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Investigation and Wisdom - Ines Freedman

The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Investigation and Wisdom

Good morning. Does it sound good? Can everyone hear? Great, thank you.

I'm going to begin with a little story about one of the monks at Ajahn Brahm's¹ monastery. Ajahn Brahm is the abbot of a monastery in Western Australia that's kind of remote. So it's not very easy to get back and forth to town. When people need to see the doctor, it's quite a trek, and monks don't drive, so it's not so convenient.

One of the monks was having a lot of dental problems. He'd gone to the dentist, and then a different problem started. Ajahn Brahm was walking around the monastery and he sees that monk standing by the woodshed with pliers and a bloody tooth, and he realizes how he dealt with this problem. He asked him, "How did you do that? How were you able to do that?"

The monk said that when he had the idea, he was resting in his kuti², and he decided to do this. He had a dull pain right at that point. He asked himself, "Does it hurt pulling the tooth right this moment?" He said, "No, it doesn't hurt now." He started walking to the shed, and he asked himself, "Well, does it hurt now? Nope." He kept walking to the shed, holds the door open. "No, it doesn't hurt." And then he put the pliers to his tooth and he asked himself, "Does it hurt? No." He yanked, and "Wow, that hurt!" [Laughter] And then it was over.

The moral, of course, is the fact that he didn't spend all that time caught in dread and anticipation. How much more suffering do we cause ourselves to avoid that one moment of pain, or that very short period of pain? We can spend weeks in that state, some of us, just avoiding that. I told the story to one of my students, and he came back to me a couple of months later and said, "I just used that when I went to get my blood drawn." He said he used to dread getting his blood drawn for days before, and he said, "I just kept asking myself, 'Is it hurting now? No.'"

This brings me to the topic of this talk, which is investigation. That was what he was actually doing: investigating what's happening right now. It's not the imagination of the dread or the fear. What's happening right now? There's no pain. If we just keep coming back to that—what's happening here, what's happening now—that's the wisdom that can come from investigation.

The Buddha taught that everything we need to learn on the path to freedom can be discovered through our own powers of investigation. Everything. Basically, what he taught us is to train that ability, to develop that power of investigation that really sees clearly what's happening at any given moment.

A lot of us grew up with TV shows, like crime shows, where there's always the investigation. The investigation always in my mind was that they're trying to solve a crime. But what it has in common with the investigation that we use in practice is that in the crime scene, they're looking at the details. What are all the details there? They're looking for what's out of place, what's something unusual. They're noticing everything that there is.

In a very similar way, we do that when we investigate our own minds. We look at the details of our experience. What's really happening here? Not what we want to be happening here, but what's really happening here. And instead of noticing what's out of place or doesn't belong, we notice what causes us stress, what causes us contraction, what we're pushing away, and what we're pulling towards us. We notice those things.

When we notice those things, it gives us a choice. We can either continue pushing something away, or we can just look again. "Oh, what's happening here? Oh, look, this is how pushing something away feels like." This is the power that we develop: the ability to keep seeing what's here. And when stress rises in any form, to make the choice to let go of the stress in whatever skillful way we find.

Mindfulness, Concentration, and Investigation

In Insight Meditation, mindfulness and investigation go hand in hand. They work together. Most of the time when we're applying it, we're not thinking of applying investigation; you're just doing it.

For instance, one way to think of it is like when we're looking at the breath, think of it like an apple instead. You're looking at an apple, and you know it's an apple. You recognize it, and you're paying enough attention that you know it's an apple in your hand. But if you investigate it, you'll go, "Wow, that's got a lot of red on this side, some green over here. Wow, this one's a kind of flat-looking apple." I had one of those the other day; it was just the flattest apple I'd ever seen, it was kind of squished. [Laughter] So you see all those little details.

Mindfulness just sees that the apple is there. And then you have the quality of concentration that keeps you paying attention. So you're looking at the apple and suddenly you're somewhere else, and concentration says, "No, this is the task at hand. Let's look at this apple." So you've got all these three qualities that are kind of working together.

When we're watching the breath, just knowing we're watching the breath, and then we start fading away and the mind gets dull, we can apply a little more investigation. "Oh, what's really happening here?" And you start looking at the little details. There's such a difference in the breath sometimes when you're just seeing it like, "Oh yeah, in, out, one, two," compared to when you're really right there.

