[198] Preparing for Death through Meditation: Insights from Jeffery Stevens

9:29PM Mar 19, 2025

Speakers:

John Ferrari

Jeffrey Stevens

Keywords:

Meditation

mindfulness

insight

awareness

self-awareness

suffering

freedom

death preparation

Mahamudra

Vipassana

sensory field

relaxation

attention

practice

enlightenment.

I talk to a lot of people who are starting meditation or who are wanting to get back into meditation, particularly because there's a lot of stress and fear and uncertainty, which is understandable, and at the same time, there's always been that, and meditation has always been an opening for people when they want to look at their life from a broader perspective, not of what type of adventure they can have in their life, but what kind of meaning their Life has to them. And so I was just reading lots of this meditation instruction and doing a lot of practice, and I was reflecting on how the practice that the main practice that these traditions teach is a is a practice that goes beyond life. It goes beyond the context of life and death. It is the practice that you do during your life so that you can face death, but you don't do it in your life just because of death. You do it because it introduces you to reality. And while I was in retreat, I kept getting these emails from Andrew, which you all have gotten to I'm sure for his program that he's doing, I think he's doing it very soon. Maybe it's already happening, but it's his flagship, you know, preparing to die, and in this retreat, you know, that's what I was doing, not because I have any plans to die right away. One never knows, but because even when you're, you know, I started doing these practices when I was in my 20s, and teachers were telling me to, you know, it's a good idea to start to prepare, because you really don't know when it's going to happen. And right after, I started meditation, or shortly after my best friend died, and he was he was 40 something, just died, and I got married, he came to the wedding, he went home, and within a week, he was dead. And that was a real wake up call to me, because I had big plans in my life at that point, and I know that he did, too, and my plans still have a way of continuing, but his do not. And so I've had to really think about, what are my plans, what are my plans based on? Are they based on another year, another decade? Are they based on a bucket list? Are they based on a mood or something that I want to attain in my life, and it was a slow process of me growing up to the fact that I've gotten a few things that I wanted in my life. I married the girl that I fell in love with. We made a bid on a house that we ended up being able to move into long ago. You know, I had a few good things, but there are many more things in my life that I haven't gotten, and I don't think that I will, and I think that life is mostly like that. I know that I've had good times in my life, but I don't know that I will continue to have good times in my life. I don't know. I do, however, know that I will have bad times, or at least I'll have times of suffering. I can't be sure of future happiness, but I can be sure of future suffering. That's the general perspective of a Buddhist meditation path. With one caveat, you can go beyond suffering, but at the same time you're going beyond suffering, you also have to go beyond hope of happiness, because the path that leads out of suffering doesn't lead to happiness, it leads to freedom from the polarity of happiness and suffering from hope and fear. So during this retreat, I just started to do the practice that we do, which is in every session, you just drop it all. Sonia Rinpoche, who's my favorite teacher, often tells people just die when you go into meditation, people ask him, you know, I just don't know what to do. I. Have so much anxiety, and I don't know, and he'll say, just die. Just die. And I think over the years, he's just seen that many of us, we have two levels of approaching our meditation practice. We have the real level that we've connected to it originally, where we understand that this is this is a way of fully holding the situation of being a living being in an unpredictable world. And that's there we have that. But that's not usually the mask we have. That's not usually what we're walking around with or walking around with hope and fear. And even when we begin our meditation practice each day or we go to a teaching, we're engaging it from a perspective of hope and fear, which is normal, but it's not a winning combination. If we're going to live in hope and fear, then we might as well just focus on the fear, because the hope is hope is lost. Life does not end with the fulfillment of our wishes. So hope and fear, we sort of know the ending right off the bat. So how do we practice with that reality in front of us? And so this is just interesting to me. I have not attended any of Andrew's preparing to die programs. I definitely was around when he was teaching that stuff, before he began nightclub, because he's been teaching that for very long time. I've talked to him about it, and I just have started to on my own in in the style of meditation that I teach, I've, just as many of you know, not because you're all old, and of course, we have people on this call, I'm sure, who are not old, younger than me. But over the years, I've had my share of interactions with people who are in their 80s and specifically wanted to train in meditation to prepare for dying. What's interesting is I used to send them to Andrew, especially when I was younger, and I just didn't really look like I was legitimately capable of talking about dying. Now I know that anyone who's alive is legitimately capable of at least considering it, but there is a process that we go through to prepare ourselves for whatever the future holds. That future could hold another moment of being alive, and that future could hold a moment of entering the Bardo, and it doesn't, it's not different. There are teachings for the moment of death, and I'm assuming that Andrew is going to talk about that, and I'm not going to talk about that. But there are also strong traditions where you do in death exactly what you're training yourself in in your life as a meditator. And so I wanted to talk about that tonight, and I wanted to talk maybe we can do some practice that goes through that. And the reason for this is not to kill you. That's not the point. So don't worry. But we really should approach meditation knowledgeably. Any type of meditation we do, if we do it with a good heart, is going to benefit us. It's true, but it's not going to benefit us in the way that it could. We have to have an understanding of what we are and what we think we are, and what the change that will take place, either at the moment of death and entering the Bardo or at the moment of enlightenment. What is the change? And the change is that we we fundamentally either no longer identify ourselves with something which is conditioned and changing, which would be our body and mind, or we don't have the opportunity to make that distinction anymore, because life ends before we're able to do so, so in as long as we're alive, and I hope that everyone here is alive, this is for people who are currently alive.

