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Guided Meditation: Letting the Winds of Feeling Blow

Okay, people. Yeah, nice to see the names streaming over there in the chat. Very sweet. Okay, well, we'll sit.

Very gently put your heart into a kind of Dharma posture. You know the way in yoga, doing a pose, an asana^[1], is very deliberate about how we get into that pose. It's the same thing with a kind of Dharma pose of our heart, just getting lined up.

The Dharma path is one of becoming progressively sensitized to goodness, being moved by it, being moved by your own goodness. For whatever reason, we find ourselves in this lineage of wisdom and love. There are so many ways for a human life to unfold, so many ways to suffer, and so few ways to be free. But wisdom and love—that actually is a path. Some hope, and wisdom, and love.

The techniques, the way we marshal attention, the kind of efforts we make, are infused and seasoned with the felt sense of presence and love. Meditative techniques can be a recapitulation of our anxiety, vigilance, or self-correction. We let the mind marinate in images and signs of wisdom and love, and maybe then we use our attention in particular ways.

It's often useful to connect with the affective circuits of your body: the surges of feeling, emotion, impulse, and motivation—the building blocks of the moving towards and moving away that characterizes so much of our life. Equanimity with feeling is so intimately tied up with our freedom.

This feeling that tangles us up with phenomena is the fuel of the push and pull of aversion and grasping. It's feelings that make experience feel dense, a burden on the heart. So we practice letting the winds of feeling blow through us. It's interesting that nothing will be blown over.

Surges of feeling seem to beg us to think, to place the feeling in the context of what we want, what we don't want, to tell a story about this moment, about this life. It's a very innocent impulse. But sometimes we experiment in meditation with not making anything mean anything, not over-interpreting phenomena, the push and pull.

In other words, we start to trust awareness. Trust the logic of the Dharma. Our understanding comes less from seeking answers and more from surrendering. Surrendering to not knowing. Surrendering the stories we use to grapple with the intensity of the moment, the ways we cope with feeling by thinking.

Relax. Have faith in Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha.

Dharmette: Five Spiritual Faculties - Wisdom (5 of 5)

Okay, so, wisdom. The Buddha says just as the lion is the ruler of the jungle, wisdom rules over mindfulness, concentration, faith, and energy. It is the last of the five faculties. Wisdom.

Philosophy, the word breaks down as love of wisdom. I'll say more about the Buddhist definition of it, but one scientific team characterized it as having six components. There's nothing sacred about six; it could be five or seven, but they picked six facets. They defined wisdom as pro-social attitudes and behaviors, emotional homeostasis, self-understanding, value tolerance, dealing effectively with ambiguity and uncertainty, and social decision-making. I offer that just as another lens from which to understand what wisdom is.

Often, practitioners ask Dharma teachers questions, and it often boils down to something like, "How do I be wise?" That's a question that can't really be answered by another person. Wisdom can't be mimicked. It's improvisational, and it emerges out of our own intuitive connection with ourself and our ability to make good predictions about happiness. Wisdom is about making good predictions about suffering and happiness for ourself and for others.

Given everything I know about me, and you, and everyone we know, how should we live? Given anicca^[2] and anatta^[3], how should we live? Given the vulnerability of our species to greed, to hatred, to delusion, to violence, how should we live?

Philosophers sometimes distinguish "knowledge that" from "knowledge how." "Knowledge that" is knowing that the universe is 14 billion years old. "Knowledge how" is knowing how to ride a bike. Dharma insight, wisdom, is mostly about "knowledge how." Knowledge how to do what? Knowledge how not to suffer.

I heard a story of this beloved old monk in Thailand who apparently saw a satellite in the sky and asked his younger monastic to explain, "What is that? What is going on there?" The younger monk had to explain the Earth's rotation, that the Earth is round, and all these things. That was all news to this old monk. He didn't know anything about the shape of the Earth and its movement, but he knew how not to suffer, how not to cause suffering.

