Samsaric & Nirvanic Logic

In “Samsaric & Nirvanic Logic,” Vince Horn draws a clarifying line between conditional trust—the “if this, then that” bargaining that fuels the frantic seeker—and the unconditional trust of “just this,” offering a cognitive adjustment for anyone stranded in the disillusionment phase of the insight path.

PS – You can join part 2 of this series, next Monday (June 22nd) as well as any of the other training groups happening right now, by becoming a member of the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: Today we’re going to be exploring the logics of trust.

The logics of trust. This is the first part of a two-part series. So a short series intending to explore basically three different logics, or three different ways of understanding trust. The first I’ll call samsaric logic, which is based in conditional trust. The second is nirvanic logic, which has unconditional trust as its basis.

And finally, we have non-dual logic, which has an appropriate trust as its foundation. And today I want to talk about the first two forms of trust in particular, and then next time we meet next week we’ll go non-dual and see what that’s all about. So let me share a little bit about where this distinction comes from, this teaching distinction.

I found it helpful to make this distinction as I was, over a number of years, working with folks, especially one-on-one, who were trying to make progress on what’s called the progress of insight. I call it also the phases of insight. And basically, this is a map of the insight meditation territory that you encounter when doing hardcore noting meditation and vipassanā meditation.

I know a lot of you, because I see you here, I know you’ve done this training or that you’re familiar with it. For those that aren’t, it’s kind of like a hardcore sensory deconstructive practice where you’re sort of moment to moment slicing up your experience, and trying to understand what it’s made of at its most basic sensate level.

It’s not for the faint of heart, because you can actually start to destabilize your whole perceptual system and all of your constructs, including self, others, and the world. And that can be quite scary, actually. And at certain times of life, especially if we’re dealing with other intense things like death of family members or a health emergency or loss of a loved one or a job—combine that with also deconstructing your whole sense of reality, and that can get really out of whack very quickly. That’s, I think, an important warning label here. And for those of you that know what I’m talking about, you know. And for those that don’t, well, I hope you don’t ever have to know.

Yes. But what I found in helping guide people’s practice as they would move through these phases of practice, seemed pretty reliable to me, is they would at some point have a breakthrough moment where they would put in the effort, really do the practice, maybe go on retreat, maybe just be doing it regularly in their daily lives, and they would have some kind of deep and profound insight into what they were doing in the practice.

They would see the true nature of phenomena as they arise and pass away. And then they would freak out. And I did the same thing. So I’m not saying “they” as in, like, those poor people. I’m saying, like, all of us freak out when we actually see through the convenient illusions of conventional reality, conventional life, and the way that these brains and bodies and social systems work to co-construct reality together, you know? Once you start to see, oh, it’s not just a movie. It’s made up of these individual frames, and I can see the true nature of the movie that seems to be my life and all the stories underlying it. Well, that leads, in my experience, to a kind of disillusionment where you no longer believe the story of conventional reality as much, including the story of yourself, you know? It’s like, “Oh, I don’t really believe that story.” Me, the me story. But this is a challenging place to be, as many of you know, because it’s so groundless, it’s so difficult to find any kind of security and to find even any sense of a tether of, like, what am I practicing for? Like, what am I even doing this for anymore?

Before, I was doing it for the high, you know? And now that’s gone, and I’m left with this profound, searing realization about the nature of experience and of my own life, and it’s not all pleasant, this realization. Some of it’s, like, hard to digest. And so I would be working with people in the pit of this phase invariably, talking to them, and they really would want to understand, how do I get through this?

And the challenging part, in a teaching role or coaching role when you’re working with someone who’s in this phase, is you can’t really tell them anything that’s going to help them. You can’t say anything, because if I give you any idea at that point of what you could do, I know from experience that that person, they’re going to latch onto it, and they’re going to think, “Oh, if I just do this technique, then I will be able to get through the dark night of the soul.”

Or if I just... You know, if I just go on retreat. That was the thing I always fantasized about, you know? It’s like, oh, if I just go on another retreat, then I’ll finally be free. Also known as retreat junkie. But anyway, there’s this basic logic built in, right, to this phase of practice, which actually is built into our whole life up to this point, which is that we keep thinking if we just get something right, then everything will be all right.

You know, if we just get the right set of conditions, if we just do the right practices, get the right attainments, have the right people verify us, make it through the right kinds of difficulties unscathed or something. You know, like, I made it through a stage four hurricane.

You know, I’m still standing. Yay. We all made it through COVID. Yeah, okay. If I just do those things, then fill in the blank. Then I’ll have complete peace forever, and I’ll never have to worry about anything ever again. That’s usually some version of that. Like, I just have to never worry anymore, you know?

Because there’ll be nothing left that I have to do. Okay, interesting. This is what I call samsaric logic. If this, then that. That’s the core of samsaric logic. If something happens, then something will be okay, and this is conditional trust, of course. This is when we’re putting our trust in conditions.

