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Guided Meditation: Contributing to Meditation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to our Sunday morning meditation.

Meditation practice is supported or helped by our contributions to it. Instead of just sitting quietly and expecting to reap the benefits of quiet sitting, it might be helpful to think of a few things that we contribute to allow the meditation to unfold. We contribute non-hostility and non-aversion to what's happening to our experience. We contribute non-greed, the absence of greedy expectation or desire for something. We contribute non-delusion, not getting caught up in delusions of grandeur, fantasies, or all kinds of abstract, removed thinking that has nothing to do with the simplicity and immediacy of right here.

So we make a contribution. Non-hostility is related to offering some degree of simple, ordinary kindness, goodwill, and friendliness. Non-greed is associated with offering some very simple, ordinary generosity, being generous to what the experience is. And non-delusion is associated with the field of wisdom, bringing forth whatever wise understanding we have that supports us or encourages us to stay right here, to just be here.

We make simple contributions. So, assuming a meditation posture where you are upright, either literally or metaphorically, in a posture that supports you to be both comfortable and alert. Closing your eyes if that's comfortable for you, and then settling into your posture, becoming aware of your body. See if there are ways that you can relax and settle your body, to soften and ease into this human form that we have.

Perhaps take a few long, slow, deep breaths. On the exhale, stretch the torso to the edges of how big this torso can become—perhaps a stretching—and then let your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, scan through your body, relaxing those parts of the body where there might be holding and tension.

Then settling down into your body: is there some place in your body that you associate with non-greed, the absence of any strong, driven desire? Maybe a place of generosity or openness here. If there is such a place in your body, breathe with it for a few moments. Breathe through it, connecting yourself to non-greed.

Is there any place in your body that you associate with non-ill will, the absence of hostility? A place of peace, of goodwill, maybe of contentment. Breathe with this part of your body. Breathe through it, grounding yourself in non-ill will.

And is there a place in your body that you associate with non-delusion? Someplace in your body that feels at rest or relaxed when there is wisdom and understanding.

Perhaps as we sit this meditation in a gentle, easy, simple way, maybe non-greed, non-ill will, and non-delusion can be a soft, gentle support and inspiration for your present moment mindfulness. For staying alert and present, moment by moment, right here, breathing in and breathing out.

(Silence)

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, how might you be at the end of a meditation that supports non-greed, non-ill will, and non-delusion? How might you be at the end of a meditation that feels almost like a natural support? It's not complicated, and there's not a lot of thinking. Is there something about the simplicity of being, or being calm and settled, being more mindful, that supports being alive without being caught in greed, ill will, or delusion?

May it be that how we meditate, the practice that we do, and the fruits of this practice, may it be that it's something we can share with the world. Share it in intentional and unintentional ways, knowing and unknowing ways. Share it not because we proselytize, for sure, but share it just by the way we are in the world. May we live in the world with generosity, love, and wisdom, and in doing so, contribute to the good conditions that support other people to be happy, free, peaceful, and safe.

May this meditation practice that we do help someone today, for the next 24 hours, to feel safer, to feel more peaceful or at ease, to feel happier. And to feel like they can live breathing more freely, their heart beating more freely, their mind freed from contractions, constrictions, and preoccupation.

May all beings be happy, peaceful, safe, and free, and may we support that possibility.

[Music]

Planting Wholesome Seeds

Good day, everyone, and welcome to our time together this Sunday and to this Dharma^[1] talk.

Before I give the talk, I have a couple of announcements. One is that next Sunday after the talk, I will offer a community meeting here on Zoom. It's more of a community meeting for the local people who normally might come in person to IMC^[2], but everyone's welcome to come to the meeting. The topic of it will be the opening of IMC. The time to open our doors and have programs again is on the horizon, in sight, maybe in August. I just want to talk a little bit about the opening and the plans, and hear concerns, questions, and desires that people have in the more local community. If you're not local, you're certainly very welcome to come; you're part of this community regardless, and it might be interesting for you to know some of the plans here. We are certainly giving a lot of thought to how to support the widespread community of people who have been participating this last year on Zoom and YouTube. It's on our minds.

The other thing is that in a few weeks, I think around the 10th and 11th of July, a wonderful Vipassana^[3] teacher, Gregory Kramer, will be joining us. He is one of the more innovative and brilliant teachers applying the Dharma and mindfulness into the rest of our lives outside of meditation. He developed a whole practice called Insight Dialogue to bring mindfulness into talking and in our conversations with people. He has written a book now called A Whole-Life Path or The Whole-Life Dharma. He explores the Eightfold Path^[4] in this book, addressing very well how to live the Dharma in our whole life. He has offered to come on Zoom for our community to offer a creative teaching and a retreat over that weekend in July, where he'll offer teachings and practices on his whole-life Dharma approach, with lots of time during the day to go about your daily life and practice with it. He'll offer support through the day. I feel very fortunate to have him coming, and I encourage many of you to attend if you're interested. There is more information about it on the IMC website, and you have to register for it.

I also see in the chat there were several happy Father's Day wishes sent out. Certainly, to all the fathers, and a few weeks ago we had mothers, and to all the parents listening to us: may you be honored, respected, and appreciated for all that you do and have done.

