https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KnFxO6Bz-KM
Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. We livestream every morning at 9.30 a.m., every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. We will not be meeting tomorrow because it is a holiday Canada Day. Mondays, we alternate between a Paya Day, which is I do the entire ecology of practices that we’ve learned so far, and then the following Monday would be Dharma Day in which we, in which I teach a new lesson, a new principle of practice that builds on previous principles or practices. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, please go into the notes and you’ll see links to previous lessons and sits. I recommend doing lesson one right away and then you can continue meeting with us and then every Saturday or Sunday doing another of the following lessons and you’ll very soon catch up with us. Please like this stream to increase its visibility in the YouTube algorithm. At the end of every set, we have a Q&A. Please limit your questions to this ecology of practices. This course we’re on, but you can ask questions from any of the lessons that have been taught or even any of the answers that I’ve given to other people. For more general questions, please come to the general Q&A. We livestream on YouTube every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time and that will be July 17th this month. I think that’s everything for now. So please get yourself into position. Set your phones on do not disturb and we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Slowly begin to 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 to yourself. Okay. So we have some time for some questions, just waiting for them to come up on the screen. So the first is from Andy Hemistrat, which I promised to come back and treat in depth, which I would like to do now, because I think this is a very important question. Andy writes, I’m not sure if it was because of my ADHD stimulation, stimulant medication. I had a weird, scary psychosis like experience. Have you got any insight? I don’t really mind as I want to carry on. I started while meditating and carried on for like a half an hour. But really, I felt really present after it all. Weird experience. From the next couple of sits, I felt paranoid, but I just labeled it and it somewhat went away after. Okay. So the first thing we should note is that all of these practices have potential negative side effects, as I’ve mentioned. The meditation practices can have these generate weird experiences where you hear your name called out or flash of light or electric shock. The Chi practices, this is typically for people who practice it very excessively. There’s a Chi syndrome where psychophysical integration goes askew. So part of the reason why I teach you an ecology of practices is not the sole reason by any means, but there’s a therapeutic reason, which is by having multiple different practices that act as checks and balances, and you don’t get too, I think the right word is over committed to any particular practice. So it’s very important to try and first of all engage in the entire practice. Again, I don’t mean that everything I teach you should have mastered, but you should have an ecology of practice, a meditative, contemplative, a Chi Kung practice, and some of the other practices that we’re going to add in. So it’s very important to pursue an ecology of practice. It’s very important to do what you did, Andy, which was to share your experience with the Senga, and you get a lot of people reporting that this isn’t that aberrant an experience. All of that, so that’s just the general thing to do. Everybody, if you get these abnormal experiences in which you may feel depersonalized or derealized, very important to share them, to talk about them, make sure that you’re able to do it. And then the last thing is to share your experience with the other people. So all of that is very important. Next, this is also very important. I don’t know you. And so if this is a persistent pattern with you, I would recommend that you ameliorate this, the practice, significantly reduce how deep you’re going at, how long you’re sitting, and that you seek out professional therapeutic intervention. If, on the other hand, and this is what seems to be happening, as you immerse yourself in the dynamic ecology of practices and in the living Senga, and as you continue on with the practice, if you find it’s ameliorating, then that’s generally a good sign that you should keep going. But, and again, I can’t teach you everything at once, and again, there’s lots of stuff to go. So I’m going to do a bit of foreshadowing. We’re going to do this more in depth when we’re doing the wisdom of Hypatia, and we do this section on Stoicism, but we need to cultivate practices that help with the self-deception around how our beliefs are formed and helps to intervene on certain ways in which our thinking can sort of spin off. So I’m going to recommend, first of all, one of three books, or you can get all three books if you want. Here’s the first book, Biased, How Cognitive Biases Impair Our Judgment. Here’s the next book, the 25 Cognitive Biases, and then here’s the third book, Cognitive Biases, The Pocket Guide, because what I’m going to recommend for all of us, but also for you in particular, Andy, is to cultivate what’s called active open-mindedness. Active open-mindedness, and like I said, when we go into the wisdom of Hypatia, we’ll come at this in more depth. This is a preliminary introduction. Active open-mindedness is practice of every morning read about one of these biases, think about it, try to remember instances in your life where you encountered one of these biases, and then throughout the day, try to create a reminder, like when I see my frog or my stone or something else, I check and see, has the bias been recently present in my thinking? Is it present right now? Try to catch yourself spontaneously through the day and go, oh, there’s the confirmation bias, oh, that’s the availability bias, and then actively counteract it. And then at the end of the day, record in your journal if you noted or remember, and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. It’s a very, very gradual process, very gradual process, but try to note any bias. Because if you cultivate rationality, which doesn’t mean being logical, it’s this ability to detect the way our thinking can fall into patterns of self-deception, that can also help to mediate the tendency for these abnormal experiences to permeate and drive a kind of rumination that can be dissociative and can enhance a sense of delusion. So those are the things I would recommend in general. Really, when these things are happening, if it’s not ameliorating, then you need to seriously reduce the depth and the duration of the practice, maybe even stop it completely, and get some professional help, therapeutic intervention. If there’s a sense that it is ameliorating with the practice, then really dive into the ecology of practices. Don’t do just one practice, do the ecology of practices and sense the dynamic capacity for self-correction. Everybody should share. I mentioned this. We should share our, we should celebrate our moments when we realize the Buddha. We should also celebrate our aberrant experiences. Not because we can offer therapy to each other. We are not professionally trained, but we can, in a sense, resituate it. And