https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oszQ5QL11W8
Good morning. Welcome to Meditating with John Vervecki. I’m a cognitive scientist and a cognitive psychologist 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, the cultivation of wisdom, the aspiration towards enlightenment. In addition to that, I’ve been practicing Vipassana meditation, metacomplation, Tai Chi Chuan, Qi Kung, related practices like that for over 29 years and teaching Vipassana, Metta and Tai Chi Chuan for almost 20 years. Welcome. This is a progressive course. Every Monday, today is a Monday, is a Dharma day. I teach principles and practices that build on previous Dharma days and previous, therefore, previous principles and practices. If you’re joining for the first time, you’re welcome to stay. But please go to the links in this video in the description, and you’ll find links to previous lessons and previous sets. And if you go to the lessons, you can do them maybe sort of once a day over the next week or two and catch up. So as I mentioned, today is a Dharma day. But at the end, there will be Q&A. Please keep your Q&A questions directed towards this practice. If you have more general questions, I’ll remind you that every third Friday of the month, 3 p.m. EST on YouTube, I’ll live stream a Q&A for more general and broader questions. So the thing I’d like to talk to you today is we’ve been doing this thing where we, you know, initially we were learning Vipassana and we were getting, you know, sort of remember the metaphor of the pond. We’re getting to get the pond to be still, the stilling of the surface. And then we brought in inquiring mindfulness, going deeper. Now we want to talk about the concept of the Vipassana. So that’s the idea here is, we want to take the kind of, you know, the kind of, the Vipassana, the deepening Vipassana, and we want to take that deepening Vipassana and inquiring mindfulness, going deeper. Now we want to take that quite deep, these practices, the deepening Vipassana. the kind of insight that Vipassana affords, but we want to take it into the level of Metta. And this is, and what we’re doing today is actually preparation for the practice we’re going to teach you next week, which is the Prajna practice. But we want to take that mindfulness, that Vipassana very, very deep. We want it like breaking frame in a really, really deep and profound way. And remember what we want. We want eventually to be able to integrate the past, not the level of Metta. We want, you know, that insight, not just to be a cognitive or intellectual insight, but one going, an existential insight, one going into the depths of that process of identification, a process by which we’re assuming and assigning identities. We also want to bring a space into that. We want to open it up. So until now, we’ve sort of getting deeper, but we want to really open up a space in which we’re not only free from automatic and unconscious and reactive ways in which we’re framing that process of identity, formation and operation. We also want to be free to, we want to be free to grow, develop, change, transform, freedom from, which is, right, which we’ve already been really deepening. And now we’re going to deepen that more, but also start to integrate it with freedom too. What does that mean? Well, think about how I’ve mentioned, especially if you’ve been meditating on your distractions, especially the distraction of thinking. There can come a moment where the distraction goes away. There is no sentences, no inner speech, no inner pictures. There’s just a space. And what’s happening in that space is you are disidentifying, you’re disidentifying with that inner speaking voice. And think about how much we identify with that inner voice in our head, that inner speaking voice. And of course, that has afforded us lots of things. We’ve talked about how you need to do that when you’re coaching, when you’re directing. Like everything else, this has a tremendous function. But like every function, it can be overused and abused and malfunction. And what happens is if we are too tightly and automatically and mindlessly identified with our speaking voice, that puts a lot of constraints on the process of identity formation and operation. Remember, we’re talking not just about the identities you’re assuming for yourself, because they are correlated and co-determined by the identities you’re assigning to everything else. So to the degree to which you are over-identified with your speaking mind is the degree to which your identity and the way in which the world can disclose itself to you are locked down. And of course, we’re trying to open that up in Metta. Now we’re deepening the pastness so we can take it more deeply into a deeper integration with Metta itself. So how do we do this? This sounds all very abstract. One thing is you’re already doing it, which is whenever you’re meditating on a distraction and it falls silent and there is for a moment no speech, no scenery, try to, as I said, try to create a felt memory for that. What does that feel like? What does that feel like? And I know you’ll say, but I have to talk to myself. And try not to count the initial self-coaching as part of what you’re paying attention to. Eventually, you’ll just be able to directly note, oh, you won’t have to say to yourself, just like you don’t have to say to yourself, you know, I need to turn on the tap when you’re washing your hands. You just notice that you need to turn on the tap. You’ll get to the point where you just notice without having to speak to yourself, oh, this is what it’s like when my mind is empty of inner speech and inner scenery. So