https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lssL-7rc0AU
Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. We live stream this every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Time with Mondays alternating between a new lesson of Dharma Day and a review of the whole ecology of practices called Uppaya Day. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re most welcome. For previous lessons and sits, see the description. I recommend you then go and do lesson one immediately. Continue meeting with us. Do a new lesson or two every week and soon you will be caught up and integrated with us. I would ask everybody to please like the stream in order to increase its visibility on the YouTube algorithm so I can help as many people as possible. At the end of every sit, there is a Q&A. Please limit questions to this entire course, Ecology of Practice that we’re doing. However, if you have more general questions, please come to my general Q&A every third Friday of the month live streamed on YouTube at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. All right. I’d like to also remind people that we’re going to be starting the Western wisdom tradition. We’ve done a lot from the Eastern and we won’t set that behind. We will continue to practice. But we’re also going to start moving into the Western. A reminder that the book you will need very soon, like I’m going to start talking about it on Monday, is The Wisdom of Hypatia by McClellan, also another cognitive scientist. Strongly recommended that and this is the order in which you should try and get them that in order to get this very soon as possible to. Pierre does What is Ancient Philosophy? It is a good supplementary reading and background. This is basically the argument that ancient philosophy is a wisdom tradition. It is a way of life. It is a spiritual exercise, as Pierre Piedra famously argued. A little bit more down the road, especially when we move towards the end of the whole trajectory, which is the Neoplatonic trajectory. I strongly recommend getting this beautiful little gem by Arthur versus Lewis, Arthur versus Lewis, the perennial philosophy. This is not Aldous Huxley’s idea. This is a different proposal, one that is more plausible than Huxley’s, which is that Neoplatonism actually forms sort of the spiritual grammar of Western spirituality and mysticism. And Western includes Christianity, Judaism and Islam. So strongly recommend The Wisdom of Hypatia by McClellan. You need that. That’s pretty much going to be mandatory for us going forward. Strongly recommended you get as soon as possible as well. What is Ancient Philosophy? By Pierre Adot. And then a little bit later down the road, the perennial philosophy by Arthur versus Lewis. All right. Now, the next thing is I was sent a wonderful print by Nicholas. And I just want to share that with everyone. And I want to thank Nicholas for this wonderful print. He also sent a wonderful card with prints on them, both to Jason and to Amar, thanking them. And so we together, all three of us, want to thank Nicholas for the kind gifts. They’re very encouraging. Thank you very much. OK, a reminder that we didn’t I wasn’t able to get through everything. Jason and I were pinch hitting on Monday. We didn’t quite get through the entire ecology. And so after we do the set, I’ll also go through Alexia Divina for us. OK, I think that’s everything. Well, you can tell this is a real thing. And we have lots of announcements and business. Anyways, let’s set your phones to do not disturb. We’ll get ready. We will, as always, begin by chanting and then we’ll go into the silent set. We’ll come out of the set, of course, doing the promises. Do Alexia and then hopefully we’ll have some we will because we’re not on a hard day and we’ll address some questions that have been held over. All right, everyone. So we will begin when I say begin. Begin. One. One. defense. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. One. One. Om. Om. One. One. Om. Om. One. Om. One. One. Om. Om. Om. Begin your silence set. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. 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 communication. Perhaps by resetting the five promises to yourself. Om. Om. Om. Okay, let us now please move to Alexia of last. Sub detail attention. Reverence for the revelation, This is from Wilka, Buddha in Glory. Seems appropriate given the wonderful print by Nicholas. Center of all centers, core of cores, almond self-enclosed and growing sweet. All this universe to the farthest stars and beyond them is your flesh, your fruit. Now you feel how nothing clings to you. Your vast shell reaches into endless space and there the thick rich fluids rise and flow illuminated in your infinite peace. A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head, but in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. So this is very rich for me, the image of course of the Buddha. Many of the phrases are resonating with me, but the ending seems to be really present for me today. But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. So first of all, what comes up for me is just that sense of presence. What it is when you’re with somebody, for example, that sense of presence when they’re really present, you feel really present in a situation and how that can be intensified in the flow state and how it can be even more intensified in meditation. And then how that presence is, Rukh, it’s astounding. It’s like the presence itself is continuous with, it participates in, that the presencing of being itself the way out