https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nQt8dym1W_A
Welcome to meditating with John Breveke. We livestream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Time with Mondays alternating between a new lesson, Dharma Day, and a review of the whole ecology practices of Paya Day. For previous lessons and sits, see the description. If you’re joining us for the first time, please continue meeting with us. But I strongly suggest you go immediately to the first lesson, watch it, start practicing, and then every Saturday or Sunday or whatever day of the week you happen to have free, do another lesson and then you’ll quickly integrate with us. I would ask everybody to please like this video stream to increase its visibility on the YouTube algorithm. Many of you have been helping me do that and I appreciate it. I ask you to just keep doing it because we’re trying to reach as many people as we possibly can. At the end of every sit, we have Q&A and please limit the questions to that Q&A to questions around the course that we’ve been on, this whole ecology of practices. For more encompassing questions, please join us on our livestream Q&A on YouTube at 3 p.m. Eastern time every third Friday of the month and that’ll be July 17th of this month. I believe that’s everything in terms of announcements. And so what we’ll do today is we’ll sit and then we have our techno mage back with us today, Amar, and so we will try to do a little bit longer, some extra questions at the end to try and catch up with that. All right, so everybody please get in position, set your phones on do not disturb and we will begin together when I say begin. Begin. Slowly 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 communicates. Just by reciting the five promises to yourself. Okay, so we have some time for some questions. So the first one is to Khan Soho. Good to see you again. The five promises, there’s various versions of them. So I’ll do the version that I’m using right now. It’s a little bit different than what I taught people initially with the five promises. So I taught a more basic version, but it can grow. The version I use goes, I’ll go through the five promises with reverence and respect. I promise not to misuse or abuse life, but to treat life wisely. Or sometimes people say mindfully or carefully or lovingly, I say wisely, but choose the one that resonates most with you. That really gets you engaged. And so to go back with reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse life, but to treat life wisely. Some people also say to practice enhancing and enriching life. Again, there’s you have to get a constellation of words in your mantra that resonate almost like Alexio Divina for you. So although I’m giving you what I use, I don’t want you to think that that’s some sort of exclusive requirement. So with reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse life, but to treat life wisely, remembering the being mode in the aspiration towards wisdom and enlightenment. And then with reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse material objects. But to treat them wisely, remembering the being mode and the aspiration to wisdom and enlightenment. With reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse speech, but to speak wisely, remembering the being mode and the aspiration to wisdom and enlightenment. With reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse my sexuality, but to practice it wisely, remembering the being mode and the aspiration towards wisdom and enlightenment. With reverence and respect, I promise not to misuse or abuse altered states of consciousness, but to use them wisely, remembering the being mode and the aspiration to wisdom and enlightenment. And when I’m doing each one, I try to center my attention on the sense of life in me for the first one, the sense of the material objects around me, my speech center, my sexual center, my sexual center, my consciousness as I’m making the promises. One more time, I’m giving you the basic idea that you need to craft this in a way that resonates with you, that most gets you to participate in the intention and the aspiration for transformation. Lawrence Fulvick, when doing the five factors particular in a thought, do you need to go through all five factors? I find sometimes the thought goes away or I can get a new distraction when I start to apply the five factors. So it can sometimes feel like I’m seeking out my initial thought distraction in order to apply all five factors. This is an excellent question, by which point it can seem to make more sense to turn to my breath instead. You’re exactly right, Lawrence. It’s exactly right. So if when you’re starting to do the five factors, the thought goes away, that’s it. You just return. So the principles are if it goes away, you return to your breath. If you go away, if you’re distracted from your distraction, you return to your breath. If neither one of you go away, but it’s getting to be such an intense struggle that all you are doing is enduring and not learning, then you return to the breath. So the question, the answer to your question is yes. Exactly. And your sense of this was exactly bang on. So that’s correct. Gabriel Rubinstein. Hi, Gabriel. In meta, I’m very rarely getting any real insights about the person. Just a general sense of reciprocal opening being and generic empathy, awareness that they have a subjective experience. Any suggestions to get more realization of what is not yet seen? Thanks in advance. So, Gabriel, I would recommend doing that. What you’re