A Wise Relationship to Practice

Okay, so preview time at the cinema sort of thing. I'm going to give four talks over the next few days, and in a way, the next three, starting with this one, kind of form a set. I'm going to talk about the relationship we have with practice tonight. Tomorrow, I'm going to introduce a new possible way of practising. And the night after that, talking about our relationship with knowing and not knowing, and also with conceptuality and the whole thinking mind and the conceptual mind. And then after that, another possible new practice, and talk about that. I'm going to talk about tonight the relationship we have with practice, so hoping that you can, like the opening talk, kind of carry this with you. And as I said, I wish I could kind of say everything at once. It feels very relevant to certainly my practice, but in everyone's practice as it unfolds, that relationship with practice. And, well, that's all.

In another way, this talk and the talk in two nights' time are padding around the talk I'm going to give tomorrow night, which I'll talk more about. So we have a practice, and obviously everyone in here has a practice. We all have practices. And where there's practice, there's a relationship with practice. There has to be. Or relationships with practice. We have a relationship with our practice, with our whole sense of practice. So it's important to ask us, and for me to ask you, and for you to ask yourself, how am I relating to this whole thing? How am I relating to the whole of my practice? Actually quite, I think, a very profound and far-reaching question with a lot of implications. How am I relating to the whole thing? How am I relating to this whole retreat?

Within that, how do I relate to notions of effort, of goals? How do I relate to the notion of the path or a path? How do I relate when I don't understand something that's said? How do I relate to learning new approaches and the possibility of learning new meditative approaches? How do I relate to the concept of doing in practice? And, as I mentioned, how do I relate to the whole concept of concepts? How do I relate to concepts in general? And there are many more categories, of course, as well. But within all that, one will tend to see for oneself, in oneself, general tendencies, general tendency of ways of relating to specific [things] among those categories. And of course, being impermanent, one will see changes. At times, one might have quite a different relationship with one of those categories or the whole of practice or whatever because it's impermanent.

So, to me, this is a really, really important area, because it has such a huge impact on our practice, basically. It has a huge impact. The relationship with something has a huge impact on that thing. We'll talk much more about this. The relationship with practice has a huge impact on practice and on our life, and in fact on the whole way we're seeing our life. So am I seeing this endeavour here, am I seeing the beauty in it? Am I seeing the nobility in it? To me, again, those are really, I think, extremely nourishing and important to see and to really feel that one is engaged in -- to feel the beauty of what one is engaged in and yeah, the nobility of it, to borrow the Buddha's words.

Or is it, as can often happen, often, often -- a person is conscious of it or unconscious -- the relationship has moved. We've lost the sense of beauty, our beauty, the beauty of the endeavour, the nobility of it. And actually it's become infiltrated and poisoned, in a way, by impatience and self-criticism. This comes in so easily. So one piece that's really important is am I seeing practice as kindness? Am I seeing practice as a kindness? As a kindness certainly to myself. It was interesting. I taught a retreat here in -- I think it was September. I can't remember. And I hadn't planned it, but it just occurred to me in the first sitting, we'll start with really connecting with seeing practice as an offering of kindness to yourself and to others, to the world, to beings. And it was quite remarkable what a difference it made to people's practice, and people would report it really is changing something.

Often we just -- I know John's been talking to you about this -- jump into practice, and we lose the sense of what it's about. Or it has actually, without our realizing it, become about something else. Actually to see it as kindness, to have the sense of what practice rests in as a space of kindness. It's for that; it's from that. Very, very important. Rather than measuring, which it so often can turn out to be, self-measuring, or proving oneself, either to oneself or to others. Those are not, they are not movements of kindness.

So within practice, we have the notion of effort. I don't want to talk too much about effort tonight, but it weaves in and out very much of some of the stuff I'm talking about. We have a notion of effort, putting forth effort into the practice, and what does that mean? To me, it's really crucial that we have a wise relationship with effort in practice. And that is fundamental to the development of our practice, to nurturing a space that our practice can develop in. So the relationship with effort has wisdom in it. Sometimes you hear teachings, etc., that seem to lean towards, "Make no effort in practice. Get rid of it, because otherwise you're creating a duality. Any effort implies a duality: I'm here, and I need to get there." Of course, there's some truth in that, and there's some wisdom in that. But also completely the opposite is true. We could say, if I have my practice as being an exercise in non-effort, it ends up bearing very little similarity with my life, where I have effort every day, countless efforts.

Here's a question to think about: why does one kind of effort in my life bring a whole sense of problem and tightness and difficulty and stress, etc., and many, many kinds of effort bring none of that? To me it's very interesting. And then people split off practice and a sense of effort in practice from, as I said, countless efforts that we make in our life. And then one might have a practice that bears very little resemblance to that. And the same is true of thinking. We think a lot during the day, and it's an important part of our humanity. And then to split off practice as an exercise in non-thinking or repelling thought -- again, we're going to end up with a duality. We might be saying to ourselves, "Thought creates a duality." Does it? Does it? Does thought need to create that duality? I'm just mentioning that.

There was a great Mahāyāna teacher in India in the, I think, ninth century, called Śāntideva. Many of you will know his name. In his writings, he talks about effort, and he talks about wise effort. He said it needs four things. Really healthy effort in practice needs four things:

(1) The first is a sense of aspiration, which is interesting. It's like we need to be clear in ourselves what we're heading for. What is it we want out of practice? What is it we most deeply want out of practice and out of life? And am I clear about that? Our effort rests on that clarity and that connection with aspiration. If I'm not connected with my aspiration, it's very difficult to have a kind of wise and heartful effort. If I'm not clear about it, again, where's my effort supposed to move, and how's it supposed to go? That's the first one. Then he goes on.

(2) The second one is confidence. Again, a lot of wisdom here. Confidence. It takes a certain amount of confidence in ourselves and in our efforts and in our practice to actually sustain the expenditure of effort. So confidence is a fascinating one. The aspiration that we have set for ourself has to be somehow realistic. It has to be realistic for me. And if it's not, I won't really believe in it as a real aspiration. So whatever my aspiration or aspirations are, they need to be realistic for me. I need to have a sense that it's possible that I can do this. Oftentimes people -- that's a piece that's actually missing, the confidence.

