A Review of The Eightfold Path
Part II: Right Intention
Dharma Talk -- Eric Kolvig -- July 2, 1998 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

We've been spending over a year and a half making our way through the core teachings of the Buddha, who described a path for awakening. He said if you want to awaken, develop eight things: wisdom being the first; the second is developing clear intention; developing speech that is nonharmful but helpful; developing action that is nonharmful but helpful; developing work or livelihood that is nonharmful but helpful; developing a strong energy and effort for freedom; developing mindfulness or awareness; and finally, developing concentration or steadiness or one-pointedness of mind.

We've spent a lot of time on these eight aspects and now we're going on a quick tour back through, spending one evening on each of these eight aspects. This evening we're going to be dealing with the second: Right or True Intention.

But I'd like to have a little P.S. from the last time we met two weeks ago. We were talking about wisdom, the first aspect of the path: Right Understanding, True Understanding. I just want to share something that happened to me this week as an illustration. I don't know if I mentioned a couple weeks ago that the Buddha said that wisdom is our greatest protection -- that being very clear protects us from suffering, protects us from reactivity. And he also said -- very powerfully, to me -- that to understand everything is to forgive everything.

I'd like to share a little moment where wisdom came and protected me somewhat, and where wisdom, or understanding, helped me to come to a place of forgiveness. It's been hot in Tesuque where I live, not as hot as here, but hot, and early on Tuesday morning I decided to get up very early to do a meditation sitting and then, before the sun came up, to get my exercise for the day and to hike up into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Basically I can do that right out of my house in Tesuque, north of Santa Fe.

So as I was going out for my walk I passed the newspaper tube and I grabbed the newspaper as I was going by just to glance at the headlines and put it back in, because I was very concerned about the fire that's been raging in the Jemez Mountains just north of Los Alamos. I'm very concerned about it because the fire at that time had been, and still is, I believe, raging out of control and heading toward Los Alamos. Earlier this week they were planning for the contingency of evacuating all 20,000 people out of the city of Los Alamos. We know what would happen if fire got into that town and what it's got in it, and I live directly down wind, so I was definitely concerned.

The headline of the Santa Fe New Mexican was that they were pretty sure that an arsonist had set this fire. So I looked at the headline, put the newspaper back in the tube and went out for my hike, and found that my mind was actually quite reactive. Basically my thoughts and feelings were coming out of anger and fear and judgment: Why would someone do something like that? Why on earth would someone do something that destructive? Like you, I've been very concerned about the fact that not only is Los Alamos endangered but the fire is destroying the support system, the habitat of many beings, and the kind of erosion from a major fire like that can wash away topsoil that can't be re-established sometimes for centuries. You know all this.

So I was feeling vengeful as I walked up on my walk, and as I went up into the foothills of the Sangres I could look across the Rio Grande valley and see what was happening. On Tuesday morning before the sun came up, the Jemez Mountains were completely obscured with smoke. So I was feeling like, "They ought to catch that person, they ought to put them in jail for a long time," that kind of feeling. Eventually, I remembered something I think that Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye is a terrible way to blind the world," in terms of revenge.

So I was thinking, why would someone do something like this? And I've heard it from others. And as I was walking, I remembered something that I've been writing over the past week. I spend about 90% of my work life as a spiritual teacher, teaching these teachings, and about 10% I spend as a consultant writer and editor. I'm currently working with someone, a friend whom I've been working with for five years now, to write a book about the sexual abuse of children. I had just been re-working the first chapter, which is about what sexual abuse is, who is abused, who the abusers are, how they get started, what their rationalizations are -- very difficult material. And I remembered that when children are sexually abused and they have no way to express their anger -- and the anger has to be suppressed because it's too dangerous for them to express it -- they start acting out. They act out in various kinds of ways: by stealing, by violence, by setting fires.

