This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Attention is the spear tip of karma

Welcome friends. Sweet. We are here to meditate. Not exactly sure what that means, but we're going to do it. And yeah, I'm happy to be with you all. So, find a posture good for your back, the rest of your body, and we'll see what's there.

And dharma is so good. Even when it's bad, it's good. Just to know that whatever suffering is there, something is always bigger than it. So we move out of the claustrophobia that is dukkha^[1]. Move out of the gridlock of clinging, self, engineering, grandiosity, and self-harshness, into the open space. This moment, unconfined.

What's the absolute least amount of effort required to gently turn the attention towards something, anything? Maybe your breathing, maybe sound, maybe your body more broadly. Maybe the nebulous boundary separating your body from space. Just find some way to pay homage to this moment.

Attention is like the spear tip of karma, conditioned by a million things. It is not singularly governed by your willfulness or choices. And part of how we develop fidelity to the anchor of attention is to not fight karma. Your job in the mix of all this is barely even there. We're learning to love what's here, to fear a little less what's there, to sense more security in letting go and holding on, and to bow at the feet of all who have come before us.

Dharmette: A few reflections on pedagogy

Okay folks. So I just posted a link for questions in the chat. I'll take a question next week.

Every so often—I don't totally know what to make of it—but every so often I have the impulse to confess that teaching is hard. I'm not desperately seeking sympathy or something. I just have that impulse to say that sometimes, and to say that I'm not sure what the best approach to teaching is. And I do not say that to be self-deprecating or something like that. It just sometimes feels important to break the fourth wall, as they say in theater, and draw attention to the stage, to the lighting, performers, and so on.

Joseph Goldstein^[2] famously described the difference between being lost in story and mindfulness with a metaphor. In a movie theater, if you're seeing a film, you're in the story of the characters, the emotion, the tension, the surprise, and what's going to happen. And it generates, if the movie is good, maybe a lot of hope or a lot of fear. But then at some point, you might recognize that this is just light projected on a screen. We talk about breaking the illusion of story, but sometimes we watch the dharma as if that is a story too. But every story has edges. Every story has a stage of finite size.

But I don't want to be dismissive of stories. They're important. We like stories. Martha Nussbaum—I often quote her saying, "You can't really change your heart without a story." Yeah, maybe. And so we want to be able to benefit from stories and also be awake to how stories function in our mind.

There is a story from Thanissara^[3]. When she was in robes, a nun, as I recall her sharing, Ajahn Chah^[4] had just given a dharma talk, which is kind of wild to think about. But Ajahn Chah had just given a dharma talk and somehow she approached him afterwards and said, "That was a good talk." And Ajahn Chah's response was, "If you think that was a good talk or a bad talk, you didn't understand the talk." This is a wild exchange, right?

So, I want to reflect on this for a few minutes here together in order to ultimately open a space where you might develop a deeper confidence in your own mind. These reflections were prompted by a quote I read from Suzuki Roshi^[5] sixty years ago yesterday. Suzuki said:

"You should not stay at the edge of the teaching. You are quite free but you should enter our teaching. Don't try to understand it just intellectually or by means of experience only. Experience of course is important. But a more important thing is the confidence to believe in yourself, and you should be faithful to what you feel and what you think. You should not fool yourself. It's quite all right to say I cannot agree with you or I cannot accept the teaching. That is how we make our understanding deeper and deeper."

A very beautiful sentiment. And so, this is not me announcing some crisis of faith. I know what my consciousness is like. But I also know that I'm unsure about the stories I tell about how practice has unfolded. The reasons we give for our suffering and our freedom do not perfectly mirror the causes of our freedom and our suffering. The causes—that's the focus of the dharma in a way, but it's not directly perceivable. And the best we can say from within a life is, this, then that. They seem connected, but the reasons we give for our suffering and our freedom do not necessarily perfectly mirror the actual causes^[6].

So I try to take feedback and grow, and obviously continue practice. But the feedback mechanisms are kind of unclear. For one, as you know, there is selective attrition. The people who have left are not the same as the people who have stayed. Like in biostatistics, there's literally a whole field devoted to the treatment of missing data. The people who have dropped out, we can't get their data, and in a clinical trial, you cannot assume that a medicine worked the same way for the people who stayed in the trial compared with those who dropped out of the trial. And so this is all a way of saying, we're the weirdos who stayed somehow, and we should not make broad conclusions based on us. That's the statistical upshot.

And I'm being reinforced for teaching in ways that I don't understand. I don't remember exactly what the story was or where I heard it, but I remember something about a college class where all the students organized to see if they could condition their professor's behavior with their attention. So the professor would kind of pace back and forth giving a lecture in the front of the auditorium. And the students decided every time the professor moved to the right of the classroom, they would show great interest, eyes bright, attention poised. And whenever the professor would move to the left side of the classroom, they would feign deep boredom. And at some point, the professor was wedged in the right corner of the classroom. And maybe they were asked, "Why are you standing there?" and didn't know. Right?

And that's probably happening to me. We are seen in ways we don't fully appreciate, and as teachers, the teachings are unconsciously being conditioned by attention, signups, dana^[7], compliments, or other discourses adjacent to Buddhism. It's hard to track how teaching is shaped by those forces, and if those are forces that we ought to obey or resist.

The information environment is much different. You used to kind of have to walk up a mountain to hear teachings, right? And now teachings are on in the background like smooth elevator jazz when we're doing chores or whatever. It's very accessible. That's mostly a beautiful thing, but it is complex, and it puts some pressure on novelty. And so teachers, in a way, are in trouble if you have us on autocomplete and can finish the next sentence. With the saturation of the dharma info environment, it puts pressure on novelty. We want to be responsive to needs, of course, to the needs of the sangha^[8], and the kind of consumer satisfaction model has crept into the dharma realm in some way.

And then there's this thing about learning, which is the way we often prefer to learn is not always the way we best learn. We tend to prefer more passive forms of learning, lecture format, but skill development is often associated with more painful grappling with the material. Perhaps that's what part of... there's a lecture and then the silent periods is the problem-based learning where you're grappling. But I don't know. It seems to me like we probably should be experimenting with some very different pedagogy. That would be wise.

I'm almost done with my confession. There is this line from the philosopher Nietzsche: that every philosophy is a confession of the person offering it, a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography. I don't even know what I'm confessing. We can never fully know the kind of unconscious manner in which my autobiography leaks out, the disruptiveness of what I cannot yet know.

So where does this leave us? I don't know. You're in trouble. You're in the hands... you know, like you got a neurotic Jew on your hands. That's the upshot of all of this in some way.

Where does this leave us? Kind of a humble place. Even though humility coexists with confidence, I live alongside the permanent possibility of being wrong, and the epistemic humility that engenders. It makes me want to open to the many lineages of wisdom, of art and science, philosophy and literature, and the wild ways of knowing. It makes me want to hedge at times, to read the fine print out loud. And it also makes me want to offer the dharma in a kind of impressionistic way. Not so vague, hopefully, as to be confusing, but to open a space where you can make your own meanings and find your own wisdom.

And that is your job: to use what you hear and feel, and cultivate the kind of deep confidence to believe in yourself, to believe in your mind. I offer this for your consideration. Appreciate the opportunity to share this with you. Okay, see you next week.