Ending Blame

Okay, so I just want to offer something that touches on both the mettā in a way, and also beginning to go into the emptiness -- both, together. Because clearly sometimes what blocks love, what blocks our self-love, is the way we can blame ourselves, blame ourselves for this or for that, or for something that happened or didn't happen. And similarly, what can block love of others is also blaming another. So I want to just go into this in a certain way.

There's something in our life we're doing, and it doesn't go well, and very easily, we blame the self. Or we make a mistake, and we blame the self. Or I did something, you know, 'wrong,' or whatever, or I didn't do something, I should have done something and I didn't. I neglected it, I forgot, whatever it was. And blame the self. Or someone else is blaming you, and you just take that on, you just absorb that, you believe that.

So I don't know if anyone -- if you've given presentations, or if you're a performer of anything and you've done different performances. Or I see it very, very clearly when I give Dharma talks: it looks like, and maybe it sounds like, I'm giving the Dharma talk. [laughs] I mean, of course, that's true, but at another level, that's not actually my experience. If you are a performer, maybe you have a sense of this, or if you've given presentations. My sense is actually we give the Dharma talk together. This is really what I want to go into today: there's a whole confluence of conditions that come together -- here, now, in this case for a Dharma talk -- and all that together makes the talk. So a person goes, "Wow! It was great," or "It was really alive," or "It was really really boring," or whatever, or it feels a certain way, or it comes out this way or that way. In a way, usually when I give a talk, even if I talk for like an hour and a half, usually it fits on one piece of paper. It's just little shorthand notes. The choice of words, the tone of the voice, all this, is kind of dependent on the whole field of what's going on here.

Now, if you guys have had too much for lunch, that affects the Dharma talk. If you didn't sleep well last night ... Of course, same for me: if I've had too much lunch, and I didn't [sleep well], and I'm tired or whatever, all that. But even in the moment, you get a sense of where something is landing, and the reaction to that, and that affects what's said. And it's this play of conditions coming together.

A person could say, "Well," or I could say, you know, going to a Dharma talk, "That didn't go very well or whatever. Maybe they think I'm boring or da-da-da-da-da." But actually, it's not -- it's this confluence. Or, you know, you're in the office, if you work in an office, and you make a mistake. You didn't file something right, or you didn't put the data in properly, whatever it is. And again, very quickly there's the self-blame, rather than seeing: "Well, what were the conditions that either supported the mistake or didn't support the action (whichever way you want to look at it)?" Let's say, very simple, I was tired. I'm tired. There was that inner condition of the consciousness, tiredness. There were actually lots of people in the office at that time, all wanting different things and talking, and there was too much distraction. Or the boss was around, standing over my shoulder, breathing down my neck, giving me a hard time. Whatever it was. There was a pressure in the outer situation.

You're with a friend -- and again, tiredness is such a big one -- you're just tired, and the friend is sharing something and, you know, they're going through a hard time or whatever. And you find, or they point out, "Hey, you're not being as empathic as you usually are or you could be," or whatever. It's a function of the inner state, which is, "Well, I'm tired now. I'm not as available, as open." Sometimes, and this is quite an interesting one, sometimes, especially in the context of a mettā retreat, we're with someone, and it's not that we're tired, but we would expect a sense of empathy and there isn't. That can be for all kinds of complex reasons -- about what's going on in them as well. There's a sense of something in there that's actually preventing empathy.

So there's this sense of a confluence, a web of conditions coming together, and out of that web gets born a result or an action. In avijjā, in delusion, we tend to blame the self. We point at one cause, and usually that cause is the self, because the self tends to think of itself as the star of the show. It wants the centre stage, even if that's going to be the villain and a painful thing. It's like, "It was me. I'm responsible. I, I, I, I, I." It always casts itself as the centre hub of what's going on, rather than a different way of looking which is much more open, and seeing: all these conditions come together, and out comes the action.

So when we open it up, if we're going to be kind of -- I don't know what the word is -- 'categorical' about it, you've got conditions. (1) Inner conditions in the present -- so, for example, tiredness. (2) You've got outer conditions in the present -- something that's coming in the situation, in the environment; for instance, your [the other's] tiredness or, like I said, too many people in the office, or pressure, or whatever it is. (3) You've got inner conditions from the past. (4) And you've got outer conditions from the past. All these come together and they create what's happening.

