[147] Cultivating Virtue and Inner Peace through Meditation – with Jeffrey Stevens

7:55PM Feb 13, 2024

Speakers:

Jeffrey Stevens

Keywords:

meditation

equanimity

called

virtue

experience

traditions

awareness

practice

mind

nightclub

retreat

love

work

develop

parkinson

loving kindness

relax

talk

attach

instruction

All

right. Everybody, it's only been a week. I got a email from Andrew, two days ago asking if I could take tonight. And I thought it would be good to continue on what we were talking about before. So in that process, my, my laptop died. So my beautiful, expensive company computer died. And so I've had to rig up another situation, and I'm hoping that it works. Does it look good? Or does it I'm not I don't care how it looks so much. Does it sound good? Am I synced? I'm not. Okay, that's really all I needed to know me. And I must have done something right. Um, as Melissa said, after having given a number of talks on the elements of meditation, which we're going to talk about tonight, and we talked about last time, and we have talked about the many times in the past, I've just gotten a lot of requests for things to read. And although there are really great books that one can read, and I have some of them here, I showed you these last week, we have, let's see, this is not picking up there we go. The mind and its functions by geshay Robertson, and the Buddhist psychology of awakening, this one is a little more of a Western person's take. And this is more of a Tibetan. Traditional approach. And then for the type of meditation that you that we're doing, when we are together, and I think it's similar to what Andrew does probably what Joseph does, too. This is the book that I'm currently recommending. It's not there it goes indisputable truth by chokyi, Nyima Rinpoche, I've just gotten so many emails and requests for me to make recommendations that I always feel bad when I forget to do it. And the thing is, is there are so many, many things that we can read about meditation, and it's good to educate ourselves, but at the same time. But at the same time, not all the books out there belong to the same stream of teachings, even if they're all Buddhist, they could be giving very different instructions. Even though those paths may lead to the same place. They're doing it through different roads. And it's not helpful to mix those roads. If if you're doing Tara Vaughn or Vipassana practice, you don't want to be mixing in maha mudra. Because they're not the same instruction. And they both they both have their way of working. Same thing if you're doing awareness based practice, which is what I teach, you know, doing Tera Vaada practice or insight practice or Vipassana practice. It's different. It's different. It's sort of the difference between flying through the air and a plane and zooming across the surface of water in a jet boat. You're going to get there, but it's going to be a very different journey. And so you want to know what your tradition is, before you just start mixing instructions together to come up with your own plant. Hey, one second, I just realized that I have to record just in case something goes wrong.

Very good. Okay. So, to that effect, I wrote a series of articles on the elements of meditation, and I put them on my personal website, and I've linked to them in the chat and So what you do is they'll come to you as a series of emails, there's a short summary email, which will take you a few minutes to read. And it will give you a sense of whether or not you want to dig in and go into the deeper stuff. And if you do, you just click a link, and it takes you to a full article. So these are the things that I think every meditator needs to know. And usually these are the things that people want to know. And so I just wanted to say that, and for those of you who don't have that link, you can go to my website, which is this, Jeffrey, the meditator.com, you just go there. And you'll see right there on the screen, a place to sign up to get the 101. That's what I'm talking about. Again, it's a free email course. And I think that it will be helpful. So how many of you were here last Monday, or have watched the recording from last Monday? If you weren't here, okay. Maybe, maybe half, maybe not quite half. I'm right now I'm talking about. Everywhere I teach. I'm talking about the elements of the elements of the mind. There that meditation addresses, the mind is what we work on, in meditation. And in, in most of the traditions that you're going to learn in nightclub, these are awareness based traditions, or Buddha, nature, based traditions, their teachings on luminosity, these are all the words that we have. But what that essentially means is that the ultimate nature of what we are that we're trying to discover, through meditation, is found within awareness. And awareness. In the meditation context, is not the same thing as mind. We think we are the mind. In fact, anything we think, is the activity of the mind. But that's confused. Meditation shows us that that we are not in the mind, if we can be said to be something, it would be awareness, but awareness is so free, and so vast, that it's not easy to even call it a thing. So our identity would be awareness, not the mind. But that's not how we live our life we attach to our body, and we attach to our mind. Meditation is the process in the practice of helping us to relax out of the confused element of false identification with the mind, and to find ourselves in the space of awareness. And at some point, through meditation, we have a moment of recognition, where we realize this is what I am. And that's the first glimpse of freedom. So that's what, in a nutshell, that's what meditation is helping us do. And it would be wonderful if we could simply relax into awareness and be done with it. And I know that there are traditions circling around that almost promise that we can do that. But I don't think it's quite that easy. I think that we do have to go through the training in meditation to help us understand the cycle of attachment, and maybe you could say addiction to concept and emotion. And what you may have heard Andrew refer to as reification re ification. reification simply is a meditators way of describing our tendency to attribute a quality to something that it doesn't have. And what we attribute is we attribute identity to the experience of the mind. And there is no actual identity there. The mind is the stream of arising and dissolving appearances that are cognized by awareness. Awareness doesn't attach to mind. But oh Ernest can be dimmed. When this one particular, you could say kink happens in the mind, I'm sorry, my wife is in the other room. She's on a meditation call with a different group. And apparently, they're having a pretty good time. So maybe we need to make some more noise and compete with her. Ultimately, what we're going to learn how to do this is sort of just cutting to the chase of our path, is we're going to learn how to relax so much, that we're aware of the feeling of self when it comes up. And we relax in gentleness when it comes up, which will allow it to dissolve. And at some point, we'll be clear enough to see that that feeling of self just dissolved. And that the awareness that saw that is still there. When we've had that experience a number of times, we have a major Aha. And that's called liberation. So that's what we're going for here. We need to come to terms with the parts of our being that are getting in the way of that. And so last week, we talked about two of the positive qualities that neutralize negative qualities. One of those was equanimity. Or this backup. One of these was equanimity, which is the mind's eye, inability to pull awareness and disturb it. When we have equanimity, you could say the subtler layers of the mind are so strong and so clear that the coarser layers of the mind can't traverse that territory to muddy awareness. So equanimity allows us to live within the world and not be disturbed by disturbing things, it doesn't mean that we're tuned out. It just means that we're not disturbed. Sometimes equanimity is described as the walk of the elephant. There's something about the gate of an elephant walking through the jungle, which conveys a sense of steadiness and equanimity. We also talked last week about detachment and detachment is positive tendency within the mind, not to attach to things that are passing by, you can probably say that most of our day is spent attaching to things and then working through the unpleasant outcomes of having attached to things we attach to things we invest in them, even though the things that we usually attached to our already, to some extent, gone from our experience, like when a thought comes up, and we attach to it, the original thought is gone already, we are now forcing, like a replica of it to persist from moment to moment. And what happens is, it naturally morphs a little bit, which causes us to struggle to try to shape that thought into the thing that we were trying to hold on to, and it's exhausting. And eventually we forget what we were doing. And we go on to the next distraction. And that's how our life proceeds from birth to death. If we don't train and understanding this, then we're just we're just sleepwalking through our life. So detachment, and equanimity, are very important. Very, very important components of the path and of mental health.

