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Beware of the Conditioned Mind

I haven't tested this voice yet tonight. There we go, thank you. Hello, hello, the voice is working good. Welcome to Monday night. Looks like my glasses... I'm not going to be able to see anybody either.

So what I would like to talk to you about tonight begins with, "beware the conditioned mind."

Beware the conditioned mind. I've been talking to a number of people lately that have a similar issue with life, which is, "I keep practicing and I keep working, and I'm so disappointed in the outcome. Why isn't it better? How come I'm not more equanimous? I just want to be peaceful. I keep doing the right things, how do I make any difference? I try to be kind to people and then they're not happy."

In general, what's happening is that people are becoming discouraged because things don't match their idea of what it should be like. We make these unconscious contracts all the time: "If I do this, then this will be the outcome. If I diligently practice, this would be true. If I consistently meditate, I'm going to be a great meditator. If I do all my practices well, then I'm going to be equanimous." And by the way, equanimous means peaceful and easy and happy.

But it turns out equanimity isn't about being happy. Equanimity is about balance in the face of things just as they are. Equanimity is about looking at ourselves and seeing ourselves just as we are, not how we would like to be. Equanimity means that we're not measuring ourselves to see if we're improving, if we're closer to that person that we think we ought to be.

The end of suffering does not lie in the future. It only lies now. It lies in this moment, in this experience. There is a famous triad that is repeated often in the suttas^[1], and it has to do with disenchantment, dispassion, and the cessation of suffering. And after that come those things like peace, knowledge, and Nibbāna^[2].

But it really begins with this realization that what we have is a conditioned mind. What we think about things is conditioning our experience, and is itself conditioned by that experience. If we can't see this, if we don't see when it's happening, we are condemning ourselves to constantly repeating all of the habit patterns we've always had.

The problem with talking about this is it's at this great intersection point. It intersects with the aggregates^[3], with the Four Noble Truths^[4], and with mindfulness. Everything kind of comes together in this experience that determines whether we suffer or do not suffer. All of our intentions, all of our practices... somehow we think that if we do all of this, eventually we're going to get to the place where we are free of greed, hatred, and delusion. I say, may it be true. But I want to know, how do I stop suffering right now? Not when I become a better person, not when I become a better meditator, but right now. How do I end this suffering in this moment?

The Spaciousness of Uncertainty

I was inspired by something that came in the email. There was a quote from Joan Halifax^[5] on the subject of hope, and she talked about the existence of wise hope. Ordinary hope is sort of attached to some expectation that we would like to realize in our lives: "I hope this will be true." We have this great longing for something to be true. If it doesn't become true, then we are disappointed, and we consider it a misfortune. Or we condemn ourselves, or we blame somebody for why this has not happened.

Her point was that the difference between ordinary hope—that has to do with a dashing of expectations and disappointments that we might feel—and wise hope, is not seeing things unrealistically, but rather seeing things just as they are, including the truth of suffering. Both its existence and our capacity to transform it. Both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It's when we realize we don't know what will actually happen that this kind of hope comes alive. In the spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

In the spaciousness of uncertainty. If I am convinced that I am this kind of person and that I will always react this way, then I'm going to never give myself the chance to be any way other than I am. Or that you're that kind of person, or that you approach the world this way. All of these beliefs I have, these opinions I have about experience, about life, about myself... all of those things that we know are not based upon the knowing of experience, but they are views that we hold. And they leave no room at all for the spaciousness of uncertainty and impermanence. They leave no space at all for what's actually happening.

Coming Back to the Body

What's actually happening. So the other day, we have these bowls in our house. They're little bowls. They're not Pyrex, but they're something like Pyrex. You can put them in the freezer, you can put them in the microwave, you can put them in the dishwasher. They're just a really handy size. I always have them at hand for chopping vegetables and putting things in, or putting a few berries in, or putting olives on the table. We have a stack of them up on the shelf. I can just reach for them, they're always there.

And the other day I went to reach for one to put some berries in, and suddenly the whole stack came crashing down out of the cabinet, hit the stone of the counter, and shattered into I don't know how many pieces. It spread all over the kitchen.

