This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Breath as Guide; The Six Sense-Spheres (1 of 5): Introduction to the Practice. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: The Breath as Guide; Dharmette: The Six Sense-Spheres (1 of 5): Introduction to the Practice - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 01, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: The Breath as Guide

Good morning to everyone. Good day wherever you are. Thank you for joining me, for coming together to practice, and to share in the Dharma.

We will sit in meditation, but I want to give you a teaser—a trailer—for what I would like to work through this week. It is an unusual practice, a lesser-known practice drawn from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta¹, the sutta in which we are encouraged to establish mindfulness in a number of different ways and aspects of our lives.

This week I am calling it the Six Sense-Spheres². It is a teaching about how everything—every way we interact with our world of experience—is mediated by six senses: the five senses that are familiar to us, and then the sixth sense of the mind, which plays such an important role in Buddhist practice.

I had the great good fortune to teach with a colleague of mine, Andrea Castillo, in Medellín, Colombia last week, and we taught about the Six Sense-Bases. We found it a really wonderful exploration, and I hope to share some of what we found this week. At any rate, this is a practice that lies in a key place in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. It is a pivotal place, and although less familiar, it is a critically important practice. I will have a lot more to say about that over the course of the next few days.

But let's prepare our minds for sharing in the Dharma by sitting together for half an hour. I look forward to talking more about the Six Sense-Spheres practice starting at about 7:30. I'll begin with a little guidance that I think will be helpful in introducing the practice.

So, find yourself in a comfortable spot. Retake your meditation posture and the frame of mind that you find supportive for your meditation practice. When I first close my eyes, it is a practice of mine to bring my eyes down. If that feels comfortable, I invite you to do the same. Notice that as we do so, there is a gentle and important rebalancing that happens each time. We bring our attention from this very important visual sphere into our inner lives, the inner world.

We rebalance from the head down to the body. We rebalance as well by connecting with the breathing as it happens naturally. The breath is naturally balanced. One of the reasons we find connecting with it so supportive is that the breath balances itself without any need to intervene. Medical conditions apart, we can find in the breath a comfortable place to be at rest, to be in equilibrium, to be in balance.

Every time we return to the breathing in the center of our experience, it is an opportunity to rebalance, to feel the natural rebalancing that is present there. All we need to do is keep connecting with it. Coming back over and over again—that is the practice.

So, we never need to feel frustrated when we find the mind has gotten all tightened up around something that is coming at us today, something that happened yesterday or ten years ago, or something we imagine may happen in the future. No problem. The natural course of our practice is just to keep opening back up, or keep returning to the breath in the center, to the here and now. We find there the natural balance that may elude us when the mind is off doing the mind's work.

For this half an hour, in preparation for the teachings to be shared this week, we can notice that the breathing is a way in which we are in contact with the physical, material world. There is a teaching available about the way we interact with the sensory world—the only world we know. Right here in the breathing, we make tactile contact, using or benefiting from the sense of touch with the outside world.

We do so in a way that is comfortable, that typically is pretty free of attachment or clinging. We need the breath. We need the breath more than anything. And yet we can sit comfortably with something the body needs, something we rely on for our very survival. We can be here comfortably without clinging to the breath.

We can experience that balance of the breathing, the comfort of the breathing, even the pleasantness of the breathing without getting all wrapped up in it. Somehow, the breath helps us be free in the way we interact with the world. We can enjoy it. We can benefit from it. We can need it. We can want it. And yet, we can do so in a way that is comfortable, easeful, and peaceful. It doesn't have desirous attachment; it doesn't have clinging in it.

The Buddha reminds us at various places that this pleasantness—this pleasure of the meditation—isn't to be feared or pushed away. In fact, it is to be cultivated. It is part of the path. One of the reasons that is so, is because this is a pleasantness we can enjoy that doesn't depend on external conditions. It is free of clinging and attachment.

We get to rest in this wonderful space every time we meditate. Every time we come back to the breath, I like to come back with an inner sense of "Ah, here again. Here and now again." Back home again. Free in the breath's balance. This is the practice.

