This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Wise effort ~ Jim Podolske. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Jim Podolske at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Well, good evening everyone. Welcome. My name is Jim Podolske. I’m filling in for Diana tonight as she’s off on retreat. Over the last couple of weeks, she’s been giving a number of talks that have included talking about the five hindrances, and so I wanted to give a talk tonight that included that.
If you’ve been around this dharma scene a while, you’ve probably heard about the Eightfold Path. It’s a foundational paradigm for the Buddhist tradition that we practice in, the Theravadan1 tradition. It’s a way of organizing the most important practices that the Buddha taught so that if one is interested in experiencing liberation—freedom from greed, delusion, and hatred; freedom from dukkha,2 which is sometimes translated as suffering, dissatisfaction, or in common terms, just the bummer-ness of life—then these practices that the Buddha described in the Eightfold Path are really the way to get there.
These eight path elements are all interrelated, so it’s not like you cultivate one and then cultivate the next and cultivate the next. But for purposes of talking about them, it’s easiest to make them into a linear pattern. The first two are the wisdom factors: Right View, which is really starting to look at your experience through the frame of the Four Noble Truths. This is seeing that there is suffering in your life, seeing that there is dukkha, that there is either mild discontent all the way to almost unbearable conditions. It’s important to see what that’s coming from—that it’s coming from our clinging to something, and that there’s a possibility for the ending of that. The Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path; this is the way to achieve freedom.
That’s the first of the path factors. The second one is Right Intention: having intentions of letting go of greed, letting go of ill will, letting go of harming others. Those intentions really set us on a path to be able to be free. If we’re trying to be free but also harming ourselves or harming others, that’s not going to work.
The next part of the Eightfold Path are the ethical parts: developing Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood. Those mostly have to do with how we interact with others, how we interact with other people one-on-one or in communities or in groups. So those all involve the cultivation of appropriate action towards others.
And then finally, the third set is the samadhi3 set, which involves Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration. In this center, people often start with Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration, wanting to develop a mind that is aware of what’s happening as it’s happening, and a mind that can be steady and focused so that it’s not jumping all over the place.
So tonight, I’m going to talk about Wise Effort. Because the Eightfold Path is so foundational to this practice, IMC offers a course every year, a nine-month course going through each of these eight path factors. It just so happens this month they’re doing Wise Effort, so that’s why that’s on my mind.
I was inspired by something that Gil said yesterday morning. When you start the practice with something like developing mindfulness and concentration, there is a cultivation going on. Most of it is around observing; most of it is about developing a sense of awareness of what’s going on as it’s going on, and being able to stay with it in a very steady and settled way. Or at the very least, noticing that you’re not in a stable and steady way, that the mind is jumping around, and at least noticing that. Those two really involve primarily observing.
Wise Effort really involves cultivating. It’s not just noticing what’s going on, but it’s also making some effort, actually using whatever agency we have, whatever choice we have, to choose what we pay attention to, what kind of mind states or states of the heart and the mind that we’re cultivating, and which ones we’re eliminating. So Right Effort is much more of the active, cultivating part of this practice, although it also includes the observing part. You have to observe what’s going on so that you know how to do the cultivation.
One of the descriptions for Wise Effort is that it’s kind of like gardening. Things start to grow up out of the ground, and you have to decide which of these things are what you want to develop, what you want to cultivate, and which are the weeds—the things that are going to sap the nutrients and the strength and the light from those things that you want. So there are weeds that need to be pulled up, and in the same way, we can think of our heart and mind as being like a garden.
The first thing we need to be able to recognize is what are the weeds and what are the things that are the plants that you want to grow. The weeds are often referred to as unwholesome mind states. You might also call that unbeneficial or afflictive. What are the mind states that are like an affliction to us, and which are the ones that we want to encourage? In some ways, we have to figure that out for ourselves. You have to figure out which states of mind really aren’t helpful to my development and which ones are.
Some of the guidance on that comes from this book by Bhante Gunaratna called Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness. One of the characteristics of the unwholesome states is that they include the five hindrances. You may have heard Diana talk about the five hindrances over the last couple of weeks. The first one is greed, that sense of not just wanting, but wanting in an afflictive way, in a sort of addictive way. So greed, sensual desire, and lust are some of the stronger forms of that. When those are operating, it’s hard to see what’s going on. They become so enticing that all we see is what we want, and we don’t necessarily see the harm that’s coming to us or others as we try to grasp for more and more.
