This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Wise View and Delusion - Maria Straatman. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Maria Straatman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good morning, and good morning to all of you. It’s really lovely to be here. I have a few friends that are here, and it lifts my heart, but it doesn’t diminish the affection I feel for all of you that I don’t know who are here spending this time meditating together and practicing the dharma.1 It is a delight. I want to be sure to mention that because perhaps the lifting that I feel from my friends makes it more likely that I see that I share an affection for all of you. And it is that that I want to talk about today: how do our views, the views that we have, influence our experience? And what does that mean? How does that affect who we are, how we are, how we practice, whether we suffer?
In wise view, one of the first factors of the Eightfold Path, one of the goals is to be able to see clearly. That’s the only part of that biography I really like, that my goal in life is to be able to see really clearly. And if we’re going to see clearly, it’s crucial that we see the color of the lens that we’re looking through. It’s crucial that we know what our prejudices and biases are, how we are viewing the world. Why we have views is influenced by how we’re seeing, how we’re looking, where we’re looking. Otherwise, we are subject to delusion.
One piece that got me started on this idea was a briefing that I got, an email. I get a lot of really horrible emails, but one of them every day during the week I get a briefing from Nature magazine, and it has a list of the latest things that people have found in all realms of science. It kind of keeps me from forgetting entirely that there’s something else going on in the world besides news. And so in this scientific news this week, there was an article about the coffer illusion. Some of you may know what this is, but basically, it’s an optical illusion created by a man in San Francisco. It is made up of a whole series of what most people see as squares.
The estimate is 97% of people see squares when they look at this. I saw squares when I looked at this, but some people see circles. Now, the article was about the theories about why people see squares or circles. Some psychologists have been linking this to visual conditioning of how we were raised. So if you see squares, their theory is that you see that because you’re used to assembling your life—your buildings, your streets, everything’s kind of on a grid. We preferentially see structures that are at right angles to one another. But they tested some people in a village in Africa who live in round huts, and they have round corrals that they keep their animals in, and they see circles.
Now, after staring at the illusion for a while, I was able to see the circles, and now I can rapidly go back and forth between them, but I always see the squares first. You put it up in front of me, I see the squares, and then I look and I can find the circles. I know exactly how to do it now. My mind knows how to make that shift, and I can go back and forth at will.
What’s interesting is that one of the things I noticed when I was first reading about this was that I wanted to be able to see those circles. I wanted to be somebody who saw the circles. I wanted to be in that 3%. I noticed that trend toward exceptionalism. I want to be exceptional. I want to see the circles. It’s interesting to see that this is what our practice is. In order to see what is guiding what we’re doing, we need to be able to understand what our mind habits are, what are the things that we typically default to. Where do we go when we look at somebody, when we see something?
I’m speaking mostly of optical illusions, but it can apply to anything. It can apply to: I feel unsettled. Right away, I need to know why I’m feeling unsettled. I want to know why I’m feeling unsettled, what I can do about it, how can I fix it. It takes a lot of practice to just stay with “unsettled” because it’s uncomfortable, and we don’t like that. We want to be comfortable.
Now, what I want to emphasize is there’s nothing good or bad, no judgment applied to any of this. The fact that I see squares doesn’t mean anything about me, except I see squares. In fact, there are no actual squares or circles in the illusion; they’re just sticks of different lengths arranged on a page. It’s called “coffer” because the squares appear to be indented, like you could put something in them, into the little recesses of the squares. But they’re just sticks or light or shades, whatever you call it. The reality of it is there are neither squares nor circles, but the perception is that there are squares or circles, and the predominant perception is that there are squares.
It’s really crucial to understand how that affects our experience, not just because of that page, but because everything that we experience has that feature of being influenced by where you’re coming from and what you’re looking for and what you’re familiar with. We are conditioned by the familiar. That’s a large part of seeing, actually. We can’t typically see things that we’re not used to seeing. It’s quite difficult. We miss stuff. We just miss it.
So I’m going to read you a quote by Andrew Olendzki, who wrote a book called Untangling Self. That’s where this is from:
The truth is, we like our preferences and prejudices. We like defining ourselves in terms of what we like and don’t like. It’s precisely desire’s entanglement with the sense of self that makes this all so difficult to unravel. Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy and accessible way to counter the powerful forces of desire: the cultivation of equanimity. Every moment of mindfulness is also a moment of equanimity. It is not a disengagement from the object of awareness, but rather the full and complete engagement with it. It is engaging with the breath, or with the feeling tone, or with a thought, without also either wanting it to stay as it is or wanting it to be different than it is.
