Guided Meditation: Dropping the Burden of the Ego; Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (2 of 5) Relief and Ease

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Dropping the Burden of the Ego; Training in Emptiness (2 of 4) Relief and Ease. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 11, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Dropping the Burden of the Ego

So, a little announcement to begin with is that I really value your feedback as participants. I'd be very interested, since we're all in this together, if you could especially give me suggestions for improvement. Thank you very much for that in advance. I can't read the chat while I'm teaching, but I'll hopefully download it afterwards and read it then. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

This week we're exploring how we might train in emptiness as a way of countering our instinctive, habitual, and reactive preoccupation with the self, which is often expressed as discursive thinking. When we meditate, we can allow ourselves to drop down into the flow of our lived experience rather than reifying it into self-referential thinking. For these minutes of meditation, the invitation I propose to you is to keep in mind that we are, as Venerable Anālayo^[1] says, dropping the burden of the ego.

Take your meditation posture. Create a feeling of being grounded and settled, and then balance that with being quietly energetic, especially in the spine. Close the eyes if that's comfortable for you. Take a deep breath and connect with the flow of breathing.

Be friends with your body. We'll begin by offering it mettā^[2] as we do a brief fluid scan. We bring kindness and appreciation to this body, from the head down through the neck, the shoulders, the arms and hands. Mettā in the torso, going down into the pelvis, and into the legs and the feet.

Still in touch with the flow of the breathing, and breathing out, we light a little candle of mettā in the heart, letting it warm and reassure this body and mind, just as we are.

And now, dissolving the edges of our hearts and body, we radiate our mettā, unconditional friendliness, through all of the participants who are meditating with us here. May everyone in this sangha^[3] be well. Letting our mettā flow out to each and every one of the people who are here today meditating together.

Letting go of the words and radiating just the feeling of mettā to everyone. Benevolence, as we connect with the physical process of this body breathing. Dropping the burden of fabricating thoughts. Dropping the burden of the ego.

We know that it's enough just to be here, present with this beautiful sangha and breathing. No need to indulge the ego in thinking. And so we offer our presence to each other, feeling the support, knowing that we're all breathing together.

Dropping the burden of the ego, we can luxuriate in the wholesome feeling of being present. Present with the breathing and present with one another.

The body and mind imbued with a sense of mettā, benevolence, as we stay with our lived experience. Breathing together in the warm companionship of our fellow practitioners. And if the ego pushes its way into our consciousness by fabricating thoughts, we see it and we say, "No thank you." We know we don't need to invest in thinking now. It's not nearly as beautiful as being here breathing with this sangha.

Thrilling in the flow of our lived experience. Empty of fabrications, empty of proliferations. Just the goodness of being here with our most important ally: mindfulness, awareness. Awareness imbued with mettā. Experiencing the flow of phenomena, not adding any self-reference.

To bring this collaborative meditation to a close, we each open our hearts and reopen the boundaries of our sangha to include well-wishing for all beings everywhere. May all beings be safe and protected. Being safe, may we all be contented at ease. May all beings abide in peace. And may all beings everywhere be free.

I do honor your practice and your sincerity, and I feel a great gratitude for this practice. Yesterday, a participant commented that it was a nice moment when we all bow in unison around the world at the completion of the meditation. So, throughout this meditation, let's join our hands together and bow to each other. Thank you.

Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (2 of 5) Relief and Ease

Greetings everyone, good to be here with you. I'll give again a short announcement that I made at the beginning of the meditation, which is that I really value your feedback in the chat. Since we're all in this together, your suggestions for improvement would be especially welcome. We'll have a Q&A session on Friday after the talk.

This week we're exploring how we might train in emptiness as a way of countering our instinctive, habitual, and reactive preoccupation with the self, often expressed as discursive thinking.

What is emptiness in the early Buddhist texts? Emptiness is not that we don't exist or that we're not important. It only means that living beings do not have substantial and permanent selves. Especially in meditation, when the mind slows down enough, we can see that everything is in flux. Since we're constantly changing, in reality, there is nothing that we can identify as a self.

Today I'd like to share with you the teachings of a very important discourse, the Shorter Discourse on Emptiness (Cūlasuññata Sutta)^[4]. I'll read to you parts of it at the beginning from my own translation. Of course, I've used all the translations of all the great scholars, especially the monastic scholars. I did this as part of a course in Pali^[5] that I took this past year. My interest was to go into each Pali word and study the etymology and the roots behind where the word came from, and to choose renderings that best express this. Also, as a lay practitioner, I have a different point of view than monastics do, especially male monastics.

