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Guided Meditation: Listening to the Mind of Buddha

Let's set... The silence beckons us.

We can place our attention in a simple way with the breath, with our body, sound, the darkness behind our closed eyes, with a phrase, a mantra, or a practice, when we don't want the mechanics of our attention to blot out the beckoning of silence.

Before he died, Leonard Cohen wrote a few lines of poetry: "Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me. Listen to the mind of God that doesn't need to be. Listen to the mind of God, don't listen to me."

Maybe that instruction is complete for you. Maybe the practice is: listen to the mind of a Buddha. But the emphasis is on receptivity, a trusting awareness of hearing the silence beckon us.

The movements of our mind are quite a bit like the body of an animal plowing, and totally blameless. We forgive our mind. We forgive some sorrow. When we rest, suspended silence.

We find the reconciliation between spiritual urgency and abiding patience.

There are practices to rest from the endlessness of our coping. Coping with the intensity of the human condition, and just kind of giving up trying to sort out all the pleasantness from the unpleasantness, the hope from the fear, the pros and cons of me.

When we're not coping anymore, there's nothing to do but be awake.

Dharmette: Mortality and the Clarification of What Matters (3/5)

It's good to sit with you.

Silence and noise. We live in a very noisy world, a noisy realm, and of course, we have the blessings of technology, but also the ways we drown in it. So much of technology has functioned primarily to scale greed and delusion^[1]. We're kind of drowning in information but can't make much sense of anything.

There is a line from Jennifer Egan's novel The Candy House; she says, "Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it's all just information." It is very easy to lose the plot, the plot of our life. It's very easy to take on the prevailing values of the moment, of the context. And when we're pretty happy, when things are going okay, things can be kind of fun. Things we often take to be important, they can be kind of fun—I don't want to dismiss that. But when we're unhappy, when things are breaking down, almost nothing matters except the heart. There's just zero consolation from ownership. When there's not wisdom, delusion fills the vacuum.

Maybe we know the experiences like we have on retreat, especially maybe a little whirlpool of suffering. The day is going all right, we're doing our practice, and then, okay, there's a whirlpool, and we get spun out about whatever. And on retreat, the blessing of continuity, you get to see how little the house of cards we built meant. We get to actually see the collapse. When the house of cards that seemed so meaningful, the story that seemed so meaningful—we get to see it collapse, and we see how little it actually meant.

But some whirlpools are ten minutes long, and some are ten years. Is that from poet David Whyte? He said some years ago: "I found myself working with a room full of particularly thoughtful managers. We were looking at all the ways humans find it necessary to sacrifice their own sacred desires and personal visions on the altar of work and success. Out of this, a woman wrote the following lines. She read them slowly from the back of the room, unaware, stricken we all were by the silence she created. She said, 'Ten years ago, I turned my face for a moment and it became my life.'"

It's possible for that to happen. And it's possible for us to wake up. And so we ask the question: how do we keep from losing the plot? How do we remember? We take our counsel from death.

"I am of the nature to age, to become ill, to die. There's nothing I can do to escape this." We take it in, the kind of remembrances^[2]. We take it in, and we see what in our mind holds on, and what lets go. We see what falls away.

So much of what we do in our life, in the busyness, maintains its momentum only in light of immortality. We tacitly are assuming immortality; it's the only way this little thing matters. Because if I knew in this moment this thing ends, the view would be different. So we bring the contemplation to the surface not to scare ourselves, but to sense into what we care about. What will matter? What would make life feel more complete? We're complete, because even if we were to live carelessly for a thousand years, it would not feel like enough. It would not feel like enough.

It's almost like the image I'm having is that kind of the Hungry Ghost^[3] with the huge belly and the tiny mouth, trying to get sustenance. And maybe we're like that with life, with time. What would make it feel like enough? We ask ourselves this question.

I saw this interview with Roland Griffiths, who's a psychopharmacologist at Hopkins. I knew his work long before he got famous for doing psychedelic research. He was a drug abuse liability researcher and very well-respected. And I didn't know he was a long-term meditator. Then he got into psychedelic research. I was quite sad, as he was recently diagnosed with a serious, aggressive disease. I saw an interview with him, and the interviewer says, "You talk about your cancer almost as if it's a gift. Does that mean you don't have any regrets about what's happening?" And Griffiths's response was, "My life has never been better. If I had a regret, it's that I didn't wake up as much as I have without a cancer diagnosis. It's been incredible."

To live in alignment with our deepest values, with what we care about, takes something powerful—nuclear-powered, really—to keep remembering. And it takes energy. It takes wisdom, renunciation. The Buddha famously described anger as having a honeyed tip and poisoned root^[4]. And in this life, there is a lot of honey and a lot of poison. How do we remember that the honey is tied to the poison? How do we not be conned by what doesn't matter? We recall our death.

And there's something about that contemplation where I can almost just feel the energy draining out of the defilements^[5]. It just feels like too much to nurse the dense stories, or old resentments, or the envy, or divisiveness, or whatever. It's just like, "Okay, don't have time for that."

And so maybe what I'm saying is what's been said a million times: death helps us let go. It helps us let go of fake refuge, fake happiness.

Death, of course, is a letting go. In a way, in each moment we practice, we're practicing for the enormous letting go of death. Each time we surrender to imperfection, each time we stop coping, each time we open to a certain kind of helplessness, we're practicing dying.

In a certain way, rehearsing our own death is both a preparation and a way of clarifying what's going to count. In the wake of that kind of surrender, that [unintelligible] with the First Noble Truth^[6], the Dharma makes a lot of sense. Death helps the Dharma make a lot of sense.

I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what is useful and leave the rest behind. If we were speaking one-on-one, there's no way I would say exactly all of this to each of you. So we each need to wade through the words of others to find what's useful.