This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meditation as Honesty; Gil's Story (3 of 5) In Pursuit of Integrity. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Dharmette: Gil's Story (3 of 5) In Pursuit of Integrity; Guided Meditation: Meditation as Honesty - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 29, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Meditation as Honesty
Hello everyone, and welcome. When I think about mindfulness practice, I often think about something I consider a synonym to mindfulness, or a very important element of it, and that is honesty. Honesty is mindfulness out loud. Of course, we don't necessarily say everything that's going on in us out loud, but this idea that mindfulness involves an honesty to oneself is important. It's sometimes said that it's not always so clear how much honesty we should provide the world if it can be hurtful for people to hear what we really think. If the bride at the wedding asks you what you think of her dress, it's better not to say exactly what you think.
But in Buddhism, it is said that it's never okay to lie to oneself. Never. One should always be honest to oneself. So, mindfulness is a self-honesty. We sit down to be honest about what's happening for ourselves here and now.
Some people will practice what's called mental noting as part of mindfulness practice, and that's kind of saying to oneself what it is that's happening in the moment. That's an opportunity for that honesty: "Oh, I'm feeling agitated, that's what's happening," or "I'm troubled, that's what's happening," or "I'm spinning out," or whatever it might be.
With that honesty, with a moment of mindfulness, it isn't that that's the end of the story—just note what's happening and then go on to the next thing. The art of mindfulness, or this kind of awareness practice, is to stay present after we clearly know something. We note something—and it doesn't have to be verbal or in thoughts, it could be a silent knowing—but we clearly know something. "Oh, this is what's happening," as if it's a statement of truth. It could be as simple as, "I'm exhaling. Oh, this is an exhale." And then, after that clarity—"this is an exhale"—then stay. It's almost like that clarity opens the door for you to feel the breeze coming in from outside, or the breeze arising out of the practice. Stay present, and see what happens in the wake of that clarity. It's like you're opening yourself up to feel, "Okay, what's here now?" Don't be in a hurry.
So one way to do this, in fact, is with the breathing. Recognize, for example, the exhale: "Oh, this is an exhale," and then be available to feel what arises in the wake of that. That might be the inhale. Or it might be that the inhale is a little bit constricted, so you recognize: "Oh, constricted in-breath." Now, what happened in the wake of recognizing that? The recognition is a clearing of the space to now feel what follows. It might be the exhale, but it might also be that something happens with the constriction—it opens, it softens, it somehow is held in a different way, just by the honesty.
So, think of mindfulness practice as a practice of honesty, where we're being with what is. In that recognition of what is, be a little bit more open to feel it more fully, or be with the present more in the wake of that clarity. And then we do it again and again.
Again, with the breathing, it could be: "Oh, this is an exhale, this is how the exhale is." And then open, and you might feel the inhale. Maybe it doesn't have the same qualitative knowing or recognition about the inhale; it's just felt intimately in a different way in the wake of that clarity. And then again with the exhale: "Oh, this is an exhale, this is how it is. It's smooth, it's long, it's a settling in." And now, what's next? The next moment doesn't have to be known in the same way. It can be felt—what happens in the wake of it. And then a moment of knowing and feeling, knowing and feeling. Honesty, and deeper recognition.
Assuming a meditation posture. Lowering your gaze, and if it's comfortable, closing your eyes.
Just as you are, recognizing how you are now in the most obvious way. It doesn't matter so much for the purpose of practice how you are now; what matters is the honesty of recognizing it. Recognizing, and then being open to sense and feel what follows for just a few moments.
And then do it again. The clear recognition, and then to feel or sense what follows means that we're not caught up in the stories, the ideas of what's happening, but we're here for a deeper intimacy with oneself. Taking a few breaths to relax, settle in.
[Silence]
And then settling into your breathing. Feeling the inhales and exhales.
Taking a moment to recognize how you are—a truth-telling. Letting that recognition be an opening to feel the body more fully in how you are. Maybe feeling how breathing is, as you have just made a truth statement about yourself.
[Silence]
Practicing honesty of how you are right now, and then following that honest recognition, feel and sense what follows. How it is in your body as you return to breathing.
[Silence]
And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, consider how it's possible to center oneself in the middle of self-honesty. If we clearly recognize how we are, what's happening for us, settle into that, or stand in the middle of it. And with that as a foundation, being available to feel, sense, and know the world around us. To have a deeper sensitivity to the world, because honesty puts us in deeper touch with ourselves. The more we're in touch with ourselves, the more we can be in touch with the world.
