Talk 4 - Insight Meditation And The 4 Foundations Of Mindfulness

So,

Welcome to a talk on insight,

Actually the cultivation of insight,

Or insight meditation.

So,

When we started talking about the meaning of meditation in Pali,

The term for it was bahavana,

Meaning cultivation,

Bringing into being.

And there are,

I've talked about two aspects of cultivation,

Being serenity and insight.

And I know I've been talking about them as being separate kind of meditations,

But in fact they're not so easily divided.

It's more like they're on a spectrum.

But also,

In early Buddhism,

In the time of the Buddha,

He didn't really differentiate them as serenity meditation and insight meditation.

He just talked about awakening basically.

And it wasn't until much later,

Primarily around the time of the Vasudha Magga,

Which I mentioned last night,

This very thick text that was written by Burdhagasa,

That they started to talk about different pathways.

And there's a pathway of serenity or calm.

That is the path of samatha or serenity.

And there's the path of insight or vipassana.

So tonight I want to delve into the path of vipassana,

The path of insight.

And I think about,

For example,

When I went to Thailand as a young person and ordained and went to northeast Thailand and learned to speak the language to the extent I could understand the Dharma talks.

And I remember a chance the teachers would be admonishing us all the time.

In all the Dharma talks they would always be saying something along the lines of,

Still your mind,

Get it really quiet and then investigate.

That was it.

That was the practice.

Calm and still your mind.

For goodness sake,

They would almost say like that.

Quieten it so that you can see clearly and then investigate.

And they paired them up.

But it was in that order,

It wasn't in the order of investigate and then calm and still your mind,

Even though that sometimes happens.

It was in that order.

It was still in your mind and then investigating.

And what we find traditionally that's the way to go.

Traditionally it is the path of serenity first or calming your mind and then applying insight or cultivating insight with that clear and powerful mind.

However,

When I went to Thailand I was quite agitated and just a young man and I couldn't really settle my mind.

I couldn't really calm it.

I found that if I investigated into experience that would calm my mind and then I could practice serenity.

It was kind of the opposite way around.

Some people are like that.

Sometimes people,

Well traditionally it's this,

Serenity first and then insight.

Sometimes it's the other way around.

Some insight,

Then some calm and then that affects insight and so on and so forth.

But that traditional way of calming the mind first and then developing insight is reflected in the different ways people teach insight meditation.

And many of you have heard of Vipassana,

The ten day Vipassana retreat,

S.

N.

Goenka,

Goenka Ji,

Who was an Indian businessman who learnt how to meditate in Burma under a particular teacher called U Ba Khin and he learnt a particular technique of Vipassana.

And so he developed the ten day Vipassana retreat,

Which is a particular style of Vipassana.

The way it worked was that you would develop,

You did mindfulness of breath for three days at the nose tip,

Called Anapanasati at the nose tip,

Mindfulness of breath,

In order to calm and settle your mind.

Then after that three days you would launch into the Vipassana meditation.

And this particular meditation is very much about body scan,

Scanning through your body,

Becoming aware of sensations,

Different ways,

Scanning from top to bottom,

Side to side,

Various directions and so on.

Being aware of physical sensations and noticing impermanence,

Which is a characteristic of existence.

I'll mention them again tonight,

But what you pay particular attention to with this particular meditation process is the impermanence of sensations.

So in that particular practice the emphasis is on mindfulness of body,

As in physical sensations,

And also mindfulness of feelings.

It's called Vedana in Pali.

Feelings being this hedonic experience of whether something is pleasant,

Unpleasant or neither.

So I did that practice and it was really wonderful.

However I found it a little bit limiting in that it didn't kind of demonstrate these other foundations of mindfulness,

Which I talked about very briefly on our first day I think.

The four foundations of mindfulness being body,

Vedana or feelings,

Mind and phenomena.

I'll talk about these four foundations in more detail in a little while,

But basically those four foundations incorporate everything about life,

Body and feelings.

