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View purification for a BIPOC

Good morning, everyone. Happy Mother's Day to everyone involved.

Today, I'd like to share some reflections on a teaching that's been very important to me and has made a big difference in my life: the topic of views. In the teachings, views often have a very negative rendition. In all the discourses, views are not rendered as positive things. So they are qualified: the views that we work on are things called "Right View" or the "purification of views."

This is particularly wonderful to me because I think that this practice is about meeting the deepest needs that a human person can have. It is about coming into contact with what we need the most and being able to have relationships—internal and external—that help us settle, open up, and come into the fullness of our being, the fullness of here, the fullness of being together.

Sīla, Samādhi, and Paññā

Views are usually found in a classic teaching comprised of sīla^[1], samādhi^[2], and paññā^[3]. These are Pali words that can be translated to ethical conduct, concentration or meditation, and wisdom. Views are usually in the category of wisdom because they can be the beginning and the end of the path. That's one of the potent things about them. We start working on our views—relating to our views, branching out widely, releasing views, lessening views, finding views that are helpful—and then this amazing thing begins to happen: without views, there's just viewing, seeing, knowing.

This knowing that I'm talking about, the knowledge and vision we develop in this tradition, is very gentle. Gil^[4] says something like, "Be still and look at everything, and gaze at everything kindly." Gazing at everything kindly. The kindly part is really important, because that is where the settling has happened in order to be able to look at views.

First, there's sīla, ethical virtue. What we get from practicing our ethical conduct is some safety. We find where our need for safety is met, and where our need for non-harming is also met. That allows us to settle down and really start relaxing some of the deeper things inside of us that are a little fragmented. We mostly lead fragmented lives. We're usually coming and going in our minds, coming and going in the world. It's part of the worldly life to come and go, to reach, to push, to want, to not want.

So samādhi is a coming together. It's a centering. It's not being "out there" or "then and there." Once we find that we have this foothold, this place of rest, we can begin to more easily take note of our view, of what we see. We begin to notice those views that lead us to wholesomeness, to goodness, to compassion, to authentic joy.

There are different views. The word for views in Pali is diṭṭhi^[5], which can mean pretty much the same thing that it does in English: the opinion, the belief, the metaphysics, the history, the stories—all these things that we've inherited and brought along. But "view" can also share the meaning of having a beautiful vista, like from the top of a mountain or the edge of a cliff. And diṭṭhi has another very interesting meaning in Pali that we don't have in English: being here and now.

That's what we get to. We get to this place where we're here and now with tremendous clarity. This clarity can see the here and now in a way that's normally not available because there are so many filters that we live with—filters that we need, in fact.

So it's a lot about removing the filters. We start to do this by settling down, by doing what we just did: we meditated, we were quiet, and then we can begin to notice all the things that come up. It's very different when we are able to just be there fully.

Let's say that you were standing in a long line for the bathroom over there, and you wanted to get back here to the meditation hall to be on time. So there's a little concern, a little worry, a little preoccupation. There's a little back-and-forth going on in you.

It's also possible—maybe because you heard some teaching about being quiet and receiving the moment, being massaged by the present moment, and receiving the goodness that's here—that you decide to be still while you're waiting for the bathroom. Just still, taking in your feet on the ground, your body shifting, the space, people coming and going, the sunlight. Those are a whole bunch of other things outside of the concern to get to the bathroom and be on time.

That's the fullness that I'm alluding to. The moment gets thicker, in a way, as we begin to quiet down and release our views and our thinking. There are some views that really hold us back: fearful views, long habits, long ideas that we picked up from somewhere, flashbacks, and stories. As these begin to settle, we can begin to take care of something that's a little deeper inside.

We can put a question mark on views and realize that maybe a certain view is not really necessary. We come back to the present moment, take another look at that view, and slowly see that it doesn't really help us. There's a kind of massage that goes back and forth; it's very organic. We can sense the physical and emotional effect it has on us to go back to that same concern or preoccupation. Then we begin to see, "Maybe I don't need to see it this way. Maybe I can begin to question it a little bit differently."

This helps a lot because it leads us onward to go deeper into how we frame things, how we see things, how we exist here.

