Dharmette: Aspiration (2 of 5) Understanding and Uprooting; Guided Meditation: Quieting Discursive Thought

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Quieting Discursive Thought; Aspiration (2 of 5) Understanding and Uprooting. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 04, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Quieting Discursive Thought

So good morning everyone. Have a good day, good evening wherever you are, and welcome on this Fourth of July, Independence Day. I wonder if we could almost claim it as a Buddhist holiday for a different definition of independence or liberation. And so here we sit on the path of liberation.

In the teachings of the Buddha, the idea is to perceive in our direct experience the Dharma so that we become independent in the Dharma. We don't have to depend on anyone else to tell us what the Dharma is because we've really seen it for ourselves.

So for today, what I'd like to emphasize—and maybe building on the idea of aspiration—is that what I'm going to offer you for the meditation can be aspirational, so you don't get caught up in the idea of success or doing it right. The idea is to see if you can, for maybe only a few moments at a time, and maybe longer as the meditation goes along, quiet your discursive thinking.

The thinking that is telling stories, explaining things, and having commentary. The mind that's having fantasies, reviewing things, remembering what happened, and remembering or having conversations with people. That's why it's called discursive thinking: you're holding a discourse with yourself. This is a higher-order, more active, agitated, and complex form of thinking that can take all the air out of the room. It's as if someone goes into a room of other people and is so loud and assertive about their opinions and views that there's no space for anyone else to speak. The discursive mind fills the space.

But we have other, deeper ways of understanding and knowing, and even deeper, more subtle, and more satisfying ways of thinking. There's a lot of knowing and understanding that can happen if the thinking mind becomes quiet and we listen more deeply to what is here. What do we know? What is happening? What are we feeling? What deeper understandings are coming that are not coming from the same place that discursive thinking comes from? Discursive thinking comes from pressure, tension, a certain degree of attachment, anxiety, ambition, and desires. And again, they fill the room so there's no chance for anything else to happen.

As we sit today to meditate, maybe with every exhale you can let go of your discursive thoughts. It doesn't mean letting go of all your thinking. What remains are very simple thoughts of recognition and understanding—something that doesn't involve thinking, reflecting, examining, wondering, and constructing.

The advantage of dropping below this discursive mind is that the discursive mind is like a puppeteer with strings all over. It has effects on our emotions, our body, and the tensions we carry. It has a big impact on us, this discursive mind that is not always so useful. To drop below that and let it become quiet gives you a chance to hear and recognize the knowing that arises, the feelings, the understanding, and the connection to ourselves that can be there in a non-assertive way. It's almost like: what's there if there's no self-preoccupation? What arises without the self trying to make something happen or figure something out?

So, with every exhale, quiet the thinking mind all the way to the end of the exhale where there's silence. At the end of the exhale, there is momentarily a stillness of the mind. Then listen, sense, and feel: now what is there? And maybe that can persist into the beginning of the inhale. It's very brief, but the more you become concentrated or settled on the breathing, the more it begins to quiet the discursive mind.

So we'll see. That's the aspiration.

Assume your meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Spend a little bit of time with your body, maybe swaying back and forth and forward and backwards, just slowing down and finding the midpoint of upright and balanced on the sitting bones.

To help you move out of the stream of discursive thoughts, it can be helpful to take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Maybe three-quarters full, so there's an intentional engagement with breathing in deeply, and an intentional involvement with exhaling fully. Connecting to the body as you do so. Feeling a more embodied connection to the present moment.

Then, let your breathing return to normal.

Continue systematically scanning through the body and relaxing. Part of the power that drives discursive thought comes from the tension we hold. If you find yourself in a lot of discursive thoughts and look around in your body, you will probably find places of tension, either in your body or in your mind. Fuel for discursive thought is tension, stress, pressure, and contraction.

So, relax the face around the forehead and the eyes. Relax the jaw, maybe letting the upper and lower teeth fall a little bit away from each other. As you exhale, soften and relax around the shoulders. Perhaps softening and relaxing in your chest, in the heart center. And perhaps softening in the belly, letting the belly hang forward and down. Maybe a softening of the hands and fingers. Maybe a relaxing of the thighs and the legs.

