Lam-rim 79: Foggy-Mindedness, Mental Dullness & Flightiness of Mind

Initial Scope

In the initial scope, we spoke about the precious human rebirth and how fortunate we are to be free, at least temporarily, from the worst states in which we would not be able to do anything to improve our situations. We saw how difficult such a rebirth is to obtain, what the causes for it are, and how easily it will be lost with death. Death will come for sure, and we have no idea when. The only thing that will be of any help at the time of death is having built up the positive habits to avoid worst rebirths and to continue getting better rebirths, especially precious human rebirths, so we can continue on our path of spiritual development. 

We looked at the worst rebirth states that could follow: as a trapped being in one of the hellish realms, as a clutching ghost, or as creeping creature, an animal on the floor. We saw how awful that would be. Then we considered if there was a way to avoid this, because we are certainly afraid of experiencing this in future lives. However, it’s not a helpless and hopeless situation, because we saw that there is a way to avoid that, which is to go in the safe and sound direction of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. 

What does it mean to go in this direction? We can ask for somebody to save us, but that is not exactly the way that it works. We need to do something ourselves. Others can inspire us, such as the Buddhas – they gave us the teachings – and there can be a community that supports those teachings, but we still have to do something about it. That means going in the direction of obtaining what they have obtained: the true stoppings of suffering and the causes of suffering and the true pathway minds, the understandings, that will bring that stopping about and that result from it. The Buddhas are those who have these true stoppings and true pathway minds in full and taught how to attain them. The Arya Sangha are those who have them in part. 

To go in that direction, what we have to do first of all is to avoid worst rebirths. For that, we need to refrain from destructive behaviors because that is the main cause of these terrible rebirth states and the cause of suffering of pain and unhappiness in general, what’s known as the suffering of suffering. That led to a big discussion of karma and the factors that are involved in making karmic consequences strong or weak, etc.

Intermediate Scope

For the intermediate scope, we looked at the suffering of any type of rebirth state, not just the suffering of the worst states. Even in the better rebirth states, we can be unhappy. We can still experience the suffering of change – which is our ordinary happiness that never lasts, never satisfies, and that, after a while, changes to unhappiness and suffering – and the all-pervasive suffering of continuing to have rebirths that support experiencing the suffering of suffering and the suffering of change.

We looked in detail at the general sufferings of samsara and, also, at the specific sufferings of the human realm, of the so-called god realms, the divine realms, and of the anti-god, or asura, realms. That led to the discussion of the causes of suffering, the true causes of suffering. Although we can speak of destructive behavior as being the true cause of suffering, if we look deeper, we find that the disturbing emotions and attitudes are the primary causes of destructive behavior. And some of the disturbing emotions can be involved with our constructive behavior as well. Not knowing reality, not knowing how things exist, certainly underlies our ordinary constructive behavior, which leads to better rebirths and to our ordinary type of happiness. So, we need to look more generally at these disturbing emotions, especially the ones that are associated with some sort of outlook. These, too, can underlie constructive behavior – thinking in terms of “me” and “mine,” and so on. One could argue that attachment could accompany constructive behavior. It’s quite interesting to think about that and to try to analyze that. 

The standard presentation, at least in the Gelugpa presentation of the lam-rim, emphasizes constructive behavior simply as refraining from destructive behavior. In other words, not killing, all by itself, is a very weak constructive action. The motivation is very weak. Motivation is one of the strongest factors that affects the strength of the ripening of karma. The fact that we don’t kill is fine, but it’s a very weak action karmically. The point is to refrain from killing when we feel like killing, like when we want to swap that mosquito. So, for the action of refraining to have the strongest result, the motivation needs to be very strong. 

The motivation for not killing the mosquito, if we’re thinking just in terms of the intermediate scope, could be, “I want to avoid doing that because it will cause negative consequences for me in the future. Taking the life of others will shorten my life,” and so on. A stronger motivation would be, “I don’t want to kill the mosquito because it could have been my mother in a previous lifetime” – so, thinking of the kindness of the mother and so on and how terrible it is that now she has been born as a mosquito. An even stronger motivation – I think we’d have to say a bodhichitta motivation – would be, “I don’t want to kill the mosquito because it will harm my progress toward enlightenment. I want to be able to achieve enlightenment so as to benefit everyone, including my mother who is a mosquito. If I act destructively and kill this mosquito, not only does it damage my compassion, it makes my chances of reaching enlightenment quickly much slimmer.” So, there needs to be strong motivation in a Dharma sense. 

