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Different Ways of Seeing

So today, I want to begin the dharma talk by telling some real-life stories. I worked as a spiritual care volunteer in the hospital for some time, where I met a bunch of cancer patients. I was often struck by how wide a range of ways that people see their situation—this situation of having a cancer diagnosis—and how different ways of relating and seeing their experiences have changed their lives.

Of course, a lot of times the common ways of relating to and perceiving this kind of a situation, oftentimes initially, is that of fear, maybe anger, dread, resistance, blame, "why me," and so on. But there are also other ways of seeing this as well.

One cancer patient, who had late-stage lung cancer, first heard this news from the doctor's office. The doctor was very uncomfortable telling him this news. So this patient, when he saw the doctor and the way he was, paused and said to this doctor something like this: "Oh doctor, I know this must be really challenging for you to communicate news like this to the patients. Please take your time." And so, instead of addressing the news that he just got, he saw this as an opportunity to extend his compassion to this doctor—a doctor who was struggling in telling this news to him.

Another patient said this after her breast cancer diagnosis: "I put myself on a mission. I tell myself that this disease is not going to get the best of me. My prayer every day is that God shows me how I can be a blessing to others." That was how she related to this, and she saw this as an opportunity to be a blessing to others.

One other patient saw the last stage of her life, due to pancreatic cancer, as the best time in her life because she let go of all the things that weren't meaningful to her whatsoever. She was sunshine in the infusion room. Whenever she was there doing her chemo session, she was always doing loving-kindness practice for everybody. The nurses loved her.

For me, sitting next to patients and people like this really brings a sense of the divine all around everybody. I'm sure that you've heard a lot of stories like this, but for me personally, having this opportunity to meet people like this in real life has really opened me up in terms of how I see the situations and challenges that I meet. I oftentimes ask myself, can there be other ways of seeing my situation?

Endless Ways of Seeing

Today I want to make a somewhat provocative statement—maybe not very provocative for many of you, but it may feel provocative in some sense. This statement is this: every experience in life can be seen in endless ways. Some ways of seeing, some ways of perceiving our experiences, can lead to welfare and well-being for us and for others. And there are some ways of seeing, perceiving, and relating to our experience that can lead to harm, stress, and the opposite of well-being to ourselves and others. See if this is true for you in your own lived experience.

A big part of the dharma practice has to do with seeing, observing, paying attention, and opening up to new ways of seeing. I know that Gil [Fronsdal]^[1], our teacher here, sometimes says that mindfulness practice is not about seeing new things; rather, it is about seeing things in new perspectives. Our practice has a lot to do with learning to see, observe, and pay attention—learning to see in ways that can support us in our own well-being and others', and learning to see the ways that can lead to challenges and harm in us.

Illness as an Opportunity to Pause

An illness can sometimes be seen as something unwanted, undesirable, painful, disabling, and a source of misfortune in life—for example, loss of relationships, loss of jobs, loss of physical and mental capacity, and even loss of simple pleasures like going for a hike. I use illness as an example, but you can easily replace this with other difficulties or challenges that you may be meeting.

As I say, those are common perspectives that we have, and common ways of relating to a challenge and illness, and there's a lot of truth to it. I don't want to dismiss this. For me personally, having chronic pain, there are definitely moments that I see myself reacting and seeing this as just unwanted, undesirable. I don't want it; I'd rather it go away. But through the dharma practice, I know that I can also open myself up to see this with some new perspectives.

One of the perspectives that you may be seeing this through is that of an opportunity to pause and to look. Can an illness, a difficulty, or a challenge be seen as an opportunity to pause and look, maybe to slow down? Like driving through a stretch of rumble strips. A friend shared this image last week; it was very vivid and stuck in my head, so today I'm going to share this as well: driving through rumble strips.

Many people can probably relate to the fact that nowadays, a lot of people are living their lives running really fast. Maybe from grade school times all the way up to when we can no longer run at fast speeds, whether due to illnesses or due to a pandemic like what we have right now. We know that sometimes even when people are ill, they won't stop running at very high speeds. They won't stop speeding ahead. A lot of times, this non-stop speeding ahead in life is a lifelong pattern that we've developed and conditioned ourselves to do.

When we hit a challenge like this that may be outside of our own control, can we use this as an opportunity to stop, to pause, to slow down, and then to look? Look at the situation, look at how our lives have been for us. I know for many people, our fast-speed life can look like Google Calendar—our lives controlled by our calendar. Is your life like a schedule? "Well, half an hour after this we're gonna do half an hour of this." Is your life spacious? Do you feel some ease with the life that you're living?

Can we see an illness as an opportunity to pause and take a look?

A Guide from Beyond

Another way of seeing is, can an illness or a challenge be seen as a gift bestowed upon us? I know in my cancer group there was a person who oftentimes shared an outpouring sense of gratitude and love that she received, and she also transmitted that to whoever she met. For me, it felt like a gift that she'd been offering to everyone. Can this be a gift to us?

Rumi, in his famous poem The Guest House, invited us to see our experience as a guide from beyond. Can an illness be seen as a guide from beyond? What can we learn from those experiences?

It doesn't mean that we always have to see things these ways, but rather, when we begin to open up to new ways of seeing, and they become available to us, it can begin to soften some of the old beliefs that we may have about how we're always supposed to relate to our experiences. Especially when everyone else around us seems to be relating to our experiences the same way, it reinforces the beliefs that we may have had. But when we begin to open ourselves up to some of these new perspectives that we may not have had the chance to touch or see, it begins to soften and loosen our grip on some of the fixed ideas that we may have. Over time, we'll get to learn some wiser ways of seeing our experiences that can really support us and open us up to some sense of well-being.

