Nov 13 -- Power

[Missed section before first 5-minute meditation, it's from memory.]

A: OK, I've brought along some food and drink, hopefully there's
something here which everyone craves.  Pick something, but don't consume
it now.

Let's do 5 minutes of whatever meditation we each find stabilises the
mind.  Then consume the food/drink for 30 seconds or so when I say, then
stop and we'll do another 5 minutes' meditation.  Just watch whatever
comes up during those five minutes.

[5 minutes pass]

A: OK, go ahead and consume.

R: Don't yell at me this time!

A: I'm sorry about [yelling when you took a sip to early before.]
[Laughter]

[Sounds of eating and drinking.]

R: So exactly how much should we have?

A: Just consume whatever seems right.  Ideally I'd like to stop when
everybody's caught up in the world of eating.  But it's hard for me to
judge.  Actually, now seems like a good stopping point.

J: But I was just... [Laughter]

[5 more minutes pass.]

A: Any comments?

S: I'm generally finding it really hard to concentrate right now.  I
don't know if it's because of this or just because for some reason my
mind is just going all over the place, and I'm having a really hard time
just focusing so I don't know if that has anything to do with this at
all, but that's just what I was finding.

A: Uh huh.  Have you been able to meditate 10 minutes a day or so?

S: Definitely not 10 minutes a day, but yeah I've been doing it
semi-regularly.

A: Uh huh.  Just a tough day today.

S: Yeah, it was one of these go, go, go kinda days for me, and I've got
a lot on my mind.

[Rob starts to take another drink, thinks better of it.  Laughter]

A: Thanks, Rob.

S: But I was having movie clips and all sorts of stuff [coming up in
meditation.]

A: Oh, OK, so did anything stand out in terms of the experience of
eating and then stopping?

S: I don't think so.  I was looking, but I had a huge dinner.  I think
if I hadn't, then it may have had more its desired effect, but I ate so
much before coming over here.

A: Anyone else, what was your experience?

J: Well, I enjoyed the texture and the taste, and then you stopped us
and I wanted more.  But I couldn't have more, but I said "OK, I'm not
really that angry because I'm not hungry."  If I were really hungry, I
would have been mad.  And I just sat with it, and I was just happy about
liking cashews.  Because it kept tasting like cashews in my mouth.  And
I realized I didn't need any more.

A: Oh, that's fantastic!

G: Nice!

H: I wanted to pick one of these little things up and throw them at you!

[Laughter]

J: I don't like sweets, I'm very lucky!  Cookies, now if you'd brought
cookies I would have been in trouble.

A: Anyone else?

P: Well at first when I stopped I thought "That's fine, I'm just not
eating those for a while."  But then I thought "Well, what if I'm not
allowed to eat them, ever, and that was problematic.  Because, "Oh, man,
I want my cashews!"

H: I had the whole thing going on.  I had the thoughts like "When do I
get to eat again, are we picking this up again?"  And my brain kept
visualising [the food], so because I felt like it was still here, still
with me, so would have liked someone to take this stuff away, because
that would make it easier.  And then I realized it was plaguing me more
because it was still present.  And the sensations were still there, like
my mouth is watering, and I'm feeling that, and the experience of
swallowing and  then needing to swallowing, which reminds me that I'm
not eating these delicious little things.  And I was recognizing the
heart-hurt about it.  I don't feel any hunger, but I could feel it
around [my heart/chest], and there was this sadness about it.  There was
a lot going on.

G: She pretty much nailed it.  My meditation was on a much more
difficult craving.  I had the same situation, where it's much harder
because it's still around.  It's like a smoker.  If they see someone
smoking it's much harder not to smoke.  So that's my trouble, the
craving thing.  The trigger is the object of craving.  And the other
thing was not detaching myself from  craving, but I could watch myself
craving.

A: Great!

G: You know, in the third person.  And that was interesting.  Doesn't go
anywhere, it just is what it is.  I think I'd have to do a lot of
tonglen if I wanted to get rid of the craving.

A: Yeah.

G: It's just pain, and I don't want it!

A: I know what you mean.

G: It takes motivation, right?

A: It sure does.  Definitely does.  And some cravings you don't
necessarily want to give up, right?

G: Exactly, so it's problematic.  I don't know what the solution is.

R: To be honest, I didn't really have... although my actions might seem
to suggest otherwise... I guess I just wasn't really craving it that
much.  I didn't really have any trouble  just clearing my mind just
then.

A: That's good.

G: Pick something harder then!

R: Well, I was just thinking, I do [reach for things to consume then put
them down] subconsciously all the time.  Maybe I like to torture myself,
but if I'm craving something, I just try to resist it.  And it's not
even a conscious thing.

A: Do you remember what was going through your mind the second time you
picked up the [bottle of hard lemonade]?

R: I think just absent-mindedness.  It was just sitting there, and I
sort of instinctively reached for it.

S: Just to pick up on what you said about instinctively, I wonder if I
would sense the craving more if... because if I'm actually holding a
drink, then I habitually drink it.  I would have done exactly the same
thing if I was holding it [in my hand] but because I put it [on the
floor], it had a different effect.

A: I just had an idea... Anyone who feels uncomfortable with this can
veto it.  I suggest that we go on consuming this stuff mindfully, during
the rest of the class, and if you think you notice that someone is doing
it absent-mindedly, then you can call them out on it.  And no one loses
in this.  This isn't a matter of winning and losing.

R: But how do you recognise that someone's doing it absentmindedly vs
willfully?  Or mindedly, I guess?

A: I can't tell you...

G: Maybe the cue is that we eat it really slowly if we're doing it
mindfully.  Like we reach for it more slowly and deliberately to show
everybody...

A: Yeah, this is why this kind of stuff gets really complicated.  You
try to set up external metrics for stuff like that and what really
matters is the intention and the internal state.  All I can say is
you'll know it when you see it.  And we'll just trust that everybody in
the room is making their assessment as honestly as they can.  And if
someone gets called out on it and they say "No, I was eating mindfully,"
we'll just trust that that's the case.  But things like, you know,
they're bent over the food, or...

S: A glazed look... [Laughter]

A: Yeah.  Of course, then patterns evolve where people look very
attentive while they're eating.

G: So, "Life in practice," right?  So is the idea of that to cultivate
mindfulness while craving something?  Not food [necessarily]?  Like
you're really craving going on a trip.  So you're just mindful about the
fact that you're craving a vacation?

A: Yeah, it's definitely about practice in life.  Power is about the
realization of practice in your behavior and in your modes of
perception.  And craving is definitely a part of that.  And if you can
be mindful when a craving is in operation, that cuts the suffering right
there.  That mindfulness is the antidote to the ignorance which leads to
suffering.  It doesn't mean you're not going to experience pain in your
life, but it does mean that you'll have the possibility of still being
mindful when the pain arises and experiencing the pain in attention and
not being bewildered by it, thereby establishing a clearer and clearer
picture of what's going on in your life and the conditioning that's
running your life, and ways that you might change that.

I have no experience with this, because I just can't seem to put on
weight, but while I was researching this, I found this diet called the
"Deconditioning diet," which is basically Pavlovian conditioning, or
Skinnerian training, actually, applied to food.  So the way it works is
you initially try to put as much structure as you can into your daily
eating, so that you've got a fairly clear picture of it, you take note
of all the cues that trigger your desire for a snack or something, and
then you do what's called counter-conditioning, where you put that cue
in front of you (basically what I'm doing now) and you trigger it, but
then you don't eat.  And that's an expression of power.  And then you
start extending the time between meals until you're fasting
periodically.

And this is a really beautiful example of why Buddhist practice is
useful even if you don't really believe all of this stuff about the
soteriology of enlightenment and the end of all suffering.  If you can
approach your eating that way so that you're not bewildered by your
cravings and you approach things methodically, then you actually start
to treat the conditioning in your life as a kind of a garden where
you're creating the desirable conditioning out of the behavior that
you're performing at the moment.  [R], you look skeptical.

R: No, I'm not really skeptical.

A: All right.  So one place where power really is directly used as a
spiritual practice is martial arts.  The most famous example is kung
fu.

R: [To P] was [that consumption] absentminded?

P: Yeah, I guess it was.

A: Can you remember what was going through your mind before you did it?

P: Well, I was definitely thinking "I'm thirsty, I need some water," but
I wasn't thinking about experiencing drinking the water as I was
drinking it.

S: Sorry to interrupt, but coffee, for example.  I have an unbelievably
unhealthy attachment to coffee.  Is this practice something I could work
with?  Because the idea of going and getting some coffee and not
drinking it would drive me crazy.  You know what I mean?  I have a
really big problem with the amount of coffee I drink.  So, is this the
kind of thing that would be worth... What I'm saying is that finding the
kind of object of desire like that and then practicing this kind of
exercise, is that a good thing to do, or?

A: It's what I'm doing.  That is my practice these days.  Not so much
with craving but with fear.  Well, craving too.  Lots of craving comes
up.  When you start doing this stuff, you can't follow a set formula
anymore.  If you try to do that, you're back in the world of the
intention instead of making the intention an object of study.  So I
can't give you specific advice about how to do this sort of thing, but I
think it's an appropriate way to use these practices.  And if having a
cup of coffee in front of you and not drinking it drives you crazy,
there are a few approaches to that to make it less disturbing.  One is
to do concentration beforehand to steady your mind.  I wouldn't do metta
practice before this, but the joy/breath thing would be a good one to
do.  The other is to do this practice when you're not going to have the
craving.  So you have your first coffee, then an hour or two later, or
at whatever interval where you're not likely to have the full burn, then
do the practice.  And if you do that, don't reward yourself with the
coffee when you're done.  Just pour it down the sink.  [Rewarding
yourself that way] is just going to make it worse.

S: Yeah, that makes sense, because then you're just increasing the
desire, and kind of suspending it.  That's  really interesting.  I'll
try that.  Cause I have this starbucks card, so you get free coffee for
the rest of the day.  So I can just dump as much as I want down me...

