Our FBA Dharmabyte today is an interesting, down to earth talk from the Director of the San Francisco Buddhist Center. In and#8220;Ethics and Speech: What Am I Trying to Say?and#8221; Padmatara discusses the ethics of speech as well as authenticity, kindness and miscommunication. She has been working with ways to bring more awareness to her own communication and is still learning from resistance and obstacles along the way.
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Ethics and Speech: What Am I Trying to Say?
[Music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. It's quite odd going and talking about speech really. It's thinking kind of demonstrating, it's imperfections even as I'm talking about them. I was thinking looking at these copious notes here. But what I tend to do is write down anything I wanted to say and then cross out a few chunks of it like this. So I didn't see that. As you're thinking, how fantastic it would be if I could do that with what comes out of my mouth. [Laughter] Sadly, it's your city. I had a good suggestion actually that I play the animals song. Please don't let me be misunderstood. It's quite pertinent to this talk actually, all my talks in fact, possibly, but particularly this one. It is painful and yet so easy to be misunderstood. And then again, it can be quite scary to be understood only too well, to feel exposed, which is possibly why public speaking is above death and war on the list of most scary things in this part of the world. [Laughter] So what am I trying to say to the title of this talk? More importantly, perhaps why am I trying to say anything? I've always found the area of speech really challenging. Growing up horribly shy and self-conscious in an English school system where self-expression wasn't exactly encouraged. But I've also been fascinated by it. So what I'm going to try to do, what I'd like to do is give you some food for thought. It's not going to be deeply academic this talk. But I'm going to share my own experience in the hope that I'll give you some ideas of ways to go deeper with communication, yourselves. Sankar Ashta points out in his commentary on the eightfold path that Buddhism doesn't make a division into body and spirit or body and soul, but into body, speech and mind. And that was the subject of the talks in the first night of this series. So speech has equal importance with body and mind. Through speech we express our mental states, our thoughts and moods become actions. Through perfect speech we give expression to wisdom and to love and compassion. Through most other kinds of speech our desire to be wise and compassionate is obscured in varying degrees by varying degrees of greed, hatred and delusion. I used to blame my inability to communicate effectively on the people I was failing to communicate with. They didn't get it, they didn't understand me because they had different values or they were too self-absorbed or lacking in empathy. And like a lot of other things at the time I thought that speech should be spontaneous and free and I didn't think I should need to put too much effort into it. So I divided people into groups, those who I thought would understand me and those, it wasn't worth filling a lot of effort into, not surprisingly this wasn't very satisfying. Trying to avoid the pain of being misunderstood I stifled myself and lost touch with the authenticity that I was craving. It wasn't that I was lying but I definitely wasn't saying the whole truth to most people and that separated from me from them and left me feeling quite isolated at times. So after years of feeling that something was a skew I began to wonder if I could actually learn how to communicate better with people. If I could say things in the right way and maybe have a bit more confidence people would understand me. And meditation and studying the Dharma and ethics really helped me because they had a very positive effect on their mental states and with emotional positivity speech definitely becomes more open, direct and kind. But I didn't always feel emotionally positive so there were big chunks of time when my desire to express myself authentically and kindly was quite severely impeded by negative emotion. I think there's something that happens sometimes, there's a danger that in any practice really when things start to go well, we feel better and we think the bad times are over or I do anyway. I can do it now, I don't need to practice so much, I don't need those particular practices anymore. And then luckily something comes up to challenge, so we're back. So basically I began to realise that I was still hung up on the idea that things could happen naturally. And I think they do happen naturally with awareness but it's a long process. And some things just need a bit more deliberate effort in addition. So I wanted to know how to prevent my communication, making things worse when I wasn't feeling so positive. Lisa can you hear me? This is my check that I'm speaking loud enough recently. So I became interested in nonviolent communication and Marshall Rosenberg's system that's speaking and I'm not going to talk much about that tonight. But I don't think it helped me at all actually in the way that I hoped it would in the way that I thought it would. I found it virtually impossible to put into practice outside of a study group where we were all practising. Quite close to leave but we were doing it all together. But it really did help me to look at speech in a totally different way. I began to see that the power of speech is in the intention more than the words themselves. And I began to try to bring more awareness to that. I began to ask myself why I was saying something, why I wanted to speak at all, what I was trying to communicate. And all things that amazingly really I hadn't given much attention to before. I think I've been trying to cure the symptoms in fact and ignoring the actual illness. So when I first started to really look at intention it was a bit shocking. Far from being just a soul whose intentions are good as a song goes. I spend a lot, quite a shocking amount of time trying to gain points for myself. My intentions aren't always that good, so it turns out. So I spend time measuring myself up against other people. And some ludicrous scale that I can only guess I created unconsciously in childhood perhaps, some formative childhood events, random conversations. And I suspect some television programmes and I watch what I'm thinking of some scale that I've got that I've constantly measured myself against. It doesn't actually make a lot of sense when I look at it in detail. So I wasn't alone in this quite quickly became obvious that we're all to some degree competing with our own imaginary demons. There'd be two of us talking, but in between us there were so many projections that