And you can develop these through a combination of shamatha or calm abiding meditation, that's, of course, very good for developing equanimity. And then you can also engage in Insight meditation, which helps you see that things have dissolved. When you're reaching out to grab something. You begin to see that there's nothing there to grab. It's already gone. That's where detach judgment begins to develop and detachment and equanimity work together so that someone can just be, and when you can just be what is within you begins to come forward. And those are those qualities that come forward are the qualities that are typically talked about in Buddha nature, teachings, or teachings on luminosity, or teachings on wisdom. Those are the words that will often have that those are the innate qualities of awareness, which begin to emerge when the mind has become tamed and clear. So, oh, and some of those would be great compassion, great wisdom, and great power. Those are the three main categories of qualities that begin to emerge naturally, from awareness, if you've ever been around a meditation master, someone who's actually realized these things, even if someone has just experienced them, they might exhibit some of these qualities. But if you're able to encounter someone who has realized or made these a permanent part of their expression, you've seen this, you've seen the incredible equanimity. You've seen, what we often call compassion, but compassion just means availability and caring, and not retreating from you. So you talk to a meditation master, and you feel like a wreck, you feel like a mess when you're talking to them. They see that too, but they don't pull away, they don't pull away from your disordered state, they just stay there with you, that would be compassion. Anyway, it's important to also understand what we can do throughout the day, that begins to generate the strength that will allow us to develop detachment and equanimity. And probably the meditation that is most well known, that develops the positive qualities of the mind, is the meditation on loving kindness and compassion. If you develop loving kindness, which means the desire for others to be happy, and well, if you're able to develop that, then you can start to sustain it, just like you would sustain any meditation on any object. But in that case, you're sustaining the feeling of love. And when you sustain the feeling of love, anger can't arise. Anger and love cannot coexist. And when it's deeper than that, you can develop the quality of compassion. Compassion, is the wish that others not suffer, and the energy, that the willingness to expend energy to remove their suffering, even if we have to go into suffering to do so. So love is wanting others to be well and compassion is not what is wanting others not to suffer. And when we have this as a theme, in the space of our mind, selfishness, and anger can't arise. When they can't arise. After a while, they lose their grip on us and our mind begins to tip into a continual state of wholesomeness. And that state of wholesomeness is the perfect environment, for realization of the nature of our being. So if you could, the best thing you could do, if you want to wake up, is to create a virtuous state of mind. And then it's just like Tinder or kindling that's dry and perfectly arranged, and just ready for a match to be thrown into it. So there are many, many ways of developing a wholesome mind for waking up. But probably the most efficient way that's accessible to most of us is to develop loving kindness and compassion. So we're gonna talk about the first one tonight, loving kindness. Let's start out though, with just a period of relaxing. And what I would ask you to do, while we're doing this, this will be a little preliminary practice period, is just pay attention to how you feel toward thoughts that are distinct. Acting you are trying to distract you. Or if it's sleepiness that's pulling you away. How are you responding to these experiences, don't try to change it. Don't try to be on your best behavior. Try to be on your most normal behavior. We want to get a reading a baseline reading of what it's like for us to realize that we are distracted or to realize that we're sleepy, or whatever it is. I know some of you have music going on in your minds. How is it for you to endure that when you're trying to meditate? So let's put some time on the clock. Are you ready? Here we go. Just relax. Your eyes can be open or closed. Whatever you do.

So just relax so that you can see how you're responding to what pops up in your experience. It's not important that anything in particular pops up. Anything is okay. We're more interested in how we experience it. Now what our thoughts are so much as what the tone is. Is it distressing? Is it frustrating? Or I suppose, is it? Is it wonderful? Just want to give that an opportunity to we are not usually neutral beings

usually we have some tone that accompanies our experience It would be wonderful to be carefree. But it's not always the case for most of us and it may almost never be the case for some of us

but we will work through that

we just have to give ourselves the space to do so, the space to see and appreciate how it is that we are experiencing and reacting to our world.

