Spent a lot of my life talking to people about meditation and working with people who are making the decision that they want to begin meditation practice, and usually the people that I work with are people who are in the middle or after of their life. So I don't really work with 20 year olds. I don't even work with I work with some 30 year olds. But those people don't want to meditate. They don't want to do this. Meditation is for you when you've grown up, when you've seen what, what this world does to you, and you know, if it's really fortunate, if you can come to this point in your life and still feel good about life, I mean, it is good to be alive, and if you have what you need, then you have a good life. But then you start looking down the road and you see that man life, life doesn't go on forever. And then you kind of wonder, what really should we be doing with our time? And you go through your own discovery process of, well, what other people say? And it's just so interesting how I think most of us here have been exposed to the message that you should do things in your life and create memories. I grew up in a household where we do everything so that we can have good memories for when we're older, and then I watched people fall to the ravages of Alzheimer's and just general, just getting older and not really being able to remember, my wonderful father, who is alive and well, was the principal preacher of the Kodak moment, and told me that everything we did, we weren't doing for right now. We were doing so that we would have memories. And whenever I get together with him, now, this is the time of his life. He's 82 where he wants those memories available, but he'll ask me things like, Do you remember where the hell we were back in blah, blah, blah, what was I doing? And it just turns out that he doesn't have access to his memories. Just doesn't they're not there to support him. They're not contributing meaning to this final stage of his journey. And meditation teachings and Dharma teachings in general, are in the their reason to be is to help us find the meaning that is available to us not to make our lives better exactly, although it will make our lives better, but they help us find meaning that is available to us because We are alive and we find ourselves in a situation which it takes work on our part to even form a frame of reference around because we don't have a like a state sponsored vast outlook of existence. We have stories that we've all heard about life and death and the afterlife and being good or being bad or this kind of thing, and probably most people who are on nightclub this wasn't enough that those stories didn't really, didn't really answer the question. And So meditation is a
it's I was describing this earlier today. You know, the purpose of meditation isn't to calm down. The purpose of meditation isn't to feel good. It isn't even to relax. I guess that's like calming down. It it can encourage those things, and all of those things are good to have. But meditation is a process whereby we gain the opportunity for insight, direct insight, into what we are, which is to say that without that insight, we can have ideas about what we are, and we can have beliefs about what we are. Are, we cannot have the direct experience of what we are, which is known to meditation traditions as insight or vipashyana.
So when someone wants to engage in meditation and they're say, in the middle of their lives or toward the end of their lives, it's probably the meaning that's calling to them. They feel a longing. They want to they just they want to understand, and they're willing to do what is necessary to understand, and that's a bargain that meditation will take you up on, Oh, you want to understand and directly understand what you are, and you're willing to do what it takes for that to happen. Perfect. And so meditation extends to us and says, Hey, let's work together, you and me. And so we have to understand that there are a variety of effective meditation traditions available to us, and every one of them will take the rest of our lives. And they're not all the same. Even though they all come from the same basic place, we have diverse methods, and we, we kind of have to choose, because you can't mix methods very skillfully. I mean, someone who really knows what they're doing could, but they never do. So we want to choose carefully, and it's perfectly okay to, you know, try something out for a little while and decide, well, I don't know, maybe I'll try this, this other thing that sounds appealing. And so maybe we try that, and then maybe there's one more time, maybe three times we switch. And that's that's okay, but at some point we have to land somewhere because of what meditation is. Meditation is the art of becoming familiar with something once we've been introduced to it. And becoming familiar with something is kind of like a hen sitting on an egg, or it's like taking dough, shaping it into a loaf, and then popping it in the oven and letting it stay there while it turns into bread. Meditation isn't about touching in it's not about that. It's about becoming familiar, staying with something, once you've been introduced to it. So it's the being introduced to it, part that takes up the first part of our journey. And this is where it's important to understand that these methods that are available that are good, they approach that differently. And some of them, in fact, the ones that have become most popular and most available to us, are the ones that take the longest time, and those are the mindfulness traditions. And I don't mean the mindfulness movement of just emptying your mind and calming down and being in the present moment, not that that's a Western thing. I'm talking about the Theravadin tradition. So Southeast Asian practice, or Thai practice, Burmese practice, that kind of thing. They are based around monastic life, and they make the assumption they have to that uh, they kind of make the assumption that you're 19 years old and that this is what you're going to do, and that you're going to live your life according to a set of principles which will keep you out of trouble and which will help you Simplify your everyday doings while you go through a process of refining your faculties so that you can find yourself in direct experience of what's known as impermanence, impermanence, the momentariness of experience. That's fantastic. I mean that that is remarkable. What happens when someone is introduced to the experience of impermanence and then becomes familiar with it through meditation practice that is a human life well spent, that takes a long time, really does? It. It seems to be what everyone defaults to about meditation. That's what we all think meditation is kind of but if you just go to other places in the world of meditation, you find cultures that have actually been meditating longer than they have in Thailand or Burma, older traditions, which don't do any of that, and they'll say the same thing. That's going to take forever, because, and this is the crux, we have these two aspects of ourselves, one of them we can hear about and long to discover, called awareness. It's not the mind. It doesn't think. It's not the part of us that thinks. It's not the part of us that gets pulled in. It's the part of us that is either recognized or not recognized. Awareness is the domain of transformation. It's where the real insights happen. It's the goal of meditation, really. It's certainly if you look at the at the full tradition, you see that it's the end point of most of the paths that we've just talked about. It's the end point. But there are other traditions where it's not at all the end point. It's the starting point. Introduction to awareness is considered the fastest, most powerful style of meditative practice. You are introduced to awareness, and then you spend the rest of the life that you have becoming familiar with awareness. It would be like taking a baby bird and one maybe you have two baby birds, and one of them is enrolled in a gym, a little bird gym, where they flap their wings and they get strong. They learn how to grab with their claws. They have straps put on them, and then they sort of jump up and come down. And after three or four years, they're taken out to the field, and one after another, they're kind of given more opportunities to go into space and in the sky, and they learn to fly that way, whereas the other the other birds are just kicked out of the nest, and either you fall or you fly. That's what the awareness traditions are like. That's what the pure awareness traditions are like. And those are starting to have more and more representation in our world, which is a good thing for us, because most of us are probably in a situation where we're more inclined to do what it takes to fly right from the beginning than we are to learn all the basics and to