Transcription
So tonight in the talk I would like to explore something I mentioned a little bit yesterday night, in the talk last night, and that's the inner critic: that character inside, that constellation of voices, that personality structure, whatever you want to call it, that many, many people experience in their lives, certainly on retreats, but throughout their lives, that puts us down -- voice of negativity, of demeaning, belittling, self-judging, criticizing, self-blaming; the voice that nags at us; the voice of harshness; that whole orbit of shame, very much wrapped up with aversion and contempt, even for oneself; the whole conglomeration of feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness. All that, I'm just giving the name 'the inner critic,' could give it lots of different names. But I want to address this. And really what I want to address is the possibility that we have as human beings of being free of that, really being free of that, completely and utterly free of that, and how we might move from not being free to being free.
Sometimes, even just hearing that, a person may be so used to the inner environment of this structure -- so "it's the air we breathe" -- they cannot even imagine it not being there. Cannot imagine it. It's incredibly common in the West. I meet with a lot of people, and I just see it's probably one of the most prevalent patterns in the West that we meet when we look inside, and one meets it in other people, of course. So that's important to know. It's important to know, if it's something that you suffer with, that you're not alone in it. The very structure itself brings, by its very nature, a sense of isolation sometimes as part of it. But you're not alone. It's very common. That can be important to know.
On the other hand, sometimes people assume that everyone has it, and that's actually not true. There are some, a small number of people, who are fortunate enough never to have experienced it. The conditions weren't there, and it didn't grow. And there are others who have known it and are now free of it. Whether I assume I'm alone in it, or I assume everyone has it, both of those are a little bit dangerous, because they can both lead to despair, a sense of "It's impossible. It's impossible to be free of this thing," and despair is a very dangerous feeling in the Dharma.
So it's very common; it's there probably for a lot of people in this hall. And to realize: actually, it's understandable that it's there, you know, given the history. When we look back and we see this and that and the conditions that were there and the environment that was there, it's actually understandable. Oftentimes those conditions are personal, familial, you know, whatever -- the environment when we were younger. There's a wider set of conditions, and that has to do with the culture that we live in. This pattern is a lot less common in Eastern societies than it is in Western societies. And obviously there's a lot to be said about what we have in the West, and the way we approach things. I'm not going to go into this, but something happened in the time of the Renaissance -- a shift began to happen in the sort of common, shared consciousness: a movement towards individualism. And that has actually just increased and increased and increased, bringing with it a lot of beauty, a lot of potential, but as a shadow, bringing with it the kind of pain of excessive individualism that can manifest as the inner critic, and all the isolation that that brings. It would be interesting to see now, as Western values begin globalizing around the world, what happens.
Why is this important, apart from the fact it's just plain painful? When that structure is there and operating, and kind of pervasively operating, one of the things that it can do in terms of practice is it pervades practice, it injects practice with a sense of 'should' -- that we approach meditation, we approach our spiritual life, with a sense of 'should.' It's almost like there's always this voice, this energy, berating us, pushing us: "You should. I should." And how often I hear that when people speak, and how often that voice is there when they speak to themselves around practice. That 'should,' the 'should' in the voice, brings a sense of pressure, brings a sense of pressure into practice. When there's a sense of pressure, either we crumble under the pressure -- we're burdened, we're squashed by it; the very life, the heart, the openness is squashed -- or we rebel, and there's a rebellion, but it becomes a rebellion against practice, or against the very things that might be good for us.
A number of other things happen -- not always, but potentially. This inner critic structure can also strangle our beautiful and precious capacity as human beings to ask questions, and ask deep, probing questions of ourselves and of life. We talked last night in the opening talk about the quality of sīla, of the care for how we are with each other and the ethical guidelines. In a way, we say, "We try and do this, we try and not do that, we try and not do that," but actually, sīla is an area of investigation. It's a whole wide arena of investigation. I'm not going to go into this, but especially in the time of globalization -- what does it mean to live ethically? What does it mean to really live with care and respect for how our actions affect beings maybe totally on the other side of the planet? It's rare to find black-and-white answers. But it's almost like, when we come with the inner critic and the 'should,' everything gets put into a box in terms of ethics, as well, and what could have been an investigation becomes a tight kind of coffin, really. So it cramps our ability to question.
The Buddha once said, "There are ten questions that a practitioner should ask themselves regularly," and it's a very interesting list. One of them is, "What am I becoming as the days and nights fly past?"[1] It's a pretty serious question! [laughs] In the climate of the inner critic, that kind of questioning becomes impossible -- it's like poison landing in poison. It's impossible to relate to that question with any kind of sense of it opening something or inspiring something, or even finding an honest answer. A whole level of questioning becomes impossible.
Another instance, the Buddha says, "When one hears of someone else achieving a level of awakening or deep insight, one should think, 'Why not me? Why not me?'"[2] How rarely that's the case when the inner critic is operating -- some whole other spiel of story starts going. The Buddha says, "By relying on conceit, I abandon conceit." More often, what happens in terms of questioning is, the questionings kind of contract into a couple of questions, which end up being, for instance, "Am I doing it right? Am I okay?", and/or "What will they think of me? Will they think I'm stupid, weak, lazy, whatever it is?" So what could be a beautiful outpouring of our life energy, this deep capacity to question, actually becomes something that's constricting and strangling us, binding us.
