This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Present Moment in View; Insight (6) Personal Insights. 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.
Hello and welcome to this meditation session. The topic these days is insight. I think it might be useful to see the wordplay a little bit around the word ‘insight,’ in that it means something similar to having something in view. If it’s in view, then it’s within eyesight, something we can see. So, insight is something that also comes into the domain of our mind’s eye, our perception. Sometimes I consider insight to be closer to revelation than it is to understanding. We don’t search, we don’t analyze, but something comes into view. When we walk up a hill and then we see the surroundings, they come into view. There’s somewhat of a receptive quality to it, a discovery. Reality appears to us, rather than we going to reality.
Mindfulness meditation is the meditation practice where we become available to have things in view. The direct experience of our life comes into view because our distracted mind that takes us into the past, the present, into fantasy, into commentary, into planning has quieted down. The mind is not jumping around so much. And so now we’ve come to a place where there’s an amazing view, and we don’t have to work at seeing that view. We just sit here quietly, keeping it in view, keeping it in sight, allowing what’s here to show itself to us.
To do that, we prepare ourselves by understanding at the beginning of the meditation that the goal of the meditation is to be present with what is. And if what is is a distracted mind thinking about the past and present, we enter the present moment experience of doing so. This is a mind thinking about the past. This now is a mind thinking about the future. Here, this is the place where we relax and hold reality in view.
So, assuming a meditation posture and gently closing the eyes. As part of this preparatory work, take some fuller breaths. Maybe when you breathe in more fully, pause before you exhale. It can be a momentary pause so that you choose to begin the exhale with a letting go and releasing, relaxing at the end of the exhale, so the exhale is longer. The fuller, little pause at the top of the inhale is a moment to bring you more fully into the present moment.
And then letting your breathing return to normal. As you exhale, relax your body. Tension in the body is kind of like exerting pressure on the thinking mind, so it thinks more. As the body relaxes, there’s less pressure to think. So, softening in the face, around the eyes. As you exhale, softening the shoulders, relaxing, giving in to the weight of the pull of gravity. As you exhale, softening the belly. And as you exhale, a broad, general relaxation of the whole body.
As you inhale, feel the thinking mind, the thinking muscle, pressure, or tightness. As you exhale, soften the thinking mind, quiet the mind.
And then, as you now center yourself on your breathing, breathing in an easy way. When you get to the top of the inhale, experiment with a momentary pause that brings you more into the present moment. Maybe it’s an occasion to let the thinking mind become quiet, and then exhale. Relaxing into the present experience of your body as you exhale.
The pause at the top of the inhale can be for just a half a moment, just enough to pull you into the present more fully, to quiet the thinking mind. And as you exhale, relax. At the end of the exhale, release in the body, so the exhale continues for a few moments more. And for a half a moment, pause before breathing in, for another moment of being present, being pulled into the present moment around the breathing, with the thinking mind becoming quiet, and then breathing in.
With these momentary pauses at the end of the inhale, perhaps the exhale comes into better view. Pause at the end of the inhale, exhale. The inhale comes into better view, the life-giving experience of breathing can be appreciated for what it is and what it does by keeping it in view.
Where there is breathing, there is life. To let the thinking mind become quieter so you can better feel, observe, experience the life-giving movements of the body as you breathe. As if breathing is a sponge for any tension and preoccupation and pressure to think, allowing everything to enter the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.
At the end of the inhale, the exhale comes into view. Gaze upon the exhale as you would seeing some natural object that’s a delight to gaze at. At the end of the exhale, let the inhale come into view, like watching maybe the gentle swells of waves moving by the ocean, washing up on the shore. Hold the breathing in view.
And after these minutes of meditation, what else comes into view? Without thinking about it, what else besides breathing do you now have a better view of? What do you see about yourself? What is revealed?
And for whatever that’s revealed, breathe with it. Let it too rest in the gentle rhythm of breathing, so you don’t do anything about it. Just see, just observe from the vantage point of breathing in and breathing out.
