A Review of The Eightfold Path
Part I: Right Understanding
Dharma Talk -- Eric Kolvig -- June 18, 1998 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

We've spent about a year and a half going very carefully through the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddhist teachings, spending a few of our gatherings on each aspect of the path. Now we're going to go back and do a quick reprise, spending one evening on each of the eight aspects of the Eightfold Path.

The first aspect of our spiritual path from the Buddhist teachings is Right Understanding or True Understanding -- it's wisdom. It's an absolutely crucial aspect of our spiritual practice. It's important because how we understand the world will determine how we experience the world. It's really that crucial. If we have an understanding, for example, that we are quite separate and isolated, if we have a sense of alienation from ourselves and a sense of separation from other beings and from the rest of the world, this will bring us unhappiness and suffering. It's just that simple. If we have an understanding that there is no separation, if we can heal the inner divisions in our own minds and if we can have a sense that there is absolutely an interconnectedness among all things, that will eventually bring us happiness.

So it's very, very important and really very simple. Somehow we think of "Wisdom" as being with a capital "W" -- it's kind of a loaded word in this tradition and in this culture and society. But actually, all wisdom is, is seeing things clearly. It's that simple. It's shifting our understanding: a little shift in perspective is all it is. And yet that shift is difficult for most of us to attain. It doesn't come automatically to us because we actually are born embedded in delusion, and so many of the basic assumptions of this society are incorrect and they lead to suffering. Those are the understandings that we inherit, and it takes a real effort to bring about a shift, because some of these understandings go very deep into our psyches.

Basically what is required to free ourselves on the level of understanding or wisdom is a real passion for the truth, a passion to know and to understand the truth. Without that passion, without that drive for understanding, it's unlikely to happen. We'll be talking more about that when we come to the second aspect of the Path the next time we meet, Right Intention.

The Buddha said that there are basically two ways we can come to understanding. He says, "There are, followers, two conditions that give rise to Right Understanding: namely, instruction from someone else and one's own wise consideration." I very strongly recommend the second. You can listen to a dharma talk like this one, or you can read a book or listen to a tape or watch a video, and feel very inspired by it, and that's fine, it's wonderful. But my experience with these kinds of things is that they don't last very long. We get a kind of intellectual understanding -- "Oh, that's really interesting" -- and it doesn't last. But if you really rely on your own direct experience of reality, your own inquiry, your own discovery, you get an understanding, a shift in perspective deep in the psyche and your heart, and it lasts. And so I think really relying on our own wise consideration and not relying on second-hand wisdom is better, because that kind of second-hand wisdom has only this much value [fingers an inch apart]. It strengthens our faith, but it doesn't necessarily strengthen our understanding or our wisdom. And that's why I'm quite skeptical of talks like this one, but we do it anyway.

The Buddha also used a very powerful metaphor; sometimes he could sort of shock us with very strong images. He used a very powerful metaphor to express how very important he felt it was to do whatever is necessary to come to understand more clearly. I read this about a year ago in January, about 17 months ago, so this may be familiar to you who were there then. He said,

Basically what he's saying is, do whatever you have to do, go through whatever you have to go through in order to attain deep understanding, because this is the most valuable thing that can happen. The most valuable thing that can happen to a sentient being is to come to understand rightly what the truth is, because then your whole relationship to the world changes. You're happier yourself; you don't cause suffering to others.

I've been feeling a lot of gratitude to have a spiritual path, to have something laid out with such detail and so specifically and so concretely -- this Eightfold Path, these eight things we can cultivate if we really want to free ourselves -- because not everybody runs into this stuff. Many years ago I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the fiction of Herman Melville. I spent years studying Melville's writings and studying his life, and came to have great admiration for someone who was, if ever there was a true spiritual seeker, someone whose heart had an enormous passion to understand the truth. And yet he didn't have a path. It wasn't available in the middle of the nineteenth century for him. He wanted to know, he came to understand some things, but he basically didn't have a practice -- he didn't have what has come to us, what the Buddha was able to provide to us. And so his life was in many ways an enormous frustration: someone whose sole passion was to come to understand more deeply.

