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Guided Meditation: Experiencing

Good evening, good evening. A really warm welcome. I'm hoping you can hear me now. Right, let's see here. I think I have all the buttons going in the right direction. Okay, good. Thank you for letting me know that the sound is okay.

Thank you. So, settling into this moment for a little bit of a guided meditation.

And just feeling into what it feels like at this moment. That is, what are the bodily sensations? What are the sounds? Can we just notice them? Not so much thinking about them, but feeling them. Being with the sensations.

As we're feeling the sensations in the body, of course, we'll notice the pressure against the body, wherever we're sitting—on the buttocks, the top of the legs or the top portion of the legs, perhaps the feet. And the movements associated with breathing: the expansion and contraction. But as part of the body breathing, we're just noticing the sensations like from the inside. Not so much thinking, philosophizing, or anything like this, but just being with the experience of breathing.

Maybe we feel it in the chest or the abdomen. Or maybe the feeling of air going in and out of the nose. Feeling the rhythm of the breath. We don't have to control it; we're just noticing.

Can you notice the difference between really being with the experience—feeling, sensing whatever is arising—as opposed to more thinking about the breath, thinking about whatever's arising? Can you notice the difference between the sensations and the thinking about whatever the sensations are?

And whether it's a sensation that we find pleasant, or unpleasant, or neutral, can we just notice, "it feels like this"? This is the experience. And, as best we can, not getting tangled up with the experience.

Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We're just being with our experience, and perhaps primarily with the experience of breathing. Feeling the contraction and expansion, the stretching, tautness, and the ease.

So this practice is about being with our experience. Mindfulness is being present for what's happening as opposed to lost in thought, story making, fantasies, memories. It seems straightforward. Turns out not to be so easy to stay with our experience.

But doing this allows us to be present with what actually is, to be in accordance with what's actually happening, with the reality of the moment. And in this way, we can respond in a way that's supportive and appropriate, hopefully, with what's actually happening. So that our practice can be a support for ourselves, and not only ourselves but for others. Sometimes just being present for what actually is and not spinning out can be a tremendous benefit for others who are maybe spinning out into stories, or blaming, or memories, or whatever it might be.

So just to simply be with what is. It's a benefit for ourselves and for others, and this way our practice can ripple out and maybe for the benefit of all beings everywhere.

Knowledge, Wisdom, Insight

So, welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. It's nice to be here, and in a way, we're connected through our screens, but connected nevertheless. So, a really warm welcome.

Tonight I want to start with a story that's in the suttas^[1]. The story is about this woman, Dhanañjānī, and she's a brahmin, which means that she's from what was the dominant religion at the time of the Buddha. Apparently, there's a meal happening, and she stumbles or trips. As she recovers herself, she says, "Homage to the Blessed One," referring to the Buddha.

So it's a little bit surprising that amongst a meeting of one religious tradition, she's saying homage to a different—at that time, it wasn't really a religion, but a different religious teacher. One of the people there, the story is that it's her brother-in-law, Saṅgārava, says, "What are you doing?" I'm paraphrasing obviously. "What are you doing? Why are you saying homage to the Blessed One?"

And she says, "Well, if you knew his ethics and his wisdom—that is, the way that he is in the world—maybe you would be doing this as well."

So, Saṅgārava, the person who is asking about this, says, "Okay, well, the next time this Buddha person is in town, let me know."

The next time the Buddha is in town—he was a traveling mendicant, we don't know how much later it is—she tells him, and he goes to see the Buddha. He asks the Buddha, and I'm paraphrasing here, "There are some recluses and brahmins, some religious teachers, who proclaim the fundamentals of the religious life after finding a final and ultimate insight into this life. And how do you stand among them? How do you, Mr. Gotama, stand among them?"

The Buddha responds that there is a difference. Not all teachers are proclaiming the fundamentals of the holy life in the same way. In fact, there are three different types. The Buddha says that the first is the traditionalists, those who are upholding the tradition. At that time, the dominant tradition were the brahmins who were well versed in the Vedas. The Vedas were these ancient scriptures, but I'm using the word scripture, and it's not really the right word because they weren't written down. They were just passed down orally from generation to generation. I believe that's still like that today. They had these amazing memories, this amazing capacity to remember, so they're memorized and passed down from one generation to the next for thousands of years.

So the Buddha says there's one set of religious teachers that are the traditionalists, those who are memorizing the teachings that have been passed down. They consider these sacred texts to be revealed in some way, that the sages of the past had received these sacred teachings and they've just been preserved through these years. One thing that's interesting about this is that they believed that it wasn't really necessary to go find new knowledge. It wasn't really necessary to go figure things out. Everything that you needed was already known, and it was in these Vedas, so you just had to find it in the Vedas.

So there was not so much of an emphasis on finding new things or figuring things out, but an emphasis on learning what was already known. That was one type of teacher that the Buddha talked about. The second type were the reasoners and the logicians, and we might say the philosophers. They didn't entirely discard the scriptures, but they considered it more of a secondary source of wisdom. They believed that knowledge of reality, or knowledge about how to live a good life, was found more by reasoning, speculating, and working with inference. This included ideas about what happened after death, so you could use logic, philosophy, or speculation to know about that. This was a second type of teacher.

