The Hindrances: An Introduction

This is a talk given by Lloyd to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado on The Hindrances. In the Buddhist tradition, the five hindrances are identified as mental factors that hinder progress in meditation and in our daily lives.

Transcript

Okay,

So under the rubric of we always teach what we need to hear,

This is a good time of year for me to focus in on a set of teachings about what to do when difficulties arise.

Whether it has to do with your own practice or just has to do with living your life,

The stuff of life.

And there are some sets of teachings that the Buddha had that are specific to that subject,

And so I thought it might be nice if we spend a couple of months going over those teachings together.

And there are related but distinguishable sets of teachings.

The first set is called the hindrances or obstacles to concentration.

And the other set of teachings is referred to usually as the three personality types or sometimes the three temperaments.

And they arise from,

They're actually found in the commentaries that were written a long time after the Buddha died,

But they arise from those teachings on the origins of suffering,

You know,

The second double truth.

And how essentially attachment,

Aversion,

And delusion can kind of harden or ripen into certain previous positions of personality.

And again,

This is,

Like I said,

Kind of the Buddha's folk medicine for the mind.

It was,

You know,

One of the reasons that I have this fairly traditional image of the Buddha here,

You know,

The calling earth to witness is a reminder of the fact that he was an empiricist.

That what he spoke of in terms of his insights into the arising of suffering and understanding it and how it might be alleviated arose from his own experience and his own observation.

When he,

You know,

Rather soon into his teaching career,

He was invited to speak at a spiritual community that would bring in various folks that all had their own kind of shtick about,

You know,

How the world is and how you ought to be if you want to be happy and that sort of thing.

It was a community called the Kalamas.

And in one of the discourses is called the Kalamas Dilemma.

And their dilemma was that they had all these people coming in,

The nihilists and the eternalists and everybody who was representing a kind of a major philosophical school at the time would come and they'd give their rap and they'd say,

Well,

Thanks very much.

And if they had some practices to teach,

They might give them a try and see what happened.

And so the Buddha came to speak to the Kalamas.

They were a pretty jaded group by that time,

You know.

And so one of them,

People after he gave his shtick about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and so on and so forth,

One of the people there said,

Well,

Some clown came through here last week and said something completely different.

And then two weeks ago or a month ago,

There was somebody else that came through and he said something that was entirely different again.

So why should we believe you any more than any of these other folks?

And his Buddhist responses,

You should not.

This sort of famous line that comes out of that is,

Ae Pasiko.

And what that means,

Translated means,

Come see for yourself.

What he said was,

You know,

My inquiry was into the nature of distress and dissatisfaction that arises in the mind.

Why it arises is how it can be alleviated.

If that is likewise your concern,

This way of looking at things for me is very helpful.

This set of practices for me turned out to be very helpful.

In fact,

It eventually led to my liberation from suffering.

So he said,

If your goal is the same as mine,

I think you might benefit from,

You know,

Listening to these teachings,

Doing some of these practices and see if it has the same result for you that it did for me.

If it does,

Stick with it.

If it doesn't,

Go find something else.

It's in that very same spirit that I want to offer these teachings over the courses in the next three months or so.

As was the case with the Buddha,

In my own practice,

My own understanding,

My own life,

I have found this stuff to be very useful.

In terms of coming into a kind of an understanding relationship with the nature of the distresses and the difficulties that arise in my own life and a way to create some space around them and work with them in a kind of a constructive way.

And do these practices that actually wind up generating insights into why this stuff arises in my own mind and how to make peace with it and how eventually to become free of its effects.

And so that's why I wanted to share these teachings with you.

If you find that they're similarly helpful,

Fine.

If not,

Settle to one side.

So I'm going to kind of lay out some of these frameworks here.

I would appreciate it.

I don't want to just blast away here for 45 minutes and we all go home.

That's what I go for and I'd really like it if you have any questions along the way,

If you just break them up so we can make it sort of more conversational in that way.

