April 7, 2015 Tuesday, Teacher Training Class
Dhamma as Jigsaw Puzzle
Aaron: First, as an aside, you only partially got through the discussion today. Barbara will send out to you the written ideas, suggestions, for dealing with students in crisis of any sort, not just spiritual emergence but any kind of crisis. It would be good for you to review those… They are a clearly formulated statement.
What I wish to speak about now, just for 10 or 15 minutes, is a little bit different. Those of you who are coming to the conclusion of the three year teacher training program, and those of you who have concluded it and are visiting, and those of you who are starting a one year program, consider the dhamma. It is vast.
(tape paused; Aaron has walked across the room to try to find something)
She had a crystal prism with hundreds of facets about this size, with many tiny facets. I don’t see that prism so we’re going to have to imagine it. I saw it in the past day or two, but I don’t know where. If you hold it up and look in one facet, you get a certain view. Turn it slightly, you get a different view. Thousands of combinations, tens of thousands of combinations. The dhamma is like that.
There’s nothing we can point to and say, “This is the dhamma,” because it’s about relationship, and how different aspects of experience combine and interrelate. Each of you will see a different part of the dhamma because no human can really encompass the whole. What you teach will come from that part which is most deeply resonant for you. And the students that come to you are those for whom what you teach is also resonant.
As your experience deepens you will find that, like the jigsaw puzzle, the thousand piece puzzle, you have these 20 pieces together and those 10 together, and here’s a little flower of 5 pieces over here, and here’s a human figure, 200 pieces over here. Where do they go? How do they relate? Does the flower belong here or up there? Where does the human go? How does it all fit together?
Well, I see that there’s a human there. I’ve got it put together. And I see there’s a flower, and I’ve got that put together. But I don’t understand anything about how they interrelate. But then, as you find more pieces, or as the prism turns and you start to connect the facets, suddenly you have new insights, how this relates to that, relates to that. You see the distinction between pain and suffering; how the practice of right speech relates to liberation; how the open heart and fear are connected, how they interweave.
Slowly, at first just two or three parts, and then gradually more and more parts begin to come together. At the point at which you begin to teach, you still may not feel confident that you understand dhamma. And if you came to me and said, “Oh Aaron, I understand it,” I would probably roll my eyes a bit.
What do you know from your own experience? What are you able to teach from your own experience? That’s your ground. You build on that. Suddenly there’s a new connection, something that you’re working on. Some of you have probably noticed that Barbara’s teaching often relates to whatever she is currently working with, like the whole question she’s been working with these last two months of armoring versus shielding. How that feels in the body. How that works with the emotions. How that relates to all the various aspects that she understands in dhamma practice.
Don’t be afraid to use your own experience and your own strengths. You have, I said a thousand piece puzzle, but let’s call it a hundred thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. As you keep putting the pieces together, slowly the relationships will start to make sense.
What I’m saying here is really just to encourage you, wherever you are, to share what you know from your own experience. Not to try to go beyond your experience. Not to feel like you should be able to go beyond it. But to trust your own experience and your own deep intention for the highest good of beings and for offering service to all beings, releasing suffering in the world. Trust the power of that intention, and that the insights, what you need to know, will come to you.
Q, we mentioned before that we had hoped to work with your meditation today, but there’s not time at this point. It would short-change it to try to squeeze it into half an hour. People just received it. I asked them to work with it on their own, so that next class we can do it together. But you described that download. That download experience is like looking at the ten thousand pieces of the puzzle and suddenly saying, “Oh, that part and this part and this part, they all fit together!” Suddenly you have a core piece of the puzzle put together. You still don’t know where those purple pieces are going to go, or where that dragon that’s appeared over there, where that’s supposed to go. But it will all come together.
Trust your intuition. Trust your experience. Trust your loving heart. And you had the experience, and shared it briefly in your email, of that download, coming to it with an intention, and having, we can’t say spirit downloaded it to you—higher self, spirit, love, the expression of your loving intention took form as thought and practice. And we can say that here is a sizable chunk of the dhamma that came through.
Each of you has this kind of experience frequently. I would like to invite you to spend some time now and/or over the summer, as part of your ongoing practice, not necessarily every day, but when it feels appropriate, once or twice a week, to take this dhamma as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle. Write down: what do I know that I’m clear about? Conditioned arising: objects arise into my experience from conditions and cease when the conditions cease. You can write the words out on your big piece of paper, or you can just make a little drawing that speaks of that to you. It’s a piece of your puzzle. Vipassana and mindfulness support practice. It’s another piece over here. The Brahma Viharas, working with the open heart, that’s another piece. Energy, working with the body, kundalini and chakras and all of the energy field, another piece. Where on the page to put that? Let’s just chuck it over here for now.
Then keep adding pieces as they occur to you. And when you see connections between pieces, draw a line. I’m not asking you to write a clear articulation of the connection. Go into that articulation in meditation, but draw a line, so that eventually you will have a web, seeing how everything is all connected to everything else.
Then look at your present drawing and ask yourself, which pieces of this do I feel confident that I understand enough to share with others? Which interconnections between these pieces do I feel confident that I understand enough? That’s Part 1. Maybe highlight them with yellow.
Which areas here do I feel weak in understanding? Have I had resistance to developing insight into these areas? Would I be willing to take these deeper into meditation, just to spend some time with these areas where I have not felt capable, inviting from my loving heart the deepening of insight so this becomes an increasingly viable tool? Not chucking it aside, saying, “I don’t understand this.” Not saying, “I should understand it.” Just, “Come on in. I welcome you. I’m willing to try working with you also.” And in this way, both your practice and your teaching will grow.
That’s really all I wanted to say. Next class we’re going to be working with Q’s material, and I think we have one more class after that, one or two, and maybe some summarization. The dhamma is so beautiful, and beyond description. So intricate and immense, and yet so simple.
When you draw this collage, see if you can find anything that runs through, that’s part of the whole thing. What might it be? Is there anything you can think that touches every aspect of dhamma?
Q: The heart.
Aaron: Another way to say that, perhaps, is love. Thinking of the heart as a vehicle for love. So the heart, love—what else? What else touches it all?
Vibration, energy, light. That touches it all. What else?
Pure awareness, thank you. Others?
These are your ground. You may find others that are part of the ground. Basically the things that you have mentioned are all the Unconditioned expressions. That’s what ties it all together.
Cultivate the beautiful seeds of these expressions in yourselves. Begin to trust that power of these seeds to come forth and shine brightly in the world. You don’t have to understand every subtle aspect of the dhamma. But if you hold the deepest intention to keep your heart open, free of contraction, and if contraction arises, not to contract around the contract, to hold the heart open with love, to feel that strong, high vibration that is the essence not just of your being but of Being, to find joy in your own lives and in sharing the dhamma.
I can only say it’s like climbing on a rocket ship. It blasts off. It goes through the friction of heavier density space, and finally it bursts into outer space where there’s no friction. Whatever momentum it has picked up just keeps it going. There’s no friction, so it won’t stop. And it keeps picking up a momentum. You are that, bursting forth into the heavens; being the light of dhamma in the universe.
Ended here. The remainder will be in a separate file when transcribed.