https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rNv_n6dZ5GQ
Welcome to Meditating with John Vervecky. We livestream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. with Mondays alternating between a new lesson called Adharma Day and a review of a whole ecology of practices called Uppaya Day. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re very welcome. For previous lessons and see the description in this video, I recommend you go immediately and do lesson one and then do one or two lessons every week and you will very quickly integrate with us. Please continue to keep meeting with us. That will help you get involved and develop the practice in depth. I would ask you all to please like this video stream to increase visibility in the YouTube algorithm so I can help as many people as possible with this work. At the end of every session, there’s a Q&A period. Please limit the questions at that time to anything from the entire ecology of practices. For more general questions, we have a live stream on YouTube every third Friday of the month, that will be August 21st of this month, at 3 p.m. Eastern. I welcome as many of you as can possibly make it because I think it’s a very rich and rewarding experience. Normally, when you come in, I’m sitting on my mat and my zafu, my meditation pillow, but today we’re doing a final review of an aspect of the walking meditation, the brush knees from Tai Chi Chuan. I’m just going to review it one more time, giving special emphasis to the arms, and then we’ll move into the seated practice. Okay, so again, when I’m doing this, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put my, as always, like when I start the walking, I turn my right foot 45 degrees. Here’s my line, here’s 90, 45 degrees. But what I’m going to add in the arms, I step onto this part of my left foot, right behind the toes, and I’ve abandoned my knee. Right? And then what I’m going to do, I’m going to turn my hips 45, and as I do, I’ll do side on so you can see this best, what happens is this arm turns. Notice I don’t straighten it, I keep it bent, right? It’s this is pum again, that’s sort of almost like your arms are filled with water flowing through them. They’re flexible, but they’re not limp, and they’re not locked. Okay, so pum. And so when I’m turning, turning this part, the hard part of my arm and the knife edge of my hand out, I’m protecting here, my liver, my lungs, and my heart. So there’s a full body block. That’s what my left hand is doing. My right hand is coming up, it’s spiraling up, so it’s palm towards me with this finger, the middle finger, just around the tip of, just above the tip of my nose, but in line with the tip of my nose. So that looks like this. Notice how I’m turning my hips. Okay, so once I do this, then I start the Tai Chi walking, right? The meditative walking, right? Remember, heel to toe, and as my heel goes down, remember I’m straightening my hips. And what that straightening of my hips does is it moves this hand past my knee, it’s called brush knee. And when I finish the move, my hand comes beside my thigh here, and as if I’m touching a board like this. This hand is like a curved L, so it doesn’t go on the diagonal, it doesn’t go like this. It spirals into the center, that nose to navel line, right? It spirals into the center and then down. And notice how I keep a deep bend in my arm. I am not. This is very mistaken, and this is what I’m doing. Okay, so what does that look like? I’m turning, turning, turning, stepping, straightening the hips, brushing the knee, spiraling down the center, coming in. Okay, so remember I didn’t touch you walking, meditative walking, I send my weight back, and I come up onto my left heel. As I do that, my hands, my palms rotate in, and then as I turn, right, remember I do this. I align everything. My knee, remember I’m aligning the knee, see my left knee coming into place? My hands are aligned like this, okay? Keep this hand, like when I say align, they don’t be directly below it, they’re slightly ahead of it. So slightly this way, okay? So like this, and then now this is the difficult part. I’m going to try and do it as slowly as possible. Remember what I do is I do this with my weight. I bring my weight, I turn all of my weight onto my left leg, no weight going into my right heel, and that brings up my right foot. Now as I’m doing that, these hands are switching. So that this is now like this, and then this is the full body block here, okay? So like this, right? I’m aligned, I turn, okay? I’m aligned, I turn, okay? I’m aligned, I turn, and then I brush the knee on this side. I brush the knee on this side. I brush the knee on this side. Okay, so let’s say I brush my knee now. That’s the name of this move, brush knees. Okay, so I think like I said, I’ll do it first this way. I’ve got the full camera. I want to turn. I’ve got to brush knee, and I want to turn. So let’s just do the footwork again. Up, pivot, no weight yet. Shift weight from here to here. Pivot more. Let this foot slide a bit. Let the right foot slide a bit. And then up and over, okay? So what I’m doing, the first part of the weight shift with the