Streamed live on June 20, 2024
Meditation
Welcome to tonight’s meditation. Let’s start out like we did last week, with some mani mantra. If you’re not used to doing this, this is the standard mantra of Avalokiteshvara: it’s om mani padme hum, and we’re going to do it for like five minutes. It’s good if you do it with a lot of energy. The whole point is to raise energy, right? Get you energized. All spiritual practice of any kind raises energy, because most of you, on an average day, with an average amount of energy, your mind is optimized to use all that to fuel your neurosis, right? It’s perfectly optimized to use all that up, and so to break out of our neurotic mind into some possibility of change at all, we have to raise our energy—whatever that means to you. I’m just going to call it energy. Spiritual practice of many many many sorts raises energy, and so that allows us to cut through the neurosis and into something new—cut out of our habit patterns. Except, if, when you’re raising energy, and, let’s say you’re doing a mantra practice out loud—om mani padme hum—and we’re doing it, and you’re just still sitting there spinning in your neurosis, your neurotic systems will just use up, suck up all the energy, and just make you spin faster on your craziness.
So, remember, when you’re doing the mantra, to stay with the mantra, stay with your heart. Make sure that additional energy you’re creating is going towards cutting through, not just spinning on your bullshit, okay? So, again, the mantra is om mani padme hum, and there’s a there’s a habit for people to kind of say om manee podmee whom—it’s “padmay,” right? We kind of want to make those ending vowels rhyme or something, but they don’t rhyme.
Om mani padme hum
Now, just resting in the energy of that Mantra, staying wide open, stepping outside any kind of entanglement with thought. Just resting in the wide open, wide awakeness, and feeling yourself breathe. Let’s do that together for a while here. At least for a moment, just contact wide openness—even if it’s just for a moment. Just a mind like open sky, just absolutely clear, bright, unentangled, no imagination, no thought, just openness.
Then, from there, let’s do a little Tonglen, for yourself, or for someone you know really well who is suffering. You breathe in all the suffering on the in-breath, imagining it to be like black smoke that you’re breathing in. Hot, dusty stuff—thick, difficult. Breathing in all the suffering, taking all the suffering on yourself, and on the out-breath, giving them any peace, any relief, any joy, any sweetness, any love, any light. So, you’re taking on their pain, giving them all your relief. We’re doing this from the place of wide openness. That wide openness has an infinite capacity to take on this difficulty. It’s not like it’s just our own little personality trying to take it on—that would be too much. We’d be overwhelmed. But, as wide openness, skylike, wide awakeness, we have unlimited capacity, so we’re taking it on, taking it on, taking it on. Then giving away all the good, all the joy, all the peace, all the relief, all the health, all the love, all the beauty, to them, so that they feel relief.
The visualization on the out-breath is like white light, so you’re breathing in this dark, dark smoke of all the difficulty, and then breathing out this white light of relief, peace, joy, health, love.
Good. Then let’s expand our circle of concern, maybe to 10 or 12 people we know. Because we have this infinite capacity, we take on all of their sufferings, and breathe out that much relief, that much joy, that much kindness, that much love. Don’t hold back. Notice any fear or reticence to take it on. It’s interesting, here we’re not holding back, and we’re not reticent. It’s like a fire sale at the end of time, we’re taking it all on, and giving away everything we’ve got.
Very good. Then, let’s expand our circle of concern again, to include all the people you’ve already been doing, and then everyone in this room. This is our Sangha, this is our practice group, and so we include them in our giving and taking, our Tonglen practice. So include the pain, suffering, illness, difficulties, of everyone in this room. Notice it’s weirder with strangers. Do it anyway. Breathe it in, and then give away all the good stuff, all the joy, all the peace, all the kindness, all the satisfaction, all the health, all the love, all the belonging—give it away. Give it away, give it away.
Very good. And now, let’s expand it one more time, to include every being in the universe. Not just humans, with all their suffering—and believe me, there’s a lot of it, but also every animal whose home is poisoned or destroyed, or children who are killed, or trapped in a vivisection lab somewhere. All animals, all alien beings, other worldly beings, everywhere, on every planet. Breathe in all that pain, difficulty, suffering—really feel it as a kind of choking black smoke. And then, on the out-breath, give away everything you’ve got. Again, because of our vast awake awareness, there’s more than enough ability to take this all in, and give away total relief, soothing the terror, breathing peace into the rage and grief, calming the tremendous sorrow, healing the sick, loving the unloved. And just notice how that changes our basic stance, from that mood of, well, I’m just going to keep making sure my pile of beans is bigger than your pile of beans—it’s all kind of a zero-sum game, to just give away all the beans, because there’s no lack of beans.