other people say, yes, I’ve had that experience or that. It takes a lot of the numinous edge off these experiences to realize that they are shared with others. So the living sangha is also a very powerful resource. And then, like I said, begin to cultivate active open-mindedness because it seriously challenges our tendency to get into very biased, self-deceptive thought around these aberrant experiences when they occur. So I hope that was helpful, Andy. Taekwondo Soho said, what do I do about inches? Well, see if you can apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness up to the point where the principle, one of the primary principles, takes place. If you can honestly say, and I’m not inside your head, I don’t know, if you can honestly say, I’m not, this is becoming such an overwhelming experience, I can’t learn anything from it. All I’m doing is merely enduring it and break the practice and scratch your itch. Pay attention mindfully to what’s happening as you do so. If you can do one other thing, though, before, when you come out of it and there’s an itch, and when you’re start engaging the act of reducing the itch, does the itch start to immediately disappear even before you scratch? Because then take note of that. Because then that’s another very clever way the impish monkey mind has figured out how to distract you and get you involved and get you out of state. Again, monkey mind is not your enemy. So if you can note, because that means, right, that again, it’s more, and there’s nothing abnormal or stigmatic about this, right, but that’s another way in which your monkey mind is distracting you. It’s sort of psychosomatic in that sense. So the basic principle with itch is try to apply the five factors of imparting mindfulness. If it goes away, don’t get all celebratory, just come back to your breath. If you get to the point where you’re just enduring, and it’s like, ah, stop, mindfully scratch, but see what happens, try to see what happens even before you scratch. Is the itch ameliorating? Because that tells you that it’s a way in which you’re building up a habit of distraction. So just go ahead and scratch, but note that, pay attention to it. Maybe you won’t even need to scratch at all. And then go back to sitting. Oistin-Serviston, sometimes when I get a feeling of, oh, my head tends to tilt. Should I let it tilt or hold it back? Thank you. Ah, sorry, that was a pun. That was a performative pun I just did. Yes, that’s a good question. Because I think if the experience is happening spontaneously and you are not identifying the practice with achieving awe, then letting your body do what it needs to do in order to unfold that experience is probably the right thing to do. I hope you sense my caution because these special experiences can, we can very quickly, even if we don’t consciously say to ourselves, say, ah, that’s the point of this practice. The point of this practice is it is my own personal awe induction machine. So that’s a worry and a concern because while awe is relevant to the cultivation of wisdom, pursued exclusively, it will be detrimental to the cultivation of wisdom, like anything else pursued exclusively. So as long as it’s arising spontaneously and you do not get disappointed, this is the mark. If you have a sit and you don’t have that awe, are you disappointed? Do you feel like, oh, oh, oh? Then I would recommend trying to let the awe experiences go. But if that’s not the case and you’re happy to let them come and go and you’re not disappointed when they don’t come, then when they do come, let your head tilt back and let it unfold as much as it can. But try to not go too far because you’re going to start to uproot yourself. So we do the head lift in some of the Chi Kung practices because it actually does redirect brain activity. James Austin has shown this in some of his work. And so if your brain is trying to reorganize its activity and that is leading to, right, it’s exacting sort of visual processing to do that, then let it occur. So I hope that answered your question. Ben Gao, welcome, Ben. Sometimes my deep capacity feels like falling asleep, not literally as I’m sitting a wreck with my head up, but this stillness feels sluggish, empty and boring. So that is your falling asleep. And so that is where it’s very important to energize and activate the five factors of inquiring mindfulness that bring in that deep sense of questing, exploration, moving deeper. Even in the stillness, I know this sounds like a contradiction, but this is the movement appropriate to eternity. Even in the stillness, there’s a motion that, right, and I know that sounds like a contradiction, but there’s a motion in the sense that there is a depth to the stillness that you can disclose. And so the five factors of inquiring mindfulness should be deliberately enhanced if you’re getting that sense of sluggishness. So very good question, Ben. I hope that was a helpful answer. So everyone, I’ll hold these books up again one more time. Again, because down the road when we get into the wisdom of Apecha, you’re going to want one of these or perhaps all three. So thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining. This Senga means a great deal to me, and I thank you all for it. I want to thank my dear friend and the techno major, Mara, who’s making everything happen. My beloved son, Jason, who is behind the scenes making everything that needs to be done, coping with contingencies. He’s always there for me. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. On that channel, you’ll find links to the lecture series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, and the DIA Logos series, Voices with Verveki. I will be appearing tonight at 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Peter Lindberg’s Tistoa with Guy Sendstock, and we’ll be going through the DIA Logos practice for those of you who are interested. So on my channel, you will find, as I said, these two resources, these two series, which will help explore a lot of the themes we talk about here, and we’re trying to practice in depth and set them and situate them with a more, within a more encompassing framework and way of life. Please invite others who might benefit by sharing this series, trying to help as many people as I possibly can. Brett is here, pleasure of doubt, and I strongly recommend that you go, if you can, join the, go to the Discord server right now. There’s links in the description. You’ll find people who have, a group of people who have just done this set. Many of them have already done GCOM practices. They usually do some Lexio. There’s, like I said, there’s in-depth discussion of these broader issues. I strongly recommend getting involved with the Discord server. I’m there every second Monday at 6 p.m. for general Q&A, and many of the people that appear on Voices with Verveki will also be there for general Q&A. We’re doing this every weekday morning, not tomorrow. Tomorrow is Canada Day. It’s a holiday. We’re not doing it tomorrow, but we’ll do this every weekday morning at 930 Eastern time. Please remember that continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice, and there’s no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There’s no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path. Better than your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourselves and to each other. Take care, everyone. I’ll see you on Thursday. Bye-bye.