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.

Introduction

Thank you, Jill, for reminding me about the cleanup yesterday. One of the wonderful things that happens here once a year is a spring cleaning of the building. It's a wonderful and significant representation of how everything here is done by volunteers. Not just volunteering, but caring. Caring for the building, caring for the recordings, caring for managing, and coming together as a community. About a dozen people came yesterday and spent the morning cleaning. I want to thank those of you who came; it's a wonderful part of who we are here at IMC.

Forgetting and Remembering Who We Are

There are two movements in Buddhist practice that work together. One is the healthy movement to forget, and the other is to remember. We forget so we can remember. We put aside so we could remember.

Lately, I've been hearing over the years from a few different Buddhist teachers who are friends, who have a favorite expression that they use in their teaching: we forget who we are, and this practice is to remember who we are. The place where I've seen this most powerfully is with a friend, some of you know Jacques Verduin^[1], who teaches mindfulness and this kind of practice in the state prisons. He has a program for people who have done some pretty atrocious things. In teaching them, he talks to them about how they forgot who they are. What he's doing, helping them, is to remember who they are before not only their crime, but before the wounds, the suffering, and the ideations they got caught up in that led them to do their crime. To trace back to: who are you really? What's deeper down inside?

There's a famous teaching in Zen from the Japanese Zen master Dōgen^[2]: "To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to awaken with all things." First, we study ourselves. We get really present and notice. One of the things we'll notice is that some of the things we believe, some of the ways we identify with or define ourselves, and some of the values we live by, are not really representing the deepest place in us. They don't represent the places of wholeness, of love, of care, of peace. They represent the opposite. They represent dysfunctional ways of believing who we are and acting from that.

One of the powerful stories in our tradition—it is kind of a mythic story—is the story of a murderer at the time of the Buddha named Angulimala^[3]. He murdered many people living in the forest. People tried to stop him, but he just killed the people who tried to stop him. He was apparently quite a fighter. The Buddha went off into the forest where he was, and Angulimala thought, "Oh, my good luck." He didn't know the Buddha was the Buddha. He just thought it was a defenseless monastic, and, "My good luck, I have someone else to kill."

So he started chasing the Buddha. The Buddha was walking down the forest path. The more Angulimala ran, the less he could catch up to the Buddha. Either the Buddha was a very fast walker, or maybe Angulimala was weighed down by his armor or something so that he couldn't really run very well. He could fight, but not run. Or, the usual story is the Buddha was using his psychic powers. Angulimala yelled out, "Stop!" and the Buddha continued walking and said, "I have already stopped. Why don't you stop?"

Angulimala thinks to himself, "These monastics, they don't lie. Obviously he hasn't stopped; he keeps walking. But this monastic never lies, so he must be talking about something else. This is interesting." So he asked the Buddha, "How have you stopped?" The Buddha said, "I've stopped violence to all beings. Why don't you?" Something like that. Probably more eloquent.

That was enough to convert this murderer, and he became a Buddhist monk. In the language of my friends, he discovered who he is. He discovered a capacity we have to be nonviolent, not filled with hate, not greedy, but something else, something peaceful. It became particularly acute for Angulimala because, as a monk, he went back to some of the towns where he had killed people. Of course, people were quite upset seeing him there, so they stoned him. He came back quite injured to the Buddha. He didn't defend himself; he didn't attack. He just came back to the Buddha, and the Buddha said, "You have to just manage with this. You have to bear this. This is for you to bear and hold without succumbing and going back to the way you were before. This is your karma. So you have to live with this."

And so he did. He held it in an open or patient way, continued his practice, and at some point became enlightened. Which is a little bit disturbing to some people. How could someone who is a murderer get enlightened? Isn't that like some kind of cosmic injustice? But that very questioning represents again how we get caught up in beliefs that interfere with our ability to appreciate the full potential of a human being, what's possible for us.

One of the things that many of us struggle with is, in fact, our thinking, our beliefs that don't serve us, that limit us. The emotional impulses we have, the desires we have that limit us. The Buddha explicitly said that greed, hatred, and delusion are limiting. They limit us. Whereas what the Buddha was looking for was to drop the limitations. To drop what limits us, so there can be a boundless quality, an open quality.