Then the Buddha said that there is a third type of teacher, what we might call the experientialists. Those that place an emphasis on what can be empirically known. What can we know for ourselves? Not only from learning, not only from philosophizing, reasoning, using logic, but what can we actually experience? And the Buddha put himself in this third category: the experiencers.

To be sure, all three of these types of gaining knowledge, we might say, have value and have a place. We might remember that when we were beginning meditators, it was helpful to learn from others. It was helpful to perhaps, even here at IMC, do an introduction to meditation class. These days, listening to an app, reading a book, there are so many recordings you can listen to. So, all these ways in which we might learn from others, the knowledge that we have.

And there might also be this way in which it's helpful to read the suttas, some of the scriptures from before. Or it might be helpful to really contemplate and think about some of these teachings that we hear in dharma talks. Is this true? Does this make sense? Is this consistent with my experience? Not relying solely on what was heard, not giving complete authority to what some teacher has said—whether that teacher is in a book, or on a podcast, or a dharma talk—but giving some authority to our thinking mind, our capacity to figure things out.

But especially with meditation, we can see this. Maybe I could use the analogy of a mango. We can read about mangoes, we can see pictures of mangoes, we can hear or read a description of mangoes. But, of course, it's not until we actually hold and feel the mango—how they feel, the shape, the heaviness of them, maybe cutting into them ourselves and seeing, smelling, seeing the juiciness of them, the tasting of the mango—the experience is different. Of course, we know this.

And so the Buddha is pointing to this also. He's pointing to the importance of experience, and this idea that we want to not only think about the teachings, but to see them in our own lives and to experience them. On his night of awakening, the Buddha says, "The Dhamma that I have attained is profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful, sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise."

So this Dharma that he teaches, this Dharma that was part of his awakening experience that he realized, he's saying that we can't just reason it; it has to be experienced. And of course, as we would expect, sometimes in the suttas we hear him saying, "With regard to things unheard before," that is, that hasn't been passed down through the oral tradition, "with regard to things unheard before, there arose in me vision, knowledge, wisdom, true knowledge, and light." He is making this distinction between what has been learned from others and what has been actually experienced.

But we need all three. We need to be able to learn from others, to think about things, and to experience things. This third category of experiencing is where insight arises. Ajahn Amaro^[2], this delightful monk in the Thai Forest tradition, writes, "All that is required is to know, understand, digest, practice, and embody this, and through the Triple Gem—the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha—liberation will be realized. This is all we need to know. Not much, simply what is here in this small package." I'm imagining that he's saying, "here in this self."

But then here's what he says—the trick, maybe, is: "But it needs to be fully internalized, fully actualized, made real, brought to life through our practice during the course of the day." So Ajahn Amaro is pointing to the same thing that the Buddha was pointing to: this idea that we have to make the teachings our own. We have to let them not only bounce around in the mind, but also drop down into our experience of the day. One way we might think about this is that this is where insights come from: from our experiences.

Some of the key insights that the Buddha points to are the insights of anicca, dukkha, and anatta^[3]—insights of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self. Anicca, dukkha, and anatta. I appreciate that Ajahn Amaro points out that we don't have to take these as a belief. We don't have to take these as articles of faith. Instead, we can use them as tools to explore our experience.

So with anicca, this change and uncertainty; or dukkha, this unsatisfactoriness; or anatta, this inherent emptiness of self or what belongs to a self, we can use these as tools to ask ourselves, with my experience: Is this changing, or is it permanent? Is there some portion, is there some aspect of it that's completely steady, that will never change? Or is it changing? Is there some inconstancy? Is there some little bit of adjustment or movement? Is this experience completely satisfactory? Am I identified with this experience, thinking that it somehow defines me, or that somehow it's mine?

Maybe I'll unpack these just a little bit, these three different insights, or sometimes we call these the characteristics of experience. We can use this expression, "insights," as the way that we notice them when we're looking at our experience. But Ajahn Amaro is also saying they can be tools to help us be with our experience.

So, exploring anicca. This one is kind of the most obvious one, exploring the way that things change, this inconstancy. We see change everywhere we look around. The way that the audio equipment was changed here—I pushed this button, it's a toggle switch, and I thought I was toggling it on, not knowing that it had been left on and I was toggling it off! [Laughter] So many of these things. Seasons change, the weather changes, our bodies change, our internal experiences about our thoughts, our moods, these change too. You certainly don't need to be a meditator to recognize that things change.

But maybe we can explore this idea of dukkha, this idea of unsatisfactoriness, a little bit more. Because even if we have this really wonderful, perfectly delightful experience, you might ask, "Well, where's the dukkha in that? Is it true that everything has this unsatisfactoriness, this dukkha quality to it?" And using dukkha as a tool to examine our experience, maybe as a way of looking, a way of seeing things. If we really explore, we can see that even the most fantastic experience we have, the most glorious experience we have, has this quality of unsatisfactoriness to it, partly because it cannot make us completely and permanently happy. Maybe it brings some happiness, but that happiness arises and passes away, right back to that impermanence thing.

