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Guided Meditation: Unmoving Consciousness

Hello everyone. I think one of the really wonderful things to do is to sit down and meditate. It relates to, or is connected to, some of the more profound aspects of being a human being that are often overlooked if we spend the day distracted, spend the day preoccupied. If we can learn to stop everything in a certain kind of way—stop the busyness of the mind, the preoccupations of the mind, the spinning of the mind—we have an opportunity to connect and feel the depth of us, or that which is at the core of us, or that which has the most integrity or creates a sense of peace and well-being. It's a great thing to do this.

Today, we're still on the week of focusing on delusion. I'd like to offer you what could be considered a little bit of an advanced practice. Don't feel like you have to do it well, but maybe it'll give you a taste of something that will help you appreciate the absence of delusion, or if not the absence, the opposite: the prevalence of delusion in the mind.

This meditation has two stages or two steps. First is the warm-up step, just a kind of way of getting started, warming up, getting settled, preparing ourselves, getting ourselves ready for the second one. To engage in the first one with interest and a certain dedication—like, "Okay, this is worthwhile, let me kind of think of this as going through the warm-up exercise"—give yourself over to it the best you can.

The second stage is to sit and meditate doing nothing, except allowing awareness to be open, allowing awareness to be present for whatever wants to come into awareness. The awareness in this circumstance, and knowing the awareness, the mindfulness, is with the mind that doesn't move. The attention doesn't get directed anywhere. Attention doesn't move from the breathing to a sound, or to anything. All those things can be known, but the mind doesn't move. The mind is not trying to do anything. It's just there, doing nothing.

What that can allow us to do is to see how much the mind wants to move, how much the mind goes this way and that way, how much desires are operating, aversions are operating, and delusion^[1]. In fact, the theory or the idea is that any time the mind has greed or aversion and moves for that reason, there's some delusion that's operating. Perhaps even just theoretically or hypothetically, any time the mind moves to go someplace, or pick something up, or to avoid something, or analyze something, or fix something, maybe there's a little bit of delusion operating there—the delusion that the mind is not capable of having profound peace by itself. Something like that.

So, two stages of meditation today. For this first step, assume maybe your regular meditation posture. Give some care and attention to establish yourself in that posture, making small adjustments to kind of get yourself aligned and attuned to your body from the inside out. Gently close your eyes.

Giving yourself over to it, giving your attention over as if it's the only thing you need to do, take a few long, slow, deep breaths.

And then as you exhale deeply, fully relax the body, especially the shoulders. The whole upper torso, let it settle and soften.

And then letting your breathing return to normal. Again, also as you exhale, maybe a deeper softening, relaxing first of the face, maybe more in the shoulders, and in the belly.

Perhaps as you exhale you can also quiet the thinking mind, allowing the thinking mind to calm a bit, slow down. As you exhale, relaxing the thinking muscle, the tension, pressure to think.

And then to settle into the body's experience of breathing. Not so much making a lot of effort to stay with the breathing, but as you breathe, to shed the concerns for thinking. As you breathe, let the thinking recede like a boat moving through water. That boat doesn't stop for the water, but somehow just keeps going straight, and the water just washes off the side of the hull and is left behind. Stay on the breathing and let your thoughts recede in the wake.

In this first step of meditation, let the thinking mind settle and quiet by just staying closely connected to your breathing.

As you exhale gently, maybe sweetly, soften your body. A softening wave through the body.

And as you exhale gently, sweetly, a softening wave through the mind.

As you exhale, let there be a simple softening in the exhale. And then at the end of the exhale, let there be a stillness, a silence, a kind of momentary pause where the mind becomes quiet. Letting go of thoughts and concerns, and for a moment awareness just is, without any rush of thinking and thoughts.

The moment at the end of the exhale, maybe the mind is quiet, like it would be if you were going to listen to a faint sound far in the distance. The quiet, the stillness, where awareness just is for a moment without any doing on your part.

And that pause can be quite momentary, but perhaps you can then maintain this quiet, still mind as you inhale. Maybe it's a gentle receiving of the inhale, where the sensations of inhale fill the space in the mind that is normally filled with thinking and thoughts.

Seeing if you can let the mind, the awareness, consciousness be still and quiet. Noticing that aspect of consciousness where there's no work, no engaging in activity of being conscious or doing awareness. Where breathing in and breathing out is allowed to simply appear in consciousness.

