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Guided Meditation: Powers of Ten

Hello everyone, and welcome.

When my children were young, we had this children's book that had drawings that were magnifications of ten. These books would start with... I think they went different directions, but one common one would start far out in space. Maybe you'd see the world in the middle of our solar system, or a galaxy. Then, each page would take a power of ten closer in, until you'd see just the world, then just a particular continent. Getting closer, it would be just a city, and closer still, the park in the city, the lawn, the grass, and a few pieces of grass. Going closer, there would somehow be a close-up of the cells. You'd go into the cells and see pieces of the cells, maybe DNA. Going closer still, there would be molecules and atoms, and closer still, just the electrons and protons in vast space. It was quite a remarkable thing to change perspectives and see things in so many different ways.

Meditation can be a little bit the same way. Which direction we go varies. Sometimes it's going inward to our vast space of just a few electrons, and sometimes it's outwards into a vast empty space in a galactic system or something. Sometimes it's nice to have the idea of going back and forth between these two different perspectives: vast and large, and very small and close in.

I think oftentimes, meditation is more like starting where we are at as human beings, and learning to be fully present for where we are, regardless of where we are in the powers of ten. But then, as we relax, settle, and quiet, it's kind of like moving inwards. Now it's becoming closer and more intimate in here. We go in until we come to a place where the most intimate, the most expansive, the most freeing, is like this vast space, and it feels like we're home in some ways. Then we return and come back to this human perspective, hopefully bringing with us the freedom.

So, take an alert, upright posture. Lower your gaze gently, letting your gaze be relaxed, and then gently close your eyes. Begin here, at this human realm of your life, in the place where you live. Maybe you are surrounded by your neighborhood of other homes or apartment buildings. Maybe you live surrounded by fields, forests, or mountains. Just recognize where you are and the environment around you.

Consider as far as you can walk for five minutes as if this, too, is part of your world, part of who you are, in a sense. Here in the middle of this neighborhood, this land under the sky, here you are, sitting on the earth.

Then, bring your attention in closer. If you're sitting in a room, be aware of sitting in a room. This is the power of ten coming inward. If you're sitting outside, note what you can see and feel around you.

In Buddhism, we have this idea that the location where someone meditates is kind of like the center of your world, your experiential world, the world of your perceptions. If you come closer in to just here, in this body, feel how this body connects to this place. Feel the weight of the body, full of gravity, and where those meet your cushion, the surfaces your body touches. Hear, definitely hear, this spot: the center of your universe.

In this body that breathes, maybe as you breathe you feel the movements of your chest and torso against your clothes. Maybe you feel whatever your hands are contacting—your thighs, your knees, each other. Here is this body that has been your companion, one way or the other, for years now. Center yourself in this body. You can give yourself long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing into the body on the exhale.

Breathe normally, and as you exhale with a normal breath, perhaps there can be a quieting, a gentling of your thinking mind. Maybe not dramatically, but a little bit of a calming of the thinking mind.

With a lot of thinking, it's easy to feel removed from oneself, one's body, one's lived experience. Let go of your thoughts. Go into this living body, feeling it from the inside out.

Maybe coming in closer, like a power of ten movement, feel the particular location in your body where you feel most you, where you most feel your sense of aliveness. Find the place in your body that most represents or is associated with living here in this moment.

Perhaps, if it's easy, allow this location in your body to be gently massaged or rocked by the breathing, by the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, by the rhythm of the body moving as you breathe.

As you exhale, can you settle in? Let go deeper within, like a power of ten. Center yourself either at the center of where you're most alive, or where the breathing begins, where the breathing ends. Find the place in your body indicating the ending and beginning of breathing.

It's like you're entering into a beautiful grove of trees, leaving the world behind. Enter into the depth of your body, leaving your thoughts behind. Let go of thoughts, and let go into the quietest, deepest place within.

Going inwards, beneath your thoughts, beneath your feelings, beneath it all, is there some place of calm or peace that you can touch into at the center of it all? Maybe it's just a pinhead in size—some place, a power of ten going in, of calm or peace. Maybe the rhythm of your breathing moves through that place, through the calm, the peace.

