This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Caring for the Natural Wonder of Our Inner Life - Gil Fronsdal. 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.
It was very nice to be meditating here with all of you. Sitting here quietly with my eyes closed, and then hearing the bell and opening my eyes, I was gazing down, but I could feel the people on the floor around me just sitting quietly and still. I really found that invaluable—the stillness, the uprightness, the engagement in the practice. It’s rare that we’re in a group of this many people where you can open your eyes and see a group of people sitting peacefully and quietly, at least on the outside. That counts for a lot. It’s supportive and inspiring to see.
A number of times in my life, I’ve been quite inspired by just being in a room or observing a room of people sitting and meditating. Sometimes I see it as a natural wonder. Probably one of the most dramatic times for me was when I was in Burma. They segregated the housing and the location where men and women meditated. There would be a procession of us men who would walk single file to go to the men’s dining area, but it took us by the women’s meditation hall. The women’s meditation hall was quite large, much bigger than the men’s, and much more majestic. It was a large building, and the two long sides were just a series of doors that were always open, so you could see right through the building.
There would be 500 women meditating there, and they would all sit in a wonderfully straight, majestic way, really intent in a way that the men in Burma never sat. If you want to be inspired in Burma by how people meditate, at least for someone coming out of a Zen background like me, you would observe the women. It was so inspiring to see the intentness and the maturity. Every morning I would go by, and it really fueled my practice to see this natural wonder of people sitting quietly, engaging in discovering and being connected to their own inner nature. In doing so, they discover something profound about who we are and what’s going on inside of us, and through that, are better able to see and connect to the world around us.
For the last week, I was teaching a retreat in the Sierras. It was up at 5,000 feet in Sierra County, which population-wise is the smallest county in California with 4,000 people in the whole county. We were five minutes from the Yuba River, on a wonderful mountainside that sloped up to the Sierra Buttes, a beautiful big outcrop of a mountaintop sticking up. To be with 40 people on retreat, practicing in the forest, in this natural setting, was quite wonderful.
There’s something about being in the natural world that inspires many people to be present, to notice. Some of us would sit outside in the morning and watch the sun rise. We were east of the Sierra Buttes, so the sun would start falling on the buttes, and it was quite lovely to see. There was a lake we sat by sometimes, the trees, the trails. There was a mama bear and her cub. There was the natural life, the plants, and there were also natural springs on the property. So there was something quite profound about watching the water come out of the ground. It was a tremendous support for the practice, and I could feel that practicing there was very different than practicing at our retreat center, IRC. I don’t put more value on one or the other; they both have their own characteristics and conditions that are very supportive for practice. But up there, what was supportive for many people was a feeling of spaciousness or openness, like the world as it is. Maybe each person, as they are, could eventually see or feel that they also are part of nature, inside and out. We are nature and part of the natural world.
One of the marvels of the animate natural world is that it has the qualities of growing, changing, dying, and being reborn. Forest fires go through, and it’s remarkable to be in a place where soon after a fire, you see the green life come back. It’s remarkable to be in a place where there’s a real winter, and everything goes dormant or dies, and then there’s life under the ground that comes back with great freshness and intensity. I was amazed when I was 20 or so, living in a place where I wondered how many different shades of green there are. It was so beautiful.
We are also natural systems. Within us, there is birth, the arising of new things. There is growth, there is healing, and there is dying. Things inside of us that die get reborn and come back in some way. Our skin dies and is shed, and new skin is born. Apparently, nerves only last so long and have to be regrown. Our hair comes and goes—I guess hair is dead already. We spend a lot of time and money on the dead parts of ourselves. [Laughter] But there’s life that’s regrowing.
These natural cycles are also true for our inner life, our mental and psychological life. The Buddha used the language of natural processes for talking about our inner life. He talked about things being born within, and the primary thing he used the language of birth for was the birth of well-being, of joy. That’s quite something, to recognize that joy gets born in us, as opposed to being manufactured. It’s not an artificial thing; it’s not an artifact that humans make. Rather, it’s something that grows from some kind of inner depth, something profound that the practice allows to be born.
