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Introduction

I was startled out of a dream this morning about someone. Someone in the dream was actually no longer alive, and sometime in the course of the dream, I realized, "Oh, these people I'm talking to aren't actually alive," and then after that, I woke up. I woke up with this sense of intensity because of the intensity of the conversation in the dream. I had a sense of wonder for the reality of the dream, the intensity of the feelings in the dream, and how the emotions carried over into waking up.

I was walking around with this—not really edginess, but a sense of wondering. Just a sense of wonder, questioning. It's interesting to find an attitude of mind like questioning occupying your energy. I wandered around, fed my hummingbirds, said hello to my husband, and looked at the pink clouds that were reflected—because I live on the west side of my building, I can't really see the dawn—and I was just taken with how beautiful everything was in the midst of hurrying to get ready. There was just this beauty.

I came to sign in, and the people who were graciously taking care of all the recording were in gentle conversation and smiling. It contrasted with the mood of the dream and reminded me that everything changes, even emotions, after a very short time. It reminded me how useful it is to know what you're carrying around with you, what your attitude of mind is, and how it makes you receptive or not receptive to your experience.

So, I just thought I would share those short thoughts before we begin this morning. We'll begin in a couple of minutes.

Guided Meditation: Opening to What Arises

So, let's begin.

As we begin, take note of what your attitude of mind is. What's the energy that you're carrying around with you? Are you feeling at peace, agitated, curious, jittery, or simply at ease?

Just for the moment, let's all say, "Ah, this is here, and my intention now is to bring myself to this, just this sitting here." Take a deep breath and let it out. Let yourself arrive in this place with whatever is here.

Relax your body. Allow your neck to be loose, your head to float on your shoulders, and your shoulders to lie down. Gently allow your whole body to sink into this moment. Allow your torso to settle, to feel yourself on whatever surface you are on, a chair or a cushion. With your feet lying down, allow your body to sink into this space. Know that it is on this space, in this room, in this air, in this moment. And breathe.

The body at rest in this place. The mind doing what it does. Just as we breathe, thoughts come and go. The air comes in and out, thoughts come in and out. We hold onto neither.

We're aware of sounds, the feel of our hands where they lie, the movement of the air across our bodies, and the movement of the breath in and out. Even as we enter this space of meditation, we do so in the environment we're in, over which we have no control. We give ourselves over to the conditions that are here.

Ah, this is what's happening. These are the sounds. Here is where my intention meets the conditions. I find the intention to just be here, the intention to settle within these conditions. This moment, this place.

Aware of the self-imposed stillness of the body, the intention to be still, whether the thoughts are still or not. And the air keeps moving in and out. I feel the temperature of my body. I notice pleasant and unpleasant, comfort and [clears throat] discomfort. Just here with things as they arise. Each breath a surprise.

As the body stills, the mind stills. Thoughts still coming and going in the stillness. What else are you aware of? As we breathe in and out, what do you notice? Where does your awareness rest? Where do many feelings reside in the body?

If a soundtrack is running in your mind, notice how you feel about it. Notice whether there is a feeling of joy and delight, or a feeling of seriousness. How do you know this? What sense brings you here to receive whatever is happening?

Feelings are too complex. Just notice pleasant or unpleasant. Notice how one can change into the other.

Being here in the body. Being here in the body. This is home. Where you are now, where I am now, is home. Home is where we experience now. It's not a geographical place; it's the place where experience happens.

Dharmette: The Truth of Suffering (3/5); Conditions from Views

So, good morning again. I'm going to see if I can get my voice back. Welcome, everyone. This is a week where we're talking about suffering and the end of suffering.

Yesterday, we considered how intention affects suffering in the way that we refer to as kamma or karma^[1]. Karma preconditions our present experience, but what we do in that moment is entirely based on choices we make now, in this moment. So, we've been preconditioned, but now what? The degree of wisdom or good-heartedness—or greed, hatred, and delusion—we bring to the experience in the present moment is new. This moment is fresh. This moment is arising.

