The Contemplative Heart

Page 1 of 12

From a talk given on the Easter retreat, Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, 1992

Something that comes up very frequently around the subject of formal practice is the idea of ‘good’ meditation and ‘bad’ meditation. There are some bright or concentrated qualities that we appreciate and that get praised, and we call this ‘good’ meditation, and then the other – a mind which is busy, confused or over-active – that we tend to call a ‘bad’ meditation. It’s a good idea, however, to look at how we use those terms and why we are making those judgments. Are they really worthwhile? Things can be very deceptive. Even though one recognises that to have a bright, clear mind which is wise, compassionate and selfless and so forth is a worthy thing, and to have a mind which is filled with selfishness, greed, confusion, agitation, doubt, insincerity, one can reckon well, yes this is probably not such a good thing – but we can often get deluded by the appearances of things and make very superficial judgments.

It is possible to develop a concentrated mind just by applying will-power. By being disciplined and practicing meditation with diligence and energy the mind can become quite a still, clear space. But what one can also find is that, even though the mind is quite alert and no thoughts are being allowed in, what we’ve actually got is a police state. We’re unconsciously running an autocracy where any kind of intruder is immediately annihilated; it is a sort of spiritual fascism. The result is a very nice, clean, well-ordered country – everything is as it should be – unfortunately there are a lot of corpses needing to be whisked away and a lot of heavy karma being created. But we’ve got our clear space, and that’s what makes it all worthwhile!

When we investigate we realise that this is a state of suffering – there’s perfect control, but no joy. So one has to guard against that, or at least notice the sterilising, numbing effect of all of the annihilation and suppression that we’re Page 2 of 12

doing in order to create that particular mental state.

Another frequently discussed subject is that of having some sort of good experience during meditation, where the mind becomes very pure and blissful. This may not have been induced through suppression or suchlike but is instead a direct experience of the mind in a pure, bright, natural, peaceful state. This of course is extremely delicious and wonderful – very pleasant – but we’re not quite sure why exactly this state has arisen. Maybe for a whole retreat we might have managed to drop into this mode – from day three we cruise there for the rest of the retreat. And so we think, “Oh, this meditation business is really good, I like this. I’m going to come back for more.” And then of course what happens, even if it has only been for the period of one sitting, is that we’re tormented for the next ten years, doing everything we can trying to replicate that wonderful state.

I don’t know if this is a true story, but I was told that Leo Tolstoy, who was a Russian nobleman, used to like to work in the fields with his farm workers. One day while he was scything corn with them, he dropped into a state of absorption; he became completely absorbed in the scything. He worked all day long without a break – just his body moving smoothly and scything the corn. It was completely effortless, he cut masses of corn and all the time his mind was in a blissful, one-pointed state. So, of course, at the end of the day he thought, “Wow,” or whatever that is in Russian. Anyway, after that, I’m told he spent many, many years cutting acres and acres of corn desperately trying to get back to that same experience, but he never actually managed it.

Whether it’s true or not it’s a good illustration of the hunger to reclaim the wonderful experience. We think, “Well just a minute now: it was a morning sitting so maybe that’s why the afternoons Page 3 of 12

don’t work so well. Maybe it’s the morning sunlight that’s got something to do with it,” or “it was in the autumn, maybe the season’s got something to do with it,” or, “It was a monk teaching last time, now we’ve got this nun, maybe the feminine energies do something to interrupt,” or, “Well, I had a stool then and now I’ve only got this cushion and maybe if my back was just a little bit…” endless manoeuvrings and adjustments, trying to figure it out!

We can go into agonies trying to replicate those same precise conditions where we experienced the wonderful feeling. So what was originally a very pure and fine, wholesome experience becomes a cause for incredible misery – tantalising us with a sense of longing.

We can still make a problem out of it even if we do find ourselves in that kind of calmness and brightness. Someone I was talking with today was saying how he had never experienced any kind of blissful or calm mental states before and then, for the first time, on this retreat suddenly there it was – but then he thought, “Oh dear, what do I do now?”

