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Guided Meditation: If you know where are you are, you're not here

Hi folks. Welcome to all. Let's practice together. Just making space for your heart, whatever space it needs. Just letting all the nectar settle to the bottom of the glass of juice.

Thich Nhat Hanh^[1] says, "What would it mean not to stir?" What would it mean, as the Buddha invites us, to stop?

Whatever can be stopped, stop. Whatever can't be stopped, it's meant to continue. Something in us stops. Do not try to stop that which you cannot stop. But what can stop?

How long is now? Less than we think. Maybe it is skillful to gather your attention around your breathing, your body, sound. But only insofar as it reminds you to... If you know where you are, you're not here.

It is so natural that our mind is cobbling together a life. But in the sense of the future, it is a kind of agitation. Sure. We stop reiterating ourselves. Stop predicting that it's me in the next moment. Maybe all this is saying: how thoroughly can we relax?

Okay, folks. Thank you for tolerating me. I presume you all know how to meditate already. It's probably about right as an assumption, but I don't know. Sometimes I hear myself and I'm just like, I need to apologize. Like, what did I say? "If you know where you are, you're not here." [Laughter] Okay.

Dharmette: Transcendence and Service

To our topic for the evening. This is a few lines from Shinzen Young^[2]:

"In the Buddhist tradition, the word truth implies insight, clear experience, experiential knowledge of the effortless impersonal process that underlies all our experiences. Through insight, one learns to consciously participate in that process. When you do so, to a certain extent, you transcend the human condition, go beyond your limited personal identity. But this alone does not constitute a complete spiritual path. Goodness is also needed. Goodness implies the ability to manifest a personal self engaged with one's fellow beings. Goodness finds its ultimate expression in a life of effortless service. To transcend the human condition, to improve the human condition, and to understand the complementary relationship between these two—this is our basic job. Liberating insight without service is spiritually narrow. On the other hand, attempting to help people without at least some tools of transcendence leaves one susceptible to burnout and distortions in behavior."

So, "clear experiential knowledge of the effortless impersonal process that underlies all our experiences." Shinzen kind of always jumps into the deep end of the pool first. People talk about liberating insight in different ways, and in the end, all one can do is narrate one's own experience with as much fidelity as possible.

Here, as I understand him, he's pointing to something like the formative molding of anicca^[3]—impermanence. The formative molding of anicca. How the vibratory flow of anicca births and dissolves phenomena.

Usually, we take anicca to be bad news. You know, everything trembles, nothing lasts. Grief is woven into the fabric of existence, inscribed in each moment. But there's another side of anicca, which is something like the safety engendered when you perceive self and world as an impersonal, effortless process. The sense that nothing can clank into anything. Suffering is about density, about clanking—one solid thing clanking into another solid thing. The world clanking into me.

But what if you know yourself as maybe more like a kind of gust of wind, expanding, contracting? And that's not an idea, but actually experiential reality. And what if you know this not merely while sitting in some lovely, comfortable meditation, but even amidst intense pain?

Shinzen almost deifies anatta^[4] sometimes, because it is Spirit with a capital S. I don't know if I would say we are "transcending the human condition." We are still very much in time. We are vulnerable in some of the same ways we've always been. But there is some transcendence of identity. And what we disidentify with is not merely our entire autobiography, but in a strange way, we even disidentify with being human. We're not disputing the proposition, "I'm a person, I'm a human," but that, and every other identity, gets entirely swept up in the flow of anicca.

Some gurus or traditions maybe stop there, and insight and its associated freedom becomes the last word, but this alone does not constitute a complete spiritual path. He says goodness is also needed. Insight reduces fear and anxiety, sometimes very dramatically. That insight frees oneself of a great deal of self-preoccupation, self-curation, and energy pulled into the melodrama of self. That insight changes how it feels to be alive. But what is the expression of this insight in the world? Goodness implies the ability to manifest a self that is engaged with one's fellow beings. Liberating insight without service is spiritually narrow.

Sometimes people make the accusation that meditation practice is self-indulgent—taking time for oneself is self-indulgent. That is usually just a kind of defensive reaction against the silence. Usually, that's just somebody trying to rationalize their own dysregulation and inability to be still. But sometimes I think, yeah, maybe that's fair. Maybe that accusation might be fair when spiritual life is divorced from a loving relationship with other beings. When we somehow forget how deeply all beings wish not to suffer, when we forget how completely we share this longing.

We're developing capacities to help. And some of that capacity development involves manifesting a self in a fluid, adaptive, skillful way. This is a function not merely of insight into emptiness, but also the psychotherapeutic training that is part of the Dharma^[5] path. The Dharma path is not merely doing therapy on ourselves, but it does involve some of that. The path involves working therapeutically on ourselves. Meaning that we've cultivated well-rounded, attuned, functional habits all the while we've been practicing at depth. We can manifest in a way that is with the stream of life.

We're cultivating the capacity to be happy independent of conditions. It's this depth dimension. And we're also cultivating the capacity to be at home in our habits, to be at home being known, to be at home in our needs, feelings, and sensitivities. Maybe some of the problem has been that the meditation traditions expect the depth to translate into breadth.^[6] Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. And when it does not, the path is incomplete, and depth can even become self-absorbed and destructive. Goodness finds its ultimate expression in a life of effortless service.

It's a grand notion, effortless service, but as we practice, it does come to feel more and more natural to give. As one's heart overflows, we give from the overflow. In fact, it doesn't exactly feel like giving. It's just quietly going along, doing what seems needed. Attempting to help without some of the tools of transcendence and depth leaves one susceptible, Shinzen suggests, to burnout and distortions in behavior. So maybe we are called to give in accord with our level of ease and freedom, and service and freedom come to feel very unified.

A Sangha^[7] member sent me a quote from Kalu Rinpoche^[8], and I had known the second half but never seen the first half. I did research a little, and I think it was written on a note card, presented to somebody, and was conserved across time. Rinpoche says:

"My advice, don't be a Buddhist. In the end, it's all about personal gain, fame, and business. Just be a person with a good heart. That's the meaning of a truthful Dharma practitioner. We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing. Be nothing. You're everything. That is all."

Okay. Thank you.