When we're born into the human world, we're born into a world of change: a vast mixture of pleasure and pain, and joy and sorrow. The spiritual journey is one of coming to understand this range of unpredictable change. It is out of this understanding that we come to see that we don't have to be imprisoned by our reactions to the pleasure-pain syndrome. We tend to react with denial, anger, or fear in relation to the pain in this world, and we tend to react with addiction, clinging, craving, or attachment in relation to the pleasure in this world. It's through the power of mindfulness that we can change how we relate to the pleasure and pain in our lives. We can relate to our experience with wise attention, which leads to deeper levels of happiness and peace, instead of reacting with aversion, attachment, or delusion.

Insight Meditation, or mindfulness practice, is a process of becoming less indifferent to our suffering and the suffering of others. One of the goals is to understand how and why we suffer. We explore who we are through our own mind and body on very profound levels. The Buddha taught: "ehi passiko" 'come and see for yourself'. This investigation is done through our own experience. It is not something we learn merely intellectually from a tape or a book or a conversation. It is meant to be applied to our own experience through practice. The practice, which is the systematic application of mindfulness, results in vipassana, or insight. Mindfulness results in insight into the three great truths of existence. It results in insight into impermanence, or anicca. It results in insight into insecurity, unreliability or unsatisfactoriness, which is insight into dukkha. And it can result in insight into emptiness or insubstantiality, or anatta. It is the acceptance of these truths of how life is that frees our mind and heart.

Mindfulness means that we're paying attention to our direct experience, with the intention to understand rather than to judge it. Steve and I taught a mindfulness retreat in Honolulu recently, and the Retreat Center is in close proximity to other people's houses. On the Friday night that we started our silent sitting meditation, we heard someone drive up to the neighbor's house to visit. They were laughing very loudly off and on during that first meditation. Mindfulness of hearing means we encourage people to be aware of the "hearing" process itself. We notice the direct vibration of hearing, rather than thinking about what is causing the sound. If thoughts about the sound arise, all we have to do is to be aware of the direct experience of thinking, without judgment, rather than thinking about the thoughts. If we notice we get lost in thinking, we anchor the attention with our direct experience of the movement of the breath.

Even with anchoring the attention with the breath, I knew that people would eventually start getting lost in the storyline of their thoughts about the sound of the laughter. This means believing the thoughts about the sound of laughter such as, 'I wonder if this is a party;' or 'I wonder how long she's staying,' or 'I wish I was at the party instead of sitting here.' Mindfulness is bringing present time awareness to our direct experience, including noticing the thoughts we are having about our experience. We might have a thought and/or a judgment about ourselves, such as 'Oh, I shouldn't be thinking.' Being mindful is noticing at that moment that 'thinking' is happening. We're not lost in that thought unless we believe it, which is "getting identified" with thinking. We may notice that if we believe the thoughts of judgment about the sound, we may start to react to the sound with aversion. We might think, 'I didn't come to this retreat to listen to a party.' Aversion is not wanting the sound and attachment is wanting quiet. A lot of the noise in this world is reacting to change with aversion and attachment. With acceptance of change there is true peace and quiet. If we live without wise attention, we can get lost in staggering amounts of thinking about the past or future, and miss so much of our lives.

ANICCA

Understanding anicca, or impermanence, means understanding that everything that takes birth in this world passes away. Mindfulness practice allows us to become more aware of the momentariness of change. It's possible when we take the time to see life this clearly, that there can be an acceptance of the fleetingness of existence. There is a poignant quality to this understanding, which we can see when we practice in the spring. There's so much birth, and yet, if you look very closely, there's also a lot of death happening at the same time. There's so much beauty - there's such an explosion and proliferation of life. But we don't always look closely at all the beings that are dying in this process. Some live, but a lot of beings pass away.

DUKKHA

The insight into dukkha, just to be a little more specific about this, is dependent on the insight into anicca, or impermanence. It's because we see that change is happening that we understand that we never know what's going to happen. It's very difficult to translate this understanding with one word -- sometimes it's 'suffering,' sometimes it's translated as 'unsatisfactoriness.' Dukkha is the experience of intense vulnerability because we understand that things are changing.

ANATTA

The last insight that is described in this practice is anatta, insight into that no matter how hard or how closely we may investigate our own mind and body or something else, we can't find a solid, separate self. Part of the spiritual journey is exploring very deeply the question, 'who am I?' This insight comes from being mindful of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and thinking and coming to understand the insubstantiality of our experience. This insight into anatta or selflessness, is often the hardest one for us to grasp.