So what does it take for spiritual joy to be born? Maybe one interesting idea, if I’m allowed this analogy, is that something in us has to gestate. The gestation of embryos is kind of off-site; we don’t see it. Nowadays you can have ultrasounds, but it’s out of sight. So for the conditions that allow this joy to be born inside, maybe something has to be allowed to gestate, to develop and grow off-site. Can we trust that? Can we trust something we don’t see in our psychology, in our inner emotional life? Can we support it?
The Buddha would answer, “Absolutely.” That’s one of the important parts of Buddhist practice. What we contribute is not the manufacturing of states of mind. They’re not artificial. We’re a natural system. We’re not plastic or metal that we shape and cut. We’re certainly not Lego pieces that we just put together. We’re something organic, and our psychological, spiritual, and emotional maturity is something that grows and develops. So what we contribute in the practice are the conditions.
One of the conditions is to start doing the activities that reassure you that you’re not going to be harming other people. You might have impulses, but you restrain yourself from acting on those impulses to harm. You begin appreciating that there is a desire to be non-harming. Living that way for a while, it can be registered: “Oh yeah, I managed to get through three hours without swearing at anyone. Wow.” Or three days, or three months. We start shifting how we behave in such a way that we have confidence in our ability to be that way, and then letting that register, letting ourselves appreciate it.
For some people, that’s really hard because they have a tremendous orientation, due to earlier conditions, to believe that they’re inadequate, wrong, or bad. I’ve heard people regularly describe themselves by saying, “I’m a bad person.” These are not people who are in jail for doing terrible things; these are ordinary people. At Spirit Rock and other places, there’s been a whole industry and orientation to help people with self-criticism. Many people grow up in families where they get criticized all the time. Recently, someone told me that in their family, they learned to be silent because only by being silent was that person safe. As soon as any attention was drawn to them, it would end up with verbal violence or something.
The instruction in Buddhism is to let your goodness register. Take time to feel it and appreciate it. You’re allowed to have joy, to feel delight. You’re allowed to appreciate that you have been ethical for a while. Of course, you should try to be ethical all the time, but if all you managed to do was today, at least appreciate that at the end of the day. Let the goodness of it, the rightness of it, be registered deeply.
The other condition the Buddha talked about that prepares people for this underground gestation is being generous, practicing generosity. But with both being ethical and being generous, you have to be very careful how you do them. We can’t do them as a duty, an obligation, or a “should.” We can’t do it as a transactional exchange: “If I’m just ethical and give a lot, the Buddha is going to provide me with all this.” There has to be some feeling of inspiration, generosity, care, or love in the non-harming and the giving. So we must look deeply at what motivates the desire to be ethical and generous. It’s the underlying quality of the motivation that is allowing something good to gestate and grow. It can’t be straining, ambitious, conceited, or used as one more reason to be critical of oneself.
There’s a beginning to reorient something very deep inside of us, to reorient our motivation. We’re looking for other reasons, other ways of approaching this so it’s not transactional, not Buddhism by the numbers. How can I live differently? What drives me to say what I say, do what I do, and even think what I think? Can it come from some place that feels good, that can gestate something?
I like to think of this with the reference point of how you would be around a newborn baby. I hope most of us are not going to yell at them and slap them for crying. The baby comes out, and the first thing it does is start crying. Most people allow the newborn to cry; sometimes it’s celebrated. “At least now, look, they’re alive. Boy, are they alive.” The instinct is to hold them carefully. When the doctor put my first son in my arms, I thought he was the most brittle glass you could imagine. I was almost too careful. But this tenderness, care, and softness, talking gently and kindly with love and support—that creates a condition for the child to grow in a nice way.
The wonderful Buddhist teacher Ajahn Sucitto1, a monk in England, said that the environment in which a child grows up in the first years of life is basically the second womb. It’s also gestating something deep, allowing something to mature. If that second womb doesn’t have the right care, attention, and love, then something goes awry with the child.
