This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Yes to the Whole; Insight (35) Without Selfing Limiting the Whole. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello and welcome to our meditation. For today, I’d like to emphasize sitting in meditation in a holistic way, a way that doesn’t select something in particular out of our holistic experience to be preoccupied with. This selective focus can keep the whole out of the picture. Most times when we’re preoccupied with me, myself, and mine, we’ve selected something in our experience, something in who we think we are, that we think we’re supposed to focus on and be concerned with. And we leave out a lot. We might leave out our physical body because we’re so involved in thoughts and we’re not really embodied. We might leave out our emotional life because we’re involved in some kind of story. We might be preoccupied with what’s pleasant and unpleasant, or concerned with our ideas of what meditation is. This narrows the field.
The idea in mindfulness meditation is to come into a place where awareness is broad, awareness is holistic, where all of who we are is allowed to just be present in a nice way. In both early Buddhism and later Buddhism, they use an expression to point to this wholeness that isn’t part of the selectivity that narrows the field of attention. They call it suchness1 or thusness. The idea is to sit in meditation and just be thus, just be such, without selectivity, without narrowing down, without leaving things out, and maybe even without trying to include things too much. Just to be present in an open, full, embodied way.
To support that, there’s an art to being embodied. There’s an art to being with the breath where it’s not selecting one thing out of the whole, but rather it’s placed at the center of the whole. And in that center, we can be grounded so that we can then include the whole out of that center. I don’t know if this makes sense what I’m saying, but let’s try with meditation.
So, assume a meditation posture. The way you take your posture, no matter whether you’re standing, sitting, or lying down, be careful with it so that you are intentional. The way that you are caring for your body and your posture, you’re beginning to gather yourself into your embodied experience. The posture can be a help to that. If we sit in a way that’s so relaxed against the couch, it’s quite nice, but it might not be as engaging for the body. We want something that wakes up that feeling of vitality or life.
Many people are focused on sight and their eyes, which might limit the fullness of the experience here and now. So there is a tendency in meditation to suggest closing the eyes for the purpose of quietly feeling and sensing the body more fully.
As we feel the body, you might become aware of places where there’s tension or tightness. It’s okay. But at the same time, tension is a sign that something in your mind, heart, or body is over-selecting, over-focusing on something that causes a tightening. As you exhale, relax and soften the places of holding in your body, relaxing in rhythm with the rhythm of breathing. Maybe relaxing on the exhale.
If your body is still, maybe the biggest movement in your body is the movement of breathing. Not a movement that’s separate from the whole body, but movement that’s like the waves in the ocean, swells in the ocean that rise and fall and are completely part of the ocean, part of the whole. So feel the rising and falling with the movement of breathing.
If you have a sense of being grounded, settled in your breathing, settled in the grounding spot from where breathing begins and returns, feel the expansion of breathing in the swelling of the wave. Feel or imagine that it grows to fill your whole body. And as you exhale, your whole body follows the exhale back to the grounding spot, the settling spot at the end of the out-breath.
One of the primary ways in which we limit or select something in particular out of our whole experience is through our thinking or through our emotional responses. As you breathe, being aware of the whole, whatever arises, whatever appears, gently, quietly say or imagine saying, “yes.” Just say “yes” as a way of inviting it to be part of the whole, not to be caught in it or preoccupied by it. But yes, this too can be part of the whole. Saying “yes” is an alternative to being caught and involved in a limited experience. Saying “yes” to include it into the whole.
One of the ways to allow the wholeness of who we are is not to define ourselves, not to select some part of who we are as more important than other parts or less important than other parts. To avoid having ideas of what we should be doing and shouldn’t be doing. That somehow obscures the simplicity of simply being here, whole, with everything of who we are allowed to work together. A big yes to all of it.
And then as we come to the end of the sitting, feel for a few moments, even if it’s with the help of your imagination, what it’s like to allow all of yourself to be here peacefully. To be caught up in greed and desires, aversions and resentments, that’s a way that limits the whole. It’s a way of being selective. But to be here whole, yes, to all of who we are for a few moments here peacefully, allowing it all to be here.
