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.

Introduction

So good evening and welcome to our first Monday live broadcast of the Monday night talk. As I think about it, everyone knows we're doing this because in San Mateo County where we're located, the Health Department has asked that non-essential gatherings be canceled. But we still would like to support the people who have been coming regularly for Monday night, and also people from far away who never have a chance to see or have a live broadcast of talks here at IMC. And so, here we are.

Before I give the regular talk, we want to say a few words about this era that we're in right now, of the precautions in place because of the COVID-19 virus. I certainly don't want the virus, and I certainly don't want anybody to be sick. That's one of the reasons we're not meeting. All of us here are trying to participate in the slowing down or stopping of the transmission of the illness. But I'm actually kind of excited or enthusiastic about the possibilities now of how we can develop our online offerings.

For many years we've had AudioDharma, and it's been clear that many people appreciate it and benefit from it immensely. I thought it would be nice to be able to offer more varied kinds of programs, and certainly to be able to offer live broadcasts of our programs so people can feel maybe a stronger connection to the IMC community and what happens here when it's live. This is an opportunity we have now to develop other things, maybe some interactive programs online that feature a bit of give and take, where we can receive questions. Some of us are talking about doing Zoom sessions with people so there's much more interactive presence. So stay tuned. The IMC website will have updates as we develop these things and offer different programs.

Probably those updates will happen every day or two for the next little while. The one thing I want to mention now is the plan for next week: to try the experiment of having a morning sitting here at 7:00 a.m. California time. We would sit for a period of time, maybe 30 minutes or so, and maybe I will give a 20-minute short talk. We will do that for the five weekdays. Maybe that's supportive of you, and interesting to meditate together with others in this online way.

Introduction to Buddhism: Meditation

As it is, this particular Monday evening, as part of a series of talks I've been giving called "Introduction to Buddhism," I am continuing that series. Last week I gave a talk about ethics and the importance of ethics, and the centrality which ethics has in Buddhism and early Buddhism. Ethics and enlightenment are coterminous; they're inseparable. They're almost the same thing. The path toward becoming ethically mature is the same path as the path of becoming spiritually mature or becoming enlightened. The experience or the possibility of awakening in Buddhism comes together with becoming an ethical person.

The talk about ethics was the beginning of a three-part sub-series in this longer series, having to do with the three trainings. Classically, all the different trainings and practices that exist in Buddhism are categorized into three categories: ethics, meditation, and wisdom—sīla^[1], samādhi^[2], and paññā^[3]. Last week was ethics (sīla), and this week it's meditation (samādhi).

These are trainings. What's interesting about the word "trainings" is it means that we can train ourselves, we can develop ourselves, we can cultivate ourselves. We don't just settle for how we are and get out of bed one day and say, "Well, now I'm ready for spiritual maturation, and then I'll be awakened and go about my life." Rather, we put in place the conditions that allow for maturation. We put in place the conditions that allow the mind and the heart to develop and grow in a way that is part of the spiritual path. Buddhism is a path that grows and develops, so that we develop in ways where we become freer. We develop in ways where we're more compassionate and loving. We develop and cultivate ways in which we are more peaceful, more at ease, and more happy here in our life.

That cultivation begins with that training in ethics, where we live a good life. We live a life that's blameless. We live a life that has a lot to do with avoiding causing harm. When we don't cause harm to others, it's a lot easier to feel at peace with oneself. It's a lot easier to sit down to meditate and not be agitated. This restraint that ethics has a lot to do with—restraining from unethical, harmful, or unskillful behavior—is part of clearing the way. It clears the heart and the mind of all the extra unskillful stuff that can circle in there. We clear it away so that it doesn't get in the way of the deeper settling and the deeper growth of the heart and the mind.

Meditation involves the cultivation of certain qualities, but it also has a lot to do with letting go. Sometimes it's said that meditation has these two component parts: there's a letting go part and there's a cultivation part. We let go of the forces of the mind that keep us from being present. We let go of, or let subside, the forces of agitation that keep us agitated and incapable of really seeing clearly what is going on here. A lot of that has to do with thinking. An excess of thinking makes it very hard to have stable, clear attention to what's happening in the present moment. If we are somewhat in the present moment and there's a lot of thinking, the thinking tends to obscure our vision. It obscures it with stories, with commentary, with judgments that we might have, and with biases we might have. So one of the tasks of meditation—and I think just about all forms of Buddhist meditation—is to support the mind and heart to keep quieter in terms of thinking and thoughts. That has to do with letting go, or the quieting of the mind.

