This is the transcript of a talk I gave to the Zenways community in April 2024
I recently happened to spend a couple of weeks in Italy, in the place…. in the house where I grew up. Every time I go back there, I find myself in a privileged place for my practice, I always try to treat it as a retreat where, each moment, each situation, each person I am interacting with has the potential to reveal things as they are….. Of course, things always reveal themselves as they are but the mind can, may, if we allow that continuously filter this reality. I lived in that place more than half of my life and I developed patterns… mental patterns which show me the reality the mind has constructed throughout these years. Am I “fighting” what I am seeing? Am I adding things to what I see or experience?
Two weeks can turn into a very “intense” retreat if I do my best not to get distracted from being with how things are appearing in front of me…. If I don’t allow myself to fight things as they are…..if I don’t allow myself to see things rightly.
So, how do I see things rightly? How do we see things rightly? The Buddha offered us this path of liberation, 25 centuries ago and one element of this path is seeing things rightly which translates into be aware of the 4 Noble Truths.
What are the things…the elements that take us away from staying with things as they are? From seeing things rightly?
There is definitely a mental activity which gives rise to suffering, I could even call it mental affliction. The Buddha in his first Noble Truth says that there is suffering and we all very easily can experience that suffering. It is our mental “rebellion” towards how things really are in any given moment. It is our “not-accepting” how things arise in this present moment. It is the wanting things to be different than they are in this very moment. A situation can turn into hell because we are absorbed, we are one with this mental rebellion…..mental affliction. Hence our suffering.
I had a little episode I want to share with you from my Italian “retreat”. I was hiking in the mountains as I often do when I am there and, for some reasons, I found myself on a path I didn’t know, I never did before. At first, I felt ok with it but soon I realised that I had to constantly cross a stream back and forth……and, because of the rains of the previous weeks, the stream was very much alive and at times difficult to cross. The rocks which you would normally use to cross it, hardly emerged from the water. The path also started presenting places which were only passable by using chains, a via ferrata, in other words. Well, not what I was expecting and the “monkey mind”, the mental wandering started to “invade” the space of…. consciousness. I was starting to being drawn to mental objects that made me lose the ability to remain one-pointedly focused on what was really required there and then. I could become aware of thoughts such as “why did I come this way?”, “what happens if I fell”, “I just wanted an easy hike”………and so on and so forth. We always want the easy path but, at times, life can turn into an unexpected experience.
Well, I believe we are extremely lucky, we have our practice. We are developing ways which can really help us to navigate life as it is…..with a different understanding perhaps, even with different lenses, if you like. When something arises in us, that can be disturbing, conflicting, rebelling. We might well attach to these elements, making it our own reality, turning an innocuous, innocent life situation into suffering.
I remember reflecting on what was going on as I was navigating my hiking experience. I intended to use that moment of discomfort, fear, difficulty as a moment of learning or teaching. Of course, I didn’t intend to fight fear, discomfort and preoccupation. Those were elements which were there and wanted to accept…..elements which were pretty much part of what was going on in that very moment. However, there is definitely a difference between allowing things to be as they are and “offering” them a space to arise, be noticed, acknowledged, understood and so on….compared to NOT wanting them, rebelling against them, wanting something different instead. That is where our suffering really kicks in. Reality is what it is, moment to moment, regardless of what we think or what we make of it. After all, going back to my own mountain experience, the stream was just being a stream, the rocks were just being rocks, the grass, the trees, everything was just being whatever they were…for millions of years in fact, perfectly being what they were, what they are. The mind does not see just that, the mind can filter and show a very conditioned and distorted reality. The mind “creates” the world of duality, the world of “me” and the stream, the rocks….and the likes, the dislikes… There is of course some very practical use in how the mind works there, however, it does not always allow us to see things rightly.
What is our practice? What is this Zen practice? Isn’t our practice what takes us into that arena of total flow with changes? Are these changes not including fear, sense of discomfort, pain, joy, happiness, excitement, boredom…….and so on and so forth? Isn’t our practice the path which allows to see…. that rather than a fixed me, there is a flowing and changing reality and that, if anything, we are that flowing and changing reality? Understanding the mind, understanding or seeing its filters, its conditionings, its habitual patterns is to give us an opportunity to better…more skilfully…being more connected with reality itself…. navigating, seeing…that reality, this reality, this THIS. Can we give perspective to what arises in us? How can this softly merge with what arises in front of us?
When we are patient with ourselves and use each moment, whatever this might be to deepen our self-understanding, or NO-self-understanding and we don’t just allow the monkey mind to take over, we are giving us a great opportunity to see things a little bit clearer. How do we see things rightly? Can we see things wrongly? Yes, we can. When we allow the monkey mind to filter, to split, to divide…..we give the mind an opportunity to cause suffering in us. However, we know that this suffering is created and sustained by our holding on to what is arising in our mind….by holding on to these dual, divisive elements. The moment we let go of that, we bring about the end of suffering, we are fully accepting things as they are in this moment, we are no longer imprisoned within the filters of our mind but we engage with situations within the situations themselves, as the situations themselves.
In my own experience with practice, our most potent practice is Doubt. I’ve always liked to remind myself of this Zen maxim: Great doubt, great awakening, Little Doubt Little Awakening, No Doubt Fast Asleep
Who was having fear? Who was feeling uncomfortable and threatened by the environment? Again, when we are patient with ourselves and use each moment to deepen our self or NO-self-understanding, we are giving us the opportunity to drop all those fixed ideas we might experience and come into the live situation as it is. If I was not doubting anything, I would have just taken on board and acted upon what the monkey-wandering-conditioned mind says. Do I want to stick to the path of suffering? When Great Doubt is brought to the fore, I am reminded of an important element within our practice; letting go, simply drop what I think I know. Simply engage from within the life situation at hand rather than from within the “knowing” mind. Can I squeeze some absolute truth out of this situation? How do I word it? How do I express it? What is the step to take here?
In a moment, we are going to take a few steps for our walking meditation and later on we are going to do some sitting meditation together. How are we going to use these periods for our own practice? What can we do to see things rightly when walking or when sitting? Who is doing the walking? Who is doing the sitting? Who is talking now and who is listening? Can you squeeze an absolute truth out of this? Are we attaching to some fixed views?
My understanding is that if we want to free ourselves, we have to be in a different relationship with our discomfort, pain, fear, suffering. Is there a real thing binding us to these elements? Is there anyone to bind? How could we liberate what is not really bound in the first place? Our practice is to understand causes and effects, it is to see through appearances, fixations, elements which create stickiness or feeling stuck… All we can do is to offer these elements awareness; unaffected, balanced and grounded presence. Practising is to keep coming back to what is real, really real! Wanting this really real to be different than it is, is the cause of suffering, offering presence and letting go of this wanting is liberation from suffering. This is not always easy and that is why we practice; we try and try and try again……until……. Bring humour to your practice and thanks for listening!
Zen Mindfulness Cambridge Zenways Italia 