This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video How We Regard Experience - Kodo Conlin. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hi, thank you. It’s nice to be with you. We’ve been sitting with our eyes closed, and I’m just taking you all in. What a treat. We all seem to have made it beyond daylight savings time. Many of you know me as the co-managing Director at IMC’s Retreat Center over the hill, the Insight Retreat Center. Last night, Gil and Bruni were there teaching 40 or 45 yogis, and there was a very long spiel about the clocks changing because the yogis’ minds are quite still and quiet. I was pleased by the care that went into the clock’s changing announcement and the giggles that were coming out of the meditation hall.
The topic I want to talk about today is how we regard experience or how we relate to experience. My own route through practice has been a rather winding one, and I think that may be true for many or all of us. The content of our lives and the steps we take through this life—there are so many. Each of us has our own challenges, each of us has our own strengths. But there’s something that the Dharma offers which is, at least in theory, can be applied to all things: how we regard experience.
One of the reasons that this practice is a little mysterious—isn’t quite the right word—but maybe, let’s say deep, multifaceted, is that we have so many instructions. I like to count. I was doing some counting; depending on how you look at mindfulness of breathing, we might have 16 instructions or four. In the Satipatthana Sutta1, if you look through the foundations of mindfulness, depending on how you count it, maybe there’s a dozen, maybe 13. And then in Majjhima Nikaya 119, mindfulness of the body, there’s another 10. There’s some overlap in all these, but is your mind spinning with instruction?
Rather than take these as scattering, one way we can gather them all together is Joseph Goldstein has this great, pithy quote that there are only ever six things going on: sight, sound, smells, tastes, touch, and then mental activity. That simplifies things down from 30-something. In the practice, we have these traditional or time-honored ways of applying our attention in very specific ways that help to grow the path, to grow the steps of the path.
Just to strengthen this point about Joseph Goldstein and the six things, Ajahn Chah, the Thai Forest teacher, said that where practice happens is where the mind meets a sense object. In other words, we could say that’s where attention meets sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and mind. If any of you have read Gil’s book, The Issue at Hand, there’s this lovely little thing, I think it’s in the preface, where he talks about how it’s so much more skillful or easier to pay attention to the point of contact with experience. I think he uses this metaphor of walking on a rocky road, and that every step is like, “Oh, ouch, little rocks, ouch, ouch.” And rather than trying to sweep the road clear of rocks, we put on shoes. In a similar way, rather than trying to sweep all the rocks away from our six sense bases, if you will, we take really good care of this point of contact. So, how we relate to experience.
I want to tell some stories that sort of illustrate this. The first illustrates the fact that in our mindfulness practice, there are two qualities that are being cultivated in tandem. Sometimes these are translated as Serenity and Insight. There’s the calming, the stilling of the mind, and then there is the clear seeing. This is familiar territory, and these work best when they’re developed together.
So why is that? The first story is when I was a young boy, seems like forever ago, I was given a telescope. I was delighted. I was something of an astronomy enthusiast when I was a little one. The trouble was, I couldn’t figure out how to set up the tripod, and it did not occur to me in my young boy mind to ask for help. Poor little one. So instead of asking for help, I decided, “I’m just going to try to hold my great telescope.” It seems reasonable enough, right? So I’m out on the porch, and it’s the night sky, and I can see the astral something that I want to look at, maybe a star. I kind of point the telescope at the star, and I put my eye down to the viewfinder. It looks still enough, but when I look down in the viewfinder, there’s just nothing. It’s a haze. It’s like hazy nothing. I can’t see because the telescope isn’t still.
This is how the functioning of Serenity and Insight work. The tripod is the serenity, of course, and the insight is the telescope. If I had had a stable base, I may have been able to see all sorts of things. But when these two qualities develop together, they begin to unveil all sorts of layers of our experience. There’s this lovely verse in the Dhammapada2 that’s something like, “For one without insight, there is no meditative absorption, and for one without meditative absorption, there’s no insight. But with both, one is quite close to Nibbana3,” quite close to the goal of the practice, this ending of greed, hatred, and delusion. Our various practices can emphasize one side or the other, or they can emphasize both. But when they’re both mature, we can really fly.
They also have meditative implications, but I think it’s worth mentioning that they have ethical implications also. Maybe we can take the point that the more clearly we see inside ourselves and outside, how different our actions become. I was reading in the sutras this morning and found one I hadn’t seen in a long time which said something like, “A mind without delusion is a wholesome mind, and what one does with a mind without delusion is also wholesome.” That seems simple enough, but that’s an important shift from just “the mind without delusion is wholesome” to “what we do with that mind is also wholesome.” So there are these ethical implications to serenity and insight.
