This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Not Knowing Supports Curiosity, Investigation, and the Freeing of the Heart - Tanya Wiser. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Tanya Wiser at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
I’m your very own Tanya Wiser. Some of you I definitely know and know me, and some of you I don’t, so maybe I’ll say a few words about myself. I am graduating next week from the IMC/IRC 4-year Dharma Teacher Training Program. [Applause] It has been quite a journey. I’m a student of Gil and Andrea’s, really an IMC baby. This has been my place of practice since around 2008 or 2009.
I’m a therapist, and I say that because it tends to permeate the flavor of my dharma. I tend to bring up things that I have learned as a therapist, so just to give you all a heads-up. I teach here on Thursday nights. If you’re interested in connecting with the Sangha, the way I teach includes small practice groups, people talking about the topic, connecting with each other, and sharing practice. It’s a lovely way to build and create a sense of connection to the Sangha here. I also teach the queer Sangha here, which happens once a month online.
My talk will be on my current teaching topic for Thursday nights, which has to do with not knowing. This morning, I’ll weave in how not knowing supports curiosity, investigation, and ultimately, the freeing of our hearts.
I have long been a student of dukkha1—studying suffering, contraction, and clinging. The ways that I suffer in my life, I see other people suffer. I guess it makes sense; as a therapist, it’s kind of what I’m tuning into. Over time, the more I’ve studied it, the more I’ve recognized that the antidote or the opposite is love, the sense of presence. I don’t mean love in a romantic way; I mean love in being available, present, receptive, letting the heart soften. This inspires me a lot. I find a lot of joy when I connect with even very difficult things, and I can do so in a way that feels loving, caring, and like my heart isn’t trying to protect or control a situation.
I’ve been having a delightful time practicing with this idea of not knowing. Even during the sit this morning, I would watch the mind. I have friends who came from the East Bay today, and I was like, “Is that them? Is that them?” Don’t know. Just sort of watching how the mind starts to want to build and collect information and find out an answer. Somehow, just dropping in this “don’t know” allows things to soften. I find that it’s almost like this big, open, bright light—this sense of softening, opening. “Oh, then what is here?” It allows me to re-engage in the moment.
I also think it’s actually quite respectful to not know. It’s respectful for me because truly, every moment is different. Every person is different. We’re all changing all the time, things are changing, and holding this idea of not knowing allows you to open up, see, and be surprised—be willing to meet and see people or things differently. It also helps me keep my mind fresh, here, now, just on this cusp of what’s happening now.
I don’t know if it happens for you, but if I think I know what’s going to happen when I’m going into a meeting or a situation, there’s maybe a bit of a wall or a lack of openness that I experience, a defensiveness or an offensiveness. That definitely doesn’t support the heart in softening or in my receiving what is in front of me. So it’s respectful to others, respectful to my heart, and it helps me stay interested.
It’s also incredibly important if we want to be curious, if we want to do one of the things the Buddha said was incredibly important, which is to investigate our experience. It’s essential for us to be curious, to be investigative, but maybe not in the way that we might classically think of it—as analyzing or conceptualizing, but more in a direct, investigatory, experiential kind of way.
For all of this, mindfulness is obviously the foundation of our practice. We need to be mindful and present and aware. Mindfulness is critical if we want to live a life of non-harming. But if we’re just mindful and we aren’t engaging in the other teachings of the Buddha, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to just know, to just be aware. We can be mindful and do any kind of thing. When we’re mindful in the way the Buddha taught, we’re actually attuning to harm and lack of harm, or wholesomeness and unwholesomeness, suffering and non-suffering, wisdom.
We need to understand and want to understand what’s going on, but not intellectually, not conceptually—more directly. More understanding and seeing the processes that are happening, seeing things like the energies of greed, hatred, and delusion and how they operate. To see how things change, impermanence, and to recognize when we’ve got a strong sense of a constructed self happening, or a strong sense of a constructed other happening. That has to do with thinking, you know, you’ve constructed this person and how they are.
It’s important to think about why you are practicing. I came to the practice because I was suffering a lot, and I wanted to stop suffering so much. For a long time early in my practice, it was just about trying to suffer less in each moment. My meditation for a solid first year of great difficulty might be that I spent five minutes and all I did was say, “Breathing in, I calm the body; breathing out, I calm the mind,” just trying to help myself calm down. That’s actually incredibly important because we need a calm mind, we need a relaxed body. We need to be more open and spacious for us to actually investigate in any meaningful way. So however long it takes us to do that in our sit or in our lives, that’s beautiful. And then there’s more. As things start to calm down, we can start to look at different things, experience the dharma in a different way.