We have a body,

We have,

Well actually I'll talk about it now just very briefly before I talk about other ways that we find insight meditation is practiced.

Body,

There are six subdomains in body and I'll just outline them very very briefly.

We have mindfulness of breath,

We have mindfulness of postures or the tracking and seeing along with breath.

One way these four foundations are described is as we're using the word nopacity,

Which is a Pali word.

I'm not a Pali scholar but I know this much.

I think this Pali word means tracking or seeing along with.

So sometimes these foundations are called Gainopasana Satipatan,

Meaning body,

Seeing along with,

Mindfulness,

With the foundation of mindfulness.

Literally that's what it translates as.

So when we pay attention to sensations we see the moment to moment seeing along with them we're tracking the way they change.

So we get an understanding of the nature of physical sensations.

So in mindfulness of body we have these six subdomains,

Breath,

Physical sensations like qualities of hardness,

Softness,

Earth,

Water,

Fire and air as we described in that on the first day of our retreat.

We have postures,

With your sitting,

Standing,

Lying,

Moving,

Whatever you're doing you're aware of that.

We have actions,

That's another subdomain.

Another subdomain might sound a bit strange and we don't see this done much in the West.

It's called mindfulness of the component parts of the body,

Which is really,

Might be a bit strange as Westerners hearing about this.

It means that we go through a process where we imagine parts of our body are in front of us and we're just seeing them for what they are,

Like our hair,

Our skin,

Our liver,

Our kidney,

Our heart,

Our intestines,

Our blood,

Our phlegm,

All this stuff is just kind of put out,

Imagine putting it out in front of us.

And the aim of this particular meditation is to see through the illusion of body.

Like you're looking at me and you see Malcolm and I've got hair and eyes and all the rest of it and you're constructing a particular person out of me.

But in fact I am made up of a whole bunch of components.

You probably recognise me by my face but if I was just a foot,

If I was just a foot,

That would be kind of a strange thing.

You'd say,

Oh that's Malcolm.

What happens with this component parts of the body exercise or meditation is you see through the illusion of say beauty.

You see through the illusion of beauty.

Exercise will project onto people that they're beautiful or project onto people that they're ugly depending on how we view these composite parts of them.

Whereas in fact if we break it up,

This body is just a bunch of blood,

Phlegm,

Bile,

Skin,

Bones,

Etcetera,

Etcetera.

That's a particular meditation and it's in the four foundations of mindfulness.

It's in the section on mindfulness of body.

There's another subdomain which I hope I don't sound morbid with but I'll tell you anyway because this is what's in the sutta called the Satipatthana Sutta.

This next subdomain is called mindfulness,

Well it's tracking corpses,

Noticing and viewing real corpses or corpses in your mind like seeing a real corpse and then bringing that picture into your mind at various stages of decay.

I've done this,

I've done this as a monk,

I used to go to the morgue and watch bodies at various stages of decay.

It was really profound.

It really gave you a good sense of what it was like to have a body that was alive and see a body that was alive.

I used to go to the morgue in Bangkok and then I used to come out and walk through the markets and everyone's kind of animated in the markets but in the morgue they're not animated,

They're something different.

I'm imagining that everyone here has seen a dead body.

There's something really profound about seeing a dead body.

I know it can be someone we love and that can be really distressing but if there's sort of no strong emotional connection with the body that we're seeing,

They look very different.

We get a really profound reflection on life.

So this is in one of the subdomains of mindfulness of body.

We have mindfulness,

Or we have Vedana Nupasana Satipatan which means tracking feelings,

Tracking feelings in which case we have feelings related to body and feelings related to mind.

Feelings related to body would be something like pleasure,

Pleasantness,

Unpleasantness or neither arising from bodily experience or tangible experience such as having a piece of chocolate or someone getting a massage that's pleasant or something like that.

That's pleasant feelings arising from body and falling over and hurting ourselves and creating an abrasion.

It will be unpleasant.

