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Dharma of Hearing - Maria Straatmann

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 24, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Dharma of Hearing

Good evening again, my name is Maria Straatmann. I'm here for Diana, and I've been part of IMC for a lot of years. That's IMC, not the institution or the building, but IMC the sangha¹. Some of my longest-running IMC friends are in this room right now, and others that I don't know as well or at all. There are things that I think about the people that I know and that I don't know, and really what I know is that we are all here. We all came here and meditated tonight, and beyond that, there's a great deal of speculation, views, and ideas about who you are, your ideas about who I am, why we're here, what we might mean, why we're here—I might have said that twice.

Tonight's talk is going to be on the Dharma of hearing. Like all of the senses, what gets in the way of actually hearing is what we think about what we're hearing. What we think about what we're seeing, what we think about what we're expecting, what we want, what we might want—all of this gets in the way. One of the things I want is the iPad I left at home with my talk on it, but that's okay, this is going to work because all of my devices are linked, which means it's on my phone in little tiny print. So we'll see how this goes.

When I was taking training for Zen Hospice Project, one of the things that we did was we wrote down something unusual about ourselves that we didn't think people would know. We wrote it on a piece of paper and we put it in a basket. Then everybody went around and picked from the basket and tried to guess who this obscure thing belonged to. Of course, everybody wrote the most outrageous, obscure thing they could think of about themselves, and of course, very few people guessed correctly, because we don't really know one another. We have all kinds of ideas. I don't like yellow; therefore, if you like that—this isn't true by the way, this is an idea—if I didn't like yellow and you were wearing a yellow shirt, I might say there's something wrong with you.

Today I got an email from Liz Powell, who manages the sign-up page for people who want individual practice discussions. She sent me two people that are signed up for tomorrow and she said, "Here are your two people." I thought, "Well, that's great. I know people are signed up, but I don't have their names." So I wrote back and said, "I don't have their names." And she said, "Well yes, it's in the text." And I said, "Well, you used to do that, but these don't have it." She wrote back and said, "Well, here are the two names, but they are in the text." I thought, "Well..." so I went through and read every word. The problem was, she used to send it in a different format, and it was a different format than before. Sure enough, the names were there, just in a totally unexpected place so I couldn't see them. They were obvious once she told me where to find them. Obvious, but I couldn't see them.

Sometimes when somebody's talking to me, they'll say something to me and I can't hear it. I'm listening, but I can't hear it because I'm expecting to hear something else, because I'm busy planning what I want to say to them. There are all kinds of reasons. So the question is, how do we hear when we're listening? How do we hear people we actually don't want to hear? That's the real trick. We think we want to hear them, but we don't really want to hear what they have to say, maybe because we don't want to hear something about us, or something about them. We don't want to hear it.

Today I had an audiology test to get my ears checked. They put you in isolation in this room, and then they send these little tiny sounds to you. Three little beeps, an interval of time, three little beeps. They either start out softly and get louder, or the other way around, and they test each ear differently. Pretty soon I found my mind trying to decide whether I was hearing it, or I was hearing an echo, or... well, the intervals were about the same, and so I could imagine it was happening. I didn't trust my mind. Could I trust my hearing? If I couldn't trust my hearing or my mind, how did I know whether those beeps were there or not? To watch your mind go through all of these machinations and realize this was... and I was listening hard. I could feel the energy in my body listening hard, and then I said, "No, listen easy. Relax. You're not passing a test like it's going to change your life here. Listen. If you hear the beeps, push the button." All of this energy and how hard I was listening—it turned out how hard I was listening wasn't the answer. I needed to listen easily, lightly, in a relaxed way. I thought, "Okay, huh."

On the way home, I passed this corner at the corner of El Camino and Embarcadero, and there were two people out on the corner. One was waving an Israeli flag, and the other had a big sign, and the sign said, "Ceasefire, free Israelis and Palestinians from the Hamas... what do we call them... terrorists." I thought, "Okay, I know what they want, I get their message." And then I thought, "Do I get their message? Do I know what they want to say? Do I really know what they want to say?" Because what I'm reading and what I'm hearing is something that I either agree or disagree with. That's the first thing. I hear something I'm agreeing or disagreeing with—not a mental decision, but that I'm interpreting what I'm hearing based on my bias. I'm interpreting what I'm hearing.

