Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute teaching from a two-week retreat at Camp Cedar Glen in California, Joseph Goldstein introduces five “mind-weeds” or hindrances that seduce practitioners into identification and undermine insight: sense desire, anger or ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt. He explains how each operates, why it matters in practice, and walks through practical antidotes. For sense desire, he emphasizes mindfulness and moderation in food and sleep; for anger, he teaches noting the mind state directly and cultivating loving-kindness toward the person who triggered it; for sleepiness, he recommends postural precision and, as a last resort, accepting rest; for restlessness, reflecting on past kindnesses to settle the mind; for doubt, he distinguishes it from the “great doubt”—the investigative energy that deepens faith through direct experience. Throughout, the core instruction remains the same: recognize these states with non-judgmental awareness, see their impermanent nature, and use them as fertilizer for practice rather than obstacles to it. Suited for retreat participants and anyone beginning sustained meditation practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 CCG.mp3
UUID: 2bbb95ad-0ef4-4fa3-9d4c-ef829f32aabc
Teacher: Joseph Goldstein
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Joseph Goldstein)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,820
This recording of Joseph Goldstein was made on April fourth nineteen seventy seven at a two week meditation course in Julian, California. A disciple of Ramakrishna, who was a famous Bengali saint in India, came to him one day and asked him, why is there evil in the world? Ramakrishna replied, To thicken the plot. There are some energies in the mind and the body which also thicken the plot. And these plot thickeners are quite varied in the way they manifest, but they share one important characteristic.
And that characteristic is their great seductive power. There are different energies which arise in the mind and body which seduce us. They seduce us into identifying with them, into investing energy into them, to getting caught up. The first of these seductive energies is that of sense desire. We see or experience some pleasing object of the senses whether it’s a sight or sound or smell, taste, pleasant sensation in the body, or even taking the mind as a sense, some pleasing idea.
And because of its agreeable, pleasant quality we become attached. We start clinging and grasping at this object of the senses. And the problem for us both in our practice and in our lives is not the sense object itself that is just what it is but rather the energy which makes us compulsively grasp at the object. One might ask why is that a problem? The world is filled with pleasing sense objects.
What’s wrong with becoming attached? The problem is that it’s the cause of some degree of suffering for us. We invest energy into experiencing different sense objects that are pleasurable, but they don’t last. They share the nature of impermanence. So we experience something nice and agreeable and pleasant and enjoy it for some time and then it goes away.
And the degree to which we’re attached to it determines how unhappy we are, how much suffering is involved when it leaves. There’s another kind of unsatisfactoriness with respect to grasping at the sense objects, and that is the very act of wanting, of desiring, is a state of mind that indicates some incompleteness, some lack. So we look outside of ourselves for completion or fulfillment. Even in times of ease and happiness where we’re surrounded by pleasing things of the senses, to quote Chögyam Trungpa, There’s always something not quite right. It’s not quite right.
It’s not quite it. Because in fact objects of the senses will never be the cause of that kind of lasting fulfillment or completion that we’re looking for. And when the mind is seduced into that grasping energy over and over again to a great extent, it keeps the mind always off balance, always seeking something, always being somewhat unfulfilled. When we do experience the object of our desire, it doesn’t last. And so we’re again left filled with longing or wanting.
So the cycle goes on. In American culture, in the West, the object of sense desire are manifold. It’s such a sensual culture in the sense that there are beautiful things all about us. It’s as if we live in a heaven world. There are beautiful things to see and to hear, to taste and to feel in the body.
One of the purposes of coming to a retreat is to somewhat enter a protected environment where the continual input of these sense objects which are calling the mind, you know, to some degree limited, not bombarded quite so much. Yet even in a retreat situation you can experience the force of sensed desire in the mind. It’s ten thirty in the morning doing the last sitting. What’s going to be for lunch today? Mealtime becomes the big hit of the day.
There’s nothing else. You can see the mind play out and get caught. There’s another great Vipassana phenomenon that happens at retreats. It’s called the Vipassana Romance. People come to retreat sitting and practicing meditation and becoming very holy.
And their mind starts fantasizing about the person next to them or across the room. Meets with them, enters into relationship, gets married, has kids, often a divorce. And that often happens without even having eye contact. The force of desire in the mind is not to be discounted even in this kind of peaceful, protected environment. It’s there, and learning how to work with that energy, because it plays such an important part in our lives is crucial in the practice of coming to a deep understanding.
