Tara Brach - Wings of Homecoming (retreat talk)

Episode Date: December 7, 2013

2013-10-23 - Wings of Homecoming (retreat talk) - Part of incarnating is to feel separate and forget the mysterious oneness that is our home. This talk explores the two dimensions of awareness that when awakened reveal the openness, lucidity and love that expresses our true nature.

Good evening. So I thought I'd begin tonight with a note from a participant here. Dear teachers, after a week of silence, meditation and quiet prayer, what does the light at the end of the tunnel look like? So we'll explore that. And it reminded me of one of the first stories told at one of the first retreats that. had been to and it was it stuck with me ever since some of you may remember this of a woman who decides in a middle-aged woman decides that she's going to go instead of her annual trip to Miami she's going to go to India and see the guru and her travel agent says come on that India it's a long way it's a lot of travel it's going to be hard on you she goes no no I want to see the guru so they make the reservation she

does that long long flight around the globe and then she takes a you know that train ride across across a lot of India and on the train ride she runs into somebody else that's going to see the same guru and that person tells her you know the rules when you see the guru you can only say three words I know she gets then onto this bus and this pin turns you know around the the they're pretty hairy rides and gets to the encampment. There's a long line. People in the line are all talking about the

three-word thing. Again, the person up front that escorts her into the big tent where the guru is holding meeting all his disciples, again, okay, ma'am, three words. I know, I know. She goes in, and there he is

in his saffron robes and his wispy beard, and she looks him in the eye, and she says, Sheldon, come home. Now, when I first heard that story, it was like coming to a meditation retreat was a fairly exotic thing and it's not so exotic now. But what I really have always loved about it is that we have this idea that we're on a path. I'm a self, I'm on a path, I'm here and I'm trying to

get there. And there's very rare moments, if we're honest, that we step off the grid. And we're not on a map anymore trying to get somewhere. Do you know what I mean by that? That sense that we're on our way to something? So that's the great illusion that we live with and it's very subtle a lot of the time. It's in the background that we're on our way somewhere else and that what we long for, what we're really yearning for is down the road. So the Buddha offered this very radical teaching that mystics and contemplatives since ages through the ages have also offered especially from the non-dual traditions which is that we are never separate from timeless loving awareness any more than a wave can be separate from the

ocean. It's a revolutionary assertion. You know, it's one that we might conceptually go, yeah, that resonates. But what's amazing is the truth of it and that it doesn't matter how, you know, neurotic we are, how caught up we are in our hangups and our wounds and our self-doubt and our confusion. This wakefulness and tenderness and tenderness and radiance is our essential. nature. So the teaching is that our true refuge is always and already here, that our conditioning is not to think of it that way, but it's here. And what I love, one of my favorite statements in the Polycan, as the Buddha said, that I would not have taught you this. I would not have taught you about this freedom and this potential for happiness

if it weren't possible, that we can realize this. So it's interesting to me when I come across, I like the readings from Srinar Sargata, another non-dual teacher, and he was asked how he became enlightened. And I think this is a great statement. He said, my guru told me that I am the ultimate source, the essence of all. I pondered that until I knew it was true, until I became it. Then he added, I was lucky because I trusted what I was.

told. So we can make this a really short talk. So you might just check in with yourself and sense just right in this moment, do you trust that what you seek, what you're longing for is really the essence of this being right here. Do you trust that? You can consider that and also sense that you wouldn't be here if you didn't have some degree of realization, some intuition, some sense. Because why would you bother practicing presence, right? I mean, presence has that implication that it's going to be here. So tonight we'll explore, and I hope you feel it very much as a continued exploration of what you've already been attending to, how the wings of presence, how the different

facets of presence reveal who we are and so much of what's going on is a deepening trust in that when we're feeling a sense of peace or freedoms because we're really trusting so there's a story that I like that I think describes wings of presence pretty well and it's a monk that lived in northern India he's known as a brother of mercy and he was a healer who could breathe with people and And what he primarily did was offered a space, kind of a space that was unconditionally accepting, allowing, that helped their sorrows could heal in that space because there's a natural compassion when there's that kind of unconditional presence.