There's a beautiful passage in the journals of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville, after they had known each other for many years, went to visit Hawthorne when he was the American consul in Liverpool, England, and they went out for a walk along the shore, along the ocean, and sat among the dunes and smoked a cigar. Hawthorne says in his journal that Melville, as he always was, was this restless seeker, full of questions about good and evil, and right and wrong, and free will and predestination. And Hawthorne says: "He will always be this way." And so, to sense someone who did have a passion for freedom but didn't have a specific path to follow, it makes me very grateful that I was born in a time when it was possible to come into contact with a valid spiritual path that can actually take us to deep understanding.

I'd like to describe what the classical teachings say about what Right Understanding is. But before we get into that I just want to really simplify it and in the simplest terms to say that wisdom is just clear seeing. I've been recently reading J. Krishnamurti's journals and there's a very simple little passage where Krishnamurti is describing going out for a walk and being among people in the midst of their busy lives, walking through a valley and seeing this very beautiful stream flowing down at the bottom of the valley, and he says, "In order to know the beauty of the stream, you must leave the world." And the Buddha at one place says, "If you want to come to the end of suffering you have to come to the end of the world." What Krishnamurti and the Buddha are saying here is not for you to renounce the world and go off and live in a cave somewhere, renounce your commitments and engagements in life -- it's not that. It's really about coming to have a mind that is silent and spacious enough that it can be present for anything. As long as our minds are filled with their obsessions and their distractions, it's actually impossible simply to be clearly present for anything: for a stream, for the movement of a butterfly, for the traffic on Central Avenue, for another human being. It's really through the whole aspect of our spiritual practice that we're actually able to come to have minds at times and hearts at times that are silent and spacious enough so that we can just be there. In a sense, that's what wisdom is: it's just being there clearly, with whatever is.

So Right Understanding, according to the traditional teachings, is understanding of a few things. Each one of them is easy to describe intellectually -- they're pretty easy to understand intellectually -- but they're not so easy to come to understand in a really profound way. One of them is what the Buddha was talking about, the penetration of the Four Noble Truths, which is really the core of the teachings. I think it's probably familiar to anyone here who knows anything about the Buddhist teachings. It's really getting past our delusion and opening to the fact that there is pain and suffering in the world, the First Noble Truth, simply to know that it exists: to experience it very deeply and to know that there is suffering. It's pretty simple to think about, but we all have a very complex denial system that keeps us from knowing.

The second Noble Truth is to see that the source of our suffering comes from our grasping at what is pleasant and pushing away what is unpleasant in our lives: trying to control our lives in such a way that we can keep what is pleasant and try to get rid of what is unpleasant. The third Noble Truth is that the cessation of suffering comes from the falling away of that impulse of greed and grasping and attachment to what is pleasant, and aversion and pushing away of what is unpleasant. And the fourth Truth is that the way to the end of suffering is this Eightfold Path: the careful cultivation of understanding and wisdom; the cultivation of intention -- a very clear and deliberate intention in our lives; the cultivation of speech that is nonharming but is helpful; the cultivation of action that is nonharming but is helpful; the cultivation of work and livelihood that is nonharming; the cultivation of energy and effort in our spiritual practice; the cultivation of mindfulness and awareness; and finally the cultivation of concentration, of stability and one-pointedness of mind.

Just coming to understand more and more deeply the Four Noble Truths is Right Understanding; to me, it's really wonderful. One of the dominant themes of Western philosophy has been: why is there so much suffering in the world? It's been debated for centuries, for millennia. There's the wonderful testimony of Julian of Norwich (despite the name, she was a woman) who was a great 14th-century mystic from Norwich in England. As a teenager she became very ill and came right to the point of death. At that point she had visions of Jesus; Jesus came and talked to her. And one of the things she asked Jesus was, "Why is there so much suffering in the world?" And Jesus says to her, "I could tell you but you wouldn't understand. But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

