This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Entering Samadhi; Samadhi (3) The Temple of Samadhi. 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 our 30-minute meditation. I feel happy sitting down here, thinking about sharing with you this theme of samadhi1, something that I hold very dear. Partly because samadhi is something quite special. Nowadays, we talk about secular mindfulness. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about secular samadhi, at least in my mind, because samadhi has a profound sense of reverence for me.
To give you a little sense of this, there are two general movements in Theravada Buddhist Meditation. The way I’m going to say it now is a little bit for the purposes of distinction; in practice, they don’t actually play out so dramatically different, but there’s still a significant distinction. One movement is to focus on the objects of attention and to do that thoroughly, to make everything into an object, and the subject disappears. The other way to practice is to focus on being subjective. Everything becomes a subject, all objects fall away, and everything becomes part of the subjective experience. Samadhi belongs to the latter, and mindfulness a little bit more belongs to the former. There’s more to be said about this, of course, but just for the purposes of today.
When we sit for samadhi, there is a shift into the subjective world of experience. Not the world that we interpret, not the world of being self-consciously subjective. It’s not subjective in that we tie it to me, myself, and mine, but rather, it’s something we’re living inside of, as opposed to looking at it or considering it as something we look on. It’s more something we experience, we enter into. The Buddha used the language of “entering” when he talked about samadhi.
Finally, as introductory words for samadhi today, I think it can be useful for those of you who are so inclined to consider entering into samadhi as like entering into a sacred temple, a sacred spot. Entering into a sacred location, and not a location you just stumble into or casually go into, but something that, as soon as you come into the edges of it, you would become quiet. You would change your demeanor. You would enter with attention, present moment attention. You’d enter with reverence and care, with a sense of “now.” The place has a significance, an atmosphere, a value that it’s important to be attuned to, to be respectful for, maybe even with a sense of reverence.
For me, these qualities of respect and reverence and care and attunement belong to this subjective world of how we bring all of ourselves into the situation, not just treating samadhi as an object of concentration that we’re going to zero in on and stick with. We’re entering into a new mode of being, a mode of being where subjectively we are offering ourselves or allowing ourselves to be changed by something that is not our doing exactly. Just like if you walk into a sacred grove of trees or a power spot in some place of nature, just being there, something shifts. But if you stay on your phone looking at a YouTube channel while walking in, probably nothing would happen for you.
So here we are. Assuming a meditation posture, which is beginning to build and evoke the temple of samadhi. Perhaps entering into the posture not treating it as an object where the mind focuses and arranges things, but within the body itself, as if the body from the inside out is aligning itself, attuning itself, adjusting itself to be alert, to be awake, to have a balance.
Part of this turning inward to the subjective experience is to lower your gaze and perhaps close your eyes. As a preparation for entering the meditation, adjust yourself, prepare yourself by taking a few long, slow, gentle breaths—just long enough to not become winded or strained by it, but long enough to feel a fuller, embodied connection to your body. As you exhale, relax, soften the body. And as you relax, take all the rest of you and let it relax into your body.
Then, let your breathing return to normal. And if it works for you, with a feeling of reverence or tenderness or gentleness, feel different parts of your body as you breathe in, and as you exhale, soften and relax those parts of your body. A kind of relaxation where that part of the body can feel like it’s joining the rest of the body. Tension in the body is a kind of pulling away; relaxing is a joining.
On the inhale, feeling the muscles of your face. On the exhale, softening the face.
On the inhale, feeling the shoulders. On the exhale, relaxing, softening the shoulders.
On the inhale, feeling the middle of the chest. On the exhale, a gentling, a tendering of the chest.
On the inhale, feeling the belly. On the exhale, softening the belly. And as it softens, settling, relaxing the body into the pull of gravity.
On the inhale, feeling the thinking brain, the thinking mind. And on the exhale, quieting the thinking mind.
Finally, when you go into a sacred temple, sometimes there are little rituals of purification. It’s not so far-fetched to see breathing as a process of purification. The byproduct of carbon dioxide is exhaled to bring in oxygen that’s so necessary for life.