And then there is what we cultivate. It's like we have all these little muscles in the mind or in the heart, and we want to strengthen those muscles. We have a muscle for concentration: the ability to have a steady, focused attention in the present moment. We cultivate the muscle for mindfulness: the capacity to have a clear awareness of what's happening in the present moment, and a clear recognition of what's happening—mindfulness and clear comprehension. We cultivate our abilities to be patient. We cultivate our abilities to be wise, to be discerning of what's happening as we meditate—to know what to let go of and know what not to let go of. We cultivate our capacity for kindness, for goodwill toward ourselves and others. We allow the growth of care, that beautiful quality of the human heart: a compassionate care for oneself and for others. One cultivates and develops one's sense of motivation and purpose. When one has a very strong, enthusiastic, or dedicated purpose for one's life, it becomes a support or ballast that keeps us on track. It keeps us going and gives meaning and purpose to life. We're less likely to wander off into distractions of life and idle activities which are not really useful for people or even for ourselves, but we stay on track doing the things that are important and valuable—for example, cultivating the mind and cultivating the heart.

These two sides of meditation—the letting go side and the cultivation side—become central in the Buddhist endeavor of meditation. There are many kinds of meditation. If someone says, "I meditate," that gives us about as much information about what the person is doing as if someone were to say, "I'm doing sports." There are many kinds of sports; there are many kinds of meditation. So you can ask, "Well, what kind of meditation do you do?" In Buddhism, and even more so outside of Buddhism, there are many, many kinds of meditation. The tendency in Buddhism is to divide meditation into two groups: those meditations that have more to do with attention or mindfulness, and those that have to do with concentration. There is a whole bunch of concentration practices with particular focuses, and there are different kinds of practices for mindfulness. There are different teachers who teach mindfulness, who teach Vipassanā^[4] in different ways, and all for the same purpose—the purpose of awakening. They have very radically different techniques of how they do it. But what both these practices have in common—the concentration practices and the mindfulness practices—is they are developing the human capacity for attention, the human capacity to be aware of what's happening in the present moment.

As far as I can tell, all Buddhist meditation practices are based on the capacity to be here and in the present moment. Whether we're doing concentration practice or mindfulness practice, one of the first tasks for many people is to support the mind, to help the mind to arrive in the present moment. To no longer be thinking about past and future, to no longer be thinking about things happening far away, but to be here.

One evocative or suggestive way I teach to support people to be here is to say that the physical human body that you have is clearly always in the present moment. It's here and now. Wherever you go, you take it with you, and there it is. It's with you all the time. It's always in the present. It's the mind which sometimes is not—or maybe often is not—in the present moment. It's the mind that wanders off in thought, thinking about the future, planning, remembering the past maybe with regret or delight, or wandering off in fantasy that has nothing to do with anything but the fantasy itself. So the mind is not here now.

The task of meditation is to help the mind be in harmony with the body, to be unified with the body in being in the present moment. To be present here and now. In the ancient teachings of the Buddha, he put a tremendous importance on mindfulness of the body: to really be here, to be aware through the body, to somehow have the experience of awareness suffusing and spreading throughout the body.

There's often a tendency for people to think of meditation as only a mental or cognitive act. Because people are already very much in their thinking and in their heads, they sometimes try to meditate that way, using their thoughts. They use the control tower in the head—which is the locus of the self, of who I am, of how I have agency for my life—and think, "I'm just going to sit there in the control tower and try to direct the show and make something happen." When you do that, you're using only a very small, narrow part of who we are. That is valuable in some ways, but it's like saying that the tip of the iceberg is the most important part of the iceberg, not realizing the huge part of it that is underwater. Or it's like saying that if the top of the mountain clears above the clouds, that that's what's important, focusing only on that little tip of the mountain without realizing that the mountain has a huge, solid, substantial base that makes up the mountain and holds everything up.

In the same way, in meditation, one of the ways to help us really be here and now is to almost treat the body as a mountain. Early in my meditation practice, it was pretty common for teachers to bring up the image of sitting like a mountain when you meditate. It works a little easier and more obviously, I think, in the cross-legged position where we're sitting as a triangle, in that pyramid shape. The idea is sitting in such a way and really feeling the solidity of the body, the weight of the body, and feeling the way gravity pulls the body and connects us to where we're sitting. We begin feeling the substantiality of the body, the three-dimensionality of the body, and the richness of sensations in the body. When you're doing that, we're bringing the mind into the world of the present moment through the body.

