holistic kindness, metta part 3

Posted on May 27, 2021 by tiramit

POSTCARD#422: Bangkok: Continuing with Ajahn Sucitto as he takes us through the pathways towards cultivating a boundless mind.

Softening Comparative Judgments

All beings seek their own welfare. Suffering and the pressure to get free of it are the concern of us all, so surely we could get together to support each other. And yet we often focus on the ways that set us apart. This focus brings even more suffering, in terms of comparative judgments that bring competition and conflict. On the other hand, when there is empathy — even at the times when we experience bereavement, pain and fear — the suffering diminishes. There is nothing so conducive to trust, strength and uplift as a struggle shared. Consider the stories of explorers who, against extremity, struggle through to safety together; shared conflict brings about fellow-feeling with its tremendous mutual strengthening. When the boundary of concern widens to include others — even those with whom we’re in conflict — in an important respect, the suffering ceases. This, the Buddha pointed out, is the suffering we can bring to cessation. In doing that, we’re not just released from pain, we are broadened and deepened out of alienation, into wisdom and compassion. So there is great practical wisdom in understanding how the mind creates boundaries of concern and interest, and how we can work with these. Of course there are boundaries; there are other beings on earth. But what counts is how those boundaries are maintained, opened and closed. When we consider otherness — the way beings are different from us — we can feel either insecurity, ‘How does she compare with me?’ or contempt, ‘You’re not as good as me’; or fear and intimidation, ‘You’re better or stronger than me.’ Or, we can feel adoration/attraction — ‘I want to be bonded to you.’ These immediate assumptions are called ‘conceit’: that is, we conceive of people as worse, better or the same as us. The effect is that the mind’s responsiveness gets stuck. It doesn’t see the rich or successful with compassion for their suffering. It doesn’t value the beauty, humour or resilience of those ‘worse than me.’ And it doesn’t respect the differences of those who are ‘the same as me.’ Caught in the conceit of self-view, the heart doesn’t extend its boundaries of appreciation and concern; we take each other for granted as ‘my wife,’ ‘my boss,’ ‘my teacher’; and that fixing of them freezes our sensitivity. In that state, the heart easily tips over into complaining about the other not being the way they ‘should be’ (or rather the way I want them to be), and so the heart becomes a breeding ground for ill-will.

Reflect on this: if you take someone to be the same as you, you feel confused and frustrated when their opinion is different from yours. And sooner or later it is, isn’t it? So there’s conflict not only when you think others are different from yourself, but also when you think they are the same. Trying to make people be clones of yourself makes you intolerant. Or, you pressurize people into having the same view. But a ‘we’ that hasn’t arisen through recognizing and accommodating differences is a conformist tyranny, not a harmonious abiding. The only way out is mettā — the widening of a boundary of fellow-feeling to include all. Even, of course, those with whom one is ill at ease.

Cultivating a Boundless Mind

So here’s the question: who is more important, who gets first servings of kindness — me or you? Well, if your mind is crabby and depressed, you’re not in the best condition for ladling out the love. But on the other hand if you keep it for yourself, and you fuss over every twinge in your own mind, then that feels like narcissism. It’s a trick question, because the practice is holistic: to others as to oneself. The way it works is that you see where development can occur and widen it from there. You keep expanding and deepening the sphere of kindness in all directions. This is because there are near misses. For example, there’s an altruism that seems like kindness, and may carry some of its features, but is mixed with the need to feel that one is being loving and useful to others. We impose a requirement on others that they benefit from our love. This is missionary kindness. It doesn’t always allow people to be the way they are; we want to convert the nasty into the loving and make the sick get well. Now mettā may indeed have such effects, but as a Dhamma practice it’s focused on intent rather than arrival at a specific state. So we don’t practise kindness in order to make others into our idea of what a nice person is. Instead, the practice is to cultivate a conscious field of kindness in which — as aspects of ourselves and others arise in our awareness — they will not be met with fear or negativity. Then we trust the removal of ill-will and self-view to have its effect. Of course we can’t just bring kindness to others without having felt it in ourselves, which means that our limitations, fears, doubts and pains are an essential part of our fieldwork. So it’s useful to check whether we have mettā for ourselves, and when we lose it. Do we beat ourselves up and feel guilty when we make a mistake, are late, or don’t live up to others’ expectations? Do we feel shadow impressions hovering around us over things we have or haven’t done? Does our conceiving mind create an image of how great somebody else is and therefore how inferior we are? The learning point is that as long as we pick up on, and attach to, particular features as self or other, good or bad, we never arrive at holistic goodwill. With self-view, sooner or later someone’s going to be inferior and someone superior.

