Transcript:
[00:00:00] OK, so I think we'll use the rest of the time. We're running behind, which usually happens.  
[00:00:15] So I was planning on covering the Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind, which is kind of a classic  
[00:00:22] Buddhist psychology. I don't think we'll have time for that. So we'll go over Ignorance  
[00:00:32] and Attachment, and then Equanimity and Compassion, and then how to cultivate Equanimity, which  
[00:00:40] I don't think we'll actually do. I'll explain it to you. But we will use a methodology called  
[00:00:47] Tonglen in Tibetan, giving and receiving. This is the way it's kind of framed clinically,  
[00:00:56] as a way to cultivate compassion. Now I think we'll do one more session of Settling the  
[00:01:02] Speech, the final stage of Settling the Speech, when it gets to the gateway of breath. And  
[00:01:08] then we'll do a Tonglen session, and we'll kind of spend the rest of the time talking  
[00:01:12] about what was called the Three Poisons, from the point of view of Buddhist psychology.  
[00:01:20] So this is Ignorance, Attachment, and Wrath. Ignorance, Attachment, and Wrath. So the ignorance  
[00:01:29] that Buddhism is kind of pointing to, so when it uses the term ignorance, it's really talking  
[00:01:36] about an ignorance of self. And the ignorance of self is, it's kind of like you believe,  
[00:01:45] I believe that I'm inherently existing. And I believe that the reality of who I am lives  
[00:01:54] from my side, and is actually inherently existing from my side alone. And this makes me independent  
[00:02:01] from you. And this makes you also inherently existing from your side. And so from that  
[00:02:09] perspective there's very little reason for me to need to connect to you. There's a lot  
[00:02:16] of reason for me to start to frame you as a source of gratification, or a source of  
[00:02:23] being an obstacle for me, and something I need to overcome. Or if you're not a source  
[00:02:27] of gratification, or a source of pain for me, then you're totally unimportant to me,  
[00:02:32] one way or the other. Like I have no connection to you. So, and the Buddha said, despite the  
[00:02:40] way that that's the way it feels to us, it's not really how it is. That's not how it exists.  
[00:02:45] When you slow down and look at it closely, that's not how it exists. So like the usual  
[00:02:51] way this appears to us is, like one of my teachers frames it as the feeling of I'm it.  
[00:02:57] Like wherever you are in the room right now, like that's the center of the room. I mean  
[00:03:05] that's the most important place in the room. I mean you're kind of like transitionally,  
[00:03:11] kind of loosely aware that there are actual other human such and beings in the room with  
[00:03:16] you. But, you know, clearly like the way you feel, and the way you're seeing things,  
[00:03:22] and like your story, and your life, and all this stuff is just foundationally more important to  
[00:03:28] you than mine. Alright, so everyone's just kind of like, kind of existing in a periphery, in a sense.  
[00:03:36] Okay, and they become either something that can gratify you, or get in your way, or something  
[00:03:42] that's neither one of those, and so maybe they don't matter all that much. Alright, so it's like  
[00:03:47] wherever I am, that's the center of the room, like that's the place to be. You know, even if you're  
[00:03:52] like all the way in the back over there or somewhere. Wherever you are, like that's the  
[00:03:58] center of things. Okay, so that's the way it usually appears. And so, in actuality, Buddha  
[00:04:06] said this is not the case, and that things are much more relative than that. They're relative  
[00:04:12] and interdependent, not inherently existing. Not inherently existing. So, and relativity is like  
[00:04:23] an interesting concept that we've really developed in Western civilization, you know, over the last
[00:04:28] Century or so. Somewhere in there, right? This idea of relativity, even in the physical world, there's  
[00:04:34] relativity. And so, take like a classical physical example, it can kind of help to connect  
[00:04:43] the system logic in the physical world about this, so you may be able to see it in yourself. Okay,  
[00:04:49] so like the classical example, well it was Galileo, so he never talked about trains, but it's been  
[00:04:54] updated into trains. So you have a train, okay? Train is going on a track. It's going at 70 miles  
[00:05:01] an hour. It passes a guy on a platform, okay? A stationary platform. And just at the same moment in  
[00:05:08] space and time that the train is passing the platform, there's a guy inside the train, seated  
[00:05:14] in front of a window, and he's being served a cup of tea. Okay, so at the same moment in space and  
[00:05:21] time, the guy on the platform apprehends the cup of tea, and the guy seated apprehends the cup of  
[00:05:29] tea. From the perspective of the man on the platform, the tea is traveling 70 miles an hour.  
