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The Buddha is famous for having said, all
of his 45 years of teaching can be encapsulated in one sentence, and I like
to say on the off chance he wasn't just kidding around,
maybe we should memorize that sentence because, you get 45 years
of the Buddhist teachings one sentence. Put it on your iPhone, and then
consult it so you don't have to memorize it, and that sentence is: “Nothing
is to be clung to.” The operative verb is to cling, grasp, self-identify. Nothing is
to be clung to as I me and mine, the personal pronouns. So, if you want to
complete compassion practice, how about just being aware of how much selfing
goes on, how much the personal pronouns
run the whole show, in the narrative domain, but if you drop into mindfulness
then all of a sudden it's not like that shuts off and we're not trying to shut
it off, but all of a sudden there's another kind of knowing that comes
online that has the insula involved in it, and there's lateral networks, and that
has to do with the present moment - no time - that life is only unfolding here
and now. That can hold all of the other stuff that comes up in a way that's
Liberating. So what John Teasdale is Saying, is that in working memory when we
actually exercise the muscles of loving-kindness and compassion and
mindfulness, they transform working memory, they change the content of
working memory from the more propositional, like “I'm a shit, I've
always been a shit, I'll never succeed I'll never be... I'm too old.”
All of those kinds of thoughts, you know, that the cognitive therapist spend a lot
of time trying to substitute a better thought. The radical liberative mindful
approaches just see it all is thinking and it's all about as interesting and as
useful as what you had for breakfast three days ago. You didn't judge
it one way or another, you don't have to substitute one thought for another and
all of a sudden, pump ourselves up, "how great I am" or" I am capable of this or
that", but to simply actually rest in awareness and let the thoughts be like
weather patterns in the mind and then all of a sudden what is happening what's
coming online is a whole other way of being that is this holistic
implicational memory and that often is felt in the presence of each other, so in
an MBSR classroom, for instance, within a day, it's a sangha and people are coming
back and we have such a low dropout rate in part because people hear what
everybody's there for and it's like, "Jesus, I didn't even know there was that
kind of suffering" and you hear other people's kinds of suffering, it puts
yours in a certain perspective. It doesn't diminish it, although some people
come to us after the first class and they say, you know, "I don't think I belong
in this class, I don't have enough suffering," I say, "No, no, it's okay. If
you're human, if you have a body, you'll be just fine." But they look
around the room and aside from this other thing that, you know, which is very
good if you have heart disease or cancer or chronic pain or HIV or whatever and
you're looking around the room and you hear other people's stories, that
listening is an act of love, this taking your seat is a radical act of love, of
self compassion, of wisdom, just to drop in and listening. If listening isn't a
compassion practice, I don't know what is, so let's not make it too special, this
compassion stuff, I mean just being present and being there for the other
and hearing, in this implicational meaning mode, so that we're not thinking
and judging and evaluating what the person is, saying but it's going straight
into the heart . People say different things, like, inwardly they
never say this out loud, "I'm glad... I thought I had it bad... I'm glad I don't
have what that person has”, but they want to come back next week because they want
to see what is going on with that person not just with themselves and they're
motivated to practice deeply because we set a very, very high bar. Not impossibly
High, but really high, and then people move to it because they've never been
invited to actually think of themselves as a genius before, that this is actually
the most fundamental work of being human, is the “being” part, not any doing, and that
there's an architecture and the topology to the domain of being and that we can
familiarize ourselves with it, become intimate with it and
then learn to navigate the ups and downs of what's going on, working with the
actuality of whatever you brought. And that is, the full catastrophe of the
human condition. The absolute full catastrophe.
You name it, we see it. And so just being heard, being seen, being met, and then
being in a community. One of my former friends from MIT, who was a professor of
MIT, who came to the MBSR program after years and years, after I knew him in
the 70s, because he needed a bone marrow transplant and he thought before I go in
to the isolation unit for a bone marrow transplant, I need to actually learn how
to be in touch with my mind. He knew enough to do that and when he
came to the MBSR classes, he said that he loved being in the MBSR classes a lot
more, it was so much more... he felt so much more at home than in MIT faculty
meetings... which are more like, I haven't seen the movie, but I've heard
enough about it to know. MIT faculty meetings back in those days were more
like The Hunger Games, or Clockwork Orange, or something like that, you know.
And he called it the community of the afflicted, the community of the afflicted.
And then he is writing on the MTA, the MBTA,
in Boston, and at a certain point he had this realization, and he reported this in
class. He was not even looking around, but just feeling the people in
his car, in the subway car, and he realized, the entire world is the
community of the afflicted. And it was like, things just got bigger for him.
It was a transformative moment, a healing moment, a moment of profound compassion
and not about self, not about myself, me, myself.
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