Jared Janes and Charlie Awbery, June 19, 2022, online at the Stoa
Transcribed by Evolving Ground members Bonnie and JoXn
Jared: So today, this is number five but it’s the sixth thing we’ve hosted because we did have our first launch event called “Sutra to Tantra,” and that was a bit of testing the ground, so we labeled that as session zero. We’ve slowly been building on the series that was supposed to be finished a while ago. It’s interesting, because I think a lot of the resources that we’re putting together we’re allowing to happen on their own time frame, in the sense that so much of the way that we talk about things in language and what’s working and what isn’t working really is defined by the interactions and relationships that have been developed in the community over the past two years. Not rushing has kind of led to this point where our introduction series is taking almost two years to put out, but it seems fitting. [laughter]
Charlie: It’s interesting that we have a number of courses running concurrently as well. We have Introductions on the Stoa, then we have Foundations for eG members, and we had Contemporary Tantra for apprentices and pupils. Jared has been running [our] Spacious Passion course – which I think you’ve changed now to Spacious Involvement?
Jared: Mmhmm.
Charlie: So there are a lot of these different opportunities for engagement and for finding out how to incorporate Vajrayana practices from different perspectives in ordinary life. These are all simultaneous. A lot of activity at the moment!
Jared: Yeah. Today, our topic we chose was natural kindness and appreciation. I thought the best way to start would be to talk about how–we bring up opening awareness all the time because it’s so foundational and it really is kind of connected to everything, so it seems to be where I usually start things. I think it was in our third session, called Confidence, where we talked about how one of the naturally arising results of the practice is a confidence in nebulosity or uncertainty or kind of groundlessness, but feeling very grounded in it and capable of facing the world front on. That’s the result of this spacious presence that you become more and more familiar with.
There are so many different ways that that impacts daily life. One of the ways is that, because that spacious presence is non-discriminating (one of the simplest ways that I like to say it is, “There’s no such thing as a distraction with that type of awareness”), then it leads to a type of kindness that is not conditional. It’s not constructed or cultivated, but just kind of naturally emerging when there is a direct relationship with anything in your experience. It’s funny, because it’s both very exotic but also very mundane in some way as well, where it’s not like there are going to be fireworks and explosions and Buddhas shooting out of your eyeballs or something like that. It’s just a very simple good will toward something and the fundamental understanding that you have no problem being in relationship with whatever is arising and [that] your natural disposition is that of kindness. That is a bit unique. Maybe I’ll wrap it back around, because we’ll talk a bit about how this is different than the way a lot of the Buddhist discourse talks about compassion. I think that the direct relationship is maybe the most important thing here. If things aren’t labeled as distractions or being put in good/bad distinctions and everything like that, there is a type of relationship that is unelaborated. It’s extremely direct. And one of the coolest parts is that it is, as we’ve implied here, it’s available with everything in all circumstances. It’s always a possibility, discovering that kind of direct, compassionate – or maybe not compassionate – we’ll not use that word to mix things here – direct, kind relationship.
[5:30] I think that usually, of all the examples we come up with for kindness – both to ourselves and our emotions, to others, whether they are somebody that you really like or maybe you even dislike them – the fact that there can be both this thing of being annoyed by somebody or not agreeing with them and yet still being kind is the underlying, miraculous discovery here. It breaks that dualism that is perennial in everyday life.
Maybe this is a good point, Charlie – should we talk a bit about how this is different than compassion? Natural kindness versus compassion?
Charlie: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you make that distinction. I wanted to delve into that a little bit more and also pick up on your final point there, which is about the not needing to feel compassionate in order to be kind. I think we really want to labor that point because there is often an assumption that in order to behave with kindness, it is necessary to already have a compassionate outlook and attitude. So it is not saying that that is not a helpful, good, wonderful, very useful stance and feeling to have, because compassion is a felt sense. It’s the feeling. It’s also a mental state, but it is personal. It is in the self, whereas one of the ways that I would differentiate between compassion and kindness is that kindness is activity. So for the sake of this discussion, that’s one of the ways that we are differentiating.
