Dharmette: Blamelessness (2 of 5) Judgement Informed by the Aggregates

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Dharmette: Blamelessness (2 of 5): Judgement Informed by the Aggregates. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 25, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Dharmette: Blamelessness (2 of 5) Judgement Informed by the Aggregates

Hello everyone, welcome to the moment. Now, if you missed it, my name is Maria Straatmann, and I am filling in for Gil^[1] this week, who is off leading a retreat at one of his favorite places. So we can share a moment of being happy for him.

So this week what we have been talking about, or we will continue talking about, is how to overcome self-criticism or self-blame. In thinking about it, we use the word blamelessness because that's where we wish to be—in the world of blamelessness. Today, what I'd like to talk about is judgment, because it is judgment through which we finally come to the place where we say, "I did that wrong. I shouldn't have done that. How did that happen?"

I want to talk about a couple of aspects of judgment. Judgment is really about forming an opinion about something. It's not the behavior so much as it is the opinion about the behavior. We do that very largely through the act of comparison. We compare it to our ideal—our ideal self, our ideal way that anyone would behave. But there's always an element of both opinion and comparison, so it moves beyond the realm of just straight discernment. I can tell the difference between A and B, I can distinguish between A and B, but it goes to the place where I prefer A over B, and I compare A and B to one another. This act of comparing things gets us in the realm where we start judging, and we seem to have these ideas and beliefs that we're labeling against all of the experiences we have.

I want to quickly—there are so many things to say about this—first remind you of the way that we experience all experience. We call these the Aggregates^[2], and they're called the Aggregates because they're the five ways of receiving experience that we use to form a self, which is tied to what we believe and what our opinions are.

So they are:

1. The sense factor itself: what I'm hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, or thinking. The sense experience itself.
2. Feeling tone: whether that experience is pleasant or unpleasant. Not whether we like it or not—that's an important distinction—but is it pleasant or unpleasant? We don't actually have to go to like or dislike; it can just be pleasant or unpleasant. Under some conditions, I might taste a lemon and think, "That is so blessedly wonderful after all of that sweetness," or I will taste it and feel only the bitterness of it in that taste. Those are pleasant or unpleasant. Whether I like or dislike them has to do with all other kinds of conditions.
3. Perception: it's noticing something, it's the naming function. This is a glass, but actually, it is a container, but I call it a glass because it has my water in it. So there's a naming feature, and we name our experiences all the time. We name, "This is running, this is sitting, this is standing." We perceive what it is, we name it, and that places a little placemark for us.
4. Thinking: yesterday I got a few comments. I'm going to look at this and call it a bowl, and I can look at this and call it a bowl. One is much larger than the other. I can compare them on the basis of that. I can compare them on the basis of sound. That's how they sound together. [Rings bowls] That's large and deep. Small. Now, I might have a preference for one or the other, and that's where we're in the realm of thinking. Now I'm thinking, "Well, this one is like this, and this one's like this," and I can compare them. It's the world of comparing in that experience, and usually, we compare based on our experience and the other conditions around us. So maybe I prefer the light bell if I'm alone in the room and just want to make a small mark in sound, and I might prefer the large bell because it resonates much more and I feel like that is going to be a better thing for me.
5. Awareness: if we're not aware of something, it actually doesn't even exist for us. Now behind me, I know there are things on the wall. There's this—I don't know if you can see it—there's a little green heart underneath the picture. The green heart is made up of leaves, and it was given to me by my husband. I have all kinds of associations for it, but behind me, when you can't see it and I can't see it, it doesn't even exist. But when I look at it, I know it. It's not just that I see it, but I know that I see it. This is an important part of mindfulness. When we're considering what's going on in the moment, and we're mindful of the moment, we see something—there's an object, we see it, but the awareness is knowing that we see it. We see lots of things. You look around you, the environment you're in, you see all kinds of things. But what do you know? I don't mean the knowing of what you know about it, but the registering is the awareness part of it, where you say, "Oh yes, I see that. I know that."

