Meditation in Daily Life

What is Awakening?

What is a tree if it cannot exist without, soil, rain, CO2, and sunlight? What is a self if it cannot live without the sun, air, food, water, shelter, and clothing?

One of the major steps needed to progress in meditation is to expand its scope from eyes closed on a mat, to eyes open and engaged in the world. As Pierre Janet explained, healthy individuals need to be able to concentrate and take action without being side tracked by symptoms. This is the main goal for daily life meditation, which is integration. Restlessness can creep in repeatedly, especially with people who have electronic devices, and are living in a city full of distractions. For most people, some form of addiction to preferences carries them away. Conversely, Rupert Spira warns of the need to always be in activity, when in some cases it’s better to be resting. “The reason you drift away with thoughts is because your current experience is considered insufficient. Blaise Pascal said ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” As Jordan Peterson pointed out, the short-term mind can only handle 6 or 7 things, like a phone number, and so it’s easy to be distracted with advertising and be carried away. When people are carried away by the city, workplaces, by family distractions, and addictions, that escape to sit quietly in a room alone might be called euphemistically: a meditation retreat.

Remaining as Awareness in the Presence of Thoughts – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/vqq6TSpauzo?si=AT4FDgNUCGsymfJV

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v3mc0jy-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-6.html

Many meditations are couched in religious goals towards the ultimate, and those concepts will eventually become distractions too. The conceptual brain can fill itself up with what it thinks a meditation experience should be like, which this episode is not entirely free from. The insight practice, like vipassana, turns into a sifting through of mind-interruptions. These come out of the dimensionless subconscious which includes your unique set of genetic impulses and traumas. In Buddhism, and in many other mystical wings of big tent religions, noticing the impermanence of these interruptions begins to help the mind step back from going into rabbit holes of rumination and identity. The danger of self-judgement and identity is that when the short-term brain is filled up with feelings and thoughts, priming the mind to be carried away, whatever imitation or identity present, demands to be acted on with urgency. In meditation, the reward of waiting is that these thoughts just arise and pass away, if you let them. With consistent concentration, a lot of the Object Relations found in the mind appear as seeds and portals into these streets and avenues of reverie or tension, but when met nascently with a response of waiting, they subside on their own, often leaving a wake of a brightened awareness, some relief, and possibly one of the many flow states, one of the Jhanas, for instance. The arising of a wave is more exhausting than the cessation of it, which points to waiting being less like a tense anticipation and more a relaxation of effort. Many who have practiced insight meditation find that this is a way of entering Jhanas more easily than with more effortful concentration, like they are frequencies that can be tuned into depending on how long a person is willing to relax and wait. Longer waits lead to farther away radio stations broadcasting core wounds, memories, and maybe even epigenetic thoughts connected with ancestors. In Buddhism, this is considered a purging of past karma. Whether this is the creative mind’s way of inventing situations that it wants to bring in or avoid, regardless, the relief behind each successful waiting heads closer to the deepest level: the dimensionless.

Mindfulness – Gone. [Anicca]: https://rumble.com/v1gr219-mindfulness-gone.-anicca.html

Object-Relations: Karl Abraham: https://rumble.com/v1gvq5b-object-relations-karl-abraham.html

The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html

Vivid Dreams on Silent Meditation Retreats and Past Lives – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/RazI8oELug4?si=lZH7TbtYvc2KVP_C

Releasing Karma Through Sustained Contact with the Absolute – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/wh9liDGaFT0?si=yn6koZ1RAdVGMBGU

Rob Burbea, in Seeing That Frees, simplifies the experience of the present with Subject, Object, and Time. The brain filters experience, processes, and then presents a completed present moment with abilities to imagine the future or remember the past. The experiences all come up with feelings and reactions towards the sense of separation between ourselves and consumables. Because all three elements appear as separate standalone objects outside of cause and effect, they can be weakened with investigation, meaning to recognize objects, where they came from, and their impermanence. Meditators can also practice by seeing the interdependence between oneself and the environment to point to this filtered experience in the mind that delineates discrete shapes and experiences, and collapse the distance because everything is touching. It’s a reminder that we are reacting and getting emotional about a mental reconstruction of the world that is only a partially perceived and partially understood outer-world. The outer-world for Buddhists, including in all distance scales, appears right here vibrating in the reconstruction, and comes out of an eternally ever-present unmeasurable, dimensionless, Now. The outer-world that I’m talking about is an acceptance of the concept that there are phenomenon that we cannot perceive in our mental filter, and that there is an outer world, so that there is an avoidance of solipsism. Solipsism is dangerous when it leads to nihilism towards other people and a lack of care towards witnessed events. In meditative awareness, consciousness is quantified more by the strength of sensations, and perceptual demarcations, which have a palpable reactivity and stress, and wall us in this recreation, they need to be registered all as sensations, or vibrations, in order to find a deeper rest. This allows the mind to rewire so it becomes more efficient with mental energy because reactivity is used more sparingly or only when necessary. Whether people call it “mindfulness” or “biofeedback,” the mind is being trained to use stress less often.

The thalamus normally takes in sensory data that is passed onto structures that understand the world in a state of calm, but if the amygdala, which interprets threats, is over active, as can happen after trauma, with consequences of PTSD and other paranoid distortions, a reengagement with the body is necessary to calm the fight or flight response by taking in more information from the vibrating senses that things are alright. In The Body Keeps Score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, he summarizes that “being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions and then take our time to respond allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain. This capacity is crucial for preserving our relationships with our fellow human beings. As long as our frontal lobes are working properly, we’re unlikely to lose our temper every time a waiter is late with our order or an insurance company agent puts us on hold. (Our watchtower also tells us that other people’s anger and threats are a function of their emotional state.) When that system breaks down, we become like conditioned animals: The moment we detect danger we automatically go into fight-or-flight mode…Knowing the difference between top down and bottom up regulation is central for understanding and treating traumatic stress. Top-down regulation involves strengthening the capacity of the watchtower to monitor your body’s sensations. Mindfulness meditation and yoga can help with this. Bottom-up regulation involves recalibrating the autonomic nervous system. We can access [this] through breath, movement, or touch. Breathing is one of the few body functions under both conscious and autonomic control.”

Seeing That Frees – Rob Burbea: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780992848903/

The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780670785933/

Inefficiency typically appears in the mind as a feeling of over-reacting, or over-efforting. Learning to economize effort involves sensing pain in the lack between the subject, the desired object, and the pressure of time. Popping out of either of these strands, by seeing the interdependence between subject-object-time, relaxes our automatic desire for utility and consumption, which always feels a little effortful. There are still concepts going on, but the smaller labels and recognitions of objects pop into ever larger labels that eventually morph into a spherical concept of a universe, which temporarily replaces the desire to emotionally feed with a sense of wonder. Beginner meditations get people used to dropping ruminations about the past or future, to narrow things back to the present moment, which provides a lot relief, but even that is a concession to what we are dealing with. In fact, the present moment is really just short-term memory. The conceptual mind likes to interrupt experience with labels and measurements, but measurements are only approximations with some degree of error.

One of the best ways into collapse experience is attempting to measure the passing of time in meditation to realize that units of time are ultimately unfindable, which repeatedly brings the meditator back to immediate experience, and that eventually conflates to the dimensionless, which cannot be explained by 4 dimensional conceptual descriptions found in language. Similar to Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Nāgārjuna, the time delineations between a beginning, middle, or end of any experience cannot be found. They are analog wave frequencies of cause and effect with no digital tick marks denoting time precision like in a pocket watch. In Mahayana Buddhism, this is called a “lack of inherent existence.” Things don’t exist independently as a finished product. Everything is touching and or a rearrangement of matter, and even matter is only a practical concept. The conceptual mind looks at final products for consumption or utility and usually ignores how things were made and how interdependent they are to everything else. “If this, or any moment really has inherent existence, it has to be one or many. If it is one, then either it is divisible into a beginning, middle, and end, or it is not. If it is divisible, then that one moment is not in fact one but three moments. The beginning must come before the middle and the end, and so it is really a different moment in time. But if the moment cannot be divided, it must be nonexistent, infinitely small. Without any differentiation between beginning and end, it would be impossible to arrange such singular moments in order of time, of happening. Therefore a moment that is truly one is not possible. We can’t now say then that the present moment is many, for ‘many’ is only possible as an accumulation of ‘ones’, and we have just found that a moment that is truly one cannot exist.”

The unfindability of an ultimate demarcation between things and time also accepts the mystery of change, which is deep down a biological, chemical, and physical one that is beyond human perception. Nāgārjuna said that “neither from itself, nor from another, not from both, nor without a cause does any thing arise anywhere at all.” Everything points to a dimensionless “unbinding” of experience, and stress, where the experiences, thinking, and measuring comes from. The present moment’s beginning cannot be found, let alone a middle or ending. Conceptualization is a driver of energy usage with effort as a source, and when the fear from the survival mind dissipates, especially if one is meditating in a safe environment, then a deeper rest can be found, and energy is more efficiently allocated. How this happens is when it dawns on the mind that certain types of thinking are futile and unskillful, and therefore an energy drain, then the unconscious can more naturally abandon those thoughts. Effort is still maintained when there is a practical need.

