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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of How; Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (3 of 5) Come and See for Yourself - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 31, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Hello from Redwood City, the Insight Meditation Center, and welcome to this day's meditation. As an introduction, there is a wise approach, or a very direct approach, to mindfulness practice. To the degree to which Insight (Vipassanā) is involved, a form of clear seeing, some people are looking for something. But it's useful to think that what we're looking for is how we're seeing. What we're looking for is in the seeing itself, not in what's being seen through the eyes or heard through the ears or tasted through the tongue and so forth. It's the manner by which we know, that we're aware, that is where the secret, the key is found.

An analogy would be that if someone says, "I have a wonderful means for you to penetrate the depths of your spiritual life, and you'll find it with this stone," and the person hands you a little stone that you can easily hold in your hand, but there are no more instructions. "Your freedom is found through this stone." And so you spend years studying the stone, analyzing the stone, boring into the stone with a drill, trying to find out what it is about the stone that's going to bring you freedom. And then finally, you go back to the person and say, "I'm not finding anything." You explain what you've done, and maybe the person laughs or cries, "No, no, you misunderstood. It's not the stone itself, it's how you hold the stone. That's where your freedom is found."

If you are bearing down on it, if you're intensely straining to understand it, to analyze it, to figure it out, if you're looking beyond yourself at the stone, you're not going to find your freedom. But if you look at the manner in which you are holding it and seeing it and being with it and knowing it, that is where the freedom is found. And I could have given you anything, the person says. It could have been a piece of wood or a piece of paper. It doesn't matter what it is; it all is a means to freedom if you understand that it's in how you are with it that's important.

So for this meditation, then, I'd like to encourage you, in those moments where you feel like you can really see clearly or know clearly what is happening now—whether it's an in-breath and an out-breath, or knowing you're thinking, or knowing there's a feeling, or knowing there's a sensation, knowing there's a reaction, whatever it is that you know, a sound that you hear, it doesn't matter—whatever it is you know, see if you can discover how to know it, how to be aware of it, how to see it so there's an ease or a peace or freedom, a spaciousness, an openness, a lightness in the knowing.

And if there's none of those things, then let yourself really see the strain or the heaviness or the stress or the tightness in how you know, in how you're trying to see or understand. And hold that gently. Just allow that to be in the field of awareness, not as anything that's wrong or to be fixed, but one more thing to discover how to be free with what you know.

Hopefully, this is clear enough.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of How

Assume a meditation posture. There are many postures for meditation. The Buddha listed four: standing (once you start walking), standing, sitting, and lying down. On different mornings, different ones of these might be most relevant for you.

Lowering your gaze before you close your eyes, maybe lower your gaze and see if you can have a relaxed gaze, maybe not looking at anything in particular, soft eyes. And then closing your eyes.

So that the how you're aware can be more relaxed, at ease, it helps to put the body at ease. One way to do this is to take a few slightly deeper breaths than normal, feeling the torso, the rib cage, the body as you breathe in. And as you exhale, to relax the body, soften. On different exhales, you might soften different parts of your body: the shoulders, the arms, the lower back, the belly, the lower arms and hands, the legs.

And then letting the breathing return to normal. With a normal breath, on the inhale, feel these different parts of the body that I'll mention, and on the exhale, soften, relax that part of your body.

Beginning with the forehead and the eyes. Softening the forehead and the eyes.

The cheeks and the jaws.

The shoulders.

The chest and the heart area.

The belly.

And whatever sense of the global body you have, feel that and soften on the exhale.

And then feel the thinking mind. If there's any pressure, agitation, or tension, maybe in the area of the brain or anywhere else associated with thinking, as you exhale, relax and soften the thinking mind.

And then notice any way in which you're present for this moment, any way in which you're mindful, or any way in which you're viewing your present moment experience. On the exhale, can you soften and relax how you're present, how you're aware, how you know?

To continue knowing, continue feeling and sensing your experience, but without any strain, pressure, tension. What we're looking for is found in how we look.

Moment after moment, experiment with a relaxed, soft, non-stressful awareness of the present moment experience.