All of these elements are present in any experience we have. Judgment comes in when we start comparing something—some action, some feeling, some emotion—to what we believe is the right thing. Believe—where did that come from? "I failed in this because I really was sure I'd never do that again." How do I know I've failed in this? "Well, the outcome wasn't my expected outcome." It's all opinion. What do you mean expected outcome? "Oh, this is about what I think should happen, not what happened."

The art of blamelessness, of non-judgment, lies in being able to see your experience just as an experience. "Oh, this happened." And then I can say, "Oh, that wasn't my desired outcome." But I don't have to say, "That means I'm a failure." That goes to another place. Now I'm comparing myself to something else. Instead, I can say, "Well, that didn't work. I'll try something else next time," or "I'm not going to do that. I catch myself doing something I have done over and over and over, and I thought I wasn't going to do that again. Ah, I'll try harder next time." It doesn't mean that we necessarily dismiss any responsibility for the outcome, but only that we look at it cleanly without adding it to a whole list of other ways in which we define, "Who am I?"

Judgment comes down to me: "This is what I think. This is what I believe. This is what I maintain is always the same." When the experience is just happening now, a moment is only a moment. Assigning meaning to that moment is where we start creating suffering—when we have an opinion about it. When we can look at something without adding our history to it, sometimes we can see it more clearly.

If my history tells me that being kind leads to people taking advantage of me, then I'm going to be worried about always being taken advantage of. I'm going to compare any experience I have with kindness to whether I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, because, zero, that's me. But if I can just be kind without tying it to what the outcome means, I find it's easier just to be kind.

So in any moment when we find ourselves wallowing in self-criticism, it might be a moment to say, "What actually happened? What's actually happening now? And what is being wounded in me? What is the wound that I'm experiencing?" "Well, I am feeling dismissed. I am feeling like I made a fool of myself. I'm feeling like that person's not going to like me. I'm feeling unliked." Feeling unliked is very different than failing. Very, very different. But if I'm busy having an opinion about the experience, I can miss what the experience actually is. The image is getting in the way of seeing clearly, the "Oh, this must mean this."

Ask yourself, when you're thinking about all the ways in which that person is failing you, you are failing that person. Whatever those judgments are, think about how that's tied to the history of the moment and not just the moment. We tend to take these pictures of ourselves and drag them through our history on this string. "Here it comes, this is me following my experience, and I'm right here. See? It's just the same," when the conditions are totally different. Totally different. The moment is totally different. And if I let go of that string, I'm better able to see clearly this is what's happening. And maybe in seeing this is what's happening, I can break the habit of belief that leads to that judgment.

Now I want to be clear, this doesn't mean that we don't have opinions about things. It doesn't mean that we don't have value systems. It doesn't mean that we don't have ethics. But it does mean that we can look really cleanly and clearly at what it is, and not decide in advance, "If it looks like this, this is what it means."

Yesterday, I came home and there was a paramedic truck at the opening of our garage. The last time there was a paramedic truck here, someone had just died, and so immediately there's a rush of anxiety. Now, had I been anxious before that, I might have been—the conditions would have been different. But this time I was mostly curious because there was no one in the building that I would have expected might need a paramedic. Then I noticed three firemen coming down the outside stairs, and one of them got to two steps down and he leaped off and clicked his heels together before he landed. I thought, "Charlie Chaplin," right? [Laughter] I laughed, and I thought, "Oh, that's totally inappropriate." And then immediately, "Oh, that's inappropriate for him." And then I thought, "No, maybe it's because nothing serious is actually happening." And all of these were opinions and judgments about what might be true about this fireman leaping off the stair. I have no idea why he leaped off the stair and clicked his heels. None whatsoever. But I did notice there's no urgency here. No urgency. And I could lay down the judgment about why he did it and just enjoy the moment of him clicking his heels together.

