This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Road Less Traveled: The Road Less Traveled (1 of 5) Two Operating Systems. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this Monday morning meditation. I come to you from having taught a retreat at our Retreat Center in Santa Cruz. I see some of the names are people who were there. For this morning, I’d like to suggest that you take the road less traveled. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one less traveled, and that made all the difference.”
The road that I suggest today is, as you’re being mindful, as you’re present for your experience, take the road where there’s no comment. No comment. We live in commentary, we live in judging, we live in stories, we live in planning the future, remembering the past. All those are either disconnected from the present moment or are some way that we’re trying to manage the present moment. But there is another way, the road less traveled, the way of being aware in a very simple way without comment, without telling ourselves something, what it means, telling us what it’s about, telling us where it’s going, the expectation, without needing to judge what’s happening, come to conclusions about what’s happening. There’s an emphasis on a radical simplicity to what is happening.
The reason why this is a great road to take is that there’s much more happening within you than you can be thinking about, that you could be commenting about. Too often we live in the commentary and we believe it, and sometimes of course it is true, but we’re still living in it and it interferes with something deeper unfolding, something more precious, something more valuable. It’s almost like having no comment gives room for something deep within us to show itself, to come.
As we sit today, the second kind of phrase that you might want to keep in mind is that of breathing room. When we bring attention to breathing, we’re giving room for breathing, room for breathing to manage itself, to leave it alone to breathe the way we do. No comment. And if we’re aware of other things as we meditate, each act of awareness, each act of mindfulness: no comment. And no comment includes not being for or against it, neither accepting it or rejecting it. So, no comment.
So to assume a meditation posture, and to somehow adjust the arms, the torso, the head on a neck. Maybe tipping the head back and forth or a gentle circle with the head, loosening up the neck. Maybe circling the shoulders a little bit, just kind of wiggling the shoulders a little bit so they can relax. And maybe swaying the whole torso back and forth, sideways, finding a relaxed midpoint. Adjusting your legs a little bit if that helps.
And breathing in, maybe not a deep breath, but what for you is a comfortable, full breath. And if breathing is uncomfortable, to be in your body. And then letting the breathing return to normal. And with a normal breath, to continue to relax the body, soften in the face, soften in the shoulders, soften in the belly.
And as you exhale, to imagine you’re giving breathing room for the commenting mind, the thinking mind. Give it space, as if all the space outside of your head is offered to give breathing room to the thinking mind. And as you exhale, relax the thinking mind.
And then for a few moments here, see if you can do almost nothing, next to nothing. Just be present, be in the present, be with the present without directing the attention, without directing towards something, without receiving anything in awareness. Just be for a few moments. And whatever you’re aware of, no comment. Whatever you’re aware of, allow it to have breathing room, space to be itself without you being involved.
And if breathing is the center of attention, if breathing rises, what’s it like to breathe knowingly with no comment, no agenda, simply awareness of breathing? And as you continue, take the time, take all the time in the world, all the space in the world to be aware with no comment.
No comment, including no commentary about making comments. Of course, the mind will be involved in commentary from time to time. No need to make commentary about that. Each moment, taking the road less traveled, the road that’s quiet.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to consider taking the road that is less taken. In a world that does not know the difference between wholesome and unwholesome, may we be wise and not deluded. In a world where the choice is between hatred and kindness, may we choose kindness. In a world where there is greed, may we choose generosity. And in doing so, in a world where people are often self-centered, may we care for others. May we be wise and kind and generous to nourish ourselves and to benefit this world we live in.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Hello on this Monday morning from California. The series of talks I’d like to give today is very much based on the theme of my last weeklong retreat that ended yesterday, teaching with Andrea Fella. Some of you who heard that will recognize some of it. I’ll call this “The Road Less Traveled.”
