This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Calm; Samadhi (57) Calm, Clear Mind. 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 and welcome to this 30-minute meditation. As we begin and continue the series on Samadhi1, a word that I haven’t evoked that’s closely connected to Samadhi is the word Samatha2. Samatha sounds like Samadhi, but it has a very different etymology, and it means to calm. The whole world of Samadhi has a lot to do with calming—calming the body, calming the heart, calming the mind.
One of the ways of practicing today that maybe builds on how we’ve been practicing Samadhi for the last now over three months is to have a gentle emphasis on calming the mind. What I mean by gentle is that it’s almost as if you’re not doing anything, except maybe at choice points, saying the word “calm” or “calming” in a very unforceful, unexpecting kind of way, and allowing something in the mind to come. The primary, the real important area for Samadhi to calm is a calming of the mind, a calming of mental activity, a quieting of mental activity. Even certain mental activity ceases during deep Samadhi. For example, there’s the end of discursive thinking, commentary, conversations in the mind, images, and of great stories. The image-making mind quiets down dramatically, and the mind gets quieter and quieter.
A wonderful metaphor for this is the waves on a lake or waves on the ocean. When the wind is there, big waves can be born, can arise. When the wind quiets down, so do the waves, until finally, when there’s no wind, there are no waves. When there are no discursive thoughts, no active thinking reacting to what’s happening in the mind, the waves of the mind become very quiet. As the waves on the lake become still, then the lake becomes clear; we can see right down to the bottom.
So as we do this practice today, for the inhale, just let the inhale fill you with the air filling your lungs, with the movements of the body as you breathe in. Have a feeling of that attention spreading through your body, so you feel and sense widening circles of your body. Just a kind of a feeling, a sensing, sometimes different parts of the body, sometimes more like starting from the resting point, the centering, grounding point of breathing, that it spreads outwards into your body like a broadening wave.
Then on the exhale, at the beginning of this sitting, have the exhale be a place that relaxes, relaxes the body. Just allow something to relax. And then let there be a brief pause at the end of the exhale, just long enough to say the word “calm” or “calming,” which functions as a reminder for the waves of the mind to become calm. No matter what is happening to you, nothing to solve, nothing to fix, and nothing to figure out. It’s just a time to let the mind calm. Calming of the mind. And trust just the increasing, just letting the mind become quiet and still, the waves of the mind settle out.
So breathing in to feel what’s here, breathing out to, in the beginning of the sitting, relax the body. And then a brief pause, long enough before you breathe in, saying “calm,” reminding the mind it can become calm. After a while, you want to stop doing the relaxing on the exhale; it’s no longer needed. At some point, maybe you don’t even want to do the active kind of expanding of awareness into the whole body. It’s enough just to be in the whole body, breathing in and breathing out. But maybe again, at the end of the exhale, “calm.” And if you get particularly calm, you don’t have to say the word “calm” anymore. You can just have a nonverbal recognition, “Ah, this is a time to calm,” or maybe just say in your mind, “Ah.”
So, assuming a meditation posture, a posture that in some ways makes you bigger, whether you’re lying down or sitting or standing for meditation, kind of be somehow stretched, opened, a feeling of being expansive in your posture, not crunched, not crunching any part of your body, as if you can become large, big, expansive.
And gently close your eyes and take three or four deeper breaths to begin this process of feeling the body on the inhale, relaxing on the exhale, and saying the word “calm” to yourself at the end of the exhale.
And then to let your breathing return to normal. Gently let your awareness spread through your body as you inhale, relaxing the body on the exhale, pausing with the word “calm.” Calm mind. No matter what you’re concerned with, no issue, nothing to do or fix or solve, except trust the value of calming the mind, stilling the mind.
If any part of this exercise seems stressful or too much work, lighten up. Do it simpler and simpler.
Rather than waiting for a pause in the exhale to say “calm,” you might begin or gently say it during the exhale in a way that slides into the stillness at the end of the exhale. So you feel the silence of the mind at the end of the exhale.
