https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0SnhiF4fYTY
Good morning. Welcome to Meditating with John Brevecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto where I academically and scientifically study phenomena like mindfulness and related phenomena like insight, flow, mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, and the cultivation of wisdom. Thank you for joining us. I’m also a practitioner of Vipassana meditation, Tai Chi, Chuan, and Qigong for over 29 years. And I’ve been teaching Vipassana, Metta, and Tai Chi for close to 20 years. So I bring both a scientific understanding and an existential personal understanding to the teaching of this practice. And I tend to integrate from the Buddhist traditions, Vipassana and Metta, the Taoist traditions, Tai Chi, Qigong, and from what we’re learning about all of these phenomena from cognitive science and cognitive psychology. This is a course. You’re welcome to stay, but it is a course. Every Monday is Dharma Day. Today’s Monday is a Dharma Day. And it builds on previous lessons that I’ve taught the previous Mondays. In the description of this video, you’ll find links to previous lesson sessions. So you can catch up on what you’ve missed so that when I’m explaining things, you’ll understand more deeply what’s going on. And you can get more deeply into the training that the practice is offering. Tuesdays through Fridays, we sit. So I’ll often review the lesson I taught on Monday. And then we sit together. Every day at the end, there is a question and answer period. Please limit your questions to questions about the practices I’m teaching in this course. If you have more general questions, every third Friday at 3 p.m. EST, we live stream a live Q&A in which I answer more general broad questions you might have. So today I want to talk about a very important principle. And it’s the principle of integrity. When I say that word, what tends to happen is, and not completely inappropriately, but nevertheless a little bit off what I want to focus on. People hear sort of a moral term, a virtue. And of course, integrity is a virtue. And it means something like being a person who is not a person. It’s something like being true to the principles that you hold are most true. That has tended in our culture to be conflated and confused with authenticity. And I think sometimes when people are saying authenticity, they really mean integrity. Because integrity is the virtue that protects you from hypocrisy. Because what you’re doing is you’re being true to the principles that you hold to be most true. But sometimes authenticity also means this other thing, this sort of romantic notion of being true to your true self. And it’s unclear what that is. And there’s so I want to put that aside. I have some criticisms of that notion. Many people do these days within sort of philosophical circles. So let’s put that aside. We’re not talking about authenticity. We’re not completely separate from the virtue of integrity. But what I want to do is I want to go from thinking of it just as this virtue to what we need, which are principles of practice, training principles. Or as it’s put in the tradition that I was taught, we want training precepts. Precepts that tell us how to properly train. So what is it we’re training? And what is this notion of integrity? Well, let’s turn it into instead of the virtue of integrity, let’s talk about the process of integration. And we’ve been we’ve been practicing this from the beginning. At the end of every set, I say, slowly come out of your set or your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you’ve cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. And that your sitting is not a vacation, it’s an education for transforming your life. So that process of integrating what you’re doing in the practice with the patterns of your life, that’s the integrity that we’re focusing in on here. We want the patterns in our life and the patterns in our practice to befriend each other. We don’t want to be trying to cultivate one set of practice, one set of patterns and principles. And then our practice and then live different principles and patterns in our lives, because then they will actually be undermining and in conflict with each other. So the first part of this is of the integration is to extend this notion of befriending oneself. So that what we’re cultivating in our practice and what we’re practicing in our life are in a reciprocal opening, a reciprocal reinforcing, a reciprocal affording relationship. They’re befriending each other. That’s the first part of what we’re trying to do, what is map by integration. And then if we zero in on that, a more specific meaning is what we’re trying to do with the training precepts is we’re trying to afford moments of application and transfer. We’re building a bridge. And so the point of the precepts is to call out, it’s to call out like, oh, oh, oh, moments where we notice, where we notice, that’s a mindfulness that we can apply our practice to our life. It’s like, oh, here’s where I could step back and look at. Here’s where I could come into centeredness and rootedness. Here is where I could try and get into a more flowing relationship with all the dynamics