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Reflections on Ajahn Sucitto Talk

Welcome. I'm Matthew. How are you doing? Maybe a little thumb pull down? Okay, pretty cheery for the YouTube folks, FYI. Happy to sit with you. I tested negative, by the way, just in case you're looking at me like I'm a viral vector.

This is from a talk by Ajahn Sucitto^[1] that I transcribed and edited down a few things. I'll read just three paragraphs here. He is in the Thai Forest tradition and has been in robes for close to fifty years. I recently sat with him.

He says: "I was visiting my elder brother yesterday. He has Alzheimer's and also Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease incapacitates the body, and Alzheimer's incapacitates the mind. So this is obviously a very—well, yeah, it's a Dhamma messenger^[2]. All this can break down. The physical body can break down, the mental faculties can break down. Still, somebody is still in there. He's unable to communicate. 'Hello'—okay, nothing happens. Just throw some words in—nothing happens. Obviously, words aren't going to work here. Right? So I just bring awareness over the whole situation. I make bodily contact. I start gently massaging a leg, holding a hand, massaging his hand—sense of contact—and then spreading awareness over a situation with goodwill.

"After about ten minutes, he starts to speak. Can't make much sense, but at least you can see he's encouraged to come out and at least start to say something. And I'm just listening, encouraging. And then I just start chanting Mettā Sutta^[3]—just radiating loving-kindness. This other hand comes over, grabs hold of mine. Three hands linked together, just chanting slowly, mettā sahagatena^[4]. You could feel the sense of ease and love and happiness because the energies—the body energy, the heart energy—is linking up. So even though the thinking brain dissolves, breaks down, you can still have a sense that 'I'm meeting this person; there is a meeting place here.'

"It's also not up to me to make something happen. You know, I cannot cure this person. I cannot change this person. There's nothing I can do or say, however much I'd like to. But he can still receive presence, can still receive energy, and still receive loving-kindness. And as we're sitting there for about an hour or so, gradually his hand became stronger and stronger. You know, this is poignant but also something very satisfying because one feels the sense of wanting to do something, being a bit worried, wanting to help, feeling 'what can I do?' Just relaxing.

"Everybody gets to the end of their life. Sometimes people get to the end of their mind before they get to the end of their life. But that doesn't mean you abandon them. It just means you abandon your wish that they'd be something other than the way they are right now. And then you can meet them. You can start to do that with people that are dying, but it's more like you have to practice that with people who are living. Rather than trying to make them some way or another, you just hold with awareness and loving-kindness and trust they will see that, and the best will come out of that."

The Dharma in Our Bones

Here is this monk who has stripped so much out of his life. I heard him say that in the place he was staying, he just kept the lights down because he didn't really want the world always constantly jumping out at the heart-mind. It was a very renunciate life, dedicated to the cultivation of citta^[5]—heart-mind—and so much has been stripped out. But relating, relationship remains. Care remains. We talk so much about what is shed on this path, and a lot is shed, but we also keep a lot too.

There's something poignant to me about what the Ajahn was speaking about regarding his brother. This kind of deep mystery of the karmic bonds that we call family. That certain kind of reverence that we have culturally for family, and I think for a good reason for the most part. But the kind of mystery of just being of them but distinct from them, being a kind of expression. So much is shared, sharing their pain, sharing their potential. Sometimes the next generation is just an expression of the potential that was unlived in the prior generation. So we do our best to nurture the seeds of wisdom and love that we've inherited.

I was teaching college students this past week, and one of them came up to me at the end of a lecture and said, "I'm practicing mindfulness, but I'm still afraid to die." Twenty years old or something. Everybody gets to the end of their life, and that's a Dhamma messenger, classically—something to wake us up. Everybody gets to the end of their life, and there are implications for how we live. Usually, if you make mortality salient in the mind, it does a lot of bad things to the heart generally, when you meet it without wisdom, without love. You can see how much of the derangement of our culture is a function of unconsciousness around death, and the fear around that can be marshaled for the most nefarious purposes. Generally, it deforms our mind, but it need not. It is a Dhamma messenger. But in order for it not to make us more brittle, we have to take it into the heart, treating it as a Dhamma messenger.

Bertrand Russell said, "The world is vast, and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it's difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible."

And so, as I hear this talk, it's like, okay, let this Dhamma messenger just let the finitude sensitize me to goodness. That is one thing death can do: it sensitizes us to goodness because it's all that matters then. It is the only currency that matters even a little, and it is not a perfect consolation, but it is the only one as far as I can see. A lot of the Dharma path is just becoming progressively sensitized to goodness in oneself, in others, and we just get more and more responsive to that. We take our cues from goodness.

