This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Experience and Knowing; Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) Experienced by the Wise. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Experience and Knowing; Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) Experienced by the Wise - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to our Friday meditation. We'll follow this with a short Dharma talk and then a community meeting for those of you who would like to be part of it. We'll switch over to Zoom, and the Zoom link will be posted here at some point, maybe at the end at 7:45. I'll make sure it gets posted so you can get over there.

Welcome. One of the very rich and important kinds of interactions, or richness of the practice, is the mutuality, the association, the inseparability of the experience we have and the knowing of the experience, or the seeing of the experience. These two don't really exist separate. Together, seeing them working together is one means to become free from it all, not get entangled, not get reactive to what's being experienced, to what's being known. Sometimes we emphasize knowing, seeing; sometimes we emphasize experiencing, sensing, feeling what's happening here and now.

So for this meditation, you might want to consider that the purpose of knowing is to help us experience more clearly, to feel what's happening more clearly. And the purpose of experiencing something clearly is to know it better, until at some point these two don't really become two different things. It becomes very, very simple, and you can almost hyphenate knowing-experiencing or experiencing-knowing. But the important point is that we're here to really be present in our present-moment experience. And one of the ways to become wise in meditation is to become wise about how we get separated from present-moment experience, either because we get distracted, caught up in thoughts, or because we're making commentary and stories around what's happening. Excessive thinking about what's happening is a pulling away, a separation, sometimes so much so that we lose touch with what's happening because of the stories or judgments we make about it.

So, the purpose of experiencing in the present moment is to know. The purpose to know what's happening at present moment is to experience it. And perhaps in some relaxed, easy way, this will help you stay present today. Just kind of flow back and forth between experiencing what's here and now—and in the simplest way, it doesn't have to be 100% accurate—and knowing what's happening here and now. And just kind of flow back and forth, stay there, maybe in a gentle, relaxing rhythm.

Guided Meditation: Experience and Knowing

Assuming a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes. With your eyes closed in your meditation posture, globally experience what it's like to be in this body, in this posture. Globally recognize how it is, and in knowing, allow yourself to experience what is known more fully. Experience it through the body, almost like you're letting the body have its own experience of itself.

And then to know, see that experience where the knowing is not entangled, is not reactive. The knowing has a radical simplicity to it, almost as if the knowing itself is free of what it knows. Some people like the idea of it being like looking in a mirror. You know what's in the mirror, but the image in the mirror is not something that you do anything more than to know.

And then within the experience of the body, there's the experience of breathing. Experience how the body experiences breathing. Feel and sense the body breathing, how breathing in is experienced differently than breathing out. Sometimes that experience of the body, experience of breathing, comes along with experiencing how we are more broadly, emotionally. And that's fine. Let the breathing, let the body hold it all, breathe with it all. Let the breathing be part of the broader experience of being alive.

And then as you feel and sense the body, your being, breathe. Know the breathing. Know it simply, lightly, almost as if every moment of knowing evaporates as the knowing is complete.

Knowing and experiencing, seeing and feeling—both part of present-moment experience. Trust the knowing, trust the experiencing. You don't have to trust the experience or what you know, but you can trust the act of experiencing, the act of knowing, when it's simple, non-reactive, non-entangled in the flow of here and now.

Sometimes experience directly is the way to be in the present. It's an anchor, provides stability here and now. Sometimes knowing the experience is what is the anchor to here and now.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, one way of having a sense of, or to feel, or to be inspired around the possibility of freedom through this practice is to let your eyes, whether they're closed or open, have a soft gaze, where the eyeballs kind of float in the eye sockets, not staring at anything, fixated on anything. Gently floating, gently moving, floating this way and that, just loose and light. A gaze that is free of fear, free of desire, free of confusion, just gently looking. Kind of like maybe just looking at a mountain far in the distance, appreciating it but not staring. And maybe gently, the eyes roam over the edges of the mountain, the details. Or looking at a tree gently swaying in the wind, and the eyes are relaxed and soft.

Sometimes this kind of looking is very relaxing for the whole body, for the mind. That's why looking at the waves on the beach, or the water flowing in a river, or even sometimes sitting around a campfire watching the fire. Imagine that you go into your life, your day, to be with the things of the day, the people of the day, with this kind of seeing, with a soft, relaxed gaze. Maybe a sparkling gaze, just from the delight of being at ease and relaxed. It just feels good to see others, to see the world this way.

And if the gaze is not relaxed, soft, floating in the eye sockets, why is that? What have you been caught by? What emotions, what concerns, what attitudes, desires have kicked in that fixates the eyes, so you stare at what's happening?

Imagine that you can come back to a soft, relaxed gaze. That gaze which represents not being caught by what's happening, but present to see it. And in this way, we are allowing others to be free of how we do get caught, how we react. And it's a gift to others. Maybe it supports them to relax and be at ease as well.