There, there's sort of a three stage process. Now, if you if you look through meditation teachings, you'll find any number of Stage. Of the path, or breakdowns of how it all works, and that can confuse people. They can get trapped in all of that information. Honestly, most of that information isn't really meant for just practitioners. That's meant for people who are responsible for teaching the next generation of practitioners, so lineage holders and people like that, and it's helpful, but it doesn't necessarily help your practice. What helps your practice is understanding the essential points. And the essential points are that we we have stages of development that our meditation can get to in this life. If we really want to prepare for death or we want to attain enlightenment while still alive, we have to learn experientially what we are by seeing what we aren't. And so what we are is the nature of the part of us that knows, the part of us that is aware has maybe two faces, you could say one face looks out at the world and at the content of our mind. And that's active in all of us, even right now, even in people who've never meditated before, that part is active. Usually we call this clarity, or selwy, or maybe you've heard the term the eighth consciousness, the Aliya Vijnana. Usually we just call it awareness. It's a vague term, but awareness works, and awareness faces out, and it sees thoughts and emotions, and it sees the body, and it sees thoughts kind of interacting with one another. But awareness has another side, a side that knows itself. It knows without needing to know, something else that may be alive and well in you. You may have a sense of self awareness. Most people do not, and honestly, after teaching meditation for 30 years, I can say that even good students can go for years really not knowing what that means. They'll they'll hear the term self awareness, and they'll think like ordinary self awareness, like how I'm coming across in a room, or how I'm interacting with people on a busy subway car or whatever. That's not what is meant here. That isn't going to help us when we enter the Bardo, but that knowing that doesn't need an object to know that self awareness and this isn't, don't, don't take this from me. This is definitely what the tradition is saying. We got 2000 plus years of people proclaiming this, affirming it, telling us how important this is, that aspect does not die, it doesn't change. It's not part of the conditioned world. It's also not something else. It is what we are. But when the light of self awareness is dim, we begin to cling. Awareness itself begins to cling to the moving world, and it loses any notion of what it actually is, and that begins the process of seeing what isn't there as if it is there. And the term is samsara. So there is a reality that we can see. That reality, as you've heard, no doubt, is characterized by insubstantiality, which is called shunyata, or emptiness, and awareness, which is called luminosity. And that reality is the union of those two, not two separate things, but the nature of that reality is empty luminosity. And from that luminosity there's a tremendous expressive capacity. When we see that reality, we see that expressive capacity in a way that does not create further confusion, but when we don't see that reality, the reality of the empty, luminous nature of our being, when we don't see that reality. We don't stop seeing. So that means that what we're seeing isn't real. We're seeing non reality, and that's the birth of ego. That's the birth of confusion, and that's where we all are, frankly. So meditation practice is a way for us to clean the confusion away, to relax into what we are, to recover that undying nature. And this is doable. This is something that people successfully do. When you spend time around meditation masters, or even just great students of meditation masters, you get a sense that these are people whose they're centered in a part of them which isn't changing. Some of them are completely centered in that you may have heard of some of the teachers here. Talk about people like Trungpa, Rinpoche, who passed away a couple of years ago. He's a tremendous master, someone who taught a lot of Western people, Mahamudra. This is someone who you could hang around and just gaze in his eyes, and there's just something wasn't there that is in the eyes of everyone else that you meet, and all you would get is this radiance, this kind of peace and warmth and an absence of fear. Now I didn't meet him until he was a very old man, and I'm sure he had a very peaceful death. I've met a lot of the younger generation of teachers, and I can tell you that even some of the teachers I've met who are in their 40s are clearly there. They're clearly not identifying with the changing, shifting, illusory world. And you get that when you study with practiced people, and the tradition says, I don't want to, I don't like to say the tradition, but the the wisdom that comes down through the ages. It's a little bit of a hard one for Western people to swallow, but this is what they all say. You get this when you're around real meditators, you don't get it. If you're not, it's not a transmission that can come to you through a book. Now I don't know, I don't know if that's true, but it's it's so frequently said, and it's said by people who really seem to know what they're doing that it's worth hearing. It's worth hearing all over again. So what is it that we that we need to do to prepare well, the first thing we need to do is we need to make a distinction between the realm that we're clinging to and confused by and the realm that we can't cling To because it doesn't have any expression other than that awareness. And so we have, on one hand, we have the world of the body and the mind, and on the other hand, we have the world of pure awareness, real meditation practice, the type that transforms us helps us make a distinction between those two parts of our experience, but it's a lot to do. If we don't, if we don't have a staged approach, it's hard to really do that, and you'll meet people who've meditated for a long, long time. Whose questions I mean? As a meditation teacher, you, you know, you'll often just, you'll get people asking questions. They'll say, I've been meditating, you know, for 15 years or for 20 years, and I just have one question about what you said. And then they'll ask a question that shows that there's a just fundamentally no understanding of this process. Yet they have been meditating for 10 or 15 years. This is because of how we learn to meditate in our culture, people go off and do it on their own, and it feels like something's happening, but nothing's happening. They're on a stationary bike. So the real challenge these days is to make sure that we as a culture, have an effective approach, where we can see what the path is, and we can see that we are making progress along it. So what's the first thing that we need to do as meditators? Let's just say we stupidly watched the news today and now we're terrified.

