Dharma Talk April 25, 2010

by John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.

Meditating in the Thunderstorm

I run the Brain Fitness Center at Saint Luke’s Hospital, where part of the program involves mindfulness-based stress reduction. Our sessions always begin with the instructions, “assume a comfortable position in your chair, your feet flat on the floor, your hands in your lap, and your eyes lightly closed. Let your attention rest on that point right at the tip of the nose where the breath enters and leaves.” Then without warning, the drilling starts. Or the buzz saw. Or the jack hammer.

The instructions for each stress reduction session assume a certain level of calm surroundings. Little did we realize when we started training Brain Fitness gym members in stress reduction that doing such an activity in the center of a campus where construction was the norm not the exception, would present challenges.

We began our program about 18 months ago, at the same time that several physician groups in our building were renovating. We were in temporary space in a conference room there which looked out onto the parking lot. This was also the drop off location for the construction crews and delivery services that were constantly delivering new furniture and equipment or hauling away debris. This activity created a constant backdrop of noise. Sometimes low, sometimes loud and jarring. The day they installed carpeting with electric hammers directly upstairs from our space was particularly memorable. And who can forget the wood chipper when all the trees on the street were removed. Right outside our picture window.

As it turns out, the noise has been useful. This is because the process of mental relaxation cannot take place in a vacuum. The mind needs something to periodically redirect it – it needs something to push against -- in order to successfully go through the process of relaxation. It is the weaving back and forth between some outside stimulus -- noise, for example -- and the returning to an object of inner attention, like the breath, that brings on a deep relaxation state.

Harder to do in a void with no distractions. In fact, when this happens, the mind must create its own distractions in the form of random thoughts, giving it something to “push against” in the relaxation process. This way, the mind moves like a pendulum between the distraction and the focus point, each swing bringing the relaxation to a deeper level of calm.

This relaxation practice is an integral piece of the Brain Fitness program. Using the body’s natural mechanisms, this stress reduction practice purges our bodies of adrenaline and cortisol, the chemical deposits created by stress which damage the blood vessels and the brain. At the same time it’s ridding the body of these substances, it causes the body to create its own set of healing chemicals: serotonin, anandamide, and nitric oxide. These substances mend blood vessels, reduce blood pressure, and cause a cascade of healing effects in the body.

So we sat with the periodic noise. And we were able to have really successful stress reduction, using the noise to attain deep relaxation states to throw off the harmful effects of stress on the body. This changed about a month ago when we moved into our permanent space. It has been designed to be quieter, with special sound insulation in the walls and sound attenuating carrels for each gym member. So now our stress reduction sessions are quieter, but no more productive without the sound of the jackhammer or the buzz saw.

We are now more dependent on the mind’s own periodic thoughts as the vehicle for the ‘back and forth’ necessary for the relaxation process to be successful. With each breath, the mind gradually moves to a quieter place, using the distraction of thoughts to push against. More subtle than the jackhammer, but distractions just the same. Sometimes we miss the noises; sometimes we’re happy to just sit in the quiet, the jackhammer a distant memory.

Take that one step further and appreciate the noise — embrace it with metta, loving kindness for its place in the wonder of creation. As you prepare for meditation, really notice and appreciate all of the noise around you.

Bodhipaksa is a teacher who was raised in Scotland and trained by the Western Buddhist Order. He currently lives and teaches in New Hampshire. He has this mindful teaching about dealing with noise during meditation. He writes:

Call to mind the living, breathing, feeling human beings behind the noise and wish them well. And then accept that noise as part of your meditation practice. Stay loosely focused on your breathing, and let the noise be a sort of secondary focus of the practice — like the ring around the bull’s-eye. If you stop seeing the noise as the enemy of the practice and instead see it as part of the practice, then the conflict will vanish.”

Bodhipaksa continues to explain, considering the noise in the context of the five aggregates:

Trying to fight the noise is unlikely to work. The noise is not going to go away because you don’t like it. If you respond aggressively to it then you’re just getting yourself into a fight that you cannot win. When I lived in Glasgow I had a dance club across the street, a taxi stand outside the windows, and a washing machine through the wall from where I meditated. When the washing machine got noisy, for example, what I would do was embrace the noise.

I’d take this even further. What I’d do was reflect that the noise of the washing machine was a perception that existed in my consciousness. Since the noise of the washing machine was in my consciousness, and since my consciousness was meditating, then I reasoned that the washing machine was also meditating.

Realizing this made the washing machine noise just another part of my experience, like the sense of weight on my cushion, or like my breath, or like the emotions in my heart. It was no longer something separate from me that was interfering with my practice, but was a part of my practice.

