Transendental Dependent Arising...forward movement on the path

I want to deepen our exploration of Dependent Origination by introducing Transcendental Dependent Origination.  

Dependent Origination takes us through the determinative cycle of ignorance to "the origination of this entire mass of suffering” - through the 12 steps of samsaric existence.  Most of the Buddha’s teachings take us through these 12 steps forward and backward.  The cycle begins with ignorance which leads to volitional formations (karmic formations/habits) to consciousness to mentality-materiality (body and form) to the six sense spheres to contact with phenomenon to feeling tone (positive, negative, neutral) to craving, clinging, becoming, birth, aging and death.   Ignorance conditions all experiences which lead by causes and conditions to the suffering of aging and death.  In the words of the teaching, "with birth as condition, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair arise. Such is the origination of this entire mass of suffering.” ~SN12, passim  

The reverse cycle begins with the entire mass of suffering and through its elimination leads backwards to the elimination of ignorance.

Last week we looked at the middle sequence from the six sense spheres to contact, feeling tone, craving clinging, becoming to show that when we can bring awareness to any one element of the progression, we can change, even interrupt the forward momentum of the cycle through causes and conditions - because awareness is a condition that alters everything.  In MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), we learned that if we can bring awareness to the first arising of the positive or negative or neutral feeling tone, our awareness has the great power to head off the development of craving, clinging, becoming…the entire mass of suffering.  With the cessation of ignorance, all the successive stages cease one by one down to the entire mass of suffering. 

I want to quote Bhikku Bodhi who continually astonishes me with his power to express these concepts in a way that is both clear, vibrant and alive. 

This is his introduction to the teaching of Dependent Arising  (Transcendental Dependent Arising:  A Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta by Bhikkhu Bodhi, © 1995 [https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel277.html]):

"Dependent arising (paticcasamuppada) is the central principle of the Buddha's teaching, constituting both the objective content of its liberating insight and the germinative source for its vast network of doctrines and disciplines. As the frame behind the four noble truths, the key to the perspective of the middle way, and the conduit to the realization of selflessness, it is the unifying theme running through the teaching's multifarious expressions, binding them together as diversified formulations of a single coherent vision. The earliest suttas equate dependent arising with the unique discovery of the Buddha's enlightenment, so profound and difficult to grasp that he at first hesitated to announce it to the world. A simple exposition of the principle sparks off the liberating wisdom in the minds of his foremost disciples, while skill in explaining its workings is made a qualification of an adroit expounder of the Dhamma. So crucial is this principle to the body of the Buddha's doctrine that an insight into dependent arising is held to be sufficient to yield an understanding of the entire teaching. In the words of the Buddha: "He who sees dependent arising sees the Dhamma; he who sees the Dhamma sees dependent arising." [1]

…

"Its phrasing, as terse as any formulation of modern logic, recurs in the ancient texts thus: "This being, that exists; through the arising of this that arises. This not being, that does not exist; through the ceasing of this that ceases."[2]

…

"The twelvefold application accomplishes precisely this. In its positive or direct aspect (anuloma) it makes known the causal chain behind suffering, demonstrating how the round of existence arises and turns through the impulsions of craving, clinging, and karma, working freely behind the shielding screen of ignorance. In its negative or reverse side (patiloma) it reveals the way to the cessation of suffering, showing that when ignorance is eliminated by the rise of true knowledge all the factors dependent on ignorance likewise draw to a close.

Bhikku Bodhi then articulates the other related principle contained in this teaching. 

"Above and beyond its specific instances, dependent arising remains an expression of the invariable structural relatedness of phenomena ….(my italics)

From the perspective this teaching affords, things are seen to arise, not from some intrinsic nature of their own, from necessity, chance or accident, but from their causal correlations with other things to which they are connected as part of the fixed order obtaining between phenomena. Each transient entity, emerging into the present out of the stream of events bearing down from the past, absorbs into itself the causal influx of the past, to which it must be responsive. During its phase of presence, it exercises its own distinctive function with the support of its conditions, expressing thereby its own immediacy of being. And then, with the completion of its actuality, it is swept away by the universal impermanence to become itself a condition determinant of the future."

I have to highlight that last sentence as it illuminated for me as a shooting star the skies the essence of the teaching grounded in the bedrock of our existence.

 Each transient entity, emerging into the present out of the stream of events bearing down from the past, absorbs into itself the causal influx of the past, to which it must be responsive. During its phase of presence, it exercises its own distinctive function with the support of its conditions, expressing thereby its own immediacy of being. And then, with the completion of its actuality, it is swept away by the universal impermanence to become itself a condition determinant of the future.”

Worth a pause and a breath….

And here is the turning point of this particular version of dependent arising - that of Transcendental Dependent Arising:  

One particular exemplification of dependent arising...shows the basic principle to serve as the scaffolding for the course of spiritual development issuing in final emancipation.[3] It figures in these suttas as the architectonic underlying the gradual training, governing the process by which one phase of practice conditions the arising of the following phase all the way from the commencement of the path to the realization of the ultimate goal.

In Transcendental Dependent Arising, the sequence has been shifted into a positive iteration - what happens when suffering meets the way out of suffering, when some amount of awareness penetrates the depths of suffering to ask, inquire, insist, “Is there a way out of this suffering?”  "There must be a way out of suffering!”  

The first step of Transcendental Dependent Arising is when suffering meets faith.  The conditions of faith (sometimes called ‘confidence’) are embedded in suffering, arise out of suffering, are conditioned by suffering.  The arising of faith out of suffering takes the energy of suffering and uses it to fulfill its expression and to condition the next arising - that of joy. 

It is said that the faith that arises out of suffering occurs when suffering encounters the dharma or the Buddha’s teachings.  Like a match lighting the dry tinder in the forest, the dharma lights the energy of suffering into a blaze of awareness, curiosity, energy, investigation, into forward movement along the path that moves from conditioned arising to conditioned arising until full liberation has been attained. 

We’ll end with this from Bhikku Bodhi:

As living experience, the advance to emancipation cannot be tied down to a series of mere negations, for such a mode of treatment omits precisely what is most essential to the spiritual quest — the immediacy of inner striving, growth, and transformation. Parallel to the demolition of old barriers there occurs, in the quest for deliverance, a widening of vistas characterized by an evolving sense of maturation, enrichment, and fulfillment; the departure from bondage, anxiety, and suffering at the same time means the move towards freedom and peace. This expansion and enrichment is made possible by the structure of the gradual training, which is not so much a succession of discrete steps one following the other as a locking together of overlapping components in a union at once augmentative, consummative, and projective. Each pair of stages intertwines in a mutually vitalizing bond wherein the lower, antecedent member nurtures its successor by serving as its generative base, and the higher, consequent member completes its predecessor by absorbing its energies and directing them on to the next phase in the series. Each link thus performs a double function: while rewarding the efforts expended in the accomplishment of the antecedent stage, it provides the incentive for the commencement of the consequent stage. In this way the graduated training unfolds organically in a fluid progression in which, as the Buddha says, "stage flows over into stage, stage fulfills stage, for crossing over from the hither shore to the beyond."[4]

Again, a long deep breath….

The notes that apply above are references to the teachings as follows:
1. MN 28.
2.Imasmim sati idam hoti, imass'uppada idam uppajjati. Imasmim asati idam na hoti, imassa nirodha idam nirujjati. MN 79, MN 115 etc.
3.SN 22.23; AN 10.3-5.
4.AN 10.2.

"When this exists, that comes to be...

We’ve moved through the Satipatthana Sutta - the great teaching on Mindfulness - from the First Foundation of Mindfulness to the teachings and practices contain in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  It is a great and deep teaching.  Perhaps we’ve gotten an overview and dug a bit more deeply here and there.  But this overview is not to be confused with a deep dive into the practices, meanings, implications, that a more rigorous examination would reveal.  Joseph Goldstein’s book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Venerable Analayo’s three books - Sattipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization, Sattipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide, and Perspectives on Sattipatthana are all great resources for a closer look at this teaching.  Bhikku Bodhi’s book The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering is a wonderfully readable journey through this bedrock teaching contained in the Satipatthana Sutta. I urge you all to take a peak at these and other sources to explore a bit more.

However, there is an important teaching embedded in this sutta that I would like to introduce here - that of dependent origination.  The essence of it is contained in this paragraph found in "Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dhamma" in this paragraph: 

This is what the Blessed One said.  Elated, the bhikkus of the group of five delighted in the Blessed One’s statement.  And while this discourse was being spoken, there arose in the Venerable Kondañña the dust-free, stainless vision of the Dhamma:  “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation."

Whatever arises will pass away. 

 In other teachings, it is stated this way:  

“When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.”   

The Buddha taught that all things are conditioned and therefore impermanent.  They arise when causes and conditions come together and they cease when the causes and conditions fall away, cease, aren’t sufficient.  

Take fire - it needs heat, oxygen, and fuel.  Striking a match in our atmosphere supplies the heat from friction, the fuel from the point of the match and then the wood or paper of the match, and oxygen from our atmosphere.  

The acorn is necessary for an oak tree to grow.  But it is not sufficient.  Conditions sufficient for the acorn to germinate and grow include air, soil, warmth, water.  

Our bodies came to be from a complex interaction of egg and sperm, fertilization, warmth, moisture, a place to attach that will provide nutrition, protection from harsh elements, etc.   Our continued existence is conditioned on our obtaining oxygen, water, food.  Our bodies will cease when a vital organ fails and any number of other conditions. 

The Buddha called this teaching Dependent Origination and in some of the suttas it is described as a 12 step process that begins with ignorance which leads to volitional formations (habits, tendencies, automatic reactivity) which leads to a kind of consciousness which leads to name and form (the body) which leads to the six sense spheres (eyes, ears, etc.) which leads to contact (with an experience such as sight or smells) which leads to feeling tone about that contact of positive, negative or neutral from which arises desire or aversion or confusion, grasping, clinging, pushing away or overlooking which leads to becoming (forming an identity) which leads to birth which leads to old age and death with all the suffering and misery that entails.   

In the Buddha’s world this had a reference to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth with some of the factors pertaining to the past life, some to the present, and some to the future.  

There is much more to be said on this topic but for our purposes, we will focus on the overall principle of one thing leading to another and to a specific sequence which is familiar to many of you.  Out of our bodies (name and form) arise the six sense spheres - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind.  With the six sense spheres comes contact with experiential phenomena - sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, and perceptions, thoughts, mind states, emotions.  Each of those experiences has as feeling tone of positive, negative and neutral.  Out of that feeling tone arises wanting, not wanting, and delusion.  When we want, we reach out and grasp.  When we don’t want, we push away.  When it has a neutral tone, we often overlook the experience in confusion.  With our grasping arises actions like grabbing a cupcake which leads to becoming a person who likes cupcakes and grabs them - a form of birth of the self - which leads to suffering, aging, and death of that cupcake loving self.

And as many of you learned in MBSR, awareness at any point of the cycle changes the whole inevitability of the cycle.  But awareness that arises at the feeling tone point of experience just as we experience positive, negative or neutral is especially effective at breaking the cycle of suffering.  This awareness at the feeling tone point interferes with the arising of desire or craving, aversion or confusion, and thus the rest of the cycle of suffering.  

Dependent origination says that one thing leads to another but if our awareness arises at the beginning point of experience but before our positive experience turns into wanting and craving, we can experience the positive experience without getting caught by it.  Awareness is the condition that breaks the inevitability of cycle of dependent origination.

Awareness doesn’t change the over all conditioned nature of our existence but it is the necessary condition to break the cycle of suffering.  

