Thisness

54:39

54:39

Thisness

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talks

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Meditation

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Thisness is a talk about the nature of things. We are living in a world that is simply... this. The Buddha mentions that our main problem is not seeing this place clearly, and not being able to accept it is as it truly is. This talk and meditation are to help bring us back to the simple experience of THIS.

Meet your Teacher

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Meet your Teacher

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Transcript

So thank you for your questions. They actually coincide with something that I wanted to talk about tonight too. So we're all on the same page. That's nice. So firstly addressing meditation etiquette. I personally feel that we are a little bit too formal slash high strung in our meditation groups. That when I meditate in East Asia with people, They're sitting, They're coughing, They're farting, They're burping. They don't really care. Everyone's just allowing themselves to be like they are. And they're a little bit extreme in that way because sometimes people will be talking really loudly and you're like, Dude there's 50 people meditating right here. What are you doing? So they're a little bit not sensitive to things like personal space and silence. Like when I was in India or I was in a Vietnamese community for eight years and same thing. All the monks would be meditating and somebody would go to the ancestral altar where there's a fortune teller, Which is a coffee can with popsicle sticks in it with numbers on them. And you shake it until one falls out and whatever number that is, Then you correspond it to the fortune and that's your fortune. So we'd be sitting meditating with like 30 monks and nuns and the Vietnamese person would come in and they would just pick up this coffee can. You know, And just totally like doesn't, I don't understand how you don't understand that. How you don't make that connection. Do you think monks and nuns just they're in another zone? Like they're just statues like it doesn't matter or yeah, In India was the same way. People don't have a sense of personal space, Of privacy, Of noise and silence in India, I've noticed. So it's cultural, But I would say that in meditation groups. So I remember when I was on a meditation retreat once, It was in Switzerland and it was on the border of Germany and Switzerland. And it was like, I think it was a two week or 10 day meditation retreat. And we're sitting and I had to sneeze and it was halfway into the retreat. And I wanted to get an honor everybody's noise. So I was sitting there and I had to sneeze and I tried to hold it in. And what ended up happening is I went and I literally stuck my tongue out trying to block my mouth. And I and I made a loud raspberry in the room like that in the middle of the meditation. I was like, Well, That was horrible. And I was like, That's probably the worst thing that could have happened. And then simultaneously it's like, Well, That's a good lesson because it's like if you if you've already made that horrible experience, The next time I have to sneeze, Just sneeze. Then how that's as bad as it is. And I would personally say that if you have to cough, You have to sneeze, You have to move around, Just do it. Whatever. If you find yourself in a coughing fit and you can't stop and it's uncontrollably, Then I would say that's up to you. If you feel like, OK, I'm just going to take a walk right now and maybe get some water and maybe take a break. That's up to you. But honestly, If anybody gets upset at you, That's their problem. And that's the thing about the meditation circle. The rules change in this game that when we're sitting in the circle, You are in control of your minds. And if you're angry, If you're trying to blame, You can blame yourself. You can blame your own minds. One of my teachers, Achan Brahm, He practiced at a monastery in Thailand and they had construction outside. There's like sledgehammers and like jack, Like jackhammers. And he said to his teacher, This time on Gachon Chah, He said, You know, It's too noisy. The noise is bothering me. And Achan Chah looked at him and said, Really? And he said, Well, Is the noise bothering you or are you bothering the noise? And it was this beautiful way to say, Listen, The world goes about its business around us. The animals, The cars, People have their lives. Everything around us is still going. Even within this room, There's the air vents. There will be people coughing or sneezing. Life is going. Life is happening. And we do our best to come into an environment like this to meditate, To give ourselves a little bit more of a protected, Quiet, Still space. But it's not going to be perfect. You cannot control your environment 100 percent. And even if you do, I heard that there's like, I'm sure this is fake, But maybe not. But I read on one of these Facebook posts that there's a soundproof like chamber somewhere that absolutely no sound can come in or out. And the most that anyone's ever been able to spend in there is like 10 minutes without going crazy. You have to like run out because it's too much. So it's like even if you did