3 Lies About Acceptance That Keep You From Nirvana

Three lies about acceptance that keep you from Nirvana. When the Buddha gave the shortest summary of his awakening, it was a causal principle. When this is, that is. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. The this and the that refer to things that are directly experienced. Neurons may be firing in your brain, but you don't experience the chemicals or the electrical impulses directly. What you experience may be an intention or a perception, from the point of view of your experience. Science talks about things far away and inferred, so it's a mistake to see the practice as a kind of science. Now, there are some parallels. A scientist conducting an experiment has to make a few assumptions about the power of action. That the scientist can change conditions and is responsible for the decision to change the conditions. And if a change in the conditions is accompanied by a change in the results, we can assume that there's a connection between the two. All these things are assumed. In the same way, when the Buddha teaches, he says, try this, then try something else. Compare the results and learn from them. That's how the Buddha found his awakening. That's how he recommends that we practice. From that point on, though, the parallel breaks down. You can't run controlled experiments inside your mind. In other words, you can't tell part of the mind to do this at this time, and another part of the mind to do something else at the same time. They can't go back to the same initial conditions, but the general principle that your actions will make a difference is one that's worth assuming. Because we have a problem inside that the scientists don't have outside. When they look at your brain, it doesn't make any difference to them whether your brain is suffering or not. But for you, you feel the suffering inside, and it does make a big difference. In fact, they can't tell why you change your mind, or how you experience a perception or an intention. There are lots of things they can't tell about you from outside. The big difference, of course, is that you're committed inside. Your actions will lead to results that you're going to experience. If you're not careful about how you act, you can cause yourself a lot of suffering. That is an assumption, but it's an assumption worth making because if you assume that your actions don't make any difference, then you get very careless, and you don't really explore the possibilities of what human action can bring about. So you're committed. It's like that old distinction between the bacon and the eggs in a breakfast. The chicken participates, but the pig is committed. You're committed. This is your mind. These are your choices, and you're going to reap the results. So if there's a possibility that you can bring about better results, it's worth trying. And as the Buddha said, the important thing is to notice how this principle of causality works itself out in areas that you can directly experience. This is how we go from delusion to knowledge, or from uncertainty to knowledge. You start with something simple. The breath. How you experience the breath is something no one else can know. This is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to talk about breath energies, or how the breath is experienced in the body. Your experience may be different from someone else's, and we don't have much of a vocabulary in western languages to describe this. I have a student who has compromised lung capacity, and she now has to have an oxygen monitor for her blood all the time. She's discovered that if she thinks of the breath going through the whole body, the oxygen level in her blood does go up, which is a curiosity. But the important thing is how it feels from the inside. Can you create a sense of well-being here? We spend a lot of time working with the body in the meditation. Some people get frustrated. They say, when are we going to work directly with issues of the mind, spiritual issues? Well, one, you've got to clean up the body first. It's like having a home that you're going to be living in. You've got to clean up your home first before you do anything else in there. And two, one of the big issues for the mind is its relationship to the body. We spend so much of our time worrying about the body. A nerve gets pinched in your spine, and it can create a lot of pain. You could spend a lot of money and time trying to solve the problem. This goes wrong. That goes wrong. It takes a lot of energy. The older you get, the more you find these things start falling apart, and they don't ask your permission. Even before you get old, you have to eat. You have all these needs in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine that you've got to take care of, and they can overwhelm you. So, you want to clean up your relationship to the body, first in your attitude as to what's really useful about the body, what it's good for, reminding yourself that it's good for the practice. And second, it gives you a good place to stay, because the mind needs a solid place to stay, a comfortable place to stay if it's really going to see itself clearly. So we spend a lot of time working on how the body feels from within. Don't regard it as wasted time or a distraction. It's a necessary step in getting to know your own mind. Of all the things in the world, what are you most attached to? You're most attached to the body. What do you live with 24-7? You live with the body. So develop the right attitude toward your body. Develop a skillful way of interacting with it. As you get to know the breath in the different parts of the body, you learn how to, as the Buddha says, calm bodily fabrication. That allows you to work more and more directly with the mind. It's like tuning a radio into a station. If there's a lot of static, you can't hear the signal. When you've tuned things in just right, the static is gone. You can hear things clearly. In the same way, when the breath gets really, really still, then the events in the mind come to the fore, sharp and clear. This allows you to look at the issue of why the mind creates suffering. Again, this might seem like a small issue to some people. They'd like bigger issues, but the fact of pain and suffering in the mind keeps pulling you back. This is where the mind's real concerns are. In fact, it's probably why we start thinking to begin with. We're in pain. We can't figure it out. So we try thinking, Why? Why? Why is this happening? We look for a solution, first looking for other people to help solve the problem. Then, when we realize we've got to solve it ourselves, we have to get thinking and observing. You have to see how you're putting your experience together. So you're not dealing with abstractions. Again, this is an issue some people have. They think that spiritual issues have to be very abstract. But this is not abstract. It's getting to see your mind in action as you directly