Tara Brach - (retreat talk) Our True Nature--Emptiness Dancing

Episode Date: July 18, 2012

(retreat talk) 2011-10-12 - Our True Nature--Emptiness Dancing - The most profound question in spiritual life is "who (or what) am I?" This talk explores ways of inquiring into the nature of awareness, and the blessings of embodying the realization of our radiant, empty essence. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

Namaste. In our Dharma talks, these last evenings, we end in a lot of the instructions and interviews. A lot of the focus has been how to work with suffering. And we've been appropriately paying attention to the very realness of what's difficult. And fear, grief, shame, anger. So it's interesting to begin to look more closely at the moments where there's well-being and to sense, okay, since you've been here, the moments perhaps when you were outside and stopped

and there was a sense of sky or a smell of grass or look, a color, a glint of the turning autumn leaves, there are countless such moments I could recount a moment of stillness in here are moments of well-being at home when we're gardening or playing with our dogs or playing with a child whatever it is

what's the common denominator of what makes those moments a sense what happens when there's contentment what's going on when there's a sense of peace our love. What is the common denominator whenever that's there, whenever we actually touch some real happiness? Yeah. A sense of connection. We're in the present, peace of mind, no worries.

There's no wrong answer, by the way. So, yeah, yeah. Present. Present. Not wanting anything else. Gratitude. Gratitude's there. Somebody say something. beauty awareness so these are all I think of them they're all part of the all weaves in the same

experience that we're really here for the moment right you have to be really here for the moment there's presence and I'd like to name something else which is embedded which is there's not a fixation on self

have you noticed that that in any of those moments there's not a pre-reacted occupation with self. You're thinking I'm a great self, I'm a bad self. There's just not so much. You know, it's like the fuller the presence, the less there's any what we call selfing reference here to me, me, me, me, me.

Okay, there's kind of an openness. Now, when we examine moments that were fearful, that were angry, it's filled, it's solid with self, right? I mean, that's the whole deal. It's very centralized. There's a victimized self, an isolated, or a lone self, a flawed self. But it's very much about self. Many of you might remember, Wee Wu-Wi's common.

He says, why are you unhappy? He says, 99% of everything you do is for yourself. And there isn't one. So I was thinking of that, and I was reminded, because we've all been visiting the goats, this, that some months ago, there's a story of some Montana high school students. They played this prank at school, and they released three goats into the school, and they painted on the side of the goat number one, number two, and number four. The whole day, all the administrators and teachers

are looking for goat number three. So this is what happens when we fixate on something that doesn't exist, right? The problem is that when we're fixated on self, we miss out. You know, we miss out. And one of my favorite descriptions of this is Pema Trojan. 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 head. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. And we can kind of sense it. When we're, when we're centralized on self, we're just, we're missing out. Now, this is not to say we don't need to pay attention to what we call the consensual sense of self, that, you know, we're operating in a world

and we are navigating, and I sometimes describe the space suit, we have to notice what we need and take care of ourselves and others, and there's kind of one level of reality that we know that we're attending to. But the question is really, is that possessing us? Is that our exclusive identification? And this is going to be the theme that we get so narrowly fixated, and we identify ourselves with a certain set of roles and a certain persona and certain kind of currents of emotion

and the story of my life. We move through life thinking like a self as having a life happen to it. It's moving through this trajectory on its way somewhere. And the Buddhist teachings, and I think this is kind of one of the elegant kind of the core teachings, changes we suffer because we don't know who we are. We have a misunderstanding, a misperception that we adhere to. And the perception is that we're this small self. It's something, we suffer because we experience our being as less than what we are. That all suffering is a flag.

Whenever you're suffering, it's a flag that in some way your identity has contracted to something less than what you are. So in an evolutionary perspective, it's entirely natural that we identify as a separate self. Like all existence exists and awareness perceives itself as a set of waves, this self. And then we have these stages of development. And we need to feel that self

and feel then differentiated from parent and feel the self that's taking care of itself and getting things for itself and protecting itself. Bus of kindergartners are on a school trip, and this little girl brings the driver a handful of peanuts. And he's surprised, but he says thanks, and he eats them. Ten minutes later, she brings another handful. Again, well, but the third time, he says,