that’s one thing I’ve already mentioned to you. And now you want to make that, you know, something that you really try to remember to do on a regular basis with dealing with your distractions. But now we’re also going to learn a new focus or vipassana that is designed to do that disidentification that breaks up the automaticity, the unconscious reactive nature of the process of co-identification, and also frees up a space for a new way of being, a new way of seeing, a new way of realizing. Okay. Okay. So this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to, of course, find the core four, and then you’re going to do what I’ll now, from now on be calling basic vipassana. Now, I don’t mean vipassana without the five factors of inquiring mindful. I mean the vipassana that I’ve taught you up to now. You’re going to follow your breath. When there’s a distraction, you know that you apply the five factors. If you get the silence, try to notice that especially, and then you return, as I’ve taught you, to your breath. Okay. So it’s going to be a while. We find the core four. We do basic vipassana, following the breath, right? Noting the distractions of the Nyingi, we’re applying inquiring mindfulness. You’ll see why you need to keep inquiring mindfulness quite engaged. Okay. So you do this for a while, and I’ll try, I’ll sort of try and flag when you should switch, just to give you a basic idea. Once you’ve been doing that for a while, you’re going to do something, and initially it sounds counterintuitive, but please stick with me. Okay. So now you’re sort of in the zone of meditating. It’s great. And now stop putting in so much effort. Don’t, right? Let distractions come up, and don’t label them. Don’t apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. Oh, heresy. Just hang on. Just hang on. Okay. So it comes up, right? And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an interesting practice, and I’ll give you a metaphor, and it’s based on a metaphor that we already used. Think about a train of thought. The idea is a train of thought, right? One thing is pulling on the other, and they’re all, right, all moving together because they’re linked. Like it’s a causal effect train, right? So imagine now a literal train, and if you’re standing very close to it, it fills up your vision, and it seems solid to you. Right? But if you can step back and look at a deeper version of this, right, you can actually notice the space between the cars. And then you can do that thing with your attention where instead of foregrounding the cars, you foreground the space between the cars, and you start to see beyond the empty space. You see beyond the train to the empty space that’s on the other side of it. So what we do is we’re sitting, we do the basic Vipassana for a while, and then we just let, right, the distractions, the thoughts come up. But here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to count our thoughts. We’re going to count our thoughts. One, two, three, four, five. The number is meaningless. The point about counting your thoughts is it does that thing where you step back, and by counting, you step back and you start to look for the spaces between your thoughts, and they’ll be small. But you’ve had some familiarity of that already from working with distractions and acquiring mindfulness. So you’re going to start to look at the spaces and acquiring mindfulness. You look up the spaces and then try more and more to notice the spaces. Typically what happens is they start to get bigger and the train of thoughts starts to slow down. And then see if you can do the following. See if you can then do Vipassana where the focus isn’t on your breath, the focus is on that empty space between your thoughts. And then the distractions are out here again. That’s the empty space between your thoughts. And then what do you do? You apply the five factors of acquiring mindfulness to that empty space. You meditate into it. You meditatively quest into it. In the tradition this is described as you’re like a cat sitting outside of a mouse hole waiting for a mouse. What does that mean? So I meditate into that space, and what I’m trying to see when I’m in that space is I’m trying to get an inkling, I’m trying to get a sense of sort of a movement, a bubbling, an energy that right as if a thought is going to form. And see if you can pull back, disidentify with that bubbling. It’s over there so that it doesn’t actually germinate into a thought. It bubbles here, it’s bubbling. And so you’re meditating into that space and you’re always sort of sensing these protracted movements. Sensing these proto thoughts, these first seeds, there’s so many metaphors, for thinking. And you try to stay disidentified from them and you try to look at them just as shifting patterns, if you allow me this metaphor, of energy. And then that’s what you’re meditating on. And what tends to happen is you get that empty space between your thoughts opens up very, very broadly and you keep meditating into it, the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. Now you say to me, but how do I like if I was counting my thoughts, what do I do with the distractions? It’s the same rule. If you can get to the place where the space between your thoughts is now, you know, center stage and holding the mic, then that becomes your the past in the focus. You stop counting your thoughts and you focus on the space. You and you say, well, I might still have distractions, but if the distractions are out here, that doesn’t matter. Just like when you’re following your breath, you zero in on the space. Now you say, but what if I get fully