Certain senses of borders and separation are also dualistic, perceptual, and conceptual. Concepts are not ethereal because they are derived from a tension in the survival mind to protect the body and self-concept. This includes regular day-to-day feelings of forcefully controlling a body, ruminating on a self-concept, and missing out on the rest of an already arisen vibratory experience. A lot of muscles are tense continuously out of habit as a survival control over functions that actually work automatically. For a lot of people, relaxing muscles that are unnecessarily tense is a God-send. Maintaining multiple defenses is not necessary and relief is found when prioritizing defense of the body versus defending a conceptual identity. We have a lot of feelings about social identities, and we employ exhausting defenses and damage control efforts to maintain social access to economic rewards and to avoid social punishments. Because mistakes and blame cannot be avoided totally, since humans are not perfect, there’s an advantage in spending less energy instead to protect an imperfect body that has basic needs to be met. This opens up the all important adaptive learning mentality so sought after in psychology. It stops the freezing and allows one to get on with things. The body has needs and logically everyone must act on behalf of them in responsible ways. As relief develops with insight meditation practices, the results are more grounding than many extravagant altered states of concentration, sometimes attached to loaded terms like “Enlightenment.” It’s like a precious normality before conditioning that one had when one was a child, but with the still remaining adult skills and intellectual capacity. That universal applicability has allowed Buddhism to bridge cultural divides because no religion owns awareness or the operation of brain mechanisms.

Mindfulness: Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html

The Presocratics: Heraclitus: https://rumble.com/v1gst93-the-presocratics-heraclitus.html

The Presocratics: Parmenides: https://rumble.com/v1gsvkl-the-presocratics-parmenides.html

The Presocratics: Zeno of Elea: https://rumble.com/v1ydoqc-the-presocratics-zeno-of-elea.html

Thought is Never Now – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/o-t_odkc2pI?si=koBGc6Hdeey79X-0

The Intersection Between the Finite and Infinite – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/VSHc0t4Ae90?si=sAOd0SG5jJxSYOlx

Like many western Buddhists, they are versed in non-dual teachings from across several religions, and Rupert Spira comes to mind as someone who quotes from many sources. The universal difficulty of conceptual experience is that “cause implies time.” This is why a meditation practice that searches for concrete units of time can be a powerful one for reducing the stress of ruminating about the past and future. Also letting go of a sense of individuality provides a lot of relief for the long stressed-out survival reactions and sense of separation in each of us. Outside of meditation, it’s an experience also sought out by “psychonauts” who are interested in psychedelic drugs, like mushrooms and DMT. Regardless, these substances are temporary and are more often used to relieve social inhibition. For example, many in festivals attendees pursue drugs because of past rejections, abuse, and ridicule. Many also have body dysmorphic thoughts that make them feel ugly and undesirable, but in a sea of like minded people, a few drugs go a long way to bridge the gap with friendliness, and in some cases, with several indiscriminate sexual encounters with strangers.

Talking To People on Drugs at Shambhala Festival! – Jack Denmo: https://youtu.be/biL0NjN7S7s?si=dMigDvV_IXViYChe

Psychedelic Mystical Experience Tier List – Josie Kins: https://youtu.be/9jxMSYTTEPE?si=L1icOj9FoqNBzHqo

DMT Entity Ontological Spectrum – Kaleidoscope3eyes: https://youtu.be/dFoMwPcxYFU?si=6GUlnsavaHoglUKt

There are also those who want to expand their skills and move beyond rigid personality cages. Inhibitions, psychological castrations, and fears of rejection can lock people in a prison of socialization. Outside of drugs, a virtue in psychology is the ability to develop a learning mentality so that one can persist with trial and error when a nascent skill is at first too weak and embarrassing to demonstrate in front of others.

I Went to a Magic Mushroom Retreat (my FULL experience) – Laura Try: https://youtu.be/tYG692JVCmc?si=4z4TiCtc7fEuJdcN

Everything DMT Has Taught Me About Life – Vivec: https://youtu.be/xMrBQWmtDoA?si=mXskjZmE3qOX40DH

You Are The Dimensionless Now, Outside Time & Space ~ Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/5CbHswGLGIw?si=5m68g8sDWjiK4O-F

Time is Never Experienced: Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/FKW-C895Qro?si=ok1P26m0RUe9UBhl

Time is Never an Experience – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/ZnDq_a_x8yI?si=khXUoxStxsUWXyol

You are the dimensionless now – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/5CbHswGLGIw?si=eACL3be-3hANnX1G

Awareness never Flows through Time and Space – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/EV6C8gV_E5o?si=P0ILH9wPVxZgae4T

On the other hand, many others are instead seeking the comfort of one-ness so they can face death more easily, because many Buddhists like to call the dimensionless, the deathless, as something that doesn’t deteriorate over time. Like the impact of a near death experience, many turn to psychedelics to recreate those benefits without the danger, and hope to develop a more fearless attitude towards the world outside the hospital, or at least face the remainder of their days in palliative care more stoically, for example.

Psychedelic VS Near Death Experience | “Are They Similar?” | My Personal Story – The Inner Shift Institute: https://youtu.be/kemOnpHg6wo?si=Wz2vy3bo3uHnrVtz

Doctor Shares Research Of Connection Between Psychedelics And Near Death Experiences – Dr. Rachel Harris: https://youtu.be/zMCtMSFJsh8?si=l3Tky5NIkvvJJ1dV

Trip To The Afterlife – Psyched Substance: https://youtu.be/fKMhvcxWYG8?si=Bl7XIXIbInMV1yfK

Acid/Shrooms Hallucinations | “The Truth” – Psyched Substance: https://youtu.be/yDBSxWGu5Lk?si=_NkAojGigMRPyD74

7 Lessons From Taking DMT Everyday For 30 Days – Tristan Palmer: https://youtu.be/tyXdtAEnuE8?si=KSa3WkbmYZ9PbyB4

Because this amorphously described oneness cannot be conceptualized, the instructions vary in how to get to this ultimate relief. In the Theravada Mahasi tradition, Daniel Ingram is rigorous with noting, where it’s clear that when thoughts arise in the mind, absent of enough awareness, they tend to carry one away. “Noting should be as consistent and continuous as possible, perhaps one to five times per second (speed and an ability to keep noting no matter what arises are very important).” The standards are high, and progress happens when meditators are less and less lost in thoughts. “Skilled technical meditators may sit easily for hours dissecting their reality into fine and fast sensations and vibrations, perhaps even up to forty per second or more, with an extremely high level of precision and consistency.” The problem with instructions like this, without qualifications, there can be over-efforting in students that lasts as long as they are unaware of how effortless consciousness manifests. “…We can realize that reality is already showing itself, settle quietly into this moment, and be clear and precise about it. Note well: many people will totally miss these last paragraphs and get all into pushing with everything they have and will just keep plowing on that way like mad bulldozers or rabid oxen, but really this is about noticing that everything shows itself on its own naturally without any forcing on the part of anyone, so any effort finally must lead to that quiet, easy, natural understanding.” Since awareness is vibrating already, and very quickly, it’s easier to see how people can gradually increase their skill in staying with experience without over-efforting. You don’t need to search to let go of effort. “…If you can perceive the arising and passing of phenomena clearly and consistently, that is enough effort, so allow this to show itself naturally and surrender to it.”

Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781614292913/

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha(2nd Edition) An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (Second Edition Revised and Expanded) by Daniel M. Ingram: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911597100/ Free version: https://mctb.org/

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (1st Edition) by Daniel M. Ingram: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781904658405/

The Yogi Toolbox: What should I do to get Stream Entry? – The Hamilton Project: https://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/hi-friend-one-of-defining-and-very_12.html

In this maelstrom of personal and collective content pouring out of the mind, it’s easy to get lost in those beginning days. Many use the three characteristics as markers to be aware of how things are built up in the day-to-day mind. Because we are in sensation, including the sensations that thoughts bring up, multiple conceptual selves arise along with their feeling tones and preferences. These thoughts and feeling impulses of self arise one at a time like movie frames out of the dimensionless subconscious with a pre-prepared world of self, object, and time. Learning to notice some of the wasted energy is part of the practice, especially when investigating the dukkha characteristic, or the recognition of pain, tension or dissatisfaction. I would say they are instances of over-efforting. Desires always press down on the body with a small bit of tension that tries to motivate action towards satisfying objects. The hunting mind chews up energy in rumination over power, control and territoriality on automatic pilot. It can be more overt or more subtle. One of the cool things about the subconscious, is that when you put awareness on what arises, and it senses that the mind is hurting itself, it tends to find that disadvantageous, and ego-lessly releases the pressure when enough attention is paid. It’s that relaxing biofeedback loop described above. That pain can be subtle and be made up different conceptual images of borders between the body and awareness, as well as past and future concepts of the self. Seeing clearly the tension of these encasements with pure experience, can dissolve those borders. “A vastly superior form of inquiry and investigation is to carefully examine anything that seems to involve a sense of a split, of a this and a that, particularly at the rate of one to ten times per second or even faster if you can pull it off. Which sensations seem to be the watcher, and which sensations seem to be watched? Try to see the true nature of these sensations one by one as they occur.”

