How To Use A Tool
Carl brought an honesty and vulnerability to our talk in examining struggles on the spiritual path in his interview on the Discovery of Mindfulness podcast episode. After examining the path of three Western authors who found Dhamma in Asia in the 1950s to 1970s, Carl brings himself in as a fourth character and looks at his own journey in a later generation. Following is a snippet of what he shared.
“And eventually, I stopped meditating, and I just let go of that feeling that I needed to have this kind of progress.”
“At first it was the advice I was telling myself, I was just like, 'Well, you know, this will pass and I just need to re-dedicate myself or work harder or things like that.'
And after a while, you just kind of wonder, like in the Goenka tradition, they talk about storms that come. And storms are these kind of periods of extreme difficulty in your practice. And so I was constantly wondering, 'Is this just a storm or maybe like a weather system that is just floated over me, and is going to be here for years. And if I don't keep working at it, it's just going to stay forever?' And so therefore, that advice of just like keeping working, is what it was.
And I think what I eventually figured out is that, those things pass, everything passes, I mean, that's kind of the basic teaching, like everything passes, and that feeling was going to pass, kind of no matter what I did. Like if I worked really hard, eventually it was going to pass in some way. And if I stopped working, it was going to pass, probably in a different way.
And so that was kind of was kind of a funny thing to realize, because it was kind of different from the sankhara model where you have this solid defilement that is just not going anywhere, unless you shine the light of vipassana on it really firmly. And there's definitely something to that model, there's great value in sitting down and examining your mind for long periods.
But also, the mind just changes, in a lot of ways it's not under our control. And this advice, thinking that it wasn't going to change unless I worked at it, was kind of flawed in a way, because it was going to change no matter what!
And eventually, I stopped meditating, and I just let go of that feeling that I needed to have this kind of progress. And that I think was really more of what made the cloud lift, is just the letting-go!
And I understand that is part of the teachings of any kind of Buddhist tradition. But I do think that sometimes that those kind of core approaches of just letting go, and not being attached, gets subsumed by specific techniques. And this is not limited to the Goenka tradition at all.
Like, you think that you have this tool that you need to apply to this problem over and over. And the tool is supposed to be useful, but it's not really the tool itself that you're using, it's the underlying principles that cause that tool to work in these circumstances. And I think in some ways, I lost sight of the circumstances and was concentrating on the tool.”