Vipassana Meditation: Day 3 - Evening Discourse

To misquote Archimedes,

Give me a lever in the right place and I can move the world.

What the Buddha gave us to use today is a lever in exactly the right place where we can move the world.

The connecting points between our minds and our body.

And if we can focus on that deeply and we can learn to be non-reactive to the sensations then that's exactly what we start to do.

We start to shift our internal world and then our external world.

Because there's no real disconnect between the two anyway.

We create our external world out of our internal world.

Out of the places we live in our internal world,

Out of what we populate it with,

Out of how we react to our internal world,

To the habits that we formed.

This is being truly active.

So this question that comes up a lot,

Whether meditation makes us too passive is really a misunderstanding of the practice.

It makes us truly active and perhaps even for the first time.

Because we're able actually to feel a thing and to choose what we want to do,

Not just react to it.

It's like that statement that Jesus made that's often misunderstood as a sign of weakness.

If someone slaps you turn the other cheek.

As a sign of passivity and giving in.

If Jay was going to slap me,

The natural response would be for me to slap back.

And at least for me to get angry and infuriated about the fact that he slapped me.

That's just the domino effect.

That means that Jay has complete power over me.

Because he knows if he wants me to get angry,

If he wants me to slap him,

All he needs to do is slap me.

And then that's going to produce that result.

So if we all behave so predictably,

Then we're not truly active.

We're just reactive.

Somebody can see the sequence they need to start,

See the trigger for it,

And then they can set us into motion to do what they want us to do.

So when Jesus said turn the other cheek,

From his state of mind,

That's a true act,

A truly active state of mind,

A truly active response to the situation.

If someone were to slap him,

That means that he would either not feel that anger,

Or he would feel the anger and be in control of himself enough to be able to simply feel it and not react,

To be able to make a choice what to do.

Feel the slap,

Feel the sensations arise,

The slap produces,

And choose what to do after that.

And that's what we're doing here.

As we start to focus on the sensations,

We can feel all the little slaps,

All the little things that would normally trigger us.

And we can start to make a choice how we want to respond to them instead of giving in to our habitual patterns,

Our coding.

And more and more will come up.

Now that we've started to feel the sensations,

We've started to open this communication with the unconscious up.

So the deeper we go into the sensations,

The more we'll come up from our unconscious,

The more of our triggers that lie underneath the surface,

And the more we can feel,

The more individually,

And finally choose how we want to respond to them instead of just reacting however we've programmed ourselves to.

And this can go as far as we want it to go.

At first,

We might need to do it very carefully,

Just like carrying our awareness everywhere.

When we finish meditation now,

I always say,

Carry the awareness with you.

The meditation doesn't end when we get off the mat,

When we stop sitting.

It's just moving into another posture.

And at first,

Most meditators are terrible at this,

I know I was.

As soon as you get off the mat,

That's it.

You just go walking around,

And your mind's somewhere else straightaway thinking about other things.

And we've just dropped it.

We've dropped the awareness.

It's like being a waiter.

At first,

You start being a waiter in a restaurant,

And you're walking around,

You can't balance anything,

You're dropping all the dishes everywhere.

And then slowly,

You become a slightly better waiter,

And you know you need to walk around very carefully.

You're that stiff waiter that has to walk really carefully and deliver things precisely,

Otherwise you're gonna drop everything.

And you see people meditating like that as well.

When they first get given the instruction of how to carry their awareness somewhere,

They start walking very precisely,

Very carefully.

And we might need to start like this,

But we should move on from this,

Because we also want to produce naturalness.

We want to be able to walk around in our natural state,

Just as we're feeling our breath in our natural state.

We want to feel reality as it is.

We don't want to doctor it.

We don't want to walk around in a controlled,

Precise way,

In the same way that we don't want to breathe in a controlled and precise way,

Because that controls the range of sensations that we're going to feel while we do that,

Which means that we're not gonna access the true depths of the unconscious mind,

The true totality of ourselves.

We're gonna limit what we feel.

So just like the waiter moves on from being rigidly stiff,

And eventually they walk around naturally,

Looking like they're gonna drop the dishes everywhere,

And they never drop anything.

Relaxed,

Precise,

Putting everything where they want.

And that's how we want to be eventually.

When we start the walking meditation,

When we start carrying it everywhere,

We want to be able to walk around as we naturally would walk,

Take everything in that we normally take in,

And still maintain our focus on our awareness.

That's the practice.

Not to change what we do,

But to change the consciousness that we bring to it.

And then from there,

We can generate different actions.

From there,

Things start to change once we've brought clarity to them.

And that's what we'll start practicing today and tomorrow.

Tomorrow,

We'll start walking meditation,

As well as the standing meditation,

And we can practice bringing this into our day.

Slowly as the retreat goes on now,

We're gonna start to integrate activities that we're gonna do normally,

And start to bring our consciousness to them.

So that when we end the retreats,

There's no disconnect between our focus here and our focus there.

Because there is no here and there.

It's all the same place anyway.

And so if we can focus here,

We can focus there.

We just need to get used to this change of posture,

This movement.

At first,

The restriction helps.

And I experienced this in my own life.

When I was first truly happy,

Is when I realized I was happy with nothing.

I was sitting there meditating one day,

In the phase of my life when I was contemplating being a monk,

And I realized I didn't need anything else.

That's why I was happy to be a monk.

And it was beautiful.

Because I remember thinking,

Even if I got put in solitary confinement right now in prison,

I could pretty much sit here and meditate all day,

And I'd be happy.

At the time,

I was meditating 18 hours a day at times.

And so being in solitary confinement would actually just make my life simpler.

I'd get up,

I'd go to the bathroom,

I'd be in the bathroom,

I'd be in the bathroom,

I'd be in the bathroom,

I'd be in the bathroom.

It was just so much simpler.

I'd get food delivered to me,

I'd be sitting in a box,

I'd be there,

And I'd be happy.

What more do I need?

And then it struck me.

If you can be happy with nothing,

Which we can,

Because now we can simply move our awareness back here,

And slowly work on that precise mind,

That bright mind,

Then everything else just becomes icing on the cake.

And I realized that there's another thought,

Which is that as well as an extra,

It's also a potential distraction.

And I realized that me closing myself off would be the easy choice.

It was easy once we know this technique,

Once we started practicing this wonderful technique the Buddha has given us,

To be able to be happy with nothing.

But then can we take that to the world where we meet all of the complications we normally meet and then we can do it?

That's much more of a challenge than being able to sit alone and meditate and achieve that state.

It's great to sit there in bliss on your mat,

But then if every time you get up,

You get angry because the first thing that you encounter throws you off balance,

Then we haven't completed that journey.

And so I thought it was a good test for me to see if I could be happy with everything instead of nothing.

That's when I decided to start being an entrepreneur,

Start reentering the world,

More as a game with myself.

Because my real day is the day when I sit on my mat and I meditate and I focus and I go into my meditative state and then this just becomes the backdrop through which that drama is played out.

To see,

Right,

What are the forms coming my way today that I can meet with this consciousness that I've generated through my practice?

And how do I deal with these forms today?

The game just becomes a bigger game.

You get to dance through life,

Seeing okay,

What did I encounter today?

How did it affect me?

And then go back to the practice and clean that.

Start again.

Start the Groundhog Day again to be able to see how we do the second time round,

The third time round,

The fourth time round.

And eventually we might dance through it and get every line right.

And it becomes a bigger game.

And it becomes a beautiful practice,

Looking at life like that.

With this active mind,

Finally being able to meet the world,

Having a frame to be able to perceive it within,

That helps us to be able to see everything as a positive.

Everything as an opportunity to grow.

Everything as an opportunity to generate clarity.

And that's why we want to develop this skill of pushing into our practice.

Internally pushing into our practice.

Everyone here taking control over pushing into that uncomfortable zone.

I mentioned the 80-20 rule earlier,

Pareto's Law.

80% of the time,

Let's sit here and be comfortable and generate our focus,

Generate our tranquility,

Accumulate our awareness.

And then once we have accumulated that awareness,

Let's start using that to push a little bit deeper to see how we do when we're unsettled,

How we do when we're unbalanced.

Because then we start to train ourselves to be able to face things that we need to face in life.

If we develop the skill to sit here peacefully and we only ever sit in peace,

Then we don't develop that skill.

We stay within a comfortable zone,

A comfortable bubble.

So now that we have the opportunity to generate that awareness,

We want to use it to keep on pushing a little bit further.

So our mats is not our only safe space.

We know we can take our safe space with us and enlarge it as life goes on,

Spread it into everything.

I think of acceptance,

Which is what we're really learning here,

As the second strength.

Willpower,

As we learned in the beginning,

Is the first strength.

Because without willpower,

We're not going to be able to take it.

We're going to be able to take it with us.

And this is the first strength.

Because without willpower,

You can't even make choices.

You can't choose to do this or that,

To go left or right.

But it's a strength of brute force that gets things moving,

That allows us to do things.

With acceptance,

It's a greater strength that we need willpower first.

Because acceptance is the ability to be able to open ourselves up to everything and to be able to feel everything.

It's saying that we're strong enough to be able to feel everything and react to nothing.

It's a very wide form of strength,

A very big strength.

Because it's saying there's no threat in life.

There's nothing that can throw us off balance.

There's nothing that we're unwilling to open our arms to,

Because we're beyond being harmed by it.

So this small thing that we're doing here,

Feeling sensations,

Actually has very wide repercussions.

And it goes very deep into our lives,

Into our practice.

Because there may things,

There may be things right now,

That we're genuinely afraid of,

That we genuinely think we can be harmed by.

And maybe we can't even imagine getting to the point where we can completely open our arms to accepting everything.

That's why this is so important.

That's why the sensations are a good beginning.

Because that's all we're ever going to encounter.

However complicated it looks from the outside,

We're only ever going to encounter a sensation as a result of whatever it is we meet.

And if we can accept all of those,

We can accept everything.

And so what we wanna do today,

Tonight,

Is start getting used to switching between this zero point and this one point.

This zero point of tranquility,

Generating awareness,

Generating clarity,

And this one where we use it to push a little bit deeper,

To push into something that makes us uncomfortable.

So we can start to expand our zone of comfortability,

Expand our equanimity.

So if we start to set times to be able to do that,

And we sit a little bit deeper,

Frame it within that context,

That that's what we're doing.

How far can it go?

How far can it go?

I think this is where being an explorer is important.

Don't take someone else's word for it.

Like the Buddha said,

Act on your own experience.

Act from your own reason.

See if it's doing you good,

See if it's doing others good.

That's how we qualify a thing.

I personally know it can go pretty far,

And I'm sure it can go much further.

And so as we sit,

We have six more days to sit after this evening,

Let's just see how far we can individually push it and collectively push it.

How deep can we go into ourselves and our sensations and figure out what we can do?

So I'm gonna start with this one.

I'm gonna start with this one.

How deep can we go into ourselves and our sensations and figure out what we can do?

We're gonna combine the skills that we learned yesterday and today to be able to sharpen our focus even more today.

The mind is like a laser.

If we shine it over a broad area,

It can be used as a light.

Whereas if we narrow it down to a fine point of focus,

It can cut through steel.

So now that we've switched our mind over focusing on sensations,

Let's also start narrowing it down.

Let's see how far we can take our mind.

How microscopic can it go?

So,

So far we've just been using these set areas.

Tonight let's use a different method.

Now as we feel a sensation,

We want to develop the art of moving towards the subtle and away from the gross.

Throughout the whole course,

This is going to be the only way we choose between sensations.

The quality of sensation,

Whatever it is,

Is fine.

We feel it,

We feel it completely,

And we learn to be a quantumist with it,

We don't react to it.

The only way we move towards one and away from another is towards the subtle and away from the gross.

Because that's how we decondition this pattern of the mind of always moving towards the gross.

And it's how we get closer to the fundamental nature of reality by going towards the subtle.

So,

With sensations in particular,

How we do that is that as we're focusing over an area,

And we feel a sensation within that area,

Let's zero our mind onto the sensation we're feeling and make it the total area of our awareness.

Just as when we focused here on the larger triangle,

This became the total area of our awareness.

And then the smaller triangle,

And then the circle.

As we feel a sensation now,

Let's encapsulate our mind within it and focus on feeling it in its entirety.

Take as much time as you need,

Because all we're doing tonight is focusing on the sensations here.

So we have a lot of time to do this.

And see if you can place your entire mind within that sensation.

And then how do we move towards the subtle?

Within that sensation,

Or outside of it,

Within your set area of focus,

See if you feel a more subtle sensation.

Within is better,

Because we can keep on going deeper within.

See if you feel another sensation within that sensation,

Which will naturally be smaller,

Because it's contained within it.

Just like the hall is made up of the boards,

The sensation will be made up of lots of sensations.

And as we get sharper,

We can start to feel into what the sensation is made up of.

Start to feel the borders of the sensation,

The quality of the sensation,

The size of the sensation,

The shape of the sensation.

Is it fixed?

Is it a shape?

Or does it change?

Is it pliable?

And as we get to intimately know this sensation,

Slowly start to feel the other minute sensations within it.

And as we feel these other minute sensations within it,

Take our whole mind and place them within one of those sensations.

Fixate on another smaller sensation.

If we continue to do this,

Then we inevitably go closer to the fundamental layer of reality.

The only thing that stops our progress is our ability to perceive finer sensations,

And as we do perceive finer sensations,

Our ability to be non-reactive to them.

Our ability to be equanimous.

So we wanna be checking ourselves if we're doing this,

If we're truly doing this.

Are we just imagining a smaller area that we wanna put our mind into?

Or are we genuinely feeling a smaller sensation?

That's the first check.

Second check is once I do feel this finer layer of sensations,

Can I remain non-reactive to them?

Can I feel them and not react?

If you start to feel a more subtle layer of sensation,

And it opens up a whole web of sensations within you,

That distracts you and takes you away from your focus,

Then we need to work on coming back and sharpening our awareness again,

Building our equanimity.

If a layer of sensations you feel makes you feel tense and painful,

The same thing.

We need to work on the equanimity.

But remember,

Being thrown into non-reactivity for a second or two,

For a few minutes is no problem.

As long as we're working with it consciously.

As long as we're still working on feeling it and not reacting.

We wanna give ourselves a bit of time to adjust.

Like we said,

Use this 80-20 rule.

If something becomes uncomfortable,

Exists on our uncomfortable edge,

It's no problem.

Use it as an opportunity to train ourselves to be able to feel a little bit more.

But then if it truly does start to overpower us,

Then just come back.

Broaden the focus again,

Relax again.

Come back to feeling the breath if necessary.

And this is what we're gonna work with tonight.

Let's see how deep we can go.

Tomorrow,

We're gonna use this very same skill to go through the entirety of the body.

Through all the sensations that the body contains.

So today,

We want to get as sharp as possible.

We wanna sharpen that mind as much as we can,

Because tomorrow it needs to cut.

And anyone who's done any gardening before,

Knows that we need sharp tools if we wanna dig into the garden.

So that's what we're doing today.

We're getting our tools sharp so we can use them correctly tomorrow.

Let's start the evening session with a bit of standing meditation.

If you're at home,

Simply follow the instructions for standing meditation that we gave earlier in the day.