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Guided Meditation: Difficult for the Self to Understand what it can't do

Find your body. Find your breath. Find your love. Find a relaxed way to point your attention. That's the active dimension of practice. Point our attention. Practice staying. Practice noticing the gravitational pull of hope and fear. Practice rededicating our attention just to what's here. And so we do the attention, but we don't do awareness. So figure out what your job is and what is not your job, never was your job. Do our best to sort that out. We try not to let the doingness of our attention obscure the effortlessness, ownerlessness of awareness. We just find ourselves in it. Not behind it.

The doingness of attention—the intentional anchoring of the attention with some object or breathing or body feelings, whatever it may be—can create the illusion that the self is orchestrating our Dharma^[1] path. Then we wake up inside awareness and know that the plot was never that small. The protagonist story never summarized what's actually happening. It is very hard for the self to understand that it doesn't do the Dharma.

The very phrase "meditation instruction" implies a measure of doingness. Certainly when we're struggling or suffering, we want to be told what to do, what we can do. There are things we can do. But we don't want to let the doing eclipse or occlude that which we do not do, cannot do.

Q&A

Okay, it's good to practice with y'all. I see a question in the chat asking me to speak very briefly about the role of community. Community is, in the process of psychological healing... I think community can be enormous, really, like such a deep blessing. It's not monotherapy, to use clinical language. It's a kind of adjunctive component. Usually, we meet psychological distress with a number of approaches. So, it's not to undermine the potency—sometimes enormous, really—of community.

Dharmette: Insight & Love

I'm often curious about the relationship between understanding and love, wisdom, and compassion. Is love the nature of awareness? Some traditions say something like that. Or does love kind of follow in the wake of letting go? The letting go that allows awareness to hold all of us. I've always been kind of curious that some folks have done lots of awareness practices and still behave unlovingly. That's been a little bit of a puzzle for me.

I think they do converge: awareness and love, wisdom and love. But for that convergence to happen, we have to have an affectively^[2] charged experience of the three characteristics: dukkha^[3], anicca^[4], anatta^[5]. That's what generates love—an affectively charged experience of the three characteristics.

I sometimes say that understanding involves becoming a kind of grown-up about our existential situation, a grown-up about our nervous system, a grown-up about pleasure and change, and who we think we are. Being a grown-up about that, love really becomes the only tenable response to that understanding.

Mindfulness is training, and awareness allows ordinary experience to become wisdom. The raw materials are right here. It's not some fancy experience. The raw materials are right here, and it's mindfulness that allows ordinariness to become wisdom and understanding.

In that process of generating understanding, something like care, non-violence—maybe we say love—is a kind of byproduct. Insight meditation is largely about the three characteristics. As Bhante G. (Bhante Gunaratana)^[6] writes:

"There comes a point in insight meditation when the three characteristics of existence—unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, selflessness—come rushing home with concept-searing force. You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed. All that's left is an infinity of interrelated non-personal phenomena which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished, and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow."

In a sense, all of our grasping is bound up with a kind of immature relationship with the three characteristics. But the process of spiritual maturation is not a straight line. It's complex. We do not go from resistance to understanding in some kind of simple, linear way. Often, the Dharma must break our heart a little bit before we feel its freedom. And so before they become liberating, we grieve dukkha, anicca, and anatta.

We get and we get and we get, and it doesn't create a sense of completeness. It doesn't eradicate the first noble truth^[7]. We see change and we fantasize about building some fortress to keep anicca outside. It's tender. We try to build a home in identity, but it never supports our feet. And so dukkha, anicca, and anatta can harden or soften our heart.

As practitioners, dukkha is meant to soften our hearts. It's meant to make us more sensitive to love, and make hatred less tenable. If we really meet dukkha in an undefended way and recognize the helplessness of it, we deeply want to help. Amidst that cauldron of encounter with helplessness—like, "Oh, okay, dukkha is not governed. I did not write the rule. I do not control it."—we encounter that. Sometimes I say helplessness is a kind of synonym for suffering. And we deeply want to help. We cannot help but become sensitive to the burden.

And so we come to know all experience as having the same nature. It all becomes Dharma. Each moment becomes a kind of bow to the truth of things. The fact that it is not easy being human mobilizes a lot of care, a lot of love.

Feeling our way through, having an affectively charged experience of anicca (impermanence), likewise generates love. I got into practice because I knew everything was changing and would change, and I knew my heart was totally unprepared for that. Until things change, it's hard to see how deeply we've been assuming permanence. And "assume" might not be quite the right word. It might be something like reiterating or predicting from the past into the future, moment by moment. That's why we sometimes chant the five remembrances^[8] of change—to remind us that to be mindful is to be mindful of change. There's no mindfulness of stasis.

But the fact that change—even when we kind of know it—is so startling underscores the necessity of love. It takes the heart a long time to catch up with anicca. It's tender. There are so few consolations for changingness^[9], consolations for grief. But one's love becoming bigger is a genuine consolation.

Softened by dukkha, softened by anicca, and by anatta—the emptiness of self. We are freed of the habit of personalizing samsara^[10], this realm of personalizing it. We begin to see the innocence of conditionality and are freed of the territoriality of self. We start to notice how much of our afflictive emotion involves some measure of self-view. Self-view is very fertile ground for rage, envy, defensiveness, clinging to view, and shame.

I said that the intrinsic reflex of the self is to cling. Or, we might more precisely say the self is done by clinging. Naturally, the clinging propagates. And then we start to let go. As we grieve the homelessness of ego, we're reborn into a realm something like love: a kind of deep appreciation of everything that's skillful in us, a deep forgiveness for our neurosis, and a kind of playfulness with all the quirky foibles, compulsivity, and the whole mess of it. Playful.

And as we come to this deeper understanding—at least as we align our sila^[11] (ethical conduct) with our deepest values—there's a sense that we can't be "found out." There's nothing to find out about "me." We're not even so embarrassed by our unconsciousness. That's not-self, too. We become unintimidated by the goodness of others, and unpossessive about the many things that we might envy.

And then there's a kind of dissolution in the sense of ownership. That lyric, it's from like 60 years ago or something: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."^[12] That sounds bad. But the wisdom of non-ownership—got nothing, nothing to lose—makes it a lot easier to love when the spell of ownership has been broken. Attention is not pulled within the circle. Care expands dramatically. The center is empty, but the heart is full.

Understanding and love reinforce each other. There is some deep connection. The invitation would be to explore that for yourself. Okay, thank you for your attention.

Announcements

Okay, folks. I'm away again. I will miss next week. But I wish you all well. I'll be back the following week. I know I'll see some of you on retreat tomorrow. Nice. Thanks for your attention. I wish you all well.