This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Aware Lightly; Samadhi (2) Discovering Awareness. 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. I suppose the background hasn’t changed so much from yesterday, but I’m actually now back at IMC. Yesterday I was at IRC, our Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, and so here I welcome you to Redwood City. I’m delighted to be here with you and to be able to share this time.
The topic for this beginning of the year is Samadhi1, and when it’s translated as concentration, sometimes we limit ourselves dramatically by focusing on focusing. We limit ourselves to a particular channel of attention that sometimes is a kind of a one-pointed laser focus or an attempt to do this. Samadhi is a practice that awakens or utilizes all our attentional faculties. So it’s something that is holistic or inclusive of the wide range of ways which we can be present here and now.
In fact, in some ways, there’s a gathering of all our capacities for attention into one. And then with that, the objects of attention, what we’re aware of, become simpler and simpler because we’re not preoccupied. The mind is not chasing different things or fragmented and going off into different directions. The mind, the heart, gets more settled, more at ease and peaceful in itself. And so there’s very little multitracking going on, but without narrowing the expense of the open awareness and all the different faculties of attention. This is one of the reasons it’s called a gathering together, a unification process. And that’s my favorite way of thinking of Samadhi or translating it: as a unification.
It is using our attentional faculties, and so mindfulness is very important because that is also using our attentional faculties. One of the things that mindfulness can teach us is to have a very light touch with awareness, to allow the awareness to be unburdened or uninfluenced by stress, by pressure, by weight, by force, where awareness is lighter—maybe I was going to say lighter than air, but maybe then it floats away. Maybe the same weight as air. That awareness has the same clarity as a really clean window, or maybe better, the clarity of an open window where there’s no glass even in the way. Or it has no shape in a certain kind of way. Sometimes it feels like awareness has no location or center.
But whatever it is, there’s a lightness to it, or a softness to it, or a non-assertiveness to it, or non-hesitation to it. Sometimes people will describe it as being accepting, but even those are too much of a doing, though we get the hang of it from that. And so, to learn that kind of attention and to learn to do it so the mind doesn’t drift away—that’s the art. And that’s one of the ways that concentration helps, is to help the mind not drift away into other things and other places.
So yesterday, I emphasized the importance of discovery and getting to know yourself better, knowing what your mind is like, your body is like, what your heart, your feelings are like. And I’d like to continue that process of discovery, but today with an emphasis on experimenting with how you’re aware of whatever you discover is happening now. So this is not a practice today of making any kind of change, trying to get yourself concentrated, to get yourself maybe even undistracted. It’s not trying to make anything happen, anything go away, or fix anything. But it’s a simple process of discovery of what’s happening, what are the elements, who are you, what’s going on for you. Because all the different parts of who you are is what is needed to gather the mind in this unification.
And then how you do this with the mind, the awareness with which you do it, that’s also key. So see if your awareness of whatever is happening can have no force, no weight, no tension in it. It’s just very light, almost like your awareness is like an open palm that holds a butterfly that lands there, or even lighter than that might be a dandelion flower floating through the air with its seeds, and it just lands there. That kind of weight.
Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.
And without doing anything else to prepare yourself for meditation, discover how you are right now. Almost like you’re stepping back to be the observer, almost as if you’re observing something that you don’t identify yourself with, but you are kindly attentive.
How’s your body? The kind attention that allows your body to be as it is, even if it’s some challenge. But for a few moments, just discover the body and see what kind of simple awareness, a way of feeling, sensing, a simple knowing of how the body is, where these forms of attention have no force in them, no expectation, no reaction, no judgment.
And then notice also in your body how you’re feeling, what’s your mood or emotional state. Discover, maybe it’s a bit of a kaleidoscope of shifting feelings. And see if how you know it can be light and open, receptive, allowing.
Maybe it helps to back off, not to disconnect or not be aware of, but to back off from your emotions so you’re not riding them too closely, allowing them to be there, discovering them like a naturalist.
And then how are you in your mind, your thinking mind? Without opposition or contention with anything, can you experiment with the lightest touch of awareness that is present without any pressure or force?
And now, with the lightest of touches for your awareness, your feeling, sensing, knowing, to be aware of breathing.
