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Guided Meditation: Trust, Resolve, and Inquiry

There's a Dharma teaching that expresses the activity of awareness. It says there are three factors. The first factor, which Gil was talking about yesterday, is confidence in the Dharma. The word in Pali is saddhā^[1], and in Sanskrit, shraddhā. It covers the territory between trust and confidence. Maybe the way when you are very thirsty and you drink some water, and you taste how drinking water quenches thirst—you trust that activity.

So in awareness—sati^[2], mindfulness, zazen^[3], the activity of being aware—we entrust attention to the activity of the moment, and we discover. We realize that when it's met with non-grasping, when it's allowed to be what it is, something trustable in that form of experiencing arises.

The second attribute of this threefold teaching of the activity of awareness is resolve. When our intention ripens, it finds expression and activity through resolve.

And the third attribute, often called daigidan^[4] (great doubt), is maybe understood another way: inquiry that doesn't conceptualize what's experienced. That inquiry allows it to be dynamic. It allows it to be—we could even call it the truth of the moment. The truth of the moment: this appears to be happening.

So, confidence, trust, resolve, and this kind of inquiry. This is how it is in this moment, and it's dynamic.

As we start to sit, the confidence, the trust in your own body, its stability—finding the stability of posture. Quite literally, arranging your cushion, your seat, how you're sitting. And then letting your body rest on how you're sitting, and letting your body become upright, take its place in the world of being.

Within uprightness and openness, so be it. This body is part of all being. Sitting in the midst of all being.

And when we trust what's happening, when we trust our own being, we have nothing to prove. There isn't anything in particular that we need to assert or become; we just trust it as it is.

And when we trust the breath, we let it happen. Such is the nature of the breath, we can notice, as we allow the breath: how is that? How is it to allow the body to breathe? It has a physical expression. As we contact the sensations of the breath in the body, they instruct us. Those sensations instruct us on the activity of allowing.

Can the nostrils, in the area behind the nose, soften and open? Can the throat relax? Can the chest open? Can the abdomen soften?

Sometimes it's helpful in the first breaths—like one teaching you can try on, you can experiment with—if you breathe in fully, you hold the inhale, and you just gently push down with the diaphragm. It's almost like you're opening up the abdomen, and then release. You can experiment doing that a couple of times, and then allow the breath and just notice. Is there any change? Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But trusting the body and breath to find their own rhythm is in the realm of sensations. The thinking mind doesn't have to take charge, knowing what should happen. It's like trusting the being that we are in a very visceral way.

There's resolve, but in many ways, it's gentle, perceptive, and steady. And as we trust the breath to breathe the body, we're introducing those factors. The factors are resolve; it's gentle, it's consistent, persistent with a steadiness.

As we open all the senses—seeing, hearing, sensations in the body, maybe smelling and tasting too—it's as if we're enlivening the world of awareness, but not resisting the constructs of conditioned being. How it will present thoughts, memories, images, anticipations that ripple through us, reverberate in our conditioned being.

Can there be a non-grasping inquiry? The activity of awareness expressed as an inquiry: what's happening now? Before, I expressed it as "notice, acknowledge." Not so much as a doing, as an opening to being, similar to how the breathing is in the body.

Can attentiveness illuminate what's being constructed by the senses, by thought and feeling? Non-grasping inquiry and attention.

Can the resolve express itself as a confident invitation to awareness? There is nothing to prove. Trust what is.

The inquiry of awareness has an energy to it that's balanced by the trusting. What's happening now? Nothing to prove, assert, or accomplish.

How is the interplay between awareness and the activities of the self? How is that interplay right now? The expression of awareness—is it definitive? Or the expression of the constructed self, with all its issues and intrigues? Can they dance together with nothing to prove or accomplish?

In a moment, I'll ring the bell. Play a game with yourself: try to track as carefully as possible as the bell rings. Something in your disposition shifts. How is it all? What's happening?

Harmony of Awareness and Self

So, this interplay between the world of awareness and the world of constructed being—the deeply habituated world of constructed being, and this, maybe we could even say, revered world of awareness. And then, as we're discovering in practice, part of the challenge is not to stop the world of constructed being, but to not let it make invisible, to dissipate, the world of awareness.

The challenge of our practice is to make the interplay between the two harmonious. Just the same way we call this intensive the "Harmony of Vipassanā^[5] and Zen." Right in the title, there are clues about the challenge we're picking up. The interplay between the world of awareness and the world of the self.

