Tara Brach - Don't Know Mind (a talk from June 10, 2009)

Episode Date: December 30, 2016

Don't Know Mind - Thoughts, and more broadly, conceptual knowledge, cannot lead to the direct realization of truth, of reality. While thoughts are an essential part of surviving and thriving, spiritual awakening only becomes possible when we step out of the trance of thinking. This talk invites listeners into the radical openness and freedom of not-knowing. (a favorite from 2009-06-10)

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. The centerpiece really, if you look at meditation training, the centerpiece of most meditation trainings involves building some capacity to wake up out of thoughts. I tried to emphasize it a bit tonight. But really it's basic in the training. and how we relate to thoughts is kind of critical because the idea is not to get rid of them

that's like saying get rid of your that you shouldn't secrete enzymes or something that the mind secreats thoughts like the body secrete enzymes and they just happen so the idea is not to get rid of thoughts it's thinking is key to our survival and thriving but like all tools there's a limited domain for them

and in an evolutionary way to continue to evolve our consciousness involves a shifting from being identified and lost in the mental world to arriving in awareness and having thoughts be a tool. Does that make sense? This is a shift from being caught inside the trance of thinking to being able to rest in a kind of presence that knows thinking is going on and can use thoughts productively.

And the deep understanding is that the wisdom and love that we, that are what we are and that we want to arrive home in, are not available through thinking. Thinking can be a support, but they're not available through thinking. I'm reading a book called The Religious Case Against Belief by James Kars, and he describes three kinds of ignorance. And the first kind of ignorance he describes is ordinary ignorance, which we all have, which is that you can't know the weather tomorrow or even whether it's going to rain again tonight. We can't know how come sometimes we feel sick in any given moment or how an election will

turn out or so on and so on. We can't know information that we haven't been introduced to. It's like in one little story, a three-year-old goes home with his dad to see a litter of kittens and on re- he went with his dad to see a litter of kittens and on returning. home he breathlessly informs his mother that there were two boy kittens and two girl kittens. So his mom says, well how'd you know that? And he says, oh, well, daddy picked them up and looked underneath. He said, I think it's printed on the bottom, you know. So it's the kind of thing like we have certain stages of life, we have certain amount of information, and ordinary ignorance,

it's just really not knowing what we can't know. But what Kars emphasizes more is what he calls wellful ignorance, which is fear-based ignorance, which is really the ignorance that comes when we grasp onto beliefs and it's in its most extreme case fundamentalism. It's the ignorance that I'm ignoring this information because I really need this to make me secure and better and in charge and in control. It's the ignorance and the grasping on beliefs

that creates boundaries between people that makes somebody superior to somebody else and that fosters the kind of aggression that happened today in Washington. Some of you might know that somebody, I think, was a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, killed a security guard in the Holocaust Museum. It happens, though, all the time, everywhere, on every continent in the world, every day. So this is just an example, right kind of close to home, that in this fear-based ignorance, when we grasp onto our beliefs, whether it's in a big way and it leads to killing or in a small way

that just creates distance between us. It's a kind of form of violence. It violates the natural integrity and potential of loving that's here. So he talks about ordinary ignorance, this fear-based ignorance, and then the third is what he calls higher ignorance, which is the wisdom that realizes that whatever knowledge or beliefs we have

fall infinitely short of the truth. All they can be is, like, like sound bites and images, they can reflect things, but they can't be the truth. They can just point in a direction. And another way of describing this third kind of ignorance, which is considered very wholesome, is don't know mind. Don't know mind. And there's a Sansong is a Korean Zen master, and he talks about valuing don't know mind.

