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Guided Meditation: Sensations as Life Manifest

Hello everyone. It's always special when people gather to practice the Dharma, to practice awareness—showing up for this life of ours in a fuller or deeper way than maybe we can do in ordinary life. Maybe in a way that we connect to more of ourselves, more of this experience of life.

The topic these days in Satipaṭṭhāna^[1] is contemplation of the corpse. I think it's significant to recognize that the corpse contemplation occurs right after the four elements, the four elemental properties meditation. Just before this, we're doing the sensations, the living sensations which are a manifestation of being alive. It's what animates us; it's what fills us with life.

When we're no longer alive, then there are no more sensations. The body might still exist as a corpse, but it's not animated with sensations. It's also not animated with awareness, and it's not animated with the depths of our feelings.

There's something about the contemplation of a corpse—where it's not animated, consciousness is not in it anymore—that, for me at least, highlights awareness. It highlights consciousness; it highlights our sensations and our animated life right now. It's kind of like how absence often highlights things better. Silence can help us hear sound. A blank piece of paper can highlight a dot that a pen puts on the middle of the paper, in a way that wouldn't be highlighted if it was a piece of paper that was scribbled all over.

So the contemplation of the corpse, the way it goes, is: this too, my body also, one day will become a corpse. One day it will decay, or be cremated, or it will change to something else—the elements of it, the pieces of it.

And perhaps this idea that your body one day will be sensation-free, absent of sensation... For now we have sensations, and that can be the place where we center our attention. Perhaps they can be highlighted and appreciated or valued more, knowing not only is it temporary—just for this lived life we have—but this lived life we have through our sensations, the way we directly experience ourselves, is a river of change. It's a river of unfolding, coming and going. You hear a sound, like I hear the train right now, the train whistle. I can't grab it or hold on to it, it'll be gone. Now it's gone. It comes and goes.

Many of the sensations you have appear and disappear, maybe repeatedly, like the sensations of breathing. One day your body will not have these sensations. This day you have sensations, but they're fleeting and passing. Perhaps you can settle back and marvel at this animated life of sensations while they're occurring. One day they won't.

So, taking a meditation posture...

Okay, so there we go. Sorry about this, my laptop froze and I thought maybe I'd lost you, but then I muted and forgot to unmute. I think we're back on.

So yes, back on. It's part of the theme of today's meditation: absence, the end of things. Everything will be gone someday. And on this day, the deep experience of sensation or sensate life is meant to help us not cling to any of it. Just be aware.

Settling into your body and your breathing. Following the sensations in your body. Noticing when they appear. Noticing when they disappear. Following the appearance and disappearance of sensations. The appearance of sensations indicates you're alive. The disappearance of sensations is a reminder it won't always be here.

And then we'll sit quietly.

[Silence for meditation]

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, let's not only appreciate that the living, animated life we have is found in our sensations and our senses. It's also found in our capacity to love, to have a tender warmth and care for others. It's found in our ability to care for ourselves, a gentle valuing of our own life as well.

And to go deeper into the heart, to places where we can love. Either because we can do it, or because we're making ourselves available for the day when we can. And to end the sitting, maybe expressing that love, or inviting that love if it has not yet come. To consider the welfare and happiness of others. That others, just like you, have the capacity for happiness, for being alive in a peaceful, happy way.

And maybe this be our wish, that all of us, self and others, the whole world, move towards greater and greater happiness, peacefulness, and freedom. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our love, or our aspiration to love, be expressed in action. May we care for this world in how we live.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (32) Death That Highlights Life

To continue with something I said at the beginning of the meditation, this sixth exercise of the thirteen exercises that make up the practice of the four foundations of awareness—this sixth one is the contemplation of the corpse. It sits between the mindfulness of sensations and the mindfulness of feelings. We're preparing the ground to go deeper in this practice of sati^[2], in becoming sensitive and aware of the sensate life, the sensations that come and go.

But those sensations have characteristic qualities of being pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This ability to feel the pleasure of things, to feel the pain of things, is part of this deeper animated life that we have. The pleasure and pain, in some ways, we can think of it as something deeper and more within us, because it's not only physical.

