This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Awareness Love; Samadhi (38) Samadhi with Love. 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 my friends, and I very much appreciate the gathering of this meditation community that’s represented by all of you who are chatting and greetings in the chat. For those of you who are not, it’s wonderful that you’re here, and I hope that you also appreciate the goodwill that’s being expressed in the chat. May that represent all of us and how we hold each other.
I mentioned something yesterday that I’d like to mention again today: that the nature of attention, the nature of awareness, is a little bit magical or special. The way that we know many things is reconstructed in the brain. The present moment experience comes in, like when it comes in through the eyes, it comes in in little packages of sense data, pixels in a sense, and then it gets recreated in the mind. Sometimes it gets recreated in a faulty way. For example, it still happens at least once or twice a year that I’m walking in the hills here, hiking, and I’m convinced that I see a snake, and it’s just a twisted root that’s exposed above the ground on the trail.
The nature of awareness is that whatever we are aware of in the present moment is, in some ways, reconstructed. So if you’re sitting in a room, it’s accurate enough to say you look around and see the room. But the seeing of it and the room as you see it are the same thing. Seeing and the room are seen with the seeing of the wall. The wall appears in the seeing. The capacity to see and the wall don’t really occur separately in the direct experience. Because it’s all reconstructed inside the skull in a certain kind of way, there’s a way in which the whole experience of whatever we know in the present moment is, in a certain way, permeated by awareness, by attention, by sense experience. I don’t want to say that consciousness extends out into the physical world, but it’s as if everything we experience happens together, intimately, inseparably from our capacity to be aware, which involves many different faculties of attention: seeing, hearing, knowing, sensing, smelling, all coming together.
Many of us are living in a world where it’s very much centered on how we construct things. A memory is an example of that. So for this meditation, I want to first emphasize that sometimes it’s interesting to consider that the weight of awareness, the weight of that attention that is coterminous with everything, that is suffusing and penetrating everything as we experience it in the mind, as we reconstruct it in the mind, has no weight. It’s very light. It’s open in and of itself. There’s a way in which awareness has no pressure and no strain, even though we might add that as extra baggage.
In the same way, what I’d like to suggest for today is there’s another quality that’s coterminous, that also can be suffusive in our experience, that also has no weight, and that is love. That is kindness. That is not even an attitude, but maybe an attitude or a feeling that everything that we touch, know, feel, experience is known with love, weightless love, a warmth, a tenderness, a kindness, a care, an appreciation, maybe a kind of respect which is also suffused with love. I use the word love here to be a broad term that each of you maybe can find your own way to do this, but to practice samadhi1 with love. So that starting to immerse yourself into this world of meditation, the world of samadhi, is more attractive, more engaging, more like, “Yes, this is good. This is nice.” Of course, the mind wants to be centered here. Of course, the mind doesn’t want to wander off when you’re in this wonderful pool of awareness that is suffused with love. Love that is suffused with present moment awareness. Not love that requires a lot of thinking, maybe no thinking almost, but just the nature of awareness almost is with a care, a tenderness, a gentleness, love.
So, to assume a meditation posture.
As you assume a posture, if possible, assume care, kindness for this body, for this posture. A kind of gratitude and appreciation for this body sitting here. And to feel more deeply into this caring body, caring for this time and place yourself here. Gently close your eyes.
And without doing anything else, feel the places in your body that are tense, where muscles are being held, where there’s tightness. And don’t relax them. Don’t let go and soften yet. Instead, meet those places, the aches and pains and tensions, with love and care, compassion, caring for them, caring for their well-being. That’s the orientation. And then as you exhale, to allow for release in your body. Allow for a softening around the holding, the aches, the tensions. Allow for release without needing release to happen, because the love, the goodwill, the kindness is there regardless. Simple, weightless care, kindness, love.
Feeling the tensions, the holding in the mind, the thinking mind. At first, do nothing more than feel it with compassion, with care, almost as if it’s good for the thinking mind to be acknowledged and recognized how it is, to be seen with respect and care. And then allow the thinking mind to release, to relax, allowing thoughts to float away like thought bubbles that evaporate.
And then finding in your body, is there a location in your body that you most associate with love, with kindness, or care, compassion? And if there is, take a little bit of time to feel that part of your body. Breathe with it. And if there is any bit of kindness or love here now in you, gently feel the weightlessness of it, the lightness of it, the way in which it has no demands, no fear. Just a very simple, simplest form of love, care. Breathing with it, breathing through it.
And maybe, just maybe, you can find love, care, kindness suffusing your capacity to be aware. Attention, awareness, the way you know anything in the present moment is known with an even modest, undemanding attitude of care, kindness. And to let that kind awareness, loving awareness, now begin to accompany breathing. As if breathing is surrounded by loving awareness. Where that loving awareness lightly, tenderly rests on breathing in and breathing out. That love has something precious to attend to. That love has an object, an experience of breathing that arises together with there being love. Not that you have to bring love to it, but the very experience itself of breathing is inseparable from an awareness that has care, love, kindness.