And then imagine looking upon others the same way, being careful not to define others, not to reduce them to some particular aspect of being human that you’re preoccupied with, where they’re not the object of desire or aversion. Seeing others as whole, allowing them to be fully there, not limited in any way by our gaze. And in the wholeness of the other, wishing them well.
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 Friday talk in the series on insight. For those of you who’ve been following the whole series, today’s talk might make a little bit more sense.
I’ll start with an analogy. Say that somehow, maybe through meditation, maybe after a nice day in the park napping under a tree and being content and happy, safe at home, everything is settled for now, and you’re just content and happy. There could be a feeling that it’s fine just to be alive and just being present, and all of who we are is allowed to be there. We’re at home with ourselves, and the mind is quiet and peaceful. Maybe it’s gotten very, very quiet and content, a kind of happiness that doesn’t require any thinking about something. Not happy about something in the world and reviewing it, but just simply happy to be alive, the vitality of goodness coursing through us.
And it’s taken a long time to get quiet and peaceful, settled, maybe a long period of meditation practice to really arrive at a place of being peaceful, calm, settled, at home with ourselves, not preoccupied by things. And then, somehow, just spontaneously, unbidden, a thought arises. And the thought is that I might think, “Wow, I’ve been alive for a very long time, but I’ve never really taken a good look at the back of my elbow.” I can’t really see it so well. Even if I hold up my elbow to the mirror, it’s not quite right. And you know, I don’t really know what my elbows look like. Maybe my elbows are not up to snuff. Maybe they’re not really that beautiful. And maybe they’re even deformed. And I wonder what people think about my elbows. And maybe I should always wear long-sleeve shirts because my elbows are maybe not quite the right elbow for being a human being.
So here I was, peaceful and calm and settled, maybe the kind of settledness that can happen in a long, long retreat where things are very peaceful, and suddenly I have this really interesting thing to think about and be concerned with. I mean, it’s so important, my elbow, the back of my elbow. And I lose my peace. I lose my settledness. Now I’m caught up in, “Should I have plastic surgery to fix my elbow that I don’t even know what it’s like back there?” Maybe it’s too wrinkled. Maybe I’ll get the wrinkles taken out, or maybe it’s the wrong shape.
To get caught up in something like that, silly as the example is, it’s clear that something is lost. It’s clear that the quality of my inner life, the quality of my mind, has now decreased, being caught up and tight around this topic that, in my decades of life, I’ve never been preoccupied by. And now I realize I’ve lost time. I could have spent a lot of time being caught up with that, and I better make up for lost time. It’s all kind of ridiculous.
There’s a better place to be. There’s a better settledness, a better peace, a better quiet. And if I can watch when I’m really, really quiet, peaceful, content, and I watch the elbow thought or something like that begin to arise, I can see how I’m beginning to be stressed. I see how there’s a loss, and I can say, “Oh, no, thank you.” Or I can say, in a certain kind of way, “yes” to it—not to continue doing it, but “yes” to not be involved in it. “Yes” to allow it to kind of spread out and dissolve into the wholeness of who I am. So maybe there doesn’t have to be a “no,” but the “yes” is an alternative to being preoccupied, to being caught in it. And there’s a wisdom that I’m better off being more whole, more settled, than being caught in something.
As we meditate and as we go into samadhi2 and deeper insights, we start having this kind of wisdom. We see that there’s a loss, that something gets diminished by being caught up in “me, myself, and mine.” Whenever we’re involved in “mine”—this is my possession, this is for me, this is my elbow, I have to be responsible for my elbow—we see clearly that thinking “my elbow” and being caught in the idea of “my” and possession is a diminishment of my wholeness, a diminishment of my well-being.
We can start seeing that in all kinds of ways that aren’t just the elbow. It could be aspects of our body that we get narrowed and clamped down on. Most people get preoccupied about something about their body sooner or later in life. Or maybe it has to do with our opinions, our hurts, our regrets, our plans for the future, or our identity. “This is who I am. This is my role. I’m smart. I’m not smart. I’m this way and that way.” And so now we get caught up in that.
