This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Born Through The Five Reflections - 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 website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good morning. The thing about the food in the potluck is that the food is probably mostly the excuse for being together. So we don’t get too concerned about there being too little; there can just be too little friendship. It’s a time to be together in a friendly way. Especially for those of you who are new, I hope the people around you will say hello. But if they don’t, say hello to them, because people here are friendly and happy to be in connection.
There’s a certain kind of interpersonal connection we try to avoid here, and that is spreading disease. Flu season is coming, so there are a couple of things we ask. One is, if you’re coughing, there’s a famous way of coughing, which is into your elbow. That way, it doesn’t spread too far. Don’t cough into your hand, because then you’ll touch something. Also, if you have any symptoms of a cold and you’re fairly confident you’re not contagious, we still ask you to wear a mask when you come. This not only limits contagion but also supports the meditation environment. Most people would like to meditate in a place where they feel safe, and if someone has a lot of symptoms around them, it’s a little bit hard to relax in the deeper way of meditation. So, it supports the purpose we’re here for.
If that’s uncomfortable for you, well, there’s no Buddhism without being uncomfortable. If Buddhism depended on being comfortable all these centuries, it wouldn’t have made it down to us. Learning how to be comfortable with discomfort is one of the great tasks of this practice.
It’s possible that there’s no Buddhist word for the English word “sacred.” But if there was such a word that qualifies, it’s the word Buddhists use called “noble.” There’s the Noble Eightfold Path, for example, and there are those people who are the noble ones. The noble ones are those people in whom the Eightfold Path has been born and grown, and they almost become the Eightfold Path. So the path is noble, and what the path does to us is ennobling.
This idea of the path is very important in Buddhism. There are ancient teachings that the path is not outside of you. You can’t come to IMC and look under the carpet or the stage and ask, “Where is that Eightfold Path?” You won’t find it here, unfortunately. You won’t find it in any temple or any Buddhist place. The path is only found in yourself. It’s an engagement, a way of living a life that you have a potential for and that you enact.
This path of practice is sometimes described as being born in us. The implication is that it’s then going to grow and develop over time, not as something external, but as a kind of natural inner development and maturation. We’re recognizing a potential that we can give birth to, that we can awaken. The metaphor of giving birth to it makes it very personal.
If we extend this metaphor, a human birth generally doesn’t happen immaculately. It requires conditions to come together. One of the primary conditions is the coming together of an egg and a sperm. For this path to be born inside of us, two conditions need to come into play and meet. The first is a very general term that encompasses a huge part of what it means to be human, and that is awareness. The second is to be aware of something in particular. These are the two things that have to meet for the path to be born.
We start with this topic of awareness. We are Homo sapiens, those who know. This is a hugely important capacity of human beings that is generally undervalued. It’s also a multifaceted capacity. We have many faculties for attention, many ways in which we take in information from within us and the world around us, register it, process it, and adapt and change accordingly so we can find our way through this life.
Many of these capacities for attention and sensing happen subconsciously; they don’t happen deliberately. It’s kind of a miracle that we have all these different capacities. I’m fond of doing this imaginary trip back to the beginning of this planet when there was just a soup of amino acids. It took a long time for these to form more complicated molecules, and then somehow they began replicating. Eventually, something that looked like life emerged, with the ability to respond to the environment. Over time, these primitive forms of life became more and more complex, developing specialized cells to sense the environment. As they evolved, they constantly adjusted to fit into their environmental niche.
We humans are amazingly complex. We’ve inherited all the adaptations of previous life forms, giving us a vast array of sensory and knowing capacities so that we can be adaptable and respond appropriately to our world. When we say we’re cultivating present moment awareness, we are tapping into the full array of our attentional faculties.
Just to give you some semblance of how rich that world of sensing is: we have eyes that sense visual objects, ears for hearing, noses for smelling, tongues for tasting, and skin for tactile touch. And that’s just the beginning. There’s proprioception, where we know our balance and where we are in space. We have all kinds of sensory nerve receptors that pick up different pieces of information: temperature, pain, and pleasure. I’ve heard of people who don’t have pain receptors, and it’s hard to survive without them; they injure themselves quite a bit.
We have chemoreceptors that have to do with hunger and thirst. We have a whole sensory apparatus for nausea. The body itself uses this information to adjust. There are sensors that measure carbon dioxide and oxygen in the blood, so our breathing adjusts accordingly. A remarkable thing about very deep meditation is how little we need to breathe, perhaps because the brain, the biggest energy user, gets very calm and still. It’s happened to me and to others that in a state of deep contentment, I realized I wasn’t breathing, and then I gasped, and my mind said, “I’m going to die.” It took a while to learn that in this deep state, you’re not going to die if you don’t feel like you’re breathing.
Part of the richness of being aware in the present is that we avail ourselves of a whole richer range of sensory input. To practice mindfulness as an embodiment where we really feel grounded in our body means we’re putting ourselves in the mode of receiving so much of the physical information the body is providing all the time. If we’re too busy to notice our body, we don’t consciously receive enough of that information to make conscious adjustments. I’ve been tense with my shoulders approaching my ears and didn’t know it because I was so concerned about what I was tense about. Only when there was a pause did I check into my body and realize how tense my shoulders were. Poor shoulders, they wanted to relax.