So let's take a few examples of this. Obviously the point of this is that when I deconstruct it, so to speak, in this way, I'm taking away the self-blame, and that allows more self-love to open up. And it's also moving away from the self-view into what we could call more of a view that's in line with emptiness, beginning to be in line with emptiness.

Let's say you have a 'bad meditation,' whatever that means. You're in here, and you're nodding, or there's just sluggishness or sleepiness. Well, maybe some of that's fed by outer conditions. Maybe it's just that the room is very hot, and when the room is hot, there's a tendency for sleepiness (could also be a tendency for agitation as well). Maybe you're tired, again, because you didn't sleep that well. So really simple things, you know. But we tend to exclude them in this narrowing down of the vision. Insight also has to do with opening up the vision in some ways. We tend to narrow it down and make it just about the self, and exclude sometimes what's actually really quite obvious as a feeding factor, as a feeding condition. Maybe you didn't take exercise. So that's part of the past conditions: it's like, well, the energy has become sluggish because I'm not taking exercise in the day. And I go to sit, and then the only exercise I get is the neck muscles pulling up the head! [laughter] Maybe I took too much food at lunch. You know, they put something -- what's a favourite dish? [laughs] I don't know. They put ...

Yogi: Cake!

Rob: Cake! Okay, cake, good. [laughter] They put cake out, and there it goes, and we went back for third helpings! And that's a condition. It's going to affect the digestive system, and then through that, the metabolism and the consciousness, etc.

Sometimes tiredness is an emotion coming up, an emotion that wants to show itself and there's resistance to that, and the resistance manifests as kind of sluggishness and tiredness. It's like, "Well, I'll just check out by kind of going a bit unconscious," and the mind just contracts: "I don't want to deal with this." But actually that emotion coming up and also the resistance to it is part of a process unfolding. And we don't tend to see it that way. Again, we just think, "Oh, I'm just tired." Or we expect this emotion to come up without resistance necessarily, but maybe it's really on our edge. It's really on our edge, so we expect it to have some resistance. We expect there to be some resistance. At on one level, this is very, very simple, but we exclude this from our awareness.

I think it was this autumn, and I think I was going to teach a day-long, a meditation day retreat, in Oxford, if I remember -- maybe Brighton. And I was leaving here to catch a train just after lunch on a Friday afternoon, to go teach there on a Saturday. And I had done too much, tried to do too much work, etc., in the morning, and so I left late. By the time I got in the car to drive to the station, it was late. So I was -- a little extra pressure on the accelerator, through the lanes, and then halfway to the station, I thought, "Oh! The train tickets!" [laughter] So I stopped the car in the middle of the lane, rummaged through my bag, and I couldn't find the train tickets. I thought, "Oh, they're in my desk!" Reversed, back, da-da-da, rushed in, got the train tickets. They were in my desk. Put them in my wallet, etc. Back in the car, really fast to the station. [laughter] Dangerously fast on the lanes.

Got to the station, and at Newton Abbot, you actually have to park quite a way from the station, so I parked this other side of the ... it's like over a green and stuff. Parked there, thought "Now it's getting late for the train," so got the bag, rushed to the station, train was late anyway. [laughter] And then I was waiting for this now late train, and then I thought, "Ugh. The car windows. Did I close the car windows?" Because it was a hot day. And it turned out, what actually ended up happening, I think I couldn't go back at that point, so I called a friend later from Oxford, who very kindly went to check, and I had closed them.

But the point is that, especially as a meditation teacher, you go [tutting noises], "Where's the mindfulness? Should you really be doing this job?" [laughter] So all that could go on. I mean, for me, mindfulness is really not the main thing, but anyway. More importantly, there's that view that could contract there, but there's a whole other way of looking at it, which is: the conditions were coming together that there weren't the inner and outer conditions to support a moment of mindfulness in those, you know, thirty seconds as I was locking the car, etc. At that time, because of the rushing, etc., there weren't the inner and the outer conditions to support the arising of the mind state of mindfulness.

