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Guided Meditation: Noticing Traces of Thoughts

Hello everyone, thank you for coming to this gathering of our extended meditation community to spend this time meditating and exploring the dharma^[1]. It's a fantastic thing in life to explore the dharma, or explore this delightful—I like the word dharma, but a delightful, profound, significant way in which our mind works, how we interact with the world, and how the dharma works through us. In the sense that, how does the goodness that is part of our psychophysical system work really well when we're able to get out of the way properly and allow for something to move through us?

Today I'd like to offer a little bit more of an exercise than a meditation. We will still meditate as usual, but with a little emphasis on this exercise, and that is: be a little bit more attentive to when the mind wanders off in thought. Just notice it. This is to say, don't think intentionally, but do your meditation, and when your mind wanders off in thought, really notice that that's what's happening. Then see if you can notice the impact that your thinking has on you.

What influence does that thinking have on your body? On your emotions? Is what you're thinking about completely neutral, or does it have an influence on you in some way? Are there any residual feelings that come with it? For example, if you're imagining or thinking frightening thoughts, are there feelings of fear that come from that? If there are angry thoughts, are there feelings of anger? Or if there are desire thoughts, does that stimulate something in your physiology that you feel in your body a little bit, that upwelling of energy of desire, perhaps?

What impact does thinking have on you? Often, if we just notice thinking, note it, and let go of it, we haven't noticed that it has left its traces in us. The more powerful the thinking, the stronger those traces are, so much so that they might remain somehow in terms of tension in the body, contraction in the body, or a certain mood in the body that might last quite a long time after the thoughts are finished. They've left their traces.

So that's the exercise. Assuming a meditation posture. One of the possibilities with your posture is to assume a posture that seems to have some strength or solidity to it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor is sometimes likened or compared to being like a mountain. The tripod base provides a firm support. If you're sitting in a chair, how can you sit in the chair so there's a little bit more solidity or a sense of being established here in this body? The body is not treated incidentally or as something to forget when you're meditating, but the body itself is put in a position where there's a sense of presence, like the body is here with you.

If you're not used to this, it might seem a little bit awkward at first, but it's a wonderful support for meditation to receive the body's help in becoming established and stable in the present moment here.

Gently closing your eyes. Relaxing the body.

Then in a leisurely way, taking a fuller inhale than usual, as if you have all the time in the world, and a longer exhale. Feeling the expansion of your chest all the way up to your shoulders as you breathe in. Maybe noticing a little bit the more subtle expansion of your back ribcage. And as you exhale, relaxing it all and letting your breathing return to normal.

On the exhale, relaxing the muscles of the face. On the exhale, softening the shoulders. And on the exhale, softening in the belly.

Then establishing your attention on your breathing, wherever it's most comfortable to do it: in the belly, the chest, the nose. And as you exhale, let go of your thoughts. If you can't let go of them, perhaps you can let them become quieter, calmer.

Then receive the inhale, letting go with the exhale. And if thoughts occur or reappear during the inhale, recognize the thinking and notice what influence they have on the rest of you. Do they come along with a mood or an emotion, or with any tension or pressure? What impact does that thinking have? And then on the exhale, let go again.

If you're thinking, what impact does that have on your body? Is there any tension or pressure anywhere? Contraction? Do the energies in your body seemingly shift depending on what you're thinking about?

And if you notice the influence thinking has on you—in your body, your feelings, your mood, in the mind itself—is there some way that that influence encourages more thinking? Some way that it has within it an impetus to think more?

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to pick up your thoughts again more actively, intentionally. Think about the people of your lives, people in your communities locally and far away, and around the world. Consider thoughts of goodwill, to have thoughts of well-wishing, care, and appreciation of others.

Perhaps after this meditation session, calmly, openly, generously, you can think about other people with appreciation, with care. And to dedicate these 30 minutes, dedicate the benefits from meditating here to the welfare and happiness of others. May any ways that you have benefited, that we have benefited, spread out from here into the world to benefit others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Karma/Dharma (3 of 5) Karma of Thinking

Continuing on this theme of the karmic and the dharmic streams of our lives. For most people, the one that is primary in their lives, that plays the biggest role, is the karmic stream^[2]. People don't understand what this is, and so they don't recognize it as such; it's just business as usual.

The karmic stream is what we can experience directly for ourselves, not the abstract ideas about it or grand ideas about what happens over lifetimes. It is starting to become sensitive to how it works moment by moment, how it unfolds in our lives. A couple of things about this karmic stream is that it is a perpetual motion machine. It's self-generating. It creates the conditions that prompt more of the same—it creates the conditions to have more karmic activities. What makes something karmic is that it conditions us; it affects us in such a way that there's a continual motion, one after the other. There is no stop, or if there is a stop, it's there in the background as an influence ready to rear up and affect us further.

One of the best places to see this is in our thinking because then we can see it operating really moment by moment, really up close. You see it when thoughts are like monkeys. The analogy that's classically used is a monkey swinging in the trees and the branches; as soon as it's grabbed one branch, it's already moving to grab the next one. We're up with one thought and already there's a generation of the next one, moving on to the next and the next.

Oftentimes, if it is a karmic way of thinking, that karmic way of thinking leaves traces and has an effect. It generates further thinking. It generates a disposition. It creates a mood for thinking in the future. That thinking is very seldom just light, empty—just a whiff of thought that leaves no traces and has no influence on us. Oftentimes in daily life, our thoughts do leave these traces, this influence on us. Sometimes each individual thought is quite subtle, but the accumulation of many thoughts over a day or over months can be huge. It can create almost like a disposition in a person or a mood in a person.

