This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video 12 Conditions for New Beauty - Francisco Morillo Gable. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Francisco Morillo Gable at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
I thought we would start with a slightly guided sit and then move into a little discussion. So find your comfortable posture, a comfortable way to just land in the moment here, wherever you’re touching. Whatever brings rest, whatever brings some ease, coming to this moment. Feeling that sense of aliveness that can come when we just allow a little bit of being, of stillness, just arriving.
And if you wish, receiving that little relaxation or that nice feeling that comes when there’s an exhale and it ends. And the muscles and the bones maybe respond indirectly by just giving you a sense of, “Ah, this is nice. This is comfortable.”
And along with this comfort, there may be all sorts of other activities of the mind, of the body, and they can coexist. They can be here as well. But for just these few moments, giving a little weight to that feeling of, “Ah, this is nice,” just being here in community now. Letting the breath do what it does on its own.
And when we’re here sitting together, breathing together, in silence together for the most part, it’s like we participate in something that’s going on that’s all about a sense of balance, a sense of calm. The body breathing, we participate in this amazing miracle of the body just breathing. We don’t have to do so much to participate in the body breathing. We just have to sense, enjoy that little feeling that comes when the fresh air enters, and we can let go into that release that happens with the exhale. For just a few minutes here, we participate in this miracle of life, or we can. It’s an invitation, all of this.
This way to participate in your breathing is a way of being a caretaker for your inner life. It’s a very sacred process to take care inside of what’s going on inside, how it is, what needs care, what needs attention. Caring with just a simple noticing of, “Oh, this is so right now.” And if we do that while we’re resting and participating in the broad, relaxed rhythm of life, of breathing, it’s like that’s the context, the bigger context around what we may notice in terms of thinking, in terms of emotions, body things. There’s a big context all the way around and beyond, within, that offers a sort of caretaking.
The sounds that come, people still arriving, it’s just like us arriving again with breathing, easing, sensing, sitting, calming, and holding it all.
Participating in what’s here, allowing what’s here to be here, taking it in carefully, caringly, sweetly. Every sound sensation comes as a contact. It appears and it moves, changes, and fades away. Every touch sensation has that first moment when it’s sensed. Every breath, every scent that comes is also touched. Sight objects come and they move, and things come in the mind the same way. They first appear. There can be some involvement with them or not. There could be so much resting, relaxing context, maybe even sweetness of the silence, of sharing this silence together here in community, that whatever comes, whatever sensation at the level of those senses comes and exists in that big context that we’re participating in, that we’re breathing with.
Very respectfully, very tenderly, offering a kind gaze to whatever arises.
And how we make contact with what arises, how we make contact with what comes, how we tend in our attention makes a big difference. We can care for it, be a caretaker from a very calm place that we can participate inside in our breathing, if it’s available. We can give a lot of room to whatever arises. Our mindfulness is very flexible. Mindfulness can look at things from very far away if that’s what’s best, if that’s what’s most caring. Or mindfulness could get very close. How can you see and sense in a way that allows you to participate in the peaceful, broad context of being here, just being here with all this space and all this calm?
Maybe even enjoying, enjoying what’s good here, breathing together, being together. It can be even stabilizing, a stabilizing stillness. It can be even a little pleasurable to show us how, to help us see how we attend to things, how we notice.
Good morning again and welcome to IMC. I know Jill has an announcement, I believe.
Jill: Good morning. My name is Jill, and I sometimes help make sure the potlucks are pulled together on the last Sunday of the month. So everyone is welcome to join, whether you have brought something to share or not. And the only thing we need to do is when our talk is finished today, you’d give us a little bit of time to pull things together in the kitchen before you go right out there. And then we’ll gather in a circle and say a few words about our gathering today before we eat. So welcome all, and our teacher is Francisco Gable.
Francisco: Thank you. Welcome back, Francisco. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. Thank you for meditating together.
So today, I thought I would talk a little bit about 12 new ways that we might be able to look at ourselves, see ourselves, on the cusp of a group of 12 new months. That’s always used to feel—I don’t really think of it this way, but it used to feel like a new beginning. And it’s kind of a new beginning time, although here in Buddhism, things are always in a beginning since it’s beginningless time, and endings are included in that.
