From Suffering To Joy

A dharma talk given by John Cunningham, leader of Insight Meditation Cleveland on 12/19/20 giving Pali teachings on the movement from suffering to joy. In English and suitable for all levels of practitioners. "I see you. I care. Thank you."

Transcript

So,

We've done a fair amount of work today with the idea of suffering and beginning to understand what it is,

How to work with it in both our meditation practice and also in our daily lives through the living meditation.

So with the talk today,

I'd like to continue exploring this idea of moving from suffering to joy,

What that means.

It sounds like a journey,

As we said earlier.

Is there really a journey?

We have to look to see what does that mean to have a journey?

And really to begin to understand what suffering is so that we can move from suffering if that's in fact what we actually do.

One of the,

I guess really the only real gift that the Buddha gave us was this idea that it is free to be,

It is possible to be free from suffering in this life.

That is a real possibility that we can all achieve.

And he spoke of it in many,

Many different ways.

He gave many,

Many different tools as to how to work with it.

The challenge is that our natural flow of life that we've been cultivating for most of our life goes contrary to understanding suffering and dukkha in the way that the Buddha talked about it.

To begin with,

I want to say a little bit about that idea of the language.

Someone was asking before about that word dukkha.

Again,

It's a Pali word,

Pali P-A-L-I was sort of the high language at the time of the Buddha.

And although the Buddhist tradition in the early days was oral,

When it was finally written down it was written down in the Pali language.

So a lot of the words that we have in this kind of Buddhist tradition are Pali words.

What I like about the Pali words is they don't come with any baggage associated with them.

So when we hear the word suffering,

It's full.

It's full of meaning for us.

A lifetime of meaning has been crammed into that word.

It's like a balloon that's already been blown up.

So when we start talking about re-looking at suffering and what that might mean,

There's not a lot of room in the balloon for more meaning.

I've had people tell me,

I don't want anything to do with Buddhism.

They just say everything is suffering.

My life's not suffering.

So that preconceived notion at that point that suffering is a particular type of thing and that's what it is.

That's what we built up as a model in our own lives.

The word dukkha,

And the less you've heard of the word,

The better that is because it comes like a brand new balloon just out of the bag that's deflated.

So as you begin to explore dukkha,

There's plenty of room for you to put in your experience and your learning to understand what does this mean for me.

So that's why I like using the word dukkha more than suffering.

Laurie talked about early on today when she was talking about suffering,

The different interpretations of that word dukkha and what it means,

The idea that life is unsatisfactory,

That there's a basic unsatisfactory nature to things.

Another one for me is the sense that it's not reliable,

That no matter what goes on in my life,

No matter what I experience,

No matter what my relationships are,

My health,

Other things,

They cannot be counted on absolutely.

They can be counted on while they're here but not absolutely.

My health could go at any moment.

My well-being could go.

My relationships,

All these things could go anytime.

So nothing in this world can really be deeply counted on.

So that kind of underlying unreliability is another way to think of dukkha.

So it's the fact of life that we have it.

Another way of looking at dukkha,

Again,

Just a different exploration of it,

A little bit different way of thinking about it is you can think of dukkha as a measure of how much we want things to be other than they are.

So it's sort of a scale.

If we want things to be different a lot from the way they are,

There's a lot of dukkha.

You can feel that when you have something in your life that you really want to be very different than it is.

Maybe it's the COVID,

The pandemic.

You're really tired of it.

You really want things to be different.

So as you think about that and experience that difference there,

That's a lot of dukkha.

If it's something that we want to be different but not too much,

Then there's a little dukkha.

So maybe you were hoping the sun would be out today.

For those of us in Northeast Ohio,

It's not.

But if you were hoping for that,

Maybe,

Ah,

Clear would have been nice if the sun was out today.

There's a little bit of dukkha.

And the good news is when we get to the point where we're okay with things the way they are,

When we're able to open to,

To accept,

To acknowledge,

To allow,

There's no dukkha.

And this was the promise of the Buddha,

That we have this capacity to awaken,

To be free from dukkha.

Our normal way of dealing with dukkha is to try,

As Emily was asking about in the question earlier today,

And she so astutely noticed that no matter what you try to do to change the causes and conditions in the world around you,

It doesn't get rid of the underlying suffering or dukkha that comes with those causes and conditions.

And yet that's what we try to do.