Instead, we have to connect goodwill to the experience of self and other as it happens; that is, how I feel about you in the moment. Then we bring the intention of goodwill to the uncertainty, or fear or irritation as we experience it. And we’re also prepared to be affected: we stay open to what’s happening for self and other, without having an answer as to who’s right and who’s wrong.

So in working with others as with oneself, we have to go deeply into the mind. In the direct contemplation of what is arising — at the dividing line between what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not — simply note the flavour of consciousness. Is it contracted, defensive, anxious, demanding? Listen to the tones and the energies behind the topics that the mind brings up; tune in to the waves of irritation, fear, guilt, and so on; and extend empathy and non-aversion. It’s about not fighting, blocking or running. Holding our centre, we thus can soften the edginess of the mind. We can open to include the experience of ourselves and others in our awareness. This is the cultivation of the boundless mind; over time, it widens to include it all.

holistic kindness, the mettā pāramī part 2

Posted on May 21, 2021 by tiramit

Image: Wikipedia. Seated Buddha, Gandhara, 1st-2nd century CE, at the Tokyo National Museum.

POSTCARD#421: Bangkok: Excerpts from Ajahn Sucitto’s “Pāramī, Ways to Cross Life’s Floods”. Click on the link for a download or print copy. We are coming to the end of the text, and I’d like to open up this series on The 10 Pāramī for discussion. Put your thoughts in the comment box at the end of this post and I’ll try to reply immediately – please allow for time zone difference: Indochina Time, Bangkok (GMT+7hrs. EDT + 11hrs. PDT + 14 hrs.)

Cultivating a Boundless Mind

The way it works is that you see where development can occur and widen it from there. You keep expanding and deepening the sphere of kindness in all directions. This is because there are near misses. For example, there’s an altruism that seems like kindness, and may carry some of its features, but is mixed with the need to feel that one is being loving and useful to others. We impose a requirement on others that they benefit from our love. This is missionary kindness. It doesn’t always allow people to be the way they are; we want to convert the nasty into the loving and make the sick get well. Now mettā may indeed have such effects, but as a Dhamma practice it’s focused on intent rather than arrival at a specific state. So we don’t practise kindness in order to make others into our idea of what a nice person is. Instead, the practice is to cultivate a conscious field of kindness in which – as aspects of ourselves and others arise in our awareness – they will not be met with fear or negativity. Then we trust the removal of ill-will and self-view to have its effect.

Of course we can’t just bring kindness to others without having felt it in ourselves, which means that our limitations, fears, doubts and pains are an essential part of our fieldwork. So it’s useful to check whether we have mettā for ourselves, and when we lose it. Do we beat ourselves up and feel guilty when we make a mistake, are late, or don’t live up to others’ expectations? Do we feel shadow impressions hovering around us over things we have or haven’t done? Does our conceiving mind create an image of how great somebody else is and therefore how inferior we are? The learning point is that as long as we pick up on, and attach to, particular features as self or other, good or bad, we never arrive at holistic goodwill. With self-view, sooner or later someone’s going to be inferior and someone superior.

One of the nuns in the monastery was born and married in Cambodia. At the time of the Cambodian holocaust, her husband put her and the children on a plane, promising to follow them when he’d concluded some business. She never saw him again. She got busy with life in the U.S.A, not only raising three children, but also studying for and gaining a Masters’ degree. She had to, in order to keep her mind away from dwelling on the past. But all the time she could feel hatred for the Khmer Rouge (who had killed her husband) seething inside her. Eventually her intention to help the people of Cambodia rebuild their country brought her into confrontation with that ill-will. How could she bring around reconciliation, when she still hadn’t reconciled herself? Through a series of encounters, she learned about meditation, and started to clean her mind of its hatred. However the real test came when she had to go to Cambodia to meet and work with members of the Khmer Rouge, one of whose leaders was still advocating that the children should be taught to fight to cleanse their country of foreign influence. Looking straight in the eye of the leader of the faction that had destroyed her husband and a quarter of the population of her country, she asked him to pause, and then she asked forgiveness for the hatred that she had felt for him and his faction. She followed that with offering her forgiveness for the pain that they had caused. Some of the assembly wept, some embraced each other. A few remained aloof, but for many the process moved on.

(Continued next week, 28 May 2021, Holistic Kindness, the Mettā Pāramī Part 3)

holistic kindness: mettā, the ninth pāramī

Posted on May 14, 2021 by tiramit

POSTCARD#420: Bangkok: Excerpts from Pāramī, Ways to Cross Life’s Floods” by Ajahn Sucitto. Click on the above link to download the file as pdf mobi or epub. Print copy also available by post.

