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Dhamma talk by Peter Doobinin So this practice is a practice of letting go. We’re learning to let go. And really, we don’t learn to let go. What we learn to do is develop the causes that allow letting go to happen or not holding on to happen. And the causes of letting go or the cause of letting go is wisdom. We let go out of wisdom. The heart of this wisdom that we’re developing is, the pali word is nibbida, which is generally translated as disenchantment. So what we learn to do by looking at our experience and how we’re relating to our experience and looking at our actions, what we learn to do in this practice is cultivate nibbida or disenchantment. Disenchantment with our unskillful actions, the way we hold on to things that are unskillful, the unskillful holding on. And what we hold to unskillfully, the teachings would suggest, are three things. We hold on to desire. So in this sitting you may have at some point been holding on to desire. Wanting something. Or during the day you may have been holding on to wanting something. So we learn to cultivate disenchantment for this wanting, this desire. We cultivate disenchantment for it by looking clearly at our actions of holding on to this desire and seeing that they’re causing us suffering. So we pay attention and we pay attention and we pay attention and we see that thinking all these thoughts about this thing that I want, making all these striving efforts to gain these things that are driven by, these efforts that are driven by this desire is causing us suffering. And we hold on to aversion. So during the sitting you may have held on to aversion to something. Aversion to the way the body felt, aversion to the way the meditation was going, aversion to something that happened earlier in the day, aversion to something that you have to do tomorrow. And so we learn to see that holding on to this aversion and acting in ways..I mean, the holding on is the core of our actions that’s unskillful. But there’s the actions that come out of that – the things that we do that are driven by our aversion, if it’s the things that we say, etcetera. And we hold on to delusion. And so delusion you may have experienced in the sitting as, you know, the wandering mind, the fantasy. This is an interesting area because we often think this is very pleasant. This is very lovely, the fantasy. What’s the harm in it? Well if you look really closely you begin to see that there is pain in the fantasy. There is suffering in the fantasy. There is perhaps a more subtle suffering, but there’s a suffering in it. We spend a lot of our time in this place of holding on. In this place of holding on. It was very interesting. I was at a group. I wasn’t teaching it, I was part of the group. And everybody in the group was ostensibly a very senior meditator. And the first thing that we did in this group .. this was pretty recently. We went around in a circle and everybody talked about their lives. You know, check in. How’s it going. And everybody that I remember, I think, said something about how they were so busy. Or, they were stressed out about the election. Or whatever. And what it was really about was of course, in a lot of these cases, was their aversion. They were just talking about their aversion. This is what we tend to do. We hold on to.. this is the way we tend to live. We hold on to this aversion. We hold on to this desire. We hold on to this delusion. This tends to be the way that we live. And we don’t tend to look at things that way. We tend to look at, you know, the problem is the political situation. The problem is the economy. The problem is my job. The problem is my partner. But the teachings would suggest is the problem is our aversion to these things or our desire for these things to be a certain way or the way that we relate to these things by spacing out and going into a place of delusion. So this practice is a practice of cultivating disenchantment. Disenchantment not for the election or for the job or for our partner, but for the way that we hold on to things through not wanting, wanting, or spacing out around things, avoiding. So we cultivate this disenchantment, and this is a very important part of the practice. Beginning to see that what we’re doing, where we’re holding on, where we’re residing, if you will isn’t really serving us. It’s not really useful. The interesting thing about letting go, I think, that one of the reason we have a hard time with letting go, is that we really kind of perceive of letting go as sort of a freefall. Even though we don’t really let go that much. But its certainly one of the things that we can begin to believe when we kind of consider the possibility of letting go is like, I’m going to be in a freefall. If we don’t hold on to this I’m just going to be in this void. So part of the practice is to cultivate something else. To cultivate a holding on to something else other than desire, other than aversion, other than delusion. It’s learning to hold on to something that’s skillful. So it’s not really a program of, a practice of letting go and being in this freefall. It’s a practice of learning to hold on to things that are better for us. Or we could say learning