Every morning after I wash up, I sink into my meditation cushion and turn my attention toward the breath, breathing in, breathing out. But as I settle into my practice, my thoughts almost immediately turn toward whatever is plaguing my life. In times of underemployment, I count sent cover letters and imagine a rosy image of economic security. When I am dating someone, I circle around previous ghostings and question the right approach with my current intrigue. Past thought, future thought, remember the breath, repeat—a practice full of clinging and grasping. 

Initially, I perceived my insatiable state as a hindrance of sense desire. The five hindrances—sense desire, ill will, dullness, restlessness, and doubt—are states of mind that hinder our clear-seeing, our experience of freedom, and our emotional stability. My mind was consumed with trying to get what I want, constantly calculating the right move to reach my desired outcome or yearning for a particular experience. Being in sense desire is to be with longing, the urges of the body and the covetousness of an object. It is to be constrained by a mind governed by compulsion in search of completion and fulfillment. The Buddha compared sensory desire to a pool of water mixed with many colors. 

Amongst the various shades of my mind were ceaseless inquiries: How do I find comfort? What am I not seeing in my relationship patterns? If I find the ‘right’ practice will it heal me? Despite years of asking questions, I rarely arrived at a satisfying conclusion. In my practice, I began to pull back and notice when my mind turned to question, and I realized that I had been misinterpreting the subtle textural differences of the hindrances. What I thought was sense desire was actually doubt. With sense desire the mind is pulled by the compulsion to be absorbed by pleasure, while doubt is characterized by questioning and interrogation.

With the hindrance of doubt, we are overcome with uncertainty. The mind can become obsessive in its pursuit of insight. I would catch myself circling around a problem  trying to figure it out, telling myself, If I just think about it the right way I will find the “right answer.” The Buddha compared the doubtful mind to a pool of water that is darkened by mud. 

Yet, questions themselves are not unskillful. There are positive lines of questioning, dhamma vicaya, which is a positive investigation that leads to wisdom and clarity. It is when we allow the mind to get mired in the ceaseless search for answers that we risk mental well-being. In fact, the Buddha would seemingly have us leave many questions unexamined. In the Buddha’s discourse “The Arrow of Birth, Aging, and Death”, the Venerable Maluhkyaputta approaches the Buddha declaring he will abandon his training if he does not learn whether the world is eternal, if the soul is one thing and the body another and whether or not a Tathagata exists after death: 

Maluhkyaputta, if there is the view ‘the world is eternal,’ the spiritual life cannot be lived; and if there is the view ‘the world is not eternal, ‘the spiritual life cannot be lived. Whether there is the view ‘the world is eternal’ or the view ‘the world is not eternal,’ there is birth, there is aging, there is death, there are sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair, the destruction of which I prescribe here and now.

—In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Bhikkhu Bodhi

The inclination to know rests deeply in my bones. The acquisition and holding of knowledge is a cloak that—if I’m not being mindful of—I can wrap myself in as a defense against actually being with my difficult feelings. However, the inevitability of feeling has a way of coming forward one way or another. Instead of searching for something to grasp, we can repeatedly turn the mind toward what is known: all things are of nature to change. Our only inheritance is impermanence and the truth that conditions will rise and fall. 

If samadhi is the gathering and collecting of attention, doubt is the dispersal and distribution of attention. When I stay in the questions of doubt that my mind proliferates, it is unbearable. When I allow the questions to rise and fall, I experience relief. In this way, the hindrance is the path. Our meditation practice is the perfect training ground to experience the immediacy of impermanence. We can experience each breath entering and exiting the lungs with objectivity. Our thoughts, feelings, and questions are objects too. They arise in the present moment, just like the breath, and then disperse into emptiness, just like the breath. By recognizing doubt as an object, I am removed from the identification with the confusion it would otherwise bring forward. Noticing the rise and fall, impermanence helps me to know that no matter how lost I may feel in a particular moment, that state will pass. Even the most intense moments of confusion, when a boulder of an experience sits heavy on my chest, is of the nature to change.

We all have a hindrance that weighs heavy on us. Our experiences of the hindrances are unique for each of us, as unique as our pattern of thinking, our relationships to feelings, and our relationship to our practice. The ability to use this discernment and remove the identification from the hindrance cultivates stability and emotional balance. After all, samadhi training is not an effort to shut everything out. We enter and exit states of samadhi as we come into contact with the living world, just as we experience all the hindrances. This is necessary. In the practice of looking directly at our hindrances, we can open a gateway toward samadhi, which provides relief from those muddy dwelling places of the mind.