Click on this link for the Karaniya Metta Sutta

Ajahn begins with mettā as loving-kindness that includes releasing others from being the objects of our projections, lust and idealism – self and other. Mettā allows others to not be the way I want them to be for me. Mettā means ‘recognizing otherness’. We don’t have to make people the same as ourselves or judge ourselves, based on what we think about other people.

It’s valuable to bring to mind that each of us has at some time been on the receiving end of freely given goodwill. So when you’re feeling bitter, anxious or lonely – remember this: at some time you have been seen with a loving and sympathetic eye.

The Mind of Self and Other

Mettā is an extension of the affective and responsive mind or heart. How crucial its alignment is! On the one hand, the mind can get trapped by fear, greed, hatred and delusion, and on the other hand it can extend in generosity and other perfections. The main issue for the mind is how it relates to what happens. Relationship is fundamental, because we are actually never a stand-alone being, but always a ‘being with’ or a ‘being in,’ or even a ‘being with the sense of being without.’

Consciousness is just this awareness of ‘being with’ in the various fields of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching and thinking. And in that process of being with, consciousness automatically establishes the sense of a subject and an object: a seer who sees a visible object, a hearer who hears an audible object, etc. Out of that duality, the sense of self and other arises. That’s the program of consciousness.

Notice that self and other are relative positions that depend on each other. You can’t have an experience of self without an other (animate or inanimate) that is in contrast to it. However for each mind, the emphasis is on the self; the ‘me, mine’ part is the crucial aspect in a world of changing others. Even in your own mind, there appears the self (the subject) as a watcher and the other (the object) as thoughts and emotions. Or the self is how you conceive yourself as being, and other is what you should be, might be, or were.

This is self-view, and it’s the norm for unawakened beings. Self-view rests on the assumption that these dependently-arisen polarities are actually separate and autonomous. It infers a self, despite the inability of that self to own or control the body or mind that it adopts as its own; despite its genetic and psychological inheritance from others; and despite its inability to rest unsupported by sights, sounds, affection and purposeful activity – all of which are outside its dominion. Self-view is blind to interdependency. Consequently, its flooding ignorance sweeps us into a sense of separation and alienation, whilst all the time asserting that this is our empire.

Accepting Otherness

In the practice of kindness, we look into the mind as it is happening, a moment at a time, with the intention to gentle it out of the hold of aversion, depression and anxiety. To support this, the teaching is that, although the sense of self-other happens by default, we can have some say over its emotional and energetic flavouring. Our current intention doesn’t need to be tense, inadequate and critical; it can be uplifted and uncramped. The sense of self-other can catalyse and give occasion for an intention to offer support. This intention is essential for a happy life, because if we don’t use the relational experience in a kind and generous way, then defensiveness, anxiety, fault-finding and grudges are going to haunt our lives and impair the lives of others.

Mettā is non-aversion, but it’s also non-fascination and non-projection. It releases others from being the objects of our projections, lust and idealism. It allows others to not be the way I want them to be for me. True love for another means that you don’t appropriate someone or project your unfulfilled wishes or needs onto them. Instead, mettā means recognizing otherness, and feeling that it’s OK. We don’t have to make people the same as ourselves or judge ourselves, based on what we think about other people. We don’t have to feel we have to win them over, or feel that they should satisfy our emotional hunger. And when mettā is fully developed it can allow us to be with the irritating and the unfair and the messy, so that such perceptions no longer even take hold.

It’s the same for ourselves: when we hold ourselves with the mind of goodwill, we don’t have to feel intimidated and compelled to prove ourselves. We have all been small, weak and stupid. We have all been totally irresponsible infants, awkward adolescents, made a mess of things, lied, cheated and maybe even killed. Yet we changed. These were all visitors and forces that occupied the mind. Now there’s no denying the responsibility for allowing one’s mind to be so occupied, but our current responsibility is one of cultivating virtue, discernment and kindness, not of obsessing and sustaining the burden of guilt and denial. And one of the major healing tools for this process is mettā. With this we take on samsāra with non-aversion and non-projection. We can accept the presence of the petty-mindedness, the guilt and anxiety as visitors conditioned into the mind, and work with them. Then there is nothing to hide from or dread anymore. This is a more useful approach than going through another round of anguish, self-hatred and defensiveness. By stilling these reactions, mettā enables us to penetrate to, and remove, the root cause of ill-will – often towards ourselves – underneath the complexes.