So the sort of the mothership discourse,

One of the very core teachings that the Buddha had in terms of the entirety of the Theravada Buddhist tradition is the Mahasattipatthana Sutta,

The greater discourse on the foundations of mindfulness or the establishing of mindfulness.

And it was that discourse that I spent a month or so,

You know,

Last fall teaching.

We had our introductory series on the establishing of mindfulness.

What the Buddha did in that discourse was to set out a stepwise framework for the developing of mindfulness.

How to direct one's attention to first to the body,

What it feels like to be in this body.

What it feels like to have sensory stimuli come in and watch the mind categorize the stimuli as pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Or neutral.

To look at how the mind brings up thoughts and emotions and whatnot and tries to make sense out of what's going on in the mind.

To be mindful of how the mind goes through the memory banks and looks at the memories of the emotions and whatnot.

And then he offers a framework,

A fourth foundation on kind of how to make sense of it up and all,

A way to understand it.

After he lays out those four foundations,

What he starts talking about then is the problems you're going to run into as you do mindfulness practice.

The issues and the difficulties are going to arise as surely they will,

He said.

So the first subject he brings up is this teaching on these hindrances or obstacles to concentration.

And then after he teaches about them,

He starts teaching about the nature of not-self and the factors of enlightenment and so on and so forth.

He's going to spend the rest of the year doing that.

But before you can go there,

Before you can have your dessert,

You've got your vegetables.

So we're going to check out the hindrances.

They follow under the category of vegetables you don't particularly like but you know are good for you.

So we're going to look at what the Buddha taught about the arising of these obstacles to concentration.

It's a lawful unfolding.

You start doing mindfulness meditation practice and what begins to happen,

You know,

You exert a certain amount of skillful effort,

The mind begins to become calm and clear.

That word samadhi is usually translated as concentration.

The best English translator of the Pali Canon I know said,

You know,

If you really want to unpack and elaborate with samadhi,

Concentration is not a great word because it connotes kind of constriction and a certain amount of force and kind of extract of mindfulness.

Tranquil,

Focused,

Sustained attention.

Much more accurate translation of the word that's usually translated as concentration.

Tranquil,

Focused,

Sustained attention.

When you do that,

The mind begins to become clear.

The Thai meditation masters in particular Ajahn Chah speaks of the mind being as a clear forest pool.

In fact,

One of the books of his teachings goes by that title.

It's a what's called a lintic water body,

Like a lake that's undisturbed that is shallow enough that you can see clear through the water to the bottom.

The hindrances as they come along are things that obscure one's ability to see to the bottom.

Why do the hindrances arise?

Well,

They have a lawful function as it turns out.

The lawful function of the hindrances is to prohibit insight into the nature of not-self.

They are in essence literally about self-protection.

Protecting the notion of a permanent and abiding self.

That's what they're there to do.

The deflector shields and the starship ego,

That's what they do.

That's how they operate.

That's their purpose.

Because as the mind becomes more calm and more clear and more penetrating,

It begins to recognize the emptiness of all phenomena.

Including the phenomenon that we call self.

So,

Please raise your hand as I go through these if one of them has ever arisen for you.

If not,

I want to congratulate you because you're basically somewhere around the third stage of enlightenment.

Depending on which scorching system you use.

First of these five that classically arises is anger.

Yay!

Okay,

Right.

You're sitting there minding your own business and then all of a sudden,

For whatever reason,

Powerful feelings of anger or resentment arise.

Can they really take over the anger?

And a little bit later on we'll talk about ways to work with anger and how to transform that into a teacher when it arises.

The second one is ardent desire.

You know,

R-rated,

X-rated movies in your mind,

Or thinking about stopping on the way home and getting a gal on a rocky road ice cream or whatever it happens to be.

The mind bent toward future sense gratification.

Instead of just being able to sit there peacefully and whatnot,

That's where the mind wants to go.

The third one is dullness.

Also translated as sloth and torpor.

