https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TIXdtrSk5RQ
Welcome to Meditating with John Brevecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. There I study scientifically and academically mindfulness practices, mindfulness itself, related phenomena like insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, the cultivation of wisdom. I’ve also been practicing Vipassana meditation, metacomplishment and Tai Chi Chuan for 29 years and I’ve been teaching them professionally for close to 20 years. Welcome. This is a progressive course. This is not just a gathering together to sit together. Every Monday is a Dharma day. Every Monday I teach a lesson. Today is Dharma day. I’ll be teaching a lesson. Tuesday through Friday we meet, there’s some review sometimes, we sit. At the end of every day, Monday through Friday, there’s a Q&A. If you are joining us for the first time, you’re welcome to stay, but in order to catch up look in the description for links to previous lessons and sits. The description of this video. For those of you who’ve been asking more broader questions, questions about how does this fit into the overall practice or maybe some of the cognitive science of mindfulness and insight or mystical experience or what’s the relationship between Stoicism and Buddhism or Stoicism and Neoplatonism or Buddhism and Neoplatonism. There’s been a lot of questions on a lot of topics. For these Q&A, the Q&A is at the end of the sits and the lessons. We try to limit it right directly to the practice. For those broader questions and any questions you might have about my series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis or Voices with Raviki or any of my videos, we have a monthly Q&A and we will be having a monthly Q&A this Friday. So please look for that on my channel. There’ll be a video announcement for it and we will also send out on social media and you’ll be able to, we’ll be having a set up similar to this. You’ll be able to send in questions and I’ll answer them. You want to see what it looks like. There’s previous Q&A’s on my channel. So as I mentioned, today is a Dharma day. So today we want to learn a new lesson and we’re going to do a particular kind of exercise to really try and bring this lesson home. So let me start with a metaphor that you find in several traditions, especially meditative traditions. This is looking at the pond. So the idea is you come upon a pond and you’re looking at it. Initially, there’s wind disturbing the surface of the pond. This is like the way your mind is rustling, monkey mind. What you have to do first is learn how to sit and wait for the wind to subside a bit and for the pond to go more and more smooth. Because when that happens, when that happens, then you get insight, vipassana. You can see into the depths of the pond. So there’s two stages. The first stage is the calming and then the second is insight. Because books often frequently have those two paired in the title. I have a meditation manual called Calm and Insight. So up till now, more explicitly, more foreground, we’ve been concentrating on the first stage, calming the pond. Now, of course, it hasn’t gone calm, but we’ve been just staying present and letting the mind settle a bit. But in the background, I’ve also been training you with a lot of stuff for that second more important stage, which is the stage of looking into the pond, getting insight, which isn’t the same thing as having sort of a theoretical idea. So let me try to explain what this means more specifically and concretely. We’re going to talk about the, to this lesson and next lesson, or sort of part one and part two. These are the five factors of inquiring mindfulness, the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. I’ll first list them and then I’ll talk about what’s meant by inquiring. And then we’re going to talk about the first factor primarily today, because all of the other factors are actually in service of the first factor. What is that first factor? It’s vigilance. The second one is sensitivity. The third is acuity. The fourth is noticing. And the fifth is reminding. Vigilance, sensitivity, acuity, noticing and reminding. What is meant by inquiry? So this is what’s really important here. Inquiry, there’s two ways in which we engage in inquiry. One is largely curiosity inquiry and the other is wonder inquiry. What happens in curiosity inquiry is we have a question and we’re trying to sort of solve it. We have missing information, which looks like we have a hole. We’re trying to fill it in, a gap, as quickly and as effectively as we can. And that’s very, very important. I’m in no way dismissing this or denigrating it in any fashion. But there’s another kind of inquiry, which is really not questioning. It’s more like questing. The two are related, same route, but it’s slightly different. Going on a quest, because here the point is not to fill in a known gap. It’s instead to expose yourself to exploration, to open up, to call into question by going beyond the familiar, right? Everything that you have regarded is familiar. It is to learn in a deep fashion, to give up the pretense of expertise in our self-knowledge. Let me say that again, because I think that’s something that bears a little bit of repeating. It’s fundamentally a kind of humility. It’s learning to give up the pretended expertise we have in