Suspending Disbelief: An Exploration Of Views

In the Buddhist path, right view has prominence as the first in the Noble Eightfold Path. In this talk, Matthew explores view from the perspective of disbelief and the ways that negative beliefs might hinder one's progress toward happiness, peace, and awakening.

The talk was originally offered for the community at Sit.Feel.Heal. in Santa Cruz, California.

Transcript

Good evening, Everyone. It's good to be back here at SitFeel Heal. Good to see familiar faces. So I don't typically begin a talk with a definition. Maybe that's because at some point in school I was taught that you're not supposed to begin an essay with a definition, So maybe it's fine. But I'm going to be talking about views tonight, And I suppose it makes sense just to discuss what I mean by views, Just so we're clear, You know, For the rest of the evening. And views has a fairly prominent place in the Buddhist tradition. If you're familiar with the Eightfold Path, Right View is the first one. Sometimes it's called Right Understanding or Wise View or Wise Understanding, But that word view, Diti, Is typically translated as view, But a knowledge, Could be opinions, Ideas, Theories, Beliefs, Could be stances, Positions, Could be stories, Could be personal narratives. Like there's so many things that one could mean when we say, I have a view or I'm of the view that I believe such-and-such. And these views can be kind of impersonal, They could be views on the way things work, Like in nature, They could be personal, They could be views about ourselves, Things we tell ourselves, Personal narratives, They could be political, They can just be stories we believe or don't believe. Some have maybe more emotional charge than others. A lot of the times we don't think of our views as having an emotional charge or we don't even think of the view as being a view until it's challenged. Sometimes they're conscious, Sometimes they're unconscious, Like maybe the personal narrative that I'm unlovable is not something I actually tell myself, But when I do a little digging around I might find that that belief in there somewhere. So all of these are considered views and we could argue that these views and these beliefs and these opinions and these stories we tell ourselves, In many ways, Are the things we use to construct our sense of self, Of who we are. So we could see why adjusting our views might be an important thing and why it holds a prominent place in the practice with the Dharma. And so my invitation for you tonight is to try to bring special attention to your own views. Not so much that you kind of check out for the remainder of the evening, But more in the sense that when I say things that you either agree with or disagree with, Or when I say things that remind you of things that you believe or disbelieve, Or when I say things that land with you in a particular way, Maybe with some emotional charge or intense agreement or disagreement, To take note of those things. Maybe take note of what's. . . Or inquire into what that view might be. There's no need to follow it down the rabbit hole, But just take note of anything that comes up. And I'm intentionally going to tell a few stories from my own life that certainly challenged my own views, And thus perhaps they challenge yours. So I'm going to intentionally tell some stories that I'd never really shared publicly. Now there's this wonderful Thai master, His name was Ajahn Chah, And he was the teacher of many of the more famous teachers in the Insight tradition. And he had a monastery in Thailand that was open for Westerners. And there was an American nun there, Her name was Kumpha, And she was a significant part of the Sangha. And she's a Buddhist convert, As many of us in the room may be. And at some point, One monk and a handful of nuns went to England, I think, To establish a monastery. And they were gone for some time, It might have been a year or two, I'm not entirely sure. And then they were going back to Thailand, And they were very excited to return and see the folks that they hadn't seen in quite some time. And when they got back, The nun, Kumpha, Was no longer a nun. She had left the Sangha, And she was still in the neighborhood, And she had become a born-again Christian. And she spent a good deal of time and energy visiting and telling the folks at the monastery that the Dharma was not the way, That they needed to find Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. She disparaged Ajahn Chah, And this bothered Ajahn Sumedho significantly. And he eventually went to Ajahn Chah and said, Venerable, That former nun, Kumpha, Is out there disparaging the Dharma, And disparaging you, And telling us that the only way is through Jesus. And Ajahn Chah, In kind of a typical Ajahn Chah fashion, Just kind of shrugged it off, Smiled, And replied, But what if she's right? And I love this story because I think a lot of the time one expects certain folks, Particularly monastics or super Buddhists, To defend themselves. And here was a person who many considered to be