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Dharmette: Effort and Effortlessness

So, I'll just drop a link in the chat for any anonymous questions. Maybe we'll take one next week or something, I don't know.

I was listening to a talk by a very revered Thai Forest master, a very remarkable person. The video had fewer than 300 views. And right next to it, the suggested handpan video was at 17 million. Now, don't get me wrong, I would never bash the handpan—I'm a devotee myself [Laughter]—but wow.

He was talking about his practice, and the level of effort and singular focus on awakening was just so inspiring. It was such deep renunciation: hour after hour, month after month, year after year of resolution. Just walking meditation for hours on end. And what was remarkable was that he made all the efforts sound like the most obvious, natural thing to do—that if one understood the path, we all might do exactly that.

It was a little jarring. But just hearing it did something to my mind and summoned some inspiration in me. It was like, "Oh yeah," hearing those words created a condition in my mind that was not there before. It was not like, "Okay, I choose to be inspired." I was just affected.

And yet, what was an important feature of this was that all of the effort gave way to states or modes of awareness of tremendous effortlessness. He reported that it didn't feel challenging or even austere because there was a very steady stream of rapturous delight, fascination, and investigation (dhammavicaya^[4]).

I was co-teaching^[5] a daylong on the relationship between love and grit—how gentleness, self-compassion, and resolution (adhiṭṭhāna^[6]) fit together. The two of us were going back and forth, staging a fake debate basically between heroic effort and gentleness. A yogi commented that almost all of the deeply meaningful experiences in his meditation practice felt like grace rather than him doing something.

And so I thought tonight to say some words about this kind of effort and will versus effortlessness and grace.

There is a dimension of the path that is just training—training like one trains an animal. And there's a dimension of the path that is something more akin to magic. In the insight tradition, it begins with a great deal of effort. How we understand the spectrum between self-indulgence and self-mortification is highly shaped by our culture. We like to talk about the middle path, but it's good to remember that for the Buddha, the middle path meant never eating dinner again. That was the middle path, right?

So okay, maybe we have to grade on the US curve. We have to tap only the energy that actually exists in us. And I don't think we always have to make that kind of heroic effort, but I do feel like there has to be some willingness to make it.

I have only got one friend, I think, for whom the path came very, very easily. She sat a three-month retreat and was like, "The teacher told me to let go, so I let go." And I'm like, "You listen to the teacher? How do you even do that?" You know, she's like, "The teacher said let go, I let go." For almost everyone else, the path involves a tremendous amount of hard, manual spiritual labor.

Steve Armstrong said that effort and energy are among the most commonly mentioned themes in all of the suttas^[7]. We're asked to consider: Is the virtue, the training that I've undergone, that I've developed, sufficient to face death openheartedly? Have I exhausted my spiritual potential for this lifetime? These are provocative questions. They're self-seeking. They stimulate self-referential thinking and mobilize some effort.

But this is complex terrain. The self can do effort, but the self cannot do effortlessness. Striving often congeals a sense of self, and yet the Dharma is a kind of stream where the self and all its machinations are beside the point.

I am halfway through reading a book by Meghan O'Gieblyn^[8] titled Will and Attention. It's very beautiful; I'll maybe give a kind of book report on it at some point. I've read her for some years and quoted her in talks. This book is about her struggles with alcohol, with God, with willfulness.

In some promotional material, she wrote: "Several years ago, I came across an aphorism by the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil^[9]: 'We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.' I was both fascinated and mystified by this quote and ended up writing a memoir, Will and Attention, about my attempts to understand the relationship between those two ideas. As someone who has struggled with addiction and spiritual doubt, I know from experience there are certain things in life that resist willpower, or in some cases become more elusive and difficult to achieve the more you exert yourself. You cannot simply will yourself to kick a pernicious habit, abandon an obsession, fall in love, or believe in God. Brute effort^[10] is especially useless when it comes to creative work. You cannot summon inspiration on demand or overcome an obstacle in your work simply by muscling through. Such things require an indirect method, which I've come to think of as the path of attention."

You cannot will yourself to kick a habit, fall in love, or believe in God. And I would likewise say there is so much in Dharma that we cannot will. We cannot will concentration. The will is just more noise that buries the silence. We cannot will insight. The insistence on answers is a reiteration of the problem, and insight changes the problem definition altogether. We cannot fall in love with the Dharma on purpose. We cannot will any of this, and yet the path can be cultivated.

We are responsible for the effort, not the grace. And so we make effort that's tailored for what fuel is in the tank, what willingness we have. And we simultaneously are clear-perceiving the limitations of willfulness. Sometimes we must exhaust our effort—exhaust ourselves trying to engineer and make so much happen that we make the mind so tired, plastic, and surrendered that grace just fills that vacuum.

O'Gieblyn quotes from a text I know from a dharma context: The Cloud of Unknowing. It's a 14th-century mystical Christian text. From that: Salvation cannot be achieved through knowledge or effort. The very fact you want it means that the desire has come from elsewhere, from something you are completely ignorant of, stirring you to will and desire. You know not what the spiritual life requires: this letting this larger mysterious force take the lead and not interfering with its workings.

"In a word, let this thing deal with you and lead you as it will. Let it be active and you passive. Watch it if you like, but let it alone. Do not interfere with it as though you would help, for fear that you should spoil it all. Be the tree, let it be the carpenter; be the house, let it be the householder. Be willing to be unseeing. Give up all longing to know the why and the how, for knowing would be more of a hindrance than a help."

And then O'Gieblyn comments: "To be compelled by a passage like this, to find it not only cogent but revelatory, it is necessary to have lived through some time in a profound state of self-alienation. It is to admit that the kingdom is in ruins, that you have exhausted your resources and run your best ideas into the ground. That any authority, even one that is nameless and unknown, is preferable to the puppet regime of self-governance."

The relief was deep and immediate. She writes, "The puppet regime of self-governance does not get enlightened, but the willingness and the flailing are instrumental for the arising of something like grace."

Then you come to understand and situate effort and effortlessness together. I offer this for your consideration and wish you all a very good week. See you next Wednesday.