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

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Integrity; Dharmette: Gil's Story (2 of 5) Getting Ready for Zen - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 28, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Integrity

Welcome to our meditation together. I'd like this meditation to be about something that I've in the past called integrity. Not necessarily the modern understanding of ethical integrity—though it doesn't exclude it—but integrity as kind of being whole, everything coming together into one. We have the possibility, each of us, of sitting quietly and relaxing all the ways that we live divided and fragmented, and having an experience of ourselves as being whole. Being whole comes with maybe a feeling of being at home, of a deep belonging here in this universe. There's nothing that undermines our sense of place.

How this wholeness can be found is not by convincing ourselves that we're whole, or arguing the point. It's easy enough to use logic to come to all kinds of different conclusions in this regard, but rather, to discover what happens when we are no longer seeing our life and seeing ourselves through the lens of our concepts and ideas; when the thinking mind quiets; when the thinking mind is no longer the dominant filter through which we know experience and ourselves.

The thinking mind is often fragmented. If we're caught up in preoccupations, then that itself is a fragmentation because it leaves so much of ourselves out. If we're hyper-focused on one particular thing, and if the preoccupation has to do with ourselves—that there's something wrong with us or with our problems (not to diminish the fact that we have challenges in our life), to be preoccupied with it limits the full scope of what we take in, the full scope of all that we are. And so there we're fragmented, we're divided.

And so as we meditate, we begin quieting, relaxing, and settling so that we can appreciate how we are when we don't have words, ideas, and images that in any kind of way limit us, undermine us, or put us in conflict with part of who we are—where there's the "good part" and the "bad part." Conceit and self-preoccupation are all ways of being fragmented, of being divided. With that as an introduction, we'll meditate.

Assuming a relaxed, alert posture that's the right posture for you. The idea is to enter into your body and feel it from the inside out, and make the adjustments that allow your body to relax the most, but also allow the body to have a certain degree of vitality and alertness. If we have a posture that only expresses relaxation, we might be missing out on the deeper kind of relaxation that can only happen if we also have a degree of alertness. Alert, clear, present. Lowering your gaze and perhaps closing your eyes.

Many of the tensions we carry in our body are a byproduct of the ways that we think, the force that's behind how we think. Gently relax the body without ambition, without any ill will. Gently, lovingly feel your body. As you exhale, relax. Relaxing into the pull of gravity. Is there any way that the force of your thinking is impacting your physical experience in your body?

Maybe there's pressure or tension in the head, in the forehead or the eyes, in the area of the brain. As you exhale, let that soften and relax. Perhaps a gentling of whatever force is behind thinking. And if it's easy enough to do, as you exhale, let go of your thinking. Let whatever topic or theme that you're thinking about drift away, fade away, so that at the end of the exhale, there's a moment or so where you can tune in to the absence of thinking. And in that absence of thinking, take in the whole of your experience here and now.

Beyond the edges of your thinking is an experience of wholeness. An experience where there are no divisions, no fragmentation. A wholeness that includes thinking but doesn't believe that thinking is the whole story. It's just thoughts in the vastness of the wholeness we experience by opening up all our senses.

You might try feeling the pull into the world of thinking—the glue or the gravitational pull into it, the stickiness of thinking—and then feel your way beyond the edges of that pull. A wider sense of how awareness doesn't have to be collapsed into thoughts, but the awareness that is beyond the edges of thoughts, ideas, and impulses, that includes it all within its sphere.

Any thought you have, any idea that sees you in any way less than whole, any way less than beautiful, finish that thought and end it with: not so. Not so.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, relax as you exhale. Settle into your body more fully and feel any of the ways that you might be a little bit more settled or calm in your body. And if not in your body, maybe in your heart. If you're not in your heart, perhaps in the mind. And when we are relaxed in the mind, the heart, and the body, then we belong to ourselves. We're here in a way that is inclusive, allowing, and friendly.

When we're at ease, it's easier to avoid believing the thoughts that undermine us, that limit us. As we come to the end of the sitting, we could also consider how we might be with others in a relaxed way as well, so that our thoughts about them do not limit them, do not diminish them, or undermine them in any way.

Let us meet other people so we can see their wholeness, even if they can't. If we can see them as part of the whole of this life, as if they too belong here and are respected as such. May our relaxed gaze look upon everyone as whole human beings, and as such we offer them our goodwill. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may all beings experience their wholeness, no parts left out.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Gil's Story (2 of 5) Getting Ready for Zen

Hello to the second talk about my Dharma life, how I came into it, and began.

My interest in Buddhism began in college, but it was more of an intellectual interest, at least to the extent which I engaged in it. But a few things happened. At the end of my second year of college, I got interested in meditation. I took a class and was initiated into TM, Transcendental Meditation¹. I received the mantra and began meditating 20 minutes a day. I did that for two or three months, and I felt quite calm with it; it was really nice.

Come the end of the school year, I decided to drop out of college. I was happy enough being there, but after two years, I didn't find a passion for any particular subject to study. I thought, "Well, this is too important, to get a college degree and go to study in college. I should only do it if I had a passion for something." Since I didn't, I dropped out. That was relatively common back then; dropping out was a kind of expression of dropping out of society.

That summer, I had the opportunity to crew on a sailboat across the Atlantic. I spent probably six or seven weeks on the boat. It was an amazing experience to be away from society, away from the busyness and doings of school, college, and everything, and to spend long hours at the helm of the boat. My favorite was doing it in the middle of the night—to be in the middle of the Atlantic with all the amazing stars. There was a certain peacefulness in being far away from everything, and feeling kind of the danger of just a few feet away; if I fell in the water, no one would ever find me, and the boat would just kind of sail along.

