Urges, impulses and intentions, oh my!

The fourth Aggregate is volition. Like feeling tones and cognition, this is a mental formation, made of thoughts and emotions. But unlike the others, volition is what causes action to take place. It is not the action itself, but the arising urge to act.
For example, we are in a conversation, have the compelling urge to say something and blurt it out. In the moment before we speak, there is volition. Maybe we don't notice volition as we whiz right past it into speech or action, but it is there. And it is a guaranteed life-enhancer to spend some time understanding what really happens at that point of volition.

Thinking back, most of us can see that there have probably been occasions we wish we had paused to consider the wisdom of speaking or acting out. With mindfulness practice, we learn to take that pause, see the urge, the volition, and see if it is coming from a place of kindness and connection or if is arising out of fear in a hunger for approval or the need to defend our sense of separate self.

In sitting practice we might watch how feeling tones, especially unpleasant ones, spark volition. The desire to move, scratch or stretch, for example, rises out of nowhere and now we are sitting with it. Ordinarily we would scratch or move without even being aware that we did so. But here we are sitting with a strong intention to be still, present and compassionate. So we can see volition in operation, pushing hard for an action, taunting us to do something about this now seemingly intolerable situation of a leg falling asleep or some other physical sensation that calls out for action. We are still, creating with our attention to the breath or other physical sensation a quality of spaciousness and clarity. We watch how, as we continue to notice the volition, it eventually falls away.

This is not to say you ‘must not scratch or move’, because nothing will make us itchier or more restless than the idea that we can’t. But in simply noticing the volition, we can get curious. We can pause before acting to question whether it is necessary. Maybe it’s not. Maybe if we just sit and observe the volition, it will pass. It always does, but sometimes not soon enough and we find we are no longer able to sit with it. So we act. But that awareness is there. We notice. That’s the valuable skill of mindfulness we are developing.

Just like the other aggregates, we discover volition is insubstantial and impermanent, no matter how urgent it seems at the time. Unheeded, it dissolves into nothingness, sooner or later.

Volition is also ungovernable. We didn’t make up this itch. It happens in the field of our experience. We will either be mindless and act upon it, or mindful and discern whether the action it calls for is skillful.

Clearly this insubstantial, impermanent and ungovernable volition is not who we are, but it is a valuable place to rest our awareness because it is the place we have the opportunity to be skillful, creating ease and happiness instead of suffering.

There are two kinds of volition:

• The first is volition that is conditioned by past actions that have set in motion the arising of the same destructive decisions over and over again.
• The second is the conditioning decisions we make in the present that affect our current and future experiences.

Each of us has plenty of source material to look at as we develop mindfulness in our lives. We can notice the arising of a decision to do something. At that moment of noticing we can skillfully pause and examine the ‘strings attached’ to this volition, this urge to do something. We can notice:

• What thoughts or emotions preceded the urge?
• What cause or condition sparked it?
• Does the cause resonate with some memory of a similar situation?
• If so, are we reacting to some long ago distress that we haven’t faced and just use as a mindless basis to keep making poor choices?

Regular Insight Meditation helps us to see through the maze of patterned responses that seem to dictate our lives, the ones we have identified as ‘I’ ‘me’ ‘my’ and ‘mine’. This examination is non-judgmental, patient, kind but clear-seeing, so that the patterned excuses we come up with are seen as well. We create a safe space to be honest. Knowing that none of this is who we are, that we don’t have to shore up and protect our identity, we can acknowledge where we are unskillful and set the intention to be more skillful by noticing the urge to act or speak and pause there.

Developing the ability to be compassionate with ourselves and others, we are seeding our present and future with the conditioning volition of kindness, compassion, joy, wisdom and peace.

Here is a quote by a 19th century Buddhist teacher and poet, Patrul Rinpoche.

Do not take lightly small misdeeds, believing they can do no harm.
Even a tiny spark of fire can set alight a mountain of hay.
Do not take lightly small good deeds believing they can hardly help
For drops of water one by one in time can fill a giant pot.

We are most of us familiar with the term karma, but we have not discussed it in this class before. A discussion of volition is the perfect spot to look at karma. We can see how our urges, choices and decisions to say or do something have the potential to set in motion actions and words that determine how our future will play out. Through awareness and compassion, we are able to seed karma that has the potential to dissolve suffering.