We're not really conscious of the fact that we're interpreting what we're hearing. It's sort of, "Yeah, I'm really paying attention, I want to know." And it turns out, as opposed to this very quiet environment I was in when I was listening really hard, my sense right now is that everything is really loud. Big noises. Big noises, lots of yelling, lots of yelling. And it's really hard to hear when everyone's yelling. I know, I came from a very, very noisy family; everybody yells all the time.

One of the things I discovered in my hearing test today was that my left ear, which has had a hearing aid for about a year, is used to having a higher volume. When I was doing the test of words in noise, I've lost the ability because I've retrained my brain to have a higher volume sound in my left ear with the hearing aid. Without the hearing aid, I can't hear as well as I did before—voices, words in loud noises—but with the hearing aid it's great, because my brain has been reconfigured to work with the hearing aid.

Our brains have been reconfigured to work with our views. Those are the triggers. That's how they work, that's what humans do. Part of the problem for us is keeping that in mind when we're listening: that what we're hearing is affected by what we're thinking about what we're hearing. And what are people hearing? They say they're hearing, "but, but, but, but," or, "well, but me." Or they're hearing, "you blame, blame, blame, blame," or "why?"

Someone the other day told me that she was really sad and she wanted to know if the Buddha had anything to say about how to be in conflict. How to be with conflict without getting really angry. If that indeed is the problem or the challenge, how do you hear? How do you hear what is unacceptable to you without becoming reactive, angry, hurt, sad, depressed, hopeless? How do you hear it as something more than noise, and why would you? Why would you just not turn it off?

In thinking about that, I thought, "Well, so what are the sources of conflict?" Sources of conflict have to do with beliefs or views that you have, economic inequality, non-diversity of ethnicity, culture, money, ability, ways of dealing with the world, tribalism, a division into "me" and "you", "us" and "them", a lack of security, feeling safe. All of these things are very human characteristics, and they give rise to conflict. It's important to understand that these things are all conditional. They're just conditions. They're not in any way truths. They're sort of acquired and developed conditions. They're not absolutes, they're conditions. And they can come down to greed, hatred, and delusion. "Me, mine" is greed. Hatred is "not mine, not mine, go away, not mine." Delusion, ignorance—we just don't know, confusion.

And we have certain reactions. We have triggers that set you off. It could be a yellow shirt, it could be language that is used. We have the inner triggers, which have to do with self-criticism, self-doubt: "Oh, I'm doing it wrong again. Oh, I can't believe I'm falling into this pattern again." Outer ones have to do with anger and resentment. These are just reactions to conditions. I'm not talking here about whether things are right or wrong, or appropriate or inappropriate. I am simply describing conditions and reactions. These things happen.

So then what kind of responses do we have? We have intellectual responses. "I'm going to debate you to the death. I'm going to get my facts lined up and I'm going to talk to you about the facts of life." And in that case, things have to be right or wrong. If I'm right, you have to be wrong. We attack the other or build up ourselves. "You are the enemy, therefore you're slime, and I am right, therefore I'm angelic." We set that up in our arguments. We negotiate, and usually in negotiation, the idea is you get more from them than you give from yourself. The win-win thing is usually not on people's agenda. And compromise is really looked down on. If it's a question of purity, compromise is unacceptable. We often go into the negotiation with the idea that we're going to change somebody else's mind, but we rarely think of it as changing our minds. If you notice, all of these things have to do with views: "This is how I'm viewing the world. This is how I view the world."

The other form of reaction has to do with retribution, punishment: "You've harmed me." It has to do with how I feel about things that happened in the past.

Okay, now I've lost my little thing. This is the problem with going with something as small as this. Okay, so I'm going to give you an example. This is a poem by Ada Limón², who is the current Poet Laureate for the US, and this is called The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual. That's the title of the poem.