[00:05:35] From the perspective of the guy seated in the train, the tea appears to be traveling stationary,  
[00:05:42] it's traveling at zero miles per hour. So, who's correct? Both are. It's relative. Maybe neither  
[00:05:57] are. Maybe it's relative. Maybe it's like to ask who's right and who's wrong is to ask the wrong  
[00:06:05] question. Like framing the question that way pulls you out of any possibility of  
[00:06:13] meaningful answers, okay? You have some kind of absolute truth about the situation. So like  
[00:06:23] another usual way, it's like if I pulled, well, they have a pool table. I've never been in a place  
[00:06:27] where they had a pool table and I was going to do the pool table thing. So I pulled that pool table  
[00:06:35] over and I threw all the balls on it, okay, and let them all come to rest wherever that would be.  
[00:06:40] And then I gave everyone in here a sketch pad and a piece of chalk, and I asked you to sketch the  
[00:06:48] table and the balls. I mean, I would get a host of different sketches. Everyone's perspective on  
[00:06:56] it would be different. Then you could ask, who has the essence of the table? Who's captured it?  
[00:07:03] It's reality. Who has the absolute perspective here? And again, perhaps it would be everyone,  
[00:07:13] perhaps it would be no one. Perhaps the reality of this transcends our usual ways of  
[00:07:20] conceiving of it, because we like to box things up and have things very concretized and figured out.  
[00:07:26] Maybe it actually doesn't work like that. The Buddha's point was like, maybe you're doing that  
[00:07:32] with yourself, right? Maybe you think of yourself as existing inherently from its own side, almost  
[00:07:39] like there's some inherent parkerness somewhere in here, right? Some essential me, right? Like some  
[00:07:48] little homunculus or something pulling the strings. It's the usual Western idea of the soul. It's  
[00:07:55] eternalistic and it's unchanging. It is essential. That makes me feel very independent from you.  
[00:08:04] That makes me feel like I am actually existing from my own side, but maybe that's not how it is.  
[00:08:10] Maybe it's different than that. So another example that the Buddha used was, take this table. It's  
[00:08:19] like when we all walked in here, we apprehended the table and that's the label we have for it,  
[00:08:24] given the language that we speak and the culture that we're coming from, we call it a table.  
[00:08:29] And we paid no more attention to it than that. And we look at it almost like there's some  
[00:08:36] inherent tableness somewhere in here, right? Like it exists that way from its own side,  
[00:08:45] permanently, inherently. But in actuality, what was the reality of this thing here before it  
[00:08:54] was a table? It was finished lumber, maybe, on a manufacturer's floor. Before that, it was raw
[00:09:02] Lumber. That would be the label we would have for it. Before that, it was a tree. Before that,  
[00:09:09] it was a seed on another tree. After it's done being a table, maybe we'll call it trash. Maybe  
[00:09:19] someone who doesn't have a home is going to come by tonight and see it in a dumpster. And for him  
[00:09:25] or her, it'll be firewood. It'll be a way for them to keep themselves warm. Then after it's done  
[00:09:32] being firewood, it'll become ash. After it's done being ash, maybe it'll be compost somewhere in  
[00:09:38] some farmer's field or whatever. So the Buddha was like, instead of just walking into the room  
[00:09:45] and seeing this thing as a table and believing that it has that reality inherently within it  
[00:09:51] from its own side, and then just categorizing it like that is very, very limiting. I mean,  
[00:10:00] if I put a bedspread on this table and laid down on it and took a nap, could we reasonably call it  
[00:10:06] a bed? If I used it to stand on top of it so I could fix that pipe up there, could we reasonably  
[00:10:15] call it a stepstool? I mean, in actuality, this object, it's just an object with a certain form  
[00:10:24] and function. But it doesn't exist inherently that way from its own side. In fact, it's in  
[00:10:31] a state of transition, like everything else, constantly. It's actually in the process of  
[00:10:39] becoming something else right now. I mean, if we could see into its physical reality, the atomic  
[00:10:46] structure of this table is actually shifting and changing and actually in motion. It's actually  
[00:10:52] degrading. It's in this process of becoming something else. And maybe we're like that too.  
[00:11:00] Maybe it would be really useful to actually just be able to walk into the room and instead of  
[00:11:06] seeing a table and believing that this thing exists inherently, like there's some essential  
[00:11:11] tableness here from its own side, and then just categorizing it like that. Maybe it would be  
[00:11:18] fantastic to actually be able to see a table and finished lumber and raw lumber and a tree and a  
[00:11:26] seed on another tree and trash and firewood and ash and compost all simultaneously without needing  
[00:11:35] to grasp at one label in particular for some kind of emotional neurotic need we have and to push  
[00:11:43] away other labels because we're uncomfortable with them for some reason and to get all weird  
[00:11:49] about it and kind of stuck and strange about the way we perceive it. Maybe that would be really  
[00:11:59] freeing. Maybe it would be interesting to learn if you could possibly do that. And imagine if you  
[00:12:07] could do that with yourself and other people. Imagine if you could perceive the world that way.  