This practice is not about somehow having a big emotional experience—although that can happen, but that’s not really the point. Just notice how your heart becomes softer, less defended, more open, more goopy. And the sense of the atomized, divided, guarded, separate, self softens, and opens, and becomes permeable, and even connected—maybe even revealed to be what it actually is, which is totally nonseparate.
Okay, good. Now you can let go of that, and what I want you to do is, in the very open way, your mind really relaxed, unengaged with thought. On each in-breath, feel the breath going into the lower dantian, into the spot a few inches below your navel, right in the center of your body. It’s like an energy spot there. Just feel the breath going into that, and on the out-breath it flows up the central channel, out the top of your head, and into space. The out-breath releases everything into space. So, in-breath, just a normal in-breath—can be slow, but doesn’t have to be huge or anything, just a nice breath. Feel it filling or going into that spot below your navel, not on the skin, but deep in the center of the body. Then on the out-breath, it goes up the central channel out the top of your head, and your mind just dissolves into space, into sky.
For some people, having seed syllables associated with this helps. So, on the in-breath, into the lower dantian, into the below the navel chakra, we can say, om, om to yourself, silently, as we breathe into that center, feeling it energizing and warming. Then on the out-breath, out the top of your head, mind dissolves into space, becomes just open clarity. There the seed syllable we’ll use is hre—hree. It’s really H, R with a DOT under it, I, H with a DOT under it, but just think of it as HREE. The entire mind, all thought, all mental constructs just dissolve into wide open space. You can let that out-breath, if you wish—of course, do what’s comfortable, but you can let that out-breath be quite a bit longer than the in-breath. Just notice how the mind just turns into vapor, and dissolves into space, evaporates into sky, and you’re just left with shining awakeness, completely uninvolved with any thought.
On the in-breath, you can do it again, silently, like, “ooooooooooooooh.” Going into that, really energizing that chakra, really feeling it filled with warmth and light and peace and energy and clarity. Then, on the out-breath, it’s HREE—everything up and out the top of the head. It just evaporates in the sky. Of course, don’t make any effort to reconstitute the mind on the in-breath. It may do that of its own accord, but if it doesn’t, that’s fine. We’re not really doing a visualization here, you don’t have to picture any of this in imagination. You just kind of feel it, or become it.
Over and over again, the mind dissolves into space, it evaporates into open, awake, skylike, awareness. It’s impossible to have any thought there, or, if the thoughts are happening, you’re not attaching to them at all, not being with them at all. There is just awakeness and openness.
Good. Then, on an in-breath, just drop awareness into that belly chakra, and just stay there, feeling the energy there. Remembering we’re not projecting, we’re not imagining that we’re projecting consciousness down from the head, looking at the energy center, we’re just inside it, feeling it from within it. Noticing the vibratory, constantly changing, powerful, sense of energy there, vitality. Just stay with that, from within it. You may notice how, with each in-breath, it sort of charges up, and with each out-breath, it radiates outward. So, we’re no longer doing the dissolving the mind outside, above the head, but rather, just staying with this energy center. As you stay with it, you may notice it get warmer, more energized, more obvious.
To the best of your ability, remain completely uninvolved with thought. Again, we’re not stopping thinking—it can do that as much as it wants in the background, but just don’t engage, stay with the feeling, the energy feeling, in the body. Doing this visualization, this being nonvisualization, being with the energy, you may notice that your whole body feels kind of energized. It would be very easy to focus on that energy, and ride it into an altered state from that. Just remember that you could do that, we’re not going to do that, but it’s there as a possibility.
Instead, notice what’s inside the energy center, inside the energy. In the energy center, what do you feel right inside it? Right in the center—it’s vast openness, vast space, infinite space. If you’re looking at the center, that’s hard to see, but if you’re in that center, it’s just Infinite space—not as a visualization, not as an imagination, but as a direct feeling. The center of the body is open to infinite space. Then, outside the body, like we saw when we were doing the HREE, is open to infinite space, inside and outside, just infinite space. There’s no boundary between them, there’s just wide open, wide awakeness, absolutely clear and bright, relaxed and open, including everything, excluding nothing. Remain disengaged with any thought of any kind. Just be with the experience, bright, clear, crisp, relaxed, spontaneous, openness. Wide awake, no boundaries of any kind.
