Vipassana Meditation: Day 5 - 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

Gameshput Do you want to hear one of my favorite quotes?

It might sound really boring at first.

You're going to hear it and you're going to think,

He must be lying,

That can't be one of his favorite quotes.

It sounds completely ordinary and ridiculous and not profound at all.

But it's 100% one of my favorite quotes.

And maybe you won't appreciate it today.

You might want to appreciate it tomorrow,

But at some point it's going to come back to you in the right moment and you're going to be like,

Oh,

Okay.

And you'll appreciate it for its simplicity and accuracy.

You don't need to turn this into something.

This doesn't need to upset you.

Marcus Aurelius said that about 400 years after the Buddha.

And I love it because it encapsulates what we're doing here.

It encapsulates the attitude totally.

Nothing we're experiencing is because of the circumstances,

Because of the conditions.

It's because of the consciousness that we bring to it.

So it can apply to everything.

Whatever comes up,

We don't need to turn this into something.

It doesn't need to upset us.

If it's upsetting us,

It's because we're letting it.

And at first that might be a tough pill to swallow,

Especially if what's coming up is very personal for us,

Which it probably is because it's inside of us and it's our stuff.

But eventually we'll realize that it's us that's produced this landscape and it's us that's allowed us,

Allowed it to have control over us,

To be able to shift our internal state.

The beginning of all of this,

I said that Vipassana is not really a religion.

It's just a natural human skill.

A natural human skill that as we start to live and come in line with common sense,

We start to figure out about the world,

About the universe,

About how it works.

The Buddha just gave us a practice that encapsulated it,

That allowed us to be able to apply it.

I'd go even further today and say it's not just a natural human skill.

I think Vipassana is like sped up life and life is like slow motion Vipassana.

You don't need to agree.

It's okay.

And I think the more that I sit,

The more that I engage with this idea of it.

There's no separation between the two.

It's just the difference between fast forward and play or the difference between slow motion and regular speed.

This is the showreel and that's the projection and this is the projector.

And now we're just starting to go through the showreel.

First we were just getting our projector ready.

We were cleaning it.

We're getting our projector ready so we could shine it through the showreel to be able to see what it is that we've been putting on the screen this whole time on our own personal cinema.

What are these movies I've been playing to myself?

And now we've got the ability to be filmmakers,

To be editors.

We've been filmmakers the whole time,

But now we can do it consciously.

We have direct access to the showreel.

We can start to take these dusty old reels out,

To have a look at them and see what they contain.

See which scenes we've programmed into ourselves.

When they came up there,

They might have been threatening and scary and understandably so because we weren't ready for them.

But when we've got the showreel here and we start to look through them again,

That might still trigger something within us,

But it's never going to be as bad as facing it there.

Because here we know that we have agency.

We are at cause.

We have creative power.

We are the ones who've sat here and decided to be able to shine a light through these showreels to produce these images so we can look at them when we're ready.

And of course we may have forgot some of the things that we stored in our showreel so they can surprise us when they come up,

But they're just there waiting for us.

That's why it's so important for everybody to get the hang of this ability to modulate how intense their experience is.

Because if we sit deeply and we dig into the sensations,

We are going to bring things up.

We are going to start to bring up what's in the showreel,

What's in the storehouse and be able to look at our personal movie record.

If we don't want to do that,

Like I said,

We can go for a walk,

Relax,

Continue to practice.

But on a more practical sense,

It's nothing to do with posture.

It's to do with coming out of the depths of a sensation to the surface level.

So if we ever want to calm our experience down and to be able to take a step back,

We simply stop dissecting,

Stop going deeply into ourselves and we come back up to the surface.

We just feel the surface level sensations that are contained on our body.

And we won't start bringing up all these monsters from the depths until we're ready for that particular scene of the movie.

And then if we want to take a step further back and we want to get ourselves ready,

Then we go back to Anupana.

We go back to focusing here.

And the more we do this,

The less this is a discipline and the more it's a relaxation.

In Tibetan Buddhism,

They use this slightly differently,

They call it shamatha,

It's tranquility,

Because that's eventually where it goes.

Come back here,

You rest here and it produces this nice tranquil state.

It's only because we're sitting here for 12 hours a day,

Pushing ourselves to do it,

That it's this forceful activity.

In our regular practice,

If we come back here,

We focus on the breath,

Give it a bit of time to be able to settle,

It's a very peaceful,

Very tranquil practice.

It will get us prepped for anything that we might have waiting in the storehouse to come up later.

And maybe we never want to dig in there,

Maybe we just want to stay in this tranquility.

Absolutely fine,

It's a beautiful practice.

But just know that it's your choice.

I'm going to keep on taking the practices further throughout the 10 days and it's your choice how deeply you use any of them and how far you go into them.

You are in control of your own experience and you can choose to modulate what's going to come up and what isn't.

But eventually,

If you want to follow this all through,

We said that initially we're learning mastering the mind and then we learn a few other skills.

And another station along this journey is total bodily awareness.

We want to get to the point where we can feel every sensation within the body,

Every sensation.

That means that there are no monsters in the closet,

No boogeymen under the bed,

Because we know exactly what our internal register contains,

Our internal landscape contains.