experience it right here, right now. What does an intention feel like? How do you know that an intention is formed? How do you decide to go with an intention or not to go with an intention? How do you change your mind? What is it like to do these things? As you watch in this way, you're stepping out of the thoughts, out of the content and looking at them as processes. The more you do this, the more you begin to realize how much your experience of both body and mind and the world outside are things you put together. A sight comes into the eyes and there's a lot of interpretation that has to go on. Getting a sense of the three-dimensional world around you and how that particular sight fits in with other things you see. There's a lot of processing that goes on just to make sense of your visual field. All the other sensory fields require interpretation too. The mind itself, as it churns out its thoughts, raises a lot of questions. It requires a lot of cobbling together to have answers. So when you see how all of this is fabricated, you begin to wonder how you can find happiness with fabricated things like this. The mind begins to get more and more inclined to want to find stillness, so it turns more and more to concentration. At first, the concentration seems very peaceful compared to everything else, to the point where you would think it may be unfabricated. It's just there, especially as you tune into deeper and deeper levels of concentration with an unbounded sense of space, a sense of knowing. Everything seems to come out of the knowing and go into the knowing. And the knowing is not disturbed. It's the same with the space. A lot of people get deluded right here. They think they've reached the ground of being. It's so still and so pervasive. But it is fabricated. Scientists have done tests and have discovered when certain areas of the brain are activated, there's a great sense of oneness. They call it the God spot, as if they had answered the question. This is why people have religions. It's because of the God spot. Now, if the Buddha had you end up with just that sense of oneness, maybe they'd be right. But he keeps saying no, there's more. This too is fabricated. As you experience it from within, you begin to realize that you put it together. You recognize it, you label it. There's an effort that goes into maintaining it. That effort may be very subtle, but it's there. You can see that even this is fabricated. You can see what you've done to keep it going. Then there comes a point that's hard to describe. You realize you can't stay there if you want to get beyond the stress of that particular state. And you can't go someplace else because everything else you're going to go to will also be fabricated. Then, between the going and the staying, there's an opening. There's something that's totally unfabricated, totally unconditioned, unintended, an area where scientists can't go. Everything they know is all conditioned, but this is not. And that's where you find the solution to the problem, to the questions of why are we suffering and how can we stop? Well, this is how you stop. And once that problem is answered, there are no other questions that eat away at the mind. Now there will be other problems you can solve or try to solve, but this big problem has been solved. Your big problem has been solved, and it's been solved from within. This is why you might say the whole practice of the Dhamma is an inside job. The problem is something that's sensed only from within. You're suffering. And the solution comes from understanding how you experience things from within and how you can clear away all the fabrications and find something unfabricated within. At that point, there are no more doubts. You might have questions about the world outside, but now those questions don't have teeth. They don't eat away at the heart the same way the question of suffering eats away at the heart. With nothing eating the heart, it can be whole, something that's truly deserving of being our goal. The third and a half noble truth. Cultivate the desire to stay with the breath. Cultivate the desire to do it well. And don't be afraid of that desire. I don't know how many times I've heard people say, if you desire to do it well, you're setting yourself up for disappointment, for stress, suffering. So just accept whatever comes. But the Buddha was upfront about the fact that, yes, there will be stress, there will be pain, when you realize that you haven't reached the goal. But he called that a pain to be cultivated. He called it renunciate pain. He called it a pain not of the flesh. It's the pain that comes when you realize that you haven't reached the end of suffering. There's more to be done, which is different from the pain of simply sitting around being miserable. Because this pain actually motivates you to practice. The Buddha didn't tell you to develop that pain, that desire, just to stay there. You're supposed to act on the desire. You use that pain as motivation. There's work to be done. So let's do it. There's something to be attained. We're not there yet. But if we practice hard enough and practice wisely enough, we can attain it. The Buddha's message is very hopeful, that we can, through human effort, reach an end to suffering. It will involve some suffering along the way. But the Buddha was always the sort of person who would think strategically. Some pains are useless as part of the path. Others are very useful. After all, we're going to be learning about suffering. We have to comprehend it. What better way to comprehend it than to cultivate a useful and skillful pain? Get to know it well. Use it until it's served its purpose. And then you can put it aside. Don't short-circuit the path by saying, the cause of suffering is desire, so I just won't desire anything at all. I will have zero expectations. That doesn't take you anywhere. It's like the Dhamma teacher I once heard, who said that after many years of teaching she didn't know if there really was a cessation of suffering. She didn't really know if the third noble truth was true, but she had her own truth. She called it her third and a half noble truth, which is that suffering is manageable. I'm surprised that she ranked it higher than the third truth. Contrast that with Ajahn Suwat's attitude. He told me that there was one point in his practice when he realized that of the four noble truths, he knew the first, and he knew the second, and he knew the fourth, but he didn't know the third. So he set about trying to figure out, what is the cessation of suffering? Because he worked on it and he put a lot of effort into it, he finally came to know. It's when you set high goals for yourself and stick with them that you really benefit from the practice. So we know there's a pain that comes from realizing you're not there yet. There's more work to be done, but that's a pain to be cultivated and acted on. The Buddha himself said that the secret to his