Mindfulness Meditation Podcast - Mindfulness Meditation 6/08/16 with Jon Aaron

Episode Date: June 14, 2016

Every Wednesday, the Rubin Museum of Art presents a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area. This podcast is a recording of the weekly practice. If you would like to attend in person, please visit our website at RubinMuseum.org/meditation to learn more. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and the teachers from the NY Insight Meditation Center. This week’s session is led by Jon Aaron focusing on the theme of Perception. To view a related artwork from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection, please visit: rma.cm/14p

Thank you. join us in person, please visit our website at rubymuseum.org slash meditation. We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg and the teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center. In the description for each episode, you will find information about the theme for that week's session, including an image of a related artwork chosen from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection. And now, please enjoy your practice. John Aaron teaches at the New York Insight Meditation Center and is one of the guiding teachers at the Macomb Meditation Community at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

He is a certified teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction and has taught over 60 cycles of the seminal curriculum. He is a co-founding member of New York Mindfulness Meditation Collaborative. Please welcome back John Aaron. Perception is one of the five aggregates of clinging, clinging to self, which is spoken of in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, which is one of the major teachings, the early Buddhist teachings. The teaching that all of the mindfulness training that we have going on now, that is the teaching that it's based on. The mindfulness training that we have going on now, that is the teaching that it's based on. And to me, perception is a continual place of fascination.

And I wrote about this a few weeks ago, a few months ago, actually. There was a story in the New York Times that some of you may have seen regarding the funeral of a woman named Valjean McDonald. And the funeral home had mixed up two bodies. And it was an open casket funeral or open casket viewing. And Miss McDonald was not in the casket. It was another body, which is quite sad, of course. But everybody believed, except for the children, everybody believed that it was her. She had been through a lot of cancer treatments and had a pretty difficult last few years of her life. And, of course, when the body is embalmed, things happen. But generally course, when the body is embalmed, things happen.

But generally speaking, when a body is embalmed, you hope that it's going to look like the person who it is or who it was. But the children all knew that it wasn't her, which I found really interesting. And of course, our perceptions are completely caused by conditions. Our perceptions are completely caused by conditions. So in this case, the condition was, well, they had paid the funeral home. They assumed that the funeral home had done their job.

That was one condition. The other condition, of course, was the fact that they wanted it to be who it was. And so that was a pretty strong condition. The kids, of course, the young kids, had no set conditions like that. So they knew immediately that it wasn't her. The viewing was over, and then they unfortunately cremated her, this body, which belonged to another woman who the family didn't want cremated.

So it was kind of tragic in that sense. But this just shows us how we can really be thrown off by our perceptions. And who knows what the perception was of the people who were at the funeral home that even got to that point. But this is one example of this. And in MBSR training, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction training, it's actually in the first week we present something that's famously known as the nine dots puzzle.

And some of you may know this puzzle. It's just nine dots laid out as a square. And the puzzle is that you're supposed to connect these dots with four lines and no back tracing. You can do it without lifting your pencil. And of course people struggle over this because the mind locks on to the fact that these nine dots are in a box. So this relates back to that age-old saying,

thinking outside of the box. But the mind has a very saying, thinking outside of the box. But the mind has a very hard time thinking out of the box because the mind is really fixed on these nine dots as being a square. So people struggle over trying to get these nine dots in a square. So any of you that are presented with this puzzle, you now know what the solution is, or at least part of the solution. So then we say, well, if you can do it with four lines, then do it with three. Because the other thing the mind perceives is a dot is just a dot and has no area. But a dot has area. So with the notion that a dot has area,

that allows you more flexibility in trying to solve these puzzles. But it's so fascinating how we lock onto something and hold to it and refuse to believe that it's anything else. So there's an extremely well-known teaching of the Buddha from early on. It's called the Bahiya Sutra. And Bahiya was a mendicant who lived on the other side of India from where the Buddha was teaching.

And he had come to the conclusion that he was in fact awakened. But some of his friends questioned him about that and said, you know, I'm not so sure that you're really awakened. There's this guy on the other side of the country, Siddhartha Gautama, who's definitely awakened and perhaps you should go check it out with him. So he went across India. It took him quite a while to walk over there. He was wearing, allegedly wearing what they referred to as a bark robe. So that must have been very comfortable as he was going across.

He gets to where the Buddha is in the middle of his alms round. It's actually not very polite to interrupt a monastic when they're in their alms round. But he was desperate. So he asked the Buddha for a teaching.

