1989-04_13 Anapanasati_ Full Awareness of Breath Series - Tape 9 Q&A 8

Talk: 19890413-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-anapanasati_full_awareness_of_breath_series_tape_9-33812 Start_time: 00:44:45 Display_question: How can I avoid judgement of both difficult feelings and how I handle them? Keyword_search: judgement, avoid, let go, war, arise, pass away, mind, simple, now, militaristic, Dalai Lama, kilesha, greed, hatred, delusion, cold, exercise, destructive, mind, deep, calm, breath, deconditioning, free, warrior Question_content: Questioner: But how would you avoid that judgment? So you don't end up thinking, “I'm annoyed at waiting in line and I’m annoyed at myself because I can’t stay with the breath.” Larry: You just see them and let them go like anything else. We're not at war with the judgment. We hear the judging mind and we see it arise and pass away, which is central to our practice. And we come back to what's in the moment. It's very simple medicine. You may want something more special than that, but this is as good as anything. It's just seeing. Hearing the judging mind. “Oh, you've been asleep for three hours. Okay.” Hearing that, fine, let it go. And then come back to now. There's only now always, isn't there? It's only now. And what we're learning is to really understand that there's only now. Really listen, if you like, be with your breath and try to hear what's being said. Break_line: This is by the 13th Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama before the present one, sometimes called the Great 13th. If you ever see a photograph of him, he has an incredible face. “The Bodhisattva…” That's us. We're little Buddhas in training. “The Bodhisattva is like the mightiest of warriors, but his enemies are not common foes of flesh and bone. His fight is with the inner delusions, the afflictions of self-cherishing and ego-grasping, those most terrible of demons that catch living beings in the snare of confusion and cause them forever to wander in pain, frustration, and sorrow. His mission is to harm ignorance and delusion, never living beings. These he looks upon with kindness, patience, and empathy. Cherishing them like a mother cherishes her only child. He is the real hero, calmly facing any hardship in order to bring peace, happiness, and liberation to the world.” Break_line: Now, this is a beautiful statement of the kilesas. And does anyone not know what I mean by the kileasas when I use that term: greed, hatred, and delusion. And here you might, it has to do with, of course, helping other people who are ensnared in them. But I would say for right now, take the main meaning to be it's us. In other words, what we’re saving ourselves from these tendencies that we have, which were brought out by Joanne in just that simple statement. I think it might be helpful for you to put the samadhi practice because sometimes it can seem, until you start tasting the fruit, like too mechanical or even cold, an exercise, some kind of concentration exercise, which has almost a militaristic drill attitude towards it, which it really isn't. Break_line: The samadhi practice has, as we hear very, very often, value in that when the mind becomes steady and calm, we can then use it to investigate, right? So that it's in the service of being able to do Vipassana. The crown jewel of our practice is insight. But the samadhi practice has something to contribute enormously, in fact, to working with these kilesas, to helping the warrior do their job, do his or her job in and of itself. It's independent. It's not necessarily its value comes at a later time when you apply it, the strength that it gives to our Vipassana work. Break_line: Think of it in this way, just to be really brief, and then you can reflect and see it for yourself: If a person has never been alerted to the possibility of turning to, let's say, the breath—it could be other things, but we're using the breath. Then typically what happens is when any of these surface, these energies surface—greed or hatred or delusion, in any of their forms—we're enslaved to them. We're pushed around by them. We follow their commands. We do exactly as we're told, thinking that we're doing it. We're really enslaved to our mind in that sense, or this aspect of mind, which is quite prominent. It's not like it happens once or twice a day. It's going on a lot. If you look carefully, you'll see it, in a gross way and in a subtle way. Break_line: As you develop the breath as a place of refuge, in a sense, that has become a stronger place to settle into—and that comes about only through training; it's not going to happen through any magic—every time, just on one in breath or one outbreath, every time you decide, instead of rolling in your stuff, you make a conscious choice that, “Oh no, I'm going to go back to an inbreath.” And you actually are able to aim your attention at an inbreath and fully experience it, that is conditioning that happening more often in the future. Break_line: You're conditioning the increased possibility of awareness in the future so that even just one inbreath or one outbreath, what you're beginning to do is establish a substantial place of strength, a place to come to inwardly. You could use images of a house or sometimes it's used as a fortress. But it's an inner strength. And now you have an option that you might not have had before where you can short circuit some of these kilesas. So they come up, whatever they are: you're down on yourself or you're depressed or you're angry or, you know, all of them. Break_line: Now, I'm not talking about wisdom. We'll get to that later on. But even with samadhi, right then and there, if you can learn to remember that you have the option of turning to the breath. That is, these other preoccupations are competing with us and by and large they're saying, come along, follow me. Get involved. If you're going to get absorbed, get absorbed in this. Get absorbed in