One of the capacities that is described as being boundless is our capacity for love. Specifically, there's the boundless radiance of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity: four forms of love. In our tradition, in the ancient language, they're called Brahma-viharas^[4]. Brahma was an ancient god of the Indian pantheon, a little bit like the Indian Zeus, maybe. As a deity, he was associated with these four forms of love. He was the embodiment of it and had these boundless qualities of love. When people practice these four—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—they live or abide like Brahma. Brahma-vihara, sometimes in English we call them divine abodes.

There's another myth about Brahma. He was like the Zeus of the ancient Indian pantheon, so he had a big palace in the heavens and a big throne, where he had all these other gods in the heavenly court. One day he was away from home, out in the world doing something, and this ugly little runt of a troll came into the palace and jumped up on his throne. Now, you don't sit on Great Brahma's throne, especially if you're an ugly little runt of a troll.

So the other gods in the court said, "You have to get down. You can't sit there." They got angry because he didn't get down. The more they got angry and yelled at him, the bigger he started to grow. He started to grow bigger and become more beautiful and radiant. They were completely confused. They couldn't get him off the throne, and he was even getting bigger and stronger.

They went to find Brahma and explained to him what was going on. He said, "Oh, I know what that's about." He went back home, approached the throne where this formerly ugly runt of a troll was sitting, and said, "Oh, I'm happy to see you there. How are you? I hope you're comfortable. Tell me a little more about yourself." As he offered respect, care, and attention, this creature shrunk. It got smaller and smaller until poof, it disappeared.

Then Brahma got on his throne and explained, "Oh, that troll was an anger-eating troll. The more you're angry, the bigger it gets, the stronger it gets. And the only way to have it go away is to stop feeding it." That's what he did. He stopped being angry at it, and that was enough to have it go poof, disappear.

It's a nice little myth, but to use the myth as an explanation for something... Where's your throne? Where's your seat of power, your seat of choice? Where is it that there's an important place in you for how you live your life, and what do you place there? Do you place love, boundless love, or do you place anger? Do you place resentment? Do you place conceit, fear, and anxiety? What do you place at the center that then has the power? And how are you reacting to it? How are you living with it? Are you feeding it so it gets stronger and stronger? Or are you not feeding it so something else, like love, could come back? Do you put love in that central space? Do you put peace at that central place? Nonviolence, respect of others? What do you put at the center, and what governs how you live your life?

Maybe you have a divine quality within you, and a divine seat. But what do you put there? Many of us put things that don't really represent who we are. There can be beliefs we have. Many people live with self-critical, undermining beliefs. "I'm not good enough. I'm wrong. I'm guilty even before I do something. I'm inadequate. I can't do it. I'm a bad person. I have too much. I'm a broken person. I have too much suffering. I've done terrible things." Or we place anger, resentment, hate, fear, conceit, or insecurity. They're placed in that seat, on our Brahma seat inside, and we're feeding them in some way. We're supporting them, sometimes by believing them and going along with them, reinforcing them, and sometimes by reacting against them. In a sense, reacting against it is causing more harm. It creates a division, a wound inside of us, that keeps festering and gets worse.

One of the ways to see this work is in our thoughts. What kind of thought patterns do we have? What are the stories we are telling ourselves constantly? What are the beliefs that we're operating under constantly? It's so easy for them to be taken for granted, to be in the background, not to be investigated. They're so easy to believe because maybe they're in the seat of power. They're on the throne. Maybe we believe that every thought should be believed, or maybe there's something very powerful about the message we've learned that we should be a certain way. Maybe we've learned that we shouldn't be this way, because our society, our religion, or our family says, "No, you can't be this way." Then there's a big tension, and fear, or anger, or rebellion going on there. If we believe it, react to it, or get angry with it, it just gets stronger and stronger.

Maybe we don't have to believe it at all. Maybe in believing certain things we are forgetting our true self. Some people say we're forgetting what's really our potential. We're limiting ourselves in a deep way.

