Don't remove delusion , Don't even seek the truth; Guided Meditation

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided meditation and Dharma Talk - Don't remove delusion , Don't even seek the truth - Max Erdstein. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Max Erdstein at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 25, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation

So, I will start with a short guided meditation. Maybe I'll start off giving some instructions, and then we'll go into the silence. Hopefully, there's a little bit for everyone.

Just taking a moment and getting settled in the seated posture. It's always been interesting to me that some of the most experienced meditators that I know really take their time to find their posture. Maybe we could say that during the whole meditation, we're continually finding our posture. We're continually discovering what it means to be centered, to be balanced, to be upright.

I don't think the sitting posture is some particular place we get to, but is this exploration. So, just take a few moments and feel into this body. What does it mean for this body to be grounded and alert? What does it mean for this body to be at ease?

Closing the eyes, if that feels helpful. And perhaps taking a few deep, deliberate breaths. And with each out-breath, just noticing this letting go. Is there some way in each out-breath we can let go of the momentum of the thinking mind? The momentum of conditioned, habitual thoughts, and let ourselves be here?

Remembering that in this practice, our primary intention is simply to be present for what's happening. In this moment, sounds are coming and going. Sensations in the body are being felt. This moment also includes our mental activity: thoughts passing through, images in the mind, feelings, moods, and emotions. All are part of the fabric of this moment.

Can we allow ourselves to receive experience? Receiving sounds. Receiving any of the sensations of the body as they manifest.

At some point, we may notice that this body is breathing. We may notice the rise and fall of the belly, the expansion and contraction of the chest, or perhaps the flow of air right at the nostrils. Seeing if we can be present for one complete in-breath, one complete out-breath. Just one breath.

There's no need to breathe in some particular way, but rather just observe and notice this breath. Sometimes the breath will be long, sometimes short. Sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. With each in-breath, there is this opening, receiving, welcoming. And with each out-breath, a wonderful letting go, releasing, giving back.

Perhaps we can notice and tune into the rhythm of our breathing. The rhythm of welcoming in, and letting go.

Thoughts will come. Feelings will come. Not a problem. Whatever we experience as part of the fabric of this moment is worth our care, our attention.

Is it possible to rest here, right in the middle of this flow of experience? Thoughts floating by, sensations of breathing, sensations of the body, sounds passing through.

In the final few minutes of the meditation, perhaps we can take a moment to acknowledge whatever may be difficult right now. Whatever may be challenging or painful in this heart, in this mind, in this body. To include this, to meet this with our warmth, our care, our compassion.

Announcements

Hillary: Good morning and welcome again to IMC. It's so wonderful to see so many people here on our potluck Sunday. Whether or not you brought something, it's totally fine—feel free to join us after the Dharma talk for our potluck. There's seating inside and outside, so whatever feels comfortable for you. We'll just make a line at the table, and we'll ring a bell and have a blessing before the food. We also welcome anybody to help at the end with clean up. Thank you.

Just a reminder that all the teachings here are freely given; there's never a charge. The entire center runs on donations. If you're inclined to make a donation, there's a box near the front door with the spelling of the teacher's name and a slot for operations. There's also an electronic kiosk near the library door if that's more convenient. And our teacher this morning is Max Erdstein. Good morning, Max.

Don't remove delusion , Don't even seek the truth

Max Erdstein: Good morning. Well, it's very nice to see you and to be with you, and to see so many people here. It feels like the good old days before that thing happened called COVID.

I feel like maybe I should introduce myself a little bit because it's been a while since I've been here. One of the great things about a place like IMC^[1] is there are old friends who are familiar and have been coming for years, and always new people who are coming in. It's such a great mix.

I first walked in these doors—so to speak, but it wasn't these doors—in 1999. This group had a few times that it would meet at the Quaker Friends Meeting House in Palo Alto. I don't know if anyone remembers that, who was here then? Yeah. I remember I walked in, and it was a little bit of a rectangular room. People were sitting facing the center, and a friend had told me that there was meditation. It sounded interesting, so I walked in and everyone was just sitting there quietly. I just sat down and was kind of waiting for it to start. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And then at some point: Okay, this is it. [Laughter] And that's sort of been my practice for the last twenty years. Waiting, waiting, and then it's like, Oh yeah, this is it. This is it.

I was just thinking to myself during the meditation how wonderful it feels to sit in the sitting posture. I think those of us who have developed a little bit of a meditation practice over time know it sounds a little cliché, but there is this idea of coming home—coming home to ourselves and coming home to the moment. For me, when I sit down and cross my legs, sit up straight and close my eyes, it's like, Oh yeah, right. I forgot about this. In my dramas, in my problems, in my suffering—oh yeah, this is possible. This is possible to be here, to open to what's going on in a simple way.

