Formless Meditation

Lama Shenpen Hookham's talk on Formless Meditation as a general term for the discipline of sitting looking directly at your experience without relying on any kind of gimmicks – just being simple – no belief system involved!
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Transcript

So this morning I'm talking about meditation.

We have this name for the meditation we do which is called formless meditation.

I feel quite uncomfortable with that name for this meditation.

What does form mean in this context?

In Tibetan,

What one would call it would be meditation without any nikpa which isn't form actually.

It's often the word that's used for visualization but it isn't visualization either.

I think generally speaking,

Oh I see it's meditation without any visualization.

So it's actually saying something quite different and perhaps that's all we mean.

It's meditation without any visualization but if you ask the Tibetan,

Well what's that?

They'd sort of think well they don't have a word,

They don't talk like that.

You have meditation where you're you have some something you're focusing on taking as the object of your meditation or you have a meditation where you don't have an object to your meditation you don't have an object and that would be very high.

That would be very something one would train in order to be able to do that.

You wouldn't expect to start there.

We expect you to start with this what we call informless meditation which is coming through the tradition of Krumpa Rinpoche.

This is how he taught us in the west.

This is the way he chose to teach shamatha and vipassana by telling us to just sit and not to have any particular focus but just to sit and be with our experience.

To wake up.

Just be wake up.

Don't try and do anything because we're so keen on doing.

It's like it's educated into us that we've got to somehow do and produce and be special and otherwise we're no good.

We're failures.

We're completely conditioned by that.

So it affects the way we come into meditation.

So whatever we were told to do we would make out of it a project at which we had to do well and to be judged to be good and having done it properly and that's the only way we know about how to go about things and to be quite hard on ourselves when we can't produce the latter without.

So it's very important that when we sit to meditation we know it's just to be.

Just to be awake.

Just open,

Be awake and then I added heart because it seems to me it's perfectly capable of trying to be awake from up here.

Trying to wake up,

You know,

To be open,

Fill up here,

Open our eyes and just all in our head.

So I think it's important for us to start awake from here.

So those are those instructions of wake,

Be,

Heart,

Open.

They're not things that you focus on.

You don't take openness and say how do I focus on openness?

What is openness?

How do I focus on openness?

It's more just like what we were saying yesterday,

Just like a poetic association,

Intuitive association with open.

And wake,

I think we have an intuitive association with wake,

An intuitive sense that we are half asleep,

That we're capable of something better,

Something else,

That we could,

You know,

Someone asked you how do you wake?

I wouldn't have a clue how to say how I wake but when I hear the word wake,

I can respond somehow,

Wake.

It's like don't panic,

Isn't it?

How do you not panic?

But somehow when somebody says don't panic,

Something happens.

It does for me anyway.

So wake.

And that could be the final instruction,

Couldn't it?

The path to awakening.

Ultimately,

It's about waking.

And we do know that movement.

We have this example of dreams,

We can remember dreaming.

Most people,

Not everybody remembers dreaming.

Most people at some point in their life have at least one or two dreams they remember and become aware of how you can be completely absorbed in a world that you know,

You are there in your world,

Something's going on,

You're totally involved in it and then suddenly,

Oh,

It's a dream.

It's like,

Where's it gone?

Where was it?

How did you get so involved in something that wasn't there?

You did.

And we can have a similar experience in our meditation.

You have this openness,

Just be a simple instruction.

And for a moment,

You think that's all I want.

How wonderful.

I've got a whole hour just to relax and just be open.

And just connected to what's really deep and important in the heart and like a whole hour just to do that.

With a relief,

How wonderful.

A whole hour or however long it is,

Five minutes will do.

I have all day,

Maybe all week,

Just to relax,

Just to be.

And it's not very long,

Is it,

Before you start to wonder what you're doing.

Kind of,

Oh,

What was I supposed to be doing?

Oh yeah,

I was supposed to be concentrating on the breath.

Actually,

Nobody said you were supposed to be concentrating on your breath,

But somehow you think,

Well,

I should be doing something and I'm not doing it.

Exactly.

So there's that little sort of sense of awe.

And then you say,

Oh no,

I'm not supposed to do anything.

