https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yoX_e0C8lVQ
Welcome to Meditate with John Verbeke. We live stream every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern Time with Mondays. We introduce a new lesson, and that’s called Dharma Days, and then that alternates on the next Monday with a review of the ecology of practices called Uppaya Day. That also itself alternates between reviewing the Eastern traditions, reviewing the practices from the Eastern traditions, and then reviewing the practices we draw from the Western traditions. This week is a special week, though, because we’re doing Dharma Day on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In general, right now, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes will tend to be longer. If you’re joining us for the first time, don’t be put off by this odd setup, whiteboard, etc. You’re most welcome. I recommend you keep meeting, but go to the description, and in there you’ll find links to previous lessons and sets. Do lesson one right away, and try to do one or two lessons every week. Keep meeting with us, and eventually you will integrate into the course, and hopefully also into the community, the Sangha that’s around it. As I mentioned, Mondays alternate between a Dharma Day and a Uppaya Day, and last Monday was a Dharma Day. I’m going to pick up on that and have another Dharma Day today. Some things you can do to help me is to like this stream so that I can help as many people as possible. By liking it, you’ll raise its profile on the YouTube algorithm and help the outreach. At the end of every session, we sit, and then after that we have Q&A. Please limit your questions to anything from the entire ecology of practices. We give priority because it’s the material we’re working on right now, on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, to questions from the Western ecology of practice, and Tuesdays and Thursdays we give priority to the Eastern ecology of practices. I’m mentioning Thursday. Tomorrow is Thursday, and I will not be able to be here tomorrow. There is no class tomorrow on Thursday. I recommend strongly that you guys meet on the Discord server and have your regular set. I think that’s everything we need to do right now. So let’s begin. So a quick review. We’re taking a look at the second major pillar of authoritarianism. We’ve looked at the disciplining of desire. Martha Nussbaum has actually written a book on all these Hellenistic practices called The Therapy of Desire. And in there we looked about disciplining your desires so you can prioritize and hone in on ataraxia, the two kinds of ataraxia, and savoring as a practice to put us in touch with peritellic ataraxia, which is the touchstone. Well now we’re going to look at the disciplining of fear. So desires oriented towards pleasure, fear oriented towards pain. They are actually inter-defining, but this is at least pedagogically useful to make these distinctions. I want to remind everybody that I agree wholeheartedly with McLennan that epicureanism is not sufficient, but it is powerful. It is our primary school. Stoicism will be our high school, and neoplatonism will be our university. Alright so we’re talking about a specific kind of fear here. We’re not talking about the automatic instinctive fear that’s hardwired. There’s nothing we can do about that, and therefore there’s nothing we should try to do about that. What we’re talking about is the kind of fear that results from the way in which we self-terrify, that is the way in which our undisciplined imagination terrifies us. And then the idea here is we want to create a practice of the reflective discernment and disciplining of imagination. So whenever you’re getting into an imaginative state that is generating fear, you’re supposed to bring these epicurean practices to bear. And the main set of practices is captured by the maxim of the fourfold. Don’t fear the gods, don’t fear death, don’t fear the loss of pain, and remember that pleasure is easy to obtain. And there’s various translations of it. That’s the basic idea. Okay, so we talked about what do we mean by imagination. We mean that modern cognitive science is really moving towards this idea that imagination perception are interlocking. Reception is the bottom-up intake of new information, and then imagination is the top-down aspect, which is the prediction of the patterns that are going to be found. And we can run this top-down prediction without any bottom-up corrective information, and that’s imagination. The thing about imagination is, of course, it opens up the space of possibilities that we can consider, and that’s wonderful. But we want to steer a course between the Calvinists who are afraid of that opening up of the potential for idolatry and the romantics who just celebrate it and don’t worry about self-deception. And so we want a disciplined… Sorry, I don’t know what that was. We want a disciplined imagination. So I don’t quite know what’s going on right now. So Jason’s just taking care of it. Sorry about that. It’s now solved. All right, so we want a reflectively disciplined imagination, and what does that