Dharmette: Qualities of the Dharma (5 of 5) Personally Known by the Wise

AudioDharma - www.audiodharma.org

This final episode of the 'Dharmette' series explores the fifth characteristic of the Dharma: that it is personally known by the wise. The spea

Key takeaways

• The Dharma is not an abstract concept but a personally experienced reality accessible through immediate presence.
• True wisdom emerges from the meeting point of sensation and awareness, free from interpretation or narrative.

Main topics

• The five qualities of the Dharma
• Direct experience vs. intellectual understanding

Notable quotes

"It's not wise about ideas... but rather, we're finding ourselves to that deep inner place where there's a wisdom that's not even an intelligence."

Conclusion

The episode concludes by affirming that each person has the capacity to know the Dharma

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit our website at audiodharma.org. Welcome. Speaker 2 (0:15) And this is the last talk on the five characteristic qualities of the Dharma. Speaker 1 (0:23) And this remarkable Speaker 2 (0:25) description is pointing to something that where I like to... Speaker 2 (0:35) kind of render the word Dharma as intelligence, some deep intelligence that's operating within, that we can't appropriate or claim as mine, but it's part of you, it's part of this whole system, but it's not part of the place for the usual thinking and engineering and figuring out things. It's not the usual parts where we... of the brain-mind, where we're thinking and imagining and making assumptions and making up stories and placing whatever experience we have in a narrative of past, present, and future. And it's an inner world that has a lot to do with the immediate presence of now, where we experience things in the immediacy of now, here in ourselves. And so it's where what's directly perceivable in our senses, what is directly here, now, that it's immediate. That it's inviting inspection. It's like a feeling inside, like this is where to be, this is where to have attention. This is what's calling for attention here. But paying careful attention that it's the right thing. It's not that our craving is calling our attention. That's more of addictive kind of insistence. But this deeper, quieter calling of our attention towards peace. towards the Dharma, towards this inner intelligence, where we find that we are not reactive, we're not caught, we're not imagining things, but there's a place of something peaceful here, deeper, the deeper intelligence. And so we're being called to it. And maybe it's a quieter place than the loud insistence of our complaints and our fears, anxieties. And then it's onward leading. It feels like, oh, this place where we kind of can live between being mindful. Speaker 2 (3:02) And the sensations, the relationship between the two, what happens when they meet, is very different if we know things through the filter of our interpretations, our assumptions, our fears, our desires, our hates. That produces a very different in-between place than if we just bring simple, ordinary, peaceful awareness together with the sensations. That is the