Talk: Map to the Heart

An investigation of the 4 heavenly abodes: lovingkindness, compassion, joy, equanimity.

Transcript

Today I would like to talk about a map to the heart.

And in Buddhism there is what are called the four Brahma Viharas,

Or translated as heavenly abodes or the immeasurables.

The four immeasurables are loving kindness in Pali that is metta,

Compassion in Pali that is karuna,

Sympathetic joy,

Mudita,

And equanimity,

Which is upekka.

Each of these have a near and far enemy.

The far enemy is the opposite of the wholesome quality.

The near enemy is something that looks a lot like it but is not that and gets us in a lot of trouble.

So the far enemy of loving kindness,

As you could probably guess,

Is hatred.

Would anybody care to guess what is the near enemy of loving kindness?

It looks like love,

It smells like love.

You can mistake it for love but it's not loving kindness.

Infatuation?

Infatuation has the quality that I'm looking for and the quality is attachment.

So when one is infatuated there is more than likely some combination of loving kindness and attachment.

Loving kindness itself expects nothing in return.

It's freely given.

Attachment,

Love with attachment often has the quality of something like I'd like you to like me or I'd like to feel that I'm a loving person myself,

Whatever it might happen to be.

Compassion,

The far enemy of compassion is cruelty.

The near enemy of compassion is pity.

So compassion is really the same as loving kindness but in the context of suffering.

Then we come to sympathetic joy which we really don't think about too much.

I think it arises pretty naturally out of loving kindness.

Sympathetic joy,

The opposite of that is jealousy.

So sympathetic joy is feeling joy at the good fortune of your friend.

You got the book contract,

I didn't.

I feel so happy for you that you got this wonderful thing.

You got the guy,

I didn't get the guy.

Great for you.

Okay,

Good luck with that.

So the near enemy of sympathetic joy is hypocrisy.

You're pretending that you're happy for the well-being of your friend.

So somebody's walking down the street,

You're a really good Buddhist and you feel loving kindness.

You are wishing that those that you're seeing on the street are happy,

Feel great.

And all of a sudden you see someone who is obviously having a hard time.

They're a panhandler,

They're very emotionally upset possibly,

But it's really clear that this person that you see is having a hard time.

So at that point,

Loving kindness very naturally changes to compassion.

You have a deep wish that that person be free from suffering.

Stephen Levine poetically calls compassion the ability to keep your heart open and held.

So compassion,

The same as loving kindness,

But it's wishing that yourself or another,

And particularly in the West,

It's very important to remember that we need compassion for ourselves.

Traditionally in Eastern practice,

Compassion is taught for the other person who is suffering.

In the West,

We have to really look at self-compassion.

I was one time with a Tibetan Lama who said,

Okay,

Now we're going to do a practice and everybody think of your mother and how much you love her.

And he said,

Wait a minute,

This is the West,

We can't do that.

Because not everybody has wonderful feelings when you think about your mother.

Can I ask you a question?

I'd kind of like to leave until the end.

As a good Buddhist,

Am I supposed to be wishing something upon others constantly?

I'm hearing that that's part of the equation,

I'm confused.

If I'm walking down the street,

I might be wishing something around me on others.

And is that supposed to be a conscious thing?

I'm wondering.

Okay,

So wonderful question.

And I'm not suggesting that we're walking down the street looking at each person and thinking I wish you'd be happy,

I wish you'd be happy.

We're walking down the street and working with having an open heart.

And out of that naturally comes loving kindness.

If you see suffering out of that,

Naturally comes compassion.

If you see somebody who's really happy,

Out of that comes sympathetic joy.

It's kind of like learning to ride a bicycle.

In the beginning,

It is something that is a self-conscious practice,

That it's something you're doing.

And later on,

It's something that happens very naturally.

Another talk,

I think that we've spoken about this in a few of my previous visits here,

Is that being in the belly,

Being in the hara,

Supports the heart being open,

The heart opens naturally.

So if you're not centered,

Then the heart being open is going to be dependent on the environment feeling safe and supportive.

Whereas if you're centered,

If you're right there,

Then you don't need people to be liking you or the environment to be safe in order to have an open heart and a naturally arising wish.