go through all of the ethical and moral training and all of The stuff that the mindfulness traditions have to do. But for the most part, people don't know this. They don't meditation isn't one thing. So there's no regulating body. There's no CEO of meditation. I talk to a lot of people that think like the Dalai Lama is the head of it all, which is this funny? Like the Dalai Lama is the Pope or something, but even the Pope, I mean, the Pope has nothing to do with Evangelicals, right? I don't think, and the Dalai Lama doesn't have anything to do with Zen, doesn't have anything to do with Theravada or the non dual movement of India. Dalai Lama is just, you know, a very active, socially engaged Buddhist leader. Anyway, you didn't, you didn't think that the Dalai Lama was the the dean of meditation university. But a lot of people seem to the point is that when you begin meditation, nobody tells you this stuff, and you kind of need to know, because you're going to be putting your life into a practice, and you this is important stuff to know. Not all practices are the ones that you're looking for. Some of them are slow, and they're given to you because of the tradition that's giving them assumes that you have a multi lifetime outlook. Anyway, they know that you're probably not going to attain anything in this life. Life, but everyone in their culture is they're doing it for the next life. It's important to know that, wouldn't you think,
whereas there are traditions that are assuming that you want to wake up right now. So,
you know, I've, I have a lot of appreciation for all these traditions, even the slow ones are just amazing. They're they really produce powerful practitioners. But I always gravitated toward the awareness practices, and I'm sure that that's what most of you hear about here on in nightclub.
So we have two main traditions. You've heard of Mahamudra, it's probably the most useful, and Dzogchen, which is the most direct. And then we have the Japanese and Chinese styles that are similar, chan and Zen, and these all have to do with something that's very different from what the other traditions teach. So that's what I wanted to talk about tonight. So as we just said, meditation, I it has two main things that happen at the beginning. Meditation is powerful based on the object that we're meditating on. Another way to talk about this is whether or not it engages view. So view is kind of the blueprint of the journey. I'm going to put that aside for a second. The object of meditation, any meditation that anyone, anywhere is doing, is going to involve an object. So for most people, the object is the breath that is well, most people who are meditating right now are meditating on the breath in the Mahamudra and Dzogchen and probably Zen traditions, they don't they may meditate on the breath in a very different way. They probably don't meditate on the breath. They probably meditate not on an object, but they meditate in a way where they don't let their mind fragment into looking for an object, and that's different. That is a type of meditation that is related to starting with awareness first. So introduction and familiarity are the foundation of meditation practice. When you sit down to meditate, you find your object of meditation, you reintroduce yourself. So that could be the breath. You could sit down and go, Alright, I'm going to tune into my breath and Okay, there it is, right. There it is. That's introduction. And then you think, now I'm just going to be with it for these 30 minutes. I'm going to be with the breath. That's familiarity. You're familiarizing yourself with your object of meditation. But there is one problem with that. The breath is meaningless. It's not going to do anything for you. The breath is just like, like a barbell at a gym. It's gonna help you get stronger, but it's probably not the thing that you're trying to you didn't go to the gym because you wanted to learn how to lift barbells. You wanted to get stronger so you could do whatever it is that you wanted to do in your life. So you have to convert your meditation on the breath into something else, and it's up to your meditation teachers to help you determine when that is and how it will be done. So if you're meditating in one of those situations, you have to maintain communication with the teacher of those traditions, because you don't have the whole thing. The whole thing is not meditating on the breath. That's not going to do anything for you. The breath doesn't have any power. It's just convenient. By meditating on the breath. The idea is that your mind will stabilize enough there will be enough clarity that your natural faculty of insight or intelligence, prajna, will come forward, and you can begin to see something about the breath. Impermanence, that's usually the first thing you see impermanence then leads to non self. And when you've seen impermanence and non self, and you hold to it, it cuts through confusion. And at one point, at one point on that journey, there will be an opening, and you will be changed, and that the goal has happened. It's not the final goal, but it's good enough, if that's the only thing that happens in your entire lifetime. Boy, that's still great that, by the way, is called Soto patana, or stream entry. It's the first stage of insight, according to those traditions. So the object there is that you learn to find place and hold. That's what meditation is. You find your object, okay, there it is. You place all your attention on it, and then you hold to it. And over months and years, you begin to develop a very, I was going to say virtuous, because that's typically the way they'll talk about it. But you develop a mind that is able to unify on something of your choosing. And when the time comes, your teacher will sort of nudge you in one way or another to get you to look at life from that position of strength. That's the process of those traditions, the process of the awareness traditions is different. And by the way, I'm just going to talk about this, and then we'll go through these two we'll practice them. But you can't practice meditation if you don't know what you're doing. It's another thing that our our world has been kind of misled on. People think that they don't have to know what they're doing to meditate because they think that meditation is intuitive or natural. It is exactly not that. It is not natural. Natural would be to live in your wandering mind for the rest of your life and then die. That's natural. That's what happens to most people. Meditation is a something you can opt into. It's not unnatural, but it isn't the default, and it isn't something that people generally the traditional say ever but we can be more maybe liberal and say generally, people do not discover this on their own. They have to learn it. Meditation is learned. So the awareness traditions are different. They have many strategies of helping introduce you to your meditation object. But your meditation object is your basic state of being, and that's like, rather than a hen going to hen classes, learning how to sit on wooden eggs and then glass eggs and then clay eggs, so that someday she can sit on an actual egg. This is just chicken has an egg. Chicken sits on egg. Very natural process, egg hatches because mother is there. Well, the awareness traditions are much more like that. They're like, Why meditate on the breath? The breath isn't going to enlighten you or wake you up. You don't want to hold on to the breath at the moment of death, it's going to go away. You're going to panic. So instead, why don't you get used to what you are? And by learning to get used to what you are, you will refine that placement until you come to the part of yourself that doesn't change, that doesn't go through the Bardo. And you know that that's usually called Buddha nature, clarity. Sawa, the eighth consciousness, Ali avijnana, which he get very fancy and called the nature of the mind. But the nature of the mind is usually it's a milestone of insight, rather than just we start with it. We might start with nature of the mind instructions, and we'll do something kind of like that soon. But the discovery of the nature of the mind means that we see the emptiness at the core of what we are, and that emptiness liberates us from confusion. Emptiness is a good thing. Here it's the happiest moment of our life. Will be seeing emptiness, not the scariest moment of our life, the happiest moment. So in these traditions, they don't talk as much about placing and holding the. They talk about non wandering. Simply don't wander away from what you are. And so people hear that, and I'm definitely one of those people that I'm getting ready to describe. People hear instructions like that, and it's just like we feel like, Oh, come on. Just just be, come on. I've been doing that my whole life, and nothing's happened. That's not true.
