Intuitive Mind and Grasping Mind

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Intuitive Mind and Grasping Mind. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Tuere Sala at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 22, 2021. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Kevin: Thank you for being with us everybody, and thank you, Tuere, for joining us today, sitting with our sangha. Tuere Sala is a guiding teacher at the Seattle Meditation Society and she's the founding teacher of the Capitol Hill Meditation Group. She's a retired prosecuting attorney who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years. Tuere believes that urban meditation is the foundation for today's practitioner's path to liberation. She's inspired by bringing the dharma to non-traditional places and is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma, and difficulty sitting still. Tuere has been teaching since 2010 and will be completing the four-year teacher training program through the Insight Meditation Society this May. Thank you, Tuere.

Tuere Sala: Thank you, Kevin.

Intuitive Mind and Grasping Mind

It is kind of strange coming here giving this talk to you. In some respects, I've been at the center so many times through the teacher training process, so I feel at home. And then there's also this uniqueness that I don't really know most of you. You may have seen me on a retreat or something, but I don't really know most of you. So there's a trust here that happens in the dharma that is very, very touching to me.

I think that's what I want to talk a little bit about. I want to talk a little bit about, as practitioners, why it's so important that we practice taking the time to come to this present moment, here and now. Why do we even bother with all this meditation? I mean, we can do all kinds of things to settle ourselves down. Some of us run, some of us do martial arts, some of us do crafts like woodworking, reading, and all kinds of things that we do to kind of settle ourselves down.

So why the meditation? What is it that we're trying to do here with meditation? And from my perspective, what are urban practitioners trying to do with meditation? We can look at monastics and think, "Oh, they're headed right towards enlightenment and awakening," but not us, right? We're just meditating for some other reason. I'd like to share a little bit about why I think we should meditate, and why we should treat it with respect and a level of sincerity because of what it can ultimately help us see.

Maybe I'll introduce myself a little bit to you, so you know a little bit about where I've come from. I grew up in a housing project in Seattle, and I did not grow up in a Buddhist context at all. My parents were conservative Christians and very strict. One might even go so far as to point out all the abuse that I went through when I was a child with that strictness, but it was just a very dysfunctional family. My parents were very rigid on education, and so I went all the way to law school.

It was after law school, really, that I failed the bar twice. When I failed it the first time, I thought there was something wrong with the bar. But when I failed it the second time, I thought there was something wrong with me. As abusive or dysfunctional as our lives can be when we're growing up, you don't know that dysfunctionality exists. So I did not know of the dysfunction until I failed that bar the second time. Somehow the whole world dropped out. Somehow everything I thought I was walking towards got disrupted, and I found the dharma.

Well, I should say I think the dharma found me, because I think it was probably looking for me for a while, and I finally connected to this nagging thing in the back of my mind. It cannot just be about this. There's got to be something more than just this working hard, striving, striving, getting to one thing. We talk about this all the time, but no matter how much we talk about it, it still seems like we are still doing and living in the same pattern.

What I've come to understand over the years—I mean, finding the dharma, I did ultimately pass the bar, became a prosecutor, spent my life as a prosecutor—but over the years of practice, I cannot tell you that my practice ultimately came to where I was pointing it towards. But there's a way in which practice is doing something to us, and that's what I really want to point to. What is it that it's doing to us? What is it that it's allowing in us, that if we give way to it, we allow the practice to do what the practice is intended to do?

You know how our bodies are intended to eat food and digest food. We could eat cardboard, and it would digest the cardboard, but it wouldn't really get the point. Babies don't know the difference between food and non-food, so they just eat anything. You sort of have to learn what food is, but when you learn what food is, you can eat bad food, you can eat good food, you can eat healthy food, or unhealthy food. I know plenty of old folks in my family that I don't think ate any vegetables, or if they did eat vegetables, it had so much meat in it that you couldn't call it a vegetable—you might have to call it a vegetable-meat mix. Even with that, they can live a long, long time. And then some people can eat very healthy food and then they don't live very long at all.

