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Be, See, Free, We (6 of 10) Stability Reveals Inconstancy

So what I was saying is that the subject of today's talk is impermanence, inconstancy, and that this is one of the three characteristics, one of the three insights that give insight meditation its name. For the purposes of a deep spiritual freedom—freedom of the heart—Vipassana practice brings us to a point where we're able to have a deep perception of these three different characteristics in such a way that they are catalysts for liberation. They help free us from the ways in which we are caught, ways in which we resist, the ways that we are pushing things away, and the ways that we don't let the free flow of life, emotions, and experience move through us. Also, they free us from the ways in which we interfere with our own natural maturation process as we move to greater and greater freedom.

And so there are three characteristics that are said to characterize all experiences. I use the word "experience" very carefully because there's often a tendency in Theravada Buddhism to say that this characterizes all things: "Everything is impermanent. Everything is not-self." But it's not quite right to call it "everything." It's rather how we perceive and how we experience everything. That's what we're focusing on when we're doing insight practice. We're not making a metaphysical claim or a physics claim about what's out there, what the nature of reality is. Rather, it's the nature of how we experience reality, how we participate with reality, how we react to reality. That is where we have deep insight.

To really see that the way we take in, experience, perceive, and participate in the world has a deep characteristic of being changeable, impermanent, and inconstant—constantly flowing—has something to do with the idea that it's stressful. It's unsatisfactory in a certain way. There's a certain kind of suffering in the nature of experiencing itself. And there's something about the nature of experiencing and perception that is not something to take as a self.

So this focus on experiencing, rather than seeing reality, points to the intimacy of this practice. This practice is something that's very close in, very intimate, and integral to the ways in which we live and are in this world. And these things are seen as being constantly changing.

Now, it's not unusual for many people who are not Buddhists to also emphasize impermanence and the changing nature of things. Heraclitus in ancient Greece said you cannot step in the same river twice. What human beings will do is they maybe don't step in the same river twice—or they try to—but sometimes we try to dam the river and stop it and resist it from changing. Sometimes we appropriate parts of it and take a bucket, pick up the water, go back to the village and say, "Look, I have the river." But it's not the river; it's just the water. The river stays where it is and keeps flowing. You can't stop the flow.

Some people run away from impermanence, change, and the river of time. But you can't really do that. There's no place you can go. You can't go to the desert. Many years ago, some friends of mine went to Yucca Valley. They stood out in the desert during a big earthquake, and they could watch the desert floor pick up in waves across the plains. So they hadn't gotten away from how things change.

For some religions, and for some people—Buddhists even—their solution to the world of impermanence, which can be a world of tremendous suffering, is to transcend it. It is to really leave it behind. Maybe not by going to the desert, but by going to some kind of transcendent realm of experience, transcendent realms of the mind that are really separated and removed.

In a sense, the equation they're making is that the world of impermanence equals suffering. So you have to get rid of impermanence, to get away from it in order to not suffer. The Buddhist equation is that the world of impermanence is not the problem. What is a problem for human life is the attachments we have to it, the clingings we have. For the Buddhist, the equation is: impermanence times attachment equals suffering. If you don't want to have the suffering, the idea is that you don't remove the world of impermanence, because that takes everything away. Rather, you remove attachment from the equation. Then the world of impermanence doesn't lead to suffering.

So the recognition that this world is impermanent, changing, and inconstant is fairly common, and we have many different relationships to it. Sometimes we will celebrate it when the flowers of spring come forth. Sometimes we grieve it when the flowers wilt and pass away in the fall. We celebrate the birth of a child, often without the recognition that with the birth comes someone who is going to die—that inherent to anything that is born is that it will die. It's not a crime; it's not unnatural for that to happen. It's part of the natural process in its own way. Just like flowers come and go, there's so much change. Some of it we celebrate, some of it we grieve. Some things pass and we celebrate their passing. We've been sick and then we're no longer sick, and we're so glad that things change and become impermanent.

The Buddhist practice point of view is to learn to have a very realistic attention, a very realistic recognition of the nature of this world that we live in, the nature of ourselves, and our experiences. The idea is to have clear sight, the clear seeing of how things actually are. That's neither seeing with rose-colored glasses, nor seeing with tinted glasses that obscure our vision, nor with angry glasses or hateful glasses. But to be able to really see with clear glasses, with clear perceptions that are not colored by our preferences or our emotional reactivity. Just to really see.