getting is quite good. That sense of reciprocal opening being a general sense of empathy. I would concentrate before trying to deepen it in your practice. Try to practice it throughout your day when you’re encountering people, when you’re encountering situations or when you’re encountering uncomfortable emotions in yourself. If you can get throughout your day that that becomes more second nature to you, that reciprocal opening, the being mode, generic empathy. Once that’s working and once that’s really sort of taken root and living, then you can turn back to the meta and look for something deeper. And what you can start to do is to try to get a sense of, right, how you might be projecting onto that person. So the optimal person for that or the optimal situation are situations that are really push your buttons or people that really push your buttons and try to get a sense of that about you, which you’re not seeing precisely because you’re projecting on them. Please remember what I said, though, it’s very important to first practice this meta, that reciprocal opening, that general empathy, that general connectedness throughout your day. That has to really have taken deep root because only then can you try within meta to, especially with the conflict person or the conflict situation or your own emotions that you run away from or you don’t like or you just identify with. Then you can see you can do meta towards them and try and get a sense of what’s being projected. For those of you who are a Jungian, this is a kind of shadow work. What you’re trying to do is realize not only the unconscious identification, which we’re doing in regular meta, but the deeper aspects of this, which is more than just the unconscious, in the sense of being automatic and habitual. And you’ve got to work on that first. I’m going to keep saying that. You have to work on that first. But once that starts to really loosen up and open up, then you start to get the apertures for which you can start to see that those aspects of the process of identification that are being repressed or disidentified, held away from and therefore often projected onto other people. But please, it’s very important that that order that I gave you is followed. El-Janan Timas, how hello, El-Janan. Which of the five promises would most include the idea of honoring and being grateful for the gift of one’s physical body? So that’s an interesting one. I thought about that. That’s a very good one. So for me, it tends to be the life. So when I promise not to abuse or misuse life, I feel the life within myself, but it’s not my life. I’m feeling life as the participatory locus that connects me to all living things. I don’t just refer to or think about living things. I participate in being alive. I instantiate the property of life that’s in other things. So I go into I sort of when I’m making that promise, I’m not. That’s what I meant by the locus is in me, but it’s not about me. It’s the way it’s the place from which I am making the connection. But I know there’s people who also do that, make the promise to include their body when they’re doing it towards not misusing or abusing material things, because the body, of course, is a material thing. And that that makes perfect sense to me, too. For me, the life aspect seems to be more resonant, I suppose. And I haven’t explored this personally. So this is a conjecture on my part or supposition, I should say, on my part. I suppose that you could do both. You could have sort of the sense of, you know, your body as a living entity to give you that participatory connection to living things when you’re making the promise towards life. But you could also get the sense of your body as a spatial material physical thing when you’re making the promise towards material things. Actually, I think I’m going to try that, but that would be my my answer to you. Sam Lambert, currently working through the early course videos should avoid the live streams altogether until I’ve caught up. Would like to partake in some live six before they finish. Sam, please sit with us right from the beginning. Like as long as you’re working your way regularly and reliable through the previous lessons, you you you you you. Well, sorry, don’t take this as too preposterous or pretentious, but you belong here. You do. You belong here. If you do, everybody is right. And even when everybody’s done the lessons, it is always the case that we are all at different places and moving at a different pace. So as long as you are regularly and reliably making your way through the lessons, please join us every day that you possibly can. You’re most welcome. And you belong here. Ben, Ben Gow. Hello, Ben. Good to hear from you again. A while back, I experienced what I think is a flow state of love and dynamic, love and interaction with my kids. But that passed soon. And now I have only glimpses of that mental state. Can meditation help me to retrieve, enlarge and embody that mental state? If so, how? By directing that at it? Exactly how? OK, so, Ben, I want to recommend a book to you by by a slinger land called Trying Not to Try, trying not to try because the more you what you can do is set up the conditions. But you always have it’s like like sort of, you know, setting up the conditions for a fire. But the spark has to take up its own. So mindfulness and chick set my high argues this and there’s evidence for this increasingly mindfulness practices, especially if you’re doing both meta and the past mindfulness practices and doing the moving practices. These are all predictive of an enhanced likelihood of getting into the flow state. But it’s not a direct algorithmic process. You can’t all do this and then that will just immediately cause the event of the flow state. What you’re doing is increasing your overall receptivity. You also have to pay attention to the external circumstances in which the flow state might take place. You have to make sure that there is very clear and unambiguous information between you and the situation. You have to make sure that your actions and the responses from whatever it is in the environment, perhaps your kids or something else or someone else or something else, it’s very tightly coupled so that when you do something, the environment responds in a tightly coupled fashion. So clarity coupled and then error map has to matter. It’s right. If you make a mistake, it will disrupt the interaction. So you what does that mean? You have to really challenge your skills. Your skills have to be challenged continuously. So definitely the mindfulness practice that will bring it back. In the sense of making you more receptive to it, taking on a life of its own. I should recommend reading the Slingerland book, trying not to try. And then you can take a look at the conditions in the environment that will actually be most conducive to flow. Karima. Hello, Karima. What is the cognitive reason in prajna? People choose which way to inhale and inhale. I’m still trying and liking both ways. I don’t know, Karima. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to come up with a good hypothesis for that. I do know it’s a reliable feature. I mean, I think one of it is, is that people when some people like the inhale, they’re feeling their abdomen expanding. And I think they’re paying more attention to the breath as the spatial expansion of the abdomen, where other people, they’re paying more attention to the direction in which the breath is moving. So for the inhale, if you’re paying attention to the abdomen, right, you’re feeling that. But if you’re paying attention to the sensation of the air coming in, you want to be doing the vipassana rather than the meta. But what the cognitive reason is other than what’s the more likely focus? I don’t know. I don’t know what it reflects about people’s cognitive styles or personalities or anything like that. But I. That’s it. I’m sorry. Like I said, I think it’s there’s a people are focused differently on how they’re tracking their breath. But what that difference points to behind it, I don’t know. I really don’t know. In Prajna, you are not blessing just expanding into connecting. Yes, Prima, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. This is where giving priority to the existential interpretation of meta over the merely emotional interpretation of meta comes into prominence because that more existential interpretation is taken up into Prajna. So that’s exactly correct. So, everyone, thank you very much for joining. It looks like we’re all caught up now on our questions, which is great. I want I’m very happy and glad that my good friend and techno major Mara is back. And then he was today here today making everything flow so fluidly and fluently. And of course, thank you. As always, for Jason, he pinch hit yesterday, pinch hit it yesterday. And and he’s always here today making sure that chaos is held at bay. He’s kind of like a paladin fighting the dragons of chaos. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. You will also find links to the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and the Diologo series Voices with Reveke, where these themes are explored in depth and situated within a broader encompassing way of life. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. There’s a lot of people. I’ve done a couple of workshops for other channels like Future Thinkers. So there’s more and more people that are getting interested in this ecology practices and finding it beneficial and helpful. So everybody, please keep doing that. It has been it’s been very successful and it’s been very helpful. I’m pretty sure Brett is here. Pleasure of doubt. Please join the Discord server to chat with others. There’s a link in the description and the Discord server you’re going to. I’m on there every couple of weeks. All the people that are on the voice of Reveke eventually end up on there doing excellent Q&A. There’s all kinds of work being done on around the video series. And it’s taken on a life of all of its own. And it’s growing powerfully. And. It’s. I’m just it’s I just want to say for a moment, you know. There’s times when you realize that things are sort of, you know, you’ve had some success, you know, like I got tenure and things like that. And that’s important. But when I realized that, like with the people in the Discord server, it’s very much a community now that’s taken on a life of its own. And it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like the kind. Sorry, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s like the kind of success when you’ve had a child and you see the child coming into, you know, autonomy. It’s truly it’s truly wonderful. Please remember that we are doing this every weekday morning at nine thirty Eastern time. And please remember that continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice. There is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. No friend, no ally, no true companion on the path. Better than your own mind and body. The lamps unto yourselves and to each other. Take good care of everyone. I’ll see you on Monday. It’s Dharma Day.