Just one other way to talk about this: there is the what of our experience and the how of experience. The what, we might say, are the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and mental activity—the six sense bases. And then the how, of course, is how we relate. It’s a fascinating thing to look at what sort of perspective or what sort of attitude, what sort of how is the mind taking up at any moment? And then how is that influencing both how I’m seeing and how I relate to others?
The how is important, of course, because it conditions so much of how we suffer. One very innocent example about the how of experience… do we have any coffee drinkers in here? Maybe you’ll be able to relate to this. I know when I wake up in the morning, often right before I go to bed, I think, “Ah, coffee’s coming in the morning.” [Laughter] And then I wake up in the morning, and the alarm sounds. Is it time to get up? Okay, maybe a thought has arisen, but things really kick off when, at the eye door, I see the coffee grinder. And then I start—you know, all that happened was a little bit of contact at the eye door, but all of this proliferation starts. “Oh, my perfect cup. Oh, I hope I have enough of my favorite dairy-free creamer.” The desire, the craving, the thinking—all of this gets going, all on the basis of just seeing a coffee grinder. So that’s innocent enough.
A couple of stories. Last September, I was sitting a three-week retreat at IRC. Something really special. This is my aside to again share that I’m just having an upwelling of what an amazing community IMC and IRC are. This is not what I wrote, but we had a volunteer appreciation event sometime last year, and it was stunning. I was sitting right over there. It was stunning to see just that as an expression of how many people make IMC—I don’t even want to say make IMC possible, like they make IMC. You make it. It’s amazing. You’re doing IMC. What a cool thing.
All right, back to the story. So last September at IRC, sitting this retreat, little did I know that shortly before the retreat, a new neighbor moved in. And the neighbor has four legs, a tail, and barks. Barks a lot. Barks a lot. So I did a lot of my meditating in my room with the windows open, and it was, at the ear door, “bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.” Sometimes, that’s the what of the experience. And the how? Sometimes I would hear the bark, and what would happen? Annoyance, agitation. You feel the sensations in the body. Mindful, mindful. And then based on that agitation, that aversion, these thoughts started coming. Some of them were, “I wonder how long a dog could bark before it gets tired? There must be a limit.” And then it was, “Gosh, I’m the director. There are 40 people here. I wonder, do I need to go over there and have a conversation with my neighbor about their dog?” I didn’t choose to do that. Just to say, all that happened was a sound, and all this scheming started happening.
And other times, the bark would come up, mindfulness would know, and there would be absolutely no reaction whatsoever. Completely neutral. Not intentional on my part. And then still later, sometimes the bark would come, I’d hear the bark, and who knows who put this reaction there, but it would be, “What a lovely dog. I just love this dog. I cannot wait to meet this pup who’s moved into my neighborhood.” It was full of metta. It’s remarkable. The interesting thing about this first story is that I didn’t deliberately cultivate the different responses. It was just mindfulness and conditions coming together. So what does that mean? It means our reactions to things are not stuck. They’re not fixed. They are both changeable, and they are changing if we wait long enough. It’s kind of like the weather.
A little bit of a different location for the second story. Tassajara Zen Mountain Center4—has anyone been to Tassajara? Yeah. So the Zen Monastery that I moved to California for. I loved being there. It’s just beautiful, out in the Ventana Wilderness, kind of in a valley with a little creek running by, and the cabins are built along the creek. A very, very cool place to practice. And I was working in the kitchen at this time.
This story is about deliberate cultivation. The last story shows that sometimes things change on their own. This one needed a little nudging because this was a very stubborn habit. I’m working in the kitchen, and occasionally I would drop something, like a whisk or a bowl or some food or something. Maybe I’d drop a glass and it would break. And I would notice anytime I would drop something, the mind would have its response, more or less, “Grr.” I was agitated at the fact that I had dropped something. Seeing this happen enough times and just knowing it wasn’t really shifting the pattern, I was motivated to make a change because I noticed that not only did the “Grr” make me really uncomfortable—I was making my own suffering worse with the adding agitation on top—but it wasn’t doing any favors for the mood of the kitchen and the people around me. So I was having an effect.