A: Yeah, and to a certain extent, this is "Physician, heal thyself."
I'm still addicted to the internet.  And the measure at the moment is,
I've got these little devices on my computers which plug into the
ethernet port, so you can't remove them without a special tool, and [H]
has that tool.  [Laughter]  And H's computer has the password to the
wireless router, and I don't have that password.

S: You do what you've gotta do.

A: Yeah, so I have go to the library to get on the internet, so then
it's much more controlled.

I'm not putting this forward as a panacea for addiction.  It's something
I'm struggling with.  But it is something which seems to work for
people, and it's not just in the dharma, it's based in good science as
well.  This deconditioning diet I was talking about, that's based on
Skinnerian principles, which are the most scientifically grounded
theories in psychology that we have.

A: So, martial arts.  So, Zen was founded... this is the myth, it's
probably not historically accurate, but...

[Rob takes a drink.  Laughter]

R: I feel so self-conscious, now.  All eyes turn.  I like how you look
at me, and I'm like "Yes."

J: "Yes, I'm mindful."

A: Yeah, so Bodhidharma went from India to China and founded Zen,
supposedly.  He also supposedly invented kung fu.  Shaolin kung fu comes
out of Zen.  The expression of power there is obvious, and the idea
there is that when you punch someone, you don't just throw the punch
and put all your weight behind it.  You're aware during the entire
punch.  If you're not aware for the entire thing, then... let me show
you what can happen.

[Shows how an overcommitted punch can lead to being pulled off balance.]

So there are these exercises in tai chi called "push hands," where the
idea is that you're trying to take each other's balance.  And you can't
let the other person into your space too much, but you also can't just
try to push them away.  Because as soon as you become rigid, you're as
easy to tip over as a chair, basically.  This is a physical exercise
which we could all do now.  If you could all pair up with someone with
roughly the same physique... [nervous laughter]  We're not going to do
anything rough, here.  Let me demonstrate, here.

We stand [roughly toe to toe], and put our hands together, and then we
try to push each other over [through our connected hands.]

Give this a try.  Try to remain aware of what's going on in your body as
you do this.  Don't try to throw each other across the room, just try to
take each other's balance.

R: So we're supposed to just be conscious of our balance?

A: Conscious of your balance, and conscious of the other person's.  If
the other person goes rigid, that's a good time to push.

[A couple minutes pass]

Has everyone got a sense for it?

S: I guess it's not... H was...

A: Oh, yeah, H would be really good at this.  She was in a troupe doing
something called contact improv for a year.  So she has excellent
physical awareness.

So did you get a sense for how this relates to intention and the
intention of the other person?

J: It's all about paying attention to where the other person is.

A: Did anyone have the experience of their partner rigidifying, and
being able to push them as a result?

S: I was rigidifying.  I noticed when [H] was pushing me over, I'd
frequently have my legs or my arms locked.

H: I felt a lot of desire to pull.  To create resistance and then let
go.  To kind of play with the space between force and absence of force.

A: Cool.  OK, so this is really... does everybody remember the
unbendable arm?

R: What's that.

A: Right, you weren't there, that's right.  So I'm holding my arm rigid,
there.  Just bend it.  [He just about tips me over.]

So now, try again [he still bends it, but it's much harder.]

R: It was a lot harder.

A: So the thing there is that the first time I'm holding this rigid, and
mechanically, my bicep is opposed to my tricep, so I'm doing half the
work for you.  Whereas if my arm is just out like this, I don't need it
to be rigid.  My natural response is fast enough that I'll be able to
tighten my tricep against your push before you can push it too far.

R: I see, so instead of keeping it flexed all the  time, you just keep
it relaxed until you feel the initial impulse, and then you resist.

A: Exactly, and this is why they're always going on in martial arts
about staying relaxed.  On a physical level.  There's more to it than
that.  On a perceptual level, you want your perception to be relaxed as
well, you want to see everything that's going on, you don't want to just
focus in on the other guy's fist, or his sword or whatever.  You want to
see the whole picture.

And training in this way of  relating to the world, particuarlly in the
middle of a fight, is really difficult.  And at the same time, it's what
makes it such an effective spiritual practice.  There are all these
reactions which come up, not just when you're trying to apply force but
when you see a threat, and they create these intentions which aren't
really coming from you, they're coming from some kind of internal agenda
to preserve an identity you cling to.  It may just be your
identitification with your physical body, of course, and that's
perfectly reasonable, but the fact is it gets in your way if you want to
do this stuff right.  And again I should say, I'm no martial arts
expert.  Anyone could kick my ass in a fight.  I've done a couple of
years of tai chi, I've done aikido a few times.

S: Is that the one with the sticks?

A: Yeah, they do use swords and sticks.

S: Oh, right, that's pretty bad-ass. [Laughter]  Must be fun.

A: Oh, it's so much fun.  Once you get comfortable with being thrown and
learning how to land.  Throwing people through the air and being
thrown, it's a lot of fun.

S: We'll have to clear the furniture.  [Laughter]

J: G would like that!

A: There's an aikido class I'm going to on Monday nights.  Through
freeskool.

P: Good for after the apocalypse.

A: Yeah, we're gonna need these skills.

S: Take care of those zombies.

A: Let's talk about social power now.  The exercise of power really
comes down to the same thing, except now you're exercising some kind of
influence over somebody else.  And this doesn't have to be domineering.
It can be just a reflection of what you would like in the situation, if
you have a good relationship ideally that's how it works.  But even just
doing that is difficult for a lot of people?

H: "Where would you like to go to dinner?"

A: Yeah, "I dunno, where would *you* like to go to dinner, love?"

J: "I don't care.  You choose."  [Laughter]

A: Exactly.  When it comes to social power, those are where the
reactions come in.  They're more inhibitory reactions for the most part,
than a matter of actually exercising the power and then collapsing down
on that.  Though of course that happens as well.  A conflict can easily
arise because, for instance, you ask someone where they'd like to go to
dinner, and you're upset because you wanted them to ask you where you
wanted to go for dinner.

Let's do an exercise about this.  Each of you in turn, tell me something
that I'm doing wrong in this class.  [H], you go first, it'll be easy
for you.  [Laughter]

H: You're not starting with 10 minutes of meditation!

G: It took a long time to hear about the class schedule.

A: You mean the schedule within the class?

G: Yeah.

A: See, now I've got my reactions going, because I want to know what
needs to change.

J: Last time was too much content, and you need to put the chart on the
web so I can look at it.

S: I have no idea, I can't think of anything right now.

A: OK, well just tell me something wrong that I'm doing in general.

S: Oh, man.

A: (It's going to be hard for him because he's Canadian.)

S: That's totally true!  [Laughter]  I was thinking about it, so much of
this is culturally determined!  As soon as you said that, I was like,
"Oh my God."  Like, I got really stressed out when you said tell me
something I'm doing wrong.  I was like "Oh,  fuck, I don't know how to
do that!"

H: He's asking too many questions!

A: Yeah, yeah, you just told me something!  [Laughter]

S: You're asking me too many questions!  [Laughter]  (Dodged a bullet.
I'm gonna have some root beer.)

G: Mindfully?

S: Definitely

R: Could be more engaging?  More, like... actually, this class has been
very engaging, but the previous...

A: Yeah, the previous two have been a bit... insight is a... They were
too heady.

P: I'm with the Canadian.  [Laughter]

G: Can I take your [opportunity to criticise him]?

J: Is this a guy vs girl thing?  I don't know.

G: Good point.  [All the women are] full of criticism.  [Laughter]

A: OK, so now...

H: And the value of that exercise was?

A: That it would trigger a discomfort.  I don't know if you experienced
it.

J: You're demonstrating [limits on] social power.

A: Yeah.

J: It's an instance of power to express something potentially
disagreeable.

A: Yeah.

S: Yeah, I felt... and also, I was kind of joking when I reached for the
root beer, but I kept wanting to immediately, and then even after the
moment was done, I was like "Nope, nope.  Conscious[ly drink it, or not
at all.]"

A: You're right, it's culturally determined.  But this is in every
culture.  A culture can't survive without people having some kind of
inbuilt sense of shame about how they relate to other people.  I could
go into a freeskool-like rant about what's going on in the US in that
regard these days, but I think I'd just be preaching to the choir.

J: That's right, you're from Australia, yes?  So what's the difference
there?  Are you more like Canadians?

A: No, no, I mean America's always had a very direct culture about
telling things they're doing wrong, and I'm totally down with that,
obviously.  I want feedback.  But when you look at the things people are
doing now in the name of money, and the way they're hurting other
people, alot of these are things that 60 years ago, you know, a banker
who...

H: Where are you going with this?

A: You're right, I'm ranting...

OK, so where are we?

H: We just told you what you're doing wrong.

J: Social power.

A: Yeah, in terms of your practice, if you're looking for something to
practice on it's useful to find places where you know something's going
wrong but you feel like you can't speak up about it or take a necessary
action.  Because you'll usually find some conditioning there that it's
worth coming into a more conscious relationship with.  That conditioning
may actually be very valuable...

H: Can you give an example?  Or can you say what you've said in another
way?

A: Sure.  You were all taught by your parents that certain ways of
pointing out problems with the world are harmful in some way.  Or just
ways of relating to the world.  And these all come out of corruptions of
the four immeasurables.  So, joy and power become sadism or masochism,
or just disdain.  "You think you can do that really well.  Let me show
you a thing or two."  Insight becomes manipulation.  "You must be evil
even to think that."  Metta becomes envelopment, clingingness.
Compassion becomes tyranny.  "You can't do that.  You'll get hurt."  And
we carry those into adulthood.  And those things we learn from our
parents shape our lives.  And it's worth rooting those things out and
coming into a conscious relationship with them.  And the practices that
we've been learning are useful for that, because it's painful to do
that.  It's always painful.  And it's obviously useful from a spiritual
perspective because you want that sort of thing out in the open, and
it's useful from a practical perspective because those are the things
which constrain our lives.

