Spiritual Renewal

Good evening, everyone. So on tonight’s substitute teacher curriculum, I’ll be talking about spiritual renewal. So as I set the topic, I kept thinking about the word renewal, and I have alluded to in previous week’s announcements that renewal is a word that is very, very prevalent nowadays because of so many subscriptions that we have. And obviously there is monthly subscription And even weekly. Maybe in the future there will be hourly subscriptions. And eventually, this is a possibility. I kept thinking about this, like, what if we get an email in the morning saying your subscription for consciousness has been renewed for another 24 hours. However, this is the basic plan, so enlightenment is not included. And most of us are on the free trial, right? Thank you. So, that’s not the kind of renewal I was thinking about, but it comes up.

That’s the nature of the mind. It wanders off. So, why is renewal important here? And before I even go in there, let’s just review Why we practice? What do we practice? Some of us may have New Year’s resolution and we start something, maybe meditation to be more calm. But it’s July, right? So the 6 months renewal is due. And because of inflation, the price has gone up. But some of us have been practicing for maybe months and years, decades, multi-decades, half a century. There you go, Ginger. I know you’ve been practicing since 1971. It’s the birth of my country. You and my country will get enlightened at the same time. Or maybe you already did. Who knows?

So, you know, even after a long practice, We come here, whether this group, other groups, or in our daily life, we notice suffering is still present. It doesn’t go away. And practicing for a long time can be an issue itself because You know, you park at the parking lot, you walk through the same door, you come here at the same circle, you hear the same topics. Come back to the present moment. It’s the same thing over and over. And that can make it seem like it’s a routine. You know, it becomes road. Like, there is almost a tendency, almost, or a seduction that happens that if I follow the routine just good enough, someday it will happen for me. And that is the issue, that we get into this trap that even though we are earnestly practicing, there is a, there is a desire to take care of our pain and, and suffering. Over time, we lose some of that essence of aliveness in the moment, the moment we first started meditating, because it could be just now or it could be 60 years ago. But point is, when we start something, there is a certain level of curiosity and energy and openness that gets lost over time if we’re not renewing that openness and curiosity. So we we may fall into the trap of like someday I will be enlightened. Someday I will be more loving, and someday I will be more peaceful. This this someday is very convenient. It doesn’t ask us to do anything right now. It will be later.

However, the practice is always now. So that’s why renewal is important. Come back to the essence of the practice. So when I speak of this renewal, I do not mean for us to go back to the past, to that beginner moment. I’m not asking that. And we’re not also starting over again. Because if we pay attention, we already know that we can’t even go back 5 minutes earlier. There is no going back. We cannot return to be the person who we were before grief, before failure, before the disappointment of something difficult about ourselves. So renewal is not going backward. It’s not holding on to the past either. It is the willingness. Renewal is the willingness to allow the present moment To be experienced without assuming that we already know. Because over time, as, as we practice, we might think we already know because we have heard of it before.

We have heard of these— if you are practicing Buddhism, you have heard of these words Impermanence, no-self, anicca, anatta. And, you know, we, when we learn something new, that’s often very exciting. The mind is ready to grip onto the newfound wisdom. And that’s good. But at the same time, because we don’t have the full picture yet, because we’re just beginning, we’re just learning one thing or two things here and there. So, there is a lot of missing parts, and the mind immediately fills in all of that. Yeah, if this is so good, If 5 minutes of meditation is so good, 50 minutes of meditation must be amazing. So there is a lot of assumption that happens in the beginning, and that gets missed in the process because we are excited in the learning process. This— these assumptions are just that, assumptions. And they don’t get reexamined unless we really question again. As we are learning more and more, it should be a bigger responsibility to go back like, okay, what have I assumed as I started learning? So, the spiritual renewal basically starts with this openness that maybe I do not know. Maybe I do not know what impermanence really means, or Suffering even. Do I really understand what suffering truly means or even allow it to be experienced? This is the beginner’s mind, right? Like when we first learn something that we’re trying to cultivate. It’s not forgetting that we have learned all the things we have learned. It is a mind that is not imprisoned by what it already knows. So over time, we build this prison of what we know, and that’s it. So it is a mind that still can be surprised. It is the mind that still can learn. It is a mind that still can be touched. So I’m gonna share with you a little bit of my personal story of why renewal is coming up for me.

