This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Cleansing the Doors of Perception: Distortions, Wisdom, & Play. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kim Allen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So I want to read just a few paragraphs as a way of sliding into our meditation. So if you’ve already started, you can just continue, or feel free to close your eyes. The invitation is if what I read is interesting to you, you could play with it in the meditation. It’s optional; it’s just a few paragraphs.
I once met a man who was raised on the Canadian prairies. We got to talking about the open space and how it had shaped his spirit. “When the wind stops,” he said, “it is so loud that everyone pauses to listen.” The thought intrigued me. How could the end of a sound be loud? But when I traveled to those prairies, I began to understand. For the people in the great prairies, the sound they hear, the music that underlies their lives, is the constant and ever-present howl of the wind. To them, it is no sound at all. When it is removed, the silence takes a different shape, and all are aware of it. All pause to hear.
We need to pay heed to the many silences in our lives. An empty room is alive with a different silence than a room where someone is hiding. The silence of a happy house echoes less darkly than the silence of a house of brooding anger. The silence of a winter morning is sharper than the silence of a summer dawn. The silence of a mountain pass is larger than the silence of a Forest Glen. These are not fantasies; they are subtle discriminations of the senses. Though all are the absence of sound, each silence has a character of its own. We can meditate listening to the shape of the silence that surrounds us. It focuses us on the thin line between what is there and what is not there. It opens our heart to the unseen and reminds us that the world is larger than the events that fill our days.
So we’re almost at the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere, and it’ll be happening in another five or six days. I always feel like that’s a natural time for going inward, being quiet. It feels like a time of pause to me. It’s like the pause at the end of a pendulum swing. That’s how the solstices and the equinoxes work: it gets slower and slower in terms of how the days are changing, and finally, you get to the shortest day, and then it’s going to swing back. The equinox is at the bottom, things are changing quickly, and then it swings to the other side. So it has that feeling of getting to that pause and change of direction.
Before the sit, those of you who were here at the beginning, I read a little passage that included listening to the shape of silence as an invitation. I’m not putting anyone on the spot, but I’m just curious if anyone tried it and if anyone wants to comment on anything that you noticed. Maybe you all just went immediately into Samadhi. Oh, here’s one, great.
“My experience was I went searching for silence, and I had a hard time hearing it. I heard a lot of sounds and movements and some coughs. And then I went inward, and I noticed some silence within myself, and I just paid close attention to that and listened.”
Nice. Yeah, that was my experience. Great. There’s something about when we go looking for it, the noise, if you will—that’s a virtual idea—but the noise of that going toward can obscure the silence. So I’m glad you touched it. That’s fantastic.
“Well, I always notice that the energy of meditating with the group is very different than meditating at my home. It’s a different kind of silence, isn’t it?”
Yeah, exactly. It just feels different here. Nice. Yeah, great. Good thing to notice.
“I thought I would be meditating on silence, but that ending sentence, which was something—I’m paraphrasing here—about the world being much larger than our individual circumstances, hit me really hard. And then it just sent my mind off onto contemplation of that, how big the world was and how my individual circumstances are so secondary to the bigger picture that’s going on. That’s how it hit me.”
Fantastic. That’s also great. I think that’s going to touch into some of what we discuss today.
The piece that I read mentions that listening to silence is a subtle sense experience. I would say the senses, there’s a way in which our senses open up when the mind is soft and takes a receptive posture, and then we have a refinement of the senses. That’s often something that we can experience in meditation. It’s one of the draws that people have to meditation, that feeling of the enlivening, the opening up of perception.
So I want to reflect a bit today about the way Dharma practice changes our perceptions. I’m using that word to mean both what we notice in the first place and also how we recognize what we’re experiencing. Both of those affect then how we relate to experience. So that’s the territory I’m trying to capture with that word, perception.