awakened, Not feeling a need to defend the Dharma, Not feeling a need to defend himself, And actually expressing a receptivity and openness to the possibility that even he might be wrong, And this other person might be right. I think it points towards what a wise holding of views might look like, A wise holding, What it might look like to hold belief slightly. And some of you know that I'm in recovery, And I spent the first 10 or 12 years of my recovery in 12-step, And I was an Alcoholics Anonymous. I was working kind of the 12 steps, But also doing Buddhism on the side, And so kind of every time I would have to reread through the basic text of the big book of AA, You know, I increasingly started to see it in light of the Dharma that I was studying. And there's a quote in there from Herbert Spencer that over time started to strike me as very Dharmic, And the quote is this, There is a principle which is a bar against all information, Which is proof against all arguments, And which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation. Contempt prior to investigation. And I think this contempt is kind of a strong word, But I like it because it points towards certain types of views we might hold, Which I might better think of as non-views or disbeliefs. And I certainly came to meditation, I came to the Dharma, I came to Buddhism with a significant number of disbeliefs. And what this quote is suggesting is that disbelief prior to investigation especially, But disbelief is a bar for investigation. And what does the Dharma ask of us if not to investigate? What does meditation ask of us if not to investigate? And so I asked this question, How might disbelief prevent us from even practicing? How might disbelief help us remain in ignorance and hinder us in the path to awakening? And so like I said, I came to practice with a certain set of disbeliefs. Some of it might have been my Catholic upbringing, Some of it might have been my punk rock years, Probably a combination. But I had, You know, I was kind of an angry atheist and I didn't come across as angry, But I certainly held strongly to my disbelief in God, In rituals and religious scripture, Anything that was like woo-woo or supernatural, Anything that broke the laws of nature, Of physics, Of science, Stuff like that. And because of that, There was a certain variety of Buddhism that appealed to me. And it was the interpretation of Buddhism that was kind of secular. It was the interpretation of Buddhism that kind of avoided discussion of some of the more supernatural stuff like big grand karma, Rebirth, Or deities and stuff like that. Anything that avoided the woo-woo. And so I kind of landed in a tradition that psychologized a lot of that stuff when it would appear in the the Buddhist texts. I'm not sure how many people in the room are familiar with the character of Mara, In the Buddhist scriptures, But he's kind of like the equivalent of like the devil in Christianity. And he'd show up, Tempt the Buddha and try to steer him away from the path. Kind of like representative of what we think of as the root poisons, Like greed, Hatred, Delusion, But also would come with pride and conceit and doubt and things like that. And of course when I would encounter this character in my studies, I interpret it as a metaphorical representation of the mind of the Buddha, Or the mind of the Bodhisattva, If it was the Buddha before he was awakened. But I definitely thought of it not as an external deity, Not as someone who actually came and talked to the Buddha, But as some sort of just kind of part of the committee of the mind. And I don't think this is a wrong interpretation. And it's also worth pointing out that built into this view of Mara and stuff like this in the scriptures, I held a certain degree of condescension. I was judgmental a little bit. Some part of me thought that this was stuff that like archaic people like 2, 500 years ago might have written. And that somehow we know better now. And that's another thing that, It's another theme that sometimes comes up with views, Is this idea that, But I know better, But I have the answer, But I'm right. It's usually when you know you're clinging to them a little bit. So anyhow, This was my interpretation of Mara. So imagine my surprise one night when Mara spoke to me. Imagine my surprise when I laid down in bed one night and I heard a voice speaking to my ear, Not like the committee in my head. We all know that committee. But when I heard speaking intimate my ear, As if the person were laying on the same bed with me and had their head on the pillow right beside mine, The voice said, Matt, You know, This is all bullshit. And it was talking specifically about my practice. I had a lot of energy for practice at the time, A lot of motivation, You know, Our practices kind of follow these ups and downs, Or there's more energy and less energy and more energy. And so it was a stretch of time when I had a lot of energy for practice and I was experiencing a lot of fruit of practice. And here is this voice saying, Matt, You know, It's all