In Buddhism, awareness or mindfulness is not just sensory information. It’s not just feeling the sensations of the body, which is half of what mindfulness is. The other half is our cognitive capacity to recognize what’s happening. Some people prefer sensing and not cognizing; others prefer cognizing and not sensing. The idea is that these work together in harmony.
Knowing is also a vast faculty. To know something requires memory. To leave here today, you have to remember which shoes are yours. To find your shoes, you have to have some sense of direction and spatial layout. Part of the ability to cognize is also visualizing. You can close your eyes and visualize this space. Imagination is a part of knowing. When I see a red light while driving, I can imagine the consequence if I keep going, so I think it’s a good idea to stop.
Imagination and predicting the future are important parts of the cognitive world. In Buddhism, we sometimes have a simplistic idea that you’re not supposed to do that, that you should just be in the present moment. But it turns out the present moment, to some degree, contains the past and the future. It comes along naturally because we have this very rich, multifaceted capacity for knowing and cognizing.
As we practice mindfulness, there is a movement toward what is called wholeness, to be inclusive, where everything is included. Some people describe that at some point in doing Buddhist meditation, there’s a feeling the mind has become expansive. Our sense of beingness becomes expansive because it begins to encompass all these different sensory and cognitive faculties. They can all operate non-deliberately.
One of the ways of practicing mindfulness is to do just enough deliberate emphasis on attention to start overcoming the forces of distraction—the ways in which we’re not present because we’re so preoccupied with thoughts, agendas, hurts, and desires. We limit ourselves dramatically by being pulled into stories and ideas. We don’t allow the richness of all our faculties to operate together. There comes a time when there’s a unification, where all this comes into harmony and works together.
So, maybe that’s the egg that’s needed for the path to be born. We’re cultivating this capacity to be, if you will, impregnated—to allow something profound to happen to us that can’t happen if we’re caught up and distracted. In Buddhism, there’s this idea that we’re preparing ourselves for something to be born that we can’t orchestrate, create, or engineer.
So what is it that can meet this capacity for awareness? What can we know that might be the catalyst for something wonderful?
This is a very famous teaching in Buddhism called the Five Reflections. The Buddha taught this specifically for monks, nuns, lay men, and lay women. He said all people should contemplate these five subjects. He puts it in the first person, so you’re supposed to put it in your own voice:
These first three are the reflections the Buddha had before he started his path to awakening. It was this reflection that motivated him to search for freedom—freedom from the suffering and oppression of being trapped by sickness, old age, and death.
What you do and how you behave is not inconsequential. You create your own refuge, your own safety, your own future.
The Buddha then goes on to say that the benefit of doing this reflection is that it counteracts a certain kind of vanity or conceit. There’s a vanity around youth, around health, and around being alive that can be problematic. He says that those who are intoxicated with the vanity of youth, health, or life will do harmful things of body, speech, and mind. The Buddha is phenomenally concerned with not causing harm. This is one of the primary orientations of the path.
But the path hasn’t been born yet. This comes next. The Buddha says that for those beings who cultivate and contemplate these reflections, “In them, the path is born.” That’s the language he uses. The path is born, and they grow, develop, and make much of this path. By doing so, they give up attachments and eliminate their biases.
Isn’t that remarkable? There’s something about this contemplation—”I’m not exempt from aging”—that can give birth to the path of practice. It’s hard for someone busy with life to imagine why that would be the case. But maybe when you’re really settled, at home in yourself, feeling your aliveness because all your sensory capacities are operating in a unified whole, you’re at ease, centered, and calm. That gives a vantage point, a reference point to understand what it’s like to not be that way.
From that state, to reflect, “I’m going to age, and there’s no way around that,” you can feel what it will do to you to get involved in the vanity and conceit of attachment to youth. You know an alternative. You know a different way of being. When you’re at peace, you can recognize how quickly attachments, resistance, and frustrations arise when you get sick. You see there’s an alternative; you don’t have to get caught in that world of attachment.
The same thing with dying. If you know you’re about to die in the next 10 minutes, and someone comes to you with a problem about your credit card company overcharging you, what are you going to do? For a practitioner, knowing you’re going to die, what gets born in you? What gets awakened? Do you have something better to do than to be afraid?
For people who have cultivated this capacity to be awake and aware, to rest in the wholeness that’s possible and find that to be a place of peace, maybe of awe, freedom, love, and compassion—what if that was the alternative to calling up the credit card company and being put on hold for those last 10 minutes?
What if the alternative is the path that lives in you, the path you’ve cultivated and grown? These five reflections, which some Buddhists recite every day, are not meant to be depressing. They are meant to awaken something, to inspire something. “This is what’s important. This is what I want my life to be about. This is the path that I can have.”
So, we have this practice of cultivating the richness and fullness of our attentional capacities, of being at rest and at ease. At some point, life brings us something very profound to know that awakens this path, awakens the seeking mind, awakens the desire to give birth to the fullness of what this path of practice can do for you.
May it happen sooner than in the last 10 minutes of your life. May it awaken today.