This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meditation as Curiosity; Gil's Story pt 2 (2 of 5) At the Cusp of Teaching. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Gil's Story pt 2 (2 of 5) At the Cusp of Teaching; Guided Meditation: Meditation as Curiousity - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 05, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Curiousity

So hello everyone, and welcome. It's helpful when we sit down to meditate to have a bit of an attitude or an approach that we're doing it for the first time. Maybe with a certain amount of momentum or familiarity, but still that it's new. It's something new to discover, that we don't really know the subtleties, or the depths, or the corners, or the attics, or the basements of our lives that might show itself in any given meditation. So just to meditate as if it's fresh and new, entering a new world, not assuming or bringing with you the expectations or the assumptions from before. And in that regard, it's helpful to think of meditation as a form of curiosity. But a form of curiosity that doesn't stimulate more thinking, but the opposite. A form of curiosity that is a keen interest: "What's going on here?" That quiets the mind.

And the analogy that I like is that if you're in, say, the forest and you hear a sound that's unfamiliar and it's very faint, and maybe it's the sound of the river that you need to find. And you wonder, "Is that the river? What is that?" Or there's a sound of a bird. To be able to listen acutely or carefully, fully, your ordinary thinking might quiet down. You might stop thinking ordinary thoughts. There might be some very simple thoughts about the sound, but something inside of you gets very still and quiet and connected, focused on the hearing, and things get very quiet.

And in that kind of way, we can ask ourselves the kind of question that I asked myself when I was in Burma practicing. There was the question: "What is this? What is this?" Whatever was happening, "What is this?" And even if I recognized it as something that I knew—like maybe it was the tingling in my chest—I could have just said "tingling in my chest" and been done with it. But this kind of checklist approach to mindfulness, to awareness, where you just kind of recognize what's there and move on, is limiting. So I might recognize a tingling in my chest, and then I would ask, "What is this?" But I did it with a way to make my mind get quiet. And I wouldn't be looking for an answer. It wasn't like I was asking a question so that I answer it with some more thoughts, or descriptions, or ideas. But I asked the question to quiet the mind so I can move into it and feel it more fully. So I can open myself and allow myself to receive it more fully. "What is this?"

To really know something well, to know something experientially, to know something through the senses—because the sense data, how things come in through the senses, is the gate by which all the experience of the world and ourselves begins. And then we construct it, we interpret it, we apply names onto it, and it gets complicated very quickly in a way that takes us away from the immediacy of this sensory experience that we have. And what I learned in Burma practicing there was how central the sensory experience was to this practice of Vipassanā¹, the ongoing flow of sensations.

And so this question, "What is this?" and letting things in with that curiosity. "What is this?" To do that, sometimes I would say it in my mind, and sometimes it was just kind of an attitude. But an attitude that lets something get quiet. A quieting, a stilling to feel, to open, to receive, to float on whatever experience was. So even if there was a lot of thinking going on, even there I would say, "What is this?" Not to discern what the content of the thoughts were and why I was thinking what I was thinking. But again, what are the sensations of thinking? If I had a strong emotion, "What is this?" And let everything get quiet so I can feel and sense the sensory nature of the emotions. So the curiosity that quiets the mind.

So sitting upright, or sitting or lying... if you're lying down, lying in a way that adjusts your spine, a way that works for you but aligns the back, the spine. It optimizes the feeling of alertness in your back while taking care of whatever might be an issue in the back.

And gently closing your eyes, and beginning with curiosity and the question: "What is this? What is this experience of being alive right now in this posture with the eyes closed?"

Not to answer it with words, but let the thinking mind become quieter. As if, if you're quiet enough, what is here will reveal itself to you. You don't have to go looking or figuring out what is it that wants to be revealed. "What is this?" And if nothing comes, there might still be the pleasure of that curiosity, that openness, that receptivity that comes with that question.

And taking a few longer, deeper breaths, relaxing with the exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal and center yourself into a receptive mode. Center yourself in the breathing, to be receptive to breathing, the body sensations of breathing. With a question: "What is this? What are the body sensations of breathing? What is it?" As a way of quieting the mind and being more sensitive to the experience of breathing.

"What is this?" As an entry into the ongoing flow of present moment experience, with the mind becoming quieter, stiller, to better perceive the lived experience of sensations in the body.

As a way of opening more fully to the experience of here and now, you could ask yourself the question, "What is this?" Don't look for an answer. Let the question open you to the experience of here.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, to ask yourself now with a quieting curiosity: "What is this? What is this experience of being alive?" And if you let the body answer that question, what answer does the body provide?

Then with a quiet mind, maybe a calming heart, look, open up to the world around you, in your neighborhood, your home, your town. What is it to have an open heart? What is it to value the people around you? What form of receptivity and attentiveness comes out of meditation, out of mindfulness, that allows you to take in others in a deeper way? Not as projections of our complaints, or desires, or opinions, but to kind of be sensitive to the humanity of others in all their shapes and forms.