There's a way in which our body does what it does because it is the nature of the body to do what it does, and it doesn't have anything to do with you or me. And there is a thing that's happening with meditation that, if we allow it to happen, we can really see a flock of blackbirds taking a wide turn and be astonished by it.

So here's a framing: we live in a closed-circuit mind. We don't live in a mind that's wide open and fluid. We live in a mind that's pretty much guarded by our grasping mind that says, "This is right and this is wrong. This is good and this is bad. This is pleasant, this is unpleasant." It has very strict rules and associations. Things come together in our mind and everything makes sense, and we feel comfortable.

Actually, the stability that we feel in life isn't coming from life; it's coming from habit. It's coming from our habitual way of doing things. I feel still because I wake up in my own house, and I have the habit of seeing that door, that wall, that kitchen. Everything looks the same, so I feel solid, secure, and steady. It's the habit of it. And as soon as something outside of that habit happens, I've lost my stability.

Which is why this pandemic was so unnerving. I remember when it first happened, I didn't really believe I was going to be stuck in the house for a year. "Okay, a few weeks. Okay, I can do a month." I realized it was going to take a little bit longer for this to clear out. But then, months after months after months, and now I have found I have the habit of staying here. So now the mind is like, "Well, I don't know if I want to go out so much." I mean, I want to go out, but there's all this apprehension about going out, even if I could go out, because we have a mind that is built on habit, and that habit becomes our stability.

But that habit is not real. It is built on sand. I like that the Buddha would use examples of how insubstantial it is. He said it is like bubbles that rise when water is falling in a pond or a puddle. We don't think of those bubbles as being substantial. I'm not going to put my faith in those bubbles holding true; it's insubstantial. It makes sense. Or foam that comes off of the ocean. I had never seen that kind of foam before, the example that he uses is sea foam. I had never seen that kind of foam before, but once when we were at IRC the first time and went down to the beach area, I saw this foam, and I really did think it was substantial until you get up on it, and then it's nothing. It disappears. You can see that it's insubstantial. A mirage on a hot road—you can see and know it's not real, that's not really water. Or a magician—we kind of know these things, but yet we believe in our habit as if it is substantial, as if this is reality and this is the truth.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, to see this insubstantiality, to see how untrue it is. It takes a steady mind. It takes a level of curiosity and interest, and it takes a soft heart. You know, the non-judging acceptance, soft heart, steadiness, and this interest. That's what you're cultivating when we meditate. We're cultivating a level of seed that allows us to steady the gaze, that allows us to soften into a level of kindness, and that creates an interest in whatever is happening. So it is less of the doing to fix the meditation, and more of a watching.

I'm pretty sure that all of us on this call, in hearing this talk, could say oftentimes when you're sitting there, "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what it is." Because we're taking a mind that is used to setting its understanding in habit, that's used to having labels and associations and knowing things as it knows, and we are exposing it to a vast, constantly moving dharma. The dharma is moving, and our grasping mind is rigid. So the world is impermanent, it's moving all the time, and we're taking a mind that's used to labeling things and knowing things, and we're putting it in a place where we want things to just move and flow. It's not going to make any sense.

Well, I should say it's not going to make any sense to the grasping part of our mind, but it makes total sense to the embodied part of our mind. Because the embodied part of our mind is present. It's in the present moment. It knows things are insubstantial. It knows and understands the three characteristics: impermanence, subject to change (which is going to bring dukkha^[1]), and that it's not personal. It knows this. So we are spending time learning how to let go of that grasping mind and relax into, get to know, and begin to trust this more intuitive, embodied mind. And the intuitive, embodied mind allows us to see things like the blackbirds turning.

It's not easy to tap into this intuitive mind. You know this because when we sit, the grasping mind pretty much gets in the way with all of its talking, and talking, and rehearsing, and planning, and thinking, thinking, thinking. It's got plenty of stuff to say, and it waits until we're still to say it all.

So, in order for us to access this intuitive mind, we need to be kind to the grasping mind. Because I grew up with a lot of trauma, I also grew up with a lot of dysfunction, and I had a very aggressive, angry mind. It was pretty anxious. This whole meditation thing, it's way too fluid for my mind. I grew up in a house full of chaos, so it wanted everything to be non-chaotic. And of course, sitting in meditation can raise a lot of chaos in the beginning.

