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Guided Meditation: Now

Good morning again, and a good day. Today I will continue with mostly sitting meditation and not do a guided meditation, with the idea that it's valuable to just sit with oneself as we are. Guided meditations can change the context of sitting, which is often valuable, but it's also valuable to spend some time just sitting quietly without any input.

But I would like to quote a couple of things from the Buddha that pertain to the topic for today and for the Dharma talk.

Someone comes to the Buddha, a man named Udaya^[1], and refers to the idea of remembering past lives and knowing future lives, and how this relates to other teachers in India at that time. The Buddha responds to him this way:

"Let the past be. Let be the past, let be the future. I shall teach you the Dhamma."

This is a very important phrase. Put aside concerns about the past, about the future; if you want the Dhamma here, listen to this:

"When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, it does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases."

This is considered to be the teaching of dependent arising^[2]. Rather than explaining it, the important point of this is that in the present, now, put aside the past and the future. Sit. You see the Dharma if you see the river of time, the flow of change here and now—how one thing leads to another, one thing sets the stage for something else to occur one way or the other. Things are arising and they're passing. They appear and they disappear. Some of that is that the thing itself—a sound—comes and goes, and some of it has to do with how we experience something.

So if I'm holding this book, and I was just holding it, the book doesn't disappear just like that, but my awareness, my attention to the book shifts and changes as it goes from the words that I'm speaking, to holding the book, to thinking about other things here in the room, and all kinds of things that can happen.

And so, this idea of staying in the place of arising and passing, coming and going, here and now. A fascinating teaching the Buddha gave is basically to avoid the idea—he didn't say it's not true, but just to avoid the idea—that things exist and that things do not exist. For someone who sees that things appear, they cannot say that things don't exist. For those who see that things disappear, they cannot say that they exist.

The alternative to positing existence and non-existence is, again, this world that we live in—the world of experience, the world of how we perceive this world comes and goes. So, now.

One of the things you might do in this sitting is very gently, lovingly to yourself, as you are at every exhale or every inhale—whichever you like—say the word "now." Say the word "now." So that it becomes a time to know now. Know now. This that comes and goes, now.

So with that, we'll sit quietly. Thank you.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, I'd like to evoke the wisdom of three questions and answers that, in one form or another, are repeated in many wisdom traditions.

The first question is: When is the most important time? And the answer is: Now.

Who is the most important person? Whoever is present. So if you're with someone else, it might be them. If you're alone, it's yourself.

And what's the most important thing? To not obstruct the openness of your heart. To keep your heart open and not have it dim or obscured by thoughts, stories, and opinions.

And so we come to the end of the sitting. The important time is now. The most important person is each of us individually and as a collective. And the important thing is to keep the heart open. May it be that as we move out into the world and end this meditation, that the meditation reminds us, reinforces for us the possibility of keeping and staying with an open heart—a loving heart that's ready to delight in others, to love others, to care for others.

And may it be that as we go forth from this meditation, we carry with us an attitude expressed in these words:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: The Dharma, Pt 2 (2 of 5) Now is the Most Important Time

So this week we're reviewing again, or going through again, these five qualities of the Dharma. It's in part the teachings of the Buddha. This famous saying that we're relying on is that the Dharma is well spoken by the Buddha. So something well spoken, beneficial, helpful. And the Dharma as a teaching points to something here and now. The teaching and what we awaken to are inseparable. What we enter into in this practice is inseparable.

A simplistic way of saying these five qualities is: The first is that the Dharma is here, unequivocally here. Today, the second one: it is now. The third one is that the Dharma instructs us to look. The fourth one is: flow along. And the fifth one is: feel the flowing along, feel the freedom, know the freedom and this being of flowing along with here and now in the present.

So: here, now, look, flow along, feel freedom.

So today is now. Akāliko^[3]—what's immediate, what's present for us in this present moment, for however long it lasts for us—the now that we can live in.

One of the ways to appreciate the value of it is how easy it is to lose touch with it. One of the benefits and one of the things to celebrate about meditation is how it shows us how we don't meditate very well! Rather than seeing our ability to not be present as a problem for meditation, meditation is there to highlight for us how the mind works. We get to see how much the mind departs the present moment.

One of the ways to see this is the thinking mind. For example, there's retrospective thinking—it's hard to think about the past. There's anticipatory thinking—thinking about the future. We can feel ourselves leaning into those, or lingering. I like to think of it as lingering in our thoughts. And as we linger in these thoughts, there's a way in which we no longer linger in the present; we are no longer present for now, as it unfolds, as it is present.

So something as simple as being with your breathing, breathing in and breathing out—breathing is always in the present. And then you can find yourself thinking about something and no longer in touch with the breathing, or hardly in touch with it. And you can actually feel the quality of losing touch, of lingering in those thoughts. Those thoughts might feel rich and valuable and important and substantial, but they aren't. They are ephemeral, impermanent, changing, fickle.