As you meditate, trust the calming, the stilling of the mind. And it might be that all you do is very quietly whisper the word “calm” as you breathe in and as you breathe out, making less and less effort at meditating in favor of a stilling, quieting of all distractions, all thoughts, being here in this body with an expanding sense of calm pervading all things.
Any agitation you have, any active thinking you have, focus on calming underneath it. Let there be a deep calming in the mind that’s below the thinking mind, that is the source of the thinking mind. Trust this deep stilling of the waves by trusting the peace and the quiet that’s in the lake below the waves.
And as we come to the end of the sitting, to feel or sense whatever degree of calm is here for you, even if it’s quite small. Feel the calm of the body, feel the calmness in your heart, feel the calmness of your mind. And as if your calmness are your eyes, it’s through your calmness that you can see everything else with calm eyes. See whatever agitation, whatever activation, however small, is here for you, calmly knowing what is not calm. In whatever spaciousness is here, spaciously know what is not calm. Quietly know what is not calm. Maybe a silent knowing, allowing whatever is here for you to be known within a field of calmness, spaciousness, openness.
In the same way that you can hold your own agitation, activation calmly, now through the calm eyes of practice, calmly gaze upon this world, spaciously, openly, as if your calm awareness is medicine, is a gift for this world. The more the world is agitated, the more a calm person is reassuring, is a reminder to others, is medicine for an agitated world. May it be that you do not contribute to an even more agitated world. May it be that you contribute a gift of calmness, reassurance.
May all beings be calm and peaceful. May all beings experience happiness and an inner contentment. May all beings feel peace and non-strife. May all beings be free, free of tension, emotional pain, suffering. And may how we walk in the world calmly contribute to the welfare and happiness of all.
Thank you.
So hello and welcome to the next talk in this Samadhi series. Today’s talk has a theme of calm, because the general topic this week is the fourth Jhāna3, and the fourth Jhāna represents a very profound calming of the mind, a calming of mental activities. If you understand that a lot of the agitation that we have comes from thinking, as the thinking quiets down, that doesn’t trigger agitation. We appreciate how the mind that is for and against things or reacts to pleasure and pain quiets down and calms down. The relationship to pleasure and pain recedes and quiets.
Surprisingly enough, we might not feel much pleasure and pain. Certainly, there are times when pain gets accentuated by our preoccupation with it, by our vigilance against it, by our meaning-making and fear and predictions around the pain we feel. The micro-muscles around the pain tighten up, the pain just seems larger in the mind; it’s like a magnifying glass on it. But when we are no longer caught in the preoccupation with pain, sometimes even the pain recedes into the background. In this quieting, calming of mental activities in the fourth Jhāna, pain and pleasure of all kinds just recedes and becomes irrelevant, disappears from the mind. It represents a kind of coming into fullness or completion, a certain kind of the gradual calming of the mind that goes on throughout Samadhi practice.
The Samadhi practice has a general name of being called Samatha. Samatha, s-a-m-a-t-h-a, sounds like Samadhi, but it’s a different word, and Samatha means to calm, tranquility. It’s a calming, tranquilizing of the mind, making it tranquil, peaceful, tranquil like a deep, clear, tranquil lake. And so we’re calming mental activities, and the mind gets calmer and calmer. It’s not turning the mind off; it’s just quieting certain activities of the mind that are extra, that are not needed. And what comes in return is a tremendous sense of clarity. The tradition calls it a pure, clear mind. And it feels like this is the way the mind is the healthiest, most present, most fully alive in this vast, pure clarity of the mind that can be there, clarity of awareness.
And so it’s not going into a trance, it’s not checking out, it’s not becoming unaware, but there’s no thinking, no acts of recognition of what’s there. But there might be a deep nonverbal knowing that is part and parcel of the clear, pure mind. But there are no thoughts. But there’s a kind of clear knowing that there are no thoughts, but we’re not telling ourselves there are no thoughts. It’s just known without any effort, without any agitation or any waves.