That's unpleasant feelings arising from body.

We can also have pleasant,

Unpleasant and neither pleasant or unpleasant feelings arising from mind such as when one of you lovely people smile at me,

It's pleasant.

I feel somehow that I'm liked or something like that or you're having warm friendliness towards me.

That's pleasant.

That's a mental thing.

If on the other hand you walk in here and you give me a really scowling look and sit down and frown at me,

That would be unpleasant for me anyway.

It's very much dependent on my mind.

This is pleasant,

Unpleasant or neither arising from mental things.

Can you see the difference here?

That's the second foundation.

The third foundation is called Jitta Nupasana Satipatan.

Jitta usually translates as mind.

In Asia,

However,

It literally translates as heart-mind because we'll often think of mind as being in the head.

Even in the Thai language I talk about a heart,

Jitjai,

One's mind is Jitjai.

The word Jai means heart.

There's automatic connection between Jit and Jai.

Basically it refers to consciousness and it includes moods,

Emotions,

States of mind.

There are about 18 subcategories in this particular foundation.

Basically they are states of mind that are driven by the root causes of suffering,

Greed,

Ignorance and hatred.

States of mind driven by the opposites of that,

Like generosity,

Kindness for example,

And wisdom.

So states of mind that are concentrated,

States of mind that are free,

Liberated,

Awakened.

So there's a whole range of states of mind we can find in that third foundation.

And again,

Anapasthiti means we track these experiences,

We see along with them.

And here's a classic example,

You might have the experience of anger.

Anger might arise.

Rather than kind of following through and getting caught up in it,

You track it.

You say,

Oh this is interesting,

Anger.

You track it,

You see how it changes.

You notice what feeds it and what flows from it.

You get really curious about it.

You're tracking it.

You're seeing how it changes.

It could be any emotion,

It could be a state of mind.

It could be a sublime peace from meditating and you're getting really concentrated and you're feeling really joyous.

There's part of you that's mindful of that and you're tracking it.

You're seeing along with it.

You're noticing bliss,

Bliss,

Bliss.

And you're understanding how it changes.

In the fourth foundation,

Which is called dhamma,

It means dhammas.

Dhammas here mean experience of things.

Dhamma is an experience of a thing.

It's a unit of experience.

So what we do is we track experience of things,

Units of things.

We track various types of experiences.

This domain or this foundation we have five subdomains.

These subdomains are varied and I'll just go through them very briefly and you'll see why they're different from the first three.

The first three,

Body,

Feelings and mind are kind of tangible things you can,

Well,

Not so tangible with mind,

But objects that you can pay attention to.

Like we've got anger.

Okay.

We're definitely tracking that or we have pleasant feelings,

We can track that or we have sensations in the body.

We're tracking that.

They're definite things.

With the fourth foundation,

It's more about patterns,

Mostly about patterns and there's one subdomain that's about raw experience.

So I'll just go through them.

The first one is being mindful of and tracking those five hindrances.

Remember those five hindrances?

Obsessive desire,

Ill will,

Sloth and torpor,

Regret,

Remorse,

Agitation,

Worry,

Restlessness and paralyzing doubt.

But what happens with this particular subdomain,

We track these experiences and we apply intelligence in order to reduce them.

Can you understand that?

So we're seeing along with them,

We're tracking them,

We're getting to understand them,

We see what makes them arise and how they can be reduced and so on and we're applying our intelligence on this.

So that's one subdomain.

The next subdomain,

I can't remember the order,

I think the next subdomain is about tracking,

Well I'm not sure of the next subdomain but it's called the five khanda.

Five khanda are aggregates or groups of experience related to what we call ourselves.

These groups of experience are in summary form,

Feeling,

Mental formations and consciousness.

Form,

Feelings,

Perceptions,

Mental formations and consciousness.

Five khanda.

This is what we call ourselves.