What I find really amazing and wonderful about this practice is that you can find out for yourself the source of suffering in the world, and all you have to do is to sit and watch your own mind and heart and it will be manifest to you, because the suffering generates out of our own consciousness, out of our own response to the world. My own teachers, Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, are currently leading a retreat just north of Santa Fe, and both of them shared the pivotal moments at the very beginning of their own spiritual practice, when their very first teacher, Anagarika Munindra in India, said to each one of them something that really put them on the path. What Munindra said to Joseph was, "If you want to understand your mind, sit down and watch it." So simple! And what he said to Sharon was, "The Buddha solved his problem -- now solve yours." Wonderful, just wonderful! So simple. If we want to understand really deeply the cause of suffering, just look: you can see yourself generating your own suffering. Because our suffering doesn't come from what happens to us, it comes from how we relate to and respond to what happens to us. As we change that relationship, then more and more happiness comes to us in our lives and less and less suffering.

Another aspect of Right Understanding or wisdom is understanding the law of karma: to understand that everything we do or say has consequences. Each time we think and speak and act in the world we are setting seeds that have results. If we plant seeds of benevolence and kindness and helpfulness to ourselves and to others, the result or consequence is happiness. If we plant seeds that cause harm to ourselves or to others in our thoughts or our speech or our action, then suffering and pain come to us. Really understanding that is an integral part of this practice -- the three aspects of right speech, right action and right livelihood -- our actions in the world and their results. As we come to understand that nothing that we do is inconsequential, we come to be more and more careful and conscious about how we speak and act.

The Buddha tells a story about what he claims to be one of his previous lifetimes, when he was basically a Buddha-in-training. He was doing his homework for a few million lifetimes, and in one lifetime (this is one of those wonderful mythical stories and also from a very patriarchal world) there was a king who offered his daughter and half of his kingdom to anyone who could prove to him that they had stolen something that no one found out about. So all kinds of people brought things to this king and said, "I've stolen this enormous treasure and nobody's found out about it." Eventually the bodhisattva, the being who eventually, in his last lifetime, became the Buddha, came to the king and said, "It's just not possible. It's not possible for me to steal something that nobody knows about because I would know." And so of course he won, because we do always know. We always know if we cause harm, for example, and even if no one else finds out about it, it has consequences in our own minds and in our own hearts. It causes anxiety and imbalance, it causes a fear of reprisal, a fear of being caught, and it conditions us to do more of the same. That's equally true of doing benevolent and useful things in the world. It brings happiness, it brings a kind of joy in our own goodness, and it conditions us to do it again. So it's altogether important in terms of understanding the law of karma, understanding the law of consequences. It seems so abstract as an idea, but when you actually start to live it, when you actually start to notice that what you say has consequences and you start to be careful with that, you really see how transformative this can be. If we habitually kill and steal and rape and lie and blind ourselves with intoxicants, we're not going to come to deep understanding, we're not going to come to liberation.

Also, Right Understanding is understanding the very thorny subject of the law of dependent origination, which I won't go into in detail. We've talked about it before. Essentially what the Buddha did was, he said that there are basically a sequence of twelve things, each one causing the next; a chain of events which basically keeps us in our suffering, keeps us going around and around with our suffering. It's a very detailed explanation of the second Noble Truth, the cause of suffering. The important thing for us is to know that there is only one place where consciously we can break the chain. That's in the moment when a pleasant thing happens to us and we don't grasp and hold onto it, or when an unpleasant thing happens to us and we don't try to push it away. It takes a real consciousness and alertness to be able to see that in the moment. The example I've been using recently is when I went to a dinner party a few months ago and there was the best chocolate mousse I have ever had. I really enjoyed it. It was wonderful! I enjoyed every bite of it. And then I was offered a second helping and I said, "No thanks, that was OK, that was fine." To really enjoy it, to have rapture, to have delight in something really wonderful, and then to be able to say, "That's OK, I don't need any more." It's finding that kind of balance between enjoyment and not grasping.

And there's no way we can prevent the unpleasant things from happening in our lives. There's no way we can prevent loss and all kinds of pain. We don't have control over the way other people speak and act toward us. And so to allow the unpleasant to happen without being overly reactive -- that's where our freedom comes from. It's so simple to say and so hard to do.