If awareness is light enough to float on the ocean, maybe the image of awareness floating on the waves of breathing in and breathing out, gentle waves moving through the ocean with awareness riding on them. A light awareness.
And so the awareness doesn’t float away across the ocean, imagine there’s a gentle, soft rope where awareness is anchored to the bottom of the ocean, staying in more or less one place as it goes up and down, floating on the surface of breathing in and breathing out, rooted with an anchor deep in your body.
If you’re aware right now, how is it to be aware? What are the characteristics of being attentive just to what’s happening in the present? And is there some way to relax any unnecessary tension associated with being aware, or judging what it’s like to be aware or not aware?
Letting awareness be like an open door that welcomes in the breathing. The body’s experience of breathing appears freely in a light, open awareness that’s anchored deep under the surface of the waves of breathing in and breathing out.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, to take a few more breaths, to rise on the breathing, float up and down with inhale and exhale. And as you exhale, to relax your body, soften.
As you exhale, relax the thinking mind, soften any tension or pressure associated with thinking.
And if there is any pressure or tension, contraction associated with how you’re feeling, see if you can soften, relax that tension.
And then, as if body, mind, and heart are one whole, as you exhale, relax your whole being, as if the edges of your being can soften, open.
And then in the comfort or security or safety of your meditation posture, to let your attention now, your thoughts now, wander out into the world to the people in your life: friends, family, neighbors known and unknown, colleagues at work, people you encounter in stores, mail carriers that might come to your mailbox. See if you can relax your whole being, including others into your heart, into your mind.
And to allow the possibility that the practice of meditation is for the benefit and happiness of everyone, including yourself.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may those four wishes flow out of the goodness of your heart, out into the world.
Thank you.
So, welcome to this second talk on Samadhi. This will probably be a longer series, and it’s such an important topic in Buddhist practice—Samadhi, or concentration. It’s one of the key foundation stones for Buddhist practice. Mindfulness is another one, being ethical is a third one, and kindness and generosity are maybe the fourth. But it’s tremendously valuable, and it can lead to a lot of stress and a lot of confusion. I certainly have tried to develop concentration in meditation and ended up with a headache because of the way in which I was trying to develop Samadhi. It was too willful, it was too forceful, it was with a lot of tension and with a lot of expectation and a lot of conceit, you know, “I’m the one who’s going to get concentrated.”
So I think of Samadhi as an art, and sometimes as a craft that we develop over time. Sometimes I think of it as grace, that when Samadhi arises, it’s like a gift that’s been given, and I don’t necessarily feel responsible for developing it. But I have to put the conditions into place.
One of the ways of understanding the unification of all of who we are as part of Samadhi practice, and why it’s so important to discover all the different aspects of who we are—to do so without any judgments, without any criticisms, without any reactivity to it, but just to discover—is to think of all the parts of who we are as the new members of a soccer team or new members of a dance team. Not everyone is completely skilled in dancing or playing soccer, and the team doesn’t know each other. So at first, as they practice, it’s awkward and difficult. Even the coach doesn’t understand the different skills and abilities and how to give people different parts, and how those different players of the team can work together.
Of course, that’s the way it is in the beginning. Of course it’s awkward. Of course it takes time to discover the skills, the abilities, how to be inclusive, and how to put all the different pieces together. So in the beginning, the coach is involved in discovering the players. And then as we discover them, we learn how to begin bringing them together to work together, to support each other, to have the same purpose, and to be a team that is unified.
So the disparate parts of ourselves, we want to first discover what they are, understand what they are, and then we want to start understanding how to bring them together so that the unification doesn’t have any stress in it. It doesn’t have any unwholesome qualities to it. It actually feels like a welcoming coming together, a delightful coming together, and a kind of coming into a fullness or a holistic vitality or aliveness.
So we begin with the discovery process. And we discover a lot of things. We discover how distracted we are, how little concentration we have. We discover that we have expectations of wanting it to be different. We have judgments about what’s happening: “If only this wasn’t happening, then I could get concentrated.” And so there’s pushing away certain things or judging certain things. We might have a lot of conceit involved. Maybe you’ve been very successful in doing various things in your life, and you think that meditation should be the same. You just apply yourself, you learn the steps—meditation by the numbers—and you can just do it. And that conceit, sometimes, of being the doer, the successful person, gets in the way.
