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Lightly Guided Meditation

Good morning, good afternoon, and evening to some of you. Okay, you know the deal here. Find your posture.

Breathe in such a way that helps you land here now. A kind of subtle ripple of relaxation of the exhalation. A conscious effort to release tension. Whatever tension might remain, have the willingness to tolerate that.

You're not responsible for experience. You're not responsible to manage and mold yourself. You're not responsible for awareness, which does itself. You're not responsible for generating insight, engineering samadhi^[1], or concentration.

To the extent we're responsible for anything, we're responsible just for the seed of sincerity and willingness. The willingness to offer our heart up to the dharma, and then trusting, having faith in the logic of the path.

We drop beneath the layers of meaning into a more and more simple, intimate experience of what's here. Maybe the breath, or the body more broadly. Maybe the realm of feeling: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Maybe sound and silence. Maybe the darkness behind your closed eyes.

We just give our attention to something and let that simplify, distill out more and more of the meanings, the sense-making, until there's less and less to say about the moment, but more and more urgency to know it deeply. Our compulsion to extract something from the moment compromises our intimacy with it. And so there's a kind of receptivity, a willingness to be softened by the moment.

When we give ourselves the freedom of not needing to accumulate anything, you just keep surrendering in awareness, with faith in the dharma.

Meaning And Nonconceptualization

The researcher and psychologist Dan McAdams^[2] says we are the stories we live by, but we should not forget that there is no good story that is free of struggle and tension. There is no perfect life narrative, just as there is no perfect life.

The dharma is made of thoughts, and arises when thought ceases. The Buddha has given us so many thoughts, so many useful ideas, decoding suffering with such brilliant distinctions and categories. If you try to parse experience—if you had asked me, "Matthew, what's experience?" before I started practice, I would have made some wild hand movements and I don't know what I would have said. It's confusing. It's very confusing. And so, to begin to actually make some sense of it with brilliant distinctions is so useful.

The path is about the most beautiful thoughts. Is there an image that is more beautiful than mettā^[3], loving-kindness pervading the entire world? This path is about a deeply meaningful way of living, a way of living that makes life feel complete. A way of living where doubts about purpose and doubts about meaning really fall away. The dharma answers our quest for meaning. So the path is about meaning, and the path is about stepping out of thought, putting down all meaning, all compulsion to know and to make meaning. There's a kind of dialectic between this meaning-making and stepping out of the realm of meaning.

So much of our thought has an almost defensive quality; it's necessitated by fear. Our meaning-making is necessitated by fear, very innocent that it is. There is some neuroscience that suggests the organism's survival depends on high-fidelity predictions. The computationally efficient solution to this problem is for the brain to prune its models—somewhat akin to beliefs—using prediction errors. By processing the difference between a model's predictions and sensory input, the organism can indirectly quantify the accuracy of its predictions and improve the models that generated them. An organism that does not aim to minimize prediction errors over time would not survive for long.

Meaning-making revolves around this kernel of fear, the need to know. We're contending with deep forces. We're small creatures amidst big forces. Sometimes I'll just look at a bird on a branch. It's so fragile, and there are so many head movements, just looking everywhere, alert to sounds and movement, a kind of vigilance. We're vulnerable in some of the same ways, and the way to deal with that is to conceive, to make meaning.

We often come to practice drowning in meanings. We don't even know how utterly spellbound we are by our models, our interpretations, the house of cards of our views, opinions, and meanings. When our thoughts feel real, our life feels surreal. When our thoughts feel really real, our life takes on a slightly surreal quality; there's a kind of alienation in it. And so, Gil's^[4] concentric circles of the most elaborate fantasies are out in the farthest circle, and we get closer and closer to here.

The more intimate we get with experience, the less we perceive as being there. The less substantial life seems to feel, we make less and less meaning. This compulsion to always be saying something about experience starts to fall away. The compulsion to talk about our life, to talk about this moment, to make meaning out of this bit of sense data starts to fade. And experience itself, when we're not making so much meaning or conceiving in such dense ways, starts to get thinner and thinner. Experience starts to get more and more run through with space.

A questioner asked the Buddha, "Associated with what do appearances disappear? How do pleasure and pain disappear? Tell me this, I am motivated to know how they disappear." The Buddha's response: "Appearances disappear when not conceiving concepts, not conceiving false concepts, not non-conceiving, and not conceiving disappearance. This is because conceiving is the basis of conceptual differentiation."^[5]

As the more elaborate structures of meaning-making and conceptual proliferation fall away, what is known gets quieter and quieter, less and less substantial. It's both more there and less there at the same time. The field becomes less and less differentiated. The lines we draw between this experience and that experience, between self and world, all of this gets more and more porous.

And so we practice letting go of meaning and the need for meaning. Letting go of the mind's desperate attempts to make conclusions, to land on a conclusion moment by moment. Sometimes I'll give the instruction in meditation: come to know conclusions. Don't be satiated by any conclusion; it's just another conceiving moment.

And then from the silence and the stillness, from that, we make new meanings. It's like we don't find our meaning in stories, but in the intimacy with experience. The building blocks of our stories are just this very intimate encounter with knowing in this really pared-down, simple way. And so the building blocks of our stories come from this encounter with experience, and we tell new stories about experience. New stories about who we are. New stories about what means what. New stories about goodness and new stories about what matters. Our autobiography becomes a dharma story, a story of dukkha^[6] and delusion, and clinging, and release, and love.

Meaning and meaninglessness coexist. But the stories that come out of the intimacy of this experience, they're infused with space. They feel different than other stories. We make meaning out of experience. We tell stories about who we are and what we're doing. We tell stories about the freedom of heart, but the urgency and entanglement with our stories start to dissolve. We become more circumspect about our lives, our plans, all the meanings we make, and the stories we tell. There is space everywhere. There is space everywhere, even as we live a committed life.

So, the meaning and meaninglessness dialectic. I offer this for your consideration. I appreciate the chance to be with you today. May dharma blessings rain down upon you today. We gather in 23 hours, so thank you.