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Guided Meditation: Sound, Outer and Inner

Welcome, folks. It's good to be with you. Let's go right into the silence.

Maybe you begin by relaxing, or maybe you begin by becoming more sensitive to goodness—to the goodness of your intention, the goodness of the Sangha^[1], what is good in each of us. Part of practice is being moved by goodness, so maybe that's a good way to begin to help us inhabit this moment more fully. Just settle in in whatever way you settle in these first few minutes.

Yesterday I was meditating outside, and in the distance, someone was practicing bagpipes. When you're meditating, bagpipes are very, very funny. You may not have the benefit of bagpipes in your sound space, but there's something to hear. So maybe we'll explore outer sound, and then inner sound.

First, just anchoring attention to this soundscape, the ambient noises of your space. We tend to subtly image the objects from which sound emerges, and then we image those in a kind of location in the theater of our own minds. There's a sense of spaciousness, an openness of our mind. When just listening for sounds, we will tend to focus on near sounds, the beginning of sounds, loud sounds. But here we honor sounds from the distance, sounds that are faint, sounds when they end in addition to when they begin.

It's as if we allow the sounds to run through us like a gust of wind that is not trapped inside of us. It just blows through. Our hope and our fear trap phenomena, or grasping and aversion. What we like or dislike about the sound—that traps the phenomena in the headquarters of self, and we chew on it. But instead, in our practice, we practice letting sound run right through.

In this awareness of the soundscape, we can also include our own verbal thinking. Usually, we just call it thinking, and usually, we don't hear it in the sense of knowing thinking as thinking. We don't hear the phenomena of verbal thought; we are just identified with it and obey. And so now, the awareness feels almost as if it's poised, perched, listening for the arising of auditory thinking.

It's generally true that awareness will disrupt auditory thinking. The presence of awareness means that we can't be fully identified with the content of our thought. But we listen as we can for the words and sentences, for the chatter, for the embryonic auditory thoughts—the thoughts that seem to beg us to think them. So now we're attuning to the soundscape as it runs right through our own heads.

In a way, we practice not treating thoughts as some special species of sound, but in the same category as the birds, the garbage truck, and the neighbors.

Dharmette: Turning Down the Dial

The summer before September 11, 2001, I remember reading a book called Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. What I remember about it was the basic premise that life is lived under conditions of too much. "Too much" captures something important: too much energy in our system and we need to discharge it. Too much coming at us; we're besieged by samsara^[2]—by this realm of existence. Too much I want to get done, too much I need to worry about, too much to let go of. Too much.

It strikes me that maybe "too much" is a kind of synonym for dukkha^[3]. In the sense of "too much," it necessitates, if we're to be happy, that we find ways to turn down the dial on our nervous system. It's overstimulation, the sense of too much. The Dharma is a kind of dialectic between peace and purification, between tranquility and letting the world rush into our heart. Without tranquility, the letting go, the purification, the opening to dukkha—all of it feels like too much. You see how desperate we are to dial things down in some way, to turn down the nervous system and kind of seek out that cocoon of unconsciousness where we're not being stimulated in a way that creates the sense of too muchness. It's a kind of cocoon. We do a lot to create that cocoon of unconsciousness to insulate ourselves from the intensity.

I'm sympathetic to the impulse of doing all that we do to dial down the nervous system, but the Dharma celebrates a kind of tranquility that is alive rather than dissociated. It's not the peace or seclusion of the infinite scroll, but it's a kind of alive form of tranquility.

Part of the Dharma, and part of Dharma pleasure, is learning the ways that we come to rest—ways that our Dharma practice allows us to rest. We rest in a number of ways. We seek out spiritual friends with whom our heart can relax. We call that Sangha. It is soothing, and so porous. Just to be around people trying to live a life of wisdom and care—that's not trivial. That allows us to begin to relax some of our vigilance. We're reassured by the lineage, that so many have come before us and walked this path profitably. There's a certain kind of soothing in knowing this.

I remember on the first night of a retreat, Michele McDonald was teaching. She said something like, "The first night of retreat is all about reassurance." Then she repeated the word and said, "Just that word, reassurance. Something in us longs for that." And you could kind of feel the room just let down a little.

We learn practices, ways of directing our attention—maybe we say meditating, but not just meditating. We learn ways of attending that naturally bring a soothing. Some of it is as simple as just attending to phenomena that bring calm stability. In a sutta^[4], it says when one's mind is possessed by restlessness, overpowered by restlessness, one cannot properly see the escape from restlessness. One does not properly understand one's own welfare nor that of another. When there is unrest of mind, frequently giving unwise attention to it is the nourishment for the arising of restlessness—unwise attention to the sign of restlessness.

So what aspects of experience, what signs are useful to attend to? What brings a sense of seclusion, protection, and tranquility? As this process unfolds and we do start to settle, we can start to settle even when we're not quote "concentrated." You can start to sense, "Oh yes, something in you is resting." Even when there's a lot of discursive thinking, just to rest there is very healing because life doesn't feel like "too much" in that rest.

We rest in a certain rest—maybe we say in the truth of the human condition. In a sense, because we've deeply contemplated anicca^[5] (impermanence), uncertainty, dissolution, and death, change doesn't come as such a shock to the system. In a sense, maybe we say that we pre-grieve all of the inevitable losses of being human. That's different than fretting about it all, but we sort of pre-grieve.

Leonard Cohen said, "I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone waiting for it to rain, and I feel soaked to the skin." It's said that anxiety is the intolerance of uncertainty. Anxiety is the intolerance of uncertainty, but we're already soaked to the skin. There's no uncertainty.

There's the famous parable that Jack Kornfield^[6] recounted from his encounter with Ajahn Chah^[7]. Holding up a mug or something, he said, "This cup is already broken. Because I know it's broken, I can enjoy it now. The cup is already broken; I know its nature. Its nature is to break. And because I know it's broken, my heart won't break when it does."

The corollary of "this cup is already broken"—there are many corollaries—includes that this cup is already broken, already dead. This land is already gone, all is already lost. That doesn't flatten the heart, but actually can create some sense of rest because we're not gaming out samsara anymore. We know how this story ends, and there's a certain measure of peace. We pre-grieve the inevitable losses of being human, and then we can rest more deeply, and also love more deeply. I offer this for your consideration.

Announcements

We will have another optional meeting this evening on Zoom at 7:00 PM Pacific time. The link is on that website: matthewbrensilver.org. Thank you all. I wish you all a good day, and if you like, come on by this evening. We'll sit a little bit, check in to see how your day was, and I can try to answer any questions. Thanks so much.