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Guided Meditation: Stability and Change

So, good morning. Welcome. Yeah, Gil is feeling under the weather. He's okay, but was just feeling tired and a little feverish, and so he's resting and asked someone to step in. So here we are. Okay, so let's sit together.

Just letting all the thought and feeling come to rest here and take its place amidst awareness. Letting gravity have you. The dependability of the Earth's support. And the breath that soothes what's overactive and vitalizes what is flat.

To pay attention is to pay attention to change. Everything in motion. No such thing as things, really. Nothing owned. Everything momentarily rented.

But we cannot open to anicca^[1]—the changingness of all things—we cannot open to anicca from a place of fragmentation, brittleness. So we establish a sense of refuge. The center line. A kind of inner safety, stability, that's unrocked by changing conditions.

We find a kind of love that's flexible enough, malleable enough, to absorb the body blows of being human.

Ordinarily, we have our home base from which we gaze upon our life, gaze upon phenomena, as if the view were outside the flow of change. But this river has no banks. Whatever vantage point we take as ground is just more change that we're not noticing.

And so we start to join the river of change, the river of life.

In a sense, nothing can be protected, but nothing needs our protection. It's a radical openness. The mesh of our being is, as one of my teachers says, so open that experience flows through.

We literally practice this practice, and of course bits of our experience congeals, becomes solid, needs protection. And then we melt back into this river. Wide, flowing, unobstructed.

Dharmette: Acclimatizing to Anicca

Okay, it's good to see with you. So Gil let me know that the theme was mindfulness amidst change, mindfulness of change. And as I said in the instructions, to be mindful is to be mindful of change. There's really no such thing as mindfulness of stasis. There's no mindfulness of a thing or even a person, it's only the process by which phenomena comes to be, comes to pass.

So Bhikkhu Bodhi^[2] says anicca, impermanence, unreliability, anicca does not mean merely that everything comes to an end. It means that something deeper and more pervasive, namely that conditioned phenomena are in constant process, happenings which break up and perish almost as soon as they arise.

Now, before I start talking tough about letting go, talking tough about relinquishment and anicca and all of that, I should just admit that I don't really like change. In a way, my deluded fantasy is that I could get the world just how I like it, kind of hold it still, and hold it that way forever.

And I suspect that—you know, the Buddhist teacher that doesn't like change, that's a little ridiculous—but I suspect that's actually why I got into the path. I got into practice because I knew intuitively that everything would change, and I knew that my heart was unprepared. I needed to prepare my heart for the changingness of all things.

There's a study from a few years ago. Researchers recruited about 20,000 people to do a series of studies, and they asked half the participants how much they believed they would change over the next decade in terms of personality and values and preferences. Then they asked the other half how much they actually had changed over the past decade. And what they found was, across all ages, for example, the 50-year-old predicted much less change across their 50s than the 60-year-old had actually experienced in their 50s. The authors conclude: people, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. History, it seems, is always ending today. The assumption of permanence.

It's said—I've alluded to it—that our brain is a kind of prediction machine. As fragile creatures amidst unimaginably vast forces, we must be making predictions. We are relentlessly attempting to make predictions that minimize the gap between our model and what comes next. Our model of self and world, and what comes next. In other words, we're trying never to be surprised. In each moment, we're trying not to be surprised by the next, and not to be surprised by five years from now.

We see this in meditation, the way we maintain so many reference points. We keep tabs on samsara^[3], the reference points of self and other, past and future, likes and dislikes. Where I begin, where I end. What does this back pain mean? What does this heartache mean? What does this fluttering anxious feeling mean? What does this mean for the trajectory of my life? What does this mean? We're trying to trace out this moment and ensure that it has us on a kind of trajectory that feels okay.

And that's so innocent. But we can wind up living in those kind of narrow, claustrophobic models we've created, trying not to be surprised. It's harder to grow and learn, to update our models. I find change is always a little bit startling. Even when you think you're prepared for it, change is always a little startling because the assumption of permanence does run deep.

It runs deep, and the Buddha dwelled on the three characteristics: change, unsatisfactoriness or incompletion, and not-self. He dwelled on the three characteristics because in a sense, the default assumption we live in is the opposite. We fantasize about a durable pleasure that might structure our lives and end our seeking. We fantasize about tying up all the loose ends of being human, of gaming out samsara, of managing uncertainty, of living forever. And we fantasize about taking refuge in an identity, arriving and landing, finding a home in self-view. None of this can work in the end.

But before the three characteristics are liberating, we often have to grieve them. So when Gil mentioned last night that this is a theme, the first thing that came to my mind was to deeply enjoy periods of stability. By knowing the tenuousness of it all, in those windows of relative stability, we enjoy. But we enjoy not thinking it will go on forever. We enjoy deeply, even more deeply, because we know the tenuousness of it. This moment is held together by causes and conditions that we will never see, we could never fully appreciate. The millions, the everything of the causes and conditions that converge and create this moment, this breath in this moment. So we come to enjoy gratitude not in the artificial way that sometimes feels fake or something, but is like, "No, this is wow, this breath, yeah. This goodness, this person, this love."

The path is a dialectic of tranquility, safety, seclusion, and on the other hand, letting the world rush into our heart and making peace with imperfection. But we cannot really acclimatize to anicca from a place of fragmentation, right? And so we establish a sense of inner stability, of refuge, of seclusion, of protection.

Joan Halifax^[4] said—her line came to mind—"Strong back, soft front." It's such a beautiful encapsulation. Strong back, soft front. We cultivate stability. We have our Sila^[5], our honoring of goodness. We have our devotion to Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha^[6], a kind of devotion to love. Maybe we have a sense of lineage, of being in the stream of Dhamma. I saw a meditator yesterday, a college student, who told me that in music—he's a classical musician—nine generations back is Franz Liszt, or something like that. He's the protégé of the protégé of the protégé of nine generations back. You get this classical pianist student, right? And what's our lineage?

So there are stabilizing forces. And then there's equanimity, that our heart doesn't depend on samsara. Anicca, of course, can be heartbreaking. But the momentariness of change, that river with no banks, actually comes to feel like a refuge, because we know ourselves as part of that river, as made of change. It's like nothing can collide with our heart.

So I offer this for your consideration. And yeah, I appreciate what's happening. Just caught a glimpse of the chat before I started talking. Appreciate what is happening there. So may you all be well, may we be well.