Session 8: verses 22 to 24

The question we started with

• What kind of challenging patterns have you experienced in your life that have shown up again and again?
• Are there any that you have been able to overcome or get a new perspective on? How?

Teaching notes

Quick note about relative vs. ultimate bodhicitta. Each of these practices takes into account the previous ones.

Verse 22: Appearances are mind

• Nonduality. We finally made it.
• Introduce emptiness: it is empty, but pregnant.
• Interdependence leads to impermanence leads to emptiness leads to all existence is mind.
• The mind is what attaches qualities to things. If you let go of judgement of good and bad, what is left? It is our grasping that makes our perception of reality solid. When that relaxes, everything shifts.
• You can see this in your day to day: have you ever held a judgement about someone that was challenged by experience, where you found out you were wrong and your whole perception of reality shifted?
• What are thoughts really, under examination? What are they made of? Where do they come from?
• Nothing you see is secure in the way you are perceiving it (emptiness), and your perceptions are an extension of your own karma.
• A practical instruction on how to decrease our suffering: to see all of existence as dreamlike.
• Beings share a common world through common karma while each lives inside their own mind’s world. Examining any thought finds no shape, color, or location: empty like a rainbow, yet luminous (even an ant knows pleasure from pain). Clarity and emptiness inseparable, beyond existence and nonexistence.
• Something only understood through direct experience. You may get a glimpse now and again, but dedicated practice and a good teacher are the way that you make this perspective habitual.
• Note the abhidharma and maps of the mind as a way to understand how to get to emptiness.

Verse 23: Attractive things: summer rainbows

• Expanding on emptiness.
• The pleasure contained in any object is relative and temporary: rainbows, summertime; both fleeting expressions of an ever-changing reality.
• Trying to hold onto them is like trying to hold onto a rainbow.
• Recognizing the attraction and the object of attraction to be empty alleviates attachment.
• Things are like an illusion, not actually illusions. A difference between killing an illusory animal and a real one.
• Rather, the object’s illusory nature is no different from your own illusory nature.
• A distinction between tightness/attachment and relaxedness/non-afflictive enjoyment.
• Again, a practical means to alleviate suffering.
• Mastery of mind, not avoidance of the world: one who has mastered mind wanders undistracted in a crowd; one who hasn’t churns thoughts “like ripples on water” even in retreat. Quote: “It is not what you perceive that binds you, and it is your clinging to it that binds you. Cut through your clinging, Naropa!”

Verse 24: Adversity: the death of a child in a dream

• Personally prefer the translation as illusions rather than delusions, but there is some merit to that connotation.
• How to not be gaslight-y: emptiness and compassion are inseparable; additionally, internalizing emptiness makes the expanse of great compassion possible.
• Being able to recognize that pain itself is not solid.
• Suffering is simply the mind not being calm; triggers differ but the turmoil is one.
• Pain compounds into solidity if we let it. The fact that our experience and reactions change over time (grief, anger, etc.) is proof of the lack of solidity.
• Like when some people describe near-death experiences. Waking from a dream and feeling relief and distance from the events within. Internalizing the depth of impermanence and how each moment of suffering for us measures up against the expanse of time and space.
• One teacher emphasizes habituation and repetition for these so that they actually help in moments where suffering and attachment are really strong.
• It is a way to gain agency over the challenging experiences of life.
• We are not just blindly telling this to ourselves. First we have to prove it to ourselves over and over until we internalize it as true. Not merely a method to sidestep difficult emotions, but an entire shift in our perception of reality.
• Recognize painful experience in the body, allow it to exist and express itself fully through feeling, and allow it to pass away.

Analytical meditation

Settling

Find a way to sit that you can stay with for a while. Eyes closed, or lowered toward the floor. Take a few slower breaths, then let the breath go back to whatever it does on its own.

We explored three verses today. For our analytical meditation, I’ll read each one, walk through it briefly, and leave you with a little experiment. Let’s try to check each step against our own experience and see whether it matches.

pause

Verse 22

First, verse 22. The verse says that appearances are your own mind, that mind itself is beyond any fabricated extreme, and that knowing this you stop splitting experience into a perceiver and a thing perceived.