So many of you know that I grew up in Bangladesh, and I’ve shared with some of you that my childhood was difficult. There was poverty. I’m from a family of 14 children, and there were tragedies. One of my sisters passed away in a fire accident when I was 15 years old. That grief really impacted my life trajectory. So back then, I, I used to search, what is the meaning of life? Perhaps I was searching for safety, perhaps I was searching for a way out, but I didn’t know what is the way out. And eventually I found meditation, I found Buddhism, and it helped me come out of some of those suffering. Meditation allowed me to experience profound peace and joy and freedom, but that path has not been straightforward. In some moments, I found it to be easy to follow the practice. Some moments very, very challenging and frustrating. So even after practicing at this point over a decade, I started practicing Buddhism or meditation in 2015, there is still a lot of pain and suffering that come up. So the question can be still coming up like, why does You know, rejection is still hard. What does loneliness hurt? What does that old pattern of suffering come back again?

In this decade, for me, there have been relationship failures. There have been moments where I hoped something would last that did not last. And there have been much greater loss also. In the last few years, I have lost another older brother, another sister, and most recently my father. So it has been a lot of grief. Grief has been the theme of my life, it appears. So grief essentially has changed the landscape of my mind. It also changed my relationship with the practice. This is, as I was reflecting on it, I, I tried to come up with my definition of grief as if I didn’t know what it was. And here is what, what I wrote. Grief is the encounter that what the mind imagines the reality to be is not so. It’s the disappointment that reality is not what we experienced or hoped to be. So essentially, our mind creates an inner world based on what we know, and it carries images of the people we love, assumptions about how life should be. It carries a story of how life is supposed to unfold. And then something happens. Someone dies, relationship fails, dreams collapse, community disappoints us, and no longer the outer experience aligned with the inner world. And that’s grief. But this grief can be a teacher too. It can halt the mind in a way where there is a possibility to open up, to actually be ready to learn. Again, grief is not automatically wise. We— it can also make us bitter about life and make us close down and cling on more tightly. But if all of our practice is to be more open, Then grief, or essentially our practice is to open to our grief, not close. And this grief is, it doesn’t have to be just personal grief, right? It can be grief about someone we love, grief for the suffering we see in the world. It can be grief for the violence, war, poverty, and injustice. It may even be the grief for the harm human beings cause while being completely convinced that they are right. So renewal can manifest in the moment of grief as a tenderness of the heart.

We more— we become more sensitive to suffering, to our own suffering and suffering of others. Renewal is ultimately a renewal of the heart. A renewed heart is not immune to pain. It is a heart that is willing to love again, to trust again, to listen again, and to investigate again. You know, this renewal theme is especially relevant for my experience with this community. I’ve been coming here since 2018. In many ways, there is a routine happening for me also. I kept thinking about it. Is it just the motion I’m going through? Every Monday, come here, meditate, go home, and that’s it. And there are, of course, issues, right? You come here often, you might notice, you might have an expectation, oh, these people meditate, they must be so self-aware, they must be so kind, and so on, right? But we are human beings, we are all carrying our wounds and issues and projections. So A spiritual community also needs renewal to come back to the vibrancy. Now, going back to the basics, because essentially renewal is going back to the basics.

Impermanence or anicca is a fundamental teaching in Buddhism. Everything changes each moment. Our bodies change, our identities change, our relationships change, communities change. Even the way we experience Dharma changes. The person who entered this meditation hall at the beginning of this sit tonight has changed. So impermanence is the fundamental reality, and that is also the necessity for renewal, because we— if we don’t renew with each moment of change, we’re holding on to something in the past. Impermanence makes renewal possible. Because things change, suffering can change. Because things change, a hardened heart can soften. Because things change, we do not have to remain exactly as we have been.

