DHARMA DIALOGUE
An excerpt from a forthcoming Tuwhiri Project book, due out in 2022
Written by Linda Modaro (Sati Sangha) and Nelly Kaufer (Pine Street Sangha)
We are two friends, spiritual friends. We met during a meditation teacher training retreat in 2005. We both founded dharma communities (sanghas) and have many spiritual friends. Considering our practice a refuge for kindness and curiosity, we practice reflective meditation with a dedicated passion. This involves meditation with reflection and conversation.
The book we are writing, of which this is a lightly-edited extract, will be full of conversations between us. While you’ll hear our voices in the book, you may not always know who is speaking. This is an evolution of our practice, as we become less identified with who said what.
In fact, many times we can’t remember who said something, its value coming from whether it was relevant and honest. We keep cross-fertilising each other’s thoughts, feelings, experience and understanding. We write about ourselves not to elevate ourselves, but to take our teaching out of the abstract and conceptual, and into the nitty gritty of life.
While the reader may not know who is speaking, we do want our names on this book. We believe that most of us need acknowledgement and care when presenting ourselves to others. There are many ways that people can feel hurt by not being given proper attribution, so we follow a middle way between applauding our personal accomplishments and neglecting them.
A conversation about Conditionality, a core dharma teaching
Seeing conditionality in my life changes so much of how I perceive myself and others, and how my life unfolds.
But do people know what we mean by conditionality here, Nel?
Okay a short definition is in order, but I hesitate because conditionality is not a concept to be tacked on. It is a lived experience.
Yes, that is why we talk about experience so much – in meditation and outside of it. We are asking people to look at what conditions their own direct experience. And we’re not expecting we can do this perfectly or in some prescribed manner.
Though a simple definition for conditionality is that things – really all things, including or
maybe especially our inner worlds – arise from a myriad of different and ever-changing conditions.
Sounds simple. But it’s not so straightforward. I think that’s because it is taught in so many ways, that it can be confusing and complicated.
Yes I didn’t really understand this teaching for decades.
Our practice is a slow, cumulative recognition of the conditions at play in our meditation and in our lives. Gradually, over time, seeing how one thing impacts the next, over and over, back and forth.
Sometimes the conditions impacting our experience will be obvious. Other times it will be more subtle or inherent in how we think and teach.
Yes, and teaching this is embedded and embodied in our meditation instructions isn’t it?
When we tell you to let your meditation process be more “freeform”, less focused on a specific object of meditation, you are more subject to conditions. Our dominant instruction is to let your experience wander about, find its own focus, and slowly you’ll start to see how different aspects of your experience bounce off other aspects. Sometimes in predictable ways, other times in quite unexpected ways
The Buddha used all kinds of metaphors when he taught. I love the wave metaphor for conditionality. I love this metaphor because I grew up near the New Jersey shore and loved to swim in the waves. The teachings on conditionality invite and require us to ride the waves of who and what is going on as skillfully as we can. We can fight the waves, though then they are more likely to pull us under. Or we can learn how to roll with the waves. We can’t stop the waves, but we can learn to surf.
There’s also this quiet place, when you dive underneath the big wave, where there is not a great deal of turmoil. And this too is a part of meditation—a welcome guest. Quiet, still spaces which open up idiosyncratically and intentionally. We don’t get to stay there. We must come up for air. If we stay there- in the quiet oasis – in meditation and life – we will remain ignorant of so much. And ignorance feeds many of the difficulties in our lives. It’s a big deal in Buddhism.
The Buddha didn’t live near the ocean so he didn’t use the wave metaphor. He used other metaphors though: tightening or loosening the strings of a vina (a musical instrument like a lute), or ‘righting’ the wobbly wheels of a cart or chariot.
This is conditionality, the Buddha taught from the conditions in his life and world. We teach from the conditions in our life and world. We hope you will adapt our metaphors to the conditions of your life.
Remember when we played Aretha Franklin’s version of the song Chain of Fools at the start of a retreat? This was a light way to look at the devastating outcome of ignorance. We are a tangle of chains that hook into each other, coming together and getting entangled. We don’t need to go and find the start of any one of the chains. We don’t need to untangle them all. There is not one key that will unlock them all for us.
