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Eight Worldly Winds - Jim Podolske

The following talk was given by Jim Podolske at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Eight Worldly Winds

Good evening, everyone. How's the sound for you? Okay. [Applause] Good. Well, as you can tell, Diana's not here tonight. She asked me last week if I would fill in for her.

For those of you who have been around the Buddhist scene for a while, you know we have a lot of lists—lists of various qualities and activities. Tonight, I wanted to talk about one of the lists of eight, sometimes called the Eight Worldly Winds¹, or the eight concerns, conditions, or vicissitudes. There are eight conditions, energies, or behaviors that we all engage in and experience.

They're outlined in this sutta by the Buddha called the Lokavipatti Sutta², AN 8.6. It's a list of eight things that are four pairs. These are all energies, conditions, or experiences that we all experience continually throughout our lives, whether we're just starting out in this practice or whether you've reached the end. They're all going to occur. So that's why it's important to learn to recognize these and see under what conditions they arise, and how we relate to them. How are you going to relate to these things that are going to be a ubiquitous part of your experience?

I realized I picked this topic based on something that Tanya Wiser told me, and then as I went and I looked at talks in the recent past, I realized that Tanya has given five talks about these last month and Gil gave a whole series of talks a couple weeks ago. So if what I say tonight doesn't exactly click with you, there's plenty of talks on Audio Dharma about the Eight Worldly Winds.

I'll start off by describing them. The first pair are gain and loss. This refers not only to physical things like money and resources, or possessions, but also relationships. Our family, our friends, co-workers. We gain new family when somebody gets married or has a child or something like that, and then we lose people from our family. Death is a part of life, so there's continual gain and loss in the realm of relationships. Sometimes we gain new friends and other friends may move away or you may have some rupture in the relationship with a friend, and things change that way.

So gain and loss can be seen all the way from the very monumental gains and losses, like losing a friend or a parent to death, to very subtle gains and losses. As I was thinking about this today, I was driving to have lunch with a friend, and I think there were four stoplights between my house and the restaurant. At all four of them, I hit the light wrong. I got to one just as the left turn light turned red. Normally, I would have just kind of mumbled under my breath or something like that, but I thought, "Oh yeah, this is loss." I lost a couple of minutes because I have to wait for the whole cycle to go through. Then one light was actually with me, so I felt like I gained a little bit there. So this gain and loss experience can occur at many, many different levels, and oftentimes it goes on unnoticed. You don't notice that something is being gained or something is being lost, but it can color our experience. That's the first pair to look at: gain and loss.

The next pair is described as fame and disrepute. Now, probably most of you don't use the term disrepute; I don't. So it could be fame and disgrace, or fame and insignificance. Instead of fame, you might want to use the word status. So, fame and insignificance. Who doesn't want to be the center of attention, to have the spotlight on them, to be recognized, heard, celebrated? And then the opposite of fame or status can be either disgrace, in which you're still getting attention, but it's sort of a negative attention that you don't really want, or insignificance, not getting paid attention to. You're kind of out there on the periphery of the crowd or in the corner. I imagine we could all recognize having experienced fame and disrepute in our lives, sometimes in a major way, sometimes in a minor way.

For me, one of the earliest times I can remember in my life was my senior year in high school. The last or second to last day of high school, we had an awards day where everybody went into the gymnasium and they had a stage set up. The head of the math department got up and announced that this year all of the awards being given in mathematics were going to one person, and it was me. I walked up there and I got a prize and a little certificate or something. This was many years ago before being a math geek had any cachet to it at all. So I was sort of famous, but only to a handful of other people that actually saw that as a valuable prize. But nonetheless, there is value to being recognized, to being heard, to being valued, and it can also push us around. It can also influence how we act and talk and experience our lives. And the same with its opposite: being disgraced or being marginalized.

The third pair I missed earlier is praise and blame, or praise and censure.

And then the fourth pair of worldly winds are pleasure and pain. I don't think that I could even enumerate all of the possible kinds of pleasures and pains that you may experience, both physical and emotional. Like when I got here this evening, I went in the kitchen and I found that there was some dark chocolate, so that was pleasurable. But if I ate the whole bar, it probably wouldn't have been so pleasurable. Pleasure has its limits. In the same way with pain, most of the time we avoid pain. It's not something that we want to welcome in. On the other hand, if you practice anything, like sports, you may find that you need to work hard enough that some pain arises. Or if you've been injured, I've had a number of experiences where I've had to go through physical therapy. I don't think there's any physical therapy that you can do that doesn't involve some degree of discomfort or pain. You just have to see the value of experiencing that to decide to go through it.

So, these are the four pairs. They're all things that are prevalent in our experience all the time.

