Right view

After graduating from the Community Dharma Leader programme, I have entered into a new phase of learning and reflection about meditation and Buddhism. It was confusing and contradictory at first, but I am starting to find my way in the dark. This post is about how my understanding continues to develop, and as such I think it comes broadly under the heading of "right view". As a starting point, I think it's useful to ask ourselves...

What is fundamental to the Buddhist project?

There are many things we could say, but what I want to suggest could work as a point of orientation is perhaps this.

The dhamma is a project of improving our understanding of ourselves and the world. This begins with correcting our most coarse misunderstandings and becomes increasingly refined and subtle.

When we see it like this, we can see what the dhamma has in common with CBT, Socratic thought, stoicism, and the brain as a Bayesian system making predictions. All of these models share an interest in sorting beliefs, perceptions, cognitions, understandings in terms of their accuracy, fitness for a purpose, helpfulness, alignment with values, and so on. In the case of CBT and stoicism this process of reframing is probably what gives them therapeutic value.

One of the key axes along which the dhamma promotes or demotes ways of being is that of wholesome/unwholesome.

The dhamma asks us to understand which of our ideas, actions, impulses serve the good and which do not.

But what is the good? In a Buddhist context, something is said to be wholesome to the degree it is not affected by craving, aversion, or delusion. This is what the second noble truth tells us. As we gradually make progress in fielding our various behaviours, thoughts, and acts into these buckets--which we might also understand as helpful or unhelpful, skilful or unskilful, appropriate and inappropriate, even noble and ignoble--we begin to experience periods of ease and peacefulness. This process is also reflective. We understand what is wholesome and we really see it for ourselves. We know, "This isn't made up. It has an effect on my mind and happiness." We see the effects of our thoughts and actions.

One one level, this may seem obvious and trivial, "we are correcting misperceptions, sure, sure". But that really is a profound task and is a deep structural feature of the dhamma, not a surface level artifact. This is basically what the eightfold path tells us by prefacing each of its limbs with samma (appropriate). We practice appropriate speech, for example. It's also seen in the teaching on right effort which describes the path as cultivating and maintaining wholesome states of mind; and abandoning and preventing unwholesome states of mind. It's having the discernment to see what is proper. We're recognising the push of the mind to act in unwholesome ways and dropping it. Similarly, what we are doing when we reflect on the three characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not self? We are correcting a tendency to misperceive the nature of things. Part of what the dhamma gives us is a massive set of skilful and consistent propositions.

At bottom, this all has to do with the way one views the world. Human beings hold many beliefs and notions that are inconsistent with the truth and often with each other. So we need to engage in a process of seeing clearly, reflection, and self honesty. In one way of speaking, we become alert to faulty cognitions, cognitive dissonance, subpar decisions, wrong moves, common traps. As we shed unhelpful views and replace them hopefully with better ideas, we experience greater harmonisation of mind. We begin to see clearly is ways of being that lead to peace, and ways that do not. Seeing those ways of being that lead to strife, there comes a point at which we are ready to drop them.

One of our key interests, then, is in developing a continuity of wholesome mind states. To do this, we must be alert to unskilful ways of seeing, thinking, speaking, acting.

But what does it mean to select for wholesome ways of being during meditation? Well, it's a kind of balance, non-clinging, as it says in the Satipatthana refrain.

They meditate independent, not grasping at anything in the world. --Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, MN 10, Bhikkhu Sujato

We're not seizing the breath (or another object) in hopes of gaining something but neither are we allowing the mind to range over all sorts of preoccupations.

We're using the breath to steady ourselves as the mind gradually balances itself without grabbing onto things or pushing them away.

This can be supported by following the breath in meditation, or metta, for example, because the scope of these objects produces a continuity of the wholesome in which the mind coalesces.

Now, it's not the case that the whole project is a bust if unwholesome impulses arise. It's in allowing these to arise and pass in awareness that healing takes place, that we see their impermanent nature and disidentify with them. This allowing and interest is itself wholesome. It's not resisting what is but neither is it indulging in problematic patterns.

We can see this process as the mind coming to know itself, coming to know that it does not need to grasp and cling to things outside itself. Ever more at peace, it begins to settle and to see itself all the more clearly.

Of course, it is easier to keep the mind on a wholesome trajectory when conditions are easy and simple but progress on the path can’t be constrained to this. Difficult conditions can sometimes teach us more than an easy life. The goal--through skilful understanding of our own minds and judicious reflection and application of techniques--is for the mind to be at ease, centred, content in an increasing range of situations. The mind, the heart, is assured in knowing what is skilful and has little to no interest in what is not. This is the eighth path factor of samadhi, a unification of mind that isn’t fixated on objects of sensory pleasure. It is a unification of mind that leads onward into letting go, stillness and peace.