Metta is Like the Sun - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher
Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week. Meta is like the sun. Radiance.
Jomon:And we seem to begin at least with all the words that bears repeating: love, kindness, acceptance, appreciation. Radiance, now that can support a visual or sensual experience, warmth and light. I would like to begin with a guided meditation. The words are from Ayakama. Ayakama, you might have heard in our women's lineage that we chant.
Jomon:She was a powerful dharma teacher, born in Germany to Jewish parents who fled Germany in the thirties. As a dharma teacher she always recommended that people start a meditation with a little bit of metta practice, especially towards oneself. She recommended it for its calming and brightening effect on the mind, which supports concentration. So I'd like to share it with you, it's fairly brief, but if you'd like to, you can close your eyes if you'd like or settle in however you do. This is called The Sun in Your Heart.
Jomon:In order to start, please put the attention on the breath for just a few moments. Imagine that the sun is shining in your heart. It warms it. It lights it up so that there are no dark corners. Everything is pure and clear, and the warmth of the sun in your heart fills you from head to toe with a sense of well-being.
Jomon:And it surrounds you with a feeling of being taken care of, looked after, embraced by the warmth of your heart. Now let the sun that is shining in your heart reach out and send all its warming rays and its beautiful light to the people most directly nearby to you now, filling their hearts with the warmth that comes from your heart. Now think of your parents, whether they're still alive or not, and let the sun from your heart shine on them. Fill their hearts with the light and the warmth, giving them the greatest gift that you have, letting them feel your togetherness, your care and concern. Just as the warmth of the sun makes plants grow on earth, the warmth of the heart helps to make goodness grow in other people's hearts.
Jomon:And now we'll think of those people who are closest to us, those we might be living with. And the sun in our heart shines into their hearts, bringing the purity, the warmth, the clarity, the beautiful shining light to them as our gift without any expectation of a return. And now think of our good friends, relations, and acquaintances, whoever comes to mind. And the sun's rays from our heart, warm them, bring light and love to them, express our togetherness, and we can see that they feel joyful receiving this warmth. Now think of the people we meet in our everyday life.
Jomon:The neighbors, the people at work, students, teachers, patients, salespeople, mail carriers, whoever comes to mind. The sun from our heart will shine on anyone and bring love and light to everyone's heart. So we'll go from person to person, letting them know that we love and care. And now think of a difficult person in our life, or one that we feel totally indifferent toward. The sun from our heart can do exactly the same, no need to discriminate.
Jomon:We can fill that difficult person with the warmth from our heart, embrace them and surround them with care and concern. And we'll open our heart as wide as we can so that the sun in our heart has a chance to go as far as possible with its warming and beautiful rays of light and its nourishing strength. As far as the strength of our heart will reach, let the sun shine on people in towns and villages and cities near and far all over the country, in the surrounding countries, across the oceans, and in your hometown. Let the sun from your heart bring warmth and love to the people that you know or can think of, have heard about or seen or just assumed to be there. And now let the sun from our hearts shine on all that surrounds us.
Jomon:Trees, meadows, valleys, mountains, flowers, bushes, grass, the sky, the clouds, sun, moon, stars. The sun from our heart has beautiful warmth and rays and can embrace it all. And now we'll put the attention back on ourselves and feel the buoyancy and the lightness which comes from the purity of the heart. We feel the joy that comes from loving and giving our love, and we enter into our heart seeing it lit up, nourished by the warmth of love, clear, with nothing hidden, feel totally secure in that. May people everywhere become aware of the sun in their hearts.
Jomon:The sun, like metta, is life giving. We can say in one way that the sun is the source of life, but even the sun is impermanent. What is the source of the sun? Just like the sun, Meta is composed of things. They come together, they come apart.
Jomon:We might imagine the sun as a fixed object. It seems to be permanent, like the sun we might have cut out of construction paper in grade school and pasted on a piece of paper. But it's not like that. That's not what it is. Everything is impermanent.
