This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Four Inspirational Blessings (1 of 5); Making Beneficial Distinctions, Not Neglecting Wisdom. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Making Beneficial Distinctions; Dharmette: Four Inspirational Blessings (1 of 5) Not Neglecting Wisdom - Kim Allen

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

Introduction

Let's get started. This week I want to talk about a set of pithy instructions that the Buddha gave to a follower, which I found very meaningful to unfold over some years of practice.

The Buddha teaches about four foundations on which a liberated person stands, and then he gives four instructions or verbs that go with those that we can follow in order to strengthen each foundation. Even though the context is this liberated person, they are remarkably simple instructions, and my impression is that they are meant for everyone and are simply ones that are powerful enough to take us very far.

We can start with them right now. These same four appear in a teaching from a later Buddhist tradition, the Tibetan tradition, but in a different guise; there they are called the "Four Inspirational Blessings." We will call this series the "Four Inspirational Blessings," but that title is not from the sutta¹. We will talk about the blessing aspect on Friday after we go through the list as it appears in the original sutta. For those who track the suttas, this is Majjhima Nikaya 140².

The four foundational practices are: to not neglect wisdom, to preserve truth, to cultivate relinquishment, and to train for peace. We will talk about each of those and then step back to the bigger picture.

Guided Meditation: Making Beneficial Distinctions

Let's go ahead and meditate together.

Settling into your meditation posture, finding your place, and if you're comfortable doing so, please close your eyes. Bringing attention inward, just sense the places where you're making contact: your seat against the chair, or the cushion, or whatever you're lying down on. Feeling the settledness, the balance of that posture, and allowing yourself to be supported. Letting go into that stability.

Sensing how the body rises up from the stable foundation. If you're sitting up, it could feel as if there's almost a force lifting the body, gently buoying it up like water supports something. Feeling the straightness of the spine in a relaxed way.

Beginning to soften the body. Softening the muscles of the face, the eyes, and the eye sockets. Softening the jaw, down through the shoulders. Relaxing the rib cage and the diaphragm, down into the belly area. Releasing the arms and the hands, and down through the hips, legs, all the way down into the ankle joints and feet. Just inviting ease and connecting with the body as it is. It's fine as it is.

Connecting with the quality of mindfulness, of being present. Feeling the presence of your awareness right here. Not thinking about the past or the future, but being willing for now to just follow along with the present.

Connecting in then with the simple sensations of the breath—an easy way to connect to the present moment. Really feeling the direct sensations of the breath, so not an idea or picture in your head about lungs, but the actual sensations felt by the body.

You may notice that the in-breath is different from the out-breath. On the in-breath, there's the touch of air on the nostrils or the upper lip, perhaps coolness as the air enters the nasal passages. Some feeling of flow and expansion. Maybe you feel it in the throat, or the chest, or the belly. Shifting clothing against the skin.

And then at some point that comes to an end and there's an out-breath that has a different set of sensations. More a feeling of softening, or relaxation, or falling of the diaphragm. Maybe the air is a little warmer and the flow is outward. Notice simple distinctions that help us know whether it's an in-breath or an out-breath. How do you know?

We may begin to sense the breath as a whole-body phenomenon. Really, it isn't just the literal air that we can feel. Maybe as the chest expands and the shoulders shift position, there's a slight shift in how our hips are. Maybe we can feel the breath as energy that flows throughout the body.

So as we connect with the body in a gentle way, again notice certain distinctions. The body isn't all one way. We can feel places that have a sense of more solidity, and other areas that feel light, or open, or soft, warm, or cool. It's actually quite varied throughout the body. Just letting that be as it is.

In particular, we may notice areas of relative tension and relative softness. It's not that one is right and one is wrong, but it is okay to incline toward a general softening. Maybe allowing the breath energy to pass through or around places of tension. Perhaps letting the body feel like it's being lowered into a warm pool of water.

As we continue to sit, it's possible to notice when the mind gets distracted and when it is mindful. And again, we don't need an assessment of right or wrong, good or bad, but a simple noticing of how it is when there's mindfulness and when there are bouts of thought. What is different between those different states of the mind?

If we've wandered off thinking for a while and we come back, does that thinking have an impact on the body? Is there something different there?

It's very natural that things change. The body changes, the ability to be mindful changes, the thoughts and maybe emotions change. Come, go, shift.

Another layer of noticing is how we are meeting all of this changing experience in the breath, in the body, in the emotions and thoughts, and awareness. How do we meet all of that? We may meet it with kindness, interest, care. Or perhaps there's striving, or aversion, or judging. What is the distinction between kind interest and judging or striving? Can we feel the distinction between those? Is there anything noticeable in the body?

It's very helpful in meditation to be able to make beneficial distinctions—spiritually meaningful distinctions or extinguishment.

Allowing the mind to rest with just simple interest in all the differences and changes that are going on, with an eye toward not suffering, not clinging. And that includes both what we're aware of and how we meet it.

So it may be that even from this relatively short exploration of beneficial distinctions, you've already seen how it's possible to be with tension in the body and softness. How it's possible to be with different emotions or thoughts, or the way the mind gets distracted, and then just coming back. Checking the attitude in the way that we're aware.