And so that certainly means we have to learn to see the changing nature of reality. We have to witness it as people do in Vipassana meditation, putting themselves very closely in touch with their direct experience, the intimacy of how perceptions, thoughts, and emotions arise and pass. It's a very intimate thing to do this Vipassana practice. It is an intimacy that's not quite possible if we're living in our stories about the past or stories of the future. Or if we're living in the ideas that we've somehow locked in place because of something that happened in the past. There are people who lock into the idea that they have to be a certain way. Or they are locked into the idea that they have to now be angry at someone because they can never let go of that anger. Or they're locked into their grief; that's who they are and they cannot ever not be that, or there's no way out. Some people identify strongly with being a victim. Some people identify strongly with being the one in charge, dominant, and powerful. There are all kinds of ways that people try to hold on to some idea of who they are, some story of what is, was, or will be, that in some ways doesn't really allow us to ride the river of change, to see it as it unfolds moment by moment.

One of the functions of the meditation practice that we're doing is to see clearly enough that we can see through the veil, the filter of the stories that we live by, the identities we hold on to and grasp, the emotions that we're stuck in. To begin to see below that level. Below that is the constant world of how things arise and pass. How sensations, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and emotions flow. The river of experience that you can never step in twice is constantly moving and flowing.

On the way to that is beginning to understand how we resist that change. How we stay away from this intimacy and closeness to how things come and go, arise and pass. That is usually where we feel stuck, where we suffer, where we feel stress, where we feel contracted, where we feel small, where we feel somehow removed from our experience. Sometimes very dramatically disassociated, disconnected, lost, or confused. As we sit and meditate, or as mindfulness grows, we start seeing how we are resisting the river. Or how we are doing something with the river, expecting it to be one way and not another way, or only looking at things from the point of view of what's lost or what we can gain. We're not really just being in the flow and the change of this moment by moment as it actually unfolds.

It's a beautiful, profound, and deep—but difficult—process to really open up and allow the flow of the river of life to move through us over and over again. One of the reasons for that is that, for many of us, not being open to this intimate arising and passing of phenomena has meant we've bottlenecked or repressed all kinds of unresolved emotions and feelings. Things that have never gotten complete, or things that we hold in check. There can be deep grief, deep sadness that for some reason or other is not allowed to flow. Grief that has been stuck. Anger which has somehow been stuck almost into our character. Or fear, which is ever-present in people. Somehow we've resisted, somehow we've bottled it up or picked up the bucket and gone around holding it.

Part of this practice, then, is to feel and see where these difficult places of being stuck reside in us. This is where the kind regard of mindfulness, the generosity towards ourselves and our experience, the compassion and kindness by which we can hold all this—realizing that life is difficult for everyone—allows us to slowly do the powerful work of holding our pain or suffering in kindness. So that that pain and suffering we have can begin to flow, move, and break up. The hard crusts can dissolve. The ice can thaw. The fires that burn inside of us can stop having fuel added to them, and they can cool down.

This process of opening to our inner life—the depths of things that sometimes people haven't opened to for decades—we learn slowly with time through mindfulness that it's a trustable process. Slowly, bit by bit, maybe with the support of others, we can learn that bringing a certain way of mindfulness to our experience is trustable. We can be with it and allow it to flow through us. That's one of the great gifts that I feel I've received from this mindfulness practice: the ability to have a deep trust that when things are difficult, mindfulness is the way out. Mindfulness really supports and helps in times when I can't figure it out. There's something about being really present and mindful in a non-reactive way, opening to the situation. It's amazing how many times something begins to find its way to healing and resolution, simply by trusting this mindfulness that opens.

On the way there, it really helps to have cultivated a lot of stability, a steadiness, an ability to persevere in a kind, steady way so we don't get knocked off the road or off track. Cultivating stability in practice is kind of like a sailboat that has a deep keel with a lot of ballast. The heavy weight of the keel keeps the sailboat from being knocked over and capsizing. It makes the movements of the boat in the wind and the waves slow and manageable. The captain of the boat has time to be responsive—letting out the sail, turning the boat a little bit, all the different things needed to keep the boat upright. It's really hard to tip a boat over when that ballast is strong.

To create stability that becomes a ballast—where no matter how difficult life gets, we don't get blown away or tipped over by it—gives us the ability to stand, open, and experience it. It can take quite a while to learn that stability. Meditation is one of the places to do that. If we know we need that, then we can use meditation for that purpose. We can feel ourselves grounded, rooted in the place where we're meditating. We can feel ourselves rooted in our body. Sometimes maybe it's just feeling our legs, feeling our feet on the ground. The legs and the feet are kind of a neutral place for some people, or a place of confidence, or less complicated than other places in the body. Just feeling the rootedness, the groundedness of the legs on the ground or on the floor as we sit and meditate helps us stay in the present moment and not be swept away by the thoughts and emotions that might come.