I was working with a practitioner a little while ago, and he was noticing this, and noticing it, and it began to shift. And he said, "What else can I ask myself instead of 'Am I doing it right? How well am I doing this?'" It shifted to "How am I? How am I?" It's a much more caring question. And then, also, the other question that came for him was, "What's helpful right now?" That's one of the golden Dharma questions: what's helpful right now?
So it's interesting, looking at the original text of the Buddha's discourses, the suttas -- you almost never come across this then. It seemed to be not something that people at that time in India really suffered with. They obviously suffered with a lot of stuff, but not this particular thing. And so the Buddha very often uses the language of 'striving' and 'determination,' etc., which, as teachers nowadays, we have to be very careful how we use that language, because it usually just lands in the 'pond' -- I was going to say 'cesspit' -- of the inner critic. It's an extremely powerful force that's operating in our culture, extremely powerful, and operating actually as part of the collective Dharma world that we inhabit. It's something that all of us together, as a community, we have to negotiate that, and we have to find a real wisdom and a real compassion in relationship to it.
So I am going to say: this inner critic needs challenging. We need to challenge it. It needs to be challenged. But if I say something like that, oftentimes we hear and we see through the lens and the earpiece, the ears, of the inner critic. So it can sound like a judgment. The inner critic will colour what comes to us from the world as judgment very often. It does that. It colours everything like that. It interprets what other people say or think as judgment. And unfortunately, sometimes that happens most strongly with the very people or person that we're closest to -- perhaps with an intimate partner. How often that comes in and kind of coils itself around the dynamics of a relationship, and we start perceiving ourselves as being judged by that person.
So to challenge the inner critic does not mean at all that it's a hardness that we're bringing to it. It's not unloving or judgmental at all. It's actually a movement of kindness. It's a movement of kindness to sort of try and dig a little space around this thing, kind of wedge it out a little bit, and see what might be shaken up, what might be loosened.
In that journey, in that process, one of the most powerful allies is the practice of loving-kindness. Many of you will be familiar with that. We call it mettā in the tradition. And this is hugely, hugely beneficial. It's such an ally in working with and freeing ourselves from the inner critic -- immense. I'm not going to talk much about it, but with that practice, the traditional way of doing it is one offers phrases of kindness to oneself and to other beings: "May I be well. May you be well. May you be happy. May you be peaceful. May I be peaceful," etc. And these phrases are like seeds that a farmer or a gardener might plant in the earth. And there's something about that. When we're doing the mettā practice, oftentimes it feels pointless. It feels ridiculous -- like spitting into the ocean. But a faith in planting these seeds, because they do come up and they do bear fruit. It might not be in that instant, but they will. There's an immense power there to be harnessed, to be ridden, taken advantage of.
In the first two or three years when I was teaching, I would run into this pattern a lot -- and I still do, obviously, all the time. But there were a few people. I would be sitting in an interview with them, and really the person was so mired and so caught up in immense pain with this very, very harsh self-judgment, a lot of pain, a lot of torment, really -- 'torment' is a better word. And it seemed like there was no way out. And certainly they were despairing, and just kind of communicating their despair to me. And sometimes I would just not know what else to offer, and have suggested everything, and be sitting there just listening. And sometimes, a thought would go through my head: "I don't know if this is even possible for this person. There's so much of that, and there seems so little access to their inner resources, or so little cultivated and so little ability to access."
And yet, I've been completely surprised. A person, just from the depths of despair, gives themselves to the mettā practice, and they just give, and they hang on to it for dear life. And over time -- and I see that same person some months later -- and it's a whole different thing. Not that they don't still have times of difficulty, but it's a whole different thing. Something has just broken out of that structure. And I've seen it for myself, as well, in the past, and I see it repeatedly in others. It's beautiful to see it, and I know it's possible.
So, mettā practice. I don't want to talk too much about it, but there was some neuropsychological research that I came across recently, for those of you that are interested in the kind of parallels between modern scientific research and meditation, by I think the Compassionate Mind Foundation, which is quite an interesting organization. And they found that, in a way, when we're doing practices like loving-kindness or compassion -- you can be very creative; there are many ways of doing it. You don't have to use the phrases, etc. But it's almost like what's happening is one's developing or creating, imagining even, a sort of alternative personality inside. So I've got this one personality of the inner critic, and one just creates another one, and develops and cultivates another personality inside.
And the interesting thing with all their measurements -- I have no idea what they measured with the brainwaves and stuff -- but the interesting thing that they found was that actually, the brain -- obviously a very smart thing, but it actually doesn't know the difference, so it responds in the same way to mental images as it does to real external stimuli. In other words, when you put food in front of a hungry person, certain things will be triggered in the brain. When you think of food or imagine a plate of food, the same neurons (or whatever they are) are triggered. It's like the brain doesn't know the difference, and one is, in a way, taking advantage of that.