honey, you and your friends can share and enjoy them. You don't keep giving them away to me. And she says, oh, no, we're just such. the chocolate off of them. So here's the understanding that I think is interesting, is that we have, that developmentally we're supposed to feel separate and we're supposed to take care of the separate self, but there is a developmental arrest if we don't keep going, that it's not the end of the evolutionary story that we're self-centered or that we're organized around this self-sense. and when we have signs of arrest,

well, it's when we really get discontented. And you would not be here. If you had not felt the pain of not at home, something's off. And I think of that as kind of a developmental arrest. It's like something in you knows you're meant to discover or live in something larger. And yet there's this sense

of still playing out old patterns. So that not at home is kind of a signal of the arrest. So what I want to explore tonight, which we're already exploring, is this capacity we have that we've been really kind of honing in on all week to realize what we are beyond this narrow identification with a small self. And to realize that, and there's a Zen saying I just want to bring in, which is that when this realization is deep, when we have a deep realization of what we are beyond the story, our whole being is dancing, that there's a freedom, and freedom can be a word that's kind of vague,

that the more we realize our beingness beyond the stories and the roles, the more freedom there is for the spontaneous alive expression of what we are. So Adjashanti coined the term emptiness dancing, which I like. So this inquiry of really who am I, because we know ourselves through these stories, it's, I feel humble putting words on it. Every time I give a talk about the nature of awareness or emptiness or any of these, this domain, which we often don't. talk about. We just say, well, let's practice presence and it will reveal itself because

putting words on it can automatically almost reify something that is absolutely beyond words. Friend, who's a Unitarian minister, told me about this interfaith gathering she participated in. And at it was open with the inquiry of, we need this agreed language. So what's it going to be for referring to the divine? So shall we call it? at God. And right away a wicken, a female wickon said, no way, no way. What about goddess, she says? And of course, ha, remarks a Baptist minister. What about spirit? Nope, declared an atheist. So they go at it. Discussion goes on. And finally a Native American suggested the term the great mystery. The great mystery. And they all agreed because they knew that whatever his or her personal

understanding was it's a mystery. It's a mystery. So the mystery, we talk about the word love, but what is love really if we start just deepening our attention? Or, you know, where did this universe come from? What was there before the Big Bang? You know, the Big Bang, so the universe starts pouring out matter through space, right? And this matter forms stars and the residue forms these planets and so everything on earth these living bodies it was formed out of the same material that form the stars and so your bones are made of calcium and magnesium and there's seawater in your blood and so you're the living earth in this particular form right this is this is what uh brian swim cosmologist brian swim says he says four and a half billion billion

years ago, the earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera. So it's a mystery, and at the core of the mystery is the sense of cognizance, that there's cognizance here. This living earth that we are, this clay body, is cognizant. I mean, let me ask you right now just for five seconds. don't be aware anyone succeed ah we I bow to the elders that's a great feat so what happens is we say don't be aware and there's something that just keeps happening and yet what happens when we try to attend to awareness to look at it or discover it or locate it okay so awareness is going on but what happens when you really try to pay attention to it. Nowhere to land, really. The challenge is that it's just the way we can't see our own

eyes, right? You can't see awareness. What you're looking for is what's looking. So it can't be an object that our mind grasped. We can only be awareness. So the great invitation in spiritual life is to be that which we are, that this awareness is here, just be it. And yet what happens instead is that we fixate on objects and identify with objects. So back to this evolutionary development process. Awareness takes form. You know, there's all these waves that take form. And then it identifies itself with a particular set of waves and it forgets its ocean-ness.

That's just one metaphor. Okay? So the ocean is, you know, emerges as waves. Then it thinks, oh, on these waves, and it forgets the oceanists. And that's a temporary stage in evolution. There's a forgetting. And then as evolution continues, the waves become aware of their wateriness, become aware of, oh, being part of the ocean.

We discover our belonging. But in between, there's some stages of that forgetting that get very solidified. We get very rigid in these patterns we get identified with. Sometimes there's this notion that we are human beings on a spiritual path, right? But really, we are spirit experiencing a human incarnation. We're coming to realize ourselves through these bodies. These bodies are kind of like instruments, sensory, perceptive instruments, but we're a spirit coming to realize ourselves through them.

