Meditation 101 | Foundations Of Meditation & Mindfulness (1/3)

Meditation 101 provides a sweeping overview of meditative development: explore the intrinsic value of meditation, frameworks for understanding meditation and the background to traditional practices for developing present moment awareness. In this "101" series, learn about foundational concepts, the relationship of meditation and healing as well as the samadhi states and siddhis.

Transcript

Hi, My name is Keith Parker with Field Dynamics and in this talk we're going to discuss the path of meditation. So it's a series of discussions about meditation from beginning stages, Foundational concepts, And through how meditation and healing can be understood as one process in a sense, And also about advanced stages of meditation known as the Samadhi states and some of the resultant features known as the Siddhis. So this particular first talk is about foundations. So maybe, Depending, You may be coming to this from completely different places, Right? Everybody has a different relationship to meditation. Some people have sat a lot, Some people have sat a little. Regardless, This should be useful. So meditation in its most basic sense means a practice which sharpens your awareness, Sharpens and refines the attention. So if you think about your experience of life, Your experience of the moment, Whatever the quality of your attention is, The quality of your interface with what's happening in the present is going to be a significant determiner, Have a significant contribution to the quality of your actual, Your life, Your experience in general. And we're well aware of the kind of daydreaming mind or the fantasy or imaginative oriented mind that might not be present, Might obviously not be present when you catch yourself. But there's subtler layers. The idea of meditation in general or the levels in meditation is that there's actually subtler and subtler levels that as one becomes more clear and more present, They're actually able to be that much more grounded in the moment. And what's more important than the moment? That's a really good question. That is more valuable than enhancing and increasing your capacity to be present, To experience your life in each moment. I'd say that there are a few things, If anything, That is a candidate more suited for some time spent, For some investment of time and energy to develop that skill. And it certainly is a skill. Meditation is not straightforward in the sense that to develop presence, To develop in one sense mindfulness, Does take quite a bit of practice. And there is a rigorous historical record, Let alone if you just sit yourself, You'll find out how quickly, How busy the mind is. So all meditation practices and skills are going to enhance present moment awareness. That's the commonality. And there are a lot of ways to go about that. Now you could say that the development in part is to increase your dispassionate observational skill. So that means to be able to witness or to perceive what is arising in your mind, The thoughts, The feelings, And to become more and more neutral towards them. And in becoming more neutral towards them, The them, The they, Are understood as objects. They're understood as not you. You see the difference between the perceiver, The seat of how it is that you're perceiving that object. And you see that that thing that is stimulating a particular thought or object or the object of the thought, The thought object, The thought form, To see that that is actually not you. And the more disidentified you become, The more able you are to be neutral towards the phenomena of what arises in the mind. So this is the classical path. It is the movement from the busy mind to quieting the mind and all along the way becoming more and more of a neutral witness, A dispassionate observer, Until you get even more odd and perplexing and paradoxical way down at the deepest levels, Which we'll get to. So Eckhart Tolle, I have a quote here. I have a little board I'm reading off of. Eckhart Tolle has, Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, Be the awareness behind them. Right? Really, Really simple. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, Be the awareness behind them. So that's what we're trying to get to. We're trying to get to that awareness, Trying to get to that wellspring of where it is that perception, Awareness, And selfhood are kind of coming from. That's the long term. That's the long term. So meditation is going to be about quieting the mind such that you start to become more aware of what you're previously unaware of. It's like the movie projector. So if you think of the movie projector, We understand that it has lots of frames, Right? And it's kind of spitting out these frames at a particular rate. And what we see is continuity of a story or a narrative. But if we were able to slow down our perception of time, Or to heighten or enhance our acuity of perception, In general we might see a little blitz between the frames. And so those are the space between the thoughts, Or the space between noise and silence. And that silence is that emptiness, That background, That pure awareness. And so we're trying to develop that ability. But the thing is, Is that in general where we start is that there's plenty of noise. There's plenty of distraction and discursive thinking. It's kind of automatic. This is called the monkey mind. And if you sit, If you just sit, Whether you have experience doing this or you're interested now, If you just sit, What you'll find is that the mind is just, You're just generating thoughts all of the time. Without choice, There is no choice whatsoever in where, In how often, And the content of a lot of what the mind is generating. There's like an inertia behind it. And so settling the mind is the object of meditation in part. So this is a little parable to exemplify the point. There are two fish swimming. And this comes from a, I heard this in a David Foster Wallace lecture. It's just great. So, Okay, There are two fish swimming in the ocean or the sea or a river. You take your pick. And they're very young and they, They, They're coming along and they meet a big fish, A big older fish. And they, The older fish says, Hey boys, How's the water? And the two younger fish kind of look at each other and they nod and they go, Oh yeah, Yeah, It's good. It's good. And then they, They swim along. And after a bit, One of them looks to the other and says, Hey, What's water? Okay. So you can be immersed. You can be completely surrounded by something and not know what it is. And meditation is piercing that veil. It's the process of becoming more aware of what you're previously unaware of. And this transference between the unconscious or the subconscious and what is conscious is a critical aspect in understanding what we're trying to do. We're trying to become more aware of what is, Uh, And then what we are. So um, You can think of it as creating a new baseline. This is a good way. Um, If you practice regularly, Which is really the way to have any longterm continuity of development is really to have a standardized practice where you, You develop a particular skill over time. So you pretty much do it every day and you try and keep building that muscle. Um, If you, If you think of it as creating a new baseline, What you might say is wherever your normal baseline of attention is now. What you can do is you can over time, Heighten your awareness. You can heighten your perception of the present moment and after some weeks and some months and then some years, Your baseline of experience, Your normal waking state will be a radically different nature than it was previously, Where your ability to notice your mind, Your thoughts, Your self perception will have increased quite significantly. And again, This is basically saying that your ability to be engaged with life in a sense, With what is happening now, And it's an often used point, But simply to reflect on the simplicity of all life, All of experience is only happening now. It's only happening in the present moment. The future is a projection, The past is a projection in the sense that they only happen in the sense of now and that now really immediately puts us into, Um, Puts us into a kind of interaction with paradox and with profundity because now isn't a moment. A moment is a, Like a picture of, Of, Of a moment, Right? A moment is a, A moment is a picture of a now. And so the now itself is actually more like the river. It's more like a wave. It's more like a flowing thing. And even deeper behind that is that it's not actually capturable. There's no capturing it. There's just being with it as it is. And in a sense now points to a certain kind of simultaneity where it is always now there, The ever present, Right? So I'm not going to, I'm going to use Buddhist meditation as a framework to understand the two primary ways that you may go about meditating. Now I'm not teaching Buddhism. I'm just using it as a framework. So please delineate between those two. Eastern traditions in general, Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, Various others, They have a huge emphasis and a long history on kind of more traditional meditation practice. The emphasis in their spiritual traditions bring up a lot of practices and techniques. And so it's very easy to use those as great kind of maps and topographies for understanding how to approach these things. So in the Buddhist tradition, There are two often said to be two primary ways of meditating. And what we're going to do is have a couple of links on the Field Dynamics website that have free versions of these meditations. So just to give you a sense, If you're not familiar, So one of them is called Samatha and one is called the Vipassana. You know, There's a bunch of scholarly, You know, Conversations around these disagreements and agreements about what, What might exactly mean what in relation to what, And for the sake of this discussion, I'm just going to go, How I present them is just a version of how they may be presented and it's my opinion. So basically if you said you need to sit, You need to sit, You need to meditate, What to do? The meditator says, Well, What technique might I employ? Okay. Now let's think of the kind of the, The two ways, The kind of the furthest this way and the furthest that way approaches you could do. Okay. So in this case, You would concentrate on something. You would say, I'm going to pick an object like my breath or like a body part or like an image in my mind's eye. I'm going to pick an object and I'm going to focus my attention on that one object and all I'm going to do is become more and more single pointed. All of my concentration is going to build around that one object and if any other thing, If any other thought or feeling, Anything else arises in the mind, I'm going to simply come back to that one object. I'm going to negate everything else. I'm going to exclude everything else. I'm going to focus on that one thing. So that is Samatha meditation, Shamatha Samatha. And that is often translated as tranquility. And the reason it is said to be of tranquility is because as you go, As you deepen that state of single point concentration, Very particular things happen and we'll go into that in the Samadhi, The Samadhi talk. So that's one end of the thing. So very simply you choose something and you basically train yourself to ignore everything else. You concentrate on one thing. Now the inversion of that is to simply be aware of whatever arises within the space of the mind. So it's not to focus on one thing with the exclusion of everything else. It is rather to include everything. And the only thing you're doing is you're witnessing, You're observing everything that arises. So you might sit and that might go something like noticing thought, Noticing sensation. Oh, There's an image of this particular memory. And the idea is you just continue to have that awareness, That witnessing consciousness track neutrally with dispassionate observation, Each and everything that continues to arise in your mind. And so sometimes this is called Vipassana or insight meditation. Now there is a huge discussion around what happens when, Are they separate? Is Samatha alone something? Is Vipassana alone something? But basically the general consensus, Certainly my opinion, Is that both of them are kind of happening at the same time. And in a sense if you focus on the one object then what happens is as your mind naturally bounces off of that and discursively brings another thought, If you can simply be continuously aware of how that's happening and notice those objects, Then in a sense what you're doing is you're practicing the single pointedness, But you're also practicing what is arising and noticing and bringing insight to those discursive thoughts at the same time. So in a sense they're like the front hand and the back of the hand. Sometimes though traditionally these can be practiced very separately and seen as being very separate. But that gives you a general sense and we're going to provide versions of those for you. So, In one sense the insight is for understanding the nature of things, The Vipassana, Is like to understand the arising and the cessation of the phenomena of the objects of reality. So in a sense that's why it's called insight is because when you're kind of just noticing what naturally arises you may bring a certain sense of understanding the nature of something in that process. Whereas the concentration practice, The Samatha, Is generally thought of as a purification practice because as one heightens their concentration the intensity of focus clarifies. What happens is very high levels of purification and in a sense healing occur. So the foundation for these things, As we close here, The foundation for these things is relaxation. Relaxation is the foundation for a meditation practice and that is that to get the mind to be still the body also it's very helpful for the body to be still. So tension in the body is a form of noise. And of course meditation being more thought of as a mental exercise includes maintenance and development of how the body is functioning as well in investigating the mind and body connection. So when you're going about practicing these fundamental forms of meditation and in general in all meditation practice also couple things with relaxing your body. Noticing where there is tension in the muscles, Noticing where there is any gripping in the physical body and practice letting go, Releasing and softening. So relaxation is absolutely a key and foundational component to developing the quiet mind because you want to have a quiet and relaxed body as well. So I'll leave you with a quote. This is from Carl Jung and it is, The art of living is the most distinguished yet least practiced art, Whoever emptied the whole cup with grace. The art of living is the most distinguished yet least practiced art, Whoever emptied the whole cup with grace.

Reviews

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