Is that a good time to meditate? Probably not. That would be a good time to call. Down, maybe exercise, maybe get your mind off the news and do something. The meditation that's is probably out of our reach when we're in a panic reaction, but we've all been told that meditation is the perfect thing to calm down. Well, I don't know, I don't really know how that would work, because if you use meditation to calm down, you can calm down to a certain point, and then you have to stop meditating, because if you calm down further, you're going to start seeing the reality of life. And the reality of life is that it's impermanent, and that's not going to calm you down anymore. So yeah, you want to calm down up to a point, and then you want to get off the train, and that's no way to meditate. So typically, what teachers will do is they will, and this is a great approach. This is a traditional approach. They will give some type of technique of settling the attention on the body. Why? Why do we do that? Well, there's nothing important about the body. It's true that in really advanced Vajrayana or tantric practice, there are things you can do that do involve an aspect of the body, which can be transformative. Those are not easy to do. Those are time consuming, and they require a very, very settled and stabilized mind anyway. So when we settle our mind on the breath, for example, it's not because there's something important about the breath, and I say that because we don't want to cling to the breath, as if the breath is somehow going to enlighten us or save us. It's not. It's just not the mind. So we settle our attention on something which is not the mind, the body. The body works really well. The sense perceptions can also work very well, but the body, particularly the breath, is the main way we do that. And the reason that we do that is that when we put the light of our attention on the body. We're not putting the light of our attention on our thoughts. Attention causes whatever it shines on to increase in importance to us. If we put our attention on our thoughts, they increase clinging increases and confusion increases, so we place our attention on our breath to sort of starve or wean ourselves from the addiction to thoughts and emotions. That's step one. We do that until there's some stability. Step two would be we now let thoughts in, but we don't allow ourselves to engage with thought. We simply we use the stability on the breath or on the body to open ourselves up to the appearance of thoughts, and we do nothing other than feel them. What that does is it takes that fundamental stability we have, and it opens up a space where we become we put ourselves into a situation where we can see the operation of the mind and the operation of the body, and we learn to stabilize within that. You've probably heard the term Mahamudra here. That would be the first way of practicing Mahamudra. Mahamudra shamatha. You aren't manipulating anything, but you're also not indulging anything. Eventually, and I don't mean you know, 10 years down the road, this could be like in a retreat. Eventually you become sensitive and clear that something is experiencing the body and the mind that is neither the body or the mind. You have just discovered awareness. In particular. You've discovered the outward facing aspect of awareness. And what that means is if you can just settle in that allow the body and mind to arise and fall without being pulled into it, that mind is going to turn around, and the self knowing aspect of awareness is going to shine. That is the little vehicle that you want to get into. That vehicle takes you directly to awakening, but it also is the. Article that protects you at the time of death. So the the path has a strategy, and it has ways of I call them milestones. There are milestones on the path where you can you can see that you have accomplished enough of one thing that it's time for you to move into the next. But you also might be able to see, you know, I'm really not ready to move into the next thing, but if you are preparing for death, and I would, I would imagine that people who are in nightclub, well, actually, I guess nightclub isn't the preparing for death club, is it? It's Dream Yoga club, is it? I can't remember. I know Andrew is like the deaf guy who also does the dream thing, but nightclub actually is the dream thing, and then he lets everyone know that he's also the deaf guy. Okay, Patrick, I would imagine, if you're in nightclub and you're doing programs, you're thinking about death, which is that's a good thing to do because you're a human being, it's important to have a simple, but not too simple, understanding of the realities of preparing for death through meditation, you have to see clearly the distinction between the part of you that dies and the part of you that doesn't and the part of you that dies isn't really a part of you. The part of you that dies is the momentum of past error, past confusion. It's a dream that is propelled to continue until you wake up. It's karma. Karma is a deep topic. We're not going to go into it, but good meditation practice is a seamless way into this preparation. So I went eight minutes over what I allotted myself, which is for me, pretty good. So let's do some practice. Hey, wait, there was a delay, wasn't there? So maybe I'm only four minutes past. So the very first thing any practitioner does even, even a fairly advanced practitioner like I wouldn't suggest that Sony Rinpoche would do this. He probably doesn't need to do this, but I sure do this is that we have to understand that mostly what we're doing in our life is we're sort of in our sensory world, but we're mostly in our mental world. And that is danger, That's karma. That is what's going to pull us through the Bardo into the next life, and we're all going to end up, we're not going to end up as, like cats, that would be nice, right? Maybe probably going to end up as mice millions of times in a row, or politicians. So it is really within our power at any time to take command of the simple, real aspect of our relative situation, not our enlightened situation that's coming, but our real Situation is right here, right here and right now. So this is what I am finding, ground meditation. I call this here and now, practice here and now. Practice is kind of the cliche of what everyone who doesn't meditate thinks that meditation is, but everyone who does meditate eventually realizes that they don't they. It's just too hard. If you don't make a priority to do it, you do not attain here and nowness easily. I shouldn't put it that way, because it's actually very doable, but it's simple. So we're just going to do here and now practice for a minute. Your eyes are open, and that is important. Okay, I know that people meditate with their eyes closed. Don't do that here. You'll you'll sabotage the effect. So just take a good posture. I recommend that your back is up, not leaning against something. Your spine is up, your eyes are open, you're relaxed. Hands may be on your knees.