Yep.

Might as well just keep my hands up.

This is the state of mind of withdrawal,

Of desire to not be there in some ways,

A sense of withdrawal.

The fourth of these that might arise is restlessness and worry as you're sitting.

The inability to find the right posture or stay there very long,

Right?

Maybe restlessness of the body,

It might be restlessness of the mind.

The inability to stay focused,

To have the mind come to lie on something and stay with it for a while.

The fourth one is skeptical doubt.

Doubt of the Dharma,

Doubt of your own capacities,

Doubt of whatever happens to be sitting in this chair at a given point in time,

Or your teachers.

Doubt of the teachings,

Doubt of the teachers,

Doubt of oneself,

Or the classic ones.

As masters like Ajahn Chah would teach it in the tradition,

The effect of anger on the mind,

For using the simile of the still forest pool again,

Is one of water that's boiling,

That is all worked up,

Full hot energy that precludes being able to see through what's going on.

Desire is as if there were brightly colored dyes that were poured into the lake,

Vivid in color and whatnot,

But also precluding the ability to see to the bottom.

Sloth and torpor are like a pond that is grown over with algae.

It's got a layer of scum on the top,

Makes it eutrophied seriously,

Making it impossible to see down to the bottom.

The restless mind is as if this clear forest pool has a strong wind blowing over it,

That makes the surface of the water so choppy it's impossible to see through it.

The doubt is as if someone takes a stick and stirs up the mud in the bottom of the pool,

Making it turbid so it's not possible to see through it.

The really important thing,

There are several aspects of this teaching that get reinforced over and over and over again in the tradition that are really worth keeping in mind.

When somebody hears about a mindfulness meditation class being taught someplace and they've read all this stuff about how it's going to help you lose weight and control your blood pressure and have pleasant dreams and whatnot,

And they'll go and they'll take the class and they'll watch their breathing and whatnot.

There's that initial honeymoon period where it really does seem to feel a little chilled out and life is a little simpler and you find a quiet space where your consciousness can go and hang out for a little while.

Then if you stay with it,

Get a regular practice going,

Maybe go on a retreat or come to a group like this on a regular basis,

Then all of a sudden this stuff starts to come up.

Whether it's anger and irritation or restless and worry or sleepiness and dopiness or strong desires or worry and restlessness or doubt.

It leads to a sense of discouragement.

It's like,

Oh God,

You know,

I thought this was going to be my path,

But look what's happened.

I've really gone off into a ditch here.

I'd better go try something else,

Laughing yoga,

Something else because this is not fun anymore.

This is yucky.

I really got some of this stuck on my shoe and it doesn't smell very good and I don't like it.

Basically what the Buddha is saying here is you've reached our first plateau.

That you would not,

And you've got to trust me on this,

You would not be experiencing these mind states when you sit had you not already achieved a certain level of mindfulness.

The arising of the inferences are in fact a sign or a symbol that your mindfulness has reached to new depths or new heights.

You want to geographically arrange your inner cosmology here.

What it means is that the process is beginning to work in a fundamental and substantive and effective way because it has caused to arise these mind states,

The purpose of which is to preclude your having insights into the nature of not self,

Which is where this stuff eventually leads.

If you stay with this path,

You cultivate the mindfulness and the concentration,

Trample focus,

Sustained attention,

The right amount of skillful effort.

Then suddenly what begins to happen in the mind is a lot of insights begin to arise.

When you first get started doing mindfulness meditation,

You're basically just simply observing all these phenomena like the instructions that I gave at the beginning of our time together this evening.

You're paying attention to the breathing,

You're paying attention to the body and bodily sensations,

To thoughts,

To emotions.

You're beginning to see some ways in which they might be interconnected or how one may trigger another.

Then all this stuff comes up that seems to be getting in your way.

As however you begin to be able to understand what the function of the inferences is,

What they're trying to do,

You begin to be able to see them for what they are.

You begin to develop some space around them.