At my own insight retreats around the Midwest, I remember my teachers explaining noise with a kind of gentle remonstrance. When the original insight teachers were in Burma and Thailand learning Vipassana, they rarely had a quiet place to meditate, so unlike the retreat centers we can escape to in America, with nothing but the birds and the wind in the trees for background noise.

They were usually in the middle of some densely crowded Asian city, with all the sights, sounds and smells of civilization around them. “Use the noise,” was the instruction. Like the itch on your nose or the pain in your knee, investigate it when it occurs, observe it with bare attention. Watch it rise and fall.

I remember that some of my most memorable and deep sitting sessions were when it was raining and thundering outside. Such a blissful peace in between the ebb and flow of the noise. There are important lessons to learn from the noise. Like meditation is not about stillness, even though the stillness is important, necessary, and blissful. Meditation is more about observation: whether that be observation of stillness, or observation of noise—just observe whatever is coming up.

I’ll close with a quote from Meditation teacher Dhiravamsa, who puts it this way:

When you can observe closely enough…one has to be aware of things as they are, and then one will understand the connection… see the ground for their connection…to see the wholeness of what is really there. In that freedom there is love yet independence, equanimity, and understanding. There is no “actor,” but the flow of intuitive wisdom.”

From John Corbaley:

A piece on NPR awhile back got me thinking. It was titled, “The Kilogram has a weight loss problem. It presented so much juicy information about how people used to look at the world, and how many still do, that I want to talk about it this morning.

A man by the name of Gabriel Mouton was the vicar of a catholic church in the French city of Lyons in the 17th century. He has been generally recognized as the founding father of the metric system. Seeing a need for constancy, he proposed standard measurements for the mile and other expressions of length and mass.

Up until that time, every culture and many countries had their own systems of weights and measures, and it was all very confusing and complicated for everyone. Mouton’s work was embraced by French revolutionaries in the 18th century, especially one of the leaders of the revolution, Talleyrand, a catholic bishop. Assuming that the Earth was constant and never changing, commissions appointed by the French government proposed units of length based on the Earth’s circumference, and corresponding units of mass or weight derived from spatial relations to the unit of length.

Scientists, keen observers of the physical world, embraced the idea of uniform standards of measurement. A French survey team spent 6 years measuring the arc that the Earth made between Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain in an attempt to arrive at a standard definition of length which was to become the meter.

Not long after their studies were complete, metric weights and measures, the kilogram and the meter, were fashioned from precious platinum and iridium which would serve as the standard by which the world would know what length or weight something was. It was only much later that scientists would come to understand that all of these calculations were quite inaccurate, being based as they were, on an object in the physical world.

In a suburb of Paris stands an edifice which has existed for 130 years as a temple dedicated to the idea of permanence in a world which abundantly disproves it. There are no towering monoliths or symbols or statuary to motivate or inspire you...only a metal cylinder the size of a salt-shaker and a shining meter-long rod.

This is the International center for Weights and Measures. It was established as an icon for the metric system when it was first devised in the mid-nineteenth century. But trouble has arrived in this scientific Shangri-la. It seems that the actual weight of the sacred kilogram artifact has actually been changing over time. No one can tell for sure, because it can never be known with certainty whether it is the actually prime kilogram which is changing or the lesser knock-off kilograms with which it is compared, but trouble is brewing in this absolutist paradise.

It has only been fairly recently that scientists at the Center would come to understand the world as the Buddha had seen it thousands of years before, not as a constant thing, but a universe in which all was constantly changing, with nothing existing except in relation to everything else.

They were to discover, for instance, that the arc which the french scientists took six years to measure, did not take into account irregularities in the earth’s shape due to the gravitational pulls from the moon and other bodies. They were also to discover, that the precious platinum meter fashioned so carefully, changed in length with changes in temperature, humidity, and even the effects of repeated cleaning which little by little, removed atoms from the gleaming metallic surface.

The scientists were finally to learn that they only way they would be able to achieve permanence and constancy with these measurements would be to eliminate the measure of an actual object and substitute for it some abstract concept. So instead of some fraction of the distance in relation to the actual Earth, the definition of the meter has been changed; in scientific parlance “improved” to be an expression of the distance light travels in a vacuum over an infinitely tiny fraction of a second. Because the speed of light is ‘constant,‘ this new definition will never change.

Similar efforts are now underway to do the same thing with the kilogram, measuring it in terms of electrical and magnetic forces exerted by objects with mass. Both these definitions have removed objects from the equation and substituted the abstract equations themselves as expressions of mass and length.