The first crash that came down was quite startling, and I screamed. Having experienced myself screaming, which was actually wonderful because it caused me to think, "Why am I screaming? There must be something wrong with my body," it took me right into my body and out of my head. So it took the head a while to get to the point where it was asking, "Whose fault is this? Why did it happen?" All of those other kinds of things about why it shouldn't have happened. And I said, "Oh, it's just glass. I'm okay. Nothing's hit me. How interesting that I screamed."

And in the midst of what might have been, "Oh, how am I going to clean all this up? I don't have time to clean this up, I have something happening in a few minutes, and there's glass all over, and I don't have any shoes on," and all of those thoughts that came after that about how to deal with what was there... no problem. I was calm as can be. Because I was already in my body. I had come back into the body to say, "Oh, it's just glass." And then it was just glass. You just clean it up.

When the thoughts would come—all those other thoughts coming into the mind—I didn't have any opinion about them. They were neither good nor bad. Nobody was good or bad. I could tell you a story about why it happened that would establish fault and blame, but really it doesn't matter. It was just glass.

The drama of the moment fortunately took me into my body. Most times, the drama of the moment takes you into trying to figure out what to do about something, how to think about it. We have opinions about everything: "This is good, this is bad. This is better, this is worse. I'm better, this is better. That shouldn't have happened. That's your fault. Oh, this always happens, this never happens."

It is the ability to come back into the body, out of the head, to say, "What am I actually feeling? What do I feel?" so that we don't get caught up in the stories about all the things we know already that ignore what's actually happening. The practice of getting into what's actually happening is the practice of coming back into the body to say, "What's happening here? What's going on with me?"

Every thought we have has some kind of emotional content attached to it. "Oh, how did that happen?" Blame, blame, blame. I can hear the blame in that voice. It wasn't curiosity about how it happened; it was, "It shouldn't have happened." To hear your voice speak the difference between blame and curiosity is useful information about what actually is happening. What is truly happening.

So I can hear blame in my head. I can hear blame in the thought and say, "Oh, blaming is here." But I don't have to continue blaming. I don't have to explain it to myself. I can just say, "Oh, blaming is here." I don't have to become all of those thoughts. I don't have to become the person who always has to clean up. I don't have to become that, if I can see clearly, "Oh, that's here. Oh, that's happening."

Or maybe what I see is, instead of feeling calm, I feel shaken, mostly by my scream. And I'm conscious of the shakiness. So then I'm careful not to let the thoughts run away with me. Because I'm shaky, I can feel the shakiness. I don't have to name it something that has a whole story attached to it. I could just say it was shaky.

The conversation going on in our heads usually has the flavor of, "I know what this is," or, "I'm afraid because I don't know what this is." Because we don't like to say, "Oh, I'm afraid." It's easier to say, "I'm at fault," or, "I have a problem," or, "This shouldn't be happening," than to say, "I don't know what's going on." Because that feels like it's out of our control. That feels not right. That feels not familiar. It's easier to blame ourselves than to be in the space of the unfamiliar.

Familiarity with Our Triggers

If you think about how you go through your day, you will notice that sometimes you have a very optimistic attitude toward what's going to happen, and other times you have a very defeated feeling about what's going to happen.

This afternoon, I had planned my day. I had a doctor's appointment this morning and several errands to run, and I said, "Okay, this chunk of time this afternoon I'm going to spend working on my talk, and I know kind of what I'm going to talk about." Well, it didn't happen. This happened, that happened, something else happened.

What I noticed was the mind was running to a question that my husband and I had talked about: should we get this carpet cleaner? There was a Cyber Monday sale, and I hadn't decided what kind of carpet cleaner we should get. And here I was busily thinking about carpet cleaners, when I said, "This is being driven by Cyber Monday and I want to get a deal." I asked myself, "Really? Really, do I have to buy a carpet cleaner today because it's Cyber Monday? Yesterday I wasn't thinking about buying the carpet cleaner. No, no, I don't have to think about this."

And I went to my husband and said, "If you want to think about carpet cleaners, feel free. But I'm going to go do something else now." To watch the difference between how much tension there was around the fact that it was Cyber Monday and these silly carpet cleaners, and how much freer I was to consider what I was going to talk about tonight when I gave up the idea of buying a carpet cleaner... just to feel the difference in my body about how much space there was around me when I let go of the need to get a deal. I could label it something like greed or procrastination. I have all kinds of stories I could tell you about why that was happening.

