It's on. Oh. You're not going to miss. Only once. I can do that. That's fine with me. I can let you know if I need it flipped. It's probably worse, depending on your perspective. So, thank you all for coming. It's both an honor and perhaps interesting to be doing this here in a zendo. We'll see how it goes.

[01:03]

I'd like to, I'll be talking about what's on that chart later, but first I'd like to do some, kind of paint the overall picture of what I hope to do, or I hope what we can explore in these three sessions, three or four, today, tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Basically, each of those four periods, if we count the afternoon as two, we'll do a sitting just like we've done. I'll make a presentation and then leave some time for questions and discussion, partly because of the size of the group and the relatively short time. I don't think there's going to be a lot of room for one-on-one or individual stuff, but there might be some ways to do more of that tomorrow afternoon, depending on how you respond or react to what I'm presenting.

[02:21]

So that'll be the basic flow, which we'll repeat four times. Overall, there are maybe three main things that I'll be trying to get into here, and trying to stay in line with what was advertised. It's not always easy, since you have to come up with a title and a description months in advance. And then forget. But fortunately, we did have a printout, so I double-checked this afternoon. But the primary thing, and a lot of this comes out of some ongoing discussions between Lori and I and also myself and others, where it's been fruitful to use the defense mechanisms as I understand them and as I'll try to explain a bit later and then more detail tomorrow morning.

[03:48]

There are a number of ways it's quite helpful to understand and observe how these work in meditation. kind of the core focus of this workshop. One reason looking at the defense mechanisms can be rich but also difficult is the way I understand them. There are quite subtle aspect of or manifestation of the patterns of stuff that we've sort of accumulated. over the years, or if you like, over the lifetimes. And I'll be touching on more on that in a bit. In a neogram language, which I won't be teaching a neogram here, but I'll be drawing on some of its perspectives, there's something we can call a type structure.

[05:02]

And one way of looking at the defense mechanisms is both they're a subtle movement into the conscious mind that then elaborates in all kinds of ways, which the standard Enneagram literature describes quite richly. But this more subtle movement of how patterns, which Buddhism sometimes calls karmic formations, or there are other names for it, that get deposited, how that moves into consciousness. One reason it's very helpful to look at this in terms of meditation is that's one of the few contexts where many of us can actually see it when it's on a subtle level.

[06:07]

Usually, when I've talked with some psychologist friends about the defense mechanisms, the examples presented tend to be more behavioral. And that's a much more complex, energetic level of observation. But I find it, what I'm interested in, and hopefully you guys as well, is the much more subtle version of this. So that's quite rich in terms of understanding ourselves psychologically. And it's also, I think, valuable in understanding from a more Buddhist angle how we keep constructing and reconstructing ego or the illusion of self. And this, this will be a theme I'll, I'll come back to regularly because for me it's, it's the theme.

[07:11]

How, how we keep rebirthing the illusion of self. and how to let go of that recreation of me, of the ego, of self over and over again. The second aspect of this, which I hope we can, there'll be time to get some individual examples from some of you to explore in some detail. I'll also provide some of my own. is how this defense mechanism screws up meditation, to put it crudely. Those of us who meditate know how our minds are off thinking about all kinds of stuff. or if you're like me, a more body-based person, just caught up in all the irritations of my belt, my robes.

[08:14]

But I've tried meditating naked and there's still stuff. So, you know, it's not just the robes, it's just if they're there, they're the handy target of my irritable mind. There's a level of that that's quite active. And I'll try to relate the defense mechanisms to that. But again, there's a more subtle level where this will vary a bit depending on the kind of meditation we do. But the way I meditate, which is based in the breathing, after a while I start to bring attention to the nose and develop a quite subtle focus. at the tip of the nose and sometimes when the thinking begins to drop away or even does more or less stop and it's pretty peaceful but then staying there for a while there's some interesting things that happen that get in the way of

[09:27]

a deeper level of samadhi. Are you all familiar with that word? Often called concentration, but a deep, strong, peaceful, yet fully alert focus. One of the things I'll go into detail on tomorrow is nine versions of how we avoid that. Even though as meditators we claim to want it, But when we get close, we don't, something gets in the way. And I use the defense mechanisms as a way to understand that. And whether our goal is more the calmness side of meditation or the insight side of it, the defense mechanisms get in the way. So I and some friends have found it quite fruitful to use this perspective, especially borrowing from Enneagram.

[10:41]

Each of us has an ego creation pattern that's predominant, and then there's some subversions of that. But there's one kind of home ego that we're most familiar with and often so familiar that we take a lot of it for granted and don't notice because it's the traditional metaphors like a fish in water that doesn't see the water or the bird that doesn't see the sky or the maggot that doesn't see the shit. And then the fourth part of that in Thailand, the fourth is the human being that doesn't see the world. which kind of means the world of ego that we keep constructing. So one of the assumptions I'm making but as we go also trying to test is that we each have a defense mechanism that's central to our whole ego creation structure or what Enneagram calls personality type.

