https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jQroFKa6Kjc
Welcome to Cultivating Wisdom with John Breveke. We are live streaming every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. The Discord server, and the links for the Discord server will be in the description of this video, is continuing to have the daily meditation sits. We want to put together a compilation video to mark the end of the daily sits. It would be helpful if everyone could please send in a clip of no more than 10 seconds about your experience as part of the Senga community to amarr.johnbreveke.com. Amarr.johnbreveke.com. For those of you who are joining for the meditation practice, please take a look at the description of this video and you’ll find links to previous meditation and contemplation lessons and sits. Please do the first lesson and continue to do a lesson or maybe two lessons every week. Continue to meet with us Saturday morning and you’ll very quickly integrate into the entire ecology of practices and into the Senga and the Discord community. I would ask everybody to please like this stream to increase the visibility on the YouTube algorithm. We go for an hour now. We go from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Eastern Time. At the end, there will be time for questions. Please limit questions to this ecology of practices. If you have more general questions, please join me the third Friday of every month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time live stream on YouTube. We always will begin a Saturday Dharma Day or we’re thinking of calling it Saturday Senga Day. A little bit more alliteration. We’re going to begin always with sitting. We’ll begin as normally with chanting. If you’re unfamiliar with the chanting, don’t worry about it. You’ll find it in the lessons as you work your way through. Just do as best you can. We’ll begin with chanting, then we’ll go into a silent scent. We’ll cut to the second camera. I’ll go to the whiteboard and we’ll begin the Dharma and we’ll begin the second stage. We’ll move into the high school in the wisdom of Vipassana Course and we’ll start talking about Stoicism. But first, let’s get ourselves oriented. Get ourselves into our basic posture. Do not disturb. We will begin together when I say begin. Begin. Om Om Om Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Begin your silence sit. Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum 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 communitas, perhaps by reciting the five promises. Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum Aum So How do we transform our inner dialogue? I’ll just briefly indicate what we’re going to talk about next time and then give you some ideas about some practices we’re going to engage in. So the basic idea, and one way you can understand all of Stoicism is Stoicism is the practice of internalizing Socrates. This goes right back to Antisthenes. We talked about internalizing the sage. How do we internalize Socrates so that we can transform our inner dialogue so that we can become more rational, so that our ability to set our hearts more reliably tracks the real patterns, and so that we are more reliably within the being mode, and that we are more reliably free from frustration, despair, and disappointment, and free to experience and drink from the depths of the being mode itself. That’s what we’re going to talk about next time. We’re going to talk about what Socratic self-knowledge looks like, and we’re going to notice the connections. We can reach back to philosophical, contemplative companionships, and reach forward. We’ll look forward, foreshadowing Platonic dialectic. We’re going to talk about practices for how we do this. How do we cultivate rationality with active open-mindedness, but we’re also going to teach you how to do that. This internalization, it’s going to involve perspectival transformation. I’m going to teach you about the view from above, objective seeing, the pre-meditatio. We’re going to take a look at some of the stoic spiritual exercises from Buzare. That’s what’s coming. It’s so exciting, and it’s so enriching. I think I trespassed a little bit on our time for questions today. I’ll make sure next time to end a little bit earlier, but I wanted to get to at least this point, so I hope you forgive me for trespassing a little bit into the question time. I set aside 15 minutes next Saturday to address the questions that are probably mounting. We’re just going to end it here for today. I hope you can see I’m very excited about this. Stoicism has a lot to offer us. I have a lot of books. I would recommend getting The Incurier Dawn by Epictetus, and The Communications by Marcus Aurelius. This is a particularly good translation by Mark Forstater, The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius. Then I’ll recommend a whole bunch of books to you also next time. It’s so great to be doing this with you all. I love being in the Saturday Sangha. Keep reading the McLennan. I know I haven’t given you anything to practice yet. Next time, we’ll finish off the background and we’ll start right into the exercises and the spiritual exercises. I look forward to seeing you all then. Take good care, everybody. Okay?