May it be that this practice we do helps set others at ease, helps others feel safe, helps others feel seen without being imposed on. May it give people space and room to be who they are, free of our expectations and needs. May this practice that we do help us to help others in this difficult world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) Experienced by the Wise

Hello everyone, and welcome to this last talk on the five qualities of the Dharma.¹ One of the things that delights me is how, I think, each day as I think about teaching about one of the qualities, it becomes my favorite of the qualities. And so today, the quality of the Dharma is that it's characteristic of the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, that they are to be personally experienced by the wise.

Now, these five characteristics reinforce themselves, overlap, maybe sometimes saying almost the same thing. And I like this because it's really emphasizing that this is something to be personally experienced. The Buddha is only pointing to something, and we have to see and know and experience it for ourselves. And what he is pointing to is visible here and now, something to be seen. Which is again, we see in the present moment. It's immediate. It's that kind of relationship to the present moment. It's immediately here.

The teachings are inviting us to take a good look for ourselves because it is something to know for ourselves. Come and look, come and see. It's onward leading. There's something about the way that the teachings, the practice, the seeing that we do, is not static. It doesn't leave us unchanged. It sets in motion a maturation, a movement, an opening, a healing, a growing. And at different times, different ones of those words are relevant.

To be personally experienced by the wise. I find it delightful that it says "to be experienced by the wise," because this is directed to all of us, to all of you. You're being related to as a wise person and respected for that. And I think that part of that wisdom is that you are having the wisdom to understand that this is something for you to go through yourself, something for you to discover for yourself and to know for yourself, to be rooted in for yourself. No one else can free you except for your own practice and your own experience. And that's where the most profound and important freedom is found, is here in our own experience that we have to be present for.

Along that way, there are a lot of small freedoms that we discover. This freedom of staying close to our experience, staying close to what we can directly know, frees us from all the fantasies, all the memories, all the associations, all the fears, all the projections into the future, ideas we have that very easily take us away into an abstract world, help us to separate and disconnect from something. The more disconnected we are from our direct experience—our direct experience of being a human being, the direct feeling, sensing, seeing, knowing—the less it has room to unfold, to grow, the less it has space to expand. So we start becoming freer of all those abstractions, freer from being caught in thoughts and ideas and memories and fantasies. And that's a phenomenal freedom on the way to full freedom.

So, to be personally experienced by the wise. The word for experience in Pāli² can also mean to know. It could also mean to feel or to sense. And while we have different words in English—know, feel, experience, sense—there's no sharp, strong separation of that as the practice goes deeper and deeper, as the mind gets more concentrated and still and more fully in the moment here with the experience. It begins to become a rich and very simple world where knowing and experience is not that separate, knowing and sensing is not so separate. And freedom and knowing the freedom, sensing and knowing freedom sensing, start becoming intimately associated, intimately part of the same thing.

So these five qualities of the Dharma, the five qualities of the teaching—when Dharma means teaching—it's a litmus test for if you hear Dharma teachings. Are these the teachings of the Buddha, the essential teachings of the Dharma? Are they something for you to see yourself? Are they something that's visible here and now? Is it immediate, something you can experience right here, right now, immediate? Is it something that is inviting you to take a look for yourself, or is the teacher kind of imposing their beliefs on you? And is it onward leading? Does it lead to something useful? Does it lead to what's wholesome? Does it lead to what's beneficial for you? Does it lead to freedom?

That's when Dharma means teaching. Sometimes Dharma also means the natural law or the natural processes that get set in motion as we practice mindfulness, as we do this meditation practice, as we kind of engage in Buddhist practice. And there also, we're starting to notice what's happening within us, and how is this unfolding thing? And what we discover is right here in our experience. The Dharma unfolds in our experience, our felt experience, our knowing, our sensing, our really staying present here.

One of the great gifts that this mindfulness practice has brought me, and I think other people as well, is a phenomenal trust, a great trust in the efficacy, the value, the joy, the richness of the mindfulness practice itself. I trust deeply being mindful. I trust deeply knowing what's happening in the experience. I trust deeply experiencing what I'm experiencing. So the trust here is not the experience itself, the event itself that's happening, whether it's in myself or in the world. But rather, what I trust is bringing a clear attention to that, to know it clearly, to feel it, to sense it, to be mindful of it. That I trust.

In so many situations in my life, I have not known what to do, and I've been confused by it sometimes. But I've learned that I don't have to know what to do. I just have to show up. I have to be present and see. And sometimes in a complicated social situation, it can be helpful, in a wise, careful way, to name out loud what we're experiencing, what we're knowing—kind of mindfulness out loud. And hopefully, we've learned how to keep it really simple, just the events without any judgments or criticism or something that's more than just the simplicity of the moment. But to name it. I've been in social situations where simply naming, "Wow, you know, this is a tense conversation we're having," or "This is... I'm feeling uncomfortable," that begins to shift the dynamics. And other people then shift and change, and we're not locked into the conflict or the tension that we have.