[00:12:14] I mean, what would that be like? I don't have a real concrete answer for that, by the way. I don't really know what that would be like because I can't do it.  
[00:12:23] But my guess is it would be pretty cool. My guess is it would be pretty freeing, probably feel kind of liberating, to be able to see the world like that.  
[00:12:39] So the Buddha said you could see this in yourself if you wanted to, if you did a little meditative exercise. If you took pictures of yourself, say from the day you were born and then next to that, maybe one of my teachers actually had me do this on my bathroom mirror.  
[00:13:03] So I had a picture of myself at zero, and it was like a picture of me in my little crib, and I had this stupid hat my mom put on me, and I had my butt up, kind of baby shot, like that. So I had that, and then I had the next one was when I was 7, and the next one was when I was 14, and the next one was when I was 21, and so on.
[00:13:29] And I put those pictures up with the understanding that every 7 years our anatomy or physical reality totally recycles. So I put that up, and then underneath each picture I put a little flash card, a little note card, and on the note card was the person in the picture, what do they believe in?  
[00:13:53] What are their political and religious beliefs? What do they spend a lot of time doing? What are their priorities in life? Who are their major relationships in life? And so I could put cards like that for each one of the people in the pictures.  
[00:14:13] And I could see, like really radically, who I was at 7, and who I was at 14, or 21, or 28. For all intents and purposes, on a physical and a psychological level, you might as well be talking about two completely different human beings. Two entirely different human beings. Totally. I mean, think about it for a second.  
[00:14:43] And yet, there is something, there is a continuity that runs through all of them. There is like this continuity of consciousness, in a sense, that runs through all of these manifestations of this person called Parker.  
[00:15:02] And then I would project it out, too. Who will I be at 47, and so on, until I was into old age? Can I even imagine the kind of person that I'll be 21 years from now? Really. And won't it be true that that person will be radically different than the person I am now? Physically and psychologically.  
[00:15:29] So on that level, there doesn't appear to be any real inherent reality, one way or the other, to my conception of myself. This thing that I refer to when I use the pronouns I and me. There doesn't appear to be any inherent reality to that.  
[00:15:48] Like it doesn't exist from its own side alone. And it is not static. It's not stable. It's not stationary. It's not capable of being put into a box somewhere. And even from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, we've been looking for the I for a long time. It started back with Descartes. It started back with Aristotle, really.  
[00:16:13] We've been trying to seek out the nature of self for a long time, and we've never been able to find it. Now in the 20th and 21st century, cognitive neuroscience has been looking for some neural correlate or group of neural correlates that could possibly be the seat of the I, the sense of self, we all walk around with.  
[00:16:39] To date, they cannot find it either. And Buddha's contention was, you can't find it because it doesn't exist. It won't exist in the neurology, and it doesn't exist in your psychology. Like, you just believe it does. You've created that. And because you created it, you can uncreate it too.  
[00:17:05] There's an article in Newsweek this week about brains, analyzing brains, and different cultures seem to have different ways of their brains doing different things, which must mean that learning and teaching and other things has an effect on which do what and besides the parents.  
[00:17:25] That effect is called neuroplasticity. It's like what you pay attention to becomes real. And not just psychologically, but it's reflected in the neurology as well. To the extent that psychology and neurology are linked.  
[00:17:46] Actually, karma is really quite straightforward. Everything you think and feel, and every word and every action that you say has a consequence, it has an effect. Right down to the neurological level, you're actively authoring your neurology right now. You're doing that. It's not a static thing that's set and it's concretized.  
[00:18:14] We used to think it was. But it's not. It's in motion. It's dynamic like everything else. And it's constantly being created and recreated. Fascinating.  
[00:18:30] So karma is really not such a mystical thing really. It's just more of a statement of fact. The more you slow down and look at it closely. It's a statement of reality. That everything is interdependent. And constantly in a state of creativity and motion. And becoming dynamic.
[00:18:52] Okay. So that's the basic idea of ignorance of self. I believe that I am independent of you, which is hard not to believe, right? Because in a conventional sense, I am actually independent of you.  