Guy Armstrong teaches that we learn from our sitting practice but we also learn from hearing and speaking about the teachings and also from reading and studying the teachings.  So our gatherings are a place where all of these forms of learning are possible.  Asking questions, sharing experiences, hearing the journey others are going through can be enormously helpful to our own explorations.  Sometimes it can be uncomfortable when we realize we may have gone a bit astray, sometimes energizing when we have another insight about our practice.  Reading a teaching before practice can prepare our minds and spark our curiosity during our next sit.  These different forms of practice are a three-legged stool supporting and energizing our explorations.

On "Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dhamma"...

I found reading and sharing last week’s teaching on Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dhamma*  inspiring - for a number of reasons.  The teaching is deep and wide - encompassing the fundamentals of the path the new Buddha had understood - the Middle Way, the Four Noble Truths, and the Noble Eight-Fold Path.  *Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta SN 56.11  

The young Buddha, newly enlightened, was uncertain that he could impart to anyone else what he finally understood to be true.  This teaching culminates by one of his previous cohort of ascetics understanding.  "And while this discourse was being spoken, there arose in the Venerable Kondañña the dust-free, stainless vision of the Dhamma: 'Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.’” 

 The Buddha’s joy at this is expressed in the final words of the Sutta, "Then the Blessed One uttered this inspired utterance: 'Koṇḍañña has indeed understood! Koṇḍañña has indeed understood!' In this way the Venerable Koṇḍañña acquired the name 'Añña Koṇḍañña—Koṇḍañña Who Has Understood.’"

It was over a year ago that I realized how greatly I wanted to teach meditation grounded in the teachings of the Buddha from which it arose.  Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the program many of you took and which inspired your practice of meditation, is firmly grounded in the Buddha’s principles of meditation.  It is not a system of belief as much as practice and the way things are - the way the world is as it meets the way our minds and hearts truly are.  I have often said the Buddha was the first behaviorist. But he came to all his realizations from his subjective point of view - from intense study of his own mind and heart as they met experiential phenomena.  And this understanding is accessible to all of us.  

As I wondered how I would begin to teach from the Buddha’s teachings, I too wondered if anyone would understand what I might impart other than those who had heard it from other teachers.  And I too looked around for people with less dust in their eyes and was moved to bring the teachings to this group of MBSR grads and others drawn to meditation through their own paths.  This may sound a bit over reaching on my part - to compare myself to the Buddha.  But I don’t think the Buddha would feel that.  It is simply a reflection that these teachings can be heard, learned, and practiced by anyone with a sincere heart and mind, that the Buddha was a human being with all the human vulnerabilities and foibles human beings have, that he shared the human story of suddenly understanding deeply the truth of aging, sickness and death, that he was determined to find “an answer,” and that, having understood what he understood, he wanted to share it and worried that it might not be understood.

My understanding of the teachings is more humble than the Buddha's, my path with many more steps to go and includes the vast uncertainty of achieving the Buddha’s level of understanding in this lifetime.  Nevertheless, the path can continue to be traveled and it can be shared at different levels of understanding.  And as there is time and opportunity to practice, we practice and move along the path as we will until we no longer can.

But I can also see that this is the path many, many teachers and practitioners have also traveled and will travel.  As we gain understanding and a little bit of freedom, the wish arises to share that understanding with others.  And simultaneously, the question arises who in our acquaintance might be open and receptive to these teachings and this understanding.

The Buddha shared the teachings out of compassion for the suffering in the world.  And that is where the Four Noble Truths begins.  There is suffering.

As I read this powerful teaching, I realized the teaching on the First Noble Truth was deeper and more comprehensive than I remembered.  

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

Sometimes the Buddha’s teachings can seem archaic.  And the last line “the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering” is one of those occasions.  We encountered this teaching as one of the list of teachings in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of the Dharmas or the Way things are. The five aggregates are one of the Buddha’s many models for engaging his listeners and explaining the way things are.  In the Buddha’s day as in our own, aggregates refer to discrete items of stuff that are stuck together but do not dissolve into each other, do not blend like milk and water might.  They refer to our entire experiential selves which are made up of our physical body, our feelings positive, negative, or neutral, our perceptions, our volitional formations (which refer to habits, to our formation of wishes and intents), and our consciousness.  The Buddha used this model so that his followers could begin to understand that wanting, craving, greed, grasping could arise in any one of these areas.  As we encounter an experiential phenomenon, our consciousness does the encountering, our perceptions do the identifying, our feeling tone kicks in in response to those perceptions, desire or craving arises in our bodies, and our volitional formations produce the will or intent to reach out for the desired object.  The opposite process occurs with undesirable objects.

And since this reference to the aggregates of clinging appears in this, most seminal teaching, I wanted to highlight it and underscore that even though a teaching may sound archaic to our ears, it nevertheless refers to a fundamental understanding of the way things are.

I want to share some clarity I gained about volitional formation - the fourth aggregate - from my teacher Guy Armstrong.  I had read that Ajahn Chah considered volitional formations to be habits.  Guy clarified this process this way:  he said, out of our experiences, thoughts arise which can harden into intent which can become habits which form character.  This character, these habits often direct our actions with some degree of automaticity.  Mindfulness brings this tendencies, habits, character to light and adds choice.  

I also discovered that Guy Armstrong read this important teaching aloud where it can be found on YouTube.  I hope you will access Guy Armstrong reading of “Setting the Wheel of the Dhamma in Motion”, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta SN 56.11.  I found this hearing deepened by appreciation for the teaching.  I hope it will deepen yours.

"Koṇḍañña has indeed understood!"

Having progressed through the teachings of the Four Noble Truths which we did a year ago and having traversed the Satipatthana Sutta or the Four Foundations or Establishments of Mindfulness through Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, Mindfulness of the Mind, and now Mindfulness of the Way Things are (the Dharmas or Teachings of the Buddha), we arrive back at the Four Noble Truths which are the last of the teachings of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  We have reviewed three of the Four Noble Truths in these last weeks - the Noble Truth of suffering, the Noble Truth of the causes for suffering, the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering, and now we arrive at the gate of liberation, the Noble Truth of the way to the end of suffering, the Noble Eight fold Path.

When the Buddha was first enlightened, he spent some time delighting in his newfound state.  He believed that no one would understand what he had discovered if he shared what he had learned.  The story goes that a being from one of the higher realms urged him to teach, impressing on him the suffering in the world and arousing his compassion to help suffering beings.  The Buddha’s argument was that beings on this earth were so attached to their pleasures and the way of the world that they couldn’t see through the delusion that lasting happiness could only be found through pleasures of the body.  The visitor from the higher realm assured him that there were human beings without much dust in their eyes and that he should start by teaching them.  The Buddha considered this entreaty and then remembered the five ascetics he had been traveling and practicing with before he went off on his own to become enlightened.  He thought perhaps they might be able to understand and set out to find them.

When he did find them, they resisted and even mocked him at first because he had given up on his extreme asceticism of eating one kernel of rice a day and had become healthy.  But they also noted the glow emanating from him and decided to listen to what he had to say.

The first full teaching that the Buddha gave to his friends has become known as the Turning of the Wheel and is a central discourse in the Buddha’s teachings.  As Ajahn Sucitto says in "Turning the Wheel of Dhamma”, this discourse sets out the four noble truths [including the Noble 8 fold path] and the ‘Middle Way’ – the teaching structure that is the heart of his Way of realization. (Samyutta Nikaya 56).”  

The ‘Middle Way’ was the Buddha’s teaching that two extremes should not be followed by "one who has gone forth into homelessness" - the pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasure and the pursuit of self-mortification.  This teaching of the ‘Middle Way’ has relevance for us as lay people in every aspect of our lives and practice. (SM 56, translating by Bhikkus Bodhi).

He goes on to say that the hub of the wheel of Dhamma represents the discipline needed to walk the path, the spokes represent the eight path factors of the Noble Eight Fold Path, and the rim of the wheel represents Samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and is often referred to as the wheel of Samsara or Suffering. The wheel is often depicted with a hand at the center, either turning the wheel or holding it steady. Lion’s Roar, “Buddhism A to Z,” https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/dharma-wheel-dharmachakra/

The eight spokes of the wheel, elements of the path to awakening, are right (or wise, or skillful) view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.  They are divided into three broader groupings - ethical conduct (sīla) which includes wise speech, wise action, and wise livelihood, the training of the mind (samāhi) which includes wise effort, wise concentration, and wise mindfulness, and wisdom (pañña) which includes wise intention and wise view.  

As Matthew Brensilver says in his article entitled "Sīla, Samādhi, Pañña" (which is an excerpt from a talk at Spirit Rock), "Ajahn Chah said that sīla-samādhi-pañña, ethical conduct, mind training, and wisdom, are not three separate activities, they are part of the same fruit. They are the mango pit, flesh, and skin. ...these three cultivations are one and the same: inextricably bound." https://www.spiritrock.org/articles/sila-samadhi-panna

He goes on to say this:  

"To be mindful of goodness brings love, and to be mindful of pain brings love. That is something like a miracle. This weird asymmetry, that to attend to goodness brings love, and to attend to suffering also brings love. That’s not something that we should take on faith. But this is the laboratory.

The more attuned we are to our hearts, the clearer our ethical behavior becomes. So the more we actually become embodied, start to feel our body fully, to feel our heart, the clearer ethical conduct becomes. It’s like we become attuned to our own system in such a way that we begin to see that doing good feels good. And the kind of karmic loop, when we act out of alignment with our own deepest integrity, that feedback loop gets shorter and shorter, so we really feel it. And this clarity breeds more careful, non-harming behavior.

The steadier and more unified the mind gets, the deeper the love can be. Sometimes the mind gathers so singularly around an object — the breath, a mettā phrase, the body, sound, sight, looking into the eyes of another person — the mind just becomes unified. And all the static, fragmentation, and division collapses. And in that mind state, it’s like a drop of love reaches everywhere.

The mind is said to to be boundless. That’s not making a statement about the nature of mind, but the actual experience is that in this moment there is love without end, without discrimination, without preference.

And then lastly, the more clearly we see, the more effortless the love becomes. Clearly we see the less tenable hatred becomes.”  https://www.spiritrock.org/articles/sila-samadhi-panna

When the Buddha completed his teaching, one member of the five ascetics around him was enlightened, an ascetic named Koṇḍañña.  And this passage completes the teaching:  

"Then the Blessed One uttered this inspired utterance: 'Koṇḍañña has indeed understood! Koṇḍañña has indeed understood!' In this way the Venerable Koṇḍañña acquired the name “Añña Koṇḍañña—Koṇḍañña Who Has Understood.” SM 56

Nuggets from retreat...

There were many little nuggets of gold from the retreat I just sat that I would love to share with you.  But two stand out in particular.

The first is that we often can’t tell the benefit of our practice in the here and now.  I came home from the retreat exhausted by the packing and moving, by the early hours I keep on retreat, and by stopping to attend to a sick friend on the way home.  It takes time to emerge from any retreat - concentration retreats even more so.  But I felt a little at sea, a bit of “what’s it all about, Alfie?”  

Then yesterday, I woke up and decided to have lunch with a friend rather than go on a rally. (No, I haven’t given up on rallies.  I just took a break.)  And as a pleasant lunch outside in the sunshine and breeze neared its end, I decided to spend the afternoon cleaning out my files.  So I did.  The process is still ongoing.   

That’s when I knew the retreat had had a profound effect on my mind.  If my mind is overstuffed, then the files are too.  So it was both a relief and a joy to wade into the files on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.  My mind delighted in the task of clearing out my physical space.  (May it continue.)  The best thing is that the files are in the garage so I could do this with doors open, breeze blowing by, and a beautiful sunny day in attendance.

