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Guided Meditation: Big Mind

Happy to be here with all of you and this gathering of people, and also gathering of our minds, of our attention.

When I was living in the Zen monastery, I had been there for maybe about nine months or so, and content to be practicing and doing the meditation that was a regular part of that life. And then one day, they told me that I was going to be assigned to the kitchen and to be one of the cooks. I never really cooked before. And I'd come to do a lot of meditation. I knew that the cooks didn't meditate a lot, so I was a little bit dismayed by this.

But any case, I went into the kitchen the first day I was supposed to be there. I walked in, I was alone in this monastery kitchen, and I looked around. And the kitchen seemed kind of huge, like overwhelming for me. Exactly a year later, when I finished my stint in the kitchen, I had just found myself in the same situation, alone in the kitchen, and it seemed very small. The first day it seemed big, and I seemed small. The last day, the kitchen, this building hadn't changed, but now it felt small and I felt large. So there was a kind of shift of perception that went on, partly with my familiarity and my confidence of being there.

So a little bit something like that can happen in meditation as well. And other things begin happening that we experience, start experiencing our minds differently. It's perceived differently. And some of it has to do with familiarity with it and comfort with it, where the mind starts feeling big in a confident way. And in a certain kind of way, the world seems not—I don't know if not as big, but not as daunting or difficult, because the mind is big enough to hold it all.

Or as we begin to become a little bit freer in meditation and less devoted to our thoughts, devoted to our ideas, devoted to our emotions, and devoted also in a negative way, kind of devoted to being aversive to it or reactive to it, or all this complicated way we have with our lived experience. As we stop being so glued to it, so committed to it, it actually frees up the space in the mind, and the mind starts feeling large, or awareness starts feeling spacious, expansive.

When I first started studying Zen, they talked about big mind. And as we practiced this experience of having this big mind, in this early tradition that we're practicing out of, the Buddha had a similar term that could be said big mind, and might sometimes be called an expanded mind. But the word is big or large, mahā^[1]. And so this mahā, great mind.

So as mindfulness meets experience, but the attention doesn't get narrowed, it doesn't get contracted around it or lost in it, but gets relaxed around experience, then things begin... the mind begins to open up. It's kind of like, if I bring attention to my left hand, my attention can be like a little laser, it gets all wrapped up around it. Or attention can be like a big, wide-open hand, and it has lots of space for the experience of the other hand. There's lots of room for it to roam around and be experienced.

So something begins shifting in the mind or with attention, that it starts feeling large or spacious, open, expanded. Sometimes as if it has no boundaries. It's larger than our body, in a sense. Some people have the experience where their attention has a certain funny way where it's larger than anything that's known within it. So of course, you know, here I'm sitting in this room, and of course the room is bigger than me. But I only know the room through the medium of my awareness of it. And so the seeing, the awareness of it, is kind of a way in which perception is constructed in the mind, and then we know what's going on. So in a certain kind of way, awareness is larger than the room. And it can feel that way. And not that this is accurate for what the mind is—who knows what the mind is? But it's how it's experienced when the mind starts getting relaxed and spacious, and not caught in things.

So to sit quietly now, to see if you could notice how large your mind is, how small it is, how much space there is in awareness.

So to take a meditation posture and close your eyes.

And without anything more right now, if you had to kind of notice the size of your mind or the size of awareness, how large is it? As large as your skull? Smaller than your skull? Larger than your skull?

For some of you, maybe this question doesn't compute, it's perplexing. But what is it that knows being perplexed? That which knows, does it have any boundaries, edges?

So now taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. And as you exhale, let all things settle. Relax.

Letting your breath return to normal. Then gently, relaxedly on the exhale, do some further relaxing of the body, of places where things are held tight. Softening in the face. Softening in the shoulders. Softening in the belly.

And also as you exhale, to soften the mind. Especially any physical sensations connected to thinking and trying to figure things out. Or any tension, pressure, contraction in the mind, in the brain.

As you exhale, imagine that the mind spreads out horizontally like a vast, large, still lake of water. And without knowing exactly or even approximately what your mind is, does your mind have any boundaries? Is there an edge to the mind? Is there that which is inside the mind, and that which is outside the mind? And if there is, what's the shape of that boundary?

And if you relax the mind further, relax trying, looking, seeking, just allowing your mind to relax and be. Allowing awareness to be. And does your awareness have enough space in it to become aware of your breathing?

And as you exhale, to let there be a quieting of the mind. So the mind is pulled, or settles towards an inner silence, quiet. And as you inhale, let there be a receptive quality, receiving the inhale. Receiving the inhale in the vastness of the mind.

