Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute retreat session, Diana Taylor opens by affirming the students’ motivation: developing a calm, clear mind so they can cultivate wisdom and compassion to benefit all beings. She then distinguishes attachment from genuine connection, using a documentary about parents grieving suicide to show how self-focused clinging differs from compassionate presence. Moving into the nature of mind itself, Taylor explains Buddhist psychology’s three levels: gross mind (thinking, sensation, feeling), subtle mind (wind energy moving through channels and chakras), and very subtle mind (the enlightened, obscuration-free Buddha mind). She then focuses on three wisdoms essential to practice: mirror-like wisdom, the wisdom of equanimity, and discriminating wisdom, explaining how these operate without emotional turbulence. The session concludes with a listening exercise using a Chopin Nocturne, inviting students to observe their own reactivity and explore two valid approaches—either allowing emotions to arise for self-awareness, or practicing non-reactive presence—depending on what their practice needs in the moment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Ret..mp3
UUID: 6db95098-b0c1-4d2e-bc84-298e1e386e9e
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Retreat (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~4,218
Night of happy dreams into the bargain. So let’s begin by remembering our motivation for being here. So if you’d like to just settle yourselves down for a moment. And whilst it’s very often pain which brings us to do a course like this or confusion, the reason we need to be cleared from our pain and our confusion is so that our minds are calm and clear. So that we can develop wisdom and compassion.
We need the wisdom so that we connect compassionately. And the compassionate act is the act to relieve the suffering in the end of all sentient beings. So ultimately this is the reason why we’re here in this room. So remembering that and affirming it strongly in your own mind. And then just coming back into the room.
We got we have got the CD player. Can’t remember. Actually, I didn’t bring my bag in. Any questions that have arisen overnight about anything? Or anybody have an interesting dream that they want to talk about?
Attached. That’s right. We need to separate the word attachment from the word connection. Oh, I’m not switched on. I don’t understand.
I’ll I’ll stick. I’ll put it onto that. Is that better? Better? We need to separate the word attachment from the word connecting with things.
When we connect with people that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re attached to people and that connection can be very strong. There can be a very deep intimacy in that connection but that’s different to being attached. When we’re connected to a person there is a very clear awareness of that other person, where that person is coming from and the issues which are relevant to that person. And we sense it as a deep connection when those issues are very personal, often very private. When we have a sense of sharing some of those aspects with another person that’s what we call intimacy.
To be able to have an intimate relationship, need to have a mind which is calm and which is clear. So then we can see the other person with great clarity. If the other person is suffering, then we have the clarity to be able to understand how to help them. If the person is in a state of peacefulness or joyfulness, then we have that sense of loving kindness which is the joy which rejoices in what is happening to that particular person. So if we want an intimate relationship with anybody then we need these sorts of qualities in the relationship.
Attachment is when we’re trying to hang on to that person for our own needs. Right? So if I see somebody that I like and I can take joy in what that person is happy with and I can grieve at their suffering because I like that person. But I might also like that person because that person makes me feel good. When I’m happy with their happiness then that makes me feel good.
I want more of it. I want more of it so that then I can be happy for myself. So we can see that we slip very easily from this quality of being deeply connected to a person to being attached. As soon as we say, I want more of this for myself, but we don’t even notice that we’re saying it a lot of the time. So we slip into this, I want more of this for myself, I want this person to be here, I want to hang on to this person now but I’m no longer seeing this person for who he or she is but I’m seeing this person for what he or she can do for my needs.
Alright, So at that point we’ve slipped into attachment. We can see the gross attachments very clearly when people are caught in neurotic relationships and there’s a codependency type relationships where people have got a very strong attachment to each other because they’re meeting each other’s needs and yet it’s quite destructive. So in the extreme we can see it but it’s this slipping from the valid aspect of it, the connecting ness, into wanting something for our own good. So an interesting example of that actually, when I was watching a documentary on SBS one day and it was about suicide. There were interviews with parents of youth who had suicided, male and female.
There were two of these parents who stood out for me. One was a mother and one was a father. Both of them were grieving, both of them expressed very strong grief. The father was saying, I didn’t know that my son had been suffering so much. If only I had known then I could do something about it.
So the grief was focused on the suffering of the son but with the mother, the mother was saying nobody knows for how much I am suffering. She did this and this has had this effect on me and everybody should have been around, they helped this so I would not be suffering. And we hardly heard anything about the daughter. I began to wonder why the daughter suicided as I heard this mother talking. But this mother said very little about the daughter but she spoke a lot about how unjust this was for her.
