Session 4: verses 8 to 10

The question we started with

• Think of a time where you had to leave a situation that was negatively affecting you (a job, relationship, living situation). What was that like? What was your process? How did that affect you?
• Think of a time where you experienced a profound positive change by finding something new (a spiritual or artistic practice, hobby, community). What was that like? How did you grow?

Teaching notes

Verse 8: Karma and the lower realms

Verse 8 is about where the suffering of the lower realms comes from, and never doing harm even when your life is on the line.

• Lower realms: hell, hungry ghost, animal realms. Introduce the samsaric wheel.
• We can see the lower realms in our world and feel them in our mind: when you are very angry, everything in life feels like an assault; when you are habituated to greed, you feel a profound sense of lack in your life.
• Afflictive emotions create a harmful reality. In the grand scope of existence, acting wrongfully is much more damaging to you than harm you might experience in this life. Therefore, protecting your positive experiences in this life with wrong actions is the highest folly.
• Learn to experience fear and discomfort without acting on it.
• Be very clear about what constitutes wrongful action: the ten nonvirtuous deeds; touch on motivation.
• If you are motivated to avoid your own suffering, this is the best way to do it. Avoid causing harm, and you will lessen your future suffering.
• Belief in the expansive force of karma can require a bit of faith for us in our day to day with our short perception of time. How does this show up for us in our lives? Becoming desensitized to wrong action leads us down a path of difficulty.
• The real negative effects of negative actions in our daily life. One difficult choice can have effects for years.

Verse 9: Dewdrop pleasures, changeless liberation

Verse 9 is about how quickly the pleasures of the three worlds pass, and aiming instead for a liberation that does not change.

• Three worlds: desire realm, form realm, and formless realm.
• Again, attention paid to the vast expanse of existence. When you expand your perception of time and lifetimes, nothing we experience lasts long, and most of what we are drawn to that we think will bring us happiness actually leads to more attachment and suffering. Money, prestige, relationships.
• Impermanence: everything that comes will go. The cycle flows and continues. Every up has a down. The ultimate liberation is something that stays, doesn’t change.
• Every pleasant moment of my existence has also been characterized by an awareness of the great horrors of existence. There is no escaping that cycle by clinging to the highs of life, only more suffering.
• Middling motivation: not just to avoid suffering and experience wellbeing, but to be liberated from cyclic existence itself.
• Mundane: delayed gratification.

Verse 10: Our mothers; arousing bodhicitta

Verse 10 is about the beings who have been our mothers, their suffering, and giving rise to bodhicitta.

• Finally, bodhicitta.
• In the expanse of time, where we have all cycled through death and rebirth an infinite number of times, we have all been each other’s mothers, friends, and enemies an infinite number of times. We train to see everyone as preciously as we see our own mother to reflect the reality that everyone has been that generous to us in the past, present, and future.
• When we fully acknowledge this depth of interconnectedness and intimacy, our motivation naturally expands to encompass all of existence.
• Thinking about the massive suffering that is occurring right now, everywhere. How can we go about our daily lives in ignorant bliss?

Analytical meditation

Framing

The verses we just read make some fairly large claims. That the harm we do comes back around to us. That the happiness we chase tends to evaporate about as quickly as we can get hold of it. That everyone around us is caught up in the same difficulty we are. Those are the sorts of claims that are easy to nod along with and much harder to feel, and what follows is an invitation to see how much of it turns up in your own experience.

We’ll explore this in two parts. The first one is meant to be pleasant. We’ll spend some time with the felt sense of the body, and then with an image that most people find comfortable to rest in, and we’ll stay there a while.

In the second we’ll look at something in your life that feels difficult right now, and then at what you tend to do when it shows up. The text has a name for those habitual responses. It calls them poisons, and it says that when we act out of them they don’t stay small, that they build a whole world around us that we then have to live inside for a while. That’s the part we’ll try and explore directly.

Everything I say from here is a suggestion, so if something doesn’t fit, you’re welcome to let it go by and stay with whatever you’re already doing.

Find a position that works for you, with your eyes closed if that’s comfortable, or resting on the floor a few feet ahead of you.

pause

The energy body

We’ll start with the felt sense of the body, by which I mean the way the body feels from the inside.

See if you can sense the whole of it at once, rather than moving through it piece by piece. Something like the way you might notice the temperature of a room without checking each corner of it.