bitterness, get absorbed in loneliness, get absorbed in jealousy. Come on. And we do it time and time again. And what the samadhi practice is saying is that you have an option that you didn't have before. The stronger the concentration becomes, the more that option is viable and real because you can become very, very steady. That means you turn away from whatever is demanding your attention, and you drop into a place of peace. Break_line: Now, once you do that, that means that in that moment you have released yourself from unnecessarily suffering. Had you not been able to do that, you have gotten all caught up in it. And we have our other ways of escaping through movies, through the food or whatever it is, telephones. There are many things to get absorbed in. This one goes a lot deeper and is more reliable once you develop it. Break_line: Moreover, as you come into the, let's say, the healing energy that samadhi provides us with—peace is what it is, calm—while you're residing there and as you develop, you can stay in samadhi for very long periods of time. One of the things that's happening, in addition to conditioning that—in other words, you're strengthening that possibility for yourself in the future—is that you're deconditioning. You're making selfing weaker. That is, this tendency to grasp on to things in some destructive way, make them into I and mine, the kilesas, because you've not fed energy into it. Instead, you've gone to the breath and come to a place of repose. So in the process of doing that, you're deconditioning some of these tendencies to suffer. They get a little weaker because we're not exercising them. It's like they become flabby. Break_line: Now, we’re not uprooting them. Wisdom is what can do that. But the samadhi practice can make an invaluable contribution to weakening some of the kilesas. Moreover, when you come out, when you've been soothed and rested in a state of calm. And here, of course, now we get into Vipassana where much more is said about this, and probably you've all read it. Then the freshness of mind that you have, the underlying sense of well-being and joy, permits you to investigate states that are unpleasant. Break_line: The other day I had a really big laugh. And I don't know if you'll see it the way I did. It just struck me as really funny that a lot of what the samadhi practice is about is getting to taste, to become happy enough to be able to investigate our unhappiness. Whereas if you don't have that, it's sort of like a troubled mind trying to investigate itself. And, you know, there's something you can do, but it doesn't go awfully deep. And so if we have an independent source of joy, which samadhi practice leads to, that gives us a place to refresh ourselves, a place to heal and to come back and face whatever is happening in a way that makes it workable. Break_line: So, whether you know it or not, any of these perhaps seemingly abstract exercise—not abstract, but I don't know what to call it. You might think they're removed from the real juices of life. They're not. If you want to do anything worthwhile, you have to prepare for it. You want to climb a mountain, you need to go into training. If you want to really free yourself, you have to develop a mind that can really work, that really is steady enough to investigate all of these what the 13th Dalai Lama is talking about. Break_line: And, if you like, a warrior image is not a wrong one. The kilesas are destructive enough. Just look at the planet, for goodness’ sake. Look at it from an inner level. The problem not being nuclear weapons or even ecology. That's an expression of a derangement of mind that led to that, of an unbridled greed coupled with incredible delusion so that we're unable still to be able to see the consequences of what we're doing. And it's just a very short run feeling of grasping at things for some happiness that seems to elude us. Break_line: So, the state of the planet comes out of the collective ignorance of individual minds that are able, in some cases, to work together as a country and pool the ignorance. It becomes colossal. And so what each one of us is doing in our own way, it is a warrior-like quality. But it's not that you get violent towards your kilesas because that itself is a kilesa. And the breath becomes an extraordinary aid in this contention between darkness and sorrow. And, on the other hand, wisdom, brightness, love. Because the breath is a very neutral object, very simple, always available, and it just can become an extraordinary ally in enabling us to proceed in this direction. You have to see what's at stake. Break_line: And so that some of what's happening is when you see, let's say, typically just to take off on what you said Joanne, sometimes some things will come up in life. You know, you feel that you're about to explode or do something harmful to a person or enter into a course of action that's bound to have repercussions of a destructive nature for someone else and for you. And, perhaps it's so strong you can't investigate. Sometimes just being able to turn to the breath for a few moments enables you, it's a kind of a way of restraining or preventing some course of action that can be quite devastating. So please use it. I mean, that's what it's for. We're developing this inner strength so that we can use it and use it in those times when you need it. Now we're learning to do it all the time. Break_line: In those moments when some of these energies, destructive energies, rage very, very strongly, this is not a time to forget about the breath at all. This is a time to really see how deep our practice has gone. Can we use it right here and now? And if you can't, that's all right. It's just showing you. And then we pick up and we begin again. And every time we're attentive, whether it's a breath or something else, we're conditioning the possibilities of moving in a constructive direction rather than one that seems to be harmful. End_time: 00:58:20