This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Voices in Our Heads; The Five Precepts (4 of 5): Avoiding unskillful Speech. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: The Voices in Our Heads; Dharmette: The Five Precepts (4 of 5): Avoiding unskillful Speech - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 06, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Greetings again, welcome everyone. We're back today to explore further in the five precepts, ways to bring attention to our actions in five common realms of action. As Gil puts it, the practice provides a mirror where we can come to know ourselves by reflecting on our actions. To come to know ourselves in the practice through our actions, somehow coming to know ourselves through our actions removes ourselves as actor from the middle of everything. And as we know, that is freeing.

Today we'll focus on the fourth precept: the commitment to support our practice by refraining from unskillful speech, harmful speech. This is such a great area of practice, speech being something we engage in frequently without any thought. It just happens. And as we'll see, the Buddha recommends that we think before we speak in a very specific way. Without too much more on that for the moment, let's sit together and let's do a little practice in the sitting with avoiding harmful speech and cultivating skillful speech in the meditation. I'll show you what I mean.

Guided Meditation: The Voices in Our Heads

So let's bring our eyes down, if that's comfortable. An invitation to bring the eyes down partially, all the way if that works. Settle into the meditation posture. And as we've done in previous days, find balance, establish balance between alertness and relaxation. Attentive, accepting, open to what arises. Alert, engaged, just enough energy to keep attention here and now, but also at ease. Seeing if we can relax a little bit the tendency to express preference or push things away or bring things closer, hold on to things.

As we begin to settle in, we can bring attention to the body. Sometimes it's useful to just start with the weight of the body in the chair, on the bench, on the cushion, on the floor. And then feel our way into the breathing. Right in the center of it all, there's this breathing thing happening. And we don't even need to know it as breathing or as the breath. We can just notice the rise and fall of the abdomen, the sense of stretching out, filling up, followed by the sense of settling down, expelling the breath. We can bring our attention to just one breath at a time, exploring it fully. What's it like now?

Sometimes we may notice the breath feels open and free; other times tight, quivery, constricted. And our task is just to notice how things are right now. We don't have to do anything about what we notice. We're just giving this gift of attention and this soft question of what's it like right now to be here.

Every time we become aware, wake up perhaps, to notice that we've gotten entangled in thought, or that maybe the mind has, we can sense, is constricted, kind of narrowly focused on a particular stream of thought or spiral of thought, no problem. Nothing to get overly concerned about. And maybe just noticing that tightness, that narrowness, we can then proceed to return to the center of things, the breathing happening in the middle. Return again to the sensations of the abdomen rising and falling, the shoulders lifting, settling back down, noticing just this breath.

Today, with exploring together the fourth precept, we can bring this idea of avoiding harsh speech, unhelpful speech, unkind speech as a way to support our practice. We can notice the speech that may accompany our meditation. When we find the mind distracted, caught up in the future, thinking about the past, thinking about other people or ourselves, how do we direct it back to the here and now of experience? Is that voice we use to guide the meditation internally kind? Is it supportive? Or is it frustrated, exasperated, judging, etc.? Maybe we can just soften up a little bit around that voice and gently guide ourselves. Maybe it's like tugging on the leash of a puppy that we love, and an encouragement to return to here and now. No hurry. We're going to do this many times, over and over again. It's a natural process. The mind gets caught up on things; that's the mind's job. We depend on the mind to do that. And in the meditation, we're just adding to those capacities of mind that we've so well cultivated. We're cultivating another capacity of mind to be a little more still. The mind enjoys this too. The mind likes to be at rest as well as being busy.

So notice the voices in our heads, we might say. Notice what those voices are like. And if they're unkind or ungentle, just soften up around that a bit. Just notice that. Maybe it's a little painful to have that voice guide us, and perhaps we can use a gentler voice. Sometimes we can ask, whose voice is that anyway? Is that a parental voice or a caregiver's voice? The one that maybe chides us for having lost track of the breath, fallen off the breath, wandered away from the breath? A voice that hurries us back to the breath, "must return to the breath." We can be gentle there, can develop a voice of practice, skillful speech in the meditation that gently guides us back to the breath. Maybe it's something like, "Oh, there's the mind again, entangled with the future, planning." I like to be grateful for the mind's ability to do that. Sometimes I say, "Thank you, appreciate it. Appreciate those skills. Right now, I'm going to head back to the breath, going to sit with the breath for a bit." Be gentle with the voice in the meditation.