awakening was that he would not rest content with skillful qualities. What this means is that if the skillfulness in his mind had not reached the level where it put an end to suffering, he would keep working at it more and more. He wouldn't just stop. This is why he left his first two teachers. They taught him skills for concentration, he mastered them, and he realized that they didn't lead to the end of suffering. So he moved on, moved on. He tried six years of self-torment. That didn't work. He moved on. He kept looking for what would actually bring about good results. So he had very high expectations, and he stuck with them. He stuck with them skillfully, and he was finally able to reach, as he said, what he had never reached before. To attain what he hadn't attained before. To know what he hadn't known before. That's his message. There really is something special to be attained through human effort. During my first year with Ajahn Phuong, he made the comment that there are some people who say the path is simply one of letting go. Letting go, he said. They forget that the path also includes development. Look at the customs of the noble ones. The fourth custom is to delight in abandoning and to delight in developing. In other words, you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities, and you delight in developing skillful qualities. That's where you find your joy. This theme goes all the way through the teaching, even down to the Buddha's teachings to his seven-year-old son. Whenever you wonder about a Dharma teaching, always go back to those instructions to Rahula to see whether it would fit in with what the Buddha taught Rahula. There's no place where the Buddha taught him to have zero expectations, or that he should simply let go, he said. When you're going to act, ask yourself, what are the consequences of this action going to be? If you foresee any harm or affliction coming from the action, you don't do it. If, while you're doing the action, you see that you didn't think it was going to cause harm but it actually is, you stop. You don't just say, well, I have to accept the fact that that harm is there. You stop. If you don't see any harm, you continue. When the action is done, you look at the long-term consequences, and if you see that you've caused harm, again, you don't simply accept it. You resolve that you're not going to repeat that mistake, and you go and talk it over with someone who knows better, to get some idea how you might avoid that mistake next time around. If you realize that you didn't cause any harm, you should take joy in that fact that you're progressing in the training and keep at it. So there's a definite sense that you can improve by looking at your actions and looking at their consequences, learning from the consequences, and trying to make them better. Don't get caught in the trap of learned helplessness. A while back, I gave a Dharma talk in which I mentioned that there are some meditation methods that teach you that you really can't do anything. You simply have to accept things as they are. It's like an experiment they did with dogs one time. They put them in a room where wherever they lay down on the floor, they were going to get electric shocks, and the dogs, after trying to find a place where they could avoid the shocks and realizing that there was no safe place, just gave up. Then they moved the dogs to another room. Half the floor would give electric shocks and the other half wouldn't. The researchers would drag the dogs from one side of the room to the other to show them which side was the safe side and which side was the one with the shocks. But the dogs made no effort to go to the safe side. Wherever they happened to be placed, they just stayed right there. They'd given up. And there are meditation methods that would have you give up. They say, well, there's nothing to be attained. Everything is inconstant, stressful, not self. Just learn how to be okay with that and you'll be fine. But that's not the equanimity the Buddha taught. His was the equanimity of a soldier who has to face setbacks and has to accept the setbacks but doesn't stay with the setbacks. He keeps looking for a chance to come out victorious. The equanimity is there to make sure that he doesn't get discouraged. It's not there to make him give up. Then just the other day, I received a letter from someone complaining about that Dhamma talk. She had long quotes from a psychologist about how helplessness is a great condition. It's the human condition. This psychologist was saying that wherever you try to strive and realize that something in life is always going to be beyond you, there's always going to be disappointment, there's always going to be a letdown. Then when you realize that you're helpless in the face of that, this person said, that's when you can find peace. Well, that's the piece of the third and a half noble truth. In other words, the peace of giving up. It's like the Buddha's image of the cow. You want to get milk out of the cow and you're twisting the horn. The harder you twist it, the more you irritate the cow. You're not getting the milk you want. Then you stop twisting the horn. Now, some people stop there. They say, it's much nicer not to be twisting the horn. You don't have to put in so much effort. The cow isn't irritated, but you still don't get the milk. The Buddha's approach is to look around. There are other parts of the cow that you can pull on and twist. And finally, you find that there's one part where you twist and get the milk. There is something to attain. You keep up your expectations. It's interesting how many of the Buddha's analogies and similes for the practice are about people searching. There's the man searching for heartwood, the man searching for milk, the man searching for oil. They figure out how to find it and they test it to make sure they've got what they really want. This is why we cultivate the desire to stay here with the breath, the desire to stick with all the aspects of the practice, along with the desire to do it well. Because those are the desires that will take us to a place that we've never been before. So if you've been taught to have zero expectations, erase that teaching from your mind. Remember the Buddha's approach. Keep your expectations high. Don't let yourself get discouraged. Have patience, realizing that this may take a while. Have the equanimity of a soldier who faces setbacks. Have the equanimity of a doctor who, in dealing with a patient, may realize that there are some things that cannot be cured, but the doctor doesn't let that stop him or her from treating the patient. You look for the areas that can be cured, areas where, at the very least, the patient can be given some sense of comfort. So instead of helplessness, you learn hopefulness and learn to be mature about your hopes. That way, you'll be able to attain things you've never attained before and you'll find that they really are worth attaining.