We live in this kind of open feedback loop where, as a Dharma practitioner, everything is teaching us. As that famous phrase from Ajahn Chah^[6] says, there is a lot of intimacy in illness. We just come to depend on the kindness of others. We can live a whole life aspiring to be an island, independent, but in the end, the nurse will get us, the brother will get us, and we come to rely in one way or another on loved ones, on caretakers. The kind of intimacy of the body breaking down and the love expressed through touch is moving to me.

When Words Fail

And so the Ajahn arrives, and the words just don't go anywhere. We know that experience. The words just don't go anywhere, as if words are the wrong language. Now, sometimes they're not. Sometimes words can be medicine. I think ideally, talking about the Dharma is supposed to be medicine. But even that's not really about the words. The words are just kind of a thread from one body to another, making love visible in some way. That's the function of the words.

In this case though, words don't go anywhere, and we see that. Often words don't go anywhere, even though words, stories, and conceptualizations can feel like the realest thing in the world. Encased within the narrative of our life, words feel more real than anything. It can feel like happiness is about rearranging the puzzle pieces of thought in our minds. Believing in the Dharma can get heady. We can get heady about what we're doing here and get kind of lost in Dharma abstractions, tracking Dharma progress in this highly conceptualized way. The Dharma, in a sense, gets recruited by our self-model as another way of reifying itself, as another way of becoming all-too-knowing. The kind of model we bring to the world of self and other—the Dharma gets recruited in as another facet of this all-too-familiar story.

So we're encouraged to stay connected to the body. We both know the body, but we're also connected to a certain kind of not-knowing. There's a certain kind of openness where we're being asked to put down all the familiar tropes and stories and lines and words, and just inhabit, pour the awareness into the body.

We try to practice sometimes in a disembodied way, but then we just get mired in complexity. Cormac McCarthy, in Blood Meridian, says, "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there." We could quibble with that last part, you know, and I will! [Laughter] But yeah, sometimes to know one's mind—that all we have is our mind—and we just get lost in complexity. And so we breathe. When we reconnect with our body and our heart—of course, I do get the sentiment of "best not to look there"—but we can feel into that. And that feels a little bit less like the mind trying to know itself. It's more like, oh yeah, this body can be felt. The surges, the goodness, the sensitivity, the receptivity of the heart can be sensed.

The path really begins when we feel the Dharma in our bones. So the Ajahn is rubbing his leg, holding his hand, massaging his hand. Very intimate and very embodied. When words fail, embodiment, heart energy transmitting a kind of love through touch, speaks another language rather than words. We are mammals, you know, and touch does a lot to our system. A lot of times we don't even know. It's hard to even track what that does to the heart, but there's something soothed at a deep level in a gentle, loving touch.

My nine-year-old nephew tried out for an elite baseball team—at least elite for nine-year-olds—and did not make the team. Close, but did not make the team. His best friend, with whom he has some competitive rivalry, made the team. This is just the world collapsing for a nine-year-old. I'm quite upset for him, and I'm trying every therapeutic way in to try to soothe him. I'm taking all these different tacks, and I knew it wasn't really working, but I kept trying. What else am I supposed to do? And he says, "Can you please stop talking?"

Okay. Okay. So he's got this swing in his room that hangs down from the ceiling. It's this drape of nice fabric where you just kind of get fully in it and swing from the ceiling. I'm sitting there, he's encased in this swing, and I'm just gently pushing. Simple touch, movement, things settling down.

In Nick Cave's recent book, he describes the aftermath of the death of his 15-year-old son, who died in an accident. He's in mourning, hiding in some kind of embryonic process after this, and then he finally goes out, actually leaves his home. In conversation with somebody, he says, "As far as the fans were concerned, they saved my life. It was never in any way an imposition, and what you remember ultimately are the acts of kindness, the small but monumental gestures. There's a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton where I would eat sometimes. I went there for the first time I had gone out in public after Arthur died. There is a woman who worked there, and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue, and she asked me what I wanted, and I felt a little strange because there was no acknowledgment of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food, and I gave her the money, and she gave me back my change. As she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand purposefully. It's a quiet act of kindness, the simplest, most articulate of gestures, but at the same time it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe."

A Love That Cannot Go Wrong

And then the Ajahn starts chanting. Sometimes when you've done a lot of chanting, when you've said the Mettā Sutta, when you've done the practice wherever, those words have this channel in the heart-mind. They evoke goodness in a full-hearted, full-bodied way. There is this sense of plugging into this stream of Dharma love. How far is that stream right now? Part of why we practice is so that it feels very close at hand. All it takes is tilting the heart a little bit, and all those years, all those hours of practice, of rehearsing love comes back.

