Vipassana Meditation: Day 6 - Evening Discourse

You you Now we really start to get an idea of how deep this technique can go We talked about it starting to spread into and cover every area of our lives but this is the first step we really take to extending it beyond ourselves and It's a step that can bring up a lot of uncomfortable issues for people as they start to really apply it and not just apply it as a concept It's nice to sit here and to be able to tell the world we love them and send love to everyone in a peaceful way but to actually do the activity to actually do the practice and And to take this loving awareness to each individual that we encounter internally and externally Starts to bring up a lot Because it helps us to realize all of the layers that we put in between ourselves and just expressing love to people Something that we're constantly doing And I think it's worth saying here that this isn't a judicial system This isn't us going through our life and saying I approve of you.

I don't approve of you It's not a judgment of action right doing wrongdoing.

It's nothing like that It's a statement of internal freedom Because just as we go through our system And we want to know that there's nothing waiting for us inside of us that is acting against the total system There is nothing throwing us off from being able to make a free choice and take free action We want to do the same thing externally To make sure that our connection with the world our connection with other people Isn't something that we're internally reactive to or externally reactive to That we're choosing how to engage with everyone,

And that's what we're doing here.

We're wiping the slate clean Because what's the opposite of this state of internal freedom?

It would be saying that every single person that does anything to me that I don't approve of has power over me Because they have power to shift my perspective which creates my reality So it's actually a very deep form of power even the average person that we contact Say something do something we don't like if we carry that and we're able to be manipulated and pushed by it It means that we've just given this person control over us Instead of having the control over ourselves Nelson Mandela said something wonderful about this When he was just about to leave prison and finally be set free He said that when I walked through the door and I walked up to the gates that would finally lead to lead to my freedom I Realized I had to leave hatred and bitterness behind Otherwise I would still be in prison That's exactly what we're talking about If we let our captors Our persecutors if we have them Our imagined persecutors generate hate Generate bitterness in us generate any form of reactivity then we're allowing them to have control over us We're giving them strings to pull that allows them to be in charge of us Instead of taking back control ourselves and That's what we do by staying in a stable loving awareness is we take the power back ourselves And we stop saying I'm going to love you if I'm going to love you if you affirm my ego if you say nice things about me if you give me gifts I wouldn't say no to some gifts,

But I Don't know if I would say no to some gifts,

But I would say no to some gifts And we get to the point where we can just love someone regardless not if they do all those things Because otherwise what does it mean you stop giving me gifts you stop affirming my ego stop saying nice things about me.

I stopped loving you I I let it feel like love to me if it's dependent upon this shallow exchange This shallow transactional exchange to me.

That's not love that's something else What would our model for love be then our model for love would be a vending machine I give vending machine some money it gives me something juicy to eat we keep each other happy for a short controlled period of time purely transactional.

I think that's the wrong model of love.

I think a better model is trees.

Trees take in carbon dioxide,

Take in toxins,

And they give out oxygen.

That's all they do.

They're just there growing.

They're giving us goodness back,

And they're taking out negativity from our environment to be able to provide for us.

And that's what we become like when we start integrating this practice of metta bhavana.

Whatever we encounter,

We hold the ability to be able to just give out love.

Just spread this outwards.

Spread it inwards as well.

And then we step into that thing we started talking about a few days ago,

Which is where our consciousness produces our conditions.

Our conditions don't produce our consciousness.

The conditions in this case being other people,

The consciousness we're carrying towards our contact with them is love.

Stable loving awareness.

It becomes a danger just keeping the practice internal while we sit on the mat.

Even just doing metta bhavana in an internal way closed off on our mat.

We can sit here,

Think we're very kind,

Loving people,

Sending love to everyone.

And then we get up,

And we actually encounter the world,

And we don't meet the world with that love.

It's a danger that all of us are going to face,

And we're going to face it again and again and again.

Every single time that we step out of here.

Because it's easy to live in this idea of love,

And it's a little bit more difficult to actually carry that love with us.

And every single person we meet,

Offer that to them first.

When we meet each other,

That's what I lead with.

I lead with love.

To do that again and again,

Despite the changing conditions.

It's exactly the same task as going through the body,

And despite what we meet in the body,

Meeting it with our clarity.

Meeting it with our non-reactive,

Meeting it with our non-reactive,

Equanimous awareness.

Giving that same benefit to the people that we meet.

And like I said,

It's not a statement of approval or disapproval.

It's not this idea of loss and gain,

Weighing things up.

It's saying,

Regardless,

I'm going to meet you with love.

Because it's the best thing I can do for me,

And it's the best thing I can do for you.

So why would we choose anything else?

It's a net positive for everyone.

If I meet you with love,

It means that I'm at my best.

I'm at cause.

I'm internally non-reactive.

I'm in a powerful position.

And if I meet you with love,

I'm giving you my best as well.

So I'm doing the best thing I can do for you,

As well as the best thing I can do for me.

I think that's a great way to live.

And I think the more people that could truly embody this,

The more we will live in a beautiful and happy world.

Just that it's,

Um,

It can be challenging.

And we can see that.

Because what we're going to encounter,

If we haven't already,

While we've been practicing this,

Is our internal record.

As we start to go back through our lives,

We're going to realize that we've been keeping an internal record of what we think of every single person we've met.

And it might not be a list of conscious opinions,

But it is a list of impressions.

A long list of impressions that everyone has made on us.

And what we think of them,

And how we've decided to react to them.

And as we go through this internal record,

We're going to have to decide if it's more important for us to keep these judgments,

Or if it's more important to us to live in this stable loving awareness.

And that's a personal choice for everyone here.

Because some people here may have suffered some real wrongdoing at the hands of others.

You know,

May have suffered some things that it's difficult for them to be able to let go of,

And forgive others for.

And like I said,

It's not a statement of approval of the other person.

It's simply choosing internal freedom over internal slavery.

And it's a choice whether we want to make that transition or not.

Story about two monks,

An old monk and a young monk,

Traveling together.

And they get to a river,

And there's a woman there waiting to cross the river.

And she asks the monks for their help.

So the old monk says,

Okay,

Jump on my back.

So she jumps on his back,

He carries a over the river,

Puts it down on the other side,

And the monks go on their way.

And there's a woman there waiting to cross the river.

And she asks the monks for their help.

So the old monk says,

Okay,

Jump on my back.

So she jumps on his back,

He carries her over the river,

Puts it down on the other side,

And the monks go on their way.

Two miles later,

The young monk looks at the old monk and says,

I can't believe you carried that woman over the river.

What were you doing?

Obviously,

Breaking monkish regulations to touch a woman and all of that.

The old monk said,

I put her down two hours ago,

You're still carrying her.

And that's what we're all doing.

We've all left our contact with all these people in our history and in our past,

And we're still carrying them.

Carrying them on our shoulders,

Weighing us down.

And now we have the opportunity to go through them one by one,

Put them down,

And approach them with this stable,

Loving awareness.

What's a good model?

Another good model for us.

It's the sun in the sky,

Where we've just been looking at,

Where we're meditating.

The sun is just shining light towards us,

Giving us nourishment all the time.

Without the sun,

We could not exist on this planet.

We're neither too close to the sun for it to be too hot for us,

Too far away for us to be a block of ice.

We have exactly the right conditions we need to be able to survive.

And the sun doesn't need anything from us.

It just shines regardless,

Giving us nourishment.

And the only thing that interferes between the sun giving us this nourishment,

This stable,

Loving awareness,

Is our changing atmospheric conditions.

Every now and then we change our atmosphere,

And we interfere and block this light coming towards us.

Otherwise,

We get this stable light coming at us,

Nourishing us.

And this is what we're like when we're at CORE's.

We have the ability to walk through life and just bring this loving awareness.

When I was living in London when I was younger,

I didn't like it very much.

But I realized something.

Even then,

Even in the midst of me being there and not enjoying the experience,

I realized that I wasn't in London.

London was in me.

That the London that I didn't like,

The London I didn't approve of,

Was a mental construct,

An idea of a place,

Not the place itself.

And even though I'd had that realization,

I couldn't quite actualize it.

I still didn't like London.

I realized it was my fault.

I realized it was my creation.

But I was still contacting that London that was my creation.

When I came back to London after a year of practicing Vipassana,

I remember being in the airport,

Waiting to come back to London,

And realizing I wasn't going back somewhere.

I was going to somewhere.

That I'd finally been able to actualize that realization that I'd had when I was younger.

That I was going somewhere new.

And I had the chance to go there with a different awareness.

Take a different level of clarity and to see what I found.

And lo and behold,

What I found in London was a beautiful place.

Full of wonderful spiritual people doing wonderful things.

Not the London that I'd left.

Because they were both Londons that existed inside of me,

Dependent upon my internal conditions.

If I met London with love,

It would produce one result.

If I met London with hate and bitterness,

It would produce another result.

And both of those options are consistently available to us.

Do we want to meet London with love?

Do we want to meet it with hate and bitterness?

Or a myriad of other things.

We have that choice consistently in front of us.

And we're going to get to make that choice again and again and again.

And for the next few days while we're here,

We get to practice it.

We get to practice and see how we're meeting all these facets of our universe.

And then when we go out there,

We get to test it.

And we get to see how we do once we're thrown back into the mix.

Once we encounter all the people closest to us in our lives.

Once we encounter all the rest of them.

We say,

How do I do this time?

How do I do with this next person?

How do I do with this next situation?

Do I bring my love into it?

Or am I thrown into reactivity?

And of course,

If we are thrown into reactivity,

Don't judge ourselves for it.

Simply come back to the practice.

Clean the slate again.

And then come back.

May you also be happy.

May you also be free.

And see how we do with that.

Coming back into it.

And then,

Like I said,

Everything becomes this big deal.

And then,

Like I said,

Everything becomes this big dance.

And all we're learning is how this isn't contained within a singular area.

It starts to spread to every area of our lives slowly.

At first we think,

When we learn a technique like this,

There's going to be some big switch where we go from the mundane to the mystical.

Something's going to happen.

A shining light's going to come down and it's going to be like,

Bam,

Now we're in the spiritual practice away from this focusing on the breath and all this effort that I'm putting in.

But over time we start to realize it's not like that.

Not this practice.

It's just a gradual thing.

We slowly start to move over and blur the boundary between the secular and the sublime.

Between the mundane and the super mundane.

And this is one of the practices that helps us to do that.

As we start to go internally,

And we start to blur the boundary inside,

And then we can come externally,

And we can start to meet the world with love,

We blur the boundary there too.

And it all becomes one thing as opposed to two things that we're separating.

And it's easier for us to be able to carry that into our world.

There are examples,

Footsteps left by other people for us,

How to access this awareness and what the ultimate state of it looks like.

And Jesus is a very obvious one.

The example usually given is his path to the cross.

He was tortured,

Persecuted horribly,

And then hung on a cross from his hands and feet by nails.

And what he had to say to his captors was,

Forgive them,

Father,

They know not what they do.

That's someone who's reached a point of stable,

Loving awareness,

Who is now in a position that the world cannot throw off center.

That is a very high position to attain,

But it is there.

And if there's anything that we can encounter that can throw us off,

Then we shouldn't be upset at ourselves about it,

But we should remember that it is a possibility to reach that state.

And remember that that's a state of strength.

Like we said,

Acceptance,

The second strength.

We can accept everything and feel everything for what it is when it's no longer a threat to us.

We have to react,

We have to shell up,

We have to protect ourselves because we register it as a threat.

It's like the difference between fighting a professional trained fighter who can actually harm us and fighting a two-year-old.

When a two-year-old comes and wants to fight with us,

We know it's just a game,

And we're not worried about them doing anything.

We can roll with them,

We can play with them,

Let them do whatever they want and hit us.

It's not going to damage us.

We can just accept it.

Because if we're fighting a professional fighter set on doing us harm,

Then we have to take it a little bit more seriously.

And as we change,

The nature of our enemy changes,

And it stops being an enemy,

It starts just being another.

So as we get stronger,

We face a different opponent,

We face a different dance partner,

One that becomes less threatening and more engaging as we go through all of this.

I remember doing the dishes once and staring out the window,

Being distracted by this beautiful little squirrel that was running around in my back garden in London.

I just remember being captivated at how beautiful it was.

I just think,

Oh,

I could just stand here and stare at you all day,

You're wonderful.

And it's so easy to do that with animals,

Just to look at an animal and be full of love.

Humans are animals too.

So why can't we just look at each other and just be full of love,

Just be fascinated in the same way that we're fascinated by these little animals that we look at,

That generate this love in us.

I feel like it's a practice that really shifts everything that we experience.

It's become a cliché to greet and say goodbye with Namaste in the yoga world.

But what that statement actually means is the God inside of me greets the God inside of you.

And if I'm just a God,

Just a being at cause with infinite power hiding inside a human skin,

And you're just a God with infinite power hiding inside a human skin,

And we're just playing this dance,

We're all just Krishna in drag,

Then why would we meet each other with anything other than love?

And I like that.

That's what I think when I say Namaste.

The God inside of me greets the God inside of you.

So let's see if we can do this.

Let's see if we can engage with ourselves as these infinitely powerful beings that are not threatened by the external world and can accept it,

Are not threatened by the internal world and can accept it.

We start that here and it continues there.

So let's see if we can do that today.

Namaste everyone.

Let's practice.

If anyone needs to go to the bathroom,

Get a drink of water,

Shake your legs out.

Now is the time to do it.