H: Those things?

A: Those being the patterns which we learned from our parents.  I
shouldn't just say parents.  We learn them from teachers and TV, and all
kinds of stuff like that, too.

OK, so I'd like to do one more exercise.  This is kind of the spoken
component of koans.  Now, koans are usually insight practices, but
they're also power practices.  Does everyone know what a koan is?

A koan is like a riddle that they have in Zen Buddhism.  So "What is the
sound of one hand clapping," for instance.  So, you're expected to give
a "demonstration" of what this koan represents.  So, "what is the sound
of one hand clapping?" is about attending to something when there's
nothing there.  To listen and hear nothing.  So a valid response to that
koan is just to indicate that you're listening.  But that's an action,
and a lot of koans have semantic content, so the response has to be in
speech.  And the speech is an act of power as well.  You have to remain
in attention as you speak.  So what I'd like for us to do own is to go
around the room and just say something which comes out of your direct
experience of the present moment.  It doesn't have be profound, it
doesn't have to be articulate, it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has
to be something that you're saying as you're saying as you're aware of
your physical presence and what's going on in your mind, and arising out
of that awareness.  Does that make sense?

J: How does that relate to a koan?

A: This is where a koan has to come from.  So for instance, with "What
is the sound of one hand clapping."  The purpose is to teach you to
look, or in this case to hear, and see nothing.  So you have to indicate
that you're listening.  In this case all I want to you do is say
something which is coming out of your present experience.  You don't
have to indicate anything by it.  Oh, sorry, I didn't answer your
question yet.  The point is that at the time of your response to the
koan, you're listening.  You've developed that capacity to listen and
hear nothing.  So you indicate to your teacher in some way that you're
listening.  And the teacher is supposed to have the sensitivity to tell
whether that's a true expression of something  which is coming out of
your present experience, or just a formulaic response, like someone's
told you "the answer" and you're just telling that in order to get the
teacher's approval.

But in this case, you don't have to answer a koan.  All you have to do
is be in the room, attend to the five physical senses and to what's
going on in your mind, and say something which arises out of that.

So why don't I start.  "I'm nervous about this exercise."

G: It's toasty in here.

J: I smell beer.

H: My bum is sore.

P: My head is sore.

R: Nothing to do with that exercise we were doing?

S: I'm tired.

R: I'm a bit anxious to get out of here.

A: OK, how are we doing for time?

H: Ten of.

A: Good, so what came up for you as you were saying that?

R: Well, I was just searching my mind for something to say, and that's
what came up...

A: OK, great.  So now we're going to do the same exercise, but we have
to do something which will trigger a reaction.

J: In ourselves?

A: Yeah... Describe something unpleasant about your current experience.
So again, you want to be in the room, you want to attend to the five
senses and what's going on in your mind, and you want speech about
something unpleasant to come out of that.

J: I'm uncomfortable being the oldest person here.

G: I'm a little hyper.

H: I can feel my belly fat. [Laughter]

P: My head hurts.  Too much in terms of the day.  It's not this.

R: I guess I'm feeling a little hyper too.  I guess I'm just anxious to
get out of here.

A: Uh huh, that's good.

S: I think hearing what everyone else is saying is making me feel like
saying I've been feeling anxious about saying too much.  You know what I
mean?

A: OK.

R: I guess I have friends waiting for me at Maxie's so I'm eager to go
see them.

H: Sounds like it's bringing up a lot of reactivity.  It sounds like
you're conflicted.  You feel obligated to remain here, but your heart is
someplace else.  Another part of you would be "I gotta go, bye."  But
you're not.  So there's some tension there saying "I wanna go..." I'm
just exploring what you're saying because I recognize this from other
experiences I've had, where I'm trying to be polite, and I'm obligated
to be here or whatever, AND, I'm not here, and it's like what choice do
I make, do I stay or do I go, because I'm obviously not contributing
here with my mere presence.

A: Can we... sorry, we're just a little short  on time.  He needs to go,
so... [Laughter.]

So I want to go around the room and do this one more time, and this time
I want you tell us all what's your best feature.  So again, attending to
all the physical senses and what's going on in your mind, just hold that
question and say the first thing which comes into your mind.  It doesn't
even have to make sense.

J: I listen well.

G: I'm excited about everything.

A: I have delicate hands.

P: I'm confused.

R: Jeez.  This is the part that's always hardest for me.  I, uh, drink
hard lemonades well.  [Laughter.]  That was a cop-out.

S: The first thing I thought about was my eyelashes, which is
embarassing to say, because it's not what I would normally say, but it's
the first thing, so...

A: Cool, cool.

OK, so hopefully that triggered some of these reactions in all of you.
Obviously there's a lot more when it comes to social issues.

So, for this week, we're really starting to get into where this stuff
can start to apply to habits.  So I suggest you pick some aspect of what
we discussed this week.  It doesn't have to be the habit you were going
to apply this stuff to, it could be a social one, and start thinking
about ways you could apply what we've talked about today to that habit.

Any questions about how that might look?

G: Yeah. [inaudible]

A: So, for instance, if someone wanted to complain less.

G: Oh, yeah, that was me!

A: Yeah, how are you going with that?

G: Oh, yeah, just totally forgot!

P: Well, you're not complaining about complaining!

A: So, how is going?  Was it for a month or for a week that you weren't
going to complain.

G: Supposed to be 21 days, I think.

A: Is that still something you want to do?

G: Yeah.

A: So, start noticing the things which trigger your complaints, start
putting yourself in situations where you know you're likely to complain
about something, and don't do it.  Look at what comes up, look at the
reactions, make those, not the object of attention necessarily, but the
object of study in your meditation with tonglen.  Tonglen  would be a
good way to approach this.

So, everyone has a habit in mind?

S: The question is choosing which one... But yeah, I've got a few...

J: I have a quick question: how do you spell 'koan'?

A: k-o-a-n.  Yeah, I have problems with koans.  Actually, on Ken's
website at the moment, there's a guy presenting koans and they just make
no sense to me.  I'm really struggling with it.  But I get the idea,
I've done them before, it's just these koans I don't get.

[Switching topic, talking to the whole group]

If you don't like yourself in some way, I would definitely pick a habit
related to that, if it makes sense to you.  That's one of the biggest
benefits that you can derive from this kind of practice, that you can
retrain your mind with regard to that kind of thing.

This is something I do have experience with.  It actually works for
that.

So I guess that's it for today.  Thanks.

S: It's funny what you were saying, because I kept [picking up the root
beer bottle] all the time, like if things get too quiet...

P: "It's time to do something."

S: Yeah,  exactly, or if I was anxious about something, I would go to
the glass, and there was this tension there of wanting to do it, but not
doing it, and then all the various things which came up in that moment?

J: "How can I act like I'm doing it consciously?"  [Laughter]

H: You're just doing it consciously!

A: There's a talk by David Graeber [presented] at Google.  He wrote the
book "Debt: the last 5000 years."  And I didn't watch the entire talk,
but the parts that I did watch, he has this coffee cup, and he keeps
picking it up and looking at it, and then putting it back down, and the
youtube comments indicate that he does this for the entire 90 minutes of
the talk, and they're complimenting him on his discipline.

S: That would drive me nuts.  I was also thinking "When is the moment
I'd least crave coffee?"  Probably when I'm sleeping.  You're like
"After you've had a cup" but after that I get the crest of the high, and
then there's a point where I can feel the coffee high.  Clearly I've
dissected this too much, right?  And it's right at that crest that I
want to have another cup of coffee so that I can sustain it, but that
never sustains it, you know?

J: You're not drinking enough!  I used to be able to drink a cup at 3 in
the morning and go to sleep.

S: Yeah, oh, I can drink a Venti Americano before bed, no problem.

A: Have you heard this song, "Addicted to Stress"?  I'll have to send it
to you.

S: I've really got to cut it out, but it's so totally ingrained.

A: Well, you know, the other warning I should probably make is don't
push it.  If you can't figure out a way to do this kind of work which is
feasible, then don't keep testing yourself in ways where you keep
failing.  Maybe even switch to another habit.

For instance, I'm really good at Mathematics, but what drives that is
actually a fear of being bad at it.  So one of the exercises I've done
recently is I do really simple calculations, but they're complicated
enough that I make mistakes periodically and when I do, there's this
[screwing up tension inside.]  And still haven't really found a way to
put myself in a situation where those mistakes are coming up and that
anxiety happens in a way which allows me to remain present.  So I've
moved on to other things for the time being.

S: Initially when I first started this, one of the things I wanted to
work on was this feeling of losing my temper, and I've noticed that for
a whole host of different reasons, [meditation among them], I've been
able to increasingly more easily see when I'm going to lose my temper
and be aware of it and stop it.

A: That's great.

S: It used to not be an issue for me, but when things got super
stressful over the last couple of years, somehow there was a disconnect
between recognising that I was about to lose my temper and just losing
my temper.  And now for some  reason it's really kind of exciting, it's
like "Don't throw the GPS on the floor"  "Nope, nope, not gonna do
that."  And just put it down and that's fine.  So being mindful of that
kind of pattern of behaviour seems to be important to helping me move
through it.  It seems similar to what you're talking about.

A: Yeah, it's a beautiful example, actually of how you break the chain
of dependent origination.  You see the feelings/thoughts associated with
the anger, but you're not actually angry yet, and just by seeing that
you've broken the ignorance which lets the whole chain run and lets you
become angry.

That's actually been the biggest benefit for me from meditation.  When I
started this, I was just angry all the time...  So the world that you
get born into when you become angry, that's called the hell realm in
Buddhism.  And I did hell realm meditation for about a year.  And I was
with a partner who was the same as me, she would get angry all the time
and at some point she started getting angry with me, and I was like "Oh
you can be angry over there.  I'll just talk to you calmly," and it was
so liberating.

