This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Staying Receptive; Six Qualities of the Dharma (4 of 5) Onward Leading. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Staying Receptive; Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (4 of 5) Onward Leading - Shelley Gault

The following talk was given by Shelley Gault at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Staying Receptive

Good morning, everybody. We had a few glitches this morning. I tried about six times to go live on YouTube, and every time I got a message saying the broadcast was private. Kevin had to open a third-party way of accessing the stream, so I'm very happy to be with you, and I'm sorry you had to wait.

Let's sit together—each of us in our separate places all around the world, but together in this Sangha¹ that has become meaningful to so many people over the years.

Pay a little bit of attention to the posture that you are in. Let there be ease and alertness. Look around the body for areas of tension that can be eased up, opened, relaxed a little bit, or softened. Let there be ease.

This morning, I invite you to begin with hearing—with hearing sounds. Notice the sounds that are present where you are, any sounds that arise from your device related to my voice, or maybe there are some notification beeps or rings coming through from other programs that want your attention. Knowing you can just hear them without effort. If your ears and your sensory apparatus are working, they are audible. You don't have to reach out in any way in order to hear the sounds; they come to you.

So, welcome them, and then notice that they go. They pass away. They can be received in our awareness as sounds. I can hear the sound of the fan of my computer; it's very faint, but it's pretty constant. Occasional sounds from outside, other appliances making their little pings—they come and they go. Sometimes they persist, and sometimes they're just momentary. All of them can just be received. Just received.

The same is true for the sensations of breathing. Often when we're meditating, there can be a sense that breathing is an intentional action, that we're causing it to happen. I think quite a few meditators have a habit of controlling the breath, often even unconsciously, when we meditate. But the breath will continue if we leave it alone. When we leave it alone, it's not going to stop. We don't have to do anything in order for breathing to happen. The body breathes every minute of every day that we're alive.

We can just let it happen. We can be receptive to the sensations, knowing it's happening without interfering, just as we don't need to interfere with the sounds that we hear.

There's no need to reach out with the mind. Just allow whatever is arising in you—the sensations of breathing, any sounds that might be arising, any thoughts, emotions, whatever is arising within you—just let it be known as it arises. Let it be known as it persists, if it does, and then notice as it goes away. Each sensation, each breath, each sound has its little life, and then it's gone.

If we can be receptive like this, open to all that's arising, then all that's making up our life right now can just come to us. It comes to us in its fullness. All the experience that makes up our life can be known there as a flow, just a moving flow. We can come to know it very simply, not interfering, not trying to fix anything. Just sitting and receiving all the things that make up our life. Each moment can be fresh, new, and still very simple.

You might check your inner state, the state of your mind and heart. Is there a leaning forward, a trying to catch experience—catch the breath or sounds or whatever is arising? You can let go if there's anything like that, any kind of grasping or trying to get hold of experience. Just allow it to come to you. Your awareness can receive what arises. It can be known without any leaning forward. Just receiving.

Dharmette: Six Qualities of the Dharma (4 of 5) Onward Leading

Today is day four of our investigation of this list of six qualities of the Dharma. This list occurs in quite a number of Suttas, in several of the collections of the Nikayas² of the early discourses. It's not a teaching that only occurs once or twice.

We've looked at four of these six qualities. The first is that the Dharma is well proclaimed (Svakkhato); it's a useful body of teachings, able to guide us from the beginning of our practice all the way to full awakening. The second quality is that it's visible here and now (Sanditthiko); we see it in our experience as it happens in the moment. It isn't theoretical. It's not found in books and Dharma talks, but in our practice as we walk the path. The third is that the Dharma is immediately effective (Akaliko); when we practice in a Dharmic way, we can see that it works. The fourth is that it's inviting inspection (Ehipassiko)³; we're invited to come to the Dharma, to practice it, to see for ourselves whether it works and how it works, and to keep looking, keep exploring.

The fifth quality, the one I'll talk about today, is Opanayiko⁴—onward leading.

I think this logically follows from the previous ones. When we've come to see for ourselves how the Dharma works, to see its effectiveness in us here and now, immediately, then we see that we can trust the direction in which it's leading us: onward toward freedom, toward the end of greed and hatred and delusion. When we see these qualities of the Dharma for ourselves, see them playing out in our own experience, we know empirically that the path works. I believe that as a result of that, we practice it more diligently. We're inspired.

To use the "pebble in the shoe" analogy that I once heard Gil Fronsdal use: once we've seen the effect of taking a pebble out of our shoe, then we're likely to take it out more quickly the next time there's one in there. After a while, it becomes automatic. We might even shake our shoes out if we've been walking around outside in rough areas before we put them on again. We might walk in a way that's less likely to result in pebbles getting into our shoes. We might avoid pebbly areas or not wear sandals in pebbly areas. There are a lot of skillful ways to avoid pebbles.

When we see that our Dharma practice is effective—when our inspection shows us that we have more peace in our hearts and minds, that we are kinder, wiser, less reactive—we are led onward. We naturally begin to act in ways that avoid putting "pebbles" into our hearts and minds.

I think our understanding of the ways that our mind works deepens, and we begin to bring more discernment into decisions about how we spend our time—our free time, our work time—and even where we spend our money or how we interact with others. We develop more wisdom about avoiding activities or people that lead us into more dukkha⁵. Our hearts get bigger; they get more welcoming. More and more, we make choices that are based on discerning what is skillful, what's beneficial, and what's kind, as opposed to what leads to harm—both harm for ourselves and harm for others.

We keep using the tools of the Dharma: mindfulness, compassion, good will, ethical behavior, generosity. We experience the results, and that keeps us going onward. It's leading us onward, ultimately, to freedom.

