Tag: meditation

Unhooking the Self-sense

Whatever is not yours, let go of it.
Your letting go of it will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.

– Alagaddūpama Sutta, MN 22

Not me. Not mine. Uncontrollable.

Take up a lens that sees all experience as not-self.

Start with sound. Sounds are just happening – you don’t get much say in them. Listen to the whole soundscape at once, and touch it with the phrase, lightly, like brushing it with a feather.

Then the breath. If you were the breath, which breath would you be? This one? The next one?

Then feeling, the texture of what is felt. Then thought. You didn’t decide for the next thought to be there. It comes from everywhere.

Then turn toward the one meditating. The thinker, the observer, the one sensing. Where is that? How do you actually experience it?

A sunset. Vividly appearing, and you can’t hold onto it. Unhook, and notice what this way of looking does.

There is still knowing, bright and clear. Open the eyes, and notice what things look like now.

Personality, Haphazardly Assembled

No one lives his life.
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
we come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

Before you sit, grab a pen and write down your qualities and roles. Kind, caring, prickly, pedantic. Teacher, parent, neighbour. The ones you have applied to yourself, and the ones that have been applied to you. Then place the list to the side.

Settle. Let the whole body hang off the skeleton, filled with bright awareness. Tune into the gaps, the little space between the sensations, between the thoughts, between the feelings.

What is your sense of self right now? Maybe a thought. Maybe a density, a contraction. Maybe an image of yourself meditating.

Glance at the list. Are you being those things right now? Are you being caring? Are you being a friend?

They vividly appear. Yet there’s no core you can find that really is that.

Unhook. Put it to the side, and notice what happens.

The Ship of Theseus

A wooden chair on a bonfire. Flames lap at the frame, a leg falls into the ash, then the whole frame collapses. At what point is it no longer a chair?

Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness. Then bring forward your usual sense of self. Where do you locate it? Behind the eyes, in the heart, somewhere just above the body?

Now, lightly, as an experiment, let your right leg vanish into open space and be replaced by a whole new one. Then the left. The arms. The heart. An eye of a different colour. Half the brain, then all of it. Are you still you?

Where exactly are you?

Standing at the Edge of the Void

Look at the screen. Faces, a room, someone talking. Now find one small patch of it and see only colour. Points of light. The mind has to reach in to make those points into a person. Tune into that reaching, and the screen starts to thin. Paper thin.

Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness, until the whole body is held at once. Then notice how things appear now. Whatever you arrived carrying may have a little more room around it. Nothing was removed. It is being built differently.

Try seeing the body as empty. Not as an idea – as a way of perceiving. Notice what happens when the word itself arrives.

Whenever there is belief that things are real,
desire and hatred are generated.
Without that belief no defilements can occur.
And when this is completely understood,
all views and afflictions dissolve.

– Nāgārjuna, Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (translated by Rob Burbea)

Something in you may lean towards this. Something else may pull back. Fear, excitement, a voice saying this is too big to begin. Let each of them be here. How do you see yourself, standing in relation to this?

Then take the view, lightly, as an experiment. Everything you are experiencing lacks inherent existence. Vividly appearing, yet insubstantial. Points of sensation, glued by the mind into a self and a world.

Open your eyes and look at the screen again.

Just the Seen

In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen.
In reference to the heard, only the heard.
In reference to the sensed, only the sensed.
In reference to the cognized, only the cognized.

— Bāhiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10), translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Nothing added, nothing pushed away. When a sound arrives, note it lightly: hear. Not the car or the voice, just the act of hearing, acknowledged and let go as the next sound comes. With eyes open or closed, see. Light, darkness, colour, shape. Then the body — the contact where you are held up, the hands, the breath. Feel.

Then turn inward and find the same three. A felt sense in the chest, an emotion hard to name: feel in. Rest attention where thoughts seem to happen and wait, as if in the cinema of the mind. A picture of dinner arrives. A voice says you have to cook something. See in, hear in. If you get caught up, replay the last moment. Was it an image, a sound, or a feeling that drew you in?

Is there anything you know that did not come through the senses?

Just seeing, hearing, and feeling, with no you in it. Then open your eyes, and keep looking this way.

Not Me, Not Mine

You cut your fingernails and brush the clippings away. A moment ago they were you. You don’t go back for them.

Settle. Let the body be heavy, the belly soft, awareness wide enough to hold the whole of it. Then listen. A car, a voice, the hum of an appliance. As each sound arrives, label it silently and lightly: not me, not mine. This one is easy — obviously the sound isn’t you, obviously you can’t keep it. Notice what happens when you say so anyway.

Widen from there. The pressure of sitting, an ache, the rise and fall of the belly. The breath has been going all day without your permission; the air was outside a moment ago and will be outside again. If you were going to possess a breath, which one would it be, and how would you hold it? Then feeling — warmth, unease, whatever tone is here — already shifting as you turn to look. Then thoughts. Where did that one come from? Was there a decision before it arrived? Thoughts happen on their own; we take the credit after the fact.

Then look for your sense of self. It might be tight, everything glued together and about you. It might be loose and open. Either way, it is arising. Not me, not mine.

Nothing here is being got rid of. A rainbow is vividly there and has nothing solid in it. Open your eyes, look around the room, and keep looking that way.

Impressions in Awareness

A motorbike starts up in the street. You hear it, and then it is gone. You were never going to hold onto it — you couldn’t have, even if you’d tried.

Settle, and let the mind fall open. Now listen. Traffic, a bird, the hum of an appliance. Let awareness grow until it is big enough to hold all of it, then listen for the silence — in the gaps between sounds, underneath a sound while it is still going. Sounds arise out of that silence and fall back into it. Impressions in awareness.