of eternity, everything is being presenced in time, out of all of the indeterminate possibilities, there is determinate actualities that… What Rukh is calling me to is that don’t think that. The Buddha didn’t think it. What Buddha is it? Not egotistically identification, but non-egoic identification. The Buddha is that. It’s given me a sense of what it is to cultivate my inner stage, my Buddha nature, to come into that sense of a presence that deepens me into the depths of things. Calls to me. You can feel it right now, it’s like a calling to me, a very powerful calling. My inner stage is just plugged into something. The prose is from John’s goddess, Eregina, one of the greatest of the neoplatonic Christians. I regard him as the culmination of the entire history of dialectic, Socratic, neoplatonic dialectic. We ought not to understand God and creation as two things distinct from each other, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God. Think about how this resonates with the Wilka. And God, by manifesting himself in a marvelous and ineffable manner, creates himself in the creature. The invisible making himself visible. Yes, do you see that? That’s the presence that we were just talking about. And the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the hidden revealed, and the unknown known. And what is without form and species formed and specific, and the super essential essential, and the supernatural natural, and the simple composite, and the accident free subject to accident, and the infinite finite, and the unsubscribed subscribed, and the super temporal and the creator of all things created in all things, and the maker of all things made in all things, and the eternal begins to be and immobile. He moves into all things and becomes all things in all things. This is just so resonating with the Wilka. The line that’s coming out for me is the invisible becoming visible. That whole process of the ineffable coming into what’s intelligible, that profound deepest presencing. God is telling me that God is both, is both, and is that movement. It’s like God is the moreness into the suchness of everything. God is the soul of being. What does that mean for me? What would it mean for me? What does that mean for me? What would it mean for me to live that way? Seeing and being that way, remembering sati that in every moment. How would that challenge my notions of God? How would that challenge my notions of sacredness? How would that challenge my notions of being and myself? So let’s address some of the questions. Mayank Ramani, name of the books again? Yes, I’ll hold them up as well. The Wisdom of Hypatia by McLennan. What is Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Hago. Perennial Philosophy by Arthur Verslewis. The books that I’m using for Lexio are the Enlightened Heart, that’s the poetry, by Stephen Mitchell, and the Enlightened Mind for the Prose by Stephen Mitchell. That’s all the books I was using today, so I hope that answered your question. Remember, and some of you are doing this, that in addition to questions, comments and observations are welcomed, seriously welcomed. Imitar, I noticed that the first ever distraction that comes up once I reach the decent level of focus and interest is the very fact that I’m meditating. It’s almost like there’s some underlying anxiety that’s making me turn my attention towards checking whether I’m meditating, and consequently I find it difficult to renew my interest and my breath. Any advice? Yes. So it’s the very fact that you’re meditating and then you come into question whether or not you’re actually meditating. So, sorry, I don’t mean to sound this, this is not meant to be flippant. Then stop meditating in a sense of that there’s this specific thing that you’re doing to be doing meditation. And give me a moment because that sounds off-handed. I don’t mean by that. Just keep doing what you’re doing. And when that thing comes up, just label it as checking and do not begin the investigation because when you are beginning the investigation, you’re not just labeling and stepping back from it, but you’re actually doing the investigation. You’re not just labeling and stepping back from it, you’re getting involved with the content of checking. Oh, checking, it’s just a distraction. Maybe I’m meditating, maybe I’m not, but I’m just going to start following the breath again. This is a moment, think about, you know, the frog for me represents, you know, the trust in the transformation. I want to give you a little bit of a little bit of a reminder of what I’m saying. I’m saying that we have to get our faith to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. There’s nothing that anybody can say to you, not me, not God himself, that would have the capacity to remove that well of doubt because as soon as you get to the Buddha, you’re satisfied no matter what evidence it is given. That’s the, so it’s an anxious doubt as Dimitar correctly points out. You have to trust that even if you’re not doing it perfectly correctly, perfectly right, in the end, it doesn’t matter as long as you maintain the continuity of practice. I know that sounds like, but then there’s the voice in your head, but no, but, but, there is nothing beyond that. If your life transforms, that is your feedback. That is your feedback. There is nothing within your introspective awareness that will give a infinite certainty to quell that infinite kind of doubt. I understand deeply, believe me, that this is not an easy thing, but doing the checking after you get on meditating is to actually get involved with