This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Stopping and Seeing; Insight (1) Intro to Samadhi and Insight - Rerun. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello everyone. I’m happy to be back at this 7 a.m. sitting. I’ve been away and am happy to be back and be with you all. I’ve been teaching a two-week retreat for experienced practitioners. It was really lovely to be so deeply connected for two weeks with a group of people who are so dedicated to engaging in the practice. I’m still kind of in the momentum of that retreat, which ended yesterday.
In the fall, in September, I’m looking forward to teaching a month-long retreat for experienced practitioners. This has been a dream we’ve had for our retreat center at Insight Retreat Center since we started in 2012. We almost had a month-long retreat in May of 2020, but then the lockdown happened. So now it looks like we’re finally going to get to it. This last two-week retreat was a kind of warm-up for me.
So, welcome everyone back to this 7 a.m. YouTube session. Today, we will do a follow-up or a second part to what was started at the beginning of January, which was a series on samādhi1. The partner to samādhi is insight, or vipassanā2. Sometimes it’s combined into the term samatha-vipassanā3. Samatha here means calm, and vipassanā means clear seeing. In Chinese, when they translated Buddhist terms, they used the characters for “stop” for samatha and the ordinary word “to see” for vipassanā—stop and see.
This long, wonderful process of stopping all our proliferations, all our preoccupations, all the ways we’re caught, is a phenomenally wonderful process to be engaged in. We are slowing down the mind’s preoccupations so that we can see clearly. As we slow down, calm down, and settle down, and have some samādhi, it’s remarkable what we can see that’s not available if we’re not settled, if we haven’t stabilized the mind.
In fact, there’s a long tradition of understanding that without some degree of samādhi, it’s inconceivable to understand what’s possible in terms of the degree of clarity, peace, and well-being that’s possible for a human being. To have some degree of stability allows us to see clearly.
So, to begin this meditation today and to begin the series on insight, we begin by calling upon whatever delights you or inspires you about sitting down to meditate right now. Maybe gently close your eyes.
Maybe for some of you, it is simply to be here. Like me, I’m inspired to be here with you all for this 7 a.m. meditation. And maybe there’s a kind of happiness or gladness to have this opportunity. Some of you have done this for a long time, and so maybe there’s the comfort of familiarity. Maybe there’s the confidence of engaging in something that you believe in or value tremendously. Feel the inspiration, the joy of simply being here to meditate, and feel it in such a way that the thinking mind feels comforted or safe enough to quiet down, so you can better feel the sensations in the body, heart, and mind of well-being.
Maybe for some of you, there’s also a kind of sense of rightness in assuming your meditation posture. Maybe there’s inspiration with the posture to be back in a familiar place. Maybe a joy that this body and its posture is a bit like a temple, a sacred place that you have returned to. And in the middle of this familiar and maybe happy place, gently take a few long, deep breaths. Not too deeply, not too strongly, just enough to say hello to your breathing and for your breathing to say hello to you. Just enough for there to be a reconnection, a re-familiarity.
Letting your breathing return to normal. Part of samādhi is stability. As you exhale, an ordinary exhale, relax. Let go into how the weight of your body rests against some surface—a chair, cushion, floor, or bed. Stabilize yourself by grounding your weight on the surface.
It is as if the mind itself has weight. As you exhale, let that very light weight of the mind, maybe of awareness itself, settle and steady itself. Almost as if the mind, or at least awareness, can settle into your torso to accompany your breathing.
Relaxing the thinking mind and letting awareness enter into the sensations of the body breathing, as if it’s a coming home. As if it’s coming into a safe place, a sacred place, a supportive place, simply to be breathing in and breathing out.
As you breathe in, calm your body. As you breathe out, calm your body and mind. As you breathe, recognize any degree of calm that might be present for you. As you exhale, spread your awareness into whatever diffuse calm there is in your body.
And then, with an inner eye, an inner clarity, what do you see? How do you see that’s easier while you’re calm? If you turn your calm inner eyes towards the people of your life, with calm eyes and calm consideration, do you see them in a new way, or in a good way?
As we bring this meditation to a close, gaze upon the world kindly and offer to the world your wish for a better world, your inspiration to contribute to a better world. May it be that with your ability to be calm and to see clearly, you can promote happiness in this world, promote safety in this world, promote peace in this world. Bring greater freedom and liberation to this world.
May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful, and free.
Thank you.
So, good morning and welcome. I’m returning here with the sun beginning to come in through the windows. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can not have it so bright on my face, but I can’t complain too much about sitting in the light—the light of samādhi, the light of insight.
Welcome to the beginning of part two. Part one was, I guess, about 60 talks on samādhi, and I don’t think there’ll be so many this time around. But this part two is on insight. These two are paired in Buddhism: samādhi and vipassanā. Vipassanā is a Pali word; passa means “to see,” and vi is an emphatic prefix. So, to see in a special way; it’s often translated as “clear seeing.”
The relationship between samādhi and vipassanā, samādhi and insight, is variable. Different teachers will have different emphases. One of the contributions in the 20th century of Burmese Buddhism was to introduce people to a way of doing insight practice without the need for a very intense level of samādhi, an intense level of concentration. This was called “dry vipassanā”4 because it wasn’t supported by the strong degree of pleasure, joy, and happiness that can pervade the body when there’s samādhi.
