Podcast Transcription:
Chris Lawley: Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawaserat’s online course The Pearl without Price. In this talk Doug and Catherine discussed the Buddha’s first and ennobling truth: that life is always in some degree of struggle. They explore how preferences and anti-preferences contribute to our self-image and how the degree to which we suffer is tied to the degree to which we cling or can surrender this limiting view of ourselves. This coming spring, Planet Dharma will be running an insight retreat at Clear Sky center entitled Mastering the 16 stages of Insight. The program will be led by Doug Duncan. Don’t miss the chance to undertake this training with a true master of this practice. You can learn more about this retreat at www.planetdharma.com/insight. And now here’s today’s recording.
Qapel: Okay, so the dharma is to be known. The Buddha said to be known by the wise, each for themselves. So how does this work?
Catherine Sensei: Yes well, it’s an irony where here we are talking about community, and on the one hand, becoming wise is sort of a solo experience, right? It really always comes back to the inner work that we were responsible for ourselves and that only we ourselves can do. And on the other hand, we can’t do it alone. It’s easier with others, and it’s very well supported and speeded up by doing it with other people. So these are kind of like that, we can’t know our own face without the mirror and the role of other people and community is to serve as mirrors for us. All mirrors are good. Do you ever see mirrors in museums? There are a lot of mirrors in Japanese museums and they’re basically just pieces of metal that they would polish and you know, you can’t see very clearly in those, but it must have been really amazing at the time because that was all they had.
So I often appreciate the value of a clear mirror and that’s why we try to spend time with other practitioners because we’re all becoming more clear the more work that we do and then that clarity becomes very useful for one another. This process of doing our own inner work and doing it with others involves a kind of surrender. Have you ever noticed how much the ego just does not want to surrender at all? Just like: ‘No way. Absolutely not’. That news Marty? Oh my gosh, Marty just learned something. No, I’m kidding. He’s kidding. He’s obviously kidding. So this is something that a spiritual teacher and a spiritual trainer do. We do a lot of dharma training here at Clear Sky. Really make a lot of effort to specialize in that ability to be a good mirror and compassionate Sangha members also do that, and that’s a tough job, right, to be able to convince another person and convince their ego: Actually you’re going to feel better if you surrender. You know, we might agree to it intellectually like, ‘Oh yeah, I guess that would feel better.’ But then when, you know, something comes up and the ego steps in, there’s still this voice going ‘No way, you do it first.’ and Namgyal Rinpoche used to say… I guess he said that to you…
Q: My teacher once said, ‘Well who are you going to trust, me or you?’ So who do you trust? Now let’s say you trust you. I don’t wanna go here too quick, but if you’re trusting you, why? Like what makes you inherently trustworthy? If you’re going to trust you or you’re going to trust God or if you’re going to trust you or you’re going to trust say, the Dalai lama. I would think we would want to trust somebody with greater wisdom than us. How do you know if they have greater wisdom? You’re drawn to it.
So humans are drawn to wisdom like moths are drawn to a flame.
CS: Unlike animals are drawn to humans
Q: It’s important to realize you’re not trusting the person you’re trusting your realization. So if I go to Tiger Woods for golf lessons and I say no, I think I should do it this way. And Tiger says, who are you gonna trust me or you to me? I go ‘Me’. So I’m not sure why I’m paying him for the lesson. But the point is that if you go to a golf pro, trust the golf pro, right? If you go to a lawyer, trust the lawyer. You get the idea.
CS: I mean I trust my tax accountant for advice about taxes, right? And I don’t ask him dharma questions, right? But I’m not gonna argue with him about Canadian tax law. So I hope our metaphors are working. I think the important thing here is that when we’re trusting in a spiritual teacher or trainer, we’re trusting in the validity of their practice, we’re kind of recognizing that they’ve done a body of work that we’re also doing, and we’ve observed that the work they’ve done has resulted in some kind of clarity or wisdom or bliss or insight. So what we’re trusting in is that experience, it’s not in the person or the personality and that’s an important distinction.
Q: One of the things about the spiritual path is that people think hearing it is the same as doing it. So, you know, if I hear about Italy and somebody tells me all about Rome, I can sort of think that I know Rome, but of course, I haven’t been there, but I think I can know it well.