Now, I could, say, get identified with mindfulness and identified as a good meditator or a good meditation teacher, all this stuff. It's like, no. Mindfulness arises when the conditions are there for mindfulness. You could say, "Oh, yeah, but you didn't remember," or a person is like, "I didn't remember to be mindful," so it's still your fault. [laughter] This is what the self wants to convince itself, that it's our fault: "I didn't remember to ..."

But let's deconstruct it a bit more. Where does remembering come from? Where does a moment of remembering come from? So mindfulness, a moment of mindfulness, the condition of a moment of mindfulness is supported by the condition of a moment of remembering to be mindful, generally. Yeah? Where does remembering come from? Well, it comes from reminders. In the outer present, it comes from reminders. So, you know, when we're on retreat, and the teacher goes, "Be mindful. Where's your mind now? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," it's reminders to be mindful. And you see the Buddha statue -- it's reminders to be mindful. The more reminders in the outer, well, the more chance of a moment of remembering, and then the mindfulness. It's also, as I said, dependent on the mind state. So a hurried mind state -- "I need to get to that train so that I show up for the teaching, so they don't think 'Where the hell is Rob, because he's supposed to be teaching?'" etc. -- that hurried mind state doesn't support the arising of mindfulness so much.

And then there's the past, as well, the outer past. There's a history of reminders. And if I've been in these kind of situations a lot, well, my past has been saturated with the history of reminders to be mindful. I've long ago lost count of how many times I've been told to be mindful by other teachers, and read this and heard that, etc. So there's a momentum in the past of these reminders to be mindful, and that feeds the present arising of the remembering to be mindful. And also my own history of remembering -- there's the inner past. The more I remember to be mindful, the more I'm likely to remember to be mindful in the future.

So none of that -- I take all this apart, and that remembering, I can't point at the remembering and blame myself for not remembering. The inner present, that absence of remembering, is also, we say, not-self. Where's the self in that? I can take it apart, and there's not the self in there. Yeah? We're going to go into this much more later on, this kind of unfindability of the self. I can't point to something and say, "You are to blame. That is to blame," because when I look inside, what I see is conditions fed by other conditions, fed by other conditions, etc., all coming together. And I can't point to any of them and say, "That's the self. That is to blame."

Similarly, in that example before about being sleepy in the meditation, one of the things I said was maybe I took too much food, maybe you took too much cake or whatever it was. Well, what's going on there? And again, very easily: "Ah, yes, you see! The self is a greedy self. I am greedy. I'm a pig." And it's so unkind! [laughter] There's so much stuff around food. Food is so charged, generally, for people in this culture, and so much judgment, and all this stuff that goes around it. Extremely painful, can be. But again, it's like opening it up -- don't let the vision constrict and get myopic around what's going on. It's like opening it up: what are the conditions there? And again, well, okay, at the counter in the dining room, there was a moment or moments of greed, you could say. Actually, if I look more carefully at it, oftentimes taking too much food has more to do with fear than to do with greed. I don't know if anyone's noticed that. It has more to do with fear and not having enough, and "Maybe I won't have enough." And it's not actually so much about greed. Those moments of greed or fear, in that moment, they were more powerful than the qualities of mindfulness or discernment or wisdom, etc. That's all. That's all that was happening. And again, they're fed by inner and outer conditions, present and past.

You could put other outer conditions in there that can affect it in different ways, you know. You can put all kinds of conditions that would affect that moment of taking more cake, or not, in different ways. I mean, I don't know how you see Catherine and I, but if you did see us as terribly fearsome authority figures, which you may ... [laughter] Hey! [laughter] That's what we're going for! I have to rethink this one. [laughter] Let's say you did. We'll have to work harder on it. Let's say you did, and I happen to be behind you in the queue for the cake, looking over your shoulder. Well, that would be an outer condition that would probably affect how much cake you would take. There's so much that affects it. It's a web of conditions. And especially around food, etc., it's so complex what comes from the culture around that and the advertisement and the pressure, all this stuff, that food gets very charged. Outer and inner, past and present.