But there's a forgetting period. And in that forgetting period, awareness is identified with stories, with sensations, feelings, emotions. And what locks it in is these repeating thoughts that keep the stories going about who we are. So each one of us, we organize, the identification organizes in a core way,

as Pat described last night, as soon as there's a sense of separateness, with that is fear, needing to get needs met. So we organize around getting our needs met, the wanting and fear around needs. Check inside, and you'll find the most kind of tight, solid,

familiar sense of who I am is a self that wants or fears around needs. That's the most familiar deep sense of who we are. Will I get this? Won't I get this? Something bad's going to happen. So that's the core level of the identification. And then we tell all these stories about who we are and what the world's like and what has to happen in order to be okay. Now, as long as we're telling those stories and believing those stories, we're going to have that identification

glued real tight. Does that make sense that the stories keep that self-sense really solid. Gandhi described it this way that our beliefs create our thoughts and our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings create our actions. Our actions create our character and our character creates our destiny. I think that's really powerful. That as long as we're looping in these thoughts and feelings and we're believing them, then we act out of them, it creates our whole sense of self and it creates our destiny. So the beauty of a spiritual practice, a practice of remembering, is that we begin to recognize, oh, these are thoughts. They're just thoughts. And the word just is key. They're not truth. They're a map. They're not reality.

It's one of the deepest realizations I think people come away from in retreats is that I don't have to believe my thoughts. It sounds so simple, but it's like absolutely liberating. They're just thoughts. But they're a map that's fueled by fear and wanting, and we'd rather have a map than no map. That's the problem. We want ground to stand on. So even though they're fear-driven maps that are telling us something's wrong with me. This is how other people experienced me. Something's wrong with you. We'd rather have that than not have ground.

So we hold tight to our descriptions and our stories, and they become quite a solid veil between us and reality. We hold tight. Okay, so here's a kind of inquiry. It's time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts. here are the facts about three leading candidates. Candidate A associates with crooked politicians and consults with astrologists. He's had two mistresses.

He also chains smokes and drinks eight to ten martinis a day. That's a lot of martinis. Okay, that's candidate A. Candidate B, he was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college, and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening. Candidate C, he's a decorated war hero, he's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer, and never cheated on his wife. Which of these candidates would be your choice?

Okay. So, should I have you vote? I haven't thought of that. Anyway, candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Candidate B is Winston Churchill. Candidate C? Hitler. Yeah.

I like that just because, you know, if you know it already, then you you kind of go, yeah, that makes sense. But we do go around with our stereotypes and our ideas, and we can even come to a retreat like this, and we'll move through this retreat, and we've been doing meta, and we're getting more and more present, and we still have these projections on who this person is

from the way they look if we don't know them. And we sort instantaneously from our past memories and history and our cultural imprints instantaneously to notice age or who's attractive or not attractive

our color or the way the person moves and is it socioeconomically is this look like my kind and we don't even notice it we have these flash imprints in us that then project

and if we aren't able to start noticing our thoughts and noticing our stories and our beliefs, we live in a world of unreal others. The other is not real. We don't get to pick up what's really there because we've got this whole veil. And we're living in a world of unreal self.

We have these stories we're believing about ourselves. And I'll sometimes ask people, and this is not just me, it's a very, it's a question that's a really useful one. And a lot of people use with, who would you be if you didn't believe that? If you didn't believe that you were flawed, or if you didn't believe that you didn't belong, or if you didn't believe that you were unlovable, like, who would you be? And because we don't know, we'd rather know and have it be bad news sometimes than let go. Now, it's not just the bad news stories.

We just live in our ideas a lot. So we're moving through life, living in a story of how things are, and it's not always real. So, brief story. As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends with the services to be at the pauper cemetery in a Kentucky back country. In the Kentucky back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost, and being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions.

I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone, and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only diggers and crew left, and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down, and the vault lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man.

And I played Amazing Grace. The workers began to weep. They wept and I wept and wept and we all wept together. When I was finished I packed up my bagpipes and started from my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, I've never seen nothing like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for 20 years

so sometimes we can screw reality one way and sometimes another he ends his story saying apparently I'm still lost it's a man thing so whatever the story whether it's a story about good things happening or bad things happening in the future we're still living inside a story

And so mystics through the ages have explored the practices that quiet the stories enough so we can see through the veil. So there's a gap between some thoughts so we can see what's true. There's a little quip that Descartes goes into a bar. He's drinking a beer. He finishes and the bartender says, want another? I think not, he says, and he disappears. So it's a silly little quip. But, you know, what we find here is when we quiet the thoughts, there is a dissolving of that solidity of a self-sense, right?