So we can cultivate a different possibility inside. And sometimes it's okay to personalize that. It's completely okay to personalize that. In a way, some of the Tibetan practices of bodhisattvas and deities, etc., are doing that: allowing something to be accessed, internalized, and personalized, that otherwise might feel quite difficult to access. So mettā -- practising it is hugely beneficial, hugely powerful. Not just to ourselves, but mettā to others. It's the same thing. It's the same energy. Whether it's directed towards oneself or towards others, it's actually loosening, dissolving the energy, the opposite energy of the inner critic. Sometimes people think, "I have so much inner critic, I just should do the mettā to myself." But actually, that can end up being a bit too much self-contraction. I'll talk more about this as the retreat goes on. But it's important to expand it too.
And on that note, we've talked several times on the retreat about practice, having a sense of practising for all beings, for the sake of all beings. If I'm just practising for myself (which is an understandable motivation), it also puts a certain pressure on the self. It's not just about self-pressure; it's actually, "I'm doing this for others too," and it expands what was tight. It opens what was contracted and bound. And in the field of mettā, of course, sometimes we rely, as practitioners, on our friends, on the community, on teachers, on fellow practitioners. So yes, our practice of mettā, but sometimes also another person's mettā, and us seeing that and feeling that and receiving that, being on the receiving end of that -- just for someone to express faith in me goes a long way. In that moment, the person almost might not be able to lift their head and neck enough out of the water to kind of consciously register it, or even say something in return, but it's impacting that person. To express faith in each other's potential, I think, is one of the most beautiful gifts we can give each other.
So mettā, using the heart and the heartfulness, and really developing that as a practice -- hugely important. But there's an immense place, as well, for investigation, investigating this whole structure and how it's working and what's going on and what the hell is it. So this is where mindfulness comes in, awareness, attention. But that attention we also want to be, so to speak, coloured by a kind of friendliness. So we could, so to speak, say the mindfulness is a kind of befriending of this inner critic structure, befriending of that personality inside. Someone -- I think it was Ajahn Sumedho -- has a definition for mindfulness which is 'affectionate curiosity.' It's lovely. That's the attitude to what's going on: it's one of affectionate curiosity. Just as if anything else was going on -- there was a certain situation, or we were in pain physically or whatever -- it's just bringing that soft, warm, friendly curiosity of attention.
We can talk about different aspects of mindfulness. There's a friendliness to mindfulness. There can also be a spaciousness to mindfulness. So that means, normally, very understandably, the response when the inner critic is there is I'm trying to get rid of it. We hate it. I want it to go away. We could be conscious of that or unconscious of that. But there's something about letting it be there -- really consciously trying to let that be there, let it do its thing in the space, let it be there. Give it space, give it plenty of space. Noticing: am I trying to get rid of it? And if I notice that, can I do the opposite? Relax around it and give it lots of space. When we're trying to get rid of it, that's basically a movement of aversion. The inner critic is also a structure of aversion. It itself is a movement of aversion. Aversion on aversion just builds aversion. That's all it does. We're adding to it by rejecting it.
If I only give it a little space, it will take up all that space. And it can feel, at times, there's nothing else inside but this voice haranguing me, harassing me. If I give it lots of space -- big, big space, plenty of space, lots of space, vast room for it -- I actually find that it cannot take up all the space. It's actually incapable of taking up all the space. It couldn't. And what one finds in that bigger space is that other qualities can be there at the same time. So it's fine. It's doing its thing, it's playing its tapes, it's broadcasting its thing on the loudspeaker, and at the same time, there are other qualities around it, going on at the same time.
So bringing mindfulness to it, one might [be] on the cushion, sitting, in the meditation, on the chair, in the hall, in the walking, as one moves in the day, and one's conscious inside, and hears these voices, these inner voices berating. Sometimes they're loud, and sometimes it's like a hiss. The voice is hissing at you. And sometimes it's just a whisper. It's an insidious undermining of our very being. But we need to be conscious of when it's going on, really conscious, and listening. One of the gifts of the stillness in meditation is that we can listen and hear that voice, and when that voice is there -- whether it's loud or soft -- it's almost like it has a reverberation in the being, or reverberations in the being. The voice says, "You'll never do this. See? You failed again. You can't do it," etc. "You're a failure. You're no good." Whatever the character of that voice says, that has a reverberation, and it can be really, really helpful to just open and pick up on the reverberation, and feel it. It will feel painful. It hurts -- ouch. Again, the hurt can be strong, or it can be quite subtle. It's just a little pinch, a little pain running through the being, just momentarily. But it's important to pick up on it.
And then, around that hurt, with that hurt, in the space around that hurt, can there be a care, a care for the hurt? Can there be a tenderness that comes in around it, compassion, warmth? Almost around the pain. So you've got both things going on, and we're more interested in the sort of waters that are lapping up against the pain, that are washing up gently against the pain, the hurt. And sometimes just gently dropping in the question: "Can there be kindness? Can there be tenderness? Can there be care?" Something like that. Just dropping in the question, rather than forcing it, allows it to come.
