Monday, July 18, 2022
GOING AGAINST THE STREAM
Here is our practice theme for the week:
“There is one thing that when cultivated and regularly
practiced leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to
awareness and clear comprehension, to vision and
knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the
culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is
that one thing? It is awareness centered on the body.”
— The Buddha
Three thoughts as we continue our practice as spiritual friends:
1. Our Monday evening guided meditations start with a generous period of deeply relaxing the body and mind; taking plenty of time to enjoy the pleasure of relaxation; followed by a gentle investigation into the nature of reality in order to discover the roots of suffering, and to dissolve those roots, for ourselves and all beings;
2. The primary awareness skills we use in Four Foundations practice are clearly observing, understanding, trusting, and nourishing our own direct experience of life, as opposed to experiencing our imaginary and preconceived ideas about life;
3. The first thing that comes into play when we meditate is the need to clearly understand our relationship to language.
Our meditation theme this week takes us straight to this territory.
In tonight’s guided meditation, for example, we start as usual by taking generous time to relax the body and settle the mind, and to enjoy the pure pleasures of deep relaxation. Then, with our relatively calmed and clarified awareness, we’ll start to play with the words “breath” and “body.” With caring interest we’ll gently tease out what these words point to in our actual experience, as opposed to what we expect to encounter based on our unexamined relationship to language, and on how language defines the experience of “breath” and “body.”
As we continue, we’ll start to catch clear glimpses of how powerfully language shapes the very most basic experiences of our life. It does this most often by creating firm conviction in our ideas about experience, as opposed to the lived reality of experience. Most to the point—because meditation is about learning to end suffering—we begin to notice how this basic mental mistake sets up extensive arrays of automated reactive behaviors to the imagined experiences, created by thoughts, as opposed to the reality we are actually experiencing. Imagination creates suffering, while reality is bliss, so this is a problem!
At some level, we already know that unquestioned belief in our thoughts creates big problems in our lives. We make snap judgments about people that turn out to be wrong. Only later do we discover that we judged a good person as bad, or the reverse. We suffer memories of people who hurt us with words and actions long ago, even once they are far removed from our lives, and even if they are dead. Someone says “no,” but we hear “yes.” We hear a baby crying; it’s just a cat yowling. We succeed at something and when ten people praise us, and one criticizes, we dwell entirely on that one, hurting over and over.
And so it goes.
Tonight and this week, let’s stay wide open to noticing how deep this mental mistake goes, of believing in our ideas about reality, instead of seeing reality clearly and then living our lives, in our words and actions, aligned with that clear seeing. Let’s stay open to noticing that reality, in our tangible experience, and thus without the slightest doubt, is far different from our current ideas, beliefs, and accepted certainties about “the way things are.” The Buddha said that the way of the meditator goes “against the stream.” This is what he meant, that when we discover reality as it actually is, it not only differs somewhat from our personal expectations and beliefs, it goes entirely against those beliefs. It goes “against the stream.” So be ready, then, to summon courage as we embark on Four Foundations practice. Because believing in our actual experience, as opposed to our thoughts, requires us to go against the stream not only of our personal beliefs, but of the original source of those beliefs, in society at large. That is, against the conventional wisdom that we being to automatically absorb as the unquestioned truth of reality, of “how things are,” from our very first breath.
To keep things simple and practical, let’s focus this week on one particular understanding that we have learned about reality in this way, namely that at its most basic level, reality is solid. Like the body. If we want to demonstrate the supposed fact of reality’s solid nature to someone, in order to prove this fact beyond all argument, we typically will tap on some part of our body with a finger. “See?” we say. “Solid.”
For now let’s put aside the issue of how to irrefutably disprove the supposed fact of solidity as the fundamental nature of this body and this life. Because this is mostly a matter of actual practice, and its realization usually unfolds gradually, and with loving patience, as we return over and over to our actual experience of breath and body.
This is the very path we are on as spiritual friends.