Why, if we can't avoid them, if this practice doesn't lead to the end of these eight worldly winds, why talk about them? Here, I'm relying on this sutta that Thanissaro Bhikkhu translated. What the Buddha talks about in there is the difference between how an uninstructed mind, he calls it an "ordinary run-of-the-mill person," responds when they experience these things, and how a well-instructed person, a well-instructed mind, responds to these eight worldly winds.

I have to say, I think I'm somewhere between these two. I'm not an uninstructed mind, and I'm not a completely well-instructed mind at this point. So I'm sort of here with all of you, working on this. The first thing about these eight worldly winds is, do we notice when they're operating? Are we mindful? Are we clear that praise is going on or that blame is going on?

An uninstructed mind, first of all, wouldn't recognize that force or that wind or that energy going on. As a result, they wouldn't see these three qualities of it: that it's inconstant, it's stressful, and it's subject to change. I imagine all of you have noticed that when you have a pleasant experience—you might listen to some piece of music that you love or have a wonderful meal or get a great massage—when it's over, it's over. There might be a little bit of lingering to it.

Two other things that can occur when one of these winds is operating are hope and fear. For example, when gain is operating, we hope that it stays as long as possible and we fear that it won't. There's some hope of trying to hold on to an experience and some fear that it's going to go away. Now, hope and fear on their own aren't intrinsically bad. It's good to hope for a better world, or fear can help protect us from things. But in this case, hope and fear can also get in the way of us really experiencing what's going on. If something pleasant is going on, and we're hoping that it'll just last longer and longer and we're afraid it won't, then we're missing the pleasant experience. We're not fully there.

So one of the differentiations between these two uninstructed and fully instructed minds is that one is going to probably automatically go to hope and fear, and the other will just go to seeing it more clearly, seeing its impermanent nature, seeing its stressful nature, seeing its inconstant nature, and then just, if it's pleasant, enjoying it, and if it's painful, acknowledging it, recognizing that it's there and not getting carried away.

The first element, then, is to be able to be aware when these eight winds are operating. The next one is that for the uninstructed mind, the mind can remain consumed by the wind. It is maintained, sort of stuck in it. If somebody's praised you, your mind can just latch on and try to cling to what can't be clung to. Whereas for somebody that's well-instructed, their mind is not consumed. They can see it but don't get caught in the story of what it means or how they can make it last longer or push it away. It just sees it, recognizes it, and experiences it. Using one of the words Diana uses, it basically digests the experience. It brings it in and it processes it without getting stuck.

The third phrase from this sutta I had a little difficulty with. It's that for an uninstructed mind, they "welcome the arisen gain and rebel against the arisen loss." There can be a way in which the mind grasps on to and clings to what it wants and rebels against, pushes away, what it doesn't want. The word that I had trouble with was "welcome," because in some ways I like the idea of welcoming things. In my own mind, I realized I don't think that the translation really meant "welcome" as in be open and accepting, but more welcoming like taking in uncritically something that you really like. The image that came to me was being welcomed by a carnival barker. Some of you may have never been to a carnival; that's kind of an old-style form of entertainment. But they have these games like the ring toss and the coin toss where there's a barker out in front that's always trying to get you to come and try out the game. They're always a con, but they rely on this sense of welcoming people to their booth. That was the image that came to me.

Whereas the well-instructed mind doesn't welcome the arisen gain or the arisen praise or the arisen pleasure, nor does it rebel against the opposite. Again, in reading this, it can sound a little bit passive, like the practice is just to notice, to not be reactive. I don't think that's what this is talking about. I think it is not only allowable but also necessary that when things arise, you do respond to them. What's important, though, is that there's some pause, some break between seeing what's going on and then responding in a way with as much wisdom and compassion as you can find. These eight worldly winds can be responded to either in a sort of immediate, knee-jerk, reactive way, or you can respond to them in a more thoughtful, wise, and compassionate way. That's to me the difference between the uninstructed and the well-instructed mind in terms of working with these winds.

The final result is that for an ill-instructed mind, this doesn't lead to the experience of being released from suffering. It is possible, if you're not recognizing what's going on and developing some skill at recognizing and not getting caught by them, then you can go through life just continually reacting to these eight forces in a way that is sort of a never-ending spiral of suffering. The image that came for me on that was where I grew up in the Midwest. We'd often drive on dirt roads, and if it was raining and there was a rut, the car could get in a position where the drive wheel would have nothing underneath it, so it would just keep turning and turning and turning, and the car wouldn't go anywhere. You had to do something. You had to get out and rock the car or maybe get a tow truck or something to push. You need to do something to get out of that rut. I think this practice is really number one, helping us to see when we're stuck, when the wheels are spinning, and also find the wisdom and compassion to get unstuck.

