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The Gates of Awareness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 15, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, everyone. I'm home this weekend from teaching the first month-long Vipassana retreat at IRC. It's quite special. I used to teach them for many years at Spirit Rock, the month-long Vipassana retreats. I think of it a little bit like the idea that in Islam, once a lifetime you should go to Mecca. For insight practitioners, once a lifetime, you should do a month-long retreat. They're quite useful and important in our tradition.

I'm going to teach a little bit of a summary of the theme for that retreat. But my wife warned me about giving this talk here today because, at the month-long retreat, the dharma talks are more like guided meditations. If someone wasn't there, they would think I had too many tranquilizers. [Laughter] So she warned me, "Don't talk so slow here." I don't know what will happen as I go along, but for two weeks now, the dharma talks have been of a very different nature than they normally are.

The gates of awareness (link)

The core reference point for practice in our tradition is mindfulness. One of the metaphors for the practice of mindfulness in the ancient Buddhist texts is that of a gatekeeper in a walled city. If there's one gate into or out of the walled city, the gatekeeper sits there and decides who to let in and who to let out. If people who are violent and into thievery want to come in, maybe the gatekeeper says, "Not today." It's pretty easy to prevent them from coming in. If good neighbors want to leave, the gatekeeper maybe always gives them some gift to go with, "Here are some cookies or something for your travels."

The gatekeeper also prevents people from leaving. If there are violent people or thieves in the city, it creates very bad neighborly relations to let them out. So the gatekeeper doesn't let them out. Maybe he has a nice table there and says, "Hey, stay here. We'll have a nice meal together and have some lemonade." He gives them a different context. The important thing is the gatekeeper tracks what comes in and out.

The simile is meant for us. The gates for us are our senses. Everything about the world comes in through our eyes, and sometimes how we use our eyes is how we communicate with the world. So that's the eye gate, the ear gate, the mouth/taste gate, the smell gate, and the body gate. Buddhism also has a sixth gate, which is the mind gate, by which we know what's going on in the mind and by which the mind can know what's going on elsewhere.

Everything we know about the world and about ourselves comes through our ability to know. Mindfulness practice looks at and tends to that ability to know. It's about how we know as much as what we know.

Most things that we know about the world and ourselves occur through our senses. The sense that Buddhism gives a lot of emphasis to is the body sense, the tactile sense—all the different ways we can feel through the body. There's a wonderful meeting place of the world and ourselves through what happens at our skin, the experiences we have in our body and outside. So, much of what we know about the world happens through our senses and our ability to sense. An important part of mindfulness is attention to how we sense.

For a deep Buddhist spirituality, the metaphor for the sense gate that's used is seeing. The experience of awakening is opening the dharma eye. Some of the deepest states of experience are more seen in the mind's eye than they are felt or known. So the question is, how do we see? There's this constant reference back not to the object of what we're paying attention to, but to how we're experiencing things. Right there in the "how" is also the gate by which we then relate to the world.

If we can be our own gatekeepers and know how we receive and what we send forth, we have a tremendous capacity to be careful, wise, kind, and supportive. We don't send out from us words or actions that are characterized by greed, hatred, delusion, and lies. We are also very careful about what comes in. We're careful not to take in messages of greed, hatred, and delusion. We're right there seeing it and seeing the impact it has on us. We're attending to how we're aware.

I believe most people focus on what we're thinking about, what we're concerned about, the things we're watching and reading. We're concerned about something, which is different than the nature of how we know and how we experience. It's reasonable; that's how we find our way in the world, make ourselves safe, and survive—to know what's happening and to track it. But we can get caught in that, so that half of who we are, in a sense, is never known. I call it half because I want to emphasize its tremendous importance. And that is not what we know within us or outside of us, but how we know. Not what we experience, feel, or sense, but how we do that.

When we practice mindfulness, one of the things we're doing is noticing how we know and how we experience things. Sometimes you can go out to the park or downtown in the city and see in people's eyes, their face, their mannerisms, how they're taking in the world around them. Sometimes you see that people are afraid. Sometimes you can feel and see that people are looking and relating to others with hostility. The "how" they're taking in and relating is through these deep emotional attitudes that we can carry with us. But often, we don't realize that we have a choice there. It's just the filter through which we see the world, and we don't see the filter.

