Mindfulness as Protection (3 of 5): Mindfulness at the Time of Death, and as a Genuine Refuge; Guided Meditation: Impermanence

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Impermanence;Mindfulness as Protection (3/5): Mindfulness at the time of death, AndAs Genuine Refuge. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 23, 2022. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Impermanence

Okay, so let's go ahead with the meditation together. I see folks arriving, and more will come and join us. So just settling in, arriving. And allowing yourself to have a sense of slowing down, becoming present for your experience. You can let the eyes close. Just feel the body in the sitting posture.

Feeling the straightness of the spine. Feeling the connection to where you're sitting, the contact points of the seat and the legs or the feet.

We might imagine that the body rises off the cushion or the chair, the way a sea plant rises off the sea floor. It's anchored at the bottom and just floats in the water, lead upward. The arms float, the head floats on the spine. It can help to imagine a little space between the top vertebra and the base of the skull, to soften the neck.

Softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Releasing the chest, the belly. So inviting some ease or expansion in the torso.

So the invitation today is to take body sensations as the focus of mindfulness. This includes sounds and the breath, often one of the more prominent body sensations, and also all the various pulsings and tinglings, heat, and vibrations that course around in the body. Some of these are related to being in the sitting posture, or whatever posture you're in. Some relate to digestion or breathing. And some are just there because the body is alive.

So we have these different sensations, and we put those into the foreground, while letting thoughts or emotions be more in the background for now. Those things are fine, but they're not the main focus for now.

So just resting with the various body sensations. Opening to that, or being willing to listen to the body, whether the sensations are pleasant or unpleasant, as well as all the many, many neutral sensations.

The body has a way of opening up when we turn our gentle, mindful attention toward it. Perhaps the way a flower opens when the sun begins to shine on it. It perks up a bit, it shows more of itself, when there's a genuine, non-judgmental interest.

There are a lot of options with the body. So if a given part is feeling painful, it may draw the attention, but there's no need for us to continue with that. If it feels like it's getting stronger, we can just move the attention elsewhere. Or we can open to sounds, or even open the eyes. You can find what works is simply to be simple.

As we stay with this realm of the body, breath, and sounds, it's easy to see that many of these sensations are changing. Some are very quick, just to arise and pass. Others feel like they're ongoing, but if we look carefully, they're probably shifting, fluttering a bit.

There are different ways to be with changing experience like this. We might kind of feel each one as an event, noting it. Or we can also have a sense of mindfulness as a field or an expanse, like a lake or like the sky, and various experiences come in and out of that, happen within that. Either of those ways is fine. But just being aware of this changing flux of experience.

And from time to time we might again just scan through the body and invite ease, in case any parts have tightened up. Sometimes the eyes get tight if we are literally trying to look at experience. Or sometimes the changing nature of experience brings up some tension. So it can help to imagine softening. Just letting the experience be changing as it is. So we have a sense of resting in the normal flow of sounds and sensations and breath. Resting.

When we are noticing impermanence or inconstancy, it becomes clearer to see when the mind hangs up or gets fixed on something, which is very normal. And when we notice that the mind has grasped onto the bank of the river, we can just gently get back into the flow.

Again, seeing if we can rest and soften with this changing experience.

Noticing the changing nature of experience gradually helps the heart learn to let go. There's no point in grasping this flow. There's hardly anything to grasp as it changes so much. It even seems to run by itself.

So as we move toward the ending of this sit, we might consider how might it be to flow a bit more today. We may find that it's easier to be present for other people when we are not stopping the flow of an interaction in our mind by grasping on to our own thoughts or views, thinking about what we're going to say next, but instead just staying present for this other person.

Our own willingness to be with how things are changing makes us more available for other people and more resilient, more flexible, more responsive. So cultivating this understanding of change is our friend, and it's an important, rather deep aspect of practice, and it evolves over a long time.