We could refrain from killing the mosquito simply because we think it’s wrong: “I don’t know why it’s wrong; I just feel that it’s wrong.” Well, that’s not a very strong motivation. Certainly, it is a positive act, but it’s a very weak one. Or it could be, “I feel like killing, but I would be embarrassed to do so because my teacher is there. I don’t want to give a bad impression to my teacher.” Then the question is, is there attachment there? We are attached to praise from our teacher and, for that reason, we refrain from killing. This is the debate that one could have. I think we have to differentiate between the action and the motivation. The action is positive. The motivation – attachment to getting praise from the teacher – would be a negative motivation. So, that’s the way the seeming conflict is resolved.

The Root Disturbing Emotions

Anyway, we have been going through the disturbing emotions. We’ve gone through the primary ones, the so-called root ones. These are longing desire, attachment, or greed. Longing desire is when we don’t have something, we want to get it; attachment is when we have it and we don’t want to let go; greed is when we have it and we want more. They exaggerate the positive qualities of something and ignoring the negative ones or add positive qualities that aren’t even there. Then there is anger and hostility, with which we want to get rid of something. They exaggerate the negative qualities of something or add negative qualities that aren’t there and ignore the good qualities. There is pride, or arrogance, thinking, “I am so great” and so on. There is unawareness hat comes from being close-minded. Being close-minded about cause and effect accompanies only destructive behavior. A subcategory of being close-minded misknowing, specifically misknowing about reality. It can accompany any type of karmic action. The fifth one is indecisive wavering about something that is true, so it’s not necessarily about what we should eat for dinner, although that type of indecision can also be quite crippling.

Then we had the disturbing attitudes. There are five of them, the most significant one being the deluded outlook toward a transitory network. The transitory network refers to the aggregate factors that make up each moment of our experience – our bodies, minds, emotions, feelings, what we perceive, and so on. This deluded outlook latches onto some part of that transitory network – the body, for instance – with the attitude that it is “me” or “mine,” accompanied by grasping for true existence.  

The Auxiliary Disturbing Emotions

Then we started going through the auxiliary disturbing emotions. Again, the important point is not only to identify these within ourselves but also to recognize that these are causes of suffering. If we have hatred, resentment, concealment of having acted improperly, outrage, jealousy, or miserliness, it causes problems and unhappiness for us, even if it doesn’t cause problems for others, though it usually does. But not only that, it prevents us from helping others; it prevents us from reaching enlightenment. Even though the disturbing emotions are presented on the intermediate scope, I think it is important always to think ahead in terms of the advanced scope of motivation. As I have said several times in the past, when we go through the lam-rim for the first time, we are going through the process of learning new material and developing our motivation according to each stage of the training. But then we go back and redo each of the stages with the advanced motivation of bodhichitta. That is very, very helpful and very powerful. 

In our last session, we got as far as foggy-mindedness. We have a little bit more to say about that. 

• Foggy-mindedness is a heavy feeling of body and mind that makes the mind unclear and unserviceable. It’s incapable of either giving rise to a cognitive appearance of its object (we can’t think of anything or visualize anything) or apprehending the object correctly (we can’t really understand it). 

Heaviness – what could that possibly mean? Sleepiness is something else. There is a whole category called mental dullness, so this heaviness, this foggy-mindedness, has to be something different from that. We concluded – though without being absolutely positive that our interpretation was the correct one – that it’s what’s called in English just feeling “blah.” We just feel heavy in the sense that we don’t feel like doing anything. We don’t feel like thinking about anything. We just don’t feel like anything. I think that is certainly a very detrimental state of mind, whether it actually falls into this category or not. Certainly, it would be a subcategory of foggy-mindedness and something that we have to watch out for. 

Mental Dullness

Mental dullness, on the other hand, is not listed in this list of 20, but it’s certainly a problem. As discussed in the instructions on gaining concentration, mental dullness has three levels. The first, gross mental dullness, is when our minds are so dull that we can’t really concentrate on anything. That seems to be one aspect of this heaviness, this fogginess: we can’t concentrate on anything. It prevents us from even generating an object of concentration. The second, subtle dullness, is when we’re able to generate an object of focus, but the focus is not clear; it’s not sharp. So, we can be thinking about something – let’s say, love – but it’s not really sharp. We’re not really feeling it; it’s only vaguely there. Or if it’s a visualization, the object is not in focus, like a camera not being in focus. The third, the most subtle dullness, is when the object is in sharp focus, but it’s not fresh. In other words, it gets stale. 

