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Guided Meditation: Entering the Dharma

Welcome, folks. Yeah, nice to see the names over there. Thank you to whoever said yesterday that it appeared that we were double-booked; you were correct. And so this was the arrangement we got since both were publicized in different ways. Meg took the 7:00 a.m., I'm taking the 8:00 a.m., and that's how we're proceeding. I know normally we reserve the 8:00 a.m. for unconsciousness, 7:00 for mindfulness, 8:00 a.m. consciousness, but we're switching it up today. Anyway, it's sweet to be with you.

Yeah, I knew something was different yesterday because there were some familiar names that I didn't see inside around the other stream. Anyway, welcome to you all. Happy to be with you.

So, that's it. That's, yeah, we enter into the Dharma. Enter into the Dharma in this ritual we create, and in practicing together, maybe beginning each of our days with a kind of reminder. And the reminder of the Dharma becomes very tactile. Even just to say those words, "to enter into the Dharma," has a kind of its own effect.

And this very dense web of meanings and connotations of memory, of feeling, is evoked for me in that phrase. For you, you find your own. To enter into the Dharma.

And so, not to get burdened with the sense of a technique, and doing, and busyness, and fixing myself, and doing a kind of psycho-spiritual surgery on my own heart. No, no, no. Just entering, entering into the Dharma.

And so finding a posture.

Just letting the nectar settle to the bottom of the glass of juice, as [unintelligible] says.

We recollect Buddha, Dharma, Sangha^[1].

The measure, this blessing of the lineage.

So many ways to suffer. And so few ways to be free. But this is one of them.

So we wrap ourselves up in that Dharma blanket of sorts. A sense of coziness. Being held by something.

Then the breath begins to remind us of the Dharma. Remind us of devotion. Remind us of change and poignancy. The preciousness of having been born.

You just let all that suffuse body and mind.

Letting life come to awareness, rather than reaching out to hold experience.

The heart in a kind of posture of surrender. Surrendering to samsara^[2]. Surrender to imperfection.

And trusting that this gesture of surrender strengthens, awakens the heart^[3].

In other words, we abide in receptivity.

Our minds must always be doing double duty, trying to shore up our lives incredibly. When we actually see the movements and machinations of our mind, it testifies to the bigness of the world and the fragility of our condition.

But sometimes we seek our safety from somewhere else. We seek our safety from within the surrender.

Our heart can be nourished even by imperfection.

We develop a kind of faith in openness, receptivity.

Dharmette: Surrender in the Dharma

Towards the end of his life, reflecting on his happiness and suffering, Leonard Cohen was asked by an interviewer about his art. He was asked if he suffered in the ways that he used to. And he said no, and then added, "It's not so much that I got what I was looking for, but the search itself dissolved."

So yesterday the theme was wonder and awe, and today it's surrender. Surrender.

And surrender is not so much a word from our tradition; it's associated more with monotheistic traditions. But there are a couple of beautiful lines from Augustine's Confessions:

"We are but a particle of that creation. Thou awakest us to delight in the praise. For Thou made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee. Hide not Thy face from me. Let me die lest I die; only let me see Thy face. My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see; this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you."

It is kind of curious that I find that so beautiful given my own turn away from theistic tradition, and yet the potency of that seems very clear.

So what is the role, what's the role of surrender in Buddhist practice? On the one hand, we are encouraged to be independent, to be, in the phrase Gil^[4] loves, "independent in the Dharma." To verify the teachings for ourselves. That famous language from the Kalama Sutta^[5]: when you know for yourselves that these practices, these teachings are skillful. When you know for yourselves. There is a kind of theme of the resourcefulness of the individual heart. You know, "in this fathom-long body we find suffering and its end." And so there is this self-sufficiency. Something like this, maybe that's not right, self-sufficiency, but there is a kind of encouragement, a certain kind of self-reliance.

And surrender, of course, is a dangerous thing and word, and many of us at some point have surrendered to bad ideas, or bad people, or bad habits. And so I'm cautious with that word. But so much of the goodness of the path requires surrender. Our power, maybe we say in the Dharma, comes from a kind of surrender. And we're not surrendering in this tradition to someone exactly, but surrendering to the moment and trusting that it will shape our heart well.

No will to power. The urge to possess or dominate, control. Possess, dominate, control ourself. This can't take us deep into the Dharma. It's like all of that willfulness is such a tangle of so much intense feeling, affect. So we practice relaxing it.

For me, the willfulness in practice seems to draw its energy from something like a tangle deep in my own heart. It feels almost like this very primitive anger or control. And that willfulness kind of masquerades as dhammachanda^[6], a longing for the Dharma, or masquerades as viriya^[7], a kind of energetic vigor. But we must all ask: what does practice look like on the other side of your willfulness?

The most transformative practice really unfolds when our ego is all out of moves. You know? And that beautiful passage from the Confessions is like, "Oh yeah, the ego is all out of moves there." And so the path, in a sense, begins with surrender. To acknowledge at the beginning that, "I don't know exactly how to live. I know that this can't work out the way I've been doing it, but I don't know exactly how to live. Let me open to the wisdom of a lineage."

To be present, just to be present, is really another way of saying we're ceasing our attempts to govern the future. To make this moment about some future moment of security, to make the present a down payment on some future happiness.

And we have this sense of always deploying mindfulness to solve this problem or that problem, but mindfulness itself is a kind of surrender, and a receptivity. An openness to the moment. This is a kind of surrender.

Our mind wants to do something to the moment rather than be changed by it. To do something to the breath rather than be changed by it, to be suffused by it.

And so, rather than fidgeting with samsara, we're opening radically to non-control. And that is surrender.

In order to forgive samsara, we have to surrender to it, at least in moments. Just to pause deeply in a sense of like, "Okay, I'm not going to be able to work out the imperfections in this realm." There's surrender involved in that.

And in order to relinquish stories that no longer serve us, we have to surrender to not knowing. You know, like repairing a ship at sea a little bit.

The nature of insight is not knowing. Insight arises out of the mind that doesn't know. We can't know what we'll find; insight is always a little surprising.

Sometimes as people deepen in the practice, they describe getting more settled, the self getting kind of thinner, thinned out. And sometimes they feel like they are at the precipice of some really deep silence, stillness, and they kind of get jerked back into sometimes the worst thought we could have, the worst habit we have. Jerked back into a very congealed sense of self. Mara^[8], the force of suffering, kind of playing his trump card in the moment.

And so we actually are learning to surrender to groundlessness. A trust that stillness is a refuge, even if we lack our ordinary reference points. Stillness is a refuge.

This is how we settle into samadhi^[9], the kind of unification of the mind. There's effort involved, but often much less than we imagined, or a different kind of effort. And at some point in the journey into stillness, effort itself is just another species of agitation.

And so we settle into silence and stillness through a kind of falling. A kind of falling into something, and a trusting that the silence won't harm you. The groundlessness won't harm you.

And so we're not so much focusing more closely; we're surrendering to silence.

So surrender, surrender, surrender. But here's the thing: from surrender we find our power. From surrender we find our security.

So, for your consideration this morning^[10]. And it's good to be with you. I'll be back tomorrow, 8:00 Pacific, and hope to see you then. I wish you all a good Valentine's Day. And yeah, I'll see you tomorrow.