Guided Meditation: Soft, Unified Awareness; Dharmette: Wise Unification (4 of 5) - Gathering into Unification

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Soft, Unified Awareness; Wise Unification (4 of 5) Gathering into Unification. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 11, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Soft, Unified Awareness

Good morning, Sangha. Good morning, warm greetings, IMC Global YouTube Sangha. It's a delight to be with you again. I see all of the greetings in the chat. Good morning. Good morning. Warm greetings. Excuse the momentary reverberation; Zoom and YouTube do not always interact well. So happy to be with you.

And just before we settle in, taking a few moments to take in where you are physically and where you are in terms of this global network of practitioners. Feeling into your heart for whatever mood, attitude, or state of mind is present this morning. Feeling into your body for whatever is there, and feeling into the goodness of being here together.

Perhaps taking a last look, real close to the screen^[1], at the greetings from around the world, and then moving the attention inwards. Finding a posture that is warm, balanced, and receptive. The balance of uprightness and alertness. Allowing a smile to come to your lips if that feels nice and congruent for you.

And settling in. Settling in, perhaps with one or two deep breaths. Attuning, connecting to your body, our mind. Wrapping yourself in kind attention. Allowing your body to relax. Inviting the eyes to relax. The jaw, the temples, and the cheeks. The neck, the occipital muscles. Perhaps raising and lowering the shoulders to allow them to relax. Inviting the arms and hands to soften.

Noticing the natural flex of the ribs, diaphragm, and belly that happens with breathing, and allowing the breathing to be natural. Nothing special needs to happen. Feeling into, perhaps, the pleasure of the breath massaging the inside of the ribs. The inside of the back muscles. Resting at the core and viscera.

And allowing awareness to fill the whole top part of your body—torso, belly, neck, shoulders, and the head. And the way water fills a sponge, allowing the awareness to seep down into the hips, the hip points, the buttocks, as they contact whatever surface you're sitting or reclining on. Rooted. Feeling supported by your surface, and by the vast strength of the earth underneath.

Allowing awareness to fill the legs, the thighs, hamstrings, knees, shins, calves. Knowing from the inside out. Awareness and relaxation flowing through the legs, down into the ankles, filling the feet. Noticing the contact of the feet and the floor, the cushion, the mat.

And then noticing your whole body. Nothing left out. Present. Immersed here in this moment. And tuning into the vibrancy, the aliveness of the sensory details of this moment. This breath. This body.

It can be helpful to tune into the details of breathing, or the field of sensations of the whole body, very intentionally, distinctly. If focusing on the breath doesn't work for you, please use the following instructions with the sensations of your whole body, or even with the act of hearing. To zoom in, tune in to the wavelength of the details of now.

Choosing a location to attune to the breath. It could be the subtle transfusion, transpiration of life energy through all of your body's cells. Or perhaps the sense of the breath at the tip of the nose or the top of the lip. Or the whole body of the breath from beginning to end. Remember, it's easiest to connect, sustain, and draw a little comfort or pleasure.

Dedicating the attention to the details, the lived experience of breathing. Allowing other phenomena—thoughts, sensations, sounds—to come and go in the periphery. And gathering the attention around this breath. Sustaining contact. That barely noticeable moment the in-breath begins, through all the tiny sensations as the breath moves into this body. Look at that tiny pause when the body is filled with air, and releases into the out-breath.

Noticing the play of sensations, perhaps at the tip of the nose, or anywhere else that makes sense. Sometimes the in-breath has a bit more coolness, vibration. The out-breath may be smoother, moister, warmer. Relaxing into the flow, the natural rhythm of these unfolding sensations.

Allowing the mind and heart to unify with the embodied sensations of breathing. Resting, releasing into the flow of now. This moment.

Allowing the body, heart, and mind to soften, release, open into, let go.

Allowing any rhythm, relaxation, comfort, or pleasure being present with breathing—no matter how small—to be noticed, appreciated.

In the last moments of this formal meditation, the invitation is to gather together, recollect, and collect any moments of goodness, moments of awareness, mindfulness, softening or relaxation, pleasure, or patience. And savor them. Appreciate them in your heart.

And then turning your internal gaze outwards throughout your life. Sharing, offering some of that goodness outwards to the others you encounter, who your life touches directly or indirectly. Inviting the determination, the adhiṭṭhāna^[2], that this practice may benefit the self and all of those around us. The goodness overflowing like water overflowing a vessel.

May all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings everywhere be free of suffering. May we know the joy and bliss of awakening.

[Laughter]

Trash collection day.

Dharmette: Wise Unification (4 of 5) - Gathering into Unification

Good morning. A special good morning to those of you who arrived a touch late.

We are in day four of a five-day series on factors of mind that support deep wisdom and concentration in meditation practice, and that support us in daily life. We started with the fundamentals of mindfulness and practice intelligence on Monday, and then moved into a series of mental factors known as the five jhāna^[3] factors. There are five factors that support this greater stability and refinement, a deepening of meditation.

So we covered vitakka and vicāra^[4], connecting and sustaining. Then the emergent factors of joy and happiness or contentment. And today we cover the fifth of those five factors, a quality known as ekaggatā^[5]—e-k-a-g-g-a-t-ā. And that translates as single-pointed concentration or unification. Those are some of the translations; I'll go into a few more of them in a few minutes. First, I want to start with a story.