As we become more steady and stable, it comes along with becoming calmer, with the ability to be more at ease with our experience. As the mind becomes calmer, there's less discursive thought, less story-making, and it tends to bring a greater intimacy to our real moment-to-moment experience. What's happening here for ourselves? And that can come with new waves or new emotions, new experiences that come—more sadness, more fear, more anger. This is not a mistake, but this is slowly learning to open to the river of change and how things change. Learning how not to block the river, how not to resist it, how not to run away from it. Slowly learning it's safe to let the river run through.

Sometimes if there's a lot of sadness, that river running through means that there will be endless tears, and there might be a long period of just crying—a backlog of tears that need to happen. To allow this stuff to flow and to be free with all this is certainly healing emotionally, but it allows things to settle even more. As the practice continues over months and years, there's a greater settling, quieting, and steadying that goes on.

And that steadying and stability, as it gets stronger, supports us to see more and more the changing nature of phenomena. How that is liberating is that as we start seeing how perceptions, thoughts, and emotions arise and pass—how all these things are a kaleidoscope of shifting and changing things—it becomes clearer and clearer where we are clinging. Where we're resisting, where we're pulling back, where we're making ourselves really small, where we're getting angry and blaming, or where we're criticizing ourselves. All this stuff that we do is what in Buddhism is called attachment.

The more we can see and allow for things to change, the more we're able to start noticing where the drag is. If you're in a boat and you put your hand in the water, it slows down the boat a little bit. Attachments of all kinds put a drag on things and slow things down. We start feeling and seeing that. And as we get more and more stable, more and more still, it feels so good. It becomes obvious that what is better than clinging is letting go of the clinging. Holding on to something needing to always be exactly that way. Holding on to "me being exactly this way." "This is who I have to be. This is who I am." Holding on to a pleasure, an opinion, a story, a preference.

We can feel the unsatisfactoriness of that clinging, that holding on. And that's how this deep insight into impermanence is a catalyst and support. If we see the clinging, then we might at some point be willing to trust relaxing. To not always go around with a fist, but to trust that it's okay to open the fist of the heart and mind. To relax and open. But it only really works to open to the world of change and inconstancy if we have the inner support to do so.

So it is important to cultivate those inner supports. For today, the topic was stability, steadiness, a capacity for a certain kind of stillness, a capacity for imperturbability, non-reactivity. To be imperturbable can also mean to be "non-botherable"—not to be bothered by things so much. Not to interpret everything as being so significant, where every little wave that happens is interpreted with meaning and purpose and taken personally. But to be quiet and become more like an open window that lets the wind go right through. Or an open frame where the birds fly through and there's nothing that blocks them.

It turns out that what blocks things from flowing through this emptiness—what in Zen they call the "Gateless Gate"—is in fact our attachments. When we have experiences that we don't like, are troubled by, or that we want a lot, they kind of stop at the places where we get attached, where we hold on or resist. They get stuck there and they hurt. But as we become quieter and more open, things still come and go, but there's nothing to hit. There are no attachments, and the coming and going starts flowing more freely.

In terms of our emotional life, in some ways it becomes richer, and in some ways there are fewer highs and lows. The kaleidoscope of emotions still occurs, maybe in an even bigger range, but the intense highs and lows often have a lot to do with our attachments, our preferences, our identifications, and the ways in which we overreact and let the pendulum swing from one side to the other. With greater calmness, stability, and openness, the heart becomes porous. The heart is an open window.

The river of life can flow and be very meaningful. Spring and the flowers that grow can be very significant, deepening, enhancing, and maturing for a freedom of heart. And when the flowers fall and wither in the autumn, that also has a place in the open heart. It opens and reminds us of a place of freedom—the place where that too is included in the kaleidoscope of what it means to be a human being.

Freedom does not mean in Buddhism that we don't feel. It means that we feel freely, allowing the feelings to come and go completely freely. If we do that, the tendency is that our feelings, emotions, and responses don't get exaggerated. They tend not to be artificially prolonged. Sometimes these things are prolonged for decades because we keep fueling them by holding on to something. The heart's freedom is a richer state.

It's a little unfortunate that in Buddhist English we most commonly translate the Pali^[1] word anicca^[2] as impermanence. Impermanence for many people means that things are here now and they're going to disappear. The primary catalyst or insight for liberation is not the intellectual recognition that things will pass ("So don't get attached"). That's a little bit too coarse, or even callous, I think. Rather, it is to notice the inconstancy of moment-to-moment experience.

Inconstancy means that things don't necessarily have to disappear once and for all, but there's a way in which things come and go in perception. In this way, even the same thing can repeatedly reappear. Even something like physical pain. When we have a story about the pain, when we tighten up around resisting it, that pain can seem like it's constant and permanent. It can be reassuring to be told, "It's all impermanent; sooner or later it will pass." And then you reply, "Yes, it better be sooner."

