in studying the Buddha's teaching about psychology or psychological phenomena. There is also the teachings to study the phenomena. and the teachings about how to study are to some extent also psychological teachings. So there's teachings about the way we function, teachings about how you can study your psychology and realize these teachings, see for yourself, test these teachings in your experience in your experience.

[01:03]

Understanding these teachings, being able to see how these teachings are so, is sometimes presented at three different levels, three different levels of understanding of any kind of teaching. So for now, we can... levels of understanding of the teachings of... the teachings about psychology. which gives three different levels of understanding or three different levels of insight or three different levels of wisdom. Psychological teachings are the teachings about the mind and how things function in relationship to mind, how behavior and life functions in relationship to the psyche.

[02:17]

In these three different levels, in Sanskrit they're called shrutamaya prajna and cintamaya prajna and bhavana maya prajna. Shrut means hearing. So shrutamaya prajna is wisdom or insight or understanding that is arrived at through hearing, which also would include and maybe even tasting and smelling and touching. But the idea is that you're understanding the teachings as they come to you from outside in a sense. So you hear the teachings and when you first hear them you may have some understanding and that understanding might be instant insight

[03:34]

might immediately understand. It's also possible that you instantly understand part, some of the teachings immediately by hearing or by reading, and other parts you don't. And the parts that you don't understand, you may feel something or some confusion about, or maybe you're quite clear that you just don't understand. and so maybe you keep listening and asking questions and going back and forth verbally or you know visually and then at a certain point what sometimes happens is you you switched from feeling like you understand to feel like you do understand and you actually feel transformed Sometimes when you understand something right away, you may not feel a big transformation, but you might feel like happy that you understood so fast.

[04:45]

Or maybe you feel like, oh, that's neat, or something like that. In fact, that's a transformation. But some other times you may work with some teaching for a long time and feel a certain way about it, and then suddenly you feel really differently about it. and you feel like you understand better. You feel like you do. And then also, whereas previously maybe you were talking with the teacher about this teaching and you felt like you were reading pages or something, now you feel like you can talk back and forth almost like peers at this level. You can say, this is what I think, is that right? Teacher says, uh-huh. And according to my understanding it's like this, is that right? And you might say, ask me some questions teacher, and teacher asks you questions and you can answer all the questions if the teacher is behaving properly.

[05:51]

So, in a certain way, I've been giving you teachings about psychology for a few weeks now. You've been asking questions and you may have had some insights or some understandings happen that you actually could recognize in yourself. The next level of insight is, in a sense, even more intellectual than the first one. The first one is, to a certain extent, intellectual. The first level is conceptual, certainly. But the next level is a kind of... Shintamaya prajna is wisdom which comes through reflection or thinking. you think about the teaching. You're no longer necessarily talking to anybody about it, you're thinking about it. You're like walking around, sitting around, lying around, standing around and seeing how it applies or doesn't apply to your thinking, to what's happening.

[07:11]

sometimes you might be thinking about it and some more questions would come up which you need to then consider. You have some new questions and even deepen your level, the level of wisdom through hearing and then take that new insight or the deepened insight of hearing and take it back down into the reflective stage. So you can do a lot of things that you learned at the level of hearing in terms of your own thinking. And in fact, if it's teachings about psychology, your own thinking is a place to test it to some extent to see how it applies. you also may have this feeling like a transformation occurs in you and through that kind of dialogue in your own thinking you may experience insights occurring and transformations of your understanding occurring within yourself.

[08:18]

And there can be innumerable insights and innumerable transformations within that realm. And I'm not saying you would exhaust that realm of all the insights you could have about some teaching or some teachings before you go to the next level. Just that the next level is in Buddhism usually what's for a complete understanding of any teaching, the next level is also required. And you don't have to wait until you've exhausted but some work at the previous two levels is necessary to do the third level. The third level is the level of meditation. And on this level you're going to now develop tranquility and insight in association with tranquility.

