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Introduction

Welcome, folks. Welcome. Happy to be with you. I'm Matthew, and as you know, Gil is away traveling and teaching a retreat right now. He happens to be in the north of New Zealand, which received a cyclone. I was in touch with him last night and he's fine, and the sangha is fine. They're hunkered down and practicing and doing well. But I am happy to be with you this week. So let's... that's it.

Guided Meditation: Surrendering to the Present

If you have any routine ways of relaxing or directing attention that helps you establish a sense of embodiment and mindfulness, please do that.

And if there's anything that needs awareness's blessing in order for you to put it down, give that blessing. Something that's recently happened, something you're anticipating, big existential questions and issues. It's not that blessing with awareness resolves it, or ties up the loose ends of being human, but it's that we make enough peace with it that the attention is no longer compulsively pulled there. We can become available for our life in this moment.

Body in the posture. Mind in the body. Relaxation in the mind.

Surrendering to the present^[1] is to momentarily give up hope for clinging. Some part of our mind has these utopian fantasies about what clinging might be able to get us. The Buddha says, not so much. And sometimes we have to mourn the truth that our clinging cannot work out the way we hope.

But in our relaxation, in our letting go, the settledness of equanimity, we receive the Dharma, those blessings. And all the anxiety and agitation bound up with the sense of needing to steer and control our life, moment by moment, starts to fall away.

Our heart becomes more and more available. The poignancy of our life dawns. Our hopes and fears become maybe less entangling, but still poignant. The sense of self becomes less entangling, but poignant.

Rather than reaching out to control the moment, we're willing to receive it, be changed by it. And something in the heart rests.

Dharmette: Awe in the Dharma

It is good to sit with you. Last time I was here, just a few weeks ago, I did a series on the five spiritual faculties of faith, energy, mindfulness, samādhi^[2] (concentration), and wisdom.

When deciding what to teach, just generally, I kind of float a balloon in my mind, a little trial balloon, and then imagine the sangha, imagine speaking to that theme, and try to feel into that. And this time, all my trial balloons immediately deflated and fell to the ground. I didn't know what to teach. So I made up a list—not official by any stretch—of factors that don't show up in the list, but from what I can see, lead us deeper into the direct path. And so today is awe and wonder.

As the researcher Dacher Keltner^[3] describes, awe is the feeling of wonder and amazement of being in the presence of something vast that transcends one's current understanding. As part of a family of states that includes elevation, appreciation, and admiration, the majority of awe experiences occur in response to nature, other people who display virtuosity or magnanimity, art and music, religious experiences, and ideas. Similar to other prosocial emotions like gratitude and compassion, awe reliably predicts increased sharing, assistance, and generosity.

So on this path, we develop, I would say, a kind of awe for the Dharma. I remember early in practice—maybe a year into practice or something—I was at a weekend retreat with Gaylon Ferguson^[4] in the Tibetan tradition. Gaylon is a professor, and he is a full-time Dharma person, a very beautiful teacher, quite buttoned up. The weekend was on the unity of samatha^[5] and insight—the unity of the tranquilizing and the insight side of the path—and it touched me quite deeply.

Afterwards, I approached him, crying and sort of rambling, just trying to express what he had done to my heart. I was trying unsuccessfully to say something like, "I'm falling in love with the Dharma. You're helping." I wasn't able to say that, and just sat there, a little messy in his kind presence. And he said something like, "Oh yeah, gazing out over the vastness of the Dharma ocean... that can be a lot."

In a Dharma life, we develop a sense of awe for the path, awe for awareness itself. The sense of how close the distance from suffering to peace can be in a given moment. It feels so far, and yet we come to know it as being so close. The potency of awareness becomes a kind of object of awe. This life, this life we are somehow given.

I remember again, early in practice, I think from the Tibetan tradition, the image of being born human is like a turtle swimming in the great ocean that breaches the surface of the water once every century, and happening to poke its head through a small ring floating in the vastness of the ocean. The chance of that is like the preciousness of being born human with this possibility to wake up.

And so, there is wonder. Wonder for having been born. Wonder for the possibilities of being human. And wonder, or the question of, how might I live? How might I live? We're so hemmed in, so constrained by prevailing narratives and cultural assumptions and the seeming foundations of a human life. But in Buddhism, the foundation of all things is empty.

So what if everything I consider natural and customary, the "right way," everything I consider to be self-evident, to be common sense, is empty? Empty.

There is a fetter usually translated as "attachment to rites and rituals," which is said to be shed at stream entry^[6], the first real taste of enlightenment: sīlabbata-parāmāsa^[7]. It's a kind of endowing all the conventions of our life with more reality than they have. In a way, our entire culture is sīlabbata-parāmāsa.

And when we recognize the groundlessness of all convention, there's a lot of wonder. How might I live, unconstrained by this attachment to convention? How might I live? Wonder is an especially clean engine for our motivation and Dharma effort. Clinging, of course, as the Buddha says, is at the heart of suffering. But how do we avoid trying to cling our way to peace? So many of the moves that we can make on our experience, the Dharma moves we make, in one way or another, express some clinging.

And wonder—this deep, abiding interest—is a very powerful place to practice from. I feel in my capacity as a teacher, when people become interested in their minds, my job is kind of done, relegated primarily to just being a cheerleader. And I like that role. But there's something that happens when we are interested in our minds. There's no real agenda in interest, in wonder. And this is a powerful condition for the arising of wisdom and love.

Awe is associated with the sense of self becoming smaller. Sometimes this is classically seen in gazing up at the stars. As an astronomer writes: "Our galaxy is located at one end of the Local Group, a small cluster of galaxies with the Andromeda galaxy at the other end. The Local Group is near the outskirts of the Local Supercluster, which has a diameter of a hundred million light years. The biggest supercluster is the Perseus-Pegasus Filament, which stretches for roughly a billion light years. A number of other superclusters and voids are known, but astronomers have only mapped the large-scale structure of a small part of the universe. There may even be larger scale structures."

To really take that in—a hundred billion light years, whatever—it's tough to get too lost in the details of a particular life. But here's the thing: the self becoming smaller means the world gets much, much bigger. The less clinging, the more life.

And so we wake up to awe in the face of the vastness. There is awe in the face of the vastness of suffering—it just brings you to your knees. And awe in the face of love. To know how vast our love might become, even though it does not resolve saṃsāra^[8], does not tie up the loose ends of being human, but to be humbled by how vast our love might become. It is said to be measureless, in the sense that we're stepping out of measuring, and also that there is nothing on the other side of it.

So, awe and wonder on this path^[9]. I offer that for your consideration today. I wish you all well, and we'll keep going tomorrow. Thank you so much, and have a good day.