to live in a better place. Finding a better place to live in. finding a better place to put our minds. This is very important. This is very important. I mean, ultimately letting go is letting go of everything but you know, we’re not going to be able to do that to just do that; we have to learn to find something more skillful to hold on to. This is critical in this practice. There has to be something to hold on to. There has to be a place to reside. And we have to begin to see that there is a better place to reside. So we begin to compare and contrast, you know. Well, there’s the holding on to greed, hatred and delusion and there’s holding on to something else. So we need something to compare and contrast. Sometimes we call this being able to understand duality or separation. That, you know, we have a choice. We have a choice. It’s not like there’s letting go and a free fall or holding on to greed, hatred and delusion. There’s a choice between holding on to greed hatred and delusion and holding on to something else that’s more skillful. And we’re pretty good at holding on. So this is, to me, very.. This is good news. Because holding on is something we’re pretty good at, you know. So we can learn to hold on to something that’s more skillful for us. We can learn to find a better place to reside. There is a better place. So it’s not like we’re out in the cold if we let go of our normal habits, ways of living. We have another place to reside and that place is, of course, in the breath and the qualities of the breath, the qualities of concentration. So we learn to find that better place. We learn to develop that better place, to build that better place, and to reside there. When we talk about the breath, yes we’re talking about the breath as a one-pointed object to pay attention to and put our attention on and put our mind on, but we’re also talking about holding on to the qualities of ease, the qualities of contentedness, and the qualities of equanimity. Interestingly, one of the qualities of equanimity or one of the components of equanimity is steadiness of mind, or courage. So not only are we developing these qualities of ease and contentedness and peacefulness but we’re also cultivating this quality of courage, which really enables to kind of stay in this place, to live in this better place. What we learn to do in the practice is to see that there is a better place. This is the other side of disenchantment. We become disenchanted with certain things and you could say we become enchanted with something else. So there’s not just disenchantment, then that’s it. There’s enchantment with something else. This is very important in this practice is that you learn to become enchanted with something skillful. You learn to want to live in this better place and you learn to see that this is a better place. And I think that a lot of the times we probably don’t consider..when we consider the breath as a place to reside, a true dwelling, a real place to stay, we often don’t look at the breath as that..as the place where we are going to dwell. There’s a lot of ways I think that we look at the breath (and a lot of times we just don’t look at the breath or don’t even want to consider that this is a place.) But I think if you come to this class long enough and you hear me talk long enough, you begin to start to understand that the breath is an option. It’s something to hold on to that’s skillful. But we don’t tend to look at it as a true dwelling, a real dwelling for the mind, a place to live in, a better place to live. I think a lot of times.. and I just kind of jotted a few things down and everybody’s a little bit different, I know. The way my mind is when I tend to look at the breath or particularly as I looked at the breath before I really understood that this is a better place. A lot of the way we look at the breath is, “this is like a place where we take a time-out.” You know. It’s like a time-out. It’s a time-out place. It’s like, normally I live in this place where I’m holding on to greed, hatred and delusion. Where I’m obsessing about jobs, relationships and apartments and elections and the economy and all these other things. And sometimes I take a time-out from that and I feel the breath. But that’s really short-changing the breath. That’s really short-changing concentration. That’s really short-changing ease and contentment and steadiness of mind. The breath is not just a time-out. Or it’s not a vacation. Vacation might be another way that we sometimes look at it. You know, particularly, you sort of come to a class like this, or a retreat is even better. Retreats are like, I’m going on a little vacation from my life. You know I’m going on a little daylong vacation. But then I’m going to come back – and this is, I mean, anybody who’s been on longer retreats knows this – this is how you look at the breath, right. Well now I’m on my vacation, now I’m going to come back and obsess about everything. And the reason for that is because we don’t look at the breath as the dwelling. We look at IMS as the dwelling. See that’s the critical mistake that we all make. Downtown Meditation Community is the dwelling. No, the dwelling is an inner dwelling. The dwelling is in the breath and in