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Guided Meditation: Unwrapping the Gift

So hello everyone, welcome. I hope that those of you who are local and not local are safe in the weather. Here in Redwood City, we didn't have much rain or storm or wind in the last 24 hours as expected, but we did lose electricity in big parts of the town. At home where I am, there's no electricity, and then just a couple of blocks away from IMC, there's still none, but here we're good for now.

It probably can never be oversaid or overspoken that the emphasis this meditation of mindfulness and meditation of the Buddha puts a great value on what we can see and experience here and now in this own field of direct perception. I was going to say here in our own body, but it's the whole way in which, through the senses of the body, we experience directly whatever it might be. Learning to come into the fullness of our direct perception, direct experience, unmediated by theories, doctrines, speculations, and views about the nature of life or even the nature of self. It's a radical phenomenal pointing the Buddha does to the simplicity of here.

The metaphor I'd like to use for this, and for this meditation, is that of opening a present. There's a gift. Someone who cares a lot about you, loves you, and wants the best for you has given you a gift. That gift is wrapped, maybe in beautiful wrapping paper. Maybe the person has made the wrapping paper themselves, going through all the trouble of paper making so it's beautiful. Within that, there's a box.

So you take off the paper, and because it's your friend's beautiful paper, you don't want to just tear it up. You unwrap it very carefully, and as you open it, you smooth it out so it's flat and as little creased as possible so the beauty of this handmade piece of paper stands out. It's a beautiful box. Maybe the box is made from some local wood that your friend has been able to fell, mill, cut, and put together into a beautiful box. Again, you want to be careful, loving, and appreciative of the box as much as what's going to be inside it. The paper and the box itself are part of the gift.

Then now you do open the box to see what's inside, and there's something again that this person has made. Maybe it's a beautiful, exquisite clay bowl that clearly is very thin, very fine, clearly very fragile, and could easily shatter if dropped just a little bit. It is exquisitely made, and you can see the care and love that went into it. So you don't just pick it up with one hand and flip it around. Because it's so special and delicate a gift, you pick it up carefully, lovingly, and hold it gently in both hands.

In the same way, we enter into our own direct experience, maybe thinking of it as a present. There are these three layers, and the way that we can unwrap it is to relax deeply. First, we relax the body, and that's the handcrafted wrapping paper for it all. Relaxing is how we unwind, how we unfold it, how we open it up and take it off. Relax deeply in the body. Then we relax the mind, the thinking mind, and the pressure, the tightness, the contraction, the hardness, the resistance, and the fear that's embedded in the thinking mind itself. That's opening up carefully this beautiful handmade box our friend has made, our beautiful mind that we hold with care or love.

Then finally, we get to open it up and pick up what's there. In the middle of this box, there's our heart. Now we hold the heart carefully, coming around with mindfulness, with the soft palms of our hands holding our emotional heart or depth of our inner life. It's the deepest place, and we hold it gently, lovingly so it also can relax. The present is not the present; the present is what's left when we're fully relaxed. So in this way, coming into our direct experience for this purpose.

Taking a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes. Begin to feel into your body. Feel where it feels tight, maybe where it aches, and where it feels loose and comfortable. If there are easy ways of relaxing your body, soften and relax. Take a few long, slow, deep breaths. With the long exhale, relax further. Relaxing, and then letting your breathing return to normal. Again taking some time to feel your body as you inhale. Feel where there's still some holding, and on the exhale, soften the body, release the body.

Then on the inhale, sensing, feeling the thinking mind, the thinking muscle. Wherever in your body there's the energy, the impulse to be thinking, whether in images or words or another way. Feel if there might be any pressure, tension, contraction, hardness, agitation, or a feeling of activation. As you exhale, let the mind relax, soften, release.

As you relax the mind, do it letting the mind open up, spread out, as if you're opening a beautiful box to see all the spaciousness and openness in the mind that's just beyond the edges of your thoughts, your concerns. Think your thoughts, almost as if they're melting into the spaciousness around them.

Then now on the inhale, feel your heart or the center of gravity for your deepest emotional life. Maybe as you inhale, it's like a hand to cup, coming gently from underneath to hold, to support the inner emotional life that we have, whatever it might be. The heart center, the emotional center, or maybe even the very center of our lived life. See if you can relax the emotional center and relax the emotions. Let them relax so that they settle more deeply into the palms of awareness. As if the palms of awareness offer safety and support, so that it's safe to relax the heart center and soften.