Notice the tremendous stillness of this open awakeness—it is utterly still, perfectly silent, absolutely boundless. Brightly, shiningly, awake. Absolutely still, clear, silent, openness—even though it’s open like sky, the stillness is solid like a diamond, like a mountain of diamond, just absolutely rock solid still. Perfectly silent.
Good. Now, from this space of still, silent, wide awakeness, notice the flavors of sensation and movement in the body. They’re not still—the feelings of energy, the feelings of regular sensations, the movement of the breath and the beating of the heart, and so on. All the stuff that’s not still—notice that it is not in any way separate from that stillness. They’re different—one is moving, and one is still, but they’re never separate. We could almost say that the movements, the sensations, expressions of the stillness. Hear the sounds of the world around you. They’re different than the silence—it’s sound, it’s noise, so different from the silence, but never separate. Not in any way separate, ever. You can’t have the sound without the silence. They come together.
Notice the movements of the mind, without engaging with those movements. The activity of thought—it’s like a continuous babbling brook—so different from the stillness, and yet never separate. The thoughts arise out of the stillness, and only can be because of the stillness. They’re always together, they contain the stillness.
Good. If your eyes are open, notice the world around you—continuously in movement, a riot of color, shape, form. Expression so different from the vast boundless, open, clarity, but never separate from it in any way. It’s the expression of the openness, the daughter of the space. So, noticing the stillness, the silence, the openness, the clarity, and all the feelings in the body, all the sensations of energy, all the thought activity, all the sounds, all the sights, and everything else—never separate. The one requires the other, and contains it.
Now, I want you to look at what is having this experience—don’t think about it, don’t try to solve it, don’t imagine it, just look. What’s having the experience? Is it feelings and thought activity? Is it stillness, silence, openness? Just look. Just look. What is having this experience? Look, right now. Find it. You can’t find it by thinking about it, you have to look.
Okay. Let’s end that there.
Q&A
If you’ve got any questions for me, or stuff coming up, raise your hand. Remember that the Internet is listening.
Questioner 1: Hi. My question is about working with feelings and emotions, and realizing the space behind them, underneath. I think it goes through realizing emptiness for me, meaning, let’s say, if I’m working with anger, and the energy of that moment, I find the space is after I realized the emptiness. But, for some other kind of emotions, like anxiety I’ve been sitting with, I find it more like a composite, rather than a simpler kind of an emotion…
Michael: It’s just fear, so it’s an emotion.
Questioner 1: Yeah, right, and I think it’s composite because there are multiple things that I have to realize, like emptiness of self, of sensory experiences, of there’s also greed, there are so many different things inside anxiety. And the energy behind it is so fiery, and moving, just moving from here to there. But it’s not clear from where to where. It’s not even a thought, it’s just moving—very high speed. So, what to do with composite conditions like that, which is that there are so many things to dissolve or realize. It’s just too much, too many things inside it.
Michael: Sure. There’s a lot of things that we give a single name to, that are made of composite elements like that. For example, the sense of self at all is a bunch of thoughts and emotions and body sensations, and memories, and all that. So even though we’re calling it a sense of self, it’s composed of a bunch of pieces or elements. So, if we have a strong sense of ability to see emptiness, we just see the emptiness of the whole thing at once, because even if it’s different pieces, it doesn’t matter, they’re all empty. So we just see the emptiness all at once. But, if that’s not available, then you just break it up into the composite elements, and go one at a time. Here’s the emotion part, see the emptiness of that. Here’s the thinking part, see the emptiness of that—like that. And, you just do it over and over, and eventually you can see the emptiness of the composite. So, you just have to sit more, but in this case it’s not just just sitting there sitting. You’re being pretty deliberate about what you’re focusing on. That’s just one way to do it. As I say, the idea that there’s a thing there that’s made of other things is already a construction. So, really, you can just kind of see the constructedness of the whole thing—and that’s emptiness, right? But that’s harder, so if that’s not available, then we back up and just break it into pieces. Divide and conquer, right?
Questioner 1: But then, when we look at the emptiness of the whole thing for anxiety, what is that thing? It’s just the whole.