So if you're kind of looking at yourself,

Thinking about yourself,

Tracking the way you experience your being,

What happens is we start to track these experiences of the self and we notice when we're contracting in and becoming an ego and also we notice how we're letting go of these things and becoming less of an ego if that makes sense.

So that's the second subdomain.

The third subdomain,

I think,

I can't remember the order properly,

But let's say the third subdomain is about being attentive to the sixth sense fears,

Meaning sight,

Sound,

Smell,

Taste and mental objects,

Things in the mind.

So what happens here is you're aware of sights as sights,

Sounds as sounds,

Thoughts as thoughts and so on and so forth.

The bare,

Raw experience of those experiences.

The next subdomain,

And I think it's in a different order,

Is called the seven factors of awakening.

And these seven factors of awakening are kind of like the opposite of the five hindrances.

The seven factors of awakening are,

And in this order,

Mindfulness,

Investigation,

Effort or energy,

Rapture or joy,

Tranquility,

Concentration and equanimity.

You've got these in your notes,

I think,

I hope.

But these seven factors of awakening,

Sometimes they're compared to branches on a tree that you start one place and they develop,

They move into one another,

They grow from one another.

The first three factors are very much related to insight meditation,

Meaning we're applying mindfulness,

Remembering to be attentive to experience,

We're investigating into experience,

You know,

We're having curiosity to see what happens here,

How it changes,

What's its nature and so on.

And then we're experiencing a kind of effort,

Energy,

We're motivated,

It's not quite enthusiasm,

But it's that zeal,

We have this natural effort and enthusiasm to investigate.

So these first three factors are very much related to insight meditation.

The next three factors,

Joy,

Tranquility and concentration are obviously related to serenity meditation.

And equanimity is the culmination of all these factors.

Equanimity as we'll learn tomorrow night,

We'll give a talk about equanimity.

Equanimity is the result of both insight meditation and it's one of the features of serenity meditation when it gets quite refined,

Very refined.

It's actually a feature of what we call the fourth jhana.

And so the culmination of all these factors working together results in this quality of equanimity which is really peaceful,

Really centred,

Unshaken,

Quiet,

Still and so on.

We'll give a big talk about it tomorrow night.

So that's another subdomain.

What happens with this particular subdomain and these factors is we track them and understand them just like we do with the five hindrances.

So with the seven factors we use our intelligence to nourish and nurture them.

This is making sense?

Am I giving you too much information or is it clear?

Am I becoming unclear?

No complaints yet.

So the next subdomain is called,

And this is the final one.

It's kind of interesting,

These four foundations of mindfulness,

They begin with the basic and kind of gross,

Like body,

It's really tangible and they finish at probably the most subtle which is mindfulness or tracking the experiences of the four truths.

Like you're seeing these patterns.

You're seeing moments of dukkha and the relationship between dukkha and cause of dukkha,

The relationship between freedom from dukkha and the cause of freedom from dukkha.

So these four truths that I've talked about a couple of times.

So that's the other four foundations of mindfulness.

Going back to what I was saying about when I did a retreat with Goenkaji and that particular approach to developing insight,

He very much focused,

That particular technique very much focuses on the first and the second foundation,

Meaning,

And in particular physical sensations of the first foundation and also whether something is pleasant,

Unpleasant or neither.

They didn't focus so much on other qualities,

Although they may argue that they do,

People who are practitioners of that,

But in my experience it didn't feel like they focused much on the other foundations.

So there was another famous practitioner who developed what we now know as the Vipassana approach that's been taken up by many of the major teachers in the West and it has influenced Jon Kabat-Zinn.

So it's kind of at the root of the contemporary approach to mindfulness,

Although Jon Kabat-Zinn changed it around a bit,

But this approach was developed by someone called Mahasi Sayadaw from Burma and his approach was basically utilising the whole four foundations of mindfulness but focusing on particular aspects of it.

And he developed a meditation technique that would bypass the need to do serenity first and just directly go into insight meditation using mindfulness.

And I'll guide you in one example of his approach tomorrow.