All of this has to do with the senses by which we receive experience, just our ordinary human senses as well as the mind. William Blake talked about cleansing the doors of perception. That was his poetic way of saying it. And the doors are these different senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and then also the mind door. We talk about that as a door in Dharma practice also.
Cleansing is an interesting word there. It’s kind of cleaning up our senses. They get sharper, they get brighter, less obscured, more purified in a sense. This happens naturally through Dharma practice, particularly through the practices of mindfulness, of cultivating awareness, and also Samadhi1, the gathering of the mind or the unifying of the mind, steadying the mind.
I know very well that sometimes it does not feel so refined. We don’t feel very cleansed. The mind can be busy or reactive or tired or whatever. But we can get some encouragement about that from the suttas2. The Buddha is quoted as saying, “The mind is luminous, but it is obscured by visiting defilements.” That word defilements is referring to things like reactivity, strong views that come in, patterns of thought, and actions that we fall into. These are visitors. They’re mentioned as visiting, which is a nice way to think about it. As we practice, I think we do experience that sometimes we have these visitors in us, and sometimes the mind doesn’t have so many. The weather can be a little clearer inside.
So the doors of perception can seem fresh and bright, and practice gives us the clarity to start noticing the difference between those states. We notice the obscuring patterns that come in. Sometimes we actually see them rather than just being lost in them. It doesn’t mean they end; they seem to go on for quite a while. But we have a greater and greater ability to see when they’re there and also appreciate when they’re not there. That becomes a useful distinction that we make in practice.
As we look carefully at these patterns that come in, we’re able to see that there are not only things that—this obscuration is the word used—not only things that darken, like literally kind of blocking, but they also can have a distorting effect. So there’s a way we’re looking through a darkened lens, in a sense, so the shape has changed in addition to there not being as much clarity.
As a concrete example, we might have a distorted idea that our neighbor is unfriendly because we’ve never seen them smiling. So we create this distortion, “Oh, they must be an unfriendly, dour kind of person.” But of course, if we then treat them that way, they’re going to be less motivated to smile at us, right? So we’ve kind of—there’s an unhealthy feedback loop that can be created by the distortions we have in our mind, where we distort something by not seeing it clearly, and then that very distortion prevents us from seeing what might correct that distortion. It becomes self-reinforcing. I think this is well known in psychology, but it’s also described in Buddhist practice. The distortion is a reaction in and of itself, and it creates more reactivity, and all of that is a lot of suffering for us.
So we can have these distorted perceptions, but then through practice, we can have this clarification, this cleansing of the doors of perception, if you will. And so then there’s a feeling as we do this process, we can start to feel, “Oh yeah, what practice is doing is kind of aligning or orienting or straightening out.” The distortion is getting corrected through practice. I’m curious if that language resonates for anyone. Do you have a sense through practice that things may feel less distorted sometimes? Yeah, I see some nods. And then there’s less struggle. When we’re seeing more clearly, even if what we’re seeing clearly isn’t that pleasant, there’s somehow a feeling like we can deal with it when we know we’re seeing it clearly.
I didn’t just make up this image, by the way, about distortion. The Buddha talked in the texts about distortions of perception. They’re called vipallasa3 in Pali4: distortions of perception. Ways that the mind warps experience into something that does not reflect reality. They start out as simply mistaking what we’re seeing, but then this feedback loop that I talked about continues through repetition, and these distortions can actually harden into fixed views that can create pretty big limitations on our life.
But then the Buddha also talked about what are called universal qualities. Sometimes they’re called characteristics, but let’s say universal qualities of experience that can be seen when the mind is not obscured. It’s interesting that the three universal qualities, though, were originally called the three perceptions. It’s the same term, as far as I know. I hear that from a reliable scholarly source. So they were originally called the three perceptions. These are the three aspects of experience that we would naturally recognize or regard when the mind is clear and wise and open, but we miss them if we’re looking through the distorted lens.