I used to have this habit of being nice to my dysfunctional, what I would call my "trauma mind," because it was always thinking, "This is the end, this is the end, this is the end." The way that I would help soothe it is the way you would help soothe kids, and I would thank it for whatever it said. I would just say, "Thank you," and then I would ask into the moment again. So I began to use asking questions. There are all kinds of practices that you can get trained in; I just made this up for myself, but it does do wonders. I would pick something that seems hard to see, like "soft." It's hard to see soft when you have a mind that is pretty rigid. It really doesn't believe soft is around, maybe some pillow, but it has complaints even about the pillow's softness level.

So I would ask my mind, "Where's soft?" And it would say, "You know there's no soft. We meet so often here because it's just too hard, but there's no soft." And I would say, "Thank you," and I'd ask again, "Where is soft?" My teacher in Seattle, Rodney Smith^[2], used to do this in little discussion groups, and so I started doing it with myself. "Where is it?" And I'd just say, "Thank you," and then ask it again.

I learned something from doing this that has helped my practice immensely. What we're trying to see in this awakening—what we're trying to see in the Four Noble Truths (that there is suffering, that there is a cause for that suffering, and that there is a way leading out of that suffering), and the Eightfold Path itself, all of these list things that we've learned—they're all very difficult to see and experience because we have a mind that's set in habit and set in stone in the way it thinks.

So when I would start asking a rhetorical question where there's no real answer to it, and began to have the mind stumble over trying to find that hardened answer, I learned something. If our grasping mind—the part of us that needs to know—is not pushed, if you're kind to it but you keep asking a question, eventually it will ask the intuitive mind for the answer.

This is a strange phenomenon, which is why I think some practices have you asking pointed questions over and over and over. What ends up happening—this is the best way I can describe it—is when we're sitting in meditation, and if you, in your kindness, keep coming back to the same anchor. Not forcing the mind to come back, but just in a kind way, like, "Thank you for that planning, but we're going to come back to this moment. Thank you for that, come back." I think the mind is going in the back to the intuitive body and saying, "Hey, what is going on there? What is she asking for? What do they want? I keep telling them there's no soft around, why do you keep asking me? Do you know what soft is?"

Because if you keep asking, "What is soft? Is there soft? Where is it?" and you don't get mad at what the mind says, you just say, "Thank you," and you ask again, what you end up experiencing is the felt sense of soft. And all of a sudden you feel softness everywhere. Because softness is not something you can intellectually know; it's something that we feel. A lot of the dharma that we are talking about is a felt sense experience, not an intellectual concept.

And if you try to force your mind to understand it, it doesn't make any sense. It will keep trying to create an image of what it is that you want in your mind. Like when we're trying to get still, and we've been still before, so we're trying to get to that, and the mind will try to recreate it. But it'll constantly tell you, "Well, we can't get still because you need to solve that problem. You need to fix this. If you would get this done, then we could get still." And it's constantly planning, preparing, rehearsing, doing all these things in service of: one day we are going to get to that moment when you were still, and that's what it's trying to get to, but you've got all this mess in the way.

So instead, you're trying to question into: "Is stillness here now?" And it says, "No, it's not here. Look, we got to get through this." "Oh, thank you for all that. Is stillness here now?" "No, it's not. I'm saying I'm not still." "Okay, I'll say it again. There is stillness here."

The best example I can give for those of us that are older is The Karate Kid. What Mr. Miyagi did with the Karate Kid is what we're doing with the mind. If you haven't seen The Karate Kid or if it's been a long time, you've got to look at it. What you are learning to do is to embody the moment. Not kind of 'know' what's going on; you don't need to know. Over the years of my practice, I've learned to shift my awareness from this kind of knowing where I'm at, controlling what I see, knowing, knowing, knowing, to this more intuitive knowing that is much more trusting.

