This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Faith in Awakening; Core Teachings Pt 2 (3 of 5) Naturalistic Practice. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Faith In Awakening; Dharmette: Core Teachings Pt 2 (3 of 5) Naturalistic Practice - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Faith In Awakening

Hello everyone and welcome. What I'd like to suggest today is that we focus the meditation on Faith, meditation supported by faith. Faith is sometimes seen as being an extremely religious phenomenon, emotion, or motivation, and maybe it is. But rather than thinking of it as something that we can't experience and know, and something not relevant to exactly here and now, the faith I propose is faith in the practice.

With a little bit of analysis or orientation, we could think of how many of us spend much of the day having faith in the wrong things. Whatever your mind is preoccupied with, that is something that you or your mind has faith in—that it's valuable to do so, it's purposeful to do so. We put a lot of faith into sometimes fantasy, sometimes planning, sometimes remembering and reviewing. We have put faith in desires for things, we have faith in aversion to things. To put our faith in those things changes us, it limits us.

Instead, when we put faith in the practice, we are making room and space for something within us, something that's unlimited, something which is not defined by "me, myself, and mine." Something that can grow and expand and develop and be creative and be freeing. The simplest way of saying what the faith is when we practice is we have faith in being awake. I use this word carefully because instead of saying faith in being mindful, faith of being aware, to be awake is, in a sense, it doesn't refer to an activity that we do but a state that we are in. We can be sleeping at night, then in the morning we wake up and we're awake. It's just the quality or characteristic of being somewhat clear, somewhat conscious, somewhat present for our experience, but without putting any restrictions on anything, without having to focus on something. It's just being awake in the midst of this life of ours.

To have faith in being awake is so significant because an awareness, an alertness, a presence that doesn't restrict anything, doesn't interfere with anything, doesn't reinforce anything—it doesn't reinforce the unhealthy activities of our mind. It makes room for some profoundly deep, healthy activities of the mind. It makes room for healing, it makes room for settling, it makes room for unification of all we are. It makes room for growth and development that we can't engineer.

So, to have faith in being awake. As we sit for this sitting, maybe you can just very gently, gingerly, tenderly use the word "awake." Maybe each time you exhale, or maybe at the beginning of the inhale, but say the word with faith in the value of having a living awareness, a living attention to this moment. As if you're making room for whatever is there without reinforcing anything, without participating in thoughts and desires and aversions. Being awake is bigger, wider than any involvement with anything. There's room for what is healthy to grow and develop and do its work. Awake.

So, assuming a meditation posture that maybe has a little intentionality in it, that encourages a wakefulness. If you're sitting upright, maybe your spine can be a little bit more alert. If you're sitting in a chair, leaning back into the backrest, even so, you might readjust slightly so you're a little bit more alert in your spine. And if you're laying down, maybe there too you can adjust the shoulder blades so that they are a little bit more, maybe roll and kind of slide down the back, providing a stronger, flatter surface for supporting your upper back, and maybe in such a way that your chest comes out a little bit.

Closing your eyes. Relaxing on the exhales, relaxing in your body, relaxing in your mind.

And then with some regular intervals, maybe coordinated with the breathing or maybe not, gently—almost as a whisper, almost as an ever so light breeze, almost as if you're not saying anything, maybe it's not even a nonverbal knowing—say or know the word "awake." As if something in your whole mental and physical systems knows what that is, recognizes that the word "awake" awakens being awake. A wakefulness in which your present moment experience of body, of breathing, of mind is known, is revealed, without any restrictions or judgments or participation.

With the word "awake," reminding yourself of having faith, deep faith, full faith, inner attention that gives infinite room for all things to be in the present without participating with any of it.

Remembering to be awake. Being awake is similar to making infinite space around everything, so that what needs to settle can settle, relax. And what is healthy and good can grow or expand independent of you making anything happen, except remembering to be awake.

As we come to the end of this sitting, to tap into once more what within comes alive around the word "awake." To be awake, to wake up, to awaken a sense of living attention in the present moment. An attention that maybe is connected to a sense of vitality. Even if we're sick or tired, there is evidence of being alive in every sensation that we have. To be awake is to make lots of room, give breathing room to everything. Deep faith that we don't have to fix or do or make happen. We can allow something deeper to awaken as we stay awake, awakening from our depths.

And then, to include in our wakefulness other people, other living beings, where we give infinite space and room for them to be just as they are. It's easier to do if we allowed ourselves to be that way and we don't allow anything to diminish ourselves. And in this field of relating, this relatedness to others, in being awake, may we spread our goodwill, our compassion, our care.

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

Dharmette: Core Teachings Pt 2 (3 of 5) Naturalistic Practice

Hello everyone and welcome to this third talk, as I continue for the second week conveying, trying to convey some of the core teachings that underlie my orientation, my perspective as a Buddhist teacher. It's building on what I said last week, so it's part two of the same topics.

Today, my teachings are based on a very strong naturalistic orientation. What I mean by naturalistic is that it's in the world of our direct experience, things we can know for ourselves, we can experience for ourselves. We don't have to explain things with things that we can't really know or can't really discover. The supernatural world, which is such a big part of religion often, and Buddhism as well—not to dismiss that or say that it's wrong or not true, it's just not the orientation of how I teach. It's almost like I put that aside, as if it's not something we have to address or deal with for this path of liberation, path of practice, for living a life of compassion and love.

This naturalistic approach can be explained a little bit by pointing out that in the early Buddhist teaching, it appears that the Buddha, when he taught, without saying it in this kind of modern way, presented the human being as having two separate operating systems that are not really comparable or equal. They're operating, it's almost like apples and oranges, being very different from each other.