As subject, object and time fade, the ego-subject arises again and again, all on its own, to try and assert control once more against this fading of experience. All these metacognitions of control over the meditation must be included in the meditation. There are no thought formations that are primordially aware of other thoughts. Awareness permeates all experiences. “Start and perhaps remain with obvious sensations, such as physical sensations. They just show up and check out, don’t they? Tune in to this. Allow this quality of things arising and passing on their own to show itself. Notice that whatever is observed is not ‘me’ or ‘mine’. Notice this again and again and again at a rate of one to ten times per second as before…Allow vibrations to show themselves, and tune in to the sense that you don’t have to struggle for them to arise. Reality just continues to change on its own. That’s really it. Investigate this again and again until you get it. Notice that this applies to every sensation that you experience, including all the core things we think are really ‘me’, such as effort, the sensations that make up the process of attending itself, analysis, investigation, questioning, and the like. These are more profound instructions than they may initially appear.”

This leads to a form of determinism, but I would say that choice and determinism are not mutually exclusive. As one learns more and becomes an adult, there are more thoughts that allow for the weighing of options than when one was a child or when one is suffering a disability of one kind or another. It’s still astonishing to notice a conditioned personality being a part of the arising, and ultimately, as was quoted before, arising is meaningless in a dimensionless source with no beginning. This is a deeper rest than found in earlier meditative attainments, but the conceptual mind cannot wrap around this rest, as can be seen by many masters who attempt to apply language to it that assumes 4 dimensions. People still try to give it a name though. “Fruition is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no awareness, no background, no foreground, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. ‘Reality’ stops cold and then reappears…Thus, this is impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the rational mind and the universe. In ‘external time’ (if we were observing the meditator) this stage typically lasts only an instant. It is like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in the unfindable gap, exactly like what happens when someone edits out a frame or sequence of frames of a movie. It is not that you see a blank screen for a while where they edited the frames out, instead that part of the movie is just not there.” Here Daniel tries to explain the phenomenological non-experience, like a “French New Wave” jump cut, but there are also descriptions from Zen trainers like Stephen Snyder who observe students in nirvana. He is conscious and has to apply the time dimension to provide measurements for how displacing the jump cut was. “Cessation is the same as Nibbana in Theravada Buddhism, that is the pinnacle experience, and it is an experience. I want to be clear, it’s not just an understanding. It’s not an a-ha! It’s a felt sense experience. It’s a lights out experience, so a dreamless sleep, and we only know what’s happened after we awaken from cessation. It can last anywhere from a minute, to I think the longest I’ve known, is someone had a three-hour episode, which is a very long time. Typically 15 minutes to 30 minutes, 45 minutes, that’s pretty typical for a deep experience.”

Embracing Don’t Know Mind – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/CZZ2r_7-ueQ?si=aG98NSjX619DONdc

Cessation is a Pinnacle that Leads to Stream Entry – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/-aYkDFQGZdU?si=oJp0aSUVLVMjLKrS

Hot Fuzz Jumpcut Train clip – Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T43oYuz-Q

With descriptions like that, and also claims from people that they can stay in this restful non-state for long periods of conventional time, it’s truly hard to explain it other than that it is a deeper form of rest that competes with anything else on offer in spirituality. As resting continues to replace fear and restlessness before entering nirvana, the present moment can shrink towards the dimensionless until it happens on its own. For Thanissaro Bhikkhu, the more effortful jhanic attainments are important to indulge in, get used to, and then move on to the next more refined level. To experience the dimensionless unbinding, or the deathless as it’s he calls it, he moves beyond the original relief found in watching conceptualization and sensation arise and pass away. “You’re not just watching things arising and passing away. You’ve seen the deathless, something that doesn’t arise, doesn’t pass away. In fact, it’s that experience that there is a deathless element that can be touched at the mind: Once you’ve had that experience, you look back at everything else you’ve experienced up to that point, and you realize that this is not subject to origination or passing away—it has always been there, and it’s not going to change. It’s outside of time, while everything else is inside time and is subject to arising and passing away…You then begin to realize all the other things that come out of the mind: [experience-building], name-and-form, consciousness, your experience of the six sense media, the fact that you’re aware of the six senses comes from the fact that there’s something in the mind that flows out to the senses. That’s what allows you to have that experience of the senses to begin with. But when you can see the mind at a point where it’s not doing that, then the senses fall away, all six of them—what the Buddha refers to as ‘the all.’ And the deathless is beyond the all. Although the texts say you have to be very careful of the way you talk about it, still, even though it’s something that’s not to be described, it is to be experienced.” (A disclaimer here. Buddhism looks at thought as part of the six senses, and as I mentioned before, thoughts have emotional preferences connected to them which can be felt.) The prescription from Buddhists to actualize this spiritual rest is the Eight Fold Path. Preliminary practices are considered boring and to be skipped over, but drinking alcohol, taking drugs, engaging in harsh speech, violence, etc., keep adding more layers and sediment of stress memories to sift through in later meditation sessions, making the process near impossible to achieve, especially when you’re trying to be sensitive to subtle layers of effort that are hard to detect.

The Noble Eightfold Path: https://rumble.com/v1grjc1-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-concentration.html

In Front of Your Face Trailer | SGIFF 2021: https://youtu.be/UXEMnSo4dJM?si=M8ZddCCat4IhRydi

For example, intentionality requires some effort, and even as the mind gets more refined with ever smaller expenditures of effort, there’s still a little effort going on just being aware of any experience, including deep meditative experiences that still contain a subtle sense of subject-object-time. Sensing the effort of the attention span moving and intending towards sub-goals leads to seeing how seeds of dissatisfaction are arising in even small ways. When the mind sees the very intentionality it was using was helpful to a certain extent, there’s a point when the experience is very faded by deep meditation and now it can let go of the ultimate dead-end of intentionality. “So what’s the alternative between staying or moving [with intention]? This dilemma provides a possibility for there to be a moment where there’s no intention, no intentional input at all. Nothing is [conceptually or experientially built up]. Things can open up, and the Dhamma eye gets to see.” The measuring mind cannot measure to absolute perfection and give a final concept that explains the universe. “…One begins to open up to the realization that all conceptions and conceptual frameworks are, in a sense, empty, and they’re not finally true. They don’t reflect or summarize or articulate a final truth, an ultimate viewpoint on how a thing is, how the things are, etc.” Experience can also be freed of the striving of becoming somebody. “Ajahn Chah would say, ‘Don’t be a stream-enterer. Don’t be an arahant. Don’t be a once-returner. Don’t be anybody. If you’re thinking in those terms, you’re thinking of becoming someone or being someone, having achieved something and then being this or that.’ He said, ‘Let go of all that.'” There is a debate on how deep concentration has to be, to be sensitive enough to fabrication, which is the building up of stress and experience, and Thanissaro goes all the way to the eighth jhana, which is extremely rare to achieve or to be confirmed in any spiritually inclined population. “The Buddha recommends this view as conducive to developing dispassion for becoming. However, he warns that it can lead to the refined equanimity of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception (the 8th jhana), which can become an object of clinging. Only if that subtle clinging is detected can all clinging be abandoned.”

The Dhamma Eye – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/evening/2020/201107-the-dhamma-eye.html

Yes, Consciousness remains in the Absence of Perceptions – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/Hv1DERKa5os?si=tRxolaKnrhwslVHv

Francis Lucille: Internal Stillness Between Two Perception…: https://youtu.be/RWFps_WFJko?si=gTnrPq6XXT5Dwm9k

There are lots of warnings about equanimity, which is a good stage to be in, and for many people, that’s really what they are looking for, but there’s usually a lot of clinging in the form of the body and any pride related to entering and enjoying equanimity. In Mahayana traditions, they use the term preferences, and they don’t want to attach to them. So you relax effort, but not to the point of getting lost in thoughts, and you then monitor preferences, including how your body feels in its position, random itches and discomforts, that can be seen clearly and allowed to pass away naturally. If you’ve been practicing for awhile, by letting experiences arise and pass away, and you’ve gotten used to being peaceful on your own, there’s still lots of clinging in concepts of the body, tensions related to location, as well as attachment to perceptual sensation. By being able to tolerate minor discomforts, and to not exclude any movements of the attention span in the background, etc., it’s then possible to have more fading in the senses along with relaxation. The reality is that the path towards nirvana requires that the mind be dispassionate towards ALL experiences, including enjoyable experiences of equanimity, to get any further. Getting stuck here, or having too much fear, or a desire for the conceptual mind to find a trophy in the experience, will keep the mind where it is. The down-wave, or cessation of experiences has to appear more restful, in an authentic way for fading to continue. The intellectual mind will still grasp and create conceptual mental copies or facsimiles of what is ultimately non-conceptual. The key in Buddhism is clinging, and increasing sensitivity to all perceptions and experiences is required for subtle forms of clinging to relax even further. This is where you get the more advanced descriptions, like with Nāgārjuna. “One who sees the absence of ‘mine’ and the absence of I-making does not see.”

