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Guided Meditation: Openness of Awareness

Okay, so welcome, welcome, folks. Happy to be with you.

What and how we attend shapes our world of experience, in other words, shapes our world. And we practice relaxing, letting some of the attention drain out of our body into the earth so we can attend in a relaxed way, so that the way we attend is not a recapitulation of our agitation and vigilance.

And to what do we attend? The energy will follow the attention. And so without making any experience an enemy, the Buddha suggested that becoming deeply involved in objects of greed, hatred, and aversion, ruminative fantasies, or nightmares—this is not a sustainable path of peace.

And so without any brittleness in the attention, without the how of attention becoming brittle, we welcome our breath. The energizing, brightening inhale, the soothing exhale that soothes and smooths out the energy of our body.

Then at the bottom of the exhale, a sense of release, [unintelligible], suspended in space.

And sometimes the attention just pulls up in that rhythm: inhale, exhale, release. The world gets small, secluded, protected, having put down covetousness and displeasure with respect to the world.^[1]

And sometimes it gets very open, and it's like the breath is just a reminder of the openness of awareness, a sea of awareness.

Thank you. The world of hope and fear seems like it's always beckoning us. It seems like maybe it's irresponsible, or puts something at risk, in not compulsively tending to hope and fear. But to always be embroiled with the loose ends of the human condition fatigues the heart. And our problems, our hopes, our fears actually come to look quite a bit different when we're rested in the seclusion and protection of the breath, the simplicity, relaxation, and brightness.

Dharmette: Dharma & Grief

Okay, good to sit with you.

So, the Buddha witnessed aging, sickness, and death, and it was this changingness and maybe what we could call anticipatory grief that launched his spiritual search. And anticipatory grief is a profound engine for Dharma motivation.

This week, there have been prominent Dharma themes that don't always appear, and so there is surrender, humor, playfulness, and today, grieving.

The story of the Buddha is that his mother died around the time of his birth, maybe the most primal form of grief. And generally, we see that the Buddha wanted to be free from grief—beyond grief, sorrow, and lamentation. This is a path beyond grief, sorrow, and lamentation.

But then again, when two very dear disciples of his died, the Buddha said that this hall that is full with hundreds of monastics feels empty with the death of Sāriputta and Moggallāna.^[2] And then the sutta goes on to say, "But the Buddha didn't suffer." And I don't know about you, this great individual... I don't know about you, but I want my Buddha to grieve.^[3]

It took some time to kind of clarify in my own heart, but I don't place grief in the cluster of afflictive emotions. I don't live it, but I could imagine a life free of anger and agitation and anxiety. I could imagine it, but it's very hard to imagine a life free of grief, or what that would even mean.

It's like, how do you even look at the world for one minute and see the carnival of greed, hatred, delusion, and destruction that brings, and not feel some bit of grief? And so for me, I associate grief with some of really our best qualities of sensitivity, of love, of morality. I really don't know what our sīla^[4] would look like if we never grieved. Loss is kind of part of what makes the sanctity of life intelligible, its finitude.

Children have sometimes what are called growing pains, right? They say their legs hurt at night or something. And Dharma practice has growing pains too. The growing pains of Dharma often taste like grief. How does it actually feel to change in the actual trenches of change? Not on the other side of letting go—the other side of letting go might feel great, feel like release, feel like we've been freed up from some impingement. But the process of letting go, the movement from the clenched fist of clinging to the open hand of surrender, of letting go, the movement of that is often painful. And that pain often feels something like grieving.

How does it feel to deepen our compassion, to truly awaken to dukkha^[5], to suffering? The Buddha said, "Comprehend suffering." To comprehend suffering, what does that entail?

How does it feel to grow up ethically, to have one's circle of empathy expand? The process of coming out of the depth of our self-absorption into some awareness of the vastness of suffering, that feels like grieving. And before the truth of suffering, the First Noble Truth of suffering, before the truth of suffering ennobles us, we grieve it. We grieve it for a long time. The ordinariness of suffering, the endlessness of samsara, is startling.

There's research by Shelley Taylor on positive illusions. These are sort of illusions we have that seem to be associated with health. And so she writes, "Self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, an illusion of control, and unrealistic optimism are widespread in human thought. These illusions foster the criteria normally associated with mental health." Self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, the illusion of control, unrealistic optimism—associated with mental health. And it said that these illusions bolster and stabilize the sense of self.

Indeed, philosopher Thomas Metzinger says creating too much awareness of mortality threatens the integrity of your and other people's conscious self-model because it implies a deep existential loss of control. Almost nobody wants to gaze into an abyss for too long because, as Nietzsche famously remarked, the abyss might eventually gaze back into you as well.

I do get the comfort of our illusions. And we don't live every moment as a death contemplation, but there's a subtle agitation of self-deception. The Dharma is a deep, burning longing for truth, and when one part of us knows we're fooling another part of us, we can't settle. There's agitation.

And so the chickens come home to roost at some point. Those illusions will not sustain themselves. The chickens come home to roost, and if we've not grieved the homelessness of ego, the ungovernability of existence, if we've not grieved the end of all things, we will be shattered.

And so that sense that a kind of anticipatory grieving conditions our heart, not towards hopelessness, but towards motivation to practice with what we can practice with. To grow into compassion—right, the two wings of awakening: wisdom and compassion—to grow, to deepen into it, to evolve as moral creatures, to really evolve and grow up as ethical beings, this will stretch ourselves and will entail some measure of grief.

Now, the grief I speak of is very fluid rather than stagnant. James Baldwin said that people can cry much easier than they can change. That line has always kind of haunted me, you know. It's like, I don't want those tears to be a kind of a rationalization of stagnation. But the Dharma grieving is a process by which something else becomes love. Dharma is this alchemical process, transmuting.

There is this beautiful line saying that grief is completely pregnant with bodhicitta^[6], the awakened heart. Completely pregnant. And this insight path, the path of purification, is transmuting suffering into wisdom and love. And even when the grief hurts, the love never feels far.

I offer this for your consideration today. It's good to appreciate the opportunity to be able to touch these universal human themes together. So thank you all, and we'll look forward to gathering tomorrow. Okay, have a good day. Thanks.