Seven Factors Of Awakening Investigation

So the theme is the seven factors of awakening. These are qualities within ourselves that we incline our mind and actions toward. The second factor of awakening is Investigation. The one word that I like that encapsulates this quality of investigation is the word What. What is this? It's a movement of opening, to being more receptive, more attentive, to let things register more fully.

Transcript

So good morning. The theme for the next weeks is the seven factors of awakening and these are qualities within ourselves that we incline our mind and actions toward. They're very powerful and instrumental to the path towards Nibbana which we talked about a few weeks back. Nibbana is this deep, Deep release where we're no longer operating from our wanting, Our greed, Aversion or confusion. So the first factor we talked about last week is the factor of mindfulness. Paying attention moment by moment and the word that I often, That I offer to remember this factor is here. Knowing when we're lost in thought, Here. Knowing when we are here with cooking or here with driving or here in practice. Paying attention to being here in the flow of your life and of your experience. This is the first factor, Just getting here. And the second factor of awakening is investigation. And the one word that I like that kind of encapsulates this quality of investigation is what? What's here? What is this? Because in asking what is this? We don't answer the question with words like an understanding but rather it's a movement to opening, To being more receptive and more attentive to let things register more fully. So what? What is this? Is the investigative quality? So investigation, The word is the word that's often translated from the Pali but in the early teachings the word, The quality of the different functions of the mind, It's more about what's happening in the mind. So mindfulness is the foundation, It's the beginning. The clearing, Like the clear mindfulness or the clear, The awareness that we establish in the present moment. The more that we're here we kind of start to see things in and of themselves, The distinction between things. Like if you were walking on a sidewalk let's say instead of just seeing the street you'd start to notice the cracks in the sidewalk and the grass growing up in it, The gaps between the concrete. We see the details, We slow down and we start to see the details. You know for example when we first started practicing this morning David asked me you know what is the quality of the snow here in Carbondale and I said it's not sticking to the trees but then I sat in meditation and now I look out the window and I see that actually there is some snow on the trees. It's light but when we slow down we start to see the details of what's happening. It's like the mindfulness provides greater and greater resolution in our experience so we start to distinguish and differentiate the particulars of what's happening rather than to generalize. I think that's a pretty good example. You know in the practice we might be sitting and let's say I'm uncomfortable as I meditate, My mind keeps wandering off so the idea might be you know this is not a good day for me to meditate. I shouldn't have sat down and that's very far removed from what's really happening in the moment. You know instead of being aware to see it's just being uncomfortable. You know maybe I'm sleeping, Maybe I'm restless, Maybe my body is actually sore and it feels uncomfortable to be sitting. You know maybe there's a lot of planning or I'm lost in a memory and my mind keeps going off and so that experience is really uncomfortable and I can start to see the details that this is just discomfort and there's no judgment. It's just like ah discomfort. Details are just like seeing clearly what is. I really appreciate, Pemi Chodron talks about this a lot. She has a very restless mind and she's just made peace with it and I have that as well. I have a very restless mind. It bounces around a lot when I sit and I've just really made peace with it. It's like okay. I have strategies to stay in my body, Counting the breath or in out, Staying with sensations, Feeling my sitting bones on my bench. You know I don't make it a problem. It's just discomfort. It's restlessness and then this movement towards distinguishing it allows us to do something very powerful. We begin to be able to see clearly the different qualities of attention, The different qualities of the mind. So to put it into experimental terms, Not so abstract, We start to feel what discomfort is like, Sensing the quality. We start to differentiate between okay so this quality of ease in the practice or does the quality have some stress? Is there a quality of this is really pleasant or this is really unpleasant? So that sensitivity starts to build. So curiosity, Being interested, Investigating it, It's kind of the life of this practice. You know the practice runs on it, Runs on curiosity to a very large extent. We actually have to find it in ourselves because if we're practicing and we're not curious, It won't last very long. You know if something doesn't grab our hearts in a way, It's very difficult to stay with it. You know as a teacher and as teachers do, Like what we try to do is say something that's useful or provocative so that it directs your mind back in some way. But a teacher can't manufacture curiosity for you. That has to come from your own heart and mind. That means that it's a very personal spark you know. The more I work with people and talk to people, The more careful I am about imposing my sense of what practice is and should be. It really, Really needs to be yours. So we have to find some way of relating to these teachings that kind of sparks our curiosity. There needs to be a seed of intrinsic motivation that's deeply yours and it's from that seed that all of this goodness of practice unfolds. You know there's not a lot of emphasis on how much I'm progressing on the path or where it's all heading. There's much more like a simple delight in just learning about our minds and our bodies. We have a tremendous amount of information that's available to us in terms of the quality of the heart and mind as we engage in our world. And this investigation, It's not like a probing analysis, It's just mindfulness you know. Becoming sensitive to like what is this? It's a relaxed awareness like thinking, Lots of thinking or ease, Lots of ease or pain. Like just abiding in the awareness of what's happening. One of the most frequent ways that Buddha talked about mindfulness is it's that it's not something we do but something that is established like we enter into it. It's and then we abide in it. So an abiding is our home. So it doesn't suggest like an act of doing something but rather it's like we enter our home. You know when we come home after a long day or being out you open the door and you've arrived in this place that we can rest in. And it's the same idea with mindfulness. You know we're changing, We're opening the door and walking through. We're abiding in mindfulness. And as we abide in mindfulness then we can start to see you know the experience, How it feels. This is pleasant, This is unpleasant. And just meeting it with curiosity. Now curiosity doesn't have an agenda. And in this way when we just meet it with curiosity this is how we become our own teacher. And we've been you know in the sharing that I've heard that becoming our own teacher is happening in our Sangha. You know we start seeing the Dharma in ourselves to see the teachings in our own moment to moment experience. It's not very complicated you know it's as simple as feeling like ouch and feeling like ah. It's that simple. The feeling of stress and the feeling of ease. And the ways to learn how to be with that experience. You know just seeing clearly what's going on. So investigation on this path factor, This second path factor is just an engaged learning. We start to experience growth in ourselves and we get I think there's some motivation with that to see our own unfolding. There's a kind of energy and that energy is the next path factor and we'll go into that more on Thursday. So thank you for your kind attention this morning. I'll open it up to questions now.

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