This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inner Source; Road Less Traveled (3 of 5) The Wholesome Operating System. 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.
To this morning meditation in California, and as a gathering of a community here to meditate together, and a gathering of each of us, gathering all the disparate parts of who we are into some kind of whole, some kind of gathering into the present moment, so all of us is included.
The way that we include it all is in different ways, but I like to suggest that the most valuable place, maybe at the center of our inner life, can grow in a certain kind of warmth or pleasure, or an inspired feeling of the source within us. The home is not something to focus on directly, but rather somewhat indirectly, kind of like it’s on the periphery of awareness. In the center of awareness are a number of different experiences of stability, to feel stable here and now. It can be a stability in the body, and it can be a stability in the mind, and it can be a stability in awareness—that the awareness is softly, gently stable here without having too much of a sense that awareness is focused on something. If anything, it’s focused on these feelings of stability.
And then on the periphery, as we breathe, the source of breathing, or some inner sense of where the source of life, of vitality, of love, of warmth, some inner place of goodness that we might have. And if we have no such place, then maybe just a simple kind of peripheral awareness of breathing, where what we kind of become aware of in breathing is an easy breath, a soft breath, the parts of breathing that just breathe itself. Even if you control your breathing and breathing is forced or whatever, kind of rest with where the breathing feels relaxed, maybe not forced. It could be in the movements of the back rib cage, it could be the movements of the shoulders as you breathe, or something deep in the abdomen. So hopefully, as we go along here, you’ll understand what I mean.
So, to assume a meditation posture that for you gives you a feeling of stability. If you’re sitting in a chair or a couch, adjust yourself so that some parts of your body are against the surface, maybe the seat of the chair, that you feel supports you as a stable base. If you’re sitting on the floor, maybe whatever way you’re sitting, maybe cross-legged, that you feel the stability that the three points of the cross-legged posture provide at the base.
If you’re sitting on a couch resting against the backrest, maybe there’s a way of sitting up a little straighter, still resting your back against the backrest, but sitting a little straighter so that the chest is a little bit more open rather than collapsing. If you’re lying down, then to adjust your body in such a way that you feel the points of contact with the bed or the floor provide a kind of a feeling of strength or stability or groundedness. If you have your knees up and your soles of your feet on the floor, the soles of the feet can provide stability, as the soles of the feet can for people sitting in a chair. So feel the physical stability that’s available to you. It doesn’t have to be dramatic; it could be subtle stability, steadiness. And then as you exhale, let go into that stability, almost as if all the tensions of your body can soften and help with a settling into the stability, spreading a sense of stability through the body.
And then as you exhale, see if you can do the same for whatever tension, agitation, or restlessness there might be in the thinking mind. Let the thinking mind relax, soften, so the mind also begins to rest and spread out into some kind of inner mental place of stability or steadiness or a sense of supportive stillness.
You don’t have to let go of your thoughts as much as any tension, pressure, tightness, or activation in your body associated with thinking that is behind the thoughts or driving the thoughts. As you exhale, soften, relax, let the mind settle into a stability, as if gravity gently receives and pulls on the mind.
And then, without ambition or the idea that you can actually do this—maybe it’s just a little bit an act of imagination for some of you—turn your attention around so that you’re aware of being aware. And can the awareness be somewhat still, not jumping around, not chasing things? Maybe the stillness of an open window, where whatever breeze or wind or warmth or insects there might be outside comes to the window with no effort from the window. So let your awareness be still and open.
And with these three reference points of stability, stillness—either all three at once, kind of like they’re a big circle of stability that work together—with your peripheral awareness, become aware of breathing, but don’t focus on the breath. It’s almost like you’re aware of a shy cat on the edge of your peripheral vision, and you know you can’t approach it directly or stare at it. So you kind of ignore it and are kind of aware of it. And so become aware of breathing, becoming aware of the source of breath, where it begins.
In one way or the other, the body breathing is caring for you, is engaging you in a process of respiration which keeps you alive. And in that peripheral awareness of breathing, maybe you can feel the inner goodness or warmth with breathing, staying at rest with the stability in the body, mind, and awareness. Not making the breathing the central focus of attention, but more as something which you see on the edge of awareness, without expectations of breathing or trying to make it something, without trying to make anything out of it. Just allowing yourself to breathe, so that cat can become comfortable and feel safe with you.
