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Guided Meditation: Expanded Mind

Good day everyone, and I'm happy to be back. I don't know how many of you noticed that the Tuesday and Wednesday broadcasts were pre-recorded. I had to go away for a couple of days to accompany my wife on a trip, and now I'm back, and it's literally live.

Continuing on this theme of Satipaṭṭhāna^[1], there's a paradigm shift that happens as we do this practice, especially the third foundation, and that is that we go from a fragmented mind to a mind that becomes whole and inclusive. A fragmented mind is one where—well, one of the things that fragments the mind is excessive preoccupation with desire. Beginning with any preoccupation, any singular focus, kind of being caught up in desire, the mind is limited by the desire. With preoccupation with ill will or aversion, the mind is limited by that, and is narrowed, and the scope becomes smaller. The same thing happens with delusion.

With mindfulness, we're beginning to expand the scope of the mind and of awareness to become not absorbed in greed, hatred, and delusion, absorbed in the hindrances, but rather becoming broader, wider, stronger, and bigger, to be able to include all those but not be limited by them. At some point, the paradigm shift is when we have a sense of the mind as a whole—the wholeness, how good that feels, how satisfying it is, and how comforting it is to be at home in the wide, broad, inclusive mind. It's a big shift because there can be so much authority, so much pull into the world of desires, aversions, and the hindrances. They can feel so compelling; it feels like that's the right place to be, that's appropriate, it's justified. To pull ourselves out of that world is quite difficult because the habit of it, the pull of it, is so strong—the insistence of it. But as the Satipaṭṭhāna practice deepens, we are able to no longer be limited or caught up in that limited world, and start becoming aware of a shift to something that's more holistic, sometimes called the expanded mind or a big mind, and that can include everything in its scope. So, we'll sit a little bit with this.

To assume a meditation posture where the posture is the beginning of a shift away from the preoccupations of the mind to something broader or wider, more inclusive. Kind of like going from being cooped up in a small little room, beginning to go outdoors, wide open. The body can be the beginning of that shift, assuming an upright posture, sitting strong and present.

Take some care to awaken awareness in your body, beginning by taking some long, slow, deep breaths. Feeling the rib cage stretch and expand, the belly expand as you inhale, and relax, relaxing your body as you exhale.

Then letting your breathing return to normal and allowing your awareness to roam around your body. Feeling the different parts of your body in a way to awaken them, or to welcome them into the wholeness of being here and now. Perhaps as you exhale, to relax more in your body. As you relax, feel the effect of the relaxing.

Then breathing normally and settling into the experience of breathing. Just enough that it highlights any ways in which you are being pulled into the world of thought.

Perhaps you can notice if you are pulled into thoughts and ideas, stories and memories, or commentary, that your attention might become limited by those concerns. There's a way that if you let go of them, relax a thinking mind, you become aware of more than your preoccupation. Aware of your body. Aware of the state of your mind. Is the mind contracted or expanded? Is it scattered or settled? Is the mind tight, or is it loose and open? Is it receptive or closed?

Okay, and settling into your breathing. Every exhale, relaxing the mind and letting go of your thoughts. Every exhale, relaxing. Every inhale, receiving the experience of breathing.

If you're involved in your thoughts, see if you can realize and even feel what is beyond the edges of your thinking. If your thinking has a lot of desire or aversion in it, the desire and aversion don't fill the universe. It's in you. In the mind, awareness can expand beyond the edges of desire, the edges of aversion. As you breathe, let the breathing expand. Inhale, expand outward into this wider world. Massaging an awareness that's larger, more inclusive than any particular thing.

In a sense, your mind or your awareness can feel like it extends as far away as the furthest sound that you hear. As if all the sounds occur within the sphere of perception.

On the exhale, relax any tension or contraction in the mind, in the brain. The mind becomes broad and still, like a broad and still morning lake in the windless, quiet dawn.

If you're involved in any thoughts right now, see if you can shift your allegiance from thinking to awareness. Maybe a broad, wide awareness that is able to and willing to be aware of whatever is happening in the senses: hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, seeing even with the inner eye. An awareness that's open and wide and receptive.

To the degree that you are relaxed now, calm or peaceful, is the relaxed state, the calm or peaceful state, more contracted or more expanded? Is it more of a very small little thing, or does it have a feeling of being large, without strong boundaries or edges?

If you're aware of a more expanded state of being, might you recognize that it is more inclusive or expanded than preoccupation with any kinds of thinking? More expansive and open than any fixation on desire or aversion. There's more room for all of who you are in the relaxed, expanded awareness.