And when I thought of that, I thought, "Yes, this is one of the behaviors that comes from severe abuse." It really changed my perspective toward whoever this person is, to think that if indeed this is true, people don't go out and do very aggressive, anti-social things just for the fun of it. They go out and do them because they've been wounded in some kind of way. So I found my consciousness changing; I found compassion coming into my heart, thinking, "Yes, I hope they catch this person; yes, I hope this person is held responsible for such a destructive act; and yes, I hope they get help." And I found what was really strengthening in terms of my own resolve is to do what I can do to make sure that children who have been harmed get a chance to express their anger so that they don't have to act out in destructive ways like this, and to do what I can do to see if there's any way that we can prevent children from being harmed in these ways.

I was telling this on Tuesday to my friend with whom I'm writing this book and she said, "Well, I think you'll find this story interesting." Her organization, which is working to stop the sexual abuse of children, has for years been sending out a survey to adult survivors of sexual abuse asking them to profile the abuser so that we can learn who these people are and why they are doing what they're doing. She said that her organization had received, via their Web site, a return profile from a seven-year-old girl who wrote, "My mother is helping me to write this, I'm only seven years old. I was sexually abused. I feel really angry." And she talks about how her mother feels that because she was abused, it probably protected her younger sister who is two years younger. And she said, "You know, my sister is a very cheerful, happy girl, and sometimes I hate her for that, because I'm not happy any more. People sometimes say to me, `Why aren't you happy like your sister?' And I want to say to them, `I used to be happy like my sister.' "

It's very heartbreaking to encounter stories like this, but actually I heard this story and I thought that I was really glad for this girl because her mother has intervened, the abuse has stopped, she's being allowed to express her anger. She has a good chance to have a reasonably normal life. She has a reasonably good chance that she won't become alcoholic or drug-addicted, or have a lifetime of depression, or be a suicide, or become a prostitute, because she's getting help. So this is just one little example of where somehow having some level of understanding, of trying to deeply understand what is the motivation of people when they do harm, and to realize that always people do harm because they're suffering. And what that does is to bring up compassion. We still want to stop the harming, but I think we can do it more effectively as compassionate beings rather than as vengeful beings.

So that's a long digressive riff before the subject of intention. I think I talk more about this subject of intention than anything else in my teaching, and if you have been coming to my talks or have come to meditation retreats that I've led you've heard all this, so this will be repetition. It seems really important to me because basically my sense is that it's with intention, it's with motivation that the rubber hits the road in terms of our spiritual practice. Without it we don't get anywhere.

It really fascinates me to see how it is that people are able to rouse the intention for liberation, for freedom, for enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, for somehow transforming their lives. It's really interesting to me, and I think that all of us here this evening, we would probably use different language for it, but all of us have chosen to come here on this Thursday evening because we have that motivation; we have that intention. And it's pretty rare in this culture. So I'm always interested to see, how does this motivation and this intention get born in people's hearts? Because I think, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we're basically born immersed in a culture of delusion for the most part. We are so immersed we're like fish in water, hardly knowing that we're in the water: being born into a society, into a culture whose values basically do not support liberation, whose values actually move us more toward suffering.

So how is it that people step out of that; somehow step out of a culture whose values don't support liberation and then have the aspiration to liberate themselves? Very often, for many of us, it takes great affliction of some kind or other. I've talked to so many people with AIDS, for example, who have said to me, "You know, before I got this disease I was living a trance life, a self-indulgent, trance life, and getting this disease has gotten me on the path." And there's a strange way in which people say, "I'm grateful to have gotten onto the path, even if it took this terrible a thing to get me on it."

Often it's severe afflictions in our own lives or afflictions in the lives of people around us, people that we really care about, or just opening to the afflictions of the world. It's hard. So many people sort of "wake up" from the trance when they're about to die, and facing death puts a different perspective on things. The Buddha has said many times that one of the most difficult forms of suffering there is, is to come to the end of your life and look back over it and say, "I did not use this life well. I poured my life, I poured my energies into doing something that is now not so important to me." And we're fortunate if we have some shock or something that wakes us up before we come to that point. For some of us it's an LSD trip or some other drug that changes our consciousness to the point where we realize, all of a sudden, that the conventional way of seeing things is not necessarily the right way of seeing things. I think it can be any number of things. Or it might be something as simple as picking up a book and reading it and saying, "Oh, that seems true to me." Or meeting some inspiring teacher and saying, "Well, if this worked for that person maybe it will work for me. Let me do this." I think we all have different conditions that get us somehow onto this path, onto this intention to free ourselves, and I'd love to hear from you what your story is when we have discussion.

