This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: River of Change; Insight (10) Samadhi of Three Characteristics. 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.
This meditation practice, leading to deep insight, has more to do with what we don’t do than what we do. There are many ways in which we are so actively involved in our minds and our thoughts that it interferes with the natural capacity for insight. One of the core principles of Buddhism is that we have a profound natural capacity, profound natural abilities, that we’re learning to get out of the way of.
The analogy would be if you were going to canoe comfortably down a comfortable, safe, nice, slow, narrow river—maybe a stream or a creek. There are a few things you have to do. You have to untie the canoe from the dock, and you have to release your hand from holding on to the dock. Then you have to somehow stay in the middle. You don’t want to reach out to the side and hold on to a branch coming down. If you see a sandbar up ahead, you want to avoid getting stuck on it. So there are a few things we have to do, but there’s a natural capacity, if we stay in the middle of the river, to float and be carried on.
In the same way, this meditation practice and the world of insight are what opens up when we let go of the dock, we untie the rope, and we allow ourselves to flow in the river. The way that we grab onto branches and get caught on sandbars is by thinking a lot. Thinking and living in concepts, living in attitudes, are what solidifies or reifies the world, making the world solid and the self solid, rather than the self being fluid, moving, and constantly shifting and changing in a free, liberated way. Through the conceptual world and through our attachments, our fears, our resistances, and our wantings, we kind of solidify, and it’s hard to see the change. We form that big tangle, that big knot, where experiences, sensations, and direct contact with the world are entangled with our concepts of it, entangled with ideas of self, entangled with our attitudes, our desires, and our aversions. So things get all globed together, and it seems like there’s something solid here and permanent, and this is the way it’s going to be forever.
But we let go. We untie the rope from the dock. We learn to trust deeply. It’s what we don’t do; it’s a lot of letting go, not because we’re letting go into nothing, but because we’re letting go into this natural capacity to flow and to move in a really good direction. The metaphor of flowing in the river is used in Buddhism to go from small little streamlets and creeks that flow into bigger lakes, into bigger rivers, and finally flow into the big ocean. So this idea that the flow of impermanence, the flow of the changing nature and the river of change, is not itself a static thing; it moves on to better and better. But the cost, in a sense, of doing this is to let go—to untie from the dock of concepts and ideas of past and present, and also to untie ourselves from or let go of holding on to the branches of self, the branches of ideas and philosophies of self that we might be carrying along.
So it’s a lot about not doing. And when we don’t do, we’ll feel and see that the river is flowing, and we’ll flow with it. So deep insight comes when we’re no longer holding on to something.
To assume a meditation posture—if you get into a canoe, you kind of have to be in a good posture of balance, in the middle, upright. You can’t be leaning from one side to the other. You can’t sunbathe laying down in the canoe if you want to stay flowing in the river and tracking what’s going on.
So, take a good posture and close your eyes. Without doing anything else, as you’re sitting in your meditation posture, can you feel the hum of sensations, the vibration of life? Can you sense or observe the way that so much is changing and shifting in you as you just sit here, doing nothing, being still?
Even if you’re preoccupied with thoughts, the thoughts, the images, the words are coming and going and shifting. Rather than looking at the content of thoughts now, notice how the details of thinking belong to a world of change—changing words, changing sentences, changing images.
And whatever degree of change you can experience here now, in the middle of it all, from deep within, begin a comfortable, fuller inhale and a longer, easeful exhale. With whatever sense of ease you can have, easefully take just a bigger, fuller breath that keeps the ease, and a long, longer, slower exhale that settles you into an inner ease.
Then, letting your breathing return to normal. Right there in the breathing, the body’s experience of breathing, you can observe change, shifting. You might not see the changing sensations of breathing if you hold your breath, but if you allow the natural rhythm of breathing, there’ll be a natural shifting and changing, a flowing river of physical sensations associated with breathing.
If you lose touch with that because you’re thinking a lot, then those thoughts are going to interfere with seeing change. Those thoughts put you in a world of holding on to a branch, still being tied to the dock. Relax the thinking mind and settle yourself into the canoe of your body, where awareness is settled in your body, riding the river of change.
All things are changing unless we get caught up in thoughts or we get caught in ideas and feelings of self across the river of change.
When awareness is pulled into the world of thinking, the world of clinging, holding on, then the awareness cannot rest in the river of change, the changing sensations, the changing energies of the present moment. Let go and let go so you can rest, float in the river of change.
