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Dharmette: Five Spiritual Faculties: Samadhi (4 of 5)

Guided Meditation

Okay, welcome, welcome folks. Good to see names streaming over there. So we'll do what we do.

Please settle into a posture that balances relaxation and alertness.

And sometimes we try to establish mindfulness through attention to an object, a breath, or sound, or something. And sometimes it can be useful, even before identifying an object, to establish mindfulness first. What does that mean for you?

What needs to unwind in you to establish mindfulness?

What do you need to make peace with to establish mindfulness?

What images or words inspire your heart? Support the establishment of mindfulness.

What ruminations do you have to have one more time before you sense their dead end nature?

What inspires your impulse to know, to understand, to be awake?

And then, as we establish some sense of presence, maybe the attention naturally can embrace the object. It doesn't feel like squeezing the mind into some narrow slot. Doesn't feel like putting toothpaste back in the tube.

It is natural perhaps to sense the sensations of your breathing. Natural to notice the beginning and ending of the inhale. And the beginning and ending of the exhale. And the release at the bottom of the exhale. A kind of suspension in time. Okay. Open. Receptive.

There's the way we direct our attention, but then there's so much happening in the meditating mind. Ideas and frameworks in the background. And sometimes we need gentleness, gentle forgiveness. That is mindfulness. Forgiving samsara, forgiving ourselves.

And sometimes we need firmness. A reminder, this thing I keep trying to do, that I've tried to do forever, doesn't work. [unintelligible] into the breath.

Maybe it feels natural to stay with the breathing or some very defined object of attention. Or maybe it feels skillful to open up to the entirety of the field of your experience. Everything belonging, but nothing ownable.

Maybe we hallucinate the sense of the self in order to govern anicca^[1], uncertainty. But it feels so good to let go. It feels so good to stop trying to make what is uncertain certain. Ungovernable in my control.

To appreciate the centerlessness of all phenomena. What gets called me, my life, my...

Mindfulness and Samadhi

Okay. I see, maybe bell volume, no volume. My bell game is off. Okay folks, good to sit with you.

So, the relaxation of faith, the willingness of viriya^[2], mindfulness—this quiet impulse to know, a certain kind of quiet hunger to know. Faith, effort, mindfulness, samadhi. The gathered mind, unified mind. What's the relationship between mindfulness and samadhi?

It's often distinguished by referencing the aperture of attention. Concentration is narrow, just the tip of the nose or something. Mindfulness is broad. But samadhi doesn't refer to aperture; it can be narrow or broad. Thanissaro Bhikkhu says many people tell us the Buddha taught two different types of meditation: mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation. Mindfulness meditation, they say, is the direct path; concentration is the scenic route you take at your own risk, because it's easy to get caught there and you may never get out. But when you actually look at what the Buddha taught, he never separates these two practices.

Mindfulness, we could say, requires some measure of concentration. Mindfulness itself requires some measure of concentration, otherwise we're getting pinged around from memory to image, to future, to body sensations. We're glancing off the objects of attention rather than the sustained soaking, aiming and soaking, penetrating.

In the Mahasi lineage... Ajahn Sucitto puts it differently. Rather than aiming and penetrating the object with attention, it's pointing and then opening the hand. And the opening of the hand is a kind of samadhi. This sort of poised receptivity, even when we're doing quote-unquote "mindfulness practice."

Shinzen Young defines mindfulness as a threefold skill set working together: sensory clarity (the sense of making discriminating, high-level resolution on sensory phenomena), equanimity (this non-contention with phenomena), and concentration (samadhi).

Attention is this spotlighting function, bringing something to mind, manasikāra^[3]. And then we kind of brighten the object with attentional light, to use that metaphor. And generally, concentration, samadhi, deepens when the spotlight becomes brighter and brighter, steadier and steadier. There's less and less light escaping. In other words, the rest of phenomena are unlit, and we come to live in a much smaller world. A very pleasant world. Much smaller, and it's a capacity that supports the other realms of practice. So maybe we say samadhi is when the object of attention is fully satiating for the mind. There's no residual hunger for other stimulation.