So he did this for decades, but he became exhausted and dispirited, and he decided that he needed the guidance and advice of a great teacher he'd heard about, who lived down south, hundreds of miles, an older woman who had a reputation that had spread far and wide. So he went on on a kind of Yatra, which is a spiritual journey, and he walked. He started walking in that direction. And the woman that he was seeking is a Buddhist nun. She was renowned for her profound insight and her capacity to really recognize and see and guide people to seeing truth. So he began walking in halfway and through the journey. He stayed. at a place, pilgrim stay at a temple, and there was an old nun there, and he tells her

his story how he'd spent his life trying to help and offer this kind of open space but became exhausted and so on without inspiration. And so she was sympathetic to his plight, and she offered to guide him to the great healer, the teacher that he sought. So they arrive at the edge of this bustling village, and they're warmly received because the old nun had been none other, than the great teacher he was seeking. So over the year she taught him how to help others awaken by really learning to direct and engage their attention in a very wakeful way

and discover the nature of reality and really deep understanding. And many years later she was dying, she called him to her bedside and she said, there's something I never told you. And then she said, that on that day we met, I too had lost heart. I was headed north seeking a great healer I had heard about.

And she smiled and squeezed his hand and peacefully passed away. So how might we understand that? There's a sense that's so powerful to me that the truth that it really is not one or the other. and by that I mean the path is not just this offering of this unconditional allowing and it's not just this

wakefulness that they're utterly interdependent it's sometimes the metaphor is given like a like a sunlit sky that you have to have both the wakefulness the luminosity of the sun

but also the space of the sky for it to be a sunlit sky and when you have those there's a natural warmth of love, the activity or the offering of the sunlit sky is the activity of love. So in a sense you might say there's really three primary expressions of awareness, this openness, this engaged, wakeful knowing, and that tenderness that tenderness that emerges. So we practice drawing on these qualities. as a way to help us wake up to remember what we've forgotten.

And that's my favorite way of kind of framing what's happening. It's not like we're discovering something new. In a way we're uncovering or deconstructing what's kind of blinded us or gotten in the way so we can't really sense who we are. And Rumi says it my favorite way, which is whatever comes into being, gets lost in being

drunkenly forgetting its way home so that's us we're all here kind of drunkenly trying to remember our way home but there's still some drunkenness going on and if you kind of sense it from you know the kind of existential the full cosmic picture formless awareness it comes into form

everything comes into manifest into form and every successful organism needs some sort of a boundary that says this is in here, that's out there, to protect it from its environment, to get what it needs. So it's part of this natural evolution of becoming complex forms, but in that process, consciousness loses itself in what it creates. Awareness loses its sense of its oceanness in the wave. Temporarily. Just temporary forgetting.

But when that happens, it's the wave forgets it belongs to the ocean and identifies itself as waves. It has a surface experience of itself. Do you know what I mean by that? That when we just sense ourselves as a set of waves, that doesn't get the depth and the vastness of what we are. So then what happens is their suffering is really this flag of forgetting. it's awareness

sensing that there's some constriction and with suffering we feel longing many of you've noticed that that as you really because you have time here to let the suffering of homesickness of not being really connected with your wholeness

because it's visceral there's a real longing that comes always like this little story of a mother who's pregnant with her She's got a young son and she's pregnant with her next. And before she goes to the hospital to deliver, her son asks if when they come back from the hospital with the new child,

if he can spend a few minutes alone with a new baby. They agree. So it happens. She has her baby, brings the child home. And then the son reminds parents of his request. And so they leave the room, they leave the room, but the door is open. a crack. Boy goes to the cradle and he says to the newborn, please tell me about God. I've begun to forget. So a way to just understand this practice that we're doing is that there's forgetting,

