Guided Meditation: Silence in Awareness; Mindfulness of Mind (3 of 5) Respecting Awareness

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Silence in Awareness; Mindfulness of Mind (3 of 5) Respecting Awareness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 10, 2021. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Silence in Awareness

Good morning and welcome. What I'm entitling "mindfulness of mind" this week is not the same as what we did some weeks ago when we did the third foundation of mindfulness, which was also mindfulness of mind. Mindfulness of mind is sometimes used these days as almost synonymous with mindfulness of awareness. It has other meanings as well, but the ability to notice awareness, not just the objects of awareness, is one of the great delights that can come along with this practice. It's also very helpful for feeling your way to freedom—freedom from clinging to the objects of awareness.

And so there's a paradigm shift that goes on in meditation. It's starting to become aware of the silence of awareness, or the spaciousness, the vast space of awareness, or the stillness of awareness. These are metaphors, so we don't want to make them into something too solid or fixed ideas, but we are experiencing it.

For example, when you taste a strawberry, the tasting on the tongue is very distinct from the idea of a strawberry, or the idea of liking the strawberry. The taste is the tasting. It has no words as part of the tasting. The words come as a response to the taste. And so sometimes when we really want to taste something well, we even close our eyes, we reduce our senses, and we even let the thinking mind become quiet so we can really sense what's happening. The tasting is silent, but the mind might not be. There might be immediately a cascade of thoughts about wanting more strawberries.

When we see, the seeing itself is silent. The words and stories, ideas, and the mind are secondary. They come after the seeing, but the seeing itself happens in silence.

If you spend a cold day maybe working hard outdoors, and you come home and take a warm bath, and really want to feel the wonderfulness of the warm bath, and really let it soak in and relax. The sensations of the body, the relaxation, the warmth, this comfort—the sensing there in the body is silent of chatter, of thoughts, of ideas. And there again, if you want to really feel the pleasure, the comfort, the relaxation of the bath, you might even put aside all your thoughts and concerns for a few moments and just really luxuriate in the silence of it, and the silent mind.

So there is this paradigm shift where we are capable in meditation to also sense and feel things in silence. It's also possible to be aware by thinking about it, by having cognition and thoughts and labels and recognitions: "Oh, this is warmth. This is a strawberry." And this is also part of mindfulness. But mindfulness of awareness is closer to being aware of the silence in which we're aware, the space in which we're aware, the stillness in which we're aware. And it's a radical shift from being concerned with the content of our thoughts, with the things we're thinking about, or things we are aware of. So even if you're aware of your body, there's a shift to not only being aware of the sensations, but being aware of the awareness that is aware—an awareness which is coterminous with stillness, with silence, with spaciousness.

So I hope this makes some sense. And if not, don't worry about it, except that it might be good to file this away, because someday it might be relevant.

So to assume a meditation posture.

Relax your gaze, lower your gaze, and gently close your eyes.

Appreciate the sensations of your body, whatever they might be.

And how the body experiences them silently.

The body is not a thought. The body feels and senses.

Gently take a few long, slow, deep breaths. And relax. Let go as you exhale.

And then let your breathing return to normal.

Become aware of the silent way in which the body senses breathing in and of itself.

There are no thoughts in the lungs, in the diaphragm, in the belly. But there are sensations that maybe become a little bit more vivid when the thinking mind becomes quiet. Or more vivid as we feel the silence around those sensations.

And then as you exhale, to relax some more throughout your body. Wherever it feels good to relax, relax and soften.

Relaxing your thinking mind.

Softening the pressure, the tension associated with thinking.

Gently, as you exhale, allowing the agitation of thinking to settle down.

And is there a silent way of noticing thinking?

A silent knowing or sensing the mind involved in its thoughts?

And then again, feeling your breathing.

And perhaps a silent awareness of breathing.

Silent, that's free of wanting and not wanting anything.

Silent from ideas of time, before and after.

The silence that allows us to just sense, feel the breathing of the moment.

And if you feel any silence, quietness, that silence is inseparable from a certain kind of awareness, a silent awareness.

The silent knowing that's receptive.

It has space for breathing to arise within.

And the practice is the meeting of the breathing and the silent awareness.

And as my thinking mind gets quieter and more focused, each of these becomes more vivid.

The breathing becomes more vivid in the body, and the awareness that silently is aware of breathing becomes more vivid.

To the meeting of these two, breathing and awareness, stay there.