But let’s be patient for now on this score, while in the meantime simply noticing how absolutely vital it is, by discovering a fruitful way to practice, to get as clear as we can on this one question about our experience of life: Do we experience fundamental solidity or not?
By solidity I mean density, compactness, irreducible hardness and locality— because a solid thing is always located somewhere in space. Do we ever experience this solidity as reality, in awareness? Putting aside all other possible fundamental experiences such as form, weight, color, texture and so on, stay for now with searching for solidity as an experience more than all the others, because this one is most critical.
Why is that so? Why is the experience—and more the point, the total absence of solidity in our experience—so fundamental in meditation and, in particular, in the Four Foundations practice we are doing?
It’s because the mind’s belief in the reality of solidity—density, irreducible hardness, locality—causes tension in the body, and this is the basis of suffering. To put it simply: Believing in solidity causes suffering. So, once we dispel that belief, by experiencing and grounding ourselves in the absence of solidity, we stop suffering.
The breath is a wonderful way to start experiencing the absence of solidity because the breath, while undeniably real and vitally alive, is itself very nearly absent of solidity. That’s why the Buddha has us start Four Foundation practice by observing the breath, and by using our experience of the the breath to help us calm the body and mind. Then, we use the calm and relaxed mind to systematically search through our experience of lift to see if any solidity can be found. If not, we can then very enjoyably relax into the experience of non-solidity, as blissful. This is the essence of the first two steps of mindful breathing, which is noticing the long breath (Step 1) and the short breath (Step 2).
Then we move in the next two steps, from the experience of the breath (Steps 1 & 2), into the experience of the body (Steps 3 & 4).
The critical thing to notice, as we make this transition, is that the very experience of the non-solidity of the breath can be experienced in the body, as well as the breath. After all, the non-solid breath enters the body and then spreads through the whole body. In this way, via Step 3—which is “to experience the whole body”—we can directly experience how the breath spreading through the whole body, can spread with it the experience of the whole body not as solid but as non-solid, spacious, borderless and vast. In this way, the same bliss that we felt in experiencing the breath, we start to feel throughout the body as well.
We feel the spreading sense of the spacious breath throughout the body, starting to dissolve all of the long-held kinks, knots and tensions stored and tucked away in so many places through the body. The mind way well kick in at this point, with thoughts that deny this dissolving of tension that you are having at this point. The mind may continually resist, trying to continue to persuade you of the body’s solidity, and its impermeability to the spreading, healing breath. But stay with the experience of non-solidity, and that experience will start to dissolve those very thoughts, along with the bodily tensions it is also dissolving.
The Buddha offered a beautiful analogy for this experience. He said the breath spreading through the body is like a cool spring, emanating from beneath a lake, and then constantly feeding into the lake and spreading its freshness throughout the lake. So, as we move through Steps 3 & 4—experiencing the whole body (3) and calming the whole body (4)—we can bring to mind this image, experiencing breath and body in the same way. We can cool and refresh the whole body with the breath as it surges up from the depths, over and over, into the body.
Let’s return to the question of language, to wrap things up for today.
Notice how the very fact that language has two labels—“breath” and “body”—causes us immediately to believe that two separate and distinct things, breath and body, actually exist in reality. But are they, in our actual experience, truly separate and distinct? By the Buddha’s analogy, not really. At the very least, the Buddha suggests that the one apparently separate thing, the breath, melts into the other, the body, in our actual experience. And in so doing, reveals that what appeared at first to be two separate things—the breath and the body, the spring water and the lake—turned out in the end, to be one and the same.
As you practice this week, see if you can loosen your understanding of “breath” and “body” as separate things, and in this way increasingly experience them as seamlessly melting, one into the other, like the spring water flowing into the lake.
Especially, see if your body, which you unconsciously understand as irreducibly solid— dense, compact and tension-filled—can be experienced more and more like the spacious and borderless breath as it spreads through the body, relaxing and releasing tension as it goes. In time, see if the experience arises of the body as the breath, and the breath as the body—these apparently two things, experienced in reality as one.
See you tonight!
With love 🙏☀️
Doug