It's been very important for me to let go of very intense views through a lot of work, because I have found myself belonging more to the world. We all have this deep need to belong, to be at home. We see the Buddha statue pointing to the Earth. On the night of his enlightenment, he was pointing to the Earth because the Earth was his witness. He belonged to the Earth; he is of the Earth. There was no separation. Nothing could take him away from his connection to here, to the fullness of here.

And then there's the stability in his gaze. There is a kindness and sweetness in his gaze that comes, which we cultivate with our practice. The more we do this, the more we can accept things and see things clearly.

Mindfulness of Emotions

Many of us have probably looked at emotions here. One of the teachings in secular mindfulness and in our Insight tradition is looking at emotions as phenomena, as events. It is very helpful to look at an emotion as an event, as opposed to how we usually feel emotions. We usually become the emotions. There is something very different when we learn to step back a little bit, sense it, and understand it from a sensory point of view.

That's a very big place that begins to open up. That's why being with emotions is such a potent practice. Because when we look at and treat our emotions that way, we find this refuge inside. There's a space that opens up, and suddenly the emotion can be understood better.

It's not about doing anything to the emotion. It is not about trying to fix it, which is really hard, right? It would be really nice to just stop certain emotions like fear, anger, or shame. Sometimes there can even be too much joy that feels inappropriate. But we don't really change them; instead, we see them, know them, sense them, care for them. We kindly attend to them and let them be. In that space that opens up, these things can get untangled.

What gets untangled is not necessarily done by our inner "something." One of the wonderful things about mindfulness is that things get untangled by insight.

We begin to see that emotions are in flux. First, we see that they are an experience that's happening, and that we can know them. It's something very cool that our mind does: we can know something, and we can let it be. When that space opens up, this untangling begins to happen if we can be steady and caring. If we can really just be there—not fragmented, not pushing away, but finding some sort of center, foothold, nurturing, or kindliness.

If you can be kindly toward some of those horrible emotions that come from life, they unravel. This unraveling happens because these things want to be felt and seen. There are a lot of little sticky parts in them that keep us attached. With fear, it's almost like we can't even see that we are not the fear. With shame, sometimes we can't even see that we're not the shame.

But if we bring this caring, nurturing stance that our tradition teaches us—this is a tradition of tranquility and serenity as well as insight—these real knots of ours begin to slowly unravel. Because they're physical things, emotional things, motivational things, and cognitive things. We get insight into: "Oh wow, when this happens, this happens. When that comes into my vision, this happens. When that comes into my mind, I do this. When I feel this way, I really go down that rabbit hole."

And it's cool how this happens. It happens because you see things are not solid. That's one of the interesting revelations of having Right View or a purified view. A purified view means that we can see the emotion, see the object, know we're seeing the object, and recognize that they're two different things.

When we can see these two different things, we then begin to see the overlay of concepts in how we look at our emotions—how I see my anger. I begin to see how I see my anger, and then I can know that, take stock, and kindly receive it. One other thing I see is that my perspective is changing. How I'm looking at it changes, and the anger itself is also changing. Suddenly things are not so fixed. We're in this kind of stream, a moving, flowing world.

And that's amazing because we're more here, we're more alive. We can be more intimate with ourselves, and we can be more intimate with the world.

The Fullness of the Present Moment

Let's say that you are at the beach one day. It's an off day, a Sunday afternoon like today, and we just came out of meditation so we're very relaxed. We're not yet worried about Monday. So we just really take in the beach. We take in the waves, the foam, the air, the gentle cool breeze, maybe the little bird legs. We just really take all these things in. If we're settled, we're just there in some sort of joy, enjoying this.

It's very cool because you're just registering these things as a marvel. You're not really thinking about them; that's a different thing. If someone asks you, "Did you see those waves?" you might reply, "Oh yeah, those were great waves." But it wasn't because you were analyzing the waves. You could be analyzing them, but then that keeps you in a different little frame, as opposed to a very broad frame where you're just registering everything in every direction, which is what mindfulness does.

At the beach, you can go into another layer: the building blocks of your experience. How that comes into view is that you see there is sand, and that you're knowing sand. What begins to show up is the quality and essence of sand: hardness, wetness, moving air, shifting sensations. That's a whole other, deeper level of experience that is available to us.