Announcements

So first I just have one little announcement, which is that on Friday we will have, after this session, a community meeting on Zoom. And the link for that will appear on the IMC website in the 'What's New' section, and it'll be on the calendar also. And I'll be there for any questions you might have, and we'll have time for some breakout groups also. So that's Friday if you're interested.

Mindfulness as Protection (3 of 5): Mindfulness at the Time of Death, and as a Genuine Refuge

One time Gil was on a long retreat during his time in Asia, and he had an insight about mindfulness. Sometimes these things don't sound maybe as profound when spoken out of context, but his insight was that we can be mindful of anything. There's nothing that can't be known in awareness. And this is really good news. It's really good news.

So we talked yesterday about practicing to extend our mindfulness into broader realms of our life. And the focus was about how mindfulness counteracts what are called the five cords of sensual pleasure, which also includes aversion. So today we're going to go deeper into this territory that mindfulness can penetrate. So even beyond the kind of more everyday situations where we have tempting sense pleasures or more challenging emotions, there is the great challenge that all humans face of aging, and illness, and death. And this too is a realm for mindfulness. So the Buddha gave some brilliant teachings on mindfulness in relation in particular to death or terminal illness. And I hope you're not reaching for the 'off' button at this moment! Please stay if you can. I'll be sharing some stories around this, including something that the Buddha said as his own death was approaching.

So many suttas talk about mindfulness at the time of death, as well as mindfulness being a refuge in general in times of challenge. So both of those are today's theme: mindfulness at the time of death and mindfulness as a genuine refuge for us.

Mindfulness at the Time of Death

When the Buddha was giving meditation instructions to his son Rahula, one thing that he taught him was mindfulness of breathing. And in the discourse where he does that, he says to Rahula, "When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, even the final in-breaths and out-breaths are known as they cease, not unknown." So it's quite powerful. He's saying that, in other words, we can die mindfully just through the basic practice of mindfulness of breathing, which I know many of us have done at least to some degree. So continuing with that goes all the way to being mindful up to the last moments, the last breaths. So mindfulness is a reliable practice for us in ways that some other practices may not be.

The monk Assaji^[1] became agitated around the time of death because he was a practitioner mostly of concentration, and he found that he could not concentrate his mind when he was enduring a terminal illness. And so he expressed this concern to the Buddha. He said, "I think I'm slipping back because I can't get concentrated." And the Buddha pointed him toward letting go of attachment even to meditative states, and he pointed out the reliability of simply knowing we can be aware of how we are. Mindfulness is always possible. Being aware is very simple.

As Ajahn Sumedho^[2] says, and this is very practical advice for any time: "Right now it's like this." I've practiced that myself sometimes. Just realize, "right now it's like this," and it brings the mind right back to a simple place. And we could do that all the way up to the moment of death.

So then another story. One time the Buddha visited the sick ward, according to the discourse, the place where the monastics who were sick were staying. And he said to the monks there, "A person should await their time mindful and clearly comprehending. This is our instruction to you." And how is a person mindful? And then he goes on to name the four establishments of mindfulness, exactly using the same language that they're stated in the Satipatthana Sutta^[3]: "Here a person is mindful of the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, and mindful," and so forth. So it's interesting that he points out that this is what should come to mind even when we're sick, even when we're in the hospital essentially.

Feeling Tone and Impermanence

So then which aspects of Satipatthana might be particularly relevant for someone who's in a state like that? And in one teaching, the Buddha points particularly toward the contemplation of feeling tone. So you might remember Gil has been going through all the Satipatthanas, and when he spoke earlier in the series, feeling tone is the second foundation of mindfulness. And it's about whether experience is pleasant or unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So it's a very kind of basic response that we have to experience. And so that means it can be done without much mental effort. To just know whether something is pleasant or unpleasant or neither is something the mind can know every moment. And it's a powerful practice because it directly prevents the mind from—or at least reduces the chances that the mind will move into—craving or aversion. So if we just know something with the label "this is pleasant," we're much less likely to mindlessly go on into thinking, "How can I get more of this? I really need this," etc. Or if it's unpleasant, we can just stop there and not get into a long thought trail about how horrible it is and how we wish it would end, which the mind would otherwise naturally do. So this is definitely relevant for dying. We don't want to keep our mind in a prolonged state of aversion.