Let the rhythm of breathing keep you connected to awareness.

Like the waves on the ocean wash up across the sandy shore, back and forth.

Sometimes our attention is directed. Sometimes attention is receptive.

When there's a lot of thinking, a lot of desires and efforts to do, attention tends to be directed.

But sometimes it's nice to meet our friends, our family, our neighbors, strangers, with a receptive awareness.

One that's not carrying a lot of judgments, ideas, bias, history.

Maybe even awareness that's a little bit silent of thoughts, just present.

Open, available to feel, to sense.

To be aware. And a kind of silent awareness of another person, of others.

Sometimes that's a way of experiencing others more fully without the limitations of our preconceived ideas.

It's respectful of others to be receptive of how they are on their own terms, rather than coming with our preconceived ideas.

And may it be that this practice that we do fosters this kind of respect.

The respect that we allow people to be themselves, at least until we've taken them in the fullness of who they are in a receptive awareness.

Maybe even a kind of silent awareness. Silent of agendas.

And maybe it's in this fuller awareness of others that our care is born. Our love.

Our generosity. Our kindness.

And maybe our kindness is transmitted more fully in a mind that's not filled with preconceived ideas.

A mind that is quieter and receptive.

May it be that through this meditation practice that we have a more vivid awareness of others.

And in doing so, may we contribute to their welfare and happiness. May we contribute to the welfare and happiness of the whole world.

May it be that this meditation practice we do supports the happiness, safety, peace, and freedom of others.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be peaceful.

And may all beings be free.

Mindfulness of Mind (3 of 5) Respecting Awareness

Thank you for letting me know. We have lots of silence. And all these buttons to push. Let's see, there are still messages of no sound. Maybe see if you start hearing me. Still no sound? Maybe there are just a lot of people who typed in, and it takes a while for it to upload. You should be hearing me now. There we go, thank you.

Sometimes just being quietly in the present moment, I'm not tracking everything. I have all these buttons to push, so sorry about that. [Laughter]

This morning, the perspective for the topic is that of respect. As you've probably heard me say many times, I really like the word respect. I'm actually inspired by it, partly because of its etymological meaning: in its Latin roots, it means to "look again," to "inspect again." And this idea of having a willingness to not just barrel ahead into the future and keep doing and doing, but to also take a deeper look. Maybe our life, our experience warrants a second look, a better look, sustained attention. What is really happening here? So we don't just take the first impression of things, but we really take time to experience and feel it more deeply.

And as we do this, one of the benefits is we begin appreciating the looking itself—the ability to give a second look. There's something about looking again. Looking, seeing in a relaxed and open, receptive way that's free of our preconceived ideas, our agendas, our preferences, our biases, all kinds of things that so easily come along if we just go rapidly from one thing to another. Consciously deciding, "Let me look more carefully here. Let me be more open. Let me take in this experience more fully."

That's a kind of sidestepping, putting aside slightly the automatic preconceived ideas that get carried along—ideas and thoughts and agendas that are directing attention often: "I want this, I want that." Some of us can experience it acutely if we're surfing on the web on the computer, just going from one thing to the other, seeing this and that, and the mind is being directed all the time. But to step back and be willing to look again, look more carefully... At some point, the fact that we're looking, the act of looking becomes kind of special.

I've been in places where there are wonderful vistas, maybe high up in the mountains with great views of the landscape below, or on the beach looking out across the ocean. And for me at least, there's something about the panoramic view of lots of space and openness, and then relaxed looking. I just enjoy looking. After a while, certainly I'm appreciating what I see, but I also appreciate the relaxed, open, receptive just looking and gazing. It's almost like they're both separate and not so separate—the looking and what's being seen.

How they're separate is that looking now stands out and highlights, "Oh, there's seeing happening." And that seeing is so relaxed and spacious and open. I could just stay here looking at these clouds drifting in the sky for a long time, or looking at the river flowing by. I can just look and look and feel so relaxed and settling to do this looking. As opposed to rating every cloud and saying, "Well, that cloud is a little bit too big. It has too much of a bump here," or "That one is a nice shape, and I'd like to keep it that way," and "Let me find a better cloud to look at because this one's getting kind of boring." To constantly be involved in this directedness tends to make us lose sight of the fact that we're looking. We look more at our preferences: "The cloud should be that way, not this way."

