Vipassana Meditation: Day 9 - 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

Death can be a very serious subject,

But death and dissolution can be a very light subject.

It's good to approach it seriously for some of the benefits it gives us that we talked about this morning,

The way the shamans,

The stoics,

The samurai talk about it.

It's good to have this level of seriousness.

Like Steven Pressfield said,

And we quoted at the beginning of this course,

It helps us to approach the practice as warriors.

And now we see why we need to be warriors to do this.

Because you've got to go through a battle,

Maybe a few battles with yourself,

A few of your demons.

But when we bring in dissolution and this understanding that the Buddha's given us throughout this course,

This way to approach sensation and approach our total system as a structure to be dissolved,

Our system as character armor,

Not character,

Then it becomes a lot lighter.

Death starts to look a little bit different.

Another Indian sage,

A more modern Indian sage,

Jiddu Krishnamurti,

Had something to say about death.

He said,

Freedom from the known is death and then we are living.

A very short statement,

But there's a lot in there,

Right?

So let's unpack it.

Freedom from the known is death and then we are living.

So what Krishnamurti is telling us there is that the thing keeping us imprisoned is the known is our ideas,

Our concepts.

This is a barrier between us and reality.

And if we can get free from the known,

If we can experience this freedom and crack out this shell,

This shell of ideas and concepts and artificiality,

Then we are really living.

If we can go through this death,

The death to what we think reality is versus what we are actually experiencing,

Then we can finally actually touch reality.

And that's what the Buddha has given us.

The Buddha has given us a method to be able to do this,

To be able to reach out and touch reality or more appropriately to reach in and touch reality.

And maybe there's a death we need to go through to be able to do that.

The death of who we think we were,

The death of our ideas,

The death of what we think the world is versus what we actually experience it as,

Then we are on firm foundations.

Then we can truly live through this.

And dissolution is seen as a precursor to death,

A glimpse of the dissolution of our forces,

Of this confluence of forces that have come together to make this me,

This you.

Another great book that shows us that is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

And at first when you read it,

It might seem like madness because it's talking about all these different spiritual beings that you encounter,

All these different mandalas.

But what it's actually meant to signify is the process that we go through as we die.

And we talked before about phenomenon and interpretation,

Reality and our interpretation of it.

And so through the Tibetan culture,

Through the Tibetan practice,

These beings,

These spiritual beings,

These sacred geometrical structures that you go through as the body dissolves,

This is the process of dissolution.

This is what we need to go through.

The phenomenon may be experienced differently by you or by me,

But that's just interpretation.

The phenomenon itself is the same.

This dissolution of forces,

Of it falling apart.

And if you start to understand the symbols within the Tibetan system,

Actually it does follow the process of dissolution pretty spot on.

And after we've talked about death so much,

Dissolution can seem quite scary and threatening.

And it is scary,

But it's scary in the same way that something beautiful and exhilarating is.

Something almost too big for us to imagine,

Or actually in this case,

Definitely too big for us to imagine,

Comes into our lives.

It's overwhelming.

And it's overwhelming for one particular reason is because we can't conceptualize it.

It's reality itself.

So it's too much for us.

And that too much for us is exactly what we need to tear this structure apart.

And that's what happens as we start to experience dissolution.

The body comes apart,

We come apart to find something else,

Something else thereafter,

Something beautiful and amazing.

So if you start to approach this and it starts to scare you,

Good,

It should scare you.

But we just approach it the same way as we approach anything else.

Is we feel this new phenomenon.

We move through it and we really feel genuinely what it is.

And we don't react to it.

And we keep this ability to inquire into it.

That's what we want to do if we start to approach dissolution.

We start to feel this energy and then we start to feel more subtle energy,

Then we start to feel pools of energy,

These waves of things in our body pulling themselves apart,

Different things we can't conceptualize.

Simply take it step by step.

Move one step with your awareness,

One step with your equanimity.

And in this way,

Even the most extreme experience becomes something within our practice,

Something that we can move through with grace.

That's how dissolution becomes beautiful.

It's always beautiful at the end.

At the beginning,

It's just scary.

The French have a saying,

Which is that the title is a show in itself.

And one of my favorite titles is from the Milang Kundera novel,

The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I think there's so much in there.

So let's unpack that too.

It tells us that life is suffering.

Life is unbearable.

So the Buddha would agree.

There we go.

We've got the first noble truth in there.

And then it tells us why life is unbearable to the cause of our suffering.

The unbearable lightness of being.

So being is unbearable and it's unbearable because of its lightness,

Which might be the reverse of what we usually think.

We think of pain and things that make us suffer as being heavy and dragging us down.

Kundera says the opposite.

He says that being is light.

So why is that unbearable?

Well,

There can only be one reason really,

Because we must be resisting this lightness.

If being is light and we feel it as unbearable,

It must be because we're going in the opposite direction and we're creating this dynamic tension that doesn't need to exist.

What happens if we just go with it?

What happens if we just move with the lightness?

Then it stops being unbearable.

And we can accept reality for what it is.

If we can feel and accept reality for what it is,

Then that means we can move in the same direction as it,

Instead of consistently fighting against it.

And what is it that makes us fight against it?

It's our idea of reality.

It's our conceptualization.

This artificial notion that we've created was that's not reality.

If we stay with the sensations,

We stay with our direct access,

Our direct experience,

Then we can move through reality too.