our self-knowledge, which paradoxically is one that we all fall prey to, especially if we’re engaging in spiritual practices. So this brings me to the core of the five factors of inquiring mindfulness, which is vigilance. Vigilance is about getting us into this place where we’re not trying to come up with a theory or a justification or an explanation. We’re not doing any of that inferential theorizing, justifying, explaining. It’s much more an exploratory observation. So think of the word vigilance. Something that you might have noticed when you’re reading some of the sutras in translation is something that gets skipped over, because there’ll be a word mindfulness and there’ll be a word watchfulness, and we often treat them as if they’re the same. But watchfulness is something more than mindfulness. Think of, it includes mindfulness, but it’s something more. Think of a person, like a guardsman, on a watchtower. And they’re exemplifying watchfulness. They’re not just sort of staying present. What they’re doing is they’re looking for what they haven’t yet seen. They’re trying to sensitize themselves to the unfamiliar. They’re opening their mind and awareness into the unknown. Or an air traffic controller who has to be vigilant. They’re not just sort of being present with, oh, there’s all the little blips. They’re trying to look for what they haven’t seen. They’re trying to notice what is new and what is different. Of course, I’ve been already implicitly helping you to train that by instructing you and finding your flow and finding your focus. And this is building on it, but this is now making it much more focal. Or finally, think of keeping a vigil. Keeping a vigil. And you’re keeping a vigil. Of course, you’re staying awake. You’re staying aware. Let’s say many people did a vigil over Easter for their Friday. They stay awake, right? And what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to open themselves up. They’re trying to look for what might come into the sacred space. So what we’re trying to do with vigilance, which is the core factor of the five factors of inquiring mindfulness, is we are trying to explore and get below the familiar face of our experience. That’s the attention and attitude, the attention and awareness part. The attitude part is where we’re trying to give up the pretense of expertise and our self-knowledge. Right? And the energetic part is there’s a movement, an exploration, a penetrating observation. So some interesting stuff from the cog-sci angle is it looks like it’s actually this exploratory, wondering, you know, observational inquiry that is conducive to many of the beneficial effects of mindfulness practices. The Buddha was very, very critical, very critical. He’s, you know, it’s important to pay attention to where the Buddha is critical. He’s very critical of people who pursue these practices and they’re seeking a kind of contentedness and self-satisfaction. He called them indolent and sometimes compared them to cabbages that just sort of sit there. So that’s pretty harsh. And I’m, of course, not the Buddha. I don’t have the authority to criticize anybody to that degree. But it’s nevertheless something to take note of. We need to make this focal for ourselves. We need to bring inquiring mindfulness right into our mindfulness practice. OK, so how do we do that? Well, there’s going to be two sets of practices I’m going to teach you. Today, I’m going to teach you meditative questioning, which I, that’s how it’s called in the tradition. I think renaming it would make it more accurate if we called it meditative question because it brings up that vigilance and that exploratory observation. I’m going to teach you that today and I’ll start to set up for something which is next week, which is meditating on your distractions, which is one of the most powerful ways to deal with distractions in meditation and also how to deal with hindrances. Hindrances are things that prevent from engaging in the practice. But today, what I’m going to do is I’m going to teach you a particular practice. And I would recommend doing this practice once a week. It’s not a practice you do regularly like meta and Vipassana, which you should be alternating. This is a practice you do once a week because what it does is it really gives you access. It activates, right, and really brings into awareness. It accentuates the factor of vigilance. And that’s the core of the five factors, vigilance, sensitivity, acuity, noticing, and reminding. So let’s work on vigilance today. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do meditative questioning, or as I like to say, meditative questioning. How does this work? Okay, so you all, as always, and you’ll see, you see now how the core four sets you up. They give you a basic, a foundation for mindfulness, but they’ve already got you in the training of vigilance in an important way for the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. So we find our core four, we find our center, we find our root, we find our flow, we find our focus, and we do some basic Vipassana. We’ll do that. And so we will sit together, and there’ll be silence for quite a while. And then at some point, I’ll say, right, go into meditative questioning. How does this work? Well, what I want you to do is pick a question, and it has to have, and you know, you’re going to have to play around