This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Calm Knowing, Calm Sensing; Insight (2) Foundation of Knowing and Sensing - 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.
Good morning and welcome to our morning meditation.
In addressing the issue of insight as part of our practice, there are a number of ways of attending to our experience that allows for insight. As we do mindfulness practice, it’s useful to have a range of options of how to attend, which means how to be aware. One of them is very simply to know our experience. The second is to feel or sense the experience experientially, meaning through the body. These two are the foundation for developing insight. What they have in common is experiencing things in the present moment. That insight is a present moment experience, an understanding, and they come from other attentional aspects as well—present moment ways of knowing, experiencing, being aware.
In order for them to carry on their function for bringing us insight, they both have to be calm. Calm knowing, calm sensing, or spacious knowing, spacious sensing and feeling. Sometimes I think of it as giving breathing room to whatever experience we’re having in the present moment. So not to be caught up in the experience with judgments and commentary, but just to allow each thing to be as it is and to discover the joy in calmly knowing this is what’s happening, and how much we are sensing and how much we’re feeling.
Knowing is a little bit individual for each person, but there’s a posture that helps you to feel calm, helps you to feel alert. Give some care and maybe even love to that posture.
And then gently closing your eyes and beginning by knowing and sensing your body in this posture. Almost letting your attention roam around the body, refamiliarizing yourself with the present moment experience of the body. If we’re paying careful attention, the body is never the same. The experience of the body, the sense of the body is constantly shifting.
And then to gently take a few longer, slow, deeper breaths as a way of calming, centering yourself here in your experience. Relaxing on the exhale.
And letting your breathing return to normal. But with a normal breath, continue to relax your body on the exhale. Softening in the face. Softening in the shoulders. Softening the belly. Maybe as you exhale, to let there be a calming of the whole body, maybe a calming wave through the body. And as you exhale, let there be a calming of the mind, maybe a kind of settling of the mind.
Insight meditation, mindfulness meditation, begins to work best if the knowing and the sensing is done calmly. Calm knowing, as if you have all the time in the world to know something. Calm sensing, where the knowing is very simple. The simplest recognition of what’s happening in the present. The simplest way of sensing it with your body.
You might begin by doing this with your body breathing. Simple knowing of breathing in, knowing exhale as an exhale. Experimenting with a very quiet, simple, maybe almost silent, maybe silent knowing the experience of breathing in, breathing out.
Can the knowing be done from the back of the mind, so that it’s simpler, quieter?
With the mind a little gathered together, oriented to know the breathing, to know it calmly. Where something in your body and mind is nourished by the calm knowing.
And then also experimenting with sensing the bodily experience of breathing, feeling it with your body, sensing how the body experiences breathing. So the primary locus of attention now is in the body itself.
Experimenting with a calm sensing or a spacious sensing of the physical experience of breathing in and breathing out. Where the calm sensing supports a wider calming of the body.
Simple, calm knowing is an antidote to the mind thinking a lot. It’s using simple thoughts to be present. Calm sensing of the body breathing is also an antidote to being involved in discursive thinking.
Feeling any degree of calmness, settledness that might be here in your body, mind, or heart. And if you do feel some calmness, chances are that it’s a little bit of a diffuse feeling, as it should be. Breathe with the calmness. Breathe through it.
And as a support for a very simple and direct present moment awareness, calmly know breathing in whatever way that it is known. Calmly sense the sensations of breathing in whatever way they appear.
And as we come to the end of the sitting, maybe with your eyes still closed, to recall the room you’re in, the building you’re in, the location where you are, and the people who you’ll be encountering on this day or tomorrow. And to know all this calmly, to gaze upon the world calmly with goodwill for the world. With a goodwill that’s concerned for the welfare of oneself, the welfare of others, the welfare of both self and others together in community, and is concerned with the welfare of the whole world. Where the ability to gaze upon the world kindly arises out of our calm attention.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may our ability to gaze upon the world, to interact and be with others, be filled with this goodwill.
May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
So, good morning and welcome. Maybe I’ll move the umbrella for a moment.
Welcome to this second talk on insight—what the insight is of insight meditation—following the series on samadhi1. Insight is much more effective, much more penetrating, or much more wise when it’s partnered with an ability to be focused, stable, settled, where all of us is included in a kind of gathered simplicity of attention. So that when we are attending to something with our attention, with our mindfulness, it’s not a simplistic or a very narrow kind of attention, but it’s something that’s wide or full, and it’s rich with so much of who we are coming along to be present.
So part of the joy of breath meditation, being mindful of breathing, doesn’t exactly come from the experience of breathing itself, but it comes from the way in which we have this calm, stable, settled ability to really gather ourselves, really get absorbed in the experience of breathing. And then there’s a wonderful feedback loop between the breathing and how we’re aware of it. At some point in that feedback loop, in the interface between breathing and awareness, a wonderful feeling of well-being, joy, delight, a richness, a sweetness arises from the experience of breathing or maybe in that interface.
So to bring together samadhi and mindfulness, it’s very important to understand the basic building blocks of mindfulness that we’re going to be using in order to have insight. The simplest of these building blocks of attention are knowing and sensing. Knowing and feeling, feeling the experience experientially in the body.
