This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Insight Into Clinging; Insight (12) Change Highlights Clinging. 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.
Good morning, good day, everyone, and welcome to our insight meditation sitting. This is the period of time where the teachings are about insight—the insight of insight meditation. One of the primary ones is a deep insight into the changing nature of our experience, into inconstancy; how things change, how they arise and disappear. This is a universal human source for wisdom and deep understanding of life, and the Buddhist tradition places particular emphasis on it. It has tremendous value for the purpose of liberation, of becoming free.
One of the reasons for that is that any way in which we interrupt the experience of change—any way in which we freeze our experience, hold on to it, or reify it, solidify it with how we think and perceive—we add tension to our life. At first, that might just be the tension of trying to hold the river back. Trying to get into the river and stop the water from flowing is not going to be easy; it’s going to be frustrating. It might just be stressful; it might end up as a major source of suffering to be out of harmony, out of attunement with the changing nature of moment-to-moment experience.
Sometimes I think of it as wind drag. We have big hands out the window of a car, or a big load on the back of a pickup truck, and the wind is slowing the car down. Or it’s like an anchor, some heavy object hanging over the back of a rowboat that makes it much harder to row. To pull in the wind drag, to pull up the anchors, to untie the boat so we can flow with the river.
It’s possible to know, feel, and recognize that we have stepped out of the river of change, and then put ourselves back. It’s as simple as returning to the breathing. Breathing itself represents and is—not only represents but can be—kept at the center of this river of change.
So, assume a meditation posture. The paradox, a little bit, is that the stiller we are with our bodies, and especially with our minds and our inner life, the more we are attuned to, feel, and experience change. The more we’re caught in our thoughts, the busier the mind is, the more the mind tends to manufacture or interpret that things are a particular way, that they don’t change. They’ll always be this way, or they’ll never be different.
So, sit quietly in a meditation posture that allows the body to be still and quiet, in a way that feels nurturing and satisfying. Gently close the eyes.
With the eyes closed, scan through your body to see if there are some places where you can soften and relax: tensions of the shoulders, holdings of the belly, tightness in the face around the lips, the jaw, around the eyes.
Tension is one of those ways in which we all too easily impute permanence or constancy. Tension all too easily causes us to be out of touch with the changing nature of experience.
Within this posture that you’re meditating in, if your body is relatively still, then chances are the biggest movement in your body is the movement of breathing. The movement of breathing has within it change. The biggest is the change between breathing in to breathing out, between breathing out and breathing in. The closest place to feel the change is in the sensations of breathing.
You might be aware of two or three different sensations in the course of breathing in—sensations in your belly, your chest, your nostrils. Some of the sensations change in intensity during the brief moments that they’re present. The sensations you’re experiencing are also being sensed. There’s a certain physical sensitivity that allows us to feel sensations, that allows us to recognize and know the experience in the body of breathing.
As you exhale, soften and relax the thinking mind, settling your awareness into the sensations of breathing. Have gentle, quiet, slow thoughts, thinking about the experience of breathing—not in the abstract, but gentle thoughts about the direct experience, almost like gentle instructions: “Stay there.” “What is this experience of breathing?” “Let me feel it more carefully.” Or it might be very quiet words of “in” as you breathe in, “out” as you breathe out. It might almost be a nonverbal thinking that keeps you closely connected to the sensations of breathing in and breathing out.
As you feel the sensations of breathing, see if you can ride along with how they shift and change, almost like there’s a river of change right there in your body as you breathe. The thinking mind is quiet, letting go of any thoughts except those which allow you to stay intimate and connected to the river of sensations, connected to your breathing.
When your mind wanders off in thought, notice how it takes you away from the sensations of change, out of the river. Notice how the thinking contributes to a world of ideas, memories, and plans that is a kind of holding on, a kind of solidifying in thought that removes us from the changing sensations, the changing nature of the present moment.
Notice whatever thoughts and reactions take you out of the river of change, pull you away from the changing nature of sensations and direct experience. Maybe some thoughts even feel like they solidify around ideas and beliefs, plans and memories, with a feeling like, “This is how it is.”
Notice the difference between staying close to the immediacy of change, moment after moment in your body, versus losing that intimacy to change by being caught up in thoughts. Notice the ways in which you tighten up, grasp, hold tight, and contract around certain thoughts, ideas, and feelings that take you away from the flow of changing sensations—the river of change that’s here and now in direct experience.
