Talk 2 On A 10-Day Meditation Retreat At Mt. Carmel Retreat Centre

Talk 2 from a 10-day silent Buddhist meditation retreat conducted at Mt Carmel Retreat Centre, Varroville, (Sydney) Australia, on August the 31st, 2019. It is an instructive talk about the differences between serenity and insight meditation. It focused on serenity meditation with reference to neuroplasticity. It also highlights the five hindrances to meditation.

Transcript

We cultivate mindfulness,

Which is remembering to be attentive,

To experience,

In a way that's kind of connected with good intentions,

Right understanding.

Its foundation is from ethical behaviours and ethical practices.

And then what we do is we,

When we're remembering to be attentive to experience,

Our attention begins to stabilise on experience.

It begins to stabilise,

It begins to settle.

It begins to get very,

Very powerful.

It's like it penetrates deeply into the experience that we're attending to.

And that's what we call concentration or another term I'll be using and have used is called samardhi.

S-A-M-A-R-D-H-I.

Samardhi.

And samardhi,

Samardhi means,

When you break up those terms,

It means pulling together,

Gathering and putting in one place.

So it's coming together,

Gathering and putting in one place our attention and it becomes stable.

So I mentioned this morning also there's two aspects to this meditation.

The two aspects are serenity and insight.

I think I mentioned this morning that insight is about inquiring into experience and seeing things as they are.

And there's all sorts of experiences we can inquire into,

Basically our body,

Mind and life and other things,

Whatever else there is,

We can inquire into all that.

We see experience for what it is and when we can understand it,

We can,

If it's suffering,

We can be free from it.

It is insight that liberates us from the suffering,

From a Buddhist approach anyway.

So insight is that component.

Insight is based on inquiry.

It emphasizes mindfulness,

Remembering to be attentive and it has this component of investigation,

Quality of questioning,

What's happening here and how is it happening.

So we develop an understanding of experience.

We develop an understanding of the nature of experience.

The other aspect of meditation,

Being serenity,

Utilizes more concentration,

Utilizes more samadhi.

And this aspect of meditation is about calming our mind.

Serenity meditation is also called calm meditation,

It's also called tranquility meditation,

It's also called stillness,

Quietude meditation.

It's about settling our attention,

Stabilizing our attention and when we're stabilized,

Our attention doesn't go every which way.

It begins to stay in one spot,

It begins to,

We begin to relax,

Our attention becomes focused and our attention becomes very refined.

With that quality of mind,

With that serenity of mind,

We can see deeply into experience.

If our mind's all over the place,

It becomes superficial.

It becomes superficial what we're looking into.

So serenity and insight work together.

You can have some people practice,

I've seen people going on insight meditation retreats and not really developing their samadhi or their serenity and I've seen people become psychotic actually on retreats sometimes because with their insight they're investigating into experience,

They're seeing all sorts of,

Having all sorts of realizations about the nature of experience,

Particularly about the nature of themselves,

They're not what they thought they were,

Yet they don't have any kind of resources or depths of calm and loving kindness and compassion and those qualities enough to stabilize what they're seeing.

There's not enough to balance what they're seeing.

What they're seeing is quite frightening and terrifying.

So they don't have that stability of mind to protect them from what they're seeing,

To stabilize their changes and emotions and thoughts and feelings and so on.

And in fact what's happening is they're not quite seeing deeply,

They're seeing on a superficial level,

They're seeing things without the deep realizations of the true nature of these things.

So it can get quite frightening.

So serenity provides muscle to insight.

It also provides that stability,

That capacity to see deeply.

And serenity by itself is pretty good.

Serenity when you do serenity without the insight,

It's nice and can get quite pleasant.

You can get quite calm.

Also you can sort of go down unwise side passes,

Side roads.

Insight balances serenity because it helps direct what you're doing in your life.

It gives you an understanding of how you're using the serenity.

So serenity and insight work together.

Serenity helps to bring us together,

It helps to stabilize,

It brings us calm,

Peace,

It brings us a sense of cohesion,

It brings us a sense of stability.

Insight on the other hand is deconstructs.

If we look at an issue,

We can deconstruct it with insight.

Remember how I mentioned this morning,

Vipassana,

A term V-I-P-A-S-S-A-N-A,

Vipassana.

There might be a double N,

I'm not sure.

And also there's a diacritic line above the A,

Vipassana,

I think.

The diac is the little line that goes above the A meaning that it's an extended A,

Vipassana,

I think.

I'm not sure.

I'm not much of a Pali scholar.

Somebody asked me to spell the Pali words so they could look them up.

So vipassana means seeing clearly,

Seeing distinctly,

Having insight,

Seeing the way things are.

So when we have the balance of serenity and insight,

It works together.

And without that balance,

We can have issues,

We can be unbalanced.

So the way what happens with serenity,

It's like our mind becomes a tool.

We sharpen our attention so that we can see clearly.

Like a telescope looks at the moon,

You look at the moon,

I don't know where the moon is tonight,

But if you look at the moon with your bare eyes,

You'll see some shapes and lights and whatever.

You'll see the moon up in the sky.

If however you have a powerful telescope and you look at the moon,

You can see the various aspects of the moon.

You can see the craters and you can distinguish certain features of the moon.

It's the same with serenity.

Serenity is like serenity meditation creates this powerful focused attention so that we can see things clearly.

So there's an analogy that I'd like to share with you about this process of serenity and insight producing wisdom.

And some of you have heard this analogy.

People who have been on retreats with me before would have heard this.

And it's about like we go to a park and I imagine somebody goes to a park and it's a bit of a party in the park and there's a very large pond in the park and everyone's partying and they lean over into the pond and they lose some precious jewels.

They lose their precious ring into the pond and they look in the pond and it's really muddy and they look inside and they can't see it.

So they think,

Oh,

What am I going to do?

And they decide to come back later because it was dark at the time they lost it.

They decide to come back the next day and search for it in the light.

They come back the next day and the pond's all still really muddy and there's some kids playing in the pond.

So they say,

Oh,

Would you mind hopping out of the pond so I can let the mud settle?

And then what they do is they protect the pond.

They put some barriers around so the wind doesn't blow it and they sit and they wait for the sediment to settle so that they can see clearly.

And they sit and they wait very patiently waiting for the sediment to settle.

And the sediment settles and they look in the pond.

The water's really clear that they still can't see their precious jewels.

So they very carefully,

Actually what they do notice when they're looking in this pond is some broken bottles and rusty cans and bits of timber with nails sticking out.

And they think,

Wow,

Lucky I told those kids to get out of the pond.

They could have stepped on that.

And they can mindfully take out the broken glass and the rusty cans and put it out of harm's way.

And the things they can't get out,

At least they're aware of where they are.

So they won't step on it and they can let people know.

So they see all these things,

But they still can't find their jewels.

So they start to investigate a little bit.

They turn over some rocks and look around some corners and they find their precious jewels.

And they are reunited with their ring and they feel happy.

So that's the story.

Now what this refers to,

There's some analogies here.

But putting up the barriers around the pond so the water's not so disturbed is similar to having ethics.

When we behave ethically,

Where our minds aren't disturbed,

We're able to let our minds settle rather than being ridden by guilt or remorse about acting in harmful ways or ways of worrying about things or being confused about things.

There's that we allow our minds to be protected by our ethical behavior.

So the settling,

The settling of the mind is like serenity meditation.

Like when we do serenity meditation,

Our minds become very,

Very clear,

Very clear.

So we can see things.

So seeing of the rusty cans and broken bottles and nails sticking out of timber is like seeing the stuff in our lives,

The things we may have forgotten about,

The things that are quite,

You know,

The rusty cans and broken bottles of our lives.

This happens sometimes in meditation as you're sitting and stilling your mind,

Things come up.

As I mentioned,

And many of you have probably experienced this,

Has anybody noticed that things come up when they're meditating?

It's like we start to see things,

Things we may have wanted to avoid or past experiences,

For example.

Yet with mindfulness,

We can,

When we can see where there are,

At least we can avoid treading on them and also we can put them out of harm's way.

