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Dharmette: The Dharma of Challenges (3 of 5) Clarifying Truth

Warm greetings today from the Insight Meditation Center, here in Redwood City. I have the good fortune of being able to go between these two wonderful meditation centers, and this is kind of the home center. Happy to be back and happy to be with you here.

People associate Buddhism with truth, often what's called the Four Noble Truths, and sometimes put those at the center of Buddhist teachings. That's fine, but in terms of practice, what is repeated over and over again in the teachings of the Buddha, much more often than any reference to truth, is knowing and seeing. Perhaps knowing and seeing are meant to be an alternative way of talking about knowing and seeing truth, because we want to be able to see and know what's happening in our direct experience.

One of the things to distinguish is between what's directly known, directly seen, that we can really verify through our direct experience, and what is our interpretation. What is the value we put on something? What's the meaning we assign to it? What meaning do we assign to ourselves, or what do we make up about ourselves in relationship to experience? The interpretation, the meaning, the purpose, the value—they certainly have a place in this world, and in practice, it's important. But we want to really see the difference between the direct experience and the added layers we put on.

When we sit down to do mindfulness meditation, we want to emphasize the directness, what we can know directly. It's possible to know directly that we are adding meaning, adding layers of interpretation, adding values, judgments, commentary, projections into the future, and associations of what we had in the past. There are layers and complexity to all the stuff that we add that's extra. Even if it has some value and is important to do, it's still not the same thing as direct experience.

So when we sit, we want to become sensitive to this so that we can prioritize direct experience when we're meditating. After meditation, there might be a time for deep contemplation, deep reflection about meaning and purpose, and contextualizing what has happened. But for meditation, we want to try to keep it really simple, focusing on what we can know and see directly. That's the door forward in the Dharma; that's where we can begin freeing ourselves from the layers of reactivity, from the layer of cloudiness, the filters through which we see. It's the way in which we can see more clearly what's happening, and in doing so, become wiser.

In this meditation, you might do the basic meditation—mindfulness of breathing, being here in the present moment—but keep an eye out for the difference between the simplicity of the direct experience and what we add to it: meaning, interpretation. Even something as simple as, "Are we at the end yet?" or "Boy, this is taking a long time," or "Gil is talking a lot." All of that is commentary. There's nothing wrong with it necessarily, but recognize, "Oh, there's the commentary." This is not the direct experience. The immediacy of it is just Gil talking, just a voice talking, and the sound happening, the breathing as you breathe.

If your mind wanders off a lot, the idea that "I'm a poor meditator"—that's an interpretation. That's a made-up layer on top of it. The immediacy, what we can see directly, is so simple, and sometimes the relief that can come from it is so simple that we're freed from the weight of these interpretations. If the mind wanders off a lot in thought, then we see, "Oh, the mind is wandering off." It's that simple. Even the idea that it's doing it "a lot" is a higher level of interpretation based on history, based on what we remember, the repetition of it all. At the moment, what we can see and know is, "The mind is involved in thinking; let's bring it back." That simple act can be a relief.

Become sensitive to how you leave direct experience, and then return to what can be known and seen, known and perceived directly, here and now. So assuming a meditation posture...

Guided Meditation

The beginning of knowing and seeing directly in our own experience is to do so in our physical posture. Maybe moving around a little bit, twisting, rocking a little bit, to really feel and sense ourselves into an aligned, balanced, good posture.

Slowly closing the eyes. And already now, just sitting here like this, are you telling yourself stories, interpretations about what's happening, how it is for you, and how you are? Are you judging, evaluating, or interpreting? Even if it's accurate, it is not the same thing as direct experience, if we're seeing through the lens of those interpretations.

If we see interpretation as interpretation, then we're back to the world of direct knowing.

And then gently taking some long, slow, deep breaths. Relaxing on the exhale.

Letting the breathing return to normal and continuing to relax on the exhale, anywhere in the body where you feel holding.

And then centering yourself on your breathing.

The direct experience of an inhale, knowing how it's felt and known through the body.

Knowing and perceiving the exhale as it's known in the body.

And now, are there thoughts or feelings that interpret, react, assign meaning, or assign a future?

If so, recognize it as such, and come back, taking refuge in the direct experience.

When you are more involved in thinking than with breathing, chances are, as you're involved in the story-making mind, the interpretive mind, the planning mind, you've lost touch with the breathing, the direct experience and perception.