Any experience involves a distance between a subject, object, in time. Rob Burbea pointed back to the subtle recognition that all experiences having a form of clinging just to be conscious. “The fading of perception implies that the thing-ness of things is dependent on the perceiving mind’s clinging. We begin to realize that things do not have any existence as ‘this’ or ‘that’ independent of the mind.” Clinging to things, situations, including meditative attainments, which is just more desire and aversion, is to subtlety pull in what you want and to push away what you don’t want. A reduction of efforting to get from A to B, relaxes the sense of a personality doing the meditation, and relaxing preferences can soften the solidity of things. This is what opens “things” up for deeper rest, which ultimately lets go of turning Buddhism and meditation attainments into “things” to intellectualize and enjoy conceptually. The mind must find it more restful to allow any experience or perception to subside, which requires a lot of marinating in equanimity to become sensitive enough to clinging embedded in perception. In some ways you are developing a new preference. A preference for complete rest over partial rest. This rest is a difficult surrender, because you have to surrender survival reactions, which are commonsensical in a man vs. nature scenario, but get in the way of further letting go. Stephen noticed a pattern in students. “It can feel like ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen after this. I can feel the shutting off. I don’t know how the turning on works.’ That’s what keeps people hovering around the portal. You have to from within be completely clear. ‘Whatever happens. Whatever the result is. I’m [letting go].'” The trust gradually builds as people gain more and more relief, oneness, and love, but it has to be tasted, not intellectualized. “As we move closer towards cessation, the peacefulness and the stillness get quite profound. They effectively calm and let us let go of consciousness and awareness. You’ll notice thoughts will begin to slow and stop and then consciousness will begin to shut down, and then finally there’ll be pure awareness, which is non-conceptual awareness. It means if I’m talking about what water is, I can show you my glass and talk about its qualities or I can taste it, and that tells me everything about water. That’s making direct contact. We’re not using concepts to say ‘it’s clear like glass,’ or ‘it’s liquid like the ocean.’ We know because we are having the direct experience.”

Wisdom Wide and Deep – Shaila Catherine: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780861718528/

The Great Way Is Effortless with No Preferences – 1st Stanza from Trust in Awakening – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/TxNF6AKVmJI?si=K1MHUYYYoyAYmKVc

Surrender Desire and Aversion – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/Jhw7KoZHaKY?si=LAho6IH3lDVNXT8Y

Primary Resistance to Cessation – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/k-jJ-vfR7tE?si=zGZYxYquedvvcKtC

Accessing the Absolute – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/JrRypmjHmes?si=zBfwTFcNDNnk97gN

Other modalities, like Advaita Vedanta, also point to the desperate need to conceptualize, grab at an experience and hold it’s pleasure until it’s gone, which leads to a need to do it again and again when cravings return. As Rob Burbea asked, “where’s my cigar?!,” because we want the success other achieved for the same reasons we want any achievement. Eventually boredom of the same thing leads to venturing out for new challenges and explorations. This can be healthy in the sense that some activities are more blameless than others, but it’s easy to get stuck in ennui or fear when chasing for new flow experiences that are just out of reach for the time being. Enlightenment goes in the opposite direction. Francis Lucille reminds the student that there are consequences for adventure that can be more unpleasant than just sitting still. The balance has to be met for each individual. Autotelic people, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described, don’t fall into depression after a goal is achieved so easily. They like to quickly find new goals and direct their attention once again. Even if it’s effortful to direct concentration, the advantage of developing concentration is that once the goal is committed to mentally, the addictive mind follows and brings forth energy towards the new goal and one feels purposeful again, but this is only if one is patient enough to repeatedly keep attention directed towards the same goal. In the algorithmic world of social media, the habit is to have someone else fill in the short-term memory and carry you away to engage, especially if monetary exchanges are involved. But with purpose, one can hopefully find newly interesting objects worth the expenditure of energy to hold the mind at one spot.

How to gain Flow in 7 steps – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

“John Anderton, you can use a Guinness right about now.” – Minority Report: https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ?si=mofC_Bvs88SSf5Mb

Meditation In Daily Life

In meditative circles, the sublimation of libido, or craving, into chosen forms of tension and release, which is concentration, this now can follow a direct path instead, by skipping the initial tension embedded in goal seeking, and aiming directly towards release. The opposite of seeking with attention is relaxing attention. The conceptual mind has to relax completely, to go as far as possible towards that indescribable dimensionless. Terminology conflicts because many higher jhanas appear to be the “deathless” because of how restful and magnificent they are, but regardless of the terminology, the final rest has to be dimensionless with no subtle forms of subject, object, and time. There’s a difficulty in explaining how the dimensionless behaves, because of the practical demands of daily life for skill development. The descriptions tend towards more efficiency with energy, while at the same time this dimensionless permeates all conventional experience. Many also describe a sense of love that arises when the survival mind can take a break.

Some of the best English translators influenced by Advaita Vedanta, like Jean Klein, Francis Lucille, and Rupert Spira try to distance enlightenment from a peak experience or an ultimate intellectual content. “[The dimensionless] knows nothing but is everything. [The dimensionless] has no knowledge. It knows nothing of the world. It knows nothing of creation. It knows nothing of a universe. It knows nothing because in order to know something we must stand apart from that thing and [the dimensionless] cannot stand apart from itself because there is nowhere other than itself where it could stand…To know a thing by being that thing…It’s only possible to know what is not. It is only possible to be what is…The only way to know anything as it is, is to be that thing, and if we are that thing, that thing ceases to be a thing, ceases to be a person, stands revealed as the infinite that is the experience of love…When you’re trying to understand something, you’re mind is trying to appropriate consciousness’s knowledge of itself. You are understanding your true nature when you have the three experiences of peace, beauty and love you describe. Your mind, in order to satisfy itself, is trying to create a symbol in itself that represents awareness’s knowledge of itself. The mind is creating a false symbol to try to represent something that doesn’t take place in the mind. Everything that appears in the mind is an object in something that is not objective.”

Guided Meditation: You Cannot Have Your Cake and Eat It – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/wYVaGszK3ok?si=Hzv72KBSl7PoDOBN

Ajātivāda: No Birth, No Change, No Death – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/PpkaDhEMLJE?si=KoVcnMefhtCCko1d

Stabilising As Awareness – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/BVjaXKP8IlQ?si=34OIpjQiYKaEvUrl

Rupert Spira: ‘How to find lasting happiness’ – Simon Mundie: https://youtu.be/g9EH-Kx3fjU?si=jYhWP66F1uRBQ0X4

Understanding Is Beyond the Mind – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/OxEkShnmVKg?si=vxbe-6uEGW9K6tqP

The intention to go somewhere always starts with a sense of lack. To weaken that tendency requires imagining the conceptual self and all the adventures it wants to go on. These adventures are stuck in the Flow Channel of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which requires new challenges to solve that boredom, with the risk that fresh challenges may end up being too dangerous. Our search for happiness has to be continuously finetuned to achieve ever more rarified moments of pleasurable release. If we have enough resources to indulge repeatedly, we become spoiled snobs. Certainly, a lot of relief happens when the meditator learns of all the unnecessary muscle contractions related to automatic functions, such as futile attempts to control the five senses, breathing, and thinking. Relaxing those tensions also connects with the self-concepts associated with control. Stephen explained that “as long as we’re operating from the conviction that the personality is a fundamental reality, our world is always going to be out of balance.” This can subtly pervade all experiences even in meditation. These sensations of self-identity pop up now and then to try to celebrate meditative successes as an identity of a good meditator, to include in our personality structure, but they instead should be clearly registered as more thought-forms and sensations that are already seen by the dimensionless and have their own energy expenditure involved in survival motives, to check-in on the current chapter of the story of our lives and how our survival is doing today, for example. They pretend to be outside of awareness as an observer, but this is not possible because the dimensionless can already see through those pantomimes. In Freudian parlance, the Super-ego is fed by energy from the Id, so it has fuel to operate automatically and moves like a watchman, but it itself creates sensations of effort-ing that can be sensed by awareness. Rupert tries to expand attempts to localize and contract awareness, which always gets caught in cul-de-sacs like trying to search for the location of oneself behind the eyes. “[All appear in awareness], I do not appear in them. Everything that appears in awareness is made of awareness, just as all the waves and currents that appear on or in the ocean are only made of water…Our longing for love, for peace, for happiness is like a current in the ocean in search of water—not just appearing in, not just arising from, but made out of the very stuff for which it is in search.” The waves can calm down in an ever more placid ocean.

Happiness is Only Thing We Seek for its Own Sake – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/Ny5HveqIPFo?si=8Rir3nc8reYoqRNx

The Pain of Separation – Rupert Spira: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0Pa2fkUqFNSR82CxDH4xwFxy_Bs_UlHX

Money Doesn’t Solve the Ultimate Problem – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/ANWvoaGtg2w?si=WSH7gwjuIyad_Jxj

The Origin of Self-Identity, Deficiency, and the Path of Awakening – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/SaKazdBALxU?si=qtBH4MyzAIqSZddv

Meditation: Awareness of Being Is Happiness Itself – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/tBoDZQm8UKE?si=AqeEbWQuysf93j65

Meditation: Sinking the Mind into the Ocean of Awareness – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/1_ywuvqe7AU?si=EspBPCLCBKy18Nsp

Going to the Heart of an Emotion – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/Tq248KMOh8I?si=4s-N9tr1Urqx7iuK

The reality is that imitation is a deep rabbit hole and it will try to be whatever you want it to be, so you that you persist in pursuing the sharing of your DNA with suitable partners by attracting them with your survival attainments, as will be detailed below. As described in social psychology, being competent with something, like being an attractive guru or teacher, that aids in health and well-being, makes one appear sexy to prospective partners in an attractive power differential with students. The dimensionless is trying to relax all that urgency that you need to “be somebody important.” This is because the reality is that even your deepest intimate relationships with others may come to an end sooner or later. These insights can also create new meditations. One of those efficient ways Francis explains is by investigating that very need to “be somebody.” Seeing these self-images as being truly fictitious, while also draining and contracted, teaches the subconscious to release that said contraction. Stephen finds that “meditations really deepen when we relax the doing effort, the personality effort-ing, and allow the universal, the absolute to enter more fully into our meditation.”