And if there are thoughts and feelings and body sensations that become predominant, experiment with knowing it in the vastness of the mind. Know it with an awareness that is large, unpreoccupied.

The less reactivity, the more we experience the mind as something that's open and relaxed. Perhaps vast, the vast mind, which has space for all things within it.

The mind becomes larger when it's not limited by our concerns. When it doesn't become narrow with our trying to get something, or make something happen, or figure something out. Letting the mind relax. Letting awareness be relaxed. Open, wide, and clearly receptive for the meeting between awareness and our experience.

And coming to the end of this sitting, what has shifted in your mind in the course of the sitting? Not in terms of the content of the mind, the concerns, but the state of your mind. Is there more calm or subtleness? Are things quieter? Is there greater understanding or clarity about what's going on in the mind?

Does the mind in any kind of way feel more expanded, larger? Does the metaphor of space relate to maybe feeling spacious in the mind, or a spacious awareness?

And whether you feel it or you can imagine it, imagine your mind is as large as the room you're sitting in. Imagine that it's as large as the building you're in. Imagine it's as large as the town you might be sitting in, or the area you're in. Imagine that your mind is vast and open and extends out into the world.

And in the vastness of the mind, there's room for all things. And so too in your mind's eye, your imagination, imagining in some way the whole world with all its beings and all its joys and sorrows. Lots of room in your mind or your heart that you welcome all things. You're ready to be a witness, to be a safe presence for all things in your mind. Relaxed, open, receptive.

And perhaps allowing this openness holding all beings to gaze upon it all kindly. To gaze upon all of it with a feeling of caring and compassion, kindness and love, or a friendliness that wants the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. And may whatever benefits that come from this meditation, may it support that happiness of others. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may that safety and peace and freedom that others can experience, may it begin in my own mind. May they exist peacefully in my own mind. Safely safe from me, peaceful with me, and free with me. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Citta (4 of 5) Big Mind, Higher Mind

So here on the fourth talk on mindfulness of the mind, mind state. I'm kind of a little bit now maybe trying to explain a little bit more about what that guided meditation was about.

When the Buddha teaches the classic teachings on mindfulness practice, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[2], the third foundation has to do with mindfulness of the mind, the state of mind. In that description of how to practice that, there are the instructions to notice eight pairs of mental states. And the first four have a lot to do with noticing the presence of how we relate to the world, how we get involved in the world. So there can be desire, greed, there can be ill will or hostility, hatred, there can be delusion. And also there can be ways of relating without those. And so the mind somehow is still involved in the world, and thoughts and feelings and all this.

It's possible in meditation to feel that that shifts and changes, that the contractions and the tightness, the tension of greed, hatred, delusion begin to abate. And a whole other motivation comes in how to relate to the world: generosity and love.

Also, in how we relate to the world, or are confused about the world, or begin kind of not quite knowing whether to be involved in the world, or connected and preoccupied or not. The mind goes through a transition where sometimes it just doesn't know whether to collapse and get tired and fall asleep, or doesn't know to get over-excited, and doesn't know where to land or what to focus on, but it's agitated. The mind can get kind of contracted in itself, so it can get scattered in all kinds of ways, but it's still kind of a mind that's concerned with things in some way.

As mindfulness gets stronger, as our ability to be present and rooted here in the present moment grows, as we're not so inclined to get caught in our thoughts and preoccupations, then the experience of the mind shifts to a kind of mind state, a way of operating, that's not so incessantly concerned with relating to things. If you're involved in thought, swept away in thoughts, you're relating to the thought, to the ideas of the thought. If you're preoccupied with your feelings, then the mind is kind of involved in that and focused on it.

So when we stop focusing on this stuff, then the mind starts to become freer from its preoccupations. And then we start experiencing the mind more as its own thing, its own state. It's very hard to talk about what the mind is. And so to call it a mind state, or something I've been calling a state of being, the quality of our inner life—some people might call it the heart, the quality of the heart. You know, exactly what the mind is, we don't know. But we don't have to know for the purposes of meditation. We just have to recognize something about how awareness, consciousness feels, what we might call the gestalt, the totality of our mental activity, the state of our mentality. This inner world of knowing, of being conscious, of being aware, of mindfulness, and start feeling the quality of it.