All of our time is spent in wandering mind, because learning, non wandering, will be a challenge, the likes of which we've never considered possible. That's not to say it will be the hardest thing we've ever done. I'm not saying that it's something that doesn't occur outside of traditions that understand what that means, and we didn't grow up any place where that exists, so it's no surprise, and it's not our fault that we don't really know what that means. You talk about non wandering or just being. You've you've all heard be as you are, just be, and it sounds, oh, it's just so simple. It's so Instagramable. But then there's the real meaning of that, and that basically is something that you begin to taste in retreat, in intensive practice, not just in five minutes here or there. We're not just taking a break when, when we try to just be or non wander. This is something where we're going against every habit we've ever had. But the key is is it is the fastest way in. It is the fastest way to insight, because you're taking a stand in the right place with the right attitude, and you don't have anywhere else you're ever going to try to go, you're just discovering layers and layers of more things you're not going to wander into. And bit by bit, the layers peel off. One of the ways of talking about this process is the part of you that thinks it's having this experience today, in a month, is going to be something that a new part of you is seeing. You're going deeper and deeper, or, as they say, the subject of one phase becomes the object of the next phase. It's almost like you're exfoliating ego, things that you think you are, whoa, that wasn't me. Thought that was me. It's not me. And then the thing that's thinking that, whoa, that's not me either. Wow. All that comes about through non wandering. Non wandering is the main thing. When I was in my 20s, I went to see one of the really great meditation teachers that y'all can see. He's man. He is alive and kicking. He's not much older than me, really. Songs are kense Rinpoche. Song zar Ken se Rinpoche is probably the one of the most well connected meditators in the world today. The guy is everywhere. He's a filmmaker, an author, I mean. And he is really well trained, deeply trained. My wife and I were at the Venice Biennale a few years back. You know, this really awesome festival of the arts in Venice, Italy, not California. And you know, we're walking through all the pavilions with all the amazing sculptures and just all the paintings, and just our mind being blown left and right by everything that everyone's doing. And then we come around a corner, and there's an installment by zongzarkense Rinpoche. It's like the guy is everywhere, so he's easy to find, but he came. It was in Boulder. I think I asked him this question, or somebody asked him, I think I did, and just asked him, like meditation advice. I'd heard about all these things that I should be doing, and I was trying to do them, but I didn't really have them organized. Didn't really understand what should come first, or when I should do this, or when I should shift from this practice into that? I'm asking him, and he just said, no, no, no. He said the best, the best meditation, is do nothing. Do nothing at all.
And he said
that he did this. He said, everything comes up, but you do nothing at all, and then ego comes up, and then it's all over. And I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could tell that I was getting Meditations. Instruction from someone who really knew what he was talking about. I knew who his teachers were, so I knew that he was like He came from the best, but he was so certain and gentle and happy in telling me this, and he had this thing he was doing, and I never forgot it. I always kind of wondered, I don't know. I mean, I feel like I should do something make something of myself as a meditator. And, you know, years went by and I ended up studying with some of you know, his people from his generation who are just like him, like Sonia Rinpoche, who's the person I study with the most. They gave me the same instruction. And Sonia Rinpoche told me, when I first started studying with them, I had already been practicing, like, 20 years. I've been doing all of this other type of practice. And I told him that, you know you're here's what I've done, here's who I am, and this is and he said, Stop all that. Just stop it. He said, Just do this. Just do this for a year. Don't do anything else. Take care of yourself, but just do this. And then in a year, come and talk to me and we'll see. And I wasn't one to usually follow people's advice like that. I always needed to mix in a little bit of my own. I needed to put my own brand on it. But I just, I just thought, I'm not gonna mess this up. This guy is so real. So I did it. It didn't even take a year. It took about six months. And I realized, oh my God, that's and this is what that other guy had been saying 20 years ago, or however long ago it was. And it gave this perspective of what meditation is and what the different styles of meditation that we're all learning are. And you can go through your life and hear many different types of meditation and not quite get that these are different, and they're each going to take all the time you have left. So you want to choose, and it isn't so important that you choose right, because these are all good, but you want to know what you're doing and either you just feel so right about the people who are teaching it to you, that's a good enough reason to choose one of them. But if you don't, if you're sort of like, well, I like them all, or I don't like them all, you have to have a sense of I know why I'm doing this. So non wandering is something that we all hear about, but it really is a disciplined approach to practice, and it is a way of boycotting every error that the mind can make and maintaining confidence that in at least this one thing, the mind can never be right. The mind does not know how to meditate in a way that frees it of its own confusion. The mind doesn't hold that. It's beyond the mind. Awareness, the domain beyond the mind. Sam lay Dipa, that's where transformation takes place. So our instructions, they might start in the mind, but they go out of the mind. They all do this. And so we don't want to be listening to the mind. We want to be either listening to the teachings that guide us through the mind, or that there would be like a like a beacon in the fog, you know, like one of those
Foghorn that's not in the water, that's on the land. We hear it when we're in the water that we follow it, because it's not in the water. It's telling us, actually a fog horn isn't that well, I'm not a mariner. Let me. Let me not go there. Some of these things tell us where the rocks are or whatever. But let's just pretend that they're saying, hey, come this way.