Near the end of his life, the Buddha was visited by an emissary of a very bad king. He was just not a nice person; he committed patricide to take the throne. And this king had seen the Buddha before, but was maybe a little shy to be in the presence of the Buddha again given all of his misdeeds, so he sent an emissary, a minister, along to ask the Buddha a question. And his question was predicated on the notion, the truism, that Buddhas never lie.

So the king thought to take advantage of this and sends this minister along to ask about the king's chances of conquering a neighboring people, the Vajjis. He's asked this question directly, and the Buddha doesn't actually address this emissary head-on, but instead turns to his dear cousin and attendant, Ānanda, and asks him a series of questions that make it known that as long as the Vajjis, these neighboring people, gather in peace, disperse in peace, and conduct themselves with harmony and respect, they will stay unified and unconquered.

So this is timeless societal advice that happens to be timely for many of us right now. It is also a really good analogy for our minds. If we gather the constituents of our minds in harmony and respect, stability emerges. Our hearts and minds can unify.

The Pali word for unity is used to refer to both group deliberation and unification around a topic. And to unifying in meditation, then it's called ekaggatā. In meditation, this process of unification is unifying streams of thought, impulses, and attention in a congruent direction. Just like little rivulets gather and flow into streams, and those streams gather and flow into rivers, and then those rivers eventually gather together and flow into great mighty rivers. Like that.

Another example is if you picture a pile of iron filings just kind of all in many directions, and you pass a magnet over them, they all unify and move in the same direction. It's like that. Congruent alignment.

So I invite you to feel in your body, feel into some of the range of translations: unification, being collected, calm, one-pointedness, tranquility, or serenity of mind. So that's one range. I'll talk about that for a little while and then bring in another.

When this quality is present, all of the other factors of mind we've talked about over this past week are in synchrony, congruent, aligned, and moving in the same direction. There's momentum, but it's a quiet, still momentum, like a gathering magnetism, if you will. As that synchrony, tranquility, and serenity grows, the experience of our hearts, minds, and bodies becomes more quiet, subtler.

There are several stages to this, each a marked shift into a deep and stable state of consciousness known as jhāna. And jhāna's are usually, almost always, only available in deep retreat, long retreat, for most people. That's okay. The rest of the time, the mind naturally produces thought. Most of the time, thinking is its natural function. That's not an enemy; much wisdom can be gathered from this broad, receptive, mindful awareness and practice intelligence.

And then sometimes these stages take hold. And while we're not going to experience them in a half-hour sit or a single YouTube video, I'm going to speak them as similes that the Buddha offered, that can evoke a sense or a taste of how each stage of unification in this progression unfolds. And there are four that I'll talk about.

As I speak these similes, the invitation is to feel them in your body and perhaps visualize them. And if you can't visualize or feel into your body, imagining that you can visualize or feel into it is just fine. That works, too.

So settle back for a moment. Maybe take a breath or a sip of tea, and then open your receptive awareness, your intuition.

So in connecting, sustaining, joy, and easeful contentment, happiness are all present and unified. It can feel like kneading moisture into dough so that the moisture pervades evenly all throughout. Feeling that often, it can feel like ripples where the breath is massaging every part of the body, the attention massaging every part.

The Buddha described this process as being like water added to bath powder, kneaded together skillfully to create a single soft ball of soap. Moisture is pleasurable awareness throughout the whole body and mind, a [unintelligible] energetic experience.

Then in the second simile, the mental movements of connecting and sustaining attention become unnecessary and drop away. Only joy and happy contentment remain unified. The body and mind experience it like a clear mountain lake. No rain or streams feeding it, replenished only by a cool internal spring. An internal wellspring of well-being.

And even that, in the next stage, that energetic quality softens and quiets. And each individual person's body and mind are submerged and unified with calm, content happiness, a calm, content pleasure. It is like water touching lotuses of many, many different colors that are completely submerged in the cool, clear water from tip to root. Immersed, no part left out.

Then everything except for calm, unified equanimity drops away. Like after emerging from a cool, soothing bath and being wrapped from head to toe in a soft, bright white cloth or fluffy towel. Enveloped, like stepping out of that cool, shady spring.

So imagining, feeling in your body for any sense of resonance or any intuitive glimpse these similes provided. The process of serenity, unification, is a progressive letting go. A letting go of what's more obvious or coarse into what's calmer and more peaceful.

Each stage has its own value, and each must be released in order to make space for a more calm and peaceful place. And perhaps this is why ekaggatā, usually translated as unification or collected calm, also has the meaning of a capacity to make distinctions. Discernment is developed in this process of learning to make distinctions between the different mental factors, which we've been learning all week, and also in the process of letting go of the more energetic and exciting in favor of the tranquil and the peaceful. This helps to mature a practice.

And happily, that maturity, these lessons, don't require deep retreat and an uncommon stance of mind to start to learn them and embody them. Tastes of each of these factors, including unification, begin to train our capacity for letting go and experiencing how these different mental factors can deepen, broaden, and add beautiful qualities to our meditation.

So thank you. Thank you for your attention today. Tomorrow, the topic is how wisdom can support the development of these factors and how the development of these factors supports the growth in wisdom. I love the similes and comments coming in and encourage you to share whatever observations or glimpses you had with each other and with me. And if you have any questions based on the four talks I've given so far, please drop them in the chat. I can't promise I'll get to all of them, but I will certainly try to read them in.

So thank you, Sangha, for your kind attention. And your homework assignment, if you wish to take it until tomorrow, is to notice what brings more peace and unification to your heart and mind. Thank you.