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Guided Meditation: Undefined Awareness; Dharmette: Eight Worldly Winds (4 of 5) Pleasure and Pain - Gil Fronsdal

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

Warm greetings from Insight Meditation Center. This week, I'm offering you some reference points for doing mindfulness meditation. One remarkable reference point for it is that if you are at ease, if you're relaxed and present, if you're relaxed and just here, you cannot not be aware. If you're relaxed and at ease here, and you know you're aware, you're not able to turn off being aware unless you fall asleep or unless you distract yourself with something that absorbs your attention.

This idea that if you are at ease, you cannot not be aware—what kind of awareness is it that you can't turn off? What is it that's here, the simplest thing? One answer to that question is that it's an awareness which is undefined. Or to say it a little bit more provocatively, rather than from the point of view of awareness, it's a way of being. It's an awareness that does not define who we are—the undefined self. So we're not defined by our experiences. Whether we feel pleasure or pain, there is a way of being aware of it. There's a way of being present where we do not define ourselves, and where awareness is not shaped by the pleasure or the pain.

If we have gain and loss, success and failure, praise and blame, fame and disrepute—these are experiences in the world. Things are happening around us and experiences in the mind. There can be awareness that is not defined by that, or we do not define ourselves by those things. To be undefined is to be deeply at ease. As soon as we define ourselves, even if it seems like it's a completely accurate and reasonable definition, we've added a mental activity. We've added a way of activating the mind that contains within it a degree of stress, a degree of pressure, a degree of narrowing attention or being a little bit caught in some way. To be uncaught belongs to the realm of being undefined. Not undefined so that we're unimportant or we don't count, but undefined because it's a symptom of freedom. It's a symptom of non-stress, non-tension, non-anxiety.

So as we sit today, maybe you can keep as a reference point or as a question: when you're at ease and you cannot not be aware, can you allow yourself to be not defined by any experience that's happening? Can you allow the awareness to be not caught or contracted or defined by the experience it's having?

Guided Meditation: Undefined Awareness

So, to assume a meditation posture. No matter what of the four main postures you're in—walking, standing, sitting, lying down—can you arrange your body so it has a balance between some feeling of alertness in your body, sometimes with some sense of intentionality, intentness in your body that's not tense? Some slight engagement that requires attention here in the body. So the balance between being alert and being relaxed. To allow a posture that miraculously allows for both a certain degree of vitality in awareness and presence, and the conditions for which the tensions of the body can melt away, fall away.

Gently lowering your gaze or closing your eyes. This combination of alertness and relaxation can occur when you take a few long, deep breaths at the beginning of meditation. Your alertness maybe comes with breathing in, and relaxing the body on the exhale. On different exhales, letting different parts of the body soften, settle.

Then, to let your breathing return to normal. For a few more breaths, to feel a gentle sense of energy, vitality, alertness with breathing in, perhaps as the rib cage expands. And as you exhale, continue the process of relaxing in the body. As you exhale, also to relax the thinking mind, softening the mind. As you exhale, relaxing the heart, softening the heart, settling the heart.

And then notice whatever degree, however small, of ease that you might be feeling now. It could also be a sense of calm or a sense of peace. If there are ways you feel uneasy or agitated, that's okay. Ease and unease can coexist, especially if you don't define yourself by the unease, by the tensions and issues, problems. They can be there, and you can place your attention on whatever place in your body, mind, heart where there is some sense of ease, peace, calm.

To be at ease, to be calm, and to see, feel how being aware of that doesn't have to be something you're trying to do. That in the calm itself, in the ease itself, there's an awareness that doesn't have to be done. There's a way of attending or being present that's not something you're doing. It's just there. You can't turn it off.

To not define yourself by the ease, to not define yourself by the simple awareness, is in a small way to depart from the ease, depart from the awareness. It's making something of it.

Allowing your body to breathe in and breathe out without being defined by how it is, without building up a self or ideas of me, myself, and mine. There's just the experience of breathing known in awareness, not making anything of it, allowing it to be what it is.

As you exhale, relax the thinking mind, soften the heart. And in whatever degree of relaxing, softening you have, let yourself be aware without being defined by what you're aware of. If there is pleasure or pain, comfort or discomfort, what would it be like to leave it alone and not be defined by it? Not be the receiver of it, the victim of it. Just pleasure and pain, just comfort and discomfort, known in a field of untroubled awareness.