footwork, I’m spotting the footwork, I’m spiraling this down, and I’m spiraling this up. What I’m doing is I’m actually storing energy in the elasticity of my tissues. Right, so when the martial arts, you’re learning to coordinate not just the large piston muscles, you’re learning to coordinate all the small, that’s why you’re doing all the spiraling. You’re first of all, you’re coordinating all the control muscles and getting, it’s like a laser. You know, ambient light, the light bounces off in all directions. And the laser, it’s reflected, right, so that it all becomes coherent and it moves in a unified pattern. And so I’m trying to get all the muscles to have that coherence to them. That’s part of what Chi is. And then also, I’m storing energy in the elasticity of the tissues. So it’s not just, so like if I’m striking someone, right, when I strike, it’s not just piston muscles. It’s also the small control muscles and it’s also the elasticity of the tissue and it’s the weight shift and I’m getting everything coherent into one strike, okay? Hopefully, you’ll never use this for fighting, but the idea is you understand the function, it helps you to do the form correctly. Okay, so I’m like this, I rotate, and then now where I shift from, right, this leg to this leg, I start to unwrap my hands over and now you see I’m ready. I’m ready for a brush knee. What would that look like on this side? Same thing, wrapping, starting to unwrap over brush knee. Wrapping, getting into place, see this, starting to unwrap right here, right here, over brush knee. Okay, I think this is better right here, right? Wrapping, and then start to unwrap and that gets this hand down into place, the lower hand. This is now right in front of my nose, ready to go, and boom. So remember, whenever I’m, so inhale, because I’m getting everything ready, I’m drawing everything in. This is the yin part, and then yang, exhale, and then yin, right, and then exhale, then yin, and then exhale. So you’re meditating on the flow of your breath, you’re meditating on your center, your root, obviously your flow, and now the final part, right, the final part is this, and this is a word that should not be translated because whenever it’s mistranslated it gives people all kinds of crazy metaphysical ideas, but this is the chi, or the key, if you, chi is Chinese, chi is Japanese, it’s that sense of laser-like coherence, but it’s simultaneously an awareness of, like it’s an intelligent, flowing, living coherence, it’s sort of the musicality of your own perspectival and participatory awareness of your body in movement. So I hope that’s helpful, and I’m just going to go off camera, and Jason’s going to adjust the camera. I’m going to get my mat and my pillow, and we will move into the seated practice. Okay, everyone, can you please get yourself into position? And such ones on Do Not Disturb, as always we will begin with some chanting, and then we’ll go into a silent sit, and then we’ll have time to answer some questions. We’ll begin when I say begin. Om… Om… Aum. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Begin your silence set. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Aum. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Vahe. Slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice, if you’re ever did a consciousness, cognition, character, and communitas, perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We have time for a couple questions. The first is from Orawad Yonis. Do we need to prepare anything from the wisdom of Hypatia for next Monday? Yes. Please read the first three chapters, that’s 70 pages, and consider taking up over the weekend maybe a couple of the initial practices, self-examination, et cetera. You’ll know what those are when you see them. And that way we can have a bit of momentum going when we have our Dhamma Day on Monday. So, manual post. Thank you for waiting and being patient, manual, and giving me feedback, so I can hopefully give you a better answer. I’ll read through the whole thing. I have the idea that in my youth I used to be a fairly visual thinker. I had a brain injury. I’m sorry to hear that, by the way. Pressure due to inflammation that I associate with the loss of my ability to access visual information. I have the ability to access visual memories thinking. The same is true for the auditory. I’m sorry to hear that. I have some sense of what it is to lose. The veneers has cost me my hearing in my left ear. So I have some sense of what that’s like. I think there’s value in cultivating these skills to reclaim some of what I’ve lost. I’ve been able to have limited access to after intense concentration. No doubt. So, the veins, plasticity, its capacity to rewire and make use of other areas. We’re going to talk about this a little bit more on Monday. It is very significant. Recently during meditation I’ve been developing my ability to perceive and influence really limited visual and also some auditory experience after intense concentration. So, this makes great sense. So, we know that meditators, what seems to happen, and we’ll talk a lot about this on Monday when we talk about savoring, there is a