So the three perceptions that are part of Dharma wisdom and then these distortions of perception, interestingly, those two lists match up quite nicely. I want to draw that parallel today and then talk a little bit about how we would move past some of these distortions. How would we undistort our mind?
Just to name them up front, the first characteristic or wise perception is the experience of things being impermanent or inconstant. That’s wisdom to see that. And then the first distortion of perception is that we regard what is impermanent as permanent. The Buddha names that as the first vipallasa. So you see the connection there.
The second of these three universal qualities is that experience is unsatisfactory. Conditioned experience can’t be ultimately satisfying. And the second distortion of perception is that we regard what is unsatisfying as satisfying.
And then the third characteristic is that experience is not-self. That one’s a hard one to talk about; we won’t completely get through that one today. And then the third distortion that’s named is that we regard what is not-self as self. So you see the connection there.
It turns out that the correcting of these distortions can come about in a number of different ways. One of them is pretty straightforward: it’s to pay more attention, to deliberately pay attention to experience in terms of these three wise perceptions, if you will. We can actually practice that way, even though they will come about naturally through practice, so we don’t need to try too hard at it. But if we’re really feeling distorted, we can bring in a conscious reflection of one of these three wise ones.
A second way is by deliberately expanding how we see the world and our place in it. A little bit like that listening to the shape of silence, we can deliberately engage broader perspectives so that we don’t get stuck in a smaller, distorted one. Does that make sense? Kind of like deliberately open up the lens a little bit, like was named at the end of the piece where I said that we see that the world is much bigger than our particular little issues. That’s a deliberate perspective we can bring in that can be very liberating.
So we’re going to talk about both of these, and maybe sometimes they’re kind of creative, like listening to the shape of silence. I understand that’s kind of, you know, can we really take that literally? And yet, if you just try to engage with that, something happens. A couple of you named that there is something that happens to engage with an instruction like that. So sometimes we can be creative to get our mind out of these distortions.
What I’m saying overall is that how we see things is something that we can have some impact on through our spiritual practice. I don’t think we have complete control over that, but we can affect it, we can influence it through practice. And that’s really wise, actually, to do that.
So I want to just talk a little bit about each of these three wise perspectives or wise perceptions, if you will, and the corresponding distortion that goes with them. All of these, by the way, each of these three has several different facets and several different levels that we’ll understand them at. There can be an immediate level, and then it gets deeper and deeper as we keep practicing. I can say that they can be unfolded for a whole lifetime of practice. So what I’m just going to do is try to aim to hit maybe a couple different aspects of each one, but it won’t be a complete unfolding because they’re so big.
The first one I mentioned, the first of the universal qualities, is that things are impermanent. They change. In Pali, we call it Anicca5, or maybe inconstancy is a better word. And the distortion is that we see what is actually impermanent as permanent. This includes change, inconstancy, fluctuation. The Buddha talked also in terms of arising and passing. He says, “Notice things arising, notice them passing.” That’s all part of pointing to this. It’s probably hard to overemphasize how important seeing change is in Buddhism. But in some ways, what’s so special about that? I don’t think anybody is surprised to hear that things are changing. It could be like, “Okay, come on, let’s get on to something a little deeper.”
But it’s worth noticing. There’s a verse in the Dhammapada6 that says, “Better than a hundred years lived without seeing the arising and passing of things is one day lived seeing their arising and passing.” So the Buddha is pretty strong in terms of how important it is or how meaningful, valuable it is to see this. And if we start reflecting on it, we realize that despite it being so obvious, there are ways in which we don’t see it. There are ways in which we are entertaining the distortion that things are permanent when they’re actually impermanent.
As a lightweight example, one time I marked an item of clothing that I wanted to distinguish with a permanent pen. I put a little mark on it, and then after many months of using it and washing it, the mark was almost gone. And I actually had a moment where I said, “How can that be? I used a permanent pen!” [Laughter] Okay, come on, Kim, everything is impermanent, we know that. So even though the pen says “permanent” on it, it’s not really permanent, just so you know.
