Anapanasati 17: No Thought, No Form

In this recording, we begin to explore the fourth set of Anapanasati contemplations, beginning with Impermanence. The talk itself focuses on the ideas of No Thought, and No Form. This is followed by a guided meditation.

Transcript

It's getting to be warm outside.

The little second floor room where I am is getting to show its inherent Attic nature.

So today in a sort of roundabout fashion,

We're going to begin to address the fourth set of contemplations in Anupāsāti meditation.

Contemplations of wisdom,

Contemplations of insight,

Contemplations of dharma.

And as we enter into these last contemplations,

Which are kind of both obtuse and liberating at the same time,

I have to remember my own journey with these ideas and practices and what I've come to know and what I only think I've come to know and what I need to release.

And I need to practice gratitude for my own teachers,

Sensei Teshin Swager at the North Carolina Zen Center,

And the teachers who I have through my reading,

Who I've mentioned before,

Larry Rosenberg from the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center,

And also Biko Inayo,

Who sort of embodies the archetype of the scholar monk.

So I have to pay tribute to those folks also.

Remembering where we've been in all of this so far,

Really examining really the most basic functions,

Looking at the ways of our breath and the body,

The nature of our feelings,

And finally the variety of our mind states most recently.

You know,

Like observing out in nature in its endless variety with each thing existing in a state of perpetual change.

And we're the same.

We can think of ourselves as happy and depressed or pessimistic or joyful.

But if we watch for any length of time,

We find that it all goes through changes.

And eventually we find ourselves reflecting the full range of human possibility.

The 13th step in Anapanasati's series of 16 steps is the first of four in the contemplations of wisdom.

Breathing in,

I contemplate impermanence.

Breathing out,

I contemplate impermanence.

Or I'm aware of the impermanence of dharmas.

Now we talked a lot about impermanence together,

And the Buddha held impermanence really at the center of his early teaching.

Through it,

He offered a deeper understanding of the suffering that we all go through and a pathway into a release of that suffering.

This contemplation,

That of impermanence,

Is at the heart of what is known as vipassana meditation or insight meditation.

Clearly seeing the changing nature of things.

Of our breath,

Our emotions,

Our bodies themselves.

You know,

With the dying of cells and the creation of cells.

I heard once that over a period of every seven years,

We completely replace all of the cells of our body.

I mean,

If that's the case,

There's not a single thing in me that was there when I was in my 40s.

And what was in me when I was a kid is long gone.

So when observing with insight,

We observe as though a blank slate.

Seeing each thing's birth and its death.

Observing mental and physical formations as they pass through our consciousness.

And as we do,

We witness their impermanence.

It's important though not to see this as a loss,

But rather as an opportunity.

As things change,

We learn to keep ourselves open to whatever it is that's in the moment.

And this practice teaches us that we can handle everything.

Our worst fears,

Our deepest desires.

If we encounter them with clear seeing,

With insight into the impermanent nature of all things,

All beings,

All thoughts,

All feelings.

So last week we read from this book,

Silent Illumination by Guo Gu.

He's a Chan practitioner.

I think he's in Florida.

Karen,

I don't know if you are familiar with this guy.

But we spoke of contentment.

Contentment born of presence with body and breath in the moment.

And free from the grasping and rejecting that's based so deeply in our own sense of self.

What it is that captivates me.

What it is that repulses me.

When we read last week from Silent Illumination,

Guo Gu was saying that the opposite of rejecting and grasping is contentment itself.

The quality of doing neither.

Practicing what the Buddha called the middle way.

I told this story a few weeks ago and most of you know it I'm sure.

The Buddha having been raised in what can only be described as opulence.

But none of that really fulfilling his inner needs.

And leaving the palace and going out into the forest and becoming a monk and practicing severe austerities and really coming to the point of death.

And lying along the stream bank there and the boat goes by and the young boy with the lute and the teacher.

And the teacher is saying to the boy as he's tuning the lute,

Remember if you make the strings too tight,

They'll break.

