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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome everyone. As always, it's sweet to see the chat line.

Okay, just all at once, embrace all the experience that is your life. I trust wherever you are, it's safe enough not to read all the signals here, all the alarm bells of threat and opportunity. It's safe enough just to melt into this moment.

Now, the vigilance and all the armoring, all the bracing, the numbed-out disconnection—all that just melts into the moment, too. We become very alive.

We surrender some of the reference points, the referentiality sandwiching this moment between the past and the future, diligently keeping track of where I end and you begin, keeping tabs on what we like and what we don't like. All of these reference points squander the intimacy of what's here, what's arising and passing.

"Don't fight with yourself at any level," my teacher said. Radical permission for experience to arise and intensify and crest and fade. We're truly not getting anywhere, not strategizing to get anything, letting experience soften our heart through the gesture of non-resistance and intimacy.

It's so natural for us to get called back to our reference points: the story of me, my life, what I want, what hurts. It's like we try to take up some perch in samsara^[1] and see everything from there. But the perch is really just more experience. The illusion of all our reference points. So we tolerate not knowing. Tolerate some concern about not getting. Let the heart rest.

Every experience becomes exchangeable with every other. It's the dance of anicca^[2]. And here, resting in equanimity, we don't pick any sides.

Reflections on Equanimity

It's good to sit with you in this realm. I was benefiting from Buddhadasa's^[3] wishes that all beings "dance at ease in the breeze with minds left silent by laying to rest all things."

Dukkha^[4] has displaced dukkha, which has displaced other dukkha, and it's hard to keep track of all the things we might worry about. There's so much to care about, so much to love. Sometimes it feels like our nervous system wasn't really designed to care all the time. I sort of wish it were, but it doesn't feel that it is. Of course, how much rest we need, how much the heart needs to rest, what constitutes rest—that changes over the course of practice. But a flower isn't meant to be in bloom all the time, right?

Sometimes, I guess confession time, there are no closed buds, but I really want to pry open the petals that are closed. I guess a more accurate confession is not that I want to, it's that I do sometimes. I know that's bad, but I have issues—whatever, this is my impulse. But a flower is not meant to be in bloom all the time. The heart opens and closes.

I was considering the analogy with sleep. Sleep is this pervasive disconnection from our environment. We have our dreams, but from what's around us we are pervasively disconnected. That comes at a serious opportunity cost, to just disconnect for five, eight, or ten hours. But that disconnection actually is necessary for our functioning, for our learning, for our growth. And our heart needs rest too. Maybe equanimity is the deepest form of rest for our heart, our own heart's way of sleeping.

Our heart, in other words, needs these moments of being unstimulated. We usually try to rest through more stimulation. We're overstimulated by life, by the human condition, by our responsibilities, and then to soothe that stimulation, we pile on more stimulation and build a cocoon of unconsciousness. We know those moments of usually technologically-aided unconsciousness: all the streams of data. That is a kind of rest, but our heart is actually highly stimulated. Maybe we say equanimity, this fourth brahmavihara^[5], is something like true rest.

T.S. Eliot says, "Teach us to care and not to care." It sounds harsh. We can't stop caring, right? Just "not to care." We practice caring, and we practice acknowledging that our wishes do not govern the First Noble Truth^[6], do not govern samsara, this realm.

The Buddha did worry about nihilism. He worried that the teachings, this path, might be construed in such a way that it's compatible with nihilism, and he wanted to guard against that. There's some concern in emptiness that one experience is highly interchangeable with others. Really, the raw material of samsara doesn't matter much at all. That's what I was alluding to in the sit: everything becomes one taste. The play of change, of anicca. Sometimes people get the sense from this that nothing means anything. And when nothing means anything, love dissolves, goodness is at risk.

But then there's the other side: living with the sense that everything means everything. Every moment has tons riding on it: every decision, each longing, this pain, this hope, this lifetime, this generation. If everything means everything, then you can't stop caring or giving or worrying, or you can can't even justify a moment's rest.

And so we trace out the middle path. The middle path between "everything means everything" and "nothing means anything." For me, a lot of this is around the relationship, the balance of equanimity and compassion.

I have two quotes, both about the death of one's father, representing these two sides for me. Somehow they capture it beautifully: equanimity and compassion.

The first is from Karl Ove Knausgård^[7]:

"Now I saw his lifeless state, and that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor."

And Kathryn Schulz^[8] from Lost & Found:

"This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses without distinction the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often try to ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully at 74, tended through his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy; what shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral—glaciers and species and ecosystems... the pace of change as swift as in time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile. Everything felt vulnerable. The idea of loss pressed in all around me like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief."

The jacket slipping from the hanger to the floor, or the shock that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. And so we have equanimity and compassion in relationship.

Equanimity perhaps purifies our compassion. Our compassion, when purified by equanimity, becomes less compulsive, less co-dependent, less grandiose, less self-righteous, and more patient. And then our compassion is strengthened by equanimity. Actions arising from equanimity are more potent; they have greater moral force than those arising from clinging.

And so we zigzag our way through caring and not caring, finding the balance that's right in our heart for our energy, for what we're willing to give right now. And we rest, and we serve. We rest, and we serve. I offer this for your consideration.

Closing Remarks

Thank you. It's been good to be with you this week, and I appreciate the opportunity to explore these themes together. It feels very much actually in dialogue—even though all we've got is the chat and me talking, it feels very much like a relationship and aliveness.

I will wish you well. I'll stay on the chat if there are any questions I might be able to answer. I've been reading Kathryn Schulz often, so that's Lost & Found. Gil has one more week of retreat. I believe Nikki is here next week, and then Gil will return the following.

Thank you all. May you be well.