The very fact that you're able to recognize a hindrance for what it is means that your mindfulness has achieved a substantial level of acuity.

That the mind is really capable of doing things now that it wasn't before or you wouldn't even have been able to even recognize these things.

As your powers of observation get stronger,

Get better,

Then you can begin to discern within one of these mind states with greater and greater acuity,

Greater and greater detail,

What is its nature.

How strong is it?

Is it consistent?

Does it come back a lot all the time?

Or is it more kind of intermitted,

Comes and goes,

It's around for a couple of minutes and then you're off to the next thing.

You go from being really mad about something,

Politics,

Your landlord or whatever,

To looking forward to going on a date with somebody you just met.

You're kind of off into the desire or the hopes to come along with a possibility of future attachment.

Then the next thing comes along,

You remember how you went out to get in your car yesterday and you had a flat,

What a bummer that was.

Then the next thing,

Then the next thing,

Then the next thing.

But as you become more mindful,

It's as if the space around the event gets bigger and you're able to clearly distinguish between this hindrance,

Which is the object of meditation,

And your consciousness,

Your mindfulness.

The better you get to know each of these hindrances,

It's kind of like being a naturalist,

You know,

And you're going into the field and you're seeing these different kinds of wildlife or whatever.

The better you get at wildlife identifying plants and animals and studying their behaviors,

You know,

The more insight you get,

Not only into these individual plants and animals,

But how they relate to each other,

The entire ecosystem.

What you're doing is studying,

You're observing your internal ecosystem,

How all these things sort of relate to each other.

As you develop deeper and deeper understandings in them,

Then some connecting of the dots begins to happen.

And you begin to see patterns.

If routinely you find a certain sense of anger or frustration or resentment beginning to arise,

First just being able to label it for what it is,

And then say,

Okay,

What's the object of it?

What am I angry or resentful about?

Who am I angry at or resentful of?

So you begin to be able to kind of disaggregate through study,

Through inquiry,

What the nature of that particular hindrance is.

As you begin to be able to do that,

The hindrance itself begins to shift,

It begins to morph,

It begins to change.

As you become increasingly able to do this with all the hindrances as they arise,

What can begin to happen is that you will start to develop insights,

Cause and effect insights into why that particular hindrance arose.

Usually something that happened at some point in your past that was emotionally charged or whatever.

And you'll be able to see connections between the state of mind that you're in at the present moment and some of the things that may have happened in your life that have given rise to that particular form of hindrance coming up.

You know,

If,

You know,

Sharon Salzberg,

One of my teachers and friends,

When she talks about people that come to insight meditation practice,

A lot of them are what she calls spiritually wounded,

Which is to say the faith tradition,

The religious tradition they grew up in was one that taught people to regard themselves in a pretty negative way,

That created a kind of a deep cleft or split within themselves in terms of their own kind of innate understanding of their own goodness and a set of teachings that tell us,

No,

That's not really true.

You know,

You're really flawed and untrustworthy at heart and only by surrendering to this set of teachings or this authority figure can you be made whole.

So people come away from those experiences feeling actually kind of traumatized.

And so being able to develop insight into why you have the self-you that you do is an important step in the healing process.

First comes the mindfulness,

You know,

The sati patanam,

Learning how to investigate,

To clearly understand,

To recognize what to be able to classify like plants and animals in the field.

Vipassana,

Which is usually translated as insight meditation,

Is that once your understanding of the substance of these hindrances becomes complete enough and in-depth enough and you begin to see connections between how this hindrance is operating in the moment and what are some of its historical roots,

Then these insights spontaneously begin to occur.

That's why we call it insight meditation.

And you begin to see this cause-effect relationship between a difficult mind state in the present moment and all the causes and it's like looking down a tunnel into your own history.

And you can see what some of the things are that may have occurred in your life that cause you to be feeling this at this particular time.

The kind of people that the Chairman was talking about tend to be,

And I fall into that category,

Tend to be visited by very strong skeptical dows.