I decided to try something completely different, which now I know the Buddha calls “replacing the peg,” where anytime I dropped something, I would deliberately in my mind go, “Yes!” And sometimes I would do this out loud. It sounds really silly, but it totally worked. It really worked. So it came to be that in the kitchen, I would drop something, “Yes!” What would arise? Pleasant sensations rather than agitation that led on to upset. The mental training of replacing the peg was so effective that now, I’m not encouraging you to break anything, but even if I hear someone else drop something, my mind will go, “Yes!” and the pleasant will come. It’s a much better condition for a happy mind. I told this story maybe three years ago at Tassajara when I was not working in the kitchen, and the folks who were working in the kitchen for that practice period picked it up as a practice. So it’s spreading.
That’s replacing the peg. Again, it’s a kind of light-hearted story, but it makes a really important point that if we choose to, we can deliberately cultivate a different how to experience. It’s not necessarily to force anything out of our experience, but just bring some other conditions in.
This third story, it’s another retreat story, and it’s more subtle. It’s in the sort of place where the serenity and insight had some momentum. It’s been a long retreat by the time this happens. And what I came to notice in the stillness and the clarity was that there was a very subtle, almost invisible attitude. It was kind of like a tiny little seed that was coloring every aspect of experience that I hadn’t even known it was there. But there was just a slight distortion to everything. And as I tuned into that little seed, what I saw was that it was a very small seed of fear. And that fear was pervasive. It was like everything that arose at the eye, there was a little bit of fear. Every sound, every thought, every sensation in the body—the entire how of experience was fear. It was really, really subtle.
But there’s something in those meditative spaces where seeing something so small can be so powerful and can constitute a shift. You can imagine what a change comes if you put a giant lever at just the right place and you can move it just the tiniest bit, and the whole world changes. So in this case, the how of fear, just by being known with mindfulness and clarity, with serenity and insight, something allowed it to let go. Nothing really happened. That’s an anticlimactic story. But sometime later that day, there was this total unbidden vision. It was like new eyes. The world could be seen and known without fear. It somehow dropped away on its own without really doing anything. And then this big upwelling that I did not ask for of beautiful confidence came. And just to see that for a moment, “Oh, that confidence was a different option for a how to relate to experience.” It sure didn’t last forever, but it was enough. It was enough to show this beautiful possibility and also for the body and the mind to get an imprint, like, “Oh, this is possible. This is different.”
So it’s another case where it’s not exactly like confidence was cultivated. It wasn’t exactly a deliberate cultivation in that way. But as you hear Gil talk about all the time, we’re putting the conditions in place for something to unfold. And in the way we’re talking about it today, we’re putting serenity and insight, or we’re talking about the how of experience, how we relate to experience, really taking care of that, and then that making way for the unfolding of something rather beautiful or freeing or easier.
Mindfulness is a pretty easy relationship to experience. Let me say that a different way. It’s not easy, but it’s sure not complicated. It’s a very simple relationship to experience. Bhikkhu Analayo has a real succinct way he puts this. He writes that “one task of mindfulness is to remain generally aware of the process of experience without reacting to specific sense objects.” That sentence is a little complicated. “One task of mindfulness is to remain generally aware of the process of experience without reacting to specific sense objects.” To put that, as I’ve been saying, in a more simple way, we have these six sense objects, the what of experience, and one task of mindfulness is simply to know them, to know them without reactivity. So all three of these stories kind of say something about that how and what’s possible for us.
If there’s some curiosity about practicing with the how, practicing with how we relate to experience, borrowing from a sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya5, there are some reflections or things you can look toward in your own meditative experience. One is: are there thoughts present? Maybe you can get to know the how—how am I relating to experience?—by seeing if there are thoughts present. And a secondary question, asking yourself: are these true? Second, leaning into the third foundation of mindfulness: is there an attitude present? So, thoughts, attitude. Third, am I knowingly or unknowingly cultivating something? In my third story, maybe I was unknowingly conditioning fear. And in the second story, I was deliberately cultivating a more pleasant response to dropping stuff. Am I knowingly or unknowingly cultivating something? And then fourth, how simple is my seeing? How simple is my relationship to experience, or how complicated is it?
I might say that this practice has a trajectory. It has a movement, an onward-leading movement. And this unification of serenity and insight, it reveals both our what of experience and our how of experience, and then moves onward through these various deep insights, these notions of seeing things as they’ve come to be, then ceasing to be enchanted by those things, the gradual fading away of craving, and then knowing a mind that’s free. That’s amazing. That is pretty amazing. It makes me so glad that this place exists.
