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Guided Meditation

So, welcome folks. Welcome to you all. Happy to be with you this week, and I hope you're well wherever you are. And to that thing we do... let's settle into a posture that feels sustainable.

Just let the Dharma tell you what to do. And let the muscle memory of your prior practice tell you what to do. Let your mind take its cues from the stillness, the silence.

And maybe looking for the phenomena where giving some attention there brings a sense of tranquility. Maybe that's the breath, maybe that's sensations in your hands or feet or something in the body that feels vaguely pleasant, soothing. Maybe that's the darkness behind your closed eyes. Or maybe even amidst the ambient noise in your environment, you can kind of tilt the attention towards silence.

It's letting your mind take its cues from these soothing objects of attention.

The tranquility is a healing in itself. And the tranquility makes more room for the imperfection of the human condition to be digested. So maybe we just... what's arising is some sense of ease, quiet, and we just abide. There's no project to be done.

Maybe the tranquility illuminates what is unfinished in the heart, or the transient aches, heartache. That which is calling out to be digested by awareness.

So whatever is arising in experience, there's goodness unfolding.

And no matter how you think you're doing, you can rest well in the wholesomeness of your intention, the goodness of the aspiration to wake up. Connecting with that is also soothing, tranquilizing.

We take a certain kind of Dharma posture, make a certain gesture of awareness, and then just let time pass. Let time be your ally. Nothing more needs to be done other than just making that gesture of awareness. Letting the logic of the Dharma unfold through you.

Dharma Pleasure - The Pleasure of Having a Path

So it's good to sit with you, good to be with you. It's always easier actually to say hello and welcome after we all shared a kind of deeper greeting in a way. I'll be your substitute teacher this week, and I'll be with you these days. I'll actually also do tomorrow night and Thursday night, an optional Zoom session for a half hour that I'll post the info for at the end. We can sit for a few minutes and have any questions or dialogue.

I have this friend, a long-time practitioner, and he is always working actively on something in his practice, as if he's in a new phase of intense excitement about Dharma practice. He's just always there actively contemplating something. And whenever we talk, it's like he's living in a Dharma talk, giving it to himself, then giving it to anyone who will listen, really. He's extremely persuasive.

One time we spoke, and I remember this conversation, he said, "You know, we're always saying let go. We're always saying open up to anicca^[1], open up to unreliability, uncertainty, comprehend dukkha^[2], comprehend suffering." And he said, "It's too much! It's too much, we need to teach pleasure. That's what we need to teach."

And so this week, the theme is varieties of Dharma pleasure. Now, Dharma pleasure is a weird pleasure in a way, but it's pleasure nonetheless. Pleasure is not the same as satisfaction, and I really associate ordinary pleasure with actually strengthening the patterns of craving—of seeking relief, finding some kind of brief seclusion from the pain of craving, but then the cycle continuing. Whereas maybe we say Dharma pleasures are distinctive insofar as they don't create thirst; they actually satiate. They are pleasures that leave peace in their wake.

So that's the theme, and today: the pleasure of having a path.

I sometimes say we're all philosophers of happiness, and we've all asked the question many times implicitly: "What is the good life?" as a philosopher might ask. And we're all, in a sense, tentatively living our answer.

As a kid I was, without really knowing it but just looking back in retrospect, asking this question and kind of picking up and ruling out many different philosophies of happiness. A sense of, "Could this work? No. Could that work? No." I was so sensitive to suffering, and with so little equanimity, and I was just trying out what could work. My conclusion was that I didn't know, and my conclusion was that adults didn't know that much about happiness either.

I waded into this path years later with a great deal of skepticism, sort of unsure that this had anything new to offer, really. And many of the tears that I would shed in the early years of practice were tears of relief, and they were the relief of this: I found a path. Not the path that everyone must walk, not the one true path, but I found a path. This is a path for me, and there is so much relief in that. A sense of my heart kind of interlocking with some vision of happiness. Very soothing.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche^[3] said, "One who has a why can bear almost any how." And we need to be convinced of our why, but when we are convinced—the why being wisdom and love—when we do become convinced, the rest is just kind of details. The rest of the path: how I'm doing, where it's going, what I'll learn, how much I'll achieve—details. We have our why.

And I'm really alluding to, in a sense, the arising of faith, a certain kind of pleasure of faith. Václav Havel^[4] said, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

There's this kind of faith: we relax. We're not compulsively looking for evidence that we're on the right track. You know, that sense of just pinging around within our experience, just looking, "Am I doing this right? Is this right? Should I be doing something else?" That kind of energetic state starts to fade. The absence of faith, we could say, is a kind of wobble, a certain kind of ambivalence of always looking for evidence that we're doing it the right way, or trying to sort out our place on the path. We're comparing ourselves to others rather than just actually feeling one's own belonging within the Dharma.

And the absence of this kind of faith leads us to a sense of grappling in the dark and never being sure exactly what's trustworthy, where to look for data, where to validate what we're doing. And that fades. There's a pleasure in our faith. We stop guessing if we're getting it right because we know we're just going to keep going, exploring, learning, growing.

And the pleasure of this kind of faith is a particular pleasure. I'm no fundamentalist; I'm really almost reverential about the permanent possibility of being wrong. But at the same time, my mind hasn't wobbled about the path for a long time. And what that feels like is a very abiding confidence in wisdom and love.

Ken McLeod^[5] wrote: "A few times in my life I've been in difficult situations, situations in which I could not see any way forward. In my morning practice sessions, I would, to the best of my ability, rest in the confusion that swirled inside of me. I suppose it was the years of effort that made that resting possible, even though all those years those efforts had seemed paltry^[6] and ineffective. When I could rest in the confusion, it grew quiet and dark, the quiet of a dark night with no moon or stars. As I rested in that darkness, a clarity would sometimes arise, and with it a sense of direction. How or what discerned that clarity or that direction, I don't know, but both were there. The clarity didn't illumine anything; it didn't make anything in the situation clearer. It just indicated a direction. Where that direction led or what I would encounter, I had no idea. There was a direction, nothing more."

One of the measures of this path is we have a direction. And even when the confusion swirls, there's solace in a direction. There's solace in a kind of faith in wisdom and love, that that will matter. No matter what unfolds, that will matter.

So I offer this for your consideration. And we'll keep going tomorrow: new strange pleasures of Dharma practice.

Okay, thank you all. I'll post the Zoom info here for tomorrow and Thursday. Thank you folks. I wish you a good day, and it's nice to see your names here in the chat. I'll see you in the morning.