The point being trusting not the experience, but trusting the mindfulness of it, the knowing of it, the clear, present-moment knowing. It allows something different to unfold. And when I haven't known what to do, the situation unfolds, and almost inevitably, things move in a direction that's beneficial and eventually have revealed what is to be known.

I hope that these five qualities, characteristics of the Dharma, have been inspiring for you, interesting for you, useful for you.

Community Meeting & Q&A

Now in a few minutes, we will have a community meeting for this 7 a.m. YouTube community. So if you're able to go to it, we'll meet in a couple of minutes on Zoom. The Zoom link, when I get down from here, I'll post it on the chat, but also it's on the IMC website on the homepage. Under the bottom right, there's a box called "What's New," and there's a listing for it. It should also be in the IMC calendar. Hopefully you'll find it. You're also welcome to just stay on YouTube. I'll keep this channel videoing live, and so you'll certainly be able to hear me and some of the questions, but you won't be able to see people. So if that works better for you. Thank you very much, and I'll be back here in about a minute or so after I post the Zoom link.

Okay, let's see. Can you hear me on Zoom? Fantastic. And I trust that those of you who might have stayed on YouTube can hear me as well. This is very nice to be together. It's been a long time since we've done one of these... oh, wait a minute. I think that I should be on a different... oh, what happened? Somehow the audio went off, but also I should be on a different... oh, let me see. Wait one moment while I adjust.

Okay, there. I think... so I think that... I see what's happening. Okay, so I think that now I'm on the camera on the wall, so I can look at you more directly rather than looking down. So, I think that technology is now set up. Can you hear me okay again? Wonderful.

Hello. It's been a while since we've had one of these meetings. Maybe some of you have questions you'd like to ask. There's a lot of you that are here. Maybe we could do a few minutes of questions. It helps me warm up a little bit. I'm not quite sure what to say. And then maybe we'll do a little breakout group so you can meet each other a little bit and have a little discussion, and come back and have some more discussion as a whole group. It would be best if you raise your Zoom hand, if you know how to do that. If you don't know how to do it, there's a place down below, I think it's under... on my computer, it's under "React." So this is where you're allowed to react as you wish, almost, by raising your hand down there.

Question from Barbara: The first two characteristics of "here and now" and then "immediate." I understand immediacy as having something to do with relevancy in the past and relevant now, and I also see it as immediate here and now. But I'm not really clear about how those two are different.

Gil Fronsdal: The Pāli for the first is sandiṭṭhiko, which means "to view," "to be seen." And in context, it also can mean here and now, in our lived, direct experience here and now. But literally, it means "to see." And so there's a common custom to translate it as "to be visible here and now," but the "now" part is not needed because that's coming next. So "visible here" maybe is a better translation. And then the next one, "immediate," is the "now."

Question from Padma: In any of the ways of practicing... this morning you just talked about knowing and experiencing, or of course watching the mind, or the breathing, feel the body, all those things. Yes, they do work for me, but I still feel there is mind involved... I wonder what you have to say about that. I feel like in all the meditations, there is still mind involved.

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the mind is involved. All of who we are is involved. And the mind shouldn't be disrespected, or it shouldn't be overvalued either, but it has an important role. For the Vipassanā³—classic Vipassanā practice—as mindfulness gets stronger and stronger, we start seeing more and more distinctions. In our ordinary life, for many people, everything's just a big buzz of chaos. Everything's kind of jumbled together in one big experience. As mindfulness gets stronger and stronger and we get more and more settled, each individual physical and psychological, mental, emotional event that occurs is seen distinctly, rather than a bundle altogether.

So one of the things that we start seeing, for example, is that you might feel a warmth on your skin, but distinct from that sensation is the mind has a cognition, "warmth on skin." And that is seen as very distinct from each other, rather than one and the same thing. How that's valuable is that sometimes we don't distinguish between our preferences, our desires, and the experience. So if I see it all as a bundle, then having a warm skin, maybe I don't like it today because it's going to be a hot day. And so the not liking and the warmth are kind of wedded together. And so, in order to satisfy my preference, I have to get rid of the warmth. But if you can see that the warmth and the preference, the warmth and desire, are two very distinct events, then you don't have to get rid of the warmth. You have to kind of become freer of the desire, and the desire is more the mental activity. So we start seeing more and more distinctions, and that's part of where the freedom comes in the Dharma, is seeing each individual event distinct from itself, rather than somehow blended together with everything else.

...

The non... we don't say "non-self" in our tradition. We say "not-self." And there's a very important distinction between "there is no self" versus "the experience we're having is not-self." In our tradition, we're not making a universal claim that there is no self. We're just seeing for ourselves that as we see these very distinct experiences, we tease things apart and see things individually, then we see that, "Oh, this is not self, this is not self, this is not self." It's always something very particular. We don't get involved in the abstractions of what a self is. It's just a particular, and it's as clear as if you cut your fingernail and the fingernail clipping is on the counter. You'll say, "Well, that's not me." You know, it was part of me, but it's not me now. You don't identify that as the self. So it's that clear.