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Guided Meditation: Awareness Without Willfulness

So welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, even evening, I believe. It's nice to see all the names and, lovely, yeah.

You know, I talk a big game about letting go, and that's honest. I try to represent my life and practice with a lot of honesty. But the Golden State Warriors played last night. For those who don't know, it's a local basketball team—"sportsball," some people call it. And they're at the end of a kind of dynastic run, and it was a tight game. And I was, as the kids say, a hot mess.

I had this moment, as I was being told to calm down, of thinking, "I am not a person who anyone should ever listen to or look to for wisdom." [Laughter] I thought of you, and, wild, but here we are. Something about caring for things that actually don't really matter that I like. They won, by the way. Steph. Yeah.

Okay, that's the intro for our meditation. And let us contemplate the depths of human potential. Okay.

So, finding a posture that feels sustainable.

Just taking stock of your heart. The impacts and residues of the day so far, the week, this year. Whatever's here in this moment, just awake to the residues of the moment.

And we relax, willing to feel whatever residues are here.

Maybe we use the breathing to smooth out the energy of our body-mind, to unify the field of the body. Cooling the hyper-intensities, enlivening the unconscious or numbed-out zone.

There is a kind of effort we make in practicing that we want to be careful about: not letting our willfulness eclipse the grace of this moment. The ways the self-based efforting obscures something important. And so you're invited to relax that, too.

The effort we make is partnered: the effort to relax these surges of willfulness, to actually sense the abrasiveness of always doing something to the moment, to ourselves. And then, in a way, there is nothing left to do but be awake.

And it can be supportive to have, of course, an anchor for the attention, for the attentional spotlight. But the attention often has a kind of flavor of meanness. The awareness that emerges out of that attention doesn't taste like "me."

Whatever doesn't depend on you, rest there.

Dharmette: Mortality - Fear, Helplessness & Self (4/5)

Okay. The contemplation of mortality can support samadhi. It can cut through the noise and clarify what is of value to us. And today, insight into self, the self-limits of willfulness, the ways in which my life does not belong entirely to me.

Mortality offers us the contemplation—maybe we can say the ego's helplessness—of a world that is unresponsive to our willfulness. Tuesday, I think, was futurelessness; samadhi. Today, helplessness. Because what of life is left when the ego is all out of moves? And death is, in one sense, a kind of ultimate humbling, but also the source of a great deal of our grandiosity and this sense of self, a sense of self as a kind of hub of control.

So what I was alluding to with the ways in which the direction of attention, the kind of attentional spotlight, can incarnate a congealed sense of self—a sense of like "me" as the attentional agent. The attention to the breathing or the body or this or that, and then something else in the field that does not depend on us, that does not taste like "me." The sense of self is a kind of hub of control. Death obliterates control and throws us off.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez^[1] wrote, "Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later. No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find that their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life—sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow it to smithereens—tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates. And when the earthquake finally comes, we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves: accident, fluke, sometimes fate."

What is our relationship to helplessness? Before we die, we want to develop a relationship to helplessness. That's Michele McDonald's language. She often would say, "develop a relationship with..." And sometimes I think a synonym for dukkha^[2]—usually translated as suffering—a synonym for dukkha may be helplessness. There's almost always some move to make, but our capacity for influence creates the illusion of control. And then we come to a place where there's no move to make, and maybe we've not developed a kind of relationship with helplessness.

Part of meditation practice is about willingly experiencing helplessness. We call it surrender. Maybe we call it equanimity. And part of why we do this is that willfulness obscures certain qualities of the heart-mind. The moment is never perfect when I'm in it.

It can feel terrible not to be able to do something. It's like the cardinal rule of an animal: helplessness has got to be the lowest on the list, you know? It can feel so terrible. But then, of course, there's so much relief sometimes. Sometimes when we actually just give up on exerting ourselves, like on making change, on changing something or someone.

And so I think part of this contemplation of mortality is to help us find a way to keep our heart open even amidst powerlessness, where we're surrendering our clinging, where there is nothing left to engineer.

The Tibetan teacher Khyentse Rinpoche^[3] said something like—I don't remember it exactly, but something like—at the end of our life, our mind gets very small or very vast. And I for sure have seen both.

Sometimes when people are at the end of their life and they have nothing, in a sense nothing left to defend, no territory to defend, nothing really left to fear, the love gets very vast. Right? It's like the hatred and the contraction, the tightness, is a function of the territoriality, the fear.

It is said that we usually think about the self as the cause of things, but the Buddha said that it's the effect. The self is the effect of things. The effect of what? To my mind, most centrally, I'd say it's the effect of fear.

Part of how we ensure our safety is by—in a sense, we orchestrate our survival by hallucinating a self. The self, in a certain sense, feels like the headquarters of my clinging, you know? Longing for more, fear of an end.

And so in our practice, we can notice that the more safe it feels in meditation, the more deeply the moment feels like refuge, the more we can forget ourselves. The more safe we feel, the more we forget ourselves. And then some stimulus frightens us—we hear something, we think something, the knee hurts—and we are chased back into the corner of self.

So maybe we say self is partially the effect of fear. But it's also part of what makes death seem so terrifying, because we imagine death from the perspective of self. We are imagining the destruction of the self. And we're, in a certain way, protecting a phantom.

I don't think insight into anatta^[4], not-self, is like a perfect consolation for death and loss. It's not a perfect consolation, and its imperfection—that's the theme for tomorrow, "not perfect." But it's very meaningful, it's pretty good.

The philosopher Derek Parfit^[5] wrote in a very famous quote: "It is difficult to believe that there is no such thing as an All-or-Nothing self, no deep further fact beyond the multitude of small psychological facts that make you who you are. But I believed that my existence was such a further fact. I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others."

Death and self, willfulness, surrender. For your consideration.

So yeah, may we live well today. May we live well, whatever that means. Yeah, touching to be with you and be swimming in these waters together. So thank you.