Some of this, some of looking this way has to do with understanding and kind of unpicking this web of conditions, to actually see differently. One classic example of the way things can get so entangled and painful and full of blame (either for self or other, in fact) is in a couple relationship -- a classic dynamic of pain here. Let's say two people are in a relationship, and one has a pattern, brought with them from the past, of fear of being constricted by/in the relationship, a fear of not having freedom, a fear of kind of feeling a little bit imprisoned. Very common pattern. And as it often happens, that marries very well with the opposite pattern of Person B, who has a fear of abandonment and a fear of rejection. Put these two together ... [laughter] I've forgotten what the chemistry experiment was when I was in high school. I think it was magnesium and water or something, and it just goes ... [exploding sound]

What happens? Person A one day says, "I want, I need, a bit of space." And Person B hears that, feels threatened by it, clings tighter. The perception of that, being clung to tighter, wanting more contact, sends Person A into recoil: I want more space. I flee to the sense of space. And Person B who wants more contact, seeing that recoil and wanting more space, clings tighter because it threatens them with abandonment and rejection. And so it goes round, and "boom!" goes the suffering and the pain. Very easily with that, either Person A or Person B can think, after being in that kind of pain, maybe just once, maybe in different relationships, "There's something wrong with me. I can't do relationships." Actually don't see the pattern that's going on, the dynamic, the confluence of conditions that's going on. It's "I'm broken inside. I just can't do relationships. There's something wrong with me," the self-blame, rather than understanding. What needs to happen is we need to understand the dynamic there. We need to understand the dynamic.

Now, that's a classic one. But actually even that one is -- I'm not sure if this is a sidetrack; I don't think it is, but -- even that one, it's not always that those kind of patterns are always about fear. In other words, Person A and Person B, it might not be that there's a fear of constriction. It might not be that there's much of a fear of abandonment or rejection. It might just be that the so-called -- what do you call it? -- the thrust or the arrow of one person's personality expression is towards space. There's a love of spaciousness. There's also, for them, the relationship might be really important, but it's not necessarily the most important thing in their life. It might be that their sense of mission, their sense of what they want to create or give in the world, is actually more important than the relationship. Still, the relationship is very important.

And for Person B, again, it's not about fear; it's that the relationship, the loving, the contact, is actually the most important thing, and there's that love of that. So it's almost like -- it's not about fear, but there's just a tendency in different directions, can be, in some relationships. Oftentimes those two people will actually attract each other, funnily enough. The polarity there actually attracts each other. And there's a healthy tension in that. It doesn't have to be a problem. If I decide it's a problem, if I feel it as a problem, it becomes a problem. Or it could just be a healthy tension.

But when the conditions come together, and we react or see it in the wrong way, it starts really influencing the whole perception of things. So this person who might want space and feel like they need enough space in their life, and that's just how they are, it's not that they don't want to be in the relationship, it's not that they don't love, but they just need a certain amount of space. When they don't get that, their space feels intruded upon, and their perception of the partner can actually start to change. And they see the partner as someone who's intruding on them, and they actually start to look ugly. The very way that they look starts to change, and vice versa. In that situation, one needs to give messages to each other that kind of support this healthy tension without being threatened by it. And what that's doing is, if we give the messages, we're actually adding to the outer conditions. We're adding to this mix of conditions. And we take them in, so then they become inner conditions.

So for example, the person who wants the space, who likes that sort of sense of freedom within a relationship, who has this sense of other stuff that they want to do and achieve and create and manifest, they need to communicate, perhaps, they need to communicate a kind of reassurance: "I do love you. I really love you, and I need my space. I'm going to go off and do this thing, and I'm going to be back. I'm coming back." And the person whose primary thing is the contact and the love and the loving contact, they need to communicate, "You're free to go. You're free to have your space." And that makes all the difference. Because when the person who wants the space is given space, then they want to come back. When they feel like they're not given space, they don't want to come back -- it's like they want even more space. So this confluence of conditions, it can be so painful, so painful. And yet, in a way, it's just a matter of communication, understanding needs, communicating that, and changing the mix, changing the mix a little bit.

