Who Gets Wise With Practical Meditation With Niels Lyngsø

Neils, a Danish meditation coach, and I explore the Buddhist concept of anatta (not-self) and how many people mistakenly identify with transient aspects such as their body, personal stories, or viewpoints. Neils explains how this identification can cause confusion and suffering, but through meditation, individuals can move beyond these attachments toward a direct experience of reality. The discussion highlights the practical benefits of meditation in reducing ego-driven problems, fostering clarity, and promoting a peaceful mind. This conversation blends Buddhist philosophy with practical insights for daily life.

Transcript

Hold this welcome.

This is Josh and today I have Niels Lundsø with me today and Niels is Danish and I'm living here in Denmark so I'm gonna just jump in to the the standard question but we have a I would say a fairly deep practitioner here so this answer I'm looking forward to this answer who is Niels and what kind of work does he do?

Well first of all thank you for inviting me I'm happy to be here and so who am I well that is that is a very basic question right and I can of course give you the conventional answer and say that I am a 56 year old man living in Denmark and I work as a meditation coach and also as an author and translator and then I can give you you know my life story in a few chapters and that would be sort of the traditional way of saying who am I so I'll give you a biography right but the question is are we our biographies is that is that who we are and that's actually a very fundamental question to Buddhism as I'm sure we can get into yeah this is well first off I'm sorry I didn't even say hello we this weird notion of talking before the show and then kind of forgetting my entire attention was pronouncing the name there at the beginning so but this is a total fundamental question you know who am I you know what is the self I think it's something that we all take for granted you know and we just most people just gloss over it but in in Buddhist teachings and practice and study to this notion of anatta not self you know it seems really maybe a little bit I don't know not unapproachable but it's it's a very easy topic to really mess up and you know there's all kinds of theoretical ways but there's more practical ways there's so much to say and and so many ways to to be confused on it but I think some of these easier notions of yeah what are what are we identifying with and I would just say right off the bat most people identify with a story right there's a story of what they are who they are and I think maybe in meditation practice there's a notion of actually at least practicing towards a direct experience of our reality instead of a story about reality because a lot of people live in stories about reality instead of a direct experience and so but the easiest way for me to look at this is you know what am I identifying with and yeah how much am I taking personally you know what am I taking personally so if we want to jump more into this notion of self and not self I also think this notion of not self is like a strategy and this this this self we have is like a construct that we create and sometimes it can be really helpful and sometimes and oftentimes it gets us in trouble and it leads to problems and challenges that don't necessarily have to be there but yeah the the poly word for this is anatta Niels how do you how do you see this how do you tell people about this and teach people about this or what when it's right to do so yeah you're absolutely right it is a very difficult point to make because people get very confused if you say you have no self of course I do or does it what does that even mean so yeah it's very confusing so I like a slightly different wording of anata so you could say that there is no core self that's perhaps a bit easier to understand so you could say that well that would imply that there is an experience of self an ever-changing experience of a self but there is no stable permanent core self so that makes it a bit easier but but I agree with you that the best way to approach it or to sort of use a Socratic methods to to make people sort of go further into this question is to ask who do you identify with so it could be the story so I could I could have told you in the introduction five or ten different stories of who I am how I became who I am today and and so can everybody everybody can tell different stories of their lives their autobiography up until this point and sort of believing that that kind of defines who they are and another thing people often identify with is their body so are you your body what if you do not have contact with your body are you then not there and and just to mention a third possibility which is perhaps more relevant to meditation so people often identify with a point of view so we we have this sort of intuitive sense of myself being somewhere inside my head so and you can even hear that in the way we speak so you can for instance hear people say when they talk about meditation experience oh there was an itch up in my scalp or I had pain down in my knees so you're saying up and down front and back so you're having sort of you're defining a space from a point of view so there is this center point that is supposed to be you but what's interesting is that if you apply a certain technique in meditation sort of a variant of the well-known body scan then you can actually try to find that point of view so if you if you if you are pretty good at body scan then you can sort of try to scan inwards through the head and find that point and spoiler alert you're not gonna find it and it's a very strange experience to try to do that it is and I mean kind of on a surface level it can seem like for those of us like myself that identify wrongly and unhelpfully a lot of times with thinking and cognition it does seem to come somewhere from that region but when you really try to nail it down you're right and some people that are visual they'll the thoughts or the images seem to be kind of projected out in front of auditory then we can notice you know what voice the sounds are coming from if it's our own voice like a teacher or a parent or it's it's not really noticeable so it depends I think I've hear some teachers say that most people primarily think in either you know in words or sound and then