This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Conditions Arising and Disappearing; Insight (8) Conditionality. 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. For today’s guided meditation, as a way to support the teaching afterwards, I’d like to offer you an analogy or metaphor. Coming down here today, I biked down to IMC, and I was wondering about the weather. In one direction, to the north, the clouds were very dark and seemingly heavy, and there was a cool crispness in the air that indicated to me that rain was coming. I was looking at all this, trying to make sense of it, and I looked at my phone for the weather app. It said it was cloudy through the morning and then it was going to be sunny in the afternoon. I knew that in the last week or so, we’ve had a lot of strong, heavy fog coming in from the coast, and I thought maybe that today was just another, rather intense version of it. So I decided to bike down.
Some years ago, my wife and I were at about 10,000 feet elevation in the Sierra Mountains, a high up, beautiful place. We had lunch by this beautiful little lake and were just resting there. We could see even higher peaks a little bit to the west, and the sky was completely blue and free of clouds. Then we would watch, and directly above some of the highest peaks, a little cloud would form. It was one of the littlest clouds I could imagine there being in the sky; a little puff would appear high, high up in the sky, and then it would dissolve and not be there. Then another one would form and dissolve and disappear. It was kind of like magic; it was almost like watching something arise out of nothing and then disappear into nothing.
I knew that what was happening was that the coastal weather was blowing moist air towards the Sierras, and it would be pushed up as it closed on the Sierras. At the highest peaks, it would be pushed up the highest, where it was cool enough for the moisture to form a little cloud. Then probably the wind was blowing it further to the east where it was warmer, and the cloud would disappear again. So I kind of knew about the unseen world, but what was remarkable was watching the arising of the cloud and the disappearing. The vantage point of being at ease, peaceful, calm, watching the birth of a cloud, kind of understanding the simple atmospheric conditions that were operating, and being delighted and amazed by it.
The contrast of today, with all the clouds, I could probably construct an atmospheric explanation for what we have, but my mind was concerned about, “Is it okay to bike down to IMC? Do I need to—maybe it’s going to rain and my bicycle will get wet, and what will I do?” And, “How are these clouds going to rain later?” It was all this world of predicting and thinking and wondering what to do. That was a very different world than the world of just watching the cloud being born and disappearing.
Meditation is a little bit like going from the complicated world of many things and many conditions coming together—predicting and wondering and analyzing, figuring out, and conceptualizing about it—to a kind of quieting and stilling. To be able to observe a single thought arise and pass, a single sensation come and go. We start seeing the simplicity of the details of our experience. But the idea is we’re there resting, at ease, comfortable, peaceful, kind of like my wife and I were just resting on the edge of a lake looking up at the sky.
So this idea of meditation is to become still enough, quiet enough, in the present moment enough, and oriented not towards the big concepts of today, tomorrow, is it going to rain or not going to rain, but right now. In such a way that in the present moment, we see the birth of a thought, and because we’re not going to participate in it so much, it fades away. The birth of a feeling, the birth of a perception of a feeling. Some feelings, emotions, seem like they have a constant presence, but there’s the perception of it, a simple perception that arises and comes and goes. There’s the breath; the inhale is like that cloud that is born and then ends, and then gets born again.
Assuming a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes. To become established here and now in this body, taking some fuller breaths to feel your body. On the inhale, a full, broad, wide feeling of the body, and on the exhale, relaxing the body, settling in.
Then letting the breathing return to normal. For three breaths, relax your body as you exhale.
And then for three breaths on the exhale, quiet, soften the thinking mind.
Then to settle into the simplicity of breathing. Not the complex thoughts about breathing, predictions about breathing, or judgments about it, but at the most basic level of breathing, seeing, watching the beginning, the first appearance of inhaling. The inhale coming into fullness, then ending. And the exhale begins, goes through its full movement, and then fades away.
This very simplicity of watching the coming and going of inhale and exhale might highlight how much thinking there might be going on, how much complicated conceptualizing. Be amazed that the mind can do this. Be amazed at a mind that can be clouded, filled with clouds of thought, and then come back to that simple place in the natural world where you’re watching the natural unfolding of breathing in and breathing out. Amazed at the comings and goings of the perception of breathing.