Start with Empathy

If you can regard this mind as it really is, you become compassionate. People’s minds are conditioned and formed around circumstances. You realize that people may not know much about kindness simply because they haven’t received much of it. Hurtful, abusive things may have been done or said to them; appreciation and warmth may have been in short supply. Consequently, such minds can have sour flavourings which attach to their sense of self and others, and which engender aversive or mistrustful responses. The default then is a distorted relational sense in which pleasure and personal security come from besting others, even through making fun of or scapegoating them. A boundary has been created which blocks empathy. And it doesn’t even feel bad at first: getting more than another, putting others down or taking revenge has the same sweet burst to it as a drug. That’s why it takes over.

But it doesn’t have to, all that’s needed is for someone to tell the truth about suffering and the note of empathy is struck: ‘You mean you feel like that too!’ Suddenly the conflict, the ‘you’re so different from me,’ falls away. No one has changed anything except the self-other line up, but in that moment of empathy there is a mutual deepening. The way out of ill-will is not through judging who’s right, but through finding common ground. Kindness, or non-aversion, begins with empathy, the sense that we’re all in this same samsāric ocean together, struggling in the floods.

(Continued next week 21 May 2021 with Holistic Kindness, the Mettā Pāramī) Part 2)

resolve, the eighth pāramī, part 4

Posted on May 7, 2021 by tiramit

POSTCARD#419: Bangkok: This is the final part of Resolve adhitthāna, the 8th Parami from “Parami, Ways to Cross Life’s Floods” by Ajahn Sucitto. In this part of the text Ajahn describes how, for a three month period, he resolved to take on an entirely meaningless task in order to free a compulsive mind.

There was a time when I was responsible for a lot of duties around the monastery and this was making me busy and intense. I’d be sitting in meditation, thinking and planning details about the work, figuring out this and that. So I decided to occupy this busy mind with something meaningless, but devotional. We have a memorial stupa in the monastery, and every morning I’d get up at about 3:30 a.m. and go to the stupa to circumambulate it and bow to each of its four shrines. I decided to do that every day during one Rains Retreat, no matter what. So as soon as I woke up, before I could even think about it, I’d get up, get dressed and go. This may sound like a good idea in July, but in Britain in late October …

Rain and cold and dark. Inner muttering and lethargy. But whatever was in the mind at the time, I would put that mind state on one of the shrines on the stupa, and bow to it. I’d think: ‘Very good, I honour you.’ Then the mind would say, ‘What’s the point in doing this?’ and I’d reply, ‘I bow to you, I honour you.’ On another day, the mind would say, ‘This is pointless,’ and I’d focus on that mind state and bow to it. I developed a sense of opening to and supporting the mind, rather than trying to pull it into shape or make it have lovely thoughts. After a while, the mind would say, ‘I understand what you’re doing. I’ve got the point now, so now you can relax.’ And I’d think, ‘I bow to that mind state. I honour, love and respect you.’ Then the mind would say, ‘But it’s raining this morning.’ So I’d bow to that. The mind would say, ‘What are you trying to prove anyway? Who do you think you are?’ And I’d respond by bowing to and honouring that thought.

Crazy? A little — but it got me to see through the compulsive and insatiable nature of needing to be doing important things. That habit was getting me stuck on goodness, on putting myself in a repair shop to try to make samsāra work. And with this I wasn’t attuning to the invaluable lightness and joy that makes it possible to both live in and see through the world at the same time. This is where, when duty stales us, wise devotion can further us.

Devotion is not a matter of superstition or blind ritual. Directly experienced, it has a light, uplifting energy. The heart-activity of praising the good has an energy that lifts the mind. This energy can move us beyond the horizon of the functioning, managing mind with its self-importance, its need to be busy and its demand for results.

With devotion we can work without making a solid thing or person out of whatever great or small deeds we undertake. In such self emptying, the mind inclines towards the Nibbāna that is the basis for the serene compassion of the Buddha.

Over time, my resolve energy has simplified and calmed to one of sustaining the attitude, ‘May this action or thought be for my welfare, the welfare of others and lead to peace.’ Compared with the more extreme practices, such a resolve doesn’t make the headlines. But it acts as a life commitment and a basis for external action, enquiry and insight.

This resolve doesn’t make a self out of intention or results; it just holds experience carefully and lets it pass through and dissolve. This is beautiful, and selfless: the self doesn’t do it, pāramī does. In this way, when resolve widens through compassion and wisdom into self-surrender, we can liberate all the beings that arise in consciousness. Whether they arise from an internal or external source, we work to free them from aversion, indulgence, indifference and identification. (Continued next week 14 May 2021 with Holistic Kindness, the Mettā Pāramī)

Image details: Reclining Buddha, Gal Viharaya, Polonnawura, Sri Lanka 12th Century.