bullshit. And it was appealing to this view of mine that I wouldn't really typically let myself get kind of drawn into a spiritual practice like this, Would I? Like what was happening to me? And I probably would have written this incident off if it didn't happen again, In the same exact way, The next night when I went to bed. Matt, You know, This is bullshit. And of course, This was like a voice that was appealing to my sense of self being an atheist, Being against a woo woo. It's appealing to my sense of rationality. And it was certainly trying to drive a wedge in some of the confidence that I was starting to feel in the path. So it came in the form of doubt. Doubt in the path, Doubt in my own ability to walk it. And I didn't suddenly start believing in Mara. That's not what happened. But what did happen is that the next time I encountered Mara in one of these scriptures, I no longer read it with this condescending, I know better sort of mind. I read it with the, Maybe that's how it happened kind of mind. And I read it that way because I had an experience that was similar to the way it was described in the scriptures. And it struck me that if it happened to me that way, Perhaps it happened to them that way. And it doesn't mean I have to construct a new belief system around it. What I did need to do is deconstruct my old view around the concept of Mara. And so I'm not asking you or anyone in this room to believe in Mara. But I am suggesting that constructing a view of disbelief or constructing a view of belief around Mara is likely not beneficial for practice. It's better perhaps to soften around ideas like this. There's this famous teaching of the Buddha called the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow. And in it, There is a potential student who comes to him and asks him all of these kind of esoteric metaphysical questions. Is the world eternal? Is it not eternal? What happens after death? Questions like that. And the Buddha offers this parable and says, Suppose a person were shot, Fatally wounded with a poisoned arrow. And then his friends and companions came and one of them was able to remove the arrow and heal the wound. And before any of this medical procedures could happen, The wounded man said, Hold on a second. Before you do this, I need to know who shot the arrow? How tall was the person? What tree did the shaft of the arrow come from? What bird were the feathers and the fletching of the arrow? How was the arrowhead tied to it? And on and on and on. He asks all these questions. And the Buddha says, And meanwhile, This person would die. And the Buddha then goes on to explain that asking questions about is the world eternal? What happens after death is no different than this man fatally wounded by this poisoned arrow, Asking all these questions about the arrow, When he could just extract the arrow and be alleviated of his suffering. And so he likens his teachings and himself to the person who can remove the arrow. He doesn't declare these things. He doesn't offer a view for you to take up regarding if the world being eternal or what happens after death necessarily. And instead offers the four noble truths and the eightfold path as a way of practicing, As a way of removing suffering without taking up a view, A metaphysical view in this instance. And so we don't have to believe in Mara. And as we'll see later, We don't even have to believe in the Dharma itself. So I had this teacher, Her name was Venerable Panyavati. And she passed away about a month ago. And she was a special type of teacher in the sense that she was a little bit of like, Kind of wild Dharma. She wasn't afraid to talk about all of this, What we would typically think of as maybe woo-woo stuff, Stuff that was kind of definitely turned me away from the Dharma in my early years of practice. She would talk about grand karma and rebirth and reincarnation and past lives, Future lives. She would talk about speaking with deities and devas that would visit her. But she also had a really powerful, Beautiful Dharma that was impossible to ignore. And so in a way, I tolerated this other stuff because her Dharma was so powerful. But that stuff definitely rubbed up against my woo-woo views or my woo-woo disbeliefs. And we were having a conversation about karma and rebirth and Panyavati said, After I expressed some skepticism, Matt, You don't have to believe anything, But you absolutely must stop disbelieving everything. And this conversation continued a little bit, Such that she was really like stressing this point that what you need to cultivate is just an openness to these possibilities. And that if I could suspend disbelief enough to be open and receptive and willing to receive evidence one way or the other, That my progress in the path wouldn't be hindered. But that so long as I held on to these disbeliefs, I would be closed off to the full range of experience, The full range of what I might be able to see through my practice. And so I was on a self-retreat once, Shortly after having this conversation with her. And at the very beginning of