This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sensory Doorways to Freedom 5of5: Staying in Contact; Wisdom and Clarity. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Staying in Contact; Dharmette: Sensory Doorways (5 of 5): Wisdom and Clarity - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 26, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Happy Friday. I am YouTube casting from foggy Santa Cruz, where I'm seeing palm trees in the fog. Thank you very much for the sound feedback. It's good to be with you. I love to just see the greetings and want to invite you to, whether you're participating in the chat or sitting silently, to notice. Notice your environment. Notice whatever is out your window, if you have a window, whatever's around you in your room. Take a look around.

And not just the sound from my voice and your computer, but any ambient sounds from outside your space. Notice any mood or warmth or joy in your heart, any satisfaction from getting up early to meditate. The taste of a last sip of coffee or tea before we settle in.

And noticing, too, the weight of your body on the cushion or bed or chair. This feeling of being rooted, settled in the moment.

Guided Meditation: Staying in Contact

When you're ready, allow the eyes to soften, become receptive, and turn your gaze inward. It can be helpful to take two or three longer, slower, deeper breaths into the belly and releasing the breath, letting go of any tension along with it. Then allow the breathing to be natural, normal. Closing the eyes when you're ready.

Scanning through your body, noticing the sensations of air or clothing on skin. The amount of moisture or dryness in the air. Warmth, cool. And then letting the attention settle more deeply inward, interoception, to the aliveness of your body.

Perhaps rolling your shoulders and inviting any excess tension in the muscles of the neck and shoulders to release. Softening the eyes even more, softening the tongue, allowing the tip of the tongue to rest on the palate just behind your top teeth. Allowing the spine, all the way from the base of the skull through the sacrum, to relax and also be steady. Allowing the muscles around your core to be easeful, trusting the bones.

Allowing the core of your body to be known—the viscera, the motions of breathing in your abdomen, belly, diaphragm, rib cage. Bringing awareness to the hips and buttocks, the weight of the body. And allowing awareness to fill the legs and feet from the inside out. Not the concept of legs and feet, but the internal feeling: pulsing, aliveness, vibration, or stillness. Being in contact with the aliveness of your whole body, nothing left out.

And then, as you are in contact with this whole body, inviting the whole body to relax. And then inviting, may this heart and mind be clear, open, soft. And tuning in to mindful awareness at the forefront of your attention. Staying in contact with each breath, each sound, each sensation.

Simply noticing the beginning, the very inception of a breath sensation or sound, and allowing it to move through with all the variations, flowing through, perhaps to the swell of the breath, a fullness, and then the release, the fading away of air or sound or sensation. In contact all the way through to that moment of stillness, that space between.

Staying close, allowing sensory experience to flow through, unobscured, unimpeded. Relax, allowing and receiving. We'll practice mostly in silence with an occasional prompt.

If you find the mind lost in thought, the invitation is to graciously, kindly appreciate the return of awareness of the senses, of now. And to notice the difference between how it felt to be lost in thought or to be present. Is it more pleasant or unpleasant? Which is more pleasant, or is the experience very simple, neither?

In the final moments of our meditation together, the invitation is to cast your gaze back over these moments of practice with loving appreciation, kindness, including any challenges there, possibilities for being stepping stones rather than obstacles. With generosity, and then gathering in, savoring, soaking, steeping in any moments of clarity, wisdom, ease, peace, mindful awareness, kindness, letting them nourish your heart and mind.

And from that place, casting that internal gaze outwards to the others this life touches and offering them a sincere wish that the benefits of your practice touch them as well. May others be happy, safe, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, wisdom, and peace in the world.

Thank you for your presence and your practice.

Dharmette: Sensory Doorways (5 of 5): Wisdom and Clarity

So, warm greetings everyone. Warm greetings and thank you for your practice. I'm curious, as we start to settle into the Dharma talk portion of this morning together, what you noticed in your sensory doorway practice yesterday? What did you notice? I would love to see in the chat which senses were most helpful in helping you stay present. What did you notice in the spaces? What was the difference between being in the senses and in the mind?

A slowing down and opening up of time, beautiful. Yeah, I think many people notice that difference in internal acceleration versus the pace of actual sensory experience. Any others? Noticing happily. Beautiful. Tuning into what's left of a sense. Very powerful, the fleeting quality, bare attention. Peacefulness and quiet with young ones, young grandchildren, and a sense of attunement with other creatures. I love reading these. These are great. So because of the lag, I'm not going to be able to read all of them as I continue, but as I promised yesterday, I will read all of them once I'm done talking. I love learning about the vibrancy, aliveness, tenderness, all of it—grounding, centering—that you're experiencing.

And today, as I promised yesterday, we're going to play in the deep end of the pool of sensory doorway practice. And I want to start with an image. This is a simile from the ancient teachings. The Buddha talks about imagining pure light coming into a window at sunrise, open, clear, clean window panes. And that if there's no clutter in the house, no furniture, it lands on the far wall, the western wall, unobscured, beautiful. The Buddha said that when faith, confidence, settledness in the practice are deep, the practice of the senses can be like this. In other words, the five sense faculties become like those clear window panes for awareness itself.