As a follower on the Buddhist path, one reads a story like this with some feelings. Constancy, you say? That is a fiction. To entertain the notion that anything in the universe outside of Nibbana, is constant, absolute, or eternal is a delusion. Enjoy that idea at your peril. In the Lalitavistara Sutra the Buddha teaches:

“Impermanent and unstable are all conditioned things,

Essentially brittle, like an unbaked pot.

Like some borrowed article, like a town built on sand,

They last for a short while only.

“These complexes are doomed to destruction,

Like plaster washed away by the rainy season,

Like sand on a river’s bank.

They are subject to conditions, and their own-being is hard to get at.”

(Conze, p. 158).

What the Buddha is talking about references the first Noble Truth, that human existence is dukkha, suffering, due principally to the fact that everything in existence is essentially unsatisfactory, impermanent, and self-less. Even the things which bring us joy cause us suffering when they end.

And in the quote above, what the Buddha was talking about when he said “their own-being is hard to get at” when he refers to own-being, what he is referencing is the concept of paticca-sammutpada, or conditioned arising, the idea that nothing exists except in relation to something else. The kilogram in Paris only exists in relation to the air molecules around it and the skin molecules of the hands touching it, and all these are in a constant dance of exchanging energy and fluid matter.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is a Theravada monk and teacher of some renown. He speaks eloquently of the Buddha’s teaching of impermanence. He points to impermanence as the initial motivation for the Buddha’s quest for enlightenment, then relates it to the grand scale of the universe, and ends up by linking anicca to the moment by moment mindfulness of meditation. He writes:

“The notion of impermanence, (aniccata) forms the bedrock for the Buddha’s teaching, having been the initial insight that impelled the Bodhisattva to leave the palace in search of a path to enlightenment. Impermanence, in the Buddhistview, comprises the totality of conditioned existence, ranging in scale from the cosmic to the microscopic. At the far end of the spectrum the Buddha’s vision reveals a universe of immense dimensions evolving and disintegrating in repetitive cycles throughout beginningless time....

In the middle range the mark of impermanence comes to manifestation in our inescapable mortality, our condition of being bound to ageing, sickness, and death, of possessing a body that is subject to “being worn and rubbed away, to dissolution and disintegration.”

And at the close end of the spectrum, the Buddha’s teaching discloses the radical impermanence uncovered only by sustained attention to experience in its living immediacy: the fact that all the constituents of our being, bodily and mental, are in constant process, arising and passing away in rapid succession from moment to moment without any persistent underlying substance. In the very act of observation they are undergoing “destruction, vanishing, fading away, and ceasing” (Bodhi, p. 72).

Bhikkhu Bodhi connects impermanence the Buddhist understanding of the universe and human existence. The idea that literally everything is in a constant state of change. This change can be for the worse if it is guided by ignorance, or for the better if we breathe into it the breath of dhamma written large on every atomic particle.

References

Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Impermanence and the Four Noble Truths,” in Radiant Mind, Jean Smith, ed. Riverhead Books, New York, 1999.

“The origin of the Metric System.” http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/origin.html

“This Kilogram has a Weight-Loss Problem.” NPR Broadcast August 21, 2009.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112003322

Lalitavistara, XIII, v. 95. p. 158, Conze, Edward, ed., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 1995.

-- John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.

Moment-by-Moment Renewal

Easter is a great opportunity to evaluate the similarities between Jesus’ teachings and the Buddha’s—their basic message and the truth that they discovered. I would suggest that both men came to the same Truth. And then offered different practices for allowing each of us to discover this Truth for ourselves. This Truth was so powerful that it sparked a conversion in thousands of people for centuries to come. So what is this incredible Truth?

Beyond all the dogma and ritual and religious bickering, both discovered the root cause of suffering and a way to eliminate suffering. In Jesus’ time, he saw the suffering that was happening under Roman rule and prayed about how to alleviate the suffering of all people. He went out into the desert by himself and prayed and came back with a new outlook. He saw that worst suffering was not caused externally by the Romans, but was our internal suffering, caused by our forgetting our connection to God, The Source, pure potential. And why did the people feel disconnected? The translators described it because they had sinned, which in Greek is literally translated as “to miss the mark” or “to miss the target”. When Jesus was describing how sin caused our separation from God, it appears he was talking about those times when we are less than god-like in our behavior and actions. Jesus saw how these sins or bad decisions, caused people to suffer. Now, in our contemporary culture, the word sin is loaded with lots of connotations and perhaps even for each of us there is lots of baggage around the word sin. But imagine for a moment, that what Jesus was really trying to say is that sometimes we miss the mark, and that causes us to feel disconnected from God, The Source. And this feeling causes suffering.

Jesus then taught that we can come to God for all things, and act in a God-like way and suffering will be relieved.