The second little nugget happened this morning as I sat to meditate.  We’ve been looking at the Four Noble Truths recently.  The first noble truth says there is suffering.  The Buddha understood that we don’t actually look at suffering if we can help it.  We look away, distract ourselves, pretend it’s not happening, reach for food, our phones, tv programs, whatever distraction helps us ignore our suffering. The second noble truth says there are causes for suffering - namely attachment.  Attachment to wanting things to be our own way, not wanting bad things, wanting good things, being deluded about what brings us happiness.  The third noble truth says there is a path out of suffering.  We’re not stuck, trapped, hopelessly mired in our own tangled net of attachment.  The fourth noble truth says the Noble 8-Fold Path is the way out of suffering - wise view, wise intention, wise speech, wise action, wise action, wise livelihood, wise effort, wise mindfulness, wise concentration. We’re review these in a little more depth later.

As I approached my meditation bench, I realized I had forgotten to make tea which I habitually have before I sit to meditation.  I decided if I didn’t remember to make it, perhaps I didn’t desire it so much and could go without.  Then, as I sat, I remembered what had triggered my remembering the tea - a sensation in my arms and hands of placing the tea near my bench and reaching for it to drink. Then I became aware of a tingling in the tip of my tongue, then the sides of the tongue.  The tongue had a physical memory of tea, desire manifested in the tingling.  I was slightly annoyed by the distraction until I realized these sensations were not a distraction.  They were a present moment manifestation of “desire.”  I was being handed an opportunity to investigate “desire" right in the moment of its arising.  

Some of you may remember from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction that desire rises out of the positive feeling tone we experience when we make contact with an experience that we like.  In my case, it was the thought - or more specifically, the  memory - of tea that led to the positive feeling and then to desire. The desire for tea increased to a craving of the tea which manifested in the physical memory of reaching for and tasting the tea.  That led to memories of how to make tea, the calculation of how long it would take to make, the tea kettle, the tea bag, etc.  The mind quickly reviewed the possibility of getting up from meditation to make tea.  Frustrated in that desire by my determination to keep sitting, the mind began investigating memories of how long I had been making tea before meditation and realized there was a time before tea.  For years, I would sit in the morning before making tea.  The tea always came after meditation.  So what I was looking at was a habit pattern created by desire and craving - a deeply engrained habit pattern based on years of repetition and satisfaction of that desire.  The result was suffering when I didn’t have that tea.

That habit pattern contained the attachment the Buddha referred to as the cause of suffering in the second noble truth.  As I continued to sit, I watched the sensations in the mouth lessen, disappear, then return again and disappear again.  The desire weakened as well when my mind turned to the breath and the rest of the meditation process.  

This spontaneous awareness and reflection too was a process strengthened by the retreat, I realized.  Other little nuggets may continue to appear. Some  will get lost in the tumult downstream but will alter the flow nevertheless. When we become aware of and investigate a negative habit pattern, we weaken the habit.  When we practice, we strengthen the positive habit of training our minds and turning our trained minds to investigating what leads to suffering and what leads to the end of suffering in our lives.

Concentration meditation calms and steadies the mind.  It sharpens the focus and trains the mind to stay on a single object of investigation for longer.  The concentration object is often the breath although it doesn’t have to be.  But training the mind to return again and again to a single object strengthens the capacity of the mind to engage in a more focussed way.

The purpose is not concentration for concentration’s sake although there is some of that as well.  The purpose is to investigate how we meet the experiences of our lives with a better, sharper investigative tool - the concentrated mind.  How do we relate to wanting something and not being able to have it?  Are we aware when it is happening?  Or conversely how do we relate to experiences that arise that we don’t want - an unpleasant encounter, a negative health diagnosis, burning our hand on a hot pan, hearing about adverse circumstances that affect our community or our country?

The steadiness and focus of the concentrated mind - one that is free of clutter - enables us to see more deeply and with greater clarity into how we relate to what we want, what we don’t want, what delusions persist.  This greater clarity allows a calmer, more appropriate response to whatever arises that is not encumbered by the suffering of attachment.  

On retreat...

I arrived a day early for this retreat to unpack, get my bearings, and begin to settle my mind and heart after weeks of anxiety building news, dire warnings, and wonderful energizing rallies.   A handful of people arrived yesterday, a few more this morning and the bulk of the retreatants will descend this afternoon.  It has been a lovely peaceful morning getting to know a few of the early arrivers before we go into silence this evening.  We all feel the peacefulness of the place seeping into our bones.  Thousands of meditators have sat and walked here and at the two related retreat centers up the hill and down road since the late 70’s.  It reminds me of going into churches in Europe and feeling the power of hundreds of thousands of people over the centuries praying and lifting their hearts for solace.  

And yet, it’s completely different - open, spacious, with lawns, meadows, gardens, many varieties of daffodils and flowering trees, and a huge stone stupa - a round stone structure about 20 feet high that houses relics of Buddhism - built by the founding director with his bare hands.  The first time he built it, he didn’t use cement.  It eventually fell down.  So he built it again using cement.  

Just like practice.  We begin and then we continue.  Something happens and we fall away.  We wake up and begin again.  The patience needed for stupa building and practice is the same.

As I write this, I am filled with gratitude - gratitude for this place and this opportunity to engage in intensive practice, gratitude to the support staff here who feed and house us, to the teachers who guide us, to the sangha who gather here from far and wide to practice together in community, to all the people at home who watch over my fish, the birds, the plants, the house, to my family and friends who support me with their well wishes...and especially, to all of you who have given me the gift of your presence, your attention, your interest, your feedback over the years.  

I was reflecting while telling a fellow retreatant about our sangha how you have all grown in your interest and understanding of mindfulness meditation and the Buddha’s related teachings, how each of you has reached out to make the teachings relevant to you, have practiced, have read, and have begun to share your journey with others.  Some of you have related how you and your families have noticed a difference in you, a lightness, more openness.  Some of you have tried retreat life that has enriched and deepened your practice and your contemplations.  Some of you have moved into teaching in a more formal way.  

I am moved and deeply grateful to have been a part of your journey and to see how the teachings I have been given have moved through me to you to enrich your journey on this earth as they have enriched mine.

On the First Noble Truth of Suffering...

The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path
The last teaching listed in the Fourth Foundation or Establishment of Mindfulness is the Four Noble Truths, the most central, bedrock teaching of all Buddhism.  And within the Four Noble Truths lies the Eight Fold Path.  

It is no accident that this teaching comes at the very end of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The practitioner had much to learn in order to begin investigating the Four Noble Truths in earnest.  First was mindfulness of body, then feelings, then the mind, and finally all the elements of the dharmas or “the way things are” - the five hindrances to mindfulness, the five aggregates of clinging, the six sense spheres, and the seven factors of enlightenment.  With this foundation, the practitioner is equipped to contemplate the first truth of suffering, the second truth of the causes of suffering, the third truth of the end of suffering, and the fourth truth of the eightfold path.

Bhikku Bodhi in his Preface to The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering, describes the importance of these teachings this way:

The essence of the Buddha’s teaching can be summed up in two principles: the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path.  The first covers the side of doctrine, and the primary response it elicits is understanding; the second overs the side of discipline, in the broadest sense of that word, and the primary response it calls for is practice. In the structure of the teaching these two principles lock together into an indivisible unity called.. in brief, the Dhamma.  The internal unity of the Dhamma is guaranteed by the fact that the last of the Four Noble Truths, the truth of the way, is the Noble Eightfold Path, while the first factor of the Noble Eightfold path, right view, is the understanding of the Four Noble Truths. Thus the two principles penetrate and include one another, the formula for the Four Noble Truths containing the Eightfold Path and the Noble Eightfold Path containing the Four Truths.

He goes on to say in his first chapter, "The Way to the End of Suffering," that the Buddha’s teachings can be evaluated much as one might evaluate trust in a doctor.  First, did the doctor get the diagnosis right?  Second, does he or she seem to understand the underlying causes?  Third, does the doctor believe there can be an end to this disease?  And what does the doctor prescribe?  

The Buddha encouraged his followers to see for themselves.  He could point the way but the practitioner must do the investigating that would build the faith that this is the way out of suffering.  Come and see for yourself, was the Buddha’s invitation.

It seems fitting for this time we live in that we might be more aware than ever of the first Noble Truth.  This is Dukkha.  The Pali word dukkha can be translated as suffering, but also as unsatisfactoriness.  And in fact, there is such a range of suffering that this truth would not be believable if it only pertained to one kind of suffering.

Joseph Goldstein in his book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, describes three kinds of suffering. (p.291-3) There is the suffering of painful experience - the painful experiences brought on by wars, violence, natural disasters, political and social injustice, and oppression.  There are the inevitable painful experiences of the body related to sickness, injury, aging, and death.  There are painful experiences of the mind which are often caused by deeply held conditioning - feelings of fear, anger, jealously, hatred, anxiety, grief, envy, loneliness.  We have all had opportunities to work with these painful experiences whether by changing our behavior to find relief, or by going into seclusion from the suffering in concentration practice, or by turning toward and opening to these experiences and knowing the truth of suffering for ourselves.

The second kind of suffering Goldstein describes is that brought about by the changing nature of things.  We want good things to last and bad things to go away.  We are continually frustrated in this wanting of something that is not possible.  As an example of this, daffodils are in huge, glorious, vibrant profusion just now.  And when one comments upon it, the inevitable response is “too bad they won’t last.”  Good things don’t last, bad things last too long.  So we are frequently beset with this wanting, this sense of unsatisfactoriness.

The third kind of suffering is the suffering of conditioned experience.  In its simplest description, everything that arises also passes away.  That which is born will die.  Goldstein breaks it down into smaller and larger suffering from conditioned experience.  Taking care of ourselves, maintenance of our bodies and our lifestyles is one level of suffering.  We shower, brush our teeth, launder our clothes, shop for food, prepare meals, take out the trash, clean and straighten our homes, pull weeds and mow the lawn, go to work, exercise....  And before we know it, we have to do it all again.  If we don’t continually breathe air, drink water, and eat, our bodies will stop functioning.  The deterioration of body is constant causing us to have to wash, use the bathroom, change our clothes, and wash again.  And eventually no matter how well we take care of our bodies, these bodies will sicken and die.  That is the hard truth of suffering.  Our bodies are not permanent.  They grow, grow old, can be injured, can become sick, and eventually die.  As Goldstein quotes the Satipatthana Sutta, (The Four Foundations of Mindfulness), “‘Here one knows as it really is - this is dukkha.’"

This realization - taken into our bodies, our minds, our hearts as it really is - is, as Goldstein says, “the gateway” to awakening, to freedom from suffering.  It is also the gateway to compassion. “Compassion is that feeling in the heart that wants to help others and ourselves be free of suffering.  It’s the feeling described by the Japanese Zen master and poet Ryokan,  ‘O that my monk's robes / were wide enough / to gather up all the people / in this floating world.’  The first noble truth leads us to the practice of compassion, because it is the practice of letting things in, letting people in, letting all part of ourselves in.” (Goldstein, p. 297)

As Goldstein concludes, the profound importance of the first noble truth to awakening is contained in the words of the Buddha the night he was enlightened, “’This noble truth of dukkha has been fully understood:' thus, monks, in regard to things unheard before, there arose in me vision, knowledge, wisdom, true knowledge, and light.’” (Ibid, 297)

On taking refuge...

There is a well-known Buddhist chant that is often used to open retreats or gatherings of the mindfulness community.   It goes like this :

I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dharma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

A second time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
A second time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
A second time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.

A third time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
A third time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
A third time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.

The Buddha here refers both to the historical Buddha but also to the Buddha within each of us.

The Buddha often said, the most important of these is the Sangha - the community of meditators, of like-minded people.  The repetition of going for refuge a second and a third time serves to capture the essence of starting over contained in the practice.  Every new moment is an opportunity to start over.  

