1989-06_17 Anapanasati_ Full Awareness of Breath Series - Tape 15 - Q&A 1

Talk: 19890617-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-anapanasati_full_awareness_of_breath_series_tape_15-33818 Start_time: 00:37:00 Display_question: What are the objectives of breath awareness practice? Keyword_search: mind, illusion, permanence, quiet, inbreath, outbreath, examine, Sixteen Contemplations, teaching, self, no self, impermanent, permanent, continuity, coarse, still, insight, meditation, strain, intelligent, Buddha, Gorbachev, Berlin, Germany, beginning, end, body, worldly know-how, dharma, natural, planet, calm, samadhi, ñanas, causes, conditions, impermanence, interrelatedness, interdependence, Thich Nhat Hanh, ecology, science, deep Question_content: Questioner: It seems that my mind kind of wants to maintain this illusion of permanence and constancy. And as I sit, my mind quiets down, it becomes, thoughts settle down and the mind becomes sort of still. But then there's this sort of illusion of permanence that it's like the continual observation of the breath. So, apparently, the object of this teaching is to kind of use the breath as an object and see in the breath the impermanence of everything. Larry: That's one object. Questioner: This practice offers, this particular teaching offers a way to use the breath to observe it permanently. Larry: Well, in two ways, Greg: One is by observing the breath directly and seeing that you examine an inbreath—just an inbreath—and you can see that it begins and ends. You examine an outbreath, more than two, and you can see it begins and ends. Or you begin to see how each breath does what it does. And then the next one is a little different, the next one's a little different. So, the breath keeps changing—that is long becomes short and coarse becomes fine and so forth and keeping up with seeing all the full journey of the breathing. Break_line: And the other way, and that's looking at the breath directly, which I think is what you're saying, and seeing impermanence in it. The other is as an anchor, as a support, as we investigate something else and see the impermanence in that—anything in the body, anything in the mind. In some cases, we see the impermanence in the breath itself and in some cases the breath is helping us to see impermanence in whatever. Is that your understanding of these Sixteen Contemplations? Questioner: Yeah, I mean, that's my understanding, but the reality of this last sitting for me was just that I guess maybe I wasn't tuned in enough to the breath to breath change. I could go “Oh yeah, like five minutes ago my breaths are longer and now they're shorter. But like five seconds ago my last breath was different than this breath,” and I was sort of lulled into this illusion of continuity. “Well, no thoughts arose in the last breath and here's another breath where no thoughts are arising, so it's sort of the same thing as it was just five seconds before.” Larry: Yeah, but let's say you see that five minutes ago the breath was long and now it's not. It's a start. You've begun to see you've noticed a change. But what you're pointing to is the crucial role that the calmness plays, the samadhi plays because as that develops, you're able to keep up with each breath in a very fine-grained way and you can just feel it even sometimes a slight difference between… it's from breath to breath. It's not five minutes, it's breath, breath, breath, breath. And you can sometimes feel just a very, very slight change in the breath as it starts to become a little bit finer or a little bit more coarse. Break_line: Now, when there isn't that support or strength of the samadhi, there's more of a gloss over the breath and they're all kind of lumped in. Yeah, in breath. Yeah, outbreath. As a samadhi, it's like being given a microscope and suddenly you're seeing that the changes even from breath to breath, and it can be discerned. Sometimes they'll seem you can't tell the difference. Fine, it's not you don't have to dwell on it. Break_line: Another way of seeing impermanence in breath, of seeing this arising and passing away—I don't think we've used it; maybe, I don't think here—is the inbreath and the outbreath. That is, things come and then they go. They come and then they go. And it's another good way of getting a sense of change. You may want to experiment with that. Just feel something's filling up, something's emptying. Aren't we doing that all day long? Things come together and then they end. We bring in some oxygen, some wastes go out, we bring in some oxygen. It's not thinking that, but it's just feeling: in, out, in, out. Whichever helps impress upon the heart this lesson. There's no one way to do it. Break_line: See, actually, impermanence is not a big deal. I mean, it's really quite simple. Nothing so spectacular about it. What is different here is that we're beginning to see how it's wherever you look and we're being able to penetrate more deeply into it. And, mainly we're seeing the impermanence in our own mind and our own body. It's