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Guided Meditation: Not Locating Oneself

Okay, welcome. Sweet to see all the names. Warm wishes to each other, to me. Okay, let's settle in.

As we settle in, there's a kind of gentle effort not to fit this moment into everything we think we know, everything we know about ourselves, about meditation, about life. But instead, a kind of stance of not knowing. Openness.

It's so easy to take up residence in the familiar place of self: "This is what I do when I sit. I sort of occupy a place and look at my breath, my body, listen, whatever we do."

Maybe the instruction as we begin is something like: don't locate yourself. And don't try to re-establish all the familiar reference points—who, what, where I am. We just open in this new way.

Gil^[1] sometimes says there's the "what" and "how" of meditation. What we are attending to, and how we're attending. And sometimes we emphasize the "what" so much—the breath—that we lose track of the "how." And in the urgency of the "what," we get tight, or incarnate a certain kind of meditator self.

Some traditions really emphasize the "what." Other meditative lineages emphasize the "how." Maybe we can do both.

We take good care of this moment, and let this moment take care of us. A sense of being held by them. Other ways we locate the self, let's let it dissolve into the openness of this moment.

You don't need to know who you are to be awake.

Dharmette: Mortality - Futurelessness & Samadhi (2/5)

So we're exploring this week how death can inform life, the implications for a Dharma practice. And yesterday I was emphasizing neither over-learning nor under-learning from mortality. In some sense, it's the most epic thing; in other ways, it's not such a big deal.

William James^[2] said that death is the worm at the core of the human condition that turns us all into melancholy metaphysicians. Melancholy metaphysicians.

So I'm trying to weave one of the core Buddhist teachings with this theme. Over recent years, I really have become acutely aware of the role the future, the sense of our future, plays in our inner life. It stems from the simple recognition that so much of our thinking is essentially the heart and mind coping with anicca^[3]. Coping with anicca. And anicca is usually translated as impermanence, but it connotes unpredictability, unreliability, uncertainty. We're always trying to predict the movements of an entropic world.

Right? So many of the movements of our mind are just abstracting away from this moment in order to understand what's coming next. And the Buddha said, "The world trembles in all directions" (Gil's translation). The world trembles in all directions. And even when we're thinking about the past, it's often in service of learning something that will help us predict or control our future.

So we settle down, we take a breath, right? But the impelling force of the future, of the coming, is strong. And it's almost hard to conceive what a moment would be outside of the sense that something comes next.

As I said that, I just paused because I wanted to feel the sense of, "Oh yeah, something comes next." It's woven so deeply into this moment: something comes next.

And so I say all this because death is an invitation to contemplate futurelessness. Contemplate futurelessness.

Something comes next, something comes next... and then it doesn't. And if there were nothing coming, or if maybe we could say if we didn't care about what did come, there would be nothing to do but be awake.

We call this samadhi^[4]. Nothing to do but be awake.

Now, the kind of busyness and strategizing, the vigilance and fear and worry, all of it involves a future. And in our preoccupations, our tending, and vigilance, and strategizing, our energy is moving in all these different directions: what we want, what we're avoiding. The sense of futurelessness simplifies everything. Contemplating mortality helps us sense this.

And we do it as a kind of thought experiment. Okay, this moment, just this moment. Right? In some ways, that's what every meditation instruction is. Our mortality allows us to actually get a kind of visceral hit of "no future."

And maybe you can actually sense intuitively how differently the world might feel if we were not preoccupied with becoming, with just hope. If all we had was this moment, however long this moment is, if all we had was this moment, I don't think any of us would doubt the Dharma^[5]. Awareness would matter so much. There would be nothing to do but be very, very awake.

A brain scientist writing about this theme, Heleen Slagter^[6], says:

"The essence of our theory is quite simple. Our main contention is that meditation gradually brings the practitioner more and more into the present moment, thereby progressively updating temporally deep predictive processing in the brain. We contend this not only reduces episodic future thinking and decision making, but can also explain the more unusual experiences reported by meditators, including the loss of self-other distinction and the cessation of time. If awareness rests in the here and now, all mental processes that involve abstract and temporally deep processing should logically fall away, including a sense of self, time, space, and body representation. We suggest that meditation reins in the mind's habitual tendency to abstract away from the here and now until all phenomenological distinctions stop. Metaphorically, we suggest that meditation prunes the counterfactual tree."

Prunes the counterfactual tree. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. The sense of what could have been, what might have been, the alternatives to this moment. The counterfactual tree is pruned.

I remember—I don't know what I'm talking about, but I remember from when I was a kid in class: potential energy, kinetic energy, right? It's almost like the potential energy of the moment dissolves, and whatever is here is here.

A contemplation of futurelessness. We put all of our hope into the present moment. And so we have to put down our life, center our heart and awareness on what's here.

Very early in practice, I got the instruction to sit like a dying person. And in a lot of ways, it's hard to hear that, right? But one of the ways I heard it was: sit like a person without a future.

And there's nothing left to do but be awake in a moment like that.

And so the fragility of our body, contemplation of its end, all of this can—rather than frenzy our mind—settle us. It invites the contemplation of futurelessness, or to live this moment as if it were all there is. Offered for consideration.

And of course, when we do this, when we sit in this way, when we practice, contemplate futurelessness, and know it, it also clarifies the kind of life we wish to lead. And so these different realms, these realms of very deep surrender and then organizing a Dharma life, they speak to one another.

So we'll keep going tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you all, sweet to be with you.