https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=i4TQdOcK5F4
Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. We live stream every morning at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Time with Mondays alternating between a new lesson, which we call the Dharma Day, and a review of the whole ecology practices of Paya Day. The previous Monday was Paya Day, the Monday coming up is Dharma Day. For previous lessons and sits, please see the description for this video. I recommend doing the first lesson right away, then start joining us every day, and then watching a new lesson video every Saturday or Sunday. Please like this stream to increase its view in the YouTube algorithm. At the end of every sit, there is Q&A. Please limit the questions to this ecology practice, of course, that we’re all on together. And it’s wonderful to be on it with all of you together. However, questions for the Q&A today, please limit them to this ecology, as I said, and for broader questions, more encompassing questions of a philosophical or scientific or more spiritual Please come to my live stream on YouTube Q&A every third Friday of the month. It’s this Friday, June 19th at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. I believe that’s everything we need to do right now. We will have some time for questions at the end. So please get yourself into your basic posture. Set your phones on do not disturb. And then we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. 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Slowly come out of our practice Trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness, cognition, Character and Communitats Perhaps by reciting the 5 Promise to yourself So, So, we have some time for some So, we have some time for some So, we have some time for some questions. There’s a need to check the time. There’s almost fear based. There’s almost fear based. There’s almost fear based. Thoughts. So, And so we need to MRS certain And so we need to MR<|zh|>? The fear is the fear And so we need to MRS certain So we need to MRS certain the einer.агav So we need to MR. For the first one. And it sounds kind of silly And it sounds kind of silly and it’s either Let’s get your timer. Let’s get the timer. Don’t be meditating. Don’t be meditating. Let it for 10いる Let it for 10 秒 For 10. Once you’re there, so that you know, I don’t mean the intellectual or reflective part of you, but the more primitive part of your brain knows. Because your limbic system learns a much slower rate than your cortex, and you have to do basically a lot of training over and over and over again. And just, oh, see, see, see, see, see, see, see, see, see. If it’s resistance, because you’re trying to get out of the meditation, then you need to apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness, you need to realize that meditate immediately on the resistance and it means you’re already meditating. And you really need to work on cultivating the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha to build up the inner Buddha, the momentum. Also, can you taste any sense of being centered, calm, at peace in yourself, that in contrast to the part that’s sort of nervous and anxious? And can you bring that into more awareness and nurture it with your attention? If it’s that you feel that you’re somehow wasting your time in meditation and there’s more important things you need to be doing, then perhaps seriously reflect on and maybe talk to somebody about the frame you have about befriending yourself. I don’t know you and I don’t want to be too intrusive, but I know I can fall prey to this as well. So I’m speaking from experience where I, because especially with the religious upbringing I was brought up in, I can confuse self-care with being selfish, or I can consider this kind of taking care of myself not really important because it’s not producing anything. I mean, we’re given all kinds of messages that conflict with what we’re doing here, and these are messages that are bound up with time. But if you read, for example, Han’s book on the scent of time, our culture has basically eroded time, it’s become, he calls it, it’s atomized and it just buzzes and whizz, and we’ve lost the capacity to linger with things and therefore to be transformed by touching their depths. So you might also want to take a look at some of the work that’s being done on the cultural cognitive grammar surrounding time. Again, I don’t know the particular thing and I’m trying to answer many different possibilities at once and give you sort of an overall integrated way of responding. Fear that time will not go off, or fear of being lost in the void. So the first one is, like I said, practice, that was another question from Taekwon. So practice, just show over and over, and I mean ad nauseum, over and over again, the timer works, it works, it works, it works. And then a fear of being lost in the void. Have you experienced the void? I’m not being facetious. I mean, what is your fear of? Are you imagining something? Then remember to not confuse your imagination of something with the thinking, you step back and look at the imagery and feel what your mind and body are doing, and look at them and go, oh, imagining, imagining, and doesn’t matter that you’re imagining the void, you’re imagining. Take a look at it. Oh, oh. If you’ve had moments, perhaps you’ve been practicing for a long time where that narrative voice drops away and you have the silence, yes, that can initially be startling. Then what you need to do is trust. It’s a kind of faith here. You need to trust the traditions when they tell you that if you keep going, that this goes, it doesn’t aspect ship, it flips. It goes from being, right, to a realization of the opposite. So try to taste through your day the fever, hunger of that, how we’re constantly feeding that self-referential talking mind that just keeps consuming words and stories. It’s, oh, more, more, more, and what it’s like. That’s what Nirvana means, blowing out the candle, right? What it’s like when that fever, hunger goes away. Initially, oh, no, but also, wait. So you have to trust the tradition when it says that that will, right, you’ll get an aspect shift, a fundamental inversion. Now, there’s one important caution. Perhaps you’ve experienced trauma, and this is coming up, and the fear of the void is the fear of that, of a dissociation. Then you need to perhaps talk to somebody with professional expertise about that and maybe slow down this practice until that tendency towards dissociation is more properly therapeutically addressed. I’ve tried to give as comprehensive answers as I can. Please forgive me. I can speak out of what I know in the experience of teaching and of other people who’ve done this, but everybody also has their own idiosyncratic situation, and so I hope I’ve helped. Dimitar, what does surrendering to the experience practically mean in terms you’ve used in this course? A lot of vocal people emphasize the importance of surrender in psychedelic trip, and it seems to me like some kind of surrender is important in order to gain the systematic insight. So for me, I don’t use the term surrender a lot, and that’s partially because of my own religious upbringing and the way it harmed me, but also due to my ignorance of Islam, which means, of course, to surrender. But I’ve got a much deeper