[11:57]

That in that there's this very important element and there's a defense mechanism that's predominant in us. We've got all of them if you go to the some of the usual Freudian or post-Freudian lists, but there's one that's really important for each of us, and that's the one that shows up the most in meditation, especially when the mind is pretty calm and clear and stable. I won't be, just to make this clear, unless there's strong demand, I'm not going to try to teach Enneagram here, partly because there are plenty of better Enneagram teachers around, and second, because we aren't really aiming this as an Enneagram workshop, though we'll be drawing on that.

[13:04]

And so I'm not intending to elaborate a lot on the external manifestations of the defense mechanisms. I want to try and keep it more focused on what happens in meditations. I don't think it's possible to stay completely limited there since life ignores such little categories, but I'll try to I won't go so much into the behavioral aspects or even some of the thought, emotional stuff I think we'll go into, but I won't try to elaborate on the nine ego structures or type structures that Enneagram discusses. Of course, those who want to go into that, there are books and In Berkeley or the Bay Area, you've got plenty of resources and pretty much the best resources available.

[14:12]

So that's there if you want it. And then last, I hope towards the end, probably especially tomorrow afternoon, we can discuss some of the ways that we can actually work with, respond to these things. So that's an overview of what I hope we can do in these three or four sessions. Tonight will be primarily some theoretical background where I'll try to draw on some Buddhist perspectives that may become primarily out of Theravada tradition because that's my own training, but they'll be put together in ways that aren't necessarily Theravada and hopefully it'll

[15:19]

It'll make sense and be useful for all of you. That will be to try to locate the defense mechanisms and at the same time clarify what I mean by them and how they operate within certain patterns that I've schematically drawn on the paper there. So that'll be the main thing tonight. Then tomorrow morning, I'll try to describe how the defense mechanisms can manifest in meditation. There'll be first a sort of overview of the nine defense mechanisms as they line up with the nine Enneagram types or these nine styles of recreating me. And then go from that into how these defenses show up in meditation.

[16:27]

And then again tomorrow afternoon, try to explore that in more detail, especially if some of you are willing to be interrogated about this or interviewed, if you like a more polite word. I'll try to suggest ways of working with these and then, but hopefully some of you will have stuff to share and then maybe by the end of tomorrow afternoon we'll have a decent idea of how these things work and you'll be able to relate it to your meditation practice and I'm hoping that will give you some, some new angles on on how you can deepen or strengthen your practice as you continue that work. Okay.

[17:30]

I hope you're interested in that. We'll see how many show up tomorrow. Okay. So for the next 40 minutes or so, I'd like to go into what I've tried to draw on the paper there, and then we'll have some time for questions or discussion. At the top, the top heading is kilesa, that's a Pali word, klesha is the Sanskrit word, commonly translated as defilements, or they're the kind of reactive emotions or the emotional reactivity that defiles or pollutes the mind. Of course, it's important to always remember in Buddhism there's no concept of that being the mind.

[18:36]

In Theravada, the Buddha says the mind is luminous, radiant, pure. The It's merely visited by passing defilements. So those who do not for those who do not understand this, there's no meditation because we get we identify so much with anger, fear, greed, boredom, envy, pride. If we identify with these egoistic states, then we can't really see how the mind works. But when we see that these are just passing phenomena, they're not the mind itself, then real meditation can take place. Now, for the sake of what we're doing here, which is really

[19:38]

Part of it is trying to bring together two bodies of material, enneagram material and Buddhist teachings. And, of course, both of those are going to be filtered through my own understanding of each of those bodies of material and then try to relate that to our experience, especially in meditation. So when I talk about the defilements underneath, I think I wrote type and ego structures. That's, for me, shorthand for what Enneagram calls type, the personality types, which some people see as more a bundle of personality traits.

[20:41]

especially things externally observable. I personally am not interested in that and think it can be a distraction because often when people focus on the external traits, they get it wrong or they trivialize. Like I'm a one in the Enneagram and ones are our passion in Enneagram language or our favorite defilement is anger. And so, oh, you get angry a lot, you must be a one. That's stupid. I've been around other, even some of the supposedly heart types that are supposed to be very loving. And I've been around them when they're the ones who are really angry, at least for a while. I mean, anger has a very central role in my personality and how I create ego.

[21:48]

But it doesn't mean that anger is always bursting out or worry. You could say there are nine ways of worrying or nine ways of getting angry or nine greed. Greed probably takes more than nine forms. But but so we don't want to trivialize it. So I emphasize in my own study of this more the internal. If you can still call them traits, I guess, and I guess psychologists, I'm not that strong in psychology, by the way, they would call them personality traits. But I'm more interested in the thought patterns, emotional patterns, identities, the internal stories we tell about ourselves, the who we think we are, or the actually the many

[22:50]

whose we, we cycle through depending on circumstances and sometimes in conflict, all these little egos that in one day we get caught in or identify with. So there's a, it's more the internal traits. In Buddhism, we like to talk about the five aggregates, skandhas, khandhas, heaps. And we, in the Buddha's time, these were a key way of talking about the main things that go into the human being. And the Buddha used this to talk about the stuff that we habitually take to be me and mine, or in the old language, This is me, this is mine, this is myself. Or I am this, this is mine, this is myself.