There’s a lot of assumption – you see this on Twitter and everywhere – that to be kind, I must feel compassion. So let’s separate those out and say it is possible to be kind, whatever you are feeling. You could be feeling hatred, and you could still be kind. You could be feeling corny [perhaps horny? Couldn’t tell for sure], and you can still be kind. You can feel anything at all, and kindness is still available. If there’s just one thing to take away from today, it’s that that is possible. That is a real possibility in everybody’s life. So there’s a big question then: how? We’re going to come on to talk about that a little later, I think.
Jared: It’s interesting, too – I want to connect this a bit – the defining characteristic of the kindness was this direct relationship, the directness, the non-elaborative side of things, the [willingness] to be with something exactly the way it is and not want it to be different. The way that I often see that we would bring kindness in a prescriptive way, that is actually putting something between. It’s actually separating a bit. It’s noticing that there’s an immediate resistance.
To your point, there’s definitely value in understanding that I can actually change the way that I’m feeling toward somebody. Deliberately generating something can often be a good place to start if you want to start loosening that habitual resistance to certain people or places or emotions or contexts or something like that. So really, it’s not saying, “Oh, you’ve always got to do the natural kindness thing! Compassion is all bullshit!” or something like that. It’s simply mentioning that these are very distinct, different things. And yet, at the same time, we talk a lot about Buddhist translations and words and things like that, and I think that in Buddhist circles, compassion has been a bit dominant in the “how to interact” and “how to be kind” or “how to be a virtuous person” or whatever-it-is [discussions].
[10:27] Charlie: And there’s a reason for that as well – a very good reason. Historically, compassion as meditation – you know, generating compassion, creating a compassionate outlook – that has been around a very, very long time. It crosses all Buddhist paths. Historically, where it fitted changed somewhat. As you come into the Mahayana and earlier as well, you have it beginning to fit into sects and then stages, so it’s brought into staged paths. And then in the Mahayana, that is really taken to its ultimate conclusion, and compassion is dominant in the whole of Mahayana. It’s related to perfection of character. That is a really important thing to understand about practicing Mahayana: compassion is the reason that you would practice generating. Cultivating compassion is for character perfection. It’s not always spoken about in that way, because that kind of makes it sound like, “Oh, well, that’s not about other people. That’s not about all sentient beings. It’s not about relieving suffering from all sentient beings,” because of course that is coupled with compassion. So what I’m talking about here is a framework for understanding, and that framework is the development of character perfections in order that eventually one becomes bodhisattva and is pure compassion – nothing except compassion – only compassion. So that is that framework, and that is where the emphasis on generating compassion comes from.
I want to go back to that generation and cultivation, because that is a very different framework for understanding possibilities than spontaneity, which is much more coming from later Vajrayana approaches. So it’s not saying, “This one is right; that one is wrong,” all all. We’re just looking at the world in very different ways. If you’re looking at the world in a frame that says, “In order to relieve suffering, you have to have compassion,” then you’re going to put all of your time and effort into developing, generating, making it happen, bringing compassion, because that is the answer – it’s your solution. So what Vajrayana does and the approach we’re taking in Evolving Ground is that it relativizes that by bringing a different framework. It puts compassion into a somewhat different place, and it does some decoupling.
Maybe it’s a good idea to talk a little bit about causality here as well, because there are a lot of assumptions that come along with the idea that we’re going to generate compassion, and there are assumptions around causality. Let’s look at the relationship between compassion and kindness. There is an often-unspoken assumption that in order to be kind, you have to have compassion, but the causality also runs the other way. You see a kind act, you see a compassionate manifestation in the world, and there is an assumption, “Oh, that comes from a place of compassion.” So these two are very tightly connected in that framework. There’s an assumption that the felt state is connected and is causal for any activity in the world – and outside of the world as well, because ultimately it is a metaphysical framework that we have there – you’re becoming pure compassion in order to leave this world. That is a really important bit of the historical part of the framing, there.