One of the fascinating ways we see this work is the insidious ways in which the self-talk that we have can hold such great power over us. One of them is that these thoughts usually come with mood music. They come with an attitude, with emotions. They're not just simply words, beliefs, or ideas. It's kind of like the mood music in movies. The scenery can be a beautiful, pastoral image of a place in nature, and you're thinking, "Oh, that's great. I'd like to visit there," until they add ominous music to the video. The music says, "Uh oh, something terrible is about to happen," and your hair stands straight up because you know, "Oh, what's going to happen now?" Other times there's canned laughter they use in some places when it's not really funny. [Laughter] But the canned laughter somehow has this deep subconscious influence. "It must be funny. We're social beings, so we share in the laughter and oh, that was fun." But in fact, the joke was pretty poor.

We're so influenced by the mood, the music, the ambiance that's created. The same thing happens in our own mind. If the mood of how we talk is harsh inside, if the mood is angry, afraid, or insecure, and we keep repeating it over and over again. If you say to yourself one time, "I'm a lousy person," who knows? But if you keep repeating the same thought subconsciously, subliminally, over and over again, it begins to wear us down because the mood of that bad news is heavy. The way the mood music affects us, the way we take it in drop by drop, begins to create a feeling of "something is off, something feels wrong, something feels bad, I'm bad." The mood, the music, the impact on us emotionally then reinforces that something is wrong. And then the stories we're telling ourselves seem even more true.

One of the things we're doing in mindfulness meditation is learning to stop. Just like Angulimala had to learn to stop. Stop harming yourself. Stop these thoughts. Stop believing them. Step away. It's certainly difficult to automatically stop the trains of thoughts, the habits we have, but it's possible to step away. It's possible to be aware of it and see it clearly for what it is. That's the great gift of this mindfulness practice. That's partly this idea of remembering who you are, remembering our potential. Put something else in the seat of power.

One of the things we can put is awareness, mindfulness, attention. We can clearly know, "Oh, this is a belief." [Snorts] One very interesting technique is, say you have a regular belief that really has the upper hand with you. Maybe the belief is that you feel you're an inadequate human being in some way. Discover what that belief is, and then in a clear, emphatic way—standing up straight—just repeat that belief to yourself a few times. "I am an inadequate human being." You really say it with gusto, and pretty soon it's ridiculous. Pretty soon it's like, "What? Do I really believe this?" Some people find that just getting behind the belief and saying it out loud, you see it for what it is more clearly. If it's there quietly in the background, subconsciously believing it, it has a lot of hold on us. But if we stand up and take a different stance, it's like, "Oh, look at this."

Some people do it not that way, but synthetically, to break the trance. Sometimes in mindfulness, it's just naming it. "There's the inadequate thinking. Again, that's just a thought." Making that note, knowing that clearly enough, that knowing is in the seat on the throne. That knowing takes precedence. That knowing is its own remembering: "Oh, I can be aware instead of being swept away in these conceivings, in these ideas."

Sometimes we can observe. We can settle back and just watch. "Well, look at the mind. It just has a mind of its own." But that mind that's spinning around, I'm not going to believe it. I'm going to watch it. I'm going to listen to it. One of the profound things we can do in any human relationship, to ourselves and to others, is to listen well. To really be present. To really be present for what you're doing in your mind, in your heart, the mood, the emotions. To listen more deeply is a way of not going along with it and continuing to be swept away by those beliefs. Maybe there are deeper things to recognize. Maybe there are deeper wounds, difficult emotions, or even deeper beliefs underneath it all that have never had a chance to be heard and listened to. So much of our unprocessed life gets processed if we listen, if we are present, if we track it.

Here the idea is to put this presence, mindfulness, attention, listening, seeing clearly on the throne. Watch. Know. This myth of Brahma, if we apply it to ourselves, implies there's something pretty important within us. Maybe something divine even, like Brahma, that's waiting for us. That's more who we are than the ugly runt of a troll. That's a very limited way to live and be.

So we're learning to see what's there, and some things we're learning to forget. "Oh, I believed that for twenty years. It hasn't served me." I knew one person who was resentful for seven years over a relationship that ended in a very difficult way. She finally realized one day that the difficult person she separated from had long since forgotten about her, and the only person being harmed by her resentment was herself. When she saw the self-harm that was causing, that was enough for her to put it down and finally be free of carrying that resentment.

