Discipline

Since my return from California in September, my meditation has been all but non-existent, my ability to focus and concentrate and even my interest in attempting meditation has just not been there. As the cold weather has closed in I've gravitated more and more to my inner 'need' to bake and gobble up the final product in a way that can only be categorized as greed. There's no other way to look at it, whether one has Buddhist tendencies or not. Eating a whole small chocolate cake, for example, gobbling it all up in one sitting when one is not hungry and when one knows the body will react in a negative way afterwards, is greed. For me, it's definitely a craving that's always with me, one that I'm sometimes able to ignore, one that lately I've simply indulged. This is just one instance of late where craving around food has manifested itself in my life, and where I haven't had the discipline to say no.

This morning I logged on to the Bhavana web site and saw a link to an article by Bhante Gunaratana on the subject of Morality, in response to a question. Now, none of this is new to me. Morality is one of the basics of our practice and for the most part, I've developed what I think is pretty good morality, in the Buddhist sense.  The big exception for me is what he calls addictive behavior, when it comes to unnecessary food and I've long been aware of this. It's what we consider an unwholesome action.

In response to the question regarding Morality, Bhante G suggests substituting the word 'Discipline' for the word 'Morality', and somehow this helped me to put everything into a new and better perspective. Yes, I already knew I wasn't disciplined in this regard, and knew I wasn't even trying to be disciplined, but sometimes seeing or hearing the words at just the right time can make all the difference in how we react. Today must have been just the right time for me, because I got it.

I'm not going to reprint the entire article -- follow the link if you wish to read it -- but I will quote a few things that seemed to resonate with me.

"And, yes, it is correct to say that practicing sila—acting with discipline and restraint in daily life—lays an essential foundation for a good meditation practice.

"When we don’t have sufficient discipline, our practice will be difficult. Mindfulness may then be hard to attain or to sustain. We must have good discipline to be mindful."

He likens Sila (Morality) to sealing a house so the house has a good foundation that is firm and steady.  "Sila is like that when it comes to meditation. It’s the foundation. Through restraint, through wholesome actions and decisions made in our daily lives, we lay this foundation.

"If we don’t lay a good foundation for meditation, we can directly see the results in our practice. You may be meditating regularly, sitting a half-hour or an hour. All of a sudden one day, you can’t even sit for 10 minutes. Your mind is agitated, you’re constantly distracted, you simply can’t focus. Something you have done in your life—becoming enraged with someone, sexual misconduct, addictive behavior of all sorts or some other unwholesome action of body, speech or mind—has deeply registered in your subconscious mind. It keeps coming back up, making you feel remorseful, guilty, restless, full of worries. You just can’t sit!"  Boy, do I know this one well!

He says we can't wait until we are moral saints to begin meditation. "Whatever our moral situation, we must begin. We make the commitment to root out unwholesome behavior and to encourage wholesome habits in our lives." If we fail, he says, "If you do, then learn from those consequences. Feel the heaviness in your mind and in your life. Our goal is to make the mind light, to make our life light. After all, we are seeking to attain en-light-enment, aren’t we?"

He stresses that these are not commandments.  Sila is something we undertake on our own, by choice.  "If you don’t make the effort, if you commit some unwholesome behavior, you reap the consequences and it affects your meditation practice. If you do make the effort, you’ll also see the positive consequences—it’s very cause and effect. We practice sila for own self-confidence and to overcome our weaknesses. So, sila is a way of behaving, that we ourselves choose. We undertake it by ourselves for the sake of a steady state of mind, for the sake of progress in our practice. Good sila strengthens our courage and ability. It gives support to our meditation practice and provides psychological strength. It is this foundation that is absolutely necessary to gain concentration."

Discipline is the word of the day for me. I've already begun, with breakfast. Delicious, sufficient in quantity, but about half what I'd normally prepare and eat ravenously, from pure pleasure at the taste, beyond what is needed for sustenance. Yes, as I sit here writing I could use another serving -- but only from desire, not from hunger. I had great discipline in the forest, partly because little was available and partly because the monastic life simply calls for discipline in all things.