I think that with any of these levels, the term being “spaced out” would fit. I think there are different levels of being spaced out. We could be spaced out and not able to generate anything. We could be spaced out and generate things, but what we generate is not sharp. We could be spaced out, and what we generate is sharp but not fresh; we are sort of in a daze. 

[Participant comment]

Dr. Berzin: I am not quite sure what this foggy-mindedness would be referring to when you say heaviness, because sleepiness is something else. Mental dullness can degenerate to the point of sleepiness, being really tired. This heaviness is something else. Do you have any idea what it could be? I have two suggestions: feeling “blah,” which is feeling nothing, and feeling spaced out. 

Participant: Fog is the image that…

Dr. Berzin: “Fog” is the literal word.

Participant: So, it seems there is an interpolation, that there is something in addition to fog. 

 Dr. Berzin:  Right, “fog” sounds like there is an addition of something.

[Participant comment]

Dr. Berzin: When we are spaced out, isn’t it something that we are adding, like a fog that just makes us feel like nothing? Do you ever get spaced out? I am sure we all have gotten spaced out. We just stare at the wall and… nothing. 

Participant: Can you give an example? 

Dr. Berzin: There are no examples here.

Participant: One example is when you actually want to focus on one thing, but you are unable to because you have another focus.

Dr. Berzin: But that’s another category. That gets into mental wandering. Mental wandering isn’t exactly being stuck on something and not wanting to leave it to think about something else. That’s attachment. 

Participant: I was taking the bodhisattva vows last week. I was meditating, trying to generate something, but I was really stuck. I was trying to generate compassion and to do all the lines of reasoning, but there was nothing.

Dr. Berzin: Being in the daze aspect of nothing would be the foggy-mindedness. Not being able to generate the feeling of compassion would be the dullness. Let’s not get confused by the English words. This, I think, is what they are differentiating with these two different factors.

But your example of being stuck…I thought of a very good example of that. Do you ever have what’s called in German an “earworm,” which is a song that’s going through your head and that you can’t quiet? We want to meditate and to quiet our minds, but we can’t generate that quietness because we can’t shut off that song that’s going through our heads. 

Participant: That would make a fog.

Dr. Berzin: I don’t know if that would instead be in the category of flightiness of mind – that we fly off to that.

Participant: The “blah” feeling that you talked about is something that is added, like a fog. 

Dr. Berzin: As it says here, we can’t use our minds for anything. We are just sort of stuck. So, being spaced out covers a wide spectrum of these disturbing emotions, doesn’t it?

Participant: Can you please repeat the differentiation between foggy-mindedness and dullness?

Dr. Berzin: Foggy-mindedness is this heaviness. We identified it with feeling “blah,” feeling nothing. It’s sort of generating a fog and being spaced out within it. In that state, because of being dull, we are not able to generate an object, a state of mind. That’s gross mental dullness. So, we are talking about a combined state here. Remember, none of these disturbing emotions and attitudes happen by themselves. There’s always a combination of many. 

So, gross dullness is not being able to generate a state of mind. With intermediate dullness, we are able to generate it, but it’s not sharp. With subtle dullness, it’s sharp, but it’s not fresh in each moment. Sleepiness is when we are really tired, about to fall asleep. Sleepiness itself is not a disturbing emotion. It could be constructive or destructive, depending on what else is going on in our minds. Everybody has to go to sleep, so sleepiness is there – except for the Buddhas. Buddhas don’t sleep. 

Participant: Is this foggy-mindedness a bit like not wanting to engage with anything?

Dr. Berzin: Right. But it’s not that we actively have a reason for not wanting to engage with anything, because we also have laziness, which is something else. 

Participant: It’s a feeling that everything around us is too much, so we just want to disengage.

Dr. Berzin: Well, it could be that, but that’s quite conscious. I often space out for no apparent reason, like when I’m standing on the street, waiting for the light to change. I sort of space out. It’s not that I’m thinking of something else or anything like that. I just go into a daze. It’s unserviceable. It’s not that I’m not able to cross the street when the light turns green. But that can also come together with this: not paying attention. 

Participant: How is it destructive?

