The Experience Of Insight

This is an introductory talk to the four Brahma Viharas, the manifestation of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. The precursor to stepping into these teachings of the heart qualities is understanding the liberating insights that we have been learning about from the Four Noble Truths. The Buddha had insights into his own mind that freed him completely.

We also have insights all the time. Perhaps they are not as liberating but as we practice they come more regularly.

Transcript

So,

My intention for the next couple of weeks is to explore the Brahma Viharas with you.

These are ways of being that are manifestations of loving-kindness,

Compassion,

Joy,

And equanimity.

These are known as the Brahma Viharas.

It means the divine,

Godly homes.

So,

Brahma being defined as God and Vihara as a home.

So,

Sort of like these are the places within us that are available and yet often covered over.

Because each of these states,

These four ways of being,

They have two enemies,

They're called enemies,

Within them.

A near enemy and a far enemy.

And the far enemy is the opposite mental state of,

Say,

Loving-kindness or compassion.

The near enemy resembles these states,

Loving-kindness,

Compassion,

But they're ultimately showing up negatively,

Not helpful,

Not wholesome.

So,

As I was reflecting on this offering,

It occurred to me that the backward step or the precursor into these teachings of these heart qualities,

In some way,

Is to understand the liberating insight that we have been learning about the Four Noble Truths.

So,

For the past four weeks,

We were exploring the Four Noble Truths.

You know,

The Buddha had insights into his own mind that freed him completely.

And just to recap the way that it's described,

He knew directly,

Like,

Oh,

There is suffering in this life.

And I'm fairly certain that you could pull up something in your life right now where there is pain for you.

There is discomfort.

There is contraction.

You're seeing for yourself,

Oh,

This is the suffering of the Buddha.

It's right here.

It's right now.

And in his seeing,

He also saw the arising of it.

Oh,

It's caused because I'm holding on.

I'm clinging or craving it to be different.

So the birth of it.

And then also,

When putting it down,

When releasing the passing away of suffering,

The passing away of the pain.

And in this way,

He learned the practice which leads to the end of suffering.

And this was a direct insight into his own mind.

These were sort of what are known as the liberating insights of this practice.

Through his own experience,

Nobody else's experience,

Something was transformed in him.

He discovered how to live in that gap,

That space where there isn't clinging or creating or the arising of suffering.

He found a place to rest within himself.

And so in the same way,

All of us,

As we practice,

Have insights all the time.

Perhaps they're not as liberating as what the Buddha experienced,

But they can be.

They can be.

As we practice insights,

Clear seeing comes more regularly.

Have you noticed that?

Clear seeing.

And sometimes what we're seeing clearly about ourselves,

It's not pleasant.

It's hard to see.

But it's still an insight.

And it will keep showing up for us to see and to fold into our being.

Fold into ultimately our wholeness.

So if we don't get to know the near and the far enemies within ourselves,

These divine states that we'll be exploring in the next weeks,

If we don't get to know these more unwholesome states of mind,

The more they will be at play.

So for example,

The near enemy of compassion is pity.

So pity can become a self-indulgent exercise,

Almost like an excuse for inaction.

Oh,

There's just such a massive suffering in the world.

There's nothing I can do.

You know what I can do?

All I can hope to do is just feel terrible about everything that's going on.

What a pity that this world has become.

So maybe that's you.

Maybe that's a place where you're residing instead of from a place of compassion.

And the far enemy,

The far enemy of compassion,

Its opposite is cruelty.

And we all know that experience of hatred and hostility.

It seems to be almost the norm,

Right?

So seeing these insights in ourselves,

When we're operating from these states of pity or disdain,

But seeing,

But seeing,

It doesn't feel like a mountaintop experience that we associate with enlightenment and waking up.

Many people have this idea,

This mistaken idea,

I would say,

That enlightenment transcends all of our greed and our hatred and our judgment and our anger and the ego.

Like once we're enlightened,

Everything is uprooted.

And what's left is this radiant human being just abiding in love and compassion without difficulties.

So that has not been my experience.

I cannot speak to that.

The Theravada path that we are practicing together,

The path of the elders,

That's what the Theravada means.

It's a gradual path with some gradual progress along the way.

And this has been my experience.

You know,

Just as an athlete gradually reaches a higher level,

Even maybe world-class level of athleticism,

It doesn't happen all at once.

And that's the same as the progress on this path.

Eventually,

We see the dropping away of particular types of holding,

Like the letting go of kind of what hinders us from our freedom.

The Buddha said,

Just as the ocean slopes away gradually,

Tends down gradually without any abrupt precipice.

Even so,

This Dhamma,

These teachings and discipline is a gradual doing,

A gradual training,

A gradual practice.