Leaving your breathing alone, but peripherally aware of how the experience of breathing in your body moves through your body, touching, moving, awakening different areas of your body with each in-breath and each out-breath, but not focusing directly.
Letting your thinking mind become quieter, stiller, so that the shy breathing, like a shy cat, feels more comfortable to be present, to show itself to you without you looking at it directly.
As we come to the end of this sitting, to once again feel whatever degree of stability or stillness there is in the body, and take a few moments to breathe with that.
And to take a few moments to feel whatever stability or stillness is found in the mind, maybe in the thinking mind underneath your thoughts, and breathe with that.
And if it makes sense to you, feel whatever stability or stillness, steadiness there is in attention, in your awareness. And not so much focusing on the breath, but allowing breathing to arrive and gently touch awareness.
And feeling the overall wholeness of stability within, with your peripheral attention, the edges of awareness, be aware of whatever inner well-being there might be, or feel the source, maybe a little dot or spot of tenderness or warmth or goodness that’s within you. And let that softness, warmth, goodness, the feeling of it, gently have room to grow in your body without focusing on it or trying, almost allowing the peripheral awareness to make more room for a natural process.
And without focusing on some inner place of well-being, but allowing it to be there, trusting it, turn your gaze out into the world with your imagination of the day, the people you’ll meet and see, and the strangers you’ll pass by, and gaze upon them with goodwill, with well-wishing. That each person that you encounter, you wish them a good day. You wish them happiness and love and friendship and peace. You wish that they are able to have a day that’s satisfying and meaningful.
And may all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.
So good morning everyone, or good day, and welcome to this third talk on the road less taken. The idea being that in Buddhist practice, we’re always standing at the junction of two directions we could take. We could either do something in the wide variety of ways that are wholesome, or we can go in the direction that’s unwholesome. It’s rare that there’s a third way right down the middle of neither wholesome or unwholesome, and even if there is, it’s a lost opportunity. Every step we take can be done with a kind of attention and warmth that makes it wholesome, that makes it good. Nothing we do needs to be either neutral or unwholesome.
Everything we do, the step we take, what arises within us that we have no personal volition for, that we didn’t choose to do, may be unwholesome. But then to meet that with wholesomeness, to recognize it wholesomely, to avoid participating in it in a wholesome way, not to reject it or be aversive, but just, “Oh, this too. Wow, I think I’ll leave that alone.” And that could be done wholesomely, out of care for yourself.
So we always have this. Learning about this path, and here we’re calling it the road less taken, but it can also be understood as a whole different operating system. There are two operating systems within us. One has to do a lot with the world we make up and live in, the constructs of self and the future and other people that is not really there but is a projection onto ourselves or others. And there’s a whole different world we can walk in, a different operating system.
Here, I’m going to read a story from my book of tales called A Monastery Within. The title of this story is “Inside Out.”
An engineer had been a regular and devoted visitor to the monastery for many years. The meditation practice taught at the monastery was the only thing that made sense to him. In fact, the pragmatic logic of the meditation teachings gave him hope that he could overcome his chronic unhappiness and deeply felt pain. He tried all the meditation practices that the abbess taught him. He began each practice technique with enthusiasm, only to have each end with the same frustration. He would encounter a wall he couldn’t pass. The closer he came to the wall, the more he would recoil back into trying to think his way out of his pain. Offering him much support, the abbess encouraged him to relax, trust the practice, and simply feel his inner pain without reacting to it.
After many years, the abbess decided a different approach was needed. During his next visit to the monastery, the abbess told him that if he wanted to continue being her student and to be able to return to the monastery, he would have to take on a special practice. Once he had completed the assignment, he could then return for deeper teachings. Once more feeling hope, the engineer quickly agreed.
The abbess said, “For two years, I want you to volunteer 10 hours a week at the maternity ward at the local hospital. The hospital needs people to hold babies who are born prematurely. If these babies don’t receive enough physical contact, the babies will not grow healthily. When you have finished these two years, please come back to see me.”
The man was quite perplexed by this instruction, but because of his trust in the abbess and his failure to find any relief elsewhere, he plunged into volunteering in the maternity ward. He was surprised by how small and fragile the babies were that he held. He would hold them ever so carefully. He would watch their every breath because they all seemed in danger of stopping breathing. He spent a lot of time thinking about how he could more effectively care for the babies he held, but there was nothing more effective than simply holding them against his chest.