[09:23]

insight that can arrive at this level is, in a sense, much more penetrating than the insights you had at the first two levels because the first two levels were not done in association with the realization of mental stabilization. So whatever teaching you were doing, whatever teaching you were studying, now you have to learn new teachings about how to do these meditation practices. So I taught you a little bit and now you've understood some. Maybe some of you haven't had insight at any of the first two levels. Maybe some of you have. But let's say someone hasn't had insight at either of the first two levels and now I'm teaching you about how to develop insight at the third level even though you're not ready for it.

[10:31]

That's the kind of like... that's one possible scenario. Are you following this? To me it makes sense to do this because it takes a while to learn how to do this third level of study. It doesn't take so long to learn how to listen, although there's art there too. Most of you know how to listen somewhat, and it doesn't take so much difficult to reflect on things you've heard or understood. You know how to do that somewhat, but most people do not know much at all about how to concentrate. So it may be that some of you will understand the teachings on concentration faster than you understood the teachings on concentration. So I'm bringing you along on at least a few tracks at once. So I'm not going to wait until I know that all of you have understood the teachings on psychology at the first two levels before I start teaching the meditation practice to realize the deepest level.

[11:38]

Anyway, that's what I'm going to do. That's what I've been doing. And then in the instructions for the instructions on developing tranquility or mental stabilization, you will go through the same layers. You will understand at the level of listening, asking me questions, That's the first level you're going to get it at. The second level you're going to like go away from this discussion and think about it and try to practice it. And as you try to practice it, you're going to think about it to figure out how it works in this case. And then sometimes you're going to have questions and feel like you don't know. thought you did understand it. You had some insight in the class. When you tried to practice it, you realized you didn't know how to do it with the current thinking that's going on. Then you come back and ask questions again, get clarified, and go back and try it again until you can, like, do the practice sort of on your own. then as you actually you're moving into the third level.

[12:42]

When you realize some level of stabilization, then you're ready to have this third and deepest kind of insight into the teaching. The first two kinds of insight that I talked about, I was kind of associated a state of mind that supported them The third level of insight is being discussed in relationship to a certain state of mind, which is necessary for this third level to occur. Actually, the first two levels also require a state of mind, but the cultivation of it we don't usually call mental stabilization. it's more the level at which, you know, can you sit still through this class is about, you know, that's about the level that the first two require.

[13:43]

You can even move a little bit on your seat and still be able to realize the first two. But the third level requires considerably more stabilization. So another thing which I would offer to you is that the full-scale meditation practice, which is necessary for the fullest understanding of the psychological teachings, the fullest realization, so you not just understand it, but you actually see it. And even you see beyond what I've that level requires a kind of meditation which has both an aspect of developing a certain state of mind and developing a penetration into that state.

[15:01]

So the stabilization practices They develop a state and in the stabilization basically what we're doing is learning how to not move among events. learning how not to move among objects. And in the Insight training we're learning how to see, how to see the objects. We're learning how to penetrate

[16:07]

have a penetrating vision of the true nature of the events or the true nature of the objects. And if you're ready for this, I would mention that when you actually attain mental stabilization, you are no longer moving among the objects. Realization of insight, you see that there is no different objects to move among. You see that there is really no possibility to move among different objects because there are no different objects. So again, thinking about the training in mental stabilization is to not move, is to actually sit still physically.

[17:50]

And then If that physical stillness is profound, then there's also not any movement within the mind. Many things are arising and ceasing, but there's no movement in the midst of this arising and ceasing. There's no jump, the various events which are arising and ceasing. And so the way we turn the mind could be just don't move around among the objects, or another way would be focus on one object among the many. Does that make sense? One way is just don't move among the objects. Another way would be since you have to pay attention to something other than just not moving among the objects, you could focus on some particular object

[18:56]

to lock yourself into her. I was not deeply wondering about this but I did hear when I was young a God being compared to a rock and that that being kind of a nice thing to say about God Then one time I was in the I was in the desert at a Christian monastery and they sang the song and being in the desert singing these songs, I understood them much better because they were written in the desert. And a lot of things about those psalms are imagery that people who live in deserts would use. And one of them is that rocks are often very handy.

