Hindrances; Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

HINDRANCES ALONG THE REVOLUTIONARY’S PATH

PART 1: BASIC TRAINING (Cont’D)

You can read Part 1, 2 & 3 of Chapter 1, AGAINST THE STREAM: BASIC TRAINING here.

On the path to freedom there will inevitably be many difficulties—places where we get stuck or feel hindered. This is to be expected.

The Buddha referred to five main experiences that tend to slow our progress on the spiritual path:

Laziness (sloth/torpor)
Restlessness (anxiety/impatience)
Aversion (resistance/anger)
Craving (lust/attachment)
Doubt (believing the mind’s tendency to disbelieve)

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Every meditator experiences these hindrances (and their many subvariations) at some point during the inner revolution. The most skillful way to work through them is to observe them directly and to recognize that they, like everything else, are impermanent and ultimately impersonal phenomena of the mind and body.

Laziness, along with such variations as sleepiness, procrastination, and avoidance, is often acutely present at the beginning stages of the meditative path. It is normal for people to find it difficult to stay awake during meditation. This can be due to actual tiredness, in which case sleep is the prescribed remedy, or it can be caused by a physical and mental resistance to the insights that are being sought. If you suspect the latter, then your practice must strive to arouse energy and to see through the mind’s or body’s attempts to avoid waking up.

Some of the simple ways to work with sleepiness during meditation are to keep an erect posture, to stand rather than sit, to do some walking meditation, or to wash the face with cold water. If you are plagued by sleepiness, it is important to understand that this is normal; it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you or your practice. It is just a phase that will surely pass. Seeing it clearly as part of the path should help remove the judgment and offer the willingness to persevere.

Restlessness, with its siblings anxiousness, impatience, and intolerance, is also going to occur. Many people like to say that they can’t meditate because it is too hard to sit still. But it is not the stillness that is the problem; it is energetic impatience and an intolerance for inner movement. During meditation it is common to experience the desire to be doing anything but sitting still. We want to be distracted and entertained; we find facing the mental and physical experiences of the body boring or difficult. As our attention runs after thoughts, ideas, concepts, plans, or memories, every cell in our body seems to be screaming for release from the torture of nonaction and non-distraction.

Once, when I was complaining about this very thing to my father, he said, “If you can’t be bored, you can’t be Buddhist.” For those of us who have spent most of our lives addicted to intense experience, the more subtle states of existence can feel quite boring. Although I understand what my father was saying and I feel that it is a true statement, I also feel that if we are able to tolerate and investigate the moment-to-moment experience of restlessness, it is both fascinating and instructive. Rather than thinking that we have to get rid of restlessness, we turn our attention on the restlessness itself. That introspection often makes it clear that we are just trying to avoid some aspect of confusion, or perhaps the mind and body are simply craving pleasure and distraction from pain. Then we see for ourselves that restlessness is also impersonal; it is just the mind and body’s habitual reaction to certain experiences. Anxiousness becomes interesting and fruitful; as we meditate on it, great insights begin to arise into the nature of the mind and body.

Aversion, perhaps with anger and disdain, is our next visitor. When we pay attention to our mind/body/emotional experience, we see clearly how much of life is unpleasant. The body is so often experiencing unpleasant sensations, the mind think- ing unpleasant thoughts, and the heart experiencing the pains of the past, present, and future. Even just sitting still is uncomfortable for most people; and if the body isn’t uncomfortable, chances are we’re thinking about the resentments we’re hold- ing on to or some shame we feel. Each negative judgment of ourselves or others is a form of aversion.

Aversion isn’t the enemy; it is just the normal reaction of the mind and body to pain. Whatever the hurt we feel— whether of mind, body, or emotion—our biological survival mechanism tries to get rid of it. The problem is that we don’t actually have the ability to escape from all of the painful experiences in life. It can’t be done. Thus the revolutionary’s practice is to learn to break the habitual reactive tendency of aversion and to replace it with a compassionate response. The good news is that although aversion or anger toward pain is common but unhelpful, compassion is a response that decreases suffering and brings about an internal and external experience of safety and well-being.