We forget so we can remember. I'm very fond of the word remember. The word sati^[5], which is the Pali word for mindfulness, actually means to remember or memory. What I like about "remember" in English is to put the members back together. We can get so caught up in this life of ours. So many duties, responsibilities, so many things we have to do to survive and make things work. So many Netflix shows to watch, so many things and emails to check, that we become divided. We become separated from ourselves. Part of what this mindfulness practice can do is put ourselves back together again, remembering all the different parts of ourselves that are left out by being so caught up and preoccupied.

I'll end by saying one of the wonderful, important things of mindfulness practice is actually to notice how much we can get in a fixed groove around certain trains of thought, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. To really see the constriction, the contraction, how we're caught in that over and over again. There's a momentum there that doesn't serve us. There's a momentum in a habit of mind and heart which limits us, that divides us, and keeps us from remembering something that's boundless, unlimited.

What would that be for you? Maybe some days it is love. We do have the capacity for a boundless love. Maybe for you it could be peace. We do have a capacity for boundless peace. Maybe it's non-conflict. Maybe it's nonviolence and non-hostility. Maybe it's non-greed. The "non" of all these implies the opposite. Maybe non-greed is a capacity for boundless generosity. Non-hate is boundless love. Non-delusion is boundless wisdom.

So we practice to forget so that we remember who we really are, what's most important, and where we discover our best qualities as human beings. May you forget, but first really recognize clearly what it is that you want to forget. Get to know it well, and then forget what doesn't serve you so that you can really recognize the beauty and the wonder that you are.

Q&A

We have about fifteen minutes before the end of our time together. If any of you'd like to ask any questions, or have any comments or testimonials about this, please. You're welcome.

Speaker: I could offer a testimonial. For many years, I had some feelings about having let my mother down before she died. I realized that in real life, if she were alive, she would have forgiven me. She loved me. So I took a piece of paper and I wrote down all the different times when I felt that I had disappointed her, and one by one I lit them on fire and put them in a pan of water. That ritual that I created for myself really worked. So it's kind of along those lines.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. So you can put those aside. You forget those.

Speaker: Yes.

Gil Fronsdal: Beautiful. Very nice. Thank you.

When we were here last week, we had to go into small groups and talk, and there was so much talking. Now you have a chance to talk to me and there's nothing to say. [Laughter]

Speaker: Hi Gil. Thank you for pointing to something that I find really important, and that is how to manage those really critical statements that automatically come to the mind. It's still something that I continue to explore in the practice, and I always find it very valuable when there is some pointing to how to manage that. I remember being on retreat and really being so caught into a particular loop that the mind would not allow me to be free. I would meet deep suffering there. So in our practice, acknowledging is huge. And when the mind will not let go, and there is that repetitive loop, what happens next? [Laughter]

Gil Fronsdal: I think maybe that question should be reworked: "What choice do you have next?" We always want to engage our capacity for choice. So what can you choose to do now that you've acknowledged it? "I'm still caught in those loops. What choice do I have now?"

One choice, if you're really caught, is maybe go for a walk and see if you can stop the loop long enough so you can come back and take a deeper look. Maybe come back and write about it, or find a friend to talk about it with. Sometimes if you're really caught, it doesn't help to stay with it.

Another choice is to get curious. What's the ecology of this? What's the whole picture here? I keep getting caught around a particular thought, but what's the emotion connected to it? What's the bodily experience of doing this? How pleasant and unpleasant is this? What are the other beliefs I have connected to this? What sub-beliefs have to be there in order for this to have so much power?

There's an ecology. There's a whole different set of things going on. For someone who's been in our practice a lot, that ecology has all these lists of numbered things, so you can go through the checklist. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[6]: What's the experience like physically? What's this experience like with feeling tones? Is it pleasant or unpleasant? What's the state of mind when I have these kinds of thoughts? Are the hindrances^[7] present, and which ones?

Just going through these lists is a way to help you check in on the bigger picture. Sometimes, by getting the bigger picture of what's going on, you see where the attention really needs to be. Sometimes it really needs to be with the body. Sometimes the state of mind. Sometimes you might realize after a while, "You know what's needed here is more love." So maybe bring metta^[8] into the whole thing for yourself. Does that give you some ideas?