Okay, so whatever your experience was, it was probably either a form of desire, experience would come up and you wanted to mix with it, or maybe pursue it. You might do that a little for a little bit, and then realize, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be meditating. And so you pull yourself away. Or maybe you're experiencing something that's kind of wearing you down, something that you don't want to pursue, but you can't get away from either you feel the desire to run from it, or the desire to suppress it or push it away, or ignore it. And then it's also possible that you don't feel anything, you feel numb. Numbness can give us the sense that maybe we have equanimity. But that's not what equanimity is like. So in the oral instruction traditions, which is to say, the traditions that are completely based in the deep technical knowledge of the tradition, but which don't guide in a technical way, the oral instruction traditions are the folksy pithy, oral instructions, that point the way with out, requiring us to learn everything. Usually, those are the traditions that produce awakened and realized people. The more technical scriptural based traditions produce good scholars and teachers, which keep the tradition alive. But when it comes time, to getting down to business and actually waking up, we usually rely on the so called oral instructions. they condense the Dharma into what works. And one of the things that works. One of the things that accomplishes many important things with one method is to generate a feeling of sweetness and okayness. With every experience that comes up while we meditate, even if it's pulling us we just sort of learn to adore our experience, even if it's rough. We're taking the attitude that one takes to a being that they love very much like maybe you have a child or you have a grandchild in anything they do is okay with you, especially when they're when they're young. Or I have right over here, a really, really rowdy animal, who tears everything up, and absolutely obliterates the peace of the house. And I love it. Everything he does, kind of delights me. When your mind and your life is throwing things up for you that you don't want, the natural response is anger. Anger is the expression of pushing something away, or fighting against it. It's also called aggression. When life is throwing things up, that we don't want, whether it's what we fear is going to happen in the world, or what we fear is going to happen to ourselves or someone we love, or just the suffering that comes from not being able to get to sleep at night, and just having a racing mind. All of these are opportunities for aggression and anger to naturally come in and try to push things away. And that's probably what will happen. Even the sweetest people among us still do that. It's training, which reverses that it's training in meditation, that recognizes, oh, my God, look at what I'm doing. I'm just fighting against my experience. I can't control what comes up in my mind at night, or what comes up in my mind during meditation. I don't, I don't have the controls for those things. But I do have the controls with how I meet those experiences. And what the oral instruction tradition tells us is that if we can foster an absence of anger, an unwillingness to be angry or frustrated or irritated. Just a simple on willingness, we're left with space in which the positive begins to come forward. The positive side is what sees the humor, the absurdity in the drama of our experience, even if things really are going to go into hurt. If we can't do anything about it, it doesn't make any sense to make it even worse by being angry. I mean, we all know that. But do we have the capacity to make it happen? Do we have the capacity to reverse the habitual tendency? So many teachers call this the development of loving kindness, the inner most development of loving kindness, where we're pervading our experience with a sense of sweetness and kindness toward whatever happens in the very old, very technical teachings. It's funny how it isn't called loving kindness. It's called absence of hatred. And I'm going to read to you a definition about that. It's interesting and it's very helpful. Non hatred is a distinct mental factor. That when referring to an object, bears the characteristic of loving kindness which directly overcomes hatred. It has the function of acting as the basis for the prevention of hatred, and for the increase of love, and patient acceptance. This is probably what the adults in your life urged you to develop or to demonstrate whether they did or not. They still wanted you to do it. And now you want the other people in your life to do it. And of course, but how how do we do it? Well, We do it by practicing moment by moment. When something irritating comes up, and we feel the tension in our being, right then in there, we practice detachment, we let go. And then we change our tone. And it's not as if we can just do it, we have to do this again. And again, we drop, and then we just, ah, we shine a patient, non hating.

