Vipassana Meditation: Day 3 - Morning 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

Day three.

By today,

We should have some momentum behind us,

The momentum of the practice from the past few days.

And we will notice how the cumulative effect of our practice will carry us forward and help us to go deeper and deeper.

Until even a few hours of meditation today will be worth more than the whole day on day one.

And then deeper and deeper as we go further.

The quality of our mind gets enhanced.

And today we're going to learn the last essential skill that we need to be happy.

Sounds like a bold claim.

Let's see if I can qualify it.

As I said yesterday,

Awareness and equanimity are the two pillars of vipassana.

They carry us all the way through the technique.

And today we're going to learn about equanimity.

Non-reactivity.

Sounds like a big word,

But it's very simple.

It's the ability to be able to feel and not react.

But what have we done so far?

We've collected our awareness and we've started to produce clarity.

The more that we feel the reality of our breath,

The more that we become immune to everything else that could pull us away from that.

The more we can maintain this clear and focused mind.

One reason we use the breath is because it's always with us.

We have it as a tool of meditation whenever we need it.

Another reason is because it's subtle and it helps us to sharpen the mind.

And another reason is because it acts as a bridge to our unconscious.

There's another reason too that we focus up here.

It's because the more we focus up here,

The more we draw our awareness upwards.

We're slowly magnetizing all of our awareness so we have it in one place.

We're collecting it.

A ball of clear,

Pure awareness.

And once we have this pure state of awareness,

This pure ball,

We can take it anywhere.

We can take it through the body and start to clean the body of reactivity.

And that's what we're going to do with the technique.

But today we need to learn a step that helps to connect us to the body.

And that's starting to be able to perceive sensation.

I talked about the second noble truth and how when I was 14,

I realized that I was the cause of my suffering.

But the Buddha would say there was a gap in my understanding there to truly grasp the second noble truth.

And that gap is sensation.

I understood that I was the cause of my suffering.

I even understood that my actions had produced my suffering and created the habit patterns that created my cycle of suffering.

But what I didn't understand is how it was my reactivity to sensation that was anchoring that suffering within me,

That was programming me with all of these patterns.

To fully understand the second noble truth,

We need to understand this missing step of sensation.

All the rest of the steps existed before and after the Buddha and many people come to them themselves.

But this very simple step,

This connecting point between the mind,

Between the abstract and the conceptual and the body,

The physical and the concrete,

That's what the Buddha gave us.

This way to be able to reprogram ourselves and to be able to bring these worlds together,

To understand these worlds aren't separate,

They're a continuum.

And the connecting point is the sensation.

So far,

We've been passively perceiving the unconscious,

Perceiving our unconscious conditioning.

We've started to be able to dance with it and not fight against it.

But up to here,

This has been a non-contact dance.

We haven't been able to touch.

The sensation is what allows us to finally touch the unconscious and start to communicate with it directly,

Start to be able to feel what our unconscious wants to tell us and to learn the language of the unconscious so that we can reprogram all of these habit patterns that we've built.

That's what we're going to do today.

We're going to use the sensation to start communicating with our unconscious.

And what we'll learn is that our entire world is made of sensations.

Usually we think we live in a world of objects,

Maybe a world of ideas,

But actually as we start to practice this,

We realize we live in a world of sensation.

Sensation is between us and any of the other things that we experience.

So it's the thing that frames our whole experience.

And we're going to learn something else,

That we're all addicts.

We're all addicts to sensation.

Two types of addiction in particular are prevalent.

The Buddha talks about them as craving and aversion.

What we want and what we don't want.

What we've programmed ourselves to believe is good and what we've programmed ourselves to believe is bad.

When we experience a sensation that we think is good,

We want to hold on to it.

And we want to get as much of it as possible and we don't want to lose it.

So this produces attachment and it produces aversion to other sensations and other states that would take us out of this state.

When we experience aversion,

We don't want to be in this state.

We want to move away from this sensation to another sensation as quickly as possible.

This is why it's so important for us to sit for certain amounts of time in discomfort.

Because we want to be able to feel states that we have programmed into ourselves to believe are bad and to be able to sit there and feel them as sensation.

The Buddha gives us a guide for how we should deal with sensation.

A very simple one.

He says that we should perceive sensation as sensation.

That's the solution.

Three words.

Sensation as sensation.