But this moment is not arising in isolation; it's arising in the midst of lots of conditions. I remember one time when I was very ill, I had a very unfamiliar feeling of anxiety. It was not the regular, "I'm anxious about this," or, "I'm nervous about the beginning of that," or, "I don't know what's going to happen." It was a very deep, free-floating anxiety that I couldn't put my finger on. I didn't know what it was. It wasn't tied to any particular cause. It was just anxious.

Perhaps what made it even more frightening is that it wasn't me, because I had a sense of who I am—or who I was—that was based on my usual mind habits. You know, what I see, the stories I tell about myself, how I see myself—these are all things that in practice we think of as us, right? "This is me. This characterizes me." I've done enough practice now that I know not to trust that assumption. In fact, these characteristics are transient and quite unreliable, but the habits of mind are very strong.

The habits of how I see myself, how I must be in the world, and all of these instructions to ourselves are very strong. I would say I'm not an anxious person, although sometimes I'm clearly overwhelmed with anxiety. What are the things you think about yourself? What are the things like, "I am this way. This is the way I am. I can't help it. I'm just built this way"?

And why does it matter? It matters because we're setting up conditions for how we meet this moment. If I'm somebody who's never anxious, what do I do when something is anxiety-provoking? Well, I just ignore it, or I suppress it, or I pretend it's not happening. Our route to seeing clearly what our experience is depends very much on our ability to see what we are bringing into the moment in terms of how we see ourselves. What things do I think will never change? "I know these things won't change."

One way to look at that is as a resistance to resilience. You could say, "Well, I just don't deal well with change." Or you could say, "How am I holding onto what I think is true?" They're quite different.

In fact, all of the words we choose to talk to ourselves, or to talk to other people, have great impact. When I say "sadness," it may mean something entirely different from how you see the word "sadness." Those choices of words usually have stories attached to them that create an attitude of mind that we then carry forward.

If I'm a crusader, I have to crusade all the time. It's exhausting. I went through a good part of my life believing I had to be the strongest person in the room. In my practice, I finally figured out that I had that bias about myself and saw how destructive it was for me and for other people. It was destructive all around. Even though I did wonderful things with that energy and confidence, it was quite hurtful. Being able to see how that idea about oneself conditions how we experience the world is invaluable.

It is particularly important to see that clearly because, in every experience, the first thing we notice is how we feel about it. How am I receiving it? "I'm hot. I'm cold." That initial thing happens when we're in pain and suffering; it's normal to think first of ourselves. Then, depending on our habits and whatever insights we might have, we might actually include other people in that: "I wonder how they're feeling. I wonder how my words are landing with them." But we're kind of tied up with, "I want to be seen this way. I want to be heard this way."

So people say, "How are you?" And you say, "Oh, I'm fine. I'm fine"—totally irrespective of how you are. In fact, the very question, "How are you?" is more of a greeting than a question. So, how do you respond to that? What's your reaction to that? Sometimes how I react depends on other conditions in the room: the people that are there, if I'm at work, or if there are children present. How is that affecting your receipt of the experience? These conditions are conditioning whether we suffer or not.

I'm going to read you this bit from Stephen Batchelor^[2]:

"And I'm not the only one who suffers. You suffer, too. Every sentient creature suffers. When 'myself' is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates me from 'not-me' begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world. To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy. The capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer... is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love."

To the extent that we insist, "I'm this way," we actually cut off our connection to other people. We make it not possible to feel them. It's important to be able to be aware of how we suffer. It allows us the sensitivity to see that others also suffer.

I was engaged with someone yesterday. There was a conversation that was not adversarial exactly, but she wanted one thing, and I wanted another. At a certain point, I realized the only way for this conversation to end well is for me to really hear her—to really hear what her issue was, to not be so focused on my point of view that I couldn't hear her. And we ended up hugging, still at odds, but open.