There were two parents both grieving about the loss of their child. One, there seemed to be, I mean I’m only talking about a film so I don’t know exactly what it was, but there seemed to be a very strong attachment with the mother, with the daughter but with the father there was this quality of deep compassion for his son and although he was clearly grieving he wasn’t talking about his own pain, he was talking about his son’s pain. So that quality of seeing another person’s pain, that is the quality of our connectedness, that is the quality of our love. When it slips into I need this for myself then it becomes attachment. So you certainly need to keep loving relationships.
There’s no doubt about that. Yes. Talk about the mind. It’s my favorite topic. I could do a whole week course on the mind if you really wanted me to but I won’t do that to you today.
When we talk about the mind from the point of view of Western psychology, we are talking about what is referred to as the gross mind within the Abhidharma or within Buddhist psychology. That gross mind, it’s called gross simply because it’s not subtle in any way. It’s not a negative term, it’s simply a descriptive term. This gross mind refers to thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. Those four things which Jung talked about.
The intuition might be part of the more subtle parts of the mind but thinking, feeling and sensation are all parts of the gross mind. They’re connected with the central central nervous system. We can see the connections, we can pull out the reflex arcs see where the synapses are and things like that. So that’s all part of the gross mind.
Our dreaming is part of the gross mind. Extra sensory perception is part of the gross mind as well. So all these things, clairvoyance, those sorts of things are also part of the gross mind. The subtle mind and the very subtle mind refers to the psychic energies within the body. By psychic I don’t mean clairvoyant, I mean very subtle movement which is still mind but it’s not mind as it has been understood at all in Western psychology.
When we talk about the unconscious in Western psychology, we think we are talking about something subtle but we are still referring to something which is quite gross in terms of the Buddhist psychology. So the subtle aspect of the mind is often referred to as the wind energy in the body or the Tibetan word is lung. People say they are suffering from lung diseases sometimes when they’ve been doing it around the spiritual practicing. What they’re saying there is that they’re sort of out of balance in some way. The wind energies flow through channels within the body which you can think of as similar to the meridians in Chinese medicine.
But within Tibetan medicine they don’t necessarily correspond. There’s a connection but they’re not directly connected. But these channels are not physical channels in any sense. You can’t dissect the body and find these channels. So it’s a different quality of energy which is moving through the body.
These channels become focused in chakras which a lot of you are familiar with for if you’ve done yoga and things like this. So we have the chakras which where these channels come through and connect and then you have the central channel and the two channels on the side which are the main flows if you like. The subtle mind is this energy which is moving through the body, which is also the point of connection between mind in its very subtle form and material thing which is body, is through this wind energy. And the very subtle mind is the mind which is the enlightened mind if you like. It’s called the very subtle mind because it has no confusion, no ignorance, no obscuration.
It’s absolutely clear. It’s the fully enlightened Buddha mind. So that very subtle mind sits in the heart chakra physically. The heart chakra is not where the physical heart is but it’s located near there. The very subtle mind comes in at that particular point within the heart.
Heart chakra, I should say. This is why in Buddhism we say that the seed of mind is in the heart. So at the moment of death all the wind energies become absorbed into the central channels and it comes from the two ends of the central channel into the heart and it absorbs into the heart and then it becomes just this very very subtle mind at the moment of death and it’s that subtle mind which leaves the body at the moment of death. So that’s the very very subtle mind. It also means that at the moment of death we have the opportunity to achieve enlightenment.
But what happens is because we haven’t done our practices before we die, then we miss it. So you can see just from that very brief description that the concept of the mind within the Abhidharma is far more profound than anything at all that you get in Western psychology. This is why at first it’s hard to think that my mind is actually sitting here because our consciousness, our awareness, of course all the activity is actually happening up here but that’s only the gross part. When we meditate, if we are able to achieve single point of concentration, what happens is that all that wind energy slows down and becomes more still. And we start to have some sort of awareness of the power of this clarity of the subtle mind.
So that’s one reason why we want to achieve this single point of concentration is just to slow everything down so we develop up this awareness which then because of the quality of blissfulness that comes with that, then of course we’re motivated to keep on going and to meditate more, to study more and to keep on clearing the mind and keep on removing even the tiniest and tiniest of confusion and obscuration. So you can read in the Lamrim texts Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, just the big fat Lamrim text. You can read there about how you go through nine stages of development. This is after you’ve achieved the first stage of enlightenment, where the mind becomes more and more clear, more and more clean if you like. And you obtain more and more powers along the way but your ability to act with wisdom and compassion becomes incredibly profound.
