Partly Sunny or Partly Cloudy?
The importance of seeing clearly
Hello friends,
I hope your lives and work are in flow and in service. This past weekend, I led our Eon Zen Sangha in a one-day meditation retreat for beginners, which was well-attended and — judging by the smiles on people’s faces at the end — well-received. Our theme for this practice season is “The Bardo of Everyday Life.” We are focusing on how to be fully present in the midst of transitory phenomena, which is basically the fabric of our lives.
[If you are interested in formal Zen practice, you might check out one of my dharma talks on the subject, and subscribe to the Eon Zen channel while you’re at it. All our programs are available on the main Eon Zen Center site. We have many virtual offerings.]
As you know if you read my previous newsletters, I have been focusing on Bardo states, or “in-between” zones, also in my Zen@Work material. My e-book “The Bardo of Work: Five Keys to Navigating the ‘In-Between’ of Work Transitions to Manifest Your Most Fulfilling Life” is available now for download.
In today’s newsletter I’m offering a lightly edited transcript of the recent Game of Zen podcast, in which I discuss several aspects of the Eightfold Path and how they apply to everyday life and work. Scott and I discuss what Right View and Right Intention are, and how they help us keep from creating difficulties for ourselves.
I hope you enjoy, forward and share this newsletter with friends. If you would like to explore working with me one-on-one to help you navigate your personal transition, in whatever form it is taking, sign up for a free Discovery session. I’d love to chat.
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https://game-of-zen.captivate.fm/
Game of Zen Episode 6: Partly Sunny or Partly Cloudy?
The Importance of Seeing Clearly
Scott Berman [00:00:54]: So today we're going to explore right view and right intention, which are the first two steps of the Eightfold Path, and there's really good reasons why they are the first two. We're going to be sharing stories from Zen Buddhist teachings that really exemplify the transformative power of these aspects. So, Paul, can you explain to us why these are the first two parts and how they lead to the rest of the path?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:01:24]: Yeah, so we need a clear view of reality in order to kind of give us a map of what we are experiencing in the world. Right. So our behavior, our words, and even our thoughts are going to be governed by what we see in front of us in the world. Also our view of what's going on within ourselves. So it's basic Buddhist kind of understanding that our view of the world is obscured by our desires and by our cravings and by our judgments and our reactivities. So now, if these things get in the way, then all the other parts of the Eightfold Path our actions, our speech, even our livelihood, they're going to be in accord with an illusory reality or a reality that is kind of off versus real reality. And remember, delusion is the root cause of suffering in Buddhist understanding. It's a fundamental not seeing who we really are and what the real nature of reality is that causes suffering for ourselves and others.
So it's really important to have this fundamental groundwork, a clear map, as clear as we can of what's going on, so we can align our own lives in accord with that.
Scott Berman [00:02:48]: Yeah, it's really important. And so how would you describe the characteristics of right view and how do we really determine what's real and what's not?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:02:57]: Yeah, well, a really great question, right. What's real and what's not? A deep question and one that is worthy of inquiry every day. Is this real or not? Well, Buddhism gives us a few essential characteristics of reality that it teaches that a right view is going to have to take these into account. And if it does, then you're getting close to what's going on. Okay, so the first characteristic is impermanence, the fact that everything changes, everything fades away and everything is always doing this. Even at the absolute microscopic level, nothing is ever fixed or static. And quantum physics is revealing this to be the fundamental fabric of reality is a flux of energy with particles popping into and out of existence. So actually at the quantum level, the deepest level, nothing is ever fixed.
So if we base our understanding on the belief that something is going to be around forever and isn't changing all the time, that's not right view and we're going to go wrong. Okay? The second characteristic of reality is what we call suffering. And we've talked about that in the last couple of episodes. That has to do with the way that we add extra reactive patterns to our own phenomenal experience and that gets us out of joint. So you could basically say that when I don't really accept impermanence and I try to change reality and what's in front of me, I'm going to create suffering for myself. Now there's also right within dukkha, there's also the promise and the possibility of what we call nirvana, which is release from suffering or a cessation of our reactivities. Right? So any view of reality that doesn't take into account that we're constantly doing this and adding things extra is not going to be in accord with reality. And the third fundamental essential characteristic of right view is what we call no self, which you could say is a byproduct also or a special case of impermanence, which is that there's no fixed self ourselves.