So all the instructions lead us out of the mind, but some instructions begin us out of the mind, and then show us how we keep wandering back into the mind and we're like, wow, I'm back in the mind again. How did that happen? So we apply the instructions again of not wandering into the mind, and we try to non wander. And then we find ourselves back in the mind again, and it we repeat and repeat and repeat. And at some point, not too far down the road, we'll have a glimpse of what non wander. Wondering means and non wandering means we do not respond to the mind, and that means that we have identified an aspect of ourselves that is not in the mind, and the only thing that we can say about it is that it is immune from the pull of the mind. It doesn't have anything we can hold do. We couldn't draw a picture of it. It doesn't have any other qualities, but it's stable and it's free, and we experienced it. We didn't experience it as something else. We experienced it somehow, as us, and that's why the awareness practices are so important. They're kind of, I mean, like the the word chin, that's sort of like the most profound of these practices. It means, it itself means the ultimate great perfection. It has a lot of confidence in what it is, obviously, but it's, it's a sentence. All these practices are basically telling you that you you have this fundamental freedom. You don't have to go looking for it. You just have to trust that you can settle in and by not wandering into the mind, you'll come to understand, Oh, my God, it's this. It's hard to illustrate. So okay, let's do a little bit of this practice. And if you have any questions that you're going to want to ask, please feel free to do that. You can either put them in the chat or, you know, raise your hand or whatever. I but let's start out by what's called placement meditation. We have placement meditation, and then we have non wandering meditation. So placement could be your breath. It could be some object that you put in your visual field could be the feeling of your body. But essentially, what we're going to do is we're going to tune into it some however we feel our breath or we look at the object, and when we find it, that's the beginning point, and then we engage it, we find the object, and then we place our attention on that object, and we don't let it go. That's the key. So let's just do that with anything that you are familiar with, usually it's the breath. So we'll just do that for a few minutes and notice or pay attention to the process of finding the object, placing attention on it, and trying to hold and then if you're distracted, you quickly repeat those things. You Oh, good, the object, okay, there it is. I'm on it now I'm gonna hold you're always doing those three things. So here I'll hit my water glass as a Gong. You
at any time, you can ask yourself, Am I placed on my object? And if you are, that won't distract you further, and if you're not, you needed to ask that. And now you come back. You
So is your mind wandering? Have you left your object?
If you haven't, then you probably feel good like, Nope, I'm still on my object. You're not even disturbed by someone asking you that your content placement brings contentment you
we are using the faculty of mindfulness in this practice when mindfulness is fully developed, it is able to place itself on an object and be completely uninterrupted for as long as it wants, at least for 30 minutes or an hour with no wandering at all. That's not that big a deal, actually. It doesn't take that long, if you're dedicated.
That's like getting your driver's permit On your 15 and a half you
mom. This is the sort of practice that is sometimes done with the eyes closed, sometimes done with the eyes open. Traditions vary best advice is, do what the tradition you learned from told you just trust them. I learned this with my eyes open. So that's what I do. I
The culmination of this practice of mindfulness is that you are able to bring your attention fully into your physical being, and you're able to detect the operations of your mind that are trying to pull you into another direction, and you are. Able to resist that pull, and that causes you to become even stronger. And as you develop this strength, you also develop a depth that's very relaxing, and that allows you to settle in even more for longer periods. Ultimately, all aspects of your body and mind will unify in an unfragmented way, an insight will dawn and
insight won't dawn or probably won't Dawn, If your experience is still partial or disrupted by distraction. You have to do this all the way.
That's why people go on 10 day retreats and 30 day retreats, or they go stay in a monastery for a little while, or a convent, monastic situation can be very helpful.
Okay, let's let's try. Let's look behind door two, the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama learned a variation of what we just did that was his meditation training, and he was dedicated to it, and seems to have been like the Prodigy of The day. He mastered it, but his teachings supported various interpretations of meditation, and he seems to have made very clear pathways for more than one way to practice, and this is one way that's very clear, very clear in the original teachings from, you know, 500 years before the Common Era. We don't know that they come from him. We have no footage, but these are the teachings attributed to him. But about 800 years after his death, so around the second or third century, a new movement began in India that really swept the world and changed everything forever and seems to definitely have produced the most number of enlightened people, and that is meditating on our fundamental being, primarily through awareness. This is called Mahayana and Zen. Mahamudra and Dzogchen are all within this. But here, this is done with our eyes open always. I mean, what I mean is every tradition says that you can try it however you want. But here we just start out and we relax. Just be relaxed. Don't do anything special. Now the object here is, do not pervert your experience. Do not allow your experience to fragment into this and that remain settled in an unfragmented field of being and don't wander, just abide you.
Those of you who have done a retreat with me, you know this. I called this here and now practice. I.