the qualities of ease and contentedness and steadiness. Sometimes I think we look at the breath as kind of a fallback or a default. You know, things are just really bad and we’re really kind of challenged and we’re really struggling so now I’m going to go to the breath. Now I’m going to go to the breath just to kind of, you know, this is sort of a default position I can go to when things are so bad. Or, a good metaphor for that would be, it’s sort of like, bomb-shelter. It’s kind of like a bomb shelter. That’s a good one. It’s really easy to come up with the metaphors because I can relate to these things. So it’s like a bomb shelter. We just look at it that way, but eventually we’re going to come back up and walk in the nuclear rain. Or we look at the breath as a place of avoidance. It’s just a chance for me to put things to the side for a while, the same way we would look at television or some form of delusion. So it’s a chance for me to avoid things for a while, or to distract myself from my life. It’s a chance for me to distract myself from my life for a little while, but then I’m going to go back to it. And not looking at it again, is it a permanent home or dwelling. Or we look at it as like a rehab. I think a rehab is one, you know, I’m going to go into the breath for a while. I’m going to work on my practice. I’m going to do this every while, I’m going to rehab myself, but then I’m going to go back out into the world. Or, sort of like a halfway house. Retreats are kind of like another way, I think we look at retreats as sort of like, as a halfway house. And I think another way we kind of look at the breath is like purgatory. We’ve obsessed so much and we’ve suffered so much and the breath is sort of like this purgatory where we’re going to rest before we go really, you know, into hell. It’s sort of like this waystation or this purgatory. But we don’t look at it as.. you know, and I think we look at it this way. I mean, I know I’ve looked at it this way. We don’t look at it as an actual home, as a real place to dwell. So what we learn to do is we learn to develop the breath and these qualities of ease and well being. And I think a lot of the times we don’t look at the breath as a place that’s pleasant. We don’t necessarily equate meditation and even people who’ve been doing, you know, steps of breath mediation, Ajahn Lee practice, anapanasati as the Buddha taught it. It takes a while before we really start to look at the breath as a place that’s pleasant. Really the only way you can begin to.. I mean, I can tell you that the breath is a place that’s pleasant if you develop those pleasant qualities of ease and contentedness, but you’re not going to really look at the breath as a place that’s pleasant and really take that in and have conviction in the fact that the breath is a place that’s pleasant and that if you stay in that place you’ll be content, you’re not going to look at the breath that way until you actually do it. It’s a little bit of a catch-22 there. I can tell you that the breath is pleasant and it’s a better place to stay but you’re really not going to believe me. I mean, you’ll believe me up to a certain point. If you really believed me, you’d be doing it all the time, you know? I know some people here are doing it and doing it very diligently. But I know for myself that understanding that the breath is a better place is still developing. It’s still developing and it’ll continue to develop as long as there’s defilement in my mind. It’ll continue to have to develop. So we tend not to look at the breath as a place that’s pleasant. What we tend to do is, in the spirit of what I was just saying, things are difficult, things are challenging, there’s suffering, fill in the blanks. We go to the breath for a little while, but then we go looking for something that’s pleasant. I mean, I see it in my mind just in the meditation tonight. Feeling the breath, cultivating the breathing, and then starting to think, oh, later on when I go home I’m going to get something really good to eat and I’m going to watch a little TV and maybe watch a v..and you know that’s going to be really pleasant. That’s the place, after the class will be pleasant. The class, I know I gotta do, I gotta meditate, but it’s not going to be that pleasant. So, a lot of those thoughts just arise in my mind out of habit, out of my karma. ‘cause when I see them it’s like they don’t really hold any weight for me, but for a long time, they certainly held weight for me. And part of the reason why they don’t hold as much weight for me anymore is that I’ve begun to question, is that the place where I want to reside, is that a better place, the place of desire for what’s going to happen later? Or even when I get home, is that the better place? Or is the better place the breath? Is the breath really more pleasant or does it at least have enough of a pleasant quality to it where I’m willing to stay there? So we tend to look at the breath oftentimes until we develop it, until we really learn to develop the breath – you know and it’s not, I mean we talk about developing the breath – you know I thought about this when I was writing this talk. We talk about developing the breath, and maybe that’s a little bit