And he'll often ask his struggling students questions like, what is love or what is consciousness or where did your life come from and each time the students will answer well I don't know and they'll say good good keep this don't know mind it's an open mind it's a clear mind it's like this with your hands open in the Zen tradition it's called beginner's mind how many of you have read the book Zen mind beginner's mind can I see by hands Good. If you haven't, it's one of the all-time great books. And in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, one of the most famous lines is that in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the experts there are few. And isn't it true? I sometimes am amazed how we go around

with this kind of air of certainty, like we're purposeful and we know what we think and we know where we're going and we, and yet there is such a wisdom in beginner's mind because we really don't know the answers to the big ones. We just don't. And in the moments of getting that, there's a wide open kind of presence that's possible. So I want to explore that a bit more tonight, the freedom of don't know mind. And I'll talk some more about the limitations of believing our beliefs so rigidly. It's not that having beliefs is fine, you know, but it's the holding on to them and being identified with them. So we'll talk about that some and then really the gifts of waking up from the trance of thinking, from the trance of believing. And the intention

of tonight's really an invitation not to wait, that this basic training and spiritual life of waking up out of thoughts, out of all thoughts, and really, really taking refuge in the intuitive intelligence that's right here in presence itself is where our freedom comes from. And then all our brightness and our cleverness and our strategizing, it can be useful, but it's guided by wisdom. So maybe one thing I'd like to kind of start in with is to say it's really important to be sympathetic to the fact that we're addicted to thinking, to be sympathetic. Because usually when I take a poll and say, well, how many of you feel like you kind of get caught up

and obsessive thinking, most of us raise our hands. So if you kind of roll back time and evolutionary time to early humans wandering and hunting on the savannah, these bodies were rather pathetic for surviving life in the wilds.

When you compare us to other creatures definitely not particularly fast, our muscular and our hides have these kind of pathetic little patches of fur on them. and our hearing, our seeing, our smelling, again, really, really not particularly sharp. So what did we have going for us?

Okay, we had the thumb, right? That opposable thumb? And we had the cerebral cortex. We could plan and strategize, which has allowed us to pretty much dominate life on earth and potentially destroy life on earth, but dominate it for sure. that's what we had going for us, this thinking mind. So it's not surprising that we would attach ourselves to our best survival tool, right? It's part of our genetic inheritance.

And I say that on purpose because as soon as we start going to meditation classes and retreats, there's this premium on quieting the mind. And so many of us end up adding yet another belief, which is I'm a crummy meditator. You know? And it's just that we have this genetic inheritance to really fixate on thought. We also have, as part of our evolutionary capacity, a kind of self-reflexive awareness that can recognize that and wake up from the trance. We have both. Sometimes called the big squeeze, that we have all the conditioning to be fixated and reactive and obsessive, believe in our beliefs and really caught in a trance,

and there's something in us that is profoundly here and awake and loving that realizes it has an intuition of what we are and so every day we get caught in our conditioning and yet something brings us to sit still and deepen our attention because there's this yearning to be who we really are to be free to step out of this trance of thoughts and beliefs So we begin to be sympathetic and recognize, okay, there's this addiction to thinking and recognize that we want to, in some way, with loving kindness, wake up from it.

I've shared here a few times thinkers anonymous. It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone to relax, I told myself. But I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me and finally I was thinking all the time.

It goes on but I'll spare you. So we need to analyze, we need to strategize, we need to think, it's just part of really making it and being alive. And yet fear-based thought, which ends up possessing, a lot of our moments. That's the kind of thought where we don't, it doesn't help us, we're just spinning and worry and plan and preoccupation, ends up disconnecting us from reality in several important ways and I'll just name a few. One is that when we're caught in thought we are not aware of our senses. And just check this out. When you're thinking,

when you kind of go, oh, thinking, thinking, you come back, you realize, oh you weren't hearing those sounds. And you weren't aware of the sensations right in the body and you weren't aware maybe of the heart and if it's happening a lot we kind of miss out that we've been feeling lonely or sad or anxious in a way that just needs some attention. We get very preoccupied with our self-image, how am I doing? And we miss out on our world. This is Pama Chodran. She's She says being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs.

So this is the beginning of sensing, wow, if we're addicted to thinking we're missing out. A lot of our thinking has to do with what we're doing next, achieving. In fact, the mental map of our day usually has, I'm on my way to, hmm, have you noticed how much we're leaning forward? How much we're trying to achieve something rather than just arrive in the aliveness right here? It's a rare moment during many of our days to say that this is it, this is what matters, this moment, right here, this moment.

