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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome, welcome all. Nice to have the chat streaming on the side. Nice to see your names. Welcome, and thanks for the warm greetings to the substitute teacher. I'm happy to be here this week and look forward to exploring together.

We'll have the same format as Gil usually practices: a lightly guided sit for a half hour, and then some reflections until a quarter to.

Just settling into a posture.

Sometimes when we're cued to begin paying attention, it's almost like we imagine the spotlight of attention being shone from the direction of our own head, from our eyes, the perspective of looking down into our body. But that's just another thought, actually. So maybe we begin with the image of your body pervaded by awareness, porous to awareness.

Sometimes it's supportive to feel our bodies—the kind of earth element of our body, the groundedness, the weightiness, the force of gravity, the downward pull of the earth. Sometimes it's supportive to know our body as vibrating space.

To be present is to be unintimidated by the flow of pleasant and unpleasant. To relinquish our preoccupation with control, molding ourselves, molding the moment. Every phenomenon is a kind of invitation more deeply into the present.

Whatever narratives have accumulated about this sit, how it's going, how you're doing—just put it down. Make yourself radically available to this moment.

There's a palpable sense that, moment by moment, life is softening rather than hardening our hearts. We actually leverage the imperfection of the moment for our freedom. And so rather than trying to extract something from the moment, from our practice, we let ourselves be softened by it.

Letting go is not a job we reluctantly perform, but an utter delight and joy. And so we develop a kind of confidence, a faith in letting go. And it doesn't solve the complexities of being human, the demands on any life, but it does resolve the suffering of this moment. And that's something.

Helplessness and Power

It's good to practice with you.

William James^[1] said, "Nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word 'and' trails along after every sentence." The word "and" trails along after every sentence.

Sometimes when Gil and I have taught a retreat, we've done the Three Characteristics^[2], and their supporting opposites, or apparent opposites. So we open to suffering, dukkha^[3], but that is paired with a consolidation of well-being. We open to anicca^[4], to impermanence, uncertainty, but that's paired with a teaching on stability. We open to the teachings on selflessness, anattā^[5], and that's paired with self-confidence. And there's a certain kind of importance in pairing teachings.

And so this week, likewise, some pairs that seem important to me, that seem maybe in conflict with each other, but actually support each other. So today, the pair: helplessness and power.

Helplessness is a defining characteristic of any animal's life, and among the most harrowing experiences a human can have. And sometimes I feel like maybe dukkha, suffering, and helplessness are synonyms. We are, in the end, small creatures amidst unimaginably vast forces. And humans, we need a very specific environment of temperature and pressure, mixture of gases, and just a staggering number of things need to go right in our body just to be alive. And so just to have this breath is dāna^[6]. Yeah, it is a kind of generosity.

A moment of helplessness is very frightening; it's the most extreme form of vulnerability. We scramble to exert our power, to keep control, to exercise will. We will take almost anything over a moment of helplessness. People cry for many reasons, but one of the main reasons I've learned that people cry is a sense of helplessness. And perhaps our tears are a kind of plea: "I need you. I need you."

So much of our cognitive and emotional life is really organized against helplessness, organized around the sense that we can always do something. It feels like we can always do something; it feels like something might always be fixed. That is the essence of saṃsāra^[7], this realm: the idea that something might be fixed, something else might be governed. Some facet of our experience of our life might be governed. And that sense of what could be, what might have been, what will be—all those possibilities are so deeply compelling to us. And so we can tinker with the moment from cradle to grave.

And sometimes in order to soften the blow of anicca, of uncertainty and unreliability, we blame ourselves. Blaming ourselves creates the illusion of controllability: "Well, if I just didn't mess up..." In fact, I think a lot of self-hatred is really our attempt to conceal the truth of uncontrollability from ourselves.

We're helpless in moments to silence our minds, to protect ourselves from pain, to back our ways out of some karmic corners. We get backed into a kind of karmic corner, and our bed is made; we're going to suffer. We're helpless, or nearly helpless, in the face of so much greed, hatred, and delusion that seems to animate the world, our species. There's a measure of helplessness in this.

And so it is actually strange, alien, to hear the dharma teacher say, "Surrender." That this is a path of letting go. We can kind of feel like we're opening to the moment, but we're subtly trying to master the human condition. To really open—not to try to master the moment, not to try to get the upper hand on helplessness—that is profound.

So we open. We open to helplessness, we let it soften our heart, we let it teach us. Everything is teaching us, as is said. And our life, our families, our world—all of that becomes so poignant in light of helplessness. And when change comes, we're a little bit less startled. When death comes, we're a little bit less startled.

Before we've come to appreciate helplessness, we try to exert our power over all things—over ourselves, over others. But as we open to helplessness, we stop fighting the First Noble Truth^[8]. And then we pick our fights wisely. From this understanding, we find our power.

Studying helplessness illuminates our power. We're no longer trying to govern all of this realm. Studying helplessness illuminates our power: we actually know what we want. We're not so lost in the fever dream of egoic clinging and craving. We know what we want, and we're empowered. We're empowered because, through our encounter with the human condition, through our encounter with helplessness, we actually understand more deeply how things work. And that allows us to exert our force wisely, efficiently.

This is Kittisaro^[9]: "As our practice of the path deepens, we will naturally grow in personal power. Cultivating sīla, samādhi, paññā^[10], plugging into the measureless merit of the Triple Gem^[11], we potentize our actions for good or for ill. It's vital to be interested and sensitive to our impact on the world and those around us. Being a teacher or a dedicated Buddhist practitioner, we are waving the banner of the Awakened One, representing that extraordinary heritage, partaking of that trustworthy power and prestige. When one has power, one's wholesome actions are amplified, but so are the unwholesome ones. Everything we do has more impact."

We open to helplessness. We open, we are open to it, and through this we find the places where we can exert power. We come to understand the human condition more deeply. We come to understand others more deeply. We come to understand what we want more deeply, and this is empowering. We exert our power in awesome ways, exercise influence in ways that matter. And it comes out of this willingness to befriend this most radical of experiences: helplessness.

So I offer this for your consideration, and as always, please pick up what is useful and leave behind everything else. Thank you for being here. I'm glad we settled into this first day. I'll check the chat over there, and we'll keep going tomorrow. I wish you all a good day. Thank you Phil for DJing in the background. To be continued.