The second hindrance, or family of hindrances—it’s really a spectrum—is aversion or ill will or hatred. Whereas with greed we’re trying to hold on to something, usually something that can’t be held on to (I mean, pleasant can only be pleasant for so long), with aversion, it’s really trying to push away those things that oftentimes can’t be pushed away. And so there can be a lot of suffering that’s generated from being in that state of aversion. Those are the two biggest hindrances.
The other three—the next two come in pairs. The next one is sloth and torpor. That’s where there’s little or no energy. One of them is little or no energy in the mind, a sort of dullness, or little or no energy in the body, a sort of drowsiness. When one or both of those is operating, then it’s hard to see what’s going on because we just don’t have a bright enough awareness, a strong enough awareness of what’s going on.
The fourth hindrance is again a pair for body and mind, which is restlessness and worry. Unlike sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry is an overabundance of energy. The body just can’t sit still, and worry is often the mind can’t sit still; it’s just going all over the place. When that’s operating, again, it’s hard to imagine that you can really settle down and find peace.
And then the fifth hindrance is doubt, or skeptical doubt. Doubt keeps us going around in circles. It’s kind of like a dog chasing its tail. It’s just, “Should I be doing this or should I be doing something else?” and it never resolves. What it reminds me of is when I learned computer programming in the early 1970s. The program of choice was Fortran, and it was possible to write a program that would have a loop in it that would never reach a termination criterion. It would just go and go and go until the operator showed that your job had run out of resources, it had run out of time, and then it would just get terminated. So doubt can be kind of like an infinite loop; it just never on its own can just keep going.
There are some other more subtle forms of these unwholesome mind states that are called the 10 fetters, and that’s too long of a list for me to go through tonight. But if you look up the ten fetters, it’s on the internet. They tend to be more subtle experiences that keep us from being totally free, but some of them are only totally resolved when you become an arahant.4 So I wouldn’t start there; I’d start with the hindrances.
So the first thing is to learn for yourself what are the unwholesome mind states and what are the wholesome mind states. It occurred to me as I was thinking about this that, in my mind, one of the things that distinguishes wholesome mind states from unwholesome mind states is that wholesome mind states tend to be associated with letting go and opening up, and unwholesome mind states tend to be around closing down, contracting, and grasping. That’s a kind of a general criterion. When you find yourself getting more and more contracted, either physically or mentally, or holding more tightly, grasping things more tightly, that may be a sign that the mind state that you’re in isn’t going to lead to a life of peace and freedom. And likewise, when you’re in a state where there’s an openness, a letting go, some sense of generosity and kindness, you’re on the right track. So that’s a general way to describe those two categories.
Right Effort then consists of four activities. The first one is preventing the arising of unarisen unwholesome mind states. How do you do that? Well, I think for me, it starts by falling into a lot of unwholesome mind states, and then over time, you start to recognize what caused that unwholesome state to arise. What are the causative factors? What triggered it? And then as you start to see what the causative factors are that bring forth that kind of a state, you have a better chance of catching it either before it starts at all or before it gains much momentum.
I probably have told this story before. When I was about three years old, my father was doing a home improvement job on our house. When he would get frustrated, when something would go wrong, he would start to swear. I was in the bedroom watching him work and all of this stuff. At some point, I walked out of the bedroom into the living room and I started repeating some of these words I heard my father use. I had no idea what they meant. I was telling my mother all of these words, all these swear words, and she was aghast.
But I realized that for most of my life, when I would do something where frustration would start to arise, where something would start going wrong, almost immediately one or more of those words would come out of my mouth. When I wasn’t aware of that, if I just let that go, it would go from just being a mental activity to my whole body would start to get agitated. That frustration could really build. I’d just be ready to throw a tool or something.
Recently, I was doing a plumbing project at home, and if you’ve ever worked underneath a sink, there’s not much room. Sure enough, one thing went wrong, and I found myself, a swear word coming out of my mouth. But nowadays, when I hear that, I can go, “Oh yeah, that’s a sign. I must be frustrated. There must be frustration here.” And so I stopped what I was doing, I thought about it, I reread the instructions, and I was able to proceed without having to go through this really contracted, agitated state of frustration.