And then the suttas also very much encourage the wisdom reflection that all feeling tones are impermanent. That was what we looked at in the meditation. That was more just impermanence of sensations, so that means it's not fruitful to grasp onto them or push them away. So reflection on impermanence is a major theme, as you might guess, in the teachings about death. So again, even just the simple practice of sitting and noticing changing sounds, changing body sensations in our current state, is something that will fortify the mind and prepare it for something that's coming later. So all of our current practice is actually building up strength in the mind.

A Genuine Refuge

I volunteered in a hospice for a while, and I noticed that there was a big difference between the people who became overwhelmed by regret or pain or the general indignity of dying, compared with those who could stay present and could somehow keep their mind in a more wholesome place. I guess to be clear I'll say that there is not just one perfect way to die—the proverbial "good death." However you die is going to be fine. But it is good to at least aim the mind toward mindfulness. And it can help in particular to keep feeling tone in mind. So having this method of avoiding falling into craving and aversion really serves as a refuge for the mind and the heart. So there's again this sense, like we talked about yesterday, that when the mind is mindful, we're safe, we're protected in a sense.

So I wanted to look now at some passages from the sutta that deals with the death of the Buddha. So that's the Mahaparinibbana Sutta^[4], and it chronicles the last few months of the Buddha's life. It's a very long sutta that kind of goes through everything he was doing in his travels and his teachings all the way up to the time of his death. And it includes these famous lines that some of you have probably heard. So he says, "Monks, you should live as islands unto yourselves, being your own refuge, with no other refuge. You should live with the Dhamma as an island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other refuge." And many people have only heard that much. And that alone is good advice for dying, which we will be doing alone, even if there are people with us, of course. No one is coming along with us in that transition. But I want to highlight today, because of this series, what comes after those famous lines.

So the Buddha continues, "And how does a person live as an island unto themselves, being their own refuge, and with the Dhamma as an island, as a refuge? Here a person abides contemplating the body as a body, ardent, fully aware and mindful, having set aside covetousness and grief for the world. A person abides contemplating feeling as feeling..." and so on. You may recognize the lines again, straight from the Satipatthana Sutta. Same language. So the Buddha says that cultivating the four establishments of mindfulness is how we can be a refuge for ourselves, and how we can also take the Dharma as our refuge. And he thought that was important enough that he conveyed it clearly and strongly quite close to the time of his own death. He was thinking about what to pass on to people.

So one more story, this one modern. And this is something I heard from a friend of mine who trained as a monk in Asia. And he tells the story about an abbot of an Asian monastery who was dying. So this is recently, during the 20th century. And the abbot summoned his senior monk, saying that he wants to give him a final gift. And the monk was wondering what's that going to be. And so he came to the abbot, and the abbot took the monk's hand, and he folded down four of his fingers, and he just held his hand like that. And he said, "The four foundations of mindfulness are my gift to you as I pass on."

So these are some lines from Bhikkhu Analayo's^[5] book on mindfully facing disease and death: "Suppose one has suddenly become seriously ill and is in pain, physically unable to sit in formal meditation or just be quietly by oneself, perhaps even being close to passing away. What to do? The one thing to rely on in such a situation is mindfulness. From early Buddhist meditation to modern day clinical pain relief, mindfulness is what empowers one to face disease and death." After all, we might say, what's the alternative?

So mindfulness is valuable even as we approach death, the great challenge for humans. And so it might be that at this point you're starting to get a sense of the real strength and power of mindfulness. It's very powerful. So we started just a couple days ago by talking about an almost passive guarding of the sense doors, but mindfulness has a different dimension also, where it can step forward and meet very difficult situations. So that's the direction that we're going to go next. Tomorrow I'll talk about the strength of mindfulness and some of the wonderful images that go with that. It can be quite inspiring.

So thank you.