Jomon:Sometimes when I'm in despair about the state of the world, I am strangely comforted by the fact that at some point the earth will be swallowed by the sun. After that the sun will exhaust its fuel. There's some strange comfort in just aligning with these natural laws, totally impersonal, this larger perspective. And then here we are, thanks to some extremely improbable circumstances. We get to be here on earth right now.
Jomon:There's a word that the Theravadans use called, well, it's, don't know if it's Pali or not, Sankara. Sankara. This has a few meanings, a few specific ways of being used, but it's a word that can be used to point to any and all conditioned things. Any and all things that exist because they're constructed, and they can and will be deconstructed. They are subject to change and they will cease.
Jomon:The Buddha said, All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees with this wisdom, one turns away from suffering. Here's a wonderful piece on meta from an Insight teacher, Sheila Catherine, about meta.
Jomon:She says, Meta creates fabulously wholesome conditions, but we must also look into the mind and know that there is nothing there to grasp or cling to. Then we will realize not just the peace of a mind filled with benevolence, but the peace of release. So we have created some fabulously wholesome conditions here so far with our practice. And this serves. It serves to enlarge our capacity to rest in awareness.
Jomon:It serves to enlarge our heart's capacity and blur the walls of who we think we are, to help us see with wisdom and help us turn away from suffering. And this experiment apparently has been pretty effective for a few people here. Even if our focus of Metta has mostly been from and to our benefactors or ourselves, this practice of receiving love, making an offering of metta here, maybe to all beings. We haven't focused so much on a couple of the classical categories of metta: focus, strangers, people we don't know well, or the difficult ones. With meta we aspire to see no difference between these categories, No favoritism, no preferences.
Jomon:Why might it be important to include people we don't know? Well, we humans seem to be quite good at creating ingroups and outgroups, aren't we? We might find ourselves trying to hoard meta for my family, for my friends, for my people, not them. And we know how this human habit turns out when it's allowed to proliferate. So the categories have a deep wisdom in them.
Jomon:Maybe it's obvious why we focus on a difficult person or difficult ones. This category historically was called the enemy. It gets lightened to a difficult person but even now some teachers feel that is already too aggressive like it inherently suggests that that person is inherently difficult so you don't want to do that. So then they frame it as the person with whom you have difficulty which is kind of a lot to say. So I just like to say the final boss.
Jomon:And if you don't play video games, a final boss is the way a video game will present you with harder and harder challenges and enemies and the final boss is the most difficult one at the very end of the game. I have some disclaimers about moving into this category. You may have experienced some really painful stuff from someone or someone's and I want to be clear that you do not have to do this. It is totally up to you. Here are the conditions, you have some consultants, you have some companions and so you might choose here to approach this practice.
Jomon:But whatever is going on, you are in charge of your practice. There's no one size fits all, there's no off the shelf singular way to go about this. And if this isn't done with the right spirit, the right intention, it can be a subtle aggression of self improvement. You really should do this. And that's not the spirit to approach this particular practice.
Jomon:Doing Meta for the beings in this category is not the same as approving of what they did or forgetting about it or signing up for them to hurt you again. And I also want to note the importance of considering the context of systemic oppressions. To acknowledge that these teachings can sometimes be received as an echo of a pressure towards forgiveness. And some might perceive this practice to be more about creating comfort for a dominant culture. So it's important for each person to clarify for themselves whether this practice is coming from an innermost calling.
Jomon:Is it a natural process of healing a wound? Is it aligning with what is? Not suppression. So you get to discern that for yourself, whether this is about moving towards more freedom. Word forgiveness is fraught also.
Jomon:It gets wrapped up in this practice too. I prefer how the 12 Steps talk about it, letting go of resentments. The big book of A. A. Says this: Being convinced that self manifested in various ways was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.
Jomon:Resentment is the number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. Being convinced that self manifested in various ways was what had defeated us, we considered it as common manifestations. Resentment is the number one offender.
