I thought I’d talk today a little bit about going deeper into meditation.  Although we all start off with fairly comprehensive meditation instruction, it’s useful from time to time to review what it is we’re doing and some of the aspects of meditation that are helpful.  Now we already trust that by keeping up our practice, our True Nature, which is compassion, love and wisdom, will be able to manifest itself more completely.  That’s in a sense part of the trust that we have when we undertake and continue our practice.  And we trust that the meditation will facilitate the process of transformation which we undergo as a result of our practising of the Preceptual life.  Now, that trust and that willingness to keep going is enough, because it’s the basis on which we, if you like, re-establish our contact, re-establish what, on some intuitive level, we have always known: that we are not separate from That Which Is, from the Eternal.  But because meditation can sometimes, especially when one’s been practising for a number of years, become a bit foggy and fuzzy as a result of what’s going on, it’s useful to relook from time to time at the whole process, and to look at what some of the things are that we can characterise meditation by, and I’d like to deal with four of those today.  The first is alertness, the second is stillness, the third is non-engagement, and the fourth is unfolding.  And the question is, how do we relate to these four things: alertness, stillness, non-engagement and unfolding?

Well, part of the reason why, when we give meditation instruction, we place great emphasis on posture is that it has an enormous effect on alertness.  Poor posture, as we’ve probably discovered by now for ourselves from time to time, quickly leads to fatigue, and fatigue leads to drowsiness, and drowsiness leads to a loss of alertness, a loss of awareness, and that usually ends up in uninterrupted dreaming.  Now dreaming is effectively what I call participation: we’ve totally, basically, lost the meditation, we’re totally dissolved into the background stream of the mind, what’s going on in the mind.  Now I’ve called it ‘participation’ just for want of a better word, but it sort of describes what’s really going on when we’ve lost totally the awareness, the alertness that needs to be present in the meditation, and we’re just basically dreaming, we’re daydreaming in effect.  Now in a sense we don’t want to participate in the background of the mind, we want to spectate.  But we have to be very careful about what we mean by spectating, because any such thoughts as “I am watching myself meditating” is spectating, and we want to avoid spectating in that sense, because if we’re participating in the sense that we’re just daydreaming, or if we’re spectating in the sense that “I am watching myself meditate” then we’ve gone too far in either direction.  In effect, “I am watching myself meditate” is also participation, because we’ve lost ourselves in the self, in that which thinks that it’s watching itself, and as we know from the basic teachings of the Buddha, that which thinks it’s watching itself, that which thinks it’s doing anything, is delusive.  In other words, any arising of I, me or mine, or anything to do with this thing which I normally think of as me, represents the onset of participation, the onset of losing the alertness of the meditation in the mental processes that are going on in the background.  And if we don’t let go of such thoughts immediately, then immediately we’re into participation.

Now there’s a real need for stillness: stillness which is the second of our characterisations of meditation.  Because in the true stillness there is neither participation nor is there spectating.  We’re not lost in our thoughts and we’re not artificially observing ourselves, because we’re not daydreaming, which carries with it the total loss of focus, the total loss of alertness, and nor is there the tension that comes where we’re holding ourselves very stiffly and thinking “I am meditating, I am doing this, I am doing that” or alternatively “I am not doing this” or  “I am not meditating” This is a sense of “I am in control”, which we have to let go of. In other words, it points us to Dōgen’s “neither trying to think nor trying not to think”.  And the true stillness that we’re aiming for only really comes out of the alertness that arises from balancing that point of awareness where it’s kept right in focus: we’re kept totally alert and aware of what’s going on, without participating or spectating.

Now the stillness grows out of this alertness only when there’s non-engagement. Non-engagement is the third of our characteristics.  Non-engagement, or to put it another way, letting-be: letting alone what’s actually going on in the mind.  We always need to be aware of the scenery of meditation, as Rev. Master Daishin calls it.  The scenery of meditation is basically everything that arises in meditation: we have to be aware of it, but we mustn’t engage with it, because that’s how we get drawn into participation or into spectating.