Finally, feel whatever pressure or tension there might be that's associated with thinking in the area of your brain, eyes, jaws, or shoulders. Then as you exhale, soften.

Gently settle into your body breathing, and feel the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

Almost linger with the exhale. Let your thinking mind and discursive thoughts quiet with each exhale. At the end of the exhale, in peace, breathing becomes quiet for even a moment. Feel, sense, and see what is there underneath the discursive thought. What is it you can connect to and be with? Understand what knowing arises that's deeper than discursive thought.

No need to think about what that is, just let it appear and disappear. Let it come and go, whatever is there. No need to get involved in discursive thoughts, figuring it out, analyzing, or judging. You don't stay so much close to that deeper understanding or feeling, but rather stay close to the absence of discursive thinking.

Letting go with every exhale. Quieting with every exhale.

[Silence for guided meditation]

Bring this meditation to a close. Aspire that whatever depth within you that you can access, aspire for it to be for the good that is there to benefit you. It's there to benefit the world and others.

May the quieting of this discursive mind be for the welfare and happiness of everyone, self included, by being able to listen to the deeper voices, the deeper goodness, the deeper love, and generosity that's within. May our practice be for the welfare and happiness of all beings everywhere.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe, and may all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Aspiration (2 of 5) Understanding and Uprooting

So, for this second talk on the aspiration that comes along with compassion: the desire for people not to suffer, not to struggle, be in danger, or be challenged in unnecessary and difficult ways. It's a wonderful occurrence to have this wish, this aspiration. It is an aspiration where we're not self-preoccupied; we are available to care for other people, to have concern for them, and to wish that their welfare is at least as important as our own. May it be that they are happy, and may it be that they don't suffer.

This instinct, this movement towards compassion, involves a wish—a desire that precedes acting. The action part is a whole topic we'll cover at another time for a whole week. But before the action, there's the wish, the aspiration, and the care.

There are times when we have that wish, but it's not for us to do anything. We learn about someone far away or read about someone in the news, and we have compassion. We wish them well and hope their suffering goes away. We aspire for it, but maybe it's not our place or our opportunity to do something about it.

But there are times when we have the opportunity to act and do something. Acting and doing things for the welfare of others is a wonderful antidote to self-preoccupation, which can often be the operating idea. Self-preoccupation is being caught up in oneself, spinning around in self-concern, self-condemnations^[1], criticisms, and desires. There's so much tension there that just generates more of the same.

To step out of that current of self-preoccupation, one of the ways is to care for others. Be available to be aware of them, attuned to them, to appreciate them, and to feel empathy and connection to their struggles and suffering. Then, we aspire that they don't suffer, or at least they don't suffer as much.

Sometimes, throwing yourself headlong into compassion from a sense of duty—or a sense of what we "should" do—makes the aspiration simplistic or limited. The most common way to do that is to feel, "I am responsible, and I have to help end that suffering. I have to help it stop, and the only thing that counts is somehow stopping it."

Sometimes we can do something for someone. Say someone is chronically hungry, so it might be important to feed them. I don't want to diminish the value of feeding people, but if all we do is feed someone, the situation by which they are always hungry is going to remain present because it hasn't been addressed. In some ways, we perpetuate the system, the conditions, the psychology, or whatever is perpetuating their challenge.

Compassion doesn't simply stop at what we see directly in front of us, but understands that something deeper is going on. There are wider societal conditions, personal conditions, or psychological things happening. To really help someone, we want to go underneath and see more deeply what is actually going on.

What does it mean to help someone help themselves? What does it mean to help someone so the conditions are in place that they don't keep falling back into the same difficulty over and over again? This is to understand, to undo, to uproot. What Buddhism specializes in is doing this psychologically, looking deep within ourselves.

There is definitely a time and a place—and it's very important—to understand the wider conditions of the person: the social conditions, family conditions, and societal conditions. We must have an important way to address those as well, so people's challenges are not repeated simply because of how society operates.

