A Buddhist Compass To Direct You Toward Happiness | Beth Upton

30:07As I was listening to you speak, I was remembering those Zen ox herding pictures. I'm sure you're familiar with them. there are these series of zen images comparing enlightenment to ox herding and i don't know okay well i don't remember all the different i'm probably mangling this in a thousand different ways but the punchline is the final image is going to the market yeah right so right you can get enlightened but the point is to then re-engage with the world to integrate yeah so another sort of like hackneyed simile is the child learning to walk. You know, when you're teaching a child to walk, you do want to make it easy.

30:51You don't want to put them in the middle of the street, but we don't always in our practice want to be making it as safe and sterile as possible. There's the right time for challenge and integration. That's really at the heart of why I disrobed. But I still, I've got such a soft spot for monastic life. In my heart, I love it, But in this chapter, it's not the right context for me to grow. Thank you for your patience with my personal questions. My pleasure.

31:24Coming up, Beth Upton talks about the Buddhist Abhidhamma, which she calls particle physics for the mind. She talks about why she's interested in the broader teaching of Kusala and practical ways to design your life to get more Kusala.

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34:01let's talk about the thing you wanted to teach today in your conversations with marissa our senior producer marissa schneiderman who is quite a serious dharma student herself in those conversations that you had with marissa you said that you wanted to talk about the abhi dharma many people might not know what that is can you just describe and define if you would yeah so just to clarify a little bit because of the way I trained I spend a lot of my teaching life in these very sort of technical conversations with people my teaching life inclines to people who are very dedicated to the practice would probably say it's the most or one of the most important things in their life they're doing long silent retreats with me every year and it doesn't come naturally to me to think about aspects of what I have learned that I can give to a broad audience.

35:03My natural strength is sort of attending to the person in front of me, if you like. And so when I was thinking about, or I am thinking in general at the moment more about of this knowledge base, what things can I take that would be beneficial for anyone, not just the dedicated meditator in front of me, but anyone. One of the answers that I landed on is this topic of, again, another Pali word, kusala. Kusala is like a quality of mind, which has a group of mental qualities that always co-arise. It's like the beautiful thing that the mind can do, and it's essentially just one thing. But in order to understand it well, we need to lean into the Abhidharma.

35:53And the Abhidharma, to answer your question, is the side of the Buddha's teachings, which breaks everything down into its building blocks, into its smallest possible building blocks. So it's like the essence of what's really happening when you break it down as much as you can. And when we break things down into their building blocks, we find that it's all momentary. So this is what we were speaking about before with the past life practice, for example. When we go as subtle as we can go, we see that things are momentarily coming into and out of existence. And what the Abhidharma deals with is what are these momentary building blocks of reality?

36:36And then it classifies them and defines them in lots of different ways. I'm going to do my restating. Go on, you go.

36:46I'm going to reverse the order of what you said. So the Abhidhamma is my friend, Dr. Mark Epstein, who's a Buddhist psychiatrist. I believe he wrote his master's thesis or his senior thesis on the Abhidhamma, and he has described it as the table of elements for the mind. Yeah, that's right. Like particle physics for the mind. Yes, yes, yes. It's the aspect of the Buddhist teachings that really breaks down this whole system of mind, body, heart, whatever you want to call it, to its most fundamental and subtle elements. Yeah. The bit which is better than it being an elementary table is that it's not only for the physical world.

37:31It's that also for the mind, which is completely non-physical. So that's where we trump science. Or you're ahead of science and science may catch up. Let's hope so. I really want that to happen. Dan, make that happen. I'm doing my best. I mean, you can think of it as its own science. More scientific than science. Yeah. I would love, love for science to integrate more of the Abhidharma understanding. I'd love it. I'd love it. Yeah. My suspicion is that it will happen and not having anything to do with me. It's just that I see so many neuroscientists and just plain old scientists who are operating in the world today who are really interested in the Dharma.

38:21I have a sense that that momentum exists. exists. Within Buddhism and within the Abhidhamma, one of the really important concepts, as you said earlier, and now I'm continuing with my restating thing here, is kusala, K-U-S-A-L-A, which, according to my notes here, can be translated as skillful, intelligent, expert, good, right, virtuous, meritorious, beneficial, lucky, happy, healthy, prosperous, depending on the context. texts. The opposite of kusala is a kusala, A-K-U-S-A-L-A. That is in Pali, often you have a concept and then the opposite of the concept, you just put an A in front of it, kind of like atheist or theist, probably where we get it from.

