Transcription
So I want to talk for about twenty minutes more at this point, and take this thread that I alluded to, and just start pulling on this thread, this thread about construction, what we called fabrication, the way the mind builds things and then falls for what it has built, like a painter paints something and then falls in love with or gets fearful of what they have painted. So that's the thread: this thread of construction. And what is constructed, we say, is illusory. It's a fabrication. Even the word in English has that connotation: fabrication, concoction. This is the thread we're pulling on.
Let's take it a bit further, say one very general thing, and then really ground it in something specific. We could say, just languaging it slightly differently than we said earlier, we could say that, partly, what the Buddha is teaching is that, as human beings, we have what's called fundamental delusion or ignorance. Avijjā is the Pali word. It's fundamental delusion in that we have a tendency, we have tendencies to construct. Now, we don't realize the extent of those tendencies. But we have a tendency of this self -- when we feel a self, when we believe in a self, we have a tendency to construct more self, and to construct and fabricate in the ways that we're talking about. Yeah? And that's actually an expression of fundamental delusion. This is the thread we're pulling on, in general terms.
Could also say that slightly differently, just playing with ways of putting it. We could say that, when there is difficulty, when we have difficulty, dis-ease, suffering -- dukkha is the Pali word -- when there is some sense of dissatisfaction, something we're struggling with, we have a tendency to relate to that suffering, or whatever it is we're suffering with, to look at it, to view it, to conceive of it -- the whole way of looking, we have tendencies of ways of looking that either exacerbate the problem, exacerbate the suffering, create more, or lock it into place.
In other words, our very ways of looking are actually, generally speaking, not that helpful. This is also part of fundamental delusion. We get into a knot, we try and untangle it, and we actually tie it tighter. And in so doing, we said, we have tendencies of ways of looking that construct self, construct more and more self, or more and more dukkha, or lock the construction of self or dukkha, dis-ease, dissatisfaction into place. They also do that with the objects that we're relating to, the things, the sense, the perceptions and experiences of things. It's a very general statement.
By 'ways of looking,' I mean the whole thing: the reactions, the responses, the conceptions, the views, the perceptions. I don't just mean sight. I mean all of that. And the way that we relate to things actually constructs. And it's not that helpful. Does that make sense as a general statement?
Let's get very specific now. Take this thread. Consider blame -- whether I'm blaming myself for something, or I'm blaming another person for something. So we're starting following this thread, very, very simple, starting very simple, and starting to follow it. Blame, that movement of the mind to blame, is an example of exactly that. It's a way of looking that's not very helpful. It constructs self, and it solidifies something, rigidifies something -- itself, or another, or a situation, whatever. If you like, blame is an extreme of the tendency, the habitual tendency of the self, of the ego, to keep self-referencing itself, and to see in terms of itself. Have you noticed that the self often casts itself as -- you know, everything revolves around it. It's at the centre. If something goes wrong, it's my fault. Somehow it's self-referencing itself all the time. Do you get that?
Blame is an extreme example of that. It's a way of looking that builds more self, and self-references, tightens. So that when we, or another, act in a way that -- you know, maybe it's a mistake, if we use that language, or didn't go how we planned. Something went wrong through our actions, or our failure to act, neglecting to act, not managing to act. Or what we said, what came out of the mouth -- it wasn't that great. It just came out. It wasn't that skilful. It wasn't that helpful. Or of another person. Or even what comes up as a thought -- because we can blame ourselves for the kinds of thoughts we have, or another for the kind of thoughts they have. Or even the mind state, meaning an emotion or a mood that comes up -- we blame ourselves for that, or blame another for being like that. What's happening there? A rigidity of view -- a rigidity of view that's centred around self or the self of another. That's what blame is. Do you get that? It's a tightening of view around the self.
That rigidity of view, blame for this incident, or that thing that happened or didn't happen -- it's very possible, not always, but it's very possible that that, in relation to that one incident, then becomes a basis for a more pervasive negative self-view. In other words, it just goes in the little, you know, painful piggyback of negative self-views. They start crystallizing, congealing into just a more pervasive, ongoing sense of, "I'm just a loser. I'm just a failure. I'm just a" whatever it is. The negative self-view starts becoming more constant, spreading. And then what? And then there's a chance that that negative self-view starts influencing, colouring, distorting the ways of looking, the ways of relating, the ways of seeing, the ways of conceiving, of viewing other incidents, the self in general, other -- do you see? What have we got? We've got a vicious cycle, potentially, there.
