This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Far Shore: The Other Side of Clinging ~ 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 website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Welcome, welcome. Hello, good evening. While we were meditating, the thought arose, “Oh, why didn’t I do this earlier?” I just love sitting with you guys and think, “Oh, I should just spend the whole day here at IMC and sit with whoever shows up.”
So, last week I introduced this idea, the simile of the raft. Many of you might be familiar with this simile; it’s a well-known one that gets interpreted in a number of different ways, with different emphases put on different parts of it.
First, I’ll introduce the idea. It’s part of Majjhima Nikāya 22, the Alagaddūpama Sutta1, which is kind of hard to say—the “Simile of the Snake.” It’s in a sutta that has a number of different similes, but this one is the simile of the raft. It goes something like this:
Imagine a person in the course of a journey arrives at a great expanse of water whose near shore is dubious and perilous, and the far shore is a sanctuary free of peril. But there’s no ferry boat or bridge to cross the water. So the person thinks, “What if I collected grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bound them together as a raft? Supported by the raft and by paddling with my hands and feet, I should then be able to reach the other side of the shore.”
The simile continues, but I’m going to stop here. Last week, I talked about the near shore being dubious and perilous. I’ll say just a little bit about that, but today I want to talk about the far shore, and next week I’ll talk more about this idea of a raft.
Let’s unpack this simile a little bit more. This idea of going on a journey—we could say this is just one’s life. One way we can consider it is as a journey. It’s not the only way, and it doesn’t work in all situations, but one way could be as a journey. This great expanse of water is something that’s getting in the way, that we just find ourselves in contact with, or seeing, or noticing, or experiencing. The suttas talk about it as a flood, this thing that makes you feel overwhelmed, something that’s just coming this way, and it feels like there’s nothing to be done except to be swept away. We don’t like this feeling of being swept away, feeling overwhelmed.
But also, there’s a way in which we could understand this great expanse of water as just this existential dukkha2. I’m using this word dukkha; I always like to define it. There’s this huge, broad range, from just this mild feeling like something’s not right to, “Oh my gosh, this is the most terrible, awful thing that’s ever happened.” So, this one word for this wide range: dukkha.
Sometimes when we encounter some terrible diagnosis for ourselves or for a loved one, this is some existential dukkha. Like, “Wow, okay, my life is going to end in a way that I wasn’t expecting, or at a time I wasn’t expecting.” Or, “This person whom I love, maybe they are going to have some adjustment to their expected lifespan, or maybe they’re going to have a lot of pain, or maybe we’re going to have a lot of pain.” Nobody wants this, but often it can’t be avoided. This is something that life brings to us sometimes.
Or maybe this sense of dukkha is the sense of, “Oh, my life would be okay if only… if only those people over there would start behaving better, would just get it together or do what they should.” You know, the list is long. Or maybe it’s, “Oh my gosh, if only this person over here… if only I had more willpower. If only I could force myself to do all the things I know I should be doing but somehow am not doing.” Or, “Maybe if only I were different in some fundamental way.” It’s amazing the things that we come up with, how we think we should be different. It’s never-ending, or it can be endless.
This idea of the near shore is where you find yourself. And it’s only the near shore because it’s compared to something over there. Otherwise, it’s just your life that’s happening. But it’s the near shore because it’s not over there. And over there is this far shore, this idea that we have that somehow it’s better. It’s not in contact with this dukkha. Somehow it’s going to be better. Maybe it’s not clear to us exactly how, or maybe it is clear to us how everything would be fine as soon as we get there, and we know exactly what “there” is going to look like.
I want to talk a little bit about this idea of the far shore. Some of you might know that sometimes it gets defined as Nibbāna3. Nibbāna is the Pali word for Nirvana, which is a way for awakening or enlightenment or something like this. It’s not something that gets talked about so often. There are a number of reasons for this, I can imagine.