understanding, I think, of what you’re talking about, especially from Taoism and also from the Buddhist practices, also from the neoplatonic tradition. The way I understand it is, and this has to do with the cognitive science of the kind of mode you need to be in in order to have an insight. If you try and force an insight, if you’re trying to have an insight, you won’t have one. In fact, that very sort of tight, hard focus and grasping will thwart. What you have to do is you have to let go of that, you have to move out of modal confusion, you have to move into the being mode, and then what we’re doing is we’re trying to sensitize ourselves and afford the fact that our minds are ultimately dynamically self-organizing, and we are trying to let, so we do all this planning, but we forget that all of our planning actually depends on our moment-to-moment ability to cope with situations and dynamically self-organize and adjust. And then below the coping, what grounds the coping is how we’re actually dynamically coupled to the world and how that can go bad in reciprocal narrowing or open up in reciprocal opening. And then ultimately below the coupling is a deep kind of conformity that there are principles at work within that are also at work without principles and patterns. And so surrendering means to stop trying to run the whole show from the planning mode, to recognize and accept that, okay, now is the time where I cope, and then below that, the coping depends on, now is the time in which I just allow myself to be dynamically coupled to the world, et cetera. And so that’s how I understand the surrendering in this process. Ultimately to acknowledge and recognize, acknowledge and recognize the fact that most of my cognition is not ultimately in my planning, although it gets a lot of my attention because that planning depends on the coping, which ultimately depends on a deep kind of ontological conformity. And the surrendering is a deep kind of acknowledge, a lived, enacted recognition of that. I hope that was a helpful answer. Kira, hi Kira. Kira Kroger, I’ve been re-listening to the rooting lesson. I noticed it’s much easier to do reading when I’m listening to you going through it. That’s helped me notice that my inner coach doesn’t have much authority, and so monkey mind comes up big time. How can I increase authority without being punishing? You have to cultivate your Buddha. You have to celebrate it more. You have to note, keep a journal, moments, and this sounds self-aggrandizing, and of course, that’s why all the hero myths are paired with hubris myths. But there’s vices of excess and there’s vices of deficit, as Aristotle would say. And you’re pointing to, you need help with literally encouragement. So you need to more actively water your Buddha, celebrate your Buddha. Perhaps read more stories of the historical Buddha. Try to notice, sorry, I apologize. I shouldn’t be presumptuous. Perhaps you’re Christian. Perhaps your inner sage is Jesus, Christ. Perhaps you’re a Taoist, and it’s more loud say. I don’t wanna be presumptuous. But that’s what I mean by the inner Buddha. And so if your sage isn’t the historical Buddha as an exemplar, whoever you’re, spend more time in the presence via text, obviously, of the historical model, your exemplar, and also keep a journal. Collect moments of when you were mindful, when you were insightful. Really try, and when that happens, try to remember and relive it, experience it. What does it feel like in your mind and body when your inner Buddha is presencing itself? You need to give that more rounded presence in your mind and body so that your inner coach can actually be the voice through which that Buddha nature can come to speak to you. The job, my job is to make myself obsolete. My job is to be a teacher that awakens within you your inner teacher. Takuin Soho, when I meditate, no, sorry, Matthew McCready. I already answered Takuin’s question. Matthew McCready, you have mentioned along the lines that spiritual practices shouldn’t be done for reasons such as special powers, gaining more power in the world, being content, getting rid of negative, and all emotions like a stone Buddha or making us feel unique and special. What is right motivation for why we personally need to transform our awakening using these practices? Yeah, so the right motivation is, right motivation, well, what I wanna say, I’m afraid of it being misheard or misframed as a special power. The right motivation is the cultivation of wisdom, which is, the Buddha said, no matter where you put your cup in the ocean, it has the same taste, right, salt. Well, no matter where you put your cup in the ocean, am I teaching? It has the same flavor, freedom. And freedom from and freedom to. Freedom shouldn’t be pursued in its own sake. It’s an instrumental good. What’s the good? Well, we want to be as free as we can for ourselves and for each other equally, for ourselves and for each other, we wanna be as free from self-deception as possible. Self-deception, self-destructive. And we wanna be free to flourish, which means we want to enhance as much as we can for ourselves and for others equally, the ability to be connected, right? That dynamic coupling, mind and body connected, connected to yourself, connected to each other, connected to the world. So that’s what we’re after here. We’re after, and this is the standard Mahayana Buddhist phrase, we’re after the liberation of all sentient beings. And that sounds very grand. But a man’s reach, or let’s update, grounding so that we’re so successful, a person’s reach should exceed their grasp or what is a heaven for? So, right? We are trying in the end to bring a kind of fullness of being to as many beings as possible. Excellent questions. Really, really excellent questions. So thank you everyone for joining. This sangha is nurturing and nourishing, and I deeply appreciate it. I appreciate everything that’s happening in it. I want to thank my dear friend in TechnoMajorMar that’s making everything happen. My beloved son, Jason, who’s always behind the scenes taking care of things that need to be taken care of, coping as things unexpectedly come up. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. You’ll also find links to the lecture series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, and the Dialogo series, Voices with Hrveki, in which these themes and many others are explored in depth and set within a much more comprehensive way of life. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series so it can help as many people as possible with it. Brad is usually here, pleasure of doubt, and he will help guide people, shepherd people into the Discord server. There’s a link in the description where you will find people who have sat, perhaps doing lexio, other group practices, a much more expansive community. I’m on there every second Monday doing Q&A. Many of the people that are on Voices with Hrveki are there doing Q&A. It’s a wonderful, vital, and vibrant community. It is where a culture of awakening, right, is perhaps being born. Please remember that we are doing this every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern time. Please remember that continuity of practice is more important than the sheer 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. Relapse unto yourself and to each other. I’ll see you tomorrow. Take good care.