Even if you get to the first level you’re way beyond, I assume, somebody like the Dalai Lama has achieved that sort of level but it’s way beyond anything that the ordinary person achieves. That’s why I’m a nun rather than a psychologist. Or a nun in addition to being a psychologist might be better. Yes. Yeah.
Yep. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Or maybe the idea of sitting quietly, allowing the mind to sit quietly rather than the notion of control. Which is why I was saying yesterday about thinking about this control not so much in the terms of the dogmatic father who says you’ve got to do but in the sense of the mother who is just gently bringing the child and saying it’s important just to sit still at this particular time. So I mean even in the meditation posture, if you’re sitting in the full lotus or the half lotus position or something like that, then we are balanced around the spine but there’s still a level of energy involved in keeping the spine itself vertical. So there’s a quality of tension which is there but it’s not a tense tension if that makes any sense. It’s a tension which is something which is balanced and therefore around that tension there’s a lot of looseness and a lot of go.
It’s that letting go quality that men I think need to focus on much more because of this control. But also remembering that trying to control by using the conscious mind, by forcing it through the conscious mind, then we are actually inflaming the activity of the conscious mind in doing that. So it needs to come from something which is more subtle, if you like, from some other quality of subtlety which you can only access by letting go. So we’ve got all these paradoxes and it’s because we are on a path. Things are still partial and we have to use the methodology which is appropriate for us at a particular time.
Yes. There’s this quality of getting worked up about it. Which brings me to what I wanted to focus on in this session in any case. That this quality of getting worked up comes through an anxiety to get things right. So we need to say, Okay, why is it that I want to get these things right?
And when we start to ask those sorts of questions, we start to see that a lot of this is actually coming from the ego centered mind. I want to get it right so that I’m not hurting. I want to get it right so people think I’m good. I want to get it right because then I can work more efficiently and get more money. I want to get it right because I want to go on a holiday and I want to be able to relax while I’m on holiday.
So there are all these reasons why we want to get it right which are solely concerned with bolstering up an ego. So when we are caught up in that, of course, then we are inflaming all this activity and we are creating more and more tension. So the question is, why do I want to get these things right? We need to have some sort of motivation in order to sit down and meditate. Why do I want to get these things right?
And just investigating in your own mind. When I was lecturing on Thursday and I was talking about the five different types of wisdom, there are two of those which I want to focus on at the moment. One is the the mirror like wisdom which is that wisdom which allows us to simply to see things as they are without being involved emotionally in any way whatsoever. It’s that that wisdom appears to be disconnected but in fact it allows a more clear connectedness because we’re not interfering with the awareness through making some sort of judgment. Now, the sort of judgment which interferes mostly is the emotional judgment which is the value judgment: This is good or this is bad.
Which brings us into the wisdom of equanimity which is seeing that things are not good or bad in that sense but they simply are. This is what is at this particular moment. This is something which is going to further my spiritual practice or this is something which is not going to further my spiritual practice. Being able to say that without having this feeling therefore I’ve got to have this or I can’t have that. It’s a very clear objective sort of judgement.
It’s the sort of judgement that scientists are meant to make about their data when they are collecting data. And as a scientist collecting data you say, Okay, this is what is. There’s no good or there’s no bad. As soon as a scientist becomes judgemental about the data then of course there’s a tendency to say well I don’t want to know about that part and I want it to go into here and therefore distorting, unwittingly distorting the data. There are plenty of examples in the history and philosophy of scientists who have got caught up in that.
So this wisdom of equanimity is about the wisdom of not judging. But first of all simply seeing things as they are and then not judging, not trying to grab onto something represents or trying to push it away. But not judging. And then from that ability to judge then we do bring in the discriminating wisdom. Which is the wisdom which knows the nature of things and knows how they work together and knows which things are going to help us to move towards enlightenment and which things are going to take us away from that.
But that discriminating wisdom is not an emotional wisdom. It knows what moves in which direction but it’s not an emotional sort of a thing. It knows what will enhance compassion but it’s not emotional about it. Most of the emotions that we have are things which actually disturb the mind. The exceptions to that are joy at another person’s happiness which is loving kindness and grief at another person’s sadness which is the state of compassion.