find a way to block out all possible noise, It would be such an alien experience that you'd freak out and have to leave. So we have to really be realistic. And, You know, When I was on retreat, We did something called noble silence. And noble silence means I'm going to be as quiet as possible. And even if I hear other people talking, I'm going to be noble. I'm going to practice the noble silence. Right. So really learning to not try to control, Not blame, Not hold on to what's going on around you, But to really own yourself and let things go and be. And if there's a sound, Who cares? Like you were really in that deep of a meditation if somebody coughing disrupted you. Right. You know, It's like how good is your practice that you're getting upset and distracted that there's a noise outside. Honestly, You know, Who cares? Let there be noise. So what? Why is noise even bad? Distracted from what? If meditation is about being present, What's what can you even be distracted from it? If there's something happening in the present moment, If you're coughing right now and I'm hearing your cough, Then I'm meditating some in the present moment with your coughing. And as soon as your coughing stops, I'm still in the present moment. If your coughing stops and then I'm angry at you, Now I'm latching on to something that happened in the past and creating a story about it and riding an emotional wave into the present moment, Even though that thing's already gone. That's not meditation anymore. Right. That's pulling the past into this place. So I would say just be normal, Be easy, Be respectful. Don't overdo it. Feel free to burp, Fart, Sneeze as you wish. The majority of the questions tonight were centered around meditating by yourself when you go home, How to do it. It's funny that you said that you feel like you're high strung. I want to say I feel like I'm low strung. And I think we probably both want to be middle strung. Like they say, A guitar tuned too low or too high doesn't make a good sound. If it's tuned just right, Then it makes the sound that's correct. So, You know, Actually myself and Shana and my girlfriend Shannon, We went to Boston this last weekend. And there is a monk, A friend of mine, Brother Fat Man. He was part of the Plum Village Sangha with Thich Nhat Hanh. And I've practiced with him over the years at his monastery. And he came to a little group in Harvard to lead a little workshop and meditation. And so we went to that and he led a really beautiful meditation and then some exercises, Kind of like interpersonal meditations, Mindfulness dialogues. But what I really liked about the meditation session that he led is he really again reminded me and brought in this understanding of just kind of being, Just kind of being here. I found myself often in my practice in the trap of doing something that I would call trying to meditate. So when I'm trying to meditate, It means that I'm sitting here and I feel like there's this thing called meditation that I'm supposed to be doing. And that meditation is supposed to take me somewhere called like peacefulness. And these freaking thoughts keep coming in the way. So I have to keep kind of pushing them out there. And then my leg hurts and then I'm bored and then I'm cold. And then so I have all these kind of things vying for my attention. But I'm trying to do this thing called meditate, Meditation where, You know, To get me to this place called peace. And that sounds really exhausting, Doesn't it? Right. It sounds pretty exhausting. It sounds like a lot's going on. And when we were with Fatman, He said more or less that he doesn't even like to use the word meditation anymore because of kind of misunderstanding that people now take from it. So he said, I like to just talk about being with yourself in a contained kind of way. And more than that, This understanding of just being. So there's an image that I want to share with you that I kind of have gathered through my experience of meditation. And, You know, When I was a kid, I think from maybe the Museum of Science or something, I got this magnetic platform with these little metal balls. And you can like, You know, If you put two of the balls and they stick together and you can put all the balls and make like a weird shape. Or I'd one by one really meticulously construct like a pyramid out of it because I had nothing else to do when I was a kid. And I play with this so you can like make a shape and you can crash it down and make another shape and crash it down. Right. And and it could be like a really beautiful shape or it could be a kind of really ugly shape. But no matter what the shape is, You always can just keep crashing it down to this neutral level. Right. Or you can even take the balls off and you just have the platform. And right now, In this moment, We did the how are you doing thumbs up, Thumbs down kind of thing. So some of you are doing great. Your shape is beautiful. Your life looks good. You're happy. You're in a good, Good space. Some of you are more in a blast spot. Some of us are in a really bad spot, Maybe. But it doesn't matter because that's just playing with the structure on top. But no matter how you're feeling, No matter what's going on in your life, No matter how bad it is, No matter how bad you think you are, No matter how bad