5.0 Instruction: Awareness of the Breath

Part 5.0 of 10. A progression of brief sessions of instruction for developing stable attention, still awareness, and global compassion. Recorded live.

Transcript

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use that introspective awareness to get real-time reports about our mental states while we are in the heat of an emotional experience,

Before we do something regrettable,

Before we say something stupid,

Before we do irreparable damage?

So that's actually what we are going to practice doing tomorrow.

We are going to be using awareness to take as our meditation object the ever-changing parade of mental appearances.

That practice is called in Dzogchen schools,

Padmasambhava,

Settling the mind in its natural state.

Sometimes taking the mind as the path,

Sometimes taking the impure mind as the path.

But really what it's doing is it's using as a shamatha practice still,

Meaning that you're still working on stability and vividness at this point.

Rather than using the breath as the object,

We are using mental appearances as the object.

And that has extraordinary benefits,

But I think you realize that that requires a little more skill also.

The fundamental skill of this,

Before setting out into this practice,

Is developing the fusion of stillness and motion.

And so you want to simultaneously be aware of stillness of awareness while awareness is illuminating ever-changing appearances.

So I think it's clear that mental appearances are changing things,

Right?

Typically what happens,

And we'll go into this in great detail tomorrow,

Or as much detail as 12 minutes allows,

Typically what happens is we become cognitively fused with a mental appearance and are shanghaied by it.

So can you maintain the stillness of your awareness while it is illuminating these changing mental appearances?

So that requires the fusion of stillness and motion.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to develop that fusion of stillness and motion as a standalone skill before asking you to apply that skill to the domain of mental appearances,

Which are always so troublesome for us,

Or can be,

Because they are so compelling,

They shanghaied us,

They have emotional charge often.

So wouldn't it be nice to be able to develop that fusion of stillness and motion using the old familiar object of the breath?

I think so.

And luckily there is a practice for doing that called,

That I call,

Awareness of the breath.

Alan Wallace calls this a shangha's mindfulness of the breath.

Recently,

Anyway,

He's calling it that.

So what we are going to be doing here then is using awareness rather than attention to know the breath.

The Buddhist minimalist advice about breath meditation in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta was very loosely paraphrased,

O Śarapūtra,

Just as the potter knows that the revolution of his wheel is long or short,

When the inhalation is long,

Know that it is long.

When the inhalation is short,

Know that it's short.

Whether it's the inhalation or exhalation is long or short,

Know it.

As immediately,

As directly,

Without any conceptual elaboration,

Without requiring inference,

Without Google having to tell you that,

Oh yes,

That's a long breath or a short breath.

You know it as directly as you know the blue of the sky.

You know it as a potter need a stopwatch to know whether the revolution of his wheel is long or short.

No,

He doesn't have to count or anything like that.

It is simply he knows for his purposes that the wheel is long,

Revolution is long or short.

So that's what we are going to be doing,

Is just knowing with awareness rather than attention.

We're going to start with,

Yeah,

We'll start with tactile sensations again,

With awareness illuminating tactile sensations,

And then we will give up the tactile sensations.

Remember there are six domains,

Six sense domains.

And so tactile sensations is one of the five physical senses.

The mental sense includes all the space of the mind and all mental activity.

So the monkey,

The monkey mind is bouncing around in this cube,

Six walls,

Six windows,

He can only look through one at a time,

Right?

One of the sense fields or the mental.

We are going to then with awareness leave the tactile,

Because so far we've been working with tactile sensations of the breath.

So we are going to leave the tactile for the mental domain.

And so is it possible,

This is the intriguing question,

Is it possible to know the breath without tactile sensations?

The Buddha is saying,

Know that it's long or short,

So we'll just call that the rhythm of the breath.

Can you know precisely the beginning of the in-breath and the end of the out-breath?

Precisely,

Maybe more precisely than you can using tactile sensations.

What happens in a dream?

So let's just say you are lucid dreaming.

Meaning so this is a unique stage,

Right?

Not unique,

But it's a practice skill where you can know that you are dreaming.

And so all kinds of things you have can do things in your lucid dreams.

So one of the things,

One of Alan Wallace's close colleagues is the fellow who is the world,

One of the world experts and the founder of the field,

Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University.

And so when Alan first came up with this idea after a retreat in Scotland,

He contacted his friend Stephen LaBerge and said,

In a lucid dream,

If you were,

If you knew the rhythm of the breath,

If you were doing breath meditation in a lucid dream,

Would it actually correspond,

And you weren't controlling the breath,

Would it actually correspond to the rhythm of the breath that could be observed by a researcher?

And so this is a,

You know,

Not an unusual experiment in lucid dreaming.

You can signal a lucid dream researcher that you are,

Have actually entered,

You can signal them because you know that you're lucid,

You can signal them that you are lucid dreaming by basically with the movement of your eyeballs,

You know,

From as if you're watching a ping-pong match and they see that eye movement and they go,

Okay,

That's the signal that he has entered lucid dreaming.

And so Stephen LaBerge said,

Yes,

That would very likely be the case that your rhythm,

The rhythm of your breath would correspond to that.

And then there have been people who are,

That I know at Harvard,

Who are very adept at this and are able to maintain lucidity and deep dreamless sleep as well.

And they are,

Report that they are able to maintain knowing the breath,

They can know the breath in deep dreamless sleep,

Also the rhythm of the breath.

So just as you can know the breath in dream state,

You can,

So it doesn't require tactile sensations.

You have all kinds of sense experiences while you are dreaming,

While your five tactile senses are totally shut down,

Right?

So you can see the color blue in a dream,

You can feel a pinch on your skin,

I mean,

In a dream,

Right?

You have a dream that you are,

And you experience those as sense perceptions,

But all of your senses are shut down.

So that's basically,

In a sense,

What we are going to be doing in the same way,

Knowing the rhythm of the breath without tactile sensations.

So the fusion of stillness and motion,

We will maintain stillness,

Introspective awareness now,

Is going to primarily give you reports that your awareness is still.

Meaning that it is becoming glassy smooth,

Like the ocean when there is no wind,

Or a lake anyway when there is no wind,

Because there are no currents.

So glassy smooth,

Even able to reflect the stars,

So smooth,

Mirror-like.

And what it is going to be mirroring then,

Or illuminating this awareness,

Is the fluctuations of the breath.

Simply knowing the breath.

Knowing that it's long or short,

You're just knowing the rhythm of the breath.

And see what that experience is like.

Let's do that for 12 minutes.