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Guided Meditation

Okay, thanks Martha. I appreciate it.

Welcome, welcome to you all. Happy to be sitting with you, and welcome to the folks out there. We'll have the usual form: I'll lightly guide us until the top of the hour, and then offer a talk, and maybe we have time for some dialogue. We'll see.

Please settle into a posture that feels sustainable.

Just making your mind a welcoming environment for people trickling in. A welcoming environment for the intensity of having a body. Maybe exploring ways of breathing that help you arrive. Maybe it's a deeper, fuller breath that reaches into the belly and just ever so gently smooths out the energy of body and mind.

There's also often a sense, as the winds of phenomena blow through the sensations of our body—of affect, of sound, thought—it's almost as if our bracing against phenomena is an attempt to protect some kernel of our being, the center point of self. A sense that something inside of us needs protection from phenomena.

But our practice is to let the winds of experience blow, trusting that there's nothing inside that will be blown over. It's nothing more than pleasant and unpleasant.

The winds of grasping and aversion. An opportunity we sense on the horizon. The unpleasantness of sound or sensation. We let those winds blow too, held in the openness of awareness.

The Dharma never asks us to pretend. To pretend we like what we dislike or are neutral about what we like. It asks us simply to hold sensations in the openness of awareness.

Almost a sense of our heart being massaged by the kilesas^[1], forces of suffering. Greed and aversion. In the sense that something is being softened in the openness of this awareness.

Seven Factors of Awakening

So, welcome.

I don't usually do talks on lists because I like how the facets of a list interact with each other. But today, a talk on a list. We can almost get too familiar with the lists over time. When we're new, it's different, but as we practice over years, we sometimes get so familiar with Buddhist lists that we almost lose track of their brilliance.

I was talking to a friend, a colleague of mine, who said something like that she just assiduously followed the Eightfold Path deep into her practice. Years into practice, she just assiduously followed that, tried to implement it in all spheres of her life, and it changed everything. That shouldn't have shocked me, but there was something about understanding the potency of her mind and then just to say, "Yeah, this list meant everything."

In our own practice, we pick up these themes, these teachings, at greater depth and nuance. They come to mean more and more to us over time. What we hear in a list the first time we hear it is so different from the hundredth time we hear it. It's really a different list.

The Dharma generally revolves around what's to be let go, what's to be released. The basic architecture of the view is that, in a sense, suffering is our only problem. To relinquish suffering is not a trivial thing, and in its wake, it leaves many species of goodness. It's not that we let go of suffering and then we have to create some other kind of positivity. Quite naturally, the attention goes to the untangling and deconstruction of the sources of suffering. But then what is actively cultivated? What species of wholesomeness are actively cultivated?

One of those lists of what's actively cultivated, the goodness that helps us keep going, is sometimes celebrated as the anti-hindrances: the Seven Factors of Awakening. The Buddha says, "I do not see even one thing that, when developed and cultivated, leads to the abandoning of things that fetter so effectively as this: the Seven Factors of Enlightenment."

The seven factors are both the path and the fruit. It's often how these teachings are—they are both the path and the culmination, the work that we do and the fruit that is harvested. There's a story of the Buddha somewhere in the suttas being sick at night and asking one of his disciples... it had the feeling of a bedtime story, to bring to mind the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. "Speak them to me in that state of sickness at night."^[2]

In our practice, in meetings, practice discussions, and interviews on retreat, for example, so much of the time there's some form of suffering that people are seeking consultation on. But what happens when they're not? What does the teacher do when there's no report of active, coarse suffering? Mostly we just say, "Keep going." But sometimes we say, "Let us examine these seven factors to see the relative balance of the energizing side of practice and the tranquilizing side of practice."

A lot of this path is a dialectic between different forces. A lot of this practice is a dialectic between the absence of suffering and the emergence of new currents of suffering—sometimes deeper layers of suffering. As we get more and more free, mind states are increasingly characterized by some balance of these seven factors.