[23:53]

And that's elaborated on in many ways. So the five aggregates are primarily a way of talking about the stuff in our lives, the kind of feelings, the perceptions, which is the way we categorize, label, and evaluate experience, the thought patterns, our emotional responses to things, consciousness itself, and then the first one's the body. A neogram has another set of terms and how they're linked. But it's a different map, I think, of the same realms. And collectively, those different pieces that we can identify, like a quick rundown that's common in the Enneagram literature is there's a particular thought pattern, often called the mental fixation.

[25:06]

There's a habitual way of thinking My own is comparing mind, which usually leads to criticism. Compare, and then one's better than the other, and comparing and judging. Another one is doubting mind, always questioning, always doubting. Is this true? Is this real? Can I trust this person? Another one is kind of poor me mind, always thinking about how I've got the short end of the stick or how my circumstances are more painful, more difficult than others. Another mental pattern is to be always heavily involved in sifting through information, categorizing, storing it up,

[26:08]

then there are corresponding more emotional patterns, which is often called passion. And these two reinforce each other. So, like with the judgmental critical mind goes a lot with anger, at least specific forms of anger, or pride. goes with a pattern of thought that's in enneagrams called flattery. Part of it is, you know, always focusing on what you need, focusing on the needs of others and how I'm going to provide it. That promotes a pride that you need me, I don't need you. I'm better than you or I'm, I'm superior to you because you need me. That's not my strongest pattern, but it's in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's very strong.

[27:18]

Or the pattern of the poor me, which is called melancholy in the Enneagram literature, tends to go with the emotion of envy. When others are seen to have things better, poor me, he or she, has got it better, and that brings up envy. The thinking reinforces the emotion. The emotion feeds the thinking. And then a third element is identities that go with that. My own case, it's there's a lot of identity around I am right or I'm wrong. And I got to get it right fast or the universe will fall apart. For the melancholy, sad, depressed, or envious one, there's a lot of identity around being different from, unique, special, poor me, I suffer so much, and then creating a whole identity of being different and unique.

[28:35]

the worryer, the doubting mind, which the emotion that goes with that tends to be fear. And the characteristic identities are around I am loyal. It's a strategy. It's a way of dealing with fear. I'm not going to try to go into all the details that would fill up all the talk, but just trying to give some examples. So there are identities. Of course, there's behavior that follows from this, but external behavior is also strongly conditioned by our jobs, gender, the societies we grow up in, family of origin and stuff like that. but the internal patterns, there's a lot of consistency between the various individuals who share that primary pattern. And then the way I fit that with Buddhist teachings is this is what, this is kind of another way of talking about the aggregates or heaps.

[29:46]

It's this way of thinking that is so familiar and goes on so often that I take, that's me, that's mine. And that's how I keep recreating the sense of me. And then there's this emotional reactivity, which can be full-blown anger, or it can be a low-level irritability, annoyance, frustration, in my own case. And then the identities around being right, being wrong, And then there's things I avoid, like error is hard for me to take. Or the envious personality, being like others is hard to take. You create a big, when your whole ego thing is about being different, it's really hard to be the same as others. And so you find it's fun if you're like in a monastery. A good friend of mine,

[30:49]

who was my student, though he's ten years older, he was this type, the four, and, you know, just everything, he had to do something different just to kind of keep manifesting his reason for being, sort of. So, I fit this with Buddhist perspectives that This is the stuff that we keep creating, we keep clinging to, identifying with, taking personally, and recreating me over and over again. And I find that useful because if we just talk about the five aggregates or skandhas, okay, consciousness, okay. A lot of people have trouble sinking their teeth in on that. So what I try to do is, when it's possible, you can't just cram two systems together and pretend they fit perfectly.

[31:57]

But when it's possible, sometimes a neogram illuminates nine versions, maybe not of consciousness, but of how we use consciousness to pay attention. and nine characteristic thought patterns, nine characteristic emotional patterns, and so on. And so, those of us who start to hone in on our basic type structure, then it gives us some key elements to watch and observe how we habitually cling. So, that's... typically of myself. That wasn't what I planned to say, but I usually bring this in. So anyway, that's what's at the top of the chart. That's what my shorthand for kilesa or ego type structure is about.