When you relax as deeply as you can, letting go as deeply as you can, with no concerns and preoccupations taking you away from here and now, just here. What is left for you in the simplicity of breathing in and breathing out? Below all the wrapping paper, all the tension, what is the gift of freedom? Unbounded freedom, experienced with every inhale and every exhale.

Then as we come to the end of the sitting, to relax now, let go. Now that we're coming to the end, if there's something about the effort or the bracing yourself or undoing the practice, you can let go of it. Let go more deeply into yourself, taking off all the wrapping paper and settling to the deepest place of rest. So subtleness within. From whatever degree of rest within that you can have, from that rest, gaze outward into the world.

Thinking about the people in your life, the people in your communities, neighborhoods, on the streets, in the news. Wherever there are people that you're aware of in your life, gaze upon them from their settled place. Perhaps let there be kindness or friendliness. Good will. A simple good will that is not demanding or a high standard that you have to live up to. Just resting in good will.

Letting that good will be a well-wishing for others. What a wonderful thing it would be if more people could be happy, safe, peaceful, and free. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: What is the Dharma? (4 of 5) Dharma as Teachings

Warm greetings for our fourth talk on what is the Dharma. One of the meanings of Dharma is the teachings of the Buddha, what he taught. It's interesting to look at, because there are volumes and volumes of texts that purport to be his recorded teachings. I find many of these quite inspiring and really delight in swimming in those ancient teachings. But what specifically is the Dharma?

The analogy I'd like to use—maybe a poor analogy—is that say there's a modern teacher that has wonderful Buddhist teachings, and the person often talks about traffic lights driving down the road as a metaphor. When this teacher talks about traffic lights, he mentions that green means go and red means stop. Over the centuries, people recognize that this is in the teachings of this teacher. Sure enough, maybe at some point society changes and decides there are better colors for go and stop. But that teacher, he's referring to the colors that we have in the modern world for go and stop. People who are into that person's teachings will say, "Wait, no, no. We believe that green means go and red means stop, and that's the way it is. That's our religion, and that's our faith, and we have to believe that because that's what our teacher said." Now that's a misunderstanding of what the teachings were really about. That was just a metaphor, an example. Just because he was using something in the modern world, it wasn't necessarily that the teacher held absolutely, "This is the truth that has to be this way."

In the same way, the Buddha taught a lot, and is all of it really what he was about? Really his teachings? How much of it was just using and folding in teachings of his times, ideas of his times, and concepts of his times? We find people coming to the Buddha to ask questions in a particular paradigm, a particular framework. The Buddha just accommodates that framework, but he twists it or transforms it into his own teachings, what he wants to teach, using that person's framework. Is that framework the Dharma, or is it a little bit different? It's a vehicle for the Dharma, but maybe it's not exactly his core teachings, what's really essential to carry on from generation to generation.

So what we can do to answer this question—"What is the teaching of the Buddha?"—is to go back and look specifically at the places where it's said, "These are the teachings. This is the Dharma." Where it's that specific, what's exactly being said? What we find is a remarkable thing, that over and over again, predominantly the message has to do with some direct contact and experience with the present moment, something right here that we can do. Very much what's pointing to is not only direct experience, but more importantly, the actions that lead somewhere. We've been talking about how Dharma means actions, and that these actions can have consequences. So we want to choose the actions that have beneficial consequences.

For example, the Buddha says in one place, using a very famous simile, the simile of the raft. The Buddha says, "So I have shown to you how the Dharma is similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over a river, not for the purpose of grasping." He says that the simile is that a person comes to the edge of a river, and there's no way of getting across this big river except by making a small raft, getting wood and reeds and different things and constructing a raft, and then paddling the raft across to the other side. When they get to the other side, the purpose of the raft is not to be carried on your back into the forest and down wherever you go next. It served its purpose, so don't grasp it. Leave it behind.

One of the teachings here is that Dharma is something provisional. It's something contextual that is useful for a particular purpose. Beyond that, we don't look to it to understand what color traffic lights should be. It has to do with not grasping. It goes on to say, "When you know that Dharma is similar to a raft, you should abandon even the teachings. How much more things that are contrary to the teachings?" So there's tremendous importance on not grasping. Don't even grasp the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, let alone other teachings. Don't grasp ideas about traffic lights. Don't grasp anything. This centrality of not grasping in this little passage represents what I'm trying to say today. These teachings are about the immediacy of now, the imminence of now, how we live now. It's something that we can experience just as well 2,500 years ago as we can experience today. These are very modern teachings, except we don't build rafts so much. But the Dharma has something to do at its heart with not grasping.