After about six months, he started feeling something quite new. He started to feel a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being. Since this was a foreign experience that didn’t fit any of the ways he thought about himself, he ignored it. Ignoring it was the best thing he could have done because it prevented him from interfering with the warmth by thinking about it too much. Over the following months, this tender spot grew until it pervaded his body. As it did, the cold, dark wall around his heart slowly relaxed, thawed, and dissolved.
When he had completed his two years of volunteering in the maternity ward, the engineer returned to the monastery. The abbess saw immediately that he was a changed man. He was no longer desperate, and he was no longer trying to fit everything he experienced into a conceptual framework. Now he wanted to learn what else the abbess had to teach.
Giving him a new instruction, the abbess said to him, “When you meditate, don’t think about what is happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. If you do this, any meditation practice you do will be fruitful.” And the man found this to be true.
So, there’s this other operating system within us. There’s the operating system of conceptual frameworks, ideas, made-up stories we have about ourselves, judgments, the swirl of mental activity that is an operating system that often can be based on things which are not healthy for us, based on fear and anxiety. It can be based on conceit and delusion, it can be based on greed, and it can be based on hatred and anger. And these things come from an operating system which tends to reinforce itself the more we do it and create a lot of tension and fragmentation within us.
There’s another operating system that was operating for this engineer that he didn’t know about. He was offering his tender care for these little babies, and there’s something about that contact that touched something deep inside of himself, some source of care, of love, of warmth, of simple tenderness that, because it kept returning, started to grow and expand and open. This other operating system that he didn’t know about began to fill him, and he became a better person because of it. He was able then to learn to meditate. He learned something about meditation that was not doing meditation like a technical problem to accomplish, to meditate by the numbers and to focus and put everything into place like an engineering construction.
There’s nothing wrong necessarily with doing meditation by the numbers, by having a technique that we do. But as he learned, now any meditation practice he did would be successful. Any meditation practice you do, if you have this other source, this other operating system in which you do it, from which it comes, it’ll be successful.
And this second operating system is less to do about doing than it is about allowing; less to do with accomplishment than it is to do about appreciation; less to do with striving as it is to do about being soft and accepting. And it’s not just doing this naively. You can’t do this necessarily with this second operating system. You can’t think your way into tenderness. You can’t think your way into it necessarily. If that’s where the solution is, you might have thoughts that allow you to touch into this deeper place. Even just imagining you’re holding preemies1 might be enough for some people to kind of drop down and really be here in a tender way. But you can’t construct all that; you have to allow something within.
And each person will have a different source inside for this inner operating system. Some people might feel it intimately connected to breathing. Some people, it might be in the heart. Some people will find it deeper than the heart. There’s a long history in Buddhism to find something really valuable, deep, profound somewhere in the belly area, deep down in the abdomen. In Japan, they call it the hara2. Maybe it’s okay to call it, you know, associated with where the womb is in the body, the place where something gestates, something grows. A mother cannot make the child grow in the womb, but creates the conditions for it and allows it, and can feel tenderness and warmth towards it, and then the person grows by itself.
So may it be that today, everything you touch with your hands—the keys of a computer board or a device, the utensil in the kitchen, the steering wheel of your car—everything that you’re actually touching with your hand, touch it, be with it with a kind of care that you would be with a preemie if you were holding it. And see if in your everyday activities, the objects of touch, what comes into your hand, if you can be with it caringly, not casually, not offhand, not half-consciously. You know, you’re thinking of doing it for another purpose and just doing it, opening a door to get someplace else. You open doors so many times. Everything you touch today, let it be a place for your care, for your attention, for something deep inside to come forth as you live your life. Of course, the other things you’re doing might be important, and so it’s easy to overlook opening the door, but nothing can be more important than awakening this beautiful operating system we have and having that come forth into our life, so that everything becomes sacred.
So thank you very much.
Preemies: A colloquial term for premature babies. The original transcript said “pries,” which has been corrected based on the context of the story about the maternity ward. ↩
Hara: A Japanese term referring to the soft belly area, considered a center of vital energy (ki), breath, and the true self. ↩