Dissolving the Karma Police. Dharma Himalaya Session 01 with Delson Armstrong

And coming out of cessation, the realization or the understanding or the message or whatever it was, what just stayed with me from that moment was: respond to anything that arises in experience of something other than kindness is insanity. And that, but then now, when I look at these, it's like there's this tipping point, where effort and intention are the enemies. Any effort or intention applied closes the door. It impedes any progress instead of reduces the progress.

And that the tool, instead of effort and intention, the tool is relaxation and letting go. But any effort to relax or let go, or even just the slightest intention to think of letting go, puts you out of the running. And then, I love this model of the ocean and the waves. Now I can see this, like anything that arises is really part of Nibbana or fundamental consciousness. It's going to rise, it's going to sink back. All right. Effort and intention get to rise and sink back. I can't see how that works. If they're the ones that throw you out, then how can they be the ones that, oh, but they're not different.

And then, if I look back at what was important to me up to now, to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, and to meet everything that arises in my experience with kindness, if I have this model that whatever arises is just the same, it's just going to sink back, then to meet whatever arises with ill will, enmity, oh, it's just going to rise and sink back, that's not important. But that seemed like the most important thing I've ever learned in my life, and this is saying, well, no, that's just not important, it's the same, it's just going to rise and sink back. Do one to others as they would have to do one to you, well, maybe unkindness is just as important as kindness.

thing, and so it breaks the model for me, it doesn't work. So those are my questions. I'm sure that's the characteristic question, I've heard that a thousand times, you haven't figured that out yet, but there they are. They're valid. They're going to rise and sink back. To me, kindness is the greatest. It is the greatest. It is the emanation of Nibbana. I see kindness as Nibbana in action, that's how I see it. Even if it takes effort, so be it. It's important. Yeah, absolutely vital. No matter what anybody says, kindness is always going to be. Forget about what Jesus said or Buddha said or Lao Tzu said or anybody says. Forget about even the concept of kindness.

There is, I believe, a quality that is inherent in all beings, in the intrinsic nature of all beings. And all goodness, so-called goodness, yeah, we can try to transcend all good and bad and wholesome and unwholesome, and this is good, this is bad, transcend all value judgment, all of that stuff. But then that's just another intellectual exercise. In my reality, in my understanding, that which we call all good is an absolute emanation of Nibbana. And it's not something that you can conceptualize. It's the nature of all beings, that's the Buddha nature, the projection of the Dhamma Kaya, the Nirmana Kaya, you know, the three Kayas, whatever you want to say. It's a direct projection of Buddha, the Buddha nature, kindness.

Compassion, compassion is a space, holding that space for all beings. It might not manifest in the way you might want. The teacher in front of you might not be visibly kind. I might look like an asshole but might not be nice. I'd not be nice. But he is the embodiment of absolute kindness and compassion. So kindness does not equal niceness. The Dalai Lama once said, it's one that stayed with me: it's easy to be soft on the outside and soft on the inside. And it's easy to be soft on the outside and hard on the inside. But the real yogi is to be able to be hard on the outside and soft on the inside.

It's like, wow, yeah. Because when you're hard on the outside, to not be hard on the inside is just almost impossible, isn't it? That takes some skills. But it's not even like developing a skill in the relative sense. You're developing the ability to project loving kindness and compassion and empathetic joy and all of these things, but then it becomes natural. It's just like you're uncovering, unlayering, what is your true nature. Everything that tells you that you're an angry person, everything that tells you that I'm not good enough, or I don't know if I can do this, or it feels like a lot of effort, and all of

that's just emanations of the mind. Those are the waves, but the ocean has kindness itself. Even the waves aren't all that kind, it's okay. And what about the dueling coordinators' view? I love this dueling coordinators' view. But to have a coordinator saying, don't be unkind, doesn't seem like a mistake, seems like the right thing. But in the dueling coordinator view, it'd be like, no, no, that's how you're going to make it worse, you know? And so I'm having a hard time coordinating that.

So there's two different perspectives that are useful here. One is, as you say, the dueling coordinators, and one is the path of going deeper and deeper into what's classically called wisdom, so that you can abide in more and more complex, sophisticated, expanded bases of operation. Ocean and waves being one of them. From the perspective of the ocean, seeing everything as a wave helps the wave, whether it's kindness or ill will, to have less

grab, so it stops being able to become the background of perception, its own basis of operation. And then papancha. That's the entire use of ocean and waves, having it so things don't grab as much. Then if you walk around life and there's a wave that comes up, even from the perspective of ocean and waves, it's ill will, and you're noticing, the other coordinators are noticing, that you're actually going to harm something, someone, then that's skillful means to have them stop. Like hold that coordinate and be like, don't do it. That's also an aspect of wisdom. You know that if you allow that thing uninhibited you're going to create more karma, you're going to harm the other being, you're going to create more karma for yourself. Maybe there's a backlash, the whole samsaric thing on the grander scale. So of course you want to stop it. But if you're just sitting on the cushion, or any way that you're not suspecting that harm is going to happen, you want to more and