So maybe we can, in dedicating the merit of our practice today, bring forward the voice or voices we cultivate in the meditation, voices that are kind and supportive. And maybe we can, as we wish well to other beings, we can notice this voice too, make it a central part of our practice. The voice that wishes all other beings be content, be happy, be free. These voices, this voice we develop in the meditation for guiding our own practice, our own returning to the here and now, can be a voice we share with the world.

So in the spirit of that kindness, the skill that we bring to our intimate relationship with ourselves in the meditation, let's wish that other beings benefit from our practice. That all beings meet with kindness in the world. All beings benefit from the stillness and peace that the practice offers through us.

May all beings be well, be safe. May all beings live at peace. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: The Five Precepts (4 of 5): Avoiding unskillful Speech

So welcome again. Greetings and welcome back to day four of our exploration of the five precepts. The fourth precept is a commitment to refrain from harmful speech and to cultivate kind speech as a way to support our practice. I would just note, before proceeding on to some discussion of the precept in the actions of interaction with others in daily life, that as I tried to point to in the guided meditation, the voice we cultivate to guide the meditation, to the extent that it has a verbal presence and has words, that can be a voice that we are attentive to and bring into the world. A lot of times we'll notice that the voice that appears, it may have frustration, exasperation, judgment, as I noted, and we can soften around that so that even in the meditation we're avoiding harsh speech, avoiding unskillful speech, avoiding speech that causes or deepens harm.

So the fourth precept. I think as I observed at the very top of the hour, speech is something that comes so automatically to us. Of course, there are exceptions, but to most of us, speech comes very quickly and without a lot of thought. I think perhaps the central injunction here in the fourth precept is just to think more about what we bring into the world through this action of speech. So avoiding harmful speech. And it's also useful to note that, as is the case with each of these precepts, what we undertake in this sort of complicated formulation is not just to practice good speech or kind speech, but to avoid causing harm with speech, to avoid harmful speech. There's something about the "avoiding" that's really important. Among other things, I think when we avoid harmful speech, we speak less and we listen more.

It's an interesting aspect of our physiology that apparently when we speak, if we were to speak without protecting our ears internally, the sound of our voices could do damage to this very sensitive hearing apparatus we have. And so there's a mechanism—mechanism might not be the right word—but when we speak, we close off a bit, the hearing is closed off a bit. And so when we speak, we literally can't listen, or we don't hear as much. I keep that in mind, just that when I'm talking, I can't listen. That's true on a lot of levels, but apparently it's true in the physiology as well.

So, in the case of this precept, the Buddha actually provides, as many of you probably know, very specific instructions about what constitutes wise speech and what constitutes unwise speech. I'll just give you a brief flavor of this with a story. In the ancient discourses that come down to us, there are many cases, but there's a case where a prince goes to see the Buddha, asks him a trick question. As happens, I don't know why people continue to do this, because the Buddha was never fooled by trick questions, a master of rhetoric, a master of debate. I wouldn't have bothered to try. But Prince Abhaya asked the Buddha a trick question: Does the Buddha ever say anything that people don't want to hear, that's unpleasant or painful to hear? And the Buddha says, well, that's not a simple yes or no answer to that, and proceeds to give the prince a teaching.

I'll just give you a flavor of it. I paraphrase, I'm not quoting, that would take more time than we have. But the Buddha says the Buddha does not utter speech that he knows to be untrue, false, pointless, that is disliked by others. He doesn't utter speech that he knows to be true and correct, but which would be harmful and disliked. And it goes on, gives a very careful screening. But what it implies for us is that before we speak, if our aspiration is to be awake in the world, that before we speak, we should give thought to these things. The Buddha gives this complicated, carefully delineated screen for thinking about how he might speak, and it can be simplified in the following way. Essentially, the Buddha says that if something is not of benefit to others, we shouldn't speak it. If we can determine that something is of benefit, then we should choose the right time to express it.

I love this. I love the more complicated screen, but I love this two-part essence of it because I can kind of quickly go, "Is this of benefit?" I mean, I can tell in my own mind frequently this is not really going to serve anybody, myself, others. It's not going to support a healthy relationship. So I can abstain from that speech that would be harmful. And similarly, if this is speech that is something to be expressed that is a benefit to myself, to others, to this relationship, then I wait for the right time. Both of these things mean I end up speaking less. In my particular case, to share something personal, as a loquacious, talkative person, and as a man in our culture and society, somebody who comes forth as a man, it's very useful to speak less. Because I've found over time in the practice, as I've been doing this, that when I speak less, others speak more, and I hear more. I'm aware of other people's thoughts more. I already know what I think, so saying it sometimes isn't useful, isn't of benefit.

