The Five Hindrances - Doubt

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“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life
is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Lingering somewhere between certainty and uncertainty, doubt finds us all depending on life's changing conditions and our own experience. There are two flavors of doubt described in the Satipatthana Sutra - The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness. There is the kind of doubt that can be useful when it is constructive and when it is a kind of skepticism that is focused on finding and knowing the truth. Or, there is the kind of doubt that can shut us down completely because we've come to believe ourselves to be solely our indecision, powerlessness, and distrust.

As with the other Hindrances, the teachings emphasize that gaining insights about our doubts is the goal of mindfulness and meditation. As a means of investigation, mindfulness can help us realize freedom from doubt as we remember to expand our awareness, broaden our views and challenge the doubtful stories we’ve created and told ourselves. Phillip Moffit, a well known vipassana meditation teacher, says that we know doubt as “the absence of feeling grounded in something greater than your own ego structure. It is for this reason that doubt is both an existential challenge and a spiritual hindrance.”

The Five Hindrances - Sloth and Torpor

The Five Hindrances are aspects of mind that can hide or cover over what’s real in experience. They create obstacles to our concentration and attention. Energetically, they interrupt our sense of balance. They show up for everyone on the cushion and in daily life.

As we saw with the hindrances of Attachment and Aversion, we can get thrown around between grasping too hard and hating too strongly.  We miss the fact that they actually both of these aspects exist and our job is to find equanimity or balance between them. The Hindrances obscure reality and profoundly affect our mental clarity primarily when we forget that they are impermanent and come and go. 

In meditation, the hindrance of sloth affects our physical energy and vitality. This is where we feel heavy, weary or weak and struggle to activate our energy. Torpor affects our mental energy. We know is mostly as cloudy or foggy thinking or when our mind wanders.

However, with mindfulness practice we can see that the problem is not that there isn’t available energy. As soon as conditions change, as they certainly will, energy will be at the ready. With awareness we can open the truth of the changing winds and regain balance.

The Five Hindrances - Letting Go is not the same as Aversion

“Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

Jack Kornfield”

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Aversion is another hindrance to skillfully dealing with experiences in life that we sometimes confuse with "letting go."  

We have an understanding about two realities that are at the heart of Buddhist thought -- Impermanence and Interdependence. In our relationship with these two realities, we can have a range of reactions from dissatisfaction all the way to profound suffering. On one hand we are uncomfortable with things always changing, so we attach ourselves to various object of experience trying to steady the ground beneath us. On the other hand, when we don't see the interdependent connectivity of all things, we feel separate and sometimes isolated. Hoping to protect ourselves from outside forces, we attach and identify with external objects for support.

We also need to consider the energetic opposite of attachment -- Aversion. Aversion has to do with our relationship with and reaction to things we don't like or don't want. We can experience aversion in a range of ways from irritation and annoyance to anger and rage. Fear is also frequently a component of aversion and even mind states like sorrow and grief can contain its aspects. 

The undercurrent of aversion is really hatred. And, while, as adults, most of us have tempered our outward expression of hatred, we certainly have had experience of it flaring up in moments of stress or danger or when our beliefs about how things should be is challenged.

As Jack Kornfield suggests in the quote above -- "To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be." In mindful meditation, open awareness provides an important opportunity for allowing and investigating aversion as it arises.

Letting Go - Attachment to an Image of a Desired Future

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Future cares have future cures,

And we must mind today.” 

― Sophocles, Antigone

Previously we've looked at our usually uneasy relationship with impermanence. Most of us don’t like that everything comes and goes and changes. So we attach or cling to things hoping they will steady our experience. We also investigated why we might ignore the interdependence of all things. We're more comfortable turning experience into objects of the mind and assuming that each object has its own separate reality and it stays just that. However, when we accept interdependence, we see that everything relies on many other conditions and probabilities and lets us know we, too, aren't actually separate and isolated either. 

Now I'd like to consider a very subtle craving many of us come to see in the face of life's eventual outcomes. We see clearly that the mental images we created in our minds of a specific future and future best self differ markedly from the outcomes. When our hold on such specific projections is strong, we can easily get lost in planning, expecting and demanding that the world acquiesce. And, as an additional point of suffering, the comparing mind arises to judge the present moment with the idealized moments of an unknowable future. Letting go of expectations of a specific future and future self is really in service to what is true now. It lets us realize the true self that is already here, a self that can flourish with whatever arises, and whenever it arises.

Letting Go - Attachments and Interdependence

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““A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.””

— Albert Einstein

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Previously we looked at our relationship to the impermanence of the physical world. Most of us don’t like that everything comes and goes. Our discomfort leads us to attach or cling to external and internal objects believing they will steady the unsteady nature of experience. However, we suffer when we find out that our attachments also come and go. So, letting go in this case is about releasing our attachments and reclaiming the sense of our universality. Each of us are an integral expression of the ever changing being-ness.

We can also see attachments as we look at our relationship with the interdependence of all things. Simply put, this means that nothing exists independently of anything else. A wooden table is not separate from all the things that helped the tree to grow, the people who harvested the tree, the designer that imagined its use, the craftsman who fashioned the table, the shops that sells the table, the people who buy it, the people who will dispose of it, and the earth that will welcome it back. The table is one expression of the interdependence.