How to Drop Personal Thoughts in the Most Efficient Way – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/xAaVS5xr7a0?si=WqTv1UKn0ju8sVSV

Discover the Freedom of Living Without Knowing – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/Qw1FAc7O5b4?si=jJsF9xRlreajpUSp

Proactive vs Receptive Effort in Meditation – Stephen Snyder: https://youtu.be/xpJA8AqhRXM?si=ACdL66UOjCxdK92x

The dimensionless awareness is a priori to the Super-ego, the adaptive Ego, and the impulses of the Id, and it also pervades those things, to avoid subtle concepts of “being-next-to, or alongside.” The Super-ego functions of imitation are so involved in language, it’s hard to parse out, and that’s why words fail when instructions are forced to say that we have to BE awareness. Even attempts to move attention towards a location behind the eyes, or skull, or inside a phenomenological brain location, points to possible concepts of nothing, in an empty space, in a location in the head, which can be absorbed into in concentration practices to such a level that one goes to the 7th jhana, nothingness. This still has some effort required for the attention span to aim at an inward location, when in reality, the dimensionless is back, front, and side and to side of all experience, a priori to it, and transcending through experience and time. Typically the mind gets into a knot by treating awareness like a shape that it wants to superimpose on, like most people do with cloud-formations, which is like believing wood is made out of tables, an example from Francis, when it’s really the reverse. Rupert, like many others, want practitioners to look at the movement of their attention spans. “Awareness doesn’t have to move away from itself in order to know the experience of being aware. It needs to move away from itself to shine on the tree, or the flower, or the sensation, or the thought. It has to rise as attention. Attention means to stretch towards. Attention stretches itself to the apparent object, but to know itself it doesn’t have to rise. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. To know itself awareness only need to be itself. The way to know awareness is simply to be knowingly awareness. A reason you feel there is a blank wall that is covering awareness, it is because you are trying to direct your attention towards it. The closest attention can get to attending to awareness is to tend to a blank state. A blank state, it is an object. It is a state of the finite mind, and it mimics true emptiness of awareness, and we can direct attention towards a blank state, and this is often misunderstood as meditation. It is the sinking of attention into the emptiness of its source. Awareness can never be the object of attention. It is its subject. It is its source. It is a relaxation of attention, not a directing of the attention.”

The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Abiding as Awareness is a Non Practice – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/73hmMugiqGg?si=ib9yrRRlv0QCGgLW

The goal is to induce a form of sleep and rest from conceptuality and conditioning, which is an existential rest that many are seeking in their waking hours because of how tired they are of attempting to control all aspects of their environments and their lives. There is a sense that not only with sleep, meditation has a nourishing quality that makes the overall resting in one’s life more complete somehow. This is where you get teachers who instruct that formal meditation must stop, but seeing the effort to meditate is what actually needs to be seen, and over-efforting can be a temporary stage that needs to happen so one can feel the limit of that kind of meditation. This is especially true for those instructors who believe all eight jhanas must be experienced and let go of for there to be a true cessation. The only danger with this method is that if there are not enough pointing instructions towards all the forms of wasted effort out there, many practitioners will lose years unnecessarily with tense meditations going absolutely nowhere.

Gangaji – Simply Stop Looking: https://youtu.be/GdzPp9cRKN0?si=13XHsn_WGTDDC0Q0

To include more into meditation, some have resorted to the Zen method of Shikantaza, which is a less rigid form of meditation that wants to directly sense the super-ego trying to control the meditation and appear as a fake background of awareness to satisfy the conceptual mind, albeit with some gains of stress relief. Shinzen Young explains Shikantaza as a method that encapsulates the understanding that the subconscious is a priori to thoughts and sensations that try to control. “What you are pinpointing with this technique is most specifically whatever it is within us that decides to initiate thoughts, attempts to suppress thoughts, attempts to direct thought, decides to pursue a thought once it arises, or take it in some other direction once it arises, or use thoughts to do something about thought…If there’s any meditation that occurs in this technique, it’s because of all the meditation you’ve done before. It’s meditating you. Two things are meditating you: the momentum of your previous practice, and whatever you want to call it, the nature of Nature, Spirit, Time, God, God’s grace, choose your words.” The goal is to allow the universe to meditate itself and to gradually wean the meditator-self from play-acting the process, like a parent getting the child ready for bedtime.

“Do Nothing” Meditation ~ Shinzen Young: https://youtu.be/cZ6cdIaUZCA?si=BUu5XqvOQRcjK84r

Shikantaza with Sando Roshi: https://youtu.be/4KVBdSr-rSc?si=M59pZKneaCkyvwJ6

You Cannot Perceive the Perceiver – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/DWjJ6WnM2oY?si=AUJ2D6u5z7WAYo8y

Don’t Discipline your Attention – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/ba8Lf-3XWnM?si=jbvAU-c_vM7696CG

At this time one starts shifting from more seeking to more of a realization of what is already there, including robust thoughts that are still practical. The controlling effort doesn’t need to make things happen when they are automatic and arising. “Be the presence of awareness and allow this perception to come to you. Is there a different quality of seeing? Isn’t it tangible the difference? It’s not a softening of the focus, but a softening of the going out entity in here towards something. It’s a deep relaxation that allows experience to come to us.” Why these attainments seem paradoxical to experienced meditators is because their initial relief may be greater at first because there was so much tension before. When relaxation is more normalized, it is really more of a sense of deeper grounding as opposed to an amazing altered state. The thought-form that appears to witness and control other thoughts can rest until there is a real emergency. “Do you have any control over which two thoughts appears? You are suggesting in between those two thoughts, something was present which chose the second thought. What was that? What is the experience of a chooser that controlled which the second thought was?” Of course here, Rupert is treating thoughts as any content that arises, including feelings, memories, and images of a self. “In retrospect, we look at the succession of thoughts, and a thought, which is just thought #10, looks back and imagines there is a chooser in the system between each thought. That chooser is just thought #10…It claims responsibility afterwards. There is a choosing thought, but there is no chooser…The separate self IS that thought.” Again, we can allow those thoughts to appear, but the sense of control is relaxed because there’s a trust in the flow of thoughts to make good decisions based on past experience. There isn’t a lobotomy going on where a choosing thought is repressed, since the repressing thought is a waste of energy following afterwards. There is still freedom, and maybe even more freedom, if new skills can be developed with less inhibition. In the end, there’s no separation between the thinker and thinking, or the observer and the observing. Many repressing thought-forms putting effort to protect the conceptual self can now relax because they were never needed.

How Awareness Sees the World | Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/dwtYr03VxZw?si=R7pXLnTryAan7D0z

Do We Choose our Thoughts? | Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/tJxL4s4cI8s?si=1aNmViPWc7Ox-HJi

The Three Stages of Understanding | Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/QCFdBsaWWE4?si=ay9CZkIAbAE2g7xc

Now because we are so sensitive to pain as yogis at this point in practice, our morality can be more efficiently confined to the pain we can cause ourselves and others. That kind of trust can keep us out of trouble. “Augustine said ‘love and do whatever you want.’ Once you are in touch with the fact that we all share our being, and you use that single understanding to guide all your behavior, then you no longer need precepts…Take your love of truth out into the world. Engage with your body and your mind in the world. Take up some activity that expresses and shares and communicates and celebrates your love of truth. Share it. Communicate it…We need to cooperate with life. Take the skills and the interests and the inclinations and the proclivities as a body-mind and use them in the service of truth, love and beauty…You [will also] light up love [in others] to do what they love to do.”

Where Do Our Thoughts Come From? – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/HeCvA15cVOc?si=7fpRn3O39k48ZLmr

Do Something That Expresses Truth, Love or Beauty – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/BrZmJcOVsHQ?si=ZjZ9PQyrgT5cvCeV

The Way of Beauty – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/jAC9dv43o08?si=WVPCY5ZAB-HJUSs8

Do I Need to Give Up Everything to Be Free? – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/OHExK6YJcXU?si=7od5PPtMF39_nBVx

Bringing Love To All Situations – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/6R2-siKJmh8?si=_ZwfE0d-l0sIzyW7

Consciousness is our True Body – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/VoU_bjtst7c?si=Osgd8jIi1ew7DMXl

Sports and the Non-Dual Understanding Pt. 1 | Rupert Spira & Karl Morris in Conversation: https://youtu.be/6divqAG7CxM?si=DuQ5ExDeMmzeDNvr

Sports and the Non-Dual Understanding Pt. 2 | Rupert Spira & Karl Morris in Conversation: https://youtu.be/jvDfJQw_Ayw?si=uQv8P4VMRhtKAmtI

Unveiling the Connection Between Sport and Flow State – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/MZFWcuFyrk0?si=y-69Bv9CbmbL4rQo

So what about bad behavior and habits? Francis was once asked about this, and again it’s about realizing painful consequences without identifying with characters that follow bad habits. “Don’t judge yourself and don’t judge others. Instead find out who it is that is allegedly being stupid and that you are trying to judge, and find out who is the judge. You will see that there is neither judge nor defendant. Be a friend to yourself, not a prosecutor…If you chain smoke without even being aware that you are taking the cigarette out of the pack, how can you ever stop? The moment you decide that you want to stop, because it’s bad for your health, and you become aware of this desire to reach for a cigarette, you are moving in the right direction. I know from experience…When it comes to seeking the truth we are like a donkey; the stick and the carrot both work. When we feel miserable it is because we are doing something wrong; it’s that simple. And if we feel happy it is because we are doing something right. When we start feeling the stick, we try to find out what we’re doing wrong. That will place us in the right direction and then we start tasting the carrot. In this way we become smarter and smarter, like the donkey, and we need the stick less and less. We develop our sensitivity to carrots and our ability to follow carrots, until we catch the carrot.”