He said, look, I may not be around much longer. I really could use a teaching to test myself here. The Buddha wouldn't hear. He said, come back later. He said, no, no, no. I really need to hear a teaching because you just don't know what will happen, which is true. You don't know what will happen. No, come back later. Third time he asked him, and the third time with the Buddha was always a charm. If you asked him three times, he would respond. So the Buddha's response at that point was, in the seen, there is only the seen. In the heard, there is only the heard. In the sensed,

there is only the sensed. In the cognized, there is only the cognized. Thus, you should see that indeed there is no thing here. This bahia is how you should train yourself. So I'll talk more about this next week because it's a pretty deep teaching. But basically, when we see, we're seeing. When we hear, we're hearing. But our experience generally is always seen through some other perception. Yeah? We have this beautiful thing called the prefrontal cortex, which is what makes us human and what, of course, gives us the creativity and imagination that we have. At the same time, it also really gets in the way

of seeing what's right in front of us most of the time. So that even when you come in contact with somebody who you've known all your life, what you are seeing is not the person standing in front of you. What you are seeing is your perception as it's evolved over those many years that you've seen this person. Whereas if you actually just saw the person that was in front of you, you would actually be relating to this person in a very different way.

And so if you think about your experience through the day, notice how often you are actually caught in a perception of what's happening versus what's actually happening. And this becomes particularly clear when we start looking at how our own mind works and how we get caught in various perceptions and are reacting to perceptions as opposed to what's really happening.

So coming back to the shrine room, which is, of course, really hitting all the senses at once. It can. We can get stuck in our opinions about various things and whether we like things or don't like things, but the shrine room is using the senses as a way of entry into our experience in a very direct way.

And of course, in the later Buddhist traditions that are represented up there, the Tibetan traditions, images in particular are used to invoke certain ways of seeing and certain entry points into awakening. In the earliest traditions, that wasn't really used at all. But culturally, it made sense in the Tibetan world to sort of bring in all these images and sounds,

which also help sort of call your attention and really focus you in a certain way. So the shrine room offers a lot of experience, but can we just be there for the experience, for the direct experience of the image, as opposed to all the fabrications around the images that may result. So that's where we start really bringing our practice to life. So we'll go into practice now. We'll sit for about 20 minutes, and I'll guide part of this.

But even as you're sitting in practice, start to notice how one way our perceptions come in is based on expectation. So we may have an expectation of the way we want something to happen, and when it's not happening that way, we're perceiving ourselves as a failure.

Totally based on an expectation, and we don't need an expectation. We can just sit and see what arises. Clear of any prior perception, clear of any expectation, just sit and see what arises moment to moment. So finding a posture which is upright and alert, and allowing the eyes to gently close. If you're feeling sleepy or you're not comfortable with the eyes closed,

just have a gaze down at the floor. Really no need to look at me. You're not going to gain anything as far as the practice goes by looking at me. So just allowing the eyes to close. And just knowing the body sitting here right now. Knowing the experience of the body as it sits here right now. The experience breathes, knowing that sensation. And just allowing awareness to rest with ease on this body sitting here breathing.

Sensations coming and going, sounds coming and going, thoughts coming and going, sounds coming and going, thoughts coming and going. But in the foreground is simply the awareness of the body sitting here breathing. Nothing to do, no particular way you need to feel. The experience is what the experience is in this moment. And if as you're sitting you notice that you get hooked on a thought, hooked into a story, congratulate yourself for actually recognizing that and then gently returning to just this experience of sitting here with the breathing body.

No judgment. Just being present with the mind and this breathing body. You may, of course, notice thoughts and maybe even reactivity to something that was just said. So, just being aware of that. Returning to this breathing body. Sensations of the in-breath. Sensations of the out-breath Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Just checking in and noticing how the mind is just now.

Without needing it to be any other way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Just checking in. Where is the mind now? Coming back to the breath, coming back to the body. With each breath, turning a kindly awareness to whatever is arising and fading away within experience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So as we come toward the end of this short meditation, just having gratitude for those around you who are supporting you as we sit, for the space that we're sitting in, for our lives which give us the opportunity for this. Thank you.. I didn't actually finish the story of Bahia. And there's more to the teaching,

but basically once he heard this teaching, the story goes that he was immediately enlightened. And a few minutes later, he was hit by a runaway cow and died. But it's only a story, so who knows. The other thing is that obviously the practice is not to get to the point where we have no perception because the mind perceives. The question is how we hold to these perceptions and how the perceptions often get in the way of our direct experience. And our practice allows us to start seeing that in a very direct way. So that's really one of the major, major teachings of mindfulness is to start seeing things more clearly, seeing really what the direct experience of our lives is

versus our perceptions of those experiences. Thank you all. Thank you.