[20:04]

Do you know when rocks are handy in the desert? Huh? You should go to the desert sometime, you'll find out. Huh? Shade, what else? Floods. flash floods. When a flash flood comes, a rock can save you. So I'm not saying exactly that, yeah, you know, that in Samatha practice you pick a rock for shade to rest by, but also to protect you from flash floods, which happen a lot more in your mind than in the desert. you take something, and so there's many topics, and I haven't mentioned them all, but one of the topics is the breath. It's a topic which works for almost everybody. There's some other topics which work just for some people.

[21:07]

So the breath is a thing you can train your attention onto so that you start with that, and this is a way to train yourself to not jump among the many objects. focusing your attention on the breath but you still see people and hear trucks and get sensations from your seat and your ear and your nose and stuff. You train yourself on the breath. But actually you not only train yourself on the breath but you train yourself in a way that you really don't jump among many different breaths. So you gradually get more and more settled with the breath itself. And someone said that she'd find that she didn't want to meditate on the breath. I said, well, what you can do then is focus on the event or the concept of the way I've been telling you to focus on the breath.

[22:12]

Namely, focus on the breath focus on the image of the breath other than just being able to barely imagine the breath. No imaginative elaboration of the image of the breath, or focus on the concept of the breath with no conceptual elaboration. Still, it is somewhat like ordinary daily life. Many concepts are arising and ceasing. but you don't elaborate on any of them, and you stay focused on whatever happens, you stay focused on the topic of not elaborating on whatever comes. And through this non-elaboration of conceptual arisings and ceasings, the mind becomes stabilized. And I think, I don't know if it was this class or someplace recently, someone said, are you saying that you have to eliminate, that in spiritual work you have to eliminate or use the imagination?

[23:21]

And I said, no. You have to use the imagination, but you use the imagination in this new way. You imagine being able to not elaborate on whatever you're aware of. Actually, every different object is the imagination offering you a different object. So that's going to go on for a while while you're doing stabilization work. But then, in addition to just letting the mind and letting the imagination conjure up all these images, then you also imagine that you these images in this radical way of dealing simply with the image and going no further with it. So you would imagine, actually, you would train your imagination to do a great imaginative feat, to use it, to imagine its functioning in such a way that you would become calm, without trying to be calm, without even imagining that you're trying to get calm.

[24:28]

You actually just imagine that whatever image is offered, that's all that's done with it. And you can train your mind onto that image, onto that. possibility. And so you're not jumping around among objects and each thing you deal with is in this way. Okay? That's stabilization. And that creates, when it becomes steady, it actually creates a state as I mentioned in Berkeley last night, where I'm also teaching the insight, tranquility and insight. I'm going to do a work, kind of a class with a learning annex and it's about psychotherapy and Buddhism. And I wrote a little blurb for the class and then I think I said if this isn't, if you don't like it you can edit it. So they did edit it and they rewrote it into this amazing class.

[25:33]

I can't see why, you know, only a couple of people have signed up, but it sounds like the greatest class in the world. Like, tremendous things are going to happen during the three hours. Maybe that's why nobody signed up. They just couldn't believe it. It sounds like a lie. But one of the things that says in there is that our happiness and our suffering depend on our state of mind. I didn't write that. But, you know, to some extent it's true. If your state of mind is such and such, like, you know, if you put certain chemicals into a person and make their state of mind a certain way, they will be unhappy or they will be happy. At least temporarily, you can be sure. And also if you put certain kinds of poisons or other kinds of chemicals into the body, you can fairly regularly predict the person will feel very sick and unhappy and feel a lot of pain, or they'll feel, you know, no pain.

[26:37]

You know? So our happiness and our unhappiness does depend on our state of mind and body. But I think what I was intending to teach was that our happiness depends more on our response to our state of mind. Tranquility, and you get steady at it, and you create a state of mind of tranquility, it's a happy state. And once you achieve tranquility, our normal afflictions are you know, at least moved. You feel relieved of your afflictions. And there's various levels of feeling relieved. And in the highest or deepest levels of concentration, there is like a level of relief from afflictions which many people confuse with enlightenment.

