So I want to shift gears from the rather complex topic of dependent co-arising that we've been exploring and move towards the simple again.
Sometimes the practice can be experienced as a little too grim.
I don't know if anyone has told you but it's not really necessary to be really grim in meditation.
If you look at any images or statues of the Buddha,
He's smiling.
Maybe that's the goal,
To be someone who can watch their own mind and explore the world and still smile as it goes past.
When I first came to practice I was 28 years old and I was about 15 days sober from a life fueled by alcohol and heavy drinking and I was pretty lost and uncertain about how to live my life with what I called liquid courage that alcohol provided for me.
And no one in my culture told me that I could develop this quality,
This part of mind,
This thing we call mindfulness to step outside of your own psyche and observe yourself.
And that first look,
It was pretty disturbing.
The instructions were simple,
Just pay attention to your breath.
Seems like the simplest thing to do.
You start paying attention to your breath and you realize that your mind continues to plan and have fantasies and make comments without ever consulting you.
The mind has a mind of its own,
Right?
The saying self knowledge is often bad news really started to make sense to me.
But the good news was that I was learning to see how my reality was created,
Which is just about the most important thing we can understand.
The good news was that I was learning how my mind works and I was beginning to see the source of my suffering.
What a strange and wonderful gift.
What we're looking at here in our meditation practice is the human condition.
And I think it's really useful to have that as an understanding.
I guess we're looking at our own individual mind with its own individual issues,
But basically it's the same mind as the person next to you on this screen.
If you exchanged minds with the person sitting next to you,
It would probably be pretty similar.
Even the issues.
You know,
We're all sharing a culture.
We're all sharing a historical moment.
We're sharing a practice that's just a couple thousand years old.
You know,
Of self awareness and self investigation that may represent the awakening of our species.
Maybe it will happen in time to save us from a world of suffering down the road.
I really like the idea that maybe we do this practice for our species,
Not just for ourselves.
So as we meditate,
We often run into some difficult mind states and I want to talk a little bit about them.
So starting with desire and aversion,
They go together.
They're really two sides of the same coin.
Every living being has some form of it.
It's not like it's wrong.
Desire and aversion.
You can kind of think of desire as a tree reaching for the sun.
Very natural.
Where would we be without desire?
There would be no procreation.
It would be over.
It's almost integral to the definition of life.
Desire and aversion.
These are underlying tendencies.
When there's something pleasant,
We're going to want more.
And if we catch ourselves,
Maybe we temper our response or temper our reaction.
And if we don't,
Well,
Desire will lead to clinging and then we get lost in that for a while.
We'll be swept along by the instinct that we inherited from our ancestors.
That long line that's,
You could say goes back to our mammalian self.
So old.
And it's the same with aversion.
If there's something painful,
Fearful,
We back away.
We pull our hand away from a hot stove,
Right?
In some way,
It's integral to survival.
And what's the practice?
To bow deeply to them.
Desire,
Aversion.
Wow.
The Buddha's great breakthrough was to see that these uncontrolled impulses are really the source of our suffering.
And he also saw that you can observe them in action and lessen their force.
Begin to gain a little bit of freedom and a little bit of choice.
So as we begin to see the dissatisfaction of the mind up close,
We have to remember that it's not a failure to see it.
It's a triumph.
It's the beginning of our freedom.
The pervasiveness of desire and aversion.
It's kind of never ending.
So as we examine our minds,
The great revelation is that suffering,
The suffering we have doesn't come from fulfilling the latest desire.
It comes from the desire wheel itself,
Which keeps spinning and attaching itself to object after object or idea after idea or fantasy after fantasy.
Just to see it is a triumph.
Another common mind state in our practice is doubt.
Uncertainty.
Our minds do not like uncertainty.
It's a form of fear really.
We want to know what's going to happen,
Right?
We want the security of knowing what's going to happen.
And we never know what's going to happen.
And I think some part of us kind of knows that.
So how doubt often appears in the mind is with a lot of planning and a lot of judgment.
You know,
The story is like,
How are we going to make this happen without any injury or harm for ourselves?
And often the biggest doubt we have is about ourselves.
It seems that we all want to be loved and acknowledged,
To feel valued and to be appreciated.
So we continually sort of ask ourselves like,
How am I doing?
How am I showing up today?
How am I ranking in this pecking order today?
It's a constant or at least it's been for me.
It's kind of a form of doubt that's endemic in our culture.
Our culture sets us up for self doubt.
It's a culture of individualism.
You know,
It's up to you if you,
You create your destiny.
It's up to you if you make it or you don't.
It's not up to anyone else.
That's the message and it's a setup for failure.
So a lot of what we're doing is what Alan Watts calls the wisdom of insecurity,
To get comfortable with some of this doubt.
Can you be present with insecurity,
Either intellectually,
Not knowing,
Or what's going to happen in the world.
Even with the doubting mind,
We can give it a little bow.
Because the doubting mind is just trying to take care of you.
It's trying to make sure that you can survive.
I think one of the key approaches to difficult mind states is not being at war with them.
Not being at war with yourself.
Just to really acknowledge them for what they are.
It doesn't mean that we have to believe these difficult mind states that come up in our experience.
We don't have to follow their direction.
Before I had meditation practice,
I was completely focused on the content of my thinking.
Not the process.
But the process,
That's the key.
As we begin to see the mind produces thoughts over and over,
And often it's the same kind of cluster of thoughts.
It repeats itself.
It's not like you're doing it.
As you sit in meditation,
You begin to see that this happens independent of your desire to stay out of the thinking game.
You just want to stay with your breath and the sensations and what it's like,
What's happening,
So you're not so identified with them.
And the mind just goes and produces thought.
So we're all,
As Wes Nisker says,
Perfectly human.
And we have difficult mind states.
And the instruction,
The instruction is to let them have their life.
Investigate them,
Bow to them,
Let yourself feel them,
Name them.
Once they're seeing,
They no longer have the same power over you.
And the Buddha's instruction for working with difficult mind states,
So simple,
No judgment,
No moral high ground.
You know,
One knows an angry mind as an angry mind.
One knows a mind with lust as a mind with lust.
There's no fix,
No judgment and no fix.
That's beautiful.
The Buddha just would say this is not me.
This is not mine.
This is not myself.
An angry mind,
A lustful mind.
Not me.
This is not myself.
If I were in charge of my emotions all the time,
Wouldn't I mean,
I just feel like I would just choose happiness.
Wouldn't you choose happiness all the time?
Would you ever have sorrow or fear?
No.
Like,
Where did that come from?
It came from the fact that we were born a human being and we have all this stuff inside of us.
So we might as well practice.
Let ourselves feel all the stuff inside of us while we're sitting in meditation and see how intimate we can become with it.
The more intimate we can become with these difficult mind states,
The less power they have over us.
I'll close with a little bit more from Why I Meditate by Wes Nisker.
I meditate because I'm growing old and I want to become more comfortable with emptiness.
I meditate because it's such a relief to spend time ignoring myself.
I meditate because I'm composed of a hundred trillion cells and from time to time,
I need to reassure them that we're all in this together.