And even though it's simple, I think that the meditation posture—whatever that means for your body, but that orientation to our life—brings a great power. But it's not a power to do, or a power to assert, or a power to fix. It's a power to accept ourselves, and it's a power to accept things as they are. For me, I associate the meditation posture with this capacity to accept things as they are.

A close friend of mine recently lost a parent. She was going through this process when her father was quite sick for a few years, and then in hospice for a few months. We talked about this a little bit: what can we do in a situation where we don't have control? Where we're there, we want to be present, we want to be helpful, and we want to be awake. My suggestion was to find a few moments every day to sit in this posture. Just take this posture. I think there's so much strength that can come from that capacity to open to our life as it is.

So that's one of the teachings that has stuck with me over these years. I don't have the kind of mind that can really track or remember complicated lists. Buddhism has a lot of lists—there's the twelve this and the sixteen this. They're great, but to just sit down and let this moment be what it is, soften the struggle, soften the resistance, and soften the self that's always trying to get what it wants and get away from what it doesn't want... that's what stayed with me.

It's funny how some images or teachings will land in the mind. A few weeks ago, we had a one-day sitting—basically a day of quiet and silence—and I gave a talk at the end of the day. What I was remembering was this story that I heard early in my practice. After I started sitting here with Gil^[2] in Palo Alto—in those days Gil used to talk a lot about Zen, because Gil also has a Zen practice and started his practice in Zen in the 70s. I heard a lot about Zen from Gil, and I got very interested in the San Francisco Zen Center and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the famous book written by the teacher there, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi^[3]. I started sitting in San Francisco at the Zen Center as well, and somehow I heard this story.

In a Zen meditation hall, all the students sit facing the wall. Have you ever seen that? It's a different format. All the students are facing the wall, and the teacher is at the front of the room facing the students. Usually, there's another student who's facing out, who is kind of like the meditation hall manager. I think they are called the Ino^[4] in Japanese. The Ino comes in later and makes sure everything is okay.

This is a story that the manager told. All the students were sitting, and Suzuki Roshi was there facing the hall. The manager walked in and saw one of the scrolls on the wall was a little bit askew; it was a little crooked. Being the manager, and being in the Zen tradition where everything needs to be lined up and perfect—you bow in a very particular way, and you walk into the room with a particular foot in a choreographed, mindful way—there is a sense that there's a right way of doing it. Anyway, the manager walked in, saw the scroll was crooked, straightened the scroll, and then went over and found a seat.

Later, Suzuki Roshi got up to walk out of the room, and on his way out, he reached over for the scroll and messed it up again. He slanted it and walked out in one beautiful, graceful gesture. That was the story.

In my early days of Zen practice, I'm sure I heard that story and it stayed with me. One of the things I appreciated about it was that it was a little bit of a corrective. Especially in Zen, there was a sense that there's a right way to do everything. Being a kind of overachieving, wannabe perfectionist, I was trying to do things the right way, and I felt sure that everyone was watching. In a Zen community, just like in any community, there's a person or two who really enjoys correcting you and telling you that you're not supposed to do things a certain way. So this story, for me, was a great teaching.

It was a pointer that in this practice, we're not trying to endlessly correct, endlessly fix, or endlessly perfect. We're not trying to scrub the mind of all of its bad things and insert all these good things. That's not the point. For me, it was this idea of letting things be as they are.

When we sit down to meditate, we're opening to the experience of this moment, however it happens to be. Sometimes we'll feel calm, sometimes we'll feel agitated. Usually, there's going to be a mix of a lot of different things going on—thoughts coming through, and feelings. I love the fact that our center here is in a neighborhood. People are driving, kids are laughing, there are cars and people talking. We're sitting in the middle of life. We're not trying to get to some absolute silent place.

I know for myself early in my practice, I had the model of needing complete silence. Like using earplugs. There's a place for that. Like when I fly, I have my headphones and my eye mask, and I'm trying to just disappear. But I think meditation is not about disappearing, and it's not about escaping to some place where nothing can bother us or touch us. It's more about opening more and more to our life. Our life is not a flotation tank. If I totally want to get to a place where it's totally silent, totally peaceful, and I can't feel anything, am I here? If our freedom and our peace only come when everybody else does what we want them to do and stays quiet, I don't know how valuable that freedom is.

When we can be free, when we can be at ease when a parent is sick, when we're late for work, when we're stressed about something, when we're sad about something, when we're irritated, or when we're wanting something—well, I think that's a more valuable freedom. That is to be awake, to be aware, to be alive right in the middle of delusion, right in the middle of our life, without attaching to delusion or enlightenment.

