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Dharmette: Meeting Life Well – Five Dharma Resources (2 of 5): Virtue

Guided Meditation

Okay, good morning, or day, or evening. Why don't we go ahead and get started for today? We'll begin meditating together, so please settle into your meditation posture.

Maybe just take a moment to really feel the body and arrive at this place in front of your computer, phone, or tablet, wherever you are. Just have a sense that you're here, and you're now joining this. We can release whatever we were doing to get here, if possible letting go of things you're thinking about for later today, or things that happened earlier today, things you need to do or want to say. Just have a sense of being here with your mind and body as they are.

If you're comfortable doing so, you can close your eyes. Feel into the sense of the body sitting, standing, or lying down, whatever posture you're in. We want to find some kind of balance in the body; when the body is stable and balanced, that supports that same thing in the mind.

Pay some attention to the position of the head over the torso. Let the shoulders be balanced, soft, and poised over the hips. Feel the place where you're sitting, the body rising up straight from that. Generally soften; when we have places of tension, we can't as easily find a natural balance because things are being held. So, soften the jaw, the neck, and the shoulders down through the arms and hands. Soften the belly and the low back, down into the legs and feet. Allow the straightness of the central part of the body to just hold the rest, which can soften around it.

Connect in with a simple object in the present moment, such as the sensations of the breath, the general sensations of the body, or sounds—something simple that we can use as a home base for attention. Just invite ease in the body and the mind. This is a way of letting go of what's right at the surface and is willing to let go. We're not trying to make anything happen or judge that certain things shouldn't be there; we just invite some degree of ease.

I'd like to suggest a certain form of practice that you could try out or do this morning, or whatever time of day it is. If it doesn't work for you, that's okay. I'd like to suggest what's called the noting practice, or labeling, where when we feel or sense something in our body and mind, we have a gentle, one-word note of what it is. This connects us to experience.

For example, we might feel warmth, and then the next moment we notice that you've heard my voice, so the note is hearing. Then there's a thought coming through, so it's thinking. Notes are very simple expressions of what's happening. It doesn't have to be different every moment; you could be noting pressure if your attention is lingering at the place where you're sitting, for example. It's meant to be very easy, a way of engaging part of the thinking mind such that it's not running off.

The important thing about notes is not to get hung up on them. You make a note and then you wonder, "Was that the right note?" or you puzzle over, "What was that? How should I note that?" It's already gone; the moment has already moved on. Make a simple note, or if you can't think of one, you can just say something—that is an acceptable note.

The only note that I was not encouraged to use is pain, because pain is abstract; it's a concept. So we would look for something more accurate and more visceral, like aching^[1], tension, heat, or stabbing—something that conveys the feeling. So what this does is it helps the mind to be clear, connected simply to what is happening. I'll have a little more to say in a moment, but just try it out for a few minutes.

I suggest that you put about ninety percent of your attention on the actual experience and ten, or maybe even only five percent, on the note. So it's very light. This is not an exercise in meaning; it's just keeping the mind connected.

As we notice how the mind is doing the noting practice, one of the things that we can notice is the tone of voice with which we are noting. Is there some subtle judgment in the note? Is there some subtle clinging toward favoring things that are peaceful, or pointing out things that shouldn't be there? It's interesting to hear which voice is doing the noting, and if so, that's one more thing to note: that judgment is happening.

It's particularly helpful when we can begin to gain some facility in noting emotions and thoughts. Being able to simply say sadness, anger, or joy helps us to not be so reactive to those responses when they're happening. Also, forms of thought like planning or remembering. We can just say thinking for all of them, but sometimes there's a differentiation into types of thought, and again, that makes it less likely that we'll get on the train and go along with them. But again, keep ninety to ninety-five percent of attention on the actual experience.

Noting is just one form of practice, but I find that it helps my mind to be deeply honest about what is happening in my own experience. Practice evolves, I think, only when we are deeply honest about what's actually happening. When we have that level of honesty with ourselves, then we become trustworthy stewards of our own heart and our own practice. It's really only safe if we can be really open about everything that's coming up in the body and the mind.

We'll sit in silence for a while now, and I'll invite you to either continue with the noting if that was working, or to move on to whatever other practice you have. But whatever you do, have a commitment to being very honest about what's going on. It's all fine, just as you sit here with the body and mind as they are.

Seeing is loving. Part of what love is, is to really see someone or something as it is, to just be with that. So there's a way in which this deep honesty about what's really happening in mind and body is a form of loving, and hence healing, all the parts of our being. So rest for a few minutes in the sense of care that is present in this kind of clear honesty.

You know, this simple honesty that we cultivate on the cushion can serve us out in the world, also. The degree to which we have the inner capacity to know our own feelings, responses, and thoughts that are coming up as we go throughout the day, helps us to respond well. We won't say or act on everything that is coming up in ourselves. As we talk with someone else, we have all kinds of our own feelings and responses. If we have enough mindfulness, we can know those, take them in as data, and then choose how to respond clearly and carefully to this other person.

