This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Openings in Endings; Insight (15) The Gap Between Endings and Beginnings. 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.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome, or good day for those of you in other time zones.
In this exploration of the first of the three major insights of insight meditation, I’ll continue talking about inconstancy, change, and impermanence—the coming and going of experience. For meditation, one of the really important milestones is coming to a very clear understanding, a clear insight, if I may, of how much time we spend thinking. How much time we spend viewing our experience, ourselves, and what’s important through the lens of thoughts and thinking.
Most thinking is about something, and so we live in a world of “aboutness” rather than living in a world of immediacy, a world of sensation and sensing. Even if we are sensing and more or less in the present moment, feeling deeply what’s going on, there are subtle conceivings, valuings, and prioritizings—a selecting of the experience that goes on, sometimes even subvocally or almost subconsciously. This gives us a kind of holding on to experience, a momentum of preoccupation, a momentum of reifying or solidifying some concern that we have. The most extreme versions would be to be lost in thought about something that just seems insurmountable, seems permanent, like this is the way it’s going to be forever, and it’s terrible or wonderful or something.
So, to see how much time we spend there allows us to experience our life in meditation in a very different way. It’s almost like a paradigm shift from looking at our life through the lens of our concepts to feeling our life through the flow of changing sense experience. To relax the thinking mind, to soften the tension that is behind a lot of thinking, we let the momentum settle and relax the body, relax what’s going on. We’re not forcing ourselves to enter into the world of change, but we naturally settle into it, feel it, and become it.
One of the insights that’s possible as we stay close to the phenomenal world, the world of direct experience of everything including thoughts, is to appreciate how much things change, arise, and pass under the surface of our projections and reifications. In the passing, there is a hint of freedom—a freedom from preoccupation, a freedom from being entangled with experience, reacting to experience. It is a freedom of simplicity, a freedom of a heart and mind that is unpreoccupied. When something ends, that absence is often overlooked. In the dharma, we don’t overlook the absence that follows the ending of something. We appreciate the spaciousness, the peacefulness, the stillness that might be found there.
So in this meditation, notice endings and the absence of what just ended—not because it’s sad or because you miss something, but for the experiential, in-the-moment space, silence, openness, and stillness that might be there, even if it’s momentary.
Assuming a meditation posture.
Right as you close your eyes, there’s a ceasing, an ending of being involved in the visual world of sight. In settling into a meditation posture, there’s the ending of a certain degree of movement and moving around.
Breathing and settling into your posture, there’s the ending of certain large tensions or holdings, maybe if the shoulders relax, the belly relaxes. Can you readjust your arms and hands to allow something to relax and soften?
Feeling the rhythm of how the body expands and contracts as you breathe. The movements of the belly and diaphragm as you breathe. Maybe the movement, the tingling of air going in and out through your nostrils.
With a gentle massage of that rhythm of breathing, on the exhale, relax your thinking mind. Soften.
Maybe as you quiet your thinking mind, calm it. In a quiet way of thinking, it’s a way of letting go of all other thoughts. Gently on the exhale, quietly on the exhale, whisper to yourself the word “yes.” Yes to letting go of thoughts. Yes to letting go into the body.
As we’re sitting here meditating, a lot of things are no longer happening for you in this moment. There are more things that you are not thinking about, more things than you’re not clinging to, than you’re preoccupied with. Appreciate the absence. When something is not present, a degree of freedom is found there—peace, spaciousness.
Gently, calmly, stay close to the comings and goings of sensations, thoughts, feelings, appreciating the moments of absence when awareness is not feeling or sensing something that was being experienced.
At the end of the inhale, there’s a momentary absence of the inhale that allows the beginning of the exhale. But between the inhale and the exhale, there’s a momentary absence, stillness, spaciousness, being free of any sensation of breathing. At the end of the exhale, the same thing.
When you’re very quiet, you’ll see that thoughts are not continuous. There are little gaps and pauses, little moments when the mind is distracted by sound or sensations. Moments where awareness is free of what we were thinking. Feel those moments.
In the coming and going of sensations and experience, with the going of it, you might feel how then there is a non-involvement with what was.
At any given moment, there’s what the mind is involved in, and there’s a vast spaciousness of all the things it’s not involved in. Expand your sense of awareness into the spaciousness, the peacefulness of non-involvement.
At any given moment, there are things that have passed—sensations and sounds and thoughts have shifted. We’re no longer the center of attention. Let go of what was. Let go of what is not in the direct experience of the moment, so there is more space and openness for what comes next.
As we come to the end of the sitting, maybe you can appreciate the opportunity that endings provide. As much as there might be a loss, in the dharma, there’s a greater benefit in the freedom, in the peace, in the openness and freshness that’s there with the absence of what was. If we can let go of what was a moment ago, endings provide an opening into freedom.
Endings of preoccupation, endings of projections and agendas, even if temporary, allow us to meet others in a fresh, open way. May it be that this practice we do shows us, teaches us how to be present for others with a fresh awareness, an open awareness, a peaceful awareness of what is, so we’re not preoccupied by what was or what we carried with us into the meeting.
May endings support deeper connection, deeper care for this world because we know people better.
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 15th talk on insight. This week has been an exploration of the topic of Anicca1, the Pali2 word, A-N-I-C-C-A. It’s usually translated as “impermanence,” which tends to emphasize the ending of things—that things will stop, cease, and no longer be there. The Pali word more literally means “inconstancy,” meaning that things are not constantly there, but they come and go.
Some things are obvious: meals come and go, days come and go, daytime comes and goes, mornings come and go, meditation sessions come and go. All kinds of things come and go, and they return the next day, they return the next hour. The inhale comes and goes, but in a sense, it’s always there, so it’s inconstant.
