Insight and Ethics - My Experience

How insight experiences have affected my practice of ethics is, in some ways, a bit obscure, to me at least.. That is I find it hard to be precise about how it has affected me, though I know it has affected me.  In general then, the main thing that I know insight has done in my life is to make me very sure about the truth of the dharma.  In other words there is much more sraddha - confidence in the dharma - now, and confidence in further stages of the path.  I also have a lot more confidence in what I did in the past.   I mean that I know now that previous practice helped me, when that has not always been clear - indeed it has been a source of doubt.   So these days there’s a certain gratitude and gladness about whatever it was that got me practising.  You know, Sangharakshita might've made some errors, but at the same time his very detailed pointing into the Dharma was a wonderful thing.  And my involvement in his movement allowed me to explore meditation and have lots of retreat time.

I don’t think I have become a better person, but maybe that is because I wasn’t such a bad person before insight came along.  Though I also wasn’t a specially good person, and I'm still not one.   Even though I believe that I have experienced definitive insight through my practice,  I still experience unskilful motivations.  For example I can be grumpy, I can be anxious and I can be depressed; I am very good at manipulating events to my advantage, at avoiding certain situations and certain people when it seems to me that would be more comfortable.  And I am very good at resisting the clear light that urges me to change my ways.  In fact I could list all kinds of unskilfulnesses that still persist, but at the same time I know those have lessened, and I am a lot clearer about what they do to my experience when I indulge them; so I indulge them a lot less.  I often have the experience of seeing that what I am clinging on to is a complete waste of time, and of losing interest in it for that reason.  So disenchantment is a feature of my experience these days.  That’s an ethical benefit that came through the route of insight.

A degree of clarity has come from various realisations of the dharma.  In our chapter we do the refuges and precepts each week and that gives me a quick snapshot - what harm have I done this week?  But I don’t usually find confessions work.  Over my life, during which I have done various confessions in chapter, the practice hasn’t really changed me.  I am sure that at the beginning confessions made me more open in some ways, but the underlying klesa are so tricky (in my case, but surely that’s universal).  I think klesa are much better dealt with through seeing their nature; through insight.  Well, I have a lot of experience of that happening.  Some of the other Triratna trainings in ethics didn’t seem to work very thoroughly for me either.  They did work a bit, and maybe ethical transformation isn’t always easy to see, but it has always been insight that has had the obvious effects.  Take for example, community life.  It is supposed to forge a more ethical life, we were told that it would rub us up against each other and knock off the hard edges.  My experience of men’s communities though, is of everyone wanting (and the less forceful not necessarily getting) their own room.  And you may meditate and eat and study together, but still you are more or less alone with others.  Everyone of course opens up a bit,  but the deeper patterns of unconscious bullying and unconscious compliance that can happen amongst men still persist.  And remember, I have lived with the best of my generation.  And loved it, but also maintained all my worst habits.  In later life, there seems no particular advantage in single sex environments.  From my fifties, I have found being in a settled marriage relationship far more ethically challenging, and transformative too.  Maybe it is because each is so much more vulnerable to the other: you cannot bear to hurt them, yet (perhaps because of psychological or gender based incompatibilities that infatuation no longer obscures) you often do.  Such difficulties, if you decide to tackle them, really hone ones sensitivity, and that affects relations outside as well, because it makes you realise so much more about others’ suffering.  I know now how, during my nearly thirty years in men’s communities, I was so profoundly ignorant of how ordinary people feel.  I was perhaps an extreme case, being an Anagarika etc. I believe now that people, who are often very kind, just used to make allowances for my unawareness.  

And this isn’t intended to put young people off community living.  Single sex community still did me loads of good, and I don’t regret those years.  But the friendly group life was a lot more about bolstering my psychological need than supporting anything truly spiritual - even though we spent so much time in spiritual pursuits.  Society being how it is, it probably has to be like that.  Sangharakshita was right to contrast the group with the spiritual community, but of course we always made the assumption that our lifestyle defined what was spiritual.  Indeed I have heard that some of the older OMs really still believe that living in a community is ‘proper practice’ and anything else is not.  As though it were as simple as that.   Anyway, getting something similarly un-PC off my chest, I have really honed my ethical skills on Facebook.   If you want to say anything meaningful in that peculiar environment you really have to think carefully about how your words are likely to be read.  Learning how to communicate effectively on social media has changed me ethically; I know it from my responses in the real world.  

But what changed me ethically in really profound ways has been long periods of meditation practice in combination with mentoring from Shenpen Hookham, and then later some insight inquiry with ex-Satyadhana on the fetters.  Especially looking into the fetters of desire and illwill, I experienced a profound turnaround of a tendency I had to get traumatised by others sidelining and not listening to me.  It may have been a deep pattern reinforced over lifetimes, but it more or less completely disappeared during one of our dialogues.  Since that moment, I’ve never been seriously troubled by the suicidal anxiety and dread that used to overwhelm me.  It is a powerful conditioning, and it can come up again in some circumstances,  but only as a karmavipaka.  I never get freshly involved with it now, because I know its nature.  That’s the thing.  It has gone.  I don’t react to that trigger.  And it has freed me up to be more creative with my life.

Sometimes ethical progress is discussed in terms of how selfish we are.  Though obviously, given that Buddhism discusses so much in terms of anatta, that way of framing it has a certain truth, I think it is a tricky thing because the concept of selfishness is associated in all kinds of confused ways with enculturated religious ideas, perhaps connected with our idea of Christianity.   Nevertheless, being less selfish is certainly a sign of ethical development and there does seem to be more space in me these days for the needs of others.  It’s a lot easier for me to make sure I don’t harm someone that I’m in communication with.  It’s because I find myself in a position of strength a lot of the time and as a result I am more aware of others’ vulnerability, so that I get concerned not to make them feel ashamed or not to feel exposed or ‘got at’ in communication.  I do feel less vulnerable these days;  I used to spend a lot of my mental life in anxiety and in dwelling on various harms that I felt others had done to me and as I mentioned, that went a long time ago.  I think generally I understand others a lot better.  It can only be intuition, gut feeling, but nonetheless I have that experience of understanding, or at the very least of being interested in how they are and where they are coming from.  I find that a fascinating thing, and it comes because I feel fairly strong in myself, I don’t doubt myself.  This I believe is a fruit of insight through dharma practice.