Patience and plénitude

Hugh Byrne

Summary of May 12, 2024 Session: Dear Friends, Happy Mother’s Day to all who are celebrating! It was good to be with you today for our Live session. The theme was ‘The Power of Equanimity in Challenging Times.’ 

Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live:

We began by discussing how challenging it is to live in these current times—both in terms of all that is happening in the world and in relation to our personal lives. The changes that are taking place with respect to the amount and pace of information coming in about the world—and particularly the suffering that is going on in so many places—can feel overwhelming. 

We can be made aware of tremendous human suffering within minutes of it happening and without time to fully process it… before the next major event or tragedy comes along. I’ve spoken at other times about the ‘unmourned grief’ that we can carry around that affects us in ways that we may be largely unconscious of. 

Our human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years has not fully prepared us for the scale and pace of what we are being inundated with in our current world—from climate change to the wars and human suffering projected nightly on our TVs and through our multiple devices. Add to this the challenges of attempting to survive and thrive in our personal lives. It’s not surprising that so many are weighed down by strong emotions and mind states, like fear, anger, pain, grief, overwhelm, and even despair. This speaks to ‘being human’ in the 21st Century.

The good news—for those fortunate enough to encounter the teachings of the Buddha and other authentic teachers of wisdom and compassion—is that while we may have relatively little control, sometimes more, over the external conditions, we have great potential to determine how we meet everything that is arising in our bodies, hearts, and minds, and in the world. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, spoke of this as “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

The key to our happiness and freedom comes from training our mind—and particularly through bringing awareness, with kindness, to our moment-to-moment experience. The Buddha put it this way: “Nothing can do you more harm than an untrained mind… Nothing can do you more good than a trained mind.” And one of the most powerful practices, particularly when working with difficult or challenging experiences, is to cultivate equanimity.

The word equanimity comes from the Latin, meaning an ‘equal mind’—a mind able to meet life’s circumstances in a balanced and steady way. This is also its meaning in Buddhist teachings—the ability to meet life’s ‘ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows’ in a way in which we are not overwhelmed by what’s painful nor overly exuberant or triumphal about pleasant or favorable occurrences. 

The word in Pali for equanimity is upekkha, which has the meaning of looking at something in a dispassionate or unbiased way. The image that is often used for equanimity is of a mountain that is unaffected by the rain, hail, sleet and snow that fall on it. This is stated in an early Buddhist teaching: 

• “Just as a rocky mountain is not moved by storms, so sights, sounds, tastes, smells, contacts and ideas, whether desirable or undesirable, will never stir one of steady nature, whose mind is firm and free.” (Anguttara Nikaya)

• And in a verse from early Buddhist awakened nuns: 

“If your mind becomes firm like a rock

and no longer shakes

In a world where everything is shaking

Your mind will be your greatest friend

and suffering will not come your way.”

Equanimity plays an important role in Buddhist teachings: It is the fourth and final of the ‘divine abodes’ (Brahma Viharas in Pali) and helps balance the other three qualities of loving-kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy. It is also the final quality of what are known as the Seven Factors of Awakening—seven qualities (mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity) that help incline us towards enlightenment, or complete freedom from suffering, just as a river inclines towards the ocean. 

I shared T.S. Eliot’s lines from his poem Ash Wednesday: “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.” I hear this as “teach us to care and not to cling…” 

Equanimity is rooted in wisdom—knowing that everything changes and that nothing lasts forever, not human or animal lives, buildings, cities, civilizations, and even our planet and the universe. When we know impermanence deeply, it leads to equanimity—the acceptance, non-clinging and freedom that come from knowing that nothing whatsoever can or should be clung to… 

I finished by highlighting a teaching from the Buddha on equanimity called The Lokapivatti Sutta, or teaching on ‘the failings of the world,’ in which the Buddha says, “Monks [or practitioners broadly], these eight worldly conditions spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditions.” These eight worldly conditions, also called ‘worldly winds,’ are pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and disrepute. We will continue next week with an exploration of these worldly winds and a reflection on the theme of equanimity more broadly. 

We finished with a story about a Zen farmer that can be found online under the title, “ Zen farmer story Are these good times or bad times?” I also shared William Blake’s poem Eternity: “He who binds to himself a joy // Does the winged life destroy // He who kisses the joy as it flies // Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”  

Elva asked the name of my book on mindfulness and habit change in Spanish. It’s El Hábito del Aquí y Ahora and it was published in Spain by Editorial Sirio. Wishing you all a good week ahead and I look forward to seeing you next Sunday, March 19, at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻

Ricard: la bonté et le bonheur

Le vrai bonheur procède d’une bonté essentielle qui souhaite du fond du cœur que chacun trouve un sens à son existence. C’est un amour toujours disponible, sans ostentation ni calcul. La simplicité immuable d’un cœur bon.

Matthieu Ricard

True happiness comes from an essential goodness which wishes from the bottom of the heart that everyone finds meaning in their existence. It is a love that is always available, without ostentation or calculation. The unchanging simplicity of a good heart.

Matthew Ricard

Under the shade of cherry blossoms - Issa

 

Just as the rain falls on everyone

So does the sun shine on everyone. 

My refuge is your refuge,

Your refuge is my refuge.

As Issa said, "In the cherry blossom's shade,

There is no such thing as a stranger."

I have this image of strangers taking refuge under cherry blossoms 

While a drizlling rain falls.....sharing the intimacy of a small space.

Fwd: Midweek pick-me-up: Hermann Hesse on hope and the wisdom of the inner voice

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full.   If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it's free.   Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe. Hello Hsi Lin! This is the midweek edition of The Marginalian by Maria Popova — one piece resurfaced from the seventeen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection — My God, It's Full of Stars — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you  FROM THE ARCHIVE | Hermann Hesse on Hope, the Difficult Art of Taking Responsibility, and the Wisdom of the Inner Voice "Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs," Joan Didion wrote in her timeless essay on self-respect. And yet this willingness does not come naturally to the human animal. We glance left and right, we peer above and below, placing the responsibility for our suffering everywhere but at the center of our own being. We treat the unhandsome consequences of our actions as something that happens to us, at us, by some wretched external causality. In the process, the tick of our self-righteousness grows fatter and fatter on bloodthirsty blame. The great German poet, novelist, and painter Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) offered an antidote to this all too human tendency in one of his least known pieces of writing, composed as the world was coming back to consciousness after the First World War. The war had violently ejected Hesse from the exultations of his youth. But he never lost his idealism — he became an impassioned advocate for pacifism and its wellspring in the mindfulness of individuals. Over the next three decades, through the aftermath of one devastating war and the harrowing actuality of another, Hesse composed a series of remarkable, clear-minded, largehearted essays, letters, and pamphlets condemning his compatriots for the unthinking herd mentality that had allowed Hitler's rise to power and inviting what he saw as the only salvation for them: a new ethos of responsibility, beginning at the personal level upon which the political rests. He was especially invested in invigorating the young — the next generations who had inherited a burden not their own and upon whose shoulders the task of redemption fell with spirit-crushing weight. Hermann Hesse These pieces were eventually collected in 1946 — the year Hesse received the Nobel Prize — and later published as If the War Goes On… (public library). Among them is the stirring "Letter to a Young German," written to a dispirited youth in 1919 — a decade before the publication of Rilke's almost spiritual classic Letters to a Young Poet, and brimming with kindred consolation for the transcendent traumas of living. This was a momentous year for Hesse. Having recently lost his marriage to the fallout of his wife's acute mental illness, he had just left Berlin to settle alone in a small farmhouse in Switzerland. WWI had just ended, having begun as "the war to end all wars," instead netting millions of deaths and laying the gruesome groundwork for future genocides. That year, Hesse signed Romain Rolland's Declaration of the Independence of the Mind — the extraordinary manifesto for critical thinking and pacifism, co-signed by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair. Hesse addresses his despairing young correspondent while himself perched on this precipice between optimism and despair. Three years before Bertrand Russell made his timeless case for what he termed "the will to doubt," Hesse writes: You write me that you are in despair and do not know what to believe, what to hope. You do not know whether or not there is a God. You do not know whether or not life has any meaning, whether or not love of country has a meaning, whether, in the wretched condition of the world, it is better to strive for spiritual goods or merely to fill your belly. I believe your state of mind and soul to be the right one. Not to know whether there is a God, not to know whether there is good and evil, is far better than to know for sure. More than half a century before Jacob Bronowski admonished against the dark side of certainty, Hesse offers a sobering antidote to the destructive self-righteousness our certitudes delude us into: Five years ago, if you remember, I should say you were pretty well convinced there was a God, and above all you had no doubt as to what was good and what was evil. Naturally you did what you thought was good and marched off to war. For five years now, the best years of your youth, you have kept on doing "good": you have fired a gun, gone over the top, lounged about in barracks and mud holes, buried comrades or bandaged their wounds. And little by little you began to doubt the good, to suspect that the good and glorious occupation you were engaged in was fundamentally evil, or at the very least stupid and absurd. And so it was. Evidently the good you