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Guided Meditation: Peace; Dharmette: To Transform the World (2 of 5) With Peace - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 29, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Peace

Hello and welcome. For this meditation today, I'd like to start with a simplistic statement for the purpose of making a point. We want to be careful that we're not using meditation as a customer or as a consumer, and overlooking that in meditation, we should be the producer.

Now, that doesn't mean that we have to work a lot, but we have to create and bring forth the conditions that allow the practice to mature and develop. The practice does require something from us, but it is an unusual thing. One way to understand it is that our hearts, our minds, our inner life, and our spiritual life are very influenceable. What we're trying to do is put together those influences. In good Buddhist language, we are conditioned¹.

Our role is to put together the conditions that allow something to mature and develop. We have to produce or make happen the conditions, and then we have to make room and time for those conditions to condition us. Like a farmer or gardener who has a role in creating the right conditions for a seed to sprout, germinate, and for a plant to grow; once the conditions are in place, the gardener has to make room, give time, and be patient for everything to develop.

So the question is: what are the conditions to put in place?

Many years ago, I met a young monk—one of the first monks I met in Thailand when I went to a meditation monastery. He clearly had a reputation of being a very deep practitioner, a realized Buddhist in some ways. It was remarkable to look into his eyes; they were very deep and peaceful. I asked him what he had attained through his practice, not knowing at that time that that was somewhat an impolite question to ask a monk because there is a very strict rule for monastics² not to talk about their spiritual attainments with a layperson. But I didn't know that, so I asked him what he had attained through his practice.

His answer struck me very deeply and has affected me ever since. He said, "Non-contention."

This idea of living a life of non-contention is one way of saying to live a peaceful life—to live with peace. To sit in meditation, leaving alone other aspects of our life for now, and create the conditions for the plant to grow, or create the conditions to be influenced in a good way, it really helps to practice non-contention. It helps to practice peace and ease—to be at ease with what's happening for us. That's what we need to produce, as hard as it might be. We need to bring a form of mindfulness, a form of relating to our experience that is peaceful, easeful, and non-contentious.

Of course, we have contention in our life, but the task then is to hold the contention with non-contention—hold it peacefully so that the peace is what influences us, shapes us, and grows in us. We don't want to have contention growing; we don't want to have hostility or conflict growing. Not a few people are cultivating conflict within themselves. If we are concerned with the world around us, let's not cultivate more contention. Let's cultivate wise contention. Let's cultivate the capacity to be peaceful and at ease as we engage in differences of opinion and the challenges of our life. Not only is it good for ourselves, but it creates good conditions for the world.

So, to assume a meditation posture, ideally, it's a posture of non-contention. I've known people who have come across a meditator sitting in a classic meditation posture, and there was something about the peace and stillness of that person that changed the viewer for their lifetime. One person I know became a meditator and a practitioner, and someone else I read about became a Buddhist teacher because they were so struck. She had lived such a contentious life—a rebel life, angry with the world—and she saw someone sitting in this posture, and she thought, "This is a posture of peace. How do people do this?"

Gently closing your eyes, and breathing in such a way that you spread a calmness through your body. Maybe breathing longer, slower, fuller. Maybe on the exhale, having a longer exhale—like a wave or a shower of calmness flowing through your body from the top to the bottom.

And letting your breathing be normal. As you exhale, to whatever degree you can, can you set your body at ease? Releasing any ways in which you hold the body tense, ways in which you brace yourself against life or for what's coming.

As you exhale, setting your heart at ease. The wave of calming the heart, enveloping the heart with a care, a calmness, a peace, so the tensions of the heart can relax and soften.

And relaxing the mind, setting the mind at ease. And if you feel uneasy in any way, see if you can be easy with that. Hold it lightly. Can you find within body, mind, or heart some reference point for being at peace, being peaceful, or calm, or at ease?

And to breathe with a peace, or imagine that as you exhale or inhale that you're spreading the peace, the calm, the ease through your body.

Breathing breaths of peace, where you relate to your breathing very lightly, softly, gently.

And if it's helpful for you, if it's nice, you might ever so gently say in a peaceful way the word "peace" as you exhale.

[Silence]

Recognizing whatever calm or peace is in your body, your heart, your mind, and allowing that to have an influence on you. Allow that to spread and be received in the rest of the body. Let it be a reminder that you can feel calm or peaceful, and it can spread through your body, mind, and heart. Spreading with every breath.

[Silence]

As we come to the end of this sitting, may we consider: is there any way that you feel now, having meditated, that could be a gift for our world?

Where there is agitation, may we bring our calm. Where there is conflict, may we bring our peace. Where there is struggle, let us bring our ease. Where there is hatred, may we bring our love. Where there is suffering³, may we bring our compassion⁴. Where people feel abandoned, may we meet them with respect and dignity, seeing them clearly. And where there is need, let us find a way to support others.

May this practice give us the strength and the inspiration to live for the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: To Transform the World (2 of 5) With Peace

So, good morning and welcome to the second talk in a series called "To Transform the World."

One of the purposes for me being a Buddhist teacher, dedicating my life to Buddhist practice, is to support this world—to be able to teach a path of practice that leads to the end of suffering. The more that I know there is suffering in the world, the more I want to meet it and address it. My particular way is through Buddhist practice, primarily, which I understand to be pointing to the root causes⁵—the very foundation of where suffering and conflict arise.