Even the looking in and inquiring is like mindfulness.

You're being attentive to experience.

You're asking what's going on here,

How it's going on.

You're inquiring into experience and with some inquiry you eventually find your precious jewels.

The precious jewels are wisdom and compassion.

It's like sometimes we lose them through whatever way.

When I say wisdom and compassion,

Wisdom contains within it compassion.

So we find we're reunited with our wisdom.

This is an analogy of the serenity and insight approach to meditation.

What we're doing when we're practicing is we're cultivating wisdom.

And wisdom has with it compassion and a connection with others.

And so that's part of the eightfold path.

You remember how I spoke about that?

Okay.

Not going too badly.

I've got a lot of things I want to say,

But I've got to be careful I don't overload you with too much information.

We're going to focus on serenity now.

And before I do that,

I just want to highlight a psychologist called William James,

Something that he said at the turn of last century.

He was around the turn of the 19th into 1900s late 19th century,

Early 20th century.

And he was a wonderful psychologist.

Amazing.

He was really exploring a lot of that consciousness.

And he said a number of things about attention.

One thing he said about attention was what we attend to becomes our reality.

What we attend to becomes our reality.

And this is an example of what happens with focused attention with samadhi.

So I've experienced this many times myself.

What I attend becomes my reality.

And I've also seen it in my clients as a psychologist,

As a clinical psychologist.

I've seen people focus on certain things and get totally entangled in it.

It has both positive and negative aspects.

What we attend to becomes our reality.

On the negative side,

Sometimes people focus on an untoward opinion of themselves or a thought about themselves or a belief about themselves.

Or they worry excessively or they ruminate,

Ruminate being going over things that are happening in our lives that we can't control,

Often things that have happened in the past or things that are happening now,

Untoward events.

So we focus on these things with our ruminations and we become encapsulated in that reality.

It's like we're carrying a bubble around that's just like that worrying,

Ruminative,

Like a manifestation of that.

It's like people are in their heads.

So this is an example of focusing on something so much so that it becomes our reality.

People are kind of caught up in their ruminations and their worries.

There's another thing that goes with this and that is the neuropsychological approach to this.

There is a saying in neuropsychology that goes,

Use it or lose it.

You all heard of that?

So if you do so,

Say if you've learned a language,

I know I can speak Thai but I notice my Thai is not very good at the moment because I'm not using it much.

So I'm sort of losing that skill.

So if we don't feed a particular neural pathway,

Then that neural pathway will start to cull itself away.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

There's another saying that goes,

Neurons that fire together wire together.

In other words,

If we have an intention for example,

Or we do a certain thing,

The more we do it,

We develop the neural pathways that reflect that skill.

I've been trying to learn guitar for a couple of years.

The age of 64.

I picked it up just before I turned 60 I think.

I don't play it very much but I know the more I play it,

The more I'll build those neurons up that reflect guitar playing skills like the fine motor skills.

I'm also trying to learn to read music with it.

So learning to pick up,

There's all these neural patterns happening.

It's fantastic.

So coming back to being captured by rumination and worry and negative thoughts,

If we choose to not feed into those negative thoughts,

If we choose to put our attention somewhere else,

If we can develop that skill of being able to be flexible with our attention,

Then we're not feeding into those neural pathways and also those patterns that reflect that particular tendency.

If instead we pay attention to something that's the opposite of that,

Something that's really wonderful,

Something that's really uplifting,

And the more we do that,

The more our neural pathways will go along that pathway.

In addition,

That kind of overlaps with what William James is saying,

By what we attend to becomes our reality.

That other thing,

That wonderful quality,

Those beautiful aspects of ourselves or the world,

Can then become our reality.

Is this making sense for you guys?

So there's some really interesting things that happen with our attention.

I'm going to share with you something that Rick Hansen talks about.

I'll share that now.

There's a Rick Hansen friend of mine.

He says I'm a friend anyway.

He calls me a Dharma buddy.

I wrote something for his journal a couple of,

I think last year,

I know earlier this year.

And I began writing it last year and I emailed him.

I said,

Look,

I've got to have some time off.

I haven't got time to do it.

And then when I asked for time off,

He said,

Of course,

You're my Dharma buddy.

You can take the time off.

He's really lovely man.

So I've done a few courses with him.

I've done a few workshops with him.

And there was a workshop I did on positive neuroplasticity with him.

We're learning about how we let go of negative bias and cultivate positive bias.

Negative bias is this tendency to see the worst possible situation.

It's based on biology or evolution.

Negative bias,

For example,

Will be indicated in mistaking a coiled vine as a snake.

That's called negative bias because that's safer than mistaking a snake as a coiled vine.

Do you get that?

So we've set up through our evolutionary process,

We have negative bias,

Which means we tend to see the danger in things.

We tend to see what's bad about ourselves.

We tend to see what's wrong with something more than we tend to see what's right with something.

Does that make sense?

So and I'm sure you've all experienced this.

The usual thing that I refer to is when I read my evaluations on workshops,

Which you fellow psychologists will know that.

So it's always looking at,

You always look at the one out of the 20 that said,

You know,

Gave you three out of 10.

The 19 out of 20 that gave you 19 out of 10,

Or 9 out of 10,

Sorry.

So the way Rick talks about changing negative bias is by looking out for the good,

Paying attention to what's good.

And I'll refer to this later on in the week for all of you actually when we talk a little bit about joy,

Because I think Rick is a master of joy and the cultivation of joy.

But coming back to the point about serenity.

He talks about a process called HEAL.

HEAL is an acronym for having an experience.

That's the H,

Enriching the experience,

That's the E,

Absorbing into the experience,

That's the A,

And linking the experience,

That's the L.

So having an experience could be something like,

You could go outside,

You could look at the sunset,

Or I went for a walk this afternoon,

Just the sun down,

And looked at the colors in the sky,

And also looked at the softness in the grass.

It was just so beautiful.

There's a soft texture to the grass,

And wow,

So beautiful.

I was having a good experience.

So I had that good experience.

At that moment,

I could enrich it by being really curious about it,

Looking at the nuances of that experience,

The visual effects,

Tuning into it,

And also being aware how my heart is uplifted by that experience.

Then tuning into how my heart is uplifted,

How I feel kind of happy with that experience,

Watching the joy arise in myself.

So I'm enriching this,

I'm enriching it with my attention,

I'm focusing on it.

So that's the having it,

I'm enriching it now.

And I could bring this back,

By the way,

I could bring it back to now,

And I'm enriching it now as a memory.

And in the enriching,

It's like that experience is manifesting in me as well,

Right now.

So what can happen is we have the experience,

We enrich it,

And then we absorb into it the A of the H-E-A-L.

We absorb into it.

Tuning into it means kind of becoming it,

Marinating in it,

To quote Rick Hansen's words.

Sort of tuning into it and becoming good,

If that makes sense.

Letting goodness absorb into us and we absorb into it.

So the linking,

By the way,

The L stands for,

As Rick's a psychologist,

And I can see how this works,

And I do this often,

I do this process of linking,

Often with people,

People that I see in my clinical practice.

But I only do it when the time's right.

The linking means that we can bring up a memory of something or a particular painful event in our lives that is kind of like the opposite of the positive experience we're having,

And we can bring them together so much so that when the positive experience is stronger than the negative experience,

It just fades the negative experience away.

We're linking the positive with the negative so that the positive takes over.

Does that make sense?

There's a lot of ways I could explain it psychologically,

But it's like that.

I'm not going to invite you to do any linking because often that happens organically,

But at this retreat I'll be inviting you to do H,

E,

And A a lot because what Rick's explaining is the basics of serenity meditation.

Serenity meditation meaning we focus on an object and we become absorbed into that object.

And so in traditional Buddhist practices,

There's lots of different objects we can absorb into,

We can focus on and absorb into.

And usually they're objects that are uplifting or neutral,

Although there's some reflections we can do that seem to grab our attention quite nicely and we can absorb into those reflections as well.

A reflection on the Buddha,

For example,

Reflections on the qualities of the Buddha,

It's uplifting.

Remember how I talked,

I did the homages to the Buddha,

Dharma,

And Sangha?

Reflections on the uplifting qualities of the Dharma,

Reflections on the uplifting qualities of being connected with a community,

That's something we can focus on and it can be uplifting and it can become us.

We can absorb into that.

Another common experience with serenity meditation is mindfulness of the breath.

It's called mindfulness of the breath,

But really it's mindfulness and concentration on the breath,

Samadhi on the breath.

And I'll be doing some of that tomorrow with you.

I'll be inviting you to practice mindfulness of breath.

Other objects of meditation for serenity are what we call the four heart qualities,

Loving kindness,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy,

And equanimity.

I'll be talking about loving kindness and compassion tomorrow and I'll be inviting you on Monday morning to absorb into one of those experiences,

To become loving kindness so that it becomes you.

So do you like that analogy by the way,

Heel?

Serenity meditation is very,

Very important and this retreat,

I'm emphasizing serenity meditation to begin with.

Sometimes we get,

On Tuesday night I'll talk about insight and from therein we'll be doing both serenity and insight.

For the most part,

For the moment,

We're doing serenity.

And did anybody notice any hindrances today?

There's only a few nods.

Did anybody notice any obstacles for their practice?

Can I get kind of a,

Would anybody like to say what's happened?

No,

Don't give me a full explanation,

Just one word.

Wandering mind.

Wandering mind?

What else?

Sleepiness.

Sleepiness?

Yeah.

Yeah,

Okay.

Any other things happening?

Procrastination.

Procrastination,

Hmm.

Any other things?

Pain.

Pain,

Yep.

Anything else?

Impatient.

Are you going to be patient?

Impatient,

Wow.

There's five hindrances that are explained with meditation teachers and also we begin to experience these as we begin to practice.

Actually they become a whole focus of a mindfulness practice.

I won't go into,

I'll talk more about that on Tuesday night.

I want to talk about the four foundations of mindfulness.

The five hindrances are these.

Obsessive desire.

It usually relates,

Technically it's sensual desire and it's this obsession with wanting something pleasant.

We get caught up,

This will be a disruption to our being present moment to moment in our meditation practice.

It will pull us away.

We might be sitting thinking of chocolate or sex or a play or some music,

Whatever.

It draws us away out of meditation.

It's an obstacle to meditation.

I'll just point them out and then we'll talk about them in more detail.

The next hindrance is called ill will.

Sometimes people talk about it as anger.

You know,

I had a bit of a debate with Analayo,

Well it wasn't a debate really,

It was just a question with him.

Analayo Bhikkhu is a famous Buddhist monk who has written lots of stuff.

He's an amazing,

Amazing Bhikkhu,

Amazing monk.

And he was saying that anger is the second hindrance.

And I'm of the opinion that we can have wholesome anger.

We can have anger but it need not be ill will.

I'm of the view that ill will is the hindrance.

Ill will refers to aversion,

Condemnation,

Rejection,

Avoidance,

Boredom,

Kind of a pushing away of experience.

Of course,

We need avoidance to survive in many cases.

However,

When we are avoiding things that we need not avoid,

In fact through our avoidance we are making our situation worse,

Then it becomes a real hindrance.

Ill will is this,

Don't like it,

Don't want it,

Get away from it.

Ill will tends to separate us from others,

Tends to tighten our hearts,

Tends to cut us off from things.

Has anybody ever experienced ill will?

Is it pleasant?

Did anybody experience ill will today?

Maybe,

Maybe not?

Okay.

So ill will.

The next hindrance is,

It's called sloth and torpor.

That's how it's translated.

My friend Patrick talks about it as,

Patrick's a Pali scholar and meditation teacher,

Dear friend of mine,

Talks about it as mental thickness and dullness.

And it's this kind of like cloudy fog that we get in.

We're sitting and meditating and it's just getting thicker and thicker.

Sometimes it's even quite pleasant,

You're just kind of falling off to sleep,

Drifting away.

It's a thick fog,

You can't see clearly.

You're trying to pay attention to your breath or the sensations in your legs or whatever it is.

And it's just this fuzziness,

Fogginess.

And I mentioned it this morning with the clarity that many of you may be sleep deprived and not to be confused with sleep deprivation.

Many of you are probably very tired from traveling and so on.

But this mental thickness and dullness happens even after you've slept like 12 hours in a day and you get up and you meditate and you're still kind of dropping off,

Feeling thick.

It's a kind of an avoidance of things when it's like that.

The next hindrance is called restlessness and worry,

Worry and agitation.

And excuse me a minute,

I'm having some dryness,

I'm noting dryness in my mouth.

I'll turn this off while I take a drink.

So restlessness,

Restlessness and worry.

Is that on?

Yeah.

Restlessness and worry is the mind that's kind of so agitated,

So all over the place that it just can't settle.

Has anybody ever had that mind?

And it's like sloth and torpor,

It's like mental thickness and dullness in that it has an energetic quality.

With sloth and torpor,

The energetic quality is like sinking away.

With restlessness,

It's this kind of fidgety and moving leg syndrome.

So restlessness is like there's an analogy where someone throws a stone into a fire with its ash and the ash just kind of goes up and just hovers around.

It doesn't really settle.

That's like our attention,

It doesn't really settle.

So I'll give you more details on this in a minute and hopefully I'll provide some antidotes for all this before the hour is out.

The last hindrance,

It sounds a bit tinny,

Doesn't it?

The last hindrance is paralyzing doubt,

Which is like procrastination.

It's like chronic uncertainty,

Chronic lack of confidence.

Cautcyling doubt has been compared to a person at the fork of a road not knowing which branch to take.

So he or she doesn't go anywhere.

They don't go anywhere.

They're just kind of stuck.

That's chronic procrastination.

It's almost catatonic,

Just being stuck.

And this is like doubt in the practice,

Doubt in ourselves,

Being uncertain about whether something's the right thing to do.

Meditation will often present as kind of like,

Why am I doing this?

This is crazy.

Why am I here on a retreat?

Look at all these people sitting around me doing nothing.

It's useless.

How can mindfulness of breath or being attentive to the sensations in the soles of my feet going to help me in life?

This is ridiculous.

So you get up and walk away and go home.

But it's this not having confidence in the practice or not having confidence in your own decisions even,

Your own direction.

So you don't really go anywhere.

You don't put the energy in.

It becomes a real barrier.

So there's some analogies that the Buddha gave for these five hindrances.

And he compared meditation to looking at a bowl of water,

Looking at the reflection of your face in a bowl of water.

So that's an analogy of meditation.

And in regards to the hindrances,

He said the first hindrance,

The one of obsessive desire,

Sensual desire,

Is like looking at a bowl of water colored with dye.

So you're not really seeing a true image.

You're seeing a colored image of yourself.

Of his blind,

That sort of thing.

You're seeing something that's,

You're seeing a distorted image of yourself.

You know,

Excuse me for bringing up this example.

All these people have been on my talks before.

But you know,

The example of when you're a teenager and you fall in love with someone and they look so beautiful and you get obsessed about them all the time.

And you know,

You talk to your parents and they go,

You're crazy.

Why would you fall in love with this person?

Then a couple of years later,

You don't even think about them.

At the time,

You're totally obsessed with them.

You saw everything was beautiful about them.

And then slowly over time you realize,

No,

They're not that.

It's like love is blind.

That's what happens with obsessive desire,

This sensual desire.

We don't see the reality of things.

We see we're deceived by the dye in our rose colored glasses,

For example.

The next analogy,

The bowl of water for ill will,

Is the water's boiling.

So you still can't see,

You can't see a reflection very clearly.

Of course,

The water's really disturbed.

The next analogy for sloth and torpor or mental thickness and dullness is like you've got the bowl of water but there's algae on top of the water.

Still can't see your reflection.

It's just kind of thick.

The next analogy for restlessness and worry and mental agitation,

Physical agitation as well,

Is the water's there but there's some wind cutting across the surface of the water.

