Gsworth It should start being really obvious by now how this technique works and filters its way into every area of life.
Today we're going to add another area slowly bit by bit practice so that when we come back to our regular world we start to carry this skill everywhere.
Like we said in the beginning it's really just an extension of our natural human abilities returning to homeostasis,
To naturalness.
It's just that we've conditioned ourselves with so much to interfere with this naturalness that we need to go on a process of deconditioning.
And that's what the Buddha gave us,
A way to decondition ourselves so that we can come back to our natural faculties without any interference.
To see things clearly,
To see reality as it is,
The literal translations of Vipassana.
And when you break it down it's even much simpler than that.
It's just being present.
What are we doing?
We're really just bringing our awareness here,
Pulling it away from all the areas that we've left it and bringing it back here.
And that's what we're doing with all these different variations of a technique that we're using.
We're collecting our awareness,
Collecting our presence and we're bringing it back,
Bringing it back to us,
Collecting the threads.
So where have we left it?
We've left it in the unconscious conditioning of the mind.
We've left it in the body,
Like we talked about yesterday,
In the trauma,
In the intense experience we're not ready for.
And we've left it in our relationships,
As we saw through what we learned yesterday,
Through our contact with people and the world.
That's where we've left pieces of ourselves.
And slowly as we go through this,
We want to start going to each of them and bringing them back.
Everything we contact,
Every piece of unconscious conditioning,
Every person we revisit is an opportunity to take back a piece of ourselves.
To be able to feel it,
Not react to it,
Bring it into full awareness and have access to it at will.
As we build these positions of awareness when we move through the body,
We can start turning everything we've experienced into a position of awareness and one that doesn't come back to us randomly,
But that we can move to whenever we want.
We have easy access to,
Fluid access to.
There's no static in our system.
Yesterday we can see how a large part of these stories can be connected to our cast of characters in our lives.
We've probably left pieces of ourselves with our parents,
With our family,
With all of our past relationships,
Ex-lovers,
Friends,
All the people we've known throughout our lives.
And as we continue to practice metta,
We can continue to reconnect with all of these different segments that we can take back.
We are not attempting to dissolve the connection.
By smoothing this connection away and sending love through it,
We're not attempting to disconnect from our family,
From the people we love,
The reverse.
We are connecting to them through a pure stream of love.
What we're doing is we're removing our emotional reactivity to them,
To how we've registered them in the body,
In the mind,
So that we're no longer a slave to anything acting on us from the outside.
We don't leave pieces of our power in other people for them to be able to come and enact upon us,
For us to be able to give in to that reactivity.
We have a free and even connection to our entire world.
Just like Nelson Mandela said yesterday,
We want to attain internal freedom,
Want to be able to reach this state of internal freedom.
And that means that we can't leave complexes,
Pieces of our history and people that we are still at effect to.
We need to be at cause and engage with them from that standpoint.
And it may seem like the deepest,
Most difficult aspects of that are the things that we want to give time until we face down.
But actually,
I think it's the opposite.
Because if we're going to leave ourselves at effect to anything,
If everything that we leave outside of our consciousness still has power over us and power to be able to manipulate and affect us,
Do we want to leave the deepest,
Darkest pieces of our consciousness that power?
We may not be able to completely transmute them and transcend them like we were talking about,
But we can definitely encounter them,
Feel them and choose to not react to them.
So we know exactly what we're dealing with.
So if we do start to face uncomfortable memories,
Uncomfortable sensations,
Revisiting uncomfortable relationships,
Then I feel it's a good policy for us to be able to face them down as soon as possible.
Because then we take this thing that we're afraid of looking at and we bring it here and put it on the table.
And the more we look at it and the more we touch it,
The less power it will have over us.
And we have a chance to be able to slowly get used to it before we dig into it and unwind it.
And then we've got less things hiding underneath the rug,
Underneath the bed to be able to come out in surprising moments.
And today what we'll start to do with the metta practice is we'll go from just the people that we find it easy to feel love for and we'll start to spread it into the neutral area and then into the difficult.
And to those people that we really don't want to look at,
Really don't want to give our focus to,
And really don't want to extend our love to,
Just to see.
How do we feel when we do this?
How do we feel when we re-establish that connection?
What interference is there between us being at cause whilst having this person in our consciousness?
And feeling this love isn't what we normally talk about when we talk about love,
This romantic feeling,
It's just feeling this stable,
Loving awareness that we can extend towards anything.
This ability to wish everything well,
Everything to be happy.
As we start to come to presence and we collect our awareness and we collect the totality of ourselves,
Everything becomes a little bit more even at first.