I was reading a text recently. I can't quite remember where it was. But it drew the distinction between pride on one hand and admiration or appreciation on the other hand. As we were doing last week at the end of the late night sitting, so just reflecting on appreciating oneself, reflecting on what one's put forth and appreciating, appreciating one's heart and one's efforts, and how absolutely crucial that is. Pride, being puffed up about what one is doing or what one has achieved, etc., tends to limit the development of good qualities. We think, "I've got enough. I'm already enough." Admiration or appreciation is minus the sort of contracted self-sense and actually feeds and nourishes the development of qualities. So it's not egoic, in a sense, to appreciate and admire qualities that are beautiful in oneself and in another. So appreciating and admiring one's putting forth effort -- very different from pride, and very important. Aspiration, confidence.

(3) Third one is joy. That's interesting, too. Sometimes, how easily practice can become joyless. Why does it become joyless? How does it become joyless? This is really important. And so what would it be, as I talked in the opening talk, to actually let the practice be infused with some degree of joy, some degree of well-being, that we're taking care of that, that we're really nourishing that quality, to whatever degree? Because again, sustaining effort over a session, over a retreat, over the years, takes joy. We need to feel that this is a joyful exercise, this is a joyful project, and that we get joy out of the effort. So rather than the usual association of effort with a kind of grind, gritting one's teeth and sort of pushing through, actually effort and joy go together. I'll come back to this. So aspiration, confidence, joy.

(4) And the last one is rest. So knowing when it's enough, knowing when it's too much, knowing when you need to rest. It's actually very commonsensical.

So I was encouraging you before to, if you have a practice of sort of just being with experience and being present, etc., and that's your regular practice, actually seeing on this retreat if one can go beyond that. Certainly that's fine at times, but not limiting what we're doing here. And bringing in the sense of playfulness and experimentation, also sources of joy and confidence. Playfulness and experimentation to find new ways of working. And then, from now on, what's going to happen more and more is these practices we've introduced, we're going to stay with them. We're consolidating them, consolidating our capacity, our skills at doing them, and then they lead to other levels. They open up other insights which we then take further, they unfold.

So engaging in that process, as Śāntideva said, we need confidence. And where does that come from? Say a little bit more about it. Confidence comes from, again, kind of things making sense to one. So just so far, we've done mostly the three characteristics. It needs to make sense why I would practice the three characteristics, why you would practice. One can actually feel the sense of it, feel the palpable making sense of it. If not, it's hard to gain confidence. It's certainly hard to sustain sort of commitment to it. So that's important, that it makes sense. The second thing, where do we get confidence, the second possible place we get confidence from is actually a sense of progress. Actually sensing that the practice is taking us somewhere, is deepening, that there's a development of more subtlety, that there's a sense of things becoming more subtle to consciousness and one's noticing subtleties that one hadn't noticed before. All that's part of developing and progress.

So if we just touch base with what we've done so far with the three characteristics, when we contemplate with the three characteristics, we should be seeing (and I hope everyone's getting some glimpse of this) that putting on those 'lenses' (that language we were using), contemplating the three characteristics, takes some of the suffering out of experience. I think everyone has hopefully tasted that, even just a little bit. Yeah? I know you have. [laughter] Sometimes at least, right? Tell me if no. Yes? And the second thing we mentioned, that contemplating any one of the three characteristics should decrease the suffering in that moment and should also decrease the self-sense. We talked about that. So whether it's impermanence or whether it's relaxing the aversion, whatever it is, the actual self-sense gets more quiet. Yeah? So seeing both those things, when the suffering is less, and when the self-sense is less, it then feeds back, the process feeds back on itself, becomes kind of a good snowball. In that space of less suffering, less self-sense, it's actually clearer to see the three characteristics of things. Do you see? It feeds itself.

Later, as we go on, maybe starting this week even, I'm going to talk about how that also begins opening up other possibilities. Seeing the three characteristics, seeing the suffering go down a little bit, seeing the self-sense go down, actually unfolds other possibilities to do with the nature of awareness, to do with love, and to do with the nature of perception and the fading of perception. We'll get to this. But the reason why I want everyone to feel that yes, I can really see that, suffering gets less, self-sense gets less, is because we're going to build on that. It's like really getting the roots there.

And the other thing we talked about -- this is just review again -- is if, for instance, you're doing the anattā practice, the 'not me, not mine, not-self,' however you're conceiving of it, saying it or not saying it, that we're having a sense of the range of that expanding. It could be very, very slow. In other words, you might start with the body, and then realize, "Oh, actually I can build on that and introduce thoughts," etc. There's a sense of expanding that range. This is a side point, but I'm going to bring it up again because it came up in quite a few interviews: remember, when we're doing this particular anattā practice, what we're doing is, in relationship to this thing which I am looking at as not-self, in relationship to that thing, we're finding a different relationship with it in that moment which allows more freedom. Okay? That's what we're doing in the anattā practice, which is a different thing than what I'll introduce tomorrow, which is actually tackling the whole sense of self.

So it's okay, as some people were pointing out in interviews, it's okay that if I'm looking at my body sensations and I have a sense of, "Well, okay, but my self just kind of goes back here somewhere," that's okay for right now. We can tackle that later. We develop our capacity to tackle what's left of this self hiding somewhere. But what we're interested in is feeling the freedom or the relative freedom in relationship to that thing that we're looking at. Okay? Make sense?

If you're doing the letting go practice, letting be practice, or relaxing the aversion, again, as we let go, it's possible (and I mentioned this in one of the talks) that because we let go, we're not clinging and craving, pushing/pulling -- that pushing/pulling is what agitates consciousness. It agitates the mind. And because we're letting go, there's less agitation. Again, things get calmer and more subtle sometimes. Sometimes they get more subtle. And in that subtlety, we can then see things which are more subtle, see pushings and pullings which are more subtle, and let go at that stratum which, before, would have been inaccessible. We talked about, you know, there's craving at the level of thinking -- very important to deal with that. But there's quite a lot of craving way quieter than thinking, and it's important to be able to access that gradually, that level of subtlety and even more, more, more.

