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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Suchness

Good morning everyone, and welcome.

We're continuing with our Satipaṭṭhāna^[1] series, the practice of mindfulness. And mindfulness becomes pretty—this very simple capacity for being aware becomes pretty revolutionary after a while. One way to maybe mention this is to look at the way the Buddha referred to himself. Other people sometimes called him Gotama^[2], sometimes they called him—very commonly—the Bhagavān^[3], the Blessed One. Sometimes it's translated into "the Lord" in some translations. But when he talked about himself, he most commonly referred to himself as the Tathāgata^[4] (T-A-T-H, long A, G-A-T-A).

It's a kind of enigmatic title for someone. It seems to have been a title used in India before the Buddha. There are many ways of describing what that word means. Most commonly, one is to say it means "the one who is thus gone" or "thus come." It can also mean "the one who is thus," "the one who is such."

So imagine that you go to see someone and you ask them, "Who are you?" And the person says, "I am thus, I am such." The person doesn't highlight any particular characteristics of who they are. They don't define themselves in any of the usual ways you think would define them. They just say, "I'm like this." So it's kind of like, what you see is what you get. Just the suchness, that "just thus."

Often in our lives, we are defining ourselves by different characteristics, different ideas, different values that we have: "I am this, I am that." And when the Buddha said, "I am such, I am thus," he was not defining himself by any particular thing. So this is one of the revolutionary aspects of mindfulness: it is possible to sit and be present for the details of experience, but in no way define ourselves by them, in no way judge ourselves by them, or in no way build up a self around it. To simply be thus, be such.

Each thing is allowed to be its own suchness. Each thing is allowed to be its own experience. The in-breath just the in-breath, the out-breath just the out-breath. An itch just an itch, a sound just a sound, an emotion just an emotion, a thought just a thought.

So we will just sit here today with maybe this idea of sitting in your suchness. Just as you are, you're thus just as you are, without needing to define anything about yourself, or judge anything, or be anything except being present for the details of experience that arise.

Assuming a meditation posture that allows you to be alert and relaxed. And gently lower your gaze maybe to 45 degrees. With your eyes open, let your eyes gaze at nothing in particular. Let them lose focus, letting your eyes be cool and relaxed. And then, if you'd like, you can gently close your eyes.

Letting yourself take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Maybe in a gentle rhythm of breathing in three-quarters full breaths, as if you're gently swinging on a swing. Safely, relaxedly, enjoyingly. Breathing in, breathing out.

Letting your breathing return to normal. And as you exhale, relaxing the muscles of your face. Softening the face. Letting the face be the face without needing to make a self out of it, defining yourself by the face.

Softening the shoulders. Maybe feeling the tension in your shoulders relaxing. And if there is tension in the shoulders, let it just be in a relaxed way, without it saying anything about yourself. The suchness of shoulders being tense.

As you exhale, softening your belly. As you're exhaling, softening your whole body. Relaxing into your body.

And feeling this body without making it a self, without defining yourself by it. Without identifying who you are or judging who you are. Just the body from the inside out, feeling the suchness of the body.

And then centering yourself on your breathing. Maybe as if there are gentle waves on a wide, long ocean, and you're gently floating on the rising and falling of the breathing. Or a gentle wind that comes and goes.

Letting go of thoughts as you exhale. Maybe at the very end of the exhale for a moment, be aware of your experience when there is no thinking. Even just for a moment, beyond your thoughts, what is the experience?

As the inhale begins, allow the suchness of the inhale. An inhale that exists whatever way it exists, without defining yourself by it or relating it to your idea of self and your idea of the doer. Just the inhale, the suchness of the inhale.

As you're breathing, if you become aware of any feelings of pleasant or unpleasant, let it just be. In the suchness of pleasantness, the suchness of unpleasantness, without defining yourself by it or relating it to yourself, what it means about you, your preferences. Let the pleasant and unpleasant just be there in the suchness, the simplicity of each thing by itself.

Whatever emotions you're feeling, mood or state you're in, can you let that be in the suchness of the feeling? Without appropriating it to self, relating it to self. Without it having any definition or connection to any idea of yourself. Just the emotion existing by itself. Maybe you're breathing through it, breathing with it. Not doing anything with it, just allowing it to be there, as you breathe mindfully.