Sometimes I've used the term "caressing the breath." It's like if you're caressing a young child or a dog you love. You're not spaced out going, "Yeah, yeah, I'm caressing the dog." You're enjoying it; there's an engagement in it. So sometimes we can bring that intimacy with the breath, really being there with it very closely.

It's not that all forms of investigation are tiny in detail. Sometimes it's like looking through a microscope. Have most of you looked through a microscope once, or seen pictures? It's so alive in there sometimes! There's so much going on, blood cells, or... I saw vitamin C in one of those really ultra-microscopes, and it looked like this incredible mandala. It was just beautiful. If you look really closely, things open up in a different way.

But then at other times, what's useful in practice is to open up the vision, open up your scope of attention and make it broader. It's kind of like looking at the night sky through a telescope. You see millions of details out there. You're not going to focus on all of them, right? You'd go bananas. [Laughter] Getting a fruit salad here: apple, banana! It gets really big, and within that largeness, we see different kinds of details.

It's the same thing in meditation. Sometimes, if the mind is really sluggish—I'm sure all of you have experienced a little bit of that sloth and torpor³ that happens on occasion where it just starts drifting—paying really close attention can really help. Really noticing those minute parts of the breath.

But if you have a really restless mind, it can be really helpful to open up the attention really big, to give it room. The image we use sometimes is the image of wild horses. If you put them in a corral, they're really miserable; they're just trying to get out. But you put them in a wide pasture and they're moving fast and happily, and they're just so beautiful and graceful.

So with a fast mind, a busy mind, a restless mind, we don't have to change it. We just have to know: "Oh, it's a restless, busy mind." We don't have to push it away. We see it, we investigate it. What is it like to have a busy mind? "Oh, it's beautiful, it's like wild horses up there." We can allow it to be that way.

Discernment on the Path

We can say there are two aspects to investigation. There's seeing what's there. "This is a piece of paper, this is a bell." Seeing the details of my environment. When I sat down, I looked really carefully that I didn't sit on anything, especially the microphone. So you see those details.

But the other part of investigation in the practice, in the Dharma, is discernment: the ability to see distinctions between things. To see which ones are helpful in terms of freeing the heart and freeing the mind, and which ones actually aren't helpful.

For example, we're meditating, and suddenly we find ourselves in this wonderful fantasy. It's really enjoyable. It doesn't seem like it's causing us any dukkha⁴ at that moment, any stress. It's just a wonderful fantasy. And the mind goes, "I just spent a lot of time in my fantasy. I kind of want to go back, it was really juicy." But investigation says, "Is this forward-leading to the reason you're actually here? Why are you here? You took this time to meditate. You can fantasize any time." It's not bad, it's not a wrong thing, it just isn't what you're doing right now. So it sees and discerns that's not helpful for what we're trying to do here, which is train the mind. It's not making it wrong.

That's such an important point. How many of you have had a meditation and said, "That was a bad sitting"? You may not have said it out loud, but you've thought that, right? That piece of unhelpful thinking is a really important piece. We're not training the mind to stay on the breath. We're not training the mind to stay concentrated. We're training the mind to be free of attachment.

Sometimes we get stuck and we mistakenly think that the purpose of the meditation was for it to be a certain way. But the purpose of meditation is to show up enough that we see how we cause our own suffering. The more clearly we see that, the easier it is to begin to have it fade away and to let go of it.

So when we think, "That's a bad meditation," that moment is a moment of not seeing clearly. What did we learn? How do we meet our experience when it's not what we want?

The other image I sometimes have is that I'm walking down a path, hiking, and there's a fork in the road. On the left is the way I always go home; it's a short way. On the right, it's a little bit of a longer way, so I rarely take it.

As I'm walking, I really want to get home already, so I'm ready to go left. But all of a sudden, because I'm being mindful and investigating, I notice that path is really muddy right now. The other path is on the sunny side and it's pretty dry. So I make a choice: "I'm going to take this side because this is taking me home in an easier way." It doesn't make the other path bad, or wrong, or a failure, or anything. It's just how it is right now; that path is not helpful.

When the torments of the mind arise—we all have these universal things that happen in our minds where we're contracted and unhappy about our experience—when those things arise, we note, "Oh, that's what arose." It's not wrong for being there. We investigate it, and that investigation is a wholesome factor of mind. We are already transforming it.

For instance, if your habit of mind is worrying—some people really worry a lot, they're always worrying about stuff—the moment you see, "Oh, that's worry," you're no longer worrying. You're now investigating. You've already changed the picture; you've already opened the container up. And this is actually the way to freedom from worry. When we do that, it weakens the habit of worry. Every time, it weakens that habit.

