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Guided Meditation

So, good morning everyone, and welcome. Nice to have you all here in person, and nice to have everyone who's on YouTube present as well. I have the chat open, thank you.

One of the hallmarks of this practice of ours is simplicity. You might want to keep that word close by when you do this kind of practice: simple. Keep it simple. Stay simple. If it's not simple, it's probably not mindfulness. It's not meant to be a big, complicated engineering job of mindfulness—a complicated thing to figure out, or to follow and make our way.

Certainly, we enter into a complex world sometimes with mindfulness, with complex inner lives. One way that I've made that simple is I use the label "chaos." It's just chaos. I'm sitting in chaos. That's like the big overview label. Then I'm not lost in the details trying to figure it out. It's just... another big, wonderful label is "confusion." Whoa, that's all it is. Simple, I'm confused.

Okay. Then you can hopefully—oh, now that I know it's confusion, I'll just sit with confusion. Keep it simple. Maybe I don't have to be unconfused. Maybe it's okay to be confused. Just confusion. As soon as I make those labels like "chaos" or "confusion," I've kind of begun to make sense of it, or I'm just beginning to find my bearings, like a toehold or a landing place for it. Then it's not quite chaos or confusion anymore, because now, with confusion, I'm not confused by being confused. I know I'm confused.

It's beginning to shift. What would be a simple way of being with confusion or chaos? Let's be embodiedly present. Let's be present in the body with it. What is it like for the body, for this chaos, or this body to be confused? I suppose energy and agitation. So it's getting narrower and more defined where the attention goes. No, I'm not confused about this now. I'm not confused that my body is agitated. Is my little toe agitated? No, it's mostly in my torso. It's mostly in the front of my torso. It's started to get more and more sense or clarity of what's happening.

But the principle for doing so is to keep it simple. Ideally, you would take a simple posture. Sitting upright, literally or metaphorically. Gently closing your eyes. If it seems too complicated, take some deep breaths. You don't have to, but if you can, take some deeper breaths in a simple way that's appropriate for you and your lungs. Partly as a ritual of simplification. Just being here for this body, this place. Maybe a longer exhale can partly be letting go of the complexity of "there and then," past and future. Exhaling into "now," "here."

Letting the breathing return to normal.

There can be a continued simplification process as you exhale to relax your body. Relaxing the body sometimes relaxes the mind. Relaxing the body sometimes relaxes the heart. Relax the muscles of the face. Softening in the belly. Softening the shoulders.

Then the question for each of you is: What would it be like for you to be simply here? That kind of simplicity doesn't need anything to change, but you're simple with how things are for you. Maybe it has a process of simplifying. Maybe it's enough just to breathe with what's happening. Breathing in and breathing out.

Having it be the question of the meditation session, or the word "simple." Simply being with what is. Simply breathing with what is. Simply breathing. Allowing yourself to be simple. Allowing things to simplify, here and now.

And then coming to the end. Coming to the end of this sitting. To let the world come back in, allow yourself to remember the rest of your life today. People in your life, in your community, your neighbors, family, and circles of connection that we have to people that we know and don't know.

Imagine that the simplicity of your kindness, the simplicity of your care, travels in unseen ways out into the world. It begins with looking upon others kindly. See if you can look now onto your world kindly, and wish that in seen and unseen ways, your kindness can travel. That your well-wishing follows those channels, those currents. Wish well-being for this wider world that we live in.

Wish it, and also offer a little bit of yourself behind that wish. That you yourself will offer some way to contribute to the welfare and happiness of others, even if it's the smallest possible way.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. May all beings everywhere be free.

Independence, Freedom, and Peace

Hello everyone, and welcome. Nice to have you here. Hopefully, it's also nice for those of you who are here that it's nice to be with people. For some of us, it's been an unusual thing to do, to welcome. And for those of you on YouTube, I hope that someday we could be together. Someday you'll visit, come here for a time. We have people who do that periodically. Before the pandemic, it seemed like almost every Sunday someone would come up and say, "I'm visiting, I've been listening for a long time." So it's very nice.

The topic for today is a little bit following up on a talk I gave maybe four or five weeks ago on Sunday. That was in preparation for the 7:00 a.m. sittings I was doing, which focused on these basic aspects of instructions for mindfulness meditation that we teach here.

At that time, I said that the basic instructions are not only basic for beginners, but they're also basic for people who would like to consider themselves advanced, and for those who are in between the two. The basic instructions of the practice are the same. In fact, the Buddha, when he talked about this kind of thing, said that before the first experience of realization—the first level of awakening that people can experience—and after, the practice is the same. What we're doing, the basic practice, doesn't change.