INSIGHT AND LIBERATION

Through this process of paying attention to our changing experience with mindfulness, we have these insights, and we start to understand that a deep, lasting happiness will not come from experience. We realize that we no longer have to be chained to experience as something that is going to yield a lasting happiness. This doesn't mean that we don't have experiences of the happiness associated with pleasure, such as hearing the beautiful song of a shama thrush or eating a ripe mango, but we start to see that being attached to this kind of happiness is very insecure. The kind of relief that happens with this understanding is that we see that we no longer have to be imprisoned by experience. A moment of mindfulness is when the attention is free (we're not identified with experience). This experience of liberation feels wonderful.

We often have glimpses of this kind of freedom on a retreat. We'll have moments when the attention is awake, and non-attached to experience. Eventually the attention will cloud in again, yet we keep practicing because of the inspiration we receive from these glimpses. We may hear the same teachings again and again, but glimpses often happen when there is a certain kind of ripeness within ourselves for insight to blossom. A student of mine recently told me that he only understood the "wanting mind" or attachment intellectually until I described in detail how to notice the suffering of the "wanting mind" when we are eating. If we even take 5 minutes of a meal to try to be mindful of eating, we will usually notice how we can get one mouthful or bite of food in our mouths, and before we chew and swallow, we are already wanting the next bite, wanting dessert, or wanting to get on with something else in our busy lives. He realized that, whenever he is wanting the next bite, he isn't aware of the present moment, and that being lost in that wanting is suffering. From noticing this when he was eating one day, he was also aware of the implications of this, that this applied to any moment of his life when he was lost in wanting. This is what the practice is all about. We see our potential for freedom and happiness, rather than imprisonment in the wanting mind.

It's important to understand that it takes time for this practice to sink in. It takes patience. It takes understanding that we receive glimpses of the truth of how things are, but they are glimpses. These glimpses are so powerful that inspiration and faith arise in their wake.

FACING IMPERMANENCE

Ultimately, the practice is about how we relate to and understand the inevitable change in this world. My sister has had ovarian cancer for the past two years, and has had continuous chemotherapy during this time. She has extreme nerve damage in her hands and her feet. Just recently she was told she has to continue the chemotherapy for another year. Just from the outside I see how much acceptance she is having to find within herself, just to go through this process. There are times when I experience a lot of resistance to her having to go through this.

Last fall, Steve and I were staying with some friends on the island of Martha's Vineyard, off of Cape Cod. We took a walk on the beach along the great clay cliffs of Gayhead. The ocean water was perfectly transparent and blue-green. Along the shoreline, the cliffs of clay were eroding into the waves of the sea. We walked up to some huge chunks of shining red-and-gray marbled clay. Part of the clay was under water and the waves were dissolving the clay away. It was quintessential autumn and exquisitely beautiful. My friend who I was walking with looked at me and she said: "Isn't it so sad." She said: "All this beauty is washing away. It's so sad." At that moment the clay was my sister and so much more -- the sun, the water, the clouds, my friend and I -- we and everything in that moment were all washing away.

The fleetingness of existence is actually very true. We're all washing away. Depending on what perspective one wants to take, we can deny it or we can face the poignancy of it. There's a beauty in it. But it can also be very painful. The practice of mindfulness is one of facing and understanding this momentariness, the fleetingness of life.

This practice is really all about facing change. By patiently putting in our time with the mindfulness practice, we will see for ourselves the intense transformation that happens within. We see that how we are reacting to the pleasure and pain in our lives does change. Before I did this practice, my only hope for peace in this human world, whenever I was suffering, was to go seek refuge in nature for as long as I could. This is a wonderful spiritual way and still is one of my spiritual roots, but I didn't feel free. I would have to keep leaving the human world, run from the pain, to manage being in the human world. I've found that the mindfulness practice has given me deep reserves and courage, wisdom and compassion, for facing the human world. There is a quotation from the book, Gift From The Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh that I would like to end this part of the talk with. It's about patience and mindfulness:

"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy or too

impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience is what the sea teaches, patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach, waiting for a gift from the sea."

-Anne Morrow Lindberg

Patience, lying empty, choiceless as a beach"….this quality of awareness is the soft readiness of mindfulness which leads to insight. There is no end to the depth of insight possible for us as human beings -- and the resulting great wisdom, compassion, and freedom that brings great light into the darkness of this world.

(To be continued in the next issue of Vipassana Hawai'i News.)