As you inhale, let that calm become larger through your body. Let your awareness spread through your body, bringing with it the calm or the sense of spaciousness, expanding to the whole body. Let your awareness, your conceiving, spread out to include this room or the place you're sitting. Maybe the inhale spreads the calm or the spaciousness out into the room.

Then, let your awareness expand outward, as if it can reach out across the land around you, the territory, the neighborhood, bringing a sense of expanding calm. Visualize or consider the wider land out as far as you can walk on a five-minute walk, expanding outwards, as if your calm or your spaciousness spans ever outwards.

Extend powers of ten outwards, across the city, the county, the province, the state that you're in, and all the people that inhabit this area. You are one of a multitude of people, but from your point of view, you sit in the middle of the multitude. From your calm spaciousness, imagine casting your gaze upon all beings with kindness and friendliness. You wish them well.

Taking powers of ten more broadly—powers of a hundred—go out into space, looking back on this world, this planet floating in space. This blue marble has so many people on it, so many beings who have this precious opportunity to be alive and to be breathing. Cast a gaze upon it all, kindly and friendly.

Wishing: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Meaning (2 of 5) Self and Others

Welcome to the second talk in a series of talks on the topic of meaning, meaning-making, and its relationship to meditation.

First, as an introduction, there's a cliché that everyone is a philosopher, but many people don't know it. I think what that means is that everyone has a set of interpretations, a meaning or understanding of what it means to be alive, what's important, and what this life is about. They operate from this, though sometimes it's not reflective. Sometimes they haven't thought about it or haven't realized they're doing it. Part of a path of mindfulness is both to be reflective about this—to be clear and conscious—but also to discover what some of the underlying assumptions, belief systems, and interpretations are that we are basing our life on. As we sit quietly in meditation, it's possible to see these operate and then also to question them. Some of them aren't really that helpful or healthy for us, and some of them are. Being able to distinguish between what is useful and what is not, what seems accurate or not, is part of the wonderful power of meditation and mindfulness.

One area of meaning-making in connection to meditation is our understanding of what it means to be a self, and what it means to have other people in relationship to a self. There's a lot of philosophy and ideas that come along with our notions of who we are, who others are, and what that connection is.

A wonderful story around this: some years ago, someone did a study of different meditation centers. I think they were all in the United States, but some had participants who were primarily born and raised in the United States, acculturated in the local US culture. Others were acculturated in an Asian culture that had a much stronger collectivist culture, a stronger communal sense of identity in who they are. Meanwhile, in the United States, many people who grew up in this culture have a much stronger sense of individuality. The researchers studied these two different meditation centers and asked the participants, "How was the retreat you did?" (I think they both did set week-long retreats or something similar.) "What did you gain, or what were the benefits from the retreat?"

Both groups loved the retreat. They said it was fantastic and life-changing, so they had that in common. But when they discussed what they benefited from and in what way it was so great, the people raised in the local US culture emphasized that they discovered who they are. They got a sense of real independence and freedom, and all the reference points were very individualistic. Those who came from the Asian culture said, "Oh, I realized how much gratitude I have for my society and my family, how deeply connected we are. I've appreciated so much more all the benefits I've received from my society, my family, everyone. The sense of connection and gratitude and being part of something was so powerful for me."

So, in many ways, maybe they were having a similar experience of settling, getting concentrated, becoming still, and letting go of hindrances^[1]. But the meaning or value they took out of the experience—what they selected out of their experiences as what is important—was very different. One was very individualistic, and one was more about how they are in the collective. This speaks to how we make this selection, often invisibly. It just seems like, "This is natural, of course, isn't this what it's all about?" because the view we have about what's important is taken for granted. We assume it's built into the fabric of the universe that the self is important, and that discovering the self is paramount.

A similar thing happened to me many years ago when I was on a panel with a Christian minister. I was the Buddhist teacher, and the other person on the panel was Asian American. I represented people from the United States or Europe (I'm from Norway, which is very individualistic, maybe even more so sometimes than the United States). We were asked what brought us into our respective religions. I happily and matter-of-factly talked about finding myself or finding inner freedom, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She talked about how her Christian faith put her into a community of fellow people in relationship to society, and that was what was so meaningful for her. She found a sense of belonging and home. Here again, we see that people enter into religion with very different orientations of what they're looking for and what they want.