This respect—looking again and again—is partly what we're doing in mindfulness practice. We're learning not to ride the waves of our preferences, our agendas, what we always want, but to step back and take a look. As we do that, when we step back, take another look, take another look... at some point the looking, the mindfulness begins to stand out and highlight: "Oh, it's so good to be mindful." In being mindful, there's freedom, there's spaciousness, there's a relaxation, there's an ease. This is good. We start becoming aware of awareness itself.

Now, this topic of awareness is a big topic. I kind of like to use the word as a vague word, because different people have different reference points for what awareness means. For some people, the way they know things is much more through their thinking. So they're thinking about things, and that's how they're aware. For some people, it's more a sensing; their awareness comes through their body. For some people, it's more of a silent knowing, where they're not really aware of any active cognitive movement of the mind to know, but there's a silence—they just know intuitively. There are many ways to know.

In the mindfulness tradition, there's a variety of different kinds of knowing that operate at different times. But what can happen with each one of them, regardless of what your way of knowing is, or what you think awareness is for yourself, at some point it gets highlighted. It stands out a little bit and highlights, "Oh, here is something." This is not the object or what I'm thinking about. This is the receptivity, or the experience of knowing it.

We can become aware of the attitudes—like we talked about yesterday—that go along with it: desires, contractions, that are a part of being aware. But then we take a second look, and a second look, until we begin seeing, experiencing awareness, knowing, sensing, feeling, observing, whatever it might be, as kind of at ease, open. A certain kind of silence, a certain kind of spaciousness. Even when there's thinking, there can be a silence that knows it.

One of my first entry points to the world of spiritual life was spending a week in solitude. It was a beautiful place on a farm in nature. In the course of it—I wasn't meditating—but because I had no social contact, no talking with anyone, it was like being on a meditation retreat without being on one. I became acutely aware of myself thinking. I had no judgments about the fact that I was thinking, but the clarity by which I knew I was thinking... that clarity, "Oh, there's a thought." It was really... wow. There's a beauty, a clarity, a cleanliness, an openness, a distinctness that I'd never seen before. It was like in the old days when a radio would be out of tune, and then you're tuning in the radio station and you get it into tune, and suddenly it becomes clear. It's like that: "Oh, suddenly I found the wavelength of my mind, and I was clearly aware. I knew."

That clarity of knowing is what some people call awareness. It's not different than awareness, but it's not exactly awareness. It's coterminous with awareness, and the clarity is so beautiful, so wonderful. I became aware of this clarity that let me see my cognitive thoughts, my words, my mind with such clarity, and I appreciated the freedom, the ease that was there.

To respect, to be mindful of awareness, mindful of the process of being aware, is one of the ways that supports coming to a place of clarity in the meditation. Just now I talked about silence. That's another word I think of. Even though I was thinking when I was alone that week, that thinking became acutely clear. Each thought, I was aware of it in a larger silence. Sometimes this mindfulness of awareness is associated for some people with stillness. The awareness that's vividly, softly, wonderfully, velvety still. Or sometimes it's spaciousness, just lots of space for it.

It isn't so much that that's the ultimate thing—space or stillness or silence or clarity. But it's how it helps us to relax more deeply. It's how it teaches us about non-clinging. How it helps us to see where the remaining clinging is. You get a feeling for freedom. There's freedom in the clarity of awareness. There's freedom in the stillness, the silence of awareness. So you get to feel a little hint, the smell, the doors open for where freedom is found.

Finally, I'll give you another analogy from my childhood. When I was a little kid, sometimes my parents would take their car to a car wash. It was such that you could go in and stay in the car as it went through the car wash, pulled along. All this water and suds and brushes are spraying, and it was kind of chaotic outside the car, coming against the windows. But inside the car, it felt so safe and quiet and peaceful. The contrast was so acute. That was one of the reasons I loved going through these car washes, because I felt it so acutely. It highlighted the peace, the quiet, the stillness, the safety there being inside the car with the chaos outside.

That's a reference point for me of how it can be in the mind sometimes, where I'm resting in awareness, and there's a peace, a quiet, an openness, independent of the chaos that might be happening around me. We carry our peace with us.

It's a little bit esoteric, what I'm talking about today. And I'm trusting that for those of you who don't quite understand what I'm saying—which I wouldn't have when I was first introduced to meditation—just relax with it. Keep it in mind, keep it filed away, and at some point you might have an experience: "Oh, that's what Gil is talking about." And that might help you appreciate it and get the benefits of that kind of experience.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this tomorrow.