I think, "I'm just being mindful. I'm just being with. I'm just being," etc., that stuff, the subtle levels of clinging and identification, can be going on even when we think we're just being mindful. And that's partly why we're doing these particular practices, actually to highlight subtle things that are going on in the mind that we don't usually even notice are going on.

We can talk about a passive kind of mindfulness and a passive kind of insight, and that really does have its place, and it never, again, never loses it. But the believing that when we are 'being with' or 'just being,' believing that's 'just being' is an illusion. In a way, there's no such thing as just being. The mind is always putting something into the present moment. We'll talk about this later in the retreat, but if it really, really, really doesn't put anything into the present moment, the present moment actually doesn't arise in consciousness. One moves beyond the conventional world of time and subject and object. So the mind is always putting things on, putting things in. The notion of 'just being' is a bit of a red herring. Is that the right word? Red herring. So there's always a view, and that's putting something in. There's always a subtle kind of doing. So, as such, the mindfulness process, the 'being with' process is actually always active.

Now, I think both views are helpful. Both views are helpful. In other words, it can be helpful at times to have this sense of things being stored and needing to come up and releasing them. It can be helpful, but are we stuck in that and locked in that unconsciously? That will be a problem. But it can be, again, that we pick up a view and put it down, and pick up the opposite view and put that down.

So it's interesting. Healing, emotional healing in particular, but all kinds of healing -- not always, but often there is a level of drama involved in healing. And guess who's the star of that drama? [laughter] Guess who's at centre stage? It's me! Me! Healing often is a kind of 'me' drama. And sometimes, that's why (Faith brought this up at some point) we get a bit addicted to this 'me' drama. And it's nice if the 'me' drama can be in the context of a healing story and a process and what feels ... But just to be aware that we get drawn to that, and addicted, attached to it, and addicted and attracted to it.

And the view of emptiness, coming at it from the angle of emptiness and dependent arising, it kind of just a little bit lets go of all that drama and the 'me' being at the centre of it all. Again, I don't want to land anywhere. It's important to shine the light on this stuff and kind of expose it. Where have I been clinging to a view, consciously or unconsciously? And is that really a reality? And where I would actually land is in a more open place, and say, as a practitioner, as a human being, am I able to do both? In other words, have I developed the ability to be with difficult emotions, be with difficult storms and difficult energy things happening in the body, that I'm, as I said, actually able and not afraid to be with and meet and hold, that I know how to do that, I'm able to and unafraid? And am I able to and unafraid of doing the opposite: seeing it as a dependent arising, and seeing that if I don't feed it, it will just collapse right there -- it just won't arise?

Now, that can bring a different kind of fear up: fear of losing one's identity, fear of all kinds of stuff. But am I able to do both? Do I have, really, the skill to do both? Not easy, not easy, but absolutely possible to develop. Am I able to do both? And am I fearless enough to do both? And then it's a matter of honesty and integrity, and really seeing what's true, what needs working with, what needs actually just seeing through.

Yogi: Can you just repeat what both were?

Rob: The 'both' are (1) being willing to be with what comes up and see it as something that needs to come up, and also (2) the kind of opposite -- seeing it as, "It's just something that's dependently arising in this moment, dependent on how I'm viewing it and feeding it. And if I don't do that, it's actually empty." So seeing both its substantiality and the need to be with it, and also its emptiness. And to have the freedom to do both, and the skill to do both -- that's something very, very powerful to have as a human being.

[54:00] I want to return for a little bit to karma, and it's something one of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff said once. He said, you know, awakening, if we talk about awakening, it's not just like a mind-blowingly fantastic experience. It's not just the big wow. And to quote the Buddha, he said -- the Buddha said:

First there is the knowing of [dependent co-arising], then the knowing of nibbāna [then the knowing of nirvāṇa].^[3]

So in other words, there's no nirvāṇa without knowing dependent co-arising. Let's explore this a little bit. If I am in a tantrum, if that's the mind state, the heart state, if there's anger, if there's greed, if there's selfing, if there's agitation, what I see is, those qualities of the heart are builders of the self-sense and builders of a thing-sense in things. They're builders of the world. The more tantrum, anger, selfing, agitation, greed, etc., I have, the more the self-sense is built, solid, prominent, and the more the world-sense, the thing of the world is. And in those states, I have less clarity. I have less clarity, so they're also foggers of my clarity.