Centering yourself on the rhythm of breathing, to the subjective experience of the body breathing, the life-giving, purifying process of breathing as a sacred process into which to enter and settle, to be intimate with. Exploring the deep subjective experience that flows from the experience of breathing.
As you exhale, let go into your body. And as you inhale, fill your body with awareness. Release your torso and chest, as if you’re entering deeply into your subjective experience, free of self-reference, free of being self-conscious about it, like you would perhaps if you went into a sacred location.
As we come to the end of this sitting, ever so gently, follow the full cycle of breathing in and breathing out in a tender way, a gentle way, as if you’re caring for something invaluable. As if you’re touching something with care and gentleness.
Then breathe a teeny bit deeper, fuller, as if the edges of your body, your chest, are beginning to open up out into the wider world. As if your being is available to be attentive, to care gently for the environment in which you’re meditating, for the people and living beings that might be close by, out beyond into your neighborhoods, towns, districts, across the lands, across the seas. A feeling of sacredness, a feeling of tenderness, a feeling of kindness that spreads out from you across the lands. We’re all together as subjects; it’s all a subject, no objects out there in this field of care.
And then wishing: may all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may it be that each of our care, each of our kindness, friendliness touches everything we see and know today. May we leave in this world traces of kindness wherever we go.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this third talk in a long series on samadhi. This first five days is really setting the stage; it’s an introduction to the topic and entering into it. Today, in particular, I want to emphasize that samadhi is something that I believe is appropriate to enter with humility, with care, with reverence, with respect.
Too many times, I and people I know have attempted to get concentrated without humility or reverence or care, with a kind of forcefulness, a kind of expectation: “I’m going to do this, and I can do it. I’m going to really bear down and laser focus and just stay focused.” It is possible to get somewhat concentrated that way, maybe sometimes very concentrated in a certain kind of way with that attitude, but I don’t think that’s the useful attitude to have.
Useful for what purpose? In the Dharma, in Buddhism, samadhi is often considered a precondition for the arising of liberating insight. Liberating insight is not just an understanding that we appropriate for the purposes of the self, but it’s liberating insight from the appropriation of self, from the attachments to self and doing things for the self. It’s allowing ourselves to step beyond the limitations that we create for ourselves when we orient ourselves around “me, myself, and mine.”
And that is pretty special. It can feel like grace, it can feel like something transpersonal. Sometimes people even use the word “transcendent,” a word that I don’t care too much for, but for some people, it’s the only thing that can represent something that seems to take them out of their usual understanding of self.
In my studies of Indian religions, it seems that some of the religions or yoga traditions in India use the word samadhi the way Buddhists would use the word Nibbana2. Samadhi is sometimes a word for the ultimate experience that these yogic traditions will emphasize. In Buddhism, that’s usually not the case, but it does point to this very special feeling of what samadhi is.
So I like to think of it sometimes as a temple, a sacred temple that I enter into. Maybe some of you don’t care for that kind of metaphor. Sometimes I’ve thought about it as a sacred grove of trees. I’ve been in places in nature where it just felt like everything got quiet and peaceful and clear, and something inside shifts and changes in my whole demeanor because of the place. It calls for a certain kind of clarity of attention, like, “Now I’m really here,” and I’m here with a kind of reverence. Sometimes there’s a wonderful feeling of being quite small because of the great majesty of the natural world that’s in that place.
The reason why I think this is useful when we think about samadhi is that when we sit down specifically to practice samadhi, it’s helpful to reorient yourself, to spend a little bit of time preparing yourself, similar to how you would prepare yourself if you were going into some kind of sacred location. If a temple is a thing that works for you, sometimes when you go to these places, you might put on clean clothes, you might clean yourself, take a shower, and show up clean. You might bow as you enter the temple, or you touch a sacred object, or you do something that kind of marks the transition going in. You really feel like you’re outside in the busy hustle and bustle of the world, but inside, you get quiet. Now you’re ready for something that’s not exactly you, something beyond you or bigger than you that is found in the quiet and the care.