So the truth is, we like our preferences and prejudices. We define ourselves in terms of what we like or don’t like. We’re constantly saying, “Well, I’m somebody who does this. I’m somebody who believes this, and you’re somebody who believes that.” We have ideas and prejudices and beliefs about other people based on totally arbitrary things. They could just be sticks, and we’re seeing squares. Or you could be frowning, and I could decide, “Oh, you don’t like what I’m saying,” and you’re really frowning because your knee hurts. But I don’t know that, and I interpret what’s happening.
Andrew Olendzki’s quote emphasizes the importance of direct experience. This is what’s happening, really. This is what’s happening. When I feel myself, when I feel the energy of forming an opinion about something, can I stop? A very key pause and say, “Is that what’s happening, or how I’m interpreting it?” Then, what can I look at? What can I really see in this moment, as opposed to what do I believe about this moment?
It often involves this bias we have of how we see, which involves judgment—judgment of me, judgment of you. So I mentioned the thing of exceptionalism, seeing that I had this urge toward wanting to be different, wanting to be separate. I could decide, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you. You have to be important.” I can form all sorts of opinions about that, unless I’m also able to see that I really like being here in this group, with this group. I happen to be sitting up here, but really, it’s being with you that lifts my soul, lifts my heart. But if I’m focused on, “Oh, I got to worry about whether I’m conceited or whatever the judgment is you have about oneself or about others,” you can become derailed from what’s actually happening. You get kind of stuck in a rut and find yourself going down a tunnel. This is my conventional way of thinking. This is how it is. And what we’re really doing is seeing what is familiar.
I recently spent some time with my sister, who is closest in age to me. I come from a large family, and I really love my sister. Maybe three days into her visit, I found myself wanting to tear her apart. I could feel the anger, and I turned around and I walked away. I walked away because I didn’t want to say something hurtful, so I wasn’t totally out of control. I could see anger is here, and the consequences are always bad. So I turned away, and as I walked away, I thought about how this was actually an automatic response based on a long history of life with my sister and thinking, “Oh, she’s always that way.” As soon as I heard “she is always” or “I am always,” as soon as I hear that message in my head, I immediately know that I’m lost in some delusion. I immediately know I’m not seeing things as they are. Because the truth is, I turned away because I loved my sister, not because I was angry.
Seeing clearly requires you to really notice what’s going on and be brutally honest about it. It is neither good nor bad. The fact that anger arises is not bad; it just is. What we do next determines whether it’s skillful or unskillful.
One of the places this shows up most clearly is in the realm of righteousness. “This is how it should be. It really should be this way, and it’s not this way.” And the dissatisfaction comes from the sense that there’s one right way that this can be. And one has to ask oneself if they’re just not seeing the circles. Am I just not seeing the circles?
One of the difficulties of unraveling the case of reacting from a sense of seeing what’s familiar, noticing what’s familiar, is that we ignore that the conditions are always changing. So conditions are such that today, this is happening. So maybe at noon, I don’t want to be down at Market Street in San Francisco because it’s going to be really, really busy there, and there are going to be a million people there, and I might not be able to find my way. On another day, that is totally untrue.
The conditions are always changing in every moment for everything that is occurring. Any experience you have, you do not repeat that experience. There are some conditions that are different. And so being able to recognize, “I’m acting from a conditioned response,” or “I can see the tendency toward a conditioned response,” gives us the freedom to stop and say, “Oh, am I seeing clearly? Am I really seeing what’s happening, or am I just seeing what is easy to see?”
One place this plays out very strongly is in the case of expectations. We plan something, and in fact, this is what the anger with my sister was about. I had a plan for how the visit was going to go. We were going to do X, Y, and Z, and we were going to do it in this order, and it was going to make everything perfect. Except, you know, her grandson didn’t want to do that, and he was there too. And I found myself just being irritated by that. “But I’m trying to make this perfect for you. Can’t you see this act of generosity?” It took me a while to see that it was my selfish grasping on my expectation of how delighted they were going to be by this thing I planned that I failed to see that they were actually delighted by something else. And the suffering was being caused by my expectations, not by anything they were doing or even anything I was doing. It was all based on, “I have a plan. This is how I think it should go. This is what I’m offering.” It comes from a very generous place and turns into something not quite so generous when we are disappointed over the outcome of something.