Truth Love Beauty – Francis Lucille: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781882874026/

Like with many other suggestions, a daily life practice becomes a matter of choice on how much one can rest in awareness, including noticing pain in thinking as it arises, as well as enjoying concentration. Another layer of concern that often goes under the radar is how we direct our expectations. As Rob Burbea asked repeatedly in his dharma talks about thoughts: “how do they feel?” With enough subtlety, one can detect a tension-expectation for a particular release satisfaction, but when those forms of release never happen, because the expectation was wrong, likely some pain will be felt. Noticing the tension as it starts to make an expectation can lead to relaxation instead, avoiding the obvious pitfall.

Emptiness Clinic I – Rob Burbea: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jdgajeeuiAr5VzHOSz0eLSWhDBmN8QHk/view?usp=sharing

Emptiness Clinic II – Rob Burbea: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LZByzUgNDnpStwBqbUzl17pzwwkFxS6L/view?usp=sharing

For many who are not monastic types, who don’t want to renounce so many thoughts about the future and the past, because some of them are healthy forms of duality and engagement, they rarely complain about happy memories and nourishing thoughts, and they usually dislike practices that impair creativity related to negative emotions. That excited feeling of something being interesting was never a problem. Later in Rob Burbea’s teachings, he moved into exploration of mental activity to expanded it in a Jungian way that was more meaningful for those who find that the Buddhist path is limited. “If you go deep into Dharma and understanding emptiness and dependent origination, you actually see: what we perceive, our reality, is being constructed all the time. And the mind is playing the dominant part in that. And part of the construction is the fantasy, the image, the story that we have of what we are doing, and what life is, and what this is, and what that is. So certainly, meditatively, it’s possible to ‘let go of fantasy, let go of fantasy.’ But you don’t arrive at a bare actuality. Everything empties out. You go into non-appearance, levels of non-appearance. One can emerge out of that meditation, but once I emerge into the world, I’m back into the realm of fantasy, of imaging, of storying…I’m not denigrating fantasy and image. It’s necessary. It’s part of the way the psyche works. So I’m using it more in the sense that Jung or Hillman or those kind of psychologists would use it. I’m not talking about being lost in some kind of elaborate daydream. I’m talking about levels of resonance, levels of meaning, colourings of things, the way we give vitality and meaning and direction and beauty and love to things in our existence and the self in that…So admit fantasy, image, story. It’s here. We cannot live without it—mythos, fantasy, image, story. From the mythos comes the ethos. From the mythos—from the fantasy, image, story—comes the ethos, meaning the ethics and the feel of things, the emotional resonance of things. From mythos comes the ethos. So that’s one thing: acknowledging, admitting, recognizing the power.” In a roundabout way, he’s saying that “meaning is what matters.” The archetypes that appear in the mind, especially in meditation, show us ways that experiences can matter to us, avenues of skill we can develop in our lives, which adds a lot of flavor to waking life. We can let thoughts arise that already have passion embedded in them.

There’s also a desire for an embrace of emotions again to reduce hypocrisy. Emotions become less of a problem with many years of practice under your belt. Because so few Buddhists will control their emotions to a level of a master, a lot of students who eventually become teachers, find themselves going down an integrated path where emotions can be honestly examined, especially when they were disappointed with their own teachers. “Some of you may have heard the teacher Andrew Cohen. And he used to be involved many years ago, way before my time, in this tradition at Gaia House. And now he’s got his own sort of tradition, and he’s a teacher. I read just a small passage from his biography some years ago. And he relates an incident with one of the senior teachers in this tradition, donkey’s years ago. And something happened in an interview or over a couple of interviews, and the teacher, the senior teacher from this tradition—I don’t know what happened; it got a little heated, and shouted at Andrew. And Andrew said, ‘This was unbelievable.’ It just blew his mind. How could a spiritual teacher shout? How could they shout? This is showing anger. And how can you be a spiritual teacher and have that? And it ruined it, and that—I don’t know if that was the breaking point, but something, and off he went and did his thing.”

The Necessity of Fantasy – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/18111.html

The Experience of Meaning – Jan Zwicky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780773557437/

Autobiography of an Awakening – Andrew Cohen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780962267840/

With this saved energy, there shouldn’t be a rush to become a monastic, and this is precisely because conventional environments can be handled more easily with this extra energy and they can fuel development for new skills. When we stop pushing the attention span inward, closing our eyes, and finding a comfy place to meditate, even if that was helpful for a time, as Rupert reminds us, “sooner or later you’re going to have to come back to objective experience. Sahaj samadhi is the term when you stand knowingly as the presence of awareness in the presence of objects, when objects can no longer distract you from yourself, because all there is to objects is yourself. If you are gardening and you know, you feel that your experience appears in the space of awareness, it is known by the presence of awareness, and it is made out of the awareness in which it appears. Then there is nowhere to go from there. You may change from one activity to another, from gardening to cooking, to seeing friends, to reading a book, but although the outward activity changes, the reality, the substance of experience remains constant so you go from one activity to another, but you remain knowingly as the presence of awareness, so meditation is not something that starts or stops. It’s not an activity we do with our mind. It is the very nature of our experience. You may still sit with your eyes closed in your sofa at home just to rest but you wouldn’t preference that as meditation as opposed to gardening. It would all be the same.” The conceptual labels can continue being confusing by creating more senses of inside, outside, in front, and behind. The source permeates all experience. “You’re trying to understand eternity with your mind. Your mind is constructed to experience in four dimensions: 1 dimension of time and 3 dimensions of space. Whatever your mind looks at, or tries to understand, it will look at it through the prism of its four dimensional structure, and therefore it will impose that structure, those limitations, on whatever it experiences. There are no things that take place. There is a place where [ever-presence] and time intersect, and it’s called now. The now is a portal for the mind through which it has access to its own [ever-presence.]” Rupert also warns to be careful of putting on a pedestal the euphoria that initially happens with awakening. It doesn’t always repeat, and failure may lead to chasing experiences. We are to use our level of peace in life as a marker of progress, not anything more remarkable than that.

Rupert Spira | Practicing advaita in daily life: https://youtu.be/9M-ZvQwU3lA?si=3zjtZGwrYFFXJpih

Sahaj Samadhi: https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/6224/sahaj-samadhi

Mind Cannot Understand Eternity – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/0nO5brAxJDs?si=sd7te-E2JkeT69GC

Finding Your True Purpose – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/QrjIuFIJQJw?si=sQ4Fgy3VaL7pDsz1

Francis describes how this chasing can sneak up on long-time meditators who have already achieved a lot, but discount all their progress because of a lack of fireworks. “As we drop all effort, you are instantaneously in perfect meditation, however, we expect perfect meditation to be something else, and this expectation takes us away from it. Effortlessness is not something to be reached as a result of a process, because that would be something that would be reached as a result of effort. It is simply a result of an understanding, ‘I was still carrying my suitcase, I hadn’t realized that I have arrived. I can put it down.’ Sometimes putting down the suitcase feels like a big event, especially if I was extremely tired, and if the suitcase was extremely heavy, all of a sudden it makes a huge difference. Such a huge difference is [sometimes] called Satori: Big event of instantaneous, enormous relief. But what if my piece of luggage was [light, and I wasn’t tired?] The fact that I am home is the same in both cases…We are always home. Put down the suitcase just whenever we decide to do it. It is our decision to stop everything that stops the efforting instantaneously, and it is our decision to resume making effort that instantaneously takes us out of our natural state, out of meditation…The body and the mind have their innate knowledge of their natural condition and they will revert to it just as a hand of a compass will revert to the north direction.” The skill starts as unconsciously incompetent, in regards to energy efficiency in life, then moves to conscious competence, when we can notice that we are less perturbed. Being conscious of the over-effortful tensions leads to their relaxing automatically, because if there’s an effort, due to an artificial contraction or if it was habitually activated, the awareness already knows that tensions can’t be maintained indefinitely. Awareness allows you to relax the muscles sooner. Overtime the mind again begins to make another needless contraction and automatically turns back to truth north because there is now unconscious competence. You will still need effort to learn new skills and chase big achievements, and new challenges will always provide enough disparities between effort and release to be interesting, but now you have more choice.