You know,

I got taken for a ride once here,

You know,

How do I know this isn't just another cult,

Just another effort to get me to,

You know,

Drop a few coins in the domino box or whatever,

You know.

How should I place my heart upon this?

Should I have faith that this particular practice or this particular path is worth exploring?

When we get into exploring doubt,

The different levels of it,

The different intensities of it,

And for many of us it kind of becomes clear that there are pretty deep historical roots that inform certain kinds of doubt that are really worth looking at,

Really worth inquiring into.

So it's this process of transforming what appear to be obstacles or impediments or barriers to understand why they're there.

Okay.

That their function is to basically keep you from being able to progress through the Buddha's stepwise teachings on how to realize spiritual freedom.

And once you recognize what they're there to do,

It becomes possible to start to develop a certain amount of compassion for the arising of these things when they do,

Because they're like,

You know,

The Buddha likened the ego,

You know,

To a kind of a,

Like an egg,

You know,

Sort of a transport vehicle that it brings you into this world.

And it makes it,

It creates an environment for your development up to a certain point in time.

And then once you reach that certain point in time,

The shell that has outlived its usefulness,

And if you were to continue to grow,

It has to be cracked open and ready to sunder.

So the hindrances are kind of like that shell.

They've performed this protective cocoon for you,

Right?

The anger and the worry,

You know,

The aversions and the feelings of aversion to keep you from harm,

The cravings and the clings,

You know,

To meet basic needs,

The delusion to black out everything else but the first two.

And they also take you to a point where they prohibit you continuing to be able to spiritually mature and grow.

And so when the hindrances come up,

You can think of them in that way.

It's like vestigial armor,

Okay,

That had a purpose at one time but that no longer does.

Questions,

And we'll spend over the next few weeks,

We'll look at each one of these in more detail,

And we'll talk about ways to deconstruct the experience of each of them and see what teachings it has to offer.

Yeah,

Please.

When I hear what you said was the transport vehicle,

What were you?

One of the similes that the Buddha used for spiritual development and maturation was that of sort of the ego or the consciousness at the time of birth,

You know,

As a young person,

Okay,

Or as a spiritual neophyte,

Right?

That rather,

You know,

We tend to have a,

There tends to be this aversive relationship to the notion of self,

You know,

If you get into Buddha dharma study,

You know,

And you begin to become resentful of your mind every time you see it constructing the self because you don't want to do that anymore because you want to be free from suffering.

And so you get this kind of negative attitude,

Aversive attitude toward the notion of self.

And what the Buddha was trying to point out using this simile is that this notion,

This construction of self had a very important function in terms of,

You know,

Like what Jack Engler,

The psychiatrist,

Says,

You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,

You know,

That it's really important to have a kind of a robust and a positive,

A compassionate sense of who you are,

You know,

Of self.

And then once that is well established,

Okay,

At some point then it becomes possible to begin to inquire into,

You know,

What's the true nature of that being,

You know,

That is it possible that rather than it being,

You know,

A rigid,

Formed,

Never changing structure that in fact it's a construct that we conjure up and sometimes it can be extremely useful to pull together this crisp,

Clear,

Well-defined sense of self,

You know.

But instead of it being a transport vehicle like an egg,

You know,

That eventually you have to bust out of,

Okay,

It's like hopping in your car to go run an errand and you're aware that you're in your car and then you run your errand and then you get out of your car.

So it's nice to have a social security number and an address and a job and have people call you things and to exude a certain persona in order to make your way in the world.

But it's likewise useful if you can develop a perspective that regards yourself instead of saying,

Well,

That's who I am,

You know,

In terms of gender and ethnicity and profession and whatever that basically is saying,

Right,

These are attributes that I gather together and make use of for a certain purpose and it's like this,

Not ultimately who I am,

You know.

Who I am is this ceaseless flow of processes,

One to the next,

To the next,

To the next.

And that's a very different way of viewing who we are.

