This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Effort and Effortlessness

Okay, so welcome. Welcome, folks. Just landing in your posture. Supported by all the practice you've done, but not using all the practice you've done to predict exactly what happens today.

So, if you're feeling a certain kind of pressure to think particular thoughts, just think, "I'll think hard for this first minute," and then recognize that thought offers no refuge.

Directing the spotlight of attention to some anchor, some object that acts as a kind of feedback loop reminding you to stay here—maybe the breath, maybe something else. And the spotlight operator can be relaxed—their arms on that spotlight, relaxed.

We're not trying to make anything else disappear—the rest of the stage, the cast of characters—but we're just spotlighting.

The effortful quality of attention training supports the seemingly effortless quality of awareness.

If I told you to stop being aware, you couldn't do it. Whatever can't be stopped, is it possible to rest there?

There is space for all experiences to arise, but who can say where our life is?

Keep relaxing back. No effortful attempt to control the spotlight of attention.

As we become less mesmerized, the attention becomes less glued to discursive thinking, auditory thinking.

The awareness tastes less and less like me.

As the teacher [U Pandita?]^[1] says, "Let your face fall off." An element of relaxation, of course.

The non-identification. You are not your face. Just another part of your body, like a foot or a knee.

Taking its place in the openness of awareness.

Dharmette: Dharma as Existential Therapy

Welcome, good to sit with you.

Here is Bertrand Russell: "All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of humanity's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins."

Or from the Zen tradition: "May I respectfully remind you, great is the matter of life and death. Life slips quickly by. Time waits for no one. Wake up, wake up. Don't waste a moment."

Maybe it's just our grandiosity that makes life seem like it's no big deal, you know? Like it's not the freakiest of freak accidents that we're even alive.

So this week I've been making the case that there are many mechanisms of action in the dharma, many ways we're healed and nudged towards awakening. I started with attention training, and then said the dharma is also a cognitive therapy, and exposure therapy yesterday. And today, dharma as existential therapy.

So, how can we be adults about our existential situation? Yes, great is this matter of life and death.

Now, existential psychotherapy suggests that the failure to deal with four core existential challenges is linked to a lack of fulfillment or psychological symptoms. These four challenges are death, meaning, freedom (not in the Buddhist sense, but freedom to make of our life something), and lastly, isolation.

These are themes for all of us in one way or another, and maybe sometimes turning away from them, or even something like denial, can be adaptive for a time. But in the end, the chickens come home to roost.

We want to prepare our heart before it's too late. The dharma is, I feel, not necessarily a perfect cure for all of them, but at the least, it's a very deep consolation. It really does help our heart acclimatize to anicca^[2]—impermanence, to groundlessness, to the radical openness of all things. Our heart needs a lot of time to acclimatize to that. And some of what we're doing as we practice is giving our heart bearable doses of groundlessness.

So, death. That all that is precious and dear to me is of the nature to change. I think I, on some subconscious level, got into dharma practice because some part of me knew that I was utterly unprepared for that task.

There are only those of us who have grieved, and those who will grieve. And so, in our practice, we practice being softened rather than hardened by anicca. In some ways, in every moment of purification, the heart is actually adapting in its own way to loss.

The antidote to a bad death is living a valued life. And that's part of what a dharma life feels like to me. It's valued; I value it.

Irvin Yalom^[3], kind of linked to existential psychotherapy, says an existential position holds that the world is contingent. That is, everything that is could as well have been otherwise. That human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world. That there exists no meaning, no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the person creates.

Whatever meaning we make, we're going to have to make it. The Buddha said that the world trembles in all directions. That's Gil's^[4] translation—trembles in all directions. Groundless. No ultimate foundation for anything we build.

Anything we build—a life, a democracy, a species, even a civilization. Nothing is guaranteed an existence. Nothing exists on its own; everything owes its existence to many other things, but we must still build, and build well.

The poet Philip Appleman: "Face to face with death, we realize the meaning of life is inside our lives, not outside them. We cannot impose on our experience meaningfulness that we have not ourselves built into it. Our true philosophy of life is whatever we choose to do from moment to moment. The sum total of our actions at a given time constitutes our philosophy of life."

We're going to have to spend our freedom, spend our life. What will we make of our lives?

I saw this documentary about Leonard Cohen, organized around his song Hallelujah, and he spent some years in a Rinzai Zen monastery. Just one line caught me; he said something like, "Sitting in a meditation hall for four or five hours a day, you kind of get straight with yourself."

We get straight with ourselves, and cut through the pettiness, the idealism, and the naive fantasies. What will constitute our philosophy of life? And we come to appreciate our aloneness. No matter how deeply we sense interconnection, or abide in non-duality, we are in an important sense alone. But how lonely does it feel to be alone? The dharma trains us to get very comfortable being alone. And being alone reminds us of everything else.

So in all these tasks, the dharma is relevant. I might add one more existential issue to death, and meaning, and freedom, and isolation. That would be: what do we owe others? What do we owe each other? What do the divisions across space and time mean? Someone on the other side of the globe, someone yet to be born, what do we owe to them?

A lot. We learn that too.

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." That's Maya Angelou^[5].

So I will pause there. Thank you for having me. I'm conscious my kind of style is just to throw a lot of stuff your way, and so you sift through the value and the rubbish. I hope that something's useful. I appreciate the opportunity to be together. Thanks for having me and welcoming your substitute teacher. I'll be back sometime in September, I think, maybe late September. I wish you all a good day, and a week, and all the rest.

Thank you, be well.