https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x7x-ZLcrB9s
Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. We livestream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. with Mondays alternating between a new lesson called Dharma Day and a review of the whole ecology called Paya Day. I apologize yesterday for the technical difficulties we had so we couldn’t hold the class, but we were able to resolve them. If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome. It might be a little bit unusual for me standing up in front of a whiteboard for a meditation class. What I recommend you do is continue meeting with us, but go to the description for this video and you’ll find links for previous lessons and sits. Immediately do lesson one, try to do one or two lessons every week, and then while you’re meeting with us, you’ll quite quickly catch up and integrate with us. I would ask all of you to please like this video stream to increase its visibility in the YouTube algorithm so we can reach as many people as possible with this. At the end of every session, there is a Q&A. Please limit the questions at that time to the ecology of practices. However, you can ask questions from any lesson that has been given. If you have more general questions, please come to the third Friday of the month for live streaming on YouTube at 3 p.m. and that will be August 21st this month. That’s for general Q&A. I think that’s everything for now. Let’s move into a little bit of quick review. I did an extensive review on Wednesday, a little bit of quick review, and then extend a little bit more the epicuriness. Let’s remember some of the things we’re doing. We’re doing some kind of self-examination practice. It’s a good thing to note if you can. The things, the commissions, things that you did that were not virtuous or not a way of cultivating the wisdom, et cetera. Things that you admitted to do. Is it two M’s for admit? I don’t know. It’s a non-homishon that you admitted to do. And then, of course, try to note instances of virtue. For some of you who are already doing it, there’s, of course, an element that can be drawn in from stoicism. I do the bias work. I try to notice or remember any bias that I was trying to track throughout the day or any of the ones that I’ve been learning about. We’ll come back to that. You can add in, which I do too, recording your dreams. And that’s going to come in from the Platonic tradition, theurgia, especially sort of the Jungian approach to that. Then we talked about maximization. This is to the record. You may draw it from the Alexia Divina. You may draw it from some of the books you’re reading, especially the MacLennan, right? You may draw it from other people. These are maxims that you try to memorize and recite and so that they’re ready to hand. They’re ready to hand when you are, well, particularly for Epicureanism, when you’re engaging in the frame widening. The maxim should invoke a principle that commits you to the widest framing of your experience. Remember when we talked about this on Wednesday, this is also your identification framing. It’s not just of what you’re aware of, but how you’re identifying with it. And then we took a look at the Epicurean model, which is basically like a medical model. Carl Newman, a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. That’s from Epicurus. And, oh, I wanted to say one more thing about this. One thing that the followers of Epicureans did was they would actually inscribe the maxims all about their dwelling place. They would put them on their hairbrush or take them on the wall, put them on their cups. That’s a very powerful strategy, by the way, for learning your maxims. Okay, so back to Epicurus and alleviating suffering. I’m just going to go over this briefly because we did it in detail, which you, the idea is what we’re seeking and what we’re going to extend it today is what this word means, ataraxia. And the idea is we suffer because we lack ataraxia. We’re in turmoil and tumult and in conflict. And we are that way because we have uneducated desires or we seek pleasure or avoid pain, which is also fear. So let’s do that again. We have uneducated desires and fears or we’re uneducated in our approach of pleasure or in our avoidance of pain. And that’s what causes the tumult. So we want to bring rational reflection and rational discernment to bear on the way we experience and identify with our pleasures. And so the desire, like I said, I think this is a bit of a mistake in Epicurus, but I don’t think we desire pleasure. I think we desire things that give us pleasure and they give us pleasure precisely because they are good for us in some way. That’s a neoplatonic criticism, but let’s leave it like this for now, just for practical purposes. I think I believe it was Kira that has a question about, like, this is kind of negulous and hard. How can I get a hold of this? And there’s often some resistance around this. So one way of thinking about this, about the notion of desire, is to think about these three things. Okay, so when you’re about to do something, what’s motivating you? What’s your motivating affect? So you know, there’s want or a need or an urge. These all fall under what’s called desire. But you look at the motive. That’s one aspect of it. So you look at what’s the goal? Now, these are all bound together. This is a way of analyzing it. So this is to bring acuity to your reflection on your desires. You look at the motive, you look at the goal, and then you look at your anticipated sense of reward. What is it you anticipate you’ll experience? Not the state of affairs in the world. That’s your goal. But once you achieve that goal, you eat the chocolate, right? What’s your anticipated sense of reward? Is it a physical sensation? Is it emotional release? Is it a sense of security? Is it distraction? What’s the sense of