not just science, let's say looking at outer reality, which of course is valuable too, but we're seeing it with increasing breadth and depth. Realms that we thought were solid, we see aren't. And the lack of that can be penetrated with increasing power. Break_line: Now, here's another important thing to understand. When you get a glimpse, we use the word “insight.” Everyone's getting insights, even people who've never meditated. As you get older, you don't do certain things anymore. You make a mistake two million times and then finally there comes a two millionth and oneth time, you just don't do it anymore. “Yeah, okay.” And someone says, “Hey, let's do that.” “No, no, no. I don't do it. I've had enough of that one.” You use it up, but not necessarily just the boredom. You see that it hurts you or it's unfulfilling, and you stop. And we all catch glimpses. We have an insight here and an insight there about some of these themes. Break_line: But, the level of conviction that comes from that is not all that strong. And you can be talked out of it easily. Just get some fast-talking person with a good ideology or someone and you'll go in some other direction. Or if it's doubted, “Oh, come on, that's not so important.” Or if no one else around you is seeing the importance of it. So that they're what are called ñanas. It's a deeper level of insight. We muster up whatever level of wisdom we can, and we benefit from it are much deeper levels of insight that you don't need other people’s, you're not going to be pushed around by their views and opinions anymore. Break_line: At that point, more and more you see it for yourself, really see it for yourself. It's the same law, only it's experienced with such depth that you don't need to rely on teachers or books so much. And, it starts to really affect how you live. I mean, it becomes a principle. It becomes wisdom in action. That is, it often helps us to live skillfully in a particular situation because we know everything's changing. It's just fluid. Life is just <whistle sound>. Questioner: I think it's very easy to look at the impermanence of every day and for us to sit and watch things arise in the body and the mind that are kind of one-shot occurrences that, yes, well that's coming up now, that's going, and this is coming up and now this is going. But the breath sort of is a companion from birth to death that we've always had with us. And somehow there's this bias in the mind that the breath has a certain hallucinating to it, that it's always there. I'm finding on a moment-to-moment basis trying to watch the permanence of the breath itself is a little more difficult because if you look over a time frame, you can say, well, over the longer time frame. Break_line: But, in the moment to moment is the contemplation of the impermanence, the breath, analogous to just watching what we do occasionally the beginning of the inbreath, the middle of the inbreath, and then the end of the inbreath? Is that basically the model for looking at the impermanence in a single breath that you're just watching the arising because what I'm hearing about the impermanence is it seems to be just talking about the ending of everything. But I'm not talking about the beginning of everything, that everything begins and whatever comes up ends. But we don’t talk about that. Larry: Well, one way is to just follow. If you remember, we've had a lot of practice, let's say the earlier contemplations on tracking the breath, being with it as it arises, moving with—whether it's going down to the abdomen and coming up to the nose—you remember some of those earlier ones. Or wherever you decide. It can be even at the nose. Sometimes there's a little bit, it's less to track, but you can still see beginning, middle, end. That's one way. Break_line: But another way is to see, by staying with each breath, really riveting your attention to it; it has to be without strain. You feel an inbreath as, let's say, a certain level of coarseness. And then the very next inbreath is slightly less coarse. And you know that. It's something that’s felt. It's not so much weighing and analyzing. Questioner: How do you know? How can you go back to the last breath when you’re with the next breath? Larry: Has anyone experienced what I've said, ever? Yeah. Don't underestimate your intelligence. I mean, it's just been a second or two before and there is memory of it, of course. The inbreath has a certain coarseness or fineness or a certain. Look, sometimes it's very easy. Let's say the breath is—this has happened to me and perhaps some of you have experienced it. The breath is very fine and deep and it's going like that. And suddenly there's a worry or some kind of apparatus. It can be a simple thought or an angry thought, and suddenly <whistle sound>, it shrinks and it becomes <panting sound>, it becomes agitated and short. And you don't feel it down here, you just feel it over here. So that's an easy one. And it can happen in one breath. You can be very, very calm and peaceful and then suddenly like