But the important part was being able to see clearly that I was trapped, unnecessarily, by some idea I had about what needed to happen today in this space. And I was so grateful to be able to feel that release of the tension that was there, that had nothing to do with what I was going to talk about tonight. It just had to do with some imperative that I had imagined that had no basis in reality.

I was triggered. To notice where our triggers show up is not to say, "I'm always triggered by that," or, "I am somebody who is triggered by that," but rather, "Oh, that's something I need to be familiar with." Familiar with that trigger so that I can see the trigger, I can be triggered, and say, "Fine, but I don't have to go there." To see that we are independent of what we see clearly. We still have the ability to make a decision about it. We don't have to just fall into it just because it's a mind habit.

When we become familiar with the mind habit, we become disenchanted. We no longer have to be drawn into the enchantment of that point of view, of that way of being, of that need to be. When we see it clearly, there is the possibility of dispassion. We lose the energy of the drive, and we can just see it. To not have an opinion about it releases us from being drawn into it.

Disentangling from the Stories We Tell

Yesterday—maybe the day before, things are running together for me a bit right now—my grandson was playing in a soccer tournament. Kids had been pulled from different teams for this turkey tournament, and so he was playing with people he was not familiar with, and the coach wanted him to play goalie. It is his belief that he's a terrible goalie and a great defender. So he didn't want to be goalie, and he stood there with his hands on his hips not wanting to be goalie.

Sure enough, somebody kicked a really hard ball right at him. One of the rules of this indoor soccer game was that you couldn't touch it with your hands, or the other team got a point. And so this ball came right at his face, and he just put his hands up to block it—which any sane person would have done, I think. I can tell you all the things you might have done instead, but that's what I would have done. And of course, the other team got a point.

Well, this just confirmed for him that he's not a goalie, and the rest of the game he was just furious. They lost. They actually were the only undefeated team going into the finals, and the final game they were beaten by a team they had beat earlier in the day, and he was goalie, and he was convinced it was all his fault that they were in second place. He was crushed. I watched this blooming and blossoming and falling into. He went running out into the dark and hid behind a rock. It was all his fault. It wasn't that he was unhappy about being in second place, it's that it was all his fault.

I thought about how often we do that. When misfortune happens, when something happens that we don't like, "It's all my fault." What if it's not your fault? What if it just happened? What if it's really not your fault?

Somebody was telling me that she was in a conflict with someone, and she tried several ways of working it out. "I'm doing this and I'm writing letters... and nothing is working. I'm just a failure." I said, "You know, you might consider that it's not your fault and it's not her fault, but that you're seeing things from a different point of view. Each of you has a different point of view." There doesn't have to be fault in conflict. You don't have to be a flaming idiot because you don't agree with me. You just don't agree with me. Is that possible?

The tendency we have to know the right answer limits the possibilities and leaves us in a place where we're constantly struggling, and we're tied up in the struggle. I'm working on this big project with my homeowners association, and it's a speculative project. Somebody managed to get themselves put on my team who is opposed to the project, doesn't want it to happen under any conditions, and so this other person is constantly undermining me. While she's doing this, she's doing that, she's not doing this. So I talked to her and said, "You know, I haven't even made a proposal. You're fighting against a proposal I haven't made. I don't have the data yet."

That didn't matter, she was furious. I thought about it and I said, "Okay, I don't need this." One possibility is you remove yourself from the conflict, right? You just walk away from it. "I don't need this, I've got mine anyway. I'm just doing this for other people." All these virtuous thoughts. And I thought, "Well, mostly I'm feeling hurt that I'm being attacked." Oh, well that's interesting. Why is it hurting?

The more I dug into what I was actually feeling, I said, "Well, maybe I'll wait until the morning to decide whether I'm going to walk away from this." In the morning, I just got up and started again, because part of what was happening was I was just plain tired. When I gave up being sure I knew I was being unfairly attacked, then I could just get up the next morning and start again.

We don't actually have to respond to everything that the mind tells us we need to respond to. We can just notice it's there. And we can give ourselves the space to maybe not know the answer. To maybe not be clear about what's happening. It's okay to say, "You know, I'm confused at this point."