Love, compassion, generosity, samādhi, equanimity, all these boring-sounding lists -- they are actually non-builders, or rather less -- they build less. So when there is love, compassion, generosity, samādhi, equanimity, the self is built less, and the world is built less. The thing-ness of things is built less through those qualities. And they bring clarity with them -- love, compassion, samādhi, equanimity, etc., generosity. They bring clarity with them. And also, they are less built.

So they both build less, but they're also less built. In other words, it takes quite a lot of effort to be in a tantrum. You've got to inject a lot of energy. You've got to really kind of -- you've got to be up for it. [laughs] It takes a lot of effort to be angry at someone. Sometimes it seems like that's the natural thing, but that's just because our habit streams are flowing that way. Actually, in terms of the input, it takes a lot. It takes a lot to build up a state of anger. A state of love, a state of samādhi, a state of compassion, equanimity, etc., is less built. At first, because they're not normal habits to us, it feels like, "Oh, I'm really trying to build the samādhi. I'm really trying to build the mettā. I'm sort of flapping away, and furiously trying to get this little bit of mettā or samādhi going." But actually, they're less built. In other words, they take less. It takes a lot of doing mettā and samādhi to actually realize that, but you could say they're more the natural state of things. They're less fabricated.

So there's something about this -- nibbāna, nirvāṇa, comes from understanding dependent arising, which means understanding this building process, understanding the way that things get built, and, you could say, completely understanding that, completely seeing how things are built. And the development of beautiful qualities, the nourishing of beautiful qualities, actually allows that seeing for all these reasons that I've just said, because they're less built and they build less and they're more clear. And eventually, we can actually learn to build nothing. But it's the understanding that's important. There's something really about understanding here.

Wrapped up in all that, implicitly, is the fact that awakening, nirvāṇa, necessarily involves understanding, a lived understanding of ethics. It necessarily involves also an understanding of causality, insight into causality in the heart and the mind. Do you see how that ...? That's all part of the same package. So we might have, or a person might have, or a someone might come to you and say, "This person had this mind-blowingly expansive experience." Unless that's there, from the Buddhadharma point of view, it's not awakening unless there's understanding of dependent arising and karma, and how ethics is actually totally woven up into it, and how care and love are totally woven into it. It's not the same thing.

How are you guys doing? Are you okay? Okay.

This isn't a mettā or compassion retreat, but I just want to talk, again, just to throw out some sense of possibility that you might pick up at some point in your life of practice, really. When one engages in compassion practice kind of in a more long-term way, it actually deepens. Naturally, it deepens, and it goes through stages. The Buddha talks about three kinds of dukkha, three kinds of suffering. (1) One kind is what's called dukkha-dukkha. It means the suffering of just things being painful. So I hurt my body, I have an illness, I have a relationship breakdown, I have this or that, a difficult mind state -- it's dukkha, the dukkha of what's difficult. (2) The second kind of dukkha is anicca-dukkha. It's the dukkha of even lovely things being impermanent. We're all subject to that. So you might have happiness, you might have a lovely relationship, you might have whatever it is -- but it's impermanent. And there's a kind of level of dukkha that comes from that, just the fact that things are impermanent. (3) And then the last one is called saṅkhāra-dukkha, and this is interesting because different people interpret it different ways. But the way I'd like to interpret it is, actually, it's the dukkha that comes from always building things, always building, building experience, building the world, building the self, building, building, fabricating, and not knowing that things are fabricated, not knowing that.^[4]

Let me read you something actually from Chandrakīrti, the champion of the chariot. He starts that text, the Madhyamakāvatāra, that talks about the chariot and lots of really detailed stuff about emptiness -- he starts it by saying:

Compassion, non-dual understanding [in other words, the understanding of emptiness], and the altruistic [wish for awakening] are the causes of [bodhisattvas].

And then he says:

Mercy [or compassion] is seen as the seed of [an awakened one's] rich harvest [compassion is the seed of everything that an awakened one reaps], as water for development [in other words, it's there, all the way along the path, water for development], and as ripening in a state of [lasting happiness]. [So the ripening, too, is compassion.] Therefore at the start [the start of this massive, really clever treatise] I praise compassion.^[5]

He goes on:

Beings think "I" first [beings think "I," of themselves, at first], and cling to self; they think "mine" and are attached to things. They thus turn helplessly as buckets in a well [like one of those buckets that's on a thing that you wind it up in a well, and it's just clanking around, banging here and there], and to compassion for such beings, I bow down.