of what’s happening in this situation. So what we’re trying to do is we’re not only trying to get harmony, and that’s important, that resonance, but we’re also trying to expand it. We’re trying to increase the opportunities for where we will apply what we’ve trained in our practice to our life. We will also thereby do the reverse. We will more and more flag moments of our life as things that we’ve been doing. That we get that get taken into our practice that remind us of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. So I want to present the five training precepts, Buddhist love, numbered list, the five training precepts. And I want to, I want to really refocus them and even reformulate their wording to give emphasis to this not being just sort of a vague moral set of commands for getting this sort of not too clear notion of moral integrity. Instead, we want very clear and concrete way of trying to afford the harmony and trying to afford opportunity. So I’ll present the traditional version of the precept, and then how I recommend we formulate, how we reformulate it, and really zero in on the practice of integration. So the first one is do not kill. So the problem with that is it’s command, and then we tend to hear it in terms of obedience to the command, and there’s an external rule, and it leaves out a lot of what I was trying to put an emphasis on. So instead of acquiescing or obeying a command, instead, I propose you reformulate it as a promise or a vow that you’re making to yourself, because this is the way of creating that befriending. And then also the problem with these, the traditional version of these precepts is they’re all negatively formulated. They only limit what you shouldn’t do. They don’t actually make you seek opportunity. So I would propose the following. Instead of do not kill, this. I promise not to harm, but to mindfully enhance and enrich life. So what we can note is we can try and throughout our day, because what are we doing in the practice? Well, we’re trying to heal. And we’re trying to transform, and we’re trying to grow. But if we’re out in our life and we’re harming, and we’re limiting, and we’re restricting growth, and we’re restricting transformation, then these things are dissonant with each other. Also, moments where you could actually help somebody, and of course, you have to do this mindfully, right, where you could act in such a way as to enhance and enrich life are moments of opportunity for the application of what you’ve been doing in your mindfulness practice. I’m not going to tell you the particularities of how to do this, or even the particular ethical framework you might want to bring to bear on that. That is not my, I do not have that place or that role for you. I’m trying to get you to see how you could extend and integrate what you’re cultivating in your practice into your life. So I promise not to harm, but to mindfully enhance and enrich life. So the next one is, you know, do not steal. And again, you know, you know, you know, you may be able to go through an entire day, especially now without stealing, even minor stealing, very, very minor stealing. So again, is that going to be that effective? I think we’ve all been socialized to a significant degree where, at a moral level, where that’s largely something we’re probably satisfying. But let’s turn it around. Let’s turn, let’s think about how our relationship to possessions and material objects is something in which co-identification and automatic and reactive behavior is very prevalent. So our relationship to our possessions and to material things is actually a fertile field in which we can plant the seeds of mindfulness. So how about instead of don’t steal, right? As I promise not to use or perhaps relate, I like relate better, some people like use better. I promise not to relate to material things mindlessly, but mindfully and wisely. So notice the way in which objects are projections of your identity. Notice ways in which material things perhaps are giving you a sense of stability or solidity, and you might want to reflect on that. You might want to say, you know, why does this, why do I want this object near me all the time? Why do I want to control that? And so what you’re seeing here, of course, I hope, is that one of the things we can do in the mindfulness is we can periodically, and remember, neither one of these modes is good or bad, but we can periodically shift from a having mode towards material things into a being mode towards material things. Okay, not only material things. I’m in academia, and so doing this with ideas, especially other people’s ideas, is very important. So for example, I try to be very stringent about giving people credit for their ideas and how they’ve influenced on me, and try to make it very clear how much other people, anything that I produce has always been produced in concert with other people. So those are the first two. We’ll put a description of all of these also in the notes for this video. So we’ve got, I promise not to harm, but to mindfully enhance and enrich life. I promise not to use or relate to material things mindlessly, but mindfully and wisely. The next is what I’m doing, which is speech, language. So in traditional form, it’s