The Fourth Step Without Guilt or Shame – Grant R.

Hello everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you are all doing well. Today I am going to show you how to make a beautiful flower with a very simple and easy way to I have so much greatness to follow. Raise the bar really high. That's good. Okay, I'd like you to all close your eyes. And I'm going to chant at you. Don't open your eyes, I saw that. Okay, just bear with me. I was thinking about doing this for the whole 20 minutes and I'm supposed to speak but then you'd be throwing Zahu's at me. But just calm your mind while I say to you emptiness responsibility selflessness responsibility guiltlessness responsibility and think about that we're going to talk about the fourth step this morning and I'm just going to do a little introductory can we open our eyes? yes you don't have to it makes it easier for me if you close your eyes yeah four step and I believe Matt is going to talk about precepts and then Matt Simon said and then we're going to get a Matt Edwards get to moment and that's we're gonna get to do some four step writing um we're gong to write something we want to let go and then we'll put it in a special little box where Bianca will take it to her home and burn it in the fireplace rather than posting it on the internet. I would just like to say I've proved myself worthy. I've done this many times and I have not peaked. I have put it in the right place. I deem myself worthy by experience. will also ask you to write yourself a little note to remind yourself what you've let go of. Because some of us have so much that it would be hard to keep track. Can I say something? Sure. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think you write something about what you're going to work on. Not let go, you let go. And the next one is um it's really six and seven what are you willing to have what are you working on in the next stretch that you're willing to let go of what she said okay four step made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves I did my four-step first one 36 years ago and I didn't have any trouble getting going at all yeah it was relatively not pain free but I had a lot of help and a lot of incentive because I was court ordered in his treatment and I either had to finish it or I couldn't go, or I could go to jail. So it went as well as possible given the state of my mental clarity at one week or one and a half weeks sober. 36 years later after that first fourth step, stuff arises that I never dealt with just because it was so buried by other events so you know if you fast forward 25 years it doesn't bring us to here brings us to 2000 that's when I started finally going to AA meetings and since then I've maybe been to over 500 meetings I suppose and when the fourth step comes up there seems to be a common thread that people find it difficult to get started and that's probably because of fear of having to look at what one's done I don't know you find that to be the case maybe looking for validation that's it's my experience so you know I don t see anywhere in the four-step where it says anything about right and wrong or good and bad but those are implied because the whole four-step exercise readies us to admit to the universe the exact nature of our wrongs, whatever those that means. That was fine for me for years until I came across teachings of the Buddha and here all of a sudden right and wrong are empty concepts they're not I mean, there's words we use every day but there's nothing inherently right or inherently wrong according to some versions of the teachings of the Buddha so you know as a person in recovery and an interested student a student interested in Buddhism it's like, ok, how do you do a four step what are you looking at then from the moment that I came into the world I was deluged with right and wrong and good and bad some of my earliest memories are of my father who had a bad temper when I would do things that would make him mad he would say what's wrong with you? what's the matter with you ? as a four year old shy kid I mean, I didn't have the mental development to engage in a dialogue with Dad saying, well, what exactly do you mean by that? And I certainly didn't had the courage to confront him on it. All I could do was cry and feel bad. So, you know, that's everybody's experience. Is that how it matches? so we've got right and wrong and good and bad steeped into us you know some actions there's kind of a general consensus, I mean senseless brutality who's going to argue that that's not wrong or bad but really you can find some rigid ideological people who think killing a bunch of people is right in the pursuit of their worldview I guess going to the other extreme there are people who all they do is random acts, anonymous acts of kindness for others but if a person like that does so and uses all of his assets to do that therefore his family goes hungry and suffers I mean that's not really right in our definition of right So, it's kind of subjective. I think very subjective. I think the variation of what's right and wrong across societal and cultural boundaries shows as kind of evidence that it's subjective and that there are empty concepts. So, you know, what are you left with? I guess if you strip away subjectivity and you take away moral judgments value judgments self-righteousness or what what you have is an advance and its consequences you know I guess we call it karma, action at least I think this we do around here all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed hatred and ignorance born of my body speech and mind I now fully avow this is a verse we say at Khaos Water and probably as we sit here there's Buddhists all over the world reciting a variation of that one way or another it's part of the teaching what that is is an acknowledgement of things just the way they are kind of an acceptance of our responsibility for our contributions to this present moment it's not an admission of guilt I don't see it as a request for punishment doesn't say anything about the future and it kind of resonates to me with the core step we're looking at what we've done the way we are here we're looking at what we're done what we are and evolving it we're taking ownership of it simply noticing what we have done you know I guess the most effective way to me to look at that is with a deep feeling of compassion for the people that we may have hurt and for ourselves you know if we're all interdependent when we hurt someone else we're also hurting ourselves but underlying it all is personal responsibility the whole 12 step program is about personal responsibility teaching to the Buddhists. The Buddha are personal responsibility. You know, the 12-step world comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. A tradition where there's commandments come from above that say don't do this or act this way or you're committing a sin or you're wrong or you'RE bad or whatever or you'Re going to go to hell. In the Buddhist tradition Then we have the precepts, kind of a prescription for a more not suffering free but a life of less suffering. Where it's not a command that sort of deal. It's like alright I'm going to vow to or vow to act in this manner and accept the consequences whether I'm successful at it