So again, we're talking about -- how to say? -- flavours of mindfulness, aspects of mindfulness. And sometimes mindfulness is a lot about precision. I'll get to that in a minute. But other times, mindfulness is more about spaciousness. Other times, it's more about mindfulness being imbued with kindness, with warmth. And it's almost like you can have this sense of, yeah, water lapping around something that's painful, or a kind of poached egg, you know, with the yolk and the white. And what's around it, the water, the white of the egg or whatever you want to [call it], is love, is compassion, that's in the mindfulness. It's in the awareness. So it's not the same as doing a formal mettā practice. It's just bringing some warmth, some tenderness, some care around what's going on.
All this that I'm talking about -- I said last night, I'm interested in communicating things that we can develop as practices, as skills, as tools, as the art of practice. So all this is developable. It's totally developable. It just takes practice and playfulness, experimentation.
It's important -- mindfulness has this capacity to magnify, in the sense of making things more clear. So what's there? What's actually there with the inner critic? What's going on? And it's interesting. We see a lot of aspects to it. Oftentimes, when this inner critic structure is operating, and if it's operating habitually in the life, there is, generally speaking, a repression of one's self-expression -- that one feels, because of that, a holding back, a contraction, a fear of expressing oneself fully; a repression of one's creativity; also a repression of one's openness to intimacy and one's gestures of intimacy. When that is there, when those repressions are there, of self-expression, of creativity, of intimacy, the being feels strangled. Something inside feels strangled. Frustrated at feeling strangled, because it's not being expressed, our fullness is not being expressed. That frustration very easily leads to anger -- rage, in fact. Rage can also lead to depression, or both. Something about this strangling -- either we are subdued by it, or we rebel against it. Sometimes that's outwards, and there's a rage kind of coiled up there. So it's an aspect of what's going on, what's there. We need to feel that rage, feel it as rage. How does it feel in the body? How does that energy of rage feel? And be clear: "Ah, this is rage."
What happens when we really look with as much clarity as we can? We're talking about approaching the inner critic from many different aspects. We talk about the heart and mettā. We talk about bringing the warmth into the mindfulness. We can talk about precision of mindfulness. What we see, when we bring a kind of real clarity and precision to the mindfulness, is what's going on when that structure is up and running and doing its thing is that we're actually building it. Although it may well have its roots in the past, of course, we're actually also building it and feeding it in the present. This very moment, we're building it and feeding it by gluing together its constituent felt experiences.
In other words, it has this aspect (and I'll go into this in more detail). It has different aspects to it. We glue them together into one thing, and that one thing is then experienced as a vague black cloud. It all becomes very sort of amorphous and overwhelming and just dark. And then we feel burdened by that. We feel overshadowed by that and oppressed by it. So it can be really helpful to make the mindfulness more precise if possible, and find out: what are the different strands of what's going on in the present? For instance, how does the body feel right now? And there's probably some unpleasantness in the body somewhere. There's a heaviness, perhaps, in the chest, or in the overall body. There's a tightness, a contraction somewhere. And tune into that for a while, and be really clear: "Oh, that's a piece, and I'm with that piece right now." In a way, we're simplifying the attention. Very helpful. And rather than letting it build up into this amorphous mass, we're extracting and seeing: "Oh, actually it's these different things coming together that I've glued together without realizing it, and created something that's overwhelming."
What's the texture in the mind? How does the mind feel right now? What kind of thoughts are going on? Noticing very specifically what the thoughts are. How does the rest of the body feel? How is my perception coloured? Noticing the elements, really extracting them one by one, and spending some time with each one to, in a way, get a handle on something that otherwise might feel very difficult to get a handle on.
So, I don't know -- when I was a kid, we had these drawing things, 'dot-to-dot.' It would come with these dots, numbers, and you would connect the dots and make a drawing. Yes? [laughter] We do that. Consciousness does that. It does it with everything, actually, but it especially does it to create suffering. It does it with everything; we'll get into this more. But it especially does it to create suffering. And that's what we do. When this inner critic is going, we've joined the dots, and we've made a thing, when actually we could see it as separate things, and that would make our relationship with it easier. It would make it lighter and give it more space.
We do that dot-to-dot in time too. So past, and we connect it with the present, and we leap to the future, and we connect it as one inseparable block, and then we're squashed underneath that block. This -- I'm saying it quite simply; it's something that goes very, very subtle, and we need to see this in practice, especially when we're suffering. You can guarantee that when there's suffering, we've been at the dot-to-dot diagram pretty intensively, or we are at the dot-to-dot diagram, because, as I said, it's present tense. The beauty of it being present tense is that we can actually undo it in the present. We can undo it right here, because I'm doing it right here. So bare attention, just a simple attention to the different elements, can really be helpful in undoing that conglomeration.