The lightness of being does not need to be unbearable.

It can be entirely bearable and it can be pleasurable because we move with it.

One of the things I practiced before I practiced for Pashana was Qigong.

I practiced for five years when I was younger,

From when I was about 18 years old.

I was a very serious student.

I took it very seriously.

And I remember one thing that one of my teachers said to me.

So I was there practicing in position,

Holding the position very tightly,

Putting a lot of effort into being in exactly the right pose.

And he just came over to me and just said,

This isn't a holding on exercise.

It's a letting go exercise.

And that applies to exactly what we're talking about here.

Life,

Meditation,

Vipassana.

This isn't a holding on exercise.

It's a letting go exercise.

So now as we come to the end of this practice,

And we step into the next phase,

We can frame it like that.

And we can see what is it that we're holding onto that's stopping us from being able to just move through this gracefully.

It's not a doing.

It's a not doing.

It's a letting go.

What could we let go of right now that would make us lighter,

That would make this easier?

Does it need to be difficult?

Or can it just be easy?

Can we just flow through reality instead of fighting against it?

What's underneath the known?

Well,

That's what the Buddha's given us a tool to discover.

Can we really find out?

Can we really access reality directly?

The Buddha thought so.

And that's why he taught us.

Because he believed that we could all do it.

That's why he gave us Vipassana.

So that we can actually have direct contact with reality.

And we don't have to live in this world of ideas that produces this tension.

We can move through reality,

With reality.

Smooth,

Seamless,

And with grace.

So what happens when we start to dissect reality piece by piece and go deeper into ourselves?

Well,

We get closer.

We get closer to the fundamental nature of reality.

And that's the journey.

That's the game we're playing here.

How deep can we go into this?

How far can we go?

That's the question now.

We're about to end our silence.

Because we're about to practice an activity called relational presence.

Which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's practicing presence.

Which we've been doing this whole time.

Sitting here,

Focusing on ourselves.

Bringing our awareness to the presence.

But now we're going to do it in relation to each other.

If you're here,

Meditating with us,

Then you're going to come up here and stand in this spot.

And you're going to allow yourself to enter into a state of meditation.

And let go of whatever else you've been thinking about.

Whatever you've been thinking about saying.

Whatever's been going through your mind.

And you're just going to allow yourself to start talking.

And let your words come out spontaneously as they want to come out.

Communicating directly what you want to communicate.

How you do this activity is you pick a person that you're talking to.

You look at them.

And you make a point that you want to make.

And then when that point is finished,

You close that off.

And you look at someone else.

And as you look at them,

You practice transfiguration.

You practice bringing your total awareness to this moment.

And just seeing what's there to come out.

And if you're practicing this in a group,

And you're one of the listeners,

You do the same thing in reverse.

As you're sitting there listening,

You give your full attention to the person up here talking.

You stop any thoughts that are coming into your head that interfere with what they're saying.

And you simply listen as you transfigure them.

And then when the activity is over,

You give them a round of applause.

And then you switch places.

We're going to practice this for three minutes.

Everyone's going to come up here and stand up here for three minutes and let themselves talk.

We'll give you a topic to talk on.

But once you come up here and you clear your mind,

Just let yourself say whatever you want to say.

And in this way,

We start to take our meditation even a step further.

We start to take it into our speech,

Into our listening,

Into our communication.

So when we go back to the world,

And even before then when we start talking to people tomorrow and we break the silence,

We can bring our awareness.

We can bring our meditation into the communication.

The meditation does not need to end when we stop sitting.

It does not need to end when we break the silence.

Vipassana is not a silent practice.

Vipassana is to see reality as it is,

To see clearly.

So we can bring this to everything.

We can bring this to communication just as we can bring it to ourselves.

So let's bring it everywhere.

If you're at home and you're practicing this alone,

Then simply use your webcam or another camera.

Set it up so you can see yourself.

Meditate yourself a timer for three minutes.

Stand up here,

Press record,

And speak to the camera for three minutes.

And then when you're done,

Stop recording.

Go and sit back down and then watch yourself talking and meditate on yourself for three minutes.

So this way you can do this practice whether you're with a group or whether you're on your own.

You can continue to work on this ability to bring your meditation into communication.

And as with all of the rest of this,

The only thing that dictates the level of practice,

The level of presence that we can bring into our communication is how much we're willing to let go of.

That's the question we have to ask ourselves now.

How much can we let go of before day 11,

Before we leave here?

We have another couple of days of practice or let's say a day and a half of practice where we can really dig deep and we can go inside.

And let's see if we can feel everything and realize how and where we're holding on.

And ask ourselves,

What are we willing to let go of before day 11?

This is Nelson Mandela quote.

I don't know if you've ever heard it before.

It goes,

As I left the door and I walked towards the gates that would lead to my freedom,

I knew that if I did not leave all hatred and bitterness behind,

I would still be in prison.

The more I say that,

The more it makes sense to me.

The more the different layers of it come out.

What can we leave behind?

What can we let go of here as we walk out of our prisons and we walk back to freedom?

What can we let go of that will leave us more free?

Let's ask ourselves this question now.

Let's get ready to practice.

I will give you the signal during the relational,

During the guided meditation sit when to start practicing relational presence and then we can go into that activity.

Let's use this time wisely.

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