And there's a couple of other approaches to insight.

Sometimes with the Tibetan approach,

Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism,

Sometimes they do analytical meditation which is not quite the same as insight but it's similar.

It's like you think about something,

You think about it,

You reflect on something and you analyse it with a very concentrated mind and you gain insight into it.

And an approach that I use also is simply,

And I've developed this,

Well I haven't developed this approach,

But I've been guided in this approach which I found really,

Really powerful.

Because I've done,

I've practised Goenkaji's approach and that was fantastic.

And I practised Mahasi's Saya door approach for many years and I still essentially practised that when I practised insight meditation.

And that was very,

Very powerful.

However it's called the dry insight approach.

You have this serenity approach to awakening and you have a dry,

It's also called the dry insight approach.

So there's two approaches.

It's called dry insight approach because there's not much fun in it.

It's kind of down to the basics,

It's hardcore looking into experience and seeing it for what it is.

And just dry.

When I've done that approach I've always balanced it with love and kindness because you have to,

It's kind of like you have to get some softness there.

But essentially it's this bare bones insight into things.

So I practised that for many years and then I started to explore,

It seemed like I was ready maybe about 20 years ago to explore serenity again.

Remember how I mentioned when I first tried to do serenity when I was a young man,

I couldn't do it.

My mind was all over the place and I found if I inquired into something it was really useful.

I'll tell you about some of those inquiries tomorrow night,

Perhaps when I talk about equanimity.

But as I matured my practice I started to be able to do things like mindfulness of breath.

I couldn't be mindfulness of breath when I was young.

I'd be too agitated.

But I started to,

About 20 years into my practice I started to be able to do mindfulness of breath quite nicely and relax deeply and be able to concentrate.

And I noticed various experiences arising like joy and happiness and contentment and even equanimity.

These experiences are arising.

And when those experiences were arising I was telling a teacher who was helping me with these practices,

I told him about these stages where I was having these experiences.

He said,

Okay now it's time to practice insight.

So what I would do,

I would meditate maybe an hour,

An hour and a half or something like that,

Doing serenity,

Getting really concentrated.

And before I finish my meditation I would swing it to contemplate something around insight.

I would investigate into phenomena.

And I found that experience,

That practice,

Was like a turbocharger.

It really enhanced my understanding of experience.

So I'm cleaning ahead of myself here because I want to explain what we do with insight.

What we do with insight is we look at the way things are.

We look at the reality of things.

Essentially we're looking at the characteristics of existence.

Essentially we're looking at change,

Impermanence,

How everything changes.

We're also seeing how everything is unreliable,

Uncertain.

Remember how I was telling you this this morning,

Talking about this this morning?

We also see that things,

Because they're impermanent,

They are unreliable.

And also because they're impermanent and unreliable,

No single thing can be found within it.

They are empty of thingness.

In Buddhism this is called emptiness.

It's also called not-self.

It's also called,

In a kind of different way,

It's called interdependence.

Remember how I rang the bell this morning saying,

We can't find a solid bell here,

It's the result of many things coming together.

That might sound philosophical but it's actually quite profoundly experiential.

It's a shift in the perspective of things.

So being able to see impermanence,

Being able to see uncertainty or the tukka in experience,

And being able to see the not-self nature of experience is liberating.

It's liberating.

Although it doesn't feel like that at first.

But it is liberating.

The other thing we do with Insight Meditation is we look at cause-effect relationships.

So we're looking at these three characteristics of existence.

We're noticing these things.

We're developing insight into them,

We're seeing into them.

We're also developing insight into the way things relate.

You remember how I mentioned,

You probably can't remember this term,

But I mentioned something called Patitya Samuppada last night.

And Patitya Samuppada is this causal link of twelve phenomena,

Essentially.

Patitya Samuppada is quite complicated,

But a way of understanding at a very basic level is like this.

This is quoting some passages in the suttas.

When this is,

That is,

When this is not,

That is not.