So what did Buddha teach that was also revolutionary? He taught in his very first lesson, in the four Noble Truths, that we suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways, and that is, we seek to cling to things that are pleasurable, and push away things that are not, and ignore everything else. In other words, we look for happiness outside of ourselves. And that in fact is what causes us to suffer. If we take this one teaching and overlay it with Jesus’ teaching on missing the mark, and we can start to see a great similarity. When we miss the mark, we suffer. Then, both teachers went on to teach two things: how to not miss the mark so often and how to start over when we do miss the mark.

I believe that the deeper insight here is that we suffer because we can’t let go of our old experiences, whether caused by us missing the mark or by others missing the mark and causing us pain. By hanging on to our old way of thinking, we suffer, we feel disconnected from our Source, we feel unhappy. What Jesus and Buddha discovered is that the suffering is caused not by the past action but by our current unwillingness to let it go and start fresh. The message of Easter is that Jesus’ taught us that our sins are forgiven, so we can start anew to live our lives.

Buddha taught that our suffering is caused by hanging on to things that have happened in the past. We can learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and then move on. When we let go of what has happened in the past, we can begin to live fully in this present moment. To me, this is the deep meaning of the resurrection and new life. The resurrection and new life that each of us can experience.

Imagine for a moment, right now, that you have the ability to forgive yourself of anything you’ve done wrong in the past, no matter what. And imagine that you have the ability to forgive anyone who has ever harmed you in the past. You have the ability to forgive. Rest for a moment in what that feels like. You are forgiven, they are forgiven. Everyone gets to start fresh.

There is a phrase that people often use when bad things happen. They say, “Everything happens for a reason”. Well that’s true, in the law of karma, that everything that happens is a result of everything that happened in the past. But so what? The revolutionary truth that both Buddha and Jesus taught, is that whatever happened up to this very moment, right now, is gone, done. We can’t rewrite what has happened in the past. But what we can do, is from this moment forward, be mindful, in Buddha’s terms, or be saved, in Jesus’ terms, we can LET GO OF OUR BAGGAGE and start our lives anew. We can have a different response to things that happen regardless of how we reacted in the past. We may not get it right every time going forward, but we all get as many do-overs as we need. That is the comfort of this Truth. So, the phrase “Everything happens for a reason” isn’t nearly as important as the fact that We each have the ability in the present moment to change our response to whatever happens. Good things happen to everyone and Bad things happen to everyone. We each have the ability to decide what we make of it. Through Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness and Buddha’s teaching of mindfulness, every one of us can come to this realization on our own and start to live our lives differently. It doesn’t mean that we’re never going to mess up again—it means that when we do, we can forgive ourselves more quickly and move on to a higher level of being and doing.

This simple teaching was so powerful that when many people heard it and understood it, they went forward and lived their lives differently. They lived their lives without the baggage of past sins, they lived their lives born anew in their connection to the divine Source. Jesus called it God, Buddha called it our innate Buddha nature, that source in each of us that is awakened to the truth of our being, that we are all part of the Divine Source. Let’s just sit for a moment in that Truth. You are an expression of the Divine Source. Source being the pure potential available to everyone. And through you, good things can be manifested IF YOU LOOK FOR THE GOOD.

The other important similarity between these two men’s teachings is that once we realize these truths, we learn to act more selflessly, to serve others. Jesus said, “Treat your neighbor as you treat yourself”. Buddha taught compassionate action as a way of experiencing this nirvana, this supreme happiness. So, try this out for yourself. Instead of focusing on your own happiness, try focusing on someone else’s. It’s a simple practice that can be wildly transformative, and Both Buddha and Jesus taught it. It doesn’t mean being a doormat, but it means truly recognizing the needs of others and being of service to them.

Getting out of our own head and troubles and awakening to the suffering of others and how to help them. When the town of Greenburg, Kansas, was completely destroyed by a tornado, they didn’t sit around forever and lament their loss. They cried and hugged each other, they helped their neighbor, and they rebuilt a town even better than the one that was lost. Each of us has the ability to do this in our own lives. We cry and hug each other and help our neighbors and move on. That is the essence of the forgiveness and renewal. It just takes practice.

So, on this wonderful Easter Sunday, we can remind ourselves that on this day, we are forgiven and we forgive, and that happiness is found within by choosing different responses going forward. And that we are all part of the Divine Source, the innate Buddha nature, that manifests through each of us. How will you go out today and use this incredible power that you have?

Buddha taught the following:

Like a caring mother

Holding and guarding the life

Of her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Hold yourself and others.

And from Walt Whitman:

I am larger and better than I thought.

I did not think I held so much goodness.