There's heartfulness. There's the mettā. There's the warmth that can come into mindfulness. There's the spaciousness that can come into mindfulness. There's the precision and the sort of deconstructing that can come into mindfulness. There's also this capacity that we have, I mentioned earlier, as human beings, to question, to really question deeply. And we can question this inner character, this inner personality. We can really question it. So I want to make a broader point now about the practice involving both what we call, in the West, the heart, and what we call the head, the mind. And to me, it involves both, and a really deep practice involves both equally. Am I shutting one out? Most people, in the Insight Meditation tradition at least, tend to shut out the use of their intellect. They don't quite trust it. "I think too much anyway. The thinking is the problem." But actually, sometimes we don't think enough. We don't push the thinking, in a way, with enough oomph behind it. And if we do, we will find that it's an incredibly deep and potent ally for our liberation, incredibly. It's just we need to use it more, in a sense, and more powerfully, learn to use it more powerfully, the intellect, the thinking mind, the reflective mind, and turn it into an ally rather than an enemy.
So, questioning it. First question: am I believing it? Just that question, dropping that question, "Am I believing what it's saying? Am I believing it?", can just create enough space, just asking that question can create enough space to allow some doubt to come in. And that's often what's not there -- a healthy doubt, a healthy space. So allowing the doubt to enter by asking: am I believing it? And what am I believing? Something about getting quite specific here. What am I believing exactly? For instance, it's quite common -- and I know this very much from my past, very much -- we can be believing that there's something bad in us deep down, something that doesn't really belong in the human race, something poisonous, even. If I believe that, I become afraid. It gives rise to fear, almost inevitably. And this has a huge place as a cog in the wheel of patterns like addiction and relapse into addiction -- that we're afraid of something, and the fear gives it power, etc.
So what exactly am I believing? This is important to find out and get quite specific. And also to ask an interesting question: what, perhaps, is it giving me, this inner critic structure, this inner critic character? What am I getting from it? And again, all these questions are questions of kindness; they're not judgmental questions. It's curious: sometimes a person looks, and it's a sense of familiarity. We're so familiar, over years and decades, that it's giving us that sense of familiar territory, familiar kind of home. Sometimes a person says it gives them a kind of identity. It's become one's identity to see oneself in a certain way, and even present oneself to others in a certain way. So a personal identity and a social identity. And one has become attached to that, and feels like one relies on it.
Sometimes when one looks inside and asks, "What's it giving me?", one notices one feels that "Without that, I wouldn't do anything. I wouldn't get up in the morning. It's what makes me do the right thing." Is that really the case? Sometimes one feels or sees looking inside that it's, perversely enough, coming from a kind place. It wants to protect us. It's almost like if I beat myself up first, then no one else can beat me up, or I'll really be hard on myself to make sure I don't make any mistakes which might result in someone else rejecting me or my not being loved. So it's kind of protecting us from making mistakes or being rejected in the world.
So sometimes people are a little bit unsure whether they want to be rid of this structure. That's understandable. But we really have to look at it, and look at it, and look at it, again and again, and be clear, get clear: it's dukkha. It's dissatisfaction. It brings dissatisfaction. There are other ways to take care of ourselves -- much, much better ways to take care of ourselves, much healthier ways to take care of ourselves.
Pursuing the questioning, we can actually dialogue with this character, with this personality inside. Again, through the dialogue, not letting it remain as a kind of vague, shadowy force from which one's kind of cowering or feeling burdened by. Turning to it and, through dialogue, through asking it questions and listening to what it says back, helping it to be really specific. The thing about dialogue is, one can slow the whole process down. I slow it down. I ask a question. I wait for a response. I ask the same one again: "Really? So you mean da-da-da?" Slow the whole thing down, give it more space, and find out: what exactly is being judged? Because often we feel it's just like this [looking away]. We're, "No, no, please!" And in that not looking at it, not turning towards it, we're actually not even clear about what exactly we're being beaten up for.
So being very, very specific, as specific, as exact as possible. If it says, "Because you're a failure." "Why?" "Because you didn't do that." "So you're saying that if I didn't do that, it means that I'm a failure?" "Yeah. Whatever." Slowing it down, being really, really clear, chasing the questions, not stopping with the questions, keeping going with the questioning. You question, you get an answer -- ask another question in response to that answer. You get another answer, ask another question in response to that. Keep going, keep probing at it.
And sometimes we can ask it, or imagine, "Okay, if I achieved X or Y or whatever you seem to be demanding of me, would you be satisfied then? Would you ... shut up?" [laughs] And sometimes what you'll hear is, "Yes." Wait there. [laughter] And say, "Really?" Because it probably -- not probably; it definitely wouldn't. It definitely wouldn't. You have to hang out and probe it. And one eventually sees that it's an impossible and an irrational character. It's not based on anything. It's not like there's anything that you could ever do to satisfy it. You could never come to a place that it would say, "Okay, job done. Well, see you. It was nice." [laughter] It's not going to happen! And we need to expose it for what it is: vacuous, ungrounded, irrational.
You are actually a lot more intelligent than it is -- a lot more intelligent. And when we're cowering, when we're not bringing our intelligence to bear on it, as well as the heartfulness, we don't see that, and we don't use what's available to us as human beings. You are definitely more intelligent than your inner critic. No question.