[00:19:10] Like if I cut myself, you're not going to feel it. If you cut yourself, I'm not going to feel it. So there's a conventional separation between us on a physical level. Buddha's proposition was this does not exist psychologically or spiritually. We think it does, and we invest a lot of reality in that.  
[00:19:38] And so it really seems like it does. We've constructed a whole world about how I'm separate and I'm different from you, psychologically, spiritually. And that, he said, that basic misapprehension of the reality of the situation is the foundation of all suffering. He said it's the foundation of all of it.  
[00:20:04] On top of that comes attachment, right? So if I'm separate and distinct from you, and fundamentally from my own side, I have this habit, this long-term habit of projecting outside of me my gratification, my well-being, my sense of flourishing, my sense of joy.  
[00:20:26] Also my sense of dissatisfaction, loneliness, anger, and depression. I project all of this outside of me just habitually. I believe I'm cut off from you. I believe I'm different from you. And I'm kind of static, like I'm not going to change.  
[00:20:45] Like who I am now, I will always be this way. I've always been this way. This is my fundamental delusion. And so I start to get really desperate about getting certain things outside of me and keeping other certain things outside of me, away from me. This is the idea of attachment, the basic idea of attachment.  
[00:21:09] So like, the ancient way, this is a great way to start to connect to attachment, what attachment is. The ancient way of catching monkeys in India—here's how they used to catch monkeys.  
[00:21:25] They would take a coconut and cut a hole in the coconut just big enough for a monkey's hand, just to barely fit through. Inside the coconut, they'd put a little sweet, a little sweet thing, a piece of candy, whatever. Then they'd tie that coconut down into the ground, they'd post it into the ground.  
[00:21:50] Now, a monkey would come by, smell the sweet thing, get to the place where he knows it's inside the coconut, and jam his hand in there and grab the thing. But because he's grabbed it now, he can't get his hand out of the coconut. So what does the monkey do?  
[00:22:10] Yeah, and what's the net effect of that?  
[00:22:17] Yeah, that's how easy it is to catch monkeys. The hunter would come by and just pass out from sheer exhaustion, right? This monkey would be laying next to this coconut with a balled-up fist.  
[00:22:34] And then you got yourself a monkey, right? That's attachment. So that's the idea, that's what Buddha was pointing at when he talked about attachment, which is the second poison, the fundamental poison, right? You have ignorance of self, attachment, and then there's wrath. Ignorance of self, attachment, and wrath. So that's attachment.  
[00:23:00] So, ignorance of self fundamentally makes us attached. So like the way my work in a more modern example would be a guy goes down to buy a new Mercedes, and he's really jazzed about the new models of Mercedes, and he wants one, he wants one really bad.  
[00:23:23] Maybe he gets another job so that he can save money for the down payment and eventually afford the really steep car payments that he's going to have to make on this. He gets another job, and he's working, he's working, he's working, maybe doing 70 hours a week on this.
[00:23:39] Finally gets the dough together, goes down to the Mercedes dealership, buys a Mercedes, and he's like driving off the lot, and he's just high. It's just amazing. It's like the most wonderful thing. This Mercedes is great. It's like a drug. It's like nothing he's ever experienced before, maybe.  
[00:24:01] And he's driving down the street, right, and like the girls are looking at him, and he's like, he doesn't have any plates on yet, still got the date and dealer thing on, right, maybe he left a sticker up on it, just for like a little added impression. He like calls up his family and friends, everyone wants to see the new Mercedes, you got that new car smell going, the whole thing's amazing.  
[00:24:26] So fast forward that six months, and now it's hard for him to call it his new car now. Now it's like it's still cool, I mean it's still a Mercedes, right, it's great, but it's kind of worn off a little bit, like no one really wants to see it now, no one really cares, everybody gets it if they've seen it, if they've been in a ride.  
[00:24:53] And he's starting to like come off the high, it's just kind of become his car, it's not his new car anymore.  
[00:25:01] Okay, so you see a little bit of dissatisfaction creeping in here, alright.  
[00:25:06] And fast forward another year, now he's like broken down on the side of the road, he's late for one of his three jobs, right, he's going to get fired, if he gets fired he won't be able to like maintain the car payment, which he's like already sick of, it's starting to drive him insane, how much he has to work, like to pay for this thing that he's become dissatisfied about now, right.  
[00:25:29] And he's like, the whole thing starts to just back up on him and he becomes overwhelmed, and like maybe he'll kick the car and he'll curse it.  
[00:25:40] Now it's the bane of his existence.  
[00:25:45] So you've got to ask yourself, why does this happen?  