Today I'm going to read you another poem. Yesterday I failed to mention that it was Jane Hirshfield's^[3] poem, "The Best." And so today I want to be sure that I tell you this is Tony Hoagland^[4], and I will find that poem here. The title of this poem is "I Have News for You."

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood and there are people who don't interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process. There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures unrecoverable and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings do not send their sinuous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last inch of milkshake through a noisy straw. And other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality. Do you see that creamy lemon-yellow moon? There are some people, unlike me and you, who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as unattainable as that moon; thus, they do not later have to waste more time defaming the object of their former ardor, or consequently run and crucify themselves in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha. I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

Let me read it again.

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood and there are people who don't interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process. There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures unrecoverable and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings do not send their sinuous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last inch of milkshake through a noisy straw. And other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality. Do you see that creamy lemon-yellow moon? There are some people, unlike me and you, who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as unattainable as that moon; thus, they do not later have to waste more time defaming the object of their former ardor, or consequently run and crucify themselves in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha. I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

Let yourself not be the person who needs to find the meaning in every step, but simply walk across the room and let the sweet breeze rush all over your faces and bodies. Thank you.

Q&A

Host: Hey, thank you very much for that, Maria. I guess at this point we'll take any questions over Zoom or on YouTube if you want to post them in chat. And if you want to raise your hand in Zoom, then we can also call on you. Just to start off, what were the Aggregates again, and can you quickly summarize the connection to blamelessness or judgment?

Maria Straatmann: Sure. The Aggregates are the sense input, the feeling tone (which is pleasant or unpleasant or neutral), perception (the naming function, "I name this as..."), thinking (where we form our opinions and what we believe about them), and awareness (which is just "what do I know? What am I registering when I look at this or feel this or see this?"). These five things are the ways that we create self. They're the ways that we say, "I like this, I don't like this, I like it because of this." It's the way in which we form opinions and beliefs about us in relationship to the experience.

So the experience has all of these elements in it, and we use them to form a sense of self. "I am having this experience." It's the place where I am having this experience. And the way that we want to live that leads to less suffering is to live in a place where I can just see the experience. I can know the part of the experience that I am aware of. I'm aware that I'm thinking about this. I'm aware that I have an opinion about this. I'm aware that this is pleasant or unpleasant. And it allows us to enter the space where we can just experience and say, "Pleasant, unpleasant." I don't have to run away from unpleasant; I can just see it as unpleasant. And we can practice being with what is unpleasant without needing to fix it, without needing to change it. It allows us to be in the space of non-judgmental awareness.

It's a really big topic. I apologize for throwing it in the middle, but it's the basis for how we think about judgment that allows us to step away from self-criticism through judgment. So I hope that helps.

Host: Yeah, no, that's great. And it's good to be exposed to these things, even if just for a little remorseful [unintelligible].

Maria Straatmann: So are there other questions? We'll give folks a little while to, and for the YouTube folks to catch up as well.

One of the tricks of non-judgmental awareness is realizing how our opinions about life, our need to have an opinion about life, is about creating a sense of familiarity and comfort. We find the familiar more pleasant than the unfamiliar. Part of being non-judgmental is being comfortable with what is ambiguous.

One of my favorite business books, mostly for the title, was a book called Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers^[5], which offended a lot of people. But what it reminded me of was that if I come into a situation totally believing what the outcome should look like, I miss opportunities. I miss the opportunity to see things clearly or to see something that I wasn't looking for. That's one outcome of being able to be in the space of knowing this is pleasant or unpleasant. I don't have to change it. I don't have to make it something other than it already is. Can I be okay with it just as it is?

Nancy (via Zoom): What is the name of that book again, Maria?

Maria Straatmann: Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers. I don't think I have it anymore or I'd give you more information about it. Keep in mind that's probably twenty years old or more.

Host: Okay, we've got Nancy. Nancy, you can go ahead and unmute yourself.