Speaker: Yeah, it sounds like a full exploration.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. But this idea that we have choice is a powerful thing. What do you choose? Do you choose to go along with it or what? I see you out there, but we're going here first, and then maybe you can be next.

Speaker: Thank you very much. I was interested in a little more depth around Brahma coming when the troll had become enormous. I was thinking of moments in my life when I've been able to look at something without justification or condemnation. Even if I had been resisting it, just getting into the reality of it and being with it. Yet when I saw what Brahma did, it seemed a little bit different. It was less just being with the troll and accepting than it was curiosity about the troll. So I wonder if you could speak more on that.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, I was thinking it was offering respect to the troll. It's true in the world around us with people: some people are having a hard time, and the best thing we can do is just go for a walk with them and be with them. Nothing's needed except our presence to listen well. Other people, they need a little more from us. They need to feel that we really care, that we respect them, that they're valuable. So we need to ask more questions and offer some kind of respect to them in order for them to be supported and helped. Some people need truth. Some people need someone to stand up and say, "I need to tell you something that's difficult," and we need a truth teller.

In different situations, we need different things. The same thing applies to us. Sometimes our mind, our heart, who we are internally, just needs presence. It just needs attention; it just needs to be there with it. That's the core aspect of this practice of mindfulness. But sometimes it needs more than that. It needs some real showing of care, of love, of attention. Remember, Brahma represented love. So, how can I meet my difficulty with some metta, with care, love? How can I engage with it and show that I respect it?

The whole movement towards accepting something and rejecting something is sometimes overdone in Buddhism. There's an alternative to accepting and rejecting. We don't necessarily have to accept; that's too much sometimes. But don't reject. What do we do instead? Listen, look, engage, be curious, offer respect to what's there. Am I saying something that is relevant?

Speaker: Very helpful. Yes.

Gil Fronsdal: Is it enough or do you want to ask further?

Speaker: No, I'm very pleased. I'm happy. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. Thank you. So, we have the outer hall, in the middle of the seats back there. And you might need to turn up the volume for me.

Speaker: Hello. Thank you very much for the Angulimala example. I was silently laughing inside because I'd just driven my daughter to the airport, and I felt like there was this combination of Angulimala or a troll coming out at me because she was so upset and trying to check in and do ten thousand things. So I just wanted to ask you how to address this. One way to do it, you shared, is to think that she has this anger-eating troll, so I better be calm, etc. But at some point, when you're dealing with this troll again and again and again, it won't go away. I could use some advice. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Well, of course, it's hard to give advice without knowing the full context of the relationship and the people. But it sounds like your daughter is, you know, almost a grown-up maybe. One thing that occurs to me is at some point you want to say, "This is not working, to have these kinds of conversations, for you to talk to me this way. So I think we should take a five-minute silence. Let's just not talk about it for a while because this is not working for me. I don't want to continue."

That was my carpool technique! [Laughter] When I was the carpool driver for our kids going to first and second grade, we had three kids in the back seat, and the carpool wars were dramatic. I mean, wow, what's going on back there? My attempts to say, "Stop, you can't do that" didn't work. What worked was I would simply pull over to the side of the road and stop, and not go anywhere. That got their attention! [Laughter] Then they understood, "Okay, we're not going anywhere as long as we're fighting." So then they would stop. So that's how I made world peace. [Laughter]

If your daughter doesn't want to... if you tell her, "Five minutes, this is not working, I want to be silent for five minutes." If that doesn't work, pull over and stop. [Laughter] She'll miss the airplane. Yes.

Speaker: I actually want to be on the side of the troll. I didn't quite get what the wrong thing he did other than sitting on Brahma's throne. Seems like he was doing a good thing for everybody involved, showing them how they have this anger for the stupid thing of sitting on the throne.

Gil Fronsdal: Sorry, say again? I missed all the words.