One of the things that happened this morning was an annual wellness visit I did with my doctor. Being of an age that they do all the age-related testing for you, they were doing the mental tests. Curiously enough, my husband and I were talking about these tests yesterday, and he told me about this drawing of the clock. How you put the numbers on the face of the clock, and then they tell you to draw ten minutes after eleven—this is a measure of your mental acuity. And then the three words, and they come back later and ask you what the three words are.

Well, as soon as she told me about the clock, I thought, "You know, this isn't fair because I worked this out in my head yesterday. I know exactly how to draw that clock." [Laughter] And here I am going through all of these arguments about how, "Should I tell her? Is it honest not to tell her that?" I said, "Wait a minute, this is about what do you remember, and if I'm remembering yesterday, then clearly I'm doing pretty well at remembering. What's the problem here?" But there was this sense that I was cheating because I knew about the test. I could feel that, "Oh, I'm cheating." I could feel the shame. And I could laugh about it, but it didn't change the fact that the thought had been there. If my attitude had been a certain way, I might have devolved into a long story about what a cheater I am.

What it takes is a little bit of space, and the habit of noticing what it feels like. What the trigger feels like in your body, what the thought patterns that you typically have feel like. What's the energetics of that? What are the energetics I'm bringing to this moment?

One day last week I had this really horrible dream. Fortunately, I can't remember at this point, but I woke up—oh, I know it was something about divorce. I was being divorced. You know, my husband and I are happily married, thank you very much, and here I was having this dream about divorce. He wasn't the person I was divorcing either, which just added to the confusion. I realized that something was going on in my life where I felt rejected. There was a feeling of rejection, and I could feel that rejection.

From a psychological point of view, it was useful to try to figure out why I was feeling rejected. But from a mindfulness point of view, from an end of suffering point of view, what was important was to realize that I had a feeling of rejection. So I should be careful when I interact with my husband. If he doesn't say hello to me, I should not feel rejected because he doesn't say hello, just because I'm carrying that attitude with me. I should know that that's there, so that I don't add that knowing onto an experience and label it something it's not. So that I'm not enchanted by what I know. So that I can see clearly what's actually happening.

Because when you see, "Oh, this is what's happening. Oh, there's resentment here." When you see, "Oh, resentment is here," it breaks the energetics of that resentment. You can stop telling yourself the story about, "Well, of course I resent this because this always happens. Of course you're always going to take advantage of me." And to notice how often the familiarity of being the last one in the kitchen cleaning up feels good, and it's only the knowing that "you're taking advantage of me" that's causing the suffering. When in fact, I like just making sure it's all clean at the end of the day.

How we form the mental ideas of our experience is mostly about habit and inclination, and the inclination changes all the time. So if we become familiar with what things feel like in our body, then we have the information that allows us not to get trapped and enchanted by something that reminds us of something else. In the dispassion of not having an opinion about it—"Oh, anger is here. Hmm. I don't have to justify it. I don't have to tell myself why it is. I don't have to reinforce it"—I'm free to just let it be. Unentangled. Not part of who I am, not part of who I need to be.

The Law of Cats

There's a poem here I want to read. Let's see if I can find it. Not following my text very well. Here we go. So this is a new poem by Jane Hirshfield^[6] called "Two Kerosene Lanterns":

The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window where many delicate things are arranged: polished ammonites, a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke, a few curls of birch bark, two long unused kerosene lanterns.

As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person's face, to cover the eyes already closed. The crash, as it must, arrives. The hands lower slowly.

The cat sits on the floor in the room's middle, calmly licking one paw.

The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another. People are strange.

The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another. People are strange.

It's our expectation that something's going to happen that leads to the disappointment. But when we truly grasp the idea and the feeling and the experience that things arise and pass away, we're much less likely to be subject to knowing the outcome. Knowing, "It's always going to be this way. It's hopeless to even try this because it's always going to be this way." And we have the energy to start up again and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

And we become people who experience equanimity as being the condition in the moment of just seeing, "Oh, it's that way. Oh, this is what's happening. Oh, things were a little chaotic at the moment. The glass is all over the kitchen." Yep, the glass is all over the kitchen. I can have an opinion about that, but it doesn't change the fact that the glass is all over the kitchen, and I'll probably clean it up.

Yep, that's what happens. That's exactly what happens. And there's no suffering in that. It's just glass. It's just two kerosene lanterns. It's just one arrangement leading to another arrangement.

