Frameworks for Understanding Experience

AudioDharma - www.audiodharma.org

This episode explores how mindfulness helps recognize automatic mental patterns—greed, aversion, delusion—that lead to suffering. Using simple frameworks, it shows how awareness can create space for wisdom and freedom.

Key takeaways

• Suffering arises when wisdom lags behind mental reactions

Transcript preview

The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. Good evening. Welcome, welcome. This just happened to me a number of times. I pick up my phone, maybe it gave me a notification that a message that I was maybe expecting or something. I pick up my phone to look at it. Just a quick check, you know, like, okay, just want to see how this is. And then I stay on the phone. There's certain amount of like scrolling that keeps on happening and then minute after minute is passing and then here I am on this oh I better check my this and that and I don't know for some reason I'm so interested in the World Cup these days I never was interested in this before but now that it's here in our neighborhood I'm like so interested in how this works and who's playing who and how that's going so. So it's not like there's this big ethical breach or terrible mistake or anything like this. It's just a human ordinary moment. I mean you all know right our phones are designed to be difficult to put down. A lot of people get paid a lot of money to make sure that it's difficult to put down. Which is okay I mean that's their job doesn't mean that we have to let them do their job well though or in some kind of way. But maybe there's something important that has happened in this moment where in my case I'm still on the phone checking this or that you know longer than I initially intended to and that is that the mind has just been carried along without wisdom without presence it's just been carried along and you know it seems you know not like a big deal but this exact same movement that we see there with our staying on the phone longer than we intend to. This happens again and again and again. The same movement of we could say something that wisdom is maybe a little bit behind what's actually happening. It's not right there in the moment. And in this example of the phone, it's maybe a little bit a way in which suffering can be defined as just a very subtle feeling of like, this moment's not quite right. And maybe it's just a subtle feeling that we don't even articulate so clearly even know so clearly. So there's a way in which maybe we could say the suffering moves faster than the wisdom. And we could say that part of practice is to help bring these together. so that wisdom can help understand and untangle, dissect and pull apart or some way create the conditions in which the suffering, quote unquote, doesn't arise. So again, I'm using this word suffering, I'm using this word suffering. I, just this feeling of something's not quite right and therefore I'm going to distract myself with my phone or something. like this. But also, I mean, suffering means just a real terrible feeling. Sometimes the way we can be so mean to ourselves and we're just beating ourselves up. It's like, oh, I should be doing it better. Those people over there are doing it better. And whatever it happens to be. down so that the wisdom can catch up so to speak. Slow things down so that we can see more clearly what's actually happening there. Not so that we can judge ourselves, not so that we can try to control everything. Not so that we can pet ourselves on the back like okay yeah I see this I got it. I know it. But as a way for us to find more freedom. As a way for us to find more peace and more ease in our life. I think that's why all of us come to practice, not to necessarily master some techniques, memorize some lists or something like this. It's just so our life can unfold with more ease, more peace, so we can have more freedom. In whatever way that you understand these words. So I'd like to offer a few frameworks that we might use to help us kind of like see what's happening in those moments when suffering, quote unquote, Duka, is there. Wisdom isn't quite there yet in our experience. So one thing that these, I'll say one framework that I'll introduce helps us to recognize what happens to has taken over the mind, like if wisdom isn't there, what is there? And then another framework that can help us appreciate, well, how can we grow wisdom? How can we create the conditions in which wisdom develops and is more readily available and is more present for our experience? So in that ordinary moment of scrolling on the phone that I described earlier, we can begin to see. what we might think of as secret agents. I'm saying this just to be a little bit playful. This idea of secret agents in the mind, otherwise known as Kalasius. Otherwise known as unwholesome qualities. Otherwise known as defilements. But I don't like this word defilements. It makes me feel like we're dirty in some kind of way. Or you know, there's something terrible. what is a perfectly human, perfectly natural experience that everybody has until they're completely awakened. Kalasias, unwholesome qualities, defilements, secret agents. And so these secret agents, there's three of them, typically is the way in the Buddhist framework we offer them, and it can be helpful to narrow things down to these three. Often we use this word greed. Second is aversion. And the third is delusion. So whenever wisdom is not present, one of these three things is present. Greed, aversion, delusion. And they move quickly. And they're often like underneath, kind of like they are the conscious mind. And they move quickly in our influencing actions, things that we say, things that we do. influencing the next bout of thoughts that we find ourselves being lost in. So this way we can understand greed as reaching. Reaching for stimulation, maybe the next thing will be more interesting. Or this idea that maybe there's something that I need to know in the case of being on the phone or this sense of reaching for a OK, well maybe this next thing will finally be satisfying. Or maybe this next thing will be a lasting source of happiness or something like this. So Creed is this idea of reaching, reaching for something. A version we could say is resisting. This opposite is resisting boredom, resisting uncertainty, resisting a certain task, a certain feeling, a conversation that we need to have. There's, you know, it's. endless the things that we can resist. So the second of these secret agents is resisting. And then the third delusion is about the way in which we're trying to make it seem reasonable. We're trying to like justify what we're doing. In this way of this example I gave of me being on the phone is, you know, just as, yeah, it's important for me to be informed about this score. of the world cup or you know informed what the weather is going to be tomorrow you know often I don't really need to know what the weather's going to be until I'm actually going to leave my house so I know right then but you know these types of things that we are justifying our behavior or maybe we're telling ourselves yeah this helps me relax things that often don't help us relax or this it's just I just need one more minute I just need one more minute I just need one more minute and you know this quite a few more minutes. So there's this way in which we're telling ourselves, oh this is harmless, this is useful, this is necessary, even though we're not really seeing things clearly, we're not really connected to what's actually happening. All we're really doing is trying to justify the reaching or the resisting, just trying to make ourselves feel better about that. this