El Dharma Written Talks
Meditation is
Paying Attention to What is Here

In the Buddhist scriptures, it’s written that the Buddha described very specific characteristics of this world. Those characteristics are: first, anicca, that everything here is impermanent, nothing lasts. Everything that appears here out of emptiness for a period of time, disappears. And of course that includes us, although most of us don’t like to think about that. The second characteristic, dukkha, is that everyone who appears here as a human being suffers. It’s impossible to be alive without discomfort and dissatisfaction. It comes to everyone. The third of the characteristics is anatta, the doctrine of no self. That teaching is that there is no such thing as a “me”, a separate self. Related to that teaching is the notion that everything that comes into being, including thoughts and images, is inter-related; nothing exists alone. Those are key points in the Buddha's teachings. Whether we practice or not, it's important for us to understand that this world is fleeting; it's impermanent. What is “down the pike” for all of us is an exit, and it's inevitable. Everything that we relate to, all that we love, will at some point be lost. Some people say these characteristics are really the reason for the suffering.

There are other characteristics that run deep also. This world, in addition to being impermanent, is a world of duality; everything that appears here has its opposite. For every white, there's black. For every up, there's down. For every yes, there's no. For every impulse, there is the opposite reaction. The Navajo call our world the land of shadows. Everything that exists here casts a shadow. For every moment of satisfaction and glee, there will be a moment of sadness. For every bit of pain, there will be pleasure. In a world of duality, it's impossible to have one experience without eventually having the other. They come together, since nothing that exists here is separate from everything else.

The world of duality is a bipolar world. You could think of the consciousness of our world as fractured. It is divided, and there's no better example of that than the fact that the human brain has two discreetly different hemispheres, the left and the right, and they're united in the middle by a very mysterious kind of bridge called the corpus callosum. The left hemisphere, mapped by neuroscientists, is said to be the center of discursive linear thought, sequential thought. It is also the home or the place of activity of the separate self, the "me" who thinks and sees him or herself as different and separate from everything else. The right hemisphere, according to neuro-anatomists, is the land of intuition, expansiveness, ecstasy, a sense of incredible well-being, and oceanic feeling. Here there is the realization of the interconnectedness of everything—that everything is just one total being.

We humans actually have a divided consciousness that we inherit. It happens for all of us in infancy, when a unique point of view forms in the mind that there is a “me” looking out of these eyes onto the outside world. This is “me” in this skin, and everything else is different from “me”. Buddha called it wrong view. He said it was a twisted way of seeing the world, but that everyone perceives the world through that lens of separation. The “me” sees that way all the time. One could make an argument that separation between self and other is the source of suffering, of dissatisfaction. As soon as there is a “me”, there is then the “other”. This separation is an open wound where fear, suspicion, the sense of danger, and the need to protect the notion of separate self arises. The people who study the teachings by practicing the practices discover inevitably that there isn't actually a solid “me”. There isn't anything we can identify in the mind as a “me”, even though it appears to be so in our experience. That's difficult for us who have operated all our lives as egos, and have dealt with the discomfort and the suffering that inevitably comes with separation—the loneliness and fear. So we see the world with a divided attitude, a divided frame of reference. And that's normal. That's how we are. But, I think it's helpful in contemplating our lives to remember that the way we see the world is not the whole picture. The way we habitually see the world is open to question, open to change, open to expansion. Those of us who practice paying attention in life begin to intuit that there is more than the “me”; there is more than this separation. We know it somehow, deep in our hearts. We just know it; there's a taste of it.

Another aspect of this duality is that for every something that comes into being, any object: a dog, a cat, a plant, a flower, there is the “not something” of it. In other words, for every bit of space taken up by this body, there is also the emptiness of the space—can’t have the something without the nothing. One of the most subtle understandings that comes to people who become interested in the Buddha's teaching and practice, is the importance of realizing emptiness. Rather than being a vacuum, or an absence, or a bad word, emptiness is actually the other part of our experience. Emptiness is more of the totality of who we are.

In the meditation practice, the Buddha taught a way for people to awaken to this truth, a way that did not deny, but included their natural sense of separation. Think of meditation practice as carefully paying attention to something that is actually here, rather than looking for nothing. In his teachings, the Buddha gave very specific suggestions about what to pay attention to. He outlined four objects of mindfulness. First is awareness of the body. Second is the awareness of feelings, bodily sensations, the energetic life of the physical body. The third is awareness that there is mind. And the fourth is awareness of the imaginings, the thoughts, the images, the visual pictures, all of the phenomena that occur in the mind. To pay attention to who we are in the moment, it is helpful to place our focus on an obvious object of attention. The breath is suggested. It makes a lot of sense to focus on something that's here, repetitive, and constant. The breath is a perfect object of focus. A mantra, if you have a mantra, is also an object of focus. Listening to sounds is a classical way of practice, too. Listening to sound is very orienting toward the present moment, because that's when sound happens. The sensations of the breath are very orienting toward the present moment, because that's when breath happens, only now. Hearing or feeling the sensations of the body are ways of being in the present moment.

If we're going to discover the truth of our self, it's important to start with what we can observe, what we know, what's unquestionable. For instance, the breath is unquestionable. It happens. We don't need to think about the experience of the living body; it just is. When we examine thinking, it's a little trickier. The mind is deceptive. It's hard to really “get hold of” thought. It's more ephemeral, fleeting, changing, coming and going rapidly. The paradoxical and really mysterious thing that happens when we focus on an obvious object, like the breath, is that the mind opens automatically to what is not obvious, what is not material. In a world of duality you can not have one without the other. This is the genius of the practice, of the teachings. How incredible that someone would understand this and pass it down to us!