we couldn't hardly see each other at all. So we both had our own perhaps totally different private ways of measuring ourselves that had very little to do with each other. So look how clever I am, how kind, how ethical, how modest, basically some ways think how much better or worse or equal I am. And sometimes every now and then we look around and just see these shattered ruins of communication and think what happened? So no wonder speech is difficult, there's this constant inner dialogue assessing how am I doing and leaving the outer dialogue more or less on automatic a lot of time. You're just filling up space, keeping me actually from being aware. So this doesn't continue to get worse. But just a little bit, there's quite horrifying at first, but luckily it wasn't always like that. Sometimes something happened to change it, some connection happened to some real moment that changed everything or at least changed the course as a conversation. So it's something mysterious, but it encouraged me to think that if I did bother to put some effort in, bring some awareness to my intention in speech that I could change it. And no amount, NDC, no amount of communication suggests that most of the time we think of ourselves as separate as separate beings, it's not like Buddhism, and therefore there's not enough to go around. And if we're not conscious of this view, if we don't keep this view conscious, our communication will continue to reinforce it. So we'll keep thinking more and more that we're separate and there's an inner for all of us. And becoming more conscious, we can begin to connect and begin to empathize, instead of competing, and to gradually soften this view, this way of looking at things. We can begin to see people and begin to speak as Sankarashita puts it, "From mutual awareness and mutual love, knowing what each other needs without constant reference to ourselves." So I realized that unless I was going to be enlightened fairly soon, I would really need some effort, and it wasn't going to come naturally or not soon enough. But I also realized that like meta or loving kindness, there's a seed there, so I wouldn't have to create it from nothing. I just need to recognize the seeds and be encouraging. Like the mindfulness of breathing, I would wander off the path again and again and again, and need to keep coming back to my intention again and again. So most of our speech is incredibly fast and automatic, and most of our motivation for speech is unconscious. We're just really not aware of it. So we need quite a lot of mindfulness, and as always, it's important to remember that being mindful means, I don't know whether people have been in my meditation class, but being mindful means taking a gentle interest in whatever's happening, not judging ourselves to be good or bad. Because when we start to look at speech as a practice, it's really easy to see nothing but trouble and start putting ourselves down, tends to be unnatural habit. This sometimes also happens when we start to practice the meta-babner. We become aware of where meta isn't. So our speech seems out of our control, but it isn't really. And as we're talking in our sleep, I was trying to think of times when it really is out of our control, but there's always an intention behind it, behind what we're saying. We're just not always conscious of it, and we need to bring that into awareness. And we can't bring it into awareness if we're too busy judging to really be aware of it. So with awareness, we'll gradually find that we have more choice about how we speak. So the rest of what I'm going to say, actually, is about some useful structures that are already in place in Buddhism to help us look at our speech and help us become more conscious, deliberately conscious of the intention we have before we speak. So those times when we're normally on automatic pilot, we can practice just being more aware. So one really good way to see the intention that precedes our speech is to practice silence from time to time. Last time I gave a talk about speech quite a while ago, I ended up talking quite a lot about silence, so I won't do that this time. But I do like it and find it helpful. On retreats, for example, we often have quite long periods of silence. And without that constant inner dialogue that I was talking about, that usually comes in conjunction with the automatic antenna. It's possible to just go a lot deeper with ourselves and through that to see ourselves and other people as if we're actually on the same planet, in the same universe. So to connect, often, at the end of retreats, people comment and say things like, "Everyone looks so beautiful," and things like that. I do, anyway. And that comes from being aware of each other, really, because we're not too busy talking and trying to compare. So we can learn to sit with our desire to talk and just ask ourselves why. And in that way, just again, learning the intention becomes clearer. Someone, I can't remember who, so I apologize if it's anybody here. Somebody was saying recently that learning a foreign language is a bit like this. When you're talking in the language that you're sort of struggling with, you can't be so wrapped up in trying to present something else. You know, you're actually trying to communicate, so it was interesting. Vidanya, who wrote the introduction to Buddhism, are in a talk about the fourth precept, the speech precept. It uses the framework of the worldly winds as a way to become more aware of our unconscious motivations and what he calls our habits of editing the reality to make ourselves look good. And I don't know if anyone can see these, but these are the four worldly winds. Eight. Eight worldly winds. They're in four pairs, gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, and fame and loss of fame, or infamy, sometimes called. And they're called worldly winds because, like, the wind, I think, they actually happen, whatever we do. We can't actually control them, but we think that we can control them, so we keep trying to. And a lot of what we do actually is trying to get one of these, like, gain things or avoid losing them, so we're trying to get something or avoid losing it. Trying to be praised and not blamed, trying to have pleasure or comfort and avoid discomfort or pain, and trying to look good to have a good reputation. So they're quite a useful checklist, and if our communication seems off somehow, it's probably because there's a good chance it's because of one of these, because we're trying to get something or trying to avoid something. We're basically trying to control our world, actually, trying to fix our world, trying to fix people, rather than trying to see it as it really is. So, going back to Sangharachata and his eightfold path. Speech is one of the folds of the eightfold path. You probably