This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Awakening Brilliance ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good evening, good evening. Welcome. Welcome, nice to see you all. I was just reflecting as Jim rang the bell, it’s so nice to sit together. I appreciate it very much. So if nothing else, thank you for sitting with me for this 30 minutes. There’s something lovely about that. It’s different than when you’re home alone, right?
So, a number of days ago, I was reading some of the suttas1 in preparation for a class I’m going to teach with some of my friends in a few weeks. I was reading something that I’ve read many times before and looking at it again, and was like, “Oh, I hadn’t really noticed this before.” This is often how it is, I think, with the suttas and so many things; we look at them again and again, and there’s always some richness or some depth or some novelty or something new that shows up. It’s partly why I like to look at them and study them and practice with them.
But one thing that I had just overlooked before was this whole notion that was in this one little tiny passage, not the main thrust of the sutta, but just this one little passage, this mention of purification. I was like, I don’t really like this word, purification. It kind of implies that we’re impure, and I don’t know, it just feels heavy-handed and oppressive. I almost kind of ignore it, and in my teachings, I don’t talk about this process as one of purification.
But some of you that might be familiar with this tradition, you’ll know that there are some lineages, not this one, but there are some lineages who put more emphasis on this idea of purification. Partly because they are using as an authoritative text this book that was written, composed maybe about a thousand years after the Buddha, but that’s still 1,500 years ago, right? So it’s still a long time ago, but certainly sometime after the Buddha. This book is called the Visuddhimagga.2 Maybe you’ve heard this kind of gets batted around sometimes, Visuddhimagga. This book translated means “Path of Purification,” and it’s a big, thick book and purports how to get oneself purified. It talks about this entire path of practice in this context of purification. It doesn’t talk so much about purification; it has a lot to do in there about meditation.
So this idea of purification, it certainly isn’t unheard of in this tradition, but in this particular lineage, it’s not emphasized. And maybe I’ll just not to go on and on and on about this, I could give a whole lecture about this, right, but that’s not what we want. This whole notion of purification shows up in the later parts of Buddhism. The closer you get to the Buddha, as best we can tell, there’s not that much about purification. So it’s something that kind of came a little bit later, and there’s a whole reason about that that I won’t go into.
Purification, I’m not so keen on this idea just because it implies that we’re impure, and I don’t know, that just doesn’t feel very good. So I thought, well, why don’t I look this up in the Pali-English dictionary? Maybe there’s another way to understand this. Maybe there’s another way in. And you know how when you look things up in the dictionary, often the first definition is the most common, and then there’s a second and third, and as it goes down the list, it becomes more and more obscure. Well here, so the word is visuddhi3 that’s getting translated as purity or purification. The first definition: brightness. Like, oh, the path of brightness or brightening. Oh, I like this. And then the second definition: splendor. Oh, I like this, a path of splendor, of awakening splendor, allowing splendor, “splendorizing”—we can make a new word out of this. Path of splendorizing. Or excellency is the third definition, path of excellence, of becoming excellent or discovering excellence or having excellence around or something like this. The fourth definition is purification. So it’s interesting that translators are taking what’s the fourth definition and kind of using that as the definitive one.
So I’m going to use brightness. I like this idea of brightness and this idea that this is a path of brightness or brightening. And what does that mean, even this idea of brightening? There’s a few ways we might understand this, but one could be to see things clearly. You know, if there’s a certain brightness, then you can see things clearly. They’re not behind some veil or they’re not obscured with darkness or something like this. If there’s some brightness, you can see things clearly. And that’s so much what this path of practice is about, is being able to see things in a way that is closer to maybe what’s actually happening, when we’re not overlaying on top of it all our ideas or our notions about how things should be or what we want or what’s mine and yours and all these extra things that we put on them. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But this idea of brightening is to see things clearly, to no longer have illusion, to no longer be obscured.
So another way we might think about brightening is like when somebody has a sense of brightness, we might say that they have this sense of aliveness or a sense of vitality or a sense of, I don’t know, joy. Or maybe joy is too strong of a word, but this not a sense of kind of closed down, but you know, bright is like meeting the world, just looking clearly, okay, what’s out there? And this sense of brightness, a sense of not being stuck in some kind of way. So this path of practice is a path of having some aliveness and enthusiasm, maybe we might say.
Or there’s a way in which brightness also can have this sense of creativity. This sense of like, oh yeah, a new way. Seeing things clearly and having some aliveness often brings creativity. So seeing things in a new way, not just the usual way, our habits, our reactions, our patterns that we become so accustomed to that sometimes are not so helpful, but we’re stuck in them. So maybe this way of brightness is of creativity, like, oh, to see things from a different perspective or maybe combine things in a new way they hadn’t thought of before or something like this.