don’t lie. And that’s a challenge to not try to lie through an entire day, even minor lying. And so that in and of itself, I think, is valuable. But I think there’s something missing from it. Again, there’s a golden opportunity because there is nothing that is so deeply interwoven with our sense of our humanity and our personhood as language. I mean, the greatest philosophers of the previous century, like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, independently zeroed in on this idea that it’s our ability to use language that most distinguishes us as persons from the other organisms on this planet. And then, of course, how we particularly use language is how we spin and weave the autobiography of our own individual person. So, and this has also something that I’ve seen from the philosophical tradition, especially coming out of Socrates and Plato. One of the most fundamental ways in which we can care for ourselves, care for each other, and care for our humanity is being careful in our speech, taking care of it, caring about it. And that doesn’t mean caring that people agree with us. It means paying attention to what’s at work in our speech. That sloppy and careless speech, of course, becomes sloppy and careless thought, which becomes sloppy and careless action, which then becomes a sloppy and careless life. Now, I’m being a little over dramatic here because I’m not showing inevitability, but I’m showing a very distinct possibility of progression. So, in some traditions, you’re not allowed to even engage in idle talk, right? And I’m not so sure that that might be too strict. I understand that there’s important social function of pleasantries, where we’re just trying to say we’re all in this together, or we’re sharing a society, and we’re just signaling that. But I think it’s fair to say that our culture has been especially awash in the abuse of speech and language, and this is a very pertinent and powerful place where we could all bring mindfulness to bear. So, I promise not to speak mindlessly, but mindfully, wisely. So, another thing that’s precious coin is, of course, our sexuality. The fourth precept is don’t commit adultery. It’s not clear that that’s even a relevant thing for us because our notions of relationship and marriage and sex are not bound together the way they were in the traditional culture, in which it’s hard to spoke. So, instead, again, think about how deeply your sexuality weds the highest levels of your personhood, who and what you are, to the deepest levels of your embodiment, of your biology. Nietzsche famously said, in his book, The Greatest Showman, he says, There’s a whole tradition, both within Hinduism and Buddhism, it’s an area where they overlap called tantra, in which the whole point is to realize the tremendous integrative and also, therefore, disintegrative power of sexuality. Are you practicing your sexuality in a way that is not just a form of sexual intercourse but also, therefore, disintegrative power of sexuality? Are you practicing your sexuality in a way that enhances integration, that is a place where you’re bringing in mindfulness, where you’re bringing in how this deeply taps into areas of your brain that you otherwise do not have access to? Or are you practicing your sexuality in a way that disintegrates you, disintegrates your connections to others, disintegrates your connection to the world? So, a lot of what pornography does, of course, is it severs connection, it severs learning because it goes for instant gratification and it goes for the salience of the stimulus as opposed to the meaning of the relation. And so, again, I’m not a prude, I’m not telling you what to do. The point of this precept, and like I said, there’s this whole tradition, is this is a place in which we should be bringing the principles of our practice to bear. It also means if we befriend our sexuality with mindfulness, our sexual issues, and all of us have unresolved issues, thank you, Freud, right, can be addressed potentially within a meditative setting. Now, of course, I’m not saying that that’s a panacea, therapy might be needed, other things might be needed, but when we bring up this bridge, this is how we can start addressing these issues. So, I promise not to practice sex mindlessly, but mindfully. And think again about, can you come into the being mode and make love as opposed to just having sex? The last one is tricky for our culture, and it’s also tricky in sort of cross-cultural ways. So, the original form of this is don’t use intoxicants, don’t use intoxicants. So, some Buddhists take this very seriously, they won’t even take like an aspirin, right. And there’s a problem with that because our culture is kind of unclear about what we think of intoxication itself. We, of course, think we have moral criticisms of immoral acts or illegal acts committed because of intoxication, but we’re unsure as a culture of intoxication itself. Is it a good thing, is it a bad thing? Now, for those of you who are interested, I have videos, both within the series and on my channel, about altered states of consciousness. And so, I’m not going to try and give my argument about what I think is a good way of framing them here, but I do want to say what does the