The problem with the spiritual life is that if you hear it, you think you have the experience, but where the spiritual life really takes off for most people is when they do a retreat, when they actually apply the practice themselves and then they go, ’Oh okay, this is what we’re talking about’
Q: So on page 16, we say, ‘Awake is the opposite of asleep. Awakening, being awake, being in an awake state. And most of us think we’re awake most of the time. Like during the day you go about your day, you can say, ‘I was awake from 6am till midnight.’ Right, I was awake but most of what we do is done from habit and when we operate from habit we’re not actually awake. Last week we used the example of driving across Calgary and thinking you’re aware of what’s going on and you haven’t really seen any of it because you’ve been busy talking to your friend about who’s gonna win the super bowl or something and then a kid darts out and all of a sudden you’re, ‘Oh I’m right here. I’m awake. I’m right here, I’m present’.
I had a friend that I worked with in the arctic and we were sharing a motel room while we were getting ready to go to different communities to survey. I was a surveyor. And in the middle of the night, he starts to get into my bed with me, and I go… I call him Dave. I can’t remember his name now… I said, ‘Dave what are you doing?’ He says, ‘I’m going to get into bed with you’. And I go,’ Well I don’t know Dave, I think no I don’t think so, just go back to your own bed’. ‘But I want to be here,’ he says. I go, ‘Well okay but, small bed and got to work tomorrow. Just go back to bed’. So he goes back to his bed and I go, okay, well, you know, I’m liberal, right?
So whatever. And then in the morning got up and I said, ’so how was your sleep?’ And he says, ‘what did I do?’ And I said, ‘well you wanted to get in bed with me’. And he said, ‘oh that one.’ He’s a sleepwalker. He talked to me, he answered my questions, he related to me, right? And he was sound asleep. He said the biggest time he had being a sleepwalker is that when he was at his parent’s ranch farm in Ontario he got up, he made bacon and eggs, he ate them and he walked down the highway in his pajamas (good thing he had pajamas on) and he found himself like two miles down the highway when he woke up. He completely functioned normally. So when we talked about the awakening, this is the kind of difference we’re talking about. But in the awakening you’re not sleepwalking. And when in you’re in habit, you are. Because you can do 90% of what you do and not be there for it.
The nature of the waking state is that it’s blissful, you feel good, you’re clear, there’s not a lot of dialogue or confusion. There might be a little bit, but there’s not much noise in your head. It feels spacious, roomy. It feels like you’re at peace with the world. We call it an epiphany, but we would just call it awake. You’re actually awake and when you’re in habit your mind you’re not, it’s just a routine.
CS: So we’re going through some of the salient points of reflection here. And one of them is that life is a struggle. The Buddha’s first ennobling truth. This can be kind of hard to see sometimes, especially, you know when things are going well or things are just normal. My father really brought this one home to me. For some reason I said, ‘the Buddha says life is a struggle and our life is suffering’ and he says, ’well, but I have such a good life and there are all those other people who are starving in the world. I can’t say that I’m suffering.’ Which is remarkable because he’s had leukemia and two heart attacks and etcetera etcetera. And it was interesting that he just really didn’t relate to that truth. We can sometimes feel like if we’re getting our own way, then we’re not suffering. But the thing about getting our own way, what we call preference mind, is that it makes it so painful when we don’t. Have you ever noticed that? Like, ‘I’m having a really great day because I’ve got everything I wanted’ and then you get a day where it’s like, you hit every red light and your phone is updating the entire day, so you can’t use anything, right. And all of your socks, one is missing all of your pairs… Have you ever had those kinds of days? I know they’re all little things, but you know, by the end of the day you’re just absolutely frazzled.
So this too, is ‘life is suffering’. My favorite one is going to like Whole Foods or Capers or something, you know, which is just a kind of amazing monument to organic food and Fairtrade and all these things that are really good. And I just gnashed my teeth because I can’t choose the kind of cracker I want because there are, you know, 200 options. So I think, ‘Gosh, yeah, life is struggle.’
Q: I mean we recognize, of course, there are really important struggles like racism.
CS: Oh, absolutely.
Q: We don’t deny that. What we’re saying is that a low-grade struggle is still a struggle because of the absence of the epiphany.
CS: Thank you. Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, I don’t mean to demean real struggle, real suffering. So we tend to think one of the reasons that the exercise that we gave last week about trying on other people’s aggregates is so powerful is because: we tend to think that – taking myself as an example – what I think and what I feel, what I believe, what I’m experiencing.. We tend to take this as real, and then I tend to take that as my idea of ‘me’, and that’s my self-image and that is similar to… if we combine that with our preferences: ‘I like summer. I don’t really like winter.’ When we combine those things we get this potent brew called our ego. This is a true story: I do like summer, I don’t like winter and here I am living in a place where winter is like, 10 months long, right!
Q: She said she’d never live in a cold climate.
CS: Yes, I really thought that, and then I was like – what just happened? Right, so this is how we set ourselves up for suffering by hanging on to these preferences And so this has given me a great opportunity to work with this just every winter. I’m like, ‘okay, some people love winter, okay, some people think winter is the best season and just okay, I can do it, I can do it! I can get in this mind frame. Do you know what I like about winter? Can I do that more? And I think I can say that I actually love winter now.
Q: She has been walking around without gloves on, when I had gloves on, and she enjoys cross country skiing. So the important thing that – if I may – the important thing to remember also, with preference mind is, while you’re pursuing preferences, you’re also inbuilding nonpreference. Because life has a way of, whatever your preference is, is to also give you the opposite. So if I like empty highways and open roads, it’s gonna give me a lot of examples of traffic jams. I didn’t particularly want to live in Japan. I lived there for 10 years, I didn’t particularly want to stay in the Arctic. I stayed there on and off for 10 years, but at the same time, I had my preferences for the things that I got out of being in Japan and being in the arctic, those were good.
So all we’re trying to say is that where there’s a preference, there’s a non-preference And so where you have a preference you’re gonna get the non-preference, it’s inevitable. So when we go back to the point about suffering, that’s going to be the struggle, you’re gonna have a preference, you’re gonna get a non-preference, or the anti preference. The key to the Awakening is that you sit in the middle of the preference mind: ‘Okay, there’s a preference. There’s a non-preference. But I’m sitting in this awake space of bliss-clarity.
CS: Yes, and we’re sort of using a kind of light examples, partly just to have a bit of fun with it because when we’re really struggling with our preference mind, it is really suffering, it can really be a painful experience and that can manifest in just a million different ways and varies, of course, depending on the person.
But practicing with these things that are not so serious is like building the muscles. And that’s why we ask people to do things like take on the challenges and try on other people’s aggregates because, you know, just not having coffee for a morning is building that muscle so that when we think we’re going to get coffee and there’s none left we don’t freak out or something, which you know, people do. And more to the point, a really good example was this weekend when Karen and I were at a conference on ‘Chaos Community and Compassion’: this community, predominantly white and older and upper middle class, I’d say wealthy. And I think they, you know, feel too homogeneous – to their credit, and don’t want to be keeping other people out. So they invited a lot of people of different ages and gave scholarships and invited more diversity. And then these tensions came up around that and people were very brave about describing what they were going through, and sharing it, and trying to do it in a respectful way. But some people got very upset and it was neat to see Karen and I – we were like, ‘Okay, yeah, stuff is getting real’, we were really able to lean into it and what you’ve probably heard us so many times: just feel comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Like we can talk about this hard stuff. We can be with people who are having intense emotions, upset or anger, and we can just be okay with that and that’s just super super valuable, both for ourselves and for others.
Q: Mhm. Absolutely. So these are all just different ways of saying that the ego-centered view of reality, the me-centered view of reality, which produces my self-image, right, is a misunderstanding of reality. Reality isn’t in your self-image. Reality is that spaciousness of Sarah’s which is the bird soaring in the sky or however she put it, right? So where there’s going to be a self-image that you cling to – It’s not that you have a self-image that’s the problem, it’s that it stays fixed. It remains the same. It’s repetitive, it puts you to sleep. So the problem with the self-image is a) It’s not true, it’s just a construct that has been built and it’s going to bring you all the opposites of what you want. Because again, back to that preference mind and it’s non-preference mind. My self-image is also always going to be running into my anti self-image because where there’s a fixed position, there’s another opposite position that’s fixed. Does that make sense?
So how often are you surrounded by people that you don’t really like? You’ve got friends you like, yes, you’ve got people you don’t like. Have you eliminated all the people that you don’t like? No. (CS: they have a way of reproducing!) Because your self-image produces them. So if your self-image is kind and generous and sweet, right, then why did you marry the bully and the noisy, loud, aggressive guy, Right? Because opposites attract. So self-image A attracts non-self-image B.
CS: It’s like the agent in the Matrix (Q: Exactly), right? They just keep appearing until we resolve our belief in our self-image. Right
Q: Exactly. This is why we encourage you to try on other people’s aggregates, to be somebody else. If they’re the opposite of you, then you’re going to find that people that are the opposite of you don’t bother you anymore because you’ve realized from their perspective, that it kind of works.
And if you’ve got people that aren’t bothering you anymore, you also find that your friends have their, you know, aren’t exactly always friends, you know, they may be supporting you to be like an alcoholic or something? That’s not particularly good. So insofar as your friends support your self-image, they’re not helping you. Insofar as your enemies are helping you see through your self-image, they are helping you – in terms of freedom of being able to go back and forth between. So you become an actor: just make it up: ‘Today, I’m going to be Cleopatra and tomorrow I’m going to be Oprah.’
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