This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Letting Go; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (15) Bundle of Cognition. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (15) Bundle of Cognition; Guided Meditation: Letting Go - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Letting Go

Welcome to our morning sitting. I want to begin today by emphasizing that one of the strong associations people have with the Buddhist teaching, especially in relationship to non-attachment, is the idea of letting go. "Let go, let go, let go," some teachers will emphasize. What is remarkable in the Buddhist teachings is that he never talks about letting go of anything, any person, or anything in the world. The emphasis over and over again is to let go of the grasping in the mind, the clinging in the mind.

Grasping can be done towards things which are healthy and beneficial for the world, and grasping can be done with things that are unhealthy and harmful to the world. But grasping itself is always harmful to the person who grasps, clings, or attaches. So when the Buddha emphasized "letting go, letting go, letting go," it was really letting go of the clinging.

So in this week that we've been looking at grasping and clinging, certainly it helps to see what we're clinging to, what we're holding onto. But those are a mirror for doing the deep inner work of letting go. So for this meditation, I'd like to encourage that it be an ongoing meditation on letting go—not of anything, but of the grasping to anything that arises here for this next almost 30 minutes.

Stay very relaxed in the present moment. I'll guide you, and then at some point, whatever it is that is happening in the present, whatever you are aware of, gently, lovingly release any holding to it. Release any preoccupation with it, any fixation, any concern, any lingering with it, even any interest and curiosity to it. Just let go, let go, let go. And when you let go, something else will come into awareness. Let it come into awareness and let go. When you let go, become aware of whatever is obvious that is happening here and now. Know it, and let go. Know it, and let go.

So assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Closing the eyes is a beginning process of letting go of concerns with what is seen. Some people have a lot of attachment to looking and seeing, searching with their eyes. With the eyes closed, feel the body and take some long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, relax the body.

Relaxing is a form of letting go, releasing. We might be releasing muscular tension, but generally much of the tension we hold in our body arises from some holding in the mind. Letting the breathing return to normal.

As you inhale, feel the muscles of your face. And as you exhale, relax the muscles of your face. As you exhale, relax any concerns or preoccupations about your face, except for it to relax.

As you inhale, feeling the shoulders. On the exhale, allowing the shoulders to relax, soften, settle.

As you inhale, feeling the belly. Relaxing the belly on the exhale.

On the inhale, feeling the whole body, the global body, in whatever way that's easy. On the exhale, relax, release the body. Letting go of any thoughts, feelings, emotions, or judgments you have about your body. Let go of thinking about your body, except to have it relax and then to center yourself on the body breathing.

As you feel the body, exhale, relax, and release any tension in the thinking muscle, the thinking mind. Relax. Let go of your thoughts. As if letting go of your thoughts, the thoughts can drift away into the space around you.

With every exhale, releasing the hold of anything you think about. Let go of the need to think about whatever you're thinking about.

As you exhale, let go of any attachment for or against any emotion that you're feeling. Let the emotion just be there, but let go of your preoccupation with it or judgments of it. Just relax the mind, the heart.

Whatever comes into awareness, whatever you know, let go. Let go of everything when it's known. Even let go of the knowing, so that the next moment of knowing can arise fresh and new. And that too, let go of. Regardless of what you're aware of, release it from the hold of the mind. Let go, let go, let go.

Can you let go of what's in the mind? Can you begin to release what's in the heart? Here, every moment of knowing can be a moment of non-grasping, or of letting go.

Every exhale is an occasion to let go of what has arisen. Let nothing stay in the mind.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, consider how letting go of desires and diversions in relationship to people—letting go of our judgments, fears, and agendas with people—allows us to see them clearly. It is an act of respect where they're allowed to be how they are in our kind gaze.

Letting go is the windshield wiper for the heart, so the heart is uncovered and we can see people with our heart's good will.

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

Free. And may they be free of all the projections, agendas, and desires that I have. No judgments. Just see with an open heart.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (15) Bundle of Cognition

So, hello and welcome to this fifth and last talk on the five bundles of grasping, the five bundles of clinging.

The word for clinging in Pali is upādāna¹, and it has an interesting double meaning. It means both clinging and fuel—the food, like the fuel that keeps a fire burning. So clinging is the very fuel for more clinging. As long as we cling, it's very hard to get the fire to stop—the fire of clinging. But we have to somehow stop sooner or later and appreciate the stopping. Appreciate the moments, the minutes, the hours where the heart is not caught in the grip of anything. The mind can just move freely, lightly, fluidly, without stopping for anything, by getting hung up by it, or blocked by it, or preoccupied by anything. It's a remarkable state of mind, of heart.

The last of the five bundles is usually translated into English as consciousness, and the Pali word is viññāṇa². It is probably more like "cognition." The problem with translating it as consciousness is that, for one thing, we English speakers have a very deep-seated assumption about what consciousness is, and philosophers and psychologists have been trying for years to figure out what it is, as if it is something.

In Pali, the word viññāṇa is not a continuous state of awareness but rather is the individual moments of cognition, of just the simplest knowing—more simple than recognition. The word "recognition" and "cognition" have a similar root word, "cognition," in them. Just like the word saññā³ in Pali—the third bundle—has the same root as viññāṇa, so they both have this word "knowing" in it. But viññāṇa is the individual moments of cognition: a moment of hearing, a moment of seeing, a moment of smelling, of tasting, of touching, a moment of knowing a thought, an idea, whatever it is.