Also this weekend, many of us in the United States are celebrating this new holiday. We now have Juneteenth on the 19th of June, and I think it has already become my favorite holiday in the United States. I kind of liked, in principle, the idea of the Fourth of July being an Independence Day, as it seemed closely related to the Buddhist idea of freedom and liberation. But Juneteenth is much more closely related in my mind to this, and maybe this can be a holiday that we Buddhists in the United States might want to particularly cherish.

It's not really the celebration of the particular day of the Emancipation Proclamation when enslaved people were in a sense liberated in the United States, but rather it represents the day in a particular town in Texas—Galveston—where, many months after the proclamation was declared, the enslaved people there finally learned that they were free. The locals didn't want to tell them that they were free, and it took that long for them to discover it. So it marks the last of the enslaved people discovering that they were actually liberated. To celebrate this very important milestone in this country, to appreciate, to honor, and to remember seems like a very important thing to do. The liberation from slavery is a much bigger liberation than breaking away from political control by England. The people who received their independence from England already had a lot of freedom compared to what slaves had. To have this liberation from slavery is a much bigger one. It's vital to appreciate how important it is, and to feel the poignancy or the pain of the delayed notification for some, and how difficult freedom from slavery actually was. Even after being freed from slavery, the remnants of that oppression continue to this day in the United States. We are still feeling the repercussions of all that.

That leads to the topic for today, which has a little bit to do with the Buddhist teachings on karma^[5]. But rather than focusing particularly on Buddhism so much, it's actually a wide-ranging teaching in many religions that is sometimes summarized with a little phrase: "You reap what you sow." Stated differently, what we do plants seeds that will come to fruition, and the quality or the characteristics of those seeds affects the plant that grows and the fruit that comes. Actions that we do that are unwholesome will produce unwholesome fruit. Those which are wholesome produce wholesome fruit.

In plenty of places, including in Buddhism, it is seen as a fundamental law that this is how things work in this world. Whether it's that fundamental and works that way all the time, it certainly works a lot of times this way. We see this over and over and over again. The tremendous unwholesomeness of slavery—and to use the word "unwholesome" here almost seems like it's belittling the evil of it—the actions of people centuries ago on this continent set in motion a whole series of conditions and a whole series of things that are rippling through our societies to this day. We are the recipients of this bitter fruit that comes from seeds that were planted in this soil for centuries with slavery. We're still contending with it and dealing with it in so many different ways.

So we have a very clear example of this. It doesn't necessarily mean that all the fruits produced by the seeds that we plant are limited to affecting ourselves. Sometimes in the Buddhist karma teaching, the idea is that you will reap the fruit of the seeds that you plant. But I find it very helpful to separate it from being so personal, because the effect of what we do spreads out beyond us, and sometimes the impact around us is bigger than the impact we experience in ourselves. It's about being the caretakers of the seeds that we plant, to be very careful with what we do, so that what we do is not planting unwholesome seeds, but rather planting wholesome seeds.

It's presented almost like a law that if you do something unwholesome, it will produce unwholesome fruit. If you do something wholesome, it will produce wholesome fruit. Psychologically, we can see that in ourselves very clearly. If we do unwholesome things, it sets up conditions that support more unwholesomeness. If we spend a lot of time being mean, angry, critical, or hostile to others, they start to act and behave around us in a way that starts being uncomfortable for us. That social discomfort, maybe being ignored or not addressed, is painful. And some of this unwholesomeness that people live with in the world is a result of the pain they themselves feel.

So much so that I've heard this karma principle stated as: if you act out of pain, it produces more pain. If you act out of non-pain or out of happiness, you produce more happiness. There are cycles of unwholesomeness where unwholesome actions produce more unwholesome conditions, and those unwholesome conditions make it easier to act unwholesomely again. This cycle of self-perpetuating unwholesomeness can go on not only for an individual for a lifetime but also gets passed on from generation to generation. Where there's tremendous hostility, anger, and even violence in families, kids growing up learn that that's just what you do. It's a learned behavior, and they grow up to be adults who continue it and pass it on to their children. We see both in oneself and in the world that causing suffering creates conditions for further distress and further pain. And pain is a primary condition why people do things in an unwholesome, unskillful way.

Buddhist practice is a practice to interrupt the cycles of unwholesomeness, to not perpetuate them. It's remarkable how meditation functions in that. To sit down, meditate, be still, be quiet, and just focus on your breath is not such a simple, passive practice when the mindstream has all this momentum of thinking in certain ways—attitudes of anger, hostility, greed, and delusion. You can feel the power of those cycles when we sit down to meditate. But simply coming back to the breathing is an interruption in that mindstream. Maybe it's an interruption that lasts only a millisecond before we get pulled away, but we're beginning to interrupt the cycles, to step off the wheel of unwholesome actions producing conditions for further unwholesome conditions.

So we interrupt it, but we can do better than just interrupting and stopping it. It's also possible to plant the seeds of the wholesome. To plant seeds for happiness, well-being, and health. Things that are done in a healthy way produce more health. If we plant seeds for happiness, it produces more happiness. Whether it's actions of thought, actions of speech, or actions of our body, there's a way in which they produce more of the same. Unwholesomeness produces more unwholesomeness; wholesomeness produces more wholesomeness.