Again, it could be that pattern, it could be other patterns, but with friends or at work, relationships at work, or with lovers, partners, whatever, any kind of relationship, in organizations when there are political difficulties within organizations, very easily it goes to, "It's your fault" or "It's my fault." And the blame lands. And that's rarely helpful, and it's also rarely true. What happens is, reactions and communications spark off each other very quickly and create kind of feedback loops. So, much more helpful -- and I'm not suggesting this is easy, but much more helpful is, what is it for two people, whatever their relationship (whether they're friends, or work colleagues, or even a boss and a junior person at work, or a couple, whatever it is), what is it to be together, on the same team, looking at the dynamic together? Very easily it goes out of that into, "You. Yeah, but you. Yeah, but you." So together, trying to understand the dynamic that happens together.

So all of this, we could call it a way of re-viewing something, re-viewing. And it relates to something Catherine was saying -- was it the other night? -- about re-spect: spectacle, re-inspecting. That's another way -- re-inspecting something. And this may happen in the present, but often it's really, really healing to do it for something that's happened in the past that we feel we're blaming ourself for or whatever. Actually look at it again. What happens with guilt, a feeling of guilt about something, is that I'm looking back at the past at this thing that happened, and I'm seeing it in terms of the self. And the whole view of it is just wrapped around the self and stuck in the past, versus actually re-viewing it and opening that view up. Then I might learn something about different ways I want to do things, and it's more creative and it starts to look forward. There may still be remorse, regret for what happened, sadness, but that's different than guilt, which is self-centred. Remorse is action-centred. It's learning about actions and what's helpful and what's not helpful. So one has the self in it, and one is much more liberated from the self. Really, really important.

So, re-viewing things, re-specting things. And when we do that, the suffering begins to drain out of things. In a way, the head and the heart begin working together, and this is so important in practice. Sometimes we feel the head is not included, or "Oh, that's just intellectual," whatever. Actually our conceiving mind is really important, and bringing that in service of the heart. We're dissolving suffering and opening up the channels of love, the space for love to flow, softening things that way.

But all this is part of that flexibility of view that we've touched on at different times. So to deconstruct things this way doesn't then mean I decide that, you know, I move to a position where I never take responsibility for anything I've ever said or done, that I, "Oh, it's all right, there's no self, so I can just kind of be completely obnoxious." It's not that extreme. Or that I don't accept appreciation. You know, if someone's really trying to communicate some heartfelt appreciation, that's about the self, in a way. And one can receive that, and that's important to be able to receive that. So it's flexibility of view. They're both possible.

We're deconstructing something, and in a way, you can be quite analytical about it, and that can be helpful, but also what's happening is there's a kind of softening. You're softening the view. Because what's happened in blame and self-blame is rigidity has come in, a rigidity of view. And it's landed on the self, and it's just grasped it really tightly, and it's rigid, and we're softening it. We're opening the view.

And like when we were talking about food and the complexity in terms of my emotion in relationship to food at this moment, or my history of emotion in relationship to food, that's fed by all kinds of things. My inner past, my inner stream of feeling or thought or view about something, is fed also by the outer, of course: this or that happens, or this or that situation at school or from the society. We often overlook how much we are influenced by the messages we get from the society. Sometimes it's almost too much emphasis put on the family, which of course is hugely significant, but we live in a culture that's giving us very, very strong messages, and I would say dysfunctional messages, a lot of them. And so it's all of that. That outer past influences the inner past.

I want to share something with you. When I was in my early twenties, I lived in the States. I'd just moved there a year or so before. This was quite a while ago. It was in the eighties. I got into a relationship with a young woman my age, and we had some difficulties, basically. And I started to see, "Well, basically I'm having some difficulties with relationships here." There was also an unsureness to do with, around relationships, but also around sexuality as well. Like I didn't know, at that age -- I felt unsure of myself sexually. And you know, looking back now, I didn't realize at that time, for instance, like, I don't know if you know this -- it's actually mostly women in here -- I don't know if you noticed, but guys don't talk to each other about sexuality. I don't know if you're aware of that.

