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Questions and Answers - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Questions and Answers

Good morning, everyone. Welcome. It may be interesting for you to know that whereas mostly I give talks when I come Sunday morning, it's always my protection to know that instead of giving a talk, I can just answer questions. It's a wonderful protection to have. I don't have to worry; if no talk is there, then I'm here. Today, I don't have a talk, partly because all my discretionary time for the last few days has been filled with getting ready to go away for a month. I couldn't believe how many details there were to take care of, and there are still a couple.

I'm leaving right after the potluck. I'm going on a long drive to spend three weeks in the wilderness teaching kind of a Buddhist Wilderness Retreat. Then, to recover from that—I don't think I need to recover, but just for the contrast—I'm going backpacking for a week with my wife. So, four weeks in the wilderness. I come here wonderfully empty of Dharma talks. So if any of you have any questions you'd like to ask about anything that seems somewhat related to what we're about here at IMC—practice or teaching or something—I'd be very happy to respond in some way.

Questioner 1: Good morning, Gil. I just have what I guess is more of a personal question, if you're open to answering. I'm just curious how your practice has evolved over time in terms of when you first kind of got interested in it and then what's changed, what stayed the same.

Gil Fronsdal: Okay, I'll try to do it short. It's been 50 years to summarize here. Certainly, I've suffered less. Suffering is what brought me into it. It didn't bring me into Buddhism—I got interested for other reasons—but at some point, when I was about 19, I got interested in Buddhism, but it was a little more intellectual. By 22, I suffered enough that I thought, "Okay, I have to kind of deal with the suffering." And then that suffering has abated, you know, sometimes in big quantum steps, sometimes in a slow, gradual process. So one way my practice has changed over the years is it feels lighter. There's an ease to the practice, a lightness to it.

Another thing that's changed is that this practice did very important things to me. This less and less suffering and sense of ease came with a really decreasing of clinging, of being caught, or attachment. There's been a steady decrease of that. I'd like to believe that in that process, there were three phases that happened. The first phase was that compassion was awakened in me, and that became a central organizing principle for how to live my life. The second was that loving-kindness was awoken in me, and that changed the way I related to myself and to other people. It made it a little lighter than compassion. Not that the compassion didn't go, but it opened up a whole different way of appreciating people in a very deep way. The third phase was it opened up a third kind of social emotion that I call care. The Pali word is anukampa¹, which was very, very strongly associated with the absence of clinging, the absence of distress or tightness. So when compassion and loving-kindness kind of meet non-clinging, then it can come through in this very simple, easeful kind of way of really having a profound sense of care that's different than compassion, different than love. In some ways, I feel it's like the foundation for it. So that was a third phase. Does that answer the question well enough?

Questioner 2: Gil, just in the last week, it has percolated to the top of my mind that I don't really understand or haven't really understood what Vipassanā means. Is Vipassanā what we do here? And the meaning of Vipassanā, how does it intersect with or relate to the meaning of mindfulness and the differences between mindfulness and concentration? That's kind of a two or three-part question, but just answer whatever seems most useful.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, I appreciate that question very much because I think it has been confusing, all the different ways the word Vipassanā² is used, and insight and mindfulness are used. It's good to get some clarity about it rather than just one big jumble, assuming they're kind of the same, but it doesn't seem quite right or something. The original meaning for the word Vipassanā was not that it was a practice people did, but rather it was an insight people had in doing the practice. It refers to insight. The meaning of the word ‘passanā’ in Vipassanā means "to see," so it's a particular kind of seeing. So "insight" kind of works because the "sight" is in "seeing," you know, and the "vi" is just an emphatic prefix. So you can choose how you like to emphasize it. You could say "strongly seeing" or you can say, you know, "really seeing." One of my favorite translations is "clear seeing" to give that emphasis.

Then the question is, what do we see? And the ancient tradition was very clear what you see. This is to see the inconstancy, the changing nature of our experience in some very profound way that you can't imagine if you're just seeing the change in the world, which you can see all the time. But there's a different way of experiencing the changing nature of the way that perception works when the mind is concentrated, when the mindfulness is really clear. The word mindfulness, Sati³, refers to the nature of awareness that has the ability to see clearly. And for the Buddha, Sati was never a practice people did, but it was a consequence of doing practice.