When we see conditioned volition arising in the present from the seeds of greed, hatred or delusion we planted through mindlessness in the past, we can meet it with the conditioning seeds of kindness, compassion, generosity, peace and wisdom. At every point where we pause and choose wisely, we are laying the groundwork for current and future happiness.

Perhaps we get impatient for our mind to cease producing urges that are painful and destructive. If we can remember that these are leftover seeds and that we have in every moment the power and the opportunity to stop feeding them by acting upon them, then we can take heart in that. Each time those urges arise, if we meet them with compassion and wisdom, they lose their potency to take us on a wild painful ride of mindlessness.

In each moment we always have a choice of which seeds we feed, which volition we act upon.

What to do when we feel helpless

I attended a dharma talk by Rick Hanson this week about the Three Marks or Characteristics: impermanence (anicca), the universal sense of unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and no-self (anatta).

Then Thursday our traditional brief reading of an excerpt from ‘Pocket Pema (Chodron)’ also happened to talk about them. So I shared with the class a little of what Rick had said because I felt the way he explained the relationship between the three, rather than just listing them, was very useful.

He said that impermanence is a given. (This is exactly what we have been learning week after week in our exploration of the Five Aggregates.) But we have the choice of whether to react to it with the grasping, clinging and aversive reactions that cause suffering -dukkha, or respond to it with anatta, no-separate-self, and hold the impermanence of experience with ease and even joy.

So, thanks to Rick for that nugget of wisdom.

As we have looked at each of the Aggregates over the past weeks, we first recognize the quality of impermanence. All arises. All falls away. Sometimes immediately, sometimes eventually, but if you attend it closely you’ll see the process is always in cycles of motion.

Every moment is a pivotal moment of change. (If we stay present in the moment we can have a conscious effect on the nature of that change! If we are living in the past or future, whatever change we cause by our actions or words is unconscious, and therefore often unskillful.)

Wanting things to be permanent or imagining things to be permanent and reacting negatively to that belief causes us to suffer. (And when we suffer, we never suffer alone. We always cause suffering to others with our resulting unskillful words and actions.)

What a relief to discover that we do not have to shore up or cling to a sense of separate self in order to be happy.

So if you have been asking the perennial student question How will this help me in real life? here’s your answer!

Everything we learn as we explore the Buddha’s teachings, and as we create through meditation practice the opportunity to have our own insights, is for one purpose, and one purpose only: To create spacious ease and happiness in you, that you may be in the world as a conduit of loving kindness, compassion, joy and balance.

We all have created suffering through unskillfulness, and we have all witnessed how suffering in one person can activate sometimes extreme suffering in others. What can we do as witnesses? So much depends on the situation, of course, and one hopes that our practice gives us the presence of mind to respond skillfully. But even when we are thousands of miles away watching on television a horrific event unfolding before our eyes, as many of us did this past week, there is still something we can do.

We can send metta.

Metta is universal loving-kindness that is a powerful practice we can do at any time. It is especially useful when we feel overwhelmed and things seem to be spinning completely out of our control. Send metta to the victims, to their families, the first-hand witnesses, the responders, and yes, to the perpetrators of this act.

Whoa! What? Why would we send loving-kindness to them?

Think about it. Their incredibly unskillful violent means of making whatever statement comes from such an unstable delusional place. So we send metta to them.

‘May you be well.’ Yes, may you be well enough in you mind to understand that this is not the way to make your concerns known.

‘May you be happy.’ Yes, if you were happy in your own being, you would never have thought up this violent scheme in the first place.

‘May you be at ease.’ Yes, it is the dukkha-driven restlessness and dis-ease that brought this thought to painful action.

‘May you be at peace.’ Yes, if there were peace in your heart, you would never have thought up this action in the first place.

Although we don’t send metta with the hopes that people will be different from who they are, still metta does have transformative power. But it is only powerful if it is as generous as the sun, shining on all life, not just sent out selectively to the ‘deserving’.

