This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Medt’n: Just Hearing; Dharmette: Buddhism Beyond the Lists (5/5): Collections Not Cores. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, welcome. How are you all doing this morning? I love all these weather reports. I think it’s just foggy here. I’m in Redwood City, not too far from IMC, Insight Meditation Center, the mothership, so to speak. And there was a time when I would drive to IMC and do 7 a.m., but now I’m at home. Some of you may know that I teach at IMC on Mondays, so I certainly am driving there regularly, and these days I’m also teaching on Thursdays. There’s something really great about just seeing all the different locations that we find ourselves coming here together. I love it.
For those just joining us, welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. And of course, a warm welcome to everybody who’s not in the chat. And welcome to those people in the future that might be listening to this, who knows when, right? It’s kind of fun to imagine that a few hours later, a few days, a few years later, people might be listening to this.
Okay. So, today is the last day in this series that I’m doing, “Buddhism Beyond the Lists,” just talking about some things that aren’t on any of these many beautiful lists. As an aside, some of you may know that there’s a very thick book in the Pali Canon1 that’s nothing but lists and some explanations. Often it feels like there’s not enough explanation for the lists, though. There’s so many. But I wanted to do this series about some of the things that are an integral part of practice but aren’t explicitly on lists.
So, for this morning’s guided meditation, after we settle, I’m going to drop in some encouragement, some suggestions as a way to practice for just a minute or two, and then you can go back to your regular practice. So, just an encouragement: try it out, look at it, or engage with it. It might be a little awkward or clunky, or a little bit like, “Wait, what?” But maybe that can be okay. There’s just an engagement with practice, maybe in a little bit of a different way this morning. And of course, you’re welcome to just ignore it all, even turn off the audio and come back for the dharmette. You’re welcome to do whatever suits you, whatever pleases you. You don’t have to take anything I’m saying, but maybe you have some curiosity, and just an encouragement to engage for a little bit.
Okay. So with that as an introduction, if you haven’t already, let’s get into our meditation posture.
Is there a way that you can more completely arrive at this moment, at this location? The body being in this particular posture formation. Maybe in some kind of way, different parts of our attention are elsewhere. Can there be an encouragement to just land here now?
It can be helpful to connect with a tangible experience, such as the pressure against the body where it is in contact with the sitting surface. Feeling the contact on the body where the body rests on the cushion, the chair, maybe even the bed, couch, wherever you find yourself at this moment. It might be the contact on the back as it rests on the backrest. The buttocks as it sits on seats. We even have sits bones that sit on seats. I feel like they should say in Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. Sorry. The back of our legs, our feet, they’re being supported. Can we tune into them? Feel the support.
Sometimes we hold a little bit of tension in the face, around the eyes or the jaw. Sometimes the shoulders are a little bit higher than they need to be.
Then resting attention on those sensations of breathing. Being tuned into, aligned with the movements the body makes as it breathes, or the sensations that can be experienced as breathing occurs.
It wouldn’t be surprising if sometimes you found yourself lost in thought. When you wake up from being lost in thought, no need to make it a problem. We just very simply, gently begin again.
Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We’re just feeling, experiencing the sensations that are associated with breathing. Not so much from the control tower in the head, but more from the torso.
You may open and relax into the awareness of various sounds, opening to this soundscape. Whether there’s a lot of sounds or just a few, whether they’re quiet or loud, just noticing the soundscape.
And then we can ask ourselves a question: What is knowing these sounds? Clearly, we’re aware of them. But can we find what is knowing the sounds? So look in the mind. Where is knowing the sounds? The sounds are being known. Is there a knower?
And then we’ll just simply return to the sensations of breathing. Tuning into the experience of the body breathing, wherever that’s obvious and comfortable for you.
Let’s do that again. Opening to sounds. Clearly, we’re aware of sounds, but can we find what is knowing the sounds? Is there some thing that knows? Maybe there’s irritation arising, frustration arising, annoyance arising, or maybe there’s curiosity or puzzlement arising. Whatever it is, can that be okay? Because when we investigate what is knowing the sounds, we see there’s nothing to find. There isn’t a knower. Even though knowing is happening, there isn’t a knower.
And then just simply returning to the sensations of breathing, hanging out with the breath.