One of them is the wholesome one and the other is the unwholesome one. The unwholesome operating system is the one that is founded on greed, hate, and delusion. Greed, hate, and delusion are, I think of them as, deep as they might seem in a human being, they're much more surface reactions to things. They engage our surface muscles, our surface thoughts, our engagement, and often they engage our ideas and concepts and conceits of self: me, myself, and mine, what I want, who I am. That is kind of an overlay on top of a broader, wider experience of what it is to be a human being.

This operating system that's founded on greed, hate, and delusion is also one that constructs, engineers. It imagines and thinks about things and builds up stories. It's the world of make-believe, making things up. Most of us maybe don't live in a world that we think of as make-believe. I remember reading this wonderful novel, Don Quixote, and in an unconventional way, Don Quixote was living in the world of delusion. But it turned out by the end of the book, it would seem that everyone else was living in a socially constructed world of all these rules and behavior and concepts that people were navigating. That was more delusive, it seemed normal but was more delusive than Don Quixote. And he had these fundamentally beautiful values that he was living by that raised the question, what is delusion, what is not delusion?

This constructed world that we live in, that we inherit from our society, teaches us profound things about who we are, who we think we are—the constructed self.

The other operating system of the Buddha can be simplistically called the holistic side of our life. It's from a deeper source within. It's a source of life within, a source of thoughts, a source of emotions, a source of motivation which is not made up. It doesn't involve a made-up world, concepts, and constructs. It does not involve greed, hate, and delusion but arises from deeper movements from deep within. Maybe they arise from the opposite of greed, hate, and delusion—from generosity, love, and wisdom. Maybe they arise from an organic source within, meaning that it's something that we don't construct but something we allow to grow. We can build and construct a house, but we cannot build and construct a baby. We can allow the natural abilities of gestation to allow the embryo to grow and develop over time. It's remarkable that this something that's so much more complex than a house can somehow grow and evolve and develop. The task of a mother is to allow the best conditions for that life to unfold and develop within.

It's not a coincidence that I use this as the example, because one of the sources of this deeper way of living that the Buddha talks about is what he talks about as the yoniso¹, which can be the place where life begins. For humans, that's sometimes considered to be the womb. There's a place where life gestates, emerges from deep within, and that's not constructed.

These two operating systems have very different ways of relating. One we engage in and fight with and fix and adjust, and the other one we have to get out of the way for and allow. We have to recognize it, make room and space. The wonderfulness about the Dharma practice is that as we are mindful of things, as we're awake and present, it has different effects on these two operating systems. The operating system that is based on greed, hate, and delusion is a system that's based on tension. As we're aware of it and present for it, that tends to help the tension relax. The operating system that's gestational, that's emergent, something that grows and develops with the food and nourishment of attention, the space of attention—it has more room to grow, it is able to develop, to unfold and develop and move. So attachments tend to move towards letting go and the deep wisdom of awakening, the deep compassion, the deep faith, the deep equanimity, the deep peace grows and develops. The joy, the happiness of practice grows and develops from this deeper source.

These two operating systems I associate with the difference between fight-and-flight and approach-and-nurture. The fight-and-flight engages the surface muscles, it's a muscular thing. Approach-and-nurture—to nurture and support and tend something, like a gardener tends plants—that tending is something that is a deeper instinct, a deeper motivation. It involves something deeper than our musculature. Exactly what that biological source is, maybe, you know, we can have all kinds of speculation, but for the Buddha it was something that was not of the muscles, not of the flesh, that was somehow deeper within.

So in saying my orientation is naturalistic, it's appreciating something that's very natural about the human being that is healthy and wonderful and capable of healing and developing growth. One of the things it wants to grow into is a freedom from the restrictions, freedom from the limitations of what this greed, hate, and delusion operating system provides us, that the tension holds us in check in some way.

You might consider that you have these two different operating systems. Which of them do you have faith in? Which of them do you feed and support and strengthen over time by participating and engaging in it? Part of Dharma practice is to have a deep faith in this naturalistic source within us that arises and operates the more the constructing mind, the conceited sense of self, the "me, myself, and mine," quiets down and makes room for it. It's remarkable how much self-preoccupation, how much self-criticism, how much self-concepts that we live under, that we can put down. We can have faith we don't have to continue that way. We can let go of the faith we have in "me, myself, and mine" in terms of this preoccupation and concerns and thinking over and over again about me as the central character of my drama, of my life, to something deeper inside that wants to emerge, that's growing.

To continue with this metaphor of a human being kind of growing as an embryo within, one of the wonderful experiences I had as a young parent when my kids were young was just the kind of seemingly natural way in which I became less important. My own concerns and my own preoccupations with self fell away for just caring for a young baby. I mean, sometimes it was quite tiring. Sometimes there was not a time to take a shower. Occasionally, I had to take care of the kid rather than maybe even eating when I was hungry, staying up late at night when the kid was sick and knowing the next day I'd be tired for teaching the Dharma. The usual way in which I may have been involved in my own concerns kind of fell away, and it felt so freeing, so wonderful to do that.

So, to have faith in this natural operating system that we have, and not have faith in what, in this kind of way of talking, is unnatural—the constructed, the imaginary, the make-believe that we often live in.

Thank you very much, and we'll continue this topic, these themes, tomorrow. Also, before we end, I meant to do this at the beginning. I want to just for a moment celebrate with you that this is Juneteenth day. A wonderful holiday because any holiday that celebrates independence and freedom is a Buddhist holiday. For us as Buddhists to focus on liberation, to appreciate the worldly liberation that's such an important thing for people to have, that was long coming for the slaves in America, is a wonderful thing to celebrate. If you'd like to join us this evening here in California at 6:00 p.m., we're having a Juneteenth Day celebration by the wonderful teacher An Roy, who some of you might know. She's taught for Mindfulness Circle for Black Practitioners and she's also taught the happy hour. So thank you.