So it's a beautiful discourse. It begins, the scene is set at Sāvatthī^[6] in the palace or the hall of Migāra's mother^[7]. This is like a building with pillars, and this is where the Buddha and his monastic sangha were meditating.

"Then, when it was evening, the Venerable Ānanda^[8] rose from meditation, went to the Blessed One, and after paying homage to him, he sat down at one side and said to the Blessed One: 'Venerable sir, on one occasion the Blessed One was living in the Sakyan^[9] country where there is a town of the Sakyans named Nagaraka. There, venerable sir, I heard from the Blessed One's own lips...'"

He's quoting what the Buddha had said to him at that time: "Now, Ānanda, I often abide in emptiness."

And then Ānanda goes on to say, "Did I hear that correctly, venerable sir? Did I learn that correctly, attend to that correctly, remember that correctly?" You can sort of picture Ānanda really wondering what the heck he's talking about—abiding in emptiness.

So the Buddha replies, "Now, Ānanda, I often abide in emptiness." And he said, "You did certainly hear that correctly, learn that correctly, attend to that correctly, remember that correctly. Ānanda, just as this hall where we are is empty of elephants, cattle, and horses, and there is present only this non-emptiness, namely the oneness of the sangha of monastics..."

Here the Buddha is making the point that what's important is to know what things are empty of—to know not just what's present, but what's absent. He used the example of all these monks sitting in this hall meditating in the evening, and saying, so we can know that there aren't elephants and cattle and horses and other animals here. But what we do know is here is the sangha, and so in that situation, the sangha is the non-emptiness, the presence.

In the early texts, the use of the word "emptiness" as a noun is quite rare. Most of the time it's when the Buddha or someone is talking about what something is empty of. What we're supposed to understand as practitioners is that whatever is present in our experience is empty of a self, and what belongs to a self, empty of what is everlasting or unchanging.

You may have heard other teachers talk about the Bāhiya Sutta^[10]. It's a very famous one. In that sutta, the Buddha instructs Bāhiya with a really beautiful kernel of what we're supposed to do as practitioners. The Buddha says, "In the seen, there should just be the seen. In the heard, there should just be the heard. In the sensed, just what is sensed. And in the cognized, just what is cognized."

So we stay present with whatever sensory information we're getting from the six senses, and we know that. We see, especially if we can slow the mind down and take a break from proliferations, that everything is in flux and is changing so fast that there really is nothing that we could pinpoint and say, "Okay, now this right here, right now is this elephant." Our job is to be able to stay present and empty ourselves of our proliferations, of all that mental chatter.

Elsewhere, the Buddha instructs: "Do not think of the past, and do not long for the future. In the present moment, attend with mindfulness to the lack of stability of whatever phenomena there are. The wise awaken in this way."

This is what we were exploring yesterday: by paying attention to the fluidity of our experience and letting the mind quiet down, we're able to see things as they really are. There is no way that we can pinpoint anything that would be substantial, permanent, or everlasting.

Mindfulness is really the most important tool in our arsenal of tools for walking the path to freedom, because where we place our awareness determines which way we evolve. If we place our awareness in "me, myself, and mine" and proliferations of self-referential thinking, or fantasizing about the past, or recriminating about the future, or having pretend conversations, we're missing the wholesome path. The wholesome path is when we see that in attending to our experience with an open and quiet mind, we don't need to keep carrying the burden of the ego. We can choose peace.

In the Buddha's instructions for mindfulness of breathing, he tells us that the first thing we should do is to go to some place empty. So the value of seclusion is temporarily taking a break from worldly concerns and cultivating mental seclusion as well, by emptying the mind of all our concerns and worries. When we do that, we can taste the pure, clean water of the quiet mind. This gives us a feeling of ease, even a subtle sense of joy, when we inhabit, if only for a short time, a mind empty of proliferations.

The joy of being alive, without the overlay of "me, myself, and mine," feels so awesome. It's also such a relief when we drop the burden of the ego. Nothing to prove. We don't have to be anybody. We don't have to go anywhere. Amazing! You don't have to prove anything or be anybody. What freedom that is!

So please enjoy these moments when you don't have to be anybody at all. Also, be patient with your tendency to proliferation. And know that the lovely taste of emptiness is indeed possible for each one of us.

Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your practice.