There's enough of a success rate with some of those things that it reinforces that for us.

You know,

You can do certain things and make things better for a while.

And that reinforces the idea that,

Gee,

If I could just make all the causes and conditions around me the way I want them to be,

There would be no dukkha.

And it gives us this thirst for money and power and health and all these other things thinking that,

Gee,

If I could just get these lined up right,

That somehow dukkha would disappear.

So that's our normal way of dealing with our stress,

Dealing with our dukkha.

Or another one that is often used is tantrums.

We throw some sort of a tantrum when we yell at other people because we don't like the way things are,

When we honk our horns in traffic,

When we're short with people or shut down to people,

We're throwing a kind of a tantrum.

And it's a way to try to change the situation so that we're not feeling that distance that's existing there between the way things are and what we want.

We're trying to bring that,

Close that gap in ways that don't work very well to eliminate the dukkha.

Well,

If those ways worked,

We would not be here.

We'd all be doing something else today.

There would be no teachings of the Buddha.

There would be no traditions,

No need for any of the great spiritual traditions that deal with this kind of thing.

We would just make everything to our alignment and we'd be done with it.

So unfortunately,

It doesn't work.

So it's worth looking to investigate other ways.

As we begin to understand or look to understand dukkha,

Especially in the case of looking at the Buddha's model for it,

The very first thing that he presented after he was awakened was this idea of the noble truths that Laurie talked about earlier today.

And the noble truths start with the truth of dukkha.

It was the first teaching he had was this truth of dukkha.

And I want to read to you from the suttas.

The suttas,

If you're not familiar with that,

It's another Pali word.

They're the teachings of the Buddha,

The way they are recorded now from the oral traditions.

So these are the teachings.

So this particular one is how the Buddha described dukkha.

And when he taught,

He was always teaching to groups of monks.

So sometimes you'll hear the word bhikkhus or monks,

And that's the same thing.

But he was teaching to groups like this.

So he said,

Now this monks is the noble truth of dukkha.

Birth is dukkha.

Aging is dukkha.

Death is dukkha.

Sorrow,

Lamentation,

Pain,

Grief and despair are dukkha.

Separation with the unbeloved is dukkha.

Separation from the loved is dukkha.

Not getting what is wanted is dukkha.

In short,

The five clinging aggregates are dukkha.

That's big,

Isn't it?

The five clinging aggregates,

We'll talk about what those are in a minute.

When you read this list of things that are dukkha,

I mean,

It is this world we live in.

It's this conditioned world.

And it's a pretty heavy way to start a model for life.

But it's very useful in that it sets the stage that we've got a lot of work here to understand what we're talking about with dukkha and how we might move beyond it.

So that's the first noble truth.

The second noble truth was the other part of dukkha,

How dukkha happens.

And so the Buddha said this about the second noble truth.

He said,

And this monks is the noble truth of the origination of dukkha,

The craving that makes for further becoming,

Accompanied by passion and delight,

Relishing now here and now there,

That is craving for central pleasure,

Craving for becoming,

Craving for non-becoming.

So this is the root of this dukkha.

This is the origin of it.

So in these first two noble truths,

We really have the heart of what the Buddha is setting the stage for these two noble truths for what it is that we have to work with.

We really need nothing more than those two things to be able to find freedom.

There's nothing else we need to know about the world we live in to be able to find freedom.

Now the good news is,

I think Laurie said this this morning,

You know,

You start out with she had the list of different words that could be used to describe dukkha and you read that list and one by one you check them off.

Faint unsettledness,

Yeah,

I got that.

Irritation,

I have that.

Impatience,

I got that.

Annoyance,

Definitely that.

Frustration,

I've gotten frustrated hearing this list.

Disappointment and we slowly,

We take on all these things as we hear them and they all describe some aspect of us.

So this feeling that we have around dukkha,

It's really palpable to us as we begin to hear these things.

And so on one level hearing these words is really helpful that it helps to define or bound what is it that we're talking about with dukkha.

But at some point it's also important we need to understand what are these?

What is the common factor under all these things?

Whether it's a faint unsettledness or all the way to agony and anguish,

What's the common factor there?

And this is where the noble truths come in of dukkha and the origin of dukkha.

And we're not going to talk directly about them today,

But the third and the fourth noble truth are the Buddha's sort of moving back up.

He said the third noble truth,

There's a way out of this.

