The mind is one of the most complicated things in nature and to have the mind understand itself is a difficult undertaking. In Buddhism, the need to see how the mind irritates itself, including when it wrestles with spiritual concepts, can betray levels of stress no different than wrestling with other worldly concepts. In this series we will look at the Buddhist Eightfold Path where those intricacies are examined. Now it’s important to look at Buddhism both from the angle of becoming a monastic, and that of the lay person. The following information leads one to rest in the right brain more often and a monastic at most is doing manual labor, reading, memorizing texts, and meditating. The sangha provides an environment to allow old conditioning to starve and new conditioning to take its place and then eventually to let go of as much unhelpful conditioning as possible. They are recusing themselves from being in regular jobs in business and government where much of these practices are compromised with work politics, meeting deadlines, currying favor, being promoted and being rejected. This can lead to miserable mind states of resentment, envy, and aggression. An example I remember when working in Accounting, which is an area, like in many professions as we can see in the medical profession as well, where Cluster B personality types are over-represented compared to the general population. They seek power and leverage above all else and professions provide that. In this example I was mentioning what NOT to do in business, for example with Ponzi schemes and Bernie Madoff. A pretty obvious point. Another accountant, obviously a Cluster B type, with the “I don’t give fuck” look in his eyes and dead seriousness when he responded, “well Richard, you can see that the problem wasn’t with what he did but that he didn’t get away with it.”
Find Your Right Brain – The Mindful Word: https://www.themindfulword.org/2012/meditation-right-brain/
The Madoff Affair PBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH1Y66IwKvc
Of course any sangha can go out of control, which is the consequence of having people who need help who congregate in those areas. This is similar to psychology environments and other religions. Ideally when it’s working well it helps an individual’s meditation practice when struggling with influences coming from modern life. It’s expected that to perfect this practice you have to rely on donations, dana, and live in a secluded community to focus on these practices solely. As Eckhart Tolle repeatedly points out, being a monastic is not like being in highly charged jobs like in the Stock Market. A lay person, which most practitioners are, are adding this wisdom to their householder lives more or less, like a dot inside the yin or yang, but it can easily be compromised by things like marital discord, inconsistent employment, and natural aging and disease, with the later piling pressure up on top of the former as time goes on. I’m a lay person so I’ll be engaging in some harsh speech every so often and small dashes of humor, so I’m looking at monastic life from that lens of a city dweller. A monastic type may be interested in this post to a certain extent but would realize that meditating right now instead of listening to this might be more beneficial.
How Can I Find Work That Will Give Me Joy – Eckhart Tolle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFGAvPud80A
The Balance of Being and Doing – Eckhart Tolle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j57b6TigGYM&t=4s
Right View
Starting with MN9, Right View on the Eightfold Path, focuses on an ancient description of what we would call conditioning. Typical of a cause and effect method, it starts off with impulses that have turned into attitudes and behaviors that the wise should avoid at the gross level of recognition. This is when it’s almost too late. One is to avoid “Taking life, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, idle chatter, covetousness, ill will, and wrong views.” As one can see, many people enjoy all of those things in worldly pursuits and they do so regularly. One has to be sensitive enough to feel the pain in those things and to abandon those activities because of the drawbacks. I think those with serious personality disorders will have trouble with this and is partially the reason why there are so many scandals in sanghas. In a way, this is the test. “Are you sensitive enough to notice that these things have irritating components to them and any pleasure derived has a concomitant amount of stress attached to them?” Mental peace in this system is the highest goal.
In the Four Noble Truths, clinging is the target because it conditions and strengthens more craving which in a loop continues to make it easier to cling, which is an impulse to control and satisfy any particular goal. Because it never ends, until you’re dead, it becomes a vice and hampers the sense of freedom that one briefly may have encountered in youth, but with age, there are layers of adult conditioning that have hardened over time. This isn’t to blame of course, because all mammals and ancestors used conditioning to survive, but as a human who is cognizant of death, happiness and peace isn’t always about propagating the species and Darwinism. There is a meaninglessness to endless conditioning and fighting over scarcity that bothers a sensitive human so that they want to transcend circumstances much more than animals do. This root of suffering is translated as Feeding or Nutriment, because there’s a pleasure in succeeding to satisfy cravings and removing what is aversive. Pleasure creates craving to repeat the process endlessly, which means the stress connected to the pleasure keeps returning in a form of Karma.