I’m going to talk about the Kalama Sutta.2 It’s a sutta about how we discern what’s true, what’s truth. The Kalamas were a group who lived in a village that was a throughway, a place a lot of people traveled and stopped at, including many different kinds of spiritual teachers. They had an abundance of teachings, but from all different perspectives. They started to be a little bit overwhelmed with all the ideas, all the practices, all the directions that they were getting from all these different visiting teachers. So they had the Buddha come and talk, and their question was, “How do we know what is true? How do we know who is right?”
To parallel what they were experiencing, if we step back and look, our culture is feeding us all kinds of ideas and beliefs all the time. These ideas and beliefs start to fill us up, and when we start to believe them and collect them, we start to close ourselves off. Our culture encourages us to come to conclusions, to have answers, to know, to think. So we start collecting what we think of as facts, which are really just stories, and we bundle them together with some magic thread to create what we think is our truth—the truth about this thing or that thing or another thing.
Some of us have a lot of experience in certain realms of our life, so we’ve seen hundreds of times that maybe this leads to that, which leads to that. So this is the conclusion, or at least the mind tells us so. There’s wisdom in that, in collecting information and ideas and theories and our experience. But the way the mind weaves things together is kind of invisible to us. Really, there’s often—just as you are each so uniquely different from each other—each situation, each person, each moment of healing or each moment of suffering has its own uniqueness. We don’t know really how things are going to wind up. We don’t know. We do know it will change. Something will change.
This morning in my inbox, I got a beautiful, super short poem. It was perfect for this morning’s talk. It’s by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, and it’s called “One Clearing.” She says:
Every day I dismantle its nest, the fear that wings darkly into my thoughts.
I really love that image of the nest and how she’s dismantling these fears, these thoughts, these stories, these beliefs that are collecting, creating some sort of a foundational place that we could sit in and rest on and look out from. But in the case of fear, that’s probably not so skillful, not so helpful. I think about, “Oh yeah, yesterday I had this idea, this theory about what this is doing and what that’s doing and what’s going to happen.” No, let me just pull it all apart and let these things sit individually and just loosen it all up again.
We build these nests under the illusion that we actually know and see what’s going on. We actually think we really know, but they’re really stories we’re weaving, and so much of it is drawn upon historical, associative, or in some way or another, fabricated information. Maybe misperception is the norm. What if we all understood misperception was the norm? Our perceptions, our habits, our views, our beliefs, our histories—all of this stuff tends to reinforce itself, and we tend to agree with our own views. There are lots of wars going on over views.
There’s an Indian lay teacher, who’s deceased now, her name is Dipa Ma. She has this quote that I love:
The mind is all stories, one after another, like nesting dolls. You open one and another is inside. Open that one and there’s another story emerging. When you get to the last nesting doll, the smallest one, and open it, inside of it is… what? It’s empty. Nothing’s there. And all around you are the empty shells of the stories of your life.
Isn’t that great? She was a meditation master. She had a child die and her husband die, and she lived in very poor circumstances. She went off to do intensive retreat, but most of her practice was in daily life and in very difficult circumstances. She said, “Mindfulness applied in every activity: speaking, shopping, ironing, cooking, caring for children.” She said, “The whole path of mindfulness is this: whatever you are doing, be aware of it.” She was called the patron saint of householders.
To open ourselves up, to open these nesting dolls, to dismantle our nests, it’s really helpful to not know and to be curious and to investigate. It’s not that we can exile ourselves from all of these ideas and stories and beliefs. I wish I could. I wish I could say, “I’m not going to ingest this.” I wish I could tell the mind not to remember something. It doesn’t work like that. Things just come in. We get told all kinds of stories, we watch movies, we watch TV shows, we’re conditioned by our parents and our teachers and all these things. We just need to know we’re this big bundle of things that’s ready to get all turned into nesting dolls. We can’t exile ourselves from this. We just need to know what’s going on and be curious. When we start to see the mind gathering up all the data, as much as possible: don’t know. Don’t know.
There’s a neuroscientist, I think her name was Lisa Feldman Barrett, but I’m not sure if that’s correct. I read an article by her, and she described the brain as an organ, like any other organ in our body. She said it’s our prediction organ. It’s always predicting. It’s taking all this stuff we have both willingly and choicefully inputted, as well as unwillingly had inputted into us, and it draws on all of it. From that, it makes assumptions; it predicts. It’s a great thing, until it’s not. So don’t just believe your thoughts. Test them, investigate them.
This brings me back to the Kalama Sutta and what the Buddha taught. One of the beautiful things that the Buddha taught in this sutta, in my view, is this: these practitioners are asking, “How do we know what is true?” And the Buddha doesn’t say, “Go write a thesis.” He doesn’t say, “Think and analyze and cognize and imagine and evaluate and judge.” Instead, the Buddha teaches us how to look directly at our experience and to use the measure of suffering, or the absence of suffering, to help us determine that which is leading toward what he would call true dharma.