And then letting go of any focus on the breathing. See if you can let go of any doing in the mind. If you start thinking, that's a doing. If you intentionally focus on the breathing, that's a doing. Rather than doing anything, it's more like the mind is just very still, quiet, peaceful, nothing to do.

Experience appears in consciousness. Breathing might appear, sensations might appear, sounds. Without any preference for what appears, settle back into the still, quiet mind with nothing to do. But where consciousness... in consciousness, present moment experience simply appears and maybe disappears.

And if in this way of practicing it highlights how much the mind wants to do, then the exercise is working. You're seeing clearly the doing momentum of the mind. But see if you can see it. See if you can rest behind it or underneath it, to that place where consciousness doesn't need to do anything. Consciousness just is, and it's aware of the things that come and go, including the tendency to do.

If you're thinking, you're probably doing and involved in it. See if the mind can not be actively involved in anything. The awareness not involved, except that phenomena appear and disappear in consciousness. But consciousness itself is unmoving.

Awareness is not directed anywhere. You're just very quiet and still, with a 360-degree range of perception.

And in the last minutes of the sitting, continue sensing or maybe even imagining the sweetness of consciousness which is at rest in itself, that doesn't have to work or do anything or avoid anything. Consciousness, or the mind, is as at ease and peaceful and unmoving as you've been in the best times of your life of being at peace or at rest. Maybe a time when you finished the day's work.

And then perhaps within that awareness, you might feel or search for a place of sweetness, tenderness. Some people might call it inner goodness. With which now you can become aware of the people in your life, those you know, those you don't know. People spreading out from where you are now, out across the lands, across the oceans, into the lands of other continents.

And to take a few moments to appreciate the basic humanity of all people, and offer a basic goodwill, well-wishing for all beings.

And perhaps a wish for yourself, that you could be peaceful, settled enough to care for the welfare and happiness of others without that care being agitating or having any pressure with it. May it be that you care for the welfare and happiness of others in a way that's easeful, that actually is nourishing for you.

With this ease wishing:

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

And may you contribute to this possibility.

Dharmette: Delusion (4 of 5) Composting Delusion

So this will be the fourth talk on the topic of delusion, and it certainly builds on the first three. The title of it is "Composting Delusion." I think of this as an advanced practice because it does involve allowing delusion to be present. Delusion is one of the primary sources of causing harm in the world, or harm for ourselves, so that's why it's an advanced practice to allow for it. But to do it without getting entangled with it, without getting caught in it, and certainly without being motivated by the delusion.

It's an alternative to the attitude or the approach that when there's something undesirable, maybe even unwholesome going on in the mind, trying to fix it, trying to make it better, make it go away, letting go of it—which in and of itself sometimes is the operation of delusion. For example, there could be the idea that, "I will only be a good meditator or a good person if I get rid of this delusion, so I have to do something to get rid of it." There's a lot of baggage, and some of it perhaps delusive, around "me, myself, and mine," about who I have to be operating in the movement to get rid of something or to stop it or fix it. Of course, sometimes it's completely healthy to fix something or let go of it, so I don't want to say it's always that case, but there's more delusion in that movement than most people realize.

The alternative is to not try to fix anything or make anything go away, but without being caught in it. This is where having a stable, strong capacity of being still or present, especially in meditation where you're committed to not moving or not saying anything during that time, it's safer to just allow things to be there.

If we are present enough to recognize something as delusion—for example, it could be fantasies that involve delusions of grandeur, delusions of how great it'll be if I could do X, Y, and Z. You've done this so much that you see it clearly: "Oh, this is kind of a fantasy world that I'm living in." We see it clearly, but we don't try to judge it or judge ourselves for it. We don't try to get rid of it. But we do allow it in a certain kind of way. We allow it while we know it is delusion.

That does a number of things. One thing that's very important is that it allows us to become more familiar with this tendency. The more we get to recognize and feel and sense what this delusion is... one principle is that you only let go of things in a healthy way when we really understand them. If we let go of things before we really understand it, it might not really be letting go. We maybe let go of just the surface symptoms of it and not really what's happening. There's a lot of wisdom that comes from familiarity, from just seeing something over and over and over again. It's a little bit of bad news, this idea, because it may be uncomfortable to see some things over and over again. But in fact, to see it with a non-reactive mind, to see it without being entangled or caught and without trying to get rid of it, allows something deep to begin happening within us.

