Embracing Stillness: The Transformative Power of Do Nothing Meditation

Ever feel like the quest for enlightenment is just another task on your to-do list? Let's flip that notion on its head together. Join me, Don Thompson, for a profound exploration into Do Nothing Meditation, a liberating practice inspired by Sean Fargo. We'll uncover the radical simplicity behind the idea that enlightenment isn't a distant goal, but an inherent state that's available to us at all times. As we traverse the principles of Tibetan Buddhism's Dzogchen, we'll learn how to release our grip on control and simply allow life to be, revealing a hidden stillness that resides beneath the bustle of our daily lives. This isn't just meditation; it's a transformative approach to living mindfully in every moment, without the need for specific postures or intense focus.

Imagine discovering that the secret to inner peace lies in the inherent acceptance of life as it is. In embracing Tibetan wisdom on impermanence and the nature of reality, we approach a serene state of being. This episode isn't just a conversation; it's an invitation to a space where contentment blooms from the acceptance of life's transient dance. This podcast's insights provide a map to navigate the spaces between our thoughts and actions, guiding us to a peace that intertwines with our pursuit of happiness. So, if you're ready to find tranquility in the art of 'not doing' and to appreciate the beauty in life's impermanence, this journey with me is one you won't want to miss.

Music: Kevin Grahman - 'It's Not That Simple'.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hi, Don Thompson here with another podcast. Today's podcast is going to be something that those of us that don't like to practice meditation will actually probably like. I'm going to call it the Do Nothing Meditation. The Do Nothing Meditation is not something that I made up. This is inspired by the work of Sean Fargo and actually has some foundations in Tibetan Buddhism as well. But what I'd like to talk a little bit about is just give a little bit of background about this particular style of meditation, this Do Nothing meditation, and then we'll get into a summary of a method that you can use.

Speaker 1: 1:17

First, it's important to recognize that many schools of thought, spirituality, including Buddhism and also Hindu Vedic schools of thought Justinem too claimed that the highest state of spiritual communion is actually present in our minds at all times. So what that means is that meditation, or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it, is, from this perspective, it's really the natural state, and by being the natural state, there's really nothing you need to do to get to the natural state. You're already in the natural state. So the natural state becomes something not to attain but simply to recognize, and that's why they call it the do nothing meditation. In Tibet it's called Zouchen, which is more or less an acceptance of what is. And there are Zouchen masters in Tibet, and typically they come from the older school of Buddhism called the Ningma school, which is the original school of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. But I digress. Really, what I wanted to clue you in on is this idea of Zouchen of do nothing, and that this is a valid way to look at meditation. But it is also an invitation to just do nothing, it's an invitation to be lazy, it's an invitation to, you might say, gloss over your practice, but if done correctly, it can be a doorway into an awakening. Really and that's what the Zouchen proponents say is that simply by being aware of the present moment, by being mindful, you might say, of the present moment, as discussed throughout this podcast, you will come naturally to a state of natural liberation or natural meditation, or do nothing meditation. So the idea is if the highest state is present at all times, why wouldn't it be possible to simply notice it without inducing some change or special state? Do we really need to do that? And this is exactly what Zouchen and do nothing meditation? Or telling us we don't need to really do anything per se, we simply need to accept things as they are. So let's talk a little bit about a method to come to this place and I'll just step through it here.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Each time you notice an intention to control or direct your attention, you can simply give it up, and the mind will often do this. The mind will attempt to steer or control your attention in a particular way, usually towards something mundane or something distracting, something. You need to do so in the course of your busyness, in the course of doing something. You can still integrate this do nothing technique by noticing, during the course of the doing, that there is a not doing to it. There is a not doing aspect to it. There's sort of an inverse of the doing. The not doing is the presence, the stillness behind every activity, and we've talked about this a lot in other podcasts as well.

Speaker 1: 5:20

But mindfully being aware of the present moment is, in a sense, you know, when not in formal meditation, when outside of formal meditation, when using mindfulness outside of formal meditation, it becomes sort of a do nothing meditation or a zhokchen type of meditation. And just keep in mind that when you do this practice, there's really no need to get into a particular posture. Unless you feel like it. There's no need to actually do a in quotes meditation unless you feel like it. You don't have to position your attention in any particular way. You don't have to say I'm intending to do nothing. Meditation, you don't have to set it up in that way. You just need to allow to occur what will occur in the moment. Just let the natural occurrence of the moment happen.

Speaker 1: 6:24

And anytime you notice yourself doing anything intentionally, you can just stop. You can just stop. What I mean by doing anything intentionally means something that you can voluntarily control. So if you do anything intentionally means something that you can voluntarily control and therefore you can stop. If you cannot stop doing something, then it's not intentional and therefore you don't need to try to stop doing it. So anything you can stop doing, stop. If that makes sense hopefully it does. If you can stop it, stop it. If you're doing something intentionally for this moment of this meditation, just stop doing that. Of course, if you're driving, you don't want to stop driving. That's not what I'm talking about. So, of course, be aware of your surroundings. This is normal safety stuff you want to be aware of.

Speaker 1: 7:28

So some examples of things you can stop doing are you can stop intentionally thinking. You can stop trying to focus on something specific, you can stop trying to have equanimity, you can stop trying to keep track of what's going on. You can stop trying to meditate. So this is the inverse of trying to meditate. It's the not doing, you might say, of meditation. In a sense, it's like the zen of meditation. It's like meditating on the sound of one hand clapping. It's the not doing. It sounds a little bit confusing, but you can make it very simple. And you can make it very simple by simply taking a moment when you want to do this type of practice and just relax into the moment and try to reflect on the fact that usually, when we do something, we have an intention behind it. We want to do something, we want to go to the store, we want to get a cup of coffee, we want to call Bob or Sally or Joe or whatever. So what?