We challenge ourselves to recognize that sense of no separate self. We cannot send metta only to sweet-faced children or baby animals. We make no distinction while sending metta between those who we think deserve a good life and those whom we might instinctively wish hell on earth for the suffering they have caused.

Metta is not a reward. It is a universal well-wishing that actively creates a peaceful world. Those who are kind and generous do so because it flows through them as a natural response to the goodness they know to be the world they live in, even as they see unskillful painful behavior erupting sometimes.

Those who do violence do so because that is the world they know, the people they hang out with, the path of least resistance. This is not to justify their actions. It is to settle the reactivity that forces more actions and reactions within the rest of us until the violence feels entrenched and permanent. It is not permanent. When we allow the violence of others to activate the same violence of spirit within ourselves, then we are seduced by Mara, the tempter*, into mindlessness and unskillfulness. So we say, as the Buddha said again and again, ‘Ah Mara, I know you.’ Because we do recognize that quality, we are tempted by it from time to time. But knowing it for what it is, we see through it. We are spacious in our minds and spacious in our hearts, radiating loving kindness to all beings. May all beings be well, may all beings be happy, may all beings be at ease, may all beings be at peace.

* An interesting note for those of us who are Christians: A quote from Catholiceducation.org: ‘The word Satan comes from the Hebrew verb satan meaning to oppose, to harass someone; so Satan would be the tempter, the one to make us trip and fall, the one to turn us from God.’

The tempter, just like Mara, who tempted Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree. And just as Jesus preached wholesome living, kindness and compassion, so did the Buddha.

The Wizard of Oz -- A Buddhist View

We have been investigating the first three of the Five Aggregates, those ways we experience life that we typically mistake to be who we are. So far we have looked at material form, in particular our body; feeling tones, i.e. our likes and dislikes; and cognition -- the way we process information, the body of knowledge we accumulate, our natural talents or the skills we develop.

The Buddha talked about the Five Aggregates as a magic show* you might find on the road. I just saw the movie Oz, the Great and Powerful, a tale in part about how much we want to believe in smoke and mirrors.

Movies themselves are tricks, the magic of light through frames of film flickering to create a sense of continuous movement. The first time anyone saw a movie on a big screen, it is said that the audience jumped up and began to run away when it looked as if a huge train was coming right at them. When they realized it wouldn't come off of the screen, when they began to understand the concept of ‘screen’ and 'projection', they didn't leave the theater disgruntled that it wasn't real. They didn't ask for their money back. They settled down in their seats to enjoy the thrill. Knowing it was a kind of magic made it all the more fun.

And isn't that true with life? Doesn't the fact that seemingly solid objects are not what they appear actually make life more interesting and less frightening? The world looks completely different depending on what lens we are looking through: the naked eye, the magnifying glass, the telescope, the microscope, etc. At each level we see a new world. Here are three examples:

Before microscopes showed the existence of bacteria, the medical community scoffed at the idea that hygiene was important to keep patients from contracting lethal infections. When it became common knowledge, the idea that there is all this microscopic aliveness going on everywhere was unsettling and it has taken a while to recognize that it’s okay, that not all microscopic life is bad. Much of it is important to our own health.

When we saw photos of the earth from space for the first time, it expanded our idea of reality and changed how we thought of the earth, inspiring us to take better care of it. We accept new views and develop the facility, the elasticity of mind, to handle these expanded views.

When through computers the world became broken down into patterns of zeros and ones, it busted open a whole realm of possibilities. Looking at a digital photo on the computer and zooming in, there is a point at which we actually see the edges dissolve, the little blocks of pixels in a variety of shades of colors looks more like a crowd scene than the edge of a face of someone whose ill-timed pimple we are kindly removing with a poke of a digital paint brush.

So we expand our understanding of the world and in doing so we begin to see that reality at any given moment truly is a collective hunch, our best guesstimate at this time, given the abilities and technologies we have at this time.

To see through a new lens in a new way can be frightening, like the train seeming to come off the theatre screen was frightening, but it is only our fear of the unknown, ingrained in our instinctive brain. Fight or flight kicked into action. When we are able to see more clearly, expand our understanding, then we are no longer frightened, but exhilarated. What a world we live in! How great to be fully present in this moment to experience it!