If that doesn’t come easily, it’s fine to start smaller, with the hands, or the weight of sitting. The whole thing can come later, or not at all.

pause

You might also see whether the space just outside the skin wants to be included in that. An inch or two past the hands, past the shoulders.

pause

And if you’re curious, you could notice what this space is like at the moment. It might feel dense in one place and open in another, or thin, or humming, or quiet. There’s nothing here that needs fixing.

longer pause

The light

Now we can add something to that using our imagination. We’re going to imagine our own version of wish-fulfilling light that can help us shift our state of being.

Let’s just start with color. If your wish-fulfilling light had a color what would it be? If there were a light that could bring you some ease, what color might it be?

There’s no need to think it over. Whatever arrives first is fine, and if nothing arrives at all, you’re welcome to borrow a color and see what happens. Also, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t connect strongly to visuals, any of your senses are just fine. Let’s all connect to our wish-fulfilling light in whatever way works best.

pause

You might imagine that light somewhere above you. In this practice its source doesn’t run out, so there’s no need to be careful with it. The more of it you use, the more of it there is.

pause

If you’d like, you can let it come in through the top of the head. I wonder what that might feel like for us?

pause

And then see whether it can fill the space you were sensing a moment ago, all of it at once if that’s available. Head, chest, belly, arms and legs, and out past the skin.

pause

Some people feel a temperature in this. Some feel weight, or a kind of pressure. Some see it clearly and feel almost nothing at all. All of those count, and none of them is better than another.

pause

If it’s helpful, you might let the breath move through the whole lit space, so that the body breathes and the light moves along with it.

And if any of this is pleasant, you can stay with the pleasant part and let it spread on its own. There’s no hurry to get to the next thing.

The light stays available for the rest of the meditation. If you want it at any point, take it.

pause

The inquiry

Now we’ll turn toward a question from the text and see what comes. It isn’t a question to solve, so we can let it sit there for a while and watch what your own experience does with it.

What feels difficult in my life right now?

pause

There’s no need to go looking for anything. See whether something comes on its own.

pause

It might arrive as a picture, or a name, or a phrase. It might arrive as a weight somewhere in the body with nothing attached to it yet.

pause

If several things come, you might set them beside each other and see which one you can look at from where you’re sitting today. It doesn’t have to be the largest one.

pause

Now, if you’re willing, see whether you can put the words down and feel it. Where does it seem to live in the body?

pause

Does it have a size, and an edge, or no edge? Heavy or light. Warm or cool. Still or moving.

pause

You might stay with it a little longer than is comfortable and a little shorter than is too much, and only you can tell where that is.

pause

The light can come in while the difficulty stays, and both can be here at the same time.

pause

The poisons

Now a second question, if you’re up for it. When this difficulty shows up, what do I do?

pause

You might watch for the first move, the one that comes before any decision gets made.

pause

And then see whether that move has a flavor to it. Some moves have heat in them. Pushing away, shutting down, going after someone. Some have a pull. Reaching, grasping, wanting more of something. And some have a kind of fog in them. Not knowing, going numb, being somewhere else. You might find one of those, or all three, one after another.

pause

Whichever it is, see if you can go inside it for a moment. Not the situation, which we already know about, but the state itself. When you’re in there, how does the world look?

pause

How do other people appear from in there? As people? As obstacles? As sources of something you need?

pause

What seems completely obvious in that state that doesn’t seem quite so obvious now?

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And what tends to happen afterward?

pause

If it seems available to you, you might ask: what emotional need am I fulfilling right now? And then, perhaps, if it feels right, we could take a moment to generate a sincere wish that all the parts of us that need things feel heard, understood, and satisfied in a way that benefits all of us.

Close

We can let the questions rest now. Whatever we found today, and whatever we didn’t find, there’s nothing that needs deciding and nothing that has to be given up or taken on. We looked at something difficult and stayed with it a while, and the parts of us that have been doing their best with it are welcome to go on doing their best for now.

If it feels right, we might let that wish stay with us a little longer, and maybe let it widen, so that it takes in everyone sitting here, and then whoever we happen to meet this week, all of them working away at something of their own that we can’t see from where we’re sitting.

pause

And whenever you’d like, come back to the light, in through the top of the head, through the whole space, and out past the skin. There’s still as much of it as we want.

long pause

Feel the chair underneath you. Notice the room, and the people in it. And when you’re ready, we can ever so gently return to the space.

Questions for the week

Choose one or more of these questions to take into the week ahead:

• What are the ripple effects of your daily actions? How do even the smallest decisions affect you in the future?
• What do the different realms of samsara (anger, greed, ignorance, attachment, jealousy, and pride) look like in your daily experience?
• What temporary happinesses do you cling to? What is the result of that clinging?
• How does your perception change when you acknowledge every being as your mother?
• What has changed in your life by opening your mind to consider the suffering of others?