Guided Meditation: Boundless Compassion; Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (4 of 5) Infinite Space

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Boundless Compassion; Training in Emptiness (4 of 4) Infinite Space. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 13, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Boundless Compassion

Greetings, and I'm very glad to be here with you.

So, in our training in emptiness, for this meditation, the aspiration for us is cutting through the ignorance of selfishness and self-referential thinking. If that's okay with you, I propose that we adopt that as a common aspiration for these few minutes. And as always, we begin by going to someplace empty, as the Buddha told us to: seclusion. We take a break from our worldly concerns, and we create physical seclusion and mental seclusion. So we invite all of our worries and concerns to have a seat outside of our meditation space. They'll be okay out there; they don't need us for this meditation.

Assuming your meditation posture, and if you're comfortable closing your eyes, I really recommend that. I find it much more restful myself to listen to a guided meditation than to look at one. Take a moment to investigate your posture. How can you sit in a way that feels settled, relaxed, hopefully a bit empty, and at the same time being in touch with the flow of life inside of us and outside of us, having some wholesome^[1] energetic quality in the body?

I like to think of the energy coming up from the earth, and it may or may not go through the legs^[2], but certainly coming up from the base of the spine, allowing the head to be well balanced. You might want to bring it back a little ways. Connecting our posture—whether it's sitting, standing, or lying down—connecting with our breathing: long, slow, deep breaths. If you've found it beneficial, you can imagine the flow of the breath coming up from the base of the spine along the back, taking a slight pause between the inhale and the exhale at the crown of the head, and then gently letting the exhale come peacefully down the front. In a way, we're nourishing the settledness and the energy of the body by the way that we breathe, bringing this intentionality to our breathing, attending to our breathing with mindfulness, with care, and full awareness.

The Brahma-viharas^[3], the Divine Abodes, are excellent preparations for the gradual descent into emptiness. We spent these first few days relying on metta^[4], which is sort of like the mother of all four of these Divine Abodes. So again, offer your whole body a sense of exquisite friendliness, warmth, accepting whatever it is, whatever way it is, however it is. This precious body is what allows us to practice. And now offer this also to the mind. However our mind is, I'm confident that we're doing our best, and that's fine, that's good enough. Thank you, mind, for your effort.

Today, as a way of maintaining a sense of spaciousness in the mind, we'll transition to the next of the Divine Abodes, which is compassion (Karuṇā)^[5]. So first, wishing ourselves: "May I be free from all harm. May I be free from cruelty." We offer ourselves the well-wishing of being held in compassion, and we also do the holding.

And now we open up and offer this beautiful feeling of care, kindness, and compassion to all beings everywhere who are suffering. The Buddha tells us that basically anything that is constructed^[6] ends up being suffering because it doesn't last, it's fleeting. So as long as we're involved in what's going on with us, with the world, with others, even if it's going okay, there's no guarantee that it will always be okay. We can extend our well-wishing to our own suffering, especially if we're experiencing pain, health challenges, emotional distress^[7], or loss.

We reach out, imagining all the beings in the world, the humans who are also experiencing some form of suffering, and we send our heartfelt wish that they too be free from harm^[8], from cruelty, and from suffering. Connecting with the nobility of this form of kindness, well-wishing for any being who is suffering, keeping that as a backdrop for the period of the meditation.

To begin with, we can experiment with leaving the words behind and incarnating compassion in our own body and mind. Boundless compassion as we breathe in and breathe out. Our compassion is immeasurable, unlimited. We can liberate our hearts and mind through this boundless compassion, letting our compassion go out as far as it wants to go, and feeling it as unlimited, endless.

And from this spacious compassion, we can invite contemplation of infinite space. So again, coming back to the mindfulness of our energy. We take in not only grounding energy from the earth, but today we'll focus on receiving the energy from infinite space. No boundaries.

Imagine yourself a little speck on planet Earth, sitting here, but allowing your mind to inhabit infinite space. It's space that's holding everything in the universe, and it's empty. And we too can be empty of ignorant clinging to the self. I'm sure in this moment each of us is free from cruelty. We don't need to obsess with our body or the bodies of others. We don't really need to obsess with accumulating more and more possessions.

And with this spaciousness of the mind, dwelling in boundless compassion, and mindful attention to whatever arises...

[Silence for meditation]

Resting in^[9] a peaceful heart, there is no need for the burden of selfing. If thoughts arise, we have the wisdom to let them go. A mind that's like space is a wholesome and healing place to be. Tasting the freedom of emptiness, the beauty of compassion.

