This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: No Fidelity to the Past Moment

Welcome, folks. It's lovely to see all the names streaming past. I know a lot of them, actually, and anyway, I'm happy to be with you.

I'll just read a paragraph and say a few words before we sit here. This is quoted from Kathryn Schulz's^[1] book, Lost & Found, a book about losing her father and finding the woman she married. She writes:

"Even the strongest sentiments are intermittent and inconstant, forever obliged to share the stage with other members of emotion's ensemble cast: grief with gratitude, anger with boredom, happiness with irritation, frustration with amusement, and on and on in endless permutations. Most of us instinctively resent this intermingling. When we're happy we want to be wholly happy, not also missing our father or worried about work or infuriated by the awful customer service at the phone company.

That appetite for contentment makes perfect sense, but we often long to experience our disagreeable feelings uninterrupted as well. In part, that's because misery has a kind of inertia to it. There is something about a bad mood that wants perversely to persist. I have felt at various low points in my life that I did not want to venture out into a social event because I would have to pretend to be happy, forgetting the very real possibility that once there I would actually be happy, or perhaps more accurately believing that I did not want to feel better.

Worse, I have sometimes persevered in a pointless argument simply because I was in a kind of sour mood that would rather fight than be improved. This kind of emotional intransigence is common. Anger wants only to be angry; levity is deadly to it, as is compassion—accordingly it resists them both. Boredom rejects as boring everything that might vanquish it. Loneliness wants only to be left alone, and grief, as I noted earlier, is so terrified of betraying itself that it wants only to grieve."

She is not a meditation teacher, but the wisdom of that was very apparent to me and very dharmic in spirit. In dharma practice, we really have no fidelity to the moment that has just passed. We are attending to what's arising and passing, but we have no fidelity to the mood of the past hour, or the past day, or the past year. Mindfulness is neither trying to engineer the persistence of one state, nor engineer the vanishing of another. In other words, we're wide open to things continuing, and we're wide open to discontinuity.

As we sit, there's this kind of sense of radical openness to what comes next, not trying to structure the next moment based on what has happened. Not assuming continuity. Not having fidelity to what has just passed. So there's this moment-to-moment openness.

Over the course of our practice, I feel like part of what this frees up is that even really intense experience doesn't leave the same trace that it used to; that we actually are more flexible and fluid and begin to find our way into some homeostatic balance even immediately after real intensity. There's no fidelity to what's just happened, even though it's been blessed with awareness and love. This means that a moment of grief can be followed by a moment of levity or delight, or peace.

Let's sit.

Just landing. Letting the words just melt away. Just landing in the intimacy of attention.

We breathe deeply into the body. We're conscious of the whole body breathing, so as to settle there. And it's almost like we breathe deeply into the meditating mind that might lose touch with the intimacy through its own frenzy and doingness and doubt, trying to get it right. Trying to tame thought. Don't miss the intimacy right here.

No matter how well known or well loved by others you might be, no one can know you in precisely this way, with precisely this level of intimacy. Until we listen to ourself with a wide open heart, with space to let our life unfold.

To be open to that which persists, the mind states or emotions that persist, but not assume persistence. In other words, we're wide open to discontinuity, to the morphing of experience.

We're even intimate with the longings that underlie our discursive meanderings. And we're practicing not assuming our life is what we've always assumed it to be.

We are not rejecting what has just passed, nor are we maintaining fidelity to it, assuming permanence. Radically open to the unfolding of sensory experience.

Part of our openness to discontinuity means we're not narrativizing our meditation in complex ways. We're not telling a story about where it's gone and what its trajectory is. A kind of freshness, moment-by-moment intimacy.

Who knows what comes next? Who knows where insight comes from? Just keep offering ourselves up to the moment.

Dharmette: Dharma as an Attention Therapy

Over the next four days, I'll highlight four mechanisms through which dharma practice gets under our skin, into our system. I said yesterday, these are the core mechanisms, how they're classically framed, how the practice transforms us. I wanted to lay out another framework for this—not to replace sīla^[2], samādhi^[3], and paññā^[4] of course, but just as a way of looking.

The first mechanism is dharma as a kind of attention therapy. Attention is our most basic currency, and really the sense of directing our attention to what we deem important—that's very close to our sense of agency and sense of self, or the core of who we think we are. William James said volition is nothing but attention. This, of course, is part of why the commodification, extraction, and fragmentation of our attention by modern life and technology is actually a profound threat. It's like, as Ayad Akhtar^[5] said, the bright pliancy of mind itself—attention—is under assault, actually.