Then, to whatever degree that you're calm, see if you can now expand the scope of your knowing, your awareness, your consideration for the people in your life. The people that you will read about in the news, the people you'll see in your neighborhoods, in your communities—see if they can be included in a relaxed awareness, a relaxed consideration.

In this open, relaxed state, have thoughts of goodwill and well-wishing for others. Thoughts about how it would be quite wonderful if others could be happy and safe, peaceful and free.

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

To the degree to which we have an open, relaxed awareness, may we have that as the medium through which we contribute to the welfare and happiness of all beings. May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (41) Knowing the Expanded Mind

Hello everyone. We are continuing to talk about the third foundation of mindfulness. I would like to point out that in the second, third, and fourth foundations, as the description of the practice unfolds, there is a shift. I like to think of each of these three as being progressive, or describing a little journey that the meditator takes. In the second foundation, one begins by just becoming aware of the feeling tone of experience: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. As we settle in and become more familiar with it, more sensitive, we're able then to distinguish between those things which are pleasant of the flesh and those which are not of the flesh—that which is part of the sensual world of mind and body, and those which are more spiritual in nature. So we're making a shift, this journey from one into the other, as we deepen the practice in the second foundation.

In the third foundation, we begin by becoming aware of a mind that's accompanied with greed, hatred, and delusion. Then there's a journey from that state of mind into what can be called more meditative or spiritual states of mind, and that's what the last four pairs of mind states are. But this journey from these mind states that are characterized by greed, hatred, and delusion has an intermediate kind of stepping stone to it, and that is the fourth of the eight pairs. The fourth one is a scattered mind or a contracted mind. When the mind is not caught up in greed, hatred, and delusion anymore, it's sometimes a little bit lost. To have greed, hatred, and delusion is always to have some focus of attention, some concern, something that we want, something we don't want, something we're confused about. The degree to which we're focused on this object of thought, this object of concern, limits the mind. In the language of the Buddha, it's a limitation for awareness of the mind. The mind becomes smaller, contracted, its scope becomes sometimes very, very narrow. We can feel the mind get kind of tight and narrow and just preoccupied with one thing. It can even feel pleasant. There's a lot of good energy or strong energy, compelling habit energy around desires, around aversions, and around delusion. The mind just kind of goes into it because it's like a black hole, where a strong gravitational pull pulls us into this. It can feel so natural, so normal, that we don't realize the impact it has on us. We don't realize so easily that there's another whole option.

When the mind is no longer focused on these objects in this kind of narrow, constricted, or forceful way, the mind goes through a transition. Sometimes it's a little bit confused, not quite sure what to focus on or what to do. It's kind of like if desires, aversions, and delusions are like caffeine that keeps us energized; when we stop taking the caffeine, the mind goes through a period of adjustment. In that period of adjustment, the mind doesn't have a particular object that it is concerned with, but it hasn't developed its capacity for subtle, concentrated presence. So the mind then can get scattered. It just jumps around, looking for something to be concerned with but not having enough focus to really settle on anything. The mind becomes scattered, or the mind just becomes shrunken. It just sinks in on itself. Sloth and torpor set in, kind of giving up, or a kind of deflation happens. So without greed, hatred, and delusion, sometimes there is deflation, sometimes there's a scatteredness of mind, a restlessness of the mind that can happen.

But we keep practicing. It can feel like things are going backwards because the mind is all scattered, jumping around, or more deflated and shrunken. But it's actually a transition time. Sometimes we have to go through it, be patient with it, and just be willing to breathe with it and be aware of it. And then, at some point, some of the fruits of practice come into play. In the first one, it says in this third foundation: one knows an expanded mind as an expanded mind, and one knows a non-expanded mind as a non-expanded mind. Mahaggata citta^[2] could also mean "big mind"—one knows a big mind.

Here, in the earlier exercises, one knows a mind accompanied by desire as a mind accompanied by desire, accompanied by aversion as accompanied by aversion. Mindfulness shows us or creates a wider context of the mind to be aware of desires and aversions, so the desire and aversion don't take over fully. Desire and aversion are just part of the mind. It's a big influence on every part. In this transition after this contracted or restless mind, there comes a time when the mind starts feeling expansive, open, wide, large, because the mind and awareness become more and more closely linked. They overlap or are coterminous, and now we can almost talk of them as synonyms. Awareness and mind become almost the same.

