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Guided Meditation: Not Reiterating or Reimaging Self

Good morning. Good morning, whatever your time zone is. Welcome to all lines of latitude and longitude. Nice to see a lot of familiar names. Welcome to all of you. So, that's it.

Just opening and settling your body with your breath.

Just having some sense of intention. Maybe we even say a vow^[1], that for this time, awareness is prioritized over the details of our life.

Committing to awareness, rather than optimizing the moment, solving the riddle of our life, finding a more direct way to pleasure, and a more efficient escape from pain. Actually renouncing those agendas for this time.

What would we do with the moment if we didn't have to "do" our life? Maybe we would just rest and look.

We're often subtly imaging the outline of our body, imaging the space of the room, keeping track of self, another, me, not me. It's a very innocent impulse of the mind, and we can soften it. We keep updating our autobiography. We keep adding sentences, paragraphs, and chapters to the story of "me" in the words we speak to ourselves. These two can be known in awareness, can be known as empty.

And so, the subtle visual image we have of ourself and the narrative of self—all of this can be safely surrendered to awareness.

The urgent energies in the body, just meet those with patience. Let them drain right down into the center of the earth. We begin to feel a little less confined in self, a little less busy with the tasks, duties, and demands of "I am this."

Space starts to run through us. We don't have to figure out what this moment is good for, or how I will use it. We just surrender to awareness.

Strength and the Surrender to Goodness (4 of 5)

Thank you. It's good to sit with you. There's a sense that dharma talks^[2] are a little bit of a realization, or something. Dharma talks are a little more like some weird species of performance art than maybe I've realized. They're less a kind of transmission of information, or something like that. And so I say that just so that we can take whatever impression it makes on our mind. Whatever is useful we pick up, and we leave the rest behind.

Yesterday, I spoke about a certain kind of reverence for the pain of the other, and today it's about reverence for their goodness and their power.

It seems like it should be easy to open to the goodness of another, but it involves some measure of surrender. Some measure of surrender, maybe even idealization. That's not a word from our orbit. You know, idealization gets a bad rap in many circles, and for good reason. There are problems, as I'll say, but there's a sense of, "Oh yeah, we're supposed to be objective and measured." But idealization has a place in relationships; it has a place in our relationship to Dhamma^[3]. And sometimes, to be objective or measured is actually a lack of courage, or a preoccupation with one's independence.

And I know when I was younger, there were definitely relationships where I completely leapfrogged the idealizing honeymoon phase and directly entered a kind of state of vaguely disgruntled ambivalence. You know, most people live for the honeymoon, right? But that leapfrogging, that hesitation around a certain kind of heart surrender, was not a function of wisdom nor of equanimity, but something more like fear.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell^[4] said, "Idealization is destabilizing. It shifts our values, our priorities, our purposes. It undermines the utilitarian approach to practical realities that our lives require most of the time. Falling is not a viable way of life, and so we tell ourselves that the transition from falling in love to being in love represents a dispelling of fantasy, a landing on solid ground. We try to keep our footing sure by degrading idealization into mere intoxicating illusion. We are wiser and know better now. However, it is not at all clear that the solid ground we perpetually seek is any more real than the idealizations that inspire passion."

Wallace Stevens^[5] said something like, "Disillusionment is sometimes merely another illusion."

Now, of course, I'm not talking about surrendering to someone or something who lacks exquisite care and sensitivity for your heart. Idealization gets problematic when we're using it to prop ourselves up. It's problematic when we're projecting all of our needs onto the other; we're trying to extract their power.

What I'm really talking about is reverence. How do we relate to the power of another? Do we lose ourselves in their power? Do we cling tenaciously to our autonomy? And how do we surrender to Dhamma? We don't ask it on the first day, but at some point, we're going to have to surrender. We're going to have to let go of a certain kind of willfulness and autonomy and offer our heart up to Dhamma. We fall in love with the path, we stay in love with the path, we grow disenchanted with it, and we fall in love again. Our relationship with the path, and our relationship with others, is supported by something like episodes of idealization—for our heart to lean with a certain kind of reverence.

Now, I'm not temperamentally a devotional person, but now, when I see goodness, I know to get on my knees. As we grow to love ourself more deeply, as we grow to understand and appreciate the emptiness of self more fully, this kind of reverence for goodness feels more and more natural. It feels more and more like a sense of awe—a sense of awe in the face of goodness.

We look up at the night sky, we see stars light years away, and we sense the vastness of space and time. In some ways we feel small, yet sanctified, holy. And that sense of awe, you know, it's easy to feel for the Dalai Lama^[6] or these kinds of beings. But I feel like we can actually sense some of that awe, that reverence for goodness, for all the ordinary people in our lives too. Maybe it's just some little thing they do—ah, some awe, that's beautiful.

We're not relating ego to ego. When it's ego to ego, the power or the goodness of another can spark envy, self-judgment, comparison, or competitiveness. So what I'm talking about is not using the other's goodness as a kind of measuring stick for ourselves. That's the ego to ego competitiveness, and that is the wellspring of a lot of pain. Envy, yeah. Of the seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, pride, and envy—the writer Joseph Epstein^[7] said, "Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all." It's really no fun.

But is that how we get lost in the power, the goodness, the potency of another? And so, the encouragement of mettā^[8] practice is to see goodness. To see it, yet to be here. To be open to idealization, maybe just for a moment. Just such a reverence, to feel it and take it in when we see it. We're learning to find our self-sufficiency, but we're also very much practicing dependency, I feel. We're practicing the strength of surrender. The strength of surrender. So I offer this for your consideration.

Announcements

We'll gather together again, if you like, this evening. There's the page for the Zoom call this evening at Pacific Time at seven o'clock, and it's time to sit and have some dialogue. I'll be back tomorrow morning. Gil^[9] and the crew are having their in-person retreat at IRC^[10]. Anyway, I'm happy to be with you all, and yeah, I'll see you this evening or tomorrow, same place. Okay, thank you.