I was saying the other day that in one of the places I practiced, there was a scroll on the wall, and the translation of the scroll was: "Don't remove delusion, don't even seek the truth."^[5] You think, well, isn't the Buddha's teaching to remove delusion and seek the truth? Why would there be this teaching saying "Don't remove delusion, don't even seek the truth"?

For me, it was this great pointer, this great reminder that what we're looking for, what we're seeking—the Dharma^[6]—is closer than any division of delusion and truth. It's here. It's this. Let things be; open to this moment. Truth is not in some future moment, some better moment when I'm some better version of me, and the world is some better version of itself, and then I can be happy and free. If it's not here, where could it possibly be?

Here's a little story that maybe presents an aspect of this. Once, there was a monk who lived in an old temple, taking care of his retired teacher and tending the temple's rather famous garden. One day, visitors were coming from far away to admire the garden, and so he spent the morning meticulously raking the sand and gathering up all the stray leaves. After he had gotten everything to look just right, he noticed his old master looking over the garden wall at his work.

"Very nice," the old man said, "but there's one thing missing." "What's that?" asked the monk.

Taking hold of a branch of a tree that leaned over the garden wall, the master gave it a good shake, sending autumn leaves cascading every which way onto the pristinely raked sand.

"There," said the old master. "Now it's perfect."

If you've ever gone to Japan or seen these Zen gardens, you know the stones are raked in a certain way, maybe there's a maple tree in the corner, and they're beautiful. It's a kind of serenity. There's a harmony and stillness, and it kind of becomes your mind. You see how this one lone tree is relating to the pond, and relating to the stones. But there's also something about it that's very meticulous, controlled, and deliberate. Certainly, there's a place for that, and it's a certain kind of beauty. So then why would the master mess it all up?

Maybe it's not an accident that the master in the story is an old guy. I kind of imagine him as someone who has seen a lot of life, has done a lot of practice, and has a mind that's really wide, inclusive, and welcoming. And I kind of imagine the young monk as someone who has a lot of energy, a lot of ambition in a way, and wants to do something. He wants to accomplish something, has this energy for practice, and wants to get it right.

Maybe we could say these are two different models of the mind, and of Dharma practice. One is that we're continually raking, continually cleaning up, continually taking care. In a way, it's beautiful. When we sit down and notice that the mind is all over the place—thinking about what happened, stuck on yesterday, last week, or ten years ago—to then say, "Oh yeah, I'm here," and to sit up a little straighter, come back to the breath, apply myself, and gather the mind. That's important; that's what we're doing. This is the side of practice that's kind of like a training.

Learning an instrument or learning anything is a little bit like this learning of mindfulness and breathing. We first sit down and say, "Okay, just follow your breath." That sounds easy. We're there for a couple of breaths, and then we're gone, totally gone. If you've ever done this practice of counting the breath, you know. I still do it sometimes. With each out-breath, you very quietly say a number, basically from one to ten. So you're breathing in, and out: one. Breathing in, and out: two. Once we get to ten, we start again at one.

The way I think about it is that the number is like a little label. You give the thinking mind a little activity so we're not thinking randomly quite as much. Ninety percent of the awareness is with the sensations and feeling of the breath, but there's this little label. It's this wonderful way of helping the mind stay with the breath. But usually, when I offer this to groups and we talk about it afterwards, it's like, who didn't get higher than three? Because we get to one and two, and then the mind is off. Whenever we wake up, we just come back to one. It's a little bit like training wheels. I still use training wheels. It just aligns the body, the mind, and the breath.

So this is a training. Maybe we could say this is like raking the garden, cleaning up the garden. We're organizing the mind, sweeping the mind. But that's not all there is to this practice.

What is it to be able to accept the uncontrollability of life? The uncontrollability of the wind whipping up the leaves? If any of us have a garden, we know it's continuous. You clean up, and in the next moment, it's a mess all over again.

Practice is not about "once and for all." It's not about, "I'm going to meditate so one day I can just sit back and enjoy the perfection of this clean, pristine garden that has no mess, no squirrels eating our ripe tomatoes, no noisy trucks going by." Maybe the master is saying the point of practice is to see the uncontrollability, to see the mess as its own kind of perfection. When I take this posture, open the mind, open the heart, and let myself feel, think, and breathe, I can sense that this moment is just what it is.

It has its own kind of perfection, and all of the truths of the Dharma—of impermanence^[7], of interdependence, of emptiness—are all here. It's here in the sounds of the baby. It's here in the mind that's worrying about something. Are those worries some fault of mine? Is there some problem, or is it just another of the endless expressions of this moment? When we can open to ourselves and open to our life that way, it is such a gift we give to ourselves and to others.

