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Guided Meditation: Sensations as Doorways

Hello and welcome to our meditation session here at the Insight Meditation Center. As an orientation for this morning's meditation, I think it's useful to consider that there are two operating systems in our minds, deep inside of us.

One is centered in the present moment, and the other is often not centered in the present moment. That is the world of the imagination, which is our thoughts about the future and thoughts about the past, fantasy, and commentary about things that may not be here. Or if it's about what's here, it's from this operating system which is not really deeply attentive to what's here, but holding itself at a distance, making commentary, having attitudes towards it, and being in a relationship with it where it's an object to be somehow objectified or personalized and identified with. We live in this world of thoughts and constructs so much of the day.

But the other operating system—the one we're using here for meditation and for the deep spirituality of Buddhism—is the one that operates deeply intimately connected to the present, to now, to here. It is the one that comes through our senses, that picks up all the data, all the sense experience of now.

Some people find just bringing themselves into the present moment with the sense experience of breathing to be a reduced, boring area because it's such a big contrast from the constructed, thoughtful world where we tell ourselves stories, have purposes and meanings and plans, things to figure out, and tragedies to review. Coming back into this radical simplicity of just being here in the sense experience can seem like a way of going backwards or missing out on the richness and important things of life. But this simple connection to the present moment through all our senses—to be in the lived experience of now through the senses, which is always in the present moment—lets that become rich and full and brings us a whole new, deeper dimension of life than the two-dimensional life of mental constructs, ideas, and stories that we can live in so much.

It might seem boring to just be simply here, now, in the world that is only experienced in the present moment. But that's a temporary beginning until we allow that world to fill us. We allow that world to show how deep the intelligence can be, as a deep reference point for finding a deep spiritual centering in our life.

Part of the reason to consciously, intentionally have a meditation posture is so that the posture itself begins the invitation, creating the conditions for you to be present with your senses, with your body, here and now. Some people find it useful to sit up straighter. Some people find it useful to be in a very relaxed, maybe even laying down position, if it allows the whole body to start coming alive with sensations. We don't lay down so that we can forget about the body, but there's a way, whatever posture you have, to include the body and how the body is an antenna. The body feels and senses the lived experience of now.

Now gently close the eyes. Without much else to begin with, do a very simple scanning of your body, without any other purpose than to discover how it is to be in the lived body right now. Notice places where it feels pleasant, places where it feels unpleasant. Do not get caught or stuck in the places that are unpleasant or pleasant, but let your attention roam and flow around the body. Find the areas where things are comfortable and uncomfortable. The gentle moving of attention around prevents getting stuck or reactive to any particular way the body is. It's just taking it all in.

Where in your body do you feel your body most fully? Where are the centers of sensation in your body? Is it in the belly, the chest, the face and head, the hands, the spine, or the legs? Is there a place in your body where you feel most at home or most intimate? Or a place in your body which is most neutral?

If the body is a difficult place to be, gently become more aware of the body breathing. Maybe don't go to the place where breathing is difficult or forced, if that's the case. Instead, find some place in the body where the sensations of breathing are more subtle, less associated with any control or any doing on your part. Maybe the sides of your rib cage. Maybe a small, gentle pressure downward at the bottom of your belly as you breathe in, and the release of that pressure as you exhale. Maybe the movements of your back rib cage or your spine as you breathe.

As you exhale, gently invite your whole body to relax. As you exhale, relax the tension, pressure, or agitation associated with thinking. Okay.

Settle into the body. Breathing. Settle into the lived experience of the present, as you would settle into a refreshing pool of water. There is a heightened sensitivity to the living sensations. They're the evidence that you're alive. That is the data, the information which a deep intelligence processes, takes in, and can use to guide you into what is most important here and now. Deep inner lived experience.

Allow yourself to be receptive, intimate with the sense experience of your body. Notice how the body experiences itself from the inside out, with breathing in the middle of it. This is the lived experience of now through your senses, not through your thoughts. You don't have to stop thinking, but leave the thoughts alone and feel more deeply underneath them in the body. It is as if this is a doorway for a deep intelligence, a deep wisdom, and a deep freedom that cannot be found in the world of thinking.

As we come to the end of this sitting, give yourself over a little bit more to the simple, basic sense experience of your body and of breathing. Treat this as the source, the gateway to a deep appreciation and deep wisdom about what is most important for you here and now. Free of "shoulds," free of past and future, free of needing to prove yourself or apologize. Give yourself over to the lived experience that's here and now, resting deep in the body with the lived experience.

With that as a reference, what becomes most important for you? What is your heart's deepest wish? Centered here, just here. Nothing beyond this place and this time. What is the heart's deepest wish for now? With no past and future, with no constructs of the mind acting as colored glasses for being with yourself, what is your deepest wisdom? What is the deepest wisdom that arises out of the depth of the body about just now, here?

And now, from the foundation of here, now centered in the body and in the heart, use your imagination to extend your care, your love, and your kindness out into the world. Sitting centered in yourself, gaze upon the world kindly, and let these wishes flow from your heart out into the world:

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (2 of 5) Immediacy

Hello and welcome to this week where the topic is the five characteristics of the Dharma. As I said, the Dharma is often understood to mean the teachings of the Buddha, but it also refers to what he is teaching—to the truth or the deep experience of what he's pointing to. It's very personal what he's pointing to; it's not some abstraction. I like to think that the Dharma the Buddha is pointing to is a certain intelligence that we're capable of, a certain way of responding, understanding, and being in relationship with the world.

It is very personal. If you want to learn the teachings of the Buddha, you could go and get big fat books to learn all about the details of it. But the purpose of those teachings is not just to have ideas and understandings, but to see how those teachings are pointing back into ourselves to practice. We practice in a way that cultivates and develops a new form of intelligence, a new form of deep sensitivity that guides us to freedom and opens up a profound experience of life.