Jomon:It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, have been spiritually sick. For many people addiction is fatal. A fatal disease. And for many people, letting go of resentments is what stands between life and death.
Jomon:It may be also though that your final boss is yourself. For many people, meta for themselves can be quite painful. And if that's the case for you, you are not alone. I tend to switch the first two classical categories and I start with benefactors or the beloved one. Puppies, kittens, whatever you need, start there.
Jomon:That primes the pump for meta much more reliably for so many people, much more reliable than Metta for oneself. And maybe turn it once have that light shining, that sun beaming, you're going to turn it towards yourself, offer it to yourself. Think of it as filling a vast reservoir of life affirming metta so that you can share it with the whole world. And just, this is a matter of patience, this practice. It takes time, real time.
Jomon:Okay, that was a lot of disclaimers. So let's say you are on board the META train. You are on board this explanation about the direct causal relationship between harboring anger, resentment and ill will and suffering. And you're willing to explore this or you're ready to try it, whatever level, however you want to do this. So there may be someone that has harmed you or others that you care about.
Jomon:Often it seems like maintaining a level of anger and ill will commensurate to the offense is an important thing to do. And in that way we can honor or validate the experience or in that way we push back, we say no, we say no more. I'm not here to say that that's not something you should do or not do, you don't have to do it differently. But maybe this is your working assumption going in, Maybe that has been important to do for a while. If so, that should be honored.
Jomon:Many activists have found that righteous anger can be a very powerful fuel for change. Many activists have also found out that it burned them out and burned them up inside. I like to call that dirty fuel, like jet fuel. Effective, but costly. Polluting.
Jomon:Harboring anger and ill will may seem protective and in a way it is very effective. In the same way that surrounding yourself with barbed wire would be very effective. But over time you may notice that as things change and evolve around you, you're pretty much doomed to a fixed shape or a small world. It may even be true that the things you are angry about, you are actually not to blame for, that you had no part in creating them. Harboring anger you might tell a story over and over again about how someone has wronged you and there's nothing factually untrue about that.
Jomon:I did that one time when I got fired from a job. This getting fired happened to me many years ago. And as an overachiever and a goody two shoes, you can bet that I did not see it coming. So I told everybody how unfair it was and everybody was sufficiently shocked and appalled on my behalf. The experience felt especially terrible because it challenged my super cherished idea of myself as good and valuable.
Jomon:Telling this story where I was right and this person was so wrong gave me some relief. I felt like I had some people surrounding me. I did have some people that helped me in the immediate aftermath, helped me in practical ways. But I kind of gathered more like a posse and I could enlist people to my cause. I kept going with this story even after my work life had improved vastly and my story began to include the part about how I was fired for insubordination, which was true that I was.
Jomon:But that was also totally absurd, especially to anyone who knew me. But now in my story, I get to have this edgy identity, insubordinate. I have this enemy that makes me edgy and right and they are wrong and I am innocent and they are not. And it also served me because I did not have to look at my own greed, my own fixed idea, my own insistence that everybody, everybody has to like me. So there's another excellent Pali word, Ahankara.
Jomon:It means self making. This is what I was doing. Self making. This is what we do. It's highly addictive.
Jomon:I think I consider myself in early recovery from this. I knew I needed to move through this even though my continued anger could be totally justified. But my work life had improved so much it was hard to square the story and not acknowledge that the whole experience was actually quite beneficial. Conditions were changing all around me and this monument to my own righteousness that I had spent so much time building was looking pretty gross and outdated like those Civil War generals all over the South. At some point I knew I needed to move through this.
Jomon:I didn't need anyone to tell me this. At some point I wanted to let this go. I wanted to have some freedom around this. I wanted to be able to see that person and not have my stomach clench. So I started doing Meta and adding this person to the fourth category.
Jomon:So some important notes on that. One thing that helped when I did decide to do this is I did not require of myself to become their friend. They would not get to be friends with me. That was my decision at the time. I was able to trust myself that I would maintain that boundary with someone who seemed pretty unpredictable.