So the journey of wisdom goes from a latent potential—the dots inside us that haven't been connected—to insight, to embodiment, and to generalization. Generalization meaning wisdom that's operative in all spheres of our life. That is a tall order. We all know there are zones, contexts, relationships, and particular currents of feeling or thinking where we lose and become alienated from our wisdom.

We want to keep a relationship with the failures of generalization, the ways our wisdom doesn't generalize to all contexts. I was talking with a friend just a couple of days ago, another longtime Dharma practitioner, and having a very frank conversation about the ways that our wisdom has been actualized and generalized, and the ways it's not. It's actually inspiring to see the ways in which we have not generalized wisdom to all corners of our life; it's motivating.

The process starts by thawing out the top layers of delusion, and that just takes time. It takes time where we just naturally are kind of confused about the nature of happiness, confused about what we actually want, confused about what a good life would be. Maybe we find ourselves getting what we want, but then it's not what we thought it was. It's this recognition, this cycle, that getting is always different from wanting.

Wrong view feels almost visceral. It feels almost visceral, like it's in our tissues or something, and we have to thaw out. In that process of thawing out, which might be months or years, there's a lot of kicking and screaming that happens. As we're thawing out, as we're starting to replace the boards on our boat or our raft, we find we can't just replace all the boards of the boat at once. It's a gradual path.

We can't even really pick up new ideas initially. We have to almost make our body-mind more porous so that new information can flow in. This is some of why we emphasize not knowing, emphasize surrender, and emphasize putting down all the familiar reference points of liking and disliking, good and evil, us and them. We make the mind more porous, malleable, and stable. We get settled, and we get happy enough.

Usually, we think we have to get wisdom so that we can be happy, and that's fair enough, but happiness often actually precedes insight. Happiness precedes insight. When we're suffering, we're just looking so desperately for ways out, it's hard to learn. We can do it, but it's harder to learn.

Happiness, a kind of positive mood, actually modulates our attention and our cognition, and broadens the view. Whereas suffering pools the attention, narrows the view, and makes resolution feel urgent, happiness and a sense of well-being broaden the view. We become receptive to new information, and wisdom often feels like it arises almost out of our peripheral vision, not out of our intent gaze.

Ram Dass says, "The quieter you become, the more you can hear." That's the function of samadhi^[4]—the quieter you get, the more you hear. And so the wisdom actually creates the sense that the Dharma is real. It's real. It's been realized. It becomes real.

Insight feels freeing. It feels like it resolves. It's like something consistent in our being all the way down from conscious thought to subconscious computation. Something comes into true.

Sometimes we think that's the end of the story, but most insight needs reinforcement. The light from the stars dims. We need to consolidate, to re-practice, to rediscover. We need to be reminded of our wisdom. This is why we have kalyāṇa-mitta^[5], spiritual friends. We're way more suggestible than we think, and it's really important to have this kind of steady inflow of goodness into our heart. We keep practicing to nurture and protect our wisdom. Joseph Goldstein summed it up simply: "When we practice, wisdom grows. When we don't, wisdom wanes."

We do keep suffering, and we keep a conscious relationship to our dukkha^[6]. This is what inspires us to grow and deepen. We try acting from our wisdom, even sometimes when we don't feel it. I might know that insight around self-kindness, but I don't feel so kind right now at all. But what would a person do now? If I were living from this insight, from this wisdom, from self-kindness, how would I behave now? Let me do that. Let me try that on.

So we prepare the ground and till the soil of our delusions and habituated wrong view. We get still, get quiet, and stay open to the peripheral vision. We consolidate and grow our insight, our wisdom. I offer this for your consideration.

Closing

It's sweet to be with you and think about you wherever you are. I wish you all well, and I'll be back in a few weeks. If this was annoying, don't come, I guess, would be my wisdom! [Laughter] Anyway, I'm not sure of Gil's schedule. I think he's back, I hope he's back, but it's possible I'm confused. It's always lovely to step in for him and feel connected to you all. It doesn't feel like a weird, awkward substitute teaching gig. It's like, "Oh yeah, we're friends." I love that.

Okay, people, I wish you all well.