What's happened? In the original instance, one has seen in terms of self. The way of looking, as I said, is too rigidly contracted, and sees in terms of self: "Self is a cause. What happened? It's bad. It's your fault. It's my fault." Fault, cause, self is a cause. It's too tight. We haven't seen in terms of the wider conditions. There's a wider coming together, confluence of a whole host of factors and conditions and circumstances, all feeding in, and together, giving birth to whatever it was that happened or didn't happen.
To take an example, to make this, whatever [was] said or whatever, a lot of stuff needs to come together. That's really the womb -- not the self, but all those conditions coming together are, at a certain level, a more real womb for this action, for this behaviour, this speech, this thought. Example: you're with a friend. You're spending an evening with a friend. And maybe you haven't seen her for a couple weeks. You're pretty close. And she's had some difficulty. She's going through something difficult. And she's telling you about it. And as she's telling you, you're silently thinking to yourself, "Yikes. It's pretty bad, what she's telling me. And yet I'm not really feeling much here. I don't really feel much empathy." And very easily, blame oneself: "All these years of meditation, and nothing ..." [laughter] "I just can't seem to get it together." Self-blame, okay. (I'm just making this up.)
Maybe there are other factors that are feeding into that whole moment and the non-arising, in this case, of empathy, or whatever it is. Maybe you're just tired. Maybe you've been working too hard that day, or too long, and you didn't sleep, whatever. You think that's a neutral factor? That's going to affect, oftentimes, the capacity of the heart to be open, to empathize. That may be a factor, and I sometimes just don't see it: "No, it's the self's fault. It's me. It's something wrong with me." Maybe it's one of the conditions. Maybe in the moment, the very thought, "Yikes, I'm not feeling empathy. That's bad. I should be feeling empathy" -- maybe in that, putting too much pressure on the heart. Maybe that's a reaction that's happening in the moment, and I start to miss the little shoots of empathy that are actually arising in my heart. The very pressure that I'm putting -- I can't notice what's going on. My view, my looking in the moment becomes too constrained. Or the pressure itself strangles those little movements coming up, the little openings.
Perhaps when I did meet my friend two weeks ago, some little thing happened. It was so small. We didn't really even talk about it. But actually it's a niggle. Something happened. We didn't quite resolve it. She said something, or I said something, and something happened between us. And that still lingers, because we didn't talk about, and there's still something in my heart that's a little bit knotted around that. Well, that's going to be a factor as well, right? That happened two weeks ago. It's just it's unresolved. But that affects the empathy now.
Or it could be that she's telling you, but she's telling you in a subtly odd way. This thing is quite difficult, what she's going through, but she's kind of saying it in a very offhand way, for some reason. Don't know what the reason is. Or you feel that she's pumping something up, and it has a sense of artificiality about it. She's hamming something up. What's going on?
Or -- and this sometimes happens -- she's telling you, but she's a little bit aggressive somehow in the way she's telling you. Maybe it's a defence, maybe -- whatever. But that, too, is going to affect the arising or non-arising or whatever happens in my heart as I'm listening. All these factors -- not the self, but all these factors together give rise to something.
Years ago -- the late eighties, early nineties -- I worked with a therapist when I lived in Boston. And it was very good. A lot of good work, and I learnt a lot. But she was a very -- what would you call it? -- kung-fu style therapist, very confrontative, challenging, aggressive. Part of that was actually really good, but a lot of this sense of really kind of, in quotes, "not letting me get away with anything." But part of what came out of that was -- of course, I was a young man, early twenties -- that I was beginning to be a little afraid to go there. She was so aggressive sometimes, and so harsh, actually, sometimes. So fear would come up. And so I go to the session, and just the pressure, sometimes, of the session, you know -- if you're thirty seconds late, it means that you're being passive-aggressive. [laughter] I'm sure all this has changed now, but. [laughter]
Anyway. So sometimes I would find myself really stuck in the session, and then she would be sometimes, like, pouncing on that: "You're stuck. You're stuck in your life. This is a microcosm. This is a reflection of your life." The conclusions -- how quickly the conclusions come. And not seeing the -- what could we say? -- the confluence of all these conditions. Well, I'm stuck because I'm afraid right now. And why is there fear? Because of all this. And certain beliefs have been planted, you know, from way back, but also from the work itself. All of that comes together, creates stuckness in the moment. And what am I going to conclude from that? Am I going to look carefully enough at what gives rise to that, or am I going to jump to some conclusion about me and my life and how I am, etc.?