Mindfulness practice is to take that backward step, at least for a while in meditation, to not be so concerned about the world of "aboutness." Most people live in the world of aboutness. If you spend most of your time concerned with what you're thinking, your preoccupations, in front of a screen, or in conversation with people, chances are a big part of what you're doing is living in the world of aboutness. "Let me tell you about what happened yesterday." It's about yesterday; it's not about the present moment experience here and now.

If you sit in meditation, one of the great lessons is to learn how much of our time is in the world of aboutness rather than the living, lived world of the moment. As we get closer to the lived world of the moment, what begins to stand out is how we're aware, how we know, how we sense the experience. This "how we're aware"—the ability to know, to sense in a deep way, and in the mind's eye to see—these are profound capacities we have that are gateways to profundity within us, to profound ways of being in this world and with ourselves.

Learning to pay attention to how we're aware is not just so we can adjust a little bit and be in a better way. It's also a means to connect to something very profound that can only be known, only be felt, if we are no longer caught in the world of aboutness. Instead, we can learn to feel in very deep ways, to feel certain aspects of who we are instead of the usual aspects. And to know, not just as if knowing is the point, but how we know and the source within us from where we know. The Buddha emphasizes two major sources for how we know, cognize, and construct this world that we live in.

When we practice mindfulness, one of the things we're learning to do is to cultivate our capacity to know, to sense, to observe, and—the fourth one clearly stated in the Buddha's instructions—to relax, or become calm or tranquil. The Buddha's foundational instructions in mindfulness practice involve first, using our capacity to know; second, using our capacity to sense. The instruction there is to sense the whole body, and in terms of knowing, to know that you're breathing. For some people, knowing you're breathing seems like a pretty silly thing to do. There are more important things to do on Netflix. But what we're doing here is taking something very ordinary, regular, and continuous—our capacity to know breathing—not just to know breathing better. Some people say breathing is boring. Rather, it's to learn how to know breathing. And in the how we know breathing, breathing comes alive in a delightful, beautiful way.

Then we're sensing the body. It's not so much exactly what we sense that's important, but that we're cultivating a higher degree of sensitivity, so we can sense much deeper and fuller, in new ways that we've usually never been trained to do. And then, to relax. Because when you sense and know the body and breathing, sooner or later, you'll know that you have tension—in the body, in the mind, in the heart. And so then, to calm it. I like to use the word "relaxing" because it's so physical and immediate, but the Buddha's word is more like "calming." The advantage of calling it calming is that you understand we're calming the whole nervous system, not just relaxing the shoulders. This practice is to calm the whole nervous system, which can be overactivated, afraid, and all kinds of things that are not so healthy for us.

The advantage of calming the nervous system is that then we can know better, we can sense better, and eventually, with the mind's eye, we can see better. We can't do that if the field of awareness is cluttered and crowded with aboutness. Some people have so many things to be thinking about and concerned about that their mind is just jumping around all the time. Not only is it cluttered, but it's spinning and overactive. If you sense and feel and know the thinking mind, some people finally realize it's claustrophobic in there. Some people realize it's exhausted, so weary because for decades they've had the same way of being caught in this thinking mind, as if that's where the solution to all their life's problems live.

As that relaxes, we learn to sense better and feel better. What begins to occur, as the Buddha clearly instructs, is that we begin to be able to differentiate between two different modes of sensing, two areas of sensation. One is those sensations that are born when the world touches us—when a sight object comes into the eye, or when there's temperature, a massage, or you stand on a nail. We're touched by the world, and that's an important part of surviving. There are people, apparently, who cannot feel pain. On the surface, it seems like a great thing, but those people apparently don't live very long because they end up injuring themselves and not knowing it. Pain is an important part of the feedback system for life. But it comes from the surface, from the skin. Some people are living in that surface-sensing world. They just want comfort, sensual pleasure from food, sex, or alcohol. They want comfortable surroundings. Some people feel like a successful life is measured by the comfort and sensuality they have.

