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Thoughts on the Path

Good evening, as I find my voice here. I'm Maria Straatmann, in for Diana Clark tonight, and welcome.

For perhaps something over 50 years—maybe 60 years, I've stopped counting—I've been really interested in what consciousness is. Where does it come from? What does it mean? How would I know if it bit me? How does it happen? And so I continue reading on the subject. Recently, I was reading a book by Richard Boyle^[1] called Realizing Awakened Consciousness. He's interested not only in consciousness, but what is it about the Buddhist idea of being awake? How does that change your consciousness? In the course of this book, he has theories and proposals, but one of the things he does is interview a number of Buddhist teachers.

One of the interviews was with Ajahn Amaro^[2], who was the abbot of the forest monastery Abhayagiri^[3] up in Northern California. He's now back in England as an abbot in a monastery there, but he's quite a remarkable person. I'd like to read you a couple of the things that he said in his interview that I think are relevant to how we practice, why we practice, and what it means to practice anyway.

He says, "At some point I realized, after I'd been a monk for some number of years, that it was all about me and my enlightenment program. Focus on me, me and my achievements, my enlightenment program." He said maybe there's a problem here with the way I'm practicing because it's all about self-focus: my practice, my program. Suddenly, he realized that the spiritual endeavor had become him trying to outplay everyone else. He saw how those noble spiritual aspirations were getting co-opted by the competitive urge of wanting to be the best, the most committed, the most wise, the most competent, the best meditator who sits the longest. He saw that what had begun as a very worthy intention had become something that he didn't intend at all, which was all about "me" and being better and being something else. That urge and the tension from that, he realized, was getting in the way.

In his book, Small Boat, Great Mountain, Ajahn Amaro quoted a teaching of the Buddha: "Wherever there is something that is intended, something that is acted upon, or something that lies dormant, then that becomes the basis for consciousness to land. And where consciousness lands, that then is the cause for confusion, attachment, becoming, and rebirth." Here the Buddha is saying what you think about is what comes up, and what comes up is what you become attached to, hold on to, and grasp.

This was something that Ajahn Amaro then started practicing with. He would notice, he said, and just follow what was going on in his mind. Where was the mind going as he sat? How was his intention getting warped into something else?

As he worked with this, he recounted a time when he was walking across the courtyard. He said, "I was just walking across the courtyard, but at that moment I had the sense of being very contained and just observing, feeling the body walk. I was not on my way to the next thing, but was just being there." I underscore that: I was not on my way to the next thing. He says, "What I noticed was that unentangled attitude stuck in my mind, not giving the events of the day a place to land."

I underscore that because that's what being on the path is about. We think about our practice and we give it names. We talk about how we practice. We practice meditating. We develop loving-kindness. We have all of these practices that we perform. Why are we doing those things? What is our intention? And how is that landing? What is the intention creating for us? Is it about how I'm going to be better, how I'm going to be a good meditator, and therefore, if I'm a good meditator, then I'm going to be a better person, and if I'm a better person, I'm going to be happier and other people are going to be happy?

We forget that we're just meditating. We build up a story about what the outcome is going to be of our practice: who I'm going to be when I get there, who I want to be when I get there. There's an emphasis on how am I doing as opposed to what's happening. What is actually happening? Instead of seeing what our experience is, we're busy projecting into the future what this is going to be. As we sit meditating, I'm following my breath. "Okay, I have to stay with my breath because as soon as I stay with my breath, then I'm going to get concentrated." We've got this forward focus as opposed to a forward leaning. We have a "this is what it looks like when I'm doing it right." "This is what life looks like when I'm doing it right. And if I do everything right, then I'm not going to suffer." The biggest lie we tell ourselves.

The intention on the path must not be to be different. The intention has to just embody the practice. We have to know this is what's happening. That's what consciousness really is: this is what's happening. And if what's happening is I'm thinking about who I'm going to become, I'm not really here. I'm creating a fantasy about what's true. I'm not following "this is what's happening."