So even though the mind didn't understand the pandemic when I came into it, and doesn't understand what we're going to do now that we're going to start having vaccinations, and "Am I really going to leave, and what does that mean? Am I going to go back to flying? What does that mean, airplane? I don't even know really." Even though all of that's happening, inside is kind, it's still, and it's curious about the whole thing. All of it.

It's not that I am entirely like that. I still have the trauma mind from my childhood, but I just have a relationship with the intuitive body I was born with. And that aspect of me is very strong, very kind, and very interested and curious about everything. It's in all of us. It's not like it's in me because I got some special gift. If I had some special gift, I missed it when I was growing up. It's in all of us, but we have to sit and learn to access it because we have a grasping mind that is hell-bent on running the show.

So gradually, gradually, gradually, we keep introducing the grasping mind to this intuitive knowing, my intuitive embodied mind. And that mind is stronger, more courageous. It's not afraid of mystery. In fact, it probably is less interested in the same old, same old. It's like, "Come on, let's go do something different. Let's go see. Let's notice sounds that we've never heard before."

I'm going to end here on a poem to show you where I think this points to how we do this. How we live with both this grasping mind that is set in stone and controls everything, and this what Buddhadasa^[3] would call "dhamma wisdom," a mind that's very open and vast and can see and penetrate through. This is how we do it. This is called The Second Music by Annie Lighthart:

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing, one below the other, one easier to hear, the other lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard; yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real, this one fades. Yet the notes of it touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in that music without striving or cover. If the truth of our lives is what it is playing, the telling is so soft that this mortal time, this irrevocable change, becomes beautiful.

I stop and stop again to hear the second music. I hear the children in the yard, a train, birds. All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.

So let's just sit quietly for a moment.

Guided Meditation

[Music / Quiet Sitting]

Q&A

Thank you so much for your practice and your patience. You're all on Zoom and you're all muted, so you seem so quiet. We'll take a little time for some questions in case people have some. If you have a question, you can use the reactions button to raise your hand and we'll call on you, or you can post your question in chat.

I see one question here about my group. Capitol Hill is in Seattle, Washington, so it's just Capitol Hill Meditation Group if you look online.

I'm going to answer this one question here: "How do I stay consistent with practice?" That's a great question because it might seem like the question is asking, "How do I stay consistent with sitting on the cushion?" But one way I've learned to stay consistent with practice is that practice is constant. I'm never not practicing. If I am cooking dinner, I'm using that as a meditation. I tell people on retreat, and it works really well on these online retreats: everything you do is a meditation. So I just put the word "meditation" on it. If I'm going to the grocery store, I'm doing my "going to the grocery store meditation."

I learned that at retreats, because the only difference between going on a residential retreat and being in your house is that on a residential retreat, all the work you do are called "yogi jobs." You're still really just chopping vegetables or cleaning toilets, but yet it has some kind of honorable integrity to it because on a retreat it's a yogi job. When I would come home, that's when I started calling everything I did a yogi job. Somehow, as an urban practitioner, we have to bring practice into our everyday existence.

When we go on retreat for those of you that have gone on residential retreats on the land, you're kind of tucked in. You get tucked into this little cocoon, and it takes a couple of days to get the mind to let go of the flow of your life. Then you're tucked into this safe space, and you can cultivate this really, really strong internal connection with this intuitive, embodied mind. That's where that samadhi^[4] is, that sense of groundedness we get. And then we take that and we go out into the world, and basically we let it get spent out until we can't take it anymore. We come back to a retreat, we generate some kind of samadhi again, and we use that to go out in the world.

I definitely think we need to come tucked in and cultivate that samadhi. I'll be so glad when we can go back to going on the land and get that sense of tucked-away experience. But as urban practitioners, we've got to bring that tucked-in experience into our everyday world. Probably the greatest thing that's happened to Western practice is this pandemic, where we all had to have these retreats online. If you have not done a retreat online, you've got to do one. You've got to know how easy it is to begin to actually allow your household to be a sanctuary for practice.