In order to notice and be aware of whether something is causing more suffering for us or others, we have to be embodied. It’s not something that you intellectually evaluate; it’s something that you recognize, you experience, you sense. You have to notice how you’re being impacted, the quality of your heart. You have to notice if your mind is contracting. Is there aversion in my mind? Is there this thread of not liking, not wanting, anger, hatred? Anxiety and fear are part of aversion, because it’s something we don’t want, we’re afraid of.
With greed, it’s all about trying to get or hold on to or control, right? It’s all about wanting. I was thinking about that this morning from my lens of, “Can I love or not?” Because a lot of people are like, “Well, but I’m attached. I love. I want this person, I want this thing.” But when I think about it, if I’m really caught up in wanting, what does that feel like? For me, it’s like I’m really focused on what I want to take in, bring in, keep. When I’m relating that way, I might know I love, I might know I care, but is the heart really soft enough to open? Is this heart really receptive? I think it gets compromised, contracted in the effort. And with delusion, we’re just all caught up in stories. If we’re not really connected to what’s really going on, we aren’t really caring and loving what’s here. We can’t; we’re not really seeing what’s here.
Back to the Kalamas. The Kalamas were really confused. They were complaining and saying, “This one says this, and this one says that, and how are we supposed to know?” And the Buddha said something beautiful in the beginning, maybe it has to do with a little bit with not knowing. The Buddha said, “Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas.” Isn’t that nice? They’re trying to know, and he’s saying, “Of course you’re uncertain. Of course you don’t know. Of course you’re in doubt. When there’s reason for doubt, uncertainty is born.” I relaxed just imagining that.
Then the Buddha went on to say, “Don’t go by reports, legends, tradition, scripture, logic, conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement with your views, probability, or the thought, ‘This contemplative is my teacher.’” So the Buddha is even saying, whoever their teacher is, including him, “Don’t go by just what I say.” This is one of the things that I think made Buddhism so accessible to me—that I wasn’t expected or required to just believe what I was being taught. That was really, really important for me to be able to really enter deeply into this practice.
He says, after laying the ground of “of course you don’t know,” “When you yourself know these things are bad, these things are blameable, unskillful, and unwholesome”—we’re using old language here, but when you know this is not good, this is not healthy—”and that they’re censored by the wise, and when undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill will, when they are hurting us, when they are hurting others, abandon them.”
When you yourself know. The Buddha in this is empowering each person to engage and reflect, and he’s also really beautifully simplifying what we need to know directly, what we need to connect with. You suffer, I suffer. We all suffer, but all of us, because of our own conditioning, suffer slightly uniquely. So we need to study ourselves. We need to notice when we’re in unhealthy mental and emotional territory. This is so beautiful for me. It’s so simple.
One of his key teachings is that greed, hatred, and delusion cause harm. So we can just check in. If there’s greed, hatred, and delusion, and notice—sometimes it’s not clear. Maybe I need to not like this or not want this, or I want this. But then, okay, is it causing harm? Is it making me unwell? Is it making someone else unwell?
For example, my worrying about my adult child. Is my worry, while it’s from the love of a mama, making me sick? Is it making me unwell? Is it contracting my heart? Is it binding my mind? Is it turning my stomach? Is it affecting my irritability? Well, if so, it’s probably leading to harm. I’m harming myself with the ways that I’m holding things. That tells me there’s some way I’m looking at the situation or relating to it that I need to abandon. There’s some other way to hold it or be with it that will allow my mind to relax and my heart to relax and my body to be free. The Buddha is telling us to know the quality of our heart and our mind, to use that as the reference point for whether we want to pursue or abandon something.
After we come to this understanding for ourselves, the Buddha says, “Know for yourself and listen to the wise.” When you know for yourselves, and you can listen to the wise, that these things are skillful, blameless, praised by sensible people, and when you undertake them they lead to welfare and happiness, then you should acquire them and keep them. The Buddha is not telling us to all be off in our own la-la land, coming to our own completely individual conclusions, but rather to also rely on those who are wise, the teachings that are wise that have helped us. My relationship to various teachings changes over time too, so it’s also always wise to keep checking in about what we’re referencing. He doesn’t say you have to believe the wise ones absolutely, but use this as another gauge to help yourself. What we come to know and see is not just me and not just another, not them, not me, but both self-knowledge and the knowledge of the wise.
In another sutta, the Buddha is teaching his son, Rahula,3 about how to do this, how to know whether what we’re doing is causing harm or not. Again, it’s not just this intellectual analysis, it’s not a predictive thing, but we might employ those things, but we don’t rely solely upon them. He tells his son, anytime he’s about to do something, to take an action that might be significant, to reflect before you do it. Reflect: “Is this causing harm to myself? Is it causing harm to others? Or is it causing harm to both?” Before I go do something important or say something important, I want to reflect on these things.