To be kind is not to be a kinder person. It's only to be kind. Can you see the difference there? There's no measuring stick on kindness. We're either kind or not kind. We're not more kind or less kind. We're simply kind or not kind. When we're running, we're not running from something or towards something. We're running to see how things really are, how embodied the practice is. We have to be aware of what's actually happening.

I know I'm sitting, but until I am aware that I'm sitting, I don't know I'm sitting. I don't usually think about the fact that I'm sitting, but as soon as I say, "Oh yeah, I'm aware I'm sitting. How am I sitting? How do I look to them? How do I feel now? Am I sitting up straight?", the mind goes off in a camouflage version of what's actually happening. And I come back. "Yeah, I'm just sitting and I know I'm sitting, and I'm bored with that thought." I don't have to elaborate on it. The path is the attention of being, not of becoming someone who...

The path that we walk is not so much climbing a mountain as it is circumnavigating the mountain. We're going around the mountain. And when we get around to where we began, we begin again because our vision has changed. The experience of walking around the mountain has changed us, and we see things that we did not see before. There's no right direction on the path either. It is directionless. It is measurelessness that we need to be aware of. It's not about outcomes.

All of us, when we began meditating, had some sort of idea about why we were going to meditate. At the time that I finally began meditating, after reading Buddhism for 25 years, I decided, "Okay, I'm going to try meditating." I sat down on the cushion and I said, "Now what? What does that mean? And how do I do that anyway?" But I had this sense of curiosity. How could it make any difference? That sense of curiosity is really important. It's about not having a plan for the meditating. Even if your intention is to relax, just relax. Don't practice to become relaxed.

"Practice" is kind of a funny word. Practice can be the embodiment of some action, or it can be a preparation for something. When we talk about practice, it is not a preparation for how we're going to be. It's the action we take now. Whether it's meditating, whether it's talking on the phone, whether it's walking down the street, it's that sense that Ajahn Amaro had when he realized he was just walking. Just walking. It's really simple, but it's not so simple to be aware of: I am just walking. We're so used to going somewhere.

If you take even something like the ethical portion of the Eightfold Path^[4]—let's choose wise speech. Wise speech is not really about telling the truth. There are many aspects to wise speech. Truthfulness is one of them. But also, there's a sense of: Is it kind? Is it timely? Is it useful? The same words on the same topic can be skillful in one case and harmful in another depending on conditions we have no control over. We have no control over the outcomes of our intentions. We have only our intentions and what action we take in response to that intention. The intention and the action, not the outcome.

Ajahn Amaro later said, "By the time I'd been in robes for 10 years or so, I saw that if something existed, my first response was to worry. I took responsibility for it. I made it my problem and I worried about it." How much does this happen to you? Something happens. Somehow it's mine. I have some responsibility with respect to this experience. I caused it. I didn't cause it. I should have caused it. I might have caused it. There's this adoption that gives rise to worry and fretting in his condition. That was certainly the case. "It was so normal I never even realized it." This is really key. So many of our mind habits are so normal, we're totally unaware of them.

I know that I have a tendency to be a fixer. I line things up. Today I found myself with four pieces of art in black frames located closely together. Now imagine how easy it is for them to become misaligned. Really easy. And I was there slowly moving it this way and that way, and moving this one, and trying to... [Laughter] Just leave them on the wall. See what happens to them next. I watched myself become a fixer.

We develop this mindset that approval is good and rejection is bad, and we do a lot of things to be approved. Maybe not intentionally, but subconsciously: "If I do this, then somebody will love me. If I do this, then there'll be a good outcome." We have a tendency to do things for the assumed outcome.

The other day I was driving to an event in the city, and it would normally take about 45 minutes. The drive took an hour and a half. Over the course of this time, I watched myself get increasingly anxious. "I'm not going to get there in time." Now, what's true is I actually left myself an hour and a half, but I didn't expect to need it. I didn't expect to need it. So even though there was plenty of time, and I had prepaid parking across the street from where I wanted to go—I had planned meticulously—still I watched myself. "Oh, I should have done this. I should have done that." I watched my hands grip the steering wheel and I said, "Okay, Maria, just loosen the hands now." And I settled. Not a lot, but a little.

