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Guided Meditation: Not Knowing; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (13) Bundle of Perceptions - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 20, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Not Knowing

So, warm greetings. I am happy to have this next half an hour together for meditation. One of the frequent teachings in Zen Buddhism—being the first Buddhist practice that I engaged in—was the idea of not knowing. There's even a saying that "not knowing is most intimate." I think it means that if you don't know, then you can really see clearly what's there; you can know what's there in a closer, fuller way. But as soon as you put a filter of knowing—understanding, expertise, or opinions—between you and the experience or the person you're with, then you can't really know them. It's not very intimate.

Another teaching is something called "Great Doubt"—a certain kind of spiritual doubt that is not indecisiveness. It's not uncertainty, exactly. It's a questioning of our assumptions, questioning our perceptions, even our understandings. Maybe it's like adding at the end of some understanding we have: "Maybe not. Maybe it's not like that. Maybe not so." So that we're more open. Because many times we have these understandings and interpretations, and they close things down. They limit us rather than making us fresh and available for what happens next.

And so, this idea of not knowing, so that we can be more fully present for our experience, can be very helpful in meditation. Even if we might recognize something—like recognize an in-breath as an in-breath—it's like, "You know, I don't really know what the breath is. I don't really know what this experience is." Not knowing. And if you come to a conclusion during meditation that "I'm not meditating very well," then... maybe not. Maybe it's different. Maybe not that way. Always kind of putting a question mark.

Not to sow the despair of doubt, or the uncertainty or confusion of doubt, but rather to do the opposite: to let go of the overlay of concepts, interpretations, stories, predictions, and judgments we have on our experience. Not knowing. Maybe not judging, not interpreting, not making a story out of it. Maybe it's not the way I'm thinking about it. Instead, let's be more present here.

So that would be the meditation today. To make it simple, you can just say "not knowing" when your mind says it knows something. More than just a simple recognition of breathing in, or an itch, or something like that. Anything you add to that—"I don't know. Don't know. Don't know." And it happens. "I wonder if that's poison oak from hiking in the hills here yesterday?" Don't know. Not knowing. Let's just not know for now. Later you can investigate, later you can find out what things are if it's appropriate. But try in this meditation to practice not knowing mind. A not knowing mind that helps you to be here and now, in the middle of your experience, directly being with it as it is.

So, assuming a meditation posture. A posture that's appropriate for you, that helps you to be both relaxed in your body and alert in your body.

Softly close your eyes. And maybe breathing a little deeper than usual, but not completely full. Maybe half full compared to usual, half more. So there's a gentleness in the breathing in deeper. Letting your belly expand as you breathe in deeper, and then relaxing your whole body as you exhale softly.

Relaxing. Letting your breathing return to normal and becoming aware of the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. If your belly is relaxed, if your chest can be relaxed, maybe the rhythm of breathing is a little bit like waves. Maybe not waves crashing against the coast, but waves out in the ocean. Swelling up and down. Lifting up and down.

That the experience of breathing creates a kind of wave throughout the body. Certainly in the torso. An expansion, lifting in the inhale; a contraction, settling, releasing. And with a wave of breathing in and out, relax your body on the exhale. Relax different parts of your body.

The waves of breathing in and out, the massage of breathing. Let those waves, the undulation, spread out into your heart center. Maybe feeling the heart center, emotional center, expand as you breathe in—lifting—and relaxing as you exhale.

And letting the rhythm of breathing spread up into your thinking mind. Feeling the thinking mind as you inhale, and relaxing it on the exhale.

Being attentive to any softness or gentleness that's found in the breathing, or around the breathing, or in the global experience of the torso.

And then at the end of, or as part of the exhale, if any thinking has crept in whatsoever, let there be in you a not knowing. Don't know. Don't know if this is true or false. Maybe it's not the way I'm thinking about it. Don't need to know. Not knowing. So you're fresh for the inhale.