Let’s go back to the story of the Wizard of Oz we are all familiar with, where each character feels he or she is are lacking something -- a brain, a heart, a home, courage. They follow the Yellow Brick Road. They’re ‘off to meet the Wizard’ who will give them what they lack. They go through a lot of challenges. They are truly on a quest.

In the end -- spoiler alert! -- the Wizard is just a magician behind a curtain with some mechanical tricks, not the looming booming ferocious-looking face that had them trembling in their shoes.

Who is it who reveals the truth? Toto! Dorothy’s dog, who until that moment seemed just a cheerful tag-along character, probably included so Dorothy would have someone to talk to before she came upon the other characters. But now it turns out that Toto, who was never on a quest, never in search of anything, just happy to be in the present moment, is the one that sees clearly in that moment of their great distress in front of the Wizard. Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal a simple human trying to make a bigger than life impact.

All the other characters had been searching high and low, taking advice from all and sundry on where to go and what to do in order to reach their goals. Toto didn't need to search for anything. But he was alert and present enough to sense there was something behind the curtain.

Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion all feel a terrible disappointment when they see that the Wizard of Oz is just a little man behind a curtain. All this struggle and they are no closer to the goals they were seeking. Who could blame them for being frustrated or angry?

But then it turns out that once he is out from behind the curtain, the gentleman from Kansas is able to offer a little wisdom: The reminder that none of them are lacking for anything. The Scarecrow had shown he was quite smart. The Tin Man had shown he was capable of great love. The Lion had exhibited great courage. Even Dorothy who misses her home has not been lacking for family on her journey. And it turns out she had the key to return home on her feet the whole time. She just didn't know that all she had to do was click her heels.

Click your heels right now. What do you notice? Awareness of physical sensation that brings you fully present. You are home wherever you are, as long as you are fully present and cultivating compassion.

When we are present and cultivating compassion, we can enjoy engaging in the world, even if it is no more solid or substantial than the Land of Oz. Just as we can enjoy movies even though they are not real, we can enjoy the experiences of our perception of the world around us, and yet at the same time be open to the possibility that it is not all exactly as it appears.

When children cease to believe in Santa Claus, there may be sadness and a desire to continue to believe, even though it’s causing suffering because kids are teasing them. We might tell them that while it is true that there is no substantial permanent physical Santa that magically squeezes his generous girth down chimneys all over the world in one night a year, there is the spirit of generosity that Santa embodies. We cultivate that sense of generosity within ourselves, so in a way we are each of us Santa. Isn’t that more magical? More fun? More inspiring? More empowering? We each have within us the capacity to make the world a kinder gentler place because we are deeply interconnected and a change in our way of being shifts the whole world.

This is also the way we can explain to ourselves how we can live in a world where nothing is quite as substantial, solid or nameable as we thought it was. We look at how our attachment to this tidy little idea makes us suffer. We suffer because we cling to it, long for it, mourn it, resist it, blame it or vilify it. We have all sorts of strong reactions to it that are just various forms of suffering.

If we can hold it in a lighter, more spacious way, a way that doesn’t have to be tied down and locked up, we can celebrate a lightness of spirit within ourselves. We can feel liberated from that powerful need to know. We can dance in the ‘I don’t know’ mind. That’s the gift of understanding that it is all a magic act or a moving picture. It doesn’t make it meaningless. It makes it a pleasurable gift that doesn’t send us into reactivity.

This is true with each of the Five Aggregates. Cognition identifies, collects, sorts and organizes sensory input. If we enjoy the process without attachment, without needing it to be permanent, solid and governable, then we are free!

So when we grasp and cling at this illusion of self in the form of any one of  the aggregates, we are following the yellow brick road instead of simply clicking our heels, being fully in the present moment, awake, aware and able to enjoy engaging in the collective creative illusion that is this wondrous gift of life.

In our class discussion, the idea of quest or path was brought up, including the idea that Buddha was on a quest and promoted a path.

As I see it, It was when the Buddha stopped questing, recognized the futility of such a quest, and simply sat down under the Bodhi tree with intention and clarity of mind that he became enlightened. And although he suggests the Middle Way, it is more ‘way’ in ‘a way of being’ rather than a yellow brick road with a destination. The Buddha was concerned with suffering and the end of suffering. There is great suffering in thinking that our happiness is elsewhere and that we must crawl on your hands and knees across a desert to get there. 