The story ends in a really funny way. There's a lot of humor in these old sources if you look for it. The Buddha was a funny person, could be. So the prince asks the Buddha, "This is amazing, this answer. So do you as a Buddha, as a fully awakened person, when somebody approaches you with a complicated question, maybe a trick question, do you have to think in advance about your answer, or does it just occur to you on the spot?" The Buddha says to the prince, "Well, let me ask you a question. You're a prince, you're an expert in chariots." A lot of princes were experts in chariots; it's one of those princely things. You arrived places in a chariot. And I imagine in my mind, the Buddha pointing at a part of the chariot, he says, "Do you, as an expert charioteer, do you know what this part's called? This one right here?" And the prince says, "Of course I know. I'm an expert in chariots. I know what that part is. I don't have to think about it in advance. I just know it. It comes to me on the spot." And the Buddha says, "It's like that for me. Somebody comes to me, they ask me a complicated question, I don't have to think very much about my response. It just comes to me on the spot."

This is what we talked about earlier this week, beginning the first day, just that as we become more practiced, as we become more awake in this practice, more awake in the world, there's less and less conscious thinking that goes into a response. And more and more, the response comes naturally to us. It becomes second nature to avoid harmful speech, maybe to be quieter and to engage in skillful speech. So that's a theme that keeps coming forward this week. I didn't think about that in advance, I'm just noting that this is something that comes to us through the precepts. That we cultivate them by abstaining from harmful practices, and what becomes more and more second nature to us is responding skillfully to situations. So this is how abstaining from doing harm helps us be forces for good in the world in this practice. It's a very powerful training, this, and supportive of our practice and then supportive of the way we express our practice in the world, particularly in interactions with other beings.

So yeah, over time as we become really awake, we become, as I said on the first day, we become unable. Right? Like the Buddha, the Buddha is unable to engage in harmful speech because he's a person who's fully awake. That's our aspiration. That as we become more awake, we become unable to take life, to take things not freely given, to engage in sexual activity that's harmful, or in this case, to engage in harmful speech.

So what might this mean for a daily practice? I'm going to both talk and put something in the chat, and I don't know if I can do these two things at once. But I like a practice—I didn't make it up—I'm going to tell you about it, and then I'm going to push send into the chat. This is a practice that's called by the acronym WAIT: W-A-I-T. And what it stands for is "Why Am I Talking?" I find this a super useful way to take this precept into the world, to keep waiting before I respond, and even waiting before I engage in the practice. So common that I'm thinking about how I'm going to respond and the other person hasn't even finished talking yet. I'm not listening because I'm already thinking about how I am going to have a better response, get my opinion into the world, speak my truth, any number of things that seem really important to me. And if I can remember this prescription against unhelpful and harmful speech, I wait.

I like to ask, why am I talking? Or why do I feel an urge to talk, a need to talk, a need to say something? A question that I particularly enjoy in my practice with this is, maybe something needs to be said here, but is it I who need to say it? Right? Sometimes somebody else might say it. Possibly they'd say it better. Possibly they need an opportunity to speak. Maybe I don't have to say this. Very few ideas that I have—maybe I'm different from others here—but very few ideas are original, and I don't always have to be the person who expresses something.

At any rate, maybe that's something that will be useful to take into the day: wait. Without going through the complicated screen that the Buddha provides for wise speech, some of which may be familiar to some of you, simply pausing before we speak and maybe if it's helpful, think, "Is this of benefit, what I want to say?" And if it is of benefit, "Is this the time to say it? Is this the best time, the most appropriate time, the most skillful time?" I think what the Buddha does with these suggestions is ask us to slow down with this action that seems so automatic, so easily engaged in, to slow down.

And you may also look around and think about... I'm distracted by something in the chat. You may want to look around and think about... okay, I lost that thought, I got distracted. Somebody has pointed out that "silent" is an anagram for "listen." Okay, there's probably hundreds of these tricks. I love them, they're great. So that's another one. Listen. I think that's another place that WAIT goes, and I appreciate the distracting chat. Very nice, very nice to have added that to our conversation.

Okay, so think about these things. Tomorrow we'll return and take up the last of the five precepts, the last of the five lay precepts that are undertaken commonly by householders and lay practitioners in this practice: that of avoiding what I call intoxicated heedlessness. This is a prescription to avoid using, technically in the language that it comes to us, fermented drinks, distilled drinks, or other substances that cause heedlessness or to the point of heedlessness. We'll look into that tomorrow, and I look forward to that. It's a perfect topic for a Friday. It'll bring the week to another nice close. I wish you all well. Take care till tomorrow, and I'm going to sign off now and read through the various things that have been shared in the chat. Very much appreciate your sharing and supporting one another's practice, and see you tomorrow. Bye for now.