And because this calming of the mental activity has gone more and more, the way that we take in sense data from our body, from the world around us, begins to quiet as well. We’re not actively taking in sense data. The places that we register sense data on the body don’t operate in a conceptual way anymore. It’s not taking in the data and putting it into the usual concepts we have of body, hand, room, sound, distance, here, there. There are all these subtle ways which we take for granted, which is kind of recognizing the truth of reality, that it is a kind of conceptualization of the sense data that comes in in a particular way.
And so even something as innocent as me recognizing this here as a bell—it is a bell—but there’s a subtle mental activity that recognizes it as a bell. And it feels effortless, it feels nonverbal, but it is contextual, it’s learned, it’s a concept, an idea. In another time, in another situation, this same object might be used as a holder of paper clips, a pen holder, it might be a spittoon. It’s so solid, it could even be someone’s pot that they put on top of a fire to cook their soup, and someone would call this a pot. So the context changes what this is. So there’s a very subtle conceptual activity of the mind that makes that choice, what label to call it.
And then deep in the fourth Jhāna, this kind of conceptualization is quieted down. And so there might still be a recognition that there’s something here, but it doesn’t have a name, it’s not conceptualized. So in the same way with our body, we’re not conceptualizing our body in the usual way, and the body begins to become diffuse, no clear boundaries, no clear details. It’s just kind of a generalized, peaceful, clear kind of vibration or flow.
This explains a little bit the metaphor that’s used for the fourth Jhāna. Sitting in the fourth Jhāna is just as though a person were sitting covered from head down with a white cloth, so that no part of one’s whole body is not covered by the white cloth. So a white cloth represents a cloth that’s very clean, and in which the light that comes through a white cloth sometimes feels very diffuse and clear and wonderful. And so the idea of sitting with a white cloth covering ourselves, our whole body, is not strange for the ancient Indian world because there was no mosquito netting. And so the way to be untroubled by insects was to cover yourself with a blanket, with a shawl, with a cloth. And so the people, monks, would sit meditating that way. And from the outside, you know there’s a human body underneath the cloth, but there are no details, there’s no clarity of exactly the shape, the characteristics of that body. It’s diffused and kind of uncharacterized, except for a general sense of the outline that’s in the cloth.
At the same time, the person inside it feels very cozy and very safe and very comfortable, where there’s no real sharp kind of boundary in a sense to the outer world. In the felt sense, there’s a soft, kind of clear, light feeling—light with weight and light that’s luminous. And some people, in order to harmonize this metaphor with the idea of the lake in the second and third Jhāna—the metaphors for the second and third Jhāna, the lotuses that are floating in the lake, the person just floating in water—they get very clean, then they come out of the water and sit under the tree to meditate, and they wrap themselves in a clean towel, completely wrapped and covered, feeling a pure, clean, fresh, quiet content in this way. The feeling of being in the third Jhāna feels very clean, pure, content, peaceful, kind of indistinct. Nothing’s needed, everything is cozy.
And there’s no pleasure and pain because the quieting of that part of the mind that registers and conceptualizes and engages in the construction of pleasure and pain has gotten very, very quiet. That’s both physical pleasure and pain and also a mental pleasure and pain that might be emotional.
So this is the description: “Abandoning pleasure and pain, with the previous disappearance of mental happiness and mental suffering, one enters and abides with neither pain nor pleasure in the purity of equanimous awareness of the fourth Jhāna. One sits pervading this body with a pure, clear mind. One sits pervading this body with a clean, clear mind, so that no part of the entire body is untouched by the pure, clear mind. It is just as though a person were sitting covered from the head down with a white cloth, so there is no part of one’s whole body that is not covered by that white cloth.”
So, may you find calm. May you find the calm that comes from not overthinking, overreacting, being over-involved with our present moment. Let calm be your companion through the day and in whatever way you can. And maybe the calm is the calm of not adding more agitation to the circumstance you’re in. May it be a calm day. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of deep concentration or meditative absorption, where the mind becomes unified and still. ↩
Samatha: A Pali word meaning “calm” or “tranquility.” It refers to the practice of calming the mind and developing concentration, often as a foundation for insight meditation. ↩
Jhāna: A Pali term for a state of deep meditative absorption. There are traditionally four form jhānas, each characterized by increasing levels of concentration, tranquility, and equanimity. ↩