So when the meditation ends and we're unhappy with what happened, we investigate that unhappiness. "Oh, I had an expectation. I didn't get things my way." That's the Dharma. The teachings of the Dharma say that needing to get what we want, trying to always get what we want, is what causes us suffering. Life is going to give us at least half of what we don't want. So it's really about being able to be happy whether we get what we want or we don't get what we want.

Meeting Hindrances with Affectionate Curiosity

How do we investigate? When we're relaxed and we're paying attention, investigation just shows up. Have you ever had a wonderful conversation with a friend, and you're just interested? You're not working at it. You're not doing anything difficult. You're just there, you're enjoying the conversation, you're just interested. In the same way, if we're interested in the breath and we're noticing the details, we're not working at it.

But when we get caught by something, it's very easy to lose that relaxation. Let's say one of my favorite hindrances⁵ has always been noise while I'm meditating. A really loud noise has got me caught. We used to live in the desert in this really beautiful, pristine space—two and a half acres. It was so beautiful and quiet. Then all of a sudden, at 6:30 in the morning, these young guys on their motorcycles would come through the dirt roads and just circle the area over and over and over again. And rage would rise. Meditating, yes, rage would rise! So how do you meet that?

There was the displeasure of the noise; it was very unpleasant. And it came and then went, came and went. And then there was the idea: "How dare they! They shouldn't be doing this." There's all this extra stuff that came up, and I kept negotiating in my mind how to fix it. Get a water pistol? All sorts of creative ideas! [Laughter] But what's really important is what do we do in our own heart? How do we meet those things in our own heart?

I remember being really impressed when I heard about Bernie Glassman⁶. He is a Zen teacher, and he used to hold these 10-day retreats under a very busy freeway bridge. Everybody who took the retreat was supposed to have no money, no possessions, and just come as they are. They were to just live there that way with nothing for 10 days.

That's really the practice of letting go: can we be at peace in ourselves when we're not getting what we want, when things aren't the way we want them to be, including our mind state? That's the real key thing here—to be okay even when our mind state isn't okay.

For instance, when I was very angry and uptight, and I'm meditating, I thought, "Yeah, I'm going to do some loving-kindness towards those guys..." That was the state of my mind. But then finally arose the memory of Ajahn Sucitto⁷ talking about affectionate curiosity. That's how he likes to describe curiosity—a quality of mind that's affectionate. It's not curiosity for curiosity's sake; it's a friendly curiosity.

So I turned that affectionate curiosity towards my anger and turmoil, and I really saw that pain in myself. I saw how much worse it was than the unpleasant noise. God, it was so much worse than the unpleasant noise! So I was able to really apply that. When our mind is having a tantrum, it's not different than when a four-year-old is having a tantrum. It's pretty similar: "I didn't get my ice cream, and the whole world is falling down on my head!" It's a really serious matter to that four-year-old.

That's what our mind is doing—it's having a tantrum. With a child, you kind of smile. You have this sweet, affectionate feeling: "Oh, look at how they're doing that. Let me just support them while they have their tantrum, and it'll be over." We can do that with our own minds. We can do that with ourselves. Wherever we find contraction, we can bring kindness.

Investigation gives us that choice. It shows us we're not trapped in that turmoil. We have a choice to be mindful, to see what's here, and to let go of what we can let go. Not to force ourselves to let go, but to let go of what lets go. Relax into the turmoil. Allow it to move through us. Every form of turmoil, every emotion, every contraction comes and goes eventually.

Choosing Where to Focus

One of the things that we often forget is that we actually can choose what thoughts we're going to have, in some way, just by changing what we're paying attention to, what the focus of our attention is. For instance, let's say we're in the car—I saw these puddles here, so this is appropriate in my mind—and we find we've got a flat tire. We get out of the car, we've done everything we need to do: we call work, we say we're going to be late, and we call AAA to come and change our tire. And then we just have to wait.

On a day like today, we can sit there and our mind can just be focused on, "Oh God, I'm going to be late, I'm going to have all this work to do." All the stuff that goes on through a mind that's worried and having an unpleasant experience. Or we can actually shift our attention to what's here: "Oh, it's a beautiful day, beautiful sky."

