This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Simplicity; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (11) Appearance Bundle of Clinging. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Simplicity; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (11) Appearance Bundle of Clinging - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 18, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Simplicity

Good morning, good day, hello, and welcome to our Monday beginning-of-the-week series. We are continuing with an introduction to mindfulness meditation, part two.

For the meditation today, I would like to emphasize or point out that one of the primary characteristics of mindfulness meditation is simplicity. One teacher, Munindra-ji¹, a Vipassana² teacher whom I met in India, said that if it's not simple, it's not Vipassana.

The idea of radical simplicity includes not projecting our mental constructs onto our experience. If we're thinking about the past or thinking about the future, that's a mental construct that is projected onto the past and projected onto the future. The past doesn't exist, and the future doesn't exist in a certain existentially real way; it has to do with memory or prediction—constructs of the mind. These can be a fine and important part of life, but when we sit to do mindfulness meditation, we're not even interested in the constructs of the mind.

Here, there is a kind of radical simplicity where we allow our direct experience to be itself. Free from comparisons, free from ideals, free from what should or shouldn't happen, free from our stories that we have about it, and free of what we think other people will say about it. Just sitting here in a radically simple way with the experience of this. So radical that we don't even impose on the experience "me," "myself," and "mine." Those can be fine concepts, but in the simplicity of feeling the warmth of the body, the weight of the body, we can experience it without adding "me," "myself," and "mine." Just warmth. Just solidity. Just the in-breath and out-breath moving through the body.

Assume a meditation posture where somewhere in the posture there's a sense of intentionality, like you're physically engaged to be here. If you're sitting on the floor, it might be the torso that's upright. If you're sitting in a chair using a backrest, maybe there's a way of placing your hands on your lap that says, "Here I am." Palms down on the thighs: "Here I am, intentionally." If you're lying down on your back, maybe you can point your forearms up to the ceiling. So there's something intentional that is a support for being here and now.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, softening the body as you exhale.

Let your breathing return to normal. With an exhale, relax the thinking mind. A softening, a quieting of thinking as you exhale. A quieting of the heart center, relaxing in the chest.

Then, softening the belly. Letting the belly hang forward and maybe a little bit down. Sometimes a soft, expanded belly can feel like it provides a stronger foundation for the upper torso to be here, or it supports a more relaxed rhythm of breathing.

Bring your attention into your body. Maybe as if you're entering a peaceful, sacred grove of trees. Go into your body so you can be with the body's experience of itself. The body's experience of breathing. Here in this body, be very simple with staying present for the ever-changing sensations of the body as you breathe.

With whatever experience is happening in the present, be simple with it. Free the experience from the constructs of the mind: the ideas, the concepts, the judgments, the desires. If those things happen, be very simple with them. You don't have to believe them; they are just something arising in the moment, soon to be gone.

Can you be simpler here? If you need to think, think with radical simplicity about what's actually happening here in your direct experience, without interpretation, stories, or attribution to "me," "myself," and "mine."

As we come to the end of this sitting, consider reviewing this meditation. Could you have been simpler? Could you have been less involved in thoughts, judgments, anxieties, or desires, to sit here with the simplicity of being? That might even include a contentment just to be.

Simplicity of being is not a diminishment of who we are; it's a radical respect for who we are, where who we are can just be itself without adding anything on top of it.

As we come to the end of this sitting, may we prepare ourselves to go into the world with that kind of respect for others. That we are careful with our projections, our desires, our assumptions, our bias—the complicated ways in which we overlay our perceptions of others with our beliefs, ideas, and conditioning. To put those aside—maybe even put aside the past—so we can meet people as they are. To have profound respect for each person, allowed to be as they are, free of our judgment.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And as a minimum, may they be free of the limited view in which we look at people—our judgments, our bias. May people be free of our projections.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (11) Appearance Bundle of Clinging

Hello from Insight Meditation Center on this Monday morning. Today I begin a new series within the wider, longer series on the introduction to mindfulness, part two.

One of the important areas of mindfulness is not just what's happening in our experience—to be present here and now to body, breath, emotions, feelings, thoughts—but also to be present for and recognize the ways that we are attached. The ways that we cling, the ways that we grasp, the ways that we clamp down, tighten up, or constrict.

This is central to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness because attachment is considered to be one of the primary causes of optional suffering—the suffering that we add to our life by the clinging itself. Clinging itself is a kind of suffering. Attachment is a kind of constriction, a contraction, a resistance, a tightening up, a weighing down that we can experience. To lighten up, to release, to free up wherever we're attached is part of the enterprise of the Buddhist teachings on mindfulness.

To do that, we want to start becoming cognizant of how we cling, what forms of attachment we have, and the physical, direct way in which attachment is felt and experienced generally. Even if you feel like it's valid to cling to something, to be attached to something, if you really feel the cost of the attachment—the impact it has on you—you can feel that it's stressful. You can feel that it is a limitation, an irritation, a burden. It brings along a kind of contraction which doesn't feel good and leads to further contraction. Part of the problem of clinging and attachment is that one attachment gives birth to other attachments; they grow on each other.

The practice of mindfulness is a practice of radical simplicity where we're trying to be simple enough in the present moment, just with the direct experience we have, so that direct experience can highlight the addition we put to it of clinging, of attachment.

There are two things: what we attach to or cling to, and the clinging in and of itself. In the teachings of the Buddha, he put a lot of emphasis on five areas that we cling to. Not just any clinging, but these five areas are also, for the Buddha, the primary locations through which we cling to a sense of self. Regardless of what you think about whether there is or isn't a self, there is a clinging to self—clinging to identity, clinging to who we think we should be, clinging to roles, clinging to a variety of things. That clinging is how self-attachment can create a tremendous amount of suffering. People act on their attachments, act on clinging, and when we do so, it's usually not very skillful or very helpful.

These five areas are:

1. Appearances: How we appear and how others appear to us.
2. Sensations: The basic sensations of pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort.
3. Perceptions: The conceptions by which we recognize things, the simple ideas we have of things (which are often not simple enough because they come along with a whole host of associations, meanings, and projections).
4. Mental Formations: The stories we live by, the larger constructions of the mind, interpretations, philosophies, memories, histories, and imaginings of the future.
5. Consciousness: Our very simple capacity to know—not just what we know, but just that we know. It's such a fantastic capacity, and some people cling to this.

These are five areas, and the way the Buddha referred to them—and the way I understand it—is he called them the "five bundles" (sometimes they're called the five Aggregates³ in English, but I think the word "aggregates" kind of obscures what they're about). He talked about how they are different experiences that we have that we gather together into a larger collection through our clinging. It is not just that we cling to something, but it's one of many.

We understand form here to be the shape of things, how they appear. Because it also includes hearing, smelling, tasting, and the other senses, it's how things appear to the senses. But appearance is in the eyes of the beholder. We're not passive and innocent perceivers of things; appearance is something we select. We select what's important for us in the world of appearances.

We see an attractive person, and it might be the clothes they wear, it might be the shape of their nose, or there might be the quality of their voice. Somehow we're predisposed to tune into certain aspects of a person, and that's what we find attractive. So how they appear in our mind, the selection choice we've made, is not an innocent kind of just seeing things as they are. Of all the things that person is, we're tuned into a particular aspect of them.

That happens to us as well. As I grew up over time as a child, there was a progressive increase in concern with my appearance—how I appeared for others. The earliest memory I have of something like this was when I was probably about six years old. Before that, I called my parents "Mama" and "Papa." I was returning to Norway to visit with the family there, my grandparents. I remember getting off the airplane at the airport in Norway. We were getting up from our seats and walking down the aisle, so it was a time to say something where there would be no conversation about it. I turned to my mother and said, in Norwegian, "From now on, you're going to be 'Mother' and 'Father'."

The reason was I didn't want to be embarrassed looking like a small kid in the eyes of my grandparents. I wanted to be a little more grown-up and say "Mother" and "Father." So how I appeared to people became a concern.

Then when I was maybe eight, I remember the first time I got glasses. I also changed schools when I got glasses. In the new school, I didn't want to wear my glasses because I thought people would make fun of me and that I would look funny. Progressively, as I got older, there were concerns about—back then in the 1960s—how long my hair was, concerns with what kind of clothes I wore, concerns with all kinds of things. They grew and grew and grew. I don't know when they stopped growing, and I added to them.

But this whole idea of how I appear and how other people appear to me... When I was nineteen, I traveled with some friends to Morocco. Back then, most of the Moroccan men wore these beautiful, long robes—I think they called them a djellaba⁴. I was walking around the streets of Morocco and I had a strange feeling that I couldn't quite understand. Something was a little bit lighter or more open in my mind, and I couldn't understand it until one day I realized that because all these men were wearing clothes that I had no associations with, I was not projecting judgments and ideas on them.

In other parts of the world, in the West, in America, you could tell something about people by the clothes they wear. Walking down the streets, I had judgments about people and my mind was busy almost subconsciously evaluating and judging people as I went. In Morocco, I couldn't do that, and it freed part of my mind. That was a lovely feeling to have—to not have the ability to judge because I didn't have context for it.

So, appearances. We can sit down and meditate and notice what we are attached to regarding how we appear. We're attached to our body parts, how we are here and how it looks. Some people spend more time and care with the clothes they choose to wear, or the hair they arrange, or all kinds of things, than they do with care around the words they speak. How we appear is so important, and it's partly important because others take it as important. People do judge us based on our appearances and how we are. We get pulled into this world of being preoccupied with how we appear, and preoccupied with other people's appearances.

This is one area of attachment. Sometimes you can feel the clinging. Attachment to appearances can be a heavy weight to bear. It can create anxiety: the clinging to "how am I going to be accepted?" A fundamental human need is to belong, to be accepted, and there is the fear of rejection. Because we navigate so much of the world of appearances, unfortunately, people put so much store in that world.

We become concerned about appearances with our hair, the size of our nose, fingers, hands, or wrinkles as we get older. This can be quite depressing for some people, but it is a construct. It's ideas—some of them are culturally created, where our culture infects us so we think in the way that the culture around us thinks.

To sit in meditation and be radically simple, and leave ourselves, leave our body, leave our appearance radically alone so we can breathe and be quiet. Finally, let the body be left alone. Free the body from the heavy weight of all the ideas, projections, and imaginations. All the concerns we have about rejection and dismissal, and trying to build up and create a more important kind of appearance for the world.

The radical simplicity of leaving ourselves alone so that something inward can evolve and flow and give us a feeling of being content, happy, and alive—free of any clinging to how we appear. We are allowed to be as we are, independent of what society tells us is good or bad, desirable or undesirable. There's a lot of "self" related to appearance—self-making, self-building. The attachment to appearance is not an innocent thing; it's something that we gather together into bundles, and there are huge bundles of these attachments that people live with.

So that's the first of the bundles the Buddha talked about. Today, as you go about your day, you might get curious about how much of your time is spent concerned, one way or the other, with your appearance, with your clothes, with anything at all. Then kind of tilt your head down a little bit with a question: "What is this? What is this about? Is this needed? Why am I so concerned about it? What's the purpose of it?"

Just explore it and get to know it more. Maybe in the process of that, you'll recognize one or two attachments you have about appearance, and maybe you'll look at the suffering, the stress that might come with that attachment.

Thank you.