Build Resilience & Inner Strength Through Mindfulness | Sharon Salzberg's Guide to True Happiness

The theme of this summit is expanded states of consciousness and all the different ways human beings have been accessing those for millennia to realize their potential for healing, for personal spiritual evolution, and even awakening. And of course, we're covering all kinds of modalities, including meditation and transformative breath work and plant medicine, psychedelic shamanism, ecstatic dance music channel, all kinds of things. And today we're focused on meditation. And so, you know, even as you began exploring your spiritual journey in India early on and began, you know, meeting with various teachers and exploring meditation, how, how the notion of expanded states kind of, what. What does that bring up for you? And how do you see the relationship between meditation, expanded states of consciousness, healing, awakening, so forth? Maybe we could just start with your general sense of where. Where we are, what are we talking about, and then we'll go deeper into it.

Well, I mean, just within the. Certainly within the Theravada or Southern school of Buddhism framework, there are lots of different kinds of expanded states of consciousness that are talked about. And. And there's some distinction between them. There are many states that we can actually access that are quite altered from our normal state of consciousness, and we access them through the power of concentration. You know, most of us are kind of fairly scattered or distracted, maybe not in every arena of life, but at least in some, we sit down even to think something through, let alone to meditate. And our minds jump to the past and they jump to the future, and we're kind of all over the place. And there's a huge amount of energy and attention that is just thrown away in that. And so what we do in the practice of concentration is we gather. We gather this energy, we gather this attention, and we settle usually around a single object. You know, it could be a mantra or a sound or an image or the feeling of the breath could be a lot of different things. But it's that gathering that's most important. And over time, what happens is a kind of coherence of our being. And it's like that particular practice is considered extremely empowering because that's a huge amount of energy. It's like the energy of the universe that could be available to us and is not. And when we bring it together, we experience levels and dimensions of experience we couldn't have even fathomed beforehand. But. And there's a but in this power, which is what is mostly this is marked by. Doesn't necessarily mean love. It doesn't necessarily mean wisdom. And so we know people can have extraordinary states of consciousness without wisdom or without love. It doesn't mean they have to be absent, but they could potentially be. And so Buddhism more talks about other expansive states of consciousness which are marked by wisdom. It's like there's a certain sense of spaciousness, for example, when we have an emotion or we have a thought or we have a sensation, or we're not immediately adding like a million things, like, this is going to last forever, and this is all I'm capable of, you know. And so instead of that clutter, there's space. And if we appreciate or dwell in that space, we also enter a kind of different way of being, but it's not based on only concentration. And so it also has elements of wisdom because we get to see that emotion or that thought or that sensation without all those interpretations and all those other things we might be adding to it. And so is a very different kind of experience. And those states are considered ultimately more freeing for us.

So the first set of states that were largely based on concentration practices and the Theravadan tradition, these are sometimes called the Jnana states.

Is that correct, Jhnas? Yeah.

And you spoke about through the gathering, of concentrating the gathering, that we're not so scattered, so there's a lot energy available, and it begins to cohere in a certain way in our being. And in one way to describe that coherence might be flow. And so I'm wondering, you know, there might be some similarity between the genre states and certain flow states that people are accessing through athletics and high performance and everything, because those states also can be very powerful and people have. Can have a tremendous amount of data available to them and, and really high performance capabilities, but they're not necessarily characterized by wisdom or compassion or things like that. So I wonder if there's a similarity there.

Yeah, I had never actually thought of that before, but I think you're, you're quite right. I think it. It is similar because there's also. There is a kind of healing that comes with that coherence and feeling ourselves not so fragmented and not so all over the place. And, you know, so it's not to denigrate those states. It's just we can see that both in our own experience and observing others, that it isn't necessarily the most freeing aspect of all because it's a question of how do we actually live. It's like we. We brought a teacher once over from India to the states. This is before we established the retreat center or before there were other retreat centers that we knew of, but there were communities beginning to form around the country. And so we traveled around the country visiting these different communities of people meditating. And we were kind of excited, you know, like, isn't this great? You know, look at. Look at what's happening here. And we said to him, this is. Teacher, is this great? And he said, it is great, but there's just one thing. And we said, what is it? And he said, well, kind of reminds me of people a little bit who are sitting in a rowboat and with great endeavor and effort, they're rowing and rowing and rowing, but they refuse to untie the boat from the dock. And he said, you know, people here seem to want to practice sometimes for these great transcendent alternate states of consciousness, but they don't want to pay much attention to how they speak to their neighbor or their children or how they treat themselves in a time of adversity or stress. And so it's kind of a broadening of understanding, of possibility. Yes, those are great states to go for. And they can make a big difference, I'm sure, in, say, athletic performance or performance of any kind. But let's look at the entirety of our lives as a kind of seamless garment. And so there's an integration of our values and our sense of presence and our perspective, our wisdom in whatever we're encountering.