In Buddhist practice, there’s often the emphasis on a path, a path of practice. And every time, in every step, there is a fork in the path. There’s a path less traveled and the path that is commonly traveled, all too easily traveled. In Buddhism, we choose the path less traveled. Sometimes it’s called going against the current. If you’re swimming up against the current of a river, it’s hard. Or if you put something in the river, it just floats down; it doesn’t go against the current.
In the path model, we take the path that is wholesome. There is the unwholesome and the wholesome, a very simple division. So, things like lying is the unwholesome direction; being honest is the wholesome direction. Being mean is unwholesome; being kind is wholesome. Because of this kind of pairing that can happen, it can seem that it’s just one or the other. It’s kind of like a pairing of things which are of equal weight or coming from the same place inside. It’s a choice in thinking or intentionality or something that’s all occurring at the same place.
But in fact, in the Buddhist teaching, there are two different operating systems. That’s my language for the Buddhist teachings, but there are two radically different sources within us for behavior. There’s one whole operating system for the unwholesome, and there’s a completely separate operating system for the wholesome. When the wholesome arises out of the wholesome, if the wholesome arises out of a decision, the source of the unwholesome can be where we live with a lot of thinking and concerns and stress. There can be a logical understanding of consequences and what’s going on, and a decision can be made there to do the wholesome thing. But it’s not that kind of—I point up—it’s not the operating system in the control tower, but rather the operating system that’s from a deep source within.
So, “The Road Less Traveled” that I’m going to talk about this week is less about a particular choice to do the wholesome thing over the unwholesome, but the choice or the capacity to be connected to a deep source inside that is the source for the wholesome, and to not take the common road that is the source for greed, hate, delusion, the source for stress, clinging, and tension.
We see in the Buddha’s teaching repeatedly this dichotomy between these two different modes of being, without it being named in a clear way that highlights that’s what he’s talking about. But he does talk a lot about wholesome and unwholesome. One of the distinctions appears when he talks about the feeling tones of experience—how experience can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. He talks about those feeling tones that are more on the surface, that have to do with how we are in contact with the world, or how the world is in contact with us. So if there is a cold wind, the body feels cold, and then based on that, we react. We think, “That’s unpleasant, and now I don’t want it. I want to change, to do something different.” But it’s the outer world which is affecting us, or we’re oriented towards the outer world and what the outer world will do to us. For example, eating good food, getting pleasure, being nourished, feeling lonely and thinking the world’s going to provide some reassurance by just eating a lot—all kinds of ways in which we are counting on the world out there to be the source of our joy or pleasure or well-being, or that everything’s going to be okay if the world is okay, our experience out there.
This is an outer orientation—pleasure, pain of the world. Then there’s the inner. And the inner is deep inside; it doesn’t have to do with how our senses pick up the outer world. It involves a deeper connection to capacities within that in Buddhism, maybe when people translate this word that Buddha uses for that, they call it spiritual. I like to call it the kind of inner source, inner place for our inner well-being.
To know the difference between living a life which is oriented towards our happiness being provided by the world, versus an inner life where happiness is provided by some deep source within that has been set free, that has been opened up, that is allowed to flow. That deeper source can’t flow if we’re living in the control tower of reactivity to the world. And the world is not only the external world; we internalize the world in our thoughts. Some people’s inner world is completely shaped by the outer world. If we’re thinking about the past and reviewing the difficult things in the past, that would also be called being concerned with the outer world, even though it’s the inner world that’s thinking about it. The control tower. Or if you have wonderful thoughts about how to do great things in the world, it might just be more of the same. It might be the ego-driven control tower, the conceit world.
And to find a deeper way, a deeper place of connection inside. In these two different modes that the Buddha, one way or the other, is talking about often, he has different metaphors for them. And that’s what I want to talk about today before going on tomorrow with this idea. For this unwholesome source inside of us—and it might not always be seen as unwholesome because sometimes our attachments, our clinging, or greed, which are unwholesome, can bring us beneficial things. Sometimes they’re successful in getting pleasure. If I’m lonely and want to go to the refrigerator to eat, sometimes the refrigerator might have some really good food, and I’m successful and feel so good. And so we can’t see necessarily that it’s unwholesome what’s going on, because we don’t see the underlying drive of the unwholesome and how taking that road creates habit, that road reinforces this control tower operating system.