And then another station is total bodily equanimity.

To be able to feel all the sensations that we have within us and not react to any of them.

That's where this goes if you want to keep on going.

To be able to feel deeply every single thing that the body contains,

To be able to feel it for exactly what it is and to have no reactivity to it.

Then we can move through the body freely and we can sit deeper and we can go deeper into these states of meditation that take us along the path.

This personal journey is just the beginning of the path.

It's just what we all have to go through until we start going deeper and deeper into the practice.

Deeper into the concentration states,

The absorptions,

The bliss states,

The other things that come.

But we have to be willing to go through our personal journey first.

To be able to relive it.

That's why this is sped up life.

We have the chance to re-experience life again and again and again while we're sitting here in a much condensed form.

Like I said in a very mundane way,

Those little brotherly arguments I'd get in with my brother.

The reason why I went back,

I was immune to it,

Isn't that I worked on it directly.

It's just by it coming up I'd been through it a thousand times by the time I faced him.

And when I went to face him it's kind of like,

I was kind of bored of it.

You know it wasn't a big deal anymore.

It's like,

Oh this thing again.

Do I really need to go through this again?

It's like if we watch the TV show a thousand times.

It might have been funny the first time,

It might have been scary the first time.

But you know,

Hundredth time,

Two hundredths,

Five hundredths,

A thousandth,

You're probably going to be done with it.

Just let it play in the background,

It will have no effect over you.

Transcendence.

Transcendence gets a bad rap.

And I think that's because often we talk about going from trauma to transcendence without the connecting dots of transmutation.

And that's what we want to go through first.

So as you start to relive these experiences,

As we start to feel these intense sensations,

We'll come to a point where we can feel them and we can be fine with them.

Maybe we have specific issues in our body.

I mean we definitely have specific issues in our body,

All of us.

And each of us has our own ones that we're dealing with.

Our own pains,

Our own specific pains that we get to know very well,

Very intimately.

And if we can learn to feel those and not be out of effect to them,

It stops mattering if we transcend them.

Transcendence will be the next level,

Being completely beyond them.

But if we can transmute them,

If we can feel them,

Get to know them deeply and not be out of effect to them,

That's enough already.

That means that all of these things that we have within us no longer have the power to throw us off balance.

And something beautiful happens as we start to intensify the process.

Because we're sitting so deeply in intense sensation consistently,

Then what we register as trauma has to be much deeper than it used to be.

Because we're naturally used to being in a more intense situation.

We're naturally used to generating intensity and sitting in pain.

Because we can feel that pain and not register it as suffering.

So then the same things that used to be able to impact us and cause trauma wouldn't leave a dent anymore.

Because we can feel them without reacting.

It's like the channel of a river.

In monsoon season,

It will get flooded and it will get overrun because there's too much water in it.

But if that river was wider,

Then that same volume of water could run through it smoothly without causing torrents,

Knocking down trees,

And flooding.

We are like that riverbed.

And as we practice,

We're widening the riverbed so we can take a higher volume of water being flooded through it.

So it doesn't cause a flood anymore.

It just runs through us smoothly.

We can channel a deeper layer of sensation.

We can channel more going through us.

Another quote by Blaise Pascal,

All of a person's problems come from the inability to sit happily in a room alone.

Because if we can sit here happily and face everything,

Then that means that when we leave,

There's nothing left that we could face that could throw us off center.

And the only thing that can stop us from sitting here happily is our inability to be able to face ourselves.

Our inability to be able to face reality.

Like we said,

Vipassana means to see reality as it is,

To see clearly.

So all we're really doing with vipassana is learning to look at life.

That's all it is.

How do we look at life and not do anything else?

That's the basic instruction.

It's just that we're consistently doing more and more.

We're consistently reacting.

So this is just taking away things rather than adding things.

It's saying,

No,

Just look.

Don't let something else get in the way of just looking and just seeing something for it is,

For what it is.

You don't need to turn this into something.

It's just a josh.

And the more we can just look at anything like that,

The more we realize that nothing needs to upset us.

There's nothing that anything contains that needs to upset us.

We can just look at it,

We can feel it,

And accept it as a facet of life.

Now of course,

There might be some things that are much more difficult to accept than other things,

But they all fall into this category.

They all fall into the category of something that has been stimulated within our body,

A sensation that has been stimulated within our body.

Whatever the circumstance was that we encountered that through becomes irrelevant because it's the sensation that we deal with.

And if we're willing to go through every sensation that this can produce,

Then we are immune to all potential trauma.

No more new trauma,

And then we can start to happily bring up all the old trauma because we know we're ready to face it.

That's a very personal choice for everyone to be able to make on their own.

That's what we're doing while we sit here,

Starting to modulate our practice and decide how deep we really want it to go,

How far we want it to go.

Initially we framed these complexes and this unconscious conditioning as abstract things that were pulling us off center.

Then when we started to practice vipassana,

We find that there are actual things in the body,

The actual webs of sensation,

Loops of sensation that are tied within us.

And now as we move through the body,

We can start to feel that they have a gravitational pull.

