This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Heedfulness; The Five Precepts (5 of 5): Abstaining from intoxicated heedlessness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Heedfulness; Dharmette: The Five Precepts (5 of 5): Abstaining from intoxicated heedlessness - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 07, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Welcome, greetings. So today, we'll finish with our exploration of the five precepts, at least in this gathering. I very much hope that this has been inspiring to people to undertake some mindful attention to the ideas in these precepts, if not the precepts themselves. But certainly consider making these commitments to explore non-harming action in our practice as a support for practice and take them out into the world. May they benefit all beings.

Today we'll talk about the fifth precept. I joked yesterday that it was appropriate for Friday because this is the precept that encourages us to abstain from intoxicated heedlessness. We'll talk about what that means after we sit together, but in the joking, light-hearted manner, I hope I've conveyed also that this practice of five precepts can be taken on with a light heart, with a smile, almost with a sense of play. It's an opportunity to find out how we show up in the world, and really, it's a way to let our strengths, our natural and authentic capacities for doing good, emerge by clearing away some of the harmful activities we engage in or that we're tempted to engage in.

So let's meditate to start with, prepare our minds for the Dharma with a half-hour sit.

Guided Meditation: Heedfulness

Find yourself into your meditation posture. I've emphasized earlier this week in the guided, finding some balance, or it's actually not finding balance, searching for balance, cultivating balance as much as noticing the balance that's there when we bring our attention inward and downward from the outside world to this inner life. From the head to the heart, from the heart to the body, balancing and rebalancing again and again. The tightness, the wrapped-upness of the mind in thought with the stillness that's available here with the breath, the hereness and nowness of our experience that's in the center of things along with the breathing.

Today, we'll spend a little bit more time than we have with connecting with the breath. We can do it in this way today in this meditation. When we do this activity that strengthens our mindfulness of redirecting attention back to the center of things, back to the ground, back to our rootedness here now, using the breath most commonly as an anchor, as a way to reenter, we can notice how the mind connects with the breath and with the qualities that are inherent in the breathing, in ways that let a little bit of the breath's natural characteristics and qualities rub off on the mind, if you will.

When we find ourselves caught up in thought, thinking about the future, thinking about the past, thinking about other people, thinking about ourselves, we can notice maybe that it's a little tight. Maybe the pace of things picks up; the speed of thought is quite quick. Maybe we notice it's a little off-balance, where we feel a little off-kilter. When we return attention to the breath, we connect the mind with the simplicity of the breath, the slow pace of the breath, the uncomplicated nature of the breath, the balance of the breath. And these qualities sort of rub off on the mind. When the mind rests here, the mind can enjoy the stillness, the balance, the simplicity, and the slow pace that are natural to the breathing in meditation.

When the mind gets sort of tight, caught up around a thought—something that's got to be done today, something that was done or maybe left undone yesterday, some interaction we expect with someone else or had with someone else, some concern with ourselves, the usual places that the mind helps us and can get us caught up and tangled—when we open back up to the breathing in the middle of things, bringing the breathing back to the center of attention, to the foreground, we can notice the mind connecting with other aspects of the breathing.

The breathing doesn't need to plan the next breath. The breathing seems to be extremely confident in this breath right here, this one. And now this one. This one breath doesn't concern itself about the breath five or 10 breaths ago, that it wasn't good enough, wasn't adequate, fell short, should have been better. No, the breath is just right here. The breath doesn't criticize itself for being as it is. The breath doesn't aspire to become a master breather. So again, a light-hearted, playful way of recognizing that when we bring attention back to the breathing, we can connect with all these wonderful qualities of the breath, and they're just natural to the breath. We don't have to do anything except for make the connection, keep reintroducing the mind to this place of rest in the breath, and just let those good qualities of the breathing—slow, steady, confident, here, now, balanced, simple—just let those rub off on the mind. The mind likes this. The mind enjoys this rest, this gentle breathing in and out, even if it's sometimes quivery, sometimes deeper, shallower, slower, quicker. The breathing can be a place for the mind to rest.

As we reconnect again and again with the here and now by way of connecting, introducing, and reintroducing the mind with the simplicity, the slow pace, the balance of the body of the breathing, we can make this a point of departure for dedicating the merit of our practice today. And we share some of the ease and calm that comes to us in the meditation with others. Can we lean into a heartfelt wish that others benefit from the practice, knowing that when others benefit, we also benefit.

So, wishing all beings well. Wishing all beings safety, security, freedom from want. Wishing all beings comfort, ease. Wishing all beings freedom from suffering. May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: The Five Precepts (5 of 5): Abstaining from intoxicated heedlessness

Welcome again, everyone. Greetings, and thank you for this week of practice together. I appreciate you including me in this wonderful community.

Today, we'll bring our exploration of the five precepts to a temporary conclusion, because I fully hope that you'll continue making these commitments to avoiding harmful activity, that you'll make these part of your regular practice. I think another thing that makes them distinct from commandments is that they're fun to work with, actually. They're freeing to work with, and so that can make them quite enjoyable to work with.

Before I jump into them, several people asked last time where do I teach, and this gives me an opportunity to tell you, if you don't know already, about some other offerings of IMC, because that's where I teach—IMC and affiliated organizations. I teach occasionally in IMC's year-round Eightfold Path program. If you don't know, it's out there; check it out. It's an opportunity to work through the steps of the Eightfold Path over the course of a year. It's coming to a close now and begins again late summer; keep an eye on the IMC website. I teach at IRC, the Retreat Center, and be aware on the IRC website that there are new listings for what we're calling off-site Retreats offered by a new group of IMC teachers and teacher trainees over the next couple years—all sorts of different kinds of Retreats that allow us to expand outside of the IRC format and accommodate many more practitioners than can be accommodated at IRC. And then I also teach with others through the Sati Center. There I teach with colleagues you may know: Diana Clark, Kim Allen, and Ying Chen. I have taught for several years now an ongoing series of study and practice courses, with more coming up this summer. We also teach a retreat together. And finally, occasionally I teach with Andrea Castillo in Spanish, both courses of sutta study this year and at the retreat center. So check those out.

The fifth precept is a precept in which we undertake a commitment to refrain from what I've called over the course of the week—it's a tongue twister, I know—but "intoxicated heedlessness." I found myself liking this phrase because I think it brings attention to the challenge of this precept, rather than again, a commandment, a rule to not take drugs, not drink, which just wouldn't be super helpful, I don't think. The focus is on heedlessness and other words that can translate the term that's used in Pali, pamāda¹: negligence, indolence, remissness, carelessness.

The particular challenge of intoxicants of all kinds is that they lead us into actions that can cause harm. It's not so much that, and then can cause physical harm to ourselves, obviously, but it's that heedless, careless action that can result from intoxication that is the thing to watch.

One thing that can be noticed in our lives and practice—and this is an ancient thing, probably as long as there's been fully modern Homo sapiens—there has been the urge to intoxication and, in that way, to transcend this body, this earthly realm, this human life, even if it's brief, even if it has side effects, even if you wake up and not feeling good the next day. That urge is very old, and this precept can bring our attention to that urge to not only intoxication but to the carelessness or the carefreeness that comes with it.

For interacting with this, the Buddha had a framework that turns up with frequency in the suttas, in the discourses, and it's not as commonly talked about as frameworks like the Four Noble Truths, for example, but it's referred to as the gratification, the danger, and the escape. It's a three-part way of looking, I think particularly useful in looking at the fifth precept and our, I don't want to say universal, but a very common urge to heedlessness, urge to intoxication, urge to leaving it all behind, stepping outside of it for a period of time.

The idea there is that in the things we use as intoxicants—and again, the prescription is very specific in the language, actually, it's not that specific, but it calls out fermented beverages, still beverages, and other substances, majjā², other substances that intoxicate and can lead to heedlessness—but I think we can extend that to behaviors: gambling, binge shopping (I'm sorry, retail therapy), binge-watching Friends. There can be a lot of different ways that we seek to step outside our suffering or to distract ourselves, and that's the tendency to watch. But to recognize first that there's gratification in that, that it's a hard life, that there's suffering in it, right? As we know from the first Noble Truth, this unsatisfactoriness and the challenge of living in a world of impermanence and unreliability of experience, it gets to us, and it causes stress that we would like to relieve. And we look to all sorts of ways of doing this. Some are healthier, some are more skillful than others, but noticing that this provides gratification and what it does in the system can be extremely important because it brings us closer to understanding our suffering.

The danger can be pretty obvious. We notice that in this case, the particular danger of intoxicated heedlessness is the heedlessness, the carelessness, the remissness, the negligence—a lot of different words that come in there that help us understand that that's the danger of the thing. Maybe it's the hangover, maybe it's the physical harm; those things are important. Maybe it's harm caused to others by our absence or our distraction or our inability to be present with others. But we can notice that the principal danger is that we make decisions, that we engage in actions that don't have in them appropriate care for ourselves or others and that cause harm.

And then finally, the idea of the escape. That there is from this cycle of gratification and danger that we can get kind of caught up in, there is an escape. And of course, the Buddhist remedy is this practice. This is a way to get close to our suffering, understand it, and ease it, and this is a way out. This doubles back on itself, as so much practice does, that this way right here, even meeting together and practicing together, this way right here helps address the gratification we find in intoxicants and the danger of getting caught up in them. But paying attention to what's going on in our experience in the meditation in particular is the escape—"escape" is a strong word—but is certainly an antidote to the intoxication that leads to harmful heedlessness.

So, two thoughts for the day. I'm going to say a few things and then just spend a couple of minutes summarizing, so going a little bit more quickly through the fifth precept than we did with precepts two through four. One of the most useful ways that has worked for me in working with the fifth precept is a practice known as "urge surfing." Some of you are probably familiar with this. Again, not much original here. The recognition that strong emotions, including something like the temptation or the urge to become intoxicated, to step outside this human life for a brief moment or a period of time through an unskillful activity, usually lasts for 90 seconds. Any strong emotion typically peaks, like the crest of a wave, in 90 seconds. And this is a practice of riding out that wave as a surfer would. I don't surf, so the metaphor is a little lost on me, but I have watched surfers. I get the idea that a wave has a crest, and if you can wait through it, recognizing, fully present with it, noticing it happening, after a fairly brief time, which can be a difficult and painful time, urges recede. And it can be an opportunity to watch urges come and go.

I think it can be really useful to watch the urge. For many years, I used to enjoy a cold beer in the afternoon, and I've been very grateful for the explosion of all sorts of non-alcoholic brews of quality in the last, I don't know, 10 years. What I can bring attention to that's really interesting, and I encourage you to do this with whatever intoxicant you've had maybe some challenges with—and again, that can be all sorts of different behaviors—is to choose something that allows you to explore the urge to intoxicated heedlessness or intoxicated freedom from this realm, but doesn't provide the intoxication, but allows understanding that urge to that gratification and perhaps the urge to that heedlessness. It really brings us, it can bring us very close to our suffering. What is it that I want relief from? Oh, it's this. It's this. And it allows us to be close with that instead of papering it over or balancing it with good feelings or all the sorts of things that these kinds of intoxicants, behaviors and substances alike, can bring us. So use it as an opportunity to get close to yourself, to use the practice to get intimate with your experience, including the urges that a lot of times we look away from. We don't really want to know them, and this practice encourages us to get close to that stuff, step in it, know ourselves, know that suffering, get close to it, pay attention to it, learn from it. Anyway, think about that Friday night, right?

So a little bit of review may be useful in the closing minutes. Engaging with this teaching of the precepts, as I kind of discovered for myself in talking with you yesterday, is interesting in part because abstaining from these things is so freeing that it does support practice to engage in leaving something behind. Maybe that should be no surprise. It should be no surprise to me that letting go is freeing, but it's interesting that this is what the precepts are about. They're another way of letting go. They're another way of inclining the mind toward simplicity.

And particularly, something that's sort of come to me this week is when we let some of these behaviors go, one of the beauties of the commitment to abstain or refrain from harmful actions is that it's not an injunction to do the opposite, right? These precepts don't say, "engage in skillful speech," "engage in giving," "engage in protecting life, helping life thrive," "engage in loyal sexual relationships," or "engage in sobriety." They don't say "engage." What they do is leave room to see what emerges in our practice. Because the freeing that happens is very individual and has as many variations as there are people here today and people who practice.

What we do is we clear those unskillful activities out of the way, we get out of our own way, and then we can watch what emerges. What particular skillful activities can I authentically and naturally offer to the practice, to the world, to others, to myself? Each of us will be different. And I think when we clear away some of this, you know, even if they're not super harmful activities, they may not be particularly beneficial, and it allows us to watch, "Oh, here's this arising. Here's an urge to care. Here's an urge to be fully present with this suffering. Here's an urge to give something instead of taking something." I could go on and on. "Here's an urge to listen more carefully, to give attention to somebody."

I've said it several times this week, but the more we do this, the more likely it is that we end up eventually in a place where we're unable to engage in harmful activity, and beneficial activity just emerges naturally from our practice. We're kind of out of the way as actors, and actions come forth that are beneficial.

And to end on that note, I want to quote—I've been thinking of this all week, actually, from the first time I said that this isn't about actors, it's about actions—the famous Suzuki Roshi quote. I hope I can get it right, or right enough. I think of it because Suzuki Roshi was such an important influence on Gil's thinking, his teaching. But he has a famous quote where he says, I think I get it right, "Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as enlightened beings. There's just enlightened activity." And maybe this is something to take forward into the weekend at least, or maybe just the next moment. Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as enlightened beings, just enlightened activity. So it's really when we get out of the way in this way, we allow activities to come forward. When we bring attention to our activities and stop beating ourselves up for being bad, being not perfect actors, we allow this free emergence of activities that support us, support our practice, help ourselves, help other beings.

So with that in mind, a general dedication of merit for our practice this week. So much appreciate you allowing me to share the Dharma with you in this, you know, kind of unusual way for me, where I can't see anybody. I know you're out there. Love the chat. I'll be back probably sometime, I think in July, to again sit in for Gil, and I look forward to that very much, having done this now this week. So take care. I'll let the chat run for a while and follow that after we sign off. But take care, all. Have a wonderful weekend, and may our paths cross again soon. Take care.