S: It does actually feel liberating, doesn't it? I feel so much more in
control of things.  And likewise, when my partner freaks out on the
phone, I'm like "That's cool, no problem."  Sometimes it'll stress me
out but I won't react to it.

A: Brilliant, that's great.

S: No more throwing GPS's for now.

H: They're gettin' cheap.

Nov 6 -- Insight meditation part II

A: So, how's everyone going, meditation-wise?  Anything coming up for
people?

G: Fantastic!  [Laughter]

A: Yeah?  That's great!

J: Sarcasm.

G: That was too enthusiastic.  That wasn't sarcasm, sadly...

A: That's great, how's it working for you?  Doing tonglen, or the
[metta] thing by Pema Chodron that you sent me?

G: I took my lunch hour to meditate, and  I don't know what I'm doing.
I guess I was just meditating.  That was all.

A: Cool.  Well how  about we just take 10 minutes to settle the room.
We can just do whatever each of us find calming.

[10 minutes pass]

OK, so at the moment we're working on insight practice.  This is in many
ways the Buddha's key innovation.  The immeasurables that we've been
looking at up to this point, and the practices associated with
them... Well, tonglen is a few centuries later, but compassion
practices, loving-kindness, joy, these were well-known states of mind
when the Buddha began to practice and he learned them from other
people.  But the practice of insight is really something which started
with him in a lot of ways.  Certainly the way that he was approaching
it.  And the practice of insight  really comes out of the practice of
discernment.  Discernment is about having a question and  giving your
attention to that question.  The concentration practices that we've been
doing up to this point are very useful for that.  Once you know the
right questions to ask, and you get into a state of concentration, you
can hold one of these questions and insight will evolve from that.  It
doesn't mean that you'll get an answer necessarily, but you'll get a
better understanding of the inssues surrounding it.

Before we get into this, a couple of warnings.  I mentioned the first
one last week, but in case anyone didn't read the transcripts...
Insight is kind of like telling a kid that Santa Claus doesn't exist.
You can't go back once you've gone a certain distance with this stuff,
for the same reason that you can't untell a kid that Santa Claus doesn't
exist.  Because insight is really about seeing underneath the way that
we relate to the world, and seeing the problems with that.  The second
is that to do this practice well, it really requires fairly stable
concentration.  That's not to say that beginners can't do insight
practice, but the relationship to insight practice should be that you do
concentration practice for a while until your mind is stable, then you
do insight practice for a little while, and if that destabilises your
mind, you back off from that and go back to concentration practice, and
you can kind of loop around it that way and get closer and closer to the
parts that are destabilising you.

So, the Buddha's approach to insight is captured in the four noble
truths.  Those are that life is suffering, the origin of suffering is
craving, there is a cessation to suffering, and there is a path to the
cessation of suffering.  Now, this is the traditional
translation/expression of the four noble truths, and when you express it
like that it really seems like a truism or a bromide at best.  IT really
doesn't seem helpful.  And the issue there is that the four noble truths
actually reflect a path of practice in the approach to how we experience
life.

The first thing we need to know in order to learn how to approach the
four noble truths from a practical perspective is that Buddhism really
has no interest in ontological truths in the sense of determining
whether, for instance, something really exists or not.  Does everyone
know the key plot behind The Matrix?  You know, there's this idea of a
world beneath the world in the matrix, and that's what I really mean by
ontological questions... What if we're not really here?  What if this is
all, you know, being run inside a computer program inside the matrix?
Buddhism doesn't concern itself with these kinds of questions.  From the
perspective of Buddhist practice, all views, including views about
ontology, whether things exist or not for instance, are simply mental
states arising in a chain of causal dependence, and they're only
interesting to the extent that they provide you with guidance on the
path to awakening.

So when we say the first noble truth, "Life is suffering," that sounds
like an ontological position.  But what it really means is that in the
context of practice, we're sitting on the cushion and suffering arises,
and we need to acknowledge that suffering.  One of the key issues with
the way that we normally experience life is that we don't acknowledge
the suffering in our lives.  And that's what the first noble truth is
really about: suffering arises, we acknowledge that, and we want to
understand that, the basic mental processes which are leading to
suffering.

One modern Buddhist teacher said that for Buddhist practice, pain is
like the waterhole, in the sense that if a naturalist wants to know the
ecology of an area, they can just hang out at the waterhole, and all the
local fauna will come by at some point, and they'll get to see all of
them.  Similarly, if you want to understand your own mind, one way to
approach that is to look at pain, because all unconscious mental
processes arise out of pain in one way or another.

Pain is very destabilising, and that's part of the reason that these
tricks for ignoring it have evolved, so in order to do this work you
really need these concentration practices that we've been doing up to
this point.  You also need conviction that this an appropriate approach
to things; mindfulness, in other words attention to what's going on so
you can understand it; and persistence, because at first this stuff is
very bewildering, and you need to keep looking at it, and accept that
you're going to keep ending up in painful states of mind when you do
that.

The benefits to this are that having understood these processes, you can
start to undo them.  I've had some limited experience with that, it's
definitely true in my experience.  The soteriology, the salvation theory
of Buddhism is that you can understand these processes to such an extent
that you can do away with suffering altogether.  I'm not there yet
myself, and I'm even kind of skeptical that that's possible at all.  I
was saying last week when I was talking about Ken's little problem, he
was saying in one of the workshops I went to that he gets angry with
tech support when they can't help him, for instance, and I went up to
him after that session and said "I'm a little disturbed by this: You've
been practicing for 40 years and this suffering hasn't ended for you?"
And he's skeptical of this, too.  He thinks that modern life is too
complex to truly end suffering.  If you really want to end suffering
completely: you become a renunciate, and depend on other people for
survival.  Personally I'm not ready to do that.

G: Look how happy [H] looks about that!  [Laughter]

H: I might be ready to give it up, but he's not! [Laughter]

G: Not at the same time, you guys!

R: I'm just wondering, if everybody followed the way of the Buddha and
gave up all their worldly possessions and relied on other people, what
would you do in that case, because everybody's relying on everybody
else at the same time?  I don't know, maybe that would work out, but who
would have possessions?

A: Well, I think that was the kind of utopia that the Buddha actually
wanted to move towards.  Stephen Batchelor talks about this a bit in his
book Confession of Buddhist Atheist.  It would be a pretty wonderful
world, but you know, I can tell you what would happen.  Even if
everybody led these wonderful skillful lives, someone a little more
corrupt than everybody else would end up with more resources than
everybody else, and they would have a few more kids than everybody else,
and they would transmit their corrupt practices to their kids, and
pretty soon you would have the same sort of corruption and domination
that we have today.

R: Right, but I'm just thinking that relying on other people for
resources is sort of corrupting them by allowing them to do that.  For
example, if you need a place to stay and you go to your neighbor saying
"I need a place to stay, can I sleep in your house," well if he's
following the same Buddhist practices, he's going to say "Sorry, I don't
have a place to stay, I'm relying  on you to provide place to stay so
now you're both homeless...

H: Can I propose something?  Maybe it's not that people don't have
resources, it's that they don't possess them, in the sense that there
isn't a sense of ownership over things.  They can use things, but the
question would be whether or not they belong to someone.

G: Native-American style.

H: Someone like Ken, or other Buddhist teachers like  Chogyam Trungpa,
they seem to have things, and then the question would be is how tightly
do they hold them.

R: I guess so, I see your point about having things but regarding them
as belonging to the community.

A: The flip side of that is that if you come to someone and ask them for
something and they want to give that to you, it's not necessarily a
corruption.  Maybe they value you in some way.  That was kind of how the
Buddha's retinue survived.

R: It still doesn't make 100% sense, but...

H: Well, the Buddhist system works because of the householders, the
people that aren't renunciates, who get merit from donating to the
Sangha.  So there always has been a relationship there between those who
have and those who beg.

R: So you can choose between those who have and lend it out and those
who don't have and borrow it from the others.

A: There will always be householders, people who aren't renunciates,
because it's the householders who have all the influence, who have all
the kids, who dominate the culture.  So in a sense, it's never going to
happen.

R: I realize, I'm just talking hypothetically.

A: Yeah, H can probably talk your ear off about this.  She studies
utopias.

H: It's true.

A: But the same dynamic really operates in us and it's really why we
have this suffering in our lives.  Pain arises in our life, and some
reaction evolves to protect us from that pain, and that reaction is
karma, and leads to suffering.  If we didn't have those reactions
evolving in us, we wouldn't be able to function as householders,
basically.

So this kind of leads into the second advantage of insight practice,
which is just insight into the way the world works and the way people's
minds work, which leads to the possibility of... the positive side of it
is finding skillful ways of navigating the obstructions you find in
life.  The negative aspect is manipulation.  For example, if you run
into some political problem at work, you can see the drives that are
creating that problem and maybe find a smooth way through it.  If you're
doing that to serve some valuable goal, maybe that's valuable.  If
you're just doing it because you see everybody around you as your tool,
that's going to cause you problems.

So that's why you want to look at this stuff, despite the fact that it
involves looking at pain.

Let me just check that I've covered everything I want to say about the
first noble truth there.  This stuff is a lot more complex than the
other stuff we've been talking about.

H:  Why do you think that is?  Is that because we're trying to as you
said, we're trying to organize things around what's really going on, so
you have to disrupt or challenge our ordinary thinking?  Are you trying
to short-circuit ordinary thinking?

A:  I think that the other immeasurables can be approached on an
emotional level  whereas this one really requires an intellectual
component.  I think that's really what it comes down to.

I can just tell someone "Think of a time when you felt a lot of love for
someone, and now transfer that feeling to whatever is arising in
experience at the moment" but I can't tell someone "Think about a time
when you just felt OK about what was happening, you didn't have any
preferences or prejudices, and now transmit that feeling to the current
context."  You can't do that with equanimity.