As Buddhism developed, different aspects of practice were acknowledged as their own—the term would be its own kind of Buddha field, or another term would be a kāya^[6], a realm of existence. So the world of the karmic self is its own realm of existence, and the world of awareness is its own realm of existence. And the world of the interplay between the two is its own realm of existence.

A few days ago, I mentioned a Zen story where a monk asked the teacher Dongshan^[7], "Which of those realms of existence do you live in, or do you attend to?" Dongshan says, "That's the inquiry that I stay close to." The inquiry that's exploring what's happening now: is the world of the self dominant? In fact, is it totally convincing and dictating what is? Is the world of awareness sort of in its demeanor rebuking the world of the self? Monkey mind, self-centered, all caught up in yourself.

These three realms in Buddhism, each of them was acknowledged as a kind of Buddha field, and they had their own Buddha, they had their own name as a significant realm of experience. And they each had their own designated attribute. The realm of awareness went beyond any fixed ideas. The realm of the self was definite, objective; this is how the stuff of being becomes tangible. And then, very interestingly, the interplay of the two was designated as the realm of bliss, the realm of ease, the realm of harmonious existence.

The interplay between the karmic and the dharmic is the realm of harmony. As we bring awareness to the self—not simply an awareness of "Oh, there I go doing my stuff again," or maybe we flip it and we become puffed up, "Well, I think my ideas are..."—the awareness helps us bring some very supportive qualities into the realm of the self. It helps us start to see the way we think, and feel, and interact.

That's an enormous teacher for us. There's so much to learn. We learn about our own conditioned self, and we learn about the human condition. Each of us is a specimen of the human condition. There's a repertoire of emotions that each of us plays jazz with. We take that repertoire and we create all sorts of amazing and wonderful variations on a theme. Each of us, in our genius of creativity, adds value, significance, to different ways of thinking about the self, about life. And when there's awareness of it, it's so instructive.

Sometimes it's helpful to say to ourselves after there's been a significant experience in our life, "What did I learn from that?" In a way, we're inviting the noticing and the acknowledging and the inquiry: "What did I learn from that?" Not so much to grasp that "Okay, now I know," but more, "That's really helping me see the interplay between awareness and self." So it tutors our conceptual mind.

Then there's another extraordinarily valuable thing as we feel it. Rather than have the emotions sort of extend out, objectify the world, and attribute emotions to it, we feel the emotions. And as we feel them and acknowledge them, there's a kind of integration. It's a kind of emotional integration: oh, anger. Oh, sadness. Oh, gratitude. Oh, love. And we can feel how some emotions have a kind of disturbing contraction, and some emotions have a soothing expansion.

I once heard someone describe God as opening to greater being, and how certain emotions open us to greater being. Maybe if we're inclined, we call it a religious experience, or maybe we're just grateful.

Then the teachings that the mind is being given, and the teachings that the heart, the emotions, and the integration stimulate, build our trust in the Buddha Dharma. They stimulate our trust in the practice of awareness. And yet, almost paradoxically, they invite us not to cling to what's being revealed, what's being illuminated. They invite us and remind us that it's an activity, not a fixed state that you attain and then you own it, and then you have a better "me." You have a "me" that's so wonderful that it can conquer the very process of being alive.

In some ways, rather than attaining and having, the process stimulates us in a confident and trusting way to give over. "Okay, this is how it is. This dynamic interplay of the stuff of being human in the mysterious, wonderful way of being aware, and learning how to harmonize." Learning how to be patient with your own clinging and aversions, and others' clinging and aversions. "Ah, this is the human condition."

Each of us trying to navigate and sustain our very life in this moment. This is this person's best effort at being alive. I don't know why they're so angry or so afraid, but I can bring patience. I can bring an acceptance, a permission. And I can bring positive attributes. This is the resolve. The energy of attention, and commitment, and engagement.

And Dongshan says, "I stay close to that. I stay close to studying all that." Maybe all I'm trying to say is this: that it's an activity. It's not like, "Do this and then everything in your life will be perfect." And I would suggest to you that would be kind of boring if it takes on a steady state. And yet, the constant activity of life, it is a challenge. And it asks something of us. But asking something of us is part of what keeps us alive.

Just imagine if you had a good friend and they never asked anything of you. Versus how each of us, our life goes up and down. Sometimes we're the giver, sometimes we're the receiver, and that's what enhances the relationship. So Dongshan is saying, "I stay close to this. This is what I'm attending to. This is what I'm engaging, this dynamic interplay."

Okay, sorry I've run over. Thank you very much, and enjoy your day, your evening, and may you have wonderful discoveries.