Mindfulness serves as a balancing point between the energizing and tranquilizing factors. We have investigation, energy (effort), and intense joy (pīti^[3], or rapture) on the energizing side. On the tranquilizing side, we have tranquility, samādhi^[4] (the unification of mind), and equanimity.

It is said that mindfulness, investigation, and energetic vigor are the causes, and the others are the effects, which is an interesting formulation. They have complex relationships with each other. Even though the tranquilizing factors are characterized as effects, we sort of have to begin with a little bit of tranquility. Otherwise, there's no room to digest the impermanence and imperfection of experience. To try to let go, to try to open, to soften—all of these things are very difficult to do in the absence of some modicum of tranquility. So there are a lot of relations between these different facets in our practice.

Mindfulness is a word that's been used in so many ways. One of my mentors said we just have to throw it out; it's become a pocket into which so many things have been put that the word has lost all meaning and integrity. Sometimes the way mindfulness is used is as an umbrella term for the seven factors. If you hear the way it's used in popular culture, it's not sati^[5] in the narrow sense. A lot of other beautiful qualities are smuggled in the back door under this umbrella term of mindfulness.

I'm not blaming the wonderful Jon Kabat-Zinn for this, but he did say this in 2011. He developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week program that's been a tremendous blessing to many people. My life, no doubt, is a function of his efforts and many others. He said MBSR was developed as one of a possibly infinite number of skillful means for bringing the Dharma into mainstream settings. "It has never been about MBSR for its own sake. It's always been about the M, and the M is a very big M. We use the word mindfulness intentionally as an umbrella term to describe our work and to link it explicitly with what I've always considered to be a universal Dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha."

We do need a word to try to convey the depth, beauty, and richness of the Dharma, and in this case, "mindfulness" was chosen. But there are definitional consequences to that decision. What do we mean when we say mindfulness? We can talk about it in more pared-down ways or more grand ways. For mindfulness to really convey this depth, it's never been described as a single quality; it's always conjoined with other factors.

I actually link mindfulness with an awareness that lets go, an awareness that is already conjoined with other factors. An awareness that is aware of the movements of suffering, greed, and aversion, but is uncompelled by them. The awareness is a little bit bigger than the forces of suffering. When awareness is present, no matter what suffering is there, something else is also true. It's a subtle move, this gesture of awareness, but it's radical. Sometimes, just knowing suffering in the clarity and openness of awareness does not erase all of the unpleasantness, but it's enough that our life all of a sudden feels quite different than it did one moment ago when we were fully identified with the phenomena of suffering.

We usually talk about mindfulness as what rescues us from our bad habits. Without some metacognitive awareness, we are just living in obedience to our habits. That's fair enough. But mindfulness also becomes a habit and helps us develop good habits. Early in practice, we often have this sense of, "Okay, I'm going to leave here, go have my day, and I've got to be mindful. I have to remember." As we continue practicing, it's not like a grocery list where I have to remember carrots. You know when you do a bad shop, you get discombobulated, feeling at the register like you messed up and forgot a lot. We can have this sense of, "Oh yeah, I could just keep forgetting mindfulness."

It's okay to try to motivate explicit cognitive control, but to some extent, what we are actually training is elevating the trait level of mindfulness—the mindfulness that exists in the way a habit exists, where we actually don't have to remember. We are more mindful when we're not trying to be mindful. That's important because we'll never be able to remember enough consciously.

Investigation is, of course, enabled by mindfulness. Investigation, to me, is not about top-down cognitively trying to figure something out. Sometimes the line between investigation and rumination is thin. "How did I get here? Why do I feel this way? Where am I going?" Those questions can masquerade as deep existential inquiries but actually have a ruminative, obsessive feel to them. Investigation is not loosely looking for some answer out of the ether. It's a sustained attention to the unfolding of experience, the connection between moments.