39:06And so that's my full reflection. Yes, we have the Abhidhamma, which is a detailed deconstruction of the mind. And kusala is a

39:18the Abhidhamma. And so why, if I'm correct about all of that, what about Kusala is attractive to you as a broad teaching? I spend a lot of my time teaching the technical things. And when I am in that work of taking somebody up the meditation mountain, for example, I'm very much thinking about what is beneficial to them for their next step in terms of like the technique and the balance of their mind and everything. If I step back and I'm like, what is beneficial to everybody wherever they are on the mountain to take one step up the mountain? The answer is Kusala. The name of your podcast is 10 % Happier.

40:03What do you do if you want to be 10 % happier? Do more Kusala. What do you do if you want to take one step out of your depression? Do more Kusala. What do you do if you're suffering from anxiety and you want to ease it one step, do more Kusala. What do you do if you want to improve your parenting? Do more Kusala. What do you do if you want to get on better with your boss? You do more Kusala. What do you do if you're in chronic pain? Do more Kusala. It's the medicine that everyone can take and get benefit. So how do you do more Kusala? Well, I think this is where the Abhidharma really helps because as you just said, like in your definition of that word it doesn't translate easily into English and we have words like skillful beneficial wholesome good and they are vague and so we think about okay how do I be more skillful well if I knew you know so it's difficult to put into practice when we understand what's happening on that Abhidharma level, so on this atomic building blocks level, I think it becomes much more actionable and very unifying as well.

41:18So what we need to know about Kusala is that it is a collection of qualities of mind that always co-arives. It's a law of the mind that these things come together. You can think of them like best friends that are handcuffed together. And so if you invite one of them to the party, they all come along. These qualities of mind are faith, which is not the same thing as blind belief. It is our confidence that what we're doing is good, right? So our faith, mindfulness, which I'm sure you will have spoken about a lot, our non-greed, which is our renunciation, letting go, generosity, contentment our non-hatred which is our acceptance loving kindness welcoming embracing our morality which is like our conscience doesn't want to harm ourselves or others wants to do the right thing basic mental balance like nothing in too much excess and on a course level we could think of this like no drama nice and balanced nice and even keel tranquility, a softness, lightness, flexibility.

42:37And then we have a proficiency, which basically means this Kusala mind is good at its task. So a type of proficiency. And then the last one is an uprightness, which we could think of as authenticity, integrity, a truthfulness, but not just in speech in the way that we conduct ourselves, straight and true uprightness. When we know that we're dealing with this collection of mental qualities, then to do more Kusla, we can pick any one of them, and we'll be doing all of them. Let me be more generous today. Who could I give a gift to today? And without trying, you're already more tranquil. You're already more loving.

43:25you've already got more faith in the goodness of humanity you're already more mindful you're already more in line with your conscience alternatively you could sit and think what's weighing on my conscience where have I transgressed my own ethics let me make amends for that today and you're already more loving more generous of spirit more faithful more tranquil all of the good things coming along together with it and again whatever is your context whatever is your life situation you can pick any of these you can do any of them lean into any of them you get all of them together as a like added bonus and you will feel better i'm picturing like an abacus with rows horizontal rows and some sort of bead on each row if each of those beads is one of the component parts of Kusala, all you have to do is move any bead, so it could be the mindfulness bead, all the way to the right and automatically click all the other beads are in place.

44:33As soon as you're paying attention in a non-judgmental way, i.e. mindfulness, uprightness, faith, all those other beads click into place alongside it. In a true moment of mindfulness, all those things are there and it's kusala yes that's right even in that that you just said mindfulness i.e paying attention in a non-judgmental way so even in that you're conflating two of those different mental factors mindfulness and non-judgment you notice they come along together but they're actually two different things they're two best friends handcuffed together the part which is mindfulness is not forgetting what you're doing, not forgetting to stay with your object of attention.

45:18And the non-judgment is the non-hatred mental factor that comes right along with it, handcuffed to it. The part where your simile breaks down just a little is that although all of these mental factors come along together, they can vary slightly in their predominance. So, for example, if you're practicing loving kindness meditation, you'll be leading with non-hatred and it will be the predominant one in the group. They'll all be there, but one of them is making the most noise. If you do prostrations to the Buddha, you're leading with faith. It will be the loudest one. All of them will be there, but that one will be the strongest.

45:57So it's as if when the beads click onto the right side, they each inflate or deflate based on which one is in the lead. Yeah. Yeah. Or like maybe instead of they're connected by a rod, they're connected by an elastic or something. We could work the simile. But yeah, you're basically, you're right. You're right. I do appreciate when you correct me and I would encourage you to keep doing that. Pleasure. The point here is not for me to be right. The point is for the people listening to this to understand. Okay. So you're saying if the goal is Kusala to have a healthy, wholesome state of mind, which will help us be 10 % happier, 10 % less depressed, 10 % less addicted, whatever it is.