Relating to Momentary Experiences

Now, the statement I made about how every experience in life can be seen in endless ways applies to both big, significant events as well as momentary experiences. After all, in our mindfulness training and the mindfulness practice that many of us engaged in just this last half an hour of guided meditation, we're practicing ways of seeing. We're practicing seeing our momentary experiences.

For example, take a moment of anxiety that bubbles up inside of us. The immediate, habitual tendency of relating to anxiety that just bubbled up—like intimidation; I had a moment of intimidation because I've never done this YouTube live streaming before—the habitual reaction could be, "I don't like this. It's not wanted here. I'd rather get rid of it." Or it could be something like, "Oh, I'm an anxious person. I'm always anxious."

But can there be other ways of seeing? A moment of anxiety could be seen just as a wave of emotion, a wavelet of emotion that's bubbling up inside of us. We can also drop into our body to feel how that feels. A moment of anxiety may be sensed as some tightness around the neck and the shoulders, or some tension on the face. As we begin to open up our inner vision and inner awareness to closely observe these kinds of experiences, we may begin to see that our bodies naturally want to relax. There is natural body movement towards relaxation; it takes a lot of work to hold tension in the body. We may also see that as the body relaxes, anxieties might fade away.

Those can be different ways of seeing our experiences without adding additional stories that we may be telling ourselves, or more complexities that we may be adding.

As we pay attention to the momentary anxiety, there may also be other perspectives about the movements of anxiety. This momentary emotion comes and goes, and it comes and goes not under my control. So maybe opposite to what we may have believed in—which is "I'm always angry" or "I'm always anxious, I'm always fearful"—it's simply a process that comes and goes.

As we pay more attention to just this simple experience of having anxiety, we may also begin to open up to see that the arising of these kinds of emotions is not totally random, and the fading away of these kinds of emotions is not totally random. There are patterns and conditions that lead to the anxiety coming about, and then there are patterns and conditions that lead to the fading away of anxiety.

I think many of us probably have had this kind of experience before: in the moment of anxiety, when you see it's present, you may begin to notice that if you try harder to tinker with your anxiety—trying to fix it, get rid of it, or escape from it—you just get more and more panicky. It just worsens the situation. But if you simply notice that anxiety is present and drop into your body, this very simple observation, without adding any additional juicy stories on top of it, will begin to allow our emotions to move about. Emotions are basically movements in the body, movements in the mind. It's in their nature to move about, but only if we give a lot of space for them to move about.

You may begin to see this pattern: our self-centered control and manipulation tends to worsen our anxiety and fear, while simple and kind mindfulness can begin to allow our emotions to move through. Learning to observe and see things in these new ways can free us from getting knotted up with our experience.

The Buddhist Framework of Seeing

In the Buddhist teachings, finding skillful ways of seeing our experience is a key part of dharma training, and it begins by pausing and stopping to look. In the first sutta in the Middle Length Discourses^[2], the Buddha talked about several categories of people based on how they perceived their experiences.

The first category is untrained, ordinary people. They would see their physical body—which is made up of earth, water, air, and fire (the material elements)—as, "This is my body, this is me, I am this." The Buddha calls this the category of people who are untrained; their minds are untrained. There's a habitual way of seeing everything through the lens of "I, me, mine." They take delight in this, which leads to much stress, or the Pali word that we oftentimes say, dukkha^[3].

The second category that the Buddha talked about are those people who are undergoing the dharma training. This is like all of us who are practicing the dharma but have not completed training. To them, they see their experiences just as experiences. They relate to the elemental, material aspects of being just as such: the solid bones as bones, the air we breathe as just air, without adding more complications to it. They know they should not perceive this as "I, me, mine," because that leads to a lot of stress.

If you're really interested in exploring those different, new ways of seeing, just even try this as you breathe. Can you precisely define when exactly the air that you breathe in has become you? And as you breathe out, when is the air no longer you? In your lived experience, can you define this? For me, I can't find those kinds of boundaries. So how can we claim that the air we're breathing is mine, it is me, I am this? These new ways of seeing can break us free from the habitual ways of relating to our experiences, from a fixed set of views and fixed set of boundaries.

Another category the Buddha talked about is those who have completed the training, who are the Arahants^[4]. They do not perceive or see their experiences as "I, me, mine," and the boundaries have completely dissolved for them. I feel quite inspired by this because when the boundaries dissolve, if we really care deeply about our own well-being, how can we not care about nature around us and the people around us? After all, we can't find the boundaries so solidly.

Keeping Our Inner Vision Wide Open

I'll close by saying that the different ways of seeing are not things that we can control or manipulate in our head. We can't beat ourselves up and say, "We better see these things in some new, different ways." Rather, it's a process for us to open our inner vision up, to become available, so that when new perspectives emerge in us, we begin to see them.

An analogy I use to describe this is like when you go to the optometrist to do your peripheral vision test. When you put your eye in front of that little scope to do your peripheral vision test, you don't fix your vision on any specific thing. You keep your vision open, so that if anything flickers through, you will see it. Cultivating different perspectives is kind of like that: we keep our inner vision wide open to allow different perspectives to come about.

May we all keep our inner vision wide open, and may we all learn the wise ways of seeing that set us free.

Thank you, everybody.