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Meditation: The Shining Sun of Awareness

Greetings, friends. Greetings, and welcome. It's lovely to spend this moment in time with all of you, practicing and cultivating together. And it's lovely to see your hellos and greetings warming the space with your metta^[1], with your heart for each other.

Today, we continue to engage. We continue to engage right here with the practice, and with considering and exploring the teachings of karma^[2] as an empowerment in each moment. We explore our experience, our predilections, what we pass down the stream to ourselves in this life, who we are becoming every moment, and who we are making ourselves to be.

So, let us begin by meditating together. I'd like to invite you to arrive in your meditation posture.

Arrive in your meditation posture. Allowing your back to be straight. Allowing there to be a sense of integrity in your posture. And inviting your body, inviting the muscles of your body, to rest in this moment. To relax.

To arrive. To arrive here in this moment in time.

Allowing awareness to be bright, as if awareness is waking up bright in each moment. Expansive like the sun. The sun in your heart, the sun in your body, shining awareness. This amazing, beautiful, mysterious, powerful capacity of our heart and mind: awareness. Expansive through our bodies.

Aware of how this body is sitting, breathing. Effortlessly, it's just here. Just like the sun shines, as if effortlessly it's there. It's just there, you don't have to do much.

Similarly, the sun of awareness. Internally spacious, expansive, effortless knowing. Knowing this body, knowing this heart, knowing this mind. Each breath received in the body. And the sun of awareness shines on the sensations of each breath.

Each sensation, each thought, each sound, each emotion—the sun of awareness shines warmly, smilingly, knowing everything without exclusion or exception. Knowing everything appreciatively, openly.

Not holding back its knowing or its warmth from any object that is known in the space of heart and mind. Whether it's tightness, clinging, pain, or sadness, it's all known by the sun of awareness. With warmth intertwined, goodness intertwined in the knowing. Effortlessly engaged.

And with a sense of receptive interest—not judgment, but receptive interest—dropping this question, this inquiry, into your heart: How am I engaging with this moment? With whatever object is arising in this moment, what is the flavor of engagement?

Is it with greed, wanting more, attachment? Is it with hatred, "I don't want this to be here"? Is it with confusion, lost? With anger? With fear? Just knowing, how are you engaging? How is the quality of engagement?

With whatever is arising, the object is less important. It can be the best news or the worst news, it doesn't matter. It could be pain or pleasure. What is the quality of engagement? Our relationship to whatever is arising.

Is the sun of knowing imbued, tinged with equanimity^[3] and kindness, or something else? Whatever object is being known right now—sensations, thoughts, sounds, whatever.

Letting the rays of the sun of awareness touch and know the goodness of having shown up, having practiced this morning, as we bring this sit to a close. With reactions of appreciation, kindness, and gratitude for yourself, for the sangha^[4], and for the causes and conditions.

And with generosity, both letting go of whatever was difficult, challenging, distracted, or sleepy. It's okay, it's all right. You've done your best. And through generosity to all beings, sharing our collected goodness, offering it as if we let the sun of our goodness shine, offering it throughout the world.

May all beings everywhere be well, and benefit from my intentions. From my orientation towards wisdom, towards goodness and kindness. May all beings everywhere, including myself, in all parts of the world, be well. Be free.

Karma (3/5) HOW Are You Engaging Right Now?

Hello and greetings, dear sangha.

So, karma. Karma as action. We've been discussing these three aspects of action over the past couple of days: the intention around it (the leading edge), what is done (the action of thought, speech, and body), and the trailing edge (what is left behind, what is created, what is made).

Today, I'd like to talk about what Andrew Olendzki^[5] terms "where the action is."

There are two aspects to every moment's experience. One is the content, what you're aware of. It could be a sound, a thought, a sensation. In fact, in Buddhism, there are six sense doors. There are the usual five senses that we have—smell, taste, touch, hearing, and seeing—and then the sixth sense door is the door of the mind. In any moment, you can choose to imagine a beach. You can bring to mind a piece of music that you love and play it in your mind. Again, it's a sound, but you can play it. Or you can have a happy thought or a sad thought, you can conjure it up. In the mind door, everything can be chosen to be played.

So there is the object of awareness. There are many objects, either physical objects (seeing, hearing, tasting) or objects of the mind. The mind can access all of those five objects; even remembering a touch or a sensation, you can recreate it in the mind door. Which is pretty wild, right? It's pretty awesome being human, that we can do all this, recreating all these objects of knowing, objects of awareness, in the sixth door. I thought this was pretty cool when I first learned about the sixth sense door in Buddhism, whereas in Western psychology we only have the five.