Knowing can be nonverbal. Knowing can be very, very simple, quiet in the mind verbally. Knowing can be a little bit more wholehearted when people use mental notes, a label for the experience, saying “in” as we breathe in, “out” as we breathe out. And so breathing in, breathing out, really feeling like it’s known well, completely. Sometimes if it’s nonverbal, it’s a kind of knowing where you really are present for it. So if later someone asked you what your breathing was like, you would have something to say; you can describe some of the details of that experience because you are so present for it. If you’re sensing it, that helps. The sensing gives a lot of information for the knowing mind to sense all the different sensations that come into play as we’re breathing.
The reason why sensing and knowing are so important, or how they become important, is when they’re able to support us, together with the samadhi, to stay in the present moment, to stay in the present moment experience of things as close as we can. Because the insight we’re looking for in insight meditation arises from present moment experience.
There are other important insights we can have about our life, our psychology, the reasons why things are the way they are in our life. That can be really big “aha” moments. And we might in ordinary English call those insights. Meditation practice can support these personal insights. But the insights we’re looking for in insight meditation are not uniquely personal to oneself because of one’s own life experience. Rather, they’re called universal experiences, universal things that we can have insight about, that we can understand and see, that are so universal that they really touch some of the more fundamental, maybe we can say universal aspects of how we operate and how we live. That is deeper and more the foundation from which we have our personal experience in our life.
And so the art of Buddhist practice is to know when we are addressing personal issues that need to be addressed and when it’s useful to not mix them up with Buddhist practice too much. Maybe they’re treated elsewhere in reflections, journaling, talking with friends, a therapist, or someone. But to really put aside using meditation as a place to navigate and negotiate our personal psychology and the details of our emotional life, the stories of our emotional lives, in order to get quiet enough and still enough to begin to feel what’s underneath that personal level of our life. The level what we all have in common that is the fundamental building blocks for even our personal stories and experience.
So the art of this is knowing how to attend, what needs to be attended to, and how. Sometimes we have to attend to the influence or the powerful experiences in the present moment that are related to our life story or life events. When we have that, what we try to do in mindfulness meditation, when it’s a Buddhist practice, is to have insight about it, which means again staying in the present moment with it, making room for it, allowing it, and having the art of really being present, of knowing and sensing. Sometimes the analogy is that it’s kind of like listening deeply to a friend who needs someone to debrief with, needs someone to talk with about what’s going on. And what they need most from their friend is just being a good listener.
So sometimes we provide that for ourselves. We’re not exactly listening to the story we tell, but we’re knowing what’s actually going on in the present moment. We’re sensing what’s happening, accompanying ourselves in a deep way.
So when the shift happens from samadhi to insight, or when we’re trying to bring these together, samadhi doesn’t necessarily mean we’re becoming attuned to the details of the present moment. The details and how things shift and change, maybe it’s not so important for samadhi as it is the gathering and quieting of attention itself so that we get absorbed in the experience.
With insight, the details of the experience become important, not to be studied and investigated, but to bring into focus. As the experiences we have in the present moment change, the focus can be changed. The aperture can be changed. Sometimes with breathing, the focus can be very precise in a small little area, and sometimes what’s nice is to have a wide-angle lens. Both of them we allow ourselves to know and feel in the present moment, but sometimes it’s a small little area of breathing, sometimes it’s the whole breath body breathing. It’s different things for different times.
With mindfulness meditation, we’re kind of learning how to discover what is the aperture, what is the focus that’s useful to help us stay present for the experience in a way that’s appropriate for what’s happening in the moment. How we measure this is by what helps us to stay in the present moment, stay with the experience, helps us get more settled, helps samadhi to grow as we do the insight. And we’re learning how to know and sense in a richer way, and in a calm way.
A calm knowing, calm sensing. In the classic teachings of the Buddha on mindfulness, he first talks about knowing and sensing. When sensing, he talks about sensing the whole body, and then he says calming the body. As we calm the body, it has an influence on the mind, on our inner life, so that the knowing becomes calmer, the sensing can become calmer. There’s a wonderful reciprocal relationship with knowing and sensing supporting calm, and calm supporting a more present moment sensing and knowing.
So sensing and knowing—the more we are in this world of sensing and knowing, and the knowing again is the very simple recognition of what’s happening in the present, the simplest recognition we can have, almost like one word rather than an understanding of what’s happening where we know the big picture of why something is happening, the history of it, and where it’s going, what’s going to happen next—it’s very, very simple.
You might try that through the day. You might find situations where you can center yourself into the present moment and try to keep yourself here with your experience as you’re living it, as you’re doing it, and know and sense. A place that I do this a lot is with driving. I try to let driving be very simple, and I put aside a lot of my stories and a lot of my thinking, and just try to be in the experience of knowing and sensing with a focus on the driving. There’s a kind of a peacefulness that sometimes sets in because I’m not being distracted and caught up with my preoccupations, my thoughts and concerns with my day. I become a more active driver, but I’m also feel more gathered and more here for the experience of driving, almost like I’ve entered into a slight samadhi or a slight harmony with the driving itself in a very nice way. I’m looking at the rearview mirror, looking left and right. I’m kind of sensing and feeling and knowing as I go along. Sometimes if I do this, I arrive where I’m going calmer than I was when I started.
So the idea of using sensing and knowing as a way of staying in our present experience in a useful way and not being caught up in the stress of past, futures, and fantasy. You might try it in different activities that you do today.
So thank you very much, and we’ll continue this week with this introduction to insight. Next week we’ll start talking about the specific insights themselves. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative consciousness or concentration. It refers to the development of a calm, focused, and unified mind. ↩