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.