Although not a conscious verbal,

I wish,

But a conscious,

Naturally arising feeling,

Maybe a better word,

That all beings be happy.

Now you may have noticed that one of the four Brahma Viharas that I didn't talk about is the fourth one,

Equanimity.

And basically this talk is about equanimity.

That's the one we're going to focus on.

It's the most complex and it's really one that I never even thought about until my dear friend Roy King said,

Why don't we talk about equanimity next time you come to GBF?

So equanimity,

As the dictionary might suggest,

Is the quality of clear-minded,

Stable,

Steady,

Mature mind without a lot of self-centeredness.

The other three qualities that we've been talking about are often done as concentration practices.

You can go to Spirit Rock or some Buddhist center and focus,

Concentrate on a feeling of loving kindness,

A feeling of compassion,

A feeling of sympathetic joy,

A feeling of having an open heart.

But I've never heard anybody sitting down and focusing on feeling equanimous.

That is the word equanimous.

So why is equanimity so complex and why is it so important?

Equanimity is the quality that keeps the other three Brahma Viharas from becoming defiled.

So I'm feeling compassion.

There's somebody in front of me who's clearly suffering.

Maybe he's dying,

Maybe she's very emotionally upset.

And I begin to feel compassion.

But then my compassion starts slipping over into,

I'd like to fix you.

I know just what you need.

I'm going to do this for you right now.

Or I meet somebody that I find very appealing in some kind of way,

Intellectually,

Sexually,

Emotionally,

Financially,

Whatever it is.

And I feel loving kindness as I first see them.

But then I start thinking,

If I really play this loving kindness a bit,

Maybe I can get what I want here.

Okay.

But it is equanimity,

This quality of equanimity that keeps the open heart from becoming defiled or sliding over into the near or even the far enemy of the original quality.

Equanimity is the protector of love and compassion.

So my main question is,

How do you do it?

How do you cultivate equanimity?

It's fairly clear how we can cultivate an open heart,

A compassionate heart,

A loving heart.

And equanimity really has a lot to do with the quality of letting go,

Of allowing experiences to flow through.

So imagine that you're somebody who really,

Really likes pizza.

And you're eating a pizza and you're really enjoying the pizza.

If you're able to just be there with an open heart,

Allowing satisfaction to arise and not grasping,

Not getting sticky,

Not becoming attached,

Then this experience of enjoying pizza just flows through and you keep enjoying it.

But if we start grabbing on and saying,

Boy,

This is great,

And wanting more,

Having a closed heart in that sense,

Then there's no equanimity and the enjoyment turns into attachment.

Now neuroscience has been finding recently that the mind,

The nervous system has evolved in a way that it is like Teflon to positive experiences and Velcro to negative ones.

So you can imagine that thousands and thousands of years ago,

Our great,

Great,

Great,

Great grandfather was out there on the savanna being,

And there were tigers out there.

So that one bad experience could ruin your whole day.

You'd be eaten up by this tiger.

So the nervous system evolved to be very alert to negative experiences.

But now we're living in an environment where there are very few tigers running around and there are a lot of small stressors.

So suppose you go on a vacation.

You have 99 really positive experiences and one negative experience.

You sprain your ankle or somebody picks your pocket.

Which experience is the one you're going to most remember about that vacation?

And more than likely you're really going to think about that one negative experience.

But what they have found with doing recent brain scans is that if you amplify and extend a positive experience for 20 seconds,

Rather than just letting it slide through,

Then that will create a new neural pathway in the mind.

It's like taking in the good,

That you will then begin to change in a very small way your self-image,

Who you think you are.

And the quality that allows you to do that is equanimity.

It's equanimity that allows us to be with those positive experiences and not immediately grabbing onto them.

A lot of Buddhism is talking about how we deal with the difficult stuff,

How we deal with the obscurations,

The blockages to our practice.

But an equally,

If not more difficult practice is learning to be with what we enjoy,

What we love,

What are the quote positive experiences,

The good experiences,

Without getting caught in them.

So to the extent that you or I can love somebody or love a piece of pizza or love watching a 49ers game today or whatever it is that you really enjoy,

Love that,

Open to that,

Have an open heart and relationship to that without having that slide over into attachment or having compassion,

Without having that slide over into indifference or pity,

Then the next time we have negative experiences,

Very likely we don't have to go so far down into the difficult part of practice.