were so sure of at the time was not the right good, the good that is indestructible and timeless; and evidently the God you knew in those days was not the right God… Hundreds of thousands of bloody battle sacrifices were offered up to him, and in his honor hundreds of thousands of bellies were slit open, hundreds of thousands of lungs torn to pieces; he was more bloodthirsty and brutal than any idol… Illustration by Olivier Tallec from Waterloo and Trafalgar With an eye to the tragic human tendency toward perpetrating wrong under the trance of self-righteousness — a tendency as devastating in the personal realm as it is in the political — he holds up a discomfiting mirror to the self-righteous: Has anyone stopped to consider, and to wonder at the fact, that in those four years of war our theologians buried their own religion, their own Christianity? Committed to the service of love, they preached hatred; committed to the service of mankind, they mistook for mankind the authorities who paid them. Decades before James Baldwin observed that "it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within" and a century before Anne Lamott admonished against how self-righteousness syphons self-respect, Hesse contemplates "the disastrous art of putting the blame on others when we are in trouble" and exhorts for personal responsibility over self-righteous blamefulness: We are all of us equally guilty and innocent of the fact that our faith was so weak and our officially patented God so ruthless, that we were so incapable of distinguishing war and peace, good and evil. You and I, the Kaiser and the priest, all played a part; we have no call to accuse one another. […] It is childish and stupid to ask whether this one or that one is guilty. I propose that for one short hour we ask ourselves instead: "What about myself? What has been my share of the guilt? When have I been too loudmouthed, too arrogant, too credulous, too boastful? What is there in me that may have helped… all the illusions that have so suddenly collapsed?" Echoing Emerson's foundational ideas about nonconformity and self-reliance — "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string," the Sage of Concord, whom Hesse read and greatly admired, had written in the previous century — Hesse offers his young correspondent the only real and reliable source of comfort: If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God, a new and better faith, you will surely realize, in your present loneliness and despair, that this time you must not look to external, official sources, to Bibles, pulpits, or thrones, for enlightenment. Nor to me. You can find it only in yourself. And there it is, there dwells the God who is higher and more selfless… The sages of all time have proclaimed him, but he does not come to us from books, he lives within us, and all our knowledge of him is worthless unless he opens our inner eye. This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing… Search where you may, no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within… Don't confine yourself… to any other prophet or guide. Our mission is not to instruct you, to make things easier for you, to show you the way. Our mission is solely to remind you that there is a God and only one God; he dwells in your hearts, and it is there that you must seek him out and speak with him. To hear and heed that inner voice — the sound-minded, pure-hearted critical thinking unmuffled by the shriek of self-righteousness, unlulled by herd mentality, unsullied by external manipulation or internal self-delusion — is perhaps the most consistent challenge we face throughout our lives, playing out in myriad forms across every realm of existence. Complement with E.B. White's lovely letter to a man who had lost faith in humanity and Seamus Heaney's splendid advice to the young, then revisit Hesse on why we read and always will, the three types of readers, savoring the little joys of life, and what trees teach us about belonging and life. Forward to a friend/Read/watch Online/ donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.   one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. KINDRED READINGS: Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace * * * Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself * * * Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny * * * You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a hand-picked piece worth revisiting from my 15-year archive. The Marginalian MAIL NOT DELIVERED 47 Bergen Street, 3rd Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201 Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list   update subscription preferences

Rumi on quiet

No more words. In the name of this place we drink in with our breathing, stay quiet like a flower.

So the nightbirds will start singing.

Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Night and Sleep

Teacher Thay: being caught and freedom

 We’re caught by the ghosts 

of the past and the future because 

we don’t know they’re ghosts. 

We think the past is still right here with us, 

and we dwell in it. 

But if we can smile 

to the ghost of the past, 

and acknowledge that the 

past was there, 

but that now it is gone, 

then we can have the smile of

enlightenment. 

When we smile like that, 

it shows 

we have love 

for ourselves. 

We know the past and the future are not our enemies. 

We know how to live in this moment we are in right now. 

We need to live our daily moments deeply, 

as they occur. 

When we live 

and know that we are living, 

this is freedom.

~Thích Nhất Hạnh 

(Our Appointment with Life)