Staying centered in an honest connection to oneself, and then gazing out upon the people in our lives, people we'll encounter today, the world around us. And gazing upon them kindly, with generosity, with care, with goodwill.
May all people realize the potential for being at peace with themselves.
May all beings realize their potential for abiding in a peaceful heart.
May all beings realize their capacity to be safe to themselves, for themselves.
May all beings be free of attachments. And in doing so, may they genuinely be happy. May they have an experience of safety that's inner and outer. May they experience peace in themselves, and a peace around them.
And may they be free within, and may they experience freedom in the world in which they walk.
May all beings be touched by our well-wishing and our friendship.
Thank you.
Dharmette: Gil's Story (3 of 5) In Pursuit of Integrity
Hello, and I continue now with the third part of my story with Buddhist practice. I had been introduced to Zen practice and was very attracted to it. Then I went back to Norway in order to come to terms with what my relationship was to my home country. I hadn't lived there for many years growing up, but had gone back frequently.
So I made it back, and I had various adventures. I worked that fall—I think it was the fall of '74—on the docks in the city of Bergen as a dock worker, mostly loading and unloading small cargo boats. I had a wonderful discovery. There were very few Buddhists in Norway, but there was one famous—I don't know how famous he was, my girlfriend at the time knew about him because he lived near where she grew up—Buddhist hermit high up in the mountains, in the snow, in the coldest part of Norway.
I went to visit him for two weeks in the middle of January. I climbed the mountain to where he lived in a small cabin. It was probably the closest thing in my life to following the cartoon idea of going into the Himalayas1 to find a wise person high up in a cave. I spent two weeks with him, and that was fascinating. I spent the mornings skiing in the high country by myself, and the afternoons having long conversations with him.
But the important thing that happened there in Norway was that I stayed for a year. The following six months, I lived on a small farm in southern Norway with a wonderful couple who took me in and included me in their family life and their farming life. I loved the life there. I loved getting up in the morning, caring for the cows and the farm; it was just a lovely lifestyle for me. So much so that I decided I wanted to be a farmer in Norway.
During that time, my friends left for a week on vacation, with me taking care of the farm and the cows. It was the first time in my life that I had been alone for that length of time. The only person I saw for that week was the mail carrier who came walking up the road at a distance. I could see him down the road; the farm was at the end of a dirt road. Otherwise, I didn't see anyone.
What happened in the course of that week—I wasn't meditating, I don't think, I was just living the life alone—was that daily life became a kind of heightened meditation. A heightened awareness. Without social contact, and just being alone, I became acutely aware of my surroundings. Everything started to sparkle. Everything seemed to be brighter than usual, and I delighted in how beautiful everything was.
I also became more acutely aware of my thoughts than I ever had before, and they had a kind of sparkle. I don't know if they were particularly good thoughts, but everything had a clarity. The sense of awareness became very present-moment, very clear, and it felt so satisfying to be alive and to be there. Later, I felt that it was kind of like being on a meditation retreat without meditating. When my friends came back, that sense of clarity and peace went away, and I felt the loss of that.
I didn't decide to become a hermit myself, but rather I now had a quest. The quest was, as I worded it: How can I be alone with others? How can I have this intimacy, this peace, this clarity, this sense of being awake with other people? That became the spiritual quest, the question that I started to explore and think about.
The other thing that happened on that farm was that I did start, at some point, meditating every day. I meditated every morning before going to breakfast. But it very quickly became clear that going to breakfast feeling very peaceful and calm, not feeling the need to say anything, and just being present in a relaxed, silent way didn't work for the friendship with the couple, the farmers. Somehow it was awkward to be there in this new way that I knew how to be, when they expected the old Gil to be there and interact in a usual, normal way at breakfast.
I decided that I either had to stop meditating, or I had to lose my friends. So I decided to stop meditating for the duration of that time living there.
I also decided that I wanted to become a small farmer in Norway. But to do that in Norway, you had to go to vocational school to be trained to be a farmer; only then could you buy a farm. I decided that since I only had two more years to get a degree from the University of California, if I went to the University of California at Davis—which is one of the premier agricultural schools in the world—I would fulfill the requirement for buying a farm in Norway. I would also have such good training, rather than just vocational school, that if at some point in the future I wanted to do something else with that degree, I could do that as well.
I wanted to be back close to the San Francisco Zen Center, and Davis was about an hour or an hour and a half drive from San Francisco. So I came back to go to school at UC Davis to finish up there and to get a degree in Agronomy, which is what I did.