It's one of the reasons why I love the Buddha because he's got such a simple and practical way of expressing a universal truth.

And in those three words he tells us everything that we shouldn't be doing.

We shouldn't be perceiving sensation as idea.

We shouldn't be perceiving it as reactivity.

We shouldn't be perceiving it as preference,

Perceiving it as story.

Simply sensation as sensation.

Feeling a thing for what it is.

Us being able to do this removes all the conditioning.

Because a thing is just a thing.

And we can feel it.

We can handle it.

We can understand its quality and we don't need to react to it.

By doing this we slowly clean our palates.

As kids we might all want to eat sugar and be addicted to sugar.

We like mango.

We don't like broccoli.

And then as we grow up we might start to be able to appreciate a wider range of flavors.

By the time we've come to be adults we can eat broccoli and appreciate it.

Maybe we can even eat pickled ginger and appreciate the effect it has on us,

The flavor.

So what we want to do is we want to take our internal habit patterns to the same level of maturity as our taste buds.

And that's what we're going to do today.

We're going to start experiencing a range of sensations and start to become familiar with what our unconscious mind has classified as savory and unsavory,

Pleasurable and unpleasurable.

And start to be able to neutralize that so that we can feel everything for what it is.

When I was a child I was also an addict to sugar cravings.

I was an ice cream lover,

Like a lot of kids.

And when I was seven years old my mom took me to this marvelous ice cream shop that had lots of flavors.

Like I said we were from humble backgrounds so we didn't get treats like this often.

So when my mom took us to a specialized cream shop it would be an occasion.

But as a child,

As a seven year old,

I was overcome with anxiety because I knew which flavors I liked and I could see from this spread of 36 flavors that there were a few that I knew were going to be winners.

And if I chose those I would have a good time.

Whereas if I was adventurous and I tried something new then maybe I wouldn't enjoy the experience as much.

And so I had this conundrum as a seven year old.

Should I pick cookies and cream and rocky road,

The safe choices?

Or should I go for a tutti frutti?

Or a pina colada sorbet?

What a choice for a seven year old.

To risk trying something new or to stick with the safe.

And that's what we're all doing when we start to go through these sensations.

We can stick to the safe zone of what we know we can be economists to.

Or we can start to expand outwards and start to experience more and broaden our world.

When people start to learn this skill there's a mistake that they often make.

And that's sticking to the safe zone.

You find it with a lot of meditators and a lot of people who've practiced.

They start to close down their world instead of open it up.

And so we want to make sure as we learn this skill we don't do that.

We're learning the skill of equanimity.

But that doesn't mean that we should always stay within our comfortable zone within the things we're already economists to.

It means the opposite.

That we should train ourselves to start moving into the uncomfortable.

And to be able to take our clarity and our equanimity into those zones.

That doesn't mean that we should be sitting here the whole time in excruciating pain attempting to bring equanimity to it.

What it means is that we should follow something like the 80-20 rule.

Which is that we build our focus,

We build our sense of stability.

We cultivate this equanimity and this awareness.

And then when we're ready we slowly start to push on the fringes of sensation.

If pain does come up we use it as an opportunity to use this equanimity and awareness that we've cultivated and start to expand it into the uncomfortable.

That's why it's important to do the long sits.

That's why it's important to hold ourselves in a position that might trigger old injuries,

Old pains or new ones from sitting.

So that we can start to feel those and bring our clarity to them.

Not allowing a world of distraction to narrow down what it is that we can maintain focus within.

Not allowing ourselves to become narrow and shut down in what we can experience and include within our life.

We want to do the opposite.

We want to experience sensation as sensation.

All sensation as sensation.

So that we can welcome whatever comes and integrate it into our lives.

Everything that comes is just going to be another sensation.

Whatever it is,

Whatever type of thing it is,

It can only be that.

It can only be a sensation or we wouldn't be perceiving it.

We wouldn't be feeling it.

So as we start to feel a sensation it's an opportunity.

Do I know this sensation?

How do I normally react to this sensation?

Can I now feel this sensation and just feel?

Not judge it,

Not shut it down,

Just purely experience it with clarity,

With awareness,

With equanimity.

That's what this technique is.

So to qualify that point that I made earlier,

The reason why this is the last skill that we'll ever need to be happy is that now we've started to build a safe space.

We started to build our narrow world where we can feel and remain nonreactive.

So whenever we want we can come back to the breath,

We can come back here and we can slowly start to reenter clarity.