[33:01]

There's more detail, but I think you've got the picture. Now, The next things I'm going to say are drawn a lot from my teacher, Buddha Dasa Bhikkhu, who spent a lot of time thinking about the traditional teachings. And unlike a certain tendency in Theravada Buddhism, where we have a lot of lists and they're memorized, he kept asking, how do these fit together? And often they don't get explained in the sense of how they fit together or the dynamics. And one of the ways he put together some important Pali concepts are what you're going to hear now. So every time the, or you know, the Tibet Wheel of Life,

[34:05]

can think of it as kind of a roulette wheel. Every time it spins, okay, ego, you know, I get reborn. By the way, I don't see that so much in terms of lifetime spanning. You know, you live here 50, 60 years, you die, and then you get reborn somewhere. That may be true, but that's not what interests me. But how that spins many times each day, and with each spin, This whole ego structure is recreated out of ignorance, and there's suffering. Now, so that happens, and if we're mindful, we start to notice. And then we start hanging around places like this because we'd like to do something about it. Now, an aspect of that is every time the ego structure takes a spin, Let's say you're the type, one I haven't mentioned yet, the three, where the ego passion is called deceit.

[35:18]

It's a type that's always goal-oriented, trying to reach goals and identifies heavily with the success and accomplishment of achieving those goals. And then the deceit is mistaking all that outward accomplishment for themselves and tending to have a kind of hollow inner life because the focus is so strongly on achieving things out there. The deeper motivation is to win approval. You know, if I do this, they'll like me. or more primitively, mommy will love me. You know, if I do good at school, mommy and daddy will love me and everything will be wonderful. So, whether it's that ego spin or another one, but every time it spins, because it's impermanent, it doesn't last.

[36:26]

Often we get distracted and take another ego spin, But every time it spins, it leaves something behind. Now, the language to talk about this is all metaphor. My favorite metaphor is duck poop, but that has to do with some very vivid memories from my Peace Corps days. But I think maybe one you might, I'm not sure if you'll relate to this better, but Bat guano. Anybody have experience with bats? I used to, the place I lived, when I'd go off for a few weeks, there'd always be a bat would take over and there'd be a little pile in one of the corners. Except one liked to sleep over me and would wake me up by peeing in my face. Fortunately, bat pee doesn't smell that bad. Anyway. Those of you who know bats or how they'll get in old houses and they drop and it starts to accumulate.

[37:37]

When it accumulates, it smells because it's very rich in urea and it gives off gases. Well, to me, that's a good metaphor for what happens every time the ego, not the ego, but every time there's an ego spin. whether it's fear, envy, pride, greed, anger. Every time that happens, kind of leaves a little deposit, you know, a little dropping. That's what those green circles are. Now, where it deposits, if you've got bats, you can find with your flashlight and your nose. For us, we don't really have a physical place we can find it. And traditional Buddhism doesn't have a very clear name for it. But thanks to Freud, we have the concept of the unconscious.

[38:41]

So that's a convenient place to collect all these, these droppings. I know Thich Nhat Hanh has, he talks about the alaya-vijnana. That's maybe, I'm not familiar with those Yogajara or whatever they are, teachings, but those who are, you can think of it in those terms. But most, I think, you can get the idea, you know, anger comes up, anger goes, but it left something behind. And if you're, if you're, the version of human being that lets that happen a lot, then you start to accumulate a pile of anger guano or fear guano or pride or envy. And we probably got a number of piles in there, but some are piling up bigger than others.

[39:48]

And the Enneagram angle is there'll be one pile that's really big. And then here's where the bad metaphor helps. Once it starts piling up, it can sort of go nuclear. If you've made compost, you know how it starts to give off heat. It gets pretty rich. It gives off smells. It gives off heat. And so it doesn't just sit there in the unconscious or whatever. It starts giving off fumes. And there's a old word for this in Pali, asav, oh, I should say the Pali word for what I'm talking about, the accumulated deposits, is anusaya. Saya means lying and anu means after. So the anusaya are sort of the, the things that accumulate or get deposited after, um,

[40:49]

left behind by our various behaviors, especially mental-emotional. Then, a key term in many of the old descriptions of the Buddha's awakening, they're described in terms of the end of the asavas or outflows, sometimes translated as eruptions and other times as taints, if you've read the Bhikkhu Bodhi translations. literally means a flowing out, which as best as I can tell is a flowing out from the unconscious into the conscious mind. And so with these deposits, some of them, if a little deposits with time, it just kind of will fade away by itself. But our more favorite stuff, doesn't have the opportunity to fade away because we keep dumping in more.

[41:52]

Those piles give off odors. They give off fumes. And here's where I think this is where I fit in the defense mechanisms that they're in the Buddhist language as the outflow from the unconscious. Once it gets into the conscious, that's the defense. Now, maybe I'm not sure psychologists may speak of the defenses is primarily unconscious. I don't I'm not up on that, but we can't observe that very well. if not at all. But what we can notice is when it starts to come into awareness or consciousness. So that's why that's the part I'm interested in. Once it starts to come up, it can sort of slowly sort of pervade the mind, what we might call a mood.