A while ago, I was in an interview with someone, and she was working a lot on this structure, among other things. She was here on a long retreat. She came in one day, and she realized, getting specific about it, "I need to be perfect." Well, that's a ... [laughter] That's a challenge. But then she explored it more. She was aware also of the fear of being punished by herself or by others or by God. She wasn't brought up religious; she never believed in God. Somehow that whole thing had been dragged in from who knows where, into the whole mess. And fear of being judged, fear of being punished if she wasn't perfect. So she would try and she would fail. Of course she would fail. How could she not fail? And it was sad for her to see that. There was a lot of sadness there. But it was also good. She felt really good to see that, to see that pattern that was painful.
We kept talking about this. And at a certain point, it's like, "Show me someone perfect." Now, Buddhists often say "The Dalai Lama." Well, there are plenty of Buddhists who don't think the Dalai Lama is perfect. I mean, in certain traditions, it's about a whole different thing, if you know the Mahāsi Sayadaw tradition, or U Pandita. It's about a very different -- it's about a really precise, bright mindfulness. That's not what the Dalai Lama's about. And similarly, the Dalai Lama would probably think these other people were not perfect. It's just chasing a different quality. What does 'perfect' mean exactly, exactly?
Be specific. Probe it. Question it. And sometimes we say, "Ah, yeah, I know it's silly. I know it doesn't make sense." That's not enough. We need to not leave the investigation. So be relentless. There's something about being absolutely relentless with it. It is relentless. It's completely relentless. We can be relentless back. And again, if we talk about perfection, what's perfect to you today will be different tomorrow, in terms of what you feel is perfection.
When we see how this is operating, and look at the whole mechanism of the whole thing, the way we see that it works is that the inner critic -- or we could say, rather, perception -- picks something out of the whole field, the whole totality, the whole global awareness of events. It singles something out, and picks it, and clings to it, and gives it a meaning, and gives it a significance. And picking it out from the whole field, giving it significance, giving it meaning, and then making a self-view out of that, making a conclusion about the self out of that.
So we're doing work, perhaps in an office or something, and we make a mistake. We -- I don't know -- forget to do something. And how often we single that out, out of the totality of events that happened that day -- you know, countless events that happened that day. That's the one, that right there. And that becomes something that we crystallize a self-view around, rather than seeing, "Actually, a lot of stuff went on. A lot of stuff is going on."
A while ago, someone else was in an interview, and they had been in hospital, visiting a friend who was probably dying, and wanting to give mettā to this friend, but found that when they tried doing that, what actually came up was a lot of self-concern, and worrying whether they were going to put their foot in it and say the wrong thing, or kind of "do it wrong." And then, noticing that most of the thoughts were actually about themself, a lot of self-judgment came in -- harsh, harsh self-judgment. Inner critic really took hold of that. But seeing that it's human to have mixed motivations, certainly until quite a deep level of practice when the whole self-concern thing begins really dissolving and opening out. It's very human. It's going to be part of the mix. Beginning to open up the vision to the totality of what's going on, and the humanity of what's going on.
So allowing -- in this case, she needed to allow herself to look at her own suffering. She was losing her friend. She was also recognizing her own mortality, looking at her friend dying in hospital. There was the anxiety, the discomfort of not really knowing what to say, and the fear of getting it wrong. There was also a kind of powerlessness of realizing that she couldn't control her friend's health, however much she might wish to. So including my personal strands of suffering, including that, allowing that. And organically, if we do that, a more natural compassion can open -- very naturally; don't even have to force it.
Something happens: in the inner critic mode of seeing, the self overestimates its own importance. Actually, that's, generally speaking, a thing that the self does anyway. We place ourself at the centre stage of whatever drama is there: "Everything depends on me." But to really see: this situation does not totally depend on me alone. It cannot. It's impossible. In this case, with the friend in hospital, I am a part of her web of relationships. Maybe an important part. But I'm part of a web of relationships. And this time now, this time now that we're together in hospital, this time now that she's dying is a very important time, but it's still just one part of the whole history of our friendship.
So we exaggerate the place of self. We also exaggerate time -- past, present, and future -- in ways that are unhelpful. In doing all that, we often fail to see the good that is there, the good that actually is present. Someone was telling me a while ago, it was running up to the US presidential elections, and they were getting quite engrossed and fascinated by the whole play of the whole thing. And then inner critic comes: "Oh, I'm just distracting myself by being involved in this." But actually not seeing that, okay, maybe there was some wish to distract, but also what was there was a genuine, deep concern, and a sense of the importance of what was going on, and a care for the outcome. And that had got kind of veiled over and eclipsed.