Awareness becomes broad and expansive; it can include everything. There is this idea of an inclusive awareness, an open set of perceptions, where everything that happens is allowed to appear in its own time in the field of perception, in the world of what we perceive. There's not a "for" or "against" our experience. There's not a preference for one thing over another. The preference is not for the object of attention, not for the thing that we're aware of, but the preference is to rest in this wide or calm awareness—an awareness that can receive things in a relaxed way, that can know things in a relaxed way as we perceive them^[3].

In the language of the Buddha, when we're too concerned with some purpose, the mind is limited by that purpose. If we're not constricted by a purpose, or if the purpose is essentially to just relax and open up, then the mind is not limited anymore. It's not bounded, it's not contracted, it's not tight and narrow. It becomes broader and wider. It's kind of like the feeling that if you're inside a small, tiny little cabin for a long time and feel all claustrophobic, and you go out into the wide open fields, open space—maybe high in the mountains with a great vista—there's an expansive feeling that arises. Certainly the vista is expansive, but something opens up in the mind and in the heart that makes it like a breath of fresh air. It takes on that expansiveness as well.

You don't have to go out to a great vista point to see a great view to feel the mind become expansive. Even with the eyes closed, the mind becomes quite expansive, quite large, because it's its nature to be that way. It's how awareness and consciousness is when it's not being channeled into a particular direction. It's not being held and contracted, or being used to focus on a particular thought, a particular concern, a particular desire or aversion. To be able to drop the limitations in the mind, the contractions of the mind—that's why in a calm meditative state for many people, the mind begins to feel expansive, large, peaceful, or broad.

Here we begin this journey now into more spiritual states or Dharma states. Greed, hatred, and delusion—those mind states are not particularly Dharmic; they're not Dharmic at all. The awareness that can include everything and be broad enough is Dharmic. Paradoxically or ironically, it can also include the presence of greed, hatred, and delusion. But the difference is that the mind is not contracted or focused on greed, hatred, and delusion. It just knows it's there. In this wide field, it is just one thing among many. We're not identified with it, we're not prioritizing it, we're not bothered by it, caught or contained in its grip^[4].

This idea of a mind that's not caught by anything, that doesn't stop for anything, doesn't get involved with or entangled with anything, is a mind that's just able to allow things to arise and pass, to be there when they're there, but without being for or against. That begins a feeling of a mind that's whole, a holistic mind. This is one of the great delights and pleasures of meditation—starting to feel more and more whole. We feel whole; our whole sense of beingness feels more holistic, and we come into our wholeness rather than the contractedness or narrowness of particular preoccupations and concerns.

How do we make that transition from desire and aversion to this expanded state? It really helps if we no longer are convinced—or maybe our mind is convinced—that what's important is to pursue desires, what's important is to be involved in aversion, or that what's important is to be constantly preoccupied with our delusions, our thoughts, our confusions about things. You can feel how that limits us. To begin relaxing, softening, and opening, until we feel like everything is included. All of who we are has a place. All of who we are has a respected place in awareness and consciousness. This is a game-changer for people who do meditation. Over time, one begins realizing we're actually much better off in this peaceful state than in the desire state, the wanting state, or the aversive state.

If you have half an hour free in the evening, and there's a common desire you get pulled into, but instead of that you go and meditate, or go for a walk, and do something that allows you to tap into this expanded state, you might find that it's much more pleasant, much more satisfying in the long run.

We'll continue tomorrow on this third foundation, these Dharma states that opened up in the last four exercises.

Announcements

I want to make an announcement. IMC has started a fundraising drive to support refugees who are fleeing Ukraine right now. There are supposed to be close to two million or so. The organization that we're supporting is Save the Children. For a number of reasons: one is there's a little bit of a personal connection to that; they're one of the highest-rated charities, I think, in the world; they've been around for a hundred years; and they're involved on the ground in some of the refugee camps and reception centers on the borders of Ukraine, offering care for some of the most vulnerable people—the children and families.

If you'd like to donate to this fund, all the money you give to IMC for this purpose will go to Save the Children. The way to do it is that on the "What's New" page on the home page of IMC's website, there's a section in the bottom right called "What's New," and there's a notice about fundraising for Ukraine. The donate button there is specific for IMC to know it's for Ukraine. Maybe tomorrow I'll post it here on the YouTube chat as well. We're raising money through Monday. We did this for Haiti after the earthquake last August and we raised thirty thousand dollars, which was quite impressive. Maybe we can do something similar, maybe even more, to provide support for this tremendous need there in Eastern Europe.

Thank you all, and I look forward to our time together tomorrow.