[15:04] So looking at that causality, we’ve already talked a little bit about decoupling compassion from being necessary to cause kindness acts. The other way round, when you see kindness or when you are in relationship – as Jared was talking about earlier, direct relationship – if you assume that compassion is necessary for activity, then you’re in a very different place to immediately discovering that possibility from relationship. So relationship is activity. Any activity means that kindness is possible there.
I was thinking about how you make that switch – how do you change from having this possibly habitual or underlying assumption? I’m not saying that it is necessarily easy, but one of the ways is appreciation. That is where appreciation comes in. There is a spaciousness that gives rise to appreciation through the sense fields: through sound, sight, immediate embodied response. And if you can appreciate circumstances, then kindness can be available, because there is spaciousness there.
Another way is simply to just make a decision. You just make the decision: “Whatever I’m feeling, I intend to be kind. It doesn’t matter whether I’m feeling grumpy or snarky or irritated or angry; I am just going to be kind, for the rest of my life, in any circumstances that arise.” That could be pretty liberating.
Jared: It’s interesting, Charlie – I think the causality and the difference between the internal state and the activity is important here, and I think it defines the difference. I think by default, if there is not spaciousness, meaning if there is not awareness of what is happening in the circumstance, then there is no choice but to act out the feeling that you’re coming from. So I’m feeling angry, and that is all there is. The whole vibe of my experience is anger. Therefore, there is nothing I can do but to act from this. The moment that that anger is arising within a larger context, then there is actually a choice. You can choose.
Charlie: Mmhmm.
Jared: You can choose.
Charlie: Yeah.
Jared: The spaciousness is what allows the choice to arise.
Charlie: Nicely put.
Jared: Spaciousness is one of those – we use it all the time, and yet it’s kind of counterintuitive if it’s not something you’ve had common experience with, I guess. What it does do to emotions is it flips the script from them being the dominant container for moment-to-moment experience to them being an aspect of it. You’re no longer habitually driven to act from that space. And the stranger thing, too, is that that emotion, even if it’s anger – the way that activity manifests from it when there is spaciousness will often not look like stereotypical anger, either. So there is a kind of transformed relationship of working with the energy or the emotion or the vibe of the situation that was not there before when it was happening kind of by default.
Charlie: That description of the flip that you make there is also pretty important. You get this in psychological frameworks as well, and development frameworks, but it is a flip that occurs in relation to your personal emotional experience of the world. And it’s pretty dramatic. It can take years for that to happen, through practice, through meditation – meditation is often but not necessarily an aspect of that change occurring. The flip that we’re talking about could be encapsulated as the change that occurs from your emotions having you to you having your emotions. That’s the spaciousness that Jared is talking about there. You are not driven and controlled by your emotional responsiveness.
[20:38] If you are, then it makes very good sense to want to cultivate compassion a lot, because you need that in order to be socially functional. If you have a lot of anger and hatred and stuff going on, and very turbulent emotions, and they are completely dominating and in control of how you respond, then without that space, there’s a very good reason to be sitting down, working with compassion, generating that feeling of love-compassion for other people, and working with that. So that fits very well in that context. If you’re in that situation, you can also be meditating and learning to find that spaciousness that we’re talking about such that emotions become less scary, less dominant, less directive of how you are in the world. And like I said, that can take a long time. Sometimes you can be in a better space and you can find that spaciousness and then it becomes available that you can simply say, “Okay, I’m carrying out my decision to be kind here,” or whatever. Other times, that simply may not be possible – you’ve got to be realistic – and then maybe the best action is just, “Okay, I’m just going to leave this situation a little. I’ll be courteous and polite and just step back and remove myself from the possibility of decapitating somebody here.”
Jared: You touched on appreciation, and that is where we are going next, but I want to pause for a second and see if anybody has any questions or comments or confusions or disagreements – whatever is alive for you at the moment. Emotions that need to be expressed. Or not!