Staying close to this caring attention, loving attention. Staying close to where it meets and mingles with breathing. And you can lower yourself into that pool of loving awareness. Lower yourself into the resting place, the grounding place of breathing. Floating lightly, openly, continuously in the pool of breathing in and out. Awareness, breathing.
With the expanding and contracting sensations of breathing, let there be the expanding, extending, opening movement of love, care.
Letting go of thoughts in such a way that there’s more space in the mind, vast open space, quietness that can be filled with awareness, love, with a love of awareness. So that somehow the experience of breathing in and breathing out, and you are immersed in the wider and bigger field of openness, an open field of love with breathing at the center. Breathing as the nest to be cozy with.
When we’re immersed in the field of awareness, awareness immersed in samadhi, immersed in breathing, sometimes it can feel that’s not us that is doing it, but we are on the receiving end. We’re being done to. It’s not that we love, but we are being loved by this profound immersion. Deeply centered in a pool of samadhi.
And if you find yourself thinking in these last minute or so, don’t let go of your thoughts. We say the mind wanders away, wandering off in thoughts. Don’t bring them back. Don’t bring the mind back. Instead, extend your love out to where your mind goes. Extend your love beyond the edges of whatever you’re thinking, so thinking is held within awareness, love. Awareness, love.
And then bring to mind, think about what you’ll be doing in the next hour or so after this meditation. And let your awareness, love, become bigger and bigger to hold those thoughts, those ideas, those places, those people, all held within this field of care. And imagine that your awareness, love, expands outwards into the wide world where nothing is outside of it. A vast field like the atmosphere of the earth, the atmosphere of the mind that holds everything in a field of kindness, care, love. Maybe arising with the inhale, expanding with the inhale, lovingly returning on the exhale.
In this wide world that we share with other living beings, may our care, our love, our kindness extend out to include all living beings, all people. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may we, as we go through the day, stay close to our practice of awareness, as if whatever we’re aware of, we touch it with kindness, touch it with love. And maybe no one else needs to know. Maybe it doesn’t have to be more complicated or elaborate than that. And see how your day is, if everything that you’re aware of is a touching with awareness, is touching with love.
Thank you.
So hello and welcome to this continuing series on samadhi. Now that we’ve been doing it for a good number of weeks, I’m now bringing it to introducing—we’re more than introducing now—bringing you into the approach stage of samadhi. And it’s approaching a deep immersion, a deep kind of clicking in, a deep kind of settling into just here. It’s almost like a physiological shift and change where we become so fully here that the mind is clearly at home, clearly settled, clearly has no inclination to wander off. And it’s a deeply satisfying immersion into something wonderful.
The approach stage is beginning to appreciate this movement to immersion, movement onward to really being here. And part of that is to begin recognizing the symptoms of samadhi, the feelings that feel good about samadhi, that are the encouragement, are the kind of the symptoms, are the very things that the awareness wants to stay connected to. Awareness wants, mindfulness wants to stay here, wants to know this. It’s like standing in the sun on a cold day, and the system, the body, kind of almost like it wants to stay there, you know, with it fully facing the sun so we get the maximum amount of heat on the body. So there’s something in our whole system that wants to be here because it’s so good, it’s so nourishing.
Classically, more often, there’s a lot of attention given to the joy and pleasure that can come as we get into this approach stage. And it’s being kind of absorbed into the pleasure, the joy, that is kind of the avenue to this deep, deep immersion of samadhi. But sometimes that emphasis on pleasure and joy is a little bit too technique-focused, a little bit too much desire involved, a little bit too narrow a scope of what the full immersion can be. And so in this last meditation, I introduced the topic of love.
The Buddha did describe beautifully states of samadhi, deep absorption in the Brahma-viharas2, in these divine forms of sublime love which we are capable of. The first one being kindness or goodwill or loving-kindness, and then compassion and sympathetic joy, and the particular kind of equanimity called love, a particular kind of love called equanimity. But there’s this kind of sense of tenderness or rightness or goodness or a kind of a love that’s there. This is good. And so to begin feeling that there’s care, there’s love, there’s gentleness, there’s a friendliness, there’s a feeling of goodwill to what’s happening. It’s not greedy to enter into samadhi. It’s not, you know, narrowing down to just feel pleasure for pleasure’s sake or joy for joy’s sake. It’s just a little bit too narrow. The love, the goodwill is a support to keep it all very light and to keep it from being selfish, to keep it from being about me, myself, and mine. It gives kind of a wider space, a wider goodwill, a wider sense of not contracting in.
