https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4e8NJK9moFw
Welcome to Meditating with John Ravecki. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I academically teach and scientifically study mindfulness and related topics like insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, cultivation of wisdom, and the aspiration to enlightenment. I’ve been practicing Vipassana meditation, metacontemplation, Tai Chi, Chuan, and Chi Kung for over 29 years and teaching them professionally for close to 20 years. Welcome. If you’re joining us for the first time, this is a progressive course and the introductory course is complete. We’re now moving into advanced techniques that are taught every Alternative Monday. If you wish to catch up, please go to the notes in this video and you will find links to the previous lessons and you can catch up at your own pace. You’re of course welcome to stay if you wish. Monday through Friday, we meet at 930 a.m. Eastern time. Every Alternative Monday is a Dharma day. Every day we sit and at the end of every day, there is also a Q&A. Please keep your Q&As at the end of the sits. Two questions concerning the ecology of practices, this course that I’m teaching. If you have more encompassing questions, more philosophical, existential or ethical nature, please come to my live stream Q&A. That’s every third Friday of the month. That will be the 19th of June, I believe, this month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So today is a sit day. And so I think what we should need to do is get yourself ready. Oh, if you could, I always ask you to do this because it’s helpful to me. If you could please remember to like this video stream that will raise its visibility in the YouTube algorithm and help me reach more people. I’m not deriving any income whatsoever from this. And my sole intent is to try and help people as much as I possibly can. I think that’s everything we need to do. So as I said, please set your phones on do not disturb. Get your posture ready. We will begin together when I say begin. Begin. Perhaps by reciting five promises to you. All right. We have time for a question or two, perhaps. So please throw your clear. I hope I didn’t mispronounce your name. Thank you for attending. I start with my posture straight and after a few minutes, I tend to sit and relax on the base of my spine. Is that OK? So I’m trying to make sure I get this. So I do sort of like this and then you relax down a bit. Well, you shouldn’t be sort of erect like this and holding yourself up. You should actually be sort of sunk down. And when I do that, I feel my sit bone touching my Zafu, my pillow. And that allows my shoulders down, open, allows my stomach open. So I think if I’m understanding it correctly, that’s actually what you want. You want that sense out of holding yourself up. But of actually sinking down. You’re erect, but you’re sunk and open. And you should be making that very definite contact with the base of your spine, with your pillow or your chair. You’re sitting on a chair. Philip Brineau, welcome, Philip, since music is a lot like poetry, could something like Lectio Divina be applied to listening to music or transformation? That’s a great question. I don’t know. I’ve never tried that. One of the advantages of Lectio is it acts as a bridge between propositional and non propositional cognition, between more abstract and more embodied cognition. Music is already much more sort of non propositional and embodied and playing with salience, landscaping and relevance realization. So I suppose what I would say, therefore, and please remember what I said, I’m ignorant of specifically trying to apply the practice to Lectio. So I’m speculating here. But given some of the goals of Lectio, I would not recommend replacing Lectio with text or poetry with music because you’re losing some of what you’re gaining when the Lectio is with text. The sense of logos as the bridge between the propositional and the non propositional. But I see no reason why you couldn’t apply something like Lectio in addition to music. And I’d be interested in knowing what happens when you do so. So one more question, I think, for today, and then we’ll start wrapping it up. Please remember that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have to be done no later than 10 o’clock. Karima, can one turn to a random page in Lectio Divina if the material has been read before at one time? Yes. So I tried both strategies because I try to thwart the fact that implicit machinery can predict huge patterns outside of our awareness. So Monday through Friday, I read sequentially, and that’s recommended because it’s recommended, especially when you’re that you stick with the text, right? You stick with the text even when you find it perhaps a bit boring. But then I switch on Saturday and Sunday to doing what Karima recommends, where I randomly and I read from this different set of texts. Right now, I’m reading I’ve got an anthology of poetry by Rumi. And for my prose, I’m reading Dionysius, the Areopagate. And there, what I do is I pick them up and I do the random selection to again, just constantly keep the level of challenge, try to keep me in the zone of proximal development. So I actually move between those two strategies. I don’t know if that’s good necessarily. If you’re just picking it up for the first time, you might want to just continue this for a while. I’m not sure about this because I haven’t had enough interaction with novices trying this. But sounds like Karima, you are having success. I recommend alternating between the two as I do, because again, we’re in our ecology of practices. Notice what we’re doing. We’re always trying to find complementary sets of strengths and weaknesses, trade off relationships and get everything into tone-offs, everything into this creative tension with everything else. So thank you very much for joining. I really appreciate this, Sangha. I want everyone to know that knowing that I can make a difference matters to me. Knowing that I can help others matters to me. And also, you are all helping me. You are all helping me deep in my practice. There is no better way to learn than to teach. If you’re doing really good teaching, really good teaching is not just giving information. It is to share transformation together. I want to thank my techno major dear friend Amar, who’s always there, always. And Jason, as always, like today, just had to get up and close the door. Patio door because of noise is always there handling things on the fly and the environment. Thank you so much. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. You’ll also find links to the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis under discussion, DeLogo series, Voices with Reveki, where all of these topics and more and more encompassing framework are explored in depth and developed, developed in concert with other people. Invite others who might benefit to please join this series. As I said, I’m trying to help as many people as I can. Pleasure of doubt. Brett is here. He’s here. And there are links in the description to the Discord server where you can go. People have been here on the Discord server, server with the sign up sitting and then you can go there and you can join that group and talk about the practice, perhaps do Alexio Dubina together. And then there’s just a broader community in which that just beautiful community. I think a new culture is emerging there, a culture that is oriented towards meaning and wisdom and waking up and transformation. I every alternative Monday at six, I am six Eastern time. I’m on that Discord server doing a general Q&A. We’re doing this practice. Every weekday morning, nine thirty Eastern time. Please remember. Continuity of practice, more important than quantity. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There is no friend, no ally, no true companion on the way, better than your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourself. Take care, everyone, and I’ll see you tomorrow.