Have you noticed that some as it gets quieter? There's just stuff happening, right? So there's a question I love, and I ask myself it a lot as I'm moving through the day. And it's, who am I taking myself to be? Just at any given moment, like at this moment, who am I taking? taking myself to be. And to the extent that there's an idea about myself, some background story about who I am and who you are, it actually runs interference with real spontaneity, with real love. When I'm taking myself to be a something, the love is, it's there, but it's in some way

diluted some. It's not as, it's not in a full flow. We can't be as creative. So as I said, the blessings of a path is that as we deepen our attention, we begin to wake up out of the self-story. And I read you Sri Nargadata, Indian non-dual teacher who I love. He says, as long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, you seem short-lived and vulnerable. And of course you will feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond space and time, you will be afraid no longer. The Buddha, when he sat under the Bodhi tree,

you know, encountered all the challenges and in his wakefulness was able to discover that presence and compassion that's larger than the challenges that were thrown at him by the God Mara, you know, the arrows and the spears. And they're really the challenges the shadow side that we all experience. And so that's what we're practicing here, like the Buddha, just being under the Bodhi tree here.

And his awakening was to that timeless presence that's not identified with something small. And that didn't mean he still didn't experience bodily sensations. And as Larry said, there was pain, you might remember, that he still had pain through his life, but his identity wasn't hitched to a small self. So he was resting in a freedom

that knew a larger belonging to something that's timeless. And an interesting part of the story or myth, however we want to think of it, of the Buddha's awakening, is that after his enlightenment experience, after he was awakened, he hesitated about teaching.

you know he had a sense that you know the ignorance the dust in people's eyes its ignorance was too much and that they just wouldn't get it because freedom was so profound it was it's not like you can imagine it was so profound he said you know he just didn't trust that people would get it so brahma had to convince him you know because he was just going to go off and just bliss and he had to convince him come on back you know these folks they can handle it And then he looked again and he saw with the eyes of compassion the suffering and he also saw with the eyes of wisdom that yeah we have dust in our eyes and yet we're all Buddhists. I mean what he realized is what we all are. It's in us all. And to me my attraction to Buddhism, the most basic reason I'm attracted to Buddhism is the same. single message that it's what we already are and it's homecoming. Just deepen our attention.

We're coming home. And I think it's irreversible that you can't be here. You can go back into trance. We all awake, forget, awake, forget. But that awareness wants to realize itself. That's the nature of awareness to awaken through these bodies and realize itself through us. And it's just happening. It's just happening. So to me that's the beauty, that's the message that's so powerful, that it's possible for every one of us. And so what we do here to realize this evolutionary potential, because this is the evolution of consciousness. What we do here is pay attention in what I consider two ways, and the rest of the time I talk,

I'm going to talk about how these two ways work. And one of the ways, the primary thing we're doing here is what I call paying attention to the waves. We're noticing the waves of our experience, and we're getting better and better at, oh, okay, thinking, which is, again, this morning's instructions,

the sound right now, a strong sensation. We're becoming mindful, of the waves of experience. And there's several different ways that awakens us. You know, sometimes we're mindful in a very simple way of, it's not like there's high drama. It's not like there's some intense charged experience. But as we start, as we just get very, very present with this moving flow of this sensation and that sound more and more, rather than relating from experience, there's a sense of that mindfulness, that awareness, that awareness,

that is aware of what's happening and there's a dissolution of a sense of self. In the moment that you're aware of something, you're not hitched to it or you're less hitched to it. And then for many of us, because this is what happens at retreat, because we're no longer using our normal escapes,

our normal ways of being preoccupied, what wanted attention, what was still tangled, presents itself. And this is awareness is wanting to be free. It's like as long as there's a tangle, awareness is going to keep presenting it

so that it can be untangled to allow the full flow and realization. Suffering is a call for loving attention. It's awareness wanting to come home to itself. So that's a lot of what's happening here is that we start encountering that which is really asking

for attention. and sometimes it's a dramatic encounter and sometimes it's not. I share with you just because again I'll use the metaphor of waves that the more you can be with the intense and difficult waves the more fully you bring presence to it the more you realize the oceaness.