I noticed the inching forward, inching forward, inching forward. And I reminded myself, there's actually plenty of time. This is just frustration against your expectation. It's not real. It's not even rational. And I could feel that, and I would remind myself: You will either be on time or you will be late. That's all. That's all. This is not a catastrophe. The world is not ending. You will either be on time or you will be late. But you're in the car. You're in traffic. You're doing what you can. You did what you could. So now see what happens.

Then, twice I had to dodge cars pulling into my lane because other drivers were becoming very frustrated by this. And I thought, "My space! My space!" And then I thought, "Some temporary location on a random street in San Francisco. That's going to be my space." And I laughed. The ability to notice what's really going on, that it's just this thwarting of expectation, that there is no catastrophe here. But I saw the mind try on anger about these people who cut in front of me, and I reminded myself: I have no quarrel with this person. It's already over. Being angry is only going to agitate me, and I don't have it in for me. So, I'm going to just let that go.

It's seeing when you're triggered and that you don't have to be caught by the trigger. The triggering is not a fault. It's just a trigger. It comes from the mind habits. It comes from "I want all the pictures aligned on the wall." I get it. There are all these wants that I have, but I don't have to have them. I don't have to have them.

I also noticed a familiar trickle of what Ajahn Amaro called the competitive urge. "No, you're not going to take my spot." I could just feel that drive of competition. "I can be better at this. I can find a minute shorter route." Really? A minute on an hour and a half? This is important? To watch yourself get into that space and then say, "No, no, no, no. I don't have to do that." This constant juggling for "I want it to be a certain way." There's something about that that's very human. Maybe it comes from a place of fear and not feeling safe. "If I protect myself enough, I'll be safe. If I'm smart enough, if I'm big enough, if I'm loose enough"—whatever the adjective is you want to apply to it, there's this sense of "If I do this right." But the right way is just to see, "Ah, I see what's happening, but I don't have to be caught by it."

Instead of trying to overcome the anxiety, I see it arising. I try to see what's happening here. Coming to the realization that it was just a thwarted expectation actually took me a little while. There's a process of saying, "Oh, nope. That's not quite it." In talking about it, there is reflexive thought and investigation. You know what you're thinking. You ask yourself, "What's the bodily sensation? My gut is tight. Okay. Tension, definitely tension. Watch it. Watch it." When you're watching the tension and not thinking about the traffic, it changes. Traffic isn't going to change. You're stuck in traffic. But watching the tightness and watching it relax changes the experience.

So you hang out with the bodily sensation until you see it change. Then you go back to the thought and you say, "Oh yeah, it's just traffic. It's just traffic." It changes from, "Oh my god, it's traffic," to, "It's just traffic. I will either be on time or I will be late." And you can feel the disentanglement. You can feel the lessening of the impassioned grabbing onto something. You go back and forth. You can see that the catching is less.

I am not the outcome of all my experiences. I'm merely here for them. I don't have to take responsibility for everything that happens. I have to take responsibility for seeing clearly, "Oh, this is what's happening. Here's what's operating now," and then choosing my next action. But even that, I don't know what the outcome's going to be. Seeing the arising of anxiety didn't make anxiety go away, and it wasn't the purpose of seeing it. But understanding it, I was less caught, and I could just say, "Okay, I'll either be late or I'll be on time."

As we become used to this, what arises is not a sense of frustration over seeing all the mind habits. What arises is the sense of confidence that I can see it and I don't have to be caught. I am not wed to my automatic responses.