distracted? Right. If you get fully distracted from the space, if you give in to the thought in that sense, then what you do is you step back, notice the thought, label it with an ing word, apply the five factors, see if the distraction falls silent, and then try to note that. Then what you do, as you come back to basic Vipassana, follow your breath for a bit, destabilize, then let, let your mind just be open, thoughts come up, count your thoughts until you realize the space between your thoughts, and then meditate into that space so that you come to a place where you feel an expansiveness of mind that is not identified with speaking or making scenes. So a couple of things. This is, this is a very, you know, this is a challenging practice. Remember, we always have to keep the demands ahead of our growing skills, and that’s, so be patient with yourself. For some people, this, this falling silent of their inner speaker, inner, inner painter, or whatever it is that makes the scenery can be, it can be, oh, challenging, precisely because they are very identified with this inner speaking mind. And so if what comes up is something, being uncomfortable is normal, and just keep meditating. Maybe, you know, anxiety or something, if it’s, if it takes you away, or if it’s just in the background percolating uncomfortableness, just stay with it. I promise you that with time, it will go to being, it will change its valence from something negative to something positive for you, but it takes time. However, if when you get that disidentification, and you’re into that silent mind, if you’re experiencing something that feels like it might mount to terror, stop. Go back, do basic hypersensitivity for a while. Leave this practice for a few weeks. Try it again gently, like always, gentle, probative erosion until we can gradually make our way into this place. Now, just to give you a bit of foreshadowing, what happens is, right, initially, you’ll get the space between your thoughts, and it’s free of thought, and it’s free of scenery, but it’s bubbling still. There’s all this sense of sort of energy, and it’s going to, a thought might form here, and a thought might form there. And that’ll be the case whenever you start this practice, and it’ll probably be all that you’ll get in this practice for a very long time. But what can happen down the road is not only does it go silent, it drops still. Okay, don’t try to silence your mind or make it still. Remember, we put that project away a long time ago. But what can happen is, is you meditate into the space, you get the silence, and then the stillness. Okay, I’m sorry, I’m just having my nears attack. Just be with me for a second. Sorry about that. Okay, I’m back. So, like, you can follow silent, and then still. And then what you’ll see is that’s going to be one pool that we’re going to need to have cultivated when we practice and learn prajna next week. Prajna is dynamic wisdom. It’s active, self-liberating intelligence. Okay, everyone. So, I’ll remind you again of everything we’re going to do, and I’ll try to make an indication of where to sort of shift gears. So, find your core four, basic vipassana, noting and labeling the distractions with an ing word, five factors of inquiring mindfulness, trying to be especially sensitive and aware if the distraction goes away and there’s that silence. What does that taste like? What does that feel like? And you bring your attention back to the breath as I’ve taught you. And then I’ll, at some point, after we’ve done that for a bit, I’ll say, okay, now open. Just open your mind. You’re going to reduce that effort you’re putting in to track your breath. Just opening your mind, thoughts come up. Start counting them. One, and don’t worry. Was that one thought or two thought? Precision doesn’t matter here. One, two, three, four. And try to notice what the counting it does is try to make apparent to you the space between your thoughts. Try to notice it more and more. See if you can foreground the space between your thoughts until that becomes focal and the thoughts are now out here and then you meditate into that silent space, the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. If you’re distracted, okay, you’re distracted, ing noting, five factors of inquiring mindfulness, note if it falls silent, return and do basic vipassana again and then after you’re back in the zone, open the mind, allow the thoughts to come up, count the thoughts, etc. Okay? So there we go. So please set your phone to do not disturb. Please get yourself in a comfortable position and we will begin when I say begin. Begin. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. of opening your mind and counting your thoughts. 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, perhaps by reciting yourself the five promises. I recommend alternating. I’ll just presume you’re doing one set a day, but you can adjust this if you’re doing two sets a day. Do Vipassana one day or per set, and then the next day do Metta. Vipassana, Metta, Vipassana, Metta. Whenever you’re doing Vipassana now, have most of your meditation be basic Vipassana, but towards the end, especially when it’s most challenging and it’s sort of easy for the distractions to come up, try actually doing the deepening Vipassana exercise that I’ve taught you. And eventually over time, it’ll shift so that following the breath will just be preparation and following the mind will be actually the focus of your practice most of the time. So alternate between them. Once a week, I recommend instead of doing a Vipassana or a Metta, you’ll always find your core four and do a preliminary basic Vipassana, but