[00:25:51] This should sound very familiar to you, by the way.  
[00:25:54] I mean, we do this with people.  
[00:25:59] We just get attached.  
[00:26:01] Like why does it happen, what's the fundamental mechanism of that?  
[00:26:04] Why do we go from these really high highs to these really low lows with stuff?  
[00:26:09] People, places and things around us.  
[00:26:12] I mean, the Buddha's answer to that was because we superimpose onto people, places and things around us qualities and characteristics that they do not possess.  
[00:26:23] And then we believe very strongly that they do possess those things.  
[00:26:28] And then when it becomes clear to us that they don't possess those things, we get very dissatisfied, we get very angry at the object, right?  
[00:26:38] So maybe one of the things this guy did, like he was flipping through a car magazine one day before he even bought the Mercedes and he saw a picture of it, right?  
[00:26:49] And for him, like the Mercedes actually contained prestige and wealth and sexiness.  
[00:26:57] Maybe he like superimposed those qualities, believing that they existed from the side of the Mercedes.  
[00:27:03] Almost like prestige and wealth and sexiness were like mixed into the steel of the Mercedes, somehow.  
[00:27:12] Like believing they lived there from their own side, inherently.  
[00:27:17] So, because he believes he does not have these things, right?  
[00:27:23] He has to have the Mercedes now.  
[00:27:26] He has to have it.  
[00:27:27] He has to have the Mercedes now.  
[00:27:30] He has to have it.  
[00:27:32] He like becomes addicted.  
[00:27:35] Maybe he becomes obsessed with it.  
[00:27:39] And then once he has it, he does whatever he needs to do to get it.  
[00:27:43] Once he has it now, it's just like starting to wear off, you know?  
[00:27:48] I mean, it fulfilled his exaggerated expectations and superimpositions for a while, and then it just stopped fulfilling them so much.  
[00:27:57] Because in reality, the car doesn't contain those things.  
[00:28:01] It's just a car, okay?
[00:28:04] It's an object with a certain form and function.  
[00:28:08] That's it. That's all it is, okay?  
[00:28:12] So, when that reality met his superimposed reality of this is prestige and sexiness and wealth, who wins, right?  
[00:28:23] The actual reality of the situation wins.  
[00:28:26] And his attachment starts to become kind of shattered.  
[00:28:30] And when that happens, he feels like he's losing these qualities.  
[00:28:35] And he becomes desperate and very agitated about that.  
[00:28:42] And that eventually leads him all the way down into the anger, rather than acting out.  
[00:28:50] Like blaming the thing for not being what he thought it was.  
[00:28:59] So that's the basic idea of attachment.  
[00:29:03] It's useful to think of what you are attached to.  
[00:29:09] In what ways do you do that, currently, in your own life?  
[00:29:15] Like if you just sat down and you became quiet, you became still, maybe you did a little shamatha, right?  
[00:29:23] A little mindfulness, concentration, calm abiding, single point of focus.  
[00:29:29] Maybe you did that for half an hour, and then you took a paper and a pencil.  
[00:29:34] And you started thinking about, what am I really attached to?  
[00:29:38] What are the people, places, and things in my life that are like the guy, I'm like the guy with the Mercedes.  
[00:29:47] I'm just not seeing it clearly.  
[00:29:50] Just my perception of this is distorted and out of balance.  
[00:29:55] And it's causing me pain.  
[00:29:58] In actuality, like I'm causing myself pain.  
[00:30:03] This is like totally an inside job.  
[00:30:06] In what ways do I do this?  
[00:30:13] Maybe you would find one of the things would be money.  
[00:30:17] It's a pretty common one.  
[00:30:20] It's a pretty common one.  
[00:30:23] Like one of my teachers described Buddha's practice as like not sitting in this and that Dharma center.  
[00:30:29] And going to this and that teacher and practicing and meditating and blah blah.  
[00:30:33] He said it was like, you see the same ten dollar bill at the exact same moment another guy across the room sees it.  
[00:30:41] And you're just like jumping for it, you just have to have that, right?  
[00:30:45] Impulsivity is like...  
[00:30:47] And you just don't.  
[00:30:50] You just resist the compulsive, reflexive thing, grab it for yourself.  
[00:30:56] And maybe like go into your wallet and pull out another ten dollar bill and give that one to him as well.  
[00:31:03] Like you're just going against the grain of this habitual reactivity.  
[00:31:09] Like that's practice.  
[00:31:13] That's useful.  
[00:31:16] And I think that same idea is reflected in all the major world religions, right?  
[00:31:21] Same basic idea.  