But the inconstancy of the pain is that if you don't have a story, you don't have resistance to it, and you really feel it very intimately, the pain will be felt as a kaleidoscope of little sparks of sensations coming and going, arising and passing. Or you'll be with it for a few moments, and then you hear a sound and your attention goes there, and then you'll have a thought, and then you'll be aware that you're hungry, and then you come back and you're aware of the pain. The way we perceive is inconstant. Things don't necessarily have to disappear once and for all; it's the perception of them that's moving, changing, and shifting.

To begin to rest in that river of perception—how things arise and pass—does take a fair amount of stillness and quiet. The paradox of this practice is that the more stable we become, the more still our awareness becomes, the more we see that everything else is changing, flowing, and moving. Seeing both of them together is what is liberating.

As I talked about earlier, one of the things we release when we really see how inconstant things are is the stories we project onto our experiences. All the projections of judgments, bias, preference, and the past that we paint on top of the experience of the present. In Buddhism, this is called the "signless liberation," which I think in modern English we could call the "projectionless liberation." It's a liberation that comes when we no longer project our ideas on top of our experience.

Finally, I'll say that the insight into inconstancy, and all the others as well, are not things you should try hard to perceive. You shouldn't strain and try to see how everything is constantly changing. It's more like revelation. You're doing your practice to create adequate stability and stillness so that the inconstant nature of experience reveals itself to you.

You don't want to get ahead of yourself. Just keep wanting to learn how to be in the present moment. Learn how to hold yourself steady. Learn how to take refuge in your body and your heart's ability to be stable. Can you find the stability that's within you and grow it and enhance it? Can you find whatever stability is there and make it a resource and a support for you?

As you do that, I hope you'll feel the wonderfulness of this intimacy, closeness, and settledness that can happen as we free ourselves from the frozen river. It thaws and opens again, and we allow things to flow. With time you'll see the inconstant nature of phenomena. The more you see it, the more that will support you to see the deeper and deeper ways in which you still cling and hold on. It's a wonderful, profound, and happiness-producing process of being free of our clinging and attachment, and letting go.

So for this retreat that we're doing, please trust yourself. Trust your practice. Trust mindfulness. Trust that you have within you the resources and capacities for stability and steadiness. See if you can drop into it. See if you can find it. See if you can be supported by it. And in doing so, the story-making mind, the reactive mind, the discursive thinking mind, maybe can finally rest and become quieter. As it becomes quieter, maybe there's more intimacy with the present moment.

Thank you.

Q&A

I look forward to this inconstant retreat—these sittings and teachings come and go, and now this one will pass. What will arise again at 7:30 is our next sitting. For those of you who are new to retreats, if you would like to come at 7:00, there's a different Zoom room you can go to (it's on your announcement page) to have a little more discussion and Q&A. If you'd rather practice or just have a nice contemplative time over the next two hours, please do so.

For people on the retreat, there are also some extra spaces for practice discussion. If some of you would like to have a second practice discussion during these three days, you can go back to the sign-up system and look for a blank space. The link is on the announcement page.

Thank you very much. And thank you to those of you on YouTube. I hope this was nice for you. I'm looking over here at my YouTube laptop that has a screen. You're here, but I should look at you! It's a little bit awkward to have you come into a retreat where there's a whole other context of what I'm talking about with people. But I thought it provided continuity with the morning talks this week, and that's the only place it was announced, so I trust that most of you have the context to come here. I appreciate that you came and that you're here.

If any of you have anything you want to ask, maybe one or two of you... I don't have much time, but I would like to give you a chance to ask something or respond. I appreciate all the thank yous, and we'll do this again for the next two days at 4:00, and you're welcome to come. Sometimes it takes a little while to go from here over to the screen—there's about a 15-second delay. So we'll see if you have one or two questions, and I'll see what I can do that's supportive for you.

Q: How do you know what to commit to in the middle of inconstancy—relationships, jobs?

Gil: Ah, it's a question of commitment. Some people might assume that commitment is not allowing things to change and move. But I think there can be vows or commitments where we're committed to what is most true, most beneficial, and most inspiring. It's very easy to get derailed, but to know, "I'm committed to caring for someone," "I'm committed to love," "I'm committed to freedom." It's not so much an attachment to it as it is a reminder and a commitment to keep looking for where that flows from. It comes from our freedom, from what's deep, from what we think is most important and valuable for us.

Sometimes we can have a commitment to stay close to the world of change. Maybe that sounds like a bit of a paradox, but commitments don't have to be attachments. Commitments can really be a way of staying close, working towards, and staying engaged in bringing forth something that's really beautiful and valuable.

Well, I think it's time for me to go. I thank you for coming, and I really appreciate that this was nice for you. Maybe I'll see some of you tomorrow morning. Thank you.