H: So you're saying that this insight practice is about equanimity.

A: It leads to equanimity, and it's a kind of a positive feedback loop.
Equanimity is necessary in order to attend to the pain which is arising
in your experience, and attending to that pain and understanding the
processes which lead to it fosters equanimity, which then feeds back
into this loop.  But yeah, we're covering insight because we're
approaching this via the four immeasurables as they apply to people's
lives.  So insight leads to equanimity, and that's why we're doing it
this way.

H: Can you go back to, say loving-kindness then?  So loving-kindness is
one of the four immeasurables, what relates to it in the way that
insight relates to equanimity?

A: Yes, that's ecstasy.

H: Oh, so we didn't really talk about that.

A: No, because we didn't really need to.

G: It speaks for itself! [Laughter]

A: You can approach loving-kindness that way.  If you do, you foster
rapture.  You attend to the breath, pick out the pleasurable sensations
in your current experience, and you attend to them, particularly those
in the breath.  And then you get a kind of Skinnerian positive feedback
loop going where the attendance to the pleasant sensations is pleasant,
so your attention gets trained on those sensations which increases the
pleasantness of it, so you end up completely focused on those
sensations.  But I don't have a lot of experience with working that way,
although that feedback loop is familiar to me in the context of
fostering metta [the way we've talked about before.]

For the other immeasurables, compassion is just compassion.  Power is
what leads to joy, and we're going to do that next week.  So this is
really the sequence in Ken's primary practice.  Initially you attend to
all sensations arising in your experience, that's power, then you open
your heart to the experience, that's ecstasy, then you ask "What is
experiencing this?" and hold the question, and then you rest, and that's
compassion.

OK, so that's the first noble truth.  In some sense, all the noble
truths are contained in all the other ones, but it's useful to break
them out.  As pain arises in your experience and you're studying the
processes which lead to pain and lead to its cessation, you see that
what's causing the pain is craving and clinging.  And you realize that
the path to the cessation of that pain is abandonment of that clinging.
So that's the second noble truth.  And then the third noble truth is to
see that there is a cessation of suffering, and what that corresponds to
is you keep experimenting with these different factors in the processes
which are leading to pain, and you find a way of approaching them which
leads to cessation of the pain.  And the fourth noble truth is that
there's a path leading to the cessation of suffering, and that's really
the path that you figure out through this experimentation in the second
and third noble truths.  So, these four noble truths are really a
diagnostic framework which was common in India at the time of the
Buddha.  Basically, there's a problem, what causes this problem, how can
we eradicate those causes, how can we systematize this eradication?

So the fourth noble truth, the gloss for it is the eightfold path, so
I'm probably not going to get them all, but I'll go through the most
important ones: are Right View, Right Concentration, Right Effort, Right
Livelihood, Right Speech, let's see, what else?  Have I missed anything
important there?  That's enough to be going on with, anyway.  So, Right
View is bsaically the view that I was espousing a moment ago.  It's got
nothing to do with ontological positions.  You get into arguments with
traditionalist Buddhist, and they'll say things like "You must believe
in post-mortem rebirth," you know the cosmology that when you die you
get reborn as something else.  They'll say you must believe [such
things] because that's Right View.  Well, the Buddha did talk about that
as Right View, but he referred to it as "polluted Right View."  It's the
Right View which leads to ethical behaviour [basically a carrot and
stick approach.]  [The fundamental] Right View is that we should attend
to what's arising in the present moment of experience, and understand
the processes which are  leading to our  suffering.  Right Concentration
starts with the concentration practices we've done up to this point, but
it also means that when you get into one of those very stable mental
states which those practices lead to, you can step back from that and
see the mental processes which are going on in those mental states, and
see the suffering that's occuring in those as well.  Right Effort is
basically to do this study that we're talking about, and to put in place
in your life the principles that you've seen to lead to the cessation of
suffering in your life.  Right Livelihood means that you don't make your
living in a way which will create an attachment or create remorse, so
you don't kill, you don't trade in weapons, you don't trade in slaves, I
think those are the main ones.

G: It's very difficult to get a job in Ithaca without trading in
slaves.  [Laughter]

A: Yeah.  Well, it depends on what you call a slave, right?  I mean this
is Ithaca Freeskool, we can talk about debt and slavery... I'm kind of
sympathetic to this view...

Right Speech, basically, don't piss people off, don't make them
uncomfortable.  That's a really hard one for me.  I think those are the
ones I [mentioned.]

G: You're kidding, right?

A: For right? Right Speech?

G: He pisses people off?

A: Oh, insight is my favorite of these... I love insight, and it makes
people uncomfortable.  I love going onto Buddhist forums and telling
people who think they're enlightened that they're not.

G: Zing!

J: This is interesting.

A: And these [principles] are contingent, too.  There are certainly
cases in the Sutras of the Buddha speaking harshly to people because
they've done unskillful things or they believe unskillful beliefs or
something like that.

So, that's the four noble truths.

G: Have you already covered, or will you cover, how the four noble
truths relate to insight meditation?

A: What do you understand by insight meditation?  Have you done any?

G: I didn't call it that, but I guess I was doing that this week.  I
guess I've it for a while, I just didn't call it that.

A: What do you do?

G: Fear arises, so I just sit with it, sit with whatever arises, and
when you sit with it long enough, you just learn things about it.  So, a
situation was giving me trouble this week, and I didn't know why it was
giving me trouble, but by the end of the week I completely understood
what it was about, why I was afraid of it, where it was coming from,
what the deal was, what I could change to make it different, and by the
end of the week it had just worked itself out.

A: That's wonderful.  That's not the whole of Buddhist practice, but
that is the core of it, to do that.  It's wonderful that you were able
to do that.  And yeah, that's a good example of how this stuff works.

So in order to explain the relationship between that and the four noble
truths, you have to understand dependent origination.

J: Very complicated!

A: Yeah.  We don't need to understand all of this.  But basically, the
Buddha worked backwards [with respect to dependent origination].  He set
out on the  spiritual path because he saw a dead man, an old man, a sick
man, and he understood that all our lives will end in aging, death,
lamentation, sickness, decay and despair.  And this doesn't just happen
on the level of our biological lives.  It also happens on the level of
personal identity.  [For instance] "I'm a good-looking guy." (I'm not
saying *I'm* a good-looking guy. [laughter]  This is [an example of] an
identity.)  That's only going to last  for a certain period of time.
Or, "I'm attractive to women."  Well, only if I have money, I won't have
money forever.  You know, depending on your beliefs about gender
relations or whatever...

Anyway, aging, death, sickness, lamentation, despair, this all arises
dependent on birth.  So birth represents the formation of this
identity.  You know, "I'm a smart guy,"  "I'm good-looking guy," "I have
a lot of money."  This is birth as much as biological birth is.

P: As in there's a birth to these concepts of yourself that doesn't
occur at biological birth.

A: Yeah.  Then  we get to one of the key links in dependent origination,
called becoming.  So birth arises dependent on becoming.  Becoming is
the creation of your conception of the world around you.  So, when a
dream world arises in your sleep.  When you enter that dream, that's
birth.  You then have an identity in the context of that world.  This
can also happen with stories or movies:  You identify with some
character in the movie, and the movie theatre drops away.  You're in the
world of the movie.  And it also happens in meditation all the time.
Any time you start with the intention to attend to something in the
present moment, and you end up dreaming about lunch or an argument you
had with someone or something like that, that's a becoming and possibly
also a birth.   In the case of an argument with someone, you imagining
the argument with them is the birth.

Becoming arises from some of clining, craving, or sustenance.  So for
instance, in the case of a movie, in order  for you to enter the movie's
world, there's going to be something in the movie you really like,
[perhaps] a character you identify with.

[H], you look troubled.

H: Oh, it's just a lot, you know.  So we've talked about dependent
origination, the four noble truths, the four immeasurables... can we
practice something?

Because, OK, [G], you have this experience, which may or may not relate
to what we're talking about, I'm still confused about that

G: Yeah

H: So I'm just zoned out a little bit, like I need a diagram in the
wheel [of dependent origination] to know where we are.

G: Yeah, I agree.  If we could  cover something in a little more depth
and go a bit slower.  Because I can't really follow, and I've been
trying to study this stuff for a really long time.

A: Sure.

H: I think what you want to say is this is about practice, this comes up
in your experience.  So I'm trying to think, well what's my experience?
How does I recognize this in my own experience?

A: OK, sure.  So, big complex diagram showing all the relationships
between these different mental states, some of which I've already
described.  So, we want to end suffering, which is where the Budda
started: aging, death, lamentation, despair.  This arises from birth,
which arises from becoming, which arises from clinging.  Was that much
clear enough?  OK.  The other one we need to know about here is
ignorance of the four noble truths.  There's a big long story about [the
connection from ignorance to clinging] and if you do enough insight
practice, you see all of this.  Theoretically, I mean.  I've seen each
of the stages, but I can't say I see them all the time...

Ignorance of the four noble truths is what leads to birth, becoming,
etc.  And the reason for that is that that ignorance leads to clinging,
craving, and sustenance.

P: What do you mean by sustenance?  You haven't clarified that, yet.  It
seems like sustenance is what sustains you.

A: Yeah.  It's important to realize for starters that if you go all the
way with this, you don't give up clinging to your own life as well.
That's not to say you die..  This is part of what the Buddha's way of
life was about.  He would go out begging for food, and if he didn't get
it, he was prepared to die.

H: Which is different because of the middle way? Right?  That's
important.  He already went the path of the pure renunciate in order to
[improve his experience].  So it's the giving up of clinging to living
or dying, right?  So it's not like you're seeking life or death.  And of
course, I'm not  there, right?

A: Yeah, no, neither am I.  Absolutely not.  I loooove my breakfast.  I
just love it. [Laughter.]

J: So you give up your attachments and clingings so you can exist in the
arising?