When I say it that way, it sounds sort of Pollyanna-ish, you know, just wait and it'll all be better. But in fact, it is still broken glass all over the kitchen. It's not pleasant, and it's not wonderful, it's not beautiful, and I have to replace the bowls or do without them. But I don't have an opinion about them that leads to suffering for me. I don't have the need to explain it away: "My clumsiness, putting something where it doesn't belong." It just is.

And the sense of "it just is" is the place where we can free ourselves of the enchantment that leads to suffering. It just is. And the next moment, I have my intention and my next step. My intention and my next step. It frees me from having to be better than I am, while having an intention that is consistent with how I want to be in the world, not who I want to be in the world.

Tejaniya^[7] calls mindfulness practice not a self-improvement project, but a self-unraveling project. I kind of like that way of thinking about it. A self-unraveling, where it's a process as we see more and more clearly what's actually happening, we become disentangled from all of the conditions that impose on our lives. And in that disentangling, we can just see it.

All of us do things that we're not proud of, or there's an outcome we're not proud of. Well, the other day I made a pie. Actually, it wasn't a pie, it was something else. I deliberately don't want to call it a pie because it didn't look like a pie in the end. It was a recipe I'd never tried before. I looked at it and I thought, "God, that looks awful." But you know, it tasted really good if you didn't call it a pie! It was pretty good. But calling it a pie put it in a category where there was an expectation about what it should look like. It was awfully dark for a pie. But it was really good. You had to just look at it without the idea that it was a pie. So my husband, who wanted a pie, went around telling everybody about how I had made this pie, and I kept saying, "Oh, it's not actually a pie." Who knows what the people who were eating it were thinking. But how you felt about it had something to do with what you named it, what category of things that it went in.

The Ultimate Counterfeit

We think that the way to peace, that in a peaceful state we're going to be relaxed and at ease. That ease is... you can imagine yourself settling into it, and everything is sweet. Every piece is about sweetness, right? Not really. Not really.

I ran across a description this afternoon. Let's see if I can find the right tag here. Yeah, so this was something written by Ajahn Maha Bua^[8]. He was talking about his meditation and how sweet it was. He said:

"This radiance of meditation is the ultimate counterfeit. At that moment it's the most conspicuous point. You hardly want to touch it at all because you love it and cherish it more than anything else. In the entire body there is nothing more outstanding than this radiance, which is why you're amazed at it, love it, cherish it, dawdle over it, want nothing to touch it. But it's the enemy king: unawareness.

Once when I went to practice at Wat Doi Dhammachedi^[9], the problem of unawareness (ignorance) had me bewildered for quite some time. At that stage the mind was so radiant that I came to marvel at its radiance. Everything of every sort which could make me marvel seemed to have gathered there in the mind, to the point where I began to marvel at myself: 'Why is it that my mind is so marvelous?' Looking at the body I couldn't see it at all. It was all space, empty. The mind was radiant in full force.

But luckily, as soon as I began to marvel at myself to the point of exclaiming deludedly in the heart without being conscious of it, 'Why has my mind come so far?', at that moment a statement of Dhamma^[10] spontaneously arose. This too I hadn't anticipated. It suddenly appeared as if someone were speaking in the heart, although there was no one there speaking. It simply appeared as a statement: 'If there is a point or a center of the knower anywhere, that is the agent of rebirth.'"

Conclusion

That's what it said. As long as there is identification with anything, any sense of a knower, we are still bound by the conventional conditioned mind. Beware of ecstatic states and lovely meditations that convince you everything is wonderful. It is at that moment that you are re-entering the cycle of samsara^[11], because you have identified with that experience. It's in the identification with the experience that the suffering arises.

The ability to just see the condition—ah, now we're in a different space. It is not me, it is not the knower. It is the being. It is the being that gives rise to the space where anything is possible, where we truly embrace impermanence and the arising and passing away of what's there.

It's not in the giant understanding that we find the freedom of Nibbāna. It is in the small. It is in the everyday small. "Oh, this is what's happening."

May you all see clearly. May you know the end of enchantment. The freedom that comes with disenchantment, with dispassion, with things just as they are. Those are my thoughts. Thank you.

Sorry I went a little too close to the edge here. If anybody has any comments, I'd be happy to hear the questions.

No? Great. So...

To the spontaneity of noticing the arising as well as the passing away, I wish you all a good night.