Stop questing! Start sensing in to physical sensation. Open your eyes and be here in this moment. This is the happening place! A place of delight we hold lightly, knowing that all is an illusion, a great magic show. Enjoy!

*The Buddha is said to have used the analogy of a magic show for just one of the Five Aggregates, consciousness, but I have taken the liberty to refer it to all, since they all have similar characteristics.

'Am I what I know and how I know it?'

We continue to explore the Buddha's Five Aggregates in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness. We have looked at material form and feeling tones. Now we will look at cognition.

Cognition is the way we organize the information we take in as we experience the world. The brain develops a highly complex system of assessing, comparing, categorizing and ordering experience into patterns that make them instantly retrievable, so we can make informed decisions at any given moment.

My youngest granddaughters are at the stage of life where everyone around them is telling them the name, color, shape, size and use of any particular object. They are busy building their information organizing system. I am fortunate to be part of the team of caregivers who help them develop their systems. It does sometimes strikes me as funny that on babysitting day, I point to an object and say 'chair' and maybe add other information like 'green'; while on dharma teaching day, in the same room, I might point to the same object and ask my students to consider that, on an atomic level, that same object is not so solid, not so 'chair' and not so 'green' as it appears.

We tend to skip thinking on an atomic level and accept the solid-seeming nature of the world around us because it makes it easy to get around. Our brains do a great job of connecting the dots, organizing the information into useful patterns. But we can take one step more and develop the awareness that it is just a convenient shorthand that we are agreeing to use. With this awareness we can still fully function within the system, but we can hold it more lightly.

When we get attached to our solid understanding of the world and ourselves, we suffer. Because things fall apart. If we trusted them to be solid, then we are shocked and betrayed when they prove themselves to be impermanent. Next time something you were used to changes or disappears, notice your thoughts, emotions and sensations. Is suddenly everything thrown out of whack? Does it threaten your sense of rightness? This is being tossed about on a sea of causes and conditions that are not in our control. How do we learn to surf in these conditions instead of drown in them?

How attached are you to the way you process information?If we are highly knowledgeable or capable of processing certain kinds of information, we might feel a sense of pride and believe it to be who we are. Conversely, if we feel we aren't competent in a particular way, it can be a source of discomfort or even shame.

Since we were children we have probably been given compliments and applause for displaying these skill sets or made to feel inadequate in some way when we struggle with learning, figuring things out, etc. We have internalized all of it and made it into identifying aspects of our 'self', whom we hold ourselves to be. We can't change our childhood, but we can see through the conclusions we accepted as true. Think of labels you apply to yourself in regard to intelligence.

One student emailed me the day after class about an insight that came up for her. Being good at math has always been a part of how she sees herself. When that skill set is not as reliable as it once was, she gets upset with herself. Her 'aha!' moment came when she realized that she isn't as physically agile as she once was either, but since she isn't so vested in that ability, since it isn't a strong part of who she believes herself to be, she's much more accepting of that change. In this insight she saw for herself how suffering arises from believing herself to be 'a person who is good at math'.

This is how insight meditation is meant to work: We get some new information -- from something we read or hear, or maybe from pausing as we walk in nature -- that stirs something up inside, and then in our own way, at our own pace, we come to an insight. This process is not a struggling intellectual exercise, but simply a spacious awareness that allows us to see more clearly thoughts as they arise.

Take a moment now to notice some facility you have that readily comes to mind when you think of who you are. If that facility were no longer so facile, would you still be you? If not, you are holding on tight to something insubstantial and thereby potentially causing yourself to suffer unnecessarily. This is a noticing, so you are not going to instantly let go of this sense of identity just because you saw it. But the seeing it is creating spaciousness so that the belief can exist, but its impact is lessened. With continued compassionate noticing, it will loosen its grip more and more.

What we learn from our own noticing is the valuable lesson that stays with us. If you have such an aha! I suggest you write it down in the words as they came to you. Keep that 'note to self' with you and refer to it again and again when you need it. This becomes your personal journey that is giving you the answers you need right now.