Practicing not knowing. Because perhaps for this meditation, you're better off thinking about things you think you know... "don't know." So you can be intimate with here.

Can you feel the force or weight of the knowing? The certainty in what you're believing or thinking? Or the force or the knowing of the aversion to what you're thinking or imagining? And if you can practice not knowing, so there's no force. No force of certainty and no force of uncertainty. Just here with this.

And then to bring this meditation to a close, to gaze upon others, to gaze upon the world without the burden of having to know, having to understand, having to interpret or to judge. To gaze upon the world free of responsibility and duty. To gaze upon the world with a not-knowing mind. Because you don't need to know. It's enough for a few minutes just to gaze upon the world as it is. Not taking responsibility, not judging. Not knowing is most intimate.

And imagine meeting the people you'll meet today, where you begin this way. You don't start with your assumptions about who they are, what's happening to them. You don't start with your judgments. But you start being upright, not knowing. So you can know them in a deeper way.

[Music]

May our ability to see without the overlay of ideas help us promote the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. At least free of our judgments and assumptions.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (13) Bundle of Perceptions

So, hello for this third talk on the bundles of grasping, the bundles of clinging. The Buddha puts a tremendous emphasis on being free from grasping, clinging, attachment. But you don't want to be in a hurry to do that automatically and quickly. You want to understand well what it is that you're attached to and how you're attached. You want to become a student of grasping, of clinging. Take time with it to really know it well. Because if you know it well, then you'll see its tricks in the future. You'll see how it operates, you'll see it coming, and you can leave it alone. But if you haven't really understood it, all kinds of attachments will creep up on you and catch you by surprise. And then you have to do the much more difficult work of learning how to let go, or how to not have them interfere with the full freedom of your life.

The Buddha talks about five areas for attachment, for clinging. Because we have multiple attachments to these and we keep those attachments close to us—we're attached—he calls them "bundles." We bundle them up together. There are five different bundles.

Monday I talked about appearances, physical appearances that we perceive through our senses. Yesterday it was about feelings, vedanā¹—pleasant and unpleasant. And today it's about recognition, perception—saññā² in Pali. This involves the simple acts of perception that involve a recognizing, a recognition of what we're seeing.

What we see is not the raw, basic sense data coming in. What we see is often based on memory, concepts, ideas, and a process of selection—that we select what we want to focus on. We have preconceived ideas of what we're seeing. It's very innocent, some of it. And we do it kind of in a subvocal, almost subconscious way throughout the day.

If you're having a meal and it's a soup, you don't pick up the fork, you pick up a soup spoon. You recognize the difference between them. You know one is different than the other. It's an automatic kind of thing to do. Because it's automatic, we can do so much more in our life than we can if we had to consider what everything was every time we were going to deal with something.

However, because it's on automatic—it's kind of subconscious that we perceive, we recognize things—we don't see that the recognition is a factor of the mind, that we're contributing to it. You can see it clearly sometimes when you see that there are things which can be perceived as different things in different contexts.

Here at IMC, we have this bell, and here we recognize it as a bell. A very similar Japanese solid temple bell, about this size, I saw in downtown San Francisco one day. There was a homeless person using it as a begging bowl. So for him, it wasn't a bell, it was a begging bowl. For someone else, they might find it useful as a place to store pens... and it's a pen holder. Someone else might use it as a soup bowl. And there are things this size in Asia which kind of look like a bell like this, and used for this function, is a spittoon. It could be that someone turns it upside down and uses it as a doorstop, and so they see a doorstop. So it could be many, many different things. The function is often how we see something.

However, it's not just the different functions. Our acts of recognition come along often enough with associations, judgments, assumptions, and bias. So that we don't just see the person in their wholeness; we select, we recognize them by some feature of what they are.