There is no sudden penetration of knowledge.

And that comes right from the suttas.

So we see more and more of our behaviors and conditions as we get quiet and still.

And when we get up from our practice,

And it may be very uncomfortable,

That practice of seeing and being,

But when we get up from our seats and go into our day,

We have choice.

It was Viktor Frankl who wrote the book,

Man's Search for Meaning,

While he was in Auschwitz.

He wrote,

Between stimulus and response,

There is space.

And in that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

So insight practice has been about,

For me,

Getting real with myself,

Being honest with myself,

Seeing clearly,

No matter how painful or humiliating it is.

The practice of my life has been to investigate what I see.

So if I see my 13-year-old self manifesting in my 13-year-old son,

Then I meet him and myself with love and curiosity.

I start to include all the different dimensions of myself,

Everything that was left out.

And there's freedom that comes with that when we're not trying to hide or pretend.

We're more able to really live in our wholeness.

The psychologist Gabor Mate,

Who wrote this lovely book called The Myth of Normal,

He defines true healing as a natural movement towards our wholeness.

So opening to the truth of my life,

The past,

The present,

As honestly and authentically as I can,

This is the movement towards wholeness.

This is the practice.

Seeing where I've caused harm,

What has harmed me,

And honestly looking at the impact of that.

We have this capacity to recognize what's going on inside us without adding judgment.

It's a practice,

Though.

The challenge is in developing this capacity to bear witness without adding the habit pattern of judging and evaluating and saying this is right and this is wrong and this is bad and this is good.

The very word vipassana means seeing clearly.

It can also be understood as to feel directly or to listen deeply.

But vipassana for me,

It's really clean contact with the truth.

And I share this because there's a tendency to consciously or unconsciously bypass parts of ourselves that we haven't accepted.

You know,

I have been in spiritual scenes for a long time where the talk is all about these heart qualities.

You know,

Yet the people that are talking about perfecting their love and the quality of their hearts,

Sometimes they are hiding.

They're addicted to drugs or alcohol or sex.

They're hiding some aspect of themselves.

They're not being whole.

They're not being true.

They're hiding behind their spirituality.

So they don't have to look at parts of themselves.

Pemi Chodron,

The teacher says this about it.

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.

We leave our attachments and our wholeness behind and slowly make our way to the top.

And at the peak,

We transcend all pain.

The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind.

Our drunken brother,

Our schizophrenic sister,

Our tormented animals and friends.

Their suffering continues,

Unrelieved by our personal escape.

In the process of discovering the awakened heart,

The journey goes down,

Not up.

It's as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching to the sky.

Instead of transcending the suffering,

We move towards the turbulence and doubt.

We jump into it.

We move towards it however we can.

The journey is down.

I've shared this image many times throughout the years.

This image comes from Joseph Campbell,

The mythologist.

It's a circle with a horizontal line that runs through it.

What's below the line is what's unconscious or what we're not looking at.

What's above the line is what we're conscious of.

To the degree to which we're not aware of our strong patterns or strong beliefs or parts of ourselves that we don't want to see,

What's below the line,

To the degree that we haven't contacted that directly,

It rules us.

It affects how we make decisions.

It affects how we relate to others.

To the degree that we're not conscious of our emotions and feelings,

It controls our experience.

This insight practice is shining the light of awareness on what's below the line.

As it comes into awareness,

We become enlarged.

We start to naturally inhabit our wholeness.

That wisdom and love that you seek is there within it.

It's just not always accessible because it's uncomfortable to get to.

If you start to look at this using this idea of Joseph Campbell's circle of awareness,

If you start to look at what's below the line and you add judgment,

Like this is bad,

This part of myself isn't included,

Then it's not freeing.

It just deepens the tendency to go below the line in shame.

What makes it transformational is we start getting for ourselves that what we see,

It's not so personal.

So as we drop into this exploration of the Brahma Viharas and their near and far enemies,

I want to preface that the teachings that we'll start exploring on Thursday is we're starting to shine the light of awareness on the near and far enemies,

On the fear and the aggression that is in our nervous system.

It's not just your pain and your fear and your shame.

It's ours,

All of ours.

We can't judge what we find.

We're just shining awareness on these patterns that are within all of us.

That's how we can look with more clarity and gentleness.

Padma Chodron says,

At our pace,

Without speed or aggression,

We move down and down and down.

And with us,

Millions of others are companions in awakening from fear.

And at the bottom,

We discover water,

The healing water of the awakened heart.

Right down there in the thick of things,

We discover a love that cannot die.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Reviews

Thought-provoking. Thank you, Lisa 🌟

Beautiful 🙏❤️🙏