There is a slightly different translation of this word Opanayiko, and it is "inward leading" as opposed to "onward leading." I appreciate both of them. My sense is that this inward movement points to the Dharma being found within us. There is something within us that recognizes and responds to our practice and our study of the Dharma by aligning with it in an intuitive way. There's something within us that is the Dharma, I think. Our inner life comes to express the Dharma more and more as we continue to practice.

The Dharma becomes visible to us; we begin to see it everywhere. Sometimes we talk about looking at life through a "Dharma lens," but my sense is that the Dharma lens is not something that we put on like a pair of glasses. It's the actual way we see the world—looking through the eyes of our heart, maybe our whole being, through a mind that has developed clarity and discernment and care for others. We're in the Dharma stream, and the Dharma stream is in us, and we see the world through that.

There is a capacity listed in an essay by Sheridan Blau about "performative literacy" that I think is really relevant to our Dharma practice. This one goes along with the aspect of the Dharma being onward leading: it is a tolerance for ambiguity, for paradox, for uncertainty.

I love this suggestion because I think sometimes Dharma teachings are ambiguous. They are kind of paradoxical. For example, the Middle Way⁶. Often we talk about the Middle Way as being neither driven by sense desires nor driven by asceticism—somewhere in the middle. That's one way of defining it, and that's not ambiguous or paradoxical; that's just balanced. But the Middle Way can also refer to ideas and concepts related to identifying with a self.

As you're probably aware, the Buddha wouldn't answer when people asked him, "Is there a self?" He argued against those who were eternalists, claiming a permanent existence for a self or for anything else, and those who were annihilationists, who claimed that nothing really exists. The alternative to these extremes—that everything exists eternally or that nothing exists at all—was said to be teaching by the middle.

Things arise due to conditions, and they cease when those conditions no longer exist. The Buddha said: for those who see arising, there can't be annihilationism; and for those who see passing, there can't be eternalism. Does the self exist? It depends. The Buddha teaches by the middle.

So, being willing to not come down on one side or the other, we rest in a kind of uncertainty. It depends. When we solidify around a concept like the existence or non-existence of a self, then we put a block in that natural flow of the Dharma, the flow that is leading us onward. It's the flow of life. We aren't seeing the onward leading nature of the Dharma when we're trying to pin it down, to fix it in place.

The quality of inviting inspection also plays its part in this. We come again and again; we come and see for ourselves. We don't need to come to a conclusion. We keep looking. Wisdom comes as a result of keeping looking. So this quality of mind, being tolerant of uncertainty, allows us to let go of a desire for final truths—for some ultimate description of reality or of the purpose of human existence, or some definitive answer to the question "Who am I?"

Humans have always had a desire for firm answers to questions like this. What is the purpose of life? When did the universe begin? If we can't handle questions like that, it leaves us in a state where we crave the answers.

It is similar to the situation Sheridan Blau describes, where he said that students who aren't able to understand a difficult text the first time they read it think that they're not advanced enough to know the answer. They think they can't read. But actually, sometimes there aren't answers to these questions. Sometimes we think that because we can't figure out the purpose of life, it's because we're not philosophically sophisticated enough. But the Buddha often refused to answer philosophical questions. Does having an answer lead to the end of suffering? Is it practical to have an answer? What's useful is knowing the answers to the questions that lead to the end of suffering.

Sometimes things need to stay mysterious. When the Zen monk who was sweeping the courtyard was asked, "Who are you?", he replied that he was sweeping.

Humans like certainty; it makes us feel safe. But the Dharma is pointing towards becoming comfortable with uncertainty, comfortable with paradox, with inconsistency, with inconstancy, with change. There's that fourth quality of the Dharma, Ehipassiko: inviting inspection, come and see for yourself. Keeping the door open. Keeping looking.

Connected to this tolerance for ambiguity is a willingness to change our minds, to engage with different visions of the Dharma, and to keep our interest and our curiosity fresh. To not come to conclusions. It's really essential to be willing to change our minds as a result of what we're coming to see in our practice—to accept that we might be wrong about something and to see that it's not really a problem. It's just part of walking the path, discovering more as we go. We can engage with people who have different views and come to appreciate those views, come to see the logic and the usefulness of them, without necessarily taking them on. Just keeping our minds open to other possibilities.

In his essay, Blau mentions "methodological believing and doubting." These are two ways of engaging with ideas that we come in contact with. We can try an idea on for size. For many of us, probably early in our practice, we were just giving it a chance, seeing where it might lead, having a kind of tentative faith—practicing "believing" as an experiment.

And then on the other side, there's "methodological doubting." We can ask ourselves: "What if my views about this are wrong?" Being willing to question our own views and perceptions. To ask, "What if I'm wrong about this? What are the implications of that?" Just looking deeper.

For me, I think of this in terms of rebirth. At present, I don't subscribe to the idea of rebirth. I don't have direct experience of it, for sure, in this lifetime. I sort of subscribe to the idea that it's probably just a holdover from views that were prevalent in India during the Buddha's time. It doesn't seem useful to me in the context of ending suffering in this lifetime. But many teachers whom I respect a lot do subscribe to it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe it's true. What would that mean to investigate that? What are ways that trying on that belief would be useful in ending my suffering?

An open mind—a mind that is still curious and tolerant of not knowing, maybe even really enjoying not knowing—keeps us ready to learn something new from our lives as each day unfolds. We do this while following the compass of our hearts and minds that are more and more clearly keeping us in the current of the Dharma. There's that onward leading stream, or just moving into the stream. That's how I want to practice. That's how I want to live my life: keeping "beginner's mind," "don't know mind," along with the faith in the Dharma that grows as our minds gradually incline more and more in the direction of actions and mind states and attitudes that arise out of good will and wisdom.

Opanayiko—onward leading.