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: Investigation

Good morning. For those of you on this part of the continent, it's morning; if you're on another continent, it might not be morning. I'm happy to be here for the second day, and we're exploring the story of Mara and Mara's armies. As usually happens in these 7:00 a.m. sessions, we'll start with a guided meditation.

So, taking a moment to settle in. Breathing yourself sitting. Bringing attention to the posture, let's begin there. If you're in a seated position, just noticing if the spine has some uprightness and some ease. Noticing if the ears are over the shoulders. Sometimes it's helpful to push the chin back just a tiny bit, really small. It may not even be noticed by somebody else observing you, but pushing the chin back—not down, but back—can open up the top of the spine and the neck in a way that really supports some uprightness and ease.

Feeling into the sitting base: the buttocks, the legs, the feet. Connected, grounded.

And then just bringing this aliveness of attention—I like this expression, "aliveness of attention"—into the body, into the bodily experience. Inhabiting the body, alive to the way that it feels right now. Including the posture, but also more generally.

And then noticing the experience of breathing. Explore this experience, or feel it on its own terms. Is there a way that we can step towards the experience of breathing? Getting to know it without the experience needing to be different. We're just noticing how it is.

Can we bring some curiosity to the experience of breathing, as if you've never been with the sensations of breathing before? Maybe in the same way that a naturalist observes nature, can we be a naturalist to the experience of breathing? We're not trying to figure it out or understand it. We're just noticing. What does that feel like?

Setting the direction of our practice together as one of kindness, warmth. Can we bring this quality of kindness in the manner in which we'll be paying attention, the way we're paying attention? Can we imbue our attention with care and warmth?

And then, when the mind wanders, just very simply, gently, with this warmth and kindness, begin again with the sensations of breathing.

And now, having studied a little bit, settled a little bit by resting the attention on the sensations of breathing, we can open it up a little bit to other experiences that are compelling. Sounds: the sounds of airplanes overhead, or dogs barking nearby, someone who shares your household moving about. Whatever it might be. Just noticing sound.

And then we can return to the anchor, the sensations of breathing, in a relaxed, easy manner. We don't have to pounce on other experiences. We don't have to jerk the mind back. Being mindful with kindness and warmth, but not complacency or just being casual. Being here with intention.

Maybe noticing that that sound is no longer compelling, but now perhaps there's a bodily sensation that's compelling. The pressure of the chair or cushion against the body, perhaps. Just notice pressure. And then begin again with the sensations of breathing.

In this way, we're open to the human experience in this moment, bringing some curiosity. What does it feel like to be a human at this time, at this moment, precisely now? Without thinking that things should be otherwise. Instead, having some curiosity. Not trying to figure things out, but just curious. What is there to notice?

So we stay with the sensations of breathing until something else becomes compelling. We can bring our attention to that. Then, when it's no longer compelling, we return to the sensations of breathing.

In these last few minutes, what would it be like to bring some curiosity to the experience? What's really happening? Again, not to figure it out or understand it, but to notice. Notice the texture of the moment. Notice the arising and passing of the experiences, being present for what's happening.

Dharmette: Mara's Army of Boredom

Again, it's lovely to be practicing with you all. Yesterday I introduced this idea of stories and some of the role that they play in our practice, and certainly in our tradition and in our lives.

It turns out there are a few different stories about the Buddha's Awakening, and one of those stories includes that as the Buddha-to-be was sitting underneath the Bodhi tree, having this commitment that he was not going to move until he became awakened, Mara^[1] shows up, bringing his armies with him.

Mara we might understand as representing or symbolizing that which is obstructing or trying to prevent our movement towards Awakening, or our progress on the path towards greater freedom and peace. And so Mara, as I said yesterday and I like to emphasize in this tradition, is not a satanic figure. The story of Mara versus the Buddha is not a story of good versus evil. Instead, it's a story of complacency versus effort, or complacency versus commitment to practice.

We have to be a little bit careful here, because when we talk about effort or commitment to practice, there might be a tendency to think like we have to work really hard and strive in some kind of way. But actually, there certainly needs to be effort, but too much efforting itself can be an obstruction to practice. So part of the art of practice is knowing this right amount. The story of Mara versus the Buddha is: are we just floating along in our life, or are we engaged with it, and with the teachings in our life, in such a way that leads to greater freedom, leads to greater peace, leads to greater well-being, leads to Awakening?

Part of this is, in modern times at the Arrow River Forest Hermitage in Northern Ontario, Canada, Ajahn Punnadhammo^[2] has written these kind of whimsical stories of Mara, fleshing out Mara as a character in a way that I think is delightful and is a lot of fun. So in these talks, I'm excerpting portions of this and going to bring it forward for us to explore and enhance our practice.

The setting is that this Mara character is in this fantastical, beautiful palace or castle, and he's dictating these letters to the leaders of ten armies. And these ten armies are, in the story, the ones that assailed the Buddha, and we might even understand that they assail us today.

So here's the preamble to the letters, and again, I'm excerpting this. Here's Mara—as we might even say maybe in modern times, he's sending out a group email to the leaders of these armies:

"Greetings to all my hard-working minions. As you are well aware, our overall strategy seems to be working as smoothly as usual. The vast multitude of beings who wander in our little playground, the great samsara^[3], are by and large oblivious to the true nature of their predicament. But we must continue our unceasing efforts to maintain them in our power."