I don't know if I want to call it, I don't want to call it love. Because it's more important that we, we know what it is, without having to apply the word. But it's a sense of okayness and gentleness, and a kind of sweetness coming through. That is not attached to the outcome. I may have shared this with, with you before. And I only say this, because my dad is not a member of nightclub. But my father was very intense, but is still alive, and is very, very close to him. But he was a hard guy to be around. He was very intense and very demanding and very driven. And through a sequence of just kind of what you would call misfortunes, like a big turmoil at the end of his career, expensive lawsuits, and then a diagnosis of Parkinson's. His demeanor has completely changed. I'm sure this has happened to other people. And I just didn't recognize it. But I think it's the only example I've seen of someone doing a 180 He's absolutely kind. Now, he never says an an unkind thing. And he's just very sweet. And what it does is it makes those of us who are around him, relax, and we start to see our own aggression, because he's not putting any aggression out. I mean, he got to he beat it all in to about 70 years. But then something changed. And now it's just like, the sun's come out. I think it was the hardship and the struggle and recognizing that he was just creating his own pain. And then often when someone encounters an irreversible situation, they have to change their attitude. If you have Parkinson's disease, it's not going to go away being angry at it is only going to deprive you of any positive experience you could have and the time you have left. Not everybody makes that decision. And I'm so impressed that he did, but he clearly did. For me, I don't have Parkinson's, and I hope never to. But I do live in a world that sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I just think, man, stuff is getting dark. And I can't change it. And I have found that I can either go down the road of becoming extremely anxious and angry, and wrathful at the decisions that our species has made. Or I can just see what is there and recognize that hating it doesn't help me doesn't help it. And that is not something I'm good at. I'm not claiming accomplishment there. But it is something that I'm practicing. And I'm beginning to understand why for example, it's very rare to hear a Tibetan talk negatively about the Chinese, even Mao Zedong, who effectively eradicated their culture. The Tibetans take responsibility. Amazingly, they take responsibility for what happened to them. Seems crazy. Lisa Tibetans, I know the Dalai Lama, I think maybe it was the Karmapa said they had created did so much negative karma by being isolated from the rest of the world for centuries and centuries that it was just a matter of time before someone overpowered them. And that's what happened in 1959. But you don't find those victims of genocide to be angry. In fact, they're the least angry people I've ever met. They're the most loving people I've ever met. And a lot of them, you know, if they ever go back to Tibet, they are going into villages that are Chinese speaking, not Tibetan speaking. So anyway, our journey is about recognizing these little opportunities to change. And recognizing also, that our little efforts to reverse things will last for a short period. We can't get frustrated at ourselves. If our effort to overturn anger, or our effort to overturn selfishness doesn't have a permanent effect. It's acts of virtue, acts of virtue. In the system of dharma, we have what's called virtue, which is associated with actions that cause benevolent and wholesome changes. And then we have the long term effect of those acts of virtue, which is called merit. Someone with great merit is someone who has engaged in many, many acts of virtue in their training. So in Buddhist culture all over the world, and not just Buddhist culture, but Buddhist culture is one example of this. A practitioner engages in what I call feats of virtue throughout the year, there may be times where many practitioners come together for a weekend or a week, and they engage in massive acts of virtue. And then they celebrate at the end, like right now my teacher, Sonia, Rinpoche, is in a nine day, you know, this is the this is the Asian New Year, this is low SAR, or the New Year, the new karmic cycle begins, and all of the people in his community, and he's just one of many, many teachers in Nepal, who gets together and they do these 24 hour practices for 10 days, where hundreds and hundreds, maybe 1000s of people are just going all in doing things to raise the fund or the store of virtue and then dedicating it to everyone. They believe that this is reveal. Many people in the West would think, wow, that that's a lot of superstition, but they don't. And they actually, in my opinion, seem to have achieved the most in this. So I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. For us. We engage in feats of virtue, when we go on retreat, when we dedicate time, to pile on acts of virtue, so that in say, one weekend or one week, we can engage in almost nothing but virtue. One of my teachers told me early on that every day and retreat, I don't know if this is a rule of thumb, but I worked it out once when I was in retreat, and I thought, oh, yeah, that does kind of make sense. Every day of retreat is the equivalent to about a week of daily practice. So if you go on, you know, four days of retreat a month, it's kind of like, what you would achieve during a month of daily practice. I don't know that we have a scientific test for that. But piling on acts of virtue is effective. And all you really need is a community of other practitioners who agreed to come together to practice for a period of time. And, and we can do that we have so many opportunities to do that type of thing in person and online. And, and then just alone, it's it's, of course, okay to do feats of Virtue on our own So that's what I wanted to talk about tonight. We have, we can have a nice rich discussion now we have one minute. So please, if you have any questions

or comments

I see, I see. Oh, yes. FiO Yes.

