This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Knowing Fear Fearlessly; Non-Violence (4 of 5) Encouraging Ethical Behavior. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Knowing Fear Fearlessly; Dharmette: Non-Violence (4 of 5) Encouraging Ethical Behavior - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 26, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Knowing Fear Fearlessly

Hello everyone, and warm greetings. Warm greetings in a cold world. It's a little bit cold; I'm wearing a sweater. But a world that's full of war, violence, hostility in all directions... and no direction you look probably you don't see it. So here we are, warm greetings in a cold world.

One of the things that we're called on to do in this challenging world that we live in is to not be afraid. And this maybe is a tall order, a huge challenge. But if we're afraid, the more that we're afraid, the more that we cannot help make this a warm world, a caring world. The more that we cannot be agents of change in our households, in our neighborhoods, in our towns, spreading outwards. Fear interferes. Fear tears apart.

So one of the tasks of practice is to learn to sit with fear so that we're not afraid. And that maybe needs a little unpacking. I think we can assume that we'll be afraid, or say it differently, we can assume that there will be occasions when fear will be present for us. Some of the fear is appropriate and healthy, and some of it is not. Regardless of what it is, the practice of mindfulness is to sit in the middle of it and not be afraid. Have fear, but not be defined by the fear. Have fear, and know how to study the fear, to learn the lessons of fear, without becoming frozen, or becoming indifferent, or becoming removed.

So as we sit this meditation here, where would you go within? How would you be within, if you were meditating in a place that has no fear? Where you are not afraid, where mindfulness is not afraid. There might be fear in you, but you're not defined by the fear. What is that place that's free of fear in the midst of your fear? So whether you feel fear now or not, what is that place? Where is that resting place, that refuge, that place of strength, that place of non-fear with which you can meet whatever fear comes your way? That's the question, that's the contemplative exploration for this sitting.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. And as you're sitting here as you are, relax. Let the shoulders release, soften. Let the shoulders release to the pull of gravity. Relax the belly. Relax the hands. And relax the face. Soften around the eyes, the cheeks, the mouth.

To see if you can let the relaxation go deeper, gently take some long, slow, deep breaths. Let the exhale be as long as it's comfortable. A long, extended exhale in which you relax the body, release tension and holding.

And then letting your breathing return to normal, continue relaxing, softening. This time relaxing the thinking mind. Softening the tensions, pressures, and agitations of the mind. As if the mind is a rough sea. As you relax, let the surface of the sea quiet down and spread wide and peacefully. Letting the waves become quiet.

And then within your body, relaxing the heart. Relaxing the emotions you have. If they're fluttering or agitated, or feeling fragile or vulnerable, or there's any feeling of distress—not to make it go away. Make room for it all to settle, to relax, almost as if it's allowed to relax into itself.

Sitting quietly, settling on the body's experience of breathing. As if the experience of breathing provides a gentle reassurance: here, now, you are safe. Things are okay in the moment, sitting here. It's okay to relax further with every breath.

And now, can you find or imagine a place within, maybe deep in your body or deep in your mind, that is free of fear? If you're anxious or afraid, maybe deeper than the fear you have at the center of all things is a place of rest, of peace, of calm, of clarity. Where knowing, being aware, is to be aware with an awareness that has no fear in it. Just aware. It might be aware of fear, it might know the fear within you, but that knowing is done from a place of safety. That knowing is courageous, without fear.

Where is that place within where there is no fear, where you can know all things fearlessly? And it might not be all or nothing; it might be a matter of degree, where you get closer and closer to the place where there's less and less fear in how you're mindful, how you're present.

From where there is no fear, allow yourself to know fear without being identified with it, without becoming it. In a place within where there is no hostility, know hostility that's present, without becoming it. In the place within without greed, know greed, without becoming identified with it. From the place where there's no agitation, know agitation that's present, without becoming the agitation.

For this peaceful place within is a place free of opposition. There might be oppositional feelings; don't become those. From this peaceful place within, don't oppose anything, including your fear, your hostility. Just let it relax, as if it relaxes in the gentle warmth of this peaceful, caring place within.

As we come to the end of this sitting, see if you can relax more deeply whatever you're holding onto, or whatever is holding onto you. Let it soften, relax, for you to settle into a deeper place of knowing. Knowing that has no fear, has no identification with anything. But from which, from where comes care and compassion. That tenderness of love and respect. An ability to gaze upon all things kindly, as if all things warrant attention.