So we need to, as human beings, it's a very fundamental kind of platform of practice to really learn to respect ourselves for the right things. Are we respecting ourselves for the right things? Things like our care for ethics, our care how we are with each other. If that's there, if we can look at ourself and say, "Yeah, I do put some concern. I think about that. I care. I do try and keep the ethical guidelines," that's really something to respect deeply. If even I intend to do that, that's also something. That's a beautiful intention. It's something to respect deeply. My intention to grow, to cultivate in meditation, to cultivate goodness -- all this is worthy of such deep respect. And yet, we don't often -- or at all sometimes -- let the mind dwell there, allowing ourselves to respect ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel good about ourselves. So we can incline the mind to really sit in that place, noticing our own goodness, appreciating our own goodness. So often, a person says something, and their mind just skits off, like something bouncing off ice. It doesn't linger there for a second. Culturally, we tend to pooh-pooh that. And culturally, rather, we have this very sad game of kind of measuring ourselves and giving respect to others and giving respect to ourself based on very worldly concerns. It's upside down, as far as the Dharma is concerned. It's upside down, completely.
I touched on this last night, but there's so much that comes from letting ourselves really be in touch with and appreciate, connect to, our own deepest sense of direction and aspiration in life, and really feeling our being aligning with that. It's so powerful -- feeling that one is aligned with, one's life is aligned with, what we feel is deeply important to us. I was, again, in another interview with someone else, and she was coming in with this structure, very strong at that time, playing up quite a lot, and it was very much the voice of "I don't deserve this. I don't deserve that. I don't deserve to be happy." A lot of deep sense of unworthiness, and really, again, a lot of pain wrapped up in it, a lot of pain. And similarly, felt that her boyfriend was putting her down. That was the perception of the relationship, from the perspective of the inner critic.
And we were talking. I can't remember how it switched, but I asked her what her deepest desire was. Right there, in the middle of that pain, and I asked her: what's your deepest desire for life? And she was quiet, and she went in, and she reflected. What came -- so beautiful -- in her words, she said, "I want to be in service to love. I want my life to be in service to love." How much more beautiful can you get than that? And it was amazing. It was utterly amazing what happened. The clouds just dispersed, and I made sure she stayed with it and didn't skit off it, stayed with it and felt herself go deep with it, align with it, feel the depth of that, feel the depth of the longing that's there, the passion that's there, the life force that's there, the beauty that's there. And it dissolved. All the comparing mind dissolved. Joy came. Openness came. Strength came -- and that's crucial. Strength because of the rootedness in that deep desire and the alignment with the deep desire. It gives us strength. When the inner critic is around, doing its thing, that's what we don't have is strength. We're all over the place.
Now, that was a very powerful moment, and it lasted quite a while, but it needed to be repeated. And most things in practice that are good need to be repeated over and over. Come back to that. Sink down in that. Ground yourself in that. Feel the depth of that.
How are you doing? Are you still awake? [laughter] Is that a yes or a no? [laughter] Yes? I've got a little more to go. I hope you can hang in there.
When the inner critic is around as a habitual structure, what comes into the being is a kind of pervasive shame. It's almost like a shame that doesn't really have an object: "I'm ashamed about this or that." It's almost like it just spreads throughout the sense of being, pervades the being with a sense of toxic shame. Extremely painful. Shame is something that is about our essence. It's as if our essence feels no good. Somehow, at our core, our beingness feels no good, and we call that shame. We feel shame at our being. Very deep pain with that.
One of the most significant shifts that the Buddha kind of introduced into the whole spiritual culture of India, it's such a subtle thing, but it's immensely brilliant and makes all the difference in the world. It's that there was a shift from an emphasis on essence and the essence of self, whether it's a small 's' or a big 'S,' a shift from essence to action, and which actions bring suffering, and which actions bring release from suffering. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it makes all the difference in the world. We do something -- we do something wrong; we put our foot in it; we forget to do something; we don't do something well. And we make a conclusion about our essence. We make a conclusion about our essence, rather than seeing it as an action, that "Oh, that wasn't that helpful," and learning from mistakes. In life, in meditation practice, wherever, we make mistakes, and hopefully we learn from them, we move forward from them, because it's about the action, and not a conclusion about the essence.
Oftentimes, a human being is caught in guilt. We did something in the past, and the mind just goes round and round, feeling bad about ourselves. What's happening there is it's caught in a loop because we've made a conclusion about self and self-essence, and it just stays stuck in that loop, stuck in the past, around the self -- self, past, self, past, self, past, not going anywhere helpful. It's just going deeper down into that. Versus looking at it in terms of actions: what's helpful? What's not? And that liberates us from that loop, and can be more creative and future-looking. In the future, what actions? It's about action, and it's future, and there's possibility.
Yesterday evening, I sort of defined insight meditation, one possible definition, as learning to see in different ways, and learning to see in ways that, you could say, decrease suffering, dissolve suffering, lessen suffering. Learning to see in ways that lessen suffering. When there's an action or a speech that we have judged, can I learn to look at it? Can I practise -- it's really a practice -- looking at it in a different way, and see that it arose out of a whole web of conditions? So take someone in an office who's made a blunder, a clerical blunder. "I didn't see that actually there was tiredness around. Actually, the office was full of people, and it was distracting. There were all these other conditions. I had to do this," whatever. This web of conditions, and bloop comes the action, rather than the self making the action.