In the modern world, these things have become practices. So people will say, "Come time to see and practice mindfulness." And yes, we're doing Vipassanā here. What's happened over time is these insights have started to be identified with the practices that lead to the insight, that lead to this clear awareness, clear Sati. Some of those things are the ability to know clearly. So the recognition of the present moment experience is not the same thing as Sati in the original meaning of mindfulness, but it's become the meaning of mindfulness. And then for people who do that clear recognition of the present moment, that's sometimes called Vipassanā practice. We don't use the word Vipassanā here too much to refer to ourselves; we use the word insight. Part of it is not just because it's English, I guess that's one reason. But also because when the American teachers who started this particular lineage that we're in—Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield—they used "insight" to describe their first meditation center, Insight Meditation Society. And so then different places called themselves "insight" to associate themselves with that. So "Insight Meditation" is a little bit like a brand name or an association name for people connected in this kind of lineage.

Then there's a different lineage that uses the word Vipassanā centers. People say, "I just came back from a 10-day Vipassanā retreat." Chances are 99% that they were doing a Goenka retreat, which is wonderful, but they're different. They practice a little differently. Our practice and their practice has the same goal, but the means to it is different. The goal is the same insight—the same insights into inconstancy, something called not-self, and something called suffering, dukkha⁴—to see those in a deep way. So they and the Vipassanā people practice to have the same deep insight but get there in slightly different ways. Is that enough? That was a lot.

Questioner 3: Good morning, Gil. I have a question about something I've been exploring, some in my own work and teaching, which is something I was inspired to explore actually from my activities here. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the connection between beauty and ethical mind states.

Gil Fronsdal: Ah, the connection between beauty and ethical mind states. Every three years or so I teach a year-long course here on ethics. There are what's called the three trainings in Buddhism: the training in ethics, the training in meditation, and the training in wisdom. They're all equally important, and so I do a year-long course on each of those. In 2025, I'll start with the ethics again. The first thing that we read for that course is an essay on beauty. Because beauty—one of the words for beauty that I'm referring to in Pali—also means what in English we call ethics. It turns out there's no good Pali word, believe it or not, an ancient Buddhist word that represents the English word ethics. One of the first Western professors of Buddhist ethics was really amazed when he started looking, trying to study ethics in Buddhism, and he couldn't find any like books or doctrines or treatises or philosophies of ethics, teachings of ethics like he had been used to in Western theological studies.

I think he has an article called something like "Morality Without Ethics." And then he describes how historically this word "ethics" was somehow, because of Western cultural reasons, kind of became its own special thing. In Buddhism, ethics was not separated from the whole enterprise of Buddhism. From a Western point of view, the whole enterprise of Buddhism is ethical from the beginning all the way to enlightenment. Enlightenment is an ethical experience, but it's not kind of called that. It's just called Dharma, it's just called Dharma practice. So you have to kind of read more carefully to see that every step along the way, there's an ethical quality to it.

One of the characteristics of this kind of ethical quality is that it's a natural consequence of the mind's or the heart's beauty. To cultivate this beauty, to discover this inner beauty, this wholesomeness, this sense of, is synonymous with cultivating an ethical sensitivity. In Buddhism, ethics is defined as inseparable from, kind of, that which avoids causing harm but instead causes benefit. It's that easy. So that's the whole domain of Buddhist idea of ethics, and of course it can get complicated, how to analyze that in different circumstances. But that orientation to not causing harm is considered in Buddhism as profoundly beautiful. I've met people you really clearly feel that that's their orientation, and I think they're just beautiful people. The inner beauty... sometimes I've met people who are incapable, it seems like this person's incapable of telling a lie. You can just kind of feel it in them, and I said, "Wow, that's so beautiful and so wonderful." So, rather than shaking my finger at you and saying you should be ethical, I'll just smile at you and say, "Let us see your beauty, your inner beauty." That would serve the world well.

Questioner 4: Thank you. At this time in the world—I don't want to go into detail—but in our country, some people feel a responsibility for addressing a potentially very dangerous situation for our country as a whole. And when I think about this, I remember Martin Luther King crossing the Pettus Bridge. He was leading lots of people in a civil rights protest. He was in the front of the line. He was addressed by people making violent threats, and he surprised people because he knelt in prayer in the middle of the march. He just knelt down and started to pray. I wondered if you had any help for people in that kind of situation. I think some of us find ourselves in right now, in terms of meditation or some practice we could do that would help us right now. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Well, I think all of Buddhist practice is a preparation for that capacity. And I say that because that was really the first reason why I got interested in Buddhism. It was not my suffering, but rather it was to be able to step into exactly those kinds of situations and not be afraid of dying because it's risky, right? I'm dedicated to non-violent action, so it's not pacifism in the sense of not doing anything, but rather you have to show up, but to do it non-violently. I could see when I was 20 how important that was for me, but that I didn't know if I could do it because I felt afraid of the potential death that would come. And I thought Buddhism had the answer to that issue of fear of death.

In terms of how it's changed, I'm not afraid of death now. I don't particularly want to die, and I'll be careful in how I drive and things like that. But I have, in a certain way, a kind of a positive orientation to dying. If I could die, if I'm lucky enough to die consciously, because I imagine that it's very much like a process of the deepest meditation you go into. So, the idea, "Oh, that would be cool."

But more specifically what you can do—all of Buddhist practice is this: to meditate, to practice and know your own mind well. So that if you get afraid, if you get angry in a situation like that, it doesn't take you over. That you know how to stay balanced, equanimous. You know how to stay peaceful no matter what's coming your way. That you're able to stand there and look someone in the eye. As you know, there's someone that we know that was at the riots in San Francisco State University—it's called San Francisco State College back in the Vietnam War—and was up against a riot police and looking, you know, pressed up against him and looked him in his eye and was changed for the rest of her life by what she saw, the humanity of that person. I've known someone who was in the Civil Rights South and was literally beat up for three days in a row by the same white racist in a protest. And then the third day, the same guy came to beat her up, and he had his fist up in the air to strike her again. And he looked her in the eyes and he stopped, and he said, "What are you doing here?" And then they had a conversation and there was no more violence. To have that ability is phenomenal, to know yourself well.

One of the classic Buddhist prayers that we would do is we would rely on loving-kindness meditation. So our equivalent perhaps of stopping to pray is to wish the enemy, the people who are fighting against us, wish them well and cultivate goodwill and spread that goodwill.

Questioner 5: This question is going to seem really trivial after all that, but when I was first taught to meditate, I was taught that one should reflect on one's intention before sitting down to meditate. I never understood that question, and I also was conscious of not wanting anything from meditation. So ever since, I say my intention is to sit and meditate. I don't know if I've misinterpreted that.

Gil Fronsdal: So when you say that, when you establish that intention at the beginning of the meditation, does that support your meditation?

Questioner 5: I think so, but then I wonder, should I just not even bother doing that? Am I supposed to have a better intention?

Gil Fronsdal: Right, you wonder if there's a right intention. Maybe there's supposed to be something grand. So, one of the answers to these kinds of questions is to find the answer for yourself. And what I asked you was the way to find it. Did it help your meditation to establish the intention to meditate at the beginning? When I first started meditating, as I said, I did because I was suffering. At some point, the kind of surface suffering that I had been trying to address kind of dissolved, and I attributed it to the meditation I was doing. So the reason for why I was meditating was no longer there. But the really weird thing was for me was that I continued to meditate. I like to do things for reasons; I'm kind of a little bit logical or rational or something. And so I thought, "This is really strange. I'm meditating for no reason." Why am I doing this? I was a college student, an undergraduate, there's other things to do. And every morning, every evening, I meditated. Why am I doing this? I had that question for a long time, but I still kept meditating.