So when clarity, that kind of simplicity, exists by directly experiencing the senses, it's a possibility for wisdom to arise. It's possible to know the difference between the contact of a sense object, like a bit of light with your retina, and to notice that simply with simple cognizance, viññāṇa¹ it's called. And that all of this happens a split second before any evaluation, any evaluation of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral that we talked about yesterday. And that is often a clue, a way of loosening any hook, what the Buddha called a fetter², that sometimes shows up as resistance that might arise.

This is useful because it stops the mind and heart from cascading to all kinds of other unhelpful stuff. I'll give you a very simple example. Back during COVID lockdown, shelter in place, I was doing a lot of these online retreats at home. My job had a furlough because of the kind of work we were doing, and I was practicing walking meditation in my living room, which looked out over a back porch that was basically mine, but the neighbors who owned the place would access it occasionally. And I was doing simple walking there, beautiful morning light striking. I noticed this big pile of clutter my neighbor had left on the porch, or so I thought. I noticed the light striking something and "unpleasant" come up, conditioned by past experience with the neighbor, memory. And a split second later, the mind parsed that object as clutter, and then I could see the story arising about the neighbor and the grumpiness—not huge grumpiness, but mild grumpiness.

But what was so fascinating was I turned, and of course my walking path took me right back by that window again, and oh my goodness, what I thought was clutter was actually something else. So I say all of this because the act of perceiving itself, that moment of catching the unpleasant, allowed me to have a little more space from the evaluation and the judgments and to see the process of that very clearly. And it also allowed me to see that our preconceived notions, our memories, our attitudes, our biases, our views can actually shape how we see and even what we see. And this is true for the other senses as well.

So in this case, aversion came up. In other cases, it might be desire or resistance or any host of other sort of secondary emotions: envy or Schadenfreude³ or appreciative joy, whatever's there. So in Buddhist teachings, often noticing this link between pleasant and unpleasant, the contact of our senses, and the next thing is often taught as simple greed or aversion. And that's absolutely true; these are very basic responses. But the Buddha also taught this about emotions. So in a way, today is emotions 2.1; we talked about them earlier in the week.

The Buddha taught in particular about the difference between householder or "hooked" emotions and Dharma emotions, emerging renunciation emotions. And they fall into three basic categories of sadness or grief, joy, and equanimity. The sadness or grief I'll just touch on very briefly because we talked about working with it a little bit earlier this week. And that is the difference: a hooked sadness or grief is sadness or grief that arises in conjunction with what comes up in the senses by grabbing onto it. So the true sadness, for example, of loss about hearing or seeing that happens naturally for many of us as we age—so that's not to denigrate it, it's truly there—but rather than allowing it to inform and shape and become a problem, the Buddha talks about not using the second arrow, not adding on, piling on extra grief, extra attitude, extra judgment with any of it. But rather than obsessing over something, being with it kindly, turning to the body, holding softly with love, awareness. And then shifting. The term he uses is, "by relying on this, abandon that." Allowing any sense of grief or sadness to inspire, motivate our practice to let go of any ways we make things worse, any sadness that makes things worse, any involvement or entangling, and rather shift to a longing or wish or commitment to letting go, to being free.

And then relying on that to allow simple joys to inform us. The simple joys of what's left in my visual capacity. I used to have eagle eyes, and now I wear glasses almost all the time unless I'm this close to a screen, but appreciating what's there. And there's so much good and nothing wrong with simple joy from being present with the senses, turning towards that. However, the Buddha does recommend not becoming hooked with them. And all of us are hooked at some point, but to notice when that hook arises, that fetter arises. If there's grasping towards something pleasant, you may notice it actually decreases the pleasantness of it, and it might decrease the joy too. It's hard to experience joy fully when hanging on really tight. So this kind of hooked joy is a greed, a need for more, the planning, the protecting, the defending, the hanging on.

Instead, the suggestion is to savor and allow. Savoring and allowing means it can be transient, and even appreciating the moment of transient change. And then the Buddha describes that kind of joy, the joy of non-grasping, emergent joy of being present, as Dharma joy, renunciation joy. This can mature into the joy of insight itself, clear seeing. The way we surfed the senses earlier this week, the non-clinging itself, the presence itself can be a source of joy.

The last emotion he talks about is equanimity, and how equanimity can be specific to a particular experience, a particular sense experience or object of sound striking the ear, for example. Or it can be more general, a general sense of trust in the practice, of okayness, equipoise, allowing. And how while both kinds of equanimity are helpful, the second kind is onward-leading, portable, useful. And by relying on that equanimity, eventually it's possible to let go of identification and instead rely on non-craving, non-conceit, not having a need to construct anything at all from sensory experience, but rather resting there. And eventually that kind of non-clinging opens a practitioner up to the most beautiful of spaces, absences, and joys of all: Nibbāna⁴, Nirvana, freedom.

I'll close by saying the Buddha had another simile about window panes, and that is: imagine that pure morning light flowing through the window, but rather than striking a wall on the other side, there's no wall and there's no ground. The light just keeps going—pure, beautiful, radiant. And that is one of his similes for awakening. Nothing there to obscure.

So thank you very much this week for your wonderful attention, your practice, your exploration of this with me. And to say that I spoke of the full path of practice very briefly today, that these moments of quiet space, joy, simplicity—every single moment is onward-leading. Like drops in a bowl fill the bowl with water. So trust them, enjoy them, savor them, and trust your practice. Thank you. It's been a delight to be with you this week, and please be well until we're together again.