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Dharmette: Spiritual Power (1 of 5) Immersion and Wholehearted Engagement

Introduction

Morning, everyone. Happy to see you—or not see you. Happy to be here. Just want to check in and see, can you hear me? Good morning, IMC community. Hi.

Fantastic. It's lovely to see greetings coming in from different parts of the country, probably different parts of the world any minute here. Nice to see some familiar faces and read your names that I'm imagining to be faces.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dawn Neal, and I'm really happy to be here covering for Gil this week. He'll be back next week. Warm greetings to all of you. It's a delight to be here from Redwood City, California, and really lovely to see so many regulars greeting each other: San Jose, Bellingham, Washington, Sausalito, Mountain View, Scotland, Nevada City, and San Francisco.

I'm just going to give it a moment or two before we get started. I just want to name how much I appreciate the dedication, the regularity of this sangha^[1]; it's really quite something, going for a couple of years now. So thank you all. Everyone who gave me a sound check, that's great. We'll get started here.

All these greetings! It makes me so happy to see people greeting each other. Many of you have gotten to know each other over these couple of years, right, and all over the world.

So this morning, the topic—and in the week, the topic—is this series of steps or bases, sometimes roads, that the Buddha talked about many times in the ancient discourses. They are supports for our meditation progress, prowess, success, and for a kind of spiritual power. And there are a couple of these that appear in many different lists, or appear multiple times in this list, the iddhipada^[2]. They are a sense of immersion in practice and a sense of engagement with meditation.

Guided Meditation

So the invitation is to sit back, find a comfortable meditation posture, and balance relaxation and alertness. I'm going to start with an image, a couple of images. Maybe close your eyes if that feels right, and imagine being in a vast field, very relaxed. And as you're in this field, a very soft, comfortable, warm rain, almost like a mist, starts to come down, soaking the ground. Maybe some is hitting a roof above you, or maybe you enjoy the sensations of it on your skin, but either way, there's a sense of being soaked, saturated, settled.

As you look across the field, any dust or haze that was there has been washed away. There's clarity. And in this way, the invitation is to set a kind intention, an intention that your body, your heart, your mind be saturated, filled, immersed with awareness in the moment.

And to support that, it's helpful to relax often. Perhaps softening your eyes behind your eyelids, your face, and forehead. And even imagining a pool of relaxation behind the eyes, spreading, spreading through your whole body. Allowing your neck, shoulders, and torso to soften. Your weight to be fully supported# Dharmette: Spiritual Power (1 of 5) Immersion and Wholehearted Engagement - Dawn Neal

Dharmette: Spiritual Power (1 of 5) Immersion and Wholehearted Engagement

Introduction

Morning everyone. Happy to see you, or not see you; happy to be here. I just want to check in and see, can you hear me? Good morning IMC community.

Fantastic. It's lovely to see greetings coming in from different parts of the country, probably different parts of the world any minute here. Nice to see some familiar faces, and promote your names that I'm imagining to be faces. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dawn Neal, and I'm really happy to be here covering for Gil this week. He'll be back next week.

Warm greetings to all of you. It's a delight to be here from Redwood City, California, and really lovely to see so many regulars greeting each other: San Jose, Bellingham Washington, Sausalito, Mountain View, Scotland, Nevada City, San Francisco.

I'm just going to give it a moment or two before we get started, and just name how much I appreciate the dedication, the regularity of this sangha^[1:1]. It's really quite something, going for a couple of years now. So thank you all. Everyone who gave me a sound check, that's great. It makes me so happy to see people greeting each other. Many of you have gotten to know each other over these couple of years, right? And all over the world.

So this morning, the topic is—and in the week the topic is—these series of steps, or bases, roads sometimes, that the Buddha talked about many times in the ancient discourses that are supports for our meditation progress, prowess, success, and for a kind of spiritual power. There are a couple of these that appear in many different lists, or appear multiple times in this list, the iddhipada^[2:1], and they are a sense of immersion in practice and a sense of engagement with meditation.

Guided Meditation

So the invitation is to sit back, find a comfortable meditation posture, and balance relaxation and alertness. I'm going to start with an image, a couple of images. Maybe close your eyes if that feels right, and imagine being in a vast field, very relaxed. And as you're in this field, a very soft, comfortable warm rain, almost like a mist, starts to come down, soaking the ground. Maybe some hitting a roof above you, or maybe you enjoy the sensations of it on your skin, but either way, there's a sense of being soaked, saturated, settled.

As you look across the field, any dust or haze that was there has been washed away; there's clarity. And in this way, the invitation is to set a kind intention, an intention that your body, your heart, your mind be saturated with, filled, immersed with awareness in the moment. To support that, it's helpful to relax often. Perhaps softening your eyes behind your eyelids, your face and forehead. And even imagining a pool of relaxation behind the eyes, spreading, spreading through your whole body. Allowing your neck, shoulders, and torso to soften, your weight to be fully supported, deeply supported on whatever surface you're sitting on or lying, held, safe.

Noticing the weight of your body where it contacts the floor, perhaps the hip points, the buttocks, feet, rooted, rooted here and now. And then attuning, attuning to a sense of this whole body. Noticing the contact of air or cloth on skin, all the sensations of aliveness, vibrancy. Allowing a sense of being immersed in this moment.

And then tuning in to the deeper sensations in the body. Movement, pulse, tingling perhaps, warmth of the body's core. And especially tuning in to the sensations of this body breathing. Settling.

Resting the attention wherever the breath feels most pleasurable, compelling. Perhaps the movement of the belly, diaphragm, gentle wave-like up and down. Perhaps the expansion and relaxation of the ribcage or chest. Or the refined sensations of the breath at the nostrils, tip of the nose, or top of the lip. Noticing the distinct qualities of breathing in, breathing out. Noticing the difference between the sensations at the fullness at the top of the in-breath and how they shift in the letting go, the relaxation of the out-breath.

Noticing too, if it feels natural, the whole body of the breath from the very beginning to the very end. Inviting awareness of all the little sensations of aliveness through this whole body, of transpiration, the whole body breathing. From time to time checking in, refreshing the awareness of the moment. Acknowledging any mental processes kindly. Noticing, appreciating the sensation of aliveness in the moment, in this body, this breath. Softening into the moment.

And from time to time checking in: what's this moment like? From time to time rededicating yourself to close, devoted attention to the sensations of this body, the arisings of this moment. Allowing a sense of connection, pleasure to be there, and allowing being with anything else that's there with kindness.

And as we approach the last moments of this meditation, the invitation is to gather, gather the attention, the energy in the mind and the heart around the heart, perhaps even breathing as if you could breathe directly in and out of the heart. Gathering any goodness, any sense of peace, sincerity from this meditation, and soaking in that for a minute, breathing with it.

And then as you open your mind through your inner eye out to the other people, creatures, beings in your life that you cross paths with, dedicating some part of this goodness to them. May those in our lives benefit from this practice. Breathing this beautiful intention outwards.

May others in our lives be happy. May others be safe. May they be peaceful, and may they be free. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion for that freedom. May they be peaceful, and may they be free. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion for that freedom. May they be peaceful, and may they be free. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion for that freedom. May they be peaceful, and may they be free. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion for that freedom. May they be peaceful, and may they be free.

Thank you for your prayers. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion of that freedom. May they be peaceful, may they be free. Thank you very much. May others be safe. May this practice be an occasion for that freedom. May they be peaceful...

Sorry about that time, so I didn't realize I couldn't ring an actual bell. So the sound should have stopped looping by now. I'm taking a moment. Thank you.

Dharma Talk

Thank you all for the dedication of your practice, the sincerity of your practice, and for the technical troubleshooting. I did not realize I was going to be experimenting with sound effects in this meditation. [Laughter]

So the topic I'd like to talk about for the next few minutes is the relationship between immersion and engagement. Just a quick overview: this is part of the theme of the week, which is a series of bases or steps that the Buddha taught that were particularly supportive for him before he was awakened. And they are wholesome desire, energy or effort, investigation, and quality of mind.

These bases, these steps are sometimes called the roads to spiritual power, or the bases for spiritual power, bases for meditative success—those are all valid translations. I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to them over the years because of one of the translations that appears, which is the bases for psychic power, and so I found that title a little off-putting and uninteresting. But seeing the list again recently, I was struck how helpful for my own practice each of these qualities were.

So these four, or sometimes five bases or steps, are conditions for deepening practice, for improving the efficacy of practice. And they can be kind of considered, in tongue-in-cheek modern parlance, superpowers for meditation. When the Buddha's teachings include them as psychic powers, it's just important to notice the cultural context, to be aware of it. Spiritual power, psychic power was a currency for a lot of the ancient teachers in India in that very old culture, and it was kind of part of what was talked about. It was a very subjective kind of way of seeing the world and understanding the world based on experience in the mind.

The Buddha does bring them in, but the only power he recommends over and over again is the power of insight—the power to free the heart permanently from greed, hatred, and delusion. And it's almost like rhetorically, as a teacher, he's setting up how important that is by naming all of these other capabilities. So [while books developed?]^[3] in those times as serious meditators, the Buddha also discouraged his followers from cultivating these other powers and really focused in on insight. He went as far as to say that in cultivating all of these attributes in the meditation, a practitioner could expect full awakening in this lifetime or something very close.

Each of these bases, I'm going to call them, is a bit like a tripod stool, and each has three attributes: the immersion in the practice or samadhi^[4], which is cultivated through a wholehearted kind of engagement—a word in Pali that's padhāna^[5]—and then one of four things: desire, energy or effort, quality of mind and heart and thought, or investigation. Investigation in this moment.

And these qualities, all of them, unfold a lot more fruitfully in a serene field, relaxed content field of contentment in the practice itself. Contentment to just be immersed, engaged fully in the moment. So, in an image, we'll focus on these two legs of the stool that are there in every base, the immersion and the engagement. Imagine a potter, an artisan at a potter's wheel, and that their wheel is spinning—looping, the theme for today. The potter's wheel is spinning, the pot is spinning, and their hands are gently on the pot shaping it. They're very engaged with the act of shaping that pot, right? And they're also immersed in, settled, and concentrated on the process. So that's a little bit like the trade-off between the symbiosis, the reciprocity between engagement and relaxation. Relaxation into this immersion of samadhi, wholehearted engagement.

It can be helpful to understand it in terms of its opposite, which for me is boredom or disinterest, a sense of kind of a separation from the process. And engagement is supported instead by getting interested, getting interested in the details of the process, the materials of the moment and how they weave together to create now. It's a kind of play in a way, whether it's playing a sport or playing with kids. It's an engagement that, yes, there's maybe an outcome in the back of your mind, but it's not outcome-focused. It's engagement, play for its own sake.

For me, one of the most powerful lessons in this in my life was in many, many figure drawing sessions I went to back when I was more focused on being a visual artist. A couple of times a week we would go to the studio and a group of us would get together and draw. And in a way, we're kind of doing the same thing every week, just like we're doing the same thing with meditation every week. But there's this engagement in the difference of the materials, how they work together, noticing different facets of what could be seen, and finding each day, each drawing, each meditation a different way in. A different way to connect with the process, be fresh with it, embodied with it. Each of you probably has an example of this in your own life, something that continually is rewarded by finding new details in it.

Skillful samadhi, immersion, is a softening into. Softening into this kind of collectedness born out of the contentment of being engaged in the process itself. And earlier in the process, it can be a very active kind of engagement, and later in the process, as a sense of flow takes hold—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow concept^[6] takes hold—then it has its own momentum, and the engagement is more relaxed, settled back.

Skillful samadhi has qualities of calm and relaxation just woven right into it. It's not a bearing down or squinting, a huffing and puffing. Instead, it can be like that soft rain softening a field, or a desert quiet. It can be softening that very clay that ends up on the potter's wheel. And that is kind of a good simile. We are the clay, and we are also the artisan shaping our own mind. There's a malleability and a reciprocity that happen because these two qualities continue to support each other.

So when brought together with the other four qualities we'll talk about this week—dharmic desire or wholesome desire, energy or balanced effort, quality of mind and heart and thought, and investigation—these can become really powerful ways to cultivate both of these foundational meditation qualities. So I look forward to covering that with many of you in the coming days. Tomorrow we will talk about desire, dharmic desire, and falling in love with the practice.

I look forward to being back with you then. Thank you for the sincerity of your practice and for being here.