Knowing... knowing in a way that lets all tensions begin to relax. And to whatever degree you can rest in this knowing that has no fear, no hostility, no identification with anything, or whatever degree you can imagine such a place of openness and clarity, let that be the source of wishing this world well.

May all beings be free of hostility.

May all beings be free of violence.

May all beings be free of affliction and harm.

May all beings know that there are people in this world who care for them, who wish them no harm.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings and people be peaceful and free.

And may we contribute to that possibility.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Non-Violence (4 of 5) Encouraging Ethical Behavior

I want to start this morning with two quotes from the Buddha. The first is: "Go forth for the welfare and happiness of the world."¹ So this is a call to benefit the world that we live in. However, this instruction from the Buddha is meant for people who can go into the world with enough personal liberation, enough self-knowing, that they can go into the world without causing any harm. They know and can recognize what harm is and the impact of harm. They've freed themselves from any tendency to act in ways that are harmful to themselves or others. They can go into the world peacefully as promoters of peace.

This is a tall order, but I think the direction the Buddha is pointing us to is to become people who can go forth for the welfare and happiness of the world. And in doing so, there's a second quote: "Among types of beneficent conduct, beneficial conduct, among the best is promoting, settling, and establishing an unethical person in ethical behavior."

That's quite a statement—that the best conduct is not just being ethical yourself, and maybe not even going forth for the welfare of others in a kind of way of just helping them out. But for the Buddha, the best thing you can do is establish an unethical person in ethics, in ethical behavior. I don't fully understand the statement and the implications of it, and how universally we should understand it, but I'm inspired by this statement. I'm inspired that it's one thing to help another person, and another thing to have someone learn to be ethical so they don't go around harming many people. It's possible that in a certain kind of way, this is much more beneficial in the long term: to support, develop, and encourage greater ethical behavior in this life, in this world of ours.

I know that when I was a young teenager, I wasn't unethical, mostly because of a lack of imagination. It wasn't that I was an ethical person, but I just had no orientation that way to be unethical. But I thought that the idea of ethics to me was superficial, kind of being excessively sweet. I kind of looked down upon people who were referred to as ethical as somehow being hypocritical, or sometimes being too artificially sweet.

One of the big changes for me in coming to Buddhism was coming to have a deep appreciation for behavior and ways of being, and discovering sources within that are the wellspring of non-harming, living in a non-harming way. Part of why I'm a Buddhist teacher is to be able to convey that to people and spread that deep sense of peace that can come from this inner place that really has an ethical quality. The Buddhist path of liberation is an ethical path of liberation. An enlightened person is an ethical person; there's no doubt that this is what the Buddha taught.

But what does it mean to be an ethical person? The Buddha, as I said in this statement here, talked about establishing an unethical person in ethical behavior. Elsewhere, he talks about what's beautiful, and then there's what's more beautiful than beautiful.² What is beautiful is being ethical oneself, and what is more beautiful than that beauty is encouraging or being a catalyst for other people to become ethical. So here, this call to go forth for the benefit of the world also includes the call to speak up, to act up, to try to change the world and change how people are. Not to convert them to Buddhism, not to believe in religious truths of any kind, but to understand and appreciate the value of non-harming, non-hostility, non-greed. And not just to believe in it, but to really understand, to be motivated from the inside out to live this way.

Now, there's a reason why the Buddha emphasized this. He lived in a very different world than we live in. In that world, there were no elections to try to get the government that you like to run the show or fix things the way they should be fixed. There were no economic systems that needed to be changed. There was no capitalism or socialism operating, and there was no way to have these huge impacts on the economic systems we live in so that they could be more equitable and supportive. There were no nonprofits. It was a very simple world.

One of the main organizations back in the time of the Buddha were the kings, the monarchs who ruled often with iron fists. They were quite comfortable with killing people on the spot if there was any disagreement. So for someone to protest back then, to go and say to the king, "You should stop the war"—that meant off with your head. You couldn't really do it back then, and there was no sense that you could do something.

But the Buddha did speak up. He spoke up in ways that were sometimes not direct. When he talked to kings, he would not tell them directly, but he would tell stories in the form of myths of how things were in the ancient world. One of them had to do with a king in the ancient world who wanted to perform a big sacrifice so he could be benefited in some way.³

In this myth, the minister who hears about this big sacrifice tells the king: "Your Majesty's country is beset by thieves and is ravaged. Villages and towns are destroyed; the countryside is infested with robbers. If Your Majesty were to tax this region"—he was going to tax it to be able to do a big sacrifice—"that would be the wrong thing to do. Suppose Your Majesty were to think, 'I will get rid of this plague of robbers by executions and imprisonments, or by confiscation, threats, and banishment,' the plague would not be properly ended. Those who survived would later harm Your Majesty's realm." If you go around using violence to get your way, then sooner or later the people who survive will come back and harm you.