with this. There’s always serious play as we try to learn our way into this practice. Pick a question that has the following characteristics to you. It has a normal, familiar, automatic answer, but it can be re-understood to have a deep and profound meaning that is personally relevant to you. So these three, these factors, right, has a normal, familiar, automatic answer, but it can also be understood to have a profound, deep meaning that is relevant to you. One question that’s used a lot by people and works for a lot of people, right, always, you’re going to have to play, is who am I? Who am I? Okay. Who am I? And of course, we’re deeply interested in this question, and we have familiar answers. So you know, John, or this guy here, or this body, or this consciousness. So what happens when I ask that question, right, is I ask this question and I direct it deeply to myself from, and you’re trying to take that befriending yourself that you’ve been cultivating from the beginning. Who am I? And these automatic answers come up. Do not treat them with disdain. They are portals. They are doorways. They portend, portal portend, something beyond them. You use them like a lens that you see through or a doorway that affords you going further. So when the answer comes, I’m John. Thank you. But who am I? And the idea is, where did that answer come from? Something is behind that. And I question deeper and I try to see. And I ask the question again, not trying to force an answer or expect an answer. What answer comes up when I try to get behind and through my first answer? Yes, thank you. But who am I? You could almost say, but who am I really? All right. Another answer comes up. Maybe you picture yourself, an image. Yes, thank you. But who am I? Who am I really? Another answer comes up. You feel your body. Oh, this is me. Maybe. I’m not saying this will necessarily be the sequence. I’m just giving you some common examples. Oh, yes. Thank you. But who am I really? Oh, this inner mind space. Ah, yes. But who am I really? My memories. Ah, thank you. Every time. Thank you. Yes, but who am I really? The point is not to get an answer. A special temptation that will happen along here is you will get, you might get some really insightful answers. Note them the same way. Thank you. Maybe even thank you very much. But who am I really? Pass through the doorway. Go on the quest. The point is to get to a place that seems unfamiliar. And I think people often describe it as a kind of emptiness and expectation, awaiting. It’s sometimes it has an unpleasant tinge to it. But who am I? You’re defamiliarizing. We have a lot of evidence that the capacity to defamiliarize and de-automatize your cognition is tremendously beneficial for 40 Insight. So if you’re defamiliarizing and de-automatizing the machinery of your self-identity, that opens you up to existential insight as opposed to just intellectual insight. Okay. So that’s a very, that’s an example of a question you might want to ask. You might want to, but what is really going on now in your experience? Right. That one’s a little bit more abstract. The one that I found that is the most successful for people is who am I? Because it really brings together, right, the automatic with the get to something profound, personally relevant, exploration, the cultivation of humility, the giving up of the pretense of expertise and self-knowledge. Okay. So we will go into that. Now, if you get distracted while you’re doing the meditative questioning, remember, if the majority, the majority and center stage of your awareness is monkey-minding, not if it’s monkey minds off in the periphery because the monkey, he or she is always out there, but if this happens, you feel that shift, then you do everything as normal. Label the distraction with an ing word, return to Vipassana first, right? Return to Vipassana, follow your breath for a while, and then pick up the questioning. And we will take this right through the end. The point is not to get an answer. The point is to become, get the taste, the felt sense of what this exploratory observation is, what this questing into the depths, what’s trying to see into the pond, what affording existential insight actually is like, to have a direct, perspectival and participatory knowledge of it. Okay. All right. So, please remember to turn your phone off, do not disturb. Please remember, and I emphasize this every time, coming out of your practice is part of, coming out of your sit, I should say, is part of your practice. Try to get your comfortable posture, as comfortable as possible. We will begin when I say begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin meditative questing. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. Begin. 