So in a sense, in doing the practice, it doesn't matter whether you're enlightened or not; it's still the same practice. He even goes so far as to say when people become fully enlightened, even Buddhas, they still do the same practice. In order to be able to be at ease in this world—call it a pleasant abiding here and now—and also to encourage other people to practice.

So the practice is the same before and after enlightenment. Isn't that kind of nice? You don't have to worry about enlightenment when you're practicing, because you have to do the practice anyway. Be warned, after you do it, it does some good.

When someone has a certain degree of clarity, of letting go, of releasing something that they've been attached to for a long time, and it's clear enough and strong enough, then after that, they have a reference point for the practice that's different. The practice is the same, but the reference point for the practice changes.

In the ancient language, there are three reference points they talk about. This is where the difficulty of translating words from an Indic language to English comes in. The words in India are really rich. There's a long history to them. They're inspiring words not just in Indian Buddhism, but in the Indian language even to the modern world sometimes. They're rich in association. Whereas when you translate it literally into English, most people who only know English are not going to feel, "Oh wow, yeah, this is cool, this is wonderful." They're going to go, "What?"

I'll tell you the words in Pali first. Most of you won't have any sense of this, but some of you might have an Indian background. It's viveka^[1], virāga^[2], and nirodha^[3]. The practice becomes based on those three: viveka, virāga, nirodha.

The way they usually translate it into English does not come to inspire you, I think. Maybe it will; I shouldn't be speaking for you. Maybe you'll be really jazzed to hear this: seclusion, dispassion, and cessation.

Is that kind of okay, or is that like, "Wow, this is fantastic! Seclusion! I can't wait. More seclusion. The pandemic hasn't been long enough, let's go really do it." It just justifies the pandemic seclusion.

I don't think it really works in English to get a sense of how inspiring this is, and to hear that after some level of spiritual maturity in Buddhism, your practice gets based on those three. I think what might work, which is not a literal translation but I think is a fair translation for these three terms, is: independence, freedom, and peace.

That, I think, in English has an emotional relationship for people. They speak a little bit more to people who grew up in an English-speaking culture. Some of those words are quite powerful in the United States. When I was growing up, there was a party—I think it still exists—the Peace and Freedom Party.

And then "independence." Maybe there are problems sometimes because it aligns itself with the kind of individualism that is selfish, to be too independent from everything else and just be "myself and mine." But independence in this country is almost a religio-political ideal. It's a beautiful thing sometimes. I've thought that this word viveka, which I'm translating here as independence—I also like the English word "autonomy." To give people the autonomy to make their own medical decisions in this country is a central feature of medical ethics.

So seclusion is to be secluded from attachments. From being enmeshed in the world of things, people, experiences, and feelings, and the thoughts, ideals, and judgments we have. We're secluded from that entanglement. Another way of saying it is we become independent from it, or something inside of us is independent from it. Something inside of us has become autonomous.

Say you have a thought that goes through your mind, and maybe it's not a wonderful thought. Then you judge yourself: "Oh, I'm a bad person. I shouldn't have done that. I hope there's no one mind-reading here at IMC, because that'd be rather embarrassing that I had that thought."

That reaction is an entanglement. We're caught in its web. We're involved in it, reacting to it, having preferences around it. To be autonomous or to be independent from our thinking is to see that thought arise and just have no reaction to it. Because there's some place inside, a place of knowing, of recognition, of awareness, that clearly is aware that this is happening, but it doesn't pick it up. It doesn't react to it. It's not for or against. It doesn't use it to define oneself: "Oh, that was a terrible thought, so I am a lousy person because I had that thought."

As opposed to the simplicity of: "Look, that was a lousy thought. Wow, okay. Lousy thoughts come, lousy thoughts go." And there's no attachment. So there's a seclusion, an autonomy, an independence from that kind of thought.

Same thing with feelings. This time we'll use a positive thing, just to challenge you some more. Maybe there's a really happy feeling coming up. Now, who wants to be independent of that? A happy feeling comes up, and we're aware of it, we're present for it, but there's an autonomy and independence from the happy feeling. The happy feeling is allowed to be there, but we don't define ourselves by it. "Look at me, I got it made. I hope they notice how happy I am, because now I'm a good Buddhist." Because heaven forbid that you're depressed, because then how can you be a good Buddhist?