this 10-day retreat, I remembered what Panyavati had said and I looked at my two cats. And it was a little bit playful and it was also a little bit sincere. And I looked at my cats and I asked them, Have I known you in other lifetimes? And I was kind of operating with this story I'd heard that, You know, If rebirth happens, People or streams of consciousness tend to kind of have repeated contact with each other over many lifetimes. So I asked the cats, You know, Have I known you? And like I said, It was kind of serious, Not totally serious. But I think there is something still happening for me because this playfulness in this question that I asked was perhaps enough to just open my heart just a little bit. And a few days later on that retreat, Without going into too many details, I had experiences that would lend themselves to the possibility that things like rebirth might happen. And kind of like the Mara situation, I didn't become a believer in reincarnation. But what I started to do was to let go of disbelief. And I think what was particularly pivotal for me at that moment was that with the Mara incident, I kind of just let go of that one disbelief. But what started to happen with me after this inquiry about rebirth was that I started to see in general how important it was to let go of disbeliefs, To suspend my disbeliefs. Because I really just don't know. I just don't. And I have all of these beliefs that are really kind of just best guesses. But I tend to hold on to them as if I know. And so why did we come to practice in the first place? Now for me, Practice came along with my entry into recovery from addiction. And so what was going on with me is that I wanted to change. And I don't know if other people in the room can identify with this, But a lot of the times we come to practice because something hurts. There's some amount of suffering. There's something that doesn't feel like it's working. There's something that feels like it needs correcting, Whether it's just more meaning in life, More purpose. Maybe it's stress. Maybe it's sleeplessness. Maybe it's bigger things. But we tend to come to practice because we want change. But what is it we're hoping to change when we come to practice? I think sometimes we think it's just behaviors, Right? But our behaviors are so intimately tied with our beliefs and our views. And that means that when we come to practice, We come with all of these views. And the very thing that requires changing are those views. And that means, Ironically, That the very views that led me to pick this particular tradition of the Dharma, So those views around no woo-woo, Those views around no supernatural, Those views around no God, Those views around no maras and no rebirths, No karma, Big karma, All that stuff. Like those views, The reasons I kind of came to the insight tradition, Even though they led me to this particular path, They nonetheless started to get changed by the path itself. It's kind of a weird paradox, Right? I selected a path because of views and through selection of that path, Those views start to loosen. And if I can offer a testimony of some sort tonight, It's that the Dharma is powerful enough to survive the eradication of the views that bring us to it in the first place. So when we start to eradicate these views, The very views that may have helped us decide what spiritual practice to engage with, What's left. This brings us kind of back to that first fold and the eightfold path, Right view, That's what's left. But it's important to understand that when we eradicate views, The goal is not to replace them with new views. So when we eradicate disbeliefs, We don't replace them with beliefs. And when we eradicate beliefs, We don't replace them with disbeliefs. This is where the Dharma as the middle way is so important. And so what is right view then, If it's not a new view to believe in? You could argue that it's a sense of receptivity, Flexibility, A willingness to learn, A certain degree of okayness with uncertainty and discomfort. And so in that sense, Right view is a certain type of mindful perspective one can take. And right view might also be thought of as actually seeing clearly. That when one starts to relinquish disbeliefs, When one starts to relinquish beliefs, Those views no longer offer filters for the information that's coming into our minds. You see, When I disbelieved in a particular way of viewing Mara, It became very difficult for me to see evidence that might disprove my view. And when I disbelieved in particular ways of thinking about karma or rebirth, I, To a certain extent, Censored certain types of evidence. There may have been things in my practice prior to those moments that could have led me to hold different views, But I didn't see them because of the views I had. And so with right view, We begin to depend upon receptive awareness, Giving us the capacity to see clearly, To see for ourself, To see what causes suffering, To see what causes happiness, To see what causes harm, To see what inspires joy and love and generosity. It allows us to see what