You know, we’re thinking, like, if I just get the right set of conditions, then everything will finally be okay, or it’ll be back to that place where it was okay before. Which is usually what people are going through when they’re in the disillusionment phase. They’re like, “How do I get back to that profound mind-blowing place?”

And I’m like, “Stop trying to get back. Eventually you’ll come back around to it,” you know? But it’s hard to hear that because we don’t want to feel bad, you know, understandably. And some part of us, even if we haven’t really heard this, will still have heard it that somehow meditation is supposed to make us feel better.

Even if our teachers aren’t even telling us that, maybe one time they let it slip that they feel better for meditating, and then we’re like, “Oh yeah, then meditation’s going to make me feel better.” You know, somehow some part of us wants to believe that. And so we get locked into this sort of conditional relationship to meditation where it’s like, if I just do it correctly and I learn how to practice correctly, then everything will be good.

Who here has not experienced that? Raise your hand. Who here did not need to learn anything about meditation? Okay, everyone here has had that experience. So if you try to tell someone who’s in this phase, right, as a teacher or guide, “Okay, do this,” well, they’re going to hear that through this lens of conditional logic, the samsaric logic.

They’ll be like, “Oh, just let go.” And they’ll be like, “Okay, well, how do I do that?” Am I letting go enough? Am I letting go correctly? How do I let go? You know, this is the sound, right, of the frantic seeker. And this very understandably comes up a lot when we’re disillusioned because we want to figure it out.

We don’t want to be in this space of not knowing.

And so what I found is that talking to people about the difference between samsaric logic and nirvanic logic when they’re in this phase is helpful—almost, if you think about chiropractic work, you know, where you’re adjusting the musculoskeletal system. It’s a kind of cognitive adjustment.

It’s a way of adjusting how you’re thinking about what your experience is like and what should be happening. And I’ll just kind of point out, like, there is this logic, and right now you’re probably operating in that logic. You know, you want to have some clear, straightforward and completely reliable answer to the question of, “What should I do?”

Understandable, right? Like, I want to know that too. I would love to know what to do all the time, ideally. And who wouldn’t? But in fact, we don’t always know what to do, and it’s important to acknowledge this and point this out.

And so we have to learn a different kind of logic. If the core pattern of samsaric logic is “if this, then that”—and remember, samsara in the Buddhist context is the infinite recursive experience of rebirth. Never-ending rebirth. That’s what samsara means. This is the logic that drives samsara.

If this, then that—this is what drives birth and death. Nirvanic logic is different. If samsaric logic is “if this, then that,” nirvanic logic is “just this.” You could say it’s also “just that.” It doesn’t matter, because in the justness of this and that, it goes beyond this and that. And it’s unconditioned.

This is the unconditional trust. When we stop trusting in something to be when something else is, and instead just trust in what is, we just skip right to the is. Okay, this is the way it is. Like it or not, as we say in English, like it or not. Liking it or not liking it happens also in this moment. Okay, this is too.

I like it. I don’t like it. Ah, I don’t care. All of these things are also part of our experience, but we confuse our relationship to experience often with some kind of agency over experience. You know, it’s like, well, somehow because I have preferences, I think my experience should be conforming to them.

And if it’s not, then I must be making a mistake or someone else fucked up somewhere. Where’s my pleasurable experience, please? Who do I have to blame for it not being the way I want it to be? In nirvana, it just is the way it is, right? There’s no complaining. We’re not complaining because we’re accepting the reality of what is in this moment.

The way I like to think about this is, in nirvanic logic, you realize if it’s already happened, it’s too late to change. If it’s already arisen, you can’t change it, so why not just accept it? Once you get the logic of that and you realize, well, yeah, why not? And then you just, you know, you can—that’s what giving way to nirvanic logic is, when you stop struggling, when you give up the hunt, the search. And you’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s just this.”

So that’s why I developed this teaching distinction: to support people in understanding just how truly fucked they are when they’re in this stage of the path. And by doing so, it’s the first step, you know? Once you start to get it, then you stop trying to go to the normal things that are going to keep you avoiding the issue.

You know, it’s like, what do we do when we avoid? Like, I’ll watch Netflix. You know, my favorite thing is I’ll do productive avoidance. You know, I’ll work on something really important. I’ll work on myself or on a project or on the house, you know, I’ll do something really important to avoid what I don’t want to look at.

Okay, whatever it is that we’re doing, when we realize, oh, I’m avoiding this and I can’t, then we start coming to terms with it. You know, we start coming to terms with whatever it is. In this case, we start coming to terms with is-ness. It’s like, this is it, in terms of it’s never going to be anything more than what’s happening in your experience.

You know, it could be very expansive. It could be blissful. It could be selfless. It could be centerless. It could be joyous. I’m not saying it won’t be very pleasurable at times, but it could also be the complete opposite. It could be contracted, painful, disagreeable, irritating. You know, it could just be everything that you don’t like also.

But from the point of view of is-ness, it doesn’t matter. That’s from the point of view of nirvana. Whatever is, is what’s happening. And in that sense, there’s a complete freedom there. We can trust whatever is unconditionally when we’re accepting at that level.