Anapanasati 7: Contemplation Of The Mind

In this meeting of the Pittsboro Recovery Dharma Meditation Group, we begin to consider the third section of the Anapanasati Sutra, contemplation of the mind. The recording begins with a guided meditation on the contemplation of the body and feelings. This is followed by a teaching on the ninth step of Anapanasati practice: Breathing in, I am aware of my mind. Breathing out, I am aware of my mind.

Transcript

Well,

Let's go ahead and get started.

I wasn't sure who would be here today and what people's levels of familiarity would be with what we've been doing.

I think Sam,

I know you've got some familiarity,

Karen,

You certainly do.

So why don't we go ahead and just start with a guided meditation.

We'll go through contemplations of the body.

We'll go through contemplations of the feelings,

And then we'll do some walking meditation and we'll come back and talk about contemplations of the mind.

The biggest thing I want you to consider during contemplations of the feelings as we get into that section is just remember that there's a difference in Buddhist psychology between feelings and emotions.

These are words that in our culture we use interchangeably.

And feelings in Buddhism are really more about the sensations that we receive through our senses including from our own mind.

The emotions are the stories we start to whip up based on the sensations that we've experienced.

So something is pleasant.

Okay,

So now we're clinging,

We're grasping,

We're spinning all kinds of stories about that or something is unpleasant.

Oh my God,

I wish that would go away.

That all has a role in our self-created suffering.

So as we're doing contemplations of the feelings,

Really what we're doing is talking about mental activities.

What we're really doing is looking at mental activities and identifying them as positive,

Negative,

Neutral,

Without getting into the actual content.

This is just a positive feeling.

Let it rise,

Let it fall.

This is a negative feeling.

Let it rise,

Let it fall.

Because what we're doing after we are recognizing mental activities,

Calming mental activities,

We're trying to get ourselves into a calm state that we can begin to really examine the mind,

Which is what we're going to start today.

And you got to get a hold of this craziness first that goes on in the mind.

So go ahead and take a few deep breaths.

And we'll be all set.

Bring your body to its meditation posture.

Let your mind rest on your body as your body rests on the cushion or your chair or the floor.

Be aware of sitting upright,

Rooted and aligned,

Strong in your posture.

Take a moment to bring a sense of appreciation to your surroundings.

The seclusion that the room brings to you offering you a place of safety and solitude in which you can practice.

And then as you have for the body,

Establish a seclusion in mind.

Rest from your day to day responsibilities,

Things that are bothering you,

Expectations.

There's no need for those now.

And formulate an intention to practice here and now for your own growth and for how your growth can benefit others.

I invite you to take a moment again and just be aware of your physical posture.

Let your body be relaxed,

Shoulders relaxed,

Slightly rounded,

Spine straight but not rigid.

Consider the muscles of your face,

Your jaw,

Your tongue.

Let all these be loose.

Take a deep breath.

And as you align your physical posture,

Align your mind,

Your mental posture,

Upright and connected with your intention to practice and hold on to that connection in a real and dedicated way.

And in our meditation,

When we have the need to realign our physical posture when it weakens,

So the posture of our mind needs to be realigned whenever our attention is lost,

Gently brought back to the breath,

Gently brought back to the practice.

Your physical posture is a reflection of the posture of your mind.

Your mind a reflection of the posture of your body.

Be here now.

This present moment is your life.

Dwelling in the present moment,

Bring mindfulness to the foreground.

Let mindfulness be predominant.

And think about how this feels.

Where does mindfulness reside?

Be aware of the feeling of mind and body when mindfulness is present.

Begin with sati,

Bare awareness.

Experience your mind and body as one.

Meet yourself where you are.

Bring yourself to a space of openness.

Be soft yet alert and awake.

With mindfulness in the four,

Become aware of your breathing.

Your inhalations,

Your exhalations,

Just the breath.

In and out.

The first instruction and contemplation to the body.

Breathing in a long breath,

I know I am breathing in a long breath.

As you breathe,

Bring your sense of knowing to breathing in,

Breathing out.

Observe the nature of your breath,

Its feeling,

Its texture.

This is an opportunity to explore with attention.

Knowing the breath supports the mind in mindful observation.

This process of observing the breathing,

Your breath long or short,

Makes it easy to see when your mind is about to wander and to bring it back to the comfort of the breath.

Not forcefully but gently.

Breathing in and out.

And as you feel ready with the degree of stability in your breathing,

Move on to whole body awareness.

Feel the linkage of your breath and your body and your body as a whole at one with the breath.

Your mindful observation shifts quietly to the body now.

Keeping the breath in the background,

Still mindful of the in and out,

But no longer focused on its quality,

Just that the breath is as a background now to your awareness of the whole body.

Breathing in and out.

Breathing out.

Breathing out.

