This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Emptiness; Insight (17) The Emptiness in Impermanance. 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 everyone and welcome, and welcome back to IMC. It’s certainly nice to be here, and it was very nice to be broadcasting from up in the mountains yesterday.
In this theme of these last weeks of insight, the first and, in the tradition, the most important insight is into what we usually call impermanence in English—anicca1, inconstancy. In this tradition, impermanence is closely associated with the idea of emptiness. One way to understand this is that for things that are constantly changing, there is no center or ground that stays stable. There is nothing, no place to stand. There is no essential core or essence, existentially or ontologically, with anything.
It would be a little bit like, maybe very much like, someone who likes to kayak in a river or someone who likes to surf. The water is constantly changing, but the ideas about the water might not be changing. In fact, someone might be daydreaming about how wonderful it would be to float on a river, thinking that it’s going to be exactly like it was before. The idea of “river” is stable. But when you’re in the water, experientially, everything is moving and shifting. There’s no solid ground to stand on in the ocean, in the river. Things are always shifting.
As we develop deep samadhi2, as we become very still and quiet inside in the meditation, the world of concepts and ideas with which we construct much of our reality is no longer operating. Everything we feel is shifting, changing, and moving. At some point, we also see that mindfulness itself, awareness itself, is also part of the shifting and changing, also part of what comes and goes. We find there’s no place to stand in the river of time, in the river of now. As soon as we take a stand, we’re resisting the flow of the river.
The art of this practice is to get quiet enough and, at some point, turn the attention around 180 degrees to look back at the source of awareness, the source of mindfulness. For some people, we might call it the source of consciousness, to see that there is nothing there to stand on. It itself is shifting and changing, dissolving and reappearing. As we get deeper and deeper, every time we look at something, it’s already shifting and changing—including the looking, including the agent who is doing the practice. If we look for it, to feel it, to sense it, to experience it, there’s nothing solid there. It’s all just shifting and moving and changing.
To experience that while in samadhi, while being really still, quiet, and peaceful, can feel really wonderful because there’s freedom there. There’s freedom from holding on to anything, freedom from taking a stand, freedom from resisting what’s going on. So this idea of the insight into anicca, into inconstancy, at some point when our samadhi is strong, it becomes 360 degrees. Everything is included, nothing is outside of that changing or constantly shifting. For some people, that’s disorienting, but if we turn the attention around to look at the place of disorientation, there’s nothing there. That also is empty. Everything is empty because everything is a part of a process of change.
So, assume a meditation posture where we begin by finding stability. We begin by finding our ground to sit on, to lay on, to stand on, so it’s clear we’re here.
And then gently closing your eyes.
Feeling your way into your body to where there’s stillness in your body. At first, it might be a very tentative feeling of stillness.
As you exhale, let everything around the stillness relax.
As you exhale, feel if there’s any solidity, contraction, or pressure associated with thinking—that thinking mind, that thinking muscle. As you exhale, soften the thinking mind.
Feeling the area of your heart center. Is there anything there that feels solid or contracted, or like there’s a location there where things are a little bit more centered? As you exhale, relax around the heart center, soften.
Dropping deeper into the area of the belly, the hara3. Feeling what’s there. Allow the belly to soften, the tension there to begin loosening.
Becoming aware here in your belly, in your chest. Becoming aware of the alternating rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.
Inherent in breathing is change and inconstancy. Unless you hold your breath, breathing keeps shifting and changing.
In your breathing, can you find a place of stability or a grounding spot from which the breathing begins?
Entering the experience of the body breathing.
Everything is empty. If you turn around to look at anything which is solid, anything that feels like a gathering point for something that’s stable and constant, if you look at it clearly, you’ll see there’s no center.
And if there is, breathe with it. Let it soften and relax. Let it dissolve.
Any sense of solidity, permanence, anything that seems unchanging in your direct experience is a construct of the mind. Relax the mind deeply. Let go of the doer, the knower.