Feel, see, allow your thoughts to come and go, but don't do anything simplicity. Don't wander away from the simplicity of being just here and just now and
Thinking is Having wandered, Having wandered into thought. Thought is no problem. Just don't think it. A car pulls up in front of you and the door opens and you just don't get in. That's all you
often the teachers who teach us this are so adept at it and have been doing it for so long that they talk about it as if it's easiest thing in the world to do, and once you know how to do it, it is the easiest thing in the world to do. It's also the most meaningful. But It does take some adjustment and
this practice, you could say, is the most direct this can be done all the way to the end. It does open, and there are big milestones along the way which shift it, but the fundamental instruction doesn't change. You don't have to learn something new. You just have discovered something more, and you continue to until you've discovered the part of you that is what you are looking for, the part of you that doesn't change, the part of you that doesn't die. And then your job is To make that home and
this is also the practice that many of the great masters that we know about spend doing the last years of their life. They just sit, maybe by an open window and gaze, and they don't get caught, and they don't go any place inside. They're fully there, and this is what allows them to die peacefully and.
Okay,
well, I don't know what types of practice you all do. I know what types of practice are out there, and I know that people often have multiple streams of information operating within them. They find their way. And it's nice to know all the different things that are there, but you can't put motorcycle parts in an automobile. Probably you have to know what you're in, what you're doing, and you have to know where you're going. You can't take a motorcycle to the moon. So if you want to get to the moon, a motorcycle isn't that's not the vehicle for you. You need a spaceship.
So um.
And those of you who know the finding ground approach, you know that this is the second part. Is what we spend most of our time doing, but we always spend some time doing the first part too. It's important to learn a little bit about mindfulness, a little bit. I've had to argue with some of my teachers even about how much mindfulness, because I tend to think that I need more of that than they think I need. And so I often plead my case that I need to do more of that. And I think they didn't grow up in a world where there was so much distraction, and they didn't arrive at midlife with a fragmented, weak, wandering mind, so they don't get it, they don't understand they're basically talking to people who've lived through a very different type of war. Mindfulness is really helpful, and the breath is a very good object of meditation. But once you once you discover, just get a taste of awareness in the way of abiding in awareness. A lot of lights turn on, a lot of lights come on,
and that becomes a very clear pathway, and it's always available, even while you're talking to someone, even while you're trying to fall asleep, you're not trying to focus on something like the breath and stay present. Is nothing like that. You're letting things flow, and you're not getting caught, but you still picking up the details, and you have a lot more space so you you know what to respond to, because somebody needs something, someone doesn't say Hey, so what's your name, and you just blank out because you're not caught in the mind. That doesn't happen when someone asks you for your social security number. It's not that you can't remember it because you're just being it's easy to remember because you're not burdened with trying to hold 18 different things in your mind all the time. So your recall is unencumbered
force. Our recall deteriorates. But it's okay. Hey, Lori,
hi, Jeffrey, thanks for tonight's instruction. I have a question that maybe can help me with. So insight implies looking, which is a type of doing, yet insight only comes about through non doing and non middle non manipulations. So how does that work? Exactly?
Well, the word insight.
So, yeah, there could be an active type of insight, which involves looking, but insight is really just an attempt, I think, I think. The way, most people who use the term, who use it, you know, with a who means something, you know, because insight comes from the word Vipassana. So Vipassana means to clearly see, it just the word Vipassana, which is usually what insight is translated. It's translated as insight itself means to clearly see, and it even has an aspect of emphasis, like I really saw. I really saw Vipassana has that sense, and it doesn't mean I really looked and then I saw. It just means I really see. So Vipassana, then has been used as a word to describe the type of practice one does to stimulate that experience. So looking is something that we do so that we can see which is something that just happens. And so when someone talks about insight meditation, you have to know what they're what they're referring to, because they could be referring to like the brand name insight meditation. Like, oh, I went to the Insight Meditation Society and I practiced insight meditation. Okay, that that's going to mean what it means. But then other people could say, Yeah, I practice calm, abiding and insight meditation, and they don't have any connection to the you know. Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, World of the Insight meditations. It's nothing to do with that. So insight can be ripened by non wandering. So that, in that style of practice, Insight is sort of the natural ripening process of non wandering. By non wandering, you develop sort of space and clarity, and then you see, just like a piece of ripe fruit falling finally, and that insight isn't something that you do now, those traditions also have what are called investigations, so you can, like, look for the mind is the Mind inside? Is awareness inside? Or is awareness outside? Is awareness something that arises and then passes, and so you're doing these types of investigations, and that isn't what that is trying to do, is it's trying to ripen natural insight more quickly. It's trying to stimulate that Aha of insight. But other traditions say you don't need to do that. You just need to abide and non wander, and it will happen all on its own. And some of the traditions that say that you know that you don't have to do anything else have produced, really, the most remarkable meditators of the, you know, the recent generations. So I am always been inclined to, like, look again into that, because I always want to do whatever I can do to make it happen more quickly. And so I've done all the investigations, and I've done the visualization practices and all that kind of thing. And those are great. They certainly they work as intended over many, many years. But the general recommendation in the higher teachings is you don't have to do that once you recognize awareness. And I'm not even talking about recognizing the nature, I don't mean, of awareness. I'm not talking about recognizing emptiness, but recognizing awareness and understanding how to abide in awareness and not get caught in the mind. Just by doing that, that becomes your shamatha practice, and it naturally ripens into clearly, seeing what the mind is, what the body is, what the realm of the body and mind is, and so that's a very that's a different type of Practice stemming from the same original source, that's the Mahayana practice, as opposed to the Theravada practice. And again, they're all powerful, but they do operate differently, and they don't operate they did not operate differently. Knowing that they operated differently for most of their history, they didn't you know, you have someone in a valley in Tibet or Nepal, and then you have someone in Thailand or Japan. They don't have any communication. They don't know what one another are doing. They're evolving their practice in a way that produces the results that they're looking for. And so in the 20th century, when all these streams come together and they meet, they compare notes, and people realize, oh, wow, you're you're following the whole, that whole mindfulness thing from the early from the early Texas, we follow the whole awareness thing from the later texts. And, you know, in the best situation, everybody gets along and they recognize themselves as brothers and sisters, but it does also sometimes lead to sectarianism. We're better. No, we're better, but yeah, Insight is both of those things. It can mean looking so that you can see, or it could just mean the natural seeing you have. Insight
is that, well, I'm spending more time in just being practice, where I'm I'm not manipulating anything. I'm not doing anything. I'm just relaxing at the moment of thought, I heard it described as useless gazing,
useless gazing, useless gazing.