And then maybe there’s this way that I also say some brightness, we might think about this as a certain amount of resilience, a certain amount of not, you know, collapsing in any sense of difficulty arising. But instead, with seeing clearly and having a sense of vitality and maybe some creativity, then there’s this way in which difficulties don’t push us around as much or bowl us over or cause us to collapse. Or if they do, if it’s a big difficulty, then if there’s some brightness, then there’s a way that we can find our way out of them or not have the setback, quote unquote, that lasts as long. So this is not a canonical list, this is a list that I made up talking about brightness, but this is some of the ways that I think about brightness. And I also think about this path of practice as one that helps support these things.
And so I also want to say just a few words about this whole idea of dullness. What if brightness or these things, well, what is dullness? Like, what’s the opposite if we don’t have this path of brightness, path of brightening? I think there’s this way in which dullness can have this, like we’re not quite present. There’s like this overlay, like you’re not quite meeting what’s there. This dullness has a, maybe there’s a veil in some kind of way between you and experience or you and other people. Or there’s this not quite, I mean, you’re there, it’s not that you’re somewhere else, but there’s this maybe kind of like a hesitation or a stepping back or something like this. Dullness, right? There’s this way of maybe just going through the motions or something like this.
There’s also this way, maybe some of you have heard this, that we talk about in this tradition about the sword of wisdom, you know, the sword that can just cut through delusion. When you, after the sword goes, you can see like, oh, I see now clearly. And dullness, right, we think that things have not been sharp. So this sword of wisdom not being able to show up kind of in a way that could provide some clarity or help us see things in a new way.
So I’ve been talking about this definition of brightness and this definition of dullness, but maybe more specifically, what is it that’s getting brightened if we’re talking about this path of brightening? I’ll say that one thing that’s getting brightened, or purified if we want to use that kind of language, is our capacity to notice. With this mindfulness practice, with this practice that we’re inside, practice and maybe some concentration practice, is our ability to notice. And chances are all of you have had this experience that when you started a meditation practice, a mindfulness practice, this is not uncommon, and it was certainly the case for me, like, “Wow, I had no idea how my mind was like all over the place, doing everything except being on the breath, like how I wanted it to be.” This was kind of like the first big insight that people often have, like, “Wow, I had no idea that my mind was doing this.” We just hadn’t noticed. And then when we start to set the intention, “Okay, I’m going to do sitting meditation on the breath,” we start to kind of hone that skill of coming back to those sensations of breathing, and then we just start to notice all the things that our mind does: the planning, the fantasizing, the reminiscing, you know, these types of things.
But it’s not only on the cushion that our noticing kind of takes up a notch. Often, we can just start to notice how impatient we get sometimes when we’re standing in line at the grocery store and it’s a really long line, or how we start to get irritated with drivers on the road that are going too slow, that are going way below the speed limit, or maybe they’re not paying attention and swerving around, and maybe they’re texting while they’re supposed to be driving or something. And in the past, we wouldn’t have just noticed our irritation or our impatience; we would have just thought, “Well, of course I’m irritated or impatient, that’s the natural order of things.” But as we start to do this practice, we start to notice like, “Oh yeah, okay, I’m actually irritated, and it’s possible to not be irritated.” We start to feel like there’s more of a that things don’t have to be the way that they are, that they can be other ways too. We don’t fall into the trap of the usual way.
So maybe that’s one of the things that gets brightened is our noticing. I had an experience, and I’ll say that my experience was not uncommon; many people have reported this to me when I’m teaching a retreat and people are coming in for a practice discussion. But I don’t know why, for some reason, this particular retreat, these experiences really stick in my mind. I don’t remember how far into the retreat it was, near the beginning, and just going out for a walk, doing some walking meditation, and wanting to go find the perfect spot for walking meditation, and just noticing like, “Oh, look, there’s flowers here. Wow, I never noticed them. Oh, they’re so beautiful.” Taking a few steps, “Wow, look at these little plants, those little round leaves. Oh, that is so great. Wow, I didn’t notice.” And then taking a few steps, “Oh, wow, look at this.” Just, you know, the usual things we see all the time, just the plants or the flowers or whatever it is, all of a sudden everything just had a certain beauty to it, a certain, maybe they themselves had a certain brightness.