and messy your mind is, Right, No matter how bad that structure is, When you meditate, You're not here to like fix that structure necessarily. You're not here to change that structure to make it work better. You're here to allow that structure to just kind of collapse. So you could be sitting here and you could be really happy and your only job is to let that happiness just collapse, Let the mind collapse into itself. If you're sitting here feeling really upset or stressed, All you're here to do is let the mind collapse. Whatever story you're holding, My life looks like this. I'm going through this. I'm so stressed or angry or hurt or this or that. Whatever your story is in any given moment, Meditation, It's not about doing anything. You're not, I need to push that story away to then meditate or by meditating I'll change that story. No, It's allowing that story to be just sitting right there and then you just allow that story to collapse. One of the explanations I heard it was like if you have a water bottle filled with some dirt and you swirl that water bottle around and all that water is really dirty. If you want some clean water, You just put that bottle down and you wait and slowly all that dirt just sinks to the bottom all by itself. And then there's this clarity that comes to the top. It's clear drinking water. And it's not like the dirt is gone. You haven't done anything. That dirt is still in there, But it's not a problem. It's not affecting you. And this is a really actually profound teaching. It's difficult because we really heavily identify with our personalities. We really heavily identify with our thoughts and our feelings and our behaviors and our stories and our lives. We really heavily identify with those to the fact that we think that that's me and that's how things are. And even me telling some of you right now that you heavily identify with that, You don't even know what that means because you've never experienced anything outside of that. So again, This teacher Achim Brahma had, He said, He told us a story and he said, You know, The tadpole was swimming in the pond one day and it came upon a frog. And the tadpole said, Oh, Frog, Like, I can't wait to grow up like you and have legs. And the frog said, Yeah, Yeah, You're going to really like getting onto dry land. And the tadpole looked at the frog and he goes, What's dry land? And the frog said, Oh, It's that thing that, You know, You get to when you get out of the water. And the tadpole looks at the frog and he says, What's water? And because the tadpole had spent its whole life in the water, It didn't even know what water was because it's never experienced anything outside of it. And because we haven't experienced anything outside of ourself, We don't even see what the self is. We don't even see that we're in something because we've never experienced anything outside of it. And one of the ways to make that experience is through meditation. It's through this practice of being that if you really just sit and you allow yourself to be with this, However this is, I actually just wrote a book yesterday. I sat down and wrote for like two or three hours, Like 28 pages. It's a short book. But I called the book Thisness because I said, If you just sit with this, Just this, Just like this is, And that's it. There's nothing else to do. Meditation is actually so incredibly easy. It's painful for me when I sit and I have a room full of people who say they can't meditate or that they're struggling because it's the easiest thing in the world. But because our lives are so complicated and complex and our minds are so complicated and complex and busy and diluted in different ways, We can't even understand, We can't even see the easiness of it actually because there's nothing that you need to do. You don't need to fix. You don't need to solve. You can just sit and you feel this moment. You feel your body. You feel whatever's going on right now. And what Fat Man said to us when we were sitting with him, He said, Usually when you just sit, The first thing you'll feel are the things that don't feel good. If you just sit and you close your eyes, You'll immediately feel tension or pain or pressure on your chest or a lump in your throat or something. And usually that uncomfortable feeling, That propels the mind into thinking, Into fixing, Into action, Into trying to escape from that unpleasant feeling. But in meditation, You can feel that and just kind of hang out with it a little bit. I feel an unpleasant pressure on my chest. Well, I don't need to make this into a big story about how I feel angry or sad or anxious or whatever. I can just feel that pressure and say, OK, I feel that pressure. And then I could also feel my shoulders where there is no pressure and then the rest of my body and feel kind of more of this, More of this moment, More of what's going on. And then I feel like the space around me and then I kind of just, It's kind of again, You're just kind of hanging out. It kind of reminds me of when I was in college and I just kind of like sit on the couch and we didn't, It wasn't really, Probably I was smoking pot or something, But like, But just to sit and just to kind of, Really not have anything specific to do and just to allow yourself to be and, You know, It might feel a little bit