In the early 1850s, American painter James M. McNeil Whistler spent a brief and academically unsuccessful period at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. The story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge, he drew a romantic stone one, complete with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. Get those children off that bridge, said the instructor. This is an engineering exercise. Whistler got the kids off the bridge, drew them fishing from the bank of the river, and resubmitted the drawing. The angry instructor yelled,

I told you to remove those children, get them completely out of the picture. But the creative urge was too strong in Whistler. His next version had the children completely out of the picture indeed. They were buried under two small tombstones on the riverbank. So it disconnects us. It disconnects us from the moment. And in a very profound way, the more that we are thinking,

and the more that we're running our narrative about who we are, where we're going and what we're doing, the more we become locked in a small identity, a limited identity of what we are. We forget the largeness of our being. I think it was Don Juan, the Yaqui-Shamman said that when the inner dialogue stops, our life changes. Our life is as it is only because we repeatedly tell ourselves who we are. many people find when they, especially at retreats because there's more practice in quieting the mind that's over day after day, when there really are some spaces of quietness, we begin to sense that we've manufactured this story about who we are and when it's quiet, there's a sense of

ah, there's just awakeness in space. There's not some solid limited entity right here. So the quieting of the mind, we step out of good self or bad self, you know, that only if I do X, Y, or Z, am I okay? I can't do without such and such. I can't be happy. We step out of all that and there's some space there, some freedom in a way. There's one cartoon I have here this guy's confessing to a bartender and he says, I'm nothing and yet I'm all I can think about. I heard a story about an older man, a lifetime smoker, and he got hospitalized with emphysema. And after a series of small strokes, his daughter urged him as she had done all her adult life to give up smoking. And he refused, in fact, he asked her to buy him more cigarettes,

and he told her, look, I'm a smoker this life and that's how it is. But several days later, he had another small stroke and apparently this one hit one of the memory areas in the brain. And then, without seemingly any concern, he just stopped smoking for good. And it wasn't because he had decided to. He woke up one morning and he forgot that he was a smoker. And he just forgot. And now, who knows what his body went through and withdrawal? But the point is that our day-to-day life keeps being reinvented because we

we keep telling ourselves, I have to do this to be a responsible person or people will think that if I don't do such and such or if I don't do this, I'm falling, you know, we keep telling ourselves a story that keeps our life really narrowed and small. So these again, I'm just going to how our beliefs and our stories and our thoughts separate us from a real spontaneity and aliveness and depth. And the deepest way that our thoughts do that is that when we're... believing our thoughts, we're in those moments not paying attention to reality itself. Those thoughts can only be a description.

And so we're one step removed from the actuality, the real source of wisdom and the source of realization. In other words, thoughts block the direct experience of truth. Another story. I think this is Bertram Russell, but I'm not sure. Our well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun, and the sun in turn orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said,

What you've told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. The scientists gave a superior smile before replying, and what madam is the tortoise standing on. Oh, you're a very clever young man, very clever, said the old lady, but it's turtles all the way down. And I like this because we are so certain about our views and she was certain, but you know any view is just a view.

And some are useful, but they're not truth itself. I had for many years a T-shirt and the, words on it said meditation, it's not what you think. In Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, another one of the little reading says, usually when someone believes in a particular religion or certainty about how things are, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way, the point of the angle is always toward ourselves. What this means is that that any idea or belief is this story we have about the world, but it's not a moment that we're actually looking into the nature of reality of consciousness itself.

We're kind of fixated on a movie, not looking back to the very source of all movies, the very consciousness itself that really is the source of reality. So I get struck a lot about this sense of that we think we know things. And then when the big stuff hits, which is when we really face impermanence, really face impermanence, when it becomes very real, then it becomes quite a mystery again. And in the moments it becomes a mystery, we have access to a very profound quality of love and of wisdom. So I want to share another story that some of you might remember from a few years,

years ago. This is written by a psycho-neuro-immunologist about the heart. It's called the Heart's Code. Oh my God, David, no, cried Glenda, when she saw the blue lights headed straight for their car. As a sequel of tires struggling to grip the road became one with her own shriek of helpless terror, she knew that she had lost her husband forever. Moments before the car came crashing through their windshield, the couple had argued over some silly something something Delian had been sitting in resentful silence. They had had these little scuffles before, but unlike their previous skirmishes,