For so many years we’ve had to wrestle with thoughts and feelings, agitation and restlessness, so that’s what we’ve come to know meditation to be. And then suddenly, “boop” – nothing to wrestle with – and we feel, “Oh dear.” The restless feeling is still there: the feeling of, “I should be doing something, I should be working with something here,” and so we end up being at a loss with how to handle it. Even though there is a bright mental state there can be a ground-swell of disquiet, uncertainty and disorientation. So even though the mind is concentrated and clear we find ourselves unable to really be with it. We feel that we have to fiddle with it or put something in to it or protect it from leaving.

So, what all of this goes to show is that what we think of as Page 4 of 12

a ‘good’ meditation can easily be not so good at all.

The same is true of what we think of as a bad meditation. Often we have got a whole lot of mental stuff – repressed emotions and feelings from the past, memories, experiences, anxieties about ourselves or about other people, about the future, and a lot of unacknowledged, unnoticed conditioning and attachments that are there. Meditation is a very good way of freeing all that up.

It’s rather like scrubbing a cooking pot. It’s only after a lot of scrubbing that you get to the black, baked-on stuff down at the bottom and it only starts to get loosened after some time. Meditation is rather like pot cleaning; we’re getting down to the serious grime, the stuff that’s been there for years. So, to be sitting for a period of meditation and just be experiencing a whole maelstrom of feelings and thoughts can actually be the result of good work that’s being done. This is the muck that’s coming off the bottom; it is part of the cleansing process, the deconditioning, liberating process.

So if we think, “Oh dear, it’s all going wrong. My meditation is useless,” we’re perhaps judging the experience in the wrong way; it can easily be a very good thing. Perhaps we’re finally releasing our grip on all this stuff and allowing it to be made conscious. We need to open the mind and allow whatever is there to surface, so then we can acknowledge it, understand it and let go of it.

This is such an important aspect of meditation that it’s actually a very helpful thing to do deliberately. There are many different ways of cultivating this, but one of the most accessible is to use deliberate thought to make ourselves conscious of desires, fears, doubts and the attitudes of mind that we have. To make those conscious we bring them into the forefront of the mind and think out all the worst possibilities, all the things that we most dread. Or to think through the Page 5 of 12

most painful memories or the strongest attachments that we have – just to make them clear.

One first needs to establish a basis of tranquillity in the mind; then one simply drops in a particular thought or idea. Often one focuses on areas of emotional strain or struggle because it’s usually in the emotional world where we experience most of our suffering. As a society and as a culture we tend to be quite unconscious of our emotional world, or at least at a loss with how to handle it. So one can just introduce a thought or an idea; or bring up the face of a particular person – our father or mother, our husband or wife, our child or our lover; or we can bring up a particular doubt to voice to ourselves – whatever is the thing that most strongly affects us. Then, as we bring that idea to mind, one brings the attention down to the area of the heart.

The heart is the centre of our feelings but in this practice we’re not trying to analyze them. If you think the thought, “Did my mother really love me?” – that’s a good one, nice and easy. “Does my husband really love me?” or “Do I really love my husband?” Whatever is your favourite flavour: “Should I be a Buddhist nun?” “Should I disrobe?” Whatever we use, we’re not trying to analyze or even to figure out the question conceptually. We just raise the question and then bring the attention down to where we feel the emotional response to it. Then we’re able to witness the flow of emotion that occurs around those questions, around those areas of our life that we can’t see clearly when we are actively involved, e.g., if we are around a particular person where there is a strained relationship, or where there is some heavy memory.

When we’re in a meditation sitting we’re in a benign situation, we’re not faced with that particular person, we’re not having to perform in response to them – instead we Page 6 of 12

can just witness the habitual reactions that are there. If you remember a scene of violence in your childhood, or you re-member someone who has hurt you badly, or you think of someone that you’re passionately in love with – you can watch the play of those emotions as they occur within your heart so that you can get used to them. We can get to know them in a safe environment: they’re not having to be acted upon. That way we can understand them, get to know them better.

So, for example, we might have a lot of regret about the past; the mind dwells upon how things might have been…. “If only I hadn’t done that, then everything would have been all right.” One can just raise that thought: “If only I hadn’t married xxxxxx; if only I had married xxxxxx, then how different it would have been….” Then notice the feeling that is there, what comes with that? So we’re not trying to justify it or judge it or criticise it or make anything of it but are just getting acquainted with the power that that has in our mind. And once we begin to know how it works, we are not so easily seduced by it. This process is something that I and the people in this monastic community are very much engaged in. A lot of our training is around using this kind of practice. But it’s also something that is very basic to human nature – if we make things conscious, if we ‘name’ them, then somehow we have power over them and are able to live more harmoniously.

