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Guided Meditation: Calm Knowing

Good morning everyone, and good day. I'm quite happy to be back here after these three weeks of being on retreat. I feel very content to be here with all of you, too, and maybe a little bit too content since all that occurs to me to say is that. But I'll get into the swing of teaching here in the morning.

Dipping into some of the teachings from this three-week retreat I taught, I want to start with this simple idea that sometimes floats around different places, like physics and other places: you can't observe something without changing it. You don't necessarily see exactly what is there, but somehow you see what's co-arising with how you observe it.

That could well be, but what I'd like to suggest today is that you can't observe something, you can't be aware of something, you can't know something without changing the observer—changing you. The act of seeing something, recognizing something, knowing something that's happening in the moment—that something can also happen to the observer, to the meditator. In ordinary life, things go so quickly we hardly notice that, but in meditation, we're allowing for that to really build a change within us that creates a context or a container for holding our experience.

Maybe it'll be a little more interesting for you to stay present if you are also aware that this is bringing about a beneficial change in you. Maybe not the change you want to see happen—if your knees hurt, you want the pain to go away; if you're somehow agitated, you want the agitation to go away. But in a different way, the act of mindfulness begins to change the observer, to change you. And that can be guided or augmented in a very nice way if, in the knowing of the experience, whatever thing we know, we know it in a calm way. We know it peacefully.

What we can bring to the practice is not just our mindfulness, but we can also bring a mindfulness which is calm or peaceful, that is not agitated. The wonderfulness of that is that it's then possible to calmly know agitation, to calmly know what is troubling or how we're troubled. As we use this calm knowing, this changes the observer in a nice way.

So take a meditation posture—whatever posture works for you to meditate in. But ideally, find a posture that expresses in and of itself a bit of alertness. Some part of your body is made alert, with the chest more open, the back a little straighter, a little bit more vertical.

For some people, having their head tipped down and back a bit is a useful thing to do. Lower your gaze, and if your eyes are still open, let your gaze be soft, almost like you're gazing with your peripheral vision, not at anything in particular.

Gently close your eyes. Take a few long, slow breaths. As the deep in-breath grows, feel more fully your torso, the expansion of your chest. And as you exhale, relax, let go.

Let your breathing return to normal. Are there further places in your body you can now relax and release?

Also, as you exhale, relax the thinking mind. Any tension or pressure associated with thinking, let it relax and settle.

Any agitation of the mind—can you allow it to become calmer? Like a stormy sea that becomes still, quiet.

Then become aware of some sensation in your body that's neutral or easy to be aware of. A sensation which you can be aware of calmly. Peaceful awareness, a peaceful knowing, a gentle and peaceful recognition of the sensation.

Stay with a sensation for maybe three or four more breaths, or another one if it goes away. And with every exhale, see if the awareness or the knowing of the sensation can be calmer. Maybe by recognizing it a few times, each time a little bit more calmly.

The more you can be aware, the more you can recognize whatever is happening in a calm way. That recognition will change you.

So now, centering your attention on the breathing, calmly bring forth a calm knowing of breathing. A calm recognition of inhaling. A peaceful recognition of exhaling.

And if there are other things to be aware of during this meditation, experiment with being aware in a calm fashion. No hurry, no worry about what your experience is. For there to be a beneficial change in you simply through your calm knowing, calm recognition of what's happening, it's helpful to be continuous in that knowing, in that awareness, continually renewing it when it fades away.

As we come to the end of the sitting, turn your gaze out into the world—the mind's gaze. Calmly imagine or bring to mind people in your life: your neighbors, colleagues, people you see on the streets or in the stores. Imagine gazing upon them kindly, gazing upon them calmly, peacefully.

Wish them well, wish them a peaceful time. Offer them a little taste, a little peace in how you know them, how you look upon them, looking upon them peacefully.

May they be peaceful. May they be happy. May they be safe. May they be free. And may we find a way to be peaceful together, and in doing so, change the way that we relate to each other for the better.

Thank you.

Consciousness (1 of 5) Knowing That Changes the Knower

Good day everyone, whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening for you. As most of you who are on right now know, I've been away for three weeks, happily teaching a three-week retreat, the second one we've done at our retreat center in Santa Cruz, California.

I imagine that some of you who are watching today were at that retreat. I think there were some 140 or so people on it—about 40 in person and another 90 or so doing it online. Since it just ended two days ago on Saturday, I feel very much still in the momentum of the retreat. With the teachings there still in my mind, I want to say something about consciousness and awareness.

I see consciousness and awareness as being synonyms of each other. In fact, in one dictionary that I have, if you look up the definition for consciousness, it says awareness, and if you look up the definition for awareness, it has consciousness. I'm sure there are people who will parse apart better distinctions between them, but maybe in a simple person's English, it's very easy to treat these as being the same. But the question is: what is it? What is consciousness? What is awareness?

I don't really know exactly, but I have a working theory. It's an understanding with which I find my way. I'm in awe of the capacity to be aware, to be conscious. As a metaphor, it's kind of like a spark in a vast universe, kind of like a little candle that's burning. We have seven billion of these candles burning—of consciousness or brightness and clarity—that we all, all humans, share. The degree to which we share it with animals and other sentient beings is not so clear, but there are a lot of different ideas about it.

I'd like to relate this idea of consciousness to the basic tools of mindfulness. Consciousness is not a static thing. Rather, it is the image or the sense that the mind constructs for the gestalt of all the different capacities we have for attention and all the different mental influences that might impact our attention.

Gestalt means something that's a whole that's larger than the sum of its parts. The mind has this capacity to construct. The mind is a constructing organ. It takes in a lot of data from outside and inside, from all the different sense doors^[1] we have, and from the inner mind, with its memories, thoughts, and projections of the future. The mind is an amazing organ for processing information that comes in and then reconstructing it in such a way that we can find our way in the world.

One of the things I marvel at is that someone can throw you a ball in the air, and your mind will calculate the physics of when, how, and where you will catch the ball. If it's a beach ball, you'll calculate it very differently than if it's a baseball thrown at you as a fastball. There's a very different kind of calculation that goes on, which includes the height of the throw, the weight of the ball, its size—all kinds of things come into play. Your mind doesn't calculate the physics of it in a conscious way, but somehow it knows. It takes all the data in, maybe the memory of different balls being thrown before, and understands the particularities of this time.

This is the mind's ability to construct and to make things. We know that sometimes it does so creatively, or sees things dynamically that are not really dynamic in a certain way. For example, in old 8-millimeter movie films, there are all these individual frames that are still shots, but when they pass before the eyes quickly, the brain reconstructs it as motion. There's no motion on the screen; there are a lot of quick still shots put there, and so the mind constructs something.

The mind is a constructive organ. It takes all the different capacities for perception, awareness, knowing, and recognition, and together forms a whole sense of what that is. It can feel like this marvelous sense of consciousness, of open, broad-spectrum awareness. But the way people experience consciousness and being aware varies very much from person to person, and for an individual from day to day, depending on all kinds of mental factors that come into play and influence that sense of awareness and consciousness.

For example, if we spend a lot of time being distracted, then we hardly even know that we're conscious and aware. We know it in the abstract, but we don't live in the intimate awareness of awareness, the intimate knowing of, "Wow, this is amazing." Whereas other times, when we're not distracted and maybe in some beautiful natural setting or looking at the sky and clouds, we might marvel at the fact that here we are on this planet, aware of the planet, and how special that is. It's quite something to be with someone as they die and see that there's consciousness, and then seemingly in that body there's no more consciousness. That'll happen to us someday.

The sense of consciousness can depend on whether we're distracted or not distracted, calm or not calm. The sense of consciousness is influenced by the different ways in which we know things. In mindfulness practice, there are different attentional faculties that come into play, and different people will specialize in different attentional faculties as their grounding in mindfulness.

Mindfulness itself is not a particular function of a particular organ of perception. Rather, it is also a little bit of a gestalt of different things coming together to help us be mindful, which maybe is a narrower or smaller sphere of things than what constructs the idea of consciousness.

So today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week, I want to talk a little bit about some of these different attentional capacities we have and what they are, so we can recognize them. The more we recognize them, the more we can use them at different times in different ways. I'll talk about the ones that the Buddha emphasized when he taught mindfulness practice. There are about four different ways of paying attention that he emphasized, with the principle that we are changed as we use them. When we observe something, the observer can be changed by the observation. That's a principle we're using in Buddhist practice. We're observing, we're being mindful in such a way that we are changed in the observing.

The simplest way of saying it is that as we observe in a calm way, we become calmer and calmer. If we observe our experience in an agitated way, it's easy to become more and more agitated. How we're aware is crucial for this enterprise of mindfulness and allowing it to change us for the better. What I'll talk about today and tomorrow—since it's almost time to stop now—is what I call "knowing," which I see as a synonym for recognition. A moment of recognition, just the simplest recognition of something. Looking at a cup and recognizing, "That's a cup." That can be a verbal recognition, or it can be a kind of non-verbal cognitive recognition of a cup. We have a lot of non-verbal cognition that goes on all day long.

But if you take the time to let your knowing of something really know it—to really, in a sense, let yourself stop for a moment or more and to really know the experience you're having, or know the thing that you're with, know the cup that you're with—and then see if you can know it in a calm way, begin experimenting with calm knowing of things. That could be the homework for the next 24 hours if you're inclined: during the course of the day, observe the manner by which you know the world you're perceiving. Especially observe how you recognize what's going on. Is it in a hurry? Is it agitated? Is it tense? Is it contracted? Is it pulling away? What happens to you if you recognize something, and the recognition itself has time to be done calmly?

I'll pick up on this tomorrow. I hope that makes sense, and I hope that as we go through this week, you'll start appreciating both the different faculties for attention, but also how those faculties might help shape our construction of consciousness itself. Thank you very much, and I look forward to being here tomorrow.