To be preoccupied with that world means that we haven't gotten quiet enough and still enough to sense this deeper source within. A profound sensing that can happen that is not dependent on being impacted by the world, but maybe has more to do with a flow, a radiance, or a glow. It has a bit more persistence than a simple sense contact that comes and goes. I associate this distinction—and I'm not a scientist, so take this with a grain of salt—the surface way of sensing with the reptilian brain that helps us survive. The deeper way of sensing, I associate with the mammalian brain, the capacity for how mammals care for their young. We know there are all kinds of hormones and activities that course through a mother's body to manage the crazy thing of caring for a child. There are these wonderful chemicals that make you want to nurture and care.

There are these deeper feelings related to love, compassion, care, warmth, and kindness. Sometimes it's the feeling of the whole psychophysical system being in harmony with itself. Most people live divided, scattered lives, where all our different capacities are sometimes at cross-purposes. Mindfulness and Buddhism are to help us come into harmony, to bring all of who we are into a unified whole. That sense of unity and harmony awakens some of these beautiful sensations that can live within us—sensations of well-being, calm, and peace.

If we live in the world of aboutness, always in the world of external sensing, we don't feel this deeper place. It's about shifting our attention at some point to be not so concerned about the physical sense world, but to be concerned with this deeper place of sensitivity that's possible. That's also a place that guides us in our ethical lives because that's where we can feel care and love for people, and integrity for ourselves. That's where we can feel remorse and feel like something's off. "This doesn't feel right to me. I'm violating some deep aspect of my heart now if I lie to my best friend." There's an ethical reference point deep within us that the surface senses don't really provide. In fact, sometimes they do the opposite. If people are addicted to pleasure, sometimes they don't care what effect it has on other people.

To come into this deeper place of care, of approach and nurture, rather than fight or flight, opens up a whole different way of being.

Then with knowing. Some people think knowing is boring. Sometimes in our tradition, we have something called mental noting, and for some people, that drives them crazy—to use a single word to name what's going on. But what we're doing is training ourselves to cognize, to recognize what's happening. More important is that we should pay attention to how we know, how we do that act of recognition, and what our relationship is to these moments of recognition. For some people, knowing something is the end of a journey, like a period at the end of a sentence. For example, if I feel my stomach tighten up and I know "tightening," then I think, "What am I going to do about it? It's just a problem. I hope no one notices."

But if I notice my stomach tighten and I recognize, "Oh, it's tight," and think of that as the beginning of a sentence, the beginning of a journey, then knowing opens the door to sense and know this more. "Wow, I know this. What happens now? How is that experienced?" The mental noting, when that's done, is more like beginning a journey. The point is not to know, but knowing is the beginning of sensing, feeling, recognizing, and becoming familiar with what's there.

So, how you know, and where is the source of knowing? The Buddha says there's the reptilian knowing of the brain, the surface mind. That's often a mind that's being fueled by clinging, by attachment, by selfishness and self-preoccupation. It constructs ideas and stories and understandings of the world that are strongly under the influence of our bias, our clinging, our attachments, our hatreds.

There's another source for what we can know. I sometimes call it profound knowing. Sometimes I think of it as a surface mind and a deep mind. Sometimes I think of it as knowing from the source of life. The way the Buddha refers to this kind of knowing, he literally uses the expression "knowing from the womb." Here, the womb is used as a metaphor. Since not every human has a womb, it might be nice to not just limit it to that, but to call it the source of life. The translator Bhikkhu Bodhi¹ translated it as "careful attention." If he's going to use "careful," then I want to use the word "caringly." To know caringly, to know with care from that deep, mammalian source within.

It's so easy to think from the surface mind, and it's so compelling at times because some of you are brilliant in your imagination and the fantasies you can make up. You could probably keep Hollywood busy for a long time. But this surface mind can be very compelling. I've seen in myself that I can have some imaginary thought and see the effect it has on my survival body. I can have a thought that's really graphic and get afraid, but wait a minute, there's nothing to be afraid of. But my body reacts.

If we learn not to be caught in the surface mind and the surface way of knowing, but we learn to know from this deep source, then it's a whole different world we live in.

So I've talked about sensing from a deep place within and knowing from a deep place within. The third way the Buddha teaches how to be mindful is to see with the mind's eye, to perceive. What's very significant about seeing is that seeing doesn't interfere with what's being seen, in and of itself. It doesn't have the same intimacy as sensing does, and it doesn't have the same cognitive factor that knowing has. Seeing is much simpler.

Seeing is also connected to our spatial ability, our ability to sense space. It's possible for some of us to look around at the space in this room. It's nice with a high ceiling. You can get a sense of the space between people. Some of us can then close our eyes and, in the mind's eye, visualize or have some sense of the space. We have an innate sense of space and spatial direction.

Sometimes this spatial capacity is used to help relax the mind deeply. You go down to the beach or to the park and just settle back into a place where it's very spacious, where the mind doesn't necessarily fixate on any particular concern but floats within that space. Something within us begins to relax deeply.

The inner eye is the same way. At some point, as we relax deeply, the mind no longer feels small, contracted, or tight. The mind starts feeling expanded. The Buddha called it an expansive mind, and then a big mind, where there's a sense of a lot of space. In an odd way, it feels like the mind is now bigger than the head because there are no boundaries to it. One of the nice things about that is that a spacious mind, spacious awareness, has room for everything. A contracted mind does not.

If you're in a tiny little elevator that can only hold one person, but there's you and three very big people who really like eating ketchup all over their shirts and haven't showered in a few days, it's a bit much. It's claustrophobic. But if you go into a vast cathedral or a beautiful spot in nature and you see those same people spread out far away, then it's easy to love humanity.

It's kind of like that in our minds. When we're so caught in our concerns and preoccupations, it gets claustrophobic, and we have a very different attitude about ourselves and our life. But when the mind becomes like a vast cathedral, a sacred spot with lots of space, even if you have a terrible thought, it's like, "Wow, look at that thought." It's like a bird flying through the sky, as opposed to, "Oh my, how could I?" We tend to be much more equanimous and generous when things can be known with lots of space in the mind.

This ability to see without interference, with equanimity, without being caught, holds things in a very generous way. Not to be a pushover, but so that we can operate much more carefully about what we let out of our gate into the world. What do we want to let out into the world? If you ask that deep source of life within, it's probably going to be connected to something like care, love, and compassion.

Part of this focus on mindfulness is to be able to sit at the gate where all things we know about the world come in and all things about ourselves go out. Those gates have to do with how we sense, how we know, and how we see with the mind's eye. What's important for the purpose of this practice is not so much what you know, sense, or feel, but how you know, sense, see, and feel. And how should you do that? Calmly. Maybe you have some choice about how calmly you know you're agitated. Know it calmly. How do you sense? Sense calmly. "Calmly" implies that you have a little bit of time to know, a little bit of time to sense, a little bit of time to look and see.

That's the beginning of this wonderful journey of mindfulness: to know calmly, to sense calmly, and to see calmly. And as you do that, how you sense, know, and feel will deepen, fill out, and become richer and richer, enriching your life in phenomenal ways that it cannot be enriched if you live in the world of aboutness and are unfortunate enough to win a big lottery. That's so much about the world and the pleasures of the world. That's not where success is. That's not where the deep pleasure is. The deep fulfillment comes from these deep places that are often overlooked.

Reflections

So that's mindfulness practice, and that's a little synopsis of what's happening at this retreat. Imagine that people devoted a whole month to doing this. Maybe now you can appreciate why it's our Mecca. And it turns out the Mecca is really in you. But, you know, once a lifetime, go really into it deep.

Those are my thoughts. We have about five minutes before the official end, and then we have our tea. I think it's very nice if those of you who have a little bit of time to stay would like to turn to two or three people next to you, say hello, and greet them. If you want to share something about this talk, something evocative from it that was interesting for you, that might be nice. And those of you who are going to be leaving, thank you for being here. I'll ring a bell in a few minutes when it's time to end the conversation. So just look around, and if you turn to people, make sure no one's left alone. Everyone's included.