there's these habitual patterns of how we've gotten identified with these temporary forms, identified with these bodies and identified with the emotions and the thoughts. And none of that's wrong. It's just part of how the process works. We don't add anything to judging it. And yet what we start finding out as we start waking up more is that the identifications, the exclusive identity as a self, a thinking self, a feeling self,

obscures the mystery. There's something we can't see or experience or feel. So our practice is one of undoing the identification. And we undo it by drawing on these qualities of wakefulness, noticing what's happening, openness, giving it space, and that tenderness. So we'll just look at three domains of undoing. tonight and two of them I'm hoping are very familiar to you and the first is undoing the trance of thinking and you've been noticing how it obscures. I mean we know when we're inside the

thinking that it's a virtual reality. We're getting that more and more. The more times that you wake up out of thought and in some way juxtapose what it was like inside that that storyline, those images, those sound bites. And this, the more times there's some deep knowing that the thoughts aren't truth. So we get used to that. We start waking up out of this virtual reality. If you stop thinking for 10 seconds, the known world dissolves. Another note from someone here.

She writes, I spent 45 minutes watching a chipmunk and a squirrel and forgot the internet existed. Cool. I thought that was great. So it's important to recognize that there's a persistence of thinking and that I mentioned, I think, the other morning, it's like secreting enzymes.

It's like thinking is our primary survival tool. It's a key feature to what I always refer to our spacesuit and our self-identity. And so it's part of evolutionary development to not only have thoughts but take them to be real. We're meant to get very identified with them. And sometimes they're a useful map. Sometimes they're not.

One of my favorite illustrations of the latter is a story says it goes like this about a century or two ago. The Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome. Actually, there's a big uproar from the Jewish community. so the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community,

and if the Jew won, the Jews could stay. If the Pope won, the Jews would leave. The Jews realized they had no choice, so they picked a middle-aged man named Moisha to represent them. And Moisha asked for one addition to the debate to make it more interesting. Neither side would be allowed to talk.

Okay, the Pope agreed. The day of the great debate came, Moisha and the Pope sat opposite to each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moisa looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head and Moisa pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine. Moisa pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up and said, I give up, this man's too good. The Jews can stay. an hour later the cardinals were all around the pope saying what happened what happened the pope said well first i held up three fingers to represent the trinity and he responded by holding up one finger to remind me there was still one god common to both of our religions then i waved my fingers around me to show that god was all around us and he responded by pointing to the ground and showing that god was right here with us i pulled out the wine and wafer to show that god absolves us from our sins

He pulled out the apple to remind me of original sin. What could I do? The guy was too good. Meanwhile, the Jewish community had crowd around Moisha. What happened, they said. Well, first, he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here. I told him that not one of us was leaving. Then he told me this whole city would be cleared of Jews. I let him know we were staying right here.

Yeah? And then, and then asked the crowd, I don't know, said Moiscia. He took out his lunch and I took out mine. So we have these symbolic stuff going on in our brain. And it's, you know, sound bites and images, as I mentioned. And it symbolizes the world. Of course, it doesn't symbolize the world. If you're thinking of an apple, that's no more that it's as far from truth as,

I mean, just think, the crunch, that spurt of sour sweet. you know, it's just, you know, in our mind, it's virtual. But we take it for real. And it's primarily centralized around a me. I mean, if you watch your thoughts, there's some about other people in situations. But usually you've got right at the center, invisible or not invisible, this me that's here. And it's interesting if you think of crowds at a stadium or concert or in traffic that everybody you see, everybody. has a story of me going on in their mind.

Guy at a bar tells the bartender, I'm nothing, yet I'm all I can think about. There's one suggestion when you're at a retreat that you just imagine that all your thoughts are coming out of the head of the person in front of you or out of a loudspeaker, that everybody's thoughts at once are coming through the loudspeaker, just to kind of get a little distance.

