This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Calm Recognition; Insight (7) Appearances and Recognition. 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.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this meditation.
To begin straight off, assume a meditation posture and gently close the eyes. Become aware of what’s happening with you just right off, like this now. Recognize how it is in your body. Recognize how it is in your mind. And in a very general way, recognize how it is in your heart. Take a few moments also to recognize how your breathing is at this time.
All these acts of recognition are activities of the mind, recognizing things that maybe you would not have noticed unless you were directed to do so. Sometimes the tensions in our body, how our body is, is not noticed because we’re not paying attention. We can feel what’s happening in our body, and we can also do a recognition of it. We can be so busy thinking we don’t recognize how we are in our mind.
Recognition is an activity of the mind in and of itself. It’s distinct from what it recognizes. What it recognizes can be there whether it’s recognized or not. This distinction between recognition and what’s recognized is a distinction where peace, calm, and equanimity can be established.
Sometimes the act of recognition comes along with a lot of associated activities: judgments, preferences, opinions, attitudes. And sometimes the act of recognition is very simple, ordinary, and carries no extra complicating factors. Just simply recognizing calmly, peacefully. It’s the calm recognition that begins to come into play as we meditate.
So now, calmly take some fuller breaths and relax on the exhale, relaxing your body. If you’re open to relaxing, whatever your body relaxes, can you recognize calmly what relaxes?
Letting your breathing return to normal, take a few moments to calmly know the experience of breathing, an ordinary breath.
Calmly know the quality of your mind, your thinking mind. How is it right now? And as you exhale, soften that thinking mind, recognizing what it feels like to relax.
And then returning to the breathing, and calmly recognizing breathing in and breathing out. In any way in which the breathing, the muscles around the breathing can relax and soften.
Breathing in, breathing out.
And then settling in to focus on breathing in and breathing out. With the lightest touch, very softly, let the mind’s ability to recognize breathing in, breathing out, the sensations of breathing—let that support an entry into the world of breathing.
There are simple acts of recognition that the mind is doing all the time. Let them be simple, calm. Sometimes they come with thoughts, words. Sometimes they feel more wordless. And with a light touch, without trying too hard, appreciate the almost spontaneous acts of recognition—calm, peaceful knowing that occurs with present moment experience, with the sensations that come into play.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, imagine what it might be like to see someone, maybe in a distance, and to recognize them in a clean, simple way, without agenda, without fear or desires, without judgments. Allowing yourself to have a very calm, clear, simple recognition that creates space, room for a wellspring of goodwill to arise.
Clear, simple, calm recognition that can function as a gateway for goodwill.
And may it be that we trust a calm mind, a clear mind that sees the world without our judgments, biases, agendas, but sees it simply so we can wish the world well.
May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. May all beings be happy. And may all beings see each other through a simple, clear recognition that is the gateway for mutual respect and care. May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello, welcome to this series on insight, the meaning of insight, and how it’s practiced in the insight meditation practice. In some ways, insight is less interesting than samadhi1. It doesn’t have the excitement, the thrill, the great promise of wonderful feelings of joy, happiness, and peace. And there is a way in which it has more of a cognitive role that has to do with a clear recognition of something. For some people, that’s kind of boring, or why would that be interesting? But in this insight meditation understanding, a clear seeing, a clear insight, allows something very deep inside to release. It can allow a lot of letting go, and along that way, the deepest forms of release, the deepest forms of freedom, are touched with very profound insight, which we’ll get to as we move along here.
But that process, the path of insight, is a journey in a sense. The different kinds of insight that a person can have can be put together as a journey, as a progression. Sometimes people follow that progression, but sometimes it’s in a different order.
Yesterday, I mentioned that one of the important of the five forms of insight is personal insight: to understand something unique about yourself that helps free something, helps you be wiser, helps you to resolve certain kinds of issues and not be in conflict with yourself or the world, or settle something in a deep way. These personal insights are phenomenally helpful, and some people have a profound need to settle aspects of their personal life so that they can come to meditation to settle further. In a sense, this journey begins by enough self-understanding to be able to engage in a process of meditation that’s not involved with the stories of our life, not involved with our history and biography and who did what to whom and things like that. Those are important, but at some point, you want to settle them enough so you can really start being in the present moment.
What we’re beginning to move into in insight meditation is to see something which is universally true for everyone. And that doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant; it means that actually, we’re getting into the underlying foundation of what builds our personal world and rectifying it, cleaning it up, finding how to find freedom in it.
The first of these universal insights has to do with seeing the difference between the role of the mind and the role of sensations; to see that there are sensations that we have, and then there’s the mind’s recognition of it, and those are two different things. The tradition calls this “name and appearances,” nāma-rūpa2. The appearances here, you can primarily understand as being the direct experience we’re having in the present moment, which comes through the sense doors. So the sense experience is happening, and then there’s the recognition of what that is. And those are two distinct activities.
I’m very fond of the intimacy between sensations and sensing. If I put my hands together like this, I feel the warmth, the pressure, the smoothness, the texture of the palms of my hands touching. And I also feel the play of sensations as attention moves around the different parts of the palm to feel different things at different times. I feel a teeny bit of moisture, ever so slight, and a teeny bit of stickiness as I move my hands a little bit. All those sensations occur in the very location of sensing. Sensing and sensations arise together; they almost can’t be separated. So they’re really, in a sense, part of the physical, bodily experience.
The recognition of what’s happening there, the knowing of what it is, is an aspect of the mind. To know that my hand is touching my other hand—that’s an act of recognition. I’ve done this with someone else’s hand and I’ve known that it’s their hand. It’s such an innocent, ordinary, non-event almost, to do that kind of recognition, but that level of recognition is going on all the time.
Now I feel a slight tiredness, tension, a little ache ever so slightly in my muscles, my arm, for holding my hand up like this. And I can know that ache, and know enough of it to wonder, “Now, should I rest my hand? Have I had enough of holding my hand up?” The recognition then allows for consideration, allows for wisdom to operate. But it’s two different things. It’s possible to have sense contact without the recognition. Sometimes that’s confusing, or sometimes the recognition is inaccurate. We see something and the mind projects something onto it, and we think we’re seeing something, but it’s not. I’ve seen people from the back who have the same hairstyle, the same height, the same kind of clothes, and assumed I was seeing my friend. And so I wasn’t seeing accurately; the recognition factor was kind of jumping ahead before I had all the information. As I’ve often said, I’ve seen a stick on the ground in the hikes I do in the hills here and for a moment will think it’s a snake.
So sometimes the recognition is not accurate, but it’s a distinct mental activity. As the mind gets calmer and quieter in meditation, at some point the insight is to see into this, that these are two different events. There’s the sensation, and there’s a knowing of what it is. Sometimes with sounds, I don’t know what it is; there’s a recognition of not knowing. And then at some point, I know, and there’s recognition, “Oh, that’s what it is.” Maybe recognizing a bird, and I don’t know it at first, and then I recognize, “Oh, that’s a woodpecker,” or “That’s a dove.” This act of recognition is going on all the time, and to see it as two different events is, to adapt a traditional language, to have clear seeing. It’s a clarification of our view, a clarification of how we see that these are two different things.
Why is this important? Because it sets the foundation for the deeper insights. If our recognition and the sensation are entangled or caught up with each other, then things get confused. The act of recognition is a kind of a concept, and concepts have a kind of enduring value. A concept can be unchanging. We have a concept of a circle, and that never changes. A circle is a circle; the circle never becomes a square. So if I see the stick on the ground as a snake, the concept of “snake” is more or less a concept that doesn’t go away. And unless I take a second look at the stick, I could run off down the trail and never change my view of what I saw. I would think it’s a snake. But if I see that the seeing and the recognition are two different things, then I’m more likely to see more clearly that these are two different events, and in fact, it’s a stick.
If I’m walking down the street and I see someone who looks like my friend, but I don’t really see the person, and I recognize the seeing and I recognize the thought “friend,” and I see there are two different events, then I can question, “Is it really my friend?” But if I see them as the same, as if inseparable—the seeing and the recognition—then I might not question whether I’m seeing accurately. I might run up to the person and give them a hug, and the person is not my friend, and they’re totally surprised.
There’s something about the entanglement of the way that we recognize something with the sensory experience we have that gets us in trouble. We sometimes live with the recognition, the activity, the judgments, all the desires, the fears, all the things that come along with recognition, piled on right away as if that’s the way it is. We have judgments about people. So if we see someone, and the seeing of them, the recognizing of them as someone who is an angry person, not a nice person for example, it’s almost as if seeing and “not a nice person” are one and the same thing. As we begin seeing them as two different things, then we can see more clearly, and we see each event as its own thing. Now we can begin to have wisdom. Wisdom can operate much better in seeing that distinction.
In the course of insight practice, this difference is invaluable. And it isn’t that we have to work hard to make ourselves see this way. As the mind gets quieter, as the mindfulness gets clearer, then at some point this becomes easy to see. At some point we see, “Oh, there was a sound,” and then the recognition of the sound, of hearing, and the recognition “car”—and those are two different events.
Sometimes it’s quite lovely to not have the recognition really operating, and the mind is just very relaxed. And sometimes it’s invaluable to have the recognition. Insight practice works partly by the support of recognizing the present moment. The recognition keeps us here. “Stay here. Don’t wander off. Recognize what’s happening.” As we do this, we start recognizing better. We wander off, and then we have maybe more personal insight of what’s driving that. Don’t get lost in the personal insight. They’re useful, but for the purpose of meditation, they’re useful for helping us not get caught in that world. Stay present. Stay here. Let the recognition keep you in the present.
And over time, as you calm and relax and soften, you’ll start seeing the difference between recognition and appearances, sense experience of all kinds and then knowing the recognition of what that is. Being able to see that difference is invaluable, and we’ll continue with this tomorrow because this sets the stage for the further kinds of insight that are important for insight meditation.
So thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of deep meditative concentration or absorption. ↩
Nāma-rūpa: A Pali term that translates to “name and form.” It refers to the combination of mental phenomena (nāma: feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention) and physical phenomena (rūpa: the body and external matter). In this context, it’s used to distinguish between the raw sensory experience (“form” or “appearance”) and the mind’s act of recognizing and labeling it (“name”). ↩