The poet Cathy Park Hong writes, “being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation.” I have found this to be true. Clear-seeing is not a constant state. We awaken continually. Cultivating lasting emotional stability requires a willingness to look and look again. My patterns are going to show up. And when they do, I can welcome them in. When I greet doubt as my best friend, I can ask her what she wants me to know when she inevitably arrives. In this way, my hindrance is not only my best friend, but my greatest teacher.

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In his book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us: 

We may think our agitation is ours alone, but if we look carefully, we’ll see that it is our inheritance from our whole society and many generations of our ancestors. Individual consciousness is made of the collective consciousness, and the collective consciousness is made of individual consciousness.

Like much of his work, this reminder is prescient, especially as we continue to navigate ever-changing coronavirus protocols, the escalating climate emergency, and deadlocks in American politics that halt the possibility of true progressive, human-centered policy. In juxtaposition to these extremes, we might feel that we are standing still, not making progress on our path, or that we have been left without a choice on how we get to exist. 

These times don’t have to be a disruption. They are an opportunity to acknowledge impermanence and recognize the roots of our suffering.

From the small moment of testing a new recipe to the larger moment of asking a love interest whether they’d like to be exclusive, states of not-knowing live on the same plane of existence. Herein lies that danger that Thich Nhat Hanh warns us about regarding the collective consciousness. When we’re bombarded with the public discourse of our “unprecedented times,” no matter how big or small the issue, we are susceptible to getting lost in the narrative of what we believe about our suffering. We allow external influences to drop us deeper into the worldly truth of our thoughts and feelings instead of recognizing that in these liminal waters of uncertainty, fear and helplessness will be intensified.  

Recognition isn’t an easy task. 

This past summer I built an intimate relationship with fear and helplessness. I’ve struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and this particular season of heaviness had me contemplating the fact that I might never “get better.” The fear of looking down the road and finding myself consistently in the grip of depression was present. So too was the helplessness of my mind’s storytelling that “this is everything, this is all-encompassing, this is all that will ever be and you have no choice.”

These thoughts are mental formations, or chitta samskara. Anything that is made of something else—be it a plant or our fear and helplessness—is a mental formation, and, much like unpredictability itself, these formations are present at all times. They are aspects of our consciousness that come from wholesome and unwholesome seeds (kleshas), which will be watered and fertilized differently, depending on our current state of affairs and our individual life experience. Outward triggers will “water” these seeds and allow them to take root. Our current societal conditions, for example, have “watered” and fortified our fear, helplessness, and uncertainty to the enhanced states so many of us feel today. I suffered from these effects during this summer’s episode of depression, but the feeling has always been there. The not-knowing of this time amplified the feelings. I would venture to guess that whatever your particular seed of suffering is, the same has happened to you. What gets left out of the conversation is that this is actually a dynamic space to be in.   

The dharma invites us to embrace these often painful energies as teachers. When a feeling from an unwholesome seed rises to the surface, we have to witness it with gentleness. That alone takes strength. Allowing yourself to be a person experiencing fill-in-the-blank feeling may require a certain degree of release. When our suffering is running deep, this invitation may feel even more difficult to navigate, the heaviness too burdensome to bear. Whatever the feeling is, however, allowing yourself to go to its depths can help you touch the emptiness of the emotion. 

If we can recognize and accept our pain without pushing it away or clinging to it, we’ll be better able to see that joys and sorrows are truly the same. Through letting go and touching emptiness, we can then choose a compassionate response.

Consider the uncertainty, fear, and helplessness seeds that have taken root and sprouted to the surface in yourself. With gentle curiosity, you can ask: What does this seedling look like? How does it move in your body? Can you give it a sound? If you could touch it, how would it feel? This intimacy can lead you to see what actions you take in response to these seeds, and to know your habitual responses. With creative wisdom, you can investigate your unwholesome seeds and note: “This one drags me to the bottom, but here is bodhicitta too.” 

Once spotted and identified, the seedling needs to be properly tended to. This is calling in right diligence. With diligence, you can regain your agency. Instead of this unwholesome seed being an unwanted suffering or vulnerability where we might collapse in on ourselves, we can recognize what this pain looks and feels like and how we can move toward a skillful and compassionate response. 

This is the joy of being amidst and leaning into disruption. It is from this place that we can choose to take the next steps that anchor us along our uncertain paths. 

The post The Not-Knowing of Our Time appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.