Breathing deeply with awareness in the body.

There is a sense of contentment that can be found.

Simple.

Present.

Concentrated.

Excellent.

Excellent.

And in our awareness of the body,

There naturally comes a calming of the body.

A calming and slowing of its activity.

Not agitated.

Peaceful.

Breath is calm.

Body is calm.

Simple contentment in the tranquility of the body.

And as you sit in meditation,

Deepening your awareness over time and with practice,

This simple contentment can build toward a feeling of joy.

Joy in the simplicity of being aware in the moment,

Calm with the breath,

Calm with the body.

Take a moment and hold yourself open to the experience of joy.

This may be subtle or it may wash over you like a wave.

A feeling of joy is a gift.

A gift of practice.

A feeling of joy.

Whether you've had a full-on experience of joy,

Just a flash of it.

Eventually,

The intensity of that begins to fade.

All things do.

All things are impermanent.

You're left with a simple feeling of happiness.

Happy just to be here and now.

Awareness of your breath and your peripheral awareness.

Awareness of the whole body.

These things are still there.

But happiness,

Let that fill your awareness.

Let your happiness or even contentment serve as a base from which to become aware of your mental activities.

Things that move through your mind.

Just feelings.

Sensations from your senses allow them to rise and fall without attachment.

Rooted still in your breath.

Still in an awareness of the body.

Understand the feelings for just what they are.

Just sensations.

You don't need to chase them.

You don't need to push them away.

Just let them be.

Arising.

Recognized.

And passing.

But not followed.

Just be aware that these sensations come and go like passing clouds across the light of your awareness.

And over time,

As you bring awareness to the busyness of your mind,

The sensations that come and go.

Seeing them for what they are,

You'll find that your mental activities will begin to calm.

They become quieter because we're not becoming swirled in them.

Not exploring them,

Just seeing them for what they are.

A positive sensation,

Negative sensation.

Gentle and easy,

They come,

They go.

Not attachment is important here.

Though these steps are sequential,

You may find yourself moving back and forth.

Perhaps mindfulness of the breath and its simplicity comes forward again.

Embrace that.

Perhaps your attention shifts back to your body.

Be rooted by that.

Perhaps your practice for a long time is simply just to be aware of mental activity.

To learn how to not chase it or push it away.

That's fine.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

So the meditation we just did represents contemplations of the body and contemplations of the feelings.

The Anapanasati Sutra itself is divided into these four groupings of instructions.

Body,

Feelings,

Mind,

And objects of mind or dharmas,

The things around us.

With the contemplation of mind,

Which is this third set of four instructions,

We stand kind of at the threshold now of a more complex world.

There's a word you may have heard called Chitta,

Which in Pali,

Which was the language of the Buddha,

Means the mind,

But more like mind heart.

It's something that's larger than the thinking mind,

But it includes that too.

If the whole of Anapanasati practice is about self-knowledge,

Then with contemplation of the mind,

We are arriving at a very rich source of that.

The earlier contemplations of body and feelings,

They help us find the calm that's necessary to begin to examine the mind itself.

And as long as you need or want to stay with those first contemplations before delving into the mind,

As I was saying a minute ago during the meditation,

This is a practice and you can stay just with contemplations of the body for as long as you like.

As long as it takes to learn how to calm mental activity,

That's all fine.

As we get into this next contemplation of the mind,

This ninth step,

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my mind,

Breathing out,

I'm aware of my mind.

That simple.

Only not.

There are three aspects of the mind that I'd like you to consider.

You might have heard them referred to as,

You may know this word,

Kleshas.

It's a word which translates to mean defilement or poison.

And what we're talking about are greed,

Hatred,

And delusion.

Getting to know these states,

To observe them.

This is at the heart of contemplation of the mind.

Equally important though is getting to know the mind when it's free of these spiritual poisons.

So this next set of contemplations,

Contemplations of the mind,

Is not just about recognizing when these things are present,

But in time recognizing the absence of these,

What that feels like.

So the first question with any of these defilements,

Greed,

Hatred,

Or delusion is,

Is it present?

Are any one of these present?

A major part of the challenge is just to see these things.

For me,

It's sometimes shocking to see what my mind really is taken up with,

The way it is through the day.

Sometimes what I observe when I start to really look at the nature of my thoughts is very different than the sense of,

You know,

Who I think I am or the sense of how I think I am.

We learn to recognize greed when we're reaching out,

When we're grasping,

We're holding on to ideas,

We're holding on to things.

We create our own sense of suffering by not letting go.

Hatred or aversion,

Striking out against things,

Pulling away from them,

Trying to avoid a situation,

Trying to reverse what it is that's happened,

Clinging,

Aversion.

And then delusion.

We might also call this spiritual confusion.