One of the things that can arise with that is a very healthy kind of "enough already." A healthy feeling that, "You know, I don't really value this anymore. I'm not behind it. I'm not motivated by it. I don't care for it. I see that this particular delusion I'm having is not really healthy for me or for the world." That insight, that real clear seeing like that, is not aversion. It's not any kind of hostility. It is just a clear seeing. "Oh, look at that." It's like if you put your hand on a hot stove—if you do it long enough and become familiar enough with it, you want to pull your hand away, like, "Enough of this. I don't want to do this anymore." For most of us, we don't need a lot of time on the hot stove; just milliseconds, we know that we don't want to do that, that's not wise. But with some of the delusions of the mind, it takes longer for us to see the healthy movement of, "Oh, this is not for me."

Building on that, especially if the delusion continues and doesn't necessarily stop, it can be a wonderful source to be motivated to practice. Feeling, "You know, I don't really want to live this way anymore. I think that the only way I know to really get to the bottom of it and work through it is to practice, is to meditate." So a person might dedicate themselves to meditation or a contemplative life for a while so that they can really tap into something deeper than the surface mind of delusion and preoccupations that maybe we've been living in. So this allowing of delusion to be there, to become familiar with it, can produce a healthy attitude of "enough already" and a healthy motivation: "Okay, I'm going to get serious about my practice. Let me practice more."

The other thing about allowing delusion to be there, this composting, this digesting of it, is that I think it's often useful to think of things like delusion as being a symptom of something deeper. If we allow it to be there just without reactions, without being for or against it, it allows something deeper to manifest, or allows something that maybe metaphorically is a seed within the delusion that's healthy, that's beautiful, to sprout. And maybe it's the opposite of some of the conditions for the delusion to be there. Maybe some of the conditions for delusion are anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, or very strong desire. But as we sit quietly and allow the delusion to be there, knowing it's delusion, we begin recognizing over time that something inside begins to morph and change and settle, and the opposite of those unhealthy movements are there. We can recognize there's peace there that's growing within it. We recognize there's some feeling of security, some feeling of well-being and ease that's kind of growing there, and it's beginning to show itself. That has a lot to do with the ability to sit still and not be engaged and reactive to it.

This attitude, this idea of composting or digesting or allowing things to be so something can be transformed and changed in a deep healthy way, I like to think of it as being very respectful of life. Everything can be respected. Nothing has to be seen as a problem. Nothing needs to be seen as even unnecessary. It's all to be respected as a deep unfolding and working of our humanity. We have this amazingly fantastic, wondrous potential to move towards healing, towards health, towards wisdom, towards freedom, that doesn't have to be intentionally worked on. It's not like we have to be the doer of it as much as getting out of the way for this deeper potential to really show itself, where mindfulness, awareness, this unmoving consciousness that's really present for things, is the field or the soil out of which this transformation can happen.

So this composting of greed, hatred, and delusion^[1:1] that I've been talking over these last weeks on Thursdays, I think of it as also helping us discover this deep respect for everything. A respect that doesn't celebrate everything, it doesn't condone everything. But it's a respect that doesn't condemn anything, it doesn't disrespect or treat as being just wrong whatever is happening for us in that field, in that container of a clear awareness of what's happening without being entangled with it and without being motivated by what's unhealthy.

That's why I think meditation is such a powerful laboratory, a place for this. The composting practices I've been teaching these last Thursdays, please be very careful with them. Think of them as advanced practices and a little bit dangerous practice because it's so easy to fall into believing we're being non-reactive and then believing that whatever is arising from within is somehow wonderful or important or wise, and we should just make room to allow things to just... you know, then some kind of inner intuition or inner deep knowing can flow as we get out of the way. That attitude can be a kind of delusion as well.

You'd be very, very careful with this, that we don't in any kind of way give in to something that's going to cause harm to ourselves, harm to others, harm to everyone, and anything that perpetuates other delusions, like delusions of self and self-grandeur and things like that. So with the composting practice I've been talking about these last weeks, if you really find it valuable or something that's meaningful, it's probably good to check in with a meditation teacher a little bit to make sure that you're on the right track, because it is possible to go a little bit off track doing this kind of practice.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to our last talk on this topic of delusion tomorrow.