So right at the beginning of this very intellectual, brilliant treatise on emptiness, he says, "It's all about compassion. I bow down." He goes on to say:

Beings are like the moon in rippling water, fitful, fleeting, [impermanent, and they are] empty in their nature. Bodhisattvas see them thus and yearn to set them free. Their wisdom is beneath compassion's power.^[6]

In other words, all this wisdom that we're developing, all this understanding -- compassion stands above it and pulls the strings. That's what's in charge here: compassion. Wrapped up in what he's saying is, he's pointing to three kinds of levels of practising compassion practice. I just want to throw this out as a possibility, again, that some of you will pick up, or maybe some of you will pick up sometime.

(1) The first one is what we tend to think of as 'obvious' compassion. We see, we hear about someone in the news, or a friend who's going through something difficult. There's suffering there. There's compassion towards that suffering, compassion to suffering beings.

(2) The second one is towards beings qualified by impermanence. So what that means is actually in the compassion practice, having at the same time, contemplating someone's impermanence. This could be -- I can't see any obvious suffering right now, or maybe I can, in what you're going through, but I'm aware you're dying. I'm aware you are, however healthy you are right now, however young you are, you're basically dying, and I'm aware of your death. And something about the mortality and the fragility of human life is sort of sitting at the back of the compassion practice and feeding it, nourishing it.

It could also be, tune into a much finer level of impermanence, a much more rapid level of impermanence. And what we see is, when I really look at my experience of suffering, what the actual experience is, there are kind of mind moments of suffering. So I tend to think this self, etc. When I really go into my experience, I have a mind moment, and then another mind moment, and then another mind moment, like a perception of something, all the aggregates together making a mind moment. There's a mind moment. And there's a way you can kind of direct the compassion towards ownerless mind moments. It's just, rather than towards the self, towards mind moments. Why would you do that? Because sometimes it can bring a much deeper sense of the compassion. So they're just mind moments that are ...

Yogi 2: Is that the third?

Rob: Second one still, second one. And ...

Yogi 3: I didn't quite follow there.

Rob: Sometimes, if there's enough samādhi or stillness in the being, sometimes you look inside, and instead of a sense of self -- actually, thank you, because it needed to be drawn out more -- instead of a sense of self, the usual, solid, kind of packed together sense of self we have, what you notice is a sort of mind moment, and then another mind moment. And in that mind moment is your perception of experience and everything. It's like a moment of experience. And instead of kind of seeing a self, what you see is mind moments that seem to have -- they don't seem to have so much of an owner. Okay?

Yogi 4: And you see that in the other person?

Rob: Yes, and then you reflect on another person like that. So it's compassion to the ownerless [mind moments]. Now, you can also do it towards yourself, definitely, and it's probably easier to start with yourself. But you can also do that to another person. Just ownerless mind moments -- it's a very, very beautiful way of practising compassion.

(3) So, what about the third one, the third way which is in what Chandrakīrti says? Beings qualified by emptiness. So yesterday we talked about the body being actually permeable, and without real boundary, and sort of not separate from the rest of the universe. So here I am. Say I give compassion to a friend, and in the compassion, actually reflecting on their body not being separate, the air going in and out. And when does it become them? Seeing the non-separateness of their body from the universe and the non-separateness of all the four mental aggregates from the universe. So you can't have vedanā, perceptions, consciousness, etc., without an outer world to perceive. In other words, every time I perceive something, I need all this [knocking] to perceive. My mind can't be separate from all this. So in a way, I'm giving compassion to my friend. Their body is not separate. Their mind also is not separate from the rest of the universe.

And as I briefly touched upon last time, also, they're inseparable from the past and future because of the way that clinging works and conditions the next moment. So there's this sense of a person being a separate being, and you can go into it, in a way, and bring in the emptiness contemplation. You see there's nothing there of this dear friend, perhaps, that I know so well, that I can see as separate. And there's a kind of -- it's almost like the person is infinite. Their actual nature is infinite. You could say they're full of the universe. They're unfindable as a separate thing. And surprisingly, perhaps, that can actually open up a whole other level of love. Again, we would tend to think, "Well, no me, no you -- how's there going to be any love there?" But actually, opens up even more.