Yogi 1: Can I just go back to anattā? A really quick one. Strangely, I find it easier to think, to understand or believe, when I say, "This is not a particular body part" than I do to say, "This is not my experience of hearing a bird." I don't know whether -- is there a way that I can get my head around that? Because it just -- my brain just says, "You are hearing the bird." It doesn't about the body! [laughs]

Rob: That's important. We talked about this, but it's really important to repeat. So when I say, "This is me hearing the bird" or "me experiencing the bird," at that point, the identification is with consciousness or awareness. It's not going to be with the sound; we don't generally take sounds as being something we identify with. Letting go of the identification with awareness is more subtle than letting go of the identification with body or body sensations. I've never met anyone who jumped straight to letting go of identification with awareness. So there are many ways to go about this, and I hope by the end of the retreat you get the sense, "Wow, you could go about it this way, this way, this way." They'll all end up reinforcing each other.

If you just take that practice of anattā, what you'll find is, as I said, if you just don't worry about that part, identifying with awareness, just yet, and just keep feeling the freedom of the letting go of identification with body sensations, and then maybe on that -- I don't know what the next step will be for you; maybe thoughts or emotions or something. And you're expanding the range. Eventually it will be a much smaller jump to letting go of identification with awareness, which is still there as a kind of like -- often people say to me, "How on Earth would you let go of identification with awareness?" We can. It's quite subtle and not necessarily easy. But pretty much everyone I've ever met or worked with has to build up to it, and kind of consolidate the easier regions first.

Yogi 1: Okay. So should I just be enjoying listening to the birds and not trying to sort of force myself ...?

Rob: Yeah, at the moment, yes. Enjoy listening to the birds, but more importantly, enjoying -- so, okay, you're sitting in meditation, letting go, if you're working with anattā, letting go of the identification with body sensations. And a bird goes, okay? There's two enjoyments there: the beautiful bird sound, and the freedom in relationship to the body sensations. So always lovely to enjoy the birdsong, but don't lose this one, because that will consolidate that platform on which eventually you can even let go of the awareness. Yeah?

So we talk about developing, progressing, learning, developing our art or our skill, and the question is, what's the relationship to all that? What's the relationship to the whole notion of progress, the whole notion of developing? I remember -- it's almost one of my earlier memories -- my family used to drive to Italy, where my father's brother lived, every year until I was about nine or something. One year we stopped -- I think we were already in Italy, and we stopped. And there was this -- it was like a go-kart track for kids, but it had traffic lights and zebra crossings. And the cars, these little cars for the kids had gears and brakes and all this stuff.

Of course my parents thought me and my brother would love this. My brother, who's younger than me -- so I was probably about 6, I think -- my brother who's younger than me just didn't even wait for any instructions [laughter], jumped in the car, nnnnnyoooom, and zoomed off and was fine with it. I was completely -- I was just totally overwhelmed with the sort of complexity of it all, and I had to be kind of coached by my dad to get back in the car, and finally I had fun with it. Actually even later when I was a teenager, and in this country you're -- is it 16 you can start driving? 17? Seventeenth birthday, all my friends, driving lesson on the seventeenth birthday. For me -- maybe I was still traumatized from this [laughter] -- but I didn't have my first driving lesson until I was at least 18 or 19 or something. And even then it just seemed like so much to take in, the gears and this and that. And of course now, as some people know how I drive now [laughter], somewhat cavalier. You know, just don't think about it.

So a lot of this can feel, perhaps, overwhelming or complex. It's just learning skills. We can do this as human beings. We really can do this. Even if something feels -- as I think it was April saying last week -- it's like, "Oh, there's this, and there's this." And after a while it's like, it really just doesn't become a big deal. It's just not a big deal. So it takes time. It takes time, generally speaking, to develop these practices, I feel. They're really skills or arts. And they broaden and deepen what's possible for us. Sometimes it's possible that a person just does the same old thing, same old thing in their practice, and practice keeps unfolding. My sense is if we just keep doing the same thing, sooner or later we're going to hit a brick wall where that particular practice, it's actually not possible to go beyond.

So just really wanting to encourage this sense of, it is possible. We really can do this. And we can find what works for us as practitioners. It might be, "Well, I'm not really gelling with any of this yet." Something will come. And as I said in the opening talk, no one's going to be able to do -- a lot of what I'm saying tonight, as I said, is to keep with you over the retreat -- no one's going to be able to do all of what's being offered in terms of practices. It's impossible. Almost impossible. But to take one or three things and dig those holes deep. So this word 'progress' -- in a lot of spiritual circles nowadays, it's kind of a taboo word. There's a lot of almost like electric charge to it. But to me it's important, again, our relationship with that notion. And how does it come? How do we have a sense of moving more towards freedom, of having more freedom in our life, more understanding, more fullness and breadth of that? And will it come without a certain sense of direction? These are questions. Will it come without a certain sense of intentness? Without practising specific and sustained approaches, and specific and sustained penetrations of inquiry? It may, but I wonder if it will be limited. These are questions.

So sometimes we're tempted to just let go of progress as a concept and let go of that whole sense of things. To me, just an opinion, but I feel that, is it possible to hold that word, if we're using that word, to hold it but without suffering over it? Can I hold a notion of developing, progress, deepening, etc., but not actually suffering much with it? Sometimes as teachers we say, in insight meditation, at the beginning of a retreat, if we're teaching a week-long or something, sometimes we'll say, "Don't expect anything from practice. Come with no expectations. That's the best way to begin." And there's a lot of wisdom in that. But like everything, it goes both ways, and it has its pitfalls. Is it good never to expect anything from practice? Is that good? Is that appropriate? Is that wise? Is that healthy? Sometimes one of the dangers is that, actually, what can happen is practitioners expect too little. We expect too little from the practice. We don't really have a sense of the depth and the fullness, that our whole sense of life can be transformed and turned upside down.

Oftentimes I find myself talking to or talking with practitioners who have a kind of very, very truncated sense of what's possible in practice or what they might even expect for themselves. To me, that's a little bit sad, actually.

Yogi 2: We're also taught, though, not to have expectations.

Rob: That's what I'm saying, yes, yes.

Yogi 2: Not to think of doing this because I will -- something.