So each experience might help support the conditions for some happiness to arise, but we can notice that the happiness is fleeting; it's not permanent. And not only that, it might make us feel that subsequent, or maybe even past experiences somehow become inferior—they pale in comparison. Or even when we're having these experiences, we might be worrying about how we can prolong it.

I certainly have noticed this sometimes when I cook a meal: "Oh, this is delicious!" Or I'm eating a meal that somebody else has cooked—I'm not necessarily the greatest cook—and I'm often thinking, "Oh, how can I make this again? What are the ingredients? What was it that made it special?" So there's this little niggling sense of, "Oh, I want it again. How can I make it again?" This little sense of grabbing, holding on, which isn't quite happiness. The sense of wanting more, a little sense of dissatisfaction at that moment.

So the third, anatta, this principle of not-self. Again, this isn't a belief. We're not trying to make ourselves believe that we don't have a self, but it's a lens through which we can explore this experience of: what is this sense of me-ness? This sense of "I"? This sense of "mine," this sense of mineness. What is it that feels as if there is a "me" that's listening to this talk, for example? What is it that feels like there's this mind that's having these experiences that we are encouraging ourselves to look at during the meditation, or at this moment? What are these experiences that we're having? What is it that owns these experiences? And if we consider that to own something means that you can control it, is there an owner to these experiences?

How does any being really own anything? You know, really, in a substantial, absolute, real way, can there really be such a thing as owning, that is, complete control?

When we explore, we discover that this sense of "I" is really made up of a process of identifying: "This is me," "This is what I do." But that's a thought. "I like this," "I'm going there." Those are thoughts too. "I want it to be this way," "I don't want it to be this way." These are thoughts. The sense of self is created entirely by thoughts. But what are thoughts? They don't have any substance. They're arising and passing away, just one thought after another. And the only way that we can effectively maintain this illusion of having a self is to do a lot of thinking. Thinking, and planning, and projects, and programs. And if we just keep them coming, one after the other, and quickly paste them all together, we have this sense that we might be able to make something solid. But if we look, we'll see that it's just thoughts.

And when the mind starts to quiet down—and this might be in the setting of retreat practice, when the mind has an opportunity to really quiet down—and we investigate this whole structure of the sense of "me," the way that we identify, this structure begins to slip. It starts to seem not so solid, in fact. And if we're not so caught up in identifying with each experience, and instead we can simplify and see that each moment is really just seeing, hearing, smelling, sensing, tasting, thinking. And all of these are without a self.

So in this way, this exploration—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, not-self—this active looking and exploring, we could say is insight practice. This is part of what vipassana^[4] is about.

Mindfulness is just about being with the experience of what's actually arising, and with just simple mindfulness, these insights can arise. But part of vipassana practice is to include some of these investigations. Maybe just occasionally, maybe only on retreat, maybe during daily life, maybe during meditation. I appreciate that Ajahn Amaro describes that when we see—not the concepts, but the experiences, kind of like this third group of teachers that the Buddha talked about. So not just what we've heard, not just what we're thinking about, philosophizing, rationalizing, using logic about, but what we're experiencing. When we see them and we see, "Oh yeah, they're anicca." We might see one of those three, we might see all three. Often when you see one, they kind of go together. And often it starts with anicca, impermanence.

He describes that insight as a change of heart, an opening, a realization, an expansion of vision, a clear seeing, and seeing the world in a radically different way. Seeing like, "Oh right, how could there be an owner of this experience? How could there be an owner of this sensation? It's just an experience." And the experiences are fleeting; they're not sources of lasting happiness, and there's not a self.

Part of the beauty of this practice, of this teaching, is that we can learn from every experience. Whether it's pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant, these explorations, these inquiries, can occur with any experience, any sensation. We don't need to be having a pleasant experience on a meditation retreat. We could be filled with aversion and restlessness, but the mind that notices that aversion, the mind that notices that restlessness, that mind is not tangled up. Instead, that mind has some mindfulness and is noticing the experiences.

And that's the same mind, we could say, that notices that things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not a permanent self. So we don't have to tie ourselves up in knots thinking, "Oh, these are pleasant experiences, these are unpleasant experiences, I'm never going to get anywhere, I'm having all these unpleasant experiences, my meditation is terrible, I'm a terrible meditator," all this story-making that we might be doing. Instead, all of our experiences—whether they're the ones that we're wishing for, or the ones that we don't want—all of them we can just investigate. We can be with them, we can be mindful of them, and do this exploration: Is it permanent? Is it really a source of lasting happiness? And this third one, not-self, is often a little trickier. This one in particular does help to have a more quiet mind. But we're not asking you to adopt some belief, to just take on these teachings, but instead, the encouragement is to experience whatever is happening right now.

And then seeing these three characteristics are also the doorways to greater freedom, the doorway to greater ease, the doorway to Nibbana^[5]. So that whatever experiences you're having, may they be an opportunity for you to deepen your practice, have some insight, and may they be supported with some of the learning and some of your own thinking, and your experiences. Putting them all together so that they might be a benefit not only for you but for others, so you can show up in your life, in the world, with freedom, with ease. Thank you.