I feel like it's very important that we address suffering and conflict in all the ways that can alleviate it, but that we shouldn't neglect the root causes. Since there are very few people who do that, I try to specialize in that in some way. Or that's what the specialty of Buddhism is—not to diminish the other ways which are extremely important—but asking: What does Buddhism have to offer? What does this practice have to offer the world?

It offers a profound example of a way of living not in conflict, not in contention, not in despair or anger or anxiety, because we've seen the roots of those. We found what gives rise to those difficult emotions, we've learned how to settle beyond it, and we've learned how to let go in a very deep way. But not a letting go that removes us from the world.

Many years ago, a teacher of mine said that the Buddha taught the world to sit and meditate; Mahatma Gandhi taught the world that it is significant where you sit and meditate.

I understood this statement to be that it's one thing to go meditate alone to develop peace for oneself. It's another thing to sit and meditate in front of tanks approaching, violence in the works, or to sit and be peaceful in the presence of those who are contentious. So the idea that we would not just be alone and practice for ourselves, but practice for others—to be the kind of people who can be agents of change.

But how do we change the world? There are many ways the world changes, and I don't want to diminish any of the values of the wholesome, ethical ways of changing the world for the better. But I think to do it with love, and to do it by being carriers of peace, agents of peace—these two are so important.

One reference point I have for this is raising children. Children who are not loved grow up in problematic ways. It's a huge impact on a child not to be seen, not to be loved; to feel it is almost a form of trauma to not have that. If a child grows up with parents who are always anxious, the child learns that the world is a scary place and there are reasons to be anxious. If a child grows up with angry parents, maybe the child grows up afraid, maybe the child grows up shut down, or maybe the child grows up to be angry as well. There's a phenomenon where people who are bullied, people who are oppressed, will then turn around and do the same to the people who are lower than them on the social pecking order, and it just perpetuates the cycle.

But if children grow up with peace, they learn that there is peace in this world—it is possible to breathe at peace and be at ease. If children learn to see generosity, see caring for others, then they learn that that's valuable and it's possible. What they learn growing up, the conditions in which they grow up, has a huge impact on children that can affect them their whole life.

Human beings are conditioned creatures. We are conditioned; we are influenced by the things that come our way and how we live. And so the same thing is true for us. If we live angry, we are reinforcing anger and developing it within us. If we live peacefully or with love, we enforce that.

One of the characteristics of this is that some activities that are object-focused—that are so much about hating someone, so much about wanting power, so much about getting something—narrow the attention. It disconnects people from themselves. There are other ways of living that open up a connection to ourselves and others, that doesn't narrow it and put blinders on.

Love without need, love without craving or clinging, is the one that opens us up to see more widely ourselves in the world. Being at peace is an experience that opens us up to see more widely and be present for what's happening—to be mindful, to be present, to be respectful, to be caring, to be compassionate. All these can have a very different movement that is opening and spreading rather than narrowing and contracting.

It makes a world of difference which of these we take. Either one conditions us; either one has an influence on us. If we live peacefully, it creates more peace in ourselves. If we live peacefully, it spreads peace. If we live in conflict, it spreads conflict.

Some of these things are self-fulfilling. If we live in conflict and in anger, it's more likely that people will be in conflict with us and be hostile towards us. People don't like to have hostility directed to them, and they'll turn away or bark back. If we meet the world with peace, with love, with care, then that doesn't give people as much occasion to be angry or hostile. It might even make hostile people peaceful.

I've had conflict with people where the conflict seemed to have no end in sight when we stayed apart. But when I go towards a person, sit with a person, and I sit peacefully, attentively, and caringly—willing to be open to our conversation to find out what's going on for the other person—more often than not, it settles things. It creates conditions for some kind of frank and careful conversation. Of course, there's no guarantee, and maybe some things only happen in the long term, or some things happen in the aggregate over time with many people. But in a very important way, we create the world according to how we are.

If we want a world that's peaceful, it's important that we live peacefully. If we want to have a world where the power of love is stronger than the love for power, we need to trust the love and live with love, and give strength to our love. To find a way to live, to find a way of being that is the message we want the world to hear—the influence that we want to have on the world.

We should never succumb to the belief that our singular, individual efforts make no difference, that they're not big enough, they're not important enough. We should never hand over the authority of well-being to others—that others have to change, others have to do something, others have to stop. If we're waiting for others to change, we will never be agents of change that change the world for the better. If we're waiting for others to change the world, then in some ways we are showing the world a resignation, a passivity, a giving up of our own agency.

May it be that you all become agents of change. Not in a way to exhaust you, not in a way to stress you, not in a way to change your life too much, but that you go through this world in a way that gives love, kindness, peace, care, and respect a prominent role in how you meet the world.

Don't be distracted. Don't find yourself narrowing your attention around a desire, a fear, or hostility so you're not available to open up to all of who you are. So that the fullness of you is what conveys peace into this world. The fullness of you conveys care and non-contention. Everyone can do this.

I hope that meditation is one way that teaches us and guides us to this possibility. May we be agents of peace in every way we talk, in every way we walk, and in every way that we meet others.

May we be agents of peace.

Thank you.