As we come to the end of this sitting, we appreciate the goodness of our practice, even our imperfect practice. And we continue to offer well-wishing of compassion to all living beings, including us. May we and all beings be safe and protected. Being safe, may we all dwell in kindness, contentedness, at ease. May we abide in peace, and may all beings everywhere be free.

In, out... let's all bow together^[10]. Thank you.

Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (4 of 5) Infinite Space

I want to express my deep appreciation to both Gil Fronsdal^[11] and Venerable Anālayo^[12] for their teachings on emptiness, which I'm borrowing from quite a bit this week.

Today is the fourth in the series of training in emptiness^[13], and the step in the discourse we've been studying after what we did yesterday is infinite space.

On Monday, we focused on really becoming aware of the inconstancy of everything that's conditioned. Because we and everything are just a flow rather than solid, we're essentially empty. And what the Buddha stressed we need to be empty of, is empty of ideas of a self.

Then on Tuesday, we went to the part of the sutta^[14] where he begins teaching Ananda^[15] about how to enter into emptiness. He starts with the example that they're all there meditating together, and what is not empty is the monastic Sangha^[16] meditating there. So that is the presence. And he stresses the importance of knowing not only what's present, but also what's absent. He gave the example of the Sangha there being absent of all kinds of animals. In the same way, when we tend to reify anything, we should always know that it's empty of a self.

Yesterday, we moved to the next step in the teaching, which is to quiet down on the details and meditate on the oneness of the earth. This is a way of collecting^[17] the mind.

Infinite Space and the Cosmos

The step after that is infinite space. I'd like to make a little aside. I learned this week that NASA has celebrated the first year of the James Webb Space Telescope in space, and it has performed far beyond expectations. In fact, it has revealed in our own cosmic backyard images of galaxies that arose very close to the Big Bang, to the beginning of the universe.

Before this telescope in space, astronomers^[18] only had a handful of images of early galaxies in the first one billion years of existence. Now they have hundreds, and it is totally astonishing. What they're seeing is clouds of forming stars that are swirling around black holes. So in the midst of the space of the universe, there's all this flow happening.

The fact that they could go back so far and see this earliest time of the universe, it was like having baby pictures of the cosmos. In fact, what these reveal is how things were at the beginning of time. So in a way, the time in the early part of the cosmos is now available to humans in the form of images. Extraordinary.

The Shorter Sutta on Emptiness

I'd like to spend the rest of this talk reading to you, continuing from where we left off yesterday in the Shorter Sutta on Emptiness^[19]. It would be nice just for you to listen. If you like, you can close your eyes, but I'm hoping that dropping deep into the sutta will be useful.

The Buddha says^[20]:

"Again, not attending to the perception of forest or perception of earth, a practitioner clearly knows this field of perception is empty of the perception of forest. There is only this that is not emptiness: the oneness dependent on the perception of earth. Thus one regards what is not there as empty. However, as to what remains there, one clearly knows, 'This is present.' Thus, this is the genuine, undistorted, completely pure descent into emptiness.

"One attends to the oneness dependent on the perception of the sphere of infinite space. Through the perception of the sphere of infinite space, the mind gains confidence, becomes settled, remains still, and is inclined towards release. One clearly knows thus: 'Whatever stress there might be dependent on the perception of forest, that is not present here. Whatever stress there might be dependent on the perception of earth, that is not present here. There is only this measure of stress: the oneness dependent on the perception of the sphere of infinite space.'

"One clearly knows this field of perception is empty of the perception of earth. There is only this that is not emptiness: the oneness dependent on the perception of the sphere^[21] of infinite space. Thus one regards what is not there as empty. However, as to what remains, one clearly knows, 'This is present.' Thus, this is the genuine, undistorted, completely pure descent into emptiness."

You remember that in the beginning of this discourse, the Buddha affirms that he often abides in emptiness. This is what Buddhas do, and also Arahants^[22], fully awakened ones. The Buddha often refers to this as a pleasant abiding when he's meditating. And it's important to know that this can also be done not just in seated meditation, but in any of the four postures: sitting, standing, walking, or lying down.

We can imagine spaciousness and emptiness as medicine for the fetter of conceit.

So with that, I'd like to suggest that in as many of our daily activities as we can, see if we can perceive spaciousness, and remember that everything is empty of itself.

Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your practice.