And we might face that issue with boredom again that we were talking about because we don't have this reactivity to the highs and the lows.
And so you've just got this smooth naturalness which might be registered as boredom.
Boredom is also a gateway to the psychedelic.
It's a barrier between the mundane and the super-mundane like we discussed.
The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal gave us a very simple equation to be able to face it.
Boredom plus attention equals interest.
So while we're bored,
It's because everything is relatively neutral and it's nothing we particularly want to focus on.
How we get through that into interest,
Into being able to truly care about something and focus on something,
Is we just give it our attention.
We zero in on it and we focus on it precisely.
That's where the skill that we learned in day two comes in handy because we can zero in and use our heightened awareness to be able to feel this layer of naturalness much more evenly,
Much more deeply.
And then I don't think love is much more than that.
I think an object plus our awareness equals love.
If we are able to fully focus our awareness on any object,
Then we can slowly start to cultivate that feeling of affection and love for it.
And this flips on its head this idea that we need a suitable object to allow us to feel love.
Walking around waiting for exactly the right thing,
The right conditions to produce that love in us,
That puts us infinitely at effect.
And obviously we want to be the opposite of that.
We want to have less of an object focused love and more of a subject produced love cultivated so we can bring it to everything,
Bring it to every state.
The English NLP master Derren Brown wrote something about this in one of his books.
He wrote down the misconceptions that he had about life,
The way that he thought things would be,
And then he wrote down the age when he realized those weren't true and what he actually discovered was true.
One of the misconceptions that he had was that he was going to meet someone who had this list of qualities and characteristics.
Looked the right way,
Right height,
Dressed the right way,
Right personality,
Right character,
Right job,
Right family,
Right history,
And that would be the person that he would finally love,
That he'd finally fall in love with.
He'd meet someone,
They tick all these boxes and boom that would be it.
And then when he was somewhere in his thirties,
I can't remember exactly where,
He fell in love for the first time and the person he fell in love with was nothing like he expected at all.
In some ways he found this person repulsive and idiotic and weird.
But he still loved them.
And it just flipped that notion on its head.
It made him realize that the head makes a very different choice from the heart.
That love isn't something that is object dependent.
It comes from the inside.
It's one way traffic.
A byproduct of this love that we're working on,
This non-reactive love,
Non-dependent love,
Is that we become much more emotionally stable.
Because if we're feeling this love and we found the position of it within us,
Then we don't really need it from the outside anymore.
And we realize that a lot of our grasping comes from this desire to receive love from the outside.
A lot of what we're doing is saying one thing on the surface but underneath it's just saying,
Love me.
Give me your focus.
Give me your attention.
Love me.
And this produces a lot of different behaviors that look like they're nothing to do with this.
Whereas as we start to feel this stable loving focus and we can extend it to our world,
Regardless of what the object is,
Then we realize we filled in this gap where insecurity usually lives,
Where this need for external validation usually lives.
It occupies the same place as this loving awareness.
And as we fill it with this loving awareness,
We don't need it from the outside anymore.
It's still wonderful to be loved.
It's wonderful to meet someone who can extend that love to us.
No doubt about that.
But it's not a necessity anymore.
It's not a craving.
So when we're encountering people,
We're not attempting to pull their love from them towards us.
Because we have it and we're giving it.
And if something's flowing through us like that,
Then we become a funnel for it.
We become a funnel for love.
We're drawing it into ourselves and giving it outwards.
So we don't need to draw it from other people anymore.
It's here.
It's present all the time.
We just need to be present to be able to feel it.
We need to reclaim our kingdom,
Bring it back here,
So the totality of our awareness is here.
And then we can always be resting in love.
Whatever we're doing.
That doesn't mean that we need to agree,
Approve of,
Or even like the people that we're focusing on to send this love to.
It doesn't mean that we need to pretend to.
All of this starts with authenticity,
With reality.
Feeling what we're really feeling and extending that outwards.
It cannot be a pretense.
So if we encounter someone that we don't like and we don't like some of their qualities and some of their behavior patterns,
Some of their choices,
Some of their views,
Their political stance,
It should not interfere with us loving them.
There's a difference between our judgments and our accurate perception and our love.
And we shouldn't mix the two up.
We're not saying pretend that you think something different of this person.
We're saying that the position of power is the position of non-reactivity and being able to extend this love to everyone.
And through that light of love,
We can see them more clearly and more accurately.
We can see everything about them.
It's just that we're no longer reactive to all the little things that might have thrown us off before.
It's saying despite the fact that we are entirely different and completely disagree on everything,
We can still love each other.
