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Guided Meditation: Riding the Present; Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (2 of 5) Immediate - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello and welcome. I feel kind of delighted to be back at IMC and to be able to welcome you all and feel your welcome to be sitting here and the opportunity to share the practice with you all.

When I was a child, sometimes when traveling with my family in a car, I was sitting in the back seat and I'd love to roll down the window if we were on the freeway and stick my hand out with my palm flat, like a wing of a plane, and move my hand up and down, feeling the lift and the push down of the wind. It just put me right there in the present moment. I just felt like I was completely absorbed in this kind of constant movement of the wind against my hand.

This morning I bicycled down to IMC, and there was part of the time bicycling down, especially coming down the hill, where there was a kind of exhilarating feeling of just being fully present. There was something about the speed, the being carried, the gravity that really put me into the present moment without really any other cares except the exhilaration of being carried along by the bicycle.

There's a way of meditating which is relatively peaceful but puts us right in the present moment, so that it feels like in the present, in the immediacy of now, we're being carried. We're like riding the bicycle or being carried by a wave, if you've ever body surfed or been carried by a wave. Or, there was a delightful place in West Virginia I got carried along by the current of the river. It was just such a wonderful feeling to be carried along. And to be carried along with, right in the present moment, on the wave of the present moment.

In the West, the Western culture, the future often seems to be ahead of us, but there are cultures where the future is in the back, catching up to us and lifting us up as we go along. And all we can really see is the past, which is somehow in this kind of culture in front of us. But the past, which we can't see, is lifting us up, carrying us along. This idea that we're on a wave of the present moment, and there's an exhilarating way of really being here, present for this moment, riding that wave, riding that razor's edge, riding right here.

When I was going down on the bicycle down the hill today, there were lots of things around me to see—cars and trees and houses and things—but those just all kind of receded, receded, receded. I didn't stop to look at them. I didn't consider them. I didn't get involved. I just was there, being carried along down the hill. So there's a delightful way of being fully in the moment, in this very little saddle. It has sometimes been called a saddleback of the present, right there. Maybe the bike seat of the present, right there. And allow ourselves, let everything else just kind of be left behind, left behind. Just stay with the coming, the coming. Stay with the rising, what's lifting us up, what's bringing us into the present, what's the wave of time.

So if this makes any sense, you might want to experiment for this practice this morning. And that is that it's not simply being mindful, because sometimes if mindfulness is too cognitive, we're behind the present moment. We take a moment or two or three or more to recognize what's happening in ourselves, and what's happening has already changed very quickly. And so the idea is to cognize or be aware in the immediacy of now, carried along, carried along. And many things that we could know can just fall away, fall away, as we stay knowing the immediacy of now. So, and if this doesn't make sense to you or is confusing for you, please by all means just discard it and practice how you normally would.

To begin setting ourselves into this saddle seat of the present moment—that metaphor is used because it's kind of like a U-shape, and there's no clear idea of exactly where the present moment is, but it includes a little bit of the future, a little bit of the past perhaps, or the surfboard of the present moment. And surfboards are a little bit sticking out into the empty space in front of the wave, and a little bit of it's in the back, embedded in the wave. And a little bit to be on a surfboard of time is to have some sense of the emptiness ahead of us, the potential, the openness in front of us of time. And a little bit is kind of being carried by the past into the present and staying right there, balanced.

Guided Meditation: Riding the Present

So placing ourselves here now in this body, gently closing the eyes. And with the eyes closed, to sense and feel the present moment experience of being in a body, and to try to do it without focusing or being preoccupied by any particular aspect of your body, any pain or discomfort or tension. Just going to be open to all the body, the full body experience, as if your whole body is a surfboard or the bicycle or the hand in the wind.

And in this whole body experience, to take a few long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing the body as you exhale. A long exhale with the extended settling the weight of your body into here and now. Letting your breathing return to normal. Feeling your whole body, and within your body, the influence that breathing in and breathing out has on you. Again, not fixating on any particular way. If the breathing is uncomfortable, not to be preoccupied with that. The broad experience of breathing in the back rib cage, the sides of your rib cage, the shoulders, deep in the belly.