mean for us? Well, what it means is we note that because imagination does not have the bottom-up perception, it is especially prey to cognitive bias and therefore to self-deception. That doesn’t mean we should reject it or repress it. We should discipline it and use it properly in a rationally reflective manner. All right, so the first one is the gods are not to be feared. For many of us, myself included, we don’t believe in gods. I’m not being insulting. That’s just a statistical statement. For those of us who do believe in some kind of divinity, we’ve had two millennia of Christianity or Islam or Judaism teaching us that God is basically good and not capricious or malicious, but an inherently moral being. So the axial revolution and the axial religions have taken care of that aspect. I think in that sense, what Epicurus was addressing is obsolete, but there is a way we can expand Epicurianism and make it relevant to us today. I’m going a little bit rapidly because this is review. I’ll slow down when we get to the new material. The funny is, and Margaret Bisser makes an excellent case for this in her book Beyond Fate, you can see this as the fear of fate, the fear of the fact that the universe unfolds according to powers and principles beyond our control, beyond our ken, in ways that are often completely indifferent in a titanic fashion to our narrative projects, our personal concerns, our relationships, et cetera. So that’s the idea of fate. And then what is at the core of this is the understanding, often implicit, that we are finite and fallible creatures and that we are always finite and fallible creatures. And this is the fatality of all things. Fatality doesn’t just mean subject to death, it means subject to fate, not as some pre-written destiny or something like that, but in the sense that we will always be finite and fallible and we will always be vulnerable to being overwhelmed by forces beyond our understanding and control. And that is scary. No doubt about it. So learning to not avoid our mortality but embrace it appropriately is part of what the Epicureans are trying to give us. I think we’re going to need help from the Stoics and the Neoplatons down the road. So what they’re basically trying to get us to realize is that, again, the Epicureans more enact it than actually theorize it. But although we are finite and fallible, we are also capable of significant self-transcendence. We can self-transcend and philosophy is the practice, the art of such self-transcendence. So learning to practice philosophy will actually help us. Like I said, this is going to be first exflocated and then I think really developed richly in the Neoplatonists that our sense of coming into contact with that which is most real is the best way to ameliorate our finitude and our fallibility. So when we come into contact and we can savor what is most real, that addresses the concern that was born in us from the confrontation with our mortality. I would put to you that perhaps, this is at least what some traditions claim, and I have found it to be quite experientially powerful in my life, that I do not long for immortality, I long for reality. I long for being most real. And once that, and the Stoics claim and the Neoplatonists claim, that once you’ve touched that, and this seems to be central also I would claim in Buddhism, that once you touch that, your fear due to your mortality diminishes significantly. So the other one might be a fear of the afterlife. Like Epicurus, I use the best science of our time, I find, and I think this is what the Epicurus would argue, I find the proposal of an afterlife scientifically improbable, highly improbable, the increasing evidence of the deep interdependence between mind, brain, body and environment, and we clearly know that the body and the brain perish and are impermanent. That to me means I’m not really concerned with an afterlife. But some of you might have, and remember I don’t use this word insultingly, you might have a mythic model of the afterlife. The Epicureans recommend that you actually imagine that, and this is where the Eastern traditions can be very helpful. The Eastern traditions ask you to actually expand your imagination and confront the horror of immortality. That living forever is basically an attempt to freeze the world and to freeze yourself, and this is just, titanically would empty everything of meaning, a meaningless existence. This is why in Vedanta you see moksha, which is release from immortality, or in Buddhism nirvana, the blowing out of the flame of personal immortality, etc. So I think if you open yourself up to both the science and alternative mythologies that have a much more expansive imagination, that can significantly ameliorate the fear of the afterlife. So then we moved into what we’re actually confronting when we confront the fear of mortality, is the fear of death. And then the Epicureans point out that, well, there’s two aspects. One is the fear of, so here’s the mortality, and what we might be fearing here is death, or a fear of dying. Then they point out, again, using imagination in a disciplined and rational fashion, that if your