It doesn't matter what feelings are there—depressed or happy. In this place of autonomy, independence has a lot to do with knowing. Being aware. There's a place inside almost where we know what's happening. I want to stress this idea of knowing, that it's not shutting out the world. We know. And the knowing is free. The knowing is independent.

That comes to the second quality, which I render as freedom. Independence is the first one, or autonomy, and the second one is freedom. This is usually translated as dispassion, but what dispassion means in the ancient language is no longer having attachments and clinging. The word rāga^[4], which translates as passion here, has some of the negative connotations that we can have sometimes in English. Having too much passion—"you have passion for your anger"—whoa, please, that's not good. Or passion for money, status, or wealth. But in California, maybe, passion is considered all good. You're supposed to have a passion for life.

So to talk about dispassion doesn't quite work. "Passion" used to mean suffering in the old days, from the Latin word for suffer. The Passion of Christ was the suffering of Christ.

But freedom—it's freedom from clinging, from grasping, greed. It's freedom from ill will and hatred. And it's freedom from delusion. Delusion has a lot to do with the projections we put on the world, and then we believe those projections. Human beings are kind of projecting machines. People are walking, talking projectors. We have all these ideas that we overlay onto the world and others, and some of those are deluded.

As we develop this independent way of knowing, this autonomy of seeing, of being aware, we're no longer so enmeshed in the experience. We can actually see thoughts, interpretations, projections arise in the mind, and we say, "Oh, that's just a projection. That's just... who knows what that is."

You guys are all wearing masks, and I bet you all have nice mustaches. I would love to see your mustaches, and probably some handlebar mustaches. I'm just seeing mustaches on all your faces because I can't see. So I'm making up a story. I can see the mustache story arising, and it's just a story. It's just an idea. It's so easy to live in that story and assume that I'm seeing accurately.

The more independent we become, from this aware place, we have a fantastic vantage point to see the birth, the arising of an idea, and we can put a question mark behind it: Is it true?

So this dispassion is this fading away or becoming free from clinging. Some people would say it's a little bit of a different way of talking about the first one. But here we really feel the freedom when we feel independent, and now we feel there's freedom. Oh, what a relief. It's so great to have this freedom. It's so great to not be caught. There's a joy, a delight, a sense of well-being, an appreciation of how great that is.

And the third one, nirodha, is technically translated as cessation. It means the stopping of something. It's a stopping of the agitation. Calling it "peace" kind of works. There's a place of peace that we have because we know something about peace.

In fact, peace is always present, believe it or not. It's just that if we're agitated, we can't notice it. There's more peace in this world than there is agitation, but we don't notice it because we're caught up in our swirls and thoughts and fears. So when someone has reached deep enough letting go—letting go of their self-preoccupation, letting go of their clingings and attachments—they let go enough so that agitation has abated, and they have an experience of themselves being unagitated. When it's been strong enough, it becomes ever-available. It's always there if you turn towards it and see it.

"Oh, it's there. I might be agitated, but there's also peace. I might still be entangled, but there's also a place of independence where I see that I'm entangled. I still have these passions, these attachments, but I'm seeing it from a place that's not attached." The two work together, as opposed to just being completely immersed in the world of attachment, immersed in the world of self-definition and selfing.

The spirit of mindfulness practice is very simple. It's just to be present, clearly, for what's happening in the moment. I like to think that this mindfulness practice has a light touch to it. It's a light practice; it has no weight.

But I certainly add weight to it. I bear down. I'm trying hard. I'm trying desperately to make it work. Sometimes I have the bazooka approach to mindfulness. "I don't like what's happening, and I'm going to blast it out of existence." I used to do that with knee pain: "If I just get really concentrated, I could blast it away." Or, "My mind is so agitated, I'm really going to be mindful of my agitated mind and blast it away." That's when there's a lot of weight, intensity, and tension.

But mindfulness has this very light touch that has no weight. It clearly sees, clearly knows, but it's not reacting. In doing so, we learn that mindfulness practice is very simple. We always try to keep things simple. Being aware: "Thinking. I'm thinking, just thinking." And then we do it again: "Thinking, thinking," really see it.

Then we might see that we're tense around our thoughts. We see we have preferences around thinking. We see that we're recoiling from our thoughts: "Oh, this is recoiling." Then we notice, "Oh, I'm breathing," in addition to all these thoughts I'm having. "Oh, it's just breathing." And then there might be a choice that, rather than thinking about these things, what if I just stay with my breath?

You can stay two or three breaths. That was nice. Then my mind wanders off. At some point you notice that the mind wanders off, and then it's just a wandering of mind. Then there's breathing again. Breathing in and breathing out. Now I can stay longer with the breath. And then it occurs to me, "If I kind of relax in my torso and my belly, I think I can stay with the breath longer." So we stay longer and longer.

Slowly things kind of come together, and at some point, this process of simplification comes to a place where something releases. Something lets go enough, something quiets enough, or stills enough, that we discover this place. We discover something that feels independent, free, and peaceful. Wow.

Now, one option then is to cling to that. "I want more of that. I'll hold on to this." So then with the simple practice of mindfulness, you notice wanting. Tension, a headache arising because of peace and freedom. You notice how much loss of peace happens as we cling and want more of the peace and try to make it come back. We learn all these tricks of the mind. We learn what the mind does to all this that makes it more complicated than it needs to be.

But you know, if we practice, someone who has some level of maturity in Buddhism, their practice is the same as someone who's a beginner. But they have this reference point. They can kind of feel, or sense, or know, or remember that there's this potential, this capacity to know well. In the knowing, there's this independence, freedom, and peace.

The practice of mindfulness is the same; it's just the reference point for it, the support for it, the context for doing it, shifts. That's the big change. Sometimes a little slogan says it's not seeing something new, but seeing in a new way. It's not necessarily that we live in a world and see the world differently, but we see with eyes or with perception that doesn't cling. We see with eyes that feel independent. It's not enmeshed with or tangled with. We perceive with a capacity where there's just freedom in being with something, not caught in it. And there's peace rather than agitation, as the eyes that see are calm as opposed to darting around being afraid or wanting.

You have some hint of that. You feel traces of that, and this is to be appreciated and valued. Some people don't hear that message, and so they just think it's always the same practice, and so they keep focusing on what's happening in the moment, not understanding that how they focus, how they're aware, is actually more important than what they're aware of. You have to be aware of something in this world of ours usually as we go about our life, but how we're aware of it: can we be independent, free, and peaceful?

And if it can't be—which it often isn't—can you know that? Be independent, free, and peaceful about it, and you keep stepping back. Where can I step back and just see, "Okay, this is how it is."

In terms of mindfulness meditation, it's always the same practice. But what we're aware of also shifts as we practice. There's a simplification process that goes on. The Buddha talked about this simplification process that leads us to simpler and simpler and simpler states, and then we get turned inside out. This is my language, "inside out," so that when we come back into the world, we're back in the world in a simple way, but we're free.

It's not a rejection of the world; it's learning how to be in the world in a whole different way. There's one discourse called the Lesser Discourse on Emptiness^[5], which I think should be translated as the Lesser Discourse on Emptying, because there is a process of simplifying that goes on.

I wanted to give you a little example of this. This morning before I came down to IMC, my mind was thinking about being here this morning. We had this COVID protocol, and I'm going off to teach a retreat today, so I had to get some things from here. I wanted to be here early enough to make sure everything was in place. My responsibilities here had to be fulfilled before I left. And there was this talk I was supposed to give, and who's going to come, and do I have the right mask... I was comfortable and peaceful enough about it, but my mind was in this complicated world, thinking ahead, planning ahead what I had to do.

Once I came here, I didn't have to be thinking about what I was going to do. I was at IMC. So I just went around and started taking care of the things I had to do. I still was thinking ahead a little bit, but it was a simpler world than the complicated projections.

Then at some point, I could meditate with all of you. A lot of things were taken care of. Yes, there are things to do afterwards, but now I didn't have to think about them. I could feel the momentum of having all that thinking going on, but that momentum just felt like energy, a little agitation, a little tightness in my chest. It's okay, I'll just breathe with it and feel it.

Then I could feel there started to be a shift, and my thinking got quieter. I dropped into my body, and it was just the simplicity of breathing, very little thought going on. If that process continued, it could get more and more simple. After a while, maybe the breathing gets quieter and calmer, and you just feel sensations in your body. Sometimes when I meditate, the sense of the boundaries of the body disappears, and the body feels porous to the environment, or boundaryless almost.

There are times when my body has disappeared in meditation. I felt so invisible that the first times it happened, I opened my eyes to make sure I was still here. Yep, it hadn't gone anywhere.

There's simplification that goes on. It's not valuable just to have it simple because it's relaxed and calm. What's valuable is what it teaches us about non-clinging. When it's more complicated, there tends to be more clinging, more attachment. But you shed all those, and it takes a lot of deep trust that it's okay to let go of the things we're attached to. Let go of being concerned about it. It takes a lot of love and care not to criticize yourself if you can't let go, and your mind is swirling by itself. That's a time we probably need a lot of compassion, care, loving-kindness, and trust.

Trusting that it's okay to be agitated is a great help for getting calm. Trust the present moment. It's enough just to be alive in the present moment, breathing and being. At some point, you get a sense of independence, you get a sense of freedom, you get a sense of peace. If that experience is impactful enough, strong enough, some remnant of it, some traces of it remain.

In the Lesser Discourse on Emptiness, you go through this whole process of emptying, simplifying, becoming less, and then the Buddha takes us back into the world. It seems like he's going to more and more reified, sublime meditation states, but then he basically says the most ultimate thing is to be back in the world with hearing, seeing, tasting, and touching, being aware of what goes on in the mind, just being in the world without any clinging. You're just aware that your practice is the same, aware of what you see, hear, sense, taste, think, and feel. All these things are still there, but there's a different reference point.

It's possible that some of you already have a reference point for that. Maybe something happened for you in your life where there was independence outside of meditation. Maybe you were in some setting where you had a profound experience of being at peace, being at home, being at ease. Some people have it in a natural setting, in a park, by the ocean, or in the mountains. Some people have it with other people, sometimes in lovemaking. Some people listening to music. Some people through playing music, dance, exercise, or having a good nap and waking up in a peaceful setting.

Maybe you've had an experience like that. I had a few experiences as a child growing up that remained for me as a touchstone. One of them was that we had a relatively small dining room table. Sometimes I would take the white bed sheets and put them over the table, and crawl underneath. The light from the sun coming into the kitchen would come through the white sheet, so sublime, beautiful, and clear. I'd feel so cozy and safe from the world, protected, secluded. I just loved to spend time there. I still feel it in my body, this physical sense of well-being that came from that.

The Buddha also had a childhood story like that^[6]—it wasn't under the kitchen table, but a similar childhood experience that became his reference point for how he then followed the path to his awakening.

Maybe you have a reference point already. So that when you practice, that reference point is close by. It's like a little reminder or a pointer to: "Oh, that's possible. That's a way of being with this."

As opposed to when I was in Japan in the Zen monasteries. Sometimes the abbot would bark like a drill sergeant: "Concentrate! Concentrate! Concentrate as if your head's on fire! Die! Die now!" If I took that as the only reference point for the attitude of how to sit and meditate, I probably would have given myself a headache.

Some people grew up with taskmasters, teachers, or parents that imbued a certain attitude that became the reference point, which is not so healthy. I think what Buddhism is suggesting is that there is a healthy way to have reference points of experiences we've had in life that are really wholesome and good. Not to try to desperately have it again or engineer it again, but to remember the quality of the mind, the attention, the heart, so that when you start doing mindfulness practice, that's the tone. That's the light touch. The attention is oriented to be that way. It's like a North Star, a reminder: you don't have to be so tense. You don't have to try so hard. You don't have to confuse mindfulness with judgments, with preferences.

It's okay to be simple. It's okay to be really simple.

I'll end by saying that it's a beautiful thing to be independent, free, and peaceful. Because then there's a generosity in our way of being with the world. That is the generosity of granting everything else its freedom.

When we're with someone, we're not entangled with them, or needing them to be a certain way, or imposing upon them our agitation or agendas. Being able to be with someone fully and kindly and presently with a degree of independence allows them to be independent. With our inner freedom, we're not complicating their life and taking their freedom away. Because we are peaceful, there's a possibility for them to be peaceful. Our agitation is not necessarily agitating them. That's true with people, it's true with things, and animals, and everything. We grant everything its freedom. Isn't that nice?

In the end, maybe you don't get liberated; maybe you've liberated everything from you. And that's your gift.

So thank you all very much for today.

Announcements

Next week, Max Erdstein is coming to speak. I'm very happy to have him come and be here. I'll be back the following week, and the week after that, Matthew Brensilver will come and give the talk here in person.

I want to say that depending on what direction these COVID infections go, if it goes in a good direction, we'll probably start to change the registration and what we do here. Maybe have a few more people come on Sundays, or we might change the Sunday schedule a little bit so that the first sitting starts at 8:30 rather than at 8:00.

You have to be sure you read the announcement to sign up; that's where we'll explain how it changes. I think at the beginning of each month we'll probably change what we're doing.

For those of you on YouTube, if you live locally, in order to get that email with instructions about how to come here in person, you have to register your COVID card to show us that you're vaccinated. You'll find that information on the "What's New" page on the IMC website.

Thank you very much, everyone.