To go back to the idea that Ajahn Amaro spoke of, this is not an end-of-the-road thing. This is not something that happens and never happens again. I'm going to read another section: "I've never had any kind of Shazam moment where suddenly everything was permanently different. In our tradition, our teacher Ajahn Chah^[5] never made much of that kind of thing. He tended to play down such experiences. Teachers tend to attract people of similar natures, and groups of all kinds tend to have in-house language. If the teacher has a big Shazam moment and speaks about it all the time, then that tends to be what happens in the student. Our teacher tended to not make a big thing about that, even though he had the reputation of being an arahant^[6] himself and certainly had a few Shazam experiences of his own. On these, the most you could coax out of him was, 'Well, that was a significant moment.'"

"Well, that was a significant moment." And then the next moment comes, and the next experience comes, and we are always on the path. The path doesn't have an end or a conclusion. We are always on the path. We are always noticing, seeing things as clearly as we can see them.

So, I'm going to close with a poem by Jane Hirshfield^[7] called I Would Like:

I would like my living to inhabit me. The way rain, sun, and their wanting inhabit a fig or an apple. I would like to meet my life also in pieces scattered. A conversation sat down on a long hallway table. A disappointment pocketed inside a jacket some long ago, longing glimpsed half recognized in the corner of a thrift store painting to discover my happiness walking first toward me then down a stairwell on two strong legs all its own. Also the uncountable wheat stalks how many times broken beaten sent between grindstones before entering the marriage of oven and bread. Let me find my life in that too. In my moments of clumsiness, solitude, in days of vertigo and hesitation, in the many year ends that found me standing on top of a stove top to take down a track light. I would like to add to my life while we are still living. A little salt and butter, one more slice of the edible apple, a teaspoon of jam from the long simmered fig. To taste as if something tasted for the first time what we will have become then.

To taste as if for the first time what we will have become then. To not be attached to who we think we are or what we expect to happen, but to be present for what actually happens. This: what actually happens.

May your practice be a place of great freshness and joy for you, and of constant discovery, so that you find freedom there. Thank you.

Q&A

So, those are my thoughts. You're free to leave. If you would like to make a comment or ask a question, I'm happy to have that.

Question: So is wanting to be free from suffering, or another way to say it, wanting to wake up to enlightenment—is that a hindrance? If it's in the future, does that always have to be a hindrance?

Maria Straatmann: So, the question is if your goal is enlightenment, right? The thing about a goal of enlightenment is that you are setting up a condition for an outcome. But the practice for that outcome is not reliant on the outcome. It's actually to practice. What you're doing now, what you're experiencing now, has an impact on the future. But to have as a goal to be someone else, an imaginary future of what you think that's going to look like—that turns out not to be so skillful.

There were interviews of five or six or seven different teachers in this book, and every one of them talked about the gradualness of practice. So Gil^[8] is in there, Joseph Goldstein, Ken McLeod^[9], Bernie Glassman. It was a mixture of different traditions, and all of them talked about, "Well, this is what happened while I was on my way to somewhere else, and I learned not to be on the way to somewhere else." I learned that freedom arose in just being the practice. They didn't put it in those words, so those are my words for that.

The author, Richard Boyle, concluded with these things about consciousness and what he thought awakened consciousness was. Those were his opinions about what happened. But just as you read the experiences of these teachers, it isn't that they didn't have Shazam moments. It's just that's not what was important to being awake in this life.

Look very carefully at your intention. Not to be who you are not to be, but to be fully and completely who you are, and free there.

Anyone else?

Reflections

This idea of how we think about practice—whether practice becomes a road to something or is what it is—is, I think, a very rich area to just reflect upon. This is it. This life we're living now is it. We're not practicing for the future. We live now. Suffering or the lack of suffering arises now. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. But now we can be aware of how we are seeing and why we are seeing. Not from an analysis point of view, but rather a clarity of seeing point of view. How clearly am I seeing what's happening? How clearly am I aware of my own responses? Do I know what my mind habits are? Do I have to be those mind habits? How does my seeing influence my ability to make choices about how I live?

Sometimes I feel like I always say the same thing, and in a way I do. I always say the same thing: that how we see influences so much about whether we suffer or not. So watch how you see. Be aware of it. Not to change it, but so that you can be wise about it.

Thank you.