There are so many different, I want to say, handles or knobs to turn in a sense. It's not complex, but we have so many ways that we can make simple adjustments toward being more easeful, suffering less in any given moment. This is much of the art of just living a mindful life. How are things now? How am I with it? Could I be freer? "Oh, my mind isn't free right now." Okay, I'll be with that.

The encouragement is to bring this same kind of simple awareness into daily life. It's definitely a more complex set of inputs; that's why we practice on the cushion. But during the day, could we have a simple attitude of kindness, interest, awareness? Paying attention to whether our body is getting tense? Paying attention to other people? Having a sense that if we're present and aware with an attitude of non-clinging, that's a spiritually meaningful way of being.

It's very simple, and it rests on the mind's basic ability to notice this and that—to be aware of spiritually meaningful distinctions between things. We can help ourselves this way, and by natural extension, we help everyone else in doing that.

Dharmette: Four Inspirational Blessings (1 of 5) Not Neglecting Wisdom

So this week we'll be exploring a sutta that has four compact instructions for walking the path. In the sutta, the Buddha meets a very dedicated practitioner, a monk who has gone forth as a Buddhist monk without even meeting the Buddha. So he must have ordained with one of the Buddha's senior disciples. The Buddha is impressed with his practice and dedication, so he offers this teaching on four fundamental practices that are simple but can take a person very far along the path—maybe all the way to Liberation.

The Buddha says in this teaching that a person can stand upon these four foundations as reliable activity that will move us toward Liberation. So we'll explore them as practical activities that we can engage with both on and off the cushion, and they can go very deep. They keep unfolding over time. Maybe even when we first hear them we think, "I don't really know what that is," or "It sounds kind of abstract." But as we start looking at little specific examples, it's like, "Oh, I get it. Oh, and there's more, and there's more here." We see new and different ways of seeing them.

The first one is: To not neglect wisdom.

Today is April 8th, 2024. There will be a total solar eclipse visible in the Northern Hemisphere, which amazingly has happened twice in the last seven years. Where I am, it's going to start in just a few hours. It won't be complete where I am.

In the past, solar eclipses were associated with various stories about gods eating the sun or gods fighting in the sky. Nearly every culture has come up with its own stories to explain why the sky gets dark in the middle of the day. Typically in history, these have been somewhat negative stories because it's disturbing when the sun goes away briefly during the day. That's not our usual intuitive understanding of it.

But now, in our present time, people treat it like a spectacle. They flock to see eclipses out of amazement, or for fun, or for scientific interest. And it is amazing and it's interesting. We have a whole different story about what's going on; we have stories about the moon and the sun and the Earth.

So what does it mean to not neglect wisdom? It has something to do with not getting caught up in the particular story, but to remember to pay attention to what is spiritually relevant about any given experience. As experience unfolds—so whether experience is totally mundane and ordinary, or whether the sun is disappearing from the sky—can we direct our attention in some beneficial way?

Wisdom is about making beneficial distinctions, like I said: spiritually meaningful, or in the meditation, valuable distinguishing of experience. This ability to make distinctions is inherent in the human mind; that's the faculty of wisdom, of making distinctions. But if we look at our mind and our experience, we have to admit that sometimes we don't use this capacity as well as it could be used.

We're not talking about the distinction of whether to watch the eclipse from Houston or Buffalo. That's not so important spiritually, even if we might have to make such a choice. But not neglecting wisdom means remembering to make the distinctions that are important, that are going to be valuable or beneficial for us. Usually, that means starting at least with what is actually known, what is actually present in this moment.

Not an imagination about the future; not getting lost in a memory about the past; not coming up with a fantasy or complicated story and living in that; or some kind of an ideal that's not actually present. What is actually present are various experiences in the body and the mind, and also various perspectives that we're bringing to those experiences, which maybe are wise—like the fact that things change. That's a wise perspective.

Yesterday I was driving in a parking lot looking for a space, and I saw someone backing out just ahead. It was nice timing, so I stopped to wait and take that place. The car backed up, and then it kept backing up and backing up, getting very close to my car. I think the driver didn't see me. The first thing I could remember to do was I honked. I couldn't easily back up so quickly—I wasn't in the right gear—and the other car was going pretty fast, but it managed to just miss my car. It just swung out a little bit to the side. It almost then overlapped, but to the side. It must have been just inches.

I don't think that person ever saw or heard my honk, but they stopped and then went on forward on their way. It was really close, and I was rather amazed that we didn't collide. But once the car was gone and nothing was amiss, I found that my mind just went back to calmness. I even checked in my body; actually, there hadn't really been time for me to have an adrenaline rush and get agitated.

But there was a little part in the back of my mind that wanted to get agitated or irritated or scared. It kept saying, "But shouldn't we be rattled by that? Shouldn't we be afraid? Shouldn't our heart be pounding?" For the most part, I wasn't, really. It had all been quite quick, actually; it was over and nothing had happened.