It might take us a while but now we know the skill and by now we should start to experience the fact that we're moving towards clarity and away from distraction.

Or we can choose to explore.

We can choose to dig deeper and start to understand more about fundamental reality and we use the sensations to do that.

We're going to focus here or here or here in the same area we've been focusing and instead of feeling our breath we're going to switch toward whichever sensation we feel in this area and whichever sensations come up we're simply going to feel them as sensation.

We're going to feel them,

We're going to focus on them and we're going to use our heightened awareness to dig into them.

That's how we explore.

Like I said we don't want to be believers,

We don't want to be students,

We want to be explorers.

To explore we need to have a method to travel and this is how we travel.

We travel inwards,

Away from the gross towards the subtle.

Yesterday I gave the example of the meditation hall and the floorboards and the grains and the fibers.

Can do the same thing with anything.

If you look at your hand you can do it in a few seconds.

You can see the total hand and then you can break it down to the five fingers.

Then you break it down to the pieces of the fingers and the segments of the hand.

Then you can break it down to the lines that people would read your palms with.

And then you can see the tiny little grains,

The tiny little lines of your hand between those.

And then you can start to see the blood vessels underneath and the veins,

The pulsation.

That's as far as my eyesight goes but our mind has no limit to how far it can go.

When we start to narrow down the area of awareness our mind can keep on going.

Down to the atomic level,

Down to the energetic level.

That's how the Buddha discovered these truths.

Because he went down to the fibers of reality and found out what made them.

And if we go down to the fibers of reality within ourselves then we start to understand the fundamental nature of the universe because we're a part of the universe.

And this is how concentration,

Meditation,

Samadhi,

Which is what we've been practicing with Anupana,

Produces insight,

Wisdom.

As we sharpen our mind we start to see more about reality.

That's concentration.

But as we start to see more about reality we gain insight over the nature of what reality is.

That's wisdom.

And that's how the two techniques work together and that's how the Buddha brought them together.

And that's exactly what we're doing.

We want to take every flavor that we experience and turn it into wisdom.

Any phenomenon experienced fully from the beginning to the end produces wisdom.

So if we can fully feel a sensation and not react to it,

Not judge it,

Not interfere with our perception of it,

Simply feel it,

Welcome it,

Then it produces wisdom.

It produces insight.

Because every sensation that we understand and we go deeper into helps us to more deeply understand the nature of reality.

Another string to our bow that we've gained.

We framed our dance with the unconscious as a very personal thing.

Our animal that we're training.

It's good to personalize it so we can relate to the practice.

Let's depersonalize it a little bit and get a little bit closer to the reality.

It's not one animal that we're struggling against to be able to maintain clarity or working with to maintain clarity.

It is lots of different little patterns.

Lots of mental formations,

Sankaras,

Complexes,

Our unconscious conditioning that each have their own gravity that are consistently pulling us off center in different directions.

Just like when we're using our computer and there's a million and one distractions coming up all the time.

Messages,

Social media,

Open tabs,

They're all consistently pulling our focus in a different direction.

So even if we're meant to be doing focused work,

A portion of our awareness is on all these other distractions.

That's what we're consistently like with our minds.

A portion of our awareness is being pulled in a million and one directions by the gravity of our complexes,

The gravitational pull.

Already today,

We can probably start to experience the fact that our gravitational pull is lessened a little bit because we've drawn the awareness up and we've collected it so that we've become the center of gravity for ourselves,

Which is how it should be.

Imagine if the sun wasn't the center of gravity of the solar system.

Then we wouldn't have a solar system.

We'd have a bunch of rocks flying through space that will eventually crash into each other and break.

Catastrophe.

We need the sun to be the center of gravity to form the solar system for it to work correctly.

Our awareness,

Our conscious focus is like this.

It's our center of gravity and we're starting to rebalance the solar system,

To form the solar system correctly so that it can produce life.

It can work in harmony with the universe.

Just like that sparrow that I discussed yesterday.

We have a lot of little parasites on us that are attempting to take us down.

Any one of them on their own cannot take us down.

It simply does not have the power.

But if we let all of them continually pile on top of us,

They can take us down.

And so now we're generating our awareness,

We're building it and we're strengthening it day by day so that we starve off each of these little parasites.

We stop being at effect to their gravitational pull and we start being consistently at cause.