When we feel the warmth of the sun against our skin, that's a pure physical sensation. The pleasure we get from that is a mixture of physical pleasure and mental pleasure, the mental evaluation of it. So it is something deeper, more connected to our lived life. Between these two, between sensations and feelings, there's this contemplation of a human body that has neither sensations nor feelings.

And to spend some time contemplating that there will be a day for each of us. In this contemplation of the corpse, there are nine different states of decay that the practice talks about. To imagine for each one of those: "I will be like this too, my body also will." All the things of our body that we cherish, we love, we're identified with, we may be attached to, or preoccupied with—they will slowly go.

Now, this contemplation of the corpse involves what happened to corpses in the old days, when many people did not cremate bodies. Rather, they were just put on top of the charnel grounds and left there to rot, decay, and decompose. You could go to the charnel ground and see this process.

A friend of mine was up in the Himalayas where they still have charnel grounds. They walked through the charnel grounds and came across a recently dead body that was just lying there, having been left.

I mentioned yesterday the teacher Buddhadasa^[3], who had the skeleton hanging of Miss Thailand 1936. His instructions for when he died were to simply be put in the forest, a place where his followers, his monks and nuns, could come and just contemplate his body decaying. He didn't get his wish because he was one of the most famous monks in Thailand, and so other authorities had other ideas.

But our skin that we put a lot of attention to perhaps, our hair—it will all decay and pass away. It may be eaten by worms and other things, mushrooms, and fungi. The muscles that maybe some of us might be exercising, working out—the muscles fade and decay; they won't be here at some point. The tendons will no longer be here. The bones will no longer be held together. The bones will begin to decay and eventually just become dust.

So it's an orienting feeling, knowing that not only the sensations go, but all these ways in which we're attached or we orient ourselves around the body will also go. The absence of it highlights that we're alive, and some of the core elements of that aliveness are sensations and feelings.

Maybe we appreciate these sensations deeper by contemplating their absence through the image of a corpse, that we will be like a corpse too. Maybe it's a way of taking a little more seriously this moment. The only place that you can be alive is in the present moment.

There's a very powerful verse in the Dhammapada^[4], in Chapter 2, the first verse. It goes something like: "Negligence is the path of death; vigilance, the path to the deathless. Those who are negligent are as if already dead; those who are vigilant never die."

I don't know what the figurative meaning of "never die" is, but the sense is to be vigilant, to be heedful^[5], to be careful, to be present in a full way. The only place where that can happen is now, in the present moment. To feel that, to be present for that—the flow of sensations, the flow of experience, the flow of feelings—is to let go of everything else. When you die, as a corpse, you will have let go of everything.

It's possible to do this before you die. And why not? Why not, when that gives us freedom? Why not, when it gives us an experience to really be alive, present, and free in a way that is fantastic and wonderful?

So to spend time contemplating a corpse... You might not have an anatomy lab to go visit a corpse. It's probably pretty easy to find some photographs. Photographs of people who are peacefully dead, or maybe photographs of bodies which are decaying. This is not to make it gruesome, not to upset your stomach, but is there a way of contemplating corpses—the body that has no animated sensations—that brings you into the present moment?

I'll tell you a story, something I do which I've told many times, but it's related to this. I'm fond of looking at old photographs, old enough that the people in it are no longer alive, like from 100, 120, 130, or 140 years ago. I like it when the photograph has a really good resolution. You see portraits of people, and I'll go up and look at their eyes, get close, or look at the expression on their face. Occasionally you see in old photographs a gleam in their eyes, like the spark of life that was there for that moment.

Other times you see expressions on their faces that kind of stand out, like an expression of the moment. Now when I see these, I contemplate: this was their moment to be alive, and this is my moment for me to be alive. Somehow appreciating that that was their moment, I don't want to miss my moment. This is my moment, my glimmer or spark of life. Life is short. And so, looking at old photographs puts me into my own life in a fuller, nicer way.

I think that's what I'll say today. I'm unsure what we'll do tomorrow; I kind of would like to do one more day on the corpse, as I haven't really introduced you to the full text of it. But maybe we'll see, or we'll move over to feelings.

Thank you, and I'll be here tomorrow.