And to end the meditation with wishing everyone well: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And perhaps inspired to have this well-wishing, knowing that combination of happiness, safety, peace, and freedom brings out the best in people, even the ones who are difficult.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Gil's Story pt 2 (2 of 5) At the Cusp of Teaching

So hello and welcome to this series that I'm giving about my Dharma life. I left off yesterday with having gone to Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts for a three-month retreat. Up to that point, I had been kind of going back and forth some between doing Zen practice at the San Francisco Zen Center and doing Insight practice in Asia, in Thailand and Burma. The first time I practiced with Western teachers was at that three-month retreat at IMS.

And then I went back to Zen Center. I had been ordained as a Zen priest there, a Zen monk. And in the course of growth in that kind of role, at some point someone who is ordained there as a priest has this position of being called the head student, the head monk of a three-month practice period at the monastery. It's considered to be kind of like the transition into starting to train to become a Zen teacher, and you do your first Dharma talks there. So I was invited to have that role, and it seemed like a wonderful continuation of, or completion of, my Zen training. Some people see it as a completion—all your basic training has now been done. You're also a little bit the model student and a model practitioner, so you go to all the meditations and you do all the rituals. The job the head student has is to clean all the public bathrooms and do the trash and the compost. I loved it, it was very nice.

So I went back from IMS and I went to do this three-month retreat at Tassajara Monastery in the wilderness. It was wonderful as a way of continuing what had happened. Imagine being three months in a long silent retreat and then not going back into the busyness of the world, but being able to go into the monastic life and the quiet of the winter where there was no public coming into Tassajara.

So I continued with that, but during that time I began feeling that my future was not to stay at Zen Center. I can't articulate exactly why, but it just didn't seem right to. I'd spent ten years of intensive practice and that period of time felt like it had completed. A complete cycle of development, of growth, and it felt appropriate not to continue in the kind of more intensive Buddhist and practice environment, and to kind of go out into the world a little bit now. But I had no interest in a career or conventional job or anything at all, and I thought, "Well, I'm going to have to support myself some way." I had this probably naive idea that if I got a master's in Buddhist studies, then maybe I could teach Buddhist studies at a community college, classes in Buddhism or something, and make enough income to kind of get by in my simple monastic lifestyle.

So I applied to the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu to do a master's in religious studies with a focus on Buddhism. The reason I went there was twofold. Someone had given me a book by a professor in the philosophy department, a Sri Lankan man named David Kalupahana², about the middle way of Nagarjuna³. Nagarjuna was one of the very important early Mahayana philosophers of India. David Kalupahana had a very different orientation towards how to study Nagarjuna. Most people studied this maybe second-century philosopher through the lens of later Indian interpretations. He said, "No, no, we shouldn't do that. We should understand him through the lens of the earlier Buddhist texts that Nagarjuna would have read and been influenced by." And that was these early Pali⁴ suttas⁵, early Pali discourses of the Buddha. I thought that was a brilliant move, and I really liked David Kalupahana's take on all this, so I wanted to go there to study with him.

Also, there was a wonderful Zen teacher named Robert Aitken Roshi⁶ who was also right there. He had a Zen Center in a house right next to the university, so I went there to study with the Zen teacher for two years and to do this master's program.

The master's program in Buddhist studies turned out to be lots of fun for me. In the ten years that I'd lived this kind of more monastic life, I actually hadn't done very much study of Buddhism, very little reading. Now it felt like a kid in a candy store, and I just had a great time with the studies. So that was nice.

Then after two years, it was over, and I said, "What do I do now?" Again, I had no conventional career in mind, I didn't feel like I should go back to living at a Buddhist center anymore. So what do I do? I didn't really have any idea, I wasn't really a teacher yet. So I thought, "Well, it was fun to do this master's program, why don't I apply for a doctoral program in the San Francisco Bay Area?" Because I wanted to be close to my Buddhist teacher and my Buddhist communities, I wanted to be close to the San Francisco Zen Center. Also, by then I wanted to be closer to the burgeoning world of Spirit Rock. There were some Vipassanā teachers there, Jack Kornfield and others, that I hardly knew, but I wanted to be kind of closer to that scene.

I didn't expect to get accepted into a doctorate program, but I was accepted. To my surprise, not only was I accepted, but there was a very large scholarship for living. I think it was a lot of money back then—it was $8,000 a year in 1990 for me to live on, and that was enough for me to live on and go to school.

I quickly discovered that a doctorate program at a major research university is very different from a master's program. A master's program was kind of like just great introductions and surveys to Buddhism. The doctoral program was now to bore down into the details and do a lot of analysis and often critical analysis of texts. It wasn't as much fun the way that I had before.

But one of the motivations for me was that my undergraduate degree was in agronomy at the great agricultural school, University of California at Davis. I was part of a group of other students who were kind of activists on campus. We called it "Alternatives in Agriculture"—trying to get more organic farming studies, trying to do different things that were more alternative to conventional commercial fertilizer and pesticide-centered agriculture. We had wonderful adventures at the university promoting that. But one of the things that was a surprise for me when I studied the science behind farming is that I came kind of as a fundamentalist organic farmer, with a lot of received ideas about farming, and especially fertilizers, that were erroneous. I was kind of shocked that I was capable of very dogmatic, opinionated ideas about farming and things, and it wasn't quite right.