Dr. Berzin: It’s destructive because it prevents us from engaging in anything constructive. It could also be destructive in the sense that when somebody needs our help, we are just too spaced out to do anything.

Participant: It’s very self-centered and unconscious.

Dr. Berzin: Right, but not in the Western sense of falling on the floor unconscious. It’s that we are unaware of what’s going on around us. And we are not being mindful, or we are not being alert, not being attentive. We are not being anything. It’s not that we are lost in our own thoughts – that’s mental wandering. That’s something else. It’s as if nothing is going on. 

That leads us to the next one, which is flightiness of mind. Here we have a lot of subcategories that I can think of. 

• Flightiness of mind is part of longing desire. It’s a subsidiary awareness that causes our attention to fly off from its object and to recollect or to think about something attractive that we have previously experienced. Thus, it causes us to lose our concentration and peace of mind.

It’s differentiated from mental wandering, which is another one in this list. Mental wandering causes our minds to be distracted by anything, whether we are familiar with it or not. We could be distracted by traffic or something like that. It could be because of desire. It could be because of anger. It could be because of any of the disturbing emotions. 

Flightiness of mind is very specific. It is thinking about something that we’re attracted to or desire, something that we are already familiar with – for example, thinking about a loved one, thinking of food, thinking of our plans, these types of things. This is differentiated from mental wandering because it’s such a major obstacle in concentration meditation. There are degrees of it. The first degree, gross level, is that we can’t even get an object of concentration because our minds keep flying off. Maybe that’s what happens with this music thing, the earworm. The second level is that the mind is able to get the object of focus, but it’s always leaving. The subtlest level is that the mind can stay focused on the object – it doesn’t leave – but there is an itchiness to leave. It’s not calmed down on it. These are the three levels. 

We didn’t take time to think in terms of ourselves about these different levels of foggy-mindedness, being spaced out, feeling “blah,” dull, and all these sorts of things. I’d like for us to take a few minutes to think about these different levels. The point is to recognize that these are big obstacles. They can cause a lot of problems. They can cause us to be hit by a car, for example, or to get into an accident when we are driving. That happens to a lot of people; they get sort of hypnotized by the road. They certainly prevent us from helping anybody. 

The thing that we want to generate here is renunciation. That’s what we want to generate with all these things: the determination to be free. So, if we recognize any of these things happening, we try to snap ourselves out of it and not just indulge in it. That’s really the essence, the point of going through all of these disturbing emotions. So, let’s spend a few moments thinking about that, especially if we are very spaced-out ourselves. The English idiom for that is a “space cadet.” That’s an idiom from the 1960s. I am very out of date. 

[meditation]

OK, now I have an interesting question for you (speaking to a participant). You gave a very good example of going through all the steps of compassion in meditation, building yourself up to feeling compassion, and then – nothing. What do you do then? 

Participant: Arouse the attention.

Dr. Berzin: But how do you get yourself to feel anything? 

Participant: I have to start again. 

Dr. Berzin: And what happens if you still feel nothing? 

Participant: Maybe go to bed and sleep a bit. 

Dr. Berzin: Well, I am wondering if there is something else that we can do. Does anybody else have any suggestions? 

Participant: We can find examples of those who are really suffering or think of our own loved ones’ suffering.

Dr. Berzin: Right. That’s one thing that we can do. 

What I was thinking more of was relaxing. I think that when we are spaced out, we are not feeling anything. Although it feels as though we are relaxed, I don’t think we are really relaxed. We’re frozen, and somehow, we need to loosen up. Does that make any sense? 

Participant: When I feel like this, I move and do some yoga. If I sit down to relax, it gets even worse. 

Dr. Berzin: Right, that’s excellent. Get up and do some movement. For instance, in standard Theravada practice, they always alternate between sitting and walking meditation. I sometimes used to teach in a Hatha yoga center where they also did meditation. After a certain period of time, maybe 15 minutes, everybody always had to get up and do some movement, some posture or something. 

Participant: If we’re sitting at the computer for a long time, it’s good to periodically get up.

Dr. Berzin: It’s good for our backs as well to get up periodically, especially if we get dull. 

Participant: As soon as we just recognize it, most of the heaviness goes.  

Dr. Berzin: That’s true. The example that I am thinking of is falling asleep or dream yoga. With dream yoga, we try to recognize that we are dreaming and then use the dream state to do concentration meditation. It’s the best state for doing concentration meditation, because then we don’t have distractions, and also for seeing that everything is like a dream, like an illusion. Often what happens, though, is that as soon as we recognize that we’re in a dream, we wake up. As you say, it’s gone as soon as we recognize that it’s dullness. 

