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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Entanglement

Warm greetings from IMC in Redwood City, California.

I have a delightful feeling of the goodwill that somehow circles the spot that I'm in, through all the YouTube spreading out in all directions. And I hope that each of you can feel the same thing—that from your spot, there are circles of goodwill as this community gathers around the globe.

This week I'm offering little mindfulness exercises that go along with the dharmettes, the teachings that I'm doing. The idea is to continue with your mindfulness practice as you do it, but then this little exercise might be relevant that you could do as you go along.

This one has to do with the idea that something happens, and then we react to it. Of course, we don't always react, but there are reactions. There's a difficult sound outside, an uncomfortable sound, and then we react to it. We get involved in it, we get for and against it, we start thinking about it.

It might not be a perfect match for our English idea of reaction, but the Buddha used the word knot or entanglement. Sometimes it's translated into English as fetter^[1]. So a knot, getting knotted up in something.

This idea of getting caught, maybe we use in English, but if you get caught in a spider web, the spider web is kind of responsible. When we get knotted up, we're the ones who create the knot. We tie ourselves up.

As you go along in this meditation, I want to say one more thing. This way in which we get knotted up with things, caught in things, is not always so conscious. It happens a little bit, not necessarily in the unconscious, but it happens kind of under the radar. We're busy focusing on whatever we do, and we don't notice some of the more subtle ways we get entangled and caught.

In this exercise, as we go along doing the basic mindfulness practice, whatever you notice—if you're noticing the in-breath or the out-breath, you're noticing a sound, a body sensation, a feeling, whatever it is that comes into awareness—if you're caught in it, reacting to it, entangled with it, then use the label knot, k-n-o-t.

And I kind of lighten this label because it can also be spelled n-o-t. In other words, not this. Let's not get entangled, let's not get knotted up. So you say very gently, lovingly, calmly, "Knot." Recognizing there's a knot, and a little subliminal kind of feeling of, "Maybe not, maybe I don't need to." So just "Knot," and just notice.

If you start thinking about something, start thinking about your breath in a subtle way, maybe without any discomfort. In the Buddhist language, you are knotted up in it, you're involved in it. So maybe involved is an English word for this, but knotted up.

If this seems like too much, or you don't care for this, you don't have to do it. But it might be interesting to notice how often, in some way or other, you get involved in what's happening. It might be interesting to see what happens if you just quietly recognize it as a knot.

Taking a meditative posture. Establishing a posture that's upright, alert, or supportive for you, and one that also allows you to relax.

To relax. To make room for yourself, for calmness to be here as well.

Even if you're agitated, there could be a wave of calmness or an envelope of calmness around it.

Gently closing your eyes. And taking a few long, slow, deep breaths, with the idea that these deeper breaths are calming you, bringing some calm, some subtleness. Especially as you exhale, a calming, peaceful effect.

Breathing in. Breathing out.

Letting your breathing return to normal. And on the exhale, for a little while, relax your body, different parts of your body, with the idea that each little micro-relaxation is a gentle calming, settling, and steadying yourself on a normal breath. Calming yourself into an attention centered on breathing.

Maybe the exhale has a little peacemaking movement, a wave of calming, settling. And allow yourself to feel the calming, soothing impact of exhaling, even if it's just near the end of the exhale.

Letting go of thoughts. Every exhale, letting go of thoughts.

And if you find yourself involved with anything in the present moment—thinking, feelings, body sensations, sounds, any concern, anything that could be called a concern because you're caught up in it, involved—gently, lovingly, say the word "knot". Recognize it as a knot, an entanglement.

And see what happens in the wake of simply recognizing it as such. No need to let go of it, just recognize, "Oh, there's a knot," and then continue with your breathing.

If you are involved in thinking, you probably have a knot. An entanglement. It can feel innocent enough to be involved in thinking, but when it takes us out of the flow of the present moment, we would call it a knot.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, turn your attention outward to the people, the community, that you somehow are touched with, have contact with, interact with. Consider what it would be like to be present with them without being reactive, without being entangled, without a knot, without being knotted up.