aimless or it might even seem like that's boring or how am I going to get anywhere by doing nothing? We're not doing nothing. We're being. We're giving ourselves permission just to be here, To just be present in a self-contained kind of way. And in a group, It's kind of like a group contained kind of way, Which is why it's easier. I don't think there's anything wrong with having trouble meditating by ourselves or even getting the motivation to do it. You know, I joined a gym for a reason because I would not be able to work out at home. It's just not the right head space for me. I need to go somewhere to do that. My sister is a writer too. She has to go to the library to write. She can't write in her bedroom. She has to go somewhere. So to have to leave our house, To have to get out of our life, Out of our space to meditate, That's quite normal. I think that's okay. There's nothing wrong with needing a different environment. There's a reason why monasteries are up on top of mountains in India, You know, Because you have to get away from everything physically to then also have the feeling of like I'm away from everything mentally and emotionally too. You know, There's a reason why Tibet, It's all the way up there, The roof of the world, Right? Because you need to get away from everything to get some perspective. And simultaneously, You can also practice sitting right there in the middle of the storm. That you can sit down in the middle of your bedroom with dirty clothes all over the floor and an unmade bed, And people yelling or a dog ripping up tissues on the floor, Speaking from experience in that way. And you can just look at all of that mess and just say, Yeah, It's okay. That's right for right now in this moment, That's fine. And I'm just going to sit and close my eyes because I'm going to notice that I'm a mess inside too. You know, It's like when we get angry because somebody's coughing, We get angry because there's like a jackhammer talking outside. You know, I guarantee you that if everything outside of you is perfectly quiet, Your mind would be twice as loud. You know, Because even if we have the great conditions outside, We haven't done our work inside yet. And it's really, It's almost like the thing that I really so desperately almost want everyone to know is that is that this practice, This is for everybody. You don't have to be any certain way. It's not like I even heard someone say, You know, I don't do yoga because I'm not flexible. And then and then someone else is like, Well, You go to yoga to become flexible. You know, I don't even say that we don't meditate. You know, If someone says I can't meditate, My mind's busy. And I would say, No, You meditate because your mind's busy. Right. Meditate. I would even say that that's not even right. I would even say that whether your mind is busy or calm, You can still meditate because meditation, It's not about fixing or doing anything. It's just about being here. And there is a goal to this. And I practice for a long time without knowing that goal. And then I practice for a long time knowing that goal. And I can say that knowing the stages of meditation can sometimes really become a hindrance to the meditation because you're then trying to get somewhere. It's such. One of my teachers called it a counterintuitive thing. But it's it's really just simple if you understand the principles of it, I guess you could say. So the mind has this ability to break up into many different pieces. You'll notice that if you sit right now and you close your eyes and you feel your body and you feel your breath and then you hear my voice. And then you maybe have a thought. Maybe I say, Like, Imagine a Christmas tree, You know, And we have this experience of having all of these different parts of ourselves. And then I have this me who's trying to meditate and then these thoughts who are trying to get in my way. And then this willpower trying to push that away and this piece that I'm trying to get to and then this breath that I'm trying to feel. So it's like, You know, There's like eight different parts of me working in there. But ultimately, That's all mine. So I would almost say it's like if you took a jug of water and you poured it into an ice cube tray. You know, All of those little squares, They seem like different things. Now I have like what used to be one single substance has now become like 16 different little things, Compartmentalized things. And that's how we experience life. We're so compartmentalized that there's me and then there's my thoughts and then my feelings. And then, You know, Then there's all these different things going on. And what meditation is kind of talking about, It's like pouring that water back into the pitcher, Reuniting that water with itself. So when I meditate, I close my eyes. So right away, I break away from having a visual separation, A duality through vision. Close my mouth. I'm not tasting anything. Close my body up. Sitting here. Right. So I'm shutting the senses down. So getting collecting the mind, Stopping its kind of escape routes through the senses as much as I can first. Then I have my internal world. I'm sitting there with my eyes closed. I have all these sensations, These perceptions, Thoughts, Feelings and sensations. Right. And then we're sitting here perceiving