this time there would be no opportunity to apologize and reconfirm their love. Three years after the accident, Glenda sat with me in a dimly lit hospital chamber. At a request, I'd arranged a meeting between her and the young man whose life had been saved by the gift of her husband's heart. The heart recipient and his mother were almost a half hour late for the meeting,

and I was ready to suggest to Glenda, that we leave. The issue of recipients meeting with donor families is a very sensitive one and I understood why the man may have changed his mind. As I stood and took Glenda's hand, she said quietly, no, we have to wait. He's here in the hospital. I felt him arrive about 30 minutes ago. I felt my husband's presence. Please wait with me. Glenda is a practicing family physician. She's well versed in bioscience and as I do admires the rigor and healthy skepticism of modern science. Now, however, the power of something that transcends

what science calls common sense was tugging at her heart. David's heart is here, she added. I can't believe I'm saying it to you, but I feel it. His recipient is here in this hospital, and then at that moment the door opened and the young man and his mother walked hurriedly down the center aisle of the chapel. Sorry relates to the young man with a heavy Spanish accent. We got here a half hour ago, but we couldn't find the chapel.

after introductions and awkward attempts at humor about a heart-to-heart meeting between the young wife and her husband's heart, the usually shy Glenda blurted out, this embarrasses me as much as it must embarrass you, but can I put my hand on your chest and feel his, I mean your heart? The young man looked at me and then his mother put his hand to his chest and finally nodded his head. As Glenda reached forward, he unbuddled his shirt, took her hand and gently placed it against his naked chest. What happened then next transcends our current view of the brain, body, heart, and mind. Glenda's hand began to tremble and tears rolled down her cheek.

She closed her eyes and whispered, I love you, David. Everything is copacetic. She removed her hand, hug the young man to her chest, and all of us wiped tears from her eyes. Glenda and the young man sat down, silhouetted against the stained glass window of the chapel, holding hands in silence. Speaking in her heavy Spanish accent, the young man's mother told me, you know, my son uses that word copacetic all the time now. He never used it before he got his new heart,

but after a surgery it was the first thing he said to me when he could talk. I didn't know what it meant. He said everything was copacetic. It's not a word I know in Spanish. Glenda overheard us, her eyes widened. She turned toward us and said, that word was our signal that everything is okay. Every time we argued and made up,

we both would say that everything is copacetic. Our discussion about a magic word that seemed to reveal a code of the heart within him stimulated the young man to share story after story of changes he experienced following his transplant. Described by his mother as a former vegetarian and very health conscious, he said he now craves meat and fatty foods. A former lover of heavy metal music,

he now loves 50s rock and roll, and he reported recurrent dreams of bright lights coming straight for him. Glenda responded almost matter-of-factly that her husband loved meat had played in a Motown rock and roll band while in medical school and that she too dreams the lights of that fateful night. I share that because it is a mystery. I mean, even if we see, oh yes, the cells in the heart carry some sort of memory, we don't understand what dies or what consciousness is or what love is.

We might inhabit those experiences, but our mind can't, explain what's bigger than the mind. Ticknod Han described his mother's death in the morning he had for a year after her death. And then he described how he had a dream. He was in the highlands of Vietnam. He dreamed of his mother and they talked and so on. And then he woke up in the morning and he just stepped out of all his thoughts. He just went walking and he said, my mother is always alive in me. He just felt in those moments her loving presence that she was the ground he was walking on, the soft whisper of breeze, the fragrance of blossoms. He said she's the moonlight carrying me. There's so many ways we try to explain our world and yet it's when we get that humbling

sense of don't know mine that rather than explain the world we get to live into the mystery. in the spiritual traditions, and I'll speak specifically of Buddhism, the only true refuge is this presence that is beyond concepts. It's not just in the Buddhist tradition. I've seen it in many traditions. I was looking in this book I mentioned and described how in the New Testament the Apostle Paul says, God is that one or oneness in whom we live and move and have our being,

not a God that can be viewed from without, only experience directly. And then Kant, Williams-James, both describing how the nature of reality is not accessible through the rational mind, that whole galaxies, universes, oceans, moons, arose without thought, outside of thought, yet of an infinite complexity,

intelligence, relatedness and beauty, full with a loving presence that thoughts can't grasp. Thoughts can't grasp what's beyond thoughts. There was a meeting that a Buddhist meditation teacher and a Unitarian minister described. It was a three-day interfaith conference of diverse people, including atheists. And at the start they gathered together to try to agree on what they'd call the divine throughout the conference. So they just wanted to have one language. he's coming back to.