And then as we come to the end of this meditation, there’s a way of staying close to breathing that makes it easier then to gaze upon the world without getting caught in thoughts and judgments, agendas. To let the world and others come into view, where the eyes are not marshaled by desires and fears and judgments, where the eyes of perception gaze upon the world calmly and are available as a conduit for our goodwill, for kind regard of others.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Hello and welcome to our series on insight. Now, for the second week, I’m going to introduce to you five areas of insight that might be significant for people who do insight meditation. Understanding that there are different forms of insight and different objects of insight can help us put each into context. This way, we might better understand what the classic Buddhist idea of insight meditation is aiming towards. All these forms of insight are valuable, but we don’t want to be limited by any one of them. We want to be able to appreciate each one in its own way, but not think that this is what insight is by itself.
The word insight comes from the word vipassanā1, which means either to see clearly or to see distinctively—to see each thing that occurs in a distinctive kind of way, in its own right. What that means is we don’t use a discursive mind to start lumping everything together. Rather, we are letting each thing stand for itself so we know it well, and so that the thinking, conceptual mind is not so busy analyzing or conceptualizing about our experience, taking us away from it in a certain way.
In an evocative way, I like to think of a synonym for insight as being “revelation.” I like that as a synonym because revelation is not something that we are searching for necessarily, or that we’re responsible for. It’s something that just suddenly seems to appear—a meaningful understanding, a meaningful experience—but that we didn’t make happen. We didn’t feel like we constructed it or thought it out or analyzed something. It just appeared, somehow, in a way that was surprising and gratifying, meaningful.
Insight has that quality. We’re not trying to construct insight or figure something out with the figuring-out mind. We’re using the meditative mind to become quiet and still so that we’re not distracted, we’re not caught up in the world of concepts. Instead, we can kind of see things directly. Our life comes into view, which might be less grand than the idea of revelation. Our experience comes into sight. And rather than looking, we’re seeing. Looking is this active effort to zero in on something; seeing means a kind of relaxed, receptive awareness of the present moment here.
There are five different areas in which insights can occur, where some new understanding, some new clarity, some new meaningful way of experiencing our life can come into view.
The first is personal insight. That means we see or understand something new about ourselves that’s fairly unique to us. It has to do with understanding something about our history, what happened to us, how we were conditioned and shaped by things. We have a new insight into what happened to us in the past. We have insight into the kind of thoughts we have, the biases we have, the orientations we have, the beliefs we have that might be operating unbeknownst to us in the background. Sometimes it’s mystifying why certain things happen, but then at some point, we get quiet enough in meditation that the quiet mind is seen. We say, “Oh, that’s what I’m believing. That’s why everywhere I go, things look dangerous—because I’m always thinking thoughts of catastrophe. I’m always imagining that the worst will come. And no wonder every place I go seems dangerous, because I’m constantly projecting or seeing through this catastrophizing kind of mind.”
For me, I saw at one point in meditation that in the back of my mind, very, very quietly—but quietly doesn’t mean unimportant, it’s kind of like the lens through which everything else was seen—I had this strange belief that if any meditative experience was happening to me, it was not the real thing. I didn’t know what the real thing should be, but I had steeped doubt about myself and my own experience. I could never feel settled or at ease with whatever experience I had. There was a very subtle anxiety, a very subtle agitation, a very subtle kind of holding myself back from experiences in meditation because of this background thing. Other people might have something like that as well, but this is a personal insight to me. It made a huge difference to see that. It’s almost like as soon as I saw that, the veils were cleared, and now I could just be with my direct experience of meditation in a much simpler, more easy way, content to just let it be what it is, without having some idea that it’s not quite up to snuff.
There’s a whole slew of personal insights like that that become available when the mind starts getting quieter and quieter. Sometimes, if we’re very concerned about something, the mind is operating offline. And when we’re sitting quietly, we have enough space and the thinking mind gets quiet enough that some of the offline insights, revelations, and understandings will pop up.