But then I then, of course, I'm thinking, Well, okay, I'm just, I'm just being and how am I going to find anything if I'm not even looking for anything, and I'm not even sure what is I'm looking for anyway,
yeah, so I
just have to trust in the process? Well,
I think so, but I'd be very surprised if by so you're referring to, you know, instructions like relax at the moment of thought. That's a big one. I mean, that's a very that's for everybody else. That's one of the key instructions that we teach in finding ground relax at the moment of thought is a way of settling so that you're not pulled in to thinking, but also showing you what thought is by showing you that relaxing does something to thought, and relaxing begins to I don't want to say do something to awareness, but the more you relax at the things that used to pull you and confuse you, you're Relaxing into the part of you that is no longer pulled is no longer pullable or confusable. I mean, it doesn't happen like overnight, but as you start to detect, oh, I'm thinking, I'll just relax at the moment of thought, there is some insight that has happened. Otherwise you would argue with that instruction, like, relax at the moment of thought. What the hell is that gonna do? For me, that's impossible. I couldn't do this stupid, stupid so you bit by bit, you're starting to see but it's also, you know, when you relax at the moment of thought, you see what is happening. Because of that, because you're relaxed, you're not moving, you relax, and you're staying, and you're beginning to see the the breadcrumbs of impermanence and emptiness. And it's like a it's like a small little dose, like a micro dose, of insight every time that happens and it accumulates, the way that it accumulates is you begin to feel confidence. The Tibetan word is ne you feel definite, like I know what to do. So you're not you know, you're not looking for something, but you are developing in a certain way. And I would be surprised if you don't notice that happening. I mean, you're, you're so clear in your questions that unless you have someone who writes your questions for you and then submits them, that I would be, I would be, I would imagine that you do see this, you know, becoming less hassled by thoughts, realizing thoughts that, yeah, they can. It's like spinach gets in your teeth. But it doesn't mean that you stop eating spinach. Maybe that's not the best image. So. The one that came to me. But thoughts are welcome, but you're not going to think them. And when you do think them, you're not going to fight them, you're just going to let them go. And knowing that you can do that, you start to feel this buoyancy that's called Joy, meditative joy, gawa, and that meditative joy just builds your enthusiasm, and the more enthusiastic you are about your practice, I mean, in a chill way, of course, but the more enthusiastic you are, the more rapidly this whole process so you're on board with your own ripening. And you know, don't you see
that? I can see that it's my mind questioning the whole process. I can see that
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The mind wants to be doing more. It doesn't want to just do nothing,
yeah. Well, mine's gotten its way for a long time. Now there's an adult in the room, awareness and the mind, just as long as the mind doesn't feel that awareness, because the mind is going to react to what you're doing, and as long as you know, we go through this all the time and finding ground, like usually on the last day, how to how to help the mind understand that this isn't gonna hurt it. It has nothing to be afraid of. It's okay for it to be a little afraid, but there's no reason for it to to be afraid. You know that it's win, win. I remember Sonia Rinpoche once saying, you know, eventually your confusion about self is just going to drop, and self is just going to be down on the floor. And you know, like a really advanced meditator like his dad or someone like that, hasn't picked up self in 40 years has been completely free, completely free from the IE enlightened and he said, but the thing is, all you people, meaning all of us, you all think that you're going to lose something by that, don't you understand that it's going to be right there. You can pick that self up anytime you want it. Don't worry about it. If you really want to have a self, you'll always have it down there. And then his dad, Talco virgin, said, but the truth is, once you see what that is, you're never going to pick it up again. It's like somebody cleared their throat and spat in the dust. You don't run over and pick that up and go mine. And so insight shows you better options, and it's just important that it's important that we take care of ourselves and don't think that something dramatic is going to happen that we're afraid of, because that just stirs everything up. And there's a lot of that going on in the meditation world. People think they're going to have some meditation experience where everything changes. Yes, everything changes subtly, like waking up from a dream, and you can still make soup and you can still play with your dog, and no one's going to know. It's not like you're going to be glowing or have a great big E for enlightenment on your forehead. Although a lot of people, I think on YouTube, tend to put those ease there anyway, the mind's always gonna question, especially your mind, because that's, that's, sounds like, that's the mind you got. Just make it, just invite it along, tell it you don't love this.
Thanks. I'm looking forward to the retreat this weekend.
Yeah, me too. Me too. I'm glad you registered. Thank
you.