I'd like to share with you just a little bit from someone's story. Just two weeks ago when I was here, Ed Albrecht came up to me and said, "You must read this book," and shoved it into my hands. I've got 25 books at home waiting to be read and I said, "Well, I'll look at it," and I looked at it and I read the whole thing and found it very moving, to the point where I bought it and have given it to a couple of friends. It's quite apropos of this subject. It's called Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, you may have heard of it. A very well respected sociology professor at Brandeis University found that he had ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal progressive disease that's entirely incurable. What it does is basically shut down the entire body, gradually. And when he discovered that he had this illness he decided he wanted to die consciously. A former student of his who had been out of Brandeis for quite a long time, a journalist, flew back to Waltham, Massachusetts, and met with him every Tuesday for many weeks until he was very close to death -- thus the title Tuesdays with Morrie -- and recorded the meetings. They considered it their last class together. Morrie wanted to be a teacher to the end and he said, "I want to be able to teach people about dying. I can be a bridge for people because I'm more dead than most other people, but I'm still alive."

If you read this book, the information that you'll find here is the perennial wisdom. You will probably have seen it before, but the particular context and the simplicity of the expression is very powerful and moving to me. I'd just like to read some things from this dying man that are apropos of this subject.

So I think for those of us who are fortunate enough, we wake up from that trance before we come to the end of our lives. In terms of creating an alternative culture, I think that Buddhism now in the Western world is contributing -- it's only one contributing factor -- but contributing to creating a culture that may have more wholesome values, that may contribute more to happiness and less to suffering. So this moment -- sometimes a shocking moment when we suddenly realize that it could be different -- is a great gift to us.

I'd like to share with you a poem about that experience, a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, the German 19th- and 20th-century poet. He's describing the poet seeing a very old statue, an ancient Greek statue, that is quite broken -- the head is gone, the arms are gone, the legs are gone below the thighs -- seeing an ancient, broken piece of stone that's more alive than he is, and being shocked by it; being shocked out of some kind of complacency by it. And actually, many years before I ever read Rilke, in 1973 I walked into a room of the Vatican Museum in Rome and saw this very sculpture and had exactly this experience, of just seeing this thing that was so vital, that had so much kind of intense energy it shocked me. I just stood there gaping at it. I'd never seen that kind of vitality in sculpture before or since. So this is Rilke describing this experience, of seeing the power in this object and realizing that it is more alive than he (from An Archaic Torso of Apollo):

For those of us who are blessed to change our lives, I think it's very interesting that in terms of intention it only takes one thought. Just to share a little bit about a familiar story about the Buddha: the Buddha claimed that when he came to his awakening he was able to see all of his past lives. He described a time infinitely before the life in which he was born -- he said it was "a hundred thousand eons plus four incalculables," whatever that is -- when he was an ascetic living in the forest doing spiritual practice. There was a buddha at that time as well -- a fully awakened being -- named Dipankara Buddha. And he heard that this Buddha was coming and so he went to the place where the Buddha was coming to meet him.

There had been lots of rains and there was lots of mud. They were trying to prepare a path for him to walk on so that he wouldn't get all covered with mud, but they didn't get the job done before the Buddha and his entourage arrived. And so this ascetic, Sumedha, actually lay down in a mud puddle so that the Buddha could walk on him and not get his feet muddy. Before he lay down in the puddle he looked and he saw this being, and he saw how absolutely clear and powerful he was, and a thought came to his mind, "I will become a buddha." And it's said that this previous Buddha stopped everybody and said, "Don't step on this guy, he's going to be a buddha," and actually predicted to him, saying, "In some lifetime you will be born and your name will be Gautama Siddhartha, your chief disciples will be Sariputra and Maudgalyana," and told him all this stuff. And the Buddha claimed that that one thought that just came spontaneously into his mind set the direction for millions of lifetimes where he was basically doing his homework and developing the qualities of a buddha.