Can you just be present without thinking? You. Present enough that you don't have the bandwidth to also be thinking you're too alert, but at the same time, can you be relaxed? So relaxed and alert, let's do this together. We're alert. Our sense. Doors are completely open, but we are not seeking information through our eyes or through our ears. We're just alert and awake.

We are just here. We're not going anywhere else. We

Keep those eyes open. Allow your eyes to go directly into the space in front of you, as if you were talking to someone just a little bit shorter than you, or maybe you're looking at the lips of someone who's talking to you. Allow your gaze to be 180 degrees open you're Seeing everything as one field and

feel your body and

most of us learn to meditate by localizing our attention on one part of the body. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a completely valid technique, but usually we will pay attention to the breath, which could be throughout the body, or it could be at the nostrils. I also teach a way of meditating, just putting our attention on the tips of the thumbs. That is a localized placement of attention. And if you have a lot of time to meditate, that's a good way to do it. But all of that is in service of all pervasive placement. We are placing our attention on the sensory world as a whole. By doing this, we combat and eventually we overwhelm our minds. Tendency to fragment the sensory field into parts and factions from awareness, the sensory fields arise as one.

They are equal to awareness. Yes, they have different characters. I'm not saying that eyes and sound or eyes and ears are the same thing. They have their variety. But just like soup is one the sensory fields are a soup. Can you place your attention in your sensory field without letting it fragment and localize? Do? You can gain tremendous stability by learning to do this.

The key here is to expand out just enough, just enough to overcome the tendency of the mind to pull out of the sense fields and collapse into its internal dialog. So the teaching here is when thoughts arise, soften and expand out and stay present you're training a new capacity by doing this. It takes energy to do this, it takes effort, but when you gain facility in this, you'll be a very different person, and it doesn't take that long

when thoughts arise, expand out.

Don't expand beyond. Just expand enough so that the mind doesn't pull back. It's a tug of war. The mind wants to come back into its world, but you're saying nope, and you're staying placed in the sensory field in an unfragmented way. You

now, what happens when we do this? What's the strategy here? The strategy is that we are taking command of attention. Attention is an independent faculty of the mind. Attention can place itself within the mind, on a thought, but it can also place itself on something outside of the mind, such as the body. But attention long ago was claimed and employed by the mind to create an internal world, a conceptual fantasy land that we live in that isn't accurate, but we have allegiance to it simply through habit, and that will make things very, very difficult when we are forced to let go of that conceptual fantasy world, which can happen just by life events changing, but will certainly happen at The end of life so in here and now practice, we're paying allegiance, with our attention to what is naturally here. There's no argument. There is a sensory field, and it's consistent. Yes, it changes if we move this way, the sensory field is a little different, but that's the content in the sensory field. We're not paying attention to the details. We're paying attention to the fact of a sensory field. We're giving our attention to it, not to the world that we're creating moment by moment. So here and now, practice gives us command over our attention.