Aside from discipline about excessive and unneeded food, I also need discipline around exercise and more importantly, around meditation. The latter will be taken care of in a few days as I begin a retreat, but I need to exercise that same discipline on a daily basis, right here at  home. This is how wisdom develops -- actually, all three of the basics taught by the Buddha (Morality, Wisdom and Concentration) rely upon one another for support and growth, but Morality is the foundation. And I need to get back to it.

Contentment

For most of this past year I have been learning, re-learning, practicing and yes, struggling with, the process of Letting Go.  As stated in the linked blogpost, I've been letting go in smaller ways for years. This year was time to tackle letting go in big ways, because my current life path simply requires doing so. I don't think it's possible to effect a major change in one's life without letting go of the outcome, the fears, worries and doubts. At least it isn't for me, although that may merely be a factor of age and meager finances since it wasn't an issue in my younger years, when I'd up and move or change careers at the drop of a hat.

That's not to say I haven't found success, because I have let go of countless attachments and fears and such. But, I'm finding that the process of letting go is very much akin to (even related to) the process of of finding and eliminating Greed. Both are insidious -- as that linked blogpost points out, I have clearly and fully let go of lots of greed, both of the major and minor type. The same can be said of letting go of attachments and emotions. And yet, every time I feel I've made wonderful progress with either, I'll discover new and different ways that greed is manifesting itself, or that I'm holding on to an attachment or outcome in perhaps a different way. Thankfully, for the most part these are minor, particularly with greed. Letting go is still harder and in more major ways, and keeps surfacing again and again. Clearly, I'm not there yet.

While fear is part of what I'm letting go, it's interesting to me in that fear has never been a real part of my life. I've never hesitated to make major changes and live with the consequences. Mostly, the consequences were of a pleasant nature. Often, they effected major life changes of a kind that needed to be made. For example, it's amazing what one can learn about oneself during a two-month solo bicycle trip in the Colorado Rockies. Camping out every night, often in severe thunderstorms, preparing meals over a tiny camp stove, flat tires, exhaustion, struggling up steep Continental Divide passes or up a trail to the top of a fourteener can really tell you what you're made of -- and what you want to be made of.

The absence of physical fear did not, however, alleviate the deep inner fears that created a painfully shy child, teenager and adult. Much of the shyness eased, at least on the surface, but many of those deep fears remain and that's what I'm struggling with as much as I'm struggling with letting go of attachment to outcome. With letting go of control, if you will.

A few weeks ago, after writing the previous post here, I began a 28-day experiment with the idea of simply trusting that the perfect place/situation for me is out there and that it will be revealed in the proper time. Doing this gradually took the pressure -- internal pressure -- off the whole process of figuring out what to do, where to go. The result? Contentment.

That's a big deal. Many times I've found myself sitting on my sofa reading, for example, and realized that I was totally and completely content with that perfect moment and life in general. It continues, and expands daily -- and certainly not because life is what we'd think of as particularly perfect. I'm living in a house with no hot water, so how perfect could it be? But it feels perfect because I've accepted the reality of the moment -- from the lack of hot water to letting go of fretting about 'where to go and what to do'.  This is what's happening and since I can't change it, let it go.  Like everything else, this reality will change, for better or worse, so why grasp at it? Why get stuck on it? Why let it bother you? That's what I'm told enlightenment -- full enlightenment -- is all about. Arahants (fully enlightened ones) have aches and pains and frustrations and everything the rest of us have -- the difference is that it doesn't bother them. That's the goal.

No decisions about my future, but then, none are required yet. I'm here until spring and have confidence that the answer will be revealed by then. I'm certainly seeing things more clearly about all of the previous options, and have sent a letter of inquiry into yet another possibility. In the meantime, I continue to watch thoughts and insights arise and become clear, and letting this contentment soak as fully and deeply into the heart/mind as possible.

 On the other hand, I'm finding a bit of greed around baked goodies -- something I fight every winter because baking simply seems like the thing to do in cold weather, so while life is good I am far from perfect.