Just like when we were standing in line, you could have been thinking about getting to the bathroom, or you could have been really fully here—taking in everybody around you and having a different experience. One is not better than the other, it's just a different experience where there can be a greater intimacy and a fullness of the moment. That's very sweet, because we largely don't live that way.

Many times, the world of the mind is a very captivating world to be in. It's almost like a virtual reality.

The Virtual Reality of the Mind

One of my aunts sent me a little electronic story in Spanish. It was about a woman in Latin America who went into a restaurant to have lunch. She was busy planning her next big project at work and planning her vacation. She ordered her lunch, and then she heard a voice from below her say, "Can I have a piece of bread, please?"

She looked down, and there was a little boy asking for a piece of bread. She felt a pang of sadness, so she ordered him a piece of bread. She really wanted to get back to her world, but then the boy asked, "Can I have a little bit of butter to put on it, please?" She offered him the butter.

Then he asked her, "What are you doing?"

She said, "I'm sending emails."

He asked, "What's that?"

She knew that this desperately poor boy wouldn't understand. (You see this everywhere where I come from.) She couldn't figure out how to explain it to him, so she said, "You know, it's like virtual reality. It's a reality that doesn't really exist. It's letters and notes, but it's more like a virtual reality."

The boy said, "Oh, I know what virtual reality is. I live in virtual reality too. I live in the idea that it's going to be Christmas today and that we're going to have gifts. Because where I live, my mom goes to work every day, my sister goes to sell her body but comes back with her body every night, my father is in jail, and my little baby brother is crying from hunger. So I live in this virtual reality too."

The woman came to her senses. She saw how she was missing the world by escaping back into her world of vacations and memories. She was in the world but missing the world, unable to have compassion for the world she was in.

It's a very different experience to live in a virtual reality. When we do, we're not receiving all that's here. We're not unwinding all that could be unwound to open up the spaces of the heart.

A Path Full of Heart

This is a path full of heart. There's this great little book by Joseph Goldstein, a cute, yellow book called A Path Full of Heart^[6]. It's the prettiest little book; very short, but it's a path full of heart.

In the way to release all the cravings and clinging that we have, the unquenchable thirsts, the wantings, the fears, the shames, and the flashbacks—the way to unwind these things is to remember that there can always be two things.

There is what we expect. For example, there is this glass, and I know that I'm knowing this glass. Just in the time that I told you that, I wasn't really thinking of the glass. The glass looks like it's here, right? But there is all this shifting and changing at every moment. I could bring it up and have water. I call it a glass, but we could put flowers in it, and then it's something else. It's a convention that I'm overlaying on it. I can be very rigid: "This is my glass. Nobody use my glass for flowers, that's rude." Or, I can just know that this is shifting.

I'm thinking about the glass, but I'm also thinking about you, thinking about what I'm going to say, wondering if you're getting me. All this shifting and moving is happening in just this glass.

When I enter into the world of just what I know and what's being known, the sensory experience is completely changing. My internal experience and my knowing of it are also shifting and changing. There's this constant movement of arising and passing. It's not solid. And that's very relaxing for those things that are not easy to change in us. That really softens things up.

It gets really hard in there sometimes. In our heart-mind, we're really locked: "No, this is not true. You don't know, but this is how this is." But is it?

What I'm talking about is what's referred to in the tradition as the beginning of vipassanā^[7], the beginning of insight. When we are in that flowing world, when we are beginning to sense, know, see, feel, touch, experience, and look kindly at how much flux and flow is happening, then we have insight. Vipassanā—the "vi", they tell me, means you're really seeing. We're really seeing through.

It's very nice to really see through in this world, to connect deeply to this world, to connect deeply to the people around us. And equally important, to connect to ourselves really deeply. To find ourselves where there's a rub, where there's a stuckness, where there's a repetition that just won't stop and keeps holding me back. It's really nice to find, "Oh, that's that," and then to be kind toward that. To care for it. To let it be nourished by the calm that's available. There's a lot more benevolence here than we usually avail ourselves of, and so we open up broadly to this goodness.

Then it's a new world. It's the same world, it's this world, but it's very broad. It's very full. It's very free of the concepts that I've overlaid on it.

Forgiveness and Mother's Day

Today being Mother's Day, I was reflecting on being with my mother a couple of weeks ago. It was just amazing how I can be with her now. I can see this person, my mother, but I can also let her be a person. Let her be whatever she is, and that's just an amazing reality to me now.