So there's no essential non changing perspective that can establish a universal truth across all times and all circumstances. Okay? So we have to have a view that all of these things are unfixed and always changing. And when we do take these into account, we're coming closer and closer to a view that is what we call right. There's one other thing that is important to take into account, which is what we call the law of cause and effect. Everything has a cause and everything produces effects. unendingly. There are always karmic conditions that unfold around everything that we intentionally or I should say volitionally do say or even think. So everything has usually multiple causes and multiple effects.
So any of us who think things are random and don't have effects, now we can't always discover what the causes and effects of anything are. But to deny that things don't have clear causes and effects would be out of accord with right view.
Scott Berman [00:06:51]: Yeah, and what I find interesting getting a little older here is that the views change. You can go days and years with a single view and then something will happen and it'll change your view. And I focus a lot now on switching to different views that aren't biased and I think about things, big issues that are big or little issues. I never used to like spinach when I was a kid and now I love it. So that's one little view, right? But even big things that are going on in my life, so the way I work on it is based on my practice. And here I'd like to tell you a quick quote from Robert Aiken, who was one of the first generation of American Zen Buddhist teachers. So he says that it comes down to practice. Practice, after all, is conduct in keeping with right views.
Of course, right views are not merely opinions, not even the Buddha's opinions, but are views that accord with this realization, we're all in this together, and we aren't here very long. Let's take care of one another while we can.
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:07:54]: Yeah, it's a beautiful expression, right? And there's a couple of things in there. Robert Aiken, by the way, is one of the first generation of American Zen masters who receive transmission from a Japanese lineage. He passed away just within the last decade and a really instrumental and wonderful figure in the evolution of Americans. The things I love about that, what you just shared is him really pointing to the interconnectedness of all of us is that we can't really stand outside of reality and think that we've got the truth, that we know the truth, and we've got the possession of the great truth. It's that we're really all in this together, sharing our feelings and our lives and just kind of moving together altogether. The other thing is he kind of talks about right views with respect to opinions, too. And it's important to recognize that is that you could say that I have a belief about something and it could be more or less accurate, right? But the right view is that, well, that belief might be accurate in this situation, but it might not be right in that situation. The view is that it's provisional.
All of our truths, in a sense, are provisional and are perspectival. They have to do with the certain time and place you're in. So you shouldn't mistake right views with right opinions or right beliefs. The right view is that all opinions and beliefs are provisional, right?
Scott Berman [00:09:43]: And speaking of opinions and beliefs, I spent many years of my career working in political advertising, and one thing I noticed over that time was that there's a lot of wrong views and there's a lot of views that are divisive. And depending on which side of the aisle you're on or which side of the country you're on, you really look at things differently than other folks. And our country is less connected than and has been. And so when you do that, we're creating suffering for ourselves, but also our neighbors. We're disagreeing on basic things, and really it's a shame. We need to come together more. And I think that one thing I've learned that you've taught me is that selfishness, really to the exclusion of everything else, is a wrong view. We're all dependent on each other in one way or another.
So how do we determine if we disagree with someone's view? But we have our own views. How do we kind of connect with each other in a better way?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:10:41]: Yeah, wrong views or right views. From a political standpoint, it's all opinions and it's all beliefs, right? So they may be more or less accurate or helpful in any given situation. From the perspective of right view, we just have to say, well, how helpful and how accurate is that view in this time and this place? But of course, when you get political parties and you get people identifying behind certain beliefs, they just hold fixed to them, right? They say, well, this is the case and this is going to be the case forever. This is the ideology or the political platform that I absolutely hold onto. So those are not right view. You might not be coming from a perspective of right view if you're going to hold fast to an opinion. Right. So that's the overriding part of it.
With respect to selfishness that you were bringing up, that's an important part too, because if you're not seeing that we're all really in this together and we're all affecting each other and we're all, in some ways, creating helping to create each other's lives with the lives we're living and the decisions we're making and how we're interrelating with other people you're actually not seeing the way the world really is, because that's the truth of reality, is we're interconnected at the deepest level. So if you say, well, these people always want this and we need to get them certain things in certain ways, you're not really doing justice to the fundamentally interconnected and organic and know nature of our society.
Scott Berman [00:12:59]: Yeah. Great answer, Paul. Thanks. And so let's actually move on to the second step of the Noble Eightfold Path, which is right intention and how does right view lead into intention?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:13:12]: So it doesn't necessarily lead to right intention. It's another step for us to take consciously. It's just so important to recognize how powerful our intentions are? And we typically don't recognize how important our tensions are. We tend to think that we're doing things that we have to do or we might have some goals. But goals are different from intentions. Intentions are kind of working at a deeper level and sometimes we can lose contact with what our deepest intentions are. Maybe some of us have never even explored what our deepest intentions are for our life. But our intentions actually do guide our thoughts, our emotions, and also our actions.