So I'm not supposed to do anything.

So that's all right.

I'll just relax.

And then after a while you think,

I'm totally lost in my thoughts.

This can't be right.

I'm just completely lost.

I mean,

I've just been making my shopping list.

I've just done,

You know,

Just worked out why I want to put that new thing in my room.

I've just kind of thought about what I'm doing next week and I've remembered what's happened in the past.

It's amazing how much you can get to be in just a few seconds.

I can't be right.

I can't be right.

So there's a sense that I'm just on the edge of falling asleep the whole time.

You know,

Like I wake up and it's like,

Okay,

So I should be able to stay like this.

And then it's almost like you can feel yourself falling asleep.

So it means something to sort of wake up,

To kind of.

.

.

But as soon as you ask yourself what is waking up,

You go off into a train of thoughts.

You know,

You get caught in thoughts again.

You start asking the question,

Then you forget all about waking up and then you find you're thinking about something altogether.

Very quickly.

And then quite amazing really how much you can get through in a few seconds.

Let alone an hour.

So it's making friends with that actually.

Waking up to that's what is happening is dropping away from being awake and then waking up out of it again.

It's like that waking out of it becoming more and more precise.

So you can't hold on to being awake.

You have that moment of awake and think,

Oh,

That's it.

How do I hold on to it?

How do I keep it going?

How do I make it stay like that?

And you've lost it immediately,

Haven't you?

Actually,

It's got a life of its own.

And the wonderful thing is,

Although it's got a life of its own,

There's a certain volition in it because you can actually choose it.

You can choose to wake,

But then something else is kind of drifting off it.

And then you think,

Well,

How will I ever come back?

What will make me remember?

And I guess that's the whole thing with being a practitioner,

Meditation practitioner,

That you orientate your life to increase the likelihood of your coming back.

So the more you do it,

The more you'll tend to do it.

And the more disheartened you get,

The less you'll tend to do it.

So if you're very heavy on yourself,

You get disheartened.

And the more disheartened you get,

The less you wake.

So of course,

The more difficult the meditation,

Just as you predicted it would be,

Because you're already disheartened.

It's a little bit confusing in the meditation instructions,

It talks about the A in the Vowel,

A focused awake,

And then a kind of some sense of drifting off.

And then it's almost like you touch something that wakes you again.

And it's so the Vowel and the focusing and the letting go sort of is described in terms of how the awareness comes and goes.

It's also linked to the breath a bit,

But they don't actually synchronize,

Do they?

You don't always come back at a certain point on the breath.

You could try to train yourself to do that,

It might help.

So with the breath,

When you're doing the meditation,

You're always going to be able to do it.

So with the breath,

When you're using the breath for the meditation,

You have got a mikpah.

You know,

You might want to call that a subtle form.

I think it almost works,

Doesn't it?

So the breath is a subtle form you can use as a mikpah,

Something that you're using.

And so to increase the chances of your coming back,

Waking,

You use a mikpah,

Which is the breath.

And to prevent it becoming too heavy-handed,

It's not in this way Trungpa Rinpoche was teaching it,

He doesn't say,

Try and keep your attention on the breath as it goes in,

As it stays,

As it goes out,

Which sometimes is used.

He,

I think,

Rightly suspects that if he gave that instruction to us,

We would get very tense trying to think,

You know,

How can I keep my breath on coming in and then staying and then going out.

And we would try to get too driven by this project of trying to keep our mind totally on the breath all the time.

So he's,

In order to keep it much lighter,

He suggests just coming back to the breath as you're breathing out.

So there's that,

That moment of,

Maybe you could bring the sense of waking,

You might be able to get it to synchronize with it when you open out on the out breath,

As breath out breath goes out.

And then you would naturally have that falling away sensation.

It just kind of goes into,

You don't know where it's going,

Like when you wake,

You don't know where it's going to go.

And then to kind of increase the chances of you actually waking again,

Quite soon,

You think,

Well,

I'll do it again on the next out breath,

Try to just wake on the next out breath.

But you don't want to get rigid about that,

Because that wake moment,

The kind of natural movement of awareness,

And that slightly drifting quality is also natural to awareness.