So there’s this way that not only do we notice things that we don’t notice otherwise, but there’s also a way in which there can be a, like the beauty of things shine through, including things that are not conventionally thought of as aesthetically beautiful, like the little candy bar wrapper. Like, “Wow, that red is really shiny next to the green.” Right? These types of things. So this brightening of what we notice, of what gets noticed, because otherwise, you know, our life is passing us by as we’re not really paying attention, instead just being on automatic pilot.
There’s this Rob Walker, he wrote this book that’s “The Art of Noticing.” He’s not a Buddhist practitioner, but he’s a, I think, a professor of design, and he has all these great ideas of how to pay attention, and it’s so much fun, I know, to think about this. And he has a blog or website or, I’m not exactly sure how this gets communicated, but he has like the “savor of the month.” So like things to notice: shadows. Like for a month, just noticing shadows. Um, security cameras. So like spend a month when you’re out for a walk, just notice like, “Oh wow, there’s more of these than I thought.” Or small flowers, you know? So he just identifies things just to notice as a way to keep us engaged with our life and, from his point of view, it provides a sense of vitality and aliveness and creativity to kind of keep sharp our capacity to notice.
But here’s something else that’s getting brightened, which we might say is really important. The capacity to notice can then get applied to all kinds of things, whether we intentionally apply it or not, it’ll just naturally get applied. And to one particular area can really lead to more and more freedom, more and more ease, more and more peace and well-being. And that is this brightening of our capacity to notice the view we have of ourselves. The view we have of our, I’m saying ourselves, but it’s a little bit different than that.
We might notice that there’s different ways to consider, I’ll just say, the self. One is just our personality self or the ways in which we, the roles that we have. For example, right now I’m in the role of the Dharma teacher. I was just visiting my mother. It wouldn’t go so well if I just showed up to my mom at her house and said, “Okay, I’m the Dharma teacher,” and gave her Dharma talks. Right? That’s just not going to work. You know? So just this idea that we just take on roles and then we put them down when they’re not needed. And sometimes we’re identified with this. Like being a Dharma teacher is an obvious role, but sometimes there might be subtle ways. In the family, I’m the one who’s the troublemaker, or I’m the one who fixes things, or I’m the one who supports everybody else, or I’m the one that keeps the glue of the family together, or I’m the baby that’s always complaining and the world has to take care of me, or something like this.
So part of this brightening is starting to notice some of the subtle ways in which we are identifying ourself, some of the subtle labels that we have on ourselves. I just gave a whole list of things; they don’t show up specifically as those words. They’re things that we kind of feel into and just notice, “Oh yeah, there’s a theme here of the way I’m meeting the world or the way that what’s difficult for me.” And a lot of it is because we are holding on to or clinging onto some fixed views about ourselves, who we are and who we’re not.
So this is part of what gets brightening is maybe we just start to notice, oh, there’s all kinds of different views that I have about myself. Which one is the right one? Which one is the true one? Which one is the real one? I’m the one that has difficulties following maps. I’m the one that’s the youngest. I’m the one that knows how to do algebra. I don’t know, I’m just making these things up, right? So there’s this way in which we often have this sense that there’s this entity in the center that’s like this constant to which things happen. And if that’s true, well, what is it in the center? Which view of the self? Which one?
You might say, “Well, Diana, no, no, no, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not one. I’m like all of these things.” Like, okay, well then maybe is there a, like mental patterns or maybe habits or something that you do that makes up yourself, this thing that feels like it’s in the center of everything? And then I could ask the same question, “Well, which one? Which pattern? Which thing that you do often?” And then you might say, “Well, wait, don’t bother me with that. It just feels like there’s a self in the center here.”
And so so much about this, maybe this brightening we could say, this brightening, we start to see, oh yeah, we’re not the roles and we’re not some of the ideas that we have about ourselves. But maybe something that I can say here, and I’ve done this during a Dharma talk here before, but just to ask you: let’s say that you could, by some magical means, let’s say that you could have the creativity or intellect of anybody else, living or dead, or maybe even in the future if you can think that way. Like if you could have some of the creativity of some of these brilliant artists in all these mediums, or the intellect of somebody who can just solve problems like this or get things done, who would it be? Just take a moment. Who would it be?
And then for a second person, if you could have the physical capabilities or the physique of any individual, living or dead, you could have the bodily capacities or body of anybody, who would it be? Is there somebody you would choose? Just take a moment.
