https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8Yu6JBmUuXs
Welcome to Meditating with John Breveke. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where I academically teach and scientifically study mindfulness and related phenomena such as insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, the cultivation of wisdom and the aspiration to enlightenment, the enhancement of meaning in life. I’ve also been practicing the path to meditation, meta-contemplation, Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, as an integrated and dynamically alive ecology of practices for over 29 years and teaching it for close to 20 years. Welcome. If you’re joining us for the first time, this is actually a progressive course and the introductory course is done. We’re now doing advanced techniques. You’re welcome to stay, but I recommend doing the following. In the description for this video, you’ll find links to previous lessons. Go and immediately do the first lesson. You can continue meeting with us, but go and immediately do the first lesson. And then every Saturday or Sunday, do like lesson two, lesson three, lesson four, and you’ll catch up with us. So on Mondays, we meet every weekday from Monday to Friday. We have from 9.30 to 10, sometimes a little bit beyond 10 when there’s extra teaching or extra Q&A. Mondays are special days. We alternate on Mondays. One week it’ll be a Dharma day in which I teach a new principle or practice that builds on previous principles and practices. And then the following Monday will be Upaya day in which I go through the entire sequence of practices, all of the Qigong, the sitting, the Alexia divina, et cetera. And we keep alternating thusly going forward. Every day we sit together and at the end of every sit, Monday through Friday, we have a Q&A. Please keep your questions in that Q&A to this ecology of practices, this course that we’re on together. For more encompassing broader questions, please come to my monthly live streamed YouTube Q&A. It’s at 3 p.m. Eastern time. It’s June 19th. This month it’s the third Friday of every month. So things you can do to help me, please like this stream to increase its visibility so that I can reach as many people as possible and help as many people as possible. We can help as many people as possible. All right. I think that’s everything I need to mention in terms of the introduction. Yes. So let’s get yourself in your basic posture. Please put your phones on do not disturb. And we will begin when I say begin. Slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition, perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. All right. So we have time for maybe one question. The reason I’m going to say only one question is I want to answer this question in depth, both to answer the question, sort of intrinsically to answer the question, but also extrinsically to afford what we’re going to be doing later when we go through the wisdom of Hypatia course together. So Alexei Simonov, welcome again, Alexei, by the way, says, I can focus on the past but struggling and that I keep drifting away into conversation with whoever I bring up anyway to make it easier. Yes, I’m going to recommend and this is non-Buddhist. I’m not going to be drawing upon the stoic tradition, stoicism, which as I said, we will come back to and explore more deeply the wisdom to Hypatia. I’m going to recommend a practice from stoicism that is an alternative way to get to a place where you can exercise meta that has good cognitive science behind it. It’s based on construal level theory. And as I said, I’ll unpack that much later in greater detail. And this is the practice of the view from above. And so what you do is obviously you find your core form, right? And then you see yourself as you are, like you imagine, imagine, imagine, not imaginary, but imaginarily, right? You’re in this room, I’m in this room, first person perspective. And I imagine myself above this building, looking down on this body. Then I rise up higher and I see the city of Toronto. That’s where I am. And I pull back and I see the continent. And I see the whole earth. And then I pull back. I start to get a sense of the universe as a whole. I’m seeing the earth within that context. And now I also open up time on just this present moment. The deep past, all the lives that have been lived before, all the creatures, all the organisms, all the events, inanimate, inanimate. And now feel how that changes the sense of self and sense of world, that process of co-identification. And now direct meta towards it, a reciprocal opening. You’ve opened up to the moreness. It’s already been happening. You’ve opened up to the moreness of the world. Perhaps initially yourself seems sunk, but there was something in yourself, not your ego, something in yourself that was able to respond. There was a moreness in you that could respond to that, that could be in that, that reciprocal opening, that meta. The moreness of the world, the moreness of yourself. And do meta there. Direct meta towards all being, all beings, and all being. Try that as a different way of getting into meta, because it takes you out of the direct interpersonal situation that, as you said, often triggers conversations, interpersonal emotions, specific sociocultural roles. I still think the other meta is a very important practice. That’s why I taught it to you. But the view from above practice is independently powerful and is a different way of getting into meta, a much more extensive kind of meta, and really emphasizing the reciprocal opening that’s at the heart of the Buddhist form of meta. So try that. And like I said, I’m going to recommend it to all of us later as we do the Wisdom of the High Patriarch Course. But this is an alternative way of getting into meta that doesn’t launch you immediately into all of the tapes of the conversations and the narratives. In fact, this is a post-narrative way of getting into meta. And so that might be helpful to you. Alexi? Alexi? I think it’s helpful to all of us. And it gives you a sense of some of the sapiential practices, the wisdom practices from within the Western wisdom tradition that we need to re-home ourselves within. Unfortunately, I have to end it for today. There’s so much more I want to do right now. But I want to thank you for joining. As always, I want to thank my dear friend and techno-mage Amar, my beloved son Jason, who’s always there behind the scenes. Please subscribe to this video to be, sorry, to this channel to be notified of the next video. On the channel, you will find the lecture series Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, the Dialogos, the discussion series, the dialogue series, Voices with Reveki, where these topics, these ideas are developed in depth and set into a much more comprehensive and extensive framework, an entire philosophia way of life. Please invite others who might benefit from sharing this series. Please. Brett is here. Pleasure of doubt. There’s people who on the Discord server have just participated in this series, in the sitting of Dismalexio Divina, perhaps in Dialogos. I strongly encourage you all to get involved with the Discord community. There’s a link in the description to this video. We will be doing this every weekday morning at 930 Eastern Time. Remember that continuity of practice is more important than quantity of practice. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There is no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path better than your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourself and to each other. Take good care of everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow.