This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Direct Experience; Core Teachings (3 of 5) Naturalistic Dharma. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Core Teachings (3 of 5) Naturalistic Dharma; Guided Meditation: Direct Experience - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Direct Experience

Hello everyone and welcome to Wednesday morning here in Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center. It's already a bit warm this morning, and I am feeling happy and a bit inspired to take this seat and to be preparing to talk to you.

The introduction to this morning's meditation instructions is that when we do mindfulness meditation, perhaps when we do most forms of Buddhist meditation, we stay close to what you can directly sense, see, and know without any interpretation, without any judgment, without any recourse to events that are not here and now, to predictions of the future. Without any recourse to what's outside of the basic sense experience that you have here and now.

Certainly the five senses, but also the sixth sense in Buddhism, is the knowing of the mind, knowing of citta¹, knowing of the thinking, knowing of impulses, desires, and aversion. Assume there's like a sense door, a sense that can just know that, "Oh, that's what it is," as opposed to getting involved in what you're thinking about. Because if you're thinking about what you're thinking about, it just leads to more thinking. Rather than what you desire, just know desire. To think about what you're desiring again pulls you into the world of thoughts and maybe even more desires. If there's aversion, just know the aversion in the simplicity of it. You don't have to go into what you have aversion towards, just the simple experience.

So coming back to the basic here, if there are a lot of wonderful experiences in meditation that you're ready to interpret as being on the brink of enlightenment, that this is your karma that you have this good experience; or if you have difficult experiences, you want to interpret it some other way, that you'll never be a good meditator, that this is your karma that you're not having good meditation—all that is secondary. For this meditation, see if you can stay really close to the primary experience, the immediacy of here and now that doesn't require interpretation, doesn't add an interpretation to it. Just the experience, just a direct sense experience, the direct place where things arise and are known initially before we interpret. If there is an interpretation, just know it as an interpretation without needing to think about what the interpretation is, whether it's right or wrong. Just know it for that and go back to breathing and your direct experience.

It's a radical stepping away from anything that takes you away from the immediacy of your direct experience. The center of gravity for this can be the breathing. And it's not that we're following the breath, which you can't really see. What we're doing is we're tracking or being attuned to the sensations in the body that come into play as you're breathing. The basic sensations, and again, without interpretation, without judgment. So it doesn't matter whether it's a pleasant or unpleasant sensation of breathing; it just matters that you know it as that. That simple. Nothing to fix, nothing to judge, nothing to be concerned about, nothing to build a case that you're great or terrible. Just the basic sensation. Stay there. Stay there. Stay with that. And see how that's very different. Maybe it's very difficult to do, but it might highlight for you how much time you spend in this secondary world of ideas and interpretations, judgments, past and future, and concern with things that are not immediately here.

So assuming a meditation posture, which is the beginning of being connected to the immediacy of our experience. A posture is always in the present moment. And making small adjustments so you're a little bit more comfortable in your posture, but also a little bit more aligned, and a posture that somehow supports being alert to the present moment.

Lowering your gaze, closing your eyes, and letting the eyes rest in the sockets. Almost as if you're allowing the eyes to look backwards and down, so the eyes are not engaged in anything.

Gently taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. As the chest and belly expand, maybe the shoulders lift. A ritual of connection to the body, to be here and now. Relaxing as you exhale. Relaxing may be a ritual of homecoming into this direct experience of now.

And then to let your breathing return to normal. And take some time to feel your body, a kind of global experience of the body, perhaps from the inside out or from the center in your torso outwards, not so much from the thinking mind. The human body is an amazing apparatus of sensing. We have many, many capacities to sense, to feel the environment and ourselves. The human body is an amazing array of antennas, an amazing array of communication with all the sense data that comes in, that operates with very little input from us, except relaxing into the body and allowing us to feel and sense.

And within this body, kind of at the center of it, sensing, experiencing what it's like for the body to be breathing. Our human bodily apparatus is finely attuned, or finely in relationship to the body breathing. Breathing is attuned to the body.

Softening, relaxing as you exhale. Relaxing all the way to the end of the exhale, with an ever-so-slight pause before you allow the body to breathe in.

As you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Relax the tension or agitation of thinking. At the end of the exhale, ever so briefly, as there's a pause in the breath, let there be silence in the thinking mind. Maybe it's an infinitesimal silence, but let the thinking mind become still and quiet for a moment.

And when the thinking mind is quiet, then it's easier to stay with the immediacy of sensations in your body, the immediacy of our direct experience now, without interpretation, thinking, judging. Orient yourself towards the world of direct experience, letting the thinking mind recede to the background. Free of interpretations, feel the body, feel your direct experience here and now.

To center meditation in our direct experience can be supported by a deep trust in the natural human capacities for intelligence, creativity, compassion. The natural human capacity for healing, coming into homeostasis. Resting, trusting the direct experience allows the deeper capacities of being human to operate effectively. The more we stay in our interpretation, reactions, ideas, fantasies, distractions, the more we interfere with a full and deep natural capacity we have to be, have embodied intelligence, embodied healing.

Embody trust that our thinking mind doesn't have to find the answer to all things. And as we come to the end of this sitting, to expand that trust in our relationship to others, that our ability to be present for people directly—simply listening well, seeing well with clarity, without the obscuration of interpretations, judgments, bias, problem-solving, and distraction—is a great gift we give to others.

May it be, as we come to the end of this sitting, that whatever we learn about trusting our direct experience is remembered when we stay present to listen to others, to see others, so that everyone we encounter feels respected, cared for, attended to, as if they're important and valuable. And so they too can rest in themselves.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our capacity for mindful attention support this possibility for others.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Core Teachings (3 of 5) Naturalistic Dharma

So hello everyone, and welcome to this third talk in the series called "Core Teachings." That's a shorthand for the core teachings or core understandings that underlie how I teach Buddhism. And I thought it was probably high time for me to be explicit about my particular orientation around Buddhism and Buddhist teachings, so you don't have to guess or not know. This is in the background of probably everything I teach one way or the other. And so how I teach has a particular orientation that is maybe a subset of what Buddhism is. It is definitely a subset of what Buddhism is, but maybe it's a subset of what the earliest teachings are because of the orientation of what I select and what I'm oriented towards.

The first talk was about the emphasis on dukkha² and freedom from dukkha, often translated as suffering and the end of suffering. Yesterday's talk was about having no views, not operating, finding a place of no views, not centering or basing ourselves on a particular dependency on an understanding or a view, but a freedom from views—a freedom from taking anything as ultimate, views of ultimacy, which is common in religion. And both of these belong to the world of our direct experience. The idea of ultimacy, that this is what the ultimate experience is, what ultimate reality is, is a kind of interpretation. And you can ask yourself the question, where did I learn this from? Where does that interpretation come from? Is it from my teachers? Is it from my sacred texts? Is it from a popular idea? Or is it from my logic or my own interpretation of what's going on? And what are the views that I have that overlay my experience? And what happens when there are no views overlaying our direct experience?

All of this brings us into what I would like to call the natural world of our direct experience. And one of the ways of characterizing the kind of Buddhism that I'm oriented towards is naturalistic Buddhism. And one of the things that means is that it's an orientation in Buddhism that does not have recourse to the supernatural world. And what I mean by supernatural world is the world that the natural laws of science, the laws of nature as we know them today, are not understood—they don't... the Buddhism I'm oriented towards is the kind of world which relates to, that fits into the natural laws of nature that we understand today. It doesn't mean that there are not things outside of that that exist, but it means that the Buddhism is centered on that, our direct experience, what we can know for ourselves directly.

And so for many people, the experience of heavens and hells that Buddhism emphasizes is not part of their direct experience. It's not something they can know themselves. You can read about it, teachers can talk about it, and we can believe in it, but it's not something most people have a direct experience of. The idea of rebirth, for most people, that's not part of their direct experience. It's a common belief in Buddhism, but for someone who hasn't had any direct experience of it, then we have to accept it on faith or accept it as a belief system rather than something we can have known directly for ourselves. So I don't want to diminish the value for people or say that ideas of heaven and hell or rebirth are non-existent. Maybe I'm agnostic about it, but I respect people have these experiences, people have those experiences, but they're not my experience. So I'm not going to base my Buddhism on those experiences. My own practice is not based on it.

And so I stay close to the naturalistic world. And I take support for doing this, that if you go back to the ancient teachings of the Buddha, whenever he's going to talk about specifically what his Dharma is in brief, what his teachings are in brief, what are the essential things you should be teaching if you're teaching the Dharma, what are the things that the early tradition was most focused on memorizing as what represented the teaching—the earliest texts, there were so many texts, but within those they have some discussion about what the people of the time, the monks and the nuns at that time, were reciting and memorizing directly. And what you see is that in all these kind of more targeted or focused discussions about what's important in the Dharma, it's all naturalistic. There's no mention of rebirth as part of it. There is discussion about rebirth in the texts, but it seems to be not central to what the Buddha says is most important to teach. And I understand that because he was teaching a practice. He was teaching a practice to the end of clinging. And when he talks about the goal of practice, he talks about it as the end of clinging, the end of suffering, and the end of craving. And those are naturalistic experiences. You can experience those and know those for yourself. They fit within the kind of natural laws of what we know. In talking about rebirth, it's often sometimes a discussion about if you do that, you won't be reborn, but it's not that the purpose is not to be reborn. He doesn't say that. That's a rare idea. It's just almost like an add-on to what is really core.

My own teachers in this country and Asia that I had emphasized, "only believe in what you know for yourself." I feel like they'd be really disappointed in me if I had relied on Buddhist teachings I can only know from belief, these more supernatural beliefs that appear in the texts. The emphasis on "only know what you focus on, what you can know yourself." Don't rely on, like the famous teaching of the Kalamas³ of the Buddha, that don't rely on tradition, don't rely on what you know by faith, don't rely on what you know by your rational reason, don't rely on your religious texts, don't rely on what your teacher says. Rely on what you know for yourself of what is wholesome and unwholesome, what is harmful and not harmful, what is peaceful and not peaceful. That's what you rely on.

And those criteria—wholesome, non-harming, peaceful—that belongs to the world of direct experience that we know for ourselves. And so we can guide ourselves and find our way through the practice through these naturalistic criteria. We don't have to be guided by, in the practice moment by moment, by the more supernatural beliefs, the more abstract beliefs. In addition to the supernatural beliefs, there's also metaphysical beliefs, beliefs that have to do with the ultimate nature of reality, beliefs that have to do with the ultimate nature of what enlightenment is and enlightened consciousness and all kinds of ideas like this. And this is also something we cannot know directly.

And this is very nuanced. When I was in Burma, there was a tremendous emphasis on impermanence. And they emphasized everything is impermanent. And I spent a lot of time reflecting on this teaching that everything is impermanent, everything is changing all the time. Logically, it makes sense. But I finally came to understand that really what I could take a stand on was not the metaphysical idea that everything is impermanent, but rather the act of perceiving. In the act of perceiving, whatever is perceived can be seen as inconstant and changing all the time. Like a mountain doesn't necessarily change that fast, but the perception of the mountain is constantly shifting and changing. And I was then delighted to read that the Buddha never talked about impermanence as a characteristic of reality. That was a later idea in Theravāda⁴ Buddhism. But he emphasized that impermanence is a perception. And once we're into perception, we're into this natural world of our human functioning and human life.

So, maybe this talk today is a little bit more abstract and philosophical, but it underpins my orientation to the Dharma, or explains it, that I have this very strong naturalistic orientation. And so generally, that's what you'll hear from me. It's very rare that I'll talk about things that are supernatural or metaphysical because that is not navigating the Dharma through the direct experience of what we could know ourselves, and where we can find the path to practice, which is only found here and now in the natural world—what we can see, what's immediate, and what we can know for ourselves directly.

And as we do this mindfulness practice in this way over time, we become more and more understanding of the overlays we put on direct experience. Many people who are not practiced will make a statement which says, "this is my experience," but it's really they're describing something that's through their interpretation of things. So I'm sitting here in this room here, and I say, "this is my experience of what a meditation hall is like." And so we call it a meditation hall, so it's kind of an accurate enough statement. But this could also be a dance hall, it could be a studio, which it is at this moment for this broadcast, it could be a conference room. During the pandemic, I used to have a corner of it with an exercise machine where I exercised here. I used to have a table, this used to be my office. And so to say that it's a meditation hall is a kind of an overlay that it's not necessary to have.

And so as we practice mindfulness, we become more and more attuned to how we add a little something on top of our experience that is interpretive, and how much we live in the world of interpretation, and how there's a path of freedom to be found when we see that clearly and find out how not to be attached or caught in those overlays and those interpretations. And we can live more and more in this naturalistic world, which is, which I'll talk about tomorrow, an amazingly powerful resource. The naturalistic world of who we are as a human being is full of intelligence and creativity and capacity for healing and compassion. So that also is, or will be, a foundation for my orientation in the Dharma. And that talk will be for tomorrow.

So thank you for giving me this chance to explain myself, and I do look forward to continuing tomorrow.