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 and cognition. Can you keep that sense, that attitude of humility, that exploratory, wondering, awareness, that sense, that energetic sense of moving out and into the depths, getting beneath the familiar face of your experience, your sense of identity. This is often called prajna, starting to forge prajna, the mind sword of wisdom. From a cog-side point of view, when you’re using this question, who am I, you’re triggering the default mode network, especially when you’re closing your eyes. But because you’re bringing this questing element into it, you’re also triggering the task-focused networks and the salience network, and you try to get them all to integrate in a dynamic state. It’s very powerful. I recommend this week, normally, like I said, you do this practice once a week, just to really refresh and reacquaint yourself with vigilance. However, for this week, until next Monday, could you try and practice this at least two more times, at least two more times. Perhaps, if you could, in addition to your vipassana and vipassana practice, you could also try to do this in a more relaxed way, to your vipassana and your metta practices. So, some questions. This is from an I am an impulse buyer. Interesting handle. Any tips for posture when meditation, when I sit like you, my knees are rather sore. So, yeah, you might want to try. If you have a zafu, put it more horizontally. Sit cross-legged like this. First, as if you were to sit on it, and then, if you can, sit a little forward and roll onto your knees like that. Like this. It’s a good idea, generally, for this one, if you put your, you can do this, put your hands here, but it’s generally a better idea to put them out here, because they help to keep your legs from rolling up, and they give you a little bit more triangular stability. Try that posture for a bit and see if that works for you better. That’s it, right? Of course, the people who can go into the lotus while they’re doing this have optimal, because what the lotus does is it gives you this, and the opening, and the stability, and like the kneeling sit, it keeps your pelvis lateralized. But, of course, for many of us, the lotus is a very hard thing to do. If you’re doing yoga, and that’s available to you, that’s a very good posture. I used to do this kind of questioning. I’ve experienced it, bringing up intense anxiety, dissociation, and fear. Any tips around this? Yes. So, typically, if this is, so there’s two things, and I don’t know you, so please take that into consideration. I don’t know you personally. Two things can be happening here. We start to get below that familiar chatter. We start to experience something we’re going to see later, that we start to disidentify from our inner speaking mind. We come to realize that our mind is much more than what we fill it up with, you know, pictures and propositions, right? And there’s much more to us than the automatic habituated images and names and feelings that we call us. And that unfamiliarity can be very challenging. And so, if that’s happening to you, what I recommend is that you maybe slow down the rate at which you’re doing this, maybe only do this once a week, or perhaps even better, wait until I explain next week how to deal with powerful distractions like attempts at emotions and feelings. And then, if you do the vigilance practice, the meditative questioning, you’ll have tools for dealing with this deep distraction. That’s the more general case. You might have a specific case, I don’t know you, I’m not presuming, where you might be dealing with some undisclosed issues around sort of trauma or psychological or emotional abuse. And that is a case where the person’s self is, has a kind of wounding in it that might be being exposed. I don’t know you, I don’t know if this is the case. However, if that is becoming a regular sort of thing like you’re suggesting, you might want to consider talking to somebody about that aspect in a therapeutic context. I’m not telling you you need therapy, it’s highly probable that you’re just falling onto the normal case, the statistically normal case of that, you know, we’re just dealing with kind of a deep unfamiliarity, which is challenging for us. But I would be irresponsible if I didn’t hold out to you the fact that you might be touching something that needs more significant intervention. This is from The Mad Truth. When I say thank you after receiving an answer, I instinctively ask, but who are you really? Should the question be phrased, who am I really? Should, who are you phrasing be avoided? No, that’s good too. Right? You can even go between them. The you is actually good because it’s sort of directing you deeper. Yeah, I find that sometimes that comes up spontaneously for me and I just sort of spontaneously move between the two of them. Diane Nicholson. I found such a place, is it okay to stay there and wallow? I’m trying to think of what the place is that Diane’s asking me, that place of sort of contentedness. Well, I mean, I have no authority over your life. So if you’re, I’m not here to give you permission. What I can say to you is if you want the deep transformation and if you want the affordance of the deeper adaptivity and if you want to afford, therefore, overcoming more self-deception and affording more deeper connectedness to yourself, to other people, into the world, then you shouldn’t wallow. But perhaps right now in your life, getting there is a respite. The concern I have for this, and I’ve been saying this throughout all of the practice, is that we do not want to frame this practice as a vacation. It is an education. To reduce literally means to draw out, educate, draw out, to draw out from ourselves and to draw out from the world in a corresponding and co-determining fashion. Sam Selflow. Are there books or texts that you can suggest to understand the practice of meta better? Well, that’s a difficult question. There are books. The issue that I have with