Guided Meditation: Seeing Through Discursive Thinking; Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (1 of 5) Stepping out of the Cage

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Seeing Through Discursive Thinking; Training in Emptiness (1 of 4) Stepping out of the Cage. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 10, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Seeing Through Discursive Thinking

Greetings everyone, I'm happy to be with you this week. I should probably tell you that I'm speaking to you from a remote part of the South of France, and the internet is not perfect. I think the sound should be okay, but you might find the video choppy at times. I'd like to thank Sveta and Julie for taking care of the tech side.

In Gil's teachings last week, he put a lot of emphasis on quieting discursive thinking. My aspiration for this week is to give you some tools for calming and letting go of the self-preoccupation that often is behind discursive thinking.

We have to begin by befriending ourselves. Take a posture that expresses your aspiration for your practice. Settling into the body, and offering your body your heartfelt friendliness: "This is how it is." We try to assume a posture that is both settled and relaxed, and also energetic.

Inviting the energy of the earth to come into you through the base of the spine, moving upwards through the back, and exiting the body through the crown of the head. So the invitation is that we take in the earth's energy from below and release it above.

And now we invite the clear, open energy of the sky to come down through you from the head, down through the torso and the legs, and out through the feet. Bringing the energy from the sky through you and returning it to the earth, so that the body here in meditation is settled, but also a channel for the flow of energy.

Now the invitation is to light a little flame of friendliness, mettā^[1], benevolence in your heart, and let it warm and protect you. Breathe into your heart and see if you can connect with a little flame of loving-kindness. It protects and comforts you.

And now, opening the edges of your body, the edges of your heart, see if you can radiate your unconditional friendliness to all beings everywhere. Radiating mettā to the front, to the right, to the back, to the left, above, and below.

In the context of benevolent awareness radiating outward, the invitation now is to come inside and connect with the breathing. You may want to imagine an oval of the breath. On the inhale, a wave of breath coming up the back, and then when it reaches the crown of the head, a little pause, and then a wave of breath cascading down on the front of the torso. Moving up the back on the in-breath, tasting the stillness for just a moment, and exhaling downwards on the out-breath in the front. See if you can experience the breathing as waves—waves rising up and then falling back down again, with a pause at the bottom as well.

The invitation is to connect with the flow of the breath. Breathing in, breathing out. It is constantly changing. Anicca^[2]. One continuous flow.

Now see if you can stay with the flow of the breath. Breathing out, constantly changing. Feeling the flow of the breath, see if you can sense its inconstancy, always changing. And then see if you can inhabit the change. Going in, going out.

If you haven't already closed your eyes, you can do so now, and let the process of breathing convince you in a peaceful way of the ever-changing nature of our experience. Staying with the flow of the breath.

When you see your thoughts arise, take a moment to appreciate how unsubstantial they are. They have no substance. And rather than choosing to follow your thoughts, you can choose instead a quiet mind, a peaceful mind. A mind free of the preoccupations of "me," "myself," and "mine." Just present, open, receptive, and available for the experience of breathing, or the experience of being you, of being alive.

Your thoughts are not you. Should thoughts arise, instead of going back to the breath right away, recognize how insubstantial they are. Flimsy, fleeting, no substance, just thoughts. And recognize also that believing in our thoughts is a path to bondage, whereas the path to freedom is seeing through their unsubstantial nature.

The tendency of the mind can naturally want to come to peace, to being settled in one's direct experience, unencumbered by thoughts. In those moments where the mind is empty of thoughts, see if you can feel and appreciate the peacefulness, the wholesomeness of a quiet mind. A mind that is not feeding on thinking. Abide in the peacefulness of emptiness.

To end this sitting, we open our circle of friendliness to all beings. Our care, our benevolence, we offer to all beings. May all beings everywhere be safe and protected. Being safe, may all beings, including ourselves, be contented, at ease. May we all abide in peace, and may all beings everywhere be free.

With this bow, I join my hands and bow to you all to end this meditation. I bow to your practice and your sincerity. Thank you.

Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (1 of 5) Stepping out of the Cage

Greetings everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you this week, and I should say that I'm not able to see the chat today on YouTube, but I do very much value your feedback. I will download it and read it as soon as the teachings are finished, so thank you for that. I would also like to announce that we'll have a Q&A session at the end of the week on Friday, following the talk.

In Gil's meditations and talks this last week, he put a lot of emphasis on quieting our discursive thinking as a way of connecting with a deeper wellspring within us. You may have noticed that this is easier said than done, and my aspiration for this week is to give you some tools for calming and letting go of this self-preoccupation that is the motor of our discursive thinking: "me," "myself," and "mine."