To equip ourselves in life for the things that we are going to face – all of the loves and hates, successes and failures – it’s an important thing to make ourselves as fully conscious as possible. And to use thought to raise up, to look at and to inquire into all of these different areas of our life. We can also use thought to work with the feeling of selfhood. Not that Page 7 of 12

we’re trying to understand intellectually, “What I am,” or what the self is, but simply using a thought or a question to illuminate the feeling of selfhood. One composes the mind and waits until it is quiet, calm and tranquil and then just drops into it a question like, “What am I?” or “What is a human being?” If there is a real quality of enquiry there then we find that, for a moment, the habitual assumptions about what we are are interrupted. There’s a moment of hesitation. The query opens the door to our intuition like a key. So when I say, “What is Amaro Bhikkhu?” before the intellect can come up with some very poor but relatively true answers, the very fact that we’ve raised the question touches our intuition of what we truly are – which is inexpressible, but it can be realised, it can be known. We’re using this form of enquiry to create a kind of gap, to open the door a crack so that at that moment we can break through our normal habitual ways of seeing what we are – as a personality, a woman or a man – and to awaken to that which is the transcendent aspect of reality.

One can use all different kinds of approach. We can use a question or we can just state what we usually think we are: “I am a man,” “I am a human being.” And even though we might think, “Of course I’m a human being. What else am I – a goat???”, actually when we use that sort of statement reflectively, in a meditative space, then what is noticed is that the statement only refers to a little part of the picture; it’s just one way of describing certain aspects of what is here but something in our hearts knows that the truth is much vaster. The statement cannot be the whole story.

Just to say our own name can have a most amazing effect. That which is the most familiar thing in the world to us suddenly starts Page 8 of 12

to sound extremely weird. Because we’ve so associated the sound of our name with being what we are. “Of course that’s who I am,” and then we realise “but it’s only a label, isn’t it?” It’s just what we write down on our passport. But what actually is that label referring to…? At that moment the conceptual mind is interrupted, as if a door were swinging open, and then the light of what we really are is able to penetrate. At that moment of hesitation the mind is in a state of openness. There is attention, non-grasping and non-discrimination. In the mind at that moment there is the sense of mystery, wonderment.

It’s almost as if you’re creating a doorway between the personal ‘I’ and the transcendent ‘I,’ so you shift from being “I am Harry Jones of 22, Acacia Avenue” to “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” That is the shift. (Maybe this way of speaking is a bit too dramatic…. Well, it is Easter and I’m a bit prone to melodrama – so never mind!)
But I stand by the principle – that’s basically the reality of it. By questioning our assumptions about things on the immediate level we are then able to penetrate to the greater reality behind it. As, by making our doubts, fears and hopes conscious we penetrate from the superficial idea of them to the direct awareness of them, so in the same way, we can use this process to illuminate the very quality of selfhood.

Now, emotions are a particularly tortuous area of life. They are generally complicated and it can be difficult to see what emotions are at play. This process of enquiry and making things conscious helps us to unravel the emotional world and its reactive cascades. Often what we think of as being a strong emotion in us is not the real problem. We can have an emotion and then a reaction to that emotion; for example, if we experience jealousy we can develop hatred for ourselves for feeling jealous. As jealousy Page 9 of 12

arises we feel “I shouldn’t be jealous. This is terrible. I’m supposed to be a spiritual person and I just feel mean and selfish and jealous all the time.”

So on top of what is a simple reaction we pile a reaction to the reaction. This can go on into reactions to reactions to reactions. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the process: feeling anger, and then feeling guilty for being angry, and then feeling helpless because you feel guilty about your anger. The chain goes on. It’s a helpful thing to bring attention to these chains of emotional reaction be-cause otherwise we never break free from the tangle.

Some years ago I found myself madly in love with somebody; this was rather inconvenient because I happened to be a monk at the time. Normal channels of dealing with the situation were not open, as it were! I found myself completely, obsessively in love with this person, and she was around a lot of the time so it wasn’t like I could just ignore it. I found it very difficult to work with – I tried everything I could do, everything in the book to try and deal with this in a good way but it went on and on – for two years. It was a grim time, and quite agonising because I wanted to stay as a monk. My heart was in the monastic life but this passion was like having a rhinoceros in the shrine room with me; a presence that was always there, a pungent presence that one couldn’t quite ignore and which demanded to be fed constantly. It was tricky.