One reason is it’s guaranteed to not be satisfying. You’re not going to get a description that feels like, “Oh, okay, I got it. Yeah, no problem.” It’s not possible for it to have a description that is completely satisfying because the mind that’s trying to understand it is not the mind that can understand it. We do this all day long, and it’s very helpful and useful, where there’s an experience, and then we slap a label out of thin air on it. It’s a mental event; we stick it on and say, “Oh, okay, this is frustration.” And then we have a relationship with this word “frustration.” Meanwhile, the experience might have ended or completely changed and is no longer that, but we slap a label on it, and then we have a relationship with the concept, the idea about it.
Nibbāna is about not having concepts. It’s about how concepts are concepts; they’re not actually what’s being experienced. It’s about non-clinging. Clinging happens in the obvious ways: “Please don’t leave me, I’ll do anything if you don’t leave,” that type of thing we can do, whether we don’t want individuals to leave us or we don’t want experiences to leave us. But this non-clinging is in the gross ways and the really subtle ways, like the clinging to the idea that something should be clear and stable and have a label and have some constancy to it. And Nibbāna is not that.
So it usually gets described in terms of what it isn’t. It’s not clinging. It’s the ending of greed, hatred, and delusion. What’s being experienced when there’s just nothing but clarity and no resistance? None. For me, the way that I’m imagining it, especially in the context of this sutta of the simile of the raft, is like a river or a creek or a stream, this flowing body of water. Things just move. We can take a bucket, stick it in the water, and say, “Oh, okay, here’s what’s in here is the river,” kind of not realizing, “Oh no, actually the river is this moving thing.” This is the same idea I was talking about with concepts. We scoop up some water, and then we start working with this, thinking that it’s the river, but it’s not. The non-delusion, non-greed, non-hatred is the way in which we’re creating this scooper and we’re doing the activity of scooping and looking into it. We could say that’s one way we could understand greed, hatred, and delusion. This is really subtle, and maybe it doesn’t make any sense, but maybe it does in some kind of way, too. This recognition of wanting to solidify or reify or make something solid and permanent and stable. It’s this really fundamental, deep wish that we have because it’s tied up with this idea of, “Okay, I just need a place where I can rest, where everything is stable and happy and clear. I just haven’t found it yet. I just got to keep on looking.” We can spend our whole life looking for this place where, “Oh, I can finally rest,” where we’ve arrived and we never have to seek again. That doesn’t exist. And it turns out to not be a problem that it doesn’t exist. It’s the thinking that we need it that’s the problem, not the absence of this final place to rest.
Another way we might understand freedom, maybe more generally if not exactly Nibbāna, is this absence of identifying with things, this absence of having experiences be all about me. For example, maybe a wave of sadness arises. It’s not uncommon for thought patterns to arise like, “Oh, I have to fix this. I can’t have this. No, this is not good. I don’t want this.” There’s a sense of, “Oh, this is a problem, and I have to fix it.” Or maybe we identify with it in another way: “Oh my gosh, this sadness again. I don’t want to experience this again. I spent a decade so sad. I thought I was over it, and I got to do something different. I’ve been trying to outrun this my whole life, and here it is again.”
I’m not saying that any of this isn’t actual experience. What I’m saying is the stories, the narratives that get attributed to an experience, are extra. They don’t need to be there. It’s just sadness. It doesn’t have to be a problem. It doesn’t have to mean anything about us as a human, as a failure or a success, or a happy person or a sad person. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just sadness that’s being experienced, and it arises and passes away. This is a radical idea, that things just are as they are. They’re being experienced the way they’re being experienced. I’m not talking about passivity. I’m not talking about being half-comatose4 or something like this, where you’re just totally disconnected from experience. I’m talking about just recognizing it, feeling the fullness of life and like, “Oh, here’s this experience. Oh, there, here’s another experience. That one arose and went away. Oh, here’s another one, arose and passed away.” And just realizing that’s actually what life is, and it’s beautiful.
I want to talk about some of the ideas that we might have, unknowingly bringing to ideas of what the far shore is or what freedom is. Often when I’m talking about this in dharma talks, I’m using the words “peace, ease, and freedom.” I’m using these words because I want everybody to be able to find what’s meaningful for them. Maybe ease is really what’s meaningful for them, or maybe peace is, or maybe freedom, or maybe on different days it’s different. I want all of us to be able to find what’s meaningful for us or be able to relate to this in a way that’s meaningful, instead of saying, “Oh, it’s about some thing that you don’t understand or maybe you’re not interested in.”