Every time we bring our attention back to breathing, it's bringing attention back into the here and now to this experience. Saying "being here and now" might be a nicer expression rather than "there and then." For me, it's been very meaningful: the idea that we're bringing the mind and body into unity. We are unifying them so they're in the same place at the same time, and in doing so they begin to work together and in harmony. A huge part of Buddhist meditation is this unification process. It's combining the body and mind together so that they are a unit, a united ecology of the human being that is operating harmoniously, rather than operating in a fractured, dispersed, or scattered way with all kinds of different concerns. Everything begins to settle and get unified.

If we sit down to meditate after a busy day and we're still stressed, we might think, "I want to focus on my breathing when I meditate." But we're hungry, so we start thinking about dinner. Emotionally, maybe we had an argument with someone at work today, so we have feelings of anger and anxiety swirling around about this conversation. Physically, part of us is tense. Emotionally, we keep getting pulled into these swirling emotions. The sense of purpose we're trying to live with is that of being present with our breathing, but the mind is much more interested in the menu for dinner: "What am I going to make for dinner today?" And this is just a small subset of all the different ways the mind, body, emotions, and intentions can be scattered and at cross-purposes with each other. As we sit down to meditate, the busier and more frenzied we are in our daily life, the more we tend to be scattered and divided from ourselves. All these different parts are going this way and that way.

Meditation is the process of bringing all the scattered parts of ourselves together. Whether it's mindfulness meditation or concentration meditation, both have the strong tendency of this collecting process, of arriving and being here. For me, when I first started meditating, that experience of unification and becoming whole in some way was really what kept me meditating. It actually pulled me into the world of Buddhist practice, going deeper and deeper into the practice because it was one of the most satisfying experiences I had in my life. Back then, I called it an experience of "integrity." Nowadays, I might call it an experience of unification. I felt peaceful. I felt whole. I felt like I was really myself, like I had really settled. Now I could really be who I was, or allow myself to be there, because I wasn't scattered or divided by anything.

That experience was so satisfying and meaningful for me. It wasn't just that I wanted to meditate more, but my deeper involvement with Buddhist practice and living in Buddhist centers was a quest to discover: How can I live that way in the rest of my life? How could I have that same sense of wholeness, integrity, unification, well-being, and peace everywhere I went? I noticed very quickly that I could have it in meditation, but I'd lose it when I went to school and was with people and activities.

This has been a decades-long process, and it probably always continues because life is always changing with new challenges: to discover how to come back and settle. Meditation for me is one of the primary places to do this. From the foundation of meditation, a feeling of calm, a feeling of unification, a feeling of being myself, of being peaceful and at ease is close at hand as I go about my life. It becomes a reference point. I notice when I lose that, and then I come back to it. I notice how I lose it and how I come back to it. How I feel from meditation becomes a teacher for myself. Also, as I meditate, the clearer the mind is, the more focused it can be, and the stronger the mindfulness. Then the reference point of how I feel in meditation becomes a more and more useful reference point in daily life. I become clearer. I can recognize what's happening faster. I can recognize more deeply what's going on. I can start recognizing the deeper operating systems going on in my mind and heart: the underlying beliefs, assumptions, attachments, and biases that I really would not have a chance to notice if I was not settled, focused, and unified.

If I'm scattered and anxious and my mind is agitated, there's all kinds of subconscious activity motivating what I say, what I do, and how I feel. I think there are many people who feel a lot of suffering in their lives, but they have no clue why they're suffering. They don't quite understand. They can't get a handle on it. They can't quite see the entryway into it, or it's just massive. They feel upset, depressed, sad, or just off in some way because of this subconscious activity going on deeper down. It isn't so much that we're going into the unconscious in meditation, but it is that we're clearing the debris. We're clearing the scatteredness so we can start seeing more deeply what's going on under all the thinking and scatteredness we have. When we bring that kind of settled, focused attention into our daily life, daily life becomes much richer and more interesting. It becomes more clearly aware. We find the practice and the path toward liberation in daily life as well as in meditation.

Meditation is central to Buddhism and early Buddhism. This is represented by the very common statue of the Buddha sitting in meditation. Meditation can be seen as the wellspring from which the wisdom of Buddhism will come to you. Sometimes people ask me, "What books on Buddhism should I read?" I don't say this too often because maybe they wouldn't understand or it might seem a little bit strange, but my favorite response is that you should read the book in your heart, the book inside. That's where we learn. All of Buddhism is available to us in our own experience if we pay attention to it. The laboratory, the classroom, the gymnasium, the fieldwork for everything we need to learn in Buddhism is mediated through being present in our own experience. Being present in our bodies, being present from the inside out for our lives.

