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Guided Meditation: Seeing the Ordinary Clearly

Hello and welcome. Here on Friday, those of you who have been following these 7 A.M. weekday sittings for some time recognize that often there's an unfolding, a pattern of going deeper. By Friday, step by step, we take a step deeper over the five days. Today, the simile that I'll talk about later is a very simple simile that, on the surface, just seems very ordinary. It's a simile for full awakening, and so I want to highlight the ordinariness of it.

So when we do this meditation, maybe there can be for you an emphasis on seeing clearly what is obvious, what is ordinary here. In that seeing the ordinariness of everything, maybe something releases for you, something relaxes: the searching, the wanting, the not wanting, the fixing, the trying to understand, trying to have something special, trying to recover some state of meditation that you used to have. Just very simply, a simple being with what is.

So the simile is a person standing on the edge of a lake. The lake is very clear, clearer than clear, maybe so clear that you almost don't even know there's water there. And the person looks into that lake and sees on the lake floor different oyster shells, different kinds of shells. He sees the pebbles and the gravel that's there on the lake bottom, and sees schools of fish both hovering still in the water, not moving, and also gently swimming around.

So the remarkable thing about this metaphor is the clarity of the water, but what we see in the water are natural phenomena. And maybe for that reason it's kind of special, especially for people who are not connected to nature so much, but it's very ordinary. Just the gravel at the bottom of a lake, the shells that are down there, and little fish in schools swimming around peacefully.

So just to look at this simple natural world and let it be that simple. And what would it be like for this meditation, where you are content to be present here and now for what is obvious? What is it that obviously is clear?

Maybe what it is, is you're confused. You're not clear about almost anything except the fact that you are confused, and you see that clearly. Where things are not clear because you're agitated, what can be simple and obvious is the agitation.

Maybe with an emphasis on breathing: what is obvious about breathing? What can you know with some clarity? Don't worry about trying to see deeply or how you're not seeing clearly. Just be concerned about what you do see clearly, what you feel and sense and experience. And let that be like looking into the clear lake and seeing the simple natural phenomena that's there.

The simile is a simile for awakening. What is it about this radical simplicity of being with what is obvious, independent of whether it feels concentrated or feels like some great spiritual experience? What is it about just the clarity of knowing what's obvious, seeing it as a natural phenomenon and letting it be that way? What is it about that that's so valuable?

So to take a posture for meditation. Relaxing the eyes by gazing down, and gently closing the eyes. And gently taking some deeper breaths, and longer exhales. Relaxing on the exhales.

Letting the breathing return to normal. And for a few more rounds of breathing, relaxing in the body, relaxing in the mind.

And then relaxing more deeply. Maybe settling the attention on the body breathing. And maybe with breathing as a default where your attention lands and takes in more than anything else for this sitting here. Emphasize knowing what can be known clearly. What is obvious, and appreciate the clarity of knowing. That if, for example, you're confused about this instruction, maybe what's known clearly is the confusion.

If it's a sound outdoors that's known clearly. Know that whatever is clearest, most obvious. Know it as a simple natural phenomenon. To emphasize the naturalness of it, maybe you can have a little phrase that goes along with it: "Of course." Of course, this is what's here. Nothing to fight, nothing to condemn, nothing to want. Just, "Of course, this is what's happening now."

And in doing it this way, beginning to appreciate the clarity, simplicity, directness of knowing that is not encumbered by what is known.

What is getting in the way of seeing what's obvious here and now? And if there is something getting in the way, thoughts or something else, know that simply, clearly, as the obvious thing.

Whatever you're aware of, how can you be aware of it as a natural phenomenon? Where only what's obvious about it in the present moment, how it is in the present. Not what you're thinking about, but just thinking. Not the story of what you're feeling, your emotions, but simple awareness of the emotion in the present, whatever it is. What can you know? How can you know it with clarity and simplicity?

As we come to the end of the sitting, settle back. Release any extra effort you're making to be mindful in favor of seeing clearly. Knowing simply. Being present for what is obvious without any tension or straining or wanting. And if straining and wanting is the obvious, let that be what is known clearly. And to do this, to appreciate simplicity, clarity, the ordinariness of being aware.