That's the basic metaphor. So for me, one of the, I shared a couple of days ago story, a challenging story of really turning on myself when I was sick. Some months after that happened, I landed up in the hospital for a week. And there might have been a few of you that ended up at the New Year's retreat that I was supposed to teach, but I was in the hospital for it instead. And I hit a point that I consider where I was just really identified with the waves. And it was when they had absolutely no idea it was wrong with me except for that they thought maybe I needed a pacemaker

and I couldn't leave the hospital because my pulse was, you know, like below 40 or something. It was really low and I was incredibly weak and the wave was one of profound fear because I was entirely uncertain if I had any life in front of me. Like it just, I really questioned whether there was anything ahead. And could I ever be able to continue teaching? What could I count on? So there was that depth of really not knowing and the fear that comes with not knowing,

which is really scary when there's some bad possibilities. I was using the kind of the language that Chogium Trunkpa has offered where he says, just meet your edge and soften. So every time I'd hit a real edge of something, I would try to soften, you know, try to entrust to the waves. you know, try to let go, try to really be there. But I remember one point when the fear was really great,

and the only way I could kind of move towards the edge is what I shared a few days ago, where I would just use some term of self-love, like sweetheart. I'd say, it's okay, sweetheart. And there came one point where I did put both hands on my heart and said, sweetheart, just let go into this. It's okay. that I just kind of, it was like dropping into this empty hole,

except for it wasn't empty, it was just, you know, it was just a death hole of fear and grief. Like I just, I thought I'd be gone. But I kind of loved myself into letting go into it. It's the best way I can put it. And then I started finding the more excruciating, the more inside that excruciating pain was love. And the more intense it got, the more the presence that was with it was loving presence.

So the fear would get more intense, but the presence with it became intensified presence. I'll step aside and say, I found that's the alchemy of transformation for all types of transformation. That when you're present with something that's really intense, you become the presence. and that intensity is just intensified presence so that the wave still there but you have become larger. So that's what happened and in the intensity of fear

it was loving presence so that I at some point said this loving presence is what I am and it was more familiar and more home than any fear any thought about the future although the thoughts had quieted down. Now I should

share this with you and I share similar stories about myself and others because over and over I've discovered that whenever they're suffering, it's asking for loving attention. And it can't just be attention, it has to be loving in some way. It could start off that the word love just means there's some intention towards gentleness. In other words, it's not going to start as full-blown love because if you're caught in fear, how do you say, fear, okay, I'm going to bring you love. You can't because the biochemistry of fear that's filling you is not the feeling of love. Does that make sense? So sometimes we're told, oh, when you're feeling fear, just bring a lot of love to. Well, it doesn't happen so quickly.

It's more, there's fear and there's this intention that's coming from the place of love that's been blocked off to be loving. Does that resonate? And then so for me, it was just that sweetheart, it's okay. I wasn't feeling tremendously loving. loving towards myself, but just the gesture helped me connect with it. And then it dropped in and in. Suffering is asking. Suffering is a wave, and it's asking for a loving attention. So this is the alchemy of waking up.

So those are some of the ways of being with the waves. Another way of being with the waves is where we just open to everything that is right now. When there's nothing predominant that's really calling our attention. So to give you an example, you might, if you're writing, just put down everything and just, if you will, take a moment to close your eyes and just collect with your breath. Let your attention come home with the breath. You might mentally whisper here and just bring yourself right here and begin to open your senses to all the experience that's here.

So that as you're listening, you're not just listening. listening to sound, but you're listening to the whole moment, that you're feeling the whole moment. This is awareness, receiving the sensations that are here, receiving the scent or fragrance or whatever smell, just sensing the space around you and receiving that sense and sounds, feeling so that you're listening to and feeling the whole moment and there can be a sense a little of stretching

like you're being stretched listening to and feeling all that's happening and sensing the openness that's happening in how vast sensing that what you are is that openness

perceiving this moment to moment experience. When you open to the ways in their entirety, this whole living moment, you become that openness, that wakeful openness. So one whole way that we pay attention is to we pay attention to the ways we begin to discover the ocean, the wholeness, the openness. The other pathway, as you can imagine, is directly beginning to turn our attention to investigate the ocean itself, that ocean of beingness. Aldous Huxley describes this reducing valve of awareness that we are, our original nature is mind at large, is that

openness. But because we're animals trying to survive, he says, to make survival possible, this mind at large has to be funneled through a reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. He says, what comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. And I like that because it's, yes, we need to do it to survive and yes, it's possible to become mindful of that and reconnect or remember our original openness. So this last piece is training in discovering that background of experience, Normally we're focused on the waves.