The important thing here is just to discover the whole thing without judging it, getting ready for the real performance, the real game later. But for now, just kind of getting used to each other and seeing what’s there.
One of the things to discover is the different ways in which awareness operates, because Samadhi is a unification not only of all of who we are, but all the different ways in which we can be aware and attentive. There are three in particular that are useful for Samadhi and for mindfulness as well.
There is our ability to know what is happening. So that’s a cognitive function of the mind, recognizing. And it’s not judging or having commentary, not that kind of knowing, but the simplest possible knowing. There’s a sound. We don’t hear a big bang, like I just did, and begin thinking, “Oh, was that an accident? Was that someone hammering? What was someone doing, banging this early in the morning?” And so my mind races off. It’s just like, “Oh, sound. Bang.” That simple. So the simple act of knowing, knowing the in-breath, knowing the out-breath, knowing, “Oh, there’s thinking happening,” and keeping it very, very simple. So that’s one way, the cognitive functioning of recognition, of knowing.
The second kind of awareness is somatic. It’s how we can feel and sense things through our body. So you might know there’s an inhale, but you can feel the expansion of the chest, you can feel the movement of the chest, you can feel the smoothness or the choppiness of the way the inhale moves out. But that can be felt from the inside out. I like to say, as many of you know, to notice how the body experiences breathing, how the body experiences itself. So how does the body experience the breathing? This experiential aspect of it, which is somatic and sensory, is another piece, another way in which we’re aware.
A third way, emphasized by the Buddha in his teaching, at least usually waits until people are pretty settled in meditation, and that is to observe. This is to simply see, watch, observe what’s happening without necessarily having to know what it is, without interfering with it. Because when you see something, you don’t interfere with what you see; that comes a different way. And we’re not necessarily directly feeling it. There’s feeling and sensing, experiencing can have a wonderful intimacy, but observing can have a much more peaceful, much more equanimous quality. It’s not aloof; it can be very important. But there’s a quieting of all kinds of activities, including the activity of sensing and feeling.
So there’s knowing, feeling, and watching and observing. There’s also hearing and tasting and smelling. There’s proprioception. There are all these different ways in which we can experience the inner life through the different nerve endings that we have. And it’s useful to recognize what is our strength as part of the team, the soccer team, the dance troupe. What is our strength? Are we the person who’s more at ease with the somatic experiencing? Are we the one who has greater ease with recognition and knowing, and that’s how we anchor ourselves in the present? Or are we more like, we kind of settle back and observe, and that’s our strength?
And then there’s the ways in which attention can be very open, taking in everything as it arises and occurs. And sometimes attention is very centered somewhere, so that it’s not so large, maybe chaotic and confusing that so much is going on at once. We’re just kind of narrowing the attention to one little place. So like if you’re in a crowded restaurant, sometimes it’s really nice to open the awareness, the hearing, and just take in all the amazing sounds of people eating and clanking their spoon against their plates. And that can be very relaxing and spacious, or it can be confusing and agitating, just like too much input. And for some people, they prefer to just be with their own plate, their own food, and let their attention be centered there. And it can be very relaxing and quieting to just have this intimacy with your own food and everything else falls away.
So how is it for you? What kind of awareness is useful for you? This is an important part of this discovery process of bringing together the team, the dance troupe, the Samadhi dance troupe.
This principle of discovery and knowing yourself is invaluable for the preparation for moving into Samadhi itself. So I’ve said a lot today, but you might want to, as you go through the day today, notice, discover how you’re aware. Some people are very aware through the lens of their thinking, their bias, their preconceived ideas. And that’s not quite the kind of attention the Buddha focused on, but it’s important to see that you’re doing that.
And then, as you know anything at all about yourself, the core experiment of today is: can you know it lightly? Can you know it without judgment? Can you know without tension and pressure? And how light, how soft, how uncontracted, how untight can you simply know, simply feel, simply observe what’s happening with you?
So in this slow way that we’re going to go into Samadhi, this is the second step of how we’re going to move into it. Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing tomorrow.
Samadhi: A Pali word that is often translated as “concentration,” but more accurately refers to a state of unified, collected, or settled mind. ↩