So practice isn't just dealing with the difficult.

It's learning to be awake without grasping for that which we love.

We often think of love or compassion or equanimity as something that I need to cultivate for myself,

But it's also a group experience.

Equanimity is a group.

And I would suggest that one of the reasons that we like coming to satsang,

Sangha,

Like we're doing here,

Is that we feel that collective sense of equanimity,

That by being together it's easier,

If we have a common purpose,

It's easier to be in that place of balanced heart,

That stable heart that is equanimous,

Than if you're out there driving down the road or at home getting your life in order.

Buddhism loves slogans,

And there are slogans that help cultivate equanimity,

Such as,

May I accept this just as it is,

May I accept this just as it is,

Or may we all be at ease with the conditions of our lives.

Now as I was mentioning before,

The near enemy of equanimity is indifference.

And it's very possible to take these slogans,

May I accept this just as it is,

And start letting that slip into a cold indifference.

Equanimity itself is a very warm,

Moist quality.

Equanimity is the ground out of which true compassion arises.

So it's very important to notice this point where preference slips over into attachment,

Like in the pizza eating example,

Or we could say liking slips over into wanting.

As long as we're liking and having preference,

Which is the human condition,

Then that's great.

We can have a very open heart and still have a great deal of passion and enjoyment and creativity.

But when it starts sliding over into getting caught,

That is what then cuts off compassion,

What cuts off creativity,

What cuts off passion.

So that equanimity is not something that's going to turn us into gray zombie-like people without a lot of juice.

It actually is quite the opposite of that.

To be in a complicated life with a balanced heart,

It will allow the heart then to respond much more appropriately and spontaneously in a very immediate way to our preferences.

So we see something we like and we can like it even more.

We have a preference,

We can go into that preference.

We see somebody we love,

We can love them more because we're not getting caught in attachment.

In Buddhism,

There is the four foundations of mindfulness,

The four things,

The four categories of things that we can pay attention to.

One is the body,

One is the mind,

Another one is the Dharma.

You can pay attention to karma and impermanence.

But one of the things we can pay attention to is feelings.

Associated with each experience is a feeling that is either pleasant,

Neutral,

Or not pleasant.

So once again,

Equanimity is learning to pay attention to that feeling quality.

So that right now,

Maybe you're feeling neutral,

Maybe you're just enjoying this but not so much.

Maybe there's an unpleasant feeling,

Is this guy going to talk forever?

Maybe there's a pleasant feeling,

Oh this is great information.

But can you really learn to pay attention to that feeling quality moment to moment to moment as a practice,

As a way then of not getting caught in attachment,

Not having the heart close because we automatically,

Unconsciously push away unpleasant feeling,

Grasp at pleasant feeling.

So in a way,

Equanimity is based on faith.

In Buddhism,

It's based on the faith of several things.

One that this is a lawful universe,

That basically what we're experiencing now is the perfect unfolding of our karma.

That what you and I are experiencing in this moment could not be anything other than exactly what it is.

Our only choice in life is how we respond to this moment.

Another faith that we have in Buddhism is that this is a benevolent universe,

That we are whole beings,

That we are not impure.

So that just by coming into this balanced heart of equanimity,

That our true nature as compassion will arise naturally.

Compassion is both something that we can cultivate,

Compassion with a small c,

But compassion with a capital C is also our true nature.

That when we get attachment out of the way,

What remains is compassion.

I would like to point out that there is an entirely different way of approaching all of this.

And what we've been talking about is the Buddhist map of the heart.

There's also a path of devotion,

Where instead of having an equanimous heart and mind,

One drowns in love.

One goes so deeply into love that one begins to disappear.

If you've read Rumi poems,

He talks about being drunk.

And the wine that he is getting drunk on is the wine of love.

My teacher,

Nimkrolli Baba Maharaji,

Someone asked him how to meditate.

And he said,

Lose yourself in love,

Die into love.

So that's not about equanimity.

That's about becoming love so deeply that that's all that remains.

And we each have to decide,

Are we going to be somebody who wants equanimity and calmness and stableness,

Or I personally am somebody who is sort of attached to excitement.

That's been one of the downfalls in my life.