Or falling asleep – how do we fall asleep? One of the ways to fall asleep is to totally quiet our minds and not to think anything. If we have learned to do that in meditation, then we can feel when we are starting to fall asleep. There is a certain sensation that we can notice when we are starting to fall asleep. It’s like the dissolution of the elements. There is a certain heavier type of feeling. And again, the problem is that if we recognize it, it could wake us up. So, in that case – now I am just extrapolating because I have experience with this – what we have to do when we recognize that we are starting to fall asleep is to totally relax. Then we fall asleep within seconds. That’s why I come back to this thing of relaxing, of not being so frozen. But I don’t know. I am just speculating. Maybe what I am saying is complete nonsense, because when we are feeling spaced out, we wouldn’t want relaxing to result in falling asleep. 

Participant: I wonder about relaxing, because when one is agitated, relaxing is quite a lot.

Dr. Berzin: What I am thinking is that if we are feeling dull, we sort of calm down and then get up.

Participant: If we can somehow get movement, to get the freshness…

Dr. Berzin: Right. Anyway, try it out the next time you are spaced out. What I am talking about is a very, very subtle adjustment of our energies. It’s almost as though when we are spaced out, we are holding our breath. So, then we have to exhale. We have to exhale; then we are back to being alert. 

When we are not able to feel anything – let’s say, when we are doing compassion mediation – we are also, in a sense, frozen. We are sort of trying to get something, but nothing is happening. We might be in a daze, but I think that there is also a little bit of uptightness there, and that feeling, in a sense, is blocked. These are just my thoughts based on my experience.

Now about flightiness is something that I am sure we all have. That, of course, is very difficult to correct when we are meditating. It’s very funny, I find that I can concentrate very, very well when I am working on the website. When I am doing something like that, there’s very little mental wandering. But when I am sitting and trying to meditate, I have lots of mental wandering and flightiness of mind. Why is that? 

Participant: The topic doesn’t change.

Dr. Berzin: Well, with the type of meditation that I do, the topic is changing constantly. These sadhanas go very, very quickly from one thing to another. Or I read through, let’s say, the 37 bodhisattva practices or the seven-part attitude training. I read that every day. 

Participant: But it’s an input you know already. 

Dr. Berzin: Right, whereas the work that I am doing is not so repetitive. It’s always something different.

Participant: We have to focus more.

Dr. Berzin: Right. Also, if we are saying or reading something out loud, it’s more difficult to think of something else at the same time. Otherwise, we can’t continue reading out loud. I think that’s one of the reasons why the Tibetans do all their practices out loud. It’s much more difficult to mentally wander then. If we are doing it in our minds, even though they say that it’s not… I don’t know the exact mechanism, but it’s like trying to think two things at the same time. For instance, if we are reading through something just with our eyes rather than saying it out loud, it is very easy for our eyes to go through it while our minds are thinking something else. 

Participant: What if we say something out of memory?

Dr. Berzin: Then it is easy to be thinking about something else because our mouths are just automatically saying something. 

Participant: Like saying a mantra. It’s very easy to recite a mantra and to mentally wander.

Dr. Berzin: Well, when we are saying the mantra, we are supposed to be visualizing various things. So, then we are doing two things at the same time. 

Attention Deficit Disorder, Divided Attention Disorder and Continuous Partial Attention Disorder

This gets into what I want to discuss, which is attention deficit disorder (ADD). The newest ones are divided attention disorder and continuous partial attention disorder. Attention deficit disorder is also called “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” ADHD in English. It’s when the mind can’t stay with one thing because it’s going from one thing to another. Usually, we are fidgety and can’t sit still, and we can’t sustain attention. Is that what people who don’t have this as an all-around condition experience in meditation? 

Participant: The mind is jumping around.

Dr. Berzin: Jumping from one thing to another thing?

Participant: No, always jumping from the same thing to another thing.

Dr. Berzin: Well, with gross mental agitation, we can’t even get the object. We go from one thing to another to another to another. 

With attention deficit disorder, we can’t stay focused on one thing. Our minds are fidgety. We can’t stay on one thing  and are always jumping to something else. 