So I'm just going to jump ahead to where this takes us. At some point we can rule we keep our placement on the sensory field, but we open space and the mind streams back in. It's almost as if all of our attention has been in the sensory field, because we've been learning how to touch it, and mind hasn't really been able to get in. It's like shivering outside in the cold. Let me in. Let me in. It's just that if we let it in, it's going to mess everything up again. So we've been saying, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Right now we're just doing here and now practice. We'll let you know when there's an open seat. But when we attain stability, and stability means. We can place our attention in the sensory field, and for an entire meditation center session, it is not interrupted. So let's just say 25 minutes, 25 minutes of uninterrupted placement, not perfect placement, but uninterrupted placement. In other words, we place our attention on the sensory field. And although it may do this, it doesn't do this that stability that's called having developed familiarity. Familiarity, we are now in the sensory field, and we feel stable enough, all right, so now what we do is we just keep the placement and we let thoughts come in. We have enough stability now that if thoughts begin to take us over, we can just reassert stability, and thoughts are back outside in the cold again. But we don't want that. We don't want to be stiff, so we let thoughts in, but we do something remarkable. We don't feed them, we don't push them away, we don't turn away from them. We don't ignore them. We don't indulge them. We simply let them arise and we do not respond. And this is a discipline. This is not easy to do, but it is something we can do, and we can do it better and better again. We continue to do this until for an entire meditation session, we can be placed in the sensory realm, and we can allow the mind to play, and we are not pulled in to the story of the mind. We're not suppressing it, but we're not indulging it. This is the beginning of insight. This is where we begin to see the character of thoughts, and it causes us to relax. Thoughts come up, we don't do anything, and they dissolve. And we relax more as we gain more and more experience that relaxation creates a space in which we begin to see the body, the sensory field that we're still placed within, and the mind, which is coming and going and we're not giving it any energy, we begin to see that we are not in that and we never were. How is it that we thought we were when you're confused? A lot of things that aren't true seem to be true, and we were confused, how long? For a long time, but we're not anymore. We're not confused thinking that we're that, but we don't necessarily know what we are. But if we keep going, that awareness turns around and it looks within, and that's where we begin to see that self or experience that illuminated mind, that is the beginning of the path of freedom. In fact, that's it. We just sustain that. But we can't just do that if we don't train in these other steps. So if you are wanting to truly, truly prepare, not just hear teachings about but actually prepare, give yourself a chance. Make sure that you're training in these basic stages. That's how to do it. And when you meet great meditators, that, if you're lucky, they'll spend time, and they'll go through the stages, most of them will just tell you to rest in that self knowing awareness. And we think, Oh, okay, that's what I'll do. But can you do it? That's the question. I know for myself, hell no, not until I started to go into retreat, could I do it? And as soon as it started to happen, I couldn't believe my good fortune, because it's a lot different than just having heard teachings and thinking something sounded neat, but it actually becomes an experience and it removes fear.

All right, I'm going to stop there these meditation instructions, which maybe you've heard a. Billion times before. I don't know these can be the basis of a 20 minute session, but I highly encourage you to develop stability, stability first in just hearing nowness placement within the sensory field, and when that's done, open up and allow the play of thoughts and become stable by not being pulled in, stable here, stable there, begins to open the door to insight, and that is life changing, and that's why we have a 2500 year old tradition. So hey, let's have some conversation. I'm tired of listening to myself talk.

I You're welcome. Jude, you

Oh, okay, I see all right, Anita,

my is a question. I try that sometimes, and I don't know if I'm doing it well or not, but after a while of doing that at uda, that you ask us to do with the eye open, I think that I can even move in this, in my in my house, I'm still having that sense of that. I am just letting things come without reaction. Today, I was just staring in front of it so and, of course, it doesn't last. It's very interesting, but it doesn't last because immediately you think, Oh, whatever. But also, it happens to me that I am meditating with my eyes closed and suddenly, like they open by themselves. Does it have something to do with that? So they open, and I'm seeing that way, like the whole landscape.

I just stay that way.

You stay that way. But I mean, sometimes i i close my eyes to meditate, and suddenly it it happens. Do you think it's the same way of seeing when they open up? It's something like, I don't think it just happened.

