https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fNkRhj0nqpM
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Meditating with John Breveke. So I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I study scientifically, academically, mindfulness and related phenomena like insight, flow, statistical experience, transformative experience, the cultivation of wisdom. In addition to that, I’ve been practicing Vipassana meditation, meta-contemplation, Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung for 29 years, over 29 years. And I’ve also been teaching them professionally for close to 20 years. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re of course welcome to stay, but you should know that this is a course. It’s progressive. Every Monday, I teach a new lesson, a new principle that builds on previous principles. So if you want, you can go back and go to my channel, go to the playlist, which is just the lessons, and you can watch the lessons and catch up. You’re welcome to stay, but that’s how you can catch up and be in sync with everybody else and within the course. So on Mondays, the teaching day, Tuesdays to Fridays, like today, we meet. I do a bit of a brief review. We sit together, I answer questions. There are no classes on Saturdays and Sundays. Please remember to turn your phones to do not disturb. And I believe I’ll just quickly review what are the most recent principle, which is meta-contemplation. Meditation is stepping back and looking at. Contemplation is trying to renew how you see through. We do that at the level of our co-identification, our existential mode. We try to become aware of, we try to awaken to the process by which we’re assuming identities and assigning identities. And then we try to awaken from modal confusion, confusing the having mode, existential mode, and being what we try to sati, the word that’s translated as mindfulness, which means to remember, we try to remember, we try to have an insight, not at just the intellectual level, an insight at the existential level that’s the waking up to the remembering of the being mode. Because that is the mode that affords development. That is the mode that affords transformation. That is the mode that affords the aspiration and cultivation of wisdom. One question, just to be clear, no matter what you’re doing, always find the core four and do a bit of a pasana. Even when you’re going to sit for a meta sitting, you said I’m going to do meta now, right? First find your core four and do a bit of a pasana, two or three minutes, and then go into meta. So you’re welcome today to either do a pasana just all the way through or do the core four, do a bit of a pasana and then go into meta. And then after this, we will, of course, have the Q&A. I’ll try and pick up on some of the questions that were left over from tomorrow. Again, if we don’t get them all today, we will get to them throughout this week. All right, everybody, we will begin when I say begin. Get yourself in your posture, get it stable. Begin. And integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. So remember, if you’re doing meta, first meta towards yourself, maybe the traditional phrase, may I be happy and healthy, may I be free from suffering. Maybe a more recent phrase, may I realize this suchness or may I realize more here. Do it towards yourself, the person you’re close to, calling the image or the name, generic person in your life, person you’re in conflict with, and then all beings or at least all people. So let’s answer some questions. Sammy Ben-Othman, is it normal to see colors and abstract faces? Yes, that’s very normal. So what’s happening is some of the machinery that starts to kick in when we might be moving towards sleep, visual machinery is kicking in, seeing colors. Faces are also very powerful because any sort of internal noise in your nervous system can be interpreted and often be resolved into a face. This is a very normal thing to happen in meditation. Just note it, try not to get fascinated by it. These inner colors and these interfaces can be very fascinating. They’ll tend to lead you into sort of a hypnagogic state and that can potentially lead into sort of dreaming while you’re still sitting. So it’s normal, try to note it and then return to the breath. I find my most common distraction is storytelling. This is from Holly. Hello again, Holly. Running through future conversations or potential scenarios in my head. This is very normal, by the way, Holly. Running conversations is one of the most frequent forms of distraction. That’s why I recommend not watching movies, listening to the radio, listening to music or talking, especially having an intense conversation right before you sit while you’re in office. Do you have any advice for this? Maybe a mantra? I’m going to next week, Holly, I’m going to start teaching you how to meditate on your distractions. That’s coming right now. I know this is a little bit sort of, right, but if you could just keep doing what you’re doing, labeling the distraction and returning to your breath, labeling the distraction and returning to your breath. Just keep doing that. Then then next Monday and the following Monday, those two lessons will be dedicated to how do we work with distractions. And one of the things we’ll talk about is how