This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Stopping and Seeing; Insight (1) Intro to Samadhi and Insight. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
To begin this meditation today and begin the series on insight, we begin with calling upon whatever delights you, inspires you about sitting down to meditate right now. Maybe gently closing your eyes. Maybe for some of you, it is simply to be here. Like me, I’m inspired to be here with you all for this 7 a.m. meditation. And maybe there’s a kind of happiness or gladness to have this opportunity.
Some of you have done this for a long time, and so maybe there’s the comfort of familiarity. Maybe there’s the confidence of engaging in something that you believe in or value tremendously, or somewhat. And to feel the inspiration, the joy of simply being here to meditate, and feel it in such a way that the thinking mind feels comforted or safe enough to quiet down, to better feel the sensations in the body, heart, and mind of well-being.
And maybe for some of you, there’s also a kind of sense of rightness of assuming your meditation posture. Maybe there’s inspiration with the posture to be back in a familiar place. Maybe a joy that this body and its posture is a bit like a temple, a sacred place that you have returned to.
And in the middle of this familiar and maybe happy place, to gently take a few long, deep breaths. Not too deeply, not too strongly, just enough to say hello to your breathing and for your breathing to say hello to you. Just enough for there to be a reconnection, a re-familiarity.
Letting your breathing return to normal. Part of samadhi1 is stability. And as you exhale, an ordinary exhale, relax, let go into how the weight of your body rests against some surface—a chair, cushion, floor, or bed. Stabilizing yourself by grounding your weight on the surface.
And it is as if the mind itself has weight. As you exhale, let that very light weight of the mind, maybe of awareness itself, settle and steady itself. Almost as if the mind, or at least awareness, can settle into your torso to accompany your breathing.
Relaxing the thinking mind and letting awareness enter into the sensations of the body breathing, as if it’s a coming home, as if it’s coming into a safe place, a sacred place, a supportive place, simply to be breathing in and breathing out.
As you breathe in, calming your body. As you breathe out, calming your body and mind. As you breathe, recognizing any degree of calm that might be present for you. As you exhale, spread your awareness into whatever diffuse calm there is in your body.
And then, with an inner eye, an inner clarity, what do you see? What do you see, or how do you see, that’s easier while you’re calm?
And if you turn your calm eyes, your inner eyes, towards the people of your life, and with calm eyes, calm consideration, do you see them in a new way or in a good way?
As we bring this meditation to a close, gaze upon the world kindly and offer to the world your wish for a better world, your inspiration to contribute to a better world. May it be that with your ability to be calm and to see clearly, that you can promote happiness in this world, promote safety in this world, promote peace in this world, bring greater freedom and liberation to this world.
May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful, and free.
Good morning and welcome. I think in the past I’ve had a little umbrella or something there in the way, but tomorrow I’ll see if I can not have it so bright on my face. It’s a little bit much for me even, but I can’t complain too much about sitting in the light—the light of samadhi, the light of insight.
So welcome to this beginning of a part two. Part one was, I guess we had about 60 talks on samadhi, and I don’t think there’ll be so many this time around, but this part two is insight. These two are paired in Buddhism: samadhi and vipassanā2. Vipassanā is a Pali word. Passanā means “to see,” and vi is an emphatic prefix, so “to see in a special way,” “to see.” It’s often translated as “clear seeing.”
The relationship between samadhi and vipassanā, samadhi and insight, is variable. Different teachers will have different emphases. One of the contributions in the 20th century of Burmese Buddhism was to introduce people to a way of doing insight practice without the need for a very intense level of samadhi, an intense level of concentration. And so that was called dry vipassanā because it wasn’t supported by the strong degree of pleasure, joy, and happiness that can pervade the body when there’s samadhi.
However, the way that it was taught to me in Burma, the so-called dry vipassanā, came along with a lot of concentration anyway. It wasn’t to the degree of the very intense way that the Burmese had expected samadhi to be about. And so I was blessed by being able to do the insight work partnered with a degree of samadhi, which is closer to, seemingly, how the Buddha taught vipassanā. He did not teach the most intense form of samadhi that a human being can acquire, but a lesser degree that kept people connected to their lived experience in their body, but in a way that filled the body with a sense of well-being.