Well, it, you know, I don't know. I don't know what your meditation is, so I don't know what's going on. But if, whether your eyes just being open up, you know, during another session or not, doesn't even matter if you are seeing without picking out detail, and you're not in any kind of a trance, but you are awake, you are having a sense of placement of attention, even though this was it sounds like it's spontaneous, so it's going to be temporary. You won't be developing the skill of sustaining this. If it is spontaneous, it's still good. It's a nice thing. But that spontaneous openness, or what we might call non conceptual, sensory experience, we all have that from time to time, like when there's a thunderclap and a rainbow and we look and we see it, that's great, but that's not a path. That's an experience the path would be sustaining this through skill, and that's called placement, or jugpa. We place our attention in this cleaner state of experience, and we develop the ability to override. Our tendency to pull back, that's called shamatha, or that is, that is an expression of shamatha, or calm, abiding. So I think that you're getting a very good experience, but it's up to you what you do with that experience. If you just let it come and go and come and go, Okay, but you won't be learning to sustain it easily that way. Then again, I don't know what instructions you're following, so I don't know what the every meditation system has a strategy. There's a strategy, you do this, and then you do that, and then you do the next thing, and that is how you tread the path to freedom. So I don't know what your instructions are.

When it happens, I just stay like that, open eyes and continue with open eyes, but it but sometimes I start with open eyes, and I was doing what you were telling to

ask to do, but I don't do it always, but it's very good.

Well, that sounds good.

Keep experimenting with it. See if while you're walking around your apartment or walking around the city, if you can just drop everything and be in that way at the bodega or at the bank?

No, that's more difficult, but at home, I can do it. I just can't do

it, right? But what I'm saying is not, not that you try to sustain it for the entire time you're in the grocery line. I mean, it's not going to hurt you, but just drop everything and be that way and punctuate your day with that. And that will probably encourage it to happen more frequently in your meditation practice. It's a way of feeding those two. Yeah, give that a and then check back. I think I'm talking again, and I don't know, two weeks or something. Stacy is that, you know, don't worry about don't I think it's something like that. But you just come back and tell me how it went. Anita John Ferrari,

okay, here I am. I see you. Hi, Jeffrey, welcome back.

Thank you. It's good to be back. Yeah,

yeah. I think it is cold,

yeah. Well, it was really nice a few days and then it was really,

it was sort of the Sierra Nevada, Sir,

I don't know it's the Crestone mountain range. I don't actually know what those mountains are called. I just call them the Crestone mountains, but yeah, it's a it's a place where a lot of Mahamudra teachers have centers, and it's an amazing place to practice. It's also an amazing place to go and get teachings, which I highly encourage you all to do when you know, like Sonia Rinpoche, if you can get a spot in his retreats, they sell out in minutes, sadly, but it's a great place to learn.

So anyway, yeah, what's up? Just a point of instruction or definition. Really, I I think I'm comparing the Mahamudra to Vajra vajrana. How do you say that?

Adriana, yeah, Mahamudra is Vajrayana. It's a dimension of No. Now

I know I am confused. They're the same thing, but there

point of contention or not contention, but of instruction is how we spend a lot of time, or you teach the importance of relaxation and Vajrayana or maybe a Shambhala. I'm not sure I was under the impression that they start out with a very basic tenet of labeling things, especially a thought is thinking, maybe that ends in the instruction. I don't I don't really know, but where my question comes in is you use the word, not intention, but insight. And. Insight. So I think in the other tradition that they even call it insight meditation, and that I'm not really sure what, what goes on with insight. I mean, maybe just have a great sudden inspiration or something, I don't know. No, well, big terms. Okay, so, yeah, you don't know what I'm trying to say is, what is it? Oh,

no. I mean, I'm following you, John, I'm following you. If I had

to put it into a question, I would say, what is insight to us? You said that. What

is insight? Yeah, period. Let me answer that one. Okay, let me jump on something here. So do you want to know what is insight? Because you brought up labeling and that kind of thing and there, yeah, well, in terms very different

in terms of the other instructions. But no, yeah, I want to know what it is to to what, how you use it, when we say because then you'll arrive at insight.

Insight, okay, all right, so insight, the purpose of meditation practice, according to the tradition that comes from, you know, North India,