There’s that complicated world of thoughts and ideas, past and future. And there’s the simple world of what appears in the present. The perceptions. Something is heard, something is seen, something is felt. Some new thing or old repeated thing is thought. The thought arises. How can you settle back, relax into the present moment to watch the comings and goings of perceptions and thoughts? By watching every new perception as it comes into existence, and then something else, and something else. And all this can be seen in the comings and goings of the sensations of breathing.
If you’re simple enough with your presence, just here for the comings and goings of perceptions, you might notice there’s a perception of something—a feeling, a hearing—and then there’s a thought about it. Or there’s a thought that arises, and that conditions some feeling in the body. That things arise in awareness based on conditions that come together for its appearing.
As we come to the end of the sitting, to appreciate that the desires we have can condition how we see the world. And if you desire kindness, compassion, if you desire to support the well-being and happiness of others, if that’s the wish, then we see the world differently. We see the world in such a way that we care for it more.
One possibility of meditation is to be more deeply connected to the heart’s wish to bring greater peace, safety, compassion, and love into the world for the benefit and well-being of others. May it be that our meditation practice is a condition for wishing for the welfare and happiness of everyone.
Wishing, may all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may these wishes condition the eyes by which I see the world. May I see the world with love and care.
Hello and welcome to the next talk in this series on insight. This week I’m talking about five different categories of insight that can be experienced, that fit into the Buddhist idea of insight. The first day was personal insight. Yesterday, I talked about seeing the difference between appearances and the recognition of the appearance—the naming of it, the remembering what it is—and how one has a little bit more to do with the senses, the sense doors, the sense contact with the world, and the other has to do with how we understand the sense contact, how we recognize it as something. If we have these two completely joined together as if they’re the same thing, then we can’t see either one clearly, and things become kind of solid and have a solid existence.
So if some food appears in front of us, someone offers us food, we see food. But we don’t just see food; we see an offering. But we see it through the lens of, “Oh, this is something I don’t like. This is one of my least preferred dishes.” And now the whole thing is tangled up together as one big knot: the food, the offering, not my favorite food, I don’t really want this, they should have known better, and what am I going to do here? It becomes this big knot.
But if we can see each step along the way—oh, there’s an offering, there’s food and a recognition of food, there’s an offering and a recognition of offering, there’s a rising of not preferring this, there’s that thought, and then there is that impulse to want to do something about it—and then we see that impulse clearly. Because we see it clearly, maybe we don’t do anything about it. We don’t grimace, we don’t show our distaste. We just gracefully receive the food. To be able to see the component parts of what’s happening—the experience and our relationship to it, that’s more of a mental world—gives us a lot more freedom to be wise and careful with what we do.
The next insight that can happen sequentially, that really is highlighted because of our ability to see the difference between a sensation and recognizing what it is, an experience and then the relationship we form to it, is to see conditionality. Insight into the conditions, how one thing arises and something else that’s a condition for something else arising.
I’ve sat minding my own business in meditation very quietly, and I don’t know why at the moment, but maybe some thought arises. I’m sure it arose because of previous conditions I didn’t see, but a thought arises, and maybe it’s a concern about something that was difficult with someone. And I can feel fear arise in my belly. That thought arose, and that was a condition for fear in my belly. There’s no mystery. If I didn’t see the thought arise, I just feel the fear in my belly and I just kind of keep ignoring it, then after a while, I don’t know what the original condition was that stimulated it.
It can go in the other direction. Sometimes there’s a sensation in the body. I had a little twinge in my back this morning, so that was a little bit of pain, and I’ve had back problems before. So I could see that based on that, there started to be thoughts about, “How do I be careful with this? Do I have to do some exercises? Do I have to kind of go through the day a little more carefully here?” And so there was a cause-and-effect relationship, or this arose, then that arose.
At some point, when the mind gets quite quiet and settled and the mindfulness gets clear in the present moment, that gives us a vantage point, a vista point to gaze upon the present moment and be able to see the simplicity of a condition and what arises from that condition, what that condition evokes for us. And things aren’t a mystery anymore. Things aren’t glued together, entangled, caught in knots. We see that nothing has some inherent existence, nothing has some permanence or weight just because it’s there in our mind, which it tends to have if everything is knotted together into a big ball of judgments and fear and concern and history and past and present.