Divided attention disorder is from this phenomenon that comes from the internet. It started with CNN where they have this banner going across the bottom of the screen with news headlines that are totally unrelated to what the news commentators are talking about. We have something similar on our computer screens. In one corner, there is the Twitter feed, a constant stream of stuff coming in. In another corner is our Facebook page. And in another little corner, our emails are coming in. All of these things are happening on our screens at the same time. Our attention is divided, so we can’t really concentrate on any of them. That’s why it’s linked to what’s called Continuous Partial Attention Disorder. These are new things that I found on the internet. 

Continuous partial attention disorder is when our attention fades in and out while conducting other activities. We never pay full attention to anything; we just skim and move on. We get all these emails, but we just sort of skim them. We can’t stay with them for more than a second because there’s something else that we want to watch, like some Twitter video. So, we look at that. But then we only vaguely look at that because something else comes in from a friend on Facebook. We have all these tabs opened on our browsers. We just go from one to another and never stay deeply with any of them. These are major problems that will just become more and more common, given what’s happening with social media. Divided attention disorder is, for example, people watching television and text messaging at the same and maybe also doing their homework. So, it’s not really paying deep attention to anything. 

My question is, how are these things different? First of all, what in the world can we do to help people or to help ourselves if we have this problem? Is there anything in Buddhism that is reminiscent of this? 

For instance, in tantric meditation, when we are doing a sadhana, we try to visualize many, many figures and all the things that they are holding and, at the same time, to pay attention to what they are saying and the significance of what they are saying. How is that different from divided attention disorder? I would say it’s different because all these things are integrated; they’re all part of a whole. They go together, whereas somebody giving a news report at the top of the screen and banner headlines showing the stock exchange and other types of news on the bottom of the screen are things that don’t go together at all. So, there is quite a difference between these two. 

Then, I was thinking about an omniscient Buddha. An omniscient Buddha is aware of everything and how everything is interrelated. Everything is interrelated due to dependent origination, isn’t it? Everything is dependent on everything else and is interconnected through cause and effect. So, when a Buddha is aware of everything, it’s not that a Buddha is aware of millions of pieces of information that are totally disconnected from each other. Everything fits together. I think that’s the big difference. What do you think? 

Participant: It’s this, and I also see lack of attachment.

Dr. Berzin: Very good. Why do people constantly look at Twitter, Facebook, emails and stuff like that? They are afraid that they are going to miss something. Miss what? That’s the interesting question. I am a confessed news junkie. I look at the news several times a day on the internet. Why? I am afraid I am going to miss something? Miss what? 

Participant: Maybe it’s more of a habit?

Dr. Berzin: I am wondering here. It’s good to know what’s happening on the one hand, but what about this thing of being afraid of missing something? Is that a sense of “I am so important that I have to know everything”? What’s behind that? I think that’s the mentality behind having to look at every entry that comes in on our and everybody else’s Facebook page and reading all these tweets. We want to be up to date.

Participant: Mind is not quick enough. But the point is that there is a growing number of people, especially young people, who are totally into this. This is going to be a major thing if we are talking about the development of Buddhism and helping people in the future with Buddhist methods. We’re definitely going to have to take that into consideration. I think people are going to have major concentration problems. 

Dr. Berzin: Well, can we just tell people, “Shut all your tabs, just keep one thing on the screen at a time, and only look at your emails once a day”? That would be hard to do when we are in the office and getting a lot of emails. I don’t know if you have ever thought about these things. I think about them. I think it’s a big problem. 

Tsongkhapa gave an interesting and maybe helpful piece of advice in terms of meditating on these tantric figures with all the details and all the various other figures. He said to focus on one thing first. When we are able to get a very good focus on that, then expand and add something else without losing the first thing. In other words, if we try to gain concentration on many different things all at once, we’re not going to make it work. First, we have to get stable concentration on one thing; then, we can expand it. As we just mentioned, it works much better if all these things are interconnected and not completely separate. If they are completely separate, then it’s very, very hard. 

But people multi-task. How do we multi-task? Can we multi-task? I don’t know. I find that very difficult. I am thinking of the example of my mother. She could knit very complicated things and watch television at the same time. But I think that was because knitting was so automatic that she didn’t have to think about it. I am always amazed when people are able to have a conversation with us, let’s say, Skyping over the internet, and, at the same time, be able to read an email from somebody and maybe also send a text message. They’re doing all of that at the same time. I don’t know how they do that.

Participant: They are better trained.