2500 years ago, as opposed to what comes from the mindfulness movement. Very different things here, right? Very, very different things. The purpose of meditation is to strategically bring us to insight so that we no longer misperceive reality. Insight is a way of so the words that are associated with that, like the you have prajna, which means the highest form of intelligence. It's a direct, non conceptual seeing. So like when you when you wake up from a dream, like an actual dream, you're sleeping. You wake up from a dream, you have a total shift in reality, and you see that what was real to you isn't real, at least by the waking you know, by the standard of being awake, you're like, that wasn't real. I don't I don't have to pay that bill or that that bull is not actually chasing me because I'm not in a bull ring in Seville. You just realize this is not that's not real. That's insight. That's actually a little glimpse of insight that happens on a daily level. And it's kind of funny, because that's a huge change in our fundamental reality that happens every time we wake up from sleep, and we don't think anything of it well, awakening through meditation involves a more profound level of insight of that nature, but the world that we wake up from doesn't go away. You're still eating that sandwich. You could be you could pick it up as a typical unenlightened person and take a bite in it, and the cucumber and the ham and all that stuff. And right there, mid bite, you become fully enlightened. Do you no longer have a sandwich in your hand? No, you still have a sandwich in your hand. What you don't have is a misperception of the nature of the reality you're eating within. So Insight means that you're seeing correctly. You also have moments of insight. You know, the typical, you know, like an analogy, is you're walking on a path in the moonlight, and you see a snake on the path, and you jump, and you're scared, and then lightning strikes or something, and it's revealed to just be a branch. In the tradition, it's a rope. You mistake a rope for a snake, and you see this thing, and you're terrified, until you see what it is, and then are you still terrified? Well, unless you have a phobia about ropes too, then no, you know you're not. You're not. If you're scared of both the rope and the snake, I mean, you got a lot of work to do, but John, I don't think you're scared of either. So insight. Prajna is the faculty that has insight. The activity of generating insight is called vipashna. Vipassana means so prajna means highest intelligence, and Vipassana means clearly seeing. So you clearly see when prajna comes up and sees, and the meditation that develops that, well, there's more than one type that develops that, but the creme de la creme. Of meditation that develops. Prajna is not doing anything. You let events play, and you you're not pulled in. You don't suppress, you don't reject. You just be with and then prajna comes up and it sees and you have a gamma wave, but a big gamma wave, so you know. So we have prajna, which sees it, sees the illusory nature of the apparent world. But then we also have jnana, or wisdom, which doesn't just see the illusory nature of the phenomenal world, it sees what we are, that's the deeper level of enlightenment. So like the Vipassana tradition that you were referring to, they only deal with that first type. Now, I know that's going to be controversial if someone here is like, hey, wait a minute, that's my tradition. Whatever.

What's the first type wisdom, or what is the first type? There's two types.

So when you have insight into the illusory nature of the apparent world. Now, okay, basically, Vipassana, or Vipassana practice, begins by seeing the illusory factor of First of all, thinking that things endure through time. So we begin to see that no actually things are this disappearing flow called impermanence, or a nidhya, that that would be the very first level of insight. And you've heard all this from me before. I mean, we cover this in the retreats, but the next level, which is deeper and man,

you know substantial, is when you see that me is also arising and dissolving. There isn't actually a thing there that's called non self. And when you have insight into impermanence, which eventually, sort of, you know pervades your experience, and then it you also see the impermanence of me, the sense of me, you have a massive opening of the either it happens or it's or it starts happening. Some people have, you know, a big crescendo, or get orgasm of enlightenment. I think I envy those people, although sometimes they become a little kooky. Most people have like glimpses that begin to increase in frequency, and they just wear out your confusion, and you sort of, it's like an airliner going through a bank of clouds. It's not in clouds. And then out of clouds, the clouds begin to thin, and the horizon becomes clear, and then you really are. It's more gradual, and that's insight, or Vipassana. Now, at some point,

when you've really seen through self, the only thing that is confusing you is not it's not that you have to see something about the world. It's that you have to see something about the seer, and that's deeper, and that's the domain of like Zen or Mahamudra or Dzogchen. That's much, much deeper, but it's still not like so deep that we shouldn't do it. That's the man, that's the thing. And so you can do all these practices. Start out with Vipassana, a lot of people do. It's very accessible, and then graduate, or as Sonia Rinpoche says, upgrade, you upgrade your practice. And they're all about insight. Insight is just a translation. We could say insight. We could say clear seeing. It's all about seeing what was not seen before.

Yeah, that that answers the question. Because I was getting really confused the word insight meant like a list of insights, and because it was the passion that you would see insights when you were doing Vipassana and when you were doing Maha Mudra, you were, I don't know, have a

great so basically, it's the level of profundity, like, like playing miniature golf as opposed to playing real golf. There you. Go. So Mahamudra is the full thing. There is nothing beyond that. Dzogchen is the same way Zen any Mahayana based teaching, it's the full, full vapasana. Vapasana, sorry, Vipassana, Tibetan Lockton, but there are scaled down versions which are very helpful

because they give you fundamental essential insights quickly, rather than you know, like, imagine that you enroll in a program that's going to take 10 years before you get your degree, but then you're going to be guaranteed some kind of great outcome, fine, but you want, you want a job by next year, so you go into a shorter one year program, and you do get a degree, and then you're able to get a job, and then maybe you go back and finish your degree later. That's like the difference between these levels of insight, but they're not the same. You know, Vipassana is great. You know, Insight meditate, actually, Vipassana is the brand. Vipassana is a brand of meditation started by Goenka. It's important to understand that it's not like the natural it's a brand. It's like Mahamudra is not a brand. It's a tradition with hundreds or 1000s of different lineage holders all passing a tradition down, just like swimming is not a brand, but it's also not skiing.