A lot of our experience comes from preconceived views—how I see the world. Lately, I've had a few conversations with people where something someone has said to them has been very hurtful, or the conditions they're in feel threatening and unsafe. They give me the words that the person said, and I interpret them in an entirely different way because I'm seeing them from a different place. I'm mystified by how adamant they are that this is hurtful, when I can say the words can be interpreted as being inclusive—the same words that they find dismissive. But because their view is that it is hurtful, they can't hear me say that. They can't open to the possibility that the way they see it is only from a perspective that has a preconceived view.

It's not something you can be talked out of. You only see it when you are able to say, "What have I brought into this moment?" To be aware of what I've brought into this moment, and what's going on with them.

If I bring fear into this moment, everything is threatening. So I need to know, "I'm fearful right now," so that I take all the experience with a little grain of salt and say, "Okay, maybe I'm not seeing this exactly right because I know I'm tense and unsure right now." Postpone conclusions, which lead to suffering.

It's really, really extremely important to listen, see, and meet our experience with as little preconceived notions as possible. So, occasionally ask yourself, "What's going on with me? What am I seeing? How am I doing this?"

We can't stop and examine every exchange in our lives; we would just be exhausted. We wouldn't be able to live our lives. But it is helpful to understand the view that we have choices to hear and to listen, and that they're different. We have choices to feel what we're feeling or not to feel it, and to just be aware when that's happening.

It's not whether the idea is true or not, but how tightly one clings to it that causes suffering. Live with a little bit of relaxation, because we set up conditions for this moment by the things that we believe are true. So what happens if you don't follow a habit? What happens if you do?

I told you that I had this thing about being the strongest person in the room. So I set about attending meetings where I didn't speak. I cannot tell you how difficult that was. People were just making these decisions I just couldn't agree with! I watched all that discomfort and that uncertainty, and I said, "Isn't this interesting?" How difficult it was not to be able to influence the outcome. Whoa. See how attached I was to that? A source of suffering.

I'm going to read you a little story. This is a poem by Tony Hoagland^[3] from his book Turn Up the Ocean. He wrote a whole series of poems when he was nearing death. This is not a depressing story. "Mistaken Identity Librarian Syndrome" is the name of it:

I think the pink-haired librarian has me mixed up with someone else, because she used to be so nice when she checked me out, but now she's as hard as a barcode machine and chilly as the jar of iced tea in the employee fridge. I think some other white-haired guy about my height must have been caught last week putting art books under his shirt, or maybe defacing the biography of Sonic Youth. Then my librarian got her face recognition in gear and swapped our identities under the desk.

Well, not so much you can really do about so many things. No action you can take to fix or fret this out, when the question to the librarian, "What happened to our relationship?" immediately triggers the crazy stranger alert. But I miss the friendliness of librarian Maureen, with the lavender forelock some would call pink and the broad-striped Danish sailor shirts she favors.

And I pick my books more carefully now, knowing the wrong one could make things worse, like The Zurich Assassin or Dead by Dawn. But why do I feel bad when I've done nothing wrong, as I stand before her and she scowls at the overdue screen and does not look up when she stamps me out?

A victim of unpredictable patterns in human weather, where the best option is to take your literature away like a tuna fish sandwich in a brown paper sack, and have a nice day in spite of yourself, with the hunch that you're involved in a whole bunch of mistaken identities you should be used to by now. Though knowing that so much of life is just imaginary doesn't make it easier to lose something I had that I quite liked a lot, and in fact had already counted on renewing forever without knowing it.

Now, I love this because this was a fantasy world that he created around this other person. And he admitted, you know, it's all a fantasy. It's all imaginary. But he had counted on it to be the way he thought about it, and it was something that he liked, and he had counted on renewing it forever without knowing it.

He didn't realize how attached he was to the friendly librarian saying whatever she used to say to him. His suffering all came from a place of views.

I invite you to be aware of your views, to know how they condition this moment. May all your moments be peaceful. Thank you.