Another Gil-ism related to liberation more or less says something like, “It’s not us who become awakened, but with awakening, we liberate all things from us.” Yeah, that makes one pause, huh? That’s a very different how in relationship to experience.
There’s a really interesting relationship in the sutras that I don’t think we talk about all that much, but occasionally, Sakka, the ruler of the devas6, comes and asks the Buddha a question that always gets my attention. And Sakka in this case comes to basically ask, “Why is it that some beings are liberated and others are not?” That’s a good question, in my opinion. And what do you imagine the Buddha’s response might have been? I could imagine any number of responses, but I was delighted in turning this theme in my mind that the Buddha talks about eyes and sights, ears and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes, body tangibles, mind and mind objects, and more or less says, “The beings that grasp on to those objects are not liberated, and the beings that don’t grasp, that’s the difference.” It’s the relationship to experience.
Last night at IRC, there was this very short Q&A. It’s kind of a part of the process of coming out of retreat. I won’t share the details for the person’s privacy, but there was someone describing something really beautiful they had seen in themselves, a certain letting go over the course of the retreat. They had seen a way that they had been causing suffering for themselves, and it was a seemingly wholesome value that they had, but they realized that they were grasping after it really hard. And the response that I heard was, “Oh, instead of holding it like this, you can hold it like this.” So still keep it close, that’s an important value, but you can hold it close with these open hands. Maybe that’s in the same family.
So this trajectory, I want to close with some verses from the Book of Eights, the Atthakavagga, that I think as you hear them, maybe it can be something inspiring. To me, it’s both inspiring and it points to the ethical implications of what we’re doing, the sort of beauty of a free heart and how a person like that lives in the world. Inspiring maybe because that’s the possibility that’s available for us, at least in walking the path.
Two little bits of explanation before I share the verses. There are two very strange clauses in here. If I don’t explain, there will be question marks. One is that it describes a sage, a free person, as someone who is “faithless.” I did not understand this until I read the commentary, and the understanding is that perhaps it’s a person who has gone beyond having to have faith in something else because they’ve been so freed of greed, hatred, and delusion that they know it for themselves. The faith doesn’t have to be out there. Does that make sense? And then the other related piece is that they “don’t free themselves from passion” because the work has already been done. So these verses describe a sage, a free person:
Not clinging to the future, nor grieving the past, they see seclusion in the midst of sense contacts and are not guided by views.
They are neither clinging nor deceitful, not greedy or stingy, neither impudent nor offensive, and don’t engage in malicious speech.
Neither addicted to what’s pleasant nor given to arrogance, gentle and intelligent, they are faithless and don’t free themselves from passion, always equanimous and mindful.
In this world, they don’t think of themselves as equal, superior, or inferior. They have no swollen pride. Depending on nothing, having known the Dhamma, they are independent. They have no craving for becoming and not becoming.
I say they are at peace, they who are not concerned with sensual pleasures. They have no bonds and have crossed beyond attachments.
Maybe it’s enough to just say, “I say they are at peace.” I’m wishing for that for all of us, now and in the future.
Maybe to close with a word of appreciation, which is, as I’ve said in the beginning, the middle, and now the end, there’s something like arriving at IMC. There is something lovely about being in the field, and maybe it has something to do with this: that we’re oriented toward not grasping, oriented toward not being malicious, oriented toward peace or being wise about that. And maybe there’s something we’re doing here that can support us in what’s not an easy world. Not only support us, but support us to engage and do that beautifully, more like this.
So thank you for your attention. I think we have just a few minutes for questions if you like, or comments.
Questioner 1: Beautiful stories, thank you. I’m curious if that dog you mentioned had Buddha nature.
Kodo Conlin: Nice, nice. He didn’t say. [Music]
Questioner 2: Thank you so much. That was a beautiful offering. I really appreciate it. In the last reading, there was a line that I’d like to know more about, which was something to the effect that to not give up passion, but shortly after talking about equanimity. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.