Speaker: What did the troll do wrong other than sitting on the throne of Brahma? It seems like he was doing a good thing for everybody involved, showing them how they have this anger for the stupid thing of sitting on the throne. But this is not actually the question. The question is doctrinally, the undertone of the Buddhist story is that we need to eliminate anger, because he disappears eventually, right? What other things are we going to go after next? Sadness? Other things we don't want? I know only three things that are not good: greed, hatred, and delusion. Anger is not one of them. So why do we want to get rid of this troll, and what did he do wrong?

Gil Fronsdal: Great. Well, it's helpful to be generous when there are these kinds of fables and myths, to not universalize. To appreciate them on their own terms and how they work as a myth in a story. They're not meant to be absolute statements about how things are. But it's also reasonable for you to question it the way you are, which is nice.

One of the really important areas around this word "anger" is that in the ancient world, the word that we translate as anger always contains hostility in it, which is a form of hate. In English, we don't necessarily use anger to always involve hostility, but it usually does. If a fierce "no" to something has no hostility in it, then that's not limiting.

But the real test for this, and the real answer for you in this question is not me explaining something, but rather for you to watch yourself. See how different emotional positions, different belief systems, different ways of being are clearly limiting or clearly opening. The troll represents that which is limiting and diminishes us and harms us. That's what it's representing here. If we go along with it, feed it, and let it grow, some people's lives get more and more miserable. It's really sad what happens to some people's lives.

Speaker: Yeah, sorry. So this is exactly what I did, actually, what you just said. Then I watched your examples and how you unfolded your story and continued. All the examples you have given were about all these feelings that we want to have, we want to multiply. You didn't do anything about those feelings that we naturally want to reject and not have. Do you understand? All the examples were like love, peace, and calm. It's all nice and all, but it's all like low energy and kind of remote from really, fully being a human. Do you see what I'm saying? So this is what I'm saying.

Gil Fronsdal: Maybe not.

Speaker: No, okay. So I'm saying that it starts with getting rid of anger, and then it continues talking about attracting all the things that we want. But it doesn't talk at all about what to do with the things we don't want, like not rejecting the things that we don't want.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. Well, you have to be a little bit generous to me. I hope...

Speaker: This is not a criticism, this is a story...

Gil Fronsdal: You can't in a talk cover everything. But yes, I mean the general approach in Buddhism as I understand it, the early teachings, is that wisdom is defined by really understanding how you suffer, to really understand what limits you, what the challenges are, as opposed to prioritizing the ideals.

So when you sit down to practice mindfulness, the idea is to really meet what's there fully. Chances are for many of us, especially in the early years of practice, what we're meeting is what's less than ideal. And then we have to learn how to hold it well. There's a full range of things we'll discover there. So I think it's meant to be a very realistic practice that way.

But at the same time, from time to time, it's good to remember that there's a whole other side of what Buddhist practice is. That is to remember we do have a capacity for wholeness. We do have a capacity to respond from some deep depth inside, where we're coming from wholesome places within. Those wholesome places are represented by things like love, peace, nonviolence, non-hatred, and wisdom. There's a whole spectrum of what we're engaged in here. So sometimes we learn to study and forget. Other times we learn to remember and enhance. Is that good enough?

Speaker: I guess I just wish we had a little bit more balanced approach. [Snorts] Because we talk so much about love and all these good feelings, but almost not at all about the negative ones.

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, I see.

Speaker: We want to get rid of all the bad ones. And maybe they're not necessarily that bad. Like my behavior right now arguably is bad, but do we want to get rid of it? Probably not, right?

Gil Fronsdal: One of the things you could do is read my book, Unhindered^[9], which is about the five hindrances. Those are all about the problems. So there are ways of engaging this stuff.

Speaker: Okay, alright. I haven't tried it yet though.

Gil Fronsdal: So that's why! [Laughter] We uncovered the problem, right? I'm delighted that you think the problem around here is that I teach love too much! [Laughter] I historically have not been identified that way, so I kind of appreciate it. We need to stop. Can we do one more quick?

Speaker: I just want to answer his question. I think when your mind is filled more with positive love and care, I think the negative feelings automatically kind of go away.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. Very nice.

So, thank you all very much. May you realistically meet all of who you are, so you can remember the beautiful capacities of heart that you have, those that feed you and feed the world in good ways. Thank you.