Letting the shifting, changing waves of breathing in and breathing out support you to let go into the emptiness of all things, where there’s nowhere to stand and nowhere to fall.
Whatever is solid, wherever you’re holding on, look into the middle of it to see its emptiness, and there find your freedom.
To be aware like space, where awareness has room for whatever arises.
Being aware with silence, so that no sound or thought is blocked but can flow freely in the silence.
To be aware with stillness, so awareness isn’t ruffled by anything.
Being aware of emptiness, the emptiness of awareness itself. Nowhere to stand, nowhere to fall. Everything is shifting and changing and flowing with no essence, no ground that stays stable. The only stability is the floating in change.
And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to appreciate the emptiness of awareness, where we can be aware but not resist. Aware but not assert. Aware and not afraid. Aware without wanting.
And to offer this way of being aware to our friends, our family, our community, so that all beings will feel that they belong to us in our awareness. That we are everyone’s friend, that we have space and time for whoever we encounter. As soon as we don’t have the space or the time, chances are we’ve solidified around something, holding on to something with past pressure in it.
Living in the vast emptiness of a shifting, changing world of experience. Let us have space to be aware of everyone with kindness and care, with time and openness.
May, in the emptiness of our mind, we wish happiness on all. May we wish safety for all. May we wish peace for everyone. May we offer freedom from suffering to everyone. May how we’re aware of others be the avenue of a gift, the gift of attention, empty attention that has space for everything. May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this continued series on insight for insight meditation. I think now we’re on the 17th talk on this topic, continuing with the sub-theme of insight into impermanence, inconstancy, change, as this is one of the most important insights that this tradition offers. The other three important insights that are really the transformational insights come out of insight into change. So, the insight into inconstancy, insight into stress and suffering, and the third one, the insight into what’s called not-self. We’ll go through these three as I teach these 7 a.m. sessions through the summer. For now, I just want to keep focusing on this impermanence because it’s so foundational.
In the Theravadin4 tradition, there are teachings on emptiness, and the primary way of understanding emptiness is that it’s synonymous with the concept of anicca—impermanence, change, inconstancy. Anything that’s constantly shifting and changing has no inherent solidity, no inherent “thingness” there that lasts over time. As I like to refer to it, it’s like a river that’s flowing; you can’t find a solid place in the water that’s unshifting, unchanging. It’s always dynamic, always in flow, moving. Unless it becomes ice, but the river is not ice; the river is the flow. In Theravadin Buddhism, we would say that the river is empty of any inherent, solid place that makes the river what it is. What makes up the river is the flowing, changing molecules of water.
As we settle into meditation, below the level where we’re going to argue or have concepts or ideas of how things should be or how things are, we are settling the thinking mind, the analytical mind, the constructing mind. It gets quieter and quieter. So we’re now living with awareness in direct experience, the experience of the moment. This is why samadhi is so important for insight practice, because samadhi is what allows us to be centered in the direct moment-to-moment experience, as opposed to being away from it because of concepts, thoughts, and ideas we have.
Some ways of thinking can give the idea that something is permanent. There are two reasons for that. One is that ideas are unchanging. For example, the idea of a door—the door that’s there, the idea of the door doesn’t change. But the experience of the door is changing all the time. I’m looking at it, I’m not looking at it. I close my eyes and I don’t see the door. The idea that it’s still there is just an idea. In direct experience, if I’m looking at the door, the awareness of it is shifting and changing. So in the direct experience, the door doesn’t change, but the way I’m perceiving it is constantly shifting and moving all the time.
If we now turn that kind of attention not to a door but to anything that we feel inside is the essence of who we are—”This is my am-ness. This is I am this. I am whatever you fill in the blank”—if that is something that feels permanent, feels unchanging, then if we really turn to the movement of direct experience, experiencing directly what’s actually there apart from the thoughts and ideas, we see that there’s nothing there but these thoughts and ideas. Any sense of solidity or permanence that’s there begins to dissolve. It’s like pieces of ice in the river that then melt and fall away to become part of the flow and changing nature of the river.
