Guided Meditation: Attending to What is Wholesome; Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (3 of 5) Knowing Oneness in Perception of Earth

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Attending to what is Wholesome; Training in Emptiness (3of4) Knowing Oneness in Perception of Earth. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Meg Gawler at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 12, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Attending to What is Wholesome

Greetings, everyone. Good to be back with you. I'd like to offer my apologies for the technical glitches yesterday before we started, and to thank you for your kindness in that respect. So we're going to pursue our training in emptiness with the aspiration of cutting through the illusion of self.

And so, to begin, we recognize the wholesomeness of mental seclusion. Knowing the tendency of the mind to proliferate, we carefully place all our concerns, worries, and stresses outside the meditation space. We can come back to them later; no need for them now.

So, begin by assuming your meditation posture. Settling in whatever is supporting you, whether it's the cushion, the floor, the bed, or a chair, and feeling the contact of this body, and its contacting with the Earth. And closing the eyes, if that's comfortable for you. And letting the attention come to the breathing: the long, slow, deep inhale and exhale, as a way of connecting.

And we'll do a brief but hopefully loving body scan, bringing warmth, kindness, and mettā^[1] to all the parts of our body, and as we do so, relaxing them to the best we can. So starting with the head. The eyes are closed, and see if you can feel the muscles in your face. See if there's any tension anywhere in the forehead, or behind the eyes, around the mouth, any sort of holding. And it's a lovely thing to soften that.

And bringing our loving attention down through the neck, and then letting go of the shoulders, the arms, and the hands. And down through the torso, the heart, the belly, the pelvis. Loving awareness through the legs, and down through the feet.

And now making the connection with the Earth, and drawing up the Earth's energy through the feet, up through the legs, the pelvis, the belly, the torso, the shoulders, arms, and hands, the neck, the face, and the crown of the head, scalp, and that little opening, a remnant, the fontanelle. We can let that loving awareness shine out into the sky.

So being grateful for this body, however it is, and now suffusing our mental state, our mind state, with a taste of mettā. Lighting a little candle in the heart, and letting it warm and encourage this body. And then little by little, letting it spread out, far and wide: to the front, the right, the back, to the left, above, and below. Gently radiating that down—it doesn't matter how far it goes. The intention is benevolence towards all creatures everywhere in this universe.

Now, keeping that flavor of mettā as a sort of background theme to our meditation, inviting the mind to rest in the body. Resting in the body is a home. It's a safe and wise space for placing our awareness. If you like, you can imagine the myriad biological processes going on in your body. Experiencing the body as flow, inconstancy, constantly changing, and fundamentally empty of a self.

And we can move from the ecology of the body to the ecology of the Earth, and sense our interdependence with all the various creatures on the Earth. Each breath, taking in oxygen and giving away CO2, sharing these molecules with who knows what beings, and when, and where. "We're all in this together," I like to say.

I find thinking of my life in ecological terms to be very, very beneficial. It's really physically the case that there is nothing substantial that we can really reify as a self that's in control of everything. It simply doesn't exist. And these molecules that we share and receive, this process is so ephemeral, who knows who's participating? Sometimes we breathe in molecules that somebody else, perhaps the Buddha, may have breathed in—some of the molecules that we're breathing.

And then getting down to basics, seeing the body in the body. And this means that we see the Dharma^[2] in the body. Knowing our own and others' bodies are just impermanent phenomena.

And now opening up our awareness to whatever is arising, moment by moment, through any of the sense doors, and very carefully attending to our lived experience. This is crucial because in each moment, we create the causes and conditions for the next moment. And so, the crucial importance of seeing clearly, of keeping our mindfulness fully in gear, so that we can see when something arises whether it's wholesome or unwholesome, and then we can decide which way to go. And instead of choosing the path of bondage, being stuck, we can choose the path to freedom.

May my practice be a cause for awakening. So whatever you do, choose mindfulness. Keep practicing like this.

Keeping our awareness on our lived experience, in this body, in this place, in this moment. Attending to whatever arises, and seeing that clearly. Seeing the inconstancy of all that we experience, the flow of our experience. And being friends with whatever arises, and choosing which path to take. If something less wholesome arises...

As we come to the end of this sitting, we reflect on the goodness of this path of practice. And we each open our circle of care to offer whatever wholesome conditions we created in this meditation to benefit all living beings on this planet.

May all beings everywhere be safe and protected. May we be contented, at ease. May we all abide in peace. And may all of us, and all beings everywhere, be free.

I bow to you all, I bow to your practice^[3], and I invite you to join me as we bow to each other with gratitude for this circle of Saṅgha^[4].

Dharmette: Training in Emptiness (3 of 5) Knowing Oneness in Perception of Earth

Greetings, everyone. Welcome back to this series on training in emptiness.