A: Yeah, so having given up the clinging, the karma which has built up
in your life up to this point continues to run (this is all theoretical,
I don't really know this from personal experience) but you don't cling
to anything which arises in your experience from that point, so you
don't have these becomings [and birth, death, stress, etc.]  You still
have physical pain.

P: Especially if you don't eat anything!  [Laughter]

A: Yeah.  Well, the Buddha died of food poisoning, and it was a
degrading, painful and protracted death.

H: Don't sugar-coat it, Alex.  [Laughter]

Did he mention that he likes insight.  It's coming through, right?

A: And this is also where the Samurai stuff comes from.  Takuan's letter
to the sword fighter, explains how Buddhism [helps with] sword
fighting.  You're no longer focused on the sword, you're focused on the
entire situation, because you're no longer clinging to that sword as a
potential agent for your death, because you've given up fear of death.
But this is all theoretical.  I fear for my life.  Daily.

So, sustenance is food, but it's also the things which sustain our
personal identities.  Approval is a big one for most people.  "I'm a
good person."  Money is a big one.  "I'm a rich, independent person."
Winning arguments is a big one for me.  "I'm a smart person."  Not that
I'm a smart person, but I think I'm a smart person, it's an identity
that I cling to.  But I'm actually very stupid, and it takes me a long
time to realize it.

And the point which H raised about not clinging to life but also
clinging to destruction is important, so ending becoming is important,
ending what's translated in the suttas as unbecoming -- desire for the
end of a situation -- is also important.  That's a becoming in itself,
in a way.

So, ignorance of the four noble truths leads to clinging.  You can see
roughly how that works [from a distance.]  Freud had really good
examples of this in his theory of the evolution of the unconscious, for
instance.  Something traumatic arises in your experience and you don't
want to attend to that aspect anymore.  But then that very ignorance of
the pain breeds more ignorance because once there's this fact which you
can't bring yourself to attend to anymore because that will bring up
this pain, then all the facts which imply that fact need to be ignored
as well.  So you start looking for what amount to distractions from the
pain, and these distractions are things that you're clinging to.  In my
case, for instance, the pain is I'm not as smart as I thought I was, so
I go looking for places where I can prove how smart I am.

You end up with this cycle, where I'm forced to realize that I'm not as
smart as I thought, but I don't want to attend to that pain, so I go and
win an argument with someone, and I'm clinging to winning the argument,
then if I win, I'm back in this situation of "I'm a smart person," and
the cycle has returned to the start point.

Now in terms of the four noble truths and the practice that [G was
talking about], that is cutting the cycle at the ignorance of the four
noble truths.  Because fear is arising in your experience, and you just
attend to that fear and study the factors which are leading to it.  And
by doing that [G] came to see a way past it.  And there's a lot of
factors which led to that, concentration factors for instance.  You've
done a lot of metta and compassion practice, so you were able to
maintain a stable state of mind while holding the fear in attention and
you were able to do that in such a way that the fear... there's a danger
with this approach to things in that when an unskillful state of mind
arises and you hold that state of mind in attention, you can end up
making a becoming out of that state of mind itself.  That can harden the
state of mind in place.  But you had the skill to avoid doing that, as
well, instead of trying to set yourself up as an observer identity or
something like that.

So, that's the theoretical aspect of today's talk.  A lot more
theoretical than what we've done up to this point.

I gave people a practice based on  the four noble truths last week.
That was simply to look at some suffering in your life, and hold the
question, "What is the origin of this suffering?"  When you see the
clinging underlying that suffering, hold the clinging in attention until
it passes.  And  that corresponds to the first three steps of the four
noble truths.

Another way of approaching  insight practice is in terms of the three
marks of existence.  It's a little more theory, but not much.  It's the
position that everything which arises in experience is not you, it's
inconstant (in both senses of being unreliable and prone to change) and
it's stressful, it's suffering in other words.  So this practice is
simply to attend to what arises in experience and note these three
aspects of everything.  So let's say you're attending to the breath.  Is
the breath me?  No.  Is it inconstant?  Yes.  It changes from moment to
moment.  If you don't get it, it gets very uncomfortable very quickly.
Is it suffering?  Yes.  Try holding your breath and you'll see the
craving very quickly.  Or, thoughts of lunch keep coming up in your
mind.  "Is this hunger me?"  No.  "Is it inconstant?"  Yes.  "Is it
suffering."  Well, it's craving.

The people who do this kind of thing, I have no experience with this,
but they just keep subdividing experience more and more, and do this
more and more rapidly.  They claim they do this as rapidly as 40 times a
second.  I can't imagine what that's like, but that's the extent to
which you can take this practice if you're inclined to.

R: How do you even time that?

A: That's one thing which makes me a litle skeptical.

H: It's like [the Chinese] talking about "10,000 things."  It's a
metaphor.

A: No, no, these guys are modernists.  The guy who pushes this technique
is a modernist.  So he wants to have clear paths of diagnosis,
measurement of everything.  So presumably he wants a way to measure the
frequency of the noting, but I'm still skeptical.

But you don't need to work at it that fast to get benefits from this
practice.  I've gotten benefits just doing it once every five seconds.

R: Can you go over the practice one more time just to refresh my
understanding?

A: Yep, I've digressed a bit.  So the three factors of experience which
you want to attend to:

  - It's inconstant, unreliable.

  - It's not you.

  - It's stressful.

Even in the experience of pleasure, you'll find stress.  So look for the
stressful aspects.

Now, with every insight practice, you always want to be tying this in
with a concentration practice.  I suggest we do 10 minutes of whatever
practice we find stabilizes our mind the most, then 1 minute of this
practice.

So do something like calm-abiding, metta, whatever, then I'll go over
the three characteristics again, and we'll do that for a minute.

[10 minutes pass]

So, whatever arises in your experience, hold it in your attention, and
ask "Is this me?"  "Is this constant or reliable?"  "Is this free of
suffering?"  If you get a "yes" answer to any of these, keep it in mind,
and we'll talk about it after?

R: It should always be a "yes" answer?

A: It should always be a "no" answer?  But if you get a "yes" answer,
that's good.  That's a point of attack, basically.

[One minute passes.]

OK, we don't have much time  left, but hopefully we have enough time
that if anything came up for anyone we can talk about it.

R: I kind of struggled with that.  Back a while ago you gave a bunch of
examples of "yes" answers like with breathing, but what's an example of
a "no" answer?  Seems like everything leads back to a "yes" answer in
one way or another."

A: The way I phrased the questions just then, everything should lead to
a "no" answer.  A "yes" answer, indicates a point of attachment.  So for
instance "Is this breathing me?"  A "yes" answer means you've identified
with the breath.

R: Oh, I see, so that would lead to a "no" answer.

A: Yeah, breathing is a part of your experience, obviously, but it's not
you.

R: So breathing is a "no" answer.  I'm still confused.

A: Well, the doctrine is everything should be a "no" answser.  But you
don't want to just hypnotize yourself into giving "no" answsers all the
time.  What you're really looking for is the "yes" answers.

R: But this line of questioning leads to a "yes" answer or a "no" answer
if you follow it all the way through?

A: "Is this me?" [when you follow it all the way through], becomes "Is
there anything which arises  in experience which is me?"  "No."

R: OK.  And then  if the first one is a "no" do you stop there?

A: No, you do all three.  "Is it constant and reliable?" [becomes] "Is
there anything which arises in my experience which is constant and
reliable?"  "No"

"Is there anything in my experience which is free of suffering?"  "No"

That's the doctrine.  But what you want to do here is take whatever
arises in your experience, and ask these questions of it.

R: I see, so I was thinking that the summation of these three questions
led to a yes or a no, but they're [independent.]

A: Yeah, they're kind of diagnostic questions in a way.  If you get a
"yes" answer to any of those, that's a point of attachment.

H: The word "diagnostic" is a useful category, here, because there's a
tendency to want the right answer.  And then that's an attachment in
itself.  "I'm clinging to getting the right answer."

A: Yeah.  "What are you talking about?  I don't have  any 'self'!"

J: "I understood everything he said tonight!" [Laughter]

A: Speaking of breathing, I met a guy recently who claimed he was
enlightened and I said "If you stop breathing do you experience any
craving."  And he said "I don't breathe, therefore no problem."
Meaning, "My breath is not me."  So I asked him "So is it  alright if we
verify this by waterboarding you?"  He wasn't into that.

H: The other thing that's useful to me about the exercise is when I can
approach it without attachment to the answers to the questions, but
instead with curiosity about my experience, a freshness.  Otherwise I'm
doomed.  There's nothing there, and it gets very vauge.  There's nothing
there unless there's a kind of fresh curiosity.

A:  Yeah, you really want to be approaching this like a mechanic
debugging a broken machine.

H: No!  I don't like that!  The reason I don't like that is because
that's problem solving.  That's fine if there's a sense of freshness and
curiosity about one's experience.  I think otherwise it can cling.  "I'm
looking to solve this problem."

G: Yeah, because there isn't really a problem.  Can't look at as a
problem.  It's just experience.

A: I think what you're saying is an advanced perspective in the way the
Buddha taught things, and in Mahayana they tried to bring that advanced
perspective earlier, but the Buddha did describe himself as a doctor.
He was trying to solve a problem.  It's the problem of suffering.

H: Sure, and I understand why the analogy of a mechanic makes sense.  And
the analogy of a doctor makes sense.  But not a modern industrial
medical establishment doctor.  Is that what we're looking for?

A: No, we're looking for a compassionate, friendly, thoughtful doctor.
[Laughter]

H: OK, that makes more sense.

A: Yeah, this is getting into Right View again.  From the perspective of
Buddhist practice a view is only valid to the extent that it helps you
advance your practice.  So you don't want to become a mechanic fixing a
broken machine, but you want to be asking these questions the way such a
mechanic runs a diagnostic.  If he gets a "yes" answer from one of his
diagnostics, that's a good thing.  That means he's identified one of the
problems of the machine.  And then characterizing it as a problem is a
problem, so you have to hold these views lightly.  But this is the path
of insight.  There's a problem.  Let's understand the problem so we can
solve it.  That is the four noble truths: problem, study, cessation,
systematize the solution.

