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Guided Meditation: Goodness and Equanimity

Hi folks. Welcome to you all. Nice to say hi in the way we do. All right. So, find your way into your dharma. All right.

To open to something, anything, we actually have to be connected to goodness. In other words, we don't open from desolation, brittleness, but we're not too picky about where we find our goodness, or how strongly we feel it. Maybe it's the tiniest smile. A smile that can't even be discerned from the outside. They're just the tiniest. You feel the energy of your face uplifted. Maybe it's some kindness you saw this week, or some kindness you did this week.

Just because almost nobody ever writes about it doesn't mean that we're not enveloped in goodness. Just because it feels like a distant galaxy in some moments doesn't mean we're not enveloped in goodness. Just because we've acclimatized to goodness and cease to notice, that does not mean we're not enveloped. So we begin there.

We just marinate in that. We feel that coursing through our veins. And it's from that richness that we begin to forgive samsara^[1], to come to terms with the endlessness of imperfection.

In one sense, almost everything begins with unpleasant vedanā^[2], with the feeling that the moment needs adjustment. That runs so deep in us. It's not a trivial thing to follow the apparently very simple instruction from the lineage that says: "Know the unpleasant as unpleasant." End of sentence.

The little whirlpools of tension sway as we brace. Just breathe into that. It's a bit like we allow the goodness to hold the unpleasant. All the coping and control just becomes unnecessary. We just offer our heart up to the moment. What does it feel like? The unpleasantness collides.

In suffering, there's always a measure of self-referentiality. But an unpleasantness need not be. Open to all phenomena now, having no idea what the dharma is supposed to feel like right now. The self is a kind of dream inside a dream. From how many dreams must we awake?

Short Talk: We don't do freedom

Okay. Well, those were strange instructions, but an attempt to be responsive to the votes of the room. But make of them what you will.

So, we think about the dharma as freedom, and fair enough. I teach one thing: suffering and the end of suffering. Fair enough. Right. From the Majjhima^[3]: the purpose of the holy life does not consist in acquiring benefits, honor or fame, nor in gaining virtue, states of concentration, nor insight. The eye of knowledge, the unshakable deliverance of heart, the sure heart's release—this, and this alone, is the object of the holy life, its essence, its true goal.

And by freedom, what is meant, I believe, is the experience where the suffering level is zero. Not low, but zero. And there's a big difference between a tiny bit of suffering and zero. And freedom means also that from that mind, no experience could disrupt the freedom. Meaning, in a certain weird way, there is zero bad news in the enlightened mind. The brokenness is in perfect order.

And we hear that. We hear things like this. I've heard things like this. You're hearing something like this right now. It's very tantalizing. It seems very much like something to attain. And the dharma, the dharma is about freedom. The dharma practice is about preparing the mind to know freedom. And we think our practice is about capturing freedom, but it's about preparing our mind and preparing our life for freedom.

Every time I reflect on what to say in a talk, there's an implicit kind of pressure from whatever sangha^[4] I'm imagining. And I do kind of try to imagine: to whom am I speaking? And whenever I imagine the sangha, there's this implicit pressure something like, "Give me something to do." And we want something to do, but we don't do freedom, we do practice.

We know from ordinary craving that kind of "if only" mind—as it's been dubbed, the "if only" mind—doesn't really work out. You know, we get what we thought we wanted, but it's not what we thought we'd get. And causality is complex. You know, there are many karmic streams ripening each moment. And the "if only" mind ignores all of that complexity, right?

But freedom seems like the exception, maybe, to that. The "if only" mind is permissible about enlightenment, right? Not really.

I've seen people try to kind of brute force their mind into deep openings, and most of the time it fails. You know, like there's just a lot of frustration and doubt—doubting oneself, doubting the path. And sometimes, even when their heart is unprepared but the attention is kind of on steroids in a way, people can do it. They can brute force their way into things. They force themselves into celebrated mystical states, and they realize things their mind and their life is not quite ready for. And it tends to be a very unstable realization. It doesn't translate into their life, into spiritual maturity, into a life that works. I'm not sure, but I suspect that not all enlightenment experiences have the same effects on people. Maybe they're not the same experience. I don't know.

We hear "practice with your hair on fire," and yeah, fair enough. But don't rush. That does not mean rush. It means do all of that with great patience. As if it doesn't matter much when or if you arrive. We prepare the ground.

Selecting a good field. You know, removing the rocks. Apparently all the rock walls that you see around IMS^[5] in Massachusetts, that sister retreat center, all those walls were formed by people just tending to the land and having to pull out a ton of rocks from what might become their field. And then we, you know, tend to the soil, fertilize, till the ground, plant good seeds. And growing fruit has its own logic. We're not really involved in that. And our job is tending to the soil, not growing the fruit.

I was teaching recently with Dana Deama, and she kept saying something like, "We're practicing practice, not practicing results." Practicing practice. We prepare our life and our mind to open.

So there are different aspects of this preparation. We established, I would say as we began, some good feeling, a sense of refuge, tranquility, some sense of heart-embodied connection to some sense of goodness. And much of the kind of fruit of the path comes after happiness rather than being the cause of happiness. It's no, we actually have to get happy because the kind of flood of negative affect constrains our attentional capacity. We get happy enough.

We grieve some of the illusions that have propelled our life. I thought this was my life. I was confused. I thought this was happiness, but I was confused. And part of how we prepare ourselves to wake up is actually to suffer, you know. And then we say, "Wait, I thought the whole thing is about non-suffering." But no, it's also about suffering. And deeply conscious, deeply awake suffering is a process by which the human condition becomes more and more vivid. And suffering is the process by which the necessity of spiritual practice dawns on us. And suffering is the process by which a conscious, awake experience of suffering—not our usual flailing, just awake—is the process by which our arrogance and control and willfulness is broken down.

Sometimes Shinzen Young^[6] would say to us like, the somethingness of your being is being kneaded like dough. And we have to back our way out of some of the karmic corners we find ourselves in. We just get into jams, you know. And it is not to blame ourselves for all the suffering of our life, but we start to notice what dimensions of our own mind contributed to the karmic corner in which we find ourselves, where there's dukkha^[7] in all directions, you know, and it hurts. But we just have to gradually back our way out of those contexts. The dharma is much better, I've often said, you know, at preventing fires than putting them out.

Sometimes we need to just let the fire burn out, gradually extricating ourself and being careful about nourishing the habits that make us more likely to back into a corner. We seek forgiveness, and we forgive ourselves, and forgive the past, and forgive pain, and forgive samsara, all of it.

We move forward with careful sīla^[8], ethical conduct, the path of non-regret. And when you don't regret, there's much less to think about. And so part of tilling the field is establishing enough internal safety that it feels okay. Okay to surrender, because freedom is not an act of will, but a wholehearted trust in an awareness that does not depend on you.

And maybe we say there's faith. Faith, you know, maybe this is what allows us to let go. You know, when we're at various doors and it's like any act of will just adds static to the whole field. Maybe it's something like faith that allows us to fall. We thin out the self, you know, become a little more fluid, because when the delta between self and emptiness is huge, it's hard to integrate emptiness. It's hard.

We find our deep interest not kind of a compulsion to make progress or something like that. Interest doesn't care about a grasp. You know, progress in some sense is an extrinsic motivation, and the dharma just depends on sincerity, which is a way of saying intrinsic motivation. Interest, in a sense, doesn't care what it learns. It just longs to know moment by moment.

And so the ground... There's a lot of preparation that we do. The ground is prepared, and then honestly, the harvest doesn't even matter so much.

I offer this for your consideration.

Announcements

So, thank you all. Yeah, a couple announcements. So, things happening in Berkeley. I know a lot of you are remote, but many East Bay people. And IMC has a new sitting group in Berkeley on Monday nights with Lily Wong and Yan Li Wang. And that's on the IMC calendar. You can check, it's, you know, a group just off University Avenue that's happening. So know that.

And I'm going to do a daylong on August 22nd on loving-kindness. And that's posted on the IMC site. It's, you know, free, but you do have to register. So if you wish to come practice, please do. That'll be in Berkeley also.

And then lastly, I've got some retreat and other travel. And so, I apologize for being irregular, but I'll be away for a few weeks and class will resume July 8th. And I would get subs, except anybody I would get is abundantly available online already. So just go listen to them, you know.

Okay. Wishing you a good few weeks, and yeah, appreciate your presence here. Take good care of your hearts.