Then the Buddha says, “Great. And then while you’re doing it, while it’s happening, reflect again. Have mindfulness in the middle of it and reflect: Is this causing harm to me? Is it causing harm to another? Or is it causing harm to both?” If it’s not, the Buddha says, “Proceed, keep going. Great, enjoy.”
And afterwards—so maybe you think it’s not causing harm, you go through it, you still don’t think it’s causing harm—afterwards, you still pause and reflect, maybe many times after, because sometimes we don’t recognize the harm until later. And if it was all goodness, it’s great to reflect and savor the goodness many, many times, asking the same questions. This is our dharma compass, our north star. This is such a beautiful, accessible thing to do, which is to notice: Can I love? Am I present? Am I open, receptive, taking in, being willing? Or am I contracted and hurting and closed off? Am I suffering?
I think it’s something that I reference a lot, but not enough. I too often overlook how I allow myself to suffer, and I don’t think I’m alone. We need to look in all areas. Maybe we do work in our lives that’s really meaningful and important, really helpful work. But if we aren’t paying attention to how much we’re trying to do, or how much pressure we’re putting on ourselves, or how much we’re taking on, we’re letting ourselves suffer. Most likely. We need to notice it in all the realms, even if they’re what we feel are completely wholesome realms. We need to keep taking care of ourselves, be the guardians of our hearts, pay attention to stress early. It’ll help us make wiser decisions, not to blindly accept our responsibilities, our concerns, as what is most important.
So, do you think you’re paying close enough attention to your suffering? To where you’re putting yourself in stress or harm’s way, or harming others? Is there some nest you’re building, a nest of fear, stacking dolls? Maybe pick one that you know you’re constructing, that you’ve been building. Maybe bring it to mind. Let yourself see all the little tangled-up pieces, whether you like the nesting doll or the nest, all the things that are getting packed together. Just take a moment to reflect on it and notice what you feel in your body.
And what if you say, “Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. I don’t know.” What if not knowing releases the glue that binds it all together? Can you imagine that? Letting the pieces soften, deconstructing your nest.
I’ll read Rosemary’s poem again:
Every day I dismantle its nest, the fear that wings darkly into my thoughts.
We have a couple of minutes. I’m happy to take questions, or if people want to come up, I’m happy to talk to you afterwards. Is there a question or a comment anyone would like to share?
Susan: Wow, Tanya, you’re on fire. I really appreciate so much this image of the nest. I’m a very keen gardener, and every now and again after a windstorm, it’s not unusual to have a nest blown down. When you see a nest, it’s all these little pieces of grass and feather. Somehow, having this image of the little twig, the little thing landing in me, and just gently letting it go instead of this weaving of the story line is just so helpful. Thank you.
Tanya: Oh, great, Susan. Thank you.
Does anybody have a hard time imagining dismantling your nest? Maybe I’ll teach you one of the things that I do to help me. It actually comes out of my practice with right effort.
In my right hand, I have the nest, all that you were focusing on, all that’s sort of tangled up together. All that sort of contraction. Just let yourself feel it and hold it.
And then when you’re ready, in your left hand, there’s not knowing. Not knowing and opening, relaxing into not knowing. Just let the not knowing grow a bit. Let it fill up your hand and the space around it. Just not knowing is huge. It’s way bigger than the nest, the knowing. Way bigger.
And then when you’re ready, slide the not knowing under the nest. Take your hands and put the right hand above the left hand, the nest being held by this huge, amazing field of not knowing. Let the nest rest. Let it be held in that field. Don’t try and get rid of the nest, just hold it in the beautiful expansiveness of not knowing. Let it be saturated by not knowing. Let it rest in not knowing.
It can be that simple. We just might have to do it every day. Right effort is, you know, one of the ways the Buddha described it was… in the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have nails, so they used holes and pegs to build things. We’re building this nest. So the Buddha would say when the peg is rotten, use a new, good peg, pound it in, and replace the old one. Then you have the healthy rod in there holding things together. So what if not knowing can be that replacement thing, holding things together or allowing them to dissipate?
Maybe that’ll help for those of you who are having a hard time. I hope it does. Thank you for your kind attention.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in conditioned existence. ↩
Kalama Sutta: A discourse of the Buddha found in the Pali Canon. It is well-known for its encouragement of free inquiry and the rejection of blind faith, advising listeners to test teachings against their own experience of what leads to harm versus what leads to well-being. ↩
Rahula: The only son of Siddhartha Gautama (the historical Buddha) and his wife, Princess Yasodharā. He later became a monk and one of the Buddha’s disciples. ↩