So this is a trick question. Because implicit in even imagining this is the idea that you could be yourself with a different mind. But how would that work? Like, if there was a different mind, it wouldn’t be you, right? But somehow you feel like there’s something inside that with a different mind could still be you. Or same with the body, that if a body had a different capacity or looked different or in some kind of way, that would still be you. So there’s often this way, and it’s subtle, that we are identifying with either our mental capacity or the body. And so this brightening is to start to see, oh yeah, we’re not even that. There’s not even that subtle sense of this constant thing at the center.
Everything is due to causes and conditions. Everything, I mean, there aren’t exceptions. Well, I shouldn’t say it that way. I should say all of our experiences, right, are just arising and passing away due to causes and conditions. So where would that self be? It’s just this collection of experiences. So this brightening is starting to maybe peel away or help shine through some of this idea of this causes and conditions is what’s being experienced, not these different ways in which we are having this view of this self. And then after I say this, I feel like I often want to say this is not a belief that you have to adopt. This is not something like, “Oh, all the Buddhists talk about this not-self thing, okay, I guess so.” This is more just have some curiosity and to plant a seed, and you might start to see more and more in your experience like, “Oh yeah, this is always changing. How could that be this self that’s at the center?” or something like this.
What else is brightening this path? I would say our hearts, they’re showing a little bit brighter. We see this, people have this practice, maybe you’ve experienced this too, I certainly have. As there starts to be, we start to notice more and we start to loosen up some of our grip on this view of who we are and how terrible we are or how great we are, whatever it might be, we start to see how, “Oh yeah, I’m not so different than everybody else, actually.” They’re struggling too. They have ups and downs just like I do. And there’s this way we start to feel connected, and there’s much less of a “us versus them,” “me versus you,” and more of a sense of this common humanity. Like, “Oh yeah, this being a human, not so easy sometimes.” And it’s not unique to me, not unique to you, this idea that there’s difficulties and there’s joy and there’s love. And when we start to see just this common humanity, when it just starts to become evident, the heart can’t help but care, care about others, want for there to be less suffering in the world, want there to be more ease and peace in the world. It’s just natural, just happens.
And this is often also when I’m doing practice discussions, people in retreat are often talking about this, like, “Wow, I didn’t realize there’s so much warmth and love and this type of thing here.” And again, don’t take my word for this. Don’t just believe this because I said it. Just maybe I’m planting a seed and maybe you might notice to see if your heart is like opening or softening in some kind of way, maybe a little bit less irritation and ill will and maybe some more goodwill.
So this idea of the path of brightening, maybe we might say another way to say this is like awakening brilliance. You know, just brilliance with things that are shining and just allowing it to arise. We’re not making it arise, we’re not forcing it to arise. It’s what naturally happens as we start to just pay attention to our experience, which is what mindfulness practice is about. And maybe there’s sometimes some inquiry, some like, “What is this?” or “Is this true?” or “Is this just something my thoughts are making up?” So maybe some mindfulness and some inquiry can really open up just what experience is about and what life is about. So, awakening brilliance.
And I have a poem here that I’m going to close with. It’s by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer,4 of course it is. What would I do without Rosemary’s poems? For those of you who don’t know, I’m often quoting her poems. I think she’s a fabulous poet. So this poem is called “A Change in the Light,” and it was written in the beginning of March 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, before we really knew what was happening. Right at the beginning, none of us had any idea, predicted what was going to happen. But here’s this poem, “A Change in the Light” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer.
Now, while the moon is hiding behind the clouds, now, when the rain is falling midwinter, and now that they’ve told us not to hug or kiss each other for fear of contracting and spreading disease, yes, now is the time to find whatever light we have been hiding inside us, whatever measure of brilliance we’ve managed to conceal from each other, from ourselves. Now is the time to bring forth that luminescence and offer it freely to the world. Now, now when light matters most.
I’ll read this again. This is “A Change in the Light” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer.
Now, while the moon is hiding behind the clouds, now, when the rain is falling midwinter, and now that they’ve told us not to hug or kiss each other for fear of contracting and spreading disease, yes, now is the time to find whatever light we have been hiding inside us, whatever measure of brilliance we’ve managed to conceal from each other, from ourselves. Now is the time to bring forth that luminescence and offer it freely to the world. Now, when light matters most.
Light always matters. This luminescence, this brilliance, this light always matters, especially when things feel dark, especially when it feels like we can’t see clearly and there isn’t a way forward. There’s a kind of dark often has its way of kind of closing down. Now is when we need light and brilliance from the heart and from the mind. And I’d like to suggest that this practice can support that, can support this brilliance, this luminescence, this brightness.
