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Dharmette: Sensitivity Grows (1 of 5) How Does Discernment Grow?

I hope you can hear me now. Sorry about the sound going in and out. I don't know if it's with my connection or something on YouTube, but I'll try to figure it out and hope it doesn't happen again.

So, what is it about our practice—paying attention in the way that we're encouraged to do, kindly, respecting what we see—that can eventually lead to deep wisdom, liberating wisdom, to freedom? It seems kind of miraculous. I think it is kind of miraculous. My sense is that over our years of engagement with practice and the Dharma teachings, there's a gradual discernment about what is wholesome, kusala^[2], and what is not. And that is that we see more and more clearly what kinds of behaviors, what kinds of mind states, what kinds of thinking lead us in the direction of freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion, or lead us in the opposite direction [Laughter], or to more suffering, more dukkha^[3], more stress.

So, discernment—I really believe our discernment, clear-seeing wisdom, grows in a really organic way as we get more intimate with our inner life and more honest about what it's telling us.

I know a couple of months ago Gil gave a week of Dharma about this word kusala, what we usually translate as wholesome or skillful. I didn't hear any of those, so I might unknowingly repeat some of what he said. But, you know, even if that happens, I don't think it can really hurt. I wanted to talk about this topic because kusala is actually my favorite word in the Dharma and has been for quite a while. And I have a strong sense that developing increasing sensitivity to what is kusala and what is akusala, its opposite, is really key to gradually letting go of craving and clinging, letting go of greed, hatred, and delusion.

As our practice evolves—and if we're sincerely practicing, I think it's always evolving right up to the final realization [Laughter], whenever that might be—my experience has been that over time, discernment about what leads onward into the stream of the Dharma and what leads in the direction of more pain has been honed, so that I notice the difference more quickly, and I notice it in more subtle movements of mind [Laughter] or intentions to act. It's not that I did the honing either, you know, it's a result of simply doing the practice as it was presented, paying attention. And as we do that, you know, more and more of our attentional faculties naturally come into play and become more sensitive, I think.

We're learning to look at our experience of life, our whole experience of life: our actions, our mental activity, our emotional lives, our relationships. We're learning to look at them more and more closely so that details of our thinking process that we've never noticed before begin to stand out. So that we see emotional reactivity, we see unacknowledged views that we might have been holding for years. We see intentions underlying our actions that might have been driving us, you know, for decades, unseen, unnoticed. Maybe sometimes even deliberately unseen.

An analogy I thought of—hope it works—is learning to look at paintings in an art class. First, we might just see the gross forms. You know, the shape of a human body if that's the subject of the painting, the shape of a mountain, a chair, whatever the subject happens to be. And then gradually we see more. We see a gesture of a hand that seems to be pointing to something outside the painting. Or we see a smile that's kind of mysterious, you know, like the Mona Lisa's smile is said to be. The chair's legs maybe in the painting are different lengths, but somehow we know that actually they are the same length. There's perspective, there's foreshortening. [Laughter]

And then we begin to see the way the paint is applied. You know, some of the brush strokes, we see the size of the brush strokes, and how thick the paint is, the way the colors are blended. We see how an ocean wave that looks so real is just a collection of strokes of white and blue paint, now maybe a little green in here. They're just dabs of paint, and how light on a face is just a patch of yellow. [Laughter] Details begin to stand out, and at the same time, we see the way the whole thing has been constructed. A painting, you know, is a collection of many small streaks and patches of color. And we didn't see that at first. [Laughter]

And in our lives, you know, we have—or anyway, most of us have been conditioned to believe that satisfying our sense desires is the way to happiness. That's a big picture, you know. And we don't see the pain inherent in the actual striving that usually results from those desires, because we haven't looked closely at how it's all put together: the unseen beliefs and motivations, the craving that arises in the wake of simple desires, the way we've been conditioned to want certain things, to not want other things. All the little pieces that put together the big picture of our orientation to life.

And as we practice, you know, often the more gross sense desires kind of lose their pull, they lose their power over us. We see they're not really taking us where we want to go. At the same time, I think we begin to see how even if we have let go of a lot of attachments to them, there are momentary cravings or quieter, ongoing cravings that we didn't really notice before. [Laughter] That's progress. That's getting more sensitive.

I was on a retreat last month at Insight Retreat Center. And one day the kitchen crew made some cookies. Pignolis they're called. They're Italian. They had lots of pine nuts on top and the body of the cookie was made from almond paste, eggs, and sugar. Very simple. [Laughter] I had not been hoping or waiting for a cookie when I saw them on the plate in the lunch line. I took one. I didn't think too much about it.

And then when I was finished with the rest of my lunch, I made a cup of tea and I took a bite of the cookie. It was one bite. And immediately this little tickle of desire arose in me. I hadn't even eaten half of that cookie, and the delightful taste—and it was delightful to me anyway—triggered wanting more. And I saw the desire just immediately. It was there. It was kind of humorous actually to me. Even though it was really a small thing, I saw that it had made a ripple in the flow of my previous very peaceful mind. It was halfway through the retreat, so my mind was very settled.