fear of death is the fear of non-existence, that’s absurd. There has been eons and eons when you did not exist, and that doesn’t strike you with terror, or it shouldn’t strike you with terror, and you can’t actually experience your non-existence. Epicurus, they said, where death is, I am not, where I am, death is not. So you’re fearing something that you will never experience, you will never know. So those two, if you actually play with your imagination in those two ways, rationally disciplined fashion, it’s like, oh, right, non-existence isn’t something that I should fear. Now, something that I don’t think the Epicureans quite got is some people, you know, yeah, but it’s actually that mysteriousness of fear. It’s theoretical. There’s no theoretical mystery, I know I’m going to die. All other creatures do, all other things are impermanent, so am I. But what we mean by a mystery is it’s an experiential, what’s called a phenomenological mystery. I cannot imagine being dead. I can imagine myself in the darkness, but I’m there, right? And so there’s something inherently mysterious about that, and the fact that we can’t imagine it can be very fear-producing in us, because when we can’t imagine something, that mystery can be, oh, it’s unpredictable, it’s uncertain. But technically it’s not unpredictable or uncertain, it’s mysterious. And then I would recommend to you that, especially in Neoplatonism, what we need to do is to learn to transform the aspect of the mysterious, to go from experiencing it as a primarily negative thing to experiencing it as a primarily positive thing. And so a kind of experience that you’ve all had that points that out is the experience of awe. Strangely, the experience of awe, and we know this experimentally in designing experiments with Jennifer Stuller and Michelle Ferrari and Jimson Kim and talking to Brian Ostaphan of his experiences, we know that awe actually diminishes the sense of self. People feel like they’re almost overwhelmed and it’s mysterious, but yet awe is a very positive experience. It’s a very positive experience. And what that means is if we develop a virtue for awe, reverence, then we can train ourselves to confront mystery in its positive aspect rather than fixate it on its negative aspect. So what about the fear of dying? That is something you can experience. And it’s kind of unknown. Interestingly enough, when people actually sit down, this is some of the work done on death reflection, and they imagine dying and they imagine they’re friends with them, this is interesting. So when they just imagine death in the abstract, and there’s some dispute around this research, but mortality salience, they sort of get rigid and afraid. But when they go into a first-person perspective and actually imagine dying with people around them, it actually has the opposite effect. It makes them open, compassionate. That’s interesting. Because if you think about the epicurean practice of getting into the habit of being in philosophical, contemplative companionship with others, being able to carry that all the way through, that actually hooks up with some recent empirical data. So again, imagine properly. Imagine more deeply. Imagine in a way that is backed by whatever scientific evidence we have. Let’s take a look at some more of that evidence. What you said, well, what I’m afraid is I’m afraid of losing. As I get old, I’m going to lose so much. That’s interesting, because if you actually take a look at a couple things, if you look at how people’s sense of subjective well-being, how much they sort of like their life, the graph is weird. So this is sort of how much you like your life, and this is your age. When you look at your 30s and your 40s, probably where you are right now, it goes down. So, right, like sort of years, you know, childhood into adolescence. But what people don’t know and what they expect reasonably is they expect this. That’s what they predict. It’s reasonable. It’s reasonable. That’s what they imagine. But what the data shows is actually this. As people move into their old age, they go up like that. They go up like that. No, these, like everything in psychology, this is probabilistic. Of course, there’s individuals that do this, right? But what we’re saying is the prediction of the inevitability of this is definitely disconfirmed. The empirical evidence doesn’t support this. And you might ask, well, what is going on here? People are losing all, very, very many pleasures. What is it that’s happening here? Well, what it seems to be is wisdom. Now, it’s not necessary that older people are wiser. That’s not an inevitability either. But in general, they tend to be. And that seems to be very, very predictive of life satisfaction and of meaning in life. So what’s going up here is meaning in life. And that actually makes life very good. I’m looking for my eraser. I don’t know where it is. I’m looking for my eraser. Where is it? Where are you pointing? Sorry, I can’t find it. I’m just going to get a paper towel. Jason’s pointing to me, but I can’t find it. So we’ll just use a paper towel. OK. So this brings up an interesting thing. And I’ve mentioned this. And