There's an idea that the mind is constantly taking in all this different sense data that is coming in from within and from without, and they're made up of a lot of small moments of cognition. Maybe some of them are simultaneous, maybe there's a lot coming in at once. You can hear and see and smell maybe at the same time, but each is unique, discrete.

But what we tend to do is to lump it all together into a gestalt, into a whole. The analogy my teacher in Burma liked to give was that of a row of ants. From a distance, it seemed like a continuous stream, a black line. If you get close, you see they're all these discrete ants. Or they would take a fire wand and talk about it; if you take it in the dark and swirl it around fast, the eyes will see a continuous circle of flame. However, that's not really there; it's partly a construct of the mind. In the same way, the old movies that were made up of individual still shots—at 16 frames a second or 8 frames a second—would be reconstructed in the mind as continuous movement of the people in the movie, where there's no movement. It's just individual shots, still shots.

So the mind has this ability to gather things together and hold them all as a whole, and thereby miss some of the individual things. So there can be a lot of attachment to the whole of cognition, the process of cognition. There's a tendency to take that whole to be consciousness, a state of being aware. It feels so real, so second nature, so like that. Of course it's there. But it's not there in any kind of way that you can take your hand and grab it. It's like grabbing air; you end up not holding any of it. It just all disappears with the fist closing up. It has no weight, it has no color, no shape. We might understand it to be a gathering together of all the different ways perception works into a kind of whole that is not really continuous but looks like that, just like the movie.

Cognition seems so primary to what it means to exist. Even the moment-to-moment flow of cognition can seem so primary to what it means to be alive that this last bundle is almost the same as being attached to life itself, to existing. There's a clinging, a grasping to just exist.

There's also, for some people, the idea that consciousness or even just simple cognition would seem to be the very foundation of who they are. Nothing is more foundational, more core to our identity, to who we are, that of course we're going to cling to it. We're going to take this as "me," this is "mine."

For the Buddha, nothing is worth clinging to. Not any single moment of cognition, not the whole process of cognition over time, the sense of continuity of awareness or consciousness that can exist. Nothing is worth clinging to. But we cling to it. We cling to our ideas of what it means to be conscious. We cling to how consciousness is the core feeling of being alive and being a person.

We cling to the refuge of consciousness. Some people can get a very beautiful feeling of kind of a wide, spacious consciousness, or all-abiding consciousness, that can feel so distinct from the vagaries of life, the particularities of what's challenging our life. It seems also to transcend the preoccupations of our thinking mind and our emotional heart. It's a place of peace and space and freedom. In a sense, it is, and it's quite meaningful for people to have this wonderful sense of unpreoccupied consciousness that just seems to exist independent of me.

Even for the Buddha, that also could be an object of attachment. Any assumption, any belief that even the consciousness is "who I am" would be, for the Buddha, a form of clinging. Any kind of engaging in it or involvement with it is a kind of preoccupation, a kind of attachment. It can be very, very subtle.

In the teachings of the Buddha, everything is an occasion to let go. We also let go of consciousness. We don't let go of being aware, but we let go of any clinging to being aware. At the deepest stages of meditation, it's almost as if consciousness lets go of itself, awareness lets go of itself. There's no one doing the letting go. It's just letting go, letting go, letting go.

And to have letting go be so thorough, so complete, that we find ourselves without any grasping to any of the bundles. We don't grasp to appearances, we don't grasp to pleasure and pain, we don't grasp at our recognitions or ideas of things, we don't grasp at our stories. We don't grasp even at the very sense of being of cognition itself—that which knows all these things. It doesn't mean that these have to disappear, but they exist without grasping, without clinging. They exist freely: the ongoing flow of knowing, seeing, tasting, thinking.

It requires... some people would say it's a deep sense of trust. The trust that we don't have to hold on. We don't have to assert. We don't have to get preoccupied and hold things and be attached. We can learn to take care of ourselves without being attached. We can learn to get through this life successfully without clinging. It doesn't make us a victim, it doesn't make us helpless. It doesn't mean that we can't plan and set things up for ourselves. It means that whatever planning and care and preparations we do for this life that we live, we do it with no clinging. We do it, we hold it lightly, we hold it freely. We hold it without assertion and therefore without any exhaustion, without the deep weariness that comes from living a life that goes from one clinging to another, one attachment to the next.

So these are the five bundles, and at least in the teachings of the Buddha, these are emphasized over and over and over again as the primary things that we get attached to and the primary things we create a self out of. And the Buddha's idea is you just let go, let go, let go, and let them, let these things operate freely without getting caught by any of it.

In the Buddha's own classic teachings on mindfulness, in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta⁴—the discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness—this is actually one of the instructions: to be able to see clearly the five bundles of clinging. And the way to see them, the Buddha said, is you see them arising and passing, arising and passing. You see them as part of the ongoing flow, the river of life that we're in.

With that, I'll leave you to the river of your life. May you flow freely in that river without icing up, without grabbing onto the embankment, without drowning. May you float without any clinging whatsoever in the stream of your life.

So thank you very much for this chance to teach about the five bundles, and I look forward to being back on Monday to continue with this introduction to mindfulness series. Thank you.