doing the meditative questing just to strengthen inquiring mind from the strengthening vigilance. Next week, I’m going to teach you Prajna practice, and then what you’ll do is also try to practice Prajna once or twice a week as well. Now some questions. One is from Victoria, a former student of mine. It’s good to see you again, Victoria. I notice the emptiness right before it happens, usually because of some ING labeling or after it’s gone. Is this because I’m nervous about losing it that I’m not able to look in without losing it? Yes, but especially if it’s a thought, that very act of just stepping back is already a beginning of disidentification with thinking. We’re trying to look like when you’re trying to step back and look at it rather than getting caught up in it, that can cause it to disappear. Now, the emptiness itself, if that’s what you’re talking about, that’s disappearing. Yeah. So, there’s, I’m trying to be very, very careful there because I don’t want to give people sort of too much expectation because then that’ll play into it. Don’t try and hold on to that emptiness. I know that sounds strange. If you’re trying to keep it in existence, that’s the language I’m looking for. If you’re trying to keep it into existence, that will actually mean you’ll go back off into thought and stuff like that because you’ll get that hard. You’re actually doing the opposite of what you want because that hard focus in trying to keep it into existence is the opposite of that, right, of the soft vigilance that we want at the core of inquiring mindfulness. So, instead of trying to keep it into existence, try and look and then it might be, oh, then it just goes away, right? And then I’m back to the basics. And that’s, like I said, that will take quite a bit of time, quite a bit of time before that starts to stabilize. You have to do this practice quite a bit. So, your question was a little ambiguous. I hope I answered both sides of it or both interpretations. Shabriyani, what’s the benefit of meditating on distractions? As far as I understand, either the distraction goes away, in which case you should try not to be happy about it, you go away, in which case you start again, or you’re enduring and have to start again, none of which sounds particularly beneficial. It is very beneficial. If the distraction goes away, then you get that moment of disidentification that I was talking about today, which is very important. If you go away, you can realize how powerful these distractions are, and you’ll start to, if you get an ability to meditate into them to quite, as inquiring mindfulness progresses, the things that pull you away, the distractions, the meta distractions, the distractions that pull you even away from your distractions reveal some very deep habitual patterns of mind. This is how you can become aware of them and how you can learn them so that they’re no longer operating unconsciously and reactively in you. If you’re merely enduring, yes, then that is something that should just be, that is, I agree with you. That, if it comes to just endurance, that’s fruitless, and you should let it go, that’s what the practice says, and then return back to following your breath. These are Carlucci. Sometimes if I hold my breath, my thoughts also pause, and there’s that space. Why does that happen, and should I not do that? You shouldn’t hold your breath. So holding your breath is an alerting response, okay, and so alerting response will often make your mind go empty so that you can give those resources to whatever threat or really important opportunity is suddenly in front of you. That’s why you can even freeze in fear, because what it’s trying to do is clear everything away so that everything can be given to what’s at hand. So that’s why it does that. I would recommend not holding your breath if you can, because you’re sort of, I understand. It’s kind of nice because you get that pause. Holding your breath maybe very, very slightly to get that is okay, but trying to make it an extensive and repeated practice, then you’re going to limit the space to only when you’re holding your breath. And so while it initially gives you a gift, it’s got a hook in it that then keeps you sort of attached to that state of empty breath, which is not good for trying to bring this kind of depth of awareness in when we’re doing prajna, because in prajna, you’re going to be trying to get this depth while following the flow of your breath. That doesn’t make much sense right now, but I’m just mentioning that because it’s relevant to answering the question that was asked. Micah Shrek, back pain during the practice despite trying different positions. Did I try to observe and put my attention to the pain because the pain is really distracting me from fully present? Yes, you can. I hope that you’re trying not only different positions, but also meditating against the wall perhaps or in a chair to take some of the pressure off. If you’re still getting pain, then and some people it becomes part of their practice because they experience chronic pain, chronic pain. And so doing what you suggest, treating it as a strong distraction that you can apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness to. Yes, that’s what you do. Understanding that the goal here is not to make the pain go away. The goal here is to stop unconsciously, automatically, and reactively relating to the pain. André Ferrier, hello, André, good to see you again. When you asked us to try open our minds, I was still in reading stage. To be fair, in the mind of the middle, but still. Am I lacking something or doing something wrong? Is it okay to be this slow? Yes. Don’t