When that happens, you're practicing all the time. So it's not, "Let me get this done so I can do something else." You can begin to feel the sense of curiosity, kindness, and this steady mind no matter what you're doing, all the time. That's how I have consistent practice. I stopped thinking that I was only practicing when I'm sitting on the cushion. Something happened when the grasping mind learned that it's okay to stand at the sink and wash dishes and you're practicing—it also won't mind doing it when you sit on the cushion. In fact, it will want to sit on the cushion. "Let's sit on the cushion and try this. Well, we don't have to do anything." So my sitting on the cushion increased because I was willing to get still all over the house doing whatever I was doing. So don't limit your practice to just sitting on the cushion.

Trust that if I bring this stillness, this willingness to have a steadiness of mind to the here and now, a level of kindness about whatever's arising, and this curiosity in it, then that sitting on the cushion part is going to come. Our problem is that we keep losing it because we only think we're practicing on the cushion. If you have dishwashers, there is no better meditation than standing at the sink and washing dishes. You've got to let that dishwasher go, and you've got to take some time to wash the dishes and do nothing else but stand there and wash the dishes. Maybe it's the warm water, I don't know what it is, but there's something about the simplicity of washing dishes. That can be your meditation. Ultimately, you are creating what we cultivate in retreat: continuity between the sitting, the walking, the getting up in between, the eating, and going to bed. You create this continuity. You're doing the same thing when you create that kind of continuity at home.

Kevin: So there's a couple of questions from YouTube, Tuere. One of them comes from Paul: "How best to access that second music?"

Tuere Sala: This is what I was pointing to about the Karate Kid movie. You've got to watch the movie so you can see that what Mr. Miyagi was showing this kid is that he already had access to this karate wisdom. We already have access to that music. It's already there. We have to learn to turn towards it and notice it. Take into consideration that the grasping mind isn't necessarily going to trust it, so I used repeated rhetorical questions to look for it. Even if you like the poem The Second Music, you could ask, "Where is my second music?"

Of course, your grasping mind is going to say, "I don't know, I can't access it, it's not here because there's too much stuff going on right now." You just thank the mind for that and ask again, "Where is that second music?" Listen forward. "Where is it?" Eventually, your mind will ask your intuitive mind, "Where is it? I don't understand, where is it?" And that's when you begin to access it.

You actually have to give the second music layer permission to show itself or reveal itself, and that permission has to be granted almost by the grasping mind. That's why you have to be kind to this grasping mind so that it doesn't overpower your wisdom. That's what we do on retreats: we learn how to give permission for that intuitive mind to be present. So you're doing this in your everyday urban life. Just have patience with it, just be very nice, very kind.

Milarepa^[5] once said something like, "Be more like a lion than a dog chasing after your thoughts." Dogs chase after sticks. One only throws a stick, and a lion, it's like you're not going to be throwing a stick at it. If you treat your mind like a lion, you're going to approach it with a level of kindness and care. You're not going to be treating it like, "Go get it, go get it." Treat the mind with care, thank it, and ask again. Keep asking, and you'll find that second music.

What's the other question?

Kevin: So a couple people are asking about the names and authors of the two poems you read today.

Tuere Sala: It was Blackbirds by Julie Cadwallader-Staub, and the other one is The Second Music by Annie Lighthart.

Kevin: And Eric, our last question, he said, "What helps you to calm the judgments we have of ourselves and others?"

Tuere Sala: Yeah, there's a couple of questions here about a busy mind, and it's along the same line. This is the crux of what I'm pointing to. Judgment is part of the grasping mind. Everybody on this call has a grasping mind. Comparing is part of the grasping mind. The busyness, the overwhelm, all of that energy is part of a grasping mind. It's the same anxiety I had for so long; all of that is part of that mind that's trying to control everything and keep things safe and protected.

That aspect of mind is not designed to harm us. It's actually designed to help us, to remember when things hurt us and keep it in line, to remember what's good and remember what's bad, and keep it tight, know where to go, know how to do it. It's based on surety and a sense of control, and it knows. The problem is that we live in that mind. We live in that mind as if that is the mind that's going to keep us safe, and we're very much afraid of the intuitive, spontaneous, mysterious, "I don't know what's going to go on, let's just take it as we take it."