Now enlightenment is not a reflection of what we know; I mean, we all start usually with some preconceived idea of what enlightenment is or what it might be, but one of the things that it is not is ‘what we know’, or the sum total of ‘what we can know’.  We need to beware of our exclusivity of viewpoint about what it is that we know.  We need to be very much aware of a kind of particular view of the truth: “The truth isn’t like this,” or “It’s like this” or “It’s like that.”; that’s not the way it is.  If you think about it, we can never know everything because we can never experience everything.  Therefore our knowledge, such as comes out of our own stream of experiencing, is always partial, is always incomplete, and no matter how deeply we’ve gone into meditation, no matter how long we’ve been meditating, no matter how clever we are in a rational or intellectual sense, there’s always further to go.  We quite often hear the phrase “perhaps there is more… whatever it is we know, perhaps there is more”; well, from this perspective it’s not really the case that perhaps there is more, it’s actually certain that there is more, because we can’t know everything, and therefore there is always more to come into our stream of awareness.  In other words there is always further to go.  And when there is always further to go, that means there is never an arriving, we never arrive anywhere and we can never say “that’s it, I’ve arrived, I know it all, I’ve done it, there’s no more to do”.  And this is actually one of the great safeguards of our practice:  because there’s no arrival we are, if you like, protected from the pride that can arise in a sense of achievement; this is delusory.  And in effect, the fact that we don’t arrive somewhere, and we can’t say “that’s it, I’ve done it”, acts as a very good safeguard, it shows up the pointlessness of pride:  what is there to be proud of?  There is simply the going on, the putting into practice, the everyday practice, of our meditation, and our Buddhist practice, and the life of the Precepts.  This is very important.

Another way of looking at non-engagement, or letting-be, in meditation, is that we don’t assert anything and we don’t deny anything.  Whatever arises in our meditation, we neither assert it nor deny it, because both assertion and denial are actually aspects of duality.  As it says in the scripture, “when the opposites arise, the Buddha mind is lost”; assertion and denial, in any of their forms, are the arising of the opposites, and we lose the Buddha mind.  In other words, if desire has arisen, for example, in meditation, it’s pointless to try to deny it; if one is sitting in the midst of desire, there’s no point in trying to deny it, but neither do we want to engage with it.  Another classic example is that if anger arises towards somebody who we love for whatever reason, we must not try to deny that either, because that’s trying to pretend that what is, is not.  We have to be very still, whatever arises in meditation, and simply let it be there.  This is where we need the correct use of the will: the will to stillness.  If we gradually cultivate this will to stillness, we can allow things to be there, we can go beyond the fear of what might come up in our meditation, let it be there, just see it for what it is, and go beyond it.

Another way of looking at this is that it’s the compassion of all-acceptance, the willingness to say that whatever comes up, whatever I need to look at, I will look at it, I will not be afraid to look at it.  Because that’s in a sense what the Eternal, what the Unborn, offers to us, that compassion, of which we are a part and not separate; that all-embracing compassion which basically sees and accepts whatever arises in meditation, and allows it to just be there, without rejection, without judgement, without trying to deny or assert, without in any sense trying to manipulate it.  We have to really see what’s there, absolutely as it is, without judging, so that it can be enfolded in compassion and healed.  That is the process of transformation, the process of healing.  To use our previous terminology, we don’t spectate by seeing it as something separate; and we don’t participate by indulging in it.  So when greed, hate and delusion arise in our meditation, we neither keep trying to step back and separate it off and say this isn’t me, nor do we indulge it in such a way that we lose ourselves in daydreaming.  The kind of indulging that can happen, for example, is, if hatred for a person or anger against a particular person keeps coming up in my meditation, and then saying: “well, I must be a nasty person, because I keep having hatred come up in my meditation”, that isn’t helpful.  What we need to do is let the hatred, or the anger, or the fear, or the desire, just be there, and then see what’s truly going on.  And we can only see what’s going on if we let it be there without indulgence, without participation, without separation.  So we can summarise by saying that non-engagement is neither asserting nor denying, it’s the actualising of the will to stillness.  We allow that which is to unfold, because it’s pointing us to something.