wisdom looks like and to recognize that wisdom doesn't really care whether we like what we're seeing or not. There's a famous sutta called the, Sometimes called the Kalama Sutta, And it's from the Anguttara Nikaya. In it, The Buddha talks about like what we should consider valid sources of knowledge. And I'll quote him here. He says, Don't go by reports, By legends, By traditions, By scripture, By logical conjecture, By inference, By analogy, By agreement through pondering views, By probability, Or by the thought that guy's our teacher. When you know for yourselves that these qualities are skillful, These qualities are blameless, These qualities are praised by the wise, These qualities, When adopted and carried out, Lead to welfare and to happiness, Then you should enter and remain in them. Now sometimes this teaching is used to justify a different view, Which is that reject all tradition, Reject all teachings, And that's not what the Buddha is saying here. What he's saying is test them out, See for yourself. You don't necessarily to take what I say as gospel, But see, See if it works. Ehipassiko, See for yourself, Come and see. Let go of views, See what happens. And the Buddha is pretty emphatic about the dharma itself not being a new view to take up, And I want to stress that. That these are teachings that can serve as guideposts, But they are not to be believed in beyond their utility, Beyond their capacity to give us the ability to see for ourselves. There's a famous teaching of the Buddha, Sometimes called the Parable of the Raft, And he describes someone who came to a, I don't know if it was a flood or a really wide river, But just an expanse of water, And on the shore that the man was standing on, It was turbulent, It was unsafe, It was dangerous, But on the far shore he could see that there was safety, And there was peace, And there was calm, And he knew that he needed to get to the far shore, But there were no bridges, There were no ferries, There were no boatmen. And so he went, And he gathered sticks, And twigs, And brush, And leaves, And he put together this raft. And he embarked on this raft, And he used the raft to get into the dangerous and stormy waters, And eventually made his way to the far shore, Where there was safety, And he was free from suffering and from danger. And then the Buddha asked the monks that he was talking to, What would you say if that man who had just crossed this expanse of water and made it to the far shore, If he just picked up his raft and he started carrying it with him wherever he went? And the monks replied, That would be silly, He already got across the river, He can leave the raft at the shore. And then the Buddha says, When you know the Dharma to be similar to the raft, You should abandon even the teachings. How much more so things contrary to the teachings. And so here is the Buddha himself saying, Yes, You must abandon things that are unskillful and unwise that lead to harmfulness, But you even must abandon the teachings themselves. You must see for yourself, Build the raft, And start to cross the expanse of water. And this begins with suspending disbelief. Now you might be the type of person on the other end of the spectrum, Like I don't believe in with strong disbeliefs. Perhaps you come with strong beliefs, And if it's not obvious by now, Disbeliefs are beliefs. They're just beliefs framed in the negative. So I guess I'm the aversive type. And so this applies to you too, If you're a believer. A few months ago, I went to a Nepalese restaurant with my wife, And there's this young man, Probably in his early 20s, Who was our server. And he's from Nepal. He's been here a few years. And we struck up a conversation because we've been to Nepal before. And so we were talking about places we'd been, And then talking about some of our favorite Nepalese dishes, Which ended up actually being Nepalese dishes. Bhutanese dishes. But anyways, We had this conversation. It led to talks about meditation in the Dharma, And Hinduism, And some of that stuff. And at some point, This young man said, I'm just young, And there's so much out there, And I just don't know what to believe. And it struck me that he felt like he needed to believe something. He felt like he had to pick something. And I reflected on it for a few moments. And later, At the end of the night, When we paid our bill, Paid the check, And as we were walking out of the restaurant, He was saying goodbye. And I kind of bowed to him a little bit. And then I walked up to him, And I kind of tapped him on the shoulder, And I said quietly to him, The longer I live, The less I believe. And the happier I get. I surprised myself with that statement. Because I think some part of me had made this connection between my happiness in the grip of views. This connection between happiness and thinking that I know something. And I've been thinking about that for the last couple of months, And that was the inspiration for tonight's talk. And so I offer this for your reflection. And I believe it's time for a short break, And then we can sit.