Yogi 5: Is that like interdependence?

Rob: It's starting with interdependence and going even deeper to a kind of real, radical non-separation, yeah -- unfindability as something separate. So the emptiness brings a kind of heart-melting with it. It should -- I hope it would be obvious how emptiness helps equanimity. Emptiness and equanimity -- it should be relatively obvious how they would go hand in hand. But let's think about this equanimity in the context of compassion, particularly. So we want to be of service. When there's compassion in the heart, we want to help. We want to alleviate suffering. And it's important that with that, there's equanimity.

So let's think about actions and the effects of actions. Obviously, the effects of actions depend on the action. I go, and I say something, or I do something to help, and the effect obviously depends on the action. That's the normal way of thinking. But actually, actions depend on their effects as well, because without the effects, how do you perceive something as an action? An action, to be an action, must have some noticeable effect. You can't have one without the other. When I look more at actions, actions of helping, etc., actually they're not separate from their causes either. The heart state, the intentionality -- that's not separate from the action. The aggregates of the mind, perception, etc., in a similar way that we just talked about, are not separate from the action. The perceiving, the intention, all that -- where does that stop and start, and the action begin? They're both cause and effect for each other. It's totally, again, an inseparable thing.

When we think about wanting to serve, wanting to help, wanting to alleviate suffering, this is quite important: seeing that we make an action that's almost like -- it's not a good example, but the effects are unknown to us. Now, sometimes they're completely visible, but actually, you drop something in, and ripples start moving out, and those ripples meet other ripples. So as a teacher, I might say something, or this retreat, you say something about emptiness. You say something -- in a way it's planting a seed, perhaps. Or some of this, as we said, is planting seeds, causing ripples. Some condition starts rippling and meets other conditions. You read something else, or you hear something else, or something happens. The effects of an action that's intended to be of service are actually -- in a way, again, they're infinite, and they're unknowable. There's something about that, realizing the conditionality, that helps feel[ing] overly responsible, overly like it all depends on me.

Just in a very mundane way, to judge effects too quickly, it's like, I might be going -- like in meditation -- might be going through something very difficult and painful. But if that negativity and difficulty, if what comes out of that, in response to that, is courage, willingness, openness, mindfulness, curiosity, letting go, investigation, then what felt like a difficult something actually has become very positive. And vice versa, it could be -- I'm sure this doesn't happen to any of you, but it could be that one is experiencing a lovely time in meditation, and one a little bit lets things go, kind of gets a little (what's the word?) complacent, sloppy. And then what's actually coming out -- or grasps at a state of pleasantness or something -- what's actually coming out of something that seems lovely is not so lovely, just on a kind of mundane level.

The last thing. Compassion -- if we want to be of service in the world, if we want to dedicate ourselves to that and the allowing the heart to really open in that, compassion needs equanimity. And the thing that brings the deepest equanimity is emptiness. It's totally the most powerful thing for bringing equanimity. Compassion needs the equanimity that comes from emptiness, from seeing emptiness. So love, service, generosity, selflessness -- all of those are much more possible, much more possible in our life when there's this realization, understanding of emptiness. To the degree that there's an understanding of emptiness, all those become so much more possible, so much more accessible in the being.

In the Mahāyāna tradition, they talk about two kinds of bodhicitta: ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. Ultimate bodhicitta is actually the mind seeing emptiness. The mind seeing emptiness is the ultimate bodhicitta. Relative bodhicitta is the aspiration to -- let's be loose -- to really completely dedicate one's practice and one's awakening to the service of all beings, for the awakening of all beings. But ultimate bodhicitta, the seeing of emptiness, is what allows the fullness of the relative bodhicitta. You think about these bodhisattvas pledging to be in the world for aeons. If you see that time is empty, it loosens what that means. If you see that the self is empty, it opens up what that means. If you see that suffering is also empty, it opens it up. And again, instead of feeling like a burden, it's something that's much more open. So again, the emptiness, it allows the fullness of dedication to love, the fullness of giving. It really opens up those channels, opens up that capacity in the being.

Okay. Let's have a minute of silence together.