First off, a quick review. I’ve been framing these talks as “The Four Rings” Body, Speech, Mind and Other. We’ve talked about the Body Ring, aka “Mindfulness of Body” as the rooted, grounded, earthy, fleshy experience of being alive. The feeling of walking, of dance, of swimming. The flow of our physical form in space. The Body Ring includes the fleshy parts of the sense organs - the eyeballs, the ears, the tastebuds, etc. but not sight, hearing, taste, etc. We will get to that later.
We talked about the Speech Ring, aka “Mindfulness of Speech” as a golden orb connecting the heart and the rest of the body with the head - with most of our sense organs and our gigantic brain. It is centered in the throat chakra, When body and mind are connected, aligned, synchronized, words can flow out into the world.
Talking about the Mind Ring, aka “Mindfulness of Mind” is vast.
Before I get into it, I want to complete the picture in a rough sketch so you can see where this is going. The three rings together - Body, Speech and Mind - constitute an individual life experience. Usually those three circles are at least somewhat obscured and out of sync with each other. But we have all had experiences where the three circles come together, overlap, fuse. These times are what we live for. This is why we travel to awesome places, this is why we get out of bad relationships and into good ones. This synching is one very big reason why we meditate.
The Fourth Ring, the “Other” Ring, is the life and experience outside our individual life. It’s literally the Other. Other people, the environment, the trees, the stars, external circumstances. In many ways, life is a dialog between the first three rings of our individual life and the fourth.
Before we get to the Other ring, though, we need to cover the Mind Ring. There are many many ways to approach the experience of the mind. But let’s start off first by celebrating that we can have this conversation at all! We are the only living species that we know of that can think about thinking.
We can recognize voices in our heads, call them thoughts, that are distinct from what we think of as “ourselves”. That’s amazing!
But Mind in this case is not just thoughts. It also encompasses the senses, or the “sense consciousnesses”. The eyeballs are in the body, but the ability to see something is part of the mind. You can remember this is true just by recalling a time that you were looking for your keys, and they were on the table the whole time. They were in your field of vision, but you didn’t “see” them because your “eye consciousness” part of your mind was elsewhere - was obscured or confused. Same with the other senses. How many gourmet meals in three star restaurants were wasted because the diners were distracted by some emotional upheaval.
Mind in this case also includes emotions. Emotions for meditators are really just big strong thoughts. They behave in ways similar to little thoughts - they come out of nowhere, they abide for some time, and then dissolve. But they are more intense. It’s the difference between a rain shower and a deluge. But in the end emotions are included in the Mind ring just like thoughts are.
Then there are two other components to mind, what Trungpa, Rinpoche translates as the subconscious and the unconscious. I’m not going to get into the specific descriptions of each tonight, as we don’t have a ton of time. But these are not the same definitions as Freud’s. If you want to study more, I’m drawing from his teachings on the Abhidharma for this talk.
Interestingly, there's no part of mind that generates the "awareness" that we experience. Awareness is not separate from mind either. It's actually more of a ground for everything, permeating the world. Awareness is a quality of existence, of the universe. But that's another topic.
Ok, enough talk. Let’s meditate.
This session is about thoughts, the mind consciousness that perceives those thoughts, the subconscious, the unconscious, and awareness throughout it all. So take your seat....
- Deep body breaths
- Remember your motivation.
- Usually in meditation practices, we have an object of mediation. When we meditated on the body, it was the weight of our body on the chair, or the feeling of our spine, or our ribcage and chest moving in and out naturally with our breath. So touch into that for a bit.
- In this session, our object of meditation is our thoughts, and the mind that perceives them.
- ad lib a part about seeing thoughts like we see objects, and noticing the reactions we have to them. Can we just see the thoughts and let them be? Can we leave them alone in their shimmering selves and then watch them fade away?
- There's a wonderful analogy between the non-meditator and the meditator. The person who doesn't meditate is like a dog. When someone throws a stick for a dog, the dog runs after the stick, chases it down, totally absorbed on the stick. The meditator is like a lion. When someone throws a stick for a lion, the lion just looks at them. In this session, we are the lion.
- Be the lion.
- Who is throwing the stick?
- Be the lion.
- Drop the technique. Rest and relax. Just be.
- Dedicate the merit.