Back to what I learned from swimming. I needed to keep my body loose and let the waves take me where they take me. Also I needed to stay alert, make choices, dodge under some waves and ride some to the shore.
That is the skill we are honing. How to be with the waves. Neither succumbing to them nor drowning under their force. Nor believing that we can stay under water and avoid their influence forever.
Or untangling enough knots. How to be in the chain. Neither getting entrapped nor cutting our way out. Nor believing a magic key can help us avoid the whole messy tangle.
So we come back to this. This direction of ours. A kinder, more accessible version of the teaching. Wearing away the idea that freedom lies outside conditionality. Discovering the freedom that comes from perceiving conditionality.
We hope your waves become more gentle over time, that your chains loosen. In the meantime maybe you can be a bit gentler with how you engage with the storms of life.
A teaching on why this is kinder
Seeing my life, the lives of others, and the life of our world through the lens of conditionality has the potential to change so many things. It’s like watching a play when they turn the set around and you see a whole different scene. The scene as viewed through conditionality is kinder because we can see behind the scenes and get a bit closer to understanding what is really going on – where we can have some impact and what is outside of our purview.
A friendly reminder. This seeing the world through the lens of conditionality develops slowly, and with it our insight into how we’re all intertwined. But we inevitably slip back into seeing the world as composed of a lot of separate individual people and things. And then we inevitably blame ourselves and others for what goes awry. The set change does not happen with the flip of a switch. Slowly we see a bit more, then a bit more – about the myriad complexity of things going on. Slowly we see a bit more about how they interplay, bounce off one another, impact one another.
Here is my take on a short conversation between the Buddha and his good friend and assistant, Ananda:
Ananda: Conditionality seems obvious. Kind of basic. Baby stuff.
Buddha: Don’t speak this way. It can be difficult to see and understand. It is through not understanding or penetrating this teaching that generations of living beings have become entangled together like a matted ball of yarn.
Nowadays, conditionality can be overlooked, considered too elementary. Or something to transcend, to realize beyond our daily experience.
Our inner world can be perceived like a matted ball of yarn, even if we don’t knit. It takes some patience, concentration, and dedication to untangle the mess. So we try to do our best with the matted balls in our lives.
The affirmation that “(I or you or we)” are doing the best we can” makes more sense when we use the lens of conditionality. That given the myriad of other things that are going on—this is as good as it gets.
Because there is so much we can’t change about so many of the conditions at play. Knowing about conditionality lets us off the hook, off many hooks.
Actually, sometimes we aren’t doing the “best we can”. It is kinder to see what internal obstructions prevented us from doing what we wish we had done, what would have worked out better or caused less harm. Kinder than being dead-ended with feelings of shame and guilt.
So many people come to the dharma through the door of suffering from blame and shame. This simple teaching can become a revolutionary and evolutionary change in the way we view how things unfold. Every time we try to blame ourselves or others for what is happening in our lives and in the world (and this happens more frequently than we can imagine) this teaching guides us back to look at what else comes with the situation. What else was absent? How did you feel about the situation? What does this mean to you?
Dharma practice can be very personal. If we try too hard to get past our own personal hurts and vulnerabilities they will grow stronger, get suppressed, or be transferred on to someone else. I can’t tell you how many times meditators try to gloss over the things that really matter to them in their meditation practice. They are looking for a way to float past their problems. We are not taught how to look for the value in our daily experience.
So we are developing kindness in the face of this. Compassion for ourselves and others when life is harsh and we hurt. It is an act of kindness to be with our hurt, pain, and vulnerability in meditation rather than trying to escape it. An act of kindness to be with others’ imperfections rather than trying to fix them.
We learn this teaching from our direct experience, from our relationships and the world around us. Sometimes, hearing others talk about their experience in meditation, you might be able to see the conditionality of their life before you can see it in your own. You might be able to see conditionality in your garden, in the weather, or walking in nature more easily. We all have blindspots that block our kindness.
So we consider this is an opportune time to catch the kindness of this teaching. As you read these words, as you continue to meditate, as you take the teaching into your heart.