So, what to do with this? We need to make practices out of this somehow. [13:10] We can practise re-viewing -- meaning viewing again, looking again. We have ways of looking that are not that helpful. Well, we can bring in different ways of looking that actually are helpful, that start to unbind, dissolve. Look in a different way, and start to actually look, deliberately seek out the wider coming together of all the conditions that may have given rise to this thing. Just start to consider that with the mind. Look in a broader way. So we're developing, you can practise, we could say, a way of looking not in terms of self. The usual way of looking is in terms of self -- tight. It's actually a way of looking not in terms of self, that's not so narrow, not so constricted.
So take this with a pinch of salt, but sometimes, because the habit is to be so narrow, it's actually -- how can I help open it out? And really look in the corners where I don't tend to look. I tend to not realize that there are actually important things there to be seen. So with a pinch of salt, you can think about -- we can think about, say, the inner, present conditions, meaning: "What was present in me at the time?" So for instance, if I am with my friend, and there's tiredness, that's an inner, present condition. It was present inside me at the time. It was this factor of tiredness.
What was outer, present? So in that example of the friend, for instance, the way she's telling you, she's telling you in a very kind of disconnected way, and you're picking up on the disconnection, and so it's not really landing, because she's not connected as she's speaking. That would be outer, present.
What would be inner, past? Maybe this unresolved thing that happened two weeks ago with the friend. Actually, it's got this little -- something's a little, you know, wounded in my heart. That's inner, past, but it's having its impact in the present. Or maybe that's outer, past because it's between us. But you get the picture.
So it sounds like, "Well, that's a bit systematic." It's not really to make a system out of it, or even to take these divisions so seriously: "What's 'inner, past'? What's ...?" It doesn't matter. It's more just to stretch the mind into corners where it doesn't usually look and doesn't usually consider. So it's just very, very loose categories, a very loose framework. It might sound quite contrived. It might feel, if you do this, it might feel: "Oh, this actually feels pretty contrived, to do this," at first. But with practice, it can come to be very, very fluid, and almost like the habitual way of seeing things. For most human beings, the habitual way is seeing in terms of self and other, and then blame is just one further step than that. But actually, we can dissolve that habit, and replace it with a habit that has a much more open way of looking -- much more compassionate way of looking, actually. That can become just the way we tend to see what happens: incidents, ourselves, and others. [16:33] It's the opposite of the usual.
Or, let's do another example. So for example, you're sitting here meditating, and you're feeling, "I'm just completely off with the fairies. There's no mindfulness. It's like, I've been doing this, and I've heard it, and read the books, and I've got the t-shirt," and whatever it is, you know. And the mindfulness or not -- very easily, I blame the self for it. But actually, the arising of mindfulness in any moment, or even the arising of the intention to be mindful, is not from the self. It's from all these conditions coming together. I don't know if you've noticed this. So for instance, if I'm mindful, if there is mindfulness in this moment, it's much more likely to condition, we say, to give birth to a next moment of mindfulness. If there's distractedness, it's much less probable to give rise. The inner, present moment of just being mindful is more likely to give rise to the next one. It's not from the self, necessarily.
Or the outer, present: if you're in a situation like today, and everyone's trying to be mindful, you open your eyes, and there are people, "Oh, yeah, meditating," and there are teachings and all that, those outer, present conditions tend to feed. Or on a retreat at Gaia House, or whatever it is, there are lots of reminders in the environment that feed that intention.
If you have a history of, you know, again and again, practising, and again and again, coming back to the breath, coming back to the moment, that's what we call karma. You're actually setting up tendencies in the mind, conditioning, pathways that are conditioned to make it more likely that, in the future, that mindfulness arises. [18:30] But it's not the self; it's the conditions. Or the outer, past: if you've hung out in these kind of environments a lot, again, it tends to condition. So the arising of even the remembering to be mindful comes from all those conditions coming together. Do you get the picture? Yeah? At least as a concept. We'll play with this in a minute.