Finally, what I feel to be the most important aspect of Right Understanding, of wisdom, is understanding the three universal characteristics of all things. Speaking briefly about it, because we spent weeks on this earlier, last year some time, it's really to come to understand on deeper and deeper levels, a deep intuitive level, that all things are impermanent, that everything passes away. And out of that understanding, which to me is really the crucial one, comes the understanding of the other two universal aspects of all things: that everything is unsatisfactory because it's impermanent, that there's no security or safety in things because we can't keep anything; and the third understanding, which can be really transformative, is to understand that there is no separate self here. That's a big one for people. It's almost impossible to understand intellectually, but really to understand on the deepest level that there is no separation, and to be living out of that place.

Understanding these three universal characteristics of all things is not a very pleasant experience for most of us, because it's actually very disconcerting to come to understand, for example, that there is nothing whatever that we can hold onto, that there is nothing whatever that doesn't pass away. There is no physical, material possession, there is no relationship that doesn't end; we're going to lose our bodies when we die: there's just nothing whatever that can be held onto. We don't want to hear that. Do you want to hear that? I'd much rather have the nice things stay permanent in my life. We have to understand that sufffering is inherent in all things because things are impermanent. Again, we don't want to know that; we're looking for permanent happiness. "Everything dear to us causes us pain," the Buddha says in his direct way.

And then this whole business of no self -- it feels to people like they would fall into some horrible void if their self disappeared, when it's only the concept of a self that disappears; nothing else changes. But it's very, very disconcerting -- that's where the dark night of the soul comes from.

I think that on just a practical level, if you really want to free your heart and free your mind, all these ideas about the "four this's" and the "three thats" are not so important. But if you really want to free your mind in terms of Right Understanding, you must ask yourself and really ask in a very deliberate inquiry, "What do I believe? What do I believe about myself and about the world?" And to really examine those beliefs. We have beliefs that we hold consciously, and there are beliefs that we hold subliminally and unconsciously. To really examine those beliefs and to determine for each belief: is it something that leads to my happiness and the happiness of others, or does this belief lead to suffering for myself and for others? It's a really interesting undertaking, and that's really where Right Understanding can come from.

What do you believe? Do you believe, for example, that you can keep things from passing away? The precious things that you own, or this precious body, or precious relationships in your life -- do you think that somehow or other you can keep them from changing? It's really useful to see that. I think we all have a wish to be able to have that kind of control over our reality, but that's not actually how reality works. Do you believe that somehow or other if you could get all the right circumstances together in your life, then you'd be perfectly happy? And even if you did, how long would that last? If you get all the conditions right, how stable will that be? They will change.

Do you believe that you are a separate self? Do you believe that you are isolated from the rest of reality, that there's an "in here" and an "out there"? Does that really lead to happiness or does it lead to suffering?

How do you feel about this body? Most of us people in the Western world have been conditioned to feel shame about our bodies and their functions. Is it possible to come to some kind of relationship to the body, to hold beliefs about our bodies that are wholesome, that don't involve shame, but also don't involve a kind of cherishing and holding on that isn't so useful to us? Is it possible to see this body as a very useful vehicle that we try to take very good care of and really try to respect and even to love, but to know that it's going to get sick and die? Is it possible to really accept the impermanence of the body?

Somebody sent me via e-mail a column by Anne Wells of the Los Angeles Times. I'd like to read it because it seems to me to be a very beautiful description of understanding our impermanence as beings.

It's wonderful to be able to slice through and to understand that we will die. I think we all know it intellectually, but do we live from that understanding? The Buddha could be quite brutal at times. He says:

This understanding of impermanence can be very painful, but the Buddha says, "All conditioned things are impermanent. It is their nature to arise and pass away. To understand this truth brings true happiness." That eventually, when our hearts come to accept it, there's more happiness. There's more happiness for this woman Anne Wells who is living without the assumption that it will go on forever, because her sister died young.

And just very briefly, what about all the social beliefs that we all carry? What about our beliefs about gender roles, for example: "this is the right way for a woman to act; this is the right way for a man to act"? Really think about what havoc has been caused in the world by those assumptions. For us men, our macho conditioning: "I am supposed to feel separate from the rest of the world; I am not supposed to feel my feelings; I should be dominant and aggressive all the time." To really examine those kinds of beliefs and see what they really do. What are the beliefs that we hold about nationalism? How do you feel about being an American, if you are a citizen of this country? Does nationalism really lead to more happiness, or does it lead to more suffering, looking over the history of the last 200 years? How do we relate to people of other nationalities? What is our belief about ourselves and about them?

