Relieving Suffering By Widening The Container

In this talk, we explore the ways that we can practice with our own distress (worry, fear, sadness, anger) by using the practice of widening the container. Broadening the sphere of our awareness frees us from what David Foster Wallace calls our "skull-sized kingdoms."

Transcript

Tonight,

You may have noticed that our reading began with a very particular teaching from the Dalai Lama.

And I'd like to read it again as a way to begin my talk.

He said,

The moment you think only of yourself,

The focus of your whole reality narrows,

And because of this narrow focus,

Uncomfortable things can appear huge and bring you fear and discomfort and a sense of feeling overwhelmed by misery.

I think all of us have had that experience,

Sometimes on a daily basis.

And what the Dalai Lama points to is the mind's tendency to see itself as the center of everything and therefore to see every feeling,

Every thought as the center of the universe.

And one of the things that Zen practice does is offers a corrective to the mind's tendency to see ourselves as the star of the show.

And of course,

You've all had glimpses of the reality as well,

That every stranger we meet on the street contains a whole universe of experience.

But the mind goes right back to putting us on center stage.

So how do we get a shift in perspective and especially a shift that helps ease the suffering caused by our self-preoccupation,

Which is with us all day long?

That self-preoccupation,

Of course,

Includes the three poisons,

Greed,

Hatred,

Delusion,

Because those three poisons are all about self-centeredness.

Greed,

Of course,

I want what she has.

I need more money.

I need more love.

Hatred,

About how he disrespected me or what she did to me.

And delusion,

Of course,

The delusion of separateness.

Life being a zero-sum game.

I need to win.

And if I win,

You lose.

And of course,

Emptiness,

Or we might say oneness,

Is the perspective that offers us a way out of swimming in these poisons,

Offers a way out of the trap,

What David Foster Wallace called being trapped in our skull-sized kingdoms.

And one of the first teachings that I learned in my early forays into Zen was this practice we think of as widening the container.

Because when we sit down for Zazen,

We often think,

Well,

I need to get rid of my suffering,

Or I just need to get rid of thoughts.

And it's a good Zazen if I don't have any thoughts,

And certainly if I don't have any suffering.

But the teaching is that nothing is to be gotten rid of.

Nothing is to be pushed away.

That the way we work with thinking,

With feeling,

With suffering,

Is to widen the container of our awareness.

And as I think many of you know,

There are countless reports of people having enlightenment experiences when they feel the vastness of the natural world,

When they widen the container beyond the small mind to how wide the world is.

When we zoom out,

If you will,

To see the biggest picture possible.

And there is a teaching I love from the astronomer Carl Sagan that does this.

Some of you know Carl Sagan was both a noted astronomer and a wonderful philosopher,

A very spiritual being.

And he wrote a piece called Pale Blue Dot.

And it was inspired by an image that he asked NASA to take.

The spacecraft Voyager was off into another galaxy.

This was a long time ago,

In 1990.

And Sagan suggested that as the spacecraft was about to leave our solar system,

That it should turn around and take one last photo of the Earth.

So there's a photo of the Earth from 4 billion miles away.

And the Earth is almost imperceptible.

It is a tiny,

Tiny pale blue dot.

And then Sagan looked at it and he wrote this.

And I'd like to read it to you because it's a bit long,

But I think it says so beautifully what this widening the container points to.

So here's what Sagan writes.

He says,

Look again at that dot.

That's here.

That's home.

That's us.

On it,

Everyone you love,

Everyone you know,

Everyone you ever heard of,

Every human being who ever was,

Lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering,

Thousands of confident religions,

Ideologies and economic doctrines,

Every hunter and forager,

Every hero and coward,

Every creator and destroyer of civilization,

Every king and peasant,

Every young couple in love,

Every mother and father,

Hopeful child,

Inventor and explorer,

Every teacher of morals,

Every corrupt politician,

Every superstar,

Every supreme leader,

Every saint and sinner in the history of our species,

Lived there on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph,

They could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

How frequent their misunderstandings,

How eager they are to kill one another,

How fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings,

Our imagined self-importance,

The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe,

Are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in a great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity,

In all this vastness,

There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me,

It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot,

The only home we've ever known.

I come back to this quote often because it is that zooming out perspective that so takes me out of my little skull-sized kingdom.

So then,

Where does that kind of perspective leave us?

It could leave us feeling so insignificant that the only option is to do nothing,

To not care.

But in fact,

Zen teaches,

As in all things,

A middle way,

That we do rely on this bigger perspective that we get.

But that in addition,

We know that in the world of form,

What we do matters.

Everything we do matters.

And so,

We are both of no significance and of maximal significance at the same time.

And just like Carl Sagan teaches us the perspective of zooming out,

Of taking that big picture about our smallness,

There's another form of practice that we do on the cushion every day,

Which is really zooming in to our inner world because that too can help us de-center.

Joko Beck,

The Zen teacher,

Used to say,

Well,

We can talk about oneness until the cows come home,

But our mind is constantly separating us from each other with our prides and our angers.

And so,

We teach the practice of observing emotion and observing thinking,

Not pushing it away,

But seeing it arise and pass away,

Seeing emotions as feelings,

As bodily states.

And what we do in this way as well is create this bigger container.

So,

For example,

When we're angry about something,

At first,

There's very little space.

The mind is completely taken up by the feeling of anger.

But then,

If we can take in the feel of the breath,

The beating of the heart,

The sound of the traffic,

Then the space gets a little bigger.

The container gets a little bigger.

And the enlightened state is just a wider and wider container,

Which by definition prompts us to develop more compassion for ourselves and for everybody.

And,

Of course,

Practicing in this way,

With our inner world,

Is always limited.

But the edge of practice is that place where we are still upset,

Where we're still angry.

We practice in these challenging places and we feel where we feel it in the body and we watch the thoughts swirl and we realize that the one who observes is not the anger,

Is not the upsurge of feeling.

And that we can,

In observing,

Be more charitable with ourselves.

And it's creating this bigger container that brings us to what in Zen we call emptiness.

If I can observe my mind and body in an angry state,

Then who's the I who observes this?

And when I come to see that I am not my anger,

I'm much bigger than my anger,

And this is what enables me to develop that wider container and to grow.

And so,

All we need to do on the cushion is keep increasing our ability to be with whatever we feel,

Whatever we think.

And as our ability to be with whatever arises grows and grows,

Two things increase.

First,

Our wisdom,

Seeing life more as it is rather than the way I want it to be.

And our compassion,

Which is the natural result of seeing life as it is.

All we need is to widen this perspective,

Whether it's zooming out on the cosmos or on the moon,

Up in the sky,

Or zooming in on my swirl of thoughts and feelings and realizing that the I who observes is so much bigger than my little skull-sized kingdom.

So in closing,

Let me take us back to Carl Sagan's conclusion.

He wrote,

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me,

It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot,

The only home we've ever known.

And so it's in widening the container on the cushion or looking at the night sky that suffering is eased and emptiness is approached.

Thank you.

Reviews

Wonderful talk 🙏