When I started my doctoral program in the religious studies department to do Buddhist studies, I remembered that and I said, "You know, I'm doing religion here, and in religion I think there's even more dogmatism, more easy to succumb to 'this is the truth,' 'this is really what is.'" I wanted to be really careful not to fall into that trap, and I wanted to be able to have the foundation to understand my assumptions, to understand where the beliefs came from, to understand how to interpret meditation experiences so there wasn't an overlay of dogmatism on top of it. I've certainly seen a lot of fundamentalists in Buddhism, and I didn't want to be one of those.

So this study turned out to be a doctoral program at a really major research university in religious studies. In some ways, it served really well to develop a better critical mind in the best terms of that expression. A mind that could analyze or think about things and question things in a deeper way. I felt that when I was there, that kind of questioning was another form of liberation. It was kind of an intellectual liberation that was going on. So that was nice.

But then a number of interesting things happened along the way. Just around that time, just before leaving Hawaii to come back to California—I think it was still 1989—I received a phone call that was out of the blue for me. I wasn't expecting it, from Jack Kornfield, who I only knew a little bit and I'd never practiced with. But he knew about my practice, and he invited me to be in his next teacher training. It was one of those remarkable experiences where I remember standing, looking out of windows as he was talking to me on the phone, and I literally, kind of viscerally, had this sensation in my body of the puzzle pieces of my life coming together. It was like a click, click, click, and I thought, "Wow, it all fits now." I can't necessarily explain that, but that was the physical sensation of it. Then later, in a rational way, I said, "Well, I don't know if I'm going to become a Vipassanā teacher, but it'd be foolish not to go study with Jack Kornfield." So I started that training at the same time that I started my doctorate program.

Then when I came back to California, I had a little bit of trouble finding a place to live. So I ended up living back at the San Francisco Zen Center, living in the temple, and it was nice to be there. But then my Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman⁷, was the abbot at that point. At some point, he took me for a walk and we had an interesting conversation. First, he asked me about the other abbot, as there were two major abbots at Zen Center at that time. So he asked me about my relationship with the other one, and I said that I trusted his Dharma, his teaching, but I didn't quite trust him. Then he asked, "What about me?" I said, "Well, I trust you, but I'm not quite sure about your Dharma."

Then he did a remarkable thing. We were walking on the sidewalk and he turned around and faced me, and when I said I'm not sure about your Dharma, he put his hands together almost like with a clap and said, "And that's where we'll meet." He wasn't upset, he wasn't concerned. He was kind of delighted that I didn't quite see eye to eye with him about the Dharma. He said, "That's where we'll meet." It was not like we were going to meet and he was going to convince me of something; that's where he wanted to meet me. It felt like a really respectful thing, and also in Zen when you put your hands together it's an act of respect.

Then later in that walk, he suggested that I start training with him specifically, or studying with him to prepare for Dharma transmission⁸, which is to become a full Zen teacher. I kind of said, "Well, I think it's too early to talk about that, but why don't I come over and start studying with you?" So I started studying basically for that purpose, but I had kind of put off a decision. So here I was: practicing, studying a PhD in Buddhist studies, involved in training to be a Vipassanā teacher with Jack Kornfield, and training to be a Zen teacher with Mel Weitsman, all at the same time.

And then in 1992, kind of when all this was going on, in addition, that's when I got married. I'd met my wife some five years earlier when I'd come back to living at Green Gulch after coming back from Burma. I had met her there on the farm—she was farming there—and we got together. We went to Tassajara together, and she went with me to Hawaii. Then when we came back from Hawaii, she went to UC Davis to get a master's in botany, and I went to graduate school in the Bay Area. In 1992, we were married.

So this is the last thing I'll say, I'm going to leave it here. As part of the homework for teacher training with Jack Kornfield, we were supposed to have a sitting group that we taught weekly. As it turned out, there was one in Palo Alto that met Monday nights with about 12 to 15 people who came. The person who facilitated it, a wonderful man named... I know in this different flow I can't quite remember... oh, Howard Nudelman. He had gotten sick and so he couldn't lead the group anymore. He wasn't teaching it, but he was facilitating it, and Jack suggested that he invite me. So he invited me, and then in August 1990, I started to teach this little group, which grew to what we are now, IMC. So that was this wonderful combination of things happening then.

Looking back at it now, it seems like I was doing a lot, but it felt very spacious and just all matter of fact. It was a different... you know, 30 years ago, it felt like, looking back now, a whole different era. There seemed to be lots of time for everything compared to now where we live in a very different world. It feels like now my time is filled in a way that it wasn't back then.

So that brings it to a certain kind of conclusion of when I started to teach. I'll continue a little bit now in my life as a teacher. So thank you.