Whatever you're thinking, leave it alone. The simplicity of a thought without it having any role in how you define yourself, characterize yourself. Having any role of judging yourself, even in the evaluation of yourself as a meditator—that you should or shouldn't be thinking. Just let the thoughts exist in their own simplicity, radical simplicity, without any real bearing on who you are, what you are. Just thoughts.

Maybe this way it is easier to just be with the simplicity of breathing, and thoughts can just be in the background, nothing to be concerned with.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, take a few breaths to breathe in the simplicity of just being alive, just being here. The simplicity of being present, beyond the ideas, thoughts, judgments, and associations the mind makes about being alive, being here. Breathing into the fullness of our simplicity, the suchness of just being here. And not narrowing ourselves down to some particular aspect of our life. The suchness of just being.

In that suchness of being, welcome in now thoughts and images, ideas of other people. People you know, people that you'll encounter in the neighborhood, communities, places of work. People you don't know around the world. People who struggle and suffer around all kinds of things, including this idea of self, minds racing, and minds that don't rest in the suchness of their being.

And then let your care, your love, extend out into the world of other people. May your ability to be calmly, simply present be a source of kindness, care for others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (48) Five Heaps: Appearance

So good morning again, and welcome to our series on this Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the discourse on the establishing of awareness.

There are many ways in which awareness is lost or subsumed, or collapses into our preoccupation with our lives. One area is with all the different aspects of our beingness—who we are, whatever that is—that we can identify and cling to as me, myself, and mine.

And now we get to this next exercise in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. It has to do with five different areas in which we cling, especially clinging to me, myself, and mine. The literal meaning of the Pali word for this is "heaps"—big heaps of stuff. It's not a very technical idea, though because it became enshrined in Buddhist philosophy and psychology, it kind of took on a technical feeling. The usual translation into English is "aggregates." The Pali word is khandha^[5] (K-H-A-N-D-A).

It is five heaps of stuff. Sometimes we'll find modern dharma teachers will say something like, "The Buddha taught there is no self, but what there is are these five aggregates, these five heaps." The problem with that is that the Buddha never said that. In fact, the Buddha, if anything, saw the five aggregates, the five heaps, as problematic, something which was burdensome, that we need to overcome this burden of the five heaps.

So this next exercise has to do with these five heaps. And the way it's described is the "five heaps of clinging." So the word "clinging" is added to it. These are five areas in which we cling, five areas from which we cling, the five areas in the world of clinging. We're looking deeply into this area of clinging to these five things, and seeing deeply into its nature in a very particular way in this exercise in the fourth foundation of mindfulness, of awareness.

I want to give an analogy. Imagine that it's a beautiful, peaceful day and you're out maybe on the beach. Or if you don't live near the ocean, maybe make up some place—a big, beautiful meadow or field that goes on for a long while. But imagine a beach: a wide, long, beautiful, sandy beach with very clean sand. Maybe very soft, fine-textured sand. You walk barefooted, and it just feels so nice and comfortable to feel the warmth of the sand and the softness of it. The beach has a very gradual grade, so it's easy to walk on, and it may be many hundreds of yards from the water up to wherever the vegetation begins. You can see up the coast for a long way.

It's an inspiring day with lots of sky, lots of beach, and you see the suchness of the beach. It's just a beach, just the suchness of it. It's inspiring, it's nice, you can wander freely. There is a sense of freedom wandering aimlessly up and down, close to the water, away from the water. It just feels so comfortable and so nice, and you have such a wonderful day. Maybe you have a picnic at some point, turn around, and come back. Just being on the beach.

You come back a week later thinking you'll do the same thing because it was so nice. But now the local beach authorities have made a decision to give easier access, or so they thought, to the beach to everyone. So that everyone would have equal ability to kind of just walk the beach, not have to worry about people getting in front of them or blocking their way. So they've decided to put fences down the whole length of the beach that are maybe ten feet wide or five feet wide. They're making lanes.

So you have to get a ticket and reserve a spot beforehand, and you're assigned a lane. Now there are these ten-foot fences on either side of the lane, so people really stay and have their privacy in their lane. And you're given your lane, maybe lane 38, and now you can just walk straight on that lane for as long as there's the beach. Everyone is free to walk their lane, and this way it's equal, and everyone has equal access. Though you can pay a little bit more to be close to the ocean.