bottom-up aspect of taking information in from the world and then a top-down inhibition that screens off a lot of that and tries to find the familiar patterns. What meditation does is it removes the information that’s in the world and then it’s a bottom-up aspect of taking information in from the world. What meditation does is it relaxes that top-down influence and opens it up, makes it more flexible. So, more of the bottom-up influence comes up. And this is what I mean when I say you can use imagination, which is the top-down, to make this top-down more flexible in order to train perception, the more bottom-up. And so, meditation actually tends to create synesthesia in people. This is when you have a color experience, you see colors in sound or you taste shapes. And so, we know that meditation can, in fact, do that kind of rewiring because of the way it probably functions. I had an experience when I took my first dose of an SSRI. Perhaps there’s some depression associated with the chronic loss where I unleashed an uncontrollable flow of thoughts. So, with this context, my question is twofold. So, that’s a very excellent explication of the context, Manuel. I want to ask for methods of cultivation of the visual and auditory, and if there is a threat to engaging a not fully integrated part of the brain, this might grow out of control. Okay. So, first of all, this is not deliberate. This is just how it fell together. The thing I’m going to be teaching you on Monday as part of extended epicureanism, the savoring of simple experience, will really help get that better relationship between the bottom-up perception and the top-down pre-ending. Pre-ending is the scene of relations and patterns. It’s in comprehension, apprehension, pre-ending. It’s an idea ultimately from Whitehead. It means the way you’re sizing things up, mentally getting an optimal grip on them. So, savoring is about making that a much more flowing and participatory experience. That should help. Because you’re doing it outside of meditation, I’ll explain the context, there’s less of a chance of it sort of running away on its own. So, there’s going to be that. And then down the road, when we move into the theurgia of the neoplatonic part, of course, we’ll be trying to engage in active imagination and dream work, which also will help use imagination to better train perception, but in a very sort of disciplined context that will integrate with mindfulness so that there’ll be less of a chance of there being that sort of runaway rumination and spiraling that you’re concerned for. So, I think that should help you. Perhaps we could take another question. So, Mike Allison asks a question. Hi, John. I have done your in-person meditation class a few times through U of T. Oh, great, Mike. Good to see you again. Do you have a week to recommend I go to catch up past that point, when, instance, the chanting is new to me? So, I will find that out and get it posted in. I think it’s, I see it’s posted in the chat. I think it’s a lesson 11 where we started the moving practices. We finished Prajna. Let me quickly check, Mike, and I’ll post it in the description. I’ll get it posted in the description for this video, and that should tell you what lessons you can start from and work your way forward. And, hi, Ben. Ben is a vital presence in the Discord server community and in the Sangha. It’s always good to see you, Ben. You describe Prajna, I think you meant Prajna, as a non-duality practice. For some, non-duality means recognizing the self as illusory. For me, what you teach decenters but still preserves the self and focuses on how the self relates to others. I’m actually working on a course right now, Ben, and devoting a lot of cognitive scientific effort to this whole debate. There’s even a good anthology edited by my friend and colleague Evan Thompson called Self No Self. And part of it is that I think the presupposition behind this debate that we clearly understand what we mean when we make this distinction, I want to challenge that presupposition. I think that what Prajna does, because it’s very intense absorption, is you obviously lose the narrative egocentric sense of self. But if what we mean by self is the capacity to be here now, a sort of Heidegger sense of Dasein, with some kind of awareness, so an awareness of our here now-ness and the unity of our experience, the oneness, if the self is our capacity for an awareness of that, so that although my mug has the here now-ness and the togetherness, it doesn’t have an awareness of that, then I think that part of the self comes to the fore in things like non-duality practices of Prajna. So often, by the way, here’s just one, this is not a complete argument, one indication of what I mean by how people are slippery about this, is they’ll say there’s no self, and then what they do is they just shift functions that have been traditionally associated with the self to consciousness. And consciousness is aware of itself, and then that doesn’t really answer the problem, it just shifts it around. So I think there’s a lot more science and philosophy needed in order to bring clarity, conceptual and theoretical clarity, to