So, we must find new motivations, new attitudes, a new source for how we live ethically and generously. It’s the intention, the mood behind it, that is gestating something. Then when we sit down to meditate or start being mindful, we have a reference point for something that feels really good, for an attitude and intentionality that is nurturing and supportive. With that, you see much more clearly when you start deviating from it. You start seeing the way that we harm ourselves when we get involved in the categories of things subsumed under the Theravāda2 Buddhist list: greed, hate, and delusion.
Those things harm us, but we often don’t see it because with greed, hate, and delusion, the orientation is out of ourselves. There’s an object for greed, an object for hatred. Even if the greed and hatred are towards something inside of ourselves, we treat ourselves as an object, not as a subject, not as a whole. If we start finding an attitude, a motivation, a way we want to hold ourselves that feels like a good womb, the right conditions to let a spiritual joy arise, then we can feel and see when we deviate from that and see the self-harm that it causes. “That’s not going in a good direction. I’d rather not.” Not because it’s moralistic, but rather, “Wow, I just lost myself. I just got disconnected from the profound place where I’m cultivating something that’s going to be born here.” Or maybe it’s already been born, and now it’s time to let it grow and mature.
A primary condition for giving birth, gestating, growing, and maturing is you have to be in the present moment. You have to be attentive to here and now, because it’s only here and now where that conditioning factor can operate. It’s only here and now that we can be fed and learn and grow.
I wanted to read for you one of the primary characteristics of the Dharma3. Dharma here might be the Buddhist teachings, but I think it’s actually something much more profound. The word Dharma can also mean nature. So I like to think of this description of the qualities of the Dharma as the qualities of our inner nature, the very thing that we want to cultivate and give birth to. It’s a natural thing inside of us, so we have to be very careful that we’re not trying to think our way to it or imagine it. The idea is to be spacious, to allow space.
The Dharma is visible. I don’t think the Buddha ever told people that it’s important to be here and now. He had a different approach. He said the Dharma is visible. You have to be here and now to see what’s visible. But the emphasis is not this abstraction of “here and now.” The Dharma is always something visible, here and now.
It’s immediate. It’s not in the future and it’s not in the past.
It is to be seen. So that’s our job. It’s visible, and we should see it. And where is it in time? It’s now, immediate.
The next one is usually translated as “onward leading.” I love this because what I found through my own practice is that at some point, what’s directly experienced is how the path is opening as you keep going. “Oh, this is the way forward. This is where practice is inviting us. Come here, follow this path.” Other translators translate this word, opanayiko4, as “to be applied.” I also love that. The Dharma is not something to just sit back and do nothing about. The Dharma is to be applied, to be engaged. Some people translate it as “suitable.” So whatever is visible here to be seen is suitable for engaging the path of practice.
And then, it’s to be personally realized by the wise. That’s supposed to be you, the wise.
These terms are very powerful because they put the focus on our direct, lived experience of what’s visible. And what is visible here now in our inner life is the very natural way in which life is always living, always active, always changing. We’re seeing the activity of life in us. We’re not static. We’re watching the leaves come out during spring, watching them turn yellow and fade away. We’re watching the thoughts that come and go, the emotions that come and go. We’re watching the growth of confidence, kindness, and presence. We’re watching the coming and going of stability and how we lose that. We can watch and see how we get caught up in our minds and emotions, get attached and reactive.
These are all things that are visible, that we can feel or know in the here and now. This instruction is not about something metaphysical or supernatural. It’s not about having some cosmic consciousness experience in the future. Whatever the Dharma is, you can see it now. It’s available to all of you. It’s not mysterious. If you see that you have a little bit of greed, if you see you’re a teeny bit attached, if you see that you were accidentally reactive—whatever it is, if you see it, you’re beginning to see the Dharma. You’re beginning to see, “Oh, this is visible. I know it.” And the only place to know it is now. It’s immediate.