I associate it a lot with curiosity, which is really the lifeblood of this practice. I don't know if it's in a list somewhere, but investigation is very closely linked to curiosity. The truth is, there's no cure for a lack of curiosity. There's nothing a teacher can say to keep you engaged unless you find something that you get interested in, like, "I want to understand this. I want to know why I keep doing this. I want to know some facet of my mind." When curiosity is present, because it's so agendaless, it's a very deeply trustworthy intention animating practice. It's not even "I want to get happier"—it's "I want to understand more." And there's a kind of patience in it.

It's not even the point to get to some final answer; there is no final answer, just deepening, refining, nuance, and more curiosity. We find our cruising altitude in our autobiographical story of who we are, what the path is, where we're going, and what happiness is. And then that rug will be pulled out before too long, hopefully. That ignites a new round of curiosity where we're no longer satisfied with the stories we've been feeding ourselves.

Somewhere the Buddha says that we have four options when in pain: blame self, blame others, despair, or investigate. That's not a hard multiple-choice question. It's like, "Okay, what is happening here?" We develop a kind of faith in looking. Not a faith that everything's okay, but a faith in wisdom, a faith in love. A faith that the more deeply we look, the more Dharma we will find. The more deeply we look, the more reason there will be to love. So we're not so afraid of what we'll find.

Energy is among the most emphasized themes in the suttas. I think because this path is genuinely against the stream. Neurosis is often the path of least resistance. My neurosis is happily floating down a stream with a strong current at my back. Gil Fronsdal has talked about satipaṭṭhāna^[6] with slides of somebody coasting down the water, relaxing into the effortlessness of mindfulness. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the stream of neurosis, where it takes zero energy for me to act it out. We all know those moments where the absolute easiest thing to do right now is to express the forces of suffering and my own bad habits.

So what are we going to do? We're going to mobilize energy, effort. Sometimes we really are in the stream of goodness, and the awareness feels effortless, but that's often a function of prior effort. We marshal our energy because growth is hard. It takes energy, like a kid going through a growth spurt who really has to rest. We marshal some effort in order not to obey the dictates of greed, hatred, and delusion.

This path is a renunciate path in the sense that it is not a "something for nothing" path. Sometimes we get the sense that because awareness is so powerful and the simplest gesture of it can bring incredible relief, maybe if I'm making effort I must be doing it wrong. The lure of "something for nothing" is deep in us. But we're not giving up things for no reason. We're giving up lesser forms of pleasure for deeper forms of satiation.

Rapture is born of letting go. Sometimes this is translated as joy, to make the definition accessible, but it's more energetic and effervescent than that, more compelling. The attention is just sucked into the flow of it. Normally, our thoughts are the most prominent thing in experience by far. But that can change, and a sense of pīti, of rapture, becomes more compelling than anything else. This is usually experienced as pleasant, but sometimes not. At some point, even rapture as pleasure gets old. "Isn't that why I'm here, why I'm doing all this letting go?" But it is significant insofar as it confirms that this path is not a con; it's not another shell game. When we start to see, "I didn't know that I could feel this way, I didn't know that I could settle into the moment in this rapturous way," it induces faith. For some people, it's the first deep glimpse of the power of our mind, which we have underestimated forever. [Laughter]

This kind of delight is said to give way to calm, which is a little bit the reverse of what we think. We think we get calm in order to become happier, but here it's happiness, and then we get calm. We get settled and focused. This pivot to the tranquilizing side of the path highlights how our nervous system is just longing to be unstimulated. We think we're always looking for pleasure, but we're usually looking for pleasure to balance out the intensity of something else. Peace, tranquility—the beginning of that is our deepest longing. I almost think of it as the nervous system longing for the Dharma, to be at peace. As far as I can tell, it is the only thing that does not fatigue the heart.