I thought we could explore something we all do pretty much all day long, which is turning verbs into nouns. Hearing, wanting, hurting, worrying are all things that are happening, moving and changing and passing, and we tend to talk about them like objects we’re holding. My anxiety. That sound. This pain.

The verses are saying that if we look closely, we won’t find a fixed thing there. But it’s hard to feel confident about that just by hearing it. It’s a bit like saying there are no cherries in my house. I could guess, but I’d be a lot more sure if I’d actually gone through all the cupboards, the fridge, and everywhere else I put things. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go looking.

Let’s start with sound. In a moment I’ll ring the bell. See if you can follow the sound from the very beginning all the way to the end, until you can’t hear it anymore.

ring the bell, wait until the sound is completely gone

See if you can find the moment the sound started.

pause

And where did it go?

pause

The verse mentions perceiver and perceived, the one who hears and the thing that’s heard. Let’s try once more, and this time see if you can find where the sound actually is while it’s happening, whether it’s over by the bell, or in your ears, or somewhere else. And see if you can find the spot where the sound ends and your hearing of it begins.

ring the bell, wait until the sound is completely gone

There’s no right answer here. Whatever you found, or didn’t find, is just fine. We’re just opening the cupboards and having a look.

quiet, one minute

Verse 23

ring the bell

The verse says that the things which attract you are like summer rainbows: do not take them as real, and let go of clinging.

Let’s try the same kind of looking with something pleasant. Let something come to mind that you really enjoy. A favorite food, a song, someone’s laugh, a warm bath, the first sip of coffee in the morning. Something simple and easy. Let’s just trust whatever comes up.

pause

See if you can let yourself really enjoy it for a moment. Let it fill you up, and notice where you feel it in your body. There’s no hurry here.

longer pause

Now, without letting go of the enjoyment, see if you can notice it moving. Like the bell, it might rise and swell and change a little from moment to moment.

pause

The verse isn’t asking us to stop enjoying things. A rainbow is beautiful. It’s asking us to enjoy without gripping, the way we’d enjoy a rainbow knowing it won’t stay. For example, many of us might feel a subtle (or not so subtle) anxiety and fear of loss even in the moment something we like is happening. So let’s experiment with loosening our grip just a little, and see what happens in our mindstream.

quiet, one minute

Verse 24

One thing before we go into the next verse: this verse uses a very difficult image, and we don’t want to perpetuate a harmful misunderstanding that pain is insignificant or invalid. Just to be careful let’s work with something a bit less activating today in our meditation so we can approach this profound idea with care.

ring the bell

The verse says that all suffering is like the death of your child in a dream, that holding deluded appearances as real is exhausting, and that difficult circumstances are to be seen as delusions.

Let something come to mind that’s a little uncomfortable. Not the hardest thing in your life. Maybe a small worry, an irritation from this week, a bit of tension you’ve been carrying around. And if you’d rather not go looking for anything uncomfortable today, that’s completely fine. You can stay with the sounds of the room or the ebb and flow of your thoughts instead.

pause

See if you can set the understanding of your experience to the side for a moment, and just notice what it feels like in the body. Maybe there’s tightness, or heat, or heaviness, or something moving. What are the verbs and qualities behind your conceptual understanding of the experience?

pause

Just like with the bell, see if you can notice whether it’s changing at all, getting stronger or softer, or moving around.

pause

The verse says it’s exhausting to hold these things as solid and real. So let’s experiment with letting this one be more like a sound than a thing, something that’s happening and moving through, with its own beginning, middle and end. We don’t have to make it go away. Let’s just see what happens in our mindstream when we let it move.

quiet, one minute

Closing

ring the bell

Before we stop, one small thing to take with you. This week, when something grabs you, a pleasant thing you can’t stop thinking about or an unpleasant thing that feels like it’s going to last forever, see if you can remember the bell, and ask yourself: is this a thing, or is this something that’s happening?

pause

We can gently drop all that. Notice the weight of your body in the chair, the sounds in the room, the other people sitting here with you. When you’re ready, open your eyes.

Questions for the week

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

• How does it feel to consider that reality is empty? What emotions come up? What thoughts?
• How can we practice these concepts without distancing ourselves from true compassion and empathy?
• What changes in your experience of attachment and suffering when you bring these practices to mind?
• How can you contemplate emptiness in your daily life?