It's a way of viewing who we are that tends to make it less likely that we're going to get into mind states that are going to result in us doing harm to ourselves or others.

So,

The hindrances.

The Buddha had companion teachings.

Some of them were right there at the beginning of the Sattipa Tamasuta.

We talked about the minds and this is a crucially important function of mind that we share with basically all sentient beings,

Certainly all mammals.

The ability of the mind to instantly discern whether a sensory stimulus is warning us of danger or threat,

To be avoided or overcome,

Whether it's warning us or informing us about an opportunity to gratify senses upon which,

You know,

Those two functions,

The ability to move toward the pleasant and gratify a sense desire and to avoid danger,

Are the reason why we're here as a species.

If we didn't have those capabilities,

We would not have survived.

As well as blanking out all other information that's not relevant to our survival and our ability to thrive.

That function of mind is what he called vedana,

The ability to instantly classify sensory stimuli into pleasant,

Unpleasant and neutral.

When the Buddha talked about,

And this is just a mental function,

It was hard work to do,

It was hard work to do,

It was somewhere down deep in the medulla until,

You know,

I don't know very much about this stuff actually,

In terms of the neuroscience of it.

But that's just part of our makeup,

It just comes along with being in this body.

What can happen however,

And this is,

You know,

One way of understanding what the Buddha was talking about when he talked about the origins of suffering,

Is that these capabilities of mind get out of balance,

Sometimes quite severely out of balance.

So that if the mind is hypervigilant,

It can start tending to interpret almost any sensory stimulus as a potential threat.

Or it can begin to interpret a very wide variety of stimuli,

Something that I want or need.

That this tendency of encountering something that you feel to be threatening,

Either to overcome and destroy or run away from,

Fight or flight or freeze,

I guess is another option,

Or to move toward to crave and to cling to that which gratifies the senses,

Which can go into overdrive and can begin to dominate one's life and drive one in a way that's all out of proportion to the reality of what's needed both to protect yourself and to meet your basic needs.

And the function of delusion in here is to keep you from seeing that that's what's going on.

So when those tendencies get that powerful,

They become what the Buddha called the three poisons,

The torments of the mind,

The polywors of the calasus,

Attachment,

Aversion and delusion.

And if they become so strong that that is what is driving your behavior,

First your perceptions and then your behavior,

Then you live in a world of hurt,

Then your mind becomes saturated with dukkha,

With dissatisfaction,

With distress.

So when he talked about this is where self-induced suffering comes from,

That's basically what he's saying.

It's when these drives to either avoid or destroy the difficult,

The unpleasant,

What you're aversive to,

Or to move toward to consume that which you find pleasing beyond all measure and beyond basic needs.

That's where the suffering comes from.

So we have to be able to recognize that when it's going on.

About a thousand years after the Buddha's time on earth,

There was a group of monks hanging out in Sri Lapa who for hundreds of years had been trying to live by what the Buddha instructed in the Pali Canon,

And came up with their own user's guide to the Pali Canon.

It was written down by a Kharapinskala named Buddhaghosa,

And a set of books is called the Vasudhimagga,

The Path to Purification.

In the Vasudhimagga,

What Buddhaghosa wrote down was,

You know what you notice over these hundreds of years of practice and whatnot,

Of looking at these three calasas of attachment,

Aversion,

And delusion,

That they seem to manifest not just in the moment,

But they tend to become habits of mind over time.

They tend to become forms of behavior that we routinely fall into.

And so they came up with this kind of system for categorizing human personalities.

It's said that we all have the tendencies to all free,

You know,

Attachment,

Aversion,

And delusion.

But some of us tend to more strongly fall into one worldview than another.

And so the three personality types,

The three temperaments that Buddhaghosa wrote about in The Path to Purification,

Were the greedy type,

The aversive type,

And the deluded type.

And so this,

Like I've said before,

Is kind of like a three-piece jazz combo.