So for the first one, for preventing, it really requires us to get to know what are the warning signs. It might be that you have to go and talk with some particular coworker that just seems to trigger you, or anger, or what triggers desire. I can sit on the website of Apple and look at this one particular laptop and it’s like, “Oh god, if I had that laptop.” I mean, it’s got 64 gigs of memory and it’s got 24 cores and all this other stuff. It’s useful to look at it, and if it makes sense to buy it, but to just sit there and look at it over and over again and kind of obsess about it, after a while it’s actually kind of tiring and doesn’t feel very good. So for preventing, that one really requires getting to know how your mind works so that you can get those warning signs.
But you can’t prevent all of them. Things get through. Some unwholesome mind states just come so fast that before you know it, you’re in it. They’ve arisen. And so the second one is abandoning arisen unwholesome mind states. For that, the Buddha gave some… well, number one was mindfulness is always helpful. Being mindful really can help. But for arisen unwholesome mind states, he had a five-element strategy. The first one was, if possible, see if you can just ignore it. Like, “Okay, yeah, that’s right. That’s anger,” or “That’s greed,” and then just drop it. Now, you might be able to do that if it isn’t so strong.
The second one is to divert your attention from that thought to some better thought. So just, “Yeah, anger is here, but I can also… here’s some other things I can think about.” And so just divert your attention from what’s unwholesome to something that’s more wholesome.
The third one is replacing the unwholesome thought with its opposite. So for example, if greed has arisen in your mind, you might think about generosity. You might try to replace those thoughts of greed with thoughts of generosity.
The fourth one involves two parts. One is it can involve deciding, “Well, let’s just investigate what this unwholesome mind state is like. How does it feel in the body? And is this something that I want? Is this where I want to hang out?” And you can also look at what are the causes that came together for this to arise and notice that all of those causes are impermanent, that they’ll arise and pass. And so this whole unwholesome mind state is also impermanent. It’s not like when anger arises, it isn’t that that’s going to be there for the rest of your life. It’s just, it’s arisen, it’s temporary, and it’ll pass.
And then the final one, which I always thought was kind of surprising, it sounds kind of harsh, is there’s sometimes when there’s an unwholesome mind state where you just have to use force of will to kind of wrestle it to the ground. I thought, “Well, that doesn’t really… is that what the Buddha said?” But I started to think, there are times when people are just overcome with some really harmful, destructive impulse. Think of somebody harming another person, injuring them or even killing them. Often it’s just a spontaneous thing where the state of mind is strong. In those cases, it’s really important to be able to have a strong enough practice and strong enough effort to be able to tell yourself, “No, I’m not going to do this. No, I’m not going to tell a boss what a blankety-blank he is.” That may seem like it would be so satisfying, but it would only be satisfying for a few seconds, and then you’d realize that it harmed a relationship, it harmed who knows what. So as a last gasp, there may be times when an unwholesome mind state really has to be dealt with with as much force and energy as possible.
So for unwholesome mind states, there’s the preventing and the abandoning. And then for wholesome mind states, there’s cultivating the unarisen wholesome state. One of the first things that comes to my mind when I think about cultivating a wholesome mind state is practicing some of the loving-kindness, the Brahma Viharas:5 cultivating well-wishing for others, sympathetic joy, compassion, equanimity. Again, those qualities of mind that are expansive, that are open-handed.
There’s also the paramis,6 some of the foundational practices for this school of Buddhism, things like generosity, being generous both to yourself and to others, offering safety to people through living an ethical life, being patient, truthful—all of those are some of the wholesome states of mind. And there’s more. It’s really up to you to discover them for yourself, which ones really seem to support you, give you a sense of well-being, a sense of living in harmony and happiness.
And then the final one is maintaining arisen wholesome mind states. So once you’ve cultivated something like loving-kindness, how do you maintain it? There may be some momentum to it, and that’s great, and it may also require some continual effort to keep it going.
One of the practices that I was taught many years ago and I’ve used when I travel is when I go to an airport. You’re often sitting in the waiting area for your flight to be called. For me, it can be a little stressful. Even though I’ve got my ticket, everything’s lined up, I’ve got my baggage, still there’s strange people I don’t know, and who knows what’s going to happen. So one of the practices, since I have nothing else to do, is I sit there and as people walk by on the concourse, I wish them well. Somebody I’ve never met, just walking by: “May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be peaceful.” I don’t say it out loud, but it’s just… why not? It may or may not affect them, but it definitely affects me. I go from feeling like I’m sitting in a group of strangers who may or may not be hostile to feeling like I’m sitting with other human beings that I can wish well for. And it’s easy to maintain that for 20 minutes or however long it takes from when I get to the gate to when I get on the plane. And of course, even once you’re on the plane, it doesn’t have to stop.
I think as you start to feel how good it feels to be in one of those mind states, then there’s more of a natural tendency to just want to stay there, to just keep it going. I remember years ago, Gil saying this thing, and I can’t remember it exactly the way he said it, but it was like, “When you have a sense of peace and ease, what is important enough for you to give that up? Why would you give that up for? What would be so important that you’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to get rid of my peace of mind’?” So I think the maintaining part also takes effort. I suspect that there are people who have practiced long enough that it’s just kind of second nature, it just keeps going. But for those of us that are still affected by unwholesome mind states, it’s something we need to do.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been finding that I don’t sleep so well at night. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I feel is kind of groggy and averse to getting out of bed. I could just lay there and go, “Oh, poor me. Why isn’t life better? Why didn’t I get a better night’s sleep?” But instead, what I do nowadays when I wake up, the first thing I do is I notice that’s the kind of mind state that’s operating. That’s what’s going on. And so rather than trying to do anything at all complicated, I just start by paying attention to my breath. I just lay in bed and I just do breath meditation.
One of the things that does is I notice my breathing slows down, and also my heartbeat slows down. I’ve had some stents put in a few years ago, and so I notice sometimes when I first wake up, my heartbeat seems a little fast and a little erratic. By just doing breath meditation, my breath and my heartbeat just really even out. So there’s a physiological component of doing breath meditation in the morning. Also, some of that drowsiness goes away. I start feeling more energy. So starting the day with breath meditation really seems to make a difference to the mind states and to the body.
And then I may also then go into loving-kindness practice. Just kind of see whoever comes to mind first. It doesn’t really matter who comes to mind this morning, I start doing loving-kindness for them. I don’t set a particular amount of time; I just decide to do it until it’s clear to me I’m ready to face the day. I’m ready to get out of bed and I’m ready to face whatever the day holds. And it sets a tone. It kind of sets a tone that you can start your day by applying Right Effort. It isn’t something that you can wait till the end of the day, till 9:00 at night after your last television program is over and it’s like, “Okay, well now I’ll do Right Effort or Wise Effort.” You can start your day with it. You can find creative ways throughout the day to tune into what’s going on in my mind right now. And is this what I want, or is there some way that I could change it? A lot of what happens in our lives is just habit. It’s not necessarily something that we can change instantaneously, but we do have some agency, we do have some choice. And by using the choice that we have, we can cultivate a more wholesome state of mind.
The final thing that I’ll say is the practice only is effective if you do it. You can hear as many talks as you want about Right Effort or any kind of practice. You can listen, you can read books, you can hear podcasts, everything else. All of that’s very useful. All of that cognitive learning is useful, but it’s not enough. If you want the practice to make a difference, you got to do it. So I think that’s the key take-home about Right Effort is you have to start paying attention. Well, if you want the benefits, you need to make the effort. So, thank you.
We’ve got a few minutes if anyone has any questions. Yeah, Manny.
Manny: So I’m just going to add on what you said about just doing the practice. I’ve found out that through my personal journey that when I’m practicing in person, so like with multiple people, but doing it with consistency, maybe getting a little bit obsessive with it, that’s when I found it to be most beneficial. So just adding on what you said.
Jim: Okay, thank you. Find it useful. Thanks. Okay, anyone else? Also, thank you for doing that.
You’re welcome. All right, well, thank you all for coming, and Diana will be back next week. I’ll stay around afterwards if anyone wants to come up and ask me any further questions. So thank you all.
Theravada: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. It is the dominant form of Buddhism in countries such as Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Samadhi: A state of meditative consciousness. It is often translated as “concentration,” “unification of mind,” or “absorption.” It is the last of the three divisions of the Eightfold Path. ↩
Arahant: In Theravada Buddhism, an arahant is a person who has attained full enlightenment and liberation (Nibbana) and will not be reborn. ↩
Brahma Viharas: The four “divine abodes” or “sublime states” in Buddhism: Metta (loving-kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy), and Upekkha (equanimity). ↩
Paramis: The ten perfections or virtues cultivated on the path to enlightenment in Theravada Buddhism. They include generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity. ↩