But to see, “Oh, with this comes that, with this comes that,” then there’s more space to leave it alone, to not act on it, to not take it on as a truth or as something that has to be dealt with. We can just see more clearly. Some people, when they come to this stage, this form of insight—it’s not required, so we don’t go looking for it, it really comes from being settled—but some people have found it’s really eye-opening. For some people, they feel tremendously empowered. They feel like now they can imagine what freedom is like because they see the space between a stimulus and a response. They see that a stimulus is one thing, a response is another. A stimulus might not have to go into something else, because at some point, as we see these things arising one after the other, one condition leading to another, at some point we don’t participate, we don’t get involved, we don’t act on it, we don’t come under its influence.
So this morning when I felt my back pain, I wondered about it and spent some time thinking about it. The condition for those thoughts was the back pain. And then I thought, “You know, I don’t think that this level of pain, which was very slight, warrants much concern at this point. So I think I’ve done enough thinking about it. I think I’ll put it down.” If the pain is there again, I don’t know if I need to really get involved in those thoughts. I might want to think about it, but I have other things to think about, or I would rather just be present for what I’m doing at the moment. So I just leave it alone.
This is called insight into conditionality. To drop into it in a deep way, it’s kind of like entering into a different world, a world where nothing is really solid, nothing is absolute in our direct experience. We can even see the impersonality of certain things. A certain sensation arises, and with that comes a thought, and the thought wafts up like the cloud I saw being formed in the sky and then disappearing, or as a rainbow appears and then it disappears. There’s a sight of a bicycle that’s kind of shiny and new—that’s the sense experience, more or less—and then with the mind, there’s a thought, “Maybe I should get a new bike.” We see that the seeing of the bicycle conditions the arising of the thought. If I hadn’t seen that, then I might have just galloped off into thoughts about the new bike. But because I could see so clearly the new bike, and then the thought, “Should I get a new bike?” I could just leave it alone. My wisdom could operate and I could say, “You know, I don’t need a new bike. I have a perfectly good bike. Let’s not gallop off, let’s not get swept up in those thoughts.”
And so there’s a sense of freedom there. The thought, “Should I get a new bike?” is almost like not my thought. It’s almost like I didn’t plan to have that thought. It wasn’t my wish to have that thought. Why exactly that thought arose from the different conditions in my psychology, I don’t know. But I don’t have to take ownership of it. I don’t have to make me out of it. There was just seeing a bike, there was a thought about maybe I should get a new bike, and it just comes and it goes. It’s just like a cloud in the sky that comes and goes, a rainbow that appears and disappears. Things just come and things go, and then life is a lot simpler and easier.
As I said before, for some people this becomes a very clear and strong insight. They feel, “Wow.” Some people even start feeling that this is so clear and powerful that they think that now they have tremendous wisdom, they must even be enlightened, because of the clarity by which they see this. They begin seeing everything through the lens of conditionality: X arises, then Y arises. X occurs and Y occurs. But the condition for this to really go strong is that the mind is deeply settled and concentrated. This is why samadhi1 is so helpful and supportive. We drop into a deeper samadhi and stillness and capacity to really be here in the present moment, content and happy and full. The distracted mind is no longer operating, and now we’re just in this vantage point of ease and relaxation, just watching the experience coming and going. One of the insights then is this insight into conditionality.
This sets up the stage for the next insight, the insight into what’s called comprehension, which involves understanding, and that’ll be for tomorrow.
I also feel that this entry into insight is seemingly more intellectual, more conceptual. And some people associate meditation so strongly with the experience of getting calm and settled, maybe samadhi that’s kind of exciting, but this now seems too heady and all that. But remember that the purpose of samadhi is to be able to see in a new way, and these are the new ways that people see. To really do well, it’s not intellectual, it’s not in the head. It’s actually the opposite. It’s to be really centered here, and these become revelations. This is what gets revealed to us, not something we have to think about or figure out or even remember.
The insight into conditionality is phenomenally important in the teachings of Buddhism, in all forms of Buddhism. And for our practice, it becomes an insight that’s something we see clearly. It’s not a philosophy. So thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of deep meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. The original transcript used the term “samadei,” which has been corrected. ↩