But these 12 ways come from a list called the liberative dependent arising. And it’s a list that allows us to see ourselves. So they’re about you. These are 12 ways that are about you, ways that we could uncover for ourselves. I’m going to talk about these conditions, these 12 conditions, and I’m going to talk about them in a way that I’m going to be looking at another list of 12 things. Don’t worry, I’m not going to just be listing things, and you don’t have to think of the 12 and the other 12. This is just to give you the little framework of what I’m going to be looking at.
These 12 conditions are considered beautiful conditions because they’re different from the conditions that are looked at that cause suffering. These are conditions that lead to liberation and knowledge of liberation. And the other list leads to, well, sorrow, lamentation, pain, anguish, and Dukkha1. So not so happy. But that list is very important, the list of dependent arising, because the list allows us to deconstruct and take apart all the different ways that human beings suffer and create suffering and get stuck in loops of suffering, spinnings of suffering. So they’re very important because suffering is endemic to human being, but it’s not a given. It’s not a given at all.
The Buddha, in his enlightenment, there was a small discourse that’s considered to be a very old discourse called “Quarrels and Disputes” in this little collection called “The Book of Eights.” And in it, he talked about the quarrels and disputes that he saw everywhere in society and all the sorrow and lamentation all around him. Everywhere he looked, there was an opportunity to see anguish and pain. And this is very humanizing for me, how the Buddha looked at that and saw the opportunity to do something about it by starting first of all with what sounds like a dramatic expression, but pulling the arrow out of his own heart. And pulling the arrow out of his own heart allowed him to have health, ultimate health, health from suffering. And this is the view that he took out to the world. He saw enlightenment as an opportunity to do this deep healing work. There might be some of the most sacred work that we do, this caretaking for our inner lives. And that instead of some grandiose enlightenment that may come—and that comes in a certain way—but this path points to this liberation that’s maybe better to call a maturation. Sometimes liberation can be approached in a little magical thinking kind of a way, how people go about liberation. And this instead is very here in this body, in this mind, for this human being, for our communities, for our broader communities, and for the whole world.
So that’s really the intention of looking at conditions and creating conditions that lead to this maturation, to this liberation. And we were given these things, we have these teachings. I find it’s glorious to me that we have these teachings that show us how we can create conditions that lead to happiness, joy, deep states of bliss, Samadhi2, profound ways of seeing deeply inside of ourselves, of this mind, to learn how this mind can be absolutely free of all the things that lead to that path of anguish.
The first conditions are especially exciting to talk about here at this point, at this end of the year, as we’re looking at a new year, these darkest of days here in the north—not in the south where some of our friends are. But as we look to start a new perhaps, and we start a new all the time, so it’s not just the new year. We start a new all the time in practice. Every sit, every time we connect to the breath is a new beginning. In the Buddhist teachings, the early Buddhist teachings that I base my thoughts on for this talk.
So the list goes like this, the liberative dependent arising: it starts with having a good look at Dukkha, what I’ve been talking about, the pain, the unsatisfactoriness of life. And then from there, we are invited to create these next necessary conditions. And we can do so by looking at pain and suffering. That’s what’s really interesting to me, that if we stop and really take a look and a caring understanding of what causes our suffering, these wholesome, beneficial, good, beautiful conditions arise. That’s the interaction of all these teachings.
So it starts with Dukkha, then we move to the condition of Faith, then Gladness, then Joy, then Tranquility, then Happiness, then Concentration or Samadhi. So that’s called the gladness pentad. It’s all about being glad, gladdening the mind and the being that then allows the remainder conditions to where insight really begins to go forth toward liberation. The next condition is Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Are. Then there’s a condition of Disenchantment—that’s not the greatest translation for what really happens there. Then Dispassion, then Liberation, and then Knowledge of Liberation.
So this Dukkha that I’ve been talking about, that can be translated in so many ways as unsatisfactoriness, as pain, dread, whatever really hurts from human existence. So this gladness pentad is telling us, “Hey, if you stop and look, if you just pause, if you really give yourself the time to see this Dukkha, see what is it that’s causing Dukkha for you here and now?” Who is the little lawyer of the mind who’s in control that’s doing this, that’s behind this Dukkha? If we stop and look at that sincerely, we come to faith.