The first thing we want to do is establish blame. “It’s your fault. It’s my fault.” No, you just see it. And when I saw that my expectations were getting in the way of everybody being at ease, I thought, “Oh, well, it’s just expectations. I can let go of expectations.” The mind locks back on the expectation. “No, it’s just an expectation.” Step away from it again. Step away, step away. We can’t really recondition the mind willfully overnight. We can only increase our ability to see when the mind habit is occurring, when it’s showing up, when it’s arising. We condition ourselves to watch. And then we say, “Oh, that’s what’s happening. Oh, I see that.”
The other thing to keep in mind is the tendency of us to see things from our point of view all the time, because you know, that’s where we’re looking from, right? But can I see you if I’m only worried about me? So there’s a need for balance in our view as well. When I feel jittery, when I feel irritated, when I feel delighted, I too have a tendency to say, “Ah, it means this, it’s about that.” And then I look at who else is in the room and see what their experience looks like, what does it feel like for them. It helps me get more in touch with what’s really happening. But if I’m only focused on me, I can’t see what’s actually happening because I’m leaving out a large part of the experience.
Seeing clearly requires us to be open to all the aspects of experience, to be open, which can be, you know, scary. It leaves you a little vulnerable. Guess what? That’s a good thing, because it means you’re taking it in. You’re actually taking in what the experience truly is.
So many of our assumptions are biologically, socially conditioned. We’re conditioned beings, but we’re not determined by those conditions. We can see, “Oh, this is happening.” We don’t decide to have that conditioning; it’s just there. What we do is we reinforce what we believe. We reinforce ideas that we have about ourselves, how we are, how we should be, instead of what’s happening now. What’s going on in this space, in this time, with these conditions? What’s happening now?
We’ve all had the experience where everything is going beautifully, and we say, “Ah, now I’ve got it. I know just how this works. This feels so good.” And we feel locked into the experience because it’s a pleasurable experience. When we feel like we’re in the flow, you know, we’re just moving with things, it’s really easy. And we ascribe meaning to that. “Oh, this means that now I’ve got the answer. I know how to do this. Cool. I’m never going to be angry with my sister again, right?”
Being affected is not the issue. Noticing something is not the endpoint. The next thing we do is say, “Okay, I notice that I’m affected. How am I being affected? What do I notice? What’s going on in me? How do I use this information that I’ve just received, that things are not the way I thought, or they are the way I thought? How is this affecting me? What do I feel about that?” So rather than getting caught up in the story about it—so let’s take the case of being angry with my sister. Instead of worrying about why I’m angry or what I’m angry about or what all the details of the story are, I can notice that it makes me uncomfortable, that I’m irritated, that I’m hot. I can change the focus based on what I see. That disentangles me from the story so that I’m not reinforcing the view, not reinforcing the need for blame. I’m in a different realm now, still with what’s happening. But now I can feel what this anger feels like. And in turning it around so that I’m not reinforcing why the anger is there, explaining the anger, whatever the feeling is, just being present for that allows me to say, “Oh, that feels not good. I don’t want that to continue.” It increases the possibility I can step away from that anger. I’m not fighting the anger. I can see it and say, “Okay, anger is here, but it’s not me. I don’t want to cultivate it.”
Here’s how I’m feeling: my stomach is upset. I’m looking at the actual things that are happening and not trying to interpret them. I’m also not denying that it’s there. That’s delusion. But it’s not the only thing there. And I can look up, and in the particular case of where this argument occurred, I looked out at the waves and the beach—we were on Santa Cruz Beach—and said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day? It’s still a beautiful day.”
We don’t have to take some emotional content, a piece of experience, and make it the entire experience. We get washed away in waves by an emotional experience, but we don’t have to be. And like waves, we can see them come crashing in, and they go out again. They’re not who we are.
So while the programmed mind establishes what it is that’s going on, we can say, “Is that true? And what else is happening? Is that true, and what else is happening? And what is actually happening that’s led me to this conclusion? What’s actually happening?”
How is this affecting me, and now what am I going to do? The skillful thing is not to have these biases never show up. The skillful thing is, what do I do when they show up? What do I do with this, whatever the bias is? Maybe it’s a bias toward optimism. My husband really likes to see the good in everything. So when he’s frowning and he’s trying desperately to find the good, you know he’s suffering because he doesn’t want to see the stuff that he doesn’t like to see. None of us do. We don’t like pain. We don’t like discomfort.