And then, with whatever energy or capacity you have to think, direct it instead to knowing and perceiving breathing.

If you're telling stories or interpretations, or thinking about something, perhaps it's something deep inside that needs to be reassured it's okay for now. And then to find a refuge, a place of safety for a few minutes in the simplicity of direct experience here: breathing, your body. Just knowing what is actually happening here without story or interpretation.

And then, as we come to the end of the meditation, how simply can you now open your heart to the wider world? Open your thoughts to simply know, or sense, or have a general idea of the people of your life, people you know, people you don't know, people you'll learn about today or meet.

And to perhaps aspire, to the best of your ability, to know them directly, without the lens of our interpretations and stories, judgments, values, meaning, futures, and pasts. Just to be with a person in their basic, simple humanity of the moment.

And to have goodwill. To wish them well. The kind of wellness—simple safety, stability, contentment—where being happy, being well, brings out the best in people.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may it be that the way that we are together with others makes it more likely for them to feel some happiness and safety, some peace, some freedom.

May we be a refuge for others.

Thank you.

Reflections

Hello everyone. Here we have the third talk on the Dharma of challenges.

Maybe in some ways, life is one continuous challenge with little interludes between them. Learning to be with challenges, learning to be wise about them and find our way through them in an effective way, is a very important part of Dharma practice.

Dharma has different meanings. The third meaning that I've listed before is Dharma as truth. What we mean by truth is very important to consider. One of the simplest ones that I like a lot is that mindfulness is a practice of truth-telling. The truth means that we're honest, and that honesty is basically truth out loud, or truth that we discover. It's being honest with ourselves. Whether we should be verbally honest and truthful about everything we experience is questionable, since sometimes truth can hurt people. But we always want to be truthful towards ourselves. We really learn how to be honest when we are honest with ourselves.

So how do we learn to do that? How do we learn to stop and take a moment, or take time to really recognize how we are and what's happening for us, the truth of how we feel? One of the really important things to learn in this quest for truth and honesty is to be able to distinguish between our direct experience and the interpretations we add to it. The layers of meaning-making, judgments, commentary, and value that we add on top of things. The time that we add on top of things—for example, "If this continues, this will end up some terrible way. This means that terrible things will happen." Or past: "This is just like what happened before, and therefore I know what this is about."

Some of those layers of meaning-making, thoughts, and interpretations that we have are appropriate and wise to do, but it's also a place where we get into tremendous trouble. When we have challenges in our life, the chances are fairly high that the interpretive story-making mind, predictive mind, value mind, judgment mind, is operating more strongly than usual. It kind of makes sense; we have a challenge, it's difficult, and so, "What does this mean for me? How do I find my way out? What's wrong here? I have to understand what's happening." It makes sense that we get into that mode, but the interpretive, meaning-making, story-making mode is, a fair amount of the time, inaccurate. It doesn't have the full picture. It generalizes, it settles on a particular interpretation, a particular aspect of what's happening. Sometimes it has blinders on; it doesn't see the fuller picture. Sometimes, depending on what the challenge is, we don't see ourselves fully.

One of the ways to learn to distinguish between what we really see versus "this is an interpretation, this is an added layer," is taking the time to see it. Maybe it has some accuracy, some truth to it; maybe it's a principle or an idea that I need to somehow take into account and act on. But it is an interpretation, it's a story, it's an added thing. When we take the time to see that, we have more ability to have choice and clarity about what we're doing.

So that if we have a challenge with another person, if we can say, "You know something, what happened, what you said yesterday, was very difficult for me. And part of the reason it was so difficult is I understood it to be, or interpreted it to be, that you were angry with me." As soon as you say, "I understand it" or "I interpret it," there's a little bit more room for it not to be dogmatic ("You were angry!"), but rather to let the other person participate and explain, "Well, I was irritated, but I was also really scared." Then you get a bigger picture of what's going on.

So to be able to hold and see something a little bit more provisionally when we know it's an interpretation or a story, as opposed to what's happening to us directly.