So for now, I'll stop for a moment and say that's one answer: you don't have to have an intention. You can just do it anyway. Maybe something deep inside knows that this is what you're doing, you want to do this. There's no question, which was my case. Eventually, what I realized was that I was meditating as a form of self-expression, not as something to attain. It was associated with the way that an artist might paint or a dancer might dance as a form of expression. It's not about finishing something or accomplishing anything; it's the very act of itself. And that became a really important orientation for me for meditation. It wasn't the intention wasn't any more than just to let this inner expressivity flow through me that was deeper than words, deeper than my emotions, a really deep thing.

Some people give instructions to connect to your intention at the beginning of a retreat or a sitting because then people have a little bit more sense of focus on the practice. Otherwise, you know, we're sitting there and thinking about what we should have for lunch, or my boss yelled at me yesterday and I really need to come back with a better rejoiner tomorrow. That might be important, but maybe meditation is more important. So to be reminded, "Oh, my intention is to really sit and be focused and be here," that kind of lets the extra stuff fall away, and we're more here to do it. If it doesn't happen, if that doesn't help you, you're more than welcome to drop it. There's no "shoulds" in this practice. The only "should" would be for you to learn how to be your own teacher in the practice. So by trial and error, find out what works for you, what doesn't work. But it does help if you have some kind of sense of why you're practicing, what you're practicing for.

What I like to do—and I don't want to mess you up even more—one of the great exercises I think is to ask yourself—I did that for a year, every day—ask yourself the question, "What is your deepest intention?" or "What is your deepest sense of purpose? What's your deepest sense of meaning that you have?" What was great about doing it over a year was I started going through all these different answers. I had one answer, and then the next day, somehow it would support me to go a little bit further, a little bit further. Sometimes I had negative answers, like, "I don't want to be afraid anymore." That's my intention. But if it's negative, then I'd ask myself, "Well, Gil, if you were not afraid, what would your intention then be?" And that would drop me into a deeper place, and it would change over time. It was really great. I think this question is so important, our lives are so valuable, that if you're asking and answering that question for yourself and you don't see how meditation relates to that, maybe you shouldn't meditate.

Online Question 1 (Pat Ho): How is Dharma attended to in personal relationships, especially family and intimate others like wives and children?

Gil Fronsdal: Well, I think that in these relationships, there's a higher degree of emotional connection. There's a higher degree of, whether we know it or not, impact that we have and benefit that can come from the relationship. I think one of the things Buddhist practice does is help us to appreciate the primacy of those relationships, or the depth of those relationships, or the potentiality of those relationships. For Buddhists, what I like to believe is that when we have these kind of more primary relationships, we always discover how to love the other, to always be able to find something like love or compassion or care. At different times, different ones will be operating, but my belief is that at some point in my Buddhist practice, I felt it was possible to find a way to love everyone. It was only then that I felt inspired, or I felt I could get behind being married. Because I thought, "This is the person I want to always discover where I can find the love, no matter what happens." Yes, we'll grow separate and yes, we'll have different things that happen and all kinds of things, but I want to always, I know that love can be universal, and I always want to come to this person I have committed to and always find it.

I think to have that as a primary characteristic of the relationship means that we're dedicated to not letting anything interfere with the clarity and the openness of the relationship. So we don't let hate or anger or resentment or envy... we don't let greed or expectations or lust or projecting our needs or our values onto the other, because all those things make the water muddy. We want to have this clear seeing or a clear space in every relationship we're in. And so that takes a lot of self-work, you know, to really recognize, "Okay, now I'm resentful. Now I'm angry. I guess I have work to do." Now this is part of my practice. And even if you can't let go of the anger or the fear or the hostility or the resentment, or sometimes the worst that can happen to someone is they close down, they shut down their heart to other people. "I have no anger." Yes, but your heart's closed.

The purpose of mindfulness and practice in Buddhism is to always bring enough attention to yourself to really see where the tension is, where the stress is, where we shut down, where the unwholesome, non-beautiful parts of the heart are taking predominance, and to not believe in it, not trust in it, not prioritize it, not give into it. That might not automatically help us to love other people, but if we try to jump over to the love before we do this inner work, the love might not be so genuine. So in Buddhism, there's always this deeper look. Look here, this is my work. And as soon as you say, "This is my work," then you're starting to become free from being caught in some of the ways that we get attached in relationships. With deep, primary relationships, the attachments sometimes are the very deepest ones we have. And so the stakes are pretty high in these relationships because if you're really going to let go fully, whoa, that's scary in these relationships. "I can't let go of that." But Buddhism says you can. And the reason you can is that the love, the compassion, the care, the respect, and maybe the commitment remains. That doesn't have to go away when there's no attachment. In fact, I'd like to believe that the love is actually better when we've let go fully.

Online Question 2 (Jamie Andrews): Is there a connection between non-self and emptiness? Are they from different traditions?

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, well thank you, Jamie. I remember you fondly from the many times you sat here in this room. Yes and no. The way that these ideas of emptiness and not-self are taught varies in different Buddhist traditions. There's one school of Buddhism called Mahayana⁵ Buddhism, which is the Buddhism of kind of East Asia, especially Tibet and East Asia. And they made a specialty around the philosophy and the practice and the insights of emptiness. So they go to town to talk about all the different forms of emptiness. And when you've spent 2,000 years with the philosophy of emptiness, you can imagine that it's varied and rich. You could spend a lifetime as a Buddhist scholar digging into the different teachings on emptiness.

But in the earliest form of Buddhism, it's there as well. In our tradition, there's a connection between emptiness and not-self. One of them is that the insight, this Vipassanā that we have, the deep insight, the clear seeing—at some point we don't have to believe in this, we don't have to understand it philosophically or read a book to understand it, but it's something that becomes obvious. It's revealed to the eyes in a completely obvious way, nothing could be clearer as the practice deepens—that everything in the world of our experience is absent of self. Of course, for many people, that's outrageous. I mean, what am I? Do I disappear? Do I not exist? What goes on here? And no, you're just fine. But there isn't this coagulation around a concept, ideas around self. Even the very simple feeling of "am-ness," "I am." If there's a feeling for that, in Buddhism they say that's not quite free yet. The very, very little constellation of am-ness we feel, even when that dissolves, that's freedom. But you're still there, you're still fine. So I don't know if that answers Jamie's question well enough, but maybe that's enigmatic enough to spark your curiosity around this topic.

Questioner 6: Thanks, Gil. You spoke a lot about suffering being a motivation, and I think that's something that deeply resonates for where I am in my practice. I feel a lot of sadness still, and so I wanted to ask if you can talk more about what can be supportive for practice when there's still a lot of sadness for the sufferings going on in what's around us.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, yeah. Well, thank you. There is an ancient teaching in Buddhism, an idea that everyone comes to Buddhism because of suffering. Not everyone realizes that, but one way or another, people come. And the suffering has to take some flavor—31 flavors of suffering. And so I have tremendous value, I really appreciate very much, someone coming up and just saying matter-of-factly, "My flavor is sadness." Because it has to be something. And to be so clear about it and open about it, I think you're well on your way to finding your way with it. So thank you.

The first thing that occurred to me—and I don't know why it occurred to me, I don't know if it's particular to something I'm understanding about you just with a question, or maybe it's just me—the first thing I would like to say is, be a sad Buddha. I say that in the sense that a sad Buddha means don't feel like you have to fix it or make it different or feel bad about yourself for being sad. Sadness often needs time, it needs to be allowed to be there. And many people don't know how to let sadness be there. I mean, they know they're sad, but then they're adding layers of reactivity on top of it. "I shouldn't be sad. I'm wrong because I'm sad. I mean, after all, I'm a Buddhist, I'm supposed to be always smiling and loving, you know, but now I'm a bad Buddhist because I'm sad." So there's layers of things that we do. Or it might just feel so uncomfortable the body tenses up, or you might feel so discouraged for whatever reason.

This idea of just being a sad Buddha is to find a way to just allow it to be there. And then what we do in mindfulness practice is, once we can learn how to be very simple, make space for it, allow it to be there as if it has permission to be there, then we can begin maybe seeing it more clearly. Find out not to understand it, you know, to analyze it, but to really get more deeply familiar. What's the roots of it in our body? How does it play out in the body? Part of the benefit of feeling emotions like this in the body is the body is a processing center that works much better than the mind. So it's a kind of way of getting out of the way of the emotions so the motion part of emotions can operate. It can be in moving. And all emotions want to move, so even sadness wants to do something. Sometimes these more painful emotions, before they can heal or become better or do what they need to do, they need to be stronger. Then the practice, if you have enough practice, you start having confidence. It's okay, I have the ability to be present, to be with it as it gets stronger and hold it, be a sad Buddha.

I have a lot of respect for sadness. I think sadness is something really important inside of us. My idea about sadness is that it's a harbinger of something that wants to be born inside. And what is it that wants to be born? So the ability to just allow it to be there, give it permission to be there, to look deeper, see what else is there. Sometimes underneath sadness might be hurt, and so maybe the hurt needs more time. Sometimes below that hurt might be love, and maybe that love now has a chance to grow and inform how we relate to the challenges we've been in. Or maybe sadness and depression sometimes are not so different. And we have a culture now in the West that I think has developed a very negative attitude towards depression, that somehow it's wrong and you should fix it as soon as you can with anti-depressant medication. Sometimes depression and sadness is a kind of fallow time, that something wants to work through or something new wants to come. And sometimes we need to give ourselves the time, quality time in being sad, being depressed, just to see if there's something else that wants to come that we're missing out on. If we don't allow that, some people don't give themselves that time and they rush into what's next, what they think they should be doing, and something kind of lingers deep inside that remains unresolved.

Questioner 7: My answer was supposed to be short, but my question is this, and I have to say that all that you've been talking about today have sort of been answers towards my question I'm about to ask. But maybe you could elaborate even further. My question is this: given the political nature, and I'm going to use words like Trump and Biden, so forgive me everybody, or don't. But here's my question. I am experiencing, and I know a lot of people are experiencing, a lot of fear, anxiety, judgment, and rage and anger. Okay? So I find myself filled with all of those things with respect to this fellow, Donald Trump. And I fear, given the last debate, I fear that he has a good chance to win. So my question is this, Gil: can you give some words and thoughts to how one like myself can respond if in fact he wins? But even if he doesn't, I am so judgmental and fearful and resentful, all these things. So you get it. So are there any more thoughts you can give to how one like myself can respond to these possibilities? And I know part of it's my future projecting, but anyway, that's my question.

Gil Fronsdal: You know, real short answer, please. I think one of the huge issues in the world these days, but also in this country here, is not political. It's hate and fear and the kind of divisiveness that comes from that in all directions. And if there's going to be a solution that's really going to be valuable, there has to be some deep addressing of this issue of divisiveness and hate. And that work can only happen at the individual level. So it needs to start with you. And if you're so mesmerized, so enamored, so obsessed with what's happening out there, you're actually missing yourself in a profound way. And probably the more that you're concerned out there, the more there's a need for you to really drop down deep inside of yourself to see what's really going on for you. There's probably some form of suffering in you that's actually primary, that's responsible for this external orientation and this expectation that the answer is out there and someone is supposed to fix it. But the real issue is hate and that divisiveness and the fear. Do your work.

And in the meantime, while you're doing that, if you're really concerned about any kind of world situations strong enough—one of the reason that people feel like what you're doing is they feel helpless—do something. Do something, anything at all that addresses what you're most concerned with, even if it's very small. So that's the hopefully short... because my answer was supposed to be short. I want it to be penetrating for you. I hope it did.

Okay, so now that we have deep insight, we have love, we have non-attachment, we're ready to do the practice. We either do or do not have a good intention to keep practicing. Let's bring it all to bear for potluck. You're all welcome to stay. It's very nice whether you brought something or not. Maybe because it's a potluck, if you'd be willing to take even two minutes to say hello to two people next to you and introduce yourself briefly. And then give us a little bit of time to set up the last of the potluck stuff. If you don't want to even stay for that, that's fine, but it's nice to say hello and maybe say something about what we talked about today.