Dr. Berzin: Or they are not paying attention to any of them or paying only partial attention. Can you multi-task? Can you do those things? To those who are just listening to the audio, I am speaking to the youngest member of our class today.

Participant: No. The example for me is not with the computer. For example, we are talking to someone and then writing an SMS, or we started talking to someone, but then we hear something else that’s interesting, and so we start to get into another conversation. 

Dr. Berzin: Can you do them at the same time, or do you have to stop doing one and do the other? How do you have a conversation and SMS something else at the same time? 

Participant: When I do this, I feel uneasy. I do it sometimes, but then I have to stop.

Dr. Berzin: So, it’s disturbing. Why is it disturbing? 

Participant: I think it’s because there is attachment. Sometimes when I’m on the internet, I want to see lots of things at the same time. It’s like I want to see my emails because maybe there is an email from someone I like. 

Dr. Berzin: So, there is a big attachment. You want more and more.

Participant: I want to have all the conversations together at the same time. 

Dr. Berzin: Like I was saying, you are afraid of missing something. I just remembered the example of continuous partial attention disorder, which is when we are doing something, let’s say, reading, and then we go, “Oh, what does that mean?” So, we look it up on Wikipedia. But then we don’t really read the whole thing in Wikipedia because there is something else, so we go to another link. We are constantly quickly surfing without really reading anything deeply. That’s this continuous partial attention syndrome. I think that is also a problem. 

It’s not quite the same, but if we are doing a tantric meditation, a sadhana, we might go through it quickly because we want to save time. These things can take a very long time. For instance, there are seven offerings to make – water for the mouth, water to wash the feet, flowers, incense, etc. – and each one has a visualization, but we don’t really get into any of them because we are going too quickly. We go blah blah blah, Argham, padyam, pushpe, duphe. We just say the words without even thinking about what they mean. It’s like continuous partial attention disorder. We are not really paying attention to any of it. 

So, how do we get over that without just completely slowing down? The standard reply would be to spend a lot of time in the beginning really getting into it so that we can generate them quickly.

Participant: What if we can generate them quickly?

Dr. Berzin: Then the point is that we don’t because we get lazy. 

I’ll never forget something Serkong Rinpoche did at a teaching he gave. He had gone through 

the whole lam-rim teaching plus a very detailed Chenrezig meditation. At the end, people wanted to do a meditation together with Rinpoche. That is something that Tibetans just don’t do, but anyway, he said, “If you want to meditate together, let’s meditate together. So, go through all the stages of the lam-rim, plus all the stages of the Chenrezig meditation, and do that in two minutes.” People freaked out, “How do we go through every single point in two minutes?” Then, he said, “OK, three minutes.” Then he said that, actually, we need to be able to go through all the points of the lam-rim – to use the Tibetan example – in the time that it takes to put one foot in the stir-up on the saddle of a horse and get our leg over the other side of the horse. He said the reason for that was that when death comes, death doesn’t wait for us to set our motivation, get our posture right, light a candle, and go slowly through every step. When death comes, we have to get it all together in one instant. So, then the question is, how do we train ourselves to do that? 

Participant: Back to shamatha, to concentration

Dr. Berzin: But shamatha is usually concentration just on one thing, and we might need to concentrate on many things. When we are dying, for example, we need to be mindful of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, our teacher, compassion, bodhichitta, voidness, non-attachment. There are lots of things.

Participant: If you have shamatha, it’s much easier to go through all these things.

Dr. Berzin: If we can’t focus on one thing, how can we focus on many? That’s my point about bringing up Tsongkhapa’s advice. He says that we start by focusing on one thing. When we can really do that well, then we expand and add other things that fit harmoniously together with it. 

All these things that I am pointing out about attention deficit disorder, Divided attention disorder and continuous partial attention disorder are not discussed here in the list of disturbing emotions. However, they are definitely either subcategories of flightiness of mind, where our attention flies off to something that we are familiar with and that we have desire for, or some other type of distraction brought on by something other than longing desire. 

But I think it’s interesting to think about how we have flightiness of mind because of feeling that we’re going to miss something. Let’s think about that. We don’t want to miss an email. We don’t want to miss a call. We don’t want to miss the latest news. We don’t want to miss the latest tweet or the latest SMS. 

[meditation]

It’s really funny. I am thinking about how 10 or 20 years ago, nobody had any idea what any of these words meant – SMS, tweets, and all that sort of stuff. And maybe 20 years from now, nobody will know what they mean either. Interesting. 