As our practice unfolds, it inevitably has ups and downs, moments of connecting, of insight, of tranquility and equanimity and moments of falling away into ignorance and suffering, into grasping and delusion.  And then we come to the truth of suffering and cry out, there must be a better way.  

Ajahn Chah, revered Thai Forest meditation master, taught there were two kinds of suffering - the suffering that leads to confusion, and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering.  We all know both kinds.  The power of the second kind - the suffering that leads to the end of suffering - is in the coming home to the first noble truth, there is suffering.  Letting go of our grasping and striving to find a way out of our suffering, we settle back, rest back in our suffering, acknowledge that it is here.  And here, we encounter the truth of the first noble truth, there is suffering.  What makes the difference between the suffering that leads to confusion and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering is the faith or confidence that arises when suffering encounters the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha.  By placing our feet on this path and taking just one step, we take refuge in the teachings.    

Some teachers emphasize this faith in the teachings.  Others point to a kernel of virtue which can be as slight as letting go of the striving for pleasant experiences as a deluded grasping for freedom and acknowledging the truth of suffering.  That letting go and acknowledging places our feet on the ancient path that leads us onward.

What arises in the momentary encounter with the teachings, that faith, that tiny light of virtue, is mindfulness - the first factor of enlightenment - which is the condition for the arising of curiosity and investigation, energy, and, surprisingly, joy - a very subtle joy - we were striving for all along.  

Saturday many of us went to the sangha, the community, for refuge and came away filled and moved and healed by the surging crowds, the waving sentiments, the honking horns, the vast, irrefutable truth that we are not alone, that our values of freedom, equality, justice, peace, inclusivity, compassion, and community are shared by hundreds of people around us, thousands close by, hundreds of thousands around the land, and certainly millions around the world.

And many of us who meditate felt the power of taking our practice off the cushion.  There are many ways to serve and not everyone was called to or able to respond in this way.  There are many ways.  But there is no denying the energy that manifested in sharing our passion with others and in supporting each other in this virtuous journey.  And it was a virtuous journey.  For there came a time for many of us when the contraction of the small self eased, the suffering of aloneness dissipated and we felt a sense of belonging.  At their same time, we also felt a sense of freedom, of lightness, of being free of something.  Without necessarily recognizing it, that freedom we experienced might have been a sense of non-selfness.  While we may have been proud of our signs, our presence in the community, much of that fell away.  Ultimately, we weren’t there to lift up our own accomplishments, our identification of being a meditator or an activist or a good community member.  We were there to be a part of something larger than ourselves, a communication and a communion that allowed us to be free of our concepts of self, to simply be - and enter into being - with others.

We took refuge once again in community, in the sangha.  

I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dharma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

For a second time,...

As the early Buddhist nun said in her enlightenment poem, 

 “Oh my heart.  
You don’t have to go it alone.”

On sticky notes, carrots, and barrels...

Our local US Senator has a quote from Edmund Burke, influential statesman, political thinker and a staunch supporter of the American Revolution, that he keeps on a sticky note near his computer screen.  “Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.”

Buddhist teachers have another way of expressing a similar teaching in a story about a little boy who plants carrots.  He is so eager for his carrots to grow that when the tender feathery shoots come up, he goes out every day and pulls up a shoot to see if it is a carrot yet.  Some of you gardeners may argue that carrots need thinning anyway but the story makes a different point for our practice and for our lives.  The carrot is growing under ground away from our prying eyes and fingers.  At a certain point, the carrot will ripen - and there are signs that indicate that is so.  The green top looks full and bushy, the carrots shoulders may crest above ground, there has been time for the carrot to grow and ripen.  But for much of its growing cycle, we don’t really know what’s going on underground.

Our resistance to this administration's destructive efforts and our practice have this in common.  We don’t know what effect our individual efforts will have.  How does our attendance at this rally affect the tide of negative actions streaming out of Washington?  How does this morning’s meditation affect our whole meditative development?  

When we call a friend in trouble, did we say the right thing?  Did it help?  When we intervene in a wayward teen’s misadventures, did we help?  Did they understand the lesson in the consequences?  

I spent a few years studying and practicing chaplaincy in the Buddhist tradition as an intern in two New York City hospitals.  Our teachers and mentors always told us that we wouldn’t always get to know the affect of our visits on a patients and their families.  Sometimes it seemed obvious.  Our presence and prayers and conversation might calm the patient and family, might help collect energies scattered by fear of a surgery into a unified sense of gratitude at the patient's survival.  But other times our actions might reveal more about the condition of the patient than the family understood and we might leave a room in greater turmoil than we found it.  But maybe that was a needed transition. We wouldn’t get to know that.

In a wider view, if we get tangled up in making sure the results are in conformance with our desires, we won't let the process unfold. 

The wise action is to do the best we can, continue to do it, and let go of the results.  The one thing we can be sure of is that our actions have an impact, have consequences - however small.  So rechecking our motivation, and practicing patience and resolve and above all, kindness, we can endeavor to have the most positive impact possible.  

Can you see the application of this idea to our practice?  Sharon Salzberg once said that practicing metta was like filling a 50 gallon barrel with a teaspoon.  If we keep checking the level of liquid in the barrel after every teaspoon, we will frustrate ourselves and waste a lot of time.  And we won’t see a difference from teaspoon to teaspoon.  But over time, there will be indications that our efforts are contributing to change in ourselves and how we live our lives.  

One thing we learned from our exploration of the Seven Factors of Awakening is that each factor is a necessary condition for the next factor to arise.  When mindfulness is present, investigation naturally follows - or even arises at the same time.  Energy follows naturally as our curiosity reveals our experience more deeply.  Joy arises followed by tranquillity, concentration and equanimity.  

So just by sitting on the cushion every day or walking mindfully or listening to dharma talks, even telling friends about a talk we heard, all of these aspects of practice and study and sharing reinforce our own progress on the path of freedom from suffering.  And this happens whether we will it to - as in will power - or not.  This is the natural unfolding of the dharma, of practice.  If we do the practice, the practice unfolds and reveals itself to us.

And sometimes that practice is hard.  The path may become obscure.  We feel our efforts are not accomplishing anything, not working.  Then we need to remember the first two lessons of practice.  

First you begin.  And then you continue.

I’m including a poem by one of the early female practitioners of the Buddha’s path.  The women monastics, as Ginger Rogers said about dancing with Fred Astaire, had to do everything the male monastics did but backwards and in high heels.  They were not expected to progress along the path because they were women nor were they allowed to join the Buddha’s community.  And even when they finally were allowed to leave household life and follow the Buddha, they ranked lower than the newest and youngest male monastic.  Yet the fact that their poems survived and were translated and published a few years ago is testament to their resolve to practice regardless of the impediments and setbacks.   

Seven Factors Poem

I was forever getting lost
until one day the Buddha told me:
To walk this path, you will need seven friends - Mindfulness, curiosity, courage, joy, calmness,
stillness and perspective.

For many year, these friends and I have traveled together.

Sometimes wandering in circles.
Sometimes taking the long way around.

There were days when I thought I couldn’t go on.
There were days when I thought I was finally beaten.

It’s scary to give all of yourself to just one thing.
What if you don’t make it?

Oh, my heart.
You don’t have to go it alone.

Train yourself To train
Just
A little

More gently.

from The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns

Perhaps we can see that this persistent resolve and letting go of results might be exactly what Edmund Burke was pointing to in his quotation, “Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.”  And we can see why this is valuable advice that our senator sought for himself as he went into battle day after day with the forces of destruction.

Suffering, joy, and letting go...

It’s a grey day here in Rhode Island and the news is even worse than last week.  There are bright spots all around and resistance is rising.  But the level of fear and anxiety is rising in direct proportion to the suffering inflicted.

So it is perhaps fortuitous that we have been spending some time with the seven factors of enlightenment and we are about to launch into the final item in the fourth foundation of mindfulness, the Four Noble Truths and the Noble 8-Fold Path.  

Just a quick review, the first foundation is mindfulness of the body, the second is mindfulness of feeling tone of positive, negative, or neutral, the third is mindfulness of mind, and the fourth is mindfulness of dharmas or the way things are.  You may remember within mindfulness of dharmas, we touched on the 5 hindrances, the six sense spheres, the 5 aggregates of clinging, and most recently, the seven factors of enlightenment.  The final item in the mindfulness of dharmas may be familiar as we have spent some time with it in the past.  It is the most important teaching in all of Buddhism and no matter what tradition you hail from, the teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble 8-Fold Path is front and center as the seminal teaching.  (Remember, before the time of paper and pens, the Buddha made lists to help the monks remember and recite the teachings.)  

What these two teachings show us is that our own happiness is closer at hand than we might imagine.  And it is within our grasp regardless of conditions around us.  When we turn to the seven factors of awakening, we establish mindfulness by bringing awareness to our breath.  That leads us to notice that our mind may be steady or it may be squirrely and we can turn naturally to investigating what is going on.   What is the quality of the mind when it is steady?  When it is squirrely?  Are these forces strong or weak?  Can we bring our minds back to our breath or are the forces of agitation overpowering?  We investigate our minds.  This arouses energy to continue our investigation.  And our mindfulness deepens.  And the very establishment of mindfulness, of being mindful of the present moment, arouses joy.  And if our minds continue in this direction and are not distracted, tranquillity will arise, concentration will follow, and equanimity will become manifest.  

The seven factors of awakening are a useful tool for working with our meditation.  If the mind is a little dull, we use the arousing factors of mindfulness, investigation and energy which lead to joy.  If the mind is agitated or too active, we bring mindfulness to help establish tranquility and concentration which lead to equanimity.  Always it starts with mindfulness.  

The Four Noble Truths can be a key part of our investigation.  The first noble truth is the truth of dukkha - suffering or stress.  The Buddha referred to big dukkha and little dukkha.  Big dukkha is sickness, pain, extreme weather, fire, war, natural disasters.  Little dukkha is not getting what we want, irritation, stress.  

The Second Noble Truth says there are causes for stress, suffering.  Attachment, grasping, clinging is at the root of all our suffering - wanting things to be other than what they are.

The Third Noble Truth assures us there is an end to suffering, there is a way out of our pain.

The Fourth Noble Truth shows us the path to freedom of suffering which is the Noble 8-Fold Path of wise view, wise intention, wise speech, wise action, wise livelihood, wise effort, wise mindfulness, and wise concentration.

We will delve into this in more depth in the coming weeks.  For now, however, it may be useful just to stay with the first Noble Truth - there is suffering.  This is so important because we put a great deal of effort into avoiding suffering.  Often the struggle against admitting suffering dances just outside our conscious awareness while we maintain our cheerful exterior at great cost to our internal alignment.  So, simply acknowledging when suffering exists, when events are not going the way we want, can be a relief.  This acceptance doesn’t catastrophize the future but simply accepts that this is what is, this uncomfortable feeling, this pain, this upset, this agitation is just the way it is right now, in this moment.  

Sometimes Buddhism gets a reputation for being all about suffering.  This is a misunderstanding.  Buddhism is about the freedom from suffering and the lasting happiness that is available to us.  But it starts with acknowledging when suffering exists.  Without that acknowledgment, we can get stuck.  A common catch phrase says, what we resist persists.  Sometimes just admitting and being with the suffering is enough to allow the clouds to lift and our natural joy and well being to surface.

If we want to look further, we may also investigate the causes of our suffering - the Second Noble Truth - and begin to see the tangle of attachments that keep us enslaved, the constant wanting things to be different - wanting bad things to go away and good things to stay.  

We don’t have that kind of control over this thing called life.  We can see that central delusion - that we can make good things stay and keep bad things away - being enacted and played out in every level of society from the personal to the national to the world-wide stage.  Everyone struggling to make things the way they want and avoid having things any other way.