However, the specialty in Buddhism, and here in meditation, is to become more deeply aware of oneself. Because we understand ourselves so well, we maybe begin understanding other people as well. We start to understand the underlying psychological causes for the tension people carry, the stresses they hold onto, their overwhelm, and the emotional pain they are experiencing.

More often than not, something deeper is operating. There is some deeper fear, some deeper attachments, some deeper conceit or ideas of self, and deeper desires that sometimes are not healthy to have. To simply address the suffering without looking at the underlying conditions means those conditions remain present, ready to show up again and again.

Not a few people are confused by how the suffering has seemingly ended, only for it to revisit them the next day. There are people who regularly move away from jobs or away from people because they find the situation difficult. Some people move away from Buddhist meditation centers or Buddhist practice to find something else. For a little while, the new thing—whatever they find: a job, new people, a practice, or a religion—is exciting and wonderful. But soon enough, they run into the same problems because they brought them with them. The underlying attachments, the fear, the ways they are closed off, and what they are avoiding begin to show themselves, and then it becomes difficult.

Sometimes in that difficulty, the situation outside is blamed. The situation outside is supposed to fix it for them, and if it doesn't, they are going to go somewhere else.

The idea is helping and supporting people to begin understanding more deeply what lies underneath. What are the underlying psychological causes and conditions for their suffering? Of course, helping people to do that is a delicate thing to do. We don't want to be people's therapists. We don't want to assume we understand what's really going on for them.

But there are ways of being present for people, listening, and being in conversation so that we discover what's going on with them in a deeper way. As a way of helping them understand, we can ask simple questions or just be a very good, active listener. Listen, reflect back what you hear, or comment briefly about it just so they know you've heard it. When some people know they've been heard and understood, they open up more and more.

So we might not be addressing the surface suffering, but we are helping to uncover the deeper suffering that is there. This uncovering, uprooting, and undoing is an understanding of something deeper.

One of the things that active listening and being present for people does is that we offer to others what we can offer to ourselves in meditation. That is a listening that begins going deeper than discursive thoughts. What we actually talk about and say might be just the tip of the iceberg of something really deeper that's going on.

If someone is talking about some challenge they have in their life, simply saying, "Sounds like that's really hard," points to something deeper. There is an opportunity then for people to say, "Yeah, it is hard. I'm afraid," or "I'm troubled," or "I'm discouraged." Then that begins to touch something deeper. I've seen over and over again that we don't necessarily have to help people solve their problems. Sometimes it just helps people to be seen and known in this deeper way.

If we fix people's surface suffering and problems, then they don't get seen. If we say, "Oh, just do this and that, and you'll be fine," or "Come with me and we'll go out and have an exciting time at the movies," it's more of a distraction than an attempt to deal with the suffering. There might be relief, but there's not release; there is no freedom. This deeper level of understanding and uncovering—for people to be seen, understood, recognized, and listened to in this deeper way—that itself is the medicine. That itself is phenomenal support for softening, lessening, and overcoming the suffering people have.

This aspiration to understand, uncover, and support people to undo or uproot what's going on much more deeply is a movement and aspiration of compassion. It has more lasting value than simply alleviating the suffering someone has in a surface way, especially if alleviating it just means it's temporary. It will come back the next day; it will keep coming back until something deeper happens.

Not a few people in this world have a recurrent theme—a particular kind of distress, anxiety, frustration, or anger that keeps recurring. If we meet them with our compassion, maybe it is to hold whatever is on the surface with a certain kind of equanimity^[2], acceptance, and non-reactivity. We listen deeply and support them to see what else is going on. What's going on more deeply?

Compassion and aspiration bring a concern not just with surface suffering, but with the deeper causes and conditions. We're not just feeding people; we are helping people grow their own food, as a metaphor.

Thank you, and thank you for being here on the Fourth of July. I wish you all here in the United States a relaxing, happy, and stress-free day. I'm going to go home now and go for a hike in the mountains with my wife this morning, which seems like the perfect thing for me to do. So, thank you.