In my own practice, I've become a little bit allergic to the kind of "once and for all" thinking. The other side of "once and for all" is, "I'm not there yet. Maybe I'll never get there. What am I doing here all these years?" This is a very common feeling that meditators have. But I think of practice a little bit more like brushing our teeth. We don't think, "If I brush my teeth really well, I'll never have to brush my teeth again. If I get them so clean, I'm done!" No. It's part of our ongoing care for ourselves. We accept that this is part of being alive. I'm not expecting miracles when I brush my teeth. I'm not brushing my teeth waiting for some "once and for all" Big Bang experience. It's so ordinary, so woven into the fabric of our life that we don't even have to convince ourselves that it's a good idea. You just do it.

Maybe there's a way that Dharma practice can be more like brushing our teeth. We sit down, and we metabolize our day. This is one of the reasons I love meditating at night. I know early morning meditation is a very virtuous thing. If you're a very good person, you get up very early. [Laughter] I remember when I was living in a Zen monastery—Tassajara^[8]—they would start the sittings at 3:50 AM. They don't just leave it up to your virtue. If you don't show up at 3:50, you get a knock on your door: "Max? Is everything okay?" There is a person whose job is to round up all the stragglers. In a way, it's the easiest place to practice because someone's basically telling you, "Go meditate now. We're going to ring the bell. Go." In our own life, it's more nuanced.

I love meditating at night because it's like metabolizing the day. I often spend a few minutes doing nothing, just sitting there and feeling what's going on. It's not that glamorous, but day-in, day-out meditation, like brushing our teeth, is a great practice. It is a deep practice.

I often think about phone books. I know they're a dated example, but one page of a phone book is so insubstantial; it's this thin paper. I think a day of practice, a day of sitting down and being with this mind exactly as it is, is like one page of the phone book. But you do that day after day after day, and something substantial develops.

Maybe with that kind of consistency of being kind to ourselves, of growing our capacity to be with the full range of who we are and the experiences life gives us, we can appreciate when the garden is pristine, and we can appreciate when it's full of leaves. When our life is full of meetings, difficult conversations, and stress, we can find the beauty in each moment. I hear this baby, and I have three of them, so it's heart-opening for me. The thing that stuns me is how fast it goes. Babies change so quickly. We're also changing, but we just don't perceive it. It's a great reminder for me to just enjoy each moment as it goes by.

I think meditation is a way of reminding us that each moment is it. Don't save ourselves for some imagined moment in the future. So often we give up this moment because we think there has to be something better.

I have a memory of those stories from early in my Zen practice. Students were on one of these long meditation retreats—sesshins^[9]—and in the Zen tradition, you don't move. You usually have a lot of physical pain, burning in your knees. In the middle of one of these week-long sesshins, the teacher came in to give a little word of encouragement, a little something to open our hearts. What did Suzuki Roshi say? He said something like: "It doesn't get better later."

Is that depressing, or is that liberating?

I think some of the most present, most awake beings I've had the good fortune of being with have been either very young children or people who are at the very end of their life. At these two extremes of the lifespan, they aren't waiting anymore. The children are just in the moment. They don't know enough to compare, or worry, or anticipate; they're just delighted by every new thing. And the friends who've been at the end of life aren't waiting anymore either. An acquaintance of mine wrote a book called Death: The End of Self-Improvement^[10]. Finally!

I had a friend who was a lovely woman in her seventies. We knew each other because we were part of a cohort of the Buddhist chaplaincy program with Gil, Paul Haller, and Jennifer Block back in 2007. She was a psychotherapist, but she had many different lives and careers. She just had this great sense of humor and down-to-earth wisdom, and I loved being with her. She was so healthy and vibrant that it was a shock to me when, a few years later, she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

There were no good treatments, so she basically said, "I want to enjoy as much time as I have left, whether it's five years or five weeks." In those eight or ten weeks that she had, she became so happy. She was so free, and she was so happy. She even met with some of her Buddhist teachers to say, "Is something wrong with me? Why am I so happy?" It was like a weight was lifted from her shoulders. She could really be alive and appreciate each moment without worrying about the future.

Instead of a funeral, when she felt she was really getting close, she threw a huge party and had her closest friends come. They drank cocktails and played cards all night. This was how she wanted to celebrate her life.

I sometimes think about her, and I think about these two extremes of life. And then here we are, kind of in the middle, right? We do have to think about the future, and we do want to improve. That is the side of practice where we're tending the garden, taking care of things, developing our skills, and raking the leaves. And then there's the side of letting every single leaf fall exactly where it falls, and seeing the perfection in this as well.

So, maybe I'll stop. I don't know if we have time for questions or comments? Okay. Thank you very much, and enjoy the potluck. Thank you.