Seeing that dynamic clearly, into the very depths of every situation of suffering, is cause for compassion to arise, a vast compassion for ourselves and our fellow human beings who are endlessly caught in this struggle to control something none of us can control.

Until we learn to let go…to accept…to allow….  Then we can move into a space of alignment and take action with wisdom.  We make the best effort we can without attachment to the outcome.  And by letting go of outcomes, we allow for the release of suffering in ourselves and in those around us.   

Seclusion: Going to the forest, to the root of a tree, to an empty hut...

The tide of injustice and heartbreak has begun to cover Rhode Island’s shores - as elsewhere - with the recent detainments, uncivil treatment, and deportations of citizens with visas and green cards.  Detailing the injustices is outside the remit of these pages as are the many actions that are being and can be taken.  But the heartbreak is not.

Our mindfulness and meditation practices are critical to our taking care of ourselves and others.  They are the oxygen mask we put on ourselves before we attempt to help the child sitting next to us.  

But sometimes the tide of heartbreak threatens to overwhelm us.  This pain we don’t like, we don’t want, and sometimes we resist even knowing about.  It is not uncommon to distract ourselves from the hurt, the frustration, the anger, the sense of helplessness.  We may find we are listening to and experiencing more and more agitated messages and rhythms in our daily lives, in the news media, in our friend circles, in our own hearts and minds.  The agitation scatters our attention.  It is an assault on our attention and leaves us scattered and deeply distracted.  Sitting can become more difficult.  Finding calm in the roiling storms can feel impossible.  Even our weather systems are having their own paroxysms as tornadoes torethrough the midwest and south this weekend.

Agitation, we have been learning, is one of the five hindrances that interfere with meditation and mindfulness.  And some level of agitation is deeply seated in our psyches - feeding and being fed by the hyper-vigilance we think we need to survive.

It is often said in the Buddha’s teachings that a monk (community of meditators) goes into seclusion - often to the forest or the root of a tree.  In the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of body, this teaching embodies that idea.  

“And how, monks, does a monk abide contemplating the body as a body?  Here a monk gone to the forest or the root of a tree or to an empty hut, sits down; having folded his legs crosswise, set his body erects, and established mindfulness in front of him, ever mindful he breathes in, mindful he breaths out…” Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness p. 46

This seclusion is key to mindfulness and the calm tranquillity that we find so healing and it can take many different forms.  In the Buddha’s day, the meditator was advised to go to the forest, the root of a tree, an empty hut.  Physical seclusion was the first step.  Being apart from people and the busyness of urban life.  Especially important now is going into seclusion from the tv, our computers, our cell phones.  Our meditation practice is one key way we go into seclusion.  Often people find it’s easier to meditate at night or the early morning - when the world becomes quiet and our minds are refreshed by sleep or the knowledge that our day is over.

But we may find these days that events are ringing more loudly in our ears and our minds recycle the resultant agitation to a great degree.  How are we to find seclusion from our own wild thoughts?  

Shaila Catherine, in her book Beyond Distraction:  Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind, has outlined five practices to working with our disturbed thoughts and wounded hearts.

First is to replace negative thoughts and messages with positive ones, the unwholesome with the wholesome.  Loving kindness and compassion practice is so important here.

Second is to examine the consequences of the disturbed thoughts and try to arouse a sense of the dangers to the mind such rumination can bring.  This is not to say we ignore, turn away from, push out of our minds and hearts the injustice to our fellow travelers.  But we need to take care of ourselves and the health of our own minds.  And we need to stay in the present moment and not become overwhelmed by past regrets and future worries.  We do need to find seclusion from such thoughts and events to stabilize our own minds in order to serve.  

The third strategy works is to withdraw the fuel - to avoid the triggers, ignore unwanted data, forget about unwholesome stimuli.  This is not meant to circumvent mindfulness but instructs us to assess whether the input in front of us is wholesome or unwholesome.  An example given is coming into a meeting where pastries are being served and selecting a chair right in front of the pastries or farther away.  We have some choice about where we place our awareness.  And we can focus more on the positive action we might take rather than the details of the negative news we have heard.

The fourth strategy is to investigate the causes of distraction.  This investigation often will take us straight to the pain or hurt that we wished to avoid in the first place.  For this investigation we need to bring our hearts to our hearts - bringing compassion and loving kindness gently to the place of pain.  This kindness toward ourselves transforms into coming home to ourselves, bathing our wounded hearts with compassion and caring.  This caring approach is a powerful way to free ourselves from the enslavement of suffering.  It enables us to soothe ourselves and others with compassion and to re-gather our energies toward effective action.

The fifth strategy is to apply determination and resolve.  This involves making a decision not to be picked apart by unsettling thoughts and itchy agitation, saying no to the distraction, the restlessness, the disturbance in that moment. Sometimes that resolve allows the agitation to fall away and a center of calm to grow.

We can explore for ourselves, in our own situations, what going into seclusion means for us.  What are the conditions that continue the distraction once it has begun?  What conditions soothe, quiet, comfort, and stabilize our attention so that we can drop into our own inner spring of wellness?  

These are increasingly disturbing and perilous times.  Our practice becomes even more important than ever and the work we have done so far will support us and help us navigate a path forward to restoring our fragmented attention and supporting our best selves.

The Seven Factors of Awakening - What it means to be on the path

A teaching assistant in a class I am taking describes the path of awakening in its most simplified form like this: 

1.  Abandon the hindrances
2.  Establish mindfulness
3.  Cultivate the awakening factors.

In his book Mindfulness, A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein quotes the Buddha saying a similar thing.  The Buddha is referencing all the Buddhas that have come before which lends great weight to this passage:

“All those Arahant Buddhas of the past attained to supreme enlightenment by abandoning the five hindrances, defilements of the mind which weaken understanding, having firmly established the four foundations of mindfulness in their minds, and realized the seven factors of awakening as they really are.”

We have been introduced to the hindrances in these past months.  We have also gained some understanding of the four foundations of mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of the way things are, the dharmas.  The seven factors of enlightenment are found in mindfulness of the dharmas or the way things are as are the five hindrances.  

The importance of the seven factors of enlightenment on the path toward freedom from suffering cannot be overstated.  Venerable Analayo in Satipatthana*: The Direct Path of Realization (p.233) says this:  "Just as a river inclines and flows toward the ocean, so the awakening factors incline toward Nibbana.”  Nibbana translates to awakening or enlightenment or realization.
*Four Foundations of Mindfulness

A river inclining and flowing toward the ocean is drawn by gravity.  There is an inevitability about this progress of the water within the river banks.  This inevitability is also indicated in the seven factors of enlightenment.  Cultivating each factor in turn creates the conditions for the arising of the next factor which creates the conditions of the next factor and so on.  These factors are called forward leaning because their cultivation inclines the mind towards enlightenment.  

This forward leaning or gravitation pull gives another flavor to the phrase of being “on the path.”  Our practice, our contemplations, our investigations, our study, our conversations with teachers and each other incline our minds towards realization, towards freedom just as the river inclines and flows towards the ocean.

What are these seven factors?  They are first and foremost mindfulness, then investigation arises, then energy, joy, tranquility, contemplation, and equanimity.  These seven factors sound very appealing and they are.  Part of the dynamic that occurs here is that the experiences of these seven factors incline towards joy and happiness, contentment and tranquility.  Equanimity is the ultimate peaceful state.  These are considered unworldly pleasures and serve to attract the mind - perhaps even compensate the mind initially - for abandoning the more worldly pleasures of the senses.  Cultivation of mindfulness by itself sets up conditions for the arising of all the other factors culminating in equanimity.

How do we cultivate these seven factors of enlightenment?  

Venerable Analayo (p.234) explains the process of this cultivation as indicated in the Buddha’s teachings as follows:

"Contemplation of the awakening factors proceeds similarly to the contemplation of the hindrances:  first, awareness turns to the presence or absence of the mental quality in question, and then to the conditions for its presence or absence.  However, while in the case of contemplating the hindrances, awareness is concerned with conditions for their future non-arising, with the awakening factors the task is to know how to develop and firmly establish these beneficial mental qualities.”

The first task is to become aware of the presence or absence of each awakening factor.  Is mindfulness present?  Investigation?  Energy?  Joy?  Tranquillity?  Concentration?  Equanimity?  The second stage is to become aware of the conditions that are necessary for its presence or that prevented its arising.  In the case of conditions necessary for each arising, the previous factor needs to be present for the next factor to arise.  These will not necessarily arise in our awareness in a neat progressive order.  If we are aware of investigation, for instance, energy is usually present.  Joy may be subtle and, if not looked for, then overlooked.  But tranquillity may be more easily noticed.  

On the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website, Venerable Analayo offers guided meditation what interweaves his guidance of the Satipatthana Sutta - the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - with the seven awakening factors to help us investigate the presence or absence of these factors in our own experience.  

From Mindfulness to freedom...

This week a friend wrote me wanting to know more about mindfulness.   And last week I left you all hanging with the six sense spheres - the five senses plus the mind - and the teaching, “In the seeing is just the seen.  In the hearing, it just the heard.”  So I thought it would be fun to connect the two.

So first what is mindfulness?  A great question for those newer to meditation and a good review for more experienced folks.  This is the definition of mindfulness according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder, developer, and scientific observer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).  

Mindfulness is paying attention in an intentional way 
to your present moment experience 
without judgement.  

There are a number of different elements to note here:  First is paying attention in a certain way, with intention.  What is the object of our paying attention?  Our own experience in this present moment.  Not in the future although your imaginings of the future as imaginings of the future are fair game.  Not in the past although your memories as memories (as I am having a memory) are also fair game.  And all this is without judgment - without pushing away a thought because we don’t like it or we think it’s a wrong thought, or trying to bring up a pleasant or worthy or “mindful” thought.  Accepting what ever experience is arising in this moment and looking more closely at it.

Some meditation teachers say you don’t need to add the “without judgement” piece - because mindfulness by definition is without judgement.  But we in the West can pay attention with judgement as is our habit pattern and not even be aware that judgement is present.  So it’s a good practice to check. 

Thich Nhat Hanh says mindfulness is shining a light on our own experience.  In the “Introduction" to his book The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, he writes:  

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

So let’s take an example of how we can practice mindfulness of our own experience.  I have a bird feeder hanging from my deck.  If I hear an unusual bird call, I often stop to see if I can see and identify the bird.  So hearing happened.  Then arose the desire to see and identify the bird.  First I was aware of hearing, then the mind added curiosity and the desire to see.    

If I’m sitting in meditation and hear the bird call, I hear the sound.  Then I identify the sound as belonging to a bird. Then I might notice that I like the sound and want to hear it again.  Now I’m desirous of hearing the sound, leaning forward in my mind to will the bird to sing again.  And now I’m aware of a slight dissatisfaction that the bird is not singing and also that I’m caught in wanting the bird to sing.  

So mindfulness allows me to hold the sound of the bird, the images of bird that arose, the question of what kind of bird, the desire to hear more bird, the awareness that I am caught in desire to hear more bird, and then perhaps the letting go of the wanting and feeling the difference between wanting what I can’t control and letting go.  So mindfulness took me from the sense sphere of hearing into the perceiving capacity of the mind, into thoughts and images in the mind, into feeling the pleasure in the bird call and seeing the pleasure turn to desire/wanting/craving and slight suffering.  And then the waking up to the mind caught in desire and letting go, feeling into the freedom of just being mindful without wanting.