[43:05]

So the habit of fear, the tendency of fear, when it kind of has accumulated enough and it leaks up into consciousness, then there's just this kind of mood of apprehensiveness, of a kind of vigilance or if the anger deposit will come up as just a general irritability or what we call waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Or a pride, the habit of pride will kind of leak out as just a sort of haughtiness. And these can, in their more diffuse forms, are just kind of a mood. But then as a sense object, you know, for example, your wife or your boss or a stranger on the street walks in, then the mood will react to that object and then it can get more active.

[44:29]

So the irritability can turn into anger. or the apprehensiveness can turn into fear and so on. And this, I think, we experience a lot in meditation. The Buddhist word for it is the hindrances, the nivarana, which I take not to be active thinking so much, but these moods. Other times, This stuff doesn't leak out, but if some experience can act as a trigger, and then it's like if we've built up the tendency of what I haven't talked about in Enneagram terms is lust. It's the all or nothing personality. Whatever you're going to do it, do it full bore. So it's kind of lust for life.

[45:30]

everything is kind of over the top, then if there's a trigger, then this will burst out. And so it can be an endless feedback loop. And unless we've got some tools to start preventing this from just endlessly repeating and feeding itself, then as we get older, some of these piles just keep piling up. And unfortunately, we meet people like that, like maybe ourselves, who, you know, we let stuff pile up. In some cases, even if we've been meditating for a number of years, but we had some blind spots and stuff kept accumulating.

[46:31]

But then through our Dharma practice and other tools, we can start to prevent this or slow it down. And that's why I think the talking about the defense mechanisms can be useful because if we start to see and become more aware of these defenses as they sort of come into consciousness and before they react, or when the level of reactivity is very subtle, as I was talking about earlier, when the mind is pretty calm, pretty focused, pretty concentrated, but still there's some reactivity. the type that, out of the habit of apprehension and vigilance, just can't really get intimate with its object, so it's always kind of jerking back out of the fearful habit.

[47:46]

Or my own, which I'll say more about tomorrow, is just a habit of the defense's reaction formation, just always tightening up around whatever comes There's a whole pattern that's fed this, but on the subtle level, it's just in meditation, instead of letting it soften, relax, and let the natural intimacy happens, always kind of a rigidity slips in or tightens up. So, if we can start to see that, we'll get some we'll see this pattern on its most subtle level, at least the more subtle level that's available to our own personal inquiry. And then also we'll see how that can then react and stir up into the more complex thinking and emotional stuff.

[48:53]

I think the last thing I'll say is just throw in a few other Buddhist terms for those who are like to use them. In some teachings the word karmic formation is used. In my understanding that pretty well corresponds to what I've called here the anusaya. You know those old karmas they pile up these formations. And then there's a second aspect of that, because the actual word in Pali and Sanskrit is a more dynamic term. It's not just the buildup, but it's the, as I translate it, the concocting out of that buildup. And that concocts patterns of how we pay attention to things, how we react, how we respond.

[49:59]

Okay, I think that's the main chunk of theoretical background I wanted to present tonight. So maybe it would be good to open the floor. Questions? Are there things that I said were unclear, didn't make sense? Anything you'd like to go into more? Yes? On your chart, you have two arrows leading from the fences, one short cut back that traces and one through entrances. might have missed what the two paths represent? Yeah, I talked about them but didn't refer to it. So when I said the kind of moods that just will kind of leak out, that was the hindrances. And then the hindrances, once we're in, say, a mood of kind of melancholy,

[51:16]

It's not yet the full-blown emotion. There's just kind of a sort of pervasive sadness. That then, if something draws our attention, then can react into a more fully developed kilesa. So I distinguish between the hindrances or nirvana, which are more moods that aren't aren't the full-scale ego reaction. And then kilesa are when that's the more fully developed self-centered reaction. So there's the one arrow is when that full-scale ego reaction is triggered immediately by some external thing. And then when the leaking out happens and then reacts. When Thich Nhat Hanh talks about planting seeds of hatred and planting seeds of love, he talks about store consciousness.

[52:29]

I don't know if you're familiar with those, but I'm wondering if he's talking about the same kind of process that you are? I think so, from what I've read. I haven't read all his stuff, but I have read some and I think I'm going into a little more detail, but I think he's drawing on Mahayana terminology. I'm drawing a little more on Theravada, but it sounds like we're describing the same stuff. And then this is sort of the defiled side of it, but we can think of the virtuous side, how instead of accumulating fear, we can accumulate courage. Instead of accumulating anger, we can accumulate metta. And in Ajahn Buddhadasa's, the virtuous counterpart of the anusaya is, are the paramis, or the paramita, because

[53:35]

The phrasing, at least in the Pali tradition, is those are the accumulation of virtue over a lifetime until they have the power for crossing over. but I was really struck by what you said about conscious versus unconscious. Because I'm in a program now studying psychology and the treatment of defense mechanisms. And one of the things that I was taught that really got my attention in school was, of course defense mechanisms are unconscious. If they weren't unconscious, there wouldn't be as much of a problem as they are. And that people come into therapy because they don't feel good, or they're suffering, but they don't have a clue what's causing that.