So these thoughts these sound bites and images are symbolic representations and we get lost in them and we spend a lot of our time in a virtual reality and we begin to practice to loosen it but then as we know

there are certain experiences that catapult us out of thoughts and in those moments there's no question that thoughts are just like this just this very thin layer of stuff that can't possibly connect us with this living, breathing world. We all have experiences like that. For some, it's been through psychedelics that just wake up out of the thoughts into this vibrant universe, making love,

seeing beauty, being transported by music, witnessing a birth, being with death. Another story for you about this waking up at a virtual reality. It's written by a doctor, psycho-immunologist, who's done a lot of training and work with people who have had heart transplant plants. And he describes this accident where this woman, you know, sees these bright lights headed straight for their car, and there's a squeal of the tires, and the helpless terror. and she knew right away she'd lost her husband forever in that car accident. They had just argued over something silly, and part of the pain of it was that they hadn't had chance to make up.

Three years after the accident, Glenda, and now I'm reading it to you, sat with me in a dimly lit hospital chapel. 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. I was ready to suggest to Glenda that we leave the issue of recipients meeting 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. McClend 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 that to you, but I feel it. His recipient is here in this hospital, and at that moment the door opened,

the young man, and his mother walked hurriedly down the center aisle of the chapel. Sorry we're late, said the young man with a heavy Spanish accent. We got here a half hour ago, but couldn't find the chapel. After introductions and an awkward attempt at humor about heart-to-heart meetings 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 unbuttoned his shirt, took her hand, and gently placed it against his naked chest.

What happened next transcends our current view of 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, hugged the young man to her chest, and all of us wiped tears from our eyes. Glendon, the young man, sat down and silhouetted against the stained glass window of the chapel, held hands in silence. Speaking in her heavy Spanish accent, the young man's mother told me, My son uses that word copacetic all the time now.

He never used it before he got his new heart, but after his surgery it was the first thing he said to me when he could talk. I don't know what it means. He said everything was copacetic, not a word I know in Spanish. Glenda overheard us, her eyes wide, and she turned toward us and said, That word was our signal that everything's okay. Every time we argued and made up, we would both say that everything is copacetic. Our discussion about a magic word that seemed to reveal a coat 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 loved 50s rock and roll. He reported recurrent dreams of bright lights coming straight form. 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 suspect most everyone here has experienced in some way that when we're present with death, with major loss, what pulls the ground out from under us or others, the thoughts can't touch the mystery, the bigness of it.

And even a pretense of understanding, it seems so strange. Sometimes it's so congruent when you've been, touch like that and the world is so uncontrollable and vast and bigger than the mind can get at and you just see people going around with such seeming certainty about how things are and busy and important and purposeful and on their way and you know it's we're living in a universe or according to some theories of quantum physics as many of you know virtual particles are just appearing and disappearing out of nothingness of the vastness of the vastness. vacuum. They're just coming and going. Here's Einstein's words. He says, once you can accept the universe as matter

expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. Einstein's great like that. So the thinking trance, you know, we really manage our experience. It's like we put, we kind of cover over the mystery with our thoughts and reduce our day. It's, we try to keep. keep control of our day by having our day in a map and we know when we're going to do certain things and we know, you know, we've kind of got it framed in boxes and we get very uneasy when those boxes are removed. I think you know what I'm talking about. So for myself I can say one of my most ongoing realizations coming back to truth again has to do with the truth that when I'm in the trance of thinking, it's veiling reality. That when my mind, when I'm in

those thoughts, my senses are not awake and I'm not so here. So the power of retreat, as I mentioned, is that we're doing this training of coming back, doing this training of noticing virtual reality versus what's right here. And the gift is, and I've seen this in so many people that we leave and there's a little more of a sense that I am not my thoughts. The thoughts with that narrative of a self, that's not me. There's a little more of a sense I don't have to believe my thoughts. That's a real freedom. I don't have to believe my thoughts. And the third gift I'll mention in a way is that because we are quieting down some, there's a gap between thoughts and we begin to rest in that gap some, and in that gap, that's when the mystery