this debate, and many people are engaged in it, and I’m engaging in it. And so I want to be careful how I answer your question. I’m trying to say that I think our narrative egocentric sense of self diminishes, but the functionality of an awareness of here now togetherness, what Heidegger calls our sort of Dasein, our being here, our being there, I think that comes to the fore. And even in traditions that talk about the self as illusory, like Zen, you’ll hear people talking about it, and then you find your true self. And so, like I said, I think this is all very slippery, and what we should do is we should do two different things and not confuse them together. In the realm of explaining, we should do a lot more cognitive science and philosophy, and in the realm of training, we should really zero in on the phenomenology that is actually functional for transformation for us. And then get those two to talk to each other as much as possible. I’m going to be working on that. Eventually, after I teach this course, I’m going to release a video series on the nature of the self. I know there’s a lot of video series coming, and they’re all unfolding, because I’m trying to be a good teacher for all of you. My job is to do a lot of the work, because you guys, you have your own lives, and you don’t have the time. I get that, and I’m in a sort of privileged position. But how I can respond to that gift that I’ve been given by others is to be a very good teacher, to learn as much as I can and share that learning as much as I can, as succinctly and as powerfully as I can for as many of you as possible. And so that’s what I’m endeavoring to do with the help of many other good people of good faith and good talent. We have one more, I think, Gabriel Rubenstein. Any tips for encouraging someone who could benefit from meditation but can’t motivate themselves to do it and is resistant to the idea? Don’t start with the seated practice. Get them involved with moving practices. You’ve seen some of the moving practices here, even the Tai Chi Chuan, like the brush knees. I’ll talk on Monday, I’m going to talk to you about the Epicurean Savoring, which you do while you’re walking. And then we’ll also talk about philosophical contemplative impendence ships, how you cultivate the phylea, the friendship that’s at Phylea Sophia, which is central to Epicureanism. What you can see now is how I’m going to treat the wisdom of Aikatia. I’m not going to just teach you what’s in the book. I’m going to supplement it and expand upon it. So there’s, back to the original question, get them involved in things where they’re moving, where they’re engaged, even practices out in the external world, way before you get them into the seated practices. Okay, everybody, thank you so much for joining. This is always so nourishing for me. I want to thank my techno friend, my techno mage and dear friend Amar, my beloved son Jason, the techno mage apprentice, and all the work he’s doing for us. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. You’ll find the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the Diologo series, Voices with Reveke. Very shortly we’re going to release another thing that combines lecture and dialogue. Great, Enriquez and myself are going to be releasing Untangling the World Nod of Consciousness, dealing with the heart problem, problems of mind and meaning. And you know that Dr. Socrates is coming, the God Beyond God is coming, the nature of the self is coming. There’s a lot that’s coming. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please join the Discord servers to chat with others, to do the moving practices with others, to do extra meditation, to find a home when we three can’t run the sangha. Also, I’m going to be coordinating with the Discord server because some of these practices in the wisdom of Vipatia need to be done in groups because the Western tradition emphasizes the patterns in your life, although there are seated practices we’ll do. And so we need to coordinate that. I hope to be talking to Mark and Brett over the weekend. Reminder, we’re doing this every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern time. Please follow me on Twitter for the fastest updates if you don’t have any sort of philosophical opposition to that. Please remember, continuity of practice is more important than quality, sorry, quantity of practice. You’re emphasizing quality in the continuity rather than just sheer quantity. Don’t hold yourself to a standard of perfection. Hold yourself to a standard of virtuous friendship because there is no enemy worse than your own mind and body. There’s no friend, no ally better. No, I can’t convey this enough. When you get that sense of companionship on the path, that alliance that your own mind and body gives you and how that’s intermeshed with your own mind and body, how that’s intermeshed, wedded to your inner sage, there’s no friendship greater than that. Be lamsome to yourselves and to each other. I’ll see you all on Monday for Dharma Day, and we’ll begin the wisdom of Hypatia. Please remember to read the first three chapters up to page 70. Take good care, everyone. Thank you.