And the third one I’d add into that is that sense of peace and bliss fulness that happens when we are not disturbed by any of the other emotions. So those three. Apart from those three, everything else is coming from the mind and has a quality of turbulence about it. So when we’re looking at equanimity, we’re looking at this ability to simply be. So it does not mean that we don’t grieve.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t have joy. But we are not hankering for something for ourselves for our own ego concerns. We are not grieving because our ego is unhappy and we’re not grasping at something to make our ego happy. So this wisdom of equanimity. So first of all the wisdom which sees things simply as they are.
Secondly that wisdom of equanimity which is not judging. Then thirdly the discriminating wisdom which has that quality of wisdom in it. It may not be perfect wisdom yet but it’s moving towards that. And none of these have any quality of emotion at all. So what I’d like to do is to put on one of the CDs.
I haven’t checked the tracks actually, and just play it. It it I’ve got, some Chopin Nocturne. So so for those of you who like classical music, it’s one of my favorite CDs. And Chopin’s Nocturnes I always enjoy because they have that quality of peacefulness in but there’s also very often in the Nocturnes disturbing quality as well. And what I would like you to do as you’re listening to this particular track is to observe your own mind as you’re listening to the track and observe as you become involved in the music whether there is this quality of emotion coming up and if so, is that quality of emotion something which allows you to hear the music clearly or something distracting from the music.
In other words, just watching your own mind as you are listening to the music and saying Okay, what is it that is happening to the mind? This is a different way of being mindful. Mindful. In this case, we’re being mindful of about how we’re reacting to this particular track. Is that clear?
Okay. Well, I’ll find let’s see if I can find the right. I like that. How many of you or what what did you find was your experience in doing that? Yeah?
Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. What are some other reactions to that?
A penny up the back. Right. So the quality of judging what ought to be right is coming in and disturbing. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. This equanimity arises from our expectations about what it ought to be. Mhmm. Yes. Yes.
Yeah. I chose that one because it does have the disturbing middle in it. He actually wrote that was the last Nocturne that he wrote and it has incredible depth in terms of music because of this anguish which is there in middle section but also the quality of peacefulness that comes out at the end. So it can evoke very powerful emotions in people. Does somebody want to say something?
Mhmm. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
These sorts of things are happening to us all the time except that because we are not stopping and watch our minds. We don’t see how we are constantly caught up in reacting to things because of past experiences of one sort and another. We are not seeing them clearly for what they actually are a lot of the time. We can use these experiences in two ways. One is by taking that look just trying to listen to the music for what it is or being in the situation for what it is.
The other one is utilizing the situation to be aware of what it is that’s being evoked in our minds and our feelings and thereby understanding our mind and our feelings through that. Now they’re two different exercises. They’re two different ways of coming to understand the mind. And again, it’s important to think now what is it that is valid for me and for my mind? Is it more important for me at this moment of my life to allow these feelings to come up so that I know what the feelings are, so that I know how it is that I’m reacting?
Or is it more important for me in my life at this moment to not be caught up in my own reactions to it but simply to be aware of what it is that is there? Those are two different questions and they are both valid questions but they’re almost entirely opposite ways of listening to the music. So what I’d like to do is to play the same track again. We can turn the volume down if that was Yes. Good on you.
So we’ve got a few experts on sound in this place. This time choose which you think is going to be more relevant to you at this moment in your life. Whether to allow yourself to be involved with the music and let the music evoke feelings and responses so that you can look at them and be aware of them or whether it’s more relevant to you to try the exercises simply being aware of the music. So you choose which way you want to listen to the music and we’ll play the track again. Let’s get some feedback from some of the other groups.
We’ll work the opposite direction around the room this time and start over here. Happened? Speak to the room because your voice is behind the corner where you’re sitting there. So you think yeah. Thanks.
And this group here. There’s a lot of variations in there. What about this group? Mhmm. And in the middle there?
Yep. Great. Up the back there. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I’m up in the corner here. Yes.
And Great. And right in the corner there. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yes.
But it doesn’t have to be an either or. Right. I mean, at one day you can do one and one day you can do the other. And then the two enhancing the two techniques enhance each other. And then oh, I’ve got those two.
Yes. It’s just down down here there. Use those down on the floor here. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Mhmm. Yep. Yep. K. And here in the corner.
Meryl shared the same No. I I won’t maybe the the non classical musicians people might not like it a third time around so I won’t do it a third time around. But it’s interesting just to reflect on how the mind does move and change and do different things as we’re listening to something like that. Mean, the listening is simply another way of focusing the mind. I could have got you to listen to the sound in your ears or I could have got you to