Meditating All The Time as You Freefall Into the Abyss – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/FljB0vLrN4A?si=hCuf1nlWqTrNbGjZ

Non Duality Meditation: Effortlessness is Our True Nature – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/xoolf5pdU_8?si=GvUGYuCKZ0Egq2mq

Meditation: Meditation Isn’t About Progress or Achievement – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/Rsd21Ze1txE?si=OEUo2vyCU_khLNqZ

Effortless abiding….Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/z-v8geSX2Cw?si=umsiJn_KPeWkUN8Q

Conventional Happiness and its Restrictions

The insight learned about conventional happiness is the required need for great tension to manufacture an intense pleasurable release later on, when the goal is achieved, but what if that release never comes? Even further, there’s a requirement that we choose which targets that we want to tense ourselves against, which is why hobbies are so enjoyable, but unfortunately the workplace is usually quite different for most people. Jobs we like, for example, require just enough skill to deal with the moving parts given to us to work on, where we need a very strong acceptance of what we’re handed to avoid falling into a grind, and a thick skin for rejection. A recent movie, Kinds of Kindness, by Yorgos Lanthimos, addresses the tension ambitious people are under for most of their day. The reality is that, unless you are able to save enough resources, what common parlance is called “fuck-you money,” you are dependent on employers for your lifestyle. It’s not a great position to be in when authority figures make most of the decisions of your life. Just like how the powerful easily make good decisions for themselves, they cannot find the energy or won’t extend that empathy towards others, especially if it’s a decision that would put you in a better position than they are in. They have the power to withdraw rewards, leaving all your goods and your home contingent on their preferences and goodwill. This of course is connected with the banking system, especially when you need a mortgage to find a home fast enough for your biological clock to fill them with children, and especially if there’s consumer debt used to keep up with the Joneses to avoid rejection from an important friend circle.

Kinds of Kindness | Official Trailer | Searchlight Pictures – Yorgos Lanthimos: https://youtu.be/NGOL2_mI9Hw?si=nm3K6jRVKqm129i3

Kinds of Kindness Explained (Ending & Full Breakdown) – Spoilers: https://youtu.be/zpeu-NYnxzc?si=hRxhNF0hHseVUBcB

When you want something, you have to think of how many hours you have to work, and how much taxes you have to pay in order to get that thing that will give you only temporary satisfaction. If you’re in a high powered job, you also have to think about how far you will fall if you have to leave it, because it’s not assumed that another firm in the same industry will take you on. One of the big fears for professionals is falling into the working class service sector when a profession has ended for them. Expectations and entitlements can cause a lot of suffering in a big fall. Intimate relationships are also contingent on expectations. If those expectations are not met, or if the goal posts are moved, as one partner develops past another, then rejection is likely. Even spiritual communities can create rules, even inane ones, that will lead to excommunication. The R.M.F. character in that movie is the closest to thing being Zen during all that eventfulness. Realizing that relief is ultimately more accessible in oneself, releases some of the dependence on always going outward for comfort, so that when there is renunciation it is more authentic and less miserly than forcefully suppressing oneself.

Her – Samantha Leaves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXTQwRf7iRg

This lack of independence is deeply embedded in culture and the information that we consume. Our alliances are to the paycheque and most conversations have truth blunted by some form of gaslighting and fake worlds built up on a tissues of lies, to allow hierarchies to go along to get along. Being candid, truthful, and honest is scary for people because it can threaten power nodes, and let’s face it, people are addicted to their lifestyles, and losing your standard of living, and possibly your family, are a whole lot of withdrawal symptoms to contend with in the survival brain. Yet at the same time, people yearn for independence because freedom has a felt sense of reduced repression and increased opportunities to choose your own challenges, which leads back to conventional wellbeing. Being able to develop yourself is already a political act that at least involves moving beyond viewpoints from your parents, and eventually people have to assess the political spectrum and all authority figures that directly restrict life.

Overcoming the Fear of Rejection – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/AQxZ1zl8o2c?si=sKxz9RbQDP36-Nsm

The Cure for Insecurity in Relationships – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/X7OwLAONIm8?si=BdcjEcGocGs6ABlb

Meditation: Bringing Expectation to an End – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/EggOerFxWi8?si=LXjfATlig-TPyh5r

One of the best intersections between restriction and freedom of speech, between power and consent, and those scary partnerships between governments and corporations, is the role of journalism. In an interview between Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, they talk about the life of trying to be a journalist. It should be all about criticizing exploitation, power and corruption, but when the journalist needs to feed their kids, how much of this is possible? Glenn: “One of the things you have as an adult, I think is the greatest obligation, is to go back and reevaluate what you were trained and indoctrinated, inculcated to believe, and not just reflexively continue to believe that in adulthood, because it was indoctrinated, but to reassess whether or not those really are your views as a result of your own critical analysis, or whether you have different views, including the role of our own country. All of these things are so important, to not being a propagandized kind of automaton…I’ve had success in my journalism career. I’m at the point where I feel I don’t ever need to be captive of my audience or feed them what they want to hear. I have always tried to cultivate an audience that knows that they can’t come to me and expect to hear what they want to hear. At times, they are going to hear things that they violently disagree with…but that’s part of what I hope they’re coming to me for…But for a lot of people in journalism, especially with the destruction of jobs and the erosion of job security, as you know, every major media is laying off people in huge numbers and it’s kind of a collapsing industry. The pressure and need to conform is greater than ever, because most people don’t have that privilege or that security that you and I both have at this point in our lives and career.” This skepticism that Glenn had, as one example, towards the Russiagate scandal, was echoed by others in legacy media, but he asked them “why aren’t you expressing it? But I know why. Because if they did, even one time, they’d become the target of the liberal mob on Twitter, that would put pressure on their editors to fire them. They’d be the first to get laid off, the last to get hired. And so our journalism profession has become one where conformity is by far the highest value. And I think for those of us who aren’t quite as vulnerable or as insecure in terms of our career position or need to keep a job, it’s almost like you have an obligation to create that space.” In the end, when you are talking to people in a professional context, you’re mostly getting a response that is colored by the fact that this person represents a brand that feeds their families. It’s hard to really get at what they truly think about anything.

Glenn Greenwald—Tucker Carlson: https://youtu.be/LT6kEK02_V4?si=3TJjClNUtDnQ0alk

Now some people have the ambition to be super successful, because they have the energy, the skills, and the opportunities to do so, but these are low probability situations for most people. It can cause a lot of consternation for people who realize it will never happen, but Francis wants to remind people “to be a celebrity, to be loved by others, to be rich, are not really sought for the sake of being powerful, wealthy, famous, but as a means towards happiness. The sad discovery, that we all have to make at some point, is that these recipes don’t work. So many celebrities are miserable, die of drug addiction. Powerful heads of states, cabinet members, politicians, are also miserable. I had the opportunity to look closely at politicians. They weren’t happy. [Instead of indirect happiness], why not try to find the place of happiness and aim directly for it? What can be understood is what it is that doesn’t deliver happiness. What we believe, that objects or events, that we desire, if we acquire them, or if they happen, will make us happy. If we closely investigate what happens, upon the acquisition, for example, of a long desired object, instantaneously the desire, [or lack] disappears. It vanishes. Experientially, happiness is the experience of the desireless state. Pretty soon a new fear, a new desire comes up, and happiness disappears, vanishes again. Through the acquisition of objects, or the actualization of events we can only get fleeting moments of happiness, and there is a very heavy price to pay for these acquisitions. A lot of toiling.”

‘How to find the direct path to happiness’ – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/FpTHP12YKDA?si=S00Fx4o0d6a-24Ki

This reassurance may still not be enough, and many people at a retreat will tell a teacher like Rupert “I’m still not happy.” That’s because they haven’t experientially rested their awareness enough to disengage from the search. There is still a continued exhausting search for the ultimate intellectual food, yet the intellectual side also needs to rest. They don’t realize that their habitual preferences are still very strong, as well as the identity self associated with them. The more preferences one has, the more inflexibility, the more misery accrues, as well as boredom. “Everything that you say Yes to in your life makes you happy. Everything you say No to makes you unhappy. The Yes is the nature of awareness. We do not have to struggle to change our resistance into welcoming, but rather to see that it is the nature of awareness. Awareness cannot resist experience…We are liberating awareness from these residues of feeling and the more awareness is liberated from these feelings, the water of awareness becomes clearer and clearer. Awareness increasingly tastes itself as it is…That awareness is the shining of happiness. No feeling is unbearable. Awareness can bare everything.” When there’s indecision, we can “make a decision that comes from the deepest possible place in our self and that is not influenced by the local, temporal elements in the situation…It is not our circumstances that take us away from Being, it is we, who lose ourselves in our circumstances…Don’t lose yourself in the world. Allow the world to lose itself in you…”

Saying Yes to All Experience – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/KeMwYSVOxbQ?si=XnckU5_B8k3IBiQg

How Can I Taste Happiness at All Times – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/26_GZW6g400?si=cNHcePGerz0xq8JX

The Tantric Approach to Difficult Emotions – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/3BleEfETm2Y?si=Vkpxh5_eonvwnmzm

Clarity in Making Decisions – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/wRwU8CmuLbk?si=7L2gnCAzHqdkx7d4

Understanding The Voice of Intuition – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/5aYfL7-PkqY?si=72f-74b8R5MELGDl

Guided Meditation: There Is No Path or Journey to Undertake – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/hgyJNJ-0jTQ?si=PGniEnHKBGjE6ChS

Guided Meditation: Let the World Lose Itself in You – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/MSkMwzFu48k?si=Fiy9ZJVOCq0kiy0Y

Guided Meditation: Stop Practicing Mindfulness! To Meditate, No Need to Concentrate – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/15BxTqozA0I?si=oOBYqh6Gue4ydvKv