Rob: That's what I'm saying, and I think that teaching -- which, you know, I have said to people, too -- has its strengths and its pitfalls. So just kind of raising the fact of both. But definitely. I'm just saying, maybe there's more to consider there. It's not quite so simple. Listen to the Dalai Lama:

Toward material things, which necessarily have a limit, it is best to be satisfied with what you have, but with regard to the limitless development of spiritual qualities, you should never be satisfied with a mere portion, but continually seek higher development.^[1]

That's the Dalai Lama. What's going to make that work? What's going to make that not backfire on me? We could talk all night about this. I don't have time. But one thing is, going back to what I said earlier, love and kindness, and seeing it as a kindness to oneself rather than as an exercise in self-measurement, which it can often slip into.

And the second thing is, how much is the self and the self-identity wrapped up with a sense of progress? That's the real danger. Progress in itself is good, deepening is good, but what happens is we then measure ourselves and our self-worth and our self-evaluation on how we feel we're doing in practice, and then the whole ship just sinks. So when we say that, Diana, that's what we're cautious about, really. And because, for a lot of people, the self is very tied up with measuring oneself and proving oneself, etc., it usually goes into that. But if I can find a way of working with those two things, the love and the kindness, and draining the self-sense from the sense of progress, then it's actually open vistas.

So what happens when you're in a talk, or you're listening to a CD or whatever it is, and the teacher starts talking, or you're reading, and the teacher starts talking about experiences or understandings or developments of practice that are beyond where you are right now, that are beyond where we find ourselves to be? Where does that go? Where does it land in you? This, to me, again, is a very important question. And I experience this all the time in talks, etc. Where does it land? Does it land in the inner critic? Does it land that we immediately dismiss where we are? "Where I am is rubbish or irrelevant. That's where I want to go." Do we get impatient? Do we tend to have a sense of futility and despair and give up? Do we feel overwhelmed? So it can land in all these places. Remember, I'm bringing this up because it's going to apply to this retreat, for sure.

Or do those same words, and that same picture that's being presented, actually land in a place of inspiring us? Of giving us a sense of direction? Maybe giving us a helpful [map], one possible map? Somehow open up joy and trigger joy, arouse our curiosity. Can land in all these places, all these places. So again, going back to something I said at the beginning of this talk, we will notice tendencies. So one person may tend, it always tends to land in the inner critic. Another person tends -- lands somewhere else. But it will change. So right in the moment that you're hearing something, where is it landing? Where is it landing? To me, it's really -- and again, it's just my opinion -- but I feel that our spiritual hunger is so precious, so precious. To keep that alive and to sustain that, our hunger to know more, to understand more, to deepen in freedom, to open in love more, that's really crucial that we're nourishing that, and that there's a kind of evenness and steadiness to that quality, our thirst; that we're patient, particularly at the times when it feels the practice is difficult or there's not much progress, or it actually feels like we've plateaued or stagnated, depending on which word one chooses.

When things are difficult -- and I think I mentioned this already at one point -- it's like, am I seeing the difficulties, the very places where I suffer, am I seeing them as opportunities? It's so easy, even though we're in the middle of a retreat, that the difficulty and the suffering is actually just seen as a hassle and not as an opportunity. This is a normal part of a kind of deluded mind, really. So I say that and the crucial thing is translating it. Everyone says, "Yeah, obviously that's important." The crucial thing is translating it. There's a Mahāyāna sūtra, the Kāśyapa Chapter Sūtra:

Just as the filth of city-dwellers [in other words, the shit, basically, of city-dwellers] helps the field of a sugar-cane grower, so the manure of a Bodhisattva's afflictions assists in growing the qualities of a Buddha.^[2]

Yogi 3: What did you mean by "translating it"?

Rob: I mean, actually, when we have a difficulty, and when we're suffering with something, something isn't going the way we want it, when there's suffering, actually seeing it as an opportunity, and taking it and working with it in a very practical way, internally, etc., to translate it from just a hassle, just a difficulty, into an opportunity for growth, for freedom. But actually doing that, actually making that shift inside. I mean, sometimes it's a lot easier than others; some situations get very complicated, but ... Does that make sense?

Yogi 3: I hear the words. [laughter] I have differing experiences of actually being able to do that.

Rob: Well, that's -- absolutely. So sometimes it will be relatively straightforward. Sometimes it will be extremely difficult. Sometimes we're not even sure how to proceed. Sometimes the situation is more external, and something needs to be said externally, something needs to be communicated. As practitioners we have a tendency to think all the resolution of a difficulty will be here, in letting go, and sometimes it's something external, again, on the language of self, this self to that self, that needs to get communicated.

Yogi 3: [?] struggling with some of my afflictions, and sometimes it's just taken me years to -- sometimes it's felt like I've had to dive into them, and perhaps I've been frightened, you know, yeah. I'm really being honest -- it's taken me years, decades, actually, if I'm honest, to become familiar with them and get to know them, and often they look very different.

Rob: Yeah. So all that's part of what I would call the translation process: getting to know it, realizing what's going on, allowing oneself to feel it, become intimate with it. And then at a certain point -- all that's part of the opportunity, and then, what can be let go of here? What am I ready to see differently, etc., to move beyond it? Again, we can hear something like that and feel very -- again, it can land in a place of self-judgment, kind of measurement, etc. Some of these things take years, as you're saying, you know? Totally.

Yogi 3: Okay. Good. I like hearing that. [laughs]

Rob: Okay. So going back to what Śāntideva said, to nourish effort takes aspiration, confidence, joy, and rest. Like everything, when you see causality go one way or dependency go one way, it tends to go the other way, too. This is a very important principle for a Dharma practitioner that we'll be revisiting a lot. So if aspiration, confidence, joy, and rest lead to effort, I wonder whether effort, aspiration, confidence and rest actually bring joy. In other words, it seems to me that, as human beings, we actually need, a part of us needs to feel like it has a meaningful challenge, like it has a sense of direction, something we're giving our energy to wholeheartedly that feels meaningful, and that, actually -- there's a joy for us there, you know?

The thing about aspiration, I want to revisit. It seems to me that our aspirations in life -- and by 'aspirations,' I mean what we most deeply long for, the heart's sort of longing to move in a certain direction or open in a certain direction or grow, that deepest longing of the heart -- that our deep aspirations, in a way, are one of our most precious potential treasures. Sometimes it's difficult to actually see them that way. There's something very, very precious about acknowledging and honouring and respecting and treasuring what it is that the heart longs for most deeply.