shines through. There's no ground. Do you know what I mean by that? There's no ground. And yet, it's here. So that's the first level of undoing to mention tonight, is that we undo the virtual reality created by holding on to the thoughts, believing in that. them. It doesn't mean we try to get rid of thoughts, but we're loosening that identification, that I am the thoughts or that the thoughts are real. Okay? The second level that I'd like to just remind us of, of this undoing, because it's in the undoing. It's Srinar Sargadata says that we're living in, there's this virtual reality, this net of emotions and thoughts. But he said, the net is filled with holes. You know? So the next,

undoing is emotions and all you have to do is consider today or yesterday if it wasn't today or when you last felt kind of caught or hooked in a strong emotion and sense well what was your sense of self in those moments and we know that when emotions are strong when they're sticky the self becomes very contracted yet solid feels very much like me, a familiar, small, deficient me. So the undoing, the instructions we have been exploring for the undoing of that solidity of being caught in the emotions, views the acronym reign. And I've noticed so many in interviews are just very, more and more getting familiar with, you know, recognizing and emotions going on and pausing to just begin to just, just

sense it here and get the felt sense. So there's, as in the monk and nun story, there's the kind of investigating, okay, so what is this? What's happening? And that space of, okay, let it be just as it is. Let it be. And that letting it be allows you to just drop even a little deeper to sense into it. And there becomes an increasing capacity to have a tenderness towards it. The more presence, the more tenderness. That begins to dissolve the sense of the self that's there. The emotion or mood might still be going around, but there's no suffering because it's not being, there's not the identity of self. There's an undoing. Now I'll give you, just share with you a story of undoing for me that I've repeated many rounds in a certain

way that has been really valuable. And it's sprung out of one, there's, many different expressions of the trance of unworthiness in my life at least. But one of the expressions, the background to it is that my parents were very politically active and in civil rights, poverty, social justice issues, economic justice. And so I grew up with this kind of, there was some sort of a mandate that to be worthy, you had to do good in the world. and it had to be in just kind of discernible outward ways. I landed up in the consciousness business,

and, you know, I've done stuff, but I've been more in another domain. So what that's meant is that there's been a background of not enough. You know, it doesn't matter what, you know, how much somebody will say, oh, you've been very helpful to me. You know, that can for the moment assuage it, but there's many, many times that stuff will come up

the world and I'll have that feeling of I should be doing more. Okay. So that sense of not enough and some shame and guilt around it became very spiked with about, I'd say about six years ago with the issue of diversity in our IMCW community. And it became spiked because it mattered so much to me. It's become more and more clear that, you know, as I'm close into the hurt that's caused when a community isn't really, it says it's welcoming, but it doesn't feel welcoming to minorities when I see that close up, the pain of that, and I've watched in the Buddhist Sanghas around the country, having that underlying principle of we're waking up from separations, this is what matters.

And the see in the Sangha's a kind of habitual way of behaving that's somewhat blind to the harm being caused by not really being welcoming, not really being sensitive to what is needed to be welcoming.

So hence, that was going on in our community and I had my already given setup that I always should be doing more and this I really really felt I should be doing more And I remember one board meeting where we were, this is the focus of our meeting. And I came away really discouraged with a sense of how much we needed to do, how we were in our infancy,

and not sensing the collective energy the way I wanted it, and feeling, okay, I'm a leader in this community. It's my responsibility. And also struggling still at that point much more than I am now with health and fatigue issues. and something in me just locked into this sense of it's hopeless, I can't do more, but I'm ashamed kind of feeling. And really a feeling of spiritually lacking. I just remember that one board meeting I came back and it was just like that was it.

