This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Med: What’s This Moment Like?; Inspirations for Insight (1 of 5): Simplicity and Interest. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
The invitation, when you’re ready, is to settle in. Settle into a posture that allows you to be present with whatever the internal and external weather is today. Maybe taking a couple of longer, slower, deeper breaths.
Notice whatever emotional tone or mood you’re bringing in with you. For me, there’s a little bit of a flurry from having done a bunch of tech stuff and watching the mind settle, watching the sediment of thought settle into the body. Attuning to your breath, your body, perhaps the sound in the room, the sound of my voice. Allowing the body to relax and the attention to go inwards and down.
Notice if there are thoughts, emotions, sensations, and allow them to be there with simplicity, keeping mindful awareness in the forefront. Resting in the flow inward and outward of the breath.
Noticing, appreciating the return or continuation of mindful awareness. Acknowledging simply whatever arises, noticing it persists, changes for a while, perhaps into something else or into moments of soothing silence.
From time to time, notice what is in awareness and notice how you are with awareness. What’s this moment like? Just allowing the system to respond with interest.
As the attention gathers itself, collects itself here, relaxing into the rhythm of breath, the texture of sound and sensation. Riding the moment with simplicity and ease. Noticing and softening into what’s obvious.
Noticing and tuning into any softening, presence, relaxation in the body. Noticing and tuning into any ease or contentment, simple awareness in the heart and mind. Appreciating that, savoring it.
And from that place, turning your gaze outwards to the others your life touches, directly and indirectly. With an internal gesture of generosity, care, kindness, offering the wish that they may be safe, happy, healthy. May they be peaceful, at ease, and free.
And offering the determination, the wish that our practice here together may be part of the growth of peace, love, and liberation in the world. May all beings be free.
Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.
So, good morning, friends. I really appreciate being able to practice together. It’s a rainy, cool morning here in Santa Cruz, and we appreciate and value this sangha.1
I’d like to introduce the theme for this week, which is “Inspirations for Insight.” It will be a series of stories and anecdotes—some myths from the Buddhist time, anecdotes from my own life—that are a bit in honor of Vesak,2 a Buddhist holiday that happened on Sunday, the early tradition’s celebration of the Buddha’s birth, death, and enlightenment.
These stories, which have been told for centuries, for millennia, are meant to evoke beneficial qualities of heart and mind, to inspire the mindsets and attitudes conducive to insight, liberation, and to strengthening practice. One such mindset is interest. So as these stories unfold over the week, I want to invite you to get interested and allow your own meanings to emerge from them as well.
When I talk about insight, it can be insight with a little “i,” which is an insight into your own conditioning, or insight into the universal truths that the Buddha taught about human subjective experience overall. And then there is the capital “I” Insight, which is a deeper knowing into the commonality of human subjective experience—the truth that the Buddha taught as relating to all people, all human experience everywhere. Both kinds of insight help to free the mind and heart in different ways. They both can be very powerful. So that’s where we’re going this week.
The first story is one that many of you are familiar with. It is, in a sense, the origin story of the Buddha’s teachings. I’ll give a brief version here. The Buddha was raised as a prince. His father had determined that he should succeed him in leading their kingdom, and he was offered a life of luxury, of opulence, of every possible sensual desire, and was protected from the suffering of life and groomed to take power.
Part of this may be because when the Buddha was born, two very consequential things happened: his mother died in childbirth, so he was raised by a very loving stepmother. The other thing was that there was a seer who had said he would either become a great king or a great spiritual teacher. And his father had a definite preference for the king.
So there he was, protected from any possible blip in his life. Even the beautiful flowers in the garden were deadheaded; the blooms were removed before they could fade. But as he got older, as a young man, curiosity and interest motivated him to sneak out of the castle with his friend, the charioteer. And he discovered the messengers of old age, sickness, and death, which shook him to the core. He hadn’t seen these things, and they affected him deeply. He conceived of the idea of wanting to discover another way, wanting a different way to penetrate through and release himself from life’s suffering.
And then on one of those trips, he saw a wandering sādhu,3 a sage, peaceful, graceful, walking through all of the chaos of the marketplace. And he left home.
There are many discourses where he talks about what he left behind and talks about the benefit, the appeal, the virtue of a life of the kind of simplicity that he was leading. He let go of all that status and wealth and became a wandering ascetic. It was the beginning of his own hero’s journey. And it also became the inspiration for generations of practitioners to embrace simplicity.
Most of you have heard this story, I’m sure. And many people over the centuries have found it resonates with them, in part because many of us come to the path of practice because of something that’s not right, a wish for something deeper, some kind of suffering or dis-ease. In the story, the Buddha literally lets go of a preoccupation with status, wealth, and sensual pleasure. But this could also be considered a metaphor, an instruction. And he uses it this way in some of his teachings: the kind of simplicity of mind that is helpful to deeper joy, freedom, and spiritual cultivation.