My mom and I have had a very difficult past. I'm a queer man, and she's a Latin American woman with a very patrician, patriarchal upbringing. I grew up in a Latin country, and so the stance was, "No, you're gay? We're going to beat that out of you." My uncles tried to beat it out of me, and my mom just refused to accept me. I had a stepfather who was also pushing me out of the house, so I left pretty early and led a semi-homeless life at a very young age. That's just how it was for everybody; it was a different era. The country and the world were in a different place around the issues of being queer. That identity was really not what it is today.

For years, I would just hang up on my mom, because when we started to talk again, she would ask every time, "When are you going to get married? When are you going to get married?" So for about ten years, I would just hang up. I kept calling her because she's my mother—we come from a big Latin family, and I'm very connected to them because they raised me. So there have been eons of forgiveness, moving through, and letting go of views, anger, and resentment.

It's a long process, having insight into what is, but it's a magical thing. I was with this woman. I was telling Gil about this, and I made a joke. I don't know if Gil liked it, but I said, "Gil, I think I'm an arahant^[8]." [Laughter]

He did not laugh. We take the term arahant, which is an awakened being in our tradition, kind of seriously. But then I said to him, "You know how they say that when you think you're really enlightened, you should go spend a weekend with your parents? Gil, I just did that. I just spent three days staying in my mother's house, which I hadn't stayed in for twenty years, and we had a great time."

Because now, I see what arises in me. I am responsible for what arises in me. The young Francisco that comes up around my mother when she talks that way—that's in me. But it's my ability now to view this, to see that this old Francisco, this young Francisco, is coming up. I can kindly see them, and they settle. This is my internal work.

And then I let my mom be herself. She does things, and she's not only my mom; she's also a person who is getting old now. I can have compassion for my mom in a way that I never thought I could, and we relate in a way that I never thought was ever going to happen in this lifetime. That's a beautiful thing in this very life, to be healed with my mother after a pretty checkered past.

My checkered past and our difficult times are no different than anybody else's. That's another great liberating insight. That pain I had with my mom, the difficulty of being semi-homeless as a teenager for four years—that's my story. You have your story. And it's relative; mine is not worse than yours.

I came to this insight via physical pain. I had an accident, then a rare degenerative disease, and then a big reconstruction of my spine. I was rendered disabled; I didn't walk for four years and had severe symptoms that I still manage, but I hide them pretty well. I was a young person when it happened. I was homebound, I couldn't work. For a long time, I pitied myself.

It was a big change when I realized, "Oh, I remember when catching a cold was a big deal." I realized pain is relative. Everybody else's pain is their pain, and it's serious to their relative experience. It's unique to them. Mine is not worse than anybody else's. That insight was very helpful, because then I was just a lot more relaxed, accepting, and at ease with a very difficult reality that takes a lot of care, attention, and medical care to handle.

Views are very liberating. The Right View, the purified view, can be very, very liberating.

Reflections and Conclusion

Now, I don't want you to manufacture anything. I talked about emotions a lot so that those of you who know mindfulness of emotions already know what I'm talking about. And if you're new to the practice, maybe you had an experience in our meditation of being with something and letting it move, caring for it, being kind toward it, being present, being at ease with it, giving it space and attention, letting it move along. Everything is kind of in this flux.

If anything, I invite you to consider your relationship to the present moment, to how things are, and how things come and go. Enter the present moment with as much fullness as is available. That can come by paying attention to your relationship to doing one thing at a time. What is your relationship to just doing one thing at a time? What unveils itself? There is much that can be unveiled.

So, Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers. Happy Mother's Day to everyone's mother, and may you go in peace. Have a great day. Maybe enjoy a good lunch, mindfully taking your time with the food. Even there, automatic patterns can be seen and not be automatic, just going a little bit slower. With somebody, you can be with them there even more than usual.

Lunchtime is coming up, and I was told that Gil has been giving questions at the end of talks to see if people wanted to have a little in-person breakout group outside in the courtyard. So, what does it mean to do one thing at a time to you? If you choose to go out in the courtyard and mingle a little bit, and if you want to have a Dharma discussion: what does it mean to just settle on one thing at a time to you?

Thank you so much for your attention.