The famous teaching that is very simple and chanted every day is that the well-taught teachings of the Buddha are to be seen here, are immediate, invite inspection, are onward leading, and are to be personally experienced by the wise. These are five ways of understanding what the Buddha is pointing to.

The first characteristic that I talked about yesterday is that it's visible, sandiṭṭhiko^[1]. But it's not just meant to be visible with the eyes; it is perceivable through all our perceptions. There is something we can perceive through our senses. If you read a book about Buddhism and the teachings seem complicated, and you're trying to put the pieces together to make sense and logic of them, that might be a nice exercise, but it's not what the teachings are really about. The teachings are meant to point here, to the world of what we can directly experience and directly perceive for ourselves. This is something the Buddha kept emphasizing in his teachings.

I'll give examples of more specifically what the Buddha is pointing to in the next few days. But the examples he gives are, in fact, something we perceive for ourselves. Perceptions only exist in the present moment. We only see—for those of us who can see—in the present. We only hear in the present moment. We only smell in the present moment. We only taste in the present moment. The tactile world that we feel in our whole body is only experienced in the present moment.

These might seem to be random and uninteresting sensations, but those sensations are the world to develop a heightened sensitivity to, because they provide very important data for us to understand more deeply what's going on in a very simple way. They provide all we need to know about what is wholesome and unwholesome, what is stressful and not stressful, what is opening, satisfying, and enriching for us, and what is not. Right there in the sense experience, we begin seeing and feeling the guide towards a kind of wholeness, fullness, and well-being that becomes deeper and deeper. It shows us more and more the places where we're attached, places where we're clinging, and places where we're resisting. To keep going deeper and to feel open to this world opens up phenomenal spiritual depth. The world of the senses—what is directly visible here—opens to the depth of what the Dharma has to offer.

So the first one is what's visible. The second one is immediate. The word is akāliko^[2]. Kāla means time, and a- is a negative prefix, so it means "not of time." Some people like to translate it in ways that sound a little bit transcendent, like "timeless." "Timeless" suggests something which exists without a beginning and an end. That sense of temporal spaciousness can be quite inspiring, but it lends itself to some transcendent ideas about what the Dharma is. Akāliko can also mean immediate. It's not just saying it's now, it's the immediacy of here and now.

What is not now? What is not now is the world of our thinking that constructs pasts and futures. Of course, we have pasts and memories, and they're important. Of course, we have to be concerned about the future, which is partly a prediction. Sometimes we predict well and sometimes poorly about what's happening in the future and making plans. We have to do these things, and this is not to deny the value of it. But people lose themselves in the past, lose themselves in the future, lose themselves in fantasy, commentary, internal conversations, judgments, reactivity, and bias.

The inner world of thinking—the words and the beliefs we keep telling ourselves over and over again—can be very undermining. It is debilitating to continually have thoughts that are self-critical: that we're not good enough, we're losers, we're not loved, we're not this and that. We have all these ideas that we live in, and they carry a lot of authority. It can feel like this is the truth, but they are surface-level. They're like commentary or advertisements that are not that important but are designed to get our attention.

However, we can drop down below the level of all this commentary and this constructed world, which is often not about the present moment. It's a wonderful world to open into in the real moment here. Even if you start asking, "My knee hurts, why is it hurting?", you're initially concerned about something in the present moment, but then you look back: "What did I do yesterday? Did I twist it? Was I not paying attention? What happened there?" You think you're in the present moment, but you're in thoughts about a cause in the past. Or you're thinking, "Well, if I don't fix the knee, then I'll be limping tomorrow." That might be a reasonable supposition, but it removes us from the present moment.

When we're going deeply into the Dharma that the Buddha is pointing to, it's emphasized that it is immediate. It's almost like there's no time. There's no past and future. It is just this—just this information, this data, this experience we're taking in. This is part of why this teaching about the Dharma is so significant that we call it an intelligence. Present-moment sense experience is being gathered by the whole of our psychophysical processing system, not the limited one that only has to do with thoughts, imagination, and constructs. There's something deeper operating here and now.

In fact, it's not too difficult to understand that a huge percentage of our daily processing and daily intelligence operates in a subconscious way, free of the conscious agent of thoughts—the agency or person that's engaged in trying to navigate, figure out, imagine, and plan the world.

Consider something as simple as walking down a sidewalk and knowing where you have to go. The road kind of curves to the left or right. You might be thinking about something else entirely, but something in your body knows the way. It knows to gently shift the direction of your feet when they step so you can follow that curve around. Something knows what angle you should turn, when to stop curving, and when to start going straight again. It's a subconscious processing that takes in the curvature of the sidewalk, the road, and what's going on. If other people are walking towards you, you know to step aside.

All these things are happening, and not necessarily in the conscious mind. They could be conscious, but there's a deeper mind that's operating and making it much more efficient. We have to have this deep subconscious processing because otherwise life is too complicated. Imagine trying to consciously decide how much energy to use to lift a foot to clear a step. We don't pull out a measuring tape, measure how tall the step is, and calculate how much we have to swing our foot. Steps can be different heights, and we somehow know to lift our foot less or more because of that. This is a deeper intelligence, and we want to tap into this deeper, more subconscious way in which understanding comes about.

The reference point for this deeper intelligence is what's really important. That will be the topic for tomorrow when we go to the next characteristic, which is that this deep intelligence of the Dharma invites inspection. It guides us in a very important way. So, thank you.

For today, you might want to consider how much you're really in the present, here in the immediate now, and what takes you away from it. How much does it take you away from it? Are there ways in which you undervalue the now, or dismiss the now because you think other things are more important? They might be, but just really track yourself and see what you're doing. Thank you.