Welcome to the mindfulness meditation podcast.
I'm your host,
Dawn Eshelman.
Every Wednesday at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea,
We present a meditation session led by a prominent meditation teacher from the New York area.
This podcast is a recording of our weekly practice.
If you would like to join us in person,
Please visit our website at rubinmuseum.
Org slash meditation.
We are proud to be partnering with Sharon Salzberg,
The teachers from the New York Insight Meditation Center,
The Interdependence Project,
And the Shambhala Center.
The series is supported in part by the Hemera Foundation.
In the description for each episode,
You will find information about the theme for that week's session,
Including an image of a related artwork chosen from the Rubin Museum's permanent collection.
And now,
Please enjoy your practice.
Hi,
Everybody.
You're joining us during a month of light and dark.
We're talking about light and dark this month as the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer.
And as we approach the holiday of Diwali that is celebrated throughout many traditions in the Himalayas.
And we're looking at this concept of light and dark not necessarily as a duality.
In many of the Himalayan traditions,
There's light and dark present in everything.
And in fact,
We're looking at an artwork today that kind of runs the gamut of light and dark and shows us the complexity of a lot of different kinds of experience.
This is the wheel of life.
And clutching the wheel of life is the fierce god of death,
Yama.
And within that wheel,
In the very center there,
We have the three,
What are called the three poisons in Buddhism.
This is the boar at the very bottom represents ignorance.
The snake represents hatred.
And the rooster represents desire.
And it is thought that by defeating these three challenges that one can attain enlightenment.
And if you look at the kind of thick circle,
The sort of pie pieces running around the center,
These are the different realms of existence.
And in fact,
We have gods and demigods at the top.
And about two o'clock,
We have the human realm.
And then about three o'clock,
We have the hungry ghosts.
And down in the bottom is the hell realm.
And then we have the realm of the animals about seven o'clock there,
Or nine actually.
And what's interesting is that one can achieve enlightenment no matter where one is,
Which realm one is existing within.
But this idea here is that this is the cycle of what is possible in death and rebirth.
But of course,
There is a way out of this cycle through enlightenment.
And the Buddha who is standing in the upper right corner here on a cloud is pointing the way.
What's interesting too is that,
Yes,
It is possible to attain enlightenment no matter what realm of existence one is in.
It's thought that being in the human realm is actually the favorite place to do this work.
And that it's actually more challenging for a god or a demigod to become enlightened in their own realm.
So there's lots to consider there,
I think,
In terms of our thematic today.
And we'll do that a little bit more with our teacher,
Sharon Salzberg,
Who is back with us.
And I really appreciated her definition of light and dark that she gave last week,
Which was that light is what is known and the dark is what is unknown or not yet known.
So we'll welcome Sharon back and hear a little bit more from her about these ideas.
She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre,
Massachusetts.
She has been teaching and studying for a long time.
And she's the author of many wonderful books,
Including her most recent,
Real Love.
Please welcome her back,
Sharon Salzberg.
Hello.
This piece of art has actually long been one of my very,
Very favorites.
So I was so delighted to see it as an option because it contains the whole universe as depicted in this particular Tibetan conceptualization.
So it's everything.
And the demarcations go back to really the Buddha having said once so famously,
I teach one thing and one thing only that is suffering and the end of suffering.
I teach one thing and one thing only that is suffering and the end of suffering.
It was on the basis of that that there were many things people actually asked about that he would refuse to discuss.
They say,
This always amuses me,
They say he,
Like we,
Lived in disputatious times.
People just like to argue about nothing and prove they were right to no end,
You know.
And so people would start these discussions and he just would remain silent because what he was concerned with was suffering and the end of suffering.
The acknowledgement,
The recognition of the suffering that is in life that we actually share,
At least the vulnerability for,
And the possibility of coming to the end.
Not that only nice things will happen,
But that we can be very,
Very different with things.