reward? What’s your motive? What’s your goal? So if you sort of open up this triangle of the aspects, that can help you get a more acute and perhaps even more precise, or at least accurate, take on your desire. So then what we do is we step back and like in the labeling practice within the Buddhist tradition, we do more than label. We categorize, catalog our desires. We ask a sequence of questions. Because what are we seeking? How are we seeking ataraxia? We’re trying to prioritize ease of sustainability. And part of what we’re trying to do is we’re, instead of confusing intensity with importance, we’re trying to learn to intensify what is most rationally reflectively discerned as important. So we ask, first of all, is it a mental or physical pleasure? And we are to prioritize. Remember, prioritize does not mean to exclude. It means to prioritize. We have to prioritize mental pleasures over physical pleasures. For both mental and physical pleasures, we go through a sequence of questions. Is it natural? Is it needed? Is it constitutive? Do we, is it like import? Do we need to take it in in order to remain physically healthy? Not just merely alive, but healthy, vital. So again, not just a passive sense, well, I’ve survived another day, but that sense of, no, I have vitality. Mental, again, not just having a mind, but you have a mind that is healthy, that is vital. I suggested that the main thing you want to concentrate when you’re looking for the life of the mind is you want to look at those things that give you an enhanced sense of meaning in life. And what seems to be constitutive of meaning in life is connectedness to oneself, to others, to the world, and how much things make sense to us, and then a sense that we have a direction in which we’re moving. For social life, we’re going to, I keep putting that off because I have a lesson dedicated to that for you when we zero in on the Epicurean notion of friendship, and friendship is the central thing in Epicureanism. It’s the central thing that encourages us and helps us deal with both our desires and our fears. So we ask, is it natural? Is it necessary? And then we ask, is it short term or long term? And this is where the maximization comes in. And then after we’ve done that, we ask about ease of sustainability. And then in order to give us a phenomenological touchstone of what we should be seeking when we’re seeking ataraxia, we give you the practice of trying to turn the world into a garden as you go for a walk. And this is new research, the idea of savoring, and remember that has two components. I’m opening up my perception of the world, and I’m activating my prehension of all the relationships and patterns. And so as I’m moving around, I’m paying attention to like textures, the tempo, the emotional tone. I’m getting a kind of shamanic synesthesia. So when I come to this, I almost feel like I’m the board or the floor. And so I’m participating in a sense of presencing. And what that gives me is something like a flow state. And that flow state, and we’ll come back to that a little bit, that flow state puts us in touch with the most important, what do I want to say, species? But it’s an exemplar. Yeah, that’s what I want. And one of the most important exemplars of ataraxia, which is the pure joy of being. Ataraxia doesn’t mean just the freedom from tumult. It means the very powerfully present, positive pleasure of the pure presencing of being. And that’s what you use as a touchstone. So the maximization and the savoring act as sort of a set of constraints that help you zero in, help you hone in on how you should be seeking ataraxia. All right. Now that brings me into what I want to talk about right now. So I’m going to ask you guys to extend it a little bit more for us. And then we’ll get into the sit and to some questions. And this is not in, what I’m going to teach now is not in Epicurus, but it is very much in the spirit of Epicurus, because as I mentioned, Epicurus is committed to science. He was a proponent of the atomic theory, for example, and an early proponent of psychological theorizing. And this has to do with two different ways in which we can think about ataraxia. And this has to do with work from Michael Apter, a psychologist. Michael Apter talks about meta motivational modes. You can tell he’s an academic, right? Now we know what a mode is. We’ve already talked about that when we talked about meta, right? It’s the co-identification. But he talks about here, he uses this term, he’s talking about that there’s two ways in which we frame and identify our arousal. Now this word is often misunderstood because of Freud, arousal doesn’t just mean sexual arousal. Arousal is any sense of intensifying your metabolic activation and energizing yourself. You’re aroused, right? So you can be very aroused by a symphony, right? Et cetera. Okay. So Apter pointed out that we actually have, most people were thinking, and I think this is a mistake that is in Epicurus, most people think of arousal just as a more or less of a single state. But Apter actually obtained evidence and made good arguments for the following thing. So what I want to, what this here is my level of arousal. So this means arousal is increasing. This here is what’s called your hedonic tone. This is how pleasurable, how positive this is to you. And what he noted and what he provided evidence for, and this has increased since he first proposed it, and what he calls reversal theory, and it lines up with other work by Chicks and Ohio others, is he proposed that there was two different modes in which we relate to our arousal. Why am I doing all this? Because I’m trying to give you a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how we seek ataraxia. Okay. So in one form, when we have very high levels of arousal, we experience that as very negative. But when we have very low levels of arousal, we