It's caused a great deal of suffering in my life.

But the Sufis say that your greatest weakness is but a warping of your greatest strength.

So that that quality in me that loves excitement and gets me in all kinds of trouble financially and romantically and all other kinds of ways that we don't even have to think about is also the quality that brings me more and more deeply into my heart.

So that's the question that you have to ask yourself.

Are you going to approach your heart in this balanced,

Equanimous way?

Or are you going to go flying in there as if your hair were on fire and see what happens next?

As Michael so graciously said in my introduction,

I have worked with a lot of people who are approaching death.

And very often people who are approaching death do not feel a lot of equanimity.

They're feeling,

Oh my God,

What's going on now?

They're pushing it away or getting lost in what they might be feeling.

There is a quality,

An energetic quality of learning to have appropriate boundaries that a child learns hopefully at around the ages of seven and eight that allows one to work with suffering.

So if suffering arises,

There are three possible responses,

Overly rigid boundaries,

Pushing it away.

I don't want to feel this.

The doctor says I might be dying,

But I don't want to think about that.

My brother has stage four pancreatic cancer.

And his doctor gave him this news in an after hours email and said,

Sorry,

We're going to put you on palliative care,

Sign doctor so and so.

So one would think that this doctor had overly rigid boundaries.

He did not want to be there when my brother got this news.

Now,

I'm not saying this to judge the doctor or to make the doctor into a bad guy.

The doctor is not trained,

Has not been trained almost certainly to work with that depth of human suffering.

So he decides I want to be an oncologist.

I really want to help people.

I've got a good heart.

And what happens is a lot of his patients are dying.

And this begins to affect him.

His boundaries aren't such,

Aren't strong enough.

His quality of being in his belly centered,

Hara,

Isn't strong enough so that he can be with that suffering and not be overwhelmed by it.

And the suffering of his patients begins to affect the way he dreams,

The way he relates to his spouse and his children.

So unconsciously he begins to develop the strategy,

If I push all of that away,

I won't feel it so much and I'll be better off.

But the problem is that when you do that,

You begin to also become warmly professional,

Push away your partner,

Your child,

The person that you really love.

Possibility number two,

Suffering arises over permeable boundaries.

Oh my God,

Your suffering is my suffering.

What a catastrophe.

What can we do here?

So if you were really suffering and one of those two people came to you,

How much help could they really give you?

Probably not too much.

There is a third possibility which depends on equanimity.

The possibility of having appropriate boundaries,

Of bringing energy into your belly,

Having that support the open heart.

The belly supports the heart.

The heart opens,

The heart has equanimity.

And one can then be with suffering but not get lost in it.

One can be with suffering in another person or suffering of your own and not get lost in it.

So equanimity is really a quality that allows us to be in our heart in all kinds of different circumstances.

And one circumstance that comes to my mind is the circumstance of being addicted.

We're all addicted.

Everybody in this room is addicted.

Until you are enlightened,

You are addicted.

Whether you're addicted to understanding or excitement,

If you're not addicted to the usual things of eating,

Drinking,

Relationships,

Whatever it might happen to be.

But we're addicted to something.

And when we get into that addictive cycle,

There's no equanimity.

And to begin to watch how like turns into want,

How preference turns into attachment,

How the addictive cycle begins and how equanimity goes out the window is a very crucial point in practice.

And when Roy,

Roy's in a group that I facilitate and I said,

Does anybody have any suggestions of what I should talk about?

And Roy said equanimity.

And I thought equanimity,

I'd never even thought about equanimity.

I mean,

It's not with all the Buddhist study I've done,

It's not something that's really appealed to me particularly because of my enjoyment of excitement and passion and things like that.

But the more I think about equanimity,

The more I've been reading about it and thinking about it and even practicing it,

Equanimity allows excitement,

Equanimity allows passion,

Equanimity allows the juice of life to not only arise but to extend,

To deepen.

Because usually when those qualities arise,

We're so happy to see them,

We grab onto them so tightly that almost immediately we squeeze the life out of them.

So I'm a convert.

Thank you,

Roy.

Equanimity is a very important quality of heart and mind to cultivate.

So I would like to leave some time for questions.

Yes.

Thank you for your talk,

Dale.