What you are trying to avoid is for the drifting to just kind of turn in on itself and spin you off.

So it's just enough of a spread,

A sort of drifting and things will appear in that drifting space.

And then you'll just wake again.

And you have the choice again to appear in that drifting space.

And then you wake again.

So you don't really need to come back to the breath in a way.

So when it says use the breath,

That's a MIGPA to help your help you to settle.

But once you've settled,

And you've got getting enough wake moments,

Then you don't really need to have the MIGPA of the breath.

If you're not getting many,

Many wake moments,

Then perhaps it's good to play around a bit with how you can get the breath to help you wake in a sort of more often,

More steady way.

But the important thing is that when you wake,

You don't do anything.

It all comes back to a basic attitude that you have towards your Dharma practice really,

And yourself,

And your life,

And the world,

And the path,

And the Dharma.

If you have that,

As we,

You know,

In the discovering the heart of Buddhism,

You do a lot of work on connecting to your own heart wish and your own confidence in your own judgment and your own sense of your own openness,

Clarity,

And sensitivity,

Which is essential really,

Because you're doing this for no other purpose.

Because you're doing this for no other reason than it's what you want to do with all your heart.

So there's nobody there with a stick telling you you're doing it wrong.

Your only intention is to discover something within your own heart and being discover awakening,

Liberation from suffering,

Happiness.

That's the only reason you're doing it.

And there is a discipline there.

It is not a discipline of being cajoled or made to do something in a certain way.

It's just a discipline of giving yourself a chance,

Really.

You're just sitting there to give yourself a chance.

If you want to see something very,

You want to really see what's happening.

You know,

Something's going on somewhere,

You really want to see what's happening.

If you keep walking,

Just looking as you go past,

You don't see it,

Do you?

So that if you want to really look at it,

You stop and you really pay attention.

And that's all you're doing,

Really,

The meditation.

Okay,

There's a proper way of sitting,

A proper way of setting up the shrine,

Setting up your meditation posture and how you remember the instructions and everything else.

But that's only to help you to see what you want to see.

So it's really important for you to enter it with that kind of very full-on enthusiasm for this being something that you're doing because you want to do it.

You know,

Not because you're being told to do it and you won't be part of this group if you don't do it.

That's kind of deadly,

Isn't it?

You could say that's Mara.

Mara means death.

Mara,

The evil one.

Actually,

The word Mara means death.

I love that because it's true.

Everything that's Mara is deadly.

The dead hand of ego,

It just kills everything.

It's exactly what it does,

Isn't it?

It just kills everything.

Everything that might have been really enjoyable and open,

Clear,

Sensitive and warm-hearted is killed by Mara.

I'm supposed to be doing this in a certain way.

It's like,

It kills something.

Whereas this is my time to really see what's happening.

Waking up and notice this drifting,

These things appearing.

So that's it.

You don't then have to have an opinion about everything that's appeared.

Oh,

That was a bad thought.

Oh,

I shouldn't have done that.

Oh,

This can't be right.

And all this little chattering that's going on.

That's something that's really important.

That's something else to notice really.

And it's really useful when you have this wake,

When you're a little bit more experienced with it and you come to this wake,

To remember the dream example.

How does it feel when you wake from a dream?

That sort of pulling away from everything that's,

You were dreaming,

Suddenly you're looking at it in a different way and you realize it's a dream.

And then your whole world changes.

From being asleep in a dream,

You're now in a whole different world.

You're a completely other person.

It's like absolutely radical.

But all that shifted was that change.

It was a dream.

And even the dream doesn't have to stop to wake.

And you might catch the dream carrying on,

But now you're awake.

That's all the difference in the world,

Isn't it,

From being fooled by it and not being fooled by it.

And it's the same with all that's going on in our mind as we wake and then as we let go,

This sort of sense of space.

But in actual fact,

We can think ourselves out of the space in the sense that we cannot even see the space.

We could actually see,

I don't know,

A blank fog.

So we let go.

As we wake,

We wake.

And then as the space opens up,

Maybe things are playing in the space,

But actually we have a sensation of fog.