Speaker 1: 8:45

The idea here with this meditation is for a period of time, to stop doing anything intentionally and just observe. Just observe mindfully what's right in front of you, what is naturally occurring, what is the natural state. And so my proposal here is that the natural state is the mindful state. It's the state of presence that we've talked about in this podcast, the state of presence, the state of stillness. It's sort of like a backdrop to everything.

Speaker 1: 9:19

Now, just a little bit of history about this type of meditative practice. It's really known as experiencing what's called content, less awareness, and it has a lot of different analogs and a lot of different traditions, and I mentioned Zouchen as an example. Another example would be J Krishnamurti. He calls it choiceless attention. J Krishnamurti is a wonderful teacher to listen to.

Speaker 1: 9:49

If you want to get beyond dogma, if you want to get beyond schools of thought and get really into the activity of directly perceiving reality, you might say you might subscribe to Krishnamurti's quotes or talks or listen or read a book of his. I find him to be quite interesting. He's different because he really you know Krishnamurti. They were going to spin him up as the world savior in this group and Krishnamurti basically discarded the whole notion that he was going to be the world savior and he became a teacher, certainly, but he didn't become the world savior that they had anticipated him to be. So suffice it to say he was recognized to have certain qualities and these qualities were self-evident, and these qualities led him to be a teacher and a lot of what he talks about in his teachings is really cutting through everything Cutting through religion, cutting through the ideas of spirituality, cutting through ideas of what we are, of what we can be, what we might be. And so he cuts through all of these ideas and asks us to directly perceive reality. And it is very similar, really, to the Tibetan tradition of Dzogchen and Dzogchen as I've experienced it mostly through the Ningma school, the original school of Dzogchen.

Speaker 1: 11:29

It's an approach, it's a valuable approach to one to consider, and the big cautionary note is that you can slip into a state where you're really kidding yourself. You're just really not doing anything Does not mean that you're doing Zoccia. You're doing the do nothing meditation by not doing anything. A lot of people, when they take up Zoccia, they just say I don't need to do anything else, I don't need to practice anymore, I'm in the natural state. Why do I need to do anything? And a lot of these folks, I think, are kidding themselves. They're really not practicing do nothing meditation, because do nothing meditation is a heightened awareness. It goes beyond what's called the monkey mind, the chatter of the mental activity that we're also familiar with. If you're just getting caught up in that and saying well, that's enlightenment too. In a way, you're right intellectually, but in terms of a practical realization, that's a whole other matter. It's not really true. Really, you need to practice regardless. You need to practice Zoccia, and you need to practice do nothing meditation, even though it says you're doing nothing. So I would encourage you to go over these guidelines that I've laid out. But also there are books out there and, as I mentioned, j Krishnamurti gets into this territory as well and he's a very interesting person to look into as well.

Speaker 1: 13:05

It's also called in the Vedic school Yana Yoga, and I mentioned this before, yana Yoga being closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism or the idea of emptiness, and in the Vedic schools it's called neti neti. Not this, not that you're going through a process of negation, and a process of negation is not negative. A process of negation is simply looking at the space around, something you might say. So, let's say, in art they talk about negative space. So in meditation, we're sort of taking the negative space and we're using it as the ground for our awareness, and it's the emptiness, it's the clear sky that holds all things. This is the idea behind neti neti, behind the Vedic practice of Yana Yoga, and this was really taught by people such as Ramana Maharshi, who was a well-known Indian saint, mystic and proponent of Yana Yoga, known as a great Yana Yoga. Also, sri Arubbindo was also another great Yogi of this tradition and the teacher of Paramahansa Yogananda. Sri Yukteswar, another great Yana Yogi, who wrote a somewhat incomprehensible book.

Speaker 1: 14:43

A lot of these teachers write books that are somewhat hard to follow, but they're always worth cracking open and taking a look at. They may seem difficult, but if you can just ponder it a little bit and think about some of these thoughts of negative space in the absence, what surrounds something, as opposed to what something is, what something exists within the context of, it's always emptiness, it's always space. You know that's. Again, think of the sky. The sky encapsulates everything. Space encapsulates everything in the universe. Space. The atom is mostly space.

Speaker 1: 15:23

Some will argue it's all space. You know, in a way or so, much space, and to say that there's something you call matter is almost nonsensical. This is what the theoretical physicists tell us. So the point being here is that if you can ease into these ideas, you can notice something that comes out of it, that is a recognition of the presence of the stillness that always is there. It doesn't go away. It's always been there, it always will be there. But these are ways of talking about it. You know it always has been there, it always will be there. That really means that there wasn't ever really there to begin with in a way, and it sounds a little bit convoluted and a little bit nonsensical in a way and to our Western thinking it can be a little bit difficult.

Speaker 1: 16:20

But I would encourage you to consider it, because this is really the nub of Eastern practice is so different from the West. The West is always concerned with the thing, the existing thing that you can then manipulate and use and wield to your own ends. It's very materialistic. The material thing becomes paramount In the East. In those practices what is not there becomes more important in a way, because what is not there is the only thing that really transcends time and space.

Speaker 1: 17:02

Again, it seems a little bit counterintuitive, but the idea here is that we're moving against the idea that anything is permanent, everything fades and, ultimately speaking, everything is empty of inherent existence, as the Tibetans have said. So this brings us back to this not doing it's not doing simply recognizes that you might say emptiness the space surrounding things, the space that's context, the silence. That is a context for all activity and can be quite wonderful in terms of evoking a sense of, you might say, acceptance of things as they are. And if you can accept things as they are, you can come to a sense of peace. If you can come to a sense of peace, happiness soon follows. If not closely related to peace, if not part of peace. I'll leave it at that. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I look forward to the next one. So see you. You.