G: I think what you're saying about the way your perspective changes as
you progress is interesting.  When you first practice a teaching, it can
be like holding a candle in a cathedral [you don't see much, but it's]
cool.  Then as you practice more, it's like you turn the candle into a
lamp, and your perspective shifts.  And if you keep sticking with it,
you keep seeing things differently, and...

J: There's no need to make it concrete.

G: Exactly, you don't have to make it concrete.  And nor do I think it's
[critical] to understand all of it from the get-go.  Because seriously,
I took about five things and worked with them for year one, and it was
fine because that was what I was happy with.  And if you want to know
these other things, then know them, or don't.  But I think it's not
necessary, because there'll be these internal shifts and you'll get
broader and broader perspectives.

A: Yeah, and there are simple practices which lead to insight, as well.
Like tonglen can lead to insight.  Breathing in somebody's pain.  Eww.
Giving away something I really value.  That's directly attacking the
becoming/clinging which underlies suffering.

G: I was just trying to think of an example from today which you could
apply your steps to.  So I walked out of the polls today after I voted
and I said "Oh my gosh, if the American public chooses candidates other
than what I've chosen, I will just be devastated."

A: We're all Democrats here, right?  [Laughter]  You can speak freely.
I think you're on pretty safe ground here.

G: It'd be like "How could I even go on?"  So I was walking down the
street this morning thinking "So once the polls are closed and the
president's decided, that's just a gut-wrenchingly final decision.
That's it, it's permanent.  It's either what you wanted or not but
[there's no changing it.]"  So I was thinking "This is permanent.
Whatever happens, it's permanent."  So now bringing it back to this
practice, "OK, not only is it not permanent, but I can have compassion
for the situation and just take myself out of the picture."  So then
I've given the situation more space [and allowed it not to be perfect.]

A: "This too shall pass."

G: Yeah, right then and there you're not attached to what the answer is
going to be.

A: So, this is the most conceptually demanding topic, that's the reason
I took two classes to cover it.  Next week we'll do power, and then for
the remainder of November we'll talk about how we can relate these
things to habits which are coming up in people's lives.  And then I'm
going on this retreat on Dec 5.  So in principle I could be back on the
Tuesday after Dec 16, but that's getting so close to Christmas that...

Yeah, perhaps we can start up again in the New Year, I'm not sure.

But power is fun, and next week should be fun.  Everything should be
more concrete from here.  But this is important too.  Especially for
dealing with things like habits.  Insight's important.  Thanks everyone.

Oct 30 -- Insight meditation part I

A: OK, so the first thing I wanted to say is that with the stuff we're
covering today, you're not at risk at this point, but at some stage, you
can't really go back anymore.  So we've already an example of this, the
cultivation of the immeasurables which we've done up to this stage have
been fabrications of emotions related to the immeasurables.  And if you
go far enough, you start to see that all emotions are fabricated, and
that changes your relationship to life in certain ways.  If you get past
a certain point, a reasonable distance past where this course is going
to take you, you need to find someone who seems to wise, who knows how
to practice this work, and who you'll listen to, if like you were
talking about, your patterns start running or something like that.  But
don't worry about it for this course.  It's just that because we're
starting to get into insight, it's important for me to tell you that.

G: [To "P"] Did you follow that?  I don't really, could you summarize?

A: Let me read you this section (pp 207-210) of Wake Up to Your Life, I
probably should have started there.

[Reads the section]

R: So, finish the job, I guess.

A: Basically, yeah, and as I was saying to the others [before you came]
you're not going to get to this point with the exercises that we're
going to cover in this class, but we're starting to get into stuff now
where we are taking apart these patterns, and past a certain point, that
process of dismantling develops a momentum that operates on its own.
You start to see parts of your life which you've depended on, but which
you haven't paid very much attention to, and you're going to want to
change some of those parts, but once you do that releases more energy,
which then if you're not paying attention, feeds back into other parts
of your life that you're not paying attention to.



OK, so I was going to bring that story up anyway, because that's getting
at the approach I want to talk about tonight, which is getting into the
insight component of Buddhism.  The way we've been cultivating the
immeasurables up to this point has been through a kind of fabrication in
a way, in the sense of letting the positive emotions from one situation
or person bleed over into another which we bring up in our minds.  And
that's not what the immeasurables are.  Like Ken was saying in that
excerpt, this is leading us toward the unconditioned mind.  So what
we've been doing so far is a form of conditioning.  It's a much better
form of conditioning than what we've been doing in [the rest of our
lives], but it's still conditioned.  What the immeasurables actually are
is something which arises from the unconditioned component of our
minds.

What do I mean by the unconditioned component?  We're going to talk
about ways of seeing the patterns in our life, and potentially ending
those patterns if we decide they should be ended.  And if you take all
the patterns in your life and end them, what you're left with at that
point is the unconditioned mind.  So that's an alternative way to
approach the immeasurables.  Instead of imagining a situation where
you've experienced loving-kindness in the past and bringing that feeling
into other parts of your life, what you do is you go to situations where
it's difficult to feel loving-kindness, and you look at the patterns
which are making that difficult for you.  And this is particularly
important for the final immeasurable, the one that we haven't looked at
at all yet, equanimity, because it's very hard to approach equanimity in
terms of this kind of bleed-over approach.

So before we go on to an exercise for how we're going to do this, I just
wanted to ask, does anyone have any questions about last week's
material, did anything come up there?

R: Can you elaborate on the bleed-over effect?

A: Oh, yeah, so I mean, like with metta, the way that works is you start
with something that's easy to feel metta for, and you build up a feeling
of metta there, and then you go to someone who's a little bit harder to
feel metta for, and you do the same thing there, and you've got this
kind of momentum from the first person that carries over into the next
person, and just progress through like that.  With equanimity, it's hard
to do that, 'cause it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's OK."  And then you go to
this other situation, "Oh that's OK, too."  'Cause that's not really how
equanimity looks.  It really is just getting all the patterns out of the
way.

So, I thought as a demonstration of this approach we would work with joy
again.  There are instructions about this in the book, but they're a
little complex, and I don't think they're good for when you're starting
out.  These instructions, which he came up with a few years later, are
much simpler and easier to work with.  The idea here is, you have these
sayings, they look like prayers, and you can actually approach them that
way, but they're not prayers in the sense of requesting assistance from
a deity or something like that.  They're just wishes.  And the point of
these wishes, again, is not to actualize the wish in some way, it's that
these wishes correspond to the immeasurables they're associated with,
and they will bring up for you the patterns that make it difficult to
connect with that immeasurable.  So, for instance, "May I be free from
preference and prejudice."  If you imagine  wishing that for yourself,
does anything come up?

R: Seems like it might be nice.

A: OK.  How about, "May I experience the world knowing me just as I am?"
Personally I find that terrifying.

R: I don't know, I guess that sounds sort of liberating, I guess.

A: Cool.

G: That's already true, for better or for worse!

A: Cool.

So that's the way these things work.  We're not actually going to work
with these tonight, we're going to do something else.  So this is an
exercise from his book, it's called "Artist and Critic" so we're going
to pair off and one person will be the artist and the other will be the
critic.  And the artist's job is to arrange a set of toothpicks in a
nice way.  And the critic's job is to point out what's wrong with the
arrangement so far.  They don't have to be reasonable criticisms, they
just have to be critical.

G: I'm going to enjoy this exercise.  [Laughter]

A: This will bring us in touch with the critical attitude which all of
us carry around, I think, and gets in the way of joy.

OK, so Rob and I'll pair off, and you guys pair off, and, so we should
start by cultivating metta.  Let's spend five minutes cultivating for
ourselves, then five minutes cultivating metta for our partners.

A: Here's your artistic medium.  I guess we should all just sit on the
floor for this...

R: So, we just, ah, make a pattern on the floor?

A: I think you're being a bit dependent there. [Laughter]

First run through, the artist has to do what the critic says.

R: What's the goal of this exercise.

A: It's to get you hearing the critic in your own head.

R: Ah, so you instruct me on what to do.

A: Well, again I think you're being kind of dependent there.  You do
something, and I'll let you know what the quality of it is.

[We play for a while]

A: All right, so let's do it again, and this time the critic plays the
same role, but the artist does whatever you want.

R: So I listen to you this time, and I just ignore it.

A: Yeah, that's it.  Come on, get started.  Oh, you don't have to do
the opposite of what I want either!  [Laughter]

[We play for a bit, then swap roles.]

So, what was that like, on either side?

R: Minor annoyance... I don't know, I guess that's pretty much it.
Maybe I was just having too much fun with it.

A: What about you guys?

P: It was a lot rougher to be the critic.

R: Yeah, it was a bit more difficult to be the critic.

G: I don't know, it was fine.

A: OK, we'll just have to go to a different exercise, then.  Let's have
a look at the prayers for joy on here.

R: What were we supposed to get from that?

A: Well, another way to aprroach this would be, can you think of any
situations in your life where you think you've done a terrible job and
everybody else has been really happy with what you've done.  Or any part
of your life which you're dissatisfied with, where when you tell other
people you're dissatisfied they go "Are you crazy?"

G: Yeah, volleyball.  They think I'm doing just fine, but if I miss a
hit, it's like "Oh..."

R: And you think they're just being polite, maybe.

G: Yeah, I mean I'm better than the worst people, but I expect more of
myself.

R: There have certainly been cases where I'm not sure if I did a good
job and maybe I've been looking for approval and never get it, so I'm
unsure of myself, so I'm not sure if there's something there, but I
can't think of an example [like you're suggesting].

A: That's fine, that's good.  Something where you're unsure about
whether you're doing a good job, but nobody's telling either.

P: Yeah, school.  There have been lots of papers where I think "It's
awful" and then I get an A.