They all get to play their own riffs from time to time,

But there's usually one person like Vince Giraldi or somebody who's actually running the ship.

So the leader of the trio,

Each of us have our own leader of a trio,

Even though the others certainly come in and play their riffs from time to time as well.

This understanding of temperaments basically just says that when these forces of mind come up over and over and over again,

They tend to leave fairly lasting imprints on our consciousness.

And that depending on our own predispositions,

Our own karma,

How we were raised or whatnot,

That one or another or things that happen to us,

Like if you tend to have a somewhat aversively oriented temperament to begin with,

You're always kind of suspicious or a little wary or whatnot,

And you wind up in some place like armed combat.

That's kind of a recipe for post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Not everyone gets it,

But certain people do.

Some people get it early to add.

So there may be this combination of possible predisposition mixed in with experience that results in us having certain kind of more or less dominant personality characteristics.

That's the rap,

And also that's not a teaching in the Buddha.

It's the one that comes out of the Siddhi Maga.

But it's turned out to be useful over the years in terms of people being able to come to a little bit better understanding of what might be going on in their own minds and why we sort of behave in the way we do.

Sharon Salzberg talks about the aversive type going into a room and saying,

Wow,

That furniture is in a really poor taste,

Or the drapes in the rug don't match or whatnot.

The greedy type comes in and says,

Oh,

That's a beautiful tapestry.

I wonder where they got it.

I wonder,

You know,

Oh,

It's a really nice batika to Buddha.

My friend knows that I'm a Dharma student.

Maybe she'll give it to me.

And then the deluded one comes in and says,

What is this place?

What's going on here?

It's basically just a kind of a set of predispositions.

It's potentially useful insofar as gaining a little bit of insight into how we come to know our own minds to incline in a certain way.

Time and again,

However,

Has been used to very ill effect because it's also a potential source of,

Again,

Self-judgment and self-recrimination.

Oh,

God,

I'm such an aversive type.

There we are.

OK,

That's a good example,

Right?

Self-aversive.

I really wish I was different.

I wish I was more of a greedy type.

I wish I was just out to lunch and wasn't even aware of any of the stuff going on.

So,

Yeah,

It's possible to engage in negative self-judgment.

It's not what the function of them is.

OK,

Not at all.

It's basically just a general instruction that there are certain tendencies or temperaments that we can sort of manifest.

Each of those also has its counterpart.

And as we go through our examination of these topics over the next few weeks,

We'll see that indeed there are means for the transformation of one into the other.

For the transformation of craving and clinging into generosity.

The transformation of aversion,

Wariness,

And fear into love and kind regard.

The transformation of delusion into wisdom.

That's what the Buddha taught.

This is where we're coming from.

These are the kinds of changes that are indeed possible if we follow this path.

So,

Any other questions or comments?

Well,

That's good because we've run out of time.

So let's get our sitting posture again for just a moment.

Getting along the eyes to gently close and the attention to come to rest on the breathing.

Knowing and accepting our aversions and our fears.

May we be more open-hearted.

Understanding our cravings and our clingings.

May we be more open-handed and generous.

Understanding our desire to not see what is.

May we rest in wisdom and compassion.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be peaceful.

May all beings be free.

Reviews

It’s the second time through for me listening to this series and I find it so helpful to discover the places in my mental “interior design” household where new possibilities can be found. Thank you.

Profound — he gives seamless insight to and explanation of the ‘five hindersnces’ and the ‘three poisons’; highly recommend.

An excellent talk. Thank you.

Highly insightful and well constructed lecture. It bound together several teaching I have learned but had yet to understand, into an overarching vision / image of what the mind is, how it can serve and (mis)guide us. Many, many thanks!

1st teaching from you. Very insightful thank you.

Wonderful! Will listen to this again and again. Thank you.

Thank you! Lovely talk!

Amazing and reassured me that I’m on the right path! Thank you & Namaste 🙏🏻

A wonderful talk providing much useful insight into the human condition. Thank you very much