In other words,

If you're thinking about the four truths,

When we have the cause for tukka,

We have tukka.

When we have the cause for suffering,

We have suffering.

When we don't have any cause for suffering,

In other words,

When we don't have greed,

Ignorance and hatred,

Then we don't have suffering.

I remember how I mentioned that thing from ACT,

When we do what we've always done,

We're going to get what we've always got.

Remember how I mentioned that?

This is a much more,

I mean that's pretty,

That's a nice little saying,

But this is quite profound.

It's the principle by which the Buddha explained how things come to be and also how they fade away.

And so what we're essentially doing when we practice insight meditation or we're looking deeply into things,

Is we're seeing cause-effect relationships.

We're seeing and we're developing understanding about how what we do causes suffering and also how things we do enable freedom from suffering.

So insight meditation is about,

Coming back to what I said with the Thai Archans,

They used to admonish us,

They said,

Quieten your mind,

Still your mind,

Develop that clarity,

Then investigate into experience.

When you have some suffering,

There is a cause for it.

If you look deeply,

You'll see the cause.

When you see the deepest cause,

Like the deep root causes,

When you see them and know them,

You're in a position to let them go.

Insight meditation enables us to see our patterns,

Enables us to see into the things that deceive us,

Our beliefs and our delusions.

It enables us to pull aside the veil of delusion to see clearly what's happening.

And this is effective at both the noble level and a noble level.

And I'll remind you about what that means.

The noble level means complete awakening,

Complete freedom,

Like enlightenment,

Realization of Nabana.

The ennobling level means how these patterns relate to basic things in our lives.

To the extent that we believe a thought,

That I'm a failure,

I'm a useless piece of nothing.

To the extent that I identify with that,

To the extent that I believe it,

To the extent that I don't see its impermanence,

Don't see its not-self nature,

Don't see its unreliability,

To that extent,

I suffer.

I believe it to be me.

However,

If I can see that thought,

That thought that arises as the thought that I'm a failure,

I'm no good,

I'm a worthless piece of nothing.

If I can see that thought as just a thought,

It is impermanent.

It is not a fact.

It is unreliable.

It's not a truth in and of itself.

And it is not who and what I am.

It doesn't define me.

Because it is just a changing phenomena.

It is not a thing in and of itself.

It's just an event that arises.

To that extent,

I can be free from,

In this case,

The causes of depression.

So insight is about inquiry.

Insight is about looking into things.

And it comes back to that simple process of stilling the mind and inquiring.

So I just wanted to mention two other things.

Has everyone seen The Matrix,

By the way?

Matrix?

Yeah?

Remember,

Have you seen it?

Well I'll fill you in on The Matrix.

It's quite a,

The first one anyway.

The second and the third one were not so relevant.

The first one,

It's about someone who's kind of like stuck in a computer-generated world and they're playing out a computer-generated life.

And some people are awakened from that dream and they're trying to free everyone.

But Neo,

Who is in the dream,

He sort of starts to sense something's not quite right.

He starts to see it's kind of,

It's an illusion.

And then one of these beings that are like the saviours,

They come to him and they find him and they communicate with him and they start to tell him about this stuff.

And they say,

Look,

Here's the red pill and the blue pill.

I can't remember which one he takes,

But he says,

You can take one of two pills here.

If you take the red pill,

Things will continue as usual.

Or might've been the other way around.

Maybe it's the blue pill.

Either way,

One of the pills.

If you take this pill,

Things will continue as you know them and life will continue and you'll continue to live in this dream.

If you take the blue pill,

Things will change.

If you take the other pill,

Things will change.

Or the red pill,

Whatever it is.

And Neo says,

I'll take that one.

I'll take the one where I can see into reality.

So he takes that and he's sort of sitting there and then he sees a mirror next to him.

He puts his hand into the mirror and the mirror starts to dissolve into his hand.

He goes,

Holy shit,

What's happening here?

Things are changing.

