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Introduction

Hello everyone. I want to say that I do appreciate the way you come in and say hello to each other and write where you're from. I know that this is a longstanding sangha^[1] that comes to this sit every morning, and it always feels so welcoming to come in, even as a guest just for a week. So I'm enjoying your good energy as we sit here.

We're continuing to move through the realms of existence^[2], which is a powerful teaching that helps us to see the broad-stroke worlds that we can fall into during our day or during our life. Although there are five main ones named in the teaching that we're talking about this week, these are meant to be general categories, of course, that represent a variety of possibilities.

Today we're going to explore the world of being limited by instinctual habit patterns. Habit patterns that easily get set up in our mind, and the mind that just lets things roll along because it's easy and familiar, let's say.

Guided Meditation: Body and Choice

So let's start meditating. Finding a posture for sitting and allowing yourself to settle in. Sensing the body, feeling into the body from the inside as if the body were just knowing itself. Noticing that there's a familiar feeling to being in this body, your body. You know what it feels like.

Feeling the seat against the cushion or the chair. Your weight is resting on something, and allowing yourself to be supported by that. Softening into the place of support, and then inviting a straightening of the body. If you're sitting upright, imagining the spine reaching upward. Not stretching it upward, but just letting it release upward the way a sea plant that's anchored on the sea floor would just float upward.

Softening the eyes in the eye sockets. Softening the face. Letting the shoulders be easy. Releasing down through the chest and the belly area, and softening or releasing any bracing in the arms and legs. The body is invited to be at ease in the sitting posture or whatever posture you're in.

Noticing also that the meditation posture, although it's invited to be soft and easy, is not just a collapse or a relaxation into how we would sleep. Noticing the quality of mindful presence we have in the mind and how that affects the body. There's kind of a balance between being easeful and being alert both in the body and the mind.

Noticing particularly that quality of mindful presence, it has a clarity to it or a sharpness in the sense of when something comes into focus. I recently had my eyes tested for new glasses, and when they put the lens that's the right one, there's a feeling of, "Ah, it's sharp, it's clear." Can we feel like that in the mind?

Then you're invited to bring in the various elements of the physical or bodily world. Feeling the breath coming in, going out, for example, and sensing how the breath is part of the wider experience of the body. Other body sensations, sensations in your belly or your skin, or the general flow of aliveness and energy in the body. And of course, various aches and pains. There's all of that, and there's the breathing.

There are also sounds. Sounds in the room, or sounds of my voice, sounds outside. Seeing if we can use this physical bodily world as the object for meditation. It's restful just to feel these basic material experiences. A phrase often used is "earth element resting on earth." And when the mind gets distracted and caught up in thought, we can just practice coming back and appreciating the ease and clarity of the mind that is present. Settling in again with the body. Sound, breath.

I'll invite a little bit of investigation that you're welcome to take up if it's of interest. The basic experience of the body, the material world, is associated with an aspect of the mind, some dimension of the mind. Part of our mind is related to bodily needs. You can notice how many thoughts come in as we meditate on the body that are about comfort. For example, relieving pain, thoughts about food, or about how much sleep you had. Do we take those up? Do we start ruminating on what to do about that ache, or the shopping list for later going to the grocery store?

You may notice also what I like to call the monitoring function of the mind that repeatedly scans through the body and checks various spots that you know might be painful or might need attention. It fixates on that new pain that you hadn't noticed before and checks that out. Observing these thoughts and functions of mind that relate to the body and our basic needs. Perhaps noticing also how familiar and habitual these thoughts are in these bodily sensations, or how we perceive and map our body. There's rarely any creativity in this function of the mind. It assumes this is it, and this is me.

And now the invitation, if you'd like, is to open the mind to its many other dimensions. For example, noticing that you are meditating, which is an amazing thing to do. Sensing into your capacity for love, for ethical conduct, for knowing how to be caring and non-harming in your life. Perhaps you have an aspiration toward awakening or living a meaningful spiritual life. Feel the contrast between these concerns in the mind and the ones that are more about bodily function. Just resting with that.

In the last few minutes of this meditation, inviting a reflection on and an appreciation of the richness of the mind that we have, and the amazing range that it can span over, and in particular, an appreciation of our choices. We have choices throughout the day of acting with generosity, with care. We have choices about how we relate to people, and we have choices about walking a spiritual path.

We're much more than just the unfolding of a body, a bodily life that needs to get food and needs to reproduce and needs to survive. When we exercise those choices, we create something beautiful. We can build a life that has meaningful relationships, meaningful work, meaningful ways of being, regardless of physical limitations we may have. It's not a small thing to notice that we have those choices, and then using them for love, for compassion. Could it be a day of actively choosing our values in the way that we relate and interact, and the way that we respond to everything that's coming through our senses? May that be so.

Dharmette: Realms (3 of 5); Animal Realm

So thank you, and we are talking this week about these five realms of existence. And just as a recap, they are the hell realms, the hungry ghost realm, the animals, the humans, and the devas^[3] or the gods. Each one has different qualities to it, and they're meant to help us see more clearly how our mind operates, different dimensions of it, and different choices that we make. That helps us to discern the path, the path to freedom eventually.

I'm going to try something here, which is that I would like to show you a picture of these five realms. I'm just going to show this briefly. We're not going to go through this completely, but it helps place this teaching about the realms of existence into a bigger picture.

This is what's called the Wheel of Life or the Wheel of Becoming. It's in many different traditions of Buddhism. This particular one is Tibetan, and this ring in the middle shows all the realms. At the bottom here, we have the hell realms, and to the side of them, we have the hungry ghost realms. Then over here on the other side is the animal realm; you can see a horse here. Humans are across from that in this one that has the houses and the farms. And then these other two are the god realms. As I said, the later traditions sometimes have six realms, but we have five. You can see this is actually the same picture. It just has this line through it, and so they understand that they're combined. These are the god realms; these are maybe the higher gods, and these are kind of the lower gods.

The reason why these are shown here—there are other things in this picture, and around the outside ring are the twelve steps of Dependent Arising. That's another teaching you may have heard of. The idea of this whole cyclic thing is that it's about karma^[4], about the unfolding of how our actions have certain results.

I'm going to stop sharing there and just say that I showed that so that you could see that this teaching is part of other teachings that you may have already learned or heard about. It's kind of one expression, a creative or dramatic expression, of understanding these other teachings. One of the distinctions of the Buddha's teachings was that he linked the journey through these different realms to the ethical quality of a being's actions. That's what karma is, or kamma in Pali^[5]. Karma just means action. What we do matters in terms of where we'll end up. Certain actions have certain results.

Today we're on to a new realm, which is the realm of the animals. This realm is characterized by instinctual concerns, like survival and getting enough to eat. Those instinctual concerns are coupled with a fairly limited scope of action. Animals live in the realm of basic drives like getting food, reproducing, and avoiding being eaten or killed. There's a fair amount of fear in an animal's life, most of it around getting all that arranged. A lot of it is habitual, almost programmed in the way that they can act; a somewhat limited scope.

These descriptions get a little bit dicey because I know that people have feelings for certain animals or for animals in general. This teaching is not intended to insult animals. Some of you may be looking at your cat or your dog right now and saying, "Well, I think they have a pretty good life actually. No responsibilities, no complications like this mind produces." And I am certainly well aware that some animals have quite good mental capacity. We'll get to that in a moment, actually. But please remember that being a loved pet is the crème de la crème^[6] of the animal realm.

This realm also includes all of the insects, the earthworms, the fish, all animals. A very, very small percentage of them are loved pets that live in an environment with guaranteed food and a controlled environment and all of that. Most animals live in a realm where they're subject to the forces of nature, to predation. If they get sick or wounded, it's likely their death. These kinds of things.

As with the others, we can see the animal realm as kind of an analogy. We're looking for ways that these worlds have some kind of a reflection in our own life. In what way do we sometimes get caught up in just playing out patterns, taking comfort in routines, sinking into just fulfilling common bodily desires like food, sex, comfort, and then feeling a vague sense of fear that that might all go away? It's actually fairly dulling to live our life in that mode if it's just about taking care of the body. Even if our body requires a lot of care, which it can if we're in a period of illness, for example, there are other options for the mind—at least in human life—to find ways to be with that.