As we come to the end of the sitting, as you exhale, soften the thinking mind. As you exhale, let the thinking mind open wide so the thoughts can empty out of the mind, so thoughts can float away in favor of an openness and a spaciousness of a quiet mind.
As you exhale, set your heart at ease, lifting the weight, the pressure, the contractions around your heart center, so that the heart center can be softer and calmer.
Soften the belly, so the belly can be settling and offer stability, a foundation for being here and now. And in that way, gaze upon the world kindly. To sit here softly, gently, and to consider the world around you, the people in your life, and what it’s like to not get caught in thoughts, judgments, interpretations, and desires, but to be open to them in a gentle, soft, flowing way, wishing them well. So we see them through the lens of appreciation, care, and kindness, instead of the ways in which we’ve locked into interpretations, desires, and ideas about others.
May we, through this practice, free people from our projections, our interpretations, our needs, our desires. May we, through this practice, offer people freedom from us. May we offer them wishes of well-being, happiness, safety, and peace.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free—at least free from our attachments, our clingings, our ways of holding on to how things should be. May we contribute to peace in this world.
Thank you.
So hello and welcome to this continuing series on the insights of insight meditation. The topic currently is the first insight, insight into Anicca1. Anicca is the Pali2 word often translated as “impermanence,” but in fact, what it means is “not constant,” so “inconstancy.” The difference between those two English words is that impermanence is often interpreted as meaning that things will end, that things are not permanent because at some point they’ll stop being there. Inconstancy, in contrast, means that things are constantly changing. They come and they go. Days are not going to stop, but individual days stop, and then the day comes back. Daytime comes and goes, meals come and go, breathing comes and go, sleep comes and goes. All kinds of things in our life come and go and come and go. The heart beats ongoingly, but each beat is an inconstant sensation, an inconstant event. A beat, and it stops. A beat, and it stops.
It turns out that if we don’t impute permanence, if we don’t get caught up in our thoughts and ideas and have ideas like, “This is how it’s always going to be,” or “This is how it is,” if we don’t live in that world of concepts and ideas, it’s much easier to experience how the present moment is always changing, always inconstant. This fascinating difference between the world of conception—the world of ideas, the world of plans, the world of stories—versus the world of direct experience is the difference between flowing down a river in a canoe or a kayak versus sitting on the side of the shore and fantasizing about what a good kayaker I am. “I’m the best kayaker, I’m a great kayaker, I’ll always be a good kayaker,” or “I’m a terrible kayaker,” where we lock into an idea that this is how things are. Someone who’s a good kayaker will have a day they’re not. Someone who’s a terrible kayaker can learn a skill and become better. We don’t have to have a fixed idea of how things are.
I’ve had fixed ideas of a friend. Maybe I felt hurt by someone who was angry and was holding on to that anger, seeing them through the lens of what happened a week ago, not realizing that they had changed. Something dramatic, maybe very difficult, had happened in their life in the intervening days, and I was still carrying my anger: “This is how this person is.” Then I found out that they had a terrible loss, and as soon as I heard that, the view I had before fell away, and I was ready to see them now as they actually are. I’ve seen people through the lens of my desires, where that desire was holding a fixed idea of who that person was, and then had those desires kind of soften, relax, or disappear as a lens of perception, and discovered that people are very different than the thought I had or the kind of desires or wishes I had for them.
So over and over and over again, we can lock into, “This is how things are.” This is our interpretation that gives a kind of permanence, a kind of constancy, a kind of solidity to something that’s inherently not solid. It’s always shifting and changing. Our friends are always different from moment to moment, minute to minute, day to day. Strangers are often different than how we project ideas onto them—bias, prejudice, all kinds of things that we do are ways in which we solidify around ideas. People spend a lot of time ruminating, thinking about themselves over and over again, and constantly tend to build up and create fixed ideas of themselves that are often debilitating, that can cause depression or anxiety or shame or all kinds of things. This idea of fixating on ideas of self causes a lot of suffering.