So again, Mara, it's not that he wants people to experience pain and go to hell or anything like that. Mara just wants people to feel complacent and unaware that greater freedom is possible. He just wants to make them feel like, "Oh yeah, this is good enough."

So that's the preamble to the letters. But what I want to talk about today is that letter or email that Mara is sending to the second army. I'm skipping over the first army, which is sense desire, and instead for this series in these mornings, I want to talk about those armies that we don't talk about as much. And so the second one is boredom. Boredom as an army is an experience that gets in the way of greater freedom.

So here's Mara sending an email to his second army:

"To the host of boredom, I extend greetings and congratulations. Your role is to act in coordination with sensual desire, the first army. We must keep beings in a state of dissatisfaction with the present reality. What a scam. We keep them craving always something exciting, something new. But the trick is to keep them from paying attention to the present moment, because once they're fully present here and now, then they cannot be bored.

But lately, we've managed to foster a social climate that positively discourages calmness and clarity. Their whole modern culture is fast and frenzied, and the last half-century or so has seen many advances in our efforts to fracture the human attention span. Television was a great help, but I think the single greatest advance in the triumph of boredom was the invention of the internet, and social media.

We've succeeded so well in this department that being bored is now considered one of the greatest evils of life. But should they stray close to the true escape, which of course lies in the middle way, then we must redouble our efforts. Whisper in their ears, tell them again and again these good old lies: 'This is really boring. Get out and enjoy life.'"

So this is Mara, right, kind of telling these minions of his army to just make sure that people are not satisfied, and to whisper in their ears, "This is really boring, get out and enjoy life." We might have these ideas about our meditation practice that it's somehow getting in the way of our enjoying life, or that the experience of meditating is boring.

So I'll flesh out just a little bit, what is this experience to be bored? We might consider it as a state of aversion. This way in which the input of the senses—whatever senses: seeing, or hearing, or sensations in the body, or even thoughts—are not providing this desired kick of pleasure that we've grown to really crave, that we've grown to think must be what it means to be alive: to always be stimulated in some kind of way.

So we are always seeking this new and exciting stimuli. And these days we carry these little smartphones in our pockets that make sure that we're never bored. In fact, we might even think that today's society is built in such a way to ensure that we're never bored, right? We have these entire industries, those that develop apps, and not to mention the advertising agencies that have been created just to make sure that we're not bored, and instead we're always seeking this new stimuli.

And not only that, we've become so accustomed to this idea of constantly doing something—whatever exactly "doing something" is. Maybe even if it's doomscrolling on our smartphones, like that's better, it seems, than just to sit quietly. So there's a way in which not doing might make us feel a little bit vulnerable, or this way that makes us feel guilty, because we've become so accustomed to this idea that we should be doing something, that somehow our value or the purpose of our existence is to be doing something.

That's not true. It's not true.

I just kind of like this story of Mara, right? This creature that's like, "Oh yeah, okay, if we make beings really dislike being bored, always seeking some stimuli, then they'll never find greater freedom," which is of course what Mara would like.

So can we work with boredom? Or what do we do if we find ourselves connecting to "this is boring"? Well, it turns out that, of course, mindfulness is this great way to work with this experience of boredom. How does boredom really feel? What is the experience of boredom? Is it this dullness? Well, what does dullness feel like? Not the ideas about it, but what is the experience?

Because come to find out, the way to work with boredom is actually to bring curiosity to the experience, to bring investigation to the experience. Whatever experience we're having, that includes the experience of boredom. So can we just pay a little bit closer attention, maybe like inhabit the experience? No matter how subtle, even if we feel like, "Well, nothing's happening, that's why I'm bored." Can we feel into the subtleness of maybe that feeling of "nothing's happening"? And maybe there's like this small, subtle contraction in the mind: "I don't want to be doing this."

Because one of the truths of life and phenomena, as all of us know, is that everything is always changing. It's arising and passing away. It's inconstant, it's impermanent, nothing stays the same.

So mindfulness is paying attention to what's happening as it's happening. And we just haven't often trained ourselves to be accustomed to noticing the small and subtle changes in our experience, because we're so used to exciting stimuli. So that might take a little bit of patience to just recognize, "Oh yeah, can we just be with exactly this moment?" Just this moment. How does it feel on the inside? What is the breath? What are my feet teaching? What is the quality of the mind state?

And it turns out that with mindfulness practice, as I'm sure many of you know, means that you will never be bored. Because there's always an opportunity to be with the present moment. And this is such a great way to increase our mindfulness capacity. If we ever feel ourselves wanting to go towards that next stimulating thing that we think is going to be inside our smartphones or on the other side of the computer screen, just bring some awareness to the experience, to that human experience, and just see if we can notice some of the subtle changes that are happening.

And then, of course, many of you know the stories of the Buddha include Mara visiting the Buddha even after he was awakened. And what does the Buddha say to him? He says, "I see you, Mara."

And then Mara disappears. So in the same way, here's boredom: "I see you, boredom, and it feels like this."

And that's the ending of boredom. So thank you for your attention, and I look forward to exploring some of these other armies of Mara later this week. Thank you very much.