Many years ago, when I was a new Zen student, I worked at a bakery. My job was to prepare the wet and the dry ingredients for the bakers that came in early in the morning to make bread and different things. I’d have these two bowls with all the wet stuff and all the dry stuff, the eggs, whatever was needed that was wet, and they would just mix it together in the morning when they came. So one day I was sitting meditating, and my mind was fairly quiet and peaceful and minding my own business, and suddenly there was a little explosion in my mind, and my mind said, “The salt.” Something inside of me, maybe because I’d been doing this work for some time and it was deeply in my body, something inside of me knew that I left the salt out of one of the bread preparations. So I had to call them as soon as I could. I called the bakery and told them, and they were very happy with the results because they put a sign up: “salt-free bread,” and it was snapped up. People bought it.
In this way, personal insights of different kinds can appear when we’re doing meditation. I don’t want to dismiss the value of these at all, but what I’d like to suggest is that for the purposes of mindfulness meditation, we don’t want to get too involved in these personal insights. If they’re impactful and you want to spend time to reflect and think about them, the recommendation is to do it afterwards. Go for a walk with a friend, journal about it, spend other time so that you don’t condition yourself to think that meditation is about thinking about things, that that’s where you’re going to have all these aha moments.
The reason for this… I like to present this analogy: If you go into a tall apartment building, a skyscraper, because you’ve been told that there’s a fantastic and very important view from high up, you get into the elevator and it takes you up to the second floor. The second floor opens and there’s an amazing party or show going on that just seems so made for you and all your interests. So you leave the elevator to go see this party, and you’re there for many weeks before you realize, “Hey, wait a minute, I was supposed to be going up in the elevator.”
So you get back in the elevator and you go up, and it opens at the fourth floor, and there is World War Three. You see the good cause, and who the good guys and bad guys are, and you feel responsible to join the good cause. You’re out there on the fourth floor fighting the war, and maybe then it takes you many months to realize, “Hey, wait a minute, I was in the elevator going up.”
And so then you go back in the elevator, and now you go up, and the elevator opens on the seventh floor. There’s this person that you can’t believe is standing there ready to greet you. It’s the person of your dreams. You’ve been dreaming about this person for years, and here is the person who is clearly going to be your life partner, clearly going to provide everything you need. You can’t believe your good luck, and so you get off the elevator. And it takes you some years before you realize, “Wait a minute, I’m going up the elevator.”
In this way, when meditation is working, it’s like you’re in the elevator. And when you have certain revelations, certain insights, certain thoughts, certain fantasies, certain things that you can’t believe how good they are or how important the right cause is, we get off the elevator in order to engage in those and plan and work and fight the good fight. But the idea when you’re doing meditation is: don’t get off the elevator. Trust the process. It’s working. If these different insights, these different self-understandings come up, different topics that are important for you come up, appreciate that, but don’t get off the elevator.
Sometimes when I meditate, things more than just salt will arise. Things will arise and I’ll say, “Oh, that’s actually important to address.” I’ll say, “Thank you,” and then I’ll say, “Later, not during meditation.” And if you’re really worried about forgetting something so important, you could have a pad next to you and just write it down so that you can put it aside. But the idea here, if you’re doing mindfulness meditation, is that the personal insights and self-understanding that come along are invaluable and very supportive, but the idea is don’t get sidetracked by those in meditation itself. Or at least don’t take them as being the only reason we’re doing meditation.
Some people, when they hear the idea of insight, will assume, “Oh, now I’ve gotten an insight. Now I know what insight is. I understand something very important about myself that’s going to change my whole life for the better. So thank you, insight that I got.” I also appreciate that very significant forms of personal insight can happen. But the idea is to remember there are actually many more important insights that are going to come, that are part of this phenomenal path to a deep liberation of the heart, a deep freedom from some of the deepest, challenging operating systems by which our whole psychophysical system is operating. To really drop down to see that in a deep, quiet way, we want to go into having insight into things which are more universal, things that are shared by all people and not just personal for myself. And that’ll be the topic now for the next four days.
So I appreciate very much this opportunity, and we’ll continue tomorrow.
Vipassanā: A Pali word that means “insight” into the true nature of reality. It is a form of meditation that involves seeing things as they really are. ↩