And so we as meditators become connoisseurs of attention. Indeed, in the scientific literature, meditation is sometimes described as attentional training. That's the language that's used. In the first iteration of what would become Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, a kind of mindfulness-based intervention, it was originally called Attentional Control Training. I'm glad they changed the name to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, but that was originally the name.

Attention has a complex relationship with our own well-being. It's notable that attention is fractured when we experience psychiatric distress. In depression, for example, the attention is disrupted. There's an attentional bias towards negative information, and disrupted concentration is one of the symptoms of depression. In post-traumatic stress or some other anxiety disorders, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, there are intrusive thoughts that disrupt the flow of attention. In generalized anxiety, there's attention that's being constantly directed to the unknown future, worrying in an uncontrollable kind of way. In addiction, there's attentional bias towards the drug cue or whatever the cue is. And ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attention is right there in the diagnostic name.

Even when we're not in psychiatric distress, not in clinical distress or suffering—even low-grade suffering often includes an attention that is pinging all over. Pinging from memory to future to emotion and narratives.

And so we train in attention. Why is attention where to place the attention? On the Four Noble Truths^[6] rather than constantly engaging worrisome scenarios. We practice how to attend steadily, patiently. We train in steadying the attention so that the spotlight of attention isn't shaking and darting around so much anymore.

We train the attention to relinquish distractions, like the movement from being absorbed in discursive thought back to the object of focus. Maybe that's the breath, maybe that's your work, maybe that's the person you're listening to. But there's less stickiness; the discursive thought is less sticky, more flimsy, less compelling.

We train in attention because life feels very fast to the unconcentrated mind; it feels kind of overwhelming. So we slow it down. As our attention gathers and is less fragmented, there's a sense of seclusion. Even though we actually can come into states where we're noticing more change, there's a sense of seclusion and protection from the bombardment of saṃsāra^[7].

We train in the effortlessness of awareness. When attention can go anywhere but not stick to anything—when the spotlight of attention can go anywhere in experience but not stick to anything—there's a kind of deep poise that happens. We're not mesmerized by phenomena. We're not mesmerized by our notions of our life, our so-called life.

Sometimes you hear divisions between samādhi and insight, concentration and mindfulness, but my understanding is that the Buddha spoke about these capacities in tandem, not as a rigid separation. A lot of fanfare about the kind of bliss of the gathered attention is understandable, but as far as I can tell, the bliss is maybe mostly good as faith and encouragement to keep going. Aspects of samādhi, this gathered attention, are indeed closely related to insight and mindfulness.

When we begin to stabilize the attention, we can perceive suffering more clearly. It's so important to actually perceive suffering with a lot of vividness, and that entails a stabilizing of the attention. When we stabilize the attention, some of the Buddha's injunctions become so clear. There's just no doubt that clinging hurts when it's perceived from the stabilized attention. There's no doubt that hatred hurts. No doubt that greed hurts. It's through this stabilization of attention that the fantasy of the closed-hearted happiness ends; that insofar as we will know deep happiness, it will be a function of openheartedness.

The training of attention, dharma as an attention therapy, is part of what gives the mind its sense of depth. The stabilizing, the settling of the mind gives the mind its sense of depth. The matter of life becomes serious. As our attention becomes stable, the lessons, the insights we have, the seeing we develop—those lessons make deeper impressions on our mind.

Sometimes we have an insight or understanding, but what kind of legs does it have? Often what we once knew, what we learned is overpowered by subsequent learning and lessons and the fragmentation of life. We go on retreat maybe, and we know once and for all something. We discover something: "This self-harshness is delusion." We know it deeply. But how does that lesson stick? How does it get its legs? My sense is that samādhi allows our understandings, this training of the attention allows our understandings to etch themselves more deeply into our being. Our insights stick.

So there are these very interesting interactions between this kind of attention, this gathering of the attention, and the learning aspects of dharma. Much more to be said about that, of course, but sometimes dharma is reduced to attention training, and it's much more than that. We'll keep going tomorrow—that's why there are three more days—but for today: dharma as an attention therapy, and all that comes with that.

I'll pause here and wish you all a good day. Thank you for your attention. I'll hang in the chat for a moment and see you tomorrow. Thank you.