of a misnomer. What we’re really developing is the qualities of jhana, the qualities of concentration. So what we’re really developing is ease, contentedness, equanimity, one-pointedness. That’s what we’re really developing. We use breath as a sort of shorthand but let’s not try to absorb too much into this idea that what we’re developing in the breath. What we’re developing is certain qualities through the breath meditation. We’re developing one-pointedness, a place to reside, a frame of reference. So that’s the place, but it’s a place that’s easeful, that’s contented, where we have contentedness, where we have peace, where we have equanimity. So, we say that we’re developing the breath, but we’re also developing the body and those qualities in the body. But really what we’re developing are these qualities. So, if we don’t develop those qualities, and we haven’t developed this conviction in the breath as a better place to live, and a better place to put our minds, we tend to look at the breath as something that’s neutral. We tend to look at the meditation, if you will, and again I’m using the breath, we tend to look at this place where we’re residing as having a neutral tone. And that’s one of the reasons why we space off a lot in the meditation. Because you know a lot of times not much is happening. The breath is very neutral. So a lot of the delusion comes from boredom. So we tend to look at.. or it comes from the fact that - a lot of people have been talking about this in the course recently on the breath, on the course that we teach, the heart of what we teach here, a lot of people have been talking about that as they begin to develop the breath. That it’s more interesting, and there’s more to do and more to stay there. There’s more to really put our attention on. So it begins to become not so neutral and not so boring. But that really asks of us that we begin to understand it. We tend to kind of look at things as being really boring but as people have been saying, the tendency is not to go off into the deluded thought so much because we’re staying within the frame of reference by practicing directed thought and evaluation. So we tend to look at the breath as neutral. We tend to look at it as dull. It’s very dull. This is really a boring pursuit. So as long as you kind of look at the breath that way, you’re in a dubious position. You’re in a precarious position. If that’s the way your breath is, if that’s the way your concentration is, if that’s the dwelling that you’re developing, if it’s dull, if it’s neutral, if it’s boring, who wants to hang out there? So you’re going to go look for something else. But as you begin to cultivate these qualities there’s less of tendency, and this is what people have been saying in this course, there’s less of a tendency to want to go out, off after something else. So what we learn to do is develop a pleasant abiding and have conviction that the breath is a pleasant abiding. That concentration is a pleasant abiding, that jhana is a pleasant abiding. So there’s real conviction. There’s real conviction that this is a better place. This is a good place to stay. This is a good place for me to be. It’s a process. I’ve been alluding to this. It’s a process of understandingness. This understanding doesn’t just happen. You don’t just take the course and feel the breath a few times. But it’ll happen gradually over time as you begin to go more and more to the breath, as you begin to rely a little bit more on the breath, as you begin to develop the easeful breath, as you begin to develop the pleasant breath, and as you begin to see the benefits in residing in the breath. As you begin to see the benefits of this place, the benefits of being in the breath, being in concentration, resting there, as opposed to holding on to greed, hatred and delusion. You have a choice. A lot of the reason why we dwell in greed, hatred and delusion is we think there’s a benefit in doing that. We think there’s a benefit in following the fantasy. We think there’s a benefit in thinking. You can see that in that little group I was in. People thought there was a benefit in talking about how they were obsessing about this, that or the other thing. So where are we in our practice? How do you look at the breath? Again, I’m using the using the breath sort of as shorthand, but how do you look at concentration, how do you look at this abiding? Do you really see it as a better place? Do you understand that it’s a better place? Because you always have a choice. Sometimes your choice is compromised by your karma and it’s very hard not to, but even if you can begin, I talked about this I think on Thursday night, for a second, make that choice. So if you do that for a second you begin to start to see that one second is pretty damn good. There’s a lot of power in that one second when you come back. As long as you do some comparison and contrasting. Then you may run off into the thoughts, run off into the fantasy or whatever, but you have that one second. You have that one half of a second. You know, it’s one thing to come back to the breath for that one second and that place of ease and reside there, and you know I’m being a little facetious. Let’s say five seconds. That’s