And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, perhaps relaxing a few moments into whatever is shifting and changing in your direct experience. Not chasing it or looking for it, but allowing it to move through you, allowing it to show itself to you. We’re opening and relaxing and receiving change.
I can highlight how we get out of the river; we get stuck in the river when we get caught in thoughts. A lot of preoccupation with thoughts clearly separates us from a deeper intimacy with the natural process of Dharma unfolding, the river carrying us along as it grows and flows and opens up to greater and greater happiness and peace.
May we appreciate how letting go of preoccupations and attachments gives room for a deeper, healthy process to unfold, deeper peace and happiness. And may we understand that this works interpersonally too, that we can bring kind and respectful attention to others where they don’t have to react to how we are, don’t have to cling or resist or want. May it be that our way of being with others helps them to relax, helps their natural capacity for peace have a chance to unfold.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this series on insight, the kind of insight that we emphasize in insight meditation. This is the end of this week’s topic that covers the five different areas that we can say involve insight, that we might define or describe as having insight into something. The way that it unfolds, as has been discussed this week, is as a process. There’s an unfolding here, just like samādhi1 is an unfolding. This is one of the reasons to give the whole series on samādhi before insight: so that we can understand and appreciate better how the unfolding and deepening of insight is a form of samādhi itself. Some of the qualities and characteristics of samādhi come into play as we go along here.
The first insight from Monday, personal insight, is very valuable to have. But from the point of view of the samādhi of insight, it’s about settling personal issues enough that we can give ourselves over to the process of meditation. We don’t have to be concerned about fixing something or healing anything in ourselves because now we can settle enough in ourselves that we can go into this process.
As we go deeper, part of this is to get quiet enough and calm enough that we can see the distinction between appearances and the recognition of them, the mental knowing of them. The simple way of saying it is the distinction between the sense experience we have, which belongs to direct experience, and the names we have for it—the concepts, the recognition. We tease those apart for the purpose of being able to see each thing even more clearly, so we don’t have everything lumped together in one big, general, conceptual way.
That then allows us to see conditionality, and that’s invaluable because then we see that it makes a difference how we are, that we do condition ourselves. If we get caught up in thoughts and hostility or greed, that has an effect on us that is not so beneficial. If we let go and are settled and open up more fully in a kind, supportive way, that has a beneficial effect on us. So conditionality helps us to see that how we engage is beneficial. A lot of it has to do with appreciating how powerful and meaningful it is to not be caught, not be tight around or resisting or having attitudes of aversion or judgments or despair or all kinds of things that are added on top of our experience.
And then as we move on further, we start seeing a much greater appreciation of how things are always changing and how the idea of self doesn’t have to be so applied or projected onto all our experiences, such that they are all “my” experience or all have some reference back to “me.” So there’s a beginning to an understanding of how changeable things are, how things flow and are impermanent and inconstant, and how it’s possible to be in that world without a lot of self-preoccupation, self-consciousness. Self doesn’t have to be defining everything in its own terms, and to do so is unsatisfactory and brings more suffering.
As we move along here with insight, at some point we enter into the approach stage that we have with samādhi approaching into jhāna2. As we keep going, there’s a feeling of an onward-leading movement. This is good, this is the right place to be. And some of the jhanic factors come into play; there starts to be some joy and happiness in the mindfulness practice itself. The clear seeing, being present for experience in this more direct way, is so direct and so immediate, it’s much more of an observation, a seeing, a sensing, a receiving than it sometimes is when people practice mindfulness where the mindfulness involves a higher-order level of recognition. Now, the recognition or the knowing is really simple, really immediate, and not a wider understanding that this applies to all of life.
We start entering into a very direct, experiential sensing, feeling, knowing, and observing of how all the building blocks of all the concepts, the building blocks of sensations that we have, are all coming and going. They’re inconstant; they’re constantly a flow of change, of arising and passing. The classic language is that we enter into the stage of things just arising and passing. In this approach stage, it enters into something comparable to the first jhāna in that the mind is not really going to wander off anymore. It’s not a lot of work to be present, to keep coming back. Now we’re in the flow of the samādhi; we’re in it. You might wander off a little bit, but you’re coming back easily. It’s like this massage of going away and coming back and being here.
Rather than being absorbed in a samādhi object like joy, there might be joy, there might be happiness, there might be many of the factors that happen in samādhi, but it’s very clear that we’re observing, that we’re present for the shifting and changing nature of reality, of our direct experience of it. So now we’re entering into the world of what is classically called the three characteristics. This is the big emphasis, the insight meditation for Vipassanā3 with a capital ‘I’. This insight is a deep seeing, a deep experiencing, a deep direct sensing of the arising and passing of sensations, the arising and passing of thoughts, the arising and passing of everything. We start to just see it comes and goes, comes and goes.