What we’re learning to do in mindfulness practice is to recognize the difference between being locked into ideas that give a sense of constancy, even permanence—the idea that “I’ll always be this way”—versus how things are in direct experience, at a level that’s deeper or more immediate than the ideas and the attachments we have. Generally, the attachments and clingings we have when we grasp onto something lend a sense of permanence, at least to the idea that we’re grasping onto. “This is what I need, this is how it is, this is what’s going on.” In doing that, we’ve stepped out of the direct, flowing experience in the present moment of things always changing.
As we sit in mindfulness meditation and settle in, and especially as we develop samadhi3—stability and centeredness—and really find ourselves able to rest here in the present moment in direct experience (not an easy thing to do, that’s why samadhi is really helpful to develop that capacity), part of the value of that is to then be able to rest in the changing river of sensations, experience, thoughts, feelings, how it’s all shifting and changing much faster than our interpretations and our ideas of things allow or admit or see. This is a very important insight because it begins to show us the cost of attachment. It begins to show us how some of our suffering is born from some kind of attitude, some kind of orientation towards permanence: “This is how things are, this is how things need to be.” Some kind of permanence around holding on to an idea, holding on to a memory, holding on to a plan or dream about the future. We’re locked into something. Even if it’s a fantasy we’re locked into—a fantasy that we’re kayaking or doing something wonderful—there’s something about being locked in that begins to create a kind of sense of permanence in the knowing, in the knower, in the one who is engaged.
Any kind of clinging, any kind of attachment, is a form of stress that gives us the wrong impression about what this world and life is about. It gives us a semblance of a fixed sense of self, a fixed idea of desires, a fixed idea that tension or pressure or stress is something that’s always built into reality, into society, that we have to just go along with. Many people don’t see how attached they are, how much they’re clinging, how much they’ve tightened up around ideas, beliefs, stories about themselves, interpretations, and judgments.
The vantage point that seeing the inconstant nature of direct experience gives is that it highlights how we get caught. It highlights how we’re attached. And it almost doesn’t matter what we’re attached to; we start seeing the cost. We see the tension, we see the stress of holding on that’s a consequence of no longer being in the flow, no longer being in that river of change where things are always flowing and moving.
Part of the insight of insight meditation is the insight into how we suffer, how we cling, how we’ve lost touch with something very immediate and nice here, which we don’t necessarily think of as nice because the allure of thoughts, the allure of the promise of doing things, getting through our to-do list, fantasizing, planning, being caught up in the world of activity can seem more promising, more valuable than the simplicity of being, the simplicity of joy, of happiness, of contentment, of just being here.
As we start settling into the inconstant nature of breathing, the flow of experience, we can start to see how we leave that for solidity, we leave that for attachment. And that is invaluable to see. This is the beginning of a real wisdom in Buddhism, a real ability to be your own teacher, to see what you’re doing, to see what is healthy for you to do and what is unhealthy. The opportunity is to be able to drop into this world of direct experience so that in a deep way, our understanding, our insights, our attitudes, our motivations, our way of living in the world arises from some place deep inside that is quite capable of living in a rich, even sophisticated way in this world without any attachments at all. We can take care of ourselves, we can be creative, we can be living with the conditions of the world, responding from a deep place inside that’s part and parcel of this river of change that we are.
Just like a skilled kayaker is completely, wisely, knowledgeably aware of the river, the rapids, the currents, all the ways in which to paddle and to shift the weight—there’s a tremendous amount that goes into being a kayaker, but it all exists and flows from this deeper place of constant change and being part of that change in a sophisticated way. As soon as the person gets locked into these ideas, they lose touch with the kayaking, and they might even lose touch with the shifting nature of the river, and they can end up in trouble. We stay safer in the river of life if we don’t get attached.
Part of the function of this deep insight into inconstancy is to see how we get caught. So as you go through your day today, start noticing how you get caught. Notice the cost of being caught. Notice what you lose touch with. Notice how often it happens. And then maybe at the end of the day, or at some point in the day, if there’s a friend that you can talk about such things with, maybe a dharma friend you can call, maybe talk about what you’re learning about the difference between being in the present moment in a full way and losing that in some way through being caught in ideas, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and bias. Become wise about attachment, and you’ll become a much better kayaker in this world that we live in. Thank you.
Anicca: A Pali word meaning “inconstancy” or “impermanence.” It refers to the universal truth that all conditioned phenomena are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Pali: An ancient Prakrit language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the liturgical language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, often developed through sustained attention. ↩