How do we open our attention? It's kind of a foreground background to the space that everything's arising from. Sogiel Rimpichet says this. If everything changes, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances,

something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on that does survive what we call death? So a brief reflection for you now. Imagine that you're looking through a photo album of your life. Okay?

So there you are in kindergarten. Just notice whatever you notice. Just flash onto that. In senior year of high school, when you started your first job, fell in love or had a very significant connection with someone as an adult. If you had a child, had your first child. So there are photos, they're celebrating your achievements,

they're also marking times of insecurity and loss. Just imagine this photo album here. And then you look in the mirror. Who are you? Now, consider are your bodies changed from kindergarten? on up your worldview has changed your sense of what's important in life your pleasures your moods and just ask yourself and every time and place through all these years all these moments what about me has been unchanging what has always been there what's always been there awareness i'm sorry heart

awareness, heart, spirit. These are, it gives me different language, yeah. Can you speak a little louder? Principles and values, is that true? Just, it's an inquiry because it might change. This is what never changes. But let's keep that there. Anything else, any other words just to put in the room?

Witness? Love. So this is language of heart. and consciousness we're hearing here that's unchanging. It might be a very early primitive kind of love. It might be an awareness that's not self-aware awareness, but it's awareness and love. So I can call this beingness in some way and the inquiry is really in I mentioned that kind of path has has three phases and the first phase is realization in the sense that we get, oh, there's something more

There's something I want to inquire about because there's something here that's larger than this story. And then the second phase is getting familiar. We have more and more moments of mindfulness, of quietness. And in that stillness, there's something there. Oh, yeah. Okay. It's getting familiar. And then the last phase is the embodiment phase.

So the inquiry is how do we get more and more familiar with this awareness this love, this consciousness, this spirit. So it's really spirit in a human existence. And one of the understandings is that this beingness is closer than we imagine. We move through our daily life thinking we're trying to get to some spiritual experience when it's always, always, always closer than we can imagine. It's always here, always been here. It's an idea that we have to get somewhere.

And it's an idea that it's outside us. So one of the reasons that we've been introducing this practice of inner space is because we think of spaciousness and openness as out there. And yet when we begin to inquire and explore, we discover that there is just like the atom, inside the atom is just space. It's like 99% of the universe, or 99.99.99 is empty space. I saw an IMAX film with my son, and some of you might have seen it. It's called the Cosmic Voyage, where you first you go out, out, out, through the solar system and the Milky Way

and to the outer edges of the observable universe, like huge space. And then through a drop of water, you go in, in, in, in, in, until you get to the tiniest known particles and the space inside everything. It's amazing to think that 99.99% of this universe is empty space,

and that the space within us is as massive and vast as a space outside us. and that when we begin to explore and sense this awake space that's the source of everything inside this body, when you sense it inside this body, it's like you become this like you're the black hole and the universe is coming out of you. It starts to decondition the sense that what we're searching for is out there. It's right here. It's between every cell. This is the poet Dana Fault says, go in and in.

Be the space between two cells, the vast resounding silence in which spirit dwells. Go in and in. Be the space between two cells, the vast resounding silence in which spirit dwells. go in and in and turn away from nothing that you find. Go in and in, become the space from which this universe brings forth. We touch and realize this beingness,

this awake space, this awake tender space through our lives in many moments. We all have those experiences and we cherish them. They're the ones when we're, you know, looking at the night sky and sensing its immensity and feeling it's, and it reminds us of the immensity of really the truth of what we are. It's during the silence in the early morning after sunrise or before sunrise, just really quiet. Are the deep snow in the world still, that stillness. We love stillness. So why do we love this silence?

and the stillness and the sense of space. It's because it's what we are. It's the most deep, subjective experience of our beingness. So the practices that help us to touch in are practices where there's just a slight effort where we're saying, okay, so what's here? So that you're listening and you say, who's listening?

Or what's aware? So we make an effort just in a slight way because it can't be striving just to turn the attention a little and then let go. And you can explore it right now just for these moments, just close your eyes and just know that if it doesn't feel useful

it feels confusing another time. You can put it aside. But just to get a sense of this exploring this beingness, you might start by just listening to sound again, receptive, listening not just with your ears, but your whole awareness. And then just to ask yourself, as you're listening, who or what is listening? Just to turn the attention towards awareness and then let go, just be whatever you notice.