training precept lead us to? Well, the training precept leads us to this idea. You can see in organisms that have high intelligence that they seek out altered states of consciousness. And in fact, you have an altered state of consciousness every night you’re dreaming. And dreaming seems to be correlated with how complex the cognitive machinery of an organism is, also how much social, the complexity of its social networking. So, dreaming, altered states of consciousness, and this seems to be the case with the altered states of consciousness, and this seems to be the case for many altered states of consciousness, seem to be conducive to a way in which higher cognition expands and enriches itself. That’s why you’ll see, you know, caledonian crows will tumble down a rooftop to make themselves dizzy because they just want to be dizzy, or elephants will eat fermenting food to get stoned, right, or goats will eat, you know, the coffee beans and get kind of, right. So, intelligent organisms pursue altered states of consciousness. And this is natural to us, and there’s increasing evidence that they’re highly functional. Now, precisely because they’re highly functional, they shouldn’t be abused. All of these things that we’re talking about are really important, right, places, loci, in which your humanity is in question. And how you act there steers it very, very deeply. And so, the idea here is how are you pursuing altered states of consciousness? Because you will. You will. You’ll either do it default, automatically, or you’ll do it more deliberately, but that deliberately might still be in a very risky or ultimately maladaptive way. So, think about this. What you’re doing right here in this practice is pursuing an altered state of consciousness. So, we need to understand this. So, the idea here is, again, this is precious coin. You’re seeking of altered states of consciousness. So, when you’re seeking an altered state of consciousness, here’s the thing to ask yourself. What’s the principle in mindfulness? I’m seeking an altered state of consciousness because I’m not seeking to escape. I’m seeking to educate. I’m seeking to transform myself so that I can be more present, more insightful, and act more wisely, more centered and rooted. When you’re pursuing your altered state of consciousness, are you pursuing escape, or are you pursuing education and transformation? So, I promise not to abuse altered states of consciousness, but cultivate them mindfully, no pun intended, and wisely. Let’s review. Okay. I promise not to harm, but to mindfully enhance and enrich life. I promise to relate to material objects, not mindlessly, but mindfully. I promise not to use speech mindlessly, but mindfully. I promise not to practice my sexuality mindlessly, but mindfully. I promise not to abuse altered states of consciousness, but seek out those which educate and transform me. Or, I promise to practice altered states of consciousness mindfully. How do we do the precepts? Two ways. And now we’ll start incorporating this into all of our six. So, when I say, today at the end of our set, slowly come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate what you’ve cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition, there will be a gap. I will not immediately start answering questions because in that time, I will be able to answer them. So, in that time, you’re in a state of deep mindfulness, you’re in a deep state of presence and receptivity. What you want to do there in order to come out of the practice, in order to create that bridging, is to recite to yourself mindfully the precepts. Maybe just one of them. Maybe all five of them. Okay. So, just to give you the reminders, first one’s about your material possessions. Sorry. Material possessions. Third one’s about speech. Fourth one is sexuality. And fifth one is altered states of consciousness. So, that’s what you do. And then throughout the day, you take it up to try and practice the precepts as a way of harmonizing and bridging between your practice and your life and creating, affording opportunities where you can grow by applying the principles to your life. Okay. So, that’s a long lesson, but it’s an important lesson. So, let’s sit. We’re only going to sit for 12 minutes today because, again, we had a longer lesson. A reminder, I won’t immediately start addressing the questions when we come out of this practice because that’s an opportunity for you to mindfully make these promises to yourself. Deep befriending, the deep practice of integration, the deep cultivation of integrity. All right. So, make sure you put your phones on do not disturb. Get ready. Posture will begin when I say begin. Begin. Okay. Slowly begin to come out of your practice, trying as best you can to integrate with your cultivated in your practice, purity, consciousness, and cognition. Perhaps by reciting the five precepts, promises to yourself right now. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Slowly open your eyes. See if that sense of the commitment to practicing integration can carry into the rest of your day as much as possible. We’re having a bit of a technical problem that Jason and Amar are doing their best to solve for us right now. So, I’m going to try and answer some questions. Got one here. Unfortunately, I don’t know who it’s from. Because of the technical glitch, I’ll just answer the question. I apologize. I can’t address you directly. After a few years of mindfulness meditation, I began to use it as a thought-free zone. To kickstart, can I ask myself, do you have something to tell me? Do you have more inquiry ideas? I’m trying to define the intent of this question. After a few years of mindfulness meditation, I began to use it as a thought-free zone. To kickstart, can I ask myself, do you have something to tell me? Do you have more inquiry ideas? Oh, I see. You want to bring in the inquiring mindfulness into how your practice has gotten you into sort of just being thought-free. So, with the practice I’ll teach on next Monday. The Prajna practice should help. Sorry. First, the deepening of the past should help that. And then the following, the Prajna practice should help address that question. So, you need to much more… You need to first, much more often, think about how you are throughout your day trying to pick up on the befriending. And as you build these bridges, your life can also inform. Try to pick up on throughout the day how you’re moving around your world and learning and noticing even though you’re not running any sort of at least sentences or words or images through your mind. You might… You’re just sort of noticing and seeing. And then when you do the meditative questing and you ask, what more can I see? What more can I learn? Of course, that might just trigger imagery. That might just trigger thoughts. But it might be because of your practice you just get that… You get that sort of very pregnant emptiness. And then what you want to do is you want to bring the five factors of inquiring mindfulness into that pregnant emptiness. Your mind is… Even though it’s empty of thought, it’s not empty of being. It’s not empty of processing. It’s unfolding. There’s still a temperature to it, a texture, a tempo. And so you want to get in more into more of the felt aspects and notice them the way you notice your room and explore them as if you were looking for a lost object, bringing those kinds of skills to bear upon it. Oh, so the last question, that was actually Karima’s question. So I hope that was a helpful answer for you, Karima. So here’s another question. When I’m meditating, it feels like there’s an imaginary layer of sensations on the front side of my body and I have a hard time distinguishing it from physical sensations. What should I do? Imaginary layers on the front side of my body. So don’t worry about distinguishing it right now. Unless it’s causing you some sort of emotional distress. Because what’s actually happening is… Because what’s actually happening is… We now have sort of some pretty good cognitive science about this. That imagination and perception aren’t two separate things like we used to think. That imagination is actually an important part of perception. That’s why we’ll often use imagination here to train perception. And so what’s happening is the imaginative part of your processing, of your sensory motor awareness, your interceptive awareness as well. Is coming into prominence at the same time as the more perceptible part. And those two are now talking to each other in a probably a novel fashion. So like I said, if it isn’t causing you sort of deep distress, don’t worry about distinguishing them. Just get them together as ways in which you are enhancing your interceptive awareness of your body. Now if you start to… Those other sensations start to spin you off and displace you into thinking and imagining other situations and places, then that’s monkey mind and then just return to your breath. So it looks like Amarn and Jason have solved the technical problem. I can give people their… Tell people their names. That previous question was from Shakie Sokomar, I believe. Yes. Next is from Sandy Alexander. I don’t know if you need to do a marathon of all the sits, but I would recommend going to the lessons you’ve missed, have at least two or three sits for each one of those lessons throughout this week and then towards the end of this week, perhaps start bringing in what I taught today. Kijil Olaf Agdal, would you consider serotonin enhancing medication as toxic and escape? If you are taking it for therapeutic reasons, I would not consider it toxic and escape, because if you’re taking it for therapeutic reasons, for example, if you’re using it for treating depression under somebody’s professional care, then you shouldn’t remove that. That’s not a toxic. That’s not a toxin, because again, think about the principles. If I remove something and then it puts me into a state where I can’t learn and all I’m doing is enduring the suffering of the loss of my agency or something like that, then it’s not a toxin. If you’re just monkeying around with things because you want to make some unpleasant feelings go away or you want to dull your awareness or skew it in particular ways, then perhaps you should consider the fact that you’re using it in a toxic manner. The question to ask yourself is, is your use actually affording you the capacity to learn and to transform and become more mindful and wiser, or is your use actually