take my intervention to get you to shift. As any indication, how you’re shifting. There is no normative demand on you or standard. I was just using sort of an average from teaching this of where you can transition for people. As I said, there’s a wide variation in how long people take to find the core form. You always give that priority. Always give that priority. Leonard Ludwig, does noticing different sounds around you count as thoughts or just distractions? I tend to label these sounds. Yes, if you’re directing attention to it, it is a thought in that sense. Yes, yes, exactly. Kira Kroger, what if thoughts seem like white noise or buzzing bees? No space between the thoughts. What do I count? So if you’re just getting that buzzing and it’s happening all at once, there’s two things here. It’s sort of like just a shh noise. Then meditate on that with the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. See if there is, right, if there’s space within it. Rather than just count what you can. But if it’s like you say sort of a white noise hum, then you’re already, I would think, starting to transition towards what I’m talking about. The white noise isn’t necessarily something bad. It’s actually something that’s sort of a liminal state, a transitional state, to getting to the space between your thoughts. So see if you can meditate into it. Instead of trying to, I’m going to find the space behind it. Maybe meditate into it and see how it… I miss FFADM. I don’t know how to pronounce that. Do you have any prescriptions for how to assess the progress and efficiency of practice? Are there things we can do to reduce self-deception, how we are appropriately meditating and contemplating? So as I’ve mentioned, the standard you use for evaluating if you’re making progress is the practice of integration. Are you starting to notice yourself, like, are you starting to notice moments of insight, moments of stepping back and realizing how you’re framing, moments of stepping back and realizing the identities you’re assigning and assuming, moments of enhanced flexibility, moments where you feel like you’re really zeroing in on what’s relevant and important, maybe getting into the flow state more often. And especially not only if you notice those behavioral changes, but if other people start to notice those changes in you. That’s the indication that you’re starting to make progress in that. Also, do the reverse. When you are in your life and, like, you were really in the flow state or you found yourself sort of really insightful, what does that feel like? What does that feel like? What does that feel like? How does it taste in your mind and in your emotion and your body? And then try to remember that felt memory and try to see how much it is naturally occurring in your meditative practice. So you can get into a Cartesian well of doubt where maybe I’m self-deceiving, but maybe I’m self-deceived about my self-deception, and maybe I’m self-deceived about how I’m self-deceived about… And you can tumble down that, and there’s not even a God can get out of that. So the thing you need to do is to, like, you have to be very pragmatic about this. And Buddhism is a very pragmatic philosophy, right? If you’re starting to get more insight, catch yourself in an illusion, be able to zero in on what’s relevant, get more into the flow state in your life, and especially if other people are noticing that change, that’s one half. And if the other half is, you can, when you notice that, you start to get a felt sense of what it’s like to be in touch, then see how much you can find that in your practice and try to create that loop. That loop is how we tell how well we’re doing. I said I would look for some Tai Chi, online Tai Chi courses, and I was going to put the notes in on Friday. Unfortunately, I haven’t found something that I like. I haven’t given up that. I will continue to look for that. When I find something, I’ll put the notes in a video, and I’ll fly it in some way by announcing it as well. All right, everyone. Sorry again for that minor disruption with my Meniere’s attack. I hope it wasn’t too startling for you. I want to thank you for joining. I want to, as always, thank you, thank my dear friend and techno mage, Mar, and my beloved son, Jason, who are behind the scenes making all of this happen. Please like this stream if you can, because when you like it, you raise its visibility on the YouTube algorithm, and that helps me to extend this teaching to more people in a way that I think they’ll find helpful and beneficial. Please share this meditation course with as many people as you can who you think might benefit from it. Please subscribe to this channel so you’ll get notice of notification. You’ll also find lots of videos, both within the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series or the Voices with Reveki series, where a lot of these topics like mindfulness and insight and flow and mystical experience and self-transcendence are discussed at length, and also how to set this into a more comprehensive way of life and perhaps a new culture for us. This is very powerful and important at this time that we’re all facing worldwide. We’re doing this every weekday morning, as I mentioned, at 9.30 a.m. EST. Monday’s are Dharma Day. Today was the Dharma Day. It tended to be longer. Tuesday through Friday are just sit days. Every day has a Q&A at the end. So remember, continuity of practice is more important than quantity. There is no enemy worse than your own mind, but there is no ally, no friend greater than your own mind. Thank you, everyone, for your time and attention. I’ll see you all tomorrow.