So, each time we return to the breath, we have this lovely opportunity to rest in the natural balance of the breathing. Wherever we are returning from—the mind maybe tight around a worry, a memory, thinking about the future, thinking about the past—taking our time, we can return to the breath with ease, gently.

We can notice in the breathing that it is simple, uncomplicated, slow, and balanced in a way that the other worlds we inhabit, where the mind is very active, aren't. We can appreciate all the mind does for us, and yet we can create this place of rest in our experience in the breathing.

As we are here with the breathing, this way of being with experience—touching the breathing, noticing, accompanying the breath without being attached, without pushing away, without pulling close—is the simple touch of our world with the external world that the breath gives us. It is a way of being free in experience.

So, can we be in all the other senses that accompany us in the world? That is what we will explore this week. How can we be in this world of experience and keep in the flow of it, without stopping the flow of it, enjoying the flow of it? How can we inhabit this world of ours in a way that is free?

Dharmette: The Six Sense-Spheres (1 of 5): Introduction to the Practice

Welcome again everyone. Good morning to you. Good day to you wherever you are. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming together to practice, and to support one another's practice.

This week I would like to share the teaching on the Six Sense-Spheres. Sometimes this is a teaching called the Six Sense-Bases. I will give you a sense today of the context for this teaching and also tell you a little bit about where we are going, and encourage people to stay around until Friday when there will be time to arrive at the heart of this teaching.

It seems to me that the teaching on the Six Sense-Bases is a teaching about how we interact with the world in the only way we can: through the six senses we have. The five traditional senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, and the sixth sense that Buddhists add: the mind. The mind, and the way the mind experiences the world through objects of the mind.

I mentioned at the outset that I had the opportunity to teach on this theme last week in Medellín, Colombia with Andrea Castillo. In fact, the notes I'll be using are in Spanish, so I am going to see how that works to go back and forth. But we found it an extraordinarily rich teaching. Although lesser known, it is very powerful. It seems to me that it is a good practice to prepare for the holiday season coming down upon us.

In putting together a plan for the week, here is the roadmap:

• Today: I will introduce the Six Sense-Spheres practice and how it sits among the teachings.
• Tomorrow: We will talk about sights and sounds in the guided meditation, and then seeing and hearing tactics and techniques. We will explore how we can see clearly, how we can observe when seeing becomes "observing" and sounds become "noise," as a way to guide us in how to work with our experience in a way that is free and freeing.
• Wednesday: We will talk about "Delights of the Season"—scents and flavors. We will talk a little bit about the sense of smell and the sense of taste, and how to interact with the world through these senses. We aim for a middle path between ascetic³ practices of pushing everything away that is pleasurable, and an indulgent approach that might have us eating too much chocolate or similar.
• Thursday: The guided meditation will be called "Home for the Holidays," and this will be about touch, including proprioception and interoception⁴. If you haven't heard about those senses, on Thursday I will talk more about those senses related to our sense of touch, and how we create a home in our body and in the world.
• Friday: "Keeping Freedom in Mind." This idea of a sixth sense and keeping freedom in mind intends a double meaning: that we keep it in mind like we keep the breath in mind, but also that we find ways to help the mind touch with freedom at all times.

So, that is the game plan.

Today I will say something about the Six Sense-Bases and where they sit in the practices. Interestingly, among the practices of the Satipaṭṭhāna—the important discourse on the ways in which we can establish mindfulness—hidden in the final section, the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, is this practice on the Six Sense-Bases.

It has this important middle position between two practices associated with suffering—the Five Hindrances and the Five Aggregates—and two practices associated with freedom—the Seven Factors of Awakening and the Four Noble Truths. As Gil Fronsdal has pointed out, it has this kind of pivotal position. I can mention two ways in which it is pivotal.

One is that it combines mind and body in a very interesting way. It recognizes the embodied nature of our experience.