I appreciate that in this poem, Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, the poet, she offers a number of different “nows”: moon behind the clouds, when it’s raining, they’ve told us not to hug or kiss. But I was thinking, there’s so many times in which it feels like it can be dark. Terrible news from the doctor’s office, just terrible news, fires, all kinds of things. And there’s a way in which we might want to just not look and just keep it in darkness. And there can be some wisdom sometimes to not allow ourselves to get overwhelmed or to not get feel too agitated. Right? That’s the job of the media, to get you agitated. They get paid to do this, absolutely, right? This is their job. The more agitated you are, the more clicking you’ll do.
But now is a time for some brilliance, for some light, some illumination. I would say light always matters. And so maybe this can be, I’m going to call it instead of the path of purification, the path of brightening. And with that, I think I’ll close and open it up to see if there’s some comments or questions. Thank you.
Audience Member 1: When you go back to the original word, purification, what I thought of when you said that is like a 12-step group. So you want to meditate, but you drink a lot, right? So you would probably have to do something about that drinking issue to really be able to meditate, right? I mean, it doesn’t matter what it’s called—brightness, illumination, purification—but I just thought of a 12-step group when you said that. Like if something is really getting in the way, you kind of have to do something about it, right? Or you can’t meditate, you know, if you’re an alcoholic. I don’t know, maybe an alcoholic could meditate, but…
Diana Clark: You’re absolutely right, though, that there’s things that we have in our lives that don’t really serve us. I’m sure… and I’ll commit, yeah, I’ll take it back. But I mean, there’s certain things that we have that we do that really do get in the way of our, you know, our clarity. And I just thought of a 12-step group when you say this. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, yeah. This is just maybe a Diana-ism. I just don’t like this word purification because I don’t like this… I don’t know, I just don’t like it.
Audience Member 2: Yeah, I had kind of a similar point, I guess. Not with alcoholism specifically, but even just like any other obstacles in life, like being really busy at work or in a relationship or anything like that. You know, suffering from the fires, as many are these days. Like, I think there’s always going to be a lot of things that are getting in your way of, you know, focusing on shining that light that you spoke about. And something I personally realized from being here today, because probably unlike many of you, I haven’t been in a while, and I feel kind of bad about that because I’d wanted to, but it’s just very hard to make the time. And from being here, I’ve realized the value of making the time. Like, you just have to make the time. You know, I kind of tried to convince myself that by getting into meditation in the past, you know, I’ve been enlightened or whatever, and like, “Oh, now I think about things better.” But it’s just not that way. You just need to make the time and put down the phone and carve out time from your work or, you know, solve your other problems in life and just really allow yourself the peace to, I guess, look within. And you can’t really short-circuit that. That’s just something that I kind of realized from, I guess, making the time today. I think it’s good that everyone else did too.
Diana Clark: Yeah, nice, nice. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. But it can be also a trap because it can feel this oppressive, like, “Oh, I have to go to IMC,” and then it weighs heavily on us. And then I feel like, “Oh, all this story, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad meditator,” or something like this. And that itself can just turn into one more thing that’s oppressing us in some kind of way. So yeah, it’s not so easy, right, to maintain things that are supportive and let go of things that aren’t so supportive. Yeah, just recognizing that. But I’m glad you’re here. Anybody else have a comment or something they’d like to say?
So maybe I’ll close by reading this poem one more time, just because I like this poem. I think it’s…
Now, while the moon is hiding behind the clouds, now, when the rain is falling midwinter, and now that they’ve told us not to hug or kiss each other for fear of contracting and spreading disease, yes, now is the time to find whatever light we have been hiding inside us, whatever measure of brilliance we’ve managed to conceal from each other, from ourselves. Now is the time to bring forth that luminescence and offer it freely to the world. Now, when light matters most.
Thank you. And wishing you all a bright rest of the evening. And if you’d like, you’re welcome to come up and talk to me and ask me a question. So otherwise, wishing you safe travels home. Good night.
Suttas: Discourses or sermons of the Buddha, which form a core part of the Pali Canon, the sacred scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. ↩
Visuddhimagga: (Pali for “The Path of Purification”) is a comprehensive manual of Theravada Buddhist doctrine and meditation written by the 5th-century scholar Buddhaghosa. It provides a detailed, systematic explanation of the Buddha’s path to liberation. ↩
Visuddhi: A Pali word that translates to “purity,” “purification,” “brightness,” or “splendor.” In a Buddhist context, it refers to the purification of the mind from defilements. ↩
Rosemary Wahtola Trommer: An American poet, writer, and teacher known for her accessible and often uplifting work that explores themes of nature, daily life, and human connection. ↩