It’s the first of these energies which seduce us into identifying with them. Second one is in some ways the opposite of sense desire, and that is the energy of anger or ill will or aversion, hatred, annoyance, irritation. It’s that energy of mind which doesn’t like what’s going on, who condemns it, wants it to go away. Unlike sensed desire which is often accompanied by a pleasant feeling, anger or ill will is always unpleasant. There’s a very turbulent quality to it, a burning quality.
We say in English that when somebody is angry they’re burning up. And when you pay attention to how anger manifests in the mind and in the body, you can feel that burning quality to it. Very difficult to penetrate into how things are happening when the mind is engaged in the turbulence of anger. And again you think that you come to retreat and still and it’s silent or you need to taken care of, not much disturbance around, there’d be no cause for anger to arise. You can see as you sit, even for a short while, a few days, sitting watching your breath, the person next to you starts to make noise.
Why can’t they be quiet? They came here to meditate. Or a few people come in late. Or the person in the lunch line ahead of you is moving so mindfully. There are so many causes for ill will and irritation.
To learn to work with that one also is an important part of the practice. The third energy which is a big one is that of sloth and torpor. Sloth and torpor means sleepiness, drowsiness, dullness, heaviness, sluggishness. That heavy quality and when it’s strong all you want to do is go to sleep. Time for a nap.
No energy to look, to see, to investigate. You know there’s an animal called the three toed sloth. All it does is hang out of a tree all day. I don’t know which came first, the name of the animal or the name of the mind state, but they’re related in the qualities which are manifest. That kind of heaviness and dullness which makes clear vision impossible.
And so learning how to work with sloth and torpor also becomes important in the development of insight. The fourth state, the fourth energy which arises is that of restlessness and agitation. The mind which gets worried about things and is very agitated can’t settle down, can’t concentrate. The mind has a wonderful capacity for creating disturbance for itself. We worry about things that have happened already.
We can’t change, can’t do anything about, and we can sit and mull it over for hours wishing that it hadn’t happened, wishing that it happened differently, thinking about something we didn’t do that we should have done. And even more wondrous than that is the ability of the mind to sit in this very beautiful place, fantasize some action in the future that hasn’t happened yet, and stop worrying about that. And you know how often the mind can do that. It’s a very disturbing energy. It’s a very agitated one.
And it makes insight and peace and stillness difficult, so we learn how to work with it. The last of the energies which are difficult and seductive is one which in some ways is most incapacitating. And that’s the mind energy of doubt. Nagging little doubts that assail the mind. Doubts about oneself and the ability to do it.
The kind of thought, Oh, it’s too hard. I can’t do it. You look around and you see everybody else in blissful Samādhi. Everybody else is doing it but me. Too difficult.
Doubt about the practice. What is this anyway? In, out, rising, falling, walking around like zombies. It’s not getting any place. Doubt about the teachers.
Who are these guys anyway? What do they know? Do they know? All kinds of nagging thoughts that infiltrate the mind and can spin it out for long periods of time. And again, unless one learns how to deal with doubt in the mind, it just stops all kinds of insight, penetration into the nature of things.
Sense desire, anger or ill will, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt. The Dhammapada, which is a collection of verses from the Buddhist teachings, says that to conquer a thousand enemies single handedly a thousand different times is an easier task than to conquer oneself. Meaning that what we’re doing here is not an insignificant or easy task. Coming to the most profound understanding of who we are and what this mind body, what our life is all about, is an extremely demanding task. And if you’re having some difficulties these first few days, it’s okay.
There are ways to work with the thousand enemies. There are ways to deal with the problems that come up in the mind as a way of using those states to deepen the understanding. It’s all workable. There’s not any situation or any experience that we go through that’s outside of the scope of awareness. Suzuki Roshi calls these states mindweeds.
You pull out the weeds and you plant them in the ground, you put them in the ground next to the plant and it acts as fertilizer for the plant to grow stronger. As you learn to deal with the mind weeds, these energies, they make your practice stronger. The way to deal with all of them, the most insightful way, is first to recognize when they come. They have power over us only because we’re not terribly mindful all the time of when they arise in the mind. And so sense desire comes, or anger, or sleepiness, and before we know it we’re seduced into them.
We invest a lot of energy, we identify with them, and it makes them strong. The first step in working with them is to see that they’re there, to become mindful, to become aware. And sense desire arises in your practice, in your life. Turn the focus of your attention onto that desire without judging it, without condemning, without identifying with it as being I or self. It’s an impersonal mindset which arises at certain times.
