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Guided Meditation: all phenomena become equally salient

Hey folks, welcome. Good to be here. Thank you for the input on the meditation themes. It's only been a couple of weeks that I was away, but it feels like a while. Anyway, happy to be together. You have not given me coherent instructions on the meditation theme, but I will do what I can. They're not usually that coherent anyway. So, I can't really outsource the blame on you all! But yeah, it's good to be practicing whatever the conditions are.

So, finding your posture. Just settling in as you have a thousand times, but not into this moment.

Just breathing soothing energy into anything that's highly activated, and breathing life into anything that's frozen or flat. Just exquisitely, empathically connected with what it's like to be you in this moment.

How unwavering can that attunement be? To attune already presumes a measure of equanimity. Not intervening, not chasing out the urgencies. We're not exactly trying to be loving, but we get this sense why some people say that love is the willingness to pay attention.

Empty phenomena rolling on. Wherever there's viscosity in experience, wherever the attention snags like a hangnail on fabric—where the attention snags on phenomena—you just soften.

Practice listening even more deeply. All phenomena have exactly the same level of salience, and we're letting go. Nothing is more meaningful than anything else. Nothing is stickier than anything else. Nothing is more urgent than anything else. Maybe knowing and letting go are kind of the same.

Dharmette: Dharma is a relational path

Okay. It's good to practice with you. I was only away a couple of weeks, so it feels like a long time. Time is kind of wild. We just keep plodding along on this beautiful path as best we can.

I received a few anonymous questions about love, romance, and heartache, and I thought to speak to some of that next week. But in a way, I wanted to start the topic by describing how this is a relational path, and really to talk about how much we need each other on this path. There really is no replacement for another human being. Maybe that's a function of our mind literally being forged interpersonally; we cannot really become human without the mirror of the other.

The Zen tradition says, and I've repeated this phrase often, that the Dharma is passed from warm hand to warm hand. That captures a lot. It means we learn from other humans, and we learn when we open to their being. What do they know? We grow through the act of being known. That is absolutely foundational to making sense of our experience. Our being is forged interpersonally.

It feels like we have this super privileged access to our own inner lives, to ourselves, but in very important ways, we learn to see ourselves in the mirror of the other. The lineage of this path is relationship. Yes, there are texts, there are suttas^[1], there are traditions, buildings, and robes, but the entirety of the path depends on the sharing from one mind to another. We are embedded in a kind of lineage of giving and receiving, of generosity and gratitude.

Sometimes it's good to acclimatize to what has been offered to us. When I think about what the teachers have sat with, what they've done with their hearts, and what they offered, it's quite poignant. As the story goes, the Buddha needed to see a renunciate in order to recognize that life might be lived differently.

Often, our path begins when we meet someone who seems to know something that seems important. As I've said and looped back to often, when I was sixteen, I met another sixteen-year-old and I knew that she knew something that I didn't know, and something that was important. We might not even consciously really recognize it. It might just be this dim sense of something being awakened within us, some sense of possibility. That dim sense is like the beginning of goodness resonating with goodness. The perception of the goodness in the other awakens our own heart.

It may be worthwhile for each of us to recall our first emotional encounter with the path. What did that involve? Very likely it involved, or was linked in one way or another, to another person. Who were they? What did you feel? That person, of course, is linked to a million other people and a million other moments of practice.

We start observing others, really opening to the wisdom of another. What do they do with their words, with their bodies, with their hearts? Meditation is not primarily an informational transfer. New teachers are often preoccupied with getting the words right, being systematic, and not leaving things out. But the path is based on transmission, and that is the basic currency of Dharma: abiding in something together. Abiding in a mind state together.

I saw this line from a critic writing about T.S. Eliot. They said T.S. Eliot described a poet's meaning as "nothing more than a tactic to keep the mind of the reader diverted and quiet while the poem does its work upon them. Much as the burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house dog." This is why it's hard to summarize Dharma talks! When you try to recount what the teacher said, to do the Cliff Notes or summarize it in some way, it sounds kind of dumb. [Laughter] Because it's hard to actually describe the transmission. But it's in that relational intimacy that the currency of Dharma flows. In the Tibetan tradition, which I don't know well at all, there's a very explicit effort to inhabit the mind of the guru. These are deeply relational paths.

Someone once described maturity as the capacity to self-regulate when it's appropriate, but also the capacity to receive emotional support and be regulated by another person. Some people are really only comfortable tending to their emotional needs privately. Some people can only be soothed by others. For many people, maturation is actually the capacity to receive relational blessings.

I know for me, a deep habit when there's something churning in me is a subtle withdrawal, a subtle flatness. "Okay, I'm going to tend to this digestion process on my own." There's a kind of privacy and intimacy of the pain. But actually, sometimes what is important is to turn outward and actually receive. That risks, of course, developing some measure of a certain kind of openness, vulnerability, and dependency in sharing pain with the other. But sometimes that is the only way to actually de-stigmatize and de-shame pain, with some measure of surrender.

For all of us, whether we regulate internally or with another primarily, the autonomous fantasies of selfhood must at some point meet their end. Those fantasies really only perish when the shame of selfhood is dissolved by the care of another.

It is said that the path is good in the beginning, middle, and end. I would just add that we need each other all along the way too. Others inspire and gladden and support, and the path is full of much grace and goodness. And of course, it is punctuated by moments of desperation where the need is complete. The need is so abject and complete, and it's there that we learn about love. We cannot truly know the necessity of love but for moments when our whole being quivers. We have those moments on the path. If we're met, we start to understand what Sangha^[2] is more fully, and start to more deeply trust goodness.

Sometimes there is some species of pain from which we simply cannot wake up from ourselves. It takes another mind. A lot of what meditation teachers do is kind of co-meditate. Maybe the experience is too big for one mind, but definitely not too big for two.

To grow meditatively often requires at some point or another that we enter realms where the familiar viscosity of the mind of the moment dissolves. The familiar reference points and signposts dissolve. Groundlessness. When we use that word, groundlessness is a way of talking about the dissolution of signs. Just like we might get anxious being lost and having no map, the dissolution of signposts is often accompanied by some fear, sometimes even terror. We find ourselves in uncharted territory. We literally don't know how to behave, what to do, how to put one foot in front of another, really.

At that juncture in the path, it's the voice of another that provides the one and only sign that you do need, which is: "You're okay. This is path. Let us continue." Endless cycles of giving and receiving.

So, I offer this for your consideration this week, and I look forward to gathering next time.