one thing to do that, but it’s another thing to begin to see the benefits in it. If you just keep coming back and you don’t really see the benefits in it, you’re not going to keep coming back. This is the wisdom of seeing the skillful. Just like seeing the drawbacks of greed, hatred and delusion, you start to see the benefits of ease, contentedness, and equanimity. You start to see the benefits of well, what’s it like. What’s it like when I’m here and what’s it like when I’m there. This is how you develop wisdom. So there’s a big difference between residing in the breath and going to the breath because it’s an instruction, and because you know it’s a better place. So that’s all the difference in the world. That’s what this talk is really about. I can talk to you, I can give you the instruction, you can read about the instruction, that’s only going to take you so far. Ultimately you have to reside there because you know through your own experience, not through my experience or somebody else’s experience or the Buddha’s experience. You know that it’s a better place because you’ve gone there and lived there. It’s like, you know, people can tell you how great Rome is. Unless you go there and spend a little time, you really don’t know, do you? It’s all hearsay. So the breath is a better place, and part of the reason why it’s a better place is because it’s a reliable place. It’s a reliable place. The breath is always there. You can always go to it. And you can always pretty much find some ease there, and some contentedness there, and some steadiness there. I don’t know any other place where you can go and find that. It’s certainly a lot more reliable than the kind of happiness we’re looking for in getting those things that we want and not having the things that we have that we don’t want. It’s certainly more reliable than that. It’s certainly a more reliable place than that. So we begin to develop some confidence, some conviction, that we can go somewhere where there’s ease. This is really profound -- that there’s a place where I can go, where there’s ease. There’s a place where I can go, where I can be content. There’s a better place for me to go. I think for a lot of us, we may not have had that so much, in our lives. I know for me, I never had a lot of that in my life. I never had a sense of a home where I could go when I was growing up or anything like that. And I don’t care how good your home was. It’s still somewhat unreliable. Mom or Dad might have had a rough day. Whatever. This is someplace that’s really reliable. You know, you can go to a friend. That can be reliable up to a certain extent. But this is a place that’s really reliable. So we begin to have this conviction that we can reside in this better place, and we can have a better life. This is really important. This is why we’re here, right? It’s like you begin to start to see, you know what? I don’t need to spend my whole life obsessing. I don’t need to spend my whole life worrying. I don’t need to spend my whole life caught in my desire for things. Maybe I’ll spend only 90% of my life. This is great. I don’t need to spend my whole life in anger. I don’t need to spend my whole life in delusion. This is very powerful once you start to see that. I mean it’s eye opening for people. Most of us start to think we’re stuck. We think we’re stuck. It’s a bad deal. Once you start to be able to do this you start to see, hey you know what? Maybe there is a possibility for a better way to live. Maybe there is a possibility for a happiness. I mean it wasn’t the happiness that I was thinking about when I was applying for college, you know? I wasn’t thinking about the happiness of the heart, or the happiness of concentration. It’s not the happiness that for the most part our elected officials are promising us if we in fact vote for them. It’s a different kind of happiness. We have to sort of get our arms around that a little bit because it’s a different path. It’s a different path. We tend to be a little wary of that. Not many other people think that, I mean, you talk to the average person on the street and, well I’ve got a lot of happiness by feeling my breath, there going to kind of look at you crazy and well, why don’t you go to that movie or that bar. That’s really where happiness is. We’re up against that. We’re up against that from the people out there, but we’re up against it in here from our own conditioning. So you start to see, wow, there is this place. There is this better life. I can have some joy. We begin to have a place where we’re able to find some contentment. So we begin to have some contentment in our lives. So even if in the sitting you only found a moment of contentment, you found some contentment. You found five minutes of contentment in this sitting, you found five minutes of contentment. The possibility is even there for more if you keep doing this and keep practicing with it. I mean how much contentment do we have in our lives, in general? This is a good question. How content are you? You know, really content. You know the quality of contentment. To be content. To be happy with what you’ve got, regardless of what it is. How much contentment do we have? Maybe some of you have a lot of contentment in your