Things are really transforming.

Like he's starting to see through things and it's an incredible shock.

He's seeing the world from a different perspective.

He's seeing outside his dream and he's seeing outside his illusion and he's seeing things as they are and it's a shock.

That's what happens with Insight Meditation.

A little bit.

It's like once you start,

It's like you take the blue pill,

Start to practice it and things start to change around.

The world starts to transform.

No longer are we caught up in the illusion of our lives like living,

Malcolm the psychologist,

Malcolm the father,

All the rest of it.

We start to see through that.

We start to see things as they really are.

So I just want to give you that warning.

And technically,

In Insight Meditation practices,

There's various stages of insight they talk about.

They include recognizing impermanence and then recognizing both the arising and passing of things.

And then recognizing sometimes how things seem to be dissolving away and it starts to get a bit freaky at that point.

Like everything starts to fall away.

You start to see the world as not as solid as you thought it was.

Then you start to have an insight into the illusion of self,

Like the not-self nature of the way we are.

And everything you held dear about yourself just falls bare.

It can be quite freaky.

Sometimes insight sometimes can send people into being quite depressed,

Quite anxious and even psychotic.

And I've seen this happen on retreats.

I've seen people become psychotic.

People become unsettled when their sense of self starts to change.

And this is why I suggest people get strong in serenity meditation and also loving kindness practice and the four heart qualities.

Because with insight sometimes the things we see are difficult to bear,

Difficult to come to terms with.

And serenity meditation as well as the four heart qualities seem to help us bear that which is difficult to see,

If that makes sense.

We fall apart,

We become deconstructed with insight meditation.

Whereas with serenity meditation and in particular the four heart qualities,

They bring us back together.

So we start to,

If we can have both those operating at once,

It's much better for us to progress because I feel we have the resources to cope with that which is difficult when we develop insight.

It grounds us in a very helpful way.

I just wanted to warn you about that.

I don't expect that you'll go through these particular stages of insight on a week long retreat.

It's been a consistent effort over a long time and a lot of perseverance and diligence.

But I can see that you guys might do that some future time.

You might even do it this retreat.

Don't let me project onto you.

And if it happens,

Just be aware of that.

And remember if you're feeling out of sorts and going crazy,

To access those meditation practices about connection,

Loving kindness,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy and equanimity.

And also access those meditation practices that can settle you down and calm you and soothe you and provide some support for you,

Balance you.

So that's the first thing I wanted to mention.

The second thing I wanted to mention is that as we sit,

Do you remember how I spoke about the other day that analogy of the pond and when we settle it down,

We see broken bottles and rusty cans and bits of nails sticking up out of 4x2s and so on.

It's like,

I don't know if I said it then or not,

But that's like the rusty cans and broken bottles of our lives come into view.

The difficult things start to come up.

And when they do come up,

We have an opportunity to remove them and put them out of harm's way.

So that's kind of analogous to something else that happens.

And this other thing that happens in Buddhism,

It's called Mara.

And I think Jesus had it as well.

When Jesus went to the mount in Sinai,

I think it was in mount Sinai,

When he did his 40 days fasting,

He got confronted with the devil.

The devil was tempting him.

And if you put aside the devil as being like a person or a being or something like that,

And you think back to the night of the Buddha's enlightenment,

Where he was sitting,

And he was challenged by what's called the 10 armies of Mara.

10 armies of Mara.

Mara here being all that is the tempter,

The Mara,

The tempter,

The killer,

The one that tempts you off the path or deceives you,

The one who convinces you to stop.

It's like the devil,

But it's our internal negative aspects.

It's not anything outside.

It's our own patterns that are blocking us.

It's our own hindances.

What happens when we meditate is Mara appears.

Mara appears as a tempter.

For example,

It may come along as saying,

Oh,

Look,

Why bother doing this?

You might have doubt.

Why bother practicing like this?

It's just rubbish anyway.

There's no such thing as enlightenment.