We start with sound because sound is the easy case. Widen from there. Visual forms, reflections on the surface of a lake. The body sitting and breathing, every sensation arising inside an awareness bigger than the body. The feeling of this moment, whatever tone it has. Thoughts, each with its location and shape, and a glimmer of stillness behind them that they return to.

Then look for your sense of self. It may be subtle, barely more than a feeling that this is you. It may be coarse — craving, aversion, thoroughly identified. Either way it is sensation, feeling, and thought glued together with a label stuck on it. Me. That is just happening too. You do not need to grab any of it. You do not need to hold it still.

Rest as the awareness it all happens in. Then open your eyes, look around the room, and carry the view off the cushion.

The Call and the Question

On yearning, and letting it become a question

“What is the Matrix?”
— Neo

If you’re reading this, chances are you hear the call. The silent scream rings in your soul. The call tells you there are still unanswered questions. It’s the feeling that the universe itself is not yet resolved. A distant cry prickles your senses. As you hear it, you become aware of your own yearning. Like the open strings of a guitar, your pain and dissatisfaction resonate sympathetically with what sounds around you. There’s a longing for more understanding and intimacy with life itself.

When they are ready, the student arrives with their particular expression of this yearning. They appear in the meditation hall or by the side of their teacher. While the yearning is uniquely theirs, it is also the same yearning of the students in the suttas of the Pali Canon and the koans of Zen. Just as Neo asks “What is the Matrix?”, so Zhaozhou asks “What is the way?”

The student has been sitting, contemplating, trying, faltering. With humility, they admit their struggle. They let their yearning form into a question. They say, in effect: “This can’t be it. What can I do?”

While the call sounds out to all people — all beings experience suffering — some are less affected. They are more adept at ignoring it, the way people who live in the flight path tune out the sound of planes. Rather than respond to the call, they get used to it or avoid it through busyness. Cypher, who had seen all of it, went back into the Matrix to eat steak in blissful ignorance.

Others are shown the call in such a way that they cannot ignore it. They are initiated through an event that brings great suffering. This may not be their choice or intention, but it is an initiation nonetheless. In a single moment, they are brought into a different life where they cannot hide. They have heard the call and now it rings loudly. Whenever they slow down, there it is, in the background of silence.

The call fills my ears and heart, even as life gets better. I bow down, humbled but not humiliated.

In the path of Zen, the practitioner may be given a koan. This is a phrase or story that they stay with and explore, letting it change them. The first koan in Robert Aitken Roshi’s The Gateless Barrier is Mu, a single word that takes a stand against conventional reality.

How the koan stays with the student is the magic. Aitken shares how Wumen Huikai implores the practitioner:

So, then, make your whole body a mass of doubt, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate on this one word “Mu.” Day and night, keep digging into it. Don’t consider it to be nothingness. Don’t think in terms of “has” and “has not.” It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can’t.

Gradually you purify yourself, eliminating mistaken knowledge and attitudes you have held from the past. Inside and outside become one.

This is how we channel the call into practice. It splinters open a great doubt. “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, sings Leonard Cohen.

Opened to rather than treated as a problem, the call becomes the question. It’s a fortune cookie that contains all fortunes, but no note.

The student in the zendo, sitting before the teacher, allows a question to form. Neo follows the white rabbit. The meditator practises sitting in uncertainty.

What do you yearn for?
A guided meditation for sitting in the question, 25 minutes.

The Loving Warmth of Awareness

A sound arrives. A car in the street, a bird, someone moving in the next room. Can you hear it through love?

Settle first. Let awareness fill the body part by part until the whole space is bright, then rest with the overall feeling of it — rich and complex, or vague and murky, or beyond words. Whatever is here is fine. Keep the body as your base.

Now imagine the space around you as filled with golden light. Awareness itself, warm and bright, as though you were submerged in something viscous and gold that nourishes every cell. Each sensation arises into that warmth, saturated by it, and falls back.

Whatever appears, welcome it. Each sound. Each visual form. Each sensation in the body. May this be welcomed. May this be held in loving presence.

Include the resistance — the agitation, the boredom, the part of you that doesn’t believe this is possible. Welcome that too.

Then take the view that the warmth is not yours to generate. Awareness is doing the loving. It is all around you, through every cell, and it is holding you.

Let yourself be held.

Come back to the felt sense of the body. Notice what has softened, and what has not.

Open, Soften, Allow

Something has bothered you and the thought will not stop turning. The body is tight, the shoulders drawn in, the world narrowed to the size of the problem. On another day you are out walking and everything is roomy and unhurried. The difference is the grip.

Clinging, craving, aversion, grasping — different words for one movement: taking hold of experience and trying to keep it fixed. It is felt in the body. Which is useful, because what is felt in the body can be released there.

Settle, then let awareness fill the whole body, part by part, until the whole space is bright. Tune into the felt sense of it — the overall tone, like dialling in an analogue radio. Notice the clear sensations, and what is vague and murky. Whatever you find is fine.

Now look for the holding. A contraction somewhere. A pull for this to be other than it is. It is in thought too — the mind solving, fixing, reaching towards something later. Find it. Stay with it a moment.

Open, soften, allow.

Take resistance the same way: soften around the sleepiness, the agitation, the doubt. Let it be here. Take the pleasant that way too. Released from the grip, what is pleasant tends to open further; what is unpleasant tends to dissipate.

Then feel the whole body again. Tight, or roomy. Solid, or moving.

You do not let go. You stop holding on.

Drawn from Rob Burbea’s teaching on ways of looking.