There are many kinds of Buddhist meditation, and as I said, there are these two broad categories: mindfulness and concentration. Here at IMC, we focus on mindfulness. At least, the rhetoric is that's what we're mostly about: mindfulness that leads to insight. Insight is the ability to see deeply into our experience in ways that are liberating. Looking deep into our history of who we are, and biographically what makes us tick—those are important insights. But Insight with a capital 'I' has to do with insights which are universal, that are true for everyone, things that we have in common. These are deep insights, deep understandings that are liberating. I like the expression "liberating insights" for what we're coming to.

We are the Insight Meditation Center, and we practice mindfulness. We teach classes on introduction to mindfulness meditation. However, the way I like to teach meditation, concentration is the intimate partner to mindfulness, and they work together in conjunction. It's not just mindfulness we're doing, but we're also cultivating concentration. There are forms of meditation where mostly what we're doing is developing concentration, but I like to think that it's kind of 50/50. We're doing mindfulness practice together with the idea of becoming centered, steady, and focused in the present moment. We develop the ability to have a continuous attention in the present moment, not just momentarily connecting to know what's happening and then doing it again. As we develop concentration, our ability to be in the present moment becomes easy. It's kind of like we ride in the groove; we're surfing on the wave. We catch the wave and we're surfing on the present moment. And it might be a really long wave. After a while, you can stay on that wave for an hour if concentration gets strong. This idea of continuity of awareness is what concentration brings.

Here at IMC, and the way I like to teach at least, for the people for whom it works, is to encourage mindfulness of breathing. The advantage of that is breathing develops both mindfulness and concentration. The simplicity and the rhythm of breathing coming and going makes a wonderful basis upon which the mind can rest and stay. It's relatively uncomplicated in the sense that you don't have to figure out where you're going to go next and what exactly to focus on. Your default is you come back to your breathing.

As we stay with the breathing, mindfulness comes alive, and we start feeling, sensing, and seeing the experience of breathing—how the body experiences it in richer, deeper, and fuller ways. For the uninitiated, it might seem very boring to spend a lot of time focused on breathing. But the breathing is infinitely fascinating. Not just because of the breathing itself, but rather there starts to be, as we get into it, a wonderful interactive relationship between our ability to focus on the breathing, the experience of having a relaxed, useful breath, and the states of our mind and heart. In that interactive movement, our feeling of who we are in our body and the experience of ease, openness, or clarity of the mind starts changing and moving. It becomes a dynamic ecology of our whole life that's centered on breathing. As we get more concentrated on the breathing and more mindful of the breathing, that whole psychophysical or spiritual ecology begins to shift, change, open, and deepen. All kinds of things happen, and that process is fascinating. It's deepening, it's liberating, it's all kinds of things.

But here at IMC, we don't do only the breathing. Many of you have maybe heard the instructions before: we're ready to let go of the breathing at a moment's notice if something else is more compelling. Then we're developing the combination of mindfulness and concentration on that something else. If there are loud sounds outside, it might actually be more of a mindfulness exercise—just recognizing and being within the experience in a simple way. But if we rest the attention on the sound, if it's continuous, then we're also developing concentration. If nothing else, we develop the concentration that's able to stay in the present moment. Maybe it's not a one-pointed focus on a single thing, but it is a continuous focus on just what's unfolding in the present moment.

In all forms of early Buddhist meditation, sooner or later, all forms of meditation will converge on the way to having liberating insight, or on the way to freedom or enlightenment. They generally converge, whether it's concentration practice or mindfulness practice, on becoming acutely aware of the transient nature of our experience. The constant appearing and disappearing, the comings and goings that are happening all the time. Rather than focusing on our thoughts and ideas of things, it's really beginning to be in the flow of the river of our experience. The current of the river of life as it moves through us, really feeling the movement of things arising and passing, coming and going. They say in Buddhism that that's a turning point for meditation: when we can feel at rest, at ease, peaceful, and content, and just allow things to be. We don't try to push the river or block the river, but we really just sit and know the whole stream of phenomena as it appears, disappears, and moves through us.

The Buddhist meditation that we do has a lot to do with the attitudes that we bring with us to meditation. For many people, an integral part of meditation practice is not the technique of what we do, but rather the attitude we have as we meditate. If we sit down to meditate with an attitude of being greedy—greedy for joy or rapture or a good experience, or greedy for concentration—or if we sit down to meditate with an attitude of arrogance, like, "I can do this, get out of my way, and I'm going to blast my way to enlightenment," or if we come to meditation with an attitude of, "I'm going to become the star of my neighborhood if I become blissed out, concentrated, and spiritual," then we're really meditating in order to enhance our prestige. These are all attitudes which actually interfere with the process of meditation.