If you can see it with mindfulness, you see the desire arises. Desire, desire it passes away. It doesn’t influence you. You don’t get caught. Mindfulness is a great light in the mind the light of recognition, of seeing when things come.
Sometimes the desire is too strong. We’ve been conditioned for so long to get involved with the desires, and when the mindfulness is still a bit weak or untrained, Sometimes we’re assailed by such a strong desire and we try to be mindful and it’s just not working. There are other antidotes to use to balance that energy. One thing to do is to be moderate in your food, to be moderate in the amount you sleep. The overindulgence in food and sleep which are two big sense desires that most people have tend to encourage all the others to come.
It makes the mind sloppy, makes it lazy. By being very moderate in your food and your sleep it’s just this whole process gets cleaned up a bit. Things get sharper, more distinct. So to work with it in conscious way, to experiment for yourself to see how much food you need, how much sleep you need. Not to take too little, not to take too much.
Another reflection which is helpful in working with desire is that of death. Don Juan calls it keeping death over one’s left shoulder. If you can keep the perspective of your own death, everybody else’s, it tends to loosen the power of lust to some extent. You realize where where we’re all going. A wonderful poem by Han Shan who was a famous Chinese sage and mystic and fool and wise man.
This is from a collection of poems called The Cold Mountain Poems. A curtain of pearls hangs before the whole of jade, and within is a lovely lady, fairer in form than the gods and immortals. Her face is like a blossom of peach or plum. Spring mist will cover the eastern mansion. Autumn winds blow from the western lodge.
And after thirty years have passed, she will look like a piece of pressed sugarcane. And so will we all. And just remembering that diminishes the stranglehold that lust sometimes gets us in. Again, work with being mindful of it. If that’s the most insightful way.
See how it’s a mind state which is impermanent, which comes and goes, which is not self and not I, see if you can get some detachment from it. You will have less and less power to disturb the mind. Working with anger or ill will, you’re sitting here and somebody’s making some noise next to you and you feel this irritation around you. As soon as you feel it arise, make a note of it. Make it the object of your practice.
Turn all the focus of your attention on to that feeling of annoyance or anger. Investigate what that mind state is about. Do it without condemning it, without identifying with it. Simply see it for what it is as it manifests. Watch it come and go.
If you can become aware of it early enough, you’ll see that the whole power of the anger dissipates. You can also work with the emotion of anger as it manifests in the body. If watching the mind state, if it’s too strong in the mind and you can’t get a hold on it, see how it’s affecting your body. Feel the sensations, the vibrations of your body as you’re experiencing the anger. Get some balance, some detachment with sensation as the object and then look at the mind state directly.
Not condemning, not identifying. Making a mental note of all these energies is a help in getting some distance. If you have enough mindfulness to be able to note, to label in the mind anger or desire, that itself creates some distance. Again as with desire sometimes the anger becomes so strong and the mindfulness is weak you feel yourself getting sucked right into it. There are specific antidotes to anger as well.
One of them is metta, loving kindness. Start doing loving kindness towards somebody for whom you feel a lot of love. In a way it’s distracting the mind from an unskillful state and substituting a wholesome one. And as you feel yourself getting a little more calm, a little more balanced, start sending loving thoughts towards the person that you are angry at. See if you can envelop them in your feelings of goodwill.
In your daily life, not so much in the retreat, another effective way of working with anger is feeling a lot of resentment or annoyance at somebody. Give them a gift. It’s not easy to do because when you’re feeling angry at somebody, it’s the last thing in the world you want to do is give them a present. But if you can be conscious enough to play with that mind state, not to be totally identified with it, you’ll see that that act of generosity softens the other person very hard to be difficult when somebody’s giving you a gift. And it softens your own mind.
Work with metta, work with generosity. Another skillful reflection to use with anger or hatred. Reflection about karma and how we all inherit the results, the consequences of our actions. When somebody’s doing something that’s unskillful and your first reaction might be one of annoyance or irritation, reflect for a moment what that other person is doing is going to be the cause of their own future pain, and that they’re doing it out of ignorance, out of not understanding the dharma, the law. And they don’t need your hatred.
That doesn’t help very much. A much more appropriate response is compassion and some action based on compassion. Tell you a story which illustrates the cycles that we get involved in. I was doing a meditation course in India. It was up in the mountains in Dalhousie.
Very large course, about two hundred people. We had rented a resort hotel that overlooked the Himalayas. It was a very exquisite place. The meditation hall was about double its size and it was used both for sitting and for eating, also the dining room. These courses in India, they used to serve milk, hot milk at nine o’clock in the evening, nine thirty.
Came nine thirty and people lined up for milk, other people were still sitting. This one friend, a musician from New York, gets in line and he comes to where they are serving the milk. And the servants at the hotel who were serving for some reason thought that he had been online already. He said you can’t have seconds. And he tried explaining to them that he wasn’t in line before and this is his first glass of milk.
They just didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe him and they refused to give him the milk. And he’s getting more and more uptight and more and more angry and he starts cursing servants. And this all the while people are sitting in the hall. You see this whole thing going on and how that reaction to the situation, that response to the situation with intense anger, somehow or other would be the cause in the future of his again not getting his milk.
The way to deal with situations is not to abdicate responsibility for doing what’s appropriate, but to take action with a balanced state of mind. Anger doesn’t help. It’s a negative energy which makes one’s own mind upset and puts out a very disturbing energy for others. Again the most skillful way of working with anger is to be mindful of it. See it as it arises.
Don’t condemn. Don’t judge. Let it come. See it. Let it go.
It’ll pass through. Sleepiness, drowsiness, sluggishness. Again, be mindful. Very interesting. You can become mindful of being sleepy.
You’re sitting there nodding with this heaviness. Instead of identifying with it and being seduced by it, start investigating it. What’s the sleepiness all about? Turn your awareness, turn your mindfulness to looking at the quality of sleepiness in the mind. Put a probe into what it’s about.
And it may take some time. It may be that you’ll be nodding ten, fifteen, twenty minutes with intermittent attempts at mindfulness. A common experience and practice, if you can keep with it, is that after some period of time of repeated effort to be aware of it, in a moment you can go from heavy sleepiness to total alertness and wakefulness. It’s just that whole mass of sleepiness disintegrates. You have to hang in with it.
You have to be willing, even though it’s difficult to keep hitting at it, to look at it. It’s particularly helpful with sleepiness as with all the others, but particularly with sleepiness to see if you can become aware of it at the very first sign. As if there’s a cloud of drowsiness which is out there. And very often you know that it’s coming. If you’re not so mindful it comes and comes and descends, and there you are.
If you can turn your attention to it while it’s still somewhere out there, just the force of your awareness, very much like the sun, can burn up a fog. The force of your awareness can dissolve that cloud of drowsiness that’s attacking. Work with it. It’s important to learn how to be with sleepiness, to look at it, to let go. Again in the beginning of practice sometimes it’s hard.
The sleepiness is strong and the mindfulness is weak. Some specific antidotes for it. Open your eyes. Stand up. Sit very straight.
You can take a very precise sitting posture. With your back very straight, your hands in a very precise position. Make your posture the object of your awareness. That’s how you leave the breath which may be contributing to drowsiness. Focus your attention on your body posture and the effort to keep very still and straight.
Sometimes it cuts through the sleepiness. If it’s the end of the sitting and you’re feeling sleepy, go out and do some walking, some fast walking. Walk backwards. Rouse some energy. You have to pay attention so you don’t fall.
There’s a good Jack Kornfield story. The final remedy for sleepiness. No, the penultimate remedy. He was in Ajahn Chah’s monastery and for a long time battling with drowsiness which is a common experience for people in the beginning. And he tried all these remedies and none of them were working.
So Ajahn Chah, his teacher said, you know there’s a well near your cottage. Go sit just on the edge of the well. The well is forty feet deep. Begins to nod out. The adrenaline rush was a good antidote.
If you try all these things and you’re still sleepy, go to sleep. And when you wake up, start again. But work with it. Don’t give in to drowsiness. You know, if you pay attention and you’re honest with yourself, you’ll be able to tell the difference between real bodily fatigue and laziness.
Don’t be lazy. There’s a lot to do, a lot to uncover, a lot to explore, and it gets fantastically exciting when you can cut through these hindrances which obstruct clear vision. So don’t give into them. Really work with it in as powerful a way as you can. The fourth one is restlessness, and again be mindful.
You start feeling agitated or worried or remorseful, make that mind state the object of your practice. Don’t judge it. Don’t identify with it. Don’t cling. Don’t condemn.
Just see it for what it is. Restless, restless, restless. If you can be mindful, you’ll see that it comes and it goes and it has not much power to disturb your mind. If it’s strong and you can’t deal with it, be mindful. A skillful reflection with restlessness is to think about some of the nice things that you’ve done in your life.
Acts of generosity, acts of love, insights that you’ve had in practice. Not with a sense of pride or ego, but just as a way of realizing that you’re okay. You know, you’ve all done lots of nice things. And reflecting on them when you’re in a very agitated or remorseful or worried state tends to cool the mind out. You get centered, you get a little still, and then again you can bring mindfulness to bear.
Working with doubt, be mindful. Nagging little doubts come, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. It doesn’t make sense. See doubt as a thought coming through the mind.
Don’t buy into it because it’s just going to spin the mind out. See doubt about doubting, doubting. Not identifying with it, not judging it, not thinking that it shouldn’t be there. Simply see it. You see the doubt comes and it goes.
It’s gone. There is a wonderful antidote to doubt. In some ways it’s the complement to mindfulness and awareness. And in the Zen tradition this antidote to the little petty nagging doubts is called the great doubt. What the great doubt means is that sense of investigation.
What’s happening? What’s going on? Who’s doubting? Who has the doubt? Really using the energy of looking carefully, of investigating to the very center, Who am I?
And what that great doubt does for your practice to be the cause of great faith. Not the faith that just believes blindly in what somebody says, but the great faith which comes from your own experience of how things are happening. The more you can work with the great doubt, which means investigation, seeing the more the great faith arises. Great faith is a wonderful quality that develops in practice. And in the Pali Canon, which is the language of the scriptures, this particular tradition, the great faith is likened to a magic jewel that when you drop it in water, it makes all the impurities of the water settle to the bottom.
It’s a water purifying gem. Great faith works exactly the same way in the mind. When that faith comes, which is based on your own understanding of how things are, none of these difficult energies have any power any longer. If you see, you understand. Now there’s an extraordinary phenomenon happening.
It very clear in our trip to Asia and in tapping into the roots of the tradition which goes back for two thousand five hundred more years, there’s a transmission of dharma which started started who knows when. It went from India to Southeast Asia to Tibet to China to Japan. And each country flowered in its own unique way, and you can see that transmission happening now to the West. And it’s a beautiful thing to be part of that, to be sharing that transmission of Dharma. It inspires great faith.
Use it in your practice to deal with these energies, to work with them in the most energetic and conscious way that you can. Do you have any questions please? Faith and understanding? There are different kinds of faith, different levels of faith. One, the lowest kind of faith is just blind faith.
Somebody says something and because you like the sound of it, you believe without much understanding. Another kind of faith which comes because you appreciate the qualities of somebody else. So you can have faith in the Buddha or Christ or Hanuman, right, because you admire the qualities of love or compassion or wisdom. And that’s a productive kind of faith. There’s an even higher kind.
That’s the faith which comes from understanding. When you see how things are for yourself, when you see the Dharma, experience the truth in your own practice, your own heart and mind, then your faith becomes unshakable. Because it’s not dependent upon anything outside of yourself. And in that place faith and understanding become one. That often is expressed in terms of blind faith in something without understanding.
But that’s not really what that quality of mind means in its highest aspect. A kind of story that comes up now and again in years in Jack Kornfield’s dharma talk. Somebody goes to a sage and asks him a question with all of us, like, why is there evil in the world? And the sage gives him kind of smart ass reply. And we all laugh, and I don’t get it.
I think that you can understand it most productively in terms of any state at all being workable. Right? Why is there evil in the world to thicken the plot? It means that’s the stuff, that’s the grist that we’re working with. It’s there.
Right? There are unwholesome states of mind. There are difficult energies. And it’s not to give some metaphysical first cause to why it should arise because that’s not so helpful. What’s helpful in terms of one’s own evolution of understanding is to realize that any state of mind, any situation in the world is something you can work with to deepen your own insight.
And it’s in that sense, picking the plot means it makes things interesting. You can use it. But other than that, ask Ramakrishna. The basic tool to use in learning how not to identify with things is the tool of mindfulness. Mindfulness means a non interfering awareness.
It’s a choiceless observation of what it is that’s coming with a recognition of its impermanent quality. And it’s the repetition of seeing the impermanence of things. You watch anger in your mind ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. Sooner or later it’s going to click that you don’t invite it to come. It goes by itself.
It’s really not you. It’s not self. And you see that it’s possible to experience it with some kind of distance, some kind of detachment. Without laying on to that experience, the mind constructs the mental concept of self. This is me.
This is I. It’s the repetition of seeing the impermanence of things with a sharply focused awareness that slowly decondition the identifying process.