46:42So we all want this. We all want Kusala. So there are, I can't remember how many factors, maybe it sounded like about 10, that are non-negotiable component parts, handcuffed together, that arise, co-arise in any Kusala moment of mind. We can pick anything off that menu, uprightness, non-hatred, generosity, mindfulness, and just focus on that and we will get happier. Yes. Don't you think more people should know? It's like a basic law of how everybody's mind works. It's happening in everybody. It's like a law of the mind and we don't know. To me, that's a tragedy. That's a tragedy. Well, you are remedying that.

47:32With your help. We're both in a Kusala mind state right now. We are, yeah. Let's go a click more practical. If I'm listening to you, Beth, speak about this, tell me more about how I can design my busy life, because a lot of people are listening to this while driving or washing the dishes and they don't have a ton of extra time. How can I design my busy life to get more of this Kusala thing to which you keep referring? Well, when I'm speaking to meditators, I often suggest that we sort of break our day down into different sections. So one section might be time where you're really just not doing anything.

48:15And we tend to fill that with scrolling our phone or distracting ourselves or whatever we do. but really you're not doing anything and there's nothing particularly useful for you to be doing. So my advice to meditators at that time is meditate. But if you're not a meditator and you're not inclined to meditate, it's worth making an inventory of those times and committing rather than filling them with distraction and junk, what kind of kusala piques your interest? Would you like to do a gratitude practice? Would you like to do a generosity practice? In the last relationship that I was in, we had a kusala hat where we put people's names in the hat.

48:59And if we had some downtime, we'd pick someone's name out and we'd plan a little kusala that we could do for them, like something nice that we could do for them. So that's the time of the day when you've got nothing useful to be doing, basically like meditate or make a list of different types of Kusler things that you would like to do and do them at that time. Another chunk of the day, like the second chunk to work with, is all of the things that we do in a day sort of on autopilot. So it's not requiring much active attention from us, but you've got to be doing those things. You know, you've got to be doing the laundry, you've got to do your commute, you've got to chop the vegetables, you know, whatever it is that you've got to do, you've got to answer the emails.

49:45and so for those activities usually what I suggest to meditators is that you train yourself to do those things with your attention on whatever is your meditation object because realistically there's enough space in the mind to be with your breath or be practicing loving kindness or whatever meditation you're doing mindfulness of the body alongside doing these kind of autopilot activities for people who aren't meditators again you could just think what kusala can i bring to this activity can i chop the vegetables as a service to the people who will eat them or with gratitude for the people that planted the vegetables or you know whatever it might be when i'm on my commute can i do well wishes to the other people on the train you know whatever it might be because you know that you're going to have to do those things every day so if you start to build into your habit to do it in a Kusala frame of mind, then it's going to compound over time because the habits will become sort of like snowballing, reinforcing themselves.

50:50And then we've got the things that we have to do each day, which do require active engagement. For example, now I'm doing this podcast with you and it's requiring my full attention or whatever we have to attend to in our work life or our parenting or whatever it might be where we do need to be fully engaged with the activity. In those cases, first of all, I would suggest people to have a look at, are there any of these things that you are having to give your full attention to that you know it's almost impossible to do it with a kusala mind? You hate it. And if that's the case, then gradually obviously we can't just immediately change our lives but we are responsible for our lives we are the captain of the ship and if there are things we're consenting to every day that just completely drain our kusala we want to gradually start to steer our lives away from having to engage in those kinds of things the things that we really can't get out of again we want to ask ourselves what beautiful quality of attention can I bring to this activity if I need to do emails for two hours a day can I make each email an act of service for example or an act of patience or humility or renunciation or if I need to do a lot of parenting can I make this my act of loving kindness or again patience can I bring in more tranquility whatever it might be So what one or more than one of these beautiful qualities of mind can I bring to this activity that I must do?

52:36Coming up, Beth talks about the beautiful qualities of mind that all co-arise in a moment of Kusala. They are co-activating these states of mind. She talks about how we get tripped up in the realm of the unwholesome and how she, Beth, navigates Kusala and Akusala in her own daily life.