The second way in which it is pivotal is the way that it points us in our practice. It moves us from the concern we have with suffering and orients us toward practices in which the flavor of freedom—the experience of a mind that is free in our life—becomes more the orientation. It creates momentum toward freedom.

The basic theoretical idea in this practice is that we can be attentive to what is happening whenever we experience something—whether it be through sight, touch, taste, smell, or the mind. The technical term in the text is that a "triad" arises.

For example, take an eye that is functioning. There is an eye. There is an object—I'm going to point to this lamp behind my head. And somewhere mysteriously between the two arises a consciousness of sight, an eye-consciousness. These three things come together to create the experience of something.

In that relationship, which begins as a simple relationship between the eye, an object, and some knowing of this experience, there can develop a knot—or what is sometimes in the classic translations referred to as a "fetter" or a "shackle." There is a way in which we are tied to these things through this experience.

A big part of this practice is right here: we can be aware of two things that are happening.

First, each of these three pieces of this triad—the eye, the lamp, and the consciousness that arises dependent on them—is impermanent. Each of these things is changing. So when we bring attention to this relationship, we are touching up against one of the very important things that we come to be aware of in our practice: the way that experience arises in these multiply dependent and impermanent ways.

Second, we can also be aware of the knot forming a relationship. I like to think of it maybe as a spectrum, or a process—although it can happen instantaneously. The relationship begins simply. It then can become a knot. It gets a little tangled up when I want that lamp, or I wish it were on, or I wish this little distracting thing over my shoulder were out of the picture.

If there is a wanting of a lamp, there is some wanting happening. If there is a not liking of this thing over my shoulder, maybe there is aversion happening. So in what was a simple relationship, there is something complicated happening. When this knot happens in experience, there is a holding happening. There is something that is just flowing in time, and the process of the knot arising has stopped it in time.

Because the holidays are coming, and because we just went through Thanksgiving, I was reminded of this. A lot of pictures were snapped the other day in my little fellowship. Those pictures were shared on a Google Drive or posted on Instagram. This reminded me that what happens here is a stopping of time. If there is an involvement with the sense spheres, there is a way in which we have stepped out of the flow of time. We have stopped things and we are trying to hold on to them in a way.

The whole trick of the Six Sense-Spaces practice, as we will explore more during the week, is to recognize the knots that develop and then let them go. Particularly when we look at the sense of touch, there is a really quite wonderful practice called "touching and letting go." In all our experiences we can have this experience of touching the world around us, knowing it, enjoying it, and yet also letting it go. We maintain our awareness in the flow of time, where we can be free.

So to summarize—and this is a general theoretical introduction; we will get tactical and technical tomorrow—we will look at each of the senses beginning tomorrow.

In closing for today, someone once asked the Buddha about these knots that develop, about how we get caught up in our experience in a way that brings us out of the flow of experience and gets us stuck, attached, wanting, or pushing away—suffering. Someone asked the Buddha: "In this world that is caught up in these knots, who can untie these knots? Who can dissolve these knots?"

And the Buddha says, essentially, that someone who is practicing sincerely, someone who has cultivated mindful attention to their experience, someone who remains dedicated and committed to their practice, can untie these knots.

So this is a really promising message: that we can do this. You can do this. It is possible to be in the world in a way that avoids extremes of ascetic pushing away or indulgent overindulgence, and leaves us free in the middle to experience the world, enjoy the world, and yet not find ourselves suffering in the world.

That is our game plan for the week. I hope you will join me in this exploration. I am looking forward to it. I think it will be a nice preparation for whatever holidays you celebrate coming up. And far beyond that, this is a way of dipping into the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta to a key practice that moves us from an orientation towards suffering, toward an orientation to what it is like to be free in the world.

Take care. May the benefit of our coming together today be shared among many beings. May you take the peace, stillness, and calm that you find in the meditation out with you into the world so that it can be there when you interact with others. May all beings be free. May all beings know safety and security. May all beings be whole in body and mind. May all beings be free.

Take care until tomorrow.