So recently,
I have been listening to some old audio recordings from the archives of Alan Watts.
And for those of you who don't know who Alan Watts is,
He was one of the first writers,
Philosophers to bring Eastern philosophy to a Western audience.
And he's a lovely writer.
That was his main vocation,
I'd say.
And many kind of considered him a kind of a philosophical entertainer,
Because his way of presenting this Eastern philosophy from Daoism to Buddhism,
To Chan,
Was really entertaining,
Funny,
In fact.
The meditation that I offered this morning was inspired from meditations that I've heard Watts give.
And he was a student of many lineages,
Including Zen.
And so much of what he taught aligned with Zazen,
Zen meditation.
And for those of you that were at our Zen practice period,
You understand that Zen meditation,
We're not trying to get anywhere with it.
You know,
In Zazen,
You kind of let go of any motivation that you had to actually get you to practice.
There might be very important motivations that get you here to practice together in the morning.
Like you may just want to overcome like the suffering of your life,
The difficulty that life provides.
But once you sit on your cushion or your bench or your chair,
You in the Zazen practice,
In the Zen practice,
You let go of your motivation so that you can be fully in the experience of what's arising.
They say in Zen practice that you are practicing with no gaining idea.
So no gaining idea is more of an expression than something that we're trying to do or to attain.
And where we can experience no gaining idea is in our breath,
In our breathing.
So when we meditate,
You know,
We're just allowing our breath to run as it will.
We're not doing any sort of controlled breathing or pranayama,
You know,
There's no technique.
We're just watching the breath breathe the way that it wants to breathe.
And perhaps,
You know,
If you're trained in a particular technique of breathing,
Or even if you say to yourself,
You know,
Some at some point during the day,
You know,
Just breathe,
Then breathing is something that you're kind of doing voluntarily,
You know,
In the same way that you're voluntarily walking or voluntarily talking.
And when you're not thinking about your breathing,
Like maybe now,
Your breathing just goes on in the same way.
So the breath can be looked at as voluntary and involuntary.
Like on the one hand,
You can feel like on the one hand,
I'm doing,
I'm doing it,
I'm breathing,
There's a deliberate,
You can take a breath right now.
And there's like,
I'm doing this,
I'm creating this happening.
And on the other,
It's just happening to you.
That's why the breath is a focal point of meditation,
Because it's going to show you as we become aware of it.
As you're watching it,
You'll become aware that both the voluntary,
I'm doing it,
And the involuntary,
It's happening to me.
Those aspects of experience are going on together.
It's just one thing.
It's what Alan Watts talks about as just one happening,
One happening.
Watts writes that you can see that everything is happening to you.
And on the other hand,
You're doing everything.
For example,
It's your eyes that are turning the sun into light.
It's your nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibration in the air into heat and temperature.
It's your eardrums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound.
And in that way,
You are creating the world.
But when we're not talking about it,
When we're not philosophizing about it,
Then there is just this happening,
This,
And we don't give it a name.
So when the meditation movement first came to this country,
There was not a lot of Buddhism in it.
In order to have mindfulness be accessible to people,
Many meditation teachers across traditions left out aspects of Buddhism so that people wouldn't be turned off by it.
And what they taught was mindfulness and no gaining idea.
They taught not to worry about the future.
And don't worry about what progress you're making.
Just be content to be aware of what is,
Of whatever is happening.
We're not doing awareness practice.
Awareness is not a verb,
Something that we're actively doing.
It's more like we're allowing for it.
We're establishing it.
And there's some effort to stay aware,
To be with awareness.
And in a way there's,
It's effortless.
You know,
If you're,
If you're just minding your own business,
And then all of a sudden there's the sound of a bird outside your window whistling,
The hearing of the bird appears without any effort on your part.
Or if you're just,
If you're sitting and let's say you're outside and you feel coldness going through your body,
The cold feeling is effortless.
It appears and the knowing of it,
You know,
The knowing of it,
It's just called,
It's called like my mind knows it,
It recognizes cold.
The knowing of the cold called attention to itself and my mind recognize it as cold.
So this awareness practice,
We're beginning to appreciate as practice deepens and matures that we can tune into this effortless quality of attention.
You know,
It might take some time to experience your thoughts as sound,
As I guided in the meditation,
Just internal sound,
But in time it develops inside and outside.
They become one,
Like Watts points out,
It becomes effortless.
And then it becomes a support on how we go through our life.
This is because we become like awareness becomes constant.
We become aware of present moment experience as we are living it.
We're not getting lost in our thoughts.
We don't get lost in the conversation.
We don't get lost in the work we're doing,
But we do everything wholeheartedly with mindfulness.
There's a real sense of feeling and knowing like,
Oh,
I'm here and this is where I'm present.
And there may be internal chatter and story,
But we're not,
That's in the background.
This is what I'm doing.
I'm just washing the dishes or just folding the laundry or just driving the car and everything else is just sound.
It's just noise.
And it's useful because awareness doesn't automatically come with attachment with wanting or not wanting.
It doesn't come with aversion.
Things are just allowed to be there and awareness without being for or against them.
Awareness in and of itself isn't for or against anything.
It's not involved with needing to accept anything really,
Or reject anything.
It's just there being experienced.
The practice of acceptance is kind of an extra step,
But allowing things to appear in the mind effortlessly,
You know,
It could,
You could consider that an acceptance practice,
But there's really no acceptance to be done.
It's just that things are arising in awareness and then there's the meaning that you ascribe to it and that's just sound.
So I'll close this talk out this morning with a quote from Alan Watts.
He says,
This is the real secret of life to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work,
Realize it is play.
So thank you for your attention and your consideration.