I'm aware when I say this to people, it doesn't sound like that big a deal. But as a practice, it's incredibly powerful. And we repeat it over and over, shifting from a view of self being responsible, self being blamed, to a web of conditions is what gives rise. Everything that arises in this universe is what we call a dependent arising, dependent on a web of conditions. There's no self there to be blamed.
We can also -- all this is practice -- we can learn to see things and describe things not in the language of self. I was working with someone, and he had a lot of self-judgment about his relationship with food. There was a situation he was reporting on, and there was a scenario with some chips. [laughter] And taking more than what was actually appropriate, and also more than what was comfortable, even. And of course the self-judgment came in for him at that time: "I'm this and I'm that, and da-da-da-da-da." We can re-language the whole thing. Let's look at that time, that whole time, whatever it was -- five or ten minutes. What was there? Impersonal language. Not "I was." "There was." There was intention: I want to eat. There was desire. There was tiredness in this case as well. There was hunger. There was the pleasant taste. There was, because of the tiredness, not such strong mindfulness. All those, cooked together, mix it around in a pot, and that's what comes.
Where's the self in that? Which one of those, or group of those, is the self? The not-strong mindfulness? Is that the self? How can that be self? It comes and goes -- strong mindfulness, weak mindfulness, no mindfulness, great mindfulness. That's not the self. It can't be the tiredness, of course. Usually people say the intention, there. But dissect it. Where's the self in here that's being so battered by the inner critic? Where is it? Intention, is that the self? If I look for intention, either I experience intention as just arising out of nowhere, as a momentary thing, and then disappearing. And maybe I happen, because there's not strong mindfulness, in this case, to get hooked on that intention and actually act on it. But again, where's the self there? Or I see the intention, again, arise out of a web of conditions, and when I look in that web of conditions -- the sight, the hunger, the peer pressure; I'm at a chip party or whatever it was [laughter] -- something's going on, and it's creating the intention. Where's the self there? I can't find it. I pick around, pull things apart, I actually can't find it. And learn, practise re-languaging, re-viewing things, not in terms of self.
Again, it's a practice. We do it a hundred times, a thousand times, five thousand times. Something begins to shift quite deeply and radically in the being if we get used to doing this. We're shifting a habitual view that's not helpful to a view that's much more open and helpful. In this second practice that we're doing with the spacious awareness, the space of awareness, maybe it might be possible -- no one mentioned it so far today, but eventually, it's possible that these thoughts that come up -- "You're crap. You're no good. You'll never amount to anything," whatever it is -- something happens to our relationship with them in the spacious awareness. We see them in a different context. We see them much more spaciously, much more lightly. We see their ephemeral nature. We see it's just like a shooting star going through the night sky. It's just woosh, and it's gone. It was barely there. And it's just a thought. One sees more and more deeply, more and more clearly, a thought is just a thought. That's all it can ever be. It loses its power over us. We're not so entangled in the way we're seeing it. When we see that, that's a very potent piece of the de-fabrication, the crumbling of this whole structure.
You know, it's actually good to be dissatisfied with one's practice, to be, in a way, dissatisfied with one's state of development. It's a good thing. Until one's a Buddha, until one's completely awakened, which is quite a high ideal, we can develop more. We can let go more. We can understand more deeply. Even in the Theravādan tradition, where they talk about arahant being the highest level other than a Buddha, they talk about different arahants having different depths of understanding. So they're completely liberated, completely free, but still some have more understanding than others.
A mature dissatisfaction with where one is at can actually be healthy. But the thing that makes it healthy is not making it about self-value and self-worth and self-judgment. The self isn't in it. It's not in it. It's just about, what qualities could be more? What could I offer more? It's not about the self and self-definition. It's liberated from that.
This movement, as I said at the beginning, this movement from feeling bound by this, trapped in it, tortured by it sometimes, the movement from that to freedom from it, real liberation from it, is completely possible. It's absolutely possible. I know. I know for myself, and I know working with plenty of people that it's possible. It may not be easy. It may not happen overnight. But it's absolutely possible. Sometimes in that journey, it kind of goes through a phase where it's almost like the words that we've used to beat ourself up remain: "Oh, you're an idiot. You're whatever." But it can go through a phase where they've lost their power. They're just kind of empty words appearing in the mind, but they have no power at all over us, no substance. And then, eventually, they don't even arise any more. They don't even arise. That whole personality, those whole voices don't even arise. And it can get to the point, even beyond that, when one knows for sure, deep in the being, that it can never arise again -- not even for a moment. Something has been cut so deeply, the understanding of the whole structure of self (which I'll talk about as the retreat goes on, one of the talks), something has been understood so deeply that this whole pattern cannot arise any more. The Buddha's analogy is it's severed at the root, like a tree trunk, severed at the root. It's impossible for it to come up. It just does not arise, and one knows that it can't arise.
And really, what I want to say: this journey is possible. It's absolutely possible for us as human beings and as practitioners. And like all things that are quite difficult, we can approach it from different ways. We should approach it from different ways. All of this is available to us.
Okay. Let's have a moment of silence together.