And when it's no longer preoccupied with things, then the mind starts feeling more peaceful, more calm. And some people find the mind feels more expanded, and it feels large: large mind, big mind, expanded mind. And it's a little bit, you know, it's possible it's a little bit of an imagination. Because what the mind is, in part, is a reconstructing apparatus. It takes in all the data that comes in from the senses and from our memory and all kinds of places, and it kind of shapes it, constructs it in some kind of way, understands it. It's an understanding apparatus that we have. And so whether there's actually space in the mind that we're making, or it just feels that way—we close our eyes and it just feels like there's a vast kind of maybe luminous darkness or light that might be there. Or just, without a sense of seeing, just a felt sense of perception being expansive and taking in things that are beyond the edges of our body. Not in some telepathic way, but just kind of like sensing that awareness is open. And it's not like focusing on anything at all. It's the absence of being concerned with anything, that awareness, consciousness still operates, but it's not eclipsed by our concerns.

And so the mind that's not always relating to things is a mind that starts feeling qualitatively different. There's a deeper level of peace, deeper level of calm, ease, spaciousness, stillness, silence, that starts to be a shift when the mind is not always incessantly relating to something.

And so to learn to recognize that shift—and for each person it will be different, and so hopefully giving enough different words that some of you will find different words work better than others—but there is a shift to something that feels more healthy, more satisfying, more free. Partly because a lot of the unhealthy—not everything, but a lot of the unhealthy ways in which the mind operates, the ways that we suffer and feel anxiety and feel, you know, caught in desire and ill will and confusion—a lot of that, the condition that makes that happen is our rumination, our preoccupation with things. It kind of, we're spinning tales, stories, ideas, telling ourselves things that are kind of deflating. To tell ourselves these same things over and over again, and reminding ourselves of stories that are painful and ideas that are painful.

But when we stop doing that, stop being in the world of thoughts and ideas and aboutness, then the mind doesn't have that stress anymore. And it turns out the mind without stress feels very satisfying, very peaceful. Nothing has to change in the world, except how we relate to everything and how we hold things in the mind, in awareness.

So there becomes a radical shift as we begin recognizing the quality of the mind. At some point we can recognize the quality of the mind that's not preoccupied, not focused on things, and being always relating to things. And this mind then is, some people say it's receptive, open, receptive mind, open mind, open awareness. The mind now is maybe not "the mind," people say it's more like awareness, more like consciousness. And it can feel boundless. It can feel like it has no limit.

So the Buddha says one can know that the mind is large, or we could know that it's not large, but that it's small still, maybe because it's preoccupied. But at some point you can actually watch it sometimes oscillate between becoming large, and we're not stable in that settled mind. And so then some wonderful thought arises and we get involved in it, and then when there's the wherewithal, you can actually feel and see how things got contracted and narrow again. Maybe some people even find it darker, the light goes out as we get involved in these thoughts. But if we're pretty settled, it might be easy to let go of it, and then we come back to this larger, more luminous and spacious mind.

As this develops further, the Buddha says in his instructions, he talks about a mind that feels as if it has some ultimate feeling, kind of ultimate state. Or maybe ultimate is maybe not the right word, but it could also mean higher. Now we're into a higher state of being, a higher state of mind. Something that's really exalted or special, or maybe special is good. And now it's with something special. And the mind feels really good, and we know it. There's a clear knowing of that: "Wow, this is, there's a purity, there's a clarity, there's a crispness, there's a freedom, there's a peace here that is qualitatively different." So now this is a mind with a high quality.

However, with how the traditional understanding of this is, there can be a wonderful feeling sense that, as high a quality of mind as this is, it's not the highest potential. And the highest potential is a mind which is called unsurpassable. And this is when there's no duality or no separation between knowing the mind is special, and no separation from the knowing of it and the special mind itself. They become one and the same almost, that the knowing is so special and is no different than what the mind is.

So all this ability in the third foundation to really get into it, it's a description of what happens when the mind is settled and concentrated and mindfulness is strong. And so, don't feel like you have to be there or you're a poor meditator if you don't recognize what I'm talking about. But it's good to know the description of the map of what can happen in meditation. Because at some point you might touch into something like this: "Oh, this is what the text is talking about. Ah, now I understand. Now I see it," rather than being like, "What's this and what do I do with this?"

So the mind, the heart, consciousness, it's one of the precious things. And there's a paradigm shift in how we live fully and completely in this life when we know there's a new game in town. The old game was always to be concerned about things and always relating to things as if that's the only game in town. It's a fine game at times and we're not rejecting it. But now we know there's another game. There's another paradigm of how to be. And it's possible to be a mind that's receptive, aware, conscious for sure, but it's not locking into things, latching on. It's not organizing itself to be focused and relating to things all the time. But it is receptive and can still know. And it allows for some deeper response from within than can happen if we're only responding from the paradigm of relating, relating, and relatedness.

So, hopefully this makes sense. And if not, just store it away and someday maybe it will. And so we'll have one more day on these Buddhist teachings on the third foundation, and I look forward to our time tomorrow. Thank you.