And if they're too loose,

They won't play.

And this is when the Buddha suddenly realized that there must surely be a middle path,

A middle way between extremes.

Now this morning in our local Zen group we were discussing the idea of the middle path.

And our teacher posed the question,

If you're not grasping and if you're not rejecting,

Then where are you?

What are you doing?

And here in this group I asked a similar question last week I think it was,

What is it that is neither grasping nor rejecting?

In their absence,

From where does contentment spring?

Now thoughts of grasping and rejection are so difficult then you know,

You might ask,

Are we not to think?

Are we not to consider?

If our reactions to the things around us bring us to the poisons of greed and hatred,

Are we not meant to interact with the world around us?

And this is where things get sticky for people and where the steps of the fourth set of contemplations need to be properly understood.

Impermanence,

Dispassion,

Cessation,

Letting go.

We've discussed before a change that we can bring to our understanding of the nature of attention.

From attention that we bring towards something,

Which is usually how we understand that word,

A process in which we can often bring our own baggage of one kind or another,

Opinions,

Etc.

Or to a sense of attention which is more receptive,

Receptive attention,

A sense of openness to what is the reality of a thing.

To the real reality of a situation,

Of a thought,

Receptive attention,

Perceiving what is neither held nor released.

But to find what is simply there before our own judgments,

Our opinions,

Our fears,

Before any of these,

Can get in the way.

And so we get into a territory in Buddhist thinking here where we hear words and phrases like emptiness,

No self,

No form.

And these can seem negating.

Some people think that Buddhism is a nihilistic sort of thing.

These seem to call us into ways of being that seem impossible.

They seem nonsensical.

No thought.

No form.

Well,

Clearly,

I think all the time and clearly,

There's form right in front of me.

So what's really happening here?

And what I'd like to do is just take a look at these two.

So as far as no thought goes,

You know,

First to be clear,

In spite of what the phrase might imply,

The idea of no thought does not mean cutting off our thinking.

A lot of people feel like that's what they're supposed to do in meditation and they feel like abject failures because they can't cut off their thinking.

We can't really.

Our brain,

It's designed to think it's what it does.

The idea of thought,

Though,

Really has two different meanings.

The first is our brain's natural ability to think,

To engage with symbols,

To consider abstract ideas.

That's a wonderful gift of humanity.

But the second is very different.

And it has to do with our fixation on our mental constructs and ideas,

Our tendency to try to make them into something concrete,

Something real that we can hold on to,

Something that we can grasp or reject.

So our natural ability to think,

To imagine,

This is not the problem.

The problem Guo Gu is telling us,

As we read last week,

Is when we start to solidify our thoughts and feelings into fixed ideas,

Which becomes so strong as to begin to define a sense of me,

Mine,

I.

To practice contentment,

He said,

We must recognize these things as they arise without grasping or rejecting.

But if we do neither,

What does that mean is really happening?

So in a sense,

We can consider that in neither grasping with desire nor rejecting with aversion,

We instead embrace our thoughts and our feelings with clarity and compassion.

We see them rise.

We witness them be for a while and we see them fall,

Which means that they lose their strength and their hold on us.

When you feel something within,

Guo Gu writes in his book,

Recognize it,

But don't identify and solidify it into a thing.

Definitely don't build a narrative around it,

He says.

This is the meaning of practicing no thought amid thoughts.

It's learning to have a healthy relationship with our thoughts instead of being conditioned by them.

And this last is a vital notion,

Being conditioned by our thoughts,

Understanding that our perceptions are conditioned realities.

They're conditioned,

They're shaped not only by what's happening around us,

But by what we ourselves think and feel in response.

In the idea of no thought,

There's no need to stop our thoughts,

As I said,

But it's vital to develop the ability to be free from them.

Remember this passage from the reading last week.

Guo Gu wrote,

The truth is,

We first have to see what it is that we have to let go of,

And what it really means to let go.

We have to expose our subtle emotional afflictions and negative habits.

We have to accept them.

