Jill Shepherd: talk: Wise View and Wise Intention

Okay, so welcome back.

Big group. I have to turn my head all the way around.

I feel to see everyone. I feel like an owl.

I need a 270 degree neck movement.

So I heard last week Bruce gave a really inspiring slide show

on pilgrimage to India that I know some of you here were also on.

I was really sorry to miss that.

But I did get a kind of sneak preview when they first came back.

I had a quick dip into the slide shows.

So I'm glad you all got a chance to have a flavor of that.

So this evening I'd like to continue our exploration of the Noble Eightfold Path.

And because quite a few of you here are new, just a little bit of context.

So this thing we call the Noble Eightfold Path.

There's a set of eight factors that we can develop and cultivate.

And taken together they powerfully support us to live our lives in ways that are conducive to ease, to well-being, to contentment, to steadiness, to freedom.

And as I always like to remind us, the more we can develop ourselves to be able to live in that way,

the more it benefits the people around us too.

So this is not just a silent solitary development.

And to be clear, that doesn't mean that we're doing this to somehow promote ourselves

and some kind of superior being who's got it all together.

It's more that we're just living this path as best we can

and doing our best to not contribute to the anxiety and the confusion and the hostility and the despair

and it seems to be getting more and more prevalent these days.

More and more prevalent as the world literally heats up and war is breaking out everywhere

and it can feel at times like the human race is collectively going insane.

And in some ways you could say the whole of this path of practice is about becoming more sane

and staying sane, no matter what challenges come our way.

And it's interesting to me, at least that in English there isn't a word for becoming more sane.

It's like saying a fight or something like that.

But actually this word sane apparently comes from the Latin word saneus

and that means healthy, sound, whole, sober.

And that is what we're trying to do here.

So how might we do that?

Well this is where the noble eightfold path comes in.

And we've already spent quite a few weeks looking at the first factor, which is wise view.

And like all of these path factors, wise view encompasses a whole range of understanding.

So there's a depth to it, there's a breadth to it, there are many nuances and subtleties.

In fact I could probably spend the rest of the year just talking about these different facets of wise view.

But to try and keep it somewhat simple and manageable,

we've been so far mostly focusing on it in relation to cause and effect,

specifically how inner lives affect our outer lives and vice versa.

In other words, what's going on for us in here, in terms of our thoughts, and our emotions, and our moods, and our mind states,

those color how we view the world, and they shape how we experience it.

Everyone gets a sense of that.

Just to give a really simple, even, almost mundane example, I guess at some point,

you've all had the experience of waking up in a bad mood.

If we don't have any self-awareness or any meditation training, we wake up in a bad mood.

How does the rest of the day tend to go?

Anyone have a sense of that?

Usually there's a kind of cascading.

We were clumsy, we trip over things, we seem to experience one unpleasant annoying irritating thing after another.

Almost to the point where by the end of the day we're feeling a bit paranoid, like the universe is out to get us.

So that was one relatively common scenario.

But I'm guessing you've also had the opposite experience,

well you might not have paid quite the same amount of attention to it.

Maybe you've had the experience of unexpectedly waking up in a good mood,

and how is the rest of the day in that situation?

Usually it just sort of flows along, and there's a feeling of ease in everything's pretty pleasant.

And you might even notice that little things that ordinarily would kind of niggle at you, the barely register.

Maybe you find yourself smiling for no particular reason, and feeling suddenly grateful for little things that ordinarily you might not even have recognised notice.

Does that make sense for people?

That sort of experience also.

So I mentioned in a previous talk that if we don't have any contact with these teachings, if we've never learned to meditate,

it can feel like both of those scenarios just happen randomly.

And when more or less at the mercy of whatever particular mood we happen to wake up in,

and when more or less at the mercy of whatever random things life throws at us,

so the great gift of this path factor of wise view,

as we start to understand that actually we have way more influence over all of this than we normally realise,

and it is possible to train this heart and mind,

so that we can experience some degree of ease, of balance, of steadiness, of well-being,

no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in.

In other words, we become much less dependent on things out there being a certain way in order for us to be happy.

And that's part of the freedom that this whole path is pointing to.

Now to be sure, this kind of message from the Buddha is completely contradictory to mainstream values,

which tend to tell us we have to put all our energy and effort into manipulating the conditions out there in order for us to be happy.

And we're taught by mainstream society that we have to get and have an acquire and achieve more stuff, more money,

more pleasant experiences. You have to get the perfect job or the perfect salary or the perfect body.

We have to find the perfect partner, have the perfect children, get the perfect home, perfect car, perfect holiday, perfect life.

And we're all supposed to be striving to live our best lives.

You know that saying, every time I hear it, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard,

living your best life. What does that mean?

And maybe when I put it like that, you can see it in a way for the fairy tale that it is.

So does that mean, oh, well, I just give up and resign myself to being miserable because things haven't worked out the way society told me they should?