For example, if some person is coming down the sidewalk and the person is not just a person for you; you recognize them as being tall or short. And with the recognition of tall and short comes associations with that, what it means. Maybe if you're short it's like, "Oh, one of my people! And I'm so glad because it's so awkward with all these tall people around." If it's a tall person, but they're really tall—they're 6'8" or something—it comes maybe with a sense of intimidation. Like, "Oh, this is a little bit dangerous now for me." So the perception can be, on one hand, familiarity and comfort, and on the other hand, can be discomfort.

We have bias around people. If someone looks to us like an enemy, then we treat them in a certain way, we see them in a certain way. The perception is not innocent; we're perceiving them now as an enemy. If we see someone as a potential friend, then now—you know, they may or may not be—but we're adding something more than just the raw data of seeing them. We're seeing them through a lens of interpretation.

So there are these ideas that we add on top of the raw basic data. And there can be a lot of attachment to those ideas. There could be clinging to them. There can be a forcefulness to them, a certainty in them. That come along with all kinds of things. If there involves fear, it's a certainty of fear; it's a force of fear that's operating, that's contributing to the attachment. If it's desire, if it's hatred—all these things come along and the perceptions are not innocent. There's attachment, there's clinging.

A tremendous amount of suffering in this world has to do with how human beings perceive each other. With bias, with prejudice, with racism, with classism, with ableism. We see people through a particular lens. We perceive them through a particular lens that limits them, that diminishes them, that makes it problematic. We don't see the wholeness of the person. Or we don't see them where we give them the freedom to be who they are with respect and care and love.

Same thing towards ourselves. There can be negative bias towards oneself and we see ourselves through that lens. "I'm a lousy person. I'm an inadequate person. I'm an unsuccessful person. I'm an unwanted person." And so there's a kind of perception—it's a judgment that becomes a perception—and this is what we see. And negative self-perceptions... there can be a lot of attachment, a lot of clinging, a lot of forcefulness, compulsivity to it. It's like it has a force of its own that's in us, driving along, and it just seems so authoritative and full.

So one of the primary teachings in much of Buddhism is to be very careful about perceptions. Perceptions are not innocent. Perceptions are not innocently "what we see out there." We have a contributing factor in constructing our perceptions, constructing our recognitions, constructing the way that we understand the simple understanding of what something is. We select out of something, out of the whole. We're partial. We see things for a certain purpose. We see things for how it relates to me.

And so this is one place, the bundles of clinging. We can feel the forcefulness behind the ideas we have. We can feel the weight of them, or the largeness of them. The clinging, the attachment comes with a sense of authority—like "this is the way it is"—and a sense that it has to be this way, and a sense of pushing it forward into the world. As I said, there's a lot of suffering because of this.

So to practice not knowing. To practice a healthy kind of doubt. "Maybe it's not this way." This person's coming down the street and they look like my enemy, and then... "Oh, maybe not. Let's just see. Maybe step off a little bit to the side to make sure I'm a little bit safe, but let me look more clearly and make sure that I'm not just projecting fear onto this person." And sure enough, as a person gets closer, you see the person actually looks very friendly and gentle. In fact, when the person comes, you smile and the person smiles and says hello. And it was a nice hello as the person goes. And we feel so glad that we took the time to doubt our initial perception. It's not always that way.

So today, if you like, you might spend the day, one way or the other, taking time to question your perceptions. To look at: when you perceive someone or something, through what lens are you seeing it? Is it what it can do for you? Is it the function? Is it your relationship to it? Your history, your past experiences? And do you limit whatever it is you're seeing by perceiving only part of the whole? Or is it limited by a judgment you have, or an interpretation or an association? Take some time questioning perception.

This is a fun thing to do with another person. Maybe you're sitting on a park bench or in some place in public, and you kind of do the exercise of explaining to the person what your first perceptions are of something or someone going by. And then the two of you kind of questioning that and saying, "Well, is that really all there is? Is there more? Is that limiting?" Try to kind of get a handle on how much perceptions are projections.

And maybe in understanding that, you'll understand how valuable it is from time to time to practice not knowing. Not knowing is most intimate.

So, thank you.