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I'm sure you've all been doing enough talking,
So I'll keep this one short.
Because now,
I bet you've realized that our time is precious.
And also our silence is precious.
So let's keep our silence.
And let's use this little bit of silence we have left to dig in deep.
And today you've experienced your first real test of bringing this back to the world.
As you've opened yourself up to communication with other people,
You have an opportunity to start to be able to feel what it's going to be like as you start to enter into regular relationships again.
What is it like to take your meditation to this communication?
Now we know how to do it.
But can we do it?
We have a chance to practice.
Use tonight,
Use tomorrow morning when you're with the other meditators and still on course as a way to practice this.
To keep your focus,
Keep your clarity,
And bring this into your communication.
Bring this into your relationships.
Then you can see,
We might be like Morihay Yeshiva,
The founder of Aikido.
We might be losing our balance all the time.
But let's see if we can regain it so quickly that no one ever notices.
Let's continue to take this focus to the world,
Take this focus to the people we communicate with.
And if we lose balance,
It's no problem.
What we've got to do is reset.
And now we know how to reset.
We have the tools.
We have the ability.
So let's do it.
We burst our bubble of silence.
And now,
As we're about to sit,
Let's practice and see just how quickly we can put that bubble back up.
How quickly we can create this space around ourselves and internalize our focus.
Because we've got a couple of choices.
One,
We can retire to the monastery or the nunnery and spend the rest of our lives there in silence.
Or two,
We can learn to be able to live our lives and carry our practice to the world.
Through communication,
Through work,
Through contacts,
Through relationships.
That's the path of the householder,
As the Buddha taught him.
The monastic practice of going and retiring and spending all your time just on meditation,
Just on cultivating liberation.
And there's the householder's practice of how to bring this to a life,
Of how to turn a life into a meditation.
It's a beautiful practice.
It's the one that's brought me here,
That's carried me through the last decade of my life.
Slowly letting meditation sink into every aspect and every area of my life.
And now we all have the chance to experience this and to test this and to see what it feels like to take this beautiful skill that we've been learning into every area.
And we've had the chance now to experience the power of collective meditation.
Even if you're doing this at home,
You've been doing it with thousands of people around the world,
All meditating together,
All meditating at the same time.
And we're all doing this together,
We're all in this together.
Focusing,
Meditating,
Digging into the internal reality,
The reality within.
In Buddhism,
They call this having a sangha,
Having a group of people to meditate with,
To focus with and develop with.
And that's what we're doing here,
We're building a sangha of people deep in meditation who've directly experienced the reality within so they can be helpers for us on the way,
So we can all support each other in this journey and grow together.
Now you've experienced the power of this,
You don't need to let it go.
You can keep this connection,
You can stay connected to the other people you've meditated with,
Whether it's online,
Whether it's physically in person.
And use this support system to go deeper together.
And then we can continue to take this practice into our world and not need to lock ourselves up.
So let's experience this power of the sangha for one last evening.
Let's all meditate together and meditate together deeply.
And let's see just how far we can push it.
Now that we know this is coming to an end and we've only got a couple more hours before we sleep and then we wake up to our last morning and we finish all of this.
Let's experiment.
How quickly can we put this bubble of silence back up?
How quickly can we intensify our process?
Go deeply into our awareness?
And how much can we push ourselves in this short period of time?
Because this is what we're going to need to do when we're at home.
So let's practice this now.
See what happens with all these thoughts running inside of us,
All this contact with other people we've had today.
If we need to,
Let's use anupana,
Let's focus,
Let's gather our awareness.
And then when we're ready,
When we've let the thoughts settle,
Let's take that clarity to vipassana.
Or maybe in this communication,
Different people from our lives have started to come back up that we want to share this with,
Share this love with,
Share this practice with.
And we feel overwhelmed with this sense of joy and love.
If so,
Let's practice metta.
Wish them to also be happy,
Also be free,
Also be liberated.
And let's send them this love,
This loving energy.
And think of the gift that we now have to share with them in the world.
Let's get ourselves ready for our final evening practice.
We're in this together.
Let's do this together.