Derek: Could you guys say something about the common scripts of being kind or nice or whatever? It’s like, I have this intention to be kind even though I feel angry or pouty or selfish or whatever, but there has to be some knowledge of what that is, right? If you are feeling angry, you’re also not feeling settled and grounded, so then how do you know what being kind is or what the kind move is? I was in a situation recently with a neighbor. I could feel my mind going towards all of these different prescriptions of: “Being nice is do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “Being kind is following the legal prescriptions for this situation.” There were all these scripts that I could follow, and I knew, “Okay, none of that is working here. But what is it?” And I didn’t have the spaciousness to just drop into whatever would naturally arise. So it feels like there’s this middle ground for me where I have the intention to be kind, but I kind of don’t know what it is.
[24:39] Charlie: I think that’s how it is, often. I think it is very difficult to script as soon as you get outside of a fixed, prescriptive, ethical framework like you’re describing now. You have a kind of meta-systematicity, but at the same time, when you see other people being kind, you know that. It’s there. You’re able to perceive kindness in the world. It’s usually pretty obvious, and for one’s self, I think it is never possible to perfect that. It is always a potentially difficult situation that you have to navigate and not know what is kind. So in some sense, by switching frameworks, by doing that flip, you’re agreeing with yourself that, you know, “This is not possible to script. I’m going to try and come up with responses in different ways, and sometimes I’m going to get it wrong.” And it’s something that you just gradually learn, more and more, over the years. That is the change in assumption from assuming compassion is the answer to assuming there is no prescriptive answer. It is difficult. Situations are messy. This is going to go wrong sometimes. And yet, I’m just going to see if I can be kind. And learn from others as well.
I remember, years and years ago, I was registered for a therapy course. I was training to be a psychotherapist. There was a weekend course, and it was in this obscure place, and the instructions were all over the place, and I’d left loads and loads of time to get there, and I just couldn’t find this damn place. I was running late, and I was getting more and more and more heated up, and we didn’t have texting at that time so I had to go and find a phone box and I was calling the leader of the course, and I was getting more and more and more irate. ”These instructions are just rubbish! They’re really unclear! They’re imprecise!” I was in a right state, and the whole thing had started already. I will never forget this. It was a small thing, but the leader of that course, she got everybody doing an exercise, got everybody settled in, and she came out to find me. She literally walked out and went looking around the streets and found me and said, “Oh, you must be so frustrated. Yeah, those instructions are just terrible. Come on in, and we’ll get you a cup of tea.” And that was just so kind. It wasn’t at all the response that I was expecting at that time. I was thinking, “I’m going to be late! Everyone is going to be mad!” Whatever I was thinking. (It was a long time ago.) But I remember that because it was an act of kindness. She didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to come out. It was very skillful.
I think kindness and relational skill and being able to have this overview of a situation – see the whole situation, see what needs to be done for the benefit of others and to help everybody get what they need and have a happy time – it’s very, very practical. It’s very simple in some ways. That person’s upset – what do they need for reassurance or to help them in this situation? I think maybe drawing from that experience that I had, I would say that simplifying things is a really good way to go. If you don’t know how to deal with a situation, and it’s complicated, and things are all getting chaotic, just [ask], “What is the most simple thing that could be done here to help relationships and people get what they need from this?”
Derek: I think that’s the point that I’m feeling a little pouty about. Compassion, even when it’s hard, you kind of know: “Am I doing it or am I not doing it?” I feel like I can kind of control it within myself. Kindness – when you say it requires skill – like, yeah! I know that I don’t have the skills in certain domains.
Charlie: Me too!
[30:00] Derek: What can I do in the moment? I can’t generate the skill in the moment. I can’t just level up immediately. So then, there’s frustration.
Charlie: Right. Yeah. And it is like that. There are some situations that require a skill that you don’t yet have, but by being in that situation, you very often muddle through in one way or another. I bet your neighbor is still there, right? There’s plenty more opportunity to interact with your neighbor. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t work out. Maybe you can look back on that and say, “Yeah, damn, if I’d have said that…” or “If I’d have thought to be like this or to offer that, or whatever, then something might be different.” Or you know, maybe it’s just not going to work out.