A lot of the deeper insight of meditation, a lot of the ordinary wisdom of being a human being, appreciates that things are impermanent, that things do sooner or later stop and disappear. We learn how to be wise about that, compassionate about that. There’s also this deeper truth that’s not seen as clearly: the inconstancy of things. One reason we don’t see it so obviously or live in it so much is that we tend to be focused so much on one thing. There’s a tremendous reification, a tremendous preoccupation that the mind has. The preoccupation of the moment can feel like it’s constant.
The metaphor that’s used for this kind of illusion of constancy, which involves a very busy and active mind, is “monkey mind.” This is the mind of a monkey swinging through the forest, from branch to branch. Before it has let go of one branch, it’s already reaching to grab the next one. So it’s always, one way or the other, involved in grasping, reaching for, and holding on. It might let go of one to grab the next, but the preoccupation is already in the grabbing of the next; it doesn’t notice the letting go. In a sense, what the mind is involved in is always grasping. So grasping can seem like it’s constant, but in fact, it comes and goes.
When we sit down in meditation, calm ourselves, and get clear with mindfulness, we start seeing, among other things, the grasping mind and how it reaches and wants. But we see the gap between it. We see the arising of a thought rather than seeing thoughts as continuous. We see that thoughts come and go, that sensations come and go. With a deeper and deeper calm, or samadhi3, of meditation, there’s a shift to being in the direct moment, just here, in the direct experience now. We start entering into the river of change, the river of inconstancy. That can be very satisfying and absorbing.
But there’s an opportunity there: we see that moment to moment, things are coming and going. In that stream, things arise and pass. Seeing the passing of things, seeing the ending of things, for all the loss it might entail, also provides opportunity. One of those opportunities is that unless we’re involved with memory and caught in it, what’s not there in the moment creates space and openness in the mind—unless the mind reaches for the next branch.
As you’re thinking about something, and a particular thought ends, before the next thought begins—between the ending of one and the beginning of the next—without using thoughts to answer the question, who are you? What is awareness like between thoughts? What is awareness like between the end of one experience and the beginning of the next? You might feel a degree of peace, a degree of spaciousness, stillness, a degree of non-clinging.
At some point in practice, we start appreciating the ending of things. It can be disorienting because in the ending of something, we’re so used to having something that we’re orienting ourselves to, holding on to, or some way of being that defines “who I am.” But in the flow of arising and passing, some people get disoriented: “If I don’t have a thought telling me who I am, then who am I? If I’m not holding on to something or preoccupied by something, then how am I going to be safe?”
So there’s a beginning of an exploration, of finding a certain kind of peace and comfort in letting go, in the freedom that’s there with the absence of things. It’s kind of like, as things arise and pass, we see in the passing that right there is the opportunity not to cling. Right there, there’s nothing to cling to, nothing to resist, nothing to do, nothing to push against, nothing to be.
Part of what comes along almost in a natural way, nothing we have to do about it, is that as we start settling more and more into the impermanent, inconstant nature of direct experience—and I’m going to underline direct experience, not thought-about experience. If we’re thinking about experience, the thinking gives all kinds of other impressions of what’s actually happening; it can give an impression of more constancy, more solidity. So it’s not the continuity of thinking about experience, it’s the continuity of the direct experience, kind of underneath the thinking level. And we start to see there’s freedom there. There’s freedom in floating along in the current of change, and there’s freedom in the spaciousness and the openness of when things end.
In the teachings of the Buddha, there are some places where he emphasized that when the hindrances—for example, when greed, hatred, aversion, desires, doubts, anxiety, and fear—come to some kind of end, don’t just go on to the next branch. Don’t just go on to the next clinging. Take a few moments to feel the absence of that, feel the goodness of that, feel the spaciousness or some of the characteristics of that absence. Monkey mind doesn’t take the time to feel the simplicity of being. When certain things have been put down, we just go on to the next thing to cling to and be involved in.
Meditation is one of those times where we’re beginning to appreciate very deeply all the things we’ve put down, all the things that we’ve let go of, settled away, and relaxed into. The absence of those things is a freshness; in the absence of those things, there’s a kind of freedom. One of the things to appreciate, one of the things that’s remarkable in how it leads to greater and greater freedom, is to appreciate the ending of things, the absence of things, how things are not there, even if it’s momentary or maybe more extended. And then it gives you the opportunity to be careful not to reach for the next branch, not to fill yourself with more presence of things, but to appreciate the absence. Absence can be more expansive and spacious.
So that when we go through our lives and we do know something, feel something, and sense something, we’re not locked into it. Rather, we feel it in a wider atmosphere of calm, of peace, of freedom, of non-clinging. And so, rather than being a monkey swinging, grabbing one branch after the other, we become more like a graceful, soaring bird, where the vast, empty sky holds our wings up as we fly through and see all the changing things in our life from the vantage point of all the space that’s here as well.
I hope this discussion about seeing endings, seeing the absence of things, is understandable to you. And it gives you an appreciation not just of the negative part of absence, not just the beginning of something new, but something in that ending that allows something expansive to be there. And as that expansive freedom is there, then it’s much easier to be with the challenging parts of impermanence and change and this human life.
So thank you. We’ll continue with this series on insight in a few weeks. I’m going to be away on vacation for this next week, and I’ll come back and be here again on the 30th, a Monday I think. I’ll still be in my vacation place that time, but I’ll teach that morning and then I’ll be back here at IMC the next day. So thank you very much, and I look forward to coming back in a little over a week.
Anicca: A Pali word that is a central concept in Buddhism, meaning “inconstancy,” “impermanence,” or “transience.” It refers to the fact that all conditioned things 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 meaning “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to a state of deep meditative absorption, where the mind becomes still, focused, and unified. Original transcript said ‘samadei’, corrected based on context. ↩