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Introduction

Warm greetings, and thank you to those offering your greetings in the chat. It's wonderful to see the warmth and also the names. I'm already seeing people I know from before, and some people I haven't heard from for a long time. It's wonderful to see your name here and your greeting, and some names that I'm beginning to recognize because of these early morning sits. So thank you, Jiwei from Yogyakarta^[1].

Guided Mediation: Giving Freedom

I think it's well known that Buddhism has as its ultimate goal liberation and freedom. In relationship to this topic of the week—the topic of self, selfing, and not-self—it's very easy to talk about this quest, this goal of liberation, in personal terms. So that, you know, someone gets liberated, or "I'm hoping to be liberated," "to be enlightened," "I'm hoping to be freed," "to experience spiritual freedom," or to experience something like that and say, "I'm liberated, I'm free, I'm awake."

Another way of seeing it is that liberation is the experience, the movement of mind, or freedom of mind which liberates others from us. We're liberating all things from our projections, which includes our biases and prejudices, our preferences, our judgments, our desires, and our aversions. To really free people^[2], we're liberating not only other people, but we're liberating all things. All things now are free and safe from our greed, our hatred, and delusion.

To turn this around, rather than talking about, "I'm going to be liberated," it can be quite a different thing to see active generosity in a sense, and care, that we liberate the world from any unethical and unwholesome^[3] tendencies that we might have. This is so that people can live free of our prejudice, free of our constructing of their self. We talked earlier about selfing as a verb, as an activity we do, but we also create selfing; we self others.

To sit in that space, to sit in the place where there's the absence of projections, absence of constructs of self, absence of appropriating things as self, or appropriating things in relationship to ourselves. And to sit in that space, to sit in that openness, in classic Buddhist terms, is to sit in that emptiness. It is the emptiness of the place that lays^[4] before the mind thinks of things in terms of self, below where it thinks in terms of self, between all the movements of selfing that we do. We sit in that gap, in that emptiness, in that spaciousness, and in that freedom.

Guided Meditation

So, to take a meditation posture and to begin directly by becoming aware of—not your experience—but becoming aware of how your body is experiencing this moment.

Maybe be aware of how the body might have muscles which are held tight or contracted. And to begin allowing the body to soften, to relax. With the body having a greater awareness of itself, the body can feel the places where release is possible.

It might be possible in the shoulders. Allow that softening and releasing of the shoulders.

It might be possible in the chest, in the heart area. And to release the holding in the heart, in a sense, to free the heart from some of the ways in which selfing contracts and tightens, constricts. It's the heart's wish to be free, to be at ease.

And to relax the belly, softening, allowing the belly a chance to be free.

And then becoming aware of how the muscles of the face know themselves. What are the sensations in the face by which the face knows itself from the inside? Letting go of the mask of self, the overlay of who we try to be and project and show ourselves as being. And allowing the inner face behind the skin to feel itself, and allow there to be release and softening.

And then to experience the body's experience. To allow the body to have its own experience of the breathing, maybe in the torso, maybe around the nose. So it's not so much being aware of breathing from the control tower of self, but softening the control tower, making room for the body to experience itself breathing.

And to sit upright literally or metaphorically, and see if this meditation can maybe not be about you. Not be about your responsibility, what you have to do, that you're the agent, or that you're the one who receives the experience. That you are the experiencer of it all, the arbitrator of it all, the endurer^[5] of it all. Let the meditation not be about you, but rather allowing each thing that occurs to be about itself, independent of our ideas of self, desires, and preferences. Free of self.

The inhale is just about itself. The exhale is just about itself. A sound is just a sound for itself. Body sensations are allowed to be something that experiences itself, that is itself. And even when thoughts arise, rather than measuring the thought or involving a thought with how it is for us—the selves—freeing the thought from self, letting the thought be just a thought, leaving it alone.

And perhaps awareness can dwell in the space that allows things to be there with themselves. In the emptiness that allows things to appear just as they are, for as long as they are. In space-like awareness—free awareness, free of self—that doesn't want anything or not want anything. It's just space that allows things to be themselves. Each thing is allowed to be free of self.

And if you find yourself selfing, doing the self thing, leave that alone. Radically alone. Let it just be itself without believing it or being involved in it. No shame, nothing wrong. Just one more thing to be free of, to allow it to have its freedom, its own freedom to just be itself. And perhaps it just will float away.

Reflections

And as we come to the end of this sitting, I'll begin by saying that to have an experience of freedom from self—self-preoccupation, self-condemnation, self-involvement—is one of the great pleasures and rewards or benefits of Buddhist practice.

But to really experience liberation fully, and to understand how much it is also a liberation from all unethical impulses—all impulses that are born from greed, hatred, and delusion^[6]—helps us to understand how valuable liberation is in freeing others. Without a preoccupation in self, part of the wonderfulness of liberation is how we liberate others from ourselves, so that we are safe for others, and we can be a refuge for others.

And may it be that as we come out of this meditation, we consider how, whatever degree of freedom, of ease, of calm, of letting go that we've had here today, let us consider how we can be a refuge for others. How we can be safe for others, or how others can benefit from the liberation and freedom they have from us.

May all beings be free.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings experience peace around them.
And may all beings be happy, at home in their own hearts, comfortable and safe.