And so then one person, how about just calling it God? But of course, no way replied a feminist wicken. Well, what about calling it goddess? And then, ha, snore did a Baptist minister. How about spirit? Nope, declared an atheist. And the discussion went on and on. Finally, a Native American suggested,

what about the great mystery? And they all agreed. Because even, as one writer put it, the most egotistical know-it-all has to admit that mystery exists. So there's a refuge that's beyond thoughts and it takes training and practice to wake up out of our thoughts because we're so in the habit of thinking and thinking our thoughts are actually the reality, not just images and soundbites. We actually think what we're thinking is reality. And one of the deepest realizations that anybody ever describes to me coming out of a retreat is I don't have to believe

my thoughts. They're just thoughts. And in that is a freedom. So we train on a couple of levels. We train on just how do you sit and get still and notice the thoughts and be able to not fight them but arrive again in presence. How do we begin to kind of in some way? disrupt the habituality of being lost in thoughts. In the Zen tradition, there's these

coens that you pose a coen and the coen can't be answered but by posing it and even beginning to try, the mind just stops. And that's a way to just get a sense of, okay, there's a trance and then there's something bigger. In the Tibetans, I've heard that some of the Tibetan llamas, one of the ways they kind of just kind of just kind of wake themselves up out of the kind of habitual, familiar cocoon of thoughts as they'll go up out to these wide open plateaus and kind of dance around and sing and jump and laugh and play. And it's in some way again just to step out of. And we do that sometimes with our sports and our walking and our singing and our dancing just to get out of the habitual rolling

on and on. Somebody described the less enlightened Western way. of how to disrupt habitual thinking. And there's a few of them. I'll just read them. At lunchtime, sit in your parked car and point a hairdryer at passing cars to see if they slow down. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask them if they want fries with that.

Put decaf in the coffee maker for three weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addiction, switch it to espresso. In the memo field of all your checks, write, for sexual favors. finish all your sentences with in accordance with the prophecy. Specify that your drive-through order is to go. And then let's see, when money comes out of the ATM scream,

I won, I won, third time this week. Tell your children over dinner, due to the economy, we're going to have to let one of you go. It's bad. When leaving the zoo, start running toward the parking lot, yelling, run for your lives, they're loose. So these are just the Western, approaches to kind of cutting through the veil. But I just want to say the basics of the practice

here that if you will just to kind of come back into sitting in a way that you can be still, take a few full breaths and let your intention be to notice thoughts. And this is a little exercise. but just for these next few moments like you're a cat at a mouse hole maybe just count them just sit very quietly and count your thoughts whenever one up rises just put a number on it

okay so how many did you notice let's just popcorn let's just hear numbers how many did you get how many thoughts anybody 30 okay what else 8? 8? 1?

Who had one? Raise your hand. What else? 14, 7. Who had like maybe over 30? A few? Yeah. Who had under 10?

Who noticed that you had very long thought, that you'd get into one would be a little long? Short thoughts? So we had the long thoughts over here and the short thoughts over here. Sometimes they're slippery ones. like, oh, not many thoughts going on in here. Right?

Right? Okay, let's practice again. Let's close your eyes. Now take some moments to arrive so that your senses are awake and you're aware of the sensations of your body, or the movement of the breath, receptive to sound, listening, so that you can sense the quality of heerness

of being right here. It might be pleasant, it might be unpleasant, but the aliveness, a sign of presence is there's a kind of a flow and experience, sound, sensations, vibrations. So let this be your home base, relaxing with what's happening and maybe relaxing yet again even more. Letting your intention simply be when thoughts arise. to become aware of them when you do and in that awareness pausing and arriving right here again

so that you can begin to sense the difference between being inside a thought and the vividness and immediacy and mystery of heerness of being right here. When you notice the thought, no judgment, it's an opportunity to then explore and discover this arriving again, what's right here. Now, purposely generate a thought. Maybe something that's coming up that you're nervous about in the next day or two with the images that come with it or the storyline. And then as if you're drawing a frame around it, just to recognize, okay, thought,