When we've got something conscious that we're putting out there, we're making a decision about the types of information that's important to us and it also tunes us into this interdependence. We were talking about this cause and effect, which is real when we have an intention and we want something to happen. So we want something to unfold in a certain way and maybe it's for ourselves or our families or our companies or communities. When we have that attention, we tend to pay attention to whether those intentions are being actualized or not. So we're incented to actually notice what produces a certain result and what produces a counter result. So it's a very essential way of moving forward in the world effectively.
Scott Berman [00:15:05]: Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot in business, and it comes up within your own company, but also with your competitors and your vendors and things like that. So can you give us an example of how this comes up in a work environment?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:15:19]: Yeah, we want to make clear intentions, and then we also want to make wholesome intentions. Right. Because we can have an intention to get all the money in the world. We could have a very greedy intention, which is certainly an intention. But from the Buddhist perspective, what it means to have right intention is to have a wholesome intention. So you could say do the greatest good for the greatest number, or to be in wholeness, both as an individual and in terms of what you manifest in the world. So an example from a business perspective would be something like how do you see your competitors? You could have an intention that I want to crush them, that competition is bad, and I want to crush my competition. Well, actually, it's pretty well understood business wisdom that competition is good, that establishes a market for your services.
So you may want to dominate a market, but rarely is it good to crush competition. And if that's what you're targeting, that's what you're aligning yourself to. You may do a disservice to your entire market if you've got that orientation. So it's important to have wholesome intentions.
Scott Berman [00:17:02]: Yeah, I was thinking too of there's a lot of talk out there about ESG initiatives, and according to many people, the view is right, the intention is right. However, right livelihood and right action are sometimes not aligned with that view. So most companies or many companies want to be on the right side of these environmental issues. However, various stakeholders will disagree. So how do we balance those two things that might be in contrast to each other?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:17:33]: Basically, we should acknowledge that holding right intention is very difficult in a complex world. It definitely is. I mean, it's difficult even just at the individual level, but then when you get into higher levels of organizations such as companies and societies, it's really difficult. Right. We have this condition of VUCA. We mentioned it in the last episode volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are going on. So we don't really know what's best and what's to do. And it can be difficult to say move from a level of, well, my overall intention is to do well for my company, do well for my society, do well for myself, do well for my community.
These really high level intentions which are really important to hold. But as you drop down into specificity and have those govern broader initiatives, it can get very difficult to hold a place that's really wholesome and takes as much as possible into account. So like you said, there's kind of competing initiatives. I'm thinking of an example of something like externalized costs and this is something that maybe you can actually work with. There's industries that are based on their profit margins, you could say are almost based on externalizing certain costs. Right? We understand that, say, the fossil fuel industry has externalized a lot of the damage it's doing to the environment as an externalized cost which society has to bear and global societies have to bear while they reap the profits of their resource extraction. So to have right intention and right view in this context would take into account externalized costs. It would be very conscious of that.
And something like the B Corp movement is a wonderful effort in that direction of taking those into account. ESG initiatives which you mentioned are in that direction. Right? They want to be conscious and everybody wants to be conscious of environmental, social and governance directives. But I think the jury maybe is still out or maybe is trickling in on ESG initiatives and the verdict is not very favorable in my understanding, on the effectiveness of those initiatives. So we have to recognize that it is difficult to really have clear intention in such a complex environment. But it will say, the last thing I'll say about this is that the intentions can't just be good intentions, right? We know where good intentions lead. It has to be intentions with an understanding that there's commitment required and there's sacrifice required to follow through with right action, right speech, right livelihood to really walk this path.
Scott Berman [00:20:51]: Yeah, and I think this is tough and it's tough for a big multinational company or a small business. And every entrepreneur goes through this situation where things conflict, profits and revenue goals conflict with how much to pay their employees. Do we have unions? How much do I reduce my carbon footprint without increasing my cost of goods? So there's decisions that come up every day where you might have one intention of doing something the quote unquote, right way, but then you might look at your numbers and say, maybe I should do it a different way. Right? How do we deal with that?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:21:31]: Yeah, definitely. Well, we hold our intention and then we see whether our actions produce the effect that we wanted and then we adjust. And that's where the virtue signaling intentions are just those are the good intentions that the road to hell is paved with because it isn't actually checking back in to see whether it's producing the desired effect. You can just say I'm holding these good intentions and then we're good. Well, no, you have to adjust based on whether your actions actually are producing the result you want?