For each moment of mindfulness, the next moment, see if you can continue being mindful, but in a non-contentious way, non-striving, without attachments. Just know, just be aware in a radically simple way. And in that simplicity, appreciate the freedom.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, preparing ourselves for what follows, for the day, it's important to keep in mind that regardless of how important other people are for you, how you are with other people is the most important for you. Regardless of how important or unimportant your work is, whatever work or activities you're doing, what's most important for you is how you do them, how you do your work, how you do your activities.

Discovering how to live this life with goodwill, the absence of ill will. Discovering how to live this life without aggression, but to live it peacefully. To know how to live this life and participate in this world without causing anyone to be afraid, but rather being unafraid ourselves. And discovering how to be free in all our encounters with others and activities and things in this world. It's how we are that's onward leading, that shows us the Dharma¹, that's visible here and now, immediate, that we can investigate for ourselves.

May this practice that we do, this learning anew how to live, be for the welfare and happiness of everyone we encounter. May everyone we encounter be an occasion for goodwill, our wishes for their happiness, our wishes for their safety and peace, our wishes for their freedom. May this practice support us with a universal goodwill, a will to help the suffering world.

May all beings be happy. Thank you.

Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (3 of 5) Come and See for Yourself

Hello and welcome to this third talk on the five qualities of the Dharma, or the five qualities of the Buddhist teachings. One way of understanding these five is that they are a litmus test to understand what is and isn't the Dharma, what is and isn't the Dharma of Liberation, the core teachings of the Buddha. For it to be core teachings, it needs to have these five qualities. It needs to be something that is directly visible, directly known in our experience. It needs to be something which is immediate, seen here and now.

And the third one for today: there are teachings which are not requiring you to believe, not imposing beliefs on you, but rather, they are teachings that are offered with an invitation to come and see for yourself, to look into this, inspect them for yourself. Are these true?

The Pali word for this third quality is ehipassiko². Ehi basically means "come," it's a kind of colloquial expression, "come here." And passiko means "to see." "Come look, come see." It's an invitation: "Hey, come here, come see, come look for yourself." I love this kind of colloquial expression in Pali. It's not a technical definition of the Dharma; it's a wonderful, soft, inviting idea. Come and study this for yourself, learn for yourself, find out for yourself if this is true. Find out for yourself how this works for you. Come and look, come and investigate.

So whatever teachings you see, you hear, you don't have to believe them. They're not about believing; they're about experimenting, they're about trial and error, trying them out and seeing for yourself how they work. And with time, how do they work with supporting you in reducing suffering, of becoming freer, of developing love and compassion, kindness? How do they support you in developing wholesome qualities so you know for yourself, "Oh, this works, this is good."

There is a tremendous emphasis in Buddhism on practice more than belief. The teachings are hopefully just enough instructions to try something out, to engage in them. Being a nightstand Buddhist is maybe a fine thing to be, but that's not what the teachings are for. The teachings are for us to put them into practice and find out for ourselves, and in a sense, to become our own teachers, so that we are finding our own path, our own way with these teachings.

One of the things that can be really helpful in this regard is what I taught in this most recent meditation. When we're looking, investigating how this works, what's going on, the investigation is deeply personal. It's not an analysis, it's not a logical figuring things out, but rather it's a discovery of how we are as we practice, how we are as we go through our lives. What are we contributing? What are we bringing with us?

If there's a tremendous challenge in the world, it might be easy to want to be upset and complain or criticize or blame or try to change the world. And sometimes, certainly, those things might be appropriate, but that's not where the Dharma is found. If what we're interested in is the Dharma, we always ask, "How am I in regard to this? How do I find my freedom in regard to this? How do I find myself not stuck in it or reactive to it?" There still might be a call to do and change something in the world, but the Dharma practice is about here, "How am I?"

One way to think of this is that the freedom we're looking for in Buddhism is found in how we're looking. How we know, how we're aware, how we practice—this is how we're relating to anything that's going on. That is the key. That's where we come and see. Come and see in yourself, in how you are in relationship to yourself, in relationship to the world, in relationship to what's happening.