In this surfing on the present moment, you might feel it, sense it, riding the changing waves of breathing in and breathing out in the body. The inhale is kind of like catching the wave. The exhale is riding the wave, being carried by the momentum of breathing out. Being lifted by the inhale, carried by the exhale to the bottom of the wave. Right there with breathing is where to ride the present moment. Perhaps letting everything else recede into the background, into the past.

For now, it's okay to let all things be left alone, except riding the experience of breathing. If it's possible, not to focus on the ways that breathing is uncomfortable, but maybe there's an edge of breathing someplace in your body that lets you feel a little bit like the kid with his hand out the window, the hand riding the wind. Breathing in and breathing out.

Following, riding the breath, and all your thoughts are simply scenery, nothing to be involved in. Riding the breath, riding the bicycle, letting the scenery fall away in favor of riding the breath in the present moment here now.

As you exhale, relax the body. Relax into riding the wave of exhaling. As you inhale, open up, release, be open to the lifting and expanding. We're being lifted on the inhale, expanded, and relaxing and settling on the exhale. To be right here in the present, with everything else just the scenery that passes by, no need to be involved in it.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to again settle, relax on the exhale, softening the shoulders, the belly, the face. And perhaps even there can be a softening or opening on the inhale, relaxing and opening the mind as you exhale and inhale, softening the thinking mind. And if you're gentle, perhaps you can gently soften, relax the heart as you exhale, letting the heart settle and allowing the heart to open on the inhale.

And imagine now, coming to the end, that with an open hand, an open mind, an open heart, you're ready to meet the world, to meet others, and to do so with goodwill, with well-wishing, wishing others well. May others be happy and peaceful and safe. May my focus be a little bit less on myself and more on the well-being of others. And may this be a way of caring for myself. May each of you, each of us, know that we care for ourselves when we have goodwill for others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may how each of us moves through the world support the well-being of others.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (2 of 5) Immediate

So good day, everyone, and welcome to the second talk on the characteristics of the Buddha's teachings, the Dharma.¹ The way that the chant that describes these five characteristics begins, it says the well-spoken Dharma of the Buddha. And then it goes on and describes it as being, the well-spoken teachings of the Buddha, Dharma of the Buddha is directly visible, immediate, inviting inspection, onward leading, and to be personally experienced by the wise.

So these teachings of the Buddha have these five characteristics, and I like to think of these five characteristics as being a kind of reverse engineering of the Dharma of the Buddhist teachings. That somehow taking all of Buddha's teachings into account, if we can kind of get back to the basic principles, the basic orientation that the Buddhist teachings are based on. And these are all based on five ways in which we are personally engaged, personally involved with the Dharma, with the practice. That it's not an abstract form of philosophy, it's not an abstract form of reflection and thinking about things. That can be part of certainly a Dharma life, but to really be involved with the Dharma practice—which is what the Buddha was most interested in—was pointing people to practice. To the degree to which he was a philosopher, it was all for the purpose of getting people into a deep, moment-to-moment experience or practice that is liberating.

And we see this emphasis on direct experience, one's own way of being, way of seeing and experiencing, emphasized that the Buddhist in these five characteristics of the Buddhist teachings. The well-spoken teachings of the Buddha is something for each of us to directly see for ourselves. That it's immediate in our experience, that these teachings invite us to look for ourselves. This is not a teaching to believe something, to take something in the abstract, to trust someone else's idea of what's real, but rather to hear what the Buddha says and inspect it for ourselves, find out in our own experience what's true.

And so for today, the emphasis is this second characteristic, which is akāliko² in Pali,³ and most literally, akāliko—the 'a' is a negative prefix for and 'kāla' is time, so not of time. And some people translate it as timeless, and some people translate it as immediate. And both translations are good. I prefer immediate because it puts practice in the immediacy of here and now. I also like the word timeless if we understand timeless to mean that it's still relevant today as much as it was 2,500 years ago in the time of the Buddha. That there's some kind of way in which the Buddha is pointing to universal characteristics or qualities or practices of the human being, that we're just as human as the people were in the time of the Buddha. And some of the same human issues that they dealt with then are what we're dealing with now. The same need to find ourselves in the present moment and resolve how we get caught and how we get tied up and stressed in the present moment are as valuable now as they were in the time of the Buddha. So in that sense, the teachings are current, they're timeless, they're as relevant today as they were back then.

So these two ways of translating akāliko, but I like immediate because there's an immediacy to that. It’s like, okay, here, right now, not anywhere else. And so the well-spoken teachings of the Buddha point to something that's immediately perceivable for ourselves here and now. Yesterday I mentioned that in describing how the Dharma has these five characteristics, the Buddha says that they're found in the ending of greed, hate, and delusion.⁴ In another place, he talks about how we see it, how it's directly visible and immediate, inviting inspection, when we've abandoned certain afflictions. And he lists 17 different ways in which we're afflicted by emotions, which have a lot to do with how we relate to others. So when we have lust and covetousness, when we have clinging desire for others in certain ways, or we covet what they have or what others have, or covet things; that if we have ill will and hatred, if we have envy and jealousy, if we have contempt for others and conceit in relationship to others—all these things are afflictive emotions that humans carry all too easily.

But when we are able to let go of those, in the letting go—even though it might seem like a slow and gradual process to let go—but when we finally let go, the immediacy of that experience of freedom, the immediacy of that possibility of living without these afflictive social emotions, that's what he's pointing to. The Dharma is pointing to that possibility to experience this for ourselves. And for some of us who can't do this immediately, fully, completely, there's the immediacy of doing it gradually. To relax, to soften, to begin to lighten up, to not be so wrapped up in these afflictive emotions, but to step back and to see them clearly, to make space around them, to not be so influenced or pushed around by them or trapped by them. Even to do it gradually, there's something about how we can experience that in the present moment, in the immediacy of now, that is a powerful teacher for us. It shows us what's possible. It shows us the possibility of a continual and gradual path, moment to moment, of softening, relaxing, making space, not being caught.

And so there's something about seeing the Dharma in the immediate present that the Buddha is emphasizing. So it's visible here and now, it's something that we can see. And we don't see it, you know, in the abstract in the world out there. We see it in the immediacy of our present moment experience. To bring these two together is fascinating: that it's directly visible here and now, and it's immediate in our experience. It's directly experienced here and now, immediately in how we see. So it's directly visible, but in how we see, how we view our experience, we can experience the stress or the absence of stress. We can experience the fear and the hesitation and the absence of hesitation and fear, anxiety. We can experience the ways in which we tighten up and strain to be aware, to see, to know something, and we can be aware of relaxing and having a relaxed vision, a relaxed knowing. Right there we can know in the immediacy of now the Dharma.

And so we want to begin focusing on how we experience the world. So even if the experience of ourselves, the world, is uncomfortable to us, how we experience it is something we can change and adjust. We can find our freedom in how we know. We don't have to change the world, we can find freedom in changing ourselves. And in changing ourselves, we do begin changing the world we live in. If we're not caught up in greed, hate, and delusion, caught up in afflictive social emotions, that makes a world of difference for others. So to learn slowly, step by step, here and now, in the small steps and the big steps, how to be free. This is how the Dharma is immediate.

So you might, as you go through the day today, consider this aspect of the immediacy of the Dharma. What is it that you can, where can you find freedom in how you're present for this life in the immediacy of your experience? And certainly, I hope you begin appreciating how we don't find freedom when we linger in preoccupations, linger in fantasy and thoughts and ideas and projections of the future and judgments. But there's something even more immediate than those where we find freedom, space, openness, non-entanglement. Can you find it, even in small degrees, as you go through the day? And if you find it in small degrees here and now, take that as a teacher, take that as a way forward. Even the smallest relaxation is a teacher for you. The smallest relaxation points you to a way forward here and now, in the immediacy of now, to greater and greater relaxation, openness, and freedom. So, thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing all this tomorrow.