Here are some common ways, and I know I certainly had all of these, absolutely, because unknowingly I did. And I see this happening in a lot of people too. In the absence of our talking about what freedom is, then people just fill in the blank. Of course they do. And what gets filled in the blank in terms of, “Okay, well, what is freedom really?” is often what we want and what the dominant culture suggests is the fruit of a spiritual practice.
Permanent Equanimity: One idea we might have is this permanent state of equanimity, where nothing is disturbing, where there’s no longer being agitated or feeling a little bit triggered or uncomfortable. Just being chilled out about everything all the time, feeling completely unbothered or serene or completely centered and never pushed off center, even just a tiny bit. This is very compelling because so much of our world feels turbulent. The outside world certainly feels turbulent; our inner world can feel turbulent. So of course we have this idea that it’s just going to be complete peacefulness all the time. We do experience moments of calm and peace when we’re meditating, and it can feel like a certain liberation from the turbulence or the stress or the chaos. So it must feel like, “Okay, awakening will be more of that.” In some ways it is, but I’ll talk a little bit more about that.
Complete Self-Acceptance: Another way we might think about it is having this complete self-acceptance, fully embracing and loving and welcoming all aspects of ourselves, every part of ourself. Not having any bit of this inner critic or any sense of shame or insecurity, but instead feeling perfectly adequate and sufficient. Of course we bring this idea because this inner critic that so many of us have is painful and wreaks havoc in our lives in so many ways. Wouldn’t it be great if it weren’t there any longer? Or maybe we have had some experiences during meditation with some warmth and warm-heartedness for ourselves, either that arose spontaneously or that we cultivated with loving-kindness practice. Or maybe there are some states of samādhi5, some states of collectedness and unification that have that feeling of wholeness with a flavor of well-being. That can feel like such a relief and also empowering, like, “Okay, I’m okay. I can meet whatever needs to be met.”
Unity Consciousness: Another idea we might have is what I’ve heard expressed as “unity consciousness.” I don’t think you’ll hear that very much here at Insight Meditation Center; it’s not part of our tradition or lineage. But it’s this idea where the separation of self, the notion between self and everything that’s not self, dissolves. These are meditative experiences; they can be known, this idea of being merged with everything. I know that early in my meditation practice, for a long time, I felt like I didn’t know what freedom was, but I was sure it had to be crazy and wild. For me, the weirder the meditative experience, the better. So I just felt like I had to cultivate weird stuff just because I felt like it certainly couldn’t be ordinary, whatever it was. That turned out not to be such a good idea. I was telling my teachers weird stuff, and they were kind of looking at me like, “Diana, what are you doing?” But it turned out not to be such a good idea because I wasn’t paying attention to what was really important. Instead, I had some experience that I assigned a whole narrative and meaning to, and it just turned out to be a cul-de-sac.
Perfect Relationships: Maybe we have these ideas that all our relationships, all our interactions with everybody, with all beings, will be healthy and mature. That we’ll communicate clearly all the time and we’ll understand what everybody is saying very clearly, and there’ll be this intimacy that feels appropriate and tender and nourishing. Of course we would like to have this, because so often we feel separate, we feel alone, we feel like maybe we don’t understand other people, or that other people don’t understand us. Of course we would want to live without this fear of rejection or abandonment, but instead with this recognition of a connection and an understanding with other people.
These are some of the ideas that we might have about the far shore. They’re perfectly legitimate. And it’s quite something how this practice—a mindfulness practice, some concentration or samādhi practice, and maybe a little bit of study—can really help move along towards those goals. Absolutely.
But there’s also this way that even the whole notion of a far shore can be a trap. Just as I said, because it makes you feel like, “Oh, I’m here, I’m not there.” And then, it’s really subtle, but often what happens with that is, “This is a problem, I have to fix it, I have to get over there. Clearly, I’m not doing something right.” Or, “Those people over there clearly aren’t doing something right that’s preventing me from doing this.”