All right, I see a question. Some have said that there is no immortal essence or souls of people in Buddhism. If this is true, how is the Buddha able to remember all of his past lives? Where were all those karmic memories stored, if not attached to the soul? Yes, Buddhism, or the teachings of the Buddha, what the Buddha and all of the people that came after that have a similar type of attainment there? There is no notion of a soul in in that world. It's just, it's an unusual concept to them, like a what, you know, it sounds like an imaginary friend or something like that to them. So their entire system operates very elegantly without the need of that that wouldn't serve a purpose. So the question is, no immortal essence. Well, now that I'm not so sure, I mean, depends. On how you look at the term essence, there is a dimension of you that is unchanging, which means it didn't have a beginning and it won't have an end. If we apply the term immortal to that, we're applying that from the part of us that sees a beginning and sees an end to everything. So it's baffled how it it doesn't mean lasts a long time, it means unchanging. And this isn't something that our minds can grasp. Awareness can, but our minds can't, and most of us are always in our minds. That's all we've ever been. So I where were all those karmic memories stored? The general way of talking about that is, it's called the eighth consciousness, the eighth and this is, you know, I'm not going to be able to talk much about this tonight. It's a pretty big philosophical topic, and it's also, once you get into the really deep meditation that transform you, they'll they'll tell you that's for when you're thinking about things, not for when you're meditating, when you're meditating. None of that stuff even matters, because you're right there in the real part of it. But the theory is that there is a storehouse of karmic imprints that is always bubbling and teeming, and everything we do in our life is stimulating that garden and bringing forward things. So you know, if we conduct ourselves peacefully, then we are kind of resonating with all the seeds that were planted in peaceful moments in past lives, and we're also making the environment of our present life more inviting to seeds from peaceful karmic actions to come forward from past lives. And so that's why we would conduct ourselves carefully. It's kind of like if you if you want to have a dinner party, and you just invite anyone that you meet, you're going to get a lot of people that you probably don't want at your dinner party. But if you are selective, and you invite people who you think will get along with one another, and make for a good dinner party, then you're going to have a better dinner party, and your life is like that kind of situation. I don't know how the Buddha was able to remember. I don't think remembering is what he would say. I think it's more seeing, seeing the karmic seeds come up. But you know, this is way beyond the scope of anything I experience. I don't see into past lives, and although those may have some importance when you really are putting together a picture of all of this, I don't think they are important in our individual experiences when we're meditators, because those would just be thoughts. They would just be memories. And their status is not a very strong status to a mind that is seeing clearly. You know, karma doesn't apply to awakened mind. It only applies to confused mind. So when you're confused, you have to deal with karma. You have to wonder about it, and you have to take care of your actions in a way that is looking toward the future when those things come back to you, when when you are in your awakened nature, it's not that karma doesn't you know, as soon as you're not in your awakened nature, you have to deal with Karma all over again. So you can have 20 minutes in the morning where you're meditating, resting in your awakened nature, and don't worry about karma. You are communing with that aspect of you that is free from karma. But when the session ends and you look at your phone, boom, you're back in that karmic world and all that does kind of, you know that's this isn't something that modern people, or maybe I should say Western people, this isn't really a part of our worldview. And I don't know how important it is for us to be trying to make it part of our worldview. I think it's far more valuable to discover for ourselves, our awakened nature, and to abide with it as much as we can, because discovering our awakened nature is no big deal. It's not going to do anything. It's not going to move the needle even a bit. But discovering it and abiding with it, that's different. That's called the path. So having a. A glimpse of your true nature. Good for you, that and 70 cents will buy you a cup of coffee. It's better than not having had a glimpse of your awakened nature. But it certainly isn't anything you know. Don't go and get a tattoo that says, I saw my awakened nature. A lot of people see their awakened nature. It's what you do with it, and what you do with it is you hold to it, you don't wander from it. And that's the practice of Samadhi, or the practice of meditation. So that's why people pile on the hours and go and retreat, and they meditate a lot. They're not looking for their awakened nature. They already discovered that years ago. I mean, you go to a good teacher, and I'll help you see that relatively quickly. Then the work begins. Boy, that's not what you asked anyway. Hey, John,
all right. Got myself unmuted, and they probably can't see me either. It's kind of dark. I can see okay, so, yeah, I've sort of been lucky enough to see some of the impermanence in meditation, and so I don't, you know, I don't want to take credit for that. I I worry about karma too, so it tells you how undeveloped I am, but
I worry about it.
Yeah, right. And so I have that knowledge too, and I kind of agree with you, the Buddha probably was not able to explain what karma was to anybody, and anybody that's enlightened isn't going to bother telling you so. But here's the thing you mentioned it before, um, I seem to get stuck with, you know, like I said, impermanence, good deal. I i love it when I see it, believe it or not, and emptiness, not so much, but I know it's kind of driving, the whole it's the engine. But
deep, deeper expression of impermanence.
Oh, is it okay, whatever, but I have some basic knowledge of it or feeling for it. But the thing that stops me cold all the time is self, and they talk a lot about well put.
Well put, okay,
and that the first one either for sure, but, yeah, I just wonder if there's an instruction, or anybody spends a lot of time developing non self in meditation, as opposed to, you know, learning about it or intellectualizing it, or, you know, yeah, that's
man. That's what that's what impermanence does. When you stabilize within the stream of impermanence, at some point, it begins to encroach on the part of you that is confused about identity, and that begins to come under the sway of impermanence, and you will have an insight, and you'll realize that that feeling of self was just a pattern of clinging. Self doesn't go away. There never was self. Self is a pattern of being confused about awareness. Okay, so, yeah, and you know, I mean, you've done enough finding ground meditation that that's it, and that is, there is nothing more direct that I have ever learned than that impermanence and non self are, you know impermanence, so you would have the like the hierarchy of insight, or the natural progression of insight, is first you begin to see and experience impermanence as a momentary, direct experience, different than thinking about it, and it begins to clean you out. It begins to clarify you. It's almost like it's flossing. You like Mental Floss, and impermanence then come begins to develop into non self, which is just a deeper expression of impermanence. And those two together begin to deepen and deepen until you begin to see emptiness, and emptiness begins to deepen and deepen, and you begin to experience what's called luminosity. T and the union of those, and that's just a that's one way of looking at the sequence of insights, and that's a very, you know, sort of Tibetan Kagyu way of talking about it. But you don't need to go after them individually. You know, you just, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, these are all milestones of and you start with impermanence. That's the most important, most important one, because that's the Yeah. That's like lighting the wick.
