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Mindfulness of Breathing (24) Imaginings for Gladness

There has been a strong tendency in the West, I think, to present the Buddha's teachings in a fairly rational way and to emphasize their empirical nature. It is really about seeing things as they are in a direct way.

In doing so, sometimes we leave behind or fail to notice the tremendous degree to which the Buddha and the early Buddhist tradition use imagination. They use the creativity of images and ideas to support the teachings. This provides us with a different reference point for both the teachings and the practice than simply rational, logical ideas.

The Buddha uses lots of similes, poetry, images, and little stories. All of these touch into other dimensions of our inner life beyond our rational, cognitive understanding. It touches our emotional life, our kinesthetic life, and our motivational life—the part of us that can be inspired and gladdened. It ties into our memory and our associations, as well as our thinking. All these different faculties that we have get touched, awakened, and brought into the field of our relationship with Dharma practice.

This contributes to the sense of unification that is samadhi^[1]. Cultivating and developing samadhi is an important part of practice. In fact, the Buddha said that to see things as they are, one must cultivate samadhi. Samadhi is unification, and unification is the bringing together of all our faculties into a dynamic, working whole, so that everything is in harmony.

Using the imagination is a means to evoke and elicit this in support of the meditation practice and in support of freedom.

It has to be done carefully, of course, as it can be overdone. Certainly, people use their imagination for all kinds of things that are not healthy or appropriate for Dharma practice. Spending a lot of time in fantasy, having delusions of grandeur or great pleasure, or getting lost in fantasies of conflict and war with other people—all these things take us away from this practice.

But the imagination that connects us to practice—we have to get a feel for it. Does it really connect? Does it really help us be more settled and more present for experience? We are using the imagination to eventually go beyond the imagination; it is a kind of stepping stone. The kinds of images that the Buddha seems to use tend not to be ongoing stories or sagas. They tend to be very simple, like a mountain, the earth, or a lake. Sometimes it is a dynamic image, like an underwater spring spreading goodness throughout a lake, or throughout the body. It is not a story, just a dynamic image of what is happening.

Another image that I love—I'll share some of these tomorrow—but in this integration process, as I said before, if we don't use our imagination, it is all too easy for our imagination to get used by others. We internalize the images and imagination that advertisements, commercials, politicians, and other people make up. Sometimes we internalize them in ways that are not beneficial for us, and can actually be quite detrimental. Imagining all kinds of terrible things happening in the world can just spiral us down in a way that is not helpful.

So we don't use imagination in Buddhism for fantasy, to avoid or deny what is going on, or to run away from life as it actually is. We use it with care, knowing how to do it so it supports us in being present. If it doesn't help us be present, there is no need to use it. It isn't like you are a better Buddhist if you use your imagination, but it is available to support us in becoming more focused.

One of the ways the Buddha talks about developing gladness in meditation—and gladness leads to joy, joy leads to tranquility, tranquility leads to happiness, and happiness leads to samadhi—is to appreciate what is absent as we sit and meditate. The most common thing that the Buddha emphasizes is the absence of the hindrances^[2].

When people meditate, they are often contending with the five hindrances: desire, aversion, lethargy and resistance, agitation and remorse, and doubt. These can be very strong, compelling hooks in the mind. We can get caught up in thinking about them and become involved in them. We can get lost in desire fantasies and aversion fantasies, get caught up in resistance, regrets, and anxieties, and really get lost in the universes that these can create for us.

As we settle down in meditation, getting more focused and relaxed, we start letting go of the force of preoccupation with all these thoughts that take us away from the present moment. We are able to sit more and more in the present moment. There comes a time when the hindrances have abated; they are not so strong anymore, and it becomes relatively easy to stay here.

The image I used the other day is of a large bowl—maybe a five-foot diameter bowl that they have in some children's museums. If you drop a marble down the edge, it will move this way and that way until its momentum slows down, and then eventually it falls through a hole at the bottom of the bowl, or rests at the bottom. But if you lean into the bowl and keep pushing the marble, it keeps going and going. To be caught in the hindrances is to keep the marble spinning. But when we finally settle down and let the marbles all settle at the bottom of the bowl and rest, we can feel in meditation how good it is for the mind to just be here.

At this point, the Buddha talks about having gladness that one is no longer caught, no longer hijacked or enslaved by the mind. The mind so often pulls us away, has a mind of its own, and we are just pulled along, losing our freedom in the process. We can feel glad about this freedom.

Here is where the Buddha teaches this as an act of imagination. The particular word he uses that is translated as "imagination" here can be a visualization. It has the word "seeing," anupassanā^[3], in it. It is a kind of seeing, but not through the physical eye; rather, it is through the mental eye of imagination. He gives five similes for being free of the hindrances, for being really here in their absence.

They are: a person in debt who has become free of debt; a person who was terribly sick who is no longer sick; a person who was in prison and bondage—tied down—who has become freed from prison; a person who was enslaved who has become freed of slavery; and a person who has wandered in a dangerous desert for a long time, who has come out to the other side and is no longer lost.

The Buddha gives these five similes for being free of the hindrances to provide a reference point for something people would celebrate. People would be so happy, it would be so relieving and joyful to be out of prison or out of sickness. But unless we remember that we are free of those things, we might just go on to the next preoccupation and concern. We should take time—not just to keep going back to the breath over and over when we're present—but to really appreciate the goodness, the well-being, and the delight of being free of the hindrances, focused, and present.

By doing so, the goodness of that spreads through the body, opens up more widely, and brings a kind of gladness that is part of this integration and unification process. We are no longer just keeping a laser focus of the mind, staying narrowly focused. Instead, there is a mellowing, opening, and settling experience of just softening here that gladness can give birth to. As we allow space for this gladness and joy—we don't pump it up strongly, it's just a natural kind of joy or gladness available when we take time to feel the goodness of what's happening in meditation—that is what allows the growth of the joy and happiness that are on the way to a strong samadhi.

It takes some wisdom to know what kind of imagination to use and when to use it—maybe what to use when you first sit down, and what to use when the hindrances have abated. The idea is not to make a big project out of it, but to note that it is available to us. It is like a little aid, a quiet support that is meant to support us, to inspire us to stay in the present moment, and to feel the goodness and well-being that comes when we really settle down in meditation. We are allowed to be present here and now, and we are allowed to enjoy it.

This is the stepping stone for going deeper, and in some ways more powerfully, into the sixteen steps of ānāpānasati^[4], which we will be coming to. For now, I'm just trying to introduce you to this territory of imagination. It can come into play when we start feeling settled in meditation, supporting the further settling and absorption in the very practice we are doing.

Thank you, and I look forward to tomorrow.