Kodo Conlin: Right, right. I think that’s the line, “They are faithless and don’t free themselves from passion,” and then right after it says, “always equanimous and mindful in this world, they don’t think of themselves as equal, superior, or inferior.” Right. Yeah, the way that I make sense of that particular line is it’s the same principle as the faithless point. They have already freed themselves of… when we use the word passion here, I think Gil is translating rāga7, which is like, it’s not the sort of passion that we think of as an inspiration or even vow or resolve. Passion, it’s like, sometimes the Buddha will describe something like the senses being overtaken with a fever. It’s that sort of thing. The mind and the senses just overtaken. Sometimes it also has this tone of relishing. Yeah, so I think that’s an important distinction when we use the English word “passion,” because we end up losing so much if we throw out everything that’s involved in the English word “passion,” but we’re also kind of missing the distinction. I don’t know if that’s what you’re asking, though.
Questioner 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, great.
Questioner 3: Related to that question, so the resolve and inspiration, how does that connect to the… yeah, to me… isn’t it right on the… okay, but I think everyone heard me.
Kodo Conlin: Yeah, so to repeat the question maybe for folks online, how does the passionless relate to faith? Or can you say it again? I got it wrong.
Questioner 3: When you mentioned resolve, to me, resolve seems very faithful. Right. And so, excuse me, so the faithless, how does it connect?
Kodo Conlin: Right, right, right. Thank you for the question. I think I have to consider it in sequence. I think we have faith in where we’re headed. Like when we put our energy into resolve because we have faith or confidence that the practice is working, this is good. Please keep this up. May you all have lots of faith in yourselves, in your practice. The way we talk about faith in Buddhist practice, there’s this interesting turn where it goes from what they call “bright faith” to a kind of “confirmed faith.” And the move is based on having seen greed in the mind, and then at a later time, that greed is not in the mind, and then that bolsters your faith that, “Oh, the practice is working. Oh, look, I’m not consumed with this all the time.” Same for hatred and delusion. Anyway, I think the principle holds that we need to have faith in the fact that the practice works. And then once you have fulfilled the path, you don’t have to believe it. I think that’s part of the point. Kind of like when you arrive at the Grand Canyon, no one has to tell you about it anymore, or you don’t have to believe it’s there because you’re looking at it. Does that make sense? Cool.
There’s a question online. The person asks, “How to attend to how I am with the moment without too much selfing?” How to attend to how I am with the moment without too much selfing. If they were here, I would ask them if they could say a little bit more about what they notice about the selfing.
Moderator: I’ll see if they respond.
Kodo Conlin: We’ll see if they respond. Yeah, maybe to try to respond in some way. Of course, it can seem like a whole lot of doing and a whole lot of “me-ing,” me doing the doing if I’m like tracking…
Moderator: Oh, they did happen. Yeah, they responded, “Making more of a story, focusing on the story of me.”
Kodo Conlin: Making more of a story, focusing on the story of me. Yeah, it’s hard to know exactly what’s meant, so I’ll try to respond in some way. I think there are two things that I’d like to note. One of them is that when we practice mindfulness, say we’re practicing mindfulness of the body, we’re staying very close to the six sense doors. Let’s say it’s actually a great simplification of experience. It allows the mind to settle on something much more simple than our novel of “me,” or like focusing on turning to the sight of a glass of water is much more simple in terms of experience than a story about it. And part of how mindfulness practice can work is that by staying very close, keeping our attention very close to the body and doing that in a way that’s steady, maybe it’s kind, it actually softens all that gripping that creates the self-story, and then there’s room for something else to come. Yeah, I hope that was semi-adequate for what was actually needed.
Great. So we’re just at time, and I want to thank you for your practice this morning and your attention, and for being and doing IMC. May we all have such a beautiful place to practice. Take care.
Satipatthana Sutta: The Buddha’s primary discourse on the foundations of mindfulness, considered a cornerstone of insight meditation practice. ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Nibbana: (Sanskrit: Nirvana) The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, representing the cessation of suffering and the cycle of rebirth. It is a state of profound peace and liberation. ↩
Tassajara Zen Mountain Center: A Sōtō Zen monastery located in the Ventana Wilderness area of California. It is the oldest Japanese Buddhist monastery in the United States. ↩
Samyutta Nikaya: The “Connected Discourses,” a collection of Buddhist scriptures from the Sutta Pitaka, organized by topic. ↩
Sakka, the ruler of the devas: In Buddhist cosmology, Sakka is the ruler of the Tāvatiṃsa heaven. He is a prominent figure in the scriptures, often depicted as a devotee of the Buddha. ↩
Rāga: A Pali word that translates to passion, lust, or desire. In Buddhism, it is considered one of the three poisons (along with aversion and ignorance) that are the root of suffering. It refers to the kind of feverish, grasping desire, not wholesome aspiration. ↩