Non Duality Meditation: Suspended in PURE LIGHT – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/VKN9ireUIh0?si=HSY3csRTS2ARGnjK

Find the One Who Focuses Their Attention. HINT: You’ll Never Find Such a One. All is a Cosmic Event. – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/QlbNhw6F7Ss?si=P0aLNjLuNFCiiwFd

Non Duality Meditation: SURRENDER & Letting Go of the Controller – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/0gK8Xl4pUhM?si=fWD6Z1GRNSQ-VroN

Non Duality Meditation: Can I Contemplate The Sense Of Lack? – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/smYYlrDK5-I?si=yTeR1FkU8nNJOWZc

Don’t Allow Yourself to Know What You Are – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/_vIbjmZWQ9A?si=XyarKkK5H90NWXvy

Francis Lucille: Finding Your own answers: https://youtu.be/TDzIhENGZK0?si=ci-Z9aZp1O3QJQr2

Collapsing the Distance Between God and Ourself – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/VizTr68p2v8?si=AQpBxI4V4XWqkzJB

A Natural, Effortless, Vanishing Direction Towards Presence – Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/xsWP6WVksAc?si=z5T1_6_Xk3Lk0Izz

Guided Meditation: From the Many to the One – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/iPDT-l9ac8g?si=HZUUcJS0tK5jYnIb

As one begins to act more in more accordance with a learning mentality, as opposed to rigid identities, the separation between daily life and spiritualty collapses, where survival reactions are used more when it’s practical, instead of wasting energy in inappropriate situations. “Situations increasingly lose their capacity to veil this innate peace.” A practical balance between four dimensions, boundaries and the absolute are negotiated. Although, an acceptance of some forms of anger and outrage can be integrated, but not to defend a fictitious “I” but to defend the body itself. “You shouldn’t feel that because there is something in me that is unharmable, therefore I should be able to tolerate any kind of behavior. Don’t allow yourself to remain in an abusive relationship.”

Self-images can still arise, because we have to think about the past and future, and it includes our involvement in them, but it goes more towards adaptivity. Collaborator with Stephen Snyder, on Practicing the Jhanas, Tina Rasmussen learned the balance between adaptation and awakening in that “it’s particularly helpful looking at those deeper layers and also getting some space from them. This is part of what we’re doing in practice is getting some space with identifying with these patterns or with the self-images around the pattern, ‘I’m a smart person, I’m a dumb person, an athletic person, I’m a clumsy person.’ We have tons of self-images that are the building blocks of the ‘me’ of the personality, of the ego-self that is possible to thin out and digest, but these are also what blocks us from really having direct experience of our deeper nature which is where the real freedom lies. It’s when that can start shining through, and in most psychology a healthy ego is the end point, and that’s an extremely worthwhile goal, because if we have a healthy ego-self it’s much more able to withstand the pressures of a spiritual path where we’re actually thinning the ‘me,’ but on the spiritual path we’re looking at going beyond that, going beyond the healthy ego-self and really understanding what we are that is beyond that.”

Tina Rasmussen – Using the Enneagram as a Tool on the Spiritual Path: https://youtu.be/CkKd-PjxG5s?si=XVCN–firUfDK2IW

Expectations also have to be checked with reality, in that most people will find progress to be gradual. This is why there are so many scandals, especially sexual scandals, in Buddhist organizations. With a giving up of some inhibition, there will likely not be enough disenchantment to prevent people from trying to mix their genetic material with others, as Guru Viking queried to Tina, especially when power differentials between master and student can trigger mutual temptation. The reality is that results with these practices are there, but people will get off the train at different stations and the vast majority of practitioners will be far away from achieving 4th path, for example. “I’ll go back to the Theravadan four stage model. To me it’s practical and that’s what I like about it. The first stage in the Theravadan model is that there are three defilements, so this is like the core personality patterns which happen to map on with the Enneagram, which I love, our desire, so wanting things, aversion wanting to push things away, also fears and then delusion, where we’re just basically unconscious to ourselves and other things. Those are the core patterns, and those will at the first stage drop by like twenty five percent, and the belief that I’m a personality, that’s really what I am at the core, being totally identified with the personality, that goes away permanently. To me that’s what’s significant about the first stage because you never see what you are the same way again, and even if you forget or fall into delusion you never really forget what you are, and the reduction in suffering, and also like in Buddhism, you don’t believe that doing rituals and rites and ceremonies is really going to cause awakening. So a 25% reduction of suffering, that’s pretty good, and also your behaviors would improve theoretically 25%. Second stage it goes down to 50%. Third stage 75%. In full Arahant you just aren’t driven by those core personality patterns anymore at all. So to me that’s kind of a useful model, and this also explains how people can have really genuine deep awakenings, but they’re still acting out the instinctual drives of self-preservation, the sexual drive, the social drive. Those aren’t completely subsumed under the Enlightenment drive yet until Stage four, so I mean to me it’s like the idea that sexuality is somehow wrong, that’s not really part of it, it’s more am I doing harm? That’s really to me more of the question, am I doing harm in life? How much am I identified with the ego self? That to me is a way of understanding the stages that’s much more neutral.”

Ep22: Jhana Master – Tina Rasmussen Ph.D – Guru Viking: https://youtu.be/Z9gr7aqGsOw?si=046_09mFg3cxEJRq

Renunciation not as sacrifice

Life in any world is incomplete, insatiate, the slave of craving ~ MN82

Some of the unexpected highlights of spiritual renunciation is the relief that happens when you’ve gotten rid of vices and all the people surrounding them. A good question to ask is how strong are the desires of the conceptual self versus the needs of the body? Is it out of balance? Sometimes people can only really test themselves with renunciation when they go on a retreat when they have no choice. That kind of sampling can motivate a minimalistic lifestyle afterwards. Rob Burbea explains how it can also help practice at home. “So if we think about the path and we think about factors of the path, and there are all these lists in Buddhist teaching—there are seven of this and eight of that, and four of this and whatnot. And renunciation is one of them. But these other factors of the path, they have a mutually feeding relationship with renunciation. What that means is that developing renunciation, inquiring into that, opening into that actually feeds, develops our equanimity, our love, our joy, our mindfulness, our calmness, etc. And similarly, equanimity, mindfulness, joy, calmness, all that, feeds, nourishes our capacity for renunciation. So that kind of two-way causality is really common in the Dharma. Positive qualities tend to feed each other.”

Rob goes onto a list benefits, including spaciousness, because the environment in the home reflects directly the habits in the mind. If you have less things to take care of your mind is less burdened by all that maintenance. If you are chasing after less things, your schedule is more open providing a lightness of being. It’s also easier to make priorities when there’s simplicity and clarity with what we choose to keep as our possessions and our goals. The clarity is a little scary at times because it points towards facing death, because the sense of legacy of what we want to leave behind usually gets buried in distraction, but now it comes into clarity. Developing practice when you’re younger also creates a stress buffer that allows one to face death with a host of habitual skills to put to use when it inevitably approaches. All these things add to a sense of confidence that one can live without a lot of things, and if our priorities are being taken care of and life has purpose, then nothing is really missing.

There are also spiritual goals that can be touched at when more time is available to cultivate a meditation practice. You can easily watch movies and TV shows ad nauseum in today’s cornucopia of content, but they often skim the surface of these spiritual topics and lots of wonder, beauty, peace, and love is left unexplored and undeveloped in the mind. It’s hard to find great art that doesn’t dull the mind. “Sensitivity is another aspect. There’s something about this whole path that moves towards a deepening sensitivity. When we indulge or overindulge, what happens to the sensitivity of being? Does it get dulled? What happens to our joy and our capacity for joy when our sensitivity is dulled? What happens to our sense of spiritual urgency, our sense of there’s something deep and available in life? There are beautiful, deep, rich things available to all of us. And sometimes we feel that, and we feel it deeply as a deep hunger. And sometimes it gets clouded over. It gets dulled because the sensitivity is dulled. What dulls it? Indulgence and that kind of being caught up in acquisition.”

Rob didn’t mince words when he talked about the sense of lack in regular consciousness. It’s not an easy thing to get over, partly because of biology and partly the momentum of habit. “I think from a Dharma perspective, it comes from fundamental delusion, from Avijjā. When there’s this belief in a self that’s real, and really separate from others and the rest of the universe, then automatically, just in that proposition, there’s a sense of having to defend oneself, having to look out for oneself, having to feed oneself, which is also a biological necessity. All of that, inherent in that sense of separateness, inherent in the sense of this self being something real which I have to look out for, and all that. In its very finiteness, in its separateness, there’s going to be a sense of lack there.” The difficulty is the dullness that creeps in that makes people restless and the search turns from material to spiritual. There is more on offer if one is willing to look. “There are different kinds of happinesses in plural. If I walk down Newton Abbot high street, there’s an Arcade. So I could go in there and play the slot machines, and there’s a degree of happiness. Compare that with the happiness of however it’s felt when the mettā [loving-kindness] has felt good for you.” He then quoted a Rumi poem that reminds us of the freshness that we all want which typically only happens after a deep sleep, but can be tapped into with meditative skill.”

When it’s cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty. ~ Rumi

Renunciation and Joy – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/12860/

The Freshness – Rumi: https://www.best-poems.net/rumi/the_freshness.html

Deepening Into Emptiness (Question and Answer Session 4) – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/12520/

Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/