Also, when we are challenged with other people, or with ourselves even, perceiving the direct experience as a direct experience gives us a very important reference point for how to go forward, or what needs care. If someone was angry with you yesterday, and the direct experience is that because of that you feel hurt, you might have a tendency, when you're hurt, to be angry back and be in the attack mode. Or to try to run away, or feel afraid or sad. If you identify what the direct experience was—"Oh yes, I was hurt, and now I'm in the attack mode," or "Yes, I was hurt, and now I'm trying to run away, or I'm afraid, or I'm sad"—then you can begin looking at, "Given that I'm hurt, afraid, sad, or angry, what do I practice with that? How do I be with it? How do I be with it so I don't act reactively? How do I be with it so that I'm caring for myself?" Because sometimes when we react to challenges, we often lose ourselves in that process.

So, to take time to find out what's true here. What's the direct experience? What's the direct experience and what's the interpretation or the story that I'm telling?

Stories are important, and one of the interesting things to do when there are challenges is to tell the story, maybe to a neutral party. "Can I tell you how I understood this? Tell you the story and what happened?" Some of the story will be accurate, and when you say it in a neutral way, having it kind of take the pressure off—the bottled-up-ness of the story and the feelings—by telling the story, it gives us more clarity of what's going on.

One of the ways to tell the story is to tell it to yourself. Some people journal about it. It's interesting to journal because there's a record now of what you're thinking, what you're interpreting. It's possible then to go back and reread it, and much better understand where the interpretation is, where the story is, where the story-making is, the values, all the things we add to the basic raw story. The raw story versus how we are interpreting it.

Also, the way we think, the way that we write, or the way that we speak sometimes pulls from a different part of the mind. One interesting way of seeing this is maybe when you're alone, speak out loud to yourself. Speak about what's happening around the challenge out loud. Maybe in speaking about it out loud, rather than it ruminating in the mind, you'll find a different relationship to it. Maybe you're speaking from a different place, you understand more your reactivity, or you understand more your place of wisdom. You're more likely to come to clarity about what's happening for you, and maybe you'll find your way with it.

All of this is a way of being honest, about being truthful: the truth of what's directly happening, and to know what that means—direct, immediate seeing and knowing. And the truth of, "Oh, this is the story I'm telling myself about it. This is how I'm interpreting it. This is the value I put on it, the meaning I put on it, the predictions of the future I put on it. This is what I dredge up from the past to include as part of what's happening." The truth of seeing what you're doing in the mind with all this is invaluable.

This means that hopefully the challenges we have are not crises of the moment, but if it's ongoing in some way that we can take time out, ask reality for a timeout to go meditate, to go journal, to go for a walk, to spend some time with a neutral friend, and just really begin discovering what is really the truth here versus what is the interpretation. What is really the direct experience? Interpretation does have a role, but if we know it's interpretation, then, as I said earlier, we can say that when we're in conversation with people, and then there's much more space to maneuver and find a way.

Truth makes us uncomfortable. You know, it's much more comfortable sometimes, oddly enough, to be caught up in our interpretations, our meaning-making, our anger, our blame, our fear, than it is to stop and really feel it, to know it, and be present for our direct experience. But that's what we're trying to do in this Dharma practice: this kind of truthfulness about what's actually happening here.

And then also to put ourselves in situations where we're more likely to kind of pop the bubble of our interpretations and our stories. What I mean by this is sometimes I've had difficulties with other people, like I'm angry with them or something, and I've learned that my mind doesn't think so accurately about the person when I'm angry towards them. So I've learned that it's really important to go find the person and be in conversation with them, because that pops the bubble of the projections, the meaning, the interpretations that my mind is making up around the anger. It's much safer for me, much safer for the other person, if we can meet and have this direct experience of each other rather than being involved in this whole other world of meaning-making, story-making, and interpretations.

So today, if you want to explore these ideas in your daily life, ask reality for a timeout. It could be a minute, it could be five minutes, depending on what's going on, it might be you need longer in order to go for a walk, meditate, journal, do something that you begin asking, "What's true here? What's true in the direct experience, and what is interpretation?"

"Oh, that's an interpretation. That statement, that's an interpretation."

"Is it a statement of truth? Oh, it's true that that's an interpretation, that's a judgment, that's a meaning-making."

"Oh, that's what my mind is doing, that's how I'm relating to all this."

Maybe it's really important to see clearly that's what you're doing. Maybe you'll see that it's false, maybe you'll see that you have to take this into account and act accordingly. But to know clearly, "Oh, this is what's happening," is one of the really important ways to work with challenges in the long term. To get a skill of doing this makes all challenges a lot easier.

Thank you very much, and we'll continue on this theme tomorrow.