or images and you know I think we all do both to a little degree perhaps and the I think the rare more rare one is is actually seeing words seeing the actual printed words but yeah you know this is another thing people identify with is emotions right that that's who they are and they're really I mean how attached are we to whatever we're identifying with as a self I think is it's an interesting thing and if we really want to start investigating further to well perception I mean I don't see as many people identifying with perception but then there's the the cognition you know the volition and then there's consciousness you get really super ultra spiritual people sometimes and they think oh I'm consciousness you know and this so these can be broken down to am let's just start with the body that's the most recognizable one for most of us am I the body you know is that who I am and you gave a great example of what happens when we don't have contact with our body then what right maybe in a dreamless sleep or in a coma something or other circumstances you know then what do I own the body you know I don't feel it's helpful for anyone else to own us even though we hear some people claiming that maybe corporations might someday down the road through different technologies put in her body through GMOs or injection whatever that they might claim some kind of proprietary rights on the body I don't not really talking about that but there's a sense that you know I own this nobody else owns this I own it but if that was the case you know I would be able to kind of control it however I want I would say just like we have ownership over something else right we can have more control you know change my heartbeat rate instantly you know I don't want to age all this stuff so that doesn't seem very plausible and then am I in the body that seems to be kind of my you know prevailing sentiment when I investigate it but you know where is it like a little homunculus in there somewhere is there a little guy inside of there you know like where if I'm inside the body where where am I inside this body you know some days I'm in identifying more with where the pain is or the pleasure head or heart and then the other one that's a little bit more is the bodies in me so I guess this would be more of a perception like I'm everything all right I mean I'm I'm in the body of the bodies in me so so that would mean like I'm identifying with like the whole universe and then somehow right I guess I'm yeah so and that doesn't really cut it either right so we can apply those four investigative modes to to the body the feeling perception thinking cognition volition and then consciousness and when we get people's answers to these things that investigate they don't really there's they they're different so so this what does this leave us with I mean I don't know how much we want to keep this topic but it is really important so what I found more helpful is this and then you said no self so it I like this terminology of not self and I like this no core self which is really relatable because some people say there's no essence right that this core I think most people have oh yeah there's if you try to like I think they say a banana tree you can cut cut it apart but it's hollow inside so if you if you really deconstruct it then there's really nothing to it but it's it's like a strategy this not self one of the other hugs throw in one more analogy that I found helpful that I heard from a teacher is the Big Dipper right there is no Big Dipper there's the stars up there but this it's a helpful construct for identifying those types of stars but you know there's not in and of itself a Big Dipper so it to me it's like a strategy and at the end of the day there's a shift I find that was helpful or is helpful when it's made is is viewing kind of more experience in terms of processes and things and parts unfolding and processes happening happening that are conditional that nothing really happens randomly or like you know because I'm an agent making it happen that everything is dependent on causes and conditions and we can affect seemingly affects are some conditions but those conditions can't be maintained in the long term and when we think we can maintain conditions in the long term to the way we like you know and that's how we're gonna be happy well you know it's it's it's inevitable that we won't be able to control the conditions so yeah I think that I've said enough about that for now yeah it's a huge topic and it's difficult to to communicate because I think like with so many other things you actually need to experience this yourself before you really get it and even me saying that experience it yourself that shows us how the language keeps messing things up for us so even if if some of the listeners might get like an intellectual understanding of what you were just saying which is fine and the good beginning then the real transformative power of this tradition and these teachings only come when you actually experience this absolutely and this will bring us to our next main point that we want to talk about today is what's the whole point of meditation you know this this notion yeah it is just words like these are words these are labels that we're trying to point to the real experience not the same thing as the experience and it's just without the practice I'll just say real quick all that stuff that I just said it can only be really touched at on a surface level so to see and know this for ourselves so I'll just throw this back to Niels what's the point of meditation Wendy and I who a gal from Australia that's a meditation coach we do a Q&A at roughly every month and we did the fundamental question you know why meditate so I'll just it's a it's a huge question but Niels has written recently about this and I think he's really it's a really good comprehensive understanding of this and a good way to explain it to you yeah okay wow that's that's a huge question so it might take me some minutes to to give a proper answer but yeah so basically you could say that there as I see it there is like a whole spectrum of reasons and you can sort of see it like there's a low end of the pool and the deep end of the pool so in the low end of the pool you meditate to calm your nervous system that's you spend 10 or 15 minutes a day focusing on your breath and it kind of calms your nerves and that's nice it's a good thing so this sort of basic mindfulness that would be one reason so it's it's perhaps the best way to calm your nervous system certainly better than alcohol or any other kind of drug so that's just a very basic reason it gives you calm peace but then if you sort of continue into the deeper end of the pool which will also demand like perhaps a little more than 10 or 15 minutes on the cushion every day and especially some retreat time I think I'm a very big fan of meditation retreats I think a lot of the good stuff only happens if you go on retreat so if I should try to explain what's going on in the deep end it might take like I said a couple of minutes because as I see it what we train in meditation is basically our clarity so you could say we have like these two forms of of clarity which could be called attention and awareness so initially you are mostly aware that you are training your attention because the beginners instructions are focus on your breath every time your attention wanders off you bring it back so you're training your attention you're trying to stabilize your attention but the thing is that you're actually also at the same time training your awareness which is this kind of more panoramic peripheral thing and you can make it like an analogy with vision and and it's notable how we it's almost impossible to talk about consciousness and related subjects without using visual metaphors so you could say attention is like the spotlight and awareness is like the floodlight so you have these two different kinds of light in your clarity or in your consciousness or whatever so to make the analogy with with vision if you if you've ever seen like a newborn baby who has not learned to focus so the eyes are just going around in the head like this or if you met imagine yourself being super stressed out or perhaps very drunk and your eyes are just going everywhere and so they what's happening there is that you are focusing your you're putting your attention here then there then there your attention is moving or sort of sorry your eyes are moving around very quickly which means that it's actually difficult also to orient yourself in the room so the background will kind of be hazy when when your attention when when your eyes are moving like that and I keep saying attention because that's of course the analogy so if your attention is very unstable moving quickly around from focus point to focus point then also your awareness will be hazy so when you train your attention to stabilize your awareness will be more clear and this is where the good stuff begins because when your awareness becomes more clear then you can begin this other type of practice where you're sort of not just stabilizing and calming and relaxing but you're actually investigating and furthermore even deconstructing what you perceive and this training when you actually start working with your clarity this is where you for instance you get much better emotional regulation because you're able to perceive tiny impulses of let's say irritation before they grow up and become anger or you are able to perceive tiny impulses of worry before it grows up and becomes anxiety so this is this is why you can get a much better emotional regulation from training your awareness it you sort of get to know your your feelings and your emotions much better and by the way I came to think of when you talked about what we identify with and a lot of people identify with their emotions I there was a few lines from Leonard Cohen that popped into my mind Leonard Cohen who was as people probably know also a Buddhist and he has these lines where he say I don't trust my inner feelings they come and go and then that's something he knows because he's a Buddhist he has trained his mind yes and it speaks to impermanence to you know that that why would we want to kind of latch on and grab something and identify with it and it kind of solidify it when it's really kind of impossible to do that there was one point that you mentioned that now I'm blanking on I love this metaphor though of that oh that's what it is the the subtlety and I think one of the reasons that this becomes more possible in meditation perhaps is it's kind of like an artificial container right we're minimizing sense input and like you said the calming of an asamata practice it just allows more stability and unified collectiveness and things settle down and so it seems like this system is more open and responsive or more capable even to seeing the subtleties of reality right so so the the energetic system can become more notice a lot more subtleties and this is where you know when it starts off it a lot of times especially meditation unless it's I guess coming up from a past memory or something that gets triggered and just floods out right away that usually they arise a little bit more subtly and then the awareness is already kind of more attention is more trained to maybe see it and the awareness expands and so there's more radar space I guess could be the way to put it and yeah so this way it's it we're not taught in school really how to train awareness I mean train attention really even I think the military does some of this right there attention or something like this but it's a different type of attention and awareness we're just not really even taught that and yeah yeah I I once had the thought that if if I should boil down meditation instructions to one word it would have to be in French and I would say attention attention that's all that that's the only instruction you need basically right so yeah there's a lot in in what you just said and I and I agree with the point about children in school it's so ironic that we always ask the children to pay attention but we never teach them how which is so stupid because it would be quite easy I think to just start every every day with five minutes of just basic mindfulness and I I'm sure that would be a good investment for for learning totally agree couldn't really agree more I it's it's really important in practical I think in today's society where you know attention is is capitalized on you know it's a precious commodity people's attention the trillions that advertisers spend on it there's there's so much science involved in getting people's attention and getting them to come back tons and tons of money and effort spent on this I don't know maybe this is too much of a