So this control tower operating system, or this unwholesome operating system if you may, the Buddha uses a lot of metaphors to describe it. And what stands out in those metaphors is they’re all things which are constructed by human beings. For example, he uses the idea of a house that’s been constructed, a wooden house that’s been built. There’s nothing wrong with the house, except that it is built by a human being; it’s constructed. And with becoming awakened, the Buddha said he had—he said, “House builder, you are seen. Your rafters and beams have been destroyed, never to be rebuilt again.” It’s a little bit of a violent idea, but the context of that is that instead of living in the constructed world, we’re now going to live in an organic world.
The wholesome source within is a source that’s much more organic or maybe biological. And for that, he uses natural metaphors. One of the common ones is that of a plant growing, a tree growing. There’s a seed, that seed inside germinates, it sprouts, it grows, it becomes a large tree, it flowers, and then it produces fruit. And awakening is sometimes called the fruit of practice. The language that he uses for what we call in English “spiritual practice,” in Pali, the ancient language, was a word that had to do more closely with growing. We’re growing something. Bhavana1, often it’s translated as cultivation. And they think of it as cultivating, like a gardener cultivating a plant, a farmer doing cultivation. We don’t construct the growth of the plant; we support it, nourish it.
Over and over again, the Buddha uses this metaphor of the constructed things that human beings make to represent how we get caught. In another place, he uses the idea of a trap that a hunter uses to trap deer. And again, a trap is something we construct. Sometimes we build our own mental constructions. We build these thought constructions that are made of fantasy, of stories that are not accurate, or only partially accurate. And then we live in the story. Sometimes when two people meet, they don’t realize they’re both living in this thought construct. And sometimes their thought constructs are similar enough that they can relate, and sometimes they completely miss each other because they’re not really listening from this deep place, but they’re listening through the filter of the constructed world of stories, ideas that we paint reality with. The world of projection is a metaphor we use in the modern world. We’re projecting onto other people, and it’s not who they are, but we’re seeing them through the lens of our projection. So, thought constructs.
The other thing that humans build is, if you want to tie two oxen together so they can both pull a plow, you build a yoke. And then the two are tied together. So the Buddha describes how human beings in their attachment become yoked, not just to each other, but sometimes to each other for sure, but yoked to what they’re attached to. And so you can’t really get away; it pulls you along. Again, the constructed world represents this.
Now, it’s the world that’s not constructed that’s within us, that which is biological, that grows, that flows. And sometimes the Buddha uses the metaphor from the natural world of a river or stream flowing to describe how Dharma practice, how the Dharma begins moving through us. And our job is to stay in the river, stay in the current so it can flow along.
In the beginning of practice, the natural metaphor that’s used over and over again is to walk a path. To walk the path. You don’t—and a path, maybe you make a path sometimes by making a clearing, but it’s emptying something, not constructing something. And then you walk the path, and as you walk the path, something grows. You get stronger in your walking, you become more fit, for example. And then at some point, you don’t walk the path anymore, but rather you’re in the river and you allow yourself to flow with the river.
So these are metaphors that Buddha uses for this deeper operating system, the wholesome operating system. And that’ll be the theme for this week: The Road Less Taken, the road taken from this deep source inside, the wholesome operating system. So thank you, and I hope that hearing this inspires you that there is within you a wonderful capacity, a wonderful potential, a natural potential in a sense, that can support you and guide you through your life. Thank you very much.
Bhavana: A Pali word that literally means “development” or “cultivation.” In a Buddhist context, it refers to mental cultivation or meditation, the practice of developing wholesome qualities of mind. ↩