More generally, we do get shocked, right, when things end or break or go away or change. We can be irritated that it suddenly starts raining after it was sunny. Or sometimes it’s a delightful surprise that something changes. We think, “Oh, this is going to be here forever,” and then suddenly it goes away. We get an email the next day saying, “Oh, you know, I changed my mind about such and such.” “Oh, wow.” So things can change in many different directions. But often we feel that something has gone wrong when our car changes, or our house, or our relationship changes in some way. The Buddha pointed right at this when he talked about being aware of death. We see other people dying, but we don’t think it’s really going to happen to us. We have a memorial this afternoon. Maybe we could use that as a moment to reflect that there will be a time when we’re not sitting in this room either.
Another verse from the Dhammapada: “Death sweeps away the person obsessed with gathering flowers, as a great flood sweeps away a sleeping village.” I used to volunteer at a hospice, and that was really interesting. I would sit with people who were dying. It was a very beautiful practice, but I did occasionally meet someone who was well into their 90s who was a little bit outraged that they were dying. They couldn’t quite believe it. “Really, it’s almost over?” There’s something nice about that, to carry life energy all the way to the last moment, and yet it was interesting that there was sometimes clinging to permanence there.
When we see this distortion that things can last forever, there is suffering for us. I get it. It’s understandable. I think that in a human life, we want stability. So I’m not dismissing this. This is a serious understanding to take on, this idea of things really being impermanent. At the top level, of course things change, but really, everything being impermanent, that’s actually pretty deep. We want stability, we want steadiness, we want things to be ongoing. We work to set things up so that they will last, and that’s wise and skillful to do in our life. It would be really hard if we didn’t try to do things like that, but it’s not realistic to expect of ordinary things that they will comply with that forever. When we see with the distortion that things can last forever, we suffer because it doesn’t align with reality. So there’s some subtlety there.
That maybe paves the way for us to look at the second characteristic, which has even more subtlety to it, and that is that experiences are not reliable or not satisfactory ultimately. More specifically, they’re not reliably pleasing or harmonious for us, are they? This is the quality of unsatisfactoriness or stress or struggle. It’s all captured in a word called Dukkha7, which is often translated as suffering, not the best translation. When it’s put forth as a quality of experience, we can understand it immediately thinking about this quality of impermanence. If everything is changing, then of course it’s going to be unreliable in the long run. That’s just another way of saying the same thing.
The verse I read from the Dhammapada talked about being obsessed with gathering flowers. That’s the suffering that can come from just chasing after momentary or impermanent pleasures. We can spend a life obsessed with trying to always have it pleasant every moment. And that’s a lot of work. It’s not a good strategy for happiness. We can do okay. In the same way that we can set things up to last for a while, we can also do okay having this pleasant thing, that pleasant thing. And to some degree, okay, we want to take care of ourselves, nourish ourselves. But it’s also unrealistic to expect that that will always work.
Andrew Olendzki says, “Conventional strategies for human happiness entail various ways of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. The problem is that pleasure is not ultimately sustainable, and pain is not avoidable.” Does anyone really disagree with those two? “The shortcoming of our usual approaches is that they treat the symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes of the predicament, which is that unsatisfactoriness is part of the fabric of experience.”
Just to be clear, life is unsatisfactory when it’s lived in this ordinary mode of spending all our energy maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. If we do that, you may have noticed, we feel a constant sense of lack and a constant sense of being unfulfilled or needing something, or having the stress that this pleasure is going to end, or that it ends sooner than we thought it would, and then we have to get another one. So there’s a sort of a constant doing that has to happen when we’re engaging with that conventional way.
Part of the issue is that we’re seeking ongoing happiness, and I would say that maybe another aspect is that we’re seeking what I like to call resolution, which means the sense of things being wrapped up, integrated, the musical chord resolved, the loose ends are gone, the hanging questions are answered. It’s all tied up neatly, and we got it, and we’re done. Anybody feel driven by that sense? And then you get to the end of the day, and there are still five things left that you didn’t get to today, but “I’m going to get to them tomorrow, and then I’m going to feel fulfilled and complete.”