We don't have to be stuck here,

Which is what we'll be talking about.

And then the fourth is the Eightfold Path,

Which is the prescription of the Buddha,

A way of living,

A way of being that helps us to move beyond dukkha,

Move to freedom from it.

But what I'd really like to explore,

An avenue for this today is to look a little bit more about these two elements that make up our dukkha.

The first he talked about was the aggregates,

These five aggregates.

And we'll speak a little bit about those in a minute.

And then the second was this idea of craving.

The Pali word is tanha,

T-A-N-H-A.

And it can be thought of as thirst.

It's that longing feeling,

That craving feeling.

And so really when we have these aggregates and we have this craving feeling together,

We're really getting close to the heart of the Buddha's model for dukkha and what it is.

Another part of dukkha that I'd like to offer for you to investigate for yourself.

And those of you who know me know I say this a lot,

But it's really true.

Please don't believe anything here.

This is an invitation for you to look for yourself to see what resonates for you beyond your stories,

Beyond what you would like to be,

What resonates for you.

If we talk about craving or thirst,

What is that for you?

What does that mean for you?

So this other aspect of dukkha I'd like to ask you to investigate is,

I'm going to call it momentary dukkha and aggregated dukkha.

So momentary dukkha is a feeling.

It's something that happens very quickly.

So in the list that Laurie shared with us this morning,

Like a faint unsettledness or an irritation,

Maybe even an impatience,

These really small experiences that are unpleasant,

Those are the types of things when I'm talking about momentary dukkha.

They happen and they go.

They happen and they go.

Often to the extent that we can't even stop and think about them before they've moved on to something else.

They may be reifying themselves,

But in that moment it's just happening and then it's not.

And so you have to really learn to look closely to see dukkha at that level,

This momentary dukkha.

When these begin to stitch themselves together,

These moments of dukkha get stitched together,

We get what I'm calling the aggregated dukkha.

And this is usually what most of us think of with suffering.

So something big happens and I don't know,

I go out to my car in this snowy weather and I got a flat tire.

I can't believe I got a flat tire in this cold weather,

I got to change it.

And it's a big feeling and a lot of words in the head,

A lot of stories,

Something's happening to me and it just grows and grows from one moment of a flat tire,

Which is probably the momentary dukkha,

But oh my gosh,

My tire is flat.

We now have built this story and the dukkha is growing.

It's continuing to be fed by the stories that I'm telling myself about my flat tire,

By the lamentation,

The anguish,

The not liking the way things are,

I'm growing that space.

I'm making a bigger space between the way things are and the way I want them to be.

When I first came out,

It was just a flat tire.

Now my whole day is ruined.

I got to call somebody.

I got to check my,

I got all these things I have to do.

So it's important for us to understand the difference between momentary and aggregated dukkha.

And by the way,

Those are my words.

I've not seen it called out that way in the sutras myself,

But I think it helps us to understand that what the Buddha was talking about when he said that the five aggregates are dukkha,

He's talking about momentary dukkha.

He's talking about momentary resistance to what is.

The aggregated things are nothing more than a bunch of those put together,

But there is a key part that comes with these two pieces that we need as a way to help us to understand this.

And that's the idea of an I or a me.

So in this combination of the aggregates and the craving,

As these two come together,

There arises a mirage that we call I or me.

Now the nature of that mirage is very interesting.

It's like a rainbow.

Can you call a rainbow a mirage?

In one way you can,

Another way you can say there's something there.

So this is the nature of the I.

I mean,

If you explore a rainbow,

You can't touch it,

You can't reach out and find it.

It moves.

If you come close to the rainbow,

The rainbow moves.

I had an experience once years ago,

I was driving down a highway and there's a rainbow,

I don't know,

Probably 100 yards ahead of me.

And it was really an interesting experience because as I was driving,

The rainbow was staying ahead of me.

There's no coming to the rainbow.

Why is that?

A rainbow is a mirage caused by causes and conditions.

When the sunlight and the water drops come together in a certain way,

A rainbow manifests.

So from one level I can say,

Yes,

Of course there's a rainbow.

I can see it.

It's right there.

I can take a picture of it and show you that.

So it's definitely there.

But I can't touch it.

I can't taste it.

I can't hold it.

I can't contain it.

I can't retain it.

I can't do anything with it except it appears there.

And so it's a good metaphor for the I,

For the me.

I can certainly sense an I or a me.