It's possible to be so centered in the present, together with our thinking, that we don't linger in them. They just feel loose and light and soft, kind of coterminous with space—just thoughts floating through now. Here and now. We're not tricked into them; we know them as present-moment things.

One of the really wonderful aspects of mindfulness meditation is when there's a really clear grounding, a clear sense that when I'm thinking about the past, the thinking is happening in the present. When I'm thinking about the future, the thinking is a present-moment phenomenon. When I'm involved in fantasy, the fantasy is a present-moment phenomenon.

So the repetition of the word "now" in meditation, "just now," or the sense of "now, here, now," is not to dismiss or deny anything, but to wake up to, "Oh, this is what the present moment experience is." We don't have to be at war with our thoughts. We don't have to be at war with thinking about the past and the future. But at least in meditation, to discover how much that thinking takes us away from the flow, the connection to here and now.

And then learning to wake up to, "Oh, this is the flavor of now." There's this thinking, and in seeing it this way, we're not tricked into living in the past or living in the future in our thoughts. We just see, "Oh, I'm thinking about it." And maybe we begin feeling the insubstantial nature of thoughts, the lightness of thoughts. Thoughts can feel very heavy and they can feel very light, but they're not heavy by themselves. They're heavy by our involvement with them, our lingering in them, our leaning into them. By themselves, thoughts are very light. Thoughts are coterminous with space. They have as much substance as the sky—sky-like thinking.

So to come here and be now. Here and now. This is where we can start recognizing how we obscure or dim or narrow the openness, sensitivity, our love, our delight, our appreciation, our friendliness, our care. We have such potential now for the beautiful qualities to come out.

As I said last night in a talk, we get caught up in so many different things in our life that seem so important, and we lose touch so easily with what is most important: to be present here for this life with full attention. It might not seem important; it might seem dull and boring from the point of view of the mind that's spinning and chasing and wanting things and not wanting things and protecting the self. It might seem that way, that just being present is not much of interest.

But do the thought experiment: if you knew that you had only one hour to live, you're dying. Maybe you'll be fortunate to die consciously and without any pain, but clearly you know you're dying. This is the time. During that time, would you suddenly realize how important it is to go back to your 2009 tax returns because you think you paid too much and you need to fill out paperwork in order to get $350 back that you know is yours after all? The last hour of your life, you probably won't. That's not what's the most important thing. The last hour of your life, probably the most important thing is not to start planning vacations, planning for the future in some way, and anticipating things. You realize it's not happening; there's no point.

With that last hour, what's important? I would like to propose that to really find the wealth of life, the potential beauty of life at that time, is to really know how to be present, to be here and now. There's a way in which that hour becomes timeless. That hour is not part of time. The idea that an hour away you will be dead doesn't have to have any relevance in the fullness of just now. This moment where love can flow, or delight, where freedom can be, where the heart is not dimmed, where the heart is not obscured, where these thoughts that are heavy don't get in the way, don't interfere.

Simply looking out the window and seeing the leaves and the trees blowing in the wind can seem like looking at Paradise, the jewels. Not because it is—you've seen it many times before—but the quality of now, when presence is so rich and so unobscured and so unencumbered by the things that dim it, that keep it from seeing the sparkle.

So, now. Akāliko—immediate, here. To be seen in this life, to be seen here. To be seen now. This is the Dharma of the Buddha.

And so I'd like to recommend that for this day, you carry with you the English word "now." And if you want to do a little—I like to play word games, letter games—if you take the first two letters of "now," N-O, and think of the W as being the first letter of another word. So "now" becomes N-O W-aiting. No waiting, just now. And no wishing. Just now.

So carry that with you. Not that you're able to stay in the now, but as I said at the beginning of this little talk, mindfulness meditation is not so much about being successful and being mindful in the way we might think of being in the now. But in saying "now," seeing more clearly what you are doing now. We're so much on automatic pilot, so much carried away by our thoughts and involved in things, we don't really see in some higher-quality way what we're actually doing now.

So this word "now." Show up for yourself. See what's happening here. Don't be on automatic pilot. And when you're now, what is the most important thing? What would be the most important thing if you had only one more hour to live? I hope you can do this exercise for many hours. Thank you very much.

Announcements

I want to make one announcement, and I'll make it again, but I wanted to make sure that a number of you can hear it in case you're not here when I announce it again.

For the next three weeks after this week, starting on Sunday, I will be on retreat teaching a three-week retreat, and so I won't be able to do these 7:00 AMs. The last week that I'm away, Matthew Brensilver will come back and teach. I wasn't able to find someone for the next two weeks—people are on retreat, doing all kinds of things that I normally would invite. So what we're going to do is to replay the two weeks of these sittings and Dharma talks that I did in December of 2020: a week on loving-kindness and a week on compassion. I think these are quite important topics, and so I think that the topics are still fresh even though the talks are almost two years old.

So that's the plan. Some of you might not even notice that I'm not here because I think it'll be played in a way that looks like it's fresh, though you'll see that I'm younger, maybe with longer hair or something! [Laughter]

So thank you, and I look forward to tomorrow.