Only when we accept them will we be able to take responsibility for them and to work through them.

And then we'll no longer be under their influence.

This is to let go of them.

So it's an interesting kind of little dichotomy there,

Letting go being acceptance,

Recognition,

Understanding that these things are,

And that we need to deal with them with a sense of open-handed release.

So this idea of no form,

No form is a teaching on relating to the external world,

Obviously.

How we grasp onto appearances and characteristics as individual,

Real things.

Now in light of interdependence,

Dependent co-arising,

We remember that there is really not a single thing.

Nothing has a fixed,

Unchanging,

Objective reality.

We've talked about this a number of times.

We've talked about that modern physics bears this out.

This is a teaching not about denying form,

But about allowing appearances and characteristics just simply to be without us coloring them with projections of our own ideas and our own feelings.

By not attaching to them,

By not reifying them as things which are somehow out there.

When we make everything,

You know,

When we make appearances and characteristics,

Just to use the phrase,

When we make them into things,

Everything we touch can become a source of suffering,

Invited by our expectations,

Our disappointments,

Our judgments,

Our opinions.

So the meaning of no form is to engage with forms and appearances,

The things that we experience around us.

It has to do,

And to do with what is appropriate,

But without grasping onto a fixed way of doing things,

To hold ourselves open through receptive attention to the reality of each thing,

To the reality of each situation,

To understand that things are not necessarily going to act,

To be,

To respond as we expect them to,

As we want them to,

As we seem to need them to.

Therefore,

When we hold on to those expectations,

We're going to create our own suffering.

For me,

That can be as simple as my keys disappearing as they do,

Or it can be listening to the radio and hearing somebody spouting what I consider to be utter nonsense.

But I also have to understand that I need to let go of my expectation of what other people are going to do and say,

And what I think is right,

And deal with it as it comes.

In the book Silent Illumination,

Guo Gu quotes the Platform Sutra,

Saying,

Good friends,

Then what is meditative concentration?

Externally,

To transcend appearances and characteristics is meditation.

Internally,

To be undisturbed is called concentration.

So meditation in this line of thinking means to not be externally swayed by causes and conditions,

And not to be internally disturbed by our own thoughts and feelings.

But to do this,

We have to become aware of what's going on inside of us,

And how we're projecting our own standards,

Our ideals,

Our expectations onto the world of form.

So the practice of no thought is connected to the practice of no form.

How we feel inside is how we relate to what we encounter outside.

The world of form operates through causes and conditions,

As we've spoken of in relation to dependent co-origination.

Appearances are fluid.

By not attaching to the appearances and characteristics of the world,

Though,

Does that mean we're simply just to be among them?

Unaffected?

Uncaring?

And if so,

How do we live in the world of causes and conditions?

What about issues of injustice?

Discrimination?

Wrongdoing?

The wrongs of the world have to be addressed.

But we need to remember that each thing is exactly how it is supposed to be,

According to the workings of causes and conditions.

And this means we need to engage the causes and conditions if we are to better the world around us,

And to better the way that we interact.

Causes and conditions are about relationships.

We have to recognize,

Adapt,

Sometimes wait,

And create the different causes and conditions that allow change to occur.

Like Gandhi said,

Right?

Be the change that you want to see in the world.

We have to create the causes and conditions for change to arise.

Otherwise,

Our emotional afflictions,

They're going to follow our every move.

So we engage in meditation practice.

In Anapanasati,

We are searching for our emotional afflictions.

We're searching for our suffering mind states.

We're working to truly incorporate this sense of independence.

Bhikkhu Nalyu recommends in his book as we come to this 13th step,

Breathing in,

I contemplate,

Impermanence.

As we go back through the first 12 steps,

And we've done some of this,

To really consider the impermanence that we find in the breath.

To really consider the impermanence that we find in the body,

In the feelings,

In the mind states to internalize impermanence as a reality.

Again,

Something that brings us opportunity rather than loss.

Take a few good deep breaths.

Find your upright,

Comfortable,

Dignified posture.