Rather than objectifying that, like this is some sacred place where a sacred being or something lives, I kind of prefer to see it as the very shift in the subjective nature of our experience that then allows us to feel or sense something that doesn’t feel like it’s part and parcel of the usual way we think of ourselves, the usual attitudes, orientations, judgments, and feelings we have.
It might not be so easy to make this kind of shift in orientation, but I think it’s helpful to realize when we practice samadhi that we are involved in a process of shifting and changing our subjective experience. To the degree to which that can be a choice, the degree to which we could prepare ourselves for that or care for that and support that. If you live a busy life, run around and do a lot of things, check all your texts and emails and social media just because you know you’re not going to be on it for 30 or 45 minutes of meditation, when you sit down, the momentum of all that greedy attention wanting things follows you.
So, to have a transition to practice samadhi where we’re leaving all that behind long enough that we allow for a settling, allow the whole system to become calmer, more settled, more ready to feel the deep, maybe sacred dimensions of subjective experience. This is very different than just sitting down and being determined, “I’m going to get concentrated.” There is a kind of humbleness or humility where we’re preparing ourselves almost like to receive a gift. It’s almost like samadhi will come. We’re shifting something about how we are to become a vessel in which to receive something that bubbles up from deep inside, something that spreads or something that appears. Maybe there’s no clear sense of whether it’s inside or outside, but now we’re really here to be open, to be available, to be receptive, to be a vessel for something.
To give you some sense of how the Buddha presents it, for him, just as samadhi is a condition for liberating insight, well-being and happiness are a condition for samadhi. So he’s already focusing on a shift in the subjective experience that’s needed in order to open up to this world of samadhi.
So when you sit down to meditate, what can you do that supports that transition? Can you give yourself more time in preparation to sit, not just rush from what you did to just sit down? Maybe always come to meditation 5 minutes early. Maybe go into it slowly, do some stretching, some settling, maybe a little bit of walking meditation. Maybe quietly have a cup of tea and let things settle. And then maybe sit down and just kind of be before you even close your eyes. Maybe look around at the walls, the floor, the objects where you are, look out the window to kind of begin really feeling connected to here and now, this place, so that the momentum of the mind being concerned about other places and other times begins to fade away. We’re beginning to gather ourselves to here and now, to prepare ourselves for a new subjective way of being.
In these introductory remarks about samadhi, I want to review that the first day I talked about discovery, that we really want to see and understand how we are. The more we can discover about how the mind, body, and heart is, the more material we have for the unification, the gathering together process. Discovery involves attention. An important part of samadhi is to find a form of attention that has a lightness to it, that’s not forceful, not contracted or straining—very light, transparent, translucent, just open. It’s easy then for the mind to wander off into thoughts and get distracted. But if we start today to appreciate that we’re entering into a new mode here, then that preparation, that new mode, can maybe be a vessel to hold that light attention that is going to be the gathering point or the support for a deepening into a dimension of our life which we often don’t experience in everyday life. A dimension of our life that is healing—samadhi can be quite healing—a dimension of our life which can feel sacred, and a dimension of our life that can give us a tremendous amount of wisdom and understanding.
With that, one more thing I’d like to suggest as we go through these weeks around samadhi is, as we settle into it, I would encourage you to consider a time where you’re going to start meditating a little bit more each day than you do. Maybe add a second meditation and to sit twice a day at least, maybe 15 to 45 minutes. Because samadhi builds on a familiarity, a connectivity; it builds on the residue that’s left behind each time we’re practicing meditation that helps it to build over time.
So if that works for you, thank you for today, and I look forward to being here with you again tomorrow.
Samadhi: A Pali and Sanskrit word for a state of meditative consciousness or deep concentration. It is a key component of the Buddhist path. ↩
Nibbana (Nirvana): The ultimate goal in Buddhism, representing the cessation of suffering (dukkha) and the cycle of rebirth. It is the state of final liberation. ↩