This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Staying Curious (3 of 5) Dharmette: Immediately Effective and Inviting Inspection. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Staying Curious; Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (3 of 5) Immediately Effective and Inviting Inspection - Shelley Gault

The following talk was given by Shelley Gault at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 08, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Staying Curious

So nice to be here. It's amazing this 7 a.m. sitting and little short Dharmette¹ has been going on for more than four years now. That's kind of astonishing to me. It's really, really lovely.

So let's settle into a meditation, tending to the posture, finding that balance of alertness and ease, uprightness and relaxation. Balance is something that we're always looking for in our practice of the Dharma in many different areas, and the posture is a place where we can start establishing a sense of balance. Not striving and not zoning out—it's being present.

Allow yourself to be present to the whole body. A sense of the whole body as it's sitting, lying down, or standing. Maybe just feeling into what it's like to be in the posture you're in. And then just taking a little trip around the body with your awareness, your attention. Recognizing tension if it's present and releasing it just as much as possible, and knowing it has been released.

Just be present to what's going on energetically in the body, in the nervous system. Any kind of pulsing or tingling, maybe in the hands and arms, legs, other parts of the body. Any sense of agitation or excitement in the nervous system itself, in the body. Breathing into what's present and letting whatever is there settle. Just attending to the lives of our bodies with care—the muscles and joints, to the nervous system—finding a place of balance.

Noticing any mental or emotional state that has maybe come with you from whatever you were doing before you joined the sit this day. Just noticing, being interested. Let there be kindness in your interest and your attention to what's arising within you. All the different areas of life that are going on all the time inside of us.

Know everything that's going on right now inside you, in your physical systems, in your mind and heart. All of it. This is life right now. It's what it is. This is what we're coming to know intimately in our practice: our life, our own life as it's lived. This is our text.

And as we come to know it more and more clearly, more and more deeply, it opens up for us, and more and more freedom is possible. And we stay present.

Stay close to your lived experience right now, right here, in this moment. Stay very close to it. Just let it be known to you in a kind regard. Kind and curious. Not prying; it's gently curious. "Curious" is meeting your life with a friendly and interested regard.

What would it be like if we all brought a kind and interested regard to every interaction that we had today? Wherever we happen to go—we go to work, people we meet there, people we meet if we're shopping or walking down a street, or in our families, with friends. A kind and interested regard. May we all bring that to all our interactions with the world today, and other days as well.

Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (3 of 5) Immediately Effective and Inviting Inspection

To recap so far: yesterday I talked about the first two qualities of the Dharma that are in this list: that it's well-proclaimed, that it's useful throughout all stages of practice; and that it's visible here and now. We can see it unfold in our daily life experience, and that's the only place really where it is visible: in our daily life experience, in our practice. Those are the first two qualities of these six.

In order to make use of the Dharma, in order to see it here and now, we need to develop a capacity for mindfulness, for sustained attention. "Sustained focused attention" is what the essay I'm referring to pointed to: the ability to stay connected to our present moment experience, to see the ways that suffering, that dukkha², that stress arises, and also to see the way that it ceases.

Then we need to be willing to not give up when we forget, when we get distracted, when we get bored or resistant. This essay that I'm referring to this week called that a "tolerance for failure," speaking about students reading texts. But I don't really like to use the word "failure" in regard to practice. Obstacles, maybe. Bumps in the road. We don't let them deter us.

So today I want to talk about the third and the fourth qualities of the Dharma in this list, along with the capacities that support them.

The third quality is that the Dharma is immediately effective. That's of course related to it being visible here and now; we can see it, and then we can see that it works as well. I mentioned yesterday an analogy that Gil³ has used before about having a pebble in your shoe. What's immediately effective is bending down, taking off my shoe, and getting the pebble out. There is immediate relief. I see the dukkha, I remove the cause, and the dukkha ceases.

In our Dharma practice, perhaps we might not discern so quickly the choice of which Dharma prescription to apply—mindfulness, compassion or mettā, ethical behavior, truthfulness—as taking off a shoe. Especially early on in practice. If I have a tendency, which I have had in the past, to get impatient with my partner, I can practice restraint and patience. I can investigate my impatience and then I can see how it's really creating stress for me, and it's not really having any effect on how my partner washes the dishes, for example. It might take some time for me to actively recognize that being patient actually relieves the stress. But when I see it here and now, then I can see that patience has been immediately effective. Recognizing the stress of impatience and the release that comes through dropping it is seeing the Four Noble Truths⁴ in action.

So sometimes it's clear what would be immediately effective and the result is immediately visible. Sitting in meditation, for example—like I invite every morning and like most Dharma teachers will invite—being mindful to our breath, noticing tension in our neck or jaw, we can begin to relax it, to let it go. Let the pebbles of stress fall away. And as practice matures and we develop more sensitivity to our inner state, we see this kind of immediate effect applied in more and more subtle experiences, to very mild emotions and subtle moods, subtle movements of mind.

So the Dharma is immediately effective. I see that in just many small ways throughout my day, both in my formal practice and in daily life.