One where your breath can flow freely.

Consider your diaphragm,

Its movement in and out.

Fill and empty your lungs.

And with a few breaths,

Root yourself into your posture.

One where your breath can flow freely.

Let a sense of mindful awareness.

Form within you.

Bring that awareness to your breath.

And with each inhalation,

Feel your sense of mindfulness swell and build.

The sutra tells us simply breathing in,

I know I am breathing in.

Such wisdom.

Breathing out,

I know I am breathing out.

And as you breathe,

Be aware of the changing nature of your breath.

From the inception of your inhalation to the capacity of your breath.

The exhalation.

Each breath in constant motion.

Each breath different from another.

Over and over your whole life long.

Each breath unique and each breath in a state of constant change.

Eman.

And as you breathe,

Allow your attention to spread into your body,

Come down out of your mind,

Come down out of your head.

Feel the expansion of your diaphragm,

The connection between mind and body.

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my whole body.

Breathing out,

I'm aware of my whole body.

As true for our breath,

Our body changes moment by moment in its sensations,

Its aches and pains,

Gray in our hair,

The constant dying and creation of cells,

Truly and on that level,

Never the same moment by moment.

Quite wondrous in a way.

And so we dwell with body and breath,

Present in the moment,

Each moment rising,

Each moment passing,

Impermanent and leading to the next.

Consider the idea of open-handed release.

In the face of constant change,

What is there to grasp?

What is there to release?

Just present,

Body,

Breath and moment.

In a warm embrace of mindful attention.

You may find a sense of contentment here.

And with time,

A sense of contentment can become a feeling of joy.

Hold yourself open to the experience of the contentment and joy.

But as for all things,

Even feelings of joy ebb and flow.

Allow these things to move into your peripheral awareness,

Your mindfulness of breath and body to a peripheral awareness,

Bringing your attention now to the feelings.

These reactive patterns we have to the small things that happen in our lives,

Day to day,

Moment by moment.

Wishes for things to be different,

Fears that things will change,

Irritations,

Flashing moments of joy.

Each very real and each very impermanent.

And so we develop a practice.

We see them arise,

Come into being and exist,

And pass away.

And we neither grasp after them nor try to push them away,

But simply hold them in an embrace of awareness.

Each thing passing.

Each thing arising.

Each feeling passing.

This way we become less attached to our feelings.

And so our feelings begin to calm.

The teacher tells us,

Breathing in,

I calm my feelings.

Breathing out,

My feelings become calm.

Breathing out,

My feelings become calm.

Breathing out,

My feelings become calm.

The feelings of the small things that clutter our lives,

The things that disturb the water of our well-being.

As the winds of our activity stir them up,

Keep them in motion.

But as with acceptance,

Our reactivity wears away.

It's like the wind falls and the waves fall with it.

Let your feelings calm.

Let your awareness of the move to that peripheral awareness bring your attention to your mind.

Clear in your sight,

Shining in the light of awareness.

Breathing in,

I am aware of my mind.

Breathing out,

I'm aware of my mind.

Here too we observe with non-attachment,

Neither grasping nor pushing away,

But observing.

Our thoughts as they arise,

It's here that our suffering truly lives.

Our deepest fears,

Our deepest desires,

The things which haunt us.

With mindfulness,

We see each one rise,

Each thought as it exists,

And each thought as it passes.

With simple acceptance,

A compassionate understanding,

This is what letting go is.

Letting go is acceptance,

Letting go is compassion.

Here too we see so clearly the reality of impermanence.

For if we don't hold and if we don't push away,

Things come,

They go,

And we see them change.

And with time and practice,

We can find moments in between these suffering thoughts,

Moments of clarity.

And in that,

And in this practice,

We can take gladness.

Breathing in,

I make my mind glad.

Breathing out,

I experience gladness.

Moving away.

Reviews

Another good one! These talks and practices are so excellent. For me, this is the type of meditation that resonates. Some Darhma, some practice, much peace. Thank you once again. ☮💖🙏