[meditation]

Grasping for True Existence 

OK, several thoughts came to my mind. One was thinking that if we’re connected to everything, receiving all these tweets, news and other stuff, it somehow that means that we exist. So, one needs to analyze: does that really demonstrate and prove that we exist? Does it establish our existence? We are grasping to establish our existence by being connected to all this stuff  And it works the other way around even more obviously – that if we get a thought or an idea, it’s only real if we tweet it, SMS it, or put it on our Facebook page. If we don’t put it up, it’s not real. So, does putting it on our Facebook page make it exist? And if we don’t put it up, does it not exist? I think behind all of this is grasping for true existence. Think about that.

Participant: It’s also not different from what we did several years ago.

Dr. Berzin: For example, some people always have to touch things. They go through the store and have to touch everything because they think that that establishes their existence. Or we always have to look in the mirror and see ourselves. It establishes our existence. Or we always have to say, “I love you.” If we don’t say, “I love you,” then our love doesn’t exist. It only exists if we say, “I love you.”

What we think will give us true existence changes over time. But the Buddhist truth is there: underlying all of that is grasping for true existence. It doesn’t mean that we have to give up the news, Facebook or any of that. The point is not to make it something compulsive and obsessive – basically, something that’s disturbing, a cause of suffering. 

One last reflection on this, and we will end unless you have something that you want to add.

Participant: It makes us think how far along we are with renunciation. 

Dr. Berzin: I think a lot of people find it difficult to go into retreat, especially a silent retreat, and to give up email, telephone, SMS, Facebook, and everything. For a lot of people, it’s very hard to renounce it even for just a weekend. And then they feel that they have to catch up on everything when they come out of retreat to see what they missed. 

Participant: There’s the potential to get addicted to it.  

Dr. Berzin: Definitely.

Participant: I try not to get too much into it. For instance, I don’t have a Facebook account. I shut off the computer several times a day and do my yoga or something that makes me feel like my existence is not the existence on the internet.

Dr. Berzin: So, in order not to get so addicted, you don’t have a Facebook page. A lot of people do, though. There are benefits of Facebook. It’s not as if it is useless. I do water aerobics or something like that gets me away from the computer, the cell phone and all of that. But then, as soon as we come back, we instantly turn it back on. We instantly look at our emails. It’s very hard. It’s very hard not to answer the phone when it rings, isn’t it? A lot of people don’t answer. They just wait to hear somebody say something on the answering machine to know if they want to pick up or not. But not to answer when we don’t have an answering machine is very hard, isn’t it? 

Participant: It’s difficult to relax during the whole day because we are always doing something on the internet.

Dr. Berzin: As I said, we don’t want to miss something. If we miss something, we don’t truly exist. 

Participant: It’s not so much the feeling that I miss something for the day. It’s that I don’t get things done, things that I want to get done. I want to do this, or I want to finish this.

Dr. Berzin: The counterpart to what we are talking about is never finishing a task. There is so much that we want to do, so then we do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But then we never finish anything because we’re always flitting from one thing to another. 

Participant: In the lab, I do one thing at a time. I spend two hours, let’s say, doing some work. I am really rushing to get it done and, at the end, my mind is completely wandering off because of doing all these tasks.

Dr. Berzin: Yes, it’s very difficult to be doing one thing and thinking about what we have to do next and whether we will be able to do it in time and move on to the next thing. Doing our morning meditation and thinking about what we need to do during the day is the same thing.

Participant: Get a sheet of paper and pen…

Dr. Berzin: Get a sheet of paper and a pen and put them next to our meditation seat so that we can write down all the things that we remember that we have to do in our mental wandering while we meditate. That’s not the point of meditation. That’s mental wandering. 

Anyway, these are difficult issues. They are disturbing. Disturbing emotions make us lose peace of mind. (remember the definition), and we lose self-control. We can’t really do what we want to because we have to look at emails. And it prevents us from helping others if we’re so attached. But now we have wandered far away from the mental attitude of not staying focused on something. 

It’s so unbelievably rude to be talking with somebody or just being with somebody and, at the same time, sending SMS to somebody else. It’s unbelievably rude. So, then we ask, whom are we being rude to? Is it the person who we are with or the person who is sending us an SMS that we don’t answer? Who takes precedence? “I have to look at this SMS because it might be something important.” Well, these are the challenges of this modern technology. But we need to work on these things.