You know,

We get into delusion,

It's as if we don't know what's what.

We don't feel unfocused,

We get caught in the delusion of separateness from the world around us,

Even separateness from our own feelings and mind as though these are something that we're simply at the mercy of,

Or something that we have to have to fight.

Delusion is the poison out of which the other two were born.

Because under delusion we can't see clearly and we spend a great deal of time chasing things that don't make us happy.

A great deal of time trying to avoid things that are unpleasant.

Now,

I know we're familiar with these ideas.

The question is,

How do we practice with this condition?

One of the things that my teacher at the Zen Center,

Teshin,

Is always saying is,

So what's the practice here?

We have these ideas,

But what's the practice?

Can we see these spiritual poisons without judging them or trying to change them?

Certainly without acting on them.

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my mind.

Breathing out,

I'm aware of my mind.

Our task now is just to experience the mind as it is.

Just to be aware of the mind,

But importantly resting all the while on things that remain in our peripheral awareness from the steps we've already done.

A steadiness in our body and our breath,

We can't let those go.

The calming of our mental activities,

Not letting feelings evolve up into emotions which take up our mental space,

They confuse our mental space.

You have to bring those forward as we go deeper and deeper through the 16 steps.

Over time,

We begin to see when greed and hatred and delusion cloud our mind.

We see thoughts that arise based in these poisons.

As we do,

We can experience that our mindfulness of these things,

Just our mindful observations of these things,

Starts to take the energy out of them.

We learn to observe these states of mind in a friendly way,

Instead of resisting them or fighting them or rejecting them,

Because that rarely works anyway.

The point is to change our mind from a battlefield where we're always fighting these states of mind to a place of peaceful coexistence with them.

I know that sounds counterintuitive,

But when we do that,

Then these mind states,

We see them as guests in our consciousness,

They don't have such power anymore because we're not pushing against them.

Sometimes when we fight against something,

We're bringing our energy against something,

It just makes it stronger.

Over time,

As we continue to look and we see these things again and again,

They lose their potency.

Now we may still be visited by anger,

Craving or fear,

But it can become easier to turn to these states and experience them directly,

And when it happens,

They start to thin out,

They start to fall away.

Larry Rosenberg wrote a good book on the Anapanasati Sutra,

Some of you have heard me mention it before,

It's called Breath by Breath.

He has a nice analogy,

He says these mind states that are based on greed and hatred and delusion,

These mind states that we produce,

They're like clouds.

Some of them are beautiful,

But some of them are dark and threatening.

They're just all clouds in the sky of the mind.

He says the sky is vast and it's glorious and it's unchanging,

But most of us live at the level of the clouds.

We barely even know that there is a sky.

And he says the way to the sky is through the clouds,

By studying them,

Observing them carefully in a friendly and unbiased way,

And in time as we do that,

They pass away.

Thich Nhat Hanh,

In his book on the Anapanasati Sutra,

The title of which will come back to me in a minute,

Breath You Are Alive,

He encourages us to love our greed and hatred and delusions as opportunities to practice with wisdom,

The same way he says that Jesus said to love our enemies as an opportunity to practice forgiveness.

Now these forces can do a great deal of harm,

But it's also true,

As I said,

That attacking them head on,

Wishing that they just didn't come up,

Doesn't work.

Instead the practice here is to accept them as part of our consciousness,

Just allow them to be,

To express themselves so that we can see them just what they are.

Come to know them,

Gradually let them disappear.

And as we become more skilled at that,

Then we also have opportunities to experience the mind when greed and hatred and delusion,

These poisons,

When they're not present,

When we're not experiencing these forms of suffering.

Over time,

With practice,

We find moments when the mind is clear.

We find peace and stillness in the breath because the suffering is not there.

There's no peace and joy and greed and confusion,

But there's a great deal of peace in their absence and we need to not miss that.

So the challenge of this ninth contemplation,

And there are four contemplations in Contemplations in the Mind,

And we're just talking about this first one.

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my mind.

Breathing out,

I'm aware of my mind.

The opportunity it brings is to know the mind in all its way of being.

Our practice here is to turn toward our suffering with the stability of our breath and the mental calm that we found in our contemplation of the feelings.

And to see these states of mind,

Poisons,

See the states of mind that they create and eventually work to find another kind of mind.

Why don't we take about,

What time is it?

6.

20,

Why don't we take about 10 or 15 minutes just to do some quiet meditation?

1.

Reviews

The best guided Anapanasati on this platform. Many thanks.
Very inspiring and profound. I wish, more people would follow this path. It's so liberating.

Thank you for your kind guidance in the stages of the anapanasati :-)

Outstanding! Very nicely led meditation. This is the type of practice that really resonates with me. I love Vippasana. And am really enjoying working through all the lessons. Thank you. ☮️💖🙏