this is the difference between subjective well-being, your sense of contentment, and meaning in life. And then there’s some confusions about this. So this is your sense of, this is the sense that yourself is sort of satisfied and solidified and it’s doing well. All right. And that’s the subjective well-being. And interestingly, people think that power and wealth are the main root to that. And our culture teaches this. And we mentioned this with Eric Fromm. So this is subjective well-being. And then this is wealth or power because they’re often conjoined. And what you find is when people are in poverty, their subjective well-being is very low. So we have an obligation to get people out of poverty, out of scarcity, overwhelming evidence. But what happens, initially differences in wealth make a huge difference in subjective well-being. And that’s where we get this idea from. But what happens is then it plateaus and goes up very, very gradually so that there’s only a very small increase in subjective well-being with massive increases in wealth. So once you’re out of poverty, the pursuit of wealth is an irrational way to pursue subjective well-being. Okay. So that’s one thing. And then what you have to ask is, well, what actually is contributing to subjective well-being? It has to do more with your sense of autonomy and how much you’re in control of yourself. And that’s what we’re learning here with epicureanism. Your sense of competence, that you have cultivated skills and virtues that help you to deal with life and connectedness, which actually will, you know, relationships to others. But that’s a bit where I can, I agree with some people, that’s where this construct and this construct would be confounded. Now, what’s interesting is that how meaningful people find their lives is not to be identified with subjective well-being. Because one can go significantly down and while the other goes up. What are two instances in which that’s the case? Well, one clear instance is having a child. When you have a child, your subjective well-being crashes, you’re hungry, you’re tired, there’s a lot of unknowns, your finances are going to be challenged, your most significant relationships are going to be put up, you know, under stress, etc. Right? So why do people have children? They have children because meaning in life goes up. When people are getting older, aspects of this go down because your health declines, your social relationships shrink. Meaning in life goes up. Meaning in life is how you are connected to yourself, connected to others, and connected to what’s most real. So the cultivation of wisdom, which is about removing self-deceptive patterns that destroy your relationship to yourself, to other people, and to the world, is how you enhance meaning in life. So, and how do we cultivate wisdom in a way that’s going to enhance meaning in life? What the Epicureans say is by philosophical contemplative companionship, by cultivating shared philosophia, the shared cultivation of wisdom with others. Phylae means communal, brotherly, not sexist, but the communal love, phylae, sophia, the communal love by leah, sophia of wisdom. The communal love of wisdom. So, you say, wow, really? Yeah, it’s because what you have to understand is you’re not actually very good at predicting your subjective, even your subjective well-being. There’s a thing called the hedonic treadmill. So you can study what happens to people after they’ve confronted a significant, now again, probabilistically, there are always individual cases, right? But probabilistically, you can study what happens to people who win the lottery or who suffer a major accident trauma. And what you find when it initially happens, there’s a huge change in their subjective well-being. Life is great, or life is hell, heaven or hell. But within about eight weeks, they return back to the state they were in before the lottery. And you say, it won’t be for me. That won’t happen for me. Well, I can make that prediction with a lot of confidence. Or after a trauma, they return back to where they were. So your hedonic set point is, you know, it’s really, really robust. And that means environmental changes don’t impact it as much as you can. Where you can make a significant difference to your happiness, if what we mean by happiness is subjective well-being plus meaning in life is in your meaning in life. That’s where you have the most control. People are actually really bad at predicting affect, affective forecasting. This is ask people to imagine how they will feel in a situation. Imagine how you imagine how you will feel in a situation, negative or positive. And they’ll say, oh, I’ll feel this way. I’ll feel that way. And then compare that to how they feel when they actually are in that situation. And they’re often dramatically wrong. And you say, I don’t believe it. I’m sorry. I know you don’t. And that’s because your memory is reconstructed. Your memory only pays attention to things that are, right, sort of predictively verified for you. You have a confirmation bias. So remember what I said. When you’re in the realm of imagination, all the cognitive biases run