and just allow yourself to listen again to the sounds right here, to feel your body, breath and your body. And perhaps in your body there's a flavor of fear because you had a thought that might have brought that up and just to gently, kindly breathe with it and feel it. And with that gentle presence to feel the space of awareness itself again, right here. In other words, come home to presence. Noticeing the difference between being right here and being inside any thought. This is your refuge. as Rumi put it, he says, why do you stay in the prison of fear thinking when the door is so wide open? He says, why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the

tangle of fear thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down and always widening rings of being. Okay, so I'll just close, I'd like to say a few words about really the kind of radical freedom that's possible when we gain some real capacity to wake up in this way. John O'Donoghue writes that the reason people find so little sense of the divine is because we've become so controlling and defended. We live so much in our mental worlds. He says we manage our life so vigorously so as to cover over this great mystery we're involved in. So there's a bit of courage that comes when we start waking up out of thoughts. And the courage is that thoughts keep us one step removed from some of the raw intensity

of what's going on in our bodies and our hearts and our feelings. And the path of healing is you have to go through to go through. So often the first step of waking up out of thoughts is learning to stay and be with and bring a real compassion towards all the different energetic. tangles and waves and feelings going on in our body. The gift of that is when we have the courage to stay with that felt sense, we discover in staying a presence and a tenderness and an awakeness that's really our home. That's the gift.

In Asia there's these mandala's and these temples that have these kind of animal-headed goddesses that are really expressing all the energies in our body. the wrathful and the fearful and the restless and the board and the aggressive and so on. And the message of these mandala's is they're like a ring that you have to go through the animal-headed goddesses to enter into sacred space. So we have to leave this world of kind of this trance that we're in and enter through our bodies, through this aliveness, to really enter into sacred space,

which is really the presence of the awareness, or the awareness that's always here, but it's obscured because we're just leaving all the time. So the gift, the real gift of waking up out of thoughts of really this attitude of don't-know mind, of not believing our beliefs, holding them lightly. The gift of that is really that our controllingness as we stop controlling so much, what replaces that as a sense of flow. There's almost a magical quality that life just starts unfolding itself

because we're not so invested in this idea of a controlling self. So life just happens and we sense this flow and there's a kind of a spontaneity to it. You never know where things will take you. There's a creative aliveness that's really unfolding itself. Let's see if I can read you from Rachel Carson because we live in this idea of certainty and it blocks out the magic.

And Rachel Carson, who's a great naturalist, says that if she could have one wish, she said this. She says, a child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us, clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life. I see this wonder return when there is this really these sacred practices of awakening that when we're willing to, and it takes courage, as I said, but willing to not know, willing to not be so fixed on our beliefs or being right or being so certain. Then there's this openness that lets the wonder move through us. So that's one of the gifts.

The other gift is that we discover a space of awareness that was obscured by thinking. That in all the spiritual traditions, this homecoming, is really described as a coming home to our true nature, which is wakeful and also completely spacious. And thoughts keep us fixated. It's like we're filled with this movie of what's happening. And when we quiet down, this really profound openness is available

that's really the openness of our own being. And in that openness, there is a natural tenderness to all of life. What is precious inside us, writes David White. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

So there's a wordless listening. We'll close tonight, kind of in the spirit of what we've been exploring, again just coming into that quietness together, noticing without judgment if the mind is already engaged in thoughts and letting this be an opportunity to notice thinking and with an interest and a care to arrive right here, opening to the sounds, opening courageously and kindly to the aliveness in the body and opening with deep gentleness to the heart, moving outside the tangle of fear thinking, live in silence, flow down and down and always widening rings of

being. Can you sense the presence, the beingness that's here when you're outside the tangle of fear thinking? Know the light of this beingness as your true nature, your true refuge, your true your home. Just to close together the prayer for our world, may all beings awaken out of the tangle of fear thinking, out of the beliefs that separate us and that are a source of violence. May all beings realize the loving presence that's been obscured but is here. all beings live from loving presence. May there be peace on earth and peace everywhere.

May all beings be free. Namaste and blessings to each. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.