Something settled in me in the course of that sailing trip. I decided at the beginning of that trip that there was nothing wrong with having a fantasy life, and I was disinclined to censor myself in any way. The fascinating thing that happened was that at the helm—we didn't have auto-steer back then—we had to be at the wheel of the boat all the time. Every few seconds, you're constantly checking. It's like driving a car on the freeway, but a little bit more dramatic. You're constantly checking the sails, checking the waves, checking the compass to see if the boat's off course a little bit, and then adjusting and constantly adjusting. You can't take your attention off for very long.

There were big waves coming from behind the sailboat, so if you weren't paying attention, those waves could cause major problems for the boat. But at the same time, I let my thoughts be free, let my fantasy go free. The combination of giving my mind freedom to do whatever it wants and coming back every second or every couple of seconds to the present moment proved to be a wonderful recipe for getting settled and peaceful. By the end of this trip across the Atlantic, I was actually quite ecstatic. This combination of inner freedom and staying present became a guide when I eventually started doing Zen practice for how to practice.

I was quite ecstatic, and I even had the thought, "I'll never be depressed again." Then, I moved to Berkeley to try to find my way in life, figure out what to do, and find work. Things proved difficult during that time. I couldn't find work. I had no skills, and I got more depressed than I had ever been in my life before.

But what happened there... There was a bookstore called Cody's Books² on Telegraph Avenue, and I found a magazine or a magazine-like booklet about a very large hippie commune in Tennessee. It was the largest hippie commune in the United States at the time—this was 1974—and it had 700 people living there.

It had its genesis in Haight-Ashbury, LSD, and psychedelics. The teacher of it, one of his main teachers was [unintelligible]³, and the other was the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi⁴. So I saw this place and I thought, "Well, that's interesting. I'd be interested in maybe stopping by." Coincidentally, in January of that year, I had the occasion to take a Greyhound bus across the country. I stopped in, I think it was Memphis, and took a local bus down to this place called The Farm⁵. What I encountered there somewhat changed my life.

Two things I encountered. One was that this community had been based on LSD. That was a spiritual practice, taking LSD. They had a lot of integrity in doing it, but they had gotten arrested in Tennessee because in Tennessee, you couldn't do that. So the founder and a few of the leaders of the community were in jail when I got there. They had looked for another practice: what could they do that was legal in Tennessee that was as valuable as LSD for the spiritual connection, as a profound way of being?

What they had found was honesty. I'd never been in a community of people who were so honest and who had the capacity to stop whenever there was any social tension, any kind of tension at all. Their practice was to stop and have a conversation about that tension and what was going on until there was real honesty and someone really understood deeply about themselves and what they were doing. I could watch these conversations and the honesty with which people practiced. I was so inspired by how they got really good at it, and they got skilled at having these conversations. After a while, some people could do them very quickly. Initially, it would take a long time to have these conversations, but they always stopped. That was their practice. This inspired me to no end, this idea that people can practice this kind of honesty.

The second thing that happened there was that the kind of "bible" of this large commune was the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind⁶. It had only come out a couple of years before. It was the Zen teachings of the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center⁷. That blew me away, because as I read this book, I had this distinct feeling that he was saying things that I knew but didn't really know consciously. There was this recognition—Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes—as I read this book. It seemed to me the book talked a lot about zazen (Zen meditation). We didn't do much meditation at The Farm; we did a lot of work and had a lot of truth-telling.

The other thing was that it was a large community of overall middle-class, white American hippies, and I was one of them, more or less. In some ways, I felt very comfortable there. But because I grew up quite a bit in Europe, I had a cosmopolitan upbringing. I changed schools twelve times in the first twelve years of growing up, sometimes going back to the same school. I lived in Italy, Switzerland, Norway, and the United States. I think because of that experience, I felt very cautious about homogeneity. I felt that being around a whole bunch of people who are just like me was not a safe thing to do; that we would all be caught up in the same delusions, the same kind of way of thinking. So because of that, I left.

Soon thereafter, I went to check out the San Francisco Zen Center. I showed up there, was kind of impressed, and wanted to come back. I came back to be there for two weeks as a guest student, and something in me felt at home. This is the practice I want to do.

There was a kind of clarity around it, but I think I was 20, maybe 21, and I felt it was too early for me to make this kind of decision. I had to go back to Norway, where I was still a Norwegian citizen. That was my home country, and I had to go back to Norway to figure out my relationship to my home country and what I was going to do in relationship to it. I felt like I had some things to take care of first before I could decide to really give myself over to Zen.

So that's what I did. I caught a ride from a ride bulletin board—back then in colleges, they had bulletin boards with people looking for riders—and I got a ride to the East Coast. Then I worked my way across the Atlantic on a freighter, which took me to Spain. Then I hitchhiked from Spain to—no, I think I took a bus—to Holland. In Holland, I got passage again in another small cargo boat back to my home country.

Now I was interested in Zen, and I also had an interest in Sufism⁸, mostly from reading about it. I went back to my home country with this question: do I want to go and study Zen, or do I want to somehow study Sufism? I wanted to explore my roots there and figure out what to do.

By now, I had these two strong influences on me: Zen meditation, and the focus on honesty that I learned at The Farm. So now I was going to find my way back there in Norway.

But I'm running out of time, and I'll continue tomorrow. Thank you for listening.