Michael: Just look at it. Even calling it a whole thing, we’re noticing its constructedness, so that’s already pointing towards emptiness, right? So just the whole experience, it’s just a mental fantasy that has components, but of course we can go through that one bit at a time and see the emptiness of each of those so-called components.
Questioner 1: Yeah, I mean, I don’t like to go through that.
Michael: That’s the down and dirty, pedal to the metal vipashyana way. Otherwise, you just relax to the experience and see the emptiness of the whole thing. Harder to do, but much easier.
Questioner 1: Yeah, thank you.
Michael: Yes, who’s next?
Questioner 2: Hey, so when we were doing this, and often when I do body somatic stuff, I was feeling a lot of energy build up around here [gesturing to the forehead, brow and bridge of the nose], even when focusing on the dantian. I think that when that happens, sometimes it feels painful, not really painful enough for me to want to stop sitting, but enough to have an impulse to fix it, or let it move somewhere else, or let it kind of equalize with the dantian down lower. I wonder, when that happens, is it better to really inspect it and look into that. Trying to find that the space in between in the middle, which kind of works, or is that is digging into that sensation, reifying it somehow. Versus trying to look out and at everything else aside from it.
Michael: The answer is, it depends. In general, that would all be considered a distraction from what we’re trying to do, right? So, if you can just keep going, just keep going, but if it’s really becoming a problem—it hurts, or it’s too much, then the simple fix that is available for some people is, you just intend the energy to move down. As you get good with working in energy, you can intend it, and it will just move. It follows intention. So that’s why, for example, if you’re doing a first jhana, you can move the piti around. It will just move wherever your thought goes, because the energy follows the thought. So, you just do the same thing with the energy in your forehead—just bring it down into the dantian, and then you’re golden. If none of that is working, and you’re getting a headache, and it’s terrible, I would just say just stop doing that meditation. But, if you want to inspect the thing, and mainly just see its
emptiness rather than reifying it, but see its openness, its movement quality, its spaciousness, do that.
Questioner 2: Thanks, I’ll experiment more.
Michael: Yeah, very good. It’s really important generally, when we’re doing the energy stuff, even though it’s like, here’s this center, and we’re meditating on it, and you’re doing a sound there, and all that. Try to not reify any of it. Let it just be a weird dream you’re having. It’s not like there’s a real center there—you’re treating it as almost like a dream or something.
Questioner 3: Hey, I have a question about coming from a background of vipassana practice.
Michael: What kind of vipassana practice?
Questioner 3: Started with guided meditations, eyes closed, paying attention to the breath, then each time you see something come up,
Michael: Any particular retreats or anything like that?
Questioner 3: Yeah, Spirit Rock.
Michael: Okay, got it.
Questioner 3: Yeah, is it wise to pick a route and go with it? Obviously, it’s all leading to the same place, but in terms of a daily practice, is it wise to pick, okay I’m gonna do this style or I’m gonna do this style, and do that every day?
Michael: Assuming that you’ve tried out the menu of styles, so you kind of know what’s out there and what you like, yes. And, it’s not all going to the same place. Different schools have different ideas about where this goes, and the ideas about where it goes matter. We were just talking about this before class, you find what you’re looking for. If you don’t think there’s something beyond that, you don’t look beyond that, and so on. So, understanding where different schools think you’re going is important.
Questioner 3: Okay, thank you.
Michael: I remember, if you look at the book Transformations of Consciousness from about 1985 or something, it’s mainly written by Ken Wilbur, but Dan Brown is in there a bit, and Dan did a really interesting thing. He studied in the original text the Visuddhimagga, so all the vipassana stuff, and then the original text of Patanjali Yoga Sutras, so that style of meditation. Then—I forget which Mahamudra text, but he studied it in Tibetan, and his conclusion, which I think is interesting and supportable, was kind of the opposite of The Perennial Philosophy idea. Actually, each of these three totally different traditions were kind of boiling down to the same sequence of meditations, but they were ending up in totally different places, because they were aiming for different things, so instead of all paths lead to one goal, it was like, all the paths are identical, and the goals are different. So, you could take that or leave it, but it’s what you’re getting yourself into.
Questioner 3: So, in terms of finding a practice to stick to, what would you recommend? Like just practicing and seeing what works? Or, like, in terms of looking towards the end goal, and seeing is this something that resonates?