more allow even the most vile thought to come up as a wave, because nothing is grabbing it, because it's not grabbing, because nothing is fighting it. It is seen from a much more systemic and wise view. It itself has a chance to see itself and has a chance to have its own moment of self-awareness, like, oh, this is mean, this is harmful. Relax back. And that is the solution of the existing karma that's there. So again, we have a shift: initially right effort, partially, is preventing unwholesome mental movements from coming up. Then we have making the unwholesome into the wholesome. So if before you knew how to get your needs met by being angry at someone, now you know how to ask kindly. We change the existing karma, and also to wholesome. But ultimately, and this is the path of taking on more sophisticated bases of operation, you dissolve the karma, and through the dissolution of karma, unwholesome and wholesome naturally things will arise in a way that can be seen as more wholesome, or innately more kind, more compassionate, more loving, because when the mind is

free, and this doesn't say that the natural expression of Nibbana is kind, it's loving, it's compassionate, and it doesn't require the effort that normally we associate with the path. That has to do with existing strategies, existing intentions, that might rely on wholesome karma, but they're still there, kind of stuck, fixed, always looking for something to make more wholesome, to make more kind. In some sense they're like the kindness police. And again, at the beginning it's good to have the kindness police if everything's a mess, if everyone's violent. But ultimately you want to let go of the karma police, of the kindness police, and allow all the participants to just freely, joyously express themselves. And there's a deepening of the trust that everything that arises is okay, everything that arises is your own unique reflection, whatever reality is around you. And it's very unlikely that something that's truly harmful will make it all the way to being the governing, ruling coordinator and do harm to yourself or in the world. So it's this continuous process

of the beginning, having more effort and intention that's always there, like a strategy. It's always like, oh, when this happens I do this, when this happens I do this, when unwholesome happens I crush it or change it to kind. And slowly making it so you're more and more hands off, just trusting that whatever arises is okay. I like the idea of increasingly sophisticated approximations, because it basically says you don't have to get rid of the doer yet. So this whole struggle of letting go or not living, yeah, nothing. It's like, no, no, don't even bother, we're just gonna keep the doer, and maybe at some point it'll

evaporate. Remember that the thing that you're calling the doer, it's just another dance of sensations. It's just more water. That we're calling it doer is what's making it special, is what's making us want to make it go away or dissolve or whatever. So the act of labeling it as doer, giving it that meaning, is what is solidifying that activity in place. And if it is to change, it's helpful not to have this doer, non-doer distinction in the first place. You speak about collapsing back into, what, how do you say it? It's a great expression, where you're collapsing back into making it like the doer. How do you say it, thinking about making things happen? Or you have a great way of saying it, and it usually involves collapsing back into.

You collapse back into a lower basis of operation, which is what happens when you have many mental contacts, monopathas, start mounting one on top of the other. Anytime you have one of those mount, so to speak, it telescopes forward. It's a reflection of an intention that's fixed, that there's attachment to in the system. Our goal, in some sense, is to keep jumping up, even if there's still some attachment, some fixed intention. You jump up, and from that perspective it's easier to allow it to dissolve. Because it dissolves, there's more substrate of mind available; it's not stuck in some petrified position. Now you can see from a wider perspective and dissolve more fixed intentions, and see wider and dissolve until there's nothing left to dissolve, until cessation, and the complete melding into nirvana. That collapsing back, though, isn't that what we're... it's getting labeled collapsing back into a fixed view. Yeah, what about it? That just considering a self seems to be a mistake, it's so

It's not a mistake, so to speak, unless you attach to that perspective and again make that the vantage point. Even that is hard to call a mistake sometimes; doing this is useful. It's just a mistake in the sense that it's the fundamental mistake of mind that we call ignorance. It's a mistake only in the sense that it leads to more and more tension, to the point where we then call that tension suffering. It's not a mistake. Sometimes I have something that really wants to move my body or my energy in some way, and it would be on for half an hour, constantly reminding in the background, "Oh, this, now relax a little bit," then something else pushes it away, and again it's like, "Do this." And when I'm done figuring out whatever it is that I do, it's still there. It has some pressure, some tension, and I'm like, "Oh, okay." Maybe then, for a few more hours, what it wants to have happen is happening, so it can fully relax.

Well, maybe I see that it's tensing too much and it's not helpful anymore. It's doing more damage than good. The thing that it wants is not available, and so it resolves. But there's no the fewer pre-existing strategies that exist that are ultimately true, like, I always have to release all the tension, or I always have to have the energy flowing this way. That is going to be the coordinator that pushes anything that doesn't conform to the standards away and just creates more tension, prevents even the fixed intentions from doing the work that they rose up to do. So I'm saying all this to say: even fixed intentions, even things that we call attachments later on the path, are not bad. It's a feature of the system. The issue is we have so many of them, so many have conflicting views, and some of them pretend to be ultimate and are really entrenched in the deep foundation, the guts of the system, and convinced us that it has to be this way. A few days ago we had the discussion of

can be centralized, can't be. You can have intention from this perspective, you lose all of those assumptions: this has to be this way. And the fewer assumptions you have, the more limiting beliefs have been dissolved, the more freedom the system has to just express the spontaneous wisdom that's already there. It arises naturally, nothing trying to be, no, not this one. No, this is continuous, spontaneous, freshly arising flow of wisdom.