And faith is, in early Buddhism, not seen as a belief system to believe something, to trust, but it’s more about not believing. It’s about no longer believing in that mud, that mucky mud of pain. Because one of the ways that Dukkha works is that it reflects our challenges just back to us as us. We are our challenge. We are that suffering. So faith is not believing that anymore, not using that as a reflection. And it’s called faith; it also can be seen as confidence because it gives a purpose and a direction. “Oh, there is another way. There is something else other than being identified with my suffering, identified with all the streams that lead to those things that are really stressful, are really difficult for human beings.”
So faith is a joyful condition. And these are conditions that we can foster, we can adopt them, we can know them and create conditions to let them be in place. The condition for faith to arise is to simply notice there is suffering here. Who is suffering? What is the suffering? And right there, we’re walking the path. We’re walking the path and we have a purpose and a direction. And we can take this path, and that already begins to liven things up because we’re out of that mud. It’s not the only way to just be reflecting back all the streams of everything that is moving through the daily mind, the non-contemplative mind. These are contemplative conditions, not worldly in a way. So moving out of the stream of the worldly things, which could be called the karmic stream, moving into the Dharma stream, the stream of the teachings or the beautiful karma, which is what the Dharma is called in the ancient teachings.
So faith, once we have this purpose, this direction, this stance, immediately can bring on gladness. Gladness is this kind of biological imperative that happens once you say, “Okay, I’m going to do a little house cleaning here. I’m not going to really believe that. I’m not really going to just be all of that which is leading to suffering, whatever that may be.” And we stop believing the resentments, the cynicisms, the anxiety, all the attitudes that are not really helping, the cyclical things that keep cycling through the mind. So there’s gladness because suddenly there is a standing with something else. And it’s like a biological imperative when we turn to looking inside and doing something about this. There’s this biological imperative, and now we’re in the Dharma stream. And this is the beginning of this gladness pentad that’s moving toward greater, greater, greater joy, greater, greater stillness, greater, greater stabilizing of mind, stabilizing stillness of concentration.
And so that condition of gladness can progress. The more we are sincere with what’s there, with what keeps coming up, the more sincerity we have with that, we begin to look at the fuel of those emotions that aren’t working, those emotions that kind of keep us trapped in more of the same emotions, in more of the same reactive circles. There’s a fuel there that’s fueling that. The tradition calls that clinging. There’s a fuel behind that fire that burns in the anger, in the fear. And we ask, “What is that fuel?” We can ask, “What is that fuel?” And that puts us on the path to joy, believe it or not, because our joy is trapped a lot by this other fire, the fire of the vehement emotions. Because joy has another fire. The more joy we have, we experience that fire of joy. The fire of joy gives light. It doesn’t burn us. It doesn’t burn us into a burned wood piece. The fire of joy brings light to see, to understand, to know better, to know more, to take in more of the goodness that is arising once we’re in these wholesome contemplative conditions. But it starts with that sincere look. What is that that’s causing that fuel in me to be sad, to be worried, to be upset, to be confused, to be buried in this feeling? Because if we ask, if we just stop and ask, we’re walking the path. It takes a sincere look, a supported look. We have to be careful about how we do this, of course. We’re doing this in the context of contemplation. We’re doing this in a context to feel reassured that we’re on this big path, we’re on this ancient path. We’re supported by many things in each moment when we participate in the moment with the intention of participating in the moment, because we have to be respectful of our inner life, of what hurts, of who’s hurt, in order to come to this condition of joy.
So joy is this light arising, very effervescent possibility that’s here now, can be here now in your body, in your being somewhere. And the more we keep cleaning the house, keep working on what’s calling our attention, if we’re listening to what’s calling our attention, then the next condition is tranquility. And tranquility is like a landing on dry ground. We’ve now landed. If you visualize gladness as—if you’ll allow me a little maybe silly metaphor—as if you’re going to a stream to take a dip in on a very hot day, maybe one of these streams in Santa Cruz by our retreat center, Insight Retreat Center. And you know you’re going to the stream with your friend or with family, and so you become glad. You’re going there, you’re looking forward to this. There’s a gladness, there’s this biological imperative that happens that takes you there and keeps you going to the destination. And then you see your stream, and then you walk down to the stream and you jump into the stream. And that joy at being refreshed, at feeling that aliveness that comes when we jump into a stream when we’re warm and we’re looking forward to a little swim and a dip, that feeling, that happiness, that full body sensation, that’s how the condition of joy manifests. And then when we step out of the stream because we’ve done our swim and we sit on the bank and we’re on dry ground, then we are experiencing tranquility, the condition of tranquility.