So that’s the characteristic of all experience being impermanent. The second is that in all this direct, immediate experience of sensations, we cannot find a self. Sometimes it’s called the characteristic of not-self. And the third is dukkha4, that there’s some profound form of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness, in any movement of the mind to hold on, to resist, to want anything to do with all these sensations that are moving through. So there’s a higher sensitivity.
Now, in modern Theravada5, it’s called the three characteristics. In the time of the Buddha, these were called the three perceptions or the three recognitions, saññā6. And that makes a huge difference, because when it started being called “characteristics,” there was a tendency to make it into a kind of Buddhist metaphysics or philosophy—that now we’re seeing the true characteristics of everything in the universe. “All things in the universe are impermanent and inconstant, everything is not-self, everything is suffering.” That kind of universalization of these three characteristics is not useful for deepening the practice and maybe not even going in the direction the Buddha really wanted us to go.
If we come back and understand them as the three perceptions, the three recognitions, the focus is not on the nature of what’s out there, but rather the nature of how we perceive it. So if I hold this bell and I tell you, “Wow, this bell is impermanent and inconstant, it’s constantly shifting and changing and coming and going. This bell is not-self. This bell is suffering,” you’d probably think I was a little crazy. But what’s inconstant is my perception of the bell. It turns out that yes, the bell has a certain constancy, but the mental activity of perceiving, of recognizing the bell, is a shifting and changing flow.
The idea that “this is my bell” is a mental concept as well; that’s a mental perception and recognition. Seeing that idea of “this is my bell” come and go, seeing it arise out of conditions—there’s no self that makes that thought. The thought that “this is my bell” just arises. So there’s no self in that thought, exactly, and there’s no self that I’m projecting now onto the bell. And then there’s the suffering when I say, “It’s my bell, I want this bell, I should have it.” We perceive the suffering in relationship to it.
So there are these three very profound ways of perceiving or recognizing the movements of the mind that take things as being permanent or constant, that take things as “me, myself, and mine,” that take things as a source of happiness if I just hold on and cling to it. Rather than that, in this kind of samādhi state, as you go deeper into this almost jhanic state, we start perceiving in a deep, deep way. We observe in a deep way. It’s so satisfying because we’re in this nice, onward-leading state. We see the flow of change, the river of change. We see that all perception, all sensing, all acts of knowing—all of those are shifting and changing and moving and coming and going, whether or not there’s a bell out here which has some constancy. That is beside the point. The world of freedom belongs to this world of not making this into a permanent thing, not taking the perception of the mind and making this “mine,” not suffering because I want to cling to it.
The mind’s activities are inconstant in a certain kind of way. The mind’s individual activities are not-self; there’s no self in those activities. And it’s suffering to cling; you can see the suffering of how we relate to things if we look deeply into the mind.
To really have this fifth insight as deep insight itself, it is a kind of deep samādhi where we’ve cleared the veils of perception so that we can really see deeply into the mind and see what the mind does: it projects permanence, projects self, and in a certain way, creates suffering. In the deep samādhi, we start seeing the opposite. We are sensing the inconstant nature of perception or recognition, the not-self nature of perception. We see that there’s suffering in how we relate to it and how we can let go. This letting go, this not participating in this deep way, allows for a deeper and deeper entering into a deeper samādhi. My teacher in Burma sometimes called this Vipassanā-jhāna.
In understanding and appreciating there’s samādhi here, you might understand that the thinking mind has gotten really quiet, and the filters of concepts by which we see have dropped away.
So these are the five areas in which insight comes into play as we do this mindfulness practice. For the next two weeks, I’ll be away on retreat, and I’ll pick this up again when I come back, I think on the 16th of June. We’ll do a week on each of these three perceptions, called the three characteristics in the modern world, and appreciate the deepening process that happens with each of these three insights.
So thank you very much, and I look forward to coming back in a couple of weeks.
Samādhi: A Pali word for concentration; a state of deep, meditative absorption. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption, characterized by profound stillness and concentration. ↩
Vipassanā: Insight into the true nature of reality, specifically the three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anattā). ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” ↩
Theravada: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. ↩
Saññā: A Pali word for “perception” or “recognition.” The original transcript said “sya,” which has been corrected to “saññā” based on context. ↩