Mettā sahagatena—the heart and mind made vast with love. And this is really a love that can't go wrong. Not so many species of love can't go wrong; a lot of kinds of love can go sideways in one way or another. But this is a love that cannot go wrong because it does not depend on saṃsāra^[7] being arranged in a particular way. So the sense of actually plugging into that, and the sense that there's no unfolding that invalidates this love, no pain possible that reduces it. It's measureless. And to be met in that way, that's a true meeting. That's heart resonating with heart. How deeply we long to be met in that way, because it gives space for us in our strength and our limitation and our confusion and pain. Love makes space for all of it. To feel like there's no line being drawn between what belongs and what doesn't.

And so his brother's grip gets stronger. The Ajahn goes on to say, "That was poignant but satisfying. It's not up to me to make something happen. I cannot cure this person. I cannot change this person. There's nothing I can do or say, however much I'd like to." One feels the sense of wanting to do something, being a bit worried, wanting to help him, feeling "What can I do?" Just relaxing. Just relaxing.

It can feel so terrible not to be able to do something. It's almost like we don't give enough credit to just how bad it feels to want to help and to run into the limitations of one's control. In some relationships that are close, I feel almost haunted by the limitations of my power to free the other of suffering. I see the greed, aversion, delusion. It might be subtle in them, but there's something about it that I can just almost not bear. It's way more evocative in them than it is in me. There's a way in which, when we love another person, their suffering becomes almost tragic. To be empathically connected to them and to face the limitations of one's power—which are nearly complete—to free them of that, that's hard to open to.

The impulse to actually change them, to change the situation for me, even just in micro-ways, reaches a certain kind of fever pitch of intolerance of the other's pain. It spins me. Growing up, the suffering of a parent or caretaker is not a cause for compassion; it's like an existential threat, right? To see very clearly the limitations of the person who's protecting you, to see the omnipotence just dispelled—that's haunting. Somehow it feels like that imprinting, that way of relating to the suffering of loved ones, has carried through even in contact grown up now. I don't depend in the same ways, but the same kind of spinning happens in different kinds of relationships. Then the intolerance of their pain prompts me into action, some kind of intervention that masquerades as compassion but is definitely not compassion. It has an impulsive, driven feel to it, afraid, with a white-hot core of willfulness. This kind of frustration when we cannot change another, when we cannot deliver them from suffering.

And the entanglement of that—the ways that in close relationships it's so easy to become over-identified with the pain of the other. Empathy, care, compassion, it's fatiguing when the pain of the other and one's own pain becomes indistinguishable. I think Carl Rogers said something around therapeutic exchange: accurate empathy is to feel the pain of the other as if it were your own, without losing the "as if" condition. We lose the "as if" condition, and then it's emotional contagion, and we're just swimming in it. We're over-identified with it. But here we have to distinguish the pain of the other from one's own pain, otherwise we both drown.

The Relief of Letting Go

"It's not up to me to make something happen." A lot of relief can come in that. There's a certain grief maybe in seeing the limitations of our power, the inevitability of suffering, but there is some relief. I remember when I heard that line when I was listening to the talk, it was just like, "Oh yeah," and something let down in my own heart.

We've really got to find a way to keep our heart open even amidst our powerlessness. To keep the heart open even amidst helplessness, which has got to be among the most aversive postures for a human to be in. But there's a lot of relief in giving up on change. Sometimes we nurture change, and sometimes we give up on it. On the far side of our compassion can either be despair or equanimity. Compassion is love in the face of suffering, and maybe we think equanimity is somehow not caring. "What do you mean you give up?" Yeah, we give up. That feels like the end of love, but it's actually just another species of love. It's love in the face of the endless, ungovernable nature of saṃsāra, recognizing that our care can never fully cure the First Noble Truth^[8]. It's a certain kind of cutting through the grandiosity and the resistance and the impulsivity around it. Okay, how do I stay open? How does my heart remain open even amidst the limitations of my power, on the other side of my willfulness, on the other side of my control?

And so, once you start to do this with people that are dying, it's more like you have to practice with people who are living. We get into trouble when the neurosis of one collides with the neurosis of the other. That's real pain, when our clingings tangle up. So we do the best we can to clear our heart, so that the pain of the other does not resonate and reverberate with our wounds, but with our love.

Maybe in this way, the care that we feel becomes more bearable. Less impulsive, less a kind of way of engineering and shaping the heart of the other. It becomes a kind of love that can't go wrong, that's always going to be of service. The best will come out of that. Loving-kindness and trust—they will see that, and the best will come out of that. The best will not be perfect, but the best will come out of that.

I offer this for your consideration. Please take what's useful, leave the rest behind. Okay.