So it's easy as human beings, too easy, to slip from our aspirations. We might have, we might feel a passionate longing at times, and a little time goes by, not even very long, and we slip from that. Our life slips from that. And it can be very insidious, the way that it just moves from something that we've set our heart on, set our sights on, set our directionality on, and somehow something's happened and ...

Yogi 4: We lose sight of it.

Rob: We lose sight of it. We forget it. We relegate it to less importance. All that. So it needs a lot of awareness and integrity to actually keep the aspirations alive. It needs a tremendous amount of awareness and integrity to keep them present in the heart, to keep our deep longing and our deep aspiration in the driving seat. It's very easy for that to slip out of the driving seat, and other forces, which we actually don't really care about much or as much -- things like our fears, our longing for security, our convenience, our comforts -- very easily they get in the driving seat without us even noticing it.

So it takes a lot of awareness, a lot of integrity to keep love on track, to keep our deepest love on track, and to keep our hearts aligned with what we really want them to be aligned for in this life. And, you know, one of the privileges of teaching Dharma is I speak to so many people, and I speak to them about this stuff, and what I see -- and I've seen it in myself in the past, as well, of course -- is how easy aspirations slip. I see loads of people, talk with loads of people. Their aspirations have slipped, and often they haven't even realized that they've slipped. A person has just drifted off into some other direction in life, or made certain choices, and it's like, "Hold on. I thought two months ago you said this. What happened?" And they didn't even realize that that drift was happening, and now they're on a different track. And again, we can hear this judgmentally, but we're talking about, what do we really want in life? And am I honouring myself? This is all in the service of kindness. Is it kind to let my longing drift, and drift away, and drift out of consciousness? To me, that's not respecting myself at the deepest level of my being.

Yogi 5: It's also important to know when our aspirations change.

Rob: Absolutely. But that's conscious. Definitely. I was talking to someone on the phone the other day, and this seemed to be going on. I said, "That's fine, as long as it's conscious." And just really want to make it conscious because often it's not, you know? It just comes in insidiously, and we don't realize. So, I think aspiration and the sense that we really are giving energy to our aspirations in our life -- there's a generosity there, that we're moving in that direction that we most deeply care about. That's a fundamental ingredient, I feel, for human happiness. We actually like -- notice on this retreat -- we like to feel stretched at times. I like to challenge myself in the direction of love. When it's not about self and self-measurement, we love that. We love that. Or there's a part in us that loves it.

Yogi 6: Can I say something about that?

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi 6: It's interesting because I heard a talk by a professor of Harvard University, a neurobiologist. And he studies ... I mean, he's a very big expert scientist. And he gave this talk, talking about what makes us different from animals as humans. And so he just, you know, sort of went through a little bit, you know, using tools, or loving, or ... He says, well, all this we find in the animal kingdom. The one thing, the difference is that we love to do the impossible.

Rob: [laughs] Interesting, yeah. Thank you. So again, in relationship to all this, and kind of other areas where I really feel it's important to be aware of and investigate and question our relationship, is kind of when we feel like we get it or we don't get it, when we hear something or read something or the teacher says something. How easily then we can have a black-and-white sense of progress. To me, the sense of deepening in practice, it's almost like there's always more. There's always that deeper sense. And it's not so much about black and white, and putting ourselves in a box: "Oh, I'm not getting it," or "I've got it."

Even after very deep realization, as I said at one point (I can't remember), there's still the refining of view. That's very, very important. We'll talk much more about this later in the retreat, but basically with emptiness, at first we tend to either not realize its full significance, its full depth, or we go overboard and it becomes a version of nihilism. You've got these two extremes. Emptiness is said to be the Middle Way. Sometimes progress, the ongoing progress, actually becomes really refining the view, not going into nihilism, not going into reification. Remember I read you a quote one time from Āryadeva. He says:

Those with little merit do not even entertain questions regarding this Dharma, these teachings of emptiness. But even by seeing the slightest bit, one is better off. Even entertaining a question about it tears saṃsāra to shreds.^[3]

We're planting seeds here. A lot of what we're doing is planting seeds, most definitely, and that's really okay. Some of the fruit we will see here. You will see, and you already have seen, fruit in your practice, some sense, as I said before -- "Is this happening? Is that happening? Is there a little less suffering?" It's fruit here and now. And we repeat that, and we consolidate it. Some fruit comes up later, and that's really okay. Some fruit might be who knows when. But in terms of -- what should we say -- planting those seeds, sometimes they're seeds of understanding, or we plant them through understanding, grappling with concepts. That's one way. The second way is in the meditation, really working in the meditation and finding things that work. And a third way is what we were talking about, in life. This is as I'm moving around. This is in my relationship. This is in my work period. This is whatever it is. All those three are important -- understanding, meditation, and life situations -- to get the fullness.

So we might hear in a talk, as I said, teacher or someone, or we read something, and it's not describing where we are. It's describing beyond where we are. And then what happens? But a similar and related question is, what's the reaction? What's the attitude when we hear something we don't understand? Very often, and this may not be so much the case in this group or for some of you not the case, but very often -- and I run into this a lot -- "I'm stupid." A person goes, again, into the inner critic, and questioning their intelligence. The measuring mind, the comparing mind, the self-judging mind. And sometimes, in fact quite often in our culture, a person has been a little bit traumatized by the school experience around intelligence and their intellect, etc., and there can be an enormous amount of pain around that. So we will be talking about some conceptual things, and it might feel, "I don't understand that. I must be stupid," and it goes right back to third grade when Ms Mackey used to slap me on the back of the knees with a ruler for whatever it was. [laughter] I mean, I'm joking, but actually it can be really quite a deep pain, or some family dynamic that's actually quite tied in with the judgment of intelligence, and it can go right to that place of pain and contraction. Often, for a lot of people, that's the case.

I found this. I'm not sure where it's from. I'll speak more about it tomorrow night. It's seven ways, seven conditions for starving wisdom or feeding confusion. [laughter] The seventh is being influenced by thoughts such as, "Someone like me could never understand this." Someone like me, little old me, could never understand this. The key word is influence. So it may come up as a thought, but buying into that based on past experience and the pain that we have around intelligence or measures of intelligence or intellectuality, etc. The fifth one is kind of the opposite: thinking you already know things and thus do not have to study or analyse. It's the opposite. On the opening talk, I asked, among other things, for two things: openness and humility.