We're talking about a kind of a dull routine. We can observe how we get into routines. We have our coffee routine, our bedtime routine. There are even spiritual routines, our meditation and yoga routine. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—we fall into a mental dullness or a fixity or limitation around these habits. Our mind starts blocking out other options, blocking out creativity or choicefulness around those things.

When we get into an animal pattern, if you will, we close off meaningful growth and development. We're using only part of our capacity, and then we suffer correspondingly with a sense of meaninglessness or dullness. Observing in your life ways that we get into those and stay in them because they're easy. They start becoming something easy that we can just do. We don't have to think about it too much. But there are consequences to that.

I've talked also about how each of these realms helps us see something about waking up, helps us realize something about goodness or about clarity or about wisdom or about freedom. One of the hidden gems of studying the animal realm is to realize more fully the power that we have in making choices, of doing intentional action. This is actually what karma is, or kamma in Pali. Karma just means action. It's a doing of body, speech, or mind. To be alive is to do things, to do actions. Dead people don't do anything.

When we see the blindness that's associated with instinctual habits, we also see the flip side: the power of choice. Beyond that, we can start to more easily distinguish the choice between helpful and not-so-helpful action, between skillful and unskillful karma. There are some animals, fortunate ones, that are apparently able to make some choices in their lives. We do see sometimes animals choosing generosity or compassion or other altruistic actions. So there is some potential in the animal realm, but it also serves to highlight how much more potential there is in the human realm, where we really can have enough mindfulness, enough clear comprehension, enough wisdom to make important shifts in our life.

We can use our reflection on the animal realm to inquire what, why, and how we are doing what we're doing. If we make a study of how our habits and routines and actions play out in our life, we can start to discern that some patterns are repetitive and dulling, and some seem to go toward greater happiness, greater ease, maybe even greater awareness. Some actions actually go somewhere good for us. This is kind of an initial form of wisdom, discerning what is helpful, what is useful.

The other hidden gem of looking at the animal realm is to deeply realize the value of mindfulness, of awareness, seeing clearly. That makes all the difference, and it's a capacity that we don't have when we fall into a routine. You can get up and make the coffee before you even become mindful, right? We can go through some actions that we already know how to play out, we can do them with very little mindfulness, and then mindfulness returns and we see that we've made the coffee.

There is unreflective action, if you will, and then there's choiceful action. We can realize that we do have some choices. There's another kind of action also, but maybe we'll start with these two as we wake up to the animal realm.

I want to link this to one of the other teachings that you may have heard of, which is the teaching on wise effort. This is one of the steps of the Eightfold Path, and it's about choosing wholesome and skillful actions, and moving away from or not choosing unwholesome or unskillful actions. That's what wise effort is about.

When we work with these animal tendencies of falling into routine or even taking unskillful choices, we get our first glimpse that there is a spiritual path. There is somewhere to go, in a sense. Maybe we're not going anywhere in the end, but there is somewhere that we can go through making good choices. We can improve our situation in an intentional way, and so we get a sense of how to use habits well. We can establish the habit of meditation without just making it something that we don't pay attention to. We can also make creative and spontaneous, in-the-moment, unique, flexible actions that are good, that go toward love, that go toward care, that make a change in some good way in our life.

Looking for ways to enhance and improve the mind and the heart, we can do that. If we let ourselves fall into the animal realm of just taking care of the body, we don't exercise that choice. We're getting into the realm of karma, of understanding, of beings that have the ability to understand how choice works. It's said that the hell beings and the hungry ghosts are so caught in their anger and their wanting that they can't see any choices, and they don't understand that karma operates at all. In the animal realm, you have it just starting. In the human realm is really where we play that out.

But we're going to skip over the humans; we'll get to them Friday. Tomorrow we're going to enter a realm that is all about goodness and beauty. It's the fruit of making good choices, and it has a lot of wonderful aspects to it, and a few things to learn also about awakening. So I hope to see you there for that tomorrow.

Have a wonderful day.