This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within-Clarifying; Ancient Similes(5of5)Clear High Mtn Lake. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within; Clarifying; Dharmette: Teachings of the Ancient Similes (5 of 5); The Simile of the Clear High Mountain Lake - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 24, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Opening to the Nature Within; Clarifying

Good morning, good day. Just happy to see the streaming chat messages.

Take a moment to gather here, maybe savor a little sense of being in community together as the people gathering here in this online virtual space.

So happy to be with you all. We're coming to the last morning or last day of this sequence that I've been hopefully taking you through as a sort of a nature guide, doing a nature within ourselves. This week we did opening to the aspect of Earth elements, grounding and enlivening through being with our breath, and enriching our experiences by being with our emotions and thoughts. And then we also included spaciousness yesterday, really like this Inner Mountain, a life Mountain surrounded by nature and the space.

Today we're coming to the piece of clarifying, or seeing clearly, knowing clearly. I have been preparing us along the way, and so today we'll be going through the sequence but then also open to clear seeing and clear knowing.

So, okay, we'll begin.

Pausing to start. Start from where we are and start from how we are, just as it is. Releasing demands for things to be otherwise. Releasing expectations.

Here and Now. What is the felt sense of here in this place and this time?

Feeling and sensing the global sense of a body sitting, lying down, standing, however your posture is.

Directing your attention to wherever the body makes contact with the floor, Earth, chairs, beds. Sensing contact, pressure, weight, temperature.

Allow this earthy body to rest into the contact. Maybe there is a sense of resting down or resting back. Allow the contact to become as big as it likes to or as deep as it likes to.

A sense of rootedness. Grounded, steady, quiet. Sitting like a quiet Mountain within.

Quiet breath, quiet aliveness. You may not have words for them and that's totally okay.

Sensing and feeling a quiet flow of the breath enlivening the whole body. It may be rhythmic, in and out, up and down. Or it may not be.

A sense of wonder and awe may come in. The movements of the emotions can enrich this very sense of Being Human.

Sensing and feeling the spaciousness all around or within.

Releasing stories, ideas, and conceptual overlays. Allow the knowing and seeing to be emerging from the felt sense.

Let each breath flow freely. Let each sensation dance freely. Let each thought float freely.

Dharmette: Teachings of the Ancient Similes (5 of 5); The Simile of the Clear High Mountain Lake

So we finished Samyutta Nikaya 22.101¹ that used the three similes of the sutta to highlight or describe some overarching characteristics of the practice. Today I feel like I have more to say about the sutta.

I like to circle back to the opening statement of the sutta: "I say that the destruction of the taints² is for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and does not see."

This sense of knowing and seeing is a very important aspect of our cultivation. Using the similes of the chicken and eggs hatching, the adze handle being worn off, and the rope that ties the ship rotting away—what they also offer is that these layers of beliefs, of fixed ideas, and our conceptual overlays are shed, put down, or let go of. When this happens, there are increasing degrees of knowing and seeing little by little. They become more and more available to us.

This kind of knowing and seeing is very different from reading the book and getting some sense. That is one aspect of knowing, but it's not the complete aspect of the knowing. When we are only counting on the conceptual level of understanding and want to manage our way through the conceptual lenses, often we shut down so much of ourselves that can know and see differently. The part of ourselves that knows and sees doesn't always speak English or Chinese or Spanish.

Our body knows, maybe through the responses in the nervous systems or responses in our cellular kind of feeling, or in the movements of the breath. Our heart knows; that may manifest as a certain kind of felt sense in our heart space. So much of our training is to begin to open to this wide range of ways of Being Human that is able to know and sense in these rich ways. When we allow this wide-ranged way of knowing and seeing, things become more and more clear.

Today I wanted to bring yet another simile. This is a week of similes from the sutta. It's not from the same sutta, but I think it's relevant to this notion of knowing and seeing. This sutta is from Majjhima Nikaya 39³. It's a simile of a clear Mountain Lake.

I like to expand a little bit because in order to get to a clear Mountain Lake, I would imagine you have to get on a hiking trail and walk to get to the mountain lake. This part—actually hiking and walking the mountain trail—is not part of the sutta, but for me, it evokes something. The person, in order to get to the Clear Mountain Lake, has to take the path, has to walk. Kind of like us having to practice, walk the Noble Eightfold Path⁴. As we engage in this, as we hike in these Mountain Trails, we put down a lot of preoccupations that we have in our mind about things we want to do or projects we need to manage, and we're more and more present on the trail. Maybe we'll have a sense of slowing down and maybe a sense of a life Mountain comes in, and the chatter in our mind might quiet down.

That's the process of the practice. We put down a lot of inner chatter or preoccupations, and when we get to the mountain lake, our mind and heart feel more clear.

I want to read you this Mountain Lake simile here:

"Practitioners, it is like a lake in a mountain range, transparent, clear, and undisturbed. Standing on the shore, a person with eyes could see oysters, shells, stones, pebbles, and a fish moving about and holding still. That person would think: 'This is a transparent, clear, and undisturbed lake. Here there are oysters, shells, stones, pebbles, and a fish moving about and holding still.'

"Practitioners, in the same way, a practitioner understands dukkha⁵ as it is..."

And so on, it goes through all the Four Noble Truths and knows this clearly. Just like seeing through the clear, transparent, undisturbed Mountain Lake, one can see things moving around and see things without the filters that we put on—without the filters of our own judgments, beliefs, and without all the reactivities that may be operating. That becomes available and possible to us.

One thing I'd like to highlight that we went through this week is that we know that this seeing and knowing becomes available to us naturally when the taints fade away. Also, I'd like to say that the clarity, the sense of being really clear, doesn't have to come all at once. It's not like a big bang, or a big switch that you just turn on. Rather, with the felt sense of the similes and this hiking the mountain trail, the mind gets more and more clear. At least to me, it feels more like things become increasingly clear, little by little.

For most of us, that's the process of our practice. It's a gradual process. Little by little we're less caught by the habitual reactivities. Little by little we begin to experience a kind of well-being or joy, to whatever degree that may be available to us. Little by little we are chipping away at the underlying tendencies.

I would also say that for most of us, there are also times that things get very, very difficult. The invitation is that we practice with a kind and compassionate heart as best as we are able. This phrase "as best as we are able" is very important because that's the truth of how we can practice. We can't practice more than what we're able. Surely we'll get lost on the path, and whenever we're able, we come back. Period. We come back. That's it. Releasing blaming, judging, shaming, criticizing. We know those are just extra burdens that we have to carry.

Even though I'm using this mountain hike as a way to illustrate this, the path we're undertaking is an Inner Path. In fact, so much of the training is about us staying where we are, how we are, right here. We stop trying to fix ourselves up and fix others, and so we make ourselves available to different possibilities.

I like to end with a quote from Wendell Berry:

"The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home."

Thank you, dear. May we all learn to be at home.