Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, Letting the Mind Go is brought to us by Viveka in a talk titled and#8220;Mindfulness as Sadhanaand#8221;, given at the Womenand#8217;s Triratna Buddhist Order Convention in 2005. Touching in on our conditioning and confidence to become Enlightened, Viveka reminds us that there is nothing to be afraid of when letting go of the mind. Calling on the image of the vast ocean with references to Suzuki Roshi on water and waves and#8211; Big Mind and Milarepaand#8217;s Song of the Yogiand#8217;s Joy, this little Dharmabyte is sure to inspire.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Letting the Mind Go, Sitting with Mindfulness
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] I think the other reason why we can change our relationship to fear is we begin to see that there's nothing to really be afraid of. I'm going to see other things. The more we sit in mindfulness with everything, we begin to have confidence that we can sit with anything really. We really can sit with anything. And then we learn that what we're sitting with isn't to be feared either, which brings us to the third image of the ocean. The vast ocean of boundless depth with waves turning the surface. So I think a lot of us actually fear our mind. Don't really trust the mind. And I think there's quite a bit in the Buddhist tradition that helps us here. Suzuki Roshia of the San Francisco Zen Center taught that everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure. It is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually, water always has waves. Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves apart from water, a water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. With big mind, we experience each of our experiences as of recognizing the face we see in the mirror as our own. For us, there's no fear of losing this mind. There's nowhere to come or go. There's no fear, no death, no suffering from all the age or sickness. So the agitation we're usually identifying with is just the surface of the water. And they're also part of the water, just the surface of the mind. And there's something much more stable like a vast ocean, which is also part of our experience. If we look for that signpost, I guess you could say. So this is another way of looking at integration. Being willing to see that as part of who we are, or begin to open up to the possibility of who we are being very different than what we usually assume. Milarepa has a great song that shows the illusoryness of the separation of big mind and small mind in his song of a Yogi's Joy, which I think is great. You read it and sometimes meditators say, you know, like, wow. But it's fantastic. He says, oh, happy are the myriad manifestations. The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. Happy is the body with no sinful karma. Happy, indeed, are the countless confusions. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel. I think there's something very important in that little song. You know, that love just being awake, being awake to the whole of our experience is this kind of deep happiness, this deep kind of meaningfulness. For us to integrate, I think we need to be willing to let the mind go. We actually need to work in a way in which at times, at least, we let the mind totally go. We're willing to experience what happens if we do that. You know, we could ask ourselves, do I ever just let the mind totally go? Or is it always something in meditation, always controlling, always directing? In our own practice, we can sense where it is that we aren't willing to go. I think we can experience this quite sematically in the body, just that kind of gripping. We're just trying to keep it together. And we can also work quite semantically, just in opening up and just relaxing into whatever might come. Unless we're enlightened already, we've got to go into some new territory. I mean, unless we recognize we're enlightened already, we've got to be willing to experience something different. You know? I know the Tathagya Garbha teachings have been getting out more of this idea that, you know, sort of like this image of the ocean, that our nature is actually this boundless nature, that we have Buddha nature, we have pure nature. And I think this image is potent to us because it evokes Shradha. It counteracts kind of fear of the mind with just trusting the mind. And just that helps us just go into our minds and what's happening. And I don't know, you know, this culture has a lot of different kinds of conditioning. I mean, I think like the conditioning of original sin, which actually I was quite free of. But that's quite a strong conditioning and an image like, you know, an ocean where, or that we have Buddha nature. I think it might be quite important in this culture to counteract. You know, it's just maybe just lack of confidence we have in ourselves and, you know, in our particular ability to be enlightened. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]