But this is very interesting. So one reaction is "I'm stupid." That's one place that it can land. And it's really important to be aware of this, because we will encounter it, if not on this retreat, in other situations when the teachings start to go quite deep and difficult. Can also land -- the teacher's saying something, or you're reading something: "I don't understand. It doesn't matter. It's okay. It doesn't matter." And we stop engaging. We stop engaging with what's being said or what's being communicated. We stop grappling, and we stop questioning, and we lose interest. And again, that's very common for other personalities or the same person at a different time. To me, as the retreat goes on, there's a lot to grapple with here. Just even on an intellectual level, there's a lot to grapple with.

Or, third possibility -- and again, just to check, what's your favourite flavour here? What do you notice yourself doing? And as the retreat goes on, this retreat or other retreats that you do, noticing what it is in the moment. Third possibility: if it's difficult to understand, "It's so intellectual. This can't be right. The truth has to be simple. The truth is simple. Doesn't everyone say that? The truth is simple, and the truth is non-conceptual," and therefore dismissing. Just to be aware of this. Or maybe John, maybe me, maybe another teacher, "He/she is so intellectual," and dismissing, dismissing them. Or, and really, really crucial, something happens when we don't understand something, and the heart closes. The heart just shrinks. Why is that? Why does it need to do that? Does it need to do that?

Or, again, we could feel inspired. There's something I don't understand, and actually feel inspired and seek to understand. Or -- and on this retreat particularly, and I want to say this; I think I might have said it already, but it's very important -- filing something for later. Again, there's too much, just in terms of ideas. It's okay to just say, "You know, I don't get it, and I'm going to file it for later, and I'll investigate it later." Or even, "I do get it, and I'm still going to file it for later." And that later could be hours later, grappling with it, questioning it. Could be days later. Could be years later. And that's really, really fine. That's actually skilful and appropriate.

So some stuff, certainly on this retreat, that's being communicated -- but I'm sure many of you have encountered it in the Dharma in the past -- some stuff is just difficult. It's just difficult stuff. It's difficult to understand. It's difficult to penetrate what's being said, either because it's said in a very cryptic sort of mystical way or it's said the opposite -- in a very, very clear kind of rational way. But either way it's difficult to understand. And again, it's rare that we would get it all at once. Maybe I'm not going to get all this at once. I'm probably not. And we can feel uncomfortable with that. We probably will feel uncomfortable with that. There's a quote I absolutely love by Sakya Paṇḍita, who was a very great Tibetan teacher from, I think, the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. He says:

Wise people suffer while they learn. If you want to be comfortable, forget about becoming wise. People who are attached to small pleasures don't get big ones.^[4]

I think -- a lot of wisdom in that. And again, if we talk about how we're listening to Dharma talks, sometimes, I think, if we're honest with ourselves -- and I know this because people regularly tell me -- we hear a Dharma talk, and it says what we already know, and we like that. [laughter] For some reason, we like that. Why would we want that? What's going on there? Why would we want that? I mean, maybe we want to feel, "I know." Often someone will say to me about a talk I gave, or about a talk someone else gave, that I'm teaching a retreat on, "That was a great talk." And what one finds when they explain why they thought it was great, it was because, actually, it agreed with the views that they already had. [laughter] And it's important to see this. It's like, what is going on there? Would we want, do we want to be really challenged? And sometimes, again, it goes right back to the inner critic, that sometimes the inner critic is so strong we actually want a relief from the sense of inner critic by having a feeling like, "I knew that. I understood that already," or whatever it is. The feeling of not getting it, of not knowing, is actually quite strong, and we want a relief from it.

If we feel uncomfortable on this retreat, and there's many ways, I know, that you can feel uncomfortable and that you perhaps already are, but in relationship to the teachings, if I feel uncomfortable, it may be it's because I'm being stretched and challenged, and there's the possibility of learning and growing there. There may well be that. And maybe that's important. I actually feel it's an important part of -- I feel uncomfortable a lot with what I study and practise. I feel it's healthy.

If we continue with this: what is the attitude to the sense of there being a kind of depth of understanding, a spectrum to the depth? And again, we can feel overwhelmed. We could feel impatient. We could feel self-critical or confused. We could also kind of stop wherever we are in our understanding, and just kind of, "That's it," not look any further, and not keep questioning. So the fourth practice I'll introduce this week -- sorry, fourth talk, the second practice I'll introduce this week, is one of the most popular places to stop. Very, very common for people to just kind of say, "This is it now. I've got it. I just need to learn this. I just need to hang out in this." Or restricting the teachings on emptiness to kind of being the same as impermanence, or just about the personal selflessness. There's plenty of places we can stop, and in that stopping, actually find a lot of support in texts and scriptures, etc., that would seem to support us stopping there. There's something about keeping the integrity and keeping the passion and keeping the questioning alive.

One of my teachers said to me, "Get attached." It's actually fine, really fine to station in these places of relative freedom and understanding, stay there even for a while. But they're provisional. So you can be staying there and enjoying that, but really just knowing that there's further to go. And that, partly, is why there's so much on this course. If you don't feel that already, you certainly will by the end of it, that there's a lot offered on this course. And it's partly because I want you to get a sense of, if you're in this place, great -- and there's more, and just to know that there's more. In the Dzogchen tradition they have a phrase I really love. It's extremely wise. It says, "Trust your experience," your meditative experience, "but keep refining your view." To not trust my experience would be to get in the inner critic and self-doubt, but keep refining the view. Whatever level we might reach in understanding emptiness, pretty much rest assured there's more to understand, there's deeper to go, there's more fullness, there's more radicality there. Trust your experience, but keep refining your view.

So in that, and again this is a kind of preview talk, so some of the teachings, they may sound at times very picky and very sort of pedantic or very complex or this and that. But I feel that if we're practising and inquiring with real integrity and real care, the subtleties actually become really, really important. They really become important. And stuff that I feel like I'm wrestling with in my understanding right now and my practice and my study, I wouldn't have gone near it x years ago. It just would have seemed the most completely picky, and now it seems almost like life and death. I feel that if there's integrity a person will yearn for clarity rather than rejecting precision or complexity, even.