But that is the nature of the world we live in. We live in a world that's very fluid and mysterious, with a mind that's set in stone, and that is where our conflict lies. So we can't just ditch this judging, comparing, rigid, fixing mind. It's not getting rid of that mind; it's adding in the other mind that we do have. An aspect of us that's just aligned with the way things are. It's trusting, its nature is to be intuitive, its nature is to live in mystery. That aspect of us is existing simultaneously.

So what we're learning to do is: how do I not disrespect this mind, or as we'd say in the hood, "throw shade" on this mind. Instead, we want to give respect and honor to this mind, but know that there is a completely different world, a different way of existing in the moment, and we are going to learn how to touch into that. You do it at home, you do it when you're sitting, you do it when you go on retreat, you just do it as often as you can. You listen for the second music, you listen for the intuitive mind in any given moment, and you never disrespect or get mean to this grasping mind, because it's not designed to see it. It's designed to keep us steady and safe. But that other mind is there. I think enlightened beings walk around in the world knowing both of those minds, and their intuitive mind is far superior. For us it's flipped; our grasping mind is more superior, and so we're just learning to balance this out so that it's steadier.

Kevin: Alright, well do you have time for one more question? Tuere Sala: Yeah. Kevin: Carrie, I think, had her hand raised. She asked, "Have you experienced a shift in the trauma mind over time?"

Tuere Sala: Yes, this is what I'm pointing to. The trauma mind, the grasping mind, did not know how to manage the world that I was living in when I was a kid. So it came up with all these structures and systems and thoughts and mechanisms to try to help me. I lived through that, and when I failed the bar, what I thought was a perfect understanding of the world came crashing in on me because it didn't work. I had to do 20 years of therapy to get rid of the trauma mind. Don't get it twisted, dharma is not therapy. It's not going to do the therapeutic thing because, in one respect, dharma doesn't care if there's trauma in the space. It's more like, "Do you know there's trauma in the space?" Most of us, when we get triggered in trauma, we don't even know we're in that trigger.

Where dharma helps in trauma—assuming that you have worked through the psychological side of it—is the aspect that allows us to bring a degree of softening, kindness, and curiosity around whatever's happening. What I found was I became less and less panicky about the anxiety. I just had more capacity to be with unpleasantness, to be with anxiety, and see it for more what it is. The grasping mind cannot do that. It cannot be with anxiety with any degree of trust because it's too judgmental. Basically, anxiety is bad, there's just no way around it, nobody wants it. But we have an intuitive side of us that knows anxiety is here, it's not caught in the anxiety, and it can steady us and say, "Well, wait, I'm not actually having a heart attack. Nobody's actually hitting us. Hold on just a moment." That aspect is an intuitive mind.

Practice is about learning how to rest in that intuitive mind and not letting our grasping mind basically tell us what to do. That's why when you're sitting, you're going to feel unpleasantness. Practice being with that unpleasantness a little bit. "I'm only going to sit here for five minutes, can I just be with this unpleasantness?" The mind is all talking, talking, talking. "I'm not going to try to get rid of that. Just okay, do what you gotta do, talk, talk, talk. Let me just see if I can settle in the body and notice that I'm doing all that talking and not caught up in it." That is something we learn how to do. It's not something that just happens.

So you're going to practice, and sometimes you're not going to be able to get out of the anxiety. Sometimes I couldn't get out of that violent kind of thinking and I just had to get up. But sometimes I could, like, "Oh wait, I see something," and then it's all gone again, and then back I'm stuck in it. Our practice sangha is really what helps us just keep doing it. Just keep trying, and keep trying, and keep trying, and over time you don't have to fix it. The mind will do it on its own.

Kevin: I see one more hand here, Jerry. Let me go ahead and unmute him.

Jerry: First of all, thank you very much for an excellent talk. I really appreciate it. I'm a psychiatrist and I try to help a lot of people in Toronto, and of course a lot of people are frightened about COVID. You spoke about the grasping mind keeping us safe, and the intuitive mind. Am I to take that both are necessary, but perhaps in our society the intuitive mind has been unnecessarily suppressed and needs to be brought into balance with the grasping mind?