So tranquility is very stabilizing, very much the landing of all the rising of the energy of joy and gladness, and then landing to see and to know tranquility. And tranquility can offer something really wonderful to what was that fuel. With tranquility, we can see into the craving that was behind that clinging, that grasping. Tranquility allows us to see into that grasping and ask and know about what is pulling me, what is coming together in me to form that way of being. So the visibility is increasing to see further into how is it that this grasping is forming, how is it that this compulsion is forming. So it’s very beneficial to have tranquility to be able to take in what’s there, because it’s really amazing, this quality that human beings have. It’s almost like, as I heard this teacher say once, that which needs our attention, that which would benefit from our attention, if we pause and are tranquil, is looking right back at us. Right back. And we can choose to engage with it or not. We have a lot of choices. That’s what this practice is all about: choosing, choosing to look, how to look, to look with tranquil eyes, spacious eyes that give a lot of room to what’s there. Because many things, we got to be a little careful. Not everything needs us to go right into it. We want to be respectful of our inner life and caring of our inner life, caring of this call of attention. It’s a call to attention that we can look at with tranquility so that it calms the craving, continues that settling process that allows a pleasurable feeling, a wholesome contemplative pleasurable feeling that reassures us a lot, because we need reassurance in order to be able to take a good close look at things. We’re not alone. This is not a solitary path. We’re very reassured with the conditions in place that offer that.
So from tranquility, that dry ground, finally we move to happiness. Isn’t that nice? Gladness, joy, tranquility, and happiness. So we’re looking at Dukkha through these eyes, with this support. It’s not about suffering at all, this path. This is a joyful path. This is a very, very, very joyful path. This is a very happy path. It is telling us, these conditions, that it is happy to do this. It is happy to be sincere with myself about what do I need. It is good because there’s this feedback system that keeps letting us know that this is good. With these conditions, we see that very clearly. There is happiness available after this contact with the forces of clinging, the forces of becoming, the forced becoming, the highly attached becoming, the clinging. There’s a release of our life force that’s coming to the fore with all of this.
And then we have happiness. And happiness, in contrast to joy—I always used to get confused by these things, like what is joy and what is happiness? They all sound like the same thing. You look in the dictionary and sometimes they refer to each other tautologically. Happiness is, if joy was this fully embodied sensation of exuberance and connection with the water and the whole body vibrating alive, happiness is a more settled, embodied feeling. Happiness is actually available all the time because our body is in a state of well-being if it’s breathing and if it’s not too sick. But even if it’s sick—and I have been very, very sick in my life for about 20 years with pretty severe conditions—I learned through those illnesses that there is a lot of well-being in the body as long as the body is breathing and processing itself in its natural way. The body is full of well-being. So that well-being is available to us, and it becomes more clear if we turn and cultivate this condition for ourselves.
So there’s happiness, and then happiness moves into the really sweet state of Samadhi, of concentration. Because if we’re happy, we’re watching, we can begin to watch what takes us out of this happiness very clearly. And we can see the forces of unpleasantness that are always a part of experience, because our mind is always categorizing things as pleasant and unpleasant. And in happiness, we have now landed, we’re on the dry ground, and we have this ability to take a better look at, “Oh, I can really connect and cling to that unpleasantness, or I cannot.” So it’s an information field that keeps us really able to see more and choose more to stay more in that stabilizing calmness. Because that stabilizing calmness increases and becomes really pleasurable to be still and single with everything. So if we’re back in that stream, it’s like we pulled out of the ground, and in the state of happiness, this unification of the whole environment begins to happen, and we are one with this environment. So it’s a singleness of focus. It’s not really a concentration; it’s a kind of a coming together that’s full of tremendous potential for more ability to see and to feel good and to keep meditating more and to keep looking at this Dukkha, these arisings of Dukkha.