What you've lost, then, is the suchness, the vast freedom, just the beach by itself. Now it's been defined and laid out. It's a kind of ridiculous analogy, but this is what we do to ourselves. We are like a vast open beach without any definition in the sand, but we make lines in the sand. And we define one thing over another.

The five lines, that these five heaps are, are the five kinds of lines that we make. Often the first word is called "form," or sometimes "body," but "form." I prefer the word "appearance," the physical appearance. But not our physical physicality, rather the way it appears to us. The second is the feelings of pleasant and unpleasant. The third is the basic perception, the sensation of sensations that occur. The fourth is the mental world of other mental activities: concepts, ideas, wishes, aspirations, memories. And the fifth is consciousness.

It makes some sense maybe to divide up our experience this way, but the Buddha is suggesting you don't have to divide them up this way. Once we divide them up this way, we cling to them and hold onto them in particular ways. Now if we cling to them, it's like making a fence, making a line, making a lane in our experience. And we're selecting part of who we are to cling to at the expense of a disconnection with the rest of it.

Some people cling a lot to their body. Some people to their comfort and sensuality, our pleasant and unpleasant. Some people to their perceptions, their sensations, their ideas of things. Some people to the whole inner landscape and psychology. I think it's a particular specialty of the modern psychological world where we're so hypersensitive to the little nuances of what we think and what we feel, and how we judge and how we operate psychologically. There's a lot of clinging there.

And then there's also this idea of clinging to consciousness, to awareness itself as being ultimate, as being special.

So these are five areas of clinging. Rather than saying that the Buddha taught there's no self but rather these five aggregates, the Buddha said that there's no need to cling, but these are the five areas in which people cling. These are five areas in which we divide ourselves up and then get attached to those divisions.

The idea is to be able to let go of those clingings, to allow things to return to the suchness of our experience, the simplicity of just the beingness of things that arise and pass and come and go. In fact, that's the exercise: to see the arising and passing of each of these five heaps. As we see the arising and passing, then at some point the sense of the division, the lines, the fences in the sand fall away. And we start being able to see then the arising and passing of all phenomena, and the suchness of things that occur.

So we are in the pristine simplicity of who we are. We don't make any lines, we don't make any fences and divisions. Everything is allowed to exist in its own naturalness, as it appears. There are sensations in the body, there are pleasant and unpleasant, and all these things, but they exist in this wider, broad, peaceful beach. Now that there are no lines in it, it's all allowed to exist without clinging to any of it.

The first of them is appearance, which is the physical appearance of how we are. So it's not literally what our physical body is, the physicality of it, but it's the concepts, ideas, projections, and ways of selecting out our physical experience that we get attached to. So for example, the physical appearance of our nose, our skin, our height, or our size. It's all these physical ways in which we appear to ourselves and to others. And that is not just the way things are, but has something to do with how we select out: this is important to judge people by, or comment on people, or notice about people, notice about ourselves.

A tremendous amount of suffering occurs in the clinging to appearance and to how things appear to us in our body. The Buddha's suggestion is that instead of focusing on being caught in the appearance and concerned and preoccupied by it, step back with mindfulness and see that the world of physical appearance belongs to the world of things that are inconstant, changing, moving.

Partly because one form of clinging to the appearance is to think that our appearances are constant or permanent: "This is who I am." The world of appearance is an interactive world between our physicality and the mind's values, perceptions, concepts, judgments, selectivity, and projections that the mind makes. If we pay careful attention, we see that there's a kind of reconstruction of appearance, a reconstruction of what's important, by selecting what's important and clinging to it, and judging it, and building up ideas around it.

And that is what begins to relax and soften as we begin seeing that appearances have a flow of inconstancy, of arising and passing that goes on. Then the clinging can begin to relax. The prioritization of certain kinds of projections or judgments or commentary can begin letting go, and we can begin experiencing the suchness or the simplicity of being, the beingness, or just be at peace and at ease with how things are with ourselves here.

So the five aggregates, the five heaps, will be the topic for this week. Each day I'll take one of the heaps and discuss it some. Today was appearances, which got a short discussion because it was an introduction to the five.

So thank you, and I wish you well, and I look forward to being back tomorrow.