all know that. In Sangharachata, normally you'll hear of those parts of the eightfold path, as I can't think of the word right now, right action, right effort, right speech, et cetera. And Sangharachata, instead, prefers to use perfect, so he calls it perfect speech, which I really like, actually, because we want to think about right speech, really gives the impression there's a correct way to say things, and an incorrect way to say things. And it almost invites our judgment, invites our judging egos to kind of take over and just compound how difficult it is really. So it makes us think of things in terms of I'm right, you're wrong. Pamadarni last week was talking a bit about how we can use anything, but how we can use ethics as a way to make Samsara work, to make ourselves look good to make people like us, or if it's our particular habit, we can use it to make ourselves look bad, actually. And comfort ourselves that there's no way, there's no point in making an effort. So we can use it for purposes that it's not really meant for. I think the language of right and wrong can encourage this, whereas perfect seems more positive and less narrow. And maybe that's partly because it's opposite, imperfect, has more of the spirit of working to transform also, working as the seeds that we already have the intention to be skillful. So it's not just one more point to be gained. Joseph Gossing, I'm pretty sure, says that he would like right speech to be called speech from the heart, which is a way Marshall Rosenberg and BC talks about it, in fact, speaking directly from my heart to yours, or you could say speaking from my potential to be enlightened, to your potential, to be enlightened, there's just a different way of looking at it, which is quite nice. So perfect speech as a way to become more aware. But for aspects of perfect speech that you're normally here, speech that is true, affectionate or kind, helpful, and promotes harmony. And they're all pretty straightforward. So I've got actually talks about them in terms of levels, actually, of communication. So beginning with two speech, we're saying what we believe to be true. We're saying things that are factual, honest, and sincere. He puts it saying what is really in our heart and mind. And he points out that often we don't actually know what that is. So again, we need to become quite intensely aware of ourselves in order to be able to speak the truth, actually. For Daniel, again, makes a couple of interesting points about this, I think. First of all, he says that consciously practicing true speech reveals our resistance to speaking to his boy. And as such, he's a very useful pointer to our motivation. It points to whether we're motivated by wisdom or compassion, or by self-centeredness. He says that, I've got a quote here. "True speech means facing and speaking the truth, even when this goes against what our ego wants." And so undermining our tendency to give priority to our self-centered desires over reality. So the precept is about speaking the truth when this is uncomfortable for us, not when it is uncomfortable for other people. He says that people often object to this precept on the grounds that speaking the truth can be unkind, as though our untruthfulness was usually about sparing other people's feelings. I know that I am MS. In fact, for most of us, he says, most of our untruthfulness is about our own selfishness. And it is this that we are trying to tackle by practicing the truth, the truth speech. So he's not suggesting that we should be unkind. He definitely goes on to say later that there are kind ways of doing this. But what he's going at, I think, is that there are times when we hold back because we don't want to upset someone. When, in fact, we don't really care too much if they're upset. But we care about being the person who does the upsetting. So because we don't want to be blamed or to feel uncomfortable, that kind of thing, or actually we don't, you know, we want, we don't want. So it's back to the worldly wins. One last point about speaking the truth. Manchester also stresses that it's important that people are believed when they speak the truth. A affectionate speech. Manchester said is the truth spoken in or with love, with complete awareness of the person we're speaking to. He says, usually we see other people in terms of our own emotional reactions to them. So if, for instance, people do what we would like them to do, we say they are good, kind, helpful and so on. We're not really communicating with that person. We're trying or pretending to communicate with our own mental projections. So helpful speech, speaking, yeah, actually, this is, this is, this is very much Sankarashta. Speaking in such a way that the person we are speaking to is raised in the scale of being unconsciousness, not lowered. So that's the ideal. He goes on to say at least we can be positive and appreciative, which allows the other person to grow. He is very, he talks a lot elsewhere about the importance of encouraging people and having faith in their potential. I think that is part of the speech. And finally, Harmony, and he points out that this is not saying, yes, I agree with you, but it's a communication based basically on the other three things based on truth, kindness and helpfulness. So, almost finished. So as well as the fourth precept, which I'm just assuming you all know, which is, and is taken to abstain from false speech. There's a set of 10 precepts, which has five other, three other, come on, some with numbers to that, three other speech precepts in it. So I undertake to abstain from harsh speech, useless speech, and slanderous speech, which are actually kind of the other side of these four things. So it all fits together quite nicely. So one last quote from Sangha Aishada, some of these are quite funny. He says, "One cannot help thinking that speech, which is so precious and so wonderful, so expressive and such a treasure, should be something exceptional. It should at least be something like eating that you do occasionally after thought and preparation. But all too often speech proceeds thought, while talking is the rule and silence, the exception." So one final word of encouragement, apparently the Buddha considered, it's quite a well-known story actually, where he considered not saying anything at all after he became enlightened, because he thought no one would understand him. But in the end he decided to teach anyway, because he knew that even though he would be understood many times, some people would be ready to hear him. He would not but us yet, but as he instructed in his famous line, we come with mindfulness, strive on. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bight. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. 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