As we have been studying the Four Foundation of Mindfulness, let’s look at the experience of hearing the bird call through those foundations.  The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body - hearing the bird with the ears.  The second foundation is feeling - the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling that arose as soon as I heard the bird sound - in this case, pleasant.  The third foundation is mindfulness of the mind and seeing how the mind wanted to identify the bird, then wanted to hear more bird, then ruminated about why the bird was suddenly silent.  The fourth foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the way things are.  I might bring mindfulness to the impermanence of a bird call, it arises and passes away.  Then I notice I have no control over when the bird sings or even whether I hear it or not.  Hearing happens, singing happens.  No “I” in there making it happen.  Then I notice that because it is impermanent and because it is not under my control, there is suffering.  Pleasant things go away too soon and “I” can’t make them stay or come back to my liking.  

The three marks of existence of insight meditation are an overarching truth.  Every experience is “marked” by impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self.  And mindfulness took me all the way there.

So we come back to the teaching:  “In the seeing is just the seen.  In the hearing is just the heard.  In the sensing is just the sensed.  In the cognizing is just the cognized.”  How does this profound teaching relate to mindfulness?  

The Six Sense Spheres, part of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, "the way things are", are a model for how we experience the world.  Every experience we have comes in through one of the sense spheres - the five senses plus the mind.

So can we imagine sitting in meditation and hearing a bird sound and allowing that experience to be on its own, without embellishing it, thinking about it,  trying to control it?  We may also be aware of the pleasant feeling tone that arises with the bird sound.  Can we just say, hearing, hearing.  And maybe pleasant pleasant…

This requires us to become more aware of the pleasant before it turns to wanting or craving, and to be aware of the flood of thoughts on the brink of washing over us before they get a good foothold.  With practice, we can spend some time in our meditation practice simply allowing the hearing - just the hearing - without encouraging the craving and thinking.  In Buddhism it is sometimes referred to as “not taking up the sign.”  We can practice not taking up the signs of the bird call sound (it’s identity, our perception, our thoughts, etc.) or if some of them arise before we become aware of them, we can also practice abandoning the “signs” of the bird call.  In the hearing is just the heard.  

And the second part of that teaching which was to a seeker named Bahiya who traveled many miles to learn the path to freedom from the Buddha, is as follows:

“And since for you, Bāhiya, in what is seen there will be only what is seen, in what is heard there will be only what is heard, in what is sensed there will be only what is sensed, in what is cognized there will be only what is cognized, therefore, Bāhiya, you will not be with that; and since, Bāhiya, you will not be with that, therefore, Bāhiya, you will not be in that; and since, Bāhiya, you will not be in that, therefore, Bāhiya, you will not be here or hereafter or in between the two—just this is the end of suffering.”

This last part is deep and a little opaque depending on the translation.  But basically the teaching is about our tendency to make everything into a subject-object relationship, “I" am seeing that “bird."  I am the subject.  Bird is the object. "In the seeing is just the seen” cuts through this mind-made subject-object relationship and cuts through our illusion of a solid sense of “I” seeing and appropriating “bird.”  There is just bird being seen.  No one is “doing” the seeing.  When our eyes alight on bird, seeing happens.  When our ears are stimulated by a bird sound, hearing happens.

It is often said that the Buddha was practicing mindfulness of breathing when he was enlightened.  You can get a glimpse here of the journey that mindfulness can take us from our illusions, our suffering, our sense of I, our sense of objects being permanent, to clear vision and seeing things as they are, to freedom from suffering.

The News and the Six Sense Spheres..

Perhaps after all that is occurring in the news it seems a little irrelevant to talk about the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  But that is exactly what I want to do because the Buddha was about suffering and the end of suffering.  So these teachings are relevant to how we experience our world right now, in every moment and are the tools which help us discern wise action from reactivity and actions which contribute to our suffering.  The news and those behind the news are quite skilled at triggering all our worst fears.  So our job as meditators is to look deeply at the roots of our own triggering, to free ourselves from hooks and triggers as much as possible so that we can view the events of our world with calm and balance and take actions that have the greatest chance of leading to the end of suffering for ourselves and others.

It may be helpful to know and be reminded that the Buddha was a scientist, a participant observer, as the sociologists would say.  He was looking carefully at his own experience to discern what led to suffering and what led to freedom from suffering.  When he didn’t get it right, he would get up and go find another master and learn from him until he realized he just had to sit down under a Bodhi tree and observe his own mind until he truly understood.  

So this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness gives us these tools:   1) The five hindrances help us discern how our meditation is going and take corrective steps where we can.   2) The five aggregates is a model by which we can see how we cling through the body, through feelings, through perception (big hook for suffering here), through habit patterns and volitional formations, and through consciousness - how our mind fastens on one thing and another.  3) The six sense spheres is another model for how we experience our world which I’ll describe in a minute. 4) The seven factors of enlightenment outline an internal unfolding toward freedom.  5) And the Four Noble Truths with the Noble Eightfold Path shows the truth of suffering and freedom from suffering and the ancient human path to such freedom.  Just a note - the Buddha was a great list-maker because it helped people remember in the time before writing.

So we come to the six sense spheres.  The six sense spheres are the five sense organs we are familiar with - the eye, the ear, the body, the tongue, the nose, and the mind plus the function of those organs - sight, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, plus cognizing.  Everything we know and experience in the world comes to us through one of these six sense spheres - sometimes known as doors.  The Buddha taught this model to help us analyze how clinging arises and also how we create a sense of self.  

But first of all, the six sense spheres are how we know what we know.  It’s a sunny day.  What told us that?  The sight of brightness, blue sky, the unobscured sun, shadows of trees creating a pattern of dark and light.  Does sound tell us it’s a sunny day?  Perhaps a newscaster or a neighbor commenting on the beautiful weather. The sensation of warm sun on our arms might tell us the sun is shining and it’s almost hot.  

The Buddha broke these elements down even farther.  Sight is a combination of the eye organ, the external sight or contact, and the ability of the eye and mind to process the information into seeing - eye consciousness.  The same with the ear, the external sound, and ear consciousness.  And so on with the body, touch, and touch consciousness, the tongue… and the nose….  The mind is also made up of mind/brain, the arisings in the mind of thoughts and emotions, and mind consciousness - the ability of the mind to process internal arisings like thoughts as well as external arisings such as sights and sounds.

This briefly outlines the six sense spheres.  The usefulness of this model lies in beginning to look at what we bring to sight, hearing, touching, etc.  For instance, we look out on our backyard and we bring the concept of backyard versus front yard versus green space versus meadow.  We bring the idea that this is mine.  I own this backyard.  I identify with it, I will protect it from others, it says something about me and who I am.  So in just looking at the backyard there arises clinging, attachment, and the sense of self, the “I” who owns this, who has appropriated land that birds and insects use without our permission as “me” and “mine.”  To take the teaching even further, it describes our duality with this area of grass - it is over there and I am over here - a subject and an object.  

One of the great teachings of the Buddha is encapsulated in the phrase, “in the seeing is just the seen.”  Is it possible to look without adding the concepts, the labels, the ownership, the attachment, the sense of self, and the separation into subject and object?  It is a liberating practice and can help us begin to see the entanglements of our minds with which we see everything - our homes, yards, neighborhoods, families, friends.  

What we see in the news is a mass of such entanglements, of attachments and aversions, of appropriations, of the sense of self which overtakes all the space that others hold for themselves.  Lives can be destroyed by this ignorance and ill will.

Can this simple teaching - “in the seeing is just the seen” - help free us from our own entanglements and allow us to move through this morass with more calm, balance, and equanimity without losing the resolve to help free ourselves and others from suffering?

Anger: its roots and its consequences

I’ve been thinking about anger this morning.  Recently, I got into a snit about something which led to my saying something rather intemperate to someone I care about.  And to venting to others about it.  And all the while, I had this split screen experience - seeing the irritation and righteous indignation on the one hand, and on the other saying, what’s the big deal?  People are being inconvenienced, not harmed.  And further, looking at how my mindfulness was not strong enough to slow down the runaway horses of irritation.  

And I wondered if others might be finding surprising upsurges of anger or irritation in their lives. While I don’t think anger as such is anything new, I’m wondering if the toxic atmosphere of our political world might be seeping into our psyches on different, more everyday levels.  

So I want to share a few thoughts about anger from the point of view of our own internal health and our practice.  

The Dalai Lama recounts a conversation with one of his monks who had been caught in Tibet when the Chinese invaded.  This monk spent some time in captivity enduring privation and torture at the hands of his captors.  When he finally gained his freedom, he made his way to the Dalai Lama.  In that conversation, the Dalai Lama asked how he was.  The monk replied, “I was in very grave danger.”  The Dalai Lama nodding thinking he understood.  But the monk went on to say, “At times I was in danger of hating my captors."  The Dalai Lama bowed to the monk’s practice saying it was even deeper than his own. 

Anger as we understand it often arises as a reaction to being hurt, as a protection, or a shield for future feared hurt.  As empathic human beings, when we see others being hurt, we might feel that pain ourselves and anger rises up.

The problem is that anger destroys wisdom.  It is a reactive emotion of a being hurt in battle.  And sometimes the wound from an earlier time is triggered by a current provocation that leads to reactive anger.

In the Buddha’s teachings, anger is a defilement that must be overcome on the path to liberation from suffering.  This is not to say that people should be passive in the face of wrong doing, injustice, harm.  As I’ve said before, these teachings on anger are not to render us passive.  

Instead we need to investigate anger, look more deeply at its roots, and consider its consequences for harm to ourselves and to others.  One of the first major actions we can take is to offer compassion to ourselves and others and spend time coming into the presence of our own interior wounding that offered up such a trigger for the anger to arise.  Spending time nurturing and healing our internal pain and hurt is one of the most valuable missions we can undertake.  This healing and familiarization can help guard us against the reactivity of anger which seeks solutions outside of ourselves.  

Rodney Smith, meditation teacher in Seattle, said on a retreat I was on, “We are hermetically sealed in our reactions.”  I initially rejected this notion.  But what he meant was we need to look inside to find the “cause” of our reactions to outside provocation.  Our reactions are always our responsibility. The outside trigger touched an internal trigger/wound that wasn’t healed.  So the outside provocation is not the cause of our upset.  Our own reactivity is where we need to look when we are aroused to anger.

Thich Nhat Hanh puts it another way, “If you know what the real roots of your anger are, you can also transform your anger. At first you think that your anger has been caused by the one outside… that something he said or did caused your anger. You don’t know that the main cause of your anger is the seed of anger in you. […] ...The first thing we can do is accept that the main cause of our anger is the seed of it inside us. Then we must realise that if we don’t deal with our anger, it will spill over and hurt others.”  I recommend the full article on anger on the PlumVillage website.  https://plumvillage.app/thich-nhat-hanh-on-the-roots-of-anger/

While we need to be able to act upon our world to reject injustice and defend the innocent, this is better motivated by in the bedrock of fierce compassion, fierce resolve rather than the white-hot lashing out of reactivity, of anger.

Ajahn Chah, well known and beloved Buddhist master in the Thai forest tradition (now deceased), said there are two kinds of suffering.  The suffering that leads to confusion and the suffering that leads to freedom.  The suffering that leads to freedom is suffering that encounters the dharma.  In that meeting of suffering and the teachings, faith arises - a sense that there is a way out.  To start with, this is a tentative believing kind of faith that becomes stronger with exposure to practice and the teachings.  As we see the benefits of practice for ourselves, faith can become the pillar of our practice guarding our minds against ignorance and the defilements of craving, anger/hatred, and ignorance.  

And faith is a necessary condition for joy to arise.  This joy can strengthen and lead us on the path to untangling and freedom.

But another element that strengthens this connection to joy is the presence of virtue.  This very humble virtue is based on our endeavors to be a good person, to do good deeds, to refrain from harming ourselves and others.  This refraining also includes working with the negative consequences of anger when it arises.  Anger causes us suffering because it separates us from the uplifting states of joy and peace and equanimity.