We also come with a lot of ideas about what it means to be an individual, what it means to be a self, and what's important. When we sit down to meditate, our motivation can be about that self. It could be that we're looking for career advancement, and we've been told that we're too anxious, so we need to meditate to get calmer and quieter because that's how we'll be more respected at work. So, it's all about me attaining something or getting something. Or, it could be that someone has been told they really don't fit into the community well, and they should try meditating because then they'll relax and start feeling more connected to the people around them. Meditation can have a different function for different people depending on what seems important to them.

Then there is the locus of what is valued the most around the self. Is it the self as an autonomous, independent person that is most important, and we have to realize that and find it? Or is it the self as someone embedded in a system of relationships with other people, finding ourselves connected to that embedded nature of society or social connections, where meditation will help us feel deeply connected to that and feel much more a part of it?

In my early years when I was first coming to Buddhism, I saw how many people were really coming to find themselves. What they found instead, or maybe after they found themselves, was that at some point they found themselves returning to a deeper connection with the religion they grew up with. They would go back to a church or synagogue and participate more in the collective life of it. Other people go into Buddhism and find a sense of community there, and that becomes more important than the meditation because culturally or personally, that's what they think is important. And some people find that their engagement with Buddhism is always very personal. They are happy to go off and be hermits for long periods of meditation without much connection to others.

Is one better or worse than the other? I'd rather not think that way. These are all ways of organizing meaning and purpose in this world of ours. Maybe they all have a place. They all have a role. There's a time and season for all things, and there's a place in society for all the different ways we can construct our sense of self, our sense of meaning, and our sense of being connected to others.

This is an adventure. It's a discovery. As I said in the meditation, it's kind of like the powers of ten. Meditation takes you into some deep, quiet, still, letting-go place. How do we interpret that around our understanding of this self, what's important around the self, and what the self is in relationship to needs, motivations, purposes, and our place in this world? From that deep place of freedom, what is the connection as we come back through the powers of ten, back into the world, back into society?

Not a few people have found themselves transformed so that their understanding of what it means to be in relationship to other people is radically changed. A simple understanding would be that many people are codependent. They have a very deep sense of neediness and measure their success and well-being in relationship to other people, constantly comparing themselves. To delve deeply into these varied powers of ten—to go within and let go of the social world for a while—can be transformative. When we come back into the social world, that sense of neediness is not there anymore. This sense of comparing and measuring ourselves with other people shifts, and the social world can have a very different meaning than it had before. How much meaning it has and how important it is depends in part on the meaning-making understandings we have about our place in the world, who we are, and who we are in relationship to other people.

We shouldn't assume that two meditators share the same understanding of what's most important, where they center their life (whether more in community or more in the individual), or what secondary understandings come from that.

Without saying any of us are right and wrong, I think it's important to become reflective about it. Think deeply to realize what we're operating under, what the assumptions are, and what beliefs we have around self and others. To dismiss this whole investigation of self simply because Buddhism says there's "no self" ^[2], or to choose not to focus on self, makes it easy to miss or not notice that we have deeply embedded, subconscious, or unconscious notions and operating principles around what it means to be a self. We need to see what this selective process of attention is used for to pick out, recognize, and know what's important in this world.

I offer this with the hope that you will spend some time today talking with friends and others about your own central understanding of what it means to be a self, an individual. What beliefs and ideas come along with your sense of personhood? What is it to be a person in society, and what are the beliefs and understandings that come along with how you are embedded in society? Are you embedded, or are you really removed? What's the connection there?

I hope that if you reflect deeply on these things and think about them, when you come to do your meditation, some of those things can be put down. They can be put to rest temporarily and won't be operating and churning away. This allows some power of ten to open up for you, whether it's a power of ten deeper and deeper in, or a power of ten further and further out. That's for you to discover.

Thank you very much.