So I thought, "Yeah, my mind didn't neglect wisdom at that moment." It didn't fall prey to spinning out or getting off into discursive thought or getting angry at the other person—"How could they have been so distracted to not even see or hear me?" As far as I know, it kind of just stayed with reality. It was like, "Yeah, that was really close, but our day gets to go on. We're not standing here right now exchanging information with someone." So I even felt grateful at that moment. I don't quite know how it was so fortunate.

We can notice in our practice that we have gained some modicum of wisdom. Even if you've just started mindfulness practice, usually we can feel right away intuitively that there's some wisdom about meditating, or "this seems useful," something like that. The question then is, can we honor that? Wow, even whatever small amount of wisdom there is in my mind, in my life, in my heart—can I honor that?

We have to admit that we don't always, because we don't. But it is possible to consider then, what does cause me to neglect my wisdom? I have it sometimes, so why is it that sometimes we don't honor that, or why is it that sometimes we neglect that?

I thought about a few things in my own life that I know get in the way of remembering wisdom.

One of the main things is surely desire: wanting something. When I want something, my mind narrows in and focuses on that; I'm going for that. It's easy at that moment to forget all kinds of things—to forget that things change, to forget that things aren't mine, to forget to pay enough attention to other people. It's not always in a dramatic way, but I see that the desire narrows the mind in a certain way.

It's not that we don't operate by means of wanting to get the next thing, like a drink of water, or going to the bathroom, or getting somewhere in our car. We do have those simple daily life movements toward things. But can we keep our mind open and spacious so it's still in touch with wisdom while we do those things?

Another thing that can get in the way of honoring our wisdom can be a lack of trust, a lack of confidence in allowing things to unfold, trusting the practice. We get in the way of ourselves and we try to make things happen, or we don't think that it will be enough to be present with kindness with someone—we have to engineer it or manipulate it or control in some way. Ironically, the very act of trying to get in there and make it all happen doesn't allow wisdom to happen. It doesn't allow things to unfold in the best way. That's also something that we learn over the course of practice: how to stay present and use the wisdom that's coming, but not get in the way of it through our control and manipulation of things.

And then also, I think conventionality gets in the way of wisdom. Our mind is conditioned by so many things from our culture, our family, our education, our religion. These help us make distinctions between things: me and you, us and them, the way it is and the way it should be. All these things. But are they always wise distinctions between things?

These conventional things lead us to make distinctions usually that benefit our self and are based on things like seeking comfort, eliminating things we don't like, deciding what's right and wrong in an abstract way. But the path is asking us to make different choices. Choices that are about wisdom, choices that are about suffering and not suffering—which might not always be the same as that first set of distinctions I named. So we have to go "against the stream" sometimes in this practice, against the conventional distinctions we've been trained to make. I think at some point we have to admit that in order to go farther on the path, and be willing to distinguish in the way that we're invited to.

So, specific practices that we can do to not neglect wisdom:

A wonderful one I've heard from Gil [Fronsdal] that I've used for many years: What will I sacrifice my peace for?

It's a simple question. So for example, after meditation when you get up, what's the first thing that you sacrifice your peace for? And then look at what that is. Was it worth it? How did that end up? There's always something, because we're not fully awakened; we're going to fall out of it at some point. But notice over time, what sorts of things are we willing to sacrifice our peace for? It says a lot about our mind.

Another useful practice to not neglect wisdom is to bring in feeling tone³ more often. That's noticing whether things are pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—just as a noticing. So often we're in reactive mode: "This is something that's unpleasant and I don't like it and I'm going to get rid of it." We're already in the mode of "how do I get rid of it, how do I solve the problem, how do I control it, how do I fix that other person so they don't do that?" That's all already happened. Long ago we had an unpleasant experience, and all of this activity is about that.

So if we can just step back and say, "You know, what's happening is that this is unpleasant at this moment," it really cuts out a lot of that papañca⁴ and that wandering off—that's a technical term for the discursive mind wandering off into stories and plans and fixing things.

Using feeling tone: is this pleasant, is this unpleasant? Then we have choices about how to react, how to respond much more often out of wisdom. And then having the wise perspective of noticing change without adding a judgment of good or bad. Things are changing; it might even get dark in the middle of the day. But just keep on with knowing how things are without this added reactivity of "is this good, bad, right, wrong?"

When wise distinctions are brought in, other possibilities open up for us. So we can become more attuned to the actual situation, and we can have actual responses that are more precise to what's going on. On the cushion, we can help the mind to settle into a more balanced place if we're aware of wise distinctions between things.

So not neglecting wisdom is remembering to make distinctions that are helpful, and not the distinctions that are just conventional. Distinctions that lead toward or away from suffering; those are useful. To know what's beneficial and what's entangling; what's helpful and kind and what's harmful. These are the distinctions that matter for the path.

See how that goes today. What if I were not neglecting wisdom as often as I do? And remember that judging yourself for neglecting wisdom is not so beneficial. So be aware of that.

Tomorrow we'll start exploring what becomes possible when the mind has remembered to stay present and balanced. What opens up at that point? What other things start to unfold? Even if we can only for a few minutes at a time throughout the day remember to be with wisdom, that's good enough. It's significant.

So have a wonderful day, and if you're in the path of the eclipse, please enjoy it. Take care.