Ordinarily we think about samadhi as involving attention, and it does. But a curious note that Ajahn Sucitto makes is that in samadhi all the intentions are aligned. All the energies of the heart-mind are moving in a single direction. That captures something beautiful about it. There are not different impulses banging into each other. It's a state of non-ambivalence, maybe we say. And all the impulses to grasp and push away, all the ways we cope, we just don't need to cope anymore. In samadhi we're not coping with samsara in the same way. We're not enchanted by samsara, by phenomena, in the same way.

So many of our efforts, so much of our thinking, the kind of stories narrativizing our life, are these kind of thin attempts to cope, to grapple with the intensity of the human condition, with the ungovernability of samsara. And this settles out as the mind gets very comfortable, and so the hunger for sensory pleasure has faded away. And there's sort of nothing to do but offer our attention.

And this is revitalizing. It's revitalizing in the sense that we're secluded, the heart can actually rest and revitalize to meet the intensity of life. Samadhi has many functions in our practice, but one of them, to my mind, is faith, the first of the five faculties. It builds our faith. It's this sense of, as we start to, maybe for the first time in our practice, get really settled, it's like, "Okay, something's happening here." Before it's like, "I don't know, yeah, I'm mindful. Yeah, I'm trying to be careful with my sīla^[4], my ethics. Yeah, maybe I have learned some things." But samadhi is like, "Okay, wow, there's something... this is not usual, this is not ordinary."

And that invites us into a deeper kind of faith, like the Buddha was talking about. You are not the exception to the Buddha's rule. And that's important because some part of us, maybe deep into the past, sometimes thinks that maybe this whole Buddhist thing is another con of some kind, or it is promising way too much. And then as the mind settles in, it's like, "Wow, I don't know what this is, but this is different, and this path is definitely something, and I can do it. I can do it."

This is the fruit really of letting go. Of letting go, not of engineering. And so we can't really cling our way into stillness. And if we try to cling our way back to stillness, it doesn't work. And there are stories, tales of people suffering enormously trying to get concentrated. But this is a pleasure born of letting go.

And so samadhi is kind of protected in the sense that we cannot cling our way into it. So it reinforces letting go. When we really gather, when there's a strong sense of samadhi, there's not a lot of learning happening. There are many other wholesome things happening, but there's not a lot of learning happening. In the same way you wouldn't learn about architecture by staring unwaveringly at a small patch of concrete. The image just came, the Getty in Los Angeles or something, the grandeur of that, but if we were just looking at a patch of the foundation we wouldn't learn so much.

And insight unfolds when the stability of samadhi is directed to understanding. To understanding how experience is put together, the architecture of experience, the architecture of self.

Samadhi is the quivering quality of mind. I associate it with a kind of... usually we use the word quivering for compassion, but this is a different species of quivering. Very, very receptive, very porous, very impressionable. Very, in other words, fertile for learning.

And so in the penumbra of samadhi, where maybe there's very little learning, we start to become more attentive to anicca, to the architecture of experience. And in that stability, the mind is very fertile for learning, and the Dharma lessons that we experience make deeper impressions on the mind.

And so sometimes we have some kind of insight or understanding, but what kind of legs does that insight have? How long does it last? How long does it stay in our bones? How long does the retreat we sat stay in our bones? How long does our understanding about self-love stay in our bones? How long does our understanding about letting go stay in our bones? There's some evidence that exercise, for example, enhances neuroplasticity. The kind of learning that happens in the wake of cardiovascular exercise may be altered, the kind of deeper learning, more learning that happens.

And if I had to guess, I would say the same for samadhi. Samadhi makes our mind-brain more malleable. What we've learned leaves a deeper mark, has more legs, when we learn it on samadhi.

So I offer this for your consideration, and pick up what's useful, leave the rest behind. And please know, if this causes more suffering for you, that's not what I meant to do. People have their own predilections around samadhi. For some people, it's a glide path, and most people have to grapple, self included. And so we keep going. Let's see what the path offers us.

Okay, see you tomorrow. Wish you a good day.