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Guided Meditation: Developing Learning Readiness

So, just stepping into this field of Dharma. It's a field where, in some sense, no moment can be wrong. Every moment is good enough. Every moment is beckoning us towards silence.

To meditate, don't even start anything. Just stop everything else. That doesn't mean stop your thoughts; it means whatever can be put down, put it down. Let's see what's left. Just listen to the silence. And when your thoughts occlude that silence, listen to them.

We practice relinquishing all preference about what we hear. Clinging is a kind of tension. Greed is tense. Hatred is tense. How deeply can we practice relaxing? Where in the body-mind space can we soften? Can we cease fighting with ourselves at any level?

To stop fighting, we have to trust that all moments are good enough for the development of wisdom and compassion. Mostly, our job as meditators is not to learn, but to develop learning readiness—to enter a field and make our heart and mind porous, open, available, and ready to learn about suffering and peace. Ready to learn about our past and our conditioning.

Okay, it is good to practice with you.

Short Talk: Bearing Witness to Harm, Moral Responsibility & Hatred

I'll be away for the next couple of weeks, so we'll be back September 30.

I have a question from the chat line:

"Hi, Matthew. A blunt way to put my question would be: do you really think Trump is suffering inside or losing sleep over all the unskillfulness he puts into the world? Sometimes it seems to me that there's a freedom at both ends of the awareness spectrum, and that suffering is not necessarily a monotonically decreasing function of awareness.

This has been coming up for me recently. I find it relatively easy to feel compassion for someone who behaves unskillfully and causes harm to the people around them if I can feel into their pain. But I struggle when it seems that even if there's some deep pain inside them, there's so little awareness they do not recognize or experience it as such. If your leg is painful, but you do not feel the pain, does it really hurt?

I guess my real question is about letting go of resentment. In these cases, I find it difficult to let go of it because it feels as though my resentment is the only thing bearing witness to the harm that's been caused. This is not the whole of me, but a young part of me that feels that someone should remember the harm, and if it is not them, then it has to be me; otherwise, it feels as though it will be as if it never happened. I was wondering if you could speak to that. And as you probably realize, my question is not really about Trump. Many thanks if you choose to answer my question with mettā^[1]."

I don't know who wrote that—it was submitted anonymously—but they probably determined that if they used the phrase "monotonically decreasing function of awareness," I'm such a sucker for statistical language that I was going to take the bait. And here I am. Yeah, your deranged little manipulation worked perfectly, and I'm taking the bait. [Laughter]

So I'll say some things about spiritual practice, but in many respects, I don't consider inner experience to be as important as stopping the harm. So that's the framework of this.

This is not the main question, but the first question is: does awareness and suffering always covary? In other words, if awareness is going down, does suffering always go up? Or is it possible to be living in a different kind of moral universe, shrouded in vast, deep delusion, and still be happy?

I'm not sure. I think there can certainly be a great deal of pleasure. That's different than satisfaction, though. And even if there is pleasure, we know wisdom and compassion are the only bulwark against the terror of death. I think to some extent you're asking, is it possible to be devoid of all conscience and concern and still be kind of happy? Unfortunately, I don't know, but I think it is possible. I wish that our hedonic system more deeply punished psychopathy, but it seems not to. I think it's hard for people without psychopathy to imagine the inner life of a psychopath. It's very, very different, from what I can tell.

But I think you're right; it's really a question about resentment and the moral responsibility of bearing witness. When someone does tremendous harm, it mobilizes a great deal of feeling in us. And when we're powerless, or nearly completely powerless to prevent that harm, there's even more feeling. Hatred just comes up very strongly. It feels like to bear witness is to hate. Maybe we want our hatred to do what our love could not. It feels as if our moral responsibility requires hate. It feels as if my love compels my hate—that the love I feel, the moral revulsion that I feel, compels me to hate.

We consult our teacher, the Buddha. Hatred does not cease by hatred, but by non-hatred alone. For animals such as ourselves, we're doing something quite difficult. We are purifying our care and untangling it from hate. We're animals whose moral machinery evolved from much more primitive systems.

Hanah Chapman, an emotion researcher, writes that disgust plays an important role in morality. The commonality between physical and moral disgust illustrates the elegant pragmatism of brain design, whereby a new set of abstract social triggers is attached to an ancient motivational system originating in the rejection of aversive and potentially poisonous tastes. This co-option may have been driven by the association between disgust and withdrawal motivation, which could have been a valuable addition to the behavioral repertoire of our highly social species.

Rotting food disgusts us; we wouldn't eat it. Hideous ethical conduct disgusts us; we want to punish it. Disgust and hate probably live in the same neighborhood. Then we look for a channel into which our disgust can flow. A lot of what we do is look for channels into which the kilesas^[2] can flow.

The notion that there is a hell to which bad people go strikes me as a kind of expression of hate. Or the principle of karma in its most extreme version, where there's a kind of perfect bookkeeping system going on and the bad people will suffer the worst fate—that might be an expression of hatred, too.

I remember in college reading Nietzsche^[3] and being caught by his depiction that much of what we call justice is often just a bloodthirsty wish for revenge and vengeance. Our empathic capacity need not witness their suffering. That may be just another way in which we try to make them more sympathetic, or another way of enjoying their suffering, making sure they're not pulling a fast one on our moral community.

What is the deepest way of saying no? It feels like the volume of my hatred is what signifies the depth of my care, and what is unbearable needs an object of hate. Right? No. I'm trying, imperfectly, to experience the intensity of my moral emotions and commitments without acquiescing to hate.

Dharma practice is purifying the nature of our love, refining out these ancient evolutionary entanglements. We have this deep sense that our love needs to do something to the world. It needs to be efficacious. It needs to act on the world, change conditions. And then if it doesn't have the intended effect, Plan B is hate. Plan C is nihilism, cynicism. But love was not meant to rescue some sorrow.

And then you say, maybe this isn't about the president, or not just about the president. Yeah, he is precisely Mara^[4], precisely craving and delusion^[5] in costume, and there has always been and will always be precisely that. We humans absolutely love our craving and delusion.

The world has endured unimaginably vast suffering. Tears, it is said, that could fill the great ocean. The world will endure unimaginably vast suffering, tears filling more oceans. In a way, this all seems unprecedented because our lifespan is perhaps one century rather than twenty. Our moral machinery wasn't quite equipped for all of this. But we bow somehow. May we train wisdom and love, and join with the lineage of care, of love, that is already right alongside the ocean of tears. This lineage of love that has already accomplished staggering things. We join with it, and we look for the million places where our love can affect the world, does affect the world.

We must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are part of it, that we share in it, and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being where it is judged.^[6]

I offer this for your consideration.