For the Buddha, when he talked about a penultimate kind of obstacle to really going deep into the well-being of samadhi are the five hindrances, one of them which is ill will. And so this idea of ill will getting in the way, even the subtlest little not liking, subtlest little “not for this, not this.” There’s plenty of experiences we can be having in meditation that are unpleasant. The body can ache, the mind can be challenging, and the heart can have its difficult emotions. And we don’t want to push them away or think they don’t belong there. But there’s a way of including them so that we’re not preoccupied by them, and this is where love can hold it all.
And this idea that awareness itself is love, mindfulness itself is a kind of love. One of my favorite reference points for this, well, it’s favorite and also maybe a sad reference point, is that I’ve learned as a teacher, in talking with a lot of people about their lives, that when they were children, if they were not really seen, if the parents kind of ignored them or never really stopped to get to know them or saw their difficulties, saw their challenges, saw their joys, that they were kind of overlooked by the busyness or the preoccupations or the alcoholism of their parents. That not being seen as children is equivalent to not being loved, not feeling that they’re loved. And there’s something about the act of seeing as adults, there’s something about the act of people stopping to really listen out and hear that is so nourishing, so good, that when people listen well, it’s because there’s a kind of a deep care, a love here.
So this love of samadhi, this love that can be part of awareness, doesn’t have to be a dramatic thing. It doesn’t have to be something that people write songs about, but rather it’s something very soft, something very gentle, something very modest, something that is very kind of pervasive and fluid. But it helps with this, “Yes, this is good. This is really nice to be here. Of course I want to be here. Of course I want to enter into this world of experience.” If the experience itself has this wonderful, light, inviting awareness, if experience itself comes along with this inviting sense of love or care that is not added to being aware but is part of being aware.
You know, it’s possible to be aware unself-consciously. It’s possible to be aware of things that we’re not really focusing on. We go through the day talking with a friend, walking through a park, and we might step over a branch or a lizard in the path or something. We might kind of avoid a rock or something. We’re aware of the rock, we’re aware of all these simple things in the park, but we’re not focusing on them. The degree to which we know it is almost effortless because we’re involved in conversation and looking around. So we have this capacity for very, very simple, unobtrusive, or undemanding kind of awareness. In the same way, we can do that for care and kindness. Maybe there’s an earthworm on the trail as you’re walking, and you would step on it if you just continued the way you are, but it’s the most natural thing in the world to step aside, to put the foot down a little bit different place so you don’t hurt the worm. It’s a kind of care, it’s a kind of love, but it’s not self-conscious. It’s not a big thing. You don’t even realize, and two seconds later you probably don’t even remember you did it. It’s not in your mind.
So to immerse ourselves in the simplicity of awareness, the simplicity of care, don’t make samadhi a difficult, big, complicated thing. It’s a dipping into the pool, into this immersion, into this state. So we’re looking for the symptoms of samadhi, and one of the symptoms is that the mind wants to be present, wants to be there. And when that awareness kind of wants to be there, look for the love, look for the care. And that then is part of the funnel that keeps us kind of there and wanting to be there. Look for the joy, look for the pleasure, look for the satisfactory feelings. Maybe the body feels much more light, like it has no weight. Maybe the body feels very spacious and open, and kind of be in that space, feel it, be it. Maybe there’s a delightful tingling or a vibration or a sense of vitality, aliveness that comes. Be in that, feel that. These are all symptoms.
Sometimes people have experiences of light, the eyesight filled with luminous, maybe a white field of light or a clear field of kind of light. Maybe it’s colored light. Don’t focus on them. Don’t get mesmerized by them. But that’s part of the kind of delightful things, the symptom of samadhi, where you can kind of accept it and appreciate how, “Yes, I’m on track. This is where I want to be.” Let the colors, the lights, let them be there on the periphery. Let them be a part of the goodness of it that wants to keep you right there with the breathing, staying there, staying connected.
So with the approach stage of samadhi, it’s helpful to start appreciating the symptoms of samadhi, how what’s shifted and changed, the calm that’s arisen. Sometimes the mind can feel very incisively—if that’s the right word—precisely or penetratingly sharp in its attention, awareness right there. And it doesn’t have to be with any kind of strain, but, “Oh, this is good to be there sharply, precisely right there on the breath.” Or it can feel like awareness is like petting a cat, and the breath is the petting almost, or the awareness that’s resting on it, and something begins to purr inside.
So the symptoms of samadhi, and one of those being love, care, and that is one of the great gifts of Buddhism, of samadhi, of practice, is to feel the almost oneness of awareness and love that you can carry with you into the world. So that whatever awareness touches is also touched by love, with care, with kindness. And you’ll lose touch with that. You’ll get caught up in your thoughts and preoccupations. But know that you’ve lost it. Know that you’re no longer doing it. Maybe just recognizing that difference can bring you back into this relaxed way in which awareness, love, awareness that is love, can then return to becoming part of how you walk through the world.
May you love, may you walk through the world with awareness, love. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of deep meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩
Brahma-viharas: Also known as the “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables.” These are four sublime states of mind cultivated in Buddhist practice: loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha). ↩