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Mindfulness of Breathing (66) Fading of Compulsion

So my friends, we continue with this Anapanasati^[1], and the topic is the 14th step: "One trains oneself, breathing in, observing fading away," or a different translation is, "One trains, breathing in, observing fading away, observing dispassion."

In this word translated as "dispassion," the word is virāga^[2] (v-i-r-a-g-a). It doesn't quite work for some English speakers because, over time, the word "passion" has acquired many positive associations, connotations, and definitions in English in some circles. The original meaning of it—like "the passion of Christ," where it meant suffering—is kind of lost. But I think there are still remnants in English that "passion" can have negative connotations. It is a source of suffering. Someone might say someone has a passion for power, a passion for sex, or a passion for something. It's an intense engagement in something, and intense engagement can be very painful.

So I want to talk a little bit about this dispassion, this virāga, maybe in an indirect way.

Buddhism is often considered a religion, and once it's called a religion, it's reasonable for people to try to understand the fundamental tenets and beliefs of this religion. In doing that, it's kind of looking at generalizations, just making universal statements about things. One of the universal statements is that Buddhism emphasizes that everything is impermanent or inconstant. Usually, people say everything's impermanent, and then we have this universal statement. Then we're contending with this universal statement: "Is this really true?" "Is this always the case?" This seems like a rather depressing way of seeing everything, or there are all kinds of reactions to this almost philosophical, general statement, as if it's some universal truth that Buddhism teaches.

Looking at this using a universal statement is one approach to understanding Buddhism. I think the practice approach to understanding Buddhism is not to understand Buddhism in the abstract—not to begin there—but to begin with oneself and one's own experience. To the degree to which Buddhism emphasizes the possibility of being free from suffering, then we begin with ourselves and look: What is the suffering here that I have? What's my pain? What's my emotional pain? What's happening here? And they say it's possible to be free of it. Well, how could I become free of it? What does it take?

In this very personal kind of exploration, feeling, and being here, Buddhism says, "Well, if you really look carefully at your experience, you'll see that there's a very close connection to the experience of inconstancy, change, transiency, impermanence, and our ability to ease up from our suffering, to soften it, to calm it down, even to have it fade away and disappear."

So we see then, in going from this direction, that the purpose of seeing inconstancy is not to have some universal theory, belief, and philosophy about life, but rather it's a pragmatic, practical idea. In the observation of change and inconstancy, this is an antidote; this is a medicine for what Buddhism calls suffering. There's something that eases up when we can really feel the flow and be in the current of change.

Whether impermanence and inconstancy is a universal, philosophical, or metaphysical concept is really beside the point. The point is that we're pointing to inconstancy and impermanence because of its value in helping us loosen up, lighten up, and free up the places we get caught. That's enough. We don't have to make a big leap of philosophy to make a universal claim, like, "Now I know something about the fundamental nature of the universe, the physics of the universe—that everything is impermanent and changing all the time." It's an interesting idea, but that idea is not really what Buddhist practice is about.

As we see things shifting and changing, and the transitory nature of phenomena, we get more interested in the process of change, the process of inconstancy, than we are with the content of our thoughts or the content of our feelings. Many times we're focused on the meaning of things, the content, the purpose, the ideas, and the particularity of what is going on.

But in a sense, at this point in Anapanasati, we're stepping back. In particular, what we're thinking is not that important; we just see that thinking itself is an inconstant phenomenon. It comes and goes. Probably you've had some of your thoughts repeatedly—they've come and gone for days, weeks, months, or years, and they just come and go. After a while, if you see how much they come and go, maybe you ease up about it.

It's also with our emotions. Sometimes the meaning of the emotions, the story around them, even the emotion itself—what emotion it is and what it means to have that emotion, and how it reflects back on ourselves as a human being—comes into play. But at some point in meditation, we shift from all that complication to not even caring whether it's sadness or joy, but rather tuning into the process of how it is shifting, changing, morphing, and moving. It is coming in and out of existence, and awareness picks it up and puts it down. It gets distracted by the train whistle, and for a moment is not sad because it's just a train whistle. Then we pick up and we're aware of sadness again; it has arisen. Then we hear more whistles, and it's all this kind of coming and going.

And it's that coming and going that begins to loosen up. It's like a lubricant that begins unsticking the ways in which we are uncontrollably caught in our emotions, our activity, or our motivations.

One of those is rāga^[3]. Rāga can be translated as passion or lust, but when it's translated as lust, some people feel like it limits it too much to sexual passion. But one definition in the Pali Text Society Dictionary is "uncontrolled excitement." I like to think of it as drivenness. We're driven by lust, driven by greed, driven by hatred and ill will. There's some way in which something has taken over control, and we're not in control anymore because of the power of that level of passion.

Describing it the way I do seems kind of dramatic. But as we get quieter and quieter in the mind, we see the subtler and subtler ways in which we're caught in the grip of certain drivenness. Anybody who meditates tends to see that—how surprisingly much we get swept away in our thoughts, pulled into our thoughts, or caught in our thoughts. That represents a little bit of a kind of uncontrolled excitement, interest, or engagement.

As we settle back into just observing, we can see that it doesn't serve us to be involved in this uncontrolled drivenness, caughtness, and preoccupation. So there starts to be this process of disinterest, losing interest in continuously doing that. "I've had the same thoughts for months now; I'm not interested in doing it anymore. I have the same preoccupation with certain emotions, feeling as if they're the most important thing, and I'm not so interested anymore. I don't want to give much more attention to these things. I've given so much attention to them. I've been kind of driven to pay attention to my anxiety, and I think it's okay to put the anxiety to the side. I know I'm anxious, but I don't have to be so driven by it. I can ease up. I can just observe it. I can not be so involved or entangled with it."

The movement to being non-driven, the dropping of compulsion, is this thing called virāga—this fading away, this dispassion. It's very closely connected to freedom; it is a kind of freedom. After a while, we begin appreciating that freedom is sweet. Freedom is a breath of fresh air. Freedom is a kind of joy, delight, and vitality, and a kind of health or healthiness. To begin to have a feeling for a sense of freedom as we observe—there's freedom in the observing. That freedom in the observing is a guide, a support to lose interest or lose our preoccupation with our drivenness, with the things that we're caught in.

So there's this fading away of compulsion, a process that some translators will translate as dispassion, a movement towards dispassion, towards freedom. The word virāga is a celebrated term in India. More often than not, it refers to liberation itself, the freedom itself, the end of rāga—the end of compulsion, drivenness, and lust in all its forms, passion and all its negative forms. It can come in a peaceful way. I like to think of this whole process as a process of settling into an ease: easing up, relaxing, softening, fading away. Not fading into nothing so much, but fading into a peaceful, happy, healthy, liberated way of being.

So, breathing in, observing fading away. Breathing out, observing this dispassion as it comes along here.

Closing Remarks

Thank you, and we'll continue with this. I apologize, I didn't check my calendar, but I believe that on Friday we could do another session where afterwards, if you want to stay and ask some questions, we can do that. That was very nice last Friday, and as we're doing this Anapanasati, maybe it's nice for you to have more questions about this.

Thank you all very much.