This sense of resolution is part of this Dukkha characteristic. It’s not exactly suffering, right? It’s more subtle than that. It’s not satisfying, and it can’t be, because the world can’t do that. That’s another distortion that we have, is that we think we should be able to get it all together and keep it that way. But that’s not in line with reality. There are going to be loose ends. You’re going to be lying on your deathbed, and there’s going to be loose ends. So the world is constantly disappointing and frustrating if we don’t understand the quality of Dukkha.
That’s a little more subtle, but then it paves the way for the third characteristic, the most subtle perhaps, of not-self. Experience is not defining or referring to an objectively existing self. It is Anatta8, not-self. And the distortion is that we see what is not-self as self, and that also causes problems for us. There are so many different aspects of this: taking things as “me” and “mine,” getting identified with them. It’s easy to see that in a number of cases, like with our body or with our views, we take those to define us.
But in the end, there’s also a quality that I’ll focus on today, kind of an issue of control, a feeling of control. Who’s in charge here, really? And can I get it all together and keep it that way? Who’s the “I” who’s trying to do that? The Anattalakkhana Sutta9, the characteristic of not-self, says it is not possible to have it of form, “Let my form be thus, let my form not be thus.” It says specifically the characteristic of not-self is about the fact that we’re not in control. Are you in control of your body completely? No.
We can see this in a number of very obvious ways. Could you make yourself three inches taller without putting on high heels? No. Could you make yourself 10 years younger? Wouldn’t you like that? No, you can’t do that. Yes, you would, but no, we can’t do that. So it’s easy enough to see that we don’t have total control of the body, and it’s continuing to age and so forth. And that doesn’t mean, just like the other characteristics, it doesn’t mean there isn’t something there that we work on. Yeah, we do, of course, try to have some integrity in what we do, and we try to take care of our body even though it’s not really ours and it’s going off the deep end anyway. But we do our best. And there’s not that there’s no influence. Meditation and Dharma training are definitely ways that we influence all of these things. But if we try to confine that to one thing that “me” as an agent can do, it’s really not going to work. It’s going to be a lot of Dukkha. It’s a mistaking, a distortion of how things actually are.
We can see that these habits that we call self, or this body that we call self, really is subject to these other characteristics. It’s impermanent, it’s not satisfactory, and it’s not really something that we’re in control of. This gets pretty deep, and it’s understandable. Again, I’m going to extend the “of course.” Of course we want things to be stable. Of course we want things to be happy and satisfying. Of course we want to know who we are, know who other people are, and know how we can navigate all of that. It would be so nice if there was actually a rule book that I could follow where all my relationships would go smoothly.
So don’t feel bad that you have these distortions. I think they’re quite reasonable, and yet they’re not in alignment quite with how the world is, and that’s the issue for us. That’s the predicament we find ourselves in. We want stability rather than Anicca. We want resolution and ease rather than Dukkha. And we want control and an identifiable self rather than Anatta. And yet, that is a lot of where our struggle comes from in life, isn’t it? Around those three areas.
One practice we can do, Buddhism tells us that if we shift toward more often acknowledging these three universal qualities, we will shift ourselves into a relationship with experience that is more harmonious, that is less struggle. It’s not going to take away all those things that we’re trying to have. It will provide more reliable forms of them. We will find something that is more reliable inside, more stable, more happy. I’d almost say the more control part, but we’ll find something inside that is more reliable than trying to make external reality or even our internal thoughts and moods match up with these things that it doesn’t match up with. So we can train ourselves to see more accurately, and we will find if we do it, if you have enough faith to give it a try, you’ll find that it helps. I see a bunch of people here who have practiced for a long time with IMC, and I think we know that over time, it’s a little surprising, amazing, that actually if we engage with the idea that things are totally impermanent, that they’re not really ultimately satisfying, and that there isn’t really a self that they refer to, things get more useful over time. Why? Because it’s more in line with reality.