We learn what the feeling is like to be at cause,

Which we may have never known because we're consistently at effect.

It may feel uncomfortable at first.

Imagine if our hand had been consistently tensed our whole lives,

If it had been holding on to something the whole time.

After 35 years,

If we attempted to relax it,

It probably couldn't relax.

It would probably snap back shut again.

It wouldn't even have the ability to be able to move.

It definitely couldn't play the piano or perform a complex skill.

This is what our mind has been like this whole time.

It has been tensed and seized.

And now as we start to relax it for the first few seconds,

It wants to snap back.

That's just natural.

So we consciously need to relax and eventually wiggle our big finger and slowly start to use it for more and more.

Slowly start to flex the hand,

Flex the mind and see what it's capable of doing.

But these first strict baby steps are necessary for us just to un-cease the hand and to reacquire it as a tool,

To un-cease the mind and reacquire it as a piece of us.

And that's what we've been doing.

And that's why the first few days are the most difficult because it's just dealing with that automatic reflex that we're fighting against.

As the gravitational pull of our complexes becomes less,

As the tension eases,

Then actually our hand being open and free to do what we want becomes our natural position.

But at first it doesn't feel like that.

At first it feels like an imposition against ourselves,

A war against ourselves.

It was eventually that's our natural state.

Whenever we get a minute to be able to relax,

We can just sink into that.

Just sit there and experience the beauty of the bright mind.

Why sit there and do anything else?

And in every moment becomes the potential,

Has the potential to produce wisdom.

As in all the spaces in between,

We're continually returning to the bright mind.

And it starts to clean the record,

Clean the record of our lives as we get rid of this tension.

And then every sensation that comes towards us is more a curiosity than a threat.

What is this sensation?

How does it feel?

What is this new thing that I've never fully felt before?

And I've never felt as sensation as it is.

And as we start to feel through it,

We start to understand more and feel more.

So we can return to that.

We can always choose to return to that and rest in peace,

Rest in power.

And then when we're ready,

We can continue to explore.

We can take this clarity and this power that we've developed and take it to anything.

But most importantly,

Take it to ourselves.

Take it to our body,

Take it to our sensations and clean this record of reactivity that we've built over time.

That's the whole technique.

We're going to continue to learn steps that take this to different areas of our lives and specifically apply it to areas we might not have thought of.

But that's how simple the technique is.

Taking clarity,

Becoming immovable,

Generating awareness,

Learning equanimity and taking it to every sensation that we encounter until we clean the record.

There might come a point where we experience a chaotic situation.

A chaotic situation and chaotic conditions no longer need to produce a chaotic state because now we can return to our clarity and our power.

So instead of being debris flying around the edges of a storm,

Of a tornado,

We can become the eye of the storm.

Even in the center of chaos,

We can sit and be unaffected,

Be at cause,

Be a center of gravity and power unto ourselves so that we're not affected by other senses of gravity and power.

This is a skill that the world could use right now.

Going through a state of chaos,

It's important to be able to maintain clarity and not be affected by it.

Not be affected by our personal madness,

Which is all we're experiencing.

Our personal madness,

Our personal conditioning,

Our personal record of our addictions.

And as we experience them with clarity,

They become less threatening and they can even become entertaining.

And then they become profound and they help us to experience wisdom.

And we appreciate the whole journey we've been on that led to this point,

Which led us to clarity and gave us the ability to be able to generate clarity out of everything,

Which is what we're going to do.

When I was 23,

In my first year of practicing Vipassana,

I was in another ice cream shop.

But this time,

I no longer met the same conundrum that I met as a seven-year-old.

I walked into the shop and before I even knew what was happening,

I felt this deep sense of freedom and happiness because my body had registered it before my mind did.

I looked at all the flavors ahead of me and I realized it didn't matter which one I picked.

Whichever one of those flavors I picked,

I was going to taste and I was going to enjoy.

And that's what we're doing today.

We're going to taste the flavors so that whatever we meet in the world,

Whatever flavor we encounter,

We can enjoy it.

Enjoy it for what it is.

Enjoy sensation as sensation.

Even if it is pina colada sorbet.

So if anyone needs to take a break,

Relax their legs,

Go for it.

And then let's learn this next step and start going deeper into sensation,

Deeper into reality.

Reviews

You’re a heaven-send David Hans-Barker.
I look forward to meeting you one day.

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