As the sutta makes clear, pleasure in food, sensation, intellectuality, including what I’m doing here, and the subtle pleasure of being conscious is a relishing that builds craving at different strengths. Now one is not to forcibly pretend one doesn’t like what one does, but to begin to see the danger of stress in these impulses and activities. A simple way of seeing is taking account of one’s own periods of mild depression as life events changed over time. Certainly when looking at impermanence, one can’t always rely on externalities to provide endless satisfaction. The mind naturally gets bored and requires more refined pleasure to keep in a Flow state, which demands more resources to make it ever more refined, and when impermanence comes inevitably, there’s a down-feeling of depression that can go into panic when expectations aren’t met. Refined conditions are also harder to keep so the come down emotionally is severe. It’s like putting all of one’s eggs in one basket, losing it, and being left with nothing to feed on. Examples of this are losing a profession that requires a lot of training and conditioning to perfect, losing an intimate partner, especially one where there were a lot of years of co-creating and co-becoming, or losing important investments before retirement. The stress is more acute. Then when you add conflict over scarcity, it’s easier to relinquish pleasure when paying attention to those kinds of drawbacks. This is an important indication of the capability to learn.
Flow – Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
The late Rob Burbea often translated Greed and Aversion, which in this sutta is described as the unskillful cause and effect in this process of dissatisfaction, as a push and pull, where subtle pulling is greed and subtle pushing is aversion. This can escalate from smaller to larger stressful manifestations. One can see at a more subtle level that unconscious movements of thinking and the spotlight of the attention span aiming, and feeling a small effort “oh, ah, uh, oh…” with each movement, like small astronaut boosters controlling direction. “Phhhffft…Phhhffft…Phhhffft…” One can ask “Is this Phhhfft satisfying?” You scan the body and relax pushes and pulls that aren’t necessary. You can also see the attention span moving like a sense of self, but realize the awareness is aware of it already, and so therefore relax the movement. Rob defines clinging as “any movement of body or mind towards or away from anything. So any time we try and push something away from us. Now, that could be really that the mind is just, ‘Get it away from me! I hate this!’, or very, very subtle: there’s no thought involved. There’s just a kind of micro-energetic inclination of mind to push something away, or to pull something towards us, or pull ourselves towards a thing. So any kind of push-pull of the consciousness (something like that) is called ‘clinging.’”
Clinging, Craving, Eros (Q & A) – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/43935/
Coinciding with these impulses are daydreams about a future version of you, Becoming, which is savoring and relishing a future outcome. Often it’s the anticipation that is more energizing than the manifestation. A personal narrative of rising or falling in success is a keen stress to look out for. For Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is just fine, because one can purposefully examine what is accessible and what is not and choose daydreams that are accessible to manifest, to maintain satisfaction. The key to that is what causes excitement when thought about. Daydreaming about what is inaccessible is frustration, and it can include fixated plans adding to tunnel vision and unnecessary conflict. Naturally he doesn’t expect permanent Flow states because what we think is accessible, or not, is prone to misjudgment, error, and uncertainty. From the Buddhist perspective, daydreaming is a dangerous business. The sense of “I am” is in the daydreaming and both can be progressively relinquished by being sensitive to the risks of stress, and this bypasses the need to force oneself to let go through dogma alone. The sensitivity can even be more refined as in AN 1:329 where “just as even a tiny amount of feces is foul-smelling, in the same way, I don’t praise even a tiny amount of becoming—even as much as a finger-snap.” Becoming is the sense of identity connected with conditioned feeding, pushes and pulls, and daydreaming. The metaphorical sense of aging and death in daydreamed narratives IS what is bypassed by these practices, not the actual physical process. The monk still will become older, sicker, and die, but ideally he or she doesn’t mind the process as much because the daydreaming is much less.
Now remember, in a lay environment, you often have to enforce boundaries, which is a way of conditioning other people to behave. In order to prevent theft, one has to have a military and police to protect property and they use aversion and aggression out of necessity to maintain peace, much like you see in the natural world with animals and territoriality. There is a purpose to anger, but it’s a pleasure mixed with pain. By relinquishing everything but necessity in the Buddhist way, one becomes boring to predators, to a certain extent, but not completely of course. You can imagine the individual taking what is scarce from you and noticing that whatever they get is just a burden they are taking on and you are unloading, especially if it’s some form of conspicuous consumption that’s not related to necessity. If you have nothing worth taking then you are bothered less.