or not. It comes from a different place, kind of the same end product. We're all kind of like conditioned creatures, compound creatures. We have our genetic background, our parents and their parents going back time immemorial, and then we've got all the influences that come after we're born. I used to think of a baby coming into the world as a blank slate and the end point, the adult is what happens after that? All of the different influences and teachings but you know I don't really think that way anymore. I think when a baby comes into the world, they're like a piece of grafting paper. It's an empty page, but there's a graph on it. And each one is different. Each one is a different pattern. And it's on that underlying genetic pattern that we overlay all of the conditioned and we're conditioned by parents teachers friends enemies something called frenemies which I'm not familiar with maybe I am but I don't know them drinking buddies and total strangers anybody we come into contact with it's a cause and effect our own brain our own thoughts condition us and all of those conditioners are similarly conditioned by everybody they've ever come into contact with so it's incredibly complex interdependence so in this little verse all my ancient twisted karma talks about twisted it's not twisted in the sense of some melodramatic evil, it's twisted in what I wrote here was an unfathomable entwined interdependence. So when you act in a certain way, there is a myriad of causes and conditions that bring you to that point. But you are the one who acts. You're responsible for what you do at that point. So the verse doesn't condemn, it doesn't condone, it just hits the stage where we are. It evolves the often messy reality of where we have the privilege of practicing right in the mind of ourselves. So in looking at a four-step from a beginning Buddhist perspective an appreciation of emptiness can help the fact that your one act is not innately evil doesn't make you evil when we get involved in thinking things like that we get pulled off into energy wasting areas like guilt and shame as we identify the numerous instances where our thoughts, our words our deeds have harmed others or caused suffering we just need to remember that that doesn't mean there's any evil involved in the way things happen it doesn't relieve us of responsibility but it speaks to the myriad of influences that helped bring us to this moment where we had an opportunity for one reason or a million to act, and yet we chose something that increased the suffering of others or ourselves. It's responsibility, not blame, not guilt. It's not a bad me. It's just naked responsibility. I put that in there so I could say naked. you know even though we're all in one stage of recovery or another and are looking at things that later on we're going to say are the exact nature of our wrongs people when they do a four step they say well you've got to look at everything good, bad when you do an inventory you look at the pristine goods you look the rotten stuff well, the pristine goods don't cause us trouble. So we kind of have to pay attention to the areas where we've caused problems. But in the balance, we've all probably done many, many more things to relieve the suffering of others and ourselves than we have the opposite. Now that really doesn't make a sense or anything, but I like to look at that as our pure, innocent, Buddha nature finding its way out of the many cloaks of delusion that we wrap ourselves in. I came across an article in Tricycle a while back by two of my favorite people, Pema Chodron and her teacher Zegar Kongtul Rinpoche and our favorite teachers I should say and Pema asked them what was the most beneficial advice you could give to western students and this connected with me because it's not just western students but we as people with dependency problems I think especially could benefit and his answer was guiltlessness and she said guiltlessness what do you mean he said well the need to realize that a person's mind is by its very nature innocent and she asked for an explanation of innocence and he had said and I'll read it. I mean it from the Buddhist point of view we can understand that all the things we do to harm ourselves and others come from a deep-rooted confusion and ignorance that the mind is by its very nature pure and enlightened when we feel a tremendous amount of guilt we forget this view and Pema not to be you know put off by an easy answer asked what proof he had of that and he said well everybody craves happiness and relief from suffering and that's all the proof that he needed so you know our western culture just does a bang up job of teaching us to feel guilt and shame you know here we are in our core of course pure white innocence I like to look at each one of us is like a redwood tree and in our little pithy core is Buddha nature, pure light and enlightenment. And as we encounter the world and we encounter the poisons that arise, greed, hate, and ignorance, our reaction to those poisons is to wrap ourselves in delusional stories so that by the time we're old, we're like a great big tree wrapped in these delusinal stories. but at our core is Buddha nature our ego plays a huge part in that process and as we do things that other people tell us are wrong you know, we shame ourselves, we feel guilt and as I said before those are distractions because it's not horrible to have remorse when you do something that hurts other people that's kind of natural but rather than feel positive regret or positive remorse compassionate regret we more tend to feel oh, we make it about ourselves bad me and then we can just wallow in our badness and not do anything positive like understanding that you know what I'm not bad by nature I've acted unskillfully and there are things that I can do because you know I love this person that I've hurt and I do love myself I gotta be up front about it and go onward bad me, put that out of your mind so So our four-step goal, we conduct this willing and deep look into our thoughts, our words, with compassion and understanding of emptiness, of selflessness, the fact that you're guiltless. And we've got this entire present moment to ease the suffering of ourselves and others we can't undo anything as of course we hear time and time again all the greed, hatred and ignorance you know in our zeal to get rid of what people call our shortcomings we can maybe try to wrestle them out of our psyches but that's aggressively trying to change something it reminds me of the old Buddhist adage what we resist persists so in dealing with what we call our shortcomings we need to just hold them gently and with compassion and with a deep appreciation of their nature and it's from that mindset we can massage them a little when they're ready to go you can't wrestle them out of your stuff so you know it's from that point that we undertake the next appropriate action so as you do your writing keep in mind that the things that you think are the worst things you've ever done to somebody don't make you evil they just happen and and remember that underlying it all is responsibility you take responsibility if it's appropriate to feel positive regret and remorse do so be gentle with it and just let it happen I'm done thank you thank you Thank you.