But when I got there, I began immediately to start meditating twice a day on the same kind of schedule that they did at the San Francisco Zen Center. I did two periods of forty-minute Zen meditation—one in the morning, one before going to bed—but never on Sunday. At the San Francisco Zen Center they never meditated on Sunday; it was like their day off. So I figured that was the way to do it.
There was a small sitting group2 in Davis, and I went to them twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and sat with them.
It was really clear that I started meditating that fall when I returned to college because I was suffering. Part of it was that I was very lonely; part of it was other issues that I was dealing with. The primary reason to start meditating regularly was that I thought the meditation would help me deal with my suffering, my anxiety, my loneliness, all kinds of things that I felt. So I started meditating every day.
Then this very strange thing happened for me after some months. The kind of surface suffering that I was trying to address kind of faded away—maybe through the meditation, maybe because I got busy with school and had some friends there, but it faded away. I noticed that the reason why I was meditating disappeared, but I still meditated.
I found that really strange, that I would continue this twice-a-day meditation without the reason I had before. I had no other reasons to do it that I could come up with. I'm kind of a rational person, so I wanted to have reasons for why I do things. I found it really strange that I kept meditating with no reason. This is just what I did, so I kept doing it, wondering, "Why am I doing this?"
At some point, I came to an understanding that I was meditating for the same reason that maybe a dancer dances, an artist paints, or a musician plays a musical instrument. For me, the meditation was a form of self-expression, almost like an artistic expression. It was a very deep way of expressing something that I didn't even know was there. Something deep inside that I could characterize as peace, calm, or a sense of aliveness that had such goodness in it. I felt more alive in meditation than at any other time in my life. It just felt so right.
The keyword that I used to characterize how I felt was integrity. I didn't have a sense that the word integrity was connected to ethics, so it wasn't ethical integrity. Maybe it was closer to a sense of wholeness. Integrity being one, being full, like all of me was there. That integrity became the purpose for meditation—to experience that integrity.
So it wasn't some big goal for enlightenment in the future, but really to sit down and be in that integrity, that wholeness, and that expressivity of the meditation itself. Luckily, I didn't know much about meditation, so I wasn't burdened by the idea that I was supposed to stop thinking. My thinking mind continued, but there was this deeper wellspring of something happening there.
At some point during those two years at Davis, I had this idea: Why do I feel this integrity only in my meditation? It's the same mind in meditation as outside of meditation. Why can't I have the same integrity outside? Now my quest became: How can I extend this integrity, or live with this integrity, in my daily life outside of meditation? I continued meditating, but now the meditation had a second purpose. It set the stage; it gave me familiarity with a way of being. I wanted to discover how to be this way in daily life as well.
When I graduated from Davis, I didn't go back to Norway to become a farmer. By this time, I had been going to the Zen Center throughout those two years in Davis, going down there to practice and do daylong retreats and other things. So when I finished, I decided I would move closer to the Zen Center to practice there.
Part of the reason I went there was that when I visited the Zen Center, this remarkable thing happened. When I would talk to the more senior Zen practitioners, they were mirrors for myself. I saw myself better. I saw that I was playing social games. I was trying to impress people, trying to show them what a great person I was, or I had an image of myself I wanted to replicate so they would see me through that idea I had of who I should be. All kinds of social games that I got away with with my friends. My friends actually did the same; we expected it of each other, maybe, and we just merrily went along.
But there at the Zen Center, there was no response to those games from the senior practitioners. I didn't feel like they were cold; I just felt like, of course they're not going to respond to something like that. So I saw myself much better, and I said, "This is really good." This idea of trying to bring that integrity into my daily life—to live with people who are going to mirror me this way will really be a big help.
When I moved to the Zen Center—first I lived in a rental apartment near the San Francisco Zen Center—the motivation was not to meditate more, but to find a better way to integrate what I was experiencing in meditation into my daily life. As a consequence of that, I meditated even more, because at the Zen Center you go there and meditate more with them. That was the beginning of being a deeper Zen student.
I'll just mention one last thing. I lived in the neighborhood of the Zen Center for about six to eight months, and then I went and did a week-long retreat at their farm, the Green Gulch3 Zen Center. I hadn't visited it before, and it hadn't really been in my mind, but I discovered a farm and I said, "Wow, this allows me to bring together the things I love: farming and Zen practice." So I think in April of 1979, I moved to Green Gulch to live and practice there. That was my beginning of the residential, monastic life.
I'll continue with that tomorrow. Thank you.