This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Stepping into the flow; Crossing the flood (1/5) Flood. 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, friends, or good day. Welcome, everyone.
This week, I bring with me a set of reflections around water-related similes. I feel like I’ve been swimming in that, and so I’m going to bring that with me and channel it in this morning’s meditation and dharma reflection. For this first session, in our meditation, I’d like to invite everyone to imagine you’re stepping into the flow of our moment-by-moment life, and to really feel and sense the aliveness from within our experience.
I’m going to start with a poem by David Whyte.1 See if you can find the poetry here. Maybe let yourself settle into a meditative posture as you receive these words. Poetry and images often express things that may be hard to express in words. This is a poem called “Enough.”
These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath, if not this breath, this sitting here, this opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now.
With that, stepping into the flow of life in this moment, right now, right here. Gently, softly, open yourself to this life. Sitting, lying down, whatever the posture you’re in, stepping inside. Feeling and sensing the sensations, the flow of the breath, just as it is.
Becoming available to the lived moments, here and now. It can feel tender. There may be a kind of stir in the heart. A life. This opening to life feels like this. Your cells in the body may respond to this. The heart may respond to this.
In these last couple of minutes of the meditation together, as you step into the flow of your own life, touching aliveness from within, allow this opening to expand. Maybe there is a way that you can meet all life with openness, care, and respect. And may meeting life in this tender, open way bring nourishment, harmony, and peace to all life, all forms of life.
May all beings know life deeply, and may all beings be free.
Good morning and good day, everyone. This week, I’d like to share some reflections based on a Pali Canon sutta.
I find that similes often have a very powerful, symbolic meaning, and they’re quite rich. Similes are often layered and have a multi-dimensional quality to them. I wanted to read something from an author, Robert Johnson, who wrote this in relationship to symbolic language that people use. He said, “Speech is literal and rational, and it cannot easily contain the depth of the mystery. For that, we need symbols and a symbolic language.”
I resonate with that a lot. I feel that often the Buddha is trying to convey something that is hard to describe using words, and so he resorts to using rich, symbolic similes. In this way, different aspects of the simile can point to something that’s deeper than the literal meaning of the words. They can allow us to stay with what is being pointed to in a more engaged way, engaging with the body, with our emotions, with our psyche or psychological aspect of being. It can connect with a deeper part of ourselves. I hope this form of symbolic exploration can be useful and maybe evocative in some way.
The sutta that I’m going to bring in for us to explore this week is called “Crossing the Flood.” Some of you may have heard this. This is the first sutta, a very short one, from the Samyutta Nikaya.2 The sutta captures a short conversation between a glorious deity and the Buddha. The deity came to visit the Buddha in the middle of the night and asked him a question, and the Buddha responded.
I find it quite curious. The question and answer are even more curious. There are only four lines here, but there is a lot in them. Here it is:
“How, dear sir, did you cross the flood?” the deity asked.
“By not halting, friend, and by not straining, I crossed the flood,” [the Buddha replied].
“But how is it, dear sir, that by not halting and by not straining, you crossed the flood?”
The Buddha answered, “When I came to a standstill, friend, then I sank. But when I struggled, then I got swept away. It is in this way, friend, that by not halting and by not straining, I crossed the flood.”
It’s a very short conversation, with a lot of details to unpack. I’m going to start very slowly with this sutta this week.
First, I’d like to talk about this symbol of a flood, or ogha3 in Pali. In the Pali Canon, the symbol of a flood is used many times, often representing powerful forces that cause stress and suffering. I’m aware of the power of the flood in nature, and I’m aware of what’s happened recently in the United States—the devastating power of a flood. It can cause a lot of pain for so many people, and I feel a kind of heartbreak just to name it right now. In the time of the Buddha, he sometimes stayed in places that tended to experience flooding, so he knew the destructive, forceful power of a flood.
But in his teachings, he has a specific pointing for this force that we observe in human lives. He equated the flood with the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion. In one of the suttas, he said, “Greed, I say, is the great flood.” The endless wanting, the endless pushing away, aversion.
Elsewhere, the flood is interpreted as the flood of sensual desire, the endless wanting for comfort and pushing away of discomfort. It is the endless taking birth in identification with things, the endless taking birth in “I am this way, I am not that way,” this kind of selfing. Then there is the flood of wrong perspectives, mistaken views, which can cause a lot of difficulties for ourselves and for others. And then, the flood of ignorance—not seeing. Not seeing actually causes the flood.
For me, I often ask myself to just pause and reflect for a moment on this word, “flood.” What comes to your mind? For me, the first sense of it is an overwhelming amount of water that the normal river channels or water flows can’t handle. Our normal life flow has its ups and downs, its pleasant and unpleasant, its grief and joy. That’s part of being human. Sometimes teachers will call this the realm of opposites, and that’s a normal part of the flow of life.
And yet, when there is unpleasantness, our allergic reactivities to it—that we don’t want this, we want to push it away—can often overwhelm us. This overwhelming amount of water can come forth and overwhelm us, and it causes more dukkha,4 more suffering. It is dangerous and can cause stress in our own minds and hearts, and it can have an effect all around us, and maybe even in a bigger space, a broader force for humanity.
Some examples of this kind of flooding—I sometimes like to think of this not as a noun but as a verb, “flooding,” or an adjective, “being flooded.” We may experience loss. I think all of us will have experiences of loss, and they are unpleasant and may even be painful: loss of physical capacities, mental capacities, or loss of loved ones or a job. They are unpleasant. But our resistance to it, our immediate reactivity to fix it, or the reactive emotional forces of fear, anger, and resentment can lead us into actions, speech, and mental activities that begin to flood ourselves and others. Maybe we start blaming ourselves. We think things should not be like this. Maybe we start blaming others. We can see this kind of effect in ourselves and in others.
Through the practice, we can learn gradually to begin to be present for these experiences and pause in the moment of experiencing loss, which is a normal flow of being human. Instead of collapsing or resorting to reactive forces flooding our minds and hearts, we may be able to ask ourselves, “What’s the bigger perspective here? How might I relate to this loss? How do I relate to experience without being flooded by the regular reactive forces?”
It doesn’t mean that immediately we’ll be able to do this, but coming in contact with this, maybe we can begin to open ourselves up to some possibilities. What can we learn from this experience?
So today, my invitation is maybe to practice noticing in your experience. Are there times that you can begin to differentiate the normal life flow moments from the reactive forces that tend to cause additional layers of dukkha? Notice if there are choices that become available to us, that we can actually choose not to be flooded.
Thank you for your attention. May this exploration be fruitful for you and for the people that we all encounter. We’ll continue in this symbolic exploration in the rest of the week. Thank you, everyone.
David Whyte: The speaker says “David White,” but this is likely a reference to the poet David Whyte, who writes on themes of nature and spirituality. ↩
Samyutta Nikaya: A collection of Buddhist scriptures, part of the Pali Canon. The name means “Connected Discourses.” The transcript said “Samuta Nikaya.” ↩
Ogha: A Pali word meaning “flood.” In Buddhist teachings, it metaphorically refers to the four overwhelming currents that keep beings bound to the cycle of rebirth: the flood of sensual desire (kāmogha), the flood of existence/becoming (bhavogha), the flood of wrong views (diṭṭhogha), and the flood of ignorance (avijjogha). ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a core concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental suffering or dissatisfaction inherent in all conditioned existence. ↩