Female yogi: Very. [laughter]

Rob: Thank you! Guys do not do that -- or very rarely they do, very rarely. At least not in a way that's helpful. [laughter] Or honest. Helpful or honest. And that creates huge problems, so that for a young man, for instance, who's maybe quite sensitive or something, all kinds of confusions, misunderstandings, wrong beliefs, etc., can come up. And in the context of relationships, etc., plus all the relationship dynamics, you know, can be quite confusing, etc. So that was a situation I was in, without knowing that this was the case. So just feeling this, "I'm very unsure, not very clear." Found a psychotherapist who, I've got to say, she was absolutely excellent. She was really, really good in a lot of ways and -- let's put it this way -- not helpful in a lot of ways as well. [laughter]

So here was all this confusion and pain around relationships and sexuality, and she had a way of working, which was very, very helpful -- so I don't want to black-and-white this. I learnt an enormous amount there, and I healed an enormous amount working with her. But she was very, very pressured. She was very, very of the sort of confrontative, kung fu style of therapy. Which was good. It made me really look at things and have to be really honest with myself, etc. But in a way, it was too pressured. And that pressure, in terms of what we're talking about today, that was a condition. That's a condition, an outer condition in the present.

She also -- and this is very unfortunate -- had a kind of view that, as time went on, it was almost as if something was deeply bad in me that needed to kind of be purified or something. And so, it's almost like that belief in her started to work itself into me. In the soil -- the past conditions of just an unsureness, a confusion around sexuality, a misinformation around sexual stuff and relationship stuff -- it became a self-belief. And with that, an enormous amount of fear around my own responses, around my own thoughts, around my own sexuality. And so that outer condition had become an inner condition.

How much pain this was, I can't tell you. And again, I'd add: I looked at her, this relationship, it was kind of an authority figure, because of the way she was. And she was extremely wise in a lot of ways, and like I say, extremely helpful, and she became an authority figure. I was a young, you know, I was 22 or something, 23, and she became an authority figure. And also the formality of the sessions. Like you go in, and it's a certain time, and you're halfway through a sentence and your time is up, and out ... [laughter] So all that. And my personality is like, I tend to rebel against authority figures. You know, I can see that in my past, and my father, and da-da-da. And I'm not particularly formal, you know?

So all this. And what would happen -- again, not all the time; sometimes it was extremely helpful. But often, sometimes, what would happen is there would just be this stuckness in a session. It's like a stuckness in terms of my own process. I just felt completely stuck. And in the session, sort of sitting with her, and just -- it was so stuck and so painful. Now, the interpretation of that stuckness was: "You are stuck. You. There's something wrong with you." Ouch. So much pain, so much pain. The whole thing just got so contracted and so painful. Can you see it feeds back on itself? It's a certain interpretation. And eventually, I was just like, "No, no, no, no, no. Wait a minute." And something cut through and saw clearly. Actually, if I remember -- it's hard to remember because it was so long ago, but I think I just, in a way, saw through it without seeing through it with my mind first. And then afterwards I saw clearly with my mind, if that makes sense. I'm saying that because of what I'll say later.

Fundamentally in life, what gets us into trouble fundamentally is the way we view things. That's the fundamental root. That's what the Buddha called avijjā, this word in Pali. It means 'delusion' or 'ignorance.' In Sanskrit, avidyā. That's the fundamental problem. It's the way we view things. And at lots of different levels, gross and extremely subtle and profound, we view things wrongly, as I've said very briefly the other night. So here I am, and I'm experiencing -- maybe in meditation, maybe in my life in some situation -- a pain somewhere in the body. And very quickly, the thought, or even the sub-verbal thought, the not even fully articulated thought, "The presence of this pain means dot-dot-dot." Fill in the dots, and it's not very flattering, and it tends to blame and crystallize the self-view. "Because I have this pain here, it means that ... something. I'm a failure. I can't meditate. My heart is contracted. I'm a this, I'm a that. It will go on forever," da-da-da, whatever -- fill it in. Very easily, that's what happens. Or a thought goes through the head, and "The presence of that thought means dot-dot-dot. The presence of this image that just flashed through my mind means ..."

It's so interesting, you know, and I've of course seen this with myself in the past, but also just teaching, and sometimes, occasionally it happens that someone's here, and they're meditating, and they have a flash of a violent image. And if the reaction or the interpretation is "That means da-da-da about me, that I've got all this ... that, you know, I'm actually a psychopath inside, and it's just waiting to come out, and maybe I'll do this, and da-da-da," very easily that starts to build and they start to fear one's own mind. And that was a little bit the situation I was in, in the therapy. One fears one's own mind. What trauma is that! It's like there's no place to land. There's no place to sit when I'm fearing my own mind. You start to fear one's own sanity. A person says, "Maybe I'm psychotic." Actually, it's the fear of the mind that leads to psychosis. So I catch it -- just occasionally it happens with a retreatant, and you kind of nip it in the bud, and you can see, you know, talk to them, and say, "It's really okay. It's just a thought, you know." We'll revisit this much later.