the books that you’re going to get, the books in translation, the ones that are popular in North America, because of North American culture, I would say I’ve given you an argument for why I have this particular interpretation. So take that in hand, remember that. I would say that many of the most famous books teaching meta tend to be satisfied with the emotional interpretation and don’t pursue it into the existential interpretation. So those books can be helpful if, I would argue, if you understand them as incomplete. I would recommend reading something from Buddhist tradition with that kind of critical eye from Sharon Salzberg, The Art of Living Kindness or Heart is Wide as a World, but then I would compliment it with the Christian practice of the Centering Prayer. What’s her name? She wrote a book called The Wisdom Way of Knowing. Her name escapes me right now. The Centering Prayer. So this is a Christian practice. The Christian practice involves that sort of bringing in the Christ-like sense of compassion, but this is designed to more deeply come into a deeper existential place. Maybe if you read those two together, you can triangulate between them into a deeper answer. Karima, if I get a sarcastic or unfriendly answer, my ego is talking. Maybe your ego. We carry around hungry ghosts. We’ll talk about this next week in the sense that you internalize a lot of people. You carry around a lot of people in you and they have a semi-autonomous existence. They often inhabit your monkey mind. They’re talking to you. And so it could be a wide variety of things. Simply thinking it’s the ego misses the fact that it might be other voices. It might be. It might be the ego trying to protect and stabilize itself as you’re doing this unfamiliar, this de-automatization. It very well might be. But you have to keep yourself open to the fact that it’s the ego. It’s the ego. It’s the ego. It’s the ego. It’s the ego. It’s the ego. But you have to keep yourself open that it might be other voices that are present in you. But you have to keep yourself open that it might be other voices that are present in you. And I don’t say that in any kind of metaphysical, you know, sense. I mean this in a completely psychological, existential sense. Zeynep says, how do you avoid getting into an existential dread to horror? Well, that goes back to the earlier question. So, this is called progressive desensitization. But actually what we’re really trying to get into here is the way in which there is a very diverse universal scenario. So this is called progressive desensitization. So when we have to deal with anomalous things, especially if we’re getting a very powerful thing, is it can be very big. So like I said, part of what I wanna say is next week, I’ll teach you how to respond to sort of deep emotional responses. But when you’re doing this practice, if you’re getting that sort of existential dread, that sort of do it a little tiny bit and then stop and just go back to basic capacity. And then next time, again, try a little bit more, erode it. Progressively, right, this sounds like a paradox, it sounds like a zen coma, but you wanna familiarize yourself with defamiliarization. You want it so you realize, it’s an amazing thing when you come to realize that this, my suchness, my flowing minded bodiness does not disappear when that nattering, narcissistic, you know, nanny ego in my head, that narrow, that ongoing, how am I, how do I look, what am I doing, oh, that when that disappears and it’s hunger, it’s attendant hunger, this, this, just beyond that doesn’t disappear. And here’s something that you can realize that in your life. Get deeply into the flow state in the world, athletic activity or playing jazz or doing a video game. And all of that goes away. We know that from flow, but that doesn’t mean that this goes away. They aren’t the same. So thank you very much for joining. As always, I wanna thank the techno mage and dear friend Amar and my beloved son Jason. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. Tomorrow will be a sit. Again, there’s links in this video description for previous lessons and sits if you’re trying to catch up and you’re welcome to do so. If you go to my channel, you’ll find lots of videos on mindfulness, wisdom, insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, dealing with existential issues, confronting the meeting crisis, responding to our current situation. Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to situate this practice through a lot of other practices until we have a comprehensive permeation through our entire life. Please invite others who might benefit by sharing this video. I’m trying to help people. Please help me to help as many people as we possibly can together. We’re doing this every weekday morning, 9.30 EST. Remember that this Friday, there is a general question and answer you might have to any of my work in general. Please look for the notifications for that and there’ll be postings on social media as well. If you don’t have postings from me, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Facebook and you can find me on Twitter. Thank you very much, everyone. Remember continuity of practice, more important than quantity. Please keep up your practice. It will serve you well. If you befriend it, it will deeply befriend you. I’ll see you tomorrow. Take care, everyone.