And then we're really in a position of power.
It's like the Buddha said,
The Dharma has one taste,
The taste of freedom.
So we need to stop ourselves being prisoners of all these self-made prisons.
That's what I mean about how all this is doing is bringing us back to homeostasis,
Bringing us back to our natural condition.
We naturally are flowing through all of this,
But then every step along the way as we grow up,
We've put more conditioning,
More layers of conditioning on ourselves.
And a lot of people had solutions to this,
Similar solutions.
And a lot of them figured out the first few steps of what the Buddha figured out.
But they didn't figure out how to really attack it at its roots.
Within all the yogic systems and a lot of the religions,
They talk about the same thing,
Closing off the sense doors,
Being able to become single-pointed and focused.
The Buddha says the same thing,
That we need to become non-reactive to all the things that come in through the sense doors.
But the way to become non-reactive to them isn't to shut them out,
Isn't to not feel them anymore.
It's to feel all of them and to not react to them.
Because then we eliminate any possible thing that could throw us off balance.
We're not hiding in a shell,
Hoping that that thing that we hid away from doesn't suddenly come knocking on our door.
We are not drawing that hard line between us and the world.
We're saying,
Let me slowly,
As I continue to practice this technique,
Feel everything and get to the point where I can feel everything and it's no longer something that I need to react to.
I can feel it and I can respond to.
It no longer throws me off center.
Just another flavor,
Another flavor that we're adding to our palates of being able to taste.
And that's what we're doing.
And today we want to add another sense.
When all of us go back to the world,
I imagine we're not going to walk around with our eyes closed.
Unless you're blind,
It's no problem.
Then you don't need to pay attention to this aspect of the technique.
But the rest of us are going to need to open our eyes so that we can go and engage with the world.
Vipassana is not a closed-eyed practice.
We just practice it closed-eyed so we can learn it quicker,
So we can focus on the sensory awareness of the body.
The reason for that is that the Buddha discovered this is the grossest sense store,
The feeling sense.
It is the lowest vibrational level.
And it's where we produce reactivity because of that,
At the root.
If we can feel the sensations in the body and not react to them,
And we start to refine this sense store,
We start to be able to feel subtle sensation.
And as we're infusing our presence into our body,
We'll start to feel these clear channels within our body,
More subtle sensations as we clean this world and then we extend it outwards.
And as we do that and we refine this grossest sense,
It starts to refine all the other senses.
There are lots of meditation techniques that use the eyes as the object of awareness,
Focusing on a flame,
Focusing on water,
On a plant,
A flower.
And these are good techniques if we've already developed the ability to refine our sensory awareness,
Because then we start to refine our eyesight as well.
And today what we want to do is we want to start bringing our sight into the practice.
So this doesn't remain a thing that throws us off as soon as we leave here.
We haven't looked anyone in the face for 10 days and then suddenly we have to have a normal conversation again,
It might get a little bit strange.
In my first year of practicing,
I was living in a meditation center in New Zealand,
A beautiful place.
And I was volunteering there,
I was in silence most of the time,
Even the volunteers would have minimal communication between them so we could maintain our practice,
Maintain this bubble around us.
And I started to notice that I was becoming averse to looking people in the face.
I would talk to them if I needed to,
Half looking down like that.
And I was wondering,
Why is this?
It's because I started to realize that the face just has a lot of information coming off it.
And when I'd look up at someone's face,
I'd just start to see this light shining at me off their face.
And it would either make me uncomfortable or I'd just get fascinated by it and stare at them like a weirdo.
Not really what I should be doing in a meditation center.
So I realized I needed to get over this.
And so I went and started looking in the mirror and practicing meditating on myself in the mirror.
And then I realized that this was just another set of sensory input that I needed to be able to be aware of and not reactive to.
To be able to look at someone,
To be able to maintain a meditative presence,
And just continue practicing whilst looking.
And we're going to do that today.
Later in the day,
When we started to cultivate our awareness and build more of it,
We're going to start using each other as objects of awareness so that we can start to be able to use our eyes as a meditative tool.
Important things about that are,
One,
To consistently remain anchored within the sensations in the body.
Even though we're now doing an open-eyed meditation,
The main object of our meditation is always ourselves.
We should never lose this connection to the sensations of the body.
Never lose this communication with our internal landscape.
It should be a constant in our lives.
We should remain aware of that.
And everything else we're doing is simply an extension of that.
The meta is an extension of that.
If we're not truly feeling love within us,
We cannot extend it to someone else.
If we're not anchored within the sensations of the body and refining the sense doors,
Then we should not be observing through the others.