So it's not a question of right and wrong or good and bad or good and evil.
It's what leads to greater and greater suffering for ourselves and for others and what leads to the end.
And so the entire universe is about suffering and the end of suffering.
This is the universe which is bigger than just the human realm.
Now,
Of course,
Not everybody believes in that cosmology,
But you can experience a lot of it in the morning,
You know.
It's not like it doesn't have to be death and rebirth in that classical sense,
Although that is how it's illustrated and that's how it's often taught.
It could be in an hour and we're going to sit for hopefully like 20 minutes.
It could be in 20 minutes.
We can go to many realms.
And there are those realms up there which are largely about suffering.
Hell realms created out of anger,
Vengefulness.
And I don't mean feeling anger,
I mean being consumed by anger,
Everyone's life taken over by anger,
Which is a misery for the person who is just lost there.
Up until that point,
They talk about even the strengths and anger,
Like the energy,
You know,
And the kind of courage that can sometimes come,
Like drawing a line and drawing a boundary.
But by the time we are consumed,
Then interestingly enough,
The example in the Buddhist iconography is,
They say it's like a forest fire which burns up its own support.
Somebody sent me a photo just this morning of a friend's house in Santa Rosa and the fire had stopped on their porch.
The firefighters had stopped it on their porch.
It didn't just stop.
You know,
So you see like this sort of burnt stuff on the porch and the house is still there right now.
So the destructiveness,
The self-destructiveness of being lost in a realm where all we see is what's wrong and we're so alone and,
You know,
It's a pretty hostile world when we are really sucked in there and that's the hellish realm.
There are worlds of incredible desire,
Hungry ghost realms where we want and want and want and no matter how much we have,
We're never satisfied,
We never have that feeling of content and that feeling of enough.
And we can certainly experience that.
You know,
There have been,
Say,
Tibetan teachers who are asked,
You know,
What's the hungry ghost realm like?
And they'll say,
America.
And so if you can just imagine a mind state being so predominant that it like takes over,
Not just for even a morning but a really long time.
And then there's the construction of a universe from that.
The human realm is said to be the best realm to achieve enlightenment from because it's a mix of pleasure and pain.
When one's life is largely painful,
It's about survival,
Basically,
It's about getting through.
We don't really have the luxury of stepping back and taking a look.
But when there's that mix,
Then there's enough pain so that we kind of wake up.
Right?
And yet there's enough relief so that we have some energy,
We have the power and the time to actually pay attention differently.
That's human life.
It's not all human life,
Actually,
But that's what that is being depicted.
And it reminds me,
Too,
Of the Buddha as Bodhisattva before he left the palace when his life was largely pleasant since he had a team of people devoted to making sure it was pleasant.
And it was only upon leaving the palace that he saw an older person,
A sick person,
A corpse,
And then a mendicant.
And with the first three,
It said he asked his charioteer,
Sort of snuck him out.
Does that happen to everybody?
Is that going to happen to me?
And so it was this seeing of suffering that will come up called counting the mendicants,
The person who had left home as a spiritual seeker.
They're called the four heavenly messengers.
And it was the next day after seeing them that the Buddha as Bodhisattva left and went and practiced.
And as a result,
Here we are in Chelsea.
All these years later,
You know.
So it's some mix of pleasure and pain when we use the pain in the right way.
That's the human realm.
And then there are the realms considered somewhat more pleasant,
More refined.
This is also the power of myth and symbolism and imagery.
So it's like bodies of light and palaces of jewels.
And it's like a whole other real estate thing.
And long,
Long,
Long,
Long lives that are much longer than a human life.
And you just play.
But people get really kind of complacent and lazy,
Right?
Because they're just playing.
And it's said that in those realms,
For the last week,
Like human week,
You start to sweat.
And the garlands that you're wearing start to wilt.
And then you die.
And you're reborn.
So like I said,
We can see it all,
Right?
It's like a day or less than a day.