Again, very self conscious about nine self the it probably sounds a little funny, but no. Sounds
pretty normal. Okay,
we
all hear about this. We all hear about it. You know, if someone says to you, you know everything is impermanent, you know that, well, it's, you know, we're not gonna we don't push back at the coffee shop when we're 19, and someone says everything's impermanent. Maybe, I don't really know, but if someone says you don't exist, now that's just sounds like crazy. What do you mean? The stupid Buddhists say that there is no self, and then you're like, well, then Buddhists must be the stupidest people in the world, because here I and I'm speaking from experience, that that coffee shop conversation happened in my life, way back when, and because we hear this outrageous statement, and even if it's in context, even if it's in a good context, It's still an outrageous statement. But most of us hear, Oh, there is no self or the modern thing, non duality, which is just a man, that's just a playground of stupidity right now. But you hear this whole thing, this world of ideas that challenge any common sense notions at all, and then it's just like an ear worm. You can't everything. Everything starts to move in the direction. I gotta figure that out. I gotta figure that out. And it's, it's true. It's very, very It's magical to see non self. It like fear goes away. Fear just starts to melt. And you see non self and sustain it for as long as you can. You learn to balance relaxation and bravery, and it opens and it opens, and that is one meditation session that just moved you forward on the path. But then that meditation session comes to an end, and self comes back. Here I am, hey, let's go get some let's go get a hot dog. And it's like, God, I just saw that you don't exist. Well, here I am. Well, maybe you do exist. And it's just that's why the path is long. It's not one weekend of an insight where now you're changed and you're going to write a book and tour with Eckhart Tolle. It's just not like that. It's more like this is real and it's it's something that is doable, but it's got to be doable, doable, doable, doable, doable, because it's a numbers game. You know, most of the time we're cleaning, the mind is clinging to itself, and that's the experience of me. And so in meditation, that breaks apart, and awareness is still there. And awareness sort of vibrates and it sees itself. Awareness recognizes itself, and that's not the same thing that me is. And there's some kind of experience where we realize, I don't know what this is exactly, but somehow I'm not afraid anymore. Well enough of those in a meditators life, you realize, my God, that's non, that's what they mean. And even though you've had the experience, it doesn't mean that you've had the realization. So we have three stages on the on, you know, as the meditators on the path, we have understanding, which is important at first, and that's just intellectual getting it, huh? No self, huh? Yeah, I guess, okay, yeah, I think I understand that's understanding. Then we meditate and we have experience and experiences where, whoa, we get a glimpse. And what we're supposed to do after experience is not go start a YouTube channel about it. It's we're supposed to have another session of meditation where we have that experience again, and then after that we have another experience of that, and we keep repeating it. It's like, you know, we have an we have a. A a nail, and we have a hammer, and now we don't go like I did it. No, come on, it finished the job. Then the nail is flush. When we are no longer pulled into the feeling of self. We're no longer confused by it. That's called realization, understanding experience and realization. And realization is a big deal, and that's just the realization of non self. Then you've got the realization understanding experience and realization of emptiness, and the understanding experience and realization of luminosity. And, you know, the amazing thing is, there are people who seem to have all of those, and quite a number of them, and they there actually are some that are, well, I shouldn't say actually are, but there are teachers of that caliber. And you know, meeting them isn't gonna like suddenly put it into you, but meeting them can give you the confidence that, wow, this is real. I want to be like that person. And then, you know, you hear the stories of like when they die. You you can't get away from it. You read the stories of all of the great meditators of these traditions, which are very old. And these are all traditions where they didn't have the whole society trying to distract them away from death, like we do. So death is like a part of life. And so when they're talking about things, they're always talking about so and so who died, or this person died, or a man died, or a woman died. And they'll talk about how ordinary people die, who never have had any of these insights, and how terrifying it is, and how just, Oh, you don't want to be like that. They're quite, you know, Frank. And then they'll talk about how their teachers, or how their, you know, grandparents, who are meditators, died, and you just get inundated with this archae, or anthropological record of what meditators are like and what non meditators are like, and you compare the cultures, and it's like God. It doesn't matter whether it's Burma or Thailand or Tibet or Nepal or India, they're all saying the same thing. When you've had insight, things change, but they change at a very deep level, where things don't stir like they used to, and there's peace. And when you come to the end of your life, you really see where someone's practice was. And you know, I would just say that most of us, most of us will have better lives if we practice, you know, carefully, with good instruction, good heart, we will have a better life. But don't we also want to take care of just like that last little bit, because we don't know what's going to happen. Most of us don't believe in future lives, but maybe, maybe. Mean, we've got 2000 years of some of the most intelligent people that I've ever read or studied, and that's what I studied in school. And man, they're all they don't have any doubt about it. They wonder why we're so doggone sure of ourselves. It
reminds me of a story, and I think this perfectly illustrates it. You know, llama Allen. What's his first name? The guy in California, Allen, is that his name? Oh, you mean ALAN WALLACE, yeah. ALAN WALLACE, right, yeah. ALAN WALLACE, he was doing the big meditation seminar, and and had the questions and answers afterwards. And, you know, it was, it was dragging on a little bit, and then he said this thing to me, and I never understood what he meant, but it This illustrates what you're saying. Exactly. Was he said, I've, you know, I want to answer more questions. I want to spend more time with he says, but I got to get back to my meditation. And it was just like, so weird. Why would you say, why don't you go? Wouldn't you go have dinner or something now? Or, you know, he was intent, you know, probably meditating, like 10 hours a day or something like that. Well,
that's, that's someone who's preparing. He's preparing. He's definitely, it reminds me. You just, I just looked at my watch. Yeah, I'm sorry that I want so long paying attention. No, I gotta go eat Steven's household. Everybody. Thank you so much for your patience. Bye, everybody. Bye.