But if the fear kicks in and a person becomes afraid of their own mind, and then this thought might come up, and the pressure on it starts to squeeze that thought out, it's like, "Don't think of a pink elephant! Don't imagine it." [laughter] "And if you do imagine it, it means something really heavy. It's really, really bad news. Don't think of it." It puts the pressure on it. What's going to come? The pink elephant is going to come, you know. And that loops, and it creates this frenzy inside. In extreme, it will go somewhere crazy, absolutely crazy.

So what am I making this mean? This thing that's arising right now, what am I making this mean? Just to really notice that, to really ask oneself that question. What am I making this mean? I touched on this the other day: why this? Why this that I'm fixating upon? Today I've probably had -- I don't know [how many thoughts]. Someone once, I don't know how on earth they counted this, how many thoughts one had a day -- it was some figure. And that's probably just gross thoughts. Thoughts happen at a lot of different levels, very subtle thoughts as well. So I don't know, a trillion, let's say. [laughs] A gazillion. Why this thought fixated upon, and not something else? Why that one? Out of all the different things that present themselves in consciousness, inner and outer, this mistake in the office. Out of everything else I did in the office today perfectly, I focus on this mistake. Out of all the sensations I've had in the body or am having in the body, I focus on this one "because it means" or whatever. Or this thought or this image. And we do that outer as well.

So view is a huge part of the inner present. What we're bringing in the present, what's inner in the present, that's in me in the present, the way I'm viewing things -- it's a huge part of that, is the view. And interestingly, out of all that stuff (outer past, inner past, outer present, inner present -- it's not even that rigidly defined, but just for the sake of clarity), out of all that matrix or whatever you want to call it, it may be the inner present that's most amenable to change. Sometimes I can change the outer present; we've talked about talking, communicating, etc. But sometimes it's that, it's the inner one, it's the view. And we'll revisit this a lot on this retreat: practising deliberately viewing something differently, deliberately changing the view of something, deliberately flipping the view of whatever's going on.

So, you know, it gets to the evening, and the last sit. Maybe it's 8:45, and you say, "I'm just fed up with this, and da-da-da-da-da." And there's a view of the whole thing. There's a view that's there. Maybe articulated, maybe not articulated. A view of oneself, a view of the retreat, a view of the day, a view of the practice, a view of the other people here. And what would it be to just put in the view, put in the thought, even, "I'm going to go to the meditation hall and sit there to support others"? It's just a different way of seeing it. It's like, "I'm tired. I'm fed up. I'm this. I've had enough. But I'm going to go there to support others." You're just changing the view.

Or, you know, here's this sensation in the body, and there's this contraction. And like I said this morning, the energy body goes in and out of open, closed, aligned, unaligned, all day. It's doing that all day. Don't make too much of a big deal of that. What am I taking this sensation to mean? As opposed to viewing it, "There is a sensation of contraction" -- it's just that. There is a sensation of contraction. And that piece in particular, we're going to talk a lot, we're going to build on that. We're going to come back to it. We'll talk about it much later, or a bit later.

Part of what helps the mind and the heart have this malleability, what allows the flexibility of view is actually mettā. The more mettā we do, it's like it softens the rigidity of the inner environment, and so the view and the perception of things, of self, of others, of situations, becomes more soft and more malleable. It becomes more like -- I was going to say plasticine, but even more malleable. The more mettā there is in the mix over time, the more we're able to deliberately shift views of things, see it in different ways -- in all kinds of ways, all kinds of ways, but even, for instance -- and I think it was Julia or someone; we touched on this yesterday -- could even get to the point where you can actually see, "Okay, here's this situation, this retreat, whatever, this sitting room." One example. You can actually see: "Everything is in love." It's a very, very progressed mettā practice, but you actually see: "All this is happening in love, or as love. It all is love." And that's an extreme kind of mystical re-viewing. But generally speaking, the more mettā, the more just flexibility there is of the view. The whole thing, this calcification, it just softens, it softens, and then we can just -- at lots of different levels, very simple and whatever -- we can just change the view.