First of all, this is my first session. So I'm a newbie to the group. So thank you very much welcome. I enjoyed absolutely every word like dropped into my heart like it was and was so meaningful. I just wanted to express that I too, had a similar Father, that when he was diagnosed with cancer metastasized on his spine, he made an about face and really exhibited the kind heart and the compassionate person that he we knew he was, but never could demonstrate it outwardly, in an open communicative way. And from my own personal experience, I, after my second son, I got something that lupus called lupus. And it just was from one day to the next change, my life experience took me from the top of my corporate game, so to speak, and landed me on the bottom floor. And actually was that very same gift, it allowed me an awareness of, and the and the gift of seeing that the preciousness of my life still existed inside of me, and as I could detach and let go of the attachment I had around my identity. I was all the doors, and windows of my house of belonging opened, and my world changed dramatically. Even so looking back, I feel so grateful for the lupus diagnosis because of the gifts. So funny,

isn't it? That is such that is what? What percentage of people say that some percentage, but I know that it can't be all. I know that when one encounters the reality of impermanence, they, they can open. But not everybody does. But you did. Your dad did, my dad has. It's amazing. It's just amazing. It's also amazing how I've been a meditation teacher now for 25 years. And most of the people that I've worked with have always been older than me up until now. Now, I'm old enough that I have, I actually have students that are younger than me, and I'm learning about their world. But the people who have the least amount of time to spare are the people who want to invest the most amount of time in the rest of their life through practice. That's what I find. And the people who have the most amount of time and could do the most don't. They're not old enough, yet. They haven't been handed the non negotiable cards of lupus or Parkinson's or I shared last week that I just learned that I have arthritis in my hip, probably from too much, not too much, but so much meditation over the years. And it's not going to go away. And I can just imagine that some years ago, I would not have been able to handle this, but I almost don't even care. Especially if it happened because of meditation then it was, you know? But, yeah, accepting the things that you can't change. Gives you an opportunity to do so much more than just endure so much more than that. Anyway, it's nice. Are you Theo, is that your name? Yes, that's

my short name.

Where do you live?

I'm in timber. On Marin County,

California, who I love that place.

And my full name is Theo philia. But most everyone calls me Theo. Okay.

Well, it's nice to meet you.

Thank you so much everyone.

Okay, I don't actually see any

I don't see any hands. That's okay. But I don't want to just not see. Hey, any of you who are interested in engaging in a little training together, we are having a retreat, February 24, and 25th. That's something that anyone can come to. There's a lot of supporting materials that you'll get if you decide to do this. And you'll be able to practice with a friendly group of people who are engaging in feats of virtue, we do this every month. It's a way to build a little community of meditators that you come to know and just putting a little bit of culture of practice into your life. And everyone is welcome. I know some of you are already planning on coming, I'm very happy. But I would just like to let you know that that is available to you. And we're having a very good time doing it. And you can go to, you know, you can go to what is finding ground dot finding ground meditation.org. This is new website, where you can just go to my if you want to learn more, you can just go to my website. And there are links there for the retreat. So I certainly look forward to carrying on we're going to go through the virtues of mind. And these are, in a way when I come to nightclub, it's me rehearsing and preparing for a series of talks that I'll be giving starting in March, that are more formal, called the on finding ground Dharma talks, which you are all welcome. Those are free. Also, you can come to those, you just have to register for them. You can go to my website and do that. They're not happening until March. So no rush. And I will be back at nightclub the first Monday in March. So I won't see you before then. I'll see you then. And I wish you all the best. The very best. Everybody. Everybody who is hiding is now showing up. So thanks, everybody. It's great to see you all old friends, new friends. It's time for tuna melts twice in one month. This is so exciting. I only get tuna melts. When I successfully teach it nightclub. It's the agreement of our house. I can't wait. So goodbye