Then I said earlier that we would also talk about a second way to help the mind become less distorted, and that is to encourage loosening up of these visiting obscurations that we have by playing a little bit in the realm of perception, playing a little bit with our perspectives. We can do that. It’s not just like any wild fantasy we can imagine is necessarily liberating, but if we understand these three universal qualities, we can bring in imaginations or different perspectives that are somewhat liberating.
There are actually very simple possibilities for this. Maybe I’ll name those first. Let’s say that you’re going to a holiday party or a family gathering sometime in the next few weeks, and you find yourself often subject to limiting experiences when you’re in these situations. It can be that we could just bring in an alternate perspective that might be somewhat freeing. For example, we could, instead of saying, “Oh, here are these people, and they’re this and that, and I get caught in these patterns,” how about the idea that everyone is doing the best that they can? What if you just brought that into the mind before you went in and maybe reminded yourself periodically as you went through the experience? That’s a helpful perspective. It’s a freeing perspective.
How about the perspective, “How can I help? How could I help here?” instead of, “Oh, you know, I have to endure this.” How could I help here? Here’s one that I use: “What would I have to let go of to make this easier?” Do you find yourself caught in something that’s unpleasant or difficult? “What would I have to let go of to make this easier?” It brings it right here.
Then I’m also going to offer something, a meditative engagement with a couple of perspectives, a little bit like that listening to the sound of silence at the beginning. I want to invite you into some very large, very different perspectives around the realm of time. We’re not really thinking about them. Maybe just as I go through this, you might rest in the feeling of what it’s like to change our perspective of the flow of time.
One thing that burdens us about time is that we often live in what I call personal time and historical time. Those are two different, very common, very conventional perspectives. One is the flow of our everyday: “I have to do this and that between now and when I go to bed tonight,” or “It’s on my calendar for tomorrow.” Personal time. Then there’s historical time: the flows of months and years and decades, how things have gone during my lifetime, basically where our society is and where it’s going. These are very burdensome dimensions of time because… I don’t need to say why, we all know.
But then we can take a much longer perspective sometimes. That’s really helpful. Or a much shorter perspective. So we’ll do both. In the realm of the long, I want to invite you to a perspective called the Cosmic Calendar. It might be that the universe is beginningless, like the Buddhist texts say, I don’t know. But at least there is a limit to how far back we can see. So let’s say we go back that far. Let’s imagine taking all of known time and compressing it into one year. The beginning of the universe was at midnight on January 1st, and it goes all the way up, and this present moment that we’re all sharing right now is midnight on December 31st. What does that year look like?
I’ll give you some little highlights of the year. The Earth formed in the first week of September. Life began later in September, but there wasn’t multicellular life until December 5th. The first dinosaurs appeared on December 25th, and that big meteor extinction that killed them happened early on December 30th. Humans appeared in Africa on December 31st at about 10:30 p.m. The Buddha lived six seconds before midnight. And the last 400 years of human history occupy less than the last second of the year.
Don’t think about that. Just feel into the vastness of cosmic time. Now, what was that that you were worried about? Just let the mind open to this sweep of the evolving universe that’s so much bigger than our life. And it’s breathtaking. It’s not at all meant to say that our life doesn’t matter, but it’s meant to take maybe some of the gripping, the stickiness out of it.