Tuere Sala: Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm going to give you an example I gave to my Thursday night Capitol Hill group. I have an outlet in my house that was connected to a fan, and I didn't think it worked. That's how I bought the house, so we took it off the price. It didn't work for 20 years I've been in this apartment, never used that stupid outlet. A friend of mine who does electric things said, "Why don't we put an outlet there?" I said, "It doesn't work, it doesn't have wires." He goes, "Can we see?" He opens it up, and of course it works like I had it 20 years ago. Okay, it works. So he puts an outlet there and plugs in an extension cord, not even anything of power, just an extension cord to show me it worked. I'm like, "Oh, it works."

Then maybe about an hour later, the power goes off in the house. And of course, I think, "I should have never did that outlet! That's what did it! It was the outlet." He goes, "There's nothing plugged in. If it were too much power it would have happened immediately." No, it was me! And then I went to the door and I looked down the hall, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm taking out the power of the whole block." And then it turns out my whole neighborhood, the power's out. [Laughter]

All because of me! The grasping mind associates things and connects things together, and it creates stories based on that. The intuitive mind is much more connected to just what is arising in this moment. So the biggest problem with COVID was and is our fears, what we think is going to happen. It's the extrapolated stories that get drawn out. Dharma is about here and now, this moment, this moment, this moment. The more we learn to acknowledge that this moment—even though as much dharma as I had, I still had this mind that was growing an ever big story of trauma that was about to happen. And what saved me was a friend of mine sent me an email that said, "Oh, are you stuck in a power outage? I heard Capitol Hill had the snow break some power line." And I was like, "Oh, that's where it comes from."

But you can see how easily the grasping mind envelops and goes on its own, and we kind of go with it unless you have some ability to stay. The old me would have pretty much panicked, shut down, been in anxiety. I wouldn't even have been able to hear if someone did tell me that it was from a power line. I would have insisted that it was me, closed that outlet off, and never used it again. But what dharma has taught me is to be in the here and now, and in the here and now I can tell, "Oh, that is a trauma mind, that is not reality." Reality happens, it comes, it doesn't have to rock me forever. I don't have to shut off that whole side of the house. I can actually allow the present moment to have an influence on me.

That is what I think dharma can help people begin to do. What you could consider a double check: you can double check the present moment to see if it's in line or in keeping with the mind's story it's creating. Double checking that story against reality begins to help us learn to see the difference between the stories our minds are creating and the truth of what's actually going on. So what could have been a really long lasting problem ended up only lasting about an hour. See the difference?

Jerry: Yes, that's very helpful. Thank you so much, I really appreciate that.

Kevin: Tuere, actually Dunder had a question. They ask, "Where do these two minds come from, grasping mind and the intuitive mind?" And then a follow-up: "Is there an evolutionary background for these two minds?"

Tuere Sala: I don't know about the evolutionary nature of it. I guess what I would say is the two minds I'm speaking of are like digestion, like our respiratory system. It comes with the package. Grasping mind, I guess you could call it reptilian brain, but I've heard from a couple of dharma teachers that are scientists that it doesn't really line up with the reptilian brain like we try to say it does. But there is an aspect of mind that compares and judges. It's the "name and form"^[6] aspect of the link on dependent origination. This mind just automatically does this. There's an aspect of mind that automatically labels things as pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. That part of mind is what we tend to live in in our urban society.

There is still an intuitive mind. You know it because something as simple as you can walk into a room where two people were arguing; they're not arguing now, but you know something went on. You don't know what happened, but you know something went on. Or you can look at two people and say, "Oh, they like each other. I can see." You just have this intuitive sense. So we do have an intuitive capacity, a consciousness of knowing and penetrating through. Mostly we don't come to that knowing until we go into a retreat where we have shaved away all of the other distractions and we can point our mind towards it. What we're learning and practicing in urban life is how to be and cultivate that intuitive mind in the midst of a lot of distractions. It's harder, but it still can be done.

Kevin: Alright great, I think we've probably used up all our time now. Jerry: Yes, thank you very much. Tuere Sala: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I hope to see you again. Bye.