Samādhi (3 of 5) Unification of Mind

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Dharmette: Samadhi (3 of 5) Unification of Mind. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 08, 2020. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Samādhi (3 of 5) Unification of Mind

So, to continue the theme of this week, which is samādhi^[1]. It's a little bit funny to speak after meditating and being somewhat still. So, the theme is concentration, or samādhi. The word samādhi is more or less a noun, and it comes related to two verbs. One is samādahati^[2] (my Pali^[3] pronunciation is not so good, but well), and then samāhita is another one. These two words, which are more the activity that samādhi speaks to, have a meaning of placing something together, bringing together, unifying, and gathering together.

And so, this idea that samādhi is not this laser focus of the mind, but it's a gathering together, bringing together. I like the word "compose"—everything gets composed. All of who we are gets composed together, ends up coming into harmony, into a kind of unity. One of the words related to samādhi is ekodibhāva^[4] (sometimes translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi^[5] as "unified," and by another monk, Thanissaro Bhikkhu^[6], as a "unity"). This idea of unification, of bringing into harmony, is a very different feeling for samādhi than the idea that it's a kind of a laser focus of the mind.

In the dictionary definition of concentration, it has two meanings. One meaning is the action or power of focusing one's attention or mental effort. But the other meaning is a close gathering of people or things, the action of gathering together closely. Both those meanings are related to what samādhi means in the Buddhist tradition.

One of the ways that this comes together, this idea, is that we're building on the idea of settling the mind, or settling our experience, settling into our experience. So rather than a laser-focus, it's everything settling into the bottom, like a bowl with marbles where the marbles settle into the bottom of the bowl and sit there, very happy and at rest. So there's a settling, a gathering together of all the disparate parts of who we are.

It's very easy to end up living a life that's fragmented. For example, if I tripped this morning and somehow I injured my foot in the dark, part of my body sitting here could, in theory, still kind of be feeling that mild trauma of the trip, of the fall, or the fear. Another part of me might be sitting here just feeling delighted to be together with all of you this way and sharing the Dharma^[7] with you. My mind might be thinking of what's for lunch, wondering what I could find in the refrigerator. And then I might be with a conversation from yesterday, and maybe the challenges or the delights of that conversation. Then I'm wondering about this and that.

My intention is to try to be focused on my breathing or something, so there are all these different things that are going on at once, or almost at once, kind of swimming around, bouncing around. Often the mind is fragmented, divided, agitated, spinning around. The process of samādhi is settling and gathering together, so all the disparate parts of ourselves are no longer fragmented, but are gathered together and work together. Our attention, our intention, the physicality of our body, the physical sensations of our body, our emotional body, our emotional experience, our cognitive experience, the thoughts we might be having—all of it is gathered together for the same purpose in meditation.

For example, if we're concentrating on breathing, all these different parts of us are coming together, being gathered together to hold the experience of breathing, or to be together with the experience of breathing, to be in harmony, just gathering together.

Now, you don't have to work too hard at this. It maybe helps enough just to say that we're trying to overcome any sense of conflict with anything when we meditate. So there's nothing which is considered wrong or something to be gotten rid of, just something else to be held. "Come here, let me hold you. Let me include you here." Not including them like they're thoughts that we're going to keep thinking, but just letting the thinking mind relax inside. "Look, it's okay, be here."

When my older son was quite young, he went to a preschool. He was probably three years old at the time, with really marvelous teachers. They were kind of my heroes, and the goodness they brought to the children was just one of the best things going. I feel like these are the people who are creating the foundations for a wonderful society. They were really kind, generous, and wise.

There was one thing that I really loved to watch. Sometimes I'd go into the classroom and these three, four-year-old kids were running around like crazy, yelling and screaming, doing what three-year-olds do, and playing. When it was time for something different to happen, one of the teachers would stand in the middle of the classroom, stand tall, and just begin to whisper. They wouldn't try to stop the kids from playing or anything, just stand there and start whispering. The kids nearby would notice and they would come and sit next to and in front of the teacher. Slowly, the whole class would hear the whispering, and they'd all gather together and sit around the teacher. Then the teacher would sit down and tell a story.

It's possible the kids knew that a story was what was coming, but this idea of not forcing the kids to be quiet, forcing them to stop what they're doing and come back, but rather to harmonize, to gather together in this kind of peaceful way. Everything gets settled. The whole classroom got settled and quiet.

It's a little bit like when I was in elementary school. I remember having a little red, U-shaped magnet, and I would pull it across the sand in the sandbox. There were little flint, metallic iron particles in the sand, and if I'd go back and forth in a straight line, the little flint pieces, the little iron pieces, would align themselves up in a line.

With this idea of coming into the breathing, let the breathing maybe be the whispering. Let the breathing be the magnet, and everything begins to settle there. Everything gathers together. Coming together, settling together, holding together.

Earlier this week, I talked about settling the mind and centering the mind. As the attention gets centered, as the attention gets steadied and settled, it becomes the gathering place, the magnet, the support, so we don't keep giving the energy of our mind to distractions and to other things in the wrong way.

This gathering together, the settling together, this unification, this harmony—the consequence of that, for the Buddha, is that we become peaceful. The direction that samādhi takes us is peace, and part of that gentle peace is a sense of lack of conflict. If you find yourself in conflict with anything at all when you're meditating, you might want to see if there's some other perspective from which to hold it. Maybe this can be [unintelligible] and just hold it and include it. Or maybe there's a way of being not in conflict with it, but also not caught up in it or involved in it, where you make room for it. Hold it in the palms of awareness: "This too is included."

For me, with this image of the palms holding something, the palms themselves are silent—silent of words and ideas. So it lets something be held in the palms of awareness, to allow things to kind of settle into a quiet or stillness. My mind still might be thinking, but I'm not living in the thoughts. I'm not identified with the thoughts or so interested in the thoughts. I'm interested in this holding of everything. Everything coming together, settling in. And to have that happen with something like the breathing, that does become a kind of one-pointedness. But it's kind of like the one-pointedness of everything coming together into that one place, as opposed to the forcefulness of the mind.

A lot of what meditation, concentration, and samādhi has to do with is letting go, relaxation. This movement I spoke of yesterday, of applying oneself and then sustaining attention, it's a little bit like coming back to rest in awareness and then staying there for a while, open, including everything. And so finally, instead of having conflict with anything, "this too" in some way should be included. "This too" is held in awareness. "This too" is brought together into this harmonizing, this gathering together, this becoming composed, unified into the present moment.

Samādhi is the unification of mind. As I said in earlier weeks, most of the time we are beginners. So keep coming back, letting go, centering yourself over and over again on your experience. Once you can do that a little bit, then you can really get into this idea of connecting and sustaining attention. As that continues, over and over again, connecting and sustaining, the sustaining becomes longer and longer. Then it naturally begins to be like a magnet and pulls everything else together. Things settle, let go, and come together.

Over time with samādhi, you'll experience more and more this really being here and settled. One word for this kind of unification of mind that maybe is more meaningful for some of you is "calm," the calming of the mind. Everything becomes calm.

So thank you. The Buddha said that the support for deepening concentration is happiness, and that will be the topic for tomorrow. Until then, I want to thank you again, and I hope this idea of unification, and "this too"—including everything—is also a way of being in the world where your presence promotes non-conflict, and supports everyone else to find some peace and settledness. May all beings be peaceful. Thank you.