And then the other way is really interesting also. Instead of the vast, we can plummet into this very moment, and we can bring ourselves to the richness of everything that’s happening right now. I can’t even name how many sense impressions actually come into the sense doors every moment. There are so many of them that the brain has to filter them by a huge factor, like millions or billions, in order that we can have the experience we’re having now. So much has to be cut out. It’s kind of there. If you just look around, you’ll realize that you are vaguely aware of the shape of this room. It’s coming in, and if it were to change, you would notice, but it’s not actively coming into your experience in this moment. There are layered and vivid impressions of light, of sound, of motion washing over our senses all the time. Usually, people can only get to opening up to that on a retreat experience where a lot of things have been removed so that we have a more opening of the doors of perception. But nonetheless, if we can open to that and have an ongoing flow of the immediacy of all of these sense impressions, again, there’s no room for a self to form there.
These perspectives I’ve offered are validations or ways of touching in with this third characteristic of not-self. And we can see in all of these Anicca, Dukkha (not ultimate resolution, right?), and Anatta (not-self, no room for a self there). So all of these different ways I’ve talked about of experiencing time—the cosmic, the historical, the personal, the immediate—they’re all just different perspectives, actually. One is not better than the other. One is not the ultimate. But it’s really nice if the mind can be flexible about being able to touch into each of those as needed.
So play around a bit and see if that doesn’t loosen up some of these distorted perceptions we can have. There’s some verses called “Mindfulness” by Ajahn Chah10, one of the great teachers of the Thai Forest tradition of the last century. He said:
“Try to be mindful and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.”
This ability to shift perspectives when needed and to reduce the distortion that we have in our ordinary, conventional way of seeing things is part of what we do through practice. We don’t have to do it; it’ll be done. It’s part of what is done through practice. I use a passive voice there. So indeed, our doors of perception can become more cleansed, can become more in line with what’s actually happening. I need a certain distortion on these because my eyes are a little distorted, but I sometimes take them off figuratively to have a sense of not looking without the lenses.
Here we are at the time of the solstice, a time part of that larger sense of time of the earth tilting on its axis, moving around the sun that causes these changes. So maybe taking a pause to go inward and sense where the mind is, listen to the silence, consider how you’re relating to your life. Could there be a shift that includes some of the wisdom we’ve talked about? Because I know it’s there in all of us. It’s just a little change in how we see.
So I wonder if there are any questions or comments. We’re right near the end.
“Yeah, the question is, you were just reading Ajahn Chah, and he was saying at the end, something like, ‘and there you will be,’ or ‘you.’ So it brings up, wait a minute, we were just talking about no-self. So could you help reconcile some of that seeming paradox?”
Uh-huh. Yeah, so he does. He says, “You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still.” So who does that refer to? Again, I think this is a flexibility of perspective. The question is, can we use the word “you” or “I” or “me” and yet know that it doesn’t refer to exactly one definable entity? The Buddha used the word “I” all the time because he was talking with people, and I think that’s the same for Ajahn Chah.
And so we can, a little bit like, what does it mean to listen to the shape of silence? First of all, how do we listen to silence, and what does it mean to have a shape? That’s not quite literal, and yet if we offer our mind that idea, “Hmm, listen to the shape of silence,” maybe nothing comes, but at least for me, sometimes there’s a response to that somehow. And so in the same way, I think it’s okay to say “you” and yet know that “you” could be a lot of different things. Okay, great.
All right, thanks everyone.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or a collected, unified mind. ↩
Suttas: Discourses or sermons of the Buddha. The original transcript said ‘sutas’. ↩
Vipallasa: A Pali term for “distortion,” “perversion,” or “derangement” of perception, thought, or view. ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the scriptural language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence” or “inconstancy,” one of the three universal characteristics of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. The original transcript said ‘dapada’. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism and the first of the Four Noble Truths. The original transcript said ‘Dua’. ↩
Anatta: A Pali word for “not-self” or “non-self,” the doctrine that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in living beings. The original transcript said ‘anata’. ↩
Anattalakkhana Sutta: The Buddha’s second discourse, which deals with the characteristic of not-self. The original transcript said ‘anat luta’. ↩
Ajahn Chah: (1918–1992) A highly influential Thai Buddhist monk and teacher of the Thai Forest Tradition. The original transcript said ‘aan cha’. ↩