It's here.

I can feel it.

I can all feel this.

I'm experiencing.

I'm talking right now.

There's a you and there's an I there that's listening.

What is that?

But can you find this I anywhere?

Have you ever tried to look for it and see where is it inside of this me,

This body,

This mind?

Where is this I?

It defies location.

It defies pinning down.

So it has a lot of the qualities that the rainbow has.

The other thing about it is it seems to arise with dukkha.

It seems to be present when the aggregates,

Which we'll talk about in just a minute here,

When the aggregates come and there's a craving for them,

There seems to be an I that arises with that.

So this sense of a self is an essential part of exploring to see what dukkha is.

We have to understand what we can about this sense of I and most importantly what it's not more so than what it is.

So let's talk a little bit about the aggregates here.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail,

But one of the tools that the Buddha used extensively is these models.

What he did is he took our experience and he broke it into pieces in these lists different ways so that we could explore the various pieces without the confusion of the whole self that's there,

The whole entity of a me or my and I and body and mind and all that together.

And then we could reassemble it with a greater understanding.

It's much like a prism.

You take a prism and shine white light through it,

It breaks it out into its constituent colors.

So you could look at the blue separately.

You could look at the green.

You could look at the yellow and the red.

You could look at these colors separately from each other and explore them and begin to understand their nature.

When you take the prism away,

The light is white again.

There never was those colors.

There was only the white light,

But you have a deeper understanding of what that white light is by having shown it through the prism.

And that's really what we're doing with these lists and models that the Buddha has offered to us.

So this idea of the aggregates is really just a model,

A way for us to look at this experience of being here to see what are some of the constituent parts that might be useful to work with.

So the first of these is form.

That's everything that's physical about us,

All those things.

The second is the feeling tone,

Pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.

It's as simple as that.

It's not the emotions when we talk about feelings in our regular everyday language.

The third is perception.

That capacity that we have to recognize a tree as a tree,

Recognize a loved one as a person to be able to construct instantaneously a recognition based on our past experiences with what we're being given from our senses right now.

The fourth one is fabrication,

This ability that we have to think and to feel in terms of our emotions now.

Those bigger aggregated feelings that we have,

Not the feeling tone,

But joy,

Anger,

Frustration,

Happiness,

All of those kinds of feelings.

And then the last of the aggregates that the Buddha offered to us is consciousness.

So this kind of consciousness is awareness that comes from our senses.

So we have a sense consciousness for each of our five senses,

Our ability to recognize and process sound,

Sight,

Touch,

Smell,

Taste.

That ability to do that is what we're talking about here is consciousness.

So the Buddha said that dukkha is any of these aggregates when we cling to them.

That was the critical part,

This craving factor,

The second factor.

And that arises with these aggregates,

That's dukkha,

That's what leads to dukkha.

And out of that is this sense of an I or me,

One who can suffer,

One who is identified with the aggregate and that it needs to be other than it is.

And that's the essential element to it.

That's the thing that sort of glues these things into a place that we seem to not be able to get free from.

That sense of I,

One of the ways to explore this is to look at that sense of an I or me with the level of dukkha that you're feeling.

So it changes in intensity when there's more,

When it's a more intense wanting things to be other than they are.

Who is wanting things to be different than they are?

Certainly not the world around us.

They look out at the trees.

They're fine with whatever there is.

Things in my room here,

Everything's fine with what it is.

But there's something here that says,

No,

This is not okay.

What is that?

So the more I don't want things to be the same,

That sense of an I or me seems to be stronger.

When we get to the aggregated dukkha,

That continuity that seems to come from moment after moment after moment of dukkha being stitched together into this story of dukkha that seems so real.

And this I seems to be inherent.

It's a part of it.

The sense of I has the quality of feeling like it's always been there and it always will be there.

And yet when we investigate,

We find that's not the case.

So for example,

You could see this by just thinking for a moment,

You were asleep last night,

Maybe up to eight hours you were asleep.

And you had a few dreams,

But for the most part,

Most of that sleep was dreamless.

Where was the I during that night last night?

Where was it?

The I,

The me.

When we reflect on that,

It's like,

I don't know.

It doesn't seem to have been there when I woke up unless there's a dream.

I don't remember any I,

I don't remember any sense of it.

If you have a loved one that is with you when you're sleeping,

You could ask them,

Do you see any I or any signs of an I?