A few people take on the Dharma without being really careful about how they relate to the teachings and to the practices. There can be a lot of striving, a lot of judging, a lot of conceit that comes along with doing the practice. There can be the problem of perfectionism: "I have to do it right and perfect, I can't make a mistake." There's a holding on to it for dear life, like "I have to get an A," or "I have to advance further than anyone else in my neighborhood, in my block." The "how" is not looked at because the "how" propels us into the future, propels us into what we're trying to get, what we want, what we're projecting onto the world, what our need is, what our desire is, that we don't see the desire. We don't see the motivation.

Part of the purpose of mindfulness is to settle back enough that we can see how we are. We're not rushing ahead, being ahead of ourselves, but we're settling back into being in ourselves, being here fully enough to track and see: "How am I in the activity that I'm doing? Am I being mindful? Am I being relaxed? Am I being at ease? Am I being free? Or am I straining or tense or pushing or caught in desire or caught in ill will?"

There are plenty of times we'll discover that we are. That's not the problem in and of itself. The problem is when we give into those and participate in those. But having them occur is one more occasion to then ask, "Well, how do I relate to this now? Is there a healthier way of relating to strain and desire and ill will?" The healthy way of relating is to see it clearly without strain, to see the strain without strain, see the ill will without ill will, see the desire without desire for it to go away. There's something about seeing what is unwholesome that makes room for the wholesome to grow. What's good in us flourishes.

So, how we are. In that last meditation, at the beginning, I gave an analogy, which I'd like to do again for those of you who didn't hear it. Maybe the similar analogy will bring more clarity to what I'm trying to teach here.

There's this imaginary teacher out there who is very famous for really helping people. So many people travel to this teacher and they explain their difficulties. The teacher then goes into the back room and comes back and offers everyone a small stone and says, "Here, with this stone, you'll discover your freedom." Most people are confused. They thought they would get a teaching, some piece of wisdom, but just to be given a stone and the exercise that "with this stone, you'll find your freedom."

But some people take it seriously and trust the teacher, but they think that the answer is going to be in the stone. They study geology, and they study the rock, and they look at it and measure it and weigh it and maybe even crack it open or bore holes in it and get it chemically analyzed and do all kinds of things to the stone. After many years of trying to figure out what the stone has to teach, they go back to the teacher, and she says, "No, no, you misunderstood. The answer is not in the stone. The freedom is found in how you hold the stone. Don't strain, don't push it, don't bang on it, don't bore into it, don't shake it to get the answers. Just hold it lightly and freely in your palm. No need to cling to it, just hold it and discover that in the light-handed holding, holding something lightly, that is where the freedom is. Freedom is not in trying to get something out of the stone."

And it's how you hold it. The teacher might have said, "I could have given you anything at all. It could have been a piece of paper, a stick, anything. It doesn't matter what I gave you; it matters if you discover how you're with the object. It's with the 'how' that you'll find your freedom."

Liberation is not found in something, in some belief, in something external. Liberation is found in how we seek liberation. Freedom is found in how we're looking for it. So we don't seek it with tension, we don't look for it with strain, we don't look and feel and sense and know our experience with fear and dread or resistance or aversion. We discover how to be free.

In this way, the Dharma is pointing to your own experience, saying, "Come and see, come and see for yourself in your own experience how this works." The Dharma is visible here and now, it is immediate, it's right here and now. And the teachings offer you the invitation to come and check it out for yourself.

So those are the first three, and tomorrow we'll do the fourth, which is "onward leading," which is one of my favorite of these five. Thank you very much.

I have one announcement, and that is that on Friday, after our YouTube time at 7:45, all of you who would like to are invited to have one of these periodic Community meetings we have for this YouTube sangha. We'll do that on Zoom, and the Zoom link is now posted on the IMC's website, on the "What's New" section of the homepage, down the lower right-hand side. I'll announce this again and make the link available in other ways as well. We'll meet at 7:45, and we'll have a chance for some questions and answers, some discussion, maybe a small breakout group so you can meet some other people who are part of this YouTube sangha. I look forward to any of you who can come. Thank you.