feeling feel there's the body. OK, Here's how the body's doing. Then we kind of slowly shift and then we get into like the thinking, How the thoughts are doing. Right. And some feelings come up kind of. And eventually, As we just sit and allow things to kind of be holding everything in space with space, Spaciousness, Things start to fade away. Eventually, We'll notice that we don't really feel the body that much anymore, That it's like as if I'm floating in space. Right. So now I've moved away from that duality, That compartmentalized broken mind through inside and outside body and not body. Now there's not there's nothing there. It's now unified that that area. But then there's these thoughts and these feelings. But eventually, And I'll tell you, This is true, That eventually your thoughts do stop all by themselves. They do go away completely. And then that that ice cube has now assimilated with the rest of the water. And slowly, One by one, The mind starts to unite back into more of like an original state, So to say, A more of a state where where it doesn't anymore have the perception of an inside or an outside. It's just one thing. There's just this feeling of spaciousness and awareness. And that's it. And then even from that state, It can drop even deeper and deeper. And it kind of the whole mind, Then it collects, The mind collects and it collapses in on itself. And there's many words people use for this. They call it absorption. They call it concentration. They call it like one pointedness. But also it's stillness because the mind just comes in and it rests and it stops. And in those moments when the mind really drops into those states, There's great bliss that starts to arise. You can see bright lights suddenly. Some people say they have like superpowers that start to come out or they can hear things or see things. There's reports that monks actually do start levitating because like they're just in that space where the mind is completely united with itself and shiny. But then even if you drop farther into that, Then even the light goes away and then even the bliss goes away. And then eventually there's just even the peace. And then in Buddhism, They even talk about these deeper states, Which are like neither perception nor non perception. So it's like as if the mind gets so subtle that like even the awareness itself isn't even really there anymore. That there's like something but nothing that you can really name anymore. So it just keeps getting more and more and more subtle and refined and they say purified. Yeah. And that's the path. It's just it goes from gross to subtle, From many to one. But it doesn't necessarily even get to one. It just keeps getting even more and more and more collected. You know, It would be like if you if everything in the world started collapsing, Collapsing, Collapsing, Collapsing, Collapsing, And then all that's left is like a flower. But then also the flower is there and you're like, Oh, Now it's just one thing. But then the petals can fall off that flower. Then the stem can come off. Then there's just like that little thing in the middle. Then you can kind of go into that. And then there's all these little pieces and there's like the pollen in that. Then there's right. So it can keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller, Like almost an atomic level. Right. And keep going. And the mind, It's the same way is that again, We go from this very gross state of me and not me inside, Outside. And we kind of slowly move that in. And the mind starts to unify that water starts to all flow together. And then even the internal experience, Which feels separated because there's me and then there's a body and there's thoughts and there's feelings that starts to also come together and unify. And so there's just like that awareness and that stillness and that peace. And then even within that different qualities start dropping off and it starts to become even more and more refined. And it just kind of keeps going. Right. So not only does that just sound great, Right. It sounds peaceful. Honestly, You get to take a break from yourself, Which is enormous. Right. Like we said, Ruth, Right. It's like it's exhausting that those retreats, Those meditation retreats are exhausting. Man, I'll tell you, It is exhausting to sit with yourself for hours on end. It's exhausting. And when you meditate, You get to really take a break from yourself. My God. That's why people do drugs and drink and binge on Netflix. They want to break from themselves. But, You know, If you drink or do drugs or, You know, You're always left feeling tired or sick or dull. Your senses are dull. Whereas when you meditate, You take a break from yourself. You become energized. It's actually healthy. It's like you're eating healthy food. Finally, You're drinking clean water for the first time. Oh, This is how to take a break from myself in a healthy way and a strong, Empowering way. In a way that when I come back, Whoa, Now I feel like Superman and ready to take on the world. Everything's so shiny and new and I feel great. It's a total refresh. So you get to take a break from yourself. And that's that's amazing. But more than that, You start to make these deep experiences about reality because you realize that you can take a break from yourself, Which