What is Dharma?

We live in a culture where people are socialised to believe that learning happens from reading books or from listening to someone standing at the front of a classroom. This is very effective at transmitting a certain type of knowledge, but it requires cutting through if you want to get intimately in touch with your true nature or the true nature of the Universe.

People often carry the idea that gaining knowledge comes from learning about concepts and ideas. This gets translated it their practice with the belief that if they listen to enough talks, it will help them to awaken or get the thing out of meditation that they are looking for.

The opposite can actually be true. Listening to someone who is perceived as a higher status than you talking from a place of authority about what your experience is, at the wrong moment, is just as likely to be holding you back as helping you move forward.

There needs to be a balance between transmission, inspiration, insight, practical tools, intimacy with direct experience, and knowledge that you can put into practice. The balance between being encouraged to discover new things from someone who has greater wisdom than you and trusting your own experience is a very fine one. If someone is just giving you a download of their ideas as if it is unquestionable truth, then you will lose touch with what the dharma is actually about.

The dharma is being present with the truth. This is a very delicate thing that takes a huge amount of nuance, depth, courage and hard work to start doing.

There are loads of things in experience that stop you from being present. The present moment contains infinite multitudes that you can spend an entire lifetime exploring, clarifying, dissolving, merging with or accepting. This amount of complexity and hard work is why it’s easier to listen to other people talk about what they think about the dharma than it is to practice it.

People that help you practice in a way that truly invites more depth, intimacy and clarity are important; but it’s important to not get this confused with people who have clever-sounding ideas.

Practices

There are almost infinite number of tools and techniques that can help you become more present with experience, and the level of nuance and depth at which they can be applied tends to get richer and more interesting as time goes on.

The best practices are pretty simple at their core. I like to think of them as learning basic skills, like walking. Walking is in theory a very simple skill, but once you are capable of it, it creates almost infinite possibilities of where that can take you and how you can use it. Something like a simple noting practice can open up doors in experience that can take you to all sorts of interesting and unexpected places.

Practices like Theravadan Buddhist Vipassana (and specifically noting the three characteristics) are fractal in their nature. They’ve been developed by someone who has experienced an aspect of true nature that applies at every level and can be used at any phase of the path. The tools are providing a meta-perspective on experience and helping people to connect with this at whatever phase they are in.

“The level of complexity and richness and detail would just keep going”

David Lassiter, from our conversation about Long-Term Vipassana Retreat

Therapy

You are just as likely to learn the tools for connecting with truth while in a therapy room as you are in a meditation hall.

Working with content in a skilled way and purposefully engaging with the depths of the inner world is just as vital to seeing true nature as meditative insights.

The development of modalities such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy has opened up a lot of possibilities for deep practice in a therapeutic context.

The success of most traditional talk therapies largely hinges on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client. IFS in comparison has an underlying mechanism that people can intuitively work with once they have been introduced it.

IFS is also designed on the basis of people having fundamental goodness at their core (IFS calls it ‘self energy), so it fits very well with the idea of innate Buddha Nature and so can be incorporated seamlessly with other spiritual practices.

During an IFS therapy session, the therapist models self energy and holds space for the client to get in touch with this in themselves. Over time the client accumulates the tools to explore and engage with their inner world. This works similarly to developing the skills for having a meditation practice. For example, once you have done some guided IFS therapy, you can understand that you have these aspects of yourself in your inner world:

• ‘Exiles’ or feelings that you don’t want to feel
• ‘Managers’ or parts that want to stay in control
• ‘Firefighters’ or parts that are strongly reactive
• And ‘self energy’ or the part of you that is open, loving and spacious

IFS gives you some methods for working with these different parts to create more self energy. This allows you to work with the dynamic in your inner world and to continue to discover deep insights and openings.

Truth

IFS therapy and Vipassana are just a couple of examples of practices that help you get more in touch with the truth and depths of experience. There are countless other practices that can take you in this direction.

An important part of this journey is having the support of a wise and skilled teacher or facilitator to guide you and help you navigate this, as well as to introduce you to new ideas or aspects of experience.

But none of this is going to replace that your connection with the dharma comes from you being able to be intimately present with the truth of experience.

Conclusion

One thing to be mindful of is that the dominant Western scientific paradigm offers people a certain way of being in the world. It has a very narrow perspective on what the present moment is and a very limited idea of what it means to be a human in this world.

There are other paradigms that exist that offer different ways of being and it’s worth understanding that the environments that people practice in, the way that people treat each other and the deepest truths that people believe all radically change what dharma and practice looks like.

In my vision of the dharma, it’s important to make space for people to connect to their challenges and difficulties, as well as the breadths of beauty that it is possible to feel.

Really amazing and mind-blowing insights can be experienced, but there’s no ultimate truth that is going to be discovered. The process is a slow unravelling into the depths of being, that comes from connecting to the truth deep inside of you and the vast transcendent truths outside of you.

These things can happen by people learning to sit with themselves in silence and pay attention to their experience without reacting or needing to express anything. It can also happen through people being invited to explore their shadow and express their deepest pains. It also happens by people being invited into new experiences that they couldn’t have imagined were possible before.

It also happens through a thousand other both explicit and subtle ways that take can take hundreds of lifetimes to refine and can come from many different sources, but ultimately are judged as effective by the question, ‘does this lead me into deeper truth and intimacy with true nature?’