Here's a fascinating description of the purpose of the Dharma: that Dharma is for the elimination of all standpoints, all obsessions, all adherences, all underlying tendencies, all decisiveness around teachings ("this is a true teaching"), for the stilling of all reactivity, for the relinquishment of all attachments, for the ending of all craving, for cessation, for Nirvana^[1]. Whatever the Dharma is, it's for this purpose. This purpose is a lofty purpose; it's not exactly something you experience in the moment, but it is something that's part of the moment, part of our direct experience. There's nothing here about future lives, nothing here about fantastic ultimate communion with a cosmos or some deeper insight into the true nature of reality. It's mostly about releasing and freeing, and in particular around teachings. Earlier he said, "Don't even grasp the teachings." The Buddha says here, all kinds of opinions, viewpoints, standpoints that we hold onto and say, "This is how it should be," he teaches so we don't do that.

Somewhere else he teaches very eloquently that what he's teaching is not a view, is not a philosophy, is not a doctrine. What he's teaching is the letting go of all that, and something deeper, something more valuable. It's a stilling of all reactivity. So the relaxation we did in the last meditation could be called, rather than relaxation, a stilling of all reactivity—bodily, mentally, and emotionally. When we relax, it's relaxing our reactivity that somehow is built up within us.

A monk once came to the Buddha and said, "Can you teach me the Dharma in brief so I can remember it and go into the forest and practice on my own?" That's kind of important; the Buddha is going to give the pithy short version of what the Dharma is. In this case, he said, "You should let go of desire to anything which is impermanent, anything which is inconstant. Let go of clinging to it." That's all he says. That's one of the very simple key ways he wants to say it. We can protest, we can have our doubts about it, like, "Wait a minute, but..." Yet here he is pointing to something very deep. The important thing I want to say here is that it's an action, the action of letting go. It's a letting go for a particular consequence: the consequence of becoming free. This is the domain of what Dharma is about. Earlier I talked about not grasping; here he talks about not having desire for anything impermanent. If you hold onto anything which is going to change, you'll suffer.

We find a good number of times in the suttas^[2] that someone comes to the Buddha and says, "Teach me the Dharma in brief." Repeatedly it's about something very immediate, something in very practical, almost modern terms, and psychological, that doesn't have any recourse to metaphysics, to the supernatural, to anything beyond what's possible to experience in our direct experience. The last thing I want to read, he says, "When you know the Dharma for yourself..." That's the point. He's talking about something you can know for yourself, not a teaching that you have to take on faith, but a teaching that you can experience. This is why we're practicing this mindfulness: to really be able to have some deep experience of this for ourselves.

Here is another pithy way where he says how you know what the Dharma is for yourself: "When you know there is greed, hatred, and delusion within you, and when you know there is no greed, hatred, and delusion within you, then you know the Dharma is visible here and now, immediate, inviting to be seen for oneself, onward-leading, and to be personally realized by the wise." Maybe it diminishes in some people's minds to call this psychological, but I use that as an alternative to supernatural or metaphysical or something beyond what our everyday experience is like. To know greed, hatred, and delusion in all its different forms, and to know its absence, then you know the Dharma. The Dharma is about seeing what's happening, knowing suffering, knowing the causes of suffering, and knowing the end of it.

That end of greed, hatred, and delusion can be temporary, but the Buddha says here even if it's temporary, you have a qualitative experience of really being free of greed, hatred, and delusion. Maybe accidentally, on a very good day, you had good sleep. Appreciate that there's something about that that you're experiencing. You're knowing the Dharma directly. "Oh, this is what it's about. This is the Dharma. This is possible. This is what I have a relationship to. This is what actions can be about, how I live my life in accord with or supportive of this movement towards this kind of freedom." So the Dharma as a teaching is what supports or points to or highlights what I've been teaching the first three days of this week about what the Dharma is: it's the relatedness that we can live in, it's the actions that have an effect on that relatedness, and it's the actions that transform that relatedness to one of freedom, of good will, of care, of compassion. This is the Dharma.

So if you'd like to do some homework on this: do this relaxation practice. Relax, open up the present, see what's here, and see if you can have some taste, some experience of non-grasping, of non-clinging, of non-reactivity that gives you a feel for, "Oh, the Dharma. This is valuable." Maybe you have a small experience, but then if you extrapolate if this became complete, became full: "Oh, this is good Dharma." So thank you, and I look forward to the last talk on this topic.