This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Keeping Freedom in Mind; Six Sense-Spheres (5 of 5): The Sixth Sense. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Keeping Freedom in Mind; Dharmette: Six Sense-Spheres (5 of 5): The Sixth Sense - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 05, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning friends. Welcome back. Greetings from here in Portland, Oregon, and greetings to you from the IMC headquarters, the mothership in Redwood City, California. We'll get underway in a couple of minutes. In the meantime, hello to people signing in on the chat and warm greetings to everyone else as well.

Good day to you wherever you are. Thank you once again for coming together to practice, and in this way, supporting one another's practice. It's a sweet thing to participate together, and I feel the warmth, even at this odd, internet-mediated distance, of the IMC global community.

We'll continue today exploring the teaching of the six sense spheres¹. Today we arrive at the sixth sense: the mind. I think sometimes we think of the mind as being an obstacle to our practice, occasionally even the enemy. This is particularly true as practice begins and gets underway. And yet, with time spent sitting with the mind, being with the mind, and appreciating the mind, we can recognize that it plays a really important role in finding our way to freedom. We help the mind create new habits. We help the mind incline naturally, as second nature, toward freedom and away from suffering. We can't do this without the mind.

Guided Meditation: Keeping Freedom in Mind

So, the guided meditation today I've called "Keeping Freedom in Mind." There may be times when this seems like a practice about suffering. That's where we start; that's frequently how we come to the practice. But it's really a practice about freedom.

Let's take our meditation postures, doing this rebalancing that I've been stressing this week. Adjusting our posture, finding our way into our posture, bringing attention to our posture so as to encourage a balance between alertness and ease. Full, awake presence here and now, but in a way that's relaxed, open, and non-judgmental. Accompanying ourselves, opening ourselves to our experience, not pushing anything away, not holding anything close.

For many of us, using the breath as an anchor in the here and now of our lives. Returning to the breath, returning to some aspect of bodily experience. Periodically, when we find the mind has become tense and tight, contracted around a thought or an emotion, we come back to the breath. And here in the breath, in the middle of the body, we can find a place of ease and a place of freedom.

I have been stressing this week that the breath itself represents a sensory sphere. It's a way we make contact with the world through the sense of touch, through the sense of interoception. It's an object lesson, a model of how we can be fully involved in the world of sensory experience and yet free at the same time. Free from clinging, free from stress, free from unease.

So when we return to the breath in this sit today, we can do so with a sense of returning to a place of freedom. By doing this with each return to the breathing, we keep freedom in mind. We want to keep our mind inclined toward the goal of our practice, and we can remind ourselves of that each time we return to the breath.

Maybe you can notice it this way: We sort of wake up periodically, noticing that the mind has become contracted or tight around something. Thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past, thoughts of other people, thoughts of ourselves. Or maybe we have this sense that the mind has wandered away, leapt away, or rushed away, and we pull it back to the here and now. If the mind feels tight and contracted, we open it back up gently to the breath.

There's no reason to hurry when we do this. We'll have plenty of opportunities to do it again. We don't need to rush back to the breath. As we move back to the breath, we can notice the contrast. The world we were wrapped up in there for a minute—a familiar thought spiral, a worry, a plan, a memory—tends to be more complicated, frequently moves at a quicker pace, and tends to feel slightly less balanced than the breath.

When we return to the breath, we have an opportunity to connect with these characteristics of the breath, these natural, inherent qualities of breathing. It tends to be slower, uncomplicated, simple, and balanced. We can recognize this as a place of freedom. With each return, we can keep freedom in mind.

This practice of the six sense spheres encourages us to keep freedom in mind. This world that we know through the six sense bases is, in Buddhist teachings, "the world." If we can be free, if we can find a way to be at ease without pushing and pulling, without preference in this play of senses, sense objects, and sense consciousness, we can be free in the world.

The meditation provides a way to keep freedom in mind. This practice points onwards toward practices in which freedom plays the central role. Its place in the teachings is to move us from perhaps a bit of an obsession with suffering to an orientation toward freedom.

We can do this in the meditation. Every time we return to the breath, just notice that this place can be free. We can be aware here in a way that keeps us fully present and also free.

This freedom that we can find in the practice can be shared with the world without diminishing it. We can give it all away with confidence that it comes from an inexhaustible source. Maybe going forward from this week, sharing some of the benefits of the practice, we can be aware of how it can build our confidence that there's plenty more freedom where this came from. So we can share it easily with a free, open hand.

So welcome again, everyone. Thanks for meditating together.

Dharmette: Six Sense-Spheres (5 of 5): The Sixth Sense

Somehow, in closing out that guided meditation, I was reminded of something quite important about this six sense spheres teaching. I may or may not have mentioned this on Monday, but if so, it doesn't hurt to repeat it. This teaching of the six sense spheres is placed right in the middle of a set of teachings in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta²—the suttas about establishing mindfulness, the key discourse in the mindfulness practice.

It has this middle, pivotal position between two exercises or practices that really focus on understanding suffering: the Five Hindrances³ and the Five Aggregates⁴. And on the other side, the Seven Awakening Factors⁵ and the Four Noble Truths⁶. In a way, it helps us move toward keeping freedom in mind, as we did in the guided meditation. It keeps orienting us to the goals of the practice, the ultimate orientation of what brings us to practice. We may think that we come to end our suffering, but in that is a wholesome desire and aspiration for our own well-being, for freedom from suffering.

So today, the fifth of these five days focused on the six sense spheres, I'll talk about mind—the sixth sense in Buddhist phenomenology and thought.

It can be challenging, I think, to think of the mind as a sense organ like the other five that we've talked about. It's fairly easy to conceive of, say, the sense of smell as a sense sphere. There are olfactory receptors, there are molecules in the world, and when brought together, there's an arising of a consciousness of scent. Maybe it's more challenging to think of the mind as an organ that meets objects of attention, and from which emerges a consciousness of cognition. It's a little bit trickier to talk about.

But think of it this way for a minute: among the millions of possible ideas, words, images, thoughts, and memories, the mind latches on to one at a time. This latching on is mind consciousness—knowing what's known, to put it another way. The objects of the mind's attention—mind objects—include all sorts of familiar things: internal thoughts, feelings, stories, concepts, memories, and abstract ideas like "the self." They also include internal and external sensory data that is processed by the mind. Inner conversations, ideas, self-identity, worries, plans, joy, sadness, anger. And physical sensations—body sensations, pain, or pleasure. The mind does a lot of weaving together of information from the other senses in a way that creates mind objects.

Mental objects or mind objects also include the concepts that we use as focal points for the meditation. The breath, which is actually an abstraction—we focus on the sensations of the breathing. The objects of contemplation from the teachings, like the six sense spheres, are also objects of mind. You might notice that there's a little bit of a difference when we focus on the teachings as mind objects. They can have a role in furthering our practice, deepening our meditation, moving us toward greater ease and freedom in the world, and strengthening mindfulness and wisdom.

Interestingly, the mind is an ally in our practice. I said at the outset of the guided meditation that sometimes we see the mind as something to get past, or an obstacle, an impediment, a challenge, even an enemy to the practice. But the mind plays a central role in furthering our practice and moving us toward freedom.

The particular sort of thought that we work with in the meditation, that we work to attenuate with mindful attention, we sometimes refer to as "discursive thought." This is the kind of thought that moves from one theme to another and never really seems to result in anything particularly useful. Being lost in thought, being "there and then" as opposed to "here and now." Thought in which a huge percentage—90% and above—are thoughts about ourselves, having "I, me, and mine" in the middle. Thoughts that are familiar and repetitive. Discursive thought includes the stories that make up a big part of our way of thinking.

Our practice helps us move below this discursive thought into other aspects of our experience, including other ways that the mind can take wholesome objects—objects that help move us toward greater freedom.

I never find myself frustrated with the mind anymore. In fact, sometimes when the mind is busy in meditation—when it's throwing up solutions to problems, trying to figure something out, or making a plan—I feel grateful. I get that the mind is trying to do what it sees as its job. It's trying to help; it's trying to provide useful solutions. Frequently, before I return to the breath, I'll say, "Thank you. Appreciate the help. Appreciate the idea. I'll keep that in mind and maybe I'll return to that." I'm not always honest with the mind; I might not have any intention of going back to that, but I just say, "Thank you, I'll put that to one side. I'm going to go back to the breath right now."

Of course, we can't get through life without a mind that does these things. Some appreciation for all that the mind does for us can be a really useful way to hold it easily and lightly in the practice. It's not our enemy. We're trying to cultivate other aspects of mind—other capacities and competencies of mind that are less developed.

What we're doing in working with the mind and the objects it takes is creating a place of rest. This is something I've emphasized in the guided meditations this week: a place where the mind can rest from that discursive generation of things, which is part of what it usefully does. We want to reduce the power of certain patterns of thought that are deeply ingrained—certain ways that we react to pain, pleasure, and all sorts of inputs. We want to reduce the power of the old ways we do things, the reactive patterns, so that we can cultivate new mental habits.

One way of thinking about what we're doing is replacing one set of mind objects with another. We are getting in the habit of keeping freedom in mind, making sure that we use the mind's ability to be with us in the world to keep us focused on where we want to go with our practice, and what we want to bring to the world as a result of our practice.

This is where we bring attention to aspects of knowing our experience deeply, our inner life. This includes our deepest held intentions, our aspirations, and the way wanting and aversion get in the way of those intentions. We bring our attention to the teachings, waiting for teachings to land. I use a lot of synonyms; I sometimes string together a series of phrases that mean much the same thing because I know from my experience that sometimes one phrase will land and another won't. We wait for mind objects to emerge that advance our practice, that deepen our meditation, or move our practice toward greater freedom.

As I wanted to demonstrate in the meditation, the mind can take these wonderful qualities of the potential of our practice as objects. Freedom, compassion, the sharing of the merit of our practice—these, too, are objects of the mind in a way that deepens our practice.

Mind is tricky to work with. Maybe that's why it's left to the sixth sense, or to the fifth day of five days of 7 a.m. YouTube sharings. But there are also advantages to establishing mindful awareness in the mind as this relationship between mind object and mind consciousness arises.

The principal one that comes to mind is that some of the other senses seem to fix things in time fairly easily. We see something and we imagine that it's solid, that it will stay that way. This can be true of things we touch, too. But with the mind, it's really obvious that mind, mind objects, and mind consciousness—each of the three parts of this triad—are all impermanent, unreliable, and constantly changing. It's very difficult to keep anything in mind for more than a very short period of time. We can keep returning to something and kind of hold it in mind, but just being with mind, letting mind be mind, being observant of how mind works and how mind consciousness arises, is an object lesson in seeing impermanence.

This can, of course, be very useful for developing the wisdom of our practice. Mindfulness of this aspect of mind as a sensory organ can be a direct doorway into finding freedom.

The practical aspect is that anytime we find ourselves lost in discursive thought—be it in meditation or at a holiday party—when we find ourselves lost in a story or in "second arrows,"⁷ we can return to center. We can return to the "home for the holidays" that we created yesterday, right in the field of the body sitting on a chair and breathing. We can return to the breath or elsewhere in the body where there's a sense of wholeness and tranquility.

We can be free there. We can be in this world of sensory experience—and in the sitting meditation, almost all these senses are playing some role—and find ourselves aware of that in a way that doesn't have preference. It doesn't have "for and against," grasping, clinging, pushing away, or aversion. We're not making it into "me" or "mine." We can be free in this world—the only world we know, in the only way we know it: through these six senses.

I remember the first time I read in a book of Buddhist phenomenology that we only know the world through these six sense doors. I found that kind of astounding. All we know—this entire, incredible fabrication that happens that allows us to move through the world and do important things—all of this is a reflection of just six sense doors. Six sets of potential objects in the world and six arisings of sensory consciousness. It's pretty remarkable, and it's a place in which freedom is available. Freedom exists there as an inexhaustible source of well-being.

So in closing for this week, I encourage you to keep this practice close to heart. Keep it with you during the holidays when the senses are activated in a way that sometimes we may not be as aware of. Share the benefits of practice. And if you lack any confidence that there's plenty more where this freedom came from, please accept a little of my confidence, and those of my IMC teaching colleagues, in the freedom that's possible in this practice.

Take care all, see you again, and happy holidays if you're celebrating.