We, too, are a part of a broad and expansive universe of possibilities and changes. However, very early in our development we start to deduce (erroneously) that we are, in fact, separate from everything else. This might begin as we realize we are not our parents, we are not our crib, and so on. We feel we are not part any of the objects we perceive and that they are separate in and of themselves. One side effect of believing in our own separateness is a sense of isolation. So, again we attach to things to alleviate our isolated, alone feelings. We create an feeling of ownership of things we grasp and call them “ours” and “mine. Letting go here is also about releasing our attachments and assumed ownership of experience and reawakening to the fact we are far from separate. We are really among the limitless possibilities with everything and everyone.

Letting Go - Attachments and Impermanence

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“If you take a handful of salt and pour it into a small bowl of water, the water in the bowl will be too salty to drink. But if you pour the same amount of salt into a large river, people will still be able to drink the river's water.

If your heart is small, one unjust word or act will make you suffer. But if your heart is large, if you have understanding and compassion, that word or deed will not have the power to make you suffer.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

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When you first approach Buddhism, there is the clear message of hope found in the Four Noble Truths -- 

• yes, there is suffering in life, and 

• there is a known cause of it, but 

• it is possible to end it, and 

• there is a path to follow free yourself from it. 

From the Second Noble Truth we learn that the principal cause of suffering is "clinging" to things in life - almost anything - objects, people, thoughts and beliefs. Letting go then means learning to loosen our grip on all those things we are holding so dearly. 

The primary way we can loosen or let go of our clinging is by willingly and courageously investigating all the ways we actually do cling and see how they serve a liberated and peaceful life or not. Just pausing with words like desire, attachment, striving, wanting, craving, grasping, searching, and needing can start to illuminate the pretty vast world where clinging often occurs.

It's also important to understand that clinging is in direct opposition to the impermanent reality of existence -- nothing lasts forever, everything is always changing, and every moment is new and different than the last. Yet, we get stuck in hoping things won't change and try to control the ever changing landscape of life. So, we suffer.

Letting Go - Attachments - Truth of the Way Things Are

““Letting go is more a process of seeing differently than you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider. It is making room beside your old habitual perceptions, beliefs, and experiences, the ones that may — or may not — have served. But in any case, they no longer comprise the entirety of what you can imagine. Your horizon is larger than that. There is room for more.

It takes courage to simply look, not for what might have been or what will be, but at the truth — and the beauty — of what is.”

Lea Gibson Page, On Being Contributor”

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You may know that the autumnal equinox is Saturday, September 22.. So, in the seasonal moment when we naturally relinquish the summer and welcome fall, I thought an exploration of the idea of "letting go" would be a good topic of inquiry.

In Buddhism, letting go is most often understood as the necessary releasing of our attachments to people, places and things. The release is necessary because the suffering in life comes directly from our clinging to how we want things to be versus how things really are. Importantly, this understanding of clinging and attachment is also directly parallel to the expansive understanding of our True Self versus the Separate Self we most often believe ourselves to be. As the quote above suggests, it is all about "seeing differently that you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider."  One of my early teachers talked about this expansive view as our being able to see that "we are not merely human -- we are ultimately an expression of the universal." 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 9)

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““Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.” Pema Chodron

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An important exploration we can do concerns both the Separate Self (that we believe ourselves to be) and the True Self (that is open awareness itself). When looking for the Separate Self, we see it is really something that we have constructed from our societal conditioning and our own conclusions about experience. And, we find that a Separate Self actually cannot be found. The True Self, pure awareness, on the other hand, is known as the space-like field in which all our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions come and go without resistance.

By setting a sincere intention of knowing the truth of things as they actually are, we can begin seeing how the natural flow of awareness transcends the limitations of our perceived separateness and also how it pervades the activities of mind and body with a broader sense of knowing. Being fully human in wisdom and compassion is the work and joy of our "everyday lives."

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 8)

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““It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

Pema Chodron”

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We have been investigating two different views of the Self by making a distinction between our True Self and the Separate or Egoic Self.  We defined True Self as our personal expression of the eternal and infinite Awareness in which all experience appears and is known. This view of a Universal Consciousness, of which we are each a part, can open us to a realization that we are "more than merely human."

However, this True Self is not the Self with which we are most strongly identified. Instead, most of us identify with a Separate Self where we believe ourselves to be the main character in the story of our lives and are separate and distinct from all other objects of experience. We believe that our day-to-day experiences are caused by outside forces or obstacles.

This view can cause us to suffer because we don't see that it is actually us that has given the limited and finite meaning to our experience. These limitations don't let us know our True Self. This is why most contemplative traditions ask us to Investigate and let go of those limiting habits of mind. As we are able to open to the field of open awareness where all potentialities and possibilities can arise, the separate "I" that suffers can surrender its limitations and rest in the full potential of being where we are more fully aware and more fully human. 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 7)

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““The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found.”

Alan Watts
Excerpted from ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

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The low levels, or not so low levels, of anxiety that accompany our everyday life appear when "we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of the experience." Why is that the case? Recently I realized how automatically I have an opinion or commentary, or a story about any experience that appears. It became clear that when my thinking mind gets busy talking about an experience, I have already stepped out of that direct experience. So, are we "trying to get the "I" out of the experience" because the intimate connection with it is too much to "feel" directly?  This is an interesting area for reflection. If experience, that can only ever happen "now," is all that is real, how does our practice support finding and abiding in awake presence across all experience as it appears in our awareness?