During a retreat, whilst I was doing some cleaning, the woman I had this obsession with walked across the hallway where I was working. It was a retreat time so my mind was quite alert to what was going on, and I noticed that on seeing her, before the feeling of desire there was the feeling of fear. I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then a little voice in me Page 10 of 12

said, “NOTICE THIS.” Now why should this be so significant…? This is interesting…. So I pondered it and realised that the problem was actually that of being afraid of sexual desire. “The natural attraction towards this other person is probably not that great, but it’s being stoked up day after day with your being frightened it being there, and not knowing what to do with it.” And I knew – “YES! You’ve got it!”

It was quite ludicrous in some ways but something at last clicked, so instead of trying to deal with the feeling of desire and attraction towards the woman I started to notice and bring my attention to the feeling of fear of sexual desire, or the aversion to it or wanting to get rid of it. And in two weeks the infatuation was totally gone. It was incredible. If you put it in a movie no one would ever believe it. It was amazing – two years of solid anguish and then it was just, “Pop!” Gone. This was very impressive to me and it made me inclined, from that time on, not to just keep an eye on the most prominent emotion or problem but to look at the reactions to that – how the mind is handling the situation.

We can look at the way we deal with physical pain in the same way. We can get so involved in dealing with pain itself that we are not really noticing our attitude towards it. We think, “I should be patient with it, I should be able to accept and love this pain.” O.K. But actually what we feel is, “I’ll love you as long as you get out of here. I’ll love you only if you’ll leave me.” And we start making deals with the pain, “I’ll give you five minutes of affection and then out!” We negotiate and struggle and this just makes the whole thing a lot worse.

During the winter monastic retreats here, every so often we would have long sittings, for three or four hours in the Page 11 of 12

afternoon. The rules of the four-hour sitting are that no one is allowed to leave the room. It was, “You’re in. One o’clock, click, doors shut, you’re allowed to change your posture. You can even stand up if you need to but no one is allowed to leave the room.” And the idea is that you stay with the sitting practice for that whole length of time. Now in the folly of my youth I decided, “Well, if these great spiritual warriors of our time, people like Ajahn Chan, can sit without moving all night long, I can at least sit for four hours without shifting.” As soon as the thought was formed my mind panicked. But I stuck to it and even arrived ten minutes early. Normally I can sit quite comfortably for an hour without moving but on this occasion I was so anxious about the coming ordeal that after ten minutes I was aching and twitchy. Oh dear. My mind was racing and negotiating and desperately seeking some kind of escape – this went on for the first hour.

As we settled into the second hour my legs had formed themselves into a kaleidoscope of burning aches and my mood was less panicked but more like an internalised continuous whimper. At the end of the second hour I suddenly remembered where I was and opened my eyes for a while. It struck me that during the entire previous two hours I had not thought for one second about any of the other fifty people in the room. Was I the only one who was suffering? It struck me deeply how self-obsessed the mind had become in the face of anticipated pain and how it had neatly created a hell for itself. So… what to do?

I had begun to get pretty bored anyway with the endless “Poor me! O me miserum,” monologue and so I decided that, if I had to spend the next two hours stuck in the same position at least I could do something useful. So I began to practice metta Page 12 of 12

for everyone else in the room – all the other monks and nuns, lay people on the retreat.

After an hour of this my mood was considerably brighter and the pain in my legs was much reduced. Another three quarters of an hour went by and I was flying – not literally – but I was having a great time. The pain in my legs had vanished and I was beaming metta out of every pore – I knew that I had better not lose my concentration for fear that the pains would return – but after a while I didn’t even care if they came back: “Whatever happens, I am happy.” By the time that the bell rang I was disappointed – “Oh dear, it’s all over….”

It was a powerful lesson: it’s only through whole-hearted, sincere acceptance that release is found, and the effect of putting attention onto our attitude rather than onto the big bother of the moment is the thing which eventually does the trick.

(All twelve-parts of this series are accessible on the Ajahn Amaro | Articles page )