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Guided Meditation: Too busy knowing to know who you are

Folks, yeah, it's good to be here practicing together. Please find your posture.

If you're tired, just preserving the bodily relaxation without pairing it with unconsciousness. If you're hyped up, just breathing gently into the hyperarousal. Stretched between heaven and earth, as one of my teachers would say. And whatever you think is "me," whatever you think is "world," just keep relaxing.

Meditation doesn't really deal in the register of problems and solutions. My life... Just become very simple. Where is the smallest possible unit, the quark of sensory experience? What, if anything, is right here?

All phenomena are freighted with memory. To be fresh means we have to forget a lot. What even is this breath?

We become too busy knowing, getting caught up in referentiality, triangulating object, meditation, meditator. We are saturating the channel with data. Too busy knowing to know who or what or where we are. Then there's self and world and referentiality strategies. We're asked to love that too.

The arising of self is only humiliating for the self. Mother nature always knows when we're trying to hide clinging behind our back. Just relax.

Wow. I guess I'm in kind of a weird mood. You sort of never know how you are until you meditate, in a way. Anyway, it's good to practice with you. Okay.

Dharmette: Flexibility

A group of research psychologists wrote in Psychological Science that at its best, psychological science gives a roadmap for responding to life's challenges, navigating relationships, organizing ourselves in groups, learning and working effectively, and combating injustice. After decades and billions of dollars spent, perhaps our best answer is: it depends. Wisdom depends. The shape of our love depends. Who to be, how to manifest it, depends.

High functioning requires a great deal of fluidity and flexibility. We usually associate enlightenment with strength, but I think it's actually more about flexibility—about manifesting different qualities of heart depending on the moment.

The Buddha said that everything shakes within, trembles from within. That we can't perceive the tremble most of the time does not imply its absence; it does not imply permanence, but rather anicca^[1]. The trembling, the remarkable number of permutations of this moment, the next moment, what this may be—that sort of demands flexibility.

If you only run one play, you get into trouble. I was watching that old Saturday Night Live skit: "More cowbell. I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell." If you only do one thing, you get in trouble. Only one play. If our strategies for meeting the moment are rigid and constrained, we get into trouble. If our model of ourselves cannot bend, we get into trouble.

One way of thinking about the dharma is that we're dramatically expanding the range of ways that we can cope with dukkha^[2]—suffering—our own and the suffering of others. Expanding the range of ways we cope. We are increasing the things we can manifest in a moment, the facets of our heart. The dharma is sometimes called a collection of skillful means. That implies a measure of pragmatism, flexibility. It's not fetishizing one teaching, one skill; it's about being able to be fluid.

So what allows us to be flexible? What makes us inflexible? Most broadly, you could say that clinging makes us inflexible. There are a lot of ways of answering that question, but most broadly, clinging makes us inflexible. Clinging only sees a narrow pathway for our happiness. It's this labyrinth and I have to go through in this way. When we only perceive that pathway for happiness and everything else looks wrong, we become contracted and inflexible.

When we are deeply attached, when we cling to convention, we become inflexible. Everything we take to be the natural way of doing things, we actually relinquish that. There's nothing in a sense that's natural. There's only dependent co-arising. And that doesn't mean we don't follow convention. I follow so many conventions. But we know it's empty. The foundation is empty.

Maybe we say at the root of inflexibility, we find egoic processes. Our fidelity to who we think we are. Our compulsion to reiterate the self again and again. The way we abhor egoic disorientation. The defensiveness that is the hallmark of self. The emotional—or to use a psychoanalytic term, libidinal—investment in a particular view of the self creates inflexibility. The shame that is the underbelly of all selfing creates inflexibility. There's so much feeling bound up in all of this.

I've been alluding elliptically to the Buddha's four categories of clinging: of sense pleasure, view, convention, and self. But perhaps clinging to self is in fact a kind of clinging to sense pleasure, egoic pleasure, clinging to convention, clinging to view. And so how open can our system be?

Being wrong feels like it threatens the territory of "me." And so it makes sense to me that as a species we have a tough time acknowledging we were wrong, are wrong, how terrible our country is and acknowledging it's been wrong, that we're currently pervasively wrong in ways we don't even understand yet. To be wrong casts some shadow on the self, and there's just shame. Closer to home, in relationships, within families or close relationships, how many conversations go sideways because being wrong feels inherently shameful, which makes us inflexible? Rachel Cusk^[3] wrote that an argument is only an emergency of self-definition. After all, all this makes us inflexible. We cannot manifest for the benefit of this moment, of the people in this moment.

I'm not suggesting that we are like chameleons all the way down, infinitely plastic or something like that, or that there are no abiding commitments. But at the base level, what we're most interested in is the commitment to reduce suffering. That takes a lot of fluidity. The bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara^[4] is sometimes depicted with a hundred to a thousand arms to meet the cries of the world, the suffering of the world. Maybe it's like a thousand faces, fluid ways of manifesting, such that we can be this in this moment, be that with that person, meet the conditioned as skillfully as we can, as fluidly as we can.

[Ajahn Sucitto?]^[5] said there are certain things that seem like fixed realities, such as "me" and "the world." As long as we're operating on that level, it's always confusing. What you should really look at is the arising condition that bonds the two. This is dependent arising. The relationship between me and the world is the thing you should be aware of. This is really the living point of where you are. And from that relationship, the self and the world are born. From that relationship of fear, worry, narrowness, stinginess, brightness, or joy, the world and the self are born. They are dependently arisen. They are dependent upon these crucial psychological movements that can be experienced in our own citta^[6], our heart.

So there's not a dispute that there's something like heart-mind, citta, in the world. It's just that the living point where you are, the way self and world congeal, depends on a relationship. It's shaped by the habit energies of fear, or of peace. If we can be very awake to the living point, we become more fluid and flexible. We have no preference for siding with ourselves.

Next time you're having an argument with someone, someone you love maybe, see what it would take to fully take their side. See the ways that the shame of wrongness or the rigidities bind us to a particular view, a rigid manifestation of self.

"Two people under one robe," Kittisaro^[7] famously said about relationship as practice. But maybe we should think more than two. How many people might fit under one robe? How fluid can we be in releasing self and manifesting as something useful?

I offer this for consideration. It's nice to be with you all. I wish you well, and I'll be back next week. Thank you.