[27:41]

And at the lower levels of concentration, there's also quite a bit of relief from affliction. But it's temporary. It's a state of mind which is very pleasant, or anyway, there's no pain, or it's pleasant and even going beyond pleasantness sometimes. But it's temporary. The way of responding to that state of mind or any state of mind in an insightful way can lead to a permanent relief, permanent happiness, indestructible, unassailable. So it's really what we need to eventually learn is how to develop the right response to our state. But it turns out that achieving some state of tranquility helps us which will determine our happiness and freedom from suffering.

[28:49]

And that will be one that, you see, even when the state of mind, nice states of mind go away, you can respond well to those too. And even when good states of mind come, you can respond well to them. You don't grab the tranquility and you don't beat people up when you lose your tranquility. So insight is not a state. It is the wise responding to any given state. It's the wise response to any event. And another thing is that the way of training ourselves to tranquility of not elaborating on things. And one of the ways to elaborate on things, by the way, is to not just see them, but then imagine that they're graspable, and then to grasp them.

[29:58]

That's the kind of . This person is appearing this way. They have this shape of a face. This is an ugly face. This is a face that hates me, this is a face that I detest, and this is a face that I can get rid of. Or this is a face, and it's a lovely face, and it's a face which I will possess. These are the kinds of ways the mind becomes disturbed. In tranquility we stop grasping the things in our mind. We train ourselves into not grasping the events. Grasping is a conceptual elaboration of a . We train ourselves to stop grasping. That creates a state. Based on that state we see the way things are and when we see the way things are we see they cannot be grasped. And then we don't grasp but it's not a .

[30:59]

It's just the only way we can be with things because of the way we see them. So what was originally a training finally becomes an unavoidable consequence of the way we see. The precepts like practice not stealing and so on leads to the ability to practice insight and practice stabilization and realize insight. And when you have insight you see that you no longer see a way to steal. Imagine taking anything that's not given. You don't see anything out there to take. Therefore you don't desire to take something So you no longer have to train yourself to not steal. You just see things in such a way that there's nothing out there to steal, nothing out there to take.

[32:04]

So that's a kind of a description of the basic kshamata practice, some contextualization of it. And then there is some difficulties you might have besides the basic practice of the basic training of tranquility. Besides that, the training per se, there might be various other difficulties, obstacles or hindrances which undermine you as you approach, as you try to practice this central stabilization practice. The central stabilization practice is no conceptual elaboration. Again, many people have trouble starting with that right away. That's why they often want to take the breath.

[33:28]

It's a little easier to start with than many people. Then some people have trouble working with the breath. The breath, in a sense, is a kind of conceptual elaboration of . Can you see that? No? Okay, so no conceptual elaboration, okay? Got that? Know how to practice it? Okay, then that's it, I won't say any more. But if you say, I'm having trouble doing that, and I say, well, you can see that as a conceptual elaboration of what I said before, I'm giving you now a particular concept to add to that program. I'm saying, don't conceptual elaborate on anything. And you're saying, that's too subtle for me. And I say, okay, use the breath then. I'm giving you a special concept in it. Does that make any more sense? Hmm? No? No. Well, you're not having sutta maya prajna.

[34:30]

Huh? You're not having sutta maya prajna on this. And then some people have trouble finding the breath or following the breath, so then they want to count the breath. And counting the breath is a conceptual elaboration on the breath. Can you see that? Put the little number system on next to it. So some people do that because it gives them some access to the breath. Does that make sense? And then if you're able then to use that structure And if you, excuse me for saying so, that crutch to connect with your breath, connected with your breath, you start to feel like this is a kind of heavy little thing you have next to it that you don't need anymore. It's actually, the numbers are a little grosser than the breath. So then the meditator often wants to let go of the numbers and just go with the breath.

[35:36]

coarse, and the breath is relatively more subtle. I often tell the story of teaching my daughter how to ride a bicycle, you know, holding the handlebars and holding the seat and running alongside of her while she was pedaling. And so I was balancing and steering, visually loosening my grip on the steering wheel and seeing if she could steer, and finding she could steer, so I let go. but I was still balancing because she didn't know what balance was yet. And then I hold looser and looser until I felt like somebody was finding balance there. Like I wasn't, I wasn't like guiding it so heavily anymore. It was like I was barely touching it. And I remember at that point when I felt like she had just, she had found balance there, she said, you can let go now, Dad. So in the same way, when you find the breath, help you like tune into the breath, you're going to want to like, okay, we don't need the numbers anymore.