"However, with the following plan, you can completely eliminate the plague. To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let Your Majesty distribute grain and fodder. To those in trade, give capital. To those in government service, assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your Majesty's revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not beset by thieves, and the people, with joy in their hearts, will play with their children and will dwell in open houses, not locked up."

It's so painful to read this ancient admonition when we have a million children or more in Gaza who cannot go outside, who cannot play in the streets now, who are hearing constant bombing all around them. Children who are dying. What are those children going to grow up to be? The ones that survive, they're going to be scarred.

In the first couple of decades in the 1990s and early 2000s when I was teaching, I met people who were elderly who, as children, had gone through World War II in various capacities. Some were not just children but also adults, and horrific things they'd seen and experienced in the bombings of London, the bombings of Dresden, the Holocaust, the concentration camps. What struck me was the horror of it, how long it lasted for people, and how it impacted them even when they were just toddlers or couldn't even speak—babies being carried in shelters with bombing around them. It seemed to have affected them for their life, and they'd come on these retreats having to deal with these deep conditions that they grew up with.

So to plan for a better future, to be careful—this is the difficult work. When the Buddha says establish unethical people in being ethical, I'll read it a little more exactly:

"What is beautiful? Abstaining from killing. Abstaining from taking what is not given. Abstaining from sexual misconduct. Abstaining from speaking falsely. Abstaining from speaking divisively. Abstaining from speaking harshly. Abstaining from speaking pointlessly. Abstaining from being avaricious. Abstaining from hostility. Abstaining from wrong view."⁴

"And what is more beautiful than beautiful? What is better than beautiful? Abstaining from killing and prompting others to abstain from killing. Abstaining from taking what is not given and prompting others to abstain from taking what is not given." And so forth.

All of this is a very different world that the Buddha wants to live in than a world where people live in opposition to each other. To do what the Buddha is saying is really difficult. In a sense, it's easier to be in opposition. It's harder to approach people in such a way that you prompt them to change how they live. Is it possible? Is it realistic? Is it unreasonable to do this, given the level of pain, challenge, and violence that we live in?

Certainly, the Buddha prefers advocacy like this over oppositional behaviors. When he wants people to avoid divisive speech—the unhealthy, unethical divisive speech—he calls this a speech which divides those who are united and stirs up those who are already divided, spoken by a person who loves factionalism, delights in factionalism, enjoys factionalism, speaks to create factions.

In order to abstain from divisive speech, the Buddha emphasizes creating and perpetuating social unity. Uniting those who are divided, supporting those who are already united, and speaking to create harmony. So this is an explicit call to make a difference in the world, to heal social discord and divisiveness. It's not shying away from the challenging work of uniting those who are divided.

"Engaged in three actions are those acting for the welfare of many people, the happiness of many people, and the benefit, welfare, and happiness of many people. What three? They prompt them in physical acts of concord, verbal acts of concord, and mental acts of concord."

The Buddha was not trying to change social institutions, because there were none back then in the way that we understand it. But what the Buddha lived in was a world where people had personal connections, and that's where information traveled. For the most part, there was no writing, there was no TV, there was no radio. It all happened orally when people connected to each other. The world of human connectivity—how we connect to each other—was a rich world where social change could occur.

In a sense, we've come closer to that in our modern world, with this phenomenal degree of social media and communication that we have, that we've never had before spreading so far. This is a world where hostility is being promoted. This is a world where perhaps we can find a way to promote peace.

I'm very happy that we can use YouTube for these 7:00 a.m. sittings. I don't know all that goes on on YouTube, but I've heard that a good part of it is not so good. Some people have suggested we shouldn't be here, that it's somehow unethical to even be using YouTube. But for me, this is a platform in which to try to encourage all of us—myself included—to live a more ethical life. A life of not harming. Not just a life of being peaceful and de-stressed, but a life of being social change agents for the better.

So we do the very difficult work of creating concord and unity. And even if we might disagree with others, we are all committed to avoiding causing harm, and we want to encourage people to do that. This is what is more beautiful than beautiful.

So thank you. At least one more talk tomorrow for bringing this week to a conclusion. Thank you very much.