But now, if I say that -- and some of you might be thinking this -- it's not to say that we never take responsibility in life, because, "That's okay, I can speak how I want, and do what I want, and steal and cheat and whatever, and it's just conditions -- no problem!" It's not to say that we don't take responsibility. At times, we have the perspective, the way of looking, the view, the angle of taking responsibility. That's important. Or it's not to say that we don't appreciate ourselves, and appreciate others, or take in the appreciation. Someone says, "You did that really well. It was great. You know, thank you for" whatever it was. And it's not to say that we're locking out of that view. Really big principle -- one of the things I want to communicate today is: all this is going towards a flexibility of view. That's part of what we're after, that we're not locked into one way of looking at things. [20:00]
That's usually part of the problem as human beings. We're just so contracted, the ways of looking at things. And actually, what we want is flexibility. I can look in terms of self, and I can look in terms of not-self. And there's that freedom to move between the two. They're equally valid, equally helpful. Do you see? That flexibility is an important part of freedom -- really, really important part. What determines which way of looking I should choose? It's what's most helpful in the moment. Which eases the suffering of self and other? Which brings the freedom and healing? Which brings, allows the compassion and the softening to come in? That's what determines which way of looking to engage, to play with. Do you get that as a principle? You guys still here? [laughter]
Okay. To me, a really, really key principle. There's freedom to look at things in different ways. There's an enormous amount of creativity possible in the way of relating, viewing, conceiving experience of the world, and self, others.
These conditions, this confluence -- they start interacting. So it's even not quite as simple as I said. So let's go back to you and your friend, and this non-arising of empathy. Well, in that moment you're talking, she might feel this lack of empathy. Maybe she's aware of it and conscious of it. Maybe she's just not quite sure what she's picking up on. Have you noticed that when you're trying to share something more personal, more deep, that the way that you're being listened to affects what and how you say it? Yeah? Really important thing to notice. So she's sensing something. Maybe she's not quite sure what. It's a little distant, or something disconnected. And she starts speaking in a more disconnected way, a more fragmented way. The whole thing starts feeding back, interacting, you know. You've got a spaghetti there that's not that helpful.
I feel this a lot when I give -- like right now, I'm giving a talk. And I, before, was a musician for many years. And you sense this. It looks like, okay, however many people, and it looks like Rob is giving the talk. But actually, you know, the words that come out, the gestures, the tone of voice, how much oomph is in the voice, how much passion, how much softness, how much gentleness, how much fire -- all that's actually determined by all of us together. It's a synergistic coming together. I don't know if any of you have done any performing or public speaking, but I have that palpable sense that everyone is contributing to it. So you know, if I'm tired, if you guys are tired, or some of you, if you haven't slept well, or if you've eaten too much, or if you just lose interest, or you're really excited, or you're troubled, all of this makes a huge impact on the shaping, the colouring, the birthing of the whole talk. So actually, we're all giving the talk right now.
What's also quite interesting is -- we could take that just a tiny step further -- the kind of self that arises. What kind of persona is manifesting here? Because at the moment, I'm the centre of attention -- or I should be. [laughter] The kind of self that manifests is also coming together through all of that. So again, is it the kind self, the gentle, heart-melting compassion self? Is it the fiery, inspiring? Is it the challenging? Is the intellectually precise? Is it the -- whatever, you know, is it the loose, "Hey. It's all cool, everybody"? The kind of self that arises -- we tend to think the self is independent. It's not. In technical language, it's a dependent arising. So the self that arises here is dependent on all of this together. And we think, "Well, that strikes as inauthentic." But it's not. It's just how the self is. It's dependent. It's together. Do you see?
All this about blame needs practising. So for some of you, you may have heard something like this before. Or you say, "Yeah, well, it's kind of obvious. I get that intellectually." Practice, practice, practice, practice. That's so much what all this is about. I could talk all day easily, but if it's not brought into practice, it won't make any difference, or very little difference. It's practising it, again and again, that starts to shift something, melt something, open something. Not just intellectual. Sometimes in this blame thing, we actually need someone to help us. It's not just, "I shut my eyes, and I reflect, and I can do it all myself." Sometimes I need a friend, because there are corners of factors that are involved. I can't see them. I tend not to see them. And you can ask a friend or someone you trust, whose wisdom and love you can trust: "What am I not seeing here? I'm just so tight with this view. What am I not seeing?" And they say, "Well, it's this. It's this," because they have a bit more space. They're not locked in there. So sometimes you can do it together with someone -- really, really important.
Do you get the concept? Yeah? Very simple, and we're just following this thread about construction, about rigidity of view, etc., just following, very simple. But let's play with it now, a little bit. It's optional. So do you want to stretch again for thirty seconds, or ...? Some of you? [recording ends]