preventing that? That’s the way in which you decide it. You decide these issues functionally. There isn’t an absolute answer to a particular substance itself. For example, there’s indigenous cultures that within their spiritual practices make important use of psychedelics. I think that’s very much a sapiential practice, a practice for cultivating wisdom and enhancing mindfulness, enhancing insight, improving their ability to connect to each other. That’s very different than people who take a psychedelic and then go to a rave. Very, very different. André Ferrer, I’m having problems with saying the promises precisely. Is it okay to make them into short two-word pinpoints and meditate on those? Yes, yes. Please, please never treat any sort of things I give you as in any way, well, literally sacrosanct or anything like that. If you can, the intent to integration is all that matters. If you have a formulation of this that cultivates, help you cultivate integration, then by all means use that. Josh Seltzer, good to see you again. Josh, how can we practice integrating meta? Does it make sense to recite the mantra, when those feelings arise during my day, identifying, co-identifying there and then remembering it while it’s meditating? Yes, while it’s meditating, yes. So try and throughout the day pick up on, try to remember, sati the being mode, try to remember the process of co-identification, try to remember what’s going on there. And as Josh says, you can practice the meta then, try to practice the reciprocal opening, remembering the being mode then and there. You can also take a particularly challenging or difficult situation in which you came to that awareness into a meditative practice when you’re doing your meta within your sitting. Exactly. That’s exactly a great way of doing the integration, Josh. Matthew McCready, when we fail to live up to the promises we made to ourselves when we integrate, how do we find the balance of forgiving ourselves and say, discipline? Okay, this is a very important question. I hope you’re all still here. That’s what I wanted to say. Matthew’s question is excellent. When you violate a promise, you’re not… So the tradition says, treat a failure with what’s called intelligent regret rather than with guilt. So guilt in a psychological sense, not in the moral sense of taking responsibility. We shouldn’t conflate those together. We mix them up and we get confused. I’m not talking about the moral sense of guilt, of taking responsibility. I’m talking about the psychological sense, where we try to modify our behavior by punishing ourselves. Right? Now, that, of course, that’s how we got the basics of our adulthood going. We sort of punished ourselves and we still experience guilt. But the idea here is you want to befriend yourself. So if you were correcting a good friend, you wouldn’t be punitive. You wouldn’t punish them. What would you do? Well, you’d practice, try to intelligent regret with them. You try to explain and understand and see and realize what was going on so that the person regrets it. So they realize that there was a missed opportunity. The point is not to punish yourself. The point is to, ultimately, to encourage yourself to take the practice up again and to try again next time. So it’s very much like intelligent regret is very much like when you’ve caught yourself in distraction and you don’t beat yourself up. You don’t just let go. Right? You center your attitude. You center your attitude on how to come back into the practice. Okay, everyone. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you to my dear friend and techno major, Mar, and my beloved Jason, especially today. We had a glitch and they were working behind the scenes tirelessly to make it happen. So please like this stream. I’ve been told by Mar that if people like these videos, that raises the visibility in the YouTube algorithm. So it’s much more likely that other people will come across these videos and take up this practice, which would be, I hope, very helpful to them. And of course, in consonant with that, please share with other people this meditation practice, these videos, especially these troubled times. I’m trying to do this to help people and you can help me help as many people as possible. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. And as I mentioned today, you’ll find all kinds of videos on the topics we are discussing in this class. And some of them that I only mentioned and I can’t do at length. I called it things of consciousness, right? Or things about wisdom, et cetera. So you can find a lot there to enrich both this practice and enrich and enhance the way in which you can apply to your life more comprehensively and transformatively. Please remember we are doing this every weekday mornings, 930 EST. Mondays are Dharma days, Tuesday through Friday are six days. There are question and answer periods at the end. And every third Friday we do a more general question and answer live stream. So everyone, please try to keep up with your practice. Continuity is more important than quantity. And as the Buddha said, there is no enemy worse than your own mind, but there is no ally greater than your own mind. Take care, everyone. Thank you. See you tomorrow. Bye.