Jomon:There was no pressure on me, no worry that letting go of this anger and ill will would put me in a place where they could turn my life upside down again. And I was guided by this story by Thanissaro Biku called Meta is Goodwill. It's one of my favorites. It goes like this: Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, once discovered that a snake had moved into his room. Every time he entered the room, he saw it slip into a narrow space behind a storage cabinet.
Jomon:Now this is in the forest, I believe probably Sri Lanka, and I think there are some venomous snakes around there. So it's not like here where it's like, Oh, cute snake! Even though he tried leaving the door to the room open during the daytime, the snake wasn't willing to leave. So for three days they lived together. He was very careful not to startle the snake or make it feel threatened by his presence.
Jomon:Finally, on the evening of the third day, as he was sitting in meditation, he addressed the snake quietly in his mind. He said, Look, it's not that I don't like you. I don't have any bad feelings for you. But our minds work in different ways. It would be very easy for there to be a misunderstanding between us.
Jomon:Now there are lots of places out in the woods where you can live without the uneasiness of living with me. And as he sat there spreading thoughts of Meta to the snake, the snake left. Loving kindness does not mean that you have to want the person close to you physically or emotionally. It's not the lovey dovey fuzzy thing. It's goodwill.
Jomon:I wish you well. I wish you ease. I wish you peace over there. So for me, doing Metta for this person, it was like building a nice fence for both of us in the neighborhood. Not a wall, not a militarized border, not a cold war, just a nice fence that might allow us to wave at each other sometimes if we felt like it.
Jomon:Not have to pretend to not be home or dash into the house to avoid being seen and pretend not to see them. But a fence that would just clearly demarcate our relationship. So that was a helpful place to start. And for this, there was really no downside except losing that righteousness. Oh, so comforting for someone else to be so wrong, which makes me so right.
Jomon:It feels safe somehow. That's what I discovered. But is it? Is it safe? Is anything safe?
Jomon:So I did metta, a lot of it. It was my primary practice on the cushion every day for a few months solid. And this person with whom I had difficulty was my final boss person every day. And I wish I remember how it even happened, how it softened, How it became more important than the grudge. But it did.
Jomon:Like how you can't see your hair or your fingernails growing, but they do. A metaphor about this occurred to me yesterday with someone in San Zen. It's like the sun of meta shining on green hard sour fruit. It takes time. The fruit has to grow and ripen.
Jomon:That just takes its own time. As it does, it sweetens and it softens and probably long after we think it should be, it ripens. It may even fall off the tree. It may even transform into something else. So after all this time, all this ripening, I ended up writing a thank you letter to this person around the turn of a new year.
Jomon:One that I meant every word of for the professional opportunities that I had, for the learning environment, for the good qualities that were there in this person and letting them know that I no longer harbored any more ill will and I felt fine about running into them sometime. That would be just fine and sincerely wish them all the very best. Then they were able to respond with a heartfelt apology, which went a long way and meant a lot. Not everyone gets to have that part. So now I can totally see this person, appreciate and I even enjoy this person.
Jomon:I would have him over for dinner, no problem. We are good, genuinely friendly. Everything is changing. Everything is impermanent. You can try to hold a grudge forever.
Jomon:You may even figure out how to haunt someone from the afterlife. If that's what you decide to make your life, your afterlife, about or through many lifetimes. But is that what you want your life to be about? What is your life about? What do you want your life to be about?
Jomon:Eventually everything comes apart. Everything. The self we cling to is not reliable, not even findable. Will your grudge finally get burned up in the sun? Did I wait maybe a little too long?
Jomon:Maybe my grudge got a little rotten and stinky before I let my resentment go? Maybe. But it made good compost. Our precept about anger is not to unleash anger but to seek its source. Our precept about anger is not never be angry.
Jomon:It is to ask, What is the source? What is this? Who is being harmed? Who is being wronged? You know, you might be someone's final boss.