I couldn't be bothered.

Mara,

You might be saying that to yourself,

But it's really Mara.

Or Mara might come along and say,

Malcolm said,

Stick to the process,

But it's so nice to have this piece of chocolate or so nice to go outside and have a cigarette or something like that.

It's elusive.

When the Buddha was on the Night of Awakening,

The Buddha noticed Mara coming along.

For him,

It was like a fight.

It was like a war.

It was like a battle.

He talked about the 10 armies of Mara.

Actually,

It was called something else at the time.

It was called Namuchi.

I'm just going to read you.

These are the lines from Asuta talking about being confronted by Mara.

There's something really interesting about this confrontation,

And I'll tell you what that is in a minute.

I'm just going to read this.

Meditation can be seen as a war between wholesome and unwholesome mental states.

On the unwholesome side,

There are forces of kilesa kilesa distortions in our mind.

They are known as the 10 armies of Mara.

In Pali,

Mara means killer.

It is the personification of the forces that kill virtue and also kills existence.

Mara's armies are poised to attack all yogis.

They even tried to overcome the Buddha on the Night of his Enlightenment.

Here are the lines from the Buddha addressed to Mara as recorded in the Sutta Napata.

Sensual desire is your first army.

Discontent,

Your second,

Is called.

Your third is hunger and thirst.

The fourth is called craving.

Sloth and torpor are your fifth.

The sixth is called fear.

The seventh is doubt.

Conceit and ingratitude are your eighth.

Gain,

Renown,

Honour,

And whatever fame is forcefully received are the ninth.

And whoever extols himself and disparages others has fallen victim to the tenth.

That is your army,

Namucchi,

In other words,

Mara.

The striking force of darkness,

One who is not a hero cannot conquer it,

But having conquered it,

One obtains happiness.

So in other words,

The Buddha had his dark side.

And what's really interesting about this,

He saw through it,

He saw through the veil,

He saw through the deceptions,

He saw through the illusions of Mara.

And then he was enlightened and he taught for another 45 years throughout northern India.

And it's said,

You read in the suttas,

After he's enlightened,

Mara would visit him on occasions.

Is that Mara?

You know it's Mara.

Mara is visiting.

No,

It's not Mara.

We see you,

Mara.

So Mara,

He says in the suttas,

Mara visited me.

And,

You know,

We'd visit him and say,

Ah,

Come on,

You know,

Buddha,

You call yourself the Buddha,

But you know,

You're getting old now.

It's time to let go of this,

This idea of leading everyone and teaching,

Having a Sangha.

Give it up,

You know,

Let someone else do it.

It's time to relax,

Chill out,

Look after yourself.

This is when he was late in life.

And every time the Buddha,

The Mara would come and tempt him,

The Buddha would say,

I see you,

Mara.

I see you.

I know you.

And Mara would,

It says in the suttas,

Mara would sulk off and saying,

Oh,

It's like a magpie or a sparrow trying to pick blood from a stone or trying to get something from a stone.

You know,

The Buddha's just not going to fall for it.

So I'm telling you this story because what happens when we meditate is Mara visits us.

We have our dark side,

Our shadow self,

Our negative aspects come up and try to convince us to believe them.

And it's good to get to know them.

It's good to see,

Say,

I see you,

Mara.

I know you.

I see you.

So there's just a bit of something about inside meditation practice.

I might leave this.

I wanted to finish it with the bahaya sutta,

But maybe I'm taking over,

Extending beyond time.

Because what happens when I go beyond time,

I get really enlivened and invigorated and everyone else starts to fall asleep.

So I think I'll finish it there.

Okay.

Let's,

I hope I've talked a little bit about insight meditation.

We'll go into details tomorrow about how we can practice these practices of seeing impermanence,

Seeing not self,

Seeing the nature of experience,

Also seeing cause of economic relationships and seeing arising and passing of experience.

So we gain great insight.

Okay.

So let's sit quietly for a few minutes.