Right View
Right view means to have a total comprehension of the Four Noble Truths. Right resolve means a detachment from hatred (and cruelty). These factors are unique to the Buddha's teachings. The culmination of these views, based on morality and meditation, is the experience of prajna (wisdom or insight into the ultimate reality of things).
The Buddhist scholar Todd Lewis puts it succinctly about prajna: “a faculty that enables one unfailingly to see reality clearly amid the constant flow of human experience.” This kind of seeing is existential (aware of the finite limits on life) without becoming morbid. This insight shows you the preciousness of life and the pervasiveness of suffering, not only for yourself but also for everyone. This naturally leads to a feeling of compassion (karuna) for all beings and a wish to help them arises.
What did the Buddha mean by right view? Right view is the ability to experience things beyond conditioned experience. It removes the biasing filters of past experience and allows you to experience reality closer to the way it actually is.
It requires letting go of preconceptions, judgments, and reactivity developed over a lifetime of habit. Meditation (and its constituents: right effort, concentration, and mindfulness) will help you to identify your preconceptions, judgments, and reactivity, and to see how they are active in your experience.
Right view is getting The Four Noble Truths. That is, understanding dukkha, the causes of dukkha, how to stop it, and how to engage in a lifestyle that will address it. The goal is to live life well without causing harm to yourself or others. The goal is to experience things as they are without adding any preconditions, biases, or distortions. It is to find a natural happiness that is always available but obscured from your gaze in the way the sun is always there but sometimes obscured by clouds. Being in the moment is practicing right view.
The Eight Hooks
In the Pathamalokadhamma Sutta, the Buddha said,
Among humans, these things, namely,
Gain, loss, status, disrepute, blame, praise, pleasure, and pain
Naturally are impermanent, uncertain, and liable to change,
The wise, ever mindful, understand these things,
And contemplate them as always shifting and changing
Thus, delightful things cannot oppress their minds,
They have no reaction to disagreeable things,
They have abandoned all liking and disliking (for worldly concerns).
Further, they know the path of nirvana, dust-free and without sorrow,
They have reached the other shore of existence and know this correctly.
The Buddha warns about the eight worldly things to avoid. These four pairs of opposites are reflected in the above sutra.
Taking delight in money, material possessions; feeling distress when separated from these things
Taking delight in praise and things that boost the ego; feeling distress when receiving criticism or disapproval
Taking delight in maintaining a good reputation or personal image; feeling distress when image and reputation are diminished
Taking delight when making contact with pleasurable things; feeling distress when making contact with unpleasurable things
What does the Buddha mean here? These are eight hooks for the mind and are thusly eight attitudes that make you vulnerable to dukkha. The Buddha is not encouraging you to become zombie-like with no self-preserving instincts. Rather, he is cautioning against basing your self-worth, happiness, and well-being on their occurrence.
In other words, beware of contingent self-worth. All things mentioned here are either not in your direct control (that is, it is something someone else does to us) or they cannot be controlled because they are always changing (that is, the fundamental truth of impermanence). He is not saying don't enjoy things, but he is saying that enjoyment might be a double-edged sword if not tempered by the wisdom of impermanence.
He is saying don't take yourself so seriously. He is saying don't invest so much energy into self-protection. Don't base your self-worth on what other people think of you. In fact, spend less time on figuring out your self-worth and more time on paying attention to your experience (and while you're at it, why not focus on helping others, or at least not doing harm to others).
“It is very interesting and important to note here that thoughts of self-less detachment, love, and nonviolence are grouped on the side of wisdom. This clearly shows that true wisdom is endowed with these noble qualities, and that all thought of selfish desire, ill-will, hatred, and violence are the result of a lack of wisdom …” — Walpola Rahula
Gain, loss, status, disrepute, blame, praise, pleasure, and pain are eight hooks to avoid, and they may beset you constantly. Inevitably you may succumb to them on a regular basis. Alternatively, each moment is an opportunity to recognize the hook and to disentangle yourself from its barbed grasp. Mindfulness practice helps you to disentangle.
To be mindful is to see how you are hooked and allowing fear to overtake you. You can see how your sense of content has become contingent. You can breathe into this moment with interest and a commitment to get off the hook or put your energy towards solving the problem in a practical matter. If the problem can't be solved right away, you can breathe through the uncertainty.