generalization but the general psyche I think of current-day society is so fractured if we look at just media it's just chop chop chop and look at films and media from you know 20 30 years ago even and there was these long sequences and people would it could could pay to sit and see a long sequence but now it's every few seconds or multiple times a second it's chopped up and either I think it trains people's attention to have less attention span and I'm wondering what it's doing to to our psyche to of not being able to have more wholeness and yeah interest in staying with one thing for a long time so this notion of training the mind even just to stay with something training the attention to stay with one thing and and also at the same time training your awareness because I think it's it's it's nice to keep up this distinction because like we're just saying the attention can be captured very easily and we can sort of fall into these kind of hyper focus rabbit hole on the internet or whatever but actually what we need to train is to have a more balance a better balance between awareness and attention and very nice definition of mindfulness he said mindfulness is the optimal balance between attention and awareness something like that and I really like that because this distinction is is not only a question of spotlight and floodlight or narrow and parametro panoramic it's also a question of these two forms of clarity they they live in different hemisphere in in the brain so one is the right brain and the other is the left brain so for instance the self that we talked a lot about the self is very much connected to attention so you're identifying with what you are paying attention to the awareness is much more selfless so that's where you find another that's in that's in the awareness and the awareness is also more holistic whereas the attention is more on task and problem-solving so there's actually a lot of differences between these two modes of being in your consciousness and if like you say our culture is training us to have this sort of rapid-fire shifting attention that really is bad for our awareness and and so we are we are used to constantly moving our attention around very rapidly and that means that this more holistic more panoramic more selfless part of ourselves is sort of it's vanishing it's a really good point awareness is just endlessly fascinating you know this this thing that can't be kind of purified and it can't be corrupted it just knows it just observes it just notices we're using metaphors here the one I like to use a lot is a movie theater right where sometimes we're so engrossed in the drama on the screen that we forget that it's we're actually in a movie theater that we could stand up at any time turn around and look towards the projector and see the light that's actually coming that's that's creating the whole thing doesn't really have a location you know and yeah it's I'm always fascinated though but like what blocks access to awareness you know what what hinders it you know there's five five standard hindrances in Buddhism and that comes into play here but I I wonder if there's any other and speaking of Buddhist stuff here you know when I heard this this movement of practical Buddhism to me it's I had I had to chuckle a little bit because it's a little bit redundant to me because you know the Buddha is said to he knew all this stuff the teaching of the handful leaves right that he that his his knowledge and awareness and knowing was all the leaves in the forest but he only taught one handful leaves suffering in the end of suffering and he wouldn't he wouldn't even answer any of these metaphysical questions right and right it would just suffering the end of suffering and so it's very practical or stress we could say stress you know that's our just unsatisfactoriness the very practical thing that we've all met with and that's all he that's that was the core and what he addressed and so it has a lot of Buddhist stuff has gotten a lot I would say quite a bit away sometimes from that core teaching of suffering in the end of suffering and I just had to had that point that out a little bit and then one last thing here start framing this in and we're talking about kind of cultivating and Samatha and Vipassana type practices and mindfulness here and I guess where does this fit in to with daily life because you know in kind of Buddhist teachings I said before the show it's it's often trained in are framed in terms of some meet sila samadhi panya are you know ethics cultivation you know meditative cultivations meditative practices and then wisdom that's what's called the threefold training I think and it's actually kind of a handy model of the noble eightfold path right it's sort of boiling down these eight points to only three to make it easier so yeah and I think it's an excellent way to sort of sum up the Buddhist teachings who had a nice way of reframing it he said it's get your fish together concentrate your mind and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality so that's it that's the three points and I think that's that's basically it that's what you need to do you need and maybe I would add traditionally it has been seen like you start off with the Sheila you start off with with morality and then when you're sort of good enough with that then you can get your first meditation instructions and then you have to have your concentrated mind then you can get sort of the more advanced techniques and more advanced practices and you know the young monk going to the Zen monastery wanting to become a monk and and he's just giving a broom you know and you can sweep the floor for five years and then maybe we will teach you something so that's the traditional way but I in my own guidance when I guide people I try to sort of work on all all three levels at the same time I don't think you have to start with like five years of morality training before you can start focusing on your breath because the thing is that these three different categories of practice they enhance each other so when you when you get a more concentrated mind it's actually easier to get wisdom and when you have more wisdom it's easier to behave morally and when you behave morally it's easier to concentrate because you don't have all these thoughts about all the terrible stuff you did and you so on so they're kind of feeding on each other.

I think we are transition to wisdom.

It's probably easy to start off by saying what wisdom is not.

Wisdom is not the same as intelligence.

It's not even correlated with intelligence.

You can be wise and not intelligent or vice versa and it's not the same as intuition because it takes the more deliberation to be wise than to be intuitive and and then also to me a central point is that wisdom is first and foremost a practical thing.

It's something that is working in a and it's sort of contextual,

It's situational,

It's a solution to a specific situation so you cannot boil it down to words of wisdom that you find you know in the Bible or or in Buddhist scriptures.

Words can never be wisdom in themselves Wisdom is doing the right thing in a complex situation and this also relates back to what we spoke about in the intro.

So know thyself doesn't mean that you have to know your autobiography,

You have to know your story.

It means you have to know your own user's manual.

So how do you actually work?

What stops you?

What makes you go?

What can you do?

What can you not do?

These are these are such great important points.

I want to get your take on like gnosis though when it comes to wisdom.

I mean this is from direct knowing and then you know how do we I guess cultivate wisdom.

The other thing that I was just wondering about too is the the morality link here or the the ethics link.

I guess it's probably tongue-in-cheek that some gangsters are considered wise guys,

Right?

I don't know if it's just that's kind of supposed to be humorous or whatever but there's also this notion of wisdom of knowing kind of when to be quiet and not say anything you know or you know yeah exactly how do we the situational thing yeah it's it's it's interesting to see different degrees of skillful action in the world and how that comes about yeah it just strikes me now that wisdom is actually closely connected to the idea of no self or amitabha because it kind of arises situation where there is no self so if you can sort of hold your own self back hold your ego back and not wanting to control the situation to your own advantage or to some fixed idea about about how this should be or how this should go then wisdom can arise but it's actually not your wisdom I think some some wise man said that there is actually no wise men or women there are only wise actions so wisdom can arise in a specific situation if the people involved in the situation can let go of their selves and their egos then the wisdom will arise it's already there as potential but usually it gets sort of hindered by our egos our ways our ways of trying to take control but it's actually there in the clarity or in the awareness you could say when if you can just relax relax then the wisdom will arise well that's I think this is a beautiful place to start wrapping up Niels I so appreciate you coming on today and and going over the topics we did and I find their utmost importance to meditators and it's good getting your perspective insights wisdom and how you operate to around all these what would what would you like to leave any kind of message maybe to wrap up okay thank you I think if I would have a little message to leave people with it would be that I like this pragmatic approach that's why I call what I do pragmatic Buddhism because Buddhism is pragmatic or was at least in the beginning but what I mean by that is that you don't you don't have to be like an Olympian champion in meditation you can you can start wherever you are and if you if what you can do is meditate ten minutes a day that's fine if you can meditate in in the bus or on the bicycle that's fine I think it's just and you can start anywhere with one of the three trainings the morality the concentration of the wisdom keep it keep it simple keep it pragmatic don't don't aim too high very cool so may all beings everywhere come to know the most optimal and ideal straightforward practical pragmatic approach that will be a benefit for themselves and for others and for all beings everywhere and may all beings everywhere realize awakening and be free