the content rather than the labeling. You have to try returning in trust without checking, am I doing it correctly, to the practice. You have to trust in the practice and the process. It’s not a blind trust because there’s the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, and how that unfolds in your life, as I mentioned many times. But that part of your left hemisphere that likes to take credit for everything and undermine anything that it doesn’t instantiate, that it’s not running. It’s a useful thing, by the way. That’s why we have it. It’s adaptive. But like everything else, like every other adaptive process, it can become a source, it can be hijacked, it can become a source of self-deception, self-destructive behavior. I’m speaking from a long-term experience with this kind of hypervigilance. This is why right effort, right concentration, right meditation are so strongly emphasized by the Buddha. He doesn’t mean right in the sense of meeting some standard of perfection. He means right like a dextrous grip, a flowing grip that is adjusting and adapting and continually self-correcting because it is not achieving some state of final perfection. I hope that’s helpful to you, Dhimu Tantra. I really, deeply empathize with what you’re wrestling with. And so I hope that you can at least get a glimmering taste of what I’m talking about and keep centering your attention on that until it grows of its own accord. Matthew McCready, good to see you again, Matthew. I know that alongside the internal Qigong practices, there are external practices more in line with physical development. What role should the development of the body have in the ecology of practices? The development of the body and the development of the mind are not separate developments. This is why I always say there’s no friend more important than your own mind and body. There is a deep continuity between mind and body. So there, I mean, and this goes even into basic stuff. I’m talking about when we’re doing the walking practice, embodied balance, the balance that you’re training when you’re moving, the embodied balance and coordination in the movement. The cerebellum, of course, is being activated for that. But that same activation comes into place when we are trying to get balance and coordination in our lives. The cerebellum is at work there. There’s a deep continuity that the developing in the body and the developing of the mind are two sides of the same coin. This is why throughout I’ve tried to, and it’s hard to tell to what degree this is actually part of the Asiatic experience of Buddhism and Daoism or the degree to which it’s a Western misappropriation. But the way mindfulness has become a very disembodied practice in the West for a lot of people, this is something I’ve tried to compensate because I was taught something very different and that is very consonant with our best cognitive science. So developing the body, which isn’t the same thing as doing just fitness practices. You want to do things that train the body in ways that are resonant with, right, deeply continuous invoking the same basic fundamental principles as training the mind and vice versa. Mark, welcome Mark, it’s always great to have you here. Observation, chanting has all kinds of interesting side effects over time for me. Today it seemed to unlock some inflammation of tension somehow deep in my body, instantly coming from my whole self. Well, thank you, Mark. I don’t know if that was for today or from a previous day, but the observation is very helpful because chanting is exactly the way we are trying to invoke. We’re not just representing, it’s not just happening, we are invoking the deep continuity between the mind and body, that the mind befriends the body and trains the body and then the body befriends and trains the mind. We are invoking that, we are accentuating it and we are celebrating it. So thank you all very much for joining for today. This was a wonderful sanya. It always is. It’s like every time it’s like a different song. I want to, of course, thank my dear friend and TechnoMajor more for their amazing work. And my beloved son Jason, who is behind the scenes with them, are doing a lot, doing a lot of pinching. He did a lot on Monday. I want to again thank Nicholas for the wonderful gifts he gave to all of us. And Jason and Amar also want to thank him. 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, the DIA Logo Series, Voices with Reveki, where these themes are put into relationship to other themes and situated with a more encompassing framework of, as Pietro Hedell would say, philosophy as a way of life. Please invite others who might benefit from this series. Please, I hope you guys met last Tuesday, on Tuesday on the Discord server. Please join the Discord server to chat with others, to practice with others, to help develop the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The link is in the description. Brett and Mark are no doubt here in the Sangha to help guide you. Reminder that we do this every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern Time. Remember, continuity of practice. Remember what I said to Timotana, and I’m saying it to myself to remember it too. Continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice. And there is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. But there is no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path, as great as your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourselves and to each other. Take good care, everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow. you