As we come to the end of this sitting, more often than not, when we're actively involved in defining ourselves, we are also limiting ourselves by that. All too often, defining ourselves is itself an expression of some attachment, some holding on to something, needing things to be a certain way, or some insistence that this is the way it is. If we can be at ease without defining anything, without defining ourselves, the states within us which come from non-attachment, non-clinging, have more room to flow. Basic friendliness, kindness, love, compassion, care, wisdom are what can flow in the undefined space of awareness.

May it be that as we learn this practice of mindfulness, of easeful attention, that we allow ourselves to have a warm heart, a kind heart shining on this world, to gaze upon everything kindly.

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Eight Worldly Winds (4 of 5) Pleasure and Pain

So now continuing with this fourth talk on the Eight Worldly Winds¹. In the teachings of the Buddha, the fourth one is Pleasure and Pain. I've noticed that in a lot of popular teachings on the worldly winds, Pleasure and Pain, comfort and discomfort, is listed first. Whether it should be listed first or not, I don't know. But one way of interpreting that the Buddha puts it last is that maybe it's the most important, and maybe the most difficult, because Pleasure and Pain is something very personal. It's something that we experience. Things like the other six—gain and loss—that can be somewhat personal. We gain and lose our abilities and physical capacities, but often it has to do with gaining and losing things in the world. Especially things like fame and disrepute, as deep as that can travel into our psyche, into our hearts, it's still so much having to do with the world of ideas and the external world, what other people think. Praise and blame, same thing. But Pleasure and Pain is something that we experience intimately, closely, physically with ourselves.

So maybe it's easier... Oh, so I'm hearing, seeing people say the sound is going in and out. "Me too." So I don't know. "Fine for me." So some people say it's fine. "Yes, comes and goes." "No problem with sound here." Yes. So it's possible that the problem is here at IMC, but that maybe those of you with different devices have a different effect. Okay, so you're probably seeing the chats. So yeah, if you're having a problem, yes, refreshing the screen helps. Fascinating that a number of people should have the same problem at the same time. Maybe it's a YouTube problem. Okay, get lots of people saying now that... but some people are still finding it in and out. But repeatedly people are saying that they close YouTube and then it gets better. Okay, so we'll continue.

This idea that Pleasure and Pain is part of the worldly winds, it's something that in the world people just really respond to, react to. Some people are servants of Pleasure and Pain, that everything they do has to do with being comfortable or avoiding discomfort, becoming comfortable. They define themselves by the Pleasure and Pain. There are some people who feel like if things are painful, unpleasant, uncomfortable, somehow that's a personal failure, or it's an offense that the universe is providing, and it shouldn't be this way at all. And then some people, because of that, when things are pleasant, are really attached to it. This is a sign of success, this is a sign that the universe is in my favor, that I don't have... you know, this means that this is exactly how it should be. And then there's attachment to it.

Sometimes Pleasure and Pain is experienced and we define ourselves by it, that somehow I am wrong, I am right, I am great, I'm lousy because there's pleasure or there's pain. One of the phenomenal gifts that I've received from doing Buddhist practice is being able to experience Pleasure and Pain without being defined by it, without being caught in it, without picking it up and having it affect the quality of my inner life.

I remember when I was young in Buddhist practice, that somehow, the context of doing ongoing meditation, ongoing Buddhist practice, at some point it just seemed second nature that when I was going about my day... I remember I had to lift something with someone else, something very, very heavy, and carry it some distance. I remember how painful it was in my hands to hold this thing digging into my hands. I wasn't harming myself, but it was really painful. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do, second nature almost, was to be present for it and not allow myself to be caught in it or reactive to it, be agitated by it, be aversive to it. I had some semblance of a sense of attention that was at ease, a mind that was untroubled. It felt like this is valuable, to not sacrifice that untroubled mind. It's valuable to stay at ease with this intense pain in my hands. So it became this kind of riding almost a razor's edge, very careful attention to watch that the mind didn't react, just didn't pick it up. No one told me to do that. I didn't tell myself to do it. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do, to ride that edge, to explore that. I think that part of the idea was that I was better off, it was better for me not to get caught in the reactivity around the pain. So it wasn't automatic that pain meant that I had to react, contract, feel sorry for myself, feel upset, feel blaming something. It just was pain.