And because anger destroys wisdom, it weakens or breaks our defenses against it.  The Buddha called anger the poison arrow with the honeyed tip.  The honeyed tip is how good righteous indignation feels in the moment, that "I’m right, you’re wrong" moment.  But the poison of ill will invades us at the same time.  

Thich Nhat Hanh recommends caring for our anger like a mother would a child.  

“Everyone knows that anger is not good for us and for other people. Everyone knows that. But the fact is that they cannot help it. They are overwhelmed by the energy of violence, of anger; that is why everyone should learn the art of embracing anger and transforming it.

“The first step is to learn how to breathe mindfully, to smile to your own anger, and to embrace your anger tenderly like a mother embracing her baby. […]

“We know that when anger manifests in us, we should not do anything, we should not say anything. Because doing or saying something out of anger will bring about negative things that will make us regret later.”

So the best thing to do when anger arises is to take care of it by:

– Practicing mindful breathing and mindful walking

– Not yet talking to or approaching the person we think is the cause of our anger.” * 

So the teachings are to be on guard about anger and irritation, to look deeply into the consequences of anger to understand at a foundational level the harmful consequences to self and others and to care for ourselves and our anger whenever it arises.  At the same time, we also need to dedicate much of our practice to strengthen loving kindness and compassion towards ourselves and others so that these become more readily available responses to provocation than irrational anger.

I wonder how you experience this dynamic in your own lives.

infinite possibility arising out of vast compassionate emptiness...

It’s been a difficult week for many of us. Part of my journey was through some cold/flu/whatever which took my voice. One of the silver linings of having no voice (there are a few) is that it has given me pause to think about not having a voice, not being heard, and not even having an instrument through which we can be heard.  

Much of the suffering around the world is accompanied and exacerbated by the feeling that no one knows and there is no way to communicate. No voice. No megaphone.  And maybe no ears open.

These past few weeks many of us across the country have been experiencing having no voice and then finding voice and then despairing because it seems we have no voice on a larger and larger scale.  When we finally communicate with our elected representatives, we find that they can give voice all night long and then it is as if they had no voice.  Our voices are joined in ever larger groups and venues.  And our voices are reaching the courts.  And the courts are speaking. We are hearing the courts.  And we feel cheered.  Yet funds frozen illegally and ordered by the courts to be unfrozen remain frozen.  Private information taken from the Treasury and ordered by the courts to be destroyed remains out of sight and unaccounted for.  

When our voices give out, we as meditators know to turn inward, to listen to our own voices, our own pain and frustration, our own anger.  And we begin again - at the beginning, breath by breath, getting back in touch with what’s true now, in this moment.  Not getting lost in the imaginings of a future where we have no voice.  And we get in touch with our own loving kindness and compassion for ourselves and others.  We realize in that settling back that we tap into a vast silence where voice and being heard are held with compassion, where healing and restoration and wisdom reside.  

But where most of all a vast compassionate emptiness opens to infinite possibility.

And here’s my own take, our sense of democracy is deeply engrained and it is aligned with our values, our morality, our sense of equality, freedom, and justice for all, with our basic sense of respect for the rights and dignity of all beings.  And because it is so deeply engrained in so many people, it will rise up and manifest in ways we can’t begin to imagine.  That’s my belief and my hope.

As we stay connected to our own sense of compassionate emptiness, we will find ourselves able to care for ourselves and more prepared to move into wise action when the possibilities arise.  Moving back and forth, pendulating, between restoration and wise action, we will find the middle way.

What to do...or more importantly, how to do it...

I got up this morning and uncharacteristically did not meditate right away.  The news over the weekend was too distressing.  So I went to my computer and my phone and both called and emailed all my elected representatives with a long laundry list of concerns (concerns is a mild word in this context).
Then I meditated.  Then I wrote them all again.  Then I sat down to write this and re-read the first paragraph of last week’s email copied here.

One of the major goals of all the Buddha’s teachings is seeing with clear knowledge and vision the way things are.  This is the path to the end of suffering.  The implication here is that it is our own inattention, obscurations, prejudices and faulty reasoning, emotional entanglements, fears and desires, mistaken beliefs that interfere with our seeing clearly.  This lack of seeing clearly prolongs our suffering. When we see clearly and deeply, we let go of old habits of mind and heart that don’t work for us.  We gain freedom.

And I wondered, not for the first time, how that applies in this situation we/I find ourselves/myself in.  It was clear suffering was present.  It was clear that attachment to the way things were was also present.  Aversion to the huge changes and destruction taking place was very present.  And yes, it was also clear to me that some form of ignorance on my part was also present.  After all, it was clear I was not happy with the way things were.  I, my ignorant belief in the non-existent I, was not happy.

The clear knowledge and vision of the way things are is a very specific reference in Buddhism as is the word “ignorance.” 

Here I quote Bhikku Bodhi from the book I quoted from last week (Transcendental Dependent Arising):

"Wisdom is “the one thing needed’ to cut off the defilements (of greed, hatred, and delusion/ignorance) because the most fundamental of all the mental depravities is ignorance.  Ignorance is the kingpost upon which all the other defilements converge and the linchpin which holds them all in place.  While it remains the others remain, and for the others to be destroyed it must be destroyed.  …ignorance signifieds not so much the lack of specific pieces of information as a basic non-comprehension regarding the true nature of things as expressed in the four (noble) truths.  Since the eradication of the defilements depends upon the eradication of ignorance, the one factor capable of abolishing the defilements is the factor capable of abolishing their fundamental root, and that is the direct antithesis of ignorance - wisdom or “the knowledge and vision of things as they really are.”

What Bhikku Bodhi is saying is that the key to "knowledge and vision the way things are” is understanding the four noble truths - there is suffering, there are causes for suffering, there can be an end of suffering, and end of suffering is the noble 8 fold path of wise view, intention, thought, speech, action, livelihood, mindfulness, and contemplation.

Ok, sounds like the whole of the Buddha’s path.  Actually yes.  

Matthew Brensilver, meditation teacher at Spirit Rock writes:  "The Eightfold Path is broken down into three baskets. There's ethical conduct (sīla): wise speech, wise action, wise livelihood. And then there's samādhi, or mind training: wise effort, wise concentration, wise mindfulness. And then the wisdom basket, pañña in Pāli, of wise intention and wise view.

"Ajahn Chah (Thai meditation master) said that sīla-samādhi-pañña, ethical conduct, mind training, and wisdom, are not three separate activities, they are part of the same fruit. They are the mango pit, flesh, and skin. And that mango may be in a different state of ripeness or unripeness, may be big or small. But these three cultivations are one and the same: inextricably bound.” 

The good news is that what’s needed is an understanding of the causes of ignorance.  The ignorance and other defilements fall away with this wise comprehension.  We don’t have to work at it once we understand it.  Well, yes we do but not the way we think.  There is no striving involved.  
What is required is the first question in the midst of suffering - there must be a better way.  What is the way out?  Piling on more food, alcohol, social media, tv, video games, angry rants, etc., won’t cut it.  Those are the path to more suffering.  

So the first inkling of light in the ignorance of suffering is the faith that there is a better way.  This is not proven faith but called “bright faith” when we hear the Buddha’s teachings or someone tells us about MBSR and we believe this might be a way out of our suffering.

The next element is the willingness to try something different, to renounce the habits of food, alcohol, social media…etc even for a moment.  This momentary renunciation is a tiny ray of light produced by virtue, ethical conduct - sīla.  With virtue comes the relief of lack of remorse.  

That relief that comes with a brief pause into renunciation, lack of remorse, allows gladness to arise.  And that faint wisp of gladness allows mindfulness to surface, allows curiosity, our investigative abilities, our energy to get to work looking more deeply at our circumstances, our motivations, our actions.  And perhaps allows us just to stop, to forgo trying to “figure it out” and return to our breath.  Therein lies our freedom.

And yet, what of action?  Engagement?  Working for the collective good?  The best purest motivation for our actions is compassion and caring for ourselves, our family, friends, community, our world.

Once when I was on retreat in the middle of a family crisis, I went to my meditation teacher and told her of the suffering and distraction I was experiencing about the family circumstance.  She started her advice, “When there is nothing more you can do…”  I broke in with “But there is something more I can do.”  Her response was immediate and piercing.  “When there is something more you can do, do it.”

I keep that in mind as a flame for wise action.  The path does not ask passivity of us even though the hours of meditation sometimes require quelling habits of restlessness and agitation.  

For our own sanity, we need to find a balance and build up our resilience to the wrong energy of reactivity.  So we need to find time to check in with our selves, find seclusion for our minds and hearts to rest and heal, to nurture our spirits.  And we need to learn to rely on our wisdom and compassion to guide our actions.  And if we find there is something more we can do, we do it.

This is not easy.  But it’s all we’ve got.

What are the Five Aggregates and what do they have to do with anything??

One of the major goals of all the Buddha’s teachings is seeing with clear knowledge and vision the way things are.  This is the path to the end of suffering.  The implication here is that it is our own inattention, obscurations, prejudices and faulty reasoning, emotional entanglements, fears and desires, mistaken beliefs that interfere with our seeing clearly.  This lack of seeing clearly prolongs our suffering. When we see clearly and deeply, we let go of old habits of mind and heart that don’t work for us.  We gain freedom.

The fourth foundation of mindfulness is the road map toward that seeing clearly and that freedom.  In this teaching, the Buddha talks about 5 categories of practice - the 5 hindrances, the 5 aggregates of clinging, the 6 sense doors (5 senses plus consciousness), the 7 factors of awakening, and the 4 Noble Truths.  We have spent some time on the hindrances.  We have even touched on the 7 factors of awakening, and we have explored the Four Noble Truths.  

But the 5 aggregates of clinging sound a bit more alien and off-putting.  So I have spent a few months looking at the 5 aggregates to become more familiar with their place in the teachings. 

The 5 aggregates of clinging are the Buddha’s model for the categories of experience we all have.  He used the word “aggregates” to indicate masses of stuff bundled together.  Our experience feels like one more or less seamless field of experiential phenomena and this seamless field supports our belief that we are a solid self experiencing all of this.  The Buddha’s model was a way for meditators to consider each aspect of our experience by contemplating each aggregate to begin to perceive their separateness.

Bhikku Bodhi explains in an article on the Upanisa Sutta, “The five aggregates - material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness - are the basic categories structuring the Buddha’s analysis of experience.  Each experiential occasion, from the Buddha’s perspective, is a complex process involving a number of factors functioning in unison.  To normal, non-analytical consciousness, this unified complex appears as a uniform mass, a false appearance which, when accepted at face value,  leads to the assumption of a simple solid self as the permanent subject of cognition…  

“To dispel the illusion of independent selfhood, the experiential process must be submitted to searching scrutiny which rectifies the false perceptions contributing to its formation.  The first phase in this examination is the dissection of the cognitive fabric into the distant threads entering into its make-up.  These ’threads’ or components are the five aggregates.  The aggregate of material form covers the physical side of experience, comprising both external material objects and the body together with its sense faculties.   The other four aggregates constitute the mental side of experience.  Feeling is the affective quality of pleasure or pain, or the neutral tone of neither pleasure nor pain, present on any occasion of mental activity.  Perception is the selective faculty, which singles out the object's distinctive marks as a basis for recognition. The formations [sometimes known as volitional formations] aggregate is a comprehensive category incorporating all mental factors other than feeling and perception; its most conspicuous member is volition.  And consciousness is the faculty of cognition itself, which sustains and coordinates all the other factors in the task of apprehending the object.  These five aggregates function in complete autonomy, entirely through their reciprocal support without the need for a self-subsistent unifying principle to be identified as self or subject.”*

Through meditative contemplation, we can begin to see our physical experiences as belonging to the material aggregate, experiences with an affective tone as the aggregate of feeling, our noticing of an object’s distinctive signs (chirping as a bird call, facial recognition) as the workings of perception, our experience of will or volition as belonging to the mental formation aggregate, and of course our ability to cognize as our consciousness aggregate.  This investigation helps us begin to see how experience unfolds with each aspect of experience arising and passing away - without a little man behind a green curtain making it happen.  If our faculties are working properly, we can’t not see when we look around.  We can’t not hear when there is a noise nearby.  We may not notice, but the perception of sight and sound are present with or without our willing them to happen.