Craving, desire and greed

Greed, craving and desire are at the heart of the Buddha's teaching in the Four Noble Truths: the first is the truth of suffering, the dissatisfaction or unhappiness we inevitably feel in our lives. The second truth is the origin of suffering, which is our own undisciplined grasping mind. Third is cessation, the truth that by eliminating desire and craving it is possible to end our suffering. Fourth is the noble eightfold path, which is the way to end suffering.

That greed, or desire, is also an insidious thing in Buddhist practice -- at least in my experience. On the other hand, if it were easy to spot and end we wouldn't suffer in the first place.

We think we know what greed is, and on the most basic level, we do. Recognizing the many ways greed inserts itself into our thoughts and actions, however, is a great deal more difficult. Years ago when I first began my walk down this path I thought I had a pretty good handle on greed and felt that I was basically greed-free. It's humbling to see and admit just how wrong I was and continue to be on this subject!

With that in mind I want to relate an experience I had a couple of years ago (January 31, 2011 to be exact).

I don't know how other people's minds work with regard to insights, but with me, big insights rarely happen all at once. Instead, over a period of time (months or years, even) I get a series of hunches, feelings, minor insights that float around unconnected in the back of my mind until something pulls all these scraps together into a cohesive whole. Much of the time, these bits of data center around things that aren't particularly flattering to me, meaning I really don't want to sit and look at them. Eventually, I'm driven to do so. That's what happened with this experience.

I'd had insights and hunches and feelings over a period of years (from even before I began meditating) regarding one particular subject, didn't know how to connect them but knew they were connected and important. I sat on my cushion with the intent of solving this mystery.  I asked, "What am I supposed to learn from this? What does it mean? What am I supposed to be seeing that I'm not seeing?". After only a few moments, something spectacular happened that totally changed my life.

It was the proverbial 'light bulb' moment, complete with bright light and an accompanying strong sensation that totally filled my mind and body. My entire life flashed across my mind's eye in moments, showing how I'd craved more and more and more -- more than what I had or could ever expect to have sometimes -- since I was a small child and right up to that current moment when I was obsessing over finding a way to redo my kitchen even though I couldn't realistically afford to do so. More importantly, I clearly saw how this ongoing, deep craving for more had brought a lifetime of suffering along with it. 

This realization was so strong that at that very moment I said, no more. No more of this craving and no more of the suffering that goes with it. It stops now. This giving up or letting go of craving seemed to trigger an even greater response -- deepened and multiplied the existing light and sensations and thrust me into an overwhelming experience that was almost other-worldly. I sat wrapped up in the wonder of it all for awhile, observing what was happening, the feelings (physical and mental) and so much more. Eventually, it faded and eventually I got off the cushion and went about life -- but with a permanently changed mindset. Bells, whistles and dramatics aside, it was a momentous experience with huge consequences to my practice and progress along the path.

Old habit patterns surfaced in my mind for a few days, but they were quickly recognized and immediately refuted, then simply disappeared. For a long time I hesitated anytime I had a thought to buy something. Is this necessary? Is it something I want or something I need? No rationalizations about 'need' allowed, either. Soon, it simply became a new MO for me. I've learned to make do with less, use what I have, and be content with all of it. In fact, I've reached a point where I don't want 90% of the 'stuff' I own and would happily be rid of it if I could find a way to live that didn't require furniture and other 'necessities' of life. A cave in the Himalayas has great appeal.

Many other changes followed this experience, but the main event was recognizing a greed that was such a huge part of my life that I could not see it as greed. It had simply always been there.

I've seen other, smaller sources and types of greed since this experience, but basically I felt that I was 'through' with greed and suffering (although I admit to a craving for chocolate and other sweets that sometimes gets the better of me). How wrong I was!

For awhile now I've been once more gathering scraps of data, flashes, small insights, whatever you want to call them in the back of my mind. I'm seeing other ways that 'wanting more' manifests it's ugly head in insidious ways (and again, has done so for my entire life). I wrote about dissatisfaction awhile back in Just say 'yes". I expect this will all come to a head one of these days when they coalesce enough to drive me to the cushion to examine them.

So far, I've successfully avoided that, but I know from experience that eventually the need will become strong enough that it can't be avoided.  When it does, I'll let you know.