And this unfolding is the fourth characteristic of meditation that I spoke of ‒ the alertness, the stillness, the non-engagement, and the unfolding – because it is precisely by allowing that which is to unfold, without trying to manipulate it, without getting lost in it, without trying to categorise it, that our meditation actually deepens of itself.  That’s why we always stress it’s important to keep up a steady practice, we don’t have to go in for excesses, we don’t have to meditate for hours and hours at time, what we need to do is just keep up a steady practice, whether it’s five or ten minutes, if you can do it twice a day, that’s much better than doing long rafts of meditation once or twice during a weekend then leaving it for the rest of the week.  It’s the steady allowing of that which is to unfold in our lives which actually has a transformational effect.  That way the layers of delusion are gradually peeled off.  Our understanding gradually encompasses more and more of the connections between what we choose to do and how we experience life, what is the quality of our experiencing of life.  If you like it’s a direct looking into the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering; the truth of the cause of suffering; that suffering can be ended; and the ways in which we can bring suffering to an end.

Another way of describing it is a gentle vigilance, the constant, steady, not forcing but persevering of vigilance.  And that leads us naturally deeper into the Truth.  We don’t have to make these titanic efforts, we just have to be willing to be open, to be honest with ourselves, to keep the Precepts, and to keep steadily going at our meditation.  And if we do this we gradually discover that we are in fact not bound, not shackled, by fear, or hatred, or desire, or anger.  These things can arise, firstly in formal seated meditation when we offer an environment where we can let these things arise without trying to grab them, indulge them, or push them away.  And then if we keep up this practice we will find that later on, we are more comfortable when these things arise in everyday situations because, as soon as we notice these things, we have been accustomed to being still, to bringing ourselves back to the centre, the mental gasshō, when we notice these things arising.  And it’s because we catch them early that we then find that we can respond, rather than react, when these kinds of things come up.  When someone says something that makes us angry, we can respond because we see the anger arising, and then we don’t react immediately, we can just notice that there’s anger coming up, we can be still, we’re much more likely then to see what’s truly going on and make appropriate responses rather than reacting in an angry kind of way.  And it’s through this process that we discover that there’s actually always a choice: we do not have to react in old ways, we always have had a choice, it’s only by perpetuating the habit of instantly reacting in a certain way, that we get into the situation where – we’ve heard the expression so often – “he made me do something”; that’s not true!  It’s simply that we chose to react in a certain way.

Now by paying attention to these factors, these four factors which help us to remain alert, by seeking the stillness that we can find in our meditation, the stillness that lies naturally in each one of us when we can let go of the greed, hate and delusion that arises, by choosing not to engage with the scenery of meditation, all the things that keep arising in the mind, we allow the life of Buddha to unfold.  We discover that we are in fact part of the life of Buddha.  We can allow the compassion, love and wisdom that we actually are, to arise naturally in our lives.  We can go more deeply into our true being, and explore it more deeply, because the one thing that meditation is not is that it’s not boring:  there is so much going on if we’re only willing to sit still and be aware of what’s happening.  And everything that’s happening is actually pointing us to what we need to look at, to cleanse, to purify that which we are, to transform that which we are.  And eventually we can know a place which is actually beyond words, it gets increasingly difficult as we go into meditation to describe what we experience.  But the point is that we find, by this process, the place of true adequacy, the place where we don’t need to be defensive, the place where we give naturally, we respond naturally to the situation in front of us.  It’s a place where we know gratitude for the value of our training.  It’s a place where the love which is part of our natural being can manifest spontaneously, it just gives, it’s not always looking for something in return, it is our natural being to manifest compassion, love and wisdom. We can let go of the greed, hate and delusion that arises over the top of this, and which we can sometimes smother it with.  So if we keep these four things, alertness, stillness, non-engagement, and unfolding, in our minds – not thinking about them, but bearing them in mind as we see things arise in the mind during meditation – it will help us to get the most out of our meditation, and then by practising our meditation regularly, by really having a good commitment, a clear idea in our minds what our practice is about, why we want to practice, we can take our practice in this way deeper and deeper.  And that’s very much a part of what being a Buddhist is about.