Nancy: Hi Maria, hi everyone on Zoom and YouTube. My question is about the point of the process where there's the seeing what's pleasant and unpleasant, and then there's the comparison informing the opinion, and then there's this story about how this reflects something bad or unfavorable about myself. Could you talk about that point, because it seems to me like that's where the suffering comes in? It's like when I've made this story about me or something unfavorable about myself.

Maria Straatmann: I'll talk about a fault I have—or it's actually not a fault, it's a feature, but it took me a while to figure it out. At some point in my life, I decided that I had to be the strongest person in the room, that this is what would make me safe. It happened around the time my mother died when I was twelve. So, long-time mental habit of needing to be the strongest person in the room. I could withstand anything; I could be tougher than anybody else.

Over time, I came to understand that this created a huge amount of suffering both for me and for the people around me, and I decided I would stop needing to be the strongest person in the room. Now, deciding that doesn't just make it happen, I have to tell you. So I would practice things like, "Oh, I know the answer to that, and they're really on the wrong track, but I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to sit here and not say anything. I'm not going to exert control over the meeting, I'm just going to let it happen." And I would watch how unpleasant that was and how difficult it was. And the story running in my head was something like, "Oh, I have the answer, and it would be better if I just told people, and I just let it happen."

I discovered sometimes I was right about that, that the outcome was not very good. And sometimes I was wrong about that, and somebody stood up with a really great answer and a great solution, and, "Oh, I wouldn't have done it that way, but you know, I think it's going to work." So allowing myself to notice that I don't have to be the way I was is one way of dealing with it. I don't have to be who I have been. I can be someone else. And it may not be comfortable. And when I say someone else, it doesn't mean I'm trying to be an ideal self, but just this person who has this tendency to be the strongest person in the room, and to know that that is actually a skill I have, to be wielded at the right time. Under these conditions, it can be criticized, and under those conditions when there's chaos, for example, and nobody can quite see their way, I can establish a vision for people. This is an appropriate use of it. I can suggest a vision for people. You see how easy it is to fall into that? Because I was already to execution: "Okay, this is how you do it," because that's the outgrowth of that feature. But it's just a feature.

And I've also discovered the ease in not being strong sometimes, that the appropriate thing for me is to just be there. So it allows me to see more clearly that I don't have to judge what's happening now by what's come before or what I would like to become. I can just be in this moment and see, "This is what's happening in this moment." I can see the need to be right, which is tied to the need to be liked or the need to be seen in a certain way. I don't have to get lost in an analysis of it. I can just see, "Oh, that's here. That's here. That's here."

So if I'm in a conversation with my husband, and we are talking past one another, I can say, "Okay, I have an intention to be kind to my husband." So is our difference a matter of my needing to be right, or does it have some other impact? Does it have an impact that affects the future or just this moment? I can let it go. If it's just me wanting to be right, I can say, "Ah, much better to be kind to my husband than to be right. Much better." So I can make that judgment based on just seeing just this, and not, "Well, you know, if I give in now I'm going to be giving in..." whatever story we're telling. We don't have to tell the story. Does that answer the question?

Nancy: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Host: Just to share something, like when you said about getting it right or being right, I listen to sports talk radio all the time, and there's a particular co-host I listen to, and he often says, "I want to get it right, not be right." So that's good. Let me go to YouTube, there's a question there. Sam asks: Maria, how can we make sense of experience without being insensitive?

Maria Straatmann: Well, there are a few loaded words there. First of all, the only way to see clearly what the experience is, is a kind of heightened sensitivity. So making sense of the experience... I'm sorry, ask the first part again, because I'm getting lost in the words.

Host: Sure. How can we make sense of experience without being insensitive?

Maria Straatmann: Right. So part of the drive here is the need to make sense of the experience, which means I'm incorporating it, integrating it into something that has been happening, might be happening, could be happening in the future. The making sense has to do with giving it meaning, right? And the point about blamelessness is that not every experience has to be put into a pattern. It has to be put into an ongoing story that says, "Well, this means this because it looks like that."