When the view is different, then I'm putting a different thing into that mix of conditions in the present, because the inner present is different. Maybe I'll get a different result -- maybe. But more importantly even than getting a different result sometimes, is that there's not the blame. The blame goes out of it. And when the blame goes out of it, the suffering goes out. To the degree that the blame goes out, the suffering goes out. Blame will feed back into the whole mix, won't it? Because blame is a self-view that's then happening and feeding back into the whole mix. So the whole thing can loosen, can soften.

I've never taken so long to go into that before; usually I'll mention that sort of principle as part of a talk. But it seems really, really important to me. And oftentimes working one on one with people, it can be really, really helpful. But the thing about it is, it needs practice. In other words, I need to practise seeing things this way, practise opening up the view. It's usually not the habit. As I said at the beginning, the habit is usually for the self-view to crystallize: "It's my fault. It's about the self." I actually need to, over and over again, practise doing it, seeing it differently. It could be something that happened twenty, thirty years ago. It could be something that happened yesterday. Could be something that happened five minutes ago. Actually re-viewing it, seeing it differently, bringing the head and the heart into that view, repeatedly. Eventually, it can actually change our habitual ways of seeing things. And instead of habitually seeing things from this point of view of blaming self or blaming other, we start to see more in terms of this web, this infinite web of conditions coming together and fruiting, sprouting actions and results. And as I said, the head is working in the service of the heart and in the service of freedom.

So it's really a practice. In other words, it needs doing. So you might understand -- I hope you do -- just intellectually understand what's being said. But without doing it, it's not going to make the difference. When you do it over and over and over, eventually something starts to happen. And the more mettā, the more able we are to open the view up this way.

Just lastly with this: repetition, practice, and mettā, they will all help this. And again, there's a process of trust with it. Sometimes, of course, it's not that simple. You know, talking about emptiness, talking about mettā, we come from different directions, and it all kind of comes together. Sometimes a person can intellectually see. They start deconstructing the thing, and they see that, "Yeah, it doesn't make sense," but still there's this tendency for self-blame; it doesn't shift anything. So this is very interesting and complex. Sometimes there's a pervasive kind of -- what could we call it? -- when I use the word 'shame,' it's almost like, rather than blame for this or blame for that, it's more like just a pervasive feeling not good enough or feeling bad about who one is. It's more an ongoing [feeling] that's not specifically attached to this or that actual event or something. When that's there, obviously it leans the interpretation towards, "It was my fault, it was my fault, it was my fault." And even intellectually seeing it, it might be difficult to shift that. But still I say practise re-viewing, practise re-viewing something. And the mettā, eventually, gradually, starts to dissolve that pervasive shame. It's a habitual way of feeling and viewing and sensing the self, and over time, the mettā starts just dissolving that. It really [does]. And also the emptiness. Both together, they dissolve this.

There's also something about power. For instance, if I go back to that situation with the therapist that I was talking about, when I said the conceptual clarity about what was going on came afterwards for me, what emerged, thankfully, was a sense of -- I don't know what you say -- gut clarity that more had to do with a sense of power, if this makes sense. It's like, I could feel it in my belly: "This is wrong. This is not working. I need to get out of this situation." And that came as a real sense of -- it's hard to describe; just I felt it in my belly, in the hara. You just, it's like real clarity about something. I didn't fully understand what was going on; that came later. But, I mean -- we don't have time; we're going to end in like one minute, but it's like, power sometimes is a factor here. I need to access my power to be able to make this crumble the view. Sometimes the power comes from the intellect. In other words, the intellect can be very powerful. It can be our friend, and our powerful friend. I deconstruct this. I'm looking at the conditions, and I'm not taking any nonsense. You actually use the power of the intelligence. Other times it comes more from the belly, from the hara, from the guts.

But this is complex. I think, in the situations where it doesn't dissolve and open out the view, what I just said a minute ago, trusting the mettā, because it will gradually dissolve that pervasive sense of shame. Over time, it just dissolves it, as do the emptiness practices that we're going to get to.

Okay, let's take a moment to sit together.