https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l8xMPPsCdLQ
Welcome to Meditating John Ravich. We do this every weekday morning at 930 a.m. Eastern time, with Mondays alternating between a new lesson, Dharma Day, and a review of the entire ecology of practices called Uppaya Day. A couple of announcements about this. Next Monday, I believe it’s August the 3rd, is a holiday in Canada, so we won’t be meeting. What’s going to happen to the scheduled Dharma Day is it will move to the following Monday. So we will start the Wisdom of Hypatia and the Western Wisdom tradition, Wisdom Cultivation tradition, on August the 10th, I believe it is. That’s the following Monday. But one thing I will do next week is next Wednesday, I will add in the arms to the Tai Chi walking to make it more full-bodied, and then you will actually be doing what are called Prashnis. So we will do that next Wednesday. Okay, I think that’s it in terms of timing issues. I would encourage people to meet on the Discord server on Monday in order to continue their meditation practice. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re most welcome. I recommend going to the description for this video where you’ll find links to previous lessons and sets. Do Lesson 1 immediately. Keep meeting with us. Try to do one or two lessons a week, and eventually you will catch up to us. That way you’ll have the benefit of the Sangha right away. I would ask you all to please help me to help as many people as possible by liking this stream to increase its visibility in the YouTube algorithm. At the end of every session, we have a Q&A. Please limit your questions to at that time. Please limit your questions to anything from this entire ecology of practice. For more general questions and some of the questions that you guys bring up in the chat, get slotted over into the general Q&A. There is a general Q&A live streamed on YouTube every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So I think that’s it. I think we’re all caught up. I hope everybody is… What’s the right… What would be a very helpful… I hope everybody is finding the path that we’re on together, enriching and edifying. Not necessarily easy, but challenging in a way that is nevertheless educational, that is drawing something out from them and for them. So let’s get into position. Let’s set your phones on do not disturb. We will, as always now, begin with chanting. We will go into a silent sit and then we will practice coming out of the sit, because how you come out of the sit is as important as what’s happening in the sit by perhaps reciting the five promises silently to yourself. If you knew, just take a general attitude of when you’re coming out of the practice to try and slowly integrate what you’ve cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition, your sense of your character. Communitas is your sense of how you participate in groups, especially perhaps in the sangha. And just set your intention to try and lead in a more mindful and present life. Okay, we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om.cium Om. Om. Observation, thank you, thank you Ben. A constant reminder that it’s really important to share observation and comments. It helps all of us. Observation, my breath seems to be getting increasingly subtle as my concentration deepens. That’s a very widely reported and normal part of the practice. And it seems at the same time that allowing my breath to become more subtle deepens my concentration. Exactly. So what’s probably happening here, because remember one of the things we’re trying to co-activate, and remember that we’re gonna keep coming back to that idea too, we’re trying to co-activate both the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic. So we want sort of a high degree of activity in one sense, but we’re also trying to move into this deep rootedness. And the subtle breath is really, really powerful for really getting the profundity from the parasympathetic activation. How it can really help to calm and open, like open up that space. So yes, very much. Pleasure of doubt. Brett, I know I owe you a couple of emails, I think at least one. I hope to get to those today. Can you elaborate in deep vipassana what it means to meditate on the space between the thoughts? Should we still be focusing on the breath? Just on the blankness. When you’re in deep vipassana, you move out of the breath as an explicit focus. Try to keep it almost like a background awareness. It comes into the mental as that sense, like I said, that dynamic ground, the energetic sense. So don’t leave the body behind, but it’s not your focal awareness, and it’s coming into your awareness insofar as you feel your awareness being energized, a dynamic ground. But that focal awareness is on the blankness, that stillness, the non-thought aspects of your consciousness. So that’s exactly right. Hey everyone, thank you very much for joining today. I wanna thank my techno mage and dear friend Amar, and my beloved son Jason. Jason is sort of apprenticing with Amar to help increase our redundancy for managing all of the tech that’s going on. So I thank Jason for that. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. There’s a good video coming out today, my discussion with Jonathan Pageot. Jonathan’s brilliant, he’s the author of The Symbolic World, and every time he and I have a discussion, I think we get into some very deep, but also very rich and juicy dialogs. When you subscribe to the channel, you will be, as I said, you’ll become aware of other dialogues like that on Voices with Rebeki. You’ll have access to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which is the comprehensive lecture series. And you’ll find these themes that we’re talking about in this course, link to other relevant themes and situated in more encompassing framework of phyllo-sophia, the cultivation, the brotherly. We’re gonna need a better word that conveys the same thing, right? The communitas love of Sophia. Maybe that works. Please invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please, Brett is here, and so is Mark. Please join the Discord server to chat with others, to do some of the movement practices with others, to perhaps get into dialogs with other people, and also to sit on the times when the Senga isn’t available to sit, I mean, this Senga. And I know that on the Discord server, they’re already independently meditating twice a day, a longer sit, so some very powerful resources there. Please remember, there’s no livestream on Monday because it’s a holiday. Please join that Discord server on Monday at that time. Next Wednesday, I’ll be teaching you the arms. Please, if you haven’t done it already, follow me on Twitter for the latest updates. Amar and I are gonna try and make more use of Twitter to give out information about the Senga. It’d be good if everybody, I know some of you will probably oppose. I try not to use Twitter for anything other than this kind of thing, but this is probably one of those powerful way we can get out news quickly if we need to. So please consider doing that. Please remember that continuity of practice and the quality of your practice are more important than the sheer quantity of practice or trying to reach some punitive perfectionist standard. There is 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. I’ll see you all next time. I’ll see you all next Tuesday. Take good care, everyone.