No, the great gift of this understanding of wise view is it empowers us to understand how we can train our hearts and minds.

So we're not dependent on external circumstances for that elusive happiness.

So once we start clearly seeing that cause and effect relationship between what's going on internally in our hearts and minds,

and how that influences our experience of the external world, we just naturally start to take more care of our inner life.

And this brings us to the second factor of the noble eightfold path, which is wise intention.

And again, this path factor has a range of different dimensions.

But to start with, it's inviting us to recognize that everything we do, everything we say, even everything we think,

it starts with an intention in the mind.

And those intentions are influenced by the underlying quality of that heart and mind.

So for example, all of you are here tonight because you had the intention to come along.

And you might not have been fully conscious of all the different things that motivated that choice.

But probably there was some sense that it might be a good thing to do, that it would be helpful and beneficial in some way.

So there was already some flicker of wise view at work there.

And actually bringing more clarity, more awareness to those inner motivations.

That's one powerful way we can strengthen both wise view and wise intention.

And more clearly we see the connection between cause and effects and how our inner lives are shaping how we experience the world.

The more we want to strengthen our intentions and our motivations so that they do lead in the direction of more ease and more happiness, more freedom.

We can think of this whole path of practice in a way as a process of shaping our inner ecology, that internal ecosystem of our hearts and minds.

And we shape it by deliberately strengthening what's beneficial and denourishing what's harmful.

And a few of you here were at the retreat at Timowatta that we just finished on Sunday.

So you might remember I brought in this analogy, it's not a very poetic one, sorry.

But I talked about the analogy of our internal ecosystem being a bit like our gut biome.

So you know how these days everyone's talking about the gut biome and the importance of having a healthy gut biome.

In a similar way for our mental health we want to be changing that inner ecology.

So there are all kinds of different mental qualities living and dying in here.

And some of those are beneficial and some are not.

So it's a key understanding of insight practice to recognize and understand how to nourish this healthy inner ecosystem.

And we do this by gently removing the unbeneficial states.

So states like greed and compulsion, addiction, aversion, agitation, anxiety, aggression, envy, restlessness, boredom, doubt,

there's a world of afflictive states that can get activated in here and we learn how to help them release.

And then in their place we can support skillful nourishing qualities to grow.

Qualities like generosity and kindness and compassion, gladness, joy, contentment, calm, peace and so on.

So based on that analogy we want to pay attention to what are we putting in to our inner ecosystems.

And I think it's fair to say that probably all of us could benefit from more positive input.

Maybe precisely because there is so much uncertainty and misery in the world.

And that's on top of whatever challenges are going on in our own lives.

So it feels more necessary than ever to keep...

You could say micro-dosing ourselves with the good, taking in the good as the neuroscientist Rick Hansen calls it.

So given the state of the world, it might seem counter-intuitive or paradoxical to be trying to open to happiness and contentment and gratitude and joy.

But actually we need it more than ever.

This poor bruised and battered heart, it can develop resilience by strengthening that capacity to be with what's difficult, painful, challenging.

We learn to be with that by opening equally to what's nourishing so we have more resilience of heart and mind.

And I think probably most people these days are aware of the minds in built negativity bias.

So again thanks to Rick Hansen, his famous aphorism, almost a cliché, that our brains are like Velcro for the unpleasant and tesla for the pleasant.

So whatever's unpleasant tends to stick.

And unfortunately the opposite, what's pleasant, tends to just slide right off.

And in difficult times this negativity bias can go into overdrive so that all we take in is the misery and the pain of the world.

And probably that's contributing to the global epidemic of anxiety and depression, so many people are struggling with.

So this negativity bias, from the Buddhist perspective as a cognitive distortion, it's a form of delusion.

And in insight practice we're trying to see clearly.

We're trying to see without bias.

And so many of us we need to train to take in the whole spectrum of experience.

We're not just defaulting to the unpleasant and the painful aspects of it.

Now to be clear, this is not an exercise in avoidance or denial, those are just more forms of delusion.

It's not about opening to what's pleasant to try and block out what's unpleasant.

What we're trying to do is develop more flexibility and resilience.

And mindfulness as always is crucial to this development.

When there's mindfulness we have a choice in any given moment about what we pay attention to.

And to just play with a very common example of that, with so much uncertainty these days, it's pretty common to get caught in doom scrolling on our devices.

Anybody notice that?

And all the misery of the world is being streamed into those devices 24 hours a day.

And it's hard not to succumb to that misplaced belief.

If I just stay on top of all of this, if I just work out what's going on then I'll be okay.

And even if intellectually we know that's not going to work, we might even recognise it as unwise view.

Something in us keeps succumbing to that impulse.

And even though it's unpleasant in the moment and it has pretty negative lasting effects.

So over the last few months I've been contemplating all this.

I started to wonder how might we cultivate more skillful and wise intentions, specifically in relation to doom scrolling.