Well, I think too, the word insight is a label that Vipassana.

No, so Vipassana. Vipassana is one brand, and then Insight Meditation Society is another brand that's more of a that's more of a tradition. They're very open, like the Insight people are very open. Me to teach, but Vipassana never would. They're like a closed, oh, the one true way. And that's good, pretty

trouble with words. So the that their practice is is the one that's in Massachusetts.

There's the bar a center, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're awesome. They're awesome. Okay, a lot of them become students of Sony Rinpoche. By the way, he's famous for that. People start out in Vipassana, Vipassana, and then somehow they end up studying with him. And that's how he got the nickname, upgrade Rinpoche, because people would start out, they would, yeah, he would. They used to invite him the Insight society. I don't know if it was Sharon Salzberg or someone like that, because they're all, you know, they all love him and and he loves them. And, you know, these are all, this is like, these aren't in competition. These are people who love one another, lot different traditions, but there's a lot of appreciation. Well, they invited him to come and teach, and he came and taught a big group of people at the inside society. I don't know where it was, and like, well, this is an exaggeration, I'm sure, but like half the people left with him, and it's because when he starts teaching, it's a much more profound view than what they were doing. And he, when asked to explain, he said, I don't know. It's just an upgrade. It's an upgrade. So they call him upgrade Rinpoche, funny. Hope they didn't offend anyone. No, I know it didn't offend you. You're resilient. I am all right. Well, hey, anyone, anyone else?

There's a couple questions in the comments. Oh, Anthony's requesting about the finding ground retreat. Can you give us some more details about that? Is it online? Is it online, or is it in person? Oh,

yes, it's Yeah, finding ground meditation is at this point for the next, probably 18 months, online retreats and training. But it's very it's designed to be supportive. So we all practice together. I know it's a little funky. It's kind of like this, only if we were all practicing all day, and then we clarify the view, and you have opportunities to ask questions, and then I, you know, give some, you know, chunks of instruction and teaching. And we do those every month. A lot of people have just repeatedly come to those and refine their experience. It is online. Recordings are made available, and then in the future, we're getting a lot of requests to do it in person. And of course, you know that just means that we have a. Enough people, because we have to, you know, pay some center. But you're very welcome to come and, you know, I think I've given away. You know that this was a spoiler. This is just a, you know, it's all I teach anyway. So wherever I go and teach these days, it's just what I talk about, rather than topics like karma, the Four Noble Truths, or whatever. But anyway, yeah, it's an oral instruction tradition that's based on the Mahamudra approach. That's what finding ground is. And I think, and some of the people here could correct me if I'm wrong. I view it as a two year training. Someone could do it for five years or 10 years, but it's it's profound and it's effective. And I think I think of it these days as like, give me two years, and you'll be a skilled meditator. I don't know, I don't know what other people think about that, if you disagree just but if otherwise, taken me 25 years, but I'm slow. All right, what's the Yeah,

one final question. This one's from Patrick. His question is, what meditation do you recommend for trying to go to sleep or even trying to go back to sleep?

I mean, I always just think that relaxing into the sense perceptions and don't feed the mind. I'll tell you one thing I really think is good, but it's not something that everyone can do. I don't really know if I would call it a meditation, but if you can hear the so called Sound of Silence, if you can relax into that, you will be pulling away from the mind and investing in something which will begin to ripple through you. And that's what I do when I although I usually do that if I take a nap during the day, like if I'm exhausted, just hear that and but not everybody can hear it, so that's uh, not the easiest one. You're giving me a heart symbol, so I'm going to take that as as good. All right, everybody. Thank you. Tim. I can only see some of these things. I guess I could open this up. There they are. There they are. Okay, yeah, finding ground retreat is online. And by the way, I think we already said that, but we offer nightclub people a huge discount, maybe too huge, but until we have our little company meeting about it, it's going to stay this way. So I think it's like 40% off. So if you are interested and want to give it a try, just use the link. And if you don't like it, it's just a weekend that you lost. That's all. We do it every month, except the months when we are on retreat with our teachers. So I think we do 10 a year, and this will be our 19th so we're getting pretty good at it. Okay, everybody, I really appreciate it. Appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all.

Please have a good practice tomorrow, and if any of this was helpful, I'm honored. I wish you the very, very best. Keep inspiring yourselves and don't worry about all the bullshit that's going on in the world. It's always been like that. And yeah, I know it's painful, but your life is still your opportunity, and as long as you can practice and wake up, it's a good thing to do. So good night.