Like in the movie Knight of Cups, Christian Bale’s character in an amusing scene is mystifying to burglars in his boring minimalist home. They lament “how come you ain’t got nothing in this house man!?” This is an example of Delusion, which can be described in many ways, but in AN 3:69, Delusion is letting the mind wander from looking at those causes and effects of stress. When it wanders it goes back to old patterns and the same objects. A meditative example would be enjoying concentration, consuming it, and then letting go of the causes and effects that led to the pleasure in the first place. “Delusion tends to growth & abundance.…’” Force is used as a last measure to control attention, but it’s better in MN 20 to contemplate: “‘Really, these thoughts of mine are unskillful, these thoughts of mine are blameworthy, these thoughts of mine result in stress.’” That is a form of healthy cold aversion that leads to relinquishment, as opposed to an aversion that is hot and defensive. As relinquishment continues, compulsive thoughts related to those subjects weaken in craving, through intellectual starvation, they arise less in the mind, and clear consciousness progressively. A de-conditioning practice called extinction in behavior psychology.
Knight of Cups – The Awakening 09:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFVFqVlfe8Y
Identity and 5 ways to make authentic change: https://rumble.com/v1gvjcr-identity-and-5-ways-to-make-authentic-change.html
Now wrong view in the Buddhist sense can be explained as views and beliefs that increase stress. “There are these four clingings: sensuality clinging, view clinging, habit & practice clinging, and doctrine of self clinging.” Anything related to a “This is IT! The True Self! I found it! Finally! Here is the perfect ritual!”, and similar enthusiasms, usually involve some form of subtle pointing with conceptuality, relishing and stressful feeding, no different from worldly pointing towards shopping or finding the best menu item to order. Political beliefs, Religious Beliefs, including clinging to Buddhist dogma, Scientific Beliefs, and superstitious beliefs in processes, procedures, and rituals, which are used as a form of refuge from stress, they are like a leaky roof. They are unreliable pushes and pulls and should be taken on with the attitude that science, procedures, and processes can change when more wisdom arises.
So a lot of the Eightfold Path is included in Right View. It allows one to see the seeking mind, including spirituality seeking, as a just another becoming you can let go of. One rests in a mind that is not devoid of thinking, but it is curated to include only nice museum items. The habit tendencies aren’t completely forgotten, partially because learning requires some memory, but those old tendencies lose their power to take over consciousness. In MN 28 the danger in relishing Solidity, Liquidity, Heat, and the Wind of what is Impermanent includes everything in your experience including consciousness. A cooling of the mind is now possible.
“From acquisition as cause the many forms of stress come into being in the world. Whoever, unknowing, makes acquisitions —the dullard— comes to stress again & again. Therefore, discerning, you shouldn’t create acquisitions as you stay focused on the birth & origin of stress.” Acquisitions here are physical acquisitions but also acquisitions in experiences and knowledge. It’s like a rich person who makes acquisitions of all kinds but their emotions don’t look any happier than anyone else. They may have to downsize their home, sell the boat, and go through a divorce splitting their assets. The stress in their narrative might be quite similar to someone going through smaller versions of these same events. Ultimately when one faces death, the past is the past, and assuming there are still nice memories left, one is right up against death just the same. We really have to let go of everything no matter what.
Now as a lay person, one doesn’t need to relinquish clinging towards everything, but there is an interest that arises in picking and choosing the most sustainable hobbies and to include more periods of time to just rest conditioning to add refreshment to daily life. A lot of activities may not be as refreshing as intended and expose a kind of masochism where one is ignoring how one feels and not noticing if an activity, or a mental or physical acquisition, is a reliable form of satisfaction. Basic meditation for an extended period of time helps to drain the conditioning so that refreshment is more assured compared to what other activities may or may not provide. Ask, does the activity provide refreshment?
MN 9: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN9.html
MN 20: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN20.html
MN 28: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN28.html
AN 1:329: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN1_329.html
AN 3:69: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN3_69.html
SN 3:12: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/StNp/StNp3_12.html
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/