We are so at ease.
And the world seems as though lit from within.
It's all luminous.
And it is like a palace of jewels.
And then we get uncomfortable.
Or we remember it doesn't last.
Or there are times when we do feel a kind of mix.
We feel disappointed.
We feel let down.
We feel uneasy.
We feel something is not really great.
But we also feel,
Look at this.
I have the capacity to be aware.
I can be with this.
This is the light.
It's like shining the light of awareness anywhere.
Wherever we go.
And that really is our practice.
So we have stress.
We have resource.
We have threats and danger.
And we have capacities to meet it.
That's human existence.
And then there are times when we are socked in there.
We are lost,
Lost,
Lost in desire and greed and craving and clinging.
And it is like a hungry ghost realm.
And it's like in that state do you ever see anything and think that's okay.
They didn't have a blueberry muffin but the other one was fine.
No.
We don't.
We really don't.
I once was on the phone.
This was years and years ago.
I was on the phone with a friend who was planning a trip to Indy,
Which of course is a long,
Long plane ride.
And he was calculating how many miles he needed to upgrade from coach to business class.
And we actually figured it out.
And almost without drawing breath,
The instant we figured it out,
He said I wonder about first class.
I was like wait a minute.
You should feel good for a minute.
I think you can get into business classes.
That's that state.
And then the state of being just defined by the need for revenge or vengeance,
Some sense of being consumed.
So someone else's actions actually have taken over our lives.
Because we are just so in there.
This is what I quoted the Dalai Lama here not too long ago where he said if you are obsessed with someone's actions that have hurt you,
You can't eat,
You can't sleep,
You can't enjoy anything.
And then he said why give them that satisfaction?
Right?
It's like living well is the best revenge.
Me being free of that is the best way to move on actually.
Not because you're weak or incapable of a fight.
But out of really cherishing yourself.
So there's everything in a human life.
States of supreme extraordinary delight and states where we just feel so oppressed by our own minds,
Not only circumstance but also by our own minds.
So defined by the current experience.
And then there's awareness or wisdom which is actually not within that circle.
There's the possibility of not being driven by the greed,
Hatred and delusion that are in the middle of applying wisdom,
Applying balance,
Applying clarity to everything that we go through which immediately lifts us to another place.
It's not through staying within that we find freedom.
It's actually through stepping off that we find freedom.
So if you go back to the Buddha's life as a child before he was the Buddha,
Which means awakened one,
When he lived in the palace and grew up with a father who was determined that he,
As the myth goes,
As the legend goes,
The father was determined that he never see anything that was displeasing because his father knew that it was often the experience of some dis-ease about life that set one on a spiritual journey and he didn't want that for his son.
So he spent those 29 years in the palace just enjoying himself as though it were heaven world.
He spent the next six years after leaving in several practices of really fierce austerity and self-mortification which were very popular practices in India of the time and really that kind of brutalizing himself and then at the end of that he said neither was the right way.
So it's not like you come to the end of a period of suffering and you think,
I want those pleasant days back,
That's all I want is a better couch and whatever.
It's moving outside of it all together to look at all of it in a different way because it's that sense of spaciousness and perspective and freedom that is a whole other kind of happiness even when what we're looking at is not exactly what we would have ordered if anyone gave us a choice.
That's a really enduring kind of happiness that really transcends the duality of what our experience is ordinarily like.
We see the duality,
We know it,
We honor it and we also move to not be caught in it.
So that's it.
All of which is to say that anything might happen in this sitting and it's okay.
You can use the feeling of the breath,
Just the natural in and out breath as like an anchor,
As a home base,
A place to rest.
Many things may arise,
Lovely sounds,
Great sensations,
Wonderful images,
Not so wonderful images,
Painful feeling,
Heartache.
Whatever comes up that's not the breath,
See if you can recognize it,
Acknowledge it,
Very gently let go of it and see if you can bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath.
Heavenly.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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