However, the way that it was taught to me in Burma, this so-called dry vipassanā, came along with a lot of concentration anyway. It wasn’t to the degree of the very intense way that the Burmese had expected samādhi to be, but I was blessed by being able to do the insight work partnered with a degree of samādhi which is seemingly closer to how the Buddha taught vipassanā. He did not teach the most intense form of samādhi that a human being can acquire, but a lesser degree that kept people connected to their lived experience in their body, but in a way that filled the body with a sense of well-being.
Compared to the most dry form of insight where there’s no samādhi whatsoever, one way to practice them is a happy combination of the two, where there is some samādhi and an insight. The samādhi creates a good foundation for insight because you cannot have a lot of insight unless the thinking mind has settled down. Oddly enough, one of the insights is to rest or flow in the changing river, that constantly shifting, changing, inconstant experience of sensations in the body. That’s a phenomenal way that begins to loosen up attachments and clinging we have and introduce us to a whole different inner sensibility, which I sometimes call the “deep mind.”
In order for that to happen, the constantly shifting, changing, fickle nature of the thinking mind needs to quiet down. If the thinking mind becomes still and quiet, then we can start entering into this very deep mind, the deep sensations, the deep sensitivity within that opens up a whole different way of being in the world. Part of the function of samādhi is to help quiet the thinking mind, to still the mind, but to do so in a way that’s very welcoming. Of course, the mind wants to be quiet when the rewards—the sense of well-being, the sense of coming home into samādhi, into a subtleness, into this deep place of sensitivity within—feel so good, so right. It feels like this is the healthy place to be.
The thinking mind can’t believe this sometimes because the thinking mind is sometimes filled with fear, and it thinks that it has to think its way out of its fear or solve the problems it has. The thinking mind maybe has resentments, a sense of betrayal, and it’s only by ruminating on them or trying to figure out how to somehow cope with them that we can find a solution. The thinking mind is convinced that it’s going to figure this out for us. Or maybe there’s no sense of an inner life which is satisfying and meaningful and filled with well-being, and so the only avenue for happiness, success, and safety that someone knows is through the thinking mind because they don’t know an alternative. So of course, they’re going to be engaged in that and not want to give it up.
Samādhi teaches us something very different. It teaches us how there’s a profound sense of well-being that’s below the thinking mind, below the surface mind. There’s a profound sense of stillness and quiet that is a form of safety, a form of happiness, a form of joy. That allows the mind to quiet down. That’s the stopping or the stilling of the mind, the calming of the mind of samādhi, of samatha. And then it shifts to being able to see more clearly.
And seeing is not just seeing more clearly, but it’s also seeing something we don’t normally see. We don’t normally see the deep operating systems going on, the deep organizing principles by which we organize our life: the deep beliefs, the deep attitudes, the deep emotions that either support our life or undermine our life. They’re generally inaccessible by a mind that’s preoccupied in thoughts, ruminating, thinking a lot, fantasizing a lot. So there’s a whole different way of engaging ourselves that I believe is very respectful because it’s a deeper, more fully engaged part of who we are.
The combination of samādhi and insight, when samādhi is done well, is a way of becoming fully embodied. And fully embodied doesn’t mean that now we’re a hedonist feeling a lot of joy in the body. It allows for the insight to be integrated into the full range of our psychological life, our emotional life, our lived life in a way that is sometimes not possible if we don’t have a degree of samādhi. If samādhi is helping us calm and expand into the whole body, then we’re touching all the different places that the body is connected to our psychology, our emotions, the places of tension and holding, and the places of deep sense of well-being and joy.
So one of the functions of samādhi is to help us have the clarity to have insight, but it also helps the insight we have to be deeply integrated into our whole psychological makeup. Having insight be able to include all of who we are means we don’t have a spiritual bypass; it means that it’s really beneficial in our whole life. As we have a deeper and deeper sense of peace and insight, it’s good to have the insight itself be integrated into the full spectrum of our life.
The integration, the combination of samādhi and insight, is a wonderful, happy partnership. The first part of this year where we did samādhi hopefully, for those of you who did it, will set the stage—or not the stage, but set your body in place—for the ability to have insight in a way that’s deeply integrated into yourself. For those of you who might be joining now for the first time, maybe some of the benefits of samādhi won’t be so easily accessible to you. But still, as we go through this and integrate these two, you’ll probably benefit and get a sense of what’s going on here. It might open up a new orientation for you in meditation that even for a beginner might be beneficial.
So this is a very general introduction to what we’ll be doing. Some of what I just said, we’ll repeat or go into more deeply this week and more. I’m very happy to be able to begin this journey in insight. It’s been a phenomenally wonderful process and journey in my life to be on the insight journey, and now to share it with you is my pleasure. So thank you very much.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still, unified, and focused. ↩
Vipassanā: A Pāli word that translates to “insight” or “clear seeing.” It refers to the practice of observing the true nature of reality, particularly the three characteristics of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and not-self (anattā). ↩
Samatha-Vipassanā: The twin practices of tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassanā). Samatha calms the mind, creating a stable foundation for the development of vipassanā, which penetrates into the nature of reality. ↩
Dry Vipassanā (Sukkha-vipassanā): A meditation approach, particularly emphasized in some 20th-century Burmese traditions, that focuses directly on insight practice without first developing deep states of meditative absorption (jhāna). It relies on “momentary concentration” rather than the sustained concentration of samādhi. ↩