This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Mindfulness of Breathing (40) Unlimited Mind

The topic for much of this week is step nine of mindfulness of breathing, and this is the step where we're experiencing the mind. I hope that the way I'm presenting the mind is not trying to define it in ways where you have to fit yourself into the definition. Rather, I think it's pointing to how you experience the mind—the mental state or heart state. There's a lot of room here for you to find your own way to this. One of the ways to appreciate it is that we're moving into the sum total of how we experience the mind.

Vipassanā^[1] practice often has a big emphasis on particularity: really seeing the particularity of the in-breath, the out-breath, the sensations as they occur, and the particular activities of the mind as they come and go. But there is also a way that part of the particular is the harmonious working of all this together, or the awareness—the knowing—that knows it all. Whether mind and awareness, or knowing, are the same or not, it is very hard to pin these things down. It is difficult to know exactly what the mind is, or consciousness, or all these kinds of things that belong to the amorphous, difficult-to-define qualities and experiences of our interiority and inner life.

You will see in a moment why it is difficult to put words on it and define it exactly. The concepts that we live with and the ideas that we have about our experience actually shape our experience. We are not innocent bystanders of our experience. It is not that whatever experience we are having is only happening to us; we are also contributing, to some degree, to that experience. Certainly, there are clear things that happen to us.

To choose something relatively innocent, I will give you an example I've shared many times. I was thinking about it today when I was biking down here, as it was cold biking down here this morning. This was a kind of revelation from many years ago. I was living in Central California and going to college in Davis. There is an early morning fog—Tule fog^[2]—and in the wintertime, the cold fog is really cold. I didn't have any gloves, and I would bike to school. For the first five or ten minutes of being in class, I couldn't actually use my pen because my hand was still frozen. It was so cold. For a while, I was biking to school this way and feeling miserable, feeling sorry for myself because the cold that I felt was so terrible.

Then, at one point, I had a memory that the exact same feeling of cold I was having while biking to school was, to the best of my memory, the exact same feeling of cold I had in my fingers as a kid when I used to go skiing. When skiing, it was exhilarating; it was fun, fantastic, and part of the richness of the whole experience. I realized that how I was experiencing the same sensation varied depending on the interpretation I had of it, the context I put on it, and the ideas I had about it.

After that, biking didn't seem so difficult anymore. I realized that I was adding something to the experience of cold. I was adding self-pity and thinking, This is going to be tough and hard. I don't know what else I was adding exactly, but then it became just a matter of fact. It was simple to just have the cold. It was still cold and a little bit painful, but I didn't complicate it so much with all the ideas that were almost subconscious. I hadn't realized how much I was doing; I just thought the cold was bad and painful.

We contribute to the experience. We have interpretations, we make meaning, and we make predictions of what it means. We have self-referential feelings about it. This means we might have self-pity about things that are difficult, or self-congratulations for things that are good. These inner movements of the mind may be very subtle; we don't necessarily see them, but they are helping to shape our experience and give it its totality, its gestalt.

As we practice mindfulness, we can start teasing apart the different component elements that are all glommed together. We can see that self-pity is self-pity, and it's different from the cold. We can see that the way we're worried about the future pulls into the experience of the cold, but it is just our thoughts about the future. We begin teasing apart all the component elements, and as we do that, we begin freeing the mind. Rather than glomming onto or focusing on it, we begin to free it. Our experience—like my experience of the cold—is partly shaped by our relationship to it, but it is also shaping how we might experience the mind itself.

The mind gets contracted, tight, and small; the mind gets hot and agitated. The inner mood or state of mind that we have shifts and changes depending on what we're focusing on, and how we're focusing on it in relation to things. We are also, in a sense, shaping how we experience the mind, or how the mind can be felt. Whether that's the mind itself—who knows what the mind is—how we experience the mind is what we're really working with in this practice. The mind is also being shaped.

The language of the early tradition is that the concepts we focus and fixate on create limits. They create a boundary to the mind, an edge to the mind. But as we stop focusing so much on things, preoccupations, and the activities of the mind, the mind gets quieter and quieter. The feeling and sense of the mind begins to lose its edges, its coagulation, its contraction, and its gathering together. It becomes more open and more spacious. After a while, you can almost feel like there are no boundaries to the mind, no boundaries to awareness, or no boundaries to the state that we're in. To use a slightly dangerous word from what I said earlier, no boundaries to consciousness.

It isn't so important what all these words point to. The wonderful thing is the experience of no more edges, no more boundaries, and the mind starting to feel large, great, expansive, and wide. This is one of the things that can be experienced as we deepen this meditation practice: the mind becomes expansive and wide. In Zen, they call it "Big Mind"^[3], as opposed to small mind—the expansive mind rather than the contracted mind.

The more expansive it gets, the calmer it becomes and the less agitated it is. In a similar way that empty space has no agitation, they say that the mind becomes similar to space, with less agitation and more calm. It also helps make the mind more malleable and shapeable. When we are really fixated on something, the mind becomes hard, maybe even brittle. If you do the same habit of mind over and over again for decades, the mind gets locked into being a particular way, and it's hard to soften it. But with meditation and enough time, it begins to soften and relax, becoming malleable and shapeable.

What happens when the mind becomes softer and more shapeable is that it becomes easier to train the mind. It is easier to get the mind focused, centered, and settled. That allows for some of the more beautiful qualities of the mind to shine. A mind that is fixated, bounded, and limited by its agitation and preoccupation doesn't really allow for the luminosity of the mind to show itself—the clarity of a mind that feels clean and bright.

This gestalt, this wide sense of the attitude, state, or mood of the mind—this quality of awareness—is so wide that it includes all things. It includes our suffering, not to deny it, but to give it a very different context than if we are locked onto it. It is possible to suffer in different ways and not lock on, and to feel that the suffering is being held or existing in a much wider, broader context. This brings a certain kind of ease or calm that also allows us to have compassion for the suffering. There is space for friendliness and care for it, which is much more difficult when we are locked into it.

So, there are a lot of benefits to discovering this mindfulness of the mind. In Ānāpānasati^[4], the mindfulness of breathing practice, we train ourselves to breathe with the mind. Breathing in, one experiences the mind; breathing out, one experiences the mind. As always with Ānāpānasati, this rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is meant to keep us from getting fixated on anything, including getting fixated on the mind. We are just fluid and relaxed with the breathing: breathing in with the mind, breathing out with the mind.

Reflections on Taking Care

How about taking care of one's body by getting mittens or putting wool socks over your hands? These days, I bike down with mittens or gloves on my hands. I just was not smart enough when I was a college student for that to even occur to me! I didn't have gloves, and it never crossed my mind. For some of us, it takes a while to become wise about how to take care of ourselves. But in the meantime, I got a very good lesson from my story with my cold hands. Thank you very much.