And the desire for that delightful taste of that cookie—the desire itself—was not pleasant, unlike the taste itself. There was a subtle kind of neediness in that desire that was unpleasant, that was tight. It was dukkha. Even the feeling, "Are there more? Are there enough so that I could have another?" It was unpleasant. It was dukkha. [Laughter]

After I'd washed my dishes and the food was all being cleared away, I walked over to the buffet table and I saw there were still quite a few of those cookies left. I picked one up. I didn't eat it then. I practiced a little restraint. But I was still aware there was craving for that cookie. I saved it for another day. So I knew I was more focused still on the pleasure of eating the cookie than on the pain of the craving. The idea that sense pleasures were going to give me happiness was still operating at a kind of subtle level in my mind.

But I knew that was the case. I didn't ignore it. I didn't ignore the pain. We're just conditioned by our culture, by our upbringing, by our biology to look for the gratification of our sense desires. But as our practice develops, we become more attuned to the danger, as the texts call it, the danger of being driven by our sense desires. And then the escape from that danger comes when we can feel the dukkha that is inherent in the grasping after sense desires. And when the dukkha outweighs the gratification, we can let go. I don't think it happens before that. And that hadn't happened with me, with that cookie. [Laughter] Apparently, at least on that particular day.

But there are many, many areas in my life, much more important areas than my relationship with cookies, where I now choose peace over the gratification of sense desires, where I can let go of craving, or where craving doesn't even arise anymore. We become more skillful at seeing the downside, what the texts call the danger, and also more sensitive to the contraction, the tightness, maybe actual pain—mental or physical pain—that characterizes the danger of following those cravings. We recognize it and we feel it. And the danger inherent in unskillful action, it becomes something that we can feel viscerally in our bodies. It's dukkha.

In a sutta called the Relay Chariots^[4], there's a conversation between Sariputta^[5], one of the closest disciples of the Buddha, and a revered visiting monk whose name is Punna^[6]. Sariputta is kind of testing Punna by asking him a lot of questions about the goal of the Buddhist teaching. He asks, "Is it purification of virtue? Is it purification of mind? Is it purification of view by overcoming doubt? Is it purification of knowledge and vision of what is and is not the path? Is it purification of knowledge of the way? Is it purification by knowledge and vision?" And all of these, Sariputta is well aware, they're all steps, they're all stages on the way to the goal. He's just testing Punna to confirm that he knows. [Laughter]

And Punna says, "No, the goal of the path is Nibbana^[7] with no fuel for grasping." And then he goes on to make an analogy with a king taking a relay of chariots to arrive at his final destination. He stops at many places along the way and changes chariots. And each chariot brings him a little closer to his destination. And each chariot, of course, is likened to one of these stages on the path to our goal of practice. And each stage on the path prepares us for the next, builds on the one before it. Our discernment grows, our wisdom grows.

I first came to this tradition, you know, over 20 years ago in a retreat at Spirit Rock^[8]. I'd never taken a mindfulness class, but I was a long-time meditator in a different Indian tradition, a yogic tradition, not Buddhist. And I wanted to learn mindfulness. I wanted to establish sati^[9]. My previous experience had all been in a kind of shamatha^[10] practice using a mantra, developing deep samadhi^[11].

But as much as the practice itself, what really struck me on that first retreat at Spirit Rock was the ethical culture of the organization. The bookstore at Spirit Rock in those days was self-service; you chose what you wanted to purchase, you filled out a little sales slip, stuck your payment in a box. And the trust implied by that had a big effect on me. I wanted to live up to that trust. There were no locks on the dorm room doors. That also gave a sense of safety. A sense I was in a place where ethical integrity was both expressed and it was also expected from us. And I could feel that this integrity was an expression of the Buddhist Dharma. I felt myself on solid ground spiritually. [Laughter]

I always thought of myself as a moral person, you know, someone who was ethical in my relationships. [Laughter] But feeling trusted so completely let me relax into a very open state of mind, and seeing that same trust extended to everyone who came to the center inspired me to become more careful in my life, in my relationships. I wanted to be more trustworthy, that trustworthy, and to offer that kind of trust to others. I started getting a hint that ethical cultivation wasn't just a good way to live a life—a decent way to be a human being—but was actually a foundation for freedom. And I understood that before I ever encountered teachings on sila^[12]. It came through as a result of others' practice, as a result of seeing how I was received.

As I said before we sat together today, I really hope in this week I can point to ways that our practice and engagement with the Dharma, if we're sincere, organically leads to more discernment, and how that discernment gradually shifts the direction, the inclination of our minds and hearts into Dharma wisdom, into the Dharma stream.

So, that's what I have for you today. I realize that I went over a couple minutes. And I'll try not to do that in future. [Laughter] And I hope there won't be any sound problems tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow. It was a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for your attention.