And we tend to think it means something. So Sylvia Boorstein tells this wonderful story. I heard it 20 years ago or something, but she was trying to get a hold of somebody at Zen Center, and they exchanged emails. This was before the world of texting and telephone calls, and they just didn’t seem to connect. So one morning she was calling Zen Center, and she asked for the person, and whoever answered the phone said, “Well, he’s not here.” And she said, “You know, it just must be that we’re not meant to connect.” And he said, “No, it just means that he’s not here.”
Now, I particularly like this story, A) because it’s humorous, but really because it makes it really clear what it is we’re talking about here. It’s not life or death. It’s that we tend to form opinions and implications when actually, this is the only thing that’s happening. Just this thing is happening.
We have to take into account the nature of our attitudes. You know, what’s my mood today? How am I feeling physically? Did I have a night where I couldn’t sleep, and so I’m really kind of short? I have attention deficit. I’m not actually listening to you. I heard the first two words, but after that…
We can develop a sense of the energy of how we are in the world in order to make these quick determinations of what’s actually going on. We have to pause. We have to have something that we look at. Look at the energy. Am I leaning toward this? Am I leaning away from this? Am I lifted by this? Am I depressed by this? Learn to follow the energy of what’s happening. It keeps you from getting lost in the story, for one thing. There’s a tendency then to convert that into, “This is what this means,” like, “you know, we’re not meant to meet.” But if we develop a feel for what our preferences and expectations are like, what does it feel like to find myself leaning toward an expectation? I’ve got a plan, and to feel yourself moving ahead to the next item on your plan, you can kind of feel that leaning-into part and say, “Maybe I’ll just stay here. Maybe I’ll just stay now.”
Become sensitive to the energy flow of your attitudes, your responses, your experience. Become familiar with it. That’s part of what we do in meditation. When we’re sitting in meditation and watching what arises: “I can’t seem to sit here today. I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin.” Feel what that feels like. Know what that feels like. There are many times where we’re standing in the kitchen and we feel like we’re going to jump out of our skin, or we’re driving down the freeway. To know that and say, “Oh, that’s what’s happening. This is the jumping-out-of-my-skin feeling,” and not “everybody on the road is driving crazy.”
Find yourself free of blame. Don’t let the view of “this has to be someone’s fault or someone’s doing or someone’s responsibility, mine or yours” and just be with the experience of “this is what’s happening.” Know that the views of mind habits are very strong. Learn yours. Learn the ones that come up most often. They’re tendencies. They’re not you. Just as sometimes I really, really, really want to be alone, just as strongly, sometimes I really, really, really want to be in a crowd. Not as often crowds.
But get a feeling for what pressures you. Get a feel for it. Notice, “Oh, there’s pressure here. I’m feeling pressure. There’s stress. There’s stress here. I’m feeling this.” Not “I am stressed,” but “I’m feeling stress. I’m feeling some pressure. I’m feeling anxiety.” Anxiety is here, instead of saying, “Oh, well, of course I’m anxious. I’m always anxious under these conditions.” No, no, no. These conditions didn’t happen before. Oh, what’s happening that anxiety is here? What am I actually feeling? What am I uncomfortable with? What am I delighted with? How can I have more of this in my life? What did I just notice that lifted my heart? Ah, because every time you notice something that lifts your heart, it makes it more likely that you’ll notice something again later.
Feel the energy. Note, “This is how it’s affecting me. This is affecting me. This energy is affecting me. This experience is affecting me, but it is not me.” This is the wisdom of wise view. I see it, but it is not me. It just is what’s happening. It’s just this. It doesn’t have any untruthful, any unconventional meaning. What we’re in search of here is truth. What’s true?
If we know the patterns and behaviors that we are prone to, we can learn to see them and say, “Is that coloring what my experience is now? Or is it something that I need to pay attention to?” And remember that what we think we are is just a point of view. What we think we are is just a point of view, and on any given day, we might think we are something entirely different.
There’s a role of the people that we interact with in seeing ourselves clearly. When we notice how people react to us, we can form assumptions about them, or we can say, “What are they reacting to? What are they seeing? What’s going on with them?” What’s going on with them, just as much as I’m interested in what’s going on with me. What’s going on with them? Because our practice is really relative to other people. You know, it feels like it’s all about us, but it is really about all of us, as opposed to me.
Suffering in the world arises because I want to be liked, because I want this, because I want that. I have all kinds of desires, things I want to have happen, things I don’t want to have happen. How attached to those things am I?