It turns out that this isn’t a journey of distance or space. It’s a journey of perception, or a shift in our relationship to experiences, as opposed to having just the right experiences.
The far shore isn’t elsewhere. It’s not somewhere else. It’s what arises, it’s what opens, it’s what’s experienced when we stop struggling to become. To put ourselves in a little box: “I’m like this, and these are my qualities.” It’s what arises when we let go and there is no clinging—this really radical letting go.
It can be a trap because we are always looking over there, but also what’s implicit in that, as I mentioned earlier, is that we’re measuring. We’re using erroneous metrics, like, “Oh, I’m not having that complete experience that I really want, therefore I must be doing something wrong.” Meanwhile, we’re not noticing those moments of ease and spaciousness that are spontaneously arising. Maybe we’re cultivating them and developing them, but those moments when there’s not a lot of sense of self or clinging.
I remember this one time during a retreat at a retreat center where I was spending a lot of time sitting outside in nature. It was just lovely to be outside and do my meditation outside. I would sit, walk, sit, walk in this little area that I had found. I remember this one time, I was doing sitting meditation. I don’t remember what caused me to open my eyes, but I remember opening my eyes, and I was sitting up on a hill and I could see a certain expanse down into the valley. I saw this hawk—I think it was a hawk, a big bird that doesn’t flap its wings—and it was just soaring, going down and then up and maybe around in a circle. And there was this way that I felt this beautiful sense of, “Oh, I was soaring too.” It was just the most beautiful experience of ease and spaciousness and flight.
But sometimes, even those types of experiences, or even minor ones, get dismissed. I was near a kind of river not too long ago, and this feeling of, “Oh, just to jump in.” I just felt like, “Let’s just jump in,” and then just allowing the current to carry me. It was just so much fun and spaciousness, like nothing needed to happen except not to run into something, of course. But these feelings of ease and spaciousness that arise, whether they’re big things or small things—if we’re often thinking, “Oh no, I have to have perfect relationships,” or “I have to feel complete,” or “I have to get rid of any feeling of inadequacy,” then we will tend to think, “Oh yeah, that’s nice, but I’m still not there.” But it turns out that these moments are really what practice is about.
Or maybe we are having some thoughts about ourselves like, “Ah, you really should do the dishes before such and such happens.” We have all these stories. What if we have this idea of what freedom is, and then we might not notice those times in which thoughts arise and we’re like, “Okay, yeah, whatever, those are just thoughts.” We don’t pay any attention to them. We don’t make them mean anything about ourselves. We notice, “Okay, that’s a story, and it’s okay. Minds make stories. You don’t have to make them be a problem.” But there are times in which we often aren’t noticing how often we’re not getting caught up with thoughts because we think that awakening has to look a particular way. So we’re being dismissive or just not even noticing. But the way towards more freedom is not getting caught up with thoughts, and this is happening; we’re just not noticing.
We can understand that awakening is not a constant state. It’s not a location, certainly, but it’s not this continuous bliss or peace or something like that. It’s not fixed; it can’t be. Instead, it’s not being pushed around by whatever the experience is. It’s a radical shift in our relationship to what’s happening. So maybe some irritation arises, and it’s just irritation, and it goes away. It lasts for a moment and it goes away, and it doesn’t mean anything about the person. It’s just like, “Oh, okay, irritation happens when I have to stand in a long line and I’m in a hurry.” It’s not like it’s just a moment of frustration that arises, and it’s okay.
It’s this non-clinging, this unbinding, this radical letting go. Maybe anger arises, and then it just arises and passes away. There’s no rumination about it, like, “I can’t believe that person cut me off! Where did they learn how to drive?” It’s just, oh, there’s a little something of some anger, and there’s no resentment, there’s no residual, there’s no rumination. It’s just something that arises.
It turns out that this is what freedom really is. It’s not being a bliss blob. Instead, it’s like mental events are still occurring, but the relationship to them is different. There isn’t any identification. We’re not adding anything. There isn’t any adding of what it means about me as a person or about the world in general. It’s just an experience.
It’s not about what is happening, and it’s not that we’re in constant bliss. It’s more that it’s a lack of adding anything extra to experience. And it turns out that adding things extra is where uncomfortableness, where dukkha, arises. Part of meditation, as the mind starts to get quieter and quieter, is we start to see the more subtle ways in which we’re adding things that are extra. I can imagine this is not very satisfying to hear about.
But maybe there’s this way we can understand it, like there’s just greater flexibility. A disappointment arises, like, “Oh, okay, I thought I was going to do this today or I was going to meet this person today, but oh, that’s not going to happen.” And then just pivot and do the next thing, instead of any heaviness about it, like, “I can’t believe that they changed at the last minute!” Or maybe the reactivity is just… maybe there isn’t this bursting or responding, instead of like, “Oh wow, okay, that was uncomfortable.” Some interaction with somebody, and it’s just an uncomfortable experience that arises and passes away.
So what if the far shore is not like something over there to reach? What if it’s not over there, but what if it’s what remains when we stop seeking? When we stop always looking for something to be different or something to match our ideas of what freedom is like. It’s an interesting thing because as long as there’s seeking, by definition, there is not finding. And yet we are so used to seeking, seeking, seeking. What happens if we just put down the seeking? Then finding happens. This turns out to be pretty powerful.
What if the far side is not on the other side of that great expanse of water, but it’s on the other side of clinging? It’s on the other side of seeking. We can use different words for this way in which we’re adding things that are extra to our experiences.
So maybe you can just be sensitive to or open to: when do you taste moments of non-grasping, non-seeking, non-clinging? When are they being experienced? Chances are they’re happening, and meditation practice just allows it to be noticed and for it to happen more and more. Or what happens when you’re not trying to fix or protect or defend your sense of self or bolster your sense of self? What opens up when you are no longer defending the self, when that whole self-project relaxes? And then what opens? What’s available?
And can you rest there, even for just a portion of a breath? One second, less than a second? This is what’s being pointed to as the far shore. This metaphor is fun or helpful to talk about, but it also can help feed this trap that the far shore is over there somewhere.
So I’ll stop there and open it up to see if there are some comments or questions.
Questioner 1: Your description of unity consciousness, I think, is the best description I’ve heard of something that happened to me, first spontaneously when I was about 11 years old, and maybe a couple of times since then. I’ve told teachers about it, and they haven’t been really impressed by it, or they’ve said things like, “Well, was that nice for you?” And I said, “Yes.” But it feels like a transcendent experience, but I guess I haven’t really experienced it leading me on to…
Diana Clark: You hadn’t experienced it leading you towards anything deeper, maybe?
Questioner 1: So, just a comment, I guess.
Diana Clark: It feels kind of cruel, right? When we have experiences that are really meaningful, and yet they feel evasive, and we can’t have them again. It’s kind of a cruel thing. I’ll just speak from my own experience and feeling like, “Wait, what? What am I doing wrong?” All this stuff gets added on top of it. I don’t know if that was the case for you, but definitely for me. So, thank you.
Questioner 2: I’m reminded, when you talked about “extra,” it helped solidify in my mind the idea… Recently here, someone was talking about a dharma talk, partly about someone that felt in a moment like they had messed up and had omitted something that should have been included, and winced, and went up to the teacher at the end and apologized. And the teacher’s response was, “Mistakes happen. The wincing was extra.” And that helped me realize what that was about. So, thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Okay, so here we are at 8:30. So thank you for your attention. I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you. If you’d like, you’re welcome to come up here and talk to me or ask a question.
Majjhima Nikāya 22, the Alagaddūpama Sutta: The 22nd discourse in the “Middle Length Discourses” of the Buddha, a major collection of texts in the Pali Canon. The title translates to “The Simile of the Water Snake.” ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in mundane life. ↩
Nibbāna: The Pali term for Nirvana. It literally means “extinguishing” or “quenching” and refers to the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path: the cessation of suffering and the cycle of rebirth. ↩
half-comatose: The original transcript said “half comedos,” which is likely a transcription error. “Half-comatose” fits the context of being disconnected from experience. ↩
Samādhi: A Pali word meaning “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to a state of deep meditative absorption where the mind becomes still and focused. ↩