And imagine offering this kind of attention to others. Not being aware of others with your desires and your aversions. Not judging, without bias, prejudice, or preferences. Just the simplicity, the naturalness of seeing clearly. Letting each person that you see be someone natural and simple, an expression of nature. Into, through the medium of this simplicity and clarity, to gaze upon the world kindly. Gaze upon others with goodwill.

Gaze upon others with simple care, ordinary care, that you care for them. You wish them well. May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

Dharmette: Similes for Meditation (5 of 5) Lake Clearly Seen

Thank you. So on this Friday, I offer my fifth and final reflections on the Buddha's similes for meditation. The previous similes all came from the Buddha's discussion about the four absorptions. Today's will be a simile for awakening, often following the absorptions, and it's a remarkable simile because of its ordinariness.

The four absorptions are states of deep meditation that are very satisfying. People have a variety of attachments to them, wanting to have them, being upset when they don't have these states of meditation, and wanting to have them again in some desperate way if they have had them once. Sometimes they're a little bit frightening because they're so different than ordinary life. People pull back and wonder, "What was that?"

Sometimes they lend themselves to a feeling of great serenity, bliss, rapture, wondrousness, amazement, and delight. They can be very healing; there are lots of benefits with concentration practice. But they are kind of extraordinary states of mind, at least from the point of view of everyday life. In the middle of these states of concentration, if they're not too intense, it can feel like, "Oh, this is the natural mind. This is a natural state." The altered states of consciousness is everyday life of anger and desire and confusion and all the stuff that goes on when we're agitated in the mind. But when the mind is settled and quiet and peaceful, it can feel like this is health, this is natural. But in any case, some of these states of concentration are kind of extraordinary in some ways.

The simile for awakening comes back to something ordinary. And for all that Buddhism and Buddhist practice emphasizes not-self, the similes for absorption kind of involve a disappearing of the person. At deeper and deeper states of concentration, the body disappears, and it's kind of like the person is not quite there. Not discounting you as a person with meditation, it's just that the mind has gotten so quiet and peaceful. In the simile for awakening, the person has come back. The person is standing, and the clarity is in my mind of just standing. Standing at a place, a definitive location. Standing, a person standing upright.

And this person is looking into a very clear lake. Because it's so clear, the person can look right down to the bottom, to the lake floor. And the person sees there different kinds of shells. The text translates that as oyster shells in the water. The person also sees gravel and pebbles on the floor and sees schools of fish either swimming around together or just hovering still in the water. And these are seen clearly.

So that's the simile. And I think there's nothing extraordinary or symbolic that's supposed to be represented by these objects in the water, because the emphasis here is on the clarity of seeing. When one sees something so clearly and so obviously that it seems ordinary, the mind isn't for or against it. It's not excited by it. It's not making a self out of it. It's not congratulating oneself. It's just the things there, just the objects of nature. Gravel and pebbles, you know, we don't make much about them. Shells, maybe we don't make much of them unless we want to eat them. And I imagine in this metaphor, the schools of fish are very small fish. So there's not like you want to fish them, because they're way too small to eat. So it's just this natural scene in the water.

And that ordinariness of awakening. Maybe there's something extraordinary about the freedom and the release of awakening, the release of attachments, but there's also something amazingly ordinary, extraordinarily ordinary. We're seeing nature, we're seeing what's natural, we're seeing what's here as part of nature in its naturalness, and this is part of the release. We're releasing all the ways we want the extraordinary, all the ways in which we attribute meaning and purpose and self and philosophies and all kinds of layers and layers of building cathedrals of ideas and stories and meaning and self around experience. Those get released and freed. And what are we left with? We're left with simplicity. Very simple. Just standing, seeing clearly. Seeing clearly as if everything is in the naturalness of everything.

So now I want to read the simile with that background. This is Bhikkhu Bodhi's^[1] translation. It's in the 39th discourse in the Middle Length Discourses, and it's also in the second discourse of the Long Discourses. So Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation goes like this:

"Just as if there were a lake in a mountain recess, clear, limpid, and undisturbed, so that a person with good sight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming and resting. And he might think, 'There is this lake, clear, limpid, and undisturbed. There are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.'"

Exactly how we are supposed to interpret this simile for awakening, you know, there's different choices and ways. Certainly, there's much more to be said about this. But what I'd like to do by ending this week is to emphasize the ordinariness of it. The ordinariness of you standing still and quiet and peaceful and seeing, and seeing the ordinariness of life. Seeing the simple things around you without the mind wanting and needing and avoiding and building and fantasizing and making up a self in relationship to it.

In the simile, the person does not disappear. Because sometimes there's this extra idea: "I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be empty. I'm supposed to somehow vanish and have no self here," or, "I'm supposed to have a non-dualistic relationship with the world where I disappear, or just the world and everything disappears, or everything is somehow one." I'm interpreting the simile as just you're allowed to stand and be here.

But if you're alone in the mountains in a safe, wonderful, cozy place and looking at the water, the social concerns that exist in urban settings, living around people, kind of disappear. Just here, and not needing identity. Not needing to approve oneself, defend oneself, assert oneself. Not needing to be anything for anybody. Just standing there looking into this calm, peaceful lake and seeing the most ordinary things in it: gravel, shells, small fish swimming around.

So what would it take for you to have trust enough that it's okay to be this way? To stand tall and confident in a certain way. The kind of confidence that looks confident from the outside, but on the inside you're neither confident nor not confident. Just be willing to be as you are. And be able to kind of gaze upon everything, the world, yourself, content to know what is obvious. Not searching for meaning, not searching for what's behind it, the cause and the history and fault and blame.

There might be a time and place for those things, but what is it to just stand there and gaze upon things as if everything is just natural? Everything obvious, everything seen clearly as it is in the present moment. Whatever it might be, it's just seeing it as nature. No greater or lesser value than gravel in the lake bed, or small little fish swimming around. A marvel of nature, but not something to appropriate or be greedy about, or to hate, or not something supernaturally phenomenal and fantastic that you can write postcards home and say, "Wow, I had this amazing experience, it was so far out." And not to diminish the value of far-out experiences, but just the ordinariness of being here with clarity.

So, similes. Part of the value of similes is they can be interpreted in certain different ways. Sometimes, like poetry, maybe you don't have to always understand the author's intent behind the similes, but rather by exploring them and interpreting them and seeing them on different days, different months, different years, they might point to something or speak to something or clarify something that is new. It sees the world in new ways, sees ourselves in new ways. Similes have this wonderful power to reach deep inside of ourselves to understand new ways and expand our senses.

Because all of these similes have to do with meditation, the path of the Dharma^[2], there is a place to try to understand what they mean dharmically, what they mean as part of this path, and how do they work together, how do they unfold together for the purposes of freedom. A freedom that, in the end, allows us to be ordinary. A glorious ordinary, where we're free from all the burdens that we carry.

Announcements

Thank you very much. As I said yesterday, I want to repeat the announcement that it looks like I won't be here for the next four weeks. I'm teaching retreats three of those weeks, and then I'm going on a family trip for Thanksgiving.

For the next two weeks, I have guests coming. Two wonderful people in the IMC's teacher training, wise teacher trainees who are already great teachers and have done a fair amount of teaching already. I think they're the youngest teachers in the teacher training, or among the youngest, so it's kind of like the new generation coming along, which is kind of exciting. I'm very happy to introduce them to you this way and have them come. I think you'll enjoy them quite a bit.

This coming week it's Kodo Conlin. He's also a priest at San Francisco Zen Center, so he has a similar background to me in that I was a priest there and also trained to be a Vipassana^[3] teacher. And then there's May Elliott, who is a longtime Vipassana student and also a student at San Francisco Zen Center and a teacher there.

For the last two weeks, I'm not sure what's happening yet. We're a little bit dependent on having volunteers help with the technology for broadcasting this. For people who are not here at IMC, we have to make a Zoom room for them, and then they teach into the Zoom room and that gets transferred over to YouTube. So it's not clear we have volunteers to do that. I'll still wait and see. If I don't find teachers to come, then we'll do replays and hopefully make a nice choice from this huge collection now of the 7 A.M. teachings we've done over these almost three years.

So thank you very much. I look forward to coming back in a month, I think it's on the 5th of December. And I hope that you take good care of your 7 A.M. sangha^[4] during this month. Thank you.