So all this, all this, all this, and to see, how's my general response to this, my general tendency of how I respond to all this stuff. And, as I said, that's going to shift. We notice in practice, and you notice over a day of practice -- you've probably even noticed in the course of this talk -- how the attitude shifts moment to moment, because like everything else, it's impermanent. So to me, part of the art of practice is actually keeping one eye, so to speak, on my relationship with practice. It's actually all the time being kind of lightly interested in my relationship with practice. Where there's a practice, there's a relationship with practice. In any moment of practice, there's that moment of relating to practice. It's important to see, what is it right now? Because it slips into things that may not be that helpful, and we can encourage it in a different direction.

As I was saying on the opening talk -- and this is a review question -- am I nourishing joy? Am I nourishing warmth? Am I nourishing a sense of juiciness, of gratitude, of appreciation? Are those things there? Are we taking care of them? Beauty, devotion, kindness to oneself, love of the Dharma, sense of possibility. All these things need caring for. They're part of what makes up our sense of the relationship to practice. One of the reasons I had the idea of the candle was if practice is just about me, and just for me, it's very easy that the inner critic comes in there. When I nourish and nurture a relationship with practice that's actually far beyond just me and what I get out of it, it tends to diffuse the degree to which the inner critic can get involved. It's actually gone beyond the self and the self-notion. So all that stuff -- joy, warmth, juice, gratitude, appreciation -- can also be nourished by our silence and our sense of silence and our sense of presence and simplicity and curiosity and by the sense of possibility. Again, everything snowballs together.

We can also see that our interest, our interest in all this goes up and down. Sometimes you feel really compelled. Other times you just feel, well, a bit bored, basically, either in the practice or in the teachings. And to notice that. Interest is a conditioned phenomenon like all others, and it gets more and it gets less. The thing is, can I respond to that? Am I being responsive? It's very -- this goes back to something I said much earlier in terms of Śāntideva -- it's very difficult to keep responding in these ways and keep nourishing and nourishing the effort if I'm not convinced that delusion brings suffering. If I'm not actually convinced that there's a relationship between, a very, very strong relationship between delusion and suffering, I won't be so interested.

So, interest comes and goes, and rises and falls, and all the other stuff comes and goes, and rises to fall. How to keep it fresh and alive? How do I keep it fresh and alive on a retreat and in my daily life? One possibility is, and an important thing is, taking risks. Taking risks. Am I taking risks? And what possible risks can I take in my practice? It might be something just so simple as sitting longer. Feeling like one confines oneself to this amount of time, whether it's forty-five minutes -- actually, why not just go for it and sit longer? And there's a risk there. We don't know what will happen, if it will be okay. Getting up late, getting up early, all of this, just shaking up the habits and playing one's edges. You've been here -- is it a week? A little over a week. And how easily one can get into retreat habits, and keeping that shaken up is really, really important. Sometimes we're creatures of habit, and we just find our groove of comfort. Keeping an edge to things. Finding a way to shake it up and keep an edge and play one's edges.

So in our life, you know, there's a thousand things every day, outside retreat as well, a thousand things, habits that actually can increase our sense of openness and energy or decrease them. I'm talking about things like our relationship with food, with TV, with the way we speak, with awareness of our aspirations and intentions. All of this feeds into this melting pot inside, and either raises and opens, or does the opposite. I haven't had interviews this week yet except three today, three or four today, but I don't know how it's going for a lot of people, even so far with these practices. As I said, suffering sometimes goes out, self-sense sometimes goes -- there's some sense of, "Ooo, this is something to be pursued." Sometimes, and I don't know whether anyone's found this yet, sometimes we do these practices and fear comes up. Has anyone found that? Has that been the case? Yeah? Fear comes up.

Very important fact. It comes up either through the samādhi sometimes, or through the insight practices. And partly what's happening, either through the samādhi or through the insight, is that we're a little bit eroding our usual bearings, our usual sense of self and definition, and the kind of texture of experience that we usually relate to. And for a lot of people at some point, some fear comes in relationship to the unfamiliarity, and in relationship to the quieting of the self. So sometimes the fear that comes up is so strong that one needs to address the fear. More often than not, it's actually there, but it's kind of just one part of what's going on. As I was saying in one of the talks, we usually get sucked into it because it's the difficult thing. So sometimes it's not so strong, and it's almost like just standing back a little bit and becoming aware I've got fear, and I've also got maybe something quite nice going on: sense of freedom, sense of spaciousness, a sense of peace in some degree, or relief or release. And actually seeing, not pushing away the fear, not denying it, not squashing it, acknowledging it but just leaning the mind over into the sense of well-being, what might be a physical sense of well-being, of that space of letting go.

What that does is it can reassure the cells, the being, that actually, yeah, that's a good place to go, and it kind of calms the fear. Make sense as a practice? Does that make sense? Yeah? When we let go to a significant degree, when we let go, there's usually that combination: there's loveliness, and there's fear. We need to notice the loveliness, because that is what will help soften the fear long-term. Sometimes I say to people, you know, it's like you've run a bath, and you're not sure if it's too hot. So you put your toe in, and you get used to that. And that's okay, so you put your foot in, and maybe that's okay. And then you put your calf in -- okay. And then your leg -- that's okay. And then finally you can completely abandon yourself to the bath. So these spaces that come from letting go, through the three characteristics or through samādhi, similar. They take getting familiar with, and finally we have no reservations at all, we're completely abandoning ourselves and letting go of the self in that way.

Another response is sadness. That's also quite an interesting one. Generally, as I said, generally the movement of emptiness, seeing the emptiness of things, is into freedom, release, joy, peace, etc., relief. Sometimes it brings up sadness, and sometimes it's sadness even when we know that what we're letting go of is not helping us. We just -- it's somehow been part of us. Sometimes there's a sense of letting go of a part of ourselves, which we aren't really doing, but sometimes sadness can come up. And again, do I need to be with that sadness? Do I just need to find my way through it?

Another possibility outside of the sort of more expected freedom and relief and all that is that a coldness or a distance comes into the practice. Has anyone noticed this? Yeah? Okay. So this also can happen at times. Couple of options there. You can go back to a samādhi practice or a mettā practice, something that brings a bit more heart quality.

Yogi 7: I'm finding today that -- normally my samādhi and my mettā is just, like, no problem, and partly I think it's because I've been trying to make a conscious choice not to do that, but yeah, later today I made a conscious choice to do it because I felt that I was getting this ...

Rob: To do the samādhi or the mettā?