[54:39]

And the therapist's perception is, well, yeah, you have unconscious defense mechanisms, and the therapist's job is to somehow bring those into consciousness. And yet, I really understand what you're saying about until we can somehow see or touch what it is that's getting in our way, there's kind of nothing we can do. So I really like the answer to my own question. That's where a second person comes in, because a second person could can very easily view things that are unconscious to us, because our unconscious speaks with our voice, with our movements, and how we sit, and all those things, kind of blind what our own mind might not see. But I'm a little confused now about that line between consciousness and unconsciousness, and how the defense mechanisms fit in terms of where they sit. Yeah, I'm not sure I use it in the proper psychological way, the term defense mechanism.

[55:41]

But from what I understand, good psychologists, there's a body of material that, and then from their own experience, that this kind of behavior comes from this defense mechanism. So therapists, for example, learn a way, you know, you observe these things and then you deduce, because in a way the defenses are deduced. If they're unconscious, you know, it's kind of a deduction that there's this mechanism that manifests in certain behaviors. So the therapist learns that stuff and then it has this theoretical construct of, or not it, Well, psychology has these theoretical constructs, which I think are very useful and valid, though if they're unconscious, nobody can ever see it by definition.

[56:46]

Well, here, I think sometimes we use the word unconscious in two ways. One means it happens on a level of mental functioning that the conscious mind cannot access. Second, it just means unaware. Where? And so part of Buddhist practice is there might be stuff we can never become aware of. So that would be like fully unconscious. But then there's the stuff that we can learn to, to be aware of. Now, This is how it is in America. We have all this psychological language, and we have old Buddhist language, and then trying to fit them together, so it can be tricky. So I don't mind thinking of the defenses as unconscious, but there's this manifestation of them into awareness that we, I think,

[57:49]

we can observe. And then, of course, a good psychologist can help us get at them using a different technique. And here, this is how to... Hopefully, we can get some clues how to do that in meditation as well. Does that make some sense? when these hindrances become observable to us, that they're antidotes, that you're not going to speak of that, or to identify them? Well, if there's interest, we can go into that a bit, but it's interesting because In the earliest level of Pali teaching, there's no talk of antidote for the hindrances.

[58:53]

The hindrances, as understood, is fairly subtle, the way I describe them as moods. The antidote is concentration, in the older literature. The way the mind gets free of these moods, it just concentrates. Now, in the Pali literature, there is stuff about dealing with distracting thoughts. And so what happened later was people started to connect the distracting thoughts from the hindrances, and then they took the antidotes to the distracting thoughts as antidotes to hindrances. So, which is perfectly valid. It's a slightly different way of using the word hindrance than I'm using. And so I would say that use of the word hindrance is a more active manifestation of the defense mechanisms.

[60:05]

And when it's on that active level, then you can do a more active antidoting. When it's on the more subtle level, it's like coming in with a hammer, if you try to do the more active response. Like when I'm talking about, I like to do it with my hands, but like this is your meditation object and the mind's getting right in there, and then it does something. You don't want to start doing a metta meditation at that point, because you're just, you're off somewhere else, so. You're really talking about two different ways of functioning. Yeah, I would call it two levels. Again, what's the level of distraction? Is it this, basically the mind is not thinking, and so the level of reactivity is very subtle, or is it more the active that includes thinking and emotions that we can we can identify and therefore apply an antidote.

[61:16]

And I think there should be time to to look at both levels tomorrow. I heard that you have a way of grouping the different enneagram points under the three, greed, hate, and delusion. You've thrown out a lot of different attributes of them, and I'm just rather curious sort of to help me frame. Some of those piles of things have broader names. Yeah. There's been some attempt to take the nine types, which Enneagram groups the nine into three, sometimes called centers, the three head types, the three heart types, and the three gut or instinctual types.

[62:23]

And then the head types are understood to all be fear-related. And the heart types is more, different words are used, attachment, desire, but it's all related to the defense mechanism of identification, and there's a real emotional need to connect and be involved with others. And that takes three forms. So that doesn't fit so well. There's a kind of graspingness to it, but it doesn't quite fit with the Buddhist category of greed. And so it's a little tricky. The three belly types are all have a thing with anger, but they also have a thing with self-forgetting, which fits pretty well with ignorance.

[63:31]

So I'm not satisfied with the various attempts to fit these three groups with the three main defilements, because it depends how you look at it. I have some other ways, but they're kind of a little complicated and it would take a while to go into. One way I do group them I'll try to, one that's not, won't take 20 minutes to explain. The heart types tend to be, the whole heart response of those types tends to be stimulated more by what's called pleasant feeling. pleasant positive feelings. So that's that's the reactivity where a lot of their ego stuff is. The head types it's more or what in the Vipassana circles they call aversive types which connects with fear pretty well.