No,

No signs of an I there.

And yet we don't feel a hole.

We don't feel like,

Yep,

The I went till 10 o'clock last night.

Then there's this blank spot where there's no I and then I picked back up.

The mind just sort of sweeps that over and paints this picture of a continuity of an I that's always there.

That's always been there and always will be there.

That paint over quality of it,

That's part of the mirage.

So we don't notice when the I is not there,

Only this vague sense that it's always there.

So it's a worthwhile experience to try to understand how strong the I is at different times when you're really frustrated or angry or upset or fearful.

Notice that sense of an I and how strong it might be.

And then as we look at that,

That helps us to understand this idea of craving because now we have someone who can crave.

Without an I or a me,

There's no place for this concept of craving.

There's no connection to it.

It is the very act of that I taking an interest in some aspect of the aggregates and taking an interest in them not being to its liking.

That's the very nature of the craving.

So as we get that sense of we don't like something,

The natural response that we have trained ourselves to react with for most of our life is to push away.

That very sense of not liking something,

Boom,

I'll push it away.

I don't like.

The same way as when there's something that I do like,

I grab at it.

I want more of it.

I want to hold it.

I want there to be more of it.

And again,

This is well worth exploring.

We know this cognitively.

There's no question there.

We all know this cognitively.

But do we know it viscerally?

Do we know it with wisdom deeply enough that it can be a source of change for us?

The Buddha talked about wisdom.

I love the Buddhist idea of wisdom is the full path.

There's two parts to wisdom.

There's a deep,

Deep knowledge,

A visceral kind of understanding of something.

And then there's the acting from that.

And it makes a lot of sense if you think about those things that you know really deeply and well,

You act from that knowledge.

So that's wisdom,

The Buddha says.

So as we come to understand this feeling tone and how we respond to it from a place of wisdom,

There's a place that it begins to change.

We begin to stop reacting that way.

As we see,

There's things that we like or we don't like and we grab at those.

The normal way of doing that,

It reifies the situation.

So if I see something that I don't like and I go to push it away,

Most of the time I can't push it away,

Especially with the momentary situation.

So for example,

If I don't like the temperature in the room,

There's nothing I can do about the temperature in the room in this moment.

For future moments,

I can go change my heat setting.

I could take a shirt off if I'm too hot.

I could put a jacket on if I'm too cold.

But that would be for a future moment,

Not for this moment.

But this I,

This me,

Does not care about future moments.

It doesn't care about it.

It's in this moment now,

It wants its way.

It wants the temperature to be perfect in this moment.

And unfortunately,

It can't have it.

So what happens then is because it can't have it,

It reacts to that not being able to have it in this form of dukkha and thrashes.

It does things to try to get its way and often very unskillfully because it doesn't really care about the future.

So if it's a conversation with a person,

A partner,

A coworker,

Somebody like that,

You'll find this self inducing your body to say things that are unkind,

That are untrue,

That are unskillful,

That may be hurtful,

Because it's thrashing out to try to make things okay for itself in this moment.

And it'll do anything,

It'll thrash out to try to do that.

It's like a person who's fallen overboard that doesn't know how to swim.

It's just thrashing to try to save itself in that moment with no awareness of the world around it.

And yet it is stronger.

By being threatened like that,

It is stronger than it was before.

And this works the same whether it's in aversion,

Whether it's pushing away,

Or whether it's trying to grab something and bring it towards itself to hold it more.

We single our self out from the world around us to feed those two things and they don't work.

So as we begin to learn to understand suffering,

Those are the things we really need to begin to work with is understanding the aggregates well enough to know,

I have this form,

It's a reality.

I have these feelings,

They pop up.

I have no control over those.

Perception comes up.

I know it,

I can't not know a tree when I see it.

Thoughts come into the mind.

I can't stop thoughts from coming into the mind.

Feelings arise.

I'm happy,

I'm sad,

Those things all seem to happen.

I'm aware of my senses.

These aggregates just happen.

The place where we have some opportunity to affect things is with the craving.

Now even the sense of craving when there is an I will arise,

It will arise.

So we can be through our mindful practice that we can be aware as these things are starting to arise and not let them settle in,

Not let the momentary dukkha become an aggregated dukkha,

Not let the stories begin to grow.

When we see the flat tire,

Instead of processing with the dukkha and all the terrible ramifications and other things that the mind wants to do,

If we meet the flat tire with just a mindful awareness,

It's a recognition,

It's a perception.

Flat tire.

There is now an opportunity for discernment,

For clear seeing.

I need my car later,

I need to change the tire.

End of story.

There doesn't need to be any other process than that.

So the capacity that we have to do this kind of living that we've been doing in our practices so far today and working within the living meditations,

The ability to do that is the tool that's training us how to respond to life that way.

I remember when Gina shared what it was like for her to live mindfully and the difference between that being at home in a nice,

Secure,

Quiet,

No outer stimulus kind of way and how that's different from work and other situations we're in.

The difference between those two is the training to be able to recognize by being present,

By being aware that a new impingement,

A new sense impingement has met us and can be met with that same stability of mind.

Like Laurie was saying,

A noise in the world can be met with the same thing.

We learn to do that by practicing it.

It's practicing on the cushion,

Then the living meditation is even better because we're practicing it with dirty dishes,

We're practicing it with pets that are barking,

We're practicing it with doorbells rung because the mailman is there or the Amazon guy is there.

The phone is ringing with a spam call.

All the things that come into our life here and we do meet them one at a time and each time we do it,

We're training ourselves.

We're developing that wisdom.

In the training is not only a visceral understanding but it's also a responding to it,

An implicit response to this understanding that we have and so slowly we train ourselves and the more we do this,

The more we're able to meet life exactly as it is and have it come into us and meet it with that presence and that spaciousness.

When we do that,

The thing that's most powerful is that the aggregates and what's coming in does not any longer need to change.

We can be fine with things as they are because it's not the thing outside,

It's not the impingement on the senses,

It's not the feeling tone,

It's not the perceptual overlays,

It's none of those things that are the real problem.

It is simply my reaction to it wanting it to be other than it is.

I will never win the battle of wanting it to be different than it is when I'm trying to argue with the self or get the self to do that.

The self is,

As being a player in the drama,

Can't take the role of authoritarian who can stop it.

The metaphor I used,

Many of you have heard this but I think it helps to demonstrate it.

It's like looking at the person in the mirror and seeing that no matter what you do,

They do it.

So if you scowl,

They scowl right back at you.

If you're happy,

They're happy right back.

There's nothing you can do to defeat the image in the mirror.

You can't out anger it,

You can't out scowl it.

The only way to defeat the image in the mirror is to step away from the mirror.

When you step away from the mirror,

There is no longer any problem because the image itself is gone.

And this is the way we meet the Dukkha that arises.

Instead of fighting what life is offering,

Which is really fighting ourselves,

It's fighting that sense of an irony.

Instead of engaging on its turf and doing battle with it,

A battle we cannot possibly win,

We step out of the fray.

And we do that by seeing clearly that that sense of an I or me is arising with the situation.

It's part of the thing.

It is what's inducing the craving.

It's what's happening there.

And I don't have to buy into it.

And when we do that,

We've stepped out of the fray,

We've stepped out from in front of the mirror and the Dukkha disappears.

It just drops,

It evaporates because it needs that self and it needs the stories that the self generates to continue.

Now it's important,

And Larry talked about the two arrows this morning,

It's important to understand we're not talking about like physical pain here.

That's not the suffering.

That's going to happen.

That's part of the body.

And it will just happen the way it's going to happen.

It's the resistance to the pain.

It's not that our electricity went out.

It's that we're resisting that our electricity went out.

It's not that we have the flat tires that we're resisting that we have the flat tire.

So the Dukkha,

That second arrow is always our resistance to it.

So as we go through this,

The first thing is to understand,

First of all,

What the Buddha meant when he said the aggregates of clinging are Dukkha.

What he was saying is that this form,

These five aggregates that we model this form from,

Of each one,

Each aspect of it has the capacity to manifest with craving.

And in that process,

A sense of an I or a me,

Which is an essential part to it,

Becomes the owner of the show and resists.

So we begin to see,

I don't have to do that.

I don't have to engage the aggregates that way.

I don't have to allow the sense of an I or a me that arises to run the show.

And I don't have to feed it with my thoughts and energizing the feelings.

This is a wonderful practice to play with.

As we do this,

What we begin to see as the Dukkha subsides,

As it begins to evaporate,

Is what was behind it all along and what is there now.

And it's the awake presence that Laurie was talking about earlier,

That she read those different qualities that we can use to recognize it.

Things like contentment,

Stillness,

And silence.

Even in the midst of chaos,

These things are present.

They're present when we're not filling that space with Dukkha,

That space of who we are.

So you don't have to go find these things.

They will find you.

And you will find as you quiet the Dukkha out of the mind,

As it begins to still,

They were always in the background waiting for you.

They were always there.

It's like the blue sky behind the clouds.

When the clouds are dispersed,

You don't have to go find the blue sky and bring it to life.

It was always there behind the clouds.

So as our mind begins to soften these Dukkha moments,

The momentary Dukkha begins to soften,

As we begin to stop stitching together our moments of Dukkha into these stories,

Aggregated stories of woe is me and how terrible things are,

As we begin to stop doing that,

It's like the clouds beginning to clear from the sky.

And out of the background will appear these moments.

And we know these.

These are not otherworldly or foreign.

These moments of freedom,

These moments of spaciousness,

These moments of connection,

Of joy,

They begin to pop through like the little blue spots in the sky as it begins to clear.

And the words,

Like we talked about with the words around Dukkha,

We don't even need the words.

We can use the words to help paint a picture in our conversation for ourselves or for others.

But these things are your birthright.

They are you.

They are your true nature.

You need no words to understand them.

But as you begin to look at them,

Some of the qualities that these different ways you might use to explain them,

They seem to have in common.

Number one is there's not a strong sense of self in them.

Instead of a self being the foreground,

Connection is the foreground.

Oneness,

Unity is the foreground.

There may still be some sense of self,

But it's in the background.

It's not the forefront.

The mind really does become quiet.

What does that mean?

It means thoughts still arise,

But they don't take root.

They don't lodge themselves and grow in a uncontrollable way.

The mental fabrications that we're talking about in the aggregates,

This idea of fabrications that self replicate in our resistance to what is.

Instead of that happening,

They arise,

We see them for what they are,

And they drop away.

So the mind is really quite a quiet place at that point.

It's not like you're in some sort of funk and don't understand anything.

You actually are clearer.

You see things more clearly.

Because instead of the overlay,

The distortion overlay that comes with wanting things to be other than they are,

You're more able to see them as they really are in their true nature,

Just exactly as they are.

And you will find that you do have increasing moments of those qualities that Laurie read the list of.

And you'll find some more meaningful for you.

I know for me,

That idea,

One of the words she used was spaciousness,

Compassion,

Wisdom.

Those words for me are probably the closest to describing that space.

But investigate for yourself what words point to it for you.

And just like we talked about in one of the things earlier,

I don't remember where it was,

But as you begin to experience these moments of peace,

These moments of freedom,

Reflect on them,

Get to know them better.

So you have one,

There's the savor of that moment.

But then also reflect on what is that like to feel that?

What is it like to feel still?

What is it like to be contented?

What is it like to feel calm?

What is it like to feel connected or compassionate?

What is that like?

So this very process now of reflecting,

Here's the situation that I had,

Here's the experience,

Here's what it was like,

That reifies that for you.

And it teaches your body and your mind to recognize that viscerally.

It's one of the tools of cultivating this wisdom that we're talking about is to reify these experiences so they become very real to your body and to your heart.

Your mind can go on and do what it needs to do,

But we're teaching below the level of the mind when we do that.

We're teaching wisdom.

And ultimately,

The more of this we gain,

The more we teach this wisdom to ourselves,

The more we're able to see the reality of the aggregates and how they don't need to be clung to,

This idea of craving and a self that's doing that is a story and does not have to be bought into.

The more we see that,

The more that we see behind all of that is this blue sky that's free of clouds that has all these qualities to it and that we begin to connect with it moment after moment and see that it is our true nature.

This is where freedom comes.

This is where the joy that we talked about initially is.

And we see there was no journey.

There was no place to go ever.

We were always there.

We just had an obscuration in the way.

And when that set aside,

That freedom,

That joy,

That peace is there.

Reviews

Thank you. Your talk clarified a lot of concepts for me, and also provided a lot of practical examples for putting them into practice. I liked it a lot.

An amazing talk. Thank you very much. 🙏🙏🙏

Really clarifying. Thank you 🙏🏼

One of the most relevant explanations of Buddist teachings I’ve heard

Now I get it

Excellent! Thank you. 🙏🏼

Thank you John. You helped me today.