riot. What does this tell us? It tells us that all our imaginings about dying are highly probably wrong. All of our imaginings about getting old are highly probably wrong. But I can still imagine it. Of course you can. And you can imagine yourself being eaten by a dragon while being stabbed by leprechauns. And that’s a horrible, and it can provoke you and arouse you. It doesn’t mean it’s something that you should take seriously. Do you not remember what we said from the beginning? Do not confuse the intensity of your imagining with the legitimacy of what it is claiming. Those aren’t the same thing. Remember, we’re learning to, instead of mistake intensity with importance, train ourselves to make the important more intense. That’s what we’re doing with epicureanism. So what does all this mean? The epicureans say, well, this, if we mean non-existence, is absurd. And we can really buttress what the epicureans did with this, saying, well, we’re confused about a lot of things, about power and wealth, subjective well-being, meaning in life. We’re confused about how variable they are. Do you know that people have the end of history illusion? This goes into the old age idea, too. If you ask people, how much did you change in the last 10 years? They will say, a lot. How much will you change in the next 10 years? Not at all, or very little. And of course, every 10 years, this prediction is false. And every 10 years, they say, oh, that past 10 years, I changed a lot. And our self-knowledge isn’t as great as we believe it is. So what I’m trying to show you over and over again is that if you pay attention to the science, you can zero in on the fact that you have very little control over sort of subjective well-being once you’re out of poverty. Getting out of poverty, big, big difference. So no political status quo argument here. But once you’re out of that, there’s not much you can do to move that very much. You want to cultivate some skills and some competence. You want to have a sense of being in control of your own life. That’s important. That’s important. After that, though, what really matters, what is very malleable to you, and what’s really important in the having of children and in getting old, is the fact that meaning in life is much more manageable, much more malleable. So don’t think of your pleasure as a fixed sum. It’s not a zero-sum game. Meaning in life can be continually enhanced, developed, cultivated. What cultivates it? Phylia Sophia, the communal love of wisdom. That is one of the best forums in which we can continue to enhance meaning in life, even as we are losing power and fame and physical health. And what our imagination teaches us is if we die surrounded by our philosophical companions, we will die in a way that is open-hearted. That is open-hearted. So is that sufficient for the profound questions of our mortality? No. But is it powerful? Yes. We need to all practice, whenever we’re imagining in a way that can drive us to despair, we need to engage the Epicurean practices of disciplining the imagination by using the fourfold cure and a version of it that is enhanced by our best cognitive science. So that’s what we can take away from the Epicurean practice. What it all comes to then is the Phylia Sophia, the philosophical contemplative, contemplating wisdom, the philosophical contemplative commanding ships. We’re going to turn to the work of Lahav on Friday. How do we practice that? Jason’s going to help me now. I apologize earlier for that little noise and then not being able to find the eraser. But behind the scenes, he’s looking. He couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find it. So we’re going to move camera now and we’re going to do a short sit and we’ll take some questions. So welcome. This is the orientation that will allow me to see the TV screen for the questions. I couldn’t do that last time. So hopefully this isn’t too odd for you, but we’re going to have a sit now. So please get yourself in a comfortable position. Set your phones on do not disturb. We will begin with a chant, a short chant, and we’re going to the silent sit and then we’ll take some questions. We’ll begin when I say began. Again. N�ahnN Again. Your son said. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness, cognition, character, and community tasks, perhaps by resetting the five promises to yourself. So let’s try and take a couple of questions for today. And Jason’s just pulling everything up for us right now. And Tech One Soho has a question here. I have been contemplating static pleasure and realize I only notice active pleasures. Could you elaborate on mindfulness as an aid to experiencing static pleasure? So that’s what I was intending to do with the the savoring experiences. There is a place you can get to. I understand in one sense the savoring when you’re doing the walking and transforming the world into a garden. That’s an active it’s you’re doing something. But you come to them, at least what happens is the mindfulness gets you to a place where the joy is not in any of the textures or tones. It’s not right in that the musicality of your intelligibility. The joy drops to