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55:47Can you go over the menu again? What are the beautiful qualities of mine that all co-arise in a moment of akusula moment? Yeah, I'll go over them just quickly. So we've got faith, mindfulness, non-greed, non-hatred. I think non-greed and non-hatred are very boring translations for these two very powerful mental factors. But anyway, non-greed, non-hatred, our morality, like our conscience, mental balance, tranquility, lightness, softness, flexibility proficiency and uprightness what's proficiency again proficiency is a type of good at what it does so if you imagine a mind that is angry for example it will be rigid and if you try to turn it to a task to get a job done it's not going to do it very well because it's an agitated, unstable mind.

56:44So if you are angry and you were trying to chop the vegetables, for example, you're more likely to cut your finger or make a mistake. It's not established in proficiency. But when the mind is well established in Kusala, you can direct your attention, do this now, do this now, and it will do it well, because it's established in Kusala. So when I hear proficiency, as you describe it, I'm thinking a little bit about flow states. I don't get into flow that often, or at least I don't know enough about flow to know whether I'm in it often. But there are things that I do in my daily life where I'm pretty proficient.

57:21I can play the drums. I can write an introduction to this podcast. And when I'm in those states where I'm fully absorbed and I know what I'm doing and it feels good to do it, that is Kusala. You notice that other kusala comes along with it. So when you lean into proficiency and you're not thinking about it, you're not controlling anymore, then you notice you become tranquil, you become naturally mindful, you become surrendered. The hate goes away, right? They all come along together. So you're right there. And in that flow state, we have proficiency predominant, but we also have that flexibility and softness predominant, that there's no rigidity, There's no control in that flow state, right?

58:10I'm trying to think of the right similar metaphor for what it is you're laying out here for us. Because you can think of it as a recipe where if you get one ingredient, you get all of them. So it's bargain shopping in that way. Yeah, it's like a happiness cake. Yeah. But it's also kind of like a compass, I think. Yes. I'm making this up, but it's like, if you have this lens on life, let's boost our Kosala quotient for as many waking moments, or even if you're sleeping and you're a master meditator and you can meditate in your sleep, for as many mind moments as are available to you. If that's your north star, if that's the direction, well, then you're practicing all the time.

59:00Yes. And the truth is, aside from the force of habit, which is a very strong force, there is no reason why you can't be practicing kusala at any time. There is no circumstance where this isn't the right time for kusala now. It's always the better option. let's talk a little bit about akusula the opposite what qualifies like if i like to mindlessly eat some pretzels and watch sports with my son so is that akusula that is akusula yeah so whereas kusula has just got that one flavor that now we've spoken about a lot all of these factors that are chained together akusula isn't like that there's many many different kinds of unwholesome thing that the mind can do.

59:45We can be angry or prideful or greedy or lustful or many things, fearful, sad, loads and loads of different ways that the mind can be unwholesome. And at the core of the reason why we fall into akusala is because we're addicted to that me and mine. So the aversive kinds of akusala to oversimplify are sort of doing a protecting function for that imagined me and mine. And then the greedy kinds of akusala are doing a nourishing function for that imagined me or mine. So you're like, my body and my pleasure, where are those pretzels? But there is no your body and there is no your pleasure, right? So there's that wrongly imagined me and mine that we're serving through all of that akusala, which is what makes it akusala.

1:00:35Probably one of the main reasons that we get caught up, well, at the center is that me and mine, but on the level of habit is because both akusala and akusala can feel good, right? It feels good when you're eating your favorite kind of ice cream. It feels good when you're having those pretzels. It feels good when you're gossiping with your friend. There's lots of things in the realm of unwholesome that feel good for a little while. It's not as refined of a pleasure as you get through the kusala, but it is our habit. And it's sort of a more coarse form of pleasure that is somewhat addicting. So the Buddha famously said, if you want big happiness, give up the small happiness.

1:01:22Give it up. We're addicted to this small happiness of the akusala, which is like gratification to our ego gratification to our senses and so we keep on missing the opportunity to do the kusala and when we do that it's essentially a habit shift and the habit is away from something slightly more coarse and again towards something slightly more subtle but actually far more gratifying my meditation teacher joseph goldstein who i've worked with for 15 years or whatever he makes this attempt that i find it doesn't always work for me. I can't always operationalize it in my life, but I do find it worked for me intellectually.

1:02:01I think to me, it's a winning reframe. I think it's possible to hear what you're saying about giving up these small forms of happiness, which is referred to within the Dharma as renunciation, which is not always the most winning term for Westerners. We don't love it. But Joseph tries to reframe it as non-addiction, which I actually do think works for the Western mind, because we know that it sucks to be addicted. So I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts on that. I think it's a beautiful reframe. Yeah. The problem is that addiction to akustula, if you want to put it in that way, addiction to this small happiness of ego gratification, seeking praise, accomplishment, achievement, seeking gratification to the senses in the ice cream and the pretzels.