If the primary motivation or attitude we have is one of aversion—that we don't like something and we're trying to get rid of it—that's a way of clogging the gears of meditation, interfering with it and blocking the river that's flowing. So a part of meditation is to see if we can rectify or establish a healthy attitude, a healthy orientation about how we sit and meditate. In a slightly provocative way—I don't know if it's quite as absolute as the statement I'm going to make sounds—but most difficulties that people have in meditation are an issue of attitude. Problems in meditation have a lot to do with having an attitude that's not helpful.

Rather than trying harder to get concentrated, bearing down, or thinking, "There must be some insight I'm supposed to have," and trying to look deeper and deeper at what's really there and what's happening, we can step back and say, "With what attitude am I meditating? And is there an attitude I can have that is in harmony with a peaceful mind, that's in harmony with an enlightened mind?" An enlightened mind is one that is at peace. An enlightened mind is a mind that has no greed, is not conceited, is not operating under ill-will or aversion, and has no doubt about what's going on. An enlightened mind is not striving, but also is not complacent and is not afraid.

So what would be the attitude or orientation of the mind that we could try to have, or even pretend to have a little bit, or evoke a little bit? How would it be if the attitude is one of not striving, not pushing, not avoiding, not being for anything or against anything? Not trying to attain something that's not already here, not trying to prove oneself, and not trying to hide from oneself in meditation? But rather an attitude of being completely open, available, and trusting of the process. Trusting that whatever degree of mindfulness that you have, whatever degree of attention that you bring to your practice, whatever degree of stability or concentration that you have, trusting that it has to be good enough for now. Just come with your sincerity, and trust that if you're doing your best, your best is all you need. With that confidence, it's okay to let the mind have a relaxed, accepting, or allowing attitude for what's happening here.

The attitude of meditation is creating a field or an atmosphere where the mind wants to be present, where it enjoys being present. If the mind is greedy, if the mind is aversive, if the mind is filled with doubt or fear, it's not very comfortable. Do we want to be present for that? Can we somehow adjust and change our attitude so that it's more peaceful, allowing, and at ease with what's going on? An attitude where it's not about "me, myself, and mine" and what I have to do or attain, but one that is of profound trust. An enlightened person has deep trust in the natural unfolding of life in the context of being clearly aware. Can we have an attitude of trusting the life that we have, the life that we're given? Assuming, at least provisionally, that our hearts and our minds know how to self-heal and find their way if we give them a chance. The Dharma can flow through us. What is the attitude that allows for that? What's the attitude of peace and allowing, as I keep saying?

Buddhist meditation is one of the three trainings. We train ourselves in meditation by doing it. Sometimes I say—and maybe sometimes I irritate people when I say it—that meditation does not work if you don't do it. We have to do it. If you're new to meditation, one of the first things to do is to remember to be patient. That's one of the attitudes we want to establish: not to be in a hurry. We're learning to be present for our experience. We're learning to be here and now, to harmonize and unify the body and the mind. We're learning to recognize the attitudes we bring as we meditate, to see if we can adjust them a little bit. It does not have to be dramatic. We can go from maybe being very afraid when we meditate, to being a little bit less afraid. From having some striving, to maybe striving less. From having some hesitation or aversion to what's happening, to quieting that a little bit. Don't try to do all or nothing. Be very forgiving, and don't try to be perfect when you meditate. Meditation is not obligatory; there's no instruction manual for human beings that says that you have to or you should meditate. Hopefully it's something you do of your own free will, something that you find valuable, interesting, and nice.

You can sit down without a sense of obligation, without trying to prove yourself, and without trying to run away from yourself. Sit here and meditate to be open to your life as it is, to discover what your life is and who you are from the inside out. As you do that, at some point, the meditation will stop being a practice that you do, and it becomes a way of being. Meditation morphs into how you are in the world. Sitting down to meditate is not like sitting down to do a technique; sitting down to meditate is simply to be, in a valuable way that is onward-leading to greater and greater freedom. So that's my presentation about meditation as part of the Introduction to Buddhism series.

I don't know if all the ideas made sense to you, but I hope this talk gave you just enough inspiration to motivate you to either start meditation if you haven't, or if you already do, maybe to do it a little bit more, or to do it with a little bit more dedication and sincerity. Really giving yourself over to it, allowing meditation to really have its time, and being wholehearted with it. I hope that, as it's been for me, those of you who meditate will find that it enriches life immensely. I can't imagine a life without my meditation.

Thank you, and I'll continue this series next Monday.