And the 5 aggregates are often referred to as the five aggregates of clinging because we can see with some analysis which aspect of experience is craving and clinging.  The body hurts and wants to shift position.  We like the bird sound and listen for more of it.  We don’t like remembering the fight we had with a colleague and move to distract ourselves.

This may sound familiar to those who took Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the past.  As we negotiate an environment that may seem to present greater opportunities for suffering in store, it is helpful to have a practice like this to help ground us in the causes of our suffering.  Attachment and clinging - often to the way things were, even when we weren’t all that happy about the way things were.  Fear and aversion to what the future might bring which is based on our imaginings about the future.  We can begin to see through the illusory nature of both past and future and stay with our present moment experience as a refuge that will help us connect to our inner calm, strength, and resolve.

* Bhikku Bhodi, Transendental Dependent Arising: Translation & Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta, Buddhist Publication Society, 1980.

A turning point....

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Yesterday the cease fire in the Gaza held and the first three hostages were released.  And today also is the Inauguration of, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, who knows what, maybe the end of democracy, maybe something else unknown, surprisingly better or just different, unimaginable in our today’s thinking.  

So this is an extraordinary time.  We honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory, courage, sense of justice, wisdom, urgent leadership.  We crumple in gratitude and compassion for those at the center of the cease fire and hostage release.  But how do we respond appropriately, wisely, heartfully, to this Inauguration?     

I listened yesterday to an on-line session called AWARENESS IN ACTION: Poly-Crisis, offered by Upaya Meditation Center during which Jon Kabat-Zinn talked with Roshi Joan Halifax and an audience of over 1200 people.  Poly-Crisis is a term the UN is developing to describe the increasing environmental crises we face.  Over 1200 participants is 40 screens on zoom and another couple hundred on YouTube - remarkable as these things go, testament to the strength of feeling out there at this time.  All these people, mostly meditators from all over, gathered together to listen to what the father of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) had to say about this moment in time and how we fit into it, what we can do, how we can be.  He has continued to be a radical leader in the world of mindfulness in relationship to ourselves and to the larger world, reinventing himself in the most natural and gently expansive way to support us and also to urge us to regard ourselves called to this moment to contribute something we are uniquely suited to contribute.  

Tonight we will listen to a bit of the introduction to this session and to the guided meditation he offered to the group.  I think you’ll find it inspiring and calming.  He also offered, in conversation with Roshi Joan Halifax, a wider perspective on the forces propelling this world in this direction at this time.  He cited the creation of a dynasty about 4000 years ago that was destroyed 3600 years ago.  It lasted 400 years - a long time but was, as are all things, impermanent. "Never forget the 10,000 year view,” he quoted. At least backwards, who knows how long the view forward will extend.  He also reassured us that, “On a million different levels, you are not alone.”  

It began with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

 “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” 

He ended with this well-known quote from Howard Zinn, his father in law:

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”    ~~ Howard Zinn

In Buddhism, Kabat-Zinn reminded us, monks were often instructed to go meditate in the charnel grounds, surrounded by deceased bodies burning and decaying, to help them understand and come to know deeply the finite-ness of this life and the urgency of living it as wisely as possible.  Today, he said, Gaza and the Ukraine are our charnel grounds.  

As I scanned the zoom screens, I saw various people I recognized - one from the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care where I studied chaplaincy, one from a cohort of participants in a mindfulness meditation teacher training, many MBSR teachers and meditators I had met or practiced with.  So it resonated with painful beauty when he said we are called to belong to wider and wider circles of community  - whether our small Monday night gatherings with overlapping members of the different regional communities or different political action communities such as the progressive group Indivisible, or this gatherings for the Upaya series, or any other gathering inspired to help us remember and live for the best that is possible in ourselves and in our communities, country and world.  On a million levels, we are not alone.

Today and tomorrow are turning points.  And yet they are only a series of present moment experiences with each moment the mother of the moment to come, as Thich Nhat Hanh said.  And as Howard Zinn said, "The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

I found this a heartful way to consider and live in this point of time.

 I want to offer a poem by Stephen Levine.  Some of you may remember it from other times I’ve offered it.  Some of you may know it already.

If prayer would do it
I'd pray.
If reading esteemed thinkers would do it
I'd be halfway through the Patriarch.
If discourse would do it
I'd be sitting with His Holiness
every moment he was free.
If contemplation would do it
I'd have translated the Periodic Table
to hermit poems, converting
matter to spirit.
If even fighting would do it
I'd already be a black belt.
If anything other than love could do it
I've done it already
and left the hardest for last.
~~Stephen Levine 

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness and the Coming Together of the Inner and the Outer

Yesterday as I took down the Christmas tree and made some of the last of the holiday calls to old friends, I determined that I would get back on track and take us through the interesting but more complex Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.

The first three foundations or establishments of mindfulness seem relatively straight forward compared to the fourth.  In the first, we investigate the body with mindfulness, including the breath, the posture, the activities, the anatomical parts, the elemental make-up and the body in death.  In the second, we explore the first flicker that accompanies any arising experience, the sense that this experience is positive, negative or neutral.  And we see how this first feeling tone leads to wanting and then grasping, not wanting and then pushing away, or neither one which leads to confusion and wandering.  In the third foundation, we take our courage in hand and dive into the experiences of mind - the emotions, moods, the experience of grasping or pushing away, the experiences of confusion, delusion, memory and fantasy, and we have learned how slippery this investigation of the mind can be

In the fourth foundation called mindfulness of dharmas, we are asked to bring mindfulness to the way things are.  We are also asked to use our prodigiously busy minds to “think” about the way things are.  So we are bringing awareness to the way things are and we are also bringing our capacity to think, evaluate, discern, and decide what to “do” about the way things are.

Just to give you an idea how complex this fourth foundation can be, I’ll give you a little overview that I got from reading Andy Olendzki on the subject.  Andy Olendzki founded or co-founded the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS).  He is a Buddhist scholar and has taught there for many years.  Relatively recently, he left and has been teaching in many different venues including several colleges.  I have taken a number of retreat/courses with him and, not only have I learned a lot about Buddhist psychology, I have also been impressed with his depth of knowledge and understanding.  For those of you who have been to BCBS, he built the stone structure called a stupa in the middle of the lawn which is featured on the BCBS home page.  It fell down once, and he rebuilt it.  Such is his dedication to the dharma.

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is made up of mindfulness of the five hindrances, the five aggregates of clinging, the six sense doors, the seven factors of enlightenment, and the Four Noble Truths.  

Andy Olendzki writes the following:  https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/the-fourth-foundation-of-mindfulness/

"Now with the fourth foundation of mind­fulness, mindfulness of mental objects or of mental phenomena, we are sometimes told in meditation instuction to simply notice when a thought arises, be mindful of it, and allow it to pass away unobstructed. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but actually the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is directing through a much more precise exploration of the inner landscape of mental experience…. Almost as a guided meditation, the fourth foundation of mind­fulness investigates 108 mental objects, and in the process manages to guide the meditator through the whole curriculum of Buddhist psychology: five hindrances, five aggregates, six sense spheres, seven factors of awakening, and four noble truths.

"These are subjects familiar to all students of Buddhism. But in working with them as objects of meditation we are asked to look not just at their presense or absence in the mind, but also at how these factors are in motion. And in practice we are directed by the text to working with the arisen mental states in particular ways: when they are hin­drances we want to loosen our attachments and abandon them; when they are factors of awakening, which are beneficial for the growth of understanding, we are invited to learn how to cultivate, develop and strength­en them.

"This goes well beyond an agenda of passive observation of phenomena, and takes us into the realm of transformation.”

108 is a significant number in a great many realms.  For a deeper dive into the meaning of the number 108 see the article “What’s So Sacred About the number 108?” in the link below.  Olendzkie arrives at the 108 mental objects through the Buddha’s teaching in each category of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness. For each of the five hindrances, this instruction applies: 

1) When there is sense desire in him, a person is aware: ‘There is sense desire in me’; 
2)  or when there is no sense desire in him, he is aware: ‘There is no sense desire in me’;
3) and when the arising of unarisen sense desire occurs, he is aware of that;
4) and when the abandoning of arisen sense desire occurs, he is aware of that;
5) and when the future non-arising of abandoned sense desire occurs, he is aware of that.

For each of the Five Aggregates - form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness, there are three states to consider:  

1) Such is material form (or feeling or perception or volition or consciousness);
2) such is its origin;
3) such is its disappearance.

And for each of the other three categories, there are a prescribed number of mental “objects” or occurrences to be aware of for each, the total of all these adding up to 108.

This may seem confusing and off-putting.  I alternate by being inspired and discouraged with the precision of mindfulness of the way things are that the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness asks of us.  But remember, this is the path to full awakening.  It also gives you an idea what those monks are doing when they sit in meditation for days, months, years… Their minds are discerning in finer and finer grain, the way the mind works with unarisen states, with arisen states, with disappearing states, with developing states.  They are learning to abandon all unwholesome states no matter how subtle.  They are learning to nurture all wholesome states.  And as their minds become more adept at awareness of these objects, their attachments weaken and begin to fall away.  They become increasingly free.

And we know some of this falling away of attachment and increasing freedom in our own minds and hearts - because the fruits of practice are not reserved for only the most experienced meditators.  These fruits have been felt by each and every one of us and will continue to be felt and discovered as we continue along the path.  

So the two most important instructions in meditation apply equally to the adepts and the novices:  

First you begin.  And then you continue.

https://www.himalayanyogainstitute.com/what-is-so-sacred-about-the-number-108/#:~:text=In%20Buddhism%2C%20it%20is%20also,usually%20made%20of%20108%20beads.

*  *  *  *  *

Recently, two people sent me Chris Hayes’s NY Times opinion piece, “I want your attention.  I need your attention.  Here is how I mastered my own."  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/opinion/chris-hayes-msnbc-attention.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare  

For those of you who watch MSNBC or who have recently stopped watching the news and the news you stopped watching was MSNBC, Chris Hayes has a regular evening news hour.  And although I never questioned his intelligence and political acuity,  I would not have imagined this level of self-awareness in him.

This morning, I received an email and signed up for a program featuring Jon Kabat-Zinn.  The program is entitled, “Awareness in Action: The Radical Path of Engaged Practice.”   JKZ explores the question:  “What Is Your/Our Karmic Assignment? Activist Embodied Dharma in the Face of the Full Catastrophe of the Human Condition and the Planetary Poly-Crisis.”   https://www.upaya.org/program/awareness-in-action-the-radical-path-of-engaged-practice-online-january-19-2025/

Most of you know Jon Kabat-Zinn as the founder/developer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and author of Full Catastrophe Living.  More recently, Jon has explored questions of diversity, equality, inclusiveness in the medical profession and Buddhism and Activism.  

What I was struck by with these two threads is how public figures deeply engaged in the political-social sphere are turning their sharp exploratory skills inward while major Buddhist figures with considerable chops on looking inward are exploring how we bring our practice into the world, what our larger purpose or calling or remit is in this one precious life we have been given.

I think this is a hopeful trend.