But if somehow we aren't willing to see everything that's coming up in us, if we're blocking some of our own experience, that will distort a little bit how we interact with people. Of course, we all do that to some degree because we're not one hundred percent able to see our minds usually, but we do our best. This is an inner form of ethics. The more that we can be clear about our own experience, then the more straightforward and clearly we can walk through the world, and that helps everyone. It also models for other people a direct, simple, and virtuous way of being. May our practice support ever more inner clarity and outer straightforwardness.

Meeting Life Well: Virtue

This week, the theme is called meeting life well with five Dharma resources, and this is to meet life well both on and off the cushion. We're talking about five qualities upon which the heart draws in order to meet situations, whether they are dukkha^[2]-type situations of challenging suffering, or whether they're what's called sukha^[3], the opposite: sukha-type situations of happiness, ease, or appreciation.

Today, we are moving on to the second one, which is virtue or ethical conduct. You can choose the term within that realm that works for you. The Pali word is sīla^[4].

There's some classical language around this from the suttas^[5], so I'll just read it. The Buddha says: "Here a noble disciple abstains from the destruction of life, abstains from taking what is not given, abstains from sexual misconduct, abstains from false speech, abstains from liquor, wine, and intoxicants, the basis for heedlessness." You can recognize these as the classical language of the Five Precepts^[6]: not killing, not stealing, not engaging in sexual misconduct, not lying, and not intoxicating the mind or the body. Typically, lay people would try to live by these principles.

It's an interesting question, though, why we are following the precepts or some kind of ethical conduct in the world. Some people do so, I think, without too much reflection or experiential understanding of what is going on with virtue or sīla, and in cases like that, it's just following rules. The encouragement we have here is to view sīla as a practice and to actually investigate what is going on. I'm sure at a top level we can all see that it feels better and goes better in our life when we engage in these kinds of behaviors, but there's even more to discover if we investigate what's going on with living by these particular actions. It might be that until we do some kind of investigation and practice in a formal sense with virtue, it may not go deeply enough into the heart to serve as what I'm calling a Dharma resource. This means something that we can rely on to come forth when we meet the world. Especially if we meet a challenging situation, we want that sense of virtue and understanding of ethical conduct to be rooted deeply enough that it's just what counts.

So what happens when we do some investigation? One thing that we'll discover is that acting ethically is more compatible with mindfulness than acting unethically. Wholesomeness is pretty easily compatible with awareness, whereas unwholesomeness has a way of obscuring the mind in a certain way. You can check this for yourself.

Let's consider just the area of wise speech, for example. The precept in particular only mentions false speech, but there are expanded descriptions in other areas of the suttas. They expand the description of unwise speech to include speech that is false, but also that's divisive, harsh, or meaningless—sometimes translated as gossip, but I think it goes beyond that. We'll discover for ourselves, we can just observe, that when we're speaking well, it's pretty easy to stay in attention, to stay grounded in the body, to be relaxed, and to be focused on the person that you're speaking to. Whereas when we're speaking unwisely—you know, we're lying at that moment, or we're speaking harshly, or not really paying attention—then our inner vision literally gets kind of occluded, and the mind narrows in. We actually don't focus as well on the other person.

I've noticed that when I've been in situations of somewhat tension with somebody else, if I allow myself to get sucked into a sense of aversion or defensiveness, I literally feel my attention sort of drawing down, and I'm not as connected with the other person. This is the effect of an unwholesome pattern in my mind; it has this impact. Most of us have a mindfulness practice if we're sitting here in the mornings, so that means that we value mindfulness in our life, that's something that we're trying to cultivate. In that case, it would make sense that we would also be strengthening virtue in order to support our ability to be aware. When I'm mindful, even if it is a tense situation with someone else, if the mindfulness is strong enough, that in itself is a wholesome quality, and I notice that it's easier to be aware. And then if I can, in addition, try to say something kind, try to say something honest about how I'm feeling, the mindfulness stays right there and I can stay in my body. So virtue and mindfulness are very connected. This is a deeper reason to practice sīla than just following rules or just doing it because a teacher says it's a good idea.

Another discovery that we can make through investigation is that virtue is a powerful condition for a kind of happiness that endures even when conditions change. When we're acting and speaking ethically, we experience what's called the "bliss of blamelessness"^[7] in the texts. That doesn't mean that we're one hundred percent perfect, but at least we know that we were present and we did our best, so there's no basis for feeling guilt, shame, or disappointment in ourselves. The world really needs people who have a genuine positive regard for themselves—not the fake positive of denial or ignoring things, but genuinely possessed of well-being. Ethics does this for us. Again, we have a deeper reason to practice ethics: we want to support this loftier form of happiness that's better than just sensual enjoyment.