I can't wake anymore.

It's just like everything's closing in.

You don't notice that's actually thinking.

It's just the mind doing that.

And you could actually notice it and just think,

Oh,

The mind is creating fog.

And then the fog is actually quite transparent and spacious.

But we tend to give into it.

We tend to believe in it.

We don't think,

Oh,

It's just fog.

And then the things in the fog seem to be much more alive than the fog.

And you get caught up with them and fascinated by them.

And then you go,

Oh,

Meditation,

Right?

What was it?

Oh,

Yes.

I haven't done that for a long time.

But that's okay.

You can just kind of just don't get heavy about it.

You can notice the whole thing exactly as it is.

And you can gradually waken to this kind of,

It's all happening in a kind of space.

But if I think it's space,

It's only a thought.

So it's a thought in the space.

It's very awake when you notice that.

Just naturally very awake.

So when you find yourself awake,

And a bit open,

You don't need to keep pushing to be more open or correcting it or making it more better or whatever.

You just enjoy it.

Enjoy it for as long as you can.

Just kind of be.

It sounds lovely,

Doesn't it?

It could be quite scary.

Because it might suddenly,

Your perspective on your whole what and who you are,

What you and the world are,

Because suddenly take a quite serious wobble.

So what do you do then?

That's where it's really important to develop this kind of confidence.

You have this confidence in the lineage,

In the Buddha dhammasanga,

In the instructions,

In your own experience.

You just ride it out.

You can get quite a strong fear reaction coming up.

That's just something that's appeared in the space.

So if you just trust that,

That there's that's part of what's just happening.

And that'll start to drift.

And then there'll be another moment of awake.

It'll be very powerful actually after an experience like that.

But we do need that sense of a refuge,

Because we are a refuge.

Because we are opening up to a completely different world really.

It's not a different world.

But we've ignored the real world for so long.

When I say real world,

I don't mean anything that we could imagine really to be the real world.

But we've ignored this reality for so long that when we temporarily wake enough to glimpse it,

It's very common to feel a sense of fear.

Oh my god,

What have I done now?

Sort of like,

Is this madness?

Well,

The other thing that might happen is suddenly you get such a flash of something or other.

How can I get it?

How can I keep it?

And it's like a tremendous feeling of loss.

Almost,

You know,

Like you can't have something that is so full of promise.

And the reason you can't have it is because you're trying to have it by holding and it just goes,

It's just like it's gone through your fingers,

Was it even there?

Which can leave you feeling very despairing.

That's just part of what's happening in the space really.

You know,

That fear reaction or grasping,

It just happens.

You know,

It's nothing special to you.

It's not,

This is me and this is what's happened to me.

It's just like,

That's what's going on in the space,

This kind of grasping.

And that's what we're working with.

That's why we have to keep coming back to the practice because actually this resistance to awakening is,

It's just a force in the universe,

If you like,

The resistance to awakening.

If there wasn't a resistance to awakening,

We would all be awakened a long time ago.

The Buddhas are constantly,

If you like,

Radiating out their love and compassion and there's only,

There's no reason really why we don't awaken,

Except there's this very strong reaction and resistance and fear of it,

Which is surprising,

Isn't it?

Because we're all here because we think that's what we want.

More than anything,

It's this liberation,

This awakening,

This realization that the Buddha had.

And actually what's stopping us is that another side of us is resisting it.

That's ambivalence for you.

So that is actually what's going on for everybody,

Unless you've,

You know,

You're awakened and stopped resisting it.

In which case you wouldn't be here either,

Would you?

You're either not here because you're resisted so much you're not going to be here,

Or you're not here because you're not resisting it.

And you would be awakened.

And then you would be here in a sense,

Wouldn't you?

So I just wanted to say that really about,

The so called formless meditation isn't like about meditating with formlessness as our object.

It's just meditating,

Moving from a rather subtle form to a subtle focus to actually simply being very open without any particular focus.

And not having any focus,

Particular focus for the meditation will mean that there are lots of things appearing in our words.

Lots of feelings and images and thoughts and words and conversations and maybe melodies and you know,

What's all going on.

But the point is that we're not treating those as disturbances.