Compared to the most dry form of insight where there’s no samadhi whatsoever, one way to practice them is a happy combination of the two, where there is some samadhi and an insight. The samadhi creates a good foundation for insight because you cannot have a lot of insight unless the thinking mind has settled down. Oddly enough, one of the insights that we are resting in is to rest or flow in the changing river, that constantly shifting, changing, inconstant experience of sensations in the body. And that’s a phenomenal way that begins to loosen up attachments and clinging we have and introduce us to a whole different inner sensibility. I call it sometimes the “deep mind.”
In order for that to happen, the constantly shifting, changing, inconstant, fickle nature of the thinking mind needs to quiet down. So if the thinking mind becomes still and quiet, then we can start entering into this very deep mind, the deep sensations, the deep sensitivity within that opens up a whole different way of being in the world. Part of the function of samadhi is to help quiet the mind, still the mind, but to do so in a way that’s very welcoming. Of course, the mind wants to be quiet when the rewards—the sense of well-being, sense of coming home into samadhi, into a subtleness, into this deep place of sensitivity within—it feels so good, so right. It feels like this is the healthy place to be.
The thinking mind can’t believe this sometimes because the thinking mind is sometimes filled with fear. The thinking mind thinks that it has to think its way out of its fear or solve the problems it has. The thinking mind maybe has resentments, a sense of betrayal, and it’s only by kind of ruminating on them or trying to figure out how to somehow cope with them or repeat them to ourselves that we can find a solution. There’s all kinds of ways—happiness, joy, success in life—the thinking mind is convinced that it’s going to figure this out for ourselves. Or maybe there’s no sense of an inner life which is satisfying and meaningful and filled with well-being, and so the only avenue for happiness, success, and safety that someone knows is through the thinking mind. Because they don’t know an alternative, of course they’re going to be engaged in that and not wanting to give it up.
Samadhi teaches us something very different. It teaches us how there’s a profound sense of well-being that’s below the thinking mind, below the surface mind. And there’s a profound sense of stillness and quiet that is a form of safety, is a form of happiness, is a form of joy. So that allows the mind to quiet down. That’s the stopping or the stilling of the mind, the calming of the mind of samadhi, or samatha3. And then it shifts to being able to see more clearly.
And seeing more clearly, it’s not just seeing more clearly, but it’s also seeing something we don’t normally see. We don’t normally see the deep operating systems going on, the deep kind of organizing principles by which we organize our life, the deep beliefs, the deep attitudes, the deep emotions that either support our life or undermine our life. They’re usually generally inaccessible by a mind that’s preoccupied in thoughts, ruminating, thinking a lot, fantasizing a lot. And so there’s a whole different way of engaging ourselves that I believe is very respectful because it’s a deeper, more fully engaged part of who we are.
The combination of samadhi and insight is that samadhi, done well, is a way of becoming fully embodied. And fully embodied doesn’t mean that now we’re a hedonist feeling a lot of joy in the body. It allows for the insight to be integrated into the full range of our psychological life, our emotional life, our lived life. That sometimes is not possible if we don’t have a degree of samadhi. If samadhi is helping us calm and expand into the whole body, then we’re touching all the different places that the body is connected to our psychology, our emotions, the places of tension and holding, and the places of deep sense of well-being and joy.
So one of the functions of samadhi is to help us have the clarity to have insight, but it also helps the insight we have to be deeply integrated into our whole psychological makeup. And so having insight be able to include all of who we are means we don’t have a spiritual bypass. It means that it’s really beneficial in our whole life. And as we have deeper and deeper kind of sense of peace and insight, it’s good to have the insight itself be integrated into our full spectrum of our life. So the integration, the combination of samadhi and insight is a wonderful, happy partnership.
And so the first part of this year when we did samadhi, hopefully for those of you who did it, will set the stage—or not the stage, but set your body in place for the ability to have insight, and insight in a way that’s deeply integrated into yourself. For those of you who might be joining now for the first time, maybe some of the benefits of samadhi won’t be so easily accessible to you, but still, as we go through this and integrate these two, you’ll probably benefit, getting a sense of what’s going on here. And it might open up a new orientation for you in meditation that even for a beginner might be beneficial.
So this is a very general introduction to what we’ll be doing. And some of what I just said, we’ll kind of repeat or go into more deeply this week and more. And I’m very happy to be able to introduce or begin this journey in insight. It’s been a phenomenally wonderful process in my life, journey in my life, to be on the insight journey. And now to share it with you will be my pleasure. So thank you very much.