One of those areas of simplicity is letting go of a preoccupation with status, or at least not taking it quite so personally. Another version of this is not giving energy to comparing mind or FOMO, but instead turning towards this moment as best we can. There’s also a level of simplicity in releasing concern—releasing concern with what I’m going to get out of this meditation session, this retreat, this practice, this teacher even. In other words, it’s a shift of interest.
It’s a shift of interest to getting interested in how we relate to various forms of insecurities, even cravings, in our own minds and hearts, and relating to them more simply as what’s happening now rather than as commands, real needs, or even verdicts on me. So turning interest to the simplicity of the moment helps to support contentment, which is an underrated and very important quality in deepening practice and in discovering insight.
I speak from personal experience. As a young person, a young adult, an adolescent, I was very discontented. Always reaching out, wanting more, wanting, wanting, wanting. Happiness was out there, not in here. It’s so common. There’s even the simile of “monkey mind,” which is the mind grabbing on to the next thing and the next thing. Another practitioner I know called her mind a “mongoose mind,” looking at the shiny next thing to pay attention to, to grab onto, to look for happiness.
Instead, there are moments of contentment. And there were many in my younger life that I ignored or forgot about, didn’t kind of appreciate in this relentless pursuit. It wasn’t until encountering a major health challenge that I started to learn how to turn towards my own body, heart, and mind and relax, be with, and find contentment in the simple absence of reaching out, in the simple absence of a moment of discomfort, a simple moment of being present, no matter how fleeting.
Eventually, even in the midst of a health challenge, I started to feel this simple happiness that I’d never felt before. It was the happiness of presence, of being here now. Many of you have experienced this. It was humbling for me that that simple presence later got disturbed as I got more into meditation, with the habit of wanting projecting itself into the practice. But that wasn’t a mistake. Habits of aversion, habits of wanting showing up in the practice are these amazing opportunities to discover the habits of our own minds, the tendency of our own hearts, and start to release them, let them go, and cultivate a clearer way, a simpler way, a more content way.
One of the ways of doing this is to notice and appreciate, savor moments of contentment and ease now, rather than setting them aside to look for a greater moment or a contentment later. And another is to notice the frame of mind, whatever it is, like the glasses that you’re wearing. Notice how it filters experience. Am I wearing rose-colored glasses or dukkha4-colored glasses? Checking out what is the general mood or attitude, the internal posture, the stance of relationship to the moment.
It’s worth appreciating this because then sometimes we can drop into a moment of clarity. Notice what’s already here. Allow it. Be content with it. Rest in it. And it’s worth appreciating because contentment supports non-distraction. Contentment supports presence. Contentment supports the capacity to see clearly without clinging or craving. It has a flavor of the peace of the freed, liberated mind. It’s almost like a continuum towards it. So it in itself is onward-leading, and it’s a condition for that simplicity.
The Buddha praised both, likening a practitioner with these qualities as being free with nothing carried except the wings, like wings of a bird. And that simplicity is supported by contentment and supports contentment. Simplicity of lifestyle supports making time for practice. The Buddha’s going forth, his letting go of everything, is one example of this, as are contemporary and ancient monastics.
Many people, though, in the midst of our rich and full and busy lives, find a much more harmonious relationship with the heart by just simplifying activities. And there’s simplicity in how we relate to our own hearts and minds, which supports a wholesome relationship with whatever is there—the capacity to simply turn towards, to be with.
Simplicity supports clear seeing, clarity, and simplicity supports insight.
So how do you support the inner rising growth of simplicity? Well, to some extent, simplicity is an acquired taste. Maybe notice how you’ve acquired it in your own life and where it’s not there, or where complication is there. Notice how it tends to release the most unhelpful proliferation of mind if we just step back with it. If we just step back with it, allow it to be simply okay. It’s complicated. Just complicated, not a problem.
You can go to your senses. Drop into the senses of the moment, the sensory gateways to awareness. And trust that each moment of mindful awareness, noticed as such, invites the next moment of awareness. That quality of awareness itself is free of complication. You can ask yourself, “What’s this moment like? What’s obvious here?” It cuts through to something direct, a simpler way of knowing that is in the direction of ease, satisfaction, and simplicity of freedom.
So in the next 24 hours, should you choose to accept it, your homework assignment is to notice what wholesome qualities of heart and mind this talk, the story at the beginning, may have evoked in you. And to perhaps notice when there are moments of simplicity and ease and when there are not in your life. Notice the difference. I would love to hear or see in the chat what you discover.
So, thank you for your attention and your practice.
Sangha: A Pali word meaning “community” or “assembly,” referring to the community of Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Vesak: A major Buddhist festival commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. ↩
Sādhu: A Sanskrit term for a religious ascetic, mendicant, or any holy person. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a core concept in Buddhism. Original transcript said “duca.” ↩