[36:45]

And then when you get tuned into the breath, after a while you don't need the breath anymore. So you're just with this being stopped or being still with all phenomena. Does that make any sense to anybody? But even before you can sit and count your breath, there may be other kind of hindrances. So again, you have to take care of your body in such a way that's balanced enough so that when you start to look at your breath or count your breath or even when you start to look at just like dealing with events, with a mind like a wall, or dealing with events with no conceptual elaboration, the body may be giving you information, and the information may be converted into images which are saying to you things like, you know, you really should not be looking at the body like moving, or you should be like

[38:02]

you know, protesting the scheduler, you know, et cetera. These things are coming up. And so then you feel like, oh, well, I guess I can't be concentrating on this no conceptual elaboration because somebody's yelling around here, and I think maybe they might have a good point. So the body has to be happy enough to let you look at this So you have to take care of the body in order to be allowed to do this kind of... In some sense, you have to take really good care of the body to forget about it, almost to ignore it, in a sense, because you're not going to be jumping around between the body and the focus of your meditation and the... and stuff like that. but you will be jumping around if you don't take care of the body. The body will not put up with it.

[39:07]

And then also there's things in your daily life which may also be impinging on your ability to meditate. So you have to like your body's allowing you to sit, and your daily life is allowing you to sit. That you really is okay if you're doing this meditation. The world is supporting you to do this, at least for a certain period of time. It's okay with everybody if you do this. Somebody else is going to answer the telephone. If a chair falls over, there's an official in the room who'll go take care of it and so on. You don't have to like take care of everything for forty minutes or whatever. I remember you said something about driving. I remember you said something about driving and the same thing, but you didn't know what driving was. And then I found myself on the freeway, driving.

[40:13]

And I was waiting while I was driving. And then I stopped because I was waiting and I was... Well, I'm just, I'm not saying not to do it, I'm saying you've got to be careful. It's possible to, you know, there's a slight chance that you drop into a trance doing this and not be able to see the road very well anymore, but that some other people also feel like they can do this no elaboration while they're driving and it seems to be all right. I actually find myself in the present. That's right. And you actually find your hands... Yeah. And you actually find... Yeah. We're not even a simple... You're not even elaborating by calling it simple. The simple is taken away and it's just like hands on the wheel.

[41:16]

It's about as complicated and foot on the gas... and you see this freeway out there. Somebody here who was not here tonight said she tried it when she drove to Los Angeles, and she said it was, did I tell you about it last week? She said it was like steering wheel, freeway, road signs, steering wheel, road signs. She said, like that? She says, yeah. She says, well, it's boring. It can be boring. But anyway, it's kind of like that. Well, it can be, and it's a relief. It's boring. And when you get into it, it's a relief from affliction. So, yes. So rather than saying, maybe I'll caution you about driving. Now, there's one other thing which is kind of a big thing, but anyway.

[42:21]

Let's have a story like, you know, maybe you're a Zen student and you're feeling kind of depressed. depressed and you say or you think that you're depressed because the people in the community are not very supportive of you, not very friendly to you or, you know, something like that. Depression makes it hard for you to like you feel maybe allowed to sit, but when you sit, you feel kind of like, you know, it's hard for you to, you're so depressed, you kind of have a hard time taking care of your body, and you're having a hard time like being about developing tranquility.

[43:26]

Okay. So in a case like that, you can do another kind of meditation which isn't exactly a tranquility meditation but it's also a meditation in the sense that maybe you could like just look at the depression or look and kind of like but you might not be able to. Coming up with here is stuff like People aren't being very nice to me. And sort of, you know, in that realm, that conceptual realm, basically that's why you're depressed is that you're up there too much. And you're not addressing something else that's probably . But you don't know what the point is because you think the point is that people aren't being nice to you or something. Or you lost your job or... Anyway, somebody doesn't care about you.