And so as we meditate with another person and we do it with our eyes open,
We're not moving our awareness away from the sensations.
We're keeping our awareness anchored on the sensations simply while we remain present and fixed,
Aware of another person.
And while you're doing this with another,
Do your best not to attempt to not non-verbally communicate.
At first you might want to laugh,
It might get uncomfortable,
You might want to start smiling,
Winking,
Doing something to instigate some form of communication with the other person.
Slowly let this subside.
Let yourself come back to meditation.
Let yourself give this person the full force of your awareness and then do the same to you,
Whilst you're meditating.
And in this way,
We don't place another layer of unnaturalness on top of our naturalness.
We want to get down to naturalness,
Down to being able to directly feel and directly be aware in every circumstance,
Including when we're focusing on another person in a conversation.
This is like baby step training to get back to talking to people.
We're not going to speak today,
We're going to sit there and observe.
As we start to approach this,
We start to let this tool work its way into every area of our lives.
Slowly slowly filtering its way out.
And like I said,
We won't do that until the end.
A couple reasons for that.
One is,
The more we focus today,
The more we'll see when we look at another person.
And as we look at them and start to meditate with them,
We will be in a more clear state of mind to be able to focus on them clearly.
Another reason is,
That it's easier for this form of meditation,
This form of meditation is called transfiguration,
To practice it towards the evening.
So we're going to do it towards the evening.
But now throughout the day,
As you're walking around,
Start to lift your gaze a little bit.
Open your eyes a little bit more.
Start to look at the world as you're walking around meditating,
And don't let it throw you off.
Start to become a bit more natural with your movements.
We discussed the model of the waiters,
And how at first we need to carry our awareness very carefully and not drop our glass of awareness anywhere,
Because we're new waiters.
But now as we start to get better at this,
We want to turn everything into naturalness.
It's nice,
As a specific practice,
To pay attention to every single step that we're taking and feel every single sensation,
But this is also a layer of unnaturalness.
And what we want to do today is,
We want to be able to just walk and feel.
Just walk and be able to feel our sensations.
See where in your body your sensory awareness moves as you walk around,
As you do other things.
And then we can start to build this natural feeling.
Because when we go back to our lives,
I imagine we're not going to walk around like this.
I mean we could do it,
But it would take us a very long time to get from A to B,
And you'd have to make very specific friends,
I imagine,
Who want to walk with you at the same pace.
We're going to walk naturally,
We're going to walk normally,
And so we need to be able to carry our awareness to this natural state,
To this natural walking.
So let's start to build that today.
We start to build this bridge back to the world,
And we work on that together.
And then we carry it everywhere.
And if we do find ourselves getting thrown off,
Then simply do that.
Stop and collect yourself.
Now you can tell.
Now you have the awareness to be able to feel,
Whether you're starting to get dispersed,
Or you're condensed,
And your awareness is together.
If you start to feel like your awareness is getting dispersed,
Then just stop,
Collect your awareness,
Bring it back to yourself.
Focus.
If you're at home,
This evening is the time when you will need your mirror to practice transfiguration.
If you don't have a partner you're meditating with,
Here we'll do it together.
So the power of now,
The power of coming to the present.
This is where a lot of spiritual techniques end.
This is the end goal,
Being mindful,
Being here,
Being now.
For us,
This is the beginning.
This is a necessary step in us doing what we really do with Vipassana,
Which the Buddha outlines very clearly.
We slowly,
Slowly go deeper into the fundamental nature of reality.
Unless we are here and now and present,
And willing to accept reality,
The reality within,
The reality without,
We can't do that deeper work.
It's unavailable to us.
Maybe somebody can focus on the jhanas,
Somebody can use other shamanic methods,
Other things they take,
Other trance states to be able to enter psychedelic experience.
But the problem will be that if you enter this psychedelic story,
You are out of the main story to the super mundane story,
And we still haven't mastered these steps of the technique,
Then we're still a victim of the story and we're not a hero.
And by now we know we want to be the hero of the story.
That's why day number one is really the most important day.
Because whether we're in a small story or we're in a big story with magical creatures and wonderful adventures,
We don't want to be at effect.
We don't want to be the victim.
And as we start to go deeper into the aspects of this technique,
It will take us to a bigger story.
It will take us to a broader universe with lots of different features that we can discover.
And we want to make sure every step of the way we're not placing ourselves at effect.
Like Dan Millman says,
In the way of the spiritual warrior,
The hero acts where the fool can only react.
