Waking Up

This is about the notion of being awake, of waking up. Many of you know that in Buddhism, the word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word, Bodhi, which is often usually translated as to awaken. And the Buddha is a title, it's not a given name. It's his title because he's the one who's Bodhi, who's awakened. So he's the Buddha, the awakened one. So the idea of being awake is very important in Buddhism.

And the opposite of that is that people are generally asleep; that the general sleepwalking.

Transcript

So I'd like to start with a brief story around the Buddhist enlightenment myth.

It's said that soon after his enlightenment the Buddha passed a man on a road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence.

And the man stopped and asked my friend what are you?

Are you a celestial being,

A god?

And the Buddha said no.

Well then are you some kind of magician or wizard?

Again the Buddha answered no.

Are you a man?

No.

Well my friend then what are you?

And the Buddha replied I am awake.

I am awake.

So today I want to talk about this notion of being awake,

Of waking up.

Many of you know that in Buddhism the word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word Bodhi which is often usually translated as to awaken.

And the Buddha is a title.

It's not a given name.

It's his title because he's the one who's a Bodhi,

Who's awakened.

So here's the Buddha,

The awakened one.

So the idea of being awake is very important obviously in this Buddhist path.

And the opposite of that is that people are generally asleep.

That the general human condition of people is somehow we're just kind of sleepwalking.

That something about the way in which we relate to the world,

The way in which we relate to ourselves,

How our thoughts are so captivating and they require so much attention and our concerns are so captivating.

It's the equivalent of being asleep.

We actually don't see reality as it actually is.

We have these social constructs,

You know these perspectives,

These frames of reference by which we understand our experience and our life.

And they're flexible and they're fluid and we can change them and we can move with them.

So to wake up is in part to wake up from these social constructs that we have that we think are inherent in reality,

In nature actually,

How things actually are.

And to realize that these constructs,

They aren't the way that things are.

To wake up from that like,

Oh,

It's actually different than the social construct that I'm placing upon it.

You know,

They can be different.

It's an interpretation of reality.

And what the amazing thing that we discover is,

Is that we live to a large degree,

The world that we live in is really this world of social constructs.

The world that we have in our mind,

The ideas,

The concepts,

And very seldom do we actually see the world as it really is.

We paint it with our concepts.

You know,

In our culture,

We judge people all the time.

We have all kinds of ways of describing people.

They're a mountaineer or they're a skier or they're an artist or a musician or a writer or a banker or an accountant.

They're really hip or they're pretty straight laced.

You know,

We put people in these categories,

Who they are and you know,

Based on their background,

What kind of social status they have,

What their economic class is.

So to understand this idea of waking up,

I think it's helpful to understand how much of our life is spent in our thoughts and in our ideas.

So even something as simple as this bell,

You know,

This bell that I'm holding.

So maybe some of you can see this bell that I'm holding up.

You know,

It's very nice.

You know,

Sounds pretty.

I could really cling to this bell.

I can have the idea that after meditation,

I ring this bell to end meditation and that means that I'm really spiritual,

You know,

Because I have the right bell.

So I have all kinds of ideas about what it means to have this bell and it can feel really important,

You know.

But the interesting thing about clinging is that I'm holding up this bell for you to see because I want you to see it,

But I'm actually not clinging to it physically.

Clinging is not generally in the physical world.

The clinging belongs to the mental world.

You know,

Right now I'm obsessed with this.

I'm clinging to the idea of the bell and the idea of what the bell will do for me.

In the psychic world,

In the mental world,

There's nothing physical about the clinging and if we don't realize that,

Then we might not understand where the freedom lies in relationship to this clinging to the bell.

The clinging and the freedom are both in the mind.

So in the relationship that's formed there,

The clinging is not to the bell.

The clinging is to the idea,

The idea I have about it,

The idea of what it will bring me and that's actually true in a lot of different situations in our life.

We cling to people.

We cling to our possessions.

We cling to all kinds of things and we,

You know,

Things that we say.

But more often than not,

It's not the thing that we're clinging to,

But there's some kind of clinging in our mind towards the idea and the concept that we have about it.

And to wake up is to see the clinging to these ideas and concepts.

To see it's not the literal thing.

And that's,

You know,

That's sometimes very hard to see.

The gist of what I'm saying,

The wake up is to realize this whole mental world is associated to concepts and is born in the mind.

And part of the opportunity of mindfulness practice is to use the calm that maybe you get through meditation or the insight of the mindfulness practice to begin noticing the response inside of us to the stimulus in the world.

To see how we construct this social reality and how this mental construction comes into being and literally paints our experience in a certain way.

It can be hard to see this sometimes.

You know,

Unless we go into a radically different environment and we see things can be really different.

I heard this saying that there's a saying that you don't really know England until you leave England.

Like that's actually a saying and that illustrates what I'm kind of talking about.

Somehow leaving a situation that you're embedded in for a long time can give you perspective about what's going on there.

And you realize like,

Wait a minute,

There's a social reality here that I bought into and maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

Going on retreat is a way,

It's a very powerful way of seeing this.

We come together and we're all together in silence so there's not social interaction and in part our mind can rest.

And so when the retreat is over we can see it's almost a sadness comes along because we can see how we reconstruct our concerns about being liked or not being liked and how we have concerns about approval.

So from the background of silence we let go of all those concerns and then when we come back together in life we see how they're reborn.

Sometimes we can see all the ways in which we interpret ourselves and our lives which aren't really inherent to life itself but are social and mental constructs.

We can see how we create it and that's one of the things that meditation is trying to point to,

That it's a creation.

So the last thing I want to weave into this is that it could be that this idea of waking up from our mental constructs,

It doesn't entail rejecting our mental constructs.

Some people reject one mental construct of the world or social construct of the world just to pick up another one.

And I think the idea for us is not to accept or reject our constructs but rather just to be mindful,

To help us be in conversation with our mental constructs,

The way that we construct the world,

The way that we construct our social interaction with it,

To see it,

To see it and then to reflect on it.

Is it useful the way I've constructed my reality?

We don't have to reject our constructed views at all.

We just need to see them for what they are.

So and what that does is that it allows us to sort of be in charge.

So our constructs are not in charge of us.

We're in charge of them by simply seeing what is true.

Suzuki Roshi said something like you can understand this Buddhist path in just three words.

Maybe I could have just said those three words this morning and that would have been it.

And those words,

Those words are not always so.

Not always so.

That kind of sums up this teaching.

Not always so.

So thank you for your attention this morning.

Reviews

🙏💓

Helpful.

A beautiful teaching! Thank you, Lisa. Deep bow 🙏🏽

❤️excellent

Very nice. Thank you so much for the insight. Loved this. Sharing. 🙏🤍

This track is mislabeled as a guided meditation rather than a short dharma talk. Great though!