life. From my perspective, from what I can see, it was certainly corroborated in this little group I was in yesterday, I didn’t see anybody who said they were very content or at least, all they talked about was their discontent. And I think we have a lot of discontent, don’t we? And that’s not, it’s not a reflection on our external circumstances. I’m talking about our minds. And what we hold on to. There’s a lot of discontent. Right? We’re discontent. We’re not contented. We go from the winter of our discontent to the spring of our discontent to the summer of our discontent into the autumn of our discontent. Or, the word that.. it comes out of the teachings.. is perpetual dissatisfaction. Then we have these moments. A child is born or you get a new job or you have a career thing or you meet somebody or something good happens and you have those moments that are, you know, those big moments. We stake our lives on those moments, right? Our happiness is dependent on those moments. So we’ve got a few moments, that really fade really quickly because the kid gets sick or the job doesn’t turn out to be what it’s supposed to be. So there really isn’t a lot of contentment in our lives. There tends to be more dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety. So when we start to practice this breath meditation and start to reside in the breath, we begin to know some contentment. We begin to have some contentment in our lives. And I would submit to you that this is a good thing. This is a beautiful thing. I mean this is one of the qualities of the breath meditation. You stay in this dwelling, that’s one-pointedness, you stay in this dwelling, with your breath, within the frame of reference of the breathing, and then the body, when you spread your attention. And there’s ease. And then there’s contentment in the mind. And there’s the steadiness of mind that we call equanimity. So this is one of the qualities and one of the things that you should notice when you’re really working with the breath and cultivating the breath, is notice the contentment in the mind. Put your attention on the contentment for a moment and then go back to the sense of ease. But the ease that you cultivate in the breath gives rise to contentment. So we begin to know some contentment in our lives, and this really begins a process of healing. Because we have so much pain – physical, emotional, spiritual, because we have so much discontent that beginning to feel some contentment, beginning to experience some contentment in our lives begins a process of healing. It begins an extraordinary process of healing. So it’s very important to cultivate this breath and this quality of contentment, and this is a good place to be, in this place of contentment. When we begin to cultivate the breath and ease and contentment, we begin to know that this is something we can have, and I think for a lot of us, we don’t really think that we can have contentment. Or we certainly think it’s very.. it comes from those things that I talked about, but we begin to see that contentment is available to us. It’s available to us in any moment, really, if we strive to develop these qualities. So knowing contentment we begin to know that it’s something we can have. We begin to realize that we deserve it. I never really realized I deserved contentment until I started to experience it. It’s hard to realize you deserve something until you start to experience it. You start to experience contentment and you start to say, ah, maybe this is what life is supposed to be about. Maybe it’s supposed to be more like this. Maybe this is something that I want to have. Maybe I deserve this. Maybe I deserve happiness. Maybe happiness is available to me and I deserve it. As you begin to cultivate contentment in the breath, and these qualities of contentment through the breath meditation, you begin to know what contentment is. I think a lot of us don’t know what contentment is. And, as you begin to know what it is, then you can begin to look for it elsewhere. It’s hard to look for contentment and happiness in life unless you know what it is. I knew I wanted happiness to some extent, but I really didn’t know what happiness was. I didn’t’ know what contentment was. It’s kind of like, trying to find somebody and you’ve got no information. It’s like, go find this person and you don’t even know their name or what they look like. Once you begin to know what contentment is then you can begin to start to look for it. You begin.. and this is what we’re doing with the breathing, this is what that step of evaluation, is there ease, is there dis-ease, oh, that’s ease. Oh that’s what ease is like. Let me cultivate that quality. You start to do that with the breath, then you start to do that with your relationships. Oh, you know, in this relationship when I act this way there’s not much ease, or when I hang out with this person, there’s not much ease. Or, this job. Or this or that or whatever it is. So it really begins, as the Buddha said, with the breath. If you cultivate the breath, you can cultivate the body, if you can cultivate the body, you can cultivate the mind, you can follow the path and find happiness.
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