“To be seen.” Oh, that’s bad news. I’m supposed to look at it. Yes. So many people, for lots of reasons including being busy, don’t really take a deep look at what’s happening. They’re on to the next thing. So to take a deep look—what is this reactivity? What is this greed? Now that I see it, how do I feel it? How does it operate in me? Is it growing? “Yep, now that I have to look at it, I’ve been getting more and more angry over the last 20 years. Is this what I want to keep feeding, or is there a way to stop feeding it so it can fade away?”
To be involved with hostility and feed it is onward leading to more hostility. You can feel that at some point. Rumination is like a cow that’s regurgitated its food and is chewing it even better so it can get nourished by it. Well, if you chew your self-criticism and how terrible you are over and over again, that’s the food you’re feeding yourself. They say that one of the leading causes of depression is rumination. We create our own mood music with how we think over and over again.
But other things are onward leading towards kindness, honesty, presence, and freedom. And you can feel that too. “To be personally realized by the wise.” I love this, because it’s really meant to be you. The whole orientation of the Dharma is that we’re to become our own teachers. We’re supposed to learn how to read the Dharma book that’s in our own hearts, in our own world. To do that, we have to know that it’s visible, something we can touch and see right here and now. It’s immediate. It’s here to be seen. We should take a deep look and apply the mindfulness, apply the attention, and discover how it affects us and if it’s onward leading in a good way.
Certainly, we can see when there’s greed, hate, and delusion. That’s the beginning of seeing the Dharma. The other half of that is to see that the greed falls away sometimes, the hatred stops, the delusion is no longer there. To see that there’s an alternative. “Oh, I don’t have to always be that way. There is another way. Let me make room for that. Let me be inspired by that.” That is visible too.
This is not about working for some grand Buddhist project far in the future. It’s about seeing here. Know what it’s like to see, hear, feel, taste, smell in a new way—without greed, hatred, and delusion, but rather with generosity, non-harming, and clarity.
So that’s what the Dharma is. And so to stop and be here for it. Now, I know it’s very unrealistic to do this in the modern world we have. It’s kind of silly because some of us have so much to do, long to-do lists, and work is crazy. Nowadays, you’re supposed to work seven days a week, long hours. To make sure you’re in that treadmill, they feed you so you can’t leave. Just work, work, work, and there’s always more to be done. Rushing, rushing, rushing.
Be careful. Everything is onward leading. Everything you do is the womb which is cultivating something in there. And if you live your life always rushing, always disconnected, always separated, you’re growing something different, something not so useful. Careful what you do. You are invaluable, each person. As the Buddha said, “to be known by the wise.” To me, that’s just another way of saying you’re wonderful, you’re important. And your inner life is important. Care for it well.
See what you can do to begin caring for your inner life as if it’s the most important friend you have, the most important relative you have. Care for it. Some of you might like the idea that it’s a baby or an embryo, that kind of tenderness. Care for it, know it, and don’t worry about how you do that. Because when you bring mindfulness and attention to care for this inner world, if you’re off in some way—if you’re a little bit too self-absorbed, or trying too hard, or too saccharine about it—you’ll get the feedback. Mindfulness is self-correcting.
So please care for yourself, care for your inner life, so that you can care for this world. Because not only do we have a womb inside of ourselves, we collectively are creating a womb for everyone else to live in. And we would like that to be one that is nourishing and supports the best in everyone.
So those are my thoughts coming out of the mountains. Thank you. We have this community meeting in about half an hour. Maybe some of you would like to say hello to the people next to you and just introduce yourself or check in and start breaking the ice. Or if you have to go, you’re welcome to leave. They will ring a bell, and hopefully some of you will help set up chairs. I look forward to the meeting.
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravāda Buddhist monk. The name was transcribed as “Ajan Suchito.” ↩
Theravāda: The oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. The word was transcribed as “terraod.” ↩
Dharma: (In Sanskrit) or Dhamma (in Pali) refers to the teachings of the Buddha, but can also mean “cosmic law and order” or “nature.” ↩
Opanayiko: A Pali word, one of the six characteristics of the Dharma, meaning “leading onward,” “to be applied,” or “bringing one to the goal.” The word was transcribed as “panayako.” ↩