[44:30]

but you feel depressed. So how does that actually feel? I don't want to introduce too much here, so I'll just try to make it simple. So you just stop and consider how that feels. I don't know how it feels. Maybe you feel tense and constricted around your heart. Maybe you feel uneasy and thick in your abdomen, let's just say. Let me finish the story. May I? And then maybe you have a little bit different story.

[45:39]

I also want to suggest to you that your feelings are the window to your body. Feelings, usually the term we use in Buddhist psychology for feeling is vedana. And vedana is a mental phenomenon. And every moment of consciousness has this every moment of consciousness has a window into the body and sometimes that window into the body becomes converted into a concept and then we can know the feeling was previously a feeling which wasn't a concept but was an actual feeling and actual access to the bodily state. Okay, so every moment you have a concept that you're aware of and you have a feeling which is access to your actual bodily state. Of course there's zillions of things going on there so there's lots of different windows and a feeling is something in your body that's a conduit to your mind and then that can be converted into a concept and cognized.

[46:55]

But sometimes... is conceptually elaborating on your feelings. So a way to turn it around is to go back to the feeling, which is originally a concept, and then just kind of try to... Somebody gave me an example. They have these books, I don't know what you call them, but you look at the picture, and if you relax your eyes a little bit, you drop into another dimension and you see another picture. Like the original picture is still there, but you start to see a three-dimensional thing of other shapes that you can't see. What do you call those things? Magic eye? Whatever. It has to do with relax. You see a picture originally, you kind of relax, or tense or something anyway. But kind of, huh? Cross your eyes a little bit, yeah, which allows you not to focus the way you usually do, and then you open up in this other realm. So kind of like cross your eyes a little bit on your feeling, and then maybe you get access to this other feeling.

[48:02]

And instead of just feeling depressed, you feel it's located someplace, and it's not just a depression. It's maybe something, like I said, a constricted feeling, a sticky feeling, a gooey feeling, a stuck feeling. You come back up into the conceptual realm and then you maybe have a different version of it, like for example, I'm angry. People aren't being nice to me, I'm depressed. You feel the physical part of that. and then you're able to articulate something new. Depression, I think, is connected to anger often, but we often can't even necessarily find it. But if you go from the depression down to the way that it actually feels, maybe you find out the anger.

[49:08]

But that anger you find is, again, a kind of conceptual version of the anger which you got tipped off to because you felt some feeling. And then you might move from anger to feel, what does the anger feel like? And again kind of like look cross-eyed, a little bit cross-eyed at that anger and maybe you get some more physical information. Like where is the anger more specifically? and then, boom, suddenly you may feel like, oh, I'm disappointed. I thought that this is a Zen center, people would be nice or practice the precepts somewhere sort of in my direction, that they wouldn't lie to me or they wouldn't leave me out, they wouldn't hate me, they wouldn't slander me, they wouldn't praise their self at my expense because it's a Zen center and I feel disappointed. Could you imagine feeling disappointed at a Zen center if people weren't treating you according to precepts?

[50:15]

And how does that disappointment feel? Cross-eyed at the disappointment again to give yourself access to the feeling. Then you find the feeling of disappointment, the actual feeling of it. And then suddenly you maybe realize that you're not disappointed in them, but that you're disappointed in yourself. and what are you disappointed in yourself for? That you don't trust them. That you don't respect them. That you don't love them. Because if you love people, even if they're not practicing the precepts that are mean to you, you're fine. You're not depressed. You're crazy, but you're not depressed. Especially if you love people that are mean to you, you're really not depressed. You're Buddha.

[51:21]

That's who you are. That's what Buddha is. Buddha is like loving people that hate her. This is not depression. Depression is not loving people, then you get depressed. When you don't love people and you don't care about people, then something happens. In the conceptual level, when people are like nasty, drunk, are when they're not nasty and you don't love them. And you say, I like that they're not nasty, but these people who aren't nasty, who are being nice to me, I want to own them. I can make my own little herd of them. It could be a small herd like just them together with the other people that are nice to you that you want to own. This is not love, this is possessiveness. And the other one is you don't want to be anywhere near them. This is rejectionism. Both those responses to people, not really caring about them, but just caring about yourself, that happens at the conceptual level. There's a physical effect.