If I talk about my fireman, for example, the sense I made out of him leaping off the stairs was there's no urgency here. But it would have been possible for me to incorporate that into a whole, "And therefore, because there's no urgency here, it was unnecessary for me to form an opinion about that fireman jumping off the stair." Had I gotten a sense that everybody else was rushing around, I would have more likely formed an opinion that this guy did not have the proper concern for the job he was doing. There's all kinds of things that can incorporate which are additional to the moment.

So the "making sense of" part has to do with whether you're doing it in the immediate experience, or whether you're later reflecting on what has happened and you say, "Well now, what were all the elements of that?" Now you're aware of the fact that you are thinking and trying to resolve something, which doesn't have anything to do with self-judgment. As soon as it goes into the place where I'm judging whether it's good, bad, or indifferent—as opposed to, "Is this appropriate to the mental process that I'm following?"—I can get myself in trouble.

I'm sorry if that gets confusing, but I'm trying to make a distinction between analysis in the moment, which is going to be fed by my opinions and me, and reflection, which incorporates more wisdom and is not colored by whatever emotional content I have in the moment, or may not be colored by it unless I introduce it. I start saying, "Oh, that's my sister, she did that. She always does that. I don't know when she's going to stop doing that." Now I'm applying something from the past to the future, and I'm not allowing her to be any different than she was because I'm interpreting according to the story that I'm carrying with me. So the difference between seeing clearly and fitting something into a pattern is quite distinct. I hope that helps.

Host: Eloy had a question. Can you talk about how aspiring fits in? Aspiring to right thought, for example.

Maria Straatmann: Okay. You may remember that when I was talking about the firemen, or when I was talking about discussing something with my husband where we were talking past one another, I reminded myself of my intention. So I would say aspiration has to do with intention. You can use your aspiration, your intention, to re-center yourself in a moment when you feel uncertain. "This is my intention," because all we have responsibility for in this moment is our intention and the action that we take. The next step. What's already happened has already happened; we can't change it, we can't undo it. We can look at something with remorse and say, "I'm not going to do that again, and if I can make up for that, I'll do that." But carrying guilt with us is trying to make it better in the past. In the same way, aspiration is an intention: this is where I want to place my attitude for the next moment, the next step that I take. And those intentions are changing all the time. We have broad intentions and short-term intentions.

To make it less theoretical, I can say that my overall large intention is to be open-hearted. To be open-hearted. And at one point I noticed that begins with be open. Oh, it's not about becoming something else, it's about being open. So I can apply "be open" to this moment. And then I heard myself say, "Be. Just be." The way to be open-hearted is to not have opinions about everything, but to simply be as present as I possibly can.

So if you're doing something like an aspiration to wise speech, I can always ask myself, "Is this true? Is this useful? Is this kind? Is it timely?" And if it passes all of those things, I can say it. I don't always have time to go through all of those pieces of my aspirational wise speech, but I can notice when something is unkind, or I can notice when it's not timely, or I can notice there's no point in my saying this to this person because it will not change his mind or her mind, and only leads to further conflict. So I can back off based on my intention, or I can pursue it based on my intention. But it isn't about becoming someone, it's about being. How can I apply my intention in this moment?

And when I fail to be kind, I can feel the corruption in my heart, and that suffering follows from that. I increasingly sensitize myself to that so that I will be less likely to fall into that pit again.

Host: Are there any other questions? I think that's pretty much all the questions that we have in YouTube. And Cindy just commented in Zoom like we could probably have a day-long on this topic, and we only had a 15-minute talk.

Maria Straatmann: Yeah, you know, the truth is, around judgment lies everything in Buddhism. Wise view, wise speech, wise action, wise livelihood, meditation^[6]—all of it is there. So we have to choose where we point our attention as always. Thank you all. May you all be safe and well. And thank you to Job for handling the streaming, and to Kevin and all of your AV team for your support. Thank you.