The influence that thinking has on us encourages more thinking. Another way, as we did in that exercise a little while ago about noticing what influence thoughts have on you, is you could also do it the other way. You can ask, what is the mood, what is the emotion that's present for you, and how is that influencing your thinking? It goes both ways; it's cyclical. This is often how the cycle of birth and death^[3] can be seen in these cycles of the birth and death of thoughts. What comes first? Is it an emotion or a mood that gives birth to thoughts, or do thoughts give birth to the mood or the emotional state?

It can be both. Sometimes it's productive to look and see what the influence thinking has on us, and other times it's useful to look and see what the influence of our mood into the thinking is. But if we start seeing this cycle, we see that thinking is not free of any impact. There's a way in which it generates the very mood which prompts more thinking, or generates the kind of physical tension that prompts more thinking.

There's an analogy I like using occasionally. If you take a tube of toothpaste and you keep squeezing it, the paste will keep coming out. Even if you want to stop it coming out and you keep wiping the paste away from the opening, it keeps coming out. What you have to do is stop squeezing, and then it might stop. Sometimes our thoughts are that way. If we're squeezing, if there's tension, tightness, and pressure within us, we can let go of thoughts forever, but the pressure to think will just generate more thoughts, and more thoughts. So what creates that pressure? It might be a certain way of thinking that frightened us, and so there's tension in the body from that fear or anxiety, and that anxiety then gives birth to more.

There's also positive karma, good karma, beautiful karma, that can be great. That is to say, if we have beautiful thoughts—thoughts of generosity, of love, of appreciation of other people, or thoughts of wisdom—those thoughts have a different kind of impact on our body and on our emotional life.

Sometimes you can feel the impact and what's left behind. The impact has to be quite strong to really feel it if you're not really subtle and tuned in carefully. Sometimes it's really clear that the leftovers stay with us. If we really have a strong bout of resentment and the jaw clenches, that clenching of the jaw is the influence that thinking has on us. Sometimes I've had beautiful, wonderful thoughts of appreciation for other people and love for them, and I've felt this warmth that begins traveling through me. Both types of karma operate this way.

Now, one of the qualities of karma, both good karma and difficult karma, is that there keeps being this momentum. There is something operating that's pushing us along. Karma is a momentum that keeps reappearing, reoccurring, and surfacing in us. If that karmic stream is strong, or if our thinking is strong and active with a lot of pressure to think, then it limits the operation of the dharmic stream, this other whole side of who we are. Even to have beautiful karma and good karma operating is filling the space.

If we can create more space, then there's a whole other way that operates that comes from something I'd like to call shyer inside of us—something that's quiet, something that's easily eclipsed. This is the upwelling of our native goodness or the unfolding of the dharma within us. Some people raise their eyebrows around this language of inner goodness or innate goodness, but the dharmic stream has a lot to do with what gets left over when we stop the karmic stream, when it pauses.

The karmic stream is a little bit like Sisyphus^[4] pushing a boulder up the mountain. It goes up and up and up, always rolling it up the mountain. What the boulder wants to do is roll down to the bottom, so when he gets it to the top, it rolls down, and he has to push it up again. The karmic stream is the pushing of our boulders—pushing our desires, our wants, our concerns, our wishes, moving ahead, doing things with the wanting mind, the desirous mind, the aversive mind, and all these kinds of things that are carrying the thinking along. Even the subtler desires of love and generosity are carrying it along, creating work for the mind. The karmic mind is always working; it's always constructing.

When the karmic work, the constructing mind, stops, and there's space for something else to happen, there starts to be an unwinding. The boulder rolls downhill. The tensions in the mind and the tensions in the body begin to dissolve. When all these tensions are dissolved, it allows for something else to arise. One of the things that can arise is a great delight and joy at this relaxing, having breathing room again, having a sense of space, and allowing a deeper felt-sense connection to ourselves. A discovery of a feeling of wholeness emerges that's very hard to feel when karma is operating.

Karma always limits. The Buddhist language is: karma creates definition and limits to who we are and what's going on, which doesn't allow us to see things as being whole. As we relax those limitations, the feeling of wholeness, the feeling of freedom, and the feeling of ease begins happening.

Then the quality of the thinking changes. Sometimes thinking has a quality of being more spontaneous in a certain way, wiser, more intelligent. Thinking has a way of feeling light, and it doesn't leave traces. It's not a self-generation; it's not like monkeys one after the other. A thought arises, and it's there, and it's easy and light and interesting, but there's no pressure associated with it. The mind has a greater capacity for creativity and wisdom, and even things like kindness and love, but not the kind that is grabbing from one thing to the other.

So this is my attempt to try to point you to some newer understanding of how the mind might work, and how karma and dharma might work. Perhaps I don't have it exactly right for you, but I'm hoping it's well enough that you can now investigate for yourself, that you do the exercise and the exploration for yourself and see what Gil is talking about here. What are these two streams? Do you know anything about these two streams? Can you recognize something that's this self-generating perpetual motion machine of thoughts that are pushing, wanting, building, and creating? And can you recognize this stream that arises without desire, pushing, or pressure, but as a delightful expression of freedom?

Thank you, and I look forward to continuing tomorrow.