This brings us to non-self, another fundamental teaching of Buddhism. There is no fixed self. If there is no fixed self, then renewal is not something we occasionally do. It’s already happening. And just the question of whether we resist it or we go with it. Most of our suffering comes from holding on to our old identities. For example, I’m the person who cannot be loved, or I am the spiritual one. It’s an identity. I’m the one who already understands. So renewal asks, can I release my grip onto who I believe I am? Can I allow my experience to teach who I am becoming? And can I recognize that even this new identity is Temporary.

So what does renewal bring for us if this is so fundamental? Well, it can bring a renewed rigor and vigor to practice again and a willingness to learn. Willingness to change things when necessary. It may mean that we change the way we meditate. It may mean we find other teachers. It may mean different communities. It may mean resting. It may mean even taking a break from meditation. So now that you’re all sold on the importance of renewal, I’ll tie it to the question I was exploring as I was thinking about this talk is, did Buddha ever feel the need for renewal? So of course, Gautama Buddha, before enlightenment, he was just like us, an irregular person. I mean, of course he was accomplished in some ways, but still bound to suffering. And he, he was the, the prince Siddhartha Gautama who left the comfort of luxury and went on to learn meditation.

One of his earlier teachers was Alara Kalama. From him, he learned a very high level of meditative absorption. It’s called jhana. It was one of the immaterial jhanas or absorption called the dimension of nothingness. And even after achieving that, I mean, once he achieved it, Alara Kalama offered him to be a teacher. Hey, teach with me and be an equal. And that’s great, right? That a student has learned so much that it— he has become a teacher. But for Buddha, It wasn’t enough. This profound meditative experience, he questioned it. Does this end suffering? Does this lead to dispassion, disillusionment, and so on? And he realized it doesn’t. So even after such profound accomplishment, he said, no, I am leaving. And he did. He left that community and teacher, not because he, he had anything against it. It’s just that he learned what he needed, what he needed to learn, and he felt, in my opinion, the sense of renewal, that there is, that practice needs to be renewed somehow. So, he went on and found another teacher, Dudakar Ramaputta. And from him, he learned another layer of absorption, which is about the dimension of Neither perception nor non-perception. Very esoteric, very advanced. And the same question he asked, does this end suffering? And he found out that it doesn’t. He’s still bound to all of these worldly miseries. So then he left that too. That’s a renewal again. And he thought maybe it is in extreme asceticism. So, he really pushed himself, stopped taking much food, and really went deeper into self-denial, self-mortification, and eventually learned that doesn’t help either. And, you know, by that point he had gained so many followers who were looking up to him with respect, like, oh, this is the person who is really going in. But then he stopped because it didn’t lead to the end of suffering. And that’s another renewal. Eventually he realized that the End of suffering is possible through the middle way, which is not on the extremes.

As he sat down under the Bodhi tree, he remembered a childhood memory of him automatically, like effortlessly going into this absorption state as a child. And how wonderfully pleasurable that was. And he questioned, is this a pleasure that is dangerous? And he saw no, because it’s not connected to any sensuality. And that led him to discover the Middle Way and getting enlightened. So in these 3 phases of Buddha’s own journey, we can see that there was that importance to renew our practice even if we are accomplished.

So I guess I will end this talk to clarify that when we are renewing our practice, we’re not denying or disregarding what we have learned. We’re not disrespecting our teachers, but it is important for us to move forward. We have to keep asking, are we willing to look again? Are we willing to feel what is here right now? Are we willing to begin again with one conscious breath, with one moment of honesty, and with one willingness to soften? And I’ll end with the good news that the renewal subscription, this one, is already present. It’s already done and it’s free. So thank you for listening. I encourage any comments and questions.