Maybe consider the peace, or the calm, or the ease it might provide you to be present. Unentangled, just present, available, attentive. And what it would be like for them to be able to experience themselves without being entangled with anything—with themselves, with others, with their things. They can still be attentive and engaged, but not entangled.

And if we have some experience of disentanglement and the benefits of it, we can know more about the kind of happiness, peace, and ease that's possible for human beings. And for whatever peace, well-being, and happiness that we know is possible, may we wish it for others.

May we be inspired that this be a possibility for others to experience.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be disentangled.

Dharmette: Dhammas (3 of 5) The Entanglements

Announcements

Before I begin this talk, an announcement. There are plans now to try to reopen IMC sometime in the next few weeks with a COVID-era protocol, including only being open for people who are vaccinated. There will be more announcements about this, and information will appear on the website.

But the announcement now is that this Sunday, after the 10:00 AM dharma talk, we'll have a community meeting on Zoom to discuss the opening, questions, and concerns, similar to what we did in July when we were thinking about opening. So if anyone would like to come, you're welcome to come, even if it's not relevant for you because you're not planning to come in person; it might be interesting just to come along.

The information for that is in IMC's calendar and also in the 'What's New' section on the homepage of the IMC website. On the bottom right, there's a section called 'What's New,' and there's an announcement about the community meeting with the Zoom link. It's password protected, and the password is metta^[2]—m-e-t-t-a.

The Entanglements

This week I'm going through the five mindfulness exercises that are taught in the discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[3]. I call them exercises; these are ways of practicing in order to develop a heightened sense of mindfulness so that mindfulness is established. It's a means, and the means to be mindful is, in a sense, to be mindful, but there are particular ways or emphases that are given.

In the Fourth Foundation, we're beginning to pay attention to either the way we get entangled in things—get caught up and attached—or the process by which we get free and liberated. There are three exercises around being entangled, being caught. They go from the coarser—maybe the more activated, more conceptual, more story-centered, more complex world that we live in—to the simpler and simpler.

It started off with the complex world of our attachments to our desires and aversions, and to the things we desire and have aversions towards. That could be anything: complicated things in the world, ideas, and things like that. Once we stop getting so concerned in the world of objects and things, in a sense including our own comfort, then we settle down.

There's a next layer I talked about yesterday, which is the ways we identify, the way we get involved with things based on "me, myself, and mine."

As we get quieter still, it's less coarse, more subtle. There's less baggage, fewer complicated ideas and concepts. No concepts of self anymore. We're left with simple sense experience in the present moment. We're not thinking about the future or the past. We're just really present here, and we hear a sound, we feel a body sensation, we recognize there's a thought. These are all considered very simple sense recognitions. We don't usually think of the mind door as being a sense, but whatever ability we have to recognize the simplest recognition that's happening in the mind, before the complexities around it and reactions to it, is called a sense experience.

So with the eye, there's the object of the eye, the things we see. And then the Buddha talked about the entanglement between them, the knot that gets formed, how we get knotted up with it. There are three things happening: there's the eyesight (the ability to see, the eye that sees), there's the thing that we see, and then kind of imagine that between the object of sight and the eye, things get knotted up.

Of course, the knot is in our brain and our mind. But we get involved, we get attached, we get caught up, we get sticky. We start thinking about it, wanting it, reacting to it. It's not the complicated ideas of the world like winning the lottery; it's just in the moment as we go about, it's something very simple. There is a sound, and then we recognize the sound as a car, and then we might get entangled with it. We might start thinking about the sound, or not liking it because it's unpleasant, or liking it because it's pleasant and wanting more of it, or wanting less of it. Getting knotted up.

In most English translations, they translate this word as fetter^[4]. I don't use the word fetter in my ordinary English life. I don't know, maybe some of you do. But the Pali word has the meaning of being knotted up. So I like just "knotted up."

So it's recognizing that there can be two things: there's the experience we're having, and there's the way that we relate to it. That way we relate to it might be free of any entanglement. We can engage in it, we can think about it, we can care for things without being entangled. But we also can be entangled. There can be attachment, and it can be very, very subtle. If you simply start in meditation—simply start thinking about something that's happening—you've left the flow of the present moment. Maybe a word like knot or entanglement seems too big, but it's gotten sticky. We are leaning into it, and we kind of lost something in the process of thinking about it; we lost our mindfulness in our present-moment experience.

So the Buddha talks about how, in this exercise, when one is aware that there is seeing, one is aware of what is being seen, and then aware of what that relationship is—the entanglement in particular, how we're caught by it or reactive to it. We know when it's present, the fetter, the knot. We know what it's like when it's not there. And this distinction between recognizing the presence of something and the absence of something is very important in mindfulness meditation.

We often emphasize recognizing what's happening in the present, which always gives a subject, something happening that we're aware of. But in fact, sometimes it's important to be mindful of absence. Not all the time, but when we've been attached to something, it's valuable to take some time to experience what it's like to be unattached, the freedom that comes. To be knotted up, and then know the experience of being unknotted: the ease, we breathe more easily, there's a greater sense of openness, spaciousness, lightness—whatever way it might be experienced. So that it registers, and those channels of unentanglement start becoming more available to us because we let it register more deeply.

The Buddha talked about noticing the presence of these knots, and the absence of them. And then being present enough in the moment that we can see that a knot that hasn't arisen yet does arise. We notice the arising of it—"Oh, here I get knotted up." And that takes a sharp mindfulness to really be here and say, "Oh, I can watch the process." We don't wait until we find ourselves knotted up; we watch the process. This benefit can come when mindfulness gets established well enough in the present moment that there's a kind of sense of flow in the present, a sense of arising and passing, appearing and disappearing, the river of experience that's happening here and now. As we stay present for that, we notice when we leave the flow, when we get involved in something. And we can watch the beginning of that because it's part of the flow originally.

And he talked also about then knowing that the knot has been abandoned, let go of. He doesn't say to let go of it, but I think maybe it's implied. We're aware of it, and aware of letting go of it as well—that it's gone, we've let go of it, it's not there. So that we can benefit from experiencing the absence of it.

I like to say that if it's easy to let go of something like a knot, let go of the knot. We're not necessarily letting go of things in the world; we're letting go of that entanglement that's between us and the thing. And then take time to be aware of what that absence of entanglement is like.

If we do this regularly and strongly, a special time will come in practice where we have a clear sense that the entanglement is not going to arise again—at least not in this meditation, or in this state of mind, this kind of presence we have. This clarity and confidence: "Wow, I'm so settled, I'm so present, there's so much peace and awareness going on here that there is no way am I going to get entangled." That requires a kind of coarser activity, a kind of choice and involvement that I'm simply not inclined to do now. To really feel that: "Wow, I'm not inclined to get entangled again." It's like, "Now I'm safe," at least for this meditation, for these next few minutes. And to feel that possibility, to know that this is possible, can be life-changing. Because we know that life doesn't require attachment, doesn't require being entangled.

At first, we're disentangling ourselves from the coarser big ideas of the world, the things we want and don't want that involve stories and ideas and complicated concepts—the hindrances^[5]. Then we do something more subtle, which is the whole way in which we attach to self. And then we get more subtle in just our relationship to sense contact. It might seem uninteresting, it might seem not so valuable to be aware at this more base level of sense contact. But it turns out that some of the deepest attachments we have arise out of the attachment to these basic sense contacts. It sets the stage for all the other attachments and sufferings we have, so it's very powerful to become settled enough to really track it.

As we start getting more sensitive and aware of the entanglements and the absence of them, then we're poised to be aware of some of the benefits that come on the path to disentanglement, on the path to really becoming free. And that's a topic for tomorrow.

So for the next 24 hours, maybe use this concept of a knot or an entanglement. Go through the day recognizing as much as you can your entanglements, either while you're doing it, or afterwards you might reflect back over the day and say, "Well, where was I entangled and caught?" Sometimes it's hard to see in the present moment, but retrospectively we can see, "Oh, I see." And see what you learn about yourself in that process.

So, thank you.