It’s profoundly satisfying to be able to sit in meditation, get quiet enough to perceive that nothing is solid. Everything has now become spacious, open, easeful, still, quiet. And in that spacious quiet, there are experiences for sure, there are perceptions for sure, but those are constantly flowing and moving. Sometimes they can be experiences happening quickly; sometimes, in a very quiet, peaceful manner, things are just coming into awareness and receding, arising and passing, appearing and disappearing. Because the mind is gathered in the moment—it’s not distracted, it’s not spinning out, it’s not pulling back and judging and reacting and having preferences, it’s just right there in it—there’s something that gets very peaceful and very happy to just be there in that flow. The changing nature of phenomena becomes the organizing center for this gathering of the mind into harmonious, centered attention.
And it’s an attention where now we see in the direct experience everything is empty. Nothing has any inherent self, inherent essence that’s just unchanging, unmoving. The reason why this is so powerful is that the movement of clinging to something only seems to work if it’s there long enough to hold on to. If I have a striker, I can grab it because it’s there long enough to grab. But if the striker is constantly disappearing, then as I grab it, there’s nothing to hold on to. There’s something in very deep meditation where we see that what the mind wants to cling to is only concepts and ideas, wishes, projections. In the deep sense of everything is empty, everything is changing, by the time the mind goes to grab onto something, it’s no longer there.
Before that, it’s the very sense of grabbing where we think we’re grabbing something, but it’s the grabbing that gives a sense of solidity because it gets tight, like a fisted hand or a knot. And then it seems like, yes, something is solid there. But if we open the fist like this, what happens to the fist? The fist is not there. There’s just openness.
The opportunity for deeper meditation, just like in deeper jhana5 practice and deep samadhi we talked about earlier this year, is that we enter into and abide in a very different kind of world than the world we ordinarily live in. There needs to be a willingness to drop the ordinary perceptions, the ordinary way of thinking, in order to really become quiet and still enough to be able to sense, feel into the empty nature of direct experience and find the freedom in there, find the delight in there, find the deep sense of being at home that can’t be there if we’re holding on to something like this. We want to be open-handed, open, relaxed, at peace.
The important point I’m trying to make here is that as insight meditation develops, what we’re entering into and abiding in is direct experience, direct perception of experience where the experience and the perception itself is seen as a flowing river, the river of now. Every experience is shifting and changing. And if we look deeply at that and find any place that’s not flowing, any place that’s gotten solid and is holding on, gotten frozen—if we look at that kindly and gently, it too will dissolve into that flow of change. Everything becomes change. Everything is shifting and changing. And there we find the fist of attachment, the holding on that we have, begins to loosen up, begins to relax.
The function of this deep experience of inconstancy as an insight, the deep revelation of seeing things constantly change, is not to live with this kind of insight all the time. The purpose of it is how it helps to melt the attachments we have, how it helps us to soften and let go. We get a very deep personal experience of what it’s like to not be attached. In this insight tradition that I’m teaching from here, they say that when settling into and opening into this deep experience of constant change in meditation and feeling the freedom of it, this gives a person a foretaste of what liberation will be like, the ultimate liberation. It’s a kind of getting a sense or a smell of what’s possible in terms of a dramatic shift of letting go that is the purpose of this insight practice.
So I hope that this makes sense for you. Tomorrow we’ll do one more day on this impermanence insight, and then start moving into the more challenging ones that are very important also for this insight tradition. So, thank you very much and I look forward to tomorrow.
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence,” “inconstancy,” or “change.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption. It is a state of deep stillness and mental unification. ↩
Hara: A Japanese term for the area of the lower abdomen, considered a center of vital energy and focus in some meditative traditions. The original transcript said “the har.” ↩
Theravadin: Relating to Theravada, the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. ↩
Jhana: A Pali word referring to a series of cultivated states of meditative absorption. The original transcript said “jam practice.” ↩