We Know How to Steer
Another one of my favorite talks from the 2-month retreat is this one, by Guy Armstrong (especially the last 20 minutes or so), in which he talks about how we are bound to our past actions by the way we are shaped by them; we are conditioned by the patterns of thought, speech and action that we have invested in over and over again.
“These patterns are strong, but the beautiful thing is: they’re not fixed. Nothing in our being is fixed. Not the patterns. Not craving. Not even ignorance…. These are all still just arising and changing. Anything that has arisen can also pass away. Any patterning that has been established can be undone. This is the karmic principle that makes dharma practice transformative…
“The path itself is a karmic unfolding. We start with the conditioned habits of mind that we bring into practice from perhaps lifetimes of craving, ignorance, and so forth. But as we encounter the dharma we start to bring in wholesome mind states — mindfulness, lovingkindness, renunciation, tranquility, concentration, equanimity — and all these start to change us, little by little by little… All these new karmic effects start to steer the stream [of our mind] in a different direction…from suffering (samsara) to the end of suffering (nibbana). That is the only place this leads.
“And it’s important to know this because, as Yogi Berra says: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you could end up somewhere else.’ So we want to know where we’re going: We want to end up in nibbana. If there were anything fixed in us, then these streams of dharma practice couldn’t change us; they couldn’t turn us in that other direction.
“So that’s why the teaching on not-self — meaning there is nothing fixed at the center — is the avenue by which karma can unfold in us and we can change the patterning of our actions…
“Our situation is — all of us — we are afloat on a sea of changing conditions. Most of them are outside our control. External things — the weather, to some extent our body, the interactions we have with people, the successes or disappointments we have in life — a lot of these are really beyond our control.
“But we have one really important thing: We have a rudder and we know how to steer. And the rudder for our journey on this unpredictable, uncontrollable ocean — is karma.
“We steer through the force of our wholesome intentions. And the Buddha said that those intentions, repeated over and over again, are what take us to a safe harbor. Of peace. Of safety. Of security. Of release. And of liberation.”