Thank you. Thank you for sitting together, and for those of you who did, for playing along with this idea of looking for the knower of sounds. Thank you.
So today is the last day of this exploration of Buddhism beyond the lists. And today I’d like to point a little bit to the goal of practice, which can be described in a number of different ways. We could say it’s a dropping away of identity with anything in the world. This shift of identity from taking anything as a self. It’s this shift of identity from being the person who is caught in suffering towards liberation. One way we could talk about liberation is deeply knowing that there isn’t this self, this core, the center of experience.
I appreciate that Jack Kornfield wrote an article in the fall 2010 issue of Inquiring Mind. I’m pretty sure if you’re interested, you can find that at sati.org, where they’re hosting the Inquiring Mind archives. Anyway, Jack Kornfield describes the ways that awakening, enlightenment, can be expressed in different individuals. He talked about Dipa Ma2, who was like this grandmotherly sort in this tradition, and her enlightenment awakening was described as this profound love for everyone. In contrast, Suzuki Roshi3, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, expressed enlightenment as just being completely where you are and letting go of being anyone special, and instead just having beginner’s mind. And then in contrast to that, Mahasi Sayadaw4 expressed enlightenment as just abiding in emptiness, which got expressed as this unshakable equanimity5.
So we could describe awakening as this shift away from this idea that there’s a central core in the center, and once this has been known, it can get expressed in a number of different ways.
What is this idea that we have this core or essence? It’s common sense. Most often, there’s this idea that there’s something at the center, and then there are experiences that happen to the center. This is often the belief: that this core or this essence or this center has memories that get accumulated, or desires that get accumulated, or beliefs about the meaning of life or whatever it may be, or even knowledge that this core accumulates. That’s often what, without even realizing it, without investigating, is our assumption about what we are, what the self is.
But what Buddhism points to, and what deep practice points to, and what enlightenment points to, is that this model isn’t correct. It’s actually not accurate. There isn’t a “you” at the center of experience. I mean, clearly there are memories and desires and intentions and sensations and so forth, and these things exist. Of course they do. And they’re all integrated and they all overlap in some kind of way. But that’s different than having a core. It’s different than having this solid, separate entity of some kind. Because all these components—beliefs, memories, experiences—they are connected. All these different components that are arising and passing are connected because they belong to one body and one brain.
But also, they’re connected because a narrative is getting created that connects them. There’s a way in which we’re kind of knitting together these little pieces and saying, “Oh, this is happening because of that, and this is arising because of this other thing,” or something like that. But those ideas that this is arising because of that are ideas. These are things that are happening in the mind that are creating this arc that’s knitting together our experiences. And plus, let’s be honest, we do things because of other things. What we desire is partly related to our beliefs, and our beliefs are partly related to experiences. So there are all these things that are integrated in some kind of way and connected, but this is different than this idea that there’s some separate, distinct core at the center to which different things happen. No, it’s just a bunch of things happening. And these things are connected. And maybe these connected things are you, rather than this core.
So often when we hear these ideas, maybe for the first time, our reactions are puzzlement or some disbelief, like, “I don’t know, it seems so obvious I have a self, humongous in here or something like this.” Maybe we’ve never really given it that much thought, or maybe we would just want to be dismissive. Like, “That’s silly. Some of this Buddhism stuff sounds nice, but that idea of not having this core, this essence, I don’t know about that,” and we just want to dismiss it without investigating or seeing if it’s true.
And so during this guided meditation was an encouragement to investigate, because you do not have to believe anything I’m saying. The encouragement is to bring some curiosity, maybe a little bit of humility and some open-mindedness, and see for yourself. I love this about Buddhist practice, this real encouragement for us to see for ourselves, to be empiricists, to be investigators of our own beautiful, wild, and precious lives.
So this investigation requires us to distinguish experience—what’s actually being experienced, felt, heard, or seen—from ideas, from thoughts, from concepts. And I talked about this yesterday, how concepts are different than experiences. And it turns out a self is a concept. And what we are is a collection of experiences, but we’re using concepts to knit these experiences together into a narrative that makes sense. So, we’re the collection of all the experiences in life.