[52:25]

At the level of where we're having direct perceptions, a little bit of trash gets thrown down there from lack of love. at the conceptual level. And you've got this, like, piece of pollution in the physical, in the body. And then if you keep being uncaring at the conceptual level, you keep jumping more and more pollution down the body, the body gets more and more... It's a level of direct perception, but it's... the feelings are getting... the body's getting upset. And if you look at the feeling you have about that body, it's painful. And if you don't look at it, it just accumulates until it gets to be, it pulls you down into a depression. Every time you're uncaring or unloving, if you could go down and see how that felt right away, you'd find how the pollution hits your body. And that would be direct feedback on, well, see what I get from when I don't love people?

[53:35]

I take it in the body. body, then you won't get depressed, you'll just, you know, cash in on that unkindness right away by feeling how it feels in your body. So you may have to do this kind of work in order to be able to do Samatha practice. That'd be part of the log through to get to the place where you can like really apply yourself to be this kind of like genius. at imagination to imagine, you know, being like Bodhidharma and not conceptually elaborating. But you've got to have energy and to some extent clean up this other stuff to some extent before you'll be allowed by your body to do the practice. So this is like a auxiliary therapy that you may need to do. And in fact when people sit soshins, stabilization practice sometimes they can't because they have to do this other kind of work.

[54:46]

And sometimes halfway through the sitting they've gotten in touch with this kind of other material cleared it, and then they can apply themselves to this very simple core practice of stabilization. I was partly bringing this up because of something Debra said the other week about some difficulty she was having with somebody or other. Okay, Laniel, anything left that you want to talk about? Yeah, there is a difference. One is an image or a concept of no conceptual elaboration, which you use to focus on.

[55:49]

And if you can focus on that image, then there will be no conceptual elaboration at that moment. It's being, yeah. And if you use that image to not engage in elaboration, if you do that moment after moment and train yourself that way, you actually, when you have continuity in that, the mind is actually like physically transformed into another state. by that kind of training. So the image of no conceptual elaboration is just one of the images in the world available. If you look at it, focus on it, and in fact don't elaborate on it, then you realize it at that moment. But, of course, when people first look at no conceptual elaboration, they look at it and they say, well, what does that mean?

[56:54]

I don't understand that. I don't like this. This sounds cold, blah, blah, blah. What's this got to do with health? Which is reasonable, so you should bring that up because you have doubts about it until you're convinced that it makes sense for you to do it. And then when you convince yourself that it makes sense to do it, you can give yourself to that practice. When you give yourself to it, then it's realized. But it isn't just one moment. It's a training process. There needs to be consistency in it for the transformation of the state. So one moment is a moment of pretty good, but it takes some continuity for you actually to physically change and relax. which actually happens that your body and mind both become flexible and calm body and mind when you first do it mentally your mind gets concentrated but your body may still be agitated

[57:56]

And as I said, your body is so agitated that you need to do an auxiliary practice so your body will let the mind do this. When the mind does this steadily, it calms and softens both body and mind. Was there another hand over there? Yes? When is it? It's the 9th. The 30th anniversary of my ordination as a priest. And where? It's like, you know, it's in... It's like downtown, like on Powell Street, like right, you know. Is that Powell and Geary? That's the wrong address. Yeah. The one that's on the flyer is wrong.

[59:02]

Huh? The address on the flyer is the address of the learning axe. Now the question is, who should we blame for that? That's the office of the Learning Annex. The actual location is... 46 Powell? It's on the bulletin board. You know where Powell Street is? It's one of those streets downtown. The cable car turnaround at the end of it, isn't there? That's where it's going to be. Gunther? I feel a little bit daunted. Daunted? Yeah. It's very ambitious to deal with all the feelings that come in and to try and focus on it.