And here I'm sure we can all agree that we have all been heroes and fools at the same time and are still heroes and fools in different areas of our lives,
Still reacting at points in our lives and not acting,
Not being able to take this conscious action.
And so we just want to be aware where that is.
So if we do start to get into this greater journey of exploring the universe,
We can do it from a position of activity,
Not reactivity,
From presence and cause.
As the Buddha say,
It goes after this.
He says it goes from perceiving body as body,
Sensation as sensation,
To perceiving the finer details of that,
The structure of the super mundane.
And then it stops so much being about the phenomenon and it starts being about the structure underneath the phenomenon.
As we go into the body,
We start to feel finer and finer sensations until it gets down to the atomic,
The energetic,
And we start to feel these flows of energy through the body.
And this opens up a whole new world of awareness.
But as we go into this world of awareness,
It also brings up a whole new set of complexes that we have waiting underneath the surface,
Waiting to come up.
And so we want to make sure as we go deeper into our awareness,
We're more and more stable,
Not less and less stable.
Some people have practiced for a long time and push very hard to get deep into these states,
Very hard to get energetic awareness to be able to sharpen their minds and perceive whatever they can.
And then they end up being very tense with their experiences or they have experiences that make them very uncomfortable.
Visions,
Spirits,
Ghosts,
Different energetic phenomenon that they're not quite ready for,
Or simply just being very tight and tense and unable to be able to take this awareness to lots of areas of life.
This is because they haven't been working on awareness and equanimity evenly.
And we always want to make sure we work on them evenly.
As we take a step in awareness,
We also take a step in equanimity.
And then every step we take,
We're putting down more and more of our complexes,
Getting lighter and lighter,
Like the old monk,
Not the young monk.
We just put a thing down and we let it go and we move on.
And everything we encounter is a chance for us to know it thoroughly and put it down.
See what we're holding,
How we're holding it,
How that still might have power over us and be manipulating us and slowly get used to not giving in.
So it cannot affect us.
And then we understand the nature of it and it has less power to be able to do anything to us.
And that's what we want to do today.
And we want to extend that into our day.
We might realize that simply when we look at people,
The way someone responds to us has power to throw us off center.
Matilda might look at me with a mean stare while we're meditating together.
And instead of me meditating,
I might be standing here thinking,
Why doesn't Matilda love me?
We can't let that throw us off.
We can only control the awareness that we bring to the moment,
The presence that we bring to the moment.
We can't control how the Matilda responds to us.
That's entirely up to her.
That's entirely up to the world.
So as we start to open our eyes and we see all the forms of the world,
It's going to respond to us in many different ways.
People are dealing with their own conditions.
Things are dealing with their own conditions.
We have to let them be them.
Let them go through what they need to go through and throw at you whatever they're going to throw at you.
For us,
We just need to be immovable in our focus.
Whatever you're going through,
May you also be happy.
Otherwise what we end up doing is we see a response someone's giving us and then we throw a projection back at them.
And then we just start playing this silly game of us both throwing projections at each other,
Making up artificial stories and living in a fantasy world.
A lot of the things that the mystics and sages said are wonderful things and they become cliches because we've heard them so many times over.
And one of those is a thing that Jesus said,
He who is without sin cast the first stone.
And when I actually hear the story of where this comes from,
To me it has a lot more power and meaning.
It's where the Pharisees,
The religious scholars at the time within the Judaic community when Jesus was alive,
Had got Mary Magdalene,
Who was a temple harlot,
A prostitute at the time.
Well,
This is contested,
But within the story this is what's said.
But let's not dig into that.
And they brought her to Jesus and said,
Okay,
So you're the son of God.
Within the law of your father,
This woman is breaking the law of God,
The religious law.
So by the law,
It says that she should be stoned to death.
What are you going to do?
They're trying to catch Jesus out to see if he really is claiming to be the son of God,
The position he is.
And Jesus said,
Okay,
All right,
Get some stones.
And so they went and they got some stones,
Piled them up.
They said,
Good,
Good,
Draw a line here.
Everybody stand behind it.
Mary,
You go over there.
Stand there.
And he said to all of them,
Okay,
Whichever one of you is without sin,
You cast the first stone.
And we should be aware of this when we come back to engaging with people in the world and when we practice meta,
Because we're going to start to contact people,
All the people that we've experienced,
And then some new people when we open our eyes.
And it's very easy for us to start casting these stones,
Start throwing projections onto people.
And it's good to remember that we are also imperfect beings doing our best to live that cause and to work through all of this.
So let's do our best.
Let's practice.
Anyone needs to go to the bathroom,
Get some water.
Now's the time to do it.
Let's come back,
Get into meditation.