1:02:45It's such a culturally normalized addiction, culturally praised in a lot of cases. It's the way that people connect and feel included with each other that I think it's probably quite a difficult reframe for people to maintain, right? Because we're not walking around pointing out to each other that we're addicted. We're really encouraging each other. We're pulling people into this world of the small happiness again and again and again. And I think Joseph is right. At its core, it's an addiction. Yeah. So how do we make this practical? I'm curious, maybe the way to do this is talk about how you live as a no longer a nun and what you recommend to your students.

1:03:31Like, do you enjoy ice cream once in a while? Do you ever allow yourself to scroll on your phone? You anti Instagram? Like, how do you navigate all of this? Yeah, as I don't have social media, really and I don't really use that as habit but I do have ice cream and I do like those things we exist in a world where sense pleasure and sense pain is definitely going to happen because we have this sensitive body so those two things are definitely going to happen the solution isn't just avoid anything that might feel good with the body and only do things which feel painful with the body, the Buddha made that mistake, it's not the right way.

1:04:15The idea is that we can allow this body to experience both pleasure and pain. Where we are getting our gratification from is not that momentary pleasure, it's the kusala that we bring in our quality of attention, right? So, oh, this pleasure and pain is happening, it's all the time changing. For example, it's a type of mindfulness which is a type of kusala. Or, oh, this ice cream is here, let me be grateful for it, or let me be in loving connection with the friends I'm sharing this ice cream with would be like a different type of pusula that we could be doing. So the idea isn't to like cut off the body from pleasure.

1:04:52The idea is that our wellbeing is not rooted in that fleeting pleasure of the body, right? So I had a cinnamon roll last night. We're getting confessional. No, no, I don't feel any guilt about it. maybe I feel a little guilt about it but anyway I had a cinnamon roll last night and it was awesome and I don't know if my eating of it was if my mind was in a kusala or a kusala state but one way I could imagine making it truly kusala while eating the cinnamon bun is to notice how the pleasure comes and goes yeah that's one way exactly another Buddhist term that we use in the West is a pejorative, but it's actually, there's a lot to it, I think, in a positive way is disenchantment, like waking up from the spell.

1:05:45If you're really paying attention while you were eating cinnamon bun, which I frankly wasn't, that's the confessional part, you can see, okay, I get this big hit of dopamine. It's chewy and the frosting is really sweet. There's suffering embedded in the happiness there, in the pleasure rather. And if you're paying attention, you really see that. Then it becomes this tasteless mush in your mouth that you then use this weird thing called the tongue to shove back down your gullet. And if you're really paying attention, you can turn anything into kusala. That's right. And can you see in that example that you just gave, had you done that, you've gifted yourself in that moment, a better happiness.

1:06:27You've not denied yourself anything. You've increased your quality of life by moving your framing to something Kusala in that time. You've elevated the quality of life, right? You haven't denied yourself anything. You gifted yourself a bigger happiness. So if we use this compass, this Kusala compass, or if you want to use a different simile, the recipe for the happiness cake, the happiness cinnamon bun, it's not living in a hair shirt. It's not shaving our heads and becoming a nun necessarily. Do that if you want. Yes. But we're not living in a harshly abstemious life necessarily. We're walking the middle path between total self-denial and self-mortification as the Buddha did before he got enlightened and total sense pleasure, which will never actually get you anywhere.

1:07:19Right. It's like I said, wherever you are on the mountain, if you're just starting out taking your first step on the mountain or you're caught up in thorny bushes or you're sinking in a sinkhole or you're like right near the top, do more Kusala. You'll feel better. You'll be on your way up. Beth, this has been a huge pleasure. Thank you very much for doing this. It's so great to meet you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me, Dan.

1:07:47Thanks again to Beth Upton. Awesome to talk to her. I believe I mentioned another student of the Burmese Master Pa Auk Sayadaw. That student is named Nikki Mirgafori. She was on this show several years ago. I'm going to drop a link to that episode in the show notes. She is astonishingly impressive. Nikki is. As a reminder, there's a guided meditation designed to go with this episode. It is all about cultivating gratitude, which is a Kusala mind state. So it's part of the recipe for the Buddhist happiness cake that Beth was talking about. The meditation comes from Don Mauricio, who's our teacher of the month.

1:08:25You can get it if you go over to danharris.com and become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get ad-free versions of this podcast, plus transcripts of every podcast and a summary. And several times a month, live guided meditation and Q &A sessions with yours truly. So head on over to danharris.com. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the awesome people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

1:09:01DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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