Jomon:Did you ever think of that? You might be. And does that feel real? Does that feel true? Am I clinging to something that is not useful anymore?
Jomon:I would like to share another story from Doctor. Rachel Naomi Remin about clinging. She says, Thirty five years ago, I had a patient, a young man, who had become separated from his ski party and spent three days in below zero weather, yet somehow had managed to survive. He had been hospitalized for several days in the ski country and then flown to our center in New York because of frostbite and progressive gangrene of his feet. The local surgeons had wanted to amputate, and it was hoped that our world renowned vascular surgical team could avoid this difficult choice.
Jomon:He had some initial surgery, and for three weeks the outcome was not clear. Then his left foot began to improve and his right became steadily worse. The time for amputation at hand, the young man flatly refused. He preferred to keep his foot. Gradually, he became sicker and sicker as toxins from his injured foot began to flood his body.
Jomon:His family and friends were desperate, but he would not be moved. He would keep his foot. The situation came to a head late one evening when for the third or fourth time a group of doctors shared his most recent laboratory studies and reviewed his worsening condition with him. In the midst of this discussion, his fiancee, overwhelmed by the possibility of her beloved's death, was driven beyond her endurance. Weeping, she tore his engagement ring off her finger and thrust it onto the swollen black little toe of his right foot.
Jomon:I hate this damn foot! She sobbed. If you want this foot so much, why don't you marry it? You're going to have to choose, you cannot have us both. We all looked at the small bright diamond surrounded by the black and rotting tissues of his foot.
Jomon:Even under the fluorescent lights it sparkled with life. The young man said nothing and closed his eyes with weariness. Weary ourselves when we left to continue the medical rounds. The next day, he scheduled his surgery. I continued to follow him through the fitting of his artificial foot and his rehabilitation.
Jomon:At the end of a year, only a slight limp marked his difficult choice. Two weeks before his wedding I revisited that final medical conference with him asking him what had changed his mind. He said that seeing the diamond on his toe had shocked him. His fiancee had been right, he had been married to his foot! Her dramatic gesture had helped him to see for the first time that he was more attached to keeping his foot than he was committed to his life, to their life together.
Jomon:Yet it had been the promise of that life that he clung to that had enabled him to survive three days alone in the snow. What are you clinging to? What is the difference between clinging and commitment? Between grasping and maintaining a vow? In this story, the young man had a stark choice between those two.
Jomon:It was his commitment, his vow to his fiance that allowed him to let go of his foot. His foot! To save his life, to keep his commitment to her, which was supporting his commitment to life. Chozen says that Shoto Horataroshi would say that life is the original vow. It may be that we can only differentiate between clinging and vow over time, or with good counsel from our companions along the way, or quieting down and really looking, really seeing the source of our experience, the source of our life.
Jomon:Clinging tends to make our lives smaller, whereas commitment, though it may in some ways feel constraining, ultimately offers us freedom and more spaciousness. It may be that our commitments, our vows are for a benefit that is much larger than our small selves, our old stories. Everything is changing. Is it time to let something go? Or just to take that first step?
Jomon:Or to just explore the possibility that you might be larger than you thought? Or to consider exploring that. In any case, please take a moment right now to recollect during this retreat times that you were diligent in your practice, times that you were kind to yourself. Just recall a few of those moments and take that in and appreciate your capacity. I'll close with a poem by a Hindu teacher in the Advaita Vedanta school, Santanan Saraswati called I Am That.
Jomon:Before you can begin to be what you are, you have to come out of what you are not. You are not those worn out opinions, those turning thoughts, those changing feelings. That's separate ego. Well then, what are you? You will find that when you come out of what you are not, that the birds in the trees are singing to you, I am that.
Jomon:The water in the stream is bubbling to you. I am that. The sun and the moon are shining beacons to you. I am that. And you are in everything in the world and everything in the world is in you.
Jomon:Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.