It's the same thing we do in our meditation. When we're caught up in worry, we don't have to keep scratching at that scab. That cycle of worry, or cycle of planning, where we're just massaging it to death—we can just shift the attention to a little bigger point of view. We watch it. "Oh, look at that worry going on. See what's happening. Look at how the body feels with that worry. I'm not relaxed. Can I relax into it and allow the worry?" Not make it wrong. Not, "Oh, it's got to go away, go away." We just allow it to be there until it goes away. It will go away on its own when we give it room, we give it space, and when we give it curiosity.

Investigating Body, Heart, and Motivation

When things are simple in meditation, it's very simple to investigate. But sometimes when the mind is caught in a hindrance, it feels very complicated. One of the ways that I investigate when it feels too confusing to know what to pay attention to—when there's so much chaos going on in my mind—is to look to the body first. How is the body? Is the body relaxed here? We don't have contracted states in the mind without something contracting in the body.

Then I go to the heart, to the emotional state. How are my emotions right now? That's where I might notice I'm unhappy with what's happening. "This is just such a terrible meditation. I'm a terrible meditator." Well, that's more the cognitive side, because of these ideas: "If I was a good meditator, this wouldn't be happening. If I was a mature person, I wouldn't be having these immature thoughts." All these ideas that we have in our minds.

So we notice how we feel about things. Maybe there's fear going on. Maybe there's sadness going on. Maybe we're lonely. All these different things that human beings can experience. So look to the body, to the feelings, to the thoughts about how we are. We also can look to motivation. The body, heart, and mind are obvious; those are the things that are there all the time. But our motivation is something that can get away from us, that can go unseen. This is, in some ways, right at the heart of the practice: are we wanting, or are we wanting to push something away?

That sometimes is all our miseries: "I want something. I want a better meditation. I want it to be more fulfilling. I want, want, want, want." That moving forward doesn't allow us to see what's here, to be with this. Or you don't like what you're feeling, you want to push it away. Wanting it to go away, wanting things to change—it's funny, in some ways they are exactly the same thing. Not wanting things the way they are, wanting them to be different. Sometimes we experience it as wanting to have something else, and sometimes we experience it as wanting to push away what's there. Just notice however you feel it in your experience in the moment.

Just as a general rule that I really appreciate, which I heard many years ago: if we're struggling—anytime we're struggling—something is being left out of our attention. It's an interesting thought if you really bring that to heart. Whenever we're struggling.

Even when we're struggling doing something physical. For instance, I remember when I was learning to use a hammer, and I just kept trying to control the experience to get it just right, and it felt like a struggle. It really took convincing for me to let go. And the trust to let go—at that point, I stopped struggling to try to get it right, and that made all the difference in the world. Stopping the struggle.

So anytime we're struggling in our own minds and our own hearts, there's something we're not seeing. Whatever we need to do might be difficult, but there's a difference between doing something difficult and struggling. Like climbing a mountain where it's really steep, and you've been going for an hour, and your legs are really tired. It's difficult, but you don't have to struggle. It's just difficult. It might be very unpleasant, but we don't have to struggle with it. We don't have to add all this other stuff. If we're struggling, what are we not seeing? Aversion. We don't like the fact that it's hard, and we're adding that to our experience of difficulty, which is a burden. If we're just with the difficult, it's not as hard as if we're with the difficult and then have the attitude that it shouldn't be this way. That adds a lot of extra.

The Awakening Factor of Investigation

Investigation in the deeper practices of meditation is called the tool for wisdom, dhammavicaya⁸. It's the wisdom that arises from this. This really points to the discerning aspect of investigation: the part that sees what's helpful, what's forward-leading, and what's not helpful.

This is Insight Meditation, and at every level of practice, we have different types of insights that arise. Sometimes listening to a Dharma talk, we can have very wonderful insight. Sometimes a teacher says something, and it really resonates with us. I'm sure all of you who have been coming regularly know it's one of the things that brings you back: so much resonates with something inside you that knows the Dharma is true. This stuff is true; it works.

And then we investigate maybe while we're meditating. The mind is having trouble stabilizing, and through investigation we come to the understanding that if we just really pay attention to the breath, the mind eventually calms. "Oh, it does actually calm." At some point, it becomes really something we understand. It's an insight into the way our mind works.

At other times, our personal stories show up. I'll give you an example. One of the things that happened to me, I noticed on retreat while I was meditating, was that there was just something that wasn't quite right. I was staying on the breath, I was calm, but there was this overall tone in my mind that was just slightly off. I just couldn't pinpoint it. I kept practicing and looking more carefully.