I’m influenced by this TED talk that was given by Julian Baggini over 10 years ago. He gave a number of different examples, and here are two of them. One is this whole idea that “water” is a label we assign to H₂O: two hydrogen and one oxygen. Most of us know this. Of course, it’s not like there’s this core, this essence of water that has one hydrogen, another hydrogen, and then an oxygen stuck to it, right? Of course not. That’s silly even to think about it. Water is just two hydrogen and an oxygen hanging out together. We understand this very easily. And so it turns out that everything in the universe is the same. There’s a collection of things hanging out together, and we put a label, a concept, on them because it’s helpful and useful and appropriate. And sometimes practice is about teasing apart the concept from the collection, maybe we could say.
So we could also say a microphone that I’m using so that you guys can hear me. There’s this diaphragm that vibrates and there are magnets and coils and wires, and I don’t know exactly what’s in there, but somebody knows. So we understand very, very clearly that if we put together all these parts in a particular configuration, boom, there’s a microphone and it works. We all know this. Also rainbows, right? Sunlight and water. And then there also needs to be an eye and a brain that sees what happens, the prismatic effect of water and light. Rainbows are real, but they’re insubstantial.
So, we could ask, why might this self be different than anything else in the universe? Why think of ourselves as somehow not just being a collection of our parts? But somehow we think it’s a separate or this permanent entity that owns parts, but actually it’s just parts. And neuroscience tells us this, right? They’ve been looking for this center and don’t find it. And psychologists have these different models of psychology, and none says, “Oh, yeah, and then here’s the self that has all these models,” right?
So to be sure, this doesn’t mean that we don’t exist. Of course, we exist. But there’s something beautiful when we realize that we’re a collection, and there’s this way in which it allows a certain freedom and openness. And it allows the love to shine through. It allows compassion and equanimity to just be shining through when there’s no longer this constriction of a self.
So this idea of Buddhism beyond the list is pointing to one way that we can understand awakening as this deep realization that there isn’t a self. There isn’t a core. There isn’t an essence at the center of all our experience that is separate from everything else. And there’s this way in which realizing this makes possible this tremendous, beautiful freedom for everyone.
So, thank you. Thank you for practicing with me today. It’s been so great to be with you all these mornings. Buddhism beyond the lists. The lists are beautiful and helpful, and there’s so much that’s not in the lists. We could say the lists help us to discover this freedom. So just a deep bow, a deep bow of appreciation. Thank you.
And maybe I’ll say here, my heart was touched. I described last week how I kind of sheepishly launched this new website, dianaclarkdharma.org, and some of you actually went there. So thank you. Thank you for that very much. As I’m dipping my toes into being a dharma teacher in the bigger world here. So, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.
I’m reading the comments, the chat box. It’s lovely. Thank you all. Thank you so much. And some of you will remember that earlier in the week I talked about community. Ah, there’s community. So nice. It makes a difference to practice together.
Maybe I see that somebody said, “I looked up the website and couldn’t find it.” It’s so new that Google hasn’t found it yet. So, you know, I’m just new to this. I’m going to have to figure out how to let Google know that this website exists. So, it’s just dianaclarkdharma.org. I think you just have to type in the URL. I’ll figure these things out. But I don’t know, I just thought I would share with you guys my just, you know, getting started with this. Thank you.
Oh, it’s so nice that many of you are writing in there. I appreciate Debbie, you write, “You support us, Diana. We support you.” Thank you. Right. This is how community works and this is why it’s so helpful to practice together. So many different ways that we can support one another.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend, whatever the weather might be, wherever you are. Thank you for all the hearts. I’m sending hearts to you guys. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Pali Canon: The standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, as preserved in the Pāli language. It is the most complete existing early Buddhist canon. ↩
Dipa Ma (1911-1989): A prominent Indian Buddhist meditation teacher of the Theravada tradition. She was a key figure in the transmission of Vipassanā meditation to the West. ↩
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971): A Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center and is the author of the classic book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. ↩
Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982): A renowned Burmese Theravada Buddhist monk and meditation master who had a significant impact on the teaching of Vipassanā (insight) meditation worldwide. ↩
Equanimity (Upekkhā in Pali): One of the four Brahmavihāras (sublime states). It refers to a state of mental calmness, composure, and evenness of mind, especially in the face of the vicissitudes of life. It is a balanced state of mind, free from attachment and aversion. ↩