Michael: That’s a bigger question. Again, try the different practices, to see where the cylinders are firing. You can really feel it. Different people have different places of resonance with different practices. But also, learn enough about the tradition to understand what they say the end goal is, and then—and this is vitally important. This is just my own experience: look at what the people who do that practice are like. Not just one of them, but a bunch of them, because that’s what you’ll end up like. [Laughter]
Other stuff coming up for folks out there in meditation land?
Questioner 1: So, the second approach, which you said that you would look at the whole thing and realize the emptiness of it, which is harder, but easier. Would you agree that there’s no formula to that? It just either happens or doesn’t, miraculously?
Michael: I wouldn’t say it like that. I would just say, as I mentioned, it’s your facility with recognizing emptiness. That facility is trained, just like you can learn to see a signal within noise, but different people have different abilities there, number one. Then, number two, how much training have you had in seeing the signal in the noise. Over time, that gets easier and easier and easier, the recognition gets clearer and more obvious, clearer and more obvious. So it’s not just a random factor, it’s a trainable thing of recognition.
Questioner 1: Okay.
Questioner 4: Yeah, hello. I have a question about desire. From awake awareness, there’s kind of an interesting thing around joy, this language of effulgence from awake awareness, you know, where you’ve got Shakti as the expression of the joy of the goddess, and emptiness. You can feel that radiant like a mountain made of diamond. Well, you didn’t say a mountain made of like steel or stone, it’s shining bright, intense, radiant diamond. I’m kind of curious about the emergence of higher order non-emotions. We’ve talked about the desire of the Goddess, Shakti. Can you talk about the manifestation of desire from the view—like wants and desires?
Michael: It’s an interesting thing. If we’re working in the tantric mode or the Vajrayanic mode, desire is not something to get rid of, but neither is it something to get all stuck in. Rather, notice that even, as I kept saying, the stillness and the activity are never separate. The activity comes from the stillness. The stillness is contained by the activity. In another way, they they need each other, and so we can get in this transcendent mode of thinking that, oh, there’s just this kind of perfect stillness that desires nothing, and that’s the best thing, but that’s not it, because the perfect stillness actually is pregnant with everything. All that—everything, busts out of there, because of desire, yeah, but it’s not egoic desire, it’s the desire of the void. I don’t know how to put it. It’s different, it’s really easy to mix up, and it’s really easy to imagine that my little worldly desires really are the desire of goddess, or something, which is really something to look out for. But, it’s not like there’s just this flat land of desirelessness. This all is here because of desire.
Questioner 4: Okay, yeah, thanks.
Questioner 5: I conceptually liked the instruction that was like, when you’re visualizing the energy sort of at your center, not to visualize, or not even to visualize it, but not to visualize it from the place that we have our perception of consciousness, which is sort of like in our head, which is an imagination. And so, I appreciated that, but I felt really stuck when that instruction was given. I found it very difficult to separate from that imagined location. So, I was wondering if you had any advice around getting closer to that, or how to break that down a little.
Michael: Can you notice that the sense that your consciousness is located in your head is an imagination? Can you notice that right now? Is that available?
Questioner 5: I think so.
Michael: As long as you’re clear that it’s imaginary, then you don’t have to let go of it, or get rid of it. It’s just a picture in your head. Now, come into the feeling, and you can be with it. So don’t try to fight that, but if you can’t notice that it’s imaginary, then the work is to keep working with mental images until you realize the subtle ones really matter. The really wispy subtle mental images that are so unconscious we have a hard time noticing them at first, become conscious enough that you realize—oh, when I close my eyes, and I imagine there’s a room there, that’s imaginary. I mean, I’m not saying there’s not a room, but there’s a picture in your head. Same thing with the idea that consciousness is located in my head. That’s a mental image, and so if you can, you have to work on being able to notice that, so you never really have to separate them, because it’s not real. But, distinguishing, which is maybe what you meant by separating, yes. And then, you just feel your belly, and let go of the kind of mental image that there’s a spotlight of consciousness in your head that’s beaming down on some chakra in your belly. Noticing that it’s all just in the way, all of that is just extra brain energy wasted. So, we let go of all that and come into the belly. Might take a while to learn to do it, but it’s not learning to do something new, it’s just distinguishing.
Questioner 5: Okay. Thank you.
Michael: Okay, thanks for your questions everybody, and for meditating with me, and we’ll see you next week.
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