As you may know, the three pillars of the Buddhist path are ethics, samādhi^[5], and wisdom. In Pali, it's sīla, samādhi, paññā^[6]. It's really important that we keep in mind that we have to bring all that into practice in order for our meditation to be at all beneficial. So we begin by doing our best to be ethical in body, speech, and mind. And I also take generosity to be a part of being ethical, in addition to the five precepts. Generosity, because we're not just doing this for ourselves. It's a great thing to keep in mind the importance of other people. Again, an opportunity for letting go of our obsession with "me, myself, and mine."

Samādhi, or deep meditative composure, is not an end in itself. When it gets deep, it is very pleasurable, and it can even be a trap if we get attached to it. But the purpose of deep meditation is that it allows us to collect the mind sufficiently, and to be sufficiently empty, in order to have the insights that lead to freedom, to awakening.

Yesterday I began reading to you from the Buddha's shorter discourse on emptiness^[7]. If you were there yesterday, we began with Ānanda^[8] going to the Buddha in this beautiful building in the forest where the monks were all practicing meditation. He went and paid his respects and sat down. Something was on his mind, and he really wanted to make sure he had heard things right. He asked the Buddha to please let him know if he indeed heard correctly that the Buddha said previously that he often abides in emptiness. The Buddha was delighted by this question and confirmed, "Yes indeed, I abided in emptiness then, and I often abide in emptiness now."

Then he begins to explain to Ānanda what it means to abide in emptiness, and how you might actually approach deeper and deeper states of meditation that become more and more empty. What the Buddha affirmed to Ānanda is that it is really important, in order to dwell in emptiness, to be clearly aware of our experience in every moment. We should know, as practitioners, what is present in our experience. And in addition to that, we should know what is absent. The teaching is that whatever is present is empty of itself. It doesn't have "thingness"—it is essentially a process. Our body, and whatever we experience, is empty of anything that's substantial or eternal.

So after this introduction that I read yesterday, the Buddha goes on to say, "Thus one regards what is not there as empty. However, as to what remains there, one clearly knows this is present. Thus, Ānanda, this is the genuine, undistorted, completely pure descent into emptiness."

Then he goes on to give some instructions. Here, the Buddhist text uses the word bhikkhu, which means monk, but scholars now agree that bhikkhu can refer not only to monks but to all monastics, including nuns, and to lay disciples as well. So I'll be using the word "practitioner" as a translation of bhikkhu.

"A practitioner attends to the oneness dependent on the perception of Earth. Through the perception of Earth, the mind gains confidence, becomes settled, remains still, and is inclined towards release." So the advice is, in this phase of the gradual entry into emptiness, this phase is being aware of the Earth as a way of not being so attached to oneself and to details. Then the Buddha goes on to say, "Not attending to any of the rivers and ravines, the tracks of stumps and thorns, the mountains, the uneven places, one attends to the oneness dependent on the perception of the Earth." So perceiving the Earth in its globality without getting bogged down in specifics, in details. And then he says, "Through the perception of Earth, the mind gains confidence, becomes settled, remains still, and is inclined towards release."

This is a refrain: "One clearly knows thus, whatever stress there might be dependent on the perception of people, that is not present here. There is only this measure of stress: the oneness dependent on the perception of Earth. One clearly knows this field of perception is empty of the perception of people. There is only this that is not emptiness: the oneness dependent on the perception of Earth. Thus one regards what is not there as empty. However, as to what remains there, one clearly knows this is present. This, Ānanda, is the genuine, undistorted, completely pure descent into emptiness."

So we experimented with this a bit in the meditation. The idea is that we begin with physical seclusion, as we do when we sit down to meditate, and then we cultivate mental seclusion—seclusion from the hindrances, seclusion from the chattering mind. Then there was a step in between, which was the forest, but the text is repeated in each one. Today I wanted to begin with this phase of the gradual approach to emptiness, which is awareness of the Earth. We don't have to know everything about the Earth. We don't have to know, as the Buddha says, all the mountains, and ravines, and rivers, and so forth, and fields.

This is a very interesting instruction: to not get bogged down in details, because as soon as we start doing that, the mind starts roaming around. It's very easy to indulge in some sort of reification. So he's trying to help us out of the very human tendency to reify our experience.

I find that particularly helpful because I tend to be way too much of a detail person. There's an expression in English: "The devil is in the details." I've certainly seen for me that that's the case. I can get bogged down by details, wanting to make sure everything's in the right place, that that's the way it should be. And this is not skillful on the path of practice.

So if you would like some homework for the next 24 hours: see if you can, in your experience, really pay attention to where your mind is going, not just in meditation but in daily life as well. See what you're focusing on. Are you focusing on people, or what? And then if you want to simplify a bit, the invitation is to focus on the Earth as a unified perception. It's grounding, it's settling, and it can help us to stay centered.

And then, as the Buddha says: "There is only this that is not emptiness: the oneness dependent on the perception of Earth. And thus one regards what is not there as empty. However, as to what remains, one clearly knows this is present. Thus, this is the genuine, undistorted, completely pure descent into emptiness."

Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your practice.