If we practice being attentive and learn to hold our attention fairly steady for a period of time, an experience of expansiveness begins to occur. We have to practice because our attention span is so short; we're barely able to be here for a moment. Isn't that true, really? Here and gone, here and gone, here and gone. It isn't that our vision gets limited when we focus on an object like the breath as foreground, but, instead, the BACKGROUND becomes more and more obvious. The openness, the emptiness inevitably makes itself known. And when that happens, something wonderful is experienced. Maybe it happens in the hemispheres of the brain. Perhaps there's a lighting-up of the right hemisphere to balance the activity in the left. But what's certainly true, is that as we become more and more able to examine and sustain attention with the familiar, we become more and more aware of the unknown, the unfamiliar. That's the paradox. When we think of it in terms of this being a dual world, it makes total sense. Meditation is giving ourselves a gift of noticing what's here without any need to fix it, change it, or have an opinion about it—bare attention. Of course, when we start practicing bare attention, the left brain, the “me mind”, comes in immediately and wants to talk about it to us: Stop doing this because this doesn't make any sense at all, and you're not good enough to do it anyway, and what are sensations, it's not important. Yeah breath, ho hum, I've been breathing my whole life. So, what's the big deal. That kind of chatter or mind talk comes, because the more we focus on something, the more what the “me” fears the most comes into awareness. And The “me” fears emptiness. The “me” fears not knowing. The “me” fears this experience of no boundaries, no separation, no rules and regulations, no problems, no fear, no familiarity.

The genius of the practice is that it begins where we are, and then allows us to expand; the mind opens. It's inevitable that this happens in the practice, you see, it has to. The more focus, the more mindful openness occurs. First we become more aware of the experiences in our daily life. We become more and more aware of the movement of our hand, or the feeling inside of our hands, or the sound of the dogs, or the movement of the fans, or the light in the room, the tone of the voice, the faces, the floor, the colors. We become more and more aware of all of that, because the mind is opening. So the limited point of view of: I am here and you're out there diminishes. The openness and the noticing also bring pure awareness of the inner world—the world of inner vision, sound, color, the energetic life that has no boundaries—the spirit. With meditation, the life of the spirit becomes more and more obvious. So you see how it works; it makes a lot of sense.
People who don't practice in this way are more likely to get fixated and obsessed with things and ideas such as relationships, government, power, pleasure, and are more likely to be clinging to those things as reality. When clinging to material things or ideas and philosophies, opinions and agendas, we are not open to that which is larger than us.

Why should we want to practice meditation? Well, we already have this intuitive sense that there is something to be examined, there's something to be looked at, there's something more. For most people there has to be practice, because awakening usually doesn't happen without some kind of effort and attention. It doesn't have to be formal meditation. It can be just the discipline of being attentive at every moment: washing the dishes, walking across the floor, picking up the groceries, whatever. But once there is a moment or two of opening, we become enticed, because the openness and the emptiness that the Buddha speaks of is not a vacuum, it's actually a fullness. It's an opening into life itself. It's an opening into BEING, in addition to all the doing that we're used to.

An interesting thing about life, itself, is that it has no opposite. Can you get that? Life has no opposite. There is no shadow to life itself. The opposite of death is birth. The practice that we've been given is a direct route to the experience of what we “are” in every moment. When we focus on a specific something, we are led to the experience of life without the need to alter anything. As soon as we argue with "our being" or have an opinion about the experience, or want to do something about it, we fall off into the “me”. That’s the rhythm. But if there is surrender into life itself, do you know what the promise is? Since life has no opposite, it’s eternal. Life itself is eternal. We’re working toward the realization that we are life itself, at the deepest level of understanding. We experience that by being just the way we already are—total acceptance. We stop fighting it. We stop objecting to it. We stop putting opinions and judgments on it. We just allow life, as it is. Many teachers say things like, “Well, it’s not necessary to meditate, you’re already here, you already are it.” However, in my experience, most people need a little bit of orientation to that point of view, even though it's true. The importance of practice then becomes evident.

Openness into the experience of life itself, the very essence of humanity, is an experience that is beyond compare. It is unimaginable, and it is never what we think it’s going to be. It is always, always, just what it is. It’s not describable; it can only be described as something that is worth working for or opening to, because it’s the sole reason to be here. The “being”, the life itself that I’m speaking of, is synonymous with unconditional love. The world is a great ocean of love. There is no difference between life itself and love.

Consider that this planet, this tiny blue-green dot, floating in the vast emptiness of this universe and beyond, is the only location of life, as we know it. It only exists within a 2 mile band of space encircling this planet. No one has ever discovered the beginning of it or an ending to it; it’s eternal. How absolutely precious is this life we have been given and that we manifest through this body. How miraculous! What a mystery!

We are the recipients of the most incredible gift of life. If we were to understand fully the meaning of this gift; we would be greatly transformed in our lives. How would we be? We would love each other, without conditions. We would be compassionate toward each other, without conditions. We would be unable to be cruel. We would be unable to go to war. Our world isn’t like that. However, I do believe there’s a global movement in the direction of a massive awakening. For those of us having that experience, whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other label, the awakening cuts through all of those beliefs, all of those concepts. As the Native American prophecy states: We are the blessed ones. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.