And so he was born into his final lifetime as a prince in a palace and he didn't remember all of those previous lifetimes. His father, the king, was afraid that he was going to become a spiritual leader when he wanted him to become a monarch; that is, to follow in the family business. So his father made sure that the prince was surrounded only by pleasant things. He was basically living in a delusive world where only things were pleasant in a conventional way of seeing things.

When he was 29 he insisted on going outside the palace -- he'd been so protected -- and when he went outside the palace he saw four things. He went out with his charioteer and he saw an old person and he said, "What is that?" because he'd never been exposed to anything aged. And his charioteer said, "That's an old person." "Will that happen to me?" "Yes, it happens to all of us." He was absolutely stunned and he turned around and went back to the palace. When he came out a second time he saw someone sick. "Will that happen to me?" "Yes, it happens to us all." He went out a third time and saw someone dead and he was absolutely astonished and he said, "Will that happen to me?" And his charioteer said, "Yes, it happens to us all." And then finally he went out and saw a renunciant who was doing spiritual practices. And he says that he was shocked in just this way; he says:

And so he determined to find that which doesn't age; which doesn't get sick; which doesn't die. And he devoted his life -- he left the palace, he left his harem, he left his wife and his child -- and devoted himself to spiritual practices. And then after six years of these practices he sat down under a tree and with a very powerful intention he said, "I will not stand up, even if I die here, I will not stand up until I have awakened this heart." And these are his words -- just feel the quality of intention in these words:

And on the next morning he saw the morning star and his mind awoke, and he experienced knowing that what he truly was does not age, does not get sick and does not die. So he was able to find out what he wanted to find out.

And then his intention changed. Before his enlightenment he was very concerned about his own process, about his own awakening, and after his awakening his only concern was the awakening of others. And so the language changes a lot. Just a few days later he says that he will go out to teach for the benefit and happiness of the multitude, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit and happiness of devas (celestial beings) and humans.

I think it's interesting: we're faced with the same dilemma that he was as a prince. If you know yourself to be exempt from growing old and getting sick and dying, then by all means coast along. But if you're faced with the same dilemma it's really important for us to find that which doesn't age, that which doesn't get sick and that which doesn't die, and to know that's what we truly are. So having an intention, being absolutely clear about our great intention, our mega-intention in our lives -- what is our deepest purpose in life? -- it's so important because it becomes the touchstone around which everything else in our life will revolve. You know, it's like that one thought that this ascetic had a hundred thousand eons plus four incalculables ago, just that one thought -- "I will become a buddha" -- and it was deep enough that all of the energy of the universe comes together to support it, and that literally happens for us if our intention is deep enough.

Be clear about what your deepest intention is. I find it useful for myself to re-assert my deepest intention every single day when I sit. For me it is: "I commit my life and all future lives to the liberation of beings from their suffering. May all my thoughts, all my words and all my actions contribute to this purpose." And it's not true that all my words and actions and thoughts contribute to it but there's an effort -- there's an effort and it makes a difference, because we live in the midst of values that don't help us so much. And so we have to be very clear. We're not separate beings; our minds and hearts are permeable; we're all influencing each other. It's important to be clear.

So it's important, I think, to have a kind of mega-intention, a great intention in your life, to use whatever language you want for it and to keep coming back to it. But I think it's also valuable to be really careful about all of the intentions in our life, the moment-to-moment intentions. The Buddha said that intention is karma: out of our intentions come what we say and what we do. And out of what we say and what we do, those things have results, they always have results. So there's not a thought, there's not a word that we say, there's not an action that we do that isn't consequential because every one of them has consequences. If we realize this, then we're much more likely to be careful about our speech, for example. We're much more careful not to speak violently or to speak cruelly to others because we know it has results. It will have results on them, and the results will rebound eventually on us as well.