You're welcome.

I have a question about something you said kind of early on about recent neuroscientific research,

The benefits of allowing positive experience to be amplified for 20 seconds or more.

Yeah.

And various beneficial effects.

So how is that amplification?

I mean,

What would that look like in a way that's not attachment?

Because in my mind,

I'm going,

Well,

It sounds like attachment.

So I'm trying to think of the most useful example here.

If we go back to the pizza eating example,

And you're somebody that really,

Really likes pizza and you start eating the pizza,

Very often when somebody is really enjoying something,

You go to sleep.

You either get caught in that.

Instead of actually tasting the pizza,

You're thinking about how great it is.

The depth of the positive experience is such that there's not much quality of being present and aware of what it is that's going on.

I was at a Vipassana retreat many years ago.

It was toward the end of the retreat.

My mind was very,

Very present and aware.

And for breakfast,

We had grapefruit.

And I bit into a section of grapefruit and I could feel the little sacks of grapefruit juice that comprise a piece of grapefruit exploding in my mouth.

It was ecstatic.

And I realized that I'd never actually tasted grapefruit before.

The way I would eat a grapefruit,

I would take a bite and I would say,

Oh,

This is a good one or this one's a little dry or this is a sweet one.

And then I'd start thinking about something or I'd be waiting for the next bite instead of really being there with the actual experience of what's happening in that moment so that there's a notion,

There's an idea,

There's a concept of eating pizza.

And there's the moment to moment actual experience of the cheese on your teeth and the warmth and all that stuff.

And if you can keep doing that for 20 seconds,

That creates a new neural pathway of enjoyment.

So that we do that with negative things all the time.

We grab onto the negative things and start worrying about them and create all these neural pathways of danger,

Worry,

Anxiety,

Paranoia,

Again and again and again.

But very seldom do we just naturally do that with positive ones.

So it really is,

Once again,

The difference between liking and wanting.

You're liking the eating of pizza.

You're actually with moment to moment the experience without getting attached.

So many years ago I cared for my father in Parkinson's.

I was doing good deeds or whatever,

But there was a sense that the deeds I was doing would almost die within.

Not that it was a waste that I was helping him,

But it wasn't by caring for a child where this child's life was just beginning and these things were going to fall through the line.

Somehow,

Yeah,

Can you talk about that and caring for the dying?

And feelings that arise around that?

So you were saying that because he was fading away that the service you were doing didn't feel as meaningful as if the person was improving before your eyes?

Exactly.

Okay.

Well the Buddha said,

I love to be able to start a sentence like that.

The Buddha said,

If you take your parents and you carry them on your shoulders for the rest of your life,

You can't repay them for what they've given you.

And very often when I'm with somebody who's dying,

They aren't necessarily improving in some mental or physical way.

So I would say a couple things,

That firstly,

The work is about caregiving can be seen as spiritual practice.

And you're caregiving not because you're going to change the other person,

But because this is your Dharma in the moment.

There's a deity in Hinduism called Hanuman,

And he expresses his love for the divine through selfless service.

And there are other ways of expressing your love.

There's Krishna who is lover to beloved,

And Ram who's the perfect son and the perfect father and all those things.

But there is the way of doing service as your practice so that you begin to notice the feeling,

I'm not getting much out of this.

In that moment,

There's something you can work with.

That's about you.

It's not about your father.

My strategy in life is trying to not create bad karma and to do what I can to clean up the karma that I've got tailing around behind me here.

So I help both of my parents die.

I think they both died very well.

But if they would have died in more pain or more emotional pain,

As long as I was doing everything I could,

As long as I was learning how to open my heart in a situation like that,

Then I'm doing my work.

And particularly if it's your parents.

We have so many emotional entanglements with our parents.

Just as an example,

With my own father,

He was a Danish Lutheran.

I don't know if that means anything to anybody,

But we had a very loving relationship,

But it was never expressed at all.

It was very cool in a certain kind of way.

And about 10 years before he died,

I was in the car with him and I said,

Dad,

Next weekend I'm going to teach a workshop in Berkeley about conscious dying.

Would you like to hear what I'm going to talk about?

And he said,

Isn't it a beautiful day today?

So he then got metastatic prostate cancer.