Yogi 7: Yeah, and just, I felt complete block. Really clear aversion. It was blatantly obvious to me, but it still irritated me. And it's not really fear; it's just, I think it's bringing up frustration.

Rob: Okay. That they feel blocked, you mean?

Yogi 7: Yeah. That I can't get that sense of peace that should be readily available.

Rob: Okay, okay. Yeah. So peace that comes one way is available in another way, usually. Always with practice we have more than one option. So this door feels closed? Okay, let's go this door, you know. And sometimes we just have to put up with that and be okay and work with the frustration. But a second possibility is actually doing the practice of anattā, for instance, on the sense of coldness. So anattā is one that might bring that sense of coldness at times, and then actually seeing that's just another thing going on, and that also is 'not me, not mine,' seeing what happens then. Because basically what's happened is -- we'll talk more about this as the retreat goes on, but the thing that happens is we've then attached, without realizing it, to the sense of coldness or distance or disconnection, and we've owned that and solidified it that way. So just kind of seeing that's just another phenomenon happening, and we can let go that way, too.

Yogi 7: It feels nice to -- I know it would be very easy to do the anattā on that, if that makes sense.

Rob: So try, try. Yeah, good. One thing I want to throw out as well. So with these three characteristics, because we're using them as kind of -- I don't know really what the -- I was going to say springboards, but that's not really the right word; they're avenues, they're tunnels, so we're progressing with them. But part of that is, and I'm putting this out for you, is begin to notice, very specifically, as specifically as you can, what happens when you engage in these practices. Just anything you notice is going to be important. So, sometimes things happen, and it doesn't seem significant. So we don't kind of note, "Oh, that was interesting." So I'm asking you to be specific.

Yogi 8: Should that be something quite ...

Rob: Anything. Doesn't have to be dramatic.

Yogi 8: Just something quite short?

Rob: Yeah, yeah. It might be just a glimpse of something. Just begin to notice. So we're interested in what happens to the whole texture of experience and self when we do that. I wonder if I should just stop there, actually? I've got more to say, but is that ...? You guys seem a little bit tired, so I think I'll stop there.

Yogi 9: The practice of mental noting [?], is that kind of similar to anattā [?].

Rob: How, for instance?

Yogi 9: If there's thoughts and you just say, "Thinking," with a kind of understanding that it's just thoughts.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, good. Could everyone hear that? So yes, absolutely. In other words, what's important, with this anattā practice -- and it's interesting, last year almost no one took it up, and this year quite a few people have, which is great -- it's just a way of looking, whatever helps us get to that way of looking. So it could be, as I was saying, "not me, not mine," you've got a quiet label going, could be "not-self" as a label. Could be no label, it's just that you find that way. Could be the noting actually helps set up that relationship with things, which is a relationship of non-identification.

Yogi 9: Is that the way that particular exercise, practice was conceived?

Rob: I think it had a few things, but the primary thing it had in mind was just actually being clear what was going on, a sort of very basic mindfulness exercise. Just if there's thinking going on, know that thinking is going on. For some people, it ends up kind of tripping over its own feet and getting in the way. For other people, it will actually progress into a sense of the kind of thing you're talking about, actually, or impermanence, or something else; it will actually naturally evolve into a kind of sense of the three characteristics. But then, if you pursue it at that point, the same practice has got a slightly different subscript. It's actually then more an anattā practice. And that's what we want, in terms of this retreat. It's not just an exercise in mindfulness, in being clear what's going on in the moment, but actually you're using it primarily as a way of looking and encouraging the mind into a different relationship with what's going on. Yeah? So, great if it works.

Yogi 10: [?]

Rob: Absolutely. Yes, yes. Which? What was happening? The noting? Yeah, okay. Good.

Yogi 11: For me, I know I'm doing things differently, but I can't name what they are. I can't say it's A, B, or C. I don't -- I can't name which practices. It feels like when I try to do that ...

Rob: Be clear, you mean, about which it is?

Yogi 11: Yeah, it defeats the purpose.

Rob: Okay. So maybe when we meet in an interview, we can go into more specifics, and if you just describe to me when we meet what you're doing, I can have a sense.

Yogi 11: Is it important that I know which one is which?

Rob: Yes and no. I mean, what's really the most important thing is that we're having a sense of some relief or release coming out, and if that's the case, then basically what's gone on is that there's some degree, some way in which the clinging or craving in relationship to experience has been lessened. That's what's important, and that's what's absolutely most fundamentally important. So that's going on, and maybe when you describe to me when we meet exactly, I can say, "Oh, that sounds like da-da-da." But that's, I would say, at this point, less important. The important thing is you have the sense of relief or release, and also that you have a sense -- and I'm not sure if I said it clearly enough tonight -- that it's something that you have a sense of, "Actually, this could go really quite deep. I could develop this." And then, as I just said, begin to notice what happens to self, but also to experience and the whole thing, the whole show, what happens to the show when I do this. Because this relates to the nature of perception, the emptiness of perception we're going to get into. So the other stuff is kind of details, and you can let me try to figure it out if you want when we meet. That's no problem. But if you feel good about that, then that's great.

Yogi 11: Yeah, because otherwise I can get technical about this stuff. Instead of focusing on the practice, I start to say, "Well, does it go in this pigeonhole, this one, or this one?"

Rob: Yeah, then don't worry about it. What you want is a practice that you have a sense of, "This is working. Great. This is working, and I can feel it working, and I can also feel a sense of its potential," or that it has some potential to deepen and develop in subtlety, etc., as I said. And the rest, yeah, you can leave up to people like me. [laughter]

Yogi 11: And maybe it'll come over time, but right now ...

Rob: Yeah, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Okay? Okey-doke. So as I said earlier, tonight's a talk that, again, it might feel like, "Well, I know all that," or it's obvious. But it comes up, it comes up, it comes up, it comes up so often, and sometimes it comes up, and we don't even know it's coming up. So hopefully it's something you can keep within the field of awareness for the rest of the retreat, you know, these kinds of issues. Okay?

Yogi 12: [?]

Rob: Yeah, I was going to ask you guys -- well, I could ask you now, or I could ask you in a few days time. When would you like to be asked? [laughter] Now? Okay. So -- you don't need to record this part. So on this retreat, usually what happens about now or a little later ...