means that this you, Which you've been taking so seriously, Is not necessarily something that's actually there. It doesn't that you doesn't necessarily live inside of you somewhere, That it's just been a wrong perception and assumption. That suddenly this character that I call Seth, I don't have to take Seth so seriously anymore because I know that it's not something that's elemental. It's something that can just disappear, That it's just conditioned. It's just a bunch of different conditions that have come together. I call it self-relating conditions. Yeah, That this feeling of self, It's all these different conditions that come together and they relate to each other. And so it seems like there's this me inside. But, You know, We find this this deeper freedom when we realize that. It's like if you if you're in a dream and you're being chased by a monster and then suddenly you realize it's a dream. Right. God, What a relief. You know, Suddenly you're not afraid anymore. Suddenly you could turn back and look at that monster. Maybe you could even fly over that monster. Maybe you can, You know, Change scenes. You have control. You know, You're you're not afraid. You're not in fight or flight. You don't have to protect anything because you know everything's OK. And and the more that we can practice, The more that we can touch that place. This is, Of course, A little bit farther down the road, But it brings a whole different kind of freedom to our lives. We feel strong and brave. We can speak more openly and honestly about things that we feel. We can be more truthful. We can live lives that we want to live more fully and more in our integrity because we're not afraid anymore. We can show our weaknesses to others and not feel ashamed because we don't take it personally, Because we know that that has nothing to do with me. That's just these conditions that came together. It's OK. And therefore we can also transform them. So it's really it's a complete reality consciousness transformational process down the road. And the way to get there, The first steps of that, It's it's nothing more than just being here. It's sitting here, Closing the eyes. Hanging out, Letting things just kind of be like they are. And slowly starting to make peace with with what's going on. Not because you figured it out, Not because you have the answers or you have control over it. But making peace with it because are you bothering the sound or is the sound bothering you? You know, I have tension in my chest. Well, Is that tension bothering me or am I bothering that tension? Well, I'm my life's in this horrible transition and I don't know where my next job is, Where my next paycheck comes from. OK, But right now in this moment as I'm meditating, Is is that bothering me or am I bothering that? Yeah. Is there a problem with that hot coal or is the problem that I'm holding it? You know, If you let go, If you pick up a hot coal and that coal's burning and you're blaming that hot coal for being so hot, It's like, Well, Put it down. That hot coal, That's its nature. The world is going about its business. Leave it alone. And when we leave things alone, They collapse, They disappear. There is only something there because there's movement there. When the movement stops, There's nothing there. Everything we experience, It's just movement. It's just movement of the mind, Movement of the consciousness. If you stop, If you become still, There's nothing that you can experience. Everything fades away. Stillness is peace. And stillness happens because you allowed it to happen. Because you became still. So let's sit. In a position that feels comfortable, Stable, Close in the eyes. Practicing thisness. Being with this just as it is. Because this is what there is. All that truly exists is this moment. These feelings, These sensations. We're making an agreement. Consciously allowing ourselves to just be here. Be present with this. Feeling the body. Seeing if there's discomfort, Tension. Softening into that. Noticing there's other places like our hands or our cheeks that are actually soft and easeful. We can feel our skin. The place where the air is touching the skin, The ground is touching the skin. Skin on our clothes. We allow our minds to wander. Let your mind go. Your mind will go and it'll come back. And it'll go and it'll come back. And every time the mind comes back and it finds you in this resting, Easeful state. It'll start to want to hang out because you've become kind of cool. You've become chill. Your mind will start to like you because you feel good. With the eyes closed, Sitting here, We breathe. Not focusing specifically on anything. Not wanting anything. Almost like the feeling of when you're just looking out the window at falling snow. You're just kind of there with it, Observing it. Enjoying it, Allowing it. No control to be had. Our breath is something that's moving. That continues flowing in and out. If that's the only game in town, We can also just mindfully breathe in, Mindfully breathe out. Not much else going on here, Just the breath. A lot of space. Feels kind of nice just to be here. Kind of like we're peacefully sitting on a park bench. Noticing any sensations. This is here. Being here with this. Stirring the pressure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .