This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Calm Below the Stories; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (14) Bundles of Stories. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation-Calm Below the Stories; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (14) Bundle of Stories - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 21, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation-Calm Below the Stories

Good morning, hello, and greetings.

Sometimes I enjoy a little bit of fun by reclassifying human beings. Rather than calling them Homo sapiens, I consider them to be Homo stor—that we tell stories. One of the distinctive characteristics of humans is their ability to tell stories. Other animals can understand a lot, but I don't know how much other animals tell stories the way we do.

We tell stories, we make plans, we pass judgment. We bring experiences and people into the court of our mind where we are the judge, and we judge things. We fantasize, we imagine, we tell stories of all kinds. Certainly, part of the richness of human beings is sitting around a campfire and telling stories. Sometimes it's the way we understand ourselves, our people, our history, and make sense of the world. So, stories are a very important part of being a human being.

Eating is also important, but if all we did was eat all the time, that would be a problem. Sometimes when we meditate, the story-making mind is clearly a form of agitation. It is formally a way of spinning out, being preoccupied, or being disconnected from ourselves in the present moment.

It can be lovely in meditation when that storytelling mind, planning mind, and reviewing mind stops. I think it belittles that moment to compare it to the hum of the refrigerator going off. There's a feeling of, "Ah, that's good." We didn't even know there was a little bit of tension with the hum until it stops. Or we don't know that the windshield of the car has gotten dirty slowly on a long road trip until someone cleans it and, "Wow, now I see clearly."

So, let the storytelling mind take a break or rest. You don't have to eat all the time. You don't have to tell stories all the time. You don't have to make plans all the time. You don't have to review the past all the time. You don't have to be at court all the time, judging and evaluating. You don't have to be a scientist or an engineer constantly probing to understand, figure out, build, or create.

All those efforts of the thinking mind—which is complicated and active—can go to rest. There might be other forms of thinking, maybe species of thinking, that continue without that particular species of thinking known as story-making. That part of the mind that constructs, spins, and fabricates can rest. There might be very simple thoughts that say, "Oh, that's nice for things to be quiet. Ah, I'm home. I was up in my head all the time and disconnected from anything below my neck." When that part of thinking goes quiet, another voice says, "Ah, this is good. I'm here. I'm home. I've arrived for these minutes. It's good to be here."

Just like if you go to take a rest with a little nap, you don't bring your device with you to continue doing emails. You put that aside and think, "Ah, I can put that aside for now." So here we are going to meditate, putting aside—not abandoning, but putting aside—the story-making mind, the constructing mind, the mind that has abstract thought about things.

We can have the pleasure and the important challenge of just being here with what's deeper, more intimate, and more connected than the story-making mind. To know without a story. To know without imposing knowing. Just know simply, in the most simple way, without any conclusions, judgments, or predictions.

Here, assuming a meditation posture. Consider: have you been activated? Have you been activated with an abstract mind of thinking—thinking abstract thoughts, plans, memories, and stories? It has its place in our life to do that, but not now. Now is the time to connect to a deeper source within.

Closing the eyes. Taking a moment to imagine that you're dropping your attention down into your body to what feels like the deepest place you can touch. The deepest place that awareness can rest in. Maybe it's in the general heart area. Maybe it's in the diaphragm area, or deeper down into the belly. Whatever feels like the quietest, calmest, deep place within.

Let your inhale begin from there, spreading outwards. And let the exhale return to there. And if that's at the center, the calm, still place within, let the mind of stories, ideas, fantasies, and abstractions be on the far edges. Almost like it's occurring just beyond the range of your hearing.

Center yourself in the calm, still place within where there might be very simple thoughts. The simplest thought you can use maybe is the word "here." H-E-R-E. Here at the quiet center of all things.

Relaxing into that center. Breathing from that center. Allowing the thinking mind, the story mind, to relax and fade away. The tensions of the story-making mind melt away.

Centered here.

Maybe at either the inhale or the exhale, say the thought to yourself: "Here." Saying that thought from a place deep within.

[Silence]

Gently turning off the thinking mind, the story-making mind. Relaxing the tension or effort to be perpetuating an ongoing flow of thoughts that have nothing to do with here and now. Finding relief in being here. Here with the whole body. Gently, lovingly repeating the simple thought: "Here."

[Silence]

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, take a few moments to appreciate the potentials available to us when we are truly here. When we're present in a relaxed, rooted way, without the momentum of stories from the past or desires about what's to come.

This is the way we can be with someone who needs our support, who needs to experience basic human companionship. Someone who needs to feel that someone is present for them without any filters. Just here. In the simplicity and the clarity here without stories, there's a clear channel for our respect, love, and care for others.

May we offer our friendship, our friendliness to others through the medium of a simplicity of hereness. Being able to be here in a clear and simple way, not wanting anything particularly from others, without aversion to others. Just here with friendship, friendliness, metta¹.

May our goodwill spread to others, out into the world. May our friendliness spread from us to others and out into the world. May our simple respect for others spread out to them. May it be that this practice and its goodness spreads wide and far.

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (14) Bundle of Stories

So, hello to this fourth talk on grasping or clinging, and how we create not just a single grasping and clinging, but we create bundles of clinging.

Some of us specialize in clinging, grasping, holding on, and attachment to many things. It's almost like we go through the day collecting things to be attached to. We start the day not even knowing what new thing we're going to be attached to today. Sure enough, something comes along—something maybe we never even thought about. Maybe we have a smartphone and suddenly there appears a new operating system or a new app that does something we never dreamed of before, and now we really have to have it. We've collected a new attachment, a new clinging.

So we can go through the day and acquire more and more. We see something beautiful and we want it. We see something ugly and we want to push it away, and it's a kind of clinging and attachment for it to go away. It's fascinating to watch the appearance of new attachments, new clinging. The mind fixates one way or the other, either for or against things. The mind is fixated now. Sometimes people have an amazing capacity for one-pointed attention when it's for something they're attached to, clinging to, or wanting really hard—including not wanting it, wanting it to go away, wanting to get away from it.

The Buddha put a tremendous emphasis on understanding clinging: what we cling to, and what clinging feels like. He lists five different bundles, five different categories that we bundle up into forms of clinging attachment².

The first one we talked about on Monday is physical appearances. The second is feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness. The third is our perceptions, our recognitions of things. And today it's the constructions of the mind.

The Pali word saṅkhāra³ can literally, etymologically, be translated as "constructions." Thanissaro Bhikkhu⁴, a monk who is a translator into English, calls this "fabrications." I like to use the word "constructions." Some translators do "mental formations," but mental formations is a little bit weak or abstract. "Fabrications" implies something which is made up, that we make. "Constructions" means kind of the same thing.

It's not all mental activities; it's a particular kind of mental activity which has to do with constructing stories, judgments, and identities. Constructing ideas about the future and the past. Building up an edifice of self by all the different ideas of what self is, who myself is, what I'm supposed to be doing, who I am. We create these edifices, these complicated worlds of constructions.

Some people live in these constructions, these fantasies, these delusions that the mind can create. If we live in them 90% or 100% of the time, sometimes we're considered to be somehow mentally ill. The more we live in these constructions, the more disconnected we are from reality. Most of us do not go so far that others are worried about us, but there is a range. In that range, there are times we get attached to these stories, constructions, and built-up identities that we have. We're making things up in the mind, we're building things up in the mind, and we get attached to them.

That can be as simple as... well, that's true, I've never been on an electric scooter that they have now around town. So maybe today I try one. And it turns out that I have an aptitude for doing it easily and simply, zipping around town between pedestrians and between cars. After a few hours of zipping around on this scooter, I conclude that I am the best scooter driver in Redwood City. No one's as good as me. Look at me. My role in this town is to show people what good scootering I'm doing.

Before I woke up today, I had no identity, no story about myself on a scooter. But then it gets constructed right in front of my own eyes, or behind my own eyes, as I do this. I have this whole sense of pride and status and wonderful delusions of grandeur. Probably I'll be interviewed by Oprah and different things because I'm so good. I'm drifting off into this world of story-making.

The Buddha said that this world of constructs is one of the bundles, things that people get attached to and cling to. To become free—the kind of spiritual liberation the Buddha was emphasizing—all grasping has to come to a stop. All the ways in which we're tightened up and fisted up in the heart and the mind want to be released.

So we release the mind that holds on to stories, the mind that has attachment that's the fuel for building and making the stories. We can feel that sometimes as tension in the mind, pressure. We can feel it as the effort operating; effort can be tiring, can be forceful. We can feel it as a limitation where our world has narrowed down into this little world of story-making, a little world in the head from the neck up. We're just spinning around and around making these things.

Sometimes one makes the next. So I make an identity around being a good scooter driver, and then that gives birth to ideas that, well, certainly there's a nice scooter outfit that I should be wearing. This is really important to appear right, so I get attached to my appearance. And then I want to have gloves for my scooter driving that are really comfortable, and I get attached to the comfort of what I'm going to wear. And then it goes on and on. I start collecting more and more bundles of attachments in relationship to something that, when I woke up this morning, I had no attachment to. I create maybe a universe around this thing, and by the end of the day, nothing else is important in my life except everything to do with my scooter and what it means.

Some of us will live in these kinds of mental constructs, abstractions, and fabrications and not know that they are just a part and parcel of how the mind operates. We think that it's true, and this is how it is, and it's accurate. But if we sit and meditate and get quiet enough, we can feel the tension of that kind of thinking, the tiredness of that kind of thinking. We can start feeling how it keeps us limited from the whole.

To learn how to quiet that down enough to begin bringing our attention here in a simplicity of being—a radical simplicity of being—that the story-making mind will criticize as being simplistic. "Not important. Not fun. Not where life really is. Where it really is, is building and succeeding and making something fantastic and wonderful that requires that kind of thinking, that kind of story-making, that kind of ambition." To be resting in a simplicity of being is a betrayal, even, or it's not as much fun, or it's not going to get us ahead in the world in important ways.

But to let go of our grasping opens up a door. It opens up a capacity to be present for ourselves and the world in a fantastic way. It gives us depth, it gives us fullness, it gives access to the working of this intelligence of this body and mind that we have. If we're just in the neck up in the stories, we're disconnected from the amazing capacity that this body, mind, and heart has for knowing here and now. Our whole system, body and mind, has been designed to be intimately attentive, intimately processing, intimately responding, and intimately interacting with present-moment reality. So much of the fullness of who we are comes out when we turn off the story-making mind and can come from this deeper operating system that we have, which is so much richer than anything the story-making mind can do for itself.

What's fun about that is that when we're more connected and settled and not attached to the story-making mind, we can still tell stories. But we know they are stories. We're not grasping at them. They can arise out of this deeper place of creativity within that can have its own fun, its own wonderfulness, its own wisdom that cannot operate if we're living from the neck up.

So, you might go through today looking and seeing: What are the stories about the future you're living in actively—reflecting on, thinking about? What are the stories and ideas of the past? What are the stories you're making up about self—who you are, and who you are in the eyes of others? A lot of the story-making has to do with "me, myself, and mine."

See if you can notice the contrast between the stories you live in and the simplicity of being that you can live in. May you live in the fullness of your life without having the story-making mind be an obstacle to the fullness of your being.

Thank you.