What I noticed is that every time my mind drifted, when it came back, I felt like I had failed for having gone away. That habit of thinking that every time my mind drifted I had failed was so strong in me. I watched it time after time. Even while I'm watching it, it's doing it again. Wow, that sinking feeling of failure.

So I watched it for a really long time as it slowly got a little bit less. It was interesting because on a daily meditation, I would have thought I was doing really well. But on retreat, I was expecting there to be much less drifting. Expectation, of course. As I started seeing it more and more carefully, I started getting more affectionate with it, softer with it, until it finally just kind of faded. So that just doesn't arise anymore for me.

But things like that don't necessarily go away with one time of seeing them. I don't want to give you that false idea. Some things do, but a lot of things take years sometimes to let go of. I've learned to accept what lets go, and accept what doesn't let go yet. That's been a big part of my practice: seeing that the things we're still holding on to are there. It's part of the wisdom we have.

We often have what I call personal insights. As I've mentioned, the mind can have repetitive patterns: whenever the mind isn't focusing on something, it has a fallback. For some people, that fallback might be planning. How many of you did some planning while you're meditating? "Oh, this is what I'm going to do later." But most of the planning we do in meditation is actually not useful planning. It's often just compulsive planning that isn't particularly helpful.

These are personal insights when we see these inside ourselves. Again, we don't force ourselves to stop planning, but we see what's driving that planning. For myself, I'm a really good planner. It's a skill, and it was always my tendency to do this in meditation too. Part of planning for me was enjoyable. I like planning, it's fun. When it's fun, I feel happy. "Let's plan this project together!" It's always fun and exciting.

But often I'd find the planning in meditation was not that kind of planning. It was the other kind. It would be this kind of contracted: "We're having friends over for dinner, I'm going to make blah blah blah... well, maybe I'll make this, maybe I'll sit this person over here, maybe I'll do this." Just these kind of unhelpful things that arise from this anxiety or worry underneath.

As we get curious about it, we don't need to shove it away and go back to the breath. We just get curious about it and we notice, "Oh, this is how worry feels. This is how anxiety feels in my body. This is what's here. Oh okay, I can relax into it. I can allow that. I don't have to fight it, and it will go away. It will just move away. It will change." Everything changes, right? Including worry and planning. We allow it.

And as we return, we return without that having been wrong, without it having been something that we blew. It's just, "Oh, back home. Welcome home. Nice to be back." So we're developing a wholesome attitude in our entire meditation. In the times when things arise that are contracted and difficult, and in the times when things feel like they're wonderful. It's a wholesome attitude of mind, of heart.

When the awakening factor of investigation is really well established—and this is where retreat practice can really help take us much deeper into this—we start investigating much subtler levels of reality. Instead of noticing the grossness of, "Oh, my stomach feels tied," there is so much more subtleness we start experiencing. We start seeing that everything, on a very deep level, arises and passes away.

We all know intellectually that everything's impermanent, right? Nobody would argue with that. Everything is impermanent, and everything goes away. There's nothing we'll ever be able to keep. So intellectually we realize that if everything's going away, nothing can make us permanently happy.

As we practice in the deeper levels, we start seeing that on a bone-deep level. It's just so much deeper. It's not in the intellect; it's non-verbal. It's a non-verbal knowing that nothing out there is going to satisfy. There's nowhere out there to look for satisfaction. There's nothing in here to look for satisfaction. It's a letting go, a deeper and deeper letting go.

That's why investigation is the tool of wisdom. Because it brings us to the realization—which is again, not an intellectual realization—that there's nothing worth holding on to. There's nothing worth grasping. And the freedom that comes from that is what allows a very deep peace. We can touch on that at times, and we can live with it at times. Sometimes it just arises for little pieces here and there. But however it is, this is the path of practice.

This is where the practice takes us: to the point of not grabbing on to anything. To these fleeting lives, these fleeting bodies, everything in life—the trees, the beautiful trees. It calls us to just be here. Be here with what's here. Our life is here, not in the future when we become good meditators. It's this beautiful balance in the practice between being fully here, and yet being on a path that's forward-leading. Stepping here, here, here, but also knowing that we're forward-leading, developing our minds, developing the direction of freedom.

I'm going to just end with a very short quote by Ajahn Chah⁹: "Peace within us is to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It's not found in a forest or a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually running towards it."

Thank you all.