Jared: The “maybe it’s not going to work out” feels like it’s both sad but also kind of liberating, because then you’re giving yourself the permission to do your best, knowing that you can’t do otherwise. I’m thinking about romantic relationships that I’ve been in – it’s probably one of the places that I have a lot of experience with argument and things like that [laughs] because I’m a serial monogamist. I think that if I were to look at things from a distance now, I do think that a lot of the conflicts that arise come from the assumption that whatever the activity is, it is emblematic of the intention. Specifically, however the activity is affecting me must match the way that their internal state or their intention [is]. “If I’m hurt from it, then they must have been wanting to hurt me.” And I can’t count how many times – “Oh I didn’t mean that!” or “I wasn’t trying to do that” or whatever it was, and it’s just back and forth. The decoupling of these two seems like it could have been really valuable. And it’s a skill that I think I’ve developed with a lot of those things later on, to say, “This is how I’m feeling based on an interaction, and I’m not saying you were intending to do that.” Just giving that space of saying, “This is my reality,” creates a lot of space and some perspective, and then also kind of [confronts] the messiness that every action could lead to good or bad – or both! Probably both [results], in each situation.
Derek: Hey Jared, I wanted to see if you saw that there was a question about spaciousness in the chat from Ollie, so it’s good that we were just talking about space.
Jared: Yeah. Ollie asked, “I’m new to this term, spaciousness. Would you say that it has some similarity to metacognitive awareness from the TMI framework?”
Some similarity would be a good way of saying it, in the sense that that type of widening or expanding your awareness can give you a bit more perspective and create more options and lead to some less reactive stuff, but they are very distinct, at least from my experience – I didn’t go [through all] 10 stages when I was in my TMI days, so maybe the fruit is different than I assume, so I don’t want to speak for the system completely. It’s my experience that – well, there’s a couple things.
One, the way that awareness is talked about it in TMI prescribes a certain demeanor or vibe to it and phenomenology. The broad awareness in that system is blurry, peripheral, non-detailed, and kind of foggy, I guess they would say, whereas the attention is very sharp and concise and detailed. When you don’t make those distinctions between attention and awareness and allow for naturally open awareness to come up, then it’s maybe less constrained, [I would say].
[35:00] The type of metacognitive awareness that gets dialed in in that TMI system also comes with this equanimity, as a chillness. Like, “Relax. I’ve got to be okay with everything, and calm.” It kind of prescribes this certain demeanor. But the spaciousness, like we said, there can be rage emerging from within a spacious field of awareness.
So a little different. It’s such a minor distinction, and yet very profound, because the way that that type of broad awareness interacts with things like thoughts and emotions is a lot less manipulative and a lot less vigilant. That metacognitive awareness usually is something that is maintained through a vigilance and often will kind of cut certain things out of experience, like thoughts or emotions, or look away from emotions and things like that.
Is that helpful at all, Ollie? And Charlie, feel free. I know you dabbled in a TMI phrase too, and I think you said that you had some very interesting emotional reactions, that it kind of made you a little bit grumpy. [laughs]
Charlie: I’m thinking about spaciousness, and I think you’ve said everything that I would have said in that relationship with that system – I’m not super familiar.
Spaciousness: we’re using that synonymously with spacious presence in this context. Spacious presence is what you get from practicing open awareness. It is a rough translation of or substitute for a Tibetan term, ne-pa, which literally means “presence of awareness with absence of stuff arising in mind.” So it’s a non-conceptual spacious awareness. It is very clear – bright – full of potential. That’s one of the ways that it’s differentiated from a more equanimous, spacious, calm experience. It’s not necessarily quiet. It can be quiet – it can be calm – but there is also an alertness there. So it’s not that calm and no-thought are always correlated. You can have no-thought, concept-free awareness and that is just very bright, very vibrant, immediate – like what Jared was describing earlier in terms of that direct immediacy of the sense fields when you’re in relation in the world.
Jared: I think the potential might be one of the – well, as you said, the sharpness and the vividness is something that is a little different, in the sense that everything that arises within that spaciousness is very – because there’s nothing, there’s no concept between you and it –
Charlie: No elaboration. There’s no conceptual elaboration.