[64:42]

It's reacting more to unpleasant negative feeling and the body types, the self-forgetting types, tends to be more around, more reacting, and that means confusion, around ambiguous feeling. Now, that's one of my little theories that hasn't passed the test of time, so. the Eightfold Path, which breaks down into sila, samadhi and prajna, and which also can be aligned with body, head and heart. of all three of those parts that, you know, you may have a leaning towards one or the other, but each of us has a head, a heart, and a gut, and they actually have to be integrated in a way that work together.

[66:20]

So it's important not to separate them out in too metaphorical a way. Yeah, and part of the, the Enneagram stuff about types is how one of the three gets too much attention, sucks up too much energy, and so it's, the types are about imbalance. I wondered if you, would it be helpful at all if we sort of did a little reading of how many people know how much about the Enneagram or anything? Do you know one or do you kind of... That sounds smart. I would try to move this here and think, how would I phrase that? Do you know more about the Enneagram than about Buddhism? Well, how many people feel somewhat familiar with their type and the general teaching of the Enneagram?

[67:22]

Or could you raise your hand if you do? So that's a lot. Seems like a lot. And is there anybody that doesn't have a meditation practice of any kind, or has limited or no experience with Buddhism? Okay, that's kind of how we advertised it. Okay, well, since we asked how many people have some Enneagram familiarity, we could also go around quickly a quick hit of what types we think we are. We'll start with the ones Okay. Do you want the polite version or the crude version?

[68:28]

Middle way. Okay. Ones are often called. Okay, I'll try and keep it. It's really hard to do a real short because I can get turned into stereotypes. But ones are kind of error. is a big thing, being right, avoiding error, perfectionist, kind of anal retentive, metaphorically, and sometimes literally. Well, there's a little more richness to it than that. Okay. Two? Any twos? Okay. Twos are the pride type I mentioned. They're often called the helper. They send out a lot of emotional energy out to others.

[69:32]

I can help you. What do you want? What do you need? And they offer themselves as able to provide you with what you need. And it tends to be, um, There's an unspoken assumption that you'll do the same to them. So it's a way sometimes manipulative, not always, but sometimes to get what you want. But they have trouble asking for anything directly. So three is sometimes called the performer. They're the success, the goal, the one I mentioned of having goals out there that need to be achieved. And the goal is always more important than the process. They don't mind cutting corners. Winning is what matters. They drive me crazy because I get bogged down in all the details and everyone's got to be right.

[70:35]

And forget success, you know. if you would like yeah but my my type is into what's wrong it's not There are reasons for presenting that side first, but after we go around, we can come back to that before we close, because it is an important point. Fours are the envy type I mentioned, tend to have a lot of melancholy. very big emotional swings and they're into both the highs and emotional highs and lows because they're so meaningful and make me so special.

[71:50]

OK, five. Wait, we didn't ask for it. We got a couple. Oh, wow. We've got a whole lot of them. Lori, you want to do five? Five is the observer and tend to try to get away from things and be able to see them from a distance. tend to minimize your own needs, try to be satisfied by not having a lot of needs so that you'll never feel want. And they start to death in previous lives. Shall we identify ourselves? I just led a small vipassana retreat and a lot of the folks were fives and a lot of the others were sixes.

[73:04]

Any sixes who'd like to describe that part of the universe? A lot of fear. A lot of fingernail biting. Behaviour characterized by a kind of defensive suspiciousness. Thinking a lot, trying to use thought a lot to cope with things first and emotions tend to come crashing in later or before or later, but it's not the general way. It's called worst case scenario thinking. My brother's an engineer and he's a six and he thinks the two go together real well because you imagine everything that can go wrong and then engineer against it. So sixes.

[74:10]

Sevens. Any volunteers? I can't describe it because I'm just always told that I'm a seven. Sevens are sometimes called the adventurer. They tend to They're always looking for the kind of happy, bright side of things. Although, that's the stereotype of that can lead people to think they don't have sadness. And actually, some sevens have pretty heavy bouts of sadness. But they use the word interesting a lot, fun. pleasure, they're the most hedonistic of the seven types.

[75:17]

They're not always in a gross way, sometimes in a very refined way. And they have a lot of trouble with pain, so they're The personality structure is based around avoiding pain and finding that which is one helpful phrase is planning, because they're one of the head thinking types. So they do a lot of planning for pleasant possible alternatives, something like planning for pleasant possibilities. Any? Hmm, I can tell that way. Yeah. Aids? Any aids? Sometimes called the boss. They're a gut type. 8-9-1 are gut types.

[76:19]

2-3-4 are the heart types. primarily about emotion, heart, and image. 5, 6, 7 are head types. Fear is central to all of those, but different manifestations of fear. 8, 9, 1 are the gut, anger, instinctual types. 8 is the one I described. I used the word lust about. They're a kind of all-or-nothing personality. Whatever they do is full-bore. There's no lukewarm. They are very much into power in order to protect because they feel themselves as very vulnerable, and they project power as a protective thing, and they also like to protect the weak, the poor, the underdogs. What's the emotion that goes with the heart types, the two, three, and four?

[77:27]

Well, it's pride, deceit, and envy. But the sort of collective one, I'm not satisfied, actually, because I look at it from a Buddhist side, and I'm not that happy with the words that tend to get used. Can anybody remember? I can't. Image, but that's not so much the emotional thing. Right. It's kind of attached, a kind of emotional attachment. If you understand the word attachment on its has an emotional holding on to things. And he ate. There's one right next to you. Manifest a little power over there to let her know you're... I mean it's like to talk about when they enter a room they want to let everybody know, so... But I guess hang out in meditation centers you learn to contain that.

[78:37]

I walked into this endo in the middle of a meditation that I didn't know was going on. Not on purpose though. Right. Okay, and then nines? Any nines want to describe that version of reality? Well, there's a kind of a disconnection from the self and the rest of the world. It's kind of a floaty quality, not being totally here. stand up and have to take a position. It's kind of like, a metaphor I use is, you're floating down a river in a canoe where there's the waterfall, and you kind of hear the waterfall, but you just kind of go into, you know, everything's okay. Waterfall being anger, sort of.

[79:42]

Well, any kind of difficult experience. So, how many other nines? Okay, we already sort of did the hand raise. Okay. It's possible some of you who don't have a type but want one. We'll get some clues over the next 24 hours. But if those of you who have not typed yourself, please consider it an ongoing process of self-inquiry and not something that needs to happen quickly. If one does identify a type that one inhabits pretty well, then there's a body of material that describes those types and that can be used as There's a lot of useful information to help observe ourselves, if one wants to do that.

[80:51]

Okay. Can I just ask a question? You know, for a really long time, for many years, I thought I was a Jew. And then, in the last several years, though, I've been thinking and people have been giving me feedback but I'm more of a seven. And I'm wondering if it's possible to, like, have a kind of, like, conditioning that would make me, because I was, like, strongly conditioned as a woman and in my particular family structure, to have the qualities of two, where it's putting myself aside, really paying attention to others' needs, getting really sensitive, you know, moving around, but that as I've gotten older, that I seem to outgrow a lot of that, the need was removed, and that the more fundamental piece is emerging.

[81:56]

Is that, does that seem possible to you? Yeah, yeah, you, you know, there are people who For some, it's very disconcerting. They thought they were like this, and then later they find out, no, that was what I wanted to be, or who I thought I should be, or there's some strong conditioning or influence. I did a neogram workshop for a bunch of Catholics in the Philippines, and there's this huge number. They all wanted to be twos. because that fit the closest with their idea of Jesus. But if we take it as a self-inquiry process, whether one's a two or a seven is less important than just seeing oneself more and more clearly.

[82:59]

So we're almost at 9 o'clock. So we had some housekeeping. I wanted to respond to the question that came up. He's setting up some. OK. I'll try to be quick with, and if you want, we can come back to this tomorrow. It's easier to identify type from the negative stuff. And if we start trying to identify the positive side, people will latch on to what they want to be. And it makes it much harder to identify type. However, an interesting perspective is how, I don't know if all of this is verifiable, but it's interesting and makes some sense. is it's an ego construct and it's there's a kind of process.

[84:10]

I'll try to summarize a different stuff. We have a kind of vague memory of what in Buddhism we might call Buddha nature, but our memory is sort of distorted by the way, the me's that we have become. And so our memory of that is a little bit one-sided or one-dimensional. And in some ways, the type structure, we can see the whole type structure as a defense mechanism. Another way to view it is as an attempt to recreate what we think is the way, you know, the way we should be or the way, you know, what we can be that'll make us happy and everything will be okay. Now, if that's true, our particular version of ego is kind of a distorted reflection of

[85:25]

what in more theistic language is a divine quality. And I sort of think of it as a Dharma door that our personality, if we start to see it more clearly, reflects certain Dharma door. Or sometimes when I translate this into Thai, I speak of the perfections. It's like the the neogram language is holy idea and holy virtue. but to give it a Buddhist term, each type has sort of its, one of the perfections that it most naturally accesses, and the perfections being the non-egoistic version of what we've been doing with all our ego spinning, and that can then, that perfection is I don't know if efficient's the right word, but that's a really good place to work.

[86:31]

And out of that, the other perfections can grow. So there is, what we could say, positive stuff in there. Second, when we do, if we do really, like I'll give one quick example of my own. I value precision a lot, and sometimes I go overboard. But I have a way of speaking and delineating things that I and other people find useful. It's not the only way to give Dharma talks, but it does provide something. So I've seen that this is an aspect of the way I do things. value. If I cling to that too much or take it too far, it gets in the way. But there's no reason to make the most of that ability and use it well.

[87:37]

And so as the types do have these useful qualities, And so part of learning about type is to find those, appreciate them, and then use them well, but not obsessively. The tendency is to use them obsessively. OK. So it's 9. Do you have any more housekeeping stuff?

[88:05]

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