that. Has anyone ever had it? Yeah, you've seen that. Break_line: Okay. That is a dramatic and easy way to learn that the breath is a conditioned, is subject to conditions, it keeps changing. And, related to that, is you'll see that just like everything else, there's nothing special about the breath in this sense. That, as we know now, that wherever you look, if we could get an electronic microscope, we know that all there is is change. Energy is dancing. And that's being documented externally. Break_line: But let's just say for here, some of the degree of the ability to perceive at the level that I'm suggesting seems to be mainly possible when we have longer periods of time to do this practice—on a retreat is what I'm suggesting, of course. The longer the better. If you can do a three-month retreat, there are levels of calm that come that are hard to attain until you've done a fair number of them. Then it becomes a little bit more accessible. Break_line: Now, you don't have to have that to see impermanence. You need some level of calm to get the message. But you can get tremendously dramatic perceptions of nothing to hold on to. I mean, just everything <whistle sound> coming, going, coming, going. Sometimes when the mind gets very, very quiet. And so that's another way you learn it. Okay, so let's say… Break_line: Now, that's remember, I think you brought out a lot about the limitations of teaching Sixteen Contemplations in a mere twenty weeks. It's not just the twenty weeks. That's really not the limitation. It's that we only have two hours, and then you all go and run around like crazy all week, right? And so, you get a contemplation, just get going, and then you run around like crazy all week. Break_line: Now, what if we—so, I mean, I'm learning too. I'm learning about the feasibility of teaching something like this when it's broken up so much, so that there isn't that sense of development of each of the stages. There still can be some if you do it on a daily basis. I know some of you have had the experience of some of it; there's some movement and you're able to take on different contemplations. Break_line: But I didn't have any grandiose hopes. My sense was to plant some seeds and to give you an opportunity to see if this is a way of practice that's really appropriate for you. And a small number of people have really taken to it. And, so fine, then you'll have your whole life to keep developing and refining it. And it's not something that has an end. And each one of them, any one of them… For example, take emptiness, which is a crown jewel in our practice, seeing that no matter what you look at is empty of self. It doesn't have inherent, an inherent nature. It isn't inherently true. I mean, it isn't <sound>. It has relative truth. It is true as long as certain causes and conditions obtain. And when those causes and conditions stop, what seem to be forever, no longer can hold together because the cause and conditions aren't there. Break_line: Gorbachev, today, sounded like a good Buddhist on the six o’clock news. He was asked about destroying the Berlin Wall. And he said, “At the time that the wall was put up, there were conditions that made it reasonable and appropriate to put up a wall. And now it may very well be that those conditions no longer exist that make it necessary to have a wall there. And if that is so, nothing is forever. And so, sure, why can't the wall come down?” I said, “Wait a minute. What is going on here?” Also, if you visit Germany, it was so painful. And then at a certain point, it seemed like something that couldn't be repaired. This is forever. There's East Berlin, East Germany and West Germany. Okay. Certain conditions obtained. Well, if you look around, that's all that's happening. Break_line: Now, that's the other insight that comes out of impermanence. Impermanence, it opens the doors to all kinds of profundity. But we have to really get into the impermanence part. One of the things that comes out of it is you see the interchange, interrelatedness of everything That is, cause and effect is not one way; it's reciprocal. Everything is influencing everything else. And so it's this incredible exchange of energy going on—whether it's a person, whatever you want to delimit and focus on and, in a sense, create the illusion that there's something stable. Break_line: But as you start to look at it, ecology… There's now a movement within the Buddhist teaching by some of the teachers, Buddhist teachers—Thich Nhat Hahn is the most well-known, but there are others—who are seeing that the teachings of dependent co-origination, that is that if you have this, then you get that; if you don't have this, you don't get that; that everything arises because of a set of causes and conditions; nothing stands in and of itself, whether it's a person or an institution or the Berlin Wall or whatever you want to point to; everything is this process of arising and passing away in a way that's patterned so that certain causes and conditions help produce something. But since