And there’s a harmonizing—it’s not a technical word—but there’s a real cozy feeling of at-homeness when we’ve cultivated this condition of Samadhi. We’ve created all the conditions to come to this togetherness. Then we are able to sense the contact of things. And contact is just when a sound comes and we sense it, when a sensation through the nose comes, we sense it, when a thought comes in the mind, we sense it. So in Samadhi, we’re sensing all the six senses coming, but they get integrated because we are one with everything. And there’s something really interesting about Samadhi because it’s usually tied to a lot of easy breathing. The breath becomes very, very, very easeful and very even, almost non-existent. And the diaphragm in our body connects, unifies the whole body. This is a big sheet in the middle of our body, and when we’re at one with the breath, everything is unified in the entire body. And that’s some of the sensation of what Samadhi is like. And this is useful for continuing our ability to see, ability to know, ability to understand what we’re sensing, ability to keep seeing in a fresh way what needs caretaking, how to caretake more, how to do it even more and more because it’s good, it’s beautiful to take a good look inside and try to support healing. Samadhi heals. Samadhi brings us together and it gives us a momentum to move forward.
And then we’re moving forward to where insight now begins, real insight, in the next condition. The next condition is Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Are. This is when the process of insight begins, when we begin to take a deeper look at how things are forming at a closer level inside. And this is a radical shift because if we stop—you’ve heard this myth of Sisyphus3 pushing boulders up the hill—that’s kind of a little bit the way that Dukkha works in life. We keep pushing the same boulders, sometimes we’re pushing many different boulders up the hill again, and then that’s all we’re doing, pushing the same boulders up the hill again and again. And these conditions are allowing us to see that, wait a minute, we can just let the boulders run down the hill, fall down the hill, and we don’t have to keep pushing the boulders. There is a choice. We don’t have to keep pushing the same stories, the same paradigms, the same set of ideas, the same views, the same fears, or the same hopes even. There’s a whole other way of being that doesn’t involve any of that.
And so in Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Are, we’re just taking the Samadhi and turning to everything that arises from the six senses. A touch comes and we can connect to it, and we connect to it directly and deeply to sense and get to know its nature. Because every sense contact, every mind contact, every sight contact, every smell contact, every sound, every object of the eye has this amazing similar thing: it has this quality of coming and going. So it’s not constant. And so we’re invited to make this radical shift. This is not normal life. We’re invited to make a radical shift to look at the miracle of life very closely, the life movement, the life heat that comes through all the sensations that we can sense and know. And we make the shift to step into this internal world of insight, and it’s very revelatory because what’s revealed is that there is a continuous movement to everything. So it doesn’t make sense to cling. If we cling, we suffer. Clinging doesn’t make sense because everything’s moving, there’s nothing to cling to. So we trust being in another state of being that’s flowing. And we also see that the victim, the person, the experiencer, the doer, all those different postures that we can take, that we do take in our life, that also is flowing. And if we keep looking at that, we see that that’s empty. And that’s how liberation begins. We can sense all of this. We know this directly. These are not ideas to believe in or to trust. We sense it very directly.
So it’s all shifting. And so if it’s all shifting, if it’s all truly empty as we step closer to the miracle of life—we’re not detaching from it—then we get this very confident posture that can be called a condition of disenchantment. Not the greatest translation, but it’s better to see it as the condition to say, “Enough already.” I can say “enough already” to everything, to anything, because I can sense the truth of the matter. The truth of the matter is that things will let go, that suffering is not true, that Dukkha is not true. Not that suffering isn’t true, but if we cling, we suffer. So we see into this suffering thing from a whole other angle, kind of like from this internal world, we can see into this suffering that is part of life. And so we’re opening big time the door to liberation, to really having this mature stance to see into how things form, how we are.
And so disenchantment is noticing that we’re gripping to things, noticing that there is a grip. And then dispassion, which is better to call faith in a way, is then allowing the process of things appearing as they are and not labeling them. Disenchantment and dispassion can blend into this form where we see everything that arises. A sound arises, we don’t really just leave it alone. The sound arises and it’s got a label to it: ambulance, fire truck, don’t like it. But a sound can just arise and just appear, just take a form without a naming or a knowing it. And in life, we mix these things up, and so everything has a label and then it’s fixed into the label. That’s the conceptual framework of how the perceptual process works. Everything that we recognize, we can get a label, but it doesn’t have to be so. When we’re in this realm, this nice soft realm of softening down and looking with a very supported way at how things are, the more that we let things just be as they appear, the more we’re loosening that grip that our mind has on “this is this way, I am this way, they are this way, he is this way, this is this way.” That’s how this concept is true, that concept is not true. Not to dismiss or try to come to a truth statement that things are not how they are or some truth statement about anything, it’s just to see how they are operating in here. How holding on so fixedly to my story of me as it is, my continuous story, because what’s sad about this whole thing is that it repeats itself. It’s kind of like we keep repeating many, many of the same narratives again and again. And if we distinguish the concepts that we have as opposed to just the flow of the nature of how things come—things just appear, this thought appears and it can just be an appearance, it doesn’t have to be a bad thought—so this teasing apart that we do when we’re doing insight creates this fading away.
It’s like a rope that’s holding, tying a sailboat to the edge. The sailboat’s tied to this rope, and in fading away and allowing things to be part of the nature of how they are more and more, and seeing the connection to how that reduces our suffering, how that reduces how we keep ourselves entrapped in the same ways of being, when that fades away, the rope releases and sets the sailboat free to sail. Because we are actually not meant to be tied up. A sailboat is meant to sail, just like our being is meant to be who you are, your true essence, not the narrative lives, only something much, much, much more free. So there’s a way to let ideas be, concepts be, and there’s a way to let things just appear. And then there’s something right in between what happens when there’s neither, when it’s just being here. Who are you? Who can you be when we’re not the play of the same characters in the same stories? That’s what we’re unveiling, letting our most deep essence flow out of us without all of the constructed activity that we’re in, that is a part of us and that we then do. We don’t have to just be a constructing, fabricating machine of everything we’ve inherited from societies and familial lines and that then we keep reproducing ourselves. This path is showing us that there’s some other way if we allow these things to deconstruct.
So liberation is when the constructions cease, when all our narratives, all of our ways of habitual patterns of attachment, habitual patterns of clinging stop, when we can stop them. And it’s very cool because the being that is not full of habitual patterns, full of the constructed ways of being, is a being that is responsive. It’s not a being that is reactive. It’s a being that has arms open wide to everything and everyone and anything. And that’s liberation. Liberation is seen in the tradition as the unconstructed, the not fabricated, for this reason. Because when we’re not fabricating the same play of life, which is a bit of a tragic play in a sense—if you think that repeating the same three acts again and again is not tragic—it’s not necessarily happy, the same repetition of things. So stepping out of that entirely is liberation, not leaving any traces behind.
And then the final piece is knowledge of liberation. Because the Buddha, like I said, was not interested in some wonderful enlightenment only, some amazing awakening that may come, that comes. But what would you like more? To know that you can be mature and at peace, or to have a lot of flashy oneness with the universe, cosmic consciousness? I’m not sure what these things are. These things may come, but for the Buddha, it seemed to be an emphasis on liberation and knowledge of liberation, knowing how suffering ends. A much more human activity, to know how suffering ends, because then we can do something for ourselves.
And why do this? Maybe suffering has run its course for some people. Maybe you do want to say “enough.” We do say enough to suffering. We may also do this out of a certain love, maybe a certain love that doesn’t want suffering anymore. Maybe a certain love that also doesn’t want suffering for other people either. So we do it for others. And that may be one of the final instructions of the Buddha: “Go forth for the welfare of the many, for the happiness of the many, for the goodness of the many.” So why do this? We do this for the betterment of our community, for the betterment of this community, the maturing of this community, so that this community can do it for the rest of the world as well. And may it be so for all of you this year, that this year may be one fulfilling in all the ways that bring you peace and happiness and well-being.
Now I invite you to just take your meditation posture if you wish for a second. And I thank you for your attention. May you enjoy this potluck together here. May we go forth for the welfare of this world, for the happiness and peace of all. Thank you very much.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative consciousness or concentration. ↩
Sisyphus: A figure from Greek mythology condemned to endlessly push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down. Original transcript said “Copus.” ↩