and that’s the intent. The joy drops to sorry, I should be turning and looking at you guys. The joy drops to the pleasure, pure pleasure of being in a way to think about that. That is like in regular Vipassana. We’re following the flow of our breath and we’re getting into the flow state. That’s very active. But when we when we pursue deep Vipassana and drop into the mindfulness, right? That that mindfulness of the space between our thoughts, the pure being of our mind in a similar way to the pure pleasure of being. But then you can drop to that silence underneath all the music, the living silence, the energy, the the energetic matrix of silence that make music metaphors is that makes all the musicality of intelligibility. So beneath the flowing pleasure of the musicality of intelligibility as you’re walking and you’re you’re experiencing the pure pleasure of presencing. You can draw on this right this moves a little bit beyond epicureanism with mindfulness. You can then think about I can can I sense that silence from which the presencing emerges and can I come to a kind of profound rest and peace in that. And so the degree to which you can find enjoyment in the principle that regulates presencing that generates it regulates it is a degree to which you can use a profound kind of mindfulness. You can use deep Vipassana a deep kind of mindfulness to access that profound is kind of ataraxia. I hope that’s helpful. We’ll take one more question. Deborah Wagstaff observation I said to my inner self I’m afraid that if I let go I will become no one and the voice I’ve never heard before response you will you will become no one. That’s good. Thank you for sharing that. Deborah. Yeah, that. That becoming no one again there’s a mystery there. Because think about it everything that you know about yourself this is a distinction and James will talk about this when we get further in everything. That’s my need. Oh, that’s what I am. I’m John the teacher. I’m John the teacher. I’m John the father. We talked about this when we talked about again the deep you know the meditative questioning. I’m John the Tai Chi player or this is what John looks like. And I know that this is Arthur Dyckman’s point which calls the observing self many traditions call this the Whitman himself. I’m looking all those things that I’m looking at. But what I’m not looking at ever is the way I’m looking at it. I’m not looking at but what I’m not looking at ever is what’s doing the looking or language that I use. Right. Whenever I step back and look at a frame I’m not if I can’t see the frame that I’m looking through I can only see a previous frame that I was looking through when I’m but I’m now I’m looking at it. I’m never seeing the deepest frame through which I’m looking. I can’t actually see the seer. And this is James’s distinction between the me and the I like capital I. Right. And if you allow me a pun the I can’t see itself. I can’t see itself. Your eye is no thing no thingness. It’s no one. If you can drop from the multiplicity of the means into the mystery of the I the no thingness the no one then you are also dropping into again that place of profound peace. So I hope those were helpful questions. Again, there’s a longer class as I forewarned Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. Sorry about for a couple of the technical glitches, but we’re still adopting. I hope this is getting better and we are committed Jason and I and Amar to continually making it better. Thank you very much everyone for joining. I want to thank Jason. He was behind the scenes. He was trying to tell me where the market was. I just couldn’t get it. I’ll find it and have it ready for Friday. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. Find links to awakening from the meeting crisis. Voices with Reveki. Please benefit up to sorry. Please share this video with others whom you think it might benefit. I happen to think it would help most people, but you know better the people that you interact with. And I certainly do. And I don’t want to be presumptive presumptuous. Please join the discord server to chat with others. Remember, we’re not meeting here tomorrow, but hopefully the discord server will home that for everyone. You’ll also find Q&A. You’ll find movement practices. Every day they do a second sits. They do longer sits. We’re going to be housing the philosophical, contemplative companionship practice there, et cetera. So please get involved with the discord server. If you can, please follow me on Twitter so that you’ll be aware of all the changes on all the streams and any last minute announcements that need to be made. And please remember, I will not see you tomorrow, but continuity of practice is more important than your quantity of practice. Don’t hold yourself to the standard of a harsh perfectionism, but a virtuous friendship. Because there is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There is no friend, no ally, true companion on the path better than your own mind and body. You lamp sent to yourselves and to each other. I’ll see you on Friday for our third Dharma day. The Dharma of the Day. Take good care, everyone.