Earlier in the week, I ran across something that I wanted. I wanted it, and it was too expensive. I’ve been following it for a year, waiting for it to go on sale. It finally went on sale, and I wanted that. I wanted that. And I said, “And it’s on sale. This is great, just what I was waiting for. But you know, I really don’t need it.” And when I heard myself say, “I don’t need it,” I thought, “Well, you’re just arguing with yourself now. You’re trying to be a good person.” Yes, and I don’t need it. I really don’t need it. I took it out of the cart. It’s been there for a year, waiting to go on sale. It was interesting. For three days it’s been on sale, and I kept watching, what does it feel like to want? Pretty soon, the want was much bigger. The understanding of the want was much bigger than the item. I mean, the item just kind of disappeared. But what was interesting was how strong that wanting was for something I didn’t even need, would have very little impact on my life, almost none. And how strong that wanting was. Not because I’m a bad person or because I am, I don’t know, any number of things that you could say about it, but because I’m human. I’m also subject to wanting and not wanting. And to be able to watch that, feel that, understand what that feels like, to see when you’re in the grips of that, is a very important part of practice. How we cling to something. To be with that in a non-judgmental way.
So all of that wanting, the thought would arise, “Oh, you’re a bad person for wanting.” Ah, that’s… I don’t need to go there. What I need to do is understand what the wanting is, to really feel the wanting. It doesn’t have anything to do about who I am. It only exists under these conditions.
The way that we are with these uncomfortable things that we see is by not assuming that they’re us. They just are. They’re just there.
So, I have lots of other things in here I could have said. However, what I want to leave you with is that awareness of what’s happening is impacted both by the views that we bring into the moment and the mindfulness with which we see them. Wise view comes out of seeing things as they are, recognizing the tendencies of our mind habits, seeing them non-judgmentally. The space we want to occupy is the space of neither wanting nor pushing away the experience. Just see the experience. Don’t label it as good or bad. That just gets in the way.
So I’m going to read you a prose poem by Steve Kowit. It’s called “Mount Baldy.”
Up before dawn to meditate all day with a saffron-robed Thai Theravāda2 Buddhist monk who explains the incomprehensible dharma in all but incomprehensible English, then jabs a finger in the air and nods triumphantly. And at the bell, propped upon my purple zafu3 in half-lotus, I set grimly to the task of reining in the hyperactive and incorrigible mind, that screaming brat who’s flying up and down the supermarket aisles flinging from the shelves everything in sight. I liked Mount Baldy in the zendo there, and Theravāda mindfulness practice, and that grinning sensei4 with his fractured English, and I liked as well that shapely, dark, lubricious fellow meditator three zafus down, her lovely face and arched cross-legged body. Lust, longing, random fragmentary thoughts and drowsy bits of memories and momentary bouts of wakeful consciousness and sudden bursts of joy, one moment quiet ecstasy and utter peace, the next the wish this weekend-long retreat were long since over with. My back felt stiff, my knees ached. Then Sunday after lunch, with an hour’s freedom for myself, I wandered off alone and scrabbled up a nearby hill and found a perfect rock to sit upon and looked around, unburdened and relaxed, amazed by everything: those few spare pines, the sky’s soul-wrenching blue, and at my feet a tribe of ants systematically upending grains of sand, and far away that winding strip of highway with its antlike string of trucks and cars. And then I saw her in a clearing some fifty-odd feet below where I was perched, that gorgeous raven-haired young meditator, that seductive bodhisattva5 wielding a long crescent sword and practicing her katas,6 cutting through desire, the hundred thousand permutations of the wobbling mind.
Wonder, pleasure, dreams, desires, and memories, I simply watch and let them be, they too luminous, transparent, perfectly apparent, perfectly themselves, that all things rise, abide, are changed, and pass away. Mindfulness practice at the zendo at Mount Baldy, 6,000 feet above the sea. Exquisite world of craving and delusion.
May you all see clearly. Thank you.
Dharma: In Buddhism, this term refers to the teachings of the Buddha, the path to enlightenment, and the cosmic law and order. ↩
Theravāda: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. ↩
Zafu: A round cushion used for sitting meditation. ↩
Sensei: A Japanese term for a teacher or master, often used in Zen Buddhism. ↩
Bodhisattva: In Mahayana Buddhism, an enlightened being who delays their own nirvana in order to help all sentient beings achieve enlightenment. ↩
Katas: A Japanese term for a choreographed pattern of movements, often practiced in martial arts. ↩