R: That's never happened to me.  When I think I did terrible, then I did
terrible.

A: Hmm, well a lot of people have this kind of thing, and this exercise
brings it out for many.  But, that's OK.  These situations which you've
been talking about, just think about them and think about this line,
"May I experience the world taking joy in all that I do."  And remember,
the idea is not to actualize this wish.  It's to set up a friction
between that situation and this wish.  Does that make sense?

R: Not exactly.

A: You're uncertain about... actually, ["G" and "P",] you guys do [the
line I just said].  "R", you do "May I know what to do, whatever
arises.

R: Oh, OK.  So just think about the kind of experience I just mentioned,
then think about "may I know what to do whatever arises," and come to
terms between the two.

A:  Not come to terms, but notice the conflict, notice what comes up in
the conflict.  So let's do that for two minutes.

G: That was difficult.

A: What came up for you?

G: Well, the whole team gets annoyed when you miss the ball, so it's
hard for the world to be joyful.  It was difficult to reframe it.

A: So, it's difficult to imagine experiencing joy in the context of
someone disapproving of you.  How about you?

P: I was feeling anxiety and some embarassment, because we're talking
about people experiencing joy for things that I'm not proud of, I
guess.  So that was confusing.  Kind of a relief, but also a confusion.
I don't know how to feel about it.

R: I actually ended up going with "May I experience the world taking joy
in all that I do."  Because I still don't feel like the world is taking
joy in everything that I do.  And it's hard to, when, say I'm sitting
around wasting time, not being productive, how do you take joy in that.

A: So, this good, because this is what I was trying to get at with the
matchstick exercise, the critic being disapproving of the artist.  Now
the question is, we've got in touch with this sense of conflict, of we
would certainly like to experience the world taking joy in everything
that we do, we would certainly like to experience joy regardless of what
the world thinks of us, but these things are very hard to do.  Now, the
question is, once you get in touch with something like this, what do you
do with it.  And we're going to cover this in more detail in next week's
class.  Next week's class is going to be explicitly about insight, which
leads to equanimity, and this is kind of a special case of that.  The
first step in insight is always to see these patterns in operation.
It's kind of the first noble truth on a moment-to-moment level.  Do
people know the four noble truths?  So in Buddhism, after the Buddha's
enlightment, his first talk, he introduced these truths:

  Life is suffering
  Suffering has craving as its cause
  There is a cessation to suffering
  There is a path to the cessation of suffering.

These confused the hell out of me for a long time, what possible
practical use could there be for these?  It turns out these are actually
practice instructions.  They're not really truths in the usual
ontological sense we're used to thinking about.  The way it works in
practice is "life is suffering" corresponds to identifying the suffering
in a situation, or identifying the patterns of reactivity, and that
doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's amazing how much suffering goes
on our lives without us even noticing.  So exercises like this are
useful for that.  The next step is "craving is the cause for suffering."
So how that works on a practice level is when you've identified
suffering that's going on, you ask "What is the origin of this
suffering, what am I craving here."  Any suggestions, here?

G: Yeah, I want to win, I want to do really well, be the most athletic.
That's what's creating my suffering, because the fact that I'm trying
isn't good enough.

A:  What about what you were saying a moment ago about the team?

G: Yeah, I guess it's the same thing; they want to win.  I do the same
thing when other people miss a serve, it's really bad.

A: So what are you craving that gets in the way of joy when people are
disapproving of you.

G: Success, maybe?

R: Competitivness?

A: Another stage in insight practice is discernment.  This is kind of
Zen koans, if you're familiar with that.  You use the concentration
capacity that we've been developing, and you use it to just hold a
question.  So you make the question the object of your attention.  You
don't try to answer the question, you just make it the object of your
attention.

So why don't we do that for these situations where you're experiencing
stress because someone is disapproving of what you're doing.  We'll just
do that for a minute.  Just imagine the situation and ask, "What is the
cause of this stress?"

R: I don't really have that much stress in my life, I guess.  I'm
craving not suffering, so maybe it's like a vicious circle.  Not that
I'm particularly suffering, either.

A: Yeah, so suffering is a translation of the word "dukkha" which means
stress, dissatisfaction with the way things are.  It doesn't necessarily
mean stress.  It means that there's something that you're reacting to
that you're dissatisfied about.  Another question to hold would be "What
am I dissatisfied with in this situation?"  Or "What am I craving in
this situation?"

R: But that's more complicated to, because everything leads back to
yourself, doesn't it?  You're putting yourself in the situation, so
really it all boils down to you're dissatisfied with yourself.

A: OK, so you're dissatisfied with yourself, so what do you crave in
that situation.

R: Change, I guess, I can't really narrow it down more than that, just
general change, really.

A: So, use that as the question: "What characteristics..."  Hmm, what's
the right way to phrase this question?

R: Maybe you're saying "how can you make your life better?"

A:  No, the issue here is there's something that you're clinging to as a
characteristic of yourself which you would like to have.  It's not how
can you change your life, it's "What do I thirst for here?"

G: I look at it a little differently.  The way I'm approaching this is
that what I'm wishing for is that things would be different than what
they are and that's what's causing my suffering, you know, I wish I was
more athletic than I am.  So it's not that I need to become more
athletic to ease my suffering because there's no end to that, even if I
join the olympics and I'd still be dissatisfied.  Or I could just accept
who I am right at this very moment, how many of my serves go over at the
moment, and once you accept that and you accept which of your teammates
are going to miss a serve, and you're fine with that, then there is no
suffering.  That's just the way it is.

A: Mhmm, that is equanimity, and it is what we're heading towards.  The
question is, how's that working out for you?

G: Most of the time, awesome.  Sometimes, not good at all.  Very few
times, but sometimes, deep end.  So this is good.

A: OK, so could you pick one of those times?

G: Yep.

P: Well, I'm dissatisfied all the time.  [Laughter]

R: Yeah, when you have a general dissatisfaction, what are you really
craving?  You're just craving not being dissatisfied.

A: Craving not being dissatisfied.  We can work with that.  Would that
sum you up?

P: My question was going to be why am I dissatisfied, if we just
answered that, then what's my question?

A: Well, if you work with "I'm always dissatisfied, that's going to be
very hard, but... let's try this a different way.  Think of a situation
in which you've been dissatisfied with yourself recently and hold the
question "What characteristics that I'm craving in myself lie behind
this dissatisfaction?"

[one minute passes]

So, who has a craving of a characteristic of yourself?

R: There's been some brief points in my life where I have absolutely no
craving in my life, all worries or expectations just sort of disappear.
Normally those situations arise for me when I'm at an extreme of
something like, say I'm out backpacking in the woods for days on end.
You're really concentrating on the moment, it's a really Zen-like
experience.  Or if you're really in love with someone and you're with
that person.  And then the funny thing is you don't even realize it
until you get back and join your daily routine again, and all of a
sudden, "Oh, man, I was so free at a that moment."  So I guess that's
what I'm craving, experiencing that rather than just for brief moments.

G: My life's the opposite.  It's the reverse of what you're saying.
There are unusual days or moments where there are cravings for things
and I'm distracted and off-kilter.

P: I guess I'm craving love.

A: That's fantastic, that's really good.

Well it sounds like we all have a craving.

So we have suffering, the suffering is caused by craving.  So let's do
tonglen for this.  So, breathing in, you experiencing the craving.
Breathing out, offer something good, e.g. breathing in, you experience
the craving for love, breathing out, you feel love for someone else.
Just modulate the breathing in of the craving to match the extent to
which you feel the love as you're breathing out.  And the principle here
is that this leads to the cessation of craving.  Now, this takes a bit
of practice.  But let's just try it for three minutes, and see how that
goes.

[Three minutes pass]

So what was that like?

P: I'm still confused about how I'm actually doing this.  What am I
actually breathing in, what am I breathing.  So I'm just thinking about
these different things as I'm breathing in and breathing out.  But also
that's kind of hard to switch gears so fast, takes a while to sink into
these things.

A: Yeah, it takes a bit of time.  What was it like to be choosing to
feel that craving repeatedly like that?

P: I wasn't able to do it very effectively.  It was hard to experience
these things, and then on a meta-level experience my experience of
them.  By the time I got to that, I was thinking "Woah, what's going
on?"

A: Yeah, that takes practice, too.

R: I'm going to need to practice on that, too.  I guess I got the basics
of it, but I don't feel like I was really into it.

A: It was kind of flat?

R: Yeah.

A: Yeah, it takes time to establish some connection to this.  It's worth
it, because I know from experience that this kind of thing can release
those cravings.  So, this is what I suggest you do for this week.  Pick
one of these [Four immeasurables sayings], whichever one seems to be
bringing up some sort of conflict for you, and go through that exercise
with the craving, understanding the craving which underlies the
dissatisfaction, and then working to experience that craving, and as
["P"] was saying, to experience the experience of it.  That's an
important part of insight.

Next week we'll go over the process of insight in more detail and
hopefully it'll become clearer, and at least you've got some aspects of
insight to work with.

From this point forward, meditation becomes more a kind of an experiment
and a kind of an engineering of your mind in a way.  You just keep
trying things, and seeing which things lead to peace and to skillful
states of mind.  What we've covered today is one which has been working
very well for me.  And it's really behind all Buddhist practices.  It's
kind of the seminal Buddhist practice in a  way.

R: These [four immeasurables sayings] actually look good to read every
day.  I feel like if I did that, I'd have a better day.  They seem like
really useful things to repeat to yourself.

A: They're good things to hold in attention even if you're not trying to
do this kind of uncovering process.  And actually, if you go further
with the methods we've been using up to this point, you end up having to
do the same thing, anyway.  Sooner or later in the cultivation of
metta, you'll hit someone who represents something that you just can't
stand, and then you kind of have to shift gears, it's not enough to just
try and feel it.  You've got to get into the semantic components of it
and pull it apart.