The theme for this week is training in emptiness. Normally, training in emptiness is for very advanced stages of practice and deep concentration. But what I'm going to try to do is to find some ways of giving you aspects of emptiness that you can use in your everyday life and in your meditation, whether you're a beginner, a middling practitioner, or an advanced practitioner.

It's in our DNA to want to protect ourselves, to want to exist, to survive. And so our natural habitual tendency is to be very reactive. Something comes up and we react, often with some clinging—either wanting more of it, wanting less of it, or not even knowing what's going on and being confused. It's our clinging that is the source of all of our mental constructions. The word in Pali is sankhāra^[3], which literally means "constructing together."

What we do without any training is to fabricate a sort of amalgam of our inner experience and outer experience. We're constructing the way we think things are. And this constructing has its most dangerous aspect in that the construction of all constructions is clinging—hanging around wanting to be. When we really understand that everything is constantly changing, we see all things, including ourselves, as inconstant.

We understand that the mind habitually fabricates this continuous process of constructing and reconstructing our experience in the form of these mental constructs: thoughts.

Gil gave a lovely talk on the Channa Sutta^[4], in which an elder monk named Channa^[5] had been very caught for a long, long time by conceit. He had been the Buddha's charioteer and felt that he had a special connection to the Buddha—they probably grew up together—and somehow in his mind, this was good enough. So he plateaued for decades, until finally he was able to realize, with rather stern encouragement from the Buddha, that he was not on the right track and he was not able to see the Dhamma^[6].

There wasn't in him a sincere desire for liberation. So he thought he would go visit Venerable Ananda^[7], because Ananda was someone that he could really trust. He did that, and Ananda was delighted to see that at last he was asking questions; he wasn't the know-it-all that he had always been. When Channa asked Ananda to please give him a talk so that he could see the reality of the Dhamma, Ananda was happy to do so. He began by reassuring Channa that he was able to see the Dhamma—he had what it takes. And with that, Channa was joyful, delighted, and hopeful. The fact that Ananda believed in him was the real turning point in Channa being able to open his heart to the teachings.

Believing in someone is a great gift that you can give them, and it can be transformative. I'll read to you a summary of what Ananda taught Channa to help him understand and really penetrate, really see the Dhamma. He is reciting a discourse that the Buddha had given to another monk named Kaccāna^[8]:

"Mostly this world is attached, clinging, fixated, and in bondage. But if one does not attach or cling to mental constructions such as 'this is myself,' then one will clearly see dukkha^[9] when it arises, and when dukkha ceases, that person will clearly see it ceasing. And with this, one's knowledge is independent of others. This is right view."

The key to understanding everything about the Dhamma is seeing through the mental construction of "this is myself."

Of course, we know from the teachings of inconstancy, anicca, that everything is constantly changing. And we know also in modern physics that what we think of as solid—like the table here—is 99.999999% empty. There's a nucleus in the atoms, and electrons whirling around the nucleus, and mostly it's just space. In the same way, our minds are basically empty in our original nature.

Perhaps the most important insight that we can have to benefit our practice is that everything is empty of a self. We're empty of a self. Everyone in our family, our friends, our community—all of us are habitually putting this self forward all the time, selfing, and being attached to oneself. And yet this idea of a self is just a mental construction, a sankhāra.

Buddhist practice can be seen as emptying ourselves of all the projections, constructs, and attachments that we overlay onto our experience. We do this all the time; this is what the untrained person does. As I said before, it's in our DNA to be reactive. So it can be a very liberating idea to embrace the emptiness of a self.

I'll read to you now K.R. Norman's^[10] translation from the Dhammapada^[11] 93:

"Those who have extinguished becoming, who do not depend on the future, whose range is empty, silent, and secluded, their path is hard to track, like that of birds in the sky."

When we go camping, most of us practice "leave no track." We can try the same thing when we aspire to emptying ourselves of clinging, of attachment, of greed, hate, and delusion, and of selfing. When we see thinking arising during meditation, we can imagine stepping out of the cage of our belief in "me," "myself," and "mine," and then being able to leave no tracks.

We can do the same thing when we're talking with friends. Stepping out of the cage of "me," "myself," and "mine," we become much better listeners, and we're in a great position to be of benefit, to serve our friends in their development and aspiration for happiness. The same thing is true at work. If we remember that being caught up in our own ideas of how things should be is a cage, we can be a much better team player and work in collaboration instead of in competition.

Knowing that living beings don't have substance and permanent selves doesn't mean that we don't exist. We can imagine the mind as pure water, and all of our references to self as the sediments that make the water that we're swimming in muddy. We can train the mind by emptying it of the constraints of our mental constructs wrapped around the idea of self and our reactivity, gently sliding into the wholesome, clear water of a mind that's temporarily empty of suffering and selfing, and enjoy the flow of the water.

Thank you very much for your attention. I wish you well in the sky of emptiness.