Maybe something here,

Maybe something here,

Somewhere else.

There's a gravitational pull that these dense sensations will pull us towards them,

These dense patterns of sensation.

Each of us have different ones.

That's why we move through the body in a stable way,

And we're giving ourselves positions of awareness that we can reliably focus on without being dragged off center.

It's exactly the same thing we initially did here with the breath and with this area.

We're giving ourselves a place where we could focus so that we do not get pulled away by the gravity of these sensation loops in our body,

By the gravity of these mental formations in our body.

And as we move through the body,

We're going to start to actually feel where these things were that were pulling us off center.

They are physically present in places in the body.

Everyone will have their own.

And that's why we move through the same places,

And we do it in such a robotic,

Mechanical way.

Because what we're doing then is we're programming our mind and our body to not react to any of these gravitational pulls.

We're programming our mind that this doesn't need to upset us,

That nothing needs to pull us off balance,

Even if we're moving past our biggest complex,

And it's there waiting for us.

And when we're moving right next to it,

We can wait,

Give it its turn until we're going to give it our focus.

And we can keep with our meditation without being thrown off center.

This is how we start to be at cause in process,

In the process of moving through the body.

And now we have a chance to actually address each of these little loops,

Each of these pieces of unconscious conditioning that we find within us that have the tendency to throw us off.

And as we move through in a stable way around the body,

We get to locate them as well.

And we get to know,

Okay,

I've got a big complex waiting for me when I get to the liver.

I've got a big complex waiting for me when I get to the heart.

We each have our places that we're going to encounter and find as we move through the body.

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

So far,

We've been working from the outside in.

Now we're going to start working from the inside out as well.

We're also going to learn a technique that helps to bridge the gap between us and the world and clean this energy between us and the world and other people and other things.

But first we're going to start going inside.

At home,

You'll learn this technique tomorrow.

If you're here,

We'll start to practice it later tonight.

And then we'll see the difference between starting from the inside out and going in a different flow through the body and starting from the outside in,

From the surface and digging in.

And then we can start to feel all of the different facets of the body.

And then everyone can choose.

Everyone can choose what it is they're happy to focus on,

What kind of meditation it is they want to have.

If for the whole time you're here,

You just want to work on tranquility,

It's absolutely fine.

Like I said,

It's an amazing technique.

It's the one that took the Buddha to enlightenment.

It's the one that develops extreme focus.

And for those of you who are interested in those kind of things,

It's the one that's meant to give you psychic powers.

So if you want to go deep into that world,

That's what you do.

The anupana.

You focus there,

Sharpen your awareness.

Takes you to the absorption states,

The jhanas.

And so if that's what you want to work on,

Work on that.

If you want to start mapping the internal landscape,

But just in a surface way,

Just getting familiar with what all of this is before we start to dig in,

Then do that.

If you want to start digging underneath the surface into our core complexes,

Then do that.

But know that it's a choice.

Know that you can do any of those things with this technique.

And it's entirely up to you what you want to do.

There are layers and layers to this.

And it can go on for a very long time.

So there's no rush.

This is a beginning.

We're starting to learn this technique.

And now we're really starting to be able to apply it and to be able to see the full range of what it can do.

And it can do a lot.

It does exactly what it says on the tin.

And it does more.

It's just there's no real point talking about the much more that it does.

Because we start to get there,

And to be honest,

By the time we even get close to there,

We know.

We start to know what the potential is,

Because it's just moving in this direction.

The technique becomes the teacher.

You don't need anyone standing up here telling you how to use it.

Your body will know.

Your bones will know.

And you know exactly what the process is,

This direction is,

That we go towards.

So we're going to learn a new technique in two hours.

So for these next two hours,

Let's just settle stably into our practice.

Start to focus and start to take this responsibility of how far we're going to go.

How much we're going to dig into ourselves.

Start to recap these techniques we've learned.

Mastering the mind gives us the ability to be immovable.

So if we come up against something that's moving us,

And we feel like we're a victim,

Come back to mastering the mind.

Get that first.

Heightened awareness sharpens our awareness so we can see more detail and we can zoom in on ourselves.

It allows us to feel more awareness,

More sensation in any area.

We can apply it anywhere.

Equanimity,

Incremental equanimity,

Helps us to be able to be non-reactive to sensation,

Regardless of what the sensation is we're feeling.

Vipassana,

The non-reactive movement of awareness,

Allows us to be able to move this awareness and equanimity through the body and choose to dig into the body if we wish,

Choose to bring things up.

That's what we've practiced so far.

We have the tools to be able to deal with anything that comes up.

Remember,

Anything that comes up is just a storm inside the sea.

So we may at first be at effect by it because we've zoomed in and we see the scale of this storm.

If we zoom back out again and we look at the total sea and the storm taking place within it,

There's no need for it to affect us.

It doesn't need to upset us.

We can focus on it.

We can come back to ourselves.

We can gather ourselves and our presence and then we can start again as we wish.

Is everyone ready to practice?

All right,

Let's do this.

Does anyone need to take a break?

All right,

Let's take a short water break and toilet break and then let's come back in five minutes.

Reviews

Such learning 🙏

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