What is our belief about race? Think what that has done. These beliefs that maybe intellectually we know better, maybe intellectually we know that skin pigmentation has nothing to do with anything, really, other than skin pigmentation, and yet we have been taught all of these attitudes that we take in when we're very young and we can't screen them out and we hold them. So what are your beliefs about European Americans, or what are your beliefs about African-American people or about Spanish-American people or about Asian-American people? What beliefs do we hold about Native American people? Really look at those things.

What are your beliefs about lesbian and gay and bisexual and transgender people? Are they so abnormal that somehow or other they need to be excluded from the family of human beings? It's really useful for us to look at these attitudes because we carry them in our consciousness.

Just one final thing. I think it's really important for us to respect the deluded parts of ourselves. We talk so much about how it's important to come to wisdom and deeper understanding, but we are all, all of us, a mixture of wisdom and delusion. I've talked quite a bit about this in recent months because I've been going through an extremely difficult time in my own life right now because of a major loss. I've watched the very deluded parts of this consciousness that don't have a clue about wisdom, that don't have a clue about impermanence, don't want to hear about impermanence. And I think it's very easy to reject those parts of ourselves because you can see they're the parts that hold all the suffering, and you don't want that suffering. And yet to split away from the deluded parts of our own hearts and minds is not going to help, it's actually not going to help. Is it possible to really love the deluded parts of ourselves?

I came and picked up Sharon Salzberg last week at the airport and drove her up to Santa Fe. I asked her about this, because it fascinates me. I always used to think that if you came to wisdom, then you're wise, you know, that wisdom somehow pervades the whole mind, the whole heart, the whole psyche, and it doesn't. And I asked her, why is it that parts of our minds stay in these totally out-there, unbalanced, deluded states? And her response was very interesting. She said, "It's cellular. The change actually is cellular and it takes a long time for that to happen. We just have to be patient, to be patient with the unfinished, the immature, the blind and deluded parts of ourselves, and to love them as much as the wise parts." That's a big challenge, but that's an important way for us to overcome the sense of inner division.

Well, it's a giant subject, but I hope for all of us that we can come to deeper and deeper true understanding of what reality is and how we relate to the world, and that that can bring happiness to us and bring happiness to others, that we can uproot our suffering through understanding.

* * * * * Questions * * * * *

Q: The last comment that you made about reality: Is there a reality that we can come to know in Buddhist belief? Is there such a thing?

Eric: I think understanding, for example, the three universal aspects of things -- that everything is impermanent, that everything is unsatisfactory, that everything is not self -- we can come to understand that. Our conventional understanding is exactly the opposite of those three things: that somehow we can keep the world from changing, and somehow there is something that is absolutely pleasant that isn't going to change for us, and that there's definitely a self here. So we can come to understand that, and I think that if we go deep enough, and I didn't talk about this aspect of it, but if we go deep enough in our understanding our mind opens to a reality that is unchanging, actually, which is entirely satisfactory. We call it nirvana, we call it whatever, the unconditioned reality. It's not possible to know that, but it's possible to experience it. That makes a big difference, when you can actually find that there is something that doesn't age, that doesn't get sick, that doesn't die, and know that that is actually what we are, in the deepest way -- we can know that, too. So I think there is a reality that we can know. The sound of the birds is a reality. If you can get out of the static in your mind and just hear that sound, that's being in right relationship with reality, it's kind of that simple.

Q: I'm being with and watching a young friend who's dying of cancer, and I think he's in the last weeks of his life. It's an extraordinary thing for me. I'm there with my mouth open in shock at the extraordinary impermanence and the fleeting beauty of life and witnessing him in this transition -- it's just extraordinary. I don't think I've ever felt this permanent impermanence, the paradox, so intensely.

Eric: It's a great blessing to be able to do that, because normally we're in denial about death and about the dying of other people. If you can really be with him and go through that process, there is no way that you won't be living your life in a different way. It's wonderful, I'm glad for you, even though I know it's not an easy experience. Thank you.

Q: When you talked about karma before, when you do an unskillful act, basically you're setting it up to repeat it. But at the same time, if you do an unskillful act knowingly and recognize the suffering, can't that put a stop to it?

Eric: Exactly, yes, what you're saying is exactly right. If you're more or less unconsciously lying, say, habitually, and lying becomes a habit of our lives, then we just keep repeating it again and again. Habits deepen and become addictions and become character. But if in one moment you can see, "Oh, I just lied to this person and I have just threatened the whole nature of the relationship because of the lie," and you really see how disruptive it can be and your heart pulls back from that, you're much less likely to do it again.

The way the Buddha describes it, he said that we take the Five Precepts, the ethical precepts of nonharming conduct, like not lying, for example, being truthful in our speech, we take them as kind of external exercises at first. But then we more and more become them. He said eventually what happens, when you reach a deep enough level of understanding and love and open-heartedness and clarity, it becomes impossible to harm. The image he uses is quite beautiful. He talks about taking a feather and putting it close to a flame, and the filaments of the feather curl back from the flame. He said that's just what it is: even if you have the impulse to do harm, at some point there's this inner force that doesn't allow you to, it pulls you back from the act. So I think every time you can notice, "Oh yes, I did harm, I'm really sorry I did that, I'll try not to do that again," each time you condition your mind in that way, you're really bringing a change about. It may seem very inconsequential but it's not. Eventually there comes to be this kind of built-in safeguard where you can't harm any more.

Q: Sometimes that makes it difficult to live in the world. I'm having problems at work. They want to set something up where they want to tell a little lie. It's not a big lie, it's just a little lie. And I have refused to go along with it. And I'm very unpopular. And it's just a little white lie, it's just going to make things easier. And I'm saying, "But it's a lie." Sometimes it makes things difficult.

Eric: I agree. I've been having a very difficult time trying to get health insurance in New Mexico. I have a pre-existing condition of severe depression. Nobody wants to give me health insurance. And all these people are saying, "Just lie. And then you'll get your health insurance." It is sometimes difficult, and sometimes you have to pay the consequences of holding a certain integrity. I understand what you're saying.

Q: I'm thinking about this idea of no self. It seems to me, although I'm not sure, that a person has to have some sense of wholeness to approach that idea. That there's a paradox there, that you have to have a wholeness to let go of the wholeness.

Eric: I think you've expressed it beautifully. Actually this is the most difficult subject we ever deal with, this whole business of no self. And I think part of it is a confusion in language, because in the Western world we talk about creating a strong ego structure as a positive thing. And then the translation of Asian teachings is "to get rid of your ego," and it seems to be contradictory. But actually, if you look at what constitutes a strong ego structure -- a certain kind of confidence, a certain kind of self respect, a right relationship to others, however you want to describe it -- you can describe all of those things as characteristics without it necessarily belonging to anyone.

But you're right -- it's very hard for people who are borderline or psychotic to go through this process. I have a history of very severe mental illness, so there has been a very weak ego structure here. And it's been very, very difficult to get to those places in our spiritual practice where the sense of self starts to disappear because it's very terrifying. If you've got lousy boundaries to begin with and the boundaries start dissolving, you know, it's horrible. And yet on the other side of it, when you really have a sense that this is an impersonal process, it's all here, it's all happening, it's just not happening to anyone, then it is very liberating.

Q: That reminds me of some graffiti that was scratched in the sidewalk in Asheville, North Carolina, years ago that said, "Just avoid the void."

Eric: You need to go through the void, but you need to do it very carefully. There's actually a stage in the process for everyone where they get quite terrified, when this most basic assumption or belief in a separate self starts to unravel and deconstruct and fall away. It's very scary for people. The impression that I had was of being in the absolute zero of outer space. But it's all in the mind. The only thing you lose is a concept, nothing else. You don't get rid of an ego, you don't get rid of a self. The Buddha said that wisdom doesn't get rid of a self, it gets rid of grasping and suffering. You know, the self is never there to begin with. Trungpa Rinpoche, the great Tibetan teacher, was once asked, "What is self?" And he said, "It's neurosis. You're better off without it." [Laughter] It's a very rich subject and it's the hardest to talk about. Thanks for your question.