Some of these identities, some of these evaluations of ourselves, could be accurate enough. But from the point of view of samadhi, we see how we diminish ourselves, we harm ourselves. We lose the sense of wholeness by being preoccupied by issues of identity, self-evaluation, measuring ourselves, or thinking about our worth. There’s a whole constellation of ways in which we get involved in self, me, myself, and mine. We start seeing, “Oh, that hurts. Ouch.” Or we start seeing that it diminishes us. It selects out some part of the whole, and we lose the sense of wholeness.
One of the ethical words in Buddhism is “wholesomeness.” I like to think of it as that which is part of the whole. And “unwholesomeness” is that which is not part of the whole. For the Buddha, greed, hate, and delusion are unwholesome because to lock into them, we lose the whole. Things like unattached generosity, love, kindness, and equanimity are called wholesome because they connect us to the whole. There’s a kind of “yes” to the overall flow, the overall sense of being here, where we’re not dividing up the whole. Of course, there can be greed about generosity and clinging to love, and that divides the whole. Then we lose some of that wholeness.
Freedom in Buddhism has a lot to do with not having anything that limits us, any idea, any clinging, any attachment that divides us from the wholeness of who we are. A lot of this emphasis on understanding self is to understand how “selfing”—the activity of constructing ideas of “mine,” constructing the idea “I am something,” constructing the idea “this is my true self”—operates. We start seeing, not to answer the final philosophical question, but to see what we add that is extra, what we add where there’s actually a loss by the preoccupation with it.
To see how it operates from a vantage point of being settled, peaceful, quiet, feeling at home, feeling a kind of sense of wholeness, is invaluable. It gives us a contrast between that sense of settledness and becoming unsettled because we’re now caught in the whole world of selfing. And the world of selfing, especially when we sit and meditate, is seen as an unnecessary place to go. Why lose your peace in a situation where you don’t need to be involved in selfing?
Sitting in meditation and starting to see this, making these simple choices of going back to the whole, not being involved, not being seduced, not giving a lot of authority to the whole selfing thing, is a powerful way to begin to recondition ourselves, understand more deeply, and become wiser.
So when we go out into the world, we can track this as well. Maybe not as minutely, but in bigger ways. We see that when we start thinking about our elbow or something else, we can think, “I don’t need to do that. I’ve done that enough. Let me kind of relax and be here.” As I start to criticize myself or feel inadequate in some way, it’s a remarkable thing not to have to argue with that, not to have to debate it, not to have to give into it, but rather to see it as a construct of the mind. It’s something the mind is producing. It’s not necessarily true, not necessarily not true, but I don’t have to get involved in that all the time. And getting involved in it unnecessarily, this world of self, diminishes us and might take us away from the wholeness of our experience, the wholeness that saturates our whole embodied experience. A wholeness which the tradition of Buddhism sometimes will call suchness.
So, when someone asks you, “Who are you?”—and I recommend you don’t actually do this, but just as a thought experiment—the best, clearest, most complete answer would be to say, “I am such.” Nothing is taken out of the whole, nothing is selected. We’re just such, and we’re allowed to be this way, whole.
The important part that I want to try to convey is not any kind of philosophical point of view, but the very practical use of mindfulness to see the construct of self and the way that it creates stress or diminishes who we are or limits us. And by seeing it operate, we can choose not to be seduced by it. That’s a big part of this teaching of self and not-self, which will continue on Monday.
So thank you very much. And I’m sure that all of you have wonderful elbows. Thank you.
Suchness/Thusness (Tathatā): A Buddhist term for reality as it is, unconditioned by our concepts, labels, and mental fabrications. It points to the direct experience of the present moment in its wholeness, without the selective filter of the self. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of deep concentration or meditative absorption, where the mind becomes calm, unified, and focused. It is a key component of the Buddhist path to insight and liberation. ↩