do you deal with something like that, that incessant, the monkey mind is basically that inner chattering speaking mind, storytelling, running scenarios. What’s happening in your brain is when you go into this state, you’re going into what’s called the default mode network. And that is the network we do when we do a sort of mental time travel and we run scenarios in our heads and have conversations. It’s sort of it’s at the core of mindwatering. And normally these two networks, the network that is involved with being task focused and concentrating and being oriented towards the world and the default mode, they sort of switch on and off in opposition. And right now, what you’re trying to do and it takes it’s a bit of a, you know, it takes some practice is you’re trying to have them coactive at the same time. You’re trying to have all that internal awareness that goes with the default network. But you’re trying to activate the task focus network so you don’t go into mindwatering because it looks like if you can co activate these, that actually affords the most and greatest potential for transformation and profound insight. Next one by Suka. Should we find the focus for some time? Mark, could you raise the questions, please? I can’t see them all on my screen. Yeah, Suka is asking, should we find the focus for some time after finding the flow and then go back to noting only in and out with each breath? That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So once you found your focus by counting the breaths to get that sense of a momentum of mindfulness, a constant renewal of interest, you then just go back, then go to following the breath just within enough. That’s exactly right. Lynn Slater. Hi, Lynn. It’s good to see you again. When I count breath, I have a tendency to force it and I have to go back to just focusing on the breath. Yeah, so perhaps, Lynn, if there’s something else you could do instead of counting the breath to try and notice when you’ve had some continuity. Some people, I don’t know why this works, some people recite the alphabet A, B, C, D. That seems to be different. Or just by following the breath and maybe trying to note when you’re distracted spontaneously, oh, I was with my breath for the last minute or two. Maybe try that and maybe that will get you out of that tendency to control the breath. Victoria, my ex-student, can John explain suchness in more detail? Yes. Suchness is when you come into, think about the being mode. So right now, I just have this in my pocket. But if I step back and I start to relate to this as a work of art, I start to open up and I start to become aware of how it has a presencing that is not categorical in the nature. The suchness is the inexhaustibleness of this beyond any of the categories by which I try to capture it. So as I start to unfold the depths of all of this, all of its features, all of its properties, all of those are categorical, but I get a sense, I get a sense of the suchness. I get a sense of that about this that transcends all of my identities, all the identities I assign to it, all of the categories that I have for it and in which I place it in order to cognitively control and consume it by bringing it into a category. So when you’re trying to open up to the suchness, you’re trying to open up to what this is here now and in the fullness of its presencing. Of course, everything has suchness and so there’s a sense in which the suchness is sort of a focal awareness of the moreness of a particular thing. So I hope that was a little too abstract for you, but so what we’re trying to do is we’re And notice again how you do have that moments of profound love when you realize that you’re seeing your beloved again for a new, like as for the first time that renewal, because that’s what beauty does. It makes us, I’ve seen trees before, but I see this tree and it’s like I’ve never seen trees before, but of course I see this and so there’s that sense of, ah, so much more. I hadn’t realized and we remember the being of something that’s to try and relate to its suchness. All right, so we’ll take a look at some more questions tomorrow. Remember continuity of practice, more important than quantity. If you honestly can only sit for five minutes, try to alternate between Vipassana and Metta, but even when you’re doing Metta, first do the core four, do a bit of Vipassana and then go into Metta. I want to as always thank the Technomajor Mar and my beloved son Jason. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video and also if you like, you said you’re joining, you can find the all the teaching, the previous teaching videos. There’s a lot of videos on there that are also really helpful for the overall project of cultivating wisdom and affording a kind of resilient responsiveness and adaptivity for our current situation and for life in general. Please invite others who might benefit from this to join the meditation course. I’m doing this try to help as many people as possible and you could help me to help others if you reached out and told them about this and encourage them to participate. We’ll be doing this every weekday, every weekday from 9 at 9 30 EST. So thank you everyone. Please keep up your practice and I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Take care everyone. Bye bye. you