When you come, bring your brownness so we can be sure to please the funders.
Will you check this box? We're applying for a grant.
Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.
Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip Patrón?
Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
Don't send us the one where you were just like us, born in a greenhouse.
No, no. That's what we want to hear from you, but the garden—
don't tell us how you picked persimmons and ate them in the dirt,
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt, watching vultures pick apart another bird's bones in the sand.
No, we don't want those poems.
Tell us the one about your father stealing hubcaps after a colleague said that's what those people do.
Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho and tried to sell the hubcaps back to the man.
Don't mention your father was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball.
Tell us again about the poncho, the hubcaps, how he stole them,
how he did the thing he was trying to prove he didn't do.

I like this poem because what she's saying is, "Don't invite me because I'm brown. Don't invite me to tell the stories that make you feel good. Don't make my brownness your cause. Just see me as I am. Hear me talk. If I want to talk about my father, let me choose the reason I talk about my father. You don't get to tell me why I talk about my father."

Sometimes we get the idea that inclusiveness is a matter of checking off the boxes, when it really has to do with seeing me, seeing you. Really hearing, and not just listening. Not just listening.

One of the things that happens is we get into the habit of collectivizing people. "All of these people are the same." We forget that we're collections of individuals. Which is why I began the discussion here with we are a collection of individuals, but all I really know about us is that we all came here to meditate tonight. And I don't even know that for sure; I just know that we're all in the room claiming to meditate. Maybe somebody came here just because it's the only quiet place they thought they could come at this time. There are all kinds of reasons for people to come someplace, and the assumptions may or may not be true.

In conflict, one of the challenges is just hearing. One of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness is, when hearing, just hear. Don't bring everything you know to the party. Just see, just hear.

So one of my props that I did bring with me is The Buddha Before Buddhism, which is a translation of the Book of Eights³ that Gil Fronsdal did. I love this book. You can tell I've got stickers everywhere, and now I have paperclips as well to distinguish from the stickers. There are only eight suttas in this, and they're all written in kind of verse form, sort of like the Dhammapada⁴. And the one I want to read you is this one. The light is really dim here tonight. I'm having trouble seeing, not because of view, but because the light's not quite sufficient for me. Let's see. Oh, this is sweet, Jim. Thank you. All right, so light, I am right here. Okay, let's see.

Lusting for debates and plunging into assemblies,
they take each other to be fools.
They speak relying on what others have said.
Passionate for praise, they call themselves skillful.

Wishing for praise while debating in an assembly,
they become anxious.
Refuted, they become depressed.
Criticized and shaken, they seek their opponent's faults.

One whose doctrine is called deficient,
and by the judges rejected,
despairs and grieves.
The inferior debater moans, "I've been defeated."

Renunciants are elated and deflated
by the disputes that arise among them.
Seeing this, you should abstain from disputes.
They provide no benefit other than being praised.

Wishing for an opponent, you roar like a hero,
nourished on royal food.
Run off, O hero, to where the fight is.
As before, there is no fight here.

If, grasping to a view and disputing,
they say, "This alone is true,"
tell them, "In this dispute, you have no opponent here."

"You have no opponent here." Thank you, Jim. "You have no opponent here." I'm just not going to fight you. I hear you.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine, and we had a disagreement about a group of people that she maintained would do something, and I said, "You don't know that." This is probably my best friend, and she was getting very heated about how naive I was being. I thought, "You know, we don't have to fight about this." So I just stopped, and sure enough, that was the end of it. We went on and everything was great. We didn't have to fight about whether I was naive, whether she was right or wrong. We didn't have to fight about it. We didn't even have to agree to disagree, which was her suggestion. You actually don't have to take up "this is right or wrong." You actually don't have to take it up.

I'm going to try to do this without your light, Jim, because I think I can. So this is from the Greater Discourse on the Dead End⁵.

They say their own doctrine is perfect,
they say the doctrine of others is inferior.
Quarreling, so they dispute,
everyone saying their own opinion is true.

If it is inferior because of someone's contempt,
then no doctrine would be the best.
This is because many say the doctrine of others is inferior
while advocating their own.

If any doctrine people worship is true,
as is the path they praise,
then all doctrines would be true
and purity would belong to them all.

So, should someone say, "I know, I see, it's just like this," some believe purity comes through views. But if they see, what good is that for them? Going too far, they say purity comes from something other, something outside of them seeing. A person sees only names and appearances. Having seen, one knows only these. Whether one sees much or little, this doesn't bring purity, say the skillful.

If only what you see and experience can be true, then it's dependent on what you see and experience. All truth is dependent just on your experience. It seems like there's something wrong with that.

They are not an enemy to any doctrine,
those who are free from viewpoints.
Not clinging to the world, they have no self-reproach.
Not forming opinion, not shut down, and not desirous,
they are sages, wise ones who have laid their burden down.

You know, it feels like if you just say, "Well, I'm not going to have an opinion, then I don't have to fight with you, then everything's going to be rosy." But that's not actually what it says. It just says you don't have to fight. You don't have to claim that you are always right. You actually don't have to say, "This is right and you are wrong."

Now that brings us to my dear friend Joseph Goldstein. How do you get around this problem? How do you get around the views that you hold, the beliefs that you hold, the values that you hold? What do you do with those? You can't ignore them and be an integral person. You have them. The trick is mindful awareness. To see them. To see, "Ah, this is my value," and to see the other person and see that they hold also a value. And to see we're both in this room, we're both on this Earth.

I saw an amazing quote in one of the poetry books I was going through today. The title of the poem was, "An Israeli Says to a Palestinian: I Had No Idea We Shared Some of My Same Aspirations." Really? How could you not know that? It's because they were categorized as something else, something not human. In fact, it's amazing how often we dehumanize people in an effort not to feel them, not to be touched by them, not to be touched by their arguments. It's not a conscious process; it's very simple. We just say they're wrong and we become self-righteous, or "they're not like me, and therefore they must be wrong." That's kind of a red flag. You sort of go, "Wait a minute, they probably are thinking the same thing, and we can't both be right."

So, the ability to be present for the fact that someone else holds their views as strongly as I do. That someone else burns with the same fervor that I burn with, and they experience the same burning. And what is it that this person is experiencing? What do they actually believe? What do they actually want? What do they actually believe when I look at them as a person and not an institution or a group of persons? How do I hear them? How am I listening? Am I listening with an intention to hear them, or am I listening with an intention to have better arguments next time? How am I listening?

This is the Buddhadharma magazine, which is a Buddhist publication that comes out four times a year, and the most recent issue is on Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is a Buddhist concept that is more commonly spoken of in the Mahayana⁶ Buddhist traditions—Zen and Tibetan Buddhism traditions, Pure Land Chinese Buddhism—and less so in Theravadan⁶ Buddhism. What I want to talk about is not Buddha-nature, but Joseph Goldstein's response to the question of what did he think about Buddha-nature. Let me pull up the page, because he's Theravadan, right?

He wrote a book called One Dharma in which he talked about the similarity of all forms of Buddhism and what they had in common versus their differences. Some of these terms are used more often in the later traditions. I think a popular understanding of some of the later traditions is that we're already enlightened and we simply have to realize it. That might imply that it's more accessible than it actually is. Whether we phrase it in terms of "we're already enlightened and we just need to realize it" or "we're not yet realized and we have to get there," the task is formidable. So that's how he set it up, and he went on a long retreat and he argued with himself.

An important consideration here is when you're hearing, you also are hearing the arguments in your own head. The arguments you have with yourself where you're trying to understand something for you. Those arguments are going on in your head, and you need to be able to hear those arguments also. So here's what he did, and I found this quite wonderful.

Let's see: "There's only one Dharma. We may not see the unity of it all all the time, but it's not like there are two dharmas out there." He was asked a question about him being a monk, and he says, "I wasn't a monk..." I'm on the wrong page. Sorry. See, I had this all written out, but I don't think I can read it off my phone so I have to find it here. Maybe I can find it. Maybe I can read it. All right.

In One Dharma, "When I was struggling with trying to reconcile the different views, the thing that helped me the most was the phrase: I use metaphysics as skillful means, not as truth statements." Skillful means, not truth statements. "I finally realized I was asking the wrong question. It wasn't a question of who was right. Skillful means means not to see each of these positions as statements of truth, but as skillful means for not clinging." Because in my understanding and practice in several traditions, to me that is the essence of the free mind. The mind that's not clinging to anything as "I" or "mine."

If you think of your beliefs and your views as being "I" or "mine," that's where we get entangled. Clinging to views. Clinging to views is the problem, not whether the views are right or wrong. So if you hold the view lightly and say, "Huh, what do I learn from that view? And what do I learn from that view?" then you come up with something that more closely resembles a wise attention to conditions. In fact, I think somewhere here, yes, he says: "In earlier years, I remember getting into these intense Dharma debates, totally convinced I was right and that my view was the Right View, and passionately arguing it and believing it. One of my favorite mantras these days is 'Who knows?' When I'm fully enlightened, maybe then I can say I know, but until then, it seems best to keep an open mind. In this regard, I have a new definition of enlightenment." Okay, what is it? "Lightening up. We could think of the path as the process of lightening up from the more superficial levels to the most profound levels, because basically, lightening up means letting go of all self-reference, which of course is no easy task."

So that's what I want to leave with you. The way to be with the unacceptable is to lighten up and to say, "Suppose I look at it this way, and suppose I look at it this way. What can I learn from this? How can I hold all of this and not have to choose something as right or wrong that sets me on the path toward ill will, greed, and delusion?" I wish you all uncertainty and the freedom that comes with it. Thank you. But don't leave your iPads at home.

Q&A

Maria: Are there any questions, comments, rotten tomatoes?

Questioner 1: I just like to say thank you so much for your addressing our situation in the world, and listening, and hearing. Thank you.

Maria: Thank you. It's hard. It's hard to be challenged in your deepest places of what's right and wrong in the world and to not react. So the tools that we have are the tools that allow us to see as clearly as we can see. "Oh, this is what's happening. Oh, this is what's happening. Oh, look how I'm reacting to that. Oh, that really hurt." Yeah, thank you.

Questioner 2: I took that test in middle school, the hearing test, and I had the exact same experience you described. I thought, "God, I'm so neurotic. If I was just a normal person, I could just listen and answer the test." And then hearing you say that, rather than drop my decades-old judgment, I thought, "Oh, she's crazy too." [Laughter]

Maria: Well, you know, it's easy, right? You say, "Well, that's not acceptable to behave that way." So now in my defense, I said, "Well, I'll just let it go." And that's the part that I think we need more freedom around. The part that basically lets us off the hook a little bit.

I was talking to my husband today about how often we refer to what's happening now with the war, and there are kind of two approaches, or more now. You can not read anything, you can read constantly. Reading constantly is probably just foolish. Not reading at all is in denial. And somewhere in between is a place where we say, "This is happening and I'm not prepared. This is happening and I don't want it to be true." No matter what else you believe: "This is happening and I don't want it to be true."

Today as I was thinking about it, I realized that what's up in the news is happening in the Middle East, but there is still war in Ukraine, and those people aren't getting any relief. I remember when that was upfront and that seemed like the most crucial thing. What's true is that people are suffering everywhere. We were talking about end-of-the-year donations and I said, "Well, you know, let's feed people. People need to eat. I'm sure there are people here who need to eat." There's suffering in the world, and we don't have the means to end all suffering in the world, but the response to lose all hope or to become angry is simply not useful. It's not skillful.

So I'm sort of reminded of the listing of things for Right Speech⁷. Is it true? Is it useful? Is it timely? Is it kind? And that pretty much goes for everything. That's the way we listen, that's the way we make decisions about what to do. There's no right or wrong. Sometimes things are skillful and sometimes they're not, but it's not because things are necessarily right or wrong.

There is a poem that is haunting me. I don't know whether I brought it. This is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye⁸, who's a person that I read some poems from last week. This was written at the time of the last war in Gaza. For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15.

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen on October's breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don't gentle it, please.
We live among stray thoughts, tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat with stray devotions,
we feel at home among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not wish anyone well,
you can't tell us otherwise by naming it mildly.
This bullet was never the friend of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft-saying—Friendly fire, straying death.

Why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?
Mohammed, Mohammed deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed under the bridge.

A bullet is a bullet is a bullet. It has no good intentions. So have good intentions, and I trust all will be well. Good night.