And so I came up with a practice as an antidote and I call this practice gratitude gathering.

So it's gratitude gathering as the antidote to doom scrolling.

And it's a way of really training our receptors to be able to open to gratitude, to gladness, to delight.

Maybe at times even to join.

So I'll invite us to play with that in a moment, to do some practice.

The basically it involves intentionally tuning in to whatever experience in the moment is pleasant, maybe even enjoyable.

Just as a way of balancing out the mind's negativity bias.

And so you might try this on whenever you recognise that you're getting caught in doom scrolling

or you're sinking into despair with what's going on in the world or your own life.

When you recognise that sinking feeling, literally stop.

Deliberately redirect your attention to anything at all that brings some relief, some lightness, some uplift.

Anything at all that you can appreciate, enjoy, feel a flicker of gratitude for.

Now for some people the first response to this invitation might be, well that's impossible.

My life's miserable, the world's going to hell, there's nothing at all to appreciate.

But almost everybody, if they can suspend disbelief when they actually try it.

Usually they find there's a lot more positive and pleasant experiences going on than they might ordinarily have noticed.

So again this is a training.

And the invitation in a moment will have just a few minutes of silence.

And you can just let yourself sense in as you're sitting here in this room.

Is there anything at all about being here that you might feel a flicker of appreciation or gratitude for?

And then when you've got a sense of that, I'll invite you to contemplate your life more broadly.

So that's the invitation, let's just take a couple of minutes now, settle back into your meditation.

Take a couple of breaths.

Let the eyes close as that feels okay for you.

And then as you settle into the stillness.

Just tune in to your inner experience now of being here.

See if there's anything at all that you can appreciate.

Not forcing or pushing, but just allowing whatever naturally arises into your awareness that's in the terrain of pleasant.

Taking naven, maybe naming it to yourself.

And then noticing what it feels like to even momentarily take in the good.

And from there you might contemplate more broadly any current aspects of your life as a whole.

And there might be a sense of gladness or appreciation or gratitude.

What's going well for you?

What can you enjoy or maybe take delight in?

Just being curious and see if you can open through what brings any trace of gladness, appreciation, gratitude.

So just a moment to hear, was there anything that stood out for you with that little momentary experiment?

So hopefully that was very simple and very accessible and just I don't know how long we were there two minutes, but you might have a sense that it almost instantly can shift our mood, our orientation.

But as possible some of you might have found it difficult and is that true for you?

So important not to force it.

I think we've all been told you should be more grateful and starving children in Africa and all of that kind of guilt induced gratitude, which is not real gratitude.

So there can be quite a lot of conditioning, quite a lot of history and patterns that many of us have learned in relation to joy depending on our families and our culture and so forth.

And so as I mentioned earlier we can have this individual negativity bias that tends to fixate more on what's difficult, but then societally that can get reinforced too.

And we can even bring these unconscious biases to how we practice these teachings and to be fair sometimes how the teachings are presented can reinforce that bias.

And sometimes people can have a kind of puritanism that this is supposed to be about working hard and striving diligently and getting over afflictive states and more and it can turn the whole thing into a giant self improvement project and it can inadvertently reinforce our inner critic.

So that's partly why I've been emphasizing more and more the need for pleasant experiences on this path to freedom and that actually joy is a crucial factor in the transformation of the heart.

And we might not even realize in the discourses, the sutras, when skillful states are mentioned the language in relation to them is things like we're invited to abide in kindness or dwell in compassion or become saturated by deep absorption of the mind.

The language in light is a kind of savoring, even marinating in whatever pleasant and skillful states are available.

And so again as I was contemplating all this I came up with another practice that in a way is just a natural extension of the gratitude gathering and I call this practice joy savoring.

And this too is definitely a practice of training.

So again I thought just to take a couple of minutes to play with that as a concept.

So just once more settling into your meditation for a couple of minutes.

And then as you bring to mind the gratitude gathering that we did a few minutes ago maybe you might touch again one particular experience that no one was a clear feeling of gladness or gratitude.

And as you touch that memory that experience again see if you can just settle in to the pleasantness that it brought that yourself fully open to that feeling of gratitude or gladness maybe delight.

Maybe a flicker of joy.

And just sitting if you can settle in to that sense of gladness.

And noticing what's the effect on the body when you just let yourself dwell in gladness and gratitude.

And this self relax into it maybe the body feels a little bit more open or settled or steady.

And then tuning into the heart the mind see if there are any other particular emotions or thoughts that come alongside the gladness and gratitude.

That's you might feel a sense of uplift or brightening maybe warmth or tenderness.

And also openness, lightness, uplift, sensing into what's true for you.

Savoring any flavor of joy that might be available to you now.

Okay so thank you for playing with that invitation. These two practices of gratitude gathering and joy savoring.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to hear what that was like and the benefits that may come from it and or any challenges.

So again thank you for your attention over to you.