So to have a renewed intention, for example, to practice the Eightfold Path: the intention to develop wisdom; the intention to clarify our intentions; the intention to speak in ways that are not harmful to others but are helpful to others; the intention to act in ways that are helpful and not harmful; the intention to have work or livelihood that is helpful and not harmful; the intention to generate the energy required to free ourselves and to help others to be free; the intention to develop clear awareness or mindfulness; and the intention to develop strong concentration (or stability) and one-pointedness in our minds, which then gives rise to wisdom.

I had a very busy day the other day; the kind of day where the phone keeps ringing, and I had a deadline, and I had another task to do, and I had a talk to prepare. I was moving very quickly from one place to another, and as I was carrying one thing from one room to another in my house I just noticed, "Oh my goodness, I'm actually present. I'm feeling every step. As this body moves I can feel the steps." That -- even though I was very busy and quite driven in that moment -- I was still mindful. And I was very grateful for that, very grateful just to be present for my living experience. And that comes from years and years of having the intention to be aware, to be mindful. So it makes a difference when we really state these intentions to ourselves.

There's so much that can be said about this subject. I want to speak very briefly about just one other aspect of intention: that is the way that faith and intention support each other. In the West I think "faith" has gotten kind of a bad rap because we think of it as faith in something outside ourselves: "You will believe this if you want to be part of our group." And the perspective of Buddhism is very different. You don't have to believe in anything; you don't have to believe in any of it; in fact, you're encouraged not to. The whole thing is about looking for yourself. You can find out right here [pointing to chest] if you want to know where suffering comes from in your life: just watch what goes on in your mind and heart, and you'll see yourself generating your own suffering. You don't have to believe in anything outside yourself.

But it is important -- the Buddha talked about a different kind of faith that he called "verified faith." That's the confidence or trust that comes from knowing something absolutely for yourself. If you look inside yourself long enough you will understand the deepest answers to the questions that you hold in your heart and you will understand it from having observed it directly -- that kind of faith. The Buddha talks about the "lion's roar" of a buddha who has absolute confidence. There's an epithet describing the Buddha as "fearless in the possession of four kinds of perfect confidence." I don't know what those four things are, but I love it.

You don't have to believe in anything outside yourself, but you do need to believe in two things. One is that liberation or freedom is possible: that this is not wholly or totally a meaningless process that we're involved in here; there is a clear explanation that's possible to understand and, through understanding, to transform our lives. One, that liberation is possible; and two, that you can do it, that all of us are capable of freedom. You need to believe those two things, you need to have faith in those two things because otherwise intention just doesn't have enough power. The two need to go together.

We live in a very skeptical part of the world and our skepticism actually serves us well. I wouldn't want to reduce our skepticism, but I think that I would like to strengthen our faith or confidence. Again, you don't have to believe in buddhas or any of the ideas that I've shared here this evening -- just find out for yourself and then have that confidence. And what is particularly useful in my mind in developing faith along with intention is that it gives us the strength to deal with things when things become very difficult, as they do in all of our lives when we become very challenged. If you have confidence that liberation is possible and that you will do it, then you can take anything that happens to you, anything that presents itself to you in your life and say, "OK, I'm going to use this as part of my path. This is going to serve me," instead of feeling a victim of circumstances.

I personally love listening to Black gospel music to get some sense of this -- to me it's such a beautiful expression of very powerful faith in the face of great difficulty. It's very inspiring to have some sense of the juice of devotion and faith, of confidence. So I'd like to end this evening by playing my very favorite piece of music. It's sung by a Black gospel singer who died a few years ago named Marion Williams. At one point Rolling Stone called her the greatest musician of the twentieth century. Whether that's true or not, she expresses this quality of faith very powerfully.

Gospel song: It Is Well With My Soul

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Eric: I'd love to hear how the intention to get freedom came to your life, to your heart.

C: I think role models. When I was in high school I had a friend who I admired a lot and who acted very differently from my other friends. Once you kind of start looking at things differently then, like you said, it's that one thought that all of a sudden shatters all of your conceptions.

C: I think it was meeting my wife. I was just very shut down and filled with a lot of pain and feeling hopeless. It was real clear to me when I met her that she loved me and that was enough.

Eric: Lucky you!

C: My son contributed to my getting started on the path. After my partner had died I was very depressed and I was talking to my son. Listen to your kids! And he said to me, "Mother, you don't have anybody left to take care of -- why don't you start taking care of yourself?" And I had read about different Eastern philosophies when I was a teenager and I decided to check it out again. And as you said, I picked up a book and it was like, "I knew that!" And it was just a whole thing that opened up in front of me.

C: I remember when I was an art student in Australia and I heard Krishnamurti talk in the early 1950s. I think I was maybe seventeen. I had come from a very abusive home. But there was something about the quality of this man that was extraordinary, and also the feeling in the audience, which was totally foreign to me. And I never picked anything up at that time, but I think I hit a wall in myself several years ago, and somehow I connected back to something I had really forgotten.

C: I think most of the events of my life have conspired to prevent me from being able to take the cultural delusions very seriously. There have been times in my life when I desperately wanted to get out of myself and just kind of float in the ocean of what everybody else does and says -- I just wanted to be like everybody else and not to be myself. But I think everything that contributed to my own self-acceptance all along is the thing that's kept me going. I think the delusion glitters quite a lot. It's very alluring if you feel like you're outside of it.

Eric: So in that sense you've been fortunate to be the outsider.

C: Yes. It didn't always feel good, but in the long run it's paid off.

C: I think to be in a room with someone who is dying and dies is pretty compelling for anyone, and to wonder what that means.

Eric: And in terms of the kind of reflection it can have on your own life ...

C: Exactly.

C: I can remember when I was thirteen we lived overseas for a year and a half, and we lived in East Africa for half a year in Uganda. I ended up going up with some Peace Corps workers to a very small village and spending some time. I've never forgotten the experience. We spent most of one day bargaining to buy a chicken, and I remember being very impatient at one point and then realizing that there was so much going on, that we were spending the day sitting around talking and eating together. In the process this market transaction was occurring but there was just so much loving interaction going on just in this everyday process. All day there was so much time to do it. I can remember, even at thirteen, having one of those shifts and thinking, "My God! It's possible as a human being to be connected like this!" And I had never experienced that.

C: When I was thirteen my brother was killed by a drunk driver and that was that kind of a shock. At the time there was really nobody around who could give me any kind of direction or context on how to deal with that and that didn't come for a long time. But at least I knew at that time that the conventional things that were going on, the daily things, were just sort of on the surface. And talking about connection -- one of the things that I liked about that time was that people suddenly got very real and that was really different, too.

Eric: You mean the survivors?

C: Yes.

Eric: I've mentioned in previous talks that for me, I've had very severe depression and was catatonic, basically, lying and staring at the ceiling day after day. And someone handed me a book, Philip Kapleau's Three Pillars of Zen, and said, "I think you ought to read this." And I read it and I thought, "Oh, this is true." It reminded me of study that I had done in college years before. I remember reading it and saying, "This is true. If I live (which I didn't expect at that time, it felt like a terminal illness), if I live I will give my life to this." And you know, it's so interesting -- just one thought. And I know that I survived because of that one thought, and it set the whole direction of this life. And if there are future lives, all of the others that follow. So it's very interesting.

Next time we will talk about Right Speech, the third aspect of the Eightfold Path. It's quite interesting because in Santa Fe, meeting every week and my giving a talk every week, we spent like eleven weeks on Right Mindfulness, for example, and seven weeks on Right Intention and twelve or thirteen weeks on Right Action. So to take all that material and put it into one evening is kind of interesting, picking what seems most important.

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