I want to expand a little bit on this clear link between mindfulness and ethics. One time when I was returning from a trip, I arrived at the airport at night. At that time, I lived close to public transit and I figured on taking the light rail back to my apartment. I knew that at night the trains only ran about every thirty minutes. When I arrived at the station, the train was there, and so I hopped on before the doors closed so I wouldn't have to wait in the station for half an hour. But you can't buy tickets on board, and so I was riding without a ticket. I noticed that I felt some mild anxiety about that during the ride, but I did manage to get to my station without the ticket person coming to ask for tickets. So, in a sense, I got away with it. But as I exited the train, I noticed that I still felt some tension even though the anxiety of getting caught was gone. So I found myself walking to the ticket machine, buying a ticket, and then throwing it away, so that I had bought a ticket for that ride. I didn't think about that, I didn't plan it out, it just felt natural as I got off the train. Mindfulness pointed me toward that particular action, and I was willing to follow it—to follow the kind of situational ethics of the moment, because there was no one making me do that.

Meeting life well can mean that when we're not sure what to do, or how to manage a complex situation, we can default to whatever ability we've developed to serve ethics in the moment. Another Buddhist teacher I know calls this "serving what is true." So rather than gaming all the nuances and possibilities, just be aware, be clean in how you act or speak, and accept any consequences of that as better than the alternative of not paying attention.

But what does it mean to be clean in how we act and speak? Often we think it means keeping principles in mind, right? I read the Five Precepts, so we have these rules to follow, and then we figure out how to apply them. That's fine, that's how we do it a lot of the time, but in the moment this might be too slow. We can't take the time to go through the cognitive mind if something is coming right in the moment. We need something embodied, and it has to be strong enough that it can override any reactive emotions that are coming out, like anger, greed, envy, or fear.

How do we train in that? One way is to trust this connection between mindfulness and doing the right, or wise, action. Joseph Goldstein^[8] said it this way: "See what you do"—or, we say, see what you say in the case of speech—as a way of exploring sīla. This turns things around sometimes from how we often practice ethics. Usually what we do is start from the principle and try to practice doing it. We start from the idea of not speaking falsely, and then we willfully try to be truthful. That's fine, but it can be a little bit forced at times, or not spontaneous enough.

An alternative is to simply speak as we normally do, but be very clear and precise with mindfulness as we do it. If we start straying into speech that doesn't align with the situation that we're in, we'll feel it because we're being mindful. For example, if we're listening to a friend talk about a workshop that they attended, and we get excited because we've also attended a program on the same topic, and then we leap in and we start telling about our knowledge and experience. We might have assumed that our intention was wholesome, to connect and say something meaningful with our friend, but we can feel in the moment that what we're really doing is asserting our own knowledge. The ego has crept in; they're saying they did this workshop, and we say, "Oh, I know about that, too." It's okay, but it's not quite in tune. We can feel that if we're mindful. Feeling in our body and mind can be more powerful than if we had controlled our speech from a cognitive place.

This is something from Ken McLeod^[9], who's a teacher in the Tibetan tradition:

Many people try very hard to always say the right thing. There's a common misperception that we can know how to say the right thing, that we can have it in mind, and then when we speak, the words will come out correctly. This is the common idea of right speech, and most of us fail at it over and over again. The words don't come out as we thought they would, or if they do, the tone of voice is wrong, or something else happens. It rarely goes as we planned. That's the point. We cannot plan the future. We cannot plan our speech any more than we can plan our next thought. How then are we to practice right speech? The most effective effort is to listen to ourselves as we are talking. This effort brings attention to our speech. When we do this, we will hear when what we say doesn't fit the situation, when it isn't what we intended to say, or how we intended to say it. We will hear with our own ears the different emotional patterns that take over our speech. We will hear how what we say doesn't fit with our intention, or how it comes out of our confusion. And when we make this effort over and over again, we will find that we begin to speak with attention. This is how we practice right speech.

We can do a similar practice for action, like what I did with the light rail ticket, where I sensed my body moving to the ticket machine to buy the ticket, and I could feel in the moment that it was a correct action for that moment. Ethics or virtue becomes an inner resource, or a form of inner wealth or strength, when it's freed from the cognitive mind and its focus on ideas, ideals, and abstract principles. Virtue becomes embodied when we meet life with mindfulness and the intention of non-harm, and we let actions and speech emerge from that. It's a training; we won't be skilled in it immediately, but it takes our ethics training to a deeper level of Dharma practice.

There's a story from the suttas where the Buddha is speaking with a prince named Prince Abhaya^[10]—which means "fearless," by the way. He asks the Buddha whether the Buddha plans the answers to Dharma questions in advance. The Buddha asks in return whether the prince considers in advance how to respond to questions about the parts of a chariot. Prince Abhaya says, "No, I'm very skilled in the parts of a chariot, and once someone asks me about that, the answer occurs to me on the spot." And the Buddha replies, "So too, Prince. When people come to me and pose a question, the answer occurs to the Tathāgata^[11] on the spot." He's saying that he's understood the Dharma so deeply that he can always come up with an appropriate response.

We may not be quite at that level ourselves, but I would suggest that we can try taking our ethical conduct to this deeper level through experiential practice, and then it will become second nature to speak and act in non-harming ways even in stressful situations. Then it becomes a reliable resource in our heart. So we have confidence and we have ethical conduct as two resources, and we'll keep moving on as we go forward. Thank you so much.