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Guided Meditation: Simple Awareness

So here we are at the beginning of a new week, and I am happy to start the week with an exploration of delusion. But for now, for this morning's sitting, one of the hallmarks of vipassana^[1] practice is simplicity.

If there was a Munindraji^[2], an Indian teacher that some of us knew and had the practice with, he would say that if it's not simple, it's not vipassana practice. The relationship between the two can be found in the meaning of vipassana as clear seeing. If there is not simplicity in the perceptions, we don't perceive clearly. If we don't see clearly, there is no wisdom. In fact, some of the wisdom that we practice with is wisdom about simplicity. There is tremendous value in not getting involved in planning, analyzing, trying to figure out, trying to fix, engineer, or practice. Even if something doesn't seem to be going right in practice, rather than spending a lot of time trying to make it right, the paradigm shift of vipassana practice is to ask, "What would be the simplest way of knowing this? Just knowing it." And to have the wisdom to somehow step away and find some freedom, some kind of independence in the clear seeing.

The beauty of it—and the word beauty is really meant here, it's part of the tradition we'll talk about later—is in the clarity of the seeing and the simplicity of the perception, the clearness of the knowing. It's possible to know clearly, for example, that I'm confused. There's confusion here. This is an experience that's complicated. I don't know what's happening. My mind seems to want to fix it, run away, attack it, or analyze it. Each of those little recognitions can in itself have this beauty of clarity, the beauty of simplicity: just knowing this. Just knowing this.

So we begin with the meditation posture. Ideally, it's a simple posture. Over time, practicing the same meditation posture over and over again, the body makes small adjustments and finds its way to a posture that is relatively easy to maintain and become simple.

Take a little bit of time, maybe swaying forward and back, left to right, until you find a center place where there's a balance. Then, if you're sitting upright, from the sitting bones up the spine, making small adjustments to have the weight of your body, your torso, centered on the vertebrae. As you travel up the spine, you come to where the last vertebra connects with the skull. Maybe you can create a little space there by lifting the head up or pulling the back of the head slightly up and the chin slightly down.

Gently closing your eyes, establish a renewed connection, familiarity, and grounding in the breathing. Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths, three-quarters full, and gently breathing long. Breathing out longer than you normally would, not by forcing the breath out, but by releasing, letting go.

Letting your breathing return to normal, scan through your body. As you exhale, if there are places in your body where you can relax muscles held in tension, release and relax the muscles.

Also, you can see if you can exhale and relax the mind, the thinking mind. Part of relaxing the mind is allowing the mind for these minutes of meditation to be simple, simply with the present moment. Perhaps you can begin practicing a simple, clear awareness with your breathing. Not being ambitious with your breathing or trying to make anything happen except being with your breathing with clarity and knowing, with simplicity of attention. As if the fog has cleared and you can see clearly. As if the light has been turned on and you can see clearly. Not what you think you should be seeing, but whatever is easy to experience in the breathing. Being content with what is easy, just as a place to be in the present, appreciating simple awareness.

If anything occurs that makes it difficult or takes you away from breathing, experiment with how simply you can know it. So simple that you're not entangled with it, for or against it. Maybe it is more like a feeling of awe or wonder from the lack of complications, the lack of being for and against, just simple knowing. And after knowing it for a little bit, begin again with your breathing, being simple in the attention to breathing in and breathing out.

What is the simplest way you can know what's happening now? And then to keep it that simple, take refuge in that simplicity.

Simple knowing of what's happening can provide wisdom. One wisdom is that getting more complicated about what's happening loses some of that simplicity. It loses some of the clarity, loses some of the absence of entanglement. The simpler the awareness, the more clearly we can see how we lose that simplicity, that clarity.

As we come to the end of the sitting, the simplicity of being present can also reveal the complexity that takes us away from our goodwill, our simplest basic human kindness. Simplicity of knowing, clarity of knowing, enables basic human kindness to have a chance to be present. It gives it room and time and space, so it too can be available for how we meet the world.

So as we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps in whatever simplicity and clarity you have, open your heart to the world and gaze upon the world with kindness, with goodwill, a generosity of spirit. Wishing: may all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be peaceful, may all beings be free. And may there be something from this morning's meditation that supports each of us to contribute to that as a possibility. May we all live for the welfare and happiness of all beings.

Dharmette: Delusion (1 of 5) Non-Delusion

This week's theme, following up on the last two weeks, is the third of the three unwholesome roots. They are sometimes given the dramatic name of the "three poisons," or described as the three ways that firewood burns itself, so these are sometimes called the "three fires." They arise out of us and burn from us while they also burn us. These are greed, hatred, and delusion, or greed, ill will, and confusion. We'll stay for now with the translation delusion for moha^[3].

As the pattern has been for these last two weeks, this first talk will not be about the unwholesome root of delusion, but rather the opposite. The tradition calls the opposite "non-delusion," and it takes many forms. It's not simply the absence of something, but think of it as the absence that allows the opposite to appear. Those many things are kind of the opposite, so for example: wisdom, discernment, vision, clarity, understanding. The tradition also has penetration as the opposite.

We'll talk a little bit more about this, but for now, I want to emphasize clarity. Rather than wisdom being necessarily a sophisticated understanding of things—certainly understanding is part of it—so much of it arises out of clarity: clear seeing, clear knowing, clear perception. This is something to really appreciate a lot and celebrate. It's such a sense of refreshment and openness, or peacefulness, simplicity, or brightness that comes with non-delusion.

Maybe the most dramatic or the most powerful image or idea for this idea of non-delusion is the idea of being awake. The word Buddhism could be translated more literally into English as "Awake-ism." It's the religion of being awake, of being non-deluded. Often, there's a strong association with awakening as the ending of ignorance, which is a variation of delusion.

The tradition talks about these wonderful analogies for non-delusion. One of them is turning on the light. We were in the dark, and then the light goes on, and then we see clearly what's around us. Another is that non-delusion is not a passive thing, but it becomes like a skilled guide that leads us through the forest, through the jungle. Someone who knows the forest, the jungle really well, can just guide us through. So non-delusion has a function of helping us to see the path of practice. It shows us where to practice, where the practice is, where the path is found.

The other analogy that's given is that of an arrow, a skilled archer who can shoot an arrow and it penetrates whatever is shot. The idea of a skilled archer is one who has really good eyesight, a really precise ability to calmly stay present and see what's there, and then really see through it. Not just seeing the projections, not the bias, not the preferences we have, but to see through all that, penetrate all that, so we see things clearly for what they are themselves.

I love this analogy of an archer because of a story that maybe I've told before. There was here in California a wonderful Zen teacher who came from Japan in the late 1960s named Kobun Chino^[4]. Apparently, in Japan, he had studied the Japanese art of archery. So one day he was going to demonstrate his ritual or the practice of archery at a retreat center on the coast here called Esalen^[5]. Esalen has a big grass lawn on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the Pacific. There were people gathered on the lawn to watch Kobun Chino do his thing.

He took a long time to get ready, and a lot of the ritual and preparation was getting himself centered and balanced. His feet just grounded, the spine straight, the head in the right position, and putting the arrow and the bow just the right way. It took apparently a very long time for all the preparations. But he had such focus and such stillness, such quiet and poise, that I think everyone felt concentrated. Everyone got pulled in, everyone got very quiet, like this was a demonstration of skillful elegance, skillful concentration, presence, and stillness.

Then, when he had the target clearly in his sight, he let the arrow go, and it flew through the air. It hit and penetrated his target perfectly—bullseye. He had aimed for the Pacific Ocean, and the arrow landed perfectly in it.

This idea of being poised and still in the archer who penetrates and sees clearly is associated with non-delusion. One part of it is to have discernment, to really make a distinction between what is wholesome and unwholesome, skillful and unskillful, what is helpful and not helpful. Or to keep it really simple, the distinction between what is harmful and what's beneficial. Of course, it's not always easy to discern this, but the greater the wisdom, the more clearly that's discernible. In much of Buddhist practice, as we get wiser and wiser, with less and less delusion, it's more obvious right in the moment where the benefit is and where the non-benefit is.

This ability to see that also gives birth to the ability to have a vision for where the path is, the path of practice. To follow what's wholesome, what's beneficial, to follow where the non-attachment and the freedom is, and to have a vision for that is part of this clarity, this non-delusion. It gives life a kind of purpose, a direction, that can be quite powerful and quite meaningful, partly because it's so freeing and so valuable.

This factor of wisdom, discernment, vision, and understanding is said to be a beautiful state of mind. When it's there, it's not obscured or fogged over by confusion, guessing, analyzing, and trying to figure things out. In and of itself, the state of this clear awareness of wisdom is a beautiful state of mind. Whether there's brightness or clarity or illumination, simplicity, all these things are associated with it.

As we practice Buddhism, sooner or later—and sometimes it's later, or sometimes it's sooner and later and in between—we begin to slowly wake up. We slowly discern, see, and recognize the mind's capacity for simplicity, for clarity, for wisdom, for understanding, for discernment. Not in a complicated way, but it's obvious, it's right there.

One of the ways to see that—and why I'm starting the week with this topic—is that at some point we see the distinction between a simple clarity, a simple presence, being aware of the present moment, and a way of being that's more complicated. Maybe much more complicated. Maybe we lose the present moment to entanglement in the past and the future. Maybe we lose the simplicity because we've gotten very caught in our preferences for what should be in the present moment, or we're caught up in our fears, analysis, and insecurities around it. Or we're caught up in our ill will, our projections, our bias in relationship to whatever we're present for.

But if we have a reference point of clarity, of wakefulness, of wisdom in any of its forms, there's a reference point to see how we lose that. We see that getting pulled into delusion, pulled into projections and biases and an overlay of opinions on top of whatever we're seeing—including seeing ourselves and seeing other people—results in a loss there. There's a diminishment there. The light gets turned off. We lose our calm and we become agitated. We lose our guide, we lose our ability to see where the path is.

Then it becomes much more obvious and easier to see what delusion is. It's easier to see the disadvantage because we feel, we see, we recognize what we've lost. We've lost that clarity. To start out trying to see and understand delusion without any practice at all becomes an analytical exercise. It becomes like getting a clear definition of it and applying that and looking at our mind and trying to say, "Well, this is delusion, that's what they're talking about, and I'm not supposed to have it." It's almost like getting complicated to free ourselves from the complication of delusion.

But if we're settled, calm, peaceful, non-agitated, and there's a basic clarity of mind, then we have a very different reference point for recognizing delusion. That includes the understanding that we don't have to feel ashamed or feel angry or feel upset by the movement into delusion. All we have to do is recognize it as delusion. The simple recognition, the clear recognition, "Oh, this is delusion," brings us back to some of that clarity. It's not a moralistic critique of delusion; it's a clear knowing of the disadvantage of being pulled into it, and we know that the alternative of not being deluded is so much better, so much more satisfying.

This wisdom gives us the opportunity to have non-delusion about delusion, to have wisdom about delusion. In some ways, this is central to the Buddhist enterprise. It's not wisdom about wisdom so much, but freedom is found in wisdom about delusion. That'll be the topic for tomorrow. So thank you all very much, and I look forward to our time tomorrow.