The challenge here is that sometimes we find it's easier to do the unwholesome than it is to do the wholesome. It's easier sometimes to be angry than to figure out how to address a situation in a way that's peaceful or kind but still effective. It's easier to be short-sighted about the impact we have right now. Anger is sometimes used to push something away or have an immediate impact on something. Oftentimes, unwholesome behavior is short-sighted. Doing the wholesome can feel like a lot more effort and work is needed. It takes a little bit more reflection and thinking. If you're lazy, it's easier just to go ahead and do the unwholesome. If we want immediate results, unwholesomeness might provide that. But the wholesome route takes a little bit more effort initially. It might take more effort to look for delayed gratification, understanding how to be wise in a kind, supportive way with non-greed and non-hatred.

But as we practice and start getting in touch with non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion inside of us—as a clarity, a purity, an openness, or a peacefulness—then it becomes easier and easier to be that way. We start seeing that acting with unwholesomeness is a kind of instant karma where the unwholesome itself hurts. Ouch. Whereas acting on the wholesome feels good. It's an ah.

Here's the principle in very simple language: if we do something that has an ouch in it, it's going to produce more ouch. If we do something that has an ah in it, chances are it'll produce more ah.

Even though it might take more work initially to do the wholesome—the healthy, that which comes from the best part of who we are—it's a training we're doing. We're beginning to open the door that might be rusted shut. The hinges are rusted and tight, and we're beginning to open it, discovering and opening the heart so that wholesomeness becomes second nature. It becomes the place that we act from and live from in the world, and we start feeling that this is actually what's easy to do. The unwholesome is actually more stressful and more difficult in its own way. So we choose the easy route to live in wholesome ways. Initially, it seems like the unwholesome can be easier, but over time the wholesome becomes easier.

The advantage of the wholesome is that it doesn't produce the same levels of difficulty in life. With the aftereffect of wholesomeness, there's no cleanup that has to be done. There's no retribution, there's no people being angry back at us and perpetuating the cycles. Whereas if we do unwholesome things, we have to explain ourselves, we have to apologize, we have to defend ourselves, escape, shut down, or ignore. It's all this secondary and tertiary behavior that comes out of the unwholesome that simply doesn't come out of the wholesome. Live a simpler life, a cleaner life, by tuning into what is wholesome.

This distinction between wholesome and unwholesome is really key to the whole Buddhist practice. It's about beginning to understand what this means and, more importantly, how to recognize it in ourselves. How to recognize the healthy feeling of the wholesome and the unhealthy feeling of the unwholesome. To recognize that we're planting seeds and we want to be careful with the seeds that we plant. We plant seeds through our actions, and the quality of our actions is the particular plant that we're planting.

So we want to be careful with our actions. Careful means using your capacity for choice to choose what you should do. Don't live a life that doesn't use this tremendous gift that we're given, the gift that we can choose what we do and what we say. Don't live a life that lacks the simplest self-reflection of being wise and aware of what we're going to say and do before we do it.

This is one of the reasons to practice mindfulness. The more mindfulness we have, the more there is space in the mind. There is almost like a pause in which we can see where the moment of choice is. And if we can see that moment of choice, we can choose the wholesome. If we don't know what the wholesome thing is to do, then it's generally quite wholesome to simply avoid the unwholesome. That's enough sometimes; you don't have to make it more complicated than that. Or it's wholesome to pause and say, "You know, I need to think about that," or "Can we just let it sit for a while as I reflect on this?" or "Can we take a time-out so I can just be with myself a little bit before I respond to this difficult conversation?"

There are wholesome responses that don't mean we have to fully understand how to perfectly be kind or generous or loving, but we know something else. Maybe the choice is to be more mindful, to be more present, and to really listen more deeply to ourselves and to what's going on around us. But as mindfulness begins to take hold of our life, we begin to have that space where we can see there's more and more choice. If you see your choice, then you begin exercising your freedom—the freedom to live wholesomely.

You certainly have a certain freedom to live an unhealthy life. However, if you live unwholesomely, you're actually in bondage. You're actually caught in the grip of things like greed, hatred, and delusion. Unwholesome is not the place of freedom; it's the opposite. So to see the place of choice and see where the freedom is to do the wholesome, this is the path of the Dharma.

You might want to carry with you this little nugget of wisdom, this little phrase: everything you do is planting a seed for a plant that will come to fruition. If you act in ways where there's an ouch, chances are you'll produce more ouch. If the way you act has an ah in it that feels healthy and good, you probably have an ah plant, and the fruit of it will be somewhere in the world, maybe for you or maybe for others.

So may this practice that we do on this weekend of the first Juneteenth national holiday, may this practice that we do help our whole society to interrupt these century-long cycles of violence, hostility, and racism that keep going on. May it stop with our generation. And in doing so, may the wholesome flower. May we plant gardens and gardens and gardens filled with wholesome seeds that support all of us and our whole society.

Thank you all very much.