To begin to settle, to find ways of breathing, signs, anchors, and ways of attending that bring some measure of tranquility, is necessary in order to do the work of letting go. If we're trying to let go and open to experience from a very untranquil state, it just makes our mind more brittle. There's no more space; it's like filling a cup that's already overflowing. So we learn ways of bringing in calm. Over all the years of practice now, no matter what's happening in my mind, there are such deep associations with the posture, the breath, and the sense of gravity that it just induces a measure of tranquility. Then there's more room to bear with the imperfection of saṃsāra^[7].

When there is tranquility and less agitation, there's less searching and foraging for food for the mind to medicate our agitation. We are often scanning the realm of our own thought world to medicate the sense of threat and unacquired opportunity. When tranquility settles, and there are no alarm bells going off in our system moment by moment, what else is there to do other than just pay some attention?

So we settle into samādhi, the unification of the mind. Samādhi is linked with rapturous joy. Samādhi is what turns the Dharma into something more than a philosophy. The Dharma is a good philosophy, but it won't save us as a philosophy. It has to become real; it has to be realized. The literary critic Eve Sedgwick^[8] said the difference between knowledge and realization is that in realization, something becomes as real as this very room. For the Dharma to become real, it requires some measure of samādhi. Otherwise, it's just an appealing set of ideas that we clumsily try to apply to our lives. Until we actually start to hear the Dharma from a place of unification and steadiness, it's not so useful.

We come into alignment. It feels like all the pieces and parts of us suddenly start moving in the same direction. The ambivalence and the fragmentation of the self recede, and all of us is moving in one direction. It feels more and more natural just to rest the attention with what we decide is relevant.

We often use the level of discursive thinking as a barometer for our samādhi, taking the surface layer of the mind very seriously to measure how still we are. But the truth is, there are processes of stillness that happen outside the realm of discursive thought. That's why when people sit in retreat for a few days or a couple of weeks—as people have been at Insight Retreat Center—even if their minds are still florid with thought, there's a deepening that's happening as a kind of silence sets in. I associate samādhi with the unification of mind, but also with the plasticity of mind, its depth, and how deeply impressionable it becomes. The stabilized mind is deeply impressionable, and whatever we learn under the conditions of samādhi has legs. The insights we gather, the understandings we cultivate, the realizations we have under conditions of samādhi stay with us. We all know the light of some insight fading over time. Insight developed under conditions of unification has legs.

In the experience of samādhi, of pīti, of the delight of every part of us moving in the same direction, the movement of the heart is not towards the intensity of pleasure, but towards the neutrality of equanimity. The heart-mind is utterly unstimulated by the winds of phenomena. Something in us is longing to be unstimulated by the winds of phenomena. As upekkhā^[9] (equanimity) deepens, it's not the absence of preferences, but the absence of the compulsion to enact our preferences. There is preference, but the compulsion to bring our preferences into being, to make something happen, and all the agitation and strategizing required to bring clinging to fruition—that starts to fade.

In that process, something in us is being softened. The forces of clinging, when met in the openness of equanimity, feel like they are softening rather than hardening our heart. Sometimes equanimity is called the primary cathartic factor of mindfulness, alluding to the release and softening that happens when the forces of clinging soften rather than harden our heart.

It is said that equanimity, when it really ripens, is the closest approximation of awakening. But amidst this radical okayness and non-interference with all phenomena, with the winds of saṃsāra, we don't actually lose the poignancy of our life, the poignancy of the suffering world. Love is only a stone's throw away from peace. The mind that is stable, tranquilized, gathered, and equanimous—just one drop of love flavors everything.

So I offer this for your consideration. The Seven Factors. May they be the practice, may they be the fruit. Please pick up whatever is useful here and ignore the rest. This is your path, and you have to be the judge of what is useful. You test things out, you're patient, and this is the way our path unfolds in our very idiosyncratic way.

Thank you for your attention. Thank you to the crew on YouTube, and to Martha and Kevin. Be well, and we'll see you around the Dharma campus somewhere.