I was locked into this very small deficient self. So of course it was so obvious, the suffering was obvious enough that I said, okay, investigate, you know, let's take a look. and I let the belief be there in its full potency. Okay, I'm not doing enough. How does that feel? You know, and I really let the shame be there, that kind of hollow, aching, sinking,

and how it pulled me into myself, almost disappearing into myself and disappearing from the world, like pulling away from everything. And so there was this separateness for myself, and then as I started looking more poignantly, I could sense how big the sense, how big the sense of separation was from people I cared about and didn't want to let down,

those moments when I really got how my sense, when I was living with that belief and that emotion, when I really was living with it, how much it was affecting, it actually created distance when the issue was about bridging separation, that's when a really deep sorrow came up. because it's not, that was one example of a place where I went into shame and then and often my shame is around letting people down and then would create more distance. Well I feel bad about myself for hurting you so now I feel bad about you because you're making me feel bad about me. So, you know, it went on and on. So really deep kind of sorrow and with that a beginning of a sense of real compassion

and this longing to undo the unbatsy. I'm not enough feeling. And I had come back recently from a retreat with Sokney-Rimbichet, and one of the phrases he teaches is real but not true, which many of you are familiar with. And so I decided to really try that on, okay, this is real. The belief is really happening,

and the feelings of shame and badness are really here. So I was really honoring that it was really going on in me. And that was what let there be some compassion. But I kept saying, but it's not truth. And so that helped me to ask this question that we often pose out many of us when we're trying to kind of enlarge things. What would your life be like if you really didn't believe that? I didn't believe I was bad or falling short.

What would my life be like without this guilt? And as soon as I said without this guilt, that was like this instantly, without the guilt, I'd be incredibly curious and wanting to understand more about how that racial separation happened. Without that guilt, without that feeling of the something wrong feeling in me, there was a sense immediately of really, really wanting to connect with others, just to have that understanding connection.

And so, you know, I could feel this, starting, this love just opened up as soon as I said without this guilt. It was very, very quick. And then there was, this is getting to the end of rain. As soon as there's like that loving presence that opens up, the end of rain, there's nothing to do. That's the fruit of paying attention. There's just be that loving.

presence. So I just got into a being place. And as with most deeply identified tangles within a week or so, it got re-triggered in another way. And I had to go through the exact same type of process of feeling it, saying real but not true, sensing, well, what would it be like without this? Oh yeah. Go back in again. Number of rounds. But what it helped me to do was sense who I am without that particular patterning. It undid the patterning enough. So I got a deeper sense of the caring that was really genuine. It didn't make me less motivated.

It just made me less guilty and tight. And I had the great good fortune, I think it was about two years after that board meeting, of coming together with a few people, what we call a diversity sanga, of people that I got to have more understanding and experience that loving with. It's still too slow and it still feels frustrating and I still get the feeling of, oh, I want to do more. But there's less lag time so that it doesn't come into that pattern of I'm bad, which actually blocks life energy.

Real but not true, I encourage you. You haven't explored that one. The real, if you'll remember on the first talk I gave, that code of to make love of yourself perfect, it's like saying really love and attend what feels real. And as you do, you discover you are beyond. It's by going through that being with the realness that you discover the truth is bigger. So thus far I've been really talking, if we take the metaphor of an ocean with waves, I've been talking about how we undo our reactivity and identification with waves, with waves of that

thinking that keeps us separate from the real reality that's here and of the emotions and beliefs that keep us smaller than who we are. I'd like to do as the final piece, how, just to name that most of our conscious moments even when we're relatively quiet, our attention is fixated on forms. Our mind still focus on this sound or this thought or this feeling. And it's rare that we actually sense kind of the background of wakefulness sits here. We rarely sense the ocean itself. So as our mind gets quieter,

And we start, sometimes you might even sense as you're meditating that even you can sense the kind of subtle movement of thought that it's behind creating the virtual reality. You can kind of just sense that it starts moving again and that there's kind of a tendency to get sticky. One of my favorite inquiries from the Indian teacher Punji says as it gets quiet, just now and then ask yourself, am I dreaming? And I find when I ask that question, when I say, am I dreaming? Mostly there's, even if it's not a thick one, there's some thin veil, you know, of thoughts.

And because our minds are so habituated to believing thoughts as reality, it's easy to feel present and not be aware that there's some subtle level of concepts still framing what's happening on some subtle way comment. on or putting it into a certain place, are trying to explain our experience to ourselves. So, am I dreaming? What it really does, when you ask that kind of question, am I dreaming, is it alerts us to pay attention to what's happening and we often find a kind of what I, I like the term, ghost self. It's not real solid, you know? When it gets quiet, the self is not real self, but there's a ghost self. There's still a sense of somebody back there watching.