[60:11]

It sounds pretty challenging. It is. Shamanic practice is quite a So any particular thing that you want to start with that's daunting? One daunt at a time? Just sort of all the mental agitations. Like you said, those voices, they're yelling. Right. Maybe next week I should go into that more. There are there are, in this shamatha practice, there's five hindrances, five types of hindrance to getting started, and then six types of defects that develop once you get started. So one of the kind of hindrances to getting started or into applying yourself to this in the first place is doubt. That's why I say you need to

[61:13]

And the antidote for doubt is discussion with a text or with a teacher to bring up your doubts and hear responses until your doubts are calmed, until you feel like the doubt is, the doubt is you're wondering what is good? Is this really good? I doubt it's good. What are your doubts that it's good? So you bring up your doubts until you're convinced some area that's morally clear. You feel like, now I can apply myself to that. That seems good. And by applying yourself to some small area that you think is good, in that application you can maybe see wider and wider areas of good. So you can give yourself more and more. So doubt is one of the five hindrances. So next week if you want to you can bring up other things that cause you to feel hindered in the practice. I'll just mention the other ones quickly.

[62:15]

Sensual desire or sensual lust And then another one is, two of them, one is his sloth and torpor, you know, and put on top of that, around that, maybe depression. And then excitedness or worry and doubt. Those are the five. Eric? Pardon? You said you mentioned that sometimes the mind can be called and the body still added. Yeah. Just the reverse happened. Uh... Definitely. But in terms of concentration practice, the practice is, first of all, at the conceptual level, we're applying ourselves to try to train our conceptualization process

[63:19]

non-conceptual way of conceiving which calms. So the first area that becomes concentrated is the conceptual level, but it gradually gets translated into the body. And we need to get enough bodily cooperation in the first place to let us apply ourselves to this training. That's why some ordinary calming of the body that needs to be done in terms of getting enough sleep, eating properly, right posture. That stuff needs to be taken care of in order to be able to do the mind work, but the mind work can be quite developed and concentrated before it starts in the body. Unwholesome things, I think, go right into the body and cause trouble right away. But wholesome things, the transformative effect of the wholesome things takes longer to... I mean, a little bit of evil, a little bit of cruelty can immediately make you feel sick. Whether you notice it or not, your body immediately gets upset about that.

[64:22]

So you can damage yourself quite quickly, but to transform the accumulated, to make any significant transformation of an accumulated mess, it takes a lot of concentration. So the concentration can be quite developed before the body starts getting soft and pliable. But of course you can also have a calm body. For example, let's say you've attained some shamatha. So you have calm mind and calm body, affliction free for a while, and then one mean thought, and you re-pollute the body. But the body is calm. And the mind elaborates on something. Like somebody looks at you, cross-eyed. They're trying to do the meditation, right? They look at you cross-eyed. You elaborate that into, they hate me, and I hate them. And your mind flares up just like that. Your body doesn't flare up that fast. So your body can be poisoned. It doesn't get upset as fast. So your mind is much faster to change.

[65:25]

So we start with the mind, train the mind, and then train the body. Yes? Could you say anything more about the auxiliary practice of depression and so on? To sort of summarize it? To summarize, I guess the key point, I have an idea what the key point is. Let me just ask other people, what's the key point of what I was suggesting about depression? What's the key point? Go to the body and feel. That's the key point. To feel your body. But I would, you know... Yeah, that's it. That's the key point. It's an awareness, yeah. But it's also awareness directed towards the body. Now, when it's towards the body, it means... ideas now but in particular you're directing your mind to the body through your feelings because feelings are the window into the body so you direct your mind towards your feelings and then you try to like encourage yourself to be able to feel them and then when you feel them you're going to get more information again that information is going to appear in an articulated conceptual form then again direct your mind to the feeling

[66:49]

and the feeling will have something to do probably with what you just articulated and you just keep going back to the feeling until you find out maybe what you're doing conceptually in this current little picture is causing you your current disturbance. But I had to pick my wife up so please excuse me. And next week I'll talk about the five hindrances and the six defects and the nineteen reservations And the 43 resistances.

[67:22]

@Transcribed_v005
@Text_v005
@Score_86.93