You can be the silence that's listening. You might feel these ways of sensation, the vibrating, the tingling. What's aware of this? turn the attention, just glance back. There's nowhere to land. There's nothing to see. Just let go. And just be. It can be the stillness that perceives sensation. Taking a few breaths, opening your eyes.

And that's the last couple of minutes to say that it's a beautiful and liberating part of practice to include what sometimes we sense as this background of experience. So we're not just looking at paying attention to the sound, but we're sensing that silence that's perceiving.

Or if you're looking at the sky, you're not just looking at the silhouette of the branches, but you're sensing the sky itself. What happens when we begin to come into this wholeness where the ocean and the waves is that our being dances more freely? When you're not just the sensations in your body, you sense the wakeful space, there's a flow that starts happening in your body.

And it's very healing in a very real physical way too. Some of the blessings of emptiness dancing, one is happiness that's happy for no reason. And you can sense it. And I'm just going to give you an example of how you can start moving through the day and start sensing both this kind of empty space and this aliveness. You move through the day and when you're walking or eating or showering, just ask yourself, how is emptiness experiencing this right now?

Or if you don't like the word emptiness, how is this awake space experiencing this? How is awareness experiencing this cup of tea? This step I'm taking. this breath. And what you find is that in the moments that you come into that wholeness where there's awareness experiencing,

that presence itself brings happiness and wonder. There's not a conceptual overlay. There's just this, the Tibetan's called this, you become a child of wonder. You just start moving through and you're just awareness experiencing in this fresh way. And there's an innocence to it. The world takes on a very fresh expression.

Nietzsche writes, For happiness, how little suffices for happiness, the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance. Little maketh up the best happiness. Be still. So happy for no reason. It's, you can check the next time you're feeling a sense of wonder

or happiness check. And what I think you'll find is that there's more space in the background in those moments. There's more of a sense of inner space, of silence, that makes it possible to experience what you're experiencing.

Presence and happiness go together. Same thing for love. You know, you can ask the same question that I just gave you and say, how does this openness, this awareness, this emptiness, experience this other person right now? How does this wakeful openness

experience the goodness of this person or the beauty of this landscape or the sorrow of this other person? Find out how wakeful openness or awareness experiences another suffering. And what we find there's a natural response of compassion. passion of love. Same thing with peace. How does this emptiness experience change? How does this

wakeful open awareness experience change? There's room. We have a heart that's ready for anything. And finally, how does awareness experience aliveness? I mean, if you're sitting here, how is a wakeful awareness right this moment experiencing the aliveness of this body? Emptiness dancing. There's a creative flow that happens. And when we're moving through life and empty awareness is experiencing activity, it becomes very creative and spontaneous. So I know I'm going a little bit long. I'm going to share one last story and then close.

This is Ishtok Pearlman, who was crippled by polio when he was a young child, and at each performance he makes, he enters with his crutches, it's a slow entry, sits down, unclasps his bruce, races, you know, and so on, then it prepares to play. 1995 performance, Lincoln Center, New York. And on this occasion, he'd only played the first few bars of his violin when a string broke. And so the whole audience could hear the crack. And what happened next, and they wondered, was he going to put on his braces and go

and get another string for his violin or get another violin? But he sat still. he closed his eyes and paused and then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. He reentered the concerto and he played with unimaginable passion and purity and power.

And those watching him could sense him modulating and changing and reconfiguring the piece in his head as he played. So deep with his immersion and creating that when he finished there was this odd silence And then, of course, came the outburst of applause as people rose and cheered from every corner of the hall. Pearlman smiled.

He wiped a sweat from his brow to quiet the crowd. Then he spoke, not boastfully, but in a quiet and pensive and reverent tone. You know, he said, sometimes it's the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. each one of us is spirit living through these bodies and who knows how long this particular constellation or pattern of energy and thought and mind we call self-haz but the more that we can remember this timeless belonging this awakeness and openness and tenderness which is really what we are the more

these body minds can be free to express and give ourselves fully, whatever's left, whatever's here, with love, and with joy. With joy. So we'll close just a few moments of reflecting again, if you will, just to close your eyes. And as we've been doing, just take some moments to open the sense doors, just listening and sensing that silence that's listening, listening to and feeling the aliveness that's here. Can you imagine the stillness that's perceiving this living world? Can you imagine the vast space that this moment is happening in? The talk you just listened to has been freely offered.

If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.