Somebody back there deciding or controlling or guiding. Does that sound familiar to you, that kind of background sense of his self? Yeah, I'm seeing one hand go up and other nods. Yeah, thank you. Sochnu Rimpashe calls it the mere self. I think that's kind of a cool description. It's not very solid, but there's still some, identity because we're still kind of focus, we still have a veil of concepts or thoughts or something we're, our attention's fixing on. I'm sorry, mirror as in M-E-R-E. Yeah. So the last piece of undoing to explore tonight is really how we can loosen that fixation. So there's more

resting in the what is. Now, just as a, just for taking, a moment and if you just close your eyes and try something out, for the rest of the tonight we're going to be trying things out. So get ready to experiment a little. Experiment number one is just to sense if, just to try for the next ten seconds, try not to be aware. Ten seconds, try not to be aware. So was anyone successful in that? I have to say that, and I've shared this before, the first time I ever did that in a workshop,

I had people 10 seconds trying not to be aware, and then I asked if anyone was successful. My mother raised her. She's a bit of a curmudgeon on some of these things, though. So, you know, what we all know, if we ask, is awareness here? If I ask you as awareness here, you'll say, yeah, yeah, awareness is here.

But every day in most moments, we're fixated on forms and we're actually not aware of it. We're not noticing it. Most of our life, we're not. We're not remembering beingness, that openness, that's pure beingness. We're just fixing on the forms. So it becomes a very,

powerful, radical, essential part of awakening to include the formless dimension in our awareness. And it's critical because if we don't recognize the fullness of who we are in this timeless dimension, we're living in a much smaller domain than will allow us to truly discover the realities, the love, the freedom that's possible. And it's most clear when we start recognizing, wow, a lot of times I'm really trying to get through the day figuring out how to handle things. And that becomes really intense when we realize that in some way we're trying to handle what we know is around the corner that we're afraid it's going to be too much. Most of us have a sense, and it's the truth, that because we're mortal, it's going to be pretty intense, what's coming up.

Right? And we all know that it's loss, and it's loss of what really matters to us. So how are we going to handle that? And a deep, deep current that carries us to spiritual life is that we want to find refuge. We want to find a way to handle what feels like possibly too much. And yet we know it can't be a false refuge. It has to be reality. Our refuge has to be reality because it won't work otherwise. So this is, we're kind of like we have to dedicate ourselves to reality.

And that means that in order to find what's big enough, deep enough, wide enough, true enough, We have to really be able to open to the reality of this moment-to-moment flow, really open to the aliveness that's here without resistance. To open to reality, we have to really, really open to that knowing what's really happening. To open to reality, we have to sense the space that's here. like not contract we have to be able to let ourselves surrender and open into the space that's here and the love that's why meaning the meaning of meaning is belonging we have to belong to something larger than that limited sense of self to have refuge so let me ask you to reflect again

This is a bit of reflection on your own sense of refuge. And in this pause, invite yourself here. Be aware of what's going on. We don't know how long we have. We might have 30 years or 30 seconds. But just to imagine for these moments that you just have a few minutes, and this is it, you're here, and all that's happening is you've got a few minutes, And just sense as honestly as you can with yourself,

if you have a few minutes and you're just right here sitting here, just as you are, how are you paying attention? Or what are you paying attention to? Is there a prayer? What matters to you? What do you most want to know or experience or realize? If everything changes, then what is really true? really true. Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Something timeless. There are a number

of ways of paying attention that can allow us to relax back into quality of beingness, something timeless that we intuit but often pull away from. And we're going to be exploring again, as I mentioned, for the next few minutes. They're sometimes called the backwards step. Pat mentioned the phrase this morning, that we're rather than fixating forward into form or relaxing back into the ground of experience. And as we explore, I just want to say to check this out with a light touch. So just be curious, easy with it. You might find it's confusing and decide to put it aside

and that's totally fine. It's all an experiment to sense what most serves you right where you are. It's just more that we're exploring together. What really most serves is just your sincerity, that you're in this for waking up your heart and mind. So as you're paying attention right now, just let your senses be wide open. No need to seek, struggle, just letting go of goals, just relaxing.

Tension in the body is usually some form of resistance or holding on. Just notice in the noticing of tension there can be a natural softening. One of the easiest ways to move out of a kind of fixating mind is to come into the state of listening. not just with your ears but with your entire being. So you're in touch with the entirety of experience, sounds, sensations, breathing. And as you relax into the state of listening, notice that all your experience occurs within the field of awareness.

Every sound, every feeling beat of your heart, breath occurs within the space of awareness. as you rest as awareness in this natural listening. You'll sense an openness. It's hard to sense where it begins or ends. As you relax with that openness, notice that stillness is already present. Just let that stillness be felt.

Not just notice but felt. In the same way, notice that silence is is already present. Before you try to make anything silent, even if there are thoughts sounds, all is occurring within silence, known by silence. Sensing this alert

place and space of stillness, this wakefulness and openness as your own presence, just being that presence, If you notice the mind focusing on a sound or a thought, you can bring a very gentle kind of inquiry in by just asking who is listening, who or what is aware right now, just turning the attention back to see what's there, very gentle, just looking back and then just letting go back into what's there, offering your attention, letting go, letting be.

The poet Rumi writes, one matter, one energy, one light, one light mind, endlessly emanating all things. One bright turning diamond, one, one, one. Ground yourself. Strip yourself down to blind, loving silence. Stay there until you see you are gazing at the light with its own age. ageless eyes. Let yourself become aware of your breathing and as you're ready gently open your eyes and just sense quality of pureness. You can sense that

background of beingness and still receive and be aware of the different forms and shapes and colors. One of the misunderstandings is that the goal is just to rest in the ocean. Okay, we're going to be this vast, big of awareness, just become the light, and that's the end of the path. And actually, it's a wholeness and truth of our being that is the fruition of the path, which means that we, if we can remember this mysterious presence and sense our beingness as right here, then all these ways of thoughts and feelings and experience with each other, we're We can hold with love, with compassion, with friendliness.

It allows us, the way the Tibetans put it, remembering our beingness allows us to live as a child of wonder. There's a sense of wonder. And when things are painful, there's a sense of sadness. And when things are beautiful, it's awe. So it's embodied spirit. So I didn't want to leave us in that kind of just out there, just in that vast empty, for some of us as we were thinking about what we're going to do next maybe, but, you know,

that idea, because it's living it, it's living that sense of beingness with this human body and its fullness. And I'd like just to give you a short example of that that I found with Tikna Khan, in his story of how he experienced his mother's death, because he said it was one of the great misfortunes of his life, and he grieved her, his humaness grieved her, for more than a year, and then she appeared to him in a dream. He says in it they were having a wonderful talk, and she was young and beautiful. He woke up in the middle of the night and had the distinct impression

that he had never lost his mother. She was alive in him. when he stepped outside his monastery had him began walking among the tea plants he still felt her presence by his side he said she was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often very tender very sweet

continuing to walk he sensed that his body was a living continuation of all his ancestors and that together he and his mother were leaving footprints in the damp soil so I read this because it points to a possibility of refuge that's right there for each one of us here, which is that this path, it's not that we're on our way somewhere else. It's that this isn't like a lovely

view of the future as much as any moment that we remember to pause, that we remember to bring those qualities of, oh, what's right here, and that opening, and then even deepening it when it's quiet enough to sensing the what's here as that silence that's listening right now, as that stillness that's aware of all this vibratory aliveness, as the openness that everything's happening in. With that remembrance of our being, we get to live this life and love fully. So just take a few moments, if you will, to close your eyes,

seeing if it's possible just to let go a little bit more into the awakeness, openness, and love. That's the essence of being. Namaste, and thank you for your attention. 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.