Coming to our senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Introduction

• “It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey” - Wendell Berry
• Ask: “How is the world treating you?” Then, “How are you treating the world?”
• Striving towards a collective dynamic balance that would feel like “what being healthy feels like. It is what genuine happiness feels like. It is like being at home in the deepest of ways.”
• Take your experiences seriously but not personally, with a healthy dose of lightheartedness and humour.

Part 1: Meditation, it’s not what you think

• “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”
• A Zen master would start each talk by holding up a stick and asking the audience whether they saw it, and thwacked it on the ground and asked them whether they heard it. Often, we see our concepts rather than the stick, and hear our concepts rather than the thwack. We evaluate, judge, digress, categorize, react emotionally, “and so quickly that the moment of pure seeing, the moment of pure hearing, is lost. For that moment at least, you could say that we have lost our minds and have taken leave of our senses.”
• The zen master was “inviting us to wake up from the dream of our self-absorption and our endless spinning out of stories that distance us from what is actually happening in these moments that add up to what we call our life.”
• The core of the Buddha’s teachings, summed up in one sentence by Buddha: “Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.”
• “It may be that in clinging to our self-referential ways of seeing and being, to the parts of speech we call the personal pronouns, I, me, and mine, we sustain the unexamined habit of grasping and clinging to what is not fundamental, all the while missing or forgetting what is.”
  • Given the popularity of identity politics, which preoccupies itself on pronouns and labels, we still have work to do.
• “Practice gradually, or sometimes even suddenly, transcends all ideas of practice and effort, and whatever effort we put in is no longer effort at all, but really love.”
• When we practice awareness, the world offers itself to our imagination.
• “What they undertook to do, They brought to pass: All things hang like a drop of dew Upon a blade of grass.” - W. B. Yeats
• Talks about the importance of scaffolding to help us develop, to benefit from the work and methods of those who preceded us. Yet, like Michelangelo wouldn’t need the scaffold after his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was complete, we can set aside our scaffolding once our wakefulness is well-cultivated. Like the Daoist expression, once we’ve caught the fish, what need have we for the net?

Part 2: The power of attention and the dis-ease of the world

• We are out of touch with just out of touch (mindless) we can be.
• Signs/symptoms of pain can be followed by:
  • Dis-attention—>dis-connection—>dis-regulation—>dis-order—>dis-ease
  • Attention—>connection—>regulation—>order—>ease
• “Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal, It knows not what it is, …” - W. B. Yeats
  • Suffering and attachments (first line), impermanence and death (second line), mindless ignorance (third line)
• Emptiness, in this case meaning empty of inherent self-existence, “allows for a true ethics, based on reverence for life and the recognition of the interconnectedness of all things and the folly of forcing things to fit one’s own small-minded and shortsighted models for maximizing one’s own advantage when there is no fixed enduring you to benefit from it, whether ‘you’ is referring to an individual or a country.”

• “You live in illusions and the appearance of things. There is a Reality, you are that Reality. When you recognize this you will realize that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” - Kalu Rinpoche

  • When we lose our selves, we blend into the larger whole. The selves become nothing, the whole is and was everything.

Part 3: The sensory world

• “The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes.”
• “Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?” - William Stafford
• The present moment is the only time we ever have to influence the future.
• “We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.”

Part 4: Embracing formal practice

• “If you think of your body as a house, the body scan is a way to throw open all the windows and doors and let the fresh air of awareness sweep it clean.”
• “Our thoughts may have a degree of relevance and accuracy at times, but often they are at least own what distorted by our self-serving and self-cherishing inclinations, such as our ambitions, our aversions, and our overriding tendency to ignore or be deluded by both our ambition and our aversions.”
• “No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.” - David Wagoner

Part 5: Healing possibilities, the realm of body and mind

• “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” - Albert Einstein

Part 6: Arriving at your own door

• “We fill up our time and then wonder where it all went.”
• “Because [mindfulness] is on its face such a good and compelling idea to be more present in one’s life and less judgmental, some professionals naturally assume that it can merely be grasped intellectually and then taught to tigers that way, as a concept, and that that can be done without a solid ground in one’s own personal practice. But without practice, no matter how clever or articulate or sensitive or therapeutic what one is offering may be, it just isn’t mindfulness, or dharma. […] It is the practice itself that is the vehicle for our coming to our senses and waking up to the full spectrum of what is and what might be possible.”
• “I felt impelled to somehow try to make clear what I saw as the core problem with what they were proposing, while at the same time, honoring the evident fact that both their intuition and motivation were clearly right on target.”
• Do not ask anything of those you care for that you do not already ask of yourself.
• “Spiritual communities are at a particularly high risk for [clinging to concepts and fantasies], the self-satisfied belief that your style of practice is the best practice, your core of the path the wisest view, your tradition is the best tradition, and on it goes.”

Part 7: Healing the body politic

• Whether our collective suffering is described by an autoimmune model, a cancer model, or an infectious model, “they are interrelated in that autoimmune diseases and their treatments can frequently make the body more susceptible to cancers and to opportunistic infections.”
• “As in medicine and in health care, prevention is the best policy in governing and in diplomacy.”
• “We are wont to vilify particularly egregious emergences of ignorance as evil. This allows us to assert categorically our own identification with goodness in contradistinction. It is a gross and ultimately unhelpful gloss, even if there are elements of truth in it. Both views, of others as evil and of ourselves as good, may be better characterized as ignorant. For both ignore the fundamental disease, the one that manifests in human beings when we fall prey to unawareness of the preciousness of life, and wantonly or witlessly harm others in seeking pleasure and power for ourselves. In the Book of Psalms, evil is often referred to as “wickedness,” but perhaps a better rendering would be “heedlessness,” an inattention to the full spectrum of the inner and outer landscape of our experience. This inattention allows us to artificially separate self from other, the “I” from the “Thou,” to de-sacralize the world and thus make it predicated on division, on artificial separation and boundaries.”

Part 8: Let the beauty we love be what we do