Then, I was quite surprised by being introduced to Vipassanā practice. And Theravada practice includes a clear recognition and encouragement at a certain point in practice to allow yourself to feel great pleasure, joy, and happiness. And I was surprised. I didn't think that we were allowed to have those kinds of experiences. I thought it was just, "be present," and being present meant somehow some neutral state. So then the task was how to allow for the pleasure of meditation, the happiness, the joy, without picking it up, without congratulating myself, without building up a self, "look at me how great I am, I'm the one who's experiencing some pleasure in my meditation." So there too, it was this idea that I'm better off not being defined by it. I'm better off not being caught in it, reactive to it. I'm better off just allowing it to be without making it a story, making it an expectation, making it a requirement, letting the pleasure and the pain come and go.

This is one of the great gifts, I feel, of a regular ongoing meditation practice. I found it invaluable to meditate every day, more or less at the same time, day in and day out, and then be present for whatever life gives me. Because the consistency of it, over time, there are times with pain, times of pleasure, times of being sad, times of being happy. But the through-line, the thread running through it all, was mindfulness, was attention, was being really present for it. In doing so, learning how to be non-reactive, non-attached to whatever is happening; to be present and balanced, present and not going along with the swings of ups and downs, elated and depressed, and just being present. That is the art of working with the Eight Worldly Winds: to be present without being elated or depressed, without the certain agitation that comes with just being so happy and delighted and excited that is a setup to crash and go the other direction, to being so depressed and upset that things are not going our way. That happens if we define ourselves by our experience.

As we practice, we start discovering a certain degree of freedom in awareness, a certain degree of being present without being defined by anything. And feeling that this is good, this is a wonderful, deep, satisfying kind of way of being. You can feel and sense that as soon as we start defining ourselves by anything at all, making a self out of it, or "this is happening to me," or "this is that," we're actually diminishing ourselves. We're actually making something smaller or tighter or constricted. The idea that we would not define ourselves, have an undefined awareness, can feel frightening. It can feel like, "what's the point?" My whole lifetime I've been living with this idea that I am who I am, and I've been defining myself a certain way, or defending or deflecting how the world is trying to define me, or hiding how I really am because I don't want to define myself to the world that way. This whole social game that we play around this idea of self. And to find the deep satisfaction of putting that down, letting it rest, and to have the undefined awareness or undefined self, and then to encounter Pleasure and Pain and realize that these two can be the winds of the world that we don't pick up on. We don't let it push us around. We don't define ourselves by it.

There's something better that we can experience than only focusing on the pleasure and the pain. That which is better is found in the awareness of the Pleasure and Pain. The awareness is not the pain. The attention, the mindfulness, the knowing of it is not the pain, not the pleasure. But there's a way of knowing, there's a way of being at ease with awareness, at ease with knowing, at peace with awareness, at peace with knowing, that is better than what it is knowing knows. And that's the art.

When we have some sense of this higher quality knowing or higher quality inner life, then it becomes hopefully second nature not to get pushed around by Pleasure and Pain, not to be defining our life or measuring our life or needing our life to be one way or the other based on whether there's Pleasure and Pain. It doesn't mean a naive kind of just letting pain persist because that is... it's kind of a natural thing to take the thorn out of your foot. It's a natural thing to, in healthy ways, to avoid pain, and in healthy ways, allowing yourself to feel pleasure, but to do so with an inner life which is not defined by it, not dependent on it, not conditioned by it, not pushed around by it. This is the art of practicing with the Eight Worldly Winds.

So I hope that you've understood well enough now the theme I have around these Eight Worldly Winds, is that there's something better than them going on as we develop this practice. And so we know for ourselves that these worldly winds are just that, winds of the world that we don't have to pick up or get involved in. And if we do, then that's also practice. That's also where we bring our attention to, and don't let yourself be pushed around twice by the same worldly wind: one by being caught in it, and the other in being caught in reactivity to it, the reactivity to being caught.

So, thank you. We have one more day on this Eight Worldly Winds, and even though we've done all eight now, I look forward to offering you the concluding talk. Thank you.