And it was about a week before he died.

I was at his bedside in a hospital down in Mountain View.

And I said to him,

What do you think is going on right now for you?

Now he could have said,

Isn't it a beautiful day today?

But he said,

I don't know.

What do you think?

And he invited me in.

And we had a conversation about it.

I said,

I hope I'm wrong,

But medically,

I'm pretty sure you're dying.

And he said,

That's the way it feels to me.

And we had the most real talk that he and I had ever had.

And he said,

Go home and tell your mother that I'm dying and I want to talk to her about it.

And I went home and said,

Mom,

Dad feels that he's dying and he wants to talk to you about it.

And she said,

No,

He doesn't.

And I said,

Yes,

He does.

And I brought her to the hospital.

And they talked and they cried.

And she climbed into bed with him.

And they cleared up a lot of stuff.

They really connected.

And my father and I really connected during that last period of time in a way that we hadn't been able to until it was clear that he was dying and now was the last chance.

And even if there isn't that emotional rapprochement,

Even if there's still some separation,

Then you work with the place where you feel that separation.

And those Brahma Viharas,

Compassion,

Loving-kindness,

Equanimity and sympathetic joy,

They all have the feeling of connectedness,

Of connection,

Whereas the near and far enemies have the quality of separation.

Maybe you can come here to the Zen Do and meditate and feel connected with everybody.

And then you go to your mother or your father and all of a sudden all those childhood buttons are right there because they created those buttons in you.

And you have a very good opportunity,

Then,

A profound opportunity to heal places that are difficult to heal in any other way.

One friend of mine who is a psychotherapist said,

If it's not one thing,

It's your mother.

In India,

Before the British showed up,

There was no word for thank you because it was felt that if you had it and I needed it,

There it would go to me,

Or if I had it and you needed it,

There it would go.

And that thanking creates a giver and receiver.

It creates duality.

It creates separation.

And in spite of that,

I would like to say thank you very much for your kind attention.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Reviews

Nice talk. Points that has been around my everyday lately. Thank you 🙏🏻

Very interesting. I would like to know more

Sweet! I loved learning more about equanimity, the near and far qualities of each immeasurable, I loved the humor & authenticity. I love the centering quality of equanimity as I apply the spiritual principles gleaned from the 12 steps shared by the recovered 100 in “Alcoholic’s Anonymous”, www.aa.org, and how to live involved, as presented in this talk, yet not entangled. The boundaries example(s) shared were relevant and helpful as I personally explore equanimity breath by breath, moment by moment, NOW, www.gratefulness.org, ahimsa of www.compassioncourse.org

Such an excellent talk for reflection, but so much more than that—reminding me of what my practice (my life) is all about. 🌿🕊
🙏🏻

I enjoyed this talk very much. Real and funny. Thank you!

Wonderful. ( best way to clean kitchen listening to you ) 😂. Interested in the part about how you are attracted to excitement and the trouble it gets you into. ….making me think that I could open up to a bit more and be as conscious as possible … interesting ….. fyi. The first two questions I could not hear and you did not feed back the essence in your answer. Thank you 🙏

Great teachings , so funny and relateable. The idea that living in the belly helps open the heart really resonated - I need to work in this. Thank you!

Such beautiful insights and profound teachings. 🌟 Thank you 🙏💛

Very engaging talk. Thank you. It ended mid sentence sadly so not sure if that is my technical issue or a fault in the recording.

Love your talks!

Interesting, fun and informative.

Beautiful. Great way to spend 30 minutes: informative, educational and moving! 🙏🏽❤️✨

Very interesting. Thank you. 😊

Thank you. Very meaningful talk to which I'll be listening again and again.

Wonderful!! Thank you!!💚

I found this presentation to be outstanding! The focus on equanimity was something I never even thought about. It really helped me to understand some unsettled thoughts I have had that are most probably attachment issues. Funny thing is that I rarely listen to any type of lecture on this app that I use for meditation. But for some reason I was drawn to this and was intrigued enough to try it.Thank you so much for your wise words!

Wonderful insight thank you

And a little more to ponder....great talk. 🌹

Lovely to listen to. Thank you 💙

Spoke to me. Thank you for this most thoughtful talk on the four Buddhist principles in the universe of life.