The fourth quality of the Dharma is often translated as inviting inspection. This word ehipassiko⁵ is the Pali word. It's a kind of famous exhortation of the Buddha: "Come and see for yourself."

So we're invited to just keep looking. Does the Dharma seem well-expounded? Is applying the teachings immediately effective? Do we see it here and now? We pay attention to our actions, to our movements of mind. We choose to act ethically, we choose to act kindly, and we notice what the results are. Perhaps we apply mindfulness to some difficult emotion in our meditation or in our life, using the RAIN or the RAFT techniques that are spoken of so often in Dharma talks. And then we look: is there more space around the emotion? Were we kinder, were we more balanced when we dealt with that particular situation that gave rise to some strong emotion? Do we see what it was that hooked us, the conditions that triggered the emotion?

As we practice, as we keep coming back and looking—seeing, coming to see for ourselves—we understand our minds a little bit better. We get a clearer picture again and again of what makes them tick. As time goes on, we keep coming back to see for ourselves. And this might be the heart of the empirical nature of our Dharma practice. I mentioned that all these six qualities point to the empirical nature of the Dharma. This coming back, coming to attend to our experience again and again with curiosity, with kindness, to gradually learn to distinguish more skillfully between what leads to dukkha and what leads to more peace, more ease, more freedom.

This inspection that the Dharma invites is really supported by two factors that Sheridan Blau⁶, the man who wrote this essay on literacy, speaks of. The first is a willingness to suspend closure: to entertain problems rather than to avoid them. And then the second is a willingness to take risks.

Suspending closure and taking risks. Willingness to interpret for ourselves, to respond to our practice honestly, to what's going on honestly, and to question conventions and question accepted interpretations of the Dharma as well.

As we practice and learn more about the Dharma, we don't give up if we don't understand concepts that are unfamiliar to us, like "not-self" perhaps, or "emptiness," or some things that seem kind of esoteric. We're encouraged to be curious. It's essential we apply sustained attention and we stay open to what arises. We keep investigating. We don't jump to conclusions about our experience, about what it means, about what motivates us. Or if we do jump to conclusions, we recognize that and we question them. We stay open and hopefully we can recognize, "Oh, there are other possibilities here." We continue to look. We continue to be curious.

Before he was awakened, there are famous stories about the Buddha. The Buddha was asked to teach by two really highly regarded teachers who both said he had reached the pinnacle of his practice and he was ready to pass on the teachings. But the Buddha said no. He suspended closure. He felt there was more to learn, more to accomplish. He had not solved the problem of suffering, so he continued to entertain the problem. And then he changed his practice model. He came to something new; he discovered something new for himself. Seeing that the conventional approach that he was following—he was doing really ascetic practice that had him starving at the time, according to the stories—was not working. And then he remembered a time when he'd experienced a happiness that he judged to be beneficial, and he took the risk to see where that might lead. And where it led was to his final Awakening.

So, I haven't solved the problem of suffering at this point, and I want to be willing to engage with practice as an open question. I keep looking: what is this? What's motivating this? So the willingness to suspend closure and to take risks are both really useful as we continue to "come and see" for ourselves what the Dharma is, how it unfolds.

Blau talks about these in terms of an "intellectual courage," and I think it does take courage to not settle for easy answers. To keep an open mind, not come to a conclusion. To be curious about inconsistencies and sometimes to change course, to take up a different practice—to start doing Brahmavihāra⁷ practice, for instance, to move to a concentration practice from a mindfulness practice. It feels safe to have certainty, but feeling safe can be a way of staying stuck.

So we refine our own understanding by staying open and curious, not just by swallowing everything that we're taught. We have to walk the path ourselves. No one can walk it for us; not even the Buddha could walk it for us. It takes energy and sincere intention to keep inspecting and to stay curious. We can come to new interpretations of Dharma concepts that differ from the way we've heard them taught and understood them in the past. And we can check our understanding with those we respect, accepting feedback from others, checking to see if our interpretation supports growth. Seeing the empirical nature of the practice: does it move towards freedom? And if not, we stay open to having our interpretation overturned.

In our practice, it is so useful to question our assumptions about how practice is supposed to unfold. We do have assumptions about that. I believe there's that well-known quote from Suzuki Roshi⁸, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few." Or the Korean Zen teacher Seung Sahn's⁹ advice: "Only don't know." Only don't know. Something you can always kind of bring into your practice.

I think the Buddha's invitation to "come and see for ourselves" could be seen as an invitation to keep that beginner's mind, to stay in the place of curiosity, to stay in the place of an open question.

When I was thinking about this aspect of the Dharma, I thought of this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke¹⁰ from his Letters to a Young Poet. This is another quote that's often repeated in Dharma talks, and it's quite profound I think.

"I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

So: immediately effective and inviting inspection (ehipassiko). Come and see for yourself. Staying open to new possibilities, continuing to be curious, not coming to conclusions, being willing to look again and again.

Thank you very much again today for your attention. Tomorrow we'll look at the fifth of these qualities. In the meantime, I encourage you to keep looking, keep living your questions with that kind and curious, interested regard for your life. See you tomorrow. Thanks.