Jared: No elaboration. Yeah, things can be very vivid. But the potential, for me, feels like one of the most remarkable things. A lot of times when people will talk about trying to describe this state, it’s very simple and kind of mundane, but the experience of it is quite different. The potential – I’ve heard people say something like, “It felt like anything could happen. There’s this very vivid sense. I had no idea what was going to happen, and anything could.” And also, as we talked about before, there’s the awareness that you could make the choice to become involved or elaborate on things at any moment. That’s part of that potential: the opportunity for you to dive in and do stuff and manipulate things and be a human. [laughs]
[39:40] Charlie: A lot of what we’re talking about today in relation to spaciousness or spacious presence is related to the path aspect in Evolving Ground, and that is that you bring spaciousness from your sitting, from your practice, from your past experience – you have some experience of spaciousness, and you bring that into activity. That process, we call spacious involvement. That is characteristic of the Buddhist Tantric way of relating to the world. You’re bringing spaciousness with you in order that you can respond more skillfully in power situations – do things differently than you might otherwise. The [results] of that path, the Tantric results, are mastery, skill, power. These are very worldly-oriented results.
Jared: We had another question Peter wanted me to bring up that I think might be helpful. We might have do some more definitions. This is kind of the trope of Evolving Ground – we really torture words and being very precise with what they mean because they do have such an impact on experience in very interesting ways, both practice and everyday life. Peter’s question was, “Is wise kindness and unwise kindness a helpful distinction? If so, when does the latter happen?”
Speaking of semantics, if we’re being proper Buddhists, wisdom is associated with openness or the spaciousness side of things, whereas in a lot of Western contexts, it’s usually perceived as activity or knowledge or experience or something like that. The two are kind of inseparable in some sense, but yeah, it might be a good caveat to throw out there as we are talking about this.
If I were to simply look at those, “wise kindness” feels similarly synonymous to this natural kindness, in the sense that the assumption there is that there is spaciousness included. “Unwise kindness” would be the absence of spaciousness but kindness still arising. I think maybe that that would be a little bit more what we were talking about with compassion, in the sense that you’re feeling kind, and so what you do is kind or compassionate. I don’t know – Charlie, how are you feeling about my translation projects here? My semantics games? [laughs]
Charlie: I’m loving it. I really love this distinction as well from Peter; it’s great. Traditionally, [as] you were pointing to there, wisdom is emptiness, compassion is form, and the nonduality of those two are the result of Mahayana – well, Mahayana moving into Tantra. You have the nonduality of wisdom and compassion as extremely important in cultivation of compassion – it’s that side, and then finding emptiness is the wisdom side. That’s how those two correlate in the more traditional context. “Wise kindness,” to me, feels like a move away from the wisdom/compassion coupling into more of a Tantric orientation where you have kindness/activity, wisdom being more of the spacious aspect that we’ve been talking about. But that would be looking at it in a very traditional type of framework.
[44:32] Just in practical terms, wisdom – how would we define wisdom? It’s kind of difficult. To me, it relates to experience a lot. If I think of people who I think are wise, who really are wise, they’re people who have a lot of experience in the world, working in different situations, maybe put their lifelong effort into a particular area [where] they’ve gotten a lot of knowledge, that they’ve gotten to know very well, and then they can relate wisely because they have that knowledge. So not the same as knowledge – there’s this differentiation between wisdom, which is more spacious, and knowledge, which is more technical, more specific. And yet those two are very much coupled together. You develop one, and then you’re able to understand better how to apply that in context and how to use that in different unexpected circumstances.
So “wise kindness” I guess would be having practiced kindness enough that you have some familiarity with how things are going to pan out in certain relational situations. Maybe, thinking of parenting – I’m not a good person to talk about parenting because I don’t have children, but I see wise, skillful, kind parents, and their wisdom comes from having understood their children really well and gotten used to how they respond to different situations. They kind of just know what’s going to be the right thing here. That seems to me like an example of wise kindness. You’ve got that contextual history that you’ve learned from, and you’re applying that to a present moment.