experience that as very positive. And this is a prevalent model, by the way, that people have. The idea is I work very hard and then I get to a place that is right where I can relax, and then that’s where I actually experience most of the pleasure. So it looks like this. Low levels of arousal, very high hedonic tone, and then it goes down like that. He called this the telek mode. Notice the word I used, work. So in the telek mode, we have an activity, and the activity is for the sake of the goal. So, right, I’m doing something in order to get to the goal state, and the goal state is what I want. So when my activity is very, very high, right, I’m very frustrated because high activity means I haven’t reached the desired goal state. But when my arousal is low, that means I’ve either abandoned it, and then I’m usually sort of sad, or I’ve achieved it, in which case I now feel very, very happy. Okay? So this is relaxation contentment. This is frustration. That’s the telek mode. T-loss means a purpose that you’re working towards. Now, but he pointed out that there’s another mode that’s exactly the opposite. Now, both of these don’t both go to infinity or anything like that, so this is, right, but limited within sort of the natural range of human variability. So he calls this the paratelik mode, which is very similar to Shiksenmohai, the guy who did all the work on Flow, his idea of the autotelik mode. So this is, right, more like play. This is we have an activity, but we set up goals, but the goals are for the sake of the activity. So what’s an obvious example? When I’m playing music, I have a goal to get to the end. But if I could shortcut it and get to the end faster, I don’t go, hey, that’s great. Let’s just, here, I can skip the song and I can just get to the final note. Wow, that’s great. I’m at the end. You know what? No, no. The goal is just to give you a structure for an activity that is inherently valuable. So now what you’re doing is you’re doing the activity for its own sake. The problem we have with the word I just used is we tend to think it as only pertaining to trivial activities, to frivolous and trivial things. Play is just about fun. And that’s a big mistake. Now, when I have very low levels of arousal and peritellic, that’s boredom. That’s not pleasurable. But when I have high levels, this is excitement or even, as I mentioned, flow. The flow state. Remember what that is. We talked about it when we talked about finding your flow. That’s the state in which you’re absorbed. And although you’re expending a lot of metabolic energy, you’re in the zone and it feels like it’s almost, it’s paradoxical. It feels almost effortless, graceful. And it is both optimally hedonic for you and you’re also doing your optimal performance at whatever task you’re engaged in. So I’m going to now erase this. So if you want to take another quick look at it. Right. So we have, it’s not so crowded, visually crowded for you. So the solid line is the telek mode. The dotted line is the peritellic mode. And what that means is we actually have two ataraxias. We have this and we have this. And I think that although Epicurus often talks about this, this is implicitly what he is seeking. Why do I think that? What’s my argument for that? Because his primary example of the optimal state in which people can be in is in deep flowing philosophical conversation. This. But he often talks this way. Now the fact that somebody as, I don’t know, brilliant as Epicurus, I think is confusing these two should wake us up to the fact that just like we can be modally confused about the having and being modes, and these probably map onto having mode and being mode, by the way, we can be modally confused about how we’re seeking ataraxia. Now this ataraxia is good, but it tends to be what James Karrs calls a finite game. Because finite games are finite because the point of the game is to get to the goal and then be entitled. You’re the winner. You deserve the relaxation. These are what he calls infinite games. You play them for their own sake and the point of the game is to figure out how to constantly shift the parameters of the game so that you can continue to play it. So it’s very important when you’re seeking ataraxia to make sure you’re not confusing these and if, right, and to make sure you’re also clear that of the two, this is the one that actually has the more sustainability to it. Again, I am not saying that this is not ataraxia. It is. But again, just like we don’t want to prioritize physical pleasures over mental pleasures, but we still pursue physical pleasures. We don’t want to prioritize this ataraxia over this ataraxia. We need to learn how to play infinite games that put us into the flow state that allow us to savor the pure joy of being at all levels of our life, our social life, our mental life, and our physical life. Okay. There isn’t a specific practice, but I wanted to, like part of what I’m trying to do on behalf of Epicurus is educate you but extend it in terms of more recent science so we can get a better understanding of ataraxia, how we can be confused about ataraxia, and why philosophical conversation was actually so central to Epicurus. And that’s a practice I’m going to be teaching you extensively on the next Dharma Day and the following review sessions. Okay. So I’m just going to erase the board. I’m going to move the board. I’m going to get my mat and pillow. Jason is going to adjust the camera. And then we’re going to sit as usual. We will chant for a bit. We’ll go into a sit, and then we’ll do some questions. Okay. All right, everyone. Please prepare. Get yourself into your basic posture. Take your phones on do not disturb. And we will begin when I say begin. We will start with chanting. Begin. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. One. Om. One. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om.