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Guided Meditation: Awareness isn't a technique

A warm welcome to you all. I put in a link, I'll chat it in later too, for questions. Maybe I'll select one of those for next week, and even if I don't, it's helpful to hear what's on your mind. So, welcome to you all. Let's practice together.

So, just gradually stilling your body. But even if your intention is for stillness, even if your body is basically still, there's so much moving. The stillness allows one to perceive the movement or clarity. The breath can function to soothe what needs soothing, enliven that which is numbed out. So we start to feel our breath broadly across our body, unifying the field of sensation.

Can you just intuitively sense what is skillful right now? What's actually important right now? Any way that you feel split against yourself, just find some way to hold all of it. Any way in which you feel like you're performing meditation, just find some way of practicing that feels more natural and more fully. Trust goodness.

Stop looking for evidence that our practice is working, that the meditation is working, that the mindfulness is achieving something. We just stop asking the question. Just intuitively feeling our way into the moment. Awareness, not technique.

What you can do is never as beautiful as what you can't do. In other words, there's no pressure whatsoever. All the sounds from the environment, my voice, the sounds from internal verbal thinking—all of the sound just becomes one soundscape. The silence, quiet sometimes runs right through the space of our own head.

No feeling is final. Just keep going.

The Idea of the Bodhisattva

Okay, folks. So, thanks for practicing with me.

Shantideva^[1] said, "As long as diseases afflict living beings, may I be the doctor, the medicine, and also the nurse who restores them to health. May I fall as rain to increase the harvest that must feed living beings in ages of dire famine. May I myself serve as food and drink. My body, every possession, and all goodness past, present, and future, without remorse I dedicate to the well-being of the world." He goes on to say, "For as long as space endures, for as long as there are beings in cyclic existence, so long may I endure in order to dispel the suffering of those beings."

It's like, oh my goodness, those words. The vow of the bodhisattva^[2]. And we hear words like that, and it's worth examining what effect those words have on our mind. The suffering of any being becomes the only real concern. That is the main source of motivation. And the commitment to that level of generosity would be fully rational if the self were completely forgotten and you indelibly became the world. This is, I imagine, the complete relinquishment of self-cherishing.

In a sense, all happiness becomes morally equivalent—mine, yours, whoever. That doesn't mean one dismisses one's own happiness, but my happiness is no longer in any way special with regard to me. And that love is so radical, so radical that it maybe only barely prefers life to death. The love is the only software program running. That is it, and from that love all our ethical engagement arises, and in that love is all the wisdom of the dharma^[3].

So I read those words. I hear a line from Shantideva: "Mind, please understand, you do not belong to me." The implication is, you belong to the welfare of all beings. I hear words like that and I have two main reactions. One is that it is very, very beautiful; even just as words, they're beautiful. And two, I am not that. Maybe I'll become a tiny bit more like that, but I'm not that now, and I'll never be actually like that. It often seems like the suffering of our era demands a very radical heart, and I don't feel up to the task.

Or maybe we think, "Well, I'm just made out of different stuff than those examples. Who am I to even say the word bodhisattva out loud?" And it's easy to get into measurement: my heart is here, and the Shantidevas of the world are a million miles away. I myself have been careful not to take some formal bodhisattva vow because I don't know if I'm up for it, and I don't know where it stops.

But here is what I want to suggest tonight to each of you. Maybe it would be a very good thing if each of us, all of us, started to think of ourselves as bodhisattvas. A thought, whatever shape it takes, that might become a kind of companion, or light, or protector. And I don't know how these words sound, but maybe it's like, "Oh, who, me? This basket of defilements^[4] could not be me." Yeah, you, me, ordinary beings. We're trying it on as a kind of lens through which we might perceive self and other and love.

And who knows how a bodhisattva feels on the inside? Maybe they feel utterly ordinary. Ordinary in exactly the same way we might feel. Elsewhere, Shantideva said in the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life: "There is nothing in here that has not been said before, nor do I have any skill in composition. Thus, I have no concern for others, and I have composed my text solely to cultivate my own mind. Since my virtue is cultivated, my faith thereby increases in power. Nonetheless, if someone else with an outlook like mine sees this, it would be meaningful."

Maybe it's right to step out of the measurement game. "Okay, she is a lieutenant general bodhisattva, and I'm a private second-class bodhisattva," right? Measurement gives birth to the problem the bodhisattva is trying to solve. You cannot be asked to do something you can't do, only what you can do. And so perhaps we put down the question of what is enough. Just put it down for now. Questions about where to stop may thwart the process of beginning. And so, let us just start somewhere.

And so maybe, on this day or on someday soon, you take some kind of vow around love. A love infused with wisdom. And maybe we start with the kind of love that barely demands anything. Just a way of perceiving self and other, a way of framing out the meaning for life, the thread, how to not lose the plot.

Shantideva was very concerned with fear, the distorting effects of fear. It's really like the lifeblood of this realm and our species. And it seems to me that the main medicine for fear is something like love. So we develop a deeper faith in love, a faith that can withstand finitude and mortality. That is one of the very few consolations for the intensity of this realm.

Shantideva goes on to say, "Pride, which is the cause of suffering, increases due to delusion regarding the self, since from one, the other necessarily follows. Meditation on selflessness is supreme." Pride, yeah. But maybe all self-dismissiveness is another variant of pride, another kind of manifestation of being entangled with self. And so, let us go forth in our own ways according to what's possible. Just see what that does to your mind.

And no feeling is final. Just keep going. Right? As Rilke^[5] said, this is not one moment of intention. A life is very short, but the days are very long, and it's too easy to forget. And so maybe we wake up each day and we do something to remind ourselves of this vow. We maybe iterate on it: What is the nature of the love to which I'm committed? What is the nature of the goodness to which I'm committed? And then we see, what does life look like in the light of this vow? What do our problems look like? What does the world look like? What does the future look like? And who knows? Who knows where it goes? Who knows what that love becomes?

This morning I accidentally spilled coffee all over the floor and on a stranger's pants in Starbucks. That's like, for pre-practice Matthew, or even a decade into practice, true nightmare fuel. I did that this morning. Coffee everywhere. And as I'm on my hands and knees cleaning it up and apologizing and all of it, the bodhisattva vow arose. That's what I was thinking about. So that is not one of Shantideva's examples, but that is mine. Find yours. I wish you much goodness. Okay. Nice to be back.