[00:31:24] One of the things I loved about Buddhism and Buddhist psychology is it's very practical.  
[00:31:29] It tells you ways to actually cultivate all of these things.  
[00:31:33] To take a model like the seven deadly sins and the seven cardinal virtues from Judeo-Christian thought.  
[00:31:41] And actually mechanize them.  
[00:31:46] It will give you a way to make it functional.  
[00:31:49] How do you actually go from greed to generosity?  
[00:31:52] How do you actually make that happen, right?  
[00:31:56] Buddhism tends to be very concrete about that.  
[00:32:00] Which is probably one of the reasons why you can strip out techniques from it and use it in the practice of any other religion.  
[00:32:09] It's really easy to do that.  
[00:32:13] And people often do.  
[00:32:16] And it's one of the reasons you can strip out some of the psychology and secularize it and put it into clinical psych and it works.  
[00:32:27] Kind of interesting.  
[00:32:30] So you can see if you're attached to stuff, you kind of naturally start to become angry a lot.  
[00:32:39] And what's underneath anger for most of us?  
[00:32:42] Like why do people get angry?  
[00:32:45] Actually, we tested this. We were doing studies on emotion.  
[00:32:51] Human emotion. Paul Ekman was actually.
[00:32:55] If you want to know something about human emotion, Dr. Paul Ekman is the preeminent guy in the United States.  
[00:33:05] So he actually wanted to discover what's the easiest way to make a toddler angry.  
[00:33:12] Like the way that will manifest anger faster than anything.  
[00:33:18] Anyone have a guess?  
[00:33:20] Take something away from them?  
[00:33:22] That's close.  
[00:33:24] I think I was number two or three.  
[00:33:27] Like you give it something that it's locked onto and then you take it from the toddler.  
[00:33:32] You see that?  
[00:33:34] You mean fear?  
[00:33:37] Fear, what do you mean?  
[00:33:39] Making someone afraid of something.  
[00:33:42] Isn't that what's kind of underneath anger?  
[00:33:45] Well, close. That's not what Ekman found.  
[00:33:49] How do you make a toddler angry?  
[00:33:52] Immobilize him?  
[00:33:54] What do you mean?  
[00:33:56] Hold his arms down?  
[00:33:58] Yeah, that's exactly right.  
[00:33:59] You hold his arms down to his sides.  
[00:34:02] In a matter of seconds, he'll be angry.  
[00:34:08] The longer you do it, the angrier he'll become.  
[00:34:11] To the point where maybe you finally release him and he'll turn around and try to hit you.  
[00:34:19] So what's that? What's that feeling?  
[00:34:23] Powerlessness.  
[00:34:25] Helplessness.  
[00:34:27] Like you see it over and over and over again.  
[00:34:29] I was working with gangbangers and severely emotionally disturbed youth and this kind of thing.  
[00:34:34] In Los Angeles, Long Beach, South Los Angeles, these kind of areas.  
[00:34:38] You see it over and over and over again.  
[00:34:41] That's where all of that wrath comes from.  
[00:34:44] This tremendous feeling of helplessness and powerlessness.  
[00:34:49] Like thinking you have no way to actually interact with or manipulate your environment at all.  
[00:34:56] Like things are written in stone for you.  
[00:35:00] So you make human beings feel helpless.  
[00:35:04] And this pisses us off.  
[00:35:07] It makes us very angry.  
[00:35:09] We don't like that.  
[00:35:11] That's usually what's underneath anger.  
[00:35:15] At its root, some kind of sense of helplessness.  
[00:35:19] You can stack on levels of fear and anxiety about the helplessness.  
[00:35:23] That are in between anger and helplessness.  
[00:35:27] There can usually be other kinds of stuff.  
[00:35:30] Compulsivity, numb out, and abstention, and all this kind of thing.  
[00:35:36] But yeah, helplessness and powerlessness are the core of it.  
[00:35:41] So you can imagine the guy with the Mercedes, right?  
[00:35:44] He's like feeling really high.  
[00:35:48] This thing is the source of his happiness.  
[00:35:50] And then all of a sudden it's not.  
[00:35:52] And he doesn't know why.  
[00:35:55] He doesn't know how this happened.  
[00:35:57] He's not tracking it like that.  
[00:35:59] He just knows he doesn't feel high anymore.  
[00:36:03] That's the thing.  
[00:36:05] He just doesn't feel it anymore.  
[00:36:07] It's not working.  
[00:36:10] And the last place he would ever look is inside his own mind.  
[00:36:16] We're all geared to look outside of us for what's bothering us.  
[00:36:20] What's causing problems.  
[00:36:23] And so he blames the car.  
[00:36:27] And he becomes very angry about the car.  
[00:36:30] From this sense of helplessness.  
[00:36:32] The car has failed him now.  
[00:36:34] He can't find a way to make him high anymore.  
[00:36:41] So Buddha's whole point was if you get a better relationship with the car,  
[00:36:48] you'll just be happier.  
[00:36:50] You start to understand that there's no prestige and sexiness mixed into the rubber and steel and aluminum.  
[00:36:57] That it doesn't work like that.  
[00:36:59] That it's just an object with a certain form and function.  
[00:37:03] And it'll get you from A to B.  
[00:37:05] And if you relate to it on that level, you'll just be happier.  
[00:37:09] You'll be happier.  
[00:37:11] Maybe you'll have a sense of well-being.  
[00:37:13] Most of the time we mistake happiness.
[00:37:16] Most of the time, we mistake a reduction in pain as happiness.  
[00:37:25] That's the usual mistake we make.  
[00:37:28] And in actuality, we have no real frame of reference for what happiness might actually be.  
[00:37:35] I don't really know what that is.  
[00:37:37] I'm not really sure what that is.  
[00:37:40] I'm not really sure what that is.  
[00:37:44] Most of the time, we think it's like stringing together as many moments of transitory pleasure as possible,  
[00:37:51] packing them as tightly together as possible,  
[00:37:54] and we would call that period of time happy.  
[00:38:02] From the Buddhist perspective, that's suffering.  
[00:38:05] That's suffering.  
[00:38:08] We're not actually getting it.  
[00:38:11] Like, that's suffering.  
[00:38:13] Transitory pleasure and transitory pain, they're both suffering.  
[00:38:19] Our relationship with both is distorted and out of context.  
[00:38:24] So, like, take it—this is another one of my teachers talking about it like this:  
[00:38:28] Take a piece of chocolate cake.  
[00:38:30] So you've got a piece of chocolate cake.  
[00:38:32] And if you believe that inside the chocolate cake is your sense of satisfaction,  
[00:38:40] your sense of well-being, your sense of pleasure,  
[00:38:44] exists in the chocolate cake from its own side,  
[00:38:48] and exists that way inherently,  
[00:38:51] what will be your attitude about the chocolate cake?  
[00:38:54] What will be your relationship with it?  
[00:38:56] You'd eat the whole thing maybe, right?  
[00:39:00] It's kind of like, that sounds kind of compulsive.  
[00:39:05] That sounds like over the top, right?  
[00:39:08] That sounds almost desperate.  
[00:39:11] Right?  
[00:39:13] So, like, Buddha said, yeah, that's right.  
[00:39:16] It's over the top.  
[00:39:18] It's exaggerated.  
[00:39:20] It's compulsive.  
[00:39:22] It's desperate.  
[00:39:23] It's over the top.  
[00:39:24] It's exaggerated.  
[00:39:25] It's compulsive.  
[00:39:26] It's desperate.  
[00:39:28] Now, when we apply that to a person,  
[00:39:30] usually we would call that love, right?  
[00:39:34] We would think we were in love with somebody.  
[00:39:38] And maybe it's really just attachment.  
[00:39:43] Maybe that's why the divorce rate is sky-high through the roof.  
[00:39:50] Maybe attachment works like that.  
[00:39:53] You mistake it for something else.  
[00:39:56] And you don't see the real dynamic of that.  
[00:39:59] You don't see how it's really working.  
[00:40:01] You just don't get it.  
[00:40:02] You don't connect to it like that.  
[00:40:04] Now, what would happen if you had a realistic relationship with chocolate cake?  
[00:40:10] Like you recognized it was an object with a certain form and function,  
[00:40:16] and that from your side, it has pleasure.  
[00:40:23] Like you like chocolate.  
[00:40:24] Some people don't like chocolate, right?  
[00:40:27] So we know that pleasure doesn't exist in the cake.  
[00:40:30] Some people would taste that cake and go,  
[00:40:35] "It's really not that great."  
[00:40:37] For you, you're going to label it great.  
[00:40:40] But you know that you're doing that.  
[00:40:42] And you know where that lives.  
[00:40:43] That lives in you.  
[00:40:45] And so maybe your relationship is not as exaggerated.  
[00:40:50] Maybe you don't feel so compulsive about the cake.  
[00:40:54] Maybe you're not viewing it as a source of satisfaction for you,  
[00:40:59] in the sense of something outside of you that's going to provide you with some sense of happiness.  
[00:41:06] Maybe you're just seeing it very clearly.  
[00:41:09] How do you think the chocolate cake would taste then?  
[00:41:12] What would your relationship be like with it then?  
[00:41:22] Maybe you could actually enjoy it.  
[00:41:26] Maybe if you stripped out all the desperation and compulsivity and reactivity  
[00:41:32] and superimposing stuff on a subtle level on it, right?  
[00:41:36] If you just stripped all of that out, you would just kind of be able to enjoy the cake.
[00:41:42] And then when the cake was done, you wouldn't be all like,  
[00:41:46] you know, weird about it being done.  
[00:41:49] How am I going to get more?  
[00:41:51] You wouldn't be freaking out.  
[00:41:53] You could just enjoy it for what it is.  
[00:41:57] Maybe in the present moment, right?  
[00:41:59] And then when the cake is done, you would be able to be in that moment  
[00:42:04] with the cake being done.  
[00:42:06] Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal.  
[00:42:09] One way or the other, right?  
[00:42:11] It doesn't mean you still wouldn't want more cake.  
[00:42:16] Yeah, well maybe you would, you know.  
[00:42:19] But whether you got it or not, it wouldn't screw up your whole mood.  
[00:42:25] You know what I mean?  
[00:42:27] It's kind of like that.  
[00:42:30] So it's like the old thing about the Buddha, right?  
[00:42:32] Like someone could be on the left arm, kind of like sawing his skin.  
[00:42:36] And someone could be on the right arm, like kissing his palm.  
[00:42:40] He has an equal relationship to both people.  
[00:42:44] Like he has no inherent bias about which one is better and which one is worse.  
[00:42:50] He will have compassion for them equally.  
[00:42:53] Which is hard for us to imagine.  
[00:42:56] Hard for me to imagine.  
[00:42:58] So, like what if you could actually love people?  
[00:43:05] What's the difference between love and attachment?  
[00:43:10] Now that we understand some of the dynamics.  
[00:43:14] From the Buddhist perspective, what's the difference between love and attachment?  
[00:43:27] Yeah?  
[00:43:30] Something tells me you've heard this before.  
[00:43:37] Yeah, kind of something like that maybe.  
[00:43:41] Like if I love you, if I truly love you,  
[00:43:45] then I want for you your happiness,  
[00:43:49] your satisfaction, your well-being,  
[00:43:52] on your terms, not on mine,  
[00:43:55] on your terms.  
[00:43:58] And I will be of assistance in whatever way I'm capable of being,  
[00:44:02] to help you achieve it.  
[00:44:06] That sounds like love to me.  
[00:44:09] Like I'm not going to insist that you need to do it this way,  
[00:44:14] because it's going to gratify some neurotic thing I've got going on, or whatever.  
[00:44:19] And then make you feel bad if you don't do it that way,  
[00:44:22] and we're not going to do all kinds of weird emotional dances together.  
[00:44:28] Like, that's not love.  
[00:44:32] But that's mistaken for love.  
[00:44:35] Pretty routinely.  
[00:44:41] I mean, it's useful to think about.  
[00:44:44] I mean, for those of you who are married or with a significant other,  
[00:44:48] it's like actually just quieting down,  
[00:44:50] dropping all the judgments and horror stories about what a piece of garbage I am,  
[00:44:56] and just let all that go.  
[00:44:58] And actually just ask the question for a second,  
[00:45:01] how would I treat my spouse or significant other differently,  
[00:45:04] if I actually loved them?  
[00:45:07] If I really did that.  
[00:45:11] And then maybe letting that inform your next interactions with them.  
[00:45:16] Like that might be a way to train in love.  
[00:45:20] And it might be a way simultaneously to see where you're attached.  
[00:45:28] So doing analytical and experiential meditations like that,  
[00:45:32] working with it,  
[00:45:34] this is you working with your attachment.  
[00:45:37] So that you can learn to see through it to some extent.  
[00:45:41] You can learn to stop functioning from it  
[00:45:43] 99% of the time.  
[00:45:46] Maybe by the end of this life you only function from it 96% of the time.  
[00:45:51] But that might be a big difference, right?  
[00:45:55] That might be a radical difference.  
[00:45:58] That might just increase your level of actual psychological flourishing and well-being dramatically.  
[00:46:05] Just that little shift.  
[00:46:07] Just that little shift.  
[00:46:20] Just got questions about that?  
[00:46:25] It's good if you start thinking about it, you know,  
[00:46:28] and flush it out a little bit.
[00:46:38] Now, are we all really tired?  
[00:46:42] Okay.  
[00:46:44] Why don't we do another session?