Scott Berman [00:22:09]: Yeah, well, so I want to share a personal part about right intention. I got married 1992, actually, and my intention was to have a long and successful marriage. I believe at the end, I said, Till death do us part. Right. Well, I'm still here and I'm not married anymore, but things worked out really well for myself. And my ex and I have two amazing daughters. We both had this intention of building a successful life together, and we made it to 14 years, actually. And then we split up and it was all good, and my view changed and so did hers.
And so I think that that happens. And as you grow older, you sort of realize that these are a natural part of life.
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:22:53]: Yeah, that's a great example. Right. When you hold the intention of building a happy life with your partner and having kids, then that is going to inform how you hold yourself and show up for that marriage. And it did, and you did. And the fact that the marriage ended does not in any way go against the value of those good intentions or even the power of those good intentions. I would say it actually validates the power of those good intentions because it did succeed for a period.
Scott Berman [00:23:30]: And we can move on from that subject! But Paul, I'd like to talk a little bit about right intention with your coaching clients. And first, how do you redirect someone's views or intentions and how do you evaluate where they might need some adjustment?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:23:49]: Well, I definitely don't redirect their views and intentions through dialogue. I try to establish what their view is of themselves, their work and their world. They may have a view of their industry or the world and how it works. And so I may point out areas where I think they might be missing something about themselves or their work or their world, and that may resonate with them, or it may not. Usually it does. We can all use a perspective shift or a guide or a mirror to kind of reflect what you're seeing. So I will help them to clarify their view of themselves in their work. And then with respect to intention, it's very much an elicitation process.
I'll ask them, what do you want? What is your intention in going forward? Oftentimes there's a half formed intention, maybe half to three quarters formed with people who come to me in terms of what they think they want. It could be starting a new business or moving jobs or getting a new job or improving their leadership skills. These are all examples with people that I'm working with at the moment. So they could have relatively clear intention, but I can help them to really focus that and to really laser focus on what the intention is and then move into, well, how do we do that? How do we manifest that intention. And I will say that also, there's the same thing on my side. Right. I want to bring and I'm conscious of trying to bring a clarity of, well, here's where I see I can help you, and here's where I don't think I can help you, or I'm not the right person to help you, or I don't think you need any help.
Likewise with my intention, I put into writing with my initial contact with my clients. Once we engage, I say it's my intention to help this person in the ways that we've outlined in my discovery call. And that's what I'm in service to moving forward. And I think that provides a really wonderful baseline, a heart grounding for our work together.
Scott Berman [00:26:24]: And by the way, you're really good at that, Paul. I learned a lot from you when we first started talking, and I think that one of the things, and one of the reasons why I think it works so well with us is because I was very open to thinking about this in a broader context. I came to you with certain situations that were going on in my business career, and you actually helped me shift my intentions and shift my views into different ways. And the more that I've deepened my practice, the more that I've gotten better at that. So I know that's a recurring theme here, that the more we work on it, then it becomes sort of second nature. So I'm curious over your course of being a Zen master for all these years. How have you done this in your personal life, and how has that made it better for you with your students?
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:27:17]: To be expressed and conscious of my vows is what has guided me in my work. So that means I have a vow to help all people relieve suffering. I'm not relieving their suffering. I'm helping them to relieve their own suffering. That's what it means to be a Buddhist teacher. I'm not a priest or a god or anything like that, but I can help people get out of their own way and relieve their own suffering because I've traveled that path, and I've gotten in my way so much through my life. And that's what informs my work now, is my vow to share my understanding around how you can get out of your own way and suffer less and thrive more.
It's the guidepost for me. So if I do ever get into a place of confusion where I'm like, well, this person is showing up with stuff, and maybe I'm a little pissed off because they're disrespectful or they're getting in another person's way, in my community, there might be something like that. I can always just remind myself that, okay, what does this person need? And what does the situation need? And I just completely take my own ego out of it and it's really wonderful. It just makes things less complicated.
Scott Berman [00:28:54]: Yeah, that's really powerful. And one thing I think about, too, is that the eight fold path really does work. The better you get at it, it works. And this is why the specific parts of it, it's good to understand it. And future episodes, we're going to go further down the path. But the more that when you go further along and you think about delusion and attachment and impermanence, and then you say, okay, well, I'm going to think about right view here in this situation. And that relieves suffering instantly. Many times just changing your view about something releases anxiety and stress that's built up over time.
So the more that you recognize that happening, that switch taking place, the easier it is to flip it in more situations.
Paul Gyodo Agostinelli [00:29:41]: Yeah, that's right. It's really wonderful to recognize that it works.
Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash