Vipassana Meditation: Day 1 - Evening Discourse

Vipassana is the most powerful ancient technique for attaining mastery of the mind. Taught by the Buddha, Vipassana meditation is arguably the most famous & effective form of meditation. Retreats are held in cities and towns all over the world & have been instrumental in the transformation & healing of countless millions of people.

During the retreat, you will be guided to practice the foundational techniques of Vipassana, and follow the core principles of the philosophy.

Transcript

Coming face to face with reality is a beautiful thing.

And I think of these retreats as like holidays,

To be honest.

Because they're a break from all the things that we usually distract ourselves with,

And of an opportunity to come face to face with ourselves again.

And hopefully,

That's what all of us have been doing today.

Spending a bit of time coming face to face with ourselves.

The patterns we've been building in our minds,

The way our minds work.

Taking the opportunity to re-experience that again.

Or experience it,

If it's for the first time.

For the first time.

And what it always shows me is the actions I've been taking.

And this beautiful process of how the actions we take become habits.

And then the habits that we form create our reality.

And then that's the world that we live in.

That's why we're all living in different worlds.

Because I'm living in a world formed of my habits and the reality that shapes.

And you're living in a world formed of your habits and the reality that shapes.

And through something as simple as focusing on the breath,

We continually get to re-experience all of these patterns and all of these habits.

When the Buddha taught about morality,

He taught a lot about cause and effect.

About how taking certain actions creates other effects.

And to me that's exactly what we're seeing when we start to look at this cycle of what we go through mentally.

We get to see what our actions have formed as habits.

And to me that's the real root of morality.

It's not about someone coming down from a mountain with a stone tablet saying,

Thou shalt not do this,

Thou shalt do that.

It's about us observing what effects our actions have on our internal state and how that shapes the world that we perceive.

And then deciding for ourselves what do I want to do,

What do I not want to do.

What has an effect on my life that empowers me and allows me to clean away these impurities I have inside.

And what do I do that's compounding these impurities and building more of these habits on top of each other.

And the more we practice,

The more we come to terms with this ourselves.

The more we start to figure out,

Okay,

If I continue to take these actions,

It's going to continue to produce these mental patterns and cycles,

Which limit the way I perceive and interact with the world.

And so to me what we've all been doing today is looking at the building blocks of our reality.

And we can start to decide which ones we want to keep,

Which ones we don't want to keep.

It's a powerful process.

Like I said yesterday,

I started to learn this when I was about 14 years old.

I fully came face to face with it when I was 14 years old.

That's why I think this is a natural human skill.

Obviously a religion formed around the Buddha because he did such a wonderful thing and it became Buddhism.

But to me this is just a natural human skill that was so effective that it formed a religion around it.

And we all have the ability to encounter it and discover it in real life,

In our own lives,

In the context of our own exploration of ourselves.

Like I said yesterday,

When I was 14,

I was overwhelmed with anger and fear,

Living a very impure life,

Surrounded by violence,

Drugs,

Suicide,

Abuse,

A lot of sadness,

Unhappiness,

Tension around me.

And one day I was about to go to school and a thought just struck me.

There wasn't one thing I could think of waiting for me the whole day that I was looking forward to.

And then another thought hit me that stopped me from leaving the door that day,

From leaving the house that day,

Which is that there wasn't one thing in my whole life that I could do.

That I was looking forward to.

And the weight of that just sunk a little bit deeper.

And I felt it just dragging me down to the ground.

So I gave into the edge.

I just lay there on the ground in my living room,

Feeling the weight of that sitting on top of me.

And I was raging inside,

Blaming everyone and everything,

The closest people to me,

To everyone.

Like I said,

The government,

God,

The world.

And then something in me just died and clicked at the same time.

And I realized the complete lie I was telling myself,

Which is that anything outside of myself had any power over me at all.

All these things that were weighing me down were the results of actions I was taking and the result of habits that I had built over a long period of time.

This causal chain is something I felt fully in that moment.

It completely liberated me because I realized that there was no one to blame in my life but me.

And I realized up until that point,

I'd spent a lot of energy avoiding blame,

Assigning blame to other people,

To other things.

And it was just so refreshing just to sit there face to face with myself and realize that I was the bad guy.

I was the only bad guy in my life.

Because if I had all the blame,

Then I also had all the power to change it.

And I realized that even though I wasn't happy in that moment,

I could start to change things,

Tweak things,

Become a scientist,

Figure out what works,

What doesn't.

My own form of morality.

Become a self-experimenter.

And so that's how I discovered all of this.

That's how I discovered the second noble truth,

The cause to suffering,

And the beginnings of the third,

Just through personal experimentation.

Through what I came face to face with and started tweaking.

And that's why I feel that this is a natural human skill that everyone can start to act on.

And I feel that this is a natural human skill that everyone can start to access if we face it in our own lives.

What we've encountered here with the Buddha is just someone who discovered that skill before us and turned it into a perfect method that helps us to be able to walk that path if we're not ready to find it and face it in our day-to-day lives.

And it can help us to be able to walk those steps towards that truth,

Those four noble truths,

And see the nature of reality.

And then from there it all becomes easier,

Because then it's just a big game coming closer and closer to reality,

Closer and closer to understanding what we are.

So we can just sit here on a mat and we can face ourselves just through the breath.

So using the breath to anchor ourselves and seeing what we still have that pulls us in different directions.

And we can decide if this is the world that we want to live in or if we want to pull our awareness away from that and to regroup and create another world,

Start to build upon it.

So tonight we're going to go a little bit deeper into practice.

We've got four hours in the evening to be able to sink in.

And I'd urge everyone to take the opportunity to start to come face-to-face with that internal world and start to know what we've built our internal world out of.

The skill we're learning today,

This ability to be able to sharpen our mind and to be able to focus on ourselves,

We're going to need to use over the next few days.

We're going to have to use our mind.

So tonight we want to win this battle over our mind to be able to gain the control to be able to place it where we want.

So let's just see as we sit tonight,

See how long we can maintain this focus for,

How long we can focus and see this reality of ourselves without shifting off,

Sliding off into something else.

See if we can flex that muscle a little bit more intensely and see how it feels.

If we need to take a break from your practice,

Like we said,

Just bend over,

Put your head to the mat,

Take a few minutes to recover,

Change your posture if you need to,

But see what you can do to stop yourself from getting up and leaving the hall.

See if we can sit here and face it,

Like we talked about with the Buddha on the night before his enlightenment,

Sitting there and facing anything that comes up,

Because if we can choose to stay within this frame,

Then we're teaching our mind that whatever it does,

It cannot take us out of practice.

It might put us in a position where we need a break momentarily,

But it can't do something so strong that we have to get up and leave the frame of practice.

And then we start to gain this power when we take responsibility for ourselves.

We start to realize that we're the only ones to blame for our mental condition.

Now that we're adults and we know this skill,

We have the choice of where to place our mind,

Which is a beautiful thing because then we have all the power.

And as another great hero said,

With great willpower comes great responsibility.

And if we want to use one word to describe what we're learning here today as a real-world skill,

It's simply willpower.

It's the ability to be able to do what we want,

To make a choice to get things done,

Despite the conditions and the circumstances.

So tonight,

What I'd like us to do is just demonstrate that willpower to ourselves,

That scarce commodity that the business and modern world has become obsessed with,

How to use our willpower,

How to generate willpower.

We have the secret to it here.

So let's sit here and prove to ourselves that we can bring it up at will and apply it.

And then building upon that,

We can use that skill for something else later.

But before we leave the room tonight,

Let's prove to ourselves that we have access to that.

And let's start to apply it to be able to dig deeper into ourselves and come in deeper contact with what we really are.

Even if it's difficult to be able to maintain that focus,

Let's continually stay present and stay in the moment and stay conscious of what's occurring.

Let's not take the break to disappear somewhere else.

These evening sessions are going to be our long practice sessions.

So if we want to push,

This is the time to do it.

And then when we finish tonight,

When we go back to our place,

To our room,

To our bed,

Then let's leave here with a clearer mind and let's practice the meditation we were practicing in the afternoon,

The laying meditation,

To be able to carry that consciousness into our sleep.

So that as we get up and we go,

There's no break between the practice on the mat and when we go to sleep.

And slowly as the course goes on,

We want to carry that consciousness throughout the whole day so that whatever we do,

We're familiar with what it feels like to go through the transition from one position to another position to another position while still being here.

Because if we're not here,

Then where are we?

And if we're choosing to be here,

But we're not able to do that,

Then who's making the choice of where our mind is?

I think these are all good questions to answer.

And I'd like everyone here to be explorers and to be exploring what this technique can do and where these questions lead us.

Because that's exactly how we got this skill in the first place.

One human was willing to explore to the limits of what his mind could do.

And he figured all of this out.

And so if we just become students,

Then we do a little bit of a disservice to that.

If we become explorers,

Then we can test the limits of our own minds,

Test the limits of our beings,

And see what we can figure out for ourselves.

What becomes a reality through our own experience versus just listening to someone talk.

On that note,

The Buddha addressed this issue in one of his discourses.

Even amongst the many students,

Monks,

Royalty he had studying under him,

He told them all that they shouldn't believe in him just because of the traditions.

They shouldn't believe in any teacher because of the traditions.

They shouldn't listen to a teacher's perspective on the world.

They should only believe in something if they had personal experience of it,

If it matched their reason,

And if it did good to them and good to the rest of the world.

I'm entirely convinced that this skill does that,

But that's me.

And I think everyone in this room needs to convince themselves,

Everyone at home needs to convince themselves that that's what this does.

Does this really purify the mind?

Does this really give us the ability to be able to use our mind in the way we want to do it?

Have we grasped that skill and applied it?

Start to test it,

Start to play with it,

And see what effect it has on you.

So the deeper layers,

What does this start to do?

We've been talking about the very basic real-world results for this.

As you go deeper into this,

There's a long tradition for the other results this can produce.

And they're not that far away.

What are the signs that we've started to master the mind?

One,

The easy one,

Is that our mind stays here when we tell it to stay here.

Maybe not so easy to produce,

But an easy one to see.

When we tell our mind to rest here,

When we tell it to focus on something,

It can do that.

Simple as that.

That's the mundane result,

The first victory.

Two,

Is that we start to get what they call a bright mind,

A clear mind.

So we can focus,

And it's no longer a struggle,

And our mind is clear and open.

And it feels full of ease and creativity.

And then that becomes perceiving light.

As we have our eyes closed,

And we can feel this bright,

Clear mind,

We start to perceive light shining from our forehead.

And that slowly takes over the mind and consumes us.

And they talk about this in a lot of different traditions.

They talk about it in Buddhism,

They talk about it in the Bible,

They talk about it in the Quran,

From the Bible.

If they and I become singular,

Their body becomes full of light.

Because as we get the clarity and focus to be able to develop a singular fixation on the breath,

Then there's no space for anything else to come into us.

So if we're feeling our awareness being infiltrated by our thoughts,

That's simply because we don't have 100% of our awareness on the breath.

And if we can harness that completely,

And we can bring all of our awareness to one thing,

Make it one-pointed,

Then we become entirely consumed with that.

We become full of it.

Because our mind can only be in one place at the same time.

So it can't be here and there at the same time.

So if we can do that,

We can develop that singular focus,

We start to feel these higher levels of the technique.

Regardless of whether you get there today or not,

It's good to know where the technique goes,

What the scriptures say,

And what the millions of people who've effectively used this technique before say about how it works.

Again,

It doesn't matter if you believe that.

In fact,

I wouldn't want you to believe it.

I want you to practice,

Explore,

And prove to yourself that that's what it does.

So let's focus,

Let's start to intensify our practice tonight,

And at least convince ourselves that our mind can sit somewhere where we want it to sit for a significant amount of time.

So we can start to use it for other things throughout the course of this retreat.

Let's practice.

If anyone needs to go to the bathroom before we sit,

Because we're going to sit for quite a long time now,

Then this would be a good time to do it.

Reviews

Always profound wisdom from David Hans-Barker and the Yogi Lab. Much gratitude to and your team for spreading Anapana / Vipassana.
I intend to follow in your footsteps of practice, discipline, devotion and impact. Thank you for inspiring me continuously. 🧘🏻‍♂️⚡️

Super. Loved it

Your teachings, your guided practices are making an amazing impact on me. I feel my hearth soft and open; my mind peaceful and clear. Thank you for sharing your wisdom here in Insight Timer, at reach of so many seekers.

Excellent, powerful talk. Thank you 🙏