Then, for a well-instructed mind, and again I'm reading from this text, you're released from sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, despairs, suffering, and stress. So that's pretty good, right? I suspect that's what all of us want. We don't want to keep going back to the same stuck place that we've been in the past and not get blown around by these eight winds, but to be able to see them clearly and not get stuck.

At the very end of this, there's this wonderful phrase as it talks about this. It says, it talks about gain and loss, status and disgrace, censure and praise, pleasure and pain. "These conditions among human beings are inconstant, impermanent, subject to change. Knowing this, mindful, the intelligent person ponders these changing conditions. Desirable things don't charm the mind, undesirable ones bring no resistance. His welcoming and rebelling are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist."

I like this particular phrase about "desirable things don't charm the mind." That doesn't mean that we reject desirable things, but we're not under their spell. We're not charmed. I suspect that probably all of us at one time or another have been charmed by something: charmed by another person, charmed by the latest gadget, some wonderful car, some TV show, some movie, some celebrity. And at some point, the spell breaks. That charming person cheated us out of our money or did something. Part of the practice is about seeing through this.

There are two terms that I remember Gil using years ago. One is that sometimes when people first come to the practice, you can be enchanted with the practice. And he said if you're enchanted, it's important to become disenchanted. And if you're illusioned by the practice, it's important to become disillusioned. So some of these things like charm and enchantment and illusion may seem attractive, but ultimately they need to be seen through. Then the practice can lead to seeing how things are more clearly so that you don't get caught.

The other line in here about "undesirable ones bring no resistance"—this, for me, is a little bit harder. How do you not resist loss? Or disgrace or blame or pain? I think that maybe the important thing is, with all of these eight winds, is seeing them as not personal, not permanent, and not perfect. They're impersonal forces. And again, that doesn't mean no resistance means passivity. It's more that no resistance means no ignorance that they're going on. You can still act, but you're not acting out of pretending as though they don't exist, or through aversion or hatred. You're seeing that they're going on, but you can respond to them from a place of wisdom and compassion.

So that's my take on the eight worldly winds. And I thank you all for coming tonight and I'm willing to take any questions or comments or objections.

Q&A

Questioner 1: Can you hear me? Sounds good. I was at Tanya's work on these, and the review is great. Things I thought about today I hadn't really thought about before, so thank you for that. The Middle Way comes to my mind, though, about trying to stay in that observation mode and trying to stay in the Middle Way when thinking about these things that are happening. You know, stay out of the rut and be careful on the high road when we're experiencing these things. So that's kind of the strategy that I've been trying to employ regarding those things, and sometimes successfully, sometimes not. So it's a work in progress, isn't it?

Jim Podolske: Yeah, isn't it? The problem is when you're immersed in it, immersed in the storm so to speak, those skillful things you talked about aren't as easy to use as you'd like if you were more balanced. I think it's hard to recognize when that's happening, when you're immersed in a crisis, we'll call it. I think that's the challenge, is to recognize and then start digging your way out of it rather than making it worse. I know Gil always says, "Don't make it worse." So yeah, there's a lot of resources out there that I'm glad I have, but I wish I was better at picking the right one at the right time. So, thank you.

Jim Podolske: So when something like that happens, do you review it later and think about what you could have done differently?

Questioner 1: Yeah, about 10 minutes into your talk, I started reviewing something that happened today. So, very timely. Thank you.

Jim Podolske: What can happen over time is, you know, first you recognize like a day later that you could have done something different. And then maybe only an hour later, and eventually it's like you can recognize it in real time. But... thanks.

Questioner 2: Thank you for this opportunity to be here. It was just another comment, maybe somewhat similar to your observation while talking about pleasure versus pain and how an instructed mind versus an uninstructed mind can respond. I kind of agree with you that maybe the interpretation, or how it was presented, about an instructed mind is more equanimous or more quiet about being pleasured versus not happy, whereas an uninstructed mind is said to be elated versus unhappy in the other situation. I just wanted to share that comment, that it's okay to be balanced, and maybe that's what is the interpretation that you are also saying, that an uninstructed mind can be like much worse... sinusoidal if I can use a mathematical expression, which can come across as less balanced. It's like to keep an equanimous temperament in either.

Jim Podolske: Well that's an important point, but I think a well-instructed mind can experience highs and lows. They can enjoy the rollercoaster of life, it's just that they don't identify with the rollercoaster. I don't think that the practice leads to just being flatlined. Equanimity doesn't mean that you don't experience joys and sorrows, but you don't get caught by them. That's the key. Thank you.

Jim Podolske: All right, well thank you all. And Diana should be back next Monday.