everything is impermanent, those causes and conditions must change at some point. At which point that which arose because those causes and conditions also fall away because they don't have the support anymore. Break_line: So, it's a wonderful way of understanding that it's one planet that we're all totally interrelated, that we're related to the earth and to the water and to the air and that we can't play, that it's a game, it's ignorance to think that we can conquer nature. That's the kind of experimental science model. It turns out, or as one of the founders of Experimental Method said, “Science's job is to torture the truth out of nature.” What an image. And we've been doing it. Okay, at a certain point, it turns out we're torturing ourselves. Well, we're finding that out now. You see, if you pollute the air and the water, and let's say you do that where other people live, poor people live over there. Like when I was in Korea, the Koreans were taking on work that the Japanese wouldn't do. The Koreans were willing to take it on. It would pollute Korea. They didn't care, as long as they got paid. But the point is, as this goes on, there's no place to hide. You can't hide if you're a rich person because everything is interrelated. At a certain point, it comes back to you. And so, it's taking a long time for the planet to learn this. And we don't learn it for one obvious reason: incredible greed. We already know enough. Break_line: See, the applications of what we're learning are all over the place. They have tremendous political implications right now or ecological. I would just call it sane. We already know. We don't need to do all these studies. We're destroying ourselves. How can you live properly as a human being if you destroy food and water and air? I mean, where do we think we're going to live from? But we don't stop. We do more research, and we make modest grants and legislature. We don't stop because there's too much money involved in the things that cause pollution. Who wants to stop? You do it, but I'm not going to do it because I'm not ready to be unemployed or whatever it is. And so, the greed doesn't allow us to fully learn this lesson. Break_line: And the question is, do we learn it in time, or do we just destroy ourselves? I mean, it happens. Now maybe it's just part of the natural cycle of this planet ending, I don't know. And that's how it ends. But so, the impermanence leads to wherever you look, you can see it, it's special and it's not. It's very ordinary. Break_line: But what we're trying to do is not only to perceive it, but we're trying to learn how to live, to dance with it. That is, if that's the music, we have to learn how to dance to that music because it doesn't look like there's a choice. That is, there's no self that can change it and intervene on your behalf. I think I've decided to live until I'm one hundred and five. Fine, you can decide that, but you're going to die. You don't know when. Break_line: So, part of what we're doing is the perception is not just academic. We're trying to see this law, if it's truly so, so that our life becomes more real. That means it's in accordance, it's coordinated with the way things are, rather than living in illusions all the time which don't work. And, we use as our main classroom our own mind and our own body. I don't think the lessons are learned deeply enough unless you do that. You can study history and see the rise and fall of civilizations. We still keep doing the same things. And for each individual it's a question. Can you actually change? Is it possible to learn so that you don't do certain things that cause harm to yourself and others? It's a real question. Break_line: The practice, the teachings of the Buddha is saying yes. And, as you all know, it's not going to be handed to us. We have to develop strong samadhi. We need to have improve the quality of our ethical life. If we're being corrupt in all kinds of areas but we want to get strong samadhi and wisdom, it's not going to happen. So, we have to learn how to speak correctly, how to act correctly, how to use money, how to use sexual energy, how to care for the body. This is all—it's not enlightenment, it's just worldly know-how, worldly wisdom as a foundation for being able to penetrate more deeply and see this so that we learn. Break_line: The main thing is that we learn and let go and whatever helps us do that is dharma. So, in that sense it's a natural science, just as you might say biology is. We're studying the laws of nature, but the student is not exempt from the laws. The student is manifesting the same laws. In fact, the student and we're the whole thing, our practices. Break_line: Has anyone seen impermanence, even a little bit? I mean, not in a general way. We all know that things are changing but what Greg was getting at, has anyone seen any of that? Enough so that you're perceiving it perhaps a little bit in ways that you normally wouldn't because you haven't been interested. We're switching from content to process. Yes. End_time: 00:58:50