A compassionate response can, at times, be as simple as seeing clearly the pain we are meeting with anger or aversion, and just letting go of the attempt to push it away and relaxing into the experience itself with mercy and care.

As with aversion, craving for and attachment to pleasure is a completely impersonal biological survival response of our human species. Of course we want pleasure; if we didn’t, we wouldn’t procreate, and that would be the end of our human animal existence. When we understand that craving for sense pleasures is just the mind/body’s attempt at survival and happiness, it is much easier to accept and transform. The first step is seeing it for what it is: a natural phenomenon of the human condition. Meditation allows us to do this.

When we understand this—when we see that craving for and attachment to impermanent experiences allows us to survive, but also creates unnecessary suffering—we begin to let go or let be. In meditation we can observe the arising and passing of craving and see that it is just the mind trying to survive and find satisfaction. But the greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting it and clinging to passing desires. When we achieve that sort of acceptance, craving is no longer a problem; it’s just another thought, arising from nowhere and dissolving into nothing.

• • •

The experience of doubt, the final hindrance which the Buddha spoke of, can be the most difficult and debilitating. When doubts arise and we believe them, they have the power to stop our practice. Sometimes the doubt we experience is self doubt—for example, the feeling that we can’t meditate or can’t change our relationship to the mind. Sometimes it takes the form of philosophical doubt—that is, disbelieving that it is possible to find freedom from suffering, or doubting that the Buddhist path actually leads to happiness.

Whatever the case may be, doubt is likewise just another thought, not to be believed or disbelieved but to be seen as it is, a passing thought. If doubt is a consistent experience for any struggling revolutionary, it should be investigated. Is doubt actually masking a sense of unworthiness perhaps? Or some old religious conditioning that says we can’t experience true happiness because we were born into sin?

Buddhism doesn’t ask for much blind faith. Instead, it encourages us to discover for ourselves whether the Buddha’s teachings lead to freedom. But the path to freedom is a long one, and we must not give up just because it gets difficult or because our doubts become louder than our willingness to per- severe. Questioning and investigating are healthy processes; doubt, on the other hand, is more of a pessimistic experience. It is really the belief that we are right and the Buddha and the millions after him were wrong.

Perhaps these natural internal experiences of the mind and body are what became externalized in the traditional Buddhist teachings as Mara. And as I have already stated, I believe that Mara and the Buddha had an ongoing relationship—not just before but also after his awakening. This points to the hindrances discussed above as an ongoing aspect of the mind and body.

If you have been temporarily incarnated as human, you will surely experience laziness, restlessness, aversion, craving, and doubt. But the trained mind sees through the seemingly personal attacks of Mara, and eventually we can respond to Mara, as the Buddha did, with the simple statement, “I see you.” Through the inner discipline of meditation, we too begin to understand that at times the mind will be dull or sleepy, or the body will crave comfort and pleasure, or doubt will arise. If we identify with these experiences as personal and as something that we have to get rid of, we will surely suffer at our inability to control the mind. When we see such experiences as impersonal and impermanent, we’re on our way to knowing that while we can’t control what arises, we certainly can transform how we relate to what has arisen.

Living a spiritual life that involves the practice of meditation allows us to come into harmony with reality. It allows us to see, just as the Buddha did, what is happening as it happens, with the understanding that the event or experience is impersonal and impermanent.

Or as Public Enemy #1 Flava Flav likes to say, “Don’t believe the hype.”

Noah Levine Dharma Talk on ‘The Five Hinderances’

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Against The Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

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Against the Stream is more than a just another book about Buddhist meditation. It is a manifesto and field guide for the front lines of the revolution. It is the culmination of almost two decades of meditative dissonance from the next generation of Buddhists in the West. This is a call to awakening for the sleeping masses.

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