Anyway, in every moment's experience, there is the object of awareness, which could be known through the six sense doors. And then there is our emotional response towards this object of awareness. How we are relating to it, how we are engaging with it.

As I just mentioned, the objects of awareness can be recreated in any moment in the mind door. Our mind-body apparatus can really lurch around from one object of awareness to another very quickly. Sometimes it will, sometimes seemingly not. You're thinking about this, and then maybe you're meditating, you come back, and then you're thinking about something else.

Both the object of awareness and the way we relate to it—our attitude or our reaction—are clearly defined in Buddhist psychology. The objects are called form, or rūpa^[6], within the teaching of the five aggregates^[7]. If you're not familiar with the teaching of the five aggregates, don't be overwhelmed or scared! I'm just explaining them to you, so stay with me. Form is just the object of awareness, also known in Pali as rūpa.

Then there are the saṅkhāras^[8]. The saṅkhāra aggregate is the aggregate of mental formations, also simply called formations. It is the way we relate, the way we engage, and how we react in each moment. In each moment, these shift and change. Even though we have this sense of permanence, every moment is a refreshing, because it can change every moment. These formations, the ways we react, can shift and change every moment.

What is interesting is that if we were an automaton or a computer—my background being in artificial intelligence—just knowing an object is one thing. But the saṅkhāras, the way we react, respond, and relate to an object, that's where the action is. The way we engage with an object is what matters. Just knowing an object is like, "Okay, alright, yeah, this is just a pen." But, "Oh, I love this pen, I don't want anyone to take it!" or "Oh, I hate this pen, this reminds me of a difficult day"—the way we engage, the saṅkhāras, is how we are responding to an object. Whether it is a physical object or an object of the mind, that is what shapes and forms the next moment's experience.

That is how we are shaped and formed. A skillful, healthy way of relating to an object shifts and forms us into a more skillful, kinder, less deluded, more equanimous person or being in the next moment.

We could say that perhaps the harm that comes, or the harm that we cause ourselves, isn't so much from the objects that we relate to through the six sense doors, but rather the way we relate to the experience. The way we engage with the experience shapes our next moment's experience, and who we become, who we are, and how we show up in the world.

This is quite profound, actually, to see this teaching of karma in Buddhist psychology: how we engage shapes and forms who we become. This is also what Western psychology and neuroscience support. It's not so much the moment's experience, but the emotional memories—those emotions that really fix a memory in place. Something becomes fixed in place because of the emotional engagement, the emotion that has come alive as we have engaged with an object in the six sense doors.

You know this to be true from your own experience. Maybe some moment in the past became really etched in your memory, in your heart and mind, because of the emotional response you had to it. Because of the anger you had, or because of the love you had. That really felt like a formative moment. In artificial intelligence, in neural networks, that's called "one-shot learning." When there is a pattern that is so important, we give it so much weight that it really shapes and forms the neural networks.

But coming back to humans, the way we engage is really where the action is. A moment of anger shapes and grows. Maybe a moment of anger is just a thought, and then it becomes a striking blow, or a hurtful comment, or a nasty thought that becomes an action, and they grow.

Andrew Olendzki says this beautifully: who we are and what world we inhabit actually consists of this series of emotional responses unfolding within us. It's actually just this series of emotional responses that is who we are, and we keep conditioning them for the future.

So how we hold ourselves right now, in this moment—how are you holding yourself right now? How are you relating to the contents of your experience? How are we holding ourselves in this moment? Is it with greed, hatred, or delusion? Is it with the opposite: generosity, love, and wisdom? How we hold ourselves right here, right now, is the key to the next moment. It's not about what we engage with; it's how we engage with the what.

It's the how, and that is so powerful. We have so much power to shift and change the way we engage in this moment. Sitting on the cushion is important, of course, because that is when we really learn, observe, and get to see our reactions with detail. And yet, the whole day, our entire life, is our practice. Every moment we are shaping and forming our responses, our reactions, our karma.

Our time has come to an end, so I wish you a full, beautiful, wise, and wholesome karma-forming day of practice. Thank you so much for being here, for practicing for your own benefit and the benefit of all beings whose lives yours touches. Thank you, and see you tomorrow. Be well.