It's all ruffled.

And the next analogy for paralyzing doubt,

I've heard two analogies.

At first I thought it was that the bowl of water was actually mud.

So you couldn't see your reflection and also it's kind of thick to move through.

But I heard another one and it's the bowl of water is there but it's put into the dark so you can't actually see it.

I think that's a better analogy.

So you just can't see clearly.

So they're the hindrances and when we're having wandering mind,

It's usually based on some of those hindrances.

And it's restlessness because their minds are kind of going from here to there all over the place.

Wandering mind could also be based on obsessive desire.

You know what I mean by wandering mind,

Don't you?

Some of you may have had that experience.

You attempt to focus on one thing and then the mind just kind of goes off all over the place.

And impatience is mostly related to ill will.

It's one of those,

This should be better than this,

This is not good enough,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

What's the other thing?

Sleepiness,

Sloth and torpor.

What else did we say?

Oh,

Procrastination,

Paralyzing doubt.

What else do we have?

Pain.

I don't know if pain's a hindrance,

But I think it's,

I don't have time to talk about pain tonight.

Maybe I'll mention it tomorrow morning because there's insight and serenity ways of dealing with pain.

It could become a hindrance when we have ill will directed towards it.

It becomes a hindrance then.

And there's a little,

There's a formula that we have in Mindful Self-Compassion.

It didn't come from them,

It comes from a Buddhist monk actually.

He talked about suffering equals pain times resistance.

So if you take out the resistance,

There's no suffering,

There's just pain.

So pain can become a valuable tool,

Like Sayadaw Janaka once said to me when I went to him and said,

Sayadaw,

All I'm having is pain.

There's pain everywhere,

Everywhere,

Day in,

Day out.

He says,

Malcolm,

Pain is the key to the door of Nibbana.

So it's about the resistance.

So if anything,

If there's any hindrance with pain,

It would be the aversion.

What else did people come up with today?

Would you like to know some anecdotes?

Okay,

There's two ways.

There's generally two approaches to meditation,

And that's the Insight approach and the Serenity approach.

And to be honest,

Whether we're doing a Serenity meditation or an Insight meditation kind of goes backwards and forwards along a spectrum.

When we're being,

When we're emphasizing mindfulness in our practice,

It's like,

Sorry,

I'll go back,

Come back a bit.

It's like a Serenity-Insight dynamic is on a spectrum.

At one end of the spectrum,

We have Insight.

The other end of the spectrum,

We have Serenity.

At the inside end of the spectrum,

We'll have more mindfulness than concentration,

Perhaps.

We'll have a concentration of various ways,

But mindfulness is emphasized more.

And at the Serenity end of the spectrum,

Concentration is emphasized more,

Or Samadhi is emphasized more.

All meditation has effort,

Mindfulness,

And concentration,

But the ratio of concentration to mindfulness varies sometimes.

And sometimes it can be really high,

High in both cases.

So where we are on a spectrum at any one point goes backwards and forwards between this.

Sometimes people talk about the Insight path to enlightenment,

And sometimes people talk about the Serenity path to enlightenment.

I think that wasn't around in the time of the Buddha.

The Buddha,

He didn't talk about Serenity and Insight in that way,

But it has come about now.

So the Insight way to working with the hindrances is simply to note them,

To be mindful of them,

And to see them for what they are.

So naming them is really,

Really powerful.

Naming them and bringing some intelligence to this experience.

Intelligence insofar as knowing how to reduce them,

Naming them,

Being mindful of them,

Investigating into them,

Understanding them,

And then not feeding into them.

Make sense?

That's the mindfulness way,

The Insight way.

The Serenity way,

There's specific antidotes for each of the specific hindrances.

With the hindrance of obsessive desire,

We contemplate the unattractiveness of something that we're obsessed with.

You don't have to see the,

Not the ugliness of it,

But just sort of seeing it for what it is.

I won't go into great details about that right now.

But seeing the unattractiveness of something.

Also seeing the impermanence of it,

Knowing that it's going to change.

With ill will,

The direct antidote is loving kindness,

Warm,

Open friendliness,

Kind of letting go of resistance,

And embracing kindly the experience.

The antidote to sloth and torpor is rousing energy,

Rousing motivation.

So it's kind of changing energetically,

Rather than lying down for your meditations,

You get up and do walking.

Or if you're in a stuffy room,

Covered with blankets,

You take the blankets off and you open the window and change your energy.

So that's sloth and torpor,

Or mental thickness and dullness.

The antidote for,

Sorry,

The motivation is like rousing energy.

Something that rouses energy in me is when I reflect on the certainty of my death.

One day I'm going to die.

And I would like to wake up before I die.

Completely.

So,

You know,

Better get to it.

Got to do it.

Be energized.

So that's motivating.

It's not sort of depressing,

But it's just motivating.

The next hindrance,

Restlessness,

Is finding something to calm your mind down.

As I mentioned earlier,

Something that can get your attention.

Doing things that are enjoyable,

For example.

Something that can grab your attention quite easily.

Or as I mentioned earlier,

This morning,

Was it this morning?

Yeah.

Going out into wide open spaces or going for a walk or doing something you enjoy.

Just that's going to get your attention and calm you down or kind of settle your attention.

And the antidote for paralyzing doubt from the serenity pathway is to contemplate cause effect relationships.

That sounds a bit weird.

Technically it says to contemplate dependent arising.

So you're investigating into experience.

You're looking at the way experience is.

What causes what.

It could be,

You could say you could go along and read something.

Or you could learn about something.

You could educate yourself about something.

If you're lacking in confidence about something,

You educate yourself about it.

So if you're lacking in confidence or certainty about a practice,

You develop certainty.

You develop more confidence.

And sometimes this is called faith.

Chronic procrastination or paralyzing doubt is the opposite of faith,

Of confidence in something.

So I've gone over time now.

I can still rejoice.

I think it's okay.

I'll be kind with myself.

I'm going to finish up with a poem.

Actually I'll just say two last points.

When I was a monk in Thailand,

It was quite simple.

We didn't do a,

I didn't even have a book in northeast Thailand.

The only book I had was The Rules of the Monk,

Which there's 227 precepts.

So I had that book with all the precepts.

And I learned to speak,

I learned to understand some of the Dharma talks.

And this is what they said.

They said to still your mind,

To quieten your mind,

To get it clear and then investigate.

That was it.

Stilling,

Calming,

Investigate.

Stilling,

Calming,

Investigate.

It's as simple as that.

So that's what we're doing.

We're emphasizing the stilling and the calming at the moment and we can do some invest.

You might start to notice investigation happens organically anyway.

You might sort of slip up that spectrum to the mindfulness and the insight into the spectrum and start to investigate experience and have insights about it.

So the poem I'm going to read,

It's not a poem actually.

It's just something from Achancha.

Achancha is a famous Thai achang.

I never met him but I was there when he was still alive.

I was living in Thailand when he was still alive.

I knew a lot of his students.

So this is called Be Mindful.

It's not actually a poem,

It's just something Achancha said.

Try to be mindful and let things take their natural course.

Then your mind will become still in any surroundings like a clear forest,

Pool.

All kinds of wonderful rare animals will come out to drink at the pool and you'll clearly see the nature of all things.

You'll see many strange and wonderful things come and go and you will be still.

This is the happiness of the Buddha.

I'm going to read something else.

This is by Suzuki Roshi.

Suzuki Roshi wrote Then Mind Beginners Mind.

He didn't write it from his talks.

I think,

Maybe he did write it,

I can't remember.

Meditation opens our minds to the greatest mystery that takes place daily and hourly.

It widens the heart so that it may feel the eternity of time and infinity of space in every throb.

It gives us life within the world as if we were moving about in paradise.

And all these spiritual deeds take place without any refuge into a doctrine but by the simple and direct holding fast to the truth which dwells in our innermost beings.

Reviews

Thanks Mal for a constructive and comprehensive explanation of the relationship between serenity and VipassanaMeditation

Enjoyed the talk and the insights. Thank you