Allowing Dhamma to Become Integral To Your Way of Life. Old Student Talk at McKinsey and Company, New York City, April 14, 2018

Transcription

1 Allowing Dhamma to Become Integral To Your Way of Life Old Student Talk at McKinsey and Company, New York City, April 14, 2018

2 This old student talk is about the challenges and triumphs of meditating in daily life.

3 Goenkaji felt his Dhamma talks were complete, with no need for addition or modification. The teachers he appointed do not give Dhamma talks. This old student talk is intended to be a reminder about how to become established as a meditator now, under newly emerging conditions, and has been developed only after encouragement from other teachers. It is not intended to generate old student talks as a general practice, but is a specific response to specific requests.

4 This talk will be similar to but different from the old student talk given at McKinsey and Company, New York City, two years ago(2016), and to the one given in California that is posted on

5 Many old students find that meditating twice a day for an hour each time, and keeping Sila, as Goenkaji defined it for householders, is difficult, burdensome, or impossible. Many other old students find that becoming established as a meditator in these ways is easy, natural, and a great blessing in their lives. The difference between these two groups of students implies there may be a tipping point.

6 Let s look for the attitudes, tricks, practices, and ways of doing things that make living the Dhamma life so easy for that second group of students.

7 The first and most important trick is to meditate without negativity towards yourself or your meditation practice. The goal of Vipassana is to walk towards Nibbana, which means a heart like the Buddha s, without negativity. When your thoughts are negative, they won t help you get established as a meditator. Don t criticize yourself when you fall short of goals or when you face difficulties.

8 Give yourself credit for whatever you do. Being egoless does not mean you can t appreciate yourself. In the general social context of the twenty-first century there is little outside support for meditating, and everything you do to live the meditator s life is an accomplishment that you have attained against a gradient of the times.

9 Even if you imagine that you are too busy to sit two full hours a day, (a myth that I will challenge) still, don t criticize your once a day, or even your occasional practice. Instead, notice that even under the pressures of your time conscious life, you have still managed to remain loyal in your heart to the Path. In the midst of the hurricane you are keeping your eyes on the pole star.

10 Honor your own efforts. Even a very busy person has still found time to meditate sometimes. Or, recognize your accomplishments by appreciating the fact that a mostly struggling person has from time to time had the courage to observe him or herself through the lens of meditation.

11 If meditation leads you to criticize yourself, to feel you are falling below expectations, to feel that you are not doing what your teacher would want, then meditation will begin to feel like a point source of self-criticism and dissatisfaction. We will stick with those things that make us feel good about ourselves, and we will eventually discard practices and behaviors that make us feel inferior or second rate.

12 Guilt is not on the Path.

13 A school of Dhamma, an educational tradition, needs to give its students clear guidance and standards. This clarity leads to a coherent group of friends who practice similarly and have a path they can all walk together. Practicing two hours a day is a modern, educational invention by Goenkaji and his immediate predecessors, and is designed to keep us steady. This guidance is not found in the Pali Canon.

14 A strong commitment, a strong determination to sit twice a day, will make us unshakeable in practice, even when we are shaking inside. The Buddha called Nibbana, unshakeable deliverance, and we need this strength, this anchor of two hours a day, to become as unshakeable as the goal towards which we are walking.

15 We can aim to be like a tree in the wind that has roots deep in the ground. On the surface, the tree looks unstable and subject to the forces around it, but in its depths, the tree remains unshakeable.

16 Sitting one hour twice a day has been our backbone, our refuge and our way of life. We can t recommend it too strongly.

17 The best reason to never miss twice daily meditation is that when you least want to sit it may be most beneficial to do so. Sitting right then may help you deal with something that you would otherwise have avoided. If you systematically overrule your resistances to meditating, those barriers may diminish and your meditation may become smoother.

18 Take your meditation as the medication that you will use when all physical medication, complimentary medicine, healthcare behavior, and new-age treatments fail. Meditation is the medication for your well being that is deeper than health.

19 Let s look at the meaning of the word, refuge. This is your final resting place, your last stand, your safe harbor. Don t you think the last, best, refuge is awareness of the sensations of your own body, understanding that all body sensations are impermanent, and establishing equanimity in the presence of constant change?

20 When you look back upon your life, what will be more central to you than a practice that leads towards equanimity within yourself? This same practice will lead towards goodness of heart and Metta that your can send in all directions. Make meditation central every day, the pebble you have tossed from which all the ripples of your life flow outward.

21 Choose to sit when you are not exhausted, hungry, or tired. Ernest Hemingway advised young writers to write every day at their best time of day. Choose your meditation time to be your best time every day.

22 The meditation that you want feels valuable every time you sit. Don t be grim and routine, like a soldier. Treasure the timing of your meditation.

23 You will establish yourself in an ongoing practice when you make big life choices ahead of time, preemptively. How will the choice you are making regarding job, family, geographical location, facilitate or hinder your progress on the Path?

24 Don t expect your meditation to curl itself around your pre-existing obstructions. Instead, give your life a shape in which meditation can flow straight. Arrange your life, and rearrange it, so that there is an open channel for Dhamma.

25 Many established meditators have made big choices that molded their life into a clear channel for meditation. It is choices, not will power, that constitute the tipping point. Once you unblock the dam, you don t have to coax the water.

26 On a beach in Florida, I once saw a tee shirt that said: I love you, but I have chosen rock and roll instead.

27 Sometimes, the dam opens, or the seesaw tilts during a Vipassana course. But sometimes, the life-shaping choices are made in a conventional moment. You say goodbye to one phase of life and let go of its attachments, and you open the door to a new way of life.

28 The tipping point may come when you relinquish old habits and subtle consumer attachments, like television, internet, social media, texting, etc. The tipping point may come from opening a door, or from slamming a door. Meditation is for strong individualists. We also need to know how to say, No.

29 When your obstacles are too great, and your meditation is not strong enough, accept your current reality as it is. Honor your loyalty, praise your faith that in the future you will grow. Just as we are taught to refrain from criticizing or demeaning other people, we should treat ourselves, and the meditation practice we actually have, with the same respect.

30 Our teaching is to be devoted, but not rigid and rule bound. Don t force yourself to do anything that is harmful to your well being.

31 No rule is exact for everyone. Goenakji specifically taught us that a new mother, for example, should hold her baby with awareness of sensations, and with Metta, but should not disrupt her maternal responsibilities by artificially forcing herself to sit cross-legged two hours a day.

32 A tree bends in the wind. The concentric waves rippling outward from a pebble you have tossed, become asymmetric when they encounter an obstacle in the water. Although nothing is more important to you than your meditation, sometimes some people may find themselves in a condition similar to a new mother.

33 When you have become accepting of yourself, realistic, and not fighting with yourself, nor trying to be who you aren t, then this hovering authenticity will allow for changes that are not products of coercion. This process is like fruit ripening on a tree.

34 While we all wish to see improvements in ourselves, it is also our way to value our life and opportunities as they actually are. Grow without forcing anything. Increasing self-acceptance is a valuable form of growth.

35 We are all pilgrims walking barefoot towards Nibbana. We are not practicing, be here now. We are following the teaching, this is suffering, and this is the way out of suffering. We have a direction.

36 Early in a long course, Goenkaji addresses the student who feels overwhelmed, and he advises him or her to think about our place in the cosmos. He says that we are located on a tiny dot among infinite circles of galaxies. Similarly, the Buddha emphasized that the whole physical universe consists of unstable, temporary aggregates.

37 Everything is a temporary compound of particles, atoms, molecules, and energy. Our bodies, the Earth we stand on, and the sun, whose light is the source of our energy, all share the same characteristic. They are all impermanent, changing compounds that will disappear. Today, we are lucky to live in a culture where our strong telescopes can picture the spiral galaxies, so that we can accurately assess our location in a limitless, changing world.

38 Our meditation can open us to the big picture. We live in an incomprehensible universe of ungraspable size. We can use our wisdom to abandon Earth-centered fantasies, and histories that give unrealistic importance to invented stories. The Buddha said that when we have learned not to grasp anything, we have learned everything..

39 Our current phase of the universe started fourteen billion years ago, far beyond our ability to comprehend. The Earth is four billion years old and upon it, life most beautiful and most wonderful has evolved through numerous shape-shifting forms until it became us. What an incredible story!

40 The cushion upon which we sit is the billion-galaxy universe. Our meditation is a gift that has been made possible because we have taken birth within the complexities of time and space. Limitless Metta is our gratitude to the limitless world.

41 All beliefs are conditioned by our culture, by our historical era, and by our conceptual limitations. If we let go of beliefs, we can rest our weight upon the equanimity we attain and the Metta we send.

42 Metta is our yardstick. Send Metta from your own heart and mind in your own way. Make it authentic and not an imitation. The ability to radiate Metta limitlessly and in all directions is a great contributor to the tipping point, after which you will want to meditate every day. You won t want to miss the meditation that helps you feel this.

43 Don t you find it wonderful that a temporary collection of atoms and molecules, like us, can learn to meditate and to feel peace and harmony (sometimes if not always)? There must be some principles, some rules, some scientific laws, some Dhamma, that is manifesting in us.

44 We have our sabbath, our sacred set-apart time twice a day, every day. Taking this holy hour away from distractions is itself the accomplishment we are looking for.

45 We have two directions: Take charge of your life, be an active, dominating, choice-making force to make your way in the world. And stop the struggle, accept your life as it is and yourself as you are. Just observe the world with detachment.

46 We also have two directives regarding other people:

47 The Buddha said that friendship on the Path is the whole Path, so how can you not join the club, participate in the activities of meditation, like courses and group sittings, and rotating the wheel?

48 But the Buddha also taught that we should wander alone, free of social allurement, like an aging rhinoceros in the jungles of ancient India. Our teaching encourages us to keep a proper distance from engulfing group-think. Remain true to yourself.

49 Make Sila positive, not negative. Don t avoid or do without something; instead, add something, get something good from the way you keep Sila.

50 About forty years ago, on a bus ride pilgrimage into the highest Himalayas, an Indian woman explained to me that vegetarianism does not mean cooking meat and potatoes, and then taking away the meat. Vegetarianism means a whole new way of cooking. Sila also means a whole new way of cooking your interests, pleasures, and friendships.

51 Build in resilience by creating a well-rounded life with many spokes in the wheel. Don t neglect livelihood, other people who are not meditators, your health, and exercise.

52 The value of your meditation is cumulative. Let me give you an example. Suppose you are a distracted, worried, pleasure seeking person and you are no great saint. And suppose most of your meditation, most of the time is daydreaming, daydreaming, daydreaming.

53 Suppose that in a typical hour you return to meditative awareness of anapana or sensations only ten times, and each time you stay focused only for a second. That means out of an hour, you daydream for 59 minutes and 50 seconds. But suppose also that you persevere sitting two hours a day.

54 This means every day you get twenty hits of the wisdom of anicca. At the end of a week you get 140 hits. At the end of the year you will have touched down into the wisdom of anicca 7,000 times.

55 Let s also suppose that you become a serious meditator at about age 35, and you stick with the guidance of our tradition until age 75, a span of 40 years. At the end of your life (and most men and women alive today will live longer than 75 years) you will have touched down into anicca 280,000 times.

56 Now let s suppose that over the course of the 40 years, you actually improve your ability to be aware of respiration or sensations for a full 60 seconds out of every hour. Now you see looming in front of you the possibility that before you die, you will have lived with the wisdom of the Buddha (awareness of anicca with equanimity) for 1,000,000 moments!

57 This funny calculation is meant only as an example with humorous effect that is intended to encourage you no matter how far from perfect samadhi your practice may be. I hope no one will really try to keep track of their time.

58 The great historian of science, Dr. Janet Browne, concluded her two volume biography of Charles Darwin by saying that his greatest contribution was to emphasize the power of small changes. Molecule by molecule, over the course of four billion years, tiny rearrangements within living cells can account for bacteria and amoeba evolving into elephants and humans.

59 Our tradition is for ordinary people, like all of us. And our tradition is based upon the power of accumulating small changes. Enough small changes have already revolutionized the organic world. Possibly, if we all accumulate our one million moments that are attainable, even for people with modest meditative skills, we may also change our world.

60 Now that you have chosen a way of life that fits with meditation, Now that you have kept your Sila like a fresh vegetarian curry, Now that you have made sitting twice a day your backbone, but you have accepted yourself as you really are; Now that you have taken refuge in the Buddha and in our tradition, Now that you sit at your best times of day

61 Now that you appreciate the cumulative power of meditating steadily through you whole lifetime, Now that you have made friends on the Path, while you have also retained your autonomy and self-direction, you may find you have arrived at the tipping point. It may now feel easier for you to sit than to not sit.

62 You may find that meditation is not something you add to your life, but is an expression of something that is integral to all these other aspects of your life.

63 Everything you do, and every choice you make has implications for your ability to practice meditation on the Path to Nibbana. You may be facilitating or obstructing your own path numerous times, every day.

64 When you have made many big choices and many small choices, that open the channel to flow, your stream of life will naturally fall down hill following gravity, towards the ocean. Little or no effort will now be required.

65 Goenkaji s guidance has produced hundreds of men and women who have meditated for a lifetime, and who have given back an enormous amount of time and energy to pass the practice on to the next generation. You can become one of these people.