Q: I was confused about what you said about suffering. I felt that pain is part of the human condition and that part of controlling the suffering is separating the pain from the suffering. Is that what you were saying?

Eric: Yes, absolutely. Your question is a very important one. There is no way that we can avoid pain. Being born into a body means it's going to get old, it's going to get sick and it's going to die. It may not get old if it dies young, but it means that a certain amount of physical pain is inherent in being born into a body -- it's just what we get, it's our contract. But suffering is actually our mental response to pain. It's resistance to pain: if there's no resistance, there's no suffering.

The Buddha described that when he came to full enlightenment, essentially the qualities of mind that cause our suffering, of greed and hatred and delusion and all the rest of it, were uprooted forever, so that he no longer felt fear or anger or pride. And yet after his enlightenment, there were some pretty difficult things that happened to him. He had very severe stomach illness at one point, and he went through a famine where people only had oats (for horses) to eat. He had to go through the suffering of the famine and almost dying of starvation because there was no food. And yet he describes this pain happening but no reaction. When there is no reaction -- when we don't push away what is unpleasant and we don't grasp for what is pleasant but allow experience to happen without reactivity -- then the suffering is gone. So there are certain kinds of pain that can disappear, like the mental afflictions, that can be reduced and eventually uprooted, such as hatred for example. Hatred is reduced as we do this path, as we purify our hearts, and eventually they say hatred is uprooted. But there are certain kinds of physical pain that we just have to go through. So your question is a very important one, to be able to distinguish between pain on one hand and suffering, which has to do with our relationship to pain. Thanks.

Q: I wonder if you have any tips for not reacting to physical pain. I have some severe back pain this week and it comes and goes, but I would love to learn more about how not to react to it.

Eric: It's a huge subject. In three minutes or less: I think it's important to be able to distinguish between the physical experience, the physical sensation, and your mental response to it. So, if your mind is contracting with fear or resistance, there is suffering in that contraction of mind. But the contraction of mind actually also causes the contraction of the body, so that the muscles around whatever injury in your back will become more tight. So it's a compounding process: mental contraction, physical contraction, more and more pain. If it's possible to really know the pain for what it is, the experience for what it is, it's just a physical sensation. It's not you, it's not yours. If you can ever get that distinction, that this is a physical sensation, it isn't me, a lot of the resistance will actually fall away. It's quite interesting.

I very unskillfully sat with enormous amounts of pain, actually tore the cartilage in both of my knees, that's why I sit in a chair now. It was not smart. But I was taught to sit with pain and to accommodate it and I learned how to do that very well. It is really interesting that if you can pay close attention to physical pain, you'll notice that you'll start by paying attention to it over here [hands far apart] like this, because we don't want to get close to it. But if you can bring your attention closer and closer to it, and then actually to penetrate with awareness into the physical sensation, what you discover is that it's not something solid. It seems to be so solid, but when you go deeply into it you find that it is made up of thousands and thousands of little impermanent blips. My experience is that even with very severe pain, when you get to that level where you can just be with these phenomena happening, everything utterly impermanent, it's just like watching the aurora borealis go across the sky and there's no reaction at all at that point. So, to be able to gently go into the pain and go more and more deeply into it, you find that your relationship to it, through mindfulness and awareness of it, will shift.

But there's just one kind of caveat: working with physical pain is an exhausing process. Eventually the mind gets tired, it gets fragile, it gets rigid, and at that point it doesn't have fluency. At that point it's really good to back off from it if you can, to find some